My relationship with my mother has been strained ever since she found out I slept with her ex-husband. I’ll start there because then it’s out of the way.
It’s 8:52 on a Saturday morning when she calls me. The vibration jars me awake and my first response—before I’ve knuckled sleep out of my eyes—is blind rage. My heart beats in my throat. Once I’ve blinked dazedly at the contact name MUM on the screen a couple of times, the rage mutates into confusion. Complete bewilderment. I try to remember the last time we talked. It must’ve been two months ago when I texted her happy birthday! and she didn’t respond. Does that count?
‘What?’ I bite out, my voice so slushy with sleep that I’m momentarily fifteen again. I didn’t know her ex-husband when I was fifteen, it wasn’t like that. Let’s get that straight as well. He wasn’t a father figure to me, except in the way that all older men are father figure adjacent if you’re a specific type of girl. They only married when I was an adult (nineteen) and practically filed for divorce while the wedding cake leftovers were still moist in the fridge. I only had sex with him after all that (still nineteen), so it’s honestly not as bad as it sounds. I know she called before nine just to be a bitch. She’s like that.
‘Would you like to go to Puerto Rico?’ she asks, sans salutation as is her wont.
I scoot up in bed, stifle a yawn into my palm, and repeat, ‘What?’
‘I won free tickets,’ she says. ‘Flight, hotel, all-inclusive. Two weeks. Would you like to go with me?’
This sounds completely mental. You don’t just win an all-inclusive two-week round trip to Puerto Rico. That is not something that happens, except it is something that would somehow happen to my mother. She’s like that, too. Would I like to go on holiday for free? Sure. I’m not insane, duh. Would I like to do so with my mother with whom I haven’t had a real conversation in 13 months and who, I’m sure, hates me? Sure, I guess. I mean, it’s still a free holiday. And maybe I am kind of insane.
‘When is it?’ I ask, like I’m a person with plans who might not be able to make it and not someone already salivating at the thought of bottomless piña coladas and white beaches. I work customer service for an online retailer of lights, which is not something that sparks joy at any point except when I get to tell someone that their lamp is out of warranty so there’s unfortunately nothing we can do. Tough luck. Like everyone born after 1991, I hate my job. If she tells me the flight is in thirty minutes, I’ll grab a bikini and my passport and get my ass to the airport right away.
‘Next Friday.’
I wonder how long she’s had these mysterious free tickets and whether she waited weeks to invite me. I also wonder about the catch, because there has to be a catch. She can’t even look at me, so why didn’t she ask a friend or neighbour or random woman picking out organic goat’s cheese next to her in the health nut store?
‘Okay.’ I scratch at the chipped purple polish on my toenail, which I put on a few days ago while ignoring my inbox. This customer was kicking up a fuss about a late delivery, threatening to call a lawyer and demanding reparations for the trouble—again, we’re selling lights, not medical equipment or anything that actually matters—so I was letting him stew in his own impotent misery for a bit. Call that lawyer. See if I care. I’m going to fucking Puerto Rico. ‘Sounds fun.’
‘I’ll e-mail you a copy of the tickets,’ she says. ‘Don’t be late to the airport.’
‘See you Friday.’ She hangs up and my throat does something funny; I flop back on my mattress and stare at the ceiling for a while. The first thing I did when I moved here was paint the whole bedroom. I wanted it dark—not cosy but cave-like. Now is when I’d ordinarily call Riley, like, you won’t guess what just happened and she’d guess it immediately, our brains forever synced ever since the first grade. Riley’s my best friend. She’s good at everything I’m not good at, like baking chocolate chip cookies and driving a car and not fucking her best friend’s boyfriend. Yes, I fucked her boyfriend, and I wasn’t even that drunk. It was three months ago and she hasn’t talked to me since. I flush hot with shame every time I think about it; I don’t even know how I’d start apologising, so I haven’t tried. They’d been together for two years and now they’re obviously not anymore. It wasn’t even good, which makes it worse (I ruined everything for a mediocre lay) but also somewhat hysterical (shouldn’t she thank me for saving her from someone who’s that bad at eating pussy?). She helped me paint the bedroom midnight blue. She drilled the holes for the curtain rod. I squeeze my eyes shut and envision a long, warm stretch of white sand and turquoise water.
My phone dings with a new e-mail. I read the travel documents without really reading them, then close my eyes and fall back asleep.
