by Mary Miller
FIRST CLASS
We flew first class. We were drinking Perrier while the other passengers boarded. I looked at them and thought, peasants, as they bunched together with their overlarge carry-ons, bumping into each other and apologizing. Whenever Shelly and I went anywhere, it was always first class. We stayed in the best hotels. We ate in the best restaurants and she always paid. I had been hesitant about the arrangement at first. I’d offered to pick up tabs, pay my own way, but for Christmas she sent me a pale blue box from Tiffany’s with a note that said All my bitches have this necklace. It was the nicest piece of jewelry I owned, a small diamond X.
Shelly won millions in the lottery; at the time, it had been one of the largest wins in history, though she’d had to split it with four of her coworkers (the press labeled them “the Super 8 Five”). Because she’d never had money before, she didn’t know what to do with her wealth except spend it. She bought houses and cars and plane tickets and spent a lot of time ordering things online. She loved Costco and Target, which made her think of herself as unaffected. She didn’t keep up with the other women but sometimes she Googled them to see if they were dead—one was dead, had died in a single-car accident a year to the date after the win.
It was the curse of the lottery, she’d told me on numerous occasions. Within seven years, 70 percent of winners were broke; there were stories of home invasions, murders, and suicides, and Shelly liked to follow them all. She thought she might write a book about it someday, a book that told her story, maybe even get in touch with the remaining members of the Super 8 Five.
This was the only thing I knew for sure about rich people: once the money was yours, it didn’t matter that you hadn’t earned it, had done nothing to deserve it; it didn’t matter where it came from.
“We have to get you some new clothes,” she said. “I’m tired of looking at that dress.” When she tugged the hem, I noticed a wart on my knee. It had started out as a cut from shaving—I was sure of it—but I hadn’t noticed the transition from cut-to-wart take place.
“I like this dress,” I said, crossing my legs. “It’s my favorite.”
“I’m going to put you in a skirt. You never wear skirts. How come you never wear skirts?” And then she asked whether we should order mimosas or Bloody Marys. She liked for us to drink the same thing at the same time, though I always drank twice as fast and three times as much. She liked for me to do things when I was drinking, things she would never do.
When the flight attendant came by, I ordered a greyhound.
“Me too,” she said, and I knew I’d displeased her.
Our relationship was affected in every way by her money; it was also affected by her looks, though she claimed she’d never felt beautiful because she’d grown up with acne and bad teeth, things that had long ago been remedied. Her adolescent sufferings made me want to connect with her, made me think we might eventually like each other in the way we claimed to in our emails and on postcards.
She offered me half a pill and I swallowed it without asking what it was: a benzo, I assumed. She put the other half back in her case, an opalescent gold-rimmed shell with a delicate clasp.
I touched the shell and said, “So pretty.”
She tucked it back into her makeup bag and nestled her purse between us. She gave me so much and so freely that I was a little annoyed when she didn’t give me everything I wanted. This was another problem with rich people: the more they gave you, the more you felt you were owed. It didn’t make any sense—I knew she didn’t owe me anything and yet I really felt like she should give it to me. And though she was generous to a fault, if I finished a bag of her Cheetos or smoked too many of her cigarettes, she was annoyed. One time I took her magazines down to the beach without asking and she didn’t speak to me for the rest of the day.
She clutched my hand and closed her eyes. She hated takeoffs, which was most often when things went wrong, she told me, takeoffs and landings, as if this were knowledge particular to her. She pictured the plane exploding: boom, nothingness—you wouldn’t even have time to come to Jesus. I took the opportunity to stare at her profile, her lips moving, cheeks flushed. Did she get filler in her lines? How did her skin stay so smooth and unlined even though she was a thirty-eight-year-old fair-skinned blonde? My other blond friends had begun to wrinkle in their mid-twenties, were sad when they got pregnant and had to forgo their Botox regimens.
