by Zoe Whittall
She goes to the welfare office and comes back with cartons of cigarettes for the freezer and frozen peas. She is always tired, she is almost always sleeping.
I’ve cooked and cleaned and bought her favourite movies, magazines, bath salts and fine point markers. Stood at the stove stirring vegan faux-chicken broth and nursed her like her brain had a flu. Suggested therapists. Walks on the mountain. Prozac. Cocaine. Tae Bo. Anything. Something.
I work full-time at the store, take three telephone-survey shifts in the evening. I am rarely home and I am saving up. Seven is working hard on his play, working and typing. We become self-absorbed. Instead of the three of us in bed holding tight and grieving, we turn into three separate bugs spinning yarn of the everyday, toiling and talking to ourselves.
I take her to the YMCA at Parc and Bernard and buy us both memberships. She comes reluctantly. In the locker room our tattoos and scars shout out at the vibrant muscled bodies and the roly-poly seniors in their elastic-waisted jogging pants.
Two old ladies ask Della if she is in the right locker room, mistaking her for a boy. She glares silently and I tell them, No, she’s a girl. I feel like a traitor for passing, for being the one who has to categorize her complicated gender in this everyday way, just so we can paddle awkwardly in the blue chlorine water.
She says, See, this was not a good fucking idea. But I get her into the pool. We both wear bicycle shorts and old Clash T-shirts. She only knows how to doggy-paddle. I can sort of do the breaststroke.
Today is a day off from working at Santé! I’m tired of working for minimum wage and just scraping by. I’ve been feeling this need to save despite having little to put away after bills are paid. Sealed-up envelopes containing six dollars and seventy-five cents with the amount written in standard ballpoint blue on the outside. I slide the disparate amounts under my mattress. String from around vegetables. Jeans with the pockets ripped out of them. Old notes from Jenny written in study hall detailing her sexual exploits. Things are piling up. When the garbage goes out it’s all organics, leftover food and things that absolutely have no further purpose. I fold and rinse plastic bags and make flattened stacks under the sink, tied with rubber bands. I’m saving up, I don’t know why. I need something to fall back on, I guess.
Last night I was walking home from work holding my hands encased in thin dollar-store black gloves, the kind that could only be cool if you snipped off the tips à la “Lucky Star” era Madonna, but were otherwise useless against the cold. Some asshole on Ste-Catherine Street did the sly walk-by tit rub, the one that’s just inadvertent enough not to really have happened. I pictured grabbing him by the throat and slamming his head into the window of the Gap. Violence and sweater vests. I channelled my rage into walking fast, propelled by the excellent new Luscious Jackson CD. By the time I got to Parc and Mont-Royal, I was feeling okay again, all I needed was enough space between my body and someone else’s. It is with noted irony that I slipped into the tiny second floor strip club you’d miss if you blinked walking up Parc Avenue with squinty winter eyes. Jenny had left the downtown club for this one closer to home. I had promised her I’d stop in for a drink.
I’d never been into a strip club before. What I had to go on were vaguely romantic eighties daydreams from the movie Flashdance. The smell inside the club reminded me of taverns and legion halls in small-town Quebec I’d been to as a kid in the afternoon for sound checks when my father’s band was playing. Sitting on the high stools with a flat cola from the taps handed to me by the bartender who took pity on me. Anyone who gave me sugar was an immediate best friend to my sixseven-ten-year-old self, as soda was not usually allowed. I’d twist the straws and pretend it was a cocktail and that I was a rock star waiting for my own sound check. The smell wafted into my nose conjuring that time. The white lights made my heart race. After a curious and squinty-eyed bouncer checked my id three times and laughed, he said, Amateur night is tomorrow night.
“I’m here to see Jewel,” I said.
After a good long eyeballing, he pointed me into the club as if there were many different directions and I might get lost.
