That about did it for my social life, which is why I had taken to taking my spares in the doughnut shop. My lunch hours were spent there too, except over lunch I had more company. Across the tables I would watch the girls flick their feathered hair, listen to them smack gum and mutter “slut” as they passed my chair.
Leonard didn’t normally skip classes. His beauty and his uncertain sexual orientation had prompted my ex-friend Angie Alexander to join him in the darkroom yesterday. Before long she had her tongue in his mouth, her fingers on his belt. Len shoved her off. He knew enough to be scared of Gordy. Apparently, the bell rang and Angie stormed out, snarling, “You’ll get yours, asshole.”
He received a few peculiar looks around school the next morning, kids nudging each other, whispering. As he walked out for spare, he looked up from rummaging in his knapsack and Gordy Bewly sucker-punched him in the face. Twice.
“I think he was aiming for my teeth,” Len said into my bathroom mirror. “My teeth are the only decent thing about my face, and I think he was trying to wreck them. Then he says, ‘That’s for Angie, you faggot rapist,’ and knees me in the stomach.”
Sitting on the side of the bathtub, I fingered the facecloth he’d bloodied. “I wouldn’t’ve pegged you for a rapist.”
“Thanks,” he said and stood back a bit from his reflection.
“She probably said you groped her or something.”
He glanced down at my hands as I peeled a bit of blue polish off my thumbnail. “Why do girls wear that chipped nail polish? Why don’t you put it on nice if you’re gonna wear it?”
I flicked my thumb’s nail against my fingers. “Fag maybe but not a rapist,” I said.
Len rolled over on his couch now and faced the other way. It was six in the morning and I felt more lonesome than I could ever recall. Just before I woke I dreamt that Frank was beside me on the lookout up at Cypress Mountain. Morning sun lit the water below us. It was shriekingly bright and Frank wouldn’t open his eyes. I kept caressing his face, trying to get him to look at me, but his mouth and eyes were sealed. Everything jammed tight.
I wanted to feel him against my back now. Slipping out from the covers, I went into the bathroom and changed back into my clothes then tiptoed out and quietly laid my mother’s things back in the trunk.
“You leaving?”
I turned to see Len watching me.
“Yeah. Thank you for not sending me packing last night.”
“You going over to Frank’s?”
“No.” I closed the trunk. “I’ll leave the keys for my car. It’s in front of my building. I’ll get some papers and we’ll transfer it over later.” He watched as I pulled on my coat and lifted the trunk. “Watch your ass around that Eunice Chelsey.”
He looked away, a slight frown on his face.
“Are you pissed off at me?”
He shook his head.
“Okay,” I said, “go back to sleep. I’ll call you later.”
The sky lightened steadily as I walked the half block home, my shoes foreign and clumsy against the soles of my feet. Unable to bear underwire so early, I’d crammed my bra in my coat pocket. Birds twittered overhead and I felt as if neighbours were peering out their drapes, assuming I had just crawled from the bottom of an orgy.
Doors, I discovered, were much easier to manage when I set the trunk down and used both hands. Inside my apartment, I called out Frank’s name. No answer. I put the trunk in my hall closet and went into the bedroom. The long lump of him was sprawled centre-mattress where he generally tried to sleep whether I was there or not.
I sat down on what would have been Frank’s side. His eyes were closed but he was awake all right. “I dreamt this,” I said.
“What?” he grunted.
“I dreamt you wouldn’t open your eyes and see me.”
“Stop the world.” He rolled to face the other wall. “Vivian’s here.”
“I’m sorry about last night. I guess I’m more stressed out than I realized and I probably shouldn’t have been drinking on an empty stomach.” Silence. “And then that Brian guy started talking about his Bambi shit, and that idiot girlfriend of his—I don’t like that guy. He’s—”
“You don’t like him?” Frank turned over and glared at me. “Not only were you bitchy and rude but you ditched me without so much as a kiss my ass! And then you head straight for that faggot’s place. To what? Piss and moan about me?”
