Ultraviolet

by Suzanne Matson

  The whole family used to go to Reno and Lake Tahoe for vacations, her father’s idea originally. But her mother loved it, and so they all came to like it. They’d drive from Portland to Klamath Falls to Susanville, California, where they’d stop for the night. Susanville air smelled burnt and Susanville water tasted odd, but that was part of what made it a trip. The next day they’d be in Nevada, driving across sagebrush desert until passing under Reno’s Biggest Little City arch to spend a couple of nights at their favorite motel with the turquoise pool. While their parents gambled, Samantha and her brother stayed back to cannonball at the pool and loaf in the air-conditioned room, watching reruns of The Beverly Hillbillies and Green Acres. Then when their parents came back, glamorous in sunglasses, exhilarated in a way Steve and Samantha never saw them at home, everyone rested delicately in a moment of happiness that was unusual for their family. Somehow when gambling with her free nickels their mother usually beat the house, and she’d pour her winnings—three or four or five dollars—on the bedspread, saying “Share the wealth, everybody!”

  Their dad would be up or down from playing blackjack. If he were up, he’d peel off a few ones for each of them. Sammy and Steve would sort the winnings, in nickels and ones, into two respective piles to spend at the gift shops. When they swam in the pool in the afternoon, their father read the newspaper under the shaded table. The kids played Marco Polo around their mother doing laps in her pink one-piece suit and flowered rubber swim cap. Her mother was terrified of high blood pressure, and always did fifty laps before she was ready for the buffet with its glistening beef and rows of cake squares.

  On the way to Lake Tahoe they’d stop at Virginia City to walk the planks of the wooden sidewalks and look in at the saloons and general stores. Even though Virginia City was just a tourist ghost town, being there made their dad expansive and pleased. He came from a place in Montana that was now a real ghost town, nailed-up buildings and rotting timbers, and though you could visit nearby Red Lodge, he said there was no longer anything to see in Scotch Coulee, where he’d grown up. Over frosty mugs of root beer in the Silver Queen Hotel, he’d tell his stories again: about his horse Betty, his dog Shep, being a trap boy in the coal mine, catching rabbits instead of going to school, making his own skis out of chokecherry limbs. The Silver Queen was a ceiling-high portrait of a lady with an interesting smirk whose strapless dress was made up of thousands of silver dollars minted in Carson City. Every year Samantha took a picture of her on her Kodak, though the lady never changed.

  In Lake Tahoe, they’d take the tram up the mountain to Heavenly Valley or swim in the glass-clear waters of the lake. They’d make an excursion to the Ponderosa Ranch and go horseback riding and eat a chuck wagon supper and drink orange pop out of tin cups they’d get to take home. All of this had been repeated yearly, and rather than do it again as half a family, her mother had decided that she and Samantha should fly to Las Vegas, something new.

  That first afternoon, they nap in their cool, gold-and-ivory hotel room. Her mother appreciates the small soaps and shampoo and shower cap; she loves anything that’s free. Samantha isn’t used to hotels with interior hallways and high-rise floors. They’ve always stayed in motels with their own front door to the outside. Always there would be kids running around in the parking lot and family cars loaded with pool toys. Here they are on the twelfth floor, with a window that doesn’t open, looking out to a parking garage and some hazy mountains in a shimmer of heat. The pool is on a rooftop on the sixth floor. This is where Samantha will establish base, reading and plotting her future, working on her tan for the first day of school.

  It’s not so bad being in Las Vegas with her mother. The next day they breakfast in the casino downstairs, watching the gamblers over the partition as if observing the wildlife on safari. In the slot machine area, at ten in the morning, it’s just the retirees with their eyeshades—the men with striped polo shirts over big stomachs, the women in pastel shell-and-slacks ensembles, with silver perms and low, white dressy sandals. At Samantha’s age, she can only observe this perimeter, can’t penetrate the real Las Vegas with the green gaming tables and the back rooms. She would have loved to have watched her father play blackjack, see what he’d show on his face when calling for cards and flipping over busted hands.

  Samantha marks her mother’s free keno card of the day, imagining the clothes she will buy with the cash, but it doesn’t win. Everyone here is dreaming of just one jackpot. The thing about her mother is that her discipline—risking little to none of her own money, stopping when she is ahead by five dollars, never playing anything but the nickel machines—guarantees that the most she’d ever walk away with would be a twenty-dollar jackpot. Which she did win once, legendary now in her memory, and which she kept in a carefully separate envelope until she found just the right bathing suit on sale. The jackpot suit.

  At the pool that afternoon there is a boy her age who watches her. She pretends not to notice him as she strolls to the coffee urn in her yellow two-piece and makes herself a cup with three sugars and a lot of cream. She doesn’t really like coffee, but likes the mixing of it, especially here by the pool where it gives her the opportunity to move into the shade, survey the scene, and show off her newly dieted body, ready for dance team season. If she shows up in the fall above last year’s weight, she’ll be fined a quarter a pound at every Monday weigh-in. She has big sunglasses on, so she doesn’t think the boy can catch her looking. From this distance, he looks cute.

