O Beautiful

by Jung Yun

  Hannah surprises Elinor with a hug, enveloping her in her soft, slightly damp flesh, which is heavily perfumed with something beachy smelling. When Hannah steps back, Elinor realizes why it was hard to recognize her at first. Gone is her conservative uniform from the Thrifty, the button-up shirt and tweedy blazer. Instead, she’s dressed in an aqua top that shows off her considerable chest and white skinny jeans encrusted with crystals. Hannah is as loud and cheerful when she’s drunk as she is when she’s sober.

  “You guyyyyyys, this is Elinor. She’s a writer from New York. She’s staying at the hotel.”

  Elinor feels flecks of spittle hitting her cheek every time she slurs out an s.

  Hannah’s friends look over with indifference. A few mumble “hey” but none of them bothers to introduce herself, not even when Hannah grabs Elinor by the arm and pulls her toward their table. Typically, she’d resist this, but it feels so good to have a place to lean.

  “So what’s going on?” Hannah asks. Her breath smells like cigarettes and strawberries. “I didn’t expect to see you here tonight.”

  “I just thought I’d see how oil workers spend their free time.”

  It’s a silly, perhaps even stupid impulse, but Elinor doesn’t want Hannah to know how drunk she is, even though it’s obvious that she’s drunk too. No one has ever admired her writing career before. Most of her former business acquaintances were bewildered by her shift to journalism and weren’t shy about saying so. Even Damon seemed dubious for a while. The idea of someone like Elinor going to college, trying to reinvent herself as a writer but not even writing about fashion or makeup—the things she was supposedly an expert in—just didn’t make sense to people. Their skepticism didn’t particularly make her want to explain it.

  “Is this where you and your friends usually hang out?” she asks, enunciating as carefully as she can.

  Hannah tries to take a sip of her drink, but the straw keeps moving, hitting her in the face. Eventually, she pushes it off to the side and takes a big gulp. “We go to lots of places, don’t we?” She lets out a loud whoop that no one returns. “We’ll pretty much go anywhere that has a good ladies’ night.” She looks to her friends for confirmation, but they remain as unenthused as Hannah seems excitable.

  “Are you liking it at the hotel? Is everything okay there?”

  This isn’t the time or place to bring up her noisy next-door neighbors. Elinor suspects there’s nothing she could do about them anyway. “It’s nice. Thanks for asking.”

  Two of Hannah’s friends are staring at her from across the table. One of them says, “I don’t know. Half-Japanese, maybe?”

  Despite her impaired state, Elinor understands what they’re doing. Trying to figure out what she is. Good luck, she thinks. For eighteen years, she lived in North Dakota, surrounded by white people who didn’t think she was white. Then she moved to New York, where the Asians she met didn’t accept her as Asian, disconnected as she was from that part of her identity. Apparently, she was just enough of both to qualify as neither. Still, Hannah’s friends seem to agree on one thing: she’s pretty, too pretty, which Elinor can hear them grumbling about behind their drinks. The longer she stands there, the harder and less welcoming their expressions become. It’s obvious that they want her to move on, to not complicate the mathematics of their four-person hunting party. The feeling is mutual.

  “Well, it was nice running into you again. Have a—”

  “Oh, wait. Wait,” Hannah shouts, waving at someone across the room. “My boyfriend just got here. I’d love for you to meet him.”

  A guy in a baseball cap saunters over to the table, trailed by three friends. The boyfriend is a full head shorter than Hannah, unshaven, and not as attractive as he seems to think he is. He’s wearing his cap backward and his pants a few inches lower than his boxer shorts, which actually makes him look even shorter.

  “Come here, Corey. I want to introduce you to Elinor. This is the lady I was telling you about, the writer from New York.”

  They nod hello at each other, their reserve a sharp contrast to Hannah’s enthusiasm. Corey is wearing a large, ridiculous gold pendant that looks like the letter C at first glance. On closer inspection, it’s actually the sign for cents.

  “We’re good to go,” he mumbles to Hannah.

  “Aren’t you the best boyfriend in the world?” She plants a kiss on his stubbly cheek.

