My phone flashes. It’s my neighbor, Dottie, asking if I like champagne. Perhaps we could share a glass this evening.

I text back the truth, Champagne is my favorite. 

For once, I’m honest with a stranger.

I shower, put on a bra. Spray me down with a clean scent and leave my cigarettes behind. I will present Dottie with aspirational me. Self-disciplined and stoic. Hard-boiled but prone to quiet softening when pressed. 

The week before, Dottie put an aloe plant on my doorstep, its leaves outstretched like a hand. I’d recently moved to a sun-dappled block in Orlando. Cobblestone streets. Walkable neighborhood. Little free library to pass on (un)read books to strangers. I cast a moon water spell to negotiate with the universe. Gargled with tap water blessed by bugs and threads of lunar light. Lit green candles for abundance and set intentions. Fair credit but somehow approved.

My first place, post-separation, was a Gainesville starter apartment, functional and endearing even if cockroaches gushed from its electrical sockets. Outside it was used condoms, broken glass, domestic violence. Paycheck-to-paycheck variety filth like me doesn’t belong here in this tony section of O-town, but Dottie convinces me I do.   

Dottie greets me by name when I walk my dog. Mikey and I admire her twig-like frame sweeping Home Depot sand between egg chair porch swings and large succulents. She is biceps built by Pilates and big straw hat. Sturdy yet chic. Like everything in this neighborhood.

“I know it’s you by your boots,” she calls over her fence as my stacked heels clip-clop past, my girlish laughter erupting like bubble wrap.

I’m in the habit of befriending slightly older women. Maternal figures leading bohemian lives within suburban parameters. Seekers abandoned in childhood by dead(beat) moms. Motherless daughters can sniff out other motherless daughters. We wear our stale deprivation like a discontinued perfume.

Dottie’s door is open when I arrive. She’s wearing quirky yoga pants, tiny neon galaxies spiral across her toned legs. Her hair is done in Bravo reality star waves.

“C’mon on in. I gotta hold Remy back or else he’ll slobber all over ya.” 

Classic rock whispers from Dottie’s unassuming TV. Journey, Bad Company, Foreigner. At the kitchen island, a bottle of cheap pink champagne and two glasses set the tableaux for a polite ladies’ night. Dottie’s shelter dog, Remy, paws at my maxi skirt’s mesh bottom as I drop my purse and take a seat like a regular.

The light at Dottie’s duplex is the typical kind—grey shrugging over grey walls shrugging over grey, indiscriminate furnishings. Shy shadows giving inhabitants permission to blend. I expected something different. Something intimidating to put me in my place immediately. To remind me I belong outside with Remy, squatting underneath umbrellas I could never afford.

“You’re so dressed up,” Dottie says while uncorking the bottle. 

“I always dress like this,” I explain. “If I didn’t, I wouldn’t want to live.” This isn’t hyperbole but I hope Dottie interprets it as charming embellishment. 

“I used to be like you but, at this age, I’m too damn tired. So, I wear this ratty uniform.”

“You look great though.” I mean it. She does. 

Dottie gives each of our glasses a generous pour and pauses. She rests her unmanicured hands on the counter, takes a deep breath. “I just want to put it out there because I don’t want you to get the wrong idea: This invitation is not my way of hitting on you. No judgment but I don’t like women that way.”

Dottie is nervous. She’s in aspirational mode, too. I decide my best rejoinder is levity: “Never crossed my mind,” I run my Blue Slurpee acrylics through my bleached hair. “But, if that was the case, I’d be flattered.”

“Oh, thank god,” she sighs. “You never know. People are weird about shit in Florida.”

“Believe me, I get it.” I reach for Dottie’s hand across the granite, suppress this instinct and caress my empty glass instead. “It’s what I haven’t missed about this place. I grew up here but just moved back after living in New York City, well, really Brooklyn, for 19 years.”

“Damn, girl.”

“Yeah,” I raise my glass. “Shortest version of the story: I got divorced so I returned home. Longer version: I got into manifestation and did a lot of inner child work. I know it sounds woo woo but it unlocked something in me, some type of spiritual urge, I don’t know.”

Blood and wine flow through me. I’m already flushed with the candor of happy hour. I don’t drink much anymore, so the pretense fades easily.

Dottie listens, nods. Her taut skin shows no signs of interest. Her eyes do all the work. As I tell her about my amicable separation, she braids her hair into pigtails. As I tell her about my best friend’s cancer, she pours me more wine. As I tell her about how imploding a certain and stable life to seek unknown happiness has been worth it, she toasts me. Our glasses clink as Steve Perry sings about separate ways. Our eyes sparkle with impish glee.

This is what separated women do. Divorced women do. Older women do. Drink and gossip and share perimenopausal cures (Dottie recommends black cohosh for my mood swings and vertigo.) 

