by Mary Miller
“I want to go to DASH and see Kourtney,” she said. “She’s my favorite.”
“You have a favorite?”
“You don’t?”
“No.”
“Come on,” she said.
“I guess Khloe seems like the most fun?” I very much doubted that we would be seeing any of the Kardashians. If they ever were in the store, it was probably closed.
“We have to buy something there—maybe we’ll find you a skirt.”
“I’m not crazy about skirts. You have to have something to go with it. You have to have like an outfit.”
I always bought stuff on these trips because Shelly didn’t like to be the only one buying things. On our last trip, I’d paid eighty dollars for an oversized tank top with a studded star on the front.
“The men are all looking at you,” I said, craning my neck around. Perhaps if she thought she was the most beautiful woman in the bar she’d be in a better mood.
“They’re looking at us. They probably think we’re lesbians.” She pretended to whisper something in my ear and then tossed her hair and laughed.
She had dated women, had been in love with women, but said she was never sexually attracted to the ones she knew well or considered friends. And she would never end up in a long-term relationship with a woman. Women were for fun—they weren’t actual prospects—who would take out the trash and do the taxes and whatever?
“This drink is really strong,” she said. “I think I’ll get a glass of wine.” I’d finished mine so I started drinking hers. She gave me a squinty-eyed look and said, “I still might drink it.”
She didn’t want me to have the things she wasn’t going to use; she would rather throw them away. My sister had a rich friend who took all her old clothes to Goodwill, often with the tags still attached, rather than give them to her friends. What if she saw my sister wearing a shirt she’d bought and decided she wanted it back? She would realize it was cute and she ought to wear it, that she had made a mistake. My sister also went on trips with her rich friend, but she paid her own way.
We were hungry so we ventured out to find something to eat. We weren’t the kind of travelers who researched things beforehand, and neither were we the kind to engage strangers in conversation about where we might go. We walked past hotels that looked a lot more fun than ours, young people laughing on patios, music playing. Shelly always picked the nicest but beigest places, where all the old white people stayed. She liked to be the most attractive person wherever she went and coordinated her life to make this happen as frequently as possible. She didn’t seem to understand that she would be the most attractive person wherever she went. She didn’t need to surround herself with geriatrics.
After some back and forth that grew increasingly unpleasant, she walked into a restaurant and I followed. We were already annoyed with each other and the vacation had just begun. When it was over I would be exhausted and fragile. My tan had turned out well, though, the best fake tan I’d ever had.
While we ate, we settled on a neutral topic that seemed to put us both at ease—her son—it was always hard for me to believe she had a child and had raised him nearly into adulthood. He would be going away to college next year and she was already devastated. He had a girlfriend named Sarah that he was sleeping with. He played baseball. I’d seen a movie where the men come and go so frequently in a mother’s life that a boy throws the ball to one man and it’s returned by another, but I couldn’t remember the name of it. Over and over, the men changed: a clean-cut guy in a suit turned into a plumber and then a hippie and then a college professor. I imagined this was what her son’s life had been like, at least when he was younger. She’d been dating Derek for a number of years now but wouldn’t marry him; he had asked on several occasions and she’d said no, offering him feminist reasons that neither of them believed. To me she said she didn’t think she was “in love” with him anymore, that she wasn’t sure she ever had been. She said when her son was gone, perhaps she’d get rid of all of it: the man, the house, the city, and start over. We had this in common, too. I just had less to disassemble.
. . .
When I got in bed I was a little drunk. I piled the pillows around me and thought about how comfortable it was, how soft the sheets. Then I called my boyfriend to tell him I was having a terrible time.
“That’s why I never go anywhere,” he said. “People say they like to travel but then they get somewhere and just want to go home.”
“Not everyone,” I said.
“Well,” he said, “you do, every time.”
“It’s hard to fully appreciate home unless you leave it.”
“Not me,” he said. “I know what I have here.” I imagined him looking around his living room. He was on the couch with a bowl of popcorn, an action movie paused mid-fight scene. Maybe he’d have an ice cream cone before settling into his king-size Tempur-Pedic. He was by far the dullest man I’d ever been with. “I’m happy here,” he said, “I don’t have to go anywhere else to be happy.”
I told him that was nice and said good night, goodbye. We didn’t say I love you and I wondered if we ever would; every day we didn’t say it seemed like one more reason we should never say it. We’d been dating close to a year. I liked him most when we kissed, but only the closed-mouth kind when we pressed our lips together hard.
I turned on the TV and searched for something that might be interesting enough to hold my attention, but not so interesting that it would keep me awake. Something I had seen before. I fell asleep watching Back to the Future Part II and woke up with it still on, remembering my dream. There was a man and his wife and another lady, all of them middle-aged and dowdy. They were in the lady’s house, getting ready for church. The man and his wife said cruel things to each other while the lady put on her makeup and then filled a to-go cup with coffee. The lady said that maybe she and the wife could spend the day together after church? Leave the man on his own? And the man agreed. He said his wife had never had a friend in her whole life. And that was it, the entire thing. It was so on-point that it wasn’t like a dream at all.
