Little Fish

by Casey Plett

  What she knew of Henry, her grandfather, had been peaceful and deep, a pebble rippling in a lake. Had he been miserable? Had his life been bad or unhappy? He would probably say no. Anna would say no. Wendy assumed they were wrong. How old had he been when he died?

  67.

  Had it not been a blessed thing he’d made it that far?

  And Anna.

  Anna was doubtless telling the truth. She probably didn’t feel cheated, but thought of herself as sick. The way you know that, if you move your leg a certain way, it will hurt. Or if you don’t believe in God and follow His Word, you’ll go to hell. It wasn’t a matter of deserving; it was like how secular people thought about physics: If you fall off a cliff, you’ll die, whether you deserve to or not. Wendy didn’t feel cheated either.

  Except—what would Henry’s life have been like had he not chosen isolation? Did he have a choice?

  Seven weeks ago, Wendy had said to her friends, “Henry didn’t have a choice!” as if she’d been arguing with some imaginary snot-nosed kid on the Internet, as opposed to ranting to the patient, real women in front of her. Henry had choices that Wendy couldn’t comprehend, but he did have choices and he believed in them wholeheartedly. All the Mennonites around him likely would have approved. Maybe our God wasn’t the lie, Wendy suddenly thought about her people. Maybe our isolation was the lie.

  After her Saturday shift at the store the next day, she had a call to the Ramada by the airport. A guy who wanted her face down with her legs straight out and locked together as he fucked her ass. “I’m a top, but I like shemales, I dunno why,” he mused as she took off her boots. He took a long time to come and looked whimpering and childish as she left.

  The elevators opened by the front desk; the night clerks glared when they saw her. Wendy smirked at them and readied a smoke.

  Ernie’d texted her again: Giiiirl Bojack Horseman you wanna come over!!

  It was midnight.

  She also had a text from Raina: I might have found a house. Two bedrooms, 850 a month. Can you come see it with me tomorrow morning?

  You bet

  Then, waiting for the cab to turn onto Wellington, she saw white glittering lights in the driver’s side mirror. It was the downtown skyline! All the way from out here. She could see all the way down to Portage and Main? She could! God! The buildings were bigger and more majestic than she’d ever noticed. They glowed, huge and luminous and gorgeous.

  Then her eyes adjusted. They weren’t buildings. They were Christmas trees. Lined up on the hotel side of the boulevard. Twinkling.

  Back home, she counted up her money and looked in the envelope she kept hidden in her room. She’d pocketed away well over a thou in just a few weeks. And the now-sizable paycheques from the store were going straight into a savings account. She could ride out the rest of the winter. January and February business was always fall-off-a-cliff dead, and March was barely better. The boys didn’t really come back until the thaw of April, and she wouldn’t be a new thing around anymore by that time.

  It was a strange phenomenon, though, the January thing. Business was always fine all through December, even though it was cold then too. Wendy didn’t really get it. Although, as Sophie had once observed dryly, “No one makes a New Year’s Resolution to see more prostitutes.”

  Fucking—Sophie—

  In her bathroom, sipping the last from a mickey, Wendy stood in front of the mirror in her bra and underwear. It was a few hours till dawn. There was light from the street shining in from the window, the sound of the tap dripping, and the garbage truck beeping some houses away. She’d have only a few hours to sleep before her Sunday shift.

  Her hair was almost down to her waist these days. The whites of her eyes were jaundiced and sallow, and her cheeks were mottled and dry. She touched the left side of her jaw, which had begun to hurt recently, a half-stabbing, half-aching pain toward the back. She moved it around and felt the gums through her skin. She knew she shouldn’t be smoking again. But.

  “Hello! Message for … Tulip. I thought it was very. Nice to have you out up here. Hope you had a good visit too and that you might want to come again. Sometime.” Anna coughed. “I haven’t been.” She coughed again, multiple times, enough for Wendy to think, Oh, sweet Lord don’t tell me she’s—and then, “Excuse me! I haven’t been feeling too well lately. Troubles. Well. I’ll hear back from you. The number’s the same. Goodbye now.”

