“So what are you doing here?”
“Because sooner or later we’re going to have to get married. You know how miserable that’s gonna be? Man, it’ll be a piece of work. Wretched! Big-time suffering! I don’t want to spoil things yet.”
“So why get married?” I said. “And by the way, this really isn’t helping to cheer me up.”
“Everybody gets married,” said Willy with conviction. “Everybody’s gotta bite the bullet.”
We had dinner, Italian, and a bottle of red wine. The food was Alaska prices, that is, it would have been just about as cheap to go to Italy. Willy wouldn’t eat the salad. “They put sulfites on everything here,” he said. “Somebody told me. That lettuce is probably three weeks old. Eat enough sulfites and your body gets artificially preserved. Archaeologists will dig us up in two thousand years and say, ’These people knew the secret of embalming.’”
I liked the dinner and the red wine. I thought I owed myself one genuine good time in Alaska. “Come on,” said Willy. “I’ll show you a bar you shouldn’t go into by yourself.”
“I’m getting tired of hearing that crap,” I said, but I went with him anyway.
The bar was down on the waterfront, low-ceilinged and smoky. There was a big ship’s bell at one end of the room, and a harpoon and moose antlers and that sort of thing on the wall, all these manly artifacts I guess women were supposed to be afraid of. When I walked to the bathroom the men all cleared a path for me, like the Red Sea parting. It felt good having them watch me. I pretended they were all Mac, and none of them could have me.
Willy and I sat at the bar next to an Indian woman who said her name was Leonora. We shook hands all the way around. Her hand was small but she had a grip. Leonora was about forty, maybe, it was hard to tell. She had one of those great Indian faces, broad and smooth, that creased one way for smiles and another way for frowns. Leonora bought us drinks, whiskey. She said we should drink to friendship. I thought she was drunker than we were, but as time went on it was hard to tell. “Is he your boyfriend?” she asked once, when Willy couldn’t hear.
“Who, me? Nope,” I said. “No boyfriend.”
“He’s a cute little thing,” said Leonora. She craned her neck trying to look for him and her eyes crossed. “Makes you want to take him home and put him on a shelf or something.” I wanted to tell Willy there were some bars he shouldn’t go into by himself.
Later Leonora asked me what I’d been doing in Alaska. “This and that,” I said. “Being a tragedy queen, mostly.”
“Say what?” The bar was noisy.
“Doing some sightseeing.”
“She’s in love,” volunteered Willy. “And she’s pissed off about it too.”
“No I’m not. In love I mean. I just decided.”
“Well good for you,” said Leonora. “Love. What’s that, just something you hear come out of the radio.”
“Willy’s in love too,” I said. “But it doesn’t bother him much.”
“You’re still cute,” said Leonora.
“Everybody thinks I’m cute,” said Willy.
I was trying to remember being in love. I knew it hadn’t been that long ago, probably sometime before I got drunk.
I shook hands with Leonora again. I shook hands with Willy. “Have a good life,” I said. “Watch out for the bears.”
“He’s a teddy bear,” said Leonora.
“Everybody loves me,” said Willy.
The Red Sea parted for me again. I couldn’t tell anymore if the men were staring at me or not. Back at the hotel I set my alarm for six a.m. and hit the mattress hard. The phone rang. It could have been two hours or two seconds later.
In the dark I knocked it to the floor. The phone was singing a song. “One lil two lil three lil Indians,” it sang. “Four lil five lil six lil Indians.”
“Willy?” I said. “Where are you?”
“Downstairs,” he said. “Heap big fun.”
“Let me talk to the desk clerk,” I said. The desk clerk was laughing his ass off. “Get my friend a room and put it on my bill,” I told him.
The clerk said he’d be happy to oblige, but in fact he needed cash. I shoved my nightgown into my blue jeans and started downstairs. I figured I was still drunk. The lights in the hall were like an old horror movie, dripping with shadows. Willy was glad to see me. He tried to hug me but he missed by a mile. “Where’s your backpack?” I said. “Where’s Leonora? Never mind.”
I paid for the room. The desk clerk thought this was all the funniest thing he’d ever seen in his life. He was an Indian too, a young guy. “We’re getting married,” Willy told him.
