by The Journey Prize Stories 32- The Best of Canada's New Writers (retail) (epub)
Jenny won’t be here for another hour, and my only entertainment is a window to Whyte Avenue. There’s a girl with turquoise hair outside. It’s short and juts from her scalp in felted clusters. She’s painted her eyes glimmery peach all around. It brings out the red in her eyeballs, makes her look like a lab bunny—but in a good way. She’s with this guy with a kempt beard and dark toque wearing coveralls ironically. Honestly, show me a clean-shaven man without a lid and I’ll cream my panties. His jaw waggles and he slices the air between them, fingers stitched together like patronizing soldiers as he mansplains Tarkovsky’s use of recurrent imagery or perhaps why he believes her DivaCup is more harmful to the environment than tampons. That annoying voice in my head asks why I assume all men are dicks. Maybe he’s pinpointing his areas of vulnerability with those shark-fin fingers.
I’m on my third margarita and Donald’s looking more and more like a constipated orangutan swaying above my head when Jenny’s giggle wafts in. She’s accompanied by a pant-suited posse clicking toward me in five-inch heels. Argyle, Quinn, Emerson, and some dude. They’re all huddled, faces in, sweeping the bar like a tornado. I duck and run, tell the host they’ll cover my bill, and escape out the back door. Quinn is the youngest OA at Jenny’s work, fresh out of secretary school—an institution I thought had died with second-wave feminism. She’s always touching my clothes and telling me how “retro” I look. Last time Jenny brought her out, Quinn told me she hopes she looks as good as me when she’s old.
It’s November freezing outside. Head in the refrigerator cold. Not the best day to leave the house—for good—in a jean jacket and macramé scarf. The Edmontonians are huddled into their collars like frigid turtles, unaware of one another, not yet over October’s on-again off-again above-zero seductions, holding out for one more hit before December. I look for Nik’s slick of black hair tucked into a pilling green wool overcoat, the slowly unravelling scarf I knitted but never finished for him on the seventh anniversary of my landing on his doorstep. The seventh is wool. He’s not on the street. He’s not inside his coffee shop. I press my face into the glass and wish for his presence. My dad died, I want to yell at him, and here you are. I want him to be as awful as I imagine him to be. To live up to my fear he won’t return home at the end of each day. Because the alternative—the stripping off layers of yourself and feeding them to another like slices of prosciutto—feels infinitely more dangerous than solitude.
My tiny bladder leads me to tug at the coffee shop’s door, but they’re closed for the night and the little Groke mopping the floor inside only shrugs at me. At Jenny’s place, I pee and try a few of her prescription drugs. I spend far too much time searching for her son’s diary. He’s normally home when I visit—a greasy toad crumpled into his gaming remote on Jenny’s plaid vintage recliner. Jenny uses the word vintage to describe anything she found on the side of the road. How could I not take this opportunity to venture into his bedroom? This room’s brand of funk is a mixture of rancid butter, rotten eggs, and cloves. Cloves? No, mould. There is no diary to be found, but atop a pile of dirty track pants is a Captain’s Log-style notebook that deciphers butt days from abs days. He must be like Nik, with a little man inside his head who remembers everything perfectly, as it happened, including every feeling he did not feel. Under Jenny’s son’s mattress next to the obligatory crusty sock is a stash of Hustler mags from the seventies he must’ve inherited from his on-again off-again father. I haven’t passed anything down to my daughter, other than the mole under my left armpit, and neither of us knows what to do with that. We exist on different planets. If only we could gawk at a nice set of jugs and make magazines sticky together. What if she thinks of me the way I thought of my mother? What if my mother thought of me the way I think of my daughter? I take the Hustlers to the bathroom, run a bath, and mix in all of Jenny’s bubble flavours, from Sugar Plum Fairy to Grandma’s Rose Garden. I spend quite some time practising the Hustler ladies’ frog-legged, archy-backed, under the nipple boob-cupping, jaw-dropped, bottom-half-of-two-front-teeth-exposed poses in the bathroom mirror. I trim my pubes accordingly with Jenny’s bang scissors. I lie in the bath, make bubble arm rests and pretend I’m Dr. Claw. I make bubble clouds and play Care Bears with Jenny’s scrappy bits of soap. I lie very still and soak up all the hot until it’s gone, then add more, and repeat and repeat. It’s been so long since I’ve become pruney in the bath.
