The Spectacular

by Zoe Whittall

  The vibe was definitely a funeral for our revolutionary youth. I don’t think I’d been fully drunk in years. I watched, daze-eyed, as a group of friends who’d grown up in this bar reminisced and caught up. A butch with a salt-and-pepper crewcut sat beside me. “This is Angus! Angus, Missy!” Finch yelled across the table, introducing us.

  “Hey,” they said, taking a sip of beer and nodding at me. Our thighs were touching. I didn’t want our thighs to ever not be touching. Back in the day, I would have considered this many drinks to be relative sobriety. I scanned the room: How did it just never occur to me that maybe I was queer? I contemplated what my life might look like if that were true. I was nervously peeling the label off a bottle in front of me, trying to think of something to say to Angus, when Agatha pulled me outside so she could smoke in secret.

  I grilled her about Angus—what’s their pronoun? (They/them.) Who were they into? (Femmes.) Were they single? (Sort of.) Should I ask to buy them a drink? (Bring them a whisky.)

  “I love it when you’re drunk and bi,” said Agatha, laughing.

  “That feels dismissive!”

  “Sorry, feel free to come out now. We’ve all been waiting.”

  “Like who?”

  “I don’t know, everyone in the band when you went to the bathroom today was like, is she finally going to realize she’s queer?”

  “Stop it! Really?”

  I sat with that for a minute, leaning against the brick, watching Agatha revel in the cigarette Finch was going to yell at her about later.

  When we went back inside, I went to the bar and bought Angus the whisky. My heart was pounding, I was feeling so enamoured by this new possibility, but when I got back to the booth, Angus was making out with the woman next to them, a femme with a tattoo of swans across her clavicle.

  The amount of rejection I felt in that moment was completely out of proportion. I’d just met Angus twenty minutes ago, but suddenly I felt old and awful. I drank the whisky myself and began to notice, as though a spotlight from the ceiling shone down, who was probably high on coke. That was what I wanted. It was what I always wanted if I had more than two drinks, which was why I rarely did. I needed to go home. But first I needed to pee, and the line to the bathroom was a mile long. I stumbled outside, thinking I’d just go in the alleyway. I was aiming for the ripped condom wrapper and pile of pebbles, but instead I peed down the side of my leg, my shoes, and the panties I’d tried to gracefully move aside. These are the things I used to be able to do when I was younger, but now not so much. I decided to just take my panties off, ball them up, and throw them in a dumpster.

  “Classy,” I heard a male voice say through the din of the music from the bar. A guy was smoking and leaning against the alley wall near the entrance. A skinny hipster in a plaid shirt with a beard, the kind of guy who drank craft beer and sought out yuppie hot dog restaurants, the very places that made it so this historic dyke bar couldn’t afford the rent anymore. Dick, I wanted to reply but wasn’t quite that drunk.

  “Yeah, yeah. Well, the trouble with dyke bars is if there’s only one bathroom, you always have to wait for chicks to stop fucking in it to piss,” I said.

  He shrugged, took another drag.

  Whatever, asshole. He was standing in the middle of the alley now, making it so I had to walk around him to get back to the bar entrance. When he saw my face, his eyes lit up. I was not in the mood for this kind of shit today. And he was grinning, which only irritated me more.

  “Missy Alamo. You don’t remember me, do you?”

  I regarded him a bit closer. I definitely had never seen this dude before. If I asked Bass player or sound tech? I’d probably have a good chance of being right on one of the two. He was too skinny to be a drummer. He looked way too young to have been on the road with me sixteen years ago.

  “No, sorry. I don’t remember,” I said, as I moved to go around him in a slow, purposeful, don’t-fuck-with-me walk.

  “We hung around one summer during the Lollapalooza era,” he said.

  “Yeah, I hung around a lot of dudes during that time.” I laughed, taking a bottle of sanitizer out of my purse and cleaning off my hands and leg.

  He gave me a curious look.

