Bottle Rocket Hearts

by Zoe Whittall

  “She’s twenty ... from Dorval, I think.”

  “Is she, like, even fucking gay, like for real, or is she like, curious?”

  xxxx began to swear in French and make disapproving clicks with her tongue. “What could you possibly see in ...” She flows between French and English seamlessly, like it’s all one language. xxxx has a French mother and an English father, only her mother was more assimilated into English culture, because her father was old money from Westmount. Apparently xxxx has been exiled since she came out. I walked back through the living room, interrupting to ask where the bathroom was. She motioned me down the hall towards the front door and to the left. I walked slowly, peering into her open bedroom door. My heart pounded while I stood staring at her unmade bed, the clothes strewn across the floor. Her room like splayed legs relaxed with the assumption of no onlookers. I blush, seeing she’s left a plate with half-eaten apple slices beside the bed. A cup of water turned on its side, drooling onto her dresser top, leaves a stain like a ninth-grade hickey, a first-degree burn. There is a leather sling hooked up in the corner and a giant wooden cross with wrist and ankle restraints attached. Wow, I thought, giggling, before pausing to wonder if this is what Della is into. What if I was too boring for her?

  In the bathroom I noted several tubes of age-defying moisturizers, eyelash curlers, a row of vitamins, homeopathic pills and kava kava. I pocketed a tube of bright red lipstick, ran a smear of moisturizer under my eyes.

  I walked slowly back into the living room, pretending to be absorbed in a bookcase. A lot of books about women and witches. I sucked in my tummy, stuck out my tits and ran my finger seductively over Sisterhood Is Powerful.

  xxxx looked into my eyes with rehearsed ambivalence. It was hard to hold her gaze without accepting defeat with a shy giggle. It hit me then, that I may have the perky tits and the soft skin, but she had the power. She looked like she didn’t need Della.

  xxxx and I had never officially met, but you could not be queer in this town and be unaware of her. Small-c queer celebrity, reputation as a heartbreaker and a pretty successful sculptress and painter. When you see someone shouting on the news at demonstrations, the camera always focuses on her. She gives good sound bites. The journalists pick up on her last name, because of her father, I suppose, the name they recognize from City Hall bylines. I imagine it must infuriate them further.

  I got all this dish from Melanie, my women’s studies classmate and unofficial lesbian community research adviser. Word on the street is that Della always cheated, even with xxxx’s best friends. xxxx walked into the bar on dyke night, sashayed up to the former best friend who’d slept with Della the night before and punched her in the face. This was before their break up and consequent ex-sex / undefined relationship. When monogamy was still cool enough.

  I knew a lot about her, she knew only my exterior; the smell of my hair (coconut), vaguely size 8, short, A-cups, pale, quiet. A polite smile.

  Melanie and I would often sit at that same bar, years after the rumoured punch-out, and watch xxxx in our periphery as she served drinks and looked stunning. I usually made Melanie order the drinks so I’d never have to speak to her. Melanie seemed to know everything about everyone who had ever even thought about kissing another girl on the island of Montreal. I told her she should open up her own supersleuth ace-girl dyke detective agency. She got most of her info because she was sleeping with her women’s studies teacher.

  I’d be lying if I didn’t admit how fascinated I was with xxxx. She made my heart race and my mouth somewhat slack, pupils wider than necessary to take in light. Not hate, not a crush — jealous, definitely, but also keenly interested. I am forging this new life of queers and artists and adulthood, and here is this example of someone I could become. She created these paradoxical feelings, like I might want to study her, or kick her in the shins. Unlike Della, who simply made me feel as though I was perpetually on the verge of ignition. One look, one exhale on my neck, and I was flattened.

