BENJAMIN NUGENT
Claire’s roommates threw her out on November third, for falling behind on rent and hogging the Xbox. During the next three weeks, she lived in other people’s houses. She missed the Xbox, but couch surfing was like a game. She had to not smell like coke-sweat or wipe her nose all the time in front of her hosts, and she had to figure out the magic words that would make them let her stay. At her aunt’s house, she praised a samovar. Ding-ding, x 3 nights. At her friend Abby’s mom’s house, she praised a sword, and held it, at the invitation of its owner, Abby’s mom’s boyfriend, a former Naval Academy instructor, and slipped it back into its wall-mounted case, resting the blade and pommel in the felt slot. Ding-ding, x 2 nights. In Abby’s mom’s boyfriend’s gap-toothed son’s house, she praised the smell of cows as the first snow of winter fell through sunlight and country music played on the stereo. Doo-da-la-ding, x 4 nights. In Abby’s bed, she and Abby had sex, and Abby said, “Why won’t you look at me,” but she couldn’t make prolonged eye contact with Abby. x 1 night. In Abby’s mom’s boyfriend’s gap-toothed son’s ex-wife’s house, she told the ex-wife about the gap-toothed son’s girlfriend, shared two lines with the ex-wife, watched her clean the living room, and held the ladder so she could wipe down the candle-flame-shaped light bulbs in the chandelier. x 2 nights. The cocaine made it even more like a game because when she found a place to sleep she didn’t really sleep. She dozed two or three hours and bolted upright. She wanted to stay in bed and also to get up and break things, but she never did anything, just lay there half awake until the sun rose, her alarm went off, and it was time to go to work. By mid-November, she was a master of the whole routine, she felt no fear. But then pilgrim hats and turkeys appeared in the windows of the stores, and the game froze.
The week of Thanksgiving there were no more places to crash, because everybody she knew was either traveling or hosting. Scottish Inns, the Rodeway, and the Granby Motel were all full. Even no-pics Puffton Village bedrooms on Craigslist were priced to take advantage of the holiday. Abby, who always let her stay in a pinch, had been turned against her by puritanical friends who considered her a bad influence. Claire was the only person Abby had ever done coke with, and Abby’s nerd mafia of beautiful, frightening Jewish and Armenian girls had freaked out about how Abby kept showing up at the bio lab spilling coffee and grinding her jaw.
Tuesday morning, Claire left one of the last cheap Airbnbs downtown and worked a six-hour shift at Dunkin’, where the tiles in the bathroom were large and brown, with wet tracks left by boots and sneakers. After work, she walked to the public library. The bathroom off the children’s zone had a lockable door and a diaper-changing station, where you could cut a line vigorously without having to worry about some of it spilling off the side, which could happen when you used the top of a toilet-seat-cover dispenser. The walls were pale orange, with a framed drawing of nineteenth-century animals absorbedfretted a rail from a clump with her debit card, dead center of the baby, and when she did the rail it burned. Her right nasal passage felt exactly as if it had been stung by a bee.
