Peninsula Sinking

  HOW YOUR LIFE

  This is how your life has been lately: you go for an evening jog because your body has become a cellulite farm on account of binge drinking and late-night poutine and no word of a lie an owl swoops down and clutches your head. As if the whole lung-burning, tit-lurching experience wasn’t enough without some yellow-eyed demon descending out of the full moon as you’re huffing through Point Pleasant. You’re listening to Katy so you don’t hear a thing and then there are claws in your head and a nursing home smell and something is trying to fly away with your skull. You’re swatting your head and hitting feathers and talons and the deranged animal which is probably rabid starts flapping and making weird bird noises that are not scary-cute Halloween hoos until finally you collapse on the ground and rip off one of your shoes and start going batshit. Your peripherals catch someone rushing to your rescue and you think no it can’t be and then yes of course it’s the hot butcher from the market and you’re thinking, that’s right I am swinging a sneaker at my own head right now.

  There’s a crunching noise and a burn worse than a bikini wax and when you look up an enormous owl is flying away holding a ribboning clump of your hair. The hair you spent 200 dollars on yesterday. The hair that causes strangers to ask “where are you from?” and mean “I’m having trouble placing you racially.”

  You do not finish your run. You do not accept the hot butcher’s entreaties to help but instead slink away crying/gasping. You go home and call animal control and the generic dad-voice on the other end tells you that yeah, there have been a lot of owls behaving weirdly in the city lately and they’ve had a couple of similar reports. No, the animal is not rabid. It is quite sane—the bounding ponytail of the harmless, new-leaf-overturning jogger simply appears to the hungry owl eye as a delicious scurrying rodent.

  You do not run again that entire week despite your May resolution. And in fact there is a pathetically large part of you that feels secretly happy that you now basically have an excuse not to run again for your entire life. Instead of jogging, you do Pogue and Lower Deck and Alehouse with more than your usual gusto. One night you’re stumbling down Barrington with a dude named Blane, telling him you can’t believe you swiped right in spite of the fact that his name was Blane, when you step on a syringe that’s lying on the sidewalk. There’s a sound like biting last year’s candy-cane and when you look down there’s a tiny disgusting sidewalk needle next to an archipelago of broken glass. You are wearing flats and you don’t know if there are microscopic cuts on your feet but you’re thinking probably and you’re thinking Ebola thinking HIV thinking when was the last time you got tested anyway and you collapse on the curb and start to cry/gasp. When you look up Blane is gone and it’s almost definitely for the best although you were pretty excited to text Miranda that you’d let a guy with dreadlocks and an idiotic name like Blane into your bed. Miranda loves that shit because she’s got sexual claustrophobia from sleeping with Luke and only Luke and now that she’s eleventy months pregnant she can barely get off her chair so she probably/hopefully has not had sex in a few weeks. You think about calling Miranda to cry/gasp into her ear but then you think she’s probably asleep or giving birth or sitting on the toilet all night because it’s easier than getting up sixteen times to pee. It’s too late to call your mother and you definitely would not let her hear you cry/gasp anyway so you go home, fry some dumplings, and fall asleep watching Pride and Prejudice.

  Are you really over school? Are you really going to start your own organic dairy farm/artisanal cheese shop with a sign that reads “shoppe” just so you can upstage your new archnemesis the hot butcher by opening a stand in the same mall where you and he now work and showing generous cleave and outselling him? You have just received letters of acceptance with decent funding from grad schools in Edmonton and Ottawa, though you’d never heard of a master’s in public health before Dr. Pottie started pushing it when you met for coffee in September. You are not sure you can leave this place again, not sure you even want to move forward. You want to remain twenty-six living in this place you love and not committing to any of the various futures that could ruin or wrack or age you. You remember when you were seven and Miranda was nine you stood in the backyard watching inchworms crawl along your chipped white fence. She asked about who you would want to marry when you grew up and you said no one because you didn’t want to grow up, seven was the perfect age. You wanted to stay seven forever and you still do.

