All I Ask

by Eva Crocker

  When her story ended we were still a couple of blocks from the house. I tried to think of a way to introduce my German shepherd incident and maybe show her the scar on my hand but we ended up walking the rest of the way in silence.

  We turned down the short street and found the light blue house at the very end. When we got to the front door Holly reached up, her skinny wrist sticking out of a baggy cuff, and knocked. I didn’t notice the coughing woman then. I noticed the front of the house was draped in the shadow of the church.

  “Should I ring the doorbell?” Holly asked, her finger already on the button.

  The landlord was probably in his fifties, wearing a fleece vest over a checked dress shirt. He looked like a high school teacher.

  “Welcome, welcome — sorry, I was in the basement,” he said, ushering us into the house. In the photos on Kijiji the walls were all white. Now they’d been painted over in cheap rental-company colours, pale green, mocha, too-bright yellow — all chosen to conceal dirt. They were blemished with smears of plaster. The only furniture in the living room was a coffee table and a leather armchair with a rip on the seat.

  The floors were the same as in the ad, though — soft wood, varnished that golden colour you see in people’s cabins and full of half-moon dents. The same wood framed the windows and doors — wide yellow planks with dark whorls. I saw Holly run a hand over the glossy finish on the door frame.

  “I can get you the records from the Newfoundland Light and Power but I have to tell you the girls who live here, they really went to town last winter. I think you could bring the bill down by at least fifty bucks a month if you just wore a sweater, or . . . I don’t know what they were doing. This is some more storage here.” The landlord pulled open a door to a crawl space filled with rusted tins of paint.

  The house had been renovated by someone who didn’t know what they were doing. On the ground floor, there was a strange, stunted hallway between the bathroom and living room. The doors were hung on a slant and some of them were sawed off on the bottom so they could close properly, leaving a space that leaked cold and light.

  In the kitchen, the vinyl flooring was peeling away from the walls, revealing a subfloor covered in years’ worth of dusty grime. But there was a big window. The cupboard doors were made from the same wood as the floor in the living room and slathered in a varnish that made them glow.

  “This is a great kitchen,” Holly said, like she was reassuring the landlord.

  He didn’t ask us any questions about references or credit history. Holly had shifted the dynamic somehow; he seemed eager to please us.

  “Oh absolutely, look at the counter space.” The landlord opened a cupboard and quickly shut it. “The girls will clean that out before you move in.”

  When the landlord flicked the light switch in the stairway nothing happened. We all looked up at the light fixture, a bell-shaped, frosted glass shade with a crack in it.

  “The girls didn’t change the lightbulb,” he said. We followed him up the dark stairs to see the bedrooms. Both rooms had big windows and one of them had a window that opened onto the kitchen’s roof.

  Holly looked at me and I nodded.

  “We’re definitely interested, we’d love to take it.” Holly held her hand out right above the landlord’s belly. It looked like she might karate-chop him and he seemed to grab hold of it in self-defence. They were shaking on it. I felt a sinking feeling, the end of an era. I wished Holly wasn’t coming back to the house with me so I could tell Viv about it on my own.

  “I have some other people lined up but you seem like really nice girls, like a good fit.”

  Outside it was dark. The days were short and it got cold at night; the afterglow of summer had fizzled out weeks ago in a snap of frost. The weed had worn off and left me tired.

  “I love all the windows,” Holly said. “It’s a lot of space for the price, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You didn’t like it?”

  “It’ll be better without their stuff.”

  “We don’t have to take it,” Holly said. “If you don’t like it.”

  “We should take it, we can always break the lease,” I said. “It doesn’t have to be permanent.”

  “Yeah, I mean we could look at other options but this is affordable and downtown,” Holly said. “He doesn’t mind about pets.”

  “We’ll look around again in the spring,” I said. “There’ll be more stuff in the spring. At least we’ll be right around the corner from Needs,” I added as we walked by the glowing storefront, trying to offer something positive. One of the few pay phones left in the city was anchored to the front of that Needs.

  I thought of when Viv and I were in junior high and we used to play with the pay phone in Churchill Square at lunchtime. We’d eat sitting on the curb outside the strip mall and then go in to use the bathroom. The phone was on the bottom floor, tucked behind the stairs next to a travel agency. We would try to guess which 1-800 numbers led to phone sex lines. We found that almost any vaguely dirty combination of a three-letter word followed by a four-letter word led to a sex line. 1-800 WET DICK. 1-800 HOT PUSS. 1-800 GOT WOOD. Me and Viv and sometimes Kyle Patterson would come up with numbers and test them. We’d gather around while one of us dialled — shielding the caller from passersby and watching for the security guard who sometimes came by saying, “Clear out, clear out, if you’re not buying anything, clear out.”

  The slippery silver buttons would clunk back into the phone when you pressed them. 1-800 BIG TITS. Reaching out into the void. 1-800 GAY GIRL. If the number you dialled wasn’t a sex line the phone would bark an angry dial tone in your ear. 1-800 SEX COCK. Got one! When you landed on a sex line a pre-recorded message poured out of the receiver, a woman purred a monologue about masturbating, interrupting herself with increasingly stern instructions to enter your credit card number. Every part of the pay phone was greasy: the phone’s handle, the cups that rested against your ear and chin, the heavy coil that bound the receiver to the phone box, even the graffitied sides of the phone.

