by Mary Miller
He takes off his shoes, his shirt. I take a sip of my wine and set it on the table. Then I pick it back up and take another sip. I don’t like his parents and don’t pretend to like them. It is nothing against his parents, in particular.
“What time is it?” I ask.
He looks at his watch. “Four forty-two, there’s a clock right there.”
“Bingo before dinner. It’s so cliché.”
“Well,” he says, “people like bingo. And you can win a lot of money at bingo.”
“I never win anything.”
“Everyone says that.”
“No, seriously—I’ve never won anything in my life.” I think about whether this is true or not and find that it is. “I won a necklace at an auction once but I had to pay for it. It cost me like four dollars.”
“You have to tell yourself you’re going to win. You have to imagine the money already in your pocket.”
“I do that sometimes but when it doesn’t work it’s even more depressing. I’d rather know I’m going to lose and then, if I ever win, it’ll be like a sign or something. It’ll signify an important shift.”
My boyfriend won this cruise in a slot tournament. He still had to buy our plane tickets, though, and rent a car to get us to the departure point. And then there are the bottles of wine and the drinks in tourist bars and other incidentals like Carnival tank tops, things I want just to see if he will buy them. I look at the letters stretched across my chest, the C already begun to peel, and wonder why I chose pink.
“I guess I better get dressed,” I say, taking another sip. I place the cup between my thighs so I don’t have to reach any farther than I have to. “Oh—did you find any weed?”
“Shhh,” he says, looking at the wall. “I got enough for one joint. I’m going to smoke it tonight.”
“What if it’s laced?”
“It’s not laced,” he says.
“How do you know? You bought it from a stranger with a towel on his head.”
“A turban. Don’t be racist.”
“I’m pretty sure it was an actual towel,” I say. “When I was in college I had this striped terrycloth dress and I wore it all the time, like I was a kid. I didn’t even want to take it off to wash it.”
He goes into the bathroom and I pour myself another glass because I’m on vacation, because soon I will have to go to bingo with his parents and eat dinner with his parents and I’ll have to smile and be polite, which are things I do anyway but I don’t like feeling like they are required. I turn on the TV, which is playing the same movie we watched last night, and then get out of bed and look through the closet. I brought five dresses, one for each night. Before we left, his mother told me I had to wear dresses in the evenings because the dining room is semiformal, but the last cruise she went on was in the early eighties, when cruises and airplanes were still for the well-off.
I choose a low-cut black dress I’ve had for two years but never worn. Then I sit on the bed and pick up the schedule, check to see what’s going on. There is a new schedule every day and I like to read about all of the things I won’t do. I like that there are options.
When he comes out, I have him tie my dress in the back, adjust my boobs before turning around.
“Wow,” he says. “How come you’ve never worn this before?”
“Because it’s for prostitution and cruising.”
“We’ll have to take more cruises,” he says, squeezing my ass, pressing me into him.
His parents are seated in a booth when we arrive, one of the dancers calling out numbers. I wonder if the dancers share rooms on the bottom level where the workings of the ship keep them up at night. I wonder if they have sex with one another or with the cruisers or if all sex is off-limits and there is a contract about these things. I imagine beautiful young dancers left at various ports of call.
“You look nice,” I say, touching his mother’s gold bracelet. She’s wearing a blue dress with matching shoes and bag. We sit and she tells my boyfriend he has to go up to the stage to pay for the cards and he gets back up and walks to the front. He has a confident but self-conscious walk: shoulders thrown back and chest out, looking straight ahead but smiling pleasantly like he might stop and chat with somebody at any minute.
His mother pushes her card between us and then a waiter comes and offers us small, free drinks because it’s happy hour. We all take one and his mom and dad scoot theirs into the middle of the table. They’re nice people, really, but I don’t have anything to say to them. His father was in Vietnam, like my father, but he’s the kind of veteran who subscribes to a magazine, who saved up the money to go back. My father’s brother died in Vietnam and my father hitchhiked across the country to visit him in the hospital but he was already dead. Then he had to go back to war.
