Mary Beth never had any fun.
This was not a complaint. It was not a scarlet letter. It was a badge of honor.
Mary Beth’s parents had endured both the Great Depression and World War II before she was even welcomed into this world. That event took place outside of Minneapolis and was the result of some hearty stock (and not great planning, but that’s a story for another day.)
She had one doll that her Grandma Trudy made out of fabric scraps left behind from her laundry service business. In the words of the literary heroine Eloise, “That was enough.”
Mary Beth finished top of her class from kindergarten until high school graduation. She got herself into a junior college while working the dinner shift at Big Boy’s Diner, serving meatloaf and mashed potatoes every Friday. Then she went on to get her 4-year degree. She woke up at 5 am without an alarm and was asleep with her hair set in Velcro rollers by 9:01 PM. When she met her now-husband, Rudy, she showed him her schedule, written out in perfect cursive, and told him - in no uncertain terms - that unless he could abide by the proposed daily agenda, there would be no room for him in her life. Rudy was blinded by Mary Beth’s direct nature, very, very seductive eyelashes and agreed without reading the list particularly carefully.
Luckily for Rudy, he was a farmer. Farmers go to sleep before the owls and wake up with the roosters. That part of the schedule was never an issue. He liked church on Sundays and spaghetti on Tuesdays and made himself scarce on Thursdays when Mary Beth had her choir ladies over for pie and gossip. They had three children, raised them like a salt-of-the-earth midwestern family in the 50s is wont to do, and only deviated from the routine for livestock emergencies or a sick child.
There was no unpredictability. There were no secrets. And so, this life went on, day in and day out, for about thirty years. Their lives were as predictable as the seasons. That was until Mary Beth got a call that a cousin had died and she was meant to go to the funeral in Los Angeles.
“Well, obviously, I have to go,” said Mary Beth while ironing her floral church dress. A delicate pattern of pink peonies and daisies, she’d owned this particular garment for at least a decade. She quickly did the math. She’d ironed this dress approximately 500 times. She could have smiled to herself. Instead, she frowned, the creases in her forehead easily finding their marks to express disapproval.
They just don’t make things like they used to, she thought. Then, she paused.
She was waiting for Rudy to disagree, to say, “You really don’t, we can send a card with our condolences.” But Rudy didn’t. Maybe it was because 25 years with Mary Beth had taught him to never, ever disagree with her. Or maybe it was because he couldn’t even wrap his head around the idea of being on his own for 48 consecutive hours. Or maybe it was because his beloved Vikings were tied with two minutes left of play and his bedside radio matched the volume of his wife’s voice. The reasoning didn’t really matter. Rudy didn’t object to the trip and Mary Beth found herself on the phone all evening. First, she had to call the airlines and book a flight. On the phone, she took the opportunity to complain to the poor operator about the trip.
“I didn’t even know Gloria well. They never came out to the farm to visit. Sure, I saw her at Trudy’s here and there but that part of the family? They’re city folk, They’re different than us. Oh well, I suppose God would want me to pay my respects to the deceased.”
The woman on the other end of the line paused. Mary Beth felt slightly better that she’d roped someone else into her situation. She waited for the woman's response.
"And would you prefer the window or aisle seat?”
Mary Beth picked her seat and said goodbye to the Continental Airlines representative who hung up before she finished her sentence.
Then, she had to call each one of her children, all of whom were in the middle of doing something, to gripe to them as well. This was long before caller ID. Because none of the people who were not getting paid to pick up her call would have. Again, Mary Beth never had any fun. And, some close to her would argue, it showed.
The following Friday, Rudy walked his wife to her departure gate. She wore low heels, her Sunday church dress, and a hat purchased from her friend Frieda’s haberdashery just for the occasion. She may have complained to Freida too. She kissed Rudy’s cheek goodbye, flustered at the idea of getting on an airplane to go to a big city where the population was no doubt full of murderers and devil worshippers but she tried to put on a strong face. She wouldn’t look any of her fellow passengers in the eye. In fact, she was so focused on not looking at anything or anyone that she made a big, BIG mistake.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the Captain boomed, his soothing voice filling the cabin with a sense of calm and purpose, “we hope you are enjoying your flight so far. Great weather up here for you today, and we’re expecting clear skies all the way to Las Vegas, Nevada. So, please, sit back, relax, and take it all in.”
