the pack of cigarettes securely into the waistband of his shorts.
“Honey, we all wish we were something we’re not. That club back there,” Miss Val gestures toward the grey door behind her, “is full of men pretending all sorts of things.” She laughs loudly, and it sounds like hundreds of bells, the kind Danny once heard being rung for dinner in the fancy house his mother cleans once a week. Because of her raspy voice, he had expected her to chuckle or half growl and he laughs with her in surprise. “I guess that’s where I come in. Easier for them to forget their lives when I’m up onstage, shaking my can in their sad little faces.”
Danny steps forward again, his hand outstretched and reaching for her shiny green robe, but Miss Val doesn’t notice. She blows a smoke ring and watches it dissipate into the air above their heads.
“There was a time I could have been a real, bona fide actress. The studios were interested, let me tell you. But that was almost ten years ago now, and I guess I can’t complain. Better dancing and taking off my clothes every night than breaking my back raising five kids.” She pats her hip with her free hand and looks down at the ground. A puddle shimmers with the tremor of cars and trucks passing at either end of the alley.
He is close enough to smell her perfume—woody and underground, like freshly turned soil and cedar in the rain. He wants to breathe it in deeply until he falls asleep. The belt on her robe is dangling from her waist and he pinches the end between his index finger and thumb. So soft and smooth. Slippery like water, if water were cloth. What if he wrapped the fabric around his wrist and twisted it up his arm? What would that feel like? Like a whisper on the ear? The breeze from a seagull flying overhead?
Miss Val looks down at his bent head, the concentration lining his small face. “What’s your name, sweetheart?”
“It’s Danny,” he says, without looking up.
“Danny, that’s real silk satin. Some of the new girls, they go cheap on the costumes, but not me. Here.” Miss Val reaches around and pulls the belt from her robe. “Take this. You seem to love it even more than I do.” She threads the long, narrow piece of silk through the loops on his shorts, passing it through twice and then knotting it in a symmetrical little bow at his belly, firmly over the pack of cigarettes in his waistband. Briefly, Danny feels her fingers in his hair, riffling the strands until goosebumps rise on the back of his neck. “You remind me of a little boy I knew once,” she says. She straightens and laughs; her cigarette is now no more than a stub in her fingers. “Of course, you’re much more special. I wouldn’t give away bits of my costume to just anyone, you know.”
“Thank you so much, Miss Val. I can keep this for real?”
“Yes, honey, for real. It’s been a long time since any kid looked at me with those big saucer eyes, so that’s your reward.” Miss Val cocks her head at him and smiles, the sharp lines of her jaw and neck relaxing into a soft blur of skin that reminds him of the cheeks on his mother’s face. She throws her spent cigarette into a puddle. “Look at that. I’m getting lost in memories, like an old woman.” She runs a finger down Danny’s left ear. “You should run off and deliver those smokes to your dad before he goes looking for you. Don’t want to be caught with a used-up stripper in an alley, do you?”
Danny doesn’t quite understand what Miss Val means, but nods anyway. He knows that these few minutes have changed everything about him, and that he will forever be a different Danny—maybe even a glamorous, salty, fearless one. If his father weren’t waiting and likely pacing in the shop’s front window, Danny would stay and ask Miss Val how she became this lovely, silk-covered being. Maybe she had to break free from something as boring and everyday as Chinatown with its fish tanks and piles of cloth slippers.
Impulsively, he grasps Miss Val’s hand with both of his and kisses it, the way he has seen men who are in love with beautiful women do in the movies.
“Are you trying to get fresh with me?” she asks, her eyebrows knitted