Caroline Woods - The Cigarette Girl

“Herr Trommler?”

“Who do you think owns the Maybach? Not Sonje. Pretty women like Sonje always have a daddy. Trommler . . . ach . Picture a man the size of a Holstein steer.”

Berni had thought of Sonje as independent. The news of Trommler depressed her.

“We’ll get out here,” Anita called when they arrived at a row of tenements. At the door, she tugged on her skirt a few times, then rang a buzzer. Berni could hear the party before she reached the flat, could feel it through the soles of her shoes. Inside they were met with a blast of heat and dark. Perspiring people danced: men with women, men with men, women with women.

A man in bloomers mopped at the exotic rug, his hairy, pale thighs showing under the ruffles. “Anita!” he shouted over the music when he finished. He was dressed as a baby, in a bonnet, with a rattle and pacifier hanging around his neck.

“Max,” she purred, “I didn’t know we were to come in costume.” Her shoulder and chin seemed drawn to each other by magnets.

Max’s belly brushed Berni’s hip. “But you are in costume, dear. You’re Anita Berber.”

Berni thought the costume comment wouldn’t go over well, but Anita fluttered her false eyelashes, draping a long-fingered hand across her bony chest. “Max, I go by Anita Bourbon. Der Berber , may she rest in peace.”

“Who’s Anita Berber?” said Berni, and Max and Anita both squealed in disbelief.

“She was a famous nude dancer and actress,” Anita told Berni. “Taken from us too soon.”

“Some say of a sex accident, some of an overdose.” Max put his pacifier in his mouth.

Anita handed Berni a drink that sparkled and excused herself to talk to another man in a fox fur with claws. Berni stood by the wall, glad to have something in her hand. She watched Anita’s friend produce a vial from his purse, and from it he and Anita took a miniature spoon and put it in their noses. Anita caught her watching. Her lips formed the words don’t tell Sonje .

Berni nodded and found a seat on one of the satin sofas. Next to her a girl and boy were wrapped around a pipe with a glowing orange end. The boy elbowed Berni, his eyelids with their white eyelashes drooping. Pale-orange freckles dotted his cheeks and elfin nose. “It’s your turn.”

“Karl,” his companion whined, “we don’t have much more.”

The pipe smelled like Eastern spices. “No, thanks.”

Karl waved the pipe in front of Berni’s face. “This will make you relax.”

How different from a cigarette could it be? Berni inhaled and handed it back to Karl.

“What about him?” Karl pointed to Anita, who stood alone now, peering over the tops of people’s heads, looking for someone. “Isn’t that your friend?”

“ Her ,” Berni corrected him. She felt suddenly protective of Anita. “It’s her. Sie. ”

Karl blinked slowly. “I don’t understand.”

Berni’s mind had slowed. She looked at the men’s clothing on the girl beside Karl, at the outfit she herself had chosen, the jodhpurs and suspenders. They weren’t called “he,” but Anita was “she,” and Anita was “she” all the time. Berni watched Anita’s dark nervous eyes dart around the room, and a sad thought came to her: How complicated Anita’s life is . . . She looked so vulnerable that Berni would have stood and embraced her if her legs hadn’t turned to lead.

Berni watched, as if through water, as the baby-man approached Anita and put his hands on her thighs, rubbing up and down roughly, as an ungainly child might pet a cat. Berni took another pull off the pipe when the boy put it to her lips, surprised to find that she did relax. Karl kissed her on the cheek. She shut her eyes and felt very good indeed, and for a while, wrapped in Karl’s pale arms, she forgot Anita.

Berni did not wake until someone threw her arm around his neck. His elbow went under her knees, and as he lifted her against his chest, she smiled, happy for someone to carry her somewhere. Her eyes opened and she caught a hazy glimpse of a dark beard where she’d expected the smooth curve of Karl’s jaw. But then, from far away, she heard Anita’s voice: Not her, that one’s sixteen, and hasn’t been touched deeply yet. Then Berni was put back on the cushion, and then she was left alone.

Just before she was engulfed in sleep, a thought came to her, perhaps the first clear thought she’d had since she arrived at Sonje’s. Incorporating Grete into this life would be difficult. As difficult as weaving a satin ribbon through burlap.

The fly had grown comfortable enough to entwine its back legs and let down its sucker. Janeen could have killed it, if she had a swatter; instead she watched it take minuscule gulps of a buttermilk biscuit. For a minute she wished she had one of those machines from the movies, through which she and the fly could switch bodies; how gladly she’d trade her slouching frame in its elephant-leg trousers for a pair of wings! She gazed out the banquet room’s lone window, aching to buzz past the moss-draped oak outside and take to the skies.

Her mother rested a large hand on Janeen’s shoulder, bringing her back to the buffet at the luncheon following her father’s funeral. An impromptu receiving line had formed. Yet another neighbor had made a forced nice comment about how big she’d grown, something wildly inappropriate to tell a five-foot-ten seventeen-year-old.

“Here we are,” her mother, Anita, murmured close to her ear, her cologne thick in Janeen’s nose. “Another vulture. Lacey!” she greeted the next sympathetic well-wisher.

It both amazed and irritated Janeen that her mother, who wasn’t even a born-and-bred American, played this game so much better than she did. “Southerners will tolerate some eccentricity, as long as they can make of you a sort of pet,” Anita had said just that morning as she buttoned her white polyester shirt, a purchase from the men’s department at Sears. “To a few, I am their German pet.”

Janeen felt fairly certain she, herself, was nobody’s pet. Lacey Callahan, mother to the junior prom queen, approached her with the same bless-your-heart smile her daughter had perfected, her teeth hard and white as squares of gum. “Oh, he was a wonderful man, y’all,” Lacey cooed. “So . . . jolly. I thought you might’ve buried him with a tumbler in hand. My Lord, never saw the man without his drink!” She laughed behind her fingers, the nails Pepto pink.

Janeen might have slapped Mrs. Callahan if it hadn’t been for Anita, who tapped her chin. “An interesting idea, but as you saw earlier, Remy opted for cremation.”

Mrs. Callahan’s smile cracked a little. “I—yes. I was at the service, o’course.”

“Of course. Biscuit?” Anita asked, reaching for the one the fly had been nibbling. She plopped it on Mrs. Callahan’s paper plate.

As Mrs. Callahan melted back into the crowd, Janeen’s teeth shredded her chapped lips. How many people in this room had really known her father? How many cared he was gone? “I can’t do this much longer,” she murmured to her mother.

Anita squeezed her around the shoulders. “At least we are not wallowing at home, Liebchen . And this crowd is making your father in heaven laugh.”

In heaven. Janeen felt her stomach flip. Her father, who had been perfectly well seven months ago, was in heaven. And here she and her mother were, smiling sadly as people they hardly knew filled their plates with pasta salad.

Then she noticed a scruffy little man lingering beside a fake ficus tree, a young girl on his hip. She crossed the room in ten strides, never taking her eyes off of him. He wasn’t much taller than she—the height came from her mother—and he looked a bit frightened as she gazed into his eyes.