In Real Life
- Apr 16, 2021
- 2 min read
by Sarah Freligh
Both she and Janie sign contracts, but Janie chickens out at the last minute, claiming summer school and a boyfriend, so in the end she takes the bus up there alone, her stuff spread across two seats. Her mother’s full of stories about girls alone on buses, the trouble they get into with men who get funny with them and get off at the next stop, how real life is exactly like those confession magazines she used to read, where the women trudge and stumble and the men get to be light and fast as jackrabbits.
The place isn’t anything much, nothing like the pictures the recruiter had shared of boats in blue water, white-coated waiters delivering trays of drinks to women in bikinis stretched out on chaise lounges next to a swimming pool. The pool in real life is hardly bigger than a bathtub with water the color of a bruise. But Syl, the girl she rooms with, says give it a few weeks, it’ll pep up and in the meantime enjoy it. The third night, Syl loans her some hussy shoes and gets her all gussied up in a top down to there, a skirt up to here. And no lipstick, but heavy on the eyeliner. Syl says women who wear eyeliner mean business and she believes her. They drive to a dump of a bar on a road crowded by fir trees where the bartender doesn’t card her and pours double drinks for single shot money. After two, a fog sets in. The jukebox plays the same songs that spun her through senior year. A cue stick scatters balls like molecules: H2O is water, but CO is poison, something she remembers from chemistry class. It seemed important at the time to understand the difference between what could kill her and what would save her.
After lunch shift the next day, she buys a postcard of the long-dead bear whose spirit still haunts the place, something she’ll laugh at until her comb mysteriously disappears from the dresser where she left it. In two weeks she’ll balance a tray of martinis on her fingertips, deliver each drink without spilling. In three weeks, she’ll sleep with a bartender who promises to pull out in time and doesn’t.
Having a ball, she writes. Wish you were here.
Sarah Freligh is the author of four books, including Sad Math, winner of the 2014 Moon City Press Poetry Prize and the 2015 Whirling Prize from the University of Indianapolis, and We, published by Harbor Editions in early 2021. Recent work has appeared in the Cincinnati Review miCRo series, SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Fractured Lit, and in the anthologies New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (Norton 2018) and Best Microfiction (2019–21). Among her awards are a 2009 poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a grant from the New York State Council for the Arts.
