Always Happy Hour

by Mary Miller

  “I bleed every day,” Terry says.

  “Are you being metaphorical? Please don’t be metaphorical right now.”

  “No, I’m serious—I bleed every day. I fall off my skateboard or bike or cut myself shaving.” They both know this isn’t usually how he bleeds, that it’s much less romantic—the ingrown hairs that fester and leak, the acne scabs she accidentally scratches open on his back. She looks at her breasts and adjusts her dress, her black lace bra peeking out. There is still plenty of time to fuck up and begin again before she has to figure out a different way of being in the world.

  “What if something’s actually wrong with me?”

  “Then we’d deal with it.” He waits a moment and says, “I’d never leave you.”

  It makes her want to prove him wrong. Of course he would leave; men aren’t expected to stay. Her hair would fall out and she wouldn’t be pretty anymore and he would leave, or he’d stay and hate her and she’d be forced to leave him. He pats her leg and says he thinks it’s the condoms, which he’s told her a dozen times already, and goes back to his magazine. She also thinks it might be the condoms. She’s never really used them before, not consistently, and finds them strange and horrible.

  Darcie watches two little girls run around while their mother rests her head against the wall. One of the girls is about six and so fat she has breasts. She has a violent look about her: a flop of hair covering one eye and a jerkiness like it’s difficult for her to stop moving once she’s started, or to start once she’s stopped. One of the straps of her sundress slips off and Darcie waits for the girl’s mother to open her eyes and set the strap back on her shoulder, brush the mop of hair out of her eyes. The younger girl is delicate and pretty, but neither of them is aware of it yet—how they are different, how their paths will diverge.

  When Darcie’s bladder is full, she tells the one in scrubs, and the woman leads her back to the sonogram room. She lifts Darcie’s dress and tucks a sheet into her panties, squeezes warm gel onto her stomach.

  “Have you ever been pregnant?” the woman asks.

  “Yeah but it didn’t take,” Darcie says.

  The woman waits for her to say more so she explains that she miscarried very early, that the doctor said most women wouldn’t have even known they were pregnant. The woman asks a few more questions as she presses the wand to her bladder and then the clicking begins.

  She alternates between closing her eyes and watching the monitor. She thinks of all the tests she’s had over the years: a brain MRI, hearing and vision exams, screenings for depression, so much blood work. She has recently admitted something to herself—she actually likes going to the doctor. She likes answering questions about herself while someone takes notes. She likes waiting for the knock in a small clean room. She likes the free tampons and starter packs and she likes knowing all of the things she doesn’t have, as if ruling things out can negate the things that are wrong with her.

  “This must be a terrible job,” Darcie says, “trying to do your work while a nervous person looks on.”

  “I love my job.” The woman pauses to look at her. She’s maybe twenty-five but hasn’t kept her body up. Darcie wonders if she has kids at home, a husband. If she has a house in a neighborhood that has already been gentrified.

  “Is all that clicking bad?” she asks.

  “No,” the woman says, laughing a little. “I’m just taking pictures. I’m going to have a look at your ovaries here in a minute.”

  After about five more minutes of clicking, it’s clear the woman isn’t going to tell her what the pictures show or don’t show.

  “Does anything look crazy?” Darcie asks.

  “No, nothing looks crazy,” the woman says, and that small laugh again. Then she tells her that the doctor has to go over the results with her, that he’s the only one who can interpret them. Darcie watches the monitor for any large masses or asymmetry, but it could be perfectly normal or indicate certain death and she wouldn’t know the difference. She asks herself if she’s dying and listens for some inner voice to answer. It says no and she knows it’s true, but now she’s reminded that she will die, eventually, and she’s upset about it. She doesn’t want to die. She doesn’t want to go about her days eating and sleeping and watching movies when she’s going to die. It’s ridiculous, this waiting for something else when this is all there is.

  “Do you want to ride to Barton Springs?” Terry asks on the bus ride home.

