Always Happy Hour

by Mary Miller

  WHERE ALL OF THE BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE GO

  I’m on a cheap raft, pink and deflating, trying to keep my body balanced in the center while Aggie sits on a step churning the water. She’s high on pills and has recently chopped off all her hair. Her mother has been dead for six days.

  I brought cookies from the grocery store, apologizing. I feel bad about the cookies—I should have baked something—though Aggie’s family is the kind that prefers Chips Ahoy! to the homemade variety.

  “My mother always told me I was too big and clumsy, too much like my father. Mothers are supposed to tell their daughters they’re beautiful,” she says, and it makes me sad because it’s true—it’s what all girls most want to hear. I hope I never have a daughter because if I had a daughter and she wasn’t beautiful, I’d have to lie and tell her she was and I don’t like to lie, not even the nice white ones. Sometimes I think the people who believe they’re the most honest are the biggest liars of all. When I start to think this way, nothing makes sense.

  “You are beautiful. And you’re talented. You’re so talented.”

  “Do you think it’s bad?” she says. “Do you think I’m a bad person?”

  “Of course I don’t think you’re a bad person. You’re in mourning. People do strange things when they’re in mourning—they don’t think clearly.” She doesn’t say anything else so I give her a few more variations along these lines, trying to sound as supportive as possible.

  When Aggie found out her mother was dying, she applied for credit cards in her mother’s name. She received a number of them with limits from three hundred dollars to three thousand. I can imagine some of the stuff she ordered off the TV—charm bracelets and clothes that don’t wrinkle, gimmicks to help you cook breakfast foods more efficiently. She purchased a new set of living room furniture, which should arrive any day now. Maybe today. She’s very excited about this new furniture; she has never had a whole matching set before. I don’t care about things like this so it’s hard for me to understand, but I also don’t have a husband or a house or kids. Maybe if you get a husband and a house and kids you automatically want a nice set of matching furniture so badly you’re willing to steal for it.

  I wish I had a dog. I think about dogs a lot. In the past month, I’ve been to the pound five or six times, but I can’t make a decision; I don’t trust my judgment. They don’t even call it the pound anymore. My sister says I only like the neurotic ones, the ones that will only love me, that will snarl and nip at the heels of anyone who isn’t me. But I also think: What’s so wrong with that?

  Sometimes I call to ask if the dog I like is still there. Is Gunner still available? I ask, and then wait a long time for someone to check and a few times they said no, he was adopted, and one time a woman—she must have been new—told me the dog had been exterminated. Exterminated! But usually the dog is still there and I tell them I’ll be by in the morning but morning comes and I stay in bed and think about dogs, how a dog would get me up and outside, how a dog would look at me with its worshipful eyes and make me feel guilty for not being the person I know I could be.

  If I wanted a dog at this point, I don’t even think they’d give me one. They know me there, though I try to disguise myself. Some days I’m dressed up, wearing a skirt and high heels; other days I’m two days’ dirty in workout clothes.

  “I really want that furniture,” Aggie says, “and I can’t send it back now.” She tells me all about it—how many pieces, the color and fabric—but I don’t listen. I take a sip of my beer and wonder how many more her husband has in the refrigerator and whether he’d notice if I drank them all. Aggie doesn’t drink because she takes too many pills but I never see her take them. It makes me wish I had some other, less obvious vice.

  Her husband opens the door and their sons tumble outside. He holds my gaze and then watches me for a moment from behind the glass. He’s friendly, smiling and hospitable, which contradicts everything Aggie tells me about him so I see him as a menacing figure. He was a cop but now he isn’t. Now he does something with computers. His name is George. My mother and her sister used to call their periods “George” because they hated the name—“George is here,” they’d say, groaning, or as an explanation for why they needed to stay in bed: “George came late last night,” but then her sister married a man named George and they’d had to stop.

  The younger boy is carrying the bag of wedding cookies I brought so I paddle over and open it for him. He starts shoveling them into his mouth. I loved wedding cookies growing up, the powdered sugar on my fingers, a delicate sprinkling on my shirt.

