Always Happy Hour: Stories(63)

“You must not have been too worried, you didn’t call.”

We sit there for a while, not saying anything, while I use the fish on a stick, bounce it around. Its diamond-shaped eyes sparkle.

“I was having a panic attack. That’s why I left.”

“I’m not trying to be mean,” she says, “I’m really not, but it’s always something. It’s always something with you.”

She’s right. It is always something. I try to remember a time in my life when there wasn’t something. When things were good and I was happy. I never think of it this way—I only think of today—that there is this thing I’m dealing with right now and once I get a handle on it everything will be fine—but it seems there has always been a thing and that these things have eaten up my whole life.

“Hey,” she says. “Look at me.” She takes my hand, squeezes it. I put my arms around her and hold her; she was once a baby in my arms, a baby I said loving and terrible things to.

After a while, she stands and leaves the room, closes the door behind her. I use my crooked finger to try to lure the cat out: redrum, redrum. The cat spends a lot of time under my bed. Once, I pulled the mattress off, taking the top off her world, and she was mad at me for days. I don’t know why I want to fuck with her; sometimes I just get the urge. I don’t do anything that terrible. I just pet her too roughly or make her play with me when she doesn’t feel like it. Sometimes I switch her food for no reason. You are adopted, I tell her. I have saved you from the cruel, indifferent world but there is always a cost. Nothing in this life is free.





THE 37

I had never ridden a bus before, not a city bus, not a bus where you stood at a bus stop and buses came and you had to know which one to get on and where to get off. I had once ridden a bus from Jackson, Mississippi to Denver, Colorado to see the Pope at Strawberry Park. That was the Pope before this Pope and it was a long time ago. I was no longer Catholic, was no longer anything. I recalled other buses taking me back and forth to day camp as a child and how I had not liked day camp, though I’d preferred it to overnight camp. At overnight camp I cried and got my period and made the nurse call my parents to come get me. There had been other buses as well, tour group buses, buses that took you from the airport parking lot to the airport. But those were shuttles. Mostly, I had ridden shuttles. You couldn’t get on the wrong one; they were all going to the same place.

I was living in a city now, a city with many buses that could take you many places you might want to go and many places you would not want to go and I had to figure them out because I was also afraid to drive for the same reasons and some additional ones: I didn’t know how to get to where I was going or where to park once I got there or if I’d have the right parking pass, if one was required, or whether the meters were active, if there were meters, and whether they took coins only. And I’d just discovered that campus parking was particularly fucked up because you had to back into the space instead of simply nosing in headfirst. You had to put your blinker on and stop traffic and back into the space all without hitting the cars on either side of you or the bikes flying down the hill. I watched as others did this, easily, with horror and awe. A lot of them appeared to be freshmen. Their tags said Illinois and Arkansas and New York. I once visited a friend in New York and she was late meeting me at her apartment. I stood on the sidewalk with my suitcase for a long time until she showed up. Country mouse in the big city, she said.

I was ready to give up and move back home even though I’d left everything behind in a way that would not allow for my return: I had dropped out of my PhD program and broken up with my boyfriend; I had moved out of my house, leaving my roommate in a bit of a bind. There was nothing to return to except my mother. I could always return to her and she would be happy to have me. I also had a father; he lived with my mother and I loved him, too, but it wasn’t the same. We had gone out to lunch before I’d left, just the two of us, and he’d made the waitress cry and I was pretty sure she’d quit because the manager had begun to wait on us at some point and my heart had cracked a little. It was small things like this that did it.

It was August, well over 100 degrees. I stood and then sat on the hill. It hadn’t rained but my ass felt slightly damp. I was wearing a dress made of very thin cotton. It was like nothing. It was also low-cut and the tops of my breasts were exposed. Why had I worn this dress? It had been a mistake. There wasn’t even a bench at the bus stop I thought I should be at but wasn’t sure, only a pole in the ground with a picture of a bus on it, big windows like eyes and a lot of numbers that meant nothing to me.

I was in tears by the time I called my mother. I’ve been sitting on this hill for an hour, I said, over an hour, and I’m about to lose it.

Okay, she said, panicked. What can I do?

I’m about to freak out. I have to get home.

Okay, she said. Let me help you.

Look up bus routes, I said. And tell me what to do. She was in Mississippi. I was in Texas. I didn’t have a phone that had internet access but a phone that could text and call only. I waited while she looked up the information. I was pretty sure she had never ridden a bus at all, not even a sightseeing bus, though I vaguely remembered one in Paris. I was pretty sure we had been on a bus together in Paris, our heads in the open air, or maybe New York. No, it was Paris, but it hadn’t been an open-air one. Our heads had not been exposed. I had been to some places by that point. I had decided to go to some places and had gone to them. The first time I went overseas, I cried in the airport because I was scared to go so far away, to fly over an ocean, not knowing what to expect once I got there. On the plane, I stayed awake the entire time while the people around me took off their shoes and slept soundly until the plane had reached its destination. And then there was Heathrow. I didn’t even want to think about Heathrow.