Bumblebee

Elsie Blackman was sitting in the back corner of the church office when she stumbled onto the site, and it began as a sort of joke on herself. How funny this is, she thought. Here I am, a normal and regular kind of girl, and I can poke around on the personals section as if I’m one of them. That was how it began.

                The personal ads on craigslist are so unreasonably and wretchedly hopeful that no one could look over them for five minutes without getting a little sad. They fall into just a couple of main categories: You’ll find the romantics posting things like “You work behind the counter at the Kick and Giggle on 21^st avenue, and your red hair and cat-eye glasses nearly took my breath away. I said ‘nice day’ and you said ‘probably’.  I didn’t get to ask you for anything except a chai latte, but I would have asked for your number if I’d known how.”

                You’ll find the personal apologies (“This is Tom. Rachel, if you get this, remember that she was a mistake and for me there is only you”) and the vengeful ex posts (“Ths iz just to say thet Mxwell is the meanest piece uf jnk and a shthed”) and then you have a whole slew of the really scary stuff mixed throughout, the stuff that made Elsie look over her shoulder and wonder if maybe she ought to get back to work. Shocking ads for sexual favors, with terms that she’d never heard before in a shorthand that she didn’t understand.  

                These were also a strangely reassuring to her, though; they reminded her of her own normalcy, and the relative safety of her own position. A good girl, a Christian girl. She got good grades, she kept an afterschool job, and she was probably going to go to college.

                She liked the feeling of sitting with her legs crossed in the back corner of the church office, even wasting time like this; she felt that she looked purposeful and feminine.

                Half an hour of idle surfing and she came across the ad:

                “Two attractive med school students in town for the weekend, looking for two fun, easygoing girls to go get a drink with on Halloween. Send a picture to let us know your real.”

                She winced slightly at the misspelled ‘your’, but immediately scrolled to the picture they’d included. They were good looking.  Clean cut, laughing together with blazers on. These men were glowing with health and money and impending power—the assurance of their future profession had obviously made them cocksure and almost bored. They seemed to embody a life that she would never know or understand; they had ease that she could not comprehend.

                Her father was an installer for Comcast; he was a mildly philosophical man who had never applied himself singlemindedly to any one thing long enough to break through the imaginary ceiling that her mother called ‘Successful’. Elsie was never going to be anything herself, either; she had long resolved that she ought to do something creative, or something with children. What she really meant by this is that she could think of no career at all that she really wanted, and that she would most likely marry and care for children, like her mother had done.

                But it gave her a certain listlessness, already, at the age of eighteen. She could not try very hard at her school work because she deemed it wasted effort—it never occurred to her that to succeed academically would be worth the return of effort, even if it never came to a doctorate or brought her to the position of valedictorian.

                She loathed the idea of being lost in the middle of anything—she wanted to be the very best of anything she did, and if she could not be that, she would prefer to be the very worst, or to at least reassure herself with the knowledge that she had never tried. She had a cultivated hatred of boredom, but she was just smart enough that boredom hounded her all the time. Her little friends at school, chosen for their assimilating insecurities, were never quite ambitious enough for her, never quite funny enough, never quite what she wanted to be seen with. They were comfortable; that was why she clung to them so.

                But it made her increasingly restless, especially on the weekends. She had so many dimly defined ideas about the persona she wanted, socially—some strange unfocussed feeling that there were constantly things she was Missing Out on.

                There were people she was missing out on. There were college girls she’d seen who wore perfectly fitting chino skirts and polo shirts, who bought boots made of real leather and volunteered for causes with their free time. There were girls at her high school, even, who had time for cheerleading and yearbook and parties, too. They went to the mall in little shifting flocks, and never seemed to get lost in each other’s shadows, and made just the right amount of time for homework.

                As Elsie sat there in the church office and stared at the pictures of these two medical students who were foolish or bored enough to post an ad on Craigslist, she had a flashed image of herself sitting in one of those low-lit bars on the posh part of Redland Hills. The place had stainless steel light fixtures and exposed ceilings, and the two guys, charming in a bland, preppy way, were watching her impishly as she joked and sipped and touched them flirtatiously on the knee when she leaned in to say something.       

