Always Happy Hour: Stories(55)

Shelly opened the fridge and took out two mini-bottles of white wine. She handed me one and we clinked them together.

“I bet he had a really big dick,” she said. Then she said she needed a bath and went to her room and closed the door. We both loved baths and never showered. It was one of the things we had in common.

I took her pack of Davidoff Superslims and went out to the balcony. She always had cigarettes, though in all the years I’d known her, I’d only seen her smoke a few times.

There was a sign in the room that said smoking wasn’t allowed anywhere on hotel grounds—there was a $250 fine—but if I was caught Shelly wouldn’t mind paying. She would probably be happy to pay a fine and would enjoy telling people that we had gotten into trouble. Like many people who’d grown up without much that suddenly found themselves with more than they could spend, she seemed desperate to return to her original state. Every six months she put on a dress and met with a man who gave her figures and charts and tried to talk to her like a father. She was spending too much, he said, the money wouldn’t last forever at this rate. She told me she’d been happy before the money and would be happy without it, but I couldn’t believe this at all. What would she do? Go back to cleaning motel rooms? I wondered how much was left and how long it would last and whether Derek would stay with her if she was broke. I imagined her back at the same Super 8: highlights grown out, looking her age and older, old. I didn’t want to see that. I had genuinely liked her at some point, many years ago.

I lit another cigarette and watched the smoke blow to my left. I could hear people to my right and tried to make out what they were saying but they were speaking in voices too low to hear.

They were angry; people liked being angry. They liked fighting and making up and feeling like a button had been reset, like they could start fresh, or perhaps it was just one more nail in the relationship coffin and another step closer to done. I wondered what people were doing in this hotel, which is what I always wondered in hotels, or when traveling, in general. Why had they come here? Were they happy? It made me think of my honeymoon and how I’d cried and told my husband that the marriage had been a mistake and then he’d cried and said maybe it had been and it made us feel better. We’d stayed together seven years.

Soon Shelly would be finished with her bath and we would go to the CVS where she’d buy kitschy ashtrays along with her junk food. She’d buy t-shirts and postcards that said MIAMI in different-colored letters. These trips, more than anything, were about proving that she traveled and had friends. She’d sent me postcards and T-shirts from all over the world. I wore one of the shirts often: ARUBA, it said, thin and slick between my fingers because I’d washed it so many times. On the occasions I’d worn it out of the house, people asked me what Aruba was like and I said it was a beautiful place with very pretty women, that we’d rented a Jeep and driven from one side of the island to the other, climbed to the top of the lighthouse. I told them that my boyfriend left the hot young cleaning lady large tips every morning even though he was cheap and had never tipped a cleaning lady before.

I texted my boyfriend, told him I’d arrived safely. I asked if he wanted to see a picture of my bruise. A little over a week ago, I’d fallen down the stairs and bruised my left thigh; it had spread and the colors were glorious.

I don’t need to see the latest, he wrote back. You know what I like. I did know what he liked; he was very forthcoming about what he liked. Around the house he liked for me to wear shirts that barely covered my ass. He also liked it when I baked cookies. I sent him a picture of the bruise anyway, which looked ugly and more horrible than it did in person. He didn’t respond. Then I went back inside where Shelly was standing in front of the TV in her bikini bottoms.

“I need you to help me apply this tanner,” she said. “I meant to get a spray-on but ran out of time.”

All she had was time. She didn’t work. I had time, too. I was in my third and final year of graduate school, was older than all but one of my classmates.

I had seen her breasts on a number of occasions but I always liked to see them again. They were round and nice but her nipples were too dark. I liked pale nipples, nipples one shade darker than one’s skin color, like my own. She handed me the mitt and the foam and told me to rub it in good.

“Do you want me to do you?” she asked, when I’d finished.

“I don’t think so.”

“We need to be tan,” she said.

When I was around her, I felt heavy, short. I wasn’t heavy or short but she was tall and wore heels that made her taller and never gained weight despite her diet, which seemed to consist solely of candy bars and chips. I thought of it as an endearing trait, her love of processed foods. And though she ate these things, she counted every calorie, had figured out how to do it without gaining a pound.

“Okay,” I said, “you can do me.” I pulled my dress down and hung it on the back of a chair. I raised my arms and stood with my legs apart.

“Jesus,” she said. “What the fuck is that?”

“I told you I fell.”

“I didn’t know it was this bad. Jesus,” she repeated.

“I know. It’s awful, isn’t it?”

“Does it hurt?”

“Only when I touch it. I hope it heals okay.”

“Well,” she said, and I could see that this bruise, which really was huge and horrible, had depressed her. We weren’t going to look as good in our bikinis as she’d hoped. And I was sure I was fatter than the last time she’d seen me. Every time, I convinced myself I was fatter than the last time she’d seen me.