Cha ching, p.16
Cha-Ching!, page 16
“Yeah, you too.”
He hadn’t called Marisol “ma’am,” but he might as well have. She leaned against the railing and watched him descend the staircase. He was almost out of sight when she called “Thanks,” and he looked back over his shoulder and smiled, giving her a little wave like the kind a boy gives their childhood friend when they part at the bus stop after school.
Marisol lugged the video case into the pizza shop and ordered a bag of garlic knots and a diet soda. The man behind the counter picked five garlic knots from a silver tray with a pair of tongs and dropped them into a white paper bag. She felt his eyes on her; she knew she got better customer service because of her looks. She slid the video case into a corner booth and scooted in next to it. She fished the prescription bottle out of her purse and shook two more of the tiny white pills into the palm of her hand. It had been so long since she’d felt like she was on vacation and she didn’t want to lose that feeling. She popped one of the pills into her mouth and took a quick swig of diet soda; she loved its bitter flavor. She looked at the other pill and heard Candy’s voice saying, “Don’t pull no Marilyn Monroe on me.”
As much as she wanted to swallow it so she could be on super vacation, she was afraid to take too many at once, lest she build up a tolerance.
The garlic knots were still warm. She bit into one, the butter and garlic coating her teeth. Garlic knots were vacation food. She should go to P-town and visit her friends. But did people vacation alone? Maybe only sad people who were pretending to be happy. She stretched her legs out under the table, imagining Sean was across from her and she was seducing him easily, touching his legs with hers, inching down the V in her T-shirt with her pinky finger. But really she wished Theo was there. Had she scared Theo away with her coldness? She finished the garlic knot and picked up another one.
“Goddammit!” the man behind the counter yelled. He was shaking an enormous tub of white shredded cheese into a smaller tub and watching a soccer game on TV.
He caught Marisol’s eye and said, “Why do they want to break my heart?” gesturing to the TV, which was showing an instant replay of what Marisol assumed was the wrong team scoring a goal.
She smiled and went back to her garlic knot. Men shouting at sports on TV were not her idea of vacation.
“Every game, they make the same mistakes,” he said.
“It always gets darkest right before it gets pitch black,” Marisol replied.
“What’s that?” the man asked, wiping his hands on his apron and turning the TV down with the remote. He’d finally succeeded in his plan to get her to talk to him.
She ignored him. She was his hostage, the only person in the shop. Soon the gaggle of high school kids would flood in from across the street and push each other and screech and order their slices. The thought made Marisol open her purse and retrieve one of the white pills. She threw it into a mouthful of diet soda like a person tosses a bottle with a message in it into a breaking wave, and swallowed. Then she folded the top of the paper bag down neatly, into perfect, symmetrical rectangles. She wanted to save a few garlic knots for later, and she wanted to escape the man behind the counter.
“I didn’t hear you,” he said as she slid out of the booth and walked toward the door, the video case now heavier in her hand.
She looked at him, puzzled.
“You just said something to me,” he said, a touch angrily.
Marisol remembered, the soccer game.
“Oh,” she smiled. Her rubber knees giggled underneath her. She remembered the first time her mom came home from rehab talking about God’s will.
“I said, ‘We don’t always know God’s will.’”
He looked at her, incensed. “No, that’s not what you said.”
“It’s what I meant to say.”
She moved her hand over her cleavage, adjusting the V of her white T-shirt. She didn’t need to will the man’s eyes to follow her hand. They just did. I should be a hypnotist, she thought. A titnotist! She laughed at her little joke and smiled at the man. She thought about making jazz hands at him and saying, A titnotist! But she was still holding the video case.
“Do you know what’s God’s will? This,” she said firmly, raising the bag of remaining garlic knots up so he could see them over the counter.