  “Hop on, Bucko.”

  “My name’s not Bucko!”

  His name is Nathan. Nateybear, I call him, Natekabob. Cowboy. Superhero. Trashman. Beetlejuice. Peewee. Ghostrider. Angelhead. He screams every time because he loves it, or maybe he doesn’t. I don’t know. It’s about the only way I can get him to say anything. He climbs onto the raft, further deflating the situation, and straddles me. I use my arms to paddle us back to the middle of the pool where it feels more private.

  Nathan has blue eyes that droop down at the corners. They make him look sad and wise and I like him much better than the other one, Alexander, who’s a few years older and looks like a picture of a boy in a book—plain and perhaps more conventionally attractive, but dull. It won’t be long before people start introducing themselves to him again and again and he knows what it’s like to be completely forgettable.

  I run my fingers through Nathan’s hair, slick it back, and then press his cheeks together until his lips are tiny and fishlike. He pinches me on the side, just below my bikini top; it’s the last place I lose weight and the first place I gain. I slap his hand and he readjusts.

  Aggie doesn’t give him enough attention—he is starved for physical contact—because she spends a lot of time in bed with migraines or vertigo or whatever she’s calling it. Depression, I want to say, just call it what it is, but I don’t want to say it, either. I call mine insomnia, stomach issues. Perhaps a simple gluten or lactose intolerance, something easily fixed with a change in diet or a hot bath followed by a cool room and clean sheets.

  I push Nathan off and he goes under. When he surfaces, he paddles back to me, grabs onto my raft, and we’re capsizing.

  “It’s all over!” I yell. “Goodbye, so long!” And then we’re both in the water and he’s flinging his chubby arms around my neck—I love how they crease at the elbow—and wrapping his legs around my waist. I want this boy. Aggie doesn’t deserve him. He’s probably never been to the circus or an amusement park or the beach. I bet he hasn’t even been to a zoo, though I wouldn’t take him to a zoo, or I’d take him to one and explain why zoos are bad and why all of the animals should be living in their natural habitats unless they’re about to go extinct or would immediately die in the wild. I’d tell him about Inky the Octopus, who broke out of his tank in the middle of the night, slid down a six-inch-wide drainpipe and back out into the Pacific Ocean, leaving a trail of suction cup marks in his wake.

  “Would you return it?” Aggie asks.

  “What? I thought we’d settled this already.”

  “I just want to know if you’d give it back.”

  I swim over to her. Her eyes don’t look right. They don’t look right at all. “I don’t know. I guess I wouldn’t have done it—I do a lot of awful things but stealing’s not one of them.” I notice a long dark hair on my chest. I try to pull it out but it just curls. Now that I’ve seen it, I can’t stop looking at it.

  “It’s not stealing,” she says. “We applied for them and they gave them to us.”

  “You applied for one the day she died.”

  “It was the day before, and I didn’t know she was going to die. I haven’t even used that one yet.”

  “I take magazines, actually. At the gym, at doctor’s offices, everywhere but the store, so I guess I do steal, though I don’t really think of it as stealing because I usually leave one behind like a leave-one-take-one situ
ation, though there’s nothing that says it’s a leave-one-take-one situation so I guess it’s just plain stealing. And sometimes I don’t have one to leave behind.”

  “See?” she says, churning the water more forcefully. “We all steal something.”

  “Okay, so here’s what you’re going to do—you’re going to keep all of the furniture and everything else and not feel bad about it. And then you’re going to cut the cards up. If you start returning stuff it might look suspicious.”

  “I didn’t think about that,” she says, “but you’re right. I better not return anything.”

  “Now stop thinking about it. I give you permission to stop thinking about it.”

  Her arms go still but the waves keep coming.

