by Alex Pugsley
August 8 or 7
Oh Babba
Hello Hello Hello so where to start I’m not too sure I should be finishing my essay for this Feminist Theory and Discourse course that Gail made me take it’s really good and I should’ve done more work and started paying closer attention ages ago but now it’s over and the essay was due in April and I’m completely exhausted and too tired to write it so it’s easier to unplug the phone and write you instead how are you?
So here I am on a Sunday morning all hung over and tranquil and fragile and feeling really young and really old at the same time and in front of me I have this ridiculous special delivery letter from Cyrus you-know-who which I refuse to open have you heard from him? I guess he’s off at the ends of the earth somewhere I keep thinking I see him all over campus but of course it isn’t him Babba I don’t know what you heard but basically we had the scene to end all scenes in Europe so our Wonderful Beautiful Relationship came to its Final Crashing Sobbing conclusion it was just too much I don’t know what it was I’ll tell you about it in a second after I throw up
So I just read Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang for the millionth time and for breakfast I ate a dozen homemade chocolate chip cookies that Gail brought over last night before we went to Boyden’s where tout le monde was mingling and talking and having opinions and didn’t they know me from somewhere? Gail and yours truly drank our guts out and ran over to the wine store on the other side of Princess and met this gorgeous guy in Pervert Park and was it ever fun playing piggyback til I fell and cut my wrist and went to Emergency for the third time in two weeks and got the proverbial butterfly bandage
I am pretty healthy tho and my European zits have miraculously cleared up except I have to pee all the time and I’m more than slightly late (again) but to answer your question I can’t really figure out what Cyrus and I did in Europe the weeks just ran together and passed we went everywhere Dubrovnick, Avignon, Paris, Roma Roma Vaffanculo, Classical Greece, the Lost City of Atlantis and some other place I don’t remember After I got summarily abandoned I spent a week recuperating at my dad’s flat in St John’s Wood splurging on cashmere and his new girlfriend took me to Wapping Someplace and the British Museum and some old Law Hall just ridiculously crawling with stained glass windows and old leather books but I do love London I love sitting in those Tube stations with those Fruit & Nut bars and the smells of all the different aftershaves Mind the Gap
Now being with Gail I’m-going-to-sleep-with-as-many-men-as-I-want Benninger is a non-stop pajama party but my God Babba I got her to row this session and last week she went home with this Cuban waiter guy from Chez Piggy who looks like he’s been high every day since grade eight and the next day when our bus was leaving for the Henley Gail still hadn’t shown up so the whole bus drives up to his apartment and I have to ring the bell for her she runs out pulling on her sweater her face all red and blotchy trying to shoo away this sniffing dog and staring down everyone on the bus my Lordy-Loo we lost by the way we always lose we crashed into some boat from Trent
But last night at Boyden’s I really don’t know about Gail sometimes rinsing her hair in patchouli and wandering around campus in these black dykey army clothes talking about fuck-mates and Nicaragua but last night she was so funny embarrassing the men trying to give them erections by staring at their crotches saying dirty things but Gail is kind of scary too she talks about having sex on pool tables and somehow alot of the people she knows have some kind of STD or use drugs that require needles it makes me feel scared seeing her kind of screw up her life like this or is she I don’t know
I tried to talk to Brigid about it she just got back from Toronto but she’s not very receptive she didn’t really enjoy herself at the party she’s seeing this rich Rosedale guy named Avram and deferring her LSATs so they can do some Gadna kibbutz thing but I’m sure they’ll both end up at Osgoode anyway because one of his grandmothers died and left him a stinkload of money that was bitchy oh well Brigid doesn’t care too much for me anymore I guess I’m not Jewish enough though that never seems to bother Gail
Boyden’s applying to law school too and invited me to Chester for the end of August his parents bought that place they were renting for the kids but I don’t think I should go I mean it’s nice having men pay attention to you but silly when you catch yourself wanting to go back to how things were before you slept with them so yes Mind the Gap
I didn’t really understand how wierd things were with me and boys til I was back here eating a salad on the verandah yesterday before Gail came over I was thinking of the day I can remember it so vividly when me and you-know-who planned to elope except you never know if it’s a joke with him we ended up in Salzburg at this hostel sharing a room with these German and English swim-team kids plus the four year old daughter of the English chaperon guy from Manchester who was the only one around because all the German chaperons were going at it hot and heavy in every other room you walked into complete with screamy German breathing
We spent most of the day in this stupid kiddy playground being silly the kids were playing teeter-totter and swapping dirty words very funny to hear Detlev repeat them with German precision of course Cyrus got along beautifully with them playing Piaget and hitting himself in the head with a soup pot God he can be funny sometimes Babba they loved us him and me but I couldn’t help feeling we were competing for them
Because one minute Cyrus is wonderful kissing everybody and the next for no reason he’s in one of his presto change-o mood swings and being a terrible bunghole telling me why I shouldn’t like Pachelbel’s Canon and I’m the most looks-conscious person and how he hates what my clothes stand for even though the day before he said there’s no such thing as symbolism and why can’t I get that through my proverbial head?
