Cherry Beach

by Laura McPhee-Browne

  ‘And I had a few wines before I left work. Lately I seem to be getting drunk so quickly…’ Her voice trailed off and she closed her eyes again.

  I felt like I should be worrying about her losing consciousness, but there was no reason to. She was tired because she was working too much and not eating enough and drinking too often. I couldn’t do much about any of that, and I didn’t worry that she wasn’t telling the truth. It was important to try to let some of her go.

  ‘Okay, Het. Sorry to hound you. Let’s go up to bed.’

  We walked upstairs together, Hetty groaning with every step, telling me she never exercised anymore, that she was so unfit, that her heart was fatty and broken. We sat on the bed and planned the adventures that we would have together, soon, when we could both take the time. I didn’t believe the words, and tried to think about Faith instead as we shifted down into sleep. Her body was hot in my head, and I basked briefly in it.

  My mind went back to Hetty on the couch, slumped; Hetty standing with her thin body, showing me something that wasn’t there; Hetty so tired she couldn’t explain herself, or help me understand. She started to snore quickly, and I tried to hold the noise inside to remind myself that she was fine.

  When I slept I had dream after dream of Hetty sleeping, of her covered in tattoos. In one she had a tattooed face, and her lips and her eyebrows didn’t move when she talked. She told me she was hungry but she couldn’t eat, because her mouth wouldn’t open. Then she turned into Elaine, the way people do in dreams—morphing so surreptitiously I didn’t question it at all. When Elaine started to laugh at me, I walked away, looking for Hetty throughout a windowless, doorless house. There were baked beans splattered on every wall, slimy like the insides of a body.

  MERE

  a sheet of water, standing

  Faith met me after work one afternoon in late August, when Toronto was hot bricks and turgid afternoons. We had been seeing each other for over a month, in an official sort of way, though neither of us had come out and asked the other if we were girlfriends. I was starting to know what her body felt like when I was holding parts of it, and feeling a little more like myself when I was around her, but it was still scary to see her and be reminded of how much I cared.

  It had been a busy morning at Cafe Art Song, with a group of older women coming for cake and coffee and then lunch before a gallery tour. They had been joyful and raucous—howling into their milkshakes and choking on their stews with crusty rolls as one or another told a joke or reminded the others of a silly time in their past. I hoped I would have a group of friends like that when I was older. They seemed free, and sure of themselves. They smiled generously when Minnie and I came to check on them, or delivered their orders, their kindness easy. Minnie and I told each other how much we liked them when we passed in the kitchen, and by the time my shift was ending I felt I should say goodbye and thank them as I left.

  Faith was wearing a dress that looked like a neat sack tied at her waist with a long stretch of rope, and her hair was curled into a little bun. She looked pretty and clean, despite the wet and roaring heat. We sat down at one of the tables at the front of the cafe and looked at each other, and Faith asked me about my shift. She seemed to understand the weird feeling like love that I was having for the group of older women who had been our customers for hours, and told me her favourite thing to do was to watch groups of older women. Their proud chaos made her feel optimistic, she said, as if being female got better with age.

  Minnie brought out a small bowl of pistachios hiding in their shells and little glasses of lemon soda with floating rosemary sprigs for us, and I introduced her to Faith. They smiled at each other and said they had heard a lot about one another while I broke the shell away from a small green nut and ate it.

  ‘What would you like to do tonight?’ Faith asked me, after Minnie had left us.

  I hadn’t thought about what we might do—a sign I was becoming more at ease with the idea of Faith and me. She was so polite sometimes—too polite to tell me what she wanted, for fear it would make me feel as if I had to want it too. I had noticed that many times in Canada—the conscientious politeness; the dedication to never telling other people quite what they thought or what to do, in case it was too much. I hadn’t realised how direct Australians were, how direct I was, in my own way. Sometimes I felt like a brazen weed yellowing at the edge of a manicured lawn.

