Chapter 8 Jane 3
SHE CAN’T LOOK AT THE pictures on the slot machines—the pair of cherries joined at the stem with a single green leaf, the yellow sickle of a banana—without thinking of her daughter’s picture books, the pages made of thick cardboard, the images simplified into the most perfect versions of themselves.
The words she was supposed to read in a slow, sweet voice so the baby could repeat them back to her one day.
She can’t listen to the jingle of coins without thinking of the rattles she shook and shook above the baby’s bassinet, pleading with her to be quiet. Shhh, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.
But they both knew that it wasn’t okay. The baby was right—she didn’t know how to be a mother.
Sometimes when her husband was at work, she let the baby cry and cry even if she wasn’t doing anything but laying on the couch, watching poor people win things on daytime TV.
Someone told her once that the biggest pawnshop in the world is right next door to where they film The Price Is Right—that they offer half of the value of whatever the contestants win.
That’s the kind of world she was bringing her daughter into, where getting more than you’ve been slated for is only an illusion, where someone else already has half a claim on your good luck.
She couldn’t make herself feel anything for the baby.
When her husband asked about the diaper rash later, she lied.
Whose side are you on? she thought at him. But she knew the answer to that.
She watches the slot machines whir from a stool in the corner of the bar, slowly sipping the house white wine she’s allowed herself, even though her money is almost gone. The wine tastes like chilled vinegar, but she drinks it anyway.
Thinking of this, of course she shouldn’t have had the drinks, but she needs the buzz, the thing that makes the world go a little slant, so she can pretend that this new life is a fever she’ll wake from, that one day she’ll be returned to herself—whoever that is anymore.
Sometimes she puts a little money into the slots because it means free drinks: the waitresses will come around and bring you cheap liquor, wine, or beer, but she’s afraid she’s too familiar now.
Most of them have caught on that she only plays a buck or two, then milks it for four, five drinks at a time.
Worse, they could call security or even the cops, if they know she’s here picking up men.
When she thinks back on the past few months it is through the warped haze of a hangover, a blend of discomfort, disgust, self-hatred, but one that also feels slightly unreal.
Maybe that’s why she ran away from the girl in the fortune-teller’s shop.
At first the card had made her smile. The cheesy illustrations, moons with eyes, the punny name.
Clara Voyant. But as she held it in her hand, it seemed more and more like an invitation.
Since she got to Atlantic City, she had avoided thinking about the future, beyond what she needed to do to cover her room, get a bit of food.
But when she sat down with the fortune-teller, that girl, suddenly the prospect of having to reckon with the consequences of her decisions seemed like the most terrible possibility in the world—more terrible than the smell of strange men on her skin, than the motel room where she has heard gunshots ring out from the parking lot, where roaches scuttle out from the shower drain.
The slot machine nearest to her stops at two halved watermelons and a lemon.
She’s been here for three months and doesn’t know what this means—it’s as though if she refuses to learn the language of this place, then it can’t claim her.
She thinks about how real fruit is bruised, never as good as it looks.
Or when it is, she can’t think past the fact that ripeness is only something close to death, a few days, or sometimes hours, away from rot.
The baby must have known this, too. Must have known to reject all these images that the world hands you, the ones that are meant to tell us we are safe, that we’re all okay.
Just sign on the dotted line for this mortgage rate.
Just wear Ann Taylor and eat your free-range eggs and drive your Toyota and wash your clothes with Tide.
But then your life can split open, your body, too.
After the birth her husband reported to her how there had been so much blood.
She didn’t know whether that was true, but the sound of excitement in his voice confirmed what she had suspected—her mortality was thrilling to him.
What we’re most afraid of gives us a little jolt of joy, when we brush up against it, when it hovers too close.
She thinks that’s what all these gamblers must be trying to hide from, here in these dark caverns, pulling on levers and spinning their savings away: mortality.
No clocks anywhere in sight. Gamblers are the only people she knows who believe the future isn’t the past. Sure, she remembers the statistics: One probability is not dependent on the other.
A heads on the last flip of a coin doesn’t increase the odds of tails on the next.
A loss could yield to a win on the next spin.
But what about here, where the odds are rigged?
The odds are always rigged. She hates this place, but here, her thoughts come back to her, her memory feels like a room that’s been tidied up.
That thing about the coins, probability—she’d never have remembered that with the baby screaming through the night.
Motherhood was nothing like what she had imagined, running her hand over her belly all those months, thumbing through paint swatches for the nursery.
She thought there would be softness, joy.
Instead there was this new soul who, with all her screaming, insisted she not forget how scary, how terrible it could be to be alive.
She started to think about what she could do to silence her.
A pillow. A few hard shakes, and she could believe in the illusion of safety again.
When she closes her eyes she can still smell her, powdery and sweet, skin pink from the bath.
I’m doing this for her, she told her husband on the pay phone outside of Baltimore.
He didn’t understand and she couldn’t bring herself to say it.
All those times she thought about how much easier it would have been for everyone if she’d held the baby down under the surface of the water in the bathtub.
She could have done it with one hand. She thinks about the girl in the shop again, with her practiced adult voice, the too-smooth assuredness of her gestures, her hands.
What had happened to her, that she was working in that dingy little storefront?
And those posters she kept seeing all over town, about the missing teenage girl?
Were they girls whose mothers had ruined them, or ones who never had a chance because their mothers were like her—too afraid of screwing up to even stick around?
It was a feeble gesture, leaving that $10 bill, but for a moment it had made her feel a little lighter.
At least she could care for someone’s girl.
A man takes a seat at the other end of the bar.
She watches him order a drink and thumb through the cash in his wallet, waits for him to feel her stare.
He is probably twenty years older than she is, wears a wedding ring—which, of course, doesn’t mean anything—and the top three buttons of his shirt are undone to expose the glint of a gold chain tangled into a pelt of graying chest hair.
He looks up at her and she tilts her head at him, but he breaks away when a woman brushes behind him, takes the seat next to his.
She can tell by the tension in the woman’s arm that she’s wrapping a hand around his thigh.
She had never felt compelled to touch her husband like that in public, to lay claim.
Sometimes, when they were at parties together, she would watch a woman flirt with him—her husband laughing a little too loudly or leaning in a little too close—and would feel like it confirmed something.
How easily she would be erased, cut out of the equation.
It was useful information, she thought. She stored it up, to make the leaving easier.
If she didn’t find a man for tonight, she still had her credit cards, though she didn’t like the idea of using them, of sending up a little flare: I am here.
She sold the car for $750 at a mechanic’s shop on the way into Atlantic City, at a place with a strange tower made of scrap metal and hubcaps in the bare dirt yard.
She was distracted, the way the light glinted off the hubcaps while she was trying to negotiate him up to $800.
She was sure that a woman in her right mind would have waved the white flag, gone home, asked her husband for forgiveness, asked for help, for pills that would make her mind go right.
She could go back and submit to the baby, to the laundry, to the endless diapers and scrubbing the grime between tiles in the bathroom.
Instead she booked three nights at Harrah’s and the next week she pawned her wedding ring for a fifth of what it was worth.