As Good Luck Would Have It

Mirabelle Magnolia Marigold, as is written on her birth certificate, known as Mir, or Maggie, pushed her hair back behind her little bejeweled ears and looked out the passenger window to a pastoral view of the idyllic American Midwest. Farmland, corn silos, cows, and quaint modest houses which lay lazily back off the county road. They looked like those paintings that hung in her grandmother’s house, which she recalled from her childhood. She overlooked the occasional and unpleasant scattered carcass of a deer or opossum, which used to make her cry when she was a little girl, but which she hardly considered at all anymore. She could see past them because her compassion dulled suitably to befit this tragic life, and she loves much less than she did as a child, a condition foreign to no one, but which no one would so readily admit.

Her thoughts were completely contrary to those of the driver’s, but the two were in cahoots and would, by verbal agreement, spend one weekend of life together and then, in two days, be on the other side of the road going back to reality to live separate lives. But now, she was swept up in the moment, and it was as though she was still and the scenery all moved past her in a hurry to get behind her as she wished everything else besides it would. The driver, Macbeth Holt, or Mac, a thirty-something lawyer from Cleveland, a rather plain human-being on the surface, was driving three reluctant hours to spend the weekend with his family to celebrate an annual June gathering that he has been part of since he was three years-old. It was his father’s birthday which his family treated like a national holiday. Mirabelle was his guest, his date, his girlfriend, his fiancé, but just for the weekend. Their collusion to fool his overbearing father into the belief that Mac was normal and interested in procreation and family by the ritual means of stuffing his parts into someone else’s parts, only had to last two and half days.


“I can’t call you Maggie,” he mentioned casually to her.

“Why?”

“I had a dog named Maggie when I was a kid. A cocker spaniel. It would be – weird for me.”

“Okay. Then call me Mirabelle. Or Mir,” she smiled putting her hand on his knee before awkwardly withdrawing when he looked down at it, suspect. From her ears, little red rubies and sapphires dangled. She wore a short elegant black dress. Her hair was a chestnut color and her eyes were large and like two shot glasses full of whiskey. “It would probably be best to call me Mir,” she explained. “It’s more affectionate and would give the appearance that we are closer than we are.”

Mac shook his head in a kind of lazy nauseated agreement. He didn’t like what he had to do, but he had to do it. He scrutinized her with a leery sideways glance now and then and didn’t seem to be having any fun. He looked nervous and anxious, and when he squinted, he saw tiny flakes of indiscernible things float past his eyes in the shallow stream of his vision. They were people he used to know. Things he used to know. Pictures. Objects that would be familiar to him if he could see them. A bicycle he was fond of as a child. A wooden pull-along toy. Maggie, his cocker spaniel as she lay dying. But they were so small that he thought of them only as meaningless specks. Little beads of sweat sprinkled like dewdrops across his furrowed brow. But despite his appearance, in reality, this was the most fun he has had in years. He just didn’t know it yet because there was a hostile army in him that fought fun and his mind was still ruled by a fascist regime, guilty of perpetrating a holocaust against his goodness and innocence. Perhaps, it was that which it took to become such a shrewd lawyer. 

In his scrutiny, he saw Mir as a sex machine, like an appliance you buy at Sears, and imagined she was thinking of men and sex and money, but she wasn’t at all. She was thinking of a still-life of cows and milk and country homes and cornfields and fireflies and babies and checkered tablecloths and happiness. She was thinking of her grandmother’s walls and all those paintings she had admired as a child. Of cows and milkmaids and fields vaster and greener than any reality. Mir existed in a constant state of fun, hopeful and optimistic, able to adapt to whatever horror or happiness she experienced as though the conditions were the same, all because she lived on a brightly-painted carousel of fantastic ceramic horses that never stopped revolving.

