My sister, the prostitute.
I know because she comes home every night and tells me about the men she’s slept with that day.
She returns in the witching hours, just before morning breaks and whispers things like “you won’t believe the strange man who hired me tonight. He was the most handsome person I think I’ve ever met, right down to his hands. When he opened his mouth I knew why he was paying for sex, his breath was disgusting!”
She strides across the room, talking. Glowing in the moonlight that escapes the paisley-patterned sheets pretending to be curtains.
Clothes slowly roll off her body, leaving only perfumed evidence of their existence on her skin.
“Remember how it smelled on the right summer day when we lived in that old apartment above the god-awful fish market? It was like that plus ten-degrees.”
Once her hair is down and face unmasked she continues her stories. Wrapped up snug under our Little Mermaid comforter, a reminder of a childhood cut short. Now our only remaining security.
My skin is still soft, muted, like uncut fleece. Hers is the kind of soft from ritually melting lotions and creams into it, all of them tainted with some romantic aroma.
Lavender and vanilla butt heads against musk and a sour note of patchouli on too warm of a night. Peppermint from that time she only had soothing foot lotion to rub herself down with. A smell so pervasive our landlady still knocks on our door once a week, “I brought a humidifier for you! Works much better than peppermint or Vicks to loosen up a cough, I’ll just leave it at the door.”
In a strange way her gravelly voice feels motherly.
But my favorite is Amber, the kind that comes in a small wooden container, a delicately carved top that unscrews to reveal the magical substance — like moist brown sugar.
Sometimes when we lay together her voice is so faint you only know she is there by the presence of her perfumed body.
This is how we lay at night.
This is how I know my sister.
These are the lessons I’m learning about navigating life.
Wide-eyed as usual, I wait for the first kernel to fall from her lips as though I’m starving.
“Salt and pepper, business-dress. He talks casually like an uncle would instead of the head of an international company. Short for a man, one sock grey and the other pale pink. Commando,” she starts.
“Was he kind?” I ask.
“Don’t mistake shame or pity for kindness; they are not the same thing.”
I push back the hair from my face and turn towards her hoping to catch some light on her face as she’s story-telling.
“What did he want?” I ask, not willing to wait but unsure I want the answer.
“Anna, there are things in life that you won’t want to do but you do them anyways because making money is more important than being proud of yourself.. Tonight was one of those times,” she says without emotion.
The light finally shows on her face, only the shape of her left cheek and the corner of her mouth. Neither turned up or down, but sitting straight as the hair on my head falls; and it remains silent before she turns herself away from me.
She lays still as nature on a breezeless day, her feet locked tightly around one another refusing to play with mine. I wrap myself around this mannequin until I know she’s asleep.
Her shallow, slow breaths pretend they know happiness in sleep.
4:00 AM blazes neon from across the room. I count the seconds as I relax my hold and steadily move towards the edge of the bed.
Sitting up, carefully replacing the covers to hide the loss of my warm body next to hers.
4:07 AM now on the clock face.
My toes naturally curl around the purple fingerlike shag. I shuffle across the floor towards her purse, passing our closet in its constant explosion of mess. A mirror of our lives.
She claimed a regular bought the purse for her. The security tag still attached when she brought it home proved otherwise.
Gold and purple and everything Gucci, inside and out, the purse could hold everything from a change of clothes to a 15lb terrier and even as many as eight hot DVD players, at one time.
Pockets inside, but none in use. Everything is just thrown into the middle, a great meat pie.
Sometimes when a tube of lip gloss gets lost, uncapped, and I pull something out covered in goo I imagine it’s Slime from an old Nickelodeon show.
Key cards to hotels, too many to count. Most of them from places like the Holiday Inn and Marriott, once in a while an upscale boutique — The Blake, W., Crimson. Those key cards she always keeps, stacks them nice and neat in a wooden keepsake box under the dresser. Next to memories of our mother, next to the last small container of Amber.
I also find books of matches. She gave up smoking but her clients always ask for a light so she steals them by the dozen from a sleazy downtown lounge, The Trifecta. She says she hates everything Trifecta and the matches remind her to never smoke again.
Pills of every color, stowed in mismatched prescription bottles. They keep her cocaine company, baggie hidden in its own fluorescent orange tube labeled “Amoxicillin”.
Her wallet, not currently covered in bubblegum pink goo, keeps track of three twenties, a few pennies and one lonely blackened quarter. Her license pictures a girl about 25-turning-33 with loose brown curls hanging around a politely oval face.
Enough light crawls into the room and I spot a single bit of paper tucked in the side pocket that I originally missed. I pull it out to see my name scribbled and a phone number I don’t recognize below it.
“Anna,” I hear her say. That perfumed body floating along the sound waves to reach my ears and nose simultaneously. This time it is the sour Patchouli followed by sweet Amber that hits me.
“What’s this?” I point to the piece of paper that now seems to light up the room.
The perfume pauses a moment.
“I meant to talk to you earlier, I just had such a terrible night that I wanted to wait. Harold has lined up a job, for you… He thinks it’s time you got your feet wet.”
“Kate…” is the only word I manage to let escape.
Her words change from Amber to peppermint. “You’re gonna do fine, don’t think about what I said tonight because it’s really not that bad.”
“I’m scared.” A few tears test gravity while her words course through me, burning my nostrils through and through. “I ask a lot of questions but I’m not ready.”
My nostrils flare wildly. The rats start chewing at my stomach.
She reaches down to my hand, tugging at it to pull me back into bed.
“Let’s get some sleep, it’s late,” her hand squeezing mine with every vowel.
Her body encompasses mine under the sea while her vanilla voice says, “you already know everything. Doing it is the easy part.”
Her lips trace the nape of my neck until I feel her nose pressed against my hairline. The musk of her fingertips searching this body, a coercion to force my acceptance of fate.
