Free The Rescuer by Joyce Carol Oates

Mercedes teetered in gold-gleaming high-heeled boots to the knee; she had to show her I.D. to get into the casino, a fake I.D. (so I gathered) but the bored security guard, charmed by the girls, didn’t investigate closely.
    Within minutes at the slots I’d lost thirty-six dollars’ worth of tokens. Hardly a surprise!
    I imagined Professor A. regarding me with stern disgusted eyes.
    Lydia?—is that your name?
    When someone won at slots—(which was fairly frequent, when the win wasn’t a big win )—the machine lighted up giddily and music erupted in mock-hysterical celebration as, like a sudden spasm of vomiting, tokens flooded out of the mouth of the machine to be caught by the lucky winner in a cardboard container.
    The idea was to arouse envious attention on the floor. To attract others to play the slots, imagining that they might win big .
    My festive companions moved from machine to machine trying their luck. No skill was involved—just brainless luck. Of the three, Salaman actually came out eighteen dollars ahead.
    “Girl, you gon win big tonight. This be a good prem’ition!”
    On the drive from Trenton Maralena and her friends had spoken excitedly of a blackjack dealer whom they knew from Trenton, and it was this Jorge whom the girls sought amid the blackjack players. But no one seemed to have heard of Jorge— “Maybe he not workin tonight, that’d be shitty but you got to figure the man have to take some time off, yes?”—so Maralena reasoned. Much of the time Maralena was in the habit of addressing her girlfriends with her back to me, as if she’d forgotten my presence. Their exchanges were high-pitched and bird-like and barely audible to me like exclamations in a foreign language amid the noise of the casino.
    Why was I here! Why, with these glamorous young women whose toffee-colored skin glowed in the casino’s delirious lights, drawing strangers’ eyes irresistibly—why me?
    Harvey had smiled pityingly at me when I’d left the apartment in my sole dress-up clothes—black nylon stretch-band slacks, cherry-colored velour top, black ballerina slippers. While I was driving on the Garden State Parkway to Atlantic City Maralena had tried playfully to “tease out” my hair with a comb, a pick, and hair spray, but the result was more of fright than of glamour.
    “She real pretty,” the girls said of me, to one another, as if I were not present, or couldn’t be expected to understand their speech—“only the girl got smile more, show she hot. ”
    If Professor A. could see me now, with my girlfriends in Atlantic City ! I felt a deep flush of shame and incredulity at the thought.
    (Professor A. had recently sent me an e-mail, which I had not yet opened, still less answered. The director of the Newcomb Fellowship program had sent me several e-mails, which I had not yet opened. And there was some difficulty with the bank in the University town in which my stipend was supposed to be deposited . . . All of these matters hovered in the distance like casino lights glittering and winking in the stark New Jersey night. Shut your eyes, such lights disappear.)
    Gorgeous Maralena, Salaman, Mercedes were part of a small hectic crowd around a blackjack table. Was this a “hot” table? Were players winning here? The dealer wasn’t Jorge it seemed but his dark-gleaming eyes slid onto Maralena, Salaman, Mercedes with a certain zestful recognition. He was a light-skinned Hispanic with a thin mustache, tight stylish clothes and a look of sly bemusement. A robot programmed for blackjack, the mechanical motions of a card game of stunning and lethal simplicity. His hands shuffled cards, his hands doled out cards, his hands swept up and retrieved cards and in the interstices of such motions your fate was determined: win, lose.
    The girls were so fervent, so hopeful. Of course, they’d been drinking. Their drinks were festive and tropical as their clothing and hair. Not for their white-skinned girlfriend Lyd’ja