  Just across the tiled hallway from us, middle-aged women would meet for lunch at the bistro-style tables outside Living Rooms. They broke apart tea buns and used plastic knives to smear butter and strawberry jam from little packets on the doughy insides. Sometimes they looked up when we got rowdy, howling with laughter, shrieking suggestions, wrestling over the receiver. 1-800 HOT HOMO.

  We listened for as long as the pre-recorded messages lasted. Sometimes there would be different options to choose from: girls with accents, young girls, angry girls, gay girls, sometimes gay guys — we cycled through, listening to each performance in full. We huddled, shoulder to shoulder, next to a rack of pamphlets advertising tropical vacations. We listened to all the free parts of every phone sex line we could find. We stayed tuned in to the chorus of panting voices for as long as possible; I’m here, I’m horny, this is what my body looks and feels like, these are the things we could do together, pay me.

  Five

  I went with Holly to look at the bedroom set. The week before we moved in to the house by the church, the landlord texted to say the current tenants had asked him to let us know they were selling their furniture. Holly had hardly brought anything from Montreal; the place she’d sublet on Neptune Road was furnished.

  Natalie Swanson opened the door in leggings and a tank top with a lotus flower on the chest.

  “You can keep your shoes on,” she told us. She was eating handfuls of trail mix from a Ziploc bag she carried up to the bedroom. Her hair was pulled into a high ponytail.

  “We’re leaving the province on the first so if you’re interested in buying the bedroom stuff that would be great for us,” Natalie said. “We’re not taking anything, so if you like the armchair or the kitchen table . . . we’re going to sell everything really cheap, and you can just have the chair.”

 
There was a rock-climbing poster on the back of the bedroom door; I hadn’t noticed it when the landlord showed us around. It was a photograph of a woman in a harness clinging to a dusty orange cliff, one knee raised up above her hip. Natalie’s sports bra hung off the doorknob by a strap. Weights that had been lined up on the dresser when we viewed the apartment were strewn across the floor.

  “Do you mind if I try it out?” Holly asked.

  “Go for it,” Natalie said.

  Holly took her shoes off and sat on Natalie’s comforter, bouncing a little before swinging her body around and reclining. She put her head on the pillow. Natalie and I stood at the foot of the bed watching.

  “Mmm,” Holly said and shut her eyes. “Oh, it’s really comfortable.”

  “Yeah?” Natalie said, sealing the plastic zip on her trail mix.

  Holly opened her eyes and sat up, resting on her elbows, and looked at us like it was already her bed. Like Natalie and I were guests in her bedroom.

  “I don’t have cash, can I e-transfer?” Holly asked.

  “Of course.”

  Holly put her feet on the floor and reached for her sneakers. “So you and your roommate are moving together?”

  “Yeah, I just found out I got into grad school, I was wait-listed so I didn’t know until the last minute if it was going to work out. Do you want that chair downstairs?”

  On the way out, we passed the room that would be mine in a few days. I tried to imagine falling asleep in there, with Holly in the next room instead of Viv and Mike.

  “I think we’ve got living room furniture covered, don’t we, Stacey?” Holly said.

  “We’re good for chairs,” I said.

  * * *

  On our last day at Patrick Street, Viv and I scrubbed the baseboards, kneeling on either side of the living room with our backs to each other. Mike was allegedly sweeping out the upstairs bedrooms. Viv and I divided up the other jobs: Viv dealt with the litter closet and I cleaned the bathroom. It was the third house we’d moved out of together.

  When we were almost finished, we cracked the windows and propped the front door open with a chair. Soon it would be time for that last walk-through. The final load of odds and ends had been packed into laundry baskets and reusable Sobeys bags.

  Viv mopped out the basement. We fought over who would do it, both insisting the other had done enough.

  “Do you think it smells like litter down here?” Viv asked.

  “No, do you?” I was sitting on the dryer.

  “I’m not sure, kind of.” Viv twisted the handle of the mop so that all the strands of the mop head twirled together in the straining basket. I took the bucket upstairs and dumped the dirty water out the kitchen window into the backyard.

  Viv stood on a chair and used the back of a hammer to haul out each of the nails holding up the wool blanket in the doorway between the kitchen and living room. I gathered it off the floor and pressed my face into it: it smelled of cooked food. The silky bottom was covered in dirt and cat hair where it’d swept across the floor.

  I picked used Lysol wipes off the floor and dropped them into the garbage. “I think we have to change the bag.”

  We had already pulled the mouth of the garbage bag up out of the bucket because it was so full. Inside, a pair of my mud-soaked running sneakers teetered on a pile of almost-empty sauce jars Viv had cleared out of the fridge. She tugged on the edge of the garbage bag and I held the bucket. We wrestled the fat bag out together, the jars clinking against each other.

  I held the opening of the bag in two fists as the contents relaxed out of the shape of the garbage bucket. I knotted it shut. Viv took the bag down the hallway, stooped by the weight of it. I raced through the empty dining room and living room to open the front door for her.

