Crow

by Amy Spurway

  Seeing the heap of waste and destruction that now sprawls across the space where the bricks and mortar of my memories once stood is a shock to my delicate system. A rush of grief gallops through my body, grips my throat, and starts to squeeze out tears. I chide myself before any can fall. I clear my throat, shoving away the choked-up sentimentality.

  “What kind of asshole plans a high school reunion for Thanksgiving weekend?” I mutter.

  The same kind of asshole who makes the reunion’s theme “A Cape Breton Kitchen Ceilidh.” An asshole named Becky Chickenshit, who is technically an arsehole, not an asshole. Anybody can be an asshole at any given time. But when you’re an arsehole, you’re an arsehole for life. It’s part of who you are. Becky Chickenshit comes from a long line of arseholes. As Mama says, “If it’s in the cats, it’s in the kittens.”

  In the old gym, the fiddle music is a-blaring and there is tartan everywhere. Not even the Cape Breton tartan, but the garish blue Nova Scotia one, because Becky Chickenshit is a paper pusher for the provincial government. The banner on the back wall says “Ciad Mille Failte to the Class of ’95 Cape Breton Kitchen Ceilidh.” Every table has a lobster trap centrepiece stuffed with sprigs of fall leaves.

  There is no lobster on the buffet table. Which is fine by me because as far as I am concerned, all seafood is revolting. Especially lobster. It eats garbage, for Christ’s sake. There is, however, a mountain of cold cuts and rubbery cheese. Pasty white rolls with no name margarine. Coleslaw and potato salads straight out of the Presbyterian Ladies’ Auxiliary cookbook. Pickled eggs on a bed of iceberg lettuce. Jell-O salads. Three of them: a yellow one with marshmallows and canned peaches, a red one with maraschino cherries, and a green one with black olives, ham chunks, and macaroni noodles. Allie averts her eyes and stifles a gag.

  “What kind of a sick bastard puts meat wads and macaroni in Jell-O, and calls it salad?” I whisper. “And what the hell is a ladies’ auxiliary?”

  It’s good to hear Allie laugh again.

  The dessert table is worse. I’ve clung to many a plate of chocolate dipped profiteroles and fresh fruit in a sea of sushi and fried squid. I’ve been saved by the merciful grace of blueberry grunt and apple pie at lobster and clam chowder affairs. Rescued from previous stints in cold cut hell by heavenly cheesecake bites and ganache-topped brownies and butter tarts. But there is no sweet saviour here. Nothing but squares.

  There’s Shower Squares and Church Tea Squares and Funeral Squares and Bake Sale Squares. Everybody’s got a secret family recipe lifted from a church cookbook or the back of a can. Despite the seemingly endless varieties, they are all the same. Gobs of margarine, a mountain of sugar, a handful of some flavour or colour or both, a mess of some kinda crumbs, and probably a can of sweetened condensed milk. Cooked, cooled, cut into rectangles, and spread out on the finest paper plates.

  But oh, look, there’s a bar.

  Behind the bar stands the Ceilidh Queen herself, Becky Chickenshit, all decked out in a blue tartan skirt and vest with a Capers T-shirt underneath. Pewter earrings shaped like Cape Breton Island peek out from beneath her big yellow sou’wester. The selfie she’s taking will probably be posted to Facebook and tweeted to her five followers with the hashtag #realcapebretonceilidh faster than you can say “Sláinte Má Árse”, or whatever wannabe-Gaelic nonsense it is she shouts every five minutes to make everyone clink and drink.

  The urge to smack her rises swiftly and sharply. But there will be no Becky Chickenshit smacking. Not until she’s done feeding me wine for the night. Or at least until Char gets here.

  “Crow Fortune! You’re here!” she brays, squinting, blinking. “We didn’t think you’d make it . . . How are you?”

  “I’m thirsty, Becky,” I say, flashing my biggest, fattest smile in an effort to divert attention from my number two buzz cut, my fairly fresh surgical scar, and my ever-increasing gauntness. Judging by the way people are looking at me, I don’t think the big star earrings are doing the trick. I smile even bigger, harder. This is a slightly new and improved version of the same big fat smile I’d use when I was concocting stories for Viva Rica! The Essence of Inspiration! team members, convincing them that they could transform their personal energy power to attract more health, wealth, and happiness in the form of steady customers. How they, too, could come across as strong, confident, and inspirational! How to not look like a desperate, overpriced blueberry juice–peddling multi-level marketing moron! It’s all in the carefully crafted smile.