  I turned back to Della and xxxx, who were done eating. Della smoked. She didn’t seem nervous, but I wondered if she was, if she felt awkward. The awkwardness seemed to be me. I noticed a scar on her neck I hadn’t noted before. I watched her inhale. Exhale. Like all verses and no chorus. xxxx had flawless skin. I made a note to buy all those moisturizers in the future. So much poise to spare. I needed some. I could feel spontaneous zits forming in the middle of my face. xxxx looked like she could be one of those girls in a shampoo commercial. Lint and cat hair would just fall off of her. She never had ripped hemlines or cigarette burns on her sleeves. Everything I had was imperfect in some way. I come by it honestly — my parents were more creative and messy than efficient, taught me to wipe my hands on my jeans, pin things up when the buttons drop off, buy second-hand clothes.

  I felt shy when xxxx looked at me. Shy doesn’t cut it, really, more like eraseable chalk dust after being wiped down by an underpaid math teacher. I was an idea. Now I am almost clean and blank, my fingers feel powdery.

  Della stood casually, announcing that we should probably get going, as if we had dinner plans or something, instead of just an assumption that there would be more sex, maybe some pills, a movie, start that over again. While they hugged goodbye, I stuffed a lacy, red g-string between her couch cushions. Obviously mine, because Della only wore boy’s briefs. xxxx probably never wore underwear. Too patriarchal.

  As soon as we were outside, warm and nicotine-satiated, key in hand, Della explained that xxxx had the key to her apartment for security reasons. She was afraid to be alone at night. I rolled my eyes. xxxx looked like she was more dangerous than a carving knife. Serrated edges on all of her perfectly articulated words. She looked like she could snap Della in half with a smirk.

  “What if I was sleeping over?”

  “Well, she wouldn’t actually use the key, Evie. She just likes to know that she could — this neighbourhood isn’t that safe. She lives alone. You know how it is. And besides, we’re like family.”

  I nodded because I wanted to seem as though I did know how it is. I was barely ten years old when they met. I am not old enough to have had a lover for eight years or to know what it’s like to live alone and be lonely.

  I don’t know what to say. I let the quiet settle between us. I do not exclaim much. I’m not usually one to take what is swirling around in my gut to mean anything specific. I am not a good translator. I think this is why my friends growing up were mostly boys. They expected less conversation about anything not currently in front of them.

  Do you remember that game at summer camp? This is an orange. A what? An orange. You pass an orange around in a circle and you have to keep repeating that. I’m not sure what this is supposed to accomplish — heathly group dynamics or something. This is how I feel now. Like I should look at her and say, This is a challenge. A what? A Challenge. These are my confessions. Your what? Confessions.

  But I don’t.

  Jealousy is too irrational a feeling to make sense of. Like trying to explain why you like the colour blue. You just do. I just want xxxx to die. Simple. Or, more truthfully, less exaggeratedly, I want her to want. To wonder. To feel lack.

  I hope that if anything, this jealousy will toughen my heart until it feels like a dollar-store bottle rocket. Common, sturdy, but still potentially explosive. Like anybody else. Even though everyone gets jealous, even if you’re adept at fronting like you don’t, jealousy makes people ordinary and weak. At the same time, when you’re feeling it in the most extreme way you worry you might become a murderer, someone controlled by passion and ego. In France they have lesser sentences for those who kill out of passion. Passion is a reasonable excuse to lose track of your moral core. Crazy. xxxx made me crazy. xxxx made me feel like my heart was the first heart ever to feel this way. Solitary struggling to hold its ground at the top of the organ hierarchy.

  When we got home and unlocked the door, Della lay back on the couch, turned on the tv with her toe. She pulled back the tin lever from
a can of pudding. Gobs of butterscotch filled in the tense spaces. We settled in. Hours passed. Baths. Sex. Sleep. I baked vegan cookies in the shape of superheroes. I just poured in ingredients without measuring anything, handful of sugar, vegetable oil, mashed up frozen banana I found next to the bottle of vodka and the ice cubes. Smoked pot. Ate the cookies. Watched tv.

  Now I sit in the chair with another piece of pseudo-tortière sizzling from three minutes in the microwave. Ketchup puddles on the side. We’re back to where we started. Eating, the cat freaking out, the weird feelings.