When I hear Jenny’s drunken soft-whispered drawl and a low voice enter the apartment, the most important thing to take care of before I’m discovered seems to be wiping my stray hairs off her scissors, the bathroom floor, the toilet seat. Jenny puts on her Beach House playlist, which means she’s in for some serious panties-on couch action. If it was a panties-off night, she’d go for something less morose-’n-dreamy and more sexy-fun, like a few of Grimes’s higher-pitched, breathy numbers on repeat. I think I’ll be safe here in the bathroom, corpselike in the tub, until Jenny and dude finish pressing hard parts against soft parts and grabbing at the bits of each other’s bare skin that become exposed during said pressing. Until he says, I should go, and she says, Yeah, you should, and then bites his bottom lip one more time, and he says, Jeeeenny, in that you-naughty-naughty-girl voice.
We always think we’re safe, don’t we, until somebody needs to pee.
Jenny stumbles into the bathroom, twirls against the toilet, grabs the tub edge, then makes eye contact with me through the foam. Jesus, Sara, she says, then she covers her mouth and spurt-laughs into her hand. She takes off her bra and panties, which was all she had on, and climbs in with me.
What about the dude? I whisper.
He can wait.
Is it the married guy?
Jenny nods.
Is he married?
Jenny nods and adds, But unhappily.
Who isn’t?
Jenny holds my jaw with both of her hands and stares into my eyes. Are you okay?
I took some pills. I hold Jenny’s wrists and say, I’m so good.
My antibiotics? You’re hilarious.
I press my face into her chest, but the top part, so my chin rests on her boob. Men must like women who have actual boobs, I say.
I love your little bee stings. Jenny rubs a thumb over one of my nipples. I part my lips into her skin. It tastes like buttered flowers. Would it be so difficult for Nik to moisturize?
Didn’t you need to pee? I ask.
Already did.
I thought it got warmer.
Why’d you run out of the bar?
I don’t know. Your work friends.
Jenny’s hand is on my waist now, and she squeezes me like she’s ripping apart a baguette. He won’t fuck me, she says.
The wife?
If his penis doesn’t cheat, he doesn’t cheat.
I slide into Jenny and wrap my legs around her waist easy and slippy under the water. She licks my throat and I grab her ribs, each finger finds a little gap to fit into. I tilt my pelvis into her. Jenny grabs my bum and pulls me close. I bite her neck and cup one of her boobs. It feels weird to hold a boob from this side of things. Jenny runs two fingers between my bum cheeks. I press myself in and away from her soft belly and suck and suck at her neck. She mewls like a kitten, but a bit too loud. Is she here to score girl-on-girl sexy points with Married Dude?
Jenny? Is someone there? he says, and I hear the squeak of the vintage recliner.
All good, she yells. Be right out.
We should be together, I say.
We’d drive each other crazy, Jenny says.
I guess. You’re so self-centred.
You’re so high maintenance.
I curl my back away from Jenny and wrap myself into a ball. Really?
You think everyone’s out to hurt you.
Everyone does hurt me.
You get so close. Jenny rests her elbow on the tub edge and laces her fingers together. Yo
u feel betrayed if I change my hair without you.
That one time, I say. I wanted pink hair too.
I take a deep breath and blow a canyon into my bubbles. I tell Jenny, I thought my dad would come back and save me some day. But this is my life.
Maybe he only lost a foot at sea. Maybe he’s a pirate.
He used to call me Jellybean. But the day he left, Sara. I should’ve stopped him.
He would’ve left some other day.
Nik hasn’t spoken my name in months.
He would’ve left by now.
He has these baristas.
At least he’s not—Jenny wags her thumb toward the bathroom door. He probably thinks I’m massively constipated.
Blame your period.