  A long silence with no scuffle or a click and then, “Oh, I. There was something I forgot to tell you. Last time you were here. Philippians Chapter 2, verses 12 through 18. Those were also. Meaningful verses to Henry. Thought you’d want to know that too. Anyway. I hope you’ve been having a. Good week. Tulip. We’ll talk to you again soon. As we move closer to Christmas! Christmas is coming soon.”

  The place Raina found, the two-bedroom for $850 a month, was a tiny aging dollhouse of a building deep in the West End, on a short street between a school and a park by the Arlington Bridge and the rail yards. It had an unfinished basement, two bedrooms upstairs, a cozy kitchen that took up most of the main floor, and a huge backyard where the old man who owned it smoked with a hardened stare into nothing.

  Wendy and Raina conferred in the kitchen for only five minutes. “I feel like I’m gonna grow old here,” Wendy said. “I don’t want to move again for a long time.”

  “Oh?” Raina said. “This feels permanent to you?”

  “That was easy,” said Wendy in the cab back.

  These choices were happening to her so quickly.

  Raina stared out the window. “I’ll be glad for the change of environments, Wendy-burger, I cannot lie. I am getting old.”

  “Promise I’ll only ask this once, lady. What do you need from me now?”

  “Keep me company through this miserable winter,” said Raina.

  Wendy reached for her hand, and the two women looked out opposite windows. The sun was setting and the houses and snow were turning orange and white-blue.

  “Genevieve and I are on the rocks. I don’t want to talk about it,” Raina added.

  “I’m sorry.”

  They were silent a while, then Wendy said, “What are you doing for Christmas?”

  “Putting my worldly possessions in boxes, it seems.”

  “You’re not going to New York?” Raina usually went south for at least a few days during Christmas to a big family thing on her mom’s side in the Bronx. She would send Wendy pictures of herself buried under a sea of little cousins.

  “Not this time,” said Raina. “I don’t mean to be bleak, Wendy, but I’m not much up for cavorting around lately. Fun as our night at Cousin’s was.”

  “I understand. Do you want to come out to the country with my dad? I don’t know what we’re doing this year with my grandma gone, but we’ll be out there and you’d be welcome.”

  “Thanks for that.” Raina squeezed Wendy’s hand. “Pretty girl.” They were quiet, then Raina added, “I might. Ask me later.”

  “I get it.”

  “Do you? You always seem to thrive so much on social interaction. Not that I’m a hermit, but you’re even less so.”

  Eventually I gotta tell her I’m ho’ing again, Wendy thought. If she hasn’t figured it out already. She was very considerately feigning ignorance if so.

  Hey! Her dad texted the next day at the store. Granite Curling Club with the buddies tonight come meet me.

  Wendy walked up to the bar on the second floor and downed a beer as she and her dad watched bozos throw rocks down on the ice.

  “The rickshaws are coming in April, girl!” Ben said. “This is happening. Block off your summer.”

  Something in her stirred and had enough.

  “Dad, did anyone ever think Opa was gay?”

  “Oh, yeah! Well, there were rumours,” said Ben.

  “Rumours,” said Wendy.

  “People always thought he was soft. I dunno why, lotta fuckin’ Menno guys in his generation were kind of pantywaists,” he said. “
Some of them. Me and my brothers, we grew up brawling; it was different for us, I dunno why.”

  “Mmm.”

  “My day was just different,” he said. “You would have never survived, you don’t know how good you have it.”

  “I guess.”

  “It’s like Louis C.K. says, though, when I was growin’ up, the word ‘faggot’ just meant, you know, being a faggot.”

  “Huh?” said Wendy. “What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t fuckin’ know,” he laughed. “I’m blasted.”

  “Well, sometimes I wonder if, like, maybe your dad was like me!” she said, dazzling and charming. “Maybe? Is that crazy to think about?”

  “Wha, you think my dad was a girl!” Ben nearly choked he was laughing so hard. “Well, shit, maybe he was! There’s weirder things! I could have a son who’s a girl! Oh, wait!” He laughed some more, his face getting redder and redder. He punched her in the shoulder with the most loving, happiest face she’d ever seen. “Guess I got you on that one, don’t I?” he said. Wendy heard herself giggle in response.

