by Miller, Mary
“Do you know how many weeks?” I asked.
“No,” she said.
I took my swimsuit into the bathroom. It was still slightly damp; it felt awful, wedging it over my thighs.
We left all the lights and the TV on.
“Let’s take the stairs,” Elise said.
I didn’t feel like it, but I followed her to the stairwell. It wasn’t the kind that was meant for guests—concrete and gray, boxes of Urine Off advertising itself in neon yellow letters. We didn’t see anyone, but there were room service carts with trays of old food and housekeeping carts with stacks of freshly laundered towels.
“I’m not taking the stairs back up,” I said.
“You do what you want,” she said, “and I’ll do what I want.”
On the first floor, there was a table set up in the hallway that blocked the entrance to the pool, two guys sitting at it. They said we needed wristbands to get into the pool area, told us to write our names and room number in their book. They were brusque and mustached and important.
“I forget our room number,” Elise said. “Do you remember it?”
“No,” I said.
“You don’t know where you’re staying?” the older security guard asked, chuckling.
“We’re staying here,” Elise said. “We just checked in.” She found her room key in its little envelope and set it on the table and one of the guys wrote down the number. I held out my hand for the other guy to give me the wristband but he insisted on putting them on us. Then he stood and held the door.
“Jesus,” Elise said. “It’s like Fort-fucking-Knox.”
There were a lot of people milling about—couples and groups of boys and multicultural families, pretty girls like Elise taking drink orders. Old people. Babies. It was good to see so many of them. We walked to the far side of the pool and took off our dresses. After looking around to see who was looking at me—no one—I got out my phone and called Shannon. She picked up, sounding like she always sounded, slightly hoarse like she was still in bed.
Shannon and I had a very one-sided relationship—I asked her questions and she told me how bad things were, how they would never change. At the end of every conversation, she’d realize she had talked the entire time and say something like Next time we’re going to talk about you, though we never did, and I was mostly okay with it. Hearing her complain about her life made me feel better about my own—her life really was pretty shitty. But this time, when she asked how I was, I didn’t say fine and ask about her stepmom or the boy she liked who didn’t like her back. I told her about Gabe, relayed some of the sweeter things he’d said. I could tell she wasn’t happy about it. She said she was happy but she sounded very down and tried to steer the conversation back to herself. I told her he wanted to see me again and was trying to figure out a way to make that happen, that we were maybe in love. She said I should be careful—she didn’t want to see me get hurt.
“I’m not going to get hurt,” I said.
“I hope not,” she said. “I just know how excited you get.”
I didn’t like the way the conversation was going anymore. She was making me feel bad and I was tired of feeling bad. I was tired of relying on her unhappiness to make myself feel better. I wanted new friends, fun girls who laughed a lot and liked to do new things and go new places. Shannon and I always went to the same café where we sat in the same booth and ate the same sandwiches and my life was never going to be any different that way.
“That’s him on the other line now,” I said.
“It is?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re so lucky,” she said. “I wish I had a boy.”
“I’ll call you when I get home,” I said, and hung up.
Elise raised her eyebrows but didn’t say anything.
“You want to get in the pool?” I asked.
“Not right now, but Mom and Dad are over there if you want somebody to play with.”
They were in their swimsuits, the same ones they’d been wearing for the past decade. My mother’s was black with yellow flowers, so worn out it was nearly see-through. My father’s was navy blue with white stripes down the sides. It was their day at the pool, but the one time we were at a decent place all bets were off.
“Tell me something from Cosmo,” I said.
“Men like sex, no fatties,” she said. “It’s the same thing in every goddamn issue.”
I’d never heard her say “goddamn” before. I was shocked. I wanted to hear her say it again. I adjusted my swimsuit and walked to the pool’s edge, climbed onto the little shelf. Then I lowered myself in and breaststroked over to my parents. My mother was sitting on a step while my father stood in water up to his belly button. He was moving his arms around and looking about distractedly like people do when they’re peeing. I sat next to my mother.
“Are you having fun?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s so nice here.” They always wanted to know if I was having fun. It made me sorry I didn’t have more fun.
“We’re about to go up,” she said. “We just came down for a minute to cool off.”
My father patted my back as he stepped out and asked if I was having fun. I told him I was and took off, swimming in and out of groups of kids and boys, listening while trying to appear uninterested.
“Here she comes, she’s coming this way,” one of the guys said, on my third lap. I swam a wide arc around a couple of kids playing colored eggs to avoid them. “And there she goes,” he said. Maybe I wasn’t unattractive. If I moved to Arizona, I might be popular. I might be on the dance team, kicking my legs in tall boots at pep rallies. I hadn’t made the dance team in Montgomery and didn’t know if I was going to try again. It seemed better to accept the one failure than to try a second time and fail, like I hadn’t learned my lesson.
