Always Happy Hour

by Mary Miller

  I grab his hands and he leans forward and kisses me full on the mouth.

  “You can’t French kiss me,” I say. “It’s disgusting. It’s not right!” I wipe my mouth in an exaggerated manner as he squeals and think of the time I saw a dog and a pig playing together on the side of the road, how happy it had made me. Then I think of Gunner and Biscuit, Echo and Willy and Winter, all of the dogs I might have had if I’d played my cards right. Gunner was my favorite—snow white with black rings around his eyes. When I walked him up and down the driveway, he didn’t pull at the leash but stayed right by my side, occasionally looking up at me to wag his tail, no doubt in his mind that all of his troubles were in the past, already forgotten.

  LOVE APPLES

  He tells you a story about women who put peeled apples under their arms, how they would send these apples off to war with their men and the men would eat them, so what he is requesting is not so much.

  He wants you to send him a sweaty T-shirt, or some panties you got excited in.

  That night you sleep under a heavy comforter. In the morning you take off your shirt and wrap it up in a piece of tissue paper. It is thin and worn and ocean blue. You picture it draped across his chest.

  The post office is empty, the bald guy reading the newspaper.

  “Nice and quiet in here,” you say, because even though you are getting a divorce and starting a new life with a man who wants your dirty panties it is no reason to be impolite.

  “Twenty people lined up a minute ago,” he says, folding. You hand him the envelope and tell him to send it the cheapest way possible. Then you ask about mail forwarding and he gives you a request form with the stipulation that you are to tell everyone you know. “Don’t count on us,” he says, pointing to himself.

  “Through wind and rain.”

  He smiles as he wags his finger. You tell him you bet he never heard that one before, as if knowing you are the same as everyone somehow makes it better, and he winks and you gather your things and walk out into the too-bright day.

  While your husband is at work, you talk to your boyfriend. You met your boyfriend online, in a chat room for people who are interested in films but no one ever talked about films. They talked about fucking; they talked about their wives and husbands and how badly they had been mistreated so they wouldn’t feel so badly about talking about fucking.

  You get to know each other over the phone, over drinks, in the middle of the day. He works from home and you haven’t had a job since the last time you got sick, conjuring up an illness that existed only in your head, which promptly went into remission with your two weeks’ notice.

  “Are you online?” he asks. Of course you’re online, so he sends you a photo of penises in a lineup: small, small-average, average, large-average, large. His is large-average. He wants to give you an idea. You tell him you’re reading a novel that takes place inside a woman’s head, during the span of a blow job.

  At five o’clock, you stand at the door with the phone pressed to your ear and watch out the peephole. The peephole is your height, installed by your husband so you wouldn’t have to answer the door for anyone you didn’t want to answer the door for, and now the only people who come to the door are people you’re certain you don’t want to talk to. Your social life is limited to the old lady across the street. When your car is in the driveway, you’re home, so she calls and you go over to her house and drink a flat Coke and try to come up with a reason to leave, or you watch Sunday services with her in the back room and she points out people in the congregation, tells you the things they have done and the things that have been done to them and you say how terrible it all is.

  Your boyfriend is saying he has waited an eternity.

  Now he is saying he will take you to Korea, Japan, India, Iceland. The world is so big and you have seen so little of it. All of the people you used to know are strangers but if you saw one of them on the opposite side of it then maybe you could say hello. “I’m hungry,” you say. “Eat an apple,” he says, but you don’t feel like eating an apple. When the two of you are together you won’t want to eat pizza anymore. You won’t want to eat sandwich cookies. Where is your husband? He said he’d take you to The Hungry Heifer, where the waitresses wear T-shirts with cows on the back of them, because you asked, because he is a nice guy even though you are leaving and he will probably die without you. Whose back will he scratch? Who will watch Cops with him? You don’t think about these things, and you don’t think about how quiet the house will be, how he will lie in bed and listen to your absence.

