Girls Girls Girls

Cady Vishniac
| Fiction

 

This part is true. Don found her at the Pussycat and watched her writhe uncomfortably under the gazes of dozens of men. He took her to the champagne room and told her she seemed like a nice girl, a shy girl, the sort of girl who does better one-on-one.

 
    Don:         Why didn’t you like your job?
 
    Crystal:     Long story.
 
    Don:         Did you sleep with him?
                    What sort of person sleeps with a married man?
 

Elkie doesn’t like how this is all coming back on her. Don’s wife made him disappear, and now she’s scolding Elkie. As if she has a leg to stand on. As if she weren’t cheating on Don first, as if she weren’t the real whore.

 
    Crystal:     I am the best sort of person.
                    You’re a hag.
                    I’m pre-med and honors. I do charity work.
 

She turns the phone off again, just in time. Her next appointment, one of her regulars, is knocking at the door. She lets him in, and right away, because she knows he doesn’t like small talk, she opens up her kimono.
“Nice,” he says. He proceeds to use every minute of his hour, bending Elkie over the bed, the hotel’s desk, bathroom sink. He takes her standing in the shower and reverse cowgirl on the bed and pulls her hair and tries at one point to go Greek, but Elkie clenches so tight he can’t fit, a trick Don suggested for precisely this situation, if a man ever tried Greek with her.

This man always feels to her like she’s standing in a tornado, the way he tosses her body around. Some days she hates it, but today she wants to be battered.

He leaves and she turns her phone back on. Don’s wife is taking a new tack.

 
    Don:         Pre-med?
                    How old are you?
                    Nobody’s hurting you, are they?
 
    Crystal:     Where is Don?
 

Cady Vishniac studies Yiddish and Hebrew at the University of Michigan. Her work has won the contests at New Letters, Mid-American Review, Greensboro Review, and Ninth Letter, and is forthcoming in Glimmer Train.

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