by Alex Pugsley
~
When the thunderstorm broke, an electrical squall exploding above us, Karin went dashing toward the clubhouse. I found her in one of the rooms of the restaurant, her Adidas bag dropped to the floor, both of us sopping wet, shoulders hunched forward so the rainwater would drip off our chins rather than down our backs. “That storm—” said Karin. “That storm hit me right in the couscous.”
“The where?”
“Aubrey Tudball.” Karin touched again at her barrettes. “What are you doing? Are you soaking wet? Are you still a champignon?”
I was soaking wet, my nose cold, my skin goose-bumped. Making a move for the hallway, I said I was going downstairs to get some paper towels. “You okay with that?”
She frowned. “Did you just say I looked fat?”
“No, Wiggins. Paper towels.”
“No, you said I should lose ten pounds and had a fat ass.”
“Oh, wait. That’s it exactly. No, I’m going to the bathroom—”
“Boys are gross.”
“To get some paper towels.”
On my way back with a stack of paper towels, I was checking my reflection in the glass of a framed photograph of past presidents of the Waegwoltic Club, relieved to see my nose was generally blemish-free, when I heard the crash of a window breaking. Returning to the room, I saw Karin standing in front of a ruined window, a sparkle of broken glass on the hardwood floor, the splintered end of a stout tree branch lodged in the fractured window frame. As I joined her in looking at the wreckage, lightning flashed in the sky and a second surge of rain splashed against the windows. The power winked off, giving a sort of apocalyptic quality to our situation—darkness in the afternoon, lightning tinting the room blue—and, instinctively, we both backed away from the window, our bare elbows touching, slippery with rain. I glanced at Karin to see her tennis dress splattered with moisture, a glisten of watery ketchup on her upper lip, her eyelashes moistened into star-points. She looked at me with open eyes, leaned toward me, and kissed me on the mouth. I remember how eager were her soft, open-mouthed kisses, the murmurs she made as I kissed near her throat, the pattern of peeling sunburn on her exposed shoulder. After some moments, Karin moved to take a step back but my hair, straggly and rain-damp, caught in one of her barrettes so it was a few seconds before we disengaged from each other, our temples colliding as we separated, the barrette springing loose and falling to the floor.
I picked it up. “Your barrette, Madame.”
“Oh. Thank you, kind sir. What would I do without my barrette?” She neatly inserted it in her hair, dried her arms and legs with paper towel, and in the next moment she was grabbing my wrist and spinning my arm to read my digital watch. “What time is it? Oh, God, Tudball. The time has come, the walrus said. I’ve really got to run. My mixed is at four.”
“In a lightning storm?”
“No, Ding-a-ling. Didn’t you hear? They’re making us play in a flipping school gym. Classy, I know.” She plucked her bag off the floor. “Any advice?”
“You’re playing mixed? Go after the girl.”
“Go after the girl? What if she goes after you?” Flinging her bag over her shoulder, she touched again at both barrettes, a trifle coquettishly—a first gesture that betrayed any sign of nervousness or self-consciousness.
Taking the last, unused paper towel, I wiped from her cheek the smear of ketchup that had been preoccupying me the last few minutes and which had spread, in a sort of diluted, post-smooch curlicue, toward her left ear. “There,” I said. “I just sort of wanted to do that.”
“See you next time, Mr. Tudball,” said Karin, staring at me. “Probably I won’t see you again for billions of months.”
“Probably not till after your hog roast.”
“What do you have—a bionic memory or something? It is a hog roast. With lobsters.” She snapped her fingers and thumb together. “Au revoir, Monsieur,” she said, jouncing out the door of the clubhouse.
I didn’t follow her outside but I listened as she skipped up the ramp toward the tennis courts. I was trying to figure out what had just happened. There were two or three uncertainties to our relations I couldn’t figure out. This girl, this figure from faraway, from the future, really, for she seemed to have arrived from some new continuum of girliness, she had such a swift knowledge of the moment yet she was often pretending to be confused by what was going on. This would become a trademark diversion of Karin Friday, I’d notice, how she affected to mishear or misunderstand what you were saying, faking a ditzy ignorance, only to further pretend she was taking offense at what she thought you were implying. It reminded me of a little kid singing a nursery rhyme and pretending she wasn’t getting the lyrics wrong. I found her flirtiness touching—and her riffs on the characters from The Carol Burnett Show seemed sweet and I was flattered she’d kissed me—but she was maybe a bit genuinely crazy, at odds with six or seven uncertainties, some real, some maybe not so real, and there may have been something within her that was completely loopy and irregular. It was a small node with bits of orange and violet in it—the size, say, of a swallow in a storm—but it was there. I did feel there was something lovely and abiding about the person she could become, though. My own understanding of her fell off somewhere—I didn’t know where or why—I just knew I wanted to astonish her.
