by Zoe Whittall
He looked up at me, rubbed his beard. “She’s eating again! I think she’s going to be fine. I have to get up and do this every three hours or so.”
As he rattled off what the farmer next door had advised him to do, I looked at this man, the one I’d always hoped I’d be with forever, as though we were strangers. Sometimes this happened, as though a spotlight shone down from the ceiling to remind me that all our familiarity could distort the beauty that only newness can bring. He had a ring of sweat around the collar of his white T-shirt; his navy-blue toque was stuck with hay and half falling off his head. He cradled the lamb as she pulled the milk from the bottle. I could see it reviving her. I realized that maybe this would work, maybe we could start a family.
A few weeks later I went to the local doctor, who had an office in his house and confirmed what I already knew. Bryce honked the horn randomly as we drove back to the farm. I’m gonna be a dad! I told Bryce what I’d been thinking since I visited my sister. Maybe we could start over, just the two of us. Sunflower was a fun experiment, and maybe it was best to leave it at that. Bringing a kid into it, how would that even work? This was what my body was telling me, that we had to be a team, a unit. That putting up a fence with fifteen people was easier than with only two, but raising kids that way might be more difficult.
I could tell by the way Bryce kept his eyes on the road that he wasn’t in favour of this. But he was also tender, and didn’t want to upset me. And he was still thrown by my abrupt departure the previous month. The commune had been his one big dream, and he’d taken all the expectations he’d had to go into business or finance and turned that drive—and inherited money—into making his political ideas a way of life, a working community that was truly equitable. I realized in that moment that he felt as if I was asking him to give up his job, his whole life. And it didn’t feel fair.
But I also wanted him to care more about me than about the commune.
To me, starting the commune was more a great experiment, a question. I always thought at some point we would move on. But to Bryce it was an answer. I was drawn to his resolve, his steadiness and sureness. Can you blame me? His vision was exciting, but I have to admit I was never entirely convinced we could pull it off. I knew as little as he did about raising animals, working the land, and keeping an old farmhouse from falling apart even more than it already was. Still, I was delighted to discover that I had some untapped talents, and he couldn’t have built the fences, dug the ditches, or put in the new windows without me. My planning, research, and elbow grease made those things happen. I was also better with people—Bryce could talk to anyone about socialism, at great length in fact, but I was the one who organized meetings and delegated tasks, helped with conflict resolution. I was also the one who could focus on the details: starting a credit account at the feed store, putting tarps over the woodpile, having the tree branches trimmed before the spring storms. Bryce was the idea person and I was the action person. In that way, we were perfectly matched. The other members of the commune were idealistic dreamers who hadn’t found their way in the working world. So while everyone loved being there, very few really embraced the work. In fact I suspected that some of the core members, and the friends who would come to stay periodically—we had an anyone-can-pitch-a-tent rule—liked the commune because it meant they could take a time out and “work on themselves.” Everyone has their own process. So I tried to just go with it when Chris decided to brew beer, decided that this new business venture would make us lots of money. Then three months later, I tripped over the rusting equipment in the basement while going to check the furnace.
After we drove up the driveway, we lingered outside the truck before bringing in the groceries. I wrapped myself around Bryce in a big hug, not sure if I was reassuring him or myself. And to this day, I don’t know what switch turned off in me when I said, “Never mind, it’s just an idea. I’m just worried about having a baby. What if I’m not a good mother?” Is there a button that makes women do this? A switch in our wiring? Is backpedalling an actual pedal in our makeup? When do we decide that our dreams are not as important as our partners’? That we are not as important? So much work in my years since has been trying to solve this riddle.
“Are you kidding? You’re going to be amazing,” he said, hugging me tightly to him. I looked up at his face and saw how his eyes bore deeply down on me. This man loved me. I also could see that he had relaxed because nothing was going to change. Maybe he thought my idea was a hiccup, a mood swing, but it had been dismissed. I decided to drop it, at least for now.
