Getting to Happy (28 page)

She’s sitting on the grape sofa meant for clients. It’s low to the floor and, she now realizes, uncomfortable. Gloria tries to cross her legs, hoping this will cause her back to tip backward, but her thighs are too thick and feel like the sticky stuff on Post-Its. This is just one more thing she doesn’t feel like thinking about.

“Well, this is where I come in,” Joseph says. “A rent increase that’s ridiculously out of reach is really an opportunity to make a change. Maybe you should thank the bastards.”

“Thank you, bastards!” Gloria yells. “I’m going home.” But when she goes to push herself up to a standing position, she can’t do it. Joseph extends his hand. Gloria takes it. She shakes her head in embarrassment as he pulls her to a standing position.

“And this, too, shall pass,” he says, and gives her a kiss on her forehead.

After Joseph left, Gloria still didn’t want to go home, because there was no reason to. She’d been lollygagging around the salon, telling herself it was to miss rush-hour traffic.

She enters the freeway and heads in the opposite direction from home. She’s doing about seventy but is now aware of the glassy whir of headlights passing her by. In a split second she hears and then sees a motorcycle in her rearview mirror fly past her with only inches between it and the car in the next lane, and a Hummer on her left cuts her off. She is tempted to honk but in a sudden panic her heart makes one long hard beat and she decides against it. She grips the steering wheel, then puts on her blinkers and gets off at the next exit and pulls over. Her heart is beating fast and her head drops against the steering wheel. She starts crying uncontrollably. Finally, she stops. Reaches in the glove compartment and gets a napkin. Wipes her eyes. But then here come more tears. “When is this going to stop?” she says out loud. Gloria had no idea how much it hurts to lose someone you love. How hard it is to keep going. How it takes all the strength you have to just go through the motions to get from one day to the next. And sometimes, one minute to the next. Sometimes the grief strikes like an earthquake and there is nothing she can do except hold on to something solid and wait for it to pass.

“What in God’s name am I doing way out here?” she asks herself. She pulls onto the road, looking for a place to turn around. This stretch of road offers nothing but blackness. Finally, after five or six more minutes, she sees signs for an Indian casino. When Gloria spots a gas station, to her own surprise she keeps driving. “Oh, why not?” she asks herself. “Maybe I’ll have some fun. Maybe I’ll hit a jackpot! Maybe I’ll run into Sister Monroe!” Knowing she may have spoken too soon, she says, “I take that back, Lord. Please, don’t let me run into that woman. Please.”

Gloria is surprised when she starts laughing and for the next fifteen minutes travels farther down this two-lane road until the casino appears out of nowhere. She follows the curved driveway lined with giant ferns and palm trees whose fronds are lit with colored lights. If she didn’t know better, Gloria might think she was in the Caribbean, that she could expect to hear slow waves hitting a sandy shoreline. This is definitely Arizona and it’s also ninety degrees and humid, and this casino is on a real Indian reservation in the middle of the desert, make no mistake about it.

She pulls right up to valet parking.

“Good evening, madam. And will you be checking in or just here for gaming?”

“Both,” she hears herself say. Gloria thinks maybe she’s losing her mind, doing something this impulsive without even considering what she’s going to do in a hotel room all by herself and all of forty minutes from where she lives. She barely knows how to gamble. Slots don’t count and she has never had the heart to play anything higher than the quarter machines. Craps scare her because she has never understood how the game works and there are far too many numbers that mean far too many things.

Blackjack is another story. As a kid, she played it with her dad but he just called it “twenty-one” and the word
blackjack
came up only when you were dealt a hand that added up to twenty-one. Go figure. By the time she was in middle and then high school, Gloria played for nickels and dimes and usually cleaned up. She became unpopular when it came to all card games even though blackjack was the only one she was good at. Well, there was also spades.

Before she reaches the building, Gloria is taken aback by the lines of seniors being escorted onto buses. Many of them are using canes or in wheelchairs. Once she gets closer to the entrance, the doors open and close even when no one’s walking through them. Gloria tries not to stare at an elderly black woman with oxygen tubes stuffed in both nostrils struggling to smoke a cigarette as she drags her ventilator along as if it’s one of those carts you get at a Laundromat to hang your clothes on.

Once she is inside, the smoke-filled air looks like smog and yet it doesn’t seem to be bothering anybody. It looks more like a geriatric convention than a casino. It’s definitely not Vegas. This place is about the size of a big barn and is packed to capacity. There are probably close to a thousand people in here, huddled around crap tables, crouched in front of slot machines, arms crossed tightly in front of the roulette table, staring at the cards fall onto the blackjack table as if they are hoping for a miracle. Most of them look like they’re in a trance, and almost everybody looks scared or desperate. It doesn’t look like they’re having much fun, even those with stacks of chips.

Gloria heads over to the hotel registration counter. Her cell phone rings. It’s Tarik but she decides to let it go to voice mail. She’ll call him back after she’s all settled in.

When she looks up, even the young bleached blonde whose name tag reads “Cindy W.” looks damaged, like she’s been through too much already. “Checking in?” she asks Gloria. Cindy can’t be more than twenty-five but she looks thirty-five. Her hair looks like uncooked spaghetti, her roots the color of weak coffee. Her skin is sallow and dried zit marks dot her cheeks, which only draws more attention to the pale peach lipstick that’s working against her on every level. Gloria tries to ignore what nails she has left. Cindy’s eyes are glazed and her pupils dilated. She must not get tested very often, Gloria thinks. Cindy flits back and forth behind the counter for at least a minute before returning to the spot where she can actually give Gloria her full attention. Something’s making her act this revved up. “I’ll be with you in a few minutes,” Cindy says. “I have to put out a small fire.” And off she goes. She should not be welcoming anybody.