Someone farted and I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. And then the guy across the aisle opened a can of tomato juice and that smell blended with the other. He poured the juice into a cup of ice and swirled it around as if it were a fine wine before taking a sip. When he was done, he unwrapped a sandwich, something beefy and horrible, and I was disappointed because I thought things should be different in first class.
Shelly switched us over to Bloody Marys. She asked for extra olives and celery, extra everything, which I also wanted but didn’t ask for. I was jealous—she had a side cup full of veggies, fat green olives with their little spears—but I couldn’t bring myself to ask for one of my own even though the flight attendant was right there and ready to serve me. I tried to recall how long I’d been off my daily anxiety medication and whether it was possible that this had something to do with it. I didn’t think this kind of thing would have bothered me before. By all accounts my transition off meds had gone smoothly but I’d begun to notice small things: I didn’t strike up conversations with strangers as easily or smile at them; I didn’t ask for things as readily at restaurants and many of the tables felt too exposed. I was beginning to be afraid again.
. . .
The hotel was bright and modern.
There were two bedrooms, each with their own private bathrooms, and a sitting area with a fireplace. There was a balcony looking out at the water. Everything was spotless but Shelly had brought along a package of disinfectant wipes, saying she’d seen an episode of 20/20 in which they’d done tests and found that shitty hotel rooms were no more dirty than the expensive ones—fecal matter everywhere. Everything she said was obvious and boring. Of course nice hotel rooms were just as dirty; rich people weren’t any cleaner than poor ones. They might be neater, more conscious of hiding their evidence, but they weren’t cleaner. I recalled the last hotel I’d stayed in, a four-star with my parents on the coast, and how I’d just settled into the bath when I noticed streaks of blood above the waterline. I’d stared at them for a long time, considering whether they had been smeared there on purpose—they certainly looked purposeful, three fingers’ worth—and how the cleaning lady had missed it. But I hadn’t called housekeeping or wiped it off or anything. The following day I took a shower.
I counted the nights I had to be with her: four. It seemed like forever and I wondered how I’d found myself in this situation when I promised myself every time it would be the last, swearing that I wouldn’t put myself in her debt again, but here I was. She had her ways. She spaced the trips far enough apart for me to forget how miserable they were and so far in advance that I could imagine they wouldn’t ever happen, or we’d be different. But each time we were the same people who fell into the same roles and by the time the trip was over we hated each other. I had no idea why she kept planning them. It seemed a sort of sickness.
I sat on the couch and changed channels while she cleaned, the smell of lemony chemicals. Then I went to my bathroom and washed my face, took the toiletries out of my bag and placed them around the sink. There were fancy soaps and shampoos and mouthwash, Q-tips and cotton balls in silver containers. I cleaned my ears but they were already clean. I squirted some lotion into my hands and rubbed.
“I need a fan,” she said, when I resumed my place on the couch. “I can’t sleep without white noise.”
“You usually bring that little machine.”
“Derek uses it.”
“No prob, Bob.” I called housekeeping. After a guy brought the fan and she took it to her room, she had me call again for toothpaste and then extra pillows—she nee
ded at least four pillows if she was alone. She gave me tip money and I answered the door to the same guy each time: well over six feet tall and slightly too thin, handsome. If he was annoyed, he didn’t let on. He called me Ms. Nugent, my friend’s name, and I didn’t correct him. Between his first and second visits, I put on lipstick. Between his second and third, Shelly suggested I blow him; she would give me five hundred dollars to blow him. I changed into a short strapless dress and imagined blowing him.
“Thank you,” I said, as he put the pillow in my arms. It was oddly intimate. Five hundred dollars, I thought. What I might do with five hundred dollars.
In a different context, he might have been my boyfriend. I had a boyfriend but I couldn’t stop myself from wanting others. It was a pattern. I’d start thinking about something small, like how my boyfriend didn’t cut his toenails but enjoyed pulling them off with his fingers, among other shortcomings and failures, terrible things he’d once said or done in anger or passion, and then I’d wonder how I could ever be with this person, just the two of us alone together in a house for years. What would we say after a while? I couldn’t imagine any scenario in which we might be happy. I guessed the one thing I couldn’t understand about life was why no one seemed to be with the person they loved most in the world.