  “Damn, I thought I’d be memorable,” he said. He shook his head, then dropped his cigarette quickly and stubbed it out as a tall woman in high boots approached him. Her thighs were covered in flower tattoos, someone I’d seen at Agatha’s parties sometimes but I couldn’t remember her name. Chelsea. Courtney. Coral. None of those.

  “Where the fuck have you been?! You know the babysitter needs to be home by eleven,” she said, giving me the side-eye and walking away briskly.

  “Sorry, babe,” he said, rushing to catch up with her. I watched them walk up the street, both somewhat stumbling, voices rising in a fight. One of those dumb married fights I wouldn’t have to worry about anymore but in that moment almost missed.

  I called an Uber and left. My driver was cute and laid it on thick from the moment I got in the car. “You’re really pretty,” he said. “Sorry, I don’t mean to be creepy. I’m not a creep!”

  He began flirting in a not entirely awful way, but definitely a persistent bro kind of way. I’d forgotten what it was like to wear a barely-there dress out at night. He was a guy I would have affectionately called a “pounder” back in the day.

  “Want to have a drink with me?”

  “I’m going home, no thanks.” I crossed my arms over my chest, and looked out the window.

  “Come on. One drink . . .”

  I would normally have cut him off curtly, told him I was married. But tonight, buoyed by my depression and the whisky, I leaned toward him between the two front seats and caressed the slight stubble on his young face and said, “Oh honey. I’m too old for you.”

  “I’m not that young! I’m twenty-six. I’ve got stamina and you’re an angel,” he said.

  I thought about when I was young, and how I was so capable of transactional sex. It felt freeing, didn’t it? I couldn’t really remember. It wasn’t a feeling you could always get to when sober. But I saw the way the next few minutes would unfold, maybe straddling this guy in the parking lot down the street, my ass bumping against the steering wheel, the shiver of terrifying possibility that he could reach up and choke me to death. As I contemplated taking him up on the offer, a part of me knew it was so reckless, possibly suicidal. Maybe that was the gift of this loneliness.

  I was the kind of sort-of drunk that turned my depression into an ache in my chest, something that could go from vaguely self-destructive, like trying to find drugs or texting Navid, to something benign, like really, really wanting pizza.

  The driver put on a slow jam and upped the volume, glancing at me in the rear-view mirror. The song reminded me of high school, when I would daydream about being the kind of girl men would sing to.

  He was really handsome. We had some more banter, and I texted Agatha his name and Uber info in case I wasn’t heard from again.

  When we got to my house, I invited him in. I handed him a beer, but I really didn’t want to prolong any conversation. He didn’t need much persuading. This was the moment I used to excel at, would flip a guy on his back, put my tits in his face, and get a condom out of my purse in ten seconds. But in this moment, a whisky-and-desperation-soaked moment, I realized I was being given an opportunity on my own living room sofa. Had God or whoever sent a virile, handsome young man to knock me up? A careless, dangerous chance, but also one that could work out. I was debating all the possibilities as he pumped into me roughly. Would he stop before he came? He was staring at my pussy, getting off on watching, mumbling, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Maybe he was young enough I could whisper something so filthy that he’d come before thinking about it.

  “You . . . on . . . the pill?”

  I closed my eyes and nodded.

  “Yeah, come inside me.”

  He looked shocked, then really, really psyched. I felt him get even harder, start
pumping faster.

  Though the lead-in could have been something from an erotic, true-stories website, the sex was not as hot as I anticipated. I thought at least the novelty of a stranger would bring something to the table, but the thrill wasn’t there. The thought of my thighs pressed against Angus in the bar felt more electric than this. It felt vaguely good, but it wasn’t that desperate attraction that really gets me there. Perhaps it was the guilt that I’d just lied to him and crossed a serious ethical line. There was that.

  Or maybe I was a bit broken. Maybe I hadn’t waited long enough, mourned, grieved Navid.

  Why did lust happen so quickly for him?

  When the guy left, I watched his car retreat down the block through my front window. I dead-bolted the door and I got in the shower. I could not believe I just did that. I started to cry. Clearly I could not just casually drink, or fuck, the same way I used to.

