by The Journey Prize Stories 32- The Best of Canada's New Writers (retail) (epub)
Slowly, without Sandy realizing, they started to dress very similar to her. They matched her gait, wore bras too small or too large, began smoking in secret. The boy began bathing in water infused with the perfume to get a hint of her scent. They each were trying to turn David W.’s head away from Sandy and toward them. They wanted to be interchangeable. One heart subbed in for another. They wanted to believe themselves capable of being beloved too.
* * *
After Sandy made love to David W., during the September of her senior year, three months before her birthday—Volume 51—the coven was no longer with her. She stood on the toilet in The Lois Lanes bathroom, reading the scene from the diary: the fear, the shifter, the moon eclipsing between blinks—the bareness of cock—the short trickle of blood and his clucking after, punctuating and gibbous. The calm quiet drive home. The second hand job in her parents’ driveway before she stepped out of the truck.
When Sandy came out of the trance of her story and left the altar of the stall, the bathroom was empty. The taps were turned full on.
The coven was not with Sandy again until they’d each been made love to, and thoroughly fucked. Over the course of her senior year, each husk slowly became reverent of her, the prophet, the first victim of his tricks, each one except the boy, who moved with his worried mother to Manitoba after David W. and three of his goons pummelled him in the schoolyard after homecoming, after he’d been caught smiling at David W. several times from the dance floor. But by then, everything was already too late. There was too much blood and pain in being tethered together by hate, there was too much pain in being tethered together at all.
* * *
Without the coven, they did not speak of what happened to them. They all knew intimately the price they had paid in falling victim to the cult of personality, of wanting to please the perceived unpleaseable, to charm the vulnerable, misunderstood kid they believed hid beyond the wall. Split from the coven due to envy, they did not have the resources to learn from each other, to know the signs, to know not to accept the six packs, the invitations to take a long drive to hang out by the water.
They did not have the chance to shake the clouds from each other’s eyes, to try and devise ways to stop the hungry encroachment of a hand on the thigh. They did not learn the cost of surrendering to a smoky man behind a mask, did not have the chance to be warned that David W. was not misunderstood at all. That he had been there, on the surface, the whole time.
Divided, they could each be conquered with routine tactics.
* * *
During the Snowball dance of Sandy’s senior year, long after the coven had burst into individuals, the cathedrals to Brice Q.—at the other end of the school from the gymnasium, where the dance was held—were raided. Photos, originals and copies printed out and stashed there, were torn to shreds and flushed into flooding clods that the school’s plumbing couldn’t pass. Red paint was splashed on the scrawled-on stall walls with a wide brush, walls where hundreds of one-sided hearts—B.Q. & __. __.—were drawn in. Splashes and spills from the red paint mixed with the overflowing water and drained under the doors into the halls. Principal Wayne and the janitors, when it was discovered the next morning, panicked, fearing death. The sweat-filled towel was also plucked from its reliquary atop the ceiling tile, never to return.
It was the beginning of a silent upheaval, broken out from the tail end of betrayal. After that dance Brice Q.’s idolaters were thrown into a fog from the violent erasing. To them, Brice Q. became a bit less visible, began to be seen as he was in the singular present and not as he was stacked upon and tacked beside himself.
The deprogramming of the myth of Brice Q. started from this systematic removal of the icons from bathrooms around town. A few zealots were able to preserve their ideas of Brice Q., but mostly they were shook from him. Suddenly, without photos, he breathed, grew angles and depths that were imperceptible in the inked flatness. Suddenly, without access to his pheromones, people began to grow an immunity to him. They listened to him speak and got bored when he didn’t sound like Lancelot.
Destabilized and dragged back into the present, they began to dismantle their own, private cathedrals. They followed suit the invisible, unnameable hands.
* * *
Sandy’s diaries ended at Volume 58, around two-thirds of the way in. The day was February 14 of Sandy’s eighteenth year. She wrote it in third person, wrote about Sandy’s loneliness, the destructive anxiety that had descended on her, its acuteness since she learned that David W. had been expelled by Principal Wayne, how he was free to wander the world unscheduled. She wrote about how far Sandy felt from being understood, how over the weekend she had read through all the old diaries she’d written and realized that she didn’t understand Sandy either.