So that was the Day He Went Wierd and the next was the kids last night together and Erin the four year-old was sad because she lost her invisible doorbell and I was cheering her up while that smelly old horrid pseudo-psychologist type from Manchester who had great tufty eyebrows but kept terrifying everybody with stories about bullfights and children with no fingers he says to Erin who’s normally very self-assured and kid-looking Daddy hates little girls who bother him when he’s drinking his coffee Daddy hates little girls who bother him when he’s drinking his coffee Daddy hates I was going crazy! I said I’d help her find her invisible doorbell and went to get Cyrus to see if he was wandering the stairs being poetic or swatting at a diaper rash that wasn’t there or just being embarrassed he’s alive and can’t find his own invisible doorbell
But I couldn’t find him and couldn’t find him and I’ve been through this a million zillion times with Cyrus going flip it so fine whatever I left to do the Sound of Music tour and lo and behold who surprises me at the I Am Sixteen Going on Seventeen Gazebo but Cyrus crying and confessing his whole life story asking if I remember the summer we met and what happened on McNabs Island and when he asks me to marry him I don’t say anything because how can I when he’s being so fuck off ridiculous?
O God I’ll tell you the rest of that meltdown later God good thing I’ve only slept six hours the last three nights and good thing my World Civilization prof isn’t hitting on me in his office asking me to play squash and inviting me to his cottage and have I ever visited Old Fort Henry? I really don’t know what happens to people everyone seems so normal in school yet the older people get the more they write special delivery letters or apply to law school and what will happen to us all? Oh the common room, the common room, I do remember, I can recall, Babba what do you think? I guess it’s sublime til it changes into something else and mostly I try not to get upset and I know there really isn’t a need to avoid standing in the wind next to these old limestone buildings wondering what the fuck is going to happen to me for the rest of my life because I still have wierd Cyrus thoughts and he shows up in six-part dreams where someone else turns into him but it was him all along there must be some kind of unconsci
ous significance there but it will be sort of disgusting only being with normal people now since he’s my favourite person and I just feel so horribly dangerously neurotically sensitive to what people say I think my problem is that I keep sympathizing with everything
Well sorry about not going to your wedding when I thought I was eloping on my own Barbara Wells it must be wierd to have a new name when it’s wierd to have a name at all but you know you can always visit Old Fort Karin I know that sounds like I’m a cheese so maybe you can melt me on toast or add me to pasta but yes I’d love love love to visit you there I really miss Jacky and the Comeaus and I get so jealous when I think of you so close to the sea and the weeds because if I can’t pick blackberries and live like the Inuit I’d like to be in a room with big windows in an empty old house by the sea & finish all the books I’ve ever started
Say hi to all the kids for me I often think of you there lots of love and wet fish as if you need it the fish I mean
grosses bises
Karin
Gail in Winter
I am thinking now of a day in December when the sun has brilliantly manifested after five full days of snow. Storms have left drifts all over, and the snowfall, pure white on roofs and branches, has begun to melt under blue skies—icicles dripping, windows streaming, snowbanks moistening into perfect snowball snow. It is a few moments before noon and I am sliding along Hollis Street on the flat soles of loafers once brown and belonging to my uncle but now dyed black and belonging to me. For later I have a formal occasion to attend. I am on my way to a wedding, actually, a wedding of some far-reaching repercussion as it will turn out, even for me, for the day, though one of the shortest of the year, will prove to be one of the longest of my life, my last real day as a Halifax person, and the symbolic end to my youth and formative years.
