Bar Maid
Copyright © 2021 by Daniel Roberts
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.
First Edition
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021938314
Cover design by Erin Seaward-Hiatt
Cover illustrations © 4x6/Getty Images and Edge69/Getty Images (silhouettes); © Beastfromeast/Getty Images (painting); © Boris Zhitkov/Getty Images (texture)
ISBN: 978-1-950994-27-4
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-950994-28-1
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
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Chapter One
“YOUR FIRST DAY OF college should be a life bookmark,” Charlie Green said to his fellow counselor, the Very-Brown-Eyed Counselor, on their final night of camp.
“Tonight could be a life bookmark. You know, for us,” said the Very-Brown-Eyed Counselor, blinking into the bonfire they’d made.
“Tonight doesn’t feel like a bookmark. The last night of senior-year summer job? Maybe a dog-eared page that your finger finds every decade.”
“I don’t want a dog-ear, Charlie. Sigh.”
Charlie was grateful for the crackling fire. It filled silences after the Very-Brown-Eyed Counselor said things like sigh and batted her lashes, showing Charlie her impressively huge brown eyes. Her real name was Lucia, and she was the only girl he’d ever felt truly comfortable around; it pained him that he couldn’t give himself to her romantically. Worse, he felt shallow, obvious. A guy.
“You want a marshmallow, Fuchsia?”
On the first day of camp, her nametag had read LUCIA. IT RHYMES WITH FUCHSIA.
“Of course I do. If you weren’t here, I’d probably eat the whole bag. But I don’t want your last memory of me to be the chubby girl with her face full of marshmallows.”
“Who’s to say this will be a last memory? Maybe we’ll know each other forever, become these famous pen pals.”
Camp Shining Star was a camp for overweight middle-school kids. Charlie, tall and skinny, had interviewed for a counselor job that winter. They usually only hired larger counselors, but he’d won over the head counselor with his stories about last summer’s job, Space Camp, where he’d consoled an unstable Apollo mission astronaut, who’d arrived drunk for a speaking engagement.
Charlie knew his tipplers. His mother was at her most endearing during the third glass. The stories about Paris. About being nineteen in Paris. In her moist, smoky eyes Charlie could almost see the famous carousel, in view of the Eiffel Tower, where she’d met Charlie’s father. Charlie knew how to speak to winos.
“It must be hard for you,” Charlie had said to the astronaut. “So few people have seen what you’ve seen.”
“You don’t know darkness,” said the spaceman, “until you’ve walked the rock alone. Part of me wanted to stay up there.”
He smelled like Scope and gin. It was all he took from those six hot Floridian weeks. Scope and gin, the smell of outer space.
“I promise never to associate you with marshmallows,” said Charlie to the Very-Brown-Eyed Counselor.
“How romantic, Charlie.”
“I’m sorry. Maybe we’d have a future if it weren’t for—”
“Monica Miller.”
“She’s my girlfriend, Fuchsia.”
“Remember the night you admitted you have more fun with me? That the ‘Very-Brown-Eyed Counselor’ was your cup of tea?”
You are that very cup, thought Charlie, but you don’t know what it’s like inside Monica Miller’s eighteen-year-old bedroom. Girl smells. Girl clothes. Girl darkness, which is lighter than true darkness. A forgiving light. And the bed is soft, but not cloyingly so. And her long and thin eighteen-year-old fingers fumbling with my belt.
“Our campfires have been so beautiful. So easy,” said Charlie. “Your brown eyes, generous and pure. Monica Miller’s eyes can look mottled in the New York daylight.”
Lucia ran the computer lab at camp, teaching kids BASIC programming and setting them up with games. She was going to college out west, to study computing. They’d argued about the machines. Charlie found them limiting, lonely, a blinking cursor stuck on a screen, though he did admire the colorful Apple sticker on the Very-Brown-Eyed Counselor’s camping bag. It was the sort of sticker that a hot girl would slap on her book bag in a vacant act of rebellion.
Charlie watched her hold her hands up to the campfire built for two. Its heat had reddened her cheeks, and its light gave her roundness some angles. Hell, thought Charlie, everyone’s skinny on a late summer night.
“Our brown eyes are cool, Charlie.”
“I know, I know, I’ve just never kissed a blue-eyed girl and have a theory that it tastes different.”
“If I had blue eyes, I’d let you kiss me. Just for you to see what it’s like.”
“My most cherished prophecy is that on my first day of college I will fall in love with a light-eyed girl, exit college, and enter life.”
“I can’t wait for college.”
“My mother thinks that being eighteen is magical, and that anything can happen. Of course, she wants me to finish school, but I really do see myself having a life-changing escapade on the first day. The biggest life bookmark of them all.”