He frowned. She’d upset him. His God had nothing to do with garlic knots. She certainly wasn’t going to waste the first day of her vacation fighting with this man about religion. She felt great, cradled and safe against the bosom of the tiny white pills. Or like a dog running free through the house, gobbling cat shit out of the litter box. The man looked a touch scared, like maybe he thought she was going to rob him after her dazzling camouflage tactics. No one likes it when the pretty girl with the perfect tits turns out to be crazy.
“You’re not feeling well,” he said.
“You’re just jealous that I’m on vacation,” Marisol laughed, walking out of the pizza shop into the wind.
She walked the few short blocks to her apartment, hurrying up the stairs to avoid anyone in The Looney Bin. She had to shove her key three times into the lock before she opened the door of her apartment, flopping down on the monstrosity that was her couch, which was long and gold and from the seventies. When she had first seen it, she hadn’t been able to decide if it was amazing or hideous. She’d returned to the thrift store three times before she was willing to pay the hundred dollars for it. She set the video case down on the coffee table. Maybe she could nap for a few hours before she had to walk downstairs and start her shift. If she’d seduced Sean she would have asked him if he wanted to take a nap afterwards. Or better, if Theo was here. She couldn’t believe she’d passed out before having sex with Theo the other night. It was so nice to take a nap after fucking on vacation. Especially when a sunbeam was falling just right on the bed.
She opened the video case, and a familiar smell wafted out that made her mouth water. She tried to put her finger on it. She’d smelled it at the library, like some kind of old metal typewriter. Each part of the video camera fit perfectly inside its matching indentation. Marisol loved compartments; sometimes she went to a south Indian restaurant just to get served on a metal tray that had tiny indentations for all its sauces. She pulled out the heavy camera with its black rectangular foam-covered microphone on top. She touched the foam, and was surprised by its coarseness. She ran her finger back and forth over it, like it was some kind of scab on her arm. She took the other attachments out of the case and placed them around her on the coffee table like an array of Christmas presents.
In the bottom of the case, hiding behind a battery pack, was a rolled up light blue dishtowel. She pulled on the edge of it, but it was stuck. She pulled harder, and as it unraveled she heard something fall to the floor with a thud.
“Oh shit,” she said, looking at the small handgun.
•
Marisol felt her heart beating under her armpit as she leaned over and picked up the gun. She was afraid to touch it, especially after swallowing Xanax all day. How did a person know if a gun like this was loaded? In the movies, some dude usually jerked the handle down a few times quickly. She tried, timidly, but the handle didn’t budge. She’d never held a gun before, and it was lighter than she’d thought it would be. She gave the handle another fruitless jerk and then gave up. Why was she using bad cop movies as a reference? She was a fucking librarian. She would just get up, put the gun in her purse, go to the building where she’d just been laid off and ask her fellow librarians if they could help her find out if the gun she’d accidentally found when she’d picked up a case of porn equipment for a friend named “Candy” who was teaching her how to strip was loaded.
There was a tiny button that Marisol assumed was the safety. She pushed on it, holding her breath, but it didn’t move. Her heart was pounding. The room was thick with the smell of metal, her tongue even tasted metallic. She needed to get to the library before it closed to get the right book on how to load a gun. Her father had known how to load a gun. She didn’t understand how people knew the right ways to kill themselves. Where exactly to shoot themselves in the head, how to tie a noose. Her throat tightened and she felt herself on the verge of tears. Since her father had died she’d let most of her friends drift away. Now she wished she had someone to call. Why didn’t Theo call? She wished there were instant friends like instant soups. Someone you could call when you discovered guns. They just came over and you exchanged looks and smoked cigarettes and somehow figured it all out. She had a terrible desire to lick the barrel. She brought the barrel toward her face and looked into it, sniffing for the source of the smell of metal that had overtaken the room. It was pitch black inside the barrel. Staring into it, she thought maybe she saw an ocean there, like putting a conch shell to your ear, but instead of hearing she was seeing an enormous Xanax wave coming at her. She watched its perfect curl and felt it crash over her.