Her parents were out for the night, having a romantic dinner, and Sandy sat in front of the lit fireplace in the living room. The fire was roiling from the tail end of the fuel of Volume 57, and the whole room seemed to flutter, paper ash scooting through the air like dry grey snow. There, sweating, heart racing, she wrote about Sandy through to the end of her diaried-life, ending Volume 58 like a journalist who ran out of letters mid-word.
I don’t think Sandy was ever made to love or be loved. This is not how a life is supposed to work, cracked off two mo
Then, she let the flames finish it.
* * *
Years later an email chain opened up to the six of them, arriving from the far edge of a long silence, to addresses they’d hardly used or checked since graduating from high school and moving on, to university in Toronto (for philosophy) and New Brunswick (for nursing) and Brandon (for education), or to working in resorts at the lake, or—for one girl, the fourth of them—to raising a child alone, still living in her parents’ home. The email came from David W.’s second, the girl who’d written the blog set in Boise, which she deleted two weeks after he’d quit returning her calls. The email started with an apology and ended with an invitation to reconnect. She talked about how she had just got out of a stint in the hospital because of an eating disorder following a bad, bad relationship. She said she still thought about them all the time. She asked them what they were doing, what their addresses were, and whether they were doing okay.
Three girls and one boy responded, replying all, in longer and shorter form.
A few weeks later, the final response came in the form of five small packages arriving to five different stoops across the country. There were no words in any of them, no return address, there was nothing but a single plastic baggie.
Within each baggie was one-sixth of an old, white towel.
SUSAN SANFORD BLADES
THE REST OF HIM
Hair work-slicked and tie sagging, Nik lifts my covers and pokes me with a corner of envelope. From your mom, he says. He thanks me, with a generous helping of sarcasm, for ensuring our daughter got off to school on time, then informs me he has floor hockey with the boys tonight and I should not wait up. What grown man plays floor hockey?
Of course, after being incommunicado for sixteen years, Mom sends me a newspaper article about Dad’s severed foot. No note, no marginalia, not even penned devil’s horns on his image. He’s been dead to her for years, no need for fanfare.
I decide to leave the house with my mail and no plans to return. We’ll see who shouldn’t wait up for whom. My daughter’s fifteen now—as long as she’s got a buzzing rectangle of light in her palms, she doesn’t care if I’m here or there. Nik’s going through his Sad Man phase and is no help at all. Sears went under four years ago and he hasn’t worked since. He’s not fancy enough for The Bay, too proud for Walmart. The only thing he’s ever done is manage the men’s department. His only skill is loyalty, and I’m even less qualified. Now we live off EI and his mother’s pity. We haven’t told our daughter and Nik doesn’t intend to. Every morning, he dresses for work and we slump off to hide out in separate coffee shops. I b
uy almond lattes in white mugs from a Scandinavian-looking couple with clear eyes and unclenched jaws. Nik buys Americanos in paper cups from young, dark-haired women with tattooed heads and effusive problems. I’ll walk by his café of choice, saddled with legumes and leafy greens, and see him through the window, elbows to counter, body curled toward a shady pixie, nodding gracefully like he used to for me. It’s easier to listen to troubles you can walk away from.
In Little Norway, the curly haired wife delivers my almond latte and a cup of sparkling water and toast and jam for Jenny across the table. The wife has freckled, doughy cheeks and is braless under a black-and-white striped European boat shirt. How could anyone stray from a woman with cheeks like that?
Jenny’s all, Mmmph shoo good, with the jam. It’s homemade, you know, she says.
I nod and pop bubbles in my water with my fingertip.
Jenny licks a bright red glob off her palm and tells me she thinks she’s dating a married man.
You think he’s married, or you think you’re dating?
Both.
Does he wear a ring?
Jenny nods but gives me jazz hands. It could be decorative.
On his ring finger?
It’s big and twisty. Not a band. Definitely.
