The Spectacular

by Zoe Whittall

  “Oh come on, Carola. You were always so good at taking care of me,” he said with a wink.

  I rolled my eyes and gave him a playful shove. We were sipping bottles of beer, sitting at the edge of the bonfire, occasionally fanning flames away.

  “Have you talked to Missy lately?” he asked.

  “Just email. Last I heard she was doing another soundtrack for a show on HBO,” I said.

  “Yes, yes, I heard that.”

  “The end-of-the-world show?”

  “No, the one about the rich family with the secret. Sometimes it surprises me, how capable Missy is,” Bryce said.

  “She was always independent.”

  “Remember when she tried to run away on the pony when she was six and she made it all the way into town?”

  “I do, I do.”

  “Were we terrible parents, though?”

  “Well, we’re not going to win any awards, that’s for sure.”

  “But she turned out okay, she did. She did.”

  It sounded like a question when he said it like that.

  “She did, yes. Not that I really know. She talks to me now, but she has put up so many walls. She probably doesn’t do that with you.”

  Bryce shrugged. “I think she got fed up with me. I made a lot of mistakes, too.”

  I’d been waiting decades to hear him say that, and for whatever reason, tears began to well up in my eyes. To hide them, I took a long sip from my beer.

  “She and Navid are getting a divorce, you know.”

  “No shit. Ah, I never liked him.”

  “I loved him! Are you crazy? He was so present.”

  “He was self-centred. She did all the emotional work. He coasted on charm.”

  I didn’t mention the irony of Bryce saying that.

  “Did you ever tell her the truth about your mother?”

  “No, no. I don’t want her to remember Mum that way.”

  “But you did want her to think I’d abandoned her. You were fine with that being her memory of me.”

  “Well, you did abandon us.”

  “You’re oversimplifying.”

  “I think that was more to punish you, it wasn’t so much about Missy. But my mom . . . I want Missy to remember her the way she was. My mother was stubborn. She wanted to go out with some agency. I only realize now how little she’d had in life.”

  “Listen to you, using words like agency.”

  “We weren’t much older than them,” Bryce said, pointing to Chris’s kids, “when we bought a farm and we were going to live outside of capitalism. Look how young they are!”

  “I remember feeling old.”

  “I remember feeling like I knew everything.”

  “Funny how that shifts.”

  “It sure does.” Bryce put down his beer. “Should we get high?” he asked, pulling a joint out of his fanny pack.

  “I haven’t gotten high in years,” I confessed. “A little CBD tea at night, but that’s it.”

  Bryce sparked the joint. His hands were swollen a bit around the knuckles, freckled with age spots. This would always surprise me. The Bryce of my imagination would always be twenty-five.

  I watched the fire and took a small drag on the joint. I leaned back against Bryce, who was leaning against the log bench. As the dope took hold I felt my muscles relaxing. I moved my feet back and forth like windshield wipers.

  “I feel twenty-one again,” I said. “My body feels young.”

  Bryce laughed and he ran his fingers through my hair. It sent shivers down my arms and into my fingertips. Some things don’t fade in your body, even if they’ve long left your heart and mind.

  “Remember how beautiful my hair used to be?”

  “It’s still beautiful,” he said, continuing to comb through it with his fingers. I knew it wasn’t, nothing could make it luscious and shiny again. He proffered the joint.

  “I’m good, that’s enough for me,” I said.

  We watched the fire crackle, as the night grew colder. Tegan brought out a guitar and we sang some old songs, including some of Chris’s favourites, like “Tangled Up in Blue,” “Four Strong Winds,” “Our House.” I remembered the first verse or two, and then hummed along. I felt nostalgic and wistful in one moment, filled with gratitude for still being around in the next.

  Eventually the guests peeled off, in ones and twos. Most of them were camping out on the property, but a few of us had rooms in the house. Bryce kissed my head softly before he stumbled off to his own one-person tent.

