DARINA SIKMASHVILI / NICE GIRL
When I was fifteen I replied to a Craigslist post looking for an assistant to a jewelry seller at the Javits Center International Holiday Market. The pay was fifty dollars a day in cash for two consecutive weekends leading up to Christmas. The posting requested a photograph and a phone number. WOMAN ONLY. STUDENT OK.
A Poland Spring bottle with a two to one ratio of Everclear to orange juice cost five dollars in my school. To chug it was to dunk your head in bleach. I hadn’t tried but I was told. At a deli nearby (we paid the cashier a dollar to hold our cellphones and iPods in a paper bag so they wouldn't be confiscated during the metal detector scans) you could get a bloated nickel bag dark and dense as moss; a high that smeared cement over your eyelids. Or you could shell out ten for a dainty strain with sticky leaves that sparkled in the light and curled coyly away when you coaxed them apart. Fifty dollars could stretch for a lazy eternity.
I washed my hair, I brushed it. I tucked it behind an ear and staged a candid photo in my mother's work make-up. I tried to look clean and functional like furniture you couldn't argue with. I said I was a student and that was true but little else. Sofija from Odessa selling Baltic amber called and said, “Wear black dress. Please neck open and hair up.”
Assisting meant I stood at the edge of the booth in amber jewelry and if people looked, I smiled. If they approached, I greeted. Sofija saw my chewed fingernails so I was to clasp my hands behind my back. She dressed me up in earrings and a big pendant necklace that quickly felt heavy.
“Do you have ID?” she asked when I arrived at the booth.
“I forgot it at home but I’m eighteen.”
“Okay,” she said. “Tomorrow.”
Sofija was I guessed sixty. Concealer pilled around her eyes. She wore a blouse that shimmered copper. It was difficult to look at her if the merciless light of the aluminum clip lamps caught the fabric. It was also difficult to understand her beneath the heavy Eastern accent. Her hair was jet black and grey at the roots, like coal that cooled. The other vendors wore fleece vests and chatted and made change from fanny packs. The festive ones wore Santa hats. None of them had a teenage girl model at the foot of their booth. Sofija kept her money in a ratty snakeskin clutch. She reapplied her lipstick every hour. Her femininity was militant, automated.
Before we opened for the day Sofija poured us coffee from a silver thermos she brought from what I guessed was Odessa—it looked like an heirloom. The coffee was syrupy and I gulped it quick like I did everything. I just wanted to feel different. My heart purred.
“Do you smoke?” Sofija asked.
“No,” I said.
“Good. Disgusting for a young woman to smoke.”
A woman wandered over. “Bahhltic? Why Bahhltic?” She asked. Her husband stood behind, a ball of coats in his arms.
I smiled. Sofija drilled me on a script I modified to sound like native English and then I drilled her back.
“Wearing Baltic amber releases an oil that has traces of succinic acid.”
“How?” The information irritated the husband. “How does it do that?”
“The amber reacts to your body heat.”
Sofija was helping a little girl try a bracelet on. I wanted her to see me doing this right.
“So does it do anything good? What does it do, the acid?” The husband stepped closer to look at my neck. I lifted my chin, straightened my posture. The pendant was the most expensive item at our booth. The stone was the size of my palm, a spider trapped and fossilized inside the ancient resin.
“It’s like natural ibuprofen,” I said.
“Natural what?” the wife asked.
“Oh, like natural Advil.”
“You gotta be kidding me,” said the husband.
Sofija stepped in and adjusted the chain on my neck to hide the clasp. “It’s very good for pain and inflammation. Good for neck and wrists. For arthritis, headaches. Neck pain. Very relaxing.”
The husband looked at me. “How you feeling? You feeling relaxed?”
*
All afternoon people approached to ogle the big stone necklace. It was easier to stand still when the coffee wore off. Before that I occupied myself by slipping my stockinged feet in and out of my mother's shoes.
My mother danced ballroom at my age. When she stepped into heels it looked as natural as an exhale. One of the safety pins I used to pull my dress tight came undone and lanced my rib. I took careful, shallow breaths. I thought, Tonight I'll take all of this off and roll a skinny pretty little joint and wrap myself in a blanket and sit on my fire escape and smoke and watch tv until it hurts to keep my eyes open. I had never done that before. What I had were fantasies.
