Close Your Eyes

13

As I drove away from my therapist, I felt terrible. A black hole seemed to be yawning open in me, something I knew I needed to seal again, and fast. “Black hole?” I said to myself in the rearview mirror. “What are you, Mr. Spock? What is this, the starship Enterprise? Redirect to starbase!” I laughed, and the sound was high-pitched and hysterical.

I needed to pull myself together. I didn’t want to feel whatever was coursing through me—I just wanted it to stop. I thought about booze and how it helped to transport you, even as you sat still on the bar stool. Drinking did for me what old age seemed to do for Gramma: it made me less present in a world I wasn’t so crazy about anymore. I could be elsewhere, numb.

I drove to the Elks Lodge off Barton Springs Road, which was one of the last places in Austin where you could actually smoke cigarettes indoors, so my vision problem would not be as pronounced. I had sold a ramshackle 1/1 to the bartender, so when I pressed the intercom and said, “I’m here for Jerzy,” the Elk-in-Charge let me in.

“Well, well, well,” said Jerzy as I entered. He was in his mid-sixties, a muscular Vietnam vet. I had shown him apartments and carriage houses for six years before he went for his Zilker fixer-upper. “It’s Lauren the Realtor! What can I do for you, honey?”

“How about a drink?” I said.

He slapped the top of the bar. “That’s my girl,” he said. He lit a cigarette and offered me one. I accepted, and the unfiltered Marlboro almost made me gag. An elderly man at the bar said, “You know what BPOE stands for, sweetheart?”

“Best people on earth,” I exclaimed, the nicotine making me feel both giddy and ill. Jerzy had asked me this every time I took him house-hunting.

“Damn right,” said the man. “I’ll have a Jim Beam,” he added.

“Make it two,” I said. “And maybe a cheeseburger with onion rings?”

“Burger and a Beam,” said Jerzy. “Coming right up.”

After a few drinks and half a cheeseburger, I went back to my car. The good thing about a Dodge Neon with tinted windows is that you can lie down in the backseat, if you’re so inclined, which I was.

When I closed my eyes, I saw my mother the day before she died, sunbathing next to the tree house, shiny with baby oil. Her body was tan in an aqua bikini, and her hair was held back in a rubber band. She was squinting, resting a large square of cardboard covered in aluminum foil underneath her chin. I saw my own girlhood toes, painted purple. I remembered the way I had once felt: safe, bored, sunburned. These were the waning minutes of the life I’d thought would always be mine.