She wasn’t supposed to be here, of course, but it depended on how you phrased it. Lila and I had phrased it as “Can we take a walk around the block and maybe even sit out on the spiky hospital grass?” The nurses were glued to the TV and gave us an absent okay, but instead we got into my car and left Seattle in the belly of a ferry across Puget Sound. It wasn’t far, but it was far away, the ferry line the only thread which would lead us back. We drove north past Bainbridge and Kingston in search of the name that always cracked us up: Point No Point. There was a new casino, who knew? Inside it wasn’t easy to find a place that didn’t have the Super Bowl blaring on the screen. We weren’t interested in the year’s big football contest. We didn’t think those guys needed any more encouragement. It took me waiting for the bartender to slip out for something, and taking one of the heavy chairs, lifting it over my head and banging it against the bottom of the TV over and over until it spat sparks, while Lila stood underneath the green EXIT sign and watched for his return. If she saw him coming she was going to give me the password. The password was, “Shit! The bartender’s coming!”
Let us have our fun. By Super Bowl Sunday there was no one to stop us. Lila’s father had died when someone had killed him, and her husband had shot himself long before she even got sick, after a nervous breakdown that left him weeping and playing golf by himself in the rain. It was something else we had in common. She and I were cut from the same cloth, an angry odd quilt, and then she went and got sick just like her mother and I had to start drinking for both of us. “Sick?” I would hear myself yelling to the late-night science television. It was the only thing worth watching after visiting hours were done. “Why haven’t we fixed sick yet? You scientists there—put down those starfish and help us. I hereby demand that all people who are good at math make the world free of illness. The rest of us will write you epic poems and staple them together into a booklet.” Then I’d weep, finally, and fall asleep in Adam’s sweatshirt and wake up and quit my job.
“Tell me a story,” she said. “You’re thinking about Adam, I can tell.”
“Then I’ll tell you a story about him,” I said. “Once upon a time it was morning, and the two of us were hungover in Steven’s old apartment on South King. It was when Andrea visited with that boyfriend of hers who turned out to be loopy.”
“I’ve heard he’s since straightened himself out,” she said.
“You heard it from me, who’s telling this story,” I said. “The point is, five pitchers of margaritas is plenty. Andrea and what’s his-name were asleep on the couch and you in your room and by some miracle I was getting it together to make us a pot of coffee and banana waffles.”
Lila smiled at the waffles, curling her beautiful lips in fond remembrance of having something to eat. “And?” she said.
“And bacon,” I said, although this wasn’t true. Bacon was my gift to her. “And there was a knock knock knocking on Steven’s door. And behind the door was Adam, without a shirt on and holding his very old shoes.”
“And so how could you not,” Lila said, “take him and kiss him and live with him for six years? I mean, no shirt alone would be enough for most girls, Allison, but no shirt and holding old shoes? That’s better than a Jewish doctor.”
“Better than your doctors,” I said. I could say this, and not just because it was true. I wasn’t the only one who knew where the hope was hitched.
Lila dribbled her water into a potted plant above her on a counter, and then held the glass against her cheek like she’d downed a drink. “You know when I stopped with the doctors?” she said. “You know when I gave up on my life and just thought, Well, if it makes the docs happy to learn something…? It was when that handsome one, except for the pimple under his eye, looked right at me and said binomial nomenclature.”
She’d told me this story a thousand times. “Two-word name,” I said.
“Two-name name,” she said. “To look at me dying and waste breath with the Latin, and it’s not even Latin. ‘Okay, okay,’ I told him, but he didn’t get it, which was another bad sign.”
“Like a bird behaving badly,” I said.
She smiled right at me. “Or a chain saw,” she said, “outside the window.” Lila and I shared a room in college and spent one night drinking round after round of a 1930s drink recipe called the Suffering Bastard. We were almost out of bitters and brandy when we heard an evil buzzing outside. Boy oh boy was it very, very late. We peered out the window and two boys were standing in the parking lot, holding chain saws and staring at us. We screamed and called the campus security, who arrived enthusiastically only to find the boys were holding remotes with antennae poking out of them, while miniature sportscars buzzed around the concrete, and that they were staring at us because we had thrown back the curtain and stood there in our underwear screaming at them. Also we knew these boys, Joe and Joe’s friend what’s-his-name. Our position was not one of strength, but Lila argued with campus security anyway.
“You were fierce,” I told her, another bourbon gone.
“I was,” Lila agreed faintly. “The point, as I saw it, and I still see it this way, is that they were dumb guys and ought to be rounded up, chain saws or no. I mean look, it’s more than ten years later and the Super Bowl still exists. Do they honestly think I don’t know why there were scarcely any doctors on my floor today?”
I looked at her: she was tops. She made me want to have a hero. “Who’s your hero, Lila?” I said, hearing my bourbon on the lilt of her name.
