Onward Toward What We're Going Toward Read online

  Her new Viking representative, Pete Lemmingworth, was a chubby guy with curly hair who never showed up at any of her tournaments and didn’t care if she stuck with it or not. He knew the league was a mud puddle and the sun was coming out. Mary called him for advice. Were there other pool circuits? What about Las Vegas? Los Angeles? Were any Bmovies looking for women who were good at pool? What should she do? When she started crying and blabbering about Lyle, Pete hung up. She called back, but he didn’t answer. She called the next day, and he wouldn’t take her call. She had enough money to do nothing but drive around San Jose, checking in and out of hotels, eating at restaurants by herself, going to movies, walking around the zoo.

  A few months after she sent the letter, she stopped by the old apartment. There was a FOR RENT sign in the window. Mary still had her key, and it worked the lock. The living room carpet had indentations where the couch had sat. On the kitchen counter was a book of matches from a steak place on Hillside Avenue. She put the matches in her purse. The closet door was open in the bedroom. Lyle had left twenty or thirty wire hangers behind. Mary stood there, staring into the closet, imagining Lyle’s silk shirts and polyester suits. In the bathroom, she sat on the toilet seat to feel the coldness of the plastic, to feel something, anger, betrayal, loneliness. She wanted to be in Lyle’s LTD trying to sleep, listening to the hum of the interstate, Lyle in the seat next to her, snoring.

  Over the next few years, there were other men, a lot of other men, too many other men. She got married to a guy named Jack, but that lasted six, maybe eight months. She couldn’t remember. It didn’t matter. She moved to Los Angeles, hoping to run into Giles Alberhaskie. She tracked down his number and gave him a call, hoping he could get her a part in a television show or something, maybe a car commercial, but his secretary said he was “with a client.” She was staying in a little roadside motel in Encino, but most days she sat in her car in some grocery store parking lot, smoking cigarettes and watching people get in and out of their cars. Some pulled their wailing, screaming kids behind them; others were alone, like her, and walked across the parking lot, hands in their pockets, looking around for something, someone, some sort of distraction from the loneliness that was crushing them.

  After two months she left Encino for Eureka. After six months in Eureka, she headed to Portland, then Yuma, Arizona, then Las Vegas, then Reno, then Tahoe for the winter ski season of 1988. In Tahoe, Mary met Pierre Bontemps, who promised he’d take care of her. He wore a fur coat and drank champagne for no particular reason. But he didn’t take care of her. He couldn’t even take care of himself. Every morning he rolled over and asked her to make breakfast. She didn’t want to make breakfast. Why couldn’t they go out to breakfast?

  All told, she was married and divorced nine times. There were also the men she never married, like the cowboy in Flagstaff, Arizona. This was in 1990, and she was working at a Chi-Chi’s by I-40. When she got off her shift at ten, the cowboy was sitting at the bar eating a chimichanga. Mary sat next to him, and Julio, the bartender, brought her her usual—a shot of Cuervo and a Budweiser. The cowboy was a traveling salesman who sold power tools. They started talking while Julio kept setting shots in front of them. At midnight, Mary went back to his hotel, the Ramada Inn next door. The two of them rolled around on the king-size bed pawing at each other. Mary kept glancing at the hotel room door, thinking his wife or girlfriend was going to barge in.

  Afterward, she couldn’t sleep, but the cowboy nodded right off, sprawled out on his stomach, the bedsheets twisted around his body. Mary tried to remember if he’d put a condom on or not. She’d done too many shots. Her mouth was dry. It felt like a thousand angry bees were inside her skull. She checked the nightstand hoping to find a spent, shriveled rubber next to the clock radio. There wasn’t one. She checked the bed, pulling the sheet back and exposing the cowboy’s hairy white ass and his ugly feet with yellowing toenails. She checked the floor around the bed, then under the bed, then the garbage can in the bathroom. Nothing. She sat on the toilet and looked at her vagina and willed the semen to leak out. She tried to pee but only a little urine tinkled into the toilet water. She unrolled a mound of toilet paper and scrubbed her vagina. Then, she quickly got dressed and snuck out of the hotel room.

