Bottle Rocket Hearts

by Zoe Whittall

  We call the Valium Ivan, because that is who it was prescribed for. Ivan McAllister. Lived alone in Outremont. Died of a heart attack. I settle into the couch, fade out at the edges. The morning greets me with a kick. A pain in my side. I feel all the pebbles I’ve swallowed.

  My mother calls the number she found scrawled on a paper in my jeans pocket. Della looks confused when she hears the high-pitched maternal voice on the end of the line. She drops the receiver in my lap like a question mark.

  “Where are you? I called Jenny and she has no idea where you are.”

  Jenny is my best friend from high school. Despite being the biggest bad-ass kid in our neighbourhood, she’s managed to maintain a perpetual angelic façade around my mother, who thinks of her as a second daughter, even when she’s coming down off of a mescaline bender on our couch. My mother brings her soup for her terrible flu and lets her watch all the crime shows even though they make her nervous.

  Jenny, tall and empirically beautiful and therefore suspect, was regarded by my principal, the minister at church and everyone but my mother, as a handful. I really like how gentle and open-minded my mother is with Jenny. I think that she relates to her in a way, because she ran away from her religious family at fifteen and didn’t look back. She understands being an outsider.

  I was great accomplice material for Jenny. Quiet.

  In grade ten Jenny and I came home so drunk that she spent the night crying and throwing up in the basement bathroom. My mother held her hair and made maternal circles on her back comforting her, listening to her go on about Andrew who was a jerkface liar scumbag. My mother was so kind and patient with her.

  The next day she said, “Eve, you better not be doing drugs or drinking. I’ll ground you till you’re forty-five.” I had the sense there would be no hair-holding privileges for me should I ever admit my non-sobriety to her.

  I could hear my mother tapping a pen impatiently against the list she was writing. “So, where are you?”

  “I’m downtown. At my friend Della’s.”

  “Who is this Della again?”

  “A friend from art class.”

  “Oh, yes, her. Well, you know, if you never call and you never come home, your father and I worry.”

  Something like a clanging tambourine or a small chewing animal starts dancing in my stomach.

  “Well, I’m okay.” You’re going to have to let go some time, I’m eighteen.

  “Good.” You’re still a kid.

  “How are you? How’s Dad?” I decide not to tell her about my proximity to the bomb that went off, even though it’s all I can talk about to anyone else I speak to.

  “We’re fine.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “He needs your help with inventory you know, he’s been giving all your shifts to Alex.”

  My dad owns a music store. I’ve been working there since I was twelve.

  “Alex needs the money and everything, so he doesn’t mind. But you’ve got to shape up. He can’t make exceptions for you just cause you’re the boss’s kid.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Well, you know, it’s quiet around here without you and Jenny running around.”

  My mother was perhaps lonely.

  “Well, I’ll come home tonight, okay?”

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter. Whenever. You know, I just wanted to know you were okay.”

  “Yup.” I curl the phone cord around my finger impatiently.

  When I hang the phone up, Della looks amused.

  “She worries too much,” I say. “I can’t wait till I can afford my own place.”

  I walk around the apartment gathering up all my things and stuffing them arbitrarily into my heavy canvas knapsack. School books, dirty red socks, my stinky one-stars, a book Della lent me about lesbian culture called Dyke Life. It’s overflowing so I put some things in a white plastic grocery bag. Della walks me to the subway. Della’s eyes dart, her face is flushed.

  “Are you okay?” I ask her after we hug goodbye.

  “Yeah. I’m fine.” She’s not, but I’m not sure what I should do about it. I turn to walk into the station, the handles of the plastic bags forming angry, red half-circles on my palms.

  I push the sticky play button on my red cassette walkman. “She’s Crushing My Mind” by Team Dresch floods my brain and, as if hypnotized by the ragged harmonies, I’m clutching my cardboard transfer to show the driver, finding another seat and somewhat suddenly finding myself at home. Dreamy and swaying. I kick my wet boots into the pile by the door of our duplex and walk wordlessly up the carpeted stairs straight into my room. The house smells like oregano and brewed coffee and vanilla candles.

