Girl in the Holiday INN
Aine Greaney
One night in 1986, a 24-year-old girl stepped off a bus outside a Holiday Inn in Albany, New York. It was late December. The bus doors swished shut behind her, and, there in that freezing parking lot, her breath fogged as she hoisted her green rucksack on her back while the other passengers wheeled their luggage to a waiting car or into the dark.
The Holiday Inn. It was an uninspired name. And wrong, too, because when that airport bus exited off the highway, our girl saw office buildings and gas stations and closed-up stores. So, except for the white Christmas lights around the hotel’s shrubbery, what was so “holiday” about this corner of America?
“No,” said the hotel receptionist in her white blouse and dark vest. “Nobody’s been pacing or asking about the bus from JFK Airport. But you’re welcome to take a seat over there and wait.”
Our girl unhooked her rucksack and unbuttoned her winter coat to sit in a wing chair where she lit a cigarette and kept watching those glassy doors.
She was waiting for a middle-aged American man named Jim*. Tall? Short? Dark? Blond? She didn’t know because she had never met or seen a snapshot of this Jim, who was a music-business connection of one of her relatives back home in Ireland. Once, on a whistle-stop music tour, her musician relative had performed in Jim’s pub and club.
The clock on the reception wall showed a quarter to nine. Her wrist watch, which she had changed to U.S. Eastern Standard time as the airplane banked over New York, said the same.
The JFK bus gets to the Holiday Inn at about eight o’clock, and I’ll be there. No problem. Over the transatlantic phone line, in his chortling, everything’s-going-to-be-great voice, Jim had promised.
The JFK immigration queues had been long and brutal. Later, as she stood watching the honking yellow cabs and black livery cars along the footpath outside International Arrivals, night fell fast and cold over the concrete skyline, and she had to find a hat and gloves in that rucksack. She kept looking the wrong way for her bus. Then, when it came, the New York traffic turned that north-bound bus into a roadside observatory as it slow-creeped past block after block of city apartments, so many and so tall that she had to scooch down to see that place where the rooftops met the night sky.
Jim could have come and gone away again. Or forgotten. Or changed his mind. Or she had confused their agreed-upon time because it was already after two o’ clock in the morning, Irish time.
She hated this transposition of time and places, how this American Saturday night was actually an Irish Sunday morning. It was the same with the stack of $20 and $10 bills that the girl at the airport Bureau de Change had swapped for her 100 Irish pounds. She had stuffed that flimsy American money into her front jeans pocket and checked for the notebook page with the phone number for Jim’s pub and club which was in another town a half hour north of here. Just for emergencies.
Half past nine. She lit another cigarette. Surely there was a hotel payphone and surely she could telephone that number now?
The ringing startled her, the reception phone with its soft trill, more like a mewling cat than an actual telephone. Our girl sat up to eavesdrop and pray and to will that receptionist to look across that huge, carpeted lobby with its whiff of chlorine. Call for you! Instead, down the phone she listed bed types and room rates, and our girl pictured a huge bed against a wall, where she could sleep and dream herself away to somewhere else and then, sometime tomorrow, she could spend the last of her dollars on a southbound bus back to JFK for a tail-between-the-legs flight back to Shannon Airport where her father would have to knock off work early or forgo his overtime pay to come and collect her.
She felt weary and old.
Now, to be fair, this was neither Jim’s nor America’s fault. Our girl didn’t know this yet—how could she?--but all kinds of things can age us beyond our actual years. Anxiety. Melancholy concealed by fake and dutiful happiness. Or that jittery solitude that sends us to the mirror to double check for some intense gaze or rabid expression that makes folks step around us on the footpath.
In fact, she had come to America to get young again. She had bought a plane ticket and borrowed 100 pounds from her mother and sat alone on a seven-hour flight and now, here she sat in this empty hotel lobby—all to re-wind the time clock, to find or become the carefree 24-year-old that she was supposed to be.
