Melt

by Heidi Wicks

  Cait doesn’t care about love as much as she cares about having fun. She cares about feeling everything there is to be felt. All the sensations, all the words, all the elation, all the devastation. She craves it. An uncontrolled desire, rooted and swirling within her. Hot and subterranean. The ferocious need to rebel. The need to spit Fuck you, no it isn’t, no I’m not, I’ll prove you wrong, directly into the eyeballs of everyone and any situation that even suggests a thumbs down.

  Mrs. Morris reappears next to Cait. Still savouring mini sausages and cheese squares and red wine. Her gaze doesn’t leave the slideshow, yet Cait feels Mrs. Morris peering into her soul. “Tonight will reveal truth and clarity to you, my dear.” She hovers for a moment—an eagle soaring above Signal Hill, a Gypsy fortune teller on Water Street, a January snowstorm pummelling STOP signs across St. John’s—Mrs. Morris took many forms, and Cait felt Mrs. Morris might be her guide to the future.

  death by pancake batter

  2016

  Pancake batter, poured onto the pan, the browned butter spattering onto Jess’s wrist.

  Liam, her youngest, wiggles his bum from side-to-side in the Star Wars pajamas her mother gave him last Christmas. Too short in the legs and arms, the fabric gone pilly from washing them too many times, but he won’t let go of them and Jess is fine with that. He dances from foot to foot, clutching onto his crotch.

  “Do you have to go to the bathroom, bud?”

  “No.”

  Oh yes he does, she thinks. “I think you do, buddy.”

  The kitchen air thickens with pancake smoke and fried butter. Her developing hangover hasn’t quite kicked in yet but she feels it, festering, perched in the back of her throat, preparing to creep into the back of her skull by, oh, about midday and then just nuzzle in, all day, making itself comfortable, ready to crack a bag of Doritos to feed the self-loathing. Thank God it’s a snow day, she thinks, because she couldn’t handle a room full of youngsters at Redhill Elementary, where she teaches grade three. Not today.

  Stefan, the music teacher, writhing up and down her body last night. His hands sliding up her sides, over her boobs, but it’s all good: he prefers men.

  “You work it, you sly saucy woman!” His hair, usually mildly gelled and subtly spiked, his paisley-patterned shirt, usually ironed, usually tucked, is neither styled nor tucked at the moment. It’s half unbuttoned and as wrinkled as the face of a pug, saturated with sweat and stuck to his chest like a rogue pair of underwear, slapped to the pavement after a rough winter. “Jusss lookatcha. Foxy as fuck.”

  Jess is divinely grateful to have him on staff, showering the rest of them with delight, every single day. His demeanor, so bright, so cheery. His youth, eternal. He is childless and single and during the summers and on Easter breaks, he hikes:

  Machu Picchu.

  Trolltunga.

  Tiger’s Nest.

  Love Valley.

  Stefan is the zest in a blueberry-lemon muffin. Stefan is woke as fuck. Stefan is able to transcend all of the bullshit and dis-gruntled parents who complain about the lack of field trips in one breath, and the cost of field trips in the next. Stefan is Zion, radiating a kind of sunshine upon the faces of the teachers and administrators who are weary from stupid school-board policies and a lack of support, through the power of positivity and ‘80s New Wave.

  Teachers know how to party. Jess remembers her mother telling her about her own teaching days.

  “We used to go on conferences, see, with educators from all over the province,” a Seussian smirk crept across her face. “It was different then than it is now. You guys don’t get those kinds of experiences. There was this one time, we were all out in Corner Brook. We were all out this one night, and this guy, Dave Walters was his name—a real hoot. He had this reputation as a real party animal. Loved to have a good time. He was a real laugh. Anyway, this one night he decided he wanted to go skinny dipping in the pond next to the Glenmill Inn. So he went on, the rest of us stayed inside, partying, no one else was up for it. Next thing, we hear these squeals and shrieks coming from the pond, and here comes Dave, running up the front walkway, naked as a jaybird, after being bitten by the swans in the pond.” Her mother snickered tea out of her nose. “My God,” she wept, laughing, “it was the funniest thing.”

  A drop of Argentinian Malbec trickled onto Jess’s tank top and onto her sculpted shoulder. Stefan licked it off and sucked, like her shoulder was the salt and lemon in a shot of tequila.