  I don’t know what to do, sitting on my bed, curled up, suddenly exhausted. I try to read for school but can’t concentrate. I make half a mixed tape for Della, carefully planning each song with coded messages of my devotion.

  My mother eventually ends her silence with a warm smile, standing in the doorway of my room, inviting me down to eat. She seems to have missed me. She feeds me well with potatoes and green vegetables. Thick food that gathers my insides up and makes everything work together towards life. She doesn’t even try to make me eat the ham or make any remarks about my hair. She’s wearing a new sweater. I tell her it’s pretty. Evens the score. We hug.

  I do the dishes while my dad sits at the table taking apart an old synthesizer, the sound of an episode of Roseanne emanating from the living room.

  It seems no one in the west end is worried about bombs, only the impending fear that if Quebec separates we’ll be forced to move to Cornwall or Kingston.

  After dinner, in the peach-and-yellow wallpapered bathroom, I put my hands against the yellow sink. I vow my own apartment would look like it wasn’t still the seventies. No fake wood panelling, no wallpaper. I look into the mirror, my pupils outlined with a red pencil crayon, blue-black slugs under my eyes. I can feel how Della held me this morning while waking; her tongue teasing my thighs. I blush at my own memory. No one had ever made me feel that much all at once. I fill the tub with lavender bath salts and scorching hot water. Light candles. Finally feel myself returning to me.

  I settle under the covers, feeling a sudden exhaustion — perhaps a result of the Valium bender. I dial seven numbers, pink chipped nail polish pressing each button down with firm resolve. I want not to be needy, but I want to call Della to say goodnight, my right hand sliding underneath my pj pants.

  xxxx answers. “Hey, Eve.” There is a pause so long she has to know it’s purposeful. Making me wait for her to pass the phone to Della. Blood frozen in place. “She’ll call you back,” she says, coyly, quick. Was she breathless? Did she show up right after I left, was my spot on the couch even cold?

  My vision thrown off, all I see are targets. I fall deeper into my quilted bed. Fade out again. I sit up straight, every limb a plywood plank. I pull the tape out of my ghetto blaster and throw it across the room. I set to work imagining, tracing xxxx’s thigh. My mental tongue is getting started when I am stunned awake: I’ve developed a crush on this girl who loves Della.

  I hate it when rational thought interrupts fantasy.

  It’s unavoidable, this erotic space of want. I want something from her, it may as well be her. When I do get her, I’m going to slyly grind her leg into mine on the dance floor, a sword fight of silent coyness. When I kiss her neck it will be jealousy transformed. It is just a feeling but now it is tangible.

  Jenny used to do this: sleep with all of my boyfriends, when I was fourteen and holding tight to some myth about saving myself for the right person. As if virginity was a shiny gold coin with endless value. Jenny thought that was bullshit and would give the boys what they wanted, what she wanted. I remember her turning to me after she let me go on about should I or shouldn’t I let a boy get in my pants. She said, “Eve, for fuck’s sake. Madonna said losing her virginity was a good career move. I see it that way, too.”

  At the end of a night of partying, ripping her stockings op
en with a long nail, she’d say, “I just do it to get close to you,” and close her door, passing out behind it. My boyfriends were apologetic but helpless. I would immediately lose interest in them. She was always too strong a pull.

  I would take my keys and scratch a pattern into Jenny’s heavy metallic apartment door, jagged lightning highs and lows like my pulse, signalling alive alive alive alive alive, the door looked hated. I was always the one sober enough to walk her home, make sure she was okay. The patterns looked hateful, but they weren’t. Her mother always remarked, Delinquents in this neighbourhood!

  Jenny calls, I reach my hand out from under the covers. “Hey freak, what are you doing for your nineteenth birthday?”

  “I dunno. It’s not like it’s a big-deal birthday.” I tell her about xxxx.

  “You know what your problem is? You concentrate too much on her. Go out and get laid, make her jealous. I’m going to take you out and we’ll get drunk and find you some ass ... there’s got to be hotter girls out there you haven’t met. Deal?”

  “Deal. Except I hate dyke bars. The music sucks.”

