Dumb Luck

Dumb Luck

Beth, newly unengaged and a little bit more reckless than usual, wore exactly the wrong dress to the casino cruise. Over watery margaritas at an oceanfront dive in Vero Beach the night before, ensconced in a wraparound booth with a bachelorette party consisting of eight of her new best friends, Beth had clinked her tumbler into theirs in the glittering, restless dim and agreed: why wouldn’t she hit the cruise the next night with them, try her luck? Emboldened by the false confidence of four or five cocktails, having successfully (if temporarily) corralled the shrieking, bereft part of herself still reeling from the dissolution of her own engagement, Beth had become part of this group of keyed-up strangers. She was in coastal Florida, alone, on what should have been a honeymoon. She liked their cheerleader intensity, their giddiness that had likely been forced at the beginning of the evening but, with the continual administration of pump-up pop songs and tequila shots, had transformed into something that looked very much like joy.

She was determined not to drink so much she ruined another girl’s bachelorette by transforming into Weepy Beth, who tended to spill drinks and guts simultaneously. She retreated instead into the Blasé Beth shell, an easy enough identity to inhabit as the ethanol seeped into her bloodstream, turning everything malleable, golden, and manageably remote. From this vantage point, she gave herself permission to look at Callie, the bachelorette (bottle-blonde and big-boned, beaming in her too-white bandage dress, whose neckline and armpits were a little discolored by the orangey creep of makeup or sweat) with a type of amused, detached pity. Her therapist would have written this off as projection, said, Beth, you know assigning your problems to strangers doesn’t solve them for you, but her therapist, thank God, was about twenty states away. So when Callie had leaned across the booze-wet table and slurred merrily into Beth’s ear that she really ought to join them at the next day’s event, a casino cruise with an all-white dress code, Beth had assented, had booked a ticket on her phone in a pink-stalled bathroom moments later, clearing out her bladder for more margaritas.

She was separate from them. She imagined she knew a little better about things like the rude inevitability of heartbreak, the staggering injustices people could inflict on those they claimed to love. After all, here she sat, the same age as the rest of them but on the other side of what they were all now hailing, with loud glee-laden yelps and the beloved sequence of lime-salt-shot, as their dear Callie’s transition into a future of unquestioned happiness. As though marriage was the key to fulfillment! She couldn’t blame them, not when she’d so recently been just like them. They’d all been raised the wrong way, force-fed reality dating shows like cattle choking down unwanted corn. In another, more elusive way, she felt somehow integral to them, as though her arbitrary presence in their midst gave them a second wind, renewed their intensity of feeling for one another. Here, they seemed to be saying to her, obliquely, as they aligned their cheeks for Crest-whitened selfies in the gloaming of the bar’s back corner, as they endangered the other bar patrons with sloppily-flung darts and hogged the tiny stage on which some earnest employee had carefully established a karaoke corner; here, witness the uncomplicated joy we take in one another’s presence. Witness our capacity for openness, for love.

Night had blurred into another perfect morning, the sun shattering off the Florida water like so many irrelevant marquise-cut diamonds, and Beth, having ushered herself home in an Uber just before her personal cutoff point, spent the whole morning shopping in stores whose names she only knew from television. The nag and chatter of her brain poked at her in its usual incessant monologue, the voices sometimes belonging to her and sometimes belonging to her father: You won’t wear that more than once; it’s a goddamn waste of money just so you can feel special; now that you’re no longer marrying an attorney, it’s time to start lining your coffers, not scraping them clean; no one will look at you twice, whether you’re wearing satin worth a month’s rent or a hotel bedsheet, so why not do the mature thing and choose the bedsheet? You’re so dumb, was the unsung refrain, so worthless; is it any wonder you were abandoned by the man with whom you were stupid enough to envision a future?

For once, she was able to turn the volume down. A tiny opening for fun, for impulsivity, for taking chances. “It’s killer,” said the formidably chic assistant who’d spent the last ten minutes lacing Beth into the satin gown, whose tag explained its color (sweet champagne) and its price (outlandish). Beth believed her. In the full-length mirror, as they both looked at her, Beth felt something winged and unfamiliar. She looked insouciant, sexy, glamorous. What she’d always thought of as a stocky, unremarkable body had suddenly become something this dress was made to drape across. A blip of uncertainty crossed her mind as the assistant rang her up, her matte beige nails clicking smoothly across the register; she shook it away and swiped her credit card, basking in the afterglow of having seen herself the way she’d always looked at others: as something brushing close to beautiful, something to be watched across a dancefloor. To be envied.

This high carried her along, her feet barely brushing sidewalk, as she shepherded the dress back to the hotel. Her posture straightened automatically, she noted with curiosity, as the bag swung across her inner elbow; she allowed herself a moment of imagining how passersby might see her on this balmy day, in this city where it was always nearing summer: a woman, grown and glamorous, bearing a bag emblazoned with a logo instantly recognizable the world over as one signifying class, taste, and the ability to spend inordinate sums of money on one garment. It surprised and embarrassed her how much she loved the feeling.