  Darcie puts her hand on his leg but it isn’t enough so she grips his bicep with her other hand. She wonders how he can stand it, her constant need to touch him, to be near him. She wonders how long it’ll take her to push him away but they’ve been together since Thanksgiving and he’s still talking about their babies.

  “Okay,” she says. She listens to the inane conversation going on behind them, a couple of college boys trying to impress the blonde that’s with them. One of them says, “I wish there was still a popular religion that had multiple deities,” and the other asks if Hinduism counts and the discussion goes on all the way across the bridge, the blonde not saying anything. When Darcie was an undergrad, the boys were drunks who talked about pussy and action movies, and this new crop makes her miss these boys, who didn’t pretend to be something else.

  “Hey,” Terry says, directing her attention to a fire truck on the side of the road, one of the men watering a charred area no bigger than a Pinto while the others look on.

  At home, she changes into her swimsuit and then loads a backpack with towels and sunscreen, both cans of Four Loko, her driver’s license and a magazine. She looks in the money drawer to see how much they have—twelve dollars in bills and quarters—and zips it up in the front pocket. Then she puts on her helmet and they carry their bikes down the stairs.

  It’s Friday afternoon and there’s a lot of traffic so they ride on the sidewalk. Terry bikes ahead, looking back every so often to make sure she’s okay. She’s not good on a bike. All of the cars make her nervous.

  They stop at a crosswalk and wait for the man to light up.

  “This is the longest light in town,” she says, adjusting her helmet. She looks at the grass, which is so dry it’s turned a sickly yellow and crunches underfoot. When it finally rains the trees will fall, people say; there’ll be dead trees strewn everywhere. Beads of sweat well up behind her knees and in the crux of her elbow, improbable places. Finally the man lights up and she gets her pedals into position and pushes off. What scares her about riding bikes is falling—she’s terrified of falling. Other people seem to be okay with the possibility of injury.

  When they reach the narrow path, Terry pulls his bike in front of hers abruptly and stops to let a man pass, her front tire bumping his back.

  “Big tough guy,” he says, when the guy’s out of earshot.

  “What are you talking about?” she asks.

  “That guy’s walk.”

  “Do you have a tough-guy walk?”

  “If you have a walk like that they’ll see you coming,” he says. “You don’t ever want them to see you coming.”

  They arrive at the free area where all the dogs are, where people drink beer and only wade out into the water to pee. Darcie misses the three-dollar area, where there’s water deep enough to swim laps. She can see it through the chain-link fence: still green water, people with their colorful noodles and floats.

  She spreads their towels on a rock, carving out a little area among all of the other towels, and then sits and opens her magazine. Terry opens his Four Loko and leans back on his elbows, watching her. She can’t concentrate with him watching but she doesn’t look up—she wants to pretend she is self-sufficient, that she would be okay here alone. She reads an article about a man who found a lamp shade made of human skin after Katrina. He sold it at a yard sale and that person sold it to someone else until a journalist got ahold of it. The journalist discovered that a Nazi officer’s wife had a fetish for things made of human skin—she particularly liked to make things out o
f skin that had been decorated with pretty tattoos. Darcie considers telling Terry about it but doesn’t. He would say he already knows. In prison he read The Diary of Anne Frank four times. In prison he read constantly, everything he could get his hands on, and he hasn’t opened a book since.

  “I’m going down the water slide,” he says, taking a long drink. The water slide is a little concrete ditch where the water pours in, but it’s so low the kids have to use their hands to push themselves out. He doesn’t move. She goes on reading her magazine. After a few minutes, one of his friends shows up, a girl named Amber. Wherever they go, he has friends. They’re mostly girls—girls he went to high school with, girls his friends dated, girls who skateboard, girls who are friends with his sister. No matter how many Darcie meets there are always more, and nearly all of their names begin with the letter A—Allison and Alex and Andrea and Anna—and now this Amber, a pretty, ageing blonde unfurling her towel in the spot in front of them.

