by Exile
I watch as he takes her in Denise’s bed then return to his workshop to take what I need.
An hour before Denise is due home, the girlfriend leaves, declining his offer to call a cab. It’s a nice night for a walk, she says, and she’ll be careful.
I follow her home, keeping a comfortable distance between us until she approaches her building. I walk in the door behind her, noting the apartment number on her mailbox, taking the stairs as she rides the elevator, and pivot around her as she locks herself in.
I walk back home in the dark and wait on the steps, sliding inside as Leonard leaves for work in the morning.
It’s done.
I’m happy that Denise’s last few journal entries mention Leonard’s new attentiveness. How gentle his touch has become. She has no way of knowing how agitated he’ll become as the day goes on. When his pretty student doesn’t show up for class. When he discovers that both his bracelet and his notebooks are missing.
When he realizes, he doesn’t dare call the police or draw attention to himself.
When he finds the notebooks in her apartment, but can’t find the bracelet. Or her.
When he realizes he never will.
He’ll be away tonight, planning what to do in a situation where nothing can be done. Wondering how to hide his wrongdoings; seeking a solution to a convoluted problem.
I will be in bed with Denise, kissing the skin that smells like violets. I am still the master of the game, as she is the master of me. I will never stop courting her. One day, when she opens her eyes, she will be grateful for my devotion. A good guest never stops making himself welcome.
I can’t help but think Mother would be pleased.
SHOW AND TELL
Kate Story
I came late to the dance. I arrived hoping Marnie would already be there. I’d almost asked her if she wanted to go together, but I’d said nothing and now, I arrived alone.
The building still left me feeling queasy; it smelled the same. The interior walls were painted cinder blocks, glossed in brighter colours than in my day. But the school office looked the same. I remembered being sent there to get the strap for daydreaming, after being warned to pay attention three times, like in a fairy tale. Here on the island, back in the seventies in any case, there were penalties for fantasy; or maybe it was just that the teacher disliked me in particular.
But that was then. Now, twenty years later, I could hear music pumping from the gym and I saw the flash of colours; someone had rented a disco ball. I heard laughter, adult laughter. That was nice, right? Different. This was different.
I went into the gym and moved directly to the special-event licensed table, bought a beer, and surveyed the room. I’d had a sick feeling that some of my old classmates might show up this night, come back to…I don’t know. Torture me. I gave myself a mental shake. I hadn’t seen any of them in almost two decades. They had no way of knowing that I was even here.
My old elementary school had been slated for demolition, an event I anticipated with dark and vengeful pleasure. In the interim, some enterprising spark had arranged for the building to be rented out to community groups, and here we were, the fundraising committee for the dragon boat team, dancing at the seventies-themed event and, well, raising funds. Joining the team was how I’d met Marnie. She was the steerer, and fierce, yelling instructions from her adaptive seat in the stern. Also, Marnie was gay, although she and I had never talked about this.
I looked for her now, some beer safely inside me. She wasn’t hard to spot. She’d found patch-pocket flares, a groovy open-necked shirt, and rainbow socks with toes. She’d decorated her wheelchair with those plastic straw things we used to put on our bicycle wheels so they made a vaguely musical noise. Out on the dance floor, she was carving it up.
I drank the beer too fast and joined her, admiring her rainbow-toed socks. After two dances – to “Dancing Queen” and the song from the Star Wars cantina – Stevie Wonder came on. “Sir Duke.”
“Sometimes I feel like I’m living the wrong life.”
That just came out. Things like that happen sometimes. I immediately regretted saying it, but it was too late.
“It’s because we’re in your old school, isn’t it?”
This made me smile. Marnie knew me well enough at this point to grasp that my thoughts were usually only tenuously related to external stimulus; the thought was something I generated out of the spastic weirdness of my own brain. Suddenly I didn’t feel like talking about wrong lives any more. “Never mind.”
