Always Happy Hour

by Mary Miller

  In the morning, Ben wants to make me breakfast, but all I want to do is go home and get in my own bed. Once I get there, though, I’m not tired. Melinda is gone, her open doors inviting me in.

  I walk into her bedroom—messier than yesterday, panties and wet towels on the floor. I go into her bathroom, which is filled with tiny things: size 5 flip-flops, hotel bottles of lotion, lip gloss you could attach to a key ring. Even her bar of soap is small. Her toilet doesn’t look clean, but I pee anyhow and then go back to my room to search for a poem Ben wrote for me. It hung on the refrigerator at my old apartment, but when I moved I folded it up and stuck it in whatever book I was reading and now I can’t find it. The poem was about how he was going to turn all of the blackbirds in his heart to flames, or was he going to turn the flames to blackbirds? I look through dozens of books before giving up. It was pretty good but not his best. I’ll tell him I misplaced it and he’ll make me another copy, write it out on fat-lined paper.

  I sit on the counter eating cashews as I gaze out the window, stare at a corner of the blue-tarp roof. I wonder where Melinda has gone, how it’s possible that she is so much busier than I am.

  Lifting the window, I dislodge the bottle and climb out. I haven’t been on a roof since I was a teenager watching a meteor shower at Leslie Hodo’s spend-the-night party—ninth grade, tenth? Or maybe I was somewhere else in the house while the others were on the roof; the memory’s unclear. It is soft under my feet. I move slowly and bent over, as if this might make the burden of my weight less, and then stand straight to observe our yard and the crack house from this new perspective—the same but different.

  Three of the crackheads are already in the garage, two men and one woman, and I’m pretty sure they’re looking directly at me but I feel invisible, like I’m so high up no one can see me. No one can touch me. If I crashed through, I would fall into the living room of the man and his dead lover’s son. They would come running from different parts of the house and stand over me in their boxer shorts, eager to see what new tragedy had befallen them.

  PROPER ORDER

  It is a great big old beautiful house and he stands in my kitchen and says, “This is exactly where I pictured you living,” and I take this to mean he thinks I am beautiful, that I am the type of person who should be living in a grand house. I want to see myself as he sees me, as someone who deserves to live here.

  He is my student. I am his professor. The house I live in is not mine. It belonged to a famous writer who donated it to the university at which I am employed for one academic year. The house is gated, situated on ninety rolling acres. My friend Clarke says it’s the site of an old Cherokee Indian burial ground; a man who wants to sleep with me says that Geeshie Wiley haunts these woods. He sends me links to her songs, asks if he can come out and take a look around. My dog and I have walked every inch of this property, I tell him, though of course this can’t be true. We have looked for bones and gravestones, men camping in our woods, but mostly I keep my head empty and walk fast to burn calories; when my dog jumps up to lick my hand, I imagine her presenting me with a skull, her teeth in its eye sockets, a hand in my hand. And then the police will yellow-tape the place and the university people will have to move me into a cozy little condo somewhere off the Square, where the past writers-in-residence have lived.

  There are two ponds, a tennis court, a lumpy croquet court, and an overgrown baseball field. There is an old home site, steps leading to nowhere that someone roped off with vines. There are two garages. In one of them, I found the famous writer’s baseball cards scattered all over the floor and a neat stack of postcards, the paper cheaply curled. The photograph on the postcard must have been taken there: bare wooden slats behind him, blue jean shirt, staring directly into the camera. He was younger then, and newly famous. The watch on his wrist sits oddly high on his arm. His wedding band seems to be sliding off his finger.

  The famous writer and his wife are everywhere: their names carved into the driveway, wallpaper they picked out themselves. His books on the shelf, unsigned, worthless. They aren’t dead but they’re gone, which is a little bit like being dead, and which is, perhaps, the reason I keep moving. This has been my life for so long now: counting the number of paychecks until the paychecks run out and I have to find new paychecks, new boyfriends and friends and living arrangements. There is so much promise in these new places that I can almost convince myself I’ll be different there.

  I looked up the baseball cards on eBay and found they weren’t worth much so I gave them to the chair of the English department to mail back to him. Perhaps it might mean something, my gesture of goodwill.

  My students roam about, taking pictures to send to their mothers and aunts, the women who buy his books and have made him so rich he can afford to donate his house and land to the university. They take pictures of the staircase, the carpets. They take pictures out the windows.

  “I scare you,” I say to the boy. His skin turns red and splotchy. It is remarkable, his skin, a defect, but so pretty. I like people whose insecurities are obvious, when I don’t have to pull them out of them.

  “I’m not scared of anything,” he says, taking a slug of his beer. He’s from one of the O states—Ohio or Oklahoma—either way, it means nothing to me. Earlier he touched the side of the house and talked about the grain of wood. He has come here for graduate school and seems to have no idea how he got to this place or why; he wears blazers and collared shirts as if he might learn by dressing the part but it only makes him stand out more.

  I imagine unbuttoning his too-tight pants, taking him upstairs to my bedroom. The other students listening as they eat slices of pizza. They say on your deathbed you only regret the things you didn’t do and I remember a time when this was the case, when I could picture myself alone in a hospital room and there was nothing I would take back, nothing I would do differently.

