“I’ll have whatever you’re having.” I wondered how many times I’d said this in my life, but people were always ordering things I wanted. It was better this way.
Our drinks came. We toasted Miami and told each other “We’re in Miami.” This was also part of it—we would remind each other where we were and how beautiful and exciting it was, how nice it was to be away from home, even though nothing ever seemed exciting or beautiful when we were together. I wished we were in Las Vegas. In Las Vegas, no one expected you to gamble with them; you could slip away to the bathroom and be lost for hours.
I dipped my fingers into the wax while she watched, horrified. I blew on them and then lifted each one off, carefully, lined a little wax family up on the bar. It reminded me of the sticker people and pets you saw on the backs of vans and SUVs.
“I want to go to DASH and see Kourtney,” she said. “She’s my favorite.”
“You have a favorite?”
“You don’t?”
“No.”
“Come on,” she said.
“I guess Khloe seems like the most fun?” I very much doubted that we would be seeing any of the Kardashians. If they ever were in the store, it was probably closed.
“We have to buy something there—maybe we’ll find you a skirt.”
“I’m not crazy about skirts. You have to have something to go with it. You have to have like an outfit.”
I always bought stuff on these trips because Shelly didn’t like to be the only one buying things. On our last trip, I’d paid eighty dollars for an oversized tank top with a studded star on the front.
“The men are all looking at you,” I said, craning my neck around. Perhaps if she thought she was the most beautiful woman in the bar she’d be in a better mood.
“They’re looking at us. They probably think we’re lesbians.” She pretended to whisper something in my ear and then tossed her hair and laughed.
She had dated women, had been in love with women, but said she was never sexually attracted to the ones she knew well or considered friends. And she would never end up in a long-term relationship with a woman. Women were for fun—they weren’t actual prospects—who would take out the trash and do the taxes and whatever?
“This drink is really strong,” she said. “I think I’ll get a glass of wine.” I’d finished mine so I started drinking hers. She gave me a squinty-eyed look and said, “I still might drink it.”
She didn’t want me to have the things she wasn’t going to use; she would rather throw them away. My sister had a rich friend who took all her old clothes to Goodwill, often with the tags still attached, rather than give them to her friends. What if she saw my sister wearing a shirt she’d bought and decided she wanted it back? She would realize it was cute and she ought to wear it, that she had made a mistake. My sister also went on trips with her rich friend, but she paid her own way.
We were hungry so we ventured out to find something to eat. We weren’t the kind of travelers who researched things beforehand, and neither were we the kind to engage strangers in conversation about where we might go. We walked past hotels that looked a lot more fun than ours, young people laughing on patios, music playing. Shelly always picked the nicest but beigest places, where all the old white people stayed. She liked to be the most attractive person wherever she went and coordinated her life to make this happen as frequently as possible. She didn’t seem to understand that she would be the most attractive person wherever she went. She didn’t need to surround herself with geriatrics.
After some back and forth that grew increasingly unpleasant, she walked into a restaurant and I followed. We were already annoyed with each other and the vacation had just begun. When it was over I would be exhausted and fragile. My tan had turned out well, though, the best fake tan I’d ever had.
While we ate, we settled on a neutral topic that seemed to put us both at ease—her son—it was always hard for me to believe she had a child and had raised him nearly into adulthood. He would be going away to college next year and she was already devastated. He had a girlfriend named Sarah that he was sleeping with. He played baseball. I’d seen a movie where the men come and go so frequently in a mother’s life that a boy throws the ball to one man and it’s returned by another, but I couldn’t remember the name of it. Over and over, the men changed: a clean-cut guy in a suit turned into a plumber and then a hippie and then a college professor. I imagined this was what her son’s life had been like, at least when he was younger. She’d been dating Derek for a number of years now but wouldn’t marry him; he had asked on several occasions and she’d said no, offering him feminist reasons that neither of them believed. To me she said she didn’t think she was “in love” with him anymore, that she wasn’t sure she ever had been. She said when her son was gone, perhaps she’d get rid of all of it: the man, the house, the city, and start over. We had this in common, too. I just had less to disassemble.
. . .
When I got in bed I was a little drunk. I piled the pillows around me and thought about how comfortable it was, how soft the sheets. Then I called my boyfriend to tell him I was having a terrible time.
“That’s why I never go anywhere,” he said. “People say they like to travel but then they get somewhere and just want to go home.”
“Not everyone,” I said.
“Well,” he said, “you do, every time.”
“It’s hard to fully appreciate home unless you leave it.”
“Not me,” he said. “I know what I have here.” I imagined him looking around his living room. He was on the couch with a bowl of popcorn, an action movie paused mid-fight scene. Maybe he’d have an ice cream cone before settling into his king-size Tempur-Pedic. He was by far the dullest man I’d ever been with. “I’m happy here,” he said, “I don’t have to go anywhere else to be happy.”
I told him that was nice and said good night, goodbye. We didn’t say I love you and I wondered if we ever would; every day we didn’t say it seemed like one more reason we should never say it. We’d been dating close to a year. I liked him most when we kissed, but only the closed-mouth kind when we pressed our lips together hard.
I turned on the TV and searched for something that might be interesting enough to hold my attention, but not so interesting that it would keep me awake. Something I had seen before. I fell asleep watching Back to the Future Part II and woke up with it still on, remembering my dream. There was a man and his wife and another lady, all of them middle-aged and dowdy. They were in the lady’s house, getting ready for church. The man and his wife said cruel things to each other while the lady put on her makeup and then filled a to-go cup with coffee. The lady said that maybe she and the wife could spend the day together after church? Leave the man on his own? And the man agreed. He said his wife had never had a friend in her whole life. And that was it, the entire thing. It was so on-point that it wasn’t like a dream at all.