Bottle Rocket Hearts

by Zoe Whittall

  I look around my apartment at the things I’d planned, hearing her sad resignation from the message in my head. I decide to surprise her by making her apartment look festive and comfortable, a warm hug to come home to after a hard day. I plan every present carefully, making sure the night will pass slowly and soft. As I move around with the details, holding them in my mouth contemplatively, I realize that this is what everyone talks about. The feeling of really being together, beyond the sex, jealousy, drama, intrigue and romance. Real nurturing, bringing comfort to someone, intimacy. I used to regard it all with suspicion, like empty Valentine’s Day rituals, the fakery of marriage. But, anticipating her surprise, making her dinner, I feel the newness of longevity and permanence.

  I gather the tree and presents into a cab and feel a bubble of excitement to see her face when she arrives home.

  Unlocking her door with my new key, worn around my neck, attached to a length of dog chain from the hardware store, what I feel can only be described as a quick incision between my seventh and eight rib without warning. Then several quick kisses with a staple gun to my gumline, emotionally speaking. A sock in the teeth for good measure.

  It is somewhat satisfying that xxxx’s face turns inside out and monstrous while experiencing an orgasm. The tree lands on the floor with some finality, the dirt falls on my boots. I kick it across the hall. I bury my heart under the floorboards before I walk away.

  8

  •••

  HIGH SCORE - 1995

  Jealousy: 50,000,000,000

  Me: 0

  Merry fucking Christmas.

  9

  •••

  DON'T CHA THINK

  The breakup was inevitable and not like I expected it to be, a triumphant walking away, my own parade. I really thought it would be my decision, slow realizations adding up and moving on, growing up, shedding the skin of this first love bliss. Though it was ultimately my body that packed my things and walked away. Della didn’t offer much more than a boyish shrug as explanation. In fact all she said was, “It’s your decision, Eve, do what’s right for you. I’ll support you. I don’t want you to go, of course.” I felt robbed of my leading-lady moment. Everywhere I go Alanis Morrisette asks me if it’s ironic. I throw my radio out the bathroom window, watching it splinter onto the courtyard behind my building.

  Della has called every day so far this week. She’s ordered drugs from Seven, and shows up when she knows I’ll be home.

  I hide in my room. Seven tells her I’m entertaining someone, with a wink. Really I’m pressed up against the door, listening to every word.

  Today is her third visit for pot. Apparently she’s become chronic. Or she’s trying to run into me. I walk through the living room in a red negligee, obvious pragmatic study attire, pretending I don’t know she is sitting at the coffee table while Seven weighs her wares. I fake surprise with aplomb. My nipples float just beneath the shoreline of the plunging neckline. My mouth betrays hostility. My feet are bare. Seven is pretending to be an oblivious fag, but I know he knows. She knows he knows. He sings along with the music blaring from his room.

  “Eve, I was hoping to run into you.” She stands in that way that used to get to me, half James Dean, half goofy Robert Smith. She’s wearing a Vision Streetwear shirt with long sleeves, chewing on her lip ring. I hate that she can be so honest like that, just admit she was wanting to see me.

  “Yeah?” I roll my eyes, keep walking towards the kitchen, rooting through the freezer for some coffee beans. She follows me.

  “Eve, I want to apologize.”

  I close the freezer door, unzip a plastic freezer bag and plunge my hand into the cold coffee beans. I let them sift through my fingers, willing myself to say something mean or pointed or smart.

  “I was sad about my mother ...” Della goes into a convoluted story about how xxxx dropped by at the right time, manages to tell me everything without taking an ounce of responsibility.

  I turn my back to her, pour the cold beans into the grinder and press down. After a few minutes of grinding noise, I feel her leave the kitchen. The coffee is a fine, useless powder. I didn’t want it anyway.

  Seven holds me while I dissolve into manic tears. Then he calls to tell her he’ll make a house call next time and not to come by again until things are cool. He tells me just to wait a month, one month. By that time things will feel better, he promises. Thirty days, thirty days.

