Always Happy Hour: Stories(34)
“You are beautiful. And you’re talented. You’re so talented.”
“Do you think it’s bad?” she says. “Do you think I’m a bad person?”
“Of course I don’t think you’re a bad person. You’re in mourning. People do strange things when they’re in mourning—they don’t think clearly.” She doesn’t say anything else so I give her a few more variations along these lines, trying to sound as supportive as possible.
When Aggie found out her mother was dying, she applied for credit cards in her mother’s name. She received a number of them with limits from three hundred dollars to three thousand. I can imagine some of the stuff she ordered off the TV—charm bracelets and clothes that don’t wrinkle, gimmicks to help you cook breakfast foods more efficiently. She purchased a new set of living room furniture, which should arrive any day now. Maybe today. She’s very excited about this new furniture; she has never had a whole matching set before. I don’t care about things like this so it’s hard for me to understand, but I also don’t have a husband or a house or kids. Maybe if you get a husband and a house and kids you automatically want a nice set of matching furniture so badly you’re willing to steal for it.
I wish I had a dog. I think about dogs a lot. In the past month, I’ve been to the pound five or six times, but I can’t make a decision; I don’t trust my judgment. They don’t even call it the pound anymore. My sister says I only like the neurotic ones, the ones that will only love me, that will snarl and nip at the heels of anyone who isn’t me. But I also think: What’s so wrong with that?
Sometimes I call to ask if the dog I like is still there. Is Gunner still available? I ask, and then wait a long time for someone to check and a few times they said no, he was adopted, and one time a woman—she must have been new—told me the dog had been exterminated. Exterminated! But usually the dog is still there and I tell them I’ll be by in the morning but morning comes and I stay in bed and think about dogs, how a dog would get me up and outside, how a dog would look at me with its worshipful eyes and make me feel guilty for not being the person I know I could be.
If I wanted a dog at this point, I don’t even think they’d give me one. They know me there, though I try to disguise myself. Some days I’m dressed up, wearing a skirt and high heels; other days I’m two days’ dirty in workout clothes.
“I really want that furniture,” Aggie says, “and I can’t send it back now.” She tells me all about it—how many pieces, the color and fabric—but I don’t listen. I take a sip of my beer and wonder how many more her husband has in the refrigerator and whether he’d notice if I drank them all. Aggie doesn’t drink because she takes too many pills but I never see her take them. It makes me wish I had some other, less obvious vice.
Her husband opens the door and their sons tumble outside. He holds my gaze and then watches me for a moment from behind the glass. He’s friendly, smiling and hospitable, which contradicts everything Aggie tells me about him so I see him as a menacing figure. He was a cop but now he isn’t. Now he does something with computers. His name is George. My mother and her sister used to call their periods “George” because they hated the name—“George is here,” they’d say, groaning, or as an explanation for why they needed to stay in bed: “George came late last night,” but then her sister married a man named George and they’d had to stop.
The younger boy is carrying the bag of wedding cookies I brought so I paddle over and open it for him. He starts shoveling them into his mouth. I loved wedding cookies growing up, the powdered sugar on my fingers, a delicate sprinkling on my shirt.
“Hop on, Bucko.”
“My name’s not Bucko!”
His name is Nathan. Nateybear, I call him, Natekabob. Cowboy. Superhero. Trashman. Beetlejuice. Peewee. Ghostrider. Angelhead. He screams every time because he loves it, or maybe he doesn’t. I don’t know. It’s about the only way I can get him to say anything. He climbs onto the raft, further deflating the situation, and straddles me. I use my arms to paddle us back to the middle of the pool where it feels more private.
Nathan has blue eyes that droop down at the corners. They make him look sad and wise and I like him much better than the other one, Alexander, who’s a few years older and looks like a picture of a boy in a book—plain and perhaps more conventionally attractive, but dull. It won’t be long before people start introducing themselves to him again and again and he knows what it’s like to be completely forgettable.
I run my fingers through Nathan’s hair, slick it back, and then press his cheeks together until his lips are tiny and fishlike. He pinches me on the side, just below my bikini top; it’s the last place I lose weight and the first place I gain. I slap his hand and he readjusts.
Aggie doesn’t give him enough attention—he is starved for physical contact—because she spends a lot of time in bed with migraines or vertigo or whatever she’s calling it. Depression, I want to say, just call it what it is, but I don’t want to say it, either. I call mine insomnia, stomach issues. Perhaps a simple gluten or lactose intolerance, something easily fixed with a change in diet or a hot bath followed by a cool room and clean sheets.
I push Nathan off and he goes under. When he surfaces, he paddles back to me, grabs onto my raft, and we’re capsizing.