Gina Nutt

Kitty Glitter

Shirley chances a twenty on slots before going to her room or hitting the pool. She tries to make out as many images as she can before the slides stop spinning. A diamond, a pile of gold, a treasure chest. She is pretending it’s Vegas, even though it’s Upstate. No way was she flying without Abe. So she’d booked the most affordable suite, packed Abe in her space-silver bag, and driven herself up.

She’d had other ideas. A state forest where no one would find her for days and when they did the animal would have likely been non-human. Or maybe a human, a hermit, a long-lost grieving soul who had taken to the trees. There was no fun in the forest for Shirley. Only the noble solitude of venturing far, admiring a view. People talk about how they find God, get rich, or go broke on the floor. Any of those sounded better than watching the driveway where the car was already parked, making another dinner without quite knowing how much was too much. People talk about seeing doppelgangers at casinos. Shirley thought maybe that’s where people disappear to when they leave us. The living do this sometimes: fake their own deaths, spend too much, return home remorseful and broke.

A group of younger women go by with underpants over their outfits. One wears a headband with a fluttering half-veil. Shirley thinks, God love them and send me a drink, but she thinks it like, God, love them and send me a drink. Then Shirley gets a ruby and the machine rings joy. She collects the coins in a cup. She keeps her exclamations to herself, the wins, big or small, the losses, too. Stakes change when you’re alone, Shirley thinks stepping in the elevator to go find her room, Anyone can go to sleep a winner and wake up a loser.

She sets the space-silver bag at the foot of the bed and falls on the comforter after it. She waits for Abe to throw himself beside her. She still hears his gentle teasing. Something PG-rated. London, France. Both of them laughing and getting tangled. She hears other guests in the hall.

I’m just stuff now, she thinks.

Scratchy, she dials the room service extension on the bedside phone and croaks a request for a glass of the cheapest white wine on the menu, toast, and a grapefruit, even though it’s almost dinnertime.

She has her refreshment and takes the elevator back down, space-silver bag over one shoulder, Abe inside it. The weight of the urn feels disproportionate to Shirley. Then the elevator doors open and she gets out.

Anytime Shirley passes someone who smiles and nods at her, she smiles and nods back. She harnesses all the good she can and breathes it back out. She knows anyone else could be carrying someone in their bags.

When she loses on Kitty Glitter, Shirley likes how the machine doesn’t sing digital doom like some of the others. When she waits for Kitty Glitter to purr after a win, she dislikes that the machine doesn’t.

Shirley isn’t a high roller. Abe wasn’t either.

“Love’s where you’re supposed to spend it,” he used to say.

Shirley would pet back his hair or tuck the blankets under him. She’d ask him how he got so smart in a hospital. She still wonders because he hadn’t left for eight months. Of course, the day he did, the sky was blue and big. Someone coughed in the hall and they sounded like they were laughing. Shirley stayed open to it all, her whole self a sensory pore accepting every external occurrence except the departure. She held Abe’s pending absence at arm’s length until she had no choice but to live with it. She thought if she absorbed everything else—the color of the sky, its depth, the stranger’s sore throat—someone would send him back.

Shirley stacks the towels and puts Abe atop the stack. She pulls the veggie melt, fries, and frozen margarita from room service close to the tub. Head leaned on the tile, faucet off but still dripping, she can hear her own heart. She wants to get up early tomorrow and swim at the pool before she plays. The veggie melt isn’t that great. The frozen margarita tastes too sweet. The moment makes them better. Shirley on her own, carrying Abe around with her, as if he could still appreciate any of it.

She drains the tub, wraps a fluffy robe around herself, and puts the room service tray in the hall. She turns the television volume all the way down and thinks about this new loneliness over images on the screen. She feels exposed and anonymous. Her room, a cell in the body of a big temporary home. It’s the opposite of the hospitality dream: guests who feel like guests and not customers, guests who feel familiar with this strange place.

Tube slides spiral into the indoor pool. There are toadstool fountains with spores that spray and rainshowers under their caps. Shirley wades in the main pool. She sees herself outside herself, looking at the water around her ankles. The young women are at the pool. They have on matching black one-piece swimsuits with high-cut legs. Each has an A and an S over the chest, a heart between the letters.

Shirley looks up, making out rain clouds through the skylights. She nods to the young women as she returns to her lounger. She pulls her wet hair into a braid over her shoulder and orders a veggie wrap for lunch. The toothpicks speared in the spirals stick out at odd angles. She feels her chest tighten, tears in her throat. It’s not the wraps, toothpicks, or chlorine. Not the calls of “Marco” and no one saying “Polo.” Abe was the kind of person who might call “Polo” from land, not to ruin the game or make it better, but because it was what you did. You answered. You let someone know you heard them. Shirley breathes with the idea. It’s a spring, stretching until it isn’t a thought anymore, but a sun in a new universe.

She whispers, “Polo” and goes to find a bathroom.

Drying her hands, she hears sniffling. She looks over to where one of the young women in a black swimsuit washes her hands. The woman has gemstones at the corners of her eyes, a heart sticker on one cheek. The heart is iridescent with a fiery tale. She flicks her wet hands over the basin that runs the length of wall beneath the mirror. The door opens and another woman from the party slips in past the noise.

“We were wondering where you went,” the friend says.

The woman wipes her eyes with her palm as she follows her friend. The heart sticker sails from her cheek to the floor.

