Shadow Withdrawal

I don't know how it came to this. Isobel craned her neck to look at the neon sign above the door, flashing images of women bent in lucrative positions. She didn't think some of them were even possible-- they defied physics, not to mention rationality. Want a man? Twist yourself into a little pretzel, you'll be popular for life. She drew her body deeper into her coat, the collar pulled up around her neck. For a moment she knew what Lot's wife had felt, crushed and paralyzed by 20/20 vision...

-But it was too cold to be reduced to a pillar of salt on the pavement. She could either get back in her car and drive away, or she could do what she had come for to do. Isobel felt around in her jacket pocket for the cover charge. Breath expelling from her in an icy fog, she reached for the door.

Loud music exploded in a flood of flashing lights and gyrating body parts. It was like stepping into another planet. Disoriented, Isobel handed first her ID and then a crumpled five dollar bill to the man at the door.

"Are you escorted, honey? Cover's free for ladies when they're escorted."

Isobel shook her head. He grinned suddenly, x-ray eyes fastened onto her as if indulging in a knowledge of her that even she wasn't aware of. His teeth made her uncomfortable-- they reminded her of fairy tales, lost girls, and wolves.

"Have fun," he said, his words plump with unspoken meaning. Too weary to decipher them, Isobel mumbled an incoherent thank you and started toward the stage. It was hard to walk in a place like that, when all she really wanted to do was cover her eyes and run back into the cold. You're a fucking prude, Isobel, she chided herself. But it wasn't just that.

On stage, the woman's dress glittered emerald green in the whirling light. Her arms stretched above her head in a gesture reminiscent of ballet lessons, for just a moment invoking images of childhood, a past that went far beyond this bar, this stage. Then her dress was hurled to the floor and she bent backwards, grasping the gold pole behind her head.

Isobel looked away.

A graying man with liquor pungent on his breath was smiling at her from his table. "Are you a lesbian?" he asked. There was no malice in his words, only curiosity.

In any other circumstance, Isobel might have told him to mind his business. Perhaps she would have even become angry, indignant. Why does it matter to you? Instead, feeling muted and numbed, she just shook her head and concentrated on the rest of the room. There was an empty table in the far corner that looked quiet enough. Not wanting to attract any more unwanted attention, Isobel restrained herself from running as fast as she could to her new found hiding place. She put one foot in front of the other, breathing evenly--

And then something grabbed her by the ribs and squeezd all the air out of her lungs.

"Oh my God!" a gold-coloured blur was crying into Isobel's braided hair, "you're here, you're really here!"

"Of course I'm here," Isobel said, once she was able to catch her breath again. She tried to form a smile with the edges of her mouth. Not quite succeeding.

Kaia took a step backwards and studied her friend, as if there were something truly extraordinary to see. There wasn't-- Isobel was just dressed in school clothes, jeans and a sweater. It was Kaia in the tight micromini dress and six-inch black heels, her hair teased and sprayed into an unnatural configuration, eyes lined like a siren's.

"Shh," Kaia said, putting a finger to her ruby red lips. "Don't say a word. I didn't have any choice about the hair-- it's what the guys like." She smiled when Isobel opened her mouth to protest.

"I have no qualms about the hair."

"Yeah right." Kaia kissed the side of Isobel's face. "I just want to make it perfectly clear that I haven't gone into a fashion coma. Alright?"

Isobel nodded.

Kaia grabbed the arm of a passing bouncer, manic again. "This is my best friend, Isobel! Iz, this is Mark-- a very good kicker-outter of drunken and disorderly men!"

Mark gave Isobel a quick, distracted smile. "Niec to meet you." He turned back to Kaia and narrowed his eyes. "What have I told you about trying to butter me up?"

Kaia growled in return, and slung her arm around Isobel's shoulder. "This girl and I have been best friends for seven years!" she exclaimed to Mark's retreating back, "she remembers what I looked like with braces!"