                She knew that she wanted to be that girl with the long legs, who could drop by for drinks with a stranger and then say “well, I’ve got to rejoin my friends—“ and walk out laughing, shaking hands with handsome men and saying “well, this was… interesting” and then clicking out onto the Nashville sidewalk.

                She answered the ad, without thinking. She included a picture of herself and a friend at a concert, making sure that it was a less attractive friend and making sure to specify that she was the one on the left. She wrote as lightly as she could—noncommittal, breezy, slightly teasing, with hints of ‘I really never do this, but what-the-heck.’ She mentioned another party she’d be coming from—“but I could come after nine?”

                She included a phone number for texting, and then left the office, stuffing her chemistry book into her backpack with a little tremor in her hands. She went directly to a thrift store, to look for a costume. Even if she decided to blow this whole crazy thing off, there was a party that night; she hadn’t lied. It was her usual set of people. She knew that the night would nearly kill her with boredom.

                The stranger texted her not long after, while she stood at a rack of grandmothers’ dresses.  

                “Hi—it’s John, from Craigslist. J So… 9? Do you have another friend?”

                “Hi, John J” she said, wishing she could be more blithe than that, more witty. The context was cramping her charm. “I’m asking around, not sure if any of the girls will be open. It’s rather unorthodox, see.” This was better; smarter.

                He told her he’d call later to set things up—“and that’s fine, all you can do is askJ”. She resolved to mention it guardedly to a few of the more adventurous girls tonight—what could it hurt? She’d make it clear that she’d not been in craigslist with any real intention, that the guys were very aboveboard contacts, almost friends of hers, that she still wasn’t sure if she wanted to go. Perhaps she could even pass it off as a joke if they responded very badly to it.

                She picked out a gold nightie, in the end, and black tights; she was going to be a bumble bee. She imagined laughing and saying “at least I float like a butterfly” in a coy sort of way. It was the most daring things she’d ever considered wearing—like all the girls she’d always seen, in their minis, their little spaghetti straps, their bikinis in the summer. She’d stood apart from these girls until now—but, oh, to go out and to be truly sexy, to be the girl who was followed by all the eyes at a party! She felt that her very self could change, her very nature, the gold of this nightie would travel inward and make her the glowing enigma that she’d always secreted away behind mediocrity.

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                It wasn’t until she arrived at the party that she understood, how short the dress was. Her parents hadn’t been home when she left the house; she’d told her mother some vague thing about the party she was headed to. Maybe she’d said it was a sleepover, but hadn’t been too clear—if she decided to come straight home after the party, it needed to make sense.

                She walked into Katie’s house and realized in a rush that her skirt was too short. Her tights had a run in them up near the thigh, which she'd thought was stylish, but she knew now that it was simply cheap. It only added to the shockingly skimpy look that she had created.

                “Elsie,” Brook smiled at her in a funny, shocked way. “Look at you.”

                Elsie laughed with her nervously, and said “I know; I feel a little silly, but this is what all the bumblebees are wearing.” She tugged at the bottom of the skirt, was ashamed, and then rallied. She thought how much she disliked Brook anyway. What a normal sort of name, Brook. The name was a perfect illustration of Brook and Brook’s people, of all of them—not even enough imagination to be named something interesting. They were just a bunch of Ashleys and Katies and Saras, that was all they were; they were pushing along inside of this system, working at grades and high school rules and eventually becoming accountants or teachers—she would never be like them, didn’t want to be like them. She was special. She’d never met another person named Elsie.

                She forgot, in this rush of defensive feeling, that her friend had not intended insult at all, and that one of the things that usually bothered her about them was that they weren’t normal enough. They were eccentric by almost any standard, smart kids with weird senses of humor.               
            She sat around at the party for maybe an hour. There were some people there she didn’t know, and she wondered uneasily if they thought she always wore skirts this short. All of her friends were either joking with her, raising their eyebrows and saying things like “hot stuff,” or they were forgetting to notice at all, tugging at their own cardboard boxes and leotards and bulky brown fleeces.  The conversation lagged. She tried at one point to bring up John Craigslist to one of the girls she didn’t know as well, who she thought was a little wild.