  In the end, it was just Tegan and me, passing a bottle of wine back and forth, an old wool blanket wrapped around us. She poked at the fire with a long stick one of the kids had been using to roast marshmallows. We had often ended nights together at Sunflower like this. Only it was watching the sun rise, not the midnight moon, while blinking away the last sparkles of acid trips. We hadn’t spent much time in person for over a decade.

  “So, Karen’s really great. So relaxed about having everyone here like this. I’m glad I finally got to meet her.”

  “Karen is great,” she said. “We’ve been together for almost twenty years now. She puts up with a lot. She can roll with anything. Like we used to, you know? And how’s Larry?”

  “Same, same as always.”

  “You and Bryce seem fine, no drama, as the kids say.”

  “It’s been too long for all that to matter now.”

  “Do you think he knows?”

  “Knows what?”

  “About how close we were at Sunflower.”

  “Everyone was close at Sunflower.”

  “Don’t do that.”

  “What?”

  “Make light of it.”

  I poked the stick at the ashes, embarrassed.

  “All our old friends, they give me these looks like Chris was my first big love, but you know he wasn’t.”

  “He wasn’t?” I pulled my side of the blanket a little closer. I’m not sure why I was pretending not to understand. Tegan took a long swig of the wine. I didn’t like it when she got sloppy and tried to process old memories. What was the point? We couldn’t go back now. I only ever answered her phone calls before sundown. If she called after dinner she might be slurry and accusatory.

  “You’re gaslighting me,” she said, standing up, blocking the light of the fire. “You’re so afraid of conflict. We could have resolved it.”

  “Didn’t we resolve it at the ashram a few years later?”

  “I barely remember that week, Taylor had just died.”

  “That week changed everything for me,” I said.

  We were both going to stick to our stories, our version of events.

  It was my third year at the ashram, 1992. I was working in the laundry when Blue came to tell me I had a visitor. “She’s, uh, a real hippie. Like, I don’t think she has shoes. She seems . . . possibly not quite right,” she said, leading me upstairs.

  I didn’t recognize Tegan at first because she’d cut her hair and permed it. But as I got closer, it was unmistakable. She was wearing a T-shirt dress tie-dyed in blues and purples with a dolphin decal jumping across it. I got her a cup of green tea from the lobby’s refreshments table and took her outside to sit on the lawn.

  “How did you know where to find me?”

  “I called Bryce.”

  “Oh.”

  “This place doesn’t look like I thought it would, it’s so institutional.”

  “It used to be a Jesuit monastery. How did you get here?”

  “I hitchhiked. It’s harder now. People are so suspicious. But I got a nice trucker who tried to get me to accept Jesus into my heart.”

  “Well, you do look like you might have just escaped an asylum.”

  Tegan laughed and pulled her knees up to her chest and burst into tears. I remember thinking that I couldn’t believe we were almost forty.

  She explained that she and Chris had split, that it was too hard after Taylor’s death. I sat with the shock of the news, that such
a vibrant girl was no longer with us, the one who sat on my lap and who I’d taught how to read.

  Tegan slowly filled me in on everything that had happened after Sunflower disbanded—the property was auctioned off after the courts settled with the family of the girl who’d been injured when she fell down the well while on magic mushrooms. Chris and Tegan moved into an apartment in the town nearest to Sunflower. Chris wasn’t happy living in two rooms, started spending every night at the local bar, working seasonal jobs on farms while Tegan worked part-time at a daycare. She pulled a small photo out of her wallet—Taylor, with bright red teased bangs and black lipstick. “She was going through a wild period, I guess. She had a boyfriend we just hated. He was goth. They used to wander around town like ghouls. The school only had about six kids in her high school class. I didn’t want her getting pregnant and having to be stuck there. You know? So I made sure she was on the pill. So ironic that the thing that was supposed to keep her free caused her death. You’re not really supposed to smoke on them, and she loved smoking because she knew we hated it. Remember how we used to keep them from eating sugar? The last year of her life she just drank Tab and smoked and ate Doritos. She just didn’t wake up one morning. An aneurysm in her sleep.”

