Darkness Then a Blown Kiss

by Golda Fried

It was his beat-up boots with duct tape suspended there that made her finger down the sides of the tub covering some of the rust spots making it more and more white.

  Toad took out a can of beans and balanced it on the rim at the front of the tub. He said, You should see me on a road trip: I warm cans up on the dashboard.

  Eddie looked at him. Well a tub is a vessel.

  And he said, No, it’s not. It’s a holding tank.

  If Eddie knew how, she would grab friends from the world like bands grabbed musicians. You’re an excellent trumpet player, stand here. Toad was looking at her like she wasn’t considering something.

  º º º

  Look, I can’t sing, she finally said. I’ll croak. We couldn’t busk it out on the road or anything, so I hope you’re not souping up some great duo.

  He started to stroke her hair, and she realized she had already gotten him under her skin.

  She asked him, If the love song you write about me is shit, will you think it’s not really love?

  It wouldn’t really be shit if I was in love.

  She was thinking, Maybe we can sleep here while I vessel into dream . . .

  Toad hugged her more so that she wasn’t looking at the falling leaves but at the lights around that went ballistic.

  º º º

  She was walking down St. Catherine Street, and she came upon a hot dog vendor on the corner at Union. He was standing there alone beside his hot dog cart. He told her he could cart off at any time, he built the wheels himself, but he’d always be outside. He apologized profusely for the runny ketchup. Then he leaned over and whispered something, but someone else’s words were coming through.

  º º º

  Will you go to the ocean with me?

  º º º

  She was back in her grade 13 chem class and her lab partner was lighting up the Bunsen burner with a Zippo, telling her he needed her help, he couldn’t wait for her forever, she’d better snap out of it. Her chem. teacher was at the front of the class reclining with a smile, Don’t forget to boil all the water off slowly. We want residue. Pure residue. What do we call this? Precipitate. He had pen dots all above the top of his lab coat pocket where he kept sticking his pen. He said, We are all flat road holy toads. Now remember class, if you stick a frog in hot water, it will jump out right away. But if you stick it in lukewarm water and slowly turn the temperature up, you’ll have a nice blown up frog in the pot.

  º º º

  Toad couldn’t sleep and was lighting another one of his Export A Green cigarettes, the kind some call Green Death.

  He looked over at Eddie. Soon the sun would make everything white, and Eddie would be shuffling her papers for school.

  He left looking at the tubs dotting the grass even though every morning he had poured out little puddles of milk for the cats on his green linoleum floor hoping for a scene like this one.

  º º º

  When Eddie woke up, she had black lines on her cheek and ear from his eyeliner. It was all she had as a note from him.

  º º º

  It begins with the piece of paper in your hand and the handwriting. I asked my dad if I could have his signature style for my own and he said: Behind the signature of a person are so many incidents and crazy times and you want your own, don’t you? And so I was thinking when this guy and I were whirling down the fire escape, did that affect my H’s? Because if you think about it, a capital H could be like two people touching hands. And meeting this guy, it was like how I first saw an envelope being opened in a whole new way to my perception of the way things were done: from the side instead of the top. The folded pages come out like sea-shells from a paper shopping bag instead of sideways like a presentation. And when he bent down to kiss my hand like some other time than so do you want to rent a movie or do the restaurant thing again: that would have had to be a lower case h situation. The h started things, and you didn’t know what was going to happen to him and her and still don’t.

  º º º

  Instead of going up the fire escape, she went around to the front and up the stairs. It was a gray Saturday. There might be mail because Phase and Kent would just leave her mail in the box if it had her name on it. When she peered in, there was a white business-sized envelope addressed to her. She tore it open from the side. It was from her dad.

  She was always tearing into the apartment like she had to use the washroom and then was always sneaking back out like she didn’t buy anything.

  º º º

  So Kent e-mailed me from school: Well, this teacher is only giving me an A-. All alphabet stuff. I mean, some of my friends were all of a sudden using e-mail and would constantly ask, Are you using? I sent them each a pen.