“Of course not. I’m sorry. I don’t know what got into me. I just needed to be somewhere, I don’t know, neutral. I’m all screwed up right now. I’m thinking I might take off for a few days and clear my head.”
“What’re you talking about?” Frank sat up. “We were supposed to start our page on Brian’s site in a couple days. This was your idea!”
“It was not my idea. It was yours. You said—”
“You said. Shit, we could fuck at home and make better money than all our acting jobs combined,” he mimicked me. “We could wear masks and shoot it in my bedroom. Who’d know?”
“My mother just died.”
He stared down at the mattress and fidgeted with the sheet.
“I want to drive down south and try to find this friend of hers.”
Another silence. Then, “Down south? What does that mean?”
“I have an address in California. But the phone number doesn’t work.”
He looked at me. “Are you seeing someone?”
“No. For chrissake.” I took a calming breath and lowered my voice. “I need to do this. Please.” I touched his chest and he swatted my hand away.
He shook his head. “I don’t get you. You never wanted anything to do with your mother. You acted as if you didn’t even like her. And now suddenly you’re pushing me away and you’re on some kind of quest.”
“I’m not pushing you away. I just need a couple days.” I reached out again to his stubbly cheek. When he let my fingers stay, I moved in and kissed along his jaw and down his neck. As I reached his chest, his hand came up and stroked my hair. I moved down his stomach and under the covers.
Two hours later, as Frank slept behind me, his arms around my waist, the alarm sounded. I lay awake wondering if there were women somewhere in the world capable of sleeping with their bodies squeezed like this, wrung like chicken necks. I slapped the snooze button. His breath still snarling in a near snore, I could feel him fully alert at my tailbone. He put a hand to his mouth and sleepily licked his fingers. It was his usual ritual of transferring his saliva to my cunt in order to grease the wheels for his morning entrance, but for the first time in the two years we’d been together, the sound of spittle slopping against his fingers repelled me. He reached between my thighs and ran his wet fingers along the folds of me and it was everything I could do to keep from slamming my elbow back as he slipped inside. I felt raw. My fists clenched. Morning hormones surging, it was only a couple minutes before he groaned behind me.
The alarm rang out again and I smacked it silent. Frank kissed my shoulder, reached round to grope me. I crossed my thighs. “Someone needs a shave,” he teased, patting my pubes. I chewed a ragged edge of my fingernail. He reached for my wrist and pulled my hand away from my mouth. “And what’s with the nail-biting? You used to have such nice long ones and they felt so good,” he growled. “Now look at ’em. Like you’ve been busting rocks at the quarry.” He grinned and turned to get out of bed. “Have to get you some like Sienna’s.”
I rolled onto my back and watched him pull his underwear on, tried to figure out why I suddenly wanted to kick his balls. “Are you wrangling today?”
“Yes ma’am. Gotta be out at Vancouver Film Studios again.”
“With the kids?”
“No, same as yesterday. That fashion-show thing—forty lingerie models.” Frank did up his belt. “And they’re all, like, seventeen, eighteen years old,” he added incredulously. I recalled the squealing I’d heard in the background when he called the day before. “One of them was fifteen—she still has br
aces on her teeth! The grips had their hands in their pockets all day.”
“Very nice,” I muttered.
He pulled his wrinkled shirt on over his tee, swatted my ass through the quilt and said, “What’re you gonna do today?”
I shrugged. “Might get my mother’s car.”
“You should sell it and we’ll get a really good camera.” He grabbed his jacket. “We’ll probably do at least fourteen hours today. I’ll call you later.”
When Frank locked the door behind him, I felt as though a boulder had been rolled in front of my cave. I reached for the phone and dialed directly into the voice mail at my mother’s so as to avoid actual contact, and left a message asking Sally to go ahead and leave the keys out for me.
Closing my eyes, I tried to sleep some more. An hour of tossing later, I got up, had a shower and got dressed. I went to my closet, hauled out a canvas bag and stuffed in a few things. In the bathroom I threw in makeup and toiletries and wondered how long it would take to drive to Marin County. Probably two days. It would be good to see Erin.
