Best Canadian Stories 2020

by Paige Cooper

  “Internationally competitive?”

  “We went to Fargo once,” he said.

  “Wow.”

  “Montreal was better.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You still play hockey?” she said. (Chris was always into sports, Hazel tagging along to his games. What kind of fucking boy in grade school goes to watch his friend’s hockey games?) “No,” he said. “No, I haven’t played anything since high school.” He tugged at his hoodie. “I don’t mind.”

  “No?”

  “It gets—stupider as you get older,” he said, frowning. “Competition is more fun when you’re a kid. It’s literally the entire world but like it still gets to be pointless.”

  He took a huge bite of his food. He ate by slowly gathering a large forkful on his plate, lowering his head, then quickly and decisively stabbing the food into his mouth, like domination. “It gets ridiculous when adults make it mean something,” he said. “You know?”

  “I think so,” said Hazel.

  “I go to Jets game with my dad sometimes.”

  “I hate the Jets.”

  “Aw, c’mon, really?” He bit into a piece of garlic bread and Hazel followed suit, sawing into it with her knife like an animal.

  “I fucking hate hockey,” she said, scooping up butter.

  “Nobody’s perfect,” he returned, unfazed. “How’s your mom doing?”

  “Fine. I live with her. She’s fucking some guy who owns an art gallery.”

  “Good for her,” he said. “She still—aw, shit. What does your mom do again? I can’t believe I don’t remember this.”

  “Hospital tech. Sanitizes instruments. They ever cut you open at Health Sciences in the last five years, good chance my mom cleaned that scalpel.”

  “Well, good for her, eh?”

  “She does OK. And the guy has family money, so. What about your folks?”

  “Um. My mom’s dead.”

  “What?” Hazel said. Christopher’s parents had been very kind, and always seemed so in love. There’d been a short period, as a kid, where Hazel’d prayed seriously and nightly for her mother to have what they had.

  Hazel reflected, in a nanosecond, that without realizing it she had always considered this a bulwark against death. As if there had been an x = x equation of happy straight marriages with long lives.

  “Yeah,” Christopher said. “She killed herself, actually.”

  “I’m so sorry.” She broke the last piece of bread. “When was this?”

  “Like two years ago.”

  Before she could stop herself, Hazel asked, “How’s your dad?”

  “Never been the same.” Christopher delivered this information like he was in a meeting. It was calm as space outside, cars half-covered from vision by the snowdrifts. Hazel could make out antennas, the tops of SUVs.

  “I’m sorry,” said Hazel. “I’ve lost a couple friends that way. I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, well,” he said, showing the first signs of discomfort. “Not exactly nice dinner conversation, I guess.”

  An old guy with a Michelin Man jacket walked in and shuffled over to a table.

  “My mom’s here now,” Hazel said, offering this, knowing the difference between sympathy and self-concern. “In the city.”

  “So you don’t have any connection to Pilot Mound anymore?” said Christopher. The guy in the Michelin jacket slowly lowered himself into a seat, putting his hands on the table and closing his eyes. The waiter sauntered over, now with a lazy smile.

  “None. No reason to visit anymore. Ever.”

  “Me either,” Christopher said, sounding scared and unsure. “Damn, I guess I really don’t. My dad moved here last year, too. Which is good. It’s good he’s near me.”

  They ate in silence, then Hazel went to the bathroom, where an ad for a dating show stood next to the sink, a colourful list that said, “DOS AND DON’TS ON FIRST DATES.” Her eyes rested on a DO:

  Offer to go Dutch.

  (Welcome to the 21st Century.)

  *

  She straightened her ponytail, smoothed her skirt, and went back downstairs.

  The old man had a half-carafe of wine and a basket of bread, staring ahead, inserting the food into his mouth. “So what were you doing in Montreal?” asked Christopher.

