Mary Miller - The Last Days of California

“That’s him on the other line now,” I said.

“It is?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re so lucky,” she said. “I wish I had a boy.”

“I’ll call you when I get home,” I said, and hung up.

Elise raised her eyebrows but didn’t say anything.

“You want to get in the pool?” I asked.

“Not right now, but Mom and Dad are over there if you want somebody to play with.”

They were in their swimsuits, the same ones they’d been wearing for the past decade. My mother’s was black with yellow flowers, so worn out it was nearly see-through. My father’s was navy blue with white stripes down the sides. It was their day at the pool, but the one time we were at a decent place all bets were off.

“Tell me something from Cosmo,” I said.

“Men like sex, no fatties,” she said. “It’s the same thing in every goddamn issue.”

I’d never heard her say “ goddamn ” before. I was shocked. I wanted to hear her say it again. I adjusted my swimsuit and walked to the pool’s edge, climbed onto the little shelf. Then I lowered myself in and breaststroked over to my parents. My mother was sitting on a step while my father stood in water up to his belly button. He was moving his arms around and looking about distractedly like people do when they’re peeing. I sat next to my mother.

“Are you having fun?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s so nice here.” They always wanted to know if I was having fun. It made me sorry I didn’t have more fun.

“We’re about to go up,” she said. “We just came down for a minute to cool off.”

My father patted my back as he stepped out and asked if I was having fun. I told him I was and took off, swimming in and out of groups of kids and boys, listening while trying to appear uninterested.

“Here she comes, she’s coming this way,” one of the guys said, on my third lap. I swam a wide arc around a couple of kids playing colored eggs to avoid them. “And there she goes,” he said. Maybe I wasn’t unattractive. If I moved to Arizona, I might be popular. I might be on the dance team, kicking my legs in tall boots at pep rallies. I hadn’t made the dance team in Montgomery and didn’t know if I was going to try again. It seemed better to accept the one failure than to try a second time and fail, like I hadn’t learned my lesson.

I was wearing my cutest swimsuit, a black one-piece with ovals cut out of the sides, and a worn-in baseball cap that belonged to one of Elise’s ex-boyfriends. She had a lot of ex-boyfriend stuff—t-shirts and ball caps and koozies—and she usually wouldn’t say anything if I confiscated something until it was mine. I liked their t-shirts best, which were always thin and soft, tiny holes around the neck and waist. I didn’t know what they did to get them that way.

I got out and resumed my place next to my sister.

“Let’s order a drink,” she said, raising the flag on the back of her chair. “They’ve already gone. I’m sure Dad’s dying to get his hands on a slot machine. Raise the flag on your chair, too.”

Almost immediately, a pretty pool girl came over and Elise ordered two piña coladas. She didn’t ask to see our IDs. Elise signed her name and our room number and, a few minutes later, our drinks came in small white buckets: cold and sweet, I could hardly taste the liquor.

When they were empty, we put our flags back up. Elise signed our name and room number and fresh ones appeared like magic. The more I drank, the closer I looked at things—a beach ball spinning on the water, the pink and blue and yellow panels going round and round, a girl wading into the water with a cast on her arm, cocked at a ninety-degree angle. The dark spots in the clouds. Elise wouldn’t stop reading her magazine, so I got back in the pool. I swam toward the group of boys while one of them stepped steadily backward until he was right in front of me. I stood in three feet of water and said hello. He was tan with strong arms and a stomach full of well-defined muscles. He was old but I couldn’t tell how old because of the mirrored sunglasses and baseball cap.

He asked me a few questions and then I was in his arms, my neck thrown back so my hair dragged the water. My hat floated away and he fetched it and emptied the water out, set it back on my head.

“Is that your sister?” he asked, nodding at Elise.

“Yeah.”

“Why don’t you call her over?” he said, and I told him she’d come if she wanted to. I looked into his sunglasses, trying to see what he saw. There was only my face—my nose distortedly large, my hair slicked and smooth. I leaned back and he spun me in slow circles, first one way and then the other.

He started telling me about himself, how he’d started a website to help people find jobs, how it was becoming very successful. He was on a trip with friends and next they’d go to Las Vegas to play poker. I thought about the Las Vegas girl, wondered if they would encounter her somewhere, or pass her on the street.

I looked at Elise’s chair but she wasn’t in it. I found her talking to a lifeguard, a short boy with a red floaty slung over his shoulder.

“I’ll be right back,” I said, and swam over to her. “Come over here with me,” I said, interrupting her conversation. The guy was kind of fat for a lifeguard. If he could pass the test, I might pass, too.

“In a sec,” she said.

I swam back to the boys and Elise followed as the lifeguard climbed onto his perch.

We let them buy us a third drink and made plans to meet later, plans that Elise said we’d break if anything better came along, but I couldn’t imagine anything better coming along. The only thing that might be better than these boys were other boys.

At dinner, we sat at a circular table too big for the four of us. It made me feel lonely and far away from everything. I concentrated on the alcohol moving in and out of parts of my body I’d never felt before. When the dining room went quiet, there was a buzz in my ears like a lightbulb.

Though I’d hardly said a word, it seemed unlikely that my mother wouldn’t know. I avoided her eyes. She would be angry and disappointed if she found out, and I didn’t want her to look at me differently. If I wasn’t the good daughter, I wouldn’t know what I was. I wasn’t popular or a cheerleader or a straight-A student. I wasn’t on the dance team. I wasn’t a member of the Student Council or even the Key Club. There were so many things I wasn’t that I had difficulty defining myself, especially in relation to Elise, who was so many things.

My father ordered a bottle of red wine and asked the waiter for four glasses.

“John,” my mother said. “These kids aren’t drinking.”

“It’s a special occasion,” he said. “Just for toasting.”

“Absolutely not,” she said.

The waiter came back with a bottle and poured an inch of wine in my father’s glass, waited for him to take a sip.

“Taste it,” Elise said, which he did, nodding pleasantly.

Then the waiter went around the table, pouring us each a quarter of a glass.

“We’re about ready to order,” my father said.

“I haven’t even opened my menu yet,” Elise said.

The waiter said he’d give us a few minutes and set the bottle down. Elise grabbed it and filled her glass. Then she filled mine, as well. My mother handed me hers and we swapped. When the dining room went quiet again, the buzz in my ears returned. It was oddly pleasant.

“We have a lot to celebrate,” my father said. “Tomorrow we go home.”

Elise and I looked at each other. Home was Montgomery. Home was our house and our school and our friends and our dog. It was the clothes in our closets and my sister’s boyfriends and the neighborhood where we rode our bikes down the middle of the street because there were hardly any cars.