Honestly, We Meant Well

by Grant Ginder

  She turned to her left, where a boy and a girl were sitting, smiling at her. He was wearing torn black jeans and a leather jacket, even though it was ninety-two degrees. She was more appropriately dressed—jeans, still, but paired with a tank top and heels. They could have been Will’s age, she thought, smiling back. Will’s age or older—twenty, or maybe closer to thirty-five. She had always been terrible at telling how old people were.

  She said, “Pardon?”

  The girl turned to the boy, and then back to Sue Ellen.

  “We … uh, we have a bet that you’re Swiss.”

  “American.”

  The girl smiled and the boy handed her five euros.

  Sue Ellen grinned, took too large of a sip of warm whiskey, and said: “I actually hate the Swiss.”

  “Yes,” the boy said. “They’re pussies.” Then he pointed to his friend. “Her father’s Swiss.”

  Sue Ellen leaned forward and began to apologize, but the girl stopped her.

  She said, “You don’t see me living in Zurich, do you?”

  What happened next? They exchanged names. He was George; she was Lena. They asked Sue Ellen if she was alone, and when she said yes, they bought her a drink—a rum and Coke, which she hadn’t had since she was twenty-two (incidentally, they were twenty-two); they wouldn’t take no for an answer. And then, because she didn’t want to seem ungrateful, she bought them both drinks in return. It went back and forth like this for an hour—Sue Ellen trading rounds with two people half her age. At first, she felt self-conscious: What must they think, looking at her? Here is a woman who lost her way. These insecurities soon passed, though. Around the third or fourth drink, she started feeling not so much anxious as just plain drunk. This was welcome; it distracted her. Whereas she had forgotten what it felt like to socialize with people in their twenties—the strangeness of their slang; the ways in which she could be intimidated by youth—she knew what it felt like to be wasted.

  “Sue Ellen.”

  Here was George, leaning toward her, his breath warm with rum.

  “Ti kánis, George. What’s up.”

  He smiled and set a lit joint in the ashtray between them.

  He said, “You like hash?”

  She looked at it for a moment, watching its ragged tip burn. Did she like hash. Yes, George, of course she liked hash. She had never been a puritan, and the notion that age somehow erased the need for vices was—at least to her—one of the more hilarious myths about growing old. Now, did she smoke hash? Did she partake in it with any frequency? That was a different question; she was, after all, a mother, someone bound by the burden of example. But then, were these her children? Did she owe them the same guidance? Looking at George, she tried to imagine Will sitting in front of her. They were about the same height, she figured, and carried themselves with the same lose confidence—an easy mix of fey masculinity (George, she had come to suspect, was also gay). What would she do if he were, indeed, her son?

  Picking up the joint, she decided not to think about it. She decided that here—free of her son and her husband—she would just get stoned instead.

  It turned out to be the right choice: ten minutes later, Lena suggested they go to a dance club, and the hash—God bless it—softened Sue Ellen’s judgment just enough for her to agree to tag along. First, though, she excused herself to the restroom. Locking the door, she ran her fingers through her hair, working out the knots, smoothing down the frizz. Reaching into her purse, she found some strawberry ChapStick, which she applied generously, until her lips took on a glossy, pinkish tinge. Then, leaning forward, she pouted and made a face—something, she thought, that approximated sexy. She winked at herself and laughed.

  The club was called Cinderella, and while this made her laugh, too, she did her best to keep her giggles to herself, using the crook of her arm to shield her face as she burst into periodic hysterics. Lena ordered the three of them a bottle of Johnnie Walker and two liters of Coke (this was, she explained, how things were done), and as she set about mixing their drinks, Sue Ellen leaned against a black wall and watched George dance among a scrum of sweaty bodies. He moved nimbly, his body rolling and gyrating to the thick beat of a song she thought she knew but couldn’t place—a remix or Abba, or some other Scandinavian artist whose music was particularly suited to a place like this. Above him, a hundred disco balls spun at varying speeds, their gilded surfaces tossing flashes of iridescence across his cheeks, nose, and thin, bare arms. The floor left her dizzy—a patchwork of different squares that lit up with the beats of the music; an endless barrage of green, blue, and red lights, against which George’s body would temporarily disappear, his flesh becoming shadow. Every so often he looked over at her and beckoned her to join him, and while she initially declined, by the third invitation she relented; she refilled her drink and she danced.

