Mary Miller

Mary Miller

Princess Leia

Outside the Hollywood Roosevelt, a girl dressed as Princess Leia asks us to sign a petition for Carrie Fisher’s star. It seems wild that Carrie Fisher doesn’t have a star, and I believe she deserves one, but I’ve made it a policy never to stop for anyone in the city, no matter what. Once I accepted a CD from a guy on the streets of New York and he cajoled and berated me out of twenty dollars. I still think about it, and it makes me feel ashamed.

Carrie Fisher, troubled, was honest about her troubles. Wrote a book about it. Star Wars, The ‘Burbs. That’s all I’ve got. The only reason I remember she was in The ‘Burbs is because I recently tried to rewatch it and it didn’t hold up.

Oh, hey, I imagine saying to the girl. Sure, I’ll sign, and she’d pass me the clipboard. It doesn’t seem like a big deal at all. Maybe she’d want a donation too, though, and the encounter would end badly. Lately I’ve felt like an alien. I go to hug a friend and knock my head against his. In the middle of a conversation, I’ll announce that I’m going to sit down.

I think about asking my husband: do you ever forget how to be a person? and the look he would give me. He can talk to anybody whereas I am very good at greetings, but then I have to keep moving.

In the hotel lobby, I stop to fix myself an afternoon coffee. My husband doesn’t want one. He thinks one in the morning is enough.

I wonder if there are other girls dressed as Princess Leia out there, I say to my husband. Perhaps there’s a whole coterie of them.

Oh! he says. Someone’s pulling out their big words today.

It’s only—I pause to count—seven letters. It’s not so big. Medium at best. I take a sip and realize that I don’t want a second cup either, but I will have to drink it in order to prove I want what I thought I wanted. Then I start to wonder if I used coterie correctly and pull out my phone to look it up. I’ll have to do it surreptitiously, though, which is an actual big word. How many letters is that?

My husband is a know-it-all, and we can get into arguments about the smallest things that go on for a long time. I try to think of a single man I have dated who wasn’t a know-it-all and can’t come up with anyone except Kevin. I’m not sure what Kevin was, but he couldn’t have been called a know-it-all, not exactly.

My husband and I do much better in remote areas where there is little to do. We take walks we call hikes, look at trees. We comment on the tallness and the bigness of the trees. I wait while he takes landscape photos, and the waiting becomes its own activity. Start. Stop. Long breaks of nothingness as the vacation ticks by. In the city, however, he feels compelled to do as much as possible. He makes lists, and when he runs out of things on his list, he asks about mine.

I follow him down a hallway and out to the pool, through a set of doors and down another hallway, which winds for a long time and then splits. There has to be an easier way to get to our room, but he says this is it. I got lost trying to get ice yesterday, and to make myself feel better about having gotten lost, I took a bunch of pictures of the pictures on the walls—old Hollywood stuff—girls in fancy dresses draped across beds and tigers, Playboy bunnies, men in tuxedos— and sent them to a friend who likes this sort of thing. I told her she would love it here.

Our hotel room—a cabana—isn’t anything like a cabana, though there’s a small outdoor patio with a table and two chairs, a tall hedge for privacy. I send him out there when I have to use the bathroom. It’s fine enough, but not what we expected. We don’t much like the area, either, which is like Bourbon Street or Beale Street, the kind of places we avoid back home. My husband took a friend’s recommendation and made the reservation without doing any research, which is unusual for him. There are people yelling in the streets and old women spinning sausages on grills, wax museums, bars with open doors blasting dance music, people wanting you to hop on tour buses. There are so many tourists, and even though we are also tourists, it is hard not to resent them for making us feel so common.

In the room, I settle into bed with a stack of magazines. We have three more days in LA, and the next time he asks me for my list, I will give it to him. If he doesn’t like my suggestions, at least he won’t be able to say I didn’t bring any- thing to the table.

The trip began in San Francisco, where we rented a car and drove south along Highway 1, staying in different towns each night. I was the navigator, the one who looked out the window and said ooh and aah while telling him to keep his eyes on the road. It was the role I was born for.

We saw three zebras on a hill outside Hearst Castle. I’ve thought a lot about those zebras, imported from far away for rich people to watch as if they were birds. We saw dozens of elephant seals on the beach at Ragged Point, enormously ugly creatures, lolling about, flipping sand onto their backs with their flippers, a video of which I sent to a friend I message with on Twitter. This friend is a young filmmaker whose films are not good. He sent me his most recent project and I complained that it was too abstract, I couldn’t follow, and he told me about diegesis, eyeline matching, and rack focusing, but when people try to explain why their art is bad it is hard to be interested.

And still, despite this, I have developed a terrible crush.

