by Zoe Whittall
“My thesis,” she explained, giggling nervously and stacking them up where the wall met the table. Seven lit a cigarette and offered me a mug of coffee. The mugs had woman symbols on them. “They’re from my work,” Rachel said, “at the women’s centre. A little cheesy, but you know, perfect for a café au lait.” I took a sip and it was too hot, but I pretended it wasn’t. I tried to look casual yet interested yet not too intense yet not too spacey. I was entirely too aware of my hands. I drummed my fingers on the table and said, “I love the apartment. I’m not too noisy, I like to party every once in a while but you know, not all the time.”
Why did I use party as a verb? God. The vernacular of Dorval was going to give me away as very uncool. I stared at the framed poster of a butch/femme couple dancing that was the cover of an Outpunk compilation album. “I have that same poster,” I lied, though I had wanted it, had thought about trying to get one.
I liked them both right away. I’m not sure why — I felt drawn to them. My pulse sped up, I began to sweat and blush. I had the feeling I’d know them for a long time, and that there was a reason why I saw the ad and answered right away. Normally I’d procrastinate making such a big decision, but I knew it was right.
They showed me my potential bedroom, one of the two that faced the front of the house, overlooking the street and the park. Seven’s was on the right, his door shut tight — It’s a disaster, uh, Eve, right? Eve, yeah, you don’t want to see it.
The empty room was on the left and was perfect. White walls, high ceilings, a beautiful window seat, a closet. It even smelled better than the rest of the apartment, like lavender or cedar. “Our last roommate worked in a candle factory. She always smelled like vanilla and cherry,” Rachel explained.
Rachel’s room was at the back of the house off the kitchen, like it was supposed to have been a dining room. It was immaculate and smaller than the other two, but so organized. I had the feeling that she could’ve lived perfectly in an overhead compartment. A loft bed with a desk underneath it, bookshelves on every wall, perfectly in order. An open closet with everything on its hanger, a fold-up ironing board, framed photos and political posters. Shoes lined up against one wall, all shining. “It’s a disease,” said Seven. “She lets me be messy.”
They smiled at me, looked at each other and Rachel said, “Well, this is the true test.” She lifted her dark blue bedspread up and cooed softly. Out emerged a fat black-and-white cat looking vaguely annoyed. “This is Gertrude Stein.” Gertrude sniffed at my shoes and I leaned down to let her smell my hand and then rubbed her head gently. “Oh my, you’re a cute little dumpling.” Gertrude rubbed against my legs and then slumped over approvingly to lick her paw.
“You’re in,” said Rachel, satisfied. Seven nodded and shrugged. “If you want the room, it’s yours.”
Later, Seven would tell me they’d seen four people that day and they were all a little bit crazy, and they were tired, and I seemed like I was harmless, easy to intimidate, would probably pay the bills on time every month. Maybe I’d just stay for a few months anyway, so why not.
Jenny came over on the first night there to help me unpack. She sat in the window seat smoking and trying on my bras while I pulled stubborn pillowcases onto my pillows, threw my baby quilt over the futon mattress on my floor and manoeuvred it to one corner.
“So, you’re like, really gay now, like really a lesbo?”
“I dunno. I still like guys sometimes.”
“Hmm. I wish I was a lesbo.”
When we were sixteen, Jenny and I, fake ids in hand, had gone to a gay dance club called kox in the east end. She made out with three different girls on the dance floor while I stood shy and jealous with a drag queen named Amanda I’d befriended in the bathroom.
“That bitch,” Amanda said.
I hadn’t even kissed a girl yet.
When I asked her how it was she said, “It was cool.”
“Like, better than boys?”
“I dunno. Same, I guess.”
Her ambivalence was enraging.
