“Could I have another glass of milk, please?” I asked sweetly, tapping her on the arm with one hand as I waved my empty glass with the other.
Despite the chilly service, I liked it at the New England House. With its natural pine tables, Windsor chairs, exposed floors, evergreen-colored walls and faux fire in the fireplace, it was a sight more comfortable to eat my Cocoa Krispies there than it was back in our tiny ill-colored kitchen. Plus, it was nice to be spending time with Hillary, being just us two girls again.
“So,” Hillary said, after Ms. Cheerful had departed to fill my milk order, “you spent the night at Billy’s place. Then you slept with him?”
“Well, no,” I admitted, and then I went on to explain what happened, a recitation that ended with my repeated self-pronouncement of “Loser.”
“You are so not a loser,” Hillary said.
“Then what do you call it?”
“I call it that Billy’s a gentleman. I call it that he respects you too much to sleep with you for the first time when you’re too inebriated to know what you’re doing.”
“I wasn’t that inebriated! I knew I wanted to do it!”
“I call it that he wants to be sure it’s what you really want, that you won’t have any regrets in the morning.”
“I do have regrets in the morning—I regret I didn’t sleep with him!”
“I think he’s just too much of a gentleman,” she said again. “He wants it to be just perfect for you the first time.”
Her worldview seemed at once practical and romantic, like Billy was practical enough to keep a clear head about the way he wanted things to be and romantic enough to want them to be a particular way.
Still, a part of me, the part that was used to working with Conchita and Rivera, couldn’t help but channel what their reaction to all this would be:
“If he really wanted you so bad, chica,” Rivera would say, “he wouldn’t be able to stop himself.”
“He’d have that little pecker in you so quickly,” Conchita would say, “you’d be spinning like an acrobat on Brazil Day.”
Of course then they’d both point out to me how wrong Billy was for me.
“Do you think Billy is wrong for me?” I asked Hillary.
“It’s not important what I think.” She stabbed a cream-enshrouded peach with professional conviction. “It’s important what you think.”
“I’m not asking you for psychologist-speak,” I said, exasperated. “I want your honest opinion. As my friend.”
“I’ve never really talked to Billy, so how can I honestly say?”
“Well, I’ve never talked to Biff, not really, but I can tell he’s right for you. I’ve never seen you so happy. You’re right, you must be in love.”
“And are you in love with Billy?”
What a ridiculous question! Hillary was like the scared person seeing shadows everywhere, only in her case she was the romantic in-love person seeing love everywhere. Still, I thought about it. I certainly wanted to be in his company again. It was thrilling to be in his company, to be the object of that glow he gave off. And, too, I wanted the chance to show him that I was the kind of woman who was as much fun outside of the casino as in it, the kind of woman who was worth jumping heedlessly into bed with, practicalities be damned.
“I just don’t know,” I said.
“Then you’re not,” she said, amending, “at least not yet.” Then she glanced at her watch and quickly knocked back the rest of her coffee, rising from her chair even as she did so. “Gotta run.”
“So soon?”
“Biff said he’d only play nine holes this morning. If I rush I can be back at his place just in time to meet him at the door in my nightie.”
So much for the modern career woman—a psychologist, no less—refusing to cede her personal identity by subsuming it in service of a new relationship and becoming a cliché.
“Aren’t you going to finish your waffle?” I called after her.
But she was gone.
“Check?” Ms. Cheerful materialized at my side.
Considering I’d only had two glasses of milk, twenty-five dollars seemed like a lot to pay for breakfast, but I paid it and even tipped well. The doctor, being Hillary, may have been out, but while she’d been briefly in at least she’d convinced me that I was so not a loser.
“Only losers have nothing better to do than go visit their aging dads on a beautiful Saturday,” my dad said when he finally answered the door.
