Colleen could see the light peeking through the drawn curtains, the body next to her heaving slowly. That mermaid tattoo on the shoulder, fully visible, had been a conversation the night before, but now it kicked her in the gut, or whatever the equivalent was with a flipper, as she lay there in bed.
Colleen nearly threw up a little in her mouth.
She swallowed it back down, afraid to wake the mermaid or its bearer.
Everything was fine.
Sort of.
Well.
It wasn’t clear how she had ended up here, in the bed of this dank motel, the gentle sounds of domestic arguments and a barely functional ice machine rumbling somewhere in the distance. Of course, she knew. Colleen remembered, she knew, she fully recognized the steps that good her here.
But it just wasn’t clear.
The steps behind her in the mud didn’t seem like her own as they spread into amorphous divots.
But they were hers.
She rolled slowly in the bed, the rough starchy sheets rustling under her and across her skin.
Everything had been so utterly, despicably wrong. But the soreness in her cheeks revealed one thing that still left her confused. Colleen was smiling.
She thought about it, touching her jaw.
It felt good.
Yesterday, though, it had been a different story.
There was a moment the day before, some sort of tipping point, a straw of hay dropped from a farmer’s mouth that, one way or another, landed atop a camel. It was after grocery shopping for her two teens and her husband, returning home with the bags packed in the back of the car.
She had entered the house and the end’s beginning had started.
“Can someone help me with the bags out here?” she said.
It was Saturday. They were all home. Even her husband, who worked tirelessly at his firm day and night,
“Hello? There’s a bunch of bags in the car. Can I get some help, y’all?” she shouted into the void. She hunched over the counter, placing two paper bags filled with groceries on the counter, feeling her arms sore, her legs tired, her breath short from the small but still significant exertion. Everything seemed like an exertion these days. Going to sleep. Waking up. Shopping. Cooking. Cleaning. It was just one small exertion after another, with no respite in between.
There were thuds upstairs and a teen emerged from the stairwell. Her daughter Bella appeared. Her hair fell in her face, plastered with a scowl, as she flitted around the bags.
“Can you come help me, sweetie?” she implored anew.
“You got the crappy cookies,” Bella said.
“Where’s your brother?” Colleen asked.
“Why do you always buy the crappy cookies, ma?” her daughter continued. She rummaged through the paper bag.
“Sweetie, can you—”
“They’re gross. You’re the only one who likes ‘em,” Bella insisted.
“Go on outside and help me get the rest of the—”
“Screw this. I’m going to Samantha's house. Her momma’s got money and buys the real things,” Bella said.
The girl seemed to disappear like a wisp of smoke into the ether as Colleen rubbed her temple. She couldn’t do anything right by Bella. She loved her children, but she also knew it was OK to hate them from time to time. Colleen didn’t want to blame herself, but it was hard not to, and everytime she caught Bella coming home late, smelling like cigarettes, she remembered every erroneous step, every parental error, every missed hug that had built up in Bella like mercury in a fish, poisoning her.
Colleen sighed and heard more feet rumbling down the stairs. When the thuds stopped, she saw her son, wearing a tattered tee shirt and gym shorts, who beelined for the bag and ripped open the package of cookies Bella snubbed. He shoved three in his mouth at once.
At least Blake wouldn’t complain.
“Blake, please go to the car and get the rest of the bags for me, will ya?” Colleen asked him. He looked at her, his young teen eyes glazed over with adolescent abandon, a listlessness that one day could only be achieved through prescription medications. But he was young and it came naturally to him.
“What?” he asked.
“The bags. In the car. Now,” Colleen said.
“No, that’s not my thing, ma,” he said.
“Why do I have to carry them all by myself?” she asked.
“Your fault for buying so much,” Blake said.
“Oh so now you don’t want to eat?” she said. Her hands planted on her hips firmly.
“Geeze woman, get off my case,” he said.
In that moment, she almost preferred it when Bella simply ignored her request. Blake, two years older, made no qualms about denying her whatever she asked. Bella armed herself with disregard while Blake’s weapon of choice was an aggressive disobedience sharpened by masochism. It cut deeper.
Colleen wasn’t his only target. As a student in a decent school, no less, he had scoffed at reading anything by Jane Austen. Teachers asked if his father was in prison. Recently, he had called Toni Morrison a hack—alarming on many levels—among other harrowing ideas that, like the mercury that Colleen felt she fed to Bella, Blake seemed to consume with gusto.
Both poisoned in their own way.
Both still children.
Whatever that meant.
Blake turned slowly, the package of cookies in one hand, the other scratching under an arm. She watched him disappear into the den, the sounds of childish cartoons blasting through the hall into the kitchen, a shallow contrast to his deep convictions.
She loved them both.
