by Golda Fried
I have to be moving on.
“Can I come see your place?” she asks me.
Well, my place seems pretty lame and I just feel like saying no all over so, of course, I do and that is that. But this night in my cozy bed, there are stars in my teacup, the kind you get when you think a really cool person might just be your friend.
º º º
I am interviewing her about relationships. We are all documentary/cinema verité types this year. “So when you meet a guy, what do you find cuter: clumsiness, or someone who steals ashtrays?” (Christina giggles.) This may seem like a simple question, but in my experience people who steal ashtrays usually lose them pretty fast. However, if they’re clumsy, they’re probably not going to be conceited. But then there’s some people who selectively steal ashtrays and their bedrooms are more interesting than any museum I was dragged to as a kid. Anyway, I really feel like getting into ashtray philosophy, but who was I kidding? Christina, in this dark bar, is way behind sunglasses. The type that starts trends. Still, it is the kind of thing you wish you had thought of first, because she is smiling all over the place tonight.
º º º
“So, do you think I could come home with you on the train sometime to Halifax? I’ve never been,” Christina asks me, still at the bar.
“Well, I’m not going home ‘til the end of the year.” Then, “Hey, you’re done this year. What are you going to do after?”
“Well, I’m from the States, right? But I can’t go back to my hometown. No way.”
“Where’s Mark from?”
“Some small town out West. I don’t know. You’re going to work as a secretary for your dad, huh?”
I hate when people say that.
“Well, so far, you’ve just been crating books around, honey. It’s hard to picture you travelling.”
“You’re a school girl, too. Give me a break.”
“All right. All right. I just want to make sure you’re having some fun. Do you see anyone here that you find interesting?”
“I can’t look like that,” I tell her. “I’d rather take the let’s-see-what-drifts-up-on-my-shore approach and does it shine.” Last gulp. “Hey listen, can we go back to your place and make some Kraft Dinner or something? I’m starving.”
“Fuck that,” she says. “I have salad stuff.”
º º º
So I tried to make the avocado riper by sticking it in her microwave. It comes up in every conversation she has had on the phone for the next hour as I wait in the kitchen. The microwave still seems like a perfectly natural solution to me. So that night, I order pizza for us. I ask for vegetarian and it comes with everything from artichokes to zucchini. We are especially starving. Christina, opening up the cover, says, “It fuckin’ looks like a box of jewels, man. Right on.”
º º º
This guy saloons through her door and he is all Zippo lighter and pacing the room and he has a small box or something in his black leather coat pocket which he handles like a gun.
“That’s Mark,” she mouths, hand over her lips and everything. He won’t sit down.
“Christina, I’ve got to talk to you.”
He drags her towards the bathroom, the first door he can find, and she looks at me like what can she do? He is dragging her. Slam. I wait for a bit and there is a lot of noise. Laughing, I guess, and shouting and fun-shrieking.
I picture that he is tying her to some train tracks and they think a train is coming, but it’s him and they get the hell out of there and laugh about how he abducted her and saved her all in one. Isn’t that how the story goes?
I finally leave when I hear the shower go on.
The next time I am at the table with her, she keeps saying, “He’s so intense, he’s so intense,” and that’s all she can say. I think, “Right on.” I am really happy for her, I swear. For the few minutes I saw him, he did seem really intense.
º º º
Christina and I light cigarettes off the burner. We wait ‘til it is red hot. One time it looks so innocently dark again and learning over I scald my whole arm. “Jesus Christ,” I say. “Just when I was having a non-bumping-into-furniture day.” Still, I spend half an hour that night staring at the purple bruises.
º º º
#@?!#@?!
{Stella} {Stella} I am dreaming.
(Christina!) (Christina!) Bang Kick Kabink.
I am not passed out on her sofa anymore. Christina comes out of her bedroom looking genuinely helpless.
“What am I going to do? I can’t let him in here.”
“It’s raining and he’s only wearing a t-shirt,” I say, peering out the window.
“Christina, what happened? I thought you really like Mark?”
“I do, but if I let him in this time, I’m really going to get hurt.”
BANG BANG KICK.
“Listen, he’s not just going to go away.”
“Yes he is going away. He’s going back to Calgary for sure. He told me.”
“Yeah, but that’s in three months. Maybe you’ll go with him.”
“He’s not going to ask me, I know it.”
“Christina, if you let him in, you’re going to be all over each other and everything’s going to be roses.”
“You open the door.”
They come at each other with knives and give each other new haircuts. Fun is going to the all-night Pharmaprix and getting hair dye – the kind that washes out. Espionage is catching the security guard dancing to the muzak in the aisles. Hope flashes with Christina’s camera when she takes a picture of Mark. Just in case.