I’d been pounding for five minutes. His car was in the drive, so I knew he had to be there; Black Jack Sampson never walked anywhere, not even down to the mailbox. As minute after minute of pounding passed without him answering, I’d grown concerned. What if something bad had happened to him? What if he’d had a cardiac episode, like Elizabeth Hepburn, only in his case he had no live-in Lottie to call for help on his behalf? What was the last thing I’d said to him? I couldn’t remember.
So it was particularly insulting, having passed through that crucible of worry, to be greeted so rudely.
“What took you so long?” I said. I took in his disheveled hair, so atypical of him, took in his bathrobe. I’d never seen him wear a bathrobe in the daytime. It was a nice bathrobe, plush crimson, but still…“Only losers wear bathrobes in the middle of the day,” I said, trading insult for insult. Hillary would probably say I was exhibiting hostility as a means of repressing the concern I’d been feeling a moment before. Then I wondered: when most people wear bathrobes in the daytime, it’s because they’re either sick or depressed. Black Jack didn’t look sick. He looked too healthily annoyed at my being there to be sick. So maybe he was depressed? Maybe he’d been on another losing streak, one so bad it had caused him to retreat into the depression of plush velour? “What’s wrong?” I asked, all concern now.
“What do you mean, what’s wrong?” he challenged, still not letting me in.
“It’s just that you’re wearing a bathrobe in the middle of the day,” I said.
“Oh. That. I have to go to work in a little while—” ‘going to work’ was the euphemism Black Jack always used for ‘gambling’“—so I figured, why change twice?”
Why, indeed.
“What are you doing here?” he asked. “Don’t you have anything better to do with your weekend than spending it with me?”
What was with the hostility?
“Can I come in?” I asked.
“Well, no, I mean, oh, why the hell not?” He held the door open.
“Gee, thanks.”
“I was just going to grab a quick bite before getting ready for work,” he said. “Cocoa Krispies?” he offered, waving the box at me. Black Jack never ate them himself, but he did keep a box on hand for me.
“Well, no, I already…” Then I stopped myself. In order to counter his hostility, I figured it was important to be as companionable as possible. Besides, who can’t eat a second bowl of Cocoa Krispies? “Sure, why not?” I said.
Black Jack poured me a bowl, then popped some toast for himself into the old toaster as he waited for his coffee to brew.
“So,” he said, “how long are you staying for? You never said why you’re here.”
I munched my dry cereal. It was really good.
“Did you ever notice how much time people spend just eating and talking? Sometimes, it feels like that’s about all we people ever do.”
“Is that what you came by for—to offer me your philosophical analysis of the banality of human experience?”
“Do I need a reason?”
“No, you don’t. But what is it anyway?”
“I just wanted to spend a little time with you. I missed our regular get-together on Monday night—”
“We never got together every Monday night.”
“—and then when I tried to see you on Thursday, you said no to that, too. I just missed you, Dad.”
“Aw, that’s sweet.”
“Plus, I figured that, while I was here, maybe we could play a few hands of
cards. Maybe you could show me—”
“That’s a terrible idea!”
“What?”
I didn’t get it. Sure, I’d been at loose ends, but mostly I’d stopped by to give Black Jack a mercy gamble. True, when I originally told him I wanted to start gambling, he’d been resistant to the idea, but I’d never heard him turn down a chance to play in all my years growing up in his various houses. And, hey, wasn’t I one of the boys now?
I said as much.
“I just think it’s a bad idea to overdo a thing, Baby, that’s all,” he said.
“What?”
I knew I was beginning to sound like a broken record, but what was this fresh insanity of which he spoke? Black Jack had overdone things for as long as I’d known him. Overdoing things was how Black Jack came to be known as Black Jack. What was stopping him now?
“C’mon,” I said, “it’ll give us something to do other than talk and eat. We could just play a hand or two—”
“I said no, Baby.” He gulped the rest of his coffee. “Now I really do need to get ready for work. Why don’t you show yourself out?”
