Biloxi

by Mary Miller

  “Oh,” she said, taking her face out of Layla’s belly. “That’s a lot to deal with all at once.”

  I looked at my lemonade and tried to appear pitiful. It wasn’t hard. I imagined Ellen and her new boyfriend hiking in the mountains of Tennessee, the two of them wearing coordinating outfits, boots and hats. She didn’t have migraines anymore, had no use for them.

  “Was he old?” she asked. “Your father?”

  “Old enough. Eighty-four, eighty-five.” I took another sip—the sugar-to-lemon ratio was all off. I wondered if everything she made was bad. I liked the idea, though of course it wasn’t the kind of thing that would stay charming for long.

  “Does it need more sugar, you think?”

  “What? Oh, no, it’s fine. It could use a shot of vodka but I suppose it’s too early for that.”

  “Why not?” she said. “We deserve it.”

  She stood and straightened her skirt, which had twisted and lifted and done other inexplicable things, and then the dog got up and we followed her. I imagined a life in which we followed Sasha from room to room and place to place and worshipped her and it didn’t seem like a bad life. I had nothing else to do. I took a seat at the bar and watched her pour vodka into shot glasses, dump two shots in each and top them off with lemonade. I wished she’d put more ice in mine or a spoonful of sugar. She passed the glass back to me without stirring it, spilling some on her hand.

  “What’s your name again?” she asked.

  “Louis McDonald, Jr.”

  “To Louis McDonald, Jr.,” she said, raising her glass. “My hero.”

  In my experience, women only said things like this to men they would never sleep with. The nicer a woman was to you right off the less likely she was to have sex with you, or this had been my experience in the past. But my signs had gotten all mixed up at some point, and the past felt like a long time ago.

  CHAPTER 8

  SEVERAL HOURS LATER, we were still going round and round on the same topics: what a rat bastard Harry Davidson was, what a great dog Layla was, the ways in which people disappoint you. We were a couple of drinks in and I was growing more and more anxious. Soon the afternoon would turn into evening and I’d be in my car alone, no dog, nothing. I was also drunk. I had given up hard liquor when Ellen left, or had stopped buying it out of some sense of self-preservation I hadn’t even known I’d had.

  When I wasn’t looking at the scar on Sasha’s leg or the shapeliness of her behind as she sashayed to and from the kitchen, I was studying the room, making mental notes: the brands of things, names of magazines and cereal boxes, the colors of the flowers since I didn’t know anything about flowers, how the piles were stacked and ordered, if there was any order. I thought it would help me stay on my toes. I was searching for signs of Layla and Sasha and how they fit into the picture but they didn’t fit into the picture at all. There wasn’t a dog toy or a dog bed or anything pet-related, nothing feminine except the flowers. It could all be a setup. They might have found out I was coming into a substantial sum of money. It seemed unlikely but it was possible and you couldn’t be too careful these days. You just couldn’t be too careful.

  I liked the idea of a setup, though, that I was in the middle of something that could go badly.

  “Just to get this clear,” I said, “there were never any other dogs.”

  “That’s correct,” she said. “Harry has had dogs in the past, but they were outdoor dogs, and they were before my time. Katy and I came together—a package deal.”

  “Why didn’t he drive her out to the country like a normal person? Let her out and tell her to run free.”

  “He’s not that cruel. He knew you’d take good care of her—anybody can look at you and see that. And let’s face it: this dog wouldn’t survive a day out in the wild. She’s a real fraidy cat.” She turned to Layla and used a funny voice, a lot like the one I used at home, and said, “Aren’t you a big ole fraidy cat? You are! You are a fraidy cat!”

  I hoped she’d break into song but she didn’t. When the moment started to become awkward, I said, “She’s special. As soon as I saw her I knew she was . . .” I stopped myself from saying “the one.” There was no such thing as “the one,” even when it pertained to a dog. I’d lived long enough to know that. The fact that I could love an overweight dog that gagged all the time and couldn’t catch a slice of bologna proved to me that there were other animals, and perhaps even people, out there that I could love.