  He pulls up in his little white truck and gets out and you watch him get bigger and bigger. You tell your boyfriend you love him terribly, goodbye. Soon you will have a new life. You will be in love. You are in love. You are also drunk. Your husband’s head is so big when viewed through the peephole. You unlock the door as he is unlocking the door and he steps inside. He has a case of beer even though it’s Tuesday.

  “I have to go bad,” you say, and you turn and run to the bathroom and pee with the door open. You’ve sprung a leak! your husband usually says, but he doesn’t say it today so you say it quietly to yourself. You spread your legs and watch one fast stream split into two and then three and then you take a handful of stomach and pinch. Your boyfriend has no idea how big you are. You are going to lose the weight before you meet him.

  “Are we going to the Heifer?” you ask.

  Your husband kneels in front of the refrigerator with the box. He places the cans in the drawer and then he stands and leans against the counter. His earplugs hang around his neck, yellow and squishy. The plant he works at is loud. He has to wear a hard hat in certain areas and steel-toed boots. He has a small office where he spends his days, avoiding the chatty secretary and the corporate people who pass through. The Bigwigs, he calls them. If they catch him they make him go to fish camp and eat at a round table and he doesn’t like to be looked at while he’s eating. You don’t like to be looked at while you’re eating, either.

  He doesn’t feel like going out. Plus it’s too expensive, and the portions too small—this has never bothered him before. He clomps down to the basement with a can of beer. The cigarette smoke seeps into the house. You hear the garage door open so you move to the window and watch him step from one patch of grass to the other like he is trying to stamp them out. It’s about the saddest thing you ever saw but you back away from the window and sit on the couch with your laptop on your lap and double click on the Firefox icon, noticing for the first time that the fox is wrapped around a globe, and remind yourself that you are in love. You are going to have a life with a man who will take you all over the world whereas your husband doesn’t like to cross state lines even though you can’t even see them.

  Up and down and up and down, cold beer, cold beer.

  After a while, he comes back up and sits to watch you shred important documents, the kind he would keep. But they are yours and you are shredding them.

  “You don’t even know this guy,” he says.

  You pick up a strip of paper and there is your Social Security number, completely intact. He rolls the chair around to face you—legs spread, swiveling. You don’t know what to say. You only know that you are dying but you don’t say this because he would say you were being dramatic, he would say you are fine, that everything is fine, because there is nothing left for him to do but insist.

  He is hungry. Now you have sobered up and he’s drunk so you drive him to Taco Bell. At the drive-thru he tells you he wants a Mexican Pizza and you tell the man you want a Mexican Pizza. Your husband leans forward to look at the menu. The man says, “Is that all?”

  “And a Fiesta Burrito,” your husband says.

  “And a Fiesta Burrito,” you say.

  “And a Meximelt,” he says, sitting back to signal the end of his order.

  “And a Meximelt,” you say, and then you decide that you might like a Meximelt, too, so you order another Meximelt and tack on a bean burrito and the man tells you to dr
ive around to the second window without giving you your total.

  At home, your husband opens his Mexican Pizza and all the cheese has been transferred to the top of the box. He is upset about this. He is more upset about this than he is about your leaving. He takes pictures to document the situation, saying he will send them to the manager and they will send him coupons for free bean burritos, which are your favorite. Of course he will give them to you. Why does he have to be so nice? You could kill him. The two of you sit side by side on the couch and eat too much and watch television and it’s just like any other night except that it will all be over soon.

  At nine o’clock, he hands you the remote and goes into the bedroom and shuts the door. You don’t even wait for him to fall asleep before you call your boyfriend. Your boyfriend says this shows loyalty, the fact that you will not sleep in the bed with your husband anymore. I’m an awful person, you tell him, but he doesn’t believe you.

  The next day the old lady calls and you tell her you have a roast in the oven but she pretends she can’t hear you so you tell her you’ll be right over.