Shelly opened the fridge and took out two mini-bottles of white wine. She handed me one and we clinked them together.
“I bet he had a really big dick,” she said. Then she said she needed a bath and went to her room and closed the door. We both loved baths and never showered. It was one of the things we had in common.
I took her pack of Davidoff Superslims and went out to the balcony. She always had cigarettes, though in all the years I’d known her, I’d only seen her smoke a few times.
There was a sign in the room that said smoking wasn’t allowed anywhere on hotel grounds—there was a $250 fine—but if I was caught Shelly wouldn’t mind paying. She would probably be happy to pay a fine and would enjoy telling people that we had gotten into trouble. Like many people who’d grown up without much that suddenly found themselves with more than they could spend, she seemed desperate to return to her original state. Every six months she put on a dress and met with a man who gave her figures and charts and tried to talk to her like a father. She was spending too much, he said, the money wouldn’t last forever at this rate. She told me she’d been happy before the money and would be happy without it, but I couldn’t believe this at all. What would she do? Go back to cleaning motel rooms? I wondered how much was left and how long it would last and whether Derek would stay with her if she was broke. I imagined her back at the same Super 8: highlights grown out, looking her age and older, old. I didn’t want to see that. I had genuinely liked her at some point, many years ago.
I lit another cigarette and watched the smoke blow to my left. I could hear people to my right and tried to make out what they were saying but they were speaking in voices too low to hear.
They were angry; people liked being angry. They liked fighting and making up and feeling like a button had been reset, like they could start fresh, or perhaps it was just one more nail in the relationship coffin and another step closer to done. I wondered what people were doing in this hotel, which is what I always wondered in hotels, or when traveling, in general. Why had they come here? Were they happy? It made me think of my honeymoon and how I’d cried and told my husband that the marriage had been a mistake and then he’d cried and said maybe it had been and it made us feel better. We’d stayed together seven years.
Soon Shelly would be finished with her bath and we would go to the CVS where she’d buy kitschy ashtrays along with her junk food. She’d buy t-shirts and postcards that said MIAMI in different-colored letters. These trips, more than anything, were about proving that she traveled and had friends. She’d sent me postcards and T-shirts from all over the world. I wore one of the shirts often: ARUBA, it said, thin and slick between my fingers because I’d washed it so many times. On the occasions I’d worn it out of the house, people asked me what Aruba was like and I said it was a beautiful place with very pretty women, that we’d rented a Jeep and driven from one side of the island to the other, climbed to the top of the lighthouse. I told them that my boyfriend left the hot young cleaning lady large tips every morning even though he was cheap and had never tipped a cleaning lady before.
I texted my boyfriend, told him I’d arrived safely. I asked if he wanted to see a picture of my bruise. A little over a week ago, I’d fallen down the stairs and bruised my left thigh; it had spread and the colors were glorious.
I don’t need to see the latest, he wrote back. You know what I like. I did know what he liked; he was very forthcoming about what he liked. Around the house he liked for me to wear shirts that barely covered my ass. He also liked it when I baked cookies. I sent him a picture of the bruise anyway, which looked ugly and more horrible than it did in person. He didn’t respond. Then I went back inside where Shelly was standing in front of the TV in her bikini bottoms.
“I need you to help me apply this tanner,” she said. “I meant to get a spray-on but ran out of time.”
All she had was time. She didn’t work. I had time, too. I was in my third and final year of graduate school, was older than all but one of my classmates.
I had seen her breasts on a number of occasions but I always liked to see them again. They were round and nice but her nipples were too dark. I liked pale nipples, nipples one shade darker than one’s skin color, like my own. She handed me the mitt and the foam and told me to rub it in good.
“Do you want me to do you?” she asked, when I’d finished.