  The boy is unfailingly late to every class, and every time, he is sorry. During break, he has to run to Starbucks for coffee and sometimes there’s a long line—totally out of his control. There are other issues as well: he talks too much; he has a lot of opinions and I almost never agree with any of them but I nod and make neutral-sounding noises while admiring the way he has styled his hair, his nose. And his skin, I love his skin, how it betrays him. I play mediator between him and the other person in class—a very pretty but emaciated young woman who constantly talks about food—who also has strong opinions, and marvel over the fact that they can be so passionate, because I, too, believe I am right, that everyone who disagrees with me is wrong.

  It hasn’t been long since I was a graduate student, and I don’t know how to be anyone’s teacher. In an undergraduate psychology course—so many years ago now—my favorite professor said he didn’t think of himself as a professor; he considered his own professors the real professors and they must have thought of theirs as the real professors and so no one was ever truly real. We’re all just derivatives, he said, pretending. He had married one of his students. Businessmen marry their secretaries and professors marry their students. But I am a woman and I won’t marry this boy; I might have sex with him, but I won’t marry him. I like to think I have some say in the matter.

  I hate this house, I think, as I stand in the kitchen with its two dishwashers and double oven, the Sub-Zero refrigerator. There are so many cabinets that I often open three or four before I find what I’m looking for. I imagine lying under the canopy of a magnolia tree until someone comes to scoop me up, but I could lie there for days and no one would come. Perhaps on the fifth day my mother would have gotten worried enough to call the university. She once had the police do a welfare check on my sister in Nashville; two officers came to her door and she’d had to explain, after which she was horrified and refused to speak to our mother for weeks, and so our mother is less inclined to react.

  I’m supposed to be working on my second novel but I can’t write because there’s all this time and space and no one watching, no one checking in;
only one day a week that I have to show up to teach. I don’t even know if I want to be a writer anymore. I’ve become so self-conscious of what I’m writing and why, and whether I ever had any talent in the first place. My sister—who left the music business for a job in nursing—says that nearly every band’s first album is their best because they’re working in a vacuum; there’s no outside pressure to be something or to do something great. And so I spend the majority of my time watching cable, which I haven’t had in years. I watch the ID Channel and consider becoming a detective, or committing a murder. I think I could do either sufficiently well at this point. I only watch it during the day because if I fall asleep when it’s on the stories seep into my dreams: people missing, rape, women buried alive with their hands bound as if in prayer.

  Other days I stand on the porch and think: I love it here. I love this house. I love the birds. I love the geese and the ponds and the hills and the tennis court and the woods and I love that this is “my land,” if only for a little while. I sing and run and my dog jumps up to lick my hand, offering me nothing more than a stick, and we pretend we’re in a musical. These are the best days, but still I do not write.

  I observe one of my students going into the bathroom for the third time and stop myself from saying something. He once left his pipe on the floor of my office and I brought it to class and handed it to him in front of several other students. This man is writing a memoir about his time in the TSA and fears he’s on a government watchlist, which makes me like him best (besides the boy, but I don’t really like him, not really).

  The boy tells me he has relatives in Savannah he sees on holidays. I look at the bowls of nuts and pretzels that I’ve positioned around the kitchen. “Savannah has the most amazing St. Paddy’s Day Parade,” he says, “one of the best in the world.” He has ties to the South, he wants me to know, having already learned that women down here don’t date men they can’t trace. Not me, but others.

  “Maybe you could come with me?” he says, and I want to grab his arm. God, his arm. It’s like a thigh. “That might be inappropriate. I’m sorry.”

  “You won’t be my student in a month.” And then, because I think the others might be picking up on something, I ask him loudly if he plays tennis. I say, “Y’all are welcome to use the court anytime. No one ever uses it.”

  “I can learn,” he says.

  I climb onto the island to screw in one of the lightbulbs; it comes back to life. I look down at my students eating pizza and drinking Coke—most of them don’t drink alcohol—and wish I could stay there, stretch my body across its length while they glance nervously at each other and giggle. I open another beer and excuse myself to the bathroom where I text my boyfriend, the doctor. All of my exes have been reduced to two words, three at most, and this one, though still current, still in play, I think of as The Doctor. The famous writer is also a doctor. My sister says this doctor only wants to sleep in the famous doctor’s bed—it must be his dream—but all of the mattresses are new, as is most of the furniture, and my boyfriend prefers for me to sleep at his house. The only person who really likes it here is my mother. She comes to get away from my father. She brings her little dog and we go on exploring missions in which the dogs peer into holes and run through fields of tall grass. Once I let them swim in the pond and laughed as they struggled to keep their heads above water. Another time the little dog fell into a hole and I had to climb in to get her out.

  I’m watching Bob’s Burgers, he texts back. How are things going with your students? I don’t reply. I feel my lower body, swelled with blood, and hope my period starts soon.