A quarter to 10.
The cigarettes blunted her appetite, her hunger. She needed to pee. Or there had to be a payphone. She could ask the receptionist how to make a collect call to the phone number in her jeans pocket.
No. No. She would just find a Ladies lavatory and then, when she returned here, she would turn the corner to overhear Jim inquiring about a bus and a girl with a brogue.
From the bathroom she followed that whiff of chlorine down a long corridor, past all those numbered doors, those silent and empty rooms to a hotel courtyard with a line of lounge chairs along a swimming pool. The pool and its underwater lights looked nuclear.
The courtyard ended at a crossroads of east and west-bound hallways. She turned right to walk past more numbered doors and toward the thrum of music and pulsing lights. She stood in the nightclub entrance, her eyes adjusting to the snow-globe dark and the lights slithering over the cocktail tables and the dance floor and the dancers’ faces.
The Top 20s song jiggled her bones. Her coat was hot. The rucksack straps pinched. All these sweaty-faced men, all these women in their glittery blouses vexed her. All these Americans dancing and drinking while she had sat chain smoking and praying and watching a hotel door. So no. No. She would not squander her borrowed money on a hotel room and a bus back to JFK. She would find this man who had promised, faithfully, to be here, and she would not slink along these walls to reach that DJ on his stage. Instead, she wove between those cocktail tables, then took a short cut across that dance floor where, twice, some girl glared or glowered when her rucksack jabbed an arm or an elbow.
The song ended and the floor began to clear and from his stage, the DJ looked down and spotted her, the lone girl moon-walking under the strobe lights. He left his turntable and, at the edge of the stage, he had to bend down to hear.
Back at his microphone, his face dappled in violet and scarlet lights, he announced in a carnival voice: If there’s a man named Jim here, please meet your party up here at the stage …
Then he gave her that hand-twirl sign that made her turn and look back across those tables to a tiny bar where a dark-haired man stood waving and pointing toward the doorway.
In the hotel corridor they shook hands and Jim said yeah, he’d been waiting for quite a while, no biggie, so he went to the bar to grab a beer. But she was here now, and his wife couldn’t wait to meet her, and they had a spare room and it was all no problem.
She followed him through a rear exit door and along the hotel walls to that freezing parking lot, where he headed toward a daffodil yellow convertible car. Her legs felt wobbly with relief, with longing for that spare room of his. So all okay tonight. All no problem.
The girl in the Holiday Inn is, of course, me. You probably guessed this. Or you’re miffed to get told this now, at this switcheroo from third to first person.
The real trick or cover up happened years ago, when, playing the funny girl or raconteur, I told this story over coffee and pizza and beer to friends and lovers and acquaintances. I revved up the details and the drama, working up to that nightclub scene which always got the best laughs.
About five years ago, on a summertime interstate trip to a family funeral, one of those hotel-booking telephone apps sent my husband and me to this same off-highway hotel in Albany, New York. By then it had gotten itself a new name and its stucco exterior had a Tex-Mex do-over. Oh, and it’s no longer a Holiday Inn.
That night, in one of those rooms along the east-bound corridor after the swimming pool (which still looks nuclear), the air conditioner kept me awake. As I lay there, I promised myself that, next morning, before we got dressed for the funeral, I would write a true-er version of this story--one of those reminiscent tales about how the years roll forward and what was once so strange and scary is now ordinary and familiar. However, in the morning, I felt impatient to check out and get out, to rush across that hot, summer parking lot to our car.
Yet, as we drove past those office buildings and box stores, I thought that the reminiscent version wouldn’t cut it either; it wouldn’t capture everything about that night and this hotel story that had been sorry and true.
Once, during my old, raconteur-ing days, I told this story to a man who had once lived just a few miles away from that Holiday Inn.
“Yeah, that place,” he said. “That club was full of lonely divorcees. Jeez, if you couldn’t get laid anywhere else, you went over there. A last resort.”