  º º º

  They found a dead rat in Phase’s room. They kept talking about the maggots and not the rat. Even when things die, they’re still talking about the presentation, Eddie thought. Phase wouldn’t stop sobbing so finally Eddie went and got some toilet paper and handed her some.

  They’re just white things, Eddie said.

  They’re hardly white, Phase replied. And anyways, white is a lie.

  Eddie went to the tubs to wait, told herself, Believe in white till the end.

  º º º

  Before that night, she had only seen the tubs from behind a window. She brought Phase’s carpetbag full of party favours. She hoped he’d bring a bag full of tuxedo shirts and bloated books from times that he fell asleep in the tub at his place. She took off her shoes. She let her toe sink into the skin-coloured sand by the side of the tub whitening and whitening, thinking I still want to get letters –

  By now she was attracting the leaves as they pattered down on her, covering. Pretty soon she was wishing for Toad so much that she saw a key-lime Pacer trickling towards the expressway to the ocean and maybe he’d take her along.

  º º º

  When her roommates finally stomped into Eddie’s room, Eddie was already gone. Kent with his parasitic eye for business saw the letter on the floor and picked it up.

  Mom had a tiring day visiting. She went to bed early and was getting ready for tomorrow. She was last seen eating popcorn and reading a harlequin romance.

  Dad.

  And who knows where the hot dog vendor’s words were now but then he had whispered to Eddie, When all is said and done, it’s the wind that blew like handwriting.

  the hero in the grass

  (or how she will see him tomorrow)

  The girl and her boyfriend would be on horses, something like Sugar and Chester, and there would be no marked trail. Once in awhile they would stop and look at carvings on the sides of mountains and he would pretend to know what they were, and they would not fight.

  He gets into a cab with three knapsacks under his arms like pillows. She’s lying on the bed, body racking, with no pillow at all. He throws his head back, “I forgot to close the front door.” The whole inside of her apartment looks like a garage sale. He is thinking of the open door. He thinks he’s left an open wound.

  The girl tears through the morning on her bike. She had time on her hands like a gift that could easily break. She had come into the dep to get a coffee and is leaving with one. She rips off the plastic from her cigarettes like she is ripping off her face.

  The boyfriend drags himself over from the other side of town. Somehow the girl has put a chandelier in each room. He hears her pissing, and it sounds like ideas shattering.

  She used to busk in the metro. He had probably walked into one of her songs. A song about someone running.

  He is knocked out on her couch. He once bought books in different cities. He thinks, “If you lift my skin off and peer in, you will only see brown rainbows.”

  The girl is in her room with her best friend. They have names for everything. The best friend puts on her librarian glasses and walks out. The girl sticks her head out and says in the general direction of her boyfriend, “Well, are you next?” He follows her in.

  He sits at the kitchen table as she rolls ou
t cookie dough with a wine bottle. He says, “I think your neighbours are throwing buckets of snow off the roof.” She treads over to the window, “They’re defrosting the fridge. I think that’s what’s happening.”

  He still has his suit jacket on from his court date. She is teasing him about having a crush on his lawyer.

  She goes for a sandwich. There are two pieces of bread. Some light comes through the window and the bread looks like the surface of the moon.

  Down the hall on the bathroom door is scrawled, THE FLESH ROOM. The hero is out in the grass.

  lindsey and me on a party

  One summer Lindsey let me drive her around in a car.

  Her relationship had ended abruptly with Dayton. She told me in the car when I was digging into her French fries.

  I covered all the fires with ketchup. I told her, “Things are slowly deteriorating with me and my boyfriend. He told me he’s going away in September. He’s not going to be there.”

  It was first love for both of us. Gone.

  I sprinkled salt into the ketchup. Lindsey was brutally shocking and horribly funny and I heard once terribly mean. She said, “I feel like dancing.” This meant we were off to a dance club. I didn’t feel like dancing but I was already bouncing around in the car.

