The Virgin Spy

by Krista Bridge

  Tasha let her arm drop from her forehead, and she began pumping both arms half-heartedly.

  “That’s it,” Isabel called, several paces ahead. “Sweat it out.”

  Each salty trickle seemed to confirm Rita’s 110 pounds, and Isabel’s 117, and her own burbling, resplendent 152. Isabel jogged with Rita and Tasha, but in front by a foot or two, glancing back and lifting her knees high as if to spur them to greater cardiovascular heights. Sometimes she jogged backwards a few paces like an army drill sergeant. She sang while she ran them. At thirty-three, she had discovered Led Zeppelin, and it had been the main music of Tasha’s childhood.

  “Hey, hey, mama, said the way you MOVE, gonna make you SWEAT, gonna make you GROOVE,” she sang, jerking her hand in the air like she was whipping a horse.

  The song invigorated Rita, who took a deep breath and stepped up her speed. Isabel pointed to Tasha and held up her stopwatch.

  “Oh, oh, child, way you shake that thing, gonna make you BURN, gonna make you STING.”

  When she sang the word burn, she pumped her arms and grimaced. She turned frontwards again and jogged in silence for several paces before turning around again.

  “I don’t know but I’ve been told, a BIG-LEGGED woman ain’t got no SOUL.”

  Tasha was certain that here Isabel and Rita were both looking directly at her legs, and she thought that one of Isabel’s hand gestures might have been encouraging them all to take in her thighs, which brushed together.

  They jogged in silence for some time, and just when Tasha thought she was getting used to the morning air in her throat, her pounding pulse, and the stickiness on her tongue, she felt a palpitation between her breasts, a flutter that felt like a muscle twitch. Instead of slowing down, she began to sprint, as if she could outrun it. She pounded her legs so vigorously that she felt barely in control of them.

  “There you go,” Isabel shouted. “Way to go!”

  Tasha ran faster and faster until her awareness of place slid out from under her. She didn’t hear her mother cheering, but ran until she couldn’t feel her legs, until her head fell back as if her neck were too weak to support it. The trees encircling the track were hazy in her sightline, and above them, the sky looked blanched and runny. She tried to signal to Isabel, but her hands and arms seemed caught in the motion of running and she couldn’t break from the mould. She imagined the paramedics arriving, the attempts at revival, the heads shaking sombrely, then the funeral arrangements, the sparse turnout, the tart maternal eulogy. Finally she stopped running and doubled over with her hands on her knees. She closed her eyes and thought, Please let it come quickly.

  “Why did you stop?” Isabel asked. “These things take perseverance.”

  When Tasha opened her eyes again, the trees had clear outlines, the sky was a solid morning grey.

  “Leave me alone, Mother.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  Tasha straightened and started walking away from the track.

  “I can’t imagine what your problem is,” Isabel said, walking after her. “Exercise is supposed to put you in a good mood. Every cell of your brain should be engorged with endorphins right now.”

  Rita looked longingly back at the track, then slowly gathered up the towels and water bottles and trailed Tasha and Isabel at a polite distance.

  “Well, now everyone is disappointed,” Isabel said. “This behaviour isn’t fair to Rita. We all came here to exercise, but look at that—only fifteen minutes and you’re ready to quit. No one is impressed.”