  You stand at the edge of your driveway looking at a bunch of mushrooms that sprung up overnight. You nudge a big one and it leans over. Then you step on a couple of smaller ones, enjoying the crush of them under your flip-flops. The rest you leave for later.

  Her front door is open a crack. You say hello and step inside.

  She’s wearing a housedress that exposes every bone in her chest. You could ball her up like a piece of construction paper. Her maid asks if you want anything to drink and you say a Coke please and thank you and thank you again when she delivers it, your politeness so polite it is condescending even though you don’t mean for it to be condescending. You only mean to be polite.

  The two of you sit on either side of the window, where you look out at your street.

  “The Mexicans are moving in,” she says.

  “There must be a dozen in the green house on the corner,” you tell her, but you don’t care if the Mexicans are moving in, or the blacks, or the polka-dotted people, as your mother used to say when she wanted to demonstrate her sense of equality—they could be polka-dotted for all I care. Just then the Mexicans’ dog ambles past, jauntily. He’s a yellow Lab and there’s nothing remotely Mexican about him but he’s always loose, unleashed. On the small table between you, your glass sits on a coaster. Next to your glass is her checkbook. The old lady is rich, you are sure, though her house is always hot and her Coke always flat and the only baked goods come in plastic grocery store containers. You wonder if she will leave you any money. You know she won’t but you like the idea of it. She has no one and you have no one, but this isn’t true. You have a lot of people. You run down the list of them in your head: a mother and a father and a brother and a sister and a husband and a boyfriend and at least four friends you could call up and pour your heart out to, but what would they say? They are always running late. She will leave her money to First Baptist, or to the university where her son taught. Maybe it will be enough to buy him a wing.

  You finish your drink and tell her you have laundry in the dryer but her hearing goes out again so you sit there fingering the tablecloth. She asks if you like it and you say it’s pretty and she says she’ll teach you to crochet but her hands are gnarled. She holds them like a pair of socks. You look at her grandson’s senior portrait on the wall—gorgeous and long-haired, eighteen years old—and wish you’d known him then, in the backseat of a Buick, perhaps: his hands on your thighs, your breasts, his teeth on your neck. Now he’s in his fifties and chews with his mouth open, food falling out. Not even his eyes give it away.

  You stand at a window that is halfway open, watching an assortment of middle-aged women drink coffee and flip through a picture album and talk on the phone about car repairs and birthday parties. No one looks up. They all want to see who will give up first. Your husband stands beside you. You look at him: you will never have his baby and that baby will never have his eyelashes or his thick, wavy hair.

  You say something—you have to go to the bathroom, you’re thirsty, will these bitches ever shut up?—and he’s angry because you ate garlic. He backs away and you put a hand to your mouth and the lady with the picture album walks over and asks how she can help and he hands her the paperwork he filled out at the dining room table, calling you over every few minutes to sign your name as if he were doing the taxes.

  On the way home, he pulls into the parking lot of Quiznos and you go inside and order while he waits in the car. He doesn’t have to tell you what he wants because you know what he wants. You have no idea what your boyfriend would want. He could order the tuna and you wouldn’t be surprised.

  There’s a line of people in business clothes to remind you it is Thursday. Every day people get up and go to work whereas every day you are relieved to see another blank square on the calendar you got free at the Indian takeout.

  The stocky guy with the beard says, “What, no cookie?” and you say, “Not today,” and he smiles as he shoves a wad of napkins in your bag, but other days he acts like he’s never seen you before in his life.

  Your boyfriend reads books and watches videos on how to pleasure a woman, how to make her squirt. You don’t squirt, nor do you have any desire to squirt. You can barely change the sheets as it is. But your boyfriend wants to make you squirt because no one else has. He sends you a link to a video, which you watch together: a woman lies on her back on a table and a professional-looking man puts two fingers inside her and begins jerking up hard. “It doesn’t hurt,” your boyfriend says. “It just looks like it hurts.” The man on the screen is explaining the mechanics as if he were taking apart a toaster and then the woman goes into convulsions and a liquid pours out of her. “Disgusting,” you say, but you get him off the phone quick.

