Lady Luck's Map of Vegas

by Barbara Samuel

  “Right.” You don't die of the wanting. To distract myself, I say, “So you've been thinking about what you want your life to look like now that Dad's gone? Any ideas beyond travel?”

  “Not many,” she says, but there's no worry in it. She puts her elbows on the table, her graceful white hands one over the other, and leans forward intently. “I don't need to work, which is a testament to how well your father took care of me, but maybe I want to. I've been thinking I'd like to work in a bookstore. I love books. I think it would be fun.”

  “That's a great idea.”

  “Too often, you see a woman just get old real fast after her husband dies, and I don't want to do that.” She meets my eyes. “I also know you don't want to stay in Colorado Springs, that you're dying to get back to Denver.”

  “There's no rush,” I say. In fact, if—

  No. I'm not having the baby. Cannot take the chance. Made up my mind earlier and I'm sticking to it.

  But if I did, it wouldn't be so bad to be here in the Springs, where I could call on my mother and her friends for guidance. What do any of my single friends know about babies?

  This would be the perfect time to lean over the table and say, Mom? I have this problem, and I need your advice.

  Instead, I say, “I'm fine in my apartment for now, Mom. Take your time figuring it out. It's a big change, and I do understand that.”

  “You're a sweetheart, you know.” She nibbles the edge of a chip. “I hope you know how much I appreciate your support, and how much I'm enjoying this trip.”

  “Me, too,” I say, and to my surprise, it's true.

  “I'm dreading Gallup, I have to admit. Lot of bad memories there.”

  Gypsy ran away in Gallup. “Yeah.”

  “Do you remember?” my mother says with surprise.

  “That Gypsy ran away? Of course.”

  She takes a breath, puts down her chip and takes a sip of margarita. Carefully she says, “Do you remember your father's first wife at all?”

  I frown, thinking about it. A picture comes up of a woman in an old-fashioned shirtwaist, heavy-bosomed and graying, staring with hot black eyes at me and my sister in the car. “I think I only saw her a couple of times. Dad did things for her around the house, right?”

  “He took good care of her.” Eldora clears her throat, an uncharacteristic gesture of hesitation. “She didn't handle the divorce very well.”

  “She had a bitter mouth,” I say, remembering the tight lips. “It's hard to imagine anyone more different from you.”

  “I had an unfair advantage, India. I was a lot younger. And in those days, people of her generation seemed to get old faster, you know what I mean? Even in the seventies, forty was time to get out the tie-up shoes.”

  Laughingly, I shudder and toss a weight of wild, curly hair over my forty-year-old shoulder. “Thank God we don't have to now.”

  “She never gave up on your father ‘coming to his senses’ as she used to put it. Not until the bloody end.”

  “Really.” I say it as an invitation, hearing my mother's storytelling voice, slower and richer than her normal voice, fill the small, enclosed area of our booth.

  Eldora takes a sip of her margarita and looks off into the distance. Candlelight dances on her irises, and as she begins to tell me the next chapter in her tale, I imagine her at thirty-three, hanging out clothes on the line in a pair of neat shorts and a short shirt tied under her prodigious breasts.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Eldora, June 1973

  It was one of those still, hot, sunny days in June when nothing's moving between noon and five. The girls were at the swimming pool with their friends. I dropped them off right after lunch and they stayed all afternoon at least two or three times a week. It turned them brown as pinto beans, and sometimes it was hard to believe they were my children, these two dark-haired, dark-eyed girls. They looked Mexican or Indian or something. Pretty. I didn't tan as well as they did, but I was thinking about pouring a nice glass of iced tea and taking my book to a lawn chair for an hour or so once I got the clothes hung up. Get a little tan on my tummy.

  I had a dryer, you know, but there was something nice about hanging clothes on the line, especially the sheets. It made me happy to smell the sunshine and wind in them when we crawled into bed at night. Don liked it, too, and he would curl up next to me, his big hands on my tummy, and cuddle close. “So nice,” he'd say, and fall asleep.

