The Melting Season (6 page)

The bartender was named Phillip and he was from Tampa and his teeth were big and yellow, but everything else about him seemed quiet. I watched him move down the bar, serving people quick, and then leaning back against the same spot on the wall. Nothing seemed to move about him except for his hands and it was as if his feet were on some imaginary dance floor behind the bar.

I drank that beer right quick and it felt good.

When I was done I put a five-dollar bill into the video poker machine. I quickly lost it. I ordered another beer, but Phillip waved my money away.

“You play, you drink for free,” said Phillip. I felt myself being sucked in. I let the city suck me. I put in another twenty, ordered another beer.

“You like those better than the slots?” I heard someone say. It was the woman who had been standing in line, the muscled woman in the red wig. She had on a blond wig now. She changed wigs just for fun, I thought. She had a funny idea of fun, although maybe I would like it, too. She had changed her dress, too. It was blue and had sparkles across the top of it. It looked nice with her eyes—it was hard to tell in the darkness of the casino, but I thought maybe they were violet, and I had never seen eyes that color. Her eyes were so pretty it made you forget about her nose. And anyway I was starting to like her nose; I could see how it fit in well with all of her, her tough muscles and big breasts and firm voice. And I liked the way her face was powdered and smooth, and the little diamond drop earrings that hung from her ears. She looked really classy. There I was thinking I was looking good in my denim skirt and tank top, and she had just shot herself through the roof of the pyramid. I pictured little stars falling all around her.

“I don’t know if I like either that much,” I said. “It’s my first time here.”

“Slots are way better,” she said. “You can win bigger. This is just for passing the time.”

“You think that’s true?” I said.

“I know it is. Once I won five thousand dollars on the slots.” She picked up a glass of champagne that sat in front of her on the bar and swirled it. Then she downed it. “And my mother won ten thousand dollars last year. We’ve got a lucky family.”

“You
are
lucky,” I said.

“It’s in my blood,” she said. She ran a hand across the bare part of her chest. There were light bluish-purple veins running across her. Her nails were clean, but they were bitten down to her fingertips, the skin peeking over the tops of the nails like little sunrises. She said her name was Valka, and I said I was Cathy. It sounded like a nice, normal girl name. A girl to pal around with. Definitely not a girl running from her ex-husband with a suitcase full of cash.

We shook hands like we were equals. I knew right then she saw me as just like her. We could be friends. She had more makeup on and prettier clothes but we were both women alone, in the same bar in Las Vegas. She did not know anything about my past, and I did not know anything about hers. I felt myself unwind the tight spot down deep in me just a little bit. We were strangers. Maybe we could be free with each other. I let Valka lead the way.

I
began to love the ringing of the slot machines. The gentle repeat made me feel comfortable and safe. Valka and I favored the
Wheel of Fortune
slots. Every once in a while we—or someone near us—would hit a bonus spin, and the machine would play the
Wheel of Fortune
crowd shout from the beginning of the show, and Valka and I would say it along with the machine and giggle. Then we would both stop and look to see if whoever had hit the bonus round was making big bucks. Someone had won five hundred bucks so far, that was it, the rest of them just picked up twenty bucks here and there. “No luck,” Valka would mumble under her breath. Then we would order another cocktail. I lost count of how many times we had another round of drinks.

Valka was here to see the Hot Stars in the City show, she was telling me. She and her ex—Peter Dingle, was his name, no one ever called him anything but both names together, she said—used to come here all the time to see it. For years, they had driven from Santa Monica for a nice weekend of drinking, slots, and celebrity impersonators. Valka’s favorites were the Beatles. I was too young to know much about them besides that one Beatle being married to the lady with the fake leg from the motorcycle accident. The dim lights of the casino hid Valka’s age from me, but it turned out she was a lot older than I thought.