It was pretty empty except for a smattering of single men along the sides of the mirrored room, some with dancers on their laps, some with beers, eyes fixed on the stage where a girl in a white bikini top and jean skirt gyrated to Pink Floyd. I didn’t expect to feel so out of place. But the only other women were naked and I was in my giant parka, my hair unbrushed, last night’s eyeliner fading under my eyes. I felt like a raggedy kindergarten teacher with finger paint on her face. Totally asexual. Like a houseplant.
Out of the darkness came Jenny to hug me. She was unusually tall.
“It’s a fucking slow night, but I made some money earlier. Come have a drink.” She took my hand and led me to the bar, introduced me to the bartender, Pierre. “I’m glad you came by so I don’t have to have another moronic conversation for at least a few minutes.”
I told her about how my boss today had instituted a new policy against lunch breaks over fifteen minutes, that Della never left the house, that I was going crazy in this winter hell. Maybe I should work here, save some cash.
Jenny squinted her eyes at me while lighting her smoke, smiling.
“Hmmm. Well, Eve, you could try it out. It’d be fun to have you around.”
I could tell by her eyes she thought I was too much of a prude.
“Do you think I could hack it?”
She shrugged. “You’d have to toughen up a bit.”
“I am tough.”
“You couldn’t do that thing that you do, you know.”
“What thing?”
“The wide-eyed thing. Like you think everything is so fucking interesting.”
“Oh.”
“Well, that might work for you, if you wore a schoolgirl uniform or something.” She reached out and pushed my scruffy, white blond hair around. “Maybe a ponytail if you grew your hair out.”
I bring to mind a scene from a protest a few months earlier when I was the one to call the lawyer’s number scrawled on my arm in black pen, backing away from the riot cops because my instinct told me to run run run. I’m always the one checking the stove, making sure the water’s not too deep, ascertaining if we should really run across traffic. But Jenny just goes. She acts and determines safety later.
Jenny screamed and yelled and threw her placard on the ground, indignant despite the odds she’d probably be thrown in a cruiser faster than she could say “global capitalism.” She threw her disposable camera in an arc over a cop’s shoulder to land in my hands, defiant as they dragged her away, pulling her hair and kicking her legs. Not once did she look scared. She even rolled her eyes before the blows hit.
I was five feet away, heart pounding, away from calamity but still terrified; I walked on uneven ground towards the pay phone. Rooting through my messy army green canvas purse for a quarter, I realized then the fundamental difference between us. I observed from the sidelines and she was the show. I thought of things like consequences and she just lived. It depressed me, how cautious I was.
“I’ll talk to the manager and see if they need any other girls. You can borrow some of my clothes and,” she glanced at my combat boots with the silver stars drawn on the toes, “you’ll need some shoes.”
An old guy with a facial tic taps her on the shoulder. “Can I get my dance now?”
She turns. Shrugs. “I guess. Wait a few minutes, I’m not done talking.”
He smiles nervously, tics a couple of times in a row and goes over to a table, watching the stage show. A girl in a pink one-piece, totally out of time.
Jenny puts her hand on my knee and squeezes. “Things are going to get better, Eve. I can feel it. God, we’re not even twenty-one. We’re babies!” I’ve never felt older.
The bartender brings us two tequila shots. Our eyes are lemon slices.
“I feel ancient these days.”
“I feel like a newborn.” She says, “I have so many plans for
us!”
I walk home wondering if I’ll take Jenny up on her offer. I daydream that I am red-hot and wanted, wanting. I indulge in my glamorous delusions. On an empty side street I practice pole dancing on an arrêt sign and cut my hand, laughing, hoping no one saw. I picture my bedside table overflowing with fifties and hundreds, my thighs rock hard, smart one-liners tumbling off my lips in quick succession. The girl no one needs to save or walk home late at night.
I go for breakfast the next day with Seven at Pins Pizza. The air in our apartment is stale, the energy charged. I heard him rummaging around at dawn, keeping with these erratic sleeping patterns he’s developed recently. I can never guess when he’ll be home or keep a plan.
