Other Resort Cities (19 page)

Maybe, you wait long enough, people just end up making decisions for you without your knowledge, and then you wake up and you’re fifty, hustling tips over Chicken Kiev.

“Isn’t this place great?” Joan asks. She’s sitting between Tania and Natalya and keeps grabbing at both of their wrists. It’s something Tania remembers she used to do in church
whenever there was something interesting happening and Joan wanted to get Tania and her sister Justine’s attention. It was Joan’s idea to come here in the first place—she read about it in a tourist guide to Las Vegas—and they weren’t five minutes out of the airport before she was telling Tania how great it would be to have authentic Russian food for dinner, as if she’d ever had inauthentic Russian food in the past. Now, no one knows what to talk about, and the wrist-grabbing feels like a nervous tic. “ Is this what home is like?” Joan says to Natalya.

“Some,” Natalya says and then forces out a smile. It’s the first time Tania has seen the girl smile in days, and she can’t help but feel jealous that her own mother can get Natalya to show something, anything, and here she can’t even get the girl to look her in the eye most of the time.

“I think you’re just going to love it here,” Joan says.

Stu, Tania’s father, paces in front of them. For forty years he sold restaurant equipment and now, two years into his retirement, Tania can’t imagine how he ever closed any deals. He always looks vaguely displeased in restaurants, as if he can’t quite figure out how, after all the time he spent working in restaurants, he’s still expected to
eat
in them, too.

“Dad,” Tania says, “sit. You’re making me nervous.”

“No,” he says. “No. I’m trying to see what they’re cleaning with back there. From the sound of it, I’d bet they’ve got a Hobart, and not one that is functioning properly. Wash cycle sounds corrupted. We’re about fifteen minutes from food poisoning, if you want my opinion.”

When Tania graduated high school and moved first to Reno, the idea was that she’d go to community college there for two years, establish residency, and then try to get into
the hotel management program at UNLV in Las Vegas, all of which was her father’s idea. He told her there would always be hotels, that people always needed to stay somewhere. Restaurants, he told her, were a luxury people could do without, but everyone needed to sleep. But then she started cocktailing at the Cal-Neva, started making what to her was real money, and eventually just stopped attending class at all. It felt, at the time, like there was plenty more to do in life than get an education, more to life than thinking about where people stayed, but now, watching her father pace, his life boiled down to his ability to parse the sounds of dishwashers, watching the cocktail girl as she casually flirts with the locals around the bar, she thinks that her own hubris has brought her to this point in life. Opting to do nothing. She’d failed to recognize how the weight of finally making a decision could be so paralyzing.

She used to tell people she was saving money to open a dog grooming business—she even had a name picked out: Groomingdales—though the fact was that she didn’t have any idea how to accomplish that, didn’t even know if she’d need a license or if she could just get a pair of clippers and a storefront or what. And really, since her dog died last year, just a day before she started looking into adoption options in Russia, the desire to be around animals of any kind was just too depressing to consider.

But it was silly, anyway. She never had any money saved, apart from what she won at Caribbean Stud, and that hadn’t even felt like her money.

“Honey,” Tania’s mother says to her, “you should ask the manager if they have any job openings here for hostesses.
Wouldn’t that be perfect for Natalya?” She turns to Natalya and takes her wrist again. “ Wouldn’t that be nice, sweetheart? Earn a little pocket money?” When Natalya doesn’t answer, Joan looks back at Tania expectantly, as if this is the solution to a great many unknown problems. “ Wouldn’t it?”

“She’s twelve,” Tania says.

“ In a few years then,” Joan says.

“I don’t want her working in a restaurant or a bar or anywhere like this, ” Tania says.

“It would just be something to do after school,” Joan says. “ You’re going to need extra money, Tania. ”

“I’ ll start gambling again,” Tania says. “Besides, they say the Russian mafia owns the restaurant.”

“That’s just silly,” Joan says. “If you won’t ask, I will. She could maybe meet some people from her country, too.”

