The Beauty of Movement
By Ann Marie Potter
I fought to keep my eyes still, but swimming fish mesmerize me like a moving coin. This was the best platform I’d been given since I began working for the Vita Romana casino. Before I became a statue, I’d been a greeter outside the main entrance. Because I’d been in public view, where the tourist kiddies could catch a glimpse, I’d had to cover up all but a few scant inches of flesh on my belly, arms, and lower legs. A great outfit if you wanted to be parboiled inside a cocoon of silk. It had been June, a perfect time for the desert heat and midge infestation that left me sweating pancakes and ingesting my daily recommended protein in bug flesh. At least as a greeter, I’d been allowed a modicum of human reaction to stimulus. I could smile and wipe mascara sludge and dead bugs out of my eyes. As a statue, I was barely allowed to breathe.
My first gig as a living statue had been on the main casino floor. Far from the curious eyes of the under-21 crowd, I’d been hired as eye candy for the men in the high-stakes slot room. Wearing even less than the bare-legged, bare-shouldered cocktail waitresses, I’d been dressed like an ancient Roman prostitute during a textile shortage. I stepped up onto my platform, struck a seductive pose, and stared off into space for a half-hour, six times a day, six days a week. We were never supposed to make eye contact with individual gamblers, but my floor boss told me more than once that I was too detached—like I was come-hithering a napkin dispenser in the buffet. Mostly, I tried to keep my teeth from chattering in the casino’s sub-arctic climate. It brought a whole new meaning to the phrase “frozen like a statue.”
Now I was standing in the casino’s retail space—680,000 square feet of trendy bras, boots, and bags. I was lucky. My faux marble platform had me looking directly at the mall’s center attraction: a 50-thousand-gallon saltwater tank brimming with fish, rays, and baby sharks. Staring at the circling fish was like watching a piscine merry-go-round. Watching them swim was so hypnotic that it helped me slow my breathing, blinking, and thinking. I was grateful when my thoughts slowed down enough to be read as they passed through my conscious mind. I had a lot of thinking to do and a life-altering decision to make.
I’d spent my life preparing to stand on this platform, waiting to turn myself into a chunk of selfless, breathless concrete. I’d be following in my mother’s footsteps, human tracks that never went anywhere because my mother had been a professional statue. For nearly two decades, she’d stood absolutely still, gazing into space as women judged the shape of her thighs and men fantasized about touching her faux-alabaster skin. By the time I was five, I was fascinated by her. I needed a try or two to scramble onto my mother’s bed. Then, slip-sliding on silk pillow shams, I’d watched in awe as my mother transformed herself from the halting, slightly lame woman who stirred honey into my oatmeal to a goddess who made Sleeping Beauty seem frumpy. Once the hairpieces were in place and the silk arranged into folds, she was so perfect that I was afraid to touch her.
A few years later, I’d been allowed to sit beside my mother on the bench and mimic her with a set of play makeup things: face cream, a powder puff for smearing on eye-friendly pancake goop, too-orange rouge, and bright red lipstick. While my mother became a beauty queen, I became a clown. Makeup turned my mother into a stranger with a shape-shifting face. Color, texture, and intensity was adjusted depending on the role she was playing for the casino—a cat-eyed Cleopatra with cliff-dive cleavage or a holiday character my mother called “the ghost slut from Christmas past.” After the makeup came the underthings: plain cotton panties and bra because “synthetics are sweat factories and lace itches,” a body shaper because “everybody and their dog will be looking at my tush” and panty hose or colored tights rolled on carefully to avoid snags or runs.
It was the babysitter’s job to start the car early enough to cool it off. Otherwise, according to my mother, the forty-minute drive to the Strip would turn her into an oil slick of melted mascara and stage makeup. The adhesive on her false eyelashes would fail, and they would dangle like escaping spiders. Carrying her costume over one arm, my mother would blow me a kiss. I always got a little sad, wondering if the kiss really counted; my mother was even afraid to touch herself, and the kiss had come from empty air instead of pale or plummy lips.