  I suggested we take the streetcar down to The Beaches, in the east of Toronto. I’d not visited this area, but I liked the name and wanted to see if the picture in my head was anything like the reality. Faith told me she hadn’t visited there for years, but remembered it had felt like she was on holiday when she had, sauntering along the boardwalk and browsing the many shops selling ice cream and beach towels. To have a part of the city called The Beaches in a place that has lake water at its edge seemed odd, and the idea of it felt very North American, as if we were about to arrive at Coney Island. Faith warned me to curb my enthusiasm—it was just a wealthy town on the edge of the city.

  We waited for the 501 streetcar for twenty minutes before Faith suggested we start walking. There had been more and more people gathering at the stop and now there was a pack. I could feel tension rising and the grumble of polite Canadians who were too frustrated and tired and late to tamp it down. Faith and I smiled at each other and started to move away from the crowd, down Queen Street towards the east. I took her hand, small and shy, and held it. It felt good to be out with her, and to show anyone who wanted to look what we were to each other.

  We had been waiting in the part of Queen where it was mostly clothing stores and cafes, where people carrying bags of things they had already bought walked in and out of big loud shops flanked by bored security guards. I hadn’t been inside H&M or Zara or Urban Outfitters but I had walked past them many times and seen the mannequins change outfits, from spring to summer, soon to fall.

  I noticed as we walked that Faith didn’t look in the windows, at the clothes on display or at her own reflection. I was always checking in the mirror of shop windows to get an idea of how terrible I looked or whether I needed to pat down my hair. She was compact and purposeful. It was calming.

  After the shops we began to enter the neat beginning of Queen Street East where the Eaton Centre sat tall and clean on the left-hand side of the road. There were people everywhere—families spending their Saturday watching hockey players glide around Nathan Phillips Square on rollerblades, couples in matching shorts and singlets waiting for hot dogs at the vendors who always sat either side of Yonge Street. They had so many condiments hanging from their little carts that I had never attempted to order one. I would have wanted every topping—pickles, cheese, mustard, onions, those tasteless sliced black olives that were called Spanish olives in Australia, tomato sauce, shrivelled sauerkraut. I imagined that if Faith ordered one it would be plain, maybe covered with a thin trail of ketchup. I felt abundant around her, as if at any moment my indelicateness would become so evident she would shy away, and I’d never get to kiss her again.

  I squeezed her hand and pointed out the dogs standing or sitting with their owners all over the place. Torontonians love dogs—the more eccentric the better. They were hot and tired and patient: small ones with big curls of frizzy yellow hair, big ones with black tongues and snake tails. We decided to pat any dog that came close, letting them sniff our hands first to show them we were safe.

  As we crossed over Yonge Street and moved along Queen towards Church, there were fewer dogs. By the time we were at Jarvis there were no dogs at all, and at the front of Moss Park on our left we could see a group of men standing and one man on the ground beneath them. It was a park I’d been told not to walk through at night, and whenever I’d come down this way I’d seen unwell men and women, a completely different town to the one that only five minutes west was teeming with well-off people out for a nice time in the sun.

  ‘Moss Park is absent from the psyche of so many people who love this city,’ Fait
h said, as we waited to cross at the Jarvis Street lights. ‘It’s like we just close our eyes as the streetcar passes by this part.’ She moved her hand to her hair and pushed it back, exposing a smooth forehead, lightly freckled. ‘No one says anything, and everyone just keeps pretending that Toronto is perfect, and it doesn’t change.’

  I matched my steps with hers as we kept walking, slower now. It felt dangerous to be here, and I hated that I didn’t seem to be able to push past that.

  ‘I wonder why he’s on the ground,’ Faith said, looking over at the prone body. Her own was slightly tensed, and when the lights went green she walked quickly across and stood at the edge of the gutter so she could see better.

  I joined her and could see that the man on the ground was moving slightly, kicking out at those who were standing above him. They were laughing, the men standing; the man on the ground wasn’t, but he didn’t seem distressed either. Then he pushed himself up to sitting and stood up, and he gave a few of the men standing a gentle punch on the arm. Faith’s body became soft again. She looked at me and smiled, shrugging her small shoulders.

