Tania closes her eyes when the bus leaves the curb. The ride from Desert Hot Springs to the casino takes between thirty-seven and forty-eight minutes, depending upon whether or not the bus stops at all of the benches along the way. It’s a Sunday morning, so she figures she’s only got thirty-seven today, seeing as the bus is stone empty. She likes to close her eyes for the trip, though she never sleeps, because she knows
it’s the only time for the next nine hours she’ ll get the chance to see darkness. Cocktailing in a casino isn’t like what it used to be. Back in Reno, they kept it midnight inside the casino: black ceiling, purple carpet, blood red walls. These days it ’s all bright lights and warm yellows everywhere. The young girls think it’s soothing, but Tania finds it irritating, wonders why anyone would want to see so much. What she wouldn’t give to have missed a few things. Forty-seven years old now, Tania figures she could unsee ten, fifteen years and be happy about it.
Sometimes, when she’s done looking for her adopted daughter, Natalya, on the Internet, or chatting about her with other mothers online, Tania tries to find her twenty-three-year-old self on the Ouija board she bought at Toys “R” Us. She figures if a Ouija board can supposedly talk to the dead or people living in other dimensions, it might very well have the ability to reach back in time, too. It hasn’t worked yet, but Tania thinks that maybe she’s just not asking the right questions, thinks that maybe all she needs to do is find someone else to do the Ouija with her, double up on the spirit power, you see, and maybe that’ll do it. And when she finds herself, she’ll tell her to sell that fucking car and concentrate on getting her shit right, because the future is painted in bright colors, baby, and no one will notice you.
In all her years working at casinos in Reno, Las Vegas, and now Palm Springs, Tania has only hit it big once. It was 1996, back when everyone had money, and she was working at the Mirage in Las Vegas. After a particularly good night—Tania can’t remember what that means anymore, but when she tells everyone about Las Vegas in the 90s, she tells them she
pocketed between two and three grand on a weekend night, though that sounds absurd now, the truth probably a good 50 percent below the mythology—she put $500 down on a hand of Caribbean Stud and flopped a royal, and just like that she was $50,000 richer. Taxes took fifteen off the top, leaving Tania with thirty-five; still more than enough at the time to put a down payment on a nice house in Las Vegas, something with a great room, a nice yard, room for a pool, maybe even something on a golf course if she really kept banking at her job. Plus, she still had good credit back then, unlike most of her friends who had to keep changing their phone numbers to stay a few months ahead of the collection agencies, and she loved living in Las Vegas.
Five hours into her shift at the Chuyalla Indian Casino and with just $37 in tips, Tania can’t imagine ever risking $500 on paper again; because, really, she thinks now, making her tenth round this hour through the blackjack tables, that’s all gambling is: placing hope in colored paper. She wonders sometimes if her life wouldn’t have been better if, instead of betting $500 on cards, she’d taken that money to a stationery store and purchased reams of 25-weight linen resume paper. Maybe that investment would have forced her into a better life, one where success was predicated on having something to put on all that paper.
Tania drops off three White Russians, five beers, and a Tom Collins to a kid who is clearly underage, since no one under seventy would have the audacity to order a Tom Collins, and no one over twenty-one would even consider uttering it around a pack of their friends. Not when they could order Courvoisier and pretend to be 2Pac. Do kids still listen to
2Pac? She supposes they do, but Tania remembers listening to him when he was alive, before he became some martyr, and thinking he was just okay, just another guy with mommy issues, like half the men she’d hooked up with since high school. When she decided to adopt Natalya, she threw out her entire gangsta rap CD collection, figuring it wouldn’t be appropriate for her new role as a mother to be singing along to songs about hustling. Plus, she wanted to like what Natalya liked.
Tania winds back to the bar and hands the bartender, Gordon, her orders: four beers, a Sex on the Beach, two Johnnie Walkers, three more White Russians. A blackjack table full of marines in from the base at 29 Palms erupts in a flood of loud obscenities just then, prompting half of the casino to turn and stare.
“Classy people out there today,” Gordon says. “Barely noon and people are trashed.”
“I hate Sundays,” Tania says. “People should just go home. Watch TV. Read the Bible. Something.”
“It’s algebra,” Gordon says. “In order for other people to have a good time, we have to suffer their stupidity, and then someone else will have to hose their puke off the parking lot. All together, we get off pretty good.”
