Cherry Beach

by Laura McPhee-Browne

  We agreed to meet again, this time face to face, sitting down across the table from one another. Faith said goodbye, and I said goodbye, and I pulled myself away from her and walked down the steps to Beverley Street. I felt my heels kicking up slightly as I walked past Grange Park and down towards Shoppers Drugmart. She was already making me move differently. I was green and lush inside.

  RIA

  the sinking of a river valley

  A party at Marjorie was planned for the birthdays of Dill, Clark and Ingrid, all within the first week of summer. It was getting so hot in the middle of the day that it felt damp inside the kitchen at Cafe Art Song and I could smell wilting daylilies as I walked home each evening. I decided to invite Faith along, to see her among others, to put some pressure on this thing I hoped I was feeling. I wondered whether she found parties as difficult as I did. Maybe it would be different here, anyway. Back in Melbourne the parties had been full of people from school I had never known how to talk to, and too many old memories for the possibility of new ones.

  I got home from work in the late afternoon and was met at the door by Steph, who told me she was off to get the alcohol. I asked her to buy me three long bottles of beer and pressed money into her hot hand twice before she would accept it. She asked me if I had invited anyone but I didn’t feel like telling her—not because I wanted to keep anything secret, and not because I was ashamed that I felt things for Faith, but because I just didn’t feel like spreading myself out and waiting for reactions. She would meet Faith if Faith came, and she would draw her own conclusions, wonder her own wonders, or think nothing of it at all.

  Steph was so kind and tried to be unassuming, I could tell, but she could see things and maybe even read my mind if I let myself think about it for too long, because she had green eyes that grew up your neck and became a flower on your face before you could stop them near your chin. She smiled, and rubbed my shoulder before she jumped down the steps, and I knew she would likely know what Faith might be to me as soon as she met her.

  It was hot in our bedroom and Hetty wasn’t there so I took off my jeans and my shirt and lay on top of the doona in my bra and undies, watching my tummy lift up and down slightly as I breathed in the thick air and let it slowly back out. The undies were old and tight, and cut across my belly. I hadn’t noticed all day at work, wearing them under my jeans as I crossed from kitchen to floor, or on the walk home, but now the feeling was unbearable. I reached down and pulled them off—down my legs and over my toes—and threw them at my corner of the room. I could smell myself, and I liked the smell. It was rich and hungry, and made me remember I was full of lots of things. I thought about the party and felt tiny flutters in my stomach. I was always nervous in my stomach before a party.

  I wondered where Hetty was. There wasn’t much of her in the room, really, if I looked around from where I lay. She didn’t own much, hadn’t brought much with her from Melbourne and had accrued nothing since being here that I could see. Most of what she had here was still in her pack in the corner, a favourite spot of Whitney’s to curl up on top of and sleep. I guessed she had some things at work with her, or she kept them in the multicoloured bag she always had slung against her hip. The room was mostly Whitney’s and a little bit mine. Hetty was hardly anywhere, and I missed her.

  It was still warm when people started knocking on the front door of Marjorie, their arms full of drink, an energy in their eyes and bodies and voices. I had changed into a long skirt and blouse, the only special things I owned, and could feel my thighs rubbing against each other underneath. It wasn’t uncomfortable, but it did remind me of my body as I walked from lounge to kitchen to yard. I wondered when Faith would arrive. I took gulps of the fat bottle of Molson that Steph had bought me and felt the slow bubbles pop in my head.

  I watched Dill and Clark and Ingrid talk and laugh with their smudged pink lips and tongues, from the big bowl of raspberry punch Steph had mixed, complete with floating cherries and edible flowers that looked like yellow butterflies resting on its surface. I stood in the kitchen and spoke to Clark and Isabel and their friend Lou about the Australian summer—how even in Melbourne there would be stretches where it would be over forty degrees for days on end—and they told me they wanted to go there, like everyone did, and that they loved Australia already. I listened to Dill talk to a tiny girl with gold shoulders and tried to work out if he was waiting for Hetty. My Molson bottle emptied and I opened another one.

