Always Happy Hour

by Mary Miller

  “We don’t care if you’re fucking a fat girl,” I say.

  “I’m not fucking her,” he says.

  “Of course you are.”

  We throw another round of cards and then the pizza comes and I take a pill that Coach gives me even though my boyfriend doesn’t like for me to take pills because the Blockbuster girl took a lot of pills. She was a pillhead and he has no respect for pillheads. She spent all her money on pills and didn’t respect her body. I don’t respect my body, either, but I tell him I do. I tell him I wish I’d been a virgin when we’d met and he was the only person I’d ever been with, stuff like that.

  We hear a car followed by a loud series of knocks, and the fat girl comes barging in wearing sweatpants with elastic around the ankles, her hair in a banana clip. I haven’t seen a banana clip in a long time, but it’s a nice look. Maybe if I could get a bunch of people to start wearing banana clips we could bring them back.

  “I’m Amy,” I say, and hold my hand up, though she’s just a few feet away.

  “Ginger,” she says.

  Coach laughs his hoarse crazy laugh and deals four stacks and she sits next to him and calls him a shithead. She taps the bill over his eyes and he takes the cap off and throws it across the room. Help yourself to some pizza, he says to her, and my boyfriend and I look at each other. He puts an arm around me and I feel solid, like we are the model for a good life and happiness by comparison, which is how everything is measured.

  We take turns tossing cards into the hat and the fat girl wins and it’s decided that I have to pay because she doesn’t want to sleep with me and therefore I can’t stiff her. I take a quarter from my purse and hand it over and she’s happy and gloating and I wonder how she can get out of bed in the morning without wanting to die she’s so fat and not the kind of fat girl where people are always commenting on how pretty her face is, either. She goes into the kitchen and comes back with a plate with one slice on it, eats it daintily with a napkin on her leg. I ask my boyfriend to take me home.

  When I wake up, I can tell it’s sunny outside, a good day for the river, but I don’t feel like going to the river. I don’t feel like getting out of bed. I miss my ex-boyfriend, I think, and this feels right, but there are so many of them now and I’m not sure which one I miss. Lately I’m running one behind so I only stop missing the last one when the current becomes the ex and then I miss him so I’m never fully with the one I’m with, which is maybe why they keep leaving me.

  I look at my boyfriend—eye boogers, dried spit around his mouth—and know I’ll miss him, too. I’ll miss the orgasms he gives me, and how he smells, and I’ll be sad I didn’t accidentally get pregnant while I had the chance.

  I get up and go to the bathroom and wash my face. Then I go into the kitchen and take a Diet Rite from the refrigerator, drink it while putting on my sports bra and tennis shoes.

  The wheelchair man is parked in the sun. He’s about my age, but seems a lot older. I know he’s in a wheelchair because he was drunk driving and got into an accident and killed somebody, which is something that could have happened to me many nights but hasn’t. I wonder if his dick works, if it would help if I sucked it. He nods and says hello (hello!) and I walk to the end of the driveway and then I start running. I wasn’t planning on running but I know he’s watching me. I run as fast as I can until I reach the main road and then turn around and run back, thinking faster, faster. I think: When I get to that stump, that mailbox, that car, I can stop, but I run past all of them.

  He’s still there so I stop and lean against the brick wall to catch my breath.

  “I should really stop smoking,” I say, but I don’t like the way it sounds, like a lie, so I say, “No, I’m just out of shape.”

  “I see you jumping rope out here every day,” he says.

  “I’m a little hungover.”

  The wheelchair man has found God, or maybe we just assume this because the church pays three-quarters of his rent every month.

  “I used to drink,” he says, “you probably know that. I’d get into fights a lot.”

  “Did you win?”

  “Nobody ever really wins.”

  “So you lost.”

  “No,” he says, and he looks up into the trees like I am boring him completely so I tell him I’ll see him later, and he says, “Have a nice day,” and I go inside and finish my Diet Rite and wonder what he thinks about me, a pretty girl who jumps rope and doesn’t work even though she has two legs that can run so fast.