“I love this dress,” his mother says, and I look at my boobs, which are large and pale and mostly exposed.
“Thanks. It’s not something I would wear at home, obviously.”
“The weather is supposed to get bad tonight,” his father says, smiling.
My boyfriend hands me a bingo card and I wonder where I put my seasick bracelet; it didn’t work but it was something—it made my wrist itch and pressed a pattern into it.
“One time I went deep-sea fishing and all the men were throwing up over the sides while I ate lunch,” his mother says.
“I was so sick the other night—what night was that—Monday? I just laid in bed and couldn’t even watch TV,” I say.
“You better not drink too much,” my boyfriend says, placing a hand on my knee.
I take another sip of my free drink, cold and electric blue. The next game starts and I mark off the free space. I only get two numbers for a long time and then I get a bunch in a row but they’re scattered and somebody yells bingo and waves an arm in the air.
Out of the next four games, my boyfriend wins one and his mother wins one. His mother wins two hundred and fifty dollars and my boyfriend wins blackout for four hundred.
I count his money, hundred-dollar bills, and he takes the bills from me and folds them into his wallet.
“What are you going to buy me?” I ask.
“I don’t know, what do you want?”
“A bracelet,” I say, touching his mother’s wrist. She is round but tiny, her wrist as delicate as a girl’s.
“We’ll see,” he says, patting me like a child.
“There’s a jewelry store on board, duty free,” his mother says. “I might buy myself a nice watch. I’ve never had a nice watch.” She looks up at her husband, a big man with a full beard and glasses that darken in the sun. She is so small compared to him and for a moment I imagine the two of them having sex, how the arrangement might work.
The dancer announces the six o’clock seating so we file out with most of the audience and then we’re all bunched up in a too-small hallway waiting for the doors to open. In this hallway, with all of these people standing too close and talking too loud, I’m reminded what a horrible idea this was, how every night I eat too much and drink too much, how I get seasick.
The waiters fling open the doors and lead us to our seats. They have accents that are foreign but not so foreign they can’t be understood. They form a conga line around the dining room, clapping and singing “Macarena.” His mother claps along, bouncing every time her hands meet, and then she leans across the table to ask me what kind of towel animal we got—they got a duck. We got a monkey wearing my sunglasses, I tell her, which makes her ridiculously happy. His father pats his wife’s shoulder to the beat and then our waiter stops and takes the salt and pepper shakers off our table for an impromptu juggle. We look like a happy couple, on vacation with his parents. We’ve been together two years, lived together one.
While we look over our menus, the waiter comes around with a camera.
“Say pigs-in-a-blanket,” he says, smiling as if to show us how it’s done. “Say money.”
When dinner is over, we go back to our room and change. The se
as have picked up. It is a gentle rocking that doesn’t seem like it should make me sick but it does. I wash my face and brush my teeth and put on the little blue wristband I found in his mother’s medicine cabinet; it’s old and I’m not sure how it works, or if it’s expired. Then I get in bed and stretch out in the middle.
“I can get you some real medicine,” he says, brushing the hair out of my face.
“Okay,” I say.
“I’ll probably smoke my joint first and then go get it.”
“Okay,” I say again, though I don’t like this plan. He’ll end up at the dance club talking to girls who take shots out of each other’s belly buttons. Girls he calls whores. I turn on the TV and he leaves. It’s still the same movie, twenty-four hours of it, but soon another one will start. I check the schedule to see what it is: Iron Man. Then I turn off the TV and pick up a book from the table. I bought a whole stack of magazines and two paperbacks at the airport. I bought sushi and expensive coffee and a bag of almonds and now I probably won’t have enough money to get me through the rest of the month. I turn on the lamp and try to read but I’ve had too much to drink, the words blurring on the page. I wonder if I should stick my finger down my throat but I’d probably still feel sick. The upside is that it would get rid of some of the calories I consumed at dinner: four courses ending in a chocolate dish with a crispy top and a warm melty inside. We each had one, scraping our bowls.