  I bring the green bottle to my lips and suck. I cough. Della licks the spoon from another cup of pudding and throws it on the floor when she’s done. From twenty-eight to four in half a second. Tomato runs over to it, swatting it with her paws.

  “No baby, I want you to stay. Stay!” She gets up and attacks me with a giggling hug. We fall to the sticky floor and kiss.

  Now that she wants me to stay, I decide to go — I’m hopelessly predictable. I don’t mind being average and horrible at love. I pull away from our entanglement and get up to walk quickly into her room. “Why? You don’t have to go, seriously, bébé! It was just a question!”

  I peel off my two-day-old Hello Kitty underwear, root through self-help books, art books and empty cigarette packs for a clean pair of hers. She stands in the doorway watching and pouting, lower lip protruding, eyes playful and apologetic. One hand on hip, the other on her head, impossibly charming.

  I feel unable to hold back from asking how she met xxxx, to fake cool disinterest any longer.

  “It’s kind of tacky, really. So cliché.”

  “What, at a potluck? A solstice gathering?”

  She stood in the doorway watching me get dressed, her head bent slightly to one side, looking me up and down, arms crossed in a maybe.

  “I worked construction in my early twenties. I helped build a deck at her parents’ house in Westmount.”

  “Are you joking? That’s such a porno movie!”

  “I know! She was engaged to some asshole guy. She was on the student government at McGill.”

  “And look at her now ... you corrupted her!”

  Della laughed. “Well, the feminists got their hands on her, too.” She said. “Let me show you something.” She fumbles through her desk drawer and pulls out a photo. Della is barely recognizable wearing overalls with a women’s symbol painted on the front flap and a black T-shirt, sporting a short crew cut in what appears to be her natural hair colour. She only has one tattoo on her arm where there are now sleeves of colour. Della quickly covers it up with her thumb. Beside her is ...

  “Oh my God, that’s not xxxx?!” The person with her arms around Della has short choppy hair, a veritable hockey-hair mullet. She’s wearing a ripped, white tank top, ugly, red cotton pants and sandals. They’re tanned and standing in front of a tent.

  “That was us in Michigan in ...” She turns over the photo and scrawled in pen is Summer 1989. “We were twenty-two.”

  “That’s some bad fashion!”

  “It was the eighties ...”

  I’ve burned all my Hammer pants and glittery vests, so there’s no proof of my Naughty By Nature phase.

  She hands me another one, a crowd scene with many shaved-headed queers holding picket signs.

  “This is us at the protests against the Sex Garage attacks in ... ’90 ... the same summer of the ...”

  “Oka crisis.” I finish for her, remembering the helicopters over our house, the army on the bridge, my mother yelling at the television.

  “What was Sex Garage?”

  “A warehouse party the cops busted up ... they beat the shit out of all these fags and dykes. It was unbelievable. That’s where I got this from.” She pointed to a scar on her lower leg. “From a baton.” The scar looked deep and rubbery.

  “Holy shit.”

  “Yeah, they just walked in, I was working the door and suddenly all these cops just came in and walked around and stared at everyone. Then they left. I was like, ‘Fuck, that’s not going to be the end of that,’ so I got ready to leave, and suddenly they showed up and they ripped their nametags off, and just started beating the shit out of everyone. My friend Ashton was leaving in a cab and they surrounded the cab and dragged him out of the back seat and kicked him so hard he had to go to the hospital. He almost died.”

  “What the fuck? Just ’cause they were having a party? How many fucking raves have I been to in the suburbs the cops don’t ever touch?”

  “Yeah, well, the community organized right away. It got worse before it got better. We were just peacefully protesting outside the police station and they dragged my friend into the station by her hair. They took my other friend out the back of the station in an ambulance when it was clear they’d really fucked him up.”

  “Huh.”

  I vaguely remember news footage on television from those protests. I was fifteen, sitting between my parents on the couch after dinner trying to catch a glimpse of all those gay people in the same place.

