— It’s immoral.
— I don’t care what you think. You don’t even know what ‘immoral’ means.
— Yes, I do.
— So what does it mean?
Emily doesn’t answer. She knows it’s wrong, sins of the flesh, fornication, she’s heard it all at the meetings before, but she can’t explain exactly what it means. She decides she will look up “fornication” in the big dictionary during her next library shift.
— See? You don’t know.
Lenora doesn’t look at her as she studiously applies blue eyeliner beneath her green eyes.
— I mean it. You’re going to get in trouble.
— Oh yeah? For what?
— Saying stuff like that.
— No, I’m not. Because you promised to Jehovah that you wouldn’t tell. And you aren’t going to break a promise to God, are you? And risk being destroyed at Armageddon? I don’t think so. Now go away.
Confused, Emily goes to her bedroom. Lenora has been baptized for two years now, and until now, has never talked about immoral stuff. It could be a trick, something to get Emily in trouble. She decides not to tell, in case that’s exactly what Lenora wants, but she’s still angry and frustrated.
She gets dressed and is ready for the meeting early. After twisting around in front of the mirror to admire her hair a while longer, Emily decides to get back at Lenora for the story.
She sits in Lenora’s recliner for ten minutes before anyone notices. Her mom, sipping from her usual lidded coffee cup, shakes her head.
— You’re asking for it. Lenora’s not going to be happy, and I don’t have time to break up fights. I have to finish getting ready for the Hall. We’re leaving soon.
Emily doesn’t care, there’s nothing Lenora can do. She sits with her arms folded in front of her chest and her legs straight out, barely reaching the footrest.
With a rush of air, Lenora flounces into the living room.
— What do you think you’re doing?
She taps her blue painted nails on the armrest. Emily says nothing, just hums to herself, and looks straight ahead like no one is there.
— Get out of my chair.
— No. It’s my chair too. It’s everybody’s chair.
— No, it’s not; it’s mine. Now get up. Lenora leans into Emily’s face. Emily can feel the wet air from her mouth.
— Now! Lenora’s face reddens and her eyes narrow.
— Gross. Emily turns her head away.
— Say it, don’t spray it.
Lenora clears her throat.
— This is your last chance. She counts to three.
As Emily sits rigid and stares at the window across the room, a warm gob of slime hits her cheek and slides toward her chin. She wipes it on her sleeve and looks at Lenora.
— Pig. She doesn’t get up.
Lenora stomps out of the living room, and the bathroom door slams shut. Emily squirms and grins in the chair, trying not to laugh out loud. Victorious, she folds her arms behind her head and closes her eyes. While Lenora sulks in the bathroom, Emily pretends she is at the beach, lying on a towel under the warm sun, the waves quiet behind her.
As she stretches, languid, taking up as much space as possible, there is a sudden tug, hard, on the side of her head. Lenora pulls her right braid.
— This is your last chance, for real this time. Get out of my chair!
Emily doesn’t budge. There is a flash of silver near the corner of her eye, and something cold against her ear. Then the swish and clang of steel jaws, the unmistakable snap of the scissors.
Emily laughs.
— I’m not scared of you. She pushes her chin out further.
— This is my chair too.
— You asked for it. Lenora yanks her hair again.
Emily hears one quick snip, and something lands in her lap. She looks down and there, lying motionless across her knees, is her limp, amputated braid.
20
IT HAD GOTTEN COLD, JUST after the first snowfall of the season. My breath wisped like I was smoking and I tried to ignore it, tried not to see the swirling shapes and faces. That happens when sleep abandons you. You see things, glimmers and flickers, elusive forms darting in and out of your periphery, but you can’t quite focus on them before they scurry, unseen, into corners. Memory becomes pliable and elastic, and you stop believing that time moves from point A to point B. Beginnings and endings are less significant. By that frozen day, things had begun to overlap, to occur out of sequence, and I struggled to fit them all back together again, to scrabble at the pieces I had collected and hoarded. I tried to shove them back together in the right order, but by then I couldn’t remember their chronology anymore.
I could see her face when I exhaled, so I put on a scarf, but that made my face wet and even colder. The corner of my left eye twitched for an impossibly long time, strange and disconcerting. A tiny heart beating way too fast, about to explode. A microscopic bird, trapped and panicked, beneath my eyelashes. I leaned against a mailbox and closed my eyes until the pulsing stilled. I counted eleven deep breaths.
— Are you okay? A woman pushing a stroller stopped, reached her arm toward me. I pulled away.
— I’m fine. I resumed walking and winced. I called back over my shoulder.
— Thanks.
Though they were too small for me, I wore her eight-hole Doc Martens. They were tight when I put them on that morning, but I had convinced myself that they would stretch as I walked. I wanted them to fit, I wanted them to be mine. They’d been in one of the boxes I stashed under my bed, along with various t-shirts and skirts, countless mixed tapes, old photos, and dried-up makeup. My dusty shrine of decade-old fragments.