While she waits, Gloria looks around. She has no idea what she’s doing here. Row after row of slot machines are lined up like soldiers at Buckingham Palace. But this is no palace. There are no gates and there is nothing to protect. The craps tables are surrounded by people who appear to be looking for UFOs more than the right dots on the dice. There are no earsplitting jackpot squeals. No one seems to be laughing or smiling. There is no delight in this place. And to top it off, no bells are ringing. No one seems to be getting what they came here for, which was to win. Gloria knows there’s nothing in here for her to win.

“Is your husband parking your car?” Cindy asks.

Gloria is startled. “No, he isn’t.”

“Then shall I go ahead and book a room for you?”

“I don’t think so,” Gloria says. “But thanks for your help anyway.”

She heads back outside, where the woman with emphysema is now sitting. She is not smoking, thank God. She looks like a brown skeleton, especially her arms and fingers. Gloria stands here and smiles even though she wants to scream at her because she cannot for the life of her understand why this woman is out here all alone and why she is still smoking cigarettes knowing she is so close to death. Maybe that’s precisely why, Gloria thinks as she waits for the valet to bring her car around.

“Your luck couldn’ta ran out this fast,” the old woman says. She is trying very hard to smile.

“It didn’t,” Gloria says. “I just didn’t feel like betting on anything when the odds aren’t in my favor.”

On her way home, Gloria decides to stop by the grocery store. She’s almost out of everything she needs: toilet paper, paper towels, orange juice, candy corn, chips and salsa, chocolate milk (that she knows she shouldn’t be drinking), those frozen apple and raisin turnovers (that she knows she shouldn’t be eating), frozen waffles, sausage links, macaroni and cheese and a twelve-pack of Diet Pepsi. It’s been hard trying to do everything right, which is why Gloria often rewards herself with food for what she does manage.

She knows the danger. It’s called a heart attack. If she listened to her doctor and started eating like she knows she should, lost at least twenty but preferably thirty pounds, did at least a half hour of any kind of exercise five but preferably seven days a week, she could eliminate almost all of the medication she takes. The good news: her mammogram was negative. Everything else was a little too high. Her glucose was I80. Her cholesterol 205. Blood pressure I40/90. This was the one that scared her the most.

Gloria was not about to panic, because that was part of the problem. But trying not to worry was the same as worrying. You can’t trick your body, because it’s smarter than you are. Gloria’s been doing her very best pretending that in the very near future she’s going to miraculously wake up one morning and eat a piece of fruit with some yogurt, then she’ll take ten thousand steps before she starts her workday. She’ll eat steamed vegetables and a salad with baked fish or chicken and she’ll have pasta and she’ll be able to live without the twenty different desserts she once couldn’t live without. She will lose weight sensibly. She will look better. She’ll feel better. She’ll be one of the smart ones, who learned how to live like she really wanted to.

“Is that you, Gloria?” someone calls out. It’s a voice she doesn’t recognize. Even after she turns, she just sees an elderly black woman in one of those wheelchair carts.

“Yes, my name is Gloria. Do I know you from somewhere? I’m terrible with names, I’m sorry to say.”

“Girl, I’m Dottie. Dottie Knox.”

Gloria is trying to go through her memory bank, but it’s locked. She also doesn’t feel like trying to remember Dottie.

“From Black Women on the Move! Ringing any bells yet?”

Now Gloria looks more closely at this frail woman in a wig meant more for transvestites, what appeared to be bifocals, and slacks that should’ve been dry-cleaned but had clearly been ironed too many times, because they are shiny, and that’s when it hits Gloria that the other Dottie used to be an almost good-looking, well-dressed pain in the ass. In fact, she was quite a few years younger than Gloria. Dottie also thought she was fine as wine back then, but she was destined to be a spinster because she had no tolerance for other people’s shortcomings. Dottie was the one who complained about everything at the meetings (which is why they went on for hours) and always objected to just about every fund-raising idea anybody made, and nobody could really stand her. She was also the treasurer and always had to be in control. But after years of declining membership and due to a lack of focus, Gloria, Bernadine, Robin and Savannah stopped going to the meetings because that’s all they were: meetings.

“Dottie! Of course I remember you, girl. How are you?”

Dottie throws her arms up in the air. “How does it look like I’m doing?”

Gloria is ashamed of herself for even thinking it, but once a bitch always a bitch, and this is a word she stopped using a long time ago. “Did you have an accident?”

“That would be called a stroke and that would be nine years ago, and that also makes me grateful that our Lord Jesus Christ who is our savior spared me, so now I do His work and do everything in His name. Are you saved?”

Damn, Gloria thinks. I just came in here to get a few groceries. “I was saved a long time ago, Dottie. Are you doing okay, though, for real? It looks like you’re able to get around pretty good.”

“Some things aren’t what they appear to be. I never did get up the courage to marry. I was very sorry to hear about the tragic death of your husband. Wasn’t his name Marlin?”

“Marvin.”

“Yes, I read about it in the paper quite a few months back. How are you doing? You’re looking healthy. Grief sneaks up on you and you have to get through it the best you can. Look at me, would you?”