The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted (28 page)

She called her sister to come and get the car—left the keys under the seat—and she wrote a bad check for a ticket and went to San Francisco with nothing but her purse. She called in to her job on Monday and said she wasn’t coming back and told them to mail her last paycheck to an apartment she’d found in the Haight. She got a great job at an investment banking company and did very well, and then married some watercolor artist and then Rita lost touch with her. Rita has always loved that story.

Well, now it’s her turn. She isn’t going to move to Las Vegas, but she is going there by herself for the weekend.

She is going to Sin City, where what happens will stay there. Rita has always thought it disgusting to call a place
Sin City
and to say that what happened there, stayed there.

But now that she’s going, she thinks it’s kind of exciting.

It’s not
really
Sin City. Lucifer will not be standing there, twirling his mustache. She will not do anything for which she will have to ask forgiveness. She’s just going there to put a hand up and stop this noose from tightening. She’s going there to remind herself that she’s still a young woman. More or less. Well, she’s going to remind herself that she’s not that old. Some of the women in the retirement center work in nursing homes to prove to themselves that they’re not that old, but Rita could never do that. She would feel too bad for the patients, with their little fig-urines lined up on their windowsills. And she would come home smelling like pee.

In Las Vegas, she’s going to try to stay at that pyramid 218

t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d hotel, she thinks there really is something to the belief that pyramids have great power, but she’s planning to gamble at Bellagio. Just quarters in the slot machine, but that’s fine. She happens to be a very lucky person. She anticipates winning a fortune. And eating breakfast from those buffets that go on for miles, and if you think she’s eating
Egg Beaters
from them, well, forget it. She might go horseback riding in the daytime, if she can find a place that has an old reliable mare. Yes, she might buy a string tie featuring silver and turquoise to wear with a new white blouse and go horseback riding; she bets she can still ride a horse, look at Ronald and Nancy Reagan. And she’ll go to a Wayne Newton show and get a front-row seat and wear diamonds and drink Manhattans. One sentence she adores is “Oh, waiter, I’ll have a Manhattan.” She whispers it to herself now, as she stands at the sink washing her breakfast dishes, and both her big toes jump up.

As she wipes off the toaster, “Danke Schoen” is playing in her head. Bette Midler is in Las Vegas now, too! Rita will go and see her as well. She hopes Bette will sing “The Rose.” If she has enough Manhattans, she
might
go and see
A Musical Tribute to Liberace.
A musical tribute. What other kind of tribute could it be?

At a fancy dress shop in the Galleria mall, Rita sits on the little brocade bench of the dressing room trying to read the numbers on her purse-size calculator, which a Lilliput-ian couldn’t read. Well, if she buys what she wants to—the black bathing suit with the pretty pink and black paisley print robe for covering up, the lime green pantsuit with the matching silk shell, the silver sparkly top and sweater and black silk pants to wear to shows, the two wrap dresses that actually look very nice on her, the soft-as-cloud light
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blue pajama ensemble, the gray jeans and white blouse and black blazer for horseback riding, as well as the denim jeans and jean jacket in case she decides the other outfit is too nice to ride in—she’ll spend about a thousand dollars.

And she hasn’t even gotten shoes or jewelry yet. For a moment, she considers walking out of the store and forgetting the whole thing, but no. No! She has almost two hundred thousand dollars squirreled away here and there. Why should she hold on to so much? So that her children can get talked into buying a finer coffin for her? Or, more likely, so that they can get talked into buying a finer flat-screen TV

for themselves? No. She will buy every single item, and then she will hurry and buy some kitten heels. She looks at her watch. Twenty of twelve. She’s not sure how many flights there are a day to Vegas. Maybe she’ll buy the jewelry at one of the hotels on the strip, that might be fun.

She’ll buy it with her winnings so that, really, it will be free.

When she puts the calculator back in her purse, she sees a small piece of paper stuck to the bottom. She really must clean out her purse. She’ll do that on the plane, she likes to have projects to do on the plane so that the time passes more quickly. She used to embroider until needles and sewing scissors became weapons. She wonders what would happen in a face-off between embroidery scissors and five ounces of toothpaste.

Rita pulls the paper out of her purse and squints at it: it’s a ticket stub of some kind. She moves it closer to the light on the dressing room wall and sees that it’s from a tour she and Ben took of the birthplace of John Kennedy.

So many years ago now, but Rita remembers the day clearly: it was cold and rainy, and after the tour they went to some deli in Brookline that had wonderful matzo ball 220

t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d soup. They’d been a little depressed after the museum; whatever you thought of John Kennedy, his regime
did
at the time seem like Camelot; Bush Senior, who was in office at the time, just didn’t compare. And Barbara Bush next to Jackie O? They’d talked about Jackie for a while, and Ben had told Rita she was every bit as beautiful as Jackie. She wasn’t, but Ben really believed she was.

She sits back down on the bench, holding the ticket as though it’s Ben’s hand. She had loved Ben, but they should never have been together. When they met, she told him she loved Elvis and he said he favored Pat Boone: there were their differences in a nutshell. She liked things a little wild, and he liked them Christian. In the way of the times, when men wore the pants in the family and women were subservient to their husbands’ preferences, Ben dic-tated a life that was always too tame for her. And she gave in to it because she thought she had to, but also she wanted to, because she loved him so. A friend once described him as “friendly as yellow mustard,” and he was, that was exactly the right way to describe him. And oh, his mild blue eyes. His earnestness. His sentimentality. The way he fathered their children, he had been a wonderful father. Too wonderful, perhaps. For the bulk of Alice’s and Randy’s childhood, Rita had felt that she was on the sidelines of parenting while Ben ran the plays. Oh, they agreed on things generally, where the kids were concerned, but it was Ben who made the kids pancakes every Sunday and Hal-loween costumes every year. (The things that man could do with a simple cardboard box! One year the kids were dice; another year Alice was a wrapped present, ribbons spilling from her hair, while Randy was a weatherman on television, wearing a shirt and tie and congenial smile, cli-mate maps pasted behind him.) Ben checked their home-

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work and coached their teams and was the last to say good night. When they moved out, he offered financial advice, and when each of them decided to get married, it was Ben whom they told first. What bothered her most was when they were little and got hurt and ran to him for comfort.