  In the bedroom, I lie on top of my boyfriend but he doesn’t budge so I go back to the kitchen and get out the bacon. The bacon smell will wake him up and then we’ll eat breakfast and start drinking beer and I’ll feel better.

  His phone rings. Right when it’s about to go to voice mail he answers it in his radio voice with the joyless laugh that stupid people find charming. It’s one of his tenants who can’t pay his rent and my boyfriend is explaining the late procedure to him, probably for the tenth time, because it involves advanced math and lawn mowing. There’s an even more complicated procedure for when they can’t afford to pay the deposit. He learned them from his dad, who is also a slumlord, and the procedures don’t make sense but they sound so completely rational that the person always comes to the conclusion that they’re not only bad with money but also an idiot. It’s how he makes me feel a lot of times but so far I haven’t been able to come up with any hard evidence.

  He walks into the kitchen naked. I pour him a glass of Kool-Aid and he takes a seat and repeats what I’ve just overheard him say to Mr. James. He tells me he likes it when they’re a few days late but he doesn’t like it when they just don’t pay, which I already know. When they’re a few days late, he gets an extra fifty dollars. It makes me kind of sad because that extra fifty dollars only ensures they’ll be late again next month and then they’re out another fifty, or a hundred. It’s how my parents handle money, always behind, paying twice as much for everything. I put four pieces of bread in the toaster while the bacon pops and he digs a finger in his ear and looks at it.

  After we eat he goes to the bathroom and reads Siddhartha, which is the only book he’ll read and only on the toilet, while I put beer in the cooler. He’s too cheap to buy ice so we have to use a ton of trays, pop the cubes out a handful at a time and be sure to refill them for the next time.

  Coach comes in without knocking and lies on the floor. “I’m dying,” he says. He goes into a coughing fit and places his hand on his chest and I’m sure his insides are all black and scabby even though he’s only thirty-two. I don’t want him to die but if he did, then maybe something would be different. I step over him to throw a can away and go back to my trays. He stands and leans against the counter, pulls the flask from his pants. I didn’t know he was coming with us but I don’t care. The two of them go off to hunt turtles while I lay out, or scoop up stuff with my net.

  “Your girlfriend spend the night?” I ask.

  “She’s not my girlfriend.”

  “Okay, your friend with benefits.”

  “Why do you torture me like this, Miss Amy?”

  “Why do you call me Miss Amy, Coach? A title of respect for fucking your best friend?”

  “Something like that,” he says, and lets the screen door slam shut. It makes him nervous when I say fuck.

  . . .

  We stop at the gas station for another twelve-pack and some snacks and then drop Coach’s truck off at the pull-out. Then we drive back to the put-in and I stand around in my bikini while they carry the canoes down to the water where a Mexican family is fishing and remember the time my friend Travis asked me what I was still doing in this town, like I was too good for this place.

  I carry my paddle and life jacket down to our canoe and he holds it steady while I step in. Once we’re situated, I paddle hard so my boyfriend won’t have to tell me to—I know he wants to get away from the Mexicans before we start drinking—and stop when I hit thirty strokes. I ask him to hand me a beer and res
t my paddle across my legs while I admire how nice and tan they are. There’s nothing much else to look at—the trees are stick pine and the river is too low and I’d rather be watching Bear on TV instead of listening to my know-it-all boyfriend who’ll make something up if he doesn’t know the answer. Still, I like to ask him questions. I like the way his voice sounds when he doesn’t have a clue.

  I point at a big bird, perched at the top of a tree to watch us pass. “Is that a crane?”

  “Close,” he says. “It’s a heron. Cranes fly with their necks out, not pulled back like that. And herons are smaller and have a bimodal toe.”

  “A what?”

  “It’s like an opposable thumb.”

  “Like a person has?”

  “Exactly,” he says.

  When we catch up to Coach’s canoe, he throws a leg over so we can float together, pass things back and forth. The psoriasis doesn’t look as bad as I thought up close; there are a bunch of red splotches but they look more like razor burn than a lumpy patchwork quilt.

