Bottle Rocket Hearts

by Zoe Whittall

  She softly says, “Hey baby,” as I get up from the couch, stretch out, staring. I want to take her photograph, wallpaper the room with this image over and over, how beautiful she looks. Pale skin against red chair and the inky lines of her hair.

  I grab the Polaroid camera on the green table and snap her image. The flash makes her blink, startled, but her body remains unmoving. I snap another of her outstretched foot. Her wrist. The nape of her neck. I lay them out on the table and watch them develop slowly.

  Normally, I’m against nudity. I like to make out clothed, turn off the lights, proceed veiled and shadowed. Nudity is too much of an answer for me, leaving nothing left to discuss or ponder, visualize. If someone takes their clothes off too fast, I usually start thinking about running some errands. But at this moment I feel as though I finally understand the erotic trance mere bodies can cause. I put the camera down, crawl across the room to her, unable to detach my gaze.

  I stare up at her, approach softly. She twists her legs around me, clamping her ankles together like a twist-tie. My knees bruising beautifully while her breath rises and falls too many times to count. I don’t even tell her to stifle her moans in case we wake up Seven. I’d forgotten what desire feels like.

  Afterwards, we smoke cigarettes and drink hot tea on the balcony, our legs resting on the railings, wrapped in blankets, our asses cradled in plastic deck chairs soaked in rain water. The sun is beginning to rise, a pinky glow around us. “Della, how real do you think this death-before-thirty curse is?” Up until this week I hadn’t put much real worry into it. But it’s fast approaching and this year had felt cursed. What if it was really true? I hear Rachel’s voice before we passed out on New Year’s Eve, It’s the year of the fire rat, a year for natural disasters.

  “My dad thinks it is. He won’t stop calling. He wants me to come home and sit in the house until my birthday is over so he can monitor me. He wants my doctor cousin to sit with me and make sure I’m okay.”

  “I haven’t heard any messages from him. When did he call?”

  “He calls while you’re working mostly.”

  “Huh. What does your cousin think?”

  “He thinks my dad is superstitious and nuts.”

  “Do you think it’s your time?”

  “I hope not.” Her fingers shake as she puts her cigarette to her lips. “But it’s hard to say. My mother, my aunt, my grandmother. All dead at twenty-nine.”

  “Could be a coincidence. You had a physical last month and everything was fine. You had every blood test under the sun and your doctor said you were perfectly healthy.”

  Della shrugged. “I know. It’s something science can’t control. It’s beyond us.”

  “Just remember, all the Tremblays seem to live till ninety-five. You could be more like them. You’re not like most women, after all.”

  “I keep thinking of my mother dying. I see her on her deathbed. I wake up with that image every day.”

  I don’t know what to say to this. I put my hands on her shoulders, kiss her cheek. She doesn’t cry. She closes her eyes, puts her cigarette to her lips.

  “I have to stop living like I’m about to die. If it’s my time, it’s my time. Nothing is going to change that.”

  “Yes, that sounds like a good plan.” I say a little prayer right then, opening the balcony door, kicking my slushy shoes on the mat by the cat-food dishes, washing my hands with lavender soap in the kitchen sink to get the smoke smell off. I whisper little prayers to spare her.

  17

  •••

  SEVEN'S PLAY

  “Della and Eve,” Della says to the girl at the door of the bar. “We should be on the list.”

  “Yes, oh, here you are.” She runs a thin red line through our names and stamps our hands. “The show will begin in about five minutes.”

  We walk into the bar in a confusing reverse birth, from the afternoon sunlight and into the dungeon, even with all the lights on. The smell of beer and sweat still present from the night before. There are rows of wooden folding chairs placed on the dance floor. I see Melanie and Nicky in the second row. Amanda, the girl Rachel went on the date with the night she died, is setting up the lights. A few of Seven’s friends from the acc are wearing black and setting up the stage area. The floor is covered in chalk outlines of bodies, just like they are in white paint on Ste-Catherine Street. It’s a who’s who of the queer community. We sit next to Hélène, Della’s old friend, who calls me niblet. Like baby corn, I guess. My aunt Bev walks in with a long black fake-fur coat and a bright rainbow wool scarf. She sits on a tall stool and waves to us, holding a can of diet soda.

