Allison passed me some of her water and the bag of trail mix. I was sweating profusely, but I think she also figured giving me a snack was a good way to keep me quiet for a few minutes, a well-tested strategy that my mother had perfected on long car trips.
"I was very good at school." Allison started "Top of the class at my high school, received a number of scholarships, I could have gone to whichever college I wanted. I'd been told that being the best at high school is like being a big fish in a small pond, and that I should expect more competition when I got to college."
"Then, I got to college, and found I was able to make top marks there as well. I studied everything, filled my schedule with classes from early in the day to late at night. I even started auditing a few classes in my spare time."
"Chemestry, physics, math, science, but also the humanities, literature, history, sociology, economics, I couldn't get enough, I loved the atmosphere, the energy, it was intoxicating. I spent long nights at the library, my dorms, all over campus, just studying, I never had to get a job, everything was paid for as long as I kept my grades up, that was the only condition."
"So what happened?" I asked between bites.
"Well, it turns out there was another condition. After four years of college, all of my friends graduated, and I didn't."
"How?" I asked.
"I don't know if you've ever been to college, but it's not uncommon for students to change their majors at least once in their college career, I never had that problem, I just never declared a major."
"You can do that?" I asked.
"Apparently not." Allison said "Most of my scholarships expired after four years, I had plenty of credit hours, and plenty of advanced classes, but the classes I would need to actually graduate requires the declaration of a major, and once I did that, other paths would be cut off, I considered double, triple majoring, but it just wasn't enough, I didn't want to be limited in what I could learn. I became desperate, I didn't want to go, and so long as I had the funding behind me to pay for classes, the college was willing, begrudgingly, to let me maintain my habit."
"How'd you make the money?" I asked.
"At first I cut down on some classes." She said, "Campus housing was next to go and I moved in with some friends from school and got a job tutoring on campus, it paid minimum wage, and I couldn't stand it, sitting next to a freshman with a paper that's unpresentable, and telling me that he knows his professor better than me, even after I'd explained I'd taken the mans classes half a dozen times."
"Sounds exhausting."
"More than anything else I'd done in college." She said, "I couldn't stand it, I was willing to do the work, but I couldn't stand being told I didn't know what I was doing."
She sighed,
"By this point, I had accrued nearly two hundred credit hours, and still, I couldn't bring myself to apply to graduate. I needed funds for the next semester, and that's when my roommates proposed an idea.
In college, some of them had worked at the local gentleman's club as dancers, and knew they could get me a job."
"Wait." I said, holding up a hand. "You got a job as a stripper?"
“"Is that a problem?" She said,
"It's just..." I stammered.
"You seem to have a weird sense of moralization when it comes to work, Patterson." She said "But what takes place between consenting adults is..."
"No, sorry, not that." I said "I don't have an object to strippers, it's just...you?"
"Me?" She asked.
"You were a stripper?"
She tapped her finger against her cane.
"Why do you find this hard to believe?" she asked.
"It's just..." I said "I don't..."
She let me squirm for a moment, desperate for the words.
"I just can't picture it, that's all."
Allison looked down.
"I'm sitting in a sweltering hot tube in my underwear, and I've been carrying a pole with me all day, and you can't picture me as a stripper?"
“It’s just…” I stammered “not your vibe.”
"My vibe." She repeated, deadpan.
"Nothing." I said, "forget I said anything.”
"At first the idea wasn't to actually do any stripping." She said "tutoring paid minimum wage, but a private show in the back room paid seventy five dollars an hour."
"Seriously?" I asked.
She nodded.
"Word got around. If you needed help with a paper, you could bring it to the strip club, for the cost of a private show, I'd read your paper, and give a thorough list of critiques. You weren't allowed to interrupt, or take a phone call, or hand me the paper and just walk out. My house, my rules. If you broke my rules, the bouncers were more than happy to have you removed."
"And just to be clear." I said "this was all happening while you were...naked?"
"Still having trouble picturing it?" She said
"It just seems like an awkward dynamic."
"If it helps, I would put on my robe and my reading glasses for those instances where I was called upon to review work."
"And how often did that happen?"
"It was heavily reliant on the time of year, but finals season typically saw me working through the night, and time slots started increasing in price, it was more than enough to keep me in school. And all the while, I started realizing that I actually enjoyed the other parts of the job."
"Yeah?" I asked.
"I enjoyed the physicality of it, the fact that I was combining the knowledge of the routine with the actual physical stamina and acumen to pull it off. I was always good at the more scholastic aspects of life, but I think my time as a dancer was some of the most artistically and creatively fulfilling times in my life."
I sat, in awe, in a weird way, it made sense, and I could picture it.
And then I swiftly stopped picturing it.
“So, were you injured dancing?” I hesitantly asked.
Allison frowned.
