Sugartown

No one called it the last vacation because that would have been morbid, but that’s what it was. They all knew it: Glory, and her brother Ben, and Ben’s friends Suzie and Taylor, who had elected to spend ten days all together in this strange desert city, renting two adjoining condos in a 1970s building with a kidney-shaped pool and a hot tub. Instead, it was framed as “a little break.” Or “a getaway.” Or “a chance to chill out after this nightmare year.”

The city was pressed up against a range of jagged mountains to the west, as if trying to get as far away as it could from the unnerving expanse of wind-raked desert to the east. Glory had seen photos of the town one day in the salon where her friend Soledad worked. Glory herself couldn’t afford to have her hair cut or colored there, but sometimes Soledad would take pity on her and do the job after-hours with the venetian blinds closed, where it felt like the two of them were locked in some ancient beauty covenant that could only be performed in darkness.

But most of the time Glory would just visit after she’d finished work for the day, sit unobtrusively in the corner of the salon and flick through the fashion magazines, with their damp pages that smelled like the chemicals in the dye. In one of these sessions, a garish advertisement caught her eye. A group of svelte, tanned friends frolicking and laughing in a pool, straddling inflatable pink flamingos while behind them the cheerful tufts of palm trees loomed against a sheet of blue sky. She furtively tore the page out and folded it into her bag, intoxicated with the notion that such a carefree, glossy version of life was apparently taking place less than thirty minutes’ drive down the highway from the squalid, inland city where she and everyone she knew lived.

When they heard her idea, the others had all lobbied to go to a casino instead, to Vegas or maybe Reno, but Glory reminded them she needed to stay within a forty-minute drive of the hospital, so they grudgingly gave in to her choice. There would be nothing to do but lie by the pool and get bored half to death, they grumbled, but if that’s what she wanted to do. It was. She didn’t know why, but it was.

It turned out a condo rental was the only accommodation within their budget, so before they even arrived the vision Glory had seen in the magazine was wavering at the edges, her glamorous resort dream displaced by a shabbier reality.

By day three of the vacation, a routine had been established. By day eight, it was entrenched tradition, no deviations allowed. Everyone woke early (even with the blackout curtains pulled across the windows, the burning white sun crept its fingers into their rooms), then they’d drink gallons of coffee and the smokers would smoke out on the balcony (even though that was against the condo rules), then they would head down to the pool. Suzie always took the elevator with Glory, while the others clattered down the external stairs. Finally, they would drag a bunch of lounge chairs and plastic tables together like they were fashioning a raft and settle in for the morning.

On this eighth day, Glory had only just completed the elaborate ordeal of lying down when she realized she was achingly thirsty. She’d forgotten to drink any water, and it was already so hot her feet sizzled when they touched the concrete. She thought of asking Ben to get her a drink, but he was already in the pool and she already asked too much of him, so she braced her hands on the lounge chair arms and hoisted herself carefully upright until she was all the way straight. Or as straight as she was ever going to be now. She pulled her walker close and made her slow way to the vending machine in the lobby. The air was palpably hot and sticky, and the hum of the machine was overlaid by the sound of the air-conditioning unit laboring. She punched the buttons, slid her card in, and the can dropped with a weary clunk.

By the time she got back to the lounge chair the frosty can of sugar-free soda was already turning tepid. She gulped it down gratefully, panting at the effort. The sounds of Ben and his friends laughing drifted over. She squinted out at them. A ripple arrowed along the surface of the water without any obvious force compelling it, and she wondered if there would be an earthquake. She wouldn’t mind. Increasingly, she fantasized about some huge natural disaster that would at least put everyone else in the same boat she was in. Not that she wanted lots of other people to die. She wasn’t vindictive, but it was so lonely being sick.

She closed her eyes for a moment, and when she opened them again Ben was beside her, shaking himself like a dog, droplets of water arcing and shimmering.

She turned her head. “Quit it, you idiot.”