When I wake up again, it’s past noon. I make bacon in the microwave and eat it in my underwear before taking a cold shower. Cold showers feel like shit, but you always feel absurdly healthy afterwards, so it almost erases the fact that my dinner last night was two beers and a box of French fries. This is what I eat when I cosplay that I’m a Cool Guy. I set a timer, brush my teeth for three minutes, and scrape my tongue. Then I put on clean underwear.
When I’m not staving off questions about shunt circuits and which constant voltage driver to choose—do I look like a goddamn electrician?—I slush-read for a literary magazine. I only got the position because I lied in my application and invented several writing credits and an MFA in Creative Writing that I absolutely do not have, but they never asked for proof. Maybe I’d feel guilty if they paid me. Not that I feel guilty about slacking at the lamp job that does pay me.
I get to read a lot of mind-numbing, self-serious stories. I also get to read a lot of stories that try pathetically hard to be funny but aren’t. It’s embarrassing. I’m not actually passionate about fiction so I should probably quit and pass on the position to someone who isn’t a total scam artist, but reading all these short stories is a lovely (and, at times, much needed) reminder that I’m not the only one out there making awful choices. You’ve got all the fictional married 40-somethings with clichéd affairs, plus the writers submitting their mediocrity.
Infrequently, I also get to read something really good. I’m not qualified to judge if it’s actually good or just feels that way to me, a poseur with a terrible track record. But the magazine hasn’t sacked me yet, so I scroll through the inbox and start from the bottom.
Hours scurry by as I read and rate. A nineteen-year-old is fucking her college professor, and I give it a bad rating because it cuts a bit too close, even though the prose is decent enough despite the convoluted metaphors. Someone with a real MFA and integrity would’ve shrugged off her subjectivity before she started reading, but I’m fake. I’m unfair.
When I look up from my laptop screen, the room is awash in neat orange light that taints my skin slightly green. My foot cramps. My stomach groans for food.
In the kitchen, I hop on the counter to reach the highest shelf in the corner cabinet and get out a stashed pack of smokes from behind a food processor. I’ve only used it one time since I bought it. Naively, I thought I could be the type of person to make meatballs from scratch. I am not that type of person, so it just takes up space. I’m the type of person who hides cigarettes in her own flat even though nobody else lives here. Out of sight, out of mind? Not really. I still end up climbing the counter every day. There’s probably a metaphor there.
The apartment doesn’t have a balcony, so I push open the kitchen window and lean out of it to smoke. The nicotine spills through my lungs, a slow drip that gives way for a heady rush; I rest my head against the cold window frame and look at the cloud of smoke. In one week, I’ll be sunbathing on a Puerto Rican beach and sipping a fruity cocktail. I still have no idea how my mum plans to blow this up in my face, but I’m sure there’s something.
I light a second cigarette and smoke it faster than the first. Satiated, I toss it to the ground and close the window. My stomach growls again, angry beast, so I feed it two grilled cheese sandwiches dipped in splotches of ketchup.
At 2 a.m., I look up the hotel online and scrounge the website for pictures. Tan walls with arched windows and palm trees dotted around squiggle-shaped azure pools. The rooms have sleek ceiling fans and curtains, large beds with shockingly white sheets. One photo shows a fully stocked mini bar and I picture myself sexed-out in bed with a bottle of rosé. Golden appliances and a marble sink glimmer in the bathroom. I have work in less than six hours but I flick from photo to photo—close-ups of the pool; a barmaid in black with a big smile and bushy braids; plush towels folded in the shape of swans—and my frontal lobe goes crazy. It blinks and buzzes and I feel the sun whip my skin, breathe in the dense air, smile at the people around us. Within seconds, I’m already entrenched in an affair with a man my mum’s age who has a wife back in Barcelona or wherever he’s from. And I feel like a total fucking joke. I close out of the hotel’s website and stare at my dark ceiling that my best friend helped paint. I’m no longer Riley’s best friend, I’m sure. I’m that browning, soft spot on an apple that you cut off before eating it. I’m a thing of the past, her childhood best friend that isn’t her best friend anymore. But I still think of Riley as my best friend, present tense. I still think of her as whipped cream, warm apple pie, autumnal sky bruised by the setting sun. In the first grade, when Riley and I met, our teacher had us describe ourselves with one word. Riley’s word, after a few seconds of deliberation, was smart. She stayed top of the class every year and started college on a full-ride scholarship. Recently, my own word has been disappointment.
I close my eyes and don’t fall asleep.