I woke up at eight o’clock and went back to sleep. The later I slept, the shorter the day would be. I awoke again at nine-thirty and read a few paragraphs in the book with the bird lady before running a bath.
I was dressed and ready to go at eleven when Shelly finally emerged from her room and suggested we walk to Starbucks. Like Target and Costco, Shelly also loved Starbucks. She got angry when people talked badly about any of these companies’ market shares or poor business practices because how far did it go? Should we only buy from places that sold products that were made fairly and responsibly? That paid their workers decent wages and were environmentally friendly? Because, if so, there’d be nowhere to shop and then what? She was a smart person but she had difficulty with degrees.
We walked around with our coffees, peering into store windows. I was slightly hungover and one coffee wouldn’t be nearly enough. She wouldn’t drink all of hers but I couldn’t have it.
“What do you feel like doing?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I’m not sure yet.” I didn’t know anything about Miami. I’d just gotten on a plane with a suitcase full of bikinis and flimsy dresses and less than thirty dollars in cash.
“Maybe we could go to the zoo,” she said. “I bet there’s a good one here.”
“I don’t want to do that.”
“Why not?”
She liked zoos and I didn’t and we had a short but ugly conversation in which I told her about a couple of pandas I’d seen at the zoo in Atlanta, slumped over barrels and panting in the summer heat, how I’d wanted to shoot them in the head to put them out of their misery.
We stopped at CVS and she bought mini-Snickers and Doritos and Sprite Zero, two bags of gummy worms, three ashtrays and ten postcards and two T-shirts and three magazines and a four-pack of lip gloss in the cool family. She considered a bunch of other things and I stood there and looked at them with
her. This was how she spent her days, going from one place to another to buy mass-produced items she didn’t need.
When we got back to the hotel, she went to her room and shut the door. I heard her on the phone with her boyfriend so I opened a bottle of white wine—it was so cute—and sat on the couch, waiting for her to come back out. I waited a long time, nursing the bottle.
“Want to go to the pool?” she said, emerging in a stars-and-stripes string bikini. It reminded me of the Coca-Cola one-piece I’d worn as a child.
“Sure. Everything okay?”
“He’s being a dick.” Usually I loved hearing the awful details of people’s relationships because they made me feel better about my own, but I felt sorry for Derek. “He hates it when I leave.”
“I know,” I said. “They can’t do anything by themselves.” My boyfriend was fine by himself. There he was on his couch, everything within reach.
Since she was originally from South Dakota, she didn’t mind that it was windy and 68 degrees, that we were the only ones in our swimsuits. The sun was shining and that was enough. There was a guy selling hamburgers and drinks at the poolside bar.
“Hello, ladies,” he said. “Can I get you anything?”
“No, thank you,” I said, averting my gaze. I really had to go back on my meds. I vowed to do it as soon as I got home.
He said to let him know, that he was there for the duration. Shelly caught my eye and winked.
“Cute,” she said. “You should fuck him.”
I smiled as though it was a possibility. We situated our magazines and bottles of white wine and I thought about how I would associate them with this trip long after it was over because I never drank white wine at home, and certainly not in these little bottles. She hadn’t opened hers yet. I would just watch it perspire. On the last trip we’d taken, we’d ordered cheeseburgers and fries from room service one night and she’d removed her bun and eaten exactly half of the fries. And that was the real difference between us; she had a very complicated system she adhered to without fail no matter how she felt. She did, however, confess to crying a lot and I never cried. I couldn’t remember the last time I cried. I didn’t understand criers or how I could be one of them and if the crying might substitute for some of the bad feelings and the bad things I felt compelled to do because of them.
The wind picked up and then the clouds covered the sun. I put my shirt back on. I looked over at her, still and thin in her American bikini, one arm above her head so her ribs were more prominent. In New York—our last trip—two of her other bitches were with us so it had been easier; I wished they were here now. There had also been museums and streets crowded with people, places to get lost. The clouds gathered and gathered and then it started to rain and there was nothing either of us could do about that.
Back in our room, I went out to the balcony and smoked her cigarettes and wondered why I didn’t have my own. Why I hadn’t pulled out more cash before getting on the plane. Why I got myself into situations I didn’t want to be in and then stayed in them for so much longer than was necessary. Did I just like to torture myself? And, if so, what could I do to change this? I checked my account balance on my phone and called the airline, but I’d done this numerous times before and already knew that the cost of the changed ticket would be comparable to the price of the original, which would be more than I could spend. I hung up before I connected with a human. I would have to wait this one out and remember this feeling when she asked me to go somewhere the next time, as she would, even though it seemed impossible, ridiculous. She didn’t like me and it was hard to like someone who didn’t like you. Or I didn’t like her. Or we were too similar or too dissimilar or it was just a bad match. It didn’t matter. I fingered the small diamond X around my neck, which I never wore at home, and tugged on the chain. Then I tugged a little bit harder. It didn’t break and I was glad of it. In movies people chucked their wedding rings into the ocean and their cell phones out of car windows, but I’d never heard of anyone doing this in real life; in real life you held onto things as hard as you could because you knew how difficult they were to replace.