  They walked in a line back to the apartment, Tasha leading the way. Isabel followed in her version of silence: stretches of quiet punctuated with sighs and mutterings to herself. Tasha felt that she had been caught in the scene of a gross impropriety, such as picking her nose. It was the same way she had always felt, especially when it came to her mother. The year she was fifteen, she had been terrified of dying in humiliating circumstances. She had been concerned about sudden heart attacks and massive cerebral accidents, strokes, aneurysms, anything that would cause her to drop dead without warning. She was convinced that it was not only possible, but likely: her body might simply shut down, one normal function derailed, and the whole system would explode silently and magnificently. In the frantic theatre of imagination, she was always involved in something private and embarrassing when this occurred, such as one of her morning naps. On Saturday mornings before she started her homework, she used to lie down, still naked, to nap after a hot shower. Then, just when she was waking up, she felt a gasp in her head, an unwillingness to wake up, and she foresaw the end of her ability to breathe. She pictured them finding her: the cigar-drenched old coroner, repelled and fascinated by her naked body; the aerobic Isabel, wishing she had done more sit-ups; Ron, quiet as ever but clearly disappointed. Conclusions would be drawn. Gathered around her bed, they would hypothesize about the reasons for her nakedness. They would all agree, sadly, upon the same reality. The coroner’s report: “Young subject died of a massive stroke while engaged in the act of masturbation.” Tasha would watch this from heaven. “No!” she would cry, unheard. “I wasn’t! I was napping!” People would be brought in to photograph the angles of her body for the files. Click: The head-to-toe overview. Click: The subject’s hand laid suspiciously over her thigh.

  Aside from dying during a nap, Tasha had also imagined dying when she had just gotten out of the bath, or simply while she was changing clothes, her underwear still around her ankles—something tragic, something extraordinary, would come about while she was in some state of undress. Of this she was certain. Dying in such a way would remove all the dignity of untimely death. No one would remember the joy of her in life. The final view—the evidence of overeating and underexercising, the unbecoming flabbiness of an inanimate body—would be all. How sadly people would contemplate her pervertedness. Before long, they would be reassured that her passing was perhaps for the best.

  As she walked five paces ahead of her mother, she thought about this. Where did it come from, this constant feeling of having been caught out in an unspeakable idiocy, in a flustered, cataclysmic moment of dishonour? Where did it come from, this belief that her disgraces would speak for her more strongly than anything good she might have done in her life, such as volunteering weekly at a food bank, or walking the dog of her elderly neighbour? To be fair, she had to admit to herself that she hadn’t actually done these humanitarian things. But she might. She just might. And she knew that even if she had done these things, even if she lived altruistically, committed good deeds, and thought of others first, she would still feel it came to nothing. Exposure was forever imminent. Exposure and contempt.

  The more she ate, the more careful she was to eat in seclusion. And when she lived with Isabel, she resorted to tricks, though they were hardly clever and sophisticated. She knew how to take just enough from all her favourite foods so that nothing initially appeared to be missing. She skimmed a layer of ice cream evenly off the top. She dug under each row of cookies to get to the one beneath. She tried to leave things exactly as they had looked before she got to them so that there could be no immediate discovery of what she had eaten, or at least so that the discoverer of the missing row of cookies would be puzzled about what had happened, would conclude that perhaps mistakes had been made in the packaging process. She was resourceful. She would say to Isabel, “I just looked at the bag of jelly beans, and it was strange how many were gone. Who ate them all?”

  Isabel knew what was going on anyway. Ron knew. Rita knew. How could they not know? She didn’t want them to think that she ate a lot and was piggish. But what was the alternative? That she couldn’t help being portly. She didn’t consider how their opinion of her would likely be worse, their disappointment and derision that much stronger, if she put on weight just by looking at food.

  How could one live this way, with even fears of death framing themselves around the terror of being caught at something?

  One could eat cupcakes, which was what Tasha
did when she got home.

  WHEN SHE FETCHED her mail in the evening, she noticed a strange letter on top. On the envelope were the words, Opening this letter may change your life! She sat at her little kitchen table and stared at the envelope, then threw it out without opening it.

  The following day was garbage day, so she emptied her wastebaskets and stuffed her green bags into the communal bins at the back of her building, then went to work. off and on for the past year, she had been giving Shakespeare workshops to drama classes at high schools around Toronto. She enjoyed the work—it barely felt like work—though she had no passion for it. In a lot of ways, she wished she liked the work less. The presence in her life of enjoyable work was unsettling in a way that tiresome work was not. It made her aware that, even in the absence of reasons to complain, she felt no passion. She doubted that there was ever a time she had felt passion for anything. The high school students made her more sensitive to this. They arrived at drama class feeling lunatic and lighthearted, willing to try anything, to humiliate themselves in the name of fun, so relieved were they to escape the real work of school, the tedious obligations of their core classes. Where was her own passionate lunacy? Where was her willingness to be startled and consumed?

