Darkness Then a Blown Kiss

by Golda Fried

  James was doing most of the talking about how he was a big fan of Delt.

  Delt touched my arm again. Grabbed on to it, “Please, you’ll come back to see the show . . .”

  James’ flat was on top of a closed bar that you had to walk through to get to the place. James said looking Alley’s way that he could take a beer if he wanted to and the bar owner wouldn’t say anything. It made it seem that he had planned the stairs to curve around and up too, and we just tumbled into his living room. Delt saying all right as if all we had to do was fill up a dark place.

  It was cold and James was talking about the summer. He said he knew Delt since a picnic in the summer. Delt said, “It had been the summer of love truly” while James went to get the chocolate cake from his freezer and four spoons. James’ place was an icebox even after he stuck in the small heater that turned all our faces orange.

  There were two couches.

  There were signs that this was supposed to be some sort of double date.

  We were mostly on the floor. We were digging into the chocolate cake. I was trying to make it last on my tongue. I was trying to fill time and not feel all panicky ’til something substantial happened.

  Alley and James started to link fingers swirling them like birds.

  Delt knew about Wrek. I had dropped his name a bunch of times on the way over. Delt said right out that he was disappointed.

  I moved Delt closer to block Alley and James out when they started kissing but you couldn’t block out that air around them that looked like it was vacuuming up their hair.

  James asked Alley, “You want to help me find a CD to put on?” and like that James and Alley left with the door closing. James left his cigarette smouldering in the ashtray.

  The cigarette had rings in the paper going all the way up.

  Delt and I smiled at each other like two people alone waiting for the bus in the same shelter.

  James came back and took the heater, sort of shrugging to make up for it.

  I saw a book jutting out from under the couch and asked Delt to read to me. He kept getting up for various things, sitting back an inch closer.

  “I feel about twelve,” I said as he turned a page.

  James burst in, in his wino overcoat: “Do you want anything from the store?”

  Delt asked what James was getting, pulling a shadow off me.

  “Cigarettes,” James said.

  “Can you get me something to eat?”

  Delt came back and I hadn’t moved my fetal position on the floor, the shopping bag my pillow. Delt picked up the book again. His voice was drying up, already rough from singing earlier but he kept reading.

  Trying to jam with Wrek didn’t work cuz he was skilled and didn’t want to be the teacher and somehow inside of me it’s instilled that if I’m not constantly learning I’m wasting my time. I’ll sing and wonder why he doesn’t crave the sound of my voice and drag me out of bed to sing. And then I’ll be in the shower and he’ll come in and he’ll lean against the sink and play guitar for a bit just to hang out with my thoughts soaking in the water and dribbling down the drain and his thoughts hanging in the bathroom mist.

  Delt had left home in the spring and didn’t want to go back without making it. He was talking about lyrics, how everyone in the bar was probably just looking at each other during his songs thinking about making it with each other. The cigarette in the ashtray went out and he said, “In the parts that I was screaming, I was really screaming.”

  James howled up from the outside for Delt to come and open the door. Alley slipped into the living room quickly wrapped up only in a blanket and asked if I was going to be okay because she might not be able to hear me scream if Delt kept coming on to me.

  “Delt’s okay,” I said.

  Alley was like a disco ball over my head. I would get to see things illuminated on the ground that I would never have seen. She was looking out the window saying, “We have to take more trips like this.” Saying ‘this’ like it was spooned out of a dish. Then tiptoeing back.

  Delt walked back in saying James had forgotten food.

  Finally, the last door closed and everything Delt and I had said to each other was falling down long staircases.

  Delt had lugged his amp all the way from the bar, all the way up each stair. He had to get up at six to go clean houses. His open bag on the floor near Alley’s shopping bag has rubber gloves inside.

  I am wearing those rubber gloves to feel the words he said before. The words are orange heat over here around his sleeping body.

  you better come on

  Dix is checking out beef jerky but only for a second before four of them are in his silver metal basket. His eyebrows go up as he stares at jars. I feel like pocketing those eyebrows.

