The Empty Room

by Lauren B. Davis

  Even though she wasn’t the only fourteen-year-old at the party, Colleen felt a little bit like the annoying, merely tolerated younger sister. The week before, when she admitted to the willowy Crystal that she liked Danny, Crystal had smirked, stretched out her impossibly long legs and said, “I wouldn’t get my hopes up; he likes the model type, not some kid with her nose always stuck in the middle of a dusty old book.” Until that moment, Colleen hadn’t given much thought, one way or the other, to whether she was “the model type,” nor to the idea that reading was in any way unattractive. Now, watching Crystal drape her thin arm so casually across Frank Boyden’s shoulder (Frank being the most sought-after boy in school, with his long black hair and blue eyes), it seemed she peered through a kind of glass separation, a sort of bell jar, like the one Sylvia Plath, whom Colleen had recently discovered, talked about. She felt dangerously close to weepy.

  “You want some?” asked Brad Rogers, known to his friends as the Barbarian. He had brought a selection of bottles to the kitchen from the Gibsons’ liquor cabinet. Brown ones and green ones and clear ones. He poured himself half a glass of brown liquid. “Whisky,” he said. “Makes everything better.” He took a drink and shivered, smacked his lips and said, “Aaaaahhhh.”

  “Give me one,” said Crystal, stepping in front of Colleen. “Vodka. Danny,” she called over her shoulder, “you have any orange juice?”

  The kitchen was returning to its normal, inanimate state as Danny switched the various appliances off. “Yeah, sure, but don’t drink all that. My parents will have a fit.”

  He picked up the phone and set it down again, silencing it in mid-ring. Strains of “Honky Tonk Women” came from the living room. Crystal slid to Brad’s side and took her glass.

  “Aren’t you having any?” she asked Colleen, and then grinned with her perfect rosy lips and her perfect straight white teeth. “You’re just a kid really, aren’t you?”

  For the first time, Colleen wasn’t entirely sure Crystal was really her friend, or even that Crystal liked her. She suspected she might be the sort of sidekick the pretty girls only kept around to make themselves look better by comparison.

  Colleen picked up a glass and poured herself some whisky, and then, just for good measure, she poured a little from the green bottle, which she recognized as crème de menthe, into the glass as well. She was quite sure the minty taste would make the whisky go down easier.

  “Bottoms up,” she said, which is what her father said.

  “Really?” Crystal shrugged, and turned to get her orange juice.

  The liquor burned going down and for a moment Colleen was afraid it was going to come right back up, but it didn’t. She coughed a little, but no more. It tasted like minty fire and ice; sweet, but also smoky and earthy. The possibility that it held hidden properties and purposes flashed through her mind. It seared her tongue and the inside of her cheeks. The liquids were not completely blended and a little bright green lingered on the side of the glass like a magic fairy potion. She drank more, and that’s when it happened. She heard, or rather felt, a tiny, but clearly audible click, and when she looked around her at the people she thought she knew, she understood all the things she hadn’t understood before, including that she was perfect and pretty and just as smart as anyone else. The kitchen took on a warm, sunny glow, and everyone looked so friendly.

  “I don’t know if I’d mix like that,” said Brad, with something in his voice that Colleen understood to be awe.

  “It’s perfect. I’ll have some more,” she said, and she did. She laughed at Brad with his pimply skin and John Lennon glasses. She saw how hard he was trying to fit in, too, just like her. Even Crystal, with her thick blond hair that fell all the way to her waist and her superior air, standing there with her chest stuck practically in Frank Boyden’s face—Colleen understood she was afraid no one would like her for anything except her big boobs. Danny, who a moment before had seemed so in control of everything, even the electricity, now seemed nervous, taking tiny sips from a bottle of beer and telling a girl to use a coaster on his mother’s coffee table. They were all the same and all just trying to get along and she was filled with enormous goodwill toward everyone, and she wanted to dance, and pulled Brad out into the living room so they could do just that.