  My boyfriend was surprised. I had always made him drive if we were going anywhere. And why Lindsey? He heard she threw a lot of tantrums, or her sister did. “Anyway, glass ends up breaking.”

  Lindsey was more honk-sensitive than I was. My confidence was up. Her parents liked me. I found out she read books. Ones with short stories in them.

  “Who reads short stories?” I had thought.

  I paid attention as she made faces to punctuate the stories she told. I found myself in picture-like poses.

  We had other kinds of conversations too. The kind where she sat very still and laughed nervously.

  She told me she had really loved Dayton. She studied up on the things he liked. She tried not to be intimidated by the many friends he went to the movies with. He made her so nervous, she often puked at night just thinking about him.

  She had a framed poster Dayton had given her still hanging on the wall. I didn’t tell her she should take it down. I had a stuffed animal my boyfriend had given me that he had his whole life. He had said, “The eyes fell off, but I always pretended it could see anyway.”

  Her father gently sat on the couch watching TV while I was waiting for Lindsey to come down. He looked like he was looking into mountains. He had all the patience and calmness of someone who has journeyed into mountains. I sat down and felt like saying, I feel like she is trying out a subdued sort of friend.

  He looked over at me as if his neck was in a brace. He asked me, “Do you know where you’re going? You should always plan a way to avoid traffic.”

  “No, I haven’t planned on anything,” I said.

  Their dog came up to me and attacked my knees. Lindsey hurried down and tapped it on the nose. “Be nice to my friend,” she said.

  My boyfriend and I set Lindsey up with this guy named Terry. We all sat on a blanket and watched fireworks like chess pieces waiting to be moved. Terry was really an inappropriate match, I felt awful about it. He was a heavy joker and Lindsey sat there trying to smile. Wanting to like him. Her jaw loosely swinging on hinges. My boyfriend and I should have picked someone a little more sensitive.

  Terry’s ice cream plunged into the grass, and he was the only one laughing as he jumped up to buy a new one.

  It was the end of summer. Lindsey said she wished her soul could be like perfume. I said I wished mine could be like feathers.

  One time I thought I saw my ex-boyfriend and honked but he kept walking. Lindsey heard and slid into the front seat glad to see me and it was the following summer.

  She thought I’d be proud about Craig. Now Craig did a lot of things to naked girls in fur coats and described them vividly to Lindsey over the summer. Lindsey was much amused by this and talked him through it, through weeks of episodes. They were like an ongoing brother and sister. They had debates.

  He convinced her to go to a rock show that I had to see. Lindsey kept dragging me into the washroom for most of it. Her perfume was up against the smell of toilets, and she kept pouring it on. I was in love with the band and felt the music evaporating.

  “Just forget about him and enjoy the show,” I screamed.

  Craig ended up putting his arm around her, his hand holding a plastic cup, and beer splashed in her face. She wanted him to kiss her. But didn’t want him to.

  In the car on the way home, Lindsey was not going to go to any more rock concerts with me and I had only gone to one movie with Dayton at that point.

  I decided to go on my own and tell Lindsey about Dayton myself. I hadn’t spoken to her in months. She listened calmly. She didn’t make a scene. I left right after. There were no hugs goodbye just eyes plunging into her hands.

  On the sidewalk, I tried to piece it together. He was in the stairway and the cigarettes landed on the floor as birds flew out of a tree. He was a jester on the sidewalk with the family dog when I had to do some deep thinking. He was on a couch in a friend’s kitchen when I was far away from home.

  Dayton took my hand and went over all the differences between him and my ex-boyfriend to ensure in my mind that it would work out. I went home and looked at the stuffed animal my ex-boyfriend had given me, its eyes pecked out.

  I asked about Lindsey from time to time. It was like clearing out the last few of her gum wrappers from the floor of the car before giving the car back to my parents. It was like looking for scraps of food.

