Lady Luck's Map of Vegas

by Barbara Samuel

  What am I going to do about this? I press my hands to my mouth, trying to breathe through a second wave of nausea, but it doesn't work and I have to throw up again.

  Ugh.

  After a few minutes, I can stand up and wash my face, brush my teeth, but I'm going to need a cup of tea and some food immediately. I pull my hair into a scrunchy letting the twisty curls just be, and put my jeans on. Later, I'll shower and pull myself together. My mother wouldn't go out in public without her full makeup, but nobody I know is going to see me in Tucumcari, New Mexico.

  The light outside is luminous and soft, the color of a little girl's hair. The air smells of growing things, lilac and fresh grass and new shoots on the yucca plants nestled into corners of xeriscaped lots. The smell enchants me and I feel something like tears in my throat. I wish, fiercely, for the counsel of my father. I want to sit him down and say, “Daddy, I have a problem and I don't know what to do. I need your advice.”

  In the foyer of the busy diner, I wait for someone to come seat me, wondering if I would have done it if he was still alive. He was nearly eighty, after all, and more or less Catholic. He wouldn't have approved of abortion.

  “One?” the hostess asks. I nod and she leads me to a small table on the aisle. I sit so I can look through the window. “Hot tea, please,” I say. “Milk on the side.”

  My father would not have approved of abortions under most circumstances. But his heart had been as shattered as any of ours by Gypsy's illness, maybe even more so. He hated the toll her nightmares took on her, even before she had her first psychotic break. He was the one who'd come running when she screamed in the middle of the night, the one who rocked her and held her while she babbled about monsters and devils coming through the floor and out of the walls. It took her forever to calm down sometimes, and Daddy would hold her and rock her as long as she needed him. My mother couldn't cope. She didn't know what to do. The nightmares scared her even more than they did me.

  Daddy, I would say to him now. What do I do? With or without this man, how do I know what the right action is? How can I bring a child into this world knowing it might be cursed with schizophrenia down the line somewhere? What do I do?

  Again the protective sorrow makes me put my hand over my belly. How can I bring her into the world knowing the monsters she might face? But how can I let her go, knowing she might have Jack's eyes, his merry chuckle, his hands?

  I eat a hearty meal of eggs, potatoes, toast, and coffee. The orange juice tastes strange, so I order grapefruit, and the smell of bacon is absolutely impossible. I can't begin to gag it down.

  But the food does make me feel better. It's oddly freeing to be able to eat for a change. Really eat, instead of picking through the dangerous items on a menu. I can't even remember the last time I did that.

  After breakfast, I walk some of it off by checking with the homeless-shelter women again. No sign of Gypsy—I hadn't really expected one. The morning is smooth and cool, and instead of rushing, I take my time, stopping now and then to really look at things. A yard full of tulips and budding irises; a mural painted in bright pinks and greens; a graveyard lying in tatters behind a fence.

  At a junction of the highway a descanso is planted in the earth where someone died. I have read a lot about them since Gypsy is so fascinated. They're protected by the state in New Mexico, and there are literally thousands of them, everywhere. This one is small, a wooden cross with a woman's name, Pam Esquivel, carved into it. A black-and-white picture, showing a young woman with teased eighties-style hair, is laminated and glued to the center. She must be local, because the site is well-tended. Pink silk daisies bloom in a white vase, and there is a loop of blue plastic rosary beads over the cross. I step back and look toward the road, and as always, imagine the accident in pure detail: the car, maybe a Galaxy, coming down that angled ramp too fast, late at night, and slamming into the bridge supports. I can see the lights, hear the crash, imagine the horrible silence of the aftermath.

  There are stretches of road in New Mexico that can give me nightmares for weeks. I've never understood why Gypsy loves these memorials so much.

  I glance at my watch and see that I should be on my way. The TeePee Curio shop is open and I duck inside. A lot of my memories of that early road trip are irritatingly blurry, but the inside of the shop is instantly familiar. There are copper bracelets and fake plastic turquoise and Route 66 signs, books, maps, everything you can think of. The small Indian drums covered with plastic hides and fluffy, dyed ostrich feathers are pretty cute. I bang on one lightly.

