The Journey Prize Stories 28

by Kate Cayley

  Laura types into the blue-bordered status box, Moving on is hard but

  Delete delete delete.

  Well they say that

  Delete.

  The sun will come out tomorrow so smile smile smile

  Delete.

  Starting a new time in my life, looking forward to the next chapter.

  Delete.

  You are all going to die alone kids. HAHAHAHAHA!

  Delete.

  Settings.

  Deactivate profile.

  Are you sure you want to deactivate your profile?

  And then the social networking system taunts her with loneliness, displays photos of her acquaintances, with a repeated message under each face:

  Stacey will miss you,

  David will miss you,

  Leslie will miss you,

  Max will miss you,

  Matthew will miss you,

  Janice will miss you,

  Pat will miss you,

  Ray will miss you.

  Delete.

  Click.

  No one really watches the TVs in the gym—five flatscreens set on mute. Laura’s weight routine (eight machines, then free weights) overlaps with the daily evening string of game shows.

  The subtitles roll past:

  [DO YOU WANT

  TO TAKE THIS CHANCE

  TO INCREASE YOUR

  EARNINGS TO ONE

  HUNDRED AND FIFTY

  THOUSAND DOLLARS?]

  The host’s face twitches. The camera sweeps the audience.

  [AUDIENCE APPLAUSE]

  The contestant is in her mid-fifties. She perches in a black blazer with orange piping. She’s wearing a taupe headband. Who wears headbands?

  [WILL YOU TAKE

  THIS CHANCE?]

  [YES.]

  The lights dim to a smoky blue, then dissolve into a white dome.

  [SUSPENSEFUL

  MUSIC]

  [YOU HAVE REACHED

  THE NEXT LEVEL

  PAMELA.]

  The woman spreading backward, legs out, blocky gums and teeth in a close-up.

  [AUDIENCE

  APPLAUSE]

  Laura presses slightly upward. This week, she increased the weights to ninety pounds to see how it would feel. Her muscles climb and ache. The way her lungs feel when she spends slightly too long under water. She holds the weights there, in that place of almost too much.

  [YOU’RE MOVING ON

  TO THE NEXT LEVEL.

  HOW DOES IT FEEL

  PAMELA?]

  [INCREDIBLE JUST

  INCREDIBLE]

  Laura can’t catch her breath. Mallory loved these shows as much as Laura hated them. “I can’t resist the pageantry,” Mallory had said. “I love it for the same reason I love Harry Potter!” Laura would leave the room, stand in the kitchen, washing dishes until Mallory came into the kitchen and put her arms around her from behind, whispered into her neck, “Don’t hate me because I love the things you hate.” She said this about lots of things: Chicken McNuggets meals, documentaries about the British Royal family, malls, dried seaweed, SPCA commercials, cargo shorts, long distance biking. She used to go on daylong rides to Tsawwassen, the town by the ferry terminal, and come back and lie on the dog bed and moan. Laura never understood, watched her, mystified—this exuberant human with whom she happened to split life.

  Laura holds the weights away from her body until the sensation shreds through her bared teeth. She could hold it here forever. She lets it back in. Slowly. Draws it back to her chest, lets it bear in hard, lets it press there. Back and ass rooted to the seat of the machine. Opens her legs wide. A feeling glows in her, a hand at the base of her spine. Mallory’s voice in her ear: do you feel that? that’s your pelvic floor. A shudder tumbles through her.

  In what bedroom, where had she said this. How many more times, these summonings in her body. Mallory’s hand cupping the base of her spine.

  She lets the weights go.

  They slam down on either side of her ears.

  She heaves, staring at the screens. Were there this many competition shows before the economy collapsed? Recession porn. The shows are far-ranging. High school math teachers performing Broadway musical numbers; B-list movie stars paired off and hacking out tangos; a show about a Christian family with twenty children, crewcuts and braids and checkered shirts. Why are these people inflicting this on themselves? Laura thinks. Mallory loved this crap. Especially the Christians, their colonies of offspring, their plans to renovate the double garage to raise more alpacas. It’s a family project! Everybody pitches in! They are, Laura thinks spitefully, like a Revivalist Chuckie Cheese.