  He’s still looking at jars, so I bump into him with my freshly coffee-stained jacket. Got coffee all over it when the Greyhound ran into a squirrel.

  “What else can I do about dinner?” he mumbles. He picks out some Nachos and a jar of cheese dip.

  “You are such a bachelor, aren’t you?” I say. I break open a cinnamon gum packet not being able to wait. Tossing it into his metal basket. There is only one aisle in this crowed store and it leads to a steaming-ice refrigerator.

  “Well, I’ll tell you something about singing,” he says heading for the cash. “If you’re going to be a singer, singers need that extra fat around their vocal cords. Think of it, can you think of a good singer that isn’t fat?”

  I nearly swallow my gum in a laugh thinking of girly singers with tambourine hair, but then I realize he’s talking about blues singers.

  Dix has done all these computer-work jobs and tossed it all out the window when his girlfriend left him. He is staying at his friend’s flat, my friend’s flat, and together in the living room they have seven guitars. When you pull back the curtains in that living room you can see a garden of stones that they’ve never set foot in. I said I wouldn’t be a lot of trouble. I just lie down between two amps sideways. They keep drinking and smoking, this intricate continuous movement of fingers that remind me of my eyelashes watching them, Dix with a winter hat balanced on top of his head and our friend playing songs like “Sister Ray.” Dix starts singing when our friend laves the room to crash: “You better come on in my kitchen, because it’s sure to be raining outside.” I pretend I am asleep but I’m not.

  I wake up at three in the afternoon, bits of pain on my exposed skin. Dix stumbles into room, when I’d just started to tinker on the guitar. He walks right by. Goes for the refrigerator. And there’s that tinkling sound of glass touching.

  I look at my skin and realize I’ve been bitten by bottle caps. The one on my neck might even look like a hickey.

  Dix never shows his teeth. He just sits there on the curb outside the store smiling, waiting for me to say something. I instantly feel like I need some coffee.

  I grab the Nachos bag, teeth it open and start eating.

  “Can I have one?” he says, always soft-spoken.

  When he takes over the Nachos bag, my knees are up just knocking each other and I notice I even have stains on my socks.

  “I’m just going to stay one or two more days, that’s it,” I say, thumbing an eyebrow.

  “Well, my friend doesn’t care,” he says still smiling, always smiling.

  Dix’s friend, my friend, you can tell he’s a real rock guitarist. Bangs out power chords. Tells about his old band where his ex-girlfriend was the singer with very big hair. But Dix is a one-man show. He picks all over the neck slowly drawing you in. Sings softly. Leans back in the chair. Says he made some kind of wish by a gravestone about being able to play guitar well and now he can play well and is terrified about what it all means.

  This afternoon I sabotaged his plans for job-hunting. I said he had to take me around. He looked at me smiling like he got some joke and asked if I wanted a cigarette, a beer maybe, very politely. The top of the living-room table was a real picnic. About seven ashtrays. He wasn’t ev
en thinking of playing one of the guitars, it drove me mad.

  I have this small notebook I keep in my fanny pack. I take it out and show Dix when he shows me his little black book of his own possible lyrics. We don’t read each other’s lyrics of course. But I like that line he sang earlier. The Robert Johnson one. What was it? He says it word by word slowly.

  “I’m making an appointment with you now, that in ten years, I’ll have figured out the song and I’ll come and find and I’ll play it for you.”

  “You’ll be playing it at my grave,” he says just like that. But he’s linking arms with me now and walking out the door.

  Dix finishes the last Nacho and is still hungry. He wants to go to a diner for some more food.

  Dix is on his tenth life.

  He looks at me and says, “Your jacket smells like rain.”

  “It’s coffee,” I say with swelling vocal cords.

  Diners are the land of newspapers. They’re splattered on all the tabletops like minefields.

  He picks up a newspaper right away and starts reading.