“Just give me the key,” I said. I steered Willy down the hall to his room and wrestled the door open. “Here,” I said. “Sleep it off. Wake up happy.”
Willy fell into my neck. “This is the part where we make love,” he informed me. “It’s fate.”
I was drunk but he was drunker. I pushed him inside and threw the key after him. Short men really were safer. I started back to my room. One of the old men from the lobby was behind me, rattling a key ring. He must have been the janitor. “How’s the heat in that room?” he asked me.
“It’s fine.”
“You want, I can fix that heat.”
“Get lost,” I said, slamming the door. There was no chain lock. I lay down to sleep on the floor with my feet up against the doorknob. I picked up the phone. It stretched just far enough. I dialed Mac’s number. “Hello,” he said, sounding sleepy.
“I just wanted to tell you I’m in Alaska,” I said. “And I can whup any two-legged or four-legged varmint in the territory. It’s all over between us.”
“Lady, you got the wrong number,” the man said. “I don’t know what time it is in Alaska, but it’s five ayem in Missoura.”
“Sorry,” I think I said, and fell asleep with the phone in my ear. In the morning I felt bad, but I could have felt worse. The night clerk was still downstairs. He started grinning the second he saw me. “Here,” I said, handing over the rain poncho and the brandy bottle. “Give these to my friend, if you see him. If you don’t see him, give them to somebody else.” From now on I would carry no more than what I needed.
It was only six thirty, but the airport was hopping. Everybody in town was there, it looked like, all the cabdrivers and bartenders and Indians, drinking coffee and eating sweet rolls and carrying on, a party. Everybody seemed happy, wide awake, like they got a big kick out of getting up early, like watching the sun rise was one hell of a good time. It was too soon to decide if I’d had a good time in Alaska. Some people had weird ways of enjoying themselves.
Holy
Week
Arf arf arf. It had been that kind of day. Olivia Snow, hugely pissed, rancid with ill will toward the universe, sat in steamy traffic, laying on the horn. If she were a dog, she’d bite. Some kind of parade was blocking the intersection. Incredible. The universe was hating her right back.
Cars idled or nudged uselessly sideways. But there was an alley up ahead and if somebody would just get it together to turn, or let her squeeze in there, she might reach home before her car overheated. She honked again. Bow wow wow. It felt good to be making her angry noise. They’d tried to make her cry again at work. Ha ha. She was president of the Bitch of the Month Club. The Breaker of Balls. They hadn’t laid a glove on her. Still, it had taken its toll. Her head was full of slag. Her neck had turned to lumber. The city sunlight took on a fermented look, bleary and thickened. She needed a drink. She needed a bunch of drinks.
Olivia craned to see the parade itself: a line of people hoisting things over their heads, statues, she thought they were, statues winking with gilt, wreathed in flowers. The marchers wore costumes of the flapping, drapey sort. She had no clue. Then she remembered. Holy Week. Holy Week in Pilsen, and the Mexicans were dressing up like Christ and scourging themselves.
Of course there would only be the one Christ. Everyone else was an apostle or a mourner or a jeering throng. Oli
via eased off the horn. What was the point? Traffic had stopped to watch the show. Here were some men in fake beards and gold crowns. Patriarchs of the Church? The Magi? No, those were the Christmas guys. Here was a squadron of women dressed all in black, a suffering sisterhood. She should get out of her car and join the procession. Throw a shawl over her head and beat herself with a rosary. Make a complete spectacle of herself.
Defeated, she switched her engine off and watched the parade’s progress, its reverent ebb and swell. Maybe she could be Mary Magdalene. Except there was probably a lot of competition for the part, getting to look bad and willful, like a cosmetics model. Olivia read somewhere that the Bible did a number on Mary Magdalene. She wasn’t a whore at all, just another uppity woman who got a subpar job evaluation from the guys who ran the office. The goddamn office. She didn’t want to think about it. She couldn’t help thinking about it. The place was a stadium for championship dick-waving contests.