Josh—that’s his name—typically responds to my messages within an hour, but I’ve heard nothing for days and have begun to wonder if this video is the last thing I will ever send him, our final correspondence elephant seals on filthy sand with their high-pitched whines and burping noises, a couple of them rearing up to engage in a scrappy fight like pre-teen girls.

In Los Angeles, I get sucked into an article titled “Inside the Battle for Britney.” There’s a full-page picture of Britney from 2008 in which she had acne and greasy bangs, eyelashes clumpy with mascara. I hold it up to show my husband.

There’s a free Britney movement going on, I tell him. Hashtag free Britney. Oh yeah? He doesn’t care about Britney, about pop stars. When we watch

SNL, we never know who the musicians are, but sometimes I pretend.

He goes to the bathroom. He doesn’t ask me to go outside, which is nice of him, but it is also a burden; no one should be subjected to what people do in bathrooms in such a small space. He watches TV on his phone—there’s a lot of gunshots and yelling—and I fluff my pillows, flip pages. What my husband does in the bathroom is no concern of mine, though he would be better off with a deaf woman. Imagine how attractive my husband might be to a deaf woman. A blind woman, as well, could love him. His skin is soft. She would love his soft skin.

There are mostly restaurant reviews in the magazines, profiles of chefs. We’re cheap eaters, and though we could afford to eat in any of these restaurants, we’d be bitter about it afterward. There is no meal costing hundreds of dollars that might please us enough. I read about New Year’s Eve festivities, all the places we might go and the things we might do. If I haven’t mentioned it yet: it is New Year’s Eve, on the cusp of a new decade. The hotel is having a party, and because we have a cabana room, we are to receive free entry. Open bar. Cocktail attire. I don’t want to get dressed up, though, because I hate getting dressed up, and I don’t want to wear the dress I brought because it shows the scar on my knee from a stupid fall I took on ice, three gummies high in the dark. There has been some confusion over the wristbands, which were not given to us at check-in as they should have been, according to my husband. There has been quite a bit of talk about these wristbands that I don’t want, and which we need so badly to obtain.

The shower turns on. I go back to Britney and the court-ordered conservatorship that governs her life. The article rehashes her breakdown, the head-shaving, hiding in a locked bathroom with her kid, and the rest of it. Once you’re deemed a fuckup it is impossible to convince people otherwise; they’re just waiting for you to fuck up again so they can say, see.

My husband comes out of the bathroom and drops his towel. He puts on his socks and stands in front of the TV, which is playing something newsy.

This is a good look for you, I say. Do you think?

No, a naked body with socks is a tragedy.

We should go to Hollywood Forever Cemetery tomorrow, he says. It’s probably the only way I’ll get to see famous people.

I tell him I like that Father John Misty song and play it on my phone. We saw Father John Misty in concert not too long ago. We’re sure that whatever bands come through our small town are taking the night off, though, half-assing it. I imagine them laughing in their hotel rooms after the show, talking about what fat dumb hicks we are. Perhaps they even think about quitting music altogether.

I sing along for a while, badly. I sing pretty well, but it’s something I only do for myself.

We haven’t even seen the Hollywood sign, he says, zipping his pants. He looks at himself in the mirror and smiles, picks something out of his teeth. I thought I’d see it everywhere. It’s false advertising.

I agree that it is false advertising. On our drive south, we’d listened to a podcast about the sign, learned that it was originally an ad for a real estate de- velopment company and that Hugh Hefner saved it twice, once paying nearly a million dollars to preserve the land. We learned that it is a very long and sweaty hike uphill to reach it, which I made clear that I was not going to do.

I told you I’m not going up there, I remind him. So you said.

I’m not kidding. I’ll hike to Griffith Observatory, but that’s it. How far is that?

Twenty minutes there and twenty minutes back. That’s enough. Anybody can do that, he says.

My husband thinks he’s different from other people, but I’m as common as a Midwesterner poking through a wax museum right now, wondering if they should hop on a bus or eat a street sausage.

I scroll through Twitter—still no message from Josh, so fuck him if he’s going to go radio silent after the elephant seals—and read a thread from a guy who’s lost two friends to suicide in the past month. He said there was no indication they were depressed, they seemed happy, normal, and this interests me because it is hard to believe it is true. Is it just something people say to make themselves feel better about having missed the signs? No one would ever say, we never saw it coming about me, and so I must go on living.

A woman I know killed herself not too long ago as well, just after Thanksgiving. Her name keeps popping up in my head—Eliza—and there’s the shock that she is no longer in this world. I won’t see any new photographs of her dogs or her vacations or her garden. Eliza never struck me as a tragic person, the kind who would die young or take her own life. She was pretty and smart and so well-liked that it seemed rather unfair, all that she had been given and the ease with which it had come to her. If a person like this feels they can’t live, where does it leave the rest of us? But I didn’t know her well enough to say there were no warning signs. I think about how many people I know well, but at this point I couldn’t even say I know my sister. She lives in another town, and I see her on holidays. I hardly know anyone besides my husband, and he is as steady as always.