  Corey is a scumbag. Of this, Elinor is certain. There’s something about the way he has his arm draped over Hannah’s shoulder, his fingertips grazing her breast in public, in front of everyone. And yet he’s staring at Elinor, at the other girls at the table, sizing them all up to see if he has a shot with any of them. His friends are doing the same thing, whispering to each other, comparing notes and taking dibs.

  “You dance?” one of Corey’s friends asks.

  Elinor shakes her head, unable to form the word no anymore, tired of constantly having to repeat it.

  “I do,” one of the whispering girls offers.

  The friend examines her for a moment, and then extends his hand with a smile. One by one, the others pair off, leaving only Hannah, Corey, and Elinor at the table. He slides a small glassine envelope toward Hannah, who tucks it into her bra.

  “You party?” Corey asks, discreetly flashing another envelope at Elinor.

  “No, not anymore. Not like that.”

  Hannah finishes her drink, siphoning off the dregs through her straw. “We don’t either usually. Just on special occasions.”

  “Oh? What’s the occasion?”

  “It’s my first night out since the baby.”

  Elinor tries not to frown. “You have a baby?”

  “Yup. She’s four weeks old today. Her name’s Corrine, like my great-aunt, but we call her Corey, like her daddy here.”

  Elinor can’t help but glance at Hannah’s chest. She assumed the tight shirts bursting at the seams were a fashion choice. Now she wonders if they’re something else. “You’re not…” she pauses, trying to ask the question delicately, but there’s no good way to say it. “You’re not doing whatever was in that little packet and breastfeeding, are you?”

  Corey, whose attentions have drifted off to the dance floor, suddenly turns and glares at Elinor under hooded green eyes. But even his severe expression is eclipsed by Hannah’s.

  “I’m not dumb,” she barks.

  “I’m not suggesting—”

  “You think I don’t know how to take care of my baby?”

  “I didn’t—”

  “We feed her formula, bitch.”

  Elinor hears herself saying “I” over and over again, trying to get a word in while Hannah hurls insults at her. She’s snobby and stuck-up. She thinks anyone who’s not from a big city is stupid. She looks down her nose at people who have to do real work for a living. When Hannah calls her a judgmental bitch, it all starts to feel too familiar, like she’s having an argument with her sister instead of a stranger.

  Hannah continues shouting as Elinor backs away from the table. Eventually, the only thing she can hear over the music is Corey, who chimes in with a “yeah, bitch” of his own. She turns and keeps walking in the same direction she was headed before, resisting the urge to run. At the back of the club, Elinor stumbles into the vacant ladies’ room, chaining the door shut behind her. The windowless space smells like a laundry basket, thick with artificial perfume, which makes her feel sick to her stomach again. She braces her forearms on the ancient avocado-green sink, unwilling to put her face near the rust-ringed, piss-splattered toilet. At first, the nausea seems like another false alarm, just drunken dry heaves that will come and go after a few violent waves. But then her throat clenches, she tastes the rising bile, and she vomits a hot spray of liquid into the sink. She repeats this again and again, the force of the expulsions so strong, her back cracks each time she throws up.

  When the waves finally pass, she spits into the basin, wiping away the tears that leaked out of her eyes as she clenched the
m tight. In the mirror, she sees wet strands of hair clinging to her cheeks and chin. The whites of her eyes are an unnatural, watery pink.

  Never again, she tells herself, and this time she might actually mean it. If I make it through this night in one piece, I will never do this again.

  She rests her aching head on her forearms, which are still braced against the sink. It’s possible that she briefly falls asleep in this position, awakened by the sound of someone shaking the doorknob. Elinor lifts her eyes but not her head, noticing a small hole below the liquid soap, about the size of a dime—probably the first attempt to anchor the dispenser into the wall. In this awkward position, leaning low over the sink, she can look through the hole and see what’s on the other side. Shadows. Movement. Something the color of skin. She squints, and the image slowly begins to sharpen. A woman’s exposed breasts, flapping rhythmically back and forth. A man thrusting at her from behind. She leans in closer, blinking back tears as the image comes into focus. It’s Dani, bent over the sink in the adjacent bathroom. Behind her, a roughneck is fucking her like a goddamn animal.