  A girl, eleven or twelve, tells the talent show audience that she shares a bed with her single mother, that her father was an alcoholic who beat them. The judges prompt her performance of an old Etta James number.

  [THE STAGE IS

  YOURS.

  IN YOUR OWN

  SWEET TIME SWEET

  HEART.]

  It is easy to stop. This is what she has discovered.

  Easy to stop answering email. Easy to come and go from the paperwork at the office, bring nothing and leave nothing behind. Move through the cream and steel lobby, the wax museum of co-workers. So easy to heave off all things. So easy. So easy to write back to Mallory’s best friend Jared, Stop emailing me. I’m not Mallory and you never went out of your way to get to know me, and delete his responding email without reading it. All things are contracts, not covenants. Easy to say nothing. Easy to stop acknowledging, and then reading, invitations. Easy to not move in relation to others. To amputate herself from gatherings. Mallory, who was a gathering.

  The ultimate test of strength, the trainer had said at the introductory weightlifting class, is to be able to hold up your own weight. Hold yourself aloft. The trainer, a woman in her late fifties, made of thick rope and cantilevered joints, veins exposed. Laura watched her, amazed. Mallory had been the one who exercised, duct-taped an uncle’s caving headlamp to her bike before buying the proper gear. Her gear was always left piled by the front door for Laura to throw into the laundry room. Now when Laura opens their front door, she still smells Mallory’s sharp sweat, almost reaches for the pile of wet gear.

  The automated reminder call for the weightlifting class from the community centre had popped up on their landline voicemail a week after Mallory moved out. Laura hadn’t known Mallory had signed up for a weightlifting class. She hadn’t known Mallory had any interest in refining her cyclist body, her tendons already violin-tuned. This message is for Mallory Lee Rhymer, a voice had recited. This is a reminder.

  Laura had gone to the class. She’d told herself it was to try something new, but really she had thought Mallory might be there. At the class, a woman in her seventies told them she was there for her osteoporosis. “Turns out my bones aren’t what they used to be!” she said cheerfully and the whole group burst into laughter.

  The woman at the next locker looks over at Laura. “Good workout?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You were working hard in there.”

  It had never occurred to Laura that someone could be watching her. But, of course. What else would people do, while lying around grunting? “Thanks.”

  “How long’ve you been lifting?”

  “Not too long. Couple months, I guess.”

  “You’re pretty solid.”

  “I think I’m getting there.”

  Small talk is a way to keep moving. Small talk is a kind of humming. Laura never understood this before—she always wondered at the uselessness of it. For her, cocktail parties and grocery store aisle conversations were exercises in failed lip reading. Mallory had mocked this affectionately: “You just don’t understand people at all, do you?” Now she understands.

  “I’m George, by the way.”

  “George?”

  “It’s short for a name so horrible and ugly I refuse to inflict it on others.”

  “Georgephine?”

  “Oh
my god! Nobody’s ever guessed before.” Laura laughs, zipping up her jeans.

  George’s hair is shaved close. When she bends to untie and slip off her sneakers, Laura sees that the back of her head is surprisingly flat. Like a zombie head, Laura thinks to herself.

  “I’m Mallory,” Laura says.

  George glances up. “Hi, Mallory. Long day?”

  “Pretty average.”

  George nods at her shoes.

  “Just a long day at work,” Laura says. “Passport office.”

  “Sounds exciting.”

  “It is what it is.” Laura shrugs and George nods. “The work is not letting people drive you nuts.”

  “Well, I’m a teacher. When we aren’t on strike, we’re arguing about going on strike.

  George strips quickly. A body that has lifted weights for years. She’s probably in her mid-fifties. Something Laura’s father told her once—you can tell someone’s age by the backs of their hands.

