How I Spent My Summer Vacation

by Gillian Roberts

  “Can’t wait a whole lot of minutes,” he said. “I’m really tired from last night, and I’m due in early tomorrow. You know I’m here—officially—to check Nicky B.’s old haunts. How long can I pretend to inspect a city block that no longer exists?”

  “But that has nothing to do with me. I’m not leaving. Not tonight, anyway.”

  He looked flabbergasted. “Why not? You can’t be havin’ a good time.” People shoved their way around him, clearing their throats, trying to make him aware that he was blocking the door. He finally noticed and moved to the side, and I shifted over as well. “Your roomie’s in jail, it’s too cold for the beach, and you don’t gamble,” he said. “Why not?”

  His argument contained several salient points, but it nonetheless missed the relevant one, which was Sasha. “I can’t walk away and leave her here to rot!”

  He rolled his eyes, seeking the compassion of the patron saint of those who deal with nincompoops. “You watch too many old movies. Sasha’s not likely to rot. That jail’s not even damp. Besides, her lawyer cousin’s goin’ to spring her.”

  “How do I know that? And won’t she still need some kind of help, or attention? And even if the lawyer gets her bail, which isn’t a for sure, will they let her leave the state? Go back to Philadelphia?”

  “Depends,” Mackenzie said. “Long as there’s no threat she’d run, they probably will.”

  “But you don’t know for sure and you don’t really care.” It was literally painful to say the words. “Not enough. Not about anything, except crime.” Somewhere in the last twenty-four hours I had been pushed over my emotional boundary lines, into the swamp of sloppy sentiment. I was not only ready to cry about Mackenzie’s callousness, I wanted to, I ached to do so. “You aren’t really committed to—to anything!” A small and rational part of me knew that was unfair as well as untrue, but it felt right. And I was sick of facts. Facts didn’t make sense. “Nobody’s committed to anything!” I lamented. “The whole world’s—”

  “For Pete’s sake!” he said.

  A kid of about thirteen, in uniform—baseball hat turned backward, baggy droopy pants, cloaked expression—stopped about three feet from us and watched, warily. I couldn’t decide if he wanted to prevent violence or witness it firsthand. I gave the kid my best teacherly scowl, meant to pierce and draw blood.

  The kid shrugged a shoulder, said, “It’s your funeral, lady,” and meandered off.

  “That’s what I mean!” I said. “If he really thought something bad was going to happen, he should have stayed!”

  “After you made it clear he should leave? Give him a break. Give ever’body a break.”

  I could hear the exhaustion in his voice, and that should have slowed me down, but it didn’t. I don’t know if anything could have. Accumulated frustration pressed at my back like the Furies. I felt the pressure of the long teaching year and my mother’s reality-based nagging about my lack of financial security and my own ambivalence about my lack of emotional security, and—and—and—“Nobody cares enough. Not Reese, as far as his wedding vows, not Lucky’s mother. And Dunstan’s not even committed to being himself!” Everything I said felt urgent, as if I were carrying the single message that could save the planet. Paulette Revere waving her lantern and shouting, “Commit! Commit!” I couldn’t have said to what he or I was supposed to commit—that was part of the problem—but I also couldn’t bear for Mackenzie to be part of the great indifferent, to be like everybody else.

  “I’m impressed, or depressed,” he said, “by the scum and cads you’ve encountered, but it’s nonetheless time I headed home.”

  “And what about Lala?”

  “That a person or a pastime?”

  “The woman who told me a man was harassing her, so I’d make him jealous and get him to propose marriage to her. How’s that for integrity?”

  “Have you switched tirades? I thought you were doin’ commitment, not integrity.”

  I heard him through an internal yapping chorus, each voice cataloguing offenses against my person. “I thought you were committed to helping Sasha!” He surely wasn’t committed to me—and I still didn’t know if I wanted him to be, but I knew I wanted him to want that—but I couldn’t, wouldn’t, say that. Yet. Talking—yelling—about Sasha and Mackenzie’s relationship was much, much easier. “So now you want to shrug it off, return to business as usual, not try to prevent a horrible miscarriage of—”

  “Whoah!” He took a step back and looked at me with a profoundly sorrowful expression. “Mandy,” he said, his voice low, “what’s this really about?” His eyes narrowed, upped their intensity. “Tell me this isn’t that talk you’ve been sayin’ we should have.”