  On the way back to her apartment, Mary stopped at a Walgreens and bought a pregnancy test. She pissed on the stick as soon as she got home, not even bothering to take off her coat. It came back negative, of course. You’re pregnant, a loud voice inside her head said. It doesn’t matter what the test says. You’re pregnant. P-r-e-g-n-a-n-t. No you’re not, a whisper voice said. You’re forty-four years old. You are, the loud voice said. Mary sat down on the toilet. She could feel the baby inside her; it felt like a goldfish swimming circles in her stomach. Actually, she knew it was smaller than a goldfish—a minnow. Actually, smaller than a minnow, a guppy, actually smaller than that, a cell, a single cell orbiting in her womb, getting ready to multiply. The capper, the true indication of her pregnancy: her crotch was burning.

  The next morning, Mary called her manager at Chi-Chi’s and told him she wouldn’t make it in for her lunch shift. She drove straight to the Brass Bull and ordered a double gin and tonic. Her plan was to carpet bomb the baby with G&Ts. She wasn’t wearing underwear, and every hour or so, she went into the bathroom and smeared anti-burning cream on her crotch. By five o’clock, she was slurring her words and couldn’t hold her head up. She began pounding her fist on the bar and repeated, “I need someone to take care of me. I need someone to take care of me. I need someone to take care of me . . . ” The bartender at the Brass Bull, a woman with dream catcher earrings, started filling her glass with only tonic. After a while, Mary laid her head on the bar and started snoring so loud she could be heard over the jukebox. When the crowd thinned out around midnight, the bartender woke her up and told her she knew someone who might be able to help.

  Mary perked up, wiped her eyes. “Who?”

  “An herbalist. His name is Mr. Purty.” The bartender leaned in to tell Mary that she’d suffered from night sweats and insomnia, but just last week, she’d gone to visit Mr. Purty out in the desert, and after only one visit, her symptoms disappeared. “Just one visit.”

  Mary sniffed, sucking up her tears. “Can he make a baby disappear?”

  “Are you pregnant?”

  Mary nodded.

  The following morning, Mary followed the map the bartender had drawn on a cocktail napkin out of the mountains that surrounded Flagstaff and into the desert. Two hours later, she pulled into a gravel drive that led to a rusted trailer. She was in the middle of goddamn nowhere. A pack of dogs circled her car, barking. A tipped-over swing set sat in the front yard. A man who she could only assume was Mr. Purty peeked his head out the front door of the trailer. He wore an Indian headdress and a buckskin shirt that laced up the chest. He blew a whistle and the dogs sat down and stayed sitting when Mary got out of her car. Mr. Purty stood a little taller than a sixth grader. The first thing he told her was he was not Native American. He was old, maybe about eighty. He led her into the trailer where a morning game show was on the television and five or six cats slept on a ratty couch. He cleaned up some empty breakfast cereal boxes and threw away an empty milk jug before offering her a seat at the kitchen table.

  “So what’s the problem? Night sweats? Insomnia? Stomach pains?”

  “I’m pregnant. And I don’t want to be.”

  Mr. Purty looked at her for a long time, then removed his Indian headdress and set it on the table. He got up and went into the living room. He moved the coffee table out of the center of the room, turned off the television, spread a floral beach towel on the carpet, and shooed away the cats. Directly above the towel was a homemade skylight, a rectangle cut in the roof of the trailer that was fit with a piece of Plexiglas. There were scratches in the Plexiglas, and Mary could see the rusted heads of the drywall screws that held it in place. Mr. Purty motioned for her to lie down, and after she was on her back, he told
her to close her eyes and imagine that she was standing in the desert.

  Mr. Purty went into the kitchen for a moment, returning with a bucket of steaming rocks. Using a pair of tongs, he placed the hot rocks around the outline of her body. The heat radiated off them.

  “Do you have a fan or something?” Mary asked.

  “Quiet, please. No talking unless I ask a question.”

  The last rock, the largest, about the size of an oddly shaped bowling ball, was secured in a harness, and Mr. Purty winched the rock up into the air. He then pulled up her shirt to expose her navel and positioned the steaming rock about two inches from her skin. It felt like the sun was setting right into her stomach.

  “Can I please get a fan?”

  Mr. Purty kneeled next to her and whispered, “What does the man look like?”

  “I don’t think I can continue without a fan.”

  “The point is to sweat. Now, the impregnator. Imagine him.”