The two-page list of record stores was in my pocket. I fixed my gaze beyond my breath and watched the street signs and building numbers. The first shop, Sound Effects, was easy to find. Electronic music blasted through a rush of warm air as I pushed open the door. The girl behind the counter peered briefly at me from beneath her blue bangs, said nothing, and went back to the magazine she was reading. The rest of her hair was a yellow tangle piled on top of her head and she wore what looked like a dog collar around her neck. The store sold gleaming keyboards on small platforms, shelves of microphones, various cords, and expensive devices with a lot of knobs on them. I wandered down one aisle and back up the other. There were a few bins of CDs and tapes and records, but I recognized none of the bands. The repetitive song that had been playing slowed, then stopped. No one else was in the store. My arm itched and I rubbed it through my coat.
— Looking for anything in particular?
The girl stared at me like I’d been shoving tapes down my pants or something, her one eyebrow slightly raised, expectant.
— No, not really.
The music resumed with a deep thumping. My eye started to twitch again and I tried to ignore it. I hoped she wouldn’t notice and think I had some weird, contagious infection. I walked up to the counter with what I hoped resembled confidence.
— Um, I was just wondering, is Theo working today?
— Who?
— Theo. When’s he in again?
— Nobody named Theo works here. You mean Tommy? Lots of girls come in looking for Tommy . . .
— No. I guess I have the wrong store.
She smirked.
— You sure?
— Yeah. I’m sure.
— Whatever. Good luck.
What had I expected? That he’d be there, in the first store on my list? I shook my head and went back out into the cold and kept walking. On to the next. It got easier to ask after the first few times, but I didn’t know what I would say to Theo if I found him.
What am I supposed to say to him?
Pick up where I left off.
What does that mean? Can’t I just say ‘give
me back my sister’?
For the next few hours, the blisters on my heels throbbed and swelled, and finally broke raw and bled through my socks.
I didn’t know what she meant. What was I supposed to do with him? I thought she wanted revenge. I thought she wanted me to cut his brake cables, or get him fired from his job, or make his life hell in some way. But pick up where she left off? What did that mean? Be his girlfriend? Is that what she meant? Was it a trap?
I started to take my frustration out on the bitter record store employees, like a guy in tight black jeans and a ring through his eyebrow.
— Are you sure no one by that name works here?
— Yeah, I’m sure. I’m the assistant manager, okay?
I stomped out, sighing loudly, as though personally affronted. I heard him laugh as I left. I turned around and swung open the door.
— Go to hell!
I continued, refusing to let frustration slow my progress. My list was arranged in what I thought was a reasonable route through the city. The next stores were in a west end neighbourhood, farther from downtown, less commercial, and hopefully full of the kind of places where Theo would work. I wanted to reach a few of them before they closed.
I walked for another hour, crossing railroad tracks and passing abandoned buildings, until I was in a different area entirely. Pedestrians were fewer and there were more industrial and automotive businesses than retailers. My rage had waned and my pace slowed. The inside of my left forearm was still sore. At the next red light I pushed up my sleeve to find out why it stung so much. What I saw made my stomach churn.
A mess of jagged scratches, sticky and raw where the scabs had torn off and stuck to the sleeve of my sweater. A network of lines, deliberate intersections, scrawled desperately — a message.
One series of marks looked like numbers, and I twisted my forearm around and squinted. 53235. I didn’t remember etching these digits, nor did I know what they meant. Or what she was trying to tell me. A palindrome. The origins of the word palindrome were Greek: running back again. Beginnings and endings that were the same, and could be repeated, over and over, to infinity. I shivered.
I stopped looking at the addresses and walked as fast as I could. I just wanted to stop thinking, to be conscious only of my body. I ran, and my lungs ached with searing cold and my feet burned with blisters. I didn’t even realize I was crying until I stopped moving and rested with my hands on my knees and my head between my legs. I stayed that way until I could breathe normally again.
I wiped my face with my scarf and a taxi driver slowed down and honked his horn.
— Fuck you! I screamed.
He kept going. That may have been the first time I’d ever said that, to anyone, ever. I started to laugh, almost silently at first, then out loud — not that my swearing was funny, but the sheer release was mania, it was adrenaline, it was addictive. I had to say it again and again, and the words became contagious, infecting each other and multiplying, and even if I had tried, I couldn’t have stopped them.
— Fuck you! I howled over and over into the desolate street. My scarf was undone and my hair whipped across my face. I must have looked like a crazy person, screaming obscenities and laughing my head off, but I didn’t care. It was liberation. It didn’t matter what anyone thought of me. There were no Ministerial Servants to decide if I was accepted or not, no elders to admonish me, not even any family to punish me anymore.
I walked on, deeper into the unfamiliar neighbourhood.
The wind was icy and the city was huge. It was just before dusk, when the light is exhilarating, when it gleams gold and silver against tall buildings and bounces off windows and cars like an excited, living thing. The walls and storefronts glimmered as though underwater, the sun glazing them from afar. It was my favourite time of day. It was the only time when I could be invisible again, when I could stop thinking and just look.
I pulled off my glove and pressed the bracelet against my cheek.
I was falling backward into her.
Ten years of obliterating memory, of nothing but school and homework and Bible study and planning my way out. Shock is a great eclipser, and can last years.