Mary Beth jerked her head up from her Better Homes and Gardens magazine.
Wait - LAS VEGAS?
Why, Mrs. Mary Beth Summers had walked right onto the plane, took her seat, declined a glass of water, and was 32,000 feet in the air when she realized that the plane that she was currently on was not going to Los Angeles. No, she was going to an entirely different city of sin. She clutched the woman’s arm next to her. The woman jumped a bit.
“Did someone say that we are going to LAS VEGAS?” The woman, Louisa May Jacobs, who, in fact, looked so much like Mary Beth that she could have played her in the movie version of her life, nodded sweetly.
“I was supposed to do this trip with my Milton but he changed his mind. I decided to go anyway.” Mary Beth let go of Louisa May’s arm. A married woman taking a trip to Las Vegas without her husband, why, they hadn’t even landed and the danger of the city already felt like it was way too close.
Now, this was the 70s. There were no cell phones or scanners for boarding passes. There was no way to alert anyone that you had gotten on the wrong plane. That doesn’t mean that Mary Beth didn’t try.
“I AM ON THE WRONG AIRPLANE!” Mary Beth announced to the entire flight. No one seemed to care. This was back in the day when everyone was drinking alcohol on normal flights and the Minneapolis leg to Vegas was certainly no exception. A man in a Hawaiian shirt and bushy mustache clapped a few times and then went back to his paperback copy of Bukowski’s latest book. No one would match Mary Beth’s panic. Louisa May tried to talk her down from the ledge.
“What were you going to do in Los Angeles?”
Poor Mary Beth could barely eek a sentence out of her heavy blanket of distress.
“Funeral. Cousin. Didn’t know her.” Mary Beth squirmed and wriggled in the polyester, geometrically printed seat. A stewardess with a heavy cloud of Aquanet surrounding her head, walked down the aisle to check on the passenger creating a commotion in seat 7C. Usually, the passengers leaving Las Vegas presented much more of an issue.
“Ma’am? Is there anything that I can help you with?” But Mary Beth had devolved into a full-blown panic attack and was hardly capable of any kind of meaningful communication.
“FUNERAL. CALIFORNIA. SIN-” She gasped to no one particular person and the heavens above.
“She’s on the wrong flight,” Louisa May offered with a sincere smile.
Mary Beth waved her green and tan printed ticket up in the air as if it were the last holdout of the Axis powers holding a white flag on D-day. The stewardess confirmed her fears.
“Yeah, no, yeah, Mrs. Summers. You are on the wrong flight.”
“Turn. It. Around….” Mary Beth squeaked. And then, because she was a nice, church-going midwestern woman she added, “Please.”
But the airplane was not going to do any turning around. And, upon landing, there were no seats to go back to Los Angeles or even back to Minneapolis until the following morning.
“You can stay with me,” Louisa May offered while doing a terrible job of hiding her eavesdropping next to the gate’s counter. This was, for her, actually quite exciting. The woman at the desk shrugged at Mary Beth.
“That does seem to be your best option, ma’am. What a kind woman.” Louisa May smiled. She was, indeed, a kind woman.
And, since Mary Beth was completely out of her element, emotionally exhausted, and utterly disoriented, she allowed herself to get into a taxi with her new traveling companion and be taken to the Tropicana Resort and Country Club. Pulling up to the grandiose circular drive, it was a miracle that her head didn’t swivel right off her neck and fall into someone’s champagne cocktail. The outside of the casino looked right out of a postcard. There were enormous fountains and columns, manicured green grass, statues of Hollywood stars, and so many men in tuxedos to help you out of your car, it looked like the dance number in a Fred Astaire film. She could feel her heart beating in her chest as she allowed herself to be escorted from the taxi. She walked carefully through the casino door, her eyes glued to her new friend, trying to decipher what Louisa May was making of all of this spectacle.
Mary Beth had never dreamed of anything like the hotel floor. With its flashing lights, loud music, and people from every corner of the world laughing and gambling and drinking together, well, let’s just say that our lifelong cheesehead had no idea what to make of the situation.
There were women in feathers and sequins, leaving scented trails of Opium perfume and Carachel. Of course, Mary Beth could not name these scents. To her, it all smelled like sin.