  We looked at Layla, and every time the two of us focused on her, she was so happy her tail moved in circles, strong and fast enough to knock our drinks right off the table. Sasha went to the refrigerator and fed her turkey again, one piece and then another until it was gone. I imagined her putting her arms around me, telling me she’d been looking for me her whole life and now here I was, had just walked right up and knocked on her door, which is the thing people say opportunity will never do. I wished I were fifteen years younger.

  “I don’t know what to do now,” I said.

  “You mean right this minute or in general?”

  “Both.”

  “Well,” she said. “Right this minute you’re going to drink your drink. And when you finish, you can have another if you like or I’ll heat us up the lasagna I made last night for my darling husband because it’s his favorite. And then you’re going to take the rest home with you because fuck him. But let’s not think that far ahead.”

  “Do you cook?” I asked, a bit too excitedly. I wasn’t able to look at her straight on, much like Layla wasn’t able to look at me. I imagined Sasha lifting my chin, forcing me to gaze into her eyes.

  “I make four things,” she said. “Lasagna, spaghetti, meatloaf, and pimento cheese sandwiches.”

  “You’re being humble.” I took a sip of my drink. It was going down easy now.

  “No,” she said. “That’s it. I used to make tuna fish but Harry hates tuna now. I guess I can also scramble eggs but I won’t do the other breakfast stuff—no bacon or grits or even biscuits. I will toast bread, however. But it doesn’t matter ’cause we like to eat out a lot.”

  “I love meatloaf.”

  “I refuse to touch raw chicken,” she added. “Never done it and don’t plan to start.”

  “What are you going to do when Harry gets home?” I asked, wanting to see if her answer had changed.

  “I’ve been thinking about that. My name isn’t on the mortgage or anything—you probably guessed that much. Nothing in this place is mine except for my clothes and personal stuff. Literally nothing here is mine,” she said, moving her arms about, “not even the groceries.”

  “I have plenty of room at my house.”

  “You’re sweet,” she said. “I don’t know where we’ll go. My mother has a place over in Long Beach and we could stay with her, though I don’t really get along with her all that well. She doesn’t approve of my lifestyle, as she calls it. Who says that anymore?”

  “What’s wrong with your lifestyle?”

  “Well for starters, Harry is my fourth husband, which I realize is a lot of husbands to have at my age.”

  I made a noncommittal sound. What was her age? It might be anywhere from thirty to fifty-five.

  “I always fall in love after about a minute and marry them right off and then find out later that I hate them, or they hate me or that we hate each other, and then there’s a lot of ugliness and paperwork which really sucks because I hate signing my name—I don’t know what it is about signing my name to official documents but I don’t like it—and then I move back in with my mother until the next one comes along. It’s a pattern and I can’t seem to stop it. I try to stop it but then it happens again and it’s like I’ve forgotten that it’s happened a dozen times before, like I have amnesia or something until things go bad and only then can I remember. Like now. Like right now I don’t ever want to date another man ever again but in six months some bozo’ll come along and I’ll let him take me out to dinner and buy me a few things and . . . The
pattern, you see. It’s all very strange. I don’t know what to make of it.”

  I recalled a game Maxine had played as a child while watching The Bozo Show; she used to call a phone number and scream “Pow!” I couldn’t remember anything about the game or its purpose. I would have to ask her about it. I’d scream “Pow!” in her face and see if it jogged any memories. “Yes,” I said. “I’ve been thinking the same thing lately, about patterns.” I wanted to tell her I wasn’t a bozo, that I could make her life better and we could make each other happy, but I couldn’t say those things. They would only confirm what she’d experienced in the past, where love seemed like the answer to every question and then you disappointed each other and were alone again, the same person with all of the same problems only more disappointed.

  “My mother says I need a hobby.”