  Your parents have been pushing the master’s although your dentist father’s still on about upgrading and med school and you have to admit you like the idea of being better than your bilingual government employee sister at one thing ever. Your parents are in favour of grad school or med school or dental school or law school but they are definitely not pro cheese shoppe. You yourself remain baffled as to why Dr. Pottie and other experts are remotely excited about your undergrad thesis on urban versus rural sexual habits. You’d only picked the subject because it seemed pretty obvious that country folk would spread more STIs than urbanites. Your logic: fewer potential partners plus less to do equals lots of partner trading within small social pool. According to Kinsey’s largely discredited but still compelling research, fifty percent of rural males have had a sexual encounter with an animal. So there’s that. Then there’s incest. You once heard that people in Newfoundland developed an app that would tell them how much genetic material they shared with the person they were meeting. First dates started by opening this app and bumping iPhones. You remember thinking this was genius but also terrifying, bumping iPhones being basically the new sex anyway. You wonder what’re the chances that the hot butcher is related to you. Then, sicker, you think maybe that’s why you find him dangerously desirable. You remember watching a documentary where an Australian father had left his family when the kids were babies and then picked up a young blonde twenty years later and found himself in a toxically spectacular sexual relationship with his biological daughter. “She’s beautiful,” he said in his Crocodile Dundee accent. “I made her and she’s beautiful.” There used to be a girl at the grocery store from Cape Breton and one time she got drunk and told you that as a teenager she’d slept with two of her cousins before she even found out they were her cousins. Is this research or gossip? According to Dr. Pottie, it’s research. Any case for a while it seemed like a master’s was a good idea but then you came to think you were only doing school to postpone real life.

  You spend the morning taking Facebook quizzes and telling yourself you won’t post the results and then posting the results. Then you go to work and as you’re weighing portions of water buffalo Havarti your new archnemesis the hot butcher comes up to the counter. He says “Hey” and you say “Yo” and panic about your hair patch-up job as you pretend to be really focused on weighing your one hundred millionth portion of buff waterlow.

  “Hey,” he says again. “Callie?”

  How does this cleaver-wielding meatman know your name?

  He grins and nods at your chest. Your nametag. “Yep, that’s me.”

  “Ferdinand,” he says sincerely, and you are struggling not to laugh in his face and then realizing maybe the ridiculous name will keep some of the other girls away as he reaches out to shake your hand. You have never found a hand sexy before, but his is perfect. Hairless and muscular. Long, shapely fingers. The fingers of an artist.

  So his hand is just dangling there until you show him you’re wearing latex gloves and currently handling a large hunk of cheese and he smiles, embarrassed. You look down at the cheese. For the first time ever it looks exciting—porous and liquid and full of thrill and energy.

  “Are you okay? That was pretty insane, what happened yesterday. I saw the whole thing.” You tell him yeah, you set a deadly pace up those hills. He snorts. If his eyes were blue they would twinkle. “No, I mean with the owl. Was it an owl?”

  “Yeah, yeah.” You shrug, adjust your latex gloves. “That’s just my pet owl, Arie
l.”

  Though you’re expecting the sexiest laugh ever, in fact his laugh sounds a bit like the pigs from Hannibal. “You’re hilarious,” he says. “Like from The Little Mermaid?”

  “Sure. Need any cheese?”

  “No, actually. I’m vegan.”

  “A vegan butcher?”

  He grins.

  “Hilarious,” you say, thinking please don’t laugh again. He laughs again and it’s less bad this time. You’re guessing the first one was just his nervous laugh then you’re thinking if he’s nervous that’s probably a good sign.

  He swallows. You bag some cheese. He swallows again then blurts: “Want to go for a walk sometime?”

  A walk. Does it involve alcohol? “Does it involve owls?”

  He smiles like a triumphant grandfather clutching a fat trout. “It can,” he says, keying the pin into his iPhone.

  Family dinner on the dark side. Despite your mother’s panic—her eldest daughter is thirty-six weeks along and set to unload a tiny human at the most minute provocation—Miranda came down from Ottawa for an impromptu visit. She’s been on mat leave for two weeks and it’s already razing her patience and besides you and your sister always enjoy an excuse to return to the nest. Although you moved to Halifax when you were nineteen, going back across the bridge for dinners and kitchen raids is in you like salt in ocean air.

