The Drifter(6)
“Is there anything more frustrating than the title, Untitled? Don’t you want to know what happened to her?” she once asked her favorite guard, who just shook his head and left her to wonder on her own.
From the Duckpond she looped downtown past the Hippodrome and bumped along the old brick streets in front of it. Betsy propped the bike against a brick wall in front of a dusty vintage shop, locked it, and wandered in. It was a closet-sized space stocked with square-heeled shoes for tiny, pre–WWII feet and stiff dresses decorated with decaying lace. She found a pair of black, cat’s-eye sunglasses and stuck a felt bowler hat on her head, then studied her reflection in the swivel mirror that stood on the counter.
“Nice hat,” said a voice behind her. Betsy turned around to see a woman hidden by giant black vintage sunglasses, her skin the blue-white color of glacial ice. She wore a Metallica T-shirt modified with a pair of dull scissors into a tank top, which was half-covered with a cascade of dyed black hair.
“Betsy, right? From the bagel place?”
“Oh hey, yeah.” She recognized her as one of the pizza-swappers from Armando’s.
“What’re you up to?”
“Just, uh, buying a hat,” said Betsy, gesturing to her head with one hand, then immediately feeling silly for doing so. She fished four dollars out of her pocket with the other.
Another Armando’s employee with a Louise Brooks bob and a shock of brick red lipstick emerged from the dressing room with an armful of 1940s print dresses. Betsy wasn’t sure who Louise Brooks was, but she had read about her hair in one of Caroline’s magazines and was pleased that she used the phrase “Louise Brooks bob,” even if it was only to herself.
“We’re off to find AC and cheap drinks at Diggers,” said the shorter of the two. Betsy realized her window of opportunity for asking their names, and thereby admitting that she’d forgotten them, was closing rapidly. “You in?”
After a suffocating fifteen-minute ride, she locked the bike onto a street sign in front of Diggers, the cave-like lounge at the Holiday Inn on University. Once inside, she squinted in the dark to find her companions, who had saved her a stool at the bar. Betsy shared her philosophy about day-drinking while she waited for the bartender to shuffle over and take their order: If there was a substantial serving of fruit (strawberry, pineapple, coconut, etc.) and/or vegetables (celery, olive) in a cocktail, it could be consumed pre-sundown without remorse.
“I’m partial to the Bloody Mary,” Not-Louise said. “It’s like a salad in a glass. You can argue that tomato is a fruit until you pass out, but I will still think that’s bullshit.”
Betsy settled on a five-dollar Digger daiquiri, a caloric, high school drink that she would never have dared to order in front of Caroline, but her judgmental friend wasn’t back from summer break yet, and wasn’t there to witness her transgression. It had what tasted like at least a serving of canned peaches in it, so it qualified as a drink and a snack. The first few sips were so cold and smooth that her buzz rode in on the back of an ice cream headache. The frozen drink and the blast of recirculated, sixty-five-degree air was enough of a reprieve from the heat that she didn’t mind the dull, chemical sweetness of the Schnapps floater. For the next round, because two-for-one almost always equals four-for-two, she would switch to rum and Diet Coke. Betsy liked to plan ahead.
She peeled her bare forearm off of the wood bar, which was covered in a thick layer of milky-looking lacquer, which itself was coated with a thin film of something that the bartender’s mildewed rag couldn’t remove with a perfunctory swipe. She sniffed the soft, pale skin below her wrist for clues about what could have dried down to the tacky consistency of packing tape and pasted her arm to the bar. She narrowed it down to either Midori or margarita mix.
It made Betsy think that she and Ginny needed to go back to the Copper Monkey, a relatively quiet pub on the second floor of a shopping center off of University that was Ginny’s favorite spot. It had rust-colored carpet, spindly wooden stools, and old-timey bar mirrors and reminded them of the Regal Beagle on Three’s Company. On a slow night, when nothing else was happening in town and they had a little extra cash, Ginny and Caroline would hide out in a booth, order stuffed mushrooms, and vow that they would grow old together, get bad perms, and wear caftans like Mrs. Roper. Despite the depressing staleness of the bar, Betsy felt a warmth bloom inside of her, a feeling of contentment verging on happiness. She was happy to be there and, after a long, lazy summer with Ginny, swimming in the pool at her apartment complex and lying on the lounge chairs, feeling the sun braise their skin in the humid heat, she was happy in general.
Over the last year, Betsy found herself composing a sort of Dear John letter to the campus, the entire city of Gainesville, really, citing all of the reasons they weren’t right for each other. Their time together was nearly over, and she felt like she had to explain why she had to leave a semester early. It’s not you, Gainesville, it’s me, she thought. The school was too big, with all of those auditorium-sized classrooms full of faceless students, and the city was too small, without much of the charm she expected from a sleepy town. The novelty of their first months together, when Betsy was giddy with her hard-earned freedom and breathless about her new friends and the alien excitement of a keg party attended by no-longer-teenaged boys, was over. It had taken three full years, but she had finally decided who and what she wanted to be, and that was on her own, for the most part, without anyone tallying up her many social faux pas with hash marks, adding up her demerits, and scolding her with fines and sideways glances over chicken Cordon Bleu in the sorority dining room. She wanted to work hard and go to school and see and hear music as much as possible. She wanted to spend a half hour in the university museum at night before it closed, wandering its halls, alone in the clean, white, open space, and to drive out to Cedar Key on Sundays to listen to reggae at Frog’s Landing. She would be happy to scrape together spare change and eat fried okra at Grandy’s for dinner for a few more months. And she wanted to spend more days like that one, biking around the Duckpond and having spontaneous drinks with people she only sort of knew. Her relationship with Gainesville wasn’t perfect, but it had its perks. Gainesville was where she found Ginny, Tom, and Melissa at Bagelville, and the handful of people she looked forward to seeing at parties. It’s where she’d met Caroline. However complex their friendship was, they had their fun together. Betsy made a silent vow to make their remaining months together—with her friends, the town, even the school—count.