The Beef Trust Chorus
Spring, 1955
Backstage at the Persian Palms, Maxine peeled off her sweat-soaked pinafore and dabbed powder between her large thighs. She pasted on a fresh coat of pink lipstick and slipped into her blue fox-fur coat.
“Let’s go girls,” Maxine said to Velma, Lulu, Marcia and the rest of the Beef Trust Chorus. “Walt is keeping the Nankin open just for us.”
“I can’t wait,” said Lulu, “I’m dying for a Singapore Sling.” She spoke with a cigarette clenched between her teeth as she straightened her stockings. Bits of ash fell onto her shoe. She imagined her deep, clawfoot bathtub full to the brim with hot water. She hoped the other girls wouldn’t want to stay out too late. Just because she was the youngest member of the Beef Trust didn’t mean dancing the Can-Can and showing off her substantial rump to drunk old men wasn’t tiring.
The women slipped out into the night where two cars were waiting and squeezed in. Maxine sat in the front with the driver.
“Hey, Max,” Velma said, “Did you notice? That woman was in the audience.”
Maxine turned around to address Velma in the back seat. “What do I care if she was in the audience?”
Velma grinned. “She came at you with a knife.”
“It was a butter knife. Nobody ever got killed by a butter knife.”
“I don’t know, Max,” Marcia said. “She’s obsessed. She’d do anything to take Teddy from you.”
“I’m not afraid of her.”
At the Nankin, a long dining table was already laid out with all of their favorite dishes: broiled lobster, pressed duck, sweet-and-sour spareribs, eggs Cantonese style and heaps of fried rice with crabmeat. Red paper lanterns hung from the ceiling. Two small turtles dozed in a glass tank.
They checked the furs and hats and sat down as a waiter rushed around to take their drink orders. Maxine took a lobster tail and broke the shell with her hands. To be in the Beef Trust Chorus, a girl had to weigh at least two hundred pounds. They danced the cancan in short dresses that showed off their satin underwear and made one hundred dollars per week doing it. Typists and stenographers were lucky to make seventy dollars a week.
Reducing just wouldn’t do.
“So nice of Walt to keep the place open and have our standing order ready. “I never get tired of these,” Marcia said, nibbling on a sticky spare rib.
Lulu hummed along to the first few bars of “Stranger in Paradise,” which was playing on a jukebox. Then she made a face and began pawing through her coin purse in search of a nickel. “This song could knock out an elephant,” she complained. Her chair skidded backward as she got up. “I’m going to put on some Fats Domino or Chuck Berry.”
Velma picked up a chopstick and stabbed the air and laughed. “I am the one he loves!” Velma trilled.
“Very funny,” Maxine said. She took the lime from the rim of her Cuba Libre and bit down.
Max returned to the apartment she shared with her husband in an ivy-covered brownstone. It wasn’t a new building, but there was enough room in the apartment for a baby grand piano with a tiered drop crystal chandelier above it. In the bathroom with its green and black Art Deco tiles, Max soaked in a hot tub, carefully avoiding getting her hair wet. She toweled off and slid into bed where she wrapped an arm around Teddy’s waist, her fingers stroking his muscular chest. He stirred and turned to face her. The light from the streetlamp shone on his hair; it was silver and black like a chinchilla stole.
“Did you bring me a doggy bag?” he asked, groggily.
“Spareribs and crab fried rice.”
“Give me a taste,” he said as he kissed her. “How was the show?”
“Same as always,” she replied. She stroked the stubble on his cheek. His blue eyes twinkled, even in the dark. “Your old flame was there.”
“What old flame?” His hand rested on her hip. She laced her fingers through his.
“Don’t you remember the butter knife incident?”
Teddy sat up on his elbow. “You mean Rita?”
“Velma saw her. I didn’t.”
“She was there? At the Palms? Gee, Max, I don’t think I like the sound of that.” His hand slid from her hip to the small of her back.
Maxine sighed. “Why is everyone so worried? I’m not afraid of her.” Since joining the Beef Trust Chorus two years ago, she was in the best shape of her life. She was the Rocky Marciano of Skid Row burlesque. Why should she be afraid of that featherweight?
Teddy sat up and switched on the lamp. “That woman should be locked up. I met her once -- once -- at a show and then after that, she acted like we were some kind of couple. I didn’t even know her.”
Maxine stroked his fingertips with her own, feeling the hard calluses he had developed from plucking guitar strings.
Maxine closed her eyes. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear you were trying to feed me a line.”
“I’m not. I called my uncle, you know, the one who works out at the state hospital. He told me that there are people who make up these fantasies in their heads, and when they’re confronted by any reality that contradicts their fantasy, they get violent. That woman Rita is totally nutto and belongs in a rubber room. I’m worried.”
Maxine squeezed Teddy’s hand. “So call the men in the white coats.”