Have you kissed?
Jenny taps her cheek and presses her tongue into it.
Beej?
She flicks crumbs at me. He kissed me on the cheek.
I wouldn’t want Nik doing that.
Men will be assholes.
You want to date an asshole?
If you cut out the assholes, what’s left?
Flaccid, too-nice guys.
Jenny gags into my water glass. Right, she says, khaki pants, duck-footed walk.
European man-bag.
Feathered hair.
Smiles at children in restaurants.
Those are the closet Paul Bernardos.
Are you seeing him tonight?
Jenny shrugs. He’s kind of spur-of-the-moment.
Mind if I stay with you?
Jenny raises her eyebrows.
My dad died.
You have parents?
My mom mailed me this article.
I uncrumple the clipping. There’s Dad onstage, hands groping a mic as though it was a cliff edge he was falling from.
Jenny’s in her glazy-eyed new man world and doesn’t notice the headline. All she says is, Your dad’s cute.
I read the headline: “LOCAL PUNK PIONEER LEAVES PODIATRIC PUZZLE.” Some hiker found my dad’s foot on the beach.
Where’s the rest of him?
“Feet disarticulate from the body as a result of prolonged immersion in water,” I read. “Separation is a natural element of the process of decomposition.”
He’s decomposed?
He might not actually be dead.
Like a zombie?
Like Elvis.
Wouldn’t Elvis be like a hundred? Jenny steals a sip of my latte and I can tell she wants to return to her agenda. She stares out the window and taps an appropriate twenty seconds with her finger on the table before asking, But if my guy is single, why would he wear any ring on his ring finger?
Maybe all his other fingers are too fat.
You think I shouldn’t see him?
What would you get out of it?
Sex.
Vibrator?
The smell of a man.
Hard to replicate.
The smell of an asshole.
Do assholes smell better than nice guys? I look behind my shoulder to make sure the Scandinavian-looking couple isn’t within earshot, on account of all the swearing and sexy talk and them being all white and sweet-tidy-clean Belle-and-Sebastian listening boppity-boop.
You went straight from the cradle to Nik, eh?
I had sex with the first guy I kissed in middle school. Ewen Moss. We were playing seven minutes in heaven. Had an abortion. After that I stopped shaving my pits and showering. Then I came to Edmonton and met Nik.
Damn, Sara. The seven minutes weren’t for intercourse.
When were we supposed to say no?
You were supposed to let him unzip your jeans and get maybe three fingers in and then giggle all high-pitched until he stopped. You had no girlfriends?
There was this girl Rita. She had an overbite like Freddie Mercury but not his bone structure. Or stage presence. No guy would go near her.
Jenny picks up her plate and licks the crumbs off it.
I bet you had lots of friends, I say.
Nope. I was the mysterious slutty chick with a thirty-year-old boyfriend.
I was the mysterious slutty chick who’d only had sex once.
Those high-school boys were so afraid of us.
I give Jenny a high-five and ask if she thinks Nik is a nice guy or an asshole.
Nice guy, of course. But not quite flaccid.
I nod. I can’t tell Jenny about the baristas. It seems so stupid. The father of her child was fucking dish pigettes under her nose before she even went into labour. But at least he was honest about it. And Jenny’s my girl. I want to tell her about how Nik wears skid-marked sweats to bed now and how when I’m in my sex panties and I bend down to pet the cat and I look through the nook in my armpit he’s not spying my ass, he’s checking his phone for hockey scores or craft beer reviews. And about how, when we do make love and I take off my shirt, he lowers his eyes and hands to my hips to avoid addressing how even tits so small as mine could droop. And about how once I’ve had one hairy ball in my mouth after the other and I spread his legs farther and run the tip of my tongue down till I feel him taut and tangy, he clenches up and pushes my head away and says he’s not sure he wiped properly. And I want to ask her what to do. What do you do when you meet this guy when you’re eighteen who seems quirky and cool and wears mismatched socks and peels Bosc pears for you and marks you like a dog with his saliva and then he turns into this slick-haired, finger-gun-shooting, small-talk spewer who reserves his dwindling stores of kindness for a bunch of coffee-slinging angels of darkness who are young enough to befriend his daughter and are only kind to him in return because they’re paid to provide superior customer service? What do you do with a crumb-by-crumb betrayal you only notice once there’s not enough good left to spread the jam on?