She licked a finger and rubbed away marshmallow from Charlie’s chin.
“Maybe on my first day I’ll find an apartment somewhere magical,” said Charlie. “Like above an old bar that predates the Civil War. Imagine living above a place like that.”
“I like your one-way ticket to Paris fantasy better.”
“Yes,” he said, inspecting her face for his parents’ homeland, remembering that he’d found something appealingly French about her nose.
“Tell me about your cute little French dad,” she said, closing her eyes
and moving closer for a kiss, “and your wine-loving mother.”
“What are you doing?”
“Please. Just one.”
He let her kiss him, participating by shuffling his lips, until he got into it. Monica Miller was a bossy kisser, but this girl was aimless, slow. They were by the lake, near where they stored the kayaks. The boathouse keeper was asleep on a lawn chair in plain sight, the camp’s newsletter The Skinny splayed on his lap.
“Wow,” she said, her eyes still shut after it ended, both of her hands in his.
“We’re holding hands,” said Charlie.
“So what do we do now?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I’m confused. Look at the boatman, how calm he is. He’s not confused.”
“He’s asleep. Maybe we could sleep out here tonight?”
For the first time this summer Charlie could imagine a romance with her. If only he hadn’t devoted so much time, so many letters, so many thoughts to Monica Miller. And then there was the long-awaited night before college. They’d both written about it.
Champagne at the Adam’s Rib bar, then back to her parentless apartment. She’d already shopped for lingerie.
“I have a girlfriend,” said Charlie.
“Why do boys kiss me and then say that? Target practice on the girl who could lose twenty pounds?”
“I’m sorry,” he said, and meant it. She had such a good, soft heart. A marshmallow heart.
“You should know, Fuchsia,” said Charlie, “that I’m going to tell Monica Miller about this.”
“Don’t you Fuchsia me.”
Charlie wanted to be true to his word and tell Monica Miller about the kiss—but only after they’d slept together. He would tell her in the morning. It was more of a morning revelation than a night one, but then she might counter with her own story, and it wouldn’t be a singular kiss with a tender girl, it would be about the Columbia University philosophy major who built his own furniture and rode a Vespa.
“You don’t get it,” said the Very-Brown-Eyed Counselor. She upended the bag of marshmallows into the fire. “This is how a real diet starts, with a broken heart.”
*
Charlie waited on a parking lot log for the yellow cab that his mother had dispatched, while the other campers and counselors reunited with their parents. The final morning of Camp Shining Star was Weigh Out Day. Per tradition, most of the counselors dressed in costume. Against a carnival backdrop, parents held their breath as their kids stepped on the scale. Not one of the campers had asked for Charlie to be their scale chaperone, something he’d blamed on his thinness. He was surprised to feel a tap on his shoulder.
“Hey, Mr. Charlie?” Georgie was ten. Crewcut and freckles. His arms and legs raw from mosquitos.
“Big day, Georgie. You excited?” asked Charlie.
“Can you go with me?”
“To weigh out?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m expecting a taxi. But screw it, they’ll wait for us. Taxi drivers pretend to be impatient, but they like nothing more than a running meter. Wouldn’t it be fun to be a cabbie in Europe?”
“Oh, I’m not sure. My grandmother drives a school bus.”
Charlie held Georgie’s hand as they walked back to camp and into the clamor.
“They’re playing the music so loud,” said Georgie.
“They want everyone to be in a good mood, and you should be, Georgie, no matter what.”
“If I gained? My life is over.”
“Don’t be silly,” said Charlie. “One day you’ll be loved by a beautiful girl, and this camp will seem distant and absurd. That’s what a beautiful girl can do for you: solve your youth.”
“I just want to be thin.”
There were families, some elated—dads finally able to carry their daughters on their shoulders—and some silent, even sniffling, shoulder to shoulder, helping the wounded back to the station wagon, wondering how the hell a kid could gain ten pounds at a $10,000 ten-week fat camp. The counselors dressed as gangsters, ALF, cowgirls, Prince. They were taught to applaud everything, gains and losses. At Camp Shining Star, no one was a loser, and everyone was a loser.
“I had a few Skittles last night,” Georgie told Charlie.
“Good. You followed your heart while all these other kids fasted, or worse.”
“I wish I knew how to make myself puke.”
Georgie’s parents were already inside the weigh-in cabin, at scale three. The scales were large enough to weigh a golf cart or a cow, with red digital numbers overhead to broadcast the news. Charlie knew that scale three was unforgiving, but scale five—off-limits, so it could be recalibrated—was a gold mine of shed pounds. He told Georgie to wait with his parents while he plugged in scale five. No one was watching him. All eyes were on the numbers, every counselor clapping or consoling.