When we walked into the house it became clear that Chris, who’d decided to take magic mushrooms that morning, had impulsively spray-painted the living room a bright green colour. We were supposed to make all major community decisions by collective. We had lengthy meetings every Tuesday and Thursday afternoons.
I stood there, holding my celebratory bottle of apple cider, and saw Chris, naked, huddled in a corner, holding the empty spray-paint can and grinning.
I just lost it. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Chris, still quite high, began to giggle in a fit, apologizing but still unable to stop giggling.
“I’m laughing but I’m scared of you, Juniper!” He laughed as if I’d made the funniest joke in the world, gulping, unable to stop. “Trust me, you’re terrifying!”
That’s when Tegan said, “Guys, guys, I’m pregnant, too! Our kids will be like siblings! Chris and I are pregnant!”
Chris started jumping up and down, covered in green paint.
I wasn’t sure what to do with that information. It stopped my tirade. Tegan was wearing her trademark terry-cloth romper, the one that looked like red shorts and a tube top with white piping that upon closer look were joined together. Her wisps of blond hair escaped a messy ponytail on the top of her head. It seemed impossible that she could be pregnant, being so young and immature herself.
“Are you sure? And you’re sure you want to keep it?”
At this Tegan looked offended.
“What, you against abortion or something?”
“No, I just want a baby. I’ve always wanted a baby,” Tegan said, indignant, as if I should have known that.
“Sorry, I’m just tired,” I said, and as the rest of the group came inside, celebrating the news and admiring the crazy green wall, I retreated upstairs. I stretched out on the bed and watched the late-afternoon shadows dapple the walls. There was a quiet, mouse-like scratch at my door, which turned into an insistent tapping.
“Juniper? Juniper—hi, are you in there?” The door cracked open and Tegan padded into the room, coming to sit on the edge of the bed.
“There you are,” she said. She curled around me. I felt hope and exhilaration in Tegan’s embrace.
“We’ll do this together,” she said, combing her fingers through my hair.
But all I felt was uncertainty.
Chapter 9
missy
you are supposed to feel amped in Vegas: fists full of cash, dancing for the groping lights, drawn to the seductive smell of brief, hot luck. The buildings seem blanketed in synthetic fabrics stretched tight, the pavement pulsing. You’re supposed to wear a short skirt, to feel like you’re perpetually getting finger-banged by a glittering, generous angel you’ll never have to see in the daylight. Things like water and fresh air aren’t necessary for survival in Vegas, it’s all sweat and swagger, booze and amphetamines, coughing up sequins into your morning-after cocktail. If you don’t leave Vegas with a UTI, you haven’t done it right.
But we’re smart about it this tour. The van stops on the outskirts just short of the fantasy. I feel physically depleted, but it’s my twenty-second birthday, and the hangover has settled into some serious birthday blues. I want to do something. For the first time in ages, I feel a little homesick, probably because I usually wake up on my birthday to a call from my dad singing into the phone. Last year, Amita made me pancakes and we spent the day playing hooky and watching John
Hughes movies until we went out dancing. I usually visit my granny at some point close to my birthday, and she makes me a molasses cake in the shape of a bunny, like she did when I was little. But no one can easily phone me here, though Granny and my dad know my tour schedule and have my management’s number in case of emergencies. So I am kind of holding out hope, feeling fragile with my coke hangover and needing a nap. The guys want to go gambling, but I don’t want to spend my birthday inside a dark casino, surrounded by desperate energy and potentially sketchy buffet food. I tell them to go win me some birthday money.