  We come to our first stop, a nice spot with a flat rock I like to lay out on.

  I lie on my stomach and unhook my top like I don’t want to get tan lines, though I don’t care about tan lines—I’m pretty enough so that tan lines seem like the kind of flaw that only adds to it.

  They watch me while they smoke their joint.

  “Have some Doritos,” Coach says, tossing a bag next to my head.

  I take one and hold it between my teeth while I fix my top. Coach and my boyfriend throw the football and I move to the shallow water and dig my fingers into the mud and gravel—the water between my legs cold and warm and then cold again. I try to catch tiny fish with my hands but they’re too fast, so I pluck snails off rocks and drop them back into the water. They make a nice plunk sound.

  “I forgot my net.”

  “You can use mine when I’m not using it,” my boyfriend says.

  “Yours is too big.”

  “That’s what she said!” Coach says.

  “You never catch anything anyway,” my boyfriend says.

  “That’s not true. I catch little tiny fishes.”

  “But then you just let them go.”

  “I’m not gonna let my fish get eaten by your monster. Throw me the ball.” Coach throws it to me but I miss and I give up after that. I want to be able to naturally catch balls or else I don’t want to play.

  I’m ready to move on to the next spot, but they’re having a good time so I open another beer and look closely at rocks and other nothing things, as if it is my job to make something of them. One rock plus one snail plus the tab off my beer can equals what? I wonder where we’ll go for dinner. Usually we go to the Chinese buffet but we just had Chinese so we might go to Mexican. I could go back to the Chinese buffet, though. It’s better than the Mexican place but I’d probably eat more and I don’t want to eat more because I’m getting fat. I measure the roll on my stomach with two fingers but it’s just skin. I’ve seen how these things can happen, though—one day my sister was a stick and the next day a gargantuan.

  Eventually my boyfriend says, “I guess we ought to keep moving,” and we load up.

  Pretty soon, we come to the big fancy house. There’s a boy on the balcony and he waves and I wave and it seems like it would be fun up there, a big fancy house overlooking the river.

  “Hey,” the boy calls down to us, his hands cupping his mouth.

  “Hey,” I call back. There’s nothing to say after that so I lift my paddle into the air and pump it a few times, shaking the water off. The boy is blond, about ten years old. He’s been waiting for us—listening to our laughter, our voices carrying over the water.

  “Can we live there one day?” I ask my boyfriend, and he says yes. He always agrees when I ask him things like this—he’ll say of course or okay and I won’t say any more about it, but he knows I don’t really want to live with him in a big fancy house, that the only way we pull it off at all is by surrounding ourselves with disabled people and drunks, attaching our lives to the sad, impermanent lives of others.

  HE SAYS I AM A LITTLE OVEN

  At The Straw Market, my boyfriend follows a man in a turban, weaving in and out of the aisles until I can no longer see him. His mother and I wait outside, looking at things, considering them. I pick up purses and set them on my shoulder while a woman barks prices. They’re purses I wouldn’t want at home, but I don’t realize this until I get them there, put them in the closet and never take them out.

  His mother tries on a wrap. She is short and thick with hair so thin I can see her scalp.

  “How do I tie this thing?” she asks, and I set the purse back on the table. We’re on a cruise and I’m wearing a pink tank top that says Carnival across the chest, another thing that will be obsolete at home. Her husband is still on the boat, slipping quarters into a slot machine, biding his time until dinner.

  I wrap it around her waist and cinch it tightly at the hip. “It looks good. You should buy it,” I say, looking around for my boyfriend, who is trying to buy weed. He didn’t bring any along because he says drug-and-bomb dogs sniff each bag—once when we get on the boat and once when we get off. I don’t know if this is true or not; everything I do is legal. We could each bring two bottles of wine or champagne, which is eight bottles for the two of us because his mother and father don’t drink.