  Aggie gives me pills; this is why I’m friends with her. Otherwise, I wouldn’t drive all the way to Round Rock to swim in her pool. My apartment complex has its own pool where I swim laps back and forth and help the maintenance man with small jobs. “Will you take the hose out in half an hour?” he might ask, and I am happy to be given such a reasonable and achievable task. For the most part, I hoard the pills because I like having them, same as I like having extra toilet paper and a pantry full of nonperishable food items. I collect pill cases and put them in there all blue and white and yellow and they’re so pretty. She passes them across the table to me in restaurants—The Cheesecake Factory, Chili’s, cavernous Mexican places with half-price margaritas—like they’re Tylenol or loose change. Sometimes she gives me an entire bottle and I just stick it in my purse and try not to look around, but then I do. I can’t help it. I look around and people look at me because I’m looking at them and one time I dropped the bottle and it rolled into someone’s foot.

  My boyfriend would break up with me if he knew, if he found them hidden in the suitcase where I keep my illicit things. He doesn’t do drugs or smoke cigarettes and only drinks in moderation. This morning he got angry with me about the way I squeeze my toothpaste. I don’t squeeze it right, from the bottom up. He isn’t the first one to mention it but it seems to bother him more than the others and I wonder why it’s so important. It’s just toothpaste. Luckily he lives out of town and I don’t see him that often. Ten minutes after he left, I was on my way to Round Rock, stopping at the grocery store to pee and pick up cookies before getting lost in Aggie’s neighborhood, which looks like all of the surrounding neighborhoods, and then parking in front of her house that looks like all of the other houses, everything beige and neat and treeless. The curtains closed. This is the place you move if you really want to disappear.

  I climb back onto the raft—it is getting to be a desperate situation. I need another beer but I don’t want to get out and dry myself off and make my way into the kitchen, encountering Aggie’s husband on the couch, which seems perfectly nice enough, just like a couch. I imagine standing before the enormous TV, baseball or golf, and watching with him for a moment to be polite. But a few minutes later he comes out and asks if the ladies need anything.

  “Will you get me another? Do you mind that I’m drinking all your beer?”

  He doesn’t mind. I smile and row myself over, set my empty down and wait.

  “It’s Coors,” George says, as if I can’t see that it’s Coors. He removes my huggie from the empty can and puts it on the fresh one. “We’re out of Heineken.”

  “This is great. Perfect.”

  “Holler if you need another.”

  I thank him and push off. George doesn’t know about the credit cards. He would kill her, she says, or beat her to a pulp. But where does he think the money’s coming from? Perhaps she told him her mother had cashed in a policy or had an emergency savings account they didn’t know about. Perhaps he trusts her.

  George is older than Aggie by ten years, his hair gray and bushy, and Aggie is older than me by another ten, or twelve. He must wonder why I’m friends with his wife. I can’t look at him without thinking about the things I know that he doesn’t know—that she steals—not just this credit card scam but from stores, too. She gets away with it, she says, because she doesn’t look the type; frequently, she’s with her children. And she contacts men over the internet and goes over to their houses or meets them in motel rooms because George can’t get it up anymore. I’ve told her that this is insanely dangerous and irresponsible, but I like hearing about these men.

  Aggie is a storyteller, describing the situations in great detail: how they feel the need to explain themselves, how she goes through their things when they’re in the bathroom or taking a shower. They leave their wallets on the counter, along with their keys. She could take anything, and she does, though she carefully considers whether it is something that might be noticed. She shows me these tokens—voter ID cards and movie stubs and matches—spread out on her bed when we lock the door from George and the children. They remind me of the souvenirs of serial killers.

  Mostly I’m surprised that they go through with it, every time. Never has a man taken a look at her and backed out. Never has Aggie driven somewhere, parked, and decided against it, opting instead for a cheeseburger and a milkshake.

  There was an accident years ago. I know the basics: a car crash; someone died. She was in a coma for a long time and they didn’t think she’d come out of it and then she did. I didn’t know her before the accident but it’s clear she’s not the person she would have been. There are her eyes, for one, which aren’t like regular eyes. And there is the way her brain works, which is not like a regular brain, and there are all of the pills, which she began taking in order to cope.

