Mary Miller - The Last Days of California

“He wants to gamble,” Elise said. “He’s desperate to get his hands on a slot machine.”

“He’s not going to gamble,” our mother said, though we all knew he’d step onto the casino floor and the lights and sounds would trigger something in his brain, and he’d sit for hours, slipping twenty-dollar bills into machines. For years, he’d been sneaking off to the Indian casino on Eddie Tullis Drive, a beige monstrosity that could have doubled as a medical clinic.

“He gambles all the time,” Elise said. “Everybody knows he gambles.”

“Everybody does not know,” our mother said. “I haven’t told anyone, and you shouldn’t either. It’s nobody’s business.”

“We’re not like you,” Elise said. “We don’t want to live like that.”

“Like what?”

“Lying—pretending we’ve got money when we don’t, that we’re these perfect Christians who never do anything wrong.”

“It’s not lying.”

“It’s deception,” Elise said.

“It’s our reputation,” our mother said.

“I don’t care about my reputation.”

“And it shows,” our mother said, which was possibly the meanest thing I’d ever heard her say to my sister.

Elise paused dramatically and said, “I’m sorry I’m not the daughter you wanted.”

I picked up an empty popcorn bag and stuffed candy and gum wrappers into it, passed it up. My mother took it and held it. It would be no fun being a mother, everybody handing you their garbage and wanting things all the time, nobody to tell your problems to. She could never say anything bad about our family. She could only talk about other peoples’ problems as a way of talking about her own.

“I’m sorry you feel that way,” my mother said. “It isn’t true.”

Elise was clutching her stomach. It occurred to me that I had no idea when the baby had been conceived; she could be a couple of weeks pregnant or several months. She might even be far enough along that she couldn’t have an abortion, and then what would we do? I imagined taking her to a clinic set up in somebody’s house, a woman bustling her inside before closing the door in my face, which was something I’d seen in a documentary. I didn’t know anything except what I’d seen on TV and I never retained the information I learned. When I watched those outdoor programs, I didn’t actually consider that one day I might be lost in the wild and need that stuff in order to survive. I thought about it, trying to recall something, and remembered the fat hippie saying I shouldn’t eat brightly colored things, that brightly colored things are usually poisonous. If I was ever hungry and found a neon green insect under a log, I wouldn’t make the mistake of eating it.

Our father got back in the car. “I got y’all your own room,” he said, handing us key cards. “Might as well enjoy ourselves on our last night.”

“That’s what the 9/11 hijackers thought,” Elise said. “They drank and got lap dances and then left a copy of the Qur’an on the bar.”

“I hope you’ll be with us,” our father said, buckling his seatbelt.

“I’ll be with you.”

“I sincerely hope.”

He drove through a maze of empty lots and parked, but a sign said no overnight parking so he backed out and kept winding around. It reminded me of that scene in National Lampoon’s Vacation when Chevy Chase and his family arrived at Walley-World. There wasn’t a single car in the lot and they parked so far away and Chevy Chase kept saying “First ones here!”

In the hotel lobby, there was a water wall behind the check-in desk, the casino floor only steps away, dinging with bells and whistles. We walked past a coffee shop and an ice-cream parlor, stores selling dreamcatchers and turquoise jewelry, quilted bags in paisley prints. We passed a Mexican restaurant and a sundries shop. I thought I’d buy a postcard and mail it to Gabe—it occurred to me that I’d never bought a postcard before. I had never been far enough from home. You didn’t send someone a postcard from an adjoining state.

A man held the elevator and we got on. His wife was with him but he stared openly at Elise, and for the first time ever I was glad to be the unattractive sister. Who wanted to be stared at by ugly old men all the time? I wanted to kill him for her, wanted to kill all of them so she could live in peace.

Our parents got off at the sixth floor, followed by the man and his wife.

“We’re in 610,” our mother said, and the doors closed.

“Mom’s as miserable as we are,” I said, though I wasn’t feeling miserable at all. I was excited, nearly thrilled. We had our own room in a nice hotel. There was a pool and room service and I had enough money to buy a dreamcatcher if I wanted.

“Catholics don’t go in for this kind of stuff.”

“Uncle Albert does,” I said.

“Uncle Albert doesn’t count—if he wasn’t building a doomsday bunker, he’d be investing all his money in the Iraqi dinar or some other scheme. Don’t you remember when he tried to get Dad to invest in that black apartment complex?”

“No,” I said. “When was that?”

“A couple of years ago. It was a falling-apart slum.”

“Nobody tells me anything.”

“Mom tells me all sorts of things I don’t want to know,” she said. “Consider yourself lucky.”

“When?”

“At night after y’all go to sleep, we watch The Young and the Restless and she tells me everything. It’s terrible.”

“You should go to your room and read like I do.”

We turned a corner and walked a ways and then turned another corner and I knew I was going to have trouble finding my way back to the elevator. A cleaning lady stuck her head out of a room and we exchanged hellos. She was foreign but her hello had been perfected. I checked her cart for soaps and shampoos, but all of the best stuff had been hidden away somewhere.

We came to our room just as a tiny, severe woman opened the door across from ours and deposited a room service tray outside. She looked at me without any expression whatsoever. Her face was tight and smooth; it reminded me of a stone.

“Good afternoon,” I said. I liked saying “good morning” so much better.

She made a humph sound and closed her door.

“Real friendly around here,” I said, loudly.

Elise slid her key in, opened the door. Our room smelled like carpet cleaner, something that might be called Mountain Fresh or Ocean Breeze. We stood there with our bags, looking at an enormous whirlpool tub next to the king-sized bed.

“What is this ?” she said. She stepped into the tub with her shoes on while I went into the bathroom. There was a shower and two sinks and a little TV, everything cool and white. I wanted to feel my bare feet on the tiles.

I flushed and washed my hands, walked around checking everything out. I opened drawers and closets, peeled the spread off the bed. Above it, there was a painting of two empty chairs on a beach. The picture bothered me—I didn’t like it when places pretended to be other places; if people had wanted to go to those other places, they would have gone to them. Why go to Las Vegas to be in Paris? If you wanted to go to Paris, go to Paris.

Elise stepped up and down like she was walking in some kind of muck. “Let’s put on our suits and get in.”

I opened the curtains. Our room faced a parking garage that gave off a ghostly blue light. “Check out this view.”

“You know the creepiest sound ever? A man whistling in a parking garage,” she said. “And they never whistle anything in particular, it’s just this random no-song whistling. They do it to creep people out—they know it creeps everybody out.”

I picked up the phone and called our parents. Our mother answered on the fourth ring. I asked if they had a whirlpool next to their bed, and she said that they did. I asked if they had a view of the parking garage and she said they had a view of the pool and then she said to come down to their room at six-thirty for supper and hung up.