  Della goes up to the bar where xxxx is serving, gets us two beers, comes back fast, as if she could sense my discomfort. I tell her she’s projecting her guilt. I am sure I’ve been hiding it well. xxxx is wearing the red dress she once promised me; it strangles her. She looks uncomfortable.

  I am nervous for Seven’s premiere. Worried that it will be horrible and I’ll have to lie. I don’t know what to expect, only that he’s been rehearsing for weeks now, more sober than he’d been in months, hours of typing at the kitchen table.

  The lights go down and Gerard, a well-dressed blond fag in his early thirties I recognize from the ACC, makes an announcement from the stage for everyone to take their seats. He informs everyone this is a work in progress. The room goes black. A Super 8 projector starts rolling and images from the seventies appear, two children in a sandbox, looking up at the camera. It freezes on one face, a girl with pigtails I recognize as Rachel from old photos. A photograph of our wrist tattoos comes into focus, a dedication to Rachel appears. The room goes black again. Seven walks on stage wearing baggy jeans, a tight white T-shirt. He leans against the back wall, lights a cigarette, looks up.

  “God, I just want to sleep. I can’t sleep at all. I can fuck and I can dance, that should be all I need right? Except I don’t have a body. No. Not at all. Huh.”

  A nineties house song plays, he starts to dance but isn’t coordinated. He stops. The music cuts. Everyone laughs.

  “So, I’m in this alley behind the Parc theatre getting my cock sucked by some overeager raver kid I sold some E to. It’s time for the Run DMC reunion show and I can’t get excited about the show because I’m thinking about Rachel. She’s all I can think about.”

  Photos of Rachel appear behind him.

  “I close my eyes and she’s stitched to the back of my eyelids.” The photos click faster and faster until they blur.

  “I don’t know if I’m going to bother going in to see the show. We were supposed to go together. It’s like I’m all broken up and dissolving, and I’m not too sad about the show ’cause they’ve gone all born-again Christian anyway. I used to be so into them in Secondary One, me and Rachel both. The only two rap fans in Drummondville, Quebec.”

  A photo of preteen Rachel and Seven with mullets and Expos T-shirts standing next to a cow clicks on, everyone laughs, while Run DMC plays in the background.

  “This is when we ran away from home.”

  There is a photo of Seven and Rachel and they’re dressed like crusty punks, baby faces, standing on the side of a road holding a sign that says Québec City.

  “We were sixteen.”

  There are a few more projections of snapshots from their lives together before he moves into the monologue.

  “The raver is looking up at me with these pure azure eyes, and he keeps calling me Evan, which is fine. Seven is a strange name, I know. Close enough. I’m wondering why I’m going soft. I fucking hate them. Shut your fucking eyes. He does. I feel a little guilty but I get hard again. My knees are killing me from jumping down off of a fence last night. I felt the crunch and blood rising, but I couldn’t stop because I thought the cops were running after me. It turns out my friend Eve was wrong, she’d yelled, Cop! but it was only a dog walker. Today I’m paying for it in pain. But I ran and ran and floated away, panting hard against the bathhouse door where I quickly dissolved in the a
rmy of bodies, while Della and Eve ran home.

  “Eve is my roommate.” The lights go down. The film starts again. There I am asleep in bed with Della, her arms around me. “This is them asleep. That’s Della, her girlfriend.” Then I am riding my bike through the muddy path that cuts the park in two, behind me are the statues on Mont-Royal and the cross. I’m wearing the silver dress from referendum day. I’m smiling because I both love and hate being on camera. The camera slows on my face. I’m smiling like a kid. I barely remember that day. It seems like years ago.