~
Playing tennis, I had problems. I had problems with my volleys, I had problems in my head. I tended to win everything but the last match where I would flame out in the final, trying to hit my way out of trouble, going for big shots that weren’t there, berserkly energetic in a losing effort, the bigger drama on court becoming my relationship with my own failure. The various disturbances growing within me that week at the Nova Scotia Open would result in me getting thrown out of the tournament. On a scorching afternoon, on a day when I was alternately cracking forehands crosscourt and shanking backhands into the fence, I would smash my best racquet and use a number of swear words in a fit of I Hate Tennis frustration, this during a match against Bunker Burr, an eighteen-year-old hotshot with a kick serve, losing by disqualification in the third set after I had three match points in the second set tiebreaker. Bunker had gleam in his eye and jump in his step. He advanced through his half of the draw in form and in the zone, defeating me in the quarters, destroying the junior tennis coach in the semis, and meeting Cyrus Mair in the Sunday final. Cyrus would lose this match in a flurry of mistakes—this from a kid who could go days without an unforced error—and in fact he’d never win another tournament or play tennis seriously again. But I don’t know if it mattered to him. That afternoon he ran off the court, sweaty, glowing, a forelock of hair tapered to a point. “I met that girl,” he said.
“What girl?”
“The one everyone’s talking about.”
“Who? Karin?”
“She’s just like us.”
“Who is—Karin?”
“Yeah,” said Cyrus. “I think she’s a genius of life.”
~
Karin Catherine Friday was cute, carelessly cute, effortlessly cute, and in certain slants of light she was deliriously cute. She was one of those young women, like Kelly Gallagher or Megan Beckwith, who get known in the way instantly cute girls get known beyond the borders of their school and neighbourhood simply for being freshly gorgeous. In the seaside city of Halifax, where the Scots-Irish and African-Acadian and Nordic-German gene pools mingle and stream, where in some waters beauty spreads through the female population like a virus, Karin would become a regular contender for Prettiest Girl on Spring Garden Road. She embodied a quintessence of girl with all that word’s connotations of agility, rapture, and caprice. She was high spirits and high cheekbones, snow-blossom skin blooming into rosiness, her chin left-leaning to allow for the sweeping fall of abundant blonde bangs. In the junior and senior highs of the day, certain girls were celebrated because of their perceived resemblance to cultur
al ideographs and cinematic reference points. Zum Beispiel—Suzanne Snyder was considered stunning because, with her flared mouth, smoky eye shadow, and lacy peasant blouses, she was the closest we had to a Spanish Dancer. Similarly, the full-figured Kelly Gallagher—she of auburn curls and an alcoholic father—was our candidate for Freckly Celtic Druidess. Brigid Benninger was a Neurotic Snow White, Robyn Izzard a Nubian Princess, Megan Beckwith a Hillybilly Amazon. But Karin Friday was polymorphic. She floated. She shifted. She was a number of people all at once, shimmering between Tennis Nymph, Mayfair Flapper, and Hitchcock Heroine. She carried a number of symbolic identities—it was as if she could be anything you wanted her to be, almost as if she had no real control over her own nature or allure. In many moments, especially as a flip tweenster, before she achieved notoriety, I sensed she was embarrassed by her prettiness and generally acted as if she’d been given some prize she didn’t ask for and for which she didn’t particularly want any responsibility. She didn’t flaunt her looks. She acted as if she hadn’t earned the privilege. Her silliness, her playacting, her impulse to make jokes about herself, these were all maneuvers of social distraction. She did not wish to be regarded as an object of beauty. She preferred to behave as a goofball extrovert so you forgot how she looked. But I was one of those for whom Karin’s fluid liveliness—the nose-wrinkling at the absurdity of a strange person, the lip-sneering at the salacious behaviour of a drunk friend, the puckered lips at the cuteness of a manic toddler, motions and attitudes she animated with a multiplicity of intonation and inflection and split-second eye-movement and which were as natural to her as breathing—lit up as something of a revelation and would establish a pattern of flirty female behaviour that I would seek out again and again, moth to the flame.