When I wake up, the room smells musty and I decide it’s too nice out to spend the afternoon waiting for a phone call. I debate phoning my dad, just to hear the voice of someone who has known me for longer than a few years, but talking to my dad these days is like reading those free typo-ridden magazines at health food stores that tell you you can avoid cancer by tucking crystal into your pockets. I was used to it; all the parents at Sunflower had been alternative medicine types and free spirits. Taylor’s mom, Tegan, for example, wouldn’t even look up if Taylor was standing on top of the chicken coop preparing to take flight with wings made out of a gingham tablecloth. She wanted to honour our experiments. My mom was the exception. She was the one who took us to the doctor for actual medicine, not just treating us with essential oils and goldenseal. She noticed when Taylor was just pretending to know how to read, and then sat with her every night practising her letters. One time, she told everyone we were going to the thrift store for new sneakers, but really we were getting vaccinated. That would have blown shit up had the others found out. In my memories, my mother was always watching over us. So when she left the farm, we knew we were on our own. We knew we could do whatever we wanted to, but we also knew that our only real parent had flown the coop. Our fathers and the other adults felt like taller kids who knew how to fix things.
That was why it was so weird when she left, out of all the adults. Most of them taking off wouldn’t have been that strange in the grand scheme of things. But my mom, Juniper, she was the one who knew about the world and seemed to care about our well-being the most. Why would the one who was the most invested drop off the face of the earth and never come back, or call, or write, or somehow check in to see if we were okay? Didn’t she ever wonder how we turned out?
Sometimes I fantasized that she had hit her head and had amnesia, like on the soaps I watched with Granny after school in grade eight. Or she had a brain worm and it made her crazy and she thought her name was Brenda and she worked in a shoe store somewhere in Alabama. Maybe she got lost in the woods and became feral.
Then one day in my first year of university I was on the subway, and a kid was screaming and throwing his food on everyone and the mom was shushing uselessly at him, and I thought, Oh, oh, this is why. Being a parent is actually a black hole of never-ending sorrow and boredom and maybe that’s why she left.
I decide to at least check my email, so I find an Internet café in a nearby strip mall. I check my inbox about once a month, and while I wait for the dial-up connection to go through, I doodle in my journal and eat a pack of cherry Twizzlers. I am still feeling a bit hungover.
I expect to see a birthday message or two, and I do have one from Amita, who catches me up on all the goings-on back in Montreal. There’s another message, from my high school crush Steve—random! I’m not sure if this is still your email address, but happy birthday. I saw you on SNL! I press delete.
It’s a strange feeling, to be known by strangers, but to feel lonely. I suppose it’s a cliché. When we play festivals—which we actually are doing here in Vegas—and I watch some of the bands, how closed off they are from even the other bands, so accustomed to being asked for photos and followed around, it does look lonely. I’m beginning to get a tiny taste of that.
I make my way back to the motel and drag a blue chaise longue beside the pool. Everything about the motel is made to look fancy, but up close everything is totally cheap—plastic flowers, plastic wineglasses, inexpensive wine disguised in champagne bottles, clusters of plastic jewels bedazzled onto the furniture. I massage my sore hip with some Tiger Balm, and pull my grey tube dress a little further toward my knees.
The pool is the nose in the C-shaped smile of drive-up rooms, and two little girls in matching lime-green bathing suits cannonball into the water while their father sips a take-out cup of coffee on another chaise longue. He is the kind of guy who winks at me when his daughters aren’t looking, and I briefly consider how his skin might feel against mine. But then I see a Confederate flag tattoo on the biceps he is faux-casually flexing.
Most depressing birthday ever? I write in my journal.
I draw a sad, wilting flower before I remember this is probably a hangover mood, not real feelings. In reality, my life is pretty great.
These feelings will pass, I write.
I manoeuvre under a tented motel towel to keep from burning and try to write some new lyrics, which results in a scrawled list of progressively awful clichés and forced rhymes. I fold the failed pages in the middle and rip them out, stuffing them in a coffee cup. Some musicians can write on tour, but I’m not one of them.