  “Oh, Mama!” Gypsy cried. “This one! This one!”

  “All right, but no playing it while we're driving.”

  There are coloring books and key chains and postcards. I look away from the kachina dolls carefully—they've always frightened me. I had nightmares about them after seeing them throughout New Mexico on that long-ago vacation. Not nightmares like Gypsy's, of course, but bad enough. They were always coming after me with their skinny arms upraised, their wooden legs clunking on the ground, their horrifying masks leering in the darkness.

  Gypsy seems to take pleasure in the images that frighten me, and always did. Her nightmares were—are—a unified life, a world of outer space invaders and demons, a world of good and evil, pitched in an eternal fight. There's a very Catholic tone to them, I suppose, medieval Catholicism. Eldora absolutely flat-out refused to come, but our father took Gypsy and me to mass sometimes. It was years before I understood why he didn't go up for communion or get involved in any other way—because he was divorced, and his ex was Catholic, devoutly so.

  It all seemed odd to me. Give me something I can put my hands on.

  Unlike Jack, who attended church every week as a child, and still says prayers to various saints. Under his breath, it's true, and with some abashment in my presence, I've noticed. I linger over some postcards of famous churches—the Santurario de Chimayo, the Rancho de Taos— and I think about taking him some holy relic. We'll be going through Chimayo. I could bring him some dirt. The thought makes me smile.

  Instead, I choose a cartoony postcard showing Route 66 with armadillos and six-guns and tepees drawn along the dun-colored land, and pay for it. Outside, I scribble a note on the back, along with Jack's New York City address, and stop at the post office. There are Love stamps, and I buy one, stick it on, and drop the postcard in the mail slot on the way out.

  It's bad this morning, my missing him. It feels like a lost thumb. As I head back to the motel, his face floats with me—the little lines fanning out from around his eyes, the slight softening of his jaw that worries him so much these days, the hard line of his cheekbones. His black, black hair, as thick as a pelt. He loves it when I stroke the hair back from his temples and forehead. Sometimes I sing folk songs I remember from childhood, and he likes that even more.

  The pain goes through my solar plexus again. I haven't ever met anyone I liked as much as Jack Shea, and there really isn't anyone who ever let me just be myself in the same way. It's been a strange pocket of relief to discover that as a possibility, that someone would still find my company desirable if I let down my guard. If I snored. If I sang songs. If I had a cold and a red nose.

  Thinking of these things makes me believe again—my gut says this connection was not a mistake or a joke or something false. It was real, even if it did take place on long weekends once a month. They were really great weekends. I don't know how the current situation will work out, but whatever thing it is that blooms between people sometimes was true between us. I hurry back to the motel.

  I still can't sign on to e-mail. The connection keeps timing out. It's frustrating for more than missing Jack. I really shouldn't leave e-mail untended for days on end. I do a lot of business that way, and clients get touchy if I don't get back to them swiftly. I once lost an account when I didn't return a woman's e-mail in twenty-four hours. She was high strung and difficult, and I knew better. Maybe you'd say she wasn't worth it, but, well, let's just say you'd kn
ow her name if I told you what it was. It was a big-money account.

  I've been lucky in that way falling into charmed connections that lead influential people to seeing my work and wanting me to design their pages. I'm not sure why. I'm not my sister—or even my mother, who has a color sense that's just astonishing—but I do have a sense of balance and breadth and a very strong idea of how to get a client's vision into the world for them.

  I try three times to get the connection to work, and finally give up. I call voice mail on my home phone and the cell phone, and there's nothing. Without seeing the caller IDs, I can't know if anyone has called and hung up. Wishful thinking.

  For a minute, I sit with the phone in my lap, wondering if I should call Jack. After all, we haven't been out of touch like this since the second month we were dating. Every day, one way or another, we talk. E-mail, phone. Something. I glance at the clock. It's 11:30 New York time. He'd be in the office.

  It's stupid to sit here and vacillate. I'm forty years old. If I want to pick up the phone and call my lover, I have a right to do that.