By the time the machine had started, Georgie was stripped to his underwear, in a prayer circle with his parents.
“It’s going to be okay,” Charlie said to the family. “Georgie, just take a deep breath, close your eyes, and step right up. Now, when I count to three, you should open—”
“Sweet Jesus in heaven,” yelled Georgie’s dad.
“You did it, honey,” said the mom, the entire family jumping up and down on the scale.
“Fifteen pounds. Fifteen pounds, you skinny son of a bitch.”
*
“Hi,” said the Very-Brown-Eyed Counselor. She’d been watching him drink from his silver vodka flask, toasting the late summer day. She was wearing her Madonna costume: half a wedding dress over black leggings, lace arm warmers, bows in her hair.
“You look great,” said Charlie.
“I wanted to say goodbye.”
“Did your kids lose weight?”
“Most of them.”
“I only had one. Georgie.”
“How’d he do?”
“I put him on scale five.”
“Charlie, you’re not doing him any favors.”
“He probably did lose weight. I just want him to be happy. Screw college. I’ll go around the world, rigging scales so people can be happy. I’m serious.”
“Come here,” she said.
Charlie got up from his log and she hugged him, her clunky crucifix digging into his chest. He felt her tremble, felt a tear make the jump to his cheek. What wetness under the morning sun, he thought, until a car horn broke the spell. A New York yellow cab had pulled into the parking lot. After a long country summer, the dirty car looked out of place. They stared at it together as if it were a flying saucer, vibrating inches off the ground.
“Here,” Charlie said, handing her the silver flask. “Take a sip from it in college, maybe at graduation, and remember this summer.”
“Who’s RG?” she asked, looking at it.
“Rose Green. My mother.”
The taxi driver rolled down the window and tapped his watch. “It’s a long ride back to the city, kid.”
“Well, this is it,” said Charlie.
They hugged again. An adult hug. A vise. This time it was Charlie’s tear that made the jump. Two eighteen-year-olds holding on for their lives, steeling themselves against what was waiting for them. Adulthood, rapacious adulthood.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
Charlie nodded. Through wet eyes he focused on the endless pine trees and the overgrown Cherokee path that receded into its kingdom.
“Just have a good date with Monica. I mean it. I’ll be fine. And you’ll be fine.” She patted his belly. “Skinny,” she said, then walked away, intoning Madonna’s “Like a Virgin.” A song about survival for sure. She’s going to make it, thought Charlie. We both will?
“What kind of camp was that?” the cabbie asked Charlie. “When I was asking for directions, the guy at the gas station said it was a camp for fat kids.”
“It was a camp for beautiful kids.”
Chapter Two
“CHARLIE, WHERE ARE YOU going without your juice?” asked Angelina, h
olding out a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. For fifteen years she’d been juicing breakfast oranges for the Greens.
“I’m out of practice,” said Charlie. “At camp they gave us a can of fruit punch for breakfast.”
“Estupido,” said Angelina.
Angelina was from Puerto Rico. No kids of her own; a quick, snickering mouth; tight gray curls atop her head; fair skin. She contended that the original Puerto Ricans were all light skinned and all middle class: “Fishermen, servants, chauffeurs, shop owners. Work six days a week, sleep one day a week. The best people on earth. La Dignidad.”
“I have so much to do before tonight,” said Charlie. “Look at this list. Three full yellow legal pad pages. A record.”
“What happens tonight?” asked Angelina.
“I meant that I have so much to do before college tomorrow.”
“Ay Dios. Watch him get into trouble with some girl tonight.”
“No girl, just—
“Dios.”
Angelina didn’t like girls. She came to the Greens in 1970, just after Charlie was born. She was a house nanny at the San Juan Loews, where the family spent a Christmas holiday, and made the plane trip home with them, chastising the stewardess for the candy wrapper she’d found beneath the boy’s seat, and debriefing Mrs. Green about the exact type of juicer she’d require for the household.
Charlie shared Angelina’s love for the 1970s and her healthy mistrust for the 1980s. The former meant the Concorde, which the Greens flew once, the flight nearly empty except for them. Angelina cherished the experience. Charlie was shocked that she didn’t cross herself before takeoff.
“Dios is on the Concorde,” she’d said.
He’d timed her retelling of the adventure to her numb cousins in Brooklyn, the story coming in at two hours and fifteen minutes, the flight two hours and fifty-nine minutes.
Charlie believed that the 1970s were best represented by the Green family, at warp speed, wrapped in British Airways’ complimentary cashmere throws, while Angelina received a manicure from the in-flight beautician. That and when they saw Yul Brynner in The King and I, the preshow dinner at Adam’s Rib. It had been Charlie’s first time there. He remembered watching, his chin on the table, a pat of butter melting on a slice of pumpernickel bread.