Salt and Lace

The ship lurches onto the salt at nine in the morning and nobody tells you how loud it is. The hull grinds. The whole deck hums under your shoes. Then the floor turns to glass and you stop caring about anything else.

I'm standing on it now. Barefoot, because shoes felt wrong up here. The salt flats of Mehriz crack away in every direction under my feet. Hexagons. Thousands of them, like a bathroom floor built by a god with too much time. White, dry, endless. My toes feel the cool of the glass and it travels up my legs.

My name is Dani. I'm twenty-four. I write travel fluff for a website that pays by the word, which is why I'm on a luxury cruise crossing a salt desert in Iran instead of crying into a pint of ice cream back in Columbus. Three months ago Mark and I ended four years with one long conversation at a kitchen table. I signed up for this trip the next day. Impulse purchase. Best and worst decision I've made in years.

The observation lounge sits over the bow. Glass floor, glass walls, a bar in the corner. The air in here is heavy and damp, and there's a faint metallic edge to it that the brochure blames on a lava flow oozing over a road on the far shore. You can see it through the glass if you squint. A slow gray tongue crawling across the horizon. The salt shimmers around it.

That's when I see her.

She's across the lounge, by the rail, and she's already dressed for it. Black stockings. Black garter belt. A slip the color of smoke. Dark hair pinned up, one loop loose. She's got one heel propped on the rail base and one hand on her hip, chin tilted, working a pose like she's rehearsing it in a mirror only she can see.

She catches me looking. Smirks.

Great.

"First time on glass?" a guy beside me asks. He's got a clipboard and a linen blazer and the exhausted cheer of a man who runs things. Jeffrey, according to the lanyard. Entertainment director. Thirty-one, ringless, probably married to this ship.

"Yeah," I say. "It's a lot."

"Wait until tonight. The ballroom has a glass section too. We built the stage over it." He checks his clipboard. "You're Dani, right? Contestant number six?"

"Contestant number six," I confirm. Six. Not even a good number.

"The rules are simple," Jeffrey says, and I can tell he's said this a hundred times because it comes out smooth and flat, like a recording. "Three rounds. Each round, a different stockings-and-lingerie ensemble. Judged on presence, poise, and originality. Three judges, scores out of ten, highest total after round three takes the prize. One thousand dollars and the title."

"Which is?"

"Miss Salt Flat Elegance." He says it without flinching. "There's a sash."

"There's absolutely a sash." He glances at his clipboard again. "First round is at four. Wardrobe room is aft of the ballroom. Don't be late, we have eleven contestants and the schedule is tight."

Eleven. I do the math on my chances and don't love the result.

I drift toward the bar to get water because my mouth is dry, and that's where the bartender catches me. Young guy, maybe twenty-two, towel over one shoulder, polishing a glass with the boredom of a man two years into cruise work. Timmy, says his name tag. There's a small laminated card next to the tip jar that says JUDGE. Round One at 4 PM.

"You competing?" he asks.

"Yeah. Number six."

"Number six is a good number," he says. "Dice roll. Lucky."

"You said that to number five, didn't you."

"Number five is a terrible number," he admits, and I laugh for the first time in maybe two weeks. Real laugh. It surprises me.

At three forty I'm in the wardrobe room, a converted storage space with a full-length mirror and one flickering bulb, in my outfit for round one. Sheer ivory stockings. A lace bodysuit, ivory too, with little buttons down the front that I had to redo twice because my hands were shaking. Not cold-shaking. Nerves. I bought this outfit three weeks ago with money I should have spent on rent and I've only worn it alone in my apartment, walking past the mirror, telling myself I looked fine. Fine. The word you use about yourself when you've stopped believing bolder ones.

Three months out from Mark and this is what I've got. A rented confidence. A stage built over a salt desert.

"Contestants to the stage," someone calls. "Five minutes."

The ballroom is dim except for a runway of light down the center. The glass section of the floor is at the far end, past the stage, and through it the salt glows faintly white even in the dark. Eleven of us line up backstage in various states of lace. Maeve is at the end of the line. Still black. Still that smirk.

She looks me over once, unhurried, like she's pricing a used car.

"Ivory," she says. "Cute."

"You've been posing since breakfast," I say. "You've had more rehearsal than some theater productions."

"Honey, I sharpen rubber knife edges for a living. Props, film sets, five years now." She rolls one shoulder. "Precision is the whole job. Edges, angles, this." She gestures at herself. "You?"

"I write website copy about airports."

Her smirk cracks, just a little. "That's bleaker than my job."

"Contestant six!" the emcee calls, and it's my turn before I'm ready, which is always how it goes.

I walk out into the light and the room goes quiet in that way rooms do, the silence with weight to it. Three judges at a table. Timmy among them, pencil in hand, doing a bad job of looking neutral. The other two are a woman with reading glasses and a large man in a captain's uniform. Jeffrey stands off to the side with his clipboard.

