The Spectacular

by Zoe Whittall

  Through the bathroom door I hear Tom defending himself to Cory, as I begin to work Jared slowly with my hand, leaning over the tub. Cory is speaking too low to hear, so I only catch pieces of the conversation. You have platonic friends, too! What about Bob? You crash at Bob’s sometimes. Well, I didn’t know he was gay! How was I supposed to know? I am too happy to see you, but you woke me up by yelling at me! How am I supposed to act other than mad? I am not defensive. I have nothing to be defensive about.

  Jared’s fast, as expected. While he cleans up I crack the bathroom door open a tiny bit, and see that Cory and Tom have left. I send Jared out to get breakfast downstairs, rip open a pouch of vitamin C powder with my teeth, empty it into a plastic cup, and fill it with tap water. I choke it down. Finger the Cellophane wrapper from the cup.

  I quickly make myself come twice watching the scrambled porn channel before Jared returns with Styrofoam boxes of eggs and bacon. Bouncing tits, a line of fuzz, some standard in and out. I spread towels at the edge of the bed to put the breakfast down. We turn the TV from porn to The Great Muppet Caper, sit cross-legged side by side like children, and tuck in to our food.

  During a commercial break, I call my apartment and check the answering machine. I pull at the yellow threads in the upholstery, always a bit nervous to hear what is or isn’t happening at home, where real life resides in a state of suspension. Two messages. The first one from my father.

  I’m sorry, bug, I can’t come to your show when you’re in town. The store is so busy this time of year, and the traffic from San Diego is insane that time of day. Thanks for mailing the passes though, I’m giving them to our babysitter and she’s really excited. I wish I could come. Rachel can’t handle the heat and noise of the show right now, you know how it is.

  Rachel, my dad’s new wife, has a lot of things she’s inexplicably, and I imagine selectively, sensitive to. He didn’t offer to come up for breakfast the next morning at our hotel, which was my second suggestion. I always provide a backup suggestion.

  The second voice mail is from Granny, her nasal British accent cutting through the grimy hotel receiver.

  Melissa, it’s your grandmother. (As if I’d mistake her voice for someone else’s.) I’m not sure where you are, but I’m calling to tell you I’m taking a trip back to Turkey in about two or three weeks. I need to hear from you before I leave. She pauses, and I hear some background noise, perhaps a spoon clinking against a cup. And then a loud sigh. I’m old, Melissa. I need to hear from you.

  Then some fumbling around with the phone until it eventually reaches the cradle with a resolute click. There are no other messages.

  Granny has been announcing that she’s old for as long as I can remember. Any time she loses her patience or needs something done, she’ll say I’m old. She used to say Just do as you’re told until my father told her that wasn’t the way he was raising a kid. He raised me with more of a do whatever you want as long as you don’t hurt anyone attitude. That also had its downsides.

  I push aside the disappointment I feel about my father not coming to the LA show, and begin to dial Granny’s number. I’m in the middle of keying in the long distance code when I’m interrupted by Billy and Kiki coming through the adjoining door. They look a mess but you can tell they feel like the most beautiful and interesting people on earth.

  Billy throws a baggie at me, and I scramble and drop the phone receiver, trying to catch it.

  “It’s good, Miss. So clean, pure.”

  “Right, it’s basically like doing a half hour of yoga,” I say, but I don’t throw it back. I flick the tiny baggie back and forth in my hand like it’s a developing Polaroid. My mouth tastes of bacon. What does it mean to get high in the morning? I have not been high at all yet this tour. I don’t want to be all Sweet Valley High about it but it seems like a sad choice. I watch Billy and Kiki, currently arm wrestling. (“If I win, you have to do a Grateful Dead cover at your next show!” “If I win, you have to walk through the lobby with one tit out of your dress!”) I want in on that dumb, all-body joy. I grab the hotel key card from the dresser top and cut a baby line on the room service tray. I throw the bag to Jared, who does the same.