  It felt delicious. Even now, in the excruciating haze of the morning after, when each step she takes causes her head to feel like it’s about to explode, she can admit that: dancing felt delicious. The sweat dripping down her back, the way the hash made her limbs weightless, buoyant—it was heaven.

  Sue Ellen told George this. Swaying her hips toward him, she said, “George, this is heaven.”

  He looked at her and shrugged; the music was too loud, he couldn’t hear.

  So she tried again. She pressed her lips against his ear, and yelled, “THIS IS HEAVEN!”

  He shook his head and tossed back a few whiskey-soaked ice cubes.

  “No,” he said. “Heaven is in London.”

  This confused her, but Sue Ellen didn’t mind; she liked his nonchalance.

  “I HAVE A SON! HE’S ABOUT YOUR AGE!” She was still yelling, her mouth an inch from his cheek. “HE’LL NEVER BELIEVE I CAME HERE WITH YOU!”

  “Introduce me.” George bobbed his head from side to side, like he was waiting for a better song.

  “I SHOULD! I THINK YOU TWO WOULD GET ALONG!”

  “Probably. I like Americans.” Sue Ellen was smiling, and George reached out to tap her incisors. “They have nice teeth.”

  A woman passed behind Sue Ellen, jostling her and causing her to spill a few sizable drops of whiskey on her Keds.

  “GEORGE, I’M SO STONED!”

  “You can stop shouting now.”

  “George, I’m so stoned.”

  He leaned over and kissed her cheek.

  “Tomorrow we’ll go somewhere better,” he said, and looked down at their feet. “We could have gone tonight, but we’re not wearing the right shoes.”

  What did she say to that? She can’t remember now. All she knows is that she kept dancing and drinking whiskey-Cokes until finally it was four o’clock in the morning and George and Lena were screaming at each other in one of the club’s mirrored corners. She started to work her way over to them, scooting past couples making out with drunken ferocity, but she stopped once she was in earshot; the subject of their argument, it turned out, was her.

  “You always do this,” she heard Lena say. Her Greek was slurred and soggy, thick with a German accent. “You always fucking invite me out and then totally ignore me.”

  “You were the one who said we should come to Cinderella.” George poked an ice cube with his straw. He sounded bored. “I hate this place.”

  “That’s not what I mean.” Lena’s voice wavered, and she shook her head. Her eyes she had painted with dark, smoky mascara, and her lips were bloodred. Looking at the girl’s reflection in the mirror, Sue Ellen felt her own heart break. Lena didn’t know what she was doing; Lena was trying too hard.

  She said: “What I mean is that you’d rather dance with some random American in pants than hang out with me.”

  George tossed the straw to the ground and ate another of the ice cubes.

  He said, “I mean, you’re not that good of a dancer.”

  It was at this point that Sue Ellen thought about interjecting; as Lena fumed, she considered throwing herself between them to explain that (1) she was not some ran
dom American in pants, and (2) there was no need to fight, especially here in Cinderella—a club that, in Sue Ellen’s estimation, was the happiest place on earth. A moment later, she decided against it; watching them argue, she realized that this was a fight they’d had before and a fight they would continue to have. The drama of Lena’s neediness and George’s ennui would play out until, finally, he decided he didn’t actually like her and he stopped returning her calls. He would find new friends—other bored young men whose insecurities more closely resembled his own—and on the off chance that they ran into Lena, he would explain to them that they used to hang out, but that she had a crush on him and got clingy and weird, and she was never really that fun, anyway. They would nod and understand. Of course, neither George nor Lena could predict this, not now, in Cinderella’s fantasia of lights, where their youth elongated the present into a mythic infinity, a place where friendships didn’t crumble and sons didn’t leave and marriages didn’t falter. And so, Sue Ellen left. She let them have their fight and call her an American in pants, while—smiling—she slipped out into the blistering night.