The music starts. Something slow with a lot of strings.

I do what I practiced in my apartment. Slow turn at the top of the runway. Hand up the thigh, hooking the stocking seam straight, a move I stole from a video at two in the morning. Another turn, slower, letting the bodysuit's lace do its work. My hands are still trembling and I decide to stop fighting it, let the tremble read as something else. Something deliberate. It half works. My knee wobbles on the pivot and I cover it with a hip shift and hear someone whistle.

Halfway down the runway I make a mistake. I look for her.

Maeve is standing at the edge of the backstage wing, arms crossed, watching. And she's smirking. Not mean, exactly. Worse than mean. Confident. The smirk of a woman who has already seen everything I'm doing and knows exactly how she'd do it better. It lands in my chest like a spark in dry grass and suddenly I'm not nervous anymore, I'm furious, and fury walks better than nerves ever will.

I finish the turn at the end of the runway, right over the glass, salt glowing under my heels. I hold the pose longer than the music wants me to. Then I walk back, chin up, and the applause is polite and real and I don't fall over, which had been my actual fear.

"That's presence," I hear the woman with glasses tell the captain.

Backstage, Maeve peels off the wall.

"Not bad," she says. "The wobble was almost charming."

"It was charming. There was no almost."

"Sure." She's up next. Number seven. She hands me her robe to hold like we're friends, which we are not, and walks out into the light like she owns the deed to it.

I watch from the wing because I hate myself. And she's good. That's the problem. She's really good. Her turn is liquid. Her hand knows exactly where to be. The judges lean in. Timmy writes something with the urgency of a man taking dictation from God.

She finishes, blows a kiss at nobody and everybody, and comes back past me trailing smoke-colored fabric and confidence.

"Round two," she says quietly, "is where they separate the tourists from the locals."

I hand her robe back and don't say anything, because anything I say right now would sound exactly like what it is.

Jealousy, in ivory lace.

Round two starts at seven. Between rounds they let us eat, which is a joke, because who eats in a corset. I manage half a roll standing up in the wings and drink water like it's my job.

Maeve comes out of the dressing room changed. New outfit. Midnight-blue fishnets, a satin corset the color of a night sky, and no slip this time. Nothing softening anything. Her hair is still pinned up, that one loose loop hanging down her temple like it was placed there by a professional.

"Nice," I say, because not saying it would be worse.

"You too," she says, and doesn't even glance at my new ensemble, which is burgundy and cost more than my electricity bill. She's already stretching. Leg up on a chair, forehead to her knee, and she's not shaking or grimacing or doing the thing where you bounce and pray. She's just down there. Like the stretch is a place she lives.

Oh, great.

"Contestant seven!" the emcee calls.

She rolls off the chair, rolls her ankles, and walks out into the light.

What she does out there should probably be illegal on a stage built over a salt desert. The music picks up something with drums in it and she uses it. A high kick, controlled, right at the top of the runway. Then she drops into a low lunge, one hand flat on the stage, and slides forward through it, corset and fishnets catching the light the whole way. She comes up out of the lunge without using her hands. Then she puts her heel against the side of the stage frame, leans into a standing split, and holds it. Holds it. Long enough that someone in the third row says "oh my God" out loud.

The crowd makes that sound. The collective gasp, the intake from a hundred people at once. It rolls across the ballroom like weather.

I'm in the wings with my arms crossed and my jaw set and I am aware that I look like a woman being photographed for a mugshot. I don't care. She comes down out of the split in one smooth line, does a slow turn at the end of the runway over the glass, salt glowing white under her like a spotlight aimed up through the floor, and walks back to a wall of applause.

The judges lean forward. All three of them. I watch it happen. Timmy's elbows are on the table. The woman with reading glasses has her chin on her fist. Even the captain is tilted forward as a man would lean into wind.

"Beautiful," the woman with glasses says, loud enough to reach the wings.

Backstage, Maeve accepts a bottle of water from a crew guy and drinks it like she hasn't just done all that in a satin corset.

"That was incredible," I say. "I hate that I said that."

"Take the compliment. Keep the hate. It's fuel." She caps the bottle. "You watch the judges too, then."

"I watch everything. It's my whole strategy. Panicked observation."

"It's a good one." She means it. That's the annoying part. She says it like a coach.

Then they call a twenty-minute break while they reset the stage for round three, which is the originality round, the prop round, and Jeffrey gets on the mic and explains that each contestant may use one prop of her choosing and that the prop must be present, real, and "ideally baffling."

I go looking for a quiet corner and don't find one, so I end up standing near the bar in the observation lounge, drinking water and adjusting a garter strap, which is not a thing you can do subtly in public. Through the glass floor the salt polygons scroll by, huge and cracked and patient.

And then I hear them. Timmy's voice, low, coming around the corner of the lounge with Maeve. He's got two glasses of something