Always Happy Hour: Stories(31)

I choose a low-cut black dress I’ve had for two years but never worn. Then I sit on the bed and pick up the schedule, check to see what’s going on. There is a new schedule every day and I like to read about all of the things I won’t do. I like that there are options.

When he comes out, I have him tie my dress in the back, adjust my boobs before turning around.

“Wow,” he says. “How come you’ve never worn this before?”

“Because it’s for prostitution and cruising.”

“We’ll have to take more cruises,” he says, squeezing my ass, pressing me into him.


His parents are seated in a booth when we arrive, one of the dancers calling out numbers. I wonder if the dancers share rooms on the bottom level where the workings of the ship keep them up at night. I wonder if they have sex with one another or with the cruisers or if all sex is off-limits and there is a contract about these things. I imagine beautiful young dancers left at various ports of call.

“You look nice,” I say, touching his mother’s gold bracelet. She’s wearing a blue dress with matching shoes and bag. We sit and she tells my boyfriend he has to go up to the stage to pay for the cards and he gets back up and walks to the front. He has a confident but self-conscious walk: shoulders thrown back and chest out, looking straight ahead but smiling pleasantly like he might stop and chat with somebody at any minute.

His mother pushes her card between us and then a waiter comes and offers us small, free drinks because it’s happy hour. We all take one and his mom and dad scoot theirs into the middle of the table. They’re nice people, really, but I don’t have anything to say to them. His father was in Vietnam, like my father, but he’s the kind of veteran who subscribes to a magazine, who saved up the money to go back. My father’s brother died in Vietnam and my father hitchhiked across the country to visit him in the hospital but he was already dead. Then he had to go back to war.

“I love this dress,” his mother says, and I look at my boobs, which are large and pale and mostly exposed.

“Thanks. It’s not something I would wear at home, obviously.”

“The weather is supposed to get bad tonight,” his father says, smiling.

My boyfriend hands me a bingo card and I wonder where I put my seasick bracelet; it didn’t work but it was something—it made my wrist itch and pressed a pattern into it.

“One time I went deep-sea fishing and all the men were throwing up over the sides while I ate lunch,” his mother says.

“I was so sick the other night—what night was that—Monday? I just laid in bed and couldn’t even watch TV,” I say.

“You better not drink too much,” my boyfriend says, placing a hand on my knee.

I take another sip of my free drink, cold and electric blue. The next game starts and I mark off the free space. I only get two numbers for a long time and then I get a bunch in a row but they’re scattered and somebody yells bingo and waves an arm in the air.

Out of the next four games, my boyfriend wins one and his mother wins one. His mother wins two hundred and fifty dollars and my boyfriend wins blackout for four hundred.

I count his money, hundred-dollar bills, and he takes the bills from me and folds them into his wallet.

“What are you going to buy me?” I ask.

“I don’t know, what do you want?”

“A bracelet,” I say, touching his mother’s wrist. She is round but tiny, her wrist as delicate as a girl’s.

“We’ll see,” he says, patting me like a child.

“There’s a jewelry store on board, duty free,” his mother says. “I might buy myself a nice watch. I’ve never had a nice watch.” She looks up at her husband, a big man with a full beard and glasses that darken in the sun. She is so small compared to him and for a moment I imagine the two of them having sex, how the arrangement might work.

The dancer announces the six o’clock seating so we file out with most of the audience and then we’re all bunched up in a too-small hallway waiting for the doors to open. In this hallway, with all of these people standing too close and talking too loud, I’m reminded what a horrible idea this was, how every night I eat too much and drink too much, how I get seasick.

The waiters fling open the doors and lead us to our seats. They have accents that are foreign but not so foreign they can’t be understood. They form a conga line around the dining room, clapping and singing “Macarena.” His mother claps along, bouncing every time her hands meet, and then she leans across the table to ask me what kind of towel animal we got—they got a duck. We got a monkey wearing my sunglasses, I tell her, which makes her ridiculously happy. His father pats his wife’s shoulder to the beat and then our waiter stops and takes the salt and pepper shakers off our table for an impromptu juggle. We look like a happy couple, on vacation with his parents. We’ve been together two years, lived together one.

While we look over our menus, the waiter comes around with a camera.

“Say pigs-in-a-blanket,” he says, smiling as if to show us how it’s done. “Say money.”


When dinner is over, we go back to our room and change. The seas have picked up. It is a gentle rocking that doesn’t seem like it should make me sick but it does. I wash my face and brush my teeth and put on the little blue wristband I found in his mother’s medicine cabinet; it’s old and I’m not sure how it works, or if it’s expired. Then I get in bed and stretch out in the middle.