Grace
Into the slot machine Grace put the last dollar. After pulling the handle she turned to look at her husband. He was speaking with a young woman at the bar. She wore a red sequined dress which conformed the curves of her body. Perpetually she brushed her blonde shoulder–length hair away from her face. Grace remembered being blonde, before the grey dominated. Harold was grey as well, which no one knew except Grace. The world saw a dark brown.
The wheels stopped spinning. Bar-seven-cherry. Nothing. Grace took a long draw from her cigarette. Yesterday, she had broken even on the same machine. I’ll win with this one soon she thought. The band had long ago stopped playing and now a man who called himself Sammy Ray sang Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.” Grace stood up and frowned. Sleep seemed a much better alternative to hearing Sinatra covers. The slots would wait for her to return.
She took one last drag of the cigarette and rubbed the butt into the green glass ashtray which sat beside the machine. With another quick glance to the bar, Grace confirmed that her husband was still with the blonde. Coughing, she walked to the elevator. Their room was on the twenty-third floor. It had thick red carpet and red velvet drapes, a large bathtub built into the floor, and a waterbed which could sleep four people comfortably, though it generally slept only one. In the mornings, Grace’s back would hurt and Harold would be lying beside her. The pain lasted for hours. She wished she had a cheaper room just for the box-spring and mattress.
Unable to sleep, Grace stared at the ceiling in the dark until Harold opened the door. He did so slowly, like a child coming home well after curfew. Grace looked at the red numbers on the radio alarm clock she had brought along. 5:23. Her husband proceeded to undress and climb carefully into bed. The weight of his two hundred pound body displaced much more water than Grace’s ninety-eight. After a brief moment, the undulating water settled leaving Grace in an unnaturally curved position. What could that young tart find appealing about him, she wondered. With the rising of the sun, Grace fell asleep.
When she finally awoke, Harold was gone. The alarm clock displayed 2:18. Grace remembered her honeymoon. They had stayed in a cheap hotel in Las Vegas next to The Love Shack where the Elvis impersonator had married them. Forty-two years ago. The urge for nicotine over came her and she lit the first cigarette of the day then got in the shower. The slot machine was waiting. Today her luck would change; the sirens would blare; the lights would flash; the money would pour forth like milk from a bottle; the pain in her back would go away.
For hours Grace smoked cigarettes, drank martinis, listened to the band play swing tunes she didn’t know, pushed her money into the slot, pulled the arm, and lost. A few times the pictures on the wheels matched, producing ten dollars or twenty dollars, but never enough to break even. Yet her need only grew like smoking. At 9:40 her supply of money exhausted. She needed more. Grace scanned the large gambling room for her husband, but to no avail. The machine still called to her. Today she would win. Her only option was to take tomorrow’s ration of money. Harold’s too busy with Blondie to ever notice anyway, she thought. And two hundred dollars would be easy to replace from the thousands which lie waiting behind those three lucky sevens.
Having acquired a mass of dollar tokens, refilled her martini, and purchased a new pack of Virginia Slims, Grace sat down at the third slot machine from the left. She thought about how much she had put into the machine which sat before her. Soon it would have to give back to her. She could feel the machine’s love for her. Every pull of the handle, every click of the wheels, every bar or cherry or lemon, every aspect of the slot machine existed for no other purpose than to love her. All it asked was the she put every bit of herself into the relationship. Soon she would be repaid.
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