by Zoe Whittall
“No, that’s okay.” Stay. Just stay the night. Don’t leave me alone.
“Are you sure, sweetie? ’Cause I can just call Nicky and cancel.”
“No, no, I’m totally fine.” See that I’m lying. Please notice.
Melanie got up and hugged me, I detected some relief in her posture as I watched her walk down the stairs. I hoped Seven would come home. He didn’t. I remembered he was going to see the Run DMC reunion show up the street. I took an Ivan and went to bed shivering. My mother called and offered to come pick me up. I said I was fine. She didn’t push it.
Groggy with a Valium headache, standing half naked in my room, freezing and flush with red from the hot bath, I am overwhelmed with the need for someone familiar. I call her again. After I hang up, I can’t even remember what I said, or be sure that I actually made the call until Della shows up within fifteen minutes.
Standing in my room, helping me zip up my dress, she doesn’t talk about herself for even one moment. It’s like Invasion of the Body Snatchers — her beautiful angular boyish frame, her hair a little longer, less blue and more reddish-brown like her childhood photos. Same black hoodie hanging on her shoulders laissez-faire, this time over a tucked-in dress shirt and some black tuxedo pants with a stripe of shine down the seams, she calls them her funeral-wedding pants. The same Converse sneakers. She hugs me harder than she ever has. Zips up my dress with no questions.
“You’re going to be okay.”
“I’m not. I’m really not.” I feel myself falling. I sit down on the couch and stare off slack-jawed. She crouches on the coffee table in front of me.
“You will. Seven will, too, in time.”
“Seven’s been to a hundred funerals but I don’t know how he’s going to handle this one. There was no way to prepare. It wasn’t her time. It was fate. She wasn’t sick, she wasn’t an old soul who lived a full fucking life! She was robbed, Della, fucking robbed!”
“Yes, she was.”
“I dream every night about killing those skinheads. I picture it, I picture stabbing them until they’re dead. I picture hurting their fathers, whoever made them who they are, just blood everywhere.” Della holds me on the couch while I cry. The phone rings and rings and I don’t pick it up. She reminds me of the time and we stand up, I wash my face hurriedly in the bathroom sink. I look older.
She walks me outside and hails a cab. It’s March but it may as well be February, we are bundled in layers of coats and scarves, my stockings have runs almost immediately. All seams bursting. When she tries to apologize for cheating I push my hand to her mouth. “No rules this time. None. Deal?”
“Deal.”
In the days between Rachel’s death and funeral, I’ve been trying to hold Seven together, unsuccessfully. We stayed up for the rest of that night, making calls and arrangements. We just kept going. I wasn’t sure what my role should be, after all, I was the roommate. I couldn’t say exactly how well I knew Rachel, but I was there, with her things, with her best friend in the world. I took over the practical details that take over a death, and helped as best I could. After they were dealt with, we sat on the couch for a whole day.
We cuddled up. Seven felt like a moth. No bones, just string. Every once in a while he’d tell me a story about Rachel, from when she was younger. When they were obsessed with the Encyclopedia Brown books and formed their own detective agency. Rachel would give her old dresses and dolls to Seven to play with in the tree fort they built in the back woods. They kept a padlock around a box Rachel’s grandmother had given her as a hope chest. Before they even knew anything about sex, they knew they were different, before there was the language to explain it, there was just this feeling that brought them together.
After drinking a pot of coffee, we decided to go get a tattoo. Simple, typewriter font, Rachel’s favourite font, the year of her birth and death. We didn’t talk on the way there, or on the way back.
Rachel’s parents decided to have a funeral in Montreal, at the chapel at McGill’s, before having one in her hometown. She didn’t know anyone back home anymore anyway.
The chapel is packed to overflowing. Seven looks frail and childlike in his black suit; he sits with Rachel’s parents whom he’s known since he was a child. They look shell-shocked.