º º º
I know that chances of this being true are infinitesimal, but according to the way I perceive the world: stars are very fast moving molecules that rarely get to come in contact with other stars. But when the temperature gets colder and the molecules slow down, they can spend more time together and bonding can take place. Each star feels recharged and electrocuted at the same time. Bright stars tend to get brighter. Dark stars tend to get darker. But if the temperature gets too cold, stars being stars, will not become solid, but will break so that even their internal bonds will bust and the stars won’t even know which atoms from the periodical chart they have. Sooner or later, the stars reform and orbit on, but they’ve acquired new parts like stolen ashtrays. And the world gets pretty cold.
º º º
“Liking snow is like liking dandruff,” some girl is telling her boyfriend. And he isn’t a skier, he is just stark raving instigating her. And in the true Montreal spirit, we all have come out in this twenty-eight degree below weather to party. I am huddled in the corner thinking something’s weird with Christina.
She is floating around with glitter on her eyelids and it isn’t even a disco party. That much is her fun self. Then I realize the weird thing is, she is not only avoiding me, but she isn’t with Mark.
Meanwhile, some slimebucket comes and sits beside me and starts whispering in my ear that he just strolled into town and is this what Montreal has to offer?
I hear my friend Keith’s guitar somewhere and go electric. He is right by Anita, too, who is handing out ruby globs of Jell-O made with vodka. Five Jell-Os and two conversations that just bounce off me later, I am feeling like there is a neon sign flashing in my head. And realizing that this is probably as turned on as I am going to get tonight, I stumble into the bedroom to get my jacket.
There is the infamous couple-on-the-bed. Okay, they’re not interested in you; you can get your jacket and they won’t even notice. Then it turns out to be fucking Christina there with Slimebucket. Needless to say, I miss the bucket most unfortunately and puke off the balcony feeling seasick or something.
I should grab her right then and yell what are you doing #@?!, but at this time, it is a bloody mess.
º º º
She thinks there is no blood in Texas. Only desert and white pages for her to work on a screenplay and plenty of sand to go through the hourglass while she’s working on it. And she kn
ows some guy in the industry down there too. But she’s left him before.
º º º
We are at the table again. Some things get so familiar and then never happen again.
“He’s been dicking around on me.” She is confiding in me.
You know, I want to be the one. The best friend that is a vital phenomenon since kindergarten. We have talked often about her taking the train to see me in Halifax. She is going to send me her colourful stories from all over the galaxy where she does her film shoots. Be the favourite aunt when I have kids. But I just can’t roll out the sympathy – I leave that to her phone mates.
“Christina, how can you complain about Mark when I saw you messing around with some slimebucket at Anita’s party?”
Mouth wide open, she just can’t say anything. Nodding her head and sighing, she scurries into her room and slams the door.
Door.
I leave. She rains dishes on me from the window! Cuts my cheek.
“You don’t know me at all,” she screams. “By now! Not fucking all.”
I keep walking.
º º º
It’s too dry in Texas. I just can’t see her there. I know that much. And then there’s me who thinks everything will be all wet down by the waterfront docks with the sailors coming in and out of my life just how I always planned it. But I start to wonder if there is a place on the map that is sticky.
º º º
Christina is gone. Texas bound. And I am going back to Halifax, but to my own new apartment. Mark asks me if he can stay with me for a while until he can get a lift back to Calgary. We do our own thing and don’t talk very much. And then, on his last night in Montreal, we are both up late doing stuff, and I have a craving for a vanilla milkshake way after eleven when most places are closed. He is all into walking the streets with me. We are on a Mission. We finally find a restaurant that is open and serves milkshakes.
“So is it just going to be milkshakes alone for us then?"
Well, for me, it is going to be the ol’ slim milk carton as someone’s sick idea of a hangover every morning for breakfast. But that’s not what I really ask.
“So, what’s going to happen with you and Christina?”
And God this guy rides horses and the sunset’s happening tomorrow and I’m probably never going to see him again and why aren’t we friends and forget about me, what about Christina, the only cow girl I’ve ever met, and I know she’s singin’ the blues though she won’t tell me about it either.
And he goes, “Well, I’m going back to Calgary. And that is that.”
And I think, so we’re all just going to be crating stars around in milk crates then. And God, we were all impossible.
about the author and illustrator
Golda Fried is originally from Toronto. She did a BA in Film and Communications at McGill and an MA in Creative Writing at Concordia, receiving the third prize student award in poetry from Books in Canada in ’93 and the Chester Macnaghten Creative Writing award at McGill in ’94. After performing on the spoken word stage at Lollapalooza ’94, she was part of the Montreal spoken word circuit and released the chapbooks check the floor (alpha beat press ’96) and hartley’s stories (conundrum press ’97).
Vesna Mostovac is the creator of Foolish Girl comix and has been published in Don’t Touch Me comics as well as monthly in Chart magazine. She had a solo show of large scale Foolish Girl paintings at the Cameron House and at Manifestudio in Toronto. She also drew the December page in the 1998 Exclaim! calendar. Vesna is presently producing special effects for Nelvana’s animated series Stickin’ Around.