Jenny ended up moving two blocks away on Clark above Mont-Royal in a loft with her new boyfriend. She immediately got herself a German Shepherd she named Neneh Cherry. That’s how Jenny is. She wouldn’t worry about how she was going to take care of a dog, she just took a stray one home on a whim and kept him. We’d been seeing less and less of one another as our social circles grew more disparate along the lines of sexual orientation. She started dating a jock. “Can you believe it, a fucking jock?” she said. “He thinks my tattoos are so bad-ass. It’s hilarious.” We’d meet up in the park sometimes, hold coffees while walking her dog and catch up.
“So, I started stripping,” she said matter-of-factly, as if she’d said she started taking yoga classes.
“Oh my God. Are you serious?”
“Yup.” She bit her lip, smiling.
“Is it good money?”
“Yeah. I’m saving up to travel.”
“Don’t you get shy?”
“No, actually. I was nervous at first, then you get used to it.”
“Hmmm. Do you feel, I dunno, exploited?”
“No. It really highlights how dumb guys are.”
“Right on.” That’s not what I meant, really.
“Yeah.”
“I just read an anthology for school about strippers in San Francisco trying to unionize.”
“Oh yeah? That’s fucked. That’ll never happen at my bar. Too many bikers running the place.”
Jenny seemed to have shed the suburbs from her body like an old, out-of-style dress.
I walked home, kicking the leaves, still feeling kind of surprised at how adult our lives suddenly seemed. I tried to picture Jenny in thigh-high boots and lingerie and I started laughing to myself, wondering if they’d let her wear her fourteen-hole Doc Martins and miniskirt made from an old army surplus T-shirt. I wondered if she’s okay, if she’s really as tough as she seems. But it made sense too. Guys have been staring at Jenny since she hit puberty. Why not make it lucrative?
I sit on my front steps, pull my skirt down to cover the cold concrete and stare at the people in the park. It feels like a natural extension of my front yard. I’ve spent countless afternoons there, kissing, smoking, daydreaming. It’s become the backdrop for an everyday that will become my history. Stuck on a political and emotional thermometer of memory, I’ve taken my place at the foot of these statues for the last year, yet I’d never read their accompanying placards. I cannot cite the most nebulous of details, battle dates or statue-worthy escapades.
I am a lazy girl. I will feel it. Taste it. Look at it carefully. But I won’t write it down or take a picture. I simply fall in love with archivists. That is how I get things accomplished. Della cuts from every newspaper, pasting text and images in rice paper books. That’s appreciation. She is more romantic than this city, and that is something you can’t fake.
September started fast with school. New everything. Rachel left to go to the Beijing Women’s Conference. Seven got a new lover with a nice apartment so I had the run of the house. I settled in, inviting Della over for dinners I made excitedly, so hyper and energized by my own space, my new independent life in a city so seductive I tried to emulate it with every kiss on Della’s neck, every look across the room.
In October, the city seems sad. Seething leaves and greying rivers. Old ghosts knitting sweaters around the perimeter. The summer is like a lover who left too early in the morning without a note, who made you come harder than any other and then ceased to be. The downtown core is covered in graffiti.
The words “Yes” “No” “Oui” “Non” painted across brick and wood. We are plagued with a scattered inability to decide. Chicken or fish? Plaid or stripes? Work or sleep?
Finally able to vote — and this is my vague question.
“Do you agree that ... (Our father who art in ...) Quebec should become sovereign (Do I believe what my mother told me? “Fucking Bill 101!” she yelled at the radio while
I was in my car seat.), after having made a formal offer to Canada for a new Economic and Political partnership (Della believes what her father told her. Separation is a victory for the working class. Autonomy is a warm nesting place ... Blah blah blah — light a smoke here, inhale.), within the scope of the Bill respecting the future of Quebec (English people have no rights anymore, said my father, defiantly putting English signs in the window of his store with sloppy paint.) and of the agreement signed on June 12, 1995?”
(Exhale, a stream of smoke, looking heavenward.)
1995 is the year of wallpaper failing. Figures underneath it appearing. Little scraps of forgotten prayers; commercial jingles unknowingly committed to memory. National and Personal identity merging in our sleep.