  She brings the coffee back to her lounge chair where her book, The Bell Jar, and her bag have marked her territory, and arranges herself on her stomach so she can equalize her tan.

  She feels him approaching, a pair of furred shins presenting themselves in front of her. She looks up over her sunglasses.

  “You didn’t offer me a cup,” he says, adjusting the adjacent lounge chair and sitting on it, elbows on knees.

  He’s not bad, his brown hair wavy, his body bronzed and lean, but his eyes are not what she would have wished—spaced too closely together and the gaze somehow flat. Also, the smug tone. And the accent: Russian?

  “No,” she says.

  “Well, I might like some. Especially, to drink it with you.”

  “It’s over there.”

  “So I see. Thank you for the invitation.”

  He crosses the pool deck to mix his own foam cup.

  After a chubby childhood wearing glasses and suffering through her mother’s haircuts and home permanents, she was surprised to gradually realize that she had some potential with boys. The summer before sixth grade she had grown faster than she had eaten and was suddenly slim. In seventh grade, she had insisted on growing her hair long and straight. In eighth grade, she had fought her mother to get contact lenses and paid for them herself with babysitting money saved over many months. The summer before high school, after a day working in the berry fields, she climbed on the rattletrap field bus, twenty crumpled and juice-stained dollars in the pocket of her cutoffs, and a boy she didn’t know said, “Hey, Blondie, sit here.” She didn’t, she followed her friend Kathleen to sit where they always sat, but she marveled silently on the ride back to their neighborhood: Blondie! And she wasn’t! She was sure she had brown hair—light brown, yes—but maybe the summer sun had done something, changed something. Maybe she was changed?

  Then the braces her mother had scrimped and saved for came off. At high school dances, the boys, warm and damp in their collared shirts, gave off soap and deodorant odors in the dark. One boy carried on shy conversations with her at her locker, and thrust a ribboned package at her before Christmas vacation freshman year, his face twisted with embarrassment. Then, sophomore year, she had her first real date with a boy who could drive and took her to the Organ Grinder, a pizza restaurant where a player piano tinkled all night while silent movies played on a big screen, giving them something to look at when they ran out of things to talk about.

  This boy’s name is Yuri, and his family
did emigrate from Russia a few years ago, and he is neither shy nor at a lack for things to say. He is traveling with his father on business, from L.A., and he talks fast and with a confident sharpness, like she imagines a father in business might.

  “Ever been there?”

  “Disneyland, once, with my family.”

  “Of course!” His laugh is mocking. “You Americans go to Disneyland and think you have been to a real place.”

  “Wherever people go is a real place,” she says with irritation. She could have added how parents are more likely to fight about money at an expensive place like Disneyland. How whole vacations are poisoned by angry silence, and how that feels especially unbearable on Main Street, where every themed character wears a fixed smile. How some kids who have been brought to Disneyland actually just want to go home.

  “You are a philosopher.”

  “No.”

  “Observer, then.”

  She shrugs.

  He picks up her book and reads the back cover. “She is a poet?”

  “Yeah.” She doesn’t want to talk about Sylvia Plath with him.

  “And you?”

  “I don’t know. Not really. Sometimes. For fun.”

  “In my country—my old country—we honor poets. But poets don’t make money, you know.”

  “So no writing poetry for you.”

  “Money interests me.”

  “Well, most of us.”

  He waves this away. “There are those who do something about it, and those who don’t.”

  “How are you going to make it?’

  He exhales thoughtfully, seeming to appreciate the question.

  “Ultimately? Real estate. That is where the killing can be made.” His eyes narrow on the word killing.

  He tells her about the Mercedes he will own, the particular model and its features, and she begins to think it’s not worth her time to keep listening. She’s been gratified by his interest, but she isn’t required to be bored. She shifts a little, making a motion to gather her things.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I think I’m getting too much sun,” she says. This much is true. She normally tans just fine, but the sun here is fierce, ready to destroy you.

  “No, no, you just need some lotion. Here, I will do it for you.” Without asking he picks up her bottle of Coppertone and squirts some on his palm. He waits for her to lie back down.

  “No, really. I’m going to meet my mother for lunch.”

  “Lunch? It is only eleven thirty. Not time for lunch. Stay fifteen more minutes. We are having such a good chat together.”

  His hand in the air with its dollop of suntan lotion is waiting for her to comply.

  She can do whatever she wants here. She’ll never see him again. It’s not like the minefield of school hallways where you have to be careful who you hang out with because of the talk.

  She flattens back down on her stomach and pulls her long hair out of the way, leaving him her back.

  “Is a very good thing I’m here. You didn’t cover all spots properly before. There is pink by the straps.”

  Gingerly he slides the straps off her shoulders. She tenses, then relaxes under the circles he is rubbing, small ones, then larger. His hand moves to the strap encircling her back, and hesitates.

  “You want that I undo this? To have no line?”

  “No!”

  “Okay, relax. Some girls, they hate the lines.”

  He puts more on his hand and moves it over her ribs, the small of her back, around the upper edge of her swimsuit bottom.

  “You want that I do your legs?”