  It is freezing in here. I look at my stained jacket, I look at the clock on the wall, I look at him reading.

  Writing now would be like clawing out of his guitar case.

  (with love to Joel Caspar Dix 1968–1997)

  like orange juice left out in the sun

  splash and glass of orange juice on my face and clothes. I’m drowning in sun again. little girls tossed on a field. try to look statue. opps sorry, Geal said, making those laughing sounds. it was always the same eee ee sounds they made whenever I walked near their circles.

  when we played duck duck duck goose they stepped on my hands.

  at sunset we had to go to bed. I got the bunk bed by the door where the mosquitoes joined the game to suck my blood. in the morning, sometimes I’d wake my eyelids puffed and see them look confirmed I was a mutant. my hands working anyway reaching out spidering bare shelf, no Ray-ban sunglasses like all the other girls.

  that was the first summer.

  when it came round to June, there was no discussion –

  the sunshine and swimming and the canoeing were the best thing any girl could ask for. now finish your orange juice.

  throughout the years, and there were seven, I was soaked with the image of endless fields and how I had to walk through them alone and how sometimes I had to walk through them alone and how sometimes I had to fall down after only a few steps and sob it out. it circles into dreams even now.

  I’ve got a high of the green fields and it’s centuries ago. I’m wearing a white diaphanous dress that someone made me wear and it’s got its own arms moving. The windowpane is round and is my only view of green everywhere. it’s coming out of the earth and is my only cool. I know it will not last. I can hear the heavy footsteps on the stair-case so very down below.

  My mom would come in and wake me up for school by throwing iron-pressed outfits on my face, then complain that I wasn’t getting up.

  My dad, he’d slip in later when I was already sun-drenched with exhaustion. He’d fumble with the open curtains a bit saying, All the world’s a stage and you have to dress the part.

  So when my dad asked me, what about this Wane character? Is he another one of your yahoos? I told myself, Now I’ve managed not to go back to camp since I was fourteen, but think, a summer that doesn’t start with summer school or slave jobs either, as I mouthed the words “responsible” and “loving”.

  Wane and I were driving down the highway behind our shades. The day I told him everything, Wane’s eyes were ice cubes trying not melt. He said, We’re going to do it anyway and he went out and got a van with a tear-drop window and a tool box.

  Wane hadn’t slept in nights and was practically keeling over the wheel. Look what you have done to me.

  My parents’ Happy June kisses farther and farther away.

  Trace had given us coffee and cigarette kisses. Her old words felt like shingles now. She used to tell us, Think of words like small treasures, like clams and take words like a word, like just all words, the colour of words, the sounds of words, and how they look on the page, and how they feel in your mouth. It had wind, those chilling nights. Something we couldn’t touch but made me write for hours after.

  Now I see Wane sitting in all Trace’s sofas instead of filling those spaces and his fingerprints blur everything. And then I see Trace eyeing me and I think, Someone please tell her that she smashed our moon cup along with the others and her only phone.

  She was faltering with her cigarette wand, and it was one of those helpless times where you didn’t know what was wrong ‘til she choked up, Ashtray, and Wane was right there with one under her hand, Smashing. She looked straight at me and said, The best kind of bars on the road will have an ashtray by the pay-phone and think of me then.

  Whenever we pulled up to truck stops, I asked for sardine sandwiches. This gave Wane a chance to tell me I was disgusting.

  —I’m fish and you’re meat. Leave a message and make it sweet.

  —It’s Wane, found on moonshine since you haven’t been returning my calls, where the FUCK are you???

  Let’s go over it again. Let’s go over it again, Wane reached above and tilted the overhanging light in my face.

  I started out slow and told him, Everyday at lunch you walked me to your house and you sucked the thick milkshake up with your straw never taking your eyes off of me.

  No tell me more. I really want to understand this.

  You’re not going to remember how I kept golden waffles stocked in your freezer because that was your favourite. My eyes on his cold kitchen tiles saying this.