My friends have been plastering the city with posters urging everyone to spoil their ballots. The posters are green. Neutral. The colour of locker room walls. Della doesn’t like my new friends from school. “It’s like they think they invented revolution.”
Jenny says I have to vote No unless I’m “totally retarded or brainwashed by the girlfriend.”
Della was raised in a small town near Quebec City by a French father and an English mother. Her mother insisted on putting her on a two hour bus ride every day to get to an English school so she’d have a “hope in hell” of getting out of said town. She showed me photos of her and her brother holding hands on a country dirt road, smiling on their first day of school. They are little dots in a field with no signs of other human life, no houses, just trees and hay.
Her father disagreed but was never one to fight. Only after her mother’s death did her father take up separatism like a religious zealot. Della went along for the ride, despite her eventual Concordia arts degree, her fluency in English, her place in both communities. Della never seemed to say much about her mother at all. I didn’t press. Della had stories she was comfortable telling, and I’d hear them told again and again at parties, and I’d feel slightly smug that I already knew the endings, the punchlines. She told them with a similar inflection each time. She spun a beautiful sparkling string of yarn.
“Help me poster!” says Dave into my answering machine. He is a sweet, scruffy boy who wears red scarves in winter and reads a lot of leftist political theory. I met him at a screening of Manufacturing Consent at Concordia. I don’t call him back. Ever. It’s another one of my many faults; the phone call unreturned. He always spells out his phone number in a careful, slow monotone, pauses and then says maybe you need to get a pen right now? Okay, it’s 555-0994, breathing deep between each number. Something in me must actually like the burning guilt in my gut that arrives when I see him across the street, walking towards me.
Right now he is looking up at me from the street outside my window. I lean my silver body against the glass. He looks away, smiling. I motion him in with an extended curled finger.
Sometimes I kiss Dave when I’m drunk. I’m not sure why. His face is full of longing, and I want to hold it still, all that possibility. I chew his bottom lip and line it with my tongue, laughing. He looks at me very seriously afterwards and I feel bad, like I squished a small animal too hard because it was just too adorable. Like when you want to put a kitten in your mouth because it’s excruciatingly cute. He sits at the end of my bed and plays the same Pixies song over and over on my acoustic guitar. He’s the kind of friend you don’t have to feel bad about having silences with. You can just sit there and be comfortable.
Della only gets jealous when I kiss guys. Girls can come trailing out of my room like daisies on a chain and she won’t blink. She won’t even say hi to him when we see him. She just stares until he gets really uncomfortable and leaves. He’s too apologetic for being a man that he doesn’t say anything about her being such an asshole.
The graffiti down the street from my apartment says Learn French, Wimps. I think that Dave wrote it. He speaks French with a horrible Toronto private school accent but it doesn’t embarrass him.
My aunt Beverly refuses to speak French when she buys cigarettes at my corner store. “Honestly, I don’t know how you live in the east end. People are so goddamn fucking rude,” Bev says, punctuating her rant by spitting on the ground in front of her red ankle boots. My dad’s youngest sister, she’s thirty, so is relatively aware of the complexities of my life downtown. She is the only one in my family who knows I’m a dyke. My dad was twenty when I was born, so she’s always felt like more of an older sister, and he’s always taken care of her like a dad, my grandfather having died when he was a child and my grandmother Annie, a bit of a nutcase by all accounts, when I was eight.
Bev is furious that I am in love with Della, a separatist. She calls her “the separatist.” Della calls her “the bitch.” When they met, they both smoked furiously (Bev, Belmont Milds, Della, Gauloises) while I talked ceaselessly. I do that when I’m nervous. Babble about nothing.
I introduced them because I thought they had a lot in common — Della always joked about starting a dead mother’s club, to talk about it with other people who understood. I thought Aunt Bev would be a perfect candidate, articulate about loss, honest in a no-bullshit way, just like Della. But it wasn’t going to happen. Della tried, but Bev said, “Evie, there’s something about her. It’s not right. She’s not right.” She would then elaborate. I tried not to put them in the same room again.
