Always Happy Hour: Stories(44)

She alternates between closing her eyes and watching the monitor. She thinks of all the tests she’s had over the years: a brain MRI, hearing and vision exams, screenings for depression, so much blood work. She has recently admitted something to herself—she actually likes going to the doctor. She likes answering questions about herself while someone takes notes. She likes waiting for the knock in a small clean room. She likes the free tampons and starter packs and she likes knowing all of the things she doesn’t have, as if ruling things out can negate the things that are wrong with her.

“This must be a terrible job,” Darcie says, “trying to do your work while a nervous person looks on.”

“I love my job.” The woman pauses to look at her. She’s maybe twenty-five but hasn’t kept her body up. Darcie wonders if she has kids at home, a husband. If she has a house in a neighborhood that has already been gentrified.

“Is all that clicking bad?” she asks.

“No,” the woman says, laughing a little. “I’m just taking pictures. I’m going to have a look at your ovaries here in a minute.”

After about five more minutes of clicking, it’s clear the woman isn’t going to tell her what the pictures show or don’t show.

“Does anything look crazy?” Darcie asks.

“No, nothing looks crazy,” the woman says, and that small laugh again. Then she tells her that the doctor has to go over the results with her, that he’s the only one who can interpret them. Darcie watches the monitor for any large masses or asymmetry, but it could be perfectly normal or indicate certain death and she wouldn’t know the difference. She asks herself if she’s dying and listens for some inner voice to answer. It says no and she knows it’s true, but now she’s reminded that she will die, eventually, and she’s upset about it. She doesn’t want to die. She doesn’t want to go about her days eating and sleeping and watching movies when she’s going to die. It’s ridiculous, this waiting for something else when this is all there is.


“Do you want to ride to Barton Springs?” Terry asks on the bus ride home.

Darcie puts her hand on his leg but it isn’t enough so she grips his bicep with her other hand. She wonders how he can stand it, her constant need to touch him, to be near him. She wonders how long it’ll take her to push him away but they’ve been together since Thanksgiving and he’s still talking about their babies.

“Okay,” she says. She listens to the inane conversation going on behind them, a couple of college boys trying to impress the blonde that’s with them. One of them says, “I wish there was still a popular religion that had multiple deities,” and the other asks if Hinduism counts and the discussion goes on all the way across the bridge, the blonde not saying anything. When Darcie was an undergrad, the boys were drunks who talked about pussy and action movies, and this new crop makes her miss these boys, who didn’t pretend to be something else.

“Hey,” Terry says, directing her attention to a fire truck on the side of the road, one of the men watering a charred area no bigger than a Pinto while the others look on.

At home, she changes into her swimsuit and then loads a backpack with towels and sunscreen, both cans of Four Loko, her driver’s license and a magazine. She looks in the money drawer to see how much they have—twelve dollars in bills and quarters—and zips it up in the front pocket. Then she puts on her helmet and they carry their bikes down the stairs.

It’s Friday afternoon and there’s a lot of traffic so they ride on the sidewalk. Terry bikes ahead, looking back every so often to make sure she’s okay. She’s not good on a bike. All of the cars make her nervous.

They stop at a crosswalk and wait for the man to light up.

“This is the longest light in town,” she says, adjusting her helmet. She looks at the grass, which is so dry it’s turned a sickly yellow and crunches underfoot. When it finally rains the trees will fall, people say; there’ll be dead trees strewn everywhere. Beads of sweat well up behind her knees and in the crux of her elbow, improbable places. Finally the man lights up and she gets her pedals into position and pushes off. What scares her about riding bikes is falling—she’s terrified of falling. Other people seem to be okay with the possibility of injury.

When they reach the narrow path, Terry pulls his bike in front of hers abruptly and stops to let a man pass, her front tire bumping his back.

“Big tough guy,” he says, when the guy’s out of earshot.

“What are you talking about?” she asks.

“That guy’s walk.”

“Do you have a tough-guy walk?”

“If you have a walk like that they’ll see you coming,” he says. “You don’t ever want them to see you coming.”

They arrive at the free area where all the dogs are, where people drink beer and only wade out into the water to pee. Darcie misses the three-dollar area, where there’s water deep enough to swim laps. She can see it through the chain-link fence: still green water, people with their colorful noodles and floats.

She spreads their towels on a rock, carving out a little area among all of the other towels, and then sits and opens her magazine. Terry opens his Four Loko and leans back on his elbows, watching her. She can’t concentrate with him watching but she doesn’t look up—she wants to pretend she is self-sufficient, that she would be okay here alone. She reads an article about a man who found a lamp shade made of human skin after Katrina. He sold it at a yard sale and that person sold it to someone else until a journalist got ahold of it. The journalist discovered that a Nazi officer’s wife had a fetish for things made of human skin—she particularly liked to make things out of skin that had been decorated with pretty tattoos. Darcie considers telling Terry about it but doesn’t. He would say he already knows. In prison he read The Diary of Anne Frank four times. In prison he read constantly, everything he could get his hands on, and he hasn’t opened a book since.