I finished my Cocoa Krispies, took my bowl to the sink, rinsed it out. I was fully intending to obey his instructions to show myself out—I swear, this was the last time I’d pay a mercy-gamble visit unannounced!—when I decided to tidy the kitchen up for him a bit, so I washed his dishes, too. Over the sound of the running water, I could hear his voice talking in the bedroom. I turned the tap off.
“Did you want something, Dad?” I called.
“No,” he shouted back. “I was just on the phone. You’re still here?”
I dried my hands on the dish towel, straightened up the newspapers in the living room. He’d probably been studying the football spreads. My dad needed a woman to help straighten things out around here.
“You’re still here?” he said again, entering.
“I was just…” I stopped, then gasped, “What are you wearing?”
He had on navy-blue pants, a white shirt and navy-blue tie. His black shoes shone and his navy-blue hat with the badge on the front sat perkily on his hair. Even his mustache looked freshly combed.
“I told you I had to go to work, didn’t I?” he said grumpily.
“Yeah, but as what?”
“Stop looking at me like that, Baby. Haven’t you ever seen a security guard before?”
Oh, crap. Black Jack must have finally lost everything.
When I got home, the answering machine was blinking red that there had been one call. Even though it was just one, that blink was somehow very insistent. When I hit playback, I heard The Voice.
“Baby, it’s Billy. I have to work tonight and I was hoping you could come with me. I figured I could swing by your place on the way and we could ride in together this time. If you’re there, pick up…Oh, well. Guess I’ll just have to hit Foxwoods without you, see how I can do on my own without my talisman. I’ll call you tomorrow, let you know how I made out.”
Click.
Later that night, lonely at home without Hillary, I fell asleep in front of the TV, empty Jake’s Fault Shiraz glass and unfinished fiendish Sudoku puzzle close by. I woke the next morning to two sounds: The Yo-Yo Man commercial on the television and Billy Charisma’s voice leaving another message on my machine. Too groggy to register what was going on, I watched the one while listening to the other.
How could someone who loved being a yo-yoist as much as Furthest Guy keep dropping his yo-yo all the time? I idly wondered.
“Baby, are you there? It was lousy last night without you. Without you, I’m nothing anymore. I lost…a lot. Are you there?”
“I’m here, Billy,” I said, picking up the phone. “I’m here.”
“Let’s set a date for the Vegas trip,” he said. “Let’s really do it. With you by my side, I know I’ll clean up. We both will.”
“Okay, Billy.” It felt good to be the one to make him feel better. “We’ll set a date. I’ll go with you.”
A part of me wanted to have a normal relationship with him, the kind that Hillary was having with Biff. I wanted to go to the movies together, hold hands, go out to dinner together, do more than hold hands, play Frisbee together in the park, have sex—I really wanted to have sex together—and fall in love; I wanted him to see the sides of me he couldn’t see in a casino and I wanted to see the same in him. But the other part of me said that somehow that could all be achieved by going to Vegas with him. Oh, maybe not the Frisbee-in-the-park part—I wasn’t sure they even had parks in Vegas—but certainly the rest could. I’d go with Billy, I’d be his talisman so he could win again, and I’d finally win enough to buy my Jimmy Choo Ghosts.
16
But before jet-setting off to Sin City, I had some living to get through. True, the casinos offered incredible air-hotel-chips package deals to anyone foolish enough to think they could beat the House, but it still cost too much to book air with less than twenty-one-day notice and I needed to save some cash for my stake.
“I’ll pay your way, Baby,” Billy said. “I’ll put it on my credit card.”
“No.” I turned him down. “I will not be a kept talisman.” I had to remain firm about some things. “Either we do this my way, or we don’t go.”
“What will we do in the meantime?”
“Date?”
“Ah, more foreplay. Well, I suppose I could just manage that.” I wasn’t sure if he was being dry-wit British witty or if he meant to convey it’d be a trial and was unsure if I really wanted that resolved so I kept silent.