Marnie, I’d learned over the past month, hated never minds beyond all things, and teased me and poked at me until I elaborated. And indeed, part of me may have begun and then feebly tried to end the conversation on purpose. Because there was something about having Marnie pay attention to me.
“That there’s some other life that’s supposed to be yours,” I yelled over Stevie, “but you’ve taken a wrong turn and the life you’re supposed to be living is going on without you. The conscious here you.”
“The conscious here me?” She executed a nifty spin in her chair.
“The you that, in this particular narrative, drags on, making the best of it, but…it isn’t your life.”
“But if you’re here, then it’s your life.” She was taking this seriously. “Multiple universes?”
I kept dancing.
“Maybe it’s not about universes,” she proposed. “Maybe it’s a narrative, like you said. Maybe it’s what you choose to remember.”
Which was pretty perceptive, because I had difficulty remembering all kinds of things.
The song after Stevie was “Don’t Give Up on Us;” slow. I got self-conscious and left Marnie to go get another beer. Got trapped by the guy who helped organize everything: he’d lost his wife to cancer and seemed determined to talk to me. All the time. “Why don’t you like Santok?” Marnie had demanded, because really, Santok was nice and good-looking and his wife had been gone for five years so it wasn’t creepy or anything.
I didn’t tell Marnie that I’d never really dated. Just had sex. Not even good sex. I didn’t tell her that I hated sex, but I seemed to want to have it all the time, with men I didn’t like who didn’t like me. I didn’t tell her, or Santok, that I was trying not to do that anymore.
So I extricated myself from the nice, flirtatious, Marnie-approved man, and that’s when I decided to take a walk around my old elementary school. Before it was consigned to dust forever, damn it to hell.
Walking down the darkened hallway, I realized my face was stretched in a weird, teeth-baring grimace. I gave my cheek a slap, trying for a reset. My mainlander grandmother used to whack the back of my hand every time I made a face – scrunch up my nose, for example, or purse my lips. Crossing my eyes, encouraged in my brothers as amusing, was of course forbidden. Let’s not even bring up sticking out my tongue. She didn’t tell me that if the wind changed, my face would stick that way, which is what my Newfoundland relatives all said. My mainland grandmother said it was “unattractive.”
I wasn’t a little girl who understood “attractive” except that I suspected I wasn’t.
And neither was Saucy Doll. But I wanted her, and so did thousands of other little girls. Saucy Doll had a glamour about her, some kind of power. The ads made her seem like someone fun, companionable. Someone who could change things.
But she was ugly. Innocuously ugly, with blue eyes and blond hair before Karla Homolka sinisterized that combination, and even she hasn’t, in the end, succeeded. A pink dress, with a gingham undershirt. Her go-to expression was eyes wide, lips parted in that semi-pornographic expression female dolls often model. But the whole point of her was this: you would take her left arm and pump it up and down, and as you did, her face would change.
Saucy Doll had several expressions. You had to go through them all, in the same order every time. The arm didn’t move smoothly – it made a rattling, mechanical noise with every pump. Eyes rolled to the left, lips parted even further. A fai
ntly alarming creaking noise as the semi-flexible rubber of her face stretched, the mechanism beneath just faintly perceptible. Then there’d be a sort of click, and her lips would snap closed as her eyes moved to the right.
When that one was done, she’d snap back to her original position, blue eyes staring straight into mine. Next, she’d wink her right eye. Her left cheek would begin to hitch up; after her right eye snapped back open (and it never went back up all the way, just stayed partly closed with her improbably black eyelashes curling up, lending her an eerie resemblance – one I recognized even then – to my mother after one too many evening ryes), the left eye would begin to close, and the hitch of the cheek continued, so that by the time she winked with her left eye she looked demented. It was a relief when that one returned to normal.
Her next trick was a sort of proto-yawn, with eyes closed (usually they didn’t close simultaneously; we’re talking serious Uncanny Valley here). Then her eyes hitched to the left, and her lips compressed. Jowls appeared, and a sort of uh-oh-what-have-I-done expression. But she snapped out of that and back to happy-neutral pretty quick, closed her eyes, and smiled. That expression reminded me of pictures of saints, usually just as they were about to die.
