by Heidi Wicks
“Hello, my sweetheart!” In the background is their old living room. Gower Street has been taken apart, and looks empty from the division of possessions, half of which are in the boxes of this new, strange house. Cait’s heart stings seeing Maisie in their home, which is now just Jake’s house. She longs to be there, for Maisie to be in her arms, close enough that Cait can smell the mashed banana on Maisie’s cheeks and in one of her nostrils.
This mountain range of boxes didn’t even exist two days ago. Prior to the emergence of this mountain range, Cait lived in another country, with different citizens. Citizens she loved. As much of a warzone as it was, she was familiar with it. It was full of happy memories. It made her feel safe and loved and welcomed, so many times. Now, she misses its embrace so much her entire body pains.
“I miss you, Mommy, can you come over here?”
The lump in Cait’s throat throbs. Pulsates. Seems to get bigger and bigger. Her eyes sting. Burn. She will not cry in front of Maisie.
“Oh sweetie, I wish I could! I’m just doing some work here right now. I’ll see you real soon.”
Jake emerges from the background, carrying a plate with a sandwich, and he’s chomping on it obnoxiously and nostalgia smacks Cait in the face like a bucket of ice water. That chomping was one of the things that drove her insane. Nostalgia isn’t trustworthy. It isn’t real. It distorts memories by downplaying difficult times. Cait remembers a psychology prof stating that once. She knows this, yet it doesn’t matter.
“Oh, hey,” chomp chomp, “didn’t realize she knew how to use video chat,” Jake puts down the sandwich and kisses Maisie loudly on the cheek. “Does my little stinker know how to use video chat? Huh?” He lays on more kisses and Maisie laughs until she gasps for breath. Jake—what an arsehole, but he’s a wonderful father.
This new place, this new landscape, Cait doesn’t understand. The hard, straight edges of boxes, the lack of personality, the lack of soft, cushiony familiarity. It’s quiet. Empty. She sits there, on the floor, her head and greasy hair leaned against the door frame.
“Hey, I’ll let you guys go get ready for bed now, okay?” She can’t stay visible much longer. She is going to cry. She needs to cry.
“Mommy! No!” Maisie giggles from underneath tickles and kisses. “I miss you!” Maisie is okay there with Jake, without Cait, and Cait knows this yet doesn’t know how to process it.
“I’ll speak to you soon, sweetheart. Good night.” She kisses the screen and clicks the red X quickly, and plops her face onto her knees.
She can smell her unshowered armpits, and they do not smell like a field of spring flowers. What feels like an apple core is constantly lodged in her throat. What feels like a weight is constantly plunked in her lower abdomen. This foreign biosphere, like the surface of the moon: barren, cold, musty, stale-smelling cardboard. This feeling, always, like she just woke up from a nightmare in a strange hotel room. A sense of vacancy sits within her every day now. She took two days off from work for the move, but she’ll take a third one as a mental health day.
She’d actually thought it: I don’t want to live anymore. Happiness: unimaginable. She hasn’t yet transformed. She still feels like Jake’s wife, except she isn’t Jake’s wife. She doesn’t know how to act or how to feel, or even exist. A part of her is missing.
“It’s not a puzzle to be put back together,” the art history prof in the shaggy sweater and had said, “Picasso is more interested in subjective than objective views. An early analytical cubist drawing, his subject in Girl with Mandolin sat in front of him while he painted, so there is some level of the objective in this work. However, she is disjointed, abstract, geometric, which is not how people are in real life. She blends in with the background, yet she is still distinct and recognizable as a female form. So. The meaning behind her fragmentation is the subjective. Essentially, it is for you to decide.” Cait became lost in the words. They made her feel she could be whatever or whoever she wanted to be. Regenerate, deconstruct, and just keep regenerating and reconstructing in various forms, over and over again, for the rest of her life.
The angular shapes of the boxes will disassemble and reassemble into furniture. Different, less angular shapes, with more roundedness in them. Same content, different formation. What form will Cait take when she reconstructs? Now, she blends in with the background. She feels as beige as Girl with Mandolin. Will she eventually become happy here, in this space? Will colour eclipse beige? Will she stand out from the background? Become less angular? More angular? What will life look like in two years? In ten years? At one time in her life, all of the unknowns would have excited her. Now she feels paralyzed. Beige.