Jenny wraps herself in a towel and goes out like that, leaving her bra and panties like snotty tissues under a sick bed. I hear her say goodnight to Married Dude. I hear her say she likes spending time with him and I hear him say, This was fun. I hear him tell her she’s cute and sexy, but he never says beautiful. I hear him tell her to take good care and to keep in touch and then I hear Jenny’s door close. I hear Jenny repeat, slow and soft, Keep. In. Touch. I leave the bathroom wrapped in a towel of my own. I lean into her from the back, skin to skin, terry to terry. I rest my lips on her shoulder and hold her hand.
Jenny and I sleep in her bed with our underwear on. She twists around me and falls asleep squeezing me like I don’t require oxygen. Nik in bed behind me is long and lean and elastic, like a whisk. I miss his fingers between my thighs and the smell of his bedtime breath. Toothpaste mint overcome by pruney mouth. I will return home for breakfast tomorrow. I’ll sit between my daughter and Nik at the kitchen table. My daughter will say, Where’d you come from? and Nik will put a bagel in the toaster for me without asking where I was, without saying anything. I’ll wait for the right time to tell him about my dad, like that night, during a commercial break when the Oilers have just scored, as Nik rides their momentum, able to morph elation into sympathy. He’ll look into my eyes and tell me he’s sorry. And not only for the loss of my dad. Nik will be sorry for every time I’ve lost him—to his insular worries, to his misplaced ambition, to all the twenty-five-year-old girls he’s wanted to absorb his shame. I’ll look him back in the eye and I’ll thank him. And I will be thankful for his sympathy and his remorse, but most of all for the beat he waits, once the Oilers are back on the ice, before reverting his eyes to the TV.
DAVID HUEBERT
CHEMICAL VALLEY
I kneel down and reach for the nearest bird, hydraulics buzzing in my teeth and knees. The pigeon doesn’t flinch or blink. No blood. No burn-smell. Sal’s there in seconds, his face a blear of night-shift grog. He rubs his bigger eye, squats by the carcasses. Behind him the river wends and glimmers, slicks through the glare of sixty-two refineries.
Sal thumbs his coverall pockets. “Poison, you figure?”
“Leak maybe.”
Suzy appears next to Sal, seeping chew-spit into her Coke can. She leans over and takes a pigeon in her Kevlared paw. Brings it to her face. “Freaky,” she says, bottom lip bulging. “Eyes still open.” She wiggles her rat-face into a grin, a frond of tobacco wagging in her bottom teeth.
I can’t afford to say it: “Saving that for later?”
Suzy flares: “What?”
“The chew.”
Suzy puts a hand over her mouth, speaks with taut lips: “Enough of your guff.”
I snort. “Guff?”
She sets the bird down, hitches her coveralls. Lips closed, she tongues the tobacco loose and swallows. “Clean ’em up,” she says, nodding at the pigeons. She spins and walks away, a slurry of chew-spit mapping her path across the unit.
What you might find, if you were handling a dead pigeon, is something unexpected in the glassy cosmos of its eye: a dark beauty, a molten alchemy. You might find a pigeon’s iris looks how you imagine the Earth’s core—pebble-glass waves of crimson, a perfect still shudder of rose and lilac. What you might do, if you were placing a dead pigeon into the incinerator, is take off your Kevlar glove and touch your bare index finger to its cornea. What you might do before dropping the bird into a white-hot Mordor of carbon and coke is touch your fingertip to that unblinking membrane and hold it there, feeling a mangle of tenderness and violation, thinking this may be the loveliest secret you have ever touched.
I’m telling Eileen how I want to be buried, namely inside a tree. We’re sitting in bed eating Thai from the mall and listening to the 6 p.m. construction outside our window—the city tearing up the whole street along with tree roots and a rusted tangle of lead pipes—and I’m telling Eileen it’s called a biodegradable burial pod. Mouth full of cashew curry and I’m saying what they do is put your remains in this egg-looking thing like the xenomorph’s cocoon from Alien: Resurrection but it’s made of biodegradable plastic. I’m telling Eileen it’s called “capsula mundi” and what they do is hitch the remains to a semi-mature tree and plant the whole package. Stuff you down in fetal position and let you gradually decay until you become nitrogen, seep into soil.