  “Alright, hold it there, boy.” Mock offense. Boundaries, no boundaries: both are equally freeing, depending on the moment. Jess put her hand on Stefan’s chest, wagging her finger at him, pretending to keep him at bay. Except then she started to urge, the room spinning, and she had to sit down.

  “It’s alright, darling, take a break. You want some water? I’ll infuse it with lemon.” There’s that blueberry-muffin zest again. She nods. He trips off, returns, handing her an ice-cold pint glass of water and two Advil, which she knocks back, and she leans into the couch cushions, in just the same way her hangover will cozy up in her brain the next day. Stefan sashays back into the dance circle, but he periodically glances towards Jess, making sure she’s alright, that she’s not passed out.

  This week’s Friday was actually Thursday, because the teachers knew in their heart of hearts that the next day would be a snow day. Every third Friday night is for blowing off steam, but Fridays are also ripe with made-it-through-another-week exhaustion, so Jess usually passes out early.

  Chris Smith, dressed like a ninja, somehow got his hands on a pack of sugar pills, a.k.a. Rockets, that day in class. “Bam! You’re dead!” In Jess’s class, Chris Smith shot a Nerf gun at Amena, one of the three Syrian children, who, quaking in fear, was too paralyzed to even cry, convinced a bomb was about to go off. She hid underneath a work table.

  Jess crouched to her eye level. “You’re safe here, honey, I promise.” She looked right at the girl, gently offering her hands, until Amena slowly reached out to hold them. In that moment, Jess was filled with affection for this little girl, and she remembers the talks she and her mother used to have when Jess was deciding what to do at university. Moments like these revive her decision to become a teacher in the first place.

  The extra classroom support has been cut. It’s just Jess there, dog paddling every day through a pool full of diverse needs. ESL students. ADD students. Autism. Chromosomal, even. It’s not fair for anyone. Not the teachers, but most importantly, not the students. None of them are getting their needs met. The system is failing and many teachers feel powerless. This has been the talk in the media.

  The pancakes are golden on the edges and she shouts up the stairs to Dan.

  “Dan! Your office is opening at one! Get at the driveway!” Dan is an economics prof at the university. “Hello! Do you hear me up there?” Bubbles of batter, pop-pop-pop on the pan.

  “Yes! I hear you, Jessica!” A Jesus Christ is muttered, she’s knows it, and she hears the bed springs move.

  The pancake-batter bubbles get bigger and pop faster and she slides the spatula underneath. Flip. Splat. Over to the other side. A bit black on one side, but she can scrape that off and the boys’ll be none the wiser.

  “Mom!” Sam, age eight-point-five, shrieks from the rec room downstairs. “Liam punched me in the trachea!”

  Slap, slap, pancakes piled on the plate. Cover with tinfoil. Keep the heat in. She closes her eyes. Inhale, two-three-four, exhale, four-three-two. Last fall she made marijuana butter, for cookies for her mother. She could barely chew the cookies, but they gave her the best relief from the chemotherapy treatments.

  “Stress gave me cancer, Jessica, I’m sure of it.” Her mother’s eyes drooped. “Don’t let it get to you.”

  Sam is crying now. “Mom! He hit me again!” Stomping up the stairs. Face blotchy.

  “Here, come here and get your pancakes. Liam.” Maple syrup. Butter. Forks and plastic knives with Spiderman on the handles. “Now, why did you punch Sam in the
throat?”

  “He was going to turn off Paw Patrol and I was really into it!” Liam is five years old, and a newfound sense of entitlement comes with this milestone birthday.

  “Sam?” Jess has one hand on her hip as she sprinkles chocolate chips into the leftover batter. “Is that true?”

  “Well, it was a dumb show! It’s immature!” Sam plunks himself into a chair at the table.

  “Well, if Liam was watching it, then it was rude for you to switch the channel, wasn’t it?” Jess lifts the foil from the plate of pancakes and delivers it to the table. Puts two on each boy’s plate.

  “Yes.” Sniff sniff. Sam wipes his nose in his sleeve. Sam is the more sensitive child. Liam, by nature, rolls with situations. More like Dan.

  “Liam, you should not have punched him in the trachea, in the meantime. Not the best way to deal with that. Do you understand?” Bubbles, tiny detonations in the chocolate-chip batter. The chocolate chip ones are for dessert. Little sprays of steam. Poof, pop. “How would you like it if someone did that to you?”