The casino was a playground for grown-ups, and I’d never been allowed to visit my mother at work. I’d seen pictures, though—good ones my mother had commissioned for an employment portfolio. My favorites were the beautiful fairy with the star-glitter wand, the princess with the purple velvet dress, and the belly dancer with the I-Dream-of-Jeannie hair. My mother’s casino was fairy-tale themed, but I’d never thought how different my mother looked from her Disney counterparts. So much less clothing, so much more flesh. By the time I was ten, I understood that my father worked in the same grown-up playground and, according to my mother, was usually close enough to give her the “you’re a bitch” stink eye every chance he got. I had long believed that my mother possessed the magic suggested by her costumes and wondered why Daddy was no longer under her spell. The week of my eleventh birthday, he moved out to live with a cocktail waitress my mother had nicknamed “hideous Heidi.” He’d promised, and then forgotten, to attend my sixth-grade graduation. He hadn’t even bothered to go through the motions when I graduated from Centennial High, but by then, he was a cardboard cutout of a father, the guy who sent the checks that financed my trips to the outlet malls and bought me a second-hand mustang repainted the color of peach yogurt.
I’d never even considered going to college. Vegas is a tipping town, and most kids have relatives that bought their homes, cars, and boats. They amassed healthy bank accounts one crumpled dollar at a time by dealing poker, cleaning hotel rooms, or slinging drinks. Standing in front of the fish tank, I didn’t have to look down to know that the floor around my feet grew a thick turf of green. My mother left school in the tenth grade, my father in the eleventh. Both had homes that could be featured in Better Homes and Gardens. The expense and labor of a college degree is a hard sell in a town where bartenders drove BMWs. Like most of my friends, I uttered the phrase “who needs college” more than once.
Then, just before my eighteenth birthday, my boss at Macey’s asked me to work the store’s table at a career fair at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She helped me pick out a navy-blue business casual skirt suit with matching pumps. I parked my yogurt mobile and walked through the university’s cactus garden into another world. I’d never been to a college campus, and I was awestruck by the number and size of the red-stone buildings that gobbled up the acres between Flamingo Road and East Tropicana. I stood or sat at the company table for most of the day, handing out applications and schmoozing enthusiastically with potential employees. I enjoyed the sense of calculated modesty, the feeling of the skirt touching my mid-calf. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t thinking in a gender-coded binary—I felt both pretty and smart. I stayed for hours after the career fair, walking into buildings to read the notices on the bulletin boards and to gaze into darkened classrooms, enjoying the sound of my heels on the polished floors. For one whole day, I let go of my career-as-a-stone-slut fantasies and pictured myself in a white lab coat or the tweedy ensembles worn by television academics.
Those timid molecules of feeling and thought wouldn’t let go of me. Two weeks later, I made an appointment with an admissions counselor at UNLV. “How do I get into college?” I asked. She was businesslike, but kind, showing more enthusiasm than my mother, who had looked at me doubtfully and said, “I suppose. If that’s what you really want.”
Half a year later, I was walking into freshman orientation, relieved to learn that my new classmates were every bit as confused as I was. I hadn’t grown up in a house full of books, but neither had they. I didn’t feel disadvantaged or behind the 8-ball, and I surprised myself by easily adjusting to the college grind. I showed my mother my end of semester grades—five A’s—and was hurt when she failed to praise my hard work and acuity.
“I always thought you were going to do something with your looks,” my mother said. I could hear the anger and hurt in her voice when she added, “Why did I even bother with you?” When she walked away in the middle of the conversation, I felt a terrible loneliness, and I would have said anything to bring her back at that moment.
“Just because I’m in school, doesn’t mean I’m not going to go into casino work. Why can’t I do both?”
She’d stopped, looked over her shoulder, and nodded. “Maybe, if that’s what you want,” she said, but I could still hear the subtle accusation of betrayal in her voice. I knew then that I had to do both and set about dividing myself down the middle. I’d be beautiful and smart, just not at the same time.
By the end of my second semester, I’d decided that psychology was the one course of study that would never grow boring for me although I couldn’t decide if I wanted to specialize in clinical or experimental. By the beginning of my third year, I’d grown tired of the traffic and my mother’s silent resentment, so I moved to one of the less creepy apartment complexes just north of campus. It wasn’t the worst neighborhood in Vegas, but I’d grown up in the land of the gated community and was both shocked and fascinated by the addiction-driven dramas that often unfolded on my block. I learned to ignore the early morning SWAT visits to my downstairs neighbors and kept a stand-off bag packed by my front door. I tried to diagnose the mentally ill homeless man stabbing the milk cartons at my grocery store and wondered about the future of the toddlers being hauled around by meth-addled mothers and fathers covered in what one of my professors called “prison ink.” The fear in their eyes, in everybody’s eyes, made me take a second look at the clinical avenues for helping people. But first, I had to resolve the cavernous split in my own being, one way or another. The day I turned 21, I showed up at my mother’s door with my makeup kit and asked her to turn me into a statue. A month later, I told her I was applying to graduate school.