  “Gimme a glass of red wine. And don’t be stingy on the pour.”

  “Do you really think that’s a good idea?” Becky says, wringing her hands and biting the corner of her bottom lip. “We have some club soda. Club soda is nice.”

  In my dim peripheral vision, I can see people stopping what they are doing, watching as whatever is unfolding here unfolds a little more. My hands plant on my hips. My head cocks to the side. My voice rises ever so slightly. Because I have something to prove. And now I have an audience. And I want a glass of wine, dammit.

  “Tell ya what, Becky. I’ll go home, curl up on my couch in a pink Snuggie, and sip some nice club soda like a good little shut-in, but only after I get hammered here tonight. So how about you gimme my wine? Preferably before I’m dead.”

  For a minute, she just stands there, eyelids fluttering a mile a minute at me through her glasses. Allie laughs so hard that the risk of pissing in her pants is becoming more real by the second. Allie is a notorious pants-pisser when she laughs. Which is why I’d never lend her my jeans. Char, on the other hand, was not allowed to borrow my jeans because she would draw penises on them, cut holes in the crotch, and sometimes light the pockets on fire. While she was wearing them.

  “Well you just got told right the fuck off there, dinja, Chick­­enshit!” Char’s face suddenly pokes in between Allie and me, her blonde dreads flipping and flopping as she gives an exaggerated side-to-side gawk around. Now things just got really awkward. And not just because Char happens to have both tits hanging out, with her baby snuggled in a sling and suckling on one of them.

  Allie and Char have not seen each other since 1998. And I believe the last words between them were, “Fuck you, you psycho cunt face. I hope you rot in hell.” At least, that’s what the guy who lived in the apartment above us told me he heard somebody scream that night, before the door slammed and everything went quiet. I don’t know exactly what happened, or why. All I know is that I came home from the bar to an empty apartment. The next day, Char told me she was bailing on the lease and booking ’er to Germany to join the circus. A week later, Allie got kicked out of residence and moved in with me for a while, until her mother took a bad turn and had to be moved up to Halifax to be closer to a specialist. Allie said she and Char had a fight. That it had been coming for a long time. That Char was a crazy, backstabbing bitch, end of story. And all I ever got out of Char was a garbled complaint about Allie Walker and “all her melon-dramatic shit.” I don’t know what happened, but I knew enough to stay out of it. Never imagined I’d find myself standing next to the two of them again.

  “Don’t waste your money at Becky’s little lemonade stand, girls. C’mon out to the car. I got a surprise for ya,” Char says, kissing her teeth at Becky.

  “I’ll pass,” Allie says, her spine stiffening, her eyes locked straight ahead, every trace of joviality wiped from her face. “A beer please, Becky.”

  Char smacks my arse.

  “C’mon. You’ll like this surprise. Promise,” she purrs.

  “Go ahead,” Allie says without looking at me. “I’ll get a table.”

  “Wanna hold my baby for me?” Char asks her, clearly knocking Allie off guard enough to make her eyes widen and look down at the baby clinging to Char’s chest.

  “No.” Allie’s cold composure is quickly restored.

  “Dammit,” Char mutters, her eyes suddenly speed-­scanning the room. I grab her by the arm and usher her out to the park-ing lot.

  The surprise
in the car is a bottle of top-shelf tequila and a big fat joint being rolled up by none other than Willy Gimp.

  “Hey, stranger,” he says, sticking his head out the passenger side window. “Quite the haircut ya got there.”

  “It’s her fault.” I shoot a look at Char as she slides up beside me, having at least put away the boob that Daktari Christ MacIsaac wasn’t using before sharply nudging me toward the driver side door.

  “Most shit is her fault,” Willy Gimp chuckles.

  “Well, you two kids have fun.” Char turns on the heels of her snakeskin stilettos. Which do not go with her hot pink peasant blouse and the Daisy Dukes.

  I watch her prance away and wonder if I shouldn’t go back inside, apologize to Becky Chickenshit, convince Char to leave before things get out of hand, sit and have a drink with Allie, smile and make small talk with a few fellow Class of ’95ers, and then go home. Maybe stop and buy a pink Snuggie and some nice club soda at the drugstore on the way.