  I imagined her in the guest room at her mother’s apartment, too many decorative pillows on the bed and a window that overlooked a parking lot or a brick wall. I tried to picture her in an office in business clothes but couldn’t. She would always be in the grass, legs splayed and flashing her yellow panties, mascara running down her cheeks.

  We were quiet for a while, the two of them on the couch and me in the chair. I felt like I should go, like it was past time for me to go, but I couldn’t make myself stand and walk to the door.

  “I feel bad,” she said. “None of this is your fault.”

  “I know,” I said. Of course it wasn’t my fault. I was an idiot but I wasn’t guilty of anything but that. My conscience was clear.

  As if sensing that things were winding down, that her time with me had come to an end, Layla hopped off the couch and walked across the room, head bowed in its usual position. She’d never learned to use the doggy door. I hadn’t taught her to fetch or catch. If I had one regret, it was that I should have taught her something.

  “I wish we could split custody . . .” Sasha said. “You know what? We can! There’s no reason we can’t. I can bring Katy to visit and the three of us can go on walks and meet up at the dog park or the beach. And you can take care of her when I go out of town. It’ll be a win-win for everybody.”

  “I never took her to the beach,” I said. “Every day I meant to take her there so she could scatter the seagulls. And I wanted to see what she thought of sand.”

  “You can still take her,” she said. “You can watch her scatter all the birds—she loves that—and she digs and digs like a little kid, it’s so cute.” She made her hands into cups and started scooping. Then she crossed them over her heart and her chin scrunched up to show me how cute it was. “She loves to eat all kinds of dead things: fishes and crabs, whatever she can find. . . . Once she found a whole T-bone by the dumpster and snatched it up before I could yank her away so I just sat on the curb and let her finish.”

  “She really does love to eat trash,” I said, and we sat there smiling and nodding at each other. “Does she swim?”

  “Oh, yeah. Loves to swim.”

  I could see her out there, swimming like a goddamn champ. She was a contradiction, like so many of us, strong in some areas and weak in others. And sometimes weakness only looks like weakness but is really strength. Layla could swim for miles and live on trash, a champion of the land and sea, and I was smiling to myself and shaking my head as I heard the sound of Harry Davidson’s truck pulling into the driveway.

  “He’s home early,” she said, ushering me out the back door, and I made a run for it just as Harry Davidson was coming in the front. It was like a song on the radio. I heard his voice, no doubt asking who was parked in front of his house. No doubt recognizing my car as he saw that Layla was back. At the gate, I encountered a bike lock and felt sure I was done for, that the jig was up, but I pushed and it clattered open.

  As I was putting the car into drive, he came bounding down the driveway at me full speed, which was not very fast, his whole body in motion. It was really something to see. Knowing I had a few moments to spare, I watched him with my foot hovering over the gas. It was grotesque and beautiful. I wanted to punch him in the face, knock him straight out. I felt the bones in his face crack at the strength of my fist, the referee calling the match. What a mistake it had been to come and yet it only felt like part of the story and the story wasn’t finished.

  I knew I’d done something good, something beyond my knowledge and capabilities. And I felt certain that Layla would come back to me, and Sasha would, too. When it was nearly too late, when I’d nearly been caught, I mashed my foot to the gas and left the scene, which was how I thought of it, as if a crime had taken place.

  CHAPTER 9

  TO PROVE TO myself I was okay, that everything was fine, I stopped at Rouses on the way home. Oddly, I felt sober, or sober enough. I got a cart instead of a basket, a full-sized one. I almost always got a basket that could not accommodate all of the things I needed to purchase so I’d end up leaving without essential items like laundry detergent or toilet paper and would have to go back the following day. I supposed it gave me something to do, though I hadn’t thought of it that way before. I’d tell myself I was in a hurry, but I was just the type of person who felt like he was in a hurry because I didn’t like to be in public, was afraid of people, afraid of running into a neighbor or one of Ellen’s friends, a woman who would look at me and frown. But even at home I often felt hurried. I’d wash myself in the most efficient manner, make coffee and food in the most efficient manner. Only when I was in my chair or the bed did I feel like I could relax.

