A PENNY SHORT

I ask the casino waitress how to work the slot machine. I think she looks like me, even in her ornate navy-blue bikini top and train conductor’s hat. But still, she’s Asian and she’s my age. She’s tall too, taller than me, and I’m already tall for an Asian girl. I ask again, sister to sister, about the machine. She nods her head. I don’t know what she means by that. I ask her for cigarettes. She tells me she’s all out. I can see cigarettes right there in her box. I ask her for a gin and tonic. This she agrees to with another nod.

“Okay. Be right back with that.”

I watch her walk toward the bar. She stops several times to check in with other gamblers. I lose her in the crowd. I’m left staring at my penny slot machine. A Penny for Your Thoughts, it’s called. It’s got five reels and like twenty different symbols on each reel. I have no idea how to win on this thing. I’ve tried every way I can imagine. I’ve put the max bet. I’ve put the minimum bet. I’ve pulled the arm. I’ve pushed the button. I’ve said a prayer. I’ve closed my eyes. And every time, I get some outcome I don’t understand telling me I’ve done a little better or a little worse.

The guys would say I’m wasting my time, that the game is rigged against the player. The guys meaning Rick Junior and Lincoln, the other two players in our string trio. Junior is the violist and current boyfriend—or fiancé, technically. Lincoln is the violinist and ex-boyfriend, also technically. I left them both at the wedding reception. The best man was toasting the groom by listing all the women he’d given up for his new bride, and I’d had about enough. But Junior seemed into it. Taking notes, maybe, for our upcoming wedding. And there was Lincoln getting loaded on free liquor. He’d looked at me with those drunken, red eyes and asked me to stay. I said I had to go. We both shrugged, and that was that.

I’m sure they’re probably looking for me by now. Not that I’m hiding. I’ve been sitting here at Penny for Your Thoughts for God knows how long. Time measured in pennies is hard to track. But now it seems I’ve only got one penny left. I look at it a moment, kiss it for good luck. It tastes like tea. In one motion I drop it into my machine and pull the lever.

Just then, three guys I recognize from the wedding pass through the end of the row. They’re young and lean and wearing tailored suits. The best-looking one stops and waves at me, and I wave back with this conditioned cheerfulness.

He mimes the air cello and shouts, “Hey, Yoyo Ma! You were amazing.”

I wave again, still smiling, a little more authentically now.

He gives me a thumbs up and makes his way toward me.

I say, “Yoyo Ma’s a dude, but thank you.”

He laughs.

“No,” he says. “Seriously. I’m not being ironic. That was like truly superior.”

The other two nod in agreement. Then they all keep walking, past me down the aisle and out the other end. I turn back to my machine: Bet 1, Winner Paid 0.

And that’s it for my gambling career, and that waitress still hasn’t come back. I stand up to look for her but she’s nowhere to be seen. While I’m standing, an old white lady comes and sits down at what was my machine. I sit down at the machine next to me. This one’s called The Penny Pincher and has a white-gloved Mickey Mouse hand pinching a golden penny as its graphic.

I ask the old lady for a cigarette.

She says, “You should ask the waitress.”

I say, “I did. She doesn’t seem to like me.”

“It’s nothing personal. They just work slow to make you gamble more.”

“That’s funny. Because, actually, I’m not gambling.”

I show her my empty coin bucket. The old lady eyes the bucket and shakes her head, sighing. She fishes her hand into her penny cup and starts taking coins out one at a time. She carefully counts each penny out loud, twenty-two of them. She hands them to me in a neat little stack.

“Play until these run out, then go home. You need rest.”

I tell her she’s right, and then I pump all twenty-two pennies into my machine and pull the handle. The reels land one after another, kuh-thunk, kuh-thunk- kuh-thunk, and it looks like I might have won something. I look to the old lady, hoping she’ll corroborate my excitement, but she doesn’t. I look back at The Penny Pincher, the gloved cartoon hand clutching its riches just out of my reach.

The old lady says, “Sorry, dear.”

I shrug.

“Hey, can I ask you something?”

She nods.

I say, “So, I got this job offer.”

I try to smile big and exude a bit of pride. I think that I should feel proud. I should feel about this job like how I felt about cello, when things were going well. How I felt about Sunderman, and how I felt about subbing at Annapolis and The National and at U of M. How I beat the odds. A poor kid raised by a single mom, but I was talented, so talented! And I was a worker. I was a worker once. I’d spent my childhood in more practice hours than sleep, each minute like an optimistic coin dropped into a slot machine.

I think I should feel like that about this job. But I don’t.

I go on.

“It’s good money. I mean really good, like Lexuses and no debts good. And it’s easy. I mean, it’s not easy, just more certain, a lot more certain, you know? I’d be selling real estate, but not even real real estate, but like a real estate mutual fund, like if real estate were stocks, something like that. I don’t know. I’m not sure I really get it. But it’s sort of the family business, except not exactly my family. It’s Junior’s family. Junior’s my boyfriend. He’s here, somewhere. He’s gonna want to know what I plan to do. I want to know too, what I want to do, about the job, about cello, about him. Jesus, I don’t know what I want to do. I just need like some set of instructions, you know, like a signal, an omen even.”