  “You’re here all the time now, eh?”

  “Pretty much every day,” Laura says.

  George nods, drifting toward the shower, pulling on her flip-flops. “It can get pretty addictive, once you get into it. Nothing better.”

  Laura drives home, hair damp from her shower, her shoulders and arms injected with honey endorphins. The cyclists pass her, brilliant fish in a parallel stream, their safety jackets smeared across her wet windshield.

  At home, it takes an instant to reactivate her Facebook profile. The grid of friends’ faces, her truncated history. And then, there is Mallory’s face. She’s cut her hair short, scooped up around her ears and piled boyishly onto one side, and there is another woman’s face in the photo. Their eyes and cheekbones are matching and bright.

  Don’t click on her. Don’t do it. Internet law.

  What’s on your mind? the status box asks her.

  She types in: The person you most want to see will become the person you least want to see.

  She presses post and logs out.

  She’s getting stronger. A hinged thing. Flesh firm around her joints, her shoulders suddenly, one day, blade-like.

  Laura has watched her body in the mirrored wall in the gym, watched her body change. Her neck plunges into her collarbone. When she turns and looks at her back in her bedroom mirror, it is a raised plateau. Her outside layer has peeled away. She remembers those anatomical models from high school biology class, human puzzles, their removable spleens.

  The men at the gym now call her bro. One day, a shrug-nod and then, coolly, hey, bro. The luck of broad shoulders. Her new bro status pleases her in spite of herself. She moves the pin in the weights to one hundred and twenty pounds. Mid-lift, she looks at her right arm, the new tough packet resting there. When she felt the new muscle for the first time, her mind flooded with worry: a lump. Her mind looks for reasons to panic everywhere. No, this is what she’s been working for—this hardness. Beside her, a man strains on the piece of equipment dubbed the birthing machine. Weights attach to pads placed against the inside of each thigh. He squeezes and releases. Aaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Laura ties her shoelace to conceal her smirk.

  The woman, possibly a dancer, who balances on the exercise bench every night. One arm extended. A weight at the end of her arm, muscle a perfect arc, a soft band. Laura watches. The pure control of motionlessness.

  She logs in and the cursor flashes at her, asking her to fill in the box. What’s on your mind?, the pale blue text taunts her, flashes, implores her.

  She types in: You are the only one pretending to be you.

  There are people and their ways of moving. There are the storks and the straight-necked and the sufferers, backs bent, ears blocked out by the steel orbiting rings. The men who strut the length of the floor. The men who supervise the shapes of their muscles in the mirrored wall, sleeves summoned upright. How could anyone who goes to a gym think that women are the vain sex? Late at night, rows of men’s hands wrap the metal bars. One man, compact and anguished, paces to the water fountain after every set of repetitions. Another guy guides his body through cycle after cycle on the leg press, extends and withdraws, pumping the bellows of a great machinery. Laura feels it occasionally as she lifts—a roughness in her blood. She has realized that her muscles have their own busy lives. Sometimes when she pulls on the weights, there is an absence there; sometimes, there is a humming, a throbbing, begun before she makes her demand. Laura ignores these quiet pulses, learns to pull with the same force every time.

  When she tells Greg about the weightlifting, she makes sure to slip it in casually at the tail end of one of their phone calls, but he stops and his voice lowers on the other end of the line. “Whoa whoa whoa, what?”

  “Weightlifting,” she says.

  “That’s awesome. How long? What?”

  “Pretty much every day.”

  A long pause. “Since Mallory left?”

  “Yeah, pretty much.”

  “Well, that’s great, Lo, that’s great, that’s really great, good for you. I mean, I’m really glad you found an outlet.” He pauses, waiting for her to say more, and pushes, “So, is it helping?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I mean, you’ve been having a hard time. Dad called me. He says you don’t answer any of his emails or phone messages.”

