Cha-Ching! (15 page)

“What?”

“Bringing me into a room where there's only a bed to sit on.”

Marisol tried to lean back while holding her martini and spilled some of it on the comforter.

Theo sat down next to her, taking the glass from her hand.“Sammy's going to kill me if the bed smells like martinis.”

“Wait. You guys sleep in the same bed?”

Theo nodded. “And Cary Grant, too.”

“That's so gay. Hold this,” Marisol said, handing Theo her glass.

She pulled her sweater off. Theo stared at her dark nipples through her sheer, purple bra.

“It's going to be like that?” Theo asked.

“We have to hurry up and have sex and fall in love so we can break up and move on.”

Theo put both martinis on the linoleum and started to kiss Marisol's stomach. Then she pulled down her bra and began to suck on one of her nipples. She could hear Cary Grant lapping water from her bowl in the kitchen and the hiss of the radiator. Marisol pushed Theo's mouth off her nipple.

“You okay?” Theo asked.

“Yeah,” Marisol mumbled. She looked sick. “I don't normally drink this much.”

Marisol's nostrils had begun to burn the way they did before she was going to vomit. She'd seen a tiny mint-green trash can when she'd first walked into the room but now she couldn't remember where. She mustered the energy to roll slightly over on her side and then she threw up a long stream of alcohol onto Theo's floor. Cary Grant wandered in and stood a few feet away, sniffing at the vomit.

Theo went into the kitchen and got a glass of water and a roll of paper towels. She handed Marisol the water and started to clean up the vomit.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Can you take me home?”

Marisol insisted Theo come home with her and bring Cary Grant. They could have a slumber party, and the next day Marisol would make them breakfast. But instead of crawling into bed when they got there, Marisol opened a bottle of wine and started pouring out her life story to Theo. Theo was afraid of how Marisol's face had changed since she'd been drinking. It was almost as if she'd become a different person.

Marisol's mother was Puerto Rican and her father was a white fag who survived the AIDS crisis only to shoot himself a few months ago. Both parents were alcoholics. Her mother had been in and out of prison and rehabs Marisol's entire life. Marisol studied hard, went to the library every day after school and lost herself in books. She'd been a waitress in high school but she hated small talk. She knew she'd need a job where little talking was necessary. She fantasized about filing alone all day in archives or, of course, the library. She would be happy to sit at the desk hitting cards with a scanner and helping people find books. Or when it was slow, reading the new books that came in. It turned out that her idea of what it would be like to be a librarian and the reality of it were slightly different.

She studied to be a rare books librarian, but there weren't many of those jobs. So she was a regular librarian, which in Brooklyn was really like working in a homeless shelter. As soon as the doors opened each morning the homeless poured in with their sacks and belongings, vying for the best spot to camp out for the day. Sometimes Marisol thought the only people who still read books were the homeless.

Each day when she walked to work she saw a man bundled in his cardboard fort trying to soak up a beam of winter sunshine. One day she noticed that he was reading James Baldwin's
Another Country
. She'd loved that book and all things Baldwin. She sat on the fire hydrant and watched him for a long time. He was a very black man with a thick beard and matted hair lying inside an army green sleeping bag. And around him was his cardboard fort. Behind him, the doorway he was sleeping in, a closed-up bar. On the old bar sign were two faded red cardinals.

From that day on she made it a point to bring him paperbacks from the free box. She'd set them beside him when he was asleep or leave them on his cardboard fort when he was gone. One time, she handed him a book directly. She didn't know what to say; the man stank unbelievably. She breathed through her mouth as she handed him
The Plague
by Camus.
The Stranger
had also been in the free box that day. Marisol had loved
Th
e Stranger
when she first read it—had even named a car Meursault after it—and she wanted to give it to the homeless man, but it was much thinner than
The Plague
and she figured a homeless man needed a thin book as much as a thin sandwich. She looked into his wild, crazy eyes when she handed him
The Plague
and thought,
I should've brought him both books
.

After he took the book she walked away, feeling afraid of a man she'd only ever seen reading books. When she was a block away she dipped into a store to look back and see if he was following her. Of course, he wasn't. The store sold moving supplies, things like printed stickers to label boxes that said:
kitchen
,
bathroom
,
living room
,
den
,
library
, and a bunch of names for rooms that Marisol was sure no one in this neighborhood had. She thought about labeling the homeless man's fort with stickers to separate the rooms. Then she walked home and cried for a long time alone in her apartment.