Oh but here was Christ! Bare-chested, crowned with real-looking thorns, his expression all pallid and swoony. The cross bumped along behind him in top-heavy fashion. It looked like it had some real weight to it, and Christ was a little too short to be hefting the thing. But then, wasn’t pain the whole idea? Two Romans in fierce headgear and scarlet tunics stomped along on either side, sneering and coiling whips. The woman in blue was the Virgin Mother. Had to be. Don’t even get her started on the Virgin Mother. Immaculate Conception. Please. What was wrong with these people?
She didn’t have a particle of religion in her. Catholic, Mormon, Lutheran, Jew, whatever. She had no clue. Her parents had been hippies given to mushy transcendental thought. Olivia’s own daughter, Roberta, had lived through her childhood in a similar unchurched fashion, although that had more to do with absentmindedness than with policy. Olivia was just as glad to have missed out on sin and guilt and piety, but sometimes it put her at a disadvantage. She didn’t understand the mindset, God and all. She thought that things were funny when apparently they were not. It was as if she’d been brought up eating with her hands and had to learn about silverware. She bet the guys in the office were all churchgoers.
The parade was breaking up now, everybody heading off for the final gala, the Crucifixion. Simulated, one hoped, though Olivia remembered news accounts of Christs in more fervent countries who actually had the spikes driven in. As if you had to fabricate suffering in this world. The car ahead of her moved forward. Now here was a religious experience. Acceleration!
At home, she dumped her coat and bag and kicked her shoes into a high arc. They landed with a clatter, scaring the cat. She was getting too old to wear heels. Her feet were growing strange knobs, like potatoes left too long in the pantry. She took off everything elastic and pinching—hose, bra, underpants—and walked around for a little while, naked and flabbily self-conscious. She remembered when naked had been a lot more fun. Then, because Roberta and her boyfriend were likely to come in at any time, she put on her old rag of a bathrobe and mixed a pitcher of margaritas. She had a sudden taste for them. Something about Mexico.
She sat at the kitchen table and looked out the window, three flights up, with its view of alley and sooty rooftops and the Chicago sky which even when clear was the color of bathwater. The people across the way used wadded bedsheets for curtains. Never once had she seen those windows open to the light. The first year she and Roberta lived here, they’d amused themselves by imagining lurid goings-on inside. Now it was just one more unremarkable weirdness. They were going to fire her ass. She didn’t want to admit it, but it was coming up fast in the rearview mirror. They’d never liked her much to begin with, and now the veneer of civility, and even indifference, had worn off. They were laying the groundwork. Silky inquiries about her client list. Suggestions, reminders, admonitions. Kissed off, axed, outsourced to some twenty-two-year-old in New Delhi.
She knew her products cold. Everyone acknowledged that, even the jerks. And she was good with clients, did follow-ups and problem solving. She had real relationships with them, not the usual salesman glad-handing bull. One more thing the boys gave her grief for. Today it had been Harris, a kid who probably still got pimples. He’d overheard her on the phone with one of the clients who was having allergy troubles, had hung in her doorway, grinning—she could never decide if these guys were rude on purpose, or if they were ignorant of manners—while Olivia commiserated and suggested remedies. “Wow,” Harris said, when she hung up. “What do they call you, Mother?”
“Is that your suit, Harris, or your dad’s?”
“Ha ha. Seriously, you waste too much time on these people. Too much of the warm fuzzy stuff.”
“And seriously, Harris, you should start shaving. Even if nothing’s growing in. Toughen up the skin a little. See if it doesn’t help.”
Harris muttered something under his breath.
“Didn’t quite catch that,” Olivia said. “Did you say ’lesbian’? Do you even know what that means, Harris? How about ’vagina’?”
Harris had showed his teeth in an ugly way and taken himself off. She hadn’t always been like this. Hostile. At her first jobs she’d been a nice girl, brought cookies to the office, remembered her coworkers’ birthdays. It got you nowhere. There were too many nice girls out there, answering somebody else’s phone. Now she had attitude. She stood up for herself. She talked back. She took no shit. She was mean as a snake. She tilted her glass back, tasted salt and tequila. Snake food.
Feet on the stairs. The front door opened and Roberta and her boyfriend Larry made their skulking entrance, moving sideways, like a couple of cats. “Hi baby,” Olivia greeted her daughter. “Lare.”