  I remembered her under the table when she was a kid, pretending to be a dog, those buckteeth from sucking on her middle two fingers all the time.

  “It was only then that I was starting to feel like a good mom. As though I could finally pay attention when it was just us in that apartment. And of course she hated that.”

  I moved Tegan into my little cabin—extremely close quarters. It was jarring to see two toothbrushes in the beer mug I stole from the pub in Mallow sitting on the little window ledge in the bathroom, next to the Dr. Bronner’s lavender soap I used for my body, hair, and to wash dishes in the tiny sink with the rusted-out basin. You could stand in the middle of the cabin’s only room, reach out your arms, and touch both walls. We spent most of our time in two lawn chairs outside, except when we slept in the single bed, waking to sore necks and limbs gone numb.

  I didn’t tell her about the guru. Tegan was weirded out by him, the photos and the altars. I took her to a talk he was giving and she left halfway through. I came back from sunrise yoga on the first day and she’d brought me coffee from the village, with lots of cream, the way I’d loved it before giving up coffee. I drank the whole thing anyway, and felt hyper all day. I had forgotten what it felt like to feel known. Even though I had friendships at the ashram, they were all very present-tense. They didn’t know where I came from.

  On the third night, she brought a bottle of wine back from her walk into town and we walked up to the springs.

  “I must confess I have an ulterior motive for this visit,” she said, lowering herself into the water. “I leased some land and I’m starting an all-women’s commune.”

  “Why all women?”

  “Why not? Wouldn’t it be more efficient that way?”

  “I guess it depends on the women.”

  “Also, I’m a lesbian now.”

  “Really? There are quite a few lesbians here, you know. Some couples.”

  “And you’re cool with that?”

  “Of course.”

  “You weren’t always so cool.”

  “What do you mean?” I knew what she meant.

  “We used to sleep together! For years. Everyone knew.”

  “That wasn’t a big deal, that was just youth, partying too much.”

  “It’s just us, right here. You can be honest.”

  “I am being honest. I’ve hardly ever thought about it since.” That part was true. I’d placed those memories in a box and labelled it irrelevant. I wasn’t ever attracted to any other women around me.

  But she looked devastated.

  “I came to rescue you,” she said. “So we could finally just be together.”

  “Oh,” I said, absolutely shocked. “That’s a lot for me to take in right now.”

  She dunked underwater and re-emerged, changing the subject. Tegan was in the deep stage of grieving where the only thing getting her through was big plans. The commune’s philosophy, the buildings they were going to build, the horse barns, the playground, the outdoor kitchen. She monologued about it, like a manic salesperson, all the way back to the cabin. We stood farther apart, the awkwardness of her confession like an object between us.

  That night Tegan went to sleep on the floor, and I stayed awake, trying to think of a way to apologize, to explain my feelings. Right before dawn I knew she was still awake, too, and I invited her back to the bunk. “We have a chance to start over again,” she whispered, before kissing me. It was such a familiar kiss. And this time, with none of the chaos of Sunflower and husbands and children around us, with only us, I could release all my fears and just be with her.

  I went to morning yoga, leaving her asleep. I was grinning and feeling a euphoria I hadn’t felt in years. I’m in love, too! I realized, as I stretched up to greet the rising sun. I ran back to the cabin after class, so excited to tell her. But she had left, scrawled a postal box address in the town nearest the new commune. I felt an odd mix of relief and sorrow. I wrote her long letters, confessing my love, but could never bring myself to send them. Eventually she sent me a letter. She’d met Karen. Finally, she wrote, I have met someone who really sees me.

  And now, over twenty years later, here we were, trying to talk about it.

  “I was in love with you, too,” I finally said. “I realized it the morning you left the cabin. I wrote you a long letter about it. It was a revelation for me. You were right. And then you sent me a letter that you’d met Karen, and soon after I met Larry, so I just let it be.”

