UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Pretty Girl Inside Now

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Pretty Girl Inside Now Thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts by Aleksandr Conrad Peterson June 2014 T hesis Committee: Professor Michael Jayme, Chairperson Professor Susan Straight Professor Charmaine Craig Copyright by Aleksandr Conrad Peterson 2014 The Thesis of Aleksandr Conrad Peterson is approved: Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside Acknowledgments I first thank my committee members for their dedicated reading and critiquing of this novel. Your comments have cause many small heartaches along the way, but saved me from large ones in the future. I especially appreciate Michael's relentless support and encouragement, specifically his admonition to keep working and “remember [him] after Labor Day.” I thank my longsuffering wife for the grace she's extended during these two years of late nights juxtaposed with early mornings. This book has consumed me, at times, but I love you more. I t is perhaps odd to thank something so abstract as a deity. Yet, God has provided my imagination with the places, characters, and truths that became this book, which is far from abstract. And so I do thank Him. iv For Brittany v CHAPTER I Alice has been cleaning sneakers for several months now at the Fresh Kicks kiosk in the mall. If she were to leave her counter, take the escalator to the upper level, walk past the custom imprints shop and the Looking Fine men's store and the massage booth run by the Cambodian man whose soliciting voice is so loud she can hear it on the lower level, and if she were brave enough to look left then, across from Sally's Saltwater Taffy, she would see the Millennium Diamond store where her ex-husband bought her engagement ring in a time that seemed both more dispiriting and more purposeful than her life now. Most of the time, she tries not to think about the ring (which is long gone but still invisibly wrapped around her finger, a gentle pressure, a remembered burden), but coming here every day, it's impossible not to remember her first venture into this place, her arm threaded through Simon's, her hopes affixed to his confident, chest-out, I-love- this-woman parade. It's impossible not to remember the smell of the food court, the smell of his aftershave, the cold, syrupy taste of the chocolate malt they shared as all of those things were on that day. Half of her resents God for bringing her back to this place— 1 Why? To suffer? To learn something?—and the other, more honest half realizes that, no, it was she, Alice, who returned, who took the job, who drives across town every morning, five days a week, like a dog to its vomit. She works at Fresh Kicks because she has to work somewhere. It’s the kind of job that makes a person covet death. The customers, when she gets them at all, seem to regard her as less than human: a shoe-scrubbing machine with a nice smile. Perhaps they have no choice but to regard her this way. Otherwise, their pity and guilt might get the better of them. They might do something really radical, such as purchase a rag and some chemicals and clean their own damn sneakers. A gaunt man in a Kobe Bryant jersey approaches her stand now, holding a pair of Adidas high-tops in his hand and refusing to make eye contact with her, which is normal. Something about him smells bad. An animal musk that Alice can’t put her finger on. The man asks her to clean the shoes and pays the requisite $5.99. He leans against an adjacent vending machine, thumbing around on his smart phone while he waits. His shorts come down so far that they might be confused with Capris or ill-fitting pants. Alice scrubs the stitching, wipes the white leather with a bleach rag, and takes out a bristle brush for the soles, which is when she discovers the true source of the odor. A flat brown patty, matted with grass clippings, is caked against his left instep. Dog shit. This man is her final customer, she decides, not because she is finished for the day, but because he will be her final customer for all time. 2 She turns to face him, taking a stance like that of a gunslinger contemplating his draw, only her left hand is submerged in the man’s high-top instead of clutching a pistol handle. She glares at him. The man doesn’t look up from his phone. “Hey,” she calls out, her voice sounding thinner in the expanse of the mall corridor than she expected. She doesn’t say anything else, only holds up the shoe on her hand, showing him the sole in question. The man sucks his teeth and says, “Dog.” Alice shrugs her shoulders, still waiting for some kind of explanation. “You can’t, awh, you can’t clean them?” he asks. Alice closes her eyes for a moment, trying to summon tolerance. “No, dog. I will not clean shit off your high-tops. It’s not sanitary.” The man bites his lip and shakes his head. “Lemme get my money back then.” He holds out his hand. At this, Alice slings the shoe off her fist. It hits the wall beside him and some of the shit becomes dislodged, exploding like bits of shrapnel. The man flinches and shields his face with his forearms. Next she throws the shoelaces in a wad, and finally the other shoe. Ignoring the man’s profanity, Alice unties her Fresh Kicks apron and drops it on the stool by the kiosk. A few bystanders are watching now, their attentions undoubtedly aroused by the image of this petite, young mall clerk launching sneakers at some hoodlum twice her size. 3 “I’m done.” She gestures to all of them with a broad swipe of her arm, as if they are her supervisors. In truth, her supervisor isn’t even stationed at the mall, but in a tiny, rented office on the other side of Sumnerville. It’s a hands-off kind of thing. Alice knows that hours could pass, days even, before he’s aware of her departure. As she storms out through the main doors of the mall, she imagines would-be customers leaning over the banister and looking in, saying “Hello? A little help here.” The thought pleases her. In the car, she takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly, dropping her head against the steering wheel. Only now does she consider the relinquished income, the toilsome process of finding a new job, the cost of her rent. Without lifting her head from the wheel, she pushes a CD into the stereo, and Françoise Hardy’s voice comes glissading out through the speakers, confident and sensuous, which is what Alice would like to be. She takes a cigarette out from the center console, lights it, and turns her key in the ignition. Onto Wible Road, then onto the freeway, then into the far left lane, her window rolled down, her hand undoing the scrunchie at the back of her hair, the hair curling across her face and whipping back in the wind, her cigarette stub pinched between her fingers on top of the wheel, a weak torch smoldering against the horizon. Further out from the town, the sprawl gives way to a flat, dismal spread of farm tracts. Lone silos and center-pivot irrigators rise up from the alfalfa fields in clouds of white mist. Alice stops at a roadside station and puts five dollars in the tank. 4 The man at the counter looks at her cleavage while she pays for the gas and a Pepsi. “Is there anything else for you?” he says. “I don’t know. Anything else for you?” She slaps a ten on the counter and leaves before he can give her change. Gas at three-and-a-half a gallon, she makes her purchases sparingly, watching the meter turn with the sadness of a woman who has lost much, and is still losing it. A cool wind is sweeping in from the mountains, biting at Alice’s skin, pushing an empty bag across the parking lot. She pulls at the sides of her cardigan to keep warm. * At home, Alice stands naked in front of her armoire mirror. Her breasts look nice from the top, especially when upheld by the right support bra, but the undersides are corrugated with deep stretch marks, like the abandoned termite trails she used to find in the baseboards of her mother’s house. She runs her fingers in a circle across her stomach, which is scarred in the same fashion, and begins to hum some tuneless melody— something about a cornflower. Her toes curl deep into the carpet, so hard she almost rips 5 out some of the threads. She sits down on the bed and pulls her knees up to her chin, considers calling Simon. They agreed not to talk anymore, not unless there was an emergency. “I mean, if you’re thinking of hurting yourself or something,” he’d said. He thought she was calling too much, and that it was only re-opening the wound. Since the making of this pact, Alice has only called him twice. Once because she was thinking of hurting herself (a repeated fantasy, while driving on the freeway at night, of closing her eyes and letting go of the wheel), and the second time because she’d bought her first pack of cigarettes without him, and she wanted him to do something about it— stop her from smoking them, or at least make her reconsider.

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