But Jenny’s idea of commitment is using the same shade of lipstick until the tube runs out, and she has yet to accomplish this. She’s holding her hands together in that namaste way, telling me how nice-guy Nik is. How he makes those killer chicken wings and not too spicy the way most men would. How he coaches my daughter’s softball team and how he looks at me in the same way he looks at our daughter. Proud and admiring and kind of worried. And this makes me cry, with my palms to my eyes and hunched over my latte. And Jenny says, Oh shit, your dad. But it’s so much bigger than that.
Why are you avoiding Nik? Jenny asks.
I shake my head.
Jenny waits for something to come out of my mouth and then finally says, Okay. She reaches out and presses her key into my palm. She says, I gotta get to work. Stay at my place as long as you want. The kid’s with his dad this week, so you can walk around in your panties and stuff.
Jenny turns to leave, then lunges back. That’s my only key, so wear it around your neck.
When Jenny walks away, she pulls my life force with her, like a tide. I should have a reason to walk briskly from point A to B like she does, like all the people outside do. But I bet they all had fathers. Fathers who taught them to change a tire and growled at their boyfriends and gave them away to their husbands named Brad who are child psychologists or school principals and make them bulgur pilaf on Sundays and drive them to the lake in summer and otherwise bask with them in their normal, normal lives.
The Scandinavian-looking couple touch hips
while one works the till and the other the espresso machine. The wife lets the husband go on about ideal brew time and doesn’t roll her eyes when he dumps an espresso because it took thirty-one seconds to pull rather than the desired twenty to thirty. She doesn’t joke that it’s better too long than premature. Perhaps I’ve not chosen the most fitting coffee shop to patronize after all.
It’s Monday, which means it’s Margarita Monday at Julio’s Barrio, and I am to meet Jenny here after work. I hope she won’t show up with Some of the Girls—her fellow office assistants with last-name first names like Mackenzie and Argyle who nibble at plain corn chips like field mice and don’t order guacamole but eye me desperately and mumble dieting mantras while I eat mine. They drink tequila straight up because it has fewer calories that way and, after half an hour’s passed, holler about Mike from accounting’s tight pants and that time Kennedy ass-fucked Paul from marketing with a green highlighter, mistakenly using Elmer’s rubber cement as lube, at the Legendary Office Christmas Party of 2019.
I’m under the Trump piñata, which is the most coveted seat in the joint. When a jumbo plate of nachos is ordered on Margarita Monday, the cooks play “The Mexican Hat Dance” and everyone bashes at Trump with replicas of fence posts from The Donald Trump Great Great Huge Wall of Mexico™ for the duration of the song. If there’s a breach in the papier-mâché, Donald spews gold-foiled chocolate coins, Cherry Bombers, canisters of orange spray-tan, nacho-grade tear gas, Nancy Pelosi action figures, faux squirrel skins, and pink toques for all. The last time I saw Trump burst was at Nik’s fortieth birthday party five months ago. I jabbed the bat between Donald’s eyes and tore at him down to his bullfrog chin. Nik tipped his head to the ceiling and I popped Cherry Bombers down his throat. Nik held me with all his fingers entwined around my waist, exposed his cherry-red teeth, and said, You are vicious and sublime. I told him he looked like a happy cannibal grabbing me so with his blood-red mouth. Any other time I would’ve bitten my tongue. He would’ve made some remark about a man’s necessity for flesh and was there no respite from the vegan police with me around. But that night he tightened his grip and bit my neck. He took me home and fucked me like every inch of my body was a welcome surprise, like my every unconventionality was beautiful simply because it was mine. Then we woke up and he was forty. And he was not Don Draper or Jason Seaver or even George Jetson. He pierced his failings with metal hooks and hung them from my limbs, and I became weighted and precarious with his discontent.