  “You loved me, too?”

  “I did. Of course I did. We could both feel it. It was part of why I left Sunflower.”

  “That means a lot, to hear that, from you.” She grabbed my hand.

  “Everything all right out here?” Karen called from the doorway. “I was just about to bring a pitcher out to drown the fire.”

  Tegan jumped up.

  “Thanks, honey, we were just going to bed. Good night, Juniper.”

  “It’s Carola now,” I said.

  She walked inside, leaving me wrapped in the wool blanket, watching Karen pour water on the fire.

  Chapter 5

  missy

  when Agatha organized a meeting about the new band, she knew there was a fifty-fifty chance I might not show up. So she invited everyone to my house for it, and showed up early with iced lattes. I wandered around tidying up. Was I going to have strangers in my house? Had I become a hermit, that this concept of visitors was so uncomfortable? Was I becoming too used to my own company? I’d been composing for so many years by myself. But I did miss collaboration, and I certainly missed performing.

  Agatha sliced up raw vegetables on the kitchen table as I re-swept the floor. She told me about how, after the meeting, everyone was going to the Lexington, a dyke bar that was closing. Every night for two weeks they were having a goodbye party for it.

  “I don’t get it. Why is everyone so attached to a bar?” I asked Agatha.

  “You straight people have a million bars. This is literally the only dyke bar in this city! I met Finch there. I spent my youth there. Have some respect.”

  “Sorry, babe. Sounds good.”

  I was mostly just nervous because I hadn’t socialized in so long. I wasn’t sure I remembered how to do it. I’d looked at all the shoes and boots in my closet. How could I choose which ones to wear? I’d opened my medicine cabinet and scanned the nail polish for a colour that said awake human woman. I’d pulled out one of my old dresses from the band days, the kind that used to be baggy and ’90s style and was now a tight bodycon number.

  “You look perfect,” Agatha said.

  “Ugh, no, I look ancient.” I touched the deepening wrinkle between my eyes. It was all I could see when I looked at my face.

  “We’re all ancient now.
Embrace it! The alternative is worse,” she said, bringing a few music stands from the studio into the living room and arranging some chairs.

  Slowly, everyone arrived. Linda, the bass player from King Pussy; Debbie, lead guitarist from the Debbies. Agatha was going to sing, and I was going to play rhythm guitar, maybe cello if it made sense. I sat with my acoustic in my lap as everyone settled in.

  “We just need a drummer,” Linda said.

  “I’m working on that,” said Agatha, passing around the bowl of pretzels.

  “What about Tom?” I asked.

  “He actually said no,” Agatha said.

  “He said no? He’s been trying to get the Swearwolves to reunite! He’s making new music right now.”

  She shrugged. “It would be better to have a woman,” she said.

  “Or at least someone queer,” said Debbie.

  “What about Andie?” Linda asked. Even just hearing Andie’s name made me flushed and sweaty. It was so funny that I could barely remember the names of some of the guys I slept with back then, but I remembered every detail of that day on the beach.

  “Life is too messy for Andie right now,” Debbie said, and everyone nodded.

  “I’ll ask Tom. He might say yes to me,” I said, trying to camouflage the disappointment about Andie.

  By the end of the meeting, we had a rehearsal schedule, the start of a marketing plan, a tour to five or six major cities, and an idea to make a documentary about the tour. I was filled with purpose and it felt good. Really good. So when everyone was ready to head out to the bar, I went along.

  The Lexington was tiny and packed, but somehow Finch had gotten there early and settled into one of the few booths. I said no to proffered shots, sipped my ginger ale, and began to feel bored. Then someone put a beer in front of me, which led to one shot, which led to sinking into the seat leather and feeling like This is the best feeling in the world, that three-drink feeling!

  “You’re loaded.” Agatha laughed. “Now, don’t start crying.”

  I started crying.

  “This is a celebration night only!”

  “Other people are crying,” I pointed out.