  After I had been offered some of the punch and a glass of Ingrid’s wine and my eyes were warm in their sockets, Hetty arrived with Elaine. They piled into the living room in the middle of a private joke, and Hetty looked at me with eyes that told me she was drunk already, that she wasn’t really there. My body tightened with Elaine near me—I could feel it in my shoulders and my lifted clavicle. I watched as Hetty fell against her and giggled, and Elaine lifted Hetty’s chin head and said, ‘You’re such a bitch!’ It wasn’t funny to me, this crude show, and I was disappointed.

  The drinks made my thoughts fluorescent. Despite disliking Elaine and feeling she was not the right kind of friend for Hetty, I knew why they were spending time together. Hetty craved defiance, and I couldn’t give it to her. I sometimes wished I was the kind of person who would tell a friend what was useful, that I wasn’t so often afraid of the potential for hurt feelings and a fight that I would be the cause of; but I wasn’t and I couldn’t be, and I had to come to some sort of peace with that. I would always have to share Hetty with these friends she would make throughout life who rubbed up against her and pulled her up and down. I couldn’t change it.

  I decided I would go and stand in the courtyard with Ingrid’s friends, who were dancing and sharing cigarettes and tying the fairy lights around their foreheads, but Hetty was saying something to me, loud and near now.

  ‘Can I talk to you?’ she asked, her face close with hot breath.

  I nodded.

  ‘We can go up to our bedroom,’ she said, as if that was something special. It was tiring: the pull of her booze eyes and the pull at my arm with her skinny fingers that didn’t know what they were doing. I wished she hadn’t come home.

  We saw Whitney on the stairs on the way up, cowering against the wall with her plush hair standing, her eyes angry at the noise and the house full of people she didn’t know. Hetty bent down to pat her and slipped, letting me grab at her sides before she fell. Once we were in our room, she closed the door and flopped on the bed, letting the air out of her mouth loudly.

  I wanted her to know I wasn’t just full of time for her. She had been with Elaine and now she was a wreck. I couldn’t clean that up.

  ‘What is it, Hetty?’

  She lifted herself up off the doona slowly, looked at me and sighed. ‘I think Elaine likes me.’

  I sighed. Of course she did. Everyone did. I did. Dill likely did. The whole party downstairs probably dreamed of having Hetty next to them; of kissing her neck, of hearing her and knowing her sounds were theirs.

  ‘Yeah. She probably does. Do you like her?’

  At this, Hetty groaned, and scratched her arms. I noticed that some of her nails were bloody around the edges.

  ‘No. Not like that. She’s tough. And she’s funny. But I don’t like girls in that way—not really. And she looks at me so intensely sometimes. I don’t understand it.’

  She didn’t even look up at me as she said this, and I reminded myself once again that she hadn’t guessed how I felt, how I sometimes let myself feel, about her. It almost made me angry, how she was just out there in the world, being gentle and gorgeous and callow, never stopping to wonder what that might do to people.

  Hetty sat up again then, and patted the bed next to her. I walked over and sat down.

  ‘The thing is,’ she said in a low voice, looking at me sideways, ‘sometimes she says things I can’t quite hear, under her breath, and it scares me.’

  The air around us stopped.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

>   ‘I know it sounds weird, but that’s what I mean. She says things under her breath. I ask her to repeat them but she denies even saying anything at all.’

  ‘Okay…But what do you think she’s saying?’

  ‘I don’t know! It’s weird. She says I’m imagining it. But I’m not. It’s like tiny whispers.’

  Hetty was picking at her nails. I could see dabs of red on the pads of her fingers where the blood had moved. She sighed heavily, as if she needed to hold each breath in as long as she possibly could before she let it out.

  ‘And she used to cut herself. All up her arms and down her legs. With a Stanley knife. Not anymore, but it’s so sad, Ness. I don’t know how to make sure she’s okay.’

  I remembered those white lines trailing the inside of Elaine’s arms: the only vulnerable thing about her on that day out the front of Cafe Art Song. Knowing she had cut those lines herself was knowing she understood pain.