He laughed and threw himself into the lounge chair next to hers, raising his pinched, lean face to the sun. He drawled out of the corner of his mouth: “What do you want to do today, Cath?”

Most people called her Cath or Cathy, even though her real name was Glory. She got the name as a kid because she couldn’t stop talking. Chatty Cathy, her dad called her one day, not altogether affectionately, and it stuck. She irritated her parents, even as a small child she could see that, but she couldn’t help herself. It was like a faucet she couldn’t turn off, words just pouring and gushing out of her every waking minute. But bit by bit, year by year, the words dried up. These days she didn’t speak much at all, unless spoken to. Her parents might have been proud of her if she ever saw them.

“I have to go to Sugartown, pick up my last check. Told me they’d put it in the oven if I didn’t come get it today. Probably a joke, but still.”

“Those pigfuckers,” said Ben.

She laughed but she felt disloyal doing it. The truth was, she had loved that job. Had loved being surrounded by the cakes, these miracles conjured out of the most mundane ingredients. Sugar and flour and butter and eggs, and then—magic. What better example was there of something being more than the sum of its parts than a cake? (A teacher had once explained the principle this way, and it had stuck with Little Glory long after everything else from her meager education had faded.) The shop was called Lacey’s Cakes, but she called it Sugartown. They hadn’t been able to keep her on after she got sick. It put the customers off, this server with missing teeth and a scalp you could see shining bone white through thinning brittle strands of hair. She could work out the back, she pleaded with her bosses, helping make the cakes. You need to look after yourself, Cathy, they’d said. They promised to pay a month’s severance, effectively shutting her down with kindness. She missed the camaraderie of bodies milling in the sallow light of pre-dawn when they’d all arrive to start the shift. She missed the cakes, too.

“I’ll drive you,” said Ben.

“Aw, you don’t have to do that,” said Glory, although she was relieved he’d offered. The thought of getting on the bus in this heat. “But I’d be grateful.”

Ben grunted and shifted onto his belly, great hairy arms hanging over the side of the lounge chair. After a while Glory went through the ordeal of getting up again, walked gingerly to the edge of the pool, and sat on the top step. She closed her eyes and enjoyed the pulses of pleasure as her swollen feet met the cool water, and when she opened her eyes again a group of women had arrived and were in the process of setting up camp on the opposite side of the pool.

Glory put on her sunglasses so she could observe them incognito. The glasses were a pair a customer had left behind at Sugartown, a horrible wraparound style like the ones favored by goateed men in their trucks on dating apps. Sometimes she fantasized about going into a department store and spending the day picking out brand-new items and having them boxed up and sent to her home, like she’d seen people do in movies. An extended version of the childhood dream of being rich enough to walk into a store anytime and buy a candy bar, one she didn’t have to share with anyone. Little Glory had assumed this was the sole advantage of adulthood. Little Glory would never have imagined one day having access to so many cakes but being unable to eat them because she wasn’t supposed to have sugar. Little Glory was not much acquainted with irony.

She needn’t have worried about the women noticing her, with all the activity unfurling. Two of the women, both sandy blondes, were tying metallic, copper-colored balloons to the arms of a lounge chair. One balloon said 3 and the other 0. Another woman was squatting on her heels, unloading drinks and food onto a table. Yet another was taking photos and calling out vague trilling instructions. The last woman stood a little off to the side, distanced from the fuss, looking down at her screen. Glory forgot about not staring. The woman had golden-brown barrel curls that bounced gently below her ribs, and skin so smooth and golden it looked airbrushed. She wore white kitten heels and a complicated high-cut swimsuit with scooped cutouts on either side of her waist, and—as Glory saw when the woman paused to look at something behind her—multiple crisscrossing straps at the back. Glory found it ugly but conceded it was probably fashionable.

Her brother called out: “Hey Cath, I’m going up to get the meat for the grill! Back soon.”