She found this departure from her normal clientele to be, as she confessed to a friend while packing before leaving Cleveland, a welcomed breath of fresh air. Pleasant to think about, and hopefully even more pleasant to experience. She had never pretended to be someone’s wife or fiancé outside of a hotel room. She found a certain tranquility in the agreement in which she would not be stabbed in any orifice, or harassed, or mounted, or touched, or objectified, or violated at all in the usual unscrupulous ways. Not choked, slapped or spit on. She would be an equal, if only in make-believe. She looked down at the engagement ring he bought to corroborate the legitimacy of their charade, which was hers for two and half days. It was gorgeous. It sparkled mesmerically in a sun that seemed to seek it through the leaves of elms and maples and the needles of pines and billowy clouds that lay like bleached-white fat people on a blue beach. Maybe it hypnotized her as much as she stared at it. It was the kind of ring she would want when, or if, the time ever really came. She knew such shouldn’t be taken for granted. There’s no guarantees in this life, her father always said and still does to her in the shadows of her subconscious.

Mac had already told Mir that no sex would be required of her, and he was not at all interested in her for that purpose. The thought of it sickened him. The last part he didn’t say, but it was true and cause for his state of rumination in the driver’s seat. To be one of a ridiculous parade of men. Maybe a thousand. Maybe more. It was like he could see himself in a crowded football stadium full of people who fucked her and he was drowning in the hullabaloo of their obnoxious ghostly voices – gone but still there. Season ticket holders. The twelfth man. Vendors. Their loud and pestering cheers and jeers echoing in the crumbling coliseum of her vagina. The awful scent of their cologne and sport deodorant. Their angst and sweat. Their horns and sirens and incessant clapping. Their synchronized chanting. Then there was the panic of whatever STD she must have, which flashed across the jumbotron. Everyone tried to run for the exit, tiers of seats emptied at once, but he tripped and was trampled underfoot by the indignity of the piss-stained rubber soles of an endless parade of cheap Taiwanese sneakers. He shook his head to shake the thought loose and it went away. But she was beautiful despite the depravity of her libidinous despicableness, that much he couldn’t deny. She had perfect knees. Not knees that looked like baked potatoes. Knees that looked like knees should. He looked over and felt as though she were a tragedy to be considered, if he had the time to mull her over. 

She smiled in the seat next to him. Her eyes full of a melted sorbet of sunshine. It was fun in a much different way to her than her other dates. Like being a kid on a school trip to the zoo. It was her opportunity to be an actress in a role she wished to play on her feet, rather than the one she dreaded on a mattress. She had been typecast by life, dreadfully unfair, she might complain if anyone would listen to her. She might write a grievance, if such a form for whores existed. But she chose her own world when she dropped out of college for lack of money, and the money was too good to give up. She could hardly keep from grinning at the thought that she could pretend that she had a normal job, a normal life, and a fiancé who loved her, if only for a weekend of time and even if he was gay in real life. It was her chance to be decent and not degraded, all in good fun, and to make four thousand dollars in so doing. But then the thought that it was delusory, a mere mirage, the enactment of a pretense, caused the grin to fade and it was again only that American pastoral to keep her amused and billboards for car dealerships and restaurants and pest controllers and lawyers and adult bookstores that didn’t sell books at all. She could use a billboard, she considered shrewdly. She was an amusement park. 

The gathering was at a bed and breakfast called Excalibur Castle in the hills of rural Ohio. It sat in Avalon, a small town about the size of a pimple. The castle hosts a wide range of events with medieval themes ranging from King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table (great for kids of all ages!), to Robin Hood and his Merry Men (great for kids of all ages!), to The Wives of Henry the VIII (adults only please!), to murder mystery dinner theaters (adults only please!), to Shakespeare in Love on Valentine’s Day weekends (suitable for all ages!), so on and so forth, as the brochure that Mir repeatedly read boasted. Spend the night in one of the castle’s many themed rooms, it invited, such as the lovely Queen of Hearts’ Suite, or kick back and unwind in the Duke’s Dungeon, or let your hair down in Rapunzel’s Tower. Or stay in one of the seven cottages, each which boasts the name of a medieval occupation. Be the candlemaker, the clockmaker, the spinstress, the blacksmith, the cobbler, the cooper, the falconer for a weekend of time. Or relax carefree in one of the twelve more modestly-priced gypsy wagons. Costume rental available. Gift shop and full-service bar on site.

She was amused and smiled each time she read it. Mac noticed and her smile put him slightly at ease. “So you think you can do this?” he asked her again.

“I know I can.”

“How long have we been dating?”