  Once Viv had dumped it, we stood on the step for a moment, looking at the pile of garbage bags slouched against the telephone pole in front of our house. Soon to be someone else’s house.

  * * *

  Holly and I rented a panel van from U-Haul. I can’t drive, so I sat in the waiting area while Holly spoke to the guy at the counter. When she finished filling out the forms, she spun around and held the keys up for me to see.

  In the van she said, “Any requests, roomie?” before tuning the radio to Hits FM.

  But then she couldn’t find the parking brake. We sat in the cab of the truck for a long time while Holly fucked around with different levers and knobs sticking out of the base of the steering wheel. She bent and looked under her seat.

  “Is it that thing?” I pointed to a lever.

  “No.” She said it like I was stupid. “That’s for the window wipers.”

  One of the U-Haul employees was walking a couple over to the storage sheds behind our van.

  “Want me to grab that guy?”

  “No.” Her voice was even harsher this time. The dance music flooding out of the dash was loud inside the van. I watched the U-Haul guy pop open the padlock on the front of a storage shed. Just as the door to the shed opened, the van started rolling. Holly had released the parking brake.

  “Alrighty! Should we get coffees at McDonald’s?” she asked, like she’d never snapped at me.

  On the way down Kenmount Road, people bawled their horns at us every time Holly changed lanes. She would hold a middle finger up in the rear-view and then look to me for validation.

  “Assholes,” I said.

  When she glided through the red light at the intersection by Carnell’s Funeral Home, I involuntarily sucked in my breath.

  “What?”

  “The light was red.”

  “It was yellow. You’re making me nervous, can you relax?”

  I was silent until we pulled up in front of Patrick Street. We moved almost an entire house’s worth of my furniture into the new place by the church. Then we went to pick up Holly’s smaller load — all she had was a few suitcases, some books and a mirror.

  Holly’d been living in a basement apartment below a bungalow with white plastic siding and a cracked driveway. She led me around the back and down a short set of cement stairs. She’d gathered her suitcases by the door. I felt a surge of sympathy for her when I took in the lonely little space she’d been living in. The kitchen and living room were one room separated by a counter crowded with a dusty collection of wine-making equipment.

  “That’s not mine, it’s been here since I moved in,” Holly said.

  I noticed a variety pack of instant oatmeal on the stove. I had assumed Holly was naturally skinny, like she just had a high metabolism, but now it occurred to me that she might not be eating very much, either because she was broke or depressed or both. She pulled open her bedroom door; the head and footboard of her single bed were flush with the walls. She stepped on the striped mattress in her sneakers and lifted a mirror off the wall.

  “This is mine, I got it at Value Village and took it home on the bus.” She grinned over her shoulder at me.

  It was about four feet by four feet in a gilded frame, with a twisted wire on the back to hang it. Holly and I each took a side and walked the mirror out of the apartment, up the stairs and down the driveway.

  “I guess we should lay it flat,” I said when we got to the van. We flipped the mirror so it reflected the grey sky and the bottom of our chins. We slid it into the van. On the drive over I tensed each time we rounded a corner.

  When we got to the new house, I hopped out and opened the front door with a key we’d picked up from the landlord the night before. There was a woman in the living room with a mop. Natalie Swanson’s roommate. She was sporty too; she wore sneakers with jelly soles and yoga pants.

  “Sorry, I’m almost done,” she said.

  “It’s fine,” I said.

  “Thanks for cleaning,” Holly said.

  We brought the mirror in first, leaving the van doors wide open and all Holly�
�s suitcases on display. I was aware of the people clustered around the church’s fire exit but Holly didn’t seem to care. It was starting to rain — a few drops landed on the mirror and shivered themselves into rivers.

  “I actually wanted to mention something to you guys, maybe Natalie already told you,” the woman said as we edged into the house with the mirror. “We have this really great deal on internet, you could just take over our account if you want, then you don’t have to wait for a modem and we don’t have to fuck around with cancelling it.”

  “I’ve never heard of that,” Holly said. “Taking over an account.”

  “You just call and say you’re Natalie’s roommate and you want to be added to the account,” the woman answered. “Honestly, it would be great for us because then we wouldn’t have to pay the cancellation fee. But it’d be good for you too, it’s some kind of student deal they don’t offer anymore, really cheap.”

  I left Holly to deal with the internet conversation. I lifted the mirror by myself, my arms fully extended so my fingers could clamp around either edge, and started walking it up to Holly’s room.

  “We don’t need the account number?” I heard Holly ask.

  “I’ll write it down for you, hang on.”

  I set the frame down every couple of steps. It wasn’t heavy but my arms were aching. In Holly’s bedroom there was a nail sticking out of the wall above the long, low dresser she’d bought from Natalie Swanson. I lifted the mirror and slid it down the wall, lifted and slid, lifted and slid, until the wire on the back caught the nail. I could still hear Holly talking to Natalie Swanson’s roommate downstairs. I leaned in and used my sleeve to rub away the streaks the rain had made on the glass. I stepped back and watched my breath disappear. Holly got the nicer room.