  A moment later, Tom and Cory come barrelling in. Cory watches, arms crossed, while Tom packs up his green canvas army bag. All four of us become a parody of high people who don’t want anyone to know we’re high: Jared pretending to read a book, Kiki braiding Billy’s hair and pretending to follow the Muppet movie. But it is mostly Tom who’s pretending—to not care as we watch him pack.

  Cory has cute aqua sneakers I’ve never seen before. It kills me that I can’t tell her how cool she looks, with the baby-blue tank dress, the little star barrettes in her blond bob. There’s no way anyone would know she has kids. She looks like she’s in a much cooler band than ours. She is close enough to smell, and the smell is like a coconut cream or a berry-heavy shampoo. I want to hug her. I hold out the container of lukewarm home fries. “Want some?”

  She turns me down with a curt head shake and glares. She’s being so bitchy. I wish she could be my best friend.

  “Cory,” I say, “sorry if that was surprising. You know Tom’s like a brother, no vibes whatsoever.” Cory nods, with no smile, which makes me smile even more for the both of us, and descend even deeper into babbling. “Seriously, you have nothing to worry about. I would never think of Tom that way.”

  “Missy, it’s still odd. It’s not . . . normal.”

  “It’s the only way we can afford this kind of hotel, plus, you just have to think of me like a guy,” I try to explain. Tom looks over at me, a just shut up face. “Things in the music scene . . . it’s different. The norm is different. It’s like a family thing, we’re all together. Like, all the time . . .” I forget that coke makes me love talking.

  “With the way this band parties,” she says, as though parties means has constant orgies, “I’m just not cool with it. I know it’s not cool to ever have serious, adult emotional reactions to things, or to acknowledge when things are dysfunctional, but that’s what being an adult is.”

  “I’m an adult, Cory.” Now her bitchiness isn’t cute.

  “Adults don’t have to defend themselves by calling themselves adults, and also, you’re what, twenty-one years old?”

  “Yes,” I say, though when I think about being twenty-one it feels like a mature kind of age to be. When she says it, it sounds like I’m still in primary school.

  Tom hands her one of his bags, and opens the door, urging Cory outside.

  “Plus, one of your nipples is just fully hanging out of your tank top right now,” she says, before slamming the door.

  I look down. Damn. Jared laughs like a stoner, his mouth wide open, little bits of bacon flying everywhere. I pull my shirt up. “Good burn, such a good burn!”

  When Jared stops laughing, he grabs my last piece of bacon and asks, “But you are fucking him, though?” The sound he makes chewing is revolting. It’s so aggravating the way people assume that just because I like having sex with some people, it means I like having sex with all people.

  I push him, only half kidding, toward the door and then out into the hall. “Get your own room next time. We’re not your babysitters.”

  “What? I can’t stay?”

  “No!”

  I watch as he joins Cory and Tom waiting for the elevator.

  Cory whispers something to Tom.

  I hate her and want to be her friend in equal measure, and the confusing mix of emotions propels me back inside to leave a manic, coke-fuelled voice mail for Amita.

  Later that night, she leaves me one back that’s just Forget that uptight Cory cunt, I’m proud of your Dicks Across America tour. I love you. You’re perfect.

  Sometimes you just need to know that someone loves you, their love like an anchor that will bring you back when your love affair with freedom reaches a tethered end.

  Chapter 4

  carola

  toward the end of the interview the
cops brought me a burger, fries, and a Coke. The burger was in a yellow Styrofoam container. The cop poured his fries into the overturned top of his burger container. So I did the same. I hadn’t eaten meat or junk food in years. I was about to refuse it, when it began to look like the most delicious thing I had ever seen. It was practically calling out to me. I pulled a leaf of iceberg lettuce from under the saucy bun. It was still crisp. Then I took the plastic fork and dipped it in the ketchup and sucked on the tines. And then I ate it all, even the burger. I ate it too fast to feel the texture on my tongue and be disgusted by the fleshy reality of it. I could barely hear them as I ate. It was as though all my other senses shut down. As I dipped the final fry in the little pond of ketchup, the cops both smiled at each other, like I was a feral child who had just come in from the woods.