But in these first bright minutes the city seems a thrilling, raw place, an eccentric saltwater city two centuries decaying on the North Atlantic, and possible around the next corner is a figure of Dickensian scheme and consequence. I pass through streetscapes where stone townhouses neighbour lofty office developments, a tattoo parlour abuts a low-rise union for longshoremen, and ironstone warehouses preside over grimy wooden piers. At the Noon Gun I’m rounding north on to South Street, a Twizzler licorice in my mouth. Besides my uncle’s loafers, I wear a Fred Perry shirt with all the buttons done up, a vintage suit from a second-hand store, and a camelhair duffel coat inherited from a grandfather. I am chasing a Suggs-inspired ska revival look, some years after it is fashionable, sure, but I am a moody youth, somewhat haphazard, and full of hope for myself and my friends.
I am on a Samaritan trip to see a friend, as it happens, and I bring a care package of unsweetened cranberry juice, Kit Kat bar, and a paper bag of further Twizzlers. The friend is Gail Benninger and Gail in the last few years has been ejected from a few universities (Queen’s, York) and is now on a leave of absence from McGill where she’s zigzagged into graduate studies. Things there have not been good. Hit by a rock at a pro-choice rally, arrested for staging an occupation of a campus administration building, Gail in Montréal was hospitalized for severe depression two months into term and so she’s returned to Halifax to recuperate, and not to her family’s home on Robie Street, but in a borrowed place empty over the holidays, a bachelor apartment in a Victorian rooming house on South Street. It’s a yellow-shingled, three-story edifice, elaborate with porches and dormer windows, and inside the front hall linger smells of oak wainscoting and foreign foods, as if someone might have stashed and forgotten somewhere a pastrami sandwich. The complicated odours of the hallway merge with my apprehensions about seeing Gail, flavouring my understanding of her situation, and I think of her faltering in her gloom and isolation. For I am aware that many of her friendships have fallen away and she is more or less estranged from her family.
“My father’s a pervert,” she said the last time I saw her. “He’s a gross and manifest pervert.” She has suspended all relations with him and her sister Brigid she seldom saw. How to explain this? Gail would lose both parents very young, her mother at eighteen, her father at twenty-six, five years after the day under discussion, but at twenty-one she was still suffering from the convoluted after-effects of her mother’s early death. It was my conjecture—if I might be allowed some free-form psychoanalysis—that her mother died at a time when Gail was just beginning to construct an adult identity separate from her parents and her mother’s abrupt death from cancer interrupted and jumbled this differentiation from family. Gail would refuse to grieve the passing of her mother and she’d refuse to feel sorry for her imperfect, widowed father, and this willful decision to put her own feelings of resentment first became for her points of pride and personal principle. Her grief and suffering instead took the form of anger—anger at her mother for dying, anger at her father for straying—but some of this anger from time to time went deeply and dolorously inside her. Her struggles with authority, her impatience with the status quo, her bouts of depression, her contentious imperatives of self, I feel all of these issued—to conclude my pop psychologizing—from such uneasy transmutations.