The old lady says, “Well.”

She says this, then pauses, as if taking in the gravity of my question, making sure that she gives me the best possible wisdom because God knows this could be the turning point in my life.

She continues, “Well, having some security does sound nice.”

“Yeah,” I say.

I don’t look up. I just watch the wheels on Penny for Your Thoughts spin.

I think about what Lincoln told me, that life is only about what you do, not who you are. There is no you, he once said in a moment of drug-induced clarity. So then, if I do good, I am good. If I play cello, I am a cellist. If I sell real estate, I am a real estate seller.

Or is Lincoln wrong, and really it’s who I am in my heart that counts. It doesn’t matter if I have the wrong job or marry the wrong person or never play the cello again, as long as I still love the things I love, deep down.

The old lady says, “Pretty girl.”

She pinches me on the cheek.

Then she pulls the lever on her machine, what was formerly my machine. The music starts. It’s jangly and almost has a melody to it, like the intro to a children’s song. A bunch of random symbols come up on her reels, one at a time, landing with an amplified clunk. The finished outcome doesn’t look like anything to me, though I can barely focus, so who knows. It looks like elephants, queens, and exclamation points. The old lady gasps and the machine lights up and bells start to ring. She starts clapping her hands and shouting.

“Doggone it, doggone it, doggone it!”

The casino waitress, the one that’s been ignoring me, comes over to the old lady and gives her a big hug. Then a Latina woman in a black suit comes over and shakes the old lady’s hand. I don’t know exactly how it happened, but I think this old lady just got rich. She’s just won a lot of money. Not just like a couple grand, like a regular jackpot, but like the progressive, like a million bucks or something. I’m sitting there watching them take the old lady’s picture, and it all feels like the punchline out of a TV sitcom.

I try to smile at her, but I can’t bring myself to do it. I elbow her, vying for her attention. She puts a soft hand on my elbow and moves away from me. I keep trying to make eye contact so that maybe she’ll notice me.

“Hey,” I say. “That was my machine.”

The old lady says, “A day late and a penny short.”

There is not even the tiniest bit of remorse in her voice.

In all the commotion, I don’t notice all the people that have come over to see what’s going on. Junior is among them.

Junior grabs me by the shoulders.

“Lucky,” he says.

He calls me Lucky. I’ve asked him not to, but he won’t stop.

“Where have you been? I’ve been looking all over for you.”

I look up at him, bleary-eyed.

“Hey, babe,” I say. “Just playing my slots, you know. Pennies for Penny.”

My name is Penny. In case that wasn’t clear.

“What? What’s wrong with you? Are you okay?”

“I’m good,” I say. “I am.”

He grabs at my hand, not grab-grab, but more like gently takes my hand. I let him. I look at him and ask if he’ll get me some smokes and a drink.

I say, “Gin and tonic.”

He hands me his cigarettes.

“Gin and tonic?”

I shrug and say, “Yeah. Why not.”

He leaves for the bar. Before he turns the corner, I’m up, shaking out the cobwebs, blinking repeatedly until I spot the old lady. She’s walking with the woman in the black suit. They go through a door, a very regular looking door with a small brass plaque that says: Office. It’s seems like an odd place to hand over a million dollars, but what do I know.

I head toward them, passing the other penny slots: A Penny Earned—A Penny Saved, Pennies from Heaven, The Penny Jar, Lucky Penny. I stop at Lucky Penny, two-thirds of the way to the office door. I light a cigarette, wondering what I’m doing. What exactly do I think I’m doing now. I stand there. I smoke. It seems like forever. I see the casino waitress, that same one. She’s got the same box around her neck, those same cigarettes that she doesn’t want to give me. She passes those same three guys from the wedding. My number-one fan, the guy who’d waved at me earlier, is now shouting something at the waitress. But she doesn’t stop. Maybe she doesn’t hear him. She walks by, a few quick steps with her head high, and then I see the guy give a series of pelvic thrusts to the space behind her back. His companions slap and laugh, raising their champagne flutes in a toast to truth and courage and all good things lost in our postmodern age.

I wonder if this waitress and these guys and the old lady and Junior and Lincoln and me, even me, are all secretly good people, amazing and bright, just waiting for some angel to tap us on the shoulder and wake us. Or maybe we are the angels, and we’re the ones looking for some lost human soul to knead and shape, or to defeat decisively like that thing from the deep that played the wrestler’s sinews like strings on a harp . . .

Jesus, I don’t know.

The old lady comes out of the office, a small packet of forms in her hands. The woman in the suit shakes her hand again. The old lady smiles and says something. Then she turns to walk out the casino doors. I watch, balancing an invisible scale in my head, contemplating difficult answers to imaginary questions. I watch for another second and then follow.