  ‘But, Hetty, I don’t know what you’re trying to say. Is she being a bitch? Then stop being friends with her. If she makes you feel uncomfortable and then denies it, you need to do something.’

  It seemed to me that Elaine wasn’t the type of person who would say anything under her breath. I couldn’t quite picture it—yet Hetty was so upset.

  ‘I don’t know! I don’t know. I don’t think she’s being a bitch but it’s just weird. I feel weird.’

  I took her hands in mine and turned the fingers over. ‘Stop hurting yourself. Please.’

  She laughed, lightly, and pulled one of her hands away to pat me.

  Faith didn’t come to the party. I didn’t text to ask her why, but I waited in my skirt and my lace-collared shirt until one in the morning and didn’t see her come towards me, smiling, as I had imagined. My body felt tired, and the hope I’d been holding quietly in my tummy left, leaving nothing but fizz.

  That night I went to bed hours before Hetty but was awake when she crept in, the shadow of her body in the street light hunched over, as if that might help her keep quiet. She lay down next to me, smelling of meat and cigarettes. When I finally fell asleep the dreams were chaos.

  COVE

  the smallest indentation

  Halfway through summer I started to know Toronto’s streets and to feel like I was supposed to be walking along them, up them, down them. There was a warm drench to the city’s air in July, and I tried to enjoy the way my body moved through it. The doors of Marjorie, front and back and side, were left open to greet the breeze, and Whitney cooled herself under the leaves of our backyard oak, her fluffy tummy splayed against the bricks.

  After Faith had missed the party, she’d texted me to say she was sorry, and we met for a beer at Cold Tea, deep in the compost of Kensington Market. Across the bench from one another in the damp courtyard, we shared things and looked at each other shyly and then once we were drunk in a brazen way that made my throat open, we kissed in the dirty white corridor outside where an old man sat peeling carrots on a milk crate, and walked hand in hand across the pedestrian streets until she left me at my door.

  Faith was from London, a town in Ontario two hours to the south. She had known she liked girls since she was five, and had kissed her best friend when they were eight and pretending to get married. Faith was the groom, and said she realised then that she never wanted to be the bride or the groom but that she had really liked kissing her friend. When she suggested they do it again a week later the girl said no, and never spoke to Faith again. She circled girls after that, watching the ones she liked carefully, to see if they might be like her. In late high school she slept with a close friend who said she was ‘confused’ and later broke Faith’s heart. She had her first relationship at uni, with the young tutor of her Studies in Poetics subject, who was awkward and passionate and devoted, and she had been with a few other women since.

  Faith had told her parents, and rolled her eyes when she told me her mother had asked her, ‘Oh, but are you sure?’ and had later tried to make up for this with a celebration dinner. She didn’t share much about her father: his reaction or his presence in her life. He seemed to be inconsequential rather than devastating in his silence, and I thought I possibly understood. I told Faith I envied her the celebration roast chicken and lemon-meringue pie, and that I hadn’t told my parents because there didn’t seem much point.

  After we saw each other that night and confirmed the curiosity that flitted around us like street-lamp moths, we texted each other small parts of ourselves, like offerings. Faith told me that the only thing in the whole world that she truly enjoyed doing was reading. That when people spoke about the importance of doing what you were passionate about, doing what you lost yourself in, she always wondered what job there was that required only curling up on the couch with a good book. She seemed to think this meant she was fundamentally boring, but it was appealing to me. She lost herself easily in the stories of others. I wished I could do that.

  She told me in one of her long, winding texts that her favourite author, Margaret Atwood, lived in Toronto, and that she had this hope sitting like a jewel in her belly that one day she would see her. I had read one of Atwood’s novels, The Robber Bride, and found it dense and dangerous. Faith told me she had too, and that Atwood’s books were almost always like that—raw and dark and full, and full of pain, like sacrifices. I googled Margaret Atwood to see what she looked like and found a small, bright-faced woman with sprigs of white curl around her head. Faith told me that Atwood shopped at a Korean supermarket near where Faith lived, on Bloor Street West in Korea Town, and that she had spent far too many hours there quietly browsing and waiting, but had never seen her.