  I called Agatha the next morning. She was in bed nursing a hangover, while Finch had taken their daughter, Emily, to a singalong class.

  “Wait, tell me the story again,” she said. “Because I think I heard you wrong. I think you just told me that you fucked your barely legal Uber driver without a condom in your own home. Are you fucking insane? When I got that text from you last night, I thought it was a joke.”

  “You would have literally high-fived me ten years ago.”

  “I know, but you’re in a vulnerable place right now.”

  “You sent me a text last week that said I needed to go get some strange dick.”

  “Yes, but not Uber dick!”

  “This is a class thing!” I said. “You think it’s weird I fucked my Uber driver, and not some fucking tech guy. If we were in our twenties now we’d probably be Uber drivers.”

  “And you didn’t use a condom, Missy. Like, seriously? What about STIs? Birth control? Because shrivelled as they may be, I believe we still have viable eggs. What if he got you pregnant?”

  I could be pregnant. I. Could. Be. Pregnant.

  “Do you really think I could be pregnant?” I said. I didn’t tell her that was the whole reason I didn’t insist on a condom in the first place.

  “Missy! C’mon, be serious. No, probably not. It’s pretty hard to get pregnant at our age. Maybe if you’d had some marathon sex session for like, two days you’d have a shot, but I don’t think the Uber bang would do it. But Missy . . .”

  “Yeah,” I said, absently, still stuck on the Could. Be. Pregnant.

  “You need to get out there and meet people you want to date.”

  For the rest of the day, I couldn’t stop thinking I could be pregnant. I looked at my cycle app, and it had been the day before ovulation, so it was possible. I called the doctor and booked an appointment to get an STI check. I went to the gym, did some stretches in the mirror, tried to imagine my midsection swelling. I went to Whole Foods and bought a bunch of vitamins, a big smoothie, some kale. I was going to make this happen, I was thrilled, this could happen. It just made sense that all of it—Navid cheating, our separation, Agatha’s new band, the night at the bar—had happened so that I could have this baby. I was throwing myself on the mercy of the universe.

  Chapter 6

  carola

  i was doing a volunteer shift at the centre’s front desk when the doctor called. I couldn’t hear him very well because there was an a cappella workshop happening in the auditorium and they were very spirited. “Your mammogram results were inconclusive and we’re not sure why. We will have to do some follow-up testing.”

  Sing out! Sing out loud, the spirit within you! the group sang.

  “All right, then,” I said, thinking it was a rare thing when Western medicine practitioners admit they don’t know something. And in this case, it didn’t seem good.

  “Are you free tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow?” It had taken months to get the original appointment, and then I had nearly forgotten to go to it. I didn’t think it was necessary anyway, but when Larry found the lump he made me promise to get it checked out. I was fairly certain it was just a cyst, an aging thing. I’d had a benign one before. No use getting all worked up.

  “Yes, I hope it’s okay. I’ve arranged for you to have all the follow-up tests right away. Time is of the essence.”

  I wrote down the time and location, but wasn’t sure if I would tell Larry. Why worry him?

  After my shift, I walked the dogs up the mountain and around the pond, letting them run off the morning they’d spent cooped up in the house. I met so many breast cancer survivors in my workshops. Of all the types of people who frequented the week-long joy retreats, they were the ones who often had something to teach me, about the weight of time, about truly being present. While the dogs ran, I did a series of stretches and then lunges across one field and back. I did the plank pose for as long as I could, until the dogs came and tried to crawl under me. Eventually I relaxed into a dog-pile cuddle, staring up at the sky while they licked my face.

  I’d been eating organic and restricting sugar for decades. I took an immune-boosting supplement every day, drank turmeric tea in the afternoons, and took a spoonful of apple cider vinegar every evening after supper. When I told people my age, they often didn’t believe me. I walked the fundraising 10K for the centre almost every year. I ticked off this inventory of my behaviours all the way home. Usually people got cancer and then changed their diets and routines to be more like mine. How could I possibly be the one to get sick?