I close my eyes and think about the boat on the ocean, black waves and black sky and a sliver of moon, and I like the idea of it—how lonely it looks—but next time I’ll just fly wherever I want to go. I’ll step out of the airplane onto solid ground.
An hour later, he lets himself in, his eyes bloodshot. They will stay this way for about an hour. He hands me two pills and a cup of water and I sit up and swallow them.
He kisses me, pushes his tongue in my mouth. “My parents are at a show until ten,” he says, squeezing my breast. He puts my hand on his dick.
“Baby,” I say, “I’m not feeling very well.”
“We didn’t have sex yesterday or today,” he says, “and now we have an opportunity.”
I take my hand off him. He likes to have sex twice a day and we’ve settled on once—a compromise he has made for me. Sometimes he films me and I let him, only my face on camera. On the occasions I refuse to have sex with him, he gets angry and asks me questions that seem to support his position: Am I physically hurting you? Do you enjoy it?
He goes to the bathroom and pees and then tells me he’s going to the casino.
“I wish you’d stay with me,” I say. “Iron Man’s about to start.”
“We only have two more nights and I’d like to enjoy them,” he says.
“Being with me isn’t enjoyable?”
“I didn’t say that,” he says. “I’ve seen that movie four times already.”
“Stay with me for just a minute.”
He sits on the bed and I put my hand on his thigh and then move it to his crotch. He’s hard so I stroke him, and then I unzip his shorts and take him in my mouth. He chokes me with it, pushing it to the back of my throat, and I take off my panties because it’s easier to just let him fuck me.
I wake up wearing only the wristband and my Carnival tank top. I look around for my panties and find them on the floor: my prettiest pair, lace and bows. He’s snoring lightly with his mouth open, his hair so long it has begun to curl itself into loose ringlets. I press myself against him. He doesn’t mind if I lie as close as possible, practically on top of him—he says I am a little oven, that I am good in the winter. I wonder why he doesn’t love me anymore, if it’s because I’m too strong or too weak. At this point, things have become so muddled that everything feels like an inversion. I say one thing, sure I believe it, and he says the opposite and it sounds right, too, more right than the thing of which I was certain.
I get out of bed and dig through my bag for a pair of shorts, socks, a sports bra. I dress and put a key in my pocket and let myself out, stopping in front of his parents’ room to listen: his father coughs; the TV is turned to the news.
I take the stairs up.
The treadmills line the windows so you can look out and see the nose of the boat cutting through the water, dividing it. I stretch and step on, starting slowly and working my way up to a jog. I do it because I like how I look afterwards—cheeks flushed and eyes bright—a look that can’t be replicated with makeup. I’m hungover, though, and the water makes me dizzy. I imagine falling off, my body in a heap on the floor, and lose my rhythm.
I run for ten minutes and walk for twenty and take the elevator back down. He’s watching Iron Man when I come in. “Where’d you go?”
“The gym.”
“You weren’t gone for very long,” he says. “You coming to breakfast?”
People want a good hot breakfast. They want omelets and waffles and eggs and biscuits. They want bacon and sausage. We’re seated at a table with a family of seven. There are five kids, all ugly, of various ages and ethnicities. Each of them is holding something, a shabby animal or a plastic muscle man. I talk to the little girl next to me, a skinny blond with big knees and glasses who has a stuffed kangaroo in her lap. I touch its tail and ask her what his name is.
“Her name,” she says.
“Okay, her name?”
“Jessica.”
“Ah,” I say, “Jessica.” It looks like a dog toy. I unroll the silverware from my napkin and look around for the waiter.