Dottie’s had three facelifts and two marriages. Dottie has an off again, on again “booty boy,” thirty years her junior. The best sex of her life was between ages 53 and 58 with said booty boy.  She’s now 62. She takes a final sip of her champagne and grins like a crone: “Something for you to look forward to.” 

Dottie loves EDM, especially drum-n-bass. I ask if she’s worn lit-up butterfly wings before. She says, of course she has, ignoring my obvious dig. I tell her my brother’s a DJ in New York. She wants to meet him. She says he’s not too young for her.

We run out of pink champagne and move onto white wine. Dottie doesn’t want the American Spirits she stores in her fridge. She wants my Marlboro lights, so I run home to retrieve them. Outside, the sun is dropping fast and it looks like rain. I pee quickly and grab my smokes. This is intermission. Part two of tonight promises nothing. That’s what’s so exciting about it.   

I stagger back to Dottie’s, announcing my return by waving the pack of Marlboros in the air like a wedding sparkler. We smoke out on her deck, side by side. Wine glasses on the ground. Remy snoring nearby. 

Dottie says Sam Harris says, Deepak Chopra says, Gilbert says. (“That’s the name of my ChatGPT.”) All these men in her life imparting wisdom. They say a lot of things about a lot of things. I don’t remember any of it. What I recall is Dottie’s recounting of all the friends she’s lost. To drugs, to suicide, to suicide by drugs. How her face droops with grief despite her surgeon’s noble attempt to carve through time. 

“I had a friend with your name,” she says. “You remind me of her. Blonde, stylish and a little bit wild. She’d cartwheel downtown drunk. We used to have a lot of fun.”

“Sounds like my type of woman.”

Dottie refreshes our drinks by squatting on the deck, sloshing pinot grigio onto the wooden planks, sometimes filling our glasses. 

“She was full of life but she was a trust fund party girl. It’s all she did and she did it well, but I think she wanted more out of life, y’ know?” Dottie has a joint now. She offers it to me but I shake my head. Weed subdues me into passive worry. It heightens who I really am. “Well, fast forward to like 2005, she got heavy into Oxys like everyone here. She lived right downtown in this super fancy apartment complex. One night she climbed over her balcony and out onto this huge tree in the courtyard. Something she would do even sober but she wasn’t. And she fell. Hit the ground, went into a coma, and died a few days later.”

“I’m so sorry,” I say and leave it at that. To say more is to obscure the horror of grief. Like living without regret, it simply can’t be done. 

I’ve lost friends to Fentanyl, boyfriends to addiction, my late mother to her painkillers before the pain subsided for good. 

Everyone has Florida in them no matter their income, their perceived status. Dark shit. Painful shit. Piles of shit sunk under their tongues and constipating their hearts. Dottie is no different. 

So, I keep drinking because I want to. Because she wants to. Because it’s the way to keep the night moving in unexpected directions. To get to a place that’s honest and painless and the opposite of boring. 

Dottie stubs out her Marlboro in her backyard desert. “I don’t know why I’m thinking of this right now, but my nephew, gifted me some magic beans last Christmas.”

“You mean MDMA?” 

“That’s a bad idea right? I don’t know what I’m doing right now. Tell me it’s a bad idea.” One of Dottie’s braids has come undone. 

“What about if we each do half?” I coax. 

“You’re fun! I like you.” Dottie claps her hands together and squeals. 

The first time I took ecstasy was a random weeknight my senior year of high school. Mel, my hottest friend, had Audrey Horne’s brows and Laura Palmer’s doomed perfection. I was the baby’s breath in her rose bouquet—enhancing her beauty but negligible. Our drug dealer stayed at Mel’s to support us doing our first time. Mel and I changed into sheer negligee and pastel thongs—our asses transformed into Easter baskets. We kissed each other hard. We kissed the drug dealer harder, teeth clacking like dice. We took chances because we had so many to spare. There’d be other reckless occasions if this one disappointed.

We took photos, with a disposable camera, in various pairings and states of undress. Mel kept leaving the flash on. I kept staring through her and at my veiny skin, pale and tense and off-color like spoiled meat. We were too afraid to develop the photos, to resurrect the moment and find it sordid and overexposed. We were so young.

Dottie and I don’t want to fuck each other. She doesn’t like women and I’m in love with a man. But we want something from this moment, from each other. It eludes our tongues and slips our minds. We feel it lurking in the periphery. Black, voracious and spreading fast.  

Dottie uses a butter knife to split our pills in half. Instead of splitting one, she takes two and cleaves each of them. 

“Keep the other half for someday,” she winks. We bump our slivers together and swallow with our wine. “Cheers, girl! To new friends and crazy ideas. Welcome to the neighborhood!”

I palm my leftover nub and examine it. It’s larger than what I just ingested. 