  I took the anti-inflammatory cookbook from the bookshelf and made us a soup for dinner. I decided to tell Larry about the tests after he grimaced from one spoonful, getting up to make himself some baked beans on toast.

  “These tests, they’re inconclusive all the time,” Larry said. “The ultrasound technology, for example, the machines have gotten so much more sophisticated but the way the doctors read them hasn’t changed. Sometimes they aren’t sure what they’re seeing. Likely the same for mammograms.” I smiled at him gratefully. Larry’s encyclopedic knowledge of nearly everything scientific was reassuring.

  “And whatever happens, we’ll be fine. I’m right here.”

  I sipped my soup and changed the subject.

  Before I went to the follow-up tests at the hospital in Concord it was as though my nervous system kicked in and did not allow me to feel anxiety. I slept through the night, woke to Rufus making one-pawed cat biscuits on my back and purring. He held oddly consistent eye contact with me as I scratched his ears, listening to Larry putting wood on the fire below. I was going to be fine. Larry offered to drive me, but I waved his concern away. Perhaps I’d do some shopping afterwards.

  When I arrived at the lab, I produced my forms for the receptionist, offering chipper small talk, but once I shed my street clothes and hiking boots, trying to fit them into a tiny locker while wearing a humbling blue paper gown, I could hear my heartbeat in my ear. Then I was tapping my fingers against a magazine, unable to take in the text of an article about menopause. The tests were numerous. The doctor was clearly concerned. I had a full MRI and so much blood taken I wasn’t sure they’d left me enough to live on. I sat in the car afterwards, picking through the stale trail mix I’d left in the glove compartment, sipping from my Thermos of lemon water. I nearly choked on a lemon seed and wished I didn’t have to drive myself home.

  A few days later, I was in the garden harvesting some of the earliest carrots and radishes when the house phone rang. And then my cell. And the house phone again.

  “We’ve caught it early,” said my GP. “You’ll need a minimally invasive surgery, then just four weeks or so of chemotherapy. I’m referring you to an oncologist, she’s fantastic.”

  I wrote down everything, feeling strangely detached.

  “You’re in great shape, you’re only fifty-nine, still young. You can beat this, Carola,” he said.

  I wondered how many times a day he said this kind of thing and how often it was true.

  Larry was off with the dogs. I wasn’t sure what to do. I
dialled Tegan’s number but hung up before it rang. I started a text to her, and then erased it. I went and took the rifle down, loaded it, and lined up all the wine bottles I’d been saving to take into town, took a few shots but missed.

  It had been so long since my life truly involved other people in an intimate way. It was Larry and me on a raft with our dogs and cats and bears, and my work life involved so many other people that I couldn’t imagine doing that much socializing when I got home. But Larry wasn’t going to be enough right now, with this news.

  I put the rifle strap around my shoulder and went back inside, being careful to pick up Rufus when I opened the door only slightly. He’d been dying to go outside again but it was too dangerous. It was cruel in a way, to keep him in this tiny space, but I couldn’t imagine him being truly safe outside these days. I gave him a cuddle, which he squirmed against, scratching my arm and running off.

  I pressed a cold cloth to my bleeding skin, cradled the landline, and called Missy.

  It felt like a first step toward . . . well, something. I didn’t want to ask her for anything. And this felt like, perhaps, a way of carving out an opening.

  When I dialled her number, I expected to get her voice mail, but she picked up on the second ring. We exchanged the usual pleasantries about my garden and she told me that Agatha had recruited her for a new all-female band.

  “That’s wonderful!” I said. “I’m so happy to hear you’ll be playing again with a group. And how extraordinary to be in an all-female ensemble.”

  “It’s not really an ensemble, Mom. It’s a punk band.”

  “Yes, but still.”

  “So, what’s new with you? How’s Larry?”

  “Larry’s fine. Things have been . . . well, you know I went to Chris’s funeral and caught up with Tegan.”

  “How are they all doing?” Missy asked.

  “Sad,” I said. “But it was good to celebrate Chris’s life together. You know I saw your dad there—”

  “You did? I thought he might be there. How did that go?”