                “So…” she said, laughing at herself to let the girl know that she knew it was ridiculous, “I was just messing around on craigslist today, and I sort of stumbled across this ad, from these two med students who are from out of town. They just want to go out with a few locals and see the area, and they wanted a few girls to go out with. I know it was probably stupid of me to respond, but they seem to be totally normal…”

                The girl only seemed embarrassed, though, and brushed it off with a "Oh, no. No, I don't think so; I think we'll probably stay here." Elsie was surprised. She felt censured, disapproved of, and it made her a little angry to get this from even the Wild Girl. She would have expected it from Brook and them, and she knew the way the whole thing sounded. But from this girl, this foolish girl, who would have done exactly the same thing…

                When John Craigslist called, a few minutes later, she was beyond ready to leave. She psyched herself up and took the call outside the front door, glancing around to see the gaze of the Wild Girl on her as she backed out. She wished she’d never said anything to her at all.

                “Hi,” said a startled voice on the other line. “This is… John.” She was surprised that he sounded so pleasant, so normal and so uncertain. “This is Elsie,” she said, and laughed merrily. Then she realized that they were headed into a pause, so she buffed up a brisk, professional tone. “So, what’s the plan? You know the city, or do you need suggestions?”

                “Well,” he said, carefully, “my friend and I are staying at The Radisson; I was thinking we could meet there, and just head down to Broadway.”

                Oh. A hotel; they were staying at a hotel, and they wanted her to meet them there. Some dark fear hit her stomach for a moment, and then she remembered that The Radisson downtown was actually a very nice hotel. She could stay in the lobby. That was the key with these things; you just had to stay in public, stay around other people. Nothing could happen in the lobby of a hotel.

                “Sure,” she said, pertly. “That sounds just fine. Now, I wasn’t able to sell any of the girls on this, I’m sorry to say. Have you had any other responses?”

                “Well… no,” he sounded a little uncomfortable. “But that’s fine. We’ll have a good ol’ time.”

                “All right” she said. “I’ll call you when I get there.”

                “Kay.”

                And that was that. It was set. She had another glimpse of herself as the cosmopolitan girl perched across from two men in casual jackets—then she walked inside and whispered goodnight to her friend, the hostess. She was out the door before she could make eye contact with Wild Girl.

                She drove through the darkness into the increasing lights of downtown, with glamour flashing in her eyes. She found parking in a garage under the hotel—no problem—and strode her heels up an escalator and through the rotating doors of the third most expensive hotel in Nashville. She texted John a simple “I’m in the lobby” and he sent back: “Richard is coming down.”

                Richard must be the other one. She forced herself to walk over to the side and stand casually, gazing around at the polished wood, the curving twin staircases, and the glass elevators as they lunged up and down a sheer wall of stacked balconies.

                She knew it was him as soon as she saw him. He strolled awkwardly over to her, placing one foot in front of the other with deliberate slowness. His face was almost pug-like; nothing like the picture. She looked hard at him while shaking his hand, trying to place him in the photo she’d seen. Barely. They could have been brothers, maybe—if it was one of those families with a very attractive and very ugly sibling, who share only some faint whisper of a bone structure or hair texture as a cruel hint that they are related

                Somehow, though, this was supposed to be the same man. Blazer-boy, the med student. She smiled brightly at him and watched him as he tried to appear casual. She watched his squished nose as he greeted her with maybe a “hello” or a “nice to meet you” or an “I’m Richard, Richard Counts.” He was obviously nervous, too nervous to speak much; he turned around to go to the elevator and she realized that she was supposed to follow. Once the doors closed on them, he made another attempt at conversation: “so you found it okay?”

                “Yes,” she said. She was overcome with a feeling of freedom as the glass carried them upward, and she felt suddenly as if this older man was putty for her to put at ease in her hands. She smiled at him again.

                “So, where are you from?”

                “Oh, I’m from here,” he said. “I am an engineer.”

                “Oh? I thought you were from out of town…?”

                “No—that’s John. He’s a med resident, in St. Louis. He’s in town for a conference… thing. He was online doing some last minute work; that’s why he couldn’t come down himself.”