“I don’t think so.”
“We need to be tan,” she said.
When I was around her, I felt heavy, short. I wasn’t heavy or short but she was tall and wore heels that made her taller and never gained weight despite her diet, which seemed to consist solely of candy bars and chips. I thought of it as an endearing trait, her love of processed foods. And though she ate these things, she counted every calorie, had figured out how to do it without gaining a pound.
“Okay,” I said, “you can do me.” I pulled my dress down and hung it on the back of a chair. I raised my arms and stood with my legs apart.
“Jesus,” she said. “What the fuck is that?”
“I told you I fell.”
“I didn’t know it was this bad. Jesus,” she repeated.
“I know. It’s awful, isn’t it?”
“Does it hurt?”
“Only when I touch it. I hope it heals okay.”
“Well,” she said, and I could see that this bruise, which really was huge and horrible, had depressed her. We weren’t going to look as good in our bikinis as she’d hoped. And I was sure I was fatter than the last time she’d seen me. Every time, I convinced myself I was fatter than the last time she’d seen me.
She rubbed the tanner in thoroughly, gently, not just on and around the bruise, but over my entire body. “Maybe this’ll hide it some,” she said. “It’ll be fine.” I hated self-tanner, the way it smelled, the way my ankles or knees always looked wrong. I thought of a crime show I’d watched in which a man claimed his wife had an allergic reaction to a self-tanner and it had killed her. It was so preposterous that many people believed it, at least until they’d gotten all of the test results back.
We waddled around with our arms flapping, legs spread, and then I slipped my dress back on and she began to take pictures of herself. She was always taking pictures of herself and posting them to her Instagram. Most of them appeared to have been taken by someone else and I often wondered who was behind the camera, if she had a tripod she set up. She looked sexy in these photos, hair falling in her eyes, lots of skin. I hardly ever posted new photos or took them or even agreed to be in them because all of the personas I put on felt wrong. I didn’t feel sporty or nerdy or sexy. I wasn’t pretty or ugly enough, fat or thin enough. Eventually I wouldn’t need to construct any persona at all. I would
just be old.
She went to her room to get ready. I tried to read one of the books she’d mailed me months ago. She was always passing along her favorite books, telling me what movies to watch and music to download, but recently I didn’t want to read or listen to or watch things I hadn’t read or listened to or watched before.
The book had an unattractive cover of a lady in a big coat holding a bird. I turned it over and read the blurbs again. I read the author bio for the third or fourth time and stared at her picture. It was a picture she’d used for decades.
“Are you ready?” she asked. She looked amazing and effortless, but I knew she had carefully planned this outfit, perfectly casual yet nice enough to wear to a fancy restaurant. It was all a performance and it was all for me. I was wearing an unfamiliar bra that dug into my side fat and the slutty dress. I’d forgotten to pack my knockoff Spanx so I had to stand up as straight as possible and suck in my stomach but my makeup looked pretty good. My boyfriend said he liked natural women, but it wasn’t really what he liked—it was only what he wanted to like. Perhaps it made him seem like a nicer guy to himself.
We went down to the hotel bar and took the last two stools, opened the enormous drink menu between us. We had to hold it right next to the candle to read it.
“Let’s order something tropical,” she said. “Pineapple or mango.”
“I’ll have whatever you’re having.” I wondered how many times I’d said this in my life, but people were always ordering things I wanted. It was better this way.
Our drinks came. We toasted Miami and told each other “We’re in Miami.” This was also part of it—we would remind each other where we were and how beautiful and exciting it was, how nice it was to be away from home, even though nothing ever seemed exciting or beautiful when we were together. I wished we were in Las Vegas. In Las Vegas, no one expected you to gamble with them; you could slip away to the bathroom and be lost for hours.
I dipped my fingers into the wax while she watched, horrified. I blew on them and then lifted each one off, carefully, lined a little wax family up on the bar. It reminded me of the sticker people and pets you saw on the backs of vans and SUVs.