“ I want to show you something,” Tania says and pulls out a little change purse filled with business cards from her wallet and dumps the contents on her mother’s lap. There are at least a hundred cards, engraved, embossed, phone numbers and room numbers and email addresses scratched onto the back of each. Tania picks a few up and waves them in front of her mother’s face. “Every night, I get maybe five or six of these. You know what they want, Mom? They aren’t looking to make business deals, okay? They aren’t looking to make friends, okay? My daughter is not going to work in a place like this. Ever.”

Tania feels as if she might cry, as if she might just let it all go right here in the middle of pleasant Russian families having dinner, as if she might stand up and start screaming, but then Natalya reaches over and takes all of the spilled
business cards from Joan’s lap and hands them to a passing busboy, who is actually a middle-aged Mexican, and says, “Please. To garbage.”

 

Later that evening, after Natalya goes to sleep, Tania sits up with her parents in her small living room. Her parents have a room down the street at Arizona Charlie’s, a local’s casino Tania’s father likes because of the pancake buffet breakfast and because he once won a satin jacket there during a blackjack tournament, but neither of them seems to be in a hurry to leave.

There are photo albums scattered across the floor, a half eaten bowl of microwave popcorn in her mother’s lap. A series of photos from the night of her senior prom are still stacked on the coffee table. What does she remember about that night? Getting high, mostly. Having sex with her date—a boy named Devin—in the bathroom of the Ramada Inn, the music from the dance throbbing through the wall, Devin’s breath hot on her face, her hair catching in his watchband. But mostly, mostly, she remembers wondering when it would end. When she could go home, forget these people, get on with her life. Even then, at eighteen, things seemed unsatisfying to her, as if the next day would always be the best one.

“She seems very intelligent,” Stu says. At sixty-seven, and two years removed from his own real life, Tania’s father now has a doughy quality to his skin and has become obsessive about odd things: the price of gas, the amount of advertising in baseball stadiums, other peoples’ teeth. As a child, Tania was afraid of her father. That’s not to say she felt threatened by him, only that there was a feature to his existence in her life that boiled her stomach. So maybe it wasn’t fear. Maybe
it was just anxiety. And then it occurs to her that it was
his
anxiety she was feeling, that she was afraid of him because he was afraid of . . .
something
.

“ Her parents were scientists,” Tania says.

“Is that so?” her mother says. She’s barely spoken to Tania since the outburst at the restaurant, but that’s fine.

“Actually,” Tania says, “they were both very involved in Russia’s nuclear program.”

Tania’s father nods his head at this, and she can see his mind filling with questions, new obsessions forming. She knows her father still considers Russia the enemy, even though the Cold War has been over for nearly a decade, and even he must know that Natalya is just a child and not some kind of sleeper agent, but she’s sure he still has real concerns. Maybe that’s why she’s so vibrantly recalling this now. It wasn’t that he brought fear into the house with him, but that he was always so circumspect, that whenever he’d watch the news or read the
Spokesman-Review
he’d start to mutter about how the whole world was made up of charlatans, that you couldn’t trust anything you saw. Everything deserved investigation.

This is a period of her life that Tania associates with her mother’s odd descent into religion, a time her father feels largely absent from in her memory, since he didn’t actually attend church with them. Not the Wednesday night Bible study and coffee klatch the church called Supreme Bean (which, upon retrospect, strikes Tania as surprisingly clever), nor the regular Sunday service. Though since they only had one car, a blue Ford Fairmont, he’d drive them to the church both days and then he’d just sit outside smoking. Sometimes he’d bring one of those dime-store men’s adventure novels
with him—
The Exterminator
or
The Destroyer
or, occasionally, a thick Robert Ludlum novel that he never seemed to finish—but usually he just sat and waited.

Once back at home, Tania’s mother sat at the kitchen table and drank Sanka while she read the Bible, her lips moving over every word. She’d periodically jot a note down onto a steno pad, though Tania can’t remember ever seeing her mother read back over those notes. Tania usually sat on the front lawn and watched Justine practice twirling the baton, though she doesn’t know what Justine was practicing for, since she never competed, never became a member of the cheer or dance squads, while her father raked leaves, even if there weren’t any leaves on the ground. On rainy days, her father would rake the avocado-colored shag carpet in their living room. She can see him standing there in the living room, a cigarette in his teeth, pulling the rake from one corner of the room to the other, making sure not to cross the lines he’d already put into the carpet.

