“I’m not gonna let my fish get eaten by your monster. Throw me the ball.” Coach throws it to me but I miss and I give up after that. I want to be able to naturally catch balls or else I don’t want to play.
I’m ready to move on to the next spot, but they’re having a good time so I open another beer and look closely at rocks and other nothing things, as if it is my job to make something of them. One rock plus one snail plus the tab off my beer can equals what? I wonder where we’ll go for dinner. Usually we go to the Chinese buffet but we just had Chinese so we might go to Mexican. I could go back to the Chinese buffet, though. It’s better than the Mexican place but I’d probably eat more and I don’t want to eat more because I’m getting fat. I measure the roll on my stomach with two fingers but it’s just skin. I’ve seen how these things can happen, though—one day my sister was a stick and the next day a gargantuan.
Eventually my boyfriend says, “I guess we ought to keep moving,” and we load up.
Pretty soon, we come to the big fancy house. There’s a boy on the balcony and he waves and I wave and it seems like it would be fun up there, a big fancy house overlooking the river.
“Hey,” the boy calls down to us, his hands cupping his mouth.
“Hey,” I call back. There’s nothing to say after that so I lift my paddle into the air and pump it a few times, shaking the water off. The boy is blond, about ten years old. He’s been waiting for us—listening to our laughter, our voices carrying over the water.
“Can we live there one day?” I ask my boyfriend, and he says yes. He always agrees when I ask him things like this—he’ll say of course or okay and I won’t say any more about it, but he knows I don’t really want to live with him in a big fancy house, that the only way we pull it off at all is by surrounding ourselves with disabled people and drunks, attaching our lives to the sad, impermanent lives of others.
HE SAYS I AM A LITTLE OVEN
At The Straw Market, my boyfriend follows a man in a turban, weaving in and out of the aisles until I can no longer see him. His mother and I wait outside, looking at things, considering them. I pick up purses and set them on my shoulder while a woman barks prices. They’re purses I wouldn’t want at home, but I don’t realize this until I get them there, put them in the closet and never take them out.
His mother tries on a wrap. She is short and thick with hair so thin I can see her scalp.
“How do I tie this thing?” she asks, and I set the purse back on the table. We’re on a cruise and I’m wearing a pink tank top that says Carnival across the chest, another thing that will be obsolete at home. Her husband is still on the boat, slipping quarters into a slot machine, biding his time until dinner.
I wrap it around her waist and cinch it tightly at the hip. “It looks good. You should buy it,” I say, looking around for my boyfriend, who is trying to buy weed. He didn’t bring any along because he says drug-and-bomb dogs sniff each bag—once when we get on the boat and once when we get off. I don’t know if this is true or not; everything I do is legal. We could each bring two bottles of wine or champagne, which is eight bottles for the two of us because his mother and father don’t drink.
I buy two purses, both of them pastel and patterned, knockoffs. I don’t even try to talk the woman down. And then I leave his mother and walk into the covered area, down a narrow aisle. There are booths full of every imaginable souvenir and it’s too hot and there are too many people. I could slip under a table or behind a curtain and no one would ever find me.
I look at ashtrays and shot glasses, pipes and T-shirts and hats, feeling compelled to touch everything as if I have never before touched glass or cotton or wood.
“Hey,” my boyfriend says, grabbing my arm.
We find his mother where we left her and the three of us are walking, cutting wide arcs around the locals trying to sell us things, their services. I watch a young couple haggle with a man and wonder what kind of people get into an unmarked car with a stranger and then I’m thinking about all the times I’ve done exactly that: the ridiculously hot carpenter in Nashville, hopping onto the back of some guy’s motorcycle in Panama City, so many times I could have ended up in a ditch. We stop under a sign with tropical birds on it and his mother asks a man to take a picture of us and one more in case anyone closed their eyes: I tilt my head, part my lips. Then my boyfriend takes a picture of the man and his wife and then a family comes up and we’re all laughing and passing our cameras back and forth, thanking each other too many times.
We continue on in the direction of the ship, but I’m not ready to go back—we still have three hours left.
“Let’s stop here,” I say, as we pass a brightly lit tourist bar.
It’s one big room filled with beer signs and sombreros, couples drinking out of tall souvenir glasses. The women are sunburned, wearing dresses that tie around their necks, breasts loose.
His mother orders a bottle of water and my boyfriend doesn’t order anything and I order an overpriced rum drink from the specialty menu: the plastic neon-yellow, hourglass-shaped. I wanted to go on an excursion, snorkeling or horseback riding, but my boyfriend doesn’t believe in spending money on anything but food and liquor and marijuana and he’ll only spend as little as possible on these things, selling marijuana in order to pay for his own, buying the cheapest whiskey available. His body smells like processed meat and fumes. Somehow, impossibly, it is a smell I have grown to love.
I chew my straw between sips and look out the window at the people walking by. Some of them stop and open the door, look around before turning and going back out. There is only so much time before they have to get back on the boat and it must be spent wisely. His mother picks up a menu and we look it over: chicken fingers, hot wings, cheeseburgers.
“It’s like Dave & Buster’s,” I say. “The hot wings come with blue cheese and the chicken fingers come with honey mustard.”
“Except there aren’t any games and everything’s more expensive,” my boyfriend says, and I smile because he’s paying. I lace my fingers through his and he adjusts our hands; he has ideas about hand-holding.
“I could have another,” I say, slurping the ice, but we have wine and champagne on the ship. The champagne is warm but we could ice it down in the sink, which is tiny and silver like in an airplane. Everything is too small except for the bed.