October 25 - Small scrapes and bruises

Sabrina danced for a living. She wished she could say it was ballet that she danced, up a-tip toe on pink slippers that squished her toes to half their size while she wore a sparkling tutu and a jeweled tiara on her hand. Or wished she could say it was tap; not even up on a stage, but rather, her heels a drum beat on the hard platform of the subway station. She wouldn’t mind that kind of living, a cap out on the floor in front of her for errant pennies, the only heat coming from the lack of air, there, below ground, not from hot male eyes. She wished, even, she could say she was a modern dancer, gyrating to strange choreographed steps while lights flashed and the theatre director tried something outré and bizarre because every year the troupe needed to delight an ever-more demanding well-heeled crowd.

Sabrina danced against a pole, but she squeezed her eyes shut and imagined herself at Lincoln Center, the Boston Ballet, even an outdoor summer stage in Central Park. She tried to pretend the pole was a tango partner. It would have been easier to pretend if the men didn’t have wandering hands, hands that pinched fiercely, leaving behind welts of purple, hands that scratched, the nails unkempt. Those were the bachelors. The men with wives had neat, trimmed fingernails. In the dressing room, she examined her wounds.

“Small scrapes and bruises,” Monica said, waving one hand through the air dismissively while she reapplied lipstick with the other, a screaming, burnt orange color like a fire roaring wild in California. Sabrina nodded, and pulled up her bra, hiding the welt that ran from nipple to armpit. A bachelor, that one.

The words brought her back. She was a child, on the playground, nursery school. She was laughing, and someone was throwing a ball her way. She caught it, tossed back, caught in the back and forth rhythm, synchronicity, something in it for everyone. Catch, release. The ball came back, but this time the throw was off and she made a dive across the cement of the playground. Her fingertips brushed lightly against the ball like an artist’s brush on canvas, a lover’s caress on a tit, but she couldn’t get her palms around it. It skittered off into the bushes and she in turn landed, knee first, against the hard pavement.

It didn’t even hurt. But she looked down and she saw the blood cascading over her knee, and the blood scared her.

“Waaah,” she remembered wailing, that sound that only a child’s throat can produce.

She tugged on the sleeve of the teacher put in charge of recess, known derogatorily as the “lunch lady” among the children.

She pointed at her knee when the lunch lady turned to regard her coldly with a measured, “Ye-es?”

“I fell.”

The teacher’s eye took in the bleeding knee and the otherwise safe and sound child.

“Small scrapes and bruises,” she said dismissively. “Go down the hall to the nurse’s station. She’ll have a band-aid.”

Sabrina’s little eyes welled up with tears. Diligently, she did as told, but the knee burned as she limped down the hall, the blood pooled along the cut, even though it was only a few layers of skin deep, pebbling it with dots of red like little bloody islands surrounded by the otherwise healthy flesh. Bits of cement and dirt made coral reefs around which the blood had to swim. It wasn’t the pain that made her cry; it was the sight of all that frightening red. No one band-aid could staunch that flow.

She was whimpering when she reached the nurse, who leapt from behind her desk, rubbed at the wound with a soft, sure hand until only pink, raw flesh showed, dutifully produced three, overlapping band-aids that hid the shameful blotches.

Sabrina wished for a band-aid now, but rifling through the makeup kits of the other girls in the dressing room, she found all manner of rouges, lipsticks, blushes, mascaras, condoms, lubricants, and nailpolishes, but no band-aids. None of them would admit to their hurts.

Sabrina limped back to the stage.

She was alone in a private room. He wore a suit. The corporate type, well-groomed, neat hair, trimmed beard only now showing the five o’clock shadow, now that it was half past nine. His fingernails were neatly clipped, his smile charming, his eyes dead.

“Why don’t you bend over for me,” he purred.

She complied, and his hand found one cheek. She slapped it away.

“You’re allowed to look,” she reminded, “not touch.”

The hand kept coming back, more insistent. She told him there were cameras. She told him she could shout for security without raising her voice, realizing her words contradicted one another, and he sensed her unease and the smile grew feral. His hand reached out and she panicked. Her high heel found him directly in the groin; the soft squishing sound of the impact coincided with a satisfying popping of his eyes.

He clutched at himself, his mouth opening and closing like a hooked fish, until he produced one word: “Bitch,” he wheezed in a voice as high as a tot’s on the playground.

Sabrina smiled at him. “You’ll hardly have a wound to show for it,” she consoled sweetly. “Small scrapes and bruises, maybe. No more.” She swayed from the private booth. She knew she’d be fired of course; the cameras were there; that much hadn’t been a lie. They didn’t handle her too roughly when they deposited her out on the sidewalk, though her makeup kit was thrown to her feet. She watched the contents spill onto the pavement, roll a ways. A lipstick found its way into a gutter. Let a rat have it, she decided, picturing a subway rat wearing red paint and proud of how beautiful it looked compared to its ratty friends.

She didn’t have anywhere to go tonight, so she started walking. She had come through worse than this before, and she’d pick her way up again. “A small scrape,” she decided out loud, and ignored the way her heart rate sped up in fear. The night was cold, and she shivered.