  ‘I thought maybe he was in trouble,’ she said quietly.

  We kept walking, Faith with her head down. There was a hot wind coming at us along the pavement that brought the smell of something like rotting flowers, and I didn’t know what to say. I looked over at her and saw that she was looking a little at me, with the corner of her face, her cheeks and neck a little pink.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said.

  I didn’t want her to think anything she did wasn’t okay. ‘Don’t be sorry,’ I said. ‘Are you all right?’

  She nodded and we walked a little faster, both of us at the same time, as if to move past whatever this was. I hadn’t felt properly uncomfortable with Faith until that moment, and I remembered again she was a full and mysterious person, who held within her the possibility of breaking me apart and not making sense to me at any moment. I felt so scared that my hair bristled where it met my scalp, but I just continued to walk, and took her hand again, hoping mine wasn’t shaking now. I decided then that I would go back into myself after the night. It wasn’t worth it, this fear. We would just drift apart, and it would be expected, and I wouldn’t have to worry about this anymore. It made the rest of the evening feel less daunting.

  We were coming to the beginning of the Riverside Bridge, where you could turn left and enter the Distillery District. I had walked down there with Hetty soon after we arrived and we had sat at a cafe for as long as we could on the same margarita each. All the restaurants and bars in the area had seemed to serve only margaritas and oysters, and we could only afford one of one. It had been overcast that day, and Hetty had been wistful and slow: the beginning of her descent, it seemed now. I wondered what it would be like to tell Faith about how Hetty had been lately, and whether she would want to talk about it.

  ‘My friend Hetty isn’t going very well,’ I said, starkly, as we stepped onto the arch of Riverside Bridge.

  ‘Oh no,’ Faith said, sounding concerned.

  Ahead of us, above the bridge the words THIS RIVER I STEP IN IS NOT THE RIVER I STAND IN were written in curled capital letters. I said them inside my head. I didn’t know quite how to explain what had been going on with Hetty, but I hoped it would help to tell someone.

  ‘Yeah.’ I stopped. Below us wasn’t water, but just another road on a lower plane, I reminded myself.

  ‘You know this bridge is just a road curved over another road?’ I leaned over the side of the concrete barrier stopping us from walking off the edge. ‘There’s no water down there.’

  Faith laughed. ‘Tell me what’s happening with Hetty,’ she said.

  I told her how Hetty had changed, and how much it seemed like she wasn’t aware of it. I tried to explain that one of the ways she had changed was this lack of awareness, as if she no longer understood or cared how those who loved her felt, how she came across, what people thought or felt. I told her about the weight loss, the way she fell about when she was walking these days, how a couple of weeks ago she had thought she’d got a tattoo and all there had been was bare skin.

  Faith took me seriously. She touched my shoulder and when a few tears popped out of my eyes she didn’t turn hers away. I hoped as I talked, gasping a little, that it didn’t seem strange that I was sad about what I was telling her, but of course Hetty and I were best friends and I had told Faith this, and of course she was gentle and nodding and asking and reasoning, and by the time we had reached the middle of Leslieville, hand in hand, I felt lighter. The tears dried quickly and I hoped they had blushed my cheeks rather than reddened my nose, and we stepped into a shop for ice cream that was full of dogs and children and well-dressed parents, where Faith ordered me a Rocky Road and I ordered her a Peanut Brittle.

  She seemed to understand what was happening with Hetty, and communicated this to me quietly.

  ‘She’s not well,’ Faith said, and took a small lick at her cone. She swallowed, dabbed at her mouth lightly with a serviette. ‘Does she have a doctor?’

  I wasn’t sure, perhaps another sign that Hetty was slipping away from me, but I doubted that Hetty had a doctor in Toronto. She hadn’t ever been good at looking after herself and never had any money. We didn’t have health insurance, hadn’t been in Ontario long enough to register for the generous health service. She would have had to be crawling from illness to book herself in.