I rooted around the bedroom for my address book and dialed her number. The answering machine picked up. Her husband’s voice suggested I leave a message. I was coming their way, I told them, and left my cell number in hopes she would call back and invite me to stay. They probably had a pretty swell spread down there: lots of bedrooms and maids, long stairwells, a pool. Erin could smell money like a shark could scent blood.
I cabbed over to my mother’s. A For Sale sign stuck out of the front lawn. Sally’s Jeep was gone so I slipped inside, grabbed the registration papers and keys.
The interior still had new-car scent. Mum had only bought it about a year and a half ago, decided to treat herself to something sporty: a red Toyota convertible. I think I’d ridden in it twice.
Back at my place I loaded up the car with the trunk and my bag, then sat at my kitchen table and composed a note to Frank explaining that I’d decided to leave sooner so that I could be back sooner. I apologized. I said I would call him from the motel that night.
Plates of guilt shifted inside. Not because I was leaving but because this note felt fake. I added that I loved him and scribbled X’s and O’s and felt worse for it.
On the way out of town, I stopped at the agency to pick up a cheque for some extra work I’d done on an American cell phone commercial. The beauty of commercial extra work is that now and then a production company will film more than one ad on a given day. In this particular case they shot four spots and I was paid a separate day for each. All in U.S. funds.
Going by the bank, I took out five hundred in cash and deposited the rest. I wouldn’t tell Frank about the windfall. I just needed to get the hell out of town and not think about him or Brian or Sienna or camera equipment. Walking back to the car, I passed a bookstore and stopped dead. Smack in the middle of the window was Extravagance: Too Many Rats in the Pack. I bent closer to the pane. A blurb along the bottom said, “A compelling biography of the excesses and intrigues that bound Las Vegas, New York and the White House.” I went inside and snatched a copy off the shelf. Fanning the pages, those names fluttered back at me: Giancana, Rosselli, Kennedy, Lawford, Sinatra. I flipped to the back and searched the index. No Celia Dare. I put the book down on the sales counter anyway, along with a guide to California.
On the other side of the Peace Arch border, I went into a gas station, filled up and bought sandwiches, apples, protein bars, water and lighter fluid. I wanted to get as far as possible as fast as possible and I damn well wasn’t about to stop at some highway Denny’s. I picked up salt-and-vinegar chips and saw Sienna’s skinny little body, heard her squeaky caution regarding a fit form from all angles and dropped the bag back on the shelf.
It looked like rain so I put the top up.
Driving her car, after my rickety old beast, was like riding a plush cloud. New shocks absorbed every bump and road ridge and, with the roof up now, it was as though I were in a cocoon. I turned on the radio. Her classical-music station filled the space and I searched for something a little more palatable. Everything irritated me though and I snapped the radio off.
As I rolled along past dense evergreens, the sun shone silver behind dark clouds and brought a luminous green to the trees in the distance. The bay water glowed like the front of a Christian greeting card.
I snapped the radio back on, hunting for the classical. Maybe I should listen to it, maybe it would soothe me the way it did her. I pressed the search button and when the static cleared, Dean Martin sang “Return to Me” in both English and Italian.
Normally the sound of that tired old man would send me screaming, but now, all of a sudden, I saw him at a table with my mother. Like those paintings with James Dean, Marilyn, Bogey and Elvis, only I’d imagined Sammy, Dino and Frank in a diner with Celia Dare. The four of them sat at a table. Peter Lawford leaned back at the counter.
I bit into a sandwich as Rosemary Clooney got into my back seat and crooned “Come On-A My House.” Eventually she moved over for Dinah Washington and that old carny. Peggy Lee.
The farther I got from bigger towns the less music I could find. Often I was stuck with nothing but a preacher braying on about Judgment Day. Somewhere between Portland and Eugene, Oregon, the Reverend Arnie Somebody-or-other started in with a quotation from Saint Paul—You who are wives, be submissive to your husbands—and shot me right back to a pew in the Lifeline Christian Assembly with my mother.