  Things got pretty fuzzy then. Later she remembered dancing, and stumbling back into the record player, which was hilarious, but then there was something of a break in the action, and she was crawling on all fours between the living room and the kitchen, when the side door opened and she was looking up into the astonished and furious faces of Mr. and Mrs. Gibson. Then she was sitting out on the lawn, on the curb by the side of the road, but the lawn wouldn’t stay still and undulated like a riffled rug. Her mother appeared and Colleen was in the car and she didn’t feel well, and someone in the back seat said she had eaten something bad at the party, and her mother glared at her and then she was sick, and it was coming out her mouth and through her fingers. There was another gap after that, and then she was in the bathroom at home, sitting on the cold tiles, between the toilet and the bathtub clutching the toilet as her mother loomed over her.

  “Are you drunk?” her mother demanded, hands on her hips, a towel dangling from her fingers.

  This seemed a funny question. Colleen felt remarkably dignified for someone sitting on the floor next to a toilet. With great care and enunciation, she replied, “I. Am. Plastered.”

  Her mother’s face went white and she drew her hand back, way back, across her body to her opposite shoulder. Colleen understood she was about to be slapped, but she also remembered that if you were really drunk you didn’t feel pain, and so she watched in a purely analytical fashion as her mother’s hand descended in a great arc toward her face. This won’t hurt at all, she thought, and sure enough, it didn’t, and under the force of the blow her head turned in slow motion so that she could watch the toilet tank approaching her forehead, although she didn’t remember a thing after that.

  The next day she discovered another couple of truths: people talked, and projectile vomiting does not make you popular in high school. And it was a long time after that before she drank again.

  MY PEOPLE

  “I’m having a party,” she told Andrew, the liquor store clerk. Andrew dyed his hair the shade of an eggplant and had a tattoo of black roses on his right forearm, which he had showed her a year or so ago, when she first saw it poking out of his long sleeved T-shirt. He had more, he’d said, but he couldn’t show her those, and he winked. He also told her his girlfriend had a tattoo of corset lacings up her back. He was from Thunder Bay and had a degree in Computer Science, but couldn’t get a job in his field.

  Colleen knew most of the clerks at the LCBOs in the vicinity of her home and office—well, what used to be her office. She went out of her way to chat with them, as she did with most shopkeepers—the health-food store people, the bookstore owner, the dry cleaner. She liked to be part of a neighbourhood, part of a community. In the back of her mind she realized being on a first-name basis with the liquor store employees probably wasn’t a good thing. It was like that old saying about how if you started getting calls on the bar phone you knew it was time to find a new bar. (Although now everyone had cell phones, that probably didn’t make much sense. Yet further evidence she was old.) But with the liquor store employees it seemed particularly important. She didn’t like to admit it, but sometimes she felt a little embarrassed going in to buy yet another bottle of this or that. She used several shops, and tried not to go to the same one twice in the same week, but there were times it couldn’t be helped, like now. She’d been here on Friday and bought the vodka that now stood, near empty, on her counter at home.

  “Not a big party,” she said, “just a few people over.” She wondered, now and again, what they thought about how much she entertained.

  “So, what do you need?” asked Andrew.

  “Well, a couple of bottles of wine, I suppose. I’m serving chicken, so white. Maybe a
nice Chablis. And I guess a bottle of vodka, I think they like vodka.”

  “No problem,” said Andrew.

  “It’s quite the occasion, actually,” she said. “We’re celebrating.”

  “That’s nice. This do?” He held out a bottle of the Canadian wine she usually bought. Inexpensive and drinkable.

  He wasn’t very talkative today. Not like Matt. Matt was always up for a joke, always made her feel like they were, well, almost friends. “Do you like it? What about your girlfriend? What’s her name again?”

  “Gretchen. It’s okay, like I said. You want it?”