Why did some people live inside and some people outside, and people like her mother inside the outside, in prison or rehab, kept in a drawer “protected”—like a really sharp utensil you'd never want to cut yourself with. She was overcome with sadness.

After she found out her father had killed himself out in San Francisco, Marisol began collecting moving supplies. She wasn't sure where she would go; maybe she'd get out of Brooklyn or get a storage space, or just put all her belongings in boxes and label them with stickers from the moving store. Was this grief? She barely remembered her father. How could she even grieve someone she'd barely known?

Marisol showed Theo the one picture she had of her and her father and mother all in the same place. It was Christmas. There was her pale father with his big '70s moustache, and a floor full of presents. She'd kept the photo in a box most of her life and had pulled it out only a few times, most recently when her father died, and once ten years ago when she'd tried to go to therapy. The therapist had made her put the photo on the fridge and look at her young self. There were presents placed around her in a circle: a leash, a collar, bowls, and when she couldn't take it anymore, when she was shrieking and begging her father, he went out to the garage and got a little white puppy out of a cardboard box that he'd been hiding in the trunk of his car.

The therapist got a lot of mileage out of that one.

“Do you think it's responsible parenting to put a puppy in the trunk of a car?”

She'd named the puppy
Eggnot
, because that's what she thought her parents were drinking. Marisol found herself defending her father; it was a big trunk and the puppy was fine. Warm and squirmy and so eager to sleep beside Marisol in her bed. A few months later, her mother made her give the puppy away. She got pissed when it gnawed some shoes and peed on the floor.

“And did puppy things?” the therapist prompted.

She'd quit therapy when her therapist suggested she go to AA.

Marisol had become obsessed with taking care of the homeless man after her father died. When word started circulating around the library that some of the librarians were getting pink slips her first thought was
I'm not going to be able to bring him any more books from the free box
. In Brooklyn people often put their pizza boxes, pink bakery boxes or Chinese take-out containers filled with leftovers on top of trash cans so homeless people wouldn't have to rummage, but Marisol's homeless man, as she'd come to think of him, was always eating overripe bananas and Marisol figured it was because he didn't have any teeth.

When I can't bring him books anymore I'll bring him overripe bananas, she thought. She began calling in sick so she could sleep all day. She hoped when she woke up the nothing feeling would be gone, but it lingered. She couldn't even cry. She just kept trying to start the day over by taking naps. Her family was like a species that was dying out. They needed to start over from scratch, crawl out of the ocean and grow some legs. But her father was dead and her mother was doing ten years for her part in an armed robbery of a pharmacy.

Eventually, Marisol passed out, and Theo slept behind her petting her head as she listened to her breathe. In the morning when she woke up, Marisol was cold to Theo, embarrassed to find reminders of her confessions from the night before. She stared at the photo of her father on the coffee table and then told Theo she needed some time to herself.

•

When Theo got home Sammy was shuffling around in her pajamas.

“Girl,” Theo said, depressed.

“Girl,” Sammy said, listening to her story from the night before.

“I love her,” Theo sighed.

“You don't love her. You just met her. She's probably just embarrassed she got shit-faced and told you her life story. Don't worry. She'll probably call you before the end of the day.”

“Will you go with me to Atlantic City?” Theo asked. “I just want to get out of town.”

“Only if we go somewhere with a good buffet and you give me half of everything you win.”

“Okay. We can get a room and take Cary Grant and spend the night.”

“Somewhere with a hot tub?”

“Totally.”

Sammy rolled a joint in the car and smoked it.

“Girl, I'm so fucking broke. You have to hit it big.”

“I've been lucky lately,” Theo said.

Even though she had five thousand dollars of her winnings left, Theo still felt pressured to win more. She needed money for retirement, after all. She didn't have a profession in the works like Sammy did with massage school and she didn't want to work shitty cashier jobs or continue her haphazard shifts as a janitor in the junk-mail factory.

“Do you know my father gambled away every single paycheck of my childhood?” Sammy told Theo.

“Does that mean you don't want to go?”

“No. I was just thinking about it. He didn't really bet in AC. He was more of an OTB kind of guy.”