Glory raised her left hand in acknowledgement, then resumed her study of the women. The busy members of the group had now gathered and were swooning over the one woman’s swimsuit, reaching out and touching it in places like it was the holy robe. Glory’s mouth twitched in amusement. She’d noticed this before in groups of women, the tendency to anoint one of them queen. Not necessarily the prettiest or smartest, but the one who most blatantly exuded high status. The one who expected everyone to listen when she spoke but acknowledged no reciprocal expectation. There would be an unspoken rule that they would all praise her whenever a chance arose and pretend to be annoyed at how hot she was. Swoon over her outfits, which to an outsider would be indistinguishable from the outfits the others were wearing. These dynamics had always fascinated Glory, because she’d never belonged to such a group and could only relate to friendships forged in the gentle fire of some minor, shared suffering. The friends she had made in her life were met in unemployment lines or in the parking lot outside a concert they couldn’t afford, squeezing their faces against the hurricane fence.

She knew she should get out of the sun, there were red blotches showing up already on her exposed skin, but the warmth had a certain anesthetic quality that kept the pain at bay. Then she remembered the hot tub: it was in shade at this time of the day. She laboriously made her way from the pool to the tub and switched on the bubbles, then sat on the edge with her floral dress hiked to her thighs and her legs submerged to the knee.

Her skin had just begun pruning when the queen approached the hot tub. The woman bent down to trail her fingers in the water, testing for heat or washing something off. Glory tried not to stare at the nails as they swished around: ten glossy teardrops of blue, like pieces of fallen sky.

“I like your dress,” the queen said. Her voice was lower than Glory had expected. Because of the neck brace she couldn’t turn her head to properly look at the woman, so she kind of mumbled into the cone: “Thanks.” Her own voice raspy but high-pitched, like a child’s.

The queen sighed luxuriantly. She traveled to the other side of the tub and slipped in, stroking the broken surface of the water as if trying to tame it. Her gaze fixed on Glory’s calf. “Cool tattoo. Is that from a poem or something?”

Glory glanced down at the flesh. The ink had faded a little but the words were still legible: i love you but i don’t like you. She’d had it done when she left home for good. “Nah, it’s just a line I heard once.” No point adding that the mouth from which the line had emerged belonged to her own mother. What good would that do?

“Is that uncomfortable?”

The queen jerked her chin at the neck brace. She seemed determined to interrogate the entire map of Glory. It should have been intrusive, but Glory felt strangely touched at the attention.

“It’s more uncomfortable without it.”

The queen nodded slowly, chewing this over. “Was it a motorcycle accident or something?” She swept a strand of hair off her face with a pointed talon, then added, “I mean, not that you have to tell me.”

“It’s okay.” This was the usual guess of strangers, and it was always painfully obvious why—it was the kind of accident a redneck like her would have. (You know what those people are like, they love their motorcycles. Their trailers, their crack, their welfare.) “I have spinal cancer.”

“Oh.” The queen’s face contorted. “That must be horrible.”

Glory grinned, forgetting momentarily about the gaps in her inflamed gums. “Well, my bones are dissolving like sugar in iced tea. It ain’t great.”

She was exaggerating, of course, but that’s how it felt to her. She’d worked out a while ago that playing up the hillbilly schtick helped strangers feel comfortable knowing such a thing could never happen to them, a person of virtue who smartly avoided life’s hazards like sugar and riding on the back of motorcycles. But the woman still looked troubled, and for some reason Glory didn’t want her to leave, so she threw out a diversionary lifeline: “You’re thirty, huh?”

“Yeah,” said the queen with a skittish laugh. “Freaking out.”

Glory trailed her fingers through the water. “I did it last year. You’ll be fine.”

The queen’s shocked expression stung. The horror of the two of them sharing a biological age. The queen seemed to realize how rude she was being because she put on a supercilious smile and said sweetly, “Any advice?”