She gave me the look I would have given me if I were me. That was the last fun night we really had, with the chain saws; her mom died two months later, and after that, no matter where we drank or what, we were the Suffering Bastards. “You’re my hero,” she said, “for driving me here and for lack of a better guess. Finally getting to Point No Point is the last thing that makes sense. You know how the nurses started asking me to rate my pain one to ten? I just started giving them random numbers. You can’t get to ten, I told the one with those earrings I want to yank out. You can’t get to ten because someone might slap you and that would hurt more.”
“I won’t slap you,” I said.
“Someone put ‘Jewish’ on the chart,” she said, “so they sent in a rabbi who I swear looked pre–bar mitzvah.”
“They sent you a rabbi?” I said.
“You must have been putting money in the meter,” Lila said. “He had that rabbi curly hair, and it was his first gig after wherever you go to be a rabbi.”
I signaled the bartender, who hung up a phone and sulked over without a bottle. “What did he say?”
Lila blinked very slowly, which she also did when she was drunk, like the move with her empty water glass. “He said I was a very pretty girl,” she said. “He said I was beautiful.”
“Let’s go, girls,” the bartender said. “Bar’s closing.”
“It’s noon,” I said, “or something.”
“Tony says I can close it up,” he said. “Super Bowl Sunday, even the Indians aren’t drinking. I’m full of hard times today. TV goes on the fritz, and I’m the only man on earth who’s in a bar and can’t watch the game. I have to call Tony every five minutes to know what’s going on.”
“There’s no justice in the world,” I said.
“Yes, I know, I know,” the man said, “but it really bugs me when the game’s on.”
“We don’t want to watch the game,” Lila said. “We want to talk to each other before I die.”
“Listen to you with your drama,” he said, and walked away from us to reach behind the bar for a bottle of lotion. “Don’t pretend like you like me, okay? When you came in here you strongly implied that we were going to have a threesome if I gave you a round of drinks. As soon as I did, even though one of you wanted water, you laughed your asses off at me, so shut up with the There’s no justice. Justice is you leaving the Point No Point Casino Lounge Number Six right now.”
Lila stood up and tottered, which was a new thing lately and couldn’
t be good. The bartender frowned and spread his gob of lotion between his hands. “You don’t get it,” she said. “Let me explain what is happening to the Jewish people. Girls are never never never never never never never never going to walk into this place or another place and sleep with you in pairs”—she looked at his name tag—“Gus. It’s over. Stop with the porn imagination and the men tackling each other outdoors. You need to call Tony every five minutes for the score? Go score with Tony. If men went out and had sex with each other every time they were angry there’d be so much less pain in the world.”
“What the hell?” the man said. “You’re crazier than our friend Headphones and you’re not even drinking. What’s eating you, anyway?”
Lila gave him the same smile she gave her husband when he bought the gun. For hunting, he had said. To kill birds, and she unbuttoned her blouse. It was a green silk thing, bad for rain and it always rained in this part of the world. There was a row of gorgeous outfits hanging in her hospital room closet, ready for the nightlife like a sick joke. Whenever I opened the doors the hangers would ping and rattle in the breeze, like Lila was dead already and her ghost was deciding what to wear. “Check it out,” she said, unbuttoning further. She wasn’t wearing a bra and had never needed to, although of course she’d worn one for two years in junior high until I told her, in the soccer field out back as the drizzle spat into our rum, that she should just give it up. Beneath the silk was the scar from the last time, snaked between her breasts, and a spiral, wide and bearing nasty teeth, down to her pale belly, in a way that made her navel no more. For some reason they had to spiral it. For some reason this was necessary. I’d seen it a thousand times, from that day in the waiting lounge when they wouldn’t let me in, and I heard her surface from the anesthetic and cry and cry and cry until I pushed through anyway. The waiting lounge felt like a blind date on the sixth floor, with everyone staring and wondering what was wrong with one another, but Adam was gone by then, and Lila’s unmentionable husband, and so I was the only one out there for Lila and she was the only one in there for me. Every time I saw the scar I thought of what they showed on the TV in the room. Some nurse had turned it on so Lila could have company, while I magazined in the lounge because I wasn’t a relative. The TV told a science story of some people who had found a wounded bear in a faraway forest and had used science to trick it back into healthy. Now it traveled with a show and balanced objects on its head. Why don’t they leave them alone? Why don’t they ever leave them alone? I couldn’t believe my eyes, that they would show such a thing on a screen, and neither could Gus believe his eyes as he saw it. Without a rude word he left us and Lila sat down and pulled her shirt shut. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she said, and reached into the rip in her purse.
“Do you want me to come with?” I said. Terrible things happened with her in the bathroom, as you might imagine, and I had seen them all.
“Just to brush my teeth,” she said, taking her toothbrush out. “Bad taste in my mouth.”
She walked off behind the plants and I put my head down on the table and cried. When Adam moved in we bought a globe at a garage sale and would spin it together in bed. I’d stop the world with my finger and Adam, the drugs racing through his teeth, would tell me things he knew about where my finger landed. Some of them he made up but most of them he remembered from a grade school teacher of unspeakable power. Still nothing in this world prepared me. In all the world I couldn’t guess this moment or what it looked like, so I thought I’d cry about it for a minute until I heard the bottle set on the table and Lila sit down beside me.