  It had surprised me to find out I didn't mind those little chores, hanging sheets on the line and going to the supermarket and planning meals. I liked my big modern kitchen and the pretty furniture Don bought for us, and having things looking tidy and beautiful. Everyone told me I ought to be an interior designer. There was more than one living room in Pleasant Valley that I'd made improvements on, let me tell you. Some of those poor women couldn't match a green to save their lives.

  I clipped a clothespin to India's blue sheet. Over the top of the line I could see Pikes Peak, gone pale and gray in the bright sunlight, as if it were a fading painting. To the north of me, I could just make out the tops of the red rocks at Garden of the Gods, which is where Don walked every evening when he got home from work. The sky was that piercing blue of a postcard photo, so different from the skies I knew in Oklahoma, and there wasn't a sound in the world except the lazy drone of a faraway plane.

  What I was thinking, standing there, is how lucky I was, and how foolish for risking it all with Glenn, who wouldn't've turned my head if he'd come in the summer. It was only wintertime with the early dark and the dismal routine of waking up and doing chores and reading endlessly that made me feel trapped. Stupid Tupperware parties and Mary Kay demonstrations and all the other idiotic things women did to see themselves through the dullness of winter. It bored me to tears. Ditto the room mother business. I did it for one year and was so sick of those other mothers by the end of the year that I would happily have taken a meat cleaver to their heads. Their whinnying laughs, their panic at the loss of themselves in their families. The petty struggles over brownies that took the place of the struggles they really wanted to fight for.

  All around us the world was going crazy—Vietnam and hippies and women's lib and race riots—and what were we doing? These were smart women, some of them with good educations, but there wasn't much room for them to do anything with their good brains, so they turned petty and nasty. A lot of them, as time went by, dumped their straitjackets and found some new meaning in their lives, but that was a ways off just then, that winter of 1972-73. We all knew Tupperware was about as important as watching grass grow, but what else was there?

  By the time spring rolled around, I was stretched to breaking, and Glenn brought something that felt like meaning. Believe me, I hadn't missed the fact that he looked a whole lot like another man, the one man I never could get over in my heart, the one who could still come into my dreams after all these years, and make me hurt for days.

  And Glenn was from Las Vegas. It seemed like a sign to my foolish brain.

  What I wish now is that I'd gone to work sooner. I kept wanting to, but Don was against it. He wanted me home with the girls, home to fix his supper. I think he was afraid I might fall in love out there, that I'd leave him, and it was safer keeping me in the house.

  But I never wanted anybody else. I really didn't. Don was good to me. Getting together with me had cost him, and I'd made a promise to myself that I'd see it through to the very end. It's true I didn't love him the way he loved me, but he never knew that. I made sure.

  Work would have, and eventually did, give me a way to use my brain. That's the thing I never really knew about myself, that I was so smart. I'm a whiz at all kinds of things, but mainly people. I understand how people fit together, what makes them tick, and work gave me a chance to see that, use it, do something with myself every day.

  Anyway, that afternoon, hanging up clothes, half-dreaming about Glenn's smooth dark legs, and feeling guilty about it, I had an unexpected visitor.
/>   Bea, Don's ex-wife.

  She just appeared, like a ghost or something, not there one second and there the next. I made a screeching noise and grabbed the sheet to my heart. She stood in front of me, silent as a chunk of granite and just about as appealing. Everything about her had gone hard and gray over the years. Once she was an ordinary housewife, a little plump, wearing glasses that didn't do a thing for her face, but cheerful enough. She was a pillar-of-the-community type of woman: busy in her parish and in the neighborhood, visiting shut-ins and planning the Fourth of July picnic.

  That makes her sound stodgy. She wasn't. Don used to say the thing he'd liked most about her when they met was that she had a giant, wild laugh. I asked him, too, if she liked sex, and he said she'd been afraid at first, but came around.