The smile might have been meant to transmit that it was a mild joke, this woman asking someone like Glory for advice, but Glory considered answering her sincerely. My advice is to ditch those friends who all secretly hate you, stop wasting this golden tiny blip of a moment caring about getting bikini-ready for summer or whatever, and start appreciating the miraculous body and mind which haven’t failed you yet. At some point you’ll feel happy just to still be alive. At some point you might weigh so little you’ll feel like you could float away, over the craggy tops of that mountain, and there will be no one left to tether you to the earth.

“I don’t know, just get wasted and make bad decisions. That’s what I did.”

The queen considered this. “That sounds good, actually.” She laughed and gestured in the direction of her friends. “But those hoes won’t even let me have a cake, you know? They bought some poke bowls instead. Can you even?”

Glory grimaced in solidarity, although she wasn’t sure what a poke bowl was. “Why don’t you just say fuck it and have cake anyway?”

The queen blinked slowly. She plucked a tiny fiber from her tongue with thumb and forefinger. “Why? Whole thirty, baby.” She made a sweeping gesture toward the lower half of her body, either drawing attention to a flaw or illuminating the lack of them. For a second Glory thought she was referring to her thirtieth birthday, to the increasingly desperate project of keeping one’s body hot as the numbers got higher, but then she remembered there was a diet called that, something one of the girls at Sugartown had been into for a while.

“That doesn’t matter,” said Glory. She felt irrationally irritated.

“I know,” the queen said and sighed, closing her eyes. “But it sort of does.” Her eyes snapped open again like she’d just recalled an appointment she was late for. “Don’t you love palm trees? So tropical. I’ve always wanted to go to one of those islands, you know the ones with the palm trees and the suites over the water? And they, like, row breakfast out to you in a canoe?”

“Hmm.” Glory struggled to make the sound as noncommittal as possible. Maybe the queen’s questions were part of some sly trick to make her look foolish, the hidden camera she always suspected in any new situation. But she was seduced, nonetheless, by the vision the queen had conjured, this place so bizarrely and powerfully real they were able to sit in silence and visit it together.

After a while the queen stretched her toned arms and rose from the water like some goddess from an old painting. “Well, that’s me cooked.”

Glory gave her a closed-mouth smile and nodded into her neck brace. She had never felt more like a pet dog put into a cone to stop himself worrying at his wounds. The brace was too large and it chafed against her skinny neck, but she couldn’t afford to replace it just yet, not until she cashed her last check, so she put up with it. She could no longer even imagine the carefree life someone like the queen lived. It wasn’t the woman’s expensive blue gel nails Glory envied, though, or the clout she wielded, or even her good health. It was knowing this woman had never, not for one sliver of a moment in her charmed life, considered herself a burden.

The queen sauntered off and Glory heard a small explosion of laughter erupt as she reached the group. Don’t assume it’s for you, she chided herself. They could be laughing at anything. But she caught Ben out of the corner of her eye, returning with the meat, and his face was thunderous, that sulky-angry look he got, and she knew it was directed at them.

“Stuck-up bitches,” Ben said, loud enough for them to hear. Although maybe not, because one of them was playing music on their phone by then, and the whole pool area was coated in the steady beat and lulling drone of a painfully auto-tuned song.

“Hungry?” Ben barked. When anyone was mean to Glory her brother always got gruff with her. She’d always meant to ask him why that was.

“Sure,” she said, pretending enthusiasm. When she made it out of the tub, she shuffled over to stand behind his shoulder at the grill. She reached out a finger and caught a rivulet of grease dripping from the edge of the grill, and a wave of sorrow accompanied this reflexive, futile gesture. All the things she could have said to the queen marched through her head, a parade of lost chances.

▴ ▴ ▴

She hadn’t been to the cake shop in a while, and the smell made her throat ache, the overpowering rich sweetness of it. How many mornings had she stumbled in here, bleary and nauseated, setting the bell above the door a-jangling? There was free coffee for employees, and she would guzzle it before her shift to stop the gnawing hunger, feeling the acid eating away at her empty stomach.