  She did. He was in the hotel room the morning following their rendezvous, checking the bathroom, the closet, to see if he had missed packing anything up. The television was on—MTV. Mary felt a coolness around her navel, and she opened her eyes to see Mr. Purty squirting hand lotion on her stomach.

  After it was over, Mr. Purty made her drink a mug of water that had been boiled with lava rocks. He charged her a hundred bucks. Then she climbed back into the Mustang Mach 1 and sped off, the dogs barking behind her, chasing the car. She looked into the rearview to see Mr. Purty blowing his whistle and commanding the dogs to return. She put her hand under her shirt and felt the sliminess of the lotion on her stomach.

  The next day at a clinic in Flagstaff, a nurse took her into a room and gave her a cup to urinate into. After she was done, the nurse asked her a few questions about her sexual history and showed her to a room. A doctor came in, carrying a clipboard, acting like he was in a hurry. Without looking at her, he flipped through some pages on the clipboard. “You’ve got a yeast infection,” he finally said.

  “I’m not pregnant?”

  “The yeast infection is severe. I’ll write you a prescription.”

  “Yesterday I went to an herbalist. Out in the desert.”

  The doctor stopped writing and looked at her.

  “I was convinced I was pregnant. I mean . . . do you think . . . do you think I could have gotten an herbal abortion?”

  “Ms. Norwood, what made you believe you were pregnant?”

  “Just a feeling, I guess. I didn’t want to be pregnant, so I convinced myself that I was. That make sense?”

  “When was the last time you menstruated?”

  Mary shrugged. “A while ago. A year maybe.”

  The doctor tore off the prescription. “Take the pills twice a day.”

  Mary Norwood & Green Geneseo

  April 9, 1998

  Then, it was 1998, and Mary was sixty. It had been sixteen years since she had come home to find Lyle fucking that woman, and now she lived above a Mexican restaurant in Dustin, Nevada and worked as a cocktail waitress at the Frontier Casino in Vegas. She looked more like someone’s grandma than a cocktail waitress, and the thing about being a cocktail waitress was you had to look good. In the afternoons, before her shift, it took every ounce of strength for Mary to drag herself to the Mountain View Mall to buy a new pair of earrings. Every time she stepped foot into the place, she was overrun by the California floozies who descended on Las Vegas like ants on a dropped Jolly Rancher. Mary knew she couldn’t hold a candle to these women and their silicone breasts and spray-on tans—she saw how men would do a double take as they sashayed through the mall. She had this secret wish that an older guy would whisk her away to his suite where there would be a view of Las Vegas’s shimmering lights. It would be like Pretty Woman (a movie Mary popped into her VHS and fell asleep to almost every single night), and she would be the Julia Roberts character, although the guy wouldn’t be Richard Gere. Too subdued. She liked her men to be thick and sweaty, the kind of guy who had sweat stains under his arms after he mowed the lawn. That was not Richard Gere’s character. He hired someone to mow the lawn, or if he did mow it, he probably had a special lawn-mowing outfit, something he kept in the closet next to his snow boots.

  Cocktail waitressing didn’t pay too well, so to supplement her income, Mary hustled pool at the Bowl-a-Rama out by UNLV. She could still handle a cue, and the railbirds who came to the bowling alley on Wednesday nights knew she could, too. They bought her drinks. They gave her high-fives when she won. They teased her each time she used a bridge. About five years before, Mary had tried to qualify for a Women’s Professional Billiard Association (WPBA) tournament at the Riviera, but the women were so much better than they had been in the WPPA. She got knocked out in the qualifying round. At one time she could masse around an opponent’s ball. She could double bank. She could draw the cue ball the length of the table. Now she was lucky if she could make the straight-in shots. Actually, she could make the straight-in shots, but sometimes she didn’t feel like she could. Confidence was everything, and someone had gotten in her pocket and stolen hers, thrown it on the sidewalk and smeared it into itty-bitty pieces with the toe of his cowboy boot. Still, she was good enough to bring in fifty bucks or so at the Bowl-a-Rama on Wednesday nights. Every now and then, she had a really good night and won a hundred. At the end of those nights, while the shoe-counter kid sprayed the rental shoes with Lysol, Mary would buy all the railbirds a nightcap. They would pull together a couple of pub tables, and the younger guys would ask her about the WPPA. Mary didn’t like to think about those days. They reminded her of Lyle and all the things that had happened since him, and she didn’t want to be reminded of that. She hated what she’d become—a plump woman who looked like a waitress at Denny’s.