I sent a letter to Eliza’s brother, who I’d met a few times, and wrote about my favorite memories with her in graduate school. There was the drive we’d taken to the Texas Hill Country on a day when the bluebonnets were in bloom, another in which we’d camped with friends at Enchanted Rock. It was a wonderful weekend, I wrote, and Eliza made elaborate meals using tin foil, pour-over coffee, and eggs in water bottles. She made everything special, I wrote, made everything fun. I mailed the letter and then felt like I didn’t have the right to talk about her life or claim any part in it.

Despite this, I would want my sister to receive such a letter. Out of the woodwork, that’s where I’d like them to come.

You need to get dressed, my husband says.

I hold the magazine in front of my face to block him.

I’m going to go check on these wristbands and when I come back you should be dressed.

Once he’s gone, I get out of bed and get in the shower. I wash my hair and shave. My poor knee. I should never have taken that fall. There is the question of whether to put a bandage on it, to pretend it is a fresh wound. A fresh wound is understandable in a way that a scar is not.

I hear my husband come back into the room and put some rap music on while I brush my hair, slather hotel lotion onto my skin. It stinks, like all hotel lotion. I do not want to go to this party. I think about Eliza, unable to go to a party ever again. I think of past New Year’s Eves, and they are uniformly terrible. There was one, so long ago, when I was in eleventh grade and in love with a boy who sat across from me in choir. We commandeered somebody’s parents’ bedroom and talked for hours, kissed and said the sweetest things to each other, and then he ran to the bathroom and threw up in the sink in an act so violent I can still picture it in great detail. We never spoke again. Another New Year’s, I was at the childhood home of a college boyfriend. We watched the ball drop on TV with his mother and sister, both of whom disliked me, and then I slept in a room that had been shut up for years—the sheets musty, the bedspread an oversized doily—among the detritus of exercise equipment.

My husband raises his arms and pumps them slowly, puts his hands on the bed and moves his hips from side to side, rolling his neck. It’s so awful that you can’t make fun of it, just like my singing. Perhaps he is an excellent dancer but won’t let me know. It’s unlikely, but I like the idea of it, imagining him as a backup dancer for Britney, fast and on-point under the bright hot lights.

I put on mascara and blush, high heels. I cover the scar with makeup and it’s hardly even noticeable.

It’s early and there’s almost no one around except for the bartenders and waitresses. We have our wristbands and our 2020 party hats and our nicest suitcase clothes. My husband gets us drinks, and we sit and look at the pool, telling each other it’ll be good people watching.

Maybe there’ll even be some famous people, I say. This is doubtful but I say it because I know it will please him.

Let’s go sit over there, my husband says. It’s reserved.

I don’t see a sign.

It is one of half a dozen spaces that are clearly reserved, with special party favors on the cushioned benches, but he doesn’t believe me and goes and sits. A pretty girl asks him to leave. It is embarrassing and pointless, as New Year’s Eve is supposed to be. Someone will violently puke at the end of the night, you will be trapped with someone’s sober relatives, perhaps you’ll drink a strawberry daiquiri after eating a plate of fried oysters and have a great urge to use the bathroom midway through a long walk. The New Year will find a way to let you know it will be just like the old one.

The drinks are strong, though, and my husband immediately gets shit-faced, which is unusual but also fun because he’s a fun drunk. We walk around and he talks to some folks who aren’t interested in us but that’s okay—we take some pictures, and then I tell him I’m hungry. At this point he is pliable enough to be hungry, too.

We go out into the streets where there’s a truck selling hot chicken. We buy an incredible amount of hot chicken and take it back to our room and eat every- thing and get into bed. I ask him whether we should go back out, as the clock hasn’t yet struck twelve. There’s no way I would leave this room, not for a good fourteen hours at least, but I ask because I know he won’t say yes and because it is the polite thing to do. Perhaps I could rally, if he really wanted me to rally. I like the idea of it. This is something I might tell people: it was New Year’s Eve and we were done for—bellies full of liquor and hot chicken, and there was nothing to rally for, but we did it anyway.

I lie there thinking that it is not a bad New Year’s Eve. Nothing terrible happened. Nothing terrible at all. Maybe I’ll even agree to hike to the Hollywood sign—not tomorrow obviously—but the day after that. I imagine how good I’ll feel when it’s over, both heavier and lighter, and my husband will post pictures of us standing below the sign, and people will like it, and he’ll feel good about himself. We all want to feel good about ourselves. I’ll comment: hands clapping, party hat, heart emoji.