  The music changed, and Wendy’s face suddenly brightened. “This song!” she said.

  “This song?” The lines in Ben’s face were deep, but when he didn’t know something he suddenly looked worried, younger, like a confused teenage boy. When the singer began, it clicked. “This is Lou Reed!”

  “Yeah!” said Wendy. “‘Coney Island Baby.’ You know it?”

  “Sure. That’s a great album.”

  “It’s about his girlfriend Rachel,” said Wendy. “She was trans. Lou wrote it for her. This whole album is about her.”

  “Huh,” he said. For a second there was some wonder in his eyes, and Wendy allowed herself to drink in the idea that he, too, could feel what it meant to her. “Crazy,” he said. “Who knew he was into that shit too? The Velvet Underground was one of the greats, you know, the greats.”

  “I know,” said Wendy.

  “Nah, you don’t know,” her dad mused. “You can’t try to tell someone what the seventies was like. Some things you just can’t understand. Which is fine. Hey!” he said jovially, placing his palm over the beer that had just come for Wendy. “How many? You counting?”

  “Two,” Wendy said instantly.

  “Two right now or two all day?” he replied.

  “Both,” she said. She had a mickey in her bag with two slugs pulled out of it.

  “Good man,” he said, uncovering his hand. “Aw, shit, sorry—”

  “It’s fine.”

  “It’s just habit, you know.”

  “All good, Dad.”

  There’d been a day … when Wendy was a teenager. She had short brown hair and wore a yellow T-shirt and loose blue jeans and white Reeboks. She looked like a boy and she called herself a boy and she thought of herself as a boy. She had no words or world that made sense of her as a girl—so she didn’t think of herself that way. It was May and the sun was bright and summery and fresh and the wind smelled like grass. She bought a bottle of Diet Coke at the corner store and rode her bike to the Forks, steering with one hand and drinking the Coke with the other. She sat on the curve of a little rise that overlooked the skating rink, where some teenagers were kicking around a ball. Beyond them, the river, slow and gentle and brown. She breathed in and she felt perfect. She had a vision of herself then from behind. With long, long hair, and the line of a bra strap under her shirt. Long, long, long hair, that blocked off her face, went down to her jeans. This vision of herself was pure. She breathed, shut her eyes, and for a brief moment had no self-awareness or worry or shame. When she opened her eyes again, one of the girl teenagers was standing off to the side, looking at the boys who were kicking the ball.

  The next day, Wendy bought two king cans and fell asleep at two in the afternoon after a half-shift at work—Michael had said, “You’re tired, we’re overstaffed, you’ve been working too hard. Go home. I’ll make up your hours some way. Go take care of yourself. I’m telling you to go home, Wendy. I’ll check up on you later.”

  As she slept, she dreamed of a man creaking up the stairs and slowly opening the door to her room and enveloping her in a cloud. She woke up—but couldn’t move. She screamed “Help!” with all of her might, but her muscles wouldn’t move. She couldn’t fucking move! With a whisper of a “help …” gasping from her lips, she woke up for real. Her bladder was throbbing, and her phone was ringing. Some guy staying at the Fort Garry was about to get back from work and badly wanted her ass.

  But before that dream with the man creaking up the stairs, Wendy dreamed of herself and Henry. They were sitting on a couch, and Henry was swaddled in long billowy clothing. Henry had a baby in her arms, and its face leaned against Henry’s chest. Her hair was thinning and grey like it’d always been when Wendy was a kid, but her fingers were long and smooth and lotioned. The lawn outside was growing fast, and someone needed to cut it. Everyone else was yelling and there was chaos and smoke everywhere, but Henry just stayed there and smiled at Wendy, and her smile got bigger and bigger with joy pouring out of her face, and as the couch grew scratchy and the air under it whirled and screamed, Henry pulled her feet onto the couch with the baby still in both arms and leaned forward on her knees in her long billowy clothing looking at Wendy, and she laughed with her radiant, pure lit-up smile getting bigger and bigger until both of their faces were almost touching with light light light shining from all of Henry’s soft lotioned body, until they were so close, Henry now silent and smiling at Wendy deep and big and light, and neither of them moved. Wendy woke up thrashing and sitting up in the same motion with her eyes scanning every part of the room and her heart beating fast.