He’s already seated in our favorite table by the window, watching the cars race by on Ave du Parc. When I walk in, oversized hot-pink purse threatening to hit other customers as I saunter through the maze of tables, I see that he has two halves of pink grapefruit and six open containers of jam that he was sticking his fingers into.
“I have a hangover. I need to eat more fruit,” he says.
“Well, good morning to you, too.”
Seven makes me feel normal by comparison. Whatever that is.
It’s been nine months since Rachel was killed and he still looks shaky, shifted, permanently like the tattoos on our wrists that spell out her name.
I’ve never known anyone who died and though Rachel and I weren’t that close all the time, I still think about her almost every day. Now it surprises me when a day goes by and I think of her only in the kitchen at night, because I select the mug she gave me with a sixties housewife decal reading Oops! I guess I forgot to get married!
I scratch my polished fingernails at breakfast number three. A square waxy photograph of two eggs with sausages, a tin cup of baked beans, and bright tomatoes promises toast and coffee included. I’m definitely eating meat again. The potatoes are indeed God-like, like the menu says.
I watch Seven talking, grateful he isn’t Della, but not feeling much more than that. Far away. The closest I’d been to happy since November stomped her heavy boots all over my sense of calm about the world.
“What’s wrong with Della these days?”
“She’s sad. She doesn’t do anything.”
“Break up with her.” Seven has never had a long-term boyfriend. He says monogamy is for suckers, marriage is a government plot.
I try to think of something to change the subject. “I’m thinking of working at the club with Jenny.”
“Oh yeah,” Seven says, vaguely interested, not at all surprised. “You’re always broke. That might be a good idea, you know. You’re not exactly an Amazon but you could work the schoolgirl angle.”
I frown. Was cutesy-pedophiliac the only way I could pull off sexy? I look down at my barely there breasts, admit defeat.
“Besides, you’re in the right house for it. You know, house of whores and former whores.”
“You and Della ...”
“Rachel too.”
I knew Seven had turned some tricks when he was a teenager and Della danced one summer when she lived out west, but Rachel?
I raise my eyebrows. “No, that’s not true.”
“She worked a massage parlour while she was at McGill. Her dad cut her off for being a dyke and that’s how she got by.”
“Huh, I’d never have guessed. She seemed so, I dunno, unfazed by things.”
“Well, she was strong, and you know, very quiet about it. She only ever told me. But I guess now it doesn’t matter.”
Another thing to add to the list of things that divide me from the friends I love most: all cooler, tougher, bolder. Seven chews the grapefruit rind like a bone and as if he pressed a button in his brain to stop being depressed, he begins bopping his head to pop music on the restaurant radio.
“So, what are you going to do about Sylvia Plath? Where is she anyway? I thought she might come.”
“I left her in front of the tv watching The Price Is Right and smoking a bowl.”
Sometimes I close my eyes at night and put my arms around her. I want things to feel certain. Even when she’s pissed me off, even when she cheated and lied, at least I knew what I felt — something always told me I wasn’t done with her. Now I’m not so sure.
“I finished the first draft of the play,” Seven says. “They’re going to let me read it in the afternoon at the club.”
“That’s awesome, babe.”
Seven sips from the white mug of coffee, squinting. “Do you still love her, Eve? The way you used to?”
“This is what love becomes, I think. Sometimes. Hard. Everyone bails.” Or perhaps, this is what it’s like to fall out of love, I think to myself.
“Why don’t you leave her?” Seven asks.
“No, I can’t do that.” As much as I feel ambivalent, I can’t actually picture my life without her.
Often Della will be an enigma, closed, one of those people you just can’t read. In the next minute, she becomes so startlingly clear it’s as if she’s taken a Polaroid of herself and handed it to me. Everything so straightforward and defined.
We sit silently until our plates are cleared, Seven occasionally telling me about the play. Three refills in chipped, white mugs. Seven gets on his cellphone arranging a pick up. My face blushes. Everyone glares at us. He uses it for crisis counselling calls from the hospice and drug deals. Every time he answers it you can tell he doesn’t know if he should sound tough or supportive.