When the man in the tuxedo took her carpet bag and offered her a glass of something sweet, Mary Beth was in a daze. She took the delicate glass and downed the entire concoction in one sip. And this, this was the moment at 7:30 pm on June somethingth in 1978, that everything changed for our protagonist. Because, for the first time in her adult life, Mary Beth did something new. Something that she’d never dreamed of, thought about, paid attention to, chased, missed, coveted, or considered: Mary Beth Summers had fun.
She’d had a sip of alcohol before. Ok, fine, it was grape juice when she took communion, but who was counting? From that moment forward, until she rested her exhausted feet on her fresh white linens much, much later that night, she just followed Louisa May. She accepted drinks when her friend accepted drinks. She applied her lipstick at the table. She smiled and said hello to strangers. And it didn’t stop there.
She went to a buffet - the only one that she’d ever eaten at except for Cousin Laurel’s wedding in the city when she married a banker and was introduced to flavors that she never thought possible. She didn’t really enjoy the lobster or the myriad of sauces but the prime rib was divine and Mary Beth had to loosen her belt a bit after the meal. And we haven’t even touched upon the champagne.
The bubbles that tickled her nose and made the dozens of restaurant chandeliers dance dissolved the tense feeling that Mary Beth had grown so accustomed to in her lifetime. A new day meant a chance to be a good person, to worry about her husband’s crops and the coffers of the church, and that didn’t even shine a light on the massive and separate worries that she would revisit throughout the day concerning her three children. Mary Beth worried about the water furnace which would hiss and sing and she worried about what kind of casserole to bring to the Elk’s Club picnic the following Sunday. Worry was a part of her physical makeup, her genetic identity, and occasionally, it was her entire personality. But Mary Beth did not know Las Vegas. So she could not worry about it. And, based on what she was seeing in the Tropicana Resort, these souls, they'd need to pray for themselves.
So, something happened on that accidental Vegas Friday night: Mary Beth let go. And Louisa May from Harrington, Minnesota, was the perfect wingwoman. Louisa suggested sherry after their dinner and walked right up to the tuxedo-ed man outside of the dance club and asked for her and her friend to be let in. The women only stayed for three or four songs but found the band delightful. Mary Beth had never heard a full twelve-piece group of musicians play like they did that night. She was swept away in the intoxicating mix of gorgeous sounds and glamorous people dressed to the nines. The champagne and sherry and newness and unexpectedness of it all catapulted her brain into an uncharted galaxy.
Later that night, much later than she usually went to sleep, Mary Beth slipped off her stockings and crawled into the opulent bed across from her new friend’s, she made a decision. And who knows if it was that decision or the events of the last eight hours but Mary Beth slept soundly that night with a gentle smile that did not leave her lips.
The following morning, she waved goodbye as a yellow taxi that reeked of cigarette smoke carried her off to MacLaren airport for her flight. She double-checked that her light pink address book was securely in her pocket. Under “J,” in her perfect penmanship, was her new friend, Louisa May Jacobs. She held tightly onto her airplane ticket, memorizing the flight number, which she would confirm was correct all of thirty-seven times. Then she would board the plane, staring out the window replaying the whirlwind of the previous day, until the vessel landed, returning her to her reality of rolling fields, grazing cattle, and her Rudy.
That night, as Mary Beth unpacked, she carefully took out her funeral dress, put it up to her nose, closed her eyes, and inhaled. For just a moment or two, she was transported back to The Tropicana. She smelled unfamiliar perfume and cigar smoke mixed with a few drops of pure excitement. She reveled in this moment, in her safe and sensible bedroom. For, tomorrow she would launder the dress and the night in Las Vegas would exist only in her memory.
She put on the same nightgown that she had worn every weekend for the past decade, slipped under her quilt, and picked up her novel where she’d left off the previous Thursday night. But she couldn’t get back into the story. Her mind was somewhere else.
When Rudy walked into the room, freshly showered, two days of stubble shadowing his kind face, she leaned over and kissed him on his spiky cheek.
“We have a good life,” she told him, in a voice that Mary Beth herself did not entirely recognize. Rudy clearly heard something too. He looked at his wife and smiled,
“Funerals will give you an appreciation for what you have,”
Mary Beth just smiled. She’d never had fun. And she’d never had a secret. And now she had both.
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