Other Resort Cities

by Tod Goldberg

  Your sister died while you were living in our house. We went to the funeral even though we didn’t know her. It was December, a few days before Christmas, and the service was held out in Benicia. In the distance, we could see the Navy Mothball Fleet docked out in the shallow bay. You got up during the service and said that you were sorry that you’d been such a terrible brother to her; that you’d let her make so many mistakes; that you should have just picked her up in your arms and carried her away, put her in a place where she could get the help she needed, where she wouldn’t find a way to meet guys like you, Freddie, you fucking cocksucker. You made eye contact with us. We nodded our heads and mouthed that we loved you. We went to Farrell’s afterward and ate hot fudge sundaes. You told us stories about your sister. You told us she lived in regret. You told us her negativity propelled her toward drugs and guys like Freddie who would rather kick her fucking ass than kiss her on the lips. When Mom said not to use such language in front of us, you said, “You remind me of her a lot, Sally. You really do. That’s not a compliment.”

  We remember Jack Merken. Jack wore velour. Jack went to Purdue on a basketball scholarship in some nebulous, yellowed past, but that didn’t stop him from wearing Purdue sweatshirts and Purdue T-shirts and velour pullover V-neck sweaters with a tiny Purdue logo stitched over the chest. Jack Merken owned a limo service and said he had a house up in Tahoe. Every time he came to pick up Mom, a long, black limo would pull up in front of our house. “Jack’s here,” we’d say, watching him through the living room window, his shadow barely visible as he slid through the opening between the front seat and the back seat so he could get out through the back passenger door. The neighbors would come out onto their front porches to see who was in the limo, because this was in the 1970s and not just anyone could get a limo, unless you had $75 to spend for the evening. We got to drive in the limo once. It was raining, and we pounded on the master bedroom door to let Mom know we needed a ride to school, that all of us would be drenched if we walked, that there was lightning that might kill us. Jack came to the door. “Your mom says to ask the neighbors for a ride,” Jack said, “but why don’t I take you?” We climbed into the back of the limo and it was nothing like we imagined. The seats were once crushed red velvet, but now they were crusted and hard, black electrical tape keeping them together in places. It smelled of perfume and cigars and something like vinegar, but more pungent. We found a bra on the floor. We found a high-heeled shoe. We found Marlboro butts in the ashtray. We found handprints on the back window. We found Jack staring at us through the dividing window at the stop sign on the corner of our street. It looked like he wanted to cry, or he wanted to cough, or he wanted this moment in his life to end, because he just kept staring at us before finally saying, “I’m sorry. You guys should just walk.”

  You took us for lobster on the day your unemployment ran out.

  We remember Dan Kern. Dan was our stepfather for six months. Dan was a lawyer. Dan spoke German fluently. Dan wore bikini underwear long before it was fashionable. Dan had three children from a previous marriage, though all of them were adopted. Steven, Bonnie, and Lyle came to live with us on weekends, sharing our rooms, eating our Pop-Tarts, changing the TV from reruns of The Brady Bunch to reruns of Get Smart without even asking. Dan didn’t particularly care for the fact that we didn’t call him Dad. He asked us if we loved him. We said no. He asked us why not. We told him we didn’t even know him. Mom told us he was going to adopt us, and we were going to change our last names, and that Dan was going to get full custody of his kids and we’d all live together in a big house in Pacific Heights. Then Steven beat up his grandma with a broomstick and told everyone that Johnny Carson told him to do it. Then Bonnie brought a Ouija board to our house and started taking her top off around us, which caused problems, because we weren’t related and we were young and we knew from the shaking wall that there was possibility in all of this, that we could all scream our names and no one would know what it meant but us. Then Lyle showed up at homecoming dressed as a woman, and we found out that he had the machinery to be both and he’d made a choice, because he was sixteen, and he was now Linda. One day shortly thereafter, Dan chased us all into the garage. He was wearing his Hawaiian print bikini underwear and was waving around a butcher knife and screamed at us in German. And then he wasn’t our stepfather anymore.