  I had a friend once who was divorcing her husband because she despised him and then she had a seizure and forgot that she despised him and called the divorce off. Her husband was still the same guy he’d always been but her brain had been reset to the time she’d met him, back when he was her one and only, when she couldn’t remember all of the things that had happened in between falling love and filing for divorce.

  When I think of the Aggie I know and the Aggie I might have known, I think of this friend I’m no longer friends with and whether I would still be friends with her if she hadn’t had the seizure.

  Alexander screams because he sees a salamander. He loves the baby salamander. He gets down on all fours to look at it and then Nathan scrambles out of the pool and kneels beside him and they give us updates about its movement. They wonder where his family is and if he’s lost, if he’s sad. Alexander asks if they should kill him, if they should put him out of his misery, and this makes me reconsider Alexander and my blanket dismissal of him.

  Aggie takes hold of my raft, pushing me back and forth in a lulling, pleasant motion.

  “Want me to blow it back up for you?” she asks.

  “Maybe in a minute. Thanks.”

  I wonder what they’ll have for dinner, if they’ll invite me to stay. This past Thanksgiving, I couldn’t fly home so I ate with them here. Everything had come from a box or a can and I met her mother and her mother’s husband and her brother and his family and they were all wearing pleated blue jeans and sweatshirts with various designs and decorations and I had loved the whole affair—the blandness and mediocrity of it—and how they’d had no idea it was bland or mediocre. Tombstone pizza, perhaps, or frozen meatballs boiled in Ragú. Bunny bread on a plate, potatoes made from flakes, half of a pound cake in half of a plastic box.

  She stops pushing and I touch her hand; the pushing resumes. She tells me she’s doing the best she can, that she does the best she can.

  “I know,” I say. “We all do.” I close my eyes and think about this. I could do better, it’s completely within my ability, and Aggie could do better, but we allow ourselves to neglect the most important things as we tell ourselves we’re doing our best. I open my mouth and close it, decide to keep this information to myself. I think I might fall asleep but then I hear thunder in the distance and remember the place I lived before moving to Austin, how those two years were full of storms and I’d stop whatever I was doing to go out to my
balcony and watch them. When the parking lot flooded, the cars would pause before the water. Sometimes they reversed and turned around but mostly they just plowed right through.

  “My counselor says I have low self-esteem,” I say, perhaps as a way of evening things out.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. She seems really sorry, like this is terrible news.

  “I think I’m going to stop seeing her—I spend most of my time thinking about her life. And there’s nothing really wrong with my life. My life is perfectly fine.”

  Aggie is nearly unresponsive but she keeps pushing and I keep talking about my counselor and her shoe collection and how she doesn’t wear a wedding ring but maybe she takes it off before sessions? On my worst days, the only way I can get through the fifty minutes is by imagining her alone in a dark apartment drinking vodka martinis. And then I start telling her about my boyfriend and how glad I am he doesn’t live here, how he wants me to be someone else even though he liked me fine at the beginning. Loved me, even, just the way I was, and this is how it always goes. I end my soliloquy with, “Men, you can’t live with ’em.”

  This stirs something in her. “Aren’t you forgetting the second half?”

  “No,” I say. “That’s the end of it.”

  “Men,” she says, “you can’t live with ’em and you can’t live without ’em.”

  “I know the saying.”

  When the furniture comes, Aggie is sharp, sober. She wraps a towel around her waist and hurries inside. Alexander follows and it’s just Nathan and me. He tries to climb onto my raft and I let him struggle before helping him. He gestures toward the cookies and we paddle over.

  “Give me one,” I say, opening my mouth wide. He drops a cookie in. “These were my favorite when I was a kid.”

  “You weren’t a kid,” he says, and he laughs and laughs.

  I tell him he’s had enough, that he’s going to get diabetes. I don’t know if I could give him a better life but I could wean him off sugared cereal and Chef Boyardee and take him to Whole Foods so he could see where all of the beautiful people go. He paws at my breasts with his pruned fingers. How old is he? I have difficulty with the years between three and six.