“I’ll be lucky to walk with fifty,” Tania says. “You know what fifty gets you? Nothing. It’s not even worth it to come in for fifty. Once I pay for the bus, get lunch, pick up dinner on the way home, what have I got left? It’s not worth it.”
Gordon places the four beers on her tray, and for a moment Tania considers picking up one of them and just downing it, maybe lining up a couple shots, too, see how the day passes with a little less clarity on things. Back in Las
Vegas you could rail a line and . . . well . . . No, Tania thinks, you just can’t compare your life along some arbitrary timeline, can’t think of yourself as a compare and contrast. The past was different. The present is ever changing. No, it has to be about what comes next. About staying focused. Keep yourself together. Gather resources. Find Natalya. Don’t force an apology. Fix things. Get a family. Buy Christmas presents. Move to the city, any city, but get out of casinos and hotels and bars. Maybe.
“How long you lived in the desert?”Tania asks. Gordon is new—she’s seen him a couple of times in the last month, but this is the first shift he’s been on alone—so they haven’t found that rhythm yet, only know each other enough to flirt a little, tell a joke or two. Nothing personal. But for some reason today Tania feels like talking and can’t stand to listen to the other cocktail girls on the floor. They call her “Mom” and always want her to listen to their problems, Sundays inevitably taken up by whatever horror happened at the club the night previous, or whatever drama they have with their “baby daddies,” a term Tania just can’t wrap her mind around. When did people stop being parents? But Gordon seems nice, maybe even smart. Smarter than her other choices, anyway.
“Five years, plus or minus,” Gordon says. “I used to come here when I was a kid, you know? I remember my dad once drove us right up to Bob Hope’s front gate and we got chased off by dogs. Big old Dobermans. I’ll never forget that.”
“I can’t see myself being here that long,” Tania says. Gordon puts the rest of Tania’s drinks down and then rechecks the order. No one ever does that, Tania thinks; no one else here gives a damn if they screw up my money.
“Oh,” Gordon says, “you live here a while it becomes like anywhere else. You find your shit, you know? This town, I can bartend until I’m sixty-five, seventy, and no one would think differently about me. Maybe along the way I find a rich old woman who wants to take care of a hot young stud like me, I hold her hand for a few years, take her to her Botox appointments, and then, one day, she dies in her sleep and I’m a millionaire.” Gordon’s laughing now, but Tania sees something sad in his face, like he’s not just joking around, like part of him believes this might be his best chance for a good life.
“You’ve got it figured out,” Tania says.
“ Presuming I don’t blow my head off first,” he says.
“ You don’t seem the suicide type,” Tania says.
“They’d just prop me behind the bar. It wouldn’t be much difference. But if you stick around until I get my millions,” Gordon says, “I’ll let you move into my guest house. We’ll sit around the saltwater pool all day reading thrillers and sipping cognac.”
“I see myself moving somewhere with a bit more character. A little history. Less tourists. All my life, I’ve been stuck with tourists.”
“Like Maine or somewhere?”
“Somewhere,” Tania says.
“No way for me,” Gordon says. “I’m California bred and spread.” Another girl—Tania can never remember if her name is Cindy or Bonnie, so she just calls her “sweetie”—slams her order on the counter, prompting Gordon to glare at her. “To be continued,” he says. “Don’t pack your bags for Maine just yet.”
Really Tania was thinking about Russia—Tula, Russia, specifically—but telling Gordon that would mean she’d have to explain her situation, and she just isn’t emotionally prepared for that, at least not at work. Talking about Natalya here would make her trivial.
Even still, going back to Russia has been on her mind constantly these days. Maybe Natalya went back. Maybe there was an email from Natalya waiting for Tania right this instant telling her to come back to Tula, that she was sorry, too, and that she’d love to see her mother.
Before she picked up Natalya in Tula, Tania imagined Russia would be a perpetually gray country filled with scary Communists, like the ones they used to show marching in Red Square, back when Ronald Reagan used to scare her, too. Everyone told her to be careful, tell people she was Canadian so they wouldn’t kill her, to be as inconspicuous as possible.