My boyfriend plays his city-councilman role with the father, leaning forward to show interest, looking him directly in the eye. He reads books about this sort of thing. Otherwise, he doesn’t read at all. He says he got his master’s degree in education without ever reading anything; he just listened and rephrased what others were saying in class. He made all A’s doing this.
After we eat, we put on our swimsuits and lay out on the top deck. I walk around in my bikini—fetching towels, getting water—so he can catch men watching me, so he can be proud I am his.
When the waitress comes, I ask him to buy me a drink.
“Okay,” he says, “but only one.” Maybe he wants to be my father, or he doesn’t. He thinks I should learn to stand on my own two feet. I lie back and close my eyes. A moment later, his parents are standing over us, enormous in front of a bright blue sky. It reminds me of the painting classes I took as a kid, how to create the illusion of depth: his father with his round stomach and tinted glasses, his mother with her teased hair and matching outfit. They’re almost beautiful from this angle.
“We were looking at the pictures from last night,” his mother says. “They’re in that big room you walk through to get to the buffet.”
“How’d they turn out?” I ask, sitting up on my elbows.
“Y’all look so handsome. You have to buy her one,” she says to her son.
“I’ll get her one if she wants one.”
“Of course she wants one,” she says. “How many cruises will y’all take in your lifetime—two, three?” We don’t say anything. “Not many,” she says. I shield my eyes from the sun and smile up at her.
“We’re headed to the buffet,” his father says, and we all say goodbye.
“You don’t have to buy me a picture. I’m sure we could find something better to do with your fifty dollars.”
“You think it costs fifty dollars?” he asks.
“Probably. It’s probably one of those blow-up pictures they put in a stupid frame with a boat on it.”
“She’ll be disappointed if I don’t get it for you.”
“We can take our own pictures. I have my camera.” A camera you bought for me, I think, remembering how excited he was for me to unwrap it, something so expensive. Something he hadn’t made himself. My drink comes and I drink it fast because taking poor care of myself feels like a sacrifice I am offering him. I set the cup down and turn to look at him. He doesn’t acknowledge me so I keep on looking—his upper arms sprouting a few crazy hairs, his sec
ond toes longer than the big ones. I want to touch him, want to feel the steady pressure of his hand on mine. I try to remember the last time he said he loved me.
“What’d you do last night?” I ask.
“Went to the casino, lost half the money I won.”
“Did you play slots?”
“I don’t play slots. My parents play slots.”
“Blackjack?”
He lets the question hang there—blackjack?—and I think about the drive to Fort Lauderdale, the flight to Atlanta and then the two-hour layover before the flight to Nashville. How long tomorrow will be and then we’ll be at his house, our bags full of dirty clothes that won’t make it past his kitchen. I reach over and pluck one of the thick, unruly hairs from his arm.
“That hurt. Don’t do that again.”
I look at the hair attached to a root and let it go. “You’re not paying attention to me. Pay attention to me.”
“Yes I am—we’re tanning together,” he says. “Can’t you just enjoy yourself for a minute?”
“I am enjoying myself,” I say, watching a cloud float by. “Will you put some more sunscreen on me?” I pass him the bottle and turn my back to him and he squirts the cool lotion onto my shoulders. It feels nice and he rubs and rubs, trying to get it to soak in. I like to stay as pale as possible, though my shoulders and chest are freckled; as a teenager, I rubbed baby oil all over myself, laid out on sheets of tinfoil. I put lemon juice in my hair and it turned orange.
“I’m going to go to the room and get my camera,” I say, putting on my tank top.
And then we’re standing at the front of the boat, the wind blowing furiously. I throw my arms out like that scene in Titanic and he takes a picture, and I wonder how many people have posed exactly like this—thousands, millions. And for a moment I like the idea of being exactly like everyone else, in my pink Carnival tank top and Old Navy bikini, my knockoff purses. He puts his arm around me and holds the camera up and takes picture after picture, until we are perfectly centered and happy, until he gets it exactly right.