  I buy two purses, both of them pastel and patterned, knockoffs. I don’t even try to talk the woman down. And then I leave his mother and walk into the covered area, down a narrow aisle. There are booths full of every imaginable souvenir and it’s too hot and there are too many people. I could slip under a table or behind a curtain and no one would ever find me.

  I look at ashtrays and shot glasses, pipes and T-shirts and hats, feeling compelled to touch everything as if I have never before touched glass or cotton or wood.

  “Hey,” my boyfriend says, grabbing my arm.

  We find his mother where we left her and the three of us are walking, cutting wide arcs around the locals trying to sell us things, their services. I watch a young couple haggle with a man and wonder what kind of people get into an unmarked car with a stranger and then I’m thinking about all the times I’ve done exactly that: the ridiculously hot carpenter in Nashville, hopping onto the back of some guy’s motorcycle in Panama City, so many times I could have ended up in a ditch. We stop under a sign with tropical birds on it and his mother asks a man to take a picture of us and one more in case anyone closed their eyes: I tilt my head, part my lips. Then my boyfriend takes a picture of the man and his wife and then a family comes up and we’re all laughing and passing our cameras back and forth, thanking each other too many times.

  We continue on in the direction of the ship, but I’m not ready to go back—we still have three hours left.

  “Let’s stop here,” I say, as we pass a brightly lit tourist bar.

  It’s one big room filled with beer signs and sombreros, couples drinking out of tall souvenir glasses. The women are sunburned, wearing dresses that tie around their necks, breasts loose.

  His mother orders a bottle of water and my boyfriend doesn’t order anything and I order an overpriced rum drink from the specialty menu: the plastic neon-yellow, hourglass-shaped. I wanted to go on an excursion, snorkeling or horseback riding, but my boyfriend doesn’t believe in spending money on anything but food and liquor and marijuana and he’ll only spend as little as possible on these things, selling marijuana in order to pay for his own, buying the cheapest whiskey available. His body smells like processed meat and fumes. Somehow, impossibly, it is a smell I have grown to love.

  I chew my straw between sips and look out the window at the people walking by. Some of them stop and open the door, look around before turning and going back out. There is only so much time before they have to get back on the boat and it must be spent wisely. His mother picks up a menu and we look it over: chicken fingers, hot wings, cheeseburgers.

  “It’s like Dave &
Buster’s,” I say. “The hot wings come with blue cheese and the chicken fingers come with honey mustard.”

  “Except there aren’t any games and everything’s more expensive,” my boyfriend says, and I smile because he’s paying. I lace my fingers through his and he adjusts our hands; he has ideas about hand-holding.

  “I could have another,” I say, slurping the ice, but we have wine and champagne on the ship. The champagne is warm but we could ice it down in the sink, which is tiny and silver like in an airplane. Everything is too small except for the bed.

  He pays and we walk back, still holding hands, arms swinging. He kisses me on the side of the mouth and it makes me want to have sex with him but his parents are in the cabin next to ours, and we don’t have the porn or the egg-shaped vibrator we use at home. I use the vibrator in the morning after he leaves for work and think about having sex with him and it is better than the actual sex, which is confusing—how thinking about a thing can be better than the thing.

  We show our IDs and the guy welcomes us back on board. Then we navigate the hallways until we find the right elevator. It’s day four and I’m starting to learn my way around; it makes me want to stay longer despite the fact that I get seasick, that we have to eat dinner every night with his parents. We say goodbye to his mother and open the door to our cabin and she opens the door to hers and we hear his parents talking. I know what they’re saying without being able to hear: he asks what we did, if we had fun; she asks if he lost any money, how much.

  “We should start fucking really hard right now,” I say, “like we just couldn’t wait.”

  I jump on the bed and he opens a bottle of red wine, pours us each a plastic cup. I like plastic cups, though. They don’t break.

  “The headboard banging,” I say, rocking back and forth so it knocks gently.

  “Stop that,” he says.

  I pick up the towel shaped like a monkey, a pair of my sunglasses on its face. I fling it open and they go sailing. Every day it is some new towel animal on the bed.