Always Happy Hour: Stories(30)
I chew my straw between sips and look out the window at the people walking by. Some of them stop and open the door, look around before turning and going back out. There is only so much time before they have to get back on the boat and it must be spent wisely. His mother picks up a menu and we look it over: chicken fingers, hot wings, cheeseburgers.
“It’s like Dave & Buster’s,” I say. “The hot wings come with blue cheese and the chicken fingers come with honey mustard.”
“Except there aren’t any games and everything’s more expensive,” my boyfriend says, and I smile because he’s paying. I lace my fingers through his and he adjusts our hands; he has ideas about hand-holding.
“I could have another,” I say, slurping the ice, but we have wine and champagne on the ship. The champagne is warm but we could ice it down in the sink, which is tiny and silver like in an airplane. Everything is too small except for the bed.
He pays and we walk back, still holding hands, arms swinging. He kisses me on the side of the mouth and it makes me want to have sex with him but his parents are in the cabin next to ours, and we don’t have the porn or the egg-shaped vibrator we use at home. I use the vibrator in the morning after he leaves for work and think about having sex with him and it is better than the actual sex, which is confusing—how thinking about a thing can be better than the thing.
We show our IDs and the guy welcomes us back on board. Then we navigate the hallways until we find the right elevator. It’s day four and I’m starting to learn my way around; it makes me want to stay longer despite the fact that I get seasick, that we have to eat dinner every night with his parents. We say goodbye to his mother and open the door to our cabin and she opens the door to hers and we hear his parents talking. I know what they’re saying without being able to hear: he asks what we did, if we had fun; she asks if he lost any money, how much.
“We should start fucking really hard right now,” I say, “like we just couldn’t wait.”
I jump on the bed and he opens a bottle of red wine, pours us each a plastic cup. I like plastic cups, though. They don’t break.
“The headboard banging,” I say, rocking back and forth so it knocks gently.
“Stop that,” he says.
I pick up the towel shaped like a monkey, a pair of my sunglasses on its face. I fling it open and they go sailing. Every day it is some new towel animal on the bed.
He takes off his shoes, his shirt. I take a sip of my wine and set it on the table. Then I pick it back up and take another sip. I don’t like his parents and don’t pretend to like them. It is nothing against his parents, in particular.
“What time is it?” I ask.
He looks at his watch. “Four forty-two, there’s a clock right there.”
“Bingo before dinner. It’s so cliché.”
“Well,” he says, “people like bingo. And you can win a lot of money at bingo.”
“I never win anything.”
“Everyone says that.”
“No, seriously—I’ve never won anything in my life.” I think about whether this is true or not and find that it is. “I won a necklace at an auction once but I had to pay for it. It cost me like four dollars.”
“You have to tell yourself you’re going to win. You have to imagine the money already in your pocket.”
“I do that sometimes but when it doesn’t work it’s even more depressing. I’d rather know I’m going to lose and then, if I ever win, it’ll be like a sign or something. It’ll signify an important shift.”
My boyfriend won this cruise in a slot tournament. He still had to buy our plane tickets, though, and rent a car to get us to the departure point. And then there are the bottles of wine and the drinks in tourist bars and other incidentals like Carnival tank tops, things I want just to see if he will buy them. I look at the letters stretched across my chest, the C already begun to peel, and wonder why I chose pink.
“I guess I better get dressed,” I say, taking another sip. I place the cup between my thighs so I don’t have to reach any farther than I have to. “Oh—did you find any weed?”
“Shhh,” he says, looking at the wall. “I got enough for one joint. I’m going to smoke it tonight.”
“What if it’s laced?”
“It’s not laced,” he says.
“How do you know? You bought it from a stranger with a towel on his head.”
“A turban. Don’t be racist.”
“I’m pretty sure it was an actual towel,” I say. “When I was in college I had this striped terrycloth dress and I wore it all the time, like I was a kid. I didn’t even want to take it off to wash it.”
He goes into the bathroom and I pour myself another glass because I’m on vacation, because soon I will have to go to bingo with his parents and eat dinner with his parents and I’ll have to smile and be polite, which are things I do anyway but I don’t like feeling like they are required. I turn on the TV, which is playing the same movie we watched last night, and then get out of bed and look through the closet. I brought five dresses, one for each night. Before we left, his mother told me I had to wear dresses in the evenings because the dining room is semiformal, but the last cruise she went on was in the early eighties, when cruises and airplanes were still for the well-off.