Several bands from the festival have also booked the same motel, so when a gangly tomboy walks by with drum sticks in her back pocket, I’m not surprised. She nods at me from behind giant sunglasses and I recognize her as the drummer for a riot grrl band. To best describe her, I’ll just say she is often mistaken for David Bowie. Everyone notices her, and by that I mean everyone wants to fuck her. When we crossed paths at a festival in Atlanta earlier on the tour, she flirted with me by the snack table.
She has tattooed arms and wears several bike-chain and leather-band bracelets, and an open plaid shirt over a white tank top that says Daddy. I can’t remember her name.
“Hi there, Ms. Alamo,” she says, stopping to block my sunlight. I peek out at her from under a cupped hand.
“Hey there, where’s the rest of your band?”
“Trying to find a macrobiotic food place.”
“Good luck to them, this is fucking Vegas. Want some of these?” I proffer a bright green bag of sour cream and onion chips. She nods and reaches in to grab a handful, then offers me a cold can of beer from her canvas army bag.
I take a sip while she settles into the chaise longue next to me, loosening her plaid shirt, then taking it off. The beer helps with my hangover. One of the green-bathing-suited kids turns from the diving board and gives us a semi-toothless smile.
“Are you a boy or a girl?” the little girl asks, fixating on Amy? Alissa? Not remembering is going to get embarrassing.
“Neither.”
“That makes sense.” She jumps off the board. Her father offers us both a scowl.
I laugh, but hope she wasn’t uncomfortable. “Does that happen to you a lot?”
“Yeah. Kids say what adults are thinking, but they’re usually a lot nicer about it.”
I feel like a shy teenager, unsure what to say next. I take a generous sip of the beer that is rapidly warming in the sun.
“So, what are you guys up to today?” I ask.
“I dunno. The band wants to go get their tarot cards read.”
“Mine went gambling,” I say.
“Ha, so gendered. Is it tough being the only girl in your band?”
“There’s more performative farting than I wish, but it’s generally not bad. I grew up on a commune so I’m used to being around lots of people. Is it hard to be with all women?”
“Well, there’s too much emotional processing and our periods are all synced, but I prefer it to gigging with dudes, which I’ve done a lot.”
We watch the girls in the pool do handstands. I press my fingers into the empty beer can, wishing I had another. I’m not sure that we have much in common, and my high school shyness has returned with a fierceness. Just as I’m about to make an excuse to sneak back to my room, she hands me another beer from her bag and tells me she’s rented a car since
the band will be here for a few days, then asks me if I want to go to a lake until sound check.
“Fuck yeah, I do.”
By the time we get to Lake Mead I learn her name is Andie. She’s older than me, though I would have guessed younger. She has a habit of playing with the little hair she has left on her head, growing out in tiny spikes from a recent shave, running her hands through it to punctuate what she says. A vegan but not an asshole about it, she’s been surviving on bean burritos, backstage fruit bowls, and packs of peanuts for the last few months. She’s been in bands since the late ’80s, when she wasn’t even old enough to get into bars, and pretty much lives on the road, but has a steady girlfriend in Los Angeles.
“When I’m home I like to be really domestic. I’ve started making pickles and jams. Right before we left, my girlfriend and I canned enough tomatoes for like, years.” She tells me about how they worked all day putting tomatoes in jars. She felt so fulfilled and tired, and they fell asleep really soundly, and woke up to what they thought were gunshots—they live in LA, so it isn’t inconceivable—and they dove under the bed. Finally they emerged and crept into the kitchen and all the jars had unsealed, and there was tomato and glass everywhere. At first, they wondered if the jars had been shot, but then they realized that they hadn’t properly sealed the jars and so the air had tried to escape, causing them all to explode. She still has tomato sauce stains on her sneakers.
I can tell she is the kind of shy I can deal with, relate to, but I know that other musicians think she’s snobby and remote, too cool for school. That’s notable, since everyone is affecting too cool. “The way I deal with music industry bullshit from dudes is to just keep my head down, play harder, play better. That’s what has got me here,” she says, “and it’s nice to have a break from all that in this new band.”