                And she caught the relationship, then; this man was subservient to the other, somehow. She caught it in his eyes—he was asking her not to overlook him for the other man. He didn’t know he was asking it, but he was.

                “Where did you go to school?” she asked him without thinking.

                “Belmont.”

                “Oh!” She said. “Well, I want to—I went to Vanderbilt.”

                “Really?” He seemed uncomfortable again, and she felt it too: they had made each other real. This could no longer be an anonymous outing, for they had given themselves real lives. He’d gone to Belmont. It was twenty minutes from her house. He was an engineer at some company with a logo’d sign that she’d probably seen.

                Now the reality of this shallow and strange meeting was highlighted and underlined. They’d found each other on Craigslist. She glanced over at his squished face and incredible awkwardness and realized why there were no Belmont girls for him to take out tonight.

                They were strolling along the open corridor now, on the tenth floor. The corridor was one long balcony with rooms on one side and the open air of the lobby on the other. They stopped at one point and leaned over the balcony, and she felt him make one more push at a charming first impression.

                “So, you get on craigslist often?”

                “No.”

                She smiled, but her desire to change the subject made them both fall into silence.

                “Well,” he said. “I think he’s probably ready now.”

                Like some kind of royalty, like the CEO, he was being waited on by his friend the ugly engineer. She had a vague hope, as they walked towards the room, that he was truly charming and handsome. She also had a vague hope that her dress looked like a dress and not an invitation. She thought, as the key swiped and the door swung open, that she really oughtn’t to go into that room and let the door shut behind her.

                Inside, the young blonde doctor stood up and walked over to shake her hand. “Sorry about that,” he said. “Had to send in a report.”

                He wasn’t handsome, either. His face was long and horselike where his friend’s was doggish and squished, but he wasn’t truly difficult to look at. His mouth was a little long, and twisted into awkward shapes when he spoke, and his overall movement had a knobby, stiff quality to it—but she could see that if he was perfectly still and smiling, and the light was very good, he might look something like his photo. He was not her cosmopolitan dream man, but he would do. He was certainly very tall, and seemed a bit more at ease than his companion.

                Also, he did something on the front end that gave her immense relief: he walked to the door, before she could get fully inside, pulled a potted plant from inside the room, and propped the door wide open with it.

                He didn’t say why, but she nodded a little when he looked back over at her—it was a gesture of safety.

                “Well, we were just going to hang around here a little longer, while things heat up down there… we were doing a little surfing—do you like fantasy football?”

                “Oh, goodness—you’ll have to shoot me first,” she said with a nice little laugh, and they both seemed pleased. She saw them both, at separate times, briefly appraise what she had on. She hoped that it was as cute as they had hoped, that she could be a bit of excitement for these two bored guys, that she was not a disappointment to them.

                “We also got… this,” said the John, pulling out a bottle with an anxious grin. “You like Long Island iced tea?”

                It was something that looked like a pre-mixed cocktail; he poured it into a small tumbler of ice and handed her one. She realized only a few sips later that this was not a spiked tea, but a straight tea-flavored vodka. This was only her second time to have alcohol, and the taste was awful to her, but she would never let on.

                “Mmm—love me a Long Island” she said easily, and before long they were all sipping, browsing the net for SNL videos and making attempts at small talk. Elsie understood almost immediately why she was there: she was supposed to entertain them, that is what they had wanted. They wanted to have a good time, and that is what women are for. She didn’t mind; rather, she wanted very much to rise to the occasion. So she concentrated on the charming talk. Laughing easily, taking her shoes off and casting them under a chair carelessly, teasing them each by turn about anything she could latch onto.

                She knew that she could ruin the evening for either of them, if she too obviously favored one or the other. The favored would feel bored and easy, and the other would feel frustrated and disrespected. She had to keep up the play, even between the two, passing the conversation around like a platter of hors d’oeuvres. They weren’t really interested in her, either; she knew that. It didn’t matter. She was in high school.

