The Gold Dress

First in a series, including First Meeting, Tuesday, and After She Left

Striding in, dusky-skinned in her three-dollar

gold dress, and her hair set in those waves like

the girls in the movies, she felt like a queen.

 

She looked like a fortress, ruined.

There were cracks, if you knew where to look.

 

She heard the murmurs from the men with the beefy arms

and the jaws squared in the way

they have to be in their kind of life.

Hot as hell, they said.

She thought, not for the first time, that

hell must be suffocating

with all the women like her there.

And why is hell compared to a woman here?

Why not icy?

It must be the sweat between her breasts and

the carefully applied kohl on her eyelid.

It was heat, alright,

just not for them to burn on.

 

She liked her men shiny and crisp in their white uniforms.

Not slick and sharp like razors, not like some.

Or humbled and bent like the others.

She despised them the most.

So much pent-up longing in their eyes.

She’d drown in it,

if she gave them a look or a word.

 

Still, something soft and helpless stretched between them.

Like those cobwebs you walk through

when you leave the house,

the spiders that spin their webs overnight

between the bougainvilleas outside the door,

where they are going to be knocked down

again and again.