  “I wouldn’t like it very much.” Liam gulps down the first forkful of pancakes. Takes a slug of apple juice. Slams the glass back onto the table.

  “What’s the most important rule in life?” Jess asks the two of them, remembering her mother’s words to her, which she said regularly, to her as a child and to her boys.

  “Treat others the way you want to be treated.” Sam and Liam say it simultaneously, flatly.

  “Now put down those forks and give each other a hug, please and thank you.” They push their chairs back, reluctantly, but they do it anyway because they know deep down it’s the right thing to do. They hug, quickly and unenthusiastically, and sit right back down in their chairs.

  “What’s going on down here?” Dan skips down the steps, whistling, clad in snow pants and a balaclava. Chipper as always. Even a snow day doesn’t spoil his mood. He’s home with his family and what else could one want?

  “It’s alright,” plop plop, chocolate-chip pancakes on the platter, “we worked it out, didn’t we boys?”

  Near the end, her mother lost her breath so easily, wheezing more often than not. “It’s the screens. The tablets and the phones. They’re not healthy. Give them books, Jessica. The books I read you when you were little.” Her mother was the librarian at the same school Jess teaches at now. For thirty years her mother taught children to love reading. That was the way it was when her mother became a teacher. University degree at twenty, waltz right into a job, punch the clock for thirty years, retire at fifty. Why should Jess expect it to be different when her turn came around? But it is different. It is another planet.

  “It was bad then, when I was teaching, in the ‘90s, it was a bad time. Cuts. Tension between the school boards.” She held her daughter’s hand, struggling to draw a breath, light-headed. “But it’s so much worse for your crowd, Jessica.”

  Jess remembers a couple of occasions, in the ‘90s, when her mother and Cait’s father met each other outside their houses, putting their girls on the school busses in the mornings. They’d have occasional short, curt chats about work.

  “Nondenominational isn’t right. It’s letting go of our heritage, don’t you think? Aren’t you afraid of losing your teaching style?” He’d stand there, his belly protruding, squinting his eyes at Jess’s mother.”

  “With all due respect, John, no, I think it makes sense to end denominational education. We can’t afford it.” Kindness, she always spoke with kindness, but she was never afraid to say what she thought. “I know how important faith is. I go to church every single Sunday. This is just the economic reality we’re living with. The churches will still exist. People will always have faith. Morals. A soul, with our without church, quite frankly.”

  “But having it in schools makes it part of the everyday lives of our kids.” A referendum was coming. He knew it and he fought it hard.

  In high school, she spent one lunch break a week at her nan’s house for peanut-butter toast. She walked there from school—up Paton Street, across Elizabeth Avenue, down Baltimore Street. Nan watched The Young and the Restless religiously, and complained about Katherine Chancellor, that rich snot.

  “What are you going to do after you finishes school, Jessica?” Nan’s eyes never left the screen. She never missed seeing Ashley Abbott and Katherine Chancellor slaying each other with saucy comments.

  Crunching her toast between her teeth, the peanut butter was warm and gooey and the smell of it still comforts her. “I don’t know. Some of my friends are going away. I kind of wish I could too.” She said that, but just to be cool. She didn’t really want to go.

  On July 1, 1992, Nan rallied with throngs of vicious fishermen and plant workers on the wharf in Bay Bulls. In the lower intestines of the CBC archives, there’s footage of Nan shaking her fist in the face of the federal fisheries minister.

  “How come we didn’t bring in interim support for fishing families so we didn’t have to show the colour of our goddamned underwear to every Tom, Dick, and Harry up to social services for five-hundred and twenty-two dollars!” Nan’s plaid-clad arms jiggled, her hair-netted silver head bobbled, her quivering voice indignant as her eyes sprang with tears on the CBC news. Her index finger, jabbing at the minister’s face like she was Ashley Abbott, and he’s Katherine Chancellor.

  “You don’t have to abuse me!” shouted the minister. “I didn’t take the goddamned fish out of the water!” His tailored jacket, his Old Spice suffocated by the fishermen and women and plant workers’ salty tears, guts and souls, and way of life, splattered all across the wharf.

  Nan and Pop lost their car. Nan couldn’t drive Pop to his cancer treatments.