Theo felt guilty for a second for asking Sammy to come. But if something bad happened at the casino, if she fell into a losing streak, she didn't mind if Sammy saw her at her worst. Plus, she just wanted to escape, get out of town so she wouldn't torture herself about Marisol. If she won she'd help Sammy buy her expensive books for massage school, the kind with beautiful maps of the body, books where each page lifts away one layer of anatomy—first veins, then muscle, then bones. In a few seconds, the entire body disappears. Gambling was like that, too. A few pulls of the handle and everything would start dissolving: her confusion about a future with Marisol and the rest of the fears she carried around.

“I feel lucky,” Theo said. She said the same thing at the start of every trip to a casino.

There were many intonations for this statement depending on how her life was going at the time.

“I feel lucky,” like a runaway wife with a black eye on a Greyhound bus.

Or, like when a terrorist says to a hostage, “It's your lucky day.” The hostage is given the choice to have his fingers cut off with either pliers or a hatchet. That kind of luck.

Or, I feel
real
lucky, her voice laden with disgust, heavy with the memory of what had happened at the casino last time. And then four or six or eight hours have gone by and Theo has lost all her money for the buffet, for even a hot dog or a cookie at the stand outside the casino doors, the vendor who sold sad snacks to destitute people waiting for the bus to take them far away from this hellish place.

But so far, she hadn't experienced that kind of bad luck since moving to New York.

Theo got them a room when they arrived at the casino and they immediately went to the buffet to feed Sammy's hummingbird metabolism. Theo was trying not to gobble her food and rush off to the slots, but once she was in the casino and could hear the sound of the machines it took everything in her power not to run off to them. In less than twenty minutes inside the casino all of her worries had morphed into a single problem—she just needed to find a slot machine where goats were surgeons and find up a way to line up five surgeon-goats in fifty-three different directions. If she could solve this simple problem she would be a very rich person.

Theo wanted to gamble in the smoking section even though Sammy was allergic to cigarette smoke. Deep down Theo couldn't really believe Sammy was allergic since she smoked weed every day.

“Are you getting a feeling from any of them?” she asked Sammy, pointing to the rows of slot machines.

Sammy sniffled.

“Girl, you know I'm no good at that.” She refused to pick. She didn't want to be responsible if it didn't end up a winner.

Theo was getting antsy and finally said
This one
, just so she could compulsively start shoving money into something.

Sammy sat down at the slot machine next to her, but she wasn't playing.

“Start slow, girl. Start slow,” Sammy coached, sniffling.

Theo fed a hundred-dollar bill into her slot machine and another hundred into the one Sammy was sitting in front of. She'd brought a thousand dollars down from the room

“No, girl,” Sammy said. “I don't want to lose your money.” Sammy had never had the terrible misfortune of winning in a casino.

“You have to think positively,” Theo said, and Sammy started to play her slot machine but not with any conviction.

Neither one of them was doing well and before long they'd both lost a hundred dollars.

“Let's go to the hot tub,” Sammy said.

“Let me just win back that two hundred dollars first.”

She quickly lost another two hundred dollars. She could feel all her promises about buying Sammy's schoolbooks going out the window.

“What's your limit?” Sammy asked nervously.

“Two hundred more dollars,” Theo lied, thinking about the envelope of money in their hotel room.

“Girl,” Sammy said.

And the way she'd said it filled Theo with shame that she could flush money down the toilet so easily.

“Let's try this one,” Theo said, stopping at a slot machine called
Ice Age
.

The object of the game was to have a seal slide across the ice a certain distance and activate another seal to pop out of an ice-fishing hole with money fish in his mouth. When the money fish seal pops out of the hole it giggles like a teenage girl. If the seals slide too far, they disappear right off the side of the video screen, giving a sad little wave good-bye. And sometimes they don't slide far enough, never reaching the ice hole. When this happens, they push themselves up with their dejected little seal shoulders and crawl back off the screen. Theo had to try with all her might to telepathically control the length of each seal's slide. A player's level of luck is determined by how many money fish the seal tosses, and the fish flip and squirm in the air with each of their cash values emblazoned in their sides. So far the only seals Theo had been lucky enough to get to pop out of an ice hole had been depressed and unmotivated, flipping malnourished fish with low monetary value.

“Girl, can you try Reiki on the machine?” Theo asked.

“I don't know, girl.”

“But you just got an A on your test, girl. It's not like it could hurt.”