The store was busy and Glory waited in the back corner as her former colleagues darted around with flushed faces and strands slipping out of hairnets, packing cakes into white boxes, ringing up orders, making change, trying to stay on top of it all. Powdered sugar underfoot, cloud drifts of sugar forming above the giant steel mixing bowls out back, sugar in every air molecule. After a while they all grew to hate it, the inescapable saturating sweetness that seeped into their skin and clothes and hair, all of them except Glory. She would have stayed there forever.

Eventually the roar of commerce diminished and there were only two customers left. A woman called Ana, with whom Glory had been sort-of friends, lifted the hinging wooden counter and came out. She gave Glory a brief, awkward hug and pulled a check out of her apron pocket. It was limp with steam and sweat. Glory pocketed it gratefully, stammering out her thanks. Ana held the door open as the last customer exited, then hurried behind the counter and reemerged dangling a white box by its striped string.

She shoved it at Glory. “Listen, there’s a cake Kyle messed up from earlier. Cut the layers all wrong. Moron forgot to use the knife guide. Don’t tell Sam.”

Sam was the supervisor. Glory swallowed and nodded vigorously, even though it set her vertebrae jangling. “Thank you,” she said through pained breaths. Ana returned to the sanctity of the behind-counter, and Glory left before anyone could change their mind. She walked out elated. The idea already rising in her head. A tremulous, frothy thing.

▴ ▴ ▴

On the way back to the condo, she asked Ben to stop by the grocery store so she could get the other ingredients. He was baffled about why she’d want to make a cake while on vacation. “Just eat the free cake they gave you, why don’t you?”

She clutched the box on her lap tighter. “But it’s just plain sponge. I feel like something nicer.” Feigning selfishness to skirt around the real reason, which could easily provoke one of her brother’s eruptions of displeasure.

“Suit yourself.”

Back in the kitchen, while the others were lounging down by the pool, she had the best afternoon she’d had in ages. She unpacked the cans and packets and lined them up on the counter. Butter, cream, powdered sugar, and vanilla for the buttercream. A tall jar of lurid cherries in syrup. A can of pineapple chunks. A packet of shredded coconut.

She didn’t have a recipe, but she’d watched the bakers at Sugartown so often she was confident she could replicate their magic. First, she whipped the buttercream ingredients together with an electric mixer. That was the hardest part: holding the shuddering machine made her hands ache. When it was done, she carried the bowl carefully to the fridge. She drained the pineapple chunks and cherries, placed them ready in bowls. Toasted the coconut flakes in a pan until they were tinged golden brown. Then she rested.

She sat by the window and sucked on a chunk of pineapple, watching the furious hummingbirds dart into and out of flowers. She thought about vacations to places she would never go while she listened to the angry burr of leaf blowers and grass cutters and hedge trimmers coming from various points around the condo complex. She’d seen them—a whole army of gardeners who arrived in vans every morning, baseball caps pushed down over bandannas that flapped around their ears. She wished things mattered less. She wished she wouldn’t miss it all so much.

At some point she dozed off, her chin resting in her neck brace. When she woke, the sun was slanting in differently through the window and the droning of the gardening machines had stopped. The air in the condo was still, almost expectant. She groaned quietly as she rose and inched her way to the fridge. She disassembled the box the cake had come in, folding the flaps down flat, then carefully lifted the first layer of the defective sponge cake and placed it in the center of the box. Then she began building. It was a bit drippy after sandwiching the pineapples and cherries between the layers, and she held her breath as she knifed the last of the buttercream smooth and sprinkled the extra coconut flakes on top. Peeking out the window, she saw the pool area was crowded—not only her brother and friends, plus the queen and her posse, but other tenants as well, enjoying the slightly cooler temperature now that the sun had flamed out behind the mountain peaks. It was good, in a way, that there were so many people around, because she could be even more invisible in a crowd. But still her heart thumped.