  I waited for Dayton in his kitchen to come back with dinner. Outside in the living room he had a million books he had read. I could never come close to reading a sliver of them. I thought maybe I could start with some short stories.

  Dayton came back with all the ingredients for a Caesar salad in a shopping bag. He put the head of lettuce on a chopping block.

  “I had coffee with Lindsey today,” he said. The lettuce fell apart like feathers. I held one up and waited for him to go on. “She went on and on about herself.”

  Whenever I felt the worry come on, I generally ended it by not talking about Lindsey at all. If we did talk about her, it was in a hushed way like her soul was in the coffee.

  “How’s she doing?”

  “She was in good spirits. She thinks first loves should keep in touch.” Then Dayton’s eyes dodged about the room a bit and he said, “She told me she’s never going to forgive you.”

  The clouds looked like shredded Kleenex.

  Lindsey had put heaps of sugar into our coffees, and it escaped from the spoon. She turned up the radio until it made us bump into things. She tossed her closet on the bed saying, “Honestly, we can go anywhere tonight. You decide.”

  honeysuckle

  Honeysuckle laughed loud from the showers in Residence and sang at the top of her lungs. “If I could pick my friends, I would,” I’d think in my bed late at night. She let me come to the library with her. She studied all the time. She studied in the science library instead of the arts one as if that would make it more serious. She hated her name. Didn’t hate it really but was annoyed by it. Meanwhile, I’d be telling my mom, Honeysuckle and I did this, and Honeysuckle said this, and my mom would think I had an imaginary friend.

  Honeysuckle had an exercise bottle for water, and I had to keep getting up to use the water fountain.

  I was trying to get into a creative writing class and wrote poems like “mother and son” pretending I had to raise a kid by myself and was handling it fine. The poem was such fantasy and skipping on the lawn. It rhymed.

  I’d tell Honeysuckle as much about me as I could, while she packed her schoolbag. She gave me a sponge to stick up my vagina. I don’t think I even took it out of the box. It just sat in with my underwear drawer like an air freshener.

  Burrita had a mouth louder than Honeysuckle. Burrita would open her mouth and there would be
this black hole. Burrita would say to Honeysuckle, “Let’s make everyone think we’re a couple,” and they would stroll down the sidewalk holding hands. They’d plunk their salads down in the dining hall and everyone else relied on glasses of pop.

  Shrieking came from Honeysuckle’s room. Burrita was laughing knocking her head on the wall. Soon everyone knew. “I haven’t even had SEX,” Honeysuckle screamed, “and I got CRABS!” Burrita and Honeysuckle walked off with all Honeysuckle’s clothes bundled in sheets, Burrita telling everyone to stand back. Someone dropped a popcorn maker into my hands.

  By next semester Honeysuckle and Burrita moved out. They made coffee in the morning and stirfrys at night. “I had a dream I peed oil,” Burrita said.

  I walked by the dep where I had seen Honeysuckle buy a yogurt cup and ask for a spoon. Once she had bought three oranges.

  I was sitting in Honeysuckle’s room and she had to wash a plate that was in the sink. They didn’t have a living room. Burrita’s room was closed off by a purple scarf.

  Burrita had made a huge lasagna and offered Honeysuckle some without looking at me. I felt like a little cactus plant on the window ledge and then I was outside.

  By the end of they year, Honeysuckle announced she was living alone. I asked her who I should live with and she said Burrita.

  º º º

  Burrita gave me the purple scarf to drape over my window. I didn’t look outside the whole year.

  My friend brought over a pineapple. “I tried to pick something you’d find original,” he said. It looked like some kind of doll. I carried it over to the counter by its hair and made him cut it.

  “I’ll just carve out the time and come see you,” Burrita was saying to Honeysuckle on the phone.

  Burrita got a lot of calls from this guy named Westley. “You’re calling me from an airplane. Are you insane?” she told him. “Is the fact that you live over a bar supposed to impress me?” He wanted to take her to Paris once and she wouldn’t go. “Who do you think you are?” she hollered back into the phone.