The word “cougar” hits me like a fist wearing brass knuckles. My heart is pounding in my brain, clobbering my intellectual capacities, making only high school mean girl ripostes accessible. “Or he’s into the thin thing,” I say.
“See,” Brett directs her plastic cup of vodka at me, jovially, “thin” failing to deliver the body slam I hoped it would, “the thing is, Steph—I could be thin if I wanted. You can’t be in your twenties. No matter how disciplined you try to be.”
Brett raises her vodka shot and knocks it back, her face twisting gruesomely like a Salvador Dalí portrait. Tim watches us, a little nervously, unable to tell anymore if we’re joking. We’re deadly serious, but we can’t let him know that. He came over here to make us smile.
“In that case,” I say, raising my shot, “to women being in their sexual prime in their thirties.” I knock back the warm vodka, gagging. Tim wasn’t wrong. We were looking a little too serious over here. And I’m not ready to get serious. Not yet.
The nineties cover band comes on at midnight and we have no problem securing spots in the front row. The children who frequent this place are just wrapping up cocktail hour at their squalid summer shares. The rain stops at some point, and when a bead of sweat trickles down my spine I turn and realize it’s the next day, that the entire room has filled to its usual capacity, which is whatever one body shy of suffocation is. Brett and I are holding hands, dancing and screaming the lyrics to No Doubt and Goo Goo Dolls songs, making lewd Tim sandwiches to R. Kelly covers while the floor swipes at our feet with warm toffee gloves. A constellation of cell phones hangs in the air, capturing our every move.
The lead singer is not much younger than me, her hair in high pigtail buns, and I do the math to figure out if she is closer to Gwen Stefani now than Gwen Stefani then. Then. Though, just barely. If she can be here, I can be here, I decide. As she sings the final verse of “Spiderwebs,” a girl in the crowd tugs on Brett’s arm. I can’t hear what Brett says when she turns to her, but her eyes light up in recognition and she throws her arms around her neck. Someone she knows. Someone to distract her. I gesture for Tim to crouch down so that I can shout in his ear, “Drink!”
I take his hand, pulling him through the crowd, but I don’t stop at the bar in the main room, or the bar in the back room, or the bar outside. We keep going, into the loud, spongy night, past the bouncer standing beneath the white wood arbor, punching entrance stamps onto the backs of hands, and around the side of the bar and into the strip of grass between the outdoor patio and the next building, which I’ve never bothered to identify. There, I close Tim’s arms around my lower back and slip a finger under his chin, guiding his mouth toward mine. The first kiss is long, soft, and without tongue, leaving me bow-kneed and swollen.
“Aren’t you married?” he asks, the noble question a gurgle from deep within his throat.
“We can stop if you’re uncomfortable,” I offer sweetly, releasing the buckle of the needlepoint belt his mom bought for him. Tim groans. It’s not a no.
We reenter amid protests from the peons who have been waiting in line for the last forty minutes. At the outdoor bar, we find Brett stuffing a lime down the neck of a Corona.
“I have been looking for you everywhere!” she cries. She jumps up and gets behind us, herding us like a flock, ordering, “Inside, inside. I have a surprise for you.”
We get stuck in a jam at the door, and Brett takes the opportunity to dust the wet leaves and grass and crud off our new friend’s back in a dramatic, sweeping motion. “Steph,” she chides, slyly, “way to not be a dead fish, girlfriend.” I’m both incensed by the implication that I don’t have interesting enough sex with my husband to keep him faithful and pleased that Brett has noticed that I am desirable enough to have pulled a guy like . . . shit. I’ve forgotten his name.
“If only Arch could be as lucky.” I tousle her hair, the way I’ve seen Kelly do to annoy her. Brett slaps my hand away, hard enough to be heard over the music.
The three of us—the world’s most beat ménage à trois—push our way inside. At the bar, what’s his face runs into his friends again. Tim! they cry, and I silently thank them. Tim waves at me to go on with Brett, who continues to drag me onto the dance floor, holding one of my hands in both of hers for extra leverage. I glance back at him before the crowd swallows me whole—two newborns with tits have joined their group, are squealing, Oh my God, Tim! and reaching up to hug him because they are just so little and so pretty and so very, very young. It’s like the weight of the universe has suddenly settled on my eyelids. I could fall asleep standing up in this drunken, dancing crowd.
Brett has forged a path to the stage, and she’s waving her arm at the lead singer, who points right back at her, as though she knows her. “So,” the singer says into the microphone in her loud, clear veejay voice, “you know I don’t usually take requests.” The crowd hollers, incoherently. “But there are special circumstances tonight, because we have two Goal Diggers in the houseeee!” This announcement is greeted with cheers that could be cheers for anything, and booing that is very specifically for us. Brett jams both middle fingers into the air.
“And one of these bitches,” the singer continues, “has been screaming at this bitch to play ‘Bitch’ for the last hour. So what do you say we three bitches sing a song about bitches together?”
More vague cheering. More intentional booing.
A stagehand ambles toward us, sticking his hand into the crowd and hoisting the two of us over the large speakers. The stage lights are bright lie detectors, and I realize with a start that despite her twee pigtails, the lead singer might actually be older than me.
She cups her hand over the mic and speaks to us. “Please tell me you know the fucking words.”
“I dominated this song at middle school dances,” Brett says. “Steph, what was that? College for you?”
The lead singer gives me a look—oh no she didn’t—and makes a grand gesture out of pressing the mic into my hands. “She can sing backup,” she tells me with a wink. The act of camaraderie frames the moment as two old broads taking back the night from the young buck. I am struck brutally and repeatedly with a blunt-forced thought: I never should have come here.
The song starts, that bouncy pop beat laced with a few warning strokes of the guitar, gearing up for the title profanity that Brett screams into the mic with adolescent glee. Brett wasn’t in middle school when this song came out. I was. I remember my mother hanging up the phone with shaking hands, turning to me and asking if I had used street language at Ashley’s beach house after they were kind enough to host me for an entire week. That was the word ginger, golf-shoe-wearing Mrs. Lutkin had used. Street. I had washed the dishes after dinner and hung the towels to dry on the outdoor line and made the bed every morning, but what Mrs. Lutkin remembered most of my stay was the night she came home early from dinner and found Ashley and me in our pajamas, dancing around the family room to street music.