Usually.
“No, no, no, I need the whole account closed by Tuesday. Tuesday, Milly, or else we can’t move on the merger and we’ll be losing out,” a voice said from the stairwell. Her husband, Doug, appeared, as if on cue, a phone glued to his ear, the antenna poking up like a character from some 1960s outer space series. Ever the city slicker, he cradled a notebook and a pen as he furiously checked off items, tasked with multitasking, but never really understanding priorities.
Colleen’s mother warned her that she’d always be sharing the marriage bed with his job, that he’d be like her daddy, working into the grave, his career living as a very well-kept mistress while she’d toil as wife, begging for attention or a block of time on his little leather-bound agenda.
If her mother were still alive, Colleen would gladly tell her she was right and then rip her apart for not chaining Colleen in the basement until delusions of marriage passed. She had been too insistent on satiating her lust for a wedding band, a ceremony, a cake covered in flowers of icing.
The gold tarnished.
The cake went stale—like so many things.
He walked by her and Colleen looked at him, her eyes pleading, her hands pointing to the bags.
She mouthed, “Help.”
He nodded at her.
Then he fell back into the phone’s receiver.
“Yes, Milly, I know. We need to loop Carl in on that or else the associates will never go for it. Right, I know, but he’s in Bali now and won’t respond for a few days, so get it drafted ASAP,” he continued. He mouthed, “Sorry,” and Colleen shook her head as he disappeared into the living room, the good one with the furniture they never sat in, the one that smelled like a hotel lobby. She hated that room, but he insisted they have it.
Why did she let him convince her to accept it?
It was just one more thing that felt off.
Alone, in the kitchen, with the sounds of cartoons blasting in the background, Colleen wondered how it had come to this, and what she had done to bring it upon herself.
When was it?
What was the moment?
Who was there?
What had she been wearing?
Was there coffee? Or tea maybe?
Did she have an episode or a fit?
Her husband walked in again, the receiver on his chest, muting it to any listeners.
“Coll,” he said.
“Yes?” She knew the milk was in the car, getting warm, but hoped that would change soon.
“Milly’s got a work trip lined up for us this week so I’ll be out of town again,” Doug said. “Did you get my dry cleaning?”
“No, I didn’t. I was out grocery shopping all day and—”
“Why the heck not, sweetie?” he said.
“I had to go and—”
“I really wish you woulda got it. You know how busy I am,” he said.
“You didn’t ask me—-”
“I’ll have Milly get it, on her way home from the office tomorrow. Thanks anyway,” he said to her.
“Oh,” Colleen said.
Her husband picked up the conversation again, sauntering around the kitchen, picking at the paper bags full of groceries. He made a disgusted face.
“One second Milly, one sec,” he said. He placed the receiver on his shoulder again and put a hand on Colleen’s arm. It felt cold, but perhaps it would thaw to warmth in that minute, in that moment of connection. It had been years, it seemed, since she last felt his touch on her, in any capacity. She looked up at him, as she leaned on the counter. The slightest bit of electricity, vaguely familiar, zipped down her shoulder from his fingers, as if, perhaps, she were about to remember why she did it all in the first place.
He looked at Colleen.
“Did you forget to get those cookies again?” he asked.
She stared at him.
“Geeze, really Colleen?”
He walked away to the living room and, in the process, tripped a wire somewhere in Colleen’s mind. She imagined lighting the thick purple curtains on fire and smashing the Tiffany lamp his mother gave them for their wedding against his head before watching the entire place burn, Milly’s voice muffled through the phone asking what time they would meet in parking lot to get hot and heavy in the backseat of her red Camry.
The fantasy felt good.
“Sorry, Milly,” she’d say. “Doug’s busy. Hope you didn’t open the condom yet.”
She had no proof of infidelity, but Colleen was pissed.
It was an outlet. Ultimately ineffective, but a slight release.
Colleen felt stuck.
Every day it was the same.
“Mom, you suck.”
“Sweetheart, did you have to be like that?”
“Mom, get away from me.”
“Hun, why’d you do that?”
“Mom, why’d you say that?
Years and years of it.
And what did she have to show for it? Graying hair, bags under her eyes, crows feet
stepping deeper into her face, and more pervasive fantasies of everything just going up in flames. Metaphorically, of course. Colleen wasn’t going to set the home on fire. Doug had purchased lousy insurance.
But fire.
Flames.
Heat.
Colleen knew she could do nothin’ right anyway, so she walked to the coat closet and found the phone book and flipped through, looking for the name of that bar. Something about lips or shellfish or clams or something.
She wanted a drink. There was nothing right about that. Not alone. Not at her age. Who would cook dinner?
It fanned the fantasy a little hotter.