•
When Marisol woke up she felt like her brain had been replaced by the blue wadded up dishtowel that had been wrapped around the gun. Right before she woke up she’d been dreaming that the phone was ringing and ringing and ringing under a pile of comforters, and she kept moving the comforters to the side until she found that the phone was actually a frozen waffle. She was just having the realization that she’d gone her whole life not knowing waffles were phones when she pulled her creased face from the drool-soaked gold cushion and saw that her actual phone was ringing. Theo, Marisol hoped. She looked out the window over the fire escape and saw that it was dark outside. The phone stopped ringing before she could answer it. “Shit,” she said and stumbled into the kitchen, a dehydration headache beginning to pound in her skull.
The refrigerator was filled with things that needed to be cooked. A chicken, some potatoes. A stick of butter. But nothing to drink. She shut the refrigerator door and the phone began to ring again.
“Hello,” she said, not recognizing her own voice.
“Chloe?”
She almost said, “No, it’s Marisol,” but then she remembered the girls from The Looney Bin knew her as Chloe.
“Yeah?”
“It’s Candy. You didn’t come to work.”
Marisol struggled to understand what that meant.
“Are you there?” Candy asked.
“What time is it?”
“Three.”
Marisol tried to do some quick math. It had been about 3 pm when she’d gotten home from the pizza place. Twelve hours had passed?
“You drunk?” Candy said.
“No,” Marisol said defensively. She caught herself and said, “I think I’m getting sick. I fell asleep.”
She pulled a coffee cup from the cupboard and filled it with tap water.
“Sean said he gave you the video camera.”
“Oh, shit. The video camera. Sorry.”
“Can I come upstairs and get it?”
“I’ll put some clothes on and meet you downstairs.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I need to go out for milk anyway.”
Marisol hurried, trying to put the camera pieces into their respective indentations. She didn’t know what to do about the gun. Suddenly she felt guilty, as if she’d created this problem. She shoved it under a couch cushion.
Outside it was cold. Marisol glanced at the metal gate pulled across the pizza shop. Candy was sitting in the passenger seat of her girlfriend’s car, which sat idling at the curb. She rolled down the window, and Marisol awkwardly handed the video case through to her.
“Thanks,” Candy said. “You coming to work tomorrow?”
“Yeah.”
“Good ’cause we got hella Christmas parties coming in.”
“See you tomorrow.”
Candy said something to her girlfriend and the car screeched off. Marisol walked two blocks to the 24-hour bodega. The man behind the counter woke up when she came in.
“Hi,” Marisol said, and he gave her a tired smile.
She picked up two packages of crumb donuts and a gallon jug of Hi-C.
“That it?” he asked.
“Yeah. Unless you have any empty boxes.”
He looked at her, not understanding. She almost said for moving but she stopped herself.
“I want to give some things to charity,” she heard herself say.
“You need strong boxes?”
“Yes. Strong boxes,” she repeated.
He nodded, putting his burning cigarette in the ashtray and wandering to a tiny door in the back of the bodega. Marisol heard him rustling around in the closet until he came back with a few folded-up pieces of cardboard.
“These are strong boxes,” he said.
“Thank you,” Marisol smiled.
She looked at the shelf behind the counter where rat traps, tampons, pencils and packing tape were displayed.
“I’ll get some of that tape, too,” she said.
He reached for it twice before successfully grabbing it.
She wanted to tell the man her father had died, but she knew she shouldn’t.
She paid him, and he handed her the change and said, “Every day I have lots of strong boxes.”
“Good to know,” Marisol said. “Goodnight.”
She walked home smiling, with the folded boxes under one arm and her bag of donuts and Hi-C in the other. Everything seemed surreal, the way things feel after falling asleep in the middle of the afternoon and waking up at night hungover. Her apartment felt like a sauna when she walked in, making her dizzy. She laid the boxes on the floor wondering what she should pack first and then turned on the television, flipping through the channels. She watched the news and twisted the plastic cap off the Hi-C, taking a big swig. It felt so good to drink something. Then she took another gulp and shoved a crumb donut into her mouth. It was stale but she didn’t care. The whole reason she chose the crumb donuts was because the crumbs distracted from the staleness.