  “Fine. I think I’ll take three bottles.” Between wine and vodka, she’d be good for a nice long while. Not that she’d drink much of it, but it was good to have it in the house. She’d ask Lori to come over tonight and commiserate. They’d share a bottle. She wouldn’t drink any more than that. “We’re celebrating my liberation,” she said, following Andrew through the aisle to the vodka section.

  “Oh, right. Nice. You want a 750 millilitre? Absolut, right?”

  “What about this one?” Colleen pointed at a bottle that was half the price.

  “Nothing wrong with that.”

  “I’ll try it, then.”

  As they walked to the cash, Andrew asked, “So, what’s the liberation about?”

  “I’ve left my job.” That was factual, after all. She had decided she would leave the stupid job. She hadn’t let them call all the shots. Her dignity had demanded she quit, given the way they treated her. That was the truth, wasn’t it? Of course. She refused to think about it any other way.

  “Huh,” said Andrew. “Well, good luck.”

  He put the bottles down on the cash counter, nodded at her and disappeared, just like that. It was a bit rude, really.

  “Find everything you need?” the cashier asked. She was Indian, thin as a stick, with purple lips and long hair tied up in a high ponytail.

  Colleen didn’t know her, and although ordinarily she’d try and strike up a little conversation, exhaustion chose that moment to ripple up from her toes like a heat wave. She suddenly wanted nothing more than to lie down on the couch with a glass of wine and watch some mindless television. She could have one glass of wine, given what she’d just gone through. Anyone would. They’d have two.

  “I’m good,” she said, and paid. “I don’t need a carry-bag; I’ve got one. I’ll put the bottles in here, if you can just put them in paper bags so they don’t break.”

  It felt good to have that done, she thought as she walked out of the store. It was reassuring. She wouldn’t have to worry about having wine in the house if someone came over later. And someone would, surely. Lori, probably, but maybe she’d call Helen, who lived in a basement apartment in a house down the street. Maybe Colleen would stop by Helen’s. Helen was several years older than Colleen and had panic attacks so severe she’d become agoraphobic, so she was on disability. Her company, some bank, had screwed her over too, saying they weren’t going to pay, or something, but Helen had sued and the company settled. Colleen should talk to her about that lawsuit. Maybe she should sue? She had grounds, she was sure of it. The university had tons of money.

  A young man stood outside the mall entrance, begging for money. He held a sign. Looking for Work. Hungry. He wore an army surplus jacket, and was so thin his shoulder blades jutted up like a hanger under his clothes. Colleen fumbled in her pocket and pulled out a loonie, dropping it into his outstretched, utterly filthy palm.

  “God bless,” he said. There were sores around his mouth and nose.

  My people, she thought, as she imagined herself standing on a similar corner one day in the future, and then, Don’t be so dramatic.

  The bag was heavy and the weather growing uglier by the minute. The clouds roiled overhead and it was certainly about to rain. She could take the subway down one stop to Davisville, and then grab the bus or walk, but getting home seemed more urgent by the moment, and cabs would be impossible to get once it started raining.

  She flagged a cab and was home in minutes. There was nobody around at this time of day—all out, she thought, at their pointless little jobs. The elevator was empty, although it smelled of someone’s woodsy perfume. The hallway on her floor was empty. Key in the lock, door open and then she was inside, putting her bag and purse down on the kitchen counter. She felt shaky. She didn’t mean to do it, didn’t intend to do it, but she took a glass out of the cabinet and into it she poured the last of what remained in the open vodka bottle. It filled the glass more than halfway.

  “Hello, little fairy. Here’s to new beginnings,” she said as she raised her glass.

  She dropped her coat on one of the four wooden chairs around the small table in the dining area, and slouched over to the couch. She flopped down and took another drink from the glass. Warm, she thought. So nice and warm. The warmth slid down her throat and when it hit her stomach it blossomed and slipped along the inside of her arms, down her thighs and behind her knees, all the way to her toes. Another sip, sip, sip.