But when she finally arrived—she remembered the date exactly: February 22, 1997—after flying into Moscow and then driving for two hours with an administrator from the orphanage, she couldn’t get over how beautiful the country was, how pleasant the people she met seemed to be, how
substantial
everything felt. The administrator kept pointing out interesting landmarks between Moscow and Tula, talked about Peter the Great, discussed the rich mining history of the city. And what a city: Citadels from the sixteenth century. Lush green forests surrounding the Upa River. Museums honoring famous writers and warriors. It was nothing like Las Vegas, nothing like Reno, nothing like any place she’d ever visited. She wondered even then what it might be like to settle in Russia, to raise her child in her home country, to
live in such a place! Yes, she’d come back here when Natalya was fully integrated as an American. Adopting a twelve-year-old would present problems, she knew that, but Tania thought that later in life they would travel back here together, maybe buy a little house. Tania was thirty-five then, just twenty-three years older than her new daughter. Young enough that they’d be like friends the older Natalya got, less like mother and daughter.
So foolish, Tania thinks, grabbing up her tray. All of it.
Adopting Natalya wasn’t something Tania planned. It was the money that did it. Well, the money and loneliness. A few weeks after she hit the royal, Tania’s fifteen-year-old dog, Lucy, woke up one morning and urinated blood; three hours later Tania watched while her vet quietly inserted a needle into her dog’s right front paw to put her to sleep (a term Tania has never liked, as the implication is that the dog will someday wake up and be just fine), and just like that, after fifteen years and three hours, she was completely alone.
Oh, she still had family and friends then; people she honestly loved at some point. But when it all boiled away, the fact was that she just didn’t keep people very well. Her parents and older sister, Justine, still sent her Christmas and birthday gifts, invited her to their homes for Thanksgiving (they even offered money if she couldn’t afford a plane ticket from Las Vegas, since her parents lived in Spokane and her sister in San Francisco), called once a week—and she enjoyed talking to them, but afterward couldn’t recount a single aspect of the conversation.
She’d had a series of boyfriends, too. Most of them long-term affairs, actually, and at the time had just broken up with a DJ at the Rio after he accepted a six-month gig on a
cruise ship, but their relationship hadn’t even been intimate. All things being equal, sitting on the sofa at home and talking to her dog was preferable most of the time anyway.
That night, though, her dog dead, her parents and sister filled with the kind of comfort people without pets usually provide—“What you should do tomorrow is go to a rescue and pick up an abused dog,” her father said—she sat alone on her sofa and watched a documentary on HBO about the plight of children in Russian orphanages. By the film’s conclusion, Tania decided to make something of her life, to put her royal winnings to good use, give someone a chance at a better life, allow that money to be more than just a house she’d struggle to pay for night after night. She’d found the perfect place in Summerlin—a three bedroom with a little lap pool out back, Corian counters throughout, a view of the Red Rock Mountains—and was preparing to make an offer, though she didn’t even know what that meant. Either she’d buy or she wouldn’t, and she hadn’t.
No, she didn’t need a house. Tania knew her life was disposable, as if someone could cut her head off and paste it on another girl’s body, and the world wouldn’t notice at all. She needed to
become
. She would adopt a child from Russia. She would look into dental hygienist school—several girls she’d worked with at the Mirage were studying at the community college during the day to become hygienists, and it sounded like a good job, albeit one spent on your feet all day bent over people, which in concept sounded not much different than cocktailing.
She’d always had maternal instincts. Tania had even been pregnant once, if only for a few weeks. Her boyfriend Clive got her pregnant—this was when she was thirty—and
Tania spent an entire long weekend off from work shopping for baby clothes at Target, rummaging through garage sales for baby carriages and strollers and figuring out how to decorate the baby’s room. It was too soon, she knew that, as she’d only just missed her period, but she’d taken an at-home test and had an appointment to see her gynecologist for the following week and felt a great desire to begin this new phase of her life, sure that being a mother wasn’t so much a calling for her now as it was a station: a chance to be a better person. She was certain she’d need to move in order to get away from Clive, who, while he was a fun guy to waste time with, would be a terrible father. It wasn’t that he’d ever hit her or even been particularly cruel, only that he was stupid, and stupid would not do as a role model. No, she decided, she’d just move up to Spokane with her child—who she thought she’d name Corey no matter the sex—and her own father could play that positive role until she found someone smart, someone who didn’t work at a restaurant or bar. When she miscarried a few days later, she broke up with Clive to pay penance for her own conceit; to bring a child into this world, when they couldn’t even save the dolphins or blue whales or whatever, well, it was just silly. A dog would do. Yes. A dog would be enough until things felt more stable all around. But even now, in the small storage locker she has in her building in Desert Hot Springs, there’s a box marked “Corey” that she’s hauled around across two states and several years.