“With Gail,” said my mother, “you always have to be careful of her feelings. Well, with everyone in that family. But Gail most of all. Oh she’s great in lots of ways. She’s quick. She’s very quick. And she’s sensual. But angry? That kid’s got a lot of anger. That girl goes looking for fights and most of the time she finds them. But Aubrey, you dated her for years, let me ask you, does she like people?” My relationship with Gail has been a very undefined association, an unpredictable, who-knows-what’s-going-on association, but always a no-boundaries, no-secrets, all-access sort of association and even after we split we’ve been close. Very few weeks go by without some kind of contact between us. Back in September I received two birthday messages from her—the first, happily drunk and slagging off her own delinquency about missing the date by three days, and the second, the next morning, hungover, fragile, embarrassed, apologizing for what she called her drunken obnoxiousness. This very out-of-character humility—with its hints of self-loathing—coordinates in my mind with a moment from junior high when I found in one of Gail’s discarded school scribblers, written over and over on the back page in handwriting increasingly jagged, the phrase “I hate parties and I hate dancing and I hate me,” and as I push on her crooked apartment door it’s this memory more than anything that provokes my protective instinct toward her—as well as a fear that one day she might cease to be.
~
She was under rumpled blankets, staring as if recently awakened, though I knew just as easily she could have been this way for hours. Twisted beside her was a flannelette sheet, white with two lavender stripes, and further within the blankets was a paraphernalia of supplies and effects: an empty Kleenex box, a container of Gaviscon tablets, assorted books and paperbacks, and a bottle of Buckley’s Mixture cough syrup. The room itself, high-ceilinged and a hundred years old, was decorated in general issue grad student—a bookshelf constructed from cinder blocks and unpainted two-by-eights, a drafting table, a pantry of mismatched crockery, a laminate-topped kitchen table with three different chairs, and a boombox on the hardwood floor surrounded by a litter of cassette tapes and loose sections of the local newspaper.
“Hey there.” I bumped the door closed. “How are you, freak?”
Either Gail did not hear me or she pretended she did not hear me. She lay where she was, her face drab and unremarkable. Finally, there was a flicker from her eyelids and she turned from a sunlit window to regard me, but still with a sort of mongrel despair in her eyes, as if she were powerless to oppose any new turn in her destiny.
“Jesus, woman. What’s going on?”
Gail so often glowed with some grievance or passion it was strange to see her so dispirited, as if something had been bleached or drained out of her. “How can I,” she said, quickly wincing, “be this fucking sick?”
“She speaks!”
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“I’m so bloody depressed. I feel like going out and getting plastered. Just—why, why, why am I in Halifax?”
“You really sick?”
“Yes, I’m really sick.” Putting an elbow on the futon, she propped up her head with a hand. “My throat’s so frigging scratchy I can hardly talk and my teeth are like little fucking razor blades. Not to mention my head’s just one big mess of snot.” Though her face was passive, and my presence had occasioned no real reaction from her, I think for Gail a sense of obscure problematics had begun floating in the room. “Why are you here?”
“What do you mean? I’m here about your ad in the Auto Trader.”
“Is this some charity thing so you can feel better about yourself? I’m no charity case.” A wedge of hair, damp from sleep, dislodged with these first movements and flapped over her eye. “What’s it like out anyway?”
“Beautiful. You should get some daylight into you.”
Frowning at this mention of the outdoors, Gail arranged the flannelette sheet and blankets over her head and addressed me from under the covers. “I’m never getting out of bed,” she said. “I hate everybody. I hate everything out there. God, I hate this place. I haven’t been outside since I got here. I just roll around in bed like some kind of hamster person.” She made a small sigh. “Just so you know, I’ve been in the same underwear for three days.”
“So the legends are true?”
Pushing down the covers, Gail made a confused face, as if someone had forgotten to inform her that her visitor might possibly be a dolt, and reached for one of the paperbacks on the bed. It was called The Woman Warrior and between its pages, as a bookmark, was a run of toilet paper. Gail brought this to her nose and blew into it with real effort, though one nasal passage stayed resolutely congested. “This is the worst part of being sick,” she said, one nostril speckled with dried mucus. “Having a glucky nose. But I think I can almost breathe again.”