In the morning, I check my personal e-mail to make sure I didn’t dream entire thing, but the tickets wink at me. Right there, real enough. Huh. I open my work computer so I appear to be online, then go put on BB cream in the bathroom. I come back and sift through my work inbox, chewing on a stale croissant and sipping instant coffee. Everyone is mad at me. Well, they’re mad at the circumstances, faulty products or false deliveries, probably mad at their lives in general, but their anger crystallises and is directed at me. I am the face of the company, the person they can scream at after they received the blue table lamp instead of the red or if their refund wasn’t processed quickly enough. Some days, I cope with this by inventing extravagant stories about the customers. For a few days, I’ve been receiving increasingly hostile e-mails from a woman named Esther Maraschino. She’s upset because her chandelier arrived with three broken crystals (acrylic, not actually crystal) and we don’t offer spare parts, so she’ll have to return the entire light to have it exchanged. I decide that she’s underfucked by her corporate husband so she’s started day drinking. In her youth, she wanted to run away to study painting and sleep her way through Florence, but her parents kept her housebound and had her married to the right man. I picture her pacing a spacious living room while she drafts her messages to me, the sunflower maxi print of her tunic swaying around her legs. Her ashy blonde hair is pulled back in a chignon and her lipstick is a shade of pink that conjures Barbie’s convertible and bad sex. She takes long sips of her cocktail and huffs about what the world has come to. I tell Esther that if she refuses to return the chandelier, there’s nothing more we can do for her.
A man complains about the delivery time in all capital letters. Another woman complains about the return process. A man I assume has a dark family secret demands to speak to a manager, so I change my sign-off and pretend to be my own boss and reiterate what I’ve already told him. My eyes glaze over and I start thinking about the beach again. The sand is warm and soft beneath my feet. The water licks my skin like an eager puppy. I strike up a conversation with the college-aged girl next to me at the beach because her freckles and the paperback copy of Anna Karenina in her lap remind me of Riley. She’s studying psychology and I wonder if she’s X-raying my brain, if she can detect the scent of wrongness beneath my grapefruit shampoo and coconut sunscreen.
In the evening, my mum and I sit down at a restaurant and eat seafood empanadillas. She hasn’t said anything yet about why she asked me to come nor unsubtly alluded to my promiscuity or bad choices. I’m just waiting for it, though. The grenade will blow up as soon as you assume it’s a dud.
My work computer pings and pulls me back to the sad reality of customer service. Someone wants financial compensation because her order arrived two days later than expected. I consider asking for her husband’s number so I can fuck him and give her something real to cry about. Instead, I ransack my kitchen cabinets and devour three stracciatella muffins and a generous glass of orange Malfy. I raise a toast to Esther Maraschino. Bottom’s up.
After work, I look at pictures of the Caribbean. Then I sext a random man on the Internet. He asks for pictures and I send one. I ask if he has a wife and send him another picture of my pussy when he says that he does. He might be lying but I don’t care. He says I must be tight. I tell him I wish I could suck him off, wish he were here, over me, inside me, throbbing. My orgasm is not great but decent.
Riley blocked me on Instagram, but I made a private burner account with a blank profile picture. I put my name as Cassy and followed a handful of neurotic fitness influencers to seem normal. She rarely ever posts anything, but I still check obsessively. I miss her. I want to tell her about Puerto Rico and spitball what might happen there; maybe my mum is planning a fatal accident at sea and I won’t come back home. Would anyone miss me? Tonight, there’s a new photo. She’s at a bar with some friends, an out-of-focus snapshot of a few drinks captioned fun night out. The Long Island iced tea is hers; it’s what she always orders. My stomach tightens and I keep staring at the photo. There’s no accompanying selfie but I imagine she straightened her hair and shimmied into a glitzy halter top and mini leather skirt. She smells like mandarin and patchouli. Her uneven teeth glimmer charmingly in the dim light of the bar as she chats about the newest chapter of her thesis. She’s graduating in a few months, surely summa cum laude. I wonder if she’s moved on from her ex yet, if she’ll invite someone new home and have sex in her tidy bedroom. She should pick someone who’s better at giving head to women. I retreat into my kitchen to get my cigarettes. Rain drizzles down outside. The sky is still a crisp blue. I smoke the first one fast, hard, like an ill-advised public restroom hook-up. I light a second and hold the smoke inside me, reach out my hand to feel the rain hit my skin. It’s surprisingly warm. My phone buzzes against my thigh. Maybe it’s Riley drunk texting me. Maybe it’s my mum reminding me to bring my passport on Friday. I drop the butt of my cigarette to the ground and pull out my phone.
It’s the man from earlier.
He wants another picture.