Through the walls of her room Shirley hears another guest. She can’t tell what they’re saying. She orders a veggie club and something called a wild cosmo, which is a to-go cup with herbs floating in liquor and cranberry juice. A quarter into her sandwich, a few sips into her wild cosmo, Abe on the towel pile, Shirley sobs. Not because anything about this meal or moment reminds her of Abe, but because it doesn’t remind her of him and the future they no longer share. Neither of them felt fondness for excess, but they loved trying new things, asking each other, “What do you think?” Asking again and again for years. They’d often joked about Vegas for their fifteenth anniversary; they didn’t go.

When Shirley gets out of the tub, she leaves the robe on the hanger. She falls on the duvet, wrapped in her towel. She opens the chocolates on the pillows and puts both in her mouth. She leaves off the television and falls asleep listening for her neighbor’s voice through the wall.

Shirley can make out rain through the windows and closed drapes. She gets out of bed and goes down for breakfast, instead of ordering room service.

The buffet is not yet crowded. Plenty of room to pour waffle batter in a New York-shaped iron and press it into the outline of the Empire State. Shirley makes a waffle and the edges stick. The line grows behind her the more she fusses with the half-cooked batter. She tears as much as she can and finds a far table. She watches the rain out the windows.

The waffle pieces aren’t bad. Better than the rubbery eggs with white, gobby streaks in the yellow ruffles. Still better than eating alone. Shirley isn’t used to it. Eating alone, sleeping alone, laughing at the television alone. Even in the grief group she’d tried, over donuts and tea, Shirley felt a net of alone stretch over all the together. A sadness she’d consolidated down the buffet and carried on a plate across the dining room. It wasn’t oblivion that made the people at full tables smile, it was the fortune of postponement. Of knowing the loss that was possible and loving the people you were with anyway. She looks at her plate, the gummy sausages, overcooked like the eggs. She hasn’t eaten meat in years. She thought she might try.

“All set here?” a bus boy asks.

“Yes. Thank you,” Shirley says.

That, she thinks on her way to the coffee bar, is how a stranger saves you from yourself.

She asks the barista for something special. Vanilla, whipped cream, cinnamon. She takes her drink outside because the rain has stopped. It seems an occasion to mark by stepping through the automatic doors to let the sun know it has been missed. Other guests have the same idea. A crowd forms on the sidewalk by the valet kiosk; everyone stares up as if they haven’t seen a clear sky before.

Shirley’s heart rises when she sees the phone in her room blinking red, but it’s the wake-up call she’d missed when she’d gone early to breakfast. She lies on the bed and watches the ceiling. Robe open, television remote in one pocket, the sash tied behind her. The knot digs in her lower back.

She changes into a dress and leaves a five by the television for the housekeeper. She goes down to the shopping plaza. The halls without windows remind her of waking first in the house, Abe snoozing beside her. How she could get up and move through the whole house without turning on any lights, without stumbling. Early morning, blue dawn shining through on overcast days, or even those that turned out to be sunny and beautiful, that early it’s hard to tell how a day will look. The shopping plaza has jewelry and shoes and cosmetics, as if the purpose of life is to make money and get rid of it. Shirley can make out the edges of her face in the store windows but her refracted features look as unremarkable to her as the next person’s. She doesn’t buy anything.

Just browsing, she tells herself. Just looking.

The wake-up call comes while she showers. When she gets out, she lifts the lit-up phone and listens to the prerecorded message.

Not even a person, she thinks and hangs up.

Shirley orders a fruit plate and toast, coffee that doesn’t come from the dresser-top drip machine. She flips through television channels while she waits and has a cup of coffee from the dresser-top drip machine.

In the afternoon, Shirley steps up to a game called Heart of Cash. The screen flashes a glowing anatomical heart made of balled-up hundreds. A valentine to losing what you came with, then going home sorry and glad. She thinks of that first quiet morning, waking unsteady, Abe on the bedside table. She laid there, touching the urn, singing about bells and flowers. Shirley tears up and abandons Heart of Cash.

The younger women appear in the row where Shirley plays. They dance with the Kitty Glitter machines, posing and photographing each other. They’re all wearing denim skirts and black tee shirts with pink writing on them. The bride has her half-veil headband in her hair. Some of the women have tied their tops into knots at their hips. Others have snipped and twisted complicated patterns at the sides.

Shirley hasn’t hit big. She hasn’t colossally lost. Her theory is when a big thing has not happened one way or the other something big is usually about to happen. She gets Abe out of her bag and holds her seat at the machine with the space-silver bag. She goes to those young women.

“Congratulations,” Shirley says.

“Thanks,” says the bride.

“If it’s alright with you, I’d like to give you a blessing.”

“That’s sweet, but we have to make our karaoke reservation,” says the woman Shirley saw crying in the bathroom.

“We have time,” the bride says, brushing the half-veil from her face. “I’d love to hear it.”

Shirley says, “I imagine you’ll spend a lot of time in a lot of different rooms with the person you love. It’s possible someday someone is going to ask you to leave one of those rooms. The sky will probably be blue. And the sky will be deep. And that won’t make any sense because it’s going to be above you.”

The bride glances at Abe in Shirley’s arms. Eyes widening, mouth flattening into a line.

“You’ll hear someone laugh or cough in the hall. And you’ll think if you take in everything around you, then the person asking you to leave will make some kind of trade, that they’ll give you the option to stop this bad thing from happening. This won’t be true. But I still think you should stay in the room.”