I kick my feet under the pew and keep crying until I can’t anymore. I pick lint off of my dress. There is a rift between family and friends in the church, a weirdness that comes when your closest family has no idea who your closest friends are. Two camps that loved the same person separately, like there were two funerals happening at once.
Rachel’s parents are quiet, her mother sheds some tears during Seven’s eulogy, while her father is stoic. I keep hearing what they’d said when they came to gather her things two nights before the funeral. “I always knew nothing good could come from this lonely lifestyle. If she’d only made different choices.”
“What about the skinheads? What if they’d made different choices? What if you’d chosen to love your daughter instead of ignoring her for years?”
I wasn’t able to stop myself. Seven had dragged me out onto the balcony, but still we could hear her mother’s sobs. I felt awful, ashamed, but also angry.
“C’mon Seven, can you picture Rachel lonely? She was always complaining she didn’t get enough time alone to work on her writing. Everyone wanted to be around her. She didn’t date much because everyone wanted her and she was picky. I hate thinking that her parents picture her as this lonely freak.”
“I’ll try to talk to them, Eve. I’ve known them since I was a baby. I’ll try. They’re just hurting right now. We need to respect that.”
Seven went back inside, and helped pack up her belongings, the ones her mother wanted to keep. He arranged for women from the Concordia Women’s Centre to come over the next night to sort through her books and papers, give them to the archives, the library at the women’s centre.
I went back into my room, a mix of guilt and anger. I put on a red dress and electric blue eyeshadow and went to the Miami bar for drinks. I left quietly without saying goodbye to Seven or Rachel’s parents. On the street the sidewalk felt uneven and eyes felt like tiny snow globes. It was hard to swallow.
The bartender looked so much like Rachel — black boots, tough smile, choppy black and red hair — I felt like I might throw up. I couldn’t open my mouth to say anything. “Hey,” she said, “you were Rachel’s roommate.”
“Yes, I was.” I looked at her questioningly.
“I sat on a jury with her at McGill. She used to come drink here a lot after meetings. I still can’t believe it.” She wiped down the bar with her white cloth.
“I know.”
“What’ll it be?”
“Uh, a pint of red.”
“Okay.” She turned her back and I closed my eyes tight. I drank the beer at a table by the window and bit my lip until it bled. I missed Della so much I felt dizzy. I went back home a little squirrelly, called Melanie from the pay phone to ask to borrow a dress for the funeral. Bought a bottle of wine on the way home from the corner store.
The night after Rachel was murdered my mother stopped by with some muffins and a box of groceries, worried about how we were holding up. She filled the fridge with orange juice, spinach, eggs. The freezer with pre-packaged waffles, microwavable fettuccine in boxes, veggie pizzas, suburban food. She did the dishes, mopped the floor, rubbed Seven’s shoulders. She took six bottles of St. Ambroise beer out of the cardboard case and arranged them on the fridge door, taking out the old crusty ketchup bottles and pouring all the soy sauces into one bottle. Seven and I sat in the kitchen buttering the slabs of cranberry nut bread and chewing solemnly. It was the first time my mother had come over and stayed longer than five minutes since I moved in. Seven got up in the middle of our stilted conversation to smoke on the balcony and drink one of the beers she brought over.
“Mom, it’s important to me that if something were to happen to me, you’d know it wasn’t because I was ga
y, it would be because someone was homophobic. You know that right? I mean ...” I should probably have backed up a bit, but the grief was confusing me. “You know I’m gay, right?”
She paled. “Well, I’m not stupid. I’ve noticed certain things changing in your life.” She continued to scrub at a stubborn stain on the kitchen table, likely collage glue from one of my art projects.
“Yeah, well, I realized when Rachel’s parents came over that I couldn’t live that way, with my family hating me for being who I was. So I just thought I’d stop being chicken and tell you, and make sure ... you know, you’d be supportive.”
“Well, first of all, I doubt her parents hated Rachel. You wouldn’t know because you’re not a parent yet, but it’s just not possible.” For the first time my mother was being impossibly naive. “Your father and I are very liberal people, Eve. You know that. We believe in tolerance. We didn’t want to raise you the way we were raised, you know, to be scared of everything.”