  “Becoming a girl and a drunk. I came back to quit at least one of those. Got any advice?” She’d planned this line out, to say at some point during the night, to gauge his reaction—and it sounded so stupid coming out of her mouth, but Christopher laughed a true, un-self-conscious laugh, and Hazel started to like him for real.

  *

  When he kissed her, hours later, on her doorstep, after paying for both of their meals, Hazel started to cry. She went up into her mom’s bathroom but instead of peeing, she sat on the lid and cried. And then Hazel’s mom heard her crying. She entered without knocking and Hazel told her there was a boy. She said, You remember Christopher Penner, right? and her mom laughed a delirious, beautiful laugh, and got down on her knees and hugged Hazel where she was sitting. You two always did like each other so much. Hazel put her face in her mom’s coat and let her mother touch her as she sat there, the carpet of the toilet seat rustling against her skirt.

  *

  After they fucked for the first time, Hazel thought Christopher might cry. He had that look boys get after they come when the sex has really meant something to them. Something grateful unlocked from within his body, with Hazel’s legs wrapped around him like a spider. So many boys thought they were warriors after they had an orgasm. That, or they got sad. Or gave off waves of dissociation and then weeks later admitted they were girls. (This had happened to Hazel not once nor twice, but three times.) But Christopher didn’t cry—his eyes closed briefly, like he was with God, and it made Hazel feel beautiful.

  2

  Can I even begin to phrase how hard I began to re-believe in my life? How his bedroom is forever preserved in my memory as a centre of peace? Christopher had a big studio on Corydon with purple curtains and gentle traffic sounds and a neighbour who watched cable news that came through the walls as a burbling lull 24/7. For many months, when I stayed over at Christopher’s house, he would get up, make coffee, and kiss me, still sleeping in the bed, before he went to work. I lived between that apartment and my mother’s house, doing nothing. He didn’t seem to mind (something I would later realize I took for granted). It sounds chaste saying it now, though it wasn’t. We fucked against buildings, and I went with him to parties. God, he liked to drink, almost as much as I had in the old days, but that part wasn’t even hard. Once everybody knew I was sober and wasn’t trying to get me to drink, parties got fun! It was a kick to be around drunks and see so clearly now what was happening to them.

  And sober sex. Do you know that had never happened before, either? It was in fucking Christopher that I felt my body flower and come back to me. I felt my skin as a real part of the world. It was weird. Sex became not something that I tolerated, or even assented to, but a thing I wanted and liked. It felt like the same restless and tingling part of me that stayed up late as a kid. A ghostly hand touching my insides, bringing something back to me about desire.

  *

  “You know, I only ever dated one other girl in my life,” he said one night, after we’d made love. The moon was out and tinged his red hair a pale blue. A car’s shadow from the street washed over the room.

  “Really,” I said.

  “We dated for four years,” he said, staring straight up from his pillow. “She had a kid, a little daughter.”

  I propped myself up on my elbow. “Why’d you break up?” I didn’t mind hearing this stuff, and it wasn’t unprecedented. We liked filling each other in on the vast blankness of what had happened during the past half of our lives.

  “She fell out of love with me,” he said.

  “That�
��s cold.”

  “No, it’s fine,” Christopher said. “I mean, it was awful, and it dragged out too long. But she didn’t have the guts to leave me. And I wanted to believe she still loved me. It happens all the time.”

  “I see.”

  “Not that I’d know, I guess,” he added. “The sample size is n=1, as they say.”

  “Dating blows. You didn’t miss much. How’d you meet?”

  He hesitated. “Speed dating.”

  “What? That still exists?”

  “It was in Fort Garry,” he laughed. “It wasn’t even at a bar or anything, it was so awkward. But we ended up liking each other. They give you a little piece of paper and they call you up if you marked each other as a match. We went on one date afterward and then it was just normal.”

  “No shit.”

