Always Happy Hour: Stories(2)
She drags around a feather on a stick, turns to look at the cats: they stare at her without blinking or averting their gaze. She puts the feather in the male’s face, drops it to his nose, and he paws at it a few times before giving up. She kneels and crooks her finger at them like her boyfriend does. They come forward to bump her with their foreheads and she gets into bed, feels the small hairs tickling her face. They climb around her purring, louder and louder, and she wonders if she could put them in her car and take them to her apartment. Cats don’t travel well, she recalls her boyfriend saying. They scream and shit everywhere.
She has no pets, has never had a pet, and her boyfriend was sorry for her when she told him. She didn’t tell him that her family was poor, that she’d collected frogs and snakes and turtles from her backyard, which she’d let die in jars and shoeboxes. She’d once put half a dozen frogs in a dollhouse her mother had bought at a garage sale, closed it up and watched them through the windows. Of course he knows she grew up poor. When you grow up poor, even if you do everything thereafter to be not-poor, there’s no way to shake it completely. She likes to read about lottery winners, how desperately they go about losing everything so they can get back to the state at which they are familiar.
She looks at her open suitcase on the floor, her purse and backpack and tennis shoes. Her MacBook Pro, only a few months old. The other times she’s been at his apartment without him, she was waiting for him to come home—he was going to show up at any minute and they would have sex and watch movies and scratch each other’s backs. They would talk and laugh.
She walks over to his closet and takes out the leather coat that cost him seven hundred dollars, tries it on. It barely zips. Her boyfriend is small. She puts her hands in the pockets: empty. She’s always asking him how much things cost, how much he paid, and he hates this about her. She knows he hates this about her but it only makes her do it more.
In the event of my untimely death, she thinks—no, not untimely—unlikely.
She picks up the male, also smaller than his female counterpart, the one she has decided she likes least. The cat struggles and then allows her to carry him into the kitchen. She sets him down and takes the packet of treats off the counter, shakes it. It’s full of dried bits that look just like their regular food. The female comes slinking into the kitchen as she pours the bits onto the floor saying, treat, treat.
When they have finished the bits and sauntered off, she opens the refrigerator, checks the expiration date on a container of cream cheese. It expired more than four months ago but the milk is good, as are the eggs. She makes herself a drink with his Uncle Val’s, carries it into the bathroom and sets it on the counter while she pees, the female watching her from just outside the door. Though she and her boyfriend spend nearly every night together, she has never come upon any evidence that he does anything in the bathroom other than take a piss. The whole thing is very curious. She has begun to listen carefully, turn down the volume on the TV. She goes in there right after him to see if she can smell anything. Nothing—there is never anything.
The cat approaches her, warily, and knocks her razor off the edge of the bathtub. The blade pops off and she yells and the cat hightails it under the bed. She searches but can’t find it; she is certain that the cat has swallowed it and this makes her feel miserable because her boyfriend knew she would need instructions; he knew she would fuck it up somehow.
She tries to lure the cat out from under the bed. She lifts one corner of the mattress and the cat moves to a safe area while the other watches. She moves from one corner to another, lifting the mattress as she looks for the blade, but it is nowhere. She gets back into bed and sips at her drink. When her boyfriend makes himself a cocktail at home, it always goes unfinished. He forgets about it until it’s too watered down to drink and then pours it out. She wants to see if she can do this: a test. If she doesn’t finish this drink, she will win. Other than the cats, the only other thing under the bed is a gun. Her boyfriend said it was loaded and the safety was off, that she shouldn’t touch it unless she was prepared to use it. He showed her how to open the barrel and take the bullets out, but she forgot as soon as he put it away. It’s like CPR class, no matter how many times she’s certified, she wouldn’t be able to save anyone’s life.
Her boyfriend calls, says he is one hundred miles from lovely beautiful San Francisco.
Do you want to live with me in California one day? she asks.
We’re going to crush California, kid, he says. We’ll have the breeziest house with the biggest windows that face the sea. I’ll bring you fresh-baked bread every morning and then get out of your hair.
When are you going to get your tattoo? she asks.
Tomorrow, he says.
Before he left, he went over each of his tattoos with her, telling her what they meant and why he’d gotten them. One of them says CARPET inside a human heart. It didn’t always say CARPET—it was a girl’s initials and his choices were limited. There are a lot of literary allusions. When he was young, he had a Gertrude Stein poem tattooed on his back but now it’s covered up with a bull and bear fighting: the bull appears to be winning but he said that neither ever wins; they are perpetually locked in battle. There are references to Proust and Nabokov and L. Frank Baum. And then there are all of the small ones that remind her of her high school notebooks, the margins filled with stars and four-leaf clovers.