“Seven months. We met at a Halloween Party at the Ritz-Carlton. You were a wolf and I was Little Red Riding Hood. As good luck would have it, I was stood up by my date, who was to be a wolf. And you, well, you,” she said looking at him from the passenger seat, “you didn’t have a date and that was the only costume you could find. A nightgown and a wolf mask. You wore a grandma’s wig and a shower cap, and these ridiculous slippers you bought at a Walgreens on the way. You were there to meet some friends, Bruce, Josh, and Hector, I think, but then you saw me. I was standing by the cherub fountain in the lobby checking my phone for messages and you approached me and said, ‘Are you lost, Little Red?’ And I put my phone away and never looked back. We went to a nice piano bar afterwards where, I shit you not, a black guy named Sam played As Time Goes By a hundred times. It’s still the same old story. A fight for love and glory. A case of do or die. He was drunk and those were the only words besides the name of the song that he could remember.”

“Because everyone kept saying – ”

“Play it again, Sam. And he did. Again and again.”

Mac nearly drove off the road as he didn’t see an unexpected curve. But as she said it, as he looked at her, it was as though he believed it were true himself. That they had lived it together. He white-knuckled the steering wheel and panted heavily after righting the car back onto the road. Mir was still looking at him, as though she were absorbing him like someone absorbs the sun when they are new to the beach.

“You could win an Academy Award,” he said through the reluctant crack of a smile.

“I have a good memory. That’s the story, right?”

“Yeah. That’s the story. And what do you do for a living?”

“I’m a pediatric nurse at the Cleveland Clinic.”

“Good. My family knows nothing of nursing, so it’s a safe and very respectable occupation. They will love that about you. And how long have we been engaged?”

“You asked me to marry you on New Year’s Eve. At a party in Niagara Falls. You took me out on the balcony of the hotel where we were staying and you asked me. Snow was falling. Not heavily, but slow and deliberately. Giant flakes like the paper ones you make as a kid in school. The falls were frozen but still lit up so they looked like glass. I didn’t notice the cold, though. Only the warmth of your hand as you held mine. Then the warmth of your arms and your soul as I burrowed myself into you.”

Mac smiled and shook his head. He was sure it was going to work.

“So if I may ask,” she began, much the way a mouse might petition a cat, “why did you hire me for this? I mean, why not just ask a friend, or someone in your office, or just tell your parents the truth...”

“Firstly, it isn’t my parents. Only my dad. My stepmom doesn’t give a shit if I am with someone or not. My real mom’s dead. Died in an accident when I was a kid. Second, I can’t ask someone from my office. That would be weird. And I don’t have girlfriends. I have no little black book of names, or a cellphone full of booty call numbers. And in order to get my dad off my back about not being gay and my future and all that, well, I had to find someone. And you are that lucky someone. I’ve been coming to these things alone every year and, well, I’m 36. I got to show dad I am serious about a future with someone.”

“Did you say booty call numbers?” she laughed. He shook his head admonishing her, never one to revel in being teased.

“Well, why not just tell them that you’re gay and get it over with. You’ll never be happy this way, you know? I’ve been with a lot of gay men who were trying to deny their gayness. They tried to fuck it out of themselves and it is just a waste of time and money. It doesn’t work.”

“I’m not gay! Never have been. And my dad is the biggest homophobe you’ll ever meet! He’s like a Mel Gibson on crack. If he thinks I’m gay, he will hate me. It will be over. I’ll be – well, I’ll be blacksheeped. Let’s put it that way.”

“Come on, Mac. Its 2020. You don’t think they don’t already know?”

“Mir, listen to me. I’m not gay! I’m just – busy.”

“Busy?” she laughed.

“Yes. Busy! Very busy!”

“Doesn’t sound like you’re that busy at all,” she poked. But it passed over his head as he focused on the slow-moving tractor that appeared in front of him on the road. Tiny pieces of straw occasionally blew off the stacked straw bales and floated over the car and settled somewhere in the obscure distance behind them.

“Well, I don’t have time to date or to start a family. Maybe – in a year or so. Or two. Or three. I don’t know. Why does everyone think you have to get married and have kids and all that? That isn’t for everyone.”

“I know. It’s not for me, either.”

“I would suppose not.”

She gave him a look. Suddenly the cat and the mouse changed people. “What do you mean by that?”