  It was four o’clock and the sun was streaking its last blues and greens and oranges across the snow and the ice and the darkening sky. Wendy cracked open the second king can as she walked down to the river. If she made this call, she’d be happy. If it was good, she’d turn her phone off for the night and go out and drink. She would shut her fucking phone off and run out into the city and light up the sky. She put on her headphones and listened to that song “Violet” again. She put it on repeat.

  But she wished she hadn’t bought the king cans. The mickey from yesterday being long gone. Her love, her real true love, was cold hard alcohol mixed with something light, like diet pop or water. There was nothing else that felt so clean in her body.

  26

  The guy at the Hotel Fort Garry was staying on the sixth floor. Wendy hadn’t been in here for some time. She knew friends who partied here, and once there’d been a wedding. The literal Queen had stayed here once, but somehow the rooms just never got that expensive. They weren’t cheap either, but regular people still stayed here.

  She walked through the quiet hall past an open staircase, past trays of silverware and newspapers in front of doors. She had a long thin hoodie under her coat and under that, a dark-blue, full-length nightie, a thing that, were it summer, could pass as sexy street clothes.

  The man at the end of the hall who’d called her opened his door and ushered her into a tiny room with beautiful patterned wallpaper, a window facing an airshaft, and a lush queen bed. The man looked mid-fifties, with intense five o’clock shadow, a T-shirt, boxer shorts, and an Australian accent.

  “Holly,” he said, like she was greeting him at a job interview.

  “Mmm,” he said after he kissed her, as if he was sampling food.

  The cash was lying on the chair. He picked it up and gave it to her. She stuffed it away in a zippered pocket. He unscrewed a full bottle of white wine and offered her some from a plastic cup. He sipped it twice before undressing her quickly, methodically, kissing her, and grabbing her tits. He turned out to be one of those who didn’t really like to have his dick sucked but went along with it for a minute or two before guiding her head up and matter-of-factly saying, “Get a condom.” He fucked her ass as she lay on her back, looking at her with wild eyes, with her legs in his arms like a machine. He turned out to be one o
f those men who wanted to fuck for a while before coming. Wendy studied a spot on the wall and noticed his breathing, focused face.

  After he came, she finished the wine in bed as he flushed the condom down the toilet. Unless they were true creeps, sometimes Wendy liked to linger for just a minute after they finished. Especially in hotels. A lot of them liked that kind of thing anyway.

  “Oh. Well, would you like more wine?” he laughed, seeing her empty cup. He re-filled it and lay down next to her, naked. He put his free arm around her, and she put her head on his shoulder.

  “So,” said Wendy. “You’re here for work, or …?”

  “Yes, indeed, ma’am! Five days I’ve been here, and I’m leaving tomorrow. You were my reward for a hard week.” He winked at her and squeezed her shoulder. She giggled.

  “What do you do? If you want to tell me.”

  “I work for a tech firm. We’re opening a new branch here.”

  “You’re opening your Canadian branch here,” Wendy said, deadpan. “Seriously.”

  “It’s our second. We already got one in Toronto,” said the man. “We were going to do Vancouver, but, fuck, it’s expensive out there.”

  “Wow.” Wendy swirled her wine in the little plastic cup. “A tech firm, hey?”

  “This is what everyone’s gonna do now,” said the man. “It’s like how factory jobs used to be,” he said. “I trained as a typesetter. I trained before computers. You know what that is?”

  “I do,” said Wendy. The half hour was almost up. She reached for one more little cup of wine.

  What kind of world does the core of your brain expect that you, you personally, get to live in? Wendy wanted to be loved. However easily she might have abandoned or ruined her prospects, Wendy did still believe she would have love.