  Miranda broke my reverie. “Were you raised religious?” she asked. I was beginning to feel like I was part of her research somehow, and I didn’t like it. Plus, the answer was complicated. My mother loved Jesus and hated women. Well, most women.

  She was always outwardly pleasant, quick to invite a friend in for coffee, but then would ruthlessly pick her apart as we watched her walk down our porch and get into her car. She’d compliment a passerby on her outfit, then mutter under her breath about the gaudiness of it. She knew kindness was a virtue and so she acted kindly, but as I grew older I began to suspect that she didn’t feel it. None of this was unusual for her generation, but I found it unnerving.

  She didn’t like sloppiness. She curled her hair every morning. She polished the baseboards every week. The sink in the bathroom could never be wet after you washed your hands; you had to run a rag over it until it was dry, and then neatly hang the rag on a hook on the back of the sink’s cabinet door. She could see a loose thread or a tiny tear on a dress from across the room. She cut the grass with scissors so it was always the same length, even though we only had a small square of grass in the front yard of our small home. During my childhood we lived in the Glebe neighbourhood in downtown Ottawa, which was a modest, working-class area. It only became wealthy after my mother’s death, which always made me sad. She would have loved to watch it prosper. In my memories of her in the 1960s, my mother simmered with a quiet rage, but it only tipped over and showed itself twice.

  I remember sitting in the car outside of the Church of the Blessed Sacrament. It was snowing sideways, wind ripping at the car, while my mother cried in the front seat. My mother rarely cried in public, and this may have been the first time I’d really witnessed her completely let herself go into full-body sobs. Makeup smeared, hair falling into her face. At first, she tried to hide it, but I could hear her sniffling, and then she just seemed to forget I was there. As she cried, the storm outside subsided and the sun peeked through the clouds. The sudden brightness reflected off high walls of snow pushed up in piles at the edge of the church parking lot. I pulled at my itchy brown snowsuit. I tried to reach out from the back seat to give her a hug but she pushed my hands away.

  “It’s nothing, it’s nothing,” she said. “I’m overreacting.” She used the rear-view mirror to press more face powder under her eyes.

  Finally, she took a deep breath and said, “Do you know that if I were to ever divorce your daddy—which don’t worry, I won’t—but if I did, he would be allowed to go to church but the priest would not let me in? Can you believe that?”

  I’d never heard my mother say one negative word about the church before.

  “It’s bullshit, is what that is,” she muttered, more to herself. I’d never heard her swear. My father and Marie had already gone into the church. But right when we’d pulled into the parking lot, my mother had said she needed a minute. I said I’d stay, too. I didn’t want to go in with my father because he smelled bad like he usually did on Sundays. The night before I’d woken up to his yelling. It was around this age that I started to dislike him, even though my love remained firm even as my discomfort grew, these feelings continuing to confuse me until he died. So my father picked up Marie and carried her over his shoulder and I heard her squeal with delight as they crossed the parking lot to the church.

  I remember how my mother reached back to unzip my snowsuit and pat my head.

  “You’re a beautiful girl, you’re going to find a good Catholic man to marry someday,” she said, “and do it right.” She always started sentences so hopefully and then fucked it up by the end. But her heart was in the right place. I would give her that.

  The second time my mother got close to self-actualization was on Mother’s Day in 1970. When I brought her a bouquet of lilacs at breakfast, she said, “You remember about lunch, right? For Mother’s Day, just us girls!” She gave me a look that said I should say yes. It was my last month of high school. I was beginning to see the escape hatch from my childhood. I was like someone who knew they were soon to quit a job they hated and was going through the motions.

  But we weren’t going to lunch “just us girls.” My mother drove right past the restaurant we went to for special occasions and continued up toward Parliament Hill.

  “Where are we going?”

  “You’ll see.”

  I was nervous in general that weekend because I was covering for Marie, who’d hitchhiked to Toronto to join the anti-war protest for the victims at Kent State. And I’d been avoiding my mom because I was a terrible liar. Marie was supposed to be at her friend Debbie’s house in Orleans. I did not want to eat Mother’s Day sandwiches without Marie. Marie and my mother were either best friends or enemies, more the latter at that point in their lives. But they were remarkably similar—harsh but nurturing, fierce when crossed. I was the observer, the peacemaker, the wisecracker. I never confided in my mother, she was too Catholic, too afraid of our father.