He hesitated, glancing over at her seeing she was perturbed. “Well, you know, in your line of work...”

“Yeah. In my line of work,” she scowled. “I’ll have you know this is only temporary. It’s not something I’m going to do forever. I plan to do other things. Better things.”

“Like what?”

 “I don’t know,” she groused. “Maybe I’ll sell insurance. Or actually be a nurse. Or a writer. I like to write. Who knows. Maybe I’ll be an astronaut if I want.”

Mac laughed but Mir wasn’t amused. “Yeah, that’d be good. Who knows. Maybe the right guy will come along – ”

“Oh, no,” she snickered. “Not the Pretty Woman bit. I don’t suffer that malady. Hell no! I don’t need some sugar daddy to rescue me from my troubles. I provide a service. A very needed service that is an alternative to drugs and alcohol and boredom and men irrationally leaving their wives for other women, or killing their wives. I am a kind of pretty exhaust system that relieves the engine. I’m not trafficked and I’m not a victim. I’m the lingerie page of the Sears Roebuck catalog you ripped out and hid beneath your mattress when you were ten. That Playboy centerfold, hidden and folded and unfolded again and again. Your beautiful eighth grade Music teacher you couldn’t touch, or your first crush, who you never had the balls to even talk to. Maybe I’m the slutty cousin at Thanksgiving standing by the gravy who you couldn’t stop lusting over. Or the older girl next door who you climbed a tree to watch undress through her bedroom window sheers.

“I am every little secret desire someone ever had, come to life for an hour by a mad scientist named Ben Franklin. And then I disappear until they call me again, and then I may be the same person I was before, or someone entirely different. A girl from the office, maybe. Some actress in a movie they watched when they were kids. I’ve been Barbarella. Audrey Hepburn. I’ve been Nancy Reagan. Princess Leia more times than I care to count. Hell, I’ve been a nun for those naughty Catholic boys all grown up. I am the fantasy girl for old men, married men, busy executives, college kids living on a generous allowance, musicians, doctors, chefs, politicians. I may be someone’s last hundred bucks. Their goodbye kiss to this cruel world we inhabit or infest. And I am here for you, Mac, as a fiancé, no less than I am here for someone as a girl scout selling cookies door to door.”

“That’s sick.”

“Well, it’s a sick world.”

“The world’s oldest profession,” Mac mocked.

“Yes. It is,” she replied somewhat proudly, as though she were in such a confederation.

“Is it though?” he replied. “I mean, where do they get that? So before there was a doctor, or a cook, or a nurse, or a farmer, there was a hooker.”

“Excuse me?”

“Pardon me. Is that an offensive term?”

“Yes. Very.”

“I didn’t know. Then what’s it that you prefer to be called?”

“Mirabelle. Or Mir. Or Ms. Magnolia. Or Maggie, if not for your golden retriever.”

“Cocker spaniel.”

“Whatever.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you. Let’s just do this and be done with it and we will go back to Cleveland and everything will be hunky-dory. Cool?”

“Yeah. Cool,” Mir was agitated, he could tell, and he felt bad for coming off the way he did. It wasn’t his intent, but he was even worse at apologizing, which is a large part of the reason he was single at 36. At times, almost against his will, his father came out in him and he didn’t like it when he realized it. His ostentatious father idolized Ty Cobb and Andrew Jackson and Teddy Roosevelt and Trump and thought of himself as an amalgamation of all four. There wasn’t a slur he wouldn’t use because his wealth and lack of concern for anyone other than himself afforded him that pleasure. Mac caught a glimpse of himself in the rearview mirror. He too wanted to put many things behind me, but didn’t know how to do so. 

“I’m really sorry,” he apologized again. “I don’t speak very well at times.”

Mir nodded and looked at the brochure for the castle for the fifth or sixth time since they have been on the road. They made numerous stops on that lazy Friday morning since they were not expected until about five o’clock for check-in, then dinner at seven. Mac felt more like a boy than a man, even at thirty-six. He existed in a constant state of contradiction and subtle panic, appearing much younger and older and calmer than what he actually was. On their several prior stops, he watched his watch so to know when to get back on the road. He orchestrated stops to avoid traffic and he never traveled more than two miles above the speed limit at any given time because the average traffic stop for speeding takes eleven minutes and thirty two seconds and so it was not worth the risk.   