  Once, after he came inside me, I said, “Let’s have a baby.” I can’t explain these things to myself. Do I say them because I want him to break up with me or do I say them because it’s what I truly want, deep down in some unknowable part of myself? I have never wanted a child, but perhaps this is because I’ve never been with anyone who wanted a child with me. He was kind about it. He said that we should do things in the proper order. But since my divorce, eight years ago, there is no order, proper or otherwise. I think I love someone and they love me and then something comes along and ruins it. They let me believe that I am that something.

  In the dining room, I find a few of my students flipping through some old university annuals—1904, 1906—beautifully bound in soft leather. The fraternities used to publish them, their clubs interspersed with poems and drawings of farm animals, profiles of women with pinned-up hair. I got an email recently from the secretary who was looking for a particular yearbook, and then someone from the foundation contacted me about it, and then someone else. I thought it might be rare, the only copy, but I saw the secretary at brunch and she told me they wanted to destroy that year because one of the fraternities had formed a KKK club, had dressed up in white robes with cutout eyes, and the university wanted it gone.

  We walk the rooms. The house really is beautiful. There are windows everywhere and a table for twelve, high ceilings, chandeliers. When I first moved in, I imagined the house full of people and laughter, just like this, footsteps going up and down the stairs, doors opening and closing. But it hasn’t been like this; it hasn’t been anything like this. I am alone, far enough from town that it’s considered the country, though it’s not that far from town and is not the country.

  The boy follows me around, asks questions. He wants to know what it’s like to live here. They all want to know what it’s like.

  Nights, I climb out onto the roof with its not-too-steep incline to smoke a bowl; the window opens easily—all I have to do is throw a leg out. We stand in front of this window and I open it. This is what I want to show them: here is where I sit nights. When you think of me, imagine me here. But I don’t actually sit out here very often. Only after I’ve had too much to drink, when the potential for hurting myself is greatest.

  They peer into my bedroom, admire the size of my bathtub, the separate shower and all of the closet space.

  The boy comes up behind me and I ask how old he is, though I know how old he is. The only correct answer is that he is old enough and I am young enough. And I’m old enough to know better but not so old to take myself seriously when I talk about the young people today with their pretentions and noise music and carefully crafted carelessness. Their highly developed sensitivities to sexism (but not so much to racism or classism because it is still the Deep South). Stop policing my body, I once overhead a female student say to a male—not mine—and I smiled at her, thinking the comment ironic.

  As we stand awkwardly around my bedroom, I tell them things happen in the house that I can’t explain. There are noises. Lights come on. Garage doors open by themselves and books are moved. It’s an old house and there are rational explanations for all of these things, or at least most of them. The country is noisy as shit and nails don’t hold and wiring is faulty and I drink a lot so I can’t say whether or not I closed a door or moved a book, at least not for certain.

  The women ask about an alarm system—nonexistent. I tell them that my dog would happily lick the feet of an intruder, though I don’t know if this is true, and that dozens if not hundreds of people know the gate code: the year the university began. I say this with pride: I am okay here; I’m tough. But on my worst nights, I don’t sleep. I lock my bedroom door and lie awake planning escape routes. I imagine myself climbing out of the bathroom window, shimmying and jumping my way down without a scratch. I am unbelievably limber in these imaginings and there is a part of me that wants to be tested. But the facts show that I am bad in an emergency, that I will stand in one spot and scream until rescued, which is why my father refuses to give me a gun.

  And then we gather in the living room where they take turns reading their stories. I have given them guidelines: the stories must be under 750 words; they must be in first person and they must have been written this semester. They don’t follow them. As graduate students, they know they don’t have to.

  The boy reads a highly sexualized piece th
at isn’t shocking so much as it is awkward and I wonder if he’s chosen this particular piece for me. I look at the carpet as if I’m concentrating very hard and think about my own early writing, how I wrote things that shouldn’t have been written and how it had taken me years to figure out the difference between writing the truth and writing something explicit and ugly that only looked like the truth. But these things are so hard to explain. Often, in class, I find myself talking about the mystery of writing. I find myself relying on rules, which I never thought I’d have to rely on. Write and read: these are the only rules, but they are unhappy when you tell them this; it’s too difficult and they don’t really like reading all that much. And half the class writes about mermaids and aliens and strange apocalyptic worlds, which are all so similar, and I wonder what the hell any of us are doing. How I could possibly teach anyone anything.

  It goes on and on. Deirdre and the emaciated girl and the Chinese guy and my TSA friend and their stories must be seven, eight pages long. Every time someone begins to read I try to determine how many pages they’re working with, the thickness of the stack.

  When it’s finally over, I’ve had nothing to eat and five or six beers.

  I send the students home with leftover pizza. I even bag up the nuts and pretzels. While I say goodbye to everyone, the boy stays in the bathroom and then emerges, the light behind him, smiling triumphantly. His skin perfectly normal.

  “I thought you carpooled.”

  “I drove myself,” he says.

  There are only a couple of beers left so I make him drive me to the gas station where it is embarrassing how well they know me. They know what I eat and drink and give me coupons, their cards, because it’s a college town and they are trying to improve themselves. I wonder if they think of me when men come into the store late at night to buy condoms, though I haven’t sent anyone over in a month, at least.