  Then, one Wednesday night, Mary pushed through the Bowl-a-Rama’s glass front door, and Green Geneseo turned around on his barstool and gave her a head-to-toe once-over. Green Geneseo. She had no idea who he was, but she liked what she saw. He wore sunglasses and an emerald-green suit. A newspaper was spread out on the bar in front of him like he was studying the stock market or sport scores or something important. Her heart fluttered. She was glad she was wearing a new pair of earrings.

  Green’s trip to the Bowl-a-Rama wasn’t chance or fate or whatever you want to call it. The previous Wednesday, he and his friend, Tim Lee, had been on lane three, a guys’ night out, a couple of beers, a little bowling. Green kept getting distracted every time this woman shooting pool leaned over the pool table. She was a big woman, yes, but Green liked his women big (Jane had been an even bigger woman), and this woman’s ass in her blue jeans looked like a mint julep, and he wanted to take it to Derby Town. Tim Lee asked him where his mind was, and Green motioned toward the pool table. Tim Lee saw Mary leaning over the table sighting up a shot. Tim tried to get Green to talk to her, but the time wasn’t right. He needed a plan.

  The sunglasses were Tim Lee’s suggestion. The two of them had spent all afternoon at the Sunglass Hut, and the woman working the counter said they made him look “sporty.” Green wasn’t sure if “sporty” was the right look. While waiting for Mary to show up at the bowling alley, Green had caught a glimpse of himself in the bathroom mirror. He looked ridiculous. Who was he fooling? Wearing sunglasses inside? Vodka on the rocks? This wasn’t him. He was a numbers guy. He was shy. What would Jane have said?

  Green had spent twenty-five years working at the Las Vegas Bank and Trust, but after Jane died two years, four months, and sixteen days ago, he retired from the bank and got rid of his cardigan sweaters, khaki pants, and button-up Oxford shirts. A sixty-six-year-old in a cardigan sweater and a turtleneck was somebody’s uncle, and no woman wanted to date somebody’s uncle. Lately, Green had been telling women he was a bookie. This was halftrue. In his life as a bank teller, he’d kept records—“books”—and moved money from this “hand” to that “hand,” so he sorta was a bookie, kind of. Plus, he thought, telling someone he was a bank teller sounded
a little, well, a little boring.

  After Mary won her fourth straight game, Green finally slid off his barstool. He was a big man, about six foot two and thick around the middle like a steak eater. Mary had her back to him, talking to a guy wearing a Runnin’ Rebels sweatshirt. Green walked over and tapped her on the shoulder. When she turned around, the bartender pushed play on the CD player. (Green had tipped him twenty-five bucks.) It was Randy Travis covering Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” Mary let Green pull her close. He smelled like breath mints. All the railbirds hushed. A bowling ball rolled down the lane and crashed into the pins. Green moved his giant hand down to the small of her back and whispered, “I want to take you to dinner.”

  In the parking lot, Green unlocked the door of his Ford minivan. He could tell Mary liked that he unlocked the door for her. Jane had been the same way. She’d never asked him to do things but had an expectation he’d do them. He had to have ESP, or at least, always be studying her face for the slightest hint of those expectations. Jane and Green had met in a divorcee support group, and after a few months of dating, Green moved out of his one-bedroom apartment and into her trailer—an Airstream with an above-ground pool. Jane liked to sunbathe in the nude next to the pool, and some of Green’s fondest memories were coming home from the bank and walking up the deck stairs to find her soaking up the Nevada sunshine. He loved how she waved, rolling her fingers. They were married twenty-one years before she got cancer.

  Mary liked how this was starting out. At the diner, a twenty-four-hour greasy spoon, he ordered for her—pancakes and eggs and a mug of decaf coffee. How did he know she wanted decaf?

  “If you drink regular, you’ll never get to sleep tonight.”

  “How do you know I want to sleep?” She smiled, and he smiled. The waitress dropped off their food, two steaming plates of eggs and pancakes with an orange wedge and a sprig of parsley on the side. Mary picked up the hot sauce and bathed her eggs in it. Green watched her for a while, then finally said, “How about we get married?”