I felt a little angry man rising in my throat, like a cartoon character. It almost makes me giggle. I sipped my beer slowly. I don’t want to be tolerated, I want to be accepted.
“Rachel’s parents actually told her she was going to burn in hell. Her father once told her she wasn’t welcome in their home for an entire year. They’d finally got to the point where she could come home for Christmas and they would be nice to her, but she couldn’t mention anything about being gay. They never met her partners. They never really knew her.”
“Well, they’re from a different generation. It’s different. Your grandmother didn’t approve of me because I wore pants, most of my relatives don’t talk to me because I won’t submit to my husband and I wanted to finish high school.”
I have no idea how to speak to that. I didn’t want to get into another story of how the Mennos almost ruined her life path.
“Anyway, I’m going to go clean your bathroom. It’s disgusting.”
She left shortly after, asking me to move home again and handing me forty bucks. I hugged her goodbye extra long. I watched her pull away from the window seat. I called her to leave a thank-you message on her machine, to promise to come home on the weekend for dinner.
After the funeral, Della, Seven and I took the 24 bus back across the city. We walked up St-Urbain, stopping to buy booze and spray paint, manically talking about everyone at the funeral.
The rest of the night is blurred. I woke up with my head against a table at the Main, a blurry vision of Seven and Della eating smoked meat sandwiches and laughing and crying, a mix of the two.
We have been getting a lot of calls, from people who didn’t even really know Rachel all that well. At the vigil the day before the funeral, I felt so strange and outside myself. We held candles, there were impassioned speeches from Rachel’s close friends. Every time I saw a dyke I heard them talking about The girl who got bashed. There’s the girl whose roommate got bashed. People I barely knew tried to hug me. Friends of mine were awkward. Rachel had become a celebrity almost, and anyone attached to her was afflicted with this status. It felt almost like people wanted to have known her, or relayed stories like, Oh, I saw her read a poem once at the café, it was really good. Then they’d pause and look really sad. Or, One time we had a class together and she liked my paper. She was really smart. And a tear would run down their faces.
Amanda, the girl who had been on a date with Rachel that night, hasn’t been to work since it happened. Seven has been dropping by her apartment, but she doesn’t answer. Her roommate says she went to her parents’ house to deal with her shock. How could your life not unravel into the same scene replaying, choosing to go back into the bar rather than walk her home. It would have ruined me. I can’t imagine. I don’t. I try not to.
Everyone is also very fearful about being next. Dyke Defence organizers taught more classes, the women’s centre at Concordia made stickers of weak points on the male body, journalists wanted quotes for their newspapers. News reporters interviewed the neighbours of the two suspects. They were such nice boys. They mowed my lawn every summer. They all looked so shocked, but I recognized those men as two of dozens I had to contend with in high school, avoid while waiting for the bus at Dorval circle. They were fuelled by indignant rage, those boots and laces games I knew before I turned twelve, the colour coding, not looking into their eyes because I knew they were dead inside and I couldn’t risk catching what they had. Running through my head — what I would do if I had to step in and defend a person of colour or a gay guy they’d decided to attack. What if it were just me there, and I had to risk my life? Would I? It was only after I’d started dating Della that I realized I was no longer someone who could hide in my privileged skin at the bus stop when the skinheads passed by, who could afford to spit at their boots and give them nasty looks. Kissing Della goodbye at the Metro now made me a target as well. It also made me realize how normal it had been growing up to see them, like it was no big deal at all.
