D: The Bar

Chapter: Adult/the Bar

I went out the other night, on a weekday, no less. I'd had a bad day:
one mother called to say her Johnnie had always been a perfect student
- what was I trying to pull by failing him on his test?

"He didn't get any of the answers right," I told her, and it was true.
Little Johnnie's test paper was memorable because he'd missed every
single question. He even put the date wrong at the top of his
paper.

"Well," the mother said, "You must be teaching it bad." Ah.

Another parent called to say that his son wouldn't be in class for two
weeks. "He's got a baseball training camp to go to," the dad
said.

"In the middle of the school year?" I asked. Yes. And I'm supposed to
provide all of the kid's homework, quizzes, and reading for those two
weeks? Yes.

No, I don't think so. How dare you?

I dared, and I also hung up the phone. In my book, that constitutes a
bad day.

The bar was by my house, within walking distance. I told myself, "You
are doing the right thing." That means I didn't drive.

This bar isn't hidden, but unless you're a regular, you'd be
hard-pressed to notice it. Its fa?ade is stucco and two beer signs in
either window. It opens at nine in the morning, or so says the sign on
the door.

Anyway, it's by my house. I'd never been to it. I have driven by it,
numerous times, on my way to the diner up the street. I made fun of the
people going in - or out - who seemed happy despite my whispered
nastiness. Maybe it was envy, though that's a hard emotion to pin down
in the two seconds it takes to drive past a bar towards a breakfast of
bacon and pancakes.

I went to the bar, nonetheless, and it was the same bar I'd been to in
every city I've ever been to: beer posters with large-breasted women,
vinyl seats, a pinball machine, and a men's room consisting of a urinal
and a toilet, no lock on the door. All bars are like this, I think,
because there is no other reason to be there. Despite the lights, the
happy hour, the half-nude dancers - we all come for one reason. Hello,
we say. On the rocks, please.

So, I went to this bar. I looked around. All of the women smiled at me;
none of the men did. I felt nervous, of course, but not fearful. What
was this place, really, but the last place I'd been to?

I drank. The bartender was of the type who would fill each order
without question. No eyebrow raising or sympathetic looks. Several
stools down from me, I listened to a woman talk to the bartender.

"So I says to the guy, I says," she said, "I'm not doing it. I won't.
You can march right back out that door and look somewhere else, 'cause
it'll be a cold day in hell before I do something like that."

The woman jabbed her cigarette in the air with every other word, each
jab leaving a smoke ring. She was surrounded by smoke rings. They grew
bigger, though thinner, and then disappeared completely. They made me
want to make my own smoke rings with my own cigarettes, when nobody was
watching.

"And what kills me, just kills me," the woman continued, "Is that this
guy had the balls to say to me, 'Well, if that's how you're going to be
about it!' Then he walks out with a big huff, his rear end shaking like
a can-can dancer. I mean, what other way am I going to be about it? You
tell me. God, this world." The woman laughed a smoker's laugh, deep and
bubbly. And old, like it had seen better days.

I think her name was Mona, or maybe Myrna, because it would have to be
a name like that, to go with the too-blond curls and those painted
eyebrows and her throaty laugh. She was drinking something brown with
ice, and she kept her cigarettes in a little red pouch with a gold
clasp. She looked younger from behind, I noticed, but her thin
shoulders and the pattern on her shirt - big flowers, purple and red
and yellow -gave her away. She was definitely a Mona or Myrna.

"What would you do?" she asked, and I realized she was talking to me,
her cigarette jabbing in my direction. I should be more careful, I
thought; she'd caught me looking in her direction, and now this.

The bartender moved down the bar. He knew it was his chance to
escape.

"About what?" I said, but only after a moment, because I had to exhale
the smoke in my lungs, and take another sip of my drink. I didn't want
to encourage her. If I wasn't careful, she'd be walking towards me,
drink and cigarette in one hand while the other trailed along the
barstools, keeping her balance. Also I wasn't sure just what she was
asking. She'd told some man to leave her house, or her work, because he
wanted her to do something. That's all I knew.

"About some nut walking into my shop, asking me to do his nails," she
said, "And not just making 'em nice, but the whole shebang. 'Dragon
Lady nails,' he says to me, as long as possible and maybe with some
gold glitter on 'em."

Here she stopped, and sipped her drink. Her eyes appeared to look one
way and then the other, a crazy beacon in the neon light.

"Like I'm going to have some big nut," she continued, pulling on her
cigarette and making her mouth look more or less like an arrow that had
hit its mark, "Like I'll have some big fruitcake sit at my table with
all the other customers looking on while I give him a full set. 'No
sir,' I said, 'Not on my shift.'"

And I knew I would have to say something about what I would do, but for
a moment - seconds, really - I thought about how it feels to have those
long, long fingernails on my own hands; about the color, always red;
about finding that right dress, the shoes that fit, the right bracelet,
necklace, earrings; about the odd freedom that came with the cakey feel
and waxy smell on my face.

"I would've got rid of him, too," I said, but it was too late. Mona, or
maybe it was Myrna, was making her way towards me, one hand trailing
along the barstools. She blew a smoke ring as her eyes rested on the
stool next to mine.

I deserved it, too. I deserve every goddamn thing that's ever happened
to me.