Who will help her assemble? The boxes, that is. She doesn’t want to ask Jake, but would he? Maybe Jess will, if she can get away from the kids and Dan for long enough. Maybe her father, if she can stand to be around him for that long.
Most likely, Cait will get it together on her own. She will become a frustrated meme trying to put together infamously complicated Ikea furniture:
A PHOTO OF A YOUNG FATHER, FRUSTRATED, ASSEMBLING A CRIB. LEARNING SWEDISH, SAYS THE CAPTION, IKEA IS SWEDISH FOR “FUCK YOU.”
A MAN ENTERING AN OFFICE, APPLYING FOR A JOB AT IKEA. THERE’S A DISASSEMBLED CHAIR ON THE FLOOR AND THE EMPLOYER SAYS, “HAVE A SEAT.”
The only assembled piece of furniture is her desk chair. She peels herself from the floor. Scuffs over the hardwood. Plunks onto the chair. Spins it around, gawks at boxes, occasionally, absently dragging her finger across the surface of one. Her eyes, glazed wide, eventually burn hot and trickle, and she feels an invisible fist inside her chest cavity, squeezing her heart like a foam stress ball. Her heart pulses, quick, fast, feverish pumps. Her chest tightens. She is sweating. Breathing becomes quick and difficult. She bends over and puts her head between her knees, and rubs the back of her head. Inhales deeply, 1-2-3-4, exhales slowly, 4-3-2-1. She remembers talking Jess through this exact breathing exercise once, in the bathroom of the Thompson Student Centre on campus, during an Our Lady Peace concert, after her and Matt had broken up. “Isn’t life a series of images that change as they repeat themselves?” Cait has the Andy Warhol quote on a poster over her desk at her office at CBC.
This furniture is as disassembled as her family. Sometimes families are disassembled but then reassembled, she thinks. People spend time apart, work on themselves, and then come back together even stronger, right? It won’t look the same as before. It’ll look better. And it’ll be the most solid building in town.
I want my family re-assembled: it would become her vision, her mantra.
She stands. Stares at the room. Backs away, picks up her wallet on the way out. Drives to the paint store.
fake tans, false hopes
2016
In Newfoundland, a fake tan is an essential component of the female attire on graduation night. In the ‘90s, artificial tanning took place in a halogen-lit coffin that pricked tiny electric pins and needles on every inch of whatever skin touched the plastic surface. The same plastic surface upon which many-a-buttock had lain and would lie. Melanoma nirvana. Blissfully unaware, lying on a sheet of UV-poisoned plastic, nothing but a face cloth between your private parts and the sweat and fecal matter left behind from the previous, sun-deprived wretch whose buttocks had lain in that same exact place. Eye protection? No thank you, no need for that. That two-dollar rental fee could go towards a Big Mac combo.
Nowadays, spray tans are the socially acceptable and so-called healthy form of artificial, vitamin D-deprived despair therapy in Newfoundland. Going down south on an all-inclusive? You’re a Newfoundlander—don’t forget to pack that base tan.
Cait hasn’t had a spray tan before and she feels like a tool. But whatever possibilities exist that might battle the Jake ache, she must try.
“I won’t turn orange, will I?” She asks the girl, who has a blue pixie cut, shaved on one side, and who bounces on the balls of her feet and moves her hands a lot when she talks. Her eyes
are wide and violet and bordered with thick black liner. The intonation at the end of each sentence swoops upwards, like she’s asking a question every time.
“Well, like, I’d set a timer on my phone? Because, like, if you forget to shower two hours from now? It’ll just, like, keep getting darker? And darker? And then you could, like, definitely turn orange.” She nods enthusiastically and knowingly, like a bobble-headed doggy bouncing through potholes on the dashboard of a car. She rifles around the room, adjusting the spray-tan machine, which looks like a vacuum cleaner. “So just, like, take off all of your clothes and stand just on that garbage bag thingy over there? Okay? And I’ll be right back.” She grins a dazzling white teeth-baring grin and raises her pierced eyebrows as if to singsong, “Eeeee, you are gonna love this I hope you don’t fuck it uuuup!” as she exits the room.