She can’t imagine how she’d forgotten this image of her father for so long, but now it’s all she can envision when she looks at him sitting on her sofa, his purple-veined hands reaching into the bowl of popcorn. How old is he in this memory? Maybe forty, forty-five. Not much older than she is now, but living an entirely different life. He had two children, a wife, a job selling restaurant supplies that he’d have until the day he stopped working, a Craftsman in a decent neighborhood in Spokane, a fishing trip every June to Loon Lake. He must have wanted something more, though Tania can’t imagine what. Tania doesn’t know her father, really (and can’t say she knows her mother, either),
but she wonders if he misses the fear, the rage, the longing, or if somehow a satin jacket and a pancake buffet are enough to satiate him.

“Aren’t you surprised by how nice Natalya’s teeth are?” her father says. “I just assumed they’d be in really poor shape.”

 

Tania wakes up to the sound of Natalya blow-drying her hair. It is nine in the morning on Sunday, and Tania promised Natalya that they could go to the Stratosphere today to ride the rollercoaster atop the casino’s hundred-story tower. Tomorrow, she’ll be back at work and Natalya will start her first day of school, so this is their last free day before real life starts, or at least that’s how Tania thinks of it. She’s not sure what to make of real life anymore, not sure she knows how to conduct herself, except that she realizes she needs to change her shift at the hotel, or else Natalya will be home all night by herself. Last night her mother offered to move in for a couple of weeks if Tania thought it would help ease Natalya into her routine, but Tania told her no, that she’d be fine, but the reality was that she didn’t want her mother to see how unprepared she really was, that she hadn’t even thought about such a simple task as getting her shift moved.

She pulls herself out of bed and looks outside, makes sure her car is still parked under the metal awning across the way. She lives in a townhouse in Summerlin, which is just a fancy way of saying that she lives in an apartment that happens to have a connected one-car garage beneath it, one she’s filled with so much of her crap that she doesn’t have room to park her Explorer. Her neighbors are mostly working girls—strippers, other cocktail waitresses like herself, blackjack and
roulette dealers—and young families. It’s a safe neighborhood and the complex is gated, but even still, she’s aware of how vulnerable she is living alone, and now, living with Natalya. Her ex-boyfriend, Clive, who worked the door at a strip club called Little Darlings, used to tell her stories about girls who got followed home after work and were robbed and then either raped or killed or both, but because they were just dancers, and usually didn’t even really live in Las Vegas, just kept a place for the weekends they danced in town, no one bothered to check on them for days or weeks and then, well, then it didn’t matter who they were anymore. They were just dead strippers from that point forward.

Long ago she’d convinced herself that Clive’s stories were just myths, though of course anything was possible in Las Vegas. Things would be different now, anyway. She wouldn’t date guys like Clive, people who were all about bringing negativity in the absence of anything valuable. Her sister, Justine, was always saying how great it was that Tania had such a wide market of available men to date in Las Vegas, particularly single guys with money, but the truth was that no one who spent much time visiting Las Vegas was the kind of guy who would be right to help her raise Natalya. Circumstances had changed, and now here she was not even sure a person like herself was capable of the job.

She hadn’t even really been with a guy since hitting the royal. She’d done a stupid thing that night and left her job at the Mirage with a customer, a Persian guy named Pejman who said he was a doctor from Seattle, but was probably just another dumb ass from LA with a little money in his pocket for the weekend, which, honestly, didn’t bother her, really.
He had some coke, a gold Amex, and wanted to party. He tipped her over a grand that night, slipping her bills every ten minutes while he rolled craps, convinced she was his luck. And maybe she was, because she put $500 of his tips on that Stud game, flopped a royal, and found herself $50,000 richer.

The thing was, she ended up fucking that guy in his room at the Frontier (which should have been her first clue he wasn’t a doctor), and now, a year later, all she can remember about him is that he wore these absurd black and white saddle shoes, like he was ten and on his way to the sandbox. Would that be the story she eventually told Natalya about how she came to have enough money to afford her adoption? That she fucked a guy in saddle shoes who tipped her a grand that she turned around on a fucking table game?