We weren’t churchgoers for long and, as with most of our early experiments, this one took place sometime in the interim that Sally was gone. We had sold the old house and moved to Kitsilano. School was out for summer and I suppose Josie was bored or lonesome. Church, she said, over dinner one night, would bring us into the community.
“But you don’t like communities,” I reminded her.
“Well, I’m trying, okay?”
I was too old for Lifeline’s nursery school but not old enough to have any interest in an hour of one man’s drone. I squirmed. I doodled on the church bulletin and tried, now and then, to pass Mum notes.
The first Sunday after school was back in session, I brought my homework. The minister took the form of Muzak as I scratched away in my notebook. Until I glanced over at Mum. Her lips were a pursed rip across her face. I looked to the minister.
“… Now when Paul said, Wives be submissive to your husbands,” he explained, “this was the most caring and wonderful thing he could have told you ladies.” He went on to explain that, as women of the seventies, wives were in more danger than ever before. Feminists, abortionists and homosexuals wanted nothing better than to unravel the fabric of the family but we should all guard against this. “Have we not all seen these strident feminists become remarkably submissive when the right—or even the wrong—man comes into their life? Women long for—”
“Bullshit!” my mother burst like a cork. Electricity zigzagged across my ribs. Nobody turned. In my mind, the word had exploded, had echoed through the halls of the universe but nobody so much as glanced and I realized it had actually been a whisper. I watched her cross and uncross her legs until it seemed she might hyperventilate. Finally she grabbed her purse and pulled me up the aisle with her.
“My Duo-Tang,” I yipped as it hit the floor. Somebody had to say something out loud.
“Male chauvinist pig,” she breathed as she pulled me along. Billie Jean King had just been on the cover of Time, a photograph of her presenting Bobby Riggs with a piglet prior to their much-hyped Battle of the Sexes tennis match. The symbolism had been clearly explained to me.
We always sat fairly close to the back but I hoped we were at least a bit spectacular in our exit. All was quiet. The minister droned on as though nothing had happened. Still, I felt it was a minor display. I was glad I’d worn my canary-yellow dress.
Once we got out the front doors, she broke into a trot, her head down and I bellowed Bullshit! into the air. She shushed me but her frown eased into a careful smile.
It
was coming up on ten o’clock by the time I drove into Redding, California. After eleven hours of driving, it was about ten degrees warmer than home. I had wanted to find myself a place to sleep before dark, but flying down the I–5 had eased something in me and I couldn’t bring myself to stop.
Cruising along Redding’s main drag, motels and lighted signs with burnt-out bulbs screamed out deals. A place made to pass through. I stopped for gas and as I attempted to get back on the main street, I went the wrong way and found myself back on the highway. I swung off and tried a couple different exits but that dingy strip of insistently cheap motels had disappeared. I finally came upon an Econo-Lodge and pulled in there instead.
There were a few empty spots in the parking lot, which I took to mean there might be space in the motel. In the tiny glassed-in reception area, a middle-aged wiry guy gave me a peculiar smile as I came in, one that made me feel as though a stranger had just asked if I’d like a Pap test. He’s giving me the fish eye, I thought as some Internet mobster site came to mind. Teddy the Ghost had hooded fish eyes. Or was it Sam Giancana? Who cares, I thought. This guy’s no mobster. Girls like me make old men like him scared; they like to look, but tight jeans and big-heeled boots send them scurrying for cover.
I told him I’d like a room and he asked if I was alone. I wouldn’t normally have made much of that question, but now something in me clenched and receded. Maybe crossing the border had softened my spine a little. I stuttered slightly when asking the rate of his least expensive room.
“$49.95,” he said, “unless you got Triple A.”
I paused. “Oh yeah, let me just see where I put my card.” Mum was a member. I wondered if she could have left her card in the glove box.
“That’s okay.” His eyes ran down the length of my hair. “I trust you—$44.95.”
Snapping my wallet shut, I dropped it back in my purse. I trust you, I sneered inside. Was that some kind of crack?
He slid a reservation card across the counter. “Smoking or non?”
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