Cait unzips her jeans. Peels off all but her G-string undies and bandana bikini top. That morning, she even got a Brazilian bikini wax. Gytta, the severe but playful Slovakian woman who waxed her, had slapped lotion on a bunch of tissues afterwards. “Poot this on your poosy,” she said.
Brazilian bikini waxes are an anomaly, a dirty little secret amongst women Cait’s age. But they’re becoming more mainstream. Cait got one when she was very pregnant. She doesn’t know why. Jess told her she was nuts, but to Cait, at the time, it helped her feel more together somehow, in control of something upcoming that she had little control over. Superficial? She asked herself. Probably.
“Baby wondering vat happening out there,” Gytta had said. “Don’t vorry, baby, we just cleaning de doors.”
Blue pixie cut returns. “Okay, so just like, hold your arms out to the side, like a t-formation? This’ll be a bit cold, just a little warning!” Standing there, practically naked, in front of a strange, though sweet, girl…Why do women do this kind of shit to themselves? Cait wonders, feeling like Christ on the cross. In the name of vanity? Is this really the way to make oneself feel better? It seems foolish. In this moment, Cait decides this is the last time she will ever endure the humiliation of a spray tan.
A blast of cool mist lightly sprays the backs of her shoulders, arms, back, butt, thighs, calves.
Her mind flashes to the photo that Maisie keeps by her bed. It’s the same one that’s at Jake’s house. The three of them are in a pumpkin patch, grinning from ear to ear. Cait and Jake’s arms are cuddled around Maisie and around each other. It’s a Maisie sandwich on Cait and Jake bread. All three of them, so happy. Especially Maisie, with love on each side of her, the two people she loves more than anything in the whole world, right there, hugging her close. As much as she tries to distract herself, keep herself busy with stupid things like spray tans and bikini waxes, these thoughts are always floating in her subconscious, frequently floating into her conscious mind, often out of nowhere like a mean trick the universe is playing on her.
“Mommy, Daddy, Maisie.” She points her chubby fingers with the indented knuckles at the picture at bedtime. They’re starting to get unpacked at the new house. Maisie’s room is ready, with rainbows and suns on the walls, but she toddles into Cait’s bed every single night. Cait wraps her arms around her baby girl, her soft blonde hair, the same colour Cait’s was as a child, smelling like Johnson’s baby shampoo. Cait plunks dozens and dozens of kisses all over her cheeks and forehead and the dimple in her chin; the dimple that matches her own dimple. Her skin smells like buttered corn on the cob. Maisie erupts in chesty giggles as a result of all the kisses.
“She makes me turn that photo every night so she can see it from her pillow,” Jake had told Cait a few days ago during their Maisie exchange, when Jake had come in to see the new place. They’d locked eyes, just for a second. The skin on her arms seemed static-y, prickly, with his bare arm so close.
The cool spritz of the spray tan makes her shiver.
“Okay, so…turn around?” Blue pixie cut puts her big gun-type thing back on its vacuum-cleaner base. “The stomach is the most sensitive place, by the way?”
A photo flashes into Cait’s mind, taken on top of a cliff at Cape St. Mary’s, swarms of seabirds below. Very pregnant. With the chaos of the squawking sea birds, gulls and gannets below her, Maisie moved and churned inside her, and her belly morphed. An elbow, a knee, tugging through amniotic fluid, wondering what’s happening in that outer, other sphere. Is there anything beyond the amniotic sac? babies must wonder. Cait still feels phantom baby movements inside her abdomen. In that moment, she was above the squawks and the flurry of sound below. Not in the midst of it, as she feels now. Now, she’s reduced to having a fake tan sprayed onto her body in an empty attempt to feel fulfilled.
“It should only take, like, a minute or two to dry? You can put your clothes back on and just, like…meet me out front at the desk?”
“Sure thing. Thanks…what was your name?”
“Oh, it’s Ashley?”
“Thanks, Ashley.” Cait touches her stomach, ever so lightly. What of the baby sister she and Jake were going to have for Maisie? Can she still exist? Is she really gone? She touches her thighs to see if they’re dry yet. They are not the solid, rock-hard, chocolate-milk coloured thighs of the Caucasian woman on the poster on the wall. They are thighs that have been attached to more than one pair of cold stirrups in her life. Birth, and loss. Loss, and birth.