  “Well, of course I wouldn’t—this isn’t the time or—”

  “You sure?”

  I stopped. The blithering emotional surge drained and I was riding on empty. “I don’t know,” I said, softly and honestly.

  “This is an awesomely dumb time and place for it.” He was almost whispering. We were retreating, voices first.

  “I came here—to Atlantic City—in the first place, mostly to figure out—to think through—”

  He took both my hands. “An’ I didn’t really come here to find out about Nicky B. But…stuff happens. Your friend got herself in big trouble.”

  “Framed. Got herself framed.”

  “An’ you’re rattled.”

  “Of course I am! I’m sane, I’m human. But under the rattles, I still have questions.”

  “Such is the nature of existence,” he said. “It generates business for philosophers, theologians, and comedians.”

  Such was the nature of our current existence that two things were true: one, that wasn’t at all the answer I’d wanted, and two, he didn’t know that. I looked at him and felt wistful, a galloping case of the might-have-beens, and for what blighted outcome, I couldn’t even say.

  A bad blend, my granny would have cautioned me. Two people trying to have street smarts above love, or whatever it was we’d have if we relaxed long enough to define it. Dummies, she’d have called us. But it was easier for Granny, who married her first love at sixteen with the optimism that only a person with zero experience can possibly have.

  “A man died in your hotel room, Sasha’s in jail, you’ve been meetin’ slippery characters, an’ you’re probably hungry,” Mackenzie said. “Look, it’s gotten dark. So here’s the plan.”

  I shook my head, refusing him the right to organize my thoughts or behavior, but he ignored me.

  “I’m goin’ back to my hotel. Give us tahm to…think.”

  He meant to calm down. He meant me.

  “I’ll get my bag—I checked out earlier and left it in storage—”

  So his leave-taking had been a fait accompli hours ago, not subject to discussion, and I could have skipped my Elegy on a Theme of Noncommitment.

  “—then I’ll pick you up and we’ll go to dinner and, although Ah have never found it an aid to digestion—” He swallowed and took a deep breath while I translated his words, which were drenched and runny with emotion. There wasn’t a consonant or hard end to one of them. He cleared his throat. “—we’ll Talk. Like you mean. With a capital T.”

  I don’t remember agreeing, but I must have, because I remember watching him walk down the boardwalk—his hotel was many blocks up and a few over—lit by the bulbs of the stores along his route, his salt and pepper curls jostling, and for one sudden burst, neon-pink.

  And I remember thinking that for all my insistence, we really could skip the capital-T talk. It would only be a stopgap gesture. We were a wrong combination, a forced match. I was incredibly fond of him, but I couldn’t handle the way he could segment his life, his attention, and his emotions. I couldn’t handle some of what kept him sane—a rational detachment, an objectivity in the face of horror. His work had changed and hardened him, I thought. He was used to ugliness and violence, and charming though he was, he’d curled up inside himself and taken to hiding,
and at this stage in my life, I couldn’t handle it.

  I couldn’t cope with his job—his real life—and its intrusions and messiness. I couldn’t deal with the uncertainty it produced.

  They say a man’s job is a tough mistress, but Mackenzie’s was worse than another woman would be. It was his other self, a doppelganger. And all for the sake of goodness and right, which made the struggle between us impossible.

  Of course, he thought I created artificial barriers and hair splits. He thought this was all my problem, easily remedied by an attitude adjustment on my part.

  We were both bullheaded and stubborn, unlikely to give up beloved convictions, so what was the point of discussing and analyzing and trying to effect change?

  Look, I’ve read too many books not to recognize when a story is winding down, when logically, the next words have to be: The End.

  Eleven

  FOR A NANOSECOND MY EMOTIONAL tank registered empty, but that vacuum, being abhorred by nature, was immediately replaced by a depression that barreled in with the force of a typhoon. I could barely drag myself through the enormous front doors of the hotel.