  My aunt Bev stops by with cans of beer in a paper bag and we sit on the front step wrapped in blankets with our toques pulled down over our ears, smoking in thick black gloves. She tells me about every guy who ever broke her heart. She’s candid and articulate, never dismissive. I feel so thankful for her. I don’t ask her why she’s drinking again, I decide to not be one of the Program People she talks about negatively when she’s not one of them.

  When she meets Seven she gives him a big hug and asks him questions about how he knew he was gay, how he feels about women, how he pictures his life at seventy. Seven brings out a bong and she giggles like a little kid. “Fuck, I haven’t smoked pot in years!” After inhaling deeply and letting out more laughter she starts in with, “What role do drugs play in your life? How do you feel about selling them? Is it part of your spirituality?” I feel embarrassed, like she’s invading his privacy, but when she leaves he tells me he wants to marry her.

  Rachel and Seven plan their Christmas celebrations. Every year they host a “homo-hobo” party — for everyone estranged from their families, who have to work or can’t afford to travel home. Rachel shoves recipes in my face every five seconds and I help her bake cookies. She notes I am somewhat catatonic.

  “I don’t know. I guess this is my first broken heart.”

  Rachel snorts. “It’s hard, isn’t it? My first girlfriend did a number on me.”

  “It’s hard to imagine anyone holding your attention long enough to break your heart.”

  “Why do you think I’m like this? I’m totally not over her, really. She shattered me.” Rachel using dramatic words like shattered took me off guard.

  “Where is she now? How did you meet her?”

  “We met my first week in Montreal at school. She was my teacher at McGill.”

  “No!”

  “Yup. We had to keep it hidden from everyone at school, plus we were both closeted. In retrospect I can’t believe we even lasted as long as we did.”

  “How long?”

  “Three years. Until I was twenty-one. I basically didn’t make any friends, just kind of orbited around her, waiting around for her. She was everything. It was incredible, that feeling like everything important was all in one person.”

  “And now you’re a heartbreaker.”

  “Yeah, yeah. As if.”

  She stirred the vegan chocolate cake batter, smushing in a frozen banana with a potato masher, looking up at me with a smirk. “You don’t realize this now, but Della is so mediocre compared to you. Her arrogance is astounding. She can’t keep a job, she ...” Rachel lists off dozens of reasons why Della is a loser and I should be thankful to let her go. I nod vehemently, wanting to believe it. But I don’t. I feel like someone took one of my lungs away. I feel like Della was my life-changer and now she is suddenly gone.

  I look at Rachel and see she’s got a bit of a boyish side, the way she moves around the kitchen. “Do you consider yourself a butch, Rachel?”

  She laughs. “No.”

  “Femme?”

  “Hell, no. I’m nothing. I’m queer. I like the ladies. I guess I’m a little of both. Now Seven, Seven’s a high femme for sure. Jesus. Sometimes I think he wishes he was a lesbian just for the clothes.”

  “What do you think I am?”

  “Oh God, Eve, are you serious?” she lowers the electric mixer into the plastic bowl, shakes her head like she can’t believe me, while the sound drowns out what she’s saying. She clicks off a beater dripping with batter and hands it to me. “Such a femme. You’re like a baby princess waiting for her first s
et of false eyelashes to be passed down to her. You smell like a cupcake. You could wear combat boots and a plaid shirt and still be a girl from a hundred yards away.”

  I laugh, licking the beater, pulling a wooden stool up to the counter, watching as she formed the question “Yeah, but is it just about fashion?”

  “I don’t know. Be who you want to be, Eve. That’s just what I see. I have no idea.”

  “Femme.” I mouth it to myself, giggling. “Okay.” For some reason this sounded good, like it fit more than any other moniker hoisted on me like queer, lesbian, bi, whatever. None of those felt right. Femme. Okay, that works.

  Before I went home for Christmas, Rachel handed me a sparkling purple gift bag. In it was a copy of S/he by Minnie Bruce Pratt, pink sparkling eyeshadow, a seven-inch record by Slant Six called Ladybug Superfly. On the card it said, “Here’s some femme essentials from your gender retarded roommate, xo Rachel.”