  She is a mix of sleepy and tingling. It feels so good she would gladly have him do her legs, her arms, everywhere, except she knows where this is intended to lead. And she doesn’t even feel particularly attracted to him. And it seems wrong that a boy she knows nothing about and will never see again be the one to touch the back of her legs when no other boy has. Not the arrogant trumpet player she had had a crush on whose house she detoured by on walks to school last year, hoping to see him. Not the sweet speechless one she didn’t have a crush on who had given her the necklace at Christmas with the tiny pearl hanging from a gold-filled chain.

  “No, thanks. I already did that. I can reach there.”

  “Okay, done.”

  Now she thinks he is mad at her, and even though she doesn’t want to care, she cares a little.

  “Thank you.”

  “It was my pleasure,” he says, with a courtly tone that makes her giggle a little. Is she being stuck up? A prude?

  “Tomorrow I go,” he says sadly.

  Even though she’d been wondering, she dared not ask, in case it would make him think she was interested.

  “Which means tonight we should go do something,” he says.

  “Like what? Everything here is for adults. I don’t even know why I came here with my mother.”

  “No, no, there are clubs where we can dance. I know about them. One is even run by a friend of my father, and he will let us in.”

  “My mother would never let me do that,” she says.

  “Bring your mother! My father’s friend will give her a drink on the house. We’ll just dance. Who knows, maybe your mother will dance too. I will dance with her,” he declares.

  Samantha is too aghast to laugh. Her mother at a club! Her mother who is still married to her father! But she wonders; is that what her mother’s life will be after the divorce? Going out, having a drink bought for her? She is okay-looking for a mother: trim figure, dark-rimmed rectangular glasses. Short dark hair with a little pouf on top. She’s an exercise fanatic because her mother, Samantha’s grandmother, died of a stroke when she was fifty-two. Her mother is fifty-three now. She drinks, sometimes, one cocktail or glass of wine in an evening. Rarely two, and never three. When a casino gives her a drink coupon, or comes around offering a house drink when she’s playing the slots, she orders orange juice. Or if it’s the end of the day, and she has swum her laps and is having dinner and not driving, a single whiskey sour.

  “My mother is married.”

  “Why is she here, then?” At her silence, he says, “No, never mind, that was rude of me. Listen. Better idea, I will come to your room at nine, meet your mother. She will not be able to say no to me, I guarantee.”

  Samantha laughed. “You think.”

  “I know.”

  “You give me your room number. I’ll call if we’ll do it.”

  He pouts. “You won’t call.”

  “You never know.”

  “You won’t.”

  He is wrong to count her out, Samantha thinks. She doesn’t know what she might do. She has, in her bureau drawer at home, two pads of dismissal notes that she stamped with the office approval when she was working this summer. She and her best friend, June, will fill them in separately—dentist appointments, doctor appointments—and show them to teachers. June is class president and Samantha runs the literary magazine. They get straight A’s. The teachers won’t look twice at their slips when they tell them they have to leave early. June will borrow her brother’s car. They might go to the mall, or to the lake. But they have in mind other things, too—downtown things—like going to lunch at Hamburger Mary’s, where they’ve heard some of the waiters serve in drag and the creamers are baby bottles with the nipples cut off. Or they might go see an afternoon matinee of Deep Throat at the Blue Mouse theater, where it has been running for four years. There’s no telling, really.

  Back in her room she has vicious stripes from the sun. Her front, her face, is bright red; she wonders if Yuri noticed, outside in the bright light. She showers in cool water, the spray needling her painfully, then rubs Noxzema into the redness. What a disaster if she peels. School ID pictures will be taken on the first day. And now what is she to do with herself during the rest of the vacation?

  She lies on her back on the made bed, not even bothering to turn on the t
elevision or pick up her book. She’s still like that when her mother lets herself in a few minutes later, and gasps at the sight of her.

  “I know,” she says.

  “Didn’t you feel it?”

  “No.”

  “Did you put lotion on?”

  “Yes.” But really, she thinks she didn’t. She dived in the pool after breakfast and was pleasantly wet and cool and must have dozed on her back for a couple of hours.

  “Well, you can’t go back out there today.”

  “Duh.”

  Her mother goes to the bathroom to wash her hands and doesn’t speak. That last bit of sarcasm could set off a silence that will last two days if she doesn’t remedy it immediately.

  “Sorry,” Samantha says.

  Her mother looks at her coldly.

  “I’m just mad at myself,” Samantha says. That will do the trick, she thinks, self-blame, and she’s right. Her mother comes over and sits on the side of the bed.

  “You poor thing.”

  Over lunch downstairs in the coffee shop, Samantha tells her about Yuri’s invitation.

  “Is the boy nice?”

  “Really? That’s what you want to know?”

  The waitress sets down Samantha’s Tab and her mother’s ice water.

  “It’s not strange that a boy invited you out.”

  “No! It’s strange that he invited you out. I told him you were married.”

  “Not really.”

  “What do you mean? You’re really married until you’re not married. That’s the way it works.”

  “I mean it’s not a marriage anymore, and it’s about to be finished in every sense. Get used to that idea. Anyway, what do you think I’d do? I’d be there to look after you.”