  * * *

  The welcome reception the next evening begins at five thirty and is held in the restaurant on the Hilton’s roof. At Gianna’s request, Sue Ellen dresses nicely, trading in her khakis for a white sundress and her Keds for a pair of heels. She rides the elevator to the top floor, where she checks in with a Golden Age Adventures employee manning a registration desk just outside the restaurant’s entrance. She signs in and picks up her name tag, a sky-blue lanyard with a white badge that reads SUE ELLEN WRIGHT, PH.D.: SCHOLAR AND HOST.

  The restaurant is called the Galaxy, and its interior is futuristic—at least she wagers that it was once futuristic, back when it was first designed and the future was imagined to be a place bathed exclusively in neon purple light. She wanders through it, past knee-high tables and sleek white chairs, wobbling on her heels, wondering where everyone is until, finally, she turns a corner and discovers a glass door to the terrace—a wide, open expanse of the roof with a bar, a band, and seventy-five sweating seniors. They’re gathered in groups of four or five, and as she weaves through them, she picks up whiffs of their heavy perfume: patchouli, sandalwood, and cypress. There already seems to be a loose hierarchy, even in this early stage of the trip: the more seasoned cruisers are dressed in linen blazers and floral scarves, and talk exclusively about where they’ve sailed and the lines they like best (“Lindblad was a delight; Windstar, never again”). The first-timers, meanwhile, gather at the crowd’s edge. They wear wrinkle-free shirts and collapsible hats, and their conversations meander and stall: how long their flight was (“endless”), and the weather (“hot, but nothing like Palm Springs.”). Pushing deeper, past a woman in a pink vest and Velcro Eccos, Sue Ellen tries to remember if she’s ever seen this many old people in a single place. Both of Dean’s parents had passed away by the time they met, and when it came to her folks, they had insisted on dying at home. She had tried to persuade them otherwise—there was a senior living facility called Sunset Village in Tacoma—but they had been adamant (“Who says our sun is setting, anyway?”) and soon she stopped arguing. She acted disappointed; visiting them during trips back to Port Angeles, she would let Will run around the overgrown backyard as she pointed out to her father all the things that he and Sue Ellen’s mother might trip on, all the things that might break a hip.

  Now she wonders if she should have tried a little harder. At the very least, time spent wandering the halls of Sunset Village would have better prepared her for this—knobbed knees and swollen ankles and three wobbly walkers. Making her way over to the crowd’s edge, she hails down a cater waiter and, surveying his tray, plucks off a canapé—a piece of brittle toast topped with a euro-size round of watermelon and a square of dry feta. As she chews, she leans against the Plexiglas railing and does her best to look youthful, fresh. Still, she can’t seem to process the fact that she’s closer in age to the blue-haired horde before her than she is to George and Lena. It’s not as though she feels old. Which causes her to wonder: Do they? Are they shocked when they look in the mirror and are confronted with sagging skin and drooping ears? Do they feel betrayed by their sore feet, their heavy lungs, their uncooperative bowels? Or have they accepted that the war they’re waging with their bodies is one of attrition—a prolonged battle that they will inevitably lose?

  She’s thirsty, she decides—the sun’s been against her neck for the past ten minutes—so she makes her way over to a bar on the opposite end of the roof. She considers ordering a whiskey but quickly decides against it; last night’s Johnnie Walker is still there, clinging to the insides of her cheeks. Instead, she picks up the cocktail menu. Printed on a small placard, it advertises drinks with names like Persephone’s Party and Calypso’s Chantey. The bartender asks her what she wants, and she feels herself starting to panic: she worries that whichever drink she chooses, she won’t be able to say its name without doubling over in laughter.

  Finally, after ten seconds of dallying, she steels herself.

  She says, “Give me Hera’s Heartache, extra tarragon.”

  It turns out to be the wrong choice—a Long Island iced tea, but with the salty aftertaste of beef bouillon. Still, she drinks it and smiles at the bartender; it took him five minutes to make it, after all. Then, just as she’s about to retreat to her post by the railing, she hears a voice—deep, male—say her name.

  “Sue Ellen Wright?”

  Turning, she sees a man about her age, with a pair of aviator sunglasses and a shock of snow-white hair. He’s wearing a tan dinner jacket, and beneath it his white button-up is streaked with beads of perspiration.

  “Charles Winkler,” he says, extending a hand. “From the University of Richmond.”