  My mother stopped the car on Parliament Hill. She was dressed primly as always. She placed her pocketbook in her lap, adjusted her hat in the rear-view mirror, and said, “If you tell your father we were here, he won’t like it, and it will be your fault. You hear me?”

  “What are we doing here?” I craned my head to look around. There was the view of the city behind us, the imposing beauty of the Château Laurier hotel and the canal. But there were also crowds gathering in front of the Parliament Buildings, more than the usual assortment of tourists.

  “If we see any police, especially ones we know, we duck and run. We meet back here at the car. Do you hear me? Do not be noticed by any police.”

  “Mother, you sound insane. I thought we were having lunch.”

  “I went to a talk,” she said, as she pulled her lipstick from her pocketbook and, looking in the rear-view mirror again, swiped it over her lips. “The other night when I said I was baking at Marlene’s. I was with Marlene, but we went to a talk in a church basement. There were women there from Vancouver who had driven all across the country. I don’t necessarily think abortion is right”—she whispered the word abortion even though it was just us in the car—“but I went, and the women were very persuasive. I think this is important. But don’t tell your father we were here. If you tell him, there will be serious consequences.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “You will shortly, just follow me.”

  We got out of the car and walked up the hill toward the group that had assembled in front of the building. My mother moved so quickly and with such purpose, I stumbled a little trying to keep up. As we got closer, I could see that we were all women, most of whom were chanting.

  “Why are they here?” I asked my mother, as she edged into the gathering. I realized she didn’t want to be recognized. She shushed me and found her friend Marlene. Someone handed me a mimeographed pamphlet, which listed a set of demands about legalizing abortion.

  There was a car with a coffin on top. It was so strange to see my mother standing among these women holding signs that read things like THE STATE HAS NO BUSINESS IN THE WOMBS OF THE NATION!, ABORTION ON DEMAND AND WITHOUT APOLOGY!, and DON’T ROCK THE CRADLE, ROCK THE BOAT! This wa
s the woman who had a portrait of Jesus in literally every room of the house, including a giant crucifix visible from our beds lest we get any funny ideas.

  I felt overcome by the spectacle. I’d been to church nearly every Sunday my whole life, but had never felt this feeling, a sense of transcendence, a swelling with divine purpose. Up until that moment, I’d never seen women, in a big group, do anything besides organize bake sales or charity rummage sales, or cook at the Friday-night church suppers, catering to the men. I felt the way I did when Marie had taken me to see the Who the year before, like I wanted to be them. Only this time I could conceivably join them. I looked around at the women and memorized their clothes, what they were saying. I wandered away from my mother and took everything in, and chanted so loudly my voice got hoarse.

  Later, in the car, I read some of the information on the pamphlets. “Two thousand women die a year from illegal abortions!” I read, astounded.

  My mother put the key in the ignition and paused. “Your sister could have been one of them,” she said, “last year.”

  “No, that’s impossible. Marie tells me everything.”

  “Not everything. You were too young. She didn’t want to upset you. She was going to go to a place, a dirty apartment with a butcher, basically. I overheard her talking to Debbie on the phone, and I took the money from the savings, and I sent her to some women who know how to do it safely. I told your father it was for a new couch and then I bought a couch from the thrift store. It was the safest option. But still very dangerous.”

  My mother made the sign of the cross and started the car.

  I was in awe of my mother then. And confused.

  “But do you think it’s wrong?” I asked her.

  She fixed her eyes on the pedestrians crossing the street in front of us. “Yes, in a way, but once you’re a mother you have a different understanding than a priest, or a man who will never have his own child. My heart led me to that path with your sister, because she is my child and I want to protect her. I don’t regret it. Men talk a good game, but they don’t have any idea,” she said, driving back to our neighbourhood. Instead of staring out the window, daydreaming about finally leaving this stuffy city, I stared at my mother as she drove those familiar streets. She was like an alien mother I had never met.