Now the leading ladies of the town, whom my mother assessed with a pageant devotee’s obsessive-compulsion, were a source of much conversation in our house. My sisters, ever sensitive to the import of womenfolk, and communing with other females in some non-verbal, pheromones-and-territoriality way—in what was really some highly feminized version of quorum sensing—my sisters appreciated Karin for her beauty and observed her as they could, quietly waiting to see if she revealed herself to be a friend, bitch, dimwit, or rival. My mother’s reaction was typically swift. “Oh she’s a nice-looking girl. She is. That kid’s got a lot of options. Maybe too many. Because my God, Aubrey, that child flirts with everybody.”
~
Scene. A Friday in October. Karin and I walk up Oxford Street after playing tennis. We have become hitting partners, practice chums. My tracksuit is dark, hers light blue, and inside our jackets our shoulders are warm, not yet clammy. Karin is teasing me about what she has decided is my enormous crush on Kelly Gallagher—someone who walks on court with a quasi-intentional teeter-totter of her bottom, someone Karin has beaten three matches in a row, but someone whom Karin has decided should be elevated to a position of generic enviableness. “Oh, Kelly,” she says. “That Kelly, you’re obsessed with her. Just admit it for once.”
“With who?”
“‘With who.’ You know who.”
“Who—Kelly Gallagher?”
“Yes,” she says with mock-annoyance. “Kelly Gallagher. I’m talking about Kelly Gallagher.” Karin repeats the name over and over and it will become a recreation of hers to pretend to hear this name for the first time, the sounds of the name celebrated as phonemes to be repeated in phlegmy, guttural fashion, perhaps building, when giddy or drunk, to falsetto ridiculousness (Gully-Gully-Ga! Gully-Gully-Ga!). Karin is wonderfully absorbed in such intrigues, her quivers and giggles seem to bring her to the brink of some exquisite chaos—a chaos which, very possibly, she might be willing to share with you—but I notice how her laughter subsides as we approach the lineup at the Oxford Theatre.
Tonight’s movie is some unknown phenomenon called Quadrophenia and I notice the kids in the lineup are starkly different from the motley schleps in my high school common room, the kids with whom I skip class, smoke dope, and play penny-a-point Hearts. The kids in the lineup are from various high schools and among their crowd is Jeremy Horvath, eccentric in a black mohair sweater, creased trousers, Beatle boots. I have respect for Jeremy Horvath and his friends and all their junk and foibles, but up to this time I’ve felt that their cool kid exclusivity, their semi-precious interests in Minimoogs and Fortran and polyhedral dice, does not exactly coincide with my own scheme of things. There is something about his vigilant alertness, a sort of nothing-is-lost-on-me watchfulness, which makes me want to continue walking past him to the end of the line. There we encounter Brigid and Gail Benninger. Brigid is sleek with black hair. She is considered to be unimpeachably gorgeous, if somewhat aloof. To me, she seems indolently self-absorbed and perpetually spacey. It is the younger sister who has always compelled my attention. Gail Benninger is known as a sort of constantly furious teenager, as one of the wilder girls in the city, and someone at the mercy of an impulsive and profane temperament. A year before, I was not surprised to hear from my younger sisters that Gail was sternly grounded for not only wanting to go as the Pope to a Halloween dance at her school, the Convent of the Sacred Heart, but for sneaking out and attending this dance costumed only in a green garbage bag, and for getting caught later that night egging the statue of Jesus Christ on the school’s front lawn—all of which acts of performance art resulted in a month of lock-down. I remember an afternoon, some weeks following these incidents, when I saw her crossing Henry Street with silver duct tape over her mouth, a symbolic gesture for I knew not what.
Now in person Gail has an energy of unworried independence. It is a vibe which can veer, I will understand later, depending on her blood sugar levels, toward random contentiousness and even outright antagonism, but there is something about her boldness and absurdly thick hair and radical oddness that makes her tremendously noticeable.
Tonight she has taken her school’s regulation uniform—baby blue blouse, Black Watch kilt, navy blue leotards, Mary Jane shoes—and essentially destroyed it only to reconstruct it with safety pins and inserted zippers. The torn fabrics are bound and pinned tightly to her sturdy-looking physique, the shoes shined to a perverse sheen. She is fourteen years old. I have mostly stayed within the toss-and-tumble of druggy jock life but this movie event, charged with music and fashion—for many of the other girls are dressed in go-go boots and miniskirts—makes me wonder at the rising relevance of the city’s alternative crowd. Who are they? What do they want? Where will they go? I am considering how best to take my leave when Karin simply steps toward Gail to say, “I love your shoes!”