Suddenly Isobel wished Kaia still had braces-- and was shy and unsure about the edges of her body, as she had been when she was thirteen. Then neither of them would be standing in the middle of the godforsaken Never Never Land, whose napkins and match books read We Make Fantasies Come True.

-Where Kaia was one of those fantasies, smiling cheerfully and shaking her rump for the men staring at her as if she were a slab of steak and they hadn't eaten in weeks. She kept her arm around Isobel, occasionally squeezing her shoulder blade. Making sure I'm not an apparition, Isobel thought to

herself. After the last phone call, she wasn't surprised.

"What do you mean, you're stripping?" That had been almost a week ago, a peaceful morning with just a sprinkling of snow, giving the earth a softness Isobel appreciated. She had just finished her coffee and was flipping through the paper when the telephone rang.

"I got $400 last night in tips alone."

"That's nice. You didn't answer my question-"

"What was the question again?"

"Damnit, Kaia." Isobel looked down at her hands and realized that they were shaking.

A loud sigh erupted over the phone. "I don't know, Iz. It was getting really, really insane. Working ten hour shifts at that crap hut and then going to school...I hardly had the time to breathe."

"You could have gotten another job."

"I did get another job!" Kaia reminded, her voice on the verge of a crescendo.

"I meant a real job, Kaia."

"Oh, you mean the places where good girls work?!"

There was a long silence.

"Listen," Kaia said firmly, "I don't want to fight with you. But I'm getting paid a lot of money and I've never been shy...everything is fine. Alright? Isobel?"

"Sometimes I think you just like to put me in a state of cardiac arrest," Isobel muttered, staring down at the sports section of the newspaper.

Someone or another had done something wonderful on the baseball field. The words began to melt into one another, and Isobel hastily threw the whole thing on the kitchen floor, spilling her second cup of coffee in the process.

"I swear it's really not all that bad. You should come out one night and see for yourself."

Isobel watched the brown liquid drip slowly off the edge of the table and said, "I just spilled my coffee. I've got to go."

"No." Kaia's tone was insistent. "Not until you promise to visit me at the Never Never Land, if only just to say hello. We haven't seen each other for so long, I've almost forgotten what you look like."

"Fine, fine." Isobel cursed herself for not saying the words she really maent. An invisible scream filled her lungs; her breakfast was dangerously close to resurfacing. It was far from being fine.

"I expect to see you there next Monday!" A metallic buzz abruptly replaced Kaia's voice.

Isobel sat there for an indefinite amount of time, the phone beeping into her shoulder blade, coffee creating interpretive art against a linoleum canvas. She imagined this was what the phrase stunned in submission felt like.How ironic. Kaia gets a job at a strip bar, but it's my body that betrays me.

Why was that a surprise to her? Kaia had always been more resilient, almost eager for the challenges life threw at her. Isobel, on the other hand, was purely a creature of habit. Change was perhaps the most dangerous word in her vocabulary; whereas time was what kept Kaia flying, anxious to feel life fierce in her blood until the last possible moment. Now all Isobel had to understand was how a healthy zest for life had turned into taking one's clothing off for money. Was it all about money, nothing else? If so, who was Isobel to knock women finding well-paid jobs?

But Kaia had been a Brownie scout, for God's sake!

Isobel didn't know what she truly felt-- emotions edged in razor blades fleeted through her conscience as if she were nothing more than a highway on which they should travel. She stared at the brown puddle gathering at her shoes and tried not to think at all.

"If you would like to make a call, please hang up--," a mechanical voice was instructing her shoulder. Isobel hung up the phone and reached for paper towels. Outside, the snow had dissolved into a gray landscape of rain.

Now, with the pulsating lights of the bar raining down on her, Isobel could almost believe her quiet kitchen had never existed at all. How could it have, with decadence so persistent on creeping into your veins like a case of internal kudzu?

Kaia was smiling at her. "You look so preoccupied. You're never like this when we go clubbing together."