“My mother saw them on the Ed Sullivan show,” she said. She sipped her Bloody Mary, pulpy bits of tomato sticking to the side of the glass. “And she loved them and used to play them for me all the time. But I didn’t love them like she did. Like I liked them fine. Catchy songs, whatever. But she was crazy about them. And then one day, I think I was like thirteen or something, I stayed home sick from school. Or maybe it was rainy out, I don’t remember exactly. But I was bored and just laying around on the couch, I remember that. And my mom threw this tape of
A Hard Day’s Night
at me and I was just that bored, to watch something my mom thought was cool. There was this scene at the very beginning where they’re running, all of these fans are chasing them, these teenage girls just screaming for them, and there was something about that moment, the looks on their faces, the way they were all just having a good time, it reminded me of me and my friends. They were so young and free. And I just fell for them. Head. Over. Heels.”

I tried to think of one thing my mother had taught me to love that I had taken to but then I realized there was not anything she liked in our hometown. Everything she fantasized about was somewhere else. Europe. New York. Tiny snails and fish eggs you were supposed to eat like they were delicious and not just snobby. They were all things out of my reach. Why would I care? There was not a thing I was crazy about except maybe my husband.

But you could live anywhere and like the Beatles. After she watched that movie, Valka and her mother would sing their songs to each other all day long. “My mother liked all the layers of ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.’ It was like all extreme and complicated. But they don’t play that at the show; they play the sweet stuff, their early pop songs. Real crowd pleasers.” I had no idea what she was talking about but I was excited to see them. “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah,” she sang. She drummed her hands on her lap. She stopped being a lady in a nice dress for a second. She was a kid. She told me Peter Dingle had grown up loving the rock-and-roll life back East. (It was neat the way Valka said “back East” so casually, like it was a real place to her in her head.) Bon Jovi was one of his favorites from the show, but he liked all the imitation heavy metal acts, too.

“There’s an Ozzy Osbourne imitator who rips the head off a bird with his teeth,” said Valka.

“That’s not legal,” I said.

“Legal or not, it looks real to me,” said Valka. She took a sip of her rum and Diet Coke and raised her eyebrows. “Looks as real as you sitting here before me.”

“It sounds like a great show,” I said. “I’d like to see that.”

“I was hoping you’d say that,” she said. “Because I have an extra ticket for tomorrow night. So what do you say? You want to be my New Year’s Eve date?”

I was touched like I had not been in a while. Here she was, knowing me only for a few hours, and she was handing over a golden ticket to me. Sure we got along like gangbusters, but still I found myself welling up a bit.

“That is just the sweetest thing ever,” I said. “What do I wear?”

“I’ll loan you something!” she said.

We drank all night, and I felt the hangover before it was over. I did not mind it. I was caught up in the magic of Vegas. We had spent the night walking from casino to casino, through the crowds of drunks, drunk just like us. It was bitter cold out there, and there was a strong wind blowing, but Valka and I faced it. She loaned me a wrap of hers that matched the one she was carrying. “That’s pashmina, you be careful with that now,” she said. It was soft, and I cradled it around my arms like I was getting a hug. Oh, how I needed a hug. I stopped Valka on the street and said that to her. She threw her arms around me and said, “Oh, honey, I need one, too. All the time. Every day.”

By the time we got to the Bellagio we were a mess. We were spilling drinks and secrets. I tried not to lie too much. I told her my marriage had fallen apart. “It was just the fighting,” I said. “We were like two wild dogs fighting over a piece of meat. Our marriage was the meat. Do you know what I mean? The meat!”

“That’s not healthy,” said Valka. “That’s
un
healthy.” She thought she had it all figured out now. She had been trying to get the truth out of me for a while.

I held my tongue pretty well, but I was new at having someone to talk to. My secrets still felt important to me. Valka was ready to spill all of hers and I wanted her to feel better. It would make her feel closer to me, to tell her story to me. But then I was afraid I would have to do the same. I was trying to hold off. Telling the truth would hurt. I had been holding onto these secrets so long it almost felt like it all had happened to somebody else. And I would have to reach down pretty far inside to dig them all out. I was not sure if I was ready to do that.

Valka told me the Bellagio was where all the rich men were, but also the women looking for them. “Not that I need anyone else’s money,” she said. Valka was an independent businesswoman, with her very own flower shop. “I own prom season,” she said. “It’s mine, and I’d like to see someone take it from me.” She straightened her wig and plumped up the top of her dress. “I don’t know how to talk to teenagers though. Or kids. Or whatever. I just want to shake them. Prom. Those kids think it’s the most important night of their life. I want to tell them there’s so much more out there, they have a whole life of mistakes to make ahead of them.”