“Seven, why don’t you use it outside? Everyone’s going to think you’re ...”
“A hooker? A social worker on call?” He winks.
“No, an asshole.”
With that advice, he gets louder and lispier, throwing his red scarf around his neck in a flourish.
“I said eighty for a blow-job, Ramone, you know how hung I am!”
I leave money for the bill on the table laughing and walk out the door, my head tucked into my jacket. The waitress looks annoyed.
16
•••
BASH BACK
What if everything you thought you knew about AIDS was a lie? I’m standing in the elevator, reading this poster and I’m thinking some days I wake up thinking everything I think I know is a lie. I’m pretending to be engrossed in the poster to avoid conversation with a potentially chatty stranger. There is no evidence that HIV actually causes AIDS. The stranger keeps trying to meet my eyes and smiles shyly. I hate talking to strangers. I become frozen in a giant fake grin. All I can say is um, or yeah, or I lie like a maniac and it comes out so easily that it scares me, like a method actor, these different lives just come flying out of my mouth. As if they are the lives I would’ve lived if I’d made different choices. I’m in school, law school, and they look impressed.
The stranger gets off on the fourth floor and I go up to the ninth where I’m meeting Seven, who’s just finishing a meeting for activists who work at AIDS Community Care. It’s our weekly post-processing, all-you-can-eat buffet night. Since Rachel died, he’s become more active with the ACC, working on his play. It’s like the big crazy plans of making time irrelevant have been replaced by pragmatic, positive things.
I’m not thinking too straight. I’m tripping down the sanitary social-service-smelling hallway in my black platform shoes. I watch through the thick glass doors; the meeting looks like it’s coming to a close. I can tell because everyone is fidgeting, one person is sleeping and a few questionably committed people are straggling around the coffee machine. Seven is standing at the front of the group in a T-shirt I painted for him that says Action Equals Life. He is speaking, loudly, gesturing like a conductor, saying something about harm reduction and I turn on my walkman and watch him speaking as Cat Power sings. I love this boy. In a way that I’ve never loved any boy before. In an entirely different way I’ve ever loved anyone before.
Someone has put a bright red sticker up on the door that says Bash Back.
My skin feels like Silly Putty.
Someone pokes me on the shoulder and hands me a flyer. It’s a photo of Seven on the front, shirtless, an advertisement for his play. I smile, say, It looks good.
When I get home, Della has arranged all of our books in the house by colour and thrown out all the food. I’m really confused. Would normally be angry if I wasn’t so strict with making the all-you-can-eat buffet a reality. I don’t think I’ll be needing food for another day at least.
Tomato has finally come out from hiding and made herself comfortable on the couch. She looks up at me, meows, as if to say, What the fuck is up now? Gertrude walks over to her and starts licking her back. They’re bonded for life.
“Della, what did you do with the food?”
“I wanted to start things over again. I cleaned the cupboards, put new liners in the drawers. Tomorrow I’ll go shopping.”
“What about all the cans of soup and beans? Where did they go?”
“I gave them to Sun Youth. I brought them over in the neighbour’s red wagon.”
She went outside. She talked to the neigbours. She did steal all my food, but I took this as progress.
I’m relieved to find there are still liquids in the fridge, soda, soy milk and a carton of orange juice. The milk crate beside the pet dishes that serves as a makeshift liquor cabinet is full. I twist open a mickey of Scotch and two-litre bottle of ginger ale, take two rocks glasses from the newly organized (by colour) cupboard and pour two shots, fill the rest with fizz.
“We’ll start fresh!” she says, gulping down her drink. “Fresh.”
I fall asleep drunk on the couch, listening to her chatter to the cats about a new system, a new her.
When I wake up dry-eyed and aching a few hours later, Della is sitting naked in the armchair in front of me, her long legs spread open, feet dangling over each plush red arm. Her black and blue hair is wet, curling around her neck, left uncut for months longer than usual. My first thought is wow, she finally took a shower. My second is, she’s stunning.