  “That’s because all of his emails and phone messages are about kale.”

  “Lo. Look. We all know what she did is pretty fucking terrible. I mean, who fucking—who just leaves like that? But, I mean, you two were always—”

  “Always what?”

  “Nothing, it’s just—”

  “Always what?”

  His voice goes whiny, like it always does when he knows he’s losing. But he can’t stop. That’s the thing about him; he just never knows when to stop. “Well, you know as well as anyone. You two were always so different. I mean, I guess, I always thought. She was just so much louder. You know?” Then he says the worst thing. “Maybe it’s better this way.” He breathes and says, “Anyway, Dana says to come here for as long as you need, the kids want to see you and? They want to see you.” He waits. “I want to see you. Do you see anybody?”

  By the time she makes a pot of Roiboos tea and checks her email he’s already sent her links to articles cautioning against daily weightlifting for women. You just never know when to stop do you, little brother? She scans the cautionary paragraphs: not enough testosterone to build muscle as quickly as tissue breaks down, the websites inform her. She clicks on a link in a sidebar to an album of female bodybuilders; she scans for the dykes, scrolls through the stomach muscles and linebacker shoulders, sipping her cooled orange pekoe, the tears rivering down her cheeks. Everybody had known. Everybody had seen but her. And this is the part she cannot tell anyone, even Greg—she does not understand why Mallory left, cannot explain it to anybody, how Mallory raged at her that things had been off for a year and she’d had no idea, how could she have known nothing at all. She texts Greg: I feel so old.

  She’s among the last ones there at night. This small group, buff stragglers. A staffer flickers the lights; library manners.

  Laura blasts her body with scalding water in the showers, the steam pressing cloud formations against the walls, her knuckles tense. She checks her shoulders. A faint string of burst blood vessels again. Is this how it starts, she wonders, people who get into pain? Backslide, wander, trip into it. No, I’m not like that. I’m not one of those people. When she pulls the towel around her body, her skin is red. The burst blood vessels stand out in dark purple, a kitchen tattoo. She checks her right shoulder and, yes, there’s the string of erupted blood vessels. Tonight, the damage reassures her.

  In the locker room, the last women are half-naked, benches draped with yoga pants and rain jackets. While she dresses, Laura cannot help but inspect the other women’s marks and scars. The tattoos. Laura would never get a tattoo. Too permanent. In undergrad, her roommate got a tattoo after she got a call from home that her childhood
dog had been run over by a car. The tattoo was her dog’s licence number, printed across the back of her neck. “You look like you have a bar code,” Laura had told her, surprised when her roommate had burst into tears and rushed from the room, then for the rest of the term communicated with Laura only through Post-It notes. Mallory had leaned forward and whispered with a kind of awe, “Oh my god, I think that’s the most insensitive thing I’ve actually ever heard. You’re amazing.” Laura had never been able to tell whether Mallory was making fun of her or praising her.

  Both and more.

  Long-term rented lockers are decorated with family photographs. Mallory would have made Laura rent a locker, stock it with protein bars. Her thoughtfulness could be controlling. “I’m kind of insidious,” she had once told Laura proudly, and Laura had thought, I want that.

  “Hey, Mallory.”

  Laura looks up from unhooking her bra, shocked, to see George, her mild smile, and, startlingly, missing a tooth.

  It’s too late to correct her about the name. And, she realizes, she speaks to so few people these days that not being called by her own name isn’t even really very surprising.

  “Hello, Georgephine.”

  “Smoke?”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah. Seriously.”

  Outside the building, they lean against the brick wall. “It’s so warm,” she says and George laughs. “You never smoked before?”

  “Just not for a long time.”

  “Ah. I see.”

  “I’ve smoked.”

  “Sure you have.” George smokes evenly, perfectly. “Anyway, look at you, the dedicated gym bunny and I’m ruining your perfect health.” Laura smiles into the darkness. It’s been a long time since anyone has flirted with her.