"Oh, Kaia." I worry about you getting home safely after your shifts. My nightmares are filled with rape and stalkers and murder. Two strippers were killed last year, Kaia, did you know? My God, why are you so stubborn? I want you to come to your senses. I want to lead you back to the shores of safety, far away from all these greedy eyes.

But Kaia wouldn't go. Isobel knew this, staring into her friend's dark blue irises. Once Kaia made up her mind, she stuck by it. This was merely one of her more dramatic decisions.

Kaia jiggled Isobel's shoulder. "Do you think a drink will help?"

There was nothing left for Isobel to do but nod.

"A tequila sunrise okay?" Kaia was already heading in the direction of the bar, waving a bill. "It's on me!" she exclaimed over her shoulder.

Moments later a vivid pink and red concoction was thrust into Isobel's hands. "Drink it nice and slow," Kaia instructed kindly, and for a moment Isobel couldn't remember who should be mothering whom.

The alcohol was pleasant fire against Isobel's tongue. Over the rim of the plastic cup she watched Kaia staring at her, a weary, almost ancient expression in her eyes.

"That's a new ring," Kaia said, dropping her gaze.

"Yes." Why couldn't they say anything important to one another?

"I like it. Is it sterling silver?" Kaia began fidgeting with the shoulder strap of her dress. Her nails looked as if they had been tinged in blood. It hurt Isobel just to look at them. "Do you remember when that cheap turquoise ring turned my finger green?"

"You acted as if you were about to die," Isobel said in reply. She smiled at the memory.

"Actually, no. Just convinced my whole arm was going to fall off and I would have to join a leprosy colony." Kaia was smiling as well, and for a moment they could have been anywhere, two friends recollecting about times past, experiences lived.

"Raquel to the center stage," the d.j. called out in the fading tempo of a disco arrangement. For the last couple of songs Isobel recalled a Delia, Janine, perhaps even a Tiffany. Overwhelmingly she hadn't really paid attention-- until now. With a queasy stomach, she turned to Kaia.

"Raquel?" she asked, squinting as if acquainting herself with her best friend for the first time.

Kaia nodded slightly. "I always thought it was a prety name."

Isobel extended her hand. "Pleased to meet you. I'm Isobel." She wondered when that damned drink was going to start working.

Ignoring Isobel's weak attempt at a joke, Kaia grabbed her arm and directed her to an abandoned table. She seemed to be operating on a different plane now. Isobel could see Kaia hardening, emptying herself of any vulnerabilities, anything precious. Becoming a shell. "Showtime. If you want to wait until my shift ends, we can go out for coffee afterwards."

Isobel nodded and sat down clumsily. She was suddenly extremely nervous, but for who? Kaia or herself?

"Great." Kaia wavered, and then bent her head close to Isobel's, the scent of hair spray and strong perfume filling Isobel's eyes with tears. "You don't have to watch if you don't want to," she said. Her breath left a circle of warmth on the side of Isobel's face.

And then she was gone, climbing up the stage stairs in those impossibly stilted high heels, fiercely brave; fiercer than Isobel could ever imagine to be.

For a brief moment, Isobel was proud of her best friend.

The music began then, a hard song with words so flippant she couldn't relate to them, the bass insistent in giving the room it's own pulse. Isobel found herself praying for intoxication, and then, changing her mind, for absolute clarity. She tried not to look at all those men staring at her best friend, seeing Kaia but not really seeing her, dissecting the parts that appealed to them the best: her legs, her chest.

On the center stage Kaia was moving to the music, a smile on her lips that didn't quite reach her eyes, not looking at the men either but rather at a fixed point somewhere in the distance. She began to pull down the straps of her dress; men were already gathered around the stage with one dollar bills in sweaty fists.

Isobel focused on Kaia with the intensity of a tsunami, determined to be witness to this, to be strong. Are you happy, Kaia? Truthfully? Isobel could feel the question forming on the tip of her tongue as the music wound itself into a frenzy, forcing Kaia to do the same.

And then she remembered that happiness, like everything else, was a relative term.