  “Anyway, isn’t Eve just a fucking sweetheart? A little piece of pie. A cupcake. Usually girls like her drive me nuts, you know, so excitable. Bad tippers, high-pitch gigglers. That’s what she was like at first. But it’s like every day she wakes up a little more hard core. Anyway, it’s really been hard to watch her, like, go through this shit for the first time. I don’t know, maybe you lost someone suddenly and you know what I mean. It’s like someone handing you a new world and you’re not used to the air quality, you don’t recognize anything or anyone. Like it is when you’re born but there isn’t anyone there to teach you how to talk and not swallow rocks and stuff like that. It’s like getting punched in the face really slowly. I don’t suppose it’s all that interesting to you, you probably think I deserve it. I dunno. I guess I’m still sick from what Rachel’s mother said to me.”

  A female actress walks on stage, middle-aged, in respectable dress and church hat and shoes. She says, in French, “You were supposed to die first. You have the disease God gives to all you sinners. You disgust me. You ruined her. She was such a sweet little girl once.”

  The stage goes black, and Seven reappears.

  “I was trying to comfort her, help her clean out her daughter’s room. Eve had lost her shit on them, you know, in that self-righteous way you do when you first look up the definition of oppression and realize it applies to you. This woman who used to sing me to sleep and change my diapers, saying stuff like, You were supposed to die first. It’s God’s punishment. I can’t even look at you. And for some reason I kept being nice to her because I knew Rachel wouldn’t want them to hurt any more than they were. I just kept moving, like it didn’t hurt me. I didn’t even tell Eve the half of it and I swear some of her hair fell out. I just have to keep going. Rachel would think this whole play was really funny. Hilarious, that I was finally doing something for her. My wrist hurts from my new tattoo. Since her funeral smells have been mixed up, the bagel shop smelled like the ocean and church pews smelled like bales of fresh hay. Me and Eve got the same tattoo, Rachel’s name, her date of birth and death. It’s opened up a space so we can grieve together. We ducked our skinny frames through the makeshift curtains of Tatouage Iris on Ontario, held our pink raised skin together.

  “Anyway, after I get off with the raver kid, I walk back out onto the street. Gerard rides up on his blue bike like it’s any ordinary Parc Avenue night, the basket of his bike filled with condoms and safer sex info pamphlets. Gerard is tireless. He launches into some fucking New Age monologue about having been shopping for his inner child. He grabs my shoulder and looks into my eyes and says something about why can’t he just let himself be happy, you know life is short, and he shouldn’t be afraid to love and let go and why can’t he get over his nasty childhood already since he’s thirty-three. Gerard always tries to get me to fuck him. I feel like, despite his constant crusade for safer sex and harm reduction, he really just wants to hurry up and get aids so he can write a bestselling memoir. He’s still talking. For one split second he forgets that he’s a Leo and the world revolves entirely around him and looks at me like he’s only just now realized I’m there.

  “‘How are you, Seven?’ Sometimes he talks just like a social worker, soft lilts, like he knows he’s talking to someone whose life is shit or soon to be shit. Mixed with the pity he feels is this sick fascination with the glamour that comes out when he’s drunk and trying to stick his tongue in my mouth. He’s looking at me like he can’t wait to hear something juicy. Real. Hard.”

  Words come up on the screen behind him. They read, Sorry Gerard. Gerard laughs from the sidelines, says, Busted.

  “So I give it away. Why not? I tell him, in my best deadpan lisp, that Rachel is dead. He looks shocked. She never liked him anyway, calling him an earnest yuppie fag who always bums cigarettes even though he’s loaded. His eyes widen and then he looks at me like I’m seven years old and I’ve got leukemia and I’m about to fall over. And he says, over and over, with this impetuous grip-slash-hug, that he’s so sorry and, ‘Are you okay? Are you okay? You can’t be okay. What can I do?’