“I’ll make you a drink, dear,” said Lila, but it wasn’t Lila. She was older, much older, and vaguely cool, wearing a shawl I might buy if my loans ever let up. Her fingers looked like trees in the park, and she clutched everything at once: vermouth and Campari and a cocktail shaker and three dainty glasses by their stems.
“You’re the woman on the way in,” I said. “We saw you.”
“I talked to your friend,” she agreed, unscrewing the cap of the vermouth. “I told her my blackjack theory.”
Drink was making this difficult. “Do you work here?” I asked.
She made a noise so much like a barnyard hen that I missed Lila’s mom all over again, the way she always got pesto on her shirt but never stopped ordering it. “I wouldn’t call it working,” the woman said. “I’m wasting all my money away. It doesn’t pay much. As you well know, it’s quiet today, so I stumbled in here and saw you crying like you couldn’t go on. So I’m here to serve as an example, and I’m going to make you a drink called an Old Pal, Campari and vermouth and bourbon like you like, but served up so you look better drinking it, as you well know.”
I looked at this woman and saw also the bored nurse, and Adam and those boys who liked to run tiny cars at four in the morning. It was the usual revelation: everyone’s crazy. “There was another guy in here serving as an example,” I said. “He had a theory.”
“Everybody has a theory,” the woman said. She started shaking the shaker and I could hear that ice was already inside. “This other guy, what did he make you?”
“Nervous,” I said. Lila was taking a while—I felt the prickle of deciding whether or not to worry—but then she appeared like a miracle and tottered past the plants to our table.
“It’s a party!” the woman said, adding the Campari.
“I’m back and so are you,” Lila said, putting the toothbrush where it belonged. “This is the blackjack woman, Allison. We talked on the way in about her theory.”
“As you well know,” the woman said, “I have these birds in cages given to me by a dear young man who draws things. He’s the sort of boy you girls would like.”
“I’m done with boys,” Lila said, “except Sidney Poitier.”
“I met him once in my Hollywood days,” the woman said. “He’s not for you.” She turned to me and her eyes looked icicle shiny, sharp and pretty and not likely to last. “You want my bird friend,” she said. “Sometimes he behaves badly, like his birds, but you would like the likes of him.”
“I was telling Allison she needed someone apocalyptic,” Lila said.
“Maybe she needs both,” the woman said. “An apocalyptic boy who draws.”
“Even with the right boy I’d wreck it,” I said. “I’d join the navy on impulse and sail off right when he needed me, or we’d have a baby and I’d accidentally put it in my purse. The right boys I always toss and the wrong ones I keep on top of me like paperweights. I know they’re the wrong boys and I just go to them.” I balanced my finger on the square of a napkin and moved it down the table like a barge. “I just go,” I said.
“It’s true,” Lila said. The talk was cheering her, I could tell. When she first got sick there was a very popular book about heaven. While she languished in the hospital I stayed up all night on espresso, taping the word heaven over with the word Las Vegas, everywhere it appeared in the book. Sometimes when I’m alone I get a warm feeling inside me and I know my mother’s in Las Vegas thinking of me. She was smiling like that now. “What’s your name again?” she asked the woman.
“How about Gladys?” Gladys said.
“Well, Gladys,” Lila said, and draped an arm around me. “Allison here once met a boy named Adam. He was all pepped up on drugs when he knocked on the door desperate for money. ‘I need money,’ he said, and do you know what Allison did?”
“Fed him waffles,” I said. “He kept saying ‘I need money’ and I told him if he picked up all the leaves in my yard I’d give him a dollar.”
“It wasn’t even her yard,” Lila said. “She just wanted to see him bend over.” Gladys laughed and slid the Old Pals over. They looked rosy in the indoor light. “I can’t drink,” Lila said.
“I thought you looked too sick to drink,” Gladys said gently. “Never you mind, dear. As you well know, a woman looks good with a drink in front of her whether she’s drinking or not. You keep it.” She raised her glass to start a toast. �
�Good times around the corner,” she said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s a long corner, Gladys. How about ‘Confusion to the Gentiles’? That was the toast we learned in sixth grade.”
“Allison was a gloomy Gus then,” Lila said. “She would wander the halls like a ghost. She had a theory that she should be wearing men’s neckties, but it wasn’t going over well at Gene Ahern Preparatory School. People would laugh at her and she would cry at them back. She was a sore thumb.”
“And what changed the tide?” Gladys asked.
I looked at Lila and saw her mother’s chin, the crease of her mother’s brow when we stayed out past curfew and snuck in the back. It was all that was left of her. For a while in college I was an experimental filmmaker, if that’s the word for it. We’d get drunk and rip up pages in the Norton Anthology of Poetry and read them into her dad’s video camera in funny voices. There was no point to it, but we loved those movies to tears. They were for a select audience, but then again we were the Chosen People. What would happen to us? What would happen? “It was when I met you,” I said to her. “It all changed then.”
“Birds of a feather,” Lila said, and took my hand.
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