  “This is my girlfriend, Darcie,” Terry says. They shake hands and say it’s nice to meet you and then Amber goes back to her towel and takes off her shoes with her feet. She steps out of her skirt and pulls her shirt over her head. She’s too thin, with colorful tattoos blooming across her chest.

  Terry asks about Amber’s boyfriend and she says he’s a great father but a terrible partner—they’re splitting up—and then she’s telling Darcie how he got her hooked on drugs.

  Amber gives her the whole story—how they smoked crack on their first date and he said she smoked like a choo-choo train and then they were smoking every day and shooting heroin, too. Darcie looks at the dark lenses of Amber’s sunglasses, glad she can’t see her eyes.

  Amber says she’s been sober since the day she found out she was pregnant. Her boyfriend came home and she told him she was carrying his baby and they flushed the crack rock down the toilet together. She was never a crack whore, she tells them, gathering her fine hair into a ponytail. She was almost a crack whore but her boyfriend manned up. She gives Darcie the rundown of getting sober—sleeping for seventy-two hours, shitting herself—and says she still dreams of drugs. In the dreams, she can never get high.

  “I dream I’ve got a needle as big as Terry,” she says, “but I can’t find a vein or all my veins are collapsed.” She mimics trying to stick this Terry-sized needle into her neck, lifts one of her legs as if to scout out a vein there. “Or I dream a gigantic cartoon crack rock is chasing me.” She pumps her arms and looks behind her to see if the rock is gaining. Darcie is reminded that she doesn’t fit into Terry’s world, that she doesn’t fit anywhere except maybe at home with her parents, but she doesn’t fit there either. Not anymore. She digs around in their backpack for the other Four Loko. She hates the taste but it has 12 percent alcohol and she can easily get a buzz off half a can.

  Amber finishes her story, tightens her ponytail, and situates herself. Darcie watches as she lifts her hips into the air to adjust her towel, and then she watches Terry stand and wade out into the water. He cups his hands and pours the water over his head, rubs it into his face.

  On their way home, they stop at Shady Grove. Terry doesn’t want to spend the last of their money on beer when they could buy eggs and tortillas, but she insists. They sit at the bar and she orders a Blue Moon with a lemon while he drinks ice water. They look around at the other diners, mostly overweight tourists and old people at this hour.

  Halfway through her beer, the lights go out. Everyone’s quiet for a moment and then they’re loud. Darcie’s excited that they’re finally going to witness a rolling blackout—it feels like the beginning of something, the thing she’s been waiting for. She wonders if they have power at home and then she’s thinking about the tall Mexican candles and the box of Popsicles in their freezer. She imagines standing on the street corner, handing them out to passersby.

  She looks around at the other diners, the waitstaff—all of them looking around as if they are finally able to see each other, as if they are finally allowed to look.

  “I like to call them roving blackouts,” she says. “It sounds like an eye in the sky, like somebody watching.”

  “It’s technically correct,” Terry says, and then he starts talking to a man at the end of the bar and before long a man at a table tells them it’s a squirrel, that a squirrel has chewed through a power line and this blackout may last awhile, until they can string a new line.

  At home, Terry takes a joint out of his wallet and presses it into her hand. “Should we smoke it?” he asks.

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “Amber gave it to me.”

  “I’m tired of saving things,” she says, wondering when she gave it to him, if he paid her for it, and if so, how. Darcie resumes her seat on the couch, looking out the window. Terry sits next to her and she leans over and bites down on his shoulder until she’s sure her teeth marks will remain there for some time. He never tells her to stop or makes any sound at all, just waits patiently until she is finished doing whatever she’s going to do.

  He lights the joint and takes a drag, passes it to her. It burns better than the joints he rolls. She takes one more drag and he smokes the rest, leaves the roach in a glass candleholder. And then he’s talking about the time he fermented alcohol under his bed, paying twenty dollars for a pint of Blue Bell; he tells her about studying for his college degree and the guards who proctored his exams even though they weren’t supposed to because he was on closed custody.

  “I knew a lot of good people in prison,” he says. “A lot of good people. I hope I never see them again.”