  I bought her The Complete Hothead Paisan, Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist by Diane DiMassa. She squealed like a little girl when she unwrapped it.

  On December 23 my father knocks on the door and I try to pretend things are okay. He stands awkwardly in our living room while I go into Seven’s room to kiss him on the forehead while he sleeps, leaving him silver and gold glitter nail polish wrapped in magazine paper beside his alarm clock that blinks the wrong time. My dad examines the bookshelves in the living room and suggests a way to make them more sturdy before I hand him a bag of laundry to take down to the car.

  I pile into the back seat of the Toyota hatchback with garbage bags of laundry and some half-assed Christmas collages still drying in my lap. We listen to a seventies rock station in silence. The panes of the grey industrial landscape of the Turcotte Yards, the factories leading up to Lachine blend into one unpalatable painting of heartbroken misery.

  My mother greets me with, “You look emaciated,” and, “What happened to your hair?” and I say, “Merry Christmas.”

  I help my dad at the store on Christmas Eve, selling guitars to procrastinating fathers who hope their kid will be the next Stevie Ray Vaughan or Jean LeLoup. He says, “You’re even crankier with the customers than usual.” As always, some guy is playing the introduction to “One” by Metallica on the expensive Fender. My father smiles weakly, encouraging everyone to be creative, but I can tell he’s annoyed. “At least it’s not ‘Stairway to Heaven,’” I note and he laughs. It only takes a few minutes for someone to start humming about a lady who knows from an acoustic one aisle over.

  My aunt and I get drunk on a bottle of wine and dye our hair in the basement living room while my parents and their friends sing Christmas carols in four-part harmony upstairs. I tell her I love that she’s drinking again, but then regret it. My aunt targets her grey hair, teaches me how to buff my nails and I try to get her to stop ashing into the black-dye-filled Tupperware container. It’s strange to see her living there, all of my things now in boxes under the bed. I feel like she’s an excellent buffer, an older sister I always wanted. Now that we’re both adults, she doesn’t treat me like I’m ten.

  After a few drinks she says, “Why don’t you just tell them you’re a big homo?”

  “Well, I’m not dating anyone now, so what does it matter?”

  “You’re heartbroken, eh?”

  “Yeah.”

  The thing with my mother being an ex-Mennonite is that sometimes she’s still the hippie radical she wants to be, but keeps some conservative ideas tucked away that come out at strange moments. Like the time we saw a drag queen walking along St-Catherines when we were going to a bookstore when I was about ten. I’ll never forget the way she said, “Sick, that’s just not right.”

  I tell Bev that I’ve been sneaking out to the back porch every half hour to burst into tears and then checking my voice mail on the hour in case she calls to say Merry Christmas. I know her and xxxx are drunk at Foufounes Electrique for the punk rock Fuck Christmas party. And I know that, like monogamy, Christmas is a capitalist plot not to be indulged in. I suspect they’ll drop by xxxx’s parents’ mansion around midnight once they are drunk and they can score some great food when they get back from Mass, maybe even envelopes of cash.

  “Fuck her!” my aunt says, toasting me with her glass of wine.

  “Yeah, fuck her!”

  “You know what this is, Eve? Your first adult Christmas. I’ll let you in on a secret ... Christmas sucks for everyone but children.”

  “Yeah, it totally does.”

  “Just force yourself through this, you’ll find someone new in no time. In fact! There’s this girl in my improv dance class, she’s gay. She’s cute too!”

  Why must every straight person in my life try to fix me up with the other gay person they know? I picture a waify femme in bad leotards. “No thanks. I’m thinking of going back to men.”

  We pull the couch out into a bed and I climb in. I keep one hand cupped around the cordless phone. I feel suddenly apart from adolescence, like I’m a guest in their house. I’m aware with certainty at this moment, that I was cared for well as a kid, that I was lucky, and am lucky, to know what it’s like to be cared for.

  I remember Seven talking about his father’s work boots on his back like an iron branding, Rachel’s rocky two conversations a year with her parents. I feel aware that I should come out to them, that they deserve the benefit of the doubt at least.