  “We’ll go out on St-Laurent then. I know! We’ll go see the Breeders. I can get John to let us in the side door.”

  Jenny has a special relationship with almost every bouncer in town.

  Somehow I predict we’ll just get drunk at the Bifteque and by last call we’ll be making out with the same boys in the same bands we’ve been kissing since grade ten, hands smelling like free popcorn and breath raging with Boreal and tequila shooters. If there is a dyke in the bar, she’ll try to pick up Jenny. Jenny has the kind of beauty that stops cars. If Jenny didn’t sneer at Della, I’d never let her near her. I think Jenny’s trying to make up for the ninth-grade plays for my boyfriends by feigning disinterest in Della. Or perhaps it’s the old adage about hating the people who remind us of ourselves — Della was really the butchy-dyke equivalent of Jenny, the stopping-cars tomboy, making every girl with a slight proclivity towards queerness fawn. Look at her muscled forearms, drool. Look at her dispassionate lack of engagement, kiss me!

  Della knows more than she lets on. I call her back and let it ring and ring and ring some more. Every ring enrages me. Pretending that she doesn’t know what’s going on is not satisfying to me. The imagined bite on xxxx’s thigh, this will bring it home. She won’t be able to brush it off.

  Jealousy: 1

  Me: 1

  Maybe we can work together.

  4

  •••

  RUN INTO SUMMER LIKE

  MAY 1995

  Della and I are drunk at the top of Mont-Royal. We have an open blue plastic thermos of red wine at our feet. It’s the first day of spring and it’s midnight and we’ve been peeling off layers of winter all day. We stand facing each other, as if to exchange vows, chests heaving from racing up the mountain to the sky. My face is hurting from smiling so much, aching at the edges of my words. She reaches out to hold my face in her hands, dirty palms form a bowl to rest my chin. I’m standing on a tree stump so we are eye to eye. It’s hard to stay steady. I worry I may start to drool or laugh, I feel so unhinged from my body. It’s been one of those days I don’t want to end. Our goal was to shirk all responsibility merely to enjoy the lack of everyday obligations, to create fullness and purpose out of each other. Our knees are the colour of ground-in grass. Our boots are caked in mud caskets. Under our nails is a mixture of minerals and organic matter, knuckles scraped by tree bark. We are the thaw embodied.

  She says, You have changed me, Eve, you are the single most important person in my life. If you were to leave me, I would die.

  At that moment, our breath circling from my lungs and into hers, I am changed. Perhaps before this I could describe our relationship as an experiment, a happy accident, but this was irrefutable. I was completely consumed and consuming. It was as though we created some sort of object between us that we could see and almost hold. I would risk everything I’ve ever known to know only this. I wanted to honour her in a way that was understandable to every part of me. It was as though I could distill the meaning of us into something I could pour into a porcelain cup. Our bodies on top of this city, rulers of love.

  Originally, we were celebrating the fact that I got into Concordia’s visual arts program. But the congratulatory brunch she took me to at Café Santropol had turned into wine, which had turned into a day for declarations. I had a sense of spring in my body, that this season would meld into summer like a running-jump movie kiss. There would be days and days like this. xxxx gone away on a sojourn I didn’t care to note the details of, she simply ceased to be. Summer in Montreal in love is almost too much emotion to hold in an open mouth, it spills over, it causes me to not need any sleep. I don’t think I will ever feel as awake as I did in the summer of 1995.

  5

  •••

  MY CANADA INCLUDES YOU

  OCTOBER 1995

  “This referendum, this rendezvous, may be the last one, the last chance you will have to procure for yourselves a country that is truly yours. It is not given to all peoples to have a second chance.” Premier Jacques Parizeau, on Quebec television, October 1, 1995

  Montreal remembers, just like the licence plate says. It’s a wilting memory, erratic in temperature. The economy in flux like a mis-stickered Rubik’s cube. The mouths of most streets are open and prompt us to indulge. Wrought-iron staircases twist around our hearts, strengthening the aortas, tugging. Whatever excess we choose will costume us.