  Yes, I am going to remember that’s why I want to know everything.

  There’s a tower and at noon when the sun is directly overhead, you bring me way up on its flat roof and tell me to open the very big book and let you see all the ink marks on the new page and all their curves. The wind helps me, it makes things difficult. The handwriting’s spidery anyway, I murmured, but you insist. The ink marks are throbbing off the page.

  The sun was still hurting even with shades. But at least Wane couldn’t see my eyes. My Salada eyes. The way he called them that. The way he showed me around the kitchen, consumed all liquids. My Salada eyes. He wanted to milk them and leave them white. My eyes widening on their way.

  He closed the very big book with a bang and cast his finger upon me. Do you realize you could be burned at the stake for having red hair alone in my kingdom? You must relay to me your soul. It’s the only way.

  There is a place where Wade promised good friendship is a straight yellow brick road to success. It is Wane’s kitchen. Me, right on his kitchen table. Him holding me up by the knees. Before I can answer, he is sucking back my breath, but when it comes around again, I say okay, I believe in giving things a whirl. The sun coming through in slits.

  He said, You won’t regret it. I want to give you everything you want. I’ll give you the sun. He led me up the curved staircase.

  by the first minute, all the girls had rolled out the red-carpeted plans on which guy was whose and how they were going to get them. who was available? take your pick, the guys’re all wearing concert T-shirts with SOLD OUT stamped on the back in red ink. Geal said it didn’t matter anyway because she had already been felt up by the movie star Corey Haim before he was famous in their school, Zion Heights. I’d watch them put their fresh layers of make-up on, their only protection from the sun. it only reminded me how I used sunscreen and still was the one with the pale skin who got burnt. I waited like a diaphanous sheet for them to finish primping. I got, do you have staring problems? I tried to keep my eyes on the ground.

  when they rolled their plans back up it was final.

  I’m thirsty again, Wane said, pulling up to another truck stop. My feet landed outside the van with the wind picking up any loose objects on the ground. Wane was ahead trying to open the glass door, ringing bells. He was having a hard time, kicking away at the swirling hamburge
r Styrofoam containers that were going for his legs like Pac-Man. He tried to retaliate by making his curses strong enough to take chunks out of the sidewalk.

  Wane was poking around with a paper cup filled with sticky orange juice. Each pulp freshly squeezed. The thought of it burned my empty stomach.

  He leaned over and asked me if I wanted anything, his lips crawling on my cheek, his teeth grazing.

  Maybe I should go back.

  You can’t. He rolled back his tongue.

  Then he was buying maps again, cramming them into his clothes, tattooing himself with highways.

  Wane insisted on driving but was lost on sunset.

  Wane: How do you get back on the highway?

  me: I think it was back there, we needed to make a left.

  Wane: No it’s straight ahead.

  — more yellow road pills gobbled later—

  gas station attendant: You had to make a left way back there.

  repeat IX a day when the sun goes down

  when I got back to my bunk bed my stomach was a blender on Ginsu but up against the glass window I’d still get this feeling of suspension. afraid to move. maybe I’d fall asleep and fall off the bed. sometimes I’d think maybe they can’t touch me up here, but then they’d fling something dripping.

  verbal charades was the evening activity. Geal got up and said in front of everyone, looking at me, Do you have any friends? I want to know. someone else followed and asked, I want to know if you have any breasts. they laughed eee eee ee.

  they’d throw darts that would just graze me so they could see my eyes widen. not darts that would hit me in the stomach because it was filled with blood and would burst like a water balloon if hit directly, and they would be held responsible. but a dart that would whiz close enough to make me fall off and splatter all over the floor. so I’d sit there with my bag of blood and try to pretend the bunk bed was a tree house and wish and wait and wish wait for someone to climb up.

  One time we got Lucky. She was hitchhiking to the next city. Wane had just been grumping again, We should have got a smaller car. What a crazy idea, a van for just the two of us. There’s way too much room. Too bulky.