The woman beside him was playing
three slots at once, moving between them with the dexterity of an assembly-line
worker. The taut line that was her mouth made her look as determined as
someone assembling war munitions. She was a war munitions, assembly-line
worker--on her annual one-week vacation that she spent, annually, keeping
the wheels of three slots spinning. Not for the money, Jimmy knew, but for
the OM of glamor where night was day and day was day too, winter, like the
poor, a distant fiction never heard in this Scotchgarded Garden where eternity
was a constant 72° and every wedding officiated by Elvis. Jimmy knew, because
he recognized in the woman the same determined exhaustion that he faced
each day in his morning mirror and faced each night in his evening mirror
and met throughout the day in the faces of everyone whose defining moment
had become the answer to the question of whether or not they were going
to keep marching to the beat of a different drum machine.
The woman pushed the PLAY button on one slot
machine, simultaneously scooping coins from the hopper of the next to feed
the third. 'To win you got to play,' Jimmy thought, watching her. Her hands
were black from the money.