•
Marisol had two plans. Plan A was to pack up her apartment, put her stuff in storage, drive to the parking lot under the Verrazzano bridge and pull the trigger on the gun she’d found. Maybe it was God’s will she should kill herself, otherwise she never would’ve found it. Plan B was, for now, anything but Plan A. Since she’d found the gun three days had passed, and she’d stalled: setting it beside her at the kitchen table while she drank her coffee, on the nightstand while she read a book, on the coffee table while she painted her nails. It was like a pet cat that she coaxed to follow her from room to room through the apartment. The good kind of cat that never shed and wasn’t too needy, and wouldn’t lie on top of her in the middle of a New York summer heat wave.
She didn’t go back to The Looney Bin because she wanted to keep the gun with her and she didn’t trust the other girls not to go through her purse. What if Candy saw it in there? Half those girls carried weapons, afraid of creeps or stalkers. Still, Marisol was afraid they’d see hers and know it was a friend, not protection.
On the fourth day she no longer enjoyed threatening herself with the gun and just found it pathetic that she hadn’t had the guts to pull the trigger. People who want to kill themselves get the shit done. Like her father. The police had found a receipt on his kitchen table for some stationery he’d bought to write out his suicide notes. The time and date printed on it showed that he’d bought it just hours before he pulled the trigger.
On the fifth day, Marisol decided to bring the gun to the police station as part of their no questions asked, get guns off the street program. For each gun turned in, a person got $75. She walked up to the police officer drinking a cup of coffee behind the thick glass window.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hello.”
“I found a gun that I want to turn in. I’m going to take it out of my purse, so don’t shoot me.”
He chuckled and knocked on the window separating them. “Bullet proof,” he said.
Marisol put the gun into a little box the officer slid open for her, then pulled to his side of the window. He took a look at it and then at Marisol.
“You found this?”
“She nodded.”
“Where?”
“I thought this was no questions asked.”
“This isn’t a real gun. It’s a fake.”
“What?”
“Like a movie prop. I can’t give you any money for this,” the police officer said. “But it’s still great you brought it in, because stores get robbed all the time with these because they look so real.”
Marisol let out a deep sigh. She couldn’t even find the words to say good-bye. She had been ready to kill herself with a fake gun. She walked out of the police station and back onto the cold street. On the way home she bought a bottle of red wine.
When she got back to her apartment she poured herself a glass of wine and sat down on the couch, toasting to her mother and her dead father. Her toothache had progressed over the past week and she swirled each sip of wine over her sore tooth, pretending it was anesthesia, until the bottle was gone.
thirteen
With the exception of the cash she’d left behind in Brooklyn, Theo had lost all of her money while Sammy was asleep in the motel room. She counted and recounted in her head, realizing she’d lost over four thousand dollars. And her only current employment was as a janitor in the junk-mail factory, so that was like losing ten million dollars. On the ride home Sammy assured her that it was okay, but she wasn’t really being honest about how much she’d lost.
When Sammy went to massage school the next day, Theo wrapped the Christmas presents she’d ordered before they left for Atlantic City. She’d bought two bones, a red plaid coat and a squeaky lobster for Cary Grant, and a travel massage table for Sammy. The massage table was delivered in a giant cardboard box, unassembled, and Theo dragged it across the shitty linoleum into the kitchen where she leaned it up against the bar. She put Cary Grant’s presents on the bar under a miniature Christmas tree. Then she felt the terrible depression overtake her. She wanted to call Marisol, but it had been almost a week since their failed date. She pulled the scraps of paper out of her pocket with the phone numbers for the alcohol and depression studies and dialed the number for the alcohol study first. When the phone screener answered, it occurred to Theo that she didn’t know if she was supposed to present herself as an alcoholic or a normal drinker.