  26

  Morning, and a phone is ringing somewhere. It’s been ringing on and off for a while. Elinor opens her eyes and finds herself sprawled out on her bed at the Thrifty, still dressed in the same clothes from the night before. The comforter is bunched up under her back, and all the pillows are on the floor. She reaches over, swatting at nearby objects—an alarm clock, a plastic cup of water, a small bottle of pills that sounds like a rattle when it rolls off the nightstand. Finally, she feels a familiar shape in her hand.

  “Hello?” she answers. Her voice is raspy, her throat full of phlegm.

  “We’re here, waiting,” a woman says. “Are we still meeting today?”

  She sits upright, her head so heavy with pain, gravity immediately wills it back onto the bed. There’s a sharpness in the woman’s voice, an irritable spike as she hits each syllable of the word waiting. Elinor senses that she’s done something wrong, or not done something that she was supposed to. She looks at the ice bucket on the floor, strategically positioned at arm’s length in case she felt the urge to throw up in the middle of the night. She peers inside, relieved to find it empty.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, still not certain to whom she’s speaking. “I’m having … car problems. Would it be possible to reschedule?”

  The voice on the other end of the line is silent. Elinor slides out of bed and rifles through the notes on her desk. Her eyes are slow to make sense of all the letters and words. What time is it now? Who was she supposed to meet today?

  “You know, you really should have called me,” the woman says. “We’ve been sitting here for twenty-five minutes wondering if you just decided not to show up.”

  She finds her schedule in the stack of papers and follows her fingertip down to today’s date. RANDY HUDSON, NORTH FORK RESERVATION TRIBAL OFFICES, 9:30 A.M. ASSISTANT: SHAWNALEE.

  “Yes, I know. I’m so sorry … Shawnalee.” She assumes this is the name of the person to whom she’s speaking. She hears nothing to correct this notion. “My battery’s dead. I was trying to get a jump for the longest time. Someone’s working on it now.…” The excuses keep piling up, one after another. She must not be sober yet, otherwise she’d never be able to lie like this. “Is there any chance I could reschedule?”

  “He’ll be out of town for two weeks starting tomorrow.”

  In two weeks, Elinor will be long gone. She can’t risk missing an interview that Richard set up for her, no matter how bad she feels. “Well, is there anything else available today?”

  The woman is silent again. Finally, she sighs. “He could meet you at eleven. Can you make it here by then?”

  “Yes,” Elinor almost shouts, not certain if she actually can.

  There’s no time for a shower. The only nonessential activity she allows herself is a quick check of her phone. Aside from Shawnalee, she hasn’t received any other calls this morning. No texts or emails either. Not from Richard. Not even from Maren.

  In the bathroom, she slaps cold water on her face and brushes her teeth. Then she attempts to put on makeup, but her hands are shaking and everything she applies is either too thick or too thin. The skin under her eyes looks raccoon-like. The rest of her face has a green, almost ghoulish tint to it that makeup can’t hide. She leans toward the mirror and exhales, fogging up the glass. Her breath is still completely saturated with the smell of alcohol. How did she let this happen? How did she even get back to her hotel last night? The thought of Gary helping her, possibly even carrying her, into bed while Maren set out aspirin and water and a bucket to throw up in—she doesn’t know if she’ll ever recover from the shame. Elinor brushes her teeth again and scours her tongue raw with the brush, but it hardly helps. The amount of alcohol she had last night feels like it’s changed her at the cellular level. The only thing she can do is alternate between gum and mints during the hour-long drive to the reservation.