Her eyes would then pop open, and be crossed.
That was the last expression, and of course my favourite. Then the cycle began again, with several awkward, stiff pumps of her arm. There was an inescapably jerky, masturbatory quality to the action.
I knew that because I’d seen the boy next door masturbate. Bob was vastly old, thirteen. About a week after Saucy came into my life, he got me to take off my pants and show him my places, and after we’d gone through this a few times he asked me if I wanted to see his.
I didn’t, but I didn’t say so.
And that’s when I saw this masturbation thing for the first time.
Before these incidents, I’d been an enthusiastic little masturbator myself, although I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. I’d straddle my spool-carved maple bed’s footboard and ride it until my hair was damp with sweat. I had an image in my mind of a big field full of beautiful, giant flowers. The flowers opened and opened and opened, under a lovely soft blue sky.
I stopped that after the boy next door started looking at my parts. I didn’t like riding any more. And after seeing him masturbate I stopped remembering that I’d ever done anything like ride the bed or think of flowers.
I told my mother what had happened with Bob, and she said not to tell anybody, especially my father, and to stop playing with him. So, the next time Bob asked me to play with him I said I was busy. Playing with dolls was better.
Soon after, Saucy’s face grew stiffer. It became harder to make her change. And one of the cats got at her and left bite marks all over her soft, rubbery face. Her hair grew matted, and her dress became grubby. I will never know what possessed me to bring her to Grade One Show and Tell.
Maybe it was because I always forgot. The very first Show and Tell day, I was alerted to the fact too late, after my father had already delivered me, terribly early, on his way to work – just like he did every morning, and I’d stand around in the rain or cold or sun or whatever, because in those days teachers kept the school barricaded against all children until ten minutes to nine – so there I was watching all the other kids arrive, and all of them carried toys, including the horrible spectacle of Jessica, the rich girl, whose rapaciousness was legendary, with a stuffed panda bigger than she was. I felt literally sick. I’d forgotten Show and Tell day. Jessica had a giant fucking panda. And then my scrabbling mind remembered that I was wearing my ring. I wore it every day – my mainland grandparents had given it to me. So, that day, I showed the ring. It wasn’t a giant panda but it was something.
The second time I forgot Show and Tell (I want to say it was every Wednesday but I’d be making that up), I tried the ring again.
“You already showed and telled that,” Jessica said.
“Yeah,” said Monty, and I felt betrayed, because I’d thought Monty was my friend.
“I forgot,” I mumbled, and sat back down, face hot and red.
Maybe I brought Saucy that third Show and Tell because she happened to be near the door as my father hustled me out to the car, and I happened to remember. It seems unlikely. There was no earthly reason I’d ever remember Show and Tell. I had trouble remembering that kind of thing, and my parents weren’t into remembering for me. Maybe she wanted to go to school with me and somehow planted the suggestion in my mind, although telepathy wasn’t one of her powers that I was aware of.
In any case, she came with me and I showed her.
“What happened to her face?” Monty, faithless friend, pointed at Saucy’s mutilated visage.
“My cat,” I whispered.
“She’s ugly!” Jessica jeered. This week, she’d brought a doll almost as tall as me, with white-blond hair, a red dress trimmed with silver lace, and a rhinestone necklace.
“Saucy Doll! I have one of those!” screeched Heather Two (there were four Heathers in our class and three Cathys).
“So do I, and so does my cousin!” shrieked Cathy Three.
“Yes, Heather, Jessica, Monty, Cathy, we let every person have their show and tell and don’t interrupt,” said the teacher.
It shook me a bit that Heather Two and Cathy Three and Cathy Three’s cousin had one. I’d thought I was the only person in all of Newfoundland with a Saucy Doll. But hey, I was up in front of forty-five beady-eyed kids and I’d better show and tell.
