This Is Not Chick Lit

by Elizabeth Merrick

  She chewed and swallowed. “Ceci, if you want to wear a lab coat for the rest of your life, be my guest.”

  The room pared down to two adjectives, hot and quiet. Across the province, as the grain elevators continued to fade, the winds moved from town to town and the meat moved from tine to mouth and my sister’s eyes blinked into another dimension, an aerobics of mind-over-belly. Another deep cleansing breath, this time from me. Although our table sat under a window overlooking the parking lot, I don’t think Allie saw a thing. Outside, big sedans glided to rest, their engines ticking. It was still light out. Under a street lamp, an alley cat tasted the ground before sitting back on its haunches, one leg flung up by its ear. One of Lewis’s ghost cats? I thought about wrapping it in a towel and taking it home with me.

  I went back to observing the ritual meatification. After a while, I stopped watching her and watched the dish instead, the platter remembering itself as the steak retreated; underneath was a low tide of pretty flowers that matched my sister’s halter top. Once in a while, the waitress would stop by, gawk, and refill my water glass. In the open kitchen, the staff that had begat the steak analyzed my sister’s odds as if following a hockey game.

  “Ten bucks says she puts the biscuit in the basket,” said the cook.

  “Nah, warm up the bus. She’s going home,” said the busboy.

  As she hacked at her side dishes, murmuring to herself, part of me wanted to go home, to halt the contest by scooping her coleslaw, by stealing a career-ending chunk of spud. At one point, she paused, losing precious minutes, her knife drooping in her fingers, blood darkening her skin. I put a hand on her arm.

  “Allie,” I said, “it’s okay to stop.” She shook me off, soldiering on as if she (like the cow she was consuming) was gifted with multiple stomachs.

  Plenty of contests feature the healthier levels of the food pyramid. Pies are in a special category. Hot chilies, yes. Seafood holds its own: in New Orleans, at the Acme Oyster House, the oyster-eating record is forty-six dozen in ten minutes. The International Federation of Competitive Eating lists baked beans and sweet-potato casseroles among its many trials. But there’s something about the consumption of flesh that impresses people.

  The meal was not the heart-to-heart I’d visualized. Beyond our mother’s sphere of influence, I had another reason for taking my sister to Calgary. What I wanted to tell her was simple: I was getting a divorce.

  “Allie,” I said, polishing my spoon with the edge of my serviette.

  “Um,” she said.

  “Lewis and I…we’re not together. We’re breaking up.”

  Blinking furiously, she shook potato crumbs onto the table. “What do you mean? What happened?”

  “Nothing happened. It was a mutual decision, and—”

  “Well, you must have done something.”

  I jumped up, pushing my chair back so violently that I knocked over my glass. Water flooded the tablecloth, making islands of her many plates. She kept eating.

  Seething in the back hallway, I stared at the pay phone (such a charming relic, like my marriage), wondering whether to call my parents and inform them that the most selfish person on the planet was consuming a seventy-two-ounce steak, and that we might be coming home later than expected. I did not know when I would break the news about my husband. Anyone could see that Lewis was a fine man, but I recalled my mother’s reaction when I introduced him, an appraisal that started with the shoes, detoured from his heart to his back pocket, and ended with her frowning. He was too old for me, she said. His parents were snobs. Astrologically, he was a dragon and I was a dog. We were doomed.

  A man walked by and yanked a pack of Export A’s out of the cigarette machine. I moved to let him pass, but instead he stopped in front of me, easing a cancer stick between his lips. His hair couldn’t escape the fact that it would have looked better on a girl—miniature waves danced all over his head like a motel painting of the seashore. A bottle of beer sweated in his fist. When he raised his eyebrows, I knew what he was going to say.

  “So, you folks from Japan?”

  I gritted my teeth. I was about to chide him with a history lesson when I spotted my sister across the room. “Actually, she is. My job is to take tourists around and show them the local color.” I chuckled at my own joke, my voice tinny and strange. Usually, Lewis was the wiseacre.

  The man, who was hoping to qualify as local color, said, “Would you like some beer? I haven’t touched it yet.” I considered admitting I was from Ontario. Surely that would work. Albertans were still peeved about the federal government taking control of their oil. I thought about driving him away by oversharing: I could tell him that I’d married too young, that I’d chosen an administrator instead of a husband, that the very qualities I’d loved in Lewis had strangled our softer traits until we were nothing but a pair of competing Palm-Pilots.

  Instead, I said, “Sure, I’ll have a sip.” The sip graduated into a swig, the liquid smooth and yeasty. “Thanks.”

  “Do you want to go dancing?” he said.

  I showed him my wedding band.

  He shrugged, and the shrug said, Hey, what do I know? Where I saw a dead promise, he saw a piece of jewelry, and who was I to be wielding a talisman that no longer worked?