Chewing panang, Eileen asks where I got the idea about the burial pod and I tell her Facebook or maybe an email newsletter. “You click on that shit? Why are you even thinking about this now? You just turned thirty-four.”
I don’t tell her about the basement, about Mum. I don’t tell her about the pigeons strewn out on the concrete and then going supernova in the incinerator and it gets you thinking about flesh, about bodies, about waste. I don’t tell her about Blane, the twenty-nine-year-old long-distance runner who got a heart attack sitting at the panel in the Alkylation unit. Blane didn’t die but he did have to get surgery and a pacemaker and that sort of thing gets you thinking. Which is how you end up lying in bed at night checking your pulse and feeling like your chest is shrinking and thinking about the margin of irregular and erratic.
Picking a bamboo shoot from her teeth: “Since when are you into trees?”
She says it smug. She says it like Ms. University Sciences and nobody else is allowed to like trees. I don’t tell her how we’re all compost and yes I read that on a Facebook link. I also do not tell her about the article’s tagline: “Your carbon footprint doesn’t end in the grave.” Reaching for the pad thai, I tell her about the balance, how it’s only natural. How the human body’s rich in nitrogen, how when you use a coffin there’s a lot of waste because the body just rots on its own when it could be giving nutrients to the system. Not to mention all the metals and treated woods in coffins. I tell her how the idea is to phase out traditional graveyards entirely, replace them with grave-forests.
“Hmm,” Eileen says, gazing out the window—the sky a caramelized rose. “Is this a guilt thing, from working at the plants?”
I tell her no, maybe, I don’t know. An excavator hisses its load into the earth.
“Is this why you were so weird about your mother’s funeral?”
I ask what she means and she says never mind, sorry.
“Do you ever imagine they’re ducks?”
Eileen asks what and I tell her the loaders and the bulldozers and the cranes. Sometimes I imagine they’re wildlife, ducks or geese. And maybe why they’re crying like that is because they’re in distress. Like maybe they’ve lost their eggs and all they want is to get them back and when you think about it like that it’s still bad but at least it’s not just machines screaming and blaring because they’re tearing up old sidewalks to put new ones down.
“Ducks,” Eileen says. “Probably still be one working for every three scratching their guts for overtime pay.”
She stacks the containers and reaches for the vaporizer on the nightstand, asking if I love trees so much why didn’t I become a landscaper or a botanist or an arborist. I shrug, not mentioning the debt or the mortgage or the pharmaceutical bills. Not mentioning that if I wanted to do something it would be the co
mics store but there’s no market in Sarnia anyway.
I tell her it’s probably too late for a career change.
“No,” she coos, pinching my chin the way I secretly loathe. She smiles her sweet stoned smile, a wisp of non-smoke snaking through her molars. “You could do anything. You could be so much.” Eileen lies down on her back on the bed, telling the ceiling I could be so much and the worst part is she means it. The worst and the best all coiled together as I reach out and thumb the curry sauce from her chin.
Eileen tells me she needs the bathroom so I help her out of bed and into her chair. I stand outside the bathroom door listening to the faucet’s gentle gush and thinking about later, when Eileen falls asleep and I drift down to the basement, to Mum.
In 1971 the Trudeau government issued a ten-dollar bill picturing Sarnia’s Chemical Valley as a paean to Canadian progress. Inked in regal purple, the buildings rise up space-aged and triumphant, a Jetsons wet dream. Towers slink up to the sky and cloudlike drums pepper the ground, a suspended rail line curling through the scene. Smokestacks and ladders and tanks and tubs. Glimmering steel and perfect concrete, a shimmering fairy city, and the strange thing is that what you don’t see is oil, what you never see is oil. The other strange thing is that this is how Sarnia used to be seen, that not so long ago the plants were shiny and dazzling and now they’re rusty with paint peeling off the drums and poor safety and regular leaks and weeds all over, stitching concrete seams.