In the mint-fresh, conditioned air of room 305, she marveled at the sophistication of the tissue paper in which the gown had been carefully nested: ephemeral layers of pale lavender, just enough sparkle to be special without crossing the line into gaudy. In the black notebook she kept tucked inside the inner pocket of her knockoff handbag, she flipped to the page whose heading said, in black sharpie, CLOTHING, and added a new line: Givenchy dress, she wrote, $1300. The number, so bold and for such a frivolous item, stood out from its fellows: the other lines on that particular page read things like Target yoga pants, $12 (clearance!) and Nordstrom Rack work suit, $85. She still remembered the hesitation she’d felt buying that suit, although it was a professional necessity and had been marked down from a full price of nearly three hundred. She scanned her feelings and realized two things: the shame she had expected for her profligacy was absent, and she hadn’t thought about her shambles of a love life that entire morning, so consumed with anticipation had she been by the idea of the evening’s cruise.

At the hotel bar, slicked in sweet champagne satin, Beth sipped a chilled-glass flute filled with a French 75. Self-conscious in a delicious way, enjoying her obviousness, she smiled back at the bartender, her glossed lips, she imagined, catching the light from the hiply naked bulbs dangling at angled intervals over the white marble bar. “Here for the launch?” he’d asked her earlier, and she’d been bewildered briefly before it hit her: he’d mistaken her for someone of great importance, perhaps an executive or at least a plus-one, someone who was in town for that evening’s gravely historic occurrence. At nine-oh-five that evening, America’s first commercial spaceflight would commence: a rocket, stuffed with celebrities, figureheads, and insanely wealthy private citizens was set to depart from Kennedy Space Center. It had been global news for weeks. The CEO of Excelsior would be onboard.

If successful, it would mark a new era in human spaceflight. If unsuccessful, it would imbue everyone who watched it with that specific breed of shabby glamour that accompanies witnesses to incomprehensible grief: I was there when the Excelsior rocket exploded, Beth found herself imagining saying to future friends, in hushed tones, as they leaned across some future table, locking eyes with her, waiting for her to translate some of that sickening, seductive horror to them. I saw it happen in real time. It was like a dream. Like a nightmare. She abandoned the train of thought, finding it puerile and melodramatic. On the television screen beyond the bartender’s head, a clock ticked down to the launch: one hour, forty-two minutes, seventeen seconds. Beth was due at the docks at ten to eight. She left a hefty tip for the bartender and glided outside in her red-carpet gown, feeling silly and gorgeous and several shades of reckless, identifying somewhere in those layers a feeling she’d thought buried long ago: happiness.

It was the right night for the wrong dress; she was out of place, superfluously dressy, and she loved herself for it with the same ferocity the others bestowed upon her as soon as they met on the gangplank. They’d all interpreted the dress code with a casual liberation: five of them, subtly sunburnt and shedding sand, covering their neon bikinis with white sundresses of various hem lengths, two in slightly more elevated attire that nonetheless suggested expensive nightclub rather than white-tie gala. Callie, the woman of the hour, had traded in her yellowing white bandage dress for a slightly fresher white bandage dress, unsullied by mezcal or mascara.

Beth, playing her ex-fiance’s football number, won twenty thousand dollars at roulette that night: red seventeen! She was alone by then, having glistened off in her silky gown, and kept the stunning windfall secret. Not because she thought they’d want some; more because she felt, by now, she’d earned a little bit of (what did they call it?) dumb luck.

And they loved Beth’s outfit beyond words. “I wish,” sighed Callie, as they stood at the prow at some point between baccarat and craps, letting the warm night wash over them in its blissful consistency, “that was my wedding dress. But there’s no way I’d pull it off like you do. I mean,” she said, gulping down her plastic cup of vodka-rocks, her eyes traveling down Beth’s body with uncomplicated admiration, “was it like custom-made for you or something?”

Beth thought about lying. She entertained the fantasy of assenting to Callie’s question, of pretending she was the type of women for whom satin dresses might be custom-made, rather than a close-to-broke, freshly-jilted sadsack who, in forty-eight tiny hours, would be forced to reenter a life of cubicles and pointless meetings, of swiping through the deserts of dating apps for companionship. There was a cigar in her left hand, a silly party favor handed to all nine of them as they stepped from land to boat, as though entering this five-hour, all-inclusive casino cruise was tantamount to entering a portal to a totally separate existence, one chock-full of intrigue, of offshore bank accounts and heady affairs and various brands of hedonism. She took a puff from the cigar, thick with flavors of a different life, then tossed it overboard. “Nope,” she said, “I bought it on clearance.”

“Lucky,” said Callie, drawing out the final syllable. A crowd, Beth now realized, had gathered around them. As one, they turned to the dark horizon; someone began counting down, thirty, twenty-nine, twenty-eight. Beth and Callie, as though pulled by an invisible grappling hook, migrated to the front of the ship, gripped the humid iron railing with their newly manicured fingers. Waited with the others for the rocket to launch, for the night sky to fill with smoke; for other people, humans just like them, to enter the unknown.