The Melting Season
Page 5
I tried to think of one thing my mother had taught me to love that I had taken to but then I realized there was not anything she liked in our hometown. Everything she fantasized about was somewhere else. Europe. New York. Tiny snails and fish eggs you were supposed to eat like they were delicious and not just snobby. They were all things out of my reach. Why would I care? There was not a thing I was crazy about except maybe my husband.
But you could live anywhere and like the Beatles. After she watched that movie, Valka and her mother would sing their songs to each other all day long. “My mother liked all the layers of ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.’ It was like all extreme and complicated. But they don’t play that at the show; they play the sweet stuff, their early pop songs. Real crowd pleasers.” I had no idea what she was talking about but I was excited to see them. “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah,” she sang. She drummed her hands on her lap. She stopped being a lady in a nice dress for a second. She was a kid. She told me Peter Dingle had grown up loving the rock-and-roll life back East. (It was neat the way Valka said “back East” so casually, like it was a real place to her in her head.) Bon Jovi was one of his favorites from the show, but he liked all the imitation heavy metal acts, too.
“There’s an Ozzy Osbourne imitator who rips the head off a bird with his teeth,” said Valka.
“That’s not legal,” I said.
“Legal or not, it looks real to me,” said Valka. She took a sip of her rum and Diet Coke and raised her eyebrows. “Looks as real as you sitting here before me.”
“It sounds like a great show,” I said. “I’d like to see that.”
“I was hoping you’d say that,” she said. “Because I have an extra ticket for tomorrow night. So what do you say? You want to be my New Year’s Eve date?”
I was touched like I had not been in a while. Here she was, knowing me only for a few hours, and she was handing over a golden ticket to me. Sure we got along like gangbusters, but still I found myself welling up a bit.
“That is just the sweetest thing ever,” I said. “What do I wear?”
“I’ll loan you something!” she said.
We drank all night, and I felt the hangover before it was over. I did not mind it. I was caught up in the magic of Vegas. We had spent the night walking from casino to casino, through the crowds of drunks, drunk just like us. It was bitter cold out there, and there was a strong wind blowing, but Valka and I faced it. She loaned me a wrap of hers that matched the one she was carrying. “That’s pashmina, you be careful with that now,” she said. It was soft, and I cradled it around my arms like I was getting a hug. Oh, how I needed a hug. I stopped Valka on the street and said that to her. She threw her arms around me and said, “Oh, honey, I need one, too. All the time. Every day.”
By the time we got to the Bellagio we were a mess. We were spilling drinks and secrets. I tried not to lie too much. I told her my marriage had fallen apart. “It was just the fighting,” I said. “We were like two wild dogs fighting over a piece of meat. Our marriage was the meat. Do you know what I mean? The meat!”
“That’s not healthy,” said Valka. “That’s unhealthy.” She thought she had it all figured out now. She had been trying to get the truth out of me for a while.
I held my tongue pretty well, but I was new at having someone to talk to. My secrets still felt important to me. Valka was ready to spill all of hers and I wanted her to feel better. It would make her feel closer to me, to tell her story to me. But then I was afraid I would have to do the same. I was trying to hold off. Telling the truth would hurt. I had been holding onto these secrets so long it almost felt like it all had happened to somebody else. And I would have to reach down pretty far inside to dig them all out. I was not sure if I was ready to do that.
Valka told me the Bellagio was where all the rich men were, but also the women looking for them. “Not that I need anyone else’s money,” she said. Valka was an independent businesswoman, with her very own flower shop. “I own prom season,” she said. “It’s mine, and I’d like to see someone take it from me.” She straightened her wig and plumped up the top of her dress. “I don’t know how to talk to teenagers though. Or kids. Or whatever. I just want to shake them. Prom. Those kids think it’s the most important night of their life. I want to tell them there’s so much more out there, they have a whole life of mistakes to make ahead of them.”
I thought of my own prom, me staring in the bathroom mirror in the lobby of a Best Western near Lincoln, putting on lipstick. All of the other girls—the girlfriends of Thomas’s buddies—were standing next to me in a row, putting on their own makeup. How much mascara did they really need? They applied it so carefully at the beginning of the night; sloppier, boozier, as time went on. Their eyes were sooty clumps by the end, smeared beneath as if they had slept in their makeup. We did everything together the whole night, me and these girls. They would not let me out of their sight. Everyone had to laugh at all the same jokes. Everyone had to comfort Margaret when she started crying about her cousin who accidentally died during the tractor pull last fall. Everyone had to wait in the bathroom when Paula started puking up peppermint schnapps. The room had smelled like Christmas. They were sort of my friends at the time, but I guess not really at all. I did not have many friends then. I had Thomas. I had my mother. I had Jenny. I did not have any friends these days actually, when I really thought about it. Just a lot of secrets instead.