  His secretary answers. “Shea Publications, Jack Shea's office. May I help you?”

  “Hi, Penny. It's India. Is Jack around?”

  “Hi, India.” She murmurs something to a woman in the background. “I'm sorry, but he's in a meeting. Do you want me to have him call you when he gets out?”

  My heart squeezes. Why am I so sure she's lying? “No, that's all right. I'm on the road and don't know where I'll be. You can tell him I called.”

  “I sure will.”

  I hang up the phone.

  That's that.

  By the time I've showered and dressed, and gone down to find my mother, Eldora is outside her room, her hair gleaming with that coppery sheen, her lipstick fresh and perfect. This morning, she's wearing a turquoise sundress and espadrilles with ties that go up her ankles. There's a sweater tucked neatly over the crook of her arm. “You look terrific, Mom.”

  “Thank you, sweetheart.” She unwraps a piece of Juicy Fruit. “Did you eat already?”

  “Just a little,” I lie, because I want her to eat. “I woke up very early and was pretty hungry.” I don't look at her. “Why don't we put the cases in the car and then get you some breakfast?”

  “Oh, I'm not hungry. A little coffee would do me, and then maybe we can have an early lunch.”

  “You need to eat breakfast.”

  She waves a hand. “You fuss too much, India.”

  “And you don't eat right. But that's the deal this time. When I say eat, you have to.”

  “All right, all right. I'm sure I can eat something or another. I bet a place like this has great cinnamon rolls.”

  I laugh. “A cinnamon roll doesn't count as good nutrition.”

  “It's food!”

  “It's fine. Let's get your stuff in the car.” I open the motel room door and the room looks as if no one has slept there at all. The bed is made pristinely, the towels folded. “You don't have to clean a motel room, Mom. That's what the maids are for.”

  “I don't like them to think I'm a slob.” She minutely adjusts the directory on the dresser, picks up her purse. “Let's eat, then, shall we?”

  “I need to use the restroom first, if you don't mind.”

  “The restaurant is right next door, India!” She nudges my arm a little. “I'm ready for some coffee.”

  “It will only take a second.”

  She stands her ground. “I'd rather you didn't.”

  I narrow my eyes. If it were anyone else, I might think they were embarrassed about an odor or something, but my mother isn't embarrassed about anything, and I'm sure the bathroom is as pristine as the rest of the room. “What's going on?”

  “It's none of your business. Let's go.”

  For a minute, I'm so curious I'm burning to see what she's done in that bathroom. It's not like her to be so private, so protective. Then I meet her blue, blue eyes. “Okay,” I say. “Let's go.”

  She grabs her rolling suitcase and tugs open the door. “Beauty before age, sweetheart.”

  It's not until we're seated in the restaurant and she's ordered eggs and toast that she lights a cigarette and leans forward, a glitter in her eyes. She really is so beautiful still, it's just amazing. The light coming in through the window strikes her irises so that the pupils shrink to tiny dots, leaving a blue like a pearlie marble I once had. Like a Siamese cat. Like … I don't even know. Her lipstick is always good, always even, her eyebrows perfect. The turquoise dress she's wearing has a square neckline that shows off just the right amount of cleavage.

  “So,” she says, wrapping her gum in a little piece of napkin, “you want to know what I left in the bathroom?”

  “It's up to you, Mom. I don't want to pry.”

  “It's a dress. I made it into a descanso and put it in the bathtub, because I was in that room a long time ago.”

  “I was with you, remember?”

  “Before that, sweetheart.” She inclines her head, looks the tiniest bit shy, and whispers, “I lost my virginity in that room.”

  My mouth opens. “Tell me.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Eldora, 1955

  I'm not gonna tell India every little detail, only the highlights, but as I spin it out, it all comes back like a movie.

  I learned a lot over that next year, between fifteen and sixteen. Truth is, life was getting harder all the time at home, and I spent most of it at work, trying to get away from my daddy's drinking. Not like he was mean to us or anything, just filthy. I kept my little corner neat as I could, but three little brothers and my daddy drinking, only bringing in what he could shoot or catch—squirrels and catfish and trout—'cause he plain just couldn't hold down a job anymore. Well, it just wasn't tidy, that's for sure.