He kissed her and drew her in closer. He switched the light off again as they both sank under the covers.
“She is pretty,” Maxine said. “She probably thinks she’d look better on your arm than I do.”
“She’s like all the other small-waisted girls from the steno pool. Simpering over their typewriters and dying for an engagement ring. They don’t have your heap of wheat.”
He stroked the warm skin between her supple rolls of flesh.
“I love it when you recite the Song of Solomon to me,” she muttered drowsily. Teddy had dropped out of the seminary to play Devil music.
He lowered his voice and whispered, “Thy belly is like a heap of wheat beset by lillies, thy breasts like the twin fawns of a gazelle…”
He kissed her as she drifted off to sleep.
The Beef Trust had Sundays and Mondays off. Maxine spent all of Sunday in bed with Teddy. On Monday, when Teddy went to play lunchtime sets with his band in a smoke-filled bar by the river, she spent the morning reading a new bestseller, Lolita. Lulu had lent it to her and insisted she read it, but Max didn’t see what the fuss was all about. Why should she read two hundred pages about a disgusting man?
In the afternoon, she went out to the butcher shop to buy a lamb shank to roast for dinner. On her way home, she decided to cut through the park. She stopped on the footbridge and looked down into the pond where a small painted turtle sunned itself on a tree branch. A fish snapped at an insect on the surface of the water. Max breathed deeply, inhaling the scent of the water.
The stoplight was green when she reached the other end of the park. As Maxine stepped off the curb, a turquoise Bel Air barreled toward her, its engine roaring. She jumped back and tripped backward over the curb, landing on her tailbone. The car whipped around the corner, and Maxine couldn’t see the driver’s face, just a cloud of black hair.
Her heart pounded and her limbs trembled. She picked herself off the curb. Her paper shopping bag had torn, but at least the butcher paper around the lamb shank was still clean. Max hurried home and dialed Velma’s phone number.
“Velma, did you notice if Rita had a bouffant?”
“Rita who?”
“Rita! The butter knife! You said you saw her at the Palms on Saturday night.”
“Oh,” Velma coughed. Max heard the flick of Velma’s cigarette lighter. “Yeah. She had a bouffant. Big as life.”
Maxine’s hand shook as she hung up the phone. She poured herself a glass of Beefeater gin. She called the police and then Teddy, whose bandmate said that Teddy and their drummer had gone across the street for a pork sandwich and wouldn’t be back until the next set.
The police came to her door but said there wasn’t much they could do without a license plate number -- there were hundreds of turquoise Bel Airs driving around.
“Can you describe the driver?” the younger of the two officers asked. He scribbled on a small notepad.
“She has black hair in a bouffant. And she’s skinny. She’s pretty in a prom-queen sort of way.”
“What the heck is a bouffant?” the older officer asked.
“You know, all puffed up. Big,” said the younger one. He held his hand high above his head as if he were measuring the height of a Marie Antoinette wig.
The officers promised to keep an eye out for Rita and left. By the time Teddy got home, the lamb shank was still cold.
“Are the bruises that bad? Do you think they’ll show? Maybe I should have Marcia take my part tonight.” Maxine stood with her back to a mirror, looking over her shoulder at the bruises on her thighs.
“That’s not the reason you shouldn’t dance tonight,” Teddy said.
“I called the Palms. They have Rita’s description. They’re not going to let her in.”
She sat next to him on the bed. He slid his fingers into the hair at the nape of her neck.
“Wouldn’t it be better to get away?” he asked. “We could go to Hawaii. We could pick coconuts and go to a luau.” He tugged on the strap of her satin slip and kissed her shoulder. His other hand rested on her belly, his fingers splayed. Teddy liked to compare her body to sweet roll dough; when he touched her, he remembered the feeling of warm dough rising under a cloth in the kitchen of his childhood home.
“I could learn to hula. I’ve heard it’s a style of dance that favors fat women. It could be good for the act…” Maxine sighed. She stood up and put her hands out in front of her, making waves with her fingers as she shook her hips from side to side. Teddy grinned.
“So, let’s go,” he said. “I’ll join a ukulele band.”
She gazed deeply into his blue eyes and noted that they were almost the same color as the car that almost hit her.
“She’s not going to run us out of town, Teddy,” Maxine said.
Through a gap in the curtain backstage, Maxine scanned the crowd for signs of Rita but there were none. The bouncer had been true to his word and kept her out. But that didn’t mean she wouldn’t show up someplace else.
Curls of smoke rose from crystal ashtrays at every table. Sawdust covered the floor. Drunk old bums in unfashionable double-breasted suits mingled at the bar with young men in Navy uniforms. The businessmen sitting at tables had B-girls draped over their arms, wobbly from splits of champagne. Maxine never could figure out the B-girl grift. A B-girl could con any man into buying her drinks, but aside from a hangover, what did she get out of it?
Maxine took a drag on a Lucky Strike as Velma tightly knotted her pinafore behind her back.