I’m not sure where my opinion lies on Quebec separating. I’ve been chewing slowly. I can’t say I haven’t been watching Della watching tv, ripping at her cuticles. She knows what she wants.
Do you ever sit still, in an historic world moment, and think about the size of your hands? The mis-stitch in your sweater sleeve? What you want for dinner? There is something wrong with me.
This morning I woke up in Della’s bed, eyes thick with smoky residue, mascara dried against my pale skin. My eyeliner made two black eyes on her white cotton pillow. She was loudly talking on the phone, v-shaped on the couch, wrapped in a pink and green afghan and chain-smoking.
“Make sure you fucking vote, Eric! Don’t smoke a fucking joint and fall asleep, you fucking asshole!” The avocado rotary phone was curled in her lap like a cat.
I was late for class and rushed out. Cupping the mouthpiece momentarily, she gave me a raised fist, then blew me a kiss. “It’s going to happen, bébé — finally, I can feel it!”
Della puts a lot of faith in her premonitions. She dreamt every night this week that she gave birth to Quebec, a tiny baby. Healthy and smiling. It grew and grew until it was like Baby Huey. She laughed in her sleep until she woke herself up in mid-cackle. When I woke up she was sitting up so tall in the moonlit window. Her presence was daunting.
“I feel her here with us.”
“Who?”
“My mother.”
I hugged her to me. She started to kiss me hard.
I want to share that moment with her, but the pre-celebratory tequila shots hours earlier drained me of all romantic aspirations. I pushed her back into sleep, promising hot morning sex. Earlier in the night, before licking along a vein of salt, she’d said, “I want you to be mine. All mine.” She said it in French but I understood perfectly. And like that, as I felt the booze burn a hole through my core and then warm it up, we tried on a snowsuit of monogamy.
“But we can still kiss people when we’re drunk, right?”
“Bien sur!” Like I was even dumb to have asked for that distinction.
I fell asleep thinking, okay, she’s mine. All mine. I can be certain. We can contain this, name it, go forward with assurity. xxxx becomes a friend, an ex, no longer the narrator of my most insecure moments.
On the day of the referendum, I get home at noon after a particularily long Intro to Women’s Studies class, my answering machine is blinking red with messages from my family. My cousins took free buses from Ottawa to join pro-Canada rallies. My mother insists I should meet them to reconnect. I watched the news clips of crowds dressed in Canadian regalia as they dropped a big banner of support over a bridge in t
he West Island. Planting unwanted hickeys all over the news coverage and preaching to the converted. My mother doesn’t have any contact with her family, so she really wants me to make sure I stay connected to the cousins on my father’s side. She does speak to one older aunt on occasion, who reports every year that the family still unequivocally thinks of her as a sinner whore for running away with my dad at fifteen and leaving the Mennonite way of life.
Aunt Bev calls me to join her at the rally. “Come on! Do it for your country.” Her voice is wavering, a sleeve unravelling. “We’re going to win! We have to.”
I hadn’t heard her this passionate about anything since she insisted on keeping me on the phone to watch the entire white Bronco OJ Simpson car chase on cnn or maybe her first year in aa when it was all amends-this and higher-power that.
“I don’t really feel passionate about it ... that way ...” Why didn’t I just say I had to work?
Her voice is an eggshell breaking, “Oh well, stay home and pray then. We need a strong Canada.”
“What does that even mean?”
“Oh Eve, this isn’t time for semantics and your ‘I’m in College’ bullshit.”
I’m not sure exactly what I hope will happen. I feel panic. But only because I am sure that I have developed a heart murmur. I can feel it when I move my arms above my head. Whirring. I’m going to drop dead in the voter’s booth and the tabloids will eat it up. Maybe if I wear a slutty enough top, I’ll make the cover of ’Allo Police.
My fingers go numb while I paint ice-blue stars on my balcony railing. I dip the thin brush into a mason jar of muddy blue water. I smoke too many cigarettes.