Mir got him to stop at a few places that was not on the itinerary. One was Grandpa’s Cheese Barn, where the girl who acted as excited as a little kid, drank a milkshake and ate an assortment of cheeses, talking all the while in the abstract about the cow who made them and how it served a wonderful purpose, yet was treated so cruelly, subconsciously speaking analogously of herself in her trope of the dairy cow. She also mentioned how the cows she saw on the way were laying down, which meant it was going to rain. Mac laughed and dismissed it as silly homespun superstition, but she held to it. She bought a souvenir shirt, a stuffed animal cow that would never make cheese or be dismembered and slaughtered, and a cheese hat she would likely never wear again. But her father collected hats and by default, so did she. And in a closet in a cramped Cleveland studio apartment, there was an assortment of hats from her inheritance and from every two-bit pit-stop and tourist trap from here to Kansas City, Missouri, the furthest west she had ever been.

“Excalibur Castle, 5 miles,” she read a wooden hand-painted road sign. “Before I did this, I used to dance at a place called The Excalibur Club.”

“Please don’t mention that in conversation.”

“No,” she smiled. “I won’t. But my dad worked for a gun store called Excaliber Outdoors. Excaliber spelled with an ‘er,’ a play on words. It was the largest gun shop in Eastern Pennsylvania. I remember the billboard for it along the highway. It had a cartoon knight holding an AR-15 shooting these supposedly bad black knights who fell like dominoes and this fat dragon, who was spitting these wicked flames up in the air in agony. The knights were holding swords and maces and shields, but they were full of holes. It said, ‘There’d be no evil in the world if the good guys all had better guns!’ I don’t know why I remember that. Another one said, ‘Don’t get caught with your pants down. Buy a Glock.’ There was a goofy cartoon man with jeans around his ankles and a tiny penknife in his hands over his dick. A burglar was creeping in through an open window. Fear, I suppose, sells everything. Even me,” she trailed off wistfully.

Mac hardly noticed her introspective soliloquy. He had much room to improve as a listener. “Well, dad loves guns. You can talk about guns all you like. He is also a conservative Republican, so don’t fan any political flames, but for godsakes don’t claim indifference! That’s even worse. He loves to argue. He likes to poke people with sticks.”

Mir smiled over at him confidently. “Charming. I think I know how to handle men. Saying the right thing can be just as important as touching the right thing.”

Mac cringed. Somehow the thought of Mir and his father showed up and wallowed around on the mucky big screen of some sleazy movie theater in his mind where he was helpless but to watch. Such exaggerated and abstractedly lewd projections were common to him. Then the guy in front of him turned around and he realized it was Pee Wee Herman who said in that annoying voice, “Great movie, isn’t it?” before he yukked that absurd yuk of his. But Mac was rescued from that hypnotic ensnarement by the sound of the tires of his Volvo squishing the soft gravel of the lane. It was such a soothing sound, he had always thought. Tires on gravel. Wildflowers and weeds and branches of wild blackberry bushes lined the narrow path to the castle and swiped playfully at the midnight blue car. And bright yellow and white yarrow and purple knapweed and royal-blue cornflowers abundantly populated the pass and twisted their necks as though to observe the arriving guests.

The castle was just as Mac remembered it. No extraordinary spectacle. He could not appreciate Mir’s view of it, being her first. He popped the trunk and got their bags and, satisfied he didn’t see any of his family’s cars in the lot, made a beeline for the door. But Mir delighted in the fairytale of it all and seemed amused by every little thing that touched her eyes, including two swans that floated languidly through the lily pads of an emerald-green moat. She told Mac that swans mate for life and will die of a brokenheart whenever their partner dies. He grinned dismissively. She walked the red carpet over the drawbridge with an air of regality. Then gray clouds rolled in, a breeze suddenly picked up, and it began to rain. Mir smiled looking at Mac as they waited, contrary to each other, for the castle door to open. And looking out at the rain, crowded with him under the narrow stone overhang of the entryway, she found a suitable and simple synonym for “I told you so.”

She grinned at him and said, “Moo!”