It went very well because of the faces. Everyone really liked the last one, the cross-eyed one, and because I was so nervous and wrenched Saucy through them at breakneck speed, everyone insisted that I do it all a second time, and when I was done it raised a general cheer.
I realized the second time around that I went through the faces myself as Saucy did them. Weird. Luckily nobody could see that because I kept my head down.
And luckily nobody noticed that I didn’t tell the story of how I got Saucy. She’d just appeared in my life. I had no memory of opening a box and finding her, no memory of a parent or grandparent making some comment about her, or a brother trying to steal her or write on her face with a marker. Only the cat seemed to have noticed her.
She was not and then she was in my life. Kind of how she showed up at school for Show and Tell.
But maybe there was no real mystery to it. Like I said, I had trouble remembering all kinds of things. I forgot, then, to bring her home. She lived in my classroom cubbyhole for weeks. Occasionally, at recess or lunch, I’d reach in and pump her arm, taking her through her paces. She got even stiffer. Her right eye was permanently half-closed, despite my attempts at dolly physio, a fruitless nudging of it with my finger.
Finally one day she just stuck, in a terrible no-expression expression, in between.
I shoved her behind a bunch of stuff and forgot her.
Things kept going downhill after that. Suffice it to say that Monty’s defection was just the beginning; soon, anybody who’d ever been nice to me or even just tolerated my presence at school turned on me.
Every now and again, at recess, a crowd of girls would form and take me to the bathroom where they made me stick my head in a toilet and lick the water like a dog, while Jessica and all of the Heathers and two of the Cathys looked on. That lasted for the rest of Grade One and most of Grade Two, when it fell out of fashion, and instead I spent my recesses watching them eat my lunch. They made requests. If I didn’t come with what they wanted they’d kick and slap me. It was hard to procure store-bought stuff because my parents didn’t give me money for that kind of thing. I became adept at stealing small amounts of change. And my grades dropped because I was hungry. So that was recess.
At lunchtime people mostly just left me alone. It was a relief. I’d read. I had little else to do, my lunch having already been consumed by the others.
In Grade Six Monty shoved me into the boys’ bathroom and made me suck his dick.
But Grade Six isn’t forever. Right?
Twenty years later here I was, fundraising for breast cancer research. Twenty years of my life felt as small and far away as a foreign city viewed through the small end of a telescope. Finishing school, university in Toronto, various arts admin jobs that I never liked as well as I should have, a string of liaisons with people I never cared about as much as I should have. My mother’s breast cancer diagnosis. Flying home on the negative momentum of a job contract ending and the demise of yet another bad-boyfriend “relationship.” And then my mother died. It gutted me.
I joined the dragon boat team, I came to the dance, and now I was walking down a dark hallway, the sound of merriment fading behind me. I had never been in the building at night before. It gave the whole place a hallucinatory quality, like the midpoint in a horror movie.
I started at the Grade Six end of the building, and worked my way down the hall, peering through the windows of the classroom doors. Grade Six, Grade Five, Grade Four, all in a row. They had a room, empty now, labelled LIBRARY. That was an improvement; when I’d gone to school, we’d had only a pitiful selection of books in each individual classroom.
There was a drinking fountain, weirdly low on the wall. Right. We’d been shorter.
Past the entrance to the gym. “Car Wash,” disco lights flashing warm into the empty hallway. I heard Marnie and the others laughing and shrieking. Three more classrooms to go. Grade Two, then Grade Three, which had always, weirdly, been out of sequence. The horrible desks had been replaced by tables and detachable chairs. Evidently class sizes had diminished – well, of course they had; that’s one of the reasons this place was getting torn down. No children any more, like some child-collecting Pied Piper had drained our entire society.
It was the work of a moment to approach the door of my Grade One classroom, grasp the knob, find it unlocked, and walk inside.
It looked the same. Same desks, with chairs attached. The room was crammed full of them, just as in my day when there were over forty of us in one class. This room, unlike the others, hadn’t been updated.