Vodka makes me a good listener. And believe me, I need it. I hear lots of stories. Love gone wrong. Love gone right. Love gone pouf! into mid-air. I’ve seen grown women cry like babies, seen them cheesecake in the mirror like they should have been famous pin-up girls, seen them rehearse dialogue, talk sex: blow jobs-pregnancy tests, he loves her, but she loves him and yesterday she left the coffee maker on because she gets so mad at him when he screeches out of the driveway like that!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! All because her old boyfriend called her in the middle of the night.

"And my house could have burned down!" one says to me, tracing her lips with crayonish liner. "Our house," she corrects herself. "What do you think of that, young lady?"

And, I want to say, "I think that’s pretty pathetic, Helen." (I know her name is Helen because her friend keeps yelling at her from the handicapped stall). But usually, I just say what I know they want to hear: I’m sure he loves you, just a little too passionate, change your phone number, give him a break, he’s just a guy, so long as he don’t beat you, so long as he don’t make you feel bad all the time.

When they leave, the bathroom always has that creepy silence that makes the lights go brighter. Greg, the bartender, says I must be getting an education, sitting all night and listening like that. I think Greg is cute even though his eyebrows are almost growing into one big one. "I’m getting something," I tell him. "I’m surely getting something."

Obviously, Windy Pines isn’t a fancy place. More like your average shit hotel, pretending to be the Hyatt, the Hilton, the Radisson. They (the powers-that-be) hire teen-agers like me (frayed-wire nerves from dysfunctional living at the old suburban ranch, eating disorders, recreational experimentation with acid, pot, and especially hard alcohol in the back seats of cars) for one summer or two, like we’re accessories, like we’re part of some weird front designed to make insurance salesmen and secretaries and truckers’ wives feel like they’re really somebody when they dine at Windy Pines. I sit in the bathroom’s corner in a blue polyester uniform and hand out mints, fill up bottles with cheap imitation perfumes, stock vanity counters with Rave hairspray.

My mom likes it because she figures what kind of trouble can her daughter find on a Friday night in a ladies restroom? Ever since she caught me drunk, she’s been a blithering hen trying to save me from "the drink." The Windy Pines is managed by her friend Wendy Pensola and they arranged this to keep me from getting bored and to help my mom get by since the divorce. It’s like they think it’s rehab or something. Rehab and slavery combined. They have covert meetings. I see them snicker in the streetlight, holding their purses against their faces to shield the wind from carrying their words to me.

My mom has known Wendy Pensola for years. They were in each other’s wedding. Wore terrible sunflower yellow dresses for each other and had babies at about the same time of the year. Wendy’s daughter, Wynona (named for the Judds not Ryder), is terrifyingly perfect and I am terrifyingly flawed. This deal they have, I’m sure, is some sort of consolation prize for my mother. You got the shitty kid, so I’ll help you out. And it just makes me sick that my mother takes it. It just makes me sick to all hell. But you know, no one ever listens to fifteen year olds and Wendy Pensola drives a very nice car and so, I disappear like a thin blue light into a bizarre underworld every Friday and Saturday, so that my mother can be certain I will be kept from all harmful truths like cockroaches and poverty and men like my dad who dump women like my mom and that pathetic Helen. I’ve been at the Windy Pines for three months.

Karaoke nights are always a riot. This one fat woman comes in the bathroom every Thursday before she sings and puts on extra orange lipstick. She does breathing exercises. She sings scales. I think she likes the way her voice bounces off the ceramic tiles. The bartender, Greg, says she always sings the same song, Here’s your one chance, Fancy, don’t let me down.

"Fat women love that song," he says.

"Fat women always have voices like a little girl who’s just sucked helium," I say. "Like all their skinniness must have gone straight to their throat."

Greg, who always puts cherries in my break Coke like I’m a kid or something, asks me where I get ideas like that and I tell him I don’t know. I tell him I am glad that something so delicate has wiggled itself out of all that flesh.

Tonight is Friday. Hell night. All you can eat prime rib. Women who can’t afford plastic surgery but probably order youth creams off the home shopping channel will pull up their skirts, adjust their control-top panty hose. They usually come in groups of three. They will talk about Frank, Mike, Tom. They will smoke secret cigarettes in the corner stall and try to hide their age under tubes of beige and bisque. They will smell like imposter perfumes and mint gum that’s just lost its flavor.