  “I don’t feel anything. Isn’t it supposed to like kick or dance or light a cigarette in there?”

  You’re sitting on the faded maroon living room couch, the upholstery shredded by cats long dead, with one hand on your sister’s swollen gut. She’s lifted her pregnancy pants to reveal a bruise-dark navel the size of an Olympic medal, wreathed with scraggled tentacles of vein.

  “Yeah, sometimes. Once I actually saw the full hand, all five fingers prodding through my gutflesh like it was trying to mark a cave wall. But mostly it’s supposed to sleep.”

  “Sounds nice.”

  “Do you want one?”

  “What?”

  “A kid. Not now, but someday?”

  You remember when you were a child you had two female cats, neither of them neutered. Lou never got pregnant but Sabotage was a kitten factory. Five a year, every summer. Every year your mother would sigh “Jesus not again” and your father would joke that he was going to drown them in Lake Banook but really all of you loved building nests in cardboard boxes and naming them Fatty and Runty and watching them play and learn, nurse and grow. Even your father made a point of building a whelping box and saying the words “whelping box” whenever possible. You remember how slimy the kittens looked when they were born, the rank uterine film Sabotage had to lick off. But mostly what you remember is Lou taking that tabby in her mouth and bringing it to her own nest in the closet, trying to nurse it with her milkless teats. Stunned by that strange parody of motherhood, you had longed to see Lou birth a tiny squinting kitten of her own. Pined to see her curl down to lick her own child’s amniotic sac, tonguing that membrane until the great rushing world spilled through.

  “A kid? I don’t know. Does the kid want me?”

  “Don’t do that. You always do that.”

  “What?”

  “Conceal yourself. You need to let people in.”

  “Woah,” you say, raising palms. “Fine,” you say, and you tell her about Lou and the tabby kitten and that day in the backyard and how you still want to be seven forever. But you are also reluctantly thinking that maybe she’s right, maybe you have a habit of concealing yourself from yourself.

  Miranda says sad about the cat but that is not you and you sit there for a while in silence, listening to the sound of your mother tenderly cursing at a béchamel. Finally Miranda starts telling you about how her husband’s septuagenarian parents are trying to get her to baptize her baby and it is nice to laugh. Miranda is not even remotely smug about her pregnancy even though she’s more the platinum child than ever and even though her husband Luke is miraculously both super intelligent and mega dad-hot. For the longest time you tried not to admit it to yourself but now you feel better if you just concede that he’s a dorky fox. The kind of guy who takes off his thick glasses to display shimmering crystal blues and then reveals smooth hairless pecs underneath his dad-plaid. The worst/best part about Miranda is she’s so sweet she doesn’t notice that it might be hard for you to be the adopted girl in a family full of beaming blond superstars. And the other worst/best part about your older sister is that in spite of living a predictable/hateable yuppie life including a golf club membership and a purebred Australian shepherd and a mortgage, she is still genuinely fun.

  “It’s my fucking baby so go fuck yourself,” she is saying now, imagining that she is speaking to Luke’s insanely fit parents who are late seventies and threatening to live forever. “All these people making demands about this fucking baby before it’s even tasted air. No I haven’t picked a name. No I don’t want to know the sex. No I don’t want to get my kid baptized because no I’m not already thinking about its death and what it might say to Saint Peter and I don’t believe in Peter anyway. I’m going to have a baby and I’m terrified of the whole hospital part and I’m still not sure this was even a good idea so everyone can fuck off. It’s my fucking baby so go fuck yourself,” she is saying, and you are laughing, laughing as your father arrives home from the office and your mother sings dinner’s ready and you feel grateful to Miranda because you feel she has bared herself, that you are trusted and sober and home.