  “Did you ever date girls, too?” he asked. “I mean, after you—after you—”

  It never fails to amaze me, in a fond, quiet way, how boys can touch and fuck a transsexual body then stammer their way through any implication of how that body got there. I don’t know why I have a soft spot for that, but I do. “I’ve never dated a woman,” I said. “Except in high school, once. I hooked up with girls a few times and it was fun. I never really dated men, either, to be honest. I didn’t have many relationships as an adult, period.” Any relationships, I didn’t say.

  We lay there in the moonlight. I’d never felt so calm. I felt like the first thirty years of my life were slipping into place and closing. We were very quiet for a while, but he wasn’t sleeping.

  “What I can tell you,” I said, “is the first time I slept with a man. It was right after I moved east. This was in Toronto. I wasn’t in a good place. I worked with this boy and I lived in a shithole just east of downtown. Even today it’s a rough corner. Anyway. This boy, Will, he asked if I wanted to hang out. Twice I went over to his house and we watched TV, got drunk. We talked long into the night. Both times I expected—like, I thought: He’s hitting on me, right? This is how this works, this is how it ends up, right? But then around 1:00, 2:00 a.m. he’d say all abrupt that he had to get to sleep, had to get up early for work, see ya. I was like, I work at the same place, bitch! But whatever. The third time I go over again. Will says he’s gonna make tacos and he’s got a two-six of whiskey. I brought a six-pack. And right away, he says he broke up with his girlfriend the weekend before, so he’s all emotional. I was like, Ah, OK, here we go. He put bacon in the tacos. I told him to eat some of the spare bacon and take a shot of whiskey. We called them bacon chasers. I have a picture of me, still, that he took that night. I’ve got a flip phone and I’m wearing this stupid scarf. I look mad for some reason. But I was really happy.

  “Anyway. Eventually the whiskey and the beer go and we are fucked up. And then I kiss him and he’s surprised! I don’t know. But he’s into it, and we have sex, and let me tell you, baby, it was bad, like it was nooooot good. I’ll spare the unsavoury details but like, we were both too drunk to stand. And we were scared, and we didn’t know what we were doing with each other’s bodies.”

  Christopher sat up and put his arms around his knees, watching me talk to him.

  “We blacked out and woke up the next day feeling terrible,” I said. “He had to work, but it was my day off. I walked him to the subway and said, Kiss me. He did, then he left, and almost right away I had a Facebook message saying he just wanted to be friends.”

  “Motherfucker!” said Christopher.

  “No, the sadness of that hadn’t kicked in yet,” I said. “I walked home, even though it took over an hour. And I felt so clearly that I had finally lost my virginity. It seems silly, right? It wasn’t the first time I’d had sex as a woman. It wasn’t the first time a lover had stuck something up me, either. It wasn’t even the first time I’d touched boy penis. But fucking him and sleeping in his bed felt special, like something I would read about. And I guess maybe part of that feeling was heterosexist patriarchal whatever. But it occurred to me, as I was walking, hungover in the wind, feeling so in my body—that virginity is not the lie. Singular virginity, that’s the lie. It made me think: Maybe virginity is real, and it can be lost, but it can also be given. Maybe there’s something beautiful in the concept, and not just . . . ruinous. Maybe the truth is just that virginities are malleable, personal, and there are lots of them. And maybe you can even do them over again if you don’t get it right the first time.”

  Christopher was quiet. I’d like to say he eventually said or murmured something before we fell asleep, but I just don’t remember.

  *

  Once, when Christopher was drunk, he hit me in the balls. Well, he tapped me in the balls. It was supposed to be a joke, I guess. There was a split second where I didn’t understand where the pain was coming from.

  “Haaaa,” he said. “You remember that? You remember that?”

  I clocked him back before I even realized what was I was doing and then he was on the floor. He sobbed once, not from pain, I don’t think. He said he was sorry. He said he was drunk, and stupid, and that he was a bad and evil man he was bad he was bad he was bad he was evil.

  Usually, when he was in blackout mode, I’d just guide him around like a cat. I remembered how pliable I used to be, at least the shadowy mental cross-stitch I could summon from pinpricks of memories and what my friends told me later.