CHARTS
“I’m going to marry him,” my sister says, standing in my kitchen. I don’t want her in my kitchen. I wonder if she can feel me not wanting her in my kitchen.
“Do you love him?” I ask.
“He’s wonderful. He loves me so much.”
“That’s not a reason to marry him.”
“No,” she says. “It’s not.” She takes the Lean Cuisine out of its box and tosses the frozen entrée onto the counter. “But that’s not the reason.”
I unwrap my burger, scrape a corner of cheese off the waxy paper. I’ve found a whole system that allows me to eat the things I want and not get fat. I worry. I weigh myself every morning, before coffee, after I go to the bathroom. Sometimes I throw up. I’m underweight by some charts.
She stabs a fork into the plastic for ventilation, presses buttons on the microwave. I want to say, Forget that, let’s go out. I want to link my arm through hers and go traipsing down a dark alley, half-drunk on tequila, but I’m not this person. I thought I could be once, by moving to another city or meditating or doing any number of other things. Try pretending, the books said, act for long enough and eventually you won’t have to act. It’ll just be who you are. I once met a girl who wrote these books, a ghostwriter. Her case studies were her family members; she did her research on the internet.
I use a napkin to remove the excess mayonnaise, leaving a fine layer on the bottom half of the bun. I remove the onions and pickles and a thick, pale tomato—a winter tomato an ex-boyfriend used to call any tomato that wasn’t bright red and bleeding, the only thing left on his plate.
My phone rings; it’s our mother. I hit decline even though it’s the second time she’s called today and she panics when I don’t answer twice in a row—she thinks I might be dead—but I talked to her yesterday and felt bad about myself for an hour, at least. The thing I hate most is how I can never recall what she’s said that upset me so much. I try explaining it to people and I’m the one who sounds like an asshole.
The microwave dings.
“Have you talked to Mom today?”
“Yesterday,” she says, “I called her from the airport. I usually call her when I’ve almost gotten to the place I’m going so I can’t talk long.” She hops onto the counter with her tray and looks out the window. It’s how I eat when I’m alone. There’s a lot of counter space and the backyard is full of pecan trees and squirrels, neighbors moving behind the slats of my fence. I like to watch the squirrels bury their nuts. I like it when they catch me watching and give me a long hard look like they will fuck me up if they have to. I paid for this house with my divorce money: two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and an office. A backyard. A big open kitchen connected to the den and plenty of light. I still can’t believe it’s mine. I feel like I’m house-sitting, like the owner will be back any minute and will be disappointed because the plants are half-dead and there are dirty socks everywhere.
“What should we do later?” I ask.
“I have to meet some people for a drink,” she says. “It won’t take long. You’re welcome to come.”
My sister has more friends in this town than I do. I don’t know how it’s possible, seeing as she’s never lived here. I only know one of them, her freshman-year roommate, Leah. We’ve run into each other a few times. She’s tan year-round and wears loose clothes and jangly bracelets.
“That’s okay, I’m pretty tired.”
“What are you going to do?” she asks.
“Watch Mad Men, probably.”
“I haven’t seen it.”
“It’s really good, you should watch it.”
“I’m too busy to get into a series right now,” she says, and sighs like her busyness is something she doesn’t want, though she has always loved creating errands for herself, making plans with too many people in a day so she never has to be alone.
; She twists her hair on top of her head and it stays there, a great big knot.
My sister and I are both adopted. She looks like our parents—blond and tall and large-boned. No one would ever know she was adopted; people can’t believe it when they find out. They say, But she has his nose, her mouth. She even walks like them.
My skin is olive; my eyes are shaped like almonds. At thirty-three, I finally like my olive skin—it hasn’t wrinkled like my sister’s. My forehead is smooth and unlined. I only have the tiniest beginnings of one crease on the left side of my mouth. I must smile crooked or something. There are other things: I never had acne; my standardized test scores were always higher. No matter how much smarter I am, though, how much better, I’m the one who doesn’t fit.
“I could eat like four of these,” she says, hopping off the counter and stepping on the trash can’s pedal. She drops the tray in and opens the refrigerator. “Do you eat every meal out?”
“Not every meal.”
She opens the freezer, closes it, and looks at me. I can’t stop noticing her left hand, which is calling attention to itself in a way it never has before. Her diamond is large, princess cut. As a teenager, she bought wedding magazines at the grocery store, kept them under her bed in great dusty stacks. Sometimes I looked at them with her and we’d pick out dresses and cakes, but I never pictured a man attached to any of it. And then I got married at twenty-two while she went on to get advanced degrees and travel the world, making friends all over. She even taught in South Korea for a year.
The man my sister is going to marry isn’t good enough for her. He seems like a guy you might pick up at Target, the kind who took a break from shopping to sit in a plastic booth and eat popcorn. It’s not that she’s gorgeous or anything, but she’s magnetic. If she were on a TV show and America had to vote, she’d win. She’s got star quality, they’d say. She’s got that “it” factor.