  I stopped myself from suggesting we stake out the place together. I was trying not to do all the things I wanted to do—ask Faith to stay over, kiss her stomach and touch her hair, tell her I already knew that I would fall in love with her. A wrong part of me wanted to tell her that she had taken over the space that was usually filled with Hetty, as if that would prove how excited I was, but I made sure I didn’t talk about Hetty much with her. Faith sensed things. She would know, if she heard enough, how complicated my feelings had been for so long.

  I told Hetty about Faith one night in bed with the moon shining in on us. It was past midnight but I couldn’t sleep, and when Hetty crept in I told her I was awake.

  ‘I met a girl at the gallery,’ I said, my head propped up with my elbow, not able to hide my smile.

  ‘Ness! How exciting! What’s her name?’

  It was funny that Hetty and I had never really talked about how I was gay. I had modelled this by never bringing it up, after I stopped going out with boys and started trying things with girls because I had to or I would have burst, and Hetty had simply followed me into the cave. Sometimes it made me angry, as if her silence was confirmation of how ashamed I should be; but I knew this wasn’t true. Hetty just didn’t think it was a big deal, and didn’t think we needed to talk about it unless I wanted to. She was so gentle sometimes it felt like laziness, or something more sinister like self-absorption. Her reaction that night reminded me that she was really only full of love.

  ‘Faith. She hates it.’

  Hetty laughed. ‘Why? Faith’s a beautiful name!’

  ‘Because her parents are crazy.’

  I told her how keen I was on Faith and how scary it was to be so keen so quickly, and how I was so worried I would ruin it with my knotted hair or my face or my personality. I told her about our kiss next to the old man peeling carrots, and how I hadn’t even felt embarrassed, but that now I was embarrassed, because I was so full and open, and it was exhausting.

  ‘Have you seen her since then, or just texted?’ Hetty asked.

  ‘Just texted. I don’t want to suggest something else in case she gets scared.’

  Hetty was sitting up now, and holding her teddy from childhood, Bear, in her arms.

  ‘When you were with her it wasn’t scary, it didn’t sound like it was, but now you’re away from her maybe you’re f
orgetting that.’

  I had hoped Faith would be the one to suggest we see each other again, but it didn’t really matter. She seemed to have a full life. If I wanted to be a part of that I might need to make sure of it myself.

  ‘Yes, that’s true.’

  ‘You like her; it feels good. Go with it.’

  ‘But she’s so good. She’s just so good and perfect and pretty, and when I think about her I feel like I’m going to vomit.’

  ‘That’s beautiful, Nessy,’ Hetty murmured, then laughed. She was an angel, lying there, listening to me, but I didn’t feel the pull I usually did, to touch her or lie down beside her very close.

  I sent Faith a text asking if she wanted to have dinner, Hetty clapping her hands next to me on the bed and telling me I was brave, and then we talked about how our weeks had been since the party, and I asked about Elaine and whether she was still acting in the strange way Hetty had described. The question seemed to change her and she sat up in the bed, her eyes glinting.

  ‘Yes, she’s still doing it,’ she said, then whispered, ‘but she thinks I don’t realise.’

  ‘Have you spoken to her about it again?’

  ‘There’s no point. She pretends I’m crazy. Yesterday she yelled at me about it.’

  I loathed Elaine. She didn’t deserve Hetty’s sweetness, her deluded loyalty. I wondered why Hetty was so reckless with her own emotional safety, where she had learned to devalue herself. It must have been her father, I decided: how difficult he found it to care about himself, his need always for something more.

  Hetty’s body had dropped and she was looking at the cover of the doona, which she held in her hand, rubbing it between her fingers and whimpering a little.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘She says I’m putting my own anxiety onto her and that she can’t do anything to help me unless I admit it.’ Hetty was crying now, quiet tears drowning her cheeks. ‘I don’t know what to do.’