  If I’d been asked to design the atmosphere I least desired, it would have been the one I was now in, the bustling, bemarbled commercial palace’s. The building was much fancier than its mostly elderly tenants dressed in the nondescript pastel knits and cottons that are supposed to camouflage middle- and post-middle-aged indignities, but instead advertise that they’re there.

  There’s a comic who claims that the average age of Atlantic City’s visitors is dead. It always gets a big laugh.

  And among the average-aged gamblers was Lala, straight ahead and waving to catch my attention. I refused to let it be caught. This was the worst possible time to hear her version of the war between the sexes. I simply couldn’t.

  My only available escape route was the casino, into which I hustled, sure that I could make a quick detour and lose her in its blinking, dazzling interior.

  And I did. Until, that is, I decided to get on with my life and reemerge, and there she was again. I turned and reentered the casino’s inner recesses.

  I watched a determined, jaw-set elderly man pull the handle of a machine edged in blue light. The machine twinkled a message: COLUMBUS TOOK CHANCES, TOO!

  Columbus was a better gambler. He found a new world. The man I was watching lost a dollar, stared blankly, put more coins in and pulled again. GOOD LUCK, the machine responded with a flirty twinkle of lights.

  I walked down the row. The opulent, almost hysterically exuberant surroundings were in depressing contrast to the players, most of whom looked as if they needed those quarters and nickels—an elderly and frail woman on a walker—a thin man in threadworn work clothes and floppy hat, a young woman who could be Lucky’s mother. Their faces and movements had the grim resignation of people working on a factory line.

  I moved to the craps table, where there was a little more life but even less sense. I had assumed that I could comprehend anything Nathan Detroit understood. Yet another wrong assumption. I tried to decipher the many meanings stenciled on the table, the source of the muted excitement of the people gathered around, but quickly gave it up. It would take too long to understand. Besides, I felt a certain urgency about getting my belongings from upstairs quickly, before they locked up for the night. But as I turned, there was Lala again. The woman was really good at dogging a person. She could have bailed herself out financially by becoming a P.I. instead of Tommy’s wife.

  I slipped out of her line of sight and found myself having another unasked-for reality check outside the baccarat salon. Somebody had told me that baccarat was the one card game that required absolutely no skill, and in fact couldn’t utilize it, because it was based on pure chance. Which left it with only style, precious little of which was evident. The table, separated from the rest of the casino by a maroon velvet rope, was surrounded by Asian men in windbreakers. The shoe that held the cards was red plastic.

  Baccarat. I yearned for tuxedos, Grace Kelly, Monte Carlo, the splash of the Mediterranean on the rocky coast outside, balconies and palaces, designer gowns, and croupiers with sexy accents and knowledge of old world evil.

  “You all right, hon?” The accent was domestic, the voice metallic, and my clean escape a flop. Lala peered at me from beneath aquafrosted eyelids. “I’ve been calling and calling,” she said. “You were a million miles away. I’m out of breath from trying to catch you.”

  I wondered if there were equally annoying people in Monte Carlo, and whether it would be my fate to attract them there as well.

  She put her hand on my forearm. Her engagement ring sparkled. “I wanted to explain,” she said. “About, well, you know.”

  “No need.”

  “You’re young; you can’t possibly understand.”

  I wondered why people always insist on telling you that you’re not going to understand something they are going to insist upon telling you anyway.

  “About how it is to be an older woman, alone and without money,” she continued. “You know how many of the poor people in this country are women?”

  “How many?”

  Her mouth opened and closed a few times. Then she pursed her lips and spoke. “A lot, that’s how many. Maybe most. Women just like me.”

  I moved in the direction of the lobby.

  “I never worked,” she said, hustling to keep up with me. “My husband wouldn’t hear of it.” She sounded as if she were hyperventilating, in some medical danger.

  I slowed my pace, accepting my fate and not willing to be responsible for hers.

  “I had no idea we were in debt, or that he didn’t have enough insurance until after he died.”

