K. Randis - Spilled Milk

“Ah yea well,” he said, standing up. “Money well spent. I’ll see you again…” He trailed his voice, inviting me to tell him my name.

“Brooke.”

“What’s your real name?”

“Brooke.”

“You don’t use a stage name?”

“I think I would just get confused when they called my name to dance.” I shrugged. “Seems easier to use a name I actually respond to.”

He had a great smile. “Unbelievable. Well, nice to meet you Brooke.”

Two weeks later I unloaded my sack of cash onto the bed when I woke Jason up after my shift. “Jesus,” he said, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, “You rob the place?”

“Kinda. The other girl’s don’t really like me.”

“I can see why. What time is it?”

“Three.”

“Have any friendly back room chats?”

“Clearly,” I said, pointing. “You wouldn’t believe how many guys are desperate just to have someone to talk to. Can you believe I’ve never done a lap dance, not one.”

“They want to take you into the back room and talk?”

“Yea. It’s weird. They all say the same things too, I don’t belong there, I should quit. Maybe they think I’ll run off with them if they be gentlemen,” I said. “They all just want me to listen to them. Their lives kinda suck.”

“Mine doesn’t.” Jason rolled me into bed on top of him. “I have a hot stripper girlfriend who comes home and saves all her energy for me.”

The environment was wearing on me though. Guys weren’t always poster perfect. A lot of them were older, or had hygiene issues. I once sat and talked to a guy who told me it was his last night of freedom before he went to jail.

The more I worked, the more I felt uneasy about it. The last night I worked there was when a Latino male insisted I meet him after the club closed for breakfast. He wouldn’t leave, or take no for an answer, and the bouncers had to man handle him out the front doors.

“I just can’t do it anymore. I cry every night before I go in. I’m just sitting there thinking, I can’t believe I’m doing this.”

“So then why do you?” Midge called once a month to check in. I had sent her copies of the newspaper clippings when the trial was over. She sent me a card with a heartfelt message inside, telling me I was her hero.

“Everything is just so messed up. I had this idea in my head that once the trial was over things would go back to normal.”

“Which is…”

“Exactly, no one in my family knows because I’m the only one who ever bothered to go to counseling. They all went to a few sessions because the court basically made them, but once the trial ended they wanted nothing to do with it.”

“Does that surprise you?”

“Kinda. I mean, once I knew that our lives weren’t normal I couldn’t wait to change it, get healthy, you know? Jason and I don’t raise our voices to each other, we never argue or get hostile, because it’s not something I’ll ever allow in my life again.”

“And they do?” Midge asked.

“Yea. They scream at each other, at me, at themselves. They all seem miserable but yet no one does anything about it. My mom will call me crying about money, or something Kat did, or something Ethan did and she wants me to talk to them. Last time I checked I wasn’t their mother.”

“Maybe not literally, no. But you protected them, they come to you for advice, they cry to you, ask you for help. They don’t go to her, they go to you and maybe she knows that.”

“They trust me.”

Nothing fell into place like it was supposed to. There was still so much anger, but it was being channeled in the wrong ways. Anytime I brought up counseling I was told it didn’t work, or they didn’t have time. There was always an excuse.

“I don’t know Midge, I feel like I’m going crazy. My mom seems so different, like I don’t even know her anymore.”

“Lemme ask you somethin’. You’s standing in the middle of a field and it’s rainin’ and there’s a tornado, twirling, cyclone of a tornado, and a rain shower. Which one of those things you gonna notice first?”

“The tornado,” I said

“Why?”

“I don’t know, it’s scarier. It can hurt you.”

“Now let’s assume that tornado goes away. Now what’re you gonna notice?”

“The rain.”

“Why?”

“Cause I’d probably be getting wet. Or cold. And it’s all that’s left.”

“You had somethin’ in your life so powerful, so frightening it took your full attention. It was more threatening, could hurt you worse. Now that the tornado’s gone away, your focus shifts, see? The rain was there all along, you just didn’t notice it till now.”

“So you think everyone was probably always this way, I just didn’t see it until he was out of the picture?”

“You were in survival mode, Brooke. You did what you did to survive. You cleaned your mama’s house, you looked after them children like they was your own cause she was too high to be bothered herself. She used you, honey, because she could. Now that you got rid of her means of living, she’s got a whole lot of responsibility that’s new to her. That manipulation, that selfishness, it was there all along child, you just had bigger things to worry about and she never had to use it before.”

What she was saying made sense. When I was younger and my brothers and I would have to give Mom all the money we would get from holidays and birthdays and she would put it in the special savings accounts she had for us. We did this for years and sometimes Adam and I would talk about the things we would buy when we got older.

When I got to the age I wanted to start using it, she told me there was no savings, that she had four kids to raise at the time and that I should be thankful we had a roof over our heads. We had been tricked into giving her our money for safe keeping from the time we were six years old.

“Thanks Midge,” I said.

“You’re welcome, sweetheart. Just remember though,” she said as her voice lowered, “Those rains, they can turn into floods.”

Halfway through my sophomore year of college I realized that a degree in medicine was out of reach both in time and money. Jason and I struggled to keep our utilities on and food in our cabinets. A few times we cuddled closer under piles of blankets when the oil tank was drained and we became creative in making up dinners out of the remnants of our fridge.

I had to graduate quickly so I could start working full time and stop playing Russian Roulette with what bills to pay. After the first day of taking a developmental psychology course as a prerequisite, I marched down to the registrar’s office to switch majors. It was a wildly interesting field and exceptionally easy to load up on courses and graduate fast.

“They say that there is an unknown factor that gives some people a resilient personality,” Dr. Russ said in class. “You can have four people go through something exceptionally traumatic, and one of those people will have a higher resiliency to coping. They won’t turn to drugs or rebellion, they’ll seek the positive in any given situation. Now the interesting thing is the argument whether resiliency is nature or nurture. Are we born with it, or is it taught to us?”

I hung on his every word, half expecting Midge to bound through the door and tell me she had told my professor my life story. He rattled on. “These children usually have strong mentors from a young age they can build their strength on, they have some kind of talent or outlet they use to channel their frustrations or stress, and they’re intelligent.” He tapped the side of his brain. “Scientists and psychologists have been studying the phenomena. Just what makes one child so susceptible to crumbling under situations another one simply rises above?”