“You don’t see her?” Velma asked. Maxine shook her head.
When the music started, the dancers raised their ruffled skirts and showed off their underwear to a crowd of men who clapped and whistled. Maxine and Lulu held one ankle above their heads and pirouetted on the other foot while the other girls laid flat on the stage and kicked at the air. Sweat ran down Maxine’s back. Her rear end felt sore from where she’d fallen on the pavement. Marcia turned a cartwheel. Velma did a split jump. They finished the number in formation, all in a straight line, high kicking in perfect unison.
Still no sign of Rita.
The rest of the night was the same as always: thirty-minute break, second show, midnight spareribs at Nankin.
When she got home, she crawled into bed with Teddy, but she couldn’t sleep. She sat in the living room and finished Lolita. She finally felt sleepy at three o’clock, when a car pulled up to the corner on the other side of the street, its headlights glaring through their bedroom window. Maxine’s body tensed. She waited for it to drive away but it just sat there with its headlights burning through the daisy pattern on the lace curtains. The hairs on the nape of her neck stood on end. She slipped her silk kimono around her shoulders but still felt cold.
Maxine remembered meeting Rita for the first time. Between shows at the Persian Palms, Rita appeared in the dressing room. No one could remember why she was there or who had invited her. She said she’d gone to New York to be a Rockette, but she took a train home after they told her she couldn’t kick high enough. Later that night, Maxine stood backstage with Teddy when she saw Rita hanging around the dressing room door. Max locked eyes with Rita, who disappeared into the shadows. As Max and Teddy walked toward the exit, she caught sight of an eye staring at her from a narrow gap between two stacks of empty wooden beer crates.
A week later, Rita followed the girls to Nankin after the show and charged at Maxine with a butter knife. Maxine was still sore from her fall when Rita’s car nearly hit her, and now she was sitting out there flooding Max’s bedroom with retina-searing light, a spotlight for a floor show that Max wanted no part of.
Enough was enough.
She ran out into the chilly early-morning air. She crossed the street to where the car sat, idling. Through the driver’s side window, she saw a woman with a black bouffant. She balled up her fist and knocked on the glass. The woman rolled the window down and slowly turned her head as she glared at Maxine.
“Rita,” Max said, her beating so loud she could hardly hear her own voice, “Teddy is my husband. You’ve just got to accept it. You’ve just got to drive away.”
Maxine looked down and saw that Rita was clutching a small pistol in her black-lace-gloved hand. Max covered that hand with her own and squeezed Rita’s wrist with one hand and gripped the barrel of the pistol with the other. Her ears began to ring as she fought the urge to rip the gun from Rita’s hand. She knew she only had one chance at this. She had to get it right. Rita pulled her wrist back but winced in pain as Max tightened her grip.
“I know what you think: you’re the one he should be with. He’s handsome and trim. You’d look better with him than I do. I mean, look at me. I’m a hippo. A whale. But you, you could be a model. You and Teddy could be in magazines together. But that’s just it: there are other men for you, Rita.” As she spoke, she slowly twisted the pistol out of Rita’s grasp.
“He loves me,” Rita hissed. “He told me so.” Max noticed that her breath smelled like gin, and her clothes had the Skid Row stink on them: smoke, urine, wine and flophouse BO. Rita may not have been in the Persian Palms that night, but she had certainly been near it. Max curled her toes and gritted her teeth.
“Does he?” Maxine said, doing her best to keep a cool tone. The gun was in her hand now. She withdrew her hand from the car window and brought the weapon down to her side. The muscles in her neck, back and thighs gradually began to release the tension she’d been holding since she spied the gun in Rita’s hand.
Maxine glanced over her shoulder and saw that the light was on in the bedroom. Teddy was awake.
“Rita, you’re Audrey Hepburn. You’re Elizabeth Taylor. Susan Hayward. There are dozens of men for you to pick from. All you have to do is drive off into the sunset and find one of them.”
Rita cocked her head to one side and her bouffant listed. “Elizabeth Taylor can have any man she wants,” Rita said.
The pistol began to feel warm in Maxine’s hand. “No woman can have any man she wants,” Maxine said. “Not even Elizabeth Taylor.”
Maxine heard their door close and saw Teddy running across the street. Rita’s red eyes went from Maxine to Teddy and then back again as a strange grin spread slowly across Rita’s face.
Rita revved the Bel Air’s engine. Maxine screamed as Rita put the car in gear and pressed the accelerator, catching Teddy in the headlights.
“Teddy, no!” Maxine warned.
Maxine raised the pistol and fired through the rear window of the car, shattering the glass. The car spun out and ran up on a curb, smashing into the trunk of an old elm tree. Rita opened the door and ran, abandoning the car as she vanished into the pre-dawn streets. Teddy and Maxine wrapped their arms around each other as sirens wailed in the distance.