  When she was a girl, I'm sure she was pretty in an ordinary kind of way smooth skin and clear eyes, and a nice figure. I've seen the wedding pictures. She had a good sweep of glossy blond hair and wore red lipstick, and her wedding gown was white lace. They got married in 1943, since Don was 4-F and didn't have to serve in World War II.

  At the time they were saying their vows, I was three years old.

  And if you're judging me now as a harlot and a homewrecker, you go right ahead. I deserve it. I flat out stole that woman's husband, with foresight and intent as they say. There were extenuating circumstances, but I reckon they're not enough to make that okay, especially considering what happened.

  Which is that divorce ruined Bea Redding's life.

  That sounds dramatic in this day and age—though if you look around, I'll bet you'll see a whole lot more of it than you think—but in those days, what was there for Bea to do? She was forty, ordinary, trained to be a wife and mother and not much else. She got a job as a secretary, but I'm pretty sure she never went on a date or got another kiss or slept with a man's arms around her again the rest of her life.

  Part of that was stubbornness. I'm sorry, but there comes a point where you just have to move on, instead of standing there howling and nursing your wounds. Everybody gets body-slammed by life once in a while, and how you get through it is what shows your character. I'm not saying I didn't feel some pity for her, and a whole lot of guilt, but she could have looked around at church for a nice widower or something. She didn't have to keep her eyes fastened on Don the entire rest of her life.

  Now, before this June afternoon when I was hanging out clothes, we had not ever had a conversation. I didn't reckon she'd much care to have a chat with me, after all, the woman who stole her husband right out from under her nose. A younger woman, one who gave him twins after she'd been trying for twenty years and hadn't had any babies at all. It was bitter to her. Once she came after me with a shoe, but I don't blame her. She was hysterical at the time.

  “Bea!” I said. “You liked to scare the life out of me.” I was nervous, not really knowing what she was all about, and I made a joke. “Not that you would probably mind that, would you?”

  She blinked. It looked reptilian, I must admit. “I saw you, Eldora, with a man, at the Thunderbird Motel in Manitou Springs last Thursday afternoon.”

  Slowly, I straightened. Met her eyes. “And?”

  “He was a good-looking man. If you like the flashy type.”

  I waited, though I was pretty sure I knew what was coming. “And?” I said again when she didn't say anything.

  “I want my husband back.”

  “Don't be ridiculous.”

  “You have two choices,” she said. “You can run off quietly in the night, or I'll tell him and you can be disgraced in front of everybody.”

  Both fear and amazement welled up in my voice. “Are you threatening me?”

  “You better believe it.”

  “It would break his heart if you told him. And what makes you think he'd be with you anyway?”

  “He loved me before you came along and ruined it.”

  “That may be true, Bea, and I am sorry for what happened.”

  “Save it,” she said fiercely. Little bits of spit came flying out of her mouth. “You're a slut and you don't deserve that man or those children.”

  I met her eyes and spoke the truth. “You know what? You're right. I haven't done one damned thing right my whole life, and I don't deserve him or the love of those babies, but I'll be damned if I'm going to let some bitter old bag tell me what to do with my life.”

  Ducking under the sheets, I faced her head on. “What do you know about it anyway? There you were, all spoiled little princess in your sweet little world, where nothing bad ever happened to you. You had a mama and daddy who loved you, and a nice house and a nice church and people to look out for you, and you even found one of the five men not in the war to marry you.” She was glaring at me, her nostrils flaring, and I went on. “Not everybody gets it that easy, Bea. You had some bad breaks, I'll give you that. It wasn't fair, but it was ten years ago and you need to find something else to think about.”

  “I'll tell him. I swear I will.”

  Hot fear washed through me. Not fear for my safety but fear for Don, for what it might do to him. “Please,” I whispered. “Don't.”

  “Then leave him.”

  “How can I do that? The girls love him.”

  “I'll watch over the girls for you. They're good girls.”

  “No.” I lifted my chin. “You know, blackmail won't work. I know I've made a mistake, and I can fix it. I'll tell him myself, ask his forgiveness, and you know he'll give it to me.”