  The North Fork covers over a million acres of land. Along the main highway, most of it is flat and scrubby; and when towns do appear, they come and go quickly. A couple of buildings here, a couple of buildings there, sometimes a sign letting people know where they are. She’s thankful that the road is relatively smooth. When she was younger, she remembers rutted, unpaved roads crisscrossing the reservation that churned gravel through the wheel wells. She couldn’t stomach a loud or bumpy ride in her state. She can barely tolerate the sun shining in her eyes as she drives east toward Kittery, the administrative center of the Mahua Nation. The town was named after the man who negotiated a treaty with the tribe on the US government’s behalf. Apparently, Louis Kittery was willing to establish a reservation here because he thought it was throwaway land that could never be farmed, something she read in the file but never learned in school. What’s the bigger irony? she wonders. The fact that the largest town on the reservation is still named after someone who actively despised Native Americans, who wished them to die a slow, painful death of starvation? Or the fact that the shale, which was what made the land so difficult to farm, contains the richest concentrations of oil in the entire state?

  The main tribal office is located in Kittery’s town center, housed in a temporary trailer with a beige horizontal stripe hugging it like a ribbon. A few lots over, a complex of half a dozen new buildings is going up, the exterior walls all covered in bright white Tyvek. While one setup looks too modest, the other looks unusually extravagant. The architect’s rendering on the construction sign features a mid-rise office building surrounded by single-story structures, all clad in matching gold brick—nicer than anything Elinor has ever seen on the reservation before. She wonders what would have happened if Richard hadn’t set this meeting up, if she would have thought to interview someone from the Mahua tribe at all. She wants to believe that she would have come here on her own, but she can’t be sure. For most of the time she lived in the area, she and her family treated the reservation like a thruway—a place to pass on their way somewhere else.

  Elinor knocks twice on the flimsy trailer door and jumps back as it opens toward her. A thin-lipped young woman stands in the threshold, looking deeply annoyed. Elinor checks her watch—it’s 11:07.

  “Shawnalee?”

  “Yes, come in.”

  She starts to apologize as she enters the trailer, but a man shouts “Welcome!” at her before she can finish her sentence. His voice is booming and almost musical; it sounds like someone is banging on a drum inside her head.

  “Welcome, welcome, welcome, miss!”

  Randy Hudson is at least six foot five and solidly built, with a craggy face framed by salt-and-pepper hair that he wears in a low braid. He buzzes with goodwill and a kind of energy for people that Elinor doesn’t have, now or ever. When he leans in to shake her hand, she straightens her arm, trying to keep him at a distance. She doesn’t want him to notice her breath, her bloodshot eyes, or the greenish tint of her skin.

  “I’m so sorry about th
is morning—”

  “Don’t worry, don’t you worry about that. Shawnalee, did you offer our guest here some coffee?”

  Shawnalee is still standing beside the door, her glum demeanor the complete opposite of his. She doesn’t bother to ask Elinor if she wants any coffee. She just turns toward the kitchenette and begins filling a hot pot from the water cooler.

  As Elinor settles into the folding chair that Randy offers, she remembers that Richard’s notes mentioned the importance of using the correct titles for tribal leaders. She asks how Randy would like to be addressed during the interview, whether it’s “Mr. Chairman” or “Chairman Hudson” or something else.

  “Oh, no, no.” He sits down across from her at his desk, surrounded by stacks of moving boxes and dented filing cabinets. “I don’t stand on ceremony. I’m just Randy. Plain old Randy. To you and everybody else around here.” He leans back in his chair, crossing a long leg over his knee. “I have to admit—when Mr. Hall said he was sending over a student, I expected someone younger. You know, someone straight out of school.”

  “Technically I am straight out of school. I went to college late.”

  “Well, good for you. What made you want to study writing?”

  “I just always liked it,” she says, offering an incomplete truth, but also a tidy, self-contained answer that invites no further questions. She opens her bag and fumbles around inside, searching for her recorders and notebook. “So…” She looks up, realizing that Randy has been watching her, probably because she’s taking too long to get situated. “Do you mind?” She motions toward her recorder.

  “Not at all. Not at all.”

  Randy has a curious habit of repeating words when he speaks. As she goes through Richard’s preliminary questions, she notices it more and more. It’s never enough for him to just agree or say yes. He often doubles and triples up, as if the quality of his feelings and the quantity of his assurances are somehow related. Randy is at his most repetitive when he tells her about the new office building and service center complex, partially funded by the royalties and taxes that the tribe collects from wells located on the reservation. Two hundred wells and counting, he beams. Up from ninety-five just the year before.