But as soon as I left home, I remembered everything — a flood, a typhoon, a volcano — Lenora the natural disaster.
By then I was on the second page of my list, and no Theos worked in any of the stores. I was lost, and couldn’t find the next one on my list. Where I expected The Record Keeper, there was a gas station. The light began to fade into grey, and my determination soon followed. I didn’t know where I was but I didn’t want to go home. I was a failure. All day I’d tried so hard, and with what result? My blisters oozed, I was lost, on the verge of frostbite, and I hadn’t found him. I slumped against the wall in the doorway of what looked like an old warehouse. Everything started to hurt at once: my clawed up arm, my aching feet, my empty stomach.
Suddenly the door behind me swung open and gouged my back. I yelped.
— Oh my God, I’m sorry! Are you okay?
A tall woman with her hair in a bun stood over me. I nodded.
— Are you sure? She adjusted the gym bag on her shoulder.
— Yeah, I’m fine.
She got into a white car parked on the side of the street and drove away. I stood on the sidewalk, rattled back into reality, and looked at the sign over the doorway I’d been whimpering in.
I grabbed the post next to me. It had become harder and harder to distinguish what I’d dreamed from what I’d imagined, and what had happened from what was happening. I unzipped my coat, threw my glove on the ground, and pulled a rumpled business card from my pocket.
Academy of Circus Arts.
I breathed in, and I knew what I had to do, whether I found Theo or not.
I pulled open the door that had just scraped my back.
A wall of bright light and heat and echoes stopped me, and I stood still. There were trampolines, trapeze rigs, acrobats, dancers — noise and movement everywhere. I pulled off my coat and let it drop. High above me, suspended between poles and ladders, was a thick cable. A thin man stood poised in the centre of it, as though suspended, majestic, in mid-air. A funambulist.
I pushed up my sleeves, put my hands on my hips, and smiled, until someone tapped me on the shoulder. I blinked and tried to focus on the blond woman next to me. It was the young woman who’d complimented my posture at the pub.
She stared at me, then frowned.
— Your arm is bleeding.
21
— TYLER, WHAT ARE YOU trying to prove? Don’t you know that people are saying all sorts of things about you? Emily’s mom is hissing questions through her teeth as though she doesn’t want to ask but they slither out anyway.
Uncle Tyler shrugs. He’s going to the Tuesday night meeting at the Kingdom Hall with Emily and Lenora and their parents. It was their father’s idea that he have dinner with them — roast beef — even though he doesn’t seem to like Uncle Tyler very much. Hardly any of them spoke during the meal, and as soon as they were finished eating, Lenora dashed up to her room and their dad retreated to the den. Emily and her mom and Uncle Tyler sat for a while longer. Weeks have passed since their last argument about his hair, and he still hasn’t gotten it cut.
— Look, it’s just hair; it’s not such a big deal.
Her mom shakes her head.
— It’s a big deal to the elders. It’s not just about your hair, either—
— It’s hardly even long, give me a break. It’s barely past my collar.
Any hair that goes beyond the collar of a brother’s Hall shirt is considered long, and therefore worldly.
Emily opens her math book and pretends to do her homework, which is already done. She runs her fingers through her chin-length bob. Both of her braids, sadly reunited, are hidden in a shoebox under her bed. Lenora said that it looked better like
this anyway, but only because it was her fault she had to get it all cut off in the first place.
— Look, the elders have said a few things, unofficially, to Jim — and they wanted him to counsel you. I asked him to let me do it, but if you’re not going to listen to me, it’s going to get blown way out of proportion. They think that if you’re letting your appearance become worldly, then you must be behaving that way too, blah blah blah, so they’re going to start watching you more closely. If they haven’t already.
— What’s that supposed to mean?
Emily looks at her uncle, then at her mom, then back at her uncle.
— Emily, it’s time for you to go upstairs and get ready for the meeting. You can wear whichever dress you want.
Emily doesn’t respond, and keeps her head hovered over her textbook.
— Tyler, I don’t know what it means. You know how the elders’ wives are, always watching what everyone else does and then telling their husbands. Things can get out of control really quickly. If there’s anything you’re doing that you shouldn’t, if you’re associating with worldly friends too much, stop now before they find out.
Emily wants to tell her mom about Michael and Jeff, that Uncle Tyler met them out in service, that they’re interested in learning the Truth and will probably start attending the meetings soon, and that they won’t be worldly for long. She doesn’t, not yet, and she bites the insides of her cheeks, and slowly packs up her homework, waiting for her uncle to tell her mom about them himself.
— You’re overreacting.
— I wish I was. You know how rumours fly around the Hall. Once they start, there’s no stopping them, and before you know it you’re being publicly reproved or hauled in front of a Judicial Committee.
Uncle Tyler shifts in his chair. Emily clears her throat.
— Tell them about those guys that you’re almost studying with. Tell the elders about them, and then they can’t be mad, right?
— What? Who is she talking about?
— No one. Forget it.
— But why? They seemed interested. They took the magazines and talked to you all afternoon.
Watch How We Walk Page 12