“You just got hired at the Romana,” my mother said, livid. “Most people would kill for that job. You are so goddamned selfish and spoiled.”
I was shocked by the vitriol in her voice. I tried for clinical detachment, but she was my mother, and I panicked at the thought of losing her. She acted like a stage mother, and I felt the obligation to perform. My answer was weak and pleading: “Mama, this is something I need to do.”
“What you need to do is take advantage of your body while you still have it. Go back to college when you’re an old hag and the casinos put you in a dark corner because you’re past your sell-by date.”
I was getting to the real picture now. Shortly after my mother’s 38th birthday, she had been offered training at either the slot booth or the front desk of her casino, both positions where her less-than-perfectly-aligned body would be hidden behind a desk. The unspoken message— “When you were standing still, nobody noticed that you had a human imperfection. But your days as a statue are over. Even on the darkest platforms, you are simply too old to tie men to five-dollar slot machines by their scrotal sac. So, if you want to keep your pension, we’ll find you something else to do.”
When my mother told me of her demotion, she’d been in real pain, and it had made me angry. I’d lived in Vegas my whole life but had never really thought the pimping of female flesh happened on so many levels. For me, the city’s veneer began to crack, and with it the memories of my fairy-tale mother. Before long, I would begin to feel the rumble beneath my own platform, and I knew that it was only a matter of time before I walked away in a fog of disillusionment and disgust. I began to understand the privilege of movement.
But for now, I dressed like Roman Goddess Barbie, staring at a fish tank and wondering what to write my final Social Psych paper on. Maybe something showcasing Herbert Blumer’s work as a social constructionist. When you looked at me, did you see a statue or a woman? Why? What in your life experience led you to draw that conclusion? I suddenly realized how unbearably noisy the Saturday tourist crowd had become. My scalp began to itch with sweat, but I’d trained my mind to ignore distractions while my body ceased to exist. Watching the fish in the floor-to-ceiling tank, I thought again about the privilege of agency, of having the ability to either march steadily toward the horizon or reverse course, despite the angry cries of the people left behind.
I’d had offers from two graduate schools with scholarships, loans, and stipend packages that would make attendance possible. One was a continuation at UNLV, which would bundle a master's and PhD in either clinical or experimental psychology. I wouldn’t even have to move, and I could work at the casino during the summer months. I could be a really brainy statue—Dr. Roman Goddess with a potential to stay out of debt. I could stop in and drop off my paperwork on the way to class tomorrow.
The other possibility was a school in Athens, Ohio. I’d spent hours looking at the pictures. Gorgeous trees and green, green grass. Of course, I’d have to learn how to drive in snow. I’d have to learn to dress conservatively, to think conservatively, and to exist in a town where all the neon resided in two bars and a diner. Would I be miserable or right at home? The university was pretty old-fashioned. I had to actually mail in my acceptance letter. Did I own a stamp? Had I ever even seen a stamp?
My boss walked by, caught my eye, and gave me the signal that my shift was up. I said a silent goodbye to the fish, still swimming in circles in their forever home. Then I picked up my tips and headed for the locker where I’d stashed my clothes and purse. No longer lulled by the fish, my mind started to race again. If I left for Ohio, would my mother ever speak to me again? Would I miss the attention and approval of strangers who threw money at my feet? Would I miss the ritual of the mirror—luxuriating in the look and feel of silk while appreciating a good makeup session? After all, it was really the only connection I had to my mother, and it helps me not miss her so much. But let’s face it, things between us will never be the same, and I’m already grieving her loss. Would I die of boredom in a town with 25,000 people whose idea of a hot time was a Halloween block party? What was a Halloween block party, anyway? Was I really smart enough to eventually be called doctor? These thoughts swam like sleek, silver fish in my mind as I headed downstairs. The gift shop sold cards, and I was willing to bet they sold stamps as well.
Ann Marie Potter (she/her) spent two decades wandering the casinos of Vegas, negotiating the feast and famine of a town built on addiction and absurdity. She finally wised up and is now a PhD student in creative writing at Oklahoma State University. Her fiction has been published in The Storyteller, Peauxdunque Review, Penultimate Peanut, and The Meadow. Her poetry has been published by The Ghazal Page and Caterpillar.