I really dig a fancy fucking hotel and we picked the Fucking Fanciest. Nothing like rolling up to the tastefully appointed valet and handing him the grocery bag you packed your one outfit in as you hold out your arm and painfully unfold your plastic travel slippers and stained yoga pants and cramping limbs from where they’ve been molded around a steering wheel for half a day. I’m not going to continue to put too fine a point on this, but getting with someone the total opposite of you is the goddamn move. This is how I pack for a five-day trip: many underpants, maybe an extra bra, multiple socks, maybe two T-shirts, a hoodie, and a bag of dehydrated sriracha bacon and a fountain drink for the car. This is how Mavis packs: many separate top and bottom options, including but not limited to multiple shorts and shirts, dresses short and long, skirts, running/exercise tanks and shorts, a special moisture-wicking-type bra, athletic socks, several sandals, a pair of gym shoes, at least one romper, an extra carburetor, a full silver service, a twin-size bed, several different types of Tylenol, and a cooler full of dry snacks and drinks and coffee. It never even occurred to me that I might do anything other than survive off of whatever I could find in a vending machine or from room service. She is a real-life adult. It’s impressive.
The morning after we arrived, I awoke in a bed larger than my entire apartment and suddenly remembered why I rarely ever take vacations: trips cost a lot of money and I don’t ever really feel like doing anything I couldn’t already be doing in my own bed. I never wake up excited at the promise of a new day; instead, I grudgingly tear my eyelids apart while dreading whatever soul-crushing obligation is on the other side of my door. A job, a phone call, a lunch: I would rather be dead than do any of it. Mavis was already out in the world—the note she’d left next to the bed let me know that she had gone out for a run and LOL WHAT DO THOSE WORDS EVEN MEAN. I toddled around the room in a sleep haze, wiping crust out of my eyes and debating whether I could accept a room service order without a bra on. Like, what if it’s more than an exchange of plates or whatever and I have to awkwardly tuck my tits into my armpit to sign a receipt? I like traveling to other places to do the exact same thing I do at home: read books in bed, occasionally get overpriced takeout, and groan exasperatedly at tourists chattering excitedly outside my door over whatever thrilling activity they are about to go do.
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Shit we did in Nashville, in no particular order:
? Saw Dave Chapelle’s return to standup.
? Ate doughnuts in the parking lot of the Donut Den during a tornado.
? Learned what a “meat and three” is.
? Cried while eating Hattie B’s hot chicken.
? Listened to a terrible version of that “Black Velvet” song sung by your drunk stepmom at this overcrowded bar with delicious okra.
? Drove around all damn day Easter Sunday looking for an inconspicuous place that wasn’t a golf course or children’s playground to dump a giant can of ashes without alerting anyone to our possibly illegal (?) agenda.
? Xanax.
Shit we did not do in Nashville:
? Go to the Country Music Hall of Fame.
? See the Parthenon.
? Hit the Grand Ole Opry.
? Venture outside a whole lot.
? Eat anything we probably couldn’t find in Chicago.
? Talk to anyone other than my friend Lena, who was living in Nashville for work.
? Much of anything, really.
Even when I had stopped believing in God as a teenager, I would still drag myself to church once a year to contemplate my mortality while celebrating the risen Christ and surveying all the elaborate headpieces worn by the women of the congregation for Easter service. When I was little and forced week after week to attend our death-boring Methodist services, Easter was always a welcome change: better songs, a well-rehearsed play, a fierier sermon. Plus, Easter has the best candy, so of course it was my favorite. To this day, I weep like a child when those purple bags of Cadbury Mini Eggs show up in the Walgreens seasonal aisle at the first dawn of spring.
I didn’t have very much of an attachment to that dusty can of gravel; I don’t know if I’m a robot or dead inside or what, or if the passing of time leeches the sentimentality out of loss, but guilt was the only emotion keeping me from just dropping it in a garbage can outside of a 7-Eleven. I’m not much for ceremony, either. If ever there is a wedding in my future, you can bet your sweet ass that it will take place in some nondescript room in a courthouse, followed immediately by appetizers and margaritas at the closest Chili’s. I don’t like to make a big to-do, although it did seem fitting to sprinkle his ashes on Easter, if for no other reason than to see if I’d find him randomly hanging out in my kitchen three days later.
I wasn’t sure how to appropriately eulogize a dude who had once punched me in the face for washing the dishes wrong, and it really never even occurred to me that I might write something down for the occasion. People always assume that because I’m a writer, I just show up to special events with some super poignant shit written on a scroll in my purse. I write butt jokes on the Internet, you guys. Please stop asking me to “say a few words” at your kid’s baptism. Also, the only semiprivate spot on the river we found after driving around in the nice clothes I remembered at the very last second to pack was a very public boat launch down a sharp incline. Even though it was three in the afternoon, I was terrified that some kids out to enjoy the shit-smelling river on a warm day in a kayak would happen upon us and call the fucking police. (I read To Kill a Mockingbird—I’m not trying to be caught with a pretty white woman doing anything.) So even if I had written a speech, I would’ve been too fucking jittery to read it.
I could tell that Mavis was dismayed by my bored lack of liturgy, so I made a big show of slowly prying the lid off the can while I tried to come up with something moving to say. “Is it tacky to Instagram this?” I asked her, but before she could answer, a car full of hooting and laughing teenagers crunched through the gravel at the top of the hill and parked next to the idling Toyota, and I for real was not trying to explain just what the fuck we were doing to a bunch of children who were about to go skinny-dipping in my father’s cremains. “It’s bad manners just to dump him in the water! Shouldn’t you at least say something nice?!” Mavis asked, a borderline hysterical edge creeping into her voice. I waited for the wind to die down while keeping an anxious eye on the cutoff shorts and tank tops untying the boat from their SUV above us. “Thanks for always cutting my meat into tiny pieces,” I said finally, tipping the can toward the gently rippling waves. The sun sparkled on the surface of the water…which remained blissfully undisturbed, as nothing was coming out of that fucking can.
“If I have to touch these ashes with my bare hands I am going to kill myself,” I barked at Mavis, who stood downriver, wringing her hands nervously and keeping her eyes trained on the whooping and hollering kids stripping down to their bikinis up by the car. I shook the can a little harder. Still nothing. What a fucking asshole, undoubtedly mocking me from the other side of the rainbow bridge. “Stop embarrassing me!” I hissed, banging the side of the container to loosen him up (gross) before violently shaking it out over the water. As the better part of the cremains shook loose from where they had settled, a huge gust of wind came from the east. OF FUCKING COURSE.