There was this collective grief that took over the queer community after Rachel’s death. It made me bond to anyone who looked queer on the street, or anyone I knew from the bars, or actions. It gave us all the permission to look each other in the eye, to smile or nod, to acknowledge each other’s presence and it felt oddly like we were forming this army together, silently, without anyone really ever leading us. Instead of feeling scared, I got bold. I made out with girls on the streets, I held Melanie’s hand just to be visible. I wore Queer Nation and ACT UP T-shirts I’d borrowed from Della months before, I scrawled Everybody is HIV+ across T-shirts my mother had ordered me from the Sears catalogue. I tasted pepper on my tongue before I got raging headaches and thought of Rachel every day. I stopped going home to visit my family, not able to handle the suburbs, risk seeing skinheads while on my way to the corner store to buy my mother milk. Something was bubbling under my skin and I couldn’t understand it. It was rage.
The women’s centre becomes a home base for anti-violence action. Someone suggests re-naming the centre after Rachel, another person starts a mural. A ’zine of poetry is edited. I watch it all happen with a detached sense of wonder and relief, empowered but exhausted. I don’t go to class. I sleep on the women’s centre couch.
At home Seven, Della and I have started bunking up at night, curling around each other in sleep, or fake sleep. All I could do was run through Rachel’s last days like a movie, remember words I said to her, try to picture her face. I couldn’t really see her clearly. I woke up in the middle of the night crying. My dreams were tears. The wetness against my pillow startled me awake. The air in my bedroom was hard and chalky.
Della becomes the den mother, watering the plants, taking care of Gertrude Stein, who has taken to sleeping on our backs.
She doesn’t go home at all, ever. I hear her on the phone sometimes, asking someone to take care of Tomato. I don’t ask who. When Seven and I are at work, she takes our sheets to the laundromat and washes all the towels that have become hard, stinking paper plates of neglect. When I come home the coffee table in our angular living room is cleared of chip bags, empty cigarette packs, ninety-nine-cent pizza-slice crusts. A vase of flowers sits like a bull’s eye on the green table. We come home to an organized fridge, a shower stall free of mildew. I don’t know where Della is getting her money and making her way in the world, and I don’t ask. She and I move into the space of being intimate strangers, we see each other every day, but there are certain things we don’t talk about any more. Money. xxxx. Our breakup. We are now truly independent, but deciding to hang out a lot. It makes a difference knowing this. If she were to leave, I’d be surprised, but not devastated.
14
•••
MY BODY IS A BATTLEFIELD AND IT WANTS CRACKER JACKS
SEPTEMBER 1996
Lately my insomnia gets so pronounced it’s like another being sitting in the room with me. Sometimes it’s infectious, and Della, Seven and I move furniture around, glue Scrabble letters to the walls, make ’zines and draw comics. At
2:00 this morning, Seven brings out a scrapbook, overflowing, one of those photo albums with clear adhesive pages. He opens it across his lap, sitting up in my bed, lights a joint and passes it around. The album contains page after page of obituaries, fading photographs of friends smiling in black and white with dates underneath, inspirational prayers. So many pages of so many young men it takes my breath away. He points at each reflection, tells a story about how he knew each of them.
“This was my first lover, this was my drama teacher, this was the trick who paid my tuition at McGill, I was in a punk band with this guy when I was 18, this,” he pauses, “was Rachel’s uncle, the first gay guy I ever met. She was the only one in her family to go to his funeral.” I don’t know what to say. Seven seems so casual pointing everyone out to me, like it’s a yearbook. There are newspaper clippings from rallies and protests. Della nods, I note that she is not fazed.
“How is this even possible? That so many people you’ve known and loved are dead?” I move my slow molasses tongue around in my sticky mouth, close my reddened eyes in a slow blink.
Della and Seven look blankly at me, the way they do sometimes. They exchange a look of mutual disbelief. “Oh Eve,” Della says. It sounds almost like an accusation. I point to a date on the newspaper clipping. “I was eleven!” But I know what they mean.
“It’s different now, guys are living longer, with the cocktails and everything,” Seven says. “I think you’re really lucky.”
Della doesn’t look so gracious. Her face looks blank.
He puts the scrapbook down, pointing to a clipped photo from the Montreal Mirror. “Shit, Della, that’s you and I at the protest after Sex Garage! I didn’t know you were there too!” Della is holding a placard that says, We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!