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘Can you tell her? That you’re worried?’

  ‘I’ve tried.’ I hadn’t really tried. ‘I’ll try again.’

  Faith’s eyebrows lifted and she smiled at me. She leaned over and kissed me on the lips, licking at the slick of ice cream there. My insides shook, down to my groin, then felt like they had been scooped out. I wanted to push her down onto the hot concrete and touch her under her dress with sticky fingers. There were too many friendly dogs, spoilt children, loving parents wearing new chinos and pressed shirts. I suggested we keep walking, and Faith nodded before I had even finished the sentence.

  When we got to The Beaches the sky and the air were dull with heat and we ran straight up to the boardwalk and over towards the water to dip our toes in. It was so cold and my feet looked so big next to Faith’s, but there was nothing to worry about. A group of people had spread out blankets against the sand and were playing music, and they weren’t looking at us, so it felt private and full when Faith took my arm in hers and we stared out at the lake and the horizon.

  It was beautiful here, and I understood why the rest of Toronto seemed almost to hate it, or to dismiss it, rolling their eyes at the name. They couldn’t live here, because there weren’t enough houses; the few houses were owned by people who had lots of money and were very lucky and probably thought they deserved more than one spare room, and that would make anyone hate anyone else. A part of me hoped I could come here again and again, but another part felt like I would never return.

  We splashed each other for a while and then Faith swished her hair like a wet dog and suggested fish and chips. She said that she had only recently discovered that there was such a thing as fish and chips, had never imagined it could be acceptable to eat a fried meal out of a folded-over bit of butcher’s paper. We waited at the shop in the electric light, then ate the halibut and chips and coleslaw on the sand. I told her about the devotion to fish and chips in Australia, along with deep-fried dim sims and tomato sauce, and battered saveloys. She started choking slightly, and I had to pat her back and give her water until it settled.

  We didn’t talk about Hetty again that day. It was dark and we were still sitting on the sand close to each other when we saw that there was really no one else around anymore—that we were alone. We edged closer to each other, my body aching, and then she moved so I was lying down with my hair in the sand and she was over me, on top of me, and we lapped against each other for not very long before I was breathless.

  WETLAND

  saturated land

 
I stayed at Faith’s house after the beach and in the morning we woke up at almost the same time in her large lilac bed. She placed her hand down on me for a while, and then I could see her silky head there between my two legs, and I was nervous in a way that felt like floating. I could feel her tongue against my skin and we were both wetlands.

  Faith was so pretty that I didn’t feel like I should do the same to her, until she asked me to with a big voice that I hadn’t heard from her before. She smelt different to how she had smelt at the beach—she could open up to me properly there in her room, with the door closed and her bra around her belly where I had pulled it. I wanted to make her feel the way she was making me feel, and my stomach was hot against her thigh. She came quickly and with that same different voice telling me yes. Afterwards we lay on her pillows and I looked at her face with the light of the morning against it and let her look back at me, despite the fear.

  Faith made toast in the kitchen for our afternoon tea when we finally stood, giggling at each other and our mussed hair and all the raw parts of us. There was a collection of small pots of jam on her counter—an orange one, a yellow one, a red one with pink at its bottom. She spread all our slices with lemon butter and put one in her mouth to carry our coffee to the rug at the edge of the floor.

  I couldn’t talk then because she was too perfect and I saw her little nude feet on the rug, and when I sat down mine were twice the size and had short hairs at their ends and I was not worthy of her at all, all of a sudden. I felt like a giant slug. I wondered whether it was normal to want to say Thank you so much and Sorry, sorry, sorry and I’ll go now—I’ll never come back to the woman you’ve just made love to.

  She moved her head to the side as she watched me. ‘You okay?’

  ‘Not really,’ I tried to joke, but it came out sounding like how I felt inside. Stewed and sad.