                As the vodka began to go down smoother for all of them, the room began to grow warmer. Her balanced, circular flirtations grew easier to throw down, and harder to censor; she found that she had to struggle not to ask them outright whether they thought it was strange, picking up girls online. Once she almost broached the subject, but in a tease: “…Well, that’s what you get when you shop for dates on craigslist. Low quality.”

                “You’re not low quality,” John returned gallantly, and pug-nose Richard started to get a little pout.

                By the time they decided they ought to hit the street, Elsie was wavering a little. Her eyes were glazing, and when she stood up to reapply her heels, the room shifted gently to meet her. She looked over at the misty eyes of her companions and realized that they were only in a slightly better condition.
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                They all giggled their way over to the elevators and meandered their way through the lobby. She couldn’t remember how it was that they reached Broadway from 7^th, or where they were supposed to be headed, but she was aware suddenly of dozens of people all around them, always, pressing in from every side of the street in shrieking, laughing droves. They were dressed in varying degrees of Halloween commitment; the guys were mostly in street clothes and the girls were mostly in skimpy little nothings with animal ears attached as an afterthought.

                She wondered if she blended well. It seemed to her that she did.

                The night streets were exhilarating to her, as she followed John knowingly through the crowd, smiling at the men she passed and remembering to shoot Richard a look behind her now and then. The weaving was making her heart race, but it was nothing to the excitement she felt when they turned in at the door of one of the pumping clubs they’d passed.

                They stopped at the door and somehow she was passed through without an ID request—she found herself stepping through a large, loud, smoky room before she knew what had happened to her. Her mood was impossible to pin down. She was exhilarated, and felt powerful; at the same time, she made bold eye contact with everyone she passed with a feeling of intense pity. They were so sad, to come to a place like this, and empty themselves so completely of any thought or real feeling. What a world it was, what a wasteland; and all of us only survivors on the face of a strange planet, meeting in the night.

                There was a stage in the club, with a balcony above it, and strobe lights careening across it; she watched the people dance while John bought her a beer. The couples danced like they were trying to undress each other without pulling any clothes off; sometimes girls danced alone, but they seemed to believe that they were strippers, as well.

                She understood this kind of movement. She’d been fascinated with the movement of her own hips since they’d come in—it was the only part of her body that she thought was truly coordinated. Her feet would get tied in knots in minutes; her arms were like flailing, stunted branches. Her hips, though—her hips understood music. And when the music came out of the land of the black man—the soggy blues or the blantantly sexual reggaeton or the pulsing hip-hop of the day—they responded without question.

                She was born for this club, she realized, as she sipped her beer. The two men stood by the bar, sipping and leaning in to hear each other talk, and she realized that their movements and words would have been embarrassing and awkward in any other place. Here, in the darkness, with the noise crashing around them and the alcohol impairing scales of judgment, all of that was covered and atoned for.

                Richard spent about five minutes feeding himself courage before he asked her to dance. “Yes!” she yelled, and then they moved onto the edge of the floor. John took their drinks and settled himself at a table nearby. Elsie realized before long that he was watching, he was watching her along with the others, and she knew that she must perform.

                She was unwilling and unable to touch Richard while they danced, which made for a terrible time for him, as he had nothing to do with his hands. She looked around at the other girls, grinding on their dates, and she tried to will herself to do it, but could not. Instead she ground the air.

                After a few moments, Richard sat down too, and she kept dancing; the walls were starting to move around her. She stumbled once, in the middle of some circular migration she had undertaken across her portion of the floor, and hoped that John was not making fun of her to himself. She looked over once, still dancing, and through the wall of alcohol in her mind she thought she saw a look on his face which made her want to weep. He was not drunk at all. She was drunk. She was very drunk; she was the silly, easy girl they had picked up online, and she was sad to behold. She looked around at all the people she had pitied in the club, and reasoned that she was no worse—she was dancing tamely compared to them, and this was only a social experiment for her. She would never be one of them.

                By the time she had spent herself onstage, she walked over to them, grinning thinly, and they said “you ready?” and all of them stood in the music for a short moment, trying to walk. She was still joyful, somehow. “You have a buzz, don’t you, bee?” John said this with a little slur as he took her elbow to lead her out.