  You showed up at our graduations. We saw you in the back. It had been years, but we recognized you. We looked for you afterward, and since we never found you, we began to think that maybe you weren’t really there, were just a mirage, just us wishing you’d reappear.

  We remember when there was no one left. We remember when the men stopped coming because Mom had become sick, was told she’d be dead in six months, though of course she never did die. But by then we were gone. We came back as adults to care for her, back to our old bedrooms. We slept on our Star Wars sheets. We listened to The Knack and Gordon Lightfoot and Journey and REO Speedwagon and The Thompson Twins and Shaun Cassidy and Blondie and talked about how much those songs used to mean to us, so much so that when Mom would scream “Down or off !” we’d just turn it up and wait for the rage, wait for her to walk outside and turn off the power, leaving us in the dark, spinning the records on our old Fisher-Price record players, the music just tinny scratches of sound, a departure from the yelling that rippled down the hallway, that caused Sam and Roxanne, the dogs, to crap themselves right where they stood. We found Bonnie’s Ouija board and tried to contact you there, in case you were dead. We stood Mom up in her shower and bathed her, the water glancing off the tile wall and pooling at our feet, and we imagined you standing there alone, hitting that wall, pounding that wall, sobbing, and we reached out to you in our minds in case you stood there still, haunting the shower, your demons buried in the grout along with bits of skin from your knuckles. We put Mom into her bed, and it seemed so much smaller than we imagined it. Just a bed. Four corners. Sheets. A headboard. We imagined you there beside her. We tried to figure out what drove you there in the first place. How old were you? Thirty-five? Forty? Our age now. We have our own beds. We have our own master bedrooms, and yet we think of you still, standing here, saying good-bye to her in bed, because that’s where it happened. You stood in the doorway of the master bedroom, and you said, “I just can’t do this. How many others, Sally? How many?” And she said a number like five or seven or who fucking cares just get the fuck out you no-job son of a bitch. And you walked down the hallway and poked your head into each of our rooms and you said good-bye and you said sorry and you said you tried for us but that there’s a limit and you’d found yours, and then the stapler hit you in the back and we looked and Mom was throwing things from her bedroom at you. You just kept walking. You even stopped and hugged the dogs. You put your nose in that space between Sam’s eyes and you held her ears and you whispered something. And you picked up Roxanne, who was a collie, and you hugged her like a child and she licked your face. A bottle of your cologne came sailing down through the air and it cracked on the wall and you didn’t even move. The hallway still smells of you. Mom would have us shampoo the carpet and scrub the wallpaper, but nothing removed the smell. Here we are, decades in the dust, and we find tiny bits of glass still wedged into the wall.

  You exist on the Internet. We’ve MapQuested your addresses. One day we will fly to you in Florida and Iowa and Alaska and Washington and we will knock on your door and when you open it we will say, “Do you remember us?” And you will say no and you will say no and you will say no and then maybe you will say yes. Because it will be you and not just a man with your name. You’ll be older, too, because there isn’t a way for memory to freeze the body like it freezes trauma in place.

  Or we will let you be, give you that grace. We will drive by your homes across the country and we will imagine you inside and we will wonder if you’ve known all along that we remember.

  Palm Springs

  Used to be Tania hated taking the bus anywhere. She didn’t want to bec
ome one of those people who brought the bus up in every conversation, as if it were part of her life and not just how she got from one place to another. Like her friend Jean, back when she was still living in Reno and working at the Cal-Neva. They’d sit in the smokeroom during breaks—back when they still had a smokeroom—and Jean would always have some story to tell about the bus. There was the time a guy had a heart attack in his seat and died before the bus could even come to a complete stop. There was the time a little girl fell off her seat and bit through her bottom lip and ended up bleeding on Jean’s new shoes. There was even the time Jean swore she saw Bill Cosby on the bus and that he was just as sweet as could be and had asked for her phone number.