She lifted the flaps of the box around the cake, slotting the little tabs into their notches and closing the lid like she’d done a million times before. She put the box in a carry bag—she didn’t trust herself to carry it in her trembling palms—and made her way to the elevator with the bag resting on the outer bar of the walker. Enclosed in the still, metallic world of the elevator, she inhaled deeply and there it was, the distinctive smell of the tropics—coconut and pineapple, the smell of suntan oil and languid days beneath nodding palm leaves—and she knew she had done it.

No one paid her any attention as she approached the area where the gaggle of women had set up for the day. The copper balloons were still there, only slightly saggier than they had been that morning. Glory glanced at the pool. The women were on the farthest side, shrieking and laughing, their heads turned away from her. She placed the box on the table and shuffled away, her head buzzing, her bones ready to push out of her skin and fly away.

▴ ▴ ▴

She slept late the next morning and when she finally got to the pool around midday, it was quiet and sleepy. No sign of the queen or her posse. Or the cake.

Suzie, bursting with untold gossip, looked up from her magazine as Glory approached. “Oh hey, babe. You know those stuck-up bitches that were here yesterday?” Glory nodded. She feared what might be coming. “Get this. They got kicked out. Told to turn down their music and they refused, so management made ‘em leave.”

“Oh.”

“Wild, huh?”

“Yeah, wild.” Disappointment fluttered around her ears.

“Oh, by the way, Ben put some sodas in the fridge over there. Saw you going all the way to the vending machine yesterday.” Her voice accusatory, as if Glory’s attempts at independence were a personal inconvenience.

Later, when the sun and her meds had combined to make her feel woozy and dehydrated, Glory took the journey to the fridge, her throat tightening in anticipation of the cool drink. Next to the stack of soda cans—Ben had bought all her favorite sugar-free flavors—was the cake box. She looked up to check no one was watching, then gingerly lifted the lid. The cake was inside, almost entirely intact apart from the tiniest, neatest sliver.

On her way back to the lounge chair, she felt lighter than ever. Only the walker with its sturdy aluminum legs was keeping her from becoming airborne, she was sure of it. When she first became aware of this feeling, a few months after her diagnosis, it terrified her. She’d tried weighted blankets and heavy boots. Thick coats. Eating only meat for a month, which had turned her stomach but hadn’t done anything for her lightness. Her bones continued to hollow out, her bone marrow to dissolve. One day her body wouldn’t weigh enough to keep her pinned to the earth. One day soon.

▴ ▴ ▴

After everyone had gone to bed that night, she slipped out of the condo and made her way down to the pool area. She shuffled past the pool, past the fridge with the cake inside, until she arrived at the hot tub. She eased herself onto the top step, took off the neck brace, pulled her dress over her head in tiny, pained increments, and carefully lowered herself into the silky water, floating on her back and looking at the stars.

At first she was sad and slightly offended about the cake, about how little of it had been eaten. But then she turned it around and looked at it a different way. She had always been able to do this. Little Glory had once been in a class in which the teacher had given each child a small wooden puzzle, explaining to the excited class that each had a piece of chocolate hidden inside. There was only one way to open the puzzle, and the mechanisms were complicated, too complicated for such small children, and before too long the rest of the class had given up. The teacher had hastily passed out a reserved stash of candy to appease the tear-stained faces, but Glory had refused these appeasement candies and kept going, rattling the puzzle and turning it around and around in her little hands, until she finally worked out the proper sequence that popped the hidden compartment open.

Glory squeezed her eyes and thought of that long-ago, hard-won, squished chocolate, and after a while a different interpretation of the afternoon presented itself. Someone had been thoughtful enough to return the cake to the fridge so it didn’t melt. Someone had savored that small sliver in secret, away from the horrified eyes of her friends, who would no more eat a piece of cake—let alone a piece of cake from fuck knows where—than get down on all fours and lick the ground. Someone had understood it as a gift, even without knowing it was the last and most significant gift there would ever be.

She floated for a long time in the blood-warm water as the wind raked the craggy dark mountaintops and bent the palm trees, savoring the rare sensation of being in a body that was both weightless and unable to be lifted away. Safe at last.