  But this time I told him that he was good, that I loved him, and that I’d never leave him. I said, “You’re a good man” over and over. I hoped it would sink in even if he didn’t remember. In grade school I used to hit him in the nuts all the time, unprompted, for fun, and he would go down just like that. Sometimes he’d get mad. Sometimes he’d laugh. No one thought it was weird. Boys. When I said I was an unhappy child, I meant that I was also an angry child.

  *

  Later that summer, a job offer came in for him in Kingston. They offered him a lot of money. For me it wasn’t a question at all. “I’m thinking of taking it,” he said.

  “If you wanted me to come with you, I’d come with you,” I said.

  He was silent.

  Then he changed the conversation.

  A couple hours passed that night where I said goodbye to him in my head. I thought: Okay. I thought: Never mind. I thought: This strange boy from my past sewed my heart back together. I will mourn, I will hold him until he leaves, and then I will move on.

  As we were getting ready for bed, he turned to me with screaming eyes: “Are you coming with me? Are we doing this? Are we really doing this?” He was shaking as I kissed him.

  *

  So we left the city and I moved east, again. We settled into the second floor of an old house with a balcony, a house with no screaming outside, no one beating on doors, no sounds of male rage through the walls. Ontario Works got me a job in a rental management office and I closed my eyes the one time they evicted two hookers.

  We lived there for a year. I’m thankful for all of this. If your early thirties can be a rebirth, after rebirth had, supposedly, already been part of your life (I bought into the transition-as-second puberty stuff hard), then any period of your life can bring renewal. Can’t it? I believe in that.

  One day, I had this clear feeling: We went to this diner that had just opened. They used all local ingredients, claimed we really didn’t have to tip, said that they were proud to pay their workers an actual living wage. I had a sandwich with soft thick bread, a kind of cheese I’d never heard of, fresh greens, and coffee that was somehow so fucking good I didn’t even put cream in it. I’d paid for meals that nice before, but this was the first time without any regret or anxiety. That was the special thing. And we drove home (he drove home) and I thought, I made it.

  3

  And so then. The morning when it happened. You and I had been together eighteen months. We woke up in terrible heat; the A/C had broken during the night. You went to open the windows and the air o
utside was wavy. Our room was shimmering in the light. Kids outside were running through the back lane, burning in the sun.

  I put my head in your neck when you laid back down. “Hazel,” you said.

  “Christopher.” I folded my legs over yours. Your phone rang. I saw it was your dad. You said you didn’t want to speak with him.

  I only found out later that you told me second. I was always grateful for that. I was grateful you didn’t tell me first.

  *

  When you did, I hated you instantly. Because I knew my hurt would need sealing immediately. That I would need to fold my pain, stow it somewhere to shrivel and grow pale. This is the order these things go. Someday, a girl might do the same thing to you.

  You told me how you knew from when we were little, how you admired me from afar, how you thought, when we got together, that maybe you didn’t want to be a girl, that maybe just being with a trans girl would soothe this part of your mind. Do you know what it’s like to so completely understand the force about to blow up your life?—well. I barely remember what you said after that. You were vacating your guts and I was listening and nodding but I could only think, I don’t want you to transition. I don’t want you to be a girl. You were the sweetest boy to me, and I loved you, and I still love you but now I have to help you. I have to guide you through clothes and bras and every way of dealing with hair and I have to watch your eyes grow heavy and frightened when you step outside the way I’ve seen countless girls like you. I have to listen to it all, over and over, again. To see you grow out your hair—oh God, you’re going to dye it, aren’t you? Of course you are. You’ll dye it something besides that pretty, pretty red. That pretty red hair.

  *

  It only took me two weeks to break up with you. Isn’t that awful? I couldn’t—I don’t know. I couldn’t do it. You didn’t know what was coming and I did. I know you wanted to try, but I promise you, we wouldn’t have made it.