  Tania wonders now, as she steps aboard the #14 that will take her from her apartment in Desert Hot Springs to the Chuyalla Indian Casino in downtown Palm Springs, whatever became of Jean. After Tania left Reno for Las Vegas in 1985, they exchanged letters for a few months, though Tania quickly realized she didn’t have much to write about other than the weather or various personal calamities: a broken toe that kept her from cocktailing for a week, a winter heat wave that blew out her car’s AC, her cocker, Lucy, getting into an ant hill. And so she just stopped writing or responding to Jean, eventually tossing out Jean’s letters unopened. Tania remembers a vague sense of guilt concerning this whole episode, but in retrospect it all seems petty. Just because you’re friends with someone doesn’t mean you have to stay friends with them. Sometimes it’s just easier to be without.

  And anyway, what would they have to talk about today if they were still friends? Yes, better all around.

  Settling into her regular seat—third from the left—Tania can’t help but think Jean would find Tania’s present condition all very ironic, particularly since back then Tania used to tease her constantly about “taking the limo” to work every day, even when Tania offered to pick her up in her Honda when they worked the same shift. She loved that car: a black Honda Accord with leather seats, a cassette player with a detachable face, six speakers. She remembers how important it was that she have six speakers, how she obsessed over the sound quality in her car, how she rolled down the windows on even the hottest days so that passing strangers could hear her stereo. Twenty-three years old then and the thing she was most proud of was a set of goddamned speakers.

  Tania closes her eyes when the bus leaves the curb. The ride from Desert Hot Springs to the casino takes between thirty-seven and forty-eight minutes, depending upon whether or not the bus stops at all of the benches along the way. It’s a Sunday morning, so she figures she’s only got thirty-seven today, seeing as the bus is stone empty. She likes to close her eyes for the trip, though she never sleeps, because she knows it’s the only time for the next nine hours she’ ll get the chance to see darkness. Cocktailing in a casino isn’t like what it used to be. Back in Reno, they kept it midnight inside the casino: black ceiling, purple carpet, blood red walls. These days it ’s all bright lights and warm yellows everywhere. The young girls think it’s soothing, but Tania finds it irritating, wonders why anyone would want to see so much. What she wouldn’t give to have missed a few things. Forty-seven years old now, Tania figures she could unsee ten, fifteen years and be happy about it.

  Sometimes, when she’s done looking for her adopted daughter, Natalya, on the Internet, or chatting about her with other mothers online, Tania tries to find her twenty-three-year-old self on the Ouija board she bought at Toys “R” Us. She figures if a Ouija board can supposedly talk to the dead or people living in other dimensions, it might very well have the ability to reach back in time, too. It hasn’t worked yet, but Tania thinks that maybe she’s just not asking the right questions, thinks that maybe all she needs to do is find someone else to do the Ouija with her, double up on the spirit power, you see, and maybe that’ll do it. And when she finds herself, she’ll tell her to sell that fucking car and concentrate on getting her shit right, because the future is painted in bright colors, baby, and no one will notice you.

  In all her years working at casinos in Reno, Las Vegas, and now Palm Springs, Tania has only hit it big once. It was 1996, back when everyone had money, and she was working at the Mirage in Las Vegas. After a particularly good night—Tania can’t remember what that means anymore, but when she tells everyone about Las Vegas in the 90s, she tells them she pocketed between two and three grand on a weekend night, though that sounds absurd now, the truth probably a good 50 percent below the mythology—she put $500 down on a hand of Caribbean Stud and flopped a royal, and just like that she was $50,000 richer. Taxes took fifteen off the top, leaving Tania with thirty-five; still more than enough at the time to put a down payment on a nice house in Las Vegas, something with a great room, a nice yard, room for a pool, maybe even something on a golf course if she really kept banking at her job. Plus, she still had good credit back then, unlike most of her friends who had to keep changing their phone numbers to stay a few months ahead of the collection agencies, and she loved living in Las Vegas.