“Now remember,” Ashley looks Cait in the eye as she accepts her Visa. “Don’t forget to shower in two hours.”
“I won’t.” Part of her wants to shower right now. Just wash it all away. It’s like dirt, in a way, isn’t it? An attempt to cover up the bleakness she feels inside? A way to summon confidence within, which lies underneath the bleakness, that somehow a fake tan is supposed to resurrect?
People endure loss, heal, become happy again. There is death. There is life. There is resurgence. Recalibration. Caitlyn packs her Visa away. Strides to her car with her fake sun-kissed body and her bald vagina, her thoughts clashing. She is meant to feel fresh, smooth, rejuvenated and free, but more than anything, she feels fake.
And yet, she suffocates that instinct—the fakeness—she buries it, pushes it down into the earth and soil of her mind, and she marches on, towards her car, allowing a new hope to seed itself.
salt in the womb
1997
Cait and Jess climb the steps of the clinic. Cait’s chest is a gnarled ball of rubber bands.
“Baby killers!” Angry faces scream on the sides of the steps.
“Keep your rosaries off my ovaries!” Screams the group on the opposite side.
Inside the clinic, the pretty redhead nurse stands by Caitlyn’s head. Her voice is soft as gauze. “Every mother a willing mother, every child a wanted child—that’s our policy. Motherhood is very difficult and you have to be ready. You’re making the right decision, sweetie. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.” She squeezes Cait’s hand. The aroma of rubbing alcohol climbs up Cait’s nostrils and whirls into her brain, creating a cotton-ball fog.
The paper-covered steel table is so cold it hurts.
“Feet in the stirrups,” says the doctor. The clinical lights, her skin, her fingers and toes and insides, all so cold. Dead.
The nurse hovers above her, the light behind her glowing like a halo.
“I think the drugs have kicked in,” Cait warbles. Buzzing skin, tingling nose, lips, face. She is heavy on the hard surface. She’s laying on her back, on an iceberg, floating out to sea. A dead body. The instruments clinking on the surgical tray sound muffled.
“You’ll feel a kind of tugging pressure now.” The doctor is stern, his voice rough as sand paper.
A clench on her lower abdomen, wrenching rigorously around and around in a circle, hauling and yanking and jerking, her insides tugged downwards. And then, one mighty and final pull. The sensation that her bowels and lower intestines might plop right onto the floor. Something has been extracted.
Afterwards, Jess drives her down Lemarchant Road, eastbound. Cait’s head rests against the glass
of the passenger-side door. She stares at Signal Hill in the distance, a fog python slinking through The Narrows, around the rock, about to throttle Cabot Tower.
“How do you feel?” Jess keeps her eyes on the road as they approach Rawlins Cross and glide past the black-and-white cow pattern painted on Moo Moo’s ice-cream shop. Cait thinks about turtle-cheesecake ice cream, which her mother has given her for her birthday for the past twenty years, at least. The thought of it in her mouth right now makes her want to wretch.
“I feel like I’m in a bad dream.”
“It’s okay. Take it easy. The hardest part is over.”
It’s not over, though. The grieving, the guilt, it’s not over, not by a longshot. They swoop through the intersection at Rawlins Cross. Bannerman Park is on the left. Left again, and Government House is on their right, its white majesty and stunning garden dampened and morbid from the grey day.
“I guess next time you’ll think twice about unprotected sex, hey?” Jess can’t help herself.
Cait’s already bruised abdomen is sucker punched by her best friend. “Why did you say that?”
“Well I mean…Cait you have to realize that was a mistake. Why didn’t you make him cling-wrap that thing?”
“Well. Maybe driving me home from my abortion isn’t the right time to bring it up. Besides, for your information, the fucking condom broke. I had one sewn into my bag, remember?”
“Sorry. I forgot. You’re just so impulsive sometimes.”
“Wow. I do apologize.”
“Hey, I’m driving you home here. I’m always here for you, you know that.”
“Well I think you’re being pretty insensitive at the moment.”
They glide past Memorial Stadium, up Kenna’s Hill, up Logy Bay Road, left onto Newfoundland Drive, right onto Eastmeadows Avenue, where they both live. Jess pulls up outside Cait’s house.