  What was it I did that made people decide it was always story hour? “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I have something I really have to do upstairs. Excuse me.” That was true, but another truth was that I didn’t want to hear about how easy it was to become frighteningly poor. I wanted to reclaim my possessions and pretend they were protection from becoming old and without resources.

  “But I got a job then.” She trotted behind me, as if my words had been no more than white sound. “I had to. Didn’t have a cent. I worked in a discount luggage store. Three years, and then I was a recession cutback. My rent went up. My son’s wife left him and their boy and he needed help, and money for help.” Her voice dropped to dirge level. “A woman alone…”

  Oh, goody. You could really try hard and things could still get worse. Things would get worse. First aid for the insufficiently depressed.

  “He liked me,” Lala said. “Tommy. But I could not get him to go one step further, to get off the stick, you understand?”

  It’s an interesting expression: get off the stick. Doesn’t make any sense when you think about it, unless it meant get unstuck. But yes, I definitely understood what she meant.

  “So I thought,” she said, “if I made Tommy a little bit scared, less sure of himself… It always worked in the old movies.”

  We had reached the elevators. “Do you love him?” I asked.

  Once again Lala put her hand on my arm. “Even in the dictionary, love means a lot of things, darling. But having nothing only means trouble.”

  I got onto the elevator. By the third floor I couldn’t hear even her echo. By the top floor I had almost convinced myself that I had nothing in common with Lala, and that there were no similar sticks to get off of between C.K. Mackenzie and Tommy.

  A drowsy security guard sat outside the suite. “Can’t come in here, ma’am,” he said. “This here area is not open to the public.”

  I told him my name and purpose. He checked a clipboard and looked disappointed that I had passed muster. “Thought you were another gaper. People act like this is a set for Unsolved Mysteries.” His scowl made him look like a pink-skinned bulldog as he heaved himself out of his chair with a great sigh and turned the knob of the suite.

  “Thanks.” I stepped in. I expected many things, but not a c
urvacious bit of a woman dressed entirely in black—hat, gloves, shoes, stockings, slacks—except for the flashes of brass on every one of the above garments and the yellow-gold hair cascading over her shoulders. Even her cane had a brass head and rivets all the way down its shaft.

  Rivets, I thought. The bolted Mrs. Reese. Jesse’s widow. But something was wrong.

  The widow Reese stood near the door in the suite’s foyer, pursing her red-gold mouth, tilting her head and listening intently to a stocky patrolman in uniform. He interrupted himself and looked me over.

  “She’s the one,” the hall monitor said.

  “Oh, yeah?” He looked disgusted.

  “The last to know,” the woman in black said in a gravelly voice. She pressed one gloved hand to her ample bosom. “Like they always say. Isn’t that so, Holly?”

  A loud, commiserating tsk came from a blaze of hot color across the entryway, and then a slow “he was—such a—son of”—words rolling out in a deep female voice—“a bitch.”

  The widow sniffled into a black lacy handkerchief. I knew what was wrong. She’d bleached her hair overnight. From raven to brass. What a weird expression of grief. Or was it suspicious?

  The patrolman looked at me with contempt. “What do you want?”

  “My clothing and things.”

  “You?” The widow practically shouted it. “You’re the one he was shacked up here with?”

  I shook my head. “I’m here for my toothbrush and—”

  “They let you free?” Her voice sounded stone-washed and bruised.

  The deep voice of the other woman, the pink one, joined in. “You have some nerve showing your face. Don’t you have any respect?”

  “Listen, I’m not—this isn’t—” I glared at the policeman.

  “My poor sister. Bad enough that son of a bitch humiliates her with his bimbos!” I wondered how she’d define herself, bandaged as she was in hot-pink spandex that barely coexisted with her carotene hair. “But to have his playmate—his murderer—”

  I was almost flattered at being called a bimbo. I felt haggard and shabby in my oversized borrowed sweater and yesterday’s slacks, my too-tight loafers and my post-Mackenzie, post-Sasha, post-Georgette, post-Lala, post-Lucky funk.