  “‘Sure, Gerard, sure.’ I walk away while he is still talking. Grief gives you this incredible gift of being able to be an asshole without consequences. Don’t let my bravado fool you, my body has begun its own twitchy muscular apocalypse that starts in my neck and ends in my numb little toe. I’m wearing three layers of Rachel’s shirts, a wife beater under a Rock for Choice T-shirt under a flannel plaid button-down. I’m smoking all of her leftover cigarettes. Gerard would say I’m experiencing Survivor Guilt. He would have a book I could read. So, by 4:00 a.m. I am making out with another kid in the bus shelter on Bernard. It’s cold and it’s meaningless, we are not compatible kissers anyway. I’m not sure why I stay there as long as I do. I’m running my tongue over misplaced thoughts and memories. I would trade in my brain for fourteen cents and a pack of cigarettes right now. This is no sob story. No climb every mountain. No Cokes for the whole world. I flash on our high-school prom, the way she said, ‘Seven, I have to tell you, I have a crush on Christine Martindale. Do you think I’m going to go to hell?’ From that uncertain little kid to the way she grew up to stare at anyone, never hiding her longing. Ink like blood on flat white pages. The ambition of a herd of stampeding animals, the best wit, the hardest heart.

  “Eve brings home Della, who grunts at me inaudibly when she comes into the kitchen to get water. She hands me a warm pile of red and blue gummy worms and smiles. ‘You’re going to be okay, Seven. I know it.’ There is something very reassuring about this, sometimes the way Della speaks like she’s an old man on top of a mountain dispensing necessary truths to the clueless, even if I know enough not to believe everything that comes out of her mouth. I watch Eve move around the kitchen, hair all tousled, armpit hair jutting out from her tiny arms, a simple black cotton mini-dress she’s been wearing since the funeral. I want to ask her what to do but know she won’t likely have a lot of insight. Eve has never known anyone who’s died, she’s like this adorable raucous baby chick devastated by this, but she’s able to eat and stand still. Here I am, I’ve been to dozens of funerals and this feels like the hardest task I’ve ever had to complete. How come she’s not falling apart? When was the last time I slept? All I can think to write is, I can and have lived with almost anything but I can’t be alone with this.”

  The film shows Della, Seven and me on the couch. We do not smile. It’s a photo Rachel took on the morning of January 1, 1996. We look like we knew what was about to come.

  The stage goes black and the room is so quiet we can hear Seven exhaling as he walks off the stage.

  When the lights come up, there is a solid offering of applause and some hollers. Seven walks back and takes a bow and I try to catch his eye, but I don’t. Della puts a smoke behind her ear and pulls on her coat. I look at Aunt Bev and there are tears in her eyes and she’s holding her hand to her heart. I am envious of her outpouring of emotion as I can’t seem to demonstrate exactly how Seven’s play moved me. I smile at her warmly, and she walks towards me with open arms.

  We go across the street to a café and share pieces of cake and hot chocolate. Della looks relaxed for the first time in months. Seven holds my hand under the table. We listen to Aunt Bev talk about religion and politics, every once in a while she links it back to Seven’s play. “You must be so proud, Seven. You should really be so proud.”

  Seven stares at Bev, who stares back just as inte
ntly.

  “Uh, thanks.”

  18

  •••

  VEGAN SOUP OF THE DAY

  The Santé! corporation has decided to open café franchises in each of their stores. After weeks of enduring sawdusty air and protruding nails, we have a new corner with café tables and chairs and a coffee bar with stools, a simple menu with sandwiches and soup. I find sprouts in the curve of my rolled-up pant legs. There are new staff members that speak like automatons and don’t like gays. “She’s trying to get rid of all the dykes,” Melanie informs me.

  “Are you paranoid or something?”

  Later when my boss catches me kissing Della outside the store, she pulls me aside to say I should be more discreet, to think about how we reflect the store. Considering how many times I’ve caught my boss in the dry goods aisle dry humping her husband in full view of Mrs. Edelson, our most regular client, I realize Melanie’s right.

  I dream about rinsing sprouts at night. I dread going to work and feel absorbed in work politics when I’m there, thinking about it far too much after I leave. With this new café development, the really deliberate shoppers tend to lounge even more slowly while they sip herbal tea and write out their dietary needs on thick slabs of recycled napkins, parking their bony butts on chairs for hours, thumbing through free magazines.

  I stand at the counter, restocking straws and shaking the raw sugar bowl. I tear off a piece of bread to throw in the bowl, make sure the sugar doesn’t clump. I doodle caricatures of our regular customers, squiggling wrinkles into foreheads, betraying them as they are, shaky and pale, depressed and listless. I draw mountains of nutritional supplements.