Her friend from college, with the short hair, who ran into Colleen at the drug store all those years ago, she said she had worked at this bar for a while. It was lively, convivial, and the perfect place to go and get away from kids and husbands.
Gosh, what was it called?
Oysters. Right.
There it was.
Oyster Lips. She wrote the address on the back of an opened envelope with some unpaid bill in it and left the house. Dinner wasn’t made, but she didn’t care.
There was no use trying to do anything right anymore.
She heard her husband talking in the stupid living room as the screen door smacked the frame, but she didn’t look back.
Burn it down.
Die, Milly.
She drove, the paper bags in the back of the car containing warmed milk, melting ice cream, and eggs that would soon start to smell were just accessories that underscored how utterly wrong Colleen had gotten everything in her life. They rustled with approval. She nodded.
Colleen parked in the far end of the parking lot when she found Oyster Lips. It was wedged on a seedier stretch of the boulevard, near a bowling alley that kids didn’t go to much anymore and a strip bar where men would go for bachelor parties and after their second divorce. There was a more hopeful strip joint for men only on their first divorce, but that was closer to the nice hotel, the diner, and the other respectable establishments. She unbuckled the seatbelt and stepped out into the early evening air.
It was warm.
She walked slowly to the bar and pushed the door, the low light inside just a few shades darker than the dusk sky.
It was warmer still.
Her eyes adjusted quickly.
A few dozen women were inside. “Come to My Window” was playing on the radio at the bar and it felt a little too on the nose for Colleen, but who was she to judge?
Whatever song she’d have picked would have been wrong.
Everyone made it clear she was the constant error that no one could fix.
If there were a right way to do it, Colleen couldn’t find it.
She was doin’ nothin’ right, and she knew it, and she hated it, and she embraced it.
“A whiskey sour,” she said to the bartender, an older butch woman who smiled sweetly through thick-rimmed glasses.
“Cherries?” she asked.
“Only if it doesn’t interfere with the whiskey,” Colleen answered.
The woman at the bar next to her laughed. She was stirring a martini. It had a twist in it. She was probably thirty, thirty-five years old, and she reminded Colleen of her own more youthful days—not that Colleen herself was old by any means. Experienced, yes. More nap-inclined than before, yes. But each venture around the sun didn’t age her as much as those ingrates at home who wore on her, sucking her dry of any vitality that she may have possessed.
A whiskey sour changed that real quickly.
Conversation flowed freely.
The woman at the bar with her didn’t insult or berate Colleen—already something enticing.
A second drink slid across the bar.
As they talked, the woman put a hand on her shoulder and Colleen felt a jolt, like licking a 9-volt battery, but in a good way.
A fresh way.
A way that was certainly anything but right.
A third drink arrived and they clinked glasses. The woman pulled her stool closer to Colleen, who had found herself seated unwittingly. They finally doubled back to introductions.
“I’m so sorry, what’s your name?” she asked.
“Colleen, and yours?”
“Unimportant. So go on, tell me do you come here often?”
“Oh no, no, I just, well, I needed a drink is all, and I never go out, and I—”
“It’s alright,” she said.
Colleen looked at her.
“There ain’t no harm in a little drink among us girls, is there?” she said.
Colleen smiled.
“Absolutely not. Not at all.”
For the briefest moment, Colleen hoped Doug made dinner for Blake and Bella and that they wouldn’t leave dishes for her to do when she got home.
Whenever that may be.
Then they faded, wisps of smoke like Bella, disappearing through some overhead vent.
The woman’s hand had descended to Colleen’s thigh, caressing it through her jeans.
The electricity pulsed more freely, openly, creating a circuit anywhere it could through Colleen’s body. She had felt these currents before, ages ago, and she invited them to course through her.
“So,” she said.
“So, yeah,” Colleen said. Her mind raced, tripping over itself, and giggling. The cherries in the whiskey sour certainly didn’t interfere with the liquor.
Not one bit.
It all felt wrong.
And incredibly good.
And suddenly Colleen realized she had been living life backwards. Doing the wrong thing was fine sometimes, if it made her happy. She wasn’t hurting anyone anyway, right? Everyone else was ignoring the right thing, smoking cigarettes, embracing casual misogyny, maybe flirting with Milly. It was time Colleen flipped the bird to everything, and so she ordered another whiskey sour.
She knew what was right for herself.
She smiled at the woman on the barstool next to her, her cheeks straining to reach new heights. The woman’s deep cut shirt had slipped off her shoulder, and she reached to adjust it.
Colleen stopped her.
“I love your mermaid tattoo,” Colleen said.
Ugh! What a life! I made sure MINE didn't go that way.
I loved this! The details! The tattoo, the graying hair, Milly’s red Camry. This will stick with me.