Globe

After walking many blocks, she sat at Planet Hollywood and asked about the beachfront. The bartender wore the same outfit as the Hollywoods of other places: San Francisco, San Diego, Paris, London and Niagara. This was Honolulu and this Hollywood looked dead. She ordered a beer and asked what time they closed and the guy said around eleven.

She was still in her business outfit, though business here was over. She'd stopped for souvenirs, buying a flowered shirt for her ex-boyfriend. She bought a snow globe of Pearl Harbor and for her son a ukulele. She put the things down and drank a beer made special in Hawaii and she remembered her last time here, twenty years before and she tried to recall: Luaus and leis and Diamondhead, sayings like Mahalo and Aloha, in Oahu. She took off her blazer and on the screen was football, the Packers, and she remembered her father and her uncles watching Packers every Sunday, being small, and her mother had told her that these big men weren't only winners, sometimes they were losers, full of fuel and anger. She'd seen the players at the mall. She'd lost her high school friends and other things to quarterbacks, receivers, dropping her friends off at the hotels where the married ones stayed on the nights before the home games. She'd stayed there once herself, swore it was her last, and this was where her questions had been answered, all those things she wondered about when people talked about never getting started, about not falling into danger, of how hard it was to actually get over a constant ongoing fix.

Now she sipped her beer and looked around, finding most of the tables empty, save a couple tourists wearing leis and flowers, drinking all things tropical. The bartender growled at a play on TV and called a star a rat, and she told him she was from there and he said that she was lucky.

She got her bags and walked more, and as she got closer to the beach, she weaved between the busy people. Stores' lights shone on products, and palm trees darted upward, the branches out, and leaves just hung there and moved with the wind.

She heard the waves slap against each other and into the shore, and she took off her shoes and went in. Her feet got cold and she went further, probably ruining her suit, which she might need for another interview the next week in Orlando, and the week after, in a town in West Virginia. She left her bags on the shore and tried to swim, heavy in her clothing, yet still she swam and swam and swam, and she imagined playing in a game, the tundra, her teammates and opponents, and she went further underwater, then came up again, thinking she heard a scream. She stayed there for a while and after hearing nothing, she got in again, jumping over waves, hearing the ocean rolling over. She swam under, pushing through until she came up again.