The men who came close to me assumed my pose and draped their arms behind their back. I was a mannequin they had permission to study but had to remind themselves not to touch. Sometimes they glanced up, noticed my aliveness, and tried to mask their disappointment.
There was one man, the only man who was alone. He came the first day, though he did not enter our booth, only lingered nearby. I remembered this because a girl I recognized from school bought matching earrings with her mother who mistook the man for a Javits Center employee and apologized profusely.
What was the girl's name? I couldn’t remember. She got caught sucking a guy's dick in the stairwell behind the gym. I had heard that when they were taken to the principal’s office he cried at the sound of his father on the phone and she sat silent except to ask for a glass of water. I reveled in her boldness. I saw her often slicking her lips with gloss that made her mouth look wet, smoking cigarettes in the girls bathroom, ash in the sink. I never said anything to her. She didn't smoke like a teenage girl, she smoked like a secretary on break. Seasoned and mechanical.
The next day I saw the man near the entrance. I was eating a sandwich on a bench wearing a poppy-colored sweater like a bib over my black dress. Sofija asked I take my lunch “away” so as not to “ruin it” for the customers.
The man stopped mid-step, some ten feet from me, and smiled. One canine bright black. I looked away, I bit the corner of my thumbnail. I scrolled through my iPod. I slipped my feet into my mother’s shoes. He kept staring, kept smiling. You know when you're being watched, the heat of the light. I thought it was my sweater, so bright, that caught his attention.
The man approached our booth in the afternoon when the center was stuffed with sound and all I could do was fold my hands behind the small of my back and watch. He came to where I stood pivoting my hips to stay alert. I smiled through my sore mouth. I had been smiling all day.
“Hello,” I said, unsure of whether he would hear me.
The man said nothing and stepped closer. The booth was packed. I heard Sofija's guttural laugh. A child shrieked somewhere close. The man took the pendant on my neck in his hand. His knuckles pressed into my clavicle. It hadn't occurred to me that someone could touch the jewelry. When I stepped back, he stepped forward in perfect time and wrapped his fingers around the stone. The man’s frame shrouded mine. He leaned so close into my neck his lashes, if he blinked, would have brushed my collarbone. The man must have seen the veins of that stone, must have looked right through it.
“I can—” maybe I said but it was a sound he swallowed.
“You little cunt,” the man growled right into my mouth. And I knew that I had eaten venom.
“Sir,” Sofija said. He dropped the stone. “I can take it off for you to see. Would you like to see it?” He was already walking away.
She unclasped the necklace and wrapped it carefully in black polishing cloth. Three older women darted their eyes between the two of us. I heard the word “disgusting” muttered in a marinated Brooklyn accent. I found my tongue between my teeth.
“Go to the bathroom,” Sofija said.
As I was scrubbing my neck with soap that smelled like noxious cherries, I found my eyes in the mirror. Two cavernous pupils stretched out and swallowed up the honey of my irises. I leaned in just a little closer, to see the light leave. When I spit into the sink I imagined it was the man’s mouth.
For the remainder of the day, I stood in the back in my poppy sweater and made change from the snakeskin clutch. Sofija wore the big stone necklace.
*
At closing I organized the trays of beads we set up at a small table for people to make their own jewelry. On several occasions, parents left their children with Sofija while they shopped in the surrounding booths and returned to a hundred dollars’ worth of bracelets.
“You are how old?” she asked.
“Seventeen.”
“You brought ID?” She was tucking the tiny teardrop pendants into heart-shaped boxes.
“Fifteen,” I said. Sofija looked up. “I have ID, yes.”
“Thank you. You are a nice girl.” She extended a box toward me. “Stay home next week, I don’t need help again.”
At home at night I try the necklace on. My skin spurns still; I try again.
Darina Sikmashvili was born in Ukraine and raised in Brooklyn. She works in the film industry in New York City. She is writing a novella about insomnia. Contact her at darina@sikmashvili.com.