I was wearing my cutest swimsuit, a black one-piece with ovals cut out of the sides, and a worn-in baseball cap that belonged to one of Elise’s ex-boyfriends. She had a lot of ex-boyfriend stuff—t-shirts and ball caps and koozies—and she usually wouldn’t say anything if I confiscated something until it was mine. I liked their t-shirts best, which were always thin and soft, tiny holes around the neck and waist. I didn’t know what they did to get them that way.
I got out and resumed my place next to my sister.
“Let’s order a drink,” she said, raising the flag on the back of her chair. “They’ve already gone. I’m sure Dad’s dying to get his hands on a slot machine. Raise the flag on your chair, too.”
Almost immediately, a pretty pool girl came over and Elise ordered two piña coladas. She didn’t ask to see our IDs. Elise signed her name and our room number and, a few minutes later, our drinks came in small white buckets: cold and sweet, I could hardly taste the liquor.
When they were empty, we put our flags back up. Elise signed our name and room number and fresh ones appeared like magic. The more I drank, the closer I looked at things—a beach ball spinning on the water, the pink and blue and yellow panels going round and round, a girl wading into the water with a cast on her arm, cocked at a ninety-degree angle. The dark spots in the clouds. Elise wouldn’t stop reading her magazine, so I got back in the pool. I swam toward the group of boys while one of them stepped steadily backward until he was right in front of me. I stood in three feet of water and said hello. He was tan with strong arms and a stomach full of well-defined muscles. He was old but I couldn’t tell how old because of the mirrored sunglasses and baseball cap.
He asked me a few questions and then I was in his arms, my neck thrown back so my hair dragged the water. My hat floated away and he fetched it and emptied the water out, set it back on my head.
“Is that your sister?” he asked, nodding at Elise.
“Yeah.”
“Why don’t you call her over?” he said, and I told him she’d come if she wanted to. I looked into his sunglasses, trying to see what he saw. There was only my face—my nose distortedly large, my hair slicked and smooth.
I leaned back and he spun me in slow circles, first one way and then the other.
He started telling me about himself, how he’d started a website to help people find jobs, how it was becoming very successful. He was on a trip with friends and next they’d go to Las Vegas to play poker. I thought about the Las Vegas girl, wondered if they would encounter her somewhere, or pass her on the street.
I looked at Elise’s chair but she wasn’t in it. I found her talking to a lifeguard, a short boy with a red floaty slung over his shoulder.
“I’ll be right back,” I said, and swam over to her. “Come over here with me,” I said, interrupting her conversation. The guy was kind of fat for a lifeguard. If he could pass the test, I might pass, too.
“In a sec,” she said.
I swam back to the boys and Elise followed as the lifeguard climbed onto his perch.
We let them buy us a third drink and made plans to meet later, plans that Elise said we’d break if anything better came along, but I couldn’t imagine anything better coming along. The only thing that might be better than these boys were other boys.
At dinner, we sat at a circular table too big for the four of us. It made me feel lonely and far away from everything. I concentrated on the alcohol moving in and out of parts of my body I’d never felt before. When the dining room went quiet, there was a buzz in my ears like a lightbulb.
Though I’d hardly said a word, it seemed unlikely that my mother wouldn’t know. I avoided her eyes. She would be angry and disappointed if she found out, and I didn’t want her to look at me differently. If I wasn’t the good daughter, I wouldn’t know what I was. I wasn’t popular or a cheerleader or a straight-A student. I wasn’t on the dance team. I wasn’t a member of the Student Council or even the Key Club. There were so many things I wasn’t that I had difficulty defining myself, especially in relation to Elise, who was so many things.
My father ordered a bottle of red wine and asked the waiter for four glasses.
“John,” my mother said. “These kids aren’t drinking.”
“It’s a special occasion,” he said. “Just for toasting.”
“Absolutely not,” she said.
The waiter came back with a bottle and poured an inch of wine in my father’s glass, waited for him to take a sip.
“Taste it,” Elise said, which he did, nodding pleasantly.
Then the waiter went around the table, pouring us each a quarter of a glass.
“We’re about ready to order,” my father said.
“I haven’t even opened my menu yet,” Elise said.
The waiter said he’d give us a few minutes and set the bottle down. Elise grabbed it and filled her glass. Then she filled mine, as well. My mother handed me hers and we swapped. When the dining room went quiet again, the buzz in my ears returned. It was oddly pleasant.
“We have a lot to celebrate,” my father said. “Tomorrow we go home.”
Elise and I looked at each other. Home was Montgomery. Home was our house and our school and our friends and our dog. It was the clothes in our closets and my sister’s boyfriends and the neighborhood where we rode our bikes down the middle of the street because there were hardly any cars.
“You mean Alabama?” Elise said.
“He means heaven,” I said, reaching for the breadbasket and knocking over my glass in the process. The wine spilled all over the white tablecloth, pooled in my plate.
“Nice job,” Elise said.
“Jess,” my father said, like I’d ruined everything, like everything had been going so well up till now. He got angry when I spilled things, when I swallowed water too fast and it went down the wrong way. It was like he thought I did these things on purpose.