  “I knows it’s hard to live here sometimes.” During commercials, Nan smoothed Vaseline Intensive Care lotion over her hands, ensuring each crevice, each wrinkle, received nourishment.

  The announcement of the cod moratorium ended with the minister leading the crowd in the “Ode to Newfoundland.” Not one member of the group joined in. They stood there, sullen and betrayed. The minister himself, a local who’d been lured by Ottawa, looked as if he might cry.

  “We manages though, you know.” Nan looked away from the screen, at Jess. “Newfoundland is a beautiful place. We’re still here. The sun always comes back sooner or later, you knows that, don’t you, Jessica?”

  Just five years after the moratorium, there were threats to cut education. Jess’s mother was worried, and then her parents got rid of one of their cars. The cycle repeats. They stopped ordering pizza on Fridays. Jess was told she could either get an up-do or a new dress for the grad, but not both. She chose a dress.

  Jess has seniority, but how will she manage without the student support?

  The cycle repeats, the sun comes up, the cycle repeats.

  “Here we go, boys, here’s your next round,” Jess slides the last plate, with the last stack of pancakes onto the table. “They’re loaded with chocolate chips.”

  death by marriage

  2016

  Since Cait and Jake got married, they have fucked in every room of this red row house on Gower Street.

  Panting in the bedroom.

  Moaning in the office.

  Groaning in the living room.

  Grunting. Slapping. Sucking in the living room.

  The two of them crumbling into one satisfied, smiling mound when they finished.

  Now, boxes of her things, parts of their life together, are lined up next to the door.

  “I don’t know if I can do this, Jake. This is us, packed up in boxes, waiting to be hauled out the front door. I can’t do it.”

  “You’re the one who pushed for separation papers. You’re the one who called it quits.”

  Their existence together, entwined and immortalized in the photos on the wall going up the stairs.

  Jake, 22, holding a clipboard in the reception lounge at CHMR, the campus radio station where they met.

  Cait, 20, standing next to Jake, 2
2, one of her elbows propped on his shoulder, her other hand on her hip. All confidence. Mutual admiration and adoration. It’s a double frame. The photo next to it is in the same location, an almost-identical pose, except instead of her arm on his shoulder, she’s holding her middle finger in front of his face and he’s holding her wrist and they’re both laughing.

  Cait, 29, Jake, 31: A trip to Fogo Island. Cait, perched on the arm of a red Adirondack chair, a red and pink sweep over the evening sky behind her, her hands on her wide-apart knees as she leans to one side. Jake sitting in the chair. Matching straw hats. A photo taken when they still made each other laugh.

  Cait, 33, Jake, 35: A hospital bed. Newborn Maisie, snuggled into Cait’s cheek. Jake’s arm around Cait, hugging her in. Cheek-to-cheek-to-cheek. “My girls,” he’d call them. Cait swears his eyes are extra glisten-y in this photo. Jake swears they’re not. He brought Cait a can of stout beer in the hospital, snuck it in under his coat, and she cried with gratefulness and said she looked gross and he smiled back and said he thought she looked pretty beautiful, and she felt so loved and appreciated in that moment. He smiled at her, so proud of what she’d brought into the world. He couldn’t wait to get them home from the hospital.

  Cait wouldn’t sit in the front seat on the drive home. She wanted to sit in the back next to Maisie, to make sure the car seat was adequately secure, to make sure her new baby’s little bobble head didn’t fall off. Her stitched-up, post-Caesarian stomach so tight, in the car, in the relaxed 9:30 a.m. traffic, hyper-aware of any potential car accidents, despite the peaceful roads and the sunny, crisp February sky. Scared shitless to be bringing her baby home from the hospital, where she’d be fully responsible. The weight of responsibility, swirled with an immense love and lightness she’d never before experienced, never even knew existed, all wrapped up together in three bodies, in one vehicle, with the big outside world holding infinite possibilities, infinite paths towards the future. Coast 101.1 was on the radio. Adult contemporary. The first song they heard when they started driving home was “Black Velvet” by Alannah Myles, and Jake made a point to mention it: “This is Maisie’s first song on the radio.” And when they got to the house he cuddled Maisie close to his chest as he walked from room to room, giving her a tour. “This is the kitchen, this is the living room, this is the fireplace, this is one of the places where we’ll snuggle.” That’s where Caitlyn turned off the video she was making, to join them on the tour.