  You have dinner and there’s wine and it’s pleasant and afterwards you’re in the living room having chamomile tea when you see your sister’s stomach lurch. She is leaning back in an armchair, two hands on her veiny watermelon, and something buckles in that melon, the movement visible right through her shirt. It’s like that scene in Aliens, like a misplaced heart thumping in her gut. But then your sister coos and lifts her shirt and rolls her weird pants down, and then she invites you to touch and talk to the fetus and you feel your heart grow and jolt and almost pur. Your father thuds over and puts his hand there too and your mother rushes in from the kitchen and finally you understand. Some part of you has always imagined you’d have children one day but whenever you’ve thought realistically about the vaginal tears and the foul, spontaneous farting and the stretched bits and the word “perineum” you could never quite come to terms with the idea of actually choosing to accept this burden. Now you begin to get it. You are touching Miranda’s belly and her nameless, genderless child is thudding through her flesh into your hand, saying hello, saying auntie, saying help me I’m alive.

  Wednesday morning—probably because your ambulatory non-alcoholic date is the following evening—you get the trauma pruned out of your hair then spend several hours berating yourself in front of a mirror until you go for a run. But because of the whole demonic-avian-descending-from-the-heavens incident, you take your pre-date run at the Human Body Refinement Factory even though you’ve sworn you’d never go back to the Human Body Refinement Factory ever since your Sensation and Perception prof accosted you on the new “curve” treadmill.

  “Callie!” he shouted, coming right up and leaning on the left handlebar. You could see the guy on the climbing wall looking over, wondering about this stooping greyhair. “I haven’t seen you since your final assignment and I just wanted to say how truly excellent your reading of intragender versus intergender eye contact was and I thought it was appropriate to say so as you were sweating and gasping in one of your occasional manic attempts to reduce your love handle and/or thigh size even though every time you lose five pounds it seems to come directly off the boobs or the parts of the butt you actually like. I’m sure you realize that going stupid-hard until you feel the sour breath of the reaper does not make up for sporadic and irregular gym exercise but hey power to you.”

  Anyway those were not his exact words but close enough and that was only the beginning and you ended your workout ea
rly just to avoid this gaunt and overly gym-talkative professor and now you are pretty sure that you will see him as you scan the Human Body Refinement Factory, stepping onto the treadmill. But of course it is not the creepshow professor you see but Ferdinand himself and you are already crouch-walking directly back to the change room when he sees you and flashes his huge white smile and starts walking towards you, neck muscles taut and glistening with a brine of sweat.

  You say hi, terrified, still scanning the gym though you don’t know who for and he says a few things you pay no attention to. At one point he looks like he wants you to laugh so you giggle but then you start coughing and mutter some lame goodbye and he asks if you’re still on for tomorrow night and you shrug for some reason but then manage to say yes of course and he says he’ll text you. Then you are downstairs in the bathroom staring at yourself in the mirror for a long time and you are amazed but still not happy that despite everything he still seems to find you attractive. You drink water. You wait it out. Girls with taut, waxed bodies come down and shower and look at you like “why are your nipples so large?” and leave. A women’s volleyball team passes through. He must be gone by now and you are trying to decide whether to go up and finish your workout after all but by this point you are deliriously hungry because you never eat for a few hours before a workout or you’ll throw up after three strides. So here you are on the bench in the gym locker room, an enormous megastill emptiness.

  “Is his name actually Ferdinand?” Miranda’s driving you home from dinner and asking about the butcher and you’ve already disclosed far too much so you remain silent and hope she will take a hint and change subjects. As she pulls onto the McDonald Bridge you look down over the city lights and think how much you love this place—the preposterous hills and lethargic public transportation, the meandering, narrow streets, the bright colours of the wooden houses on Agricola, the ones locals call “the three sisters” although you’ve always seen four. Mostly, though, you love the oldness of it all. This is what you noticed when you came back from Calgary to finish your degree after things went sour with your ex. You noticed the long vowels in the words “tahl” and “bahr” and “hahrbour,” you noticed and were suddenly fond of Georgian buildings and the town clock. Also you became conscious of the fog. The way it whisked, spectral, across the midnight streets. How it shrouded the moon. Its thickness, wheeling through the salt summer air. The way it hung around the streetlamps, glossing the city in hard-boiled glow. The way you would go for a walk and find that, though there hadn’t been a single raindrop, your clothes were soaked when you reached home. The fog in this place loosed something ancient in you, some millennia of beauty.