  Gimp lights the joint and hands me a shot glass full of tequila, a lemon slice, and a salt shaker.

  “If you play your cards right, maybe we’ll hide in the boys’ locker room and do body shots off each other after the dance starts,” he says. “You can do one off my magically twisted arm.” I can’t tell if he’s kidding or not.

  An hour later, we waltz into the gym to see that Becky Chickenshit and the party squad have jacked things up to another level. The lights are dimmed, the fiddle tunes have temporarily given way to some quasi-country folksy stuff, and people are gathered around clapping and stomping and watching Becky fake step dance. I find Allie sitting alone at a table. I teeter to her side and start to apologize.

  “It’s fine. I get it,” she says, glancing at Gimp.

  “We were just hanging out.”

  “Whatever,” she says. “No big deal.”

  But it is. She always did get pissy when she thought I’d ditched her for a guy. Because I’ve ditched her for guys more times than I care to admit. I’m too buzzed and baked to argue with her, though, and the transition from the hallway fluorescents to the strobe-lit dance floor in the gym has set my eyes on a trip. I can’t very well argue with Allie about the “no big deals” that clearly are and the “fines” that clearly aren’t when she’s got some kinda grey-blue dustball of pall parked over her head. I miss being able to focus on actually seeing people when I talk to them.

  Meanwhile, there’s Becky Chickenshit, her big tartan arse heaving and hoing all over the place in a dizzying display. Word is that Becky just got married to none other than everybody’s favourite lecherous crooked cop, Duke the Puke. And there, my smug self-confidence is restored. At least my arse is small, I didn’t marry a bona fide creep, and I don’t fake step dance in public.

  “C’mon, Allie, let’s go show them wanker bits how to really dance. See if they’ll play Salt-N-Pepa. Pretty sure I can still Pu-push it real gooooood —” I convince myself to ignore my wooziness, throw my arm over my head, and start to arch backwards, my chest and hips thrusting up as my lower back quickly begins to insist that I am too old and way too dizzy to do this dance.

  “There’ve been enough scenes here already tonight.”

  I give her a quizzical look, as my eyes detect that the edges of her grey-blue dustball are tinged with the uneven reds of a fresh sunburn, or an old scar. I look around for evidence of a scene. Char is nowhere in sight.

  While Willy Gimp and I were in the car getting a buzz on and talking about the old days, Char was inside doing what Char has always done best. Causing a scene of epic proportions. She went straight to the bar, but Becky wouldn’t serve her because Becky didn’t think it was appropriate for a breastfeeding mother to drink alcohol. Char got loud and mouthy. Becky blinked and stammered. Char got louder and mouthier. Becky started to cry. Then Duke showed up, and threatened to arrest Char for public indecency because by now, the baby was sound asleep in the sling, but Char had both of her boobs hanging out the top of her hot pink peasant blouse, just for fun. Char grabbed one of her boobs, gave it a squeeze, and nailed Duke right between the eyes with a stream of milk. Duke called her a nasty cow. Becky wailed hysterically. Char laughed like a lunatic. Duke whipped out his badge. Becky told Char she’d better leave at once before she ended up in jail. Char told Becky to go suck a pig dick, spun on her stilettoed heels, and traipsed out the back door of the gym.

  “So where’s Char now?” I ask.

  “Dunno. Don’t care.” Allie takes a nonchalant swig of beer.

  “Bah, she’ll be back,” Willy Gimp says. “I got her car keys.”

  “Where?” I lean in close to Gimp’s ear, grazing his neck with my lips, hoping he can hear the heat in my voice over the caterwauling music. “Which pocket? This one?” My hands dance under the table and slide over his thigh. “Or this one?”

  He laughs.

  “You’re wrecked, Crow Fortune,” he leans in and whispers back.

  “Yeah, so what. Wanna go do body shots in the boys’ locker room?” I coo.

  “We drank all the tequila.”

  “Not those kind of body shots.” Beneath the table, my dancing hand makes my meaning clear. Just in case Gimp is not getting the hint.

  I push my chair back. “We’ll be back in a bit,” I tell Allie. “We’re gonna see if we can find Char.”