  The drink has been sweating against her hand, which she wipes dry before taking his.

  “Charles,” she says. “Of course.”

  “Oh, don’t worry—we haven’t met before. I just—” He cranes his neck and gazes around the terrace. “They told me one other lecturer would be here, and you’re the only person who doesn’t look like the crypt keeper, so I figured it must be you.”

  “Ha.” She glances down at her name tag and shows it to him—proof of her existence. “Well, you were right. Here I am.”

  “Is this your first one of these things?”

  “It is, as it happens,” she says, nodding. “And you?”

  He laughs.

  “Me? No, I’m an old hand at this point.”

  “Oh?”

  “Mhhm. Last summer it was In the Steps of Odysseus with Viking, and then Virgil and His Contemporaries with Norwegian the summer before that.”

  He smirks and raises an eyebrow.

  “I’m becoming a veritable pro.”

  “Well…” She sucks down more of Hera’s Heartache. “Well, that’s really something.”

  Charles shrugs. “It’s not a bad gig, if you think about it. A few grand to drink shitty drinks and give a Cliff’s Notes version of the same lecture you’ve been giving for the past thirty years.” He swats a fly away from his nose. “Of course, this time none of us will actually be on the boat, but honestly—and take it from me on this one—that’s a blessing in disguise.”

  She shakes the ice in her glass. Fifty feet to her left, she sees Gianna, clothed in a black sheath dress and a pair of dauntingly high stilettos. She presses the tips of her fingers together as she bows, shallowly, to two guests—a couple in matching cargo pants, the pockets filled and sagging.

  She says, “I don’t know, floating around the Aegean on a yacht for a few weeks doesn’t sound half bad.”

  “You’d think that.” Charles laughs. “But you’d have a change of heart if you saw fifty geriatrics get norovirus in a span of two hours.”

  “That happened?”

  “Last year, about ten miles off the coast of Crete. Totally apocalyptic. By the end of it, there wasn’t a single working bathroom.” He nudges her with his elbow. �
�So, believe me—you’re better off on Spetses.”

  “Aegina,” she says.

  “Pardon?”

  “I’m on Aegina.”

  “Ah, yes. Aphaía and all that. My apologies.” There’s a silence, an empty space where Sue Ellen watches a man adjust his fanny pack. She considers plotting her escape.

  Charles sighs. “Well, this is what we are now, I suppose.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Oh, come on, Sue Ellen. You know what I mean. This is what our job is now. Acting as script consultants on rip-offs of Indiana Jones. Writing op-eds for newspapers about the importance of studying the classics right before the fall semester starts, even though we know that the real money is in computer science. Giving ten-minute lectures to a bunch of seniors who overpaid for a themed cruise: three neat facts about the design of the Acropolis. Education, like everything else, has become a pop commodity.”

  “I tend to disagree.”

  “Yeah?” He looks at her glass. “What’s that you’re drinking?”

  Sue Ellen swirls her straw. She doesn’t want to tell him.

  “A Long Island iced tea,” she says.

  “Really? Because mine’s called Zeus’s Zest.”

  Another waiter approaches them with a tray, this one topped with mini tortes stuffed with goat cheese. Charles takes two. Sue Ellen politely declines.

  She asks, “So what, exactly, are you proposing?”

  Charles makes a sucking sound, like he is slurping something off his teeth.

  “I’m proposing you find another one of these things next year, and then the year after that,” he says. “I’m proposing you drink all the alliteratively named drinks you can.”

  Staring at him, she wonders if she’s strong enough to toss him over the edge of the roof, and if she is, how long it would take him to reach the sidewalk.

  But she also knows he might be right; the futility of her job digging up old things in order to explain a world that no longer exists has recently been weighing on her more heavily than she cares to admit. She doesn’t have the bandwidth to consider the implications of that realization now, though—not tonight, when her brain trudges through a lingering hangover. Instead, she glances around the party, trying to find someone else—a lone straggler, nervous and fidgeting—who she might befriend. But as she scans the crowd, something else catches Sue Ellen’s eye: a girl walking in her direction, her wild hair pulled back into a loose bun, her hands working to smooth the wrinkles from an oversize blue shirt.