Once, when the kids were ten and eight, Rita told a good friend that she felt her children had drawn a bad number in the mother lottery. She said she had all the flaws of Dorothy’s traveling companions in
The Wizard of
Oz:
straw for brains, no courage, and not enough heart.

And her friend put her hand over Rita’s and said, “Sweetheart, that’s just not true. Don’t be so hard on yourself!”

That night, Rita got in a nasty argument with Ben, and she accused him of stealing the children’s love from her—co-opting their affections by never giving her the chance to respond to them first. “Rita,” he said, “are you jealous?

You sound like you’re jealous.” And she admitted that she was, and he asked what he might do to help and she said nothing, it was too late, and she spent the rest of the night drinking from that bitter brew. But the next morning, she kissed the kids and sent them off to school and wiped off the breakfast table thinking,
Well, isn’t it lucky that they
love their father so much? Isn’t it good to have a man so open
with his emotions, so warm and loving, when so many men
keep their feelings so tightly bound they can’t even reveal
themselves to themselves?
Ben was a good man, through and through, and was that rarest of things: perfectly content with an ordinary life. It comes to her now that he would be horrified at what she is about to do. She feels, for the first time, a rush of guilt, of shame; she has a thought that what she is doing is completely inappropriate, wacky, even—is she getting wacky? People who live alone sometimes do.

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t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d Well, she’ll ask Ben. She often talks to him in her head, and he often answers her. She closes her eyes and thinks,
Should I go to Las Vegas?
And she hears,
Have a ball, kiddo.

He used to say that all the time, “Have a ball, kiddo.” That was him, all right, he’s tuned in to her today. She’s going to Las Vegas! But she really will have to hurry, now. She puts the ticket into her wallet, tenderly.

After Rita pays for her things, she goes back into the dressing room to change into the gray jeans and the white blouse and the black blazer. She’ll wear her silver hoop earrings with this outfit; it’s what she’ll wear on the plane.

Outside, she walks quickly down the block toward her car and, at a stoplight, turns to regard herself in a store window. The perm looks good; she should have done it long ago. She moves closer to the glass for a better look and sees a charm bracelet in the window. Rita always wanted a charm bracelet but never took the time to put one together. Well, here’s one that’s already done, and it won’t cost much—the place is an antiques store and looks to be a bit down at the mouth. She looks at her watch and rushes in. Five minutes; she won’t look at anything else.

A bell tinkles over the door, but there is no one around.

“Hello?” she calls out. Nothing. She waits a moment, then says loudly, “Hello? Could I see the bracelet in the window, please?” Again, nothing. Now that it looks as though she might not be able to get the bracelet, she wants it more than ever. She moves to the window and peers over a kind of perforated divider. Oh, it’s just loaded with charms, silver ones, Rita can distinguish only a few, they’re so crowded together. There’s a stagecoach, and a ship, and a cowboy boot—perfect for the day she goes horseback riding—and what looks like an engagement ring, with a real diamond. The stone is tiny, but it shines so brightly.

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How wonderful, that someone might put a real diamond in an engagement ring on a charm bracelet! If it is real.

She reaches over the divider and nearly has the bracelet in her hand when she hears a door bang open, then the un-ambiguous sound of a toilet finishing flushing.

“May I
help
you?” a thin, older man asks. He’s regarding her suspiciously, her with her armload of shopping bags that might so easily conceal something. Now she’ll have to buy the thing.

She offers him her winning smile, not for nothing was she awarded “prettiest smile” in her high school yearbook.

“It’s . . . I’d like very much to see the bracelet in your window.”

The man isn’t warming up much.

“The one with all the charms?”

“I know what one you mean,” the man says. “I know every single thing that’s in that window, believe you me.”

Now Rita becomes exasperated. “Listen, I know how this must look. But I have very little time and I really wanted to see that bracelet so I was just going to get it myself. I called out hello, but no one answered.”

“I was busy in the back,” the man says.

“Well, yes, I
. . . May
I see the bracelet?”

He moves past her, and Rita notices the scent of Old Spice, and this makes her like the man; her father used to wear that cologne. He lifts a latch from the divider and takes slow, careful inventory of everything there. Then, apparently satisfied that she’s not stolen anything, he hands the charm bracelet to Rita.

Oh, it’s magnificent. So heavy! And Rita thinks that
is
a real diamond on the engagement ring, and there is also a wedding band with three more diamonds. There’s an angel on the bracelet, a Mexican sombrero, a tractor, a 224

t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d penny, a Christmas tree decorated with red and green stones. There’s a thimble and an owl, and the Liberty Bell.

And, oh my, look at this: there is a slot machine, and the arm actually pulls, and the little fruits change. There is a slot machine, and there are dice, and there is a hand of cards: a royal flush. Is this a sign? Is this a
sign
? Oh, yes it is, and Rita will buy this bracelet no matter how much it costs. She looks at the man and tries not to seem too excited. But then she says, “I
love
this! I have to have it! How much is it?”

“It’s a hundred dollars,” the man says.

Rita nods slowly. Then she says, “I just want to ask you something. If I weren’t so enthusiastic, how much would it be?”