  A row of windows ran waist-high along the wall to the combined living–dining room. A door led to a tiny empty balcony she never used. It was ugly and graceless and overlooked the parking lot. Last January a fatally optimistic pigeon built a nest out there and laid eggs. She heard it chirping, loudly and insistently, but when she opened the door to see what the fuss was all about, what greeted her were four featherless, naked little birds frozen in grotesque rictus. She closed the door and hadn’t been out there since.

  Sitting on the couch, however, all she could see of the outside world were the tips of the coal silos and the treetops. She would have to move soon, to get busy and start doing all the familiar things she had to do when between jobs—contact Payroll at the university and make sure they sent her the necessary paperwork so she could register for unemployment benefits. She’d probably even have to talk to Minot again and get her to agree to classify her as “laid off” so she could get benefits earlier. How likely was that? Not very. She’d have to get a temp job, and fast if she was going to make the bills. A little voice in the back of her head whispered something about her mother’s pension checks and bank account, which she now managed. Thank God her mother had signed the power of attorney before she’d had the mini-strokes. But no, Colleen couldn’t touch that for anything other than her mother’s care, neither legally or morally. Absolutely not.

  Apart from her mother’s money, how much cash did Colleen have in the bank? Maybe a little over a thousand dollars. Less than two thousand. It wouldn’t last long. The image of the homeless man begging outside the liquor store popped up like a stepped-upon rake.

  Colleen closed her eyes, took another sip, and imagined herself in a little cabin nestled at the edge of a great, evergreen forest. For years, this image had soothed her when she was distressed. She pictured nothing but horizon, and rolling hills, slightly blued by a soft mist. There was nothing in this imagined world but the trees, the birds, the creatures of the forest and the small cabin. She knew the cabin intimately. On the wall three gauzy summer dresses with matching hats hung from brass hooks. Books lined another wall, all tidy with leather covers and gold lettering. Old books. Books of importance. A small table covered in a blue and white checked tablecloth sat by a window overlooking a tidy kitchen garden. On the centre of the table a typewriter with a stack of paper beside it waited only for her to sit down and give voice to limitless inspiration. Windows looked out onto the bucolic landscape. A deeply cushioned chair waited for her near the window, under a brass reading lamp.

  Colleen sighed, and drank a little more. Peace descended.

  She knew this feeling, this self-contained sense of righteous isolation. She remembered the first time she’d felt this way. She had been just a girl, really, only seventeen years old and living in Nova Scotia.

  It seemed an impossible scenario, but there it was; she was seventeen and all by herself. Not that anyone had expected different, not even Colleen. After the inciden
t with the butcher knife, which no one in the family ever talked about, and which even now Colleen avoided thinking about, getting away from home had been the most important thing in the world. And then George came along, a friend of Crystal’s older brother. He was ten years her senior and talked about getting a farm in Nova Scotia, where he’d been raised, with his twin brother. Not much taller than she, he had a scraggly beard and long hair, a tight, sinewy strength and a quick temper. He wore gold-rimmed round glasses, which Colleen felt gave him an air of wisdom. That air, combined with the muscles in his arms and those narrow hips, created a potent combination of danger and sophistication, at least in her teenage, hormone-addled brain.

  She graduated from high school on June twenty-third, and ran away with him on June twenty-fourth. She left a note for her parents, and when she called them later to tell them she was all right, they said, without any irony whatsoever, that she’d made her bed now and would have to lie in it. It was difficult not to giggle at that, even though her mother’s fury practically melted the receiver. She had thought, maybe, that they’d beg her to come home, and although she never told anyone, and certainly not George, it stabbed her in the heart when they didn’t. Her father was sober by then. Amazingly, the butcher knife incident had been the catalyst for that. He later told her he didn’t ask her to come home because he felt she might be better off away from them.

  Unbelievably, she’d been a virgin (one of the few she knew) until the night they left for Nova Scotia. She shuddered even now, thinking of that awful experience. The things he expected her to do. It was easy, from the vantage point of maturity, to understand what a pervert he’d been; what else would a twenty-six-year-old man want with a child of sixteen? But back then, she knew nothing.