“Let them have their dreams,” I said. We clinked our drinks. We were at a bar by then. I had lost three hundred dollars on the slots. I was not lucky, not at all. I had been tempted to lose every last cent of that $178,000 but I knew it was better to keep it safe for now. So Valka was buying everything, and I did not stop her. She was a good friend. We both got wistful, thinking about prom. We could not get out of it.
“I had dreams,” said Valka.
“Me too,” I said. “I was going to be married forever.”
“I almost got married,” said Valka. “To Peter Dingle.” She looked down at her drink miserably.
It was not going to take much prodding. There was a tiny part of me that still wanted her to hold back. I knew whatever I was going to hear had been said a million times before. It was a real story that had happened to her. I knew she would not lie to me. But it was going to be something she had practiced. And then I thought: maybe she will need to tell it a million times more just to get over it. And secrets were what girlfriends shared with each other. This is how we would become friends. Someday I was going to tell her my whole story. Maybe just some of it. Either way, I would need her to listen.
“What happened with Peter Dingle?” I said.
“Peter Dingle is a fine person,” she said. “I should say that. First. It’s not his fault he’s a man.”
Oh Lord, I thought. I did not know if I could take a night of man-hating. I liked men just fine.
“Here’s what happened,” she said. She pointed to her breasts. “It all went downhill from here.”
I looked at them. I wondered if they were the best that money could buy. They seemed very impressive: they were at the perfect point in her chest.
“My doctor kept finding lumps in my breasts,” she said. “Like every few months there was another lump. All over, both breasts, on the outside, deep inside, all different shapes and sizes. And I was having biopsies every time, and mammograms and sonograms. Everything they could do to a tit they were doing to mine. Needles, wires, the works. And my grandmother had breast cancer, both of them actually. One died young, one’s still alive. I had to do these tests to see if I was going to get it. I had the gene. This bad gene. Because I’m Jewish. I have the bad Jew gene.”
“This is horrible,” I said. “This is a horrible story.” I did not want to hear any more secrets. “I’m sorry.”
“So the doctor said, ‘Chop ’em off and start over,’ so that’s what I did.” She put her hands to the sides of her breasts. “And they’re so much better now! Than the way they were
. I kind of hated them before actually. They were flat and droopy. They looked like silver dollar pancakes. These look great in anything.”
“They’re beautiful,” I said. I got all hazy for a second. I thought about Thomas touching mine while he looked over my shoulder. I remembered a porn movie playing behind me on the TV set. Imitation and real, all at the same time. Thomas got to have it all.
“And Peter Dingle stuck through it all with me. All those years of surgeries—we were together for four years, and three of them I was in and out of the hospital all the time. He held my hand in the waiting room. He took off work. He helped me pick out what my new breasts were going to look like. He told me everything was going to be okay. He wanted to marry me and have children with me and spend the rest of his life with me and he didn’t care what was real and what was fake because he knew what was going on inside of me. That’s what mattered to him.”
We both started crying.
“I could feel him right here.” She clutched her hand to her chest. “He was my heart.”
I did not want to hear another word, but she could not stop. And I could not tell her to stop.
“We had the wedding date set. I had my dress. I looked perfect in it. We were going to start all over together. I went back to the doctor for a checkup. I was all clear, my breasts were healthy. But then it turned out there was another spot, but it wasn’t on my chest. It was down there.” She pointed toward her crotch. “Ovarian cancer. Just like that—” She snapped her fingers. “I had to have a hysterectomy and chemo and the whole works.”
I looked at her wig. I wondered how many colors she had.
“I’m all empty inside now,” she said.
“You’re not,” I said.
“And that’s what got him. After everything, it was the babies. He wanted his own children. ‘This isn’t what I signed up for,’ is what he told me. ‘It isn’t what I signed up for either!’ is what I told him. He tried to let me down gently, but I fell just like a rock.”
I hugged her, and she did not hug me back, and I said, “No, you hug me now.” I made her hug me. I think she felt better.
“Not his fault he’s a man,” she said into my shoulder. “That’s what they all want, is kids of their own. Men like that.”
I pulled apart from her and looked her in the eye. She was all glassy and drunk. I was, too, but I tried to concentrate. “It’s just wrong,” I said.
“Oh is it?” said Valka.
WHERE I CAME FROM, people did not drink much, and they sure did not drink till they were crazy. Where I came from, if people drank too much, they got quiet. Sure there were the high school kids running around the fields on a high after the football games. They liked to whoop it up, make a little noise. They were young: they needed to explode sometimes. But they would have been doing that whether or not there was a little nip of something in their thermos or not. Even those parties Jenny went to, the ones that got her in all the trouble, I knew those kids were just making each other warm at night.
And there was my mother, she drank until she got mean, but again, that was already in her. When I was little, she would drink herself so mean she would tell me awful bedtime stories. Jenny, too. It was a special kind of mean between a mother and her daughters. A whispered mean.