  And then the stories take a bad turn, as they always do, and he’s telling her about the time a guard split a man’s head open while they were on their knees, how that man was taken away and no one ever saw him again. He stands and paces, lights their last cigarette. She extends her arm, her fingers making a peace sign, opening and closing, and he passes it to her.

  “You have to let it go,” she says. “There’s nothing you can do about it so you have to let it go.”

  “I know,” he says. “You’re right, I know.”

  “I’m serious. You have to.”

  “I know,” he repeats. He walks over to the stove and opens the cupboard, takes out the flask. He unscrews the cap and drinks, offers it to her. She takes it and drinks and passes it back and he puts it away. But then he takes it out again and they pass it back and forth until it’s gone.

  Terry really believes the apocalypse is coming. She’d thought it was just a game they were playing, but it’s not—he believes the end is coming because he wants it to come. When everything goes to hell, his skills will be useful again. He’ll be high-ranking, not only carrying out decisions but making them. He’ll adapt and flourish, which are things he’s been unable to do in the straight world. They are also things she has been unable to do. Her friends from home are married, two children in. She can’t talk to them anymore because they don’t tell the truth: they tell her childbirth is beautiful and marriages only grow stronger; they ask her opinion on countertops and patio furniture and dishware, things that don’t mean anything and yet they seem convinced of their importance.

  They fall asleep on the couch watching a terrible low-budget show about skateboarders talking about skateboarding. When she wakes up, Terry’s in bed. She would like to sleep beside him, but he twitches and says things loud enough to wake her and then she wakes him because he’s woken her, because she doesn’t like to be awake alone.

  Darcie recalls bits of her dream—someone had broken into their apartment. She can see the man’s eyes. She gets up and checks the locks on the door and then goes to the bathroom to brush her teeth. She tries to recall other things—where she was when she first saw him, how she would describe him for a character sketch. If she had to describe someone for a character sketch, she feels certain the man would never be found.

  In this dream she woke up before he could get to her, but lately she’s begun to die: the bad guy catches her; the gun go
es off; she falls and doesn’t wake before she hits the ground. She recalls a recent one in which she stood over her body outlined in chalk, a detective with his small pad taking notes. She went to her mother, who confirmed it. “You died,” she said, “and we buried you, but you came back to life.” Darcie told a few people about the dream just in case, so they could say she had predicted her own death, so they could say she had seen it coming. To know something’s going to happen is almost like agreeing to it, she thinks, crawling into bed next to Terry.

  ALWAYS HAPPY HOUR

  “Are you going to take off your clothes when you go inside?” the boy asks. I have my usual swimsuit on, the white one. I have always wanted a white bikini and now I have one. The boy is in the shallow end in his Superman Speedo, the alligator Crocs his mother bought him that he refuses to take off.

  “Little pervert,” Richie says, squeezing the cherry from his cigarette, flicking his wrist. “Don’t ask her questions like that.”

  I wrap a towel around my waist and go inside, walk the darkened hallway back to his mother’s guest room and take my suit off. I put my dress back on—bra, no panties—and open the closet to look at his marijuana stalk: it needs another week to dry. I could steal it, I think, but he would give it to me. I don’t really want it, anyway; it just seems like something that would be neat to have.

  The boy wants tacos for dinner so Richie drives us to the store, the boy in the back strapped into his car seat. He seems enormous for a car seat, his long legs kicking.

  It’s cold around the meat and dairy cases. Richie pushes the cart and the boy and I walk on opposite sides of it, watching as he fills it with fish, steak, tortillas, sour cream, and onions; a box of Coronas, avocados, tomatoes, two different kinds of cheese, chips and salsa—more than we need, enough to waste. I cross my arms and suck the water out of a chunk of hair. In the checkout line, I put a Diet Coke in the basket and the boy hands me a candy bar and I put that in the basket and then he hands me a pack of gum and I tell him to put it back and Richie gets out his wallet. He always has a wad and he peels off bills. He has no job, no income; he has no debit card so he has to go to the bank during regular business hours to withdraw money.