The busboy took my plate away and brought a towel, sopped it up, but there was still red everywhere, terrible as blood.
My father opened his menu. “Order anything you want.”
“Can I ask you a question?” Elise said. Nothing good ever came after that. It was never How would you like a bowl of ice cream? Or There’s a good movie playing. Why don’t we all go see it?
“What’s that?” he asked.
“How are we paying for this trip?”
“With the money we saved for this purpose,” he said.
“We know you lost your job,” she said, and I recalled a dinner, much like this one, after our father had gotten that job: white tablecloths and oversized menus, Order anything you want.
“I can order the lobster?” I asked.
“Your father said you can order whatever you want,” my mother said.
“Have you been leaving the house in the morning and going to the park?” Elise asked. “Or the library?”
I couldn’t remember him with a briefcase at all.
“I need you to leave this table,” he said. “And I don’t want to see your face for the rest of the night.” He said “face” in a really nasty way, like it was the most horrible thing ever.
“And don’t you leave your room,” my mother said. “I’m gonna be up there to check on you in half an hour.”
My sister finished her wine and put her hands on the edge of the table like she was going to push. Then she stood and left as the waiter was walking over to take our order. He stood there smiling and we were all so tense I could feel how awkward we were making him. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, asked if he should come back in a minute. Something about it was satisfying—he wasn’t a part of us, didn’t belong. We were unhappy together, miserable even, but it was ours.
“No, we’re ready,” my father said. Then he looked at my mother and asked what she wanted. She ordered the surf and turf with a salad and a loaded baked potato, and the rest of us followed suit.
I imagined my father at the kitchen table a few weeks from now opening the credit card bill, the smell of pot roast we’d be eating for days. My mother would have us bag up all our old clothes for the Ultcheys and the other families who had given their money away, as if they needed our worn-out clothes, while my father assured them that we would all be in heaven soon, that this was not the life He had intended for us. I wondered whether he really believed it, if he’d ever believed.
The busboy brought another basket of bread and my father tore off a piece. He spread a thick layer of butter on it and immediately dropped it on his shirt.
“Seems like I can’t hardly eat without getting something on me,” he said, dipping his napkin into his ice water. I watched as he rubbed his shirt until a large wet spot stuck to his chest.
When the salads came, we stabbed at the pieces of lettuce. I drank the little bit of wine in my glass and didn’t ask for more. After a while, my mother attempted to make pleasant conversation but neither my father nor I were interested. It must have been the quietest meal of my life. My father didn’t even pray when the steaks and lobster tails were placed before us.
After dinner, I pulled my mother aside and asked if I could get Brother Jessie’s number. I’d prepared an answer but she didn’t ask, just got out her phone and called it out to me.
When I got back to the room, Elise wasn’t there. There was a note on the desk: “Meet me at the Irish bar. You can wear my blue dress.”
I sat on the bed, staring at Brother Jessie’s number. Though I saw him twice a week at church, and sometimes on Saturday mornings for breakfast in our kitchen, I’d never had any reason to call him. It made me nervous, talking on the phone to people I wasn’t used to talking on the phone to.
I hit the call button. On the second ring, he answered.
“Brother Jessie?” I said. “This is Jess Metcalf.”
“Jess,” he said, “it’s so good to hear from you. How are you?”
“I’m good.”
“That’s good to hear,” he said. His voice sounded different. People always sounded different on the phone; they used their phone voices. “So tell me, what’s happening?”
“We’re in Arizona. Somewhere around Phoenix, I think.”
He made some
affirmative-sounding noises so I said other stuff—how it felt like we’d been driving for a very long time, how things weren’t going very well. I told him about the car accident, the flat tire. He said car trips were like that, accidents and flat tires, that those things weren’t out of the ordinary.
“It was a really bad accident,” I said. “A man died. I touched his neck, trying to feel for a pulse.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“And there was a little girl. I think she was in a coma.” I felt like crying, but if I started, it might go on forever. I’d cry for Tammy and the bird woman and the Las Vegas girl, for my mother and father and the baby Elise wouldn’t have and my cousin who had died before she’d figured out how to live.
“We’re all praying for y’all,” he said. “The whole congregation.”
“Thank you.”
“What you’re doing is a good thing.”
“Thank you,” I said again. And then, “How come? Why is it a good thing?”
He took a swallow of whatever he was drinking, ice clinking in his glass. “You’re spreading the word,” he said.
“We haven’t been spreading the word that much.”
“I’m sure you’re doing what you can.”
“No,” I said. “We’ve hardly talked to anyone.”
“Maybe your father thinks it’s best for you to concentrate on each other right now.”
“I don’t know what we’re doing. I feel kind of lost,” I said. I wanted to tell him everything, wanted him to say I was okay, that we were okay, but he wouldn’t. He’d be disappointed. He might be angry.
“It sounds like you’re about to make a breakthrough,” he said, the ice clinking again.
“It does?”
“Jess, forget about your family and the trip for a minute. Have you prepared yourself for Him?”