Putting off the trip until October meant that I had yet to become Delilah Sampson, Exciting Casino Girl and was still simply Delilah Sampson, Boring Window Washer. This meant assuming the position at Stella’s beck and call as per usual.
“Not Mr. Clean!” I shouted, when Stella informed me whose house we’d be doing that day.
“Yes, Mr. Clean,” she insisted. Then she shook her head like a Himalayan cat shedding water. “I mean, Mr. Johnson. How do you always get me to call my customers by the ridiculous names you make up for them?”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “It’s a habit I picked up from my dad. He always has nicknames for people. He’s Black Jack, he calls me Baby, we used to have a neighbor he called The Man In The Rubber Shoes, his bookie was Two-Dollar Sollie, his best friend was Two-Brew Jew, one of his sisters was Slats, the other was Gold Star, if he met you you’d be—”
“I don’t care what kind of bizarre names your relatives have for people.” She cut me off. “Just stop doing it with my customers. I swear, one day you’ll get me so confused I’ll do it to a customer’s face. I’ll call Mr. Johnson ‘Mr. Clean’ or I’ll call Mrs. Smith ‘The Bitch’ and then we’ll all be screwed.”
Sheesh. That’s what a person got for trying to make the workplace more colorful.
“Hey,” I called over the back of my seat, “how come you two are so quiet today? We’ve been in the truck for a half hour and you haven’t even insulted me once yet. Is something wrong?”
“Shut up, chica,” Rivera said.
“Yeah, mind your own business,” Conchita said.
Sheesh. That’s what a person got for trying to make the workplace a more colorful place to be.
“Fine,” I said, “I won’t even tell you what kind of great nicknames my dad would come up with for you.”
“We already know, chica,” Rivera said. “He’d call us The Girls From Brazil. Just like you.”
“Yeah,” Conchita said, “you are just so clever.”
He would not call them that. I folded my arms across my chest. My dad was a creative man. He’d come up with something much better than that.
“Yeah,” Rivera said, “you and everyone in your family are just so clever.”
Stella glanced over at me and I raised my eyebrows right back at her. Translation: “What gives?” The Girls From Brazil had always sniped at me, but they’d never been so sour before. Stella shrugged. Translation: “Who knows?�
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Oh, well, I sighed. We’d figure it out later.
“So,” I asked Stella, “what do I do when Mr. Clean follows me around from window to window?”
“When Mr. Johnson follows you around from window to window, you let him.”
“And what do I do when Mr. Clean wipes out the window wells a second time after I’ve already made them spotless the first?”
“If Mr. Johnson wants to wipe his window wells all day long, you let him. They’re his window wells.”
“And when Mr. Clean—”
“Look, Delilah, I don’t care how eccentric Mr. Clean is. He’s got a little problem, okay? But he’s a good customer. He always pays his bills the same day—never makes me wait for it like some do while they’re on some kind of round-the-world cruise, as though the window washer doesn’t need to eat, too, while they’re eating round-the-clock buffets—and he even pays double because he understands that he expects a lot from us.”
“How can he miss it?” I snorted. “We always do him and his neighbor the same day. They have identical houses and his neighbor’s takes only half the time.”
“So? The man has got a problem,” she said again. “He just can’t help himself. I would think that you, of all people, would be a little more charitable.”
The problem, the way I always saw it whenever we did his house, was that Mr. Clean’s problems were mostly my problems.
True, at the beginning of each trip to his house, he’d spend a few minutes following Stella and the others around as they set up on the outside.
“Did you remember to bring the ladder mitts?” he’d ask each time, as though Stella could possibly forget his particular needs. “Did you remember the ladder mitts for all the ladders?” he’d ask anxiously, squinting up into the sky as Stella propped the twenty-eight-foot extension ladder high enough she’d be able to hop off and do his skylights; give Stella credit, when it came to heights, the woman had balls. “You know,” he’d say meekly, “I just don’t want to get any scratches on the paint job.”
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