On Fridays, I drink my vodka from an empty hair spray bottle marked on the bottom with a magic-markered "V." Braxton Pennington taught me how to do this in the fifth grade, except he filled the bottle with Tiger’s Piss, which basically meant Braxton would mix together the dregs of all the liquor decanters in his father’s alcohol closet. The first time we drank Tiger Piss under his porch, his parents came home from a square dancing convention and I couldn’t stop laughing at how stupid they looked. I kept whispering to Braxton that his mother looked like Shirley Temple. This made me laugh even harder and Braxton, who was barefoot, kept stepping on my own bare foot, pinching whatever skin he could gather in between his big toe to make me stop laughing. And his mother kept saying, "Who is that girl? Who is that girl?" like a parrot or something. So, now, every time I take my first sip of vodka, I always hear Who is that girl? Who is that girl?

Chet, the manager, has been complaining about the mints going too fast in the ladies’ restroom and said, lifting a suspicious eyebrow towards me, that he "wondered who had been eating them all." Said he’d been counting them before and after every shift and noticed that I had a pretty high "shrinkage." Using words like shrinkage makes Chet feel important.

I explained that I encourage our clients to have fresh breath, that way they are most likely to have an enjoyable evening with their dates, perhaps will pick up some hot action and come back to The Windy Pines for more hot action. (Chet can’t tell if I’m kidding or not. That’s what I love about him. He is that stupid.) I continue by saying that fresh breath has, historically, been good for business.

"Historically?" he says.

I stick my hand in my uniform’s pocket and extend it. "Mint?" I say.

"I’ll be counting," he says.

When I am sure he is gone I say, "Go blow yourself, Chet," loud enough that it echoes at least a half-echo and, for a minute, I feel as if I am in one of those old melodramatic film sequences where the ingénue’s words repeat themselves as if to drive her to madness— Go blow yourself Chet, Chet, Chet. I put my hand across my forehead, as I take another squirt from the hair spray bottle and let it burn there on the back of my throat.

Usually around ten or eleven I am buzzed enough to pick a new mother. It’s a strange game, I know, but it helps wear the time away. I mean, I have a perfectly fine and normal mother, a mother who collects teddy bears, a mother who smells like baby powder, a mother who remembers my birthday and allergies and has saved all of my baby teeth in a silver box. So, I’m not sure why, but it helps to imagine. I have a predilection, you might say, for picking mothers. (That’s one of my vocabulary words this week). Plus, it helps to pass the time. Plus, I’m drunk. Plus, it’s funny. Plus, I’m drunk. Oops. I already said that.

For starters, I almost always pick the fat karaoke lady and imagine her pantry, the steady stream of Ho-Hos and Cokes we’d have for snacks, lace all over the place, country charm and potpourri, candies that match every holiday and always in a bright dish, all that love pouring in from folds of flesh. Or, sometimes I pick a real sexy, rock-n-roll mom, the kind who would put you on the pill before you even needed it and teach you things like how to drive men wild with legs and hair and secret sexual positions, the kind of mom who might steal your boyfriend if you weren’t careful, the kind of mom who eats cold pizza for breakfast and slaps make-up on over top of last night’s.

And other nights, I just make her up—Nancy, Sheila, Barbara—a scuba diver, a piano teacher, a ballet dancer, and I pretend she is like me and that when I come home from work at night I’ll catch her in bed walking out of the upstairs bathroom with a bottle of Jim Beam in her hand. And I’ll say, "I knew this would happen! You never listen to me! Never!" And she will say, "You’re right! I’m a terrible person! Terrible! Terrible! How can you ever forgive me?" and spend the rest of her days trying to make it up to me, buying me clothes at The Gap, sending me to Florida whenever I get even a hint of a cold. Like I said, I have a perfectly normal mother, not a thing wrong with her, so don’t get the wrong idea. Truth is, I’m the one with the problem.

"Mickey, it’s time to wrap it up," Chet says, peeking his head into the bathroom, trying to sound spooky and mean.