  Today I choose a silver dress. Specifically, a vintage floor-length evening gown. I feel like it suits this momentous day in Quebec and Canadian history. I sit on my windowsill, watching. Re-imagining. Fingering the voting card I’ve folded into a paper monster. Sipping warm broth from a lopsided bowl I made in my ceramics class in CEGEP. I look out at the city like it’s my home.

  An old camera belonging to my grandmother captures me in front of a car that will later date the photograph. “This is me when I was, uh, nineteen ...” I drink. The cliché of the city in decline is basically that: a boring and repetitive tic of a truth. Overheard. Over-spoken. Rhyming like a hopscotch song. Double Double Dutch. Montréal, c’est toi ma ville, indeed, like the television jingle says.

  Memory is frozen around the branches of the trees that cluster in a slapdash semicircle around the chipped, green copper statues on Mont-Royal. The hardened men stand valiant in their decline, even though their bodies are spray-painted with anarchy signs from a drunken night with Jenny and a can of Krylon red.

  I can see the park from my apartment window on Ave de l’Esplanade. I moved in a few months ago, my mother holding back tears as she stuffed the garbage bags full of clothes into the back of her rusty brown Toyota hatchback. Jenny and I sat in the front seat together like attached twins all the way on Highway 20. Della met us outside the apartment and introduced herself to my mother with a big smile, trying to woo her with charm. My mother spoke with Della like she would any of my friends, and Della made surreptitiously gay comments every five minutes.

  “Why don’t you just tell her?” She slipped her hands around me and touched the skin on my back softly, while my mother was safely in the bathroom filling my cupboards with bars of Ivory soap and rough, aqua-green hand towels purchased in the mid-eighties.

  “I dunno.”

  Della is very honest with her family about every single detail in her life, even with her grandfather who does not understand lesbianism and called me the prostitute when I went over to his house for a family dinner last year. No one mentions her mother, ever, even though there are photos of her all over the house. There are only two topics: politics and gossip. If she arrives hungover, she will say so. Her dad will arrive late from the long drive up from Quebec City, and fall asleep early after several beers. His face will be red. Della will pat his head after he passes out on the couch. They will sit across from one another like mirror images.

  The scene from my apartment window is nothing special until someone
comes to visit and says, “Wow, quite a view.” Now when I give people the tour I say “and I have a fabulous view” like it’s an antique trunk or an impressive painting. I live with Rachel, a twenty-five year old writer, master’s student and activist who talks really fast and is hardly ever home. My other roommate is called Seven; he keeps his age a secret, like me, and is a long-time friend of Rachel. They dated in high school, even went to prom, and then came out to each other.

  I answered an ad posted on a bulletin board at L’Androgyne, the gay bookstore on the Main. Homo Haven — 5 1/2, cat lover, smoke positive, must like good music. Perfect. I called from the pay phone at the Second Cup on the corner of Bagg Street. They asked me my favourite band, I said it was a toss-up between Team Dresch and Fugazi and they said to come right away.

  I showed up at the apartment for the first time feeling nervous. It was perfect. They led me up the stairs to the second floor, through a narrow living room and into the kitchen. The first thing I noticed about Seven was that I recognized him from the bar where he worked, he poured me doubles instead of singles and pinched my cheeks. Remember how cute River Phoenix was in Running on Empty? That’s basically Seven, only way gayer and more punk rock. Ten years older than River in that movie, but you’d never know it from his smooth face. He was sporting a baby pink Mohawk at the time. A few face piercings. A red and pink tattoo of a unicorn on his right bicep. He didn’t seem to recognize me back, though. Rachel wore combat boots, baggy, black army shorts, a T-shirt with Chainsaw Records on the front, no bra and a plaid shirt, unbuttoned. She still looked kinda femme though. Her hair was choppy black and short with little bits of long every so often and she had those intense hoop earrings that stretched the holes in her earlobes out to the size of a dime. She had black eyeliner around her ice-blue eyes, covered in dark-rimmed glasses and a habit of fiddling with them. I noticed her hands were wrinkled and boney. If you looked only at her hands you’d think she was forty. The kitchen table was covered in books. The Persistent Desire. Bodies that Matter. Borderlands.