Larry let a couple of vowels escape his mouth. Roberta said, “Hey Mom.” She spoke in a series of exhales, as one succumbing to a great fatigue. Not talking was a teen thing.
“You guys hungry?” Chipper, perky tone, as if she was just taking trays of oatmeal cookies out of the oven. “There’s probably something to eat around here. Snacks.”
“Maybe a little later.” Roberta slowed her pace and she and Larry tangled knees. An almost visible hormonal charge, like static electricity, passed between them. Roberta was a short girl, busty and ripe-bottomed, with white-blonde hair worn in a dandelion fluff. Her eyes were made up with a lot of silver and black. Her beautiful slut daughter.
Poor Larry. He wasn’t going to be able to keep up with her for very much longer. The only thing he had going for him was that he’d been her first. He was a furtive boy—but then, all boys his age struck her as furtive—with dyed black hair shaped into a neogreaser forelock. He was narrow-chested and his hips were so skinny that they seemed only a kind of attachment mechanism for his penis. These were not motherly thoughts.
Olivia tried again. “Or I could get takeout. I was thinking barbecue.”
“Yeah, barbecue’s good.” Roberta continued down the back hallway to her bedroom, Larry stepping on her heels. They had not actually stopped moving since they entered the apartment. A slow-motion beeline for the bedroom. The door closed behind them and their music came on, lots of boom and growl, turned up high to cover the sounds of sex.
Olivia found some tortilla chips and shook them into a bowl. Celery and carrot sticks, prepackaged. String cheese she had to pry out of its plastic skin. The assemblage looked almost healthy. She ate a celery stick and thought about calling Marlon to see if he wanted to go out a little later. She felt both tired and restless. It wouldn’t hurt her to get out of the house, hang a good time on the end of this befucked day.
Marlon was her sort-of boyfriend. He wasn’t reliable enough for an upgrade. He was older than Olivia, forty-eight to her thirty-six. She thought that explained the sex part of things, how he wasn’t all that interested all that often. The penis was a kind of rare orchid that stopped unfurling somewhere between Larry’s age and Marlon’s. Or one of those old-fashioned window shades that lost its zip after you yanked on it too many times. Or maybe it was the drinking. Marlon drank too much. Well so did she. Pr
obably. She couldn’t say she got all hot and bothered these days, not the way she used to. Hormones were draining out of her. No more Magdalene.
She dialed Marlon’s number and spoke to his answering machine. “Hey. Me. Call if you want to head out for a drink. No, call anyway.”
He was probably still at work. Marlon was a subemployed musician. He played jazz piano as part of an ensemble that made fitful appearances in small clubs. For income, he worked odd hours, in bits and pieces, in a sound studio, processing homegrown commercials for car dealerships and retirement communities. He lived in a friend’s basement, he just got by, he would never make a name for himself, and none of that seemed to bother him. Olivia couldn’t decide if Marlon was a true artist, disinterested and detached, or simply lazy. He played beautifully. Olivia loved sitting in the clubs, wedged into a tiny side table, watching his long fingers knit the piano keys into sound. Listening, she felt serenaded. These were their best times together.
Other times they got into fights about things that didn’t matter, like who was worse, Bush or Nixon, or they walked out on each other in bars, or fell asleep in the middle of sex, or in the middle of attempting to have sex. She guessed she could do better than him if she tried. But she and Marlon had known each other for three years now and had knocked all the expectations and hard edges off each other. He was someone you could call up for any reason or no reason or when you wanted to forget you’d been summoned to the supervisor’s office for another crappy little talk about being a team player, and that everyone else had watched you, knowing you were about to get a good pasting, how you’d walked past them slow and haughty in the elegant shoes that hurt your feet.
It was almost dark when Roberta and Larry emerged from the bedroom. Olivia eyed them covertly, searching for signs of sexual exhaustion, or even gratification. Kids not only had poker faces these days, they had poker bodies. They retraced their earlier path to the front door. “I’m just going to walk Larry outside,” Roberta announced, and Olivia said OK. She replenished the margarita pitcher, figuring that Roberta would want some. When she came in again, Roberta eyed the food on the kitchen table, picked up a piece of string cheese, and put it back down.
Throw Like A Girl Page 13