"Okay, Mr. Mister," I say, obviously buzzing but Chet doesn’t notice. He just stops by the mint container and pretends to make an eyeball count of the candy and then leaves. "Mr. Fucking Pathetic," I say, right as he exits, saluting at myself in the mirror. Chet sticks his head back in the door and I pretend to be smiling because I love my job so much and he leaves—again.

All the stupid toiletries and candies and towelettes have to be stored away in a closet locked only by Chet for which Chet has the only key. Shrinkage. By the time I get around to cleaning the last toilet bowl, I am about ready to vomit but manage to push it back. I hang up my uniform, tuck the hair spray bottle back into my bag, eat another five mints and wait for Mom to pick me up. I wish I knew where Braxton was. I wish I had parents who did stupid stuff like go to clogging conventions.

At home, I watch Friday Night Videos. A model in high heels saunters into the middle of the screen and even though I secretly hate her, I think, someday I’ll have a fast car that smells like Givenchy perfume inside and I’ll have friends who would never go to an all-you-can-eat steak night at some shit hotel like The Windy Pines and my husband will have eyebrows almost grown together and on my coffee table I’ll have bowls heaped with Godiva chocolate that anyone can eat at any time and I’ll travel to places like Pamplona and Amsterdam. I’ll wear safari suits, swim beneath cliffs, I’ll float in ponds with lily pads and Braxton will be there to catch me by my big toe and pull me back through the water, past the trees making shadows of green and he’ll drop me at the foot of a volcano, draped in orchids, a virgin sacrificed.

"Mickey," my mother says. "You can’t sleep on the couch. It’s up to bed, Silly-Goose." She is standing in the doorway, in a plaid robe with a tasseled-tie and those little slippers that look like ballet shoes. Not a hair out of place.

"Mom, I hate it when you call me silly-goose," I say. My mouth feels like a cave. Vodka.

"Okay, Silly-Goose. Now, scoot."

I get up.

Sometimes I wonder where my mother gets her verbs. "Mother, where do you get your verbs?" I want to say, "K-Mart?" But she just looks at me like blankety-blank, her little black ballet-slippered feet scuffling along, picking up lint and dust. She taps me on the butt with her Good Housekeeping magazine, except she calls butts "fannies." She would never say "butt." Never. How did I come from this woman? I think, walking down the hall to my bedroom, sucking on the skin of my own wrist, hoping it leaves a hickey. I sing, "Here’s your once chance, Fannie, don’t let me down," to see if my mom recognizes the tune, to see if she knows that it’s not here’s your one chance, Fannie. She doesn’t.

I crawl into my canopy bed. By the time I look at the doorway, Mother is gone and I am left rolling around under blue-corn-flowered sheets, trying to find just the right position for sleep. I hear her in the bathroom. Smell the toothpaste, the Noxzema, her eucalyptus hint of night. The light switches off.

I suck my hand again in the same place with the fake hickey. I think of Braxton’s mom, all decked out in ruffles and polka-dots and her saying, Who is that girl? Who is that girl? I think of my mother, at home most nights, clipping coupons from Family Circle, the phone terrorizing her with its silence, her perfection unfettered, even more immovable since Daddy left and I push my belly flat against my sheets and lay my cheek upon the cold side of the pillow. My one hand stretches out towards the door, an open palm, my Hello Kitty nite-light a pink star. I think of the summer and how maybe things will get better. I will finally have my driver’s license and get to drive through McDonald’s and order a Coke, pull my sunglasses down on my very adorable nose and taunt men in expensive cars and my dad will come to his senses, his arms piled high with presents, his teeth which I always loved even though they are crooked as a barnyard fence glinting in the sun, and my mother will look sexy and messy, suntanned and sultry, a pouty smile on her lips and Braxton will somehow find me, at The Windy Pines, and when he’s not looking I’ll slice a steak-knifed slit all the way up to my hip in that god-damned awful polyester uniform, pinch my cheeks for color, tousle my hair and say, "Ah, hell, Braxton. Where ya’ been all my life?" We’ll both smile, my mom and dad will kiss, Wendy Pensola and Windy Pines will disintegrate in hellish flames as Wynona Pensola cries true tears and like the end of an old-time movie, Braxton will kiss me and the screen will stealthily fade to black. It will be a tear-jerker of an ending, I assure you, the kind that makes you want to watch again and again.