Dyan Sheldon - Away for the Weekend

The girl smiled as though they’d already met. “You’re in the writing competition?”

Beth nodded.

“Me too.” She held out her hand. “I’m Delila.”

“Delila Greaves?” Beth sat down next to her. “I’m your room-mate. It said in the letter. Beth. Beth Beeby.”

“Well, how’s that for luck?” laughed Delila.

Delila Greaves has been shortlisted in the category of poetry. She’s written a series of poems about heroic, and largely forgotten, women in American history. She’s nearly six-feet tall, loud and outgoing, and about as far from most people’s idea of a poet as Tokyo is from Black Kettle, Wyoming. Delila Greaves comes from Brooklyn and isn’t fazed by any of the things that send Beth running for the painkillers.

“Really?” said Beth. “You’re not stressed out?”

“About what?” asked Delila.

Where was Beth supposed to start? There are some people who enjoy competition. It fires them up, stirs their imaginations and whets their minds. They don’t care about prizes; it’s the game itself that matters. Beth, however, is not one of those people. Who sold the most cookies in the school’s book drive? Who got the highest marks in the maths test? Whose geography project was the longest? Whose plant grew the fastest? Whose goldfish lived the longest? Whose science project was the most complex? Whose macaroni necklace was the neatest? This is a girl who can’t do a crossword without turning it into a competitive sport. For Beth, the game barely exists; it’s the prize that matters. If you don’t win, you lose. If you don’t think you can win, don’t play. Which is why this weekend is the stress equivalent of a nuclear bomb.

“Well, you know,” Beth muttered. “Everything.”

Delila laughed. “You’re kidding, right?”

But Beth, of course, was not kidding.

“Relax, girl. Just flow with the go.” Delila patted her knee in an almost maternal way. “They’re giving us a free weekend in LA, so no matter what happens, we’re ahead of the game. I don’t see anything to worry about.”

“You don’t?”

Delila doesn’t. Not the competition; not the other contestants; not even the congestion, pollution and vibrating brightness of the city cause her a second of anxiety.

“You know what they say,” said Delila. “Que será, será.”

Beth looked at her feet. “I don’t believe in fate,” she whispered.

Delila patted her knee again. “Well, you’d sure better hope, then, that fate doesn’t believe in you.”

But despite the sanguine presence of Delila, Beth’s stress got even worse when they pulled up in front of the hotel, a Churrigueresque confection of pale stucco and faintly tinted glass that stands out against its more mundane neighbours like a castle set down in a development of summer bungalows.

Delila, of course, didn’t so much as blink. “Hot dang!” she laughed. “Will you look at this temple to Mammon! I’ve always wondered how the other one percent live.”

As arresting as it is on the outside, The Xanadu is even more impressive (or, alternatively, more terrifying) on the inside. The rooms are small and understated but elegant, and come with all the amenities its guests expect (music system, iPod dock, Wi-Fi, large-screen TV and mood-lighting). Should you want to leave your room, the hotel has three pools, a sauna and a health and fitness room, complete with personal trainers and yoga instructors, hot tubs and a jacuzzi; three restaurants, a bistro, a coffee house, two bars, several stores, a beauty salon and a laundry.

Beth has never seen anything like The Xanadu, and rather wishes that she weren’t seeing it now. The one time Beth and her mother stayed in a hotel, it was a motel and they snuck their cat Charley into their room in Beth’s backpack. Beth wouldn’t try to sneak a gerbil into a place like this. She’s so afraid that she’ll break something or spill something that she can barely move. If she had any fingernails left, she’d have chewed them all down to the quick before she got out of the elevator. And what if her mother is right about the allergies? Lillian Beeby (who has excelled at nothing in life so much as being afraid of it) has impressed on Beth that she not only has to fear things like migraines, nervous rashes and being so anxious that she sits on her glasses again, but the possibility that she might be allergic to the hotel itself.

“These fancy hotels are all recycled air and synthetics,” her mother is saying now – almost as though she hasn’t said it before. “Didn’t I tell you that when Mrs Panki stayed in Toronto that time, she was allergic to the carpet? Her head puffed up like one of those blimps. She thought she was going to die.”

Beth doesn’t want to think of Mrs Panki and her head like a blimp. “I really have to go now, Mom. I have to unpack before supper. I’ll call you later.” And she disconnects before Lillian can think of something else that could go wrong. Beth pulls off the headset and drops it and the phone on her bed, and starts to remove things from her bag.

Delila lies on the other twin, eating a bag of barbecue chips and watching Beth put her things away with the curiosity of an anthropologist studying a lost tribe. “Johnson says it’s blood money,” she says at last, continuing a conversation that was interrupted by Lillian Beeby’s third and most recent phone call. Johnson is Delila’s grandfather. Delila has lived with her grandparents since she was two because her mother is unreliable. “Johnson’s some kind of anarchist now. It makes him argumentative like you wouldn’t believe.”

Beth stares at her precisely folded clothes, systematically arranged by size and function. She was expecting a dresser – for all the things that don’t go on hangers – but there’s only a desk and the small table between the beds. How can things stay unwrinkled if she has to root around in her suitcase every time she needs to change her socks?

“Anyway, Johnson says these big corporations exploit everybody. The people who work for them … their customers … the planet. And then they run a contest like this to show how much they care about regular folk and education and stuff like that, but really all they care about’s money,” Delila goes on, though it’s obvious that Beth has more important things on her mind than corporate greed and planetary degradation. “But I said, ‘Listen up, old man. If they want to give your granddaughter a big scholarship to go to college, then that’s fine by me. So long as they wipe the blood off it first.’”

Beth shuts her case, carries it across the possibly infected carpet, opens the closet and sets it down on the stand. There are already several items of clothing hanging from the rail. Like the clothes Delila’s wearing, these are so bright they could stop traffic in a tunnel on a starless night. Beth puts her own things – including a dress bought especially for the occasion – on the opposite side.

“Hey, how much stuff did you bring, girl?” Delila props herself on one elbow, scattering tiny crumbs laced with artificial flavourings and salt into the air. “We’re only here till Sunday, you know.”

Beth looks over her shoulder. “Well, I… Not that much really…” Just everything she needs to survive the next two days. “I have an outfit for tonight and for tomorrow… And, you know, back-ups in case the weather changes.” Even when she doesn’t think she has anything to apologize for, Beth sounds apologetic. “And another outfit for the presentation ceremony on Sunday, and I brought a jacket in case it gets cold…” She shuts the closet, deciding not to mention the raincoat in case it rains and the sweater and flannel pyjamas in case it gets really cold. Neither snow, nor rain, nor a sudden heat wave will catch Beth Beeby unprepared.