  Understand, I don't blame him. He was a drunk, that's true, but he was hanging on the best way he could. You know how you sometimes see people who've just shattered, just broken into a thousand pieces when something happens to them? They never get over it. One minute of their lives stops them dead and all they are the rest of their lives is an echo. That was my daddy.

  But he didn't leave us. Didn't beat us or neglect us, at least not on purpose. Tried his best to keep some food in the house when he could. He didn't have much to say, and those blue eyes, which forever after had a stricken look to them, were too hard to look at anyway.

  Don't ask me why we didn't shatter, my brothers and me, but we didn't. We were strong. I worked there at Dina's. When he got old enough, my brother Perry got on a road crew, which took him out of town a lot. He got strong and muscular fast, though, and every few months he'd bring home a big envelope of money he'd saved for us. After a while we didn't see him too much anymore. That left the little ones and me.

  Can't talk about them too much, really. It sticks in my throat, that one thing. The boys. I know what I did to them was wrong.

  Wish I could explain to India what it was like there in that little house. The air was gray, stained with the disaster that had fallen on us. There wasn't a spot of color or a tiny bit of song. Just the grim silence, the echoes of all that had been lost. I did my best, but there wasn't a way to keep it really clean or nice or cheer it up any.

  Through that year, there was a man who used to come to the café. Always asked for my section, which wasn't unusual. There were probably a half dozen traveling types who stopped in on a regular basis, every month or every couple of months. Truck drivers with a regular route, salesmen of various sorts. The truck drivers tended to be earthy and funny and I didn't mind their half serious come-ons. Mostly, I got the idea that they'd run like hell if I ever took one of them up on it.

  The salesmen were cleaner but a little more threatening. Too slick, too polished. Like they had women in every truck stop on the route, the land-locked version of a girl in every port.

  Cliff was different. I liked him right away, the first time he stopped in. He was in insurance, and I could tell by his jewelry—simple
, but all gold—that he did pretty well. His suits fit him right, across nice wide shoulders and a slim waist. He was a lot older, of course, in his early forties, I reckon, though he never did tell me exactly how old. He had some sun lines around his eyes, that was all, and he was married. Showed me pictures of his kids—a girl and a boy—on a vacation somewhere by an ocean.

  Now you might say that a man past forty who wanted a sixteen-year-old girl wasn't a good guy on any level, but you'd be wrong. Cliff was kind. I saw him once stop his big fancy Lincoln and fetch a loose dog off the highway. It was ragged and scared and covered with mud, but Cliff talked him into the backseat, onto a blanket, and drove him into the next town and took him to the dog shelter, just so he wouldn't get hit by a car and suffer a terrible death.

  From that first time he sat in my section, I saw something else, something I'd see in men's eyes a lot more. I didn't know what it was then. It just made me want to touch his hand, give him a smile. See if I could get the light back into eyes that looked so sad I can't even tell you. Sad like there wasn't anything anymore, and never would be.

  He came through once every two weeks, going and coming, for three or four months before the first time he waited for me after work and took me to have some coffee. And then that went on a long time more.

  I knew he wanted me. It came off him in sweet-smelling waves. It made his hand shake sometimes when he helped me back into the car. It gave me the headiest sense of power, too. A man like this could want me. It might be the only way out I ever had.

  One night he kissed me, and to my complete surprise, I liked it. My whole body liked it. His lips were firm and he smelled of aftershave, and I could tell he'd shaved before he'd come to see me because his chin was smooth as a porcelain pie plate.

  Since the summer, I'd had plenty of dates, with plenty of boys. They kissed like their tongues were swords, and I was always having to keep a cigarette lit between us so I could keep their hands in place. I wasn't about to get myself pregnant and stuck in Elk City, I can tell you, and I didn't let boys get to second base, though once in a while, one would get a hand on a breast over my sweater. I never saw him again if he did.