“No.” She said “I slipped on some ice coming out of my apartment one morning. Tutoring at the club paid well, but didn’t offer insurance. The emergency room visit wiped out the college fund, and I was so wrapped up in making the money back that the leg never healed properly. My stage days were over, it hurt too much, both physically and emotionally. I took out loans to try and stay in school, but my medical leave wiped out my grades. Those months all sort of blur together in my memory,and when I finally came to, I was out of money, out of school, and my roommates were starting to remind me daily of the back rent I owed. When my loans came due, I found that Walton's had bought my loans, and the only way to make payments and avoid default was to set up an employee account through the website, which means getting a job here. My paychecks are all heavily garnished, and at this rate, I doubt I'll ever be able to work anywhere else, or go back to college."
Allison wiped a tear from her eye, and stared down into her leg.
"Why didn't you ever declare a major and just graduate?" I finally asked.
She nodded her head back and forth before answering.
"Are you familiar with the double slit experiment when it comes to quantum mechanics?"
"Let's assume I don't."
"For the sake of simplicity, it describes the phenomenon of light as it behaves as both wave and particle. It passes through the slits as a wave of possibility, and then strikes the sheet on the other side and resolves into its final position."
"Sure." I said.
"In college, I imagined my life as the waveform of that experiment, imagining the possibilities of life ahead of me, but to me, declaring a major would have been akin to observing the sheet. Causing the waveform to collapse and resolve from a wave of possibilities into a single point. That thought of doing one thing for the rest of my life kept me up at night, it was my singular fear. Not failure, but success in only one thing."
"The great irony, as I've come to realize, is that my fear of singular success became a failure to succeed at all. I'm exactly where I feared I'd be, but it's so much worse than I had originally anticipated."
She wiped another tear from her eye.
"And everything else that's followed has just reinforced that feeling of helplessness, and, honestly, I'm not even sure I have the will to do this for the rest of my life, and I lack the freedom to do anything else. So that's it, Patterson, that's why I work here, that's why they called me 'doctor Rodriguez', and it's why I walk with a cane."
She sighed.
"You're still struggling to imagine it, aren't you?" She said,
"I'm sorry, just when I think I see it, it's gone."
Allison sat forward and got back onto her knees. Her eyes blinked a few times and she shook her hair, letting it fall messily around her shoulders. She crawled over towards me on all fours in a way that at first I found hilarious, until her hand was on my knee. She kept moving until her chest was only an inch above mine, and we were staring each other in the eyes, her breath hot against my neck. At this distance, and in the darkness of the tunnel, I could just make out the slightest amount of eye shadow she wore.
"So," she breathed into my ear, "I told you mine." She touched a finger to the center of my chest. "what's your story?"
I swallowed.
"My pastor found out I was gay and told my dad, so he kicked me out of the house."
Allison blinked.
"Oh."
Then blinked again.
"Ohhhhhhhhhhh."
Then she sat up.
And crawled back over to where she'd left her polo shirt.
She lay back against the wall of the tunnel and started up at the ceiling.
"I'm sorry to hear that." She said quickly.
"Yep." I said, tapping my hands on my knees.
"Sorry I took your comments personally earlier." She said,
"It's okay." I said tapping more vigorously, "if it helps at all, that whole..." I gestured about a foot in front of me "...deal, you know, really sold it, makes sense now.'
"Thanks." She managed to say.
"It's very... intimidating."
"I get that a lot."
We sat in silence for a solid minute, stewing on these recent developments.
"Do you wish you could go back?" Allison finally said.
I sighed.
"Actually, I'm not sure anymore." I said "if you'd asked me at the start of the shift, I'd have said yes, without hesitation, but now? I don't know. I thought I missed the life I had, and I certainly do, but I don't think I can ever really get that back, you know? I'll never be able to forgive my father for kicking me out, and I'm so sad that my mother never stood up to him for me about it. And I thought that, maybe, if I was just willing to hide it, or try and bury it, I could convince myself to go back, and be the son they wanted, or to get that connection back somehow."
"What changed?" Allison asked.
"Well, when we got separated, I wound up in the furniture section, and...'
"Was confronted by a perfect replica of your childhood home and realized that the closest you could ever get to reclaiming what was lost was to surround yourself with a thin veneer of materials which the actual substance of what was lost was more substantive than anything that can be packaged and sold?"
I blinked a few times, not looking at Allison.
"How?" I finally said, still facing the wall
"For me it was the dorm room." She said "you'd be surprised how many employees here face their innermost demons in the furniture department. Real splinter in the mind's eye sorta place. It's our version of Degobah."
I burst out laughing, and so did Allison. And we sat there, in the dark, sharing a laugh over something stupid about our workplace.
"You know what?" I said, wiping a tear from my eye, "all things considered, I think I would have liked working here."
"You know." Allison said "the work sucks, but once you get to know the people, it can be alright."
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