  “It’s the strangest thing,” she told a colleague over lunch, “I can’t stop thinking about this stupid, useless letter I got yesterday.”

  Opening this letter may change your life!

  The exclamation point seemed an assault of optimism. Insidious, its pretending at generosity for the sake of a marketing ploy. Worse was its smarmy and ingratiating peddling of false hope. And that knowing smirk underlying it all. She felt that there was yet another person who knew something about her, knew that her life must be unremarkable, that it must need changing.

  The colleague, a scrappy and combative woman, said, “That’s reading in. The letter wasn’t addressed to you. Hundreds of people, at least, got that letter. Likely it was a contest you didn’t win.”

  Tasha nodded. More yeses. She had thought of all this.

  What bothered her most—this she didn’t tell the colleague— was that she hadn’t opened the letter before throwing it out. She hadn’t failed to open the letter by accident, or because she couldn’t spare time to read about a contest she wouldn’t win. She had thrown out the letter quite consciously. All day at school, she kept asking herself, Why not open it, then throw it out? She did not want to think that she was disallowing the possibility of changing her life.

  She tried to dig it up out of the garbage when she got home, but then she remembered the day was garbage day. The letter was gone.

  SHE DIDN’T WANT to be out in the world, and she didn’t want to be alone, so she invited the man with the cheese on his lip, Alan, to her apartment. She wanted to be around someone who didn’t know all her secrets.

  She had decided that she was too submissive the last time they had been out. Too accommodating, too smiling and chirpy, too willing to bend any which way. A bachelor uncle had told her when she was fifteen, “Guys like to date girls who don’t talk much and just want to make out.” She had taken this advice, perhaps, too literally—and not when she was fifteen, when the advice might actually have helped her, but when she was twenty-five and beyond. Lately, she had begun to feel that she had gone too far in dredging up mindless enthusiasm, a certain required perkiness. She knew that such poses eliminated sultriness. At the end of their last date, dinner at a small Italian restaurant near the university, she and Alan had gone back to his apartment, which was a small loft in a building on Queen Street West. The loft felt wonderfully expansive and smart, with its high ceilings and exposed brick wall and the kitchen equipped with gleaming appliances, a spotless stainless steel blender, a toaster free of old crumbs. Her own kitchen was cheap and stained in various places, filled with hand-me-downs from her parents and her friends who had moved on to marriage, to ownership. She had realized, looking around Alan’s kitchen, that she hadn’t bought a single thing in her kitchen, not even a knife or fork. More than anything in her life, it was Alan’s loft, the purposeful splendour of it, that reflected her real age back to her. The morning after their date, and in the week since, she had wished that she had been less ready to say, Like fireworks, like a comet streaking across the night sky, like a meteor.

  Looking around her living room at the time Alan was due to arrive, she felt dreadfully embarrassed by her apartment. By inviting him there, she had undermined her own plan, for she surely couldn’t act graceful and withdrawn when she was running around trying to prepare a well-balanced meal while he sat on her saggy couch. At the last minute, she lit too many candles and placed them around the living room and dining room, draped a red throw blanket over the couch, set up a cloudy old mirror from the basement on the mantel, and arranged more candles inside the alcove of the unrestored fireplace. She hoped he might think her charmingly haphazard, her apartment romantic in a casual, bohemian way.

  She wondered, as she made these adjustments, whether she even liked him.

  Alan arrived, apologizing, with a dog he had adopted from a shelter the day before. The dog, which looked like a silky black German shepherd, had begun to yowl when he left, he explained, which was not surprising, considering that she became distraught even when he left one room to go to another. He said that what the dog liked best was to sit at his feet, panting. The shelter staff had named the dog Fanny, but he was thinking of Smudge, the name of his childhood dog. Tasha thought it rather morbid to name a new dog after a dead dog, and this dog looked as little like a Smudge as it did like a Fanny.