  Five hours into her shift at the Chuyalla Indian Casino and with just $37 in tips, Tania can’t imagine ever risking $500 on paper again; because, really, she thinks now, making her tenth round this hour through the blackjack tables, that’s all gambling is: placing hope in colored paper. She wonders sometimes if her life wouldn’t have been better if, instead of betting $500 on cards, she’d taken that money to a stationery store and purchased reams of 25-weight linen resume paper. Maybe that investment would have forced her into a better life, one where success was predicated on having something to put on all that paper.

  Tania drops off three White Russians, five beers, and a Tom Collins to a kid who is clearly underage, since no one under seventy would have the audacity to order a Tom Collins, and no one over twenty-one would even consider uttering it around a pack of their friends. Not when they could order Courvoisier and pretend to be 2Pac. Do kids still listen to 2Pac? She supposes they do, but Tania remembers listening to him when he was alive, before he became some martyr, and thinking he was just okay, just another guy with mommy issues, like half the men she’d hooked up with since high school. When she decided to adopt Natalya, she threw out her entire gangsta rap CD collection, figuring it wouldn’t be appropriate for her new role as a mother to be singing along to songs about hustling. Plus, she wanted to like what Natalya liked.

  Tania winds back to the bar and hands the bartender, Gordon, her orders: four beers, a Sex on the Beach, two Johnnie Walkers, three more White Russians. A blackjack table full of marines in from the base at 29 Palms erupts in a flood of loud obscenities just then, prompting half of the casino to turn and stare.

  “Classy people out there today,” Gordon says. “Barely noon and people are trashed.”

  “I hate Sundays,” Tania says. “People should just go home. Watch TV. Read the Bible. Something.”

  “It’s algebra,” Gordon says. “In order for other people to have a good time, we have to suffer their stupidity, and then someone else will have to hose their puke off the parking lot. All together, we get off pretty good.”

  “I’ll be lucky to walk with fifty,” Tania says. “You know what fifty gets you? Nothing. It’s not even worth it to come in for fifty. Once I pay for the bus, get lunch, pick up dinner on the way home, what have I got left? It’s not worth it.”

  Gordon places the four beers on her tray, and for a moment Tania considers picking up one of them and just downing it, maybe lining up a couple shots, too, see how the day passes with a little less clarity on things. Back in Las Vegas you could rail a line and . . . well . . . No, Tania thinks, you just can’t compare your life along some arbitrary timeline, can’t think of yourself as a compare and contrast. The past was different. The present is ever changing. No, it has to be about what comes next. About staying focused. Keep yourself together. Gather resources. Find Natalya. Don’t force an apology. Fix things. Get a family. Buy Christmas presents. Move to the city, any city, but get out of casinos and hotels and bars. Maybe. />
  “How long you lived in the desert?”Tania asks. Gordon is new—she’s seen him a couple of times in the last month, but this is the first shift he’s been on alone—so they haven’t found that rhythm yet, only know each other enough to flirt a little, tell a joke or two. Nothing personal. But for some reason today Tania feels like talking and can’t stand to listen to the other cocktail girls on the floor. They call her “Mom” and always want her to listen to their problems, Sundays inevitably taken up by whatever horror happened at the club the night previous, or whatever drama they have with their “baby daddies,” a term Tania just can’t wrap her mind around. When did people stop being parents? But Gordon seems nice, maybe even smart. Smarter than her other choices, anyway.

  “Five years, plus or minus,” Gordon says. “I used to come here when I was a kid, you know? I remember my dad once drove us right up to Bob Hope’s front gate and we got chased off by dogs. Big old Dobermans. I’ll never forget that.”

  “I can’t see myself being here that long,” Tania says. Gordon puts the rest of Tania’s drinks down and then rechecks the order. No one ever does that, Tania thinks; no one else here gives a damn if they screw up my money.