  “Whatever.” Allie sighs, turning her attention to the dance floor hoedown. “You’re lucky I love you.”

  I feel like a bad kid, looking over my shoulder, half hoping that someone is watching as I pull Gimp by the hand toward the boys’ locker room. We awkwardly manoeuvre our clumsy bodies behind the heavy swinging door and into the blackness. He stops, his hand fumbling for the light switch. I keep moving and grab him by his plaid shirt, pull him close and kiss him hard. He kisses me back, but softer, more tenderly. I plant my hand in the general vicinity of Gimp’s goods. He breaks away from the kiss and lifts my hand off his crotch and places it on his chest. His heart thumps along, smooth and steady.

  “Listen, maybe we could do this like grown-ups, eh? Go out on a date or something.”

  “This is a date.” I press my hips against him. “Don’t wreck my dream of swaggering back out there with a freshly laid grin on my mug and my drawers in my purse. I might not get a chance like this again.”

  He flicks on the locker room lights. “I just . . . I want to be able to see you, is all.”

  “K, whatever, we can do it with the lights on,” I say, pressing harder, trying to fling my leg around his waist, threatening to knock us both to the floor in a decidedly un-sexy way.

  “Look, Crow, I don’t think —”

  “Dammit, Gimp, I don’t have time for you to think. Are we going to do this, yes or no?”

  Before he can answer, the chorus of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” comes streaming out of the place where I figured my underwear would be by now. I reach into my purse and answer my phone. It’s Peggy.

  “Get out to my place,” she barks. “Char’s up a tree with the baby and she won’t come down.”

  5 YOU’LL WISH YOUR CAKE, DOUGH, BABY

  November 19 is World Toilet Day. It is also the day I was born, and the day I damn near killed my mother, so you can bet I’ve heard all about that a few times. The doctor didn’t know that there was a big slab of placenta blocking my exit when they jacked Mama full of Pitocin in order to evict me from her cozy womb. I was nearly three weeks overdue. The doctor chalked it up to Mama having her dates wrong, what with her being so young and poor and obviously stupid. They didn’t listen when she told them that something was wrong after the first blast of Pitocin, so they gave her another one and added weak and whiny to their list of judgements about her. But she wasn’t whiny or weak or stupid, despite being young and poor. She was hemorrhaging. A piece of placenta was blocking the exit and had separated, so I was trapped in a contracting uterus with nowhere to go.

  Finally, a nurse had the good sense to see that my heart rate was dropping like a dirty bomb, and Mama
was white and trembling. Still, the doctor said to “wait and see.” Until Lucy Fortune got a hold of him. Lucy had given birth to every one of her children at home, and she knew that her daughter Effie — the toughest of them all — wasn’t one to cry and moan and make a royal fool of herself over a simple thing like childbirth. So, with Lucy’s persuasive hands gripping Dr. Dickey’s collar, he agreed to look into the situation more closely. Within minutes, there was a frantic team of people jabbing my mother with needles to knock her out and give her blood transfusions, while another doctor told Dickey to get out of the way while he did an emergency C-section. And five minutes before M*A*S*H — Mama’s favourite show — started, on what would be declared World Toilet Day some twenty-five years later, I entered the world. At which point, Mama almost left it when the hemorrhaging didn’t stop.

  Somehow, we both made it out of my birth alive. Mama came out of the ordeal with her midsection sliced from arsehole to appetite, a harrowing story to tell, and a low-key bitterness that the new M*A*S*H episode she missed was about her favourite character, Father Mulcahy — and I came out of it with a lingering sense of guilt over how much trouble I caused her right from the get-go.

  […]

  I wonder if someday Daktari Christ MacIsaac will feel faintly haunted by that same spectre of guilt over what’s happening to his mother. Char’s been diagnosed with severe postpartum psychosis. What other explanation is there when a woman hitchhikes home from her high school reunion with her baby in tow after squirting a cop in the face with her breast milk? And then gleefully tells the trucker who picks her up that she’s a celestial being who needs a ride to the edge of the civilized world, where she will merge into The Oneness and deliver mankind into the Cosmic Climax. And then, when she gets dropped off on the highway down by the gas station, walks to Peggy’s house, where she goes into the yard, strips naked and shimmies halfway up a sixty-foot oak tree, proclaiming her barely five-month-old baby to be Icarus. With wings of light and love.