  Alan hovered nervously over the dog and kept opening his mouth and looking at Tasha as if he were about to say something. The boldness of his bed voice was gone. There was no more issuing of instructions, no further soliciting of more imaginative descriptions. He even looked different than he had looked lying next to her in bed. He seemed paler and thinner, his chin that much more recessive. So concerned was he that Tasha might object to the dog that he offered to tie her under the kitchen table. He thought the dog wouldn’t mind that, as long as she could see him.

  Tasha had worried that she couldn’t handle seeing him again. Something too revelatory had taken place when they were in bed together. Too much, it seemed like their true, needful characters had been exposed, and somehow without their consent. Luckily, he had now reverted to the man with the cheese on his lip, but without the cheese.

  “They didn’t know her past, the shelter people,” he said. “She was collected as a stray. But they loved her there. They absolutely assured me that she had shown no aggression, not to dogs or to people.”

  He seemed to think that Tasha was afraid of the dog, though she had done nothing to indicate this. Every time the dog moved in Tasha’s direction, Alan was on the edge of his seat making kissing noises, coaxing her back to him. There was something of a paternal reprimand in the way he would call the dog back when Tasha reached out to the dog to give pats. Tasha resented it, and was reassured by it. She perceived that she had regained some advantage.

  “We had a dog that ran away when I was a kid. My family did,” he said.

  “That’s unusual,” Tasha said, coming in from the kitchen with two glasses of wine. “Dogs don’t tend to run away, do they?”

  She felt light and casual now, feeling his tension, her advantage.

  “Well, the circumstances were exceptional,” he said. “There was a lot going on. I think the dog was confused about various things. We kept waiting for her to come back.”

  “When I was a girl, I had a friend whose family moved to Toronto from Prince Edward County, out in the country near Picton. They left their dog with another family who had lived near them on a farm, a family that had lots of dogs roaming around in and out of the house and the barn all the time. They seemed happy, the dogs, but they couldn’t have gotten much attention. My friend’s family’s dog loved to run and run, and they were afraid that she would be miserable in the city. They were convinced that sh
e would be happier on the farm. My mother was very judgemental about this. We never had a dog, but my mother believed that once you got a dog, that was it, you kept it no matter what. She even stopped speaking to my friend’s mother, who was an old friend of hers, because she gave the dog away. But anyway, the dog ran away, back to its old house—which was miles and miles away—and lay on the porch, waiting and waiting for the family to come back. The new family living there eventually took it in because my friend’s mother wouldn’t budge. She kept insisting that the dog would be miserable in Toronto. My mother had a mammoth fight on the phone with her once. ‘We have dogs in Toronto!’ she screamed. ‘Toronto families have been known to keep dogs.’ What was my point though? Oh, yes, that dogs don’t usually run away from their families. They run to them.”

  “Yes, well, as I said, our circumstances were unusual,” he said somewhat defensively, then got up to go stand by the window.

  Tasha thought, Only I could lose my advantage so quickly.

  “It’s awfully hot in here,” he said. “Do you mind if I open the window? I think Fanny, Smudge, needs air.”

  An image had stuck in Tasha’s mind, of her mother on the phone in the kitchen, yelling at her friend over giving the dog away, and of herself standing in the doorway, trying to figure out some way she could smooth things over between them. How was it that she remembered that sinking feeling so well, the despair of knowing that if the mothers were at odds, her own friendship would be over too? That heady despair, the wretchedness of having no control over her own life, the melancholy and moodiness. When her mother hung up the phone, she felt that her life was over. The finality of a hung-up phone, Isabel’s righteous cool, her unwillingness to seem the least bit sorry. But everything wasn’t final. Isabel’s friend had kept calling, trying to explain her position, reasoning with Isabel, and pleading for some understanding. Isabel was rigid, but eventually gave way in small, grudging increments. Whenever the phone rang, Isabel made Tasha answer it. “Oh, God, is it her again?” she would moan. Isabel never lost her advantages. How was this?