                They edged out of the club and onto the street, and time did not seem to pass. The world was presenting itself to her as just a series of images, rising up to meet her and then falling away, and swinging in front of her, then being replaced, one after the other after the other. All the people who swung up in front of her, she looked directly in the eye. She looked at the men boldly and smiled. The women were all fellow victims of the night, she felt, so she made very serious eye contact with them as well as if to say ‘I understand, but this isn’t the way.’

                She found herself next in the lobby and then very suddenly in the hotel room, and by this time, she was directing all her attention to John and ignoring Richard altogether. There was no guile in it. She liked John and not Richard. As she and John laughed across the room together, the three of them opened a laptop and started to skip around the internet aimlessly. Eventually she moved over and sat on one side of John, sort of leaning over him to see the screen. Their flirtations were not totally articulate, but they were certainly open.

                Richard receded further and further into himself and out of the conversation. He could see that he was not wanted; he understood that he evening was over. Elsie didn’t notice until he was  saying goodnight and closing the door, and then she was struck again with a hazy fear, that she was alone in a hotel room with a strange man.

                But he only looked over at her once with his horse face, and kept on browsing the web as if he could not talk to her without it. She understood then why he had gone to the internet for a date.

                It seemed that no time had passed at all when he closed the laptop and said, “Well, you’re welcome to crash here.  I’m going to sleep in the bed; if you want to use the other side, I swear, I wouldn’t do any…” He stopped sheepishly, and so she believed him. But she was so drunk, so very drunk.

                “The couch,” she said. “It’s fine.”

                “All right,” he breathed out, and he sidled into the next room. She lost consciousness as soon as the light was out, but it was a fitful, awful sleep. When she woke two hours later, her phone was ringing. It was her mother.

                “Hello?” she said, and she rushed over to the hotel room door, to prop it open and stand in the hallway so John wouldn't wake up.

                “Hey honey—where are you?” came her mother’s sleepy voice.

                “I told you Katie’s party was a sleepover,” she said, as clearly as she could manage. “I told you it was going to go late.”

                “Oh, okay. Sorry; I just didn’t know. I’ll see you in the morning.”

                “Okay, see you at home” she said, and then she squeezed the phone in her hand for a moment, feeling her misery like a truck. When she came back into the sitting room, John was standing in the bedroom doorway.

                “Everything all right?” he said, rubbing his eyes.

                “Yes, fine” she said. “That was my…” and she saw that he had heard the conversation; he knew she lived at home. She was embarrassed again. What a child she must seem to him. “Maybe I will stay in the bed,” she said.

                “Okay.” They wordlessly went back into the bedroom, and she slid herself under the covers on the right side. Her tights were still on. He went under, too, very carefully staying away from the middle, turning away just as soon as he was in, and she felt a strange maternal pride for him. The ceiling swam a little, and she lay awake for a while because her mother had called and she had lied and she was too drunk to leave this stranger’s hotel room. At one point, he reached his hand over and grasped hers under the covers; she barely registered it.

                Then she realized that she was crying, softly. This was why he had taken her hand. He pitied her, condescended to her. Suddenly she wanted to explain to him, what was so sad to her; it was a philanthropic sadness, a maternal one. She was not a child.

                “Life doesn’t have to be this way, you know.” she said suddenly.

                She knew it sounded like she was trying to preach to him, and her position made the witness ridiculous. But she also knew that he needed it because this was obviously the way he spent all of his weekends; yes, she was here too, but she would never come here again. She was different from tonight, but he was going back on craigslist tomorrow.

                He made no response, but she felt him pat her hand, like a parent who is too sleepy to listen well. She softly wept herself to sleep.

                Elsie woke up at five, and was moved to run. She got up and found her shoes. “Are you sure you’re good for driving?” mumbled, waking. “I’m fine; thanks” she whispered, and shut the door behind her, wanting never to see or talk to him again.

                Her car started as if nothing had ever happened, and the parking attendant took her money as if she was totally sober and awake, because he didn’t know. By the time she slid herself into bed next to her little sister, flinging the yellow nightie to the floor, light was slowly starting to split the bedroom ceiling.