I thought of my own prom, me staring in the bathroom mirror in the lobby of a Best Western near Lincoln, putting on lipstick. All of the other girls—the girlfriends of Thomas’s buddies—were standing next to me in a row, putting on their own makeup. How much mascara did they really need? They applied it so carefully at the beginning of the night; sloppier, boozier, as time went on. Their eyes were sooty clumps by the end, smeared beneath as if they had slept in their makeup. We did everything together the whole night, me and these girls. They would not let me out of their sight. Everyone had to laugh at all the same jokes. Everyone had to comfort Margaret when she started crying about her cousin who accidentally died during the tractor pull last fall. Everyone had to wait in the bathroom when Paula started puking up peppermint schnapps. The room had smelled like Christmas. They were sort of my friends at the time, but I guess not really at all. I did not have many friends then. I had Thomas. I had my mother. I had Jenny. I did not have any friends these days actually, when I really thought about it. Just a lot of secrets instead.

“Let them have their dreams,” I said. We clinked our drinks. We were at a bar by then. I had lost three hundred dollars on the slots. I was not lucky, not at all. I had been tempted to lose every last cent of that $178,000 but I knew it was better to keep it safe for now. So Valka was buying everything, and I did not stop her. She was a good friend. We both got wistful, thinking about prom. We could not get out of it.

“I had dreams,” said Valka.

“Me too,” I said. “I was going to be married forever.”

“I almost got married,” said Valka. “To Peter Dingle.” She looked down at her drink miserably.

It was not going to take much prodding. There was a tiny part of me that still wanted her to hold back. I knew whatever I was going to hear had been said a million times before. It was a real story that had happened to her. I knew she would not lie to me. But it was going to be something she had practiced. And then I thought: maybe she will need to tell it a million times more just to get over it. And secrets were what girlfriends shared with each other. This is how we would become friends. Someday I was going to tell her my whole story. Maybe just some of it. Either way, I would need her to listen.

“What happened with Peter Dingle?” I said.

“Peter Dingle is a fine person,” she said. “I should say that. First. It’s not his fault he’s a
man
.”

Oh Lord, I thought. I did not know if I could take a night of man-hating. I liked men just fine.

“Here’s what happened,” she said. She pointed to her breasts. “It all went downhill from here.”

I looked at them. I wondered if they were the best that money could buy. They seemed very impressive: they were at the perfect point in her chest.

“My doctor kept finding lumps in my breasts,” she said. “Like every few months there was another lump. All over, both breasts, on the outside, deep inside, all different shapes and sizes. And I was having biopsies every time, and mammograms and sonograms. Everything they could do to a tit they were doing to mine. Needles, wires, the works. And my grandmother had breast cancer, both of them actually. One died young, one’s still alive. I had to do these tests to see if I was going to get it. I had the gene. This bad gene. Because I’m Jewish. I have the bad Jew gene.”

“This is horrible,” I said. “This is a horrible story.” I did not want to hear any more secrets. “I’m sorry.”

“So the doctor said, ‘Chop ’em off and start over,’ so that’s what I did.” She put her hands to the sides of her breasts. “And they’re so much better now! Than the way they were. I kind of hated them before actually. They were flat and droopy. They looked like silver dollar pancakes. These look great in anything.”

“They’re beautiful,” I said. I got all hazy for a second. I thought about Thomas touching mine while he looked over my shoulder. I remembered a porn movie playing behind me on the TV set. Imitation and real, all at the same time. Thomas got to have it all.

“And Peter Dingle stuck through it all with me. All those years of surgeries—we were together for four years, and three of them I was in and out of the hospital all the time. He held my hand in the waiting room. He took off work. He helped me pick out what my new breasts were going to look like. He told me everything was going to be okay. He wanted to marry me and have children with me and spend the rest of his life with me and he didn’t care what was real and what was fake because he knew what was going on inside of me. That’s what mattered to him.”