  Della kneels on the side of the bed now, her scraggly blue-black hair sticking straight up. I stopped getting dressed because I was too absorbed in the story. Tracing her fingers along my legs, she makes car noises. I lie back and she sits at the end of the bed, smiling. There is a silent wave of potential sex happening, but first we want to smoke. I stick a cigarette in my mouth, she reaches into her pocket and pulls out her Zippo lighter engraved with the word “dream” on it and reaches out to light it.

  The sound that a bomb makes brings to mind no exact words. With the swish of her lighter, I inhale, and take in the explosion four apartments south. It’s like an elevator plunging, and your ears popping and someone walking into you with a lit cigarette, all simultaneously. Then it’s over. Leaving us with a shallow stream of broken glass on the other side of the bed, our hands clasped together, the cigarette burning a slow hole in her duvet, an opera of car alarms going off in unison all over the neighbourhood.

  3

  •••

  BLUE-BLACK SLUGS

  The building settles and shakes like a person coming down from a seizure. All the windows are shattered up and down the block. A woman is screaming, swearing. Sirens approach what seems almost instantly. More urgently than usual.

  Upheaval is a steady exhale in this neighbourhood — red lights and red eyes. But this is different. Car alarms continue to blare like experimental techno. Dogs bark in chorus. Tomato sprints up and down the hall and then ducks under the bed.

  We look at each other. Our faces haven’t changed.

  “Hostie collis! ...” Della swears. “Are you okay?”

  Our hearts are accordions. I slip into jeans and a wool sweater, the first things I find with my hands, itchy against bare skin. The power is out. It’s still light out but the darkness of her apartment makes it hard to see. I follow her wordlessly as she scuffles five steps ahead of me, trying unsuccessfully to get her right foot into an orange Converse sneaker, through the front door. We head south towards Ontario Street in a stumbling jog.

  The southwest corner is in flames. What were a tattoo shop and a bar seem to be unravelling like a red bundle of yarn pouring smoke upwards. Thick grey-black cream. Strangers speculate, talking in fast French that I don’t catch all of. Della gathers everyone around the cops, who are tight-lipped, crime scenes normalized in their skin. The fire trucks block everything, we can’t tell if anyone’s been hurt.

  It’s cold. Colder than it has been. I think I have attention deficit disorder because I want to leave; my interest has piqued and descended. I want to be holding Della in bed. People stand, staring, wanting to stay till the credits roll.

  The apartment looks different from the outside. The front window is shattered. Another fucking hole.

  I fall asleep to the ripping and folding sound of Della taping up the window with industrial duct tape. In the morning I wake up feeling anxious. I see she’s drawn skulls of warning for potential intruders. The apartment is n
ow just a tent in a rainstorm instead of a force that keeps the bad things out and the comfortable home in. Della is making calls to the landlord, whose phone appears to have been disconnected. I feel as though my left and right legs were switched in my sleep. We both take a Valium with our cream of wheat. One of Della’s many former jobs included cleaning up houses where old people died. Her medicine cabinet reads like a phone book of unfamiliar names fading on plastic vials.

  Della’s brother, who works as a contractor, arrives to fix the window. We watch the midday news while smoothing down slabs of hardened brown sugar into a milky bowl with plastic spoons. A biker bomb, says news anchor Dennis Trudeau. We look for ourselves in the news footage. We don’t see us.

  I refill the pop bottle with red flavouring, hold it under the tap until it overflows, staining my hands pink. It reminds me of the colour of those cherry-flavoured pills dentists give you when you’re a kid to show you where you have plaque.

  It’s the Valium that prohibits me from leaving today. It’s creating this illusion that inside is safe and the landscape outside is precarious at best. Della and I are merging physically. From her elbow to my thigh. Her lips to my soft arches. Della calls in sick to work again. Do I care that I haven’t been alone in six days? Is love supposed to feel like needing another lung?

  It doesn’t feel completely right, her and me. But everything else feels far away.

  I fall asleep and wake up with the pills worn off. My heart is pounding. I’m having a heart attack. My teeth feel like charcoal.

  “Baby, no one has a heart attack when they’re twenty. Take another Ivan.”