  I wake up with this thought pushed forward, procrastinating the inevitable, eating the turkey-free stuffing my mother made especially for me. I open presents, a sweater, a box of chocolates, some guitar strings and a book of short stories. I spend the day in front of the tv in the quiet basement, watching old tapes of Kids in the Hall. I feel well loved and lucky, and devastated by a loss I’ve never known.

  Boxing week I work at my dad’s store every day, all day. I drown my sorrows in monotony, polish instruments, try to organize the books and clean the storage room. My dad is amazed but doesn’t try to stop me. By the thirtieth, I’m ready to leave the suburbs and get back to real life, the sidewalks and bustle, the proximity and urgency of my real urban life.

  On New Year’s Eve, Melanie and I go to a big warehouse party called Kitty Kitty put on by a dyke about town. Rachel is djing, we know some girls from around, but no one too intimately. We share a bottle of gin before getting there, wear slinky black dresses and heeled boots. I’ve stopped being devastated and started being flirty and available. The night is charged. We have too many expectations for the Best Night Ever.

  Rachel is looking really hot in a Chainsaw Records T-shirt, her hair all messy and newly blond, mixing a 7-Year Bitch song with novelty group Cunts with Attitude. Seven is dressed in full drag, except he’s grown a little beard and wears a mohawk instead of a wig. He’s attached by a chain to a hunky shirtless boy in a ball cap and a pair of overalls. He embraces Melanie and me, which results in an accidental hug with the overall boy who smiles politely. He takes us to the bar, buys us four shots of something fruity and disappears as quickly as he came.

  Melanie locates her crush and then decides to hang on my arm and make sure she’s always at least ten feet away from the crush. This makes cruising impossible. But I don’t want anyone anyway, I only want Della. Absence and indifference, I was learning, were hotter than any cologne or pheromone. Show me I’m unimportant or replaceable and I’ll lay down in the street for you.

  By 3:00 a.m. I am puking into a snowbank. By four, writing devastating nihilistic poetry in the bathroom only to emerge from said room to see xxxx and Della waiting in line. I arch my back, walk confidently by, ignoring their hello nods.

  I join Melanie on the dance floor. Before I really know what I’m doing I’ve grabbed her, whispering to her to just go with it, okay? We have an awkward but believable make out. I grab her by the back of her neck theatrically while we kiss sloppily without real desire, except the desire to perform for everyone. There are hollers and claps.

  Later, Melanie and I are smoking on the long wooden balc
ony. Della walks straight up to me, bold and bolder, just like she had the first time we met at the art show. She puts her hands on my face and says, “I’ve never loved anyone like you.”

  I see three of her faces and her words make my core sparkle like Pop Rocks candy, but I know enough to censor. To smirk. To walk away, grabbing Melanie’s hand, throwing our smokes over the side of the roof and curling back through the window that leads outside. Gathering my coat from the coat-room I saw Isabelle and xxxx in an embrace. I thought about turning around, but forced myself not to. I thought about the things I could yell.

  Reaching the clogged artery that is the front door where drunks try to match feet and corresponding boots with a definite lack of finesse, I felt hands on my back, squeezing. Della. “Baby, are you with Melanie now? What the fuck?” she whispered. I didn’t expect her to be that dumb. To fall for such an obvious ploy. Maybe she was just taking the bait. I didn’t turn around. I kept walking, pulled by Melanie’s indignant mittened hand.

  Della wasn’t wearing a coat or shoes. I went outside, leaving her in the doorway and didn’t even bother trying to hail a cab, just teetered away with Melanie on my arm, discussing how girls will always fail us.

  We laughed at each other, fell asleep on my living room floor, keys in the front door, our belongings trailing up to the apartment.

  “1996!” I said at 7:00 a.m. before throwing up my dinner of Fairmount bagels into the bathroom sink.

  “Fucking right!” I hear Seven say from the other room, as Rachel kicks a one-night stand out the door. We’ve never looked so pale and dehydrated.

  Rachel pours water into four purple plastic cups and serves them to us, forming our weakened hands around our own cup. She smiles.