  Harry Davidson. Harry Davidson, LPN. It was about time I had an enemy; it had been too long. I felt alive in a way I hadn’t in years. I wanted to fight and fuck and break things. I decided to purchase a pack of cigarettes, ask the checkout lady to fetch me some, if that was how it was done nowadays.

  I went up and down every aisle putting things into the cart, impulse items like olives and nuts and weird cheeses, a variety of crackers, and before I knew it I was making an appetizer platter. I also bought a lot of beer. I bought other things, too, because I had room—it was so nice to have room!—an eight-pack of paper towels, toilet paper to wipe an army, root beer, frozen pizzas, deli turkey and ham, bologna, two different kinds of bread, and stuff to make meatloaf and pimento cheese.

  The checkout girl was one I’d had before, a black little person. She was friendly and smiled a lot and being a black little person didn’t seem to bother her, which impressed me. She was very black, like a crayon—I wanted to hold a crayon up to her or a piece of cloth to compare. With the comparison I imagined she would look brown. She didn’t have to stand on anything in order to reach what she needed to reach; she was short, but not so short that she was unable to perform the tasks of the job. I liked her, and appreciated her friendliness.

  “How’re you doing this evening?” she asked, and she actually looked at me when she said it.

  “It’s been a hard day,” I said. “I lost my dog.”

  “Oh no! How’d you lose her?”

  “I guess ‘lose’ is the wrong word.” She looked at me encouragingly, sympathetically, so I went on. “It’s a long story but basically a man gave me a dog that wasn’t his to give and I had to return her to the rightful owner—his wife.”

  “Wait a second,” she said, shaking a box of crackers at me. “You telling me this man gave away his wife’s dog?”

  “Yes, he did. That’s exactly what he did.”

  “Awful, that’s awful.”

  “I agree.”

  “If some man tried to give away my dog, I’d shoot him,” she said.

  I imagined her holding a gun. It would have to be a tiny gun. “It was just a bad situation I got myself involved in.” And then a guy came over and started bagging my groceries. I recognized him, too. There was something not right about him—he was autistic, maybe. And one of his eyes was always looking at his nose. I thought of Layla and how much I missed her already.

  “I know what that’s like,” she said. “I’m always getting myself mixed up in
other people’s business.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh yeah,” she said, and she stopped to give me a look like just because she was a little person didn’t mean she couldn’t get herself mixed up in stuff, too, or that she didn’t have a life as complicated as everybody else’s. It was hard to think of her going to parties, going much of anywhere except the grocery store and her mother’s house which had been set up to accommodate her: the light switches low on the walls, step stools and children’s play tables, water faucets that turn on with the wave of a hand. “I have a big family,” she said, “a lot of sisters and a few of them are real b’s, excuse my language.”

  “I never had a sister,” I said.

  “You can have mine,” she said. “Take all of ’em!” And with that, the conversation was over. I knew so little about women. I’d had a mother and a wife, a couple of grandmothers, a daughter and a granddaughter—I still had a daughter and a granddaughter—but I had no idea what they wanted or how to make them happy. She told me how much I’d saved and circled the amount and then she told me I could complete a survey to win a five-hundred-dollar gift card and circled that number as well, and I was sorry she had to do that for every single person who came through her line. I was sure there were ramifications for not doing those things, that her boss watched to make sure she was circling and smiling.

  In the parking lot, I opened my door and it banged right into the car next to mine. Mine was white. This other vehicle was red. There was a little white mark on his red car and a dent, as well. I considered leaving my name and number but it was more of a ding, really, and it seemed like a lot of trouble for such a small thing. Plus, I was almost certainly legally drunk. Nobody had seen me. Were there cameras in the parking lot? I stood there with my door open, one foot in and one foot out, and then hopped in and drove off.