~
Various Common Roomers arrive like postcards out of the past when I conjure our history, our scenes, our shows—figures appear in many forms and solid states. At some appropriately advanced juncture, I will refer the curious to such interludes as “Cyrus Mair in his Rooms,” “The Glower of Jeremy Horvath,” and, always a favourite, “Lying in Bed with Gail on Her Period,” but this early to-do in front of the Oxford Theatre has real precedence in my mind and, as I recall it now, I realize it is linked to a cluster of associations—impressions, scene sequences, and half-thoughts—that I feel for Gail and me, for Karin and the impending Cyrus, and indeed for all of Halifax. It’s the moment, really, when I first thought to properly understand the place—or when I first felt I might someday try to understand the place—and I date this chance meeting at the Oxford Theatre as the beginnings of our gang and conspiracy. My memory of the exact order of events is spotty. The movie is sold out. Jeremy Horvath and his crew get in. Gail and Brigid do not. “We suck,” says Gail. “Because everything we do sucks. Just like this night sucks.”
I mention the night is not over and at the Dominion supermarket on Quinpool Road I wander the aisles to buy provisions—three cans of Reddi-Whip, a package of Sudafed pills, Russet apples. We tramp down to the Horsefield, a local stretch of greenery, home to a Little League baseball diamond, a playground, and
various meadows, the four of us popping two pills each and huffing the gas from the dessert topping. With the wind through the October leaves, the blue smell of Brigid’s cigarettes, something seems open-ended in the night and soon we sit red-eyed under a tree on the other side of the outfield. I watch Gail consume a Russet apple in its entirety—fruit, seeds, core—soon twirling in her fingers nothing but the stem. Conscious of my attention, Gail returns my gaze, without self-consciousness or restraint, and takes from me the box of Sudafed. She reads its medical information. After a passing stare into my eyes, she returns it. “Get a lot of colds, do you?” she asks, defiant. I am deep into a description of the benefits of pseudoephedrine when she holds up a hand to shush me. “Oh, what do you know?” she says. “You look exactly like Robby Benson.” This is an American teen idol of the day and I do not think I look much like Robby Benson and readers should know that, at various intervals, Gail has said I look exactly like Jim Morrison, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, and the young Debra Winger. I feel I should add, in a spirit of full disclosure, that during a sleazy period of my adolescence, the Jim Morrison resemblance I did very little to suppress. Thinking of these moments with Gail, and thinking generally of Gail, and watching the plastic grocery bag flutter in the wind above our heads, I am reorganizing my understanding of her, deciding she isn’t just universally angry, that there are vectors to her defiance and, though I still find her peculiar, I am deciding I am impressed by a girl who has such tough opinions and who stands up for herself, even if it may bring her trouble later on. And with Gail it surely would.
Karin’s Walkman is produced. The blue-and-silver contraption provokes curiosity and each of us takes a turn listening to the cassette inside. This is a homemade mix-tape—a tdk d60 sent to Karin by an ex-boyfriend in Toronto—and the rush of music adds a sudden soundtrack to our evening. Gail is the first to listen. Smoldering within her is an antipathy for anything mainstream, blowdried, or Top 40 but this unknown ex-boyfriend has put some thought into the making of this mix-tape, starting loud and lively then skewing slow and ambient, cross-fading songs we’ve never known. These songs will become touchstones of my sonic youth: “Janie Jones,” “Submission,” “God Save the Queen,” “Kiss Me Deadly,” “One Hundred Punks,” “52 Girls,” “Rock Lobster,” “I Wanna Be Sedated,” “Sheena is a Punk Rocker,” “Blitzkrieg Bop,” “Jocko Homo,” “The Robots,” and finishing with “Energy Fools the Magician,” “Nostalgia,” “Ever Fallen in Love,” and “Why Can’t I Touch It?” Gail is fascinated by the progression of music just as I am fascinated by the symbol she has drawn in black marker on her thigh through a hole in her navy blue leotards, a capital “A” with a circle swirled around it. She hands the Walkman to me as Karin asks, “You guys come here a lot?” I study Brigid and Gail, private school kids with nothing to do, sitting under a tree on a Friday night, stoned on whip-its and Sudafed by the woods of the railway cut. “Yeah,” says Gail. “We come here every Friday night—” She turns from Karin to gaze at me. “To see what Robbie Benson does.”