  She came after me then, screeching and yelling and clawing. She tried to scratch my eyes out, and succeeded in tearing my shirt practically off me. It made me think of another time in my life when a woman went crazy and came after me, and believe me, I wasn't going to let Bea hurt me. I was a lot taller, younger, stronger, and I managed to get hold of her and wrestle her down to the ground.

  “Bea,” I said when her face was in the grass, “you do whatever you think is right, but you're not going to come into my house and threaten me, do you understand? I'll break your neck if you come near my girls.”

  She said, “I … hate … you.”

  “I know.” I stood up and let her go. “You've got every right to.” I brushed grass off my knees, and there was a thud in my chest that told me I had to get my head on straight, start taking care of business properly, because she couldn't possibly hate me any more than I hated myself right then. I made up my mind to end it with Glenn. We'd only been together a few times, though he called me twice a week when Don was at work and we had long, lovely conversations.

  It had been crazy, letting him in, and I knew it when I did it. I wondered, as Bea stormed off, how it was I'd become so corrupted. I wondered how to fix it.

  And I just didn't know.

  One thing I could do was some damage control. I lit a cigarette and called Don. “Honey,” I said, exhaling all my adrenaline into the receiver, “Bea was just here, and I think she's losing it. She was talking crazy. I think you need to go see her on your way home.”

  “Are you okay?” he asked me.

  I looked up at the sky so the tears flowing down my face wouldn't ruin my makeup, and took a drag off my cigarette. “I'm fine, sweetheart. I love you, you know that?”

  “I love you, too.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  India

  After telling her story, my mother looks pale and drained. I can hardly think of what to say. You're a good woman anyway? She wouldn't appreciate it.

  We wander through the narrow streets back to the hotel, window shopping. There is hardly anyone out. Although the snow has stopped, it's very cold, the damp whisper of winter blowing back toward Canada for the season. I pause in front of a jewelry display, a cluster of inlays with fire opals and sugarlite. “These are different,” I comment. “Those earrings would look good with that purple angora sweater you have.”

  She smokes, peers into the case. Light from the showroom shines on the crown of her head. “They're pretty. I like that bracelet a
lot.”

  We move along slowly, admiring upscale and ever-so-hip western wear—leather and conches and long fringes; lots of turquoise and red and silver, with splashes of black.

  “I sometimes think I'd like to live here,” my mother says. “Somewhere it feels different.”

  “Really? I find it hard to imagine you anywhere but in that house in Pleasant Valley.”

  She waves the hand that holds her cigarette. “What's there for me now, India?”

  “Well, me, for one.” I think of the baby inside of me. I wonder how she'd feel about a grandchild, if she would like it or not like it. “Gypsy.” That would be three.

  “Oh, you've got your own life now, India. I can see that. I know you're chomping at the bit to get back to Denver.”

  “Nobody ever made me do anything I didn't want to do, Mother.”

  She chuckles. “True.”

  We part ways in the elevator—her room is on a smoking floor. Mine is one floor higher. “Take it easy,” I say as she gets off the elevator.

  Her blue eyes have a sorrow in them when she looks at me. She only nods, waves a hand. I do wish she'd just give up the drinking entirely.

  Back in my room, I glance at my watch. Nine P.M., which is eleven New York time. I want to call, but there are two things stopping me. If he doesn't answer, I'll worry about where he is and who he's with. If he does answer, I'm afraid he is going to be terribly unhappy with me and I'll feel even worse than I do right now.

  In the end, though, there is only one honorable thing to do: return his phone call. I pick up the phone, dial the first five numbers, and realize I really need to use the toilet. Hanging up the phone, I rush into the bathroom and close the door, wash my hands, and stare at myself in the mirror for a few minutes. My eyes are bloodshot, probably from driving. Any makeup I'd put on this morning has long since worn away. My skin is the color of the pale adobe walls—a nice color for deserts and houses, not so great for a face. And when did my jawline start looking so soft?