“I know what you’re thinking,” Dottie teases.

“We should though, right?” I stick out my tongue and dangle the shard above it. 

“Fuck it. You’re right. We’re doing it. What’s the point of going halfway?”  

We swallow and both reach for our wine glasses, pouting like child stars when we notice the drained bottle. So, we head outside for another smoke. There’s an unseasonal breeze. Clouds chase each other across the sky, grey on grey on grey. My pits are damp, the polyester, cool. My bangs pasted to my forehead while the rest of my stylish shag frizzes into a blonde snarl. My makeup’s erased by the heavy misting of sweat from my pores. My bra strap perpetually hangs off my right shoulder. I give up on adjusting it.

“Look at that palm tree!” Dottie gasps. “Does it always look like that? It looks magical, like a perfect puff ball or a cheerleader’s pom pom or a firework or something, right?”

“Oh yeaaah,” I chuckle while we gaze up in stoned rapture. It’s the moon making it look like that, I think, but it could also be the drugs.”  

From here onward, we flit and squeal and guffaw. We spew a continual spiral of thoughts to nourish, to entice, to defend each other.

Dottie says, “You have to set boundaries. Alienation is actually a healthy social state…No, no, you didn’t say too much. I mean, honestly, I think this is why we’re connecting so quickly. My father and my brother and my mother, no your mother, no our dead mothers, and their inherited pain or “trauma,” ugh that word is overused, but in some cases there’s no other word to use…And when can we say, without people calling bullshit, that love isn’t always enough? Love is a spectrum, right? There’s different types and degrees or whatever and what is enough for one person isn’t enough for another. I think the real question is: Is it okay for us to ask for more when what we have is good enough? When it doesn’t do any harm, but it doesn’t do much good either? Like I have so many friends who’ve settled. But isn’t fulfillment the point? I was worried after my first marriage ended that I would never be fucked again. But I was. Goddamn I was, and you are getting fucked again, am I right? Probably pretty often and pretty good, huh? And I call bullshit on anyone who says sex doesn’t matter as we age. It does and it should. And we’re not invisible. I’m intentionally celibate at the moment. I’m off sex but probably not forever…Me and the booty boy used to go at it for days…I have all these skimpy outfits that I was going to put in storage…but you wanna help me unload them from my car? I bet they would fit you. You can use them more than I can. They’re actually really cute…you wanna?”

We bring cans of Bud Light into the living room and sit cross-legged on the floor in front of Dottie’s boxes of her horned-up legacy. 

Dottie reveals each sexy outfit and its abbreviated history: a Wizard of Oz gingham mini and red sequin bra (“Obviously I bought this because my real name is Dorothy. I wore this once for Booty Boy. He got a real kick out of it.”); royal purple bra and panties with garter belt (“This is a second husband outfit. He was a real man, you know real handy and shit, but he was also really anti-social. He hated when I invited people over for wine and cheese and shit. And, you know, sometimes the coke would come out and he’d judge me from the kitchen and I’d ignore him and head downtown with my friends. It was never going to work out.”); gold lamé thong bodysuit (“I wore this to Electric Daisy like 10 years ago. I met a younger guy there. Even younger than Booty Boy. He looked like Brandon Boyd from Incubus. But even hotter. We were rolling so hard we ended up just doing it in a corner of the festival behind a taco truck. I missed most of Steve Aoki’s set but it was worth it.”); and camo print platform lace-up booties circa 2011 (“I wore these downtown a lot. With Jillian! We’d go to this one club. Jillian knew some Asian crime lords there. One of them ran this massage parlor with happy endings. Real shady dudes but they’d buy us bottles of champagne, the good stuff. Not like the cheap shit we had tonight. Never laid a finger on us, treated us like dolls. Some nights, it’d be after the club closed and they’d knock on the door of this steakhouse. We’d order martinis and french fries and these crime dudes would foot the bill. They didn’t wanna be alone. Who can blame ‘em?”)

Dottie folds each outfit carefully into the blue IKEA bag. Her dilated pupils, downcast but afloat in the fathoms of her sexual prime, confront the evidence of her erotic life, convincing herself there’s no returns, only exchanges. 

We say we’ll end this at midnight. Then one. Then definitely a hard stop at 1:30. At 2:15, a silence fills the room. It’s not uncomfortable or ominous, just a natural halt to the evening. I hug Dottie goodbye and hoist the Ikea bag stuffed with sexy time hand-me-downs over my shoulder. 

At home, the night sours into dawn. The room spins and my heart plans its escape from my body. It’s either vertigo or panic or too much champagne. I flash to Dottie’s old Jillian out on a limb, reaching for the stars and meeting the earth before she’s ready. I collapse on my couch and hope when my fall comes, it’s gradual, that I won’t even notice when the dark swallows me for good.