Mostly I thought about the farmers, who would drink themselves through the winter. That, or pray. Either way, they got quiet. We were a quiet town. One thing was possible: there was a lot of space between us, between our homes—there was so much land. Maybe if people got noisy I did not hear it. But I do not think so. I lived there my whole life and I think I would have known. If people were losing it, someone would have told me.
There in Las Vegas, though, all people wanted to do was drink until they were someone else. I could not believe all the hooting and hollering. It looked like their faces were melting. People were stumbling, running into walls. I was drunk, too, but I was my daddy’s girl when I was drunk: serious with an occasional case of the giggles. Las Vegas did not look like fun at 4 A.M. To me it looked like the end of the world. And Valka, I loved her like a sister already, but I thought maybe she had gone through to the other side. The other side of what I cannot rightly tell you, but if she was not already there, she had one foot in the door.
At first I would only have known it from talking to her. There was nothing out of place, not anywhere on her face, not a hair on that blond wig, not a sparkle on the beautiful blue dress. She had been checking her makeup all night. She knew she still looked good. And she did not slur her words either. Valka was making all her points, thinking in complete thoughts, finishing up her sentences. She used words I did not know a few times. The way she was sitting at the bar, back straight, palms flat on the bar, I never would have guessed she had had anything more than a few drinks.
But there was fire in her eyes, I could see it, shooting up toward the rafters of her mind. And even if she sounded like she was making sense, I knew she was going to places that would not be good for her. She was getting loud. It was loud in the casino. But she was getting louder.
The guys next to us at the bar heard Valka talking, and moved a little closer. I thought they were businessmen, with their shaved heads, dress shirts, and slacks, looking all suited up even though it was 4 A.M. Where was the meeting?
“How come you girls aren’t smiling?” said one. He wore a thick gold watch that dangled a little loose around his wrist. “Pretty girls like you, there should be some smiles on those faces.”
Valka’s face collapsed into a frown and then re-formed into a growl.
“You need a drink?” The other one tried to wave down a bartender. He had a hundred-dollar bill folded between a few fingers. “That’ll cheer you up.”
“Why don’t you worry about yourself,” said Valka. “About your own personal joy and happiness. Why don’t you look deep within and ask yourself, why do I need everyone around me to be smiling all the time? Is there something wrong with my life that I can’t deal with reality? Because reality is—”
“You got a fucked-up nose anyway,” said the first man, and he and his friend got up and left.
“Whatever, bald asshole,” she yelled over her shoulder at him. The bartender came over to our part of the bar and started wiping the counter with a rag and giving us looks like we were trouble. Which we were not.
“We’re fine,” Valka told the bartender. “Sheesh,” she said to me.
“Men. Always wanting you to be something you’re not,” I said. I could not believe I had fallen in with the man-hating. Las Vegas, sucking me in again. It is only for one night, I told myself.
We had another drink. Liquor was fifty percent of me by then. I swear it was replacing my blood. I felt darker than ever, and Valka was with me. She was right there. And the ghost of Peter Dingle hovered near us, too.
“It’s not bad luck, it’s good luck. It’s better to know now, you know?”
“That’s exactly right,” I said.
“What if I had spent the rest of my life with him?”
“Your life is just starting out now,” I said. “A new beginning.” I was talking about her, but I was the one who needed to hear it.
“What if I had spent the rest of my life with a man with a good job and a nice family and who gave me slow kisses in the morning? That would have been the worst thing ever.” She spit a little bit.
“He wasn’t the right one,” I said. “The right one would have stayed.”
“I’m going to be alone forever,” she said.
“You’re not.”
“I am.”
“I’m not and you’re not. Already we’ve found each other,” I said and I meant it.
“You’re like my sister,” she said. “You and I are like the same person.”
We were not the same person, I knew that. And I already had a sister. But there was something we had in common. Our men had left us wrongly. Sure, I had been the one walking out the door, but he had held it open and kicked me headfirst.
Two guys sitting next to us looked over at Valka when she said that. They had short haircuts, and were not much older than my sister. I thought they were military. I wondered if they had ever killed anyone. That was the way my mind was working. Seeing death in some places. Their gaze was steady on us both, and then one of them said, “Well, just let it out, then.”
Then she screamed it. “PETER DINGLE WAS A BAD LAY.”
And that was when the bartender asked us to leave.
“I’VE NEVER BEEN kicked out of a bar,” I said. We were laughing about it later in bed. “I haven’t even really been in that many bars.” We had decided Valka should move into my suite and stay with me for the next few nights, at least until I decided whether or not I was going to go with her back to Santa Monica. She said I could help her out with the flower business. She was always looking for someone she could trust. The high school girls robbed her blind all the time, or they were busy on the phone with their friends. The local mothers had to leave early to pick up their kids from school. She was looking for a woman just like her to help her out. Someone she could bring up in the business. Maybe I could be a partner someday, she told me. If I worked hard, took a few classes in business and floral design. There was nothing to it, working in her industry. You just had to have a good eye and be able to think on your feet, and she could see I had both of those qualities. She would teach me everything she knew and then some.