Free Peep Show by Joshua Braff

school in the morning.”
    â€œI don’t need new clothes. I have clothes at home. Let me go get them.”
    Cleopatra is walking down the steps of the stage, pointing at me. When I look up, Ira and Harry are laughing because I’m backpedaling away from her, away from being part of the shtick. She reaches me anyway and wraps a yellow, glittery rope around my torso. My shoulder aches from my fall.
    â€œHello, slave,” Cleopatra says into my ear, and I say, “I can’t now,” and she says, “Are you a bad slave?” and I say, “No,” and she puts her lips on my ear. Boner. She kisses me on the cheek and sort of taps me on the zipper of my pants. I jump back and hear Brandi yell, “Get back on stage!” My father reaches in his pocket and pulls out his car keys. “Be quick,” he says, throwing them to me. “Lickity split.”
    I CAN SEE the two of them in my mind, meeting at the theater for the first time. She was eighteen years old when she auditioned and he liked her body, her face, her long and wavy brown hair. She didn’t talk to the other girls and it made them not like her. But the boss liked her and that made the others even more resentful. The bosswould drive her home, buy her coffee before he dropped her off. One night he kissed her and they ended up going to his apartment. They made me that night but she didn’t know it was me until she was dancing a few weeks later, kneeling to lift the cash that had been tossed on the stage. She felt nauseous when she dipped her knees, felt sick and stupid because she knew what it meant, this feeling inside her, and she hated herself for letting this happen. Me, growing inside of her, waiting to come out and flip her life into something unwanted. My father took her picture as she knelt. She didn’t look at him. What now? A house in the ’burbs of Jersey, a wedding ring, promises of familial bliss and barbeques and neighbors with bowls of sugar. And when I was born, my father held me and kissed me and said, wow, he’s got my eyes before handing me back to my mother and leaving the house until 4 a.m. every night. The other moms at the playground said you need another, you have to have another, a girl would be perfect so this one can learn to share. So she asked the boss and he rolled his eyes and reminded her that the baby keeps you up all night. She said no, it’s you, you, the man who brought me here, the man who never comes home that keeps me up at night and they fought and called each other names and he said I’m not coming back and she said please, don’t say that, I’m lonely here in this big house and he said I’m sorry, but I have to work and she cried and cried and wished there was someone else to call, to talk to, a mother of her own. But she hates her mother, has never to this day mentioned hername or anything about her except the fact that she died alone in a nursing home which my uncle Don paid for. My father said, “I know, I got it.” She said she was lonely, right? He brought the party home. She dreaded the people. Always. But she went through the motions—the drinks, the fake laughs, the charade of friendship, all of it. Until she couldn’t anymore. She told him she wanted a divorce. He agreed and said he’d go. She became depressed. She called him frantically. So he moved back in. And then they had a girl.
    As I drive, I look at the picture again. She looks cold. She’s got nothing on her legs.
    I park in the street and stare at my house. I’ll hand her the photo before I say hello. Or I’ll say hello, how are you, I found something I thought you’d like to have. I could laugh as I give it her, as if, hey, no big deal.
Is that how you and Dad met? That’s crazy. You never mentioned you were a bottomless stripper, not ever, how weird. You said you met Dad at a party, remember, a party.
There’s no car in the driveway. The