  Your parents come on Saturday with a U-Haul and you load it up with heavy bookcases and china and—since you are the one leaving—all of the wedding pictures and videos and whatever other burdens that will fit. The last thing you take off the wall is the framed photograph of yourself as a child: curly hair and a pink crocheted poncho, an oversized Raggedy Ann doll in the chair next to you. He loves the picture because you look foreign—you are his little foreign poncho girl. You ask if he wants to keep it and he turns around and walks into the kitchen.

  Your father doesn’t know what’s going on, only that you are unhappy, which he doesn’t consider reason enough for anything.

  Your mother knows there is someone else. Crazy sex brain, she calls it.

  You follow behind them in your car, singing along to Sheryl Crow, who writes soundtracks for this sort of thing. You are free, you tell yourself. You are in love. You put your sunglasses on and crack the sunroof so you can hear the truckers blow their horns at you as you pass.

  Outside Birmingham, your father pulls the U-Haul into Wendy’s. You emerge sweaty and rumpled. You lift your arm and sniff and then run your fingers over your scalp, which is bumpy like a topographical map. You looked it up on the internet and determined that it was psoriasis: an immune disorder resulting in the overproduction of skin cells. Regular skin is on a thirty-day cycle whereas your skin is replacing itself every three or four days, intent upon starting over. It is a disease. There are support groups for it. Other than Brownies, you’ve never belonged to anything and you like the idea of having supporters, a group of people who sit around in a circle and drink coffee and maybe have sex with each other afterwards.

  You tell your father you want a grilled chicken sandwich with no honey mustard and a Diet Coke and go to the bathroom while they wait in line. You look at yourself in the mirror. You feel sorry for yourself like you feel sorry for pretty girls in wheelchairs, like you felt sorry for your friend Angela’s dad, who was so big he never left the house.

  When you come out, your mother and father are seated by the window.

  “I got you the combo,” your father says. You did not want the combo. If you had wanted the combo you would have a
sked for the combo.

  The plan is for you to live with your parents until your divorce is final, until your boyfriend can save up enough money to rescue you, until you lose the weight. You see now this plan has holes.

  You stuff the fries into your mouth one at a time without swallowing until your mouth is full of potato and think of all the times you’ve tried to lose the weight—how you would get on the scale to find you’d lost a few pounds and then, pleased with yourself, eat your way back up to where you started.

  . . .

  At your parents’ house, your father makes three drinks, vodka over ice with lime and a splash of tonic, and then goes outside to smoke cheap cigars.

  “When did this start?” you ask your mother.

  “It’s been a while,” she says, and she tells you that she smuggled him a box of Cubans when she went to Grand Cayman but he doesn’t like the Cubans. Your mother is a compact woman of sixty. You can’t imagine her smuggling anything, nor can you imagine that she might get in trouble for doing so.

  Your father comes back in and pours another round of drinks and then there is the inevitable talk of pizza. You want a pizza but you don’t want to be responsible for the arrival of a pizza.

  “What do you think?” your father asks, and they turn and look at you.

  “We’ll order the thin crust,” your mother says.

  “Thin crust veggie?”

  “Thin crust meat-fest,” your father says. “I can’t eat no fucking rabbit food.” He looks at you and grins. This is also new, his use of four-letter words.

  “We’ll order you a veggie and your father a meat lover’s,” your mother says. She goes to the phone and the little dog comes over and sits on your lap. Pot-licker, your father calls her, dump truck. You pet her heavily, rougher than you should but she doesn’t seem to mind. If you had a baby, you might manhandle it. You might make it cry and feel terrible. No you wouldn’t, of course you wouldn’t. You’d love it more than anything. You would die for it, probably. The world news comes on. You don’t pay attention but the noise is comforting, like your parents’ house is comforting, like regression is comforting before the hole opens up and turns you inside out. You can always go home, you tell yourself. You can always get in your car and go home.