Diary

A couple drinks. A couple aspirin. Repeat.

In the Wood and Gold Dining Room, across from the fireplace, are windows that look down the coastline. Half the glazing putty has dried hard and crumbled until the cold wind whistles inside. The windows sweat. Moisture inside the room collects on the glass and trickles down into a puddle until the floor is soaked through and the carpet smells bad as a whale washed up on the beach for the last two weeks of July. The view outside, the horizon is cluttered with billboards, the same brand names, for fast food, sunglasses, tennis shoes, that you see printed on the litter that marks the tide line.

Floating in every wave, you see cigarette butts.

Every time someone asks for table fourteen, fifteen, or sixteen by the windows and then complains about the cold draft and the stink of the squishy wet carpet, when they whine for a new table, you need to take a drink.

These summer people, their holy grail is the perfect table. The power seat. Placement. The place they’re sitting is never as good as where they aren’t. It’s so crowded, just getting across the dining room, you’re punched in the stomach by elbows and hipbones. Slapped with purses.

Before we go any further, you might want to put on some extra clothes. You might want to stock up on some extra B vitamins. Maybe some extra brain cells. If you’re reading this in public, stop until you’re wearing your best good underwear.

Even before this, you might want to get on the list somewhere for a donor liver.

You can see where this is going.

This is where Misty Marie Kleinman’s whole life has gone.

You have endless ways you can commit suicide without dying dying.

Whenever anyone from the mainland comes in with a group of her friends, all of them thin and tanned and sighing at the woodwork and white tableclothes, the crystal bud vases filled with roses and fern and the silver-plate antique everything, anytime someone says, “Well, you should serve tofu instead of veal!” take a drink.

These thin women, maybe on the weekends you’ll see a husband, short and dumpy, sweating so hard the black flock he sprays on his bald spot is running down the back of his neck. Thick rivers of dark sludge that stain the back of his shirt collar.

Whenever one of the local sea turtles comes in clutching her pearls at her withered throat, old Mrs. Burton or Mrs. Seymour or Mrs. Perry, when she sees some skinny tanned summer women at her own personal favorite table since 1865 and says, “Misty, how could you? You know I’m always a regular here at noon on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Really, Misty . . .” then you need to take two drinks.

When the summer people ask for coffee drinks with foamed milk or chelated silver or carob sprinkles or soy-based anything, take another drink.

If they don’t tip, take another.

These summer women. They wear so much black eyeliner they could be wearing glasses. They wear dark brown lip liner, then eat until the lipstick inside is worn away. What’s left is a table of skinny children, each with a dirty ring around her mouth. Their long hooked fingernails the pastel color of Jordan almonds.

When it’s summer and you still have to stoke the smoking fireplace, remove an article of clothing.

When it’s raining and the windows rattle in the cold draft, put on an article of clothing.

A couple drinks. A couple aspirin. Repeat.

When Peter’s mother comes in with your daughter, Tabbi, and expects you to wait on your own mother-in- law and your own kid like their own personal slave, take two drinks. When they both sit there at table eight, Granmy Wilmot telling Tabbi, “Your mother would be a famous artist if she’d only try, ” take a drink.

The summer women, their diamond rings and pendants and tennis bracelets, all their diamonds dull and greasy with sunblock, when they ask you to sing “Happy Birthday” to them, take a drink.

When your twelve-year-old looks up at you and calls you “ma’am” instead of Mom . . .

When her grandmother, Grace, says, “Misty dear, you’d have more money and dignity if you’d go back to painting . . .”

When the whole dining room hears this . . .

A couple drinks. A couple aspirin. Repeat.

Anytime Grace Wilmot orders the deluxe selection of tea sandwiches with cream cheese and goat cheese and walnuts chopped into a fine paste and spread on paper-thin toast, then she eats only a couple bites and leaves the rest to waste and then charges this and a pot of Earl Grey tea and a piece of carrot cake, she charges all this to you and you don’t even know she’s done this until your paycheck is only seventy-five cents because of all the deductions and some weeks you actually end up owing the Waytansea Hotel money, and you realize you’re a sharecropper trapped in the Wood and Gold Dining Room probably for the rest of your life, then take five drinks.

Anytime the dining room is crowded with every little gold brocade chair filled with some woman, local or mainland, and they’re all bitching about how the ferry ride takes too long and there’s not enough parking on the island and how you never used to need a reservation for lunch and how come some people don’t just stay home because it’s just too, too much, all these elbows and needy, strident voices asking for directions and asking for nondairy creamer and sundresses in size 2, and the fireplace still has to be blazing away because that’s hotel tradition, then remove another article of clothing.

If you’re not drunk and half naked by this point, you’re not paying attention.

When Raymon the busboy catches you in the walk-in freezer putting a bottle of sherry in your mouth and says, “Misty, carino . Salud !”

When that happens, toast him with the bottle, saying, “To my brain-dead husband. To the daughter I never see. To our house, about to go to the Catholic church. To my batty mother-in-law, who nibbles Brie and green onion finger sandwiches . . .” then say, “ Te amo,Raymon.”

Then take a bonus drink.

Anytime some crusty old fossil from a good island family tries to explain how she’s a Burton but her mother was a Seymour and her father was a Tupper and his mother was a Carlyle and somehow that makes her your second cousin once removed, and then she flops a cold, soft, withered hand on your wrist while you’re trying to clear the dirty salad plates and she says, “Misty, why aren’t you painting anymore?” and you can see yourself just getting older and older, your whole life spiraling down the garbage disposal, then take two drinks.

What they don’t teach you in art school is never, ever to tell people you wanted to be an artist. Just so you know, for the rest of your life, people will torture you by saying how you used to love to draw when you were young. You used to love to paint.

A couple drinks. A couple aspirin. Repeat.

Just for the record, today your poor wife, she drops a butter knife in the hotel dining room. When she bends to pick it up, something’s reflected in the silver blade. It’s some words written on the underside of table six. On her hands and knees, she lifts the edge of the tablecloth. On the wood, there with the dried chewing gum and crumbs of snot, it says, “Don’t let them trick you again.”

Written in pencil, it says, “Choose any book at the library.”

Somebody’s homemade immortality. Their lasting effect. This is their life after death.

Just for the record, the weather today is partly soused with occasional bursts of despair and irritation.

The message under table six, the faint penciled handwriting, it’s signed Maura Kincaid .

June 29—The New Moon

IN OCEAN PARK, the man answers his front door, a wineglass in one hand, some kind of bright orange wine filling it up to his index finger on the side of the glass. He’s wearing a white terry cloth bathrobe with “Angel” stitched on the lapel. He wears a gold chain tangled in his gray chest hair and smells like plaster dust. His other hand holds the flashlight. The man drinks the wine down to his middle finger, and his face looks puffy with dark chin stubble. His eyebrows are bleached or plucked until they’re almost not there.