  I sat down again, clutching an empty doggie bag just in case Allie needed to toss her steer. My stomach churned with the unexpected alcohol. She wouldn’t look me in the eye.

  “I’m sorry,” she mumbled, her apology smothered in beef. “It’ll probably work itself out.” I shook my head. Coming from her, “sorry” was a ball gown on display, formal and empty. It reminded me of the time my boss tried to ban the word view from all copy. This was the hardest catchall for a travel writer to avoid. You could use panorama, or vista, or scene, but sooner or later, you had to spell out what was in front of you.

  More than forty minutes into the marathon, the esophageal wonder that was my sister was in the homestretch, quivering as she hunched over her plate. Ten more bites. Eight more bites. The baked potato was an upside-down helmet, hollowed out to the point where it might have collapsed had I prodded it with my finger. The coleslaw fueled her last heroic shovelings. Five more bites. Her fist anchored her to the table. Fat coated her smile like lip gloss. The platter was almost naked now, the burlesque of eating stripping it down to a garland of poppies around a happy calf. Isn’t that morbid, I thought.

  And then she was done.

  They fell on her, whooping and hollering. A flashbulb anointed her gluttony. I abandoned the doggie bag. As for Allie and the state she was in, I can only say that when her Polaroid went up on the wall, she looked drunk. En route to the ladies’ room, she was waylaid by admirers at the long wooden bar. The bartender glued his high-five to hers, an old waiter ruffled her hair; my beer friend was there, with his bottled affection.

  Alone, I continued to the washroom, entering the sweet fallout of bubble gum, nicotine, and perfume samples, the calling card of teenagers just passing through. My teen years had been owned by the family business, an adolescence suffered among bolts of silk instead of other girls.

  I guessed that the wallpaper and the menu had been designed by the same person; as I stepped in front of the mirror to check my hair, I was dismayed by a pattern of ranch hands in the never-ending motif of trying to catch a steer. It was unspeakably sad. Under the jaundice of the lightbulb, I tilted my “married hand” back and forth, waiting for the reassuring dazzle of diamonds throwing off light. I was busy trying on the words again—divorcée, ex-husband—wanting to make them sound as common as they were. I could predict my mother’s reaction when I informed her of my twin failures—to brainwash Allie, to keep my ring finger in platinum. She wouldn’t even pretend to be surprised, and her judgment would fall on me like winter.

  I pivoted into a stall and vomited. The noise echoed off the tile. There was no one to hold back my hair. As I braced myself against the wall, I noticed a crayoned sign that said PLEASE DO NOT FLUSH PAPER TOWELS DOWN
THE TOILET!

  The door to the ladies’ room opened, leaking sounds of celebration from the dining room. The waitress poked her head in, excited by the prospect of disqualification. When she found out that the regurgitator was merely the winner’s sister, she said the same thing I’d said when Lewis broached the topic of separation. “Oh.” The door swung shut. After rinsing away the taste of acid, I wiped my forehead and tossed the paper towel in the toilet.

  When I materialized at the bar, I discovered that one of my sister’s fans had taken care of our paltry bill. Allie continued to hold court like a sunflower at a garden party, her back to me, the bartender straining toward her with a lecherous familiarity that should have worried me. “I’m in a food coma,” she giggled. My chest burned as I nudged past, desperate for air. Not comatose in the slightest, she glanced at me and mouthed the words Five minutes.

  Out in the parking lot, I failed to replace the convertible top by myself, splitting a nail. I thought I might tune to a radio station and sing along to other people’s misery. I thought I’d wait on the hood like the cool youth I’d never been, long enough for twilight to show its guts, for my sister to tire of the adulation. The deejay’s voice was sheer puree. “Hey, it’s dedication hour at the ELK, Calgary’s place for your favorite oldies and the hits of today. Pick up the phone to give a shout-out to that special someone.”

  As caller after caller dialed in, I wondered what the deejay thought of their choices. But after five laughable dedications, including gems by Bachman Turner Overdrive and Rush, I was surprised to find myself humming—my body in the driver’s seat, my fingers on the gearshift. I thought about turning the key and revving the engine, but after a while, I wasn’t thinking, but motoring.

  At 110 clicks per hour, the wind boxed me from all sides, my hands wrestling the steering wheel. The pink sky was like the virgin drift of newly opened ice cream, so gorgeous I had to remind myself that it wasn’t the planetarium. The day after tomorrow I would hop on a plane and wing back to my problems, but for now, as I gunned toward the grand peaks of Banff, I lost my interest in ghosts, and in crises that could not be solved in mountain time, because mountains are for people who need to know they’re destined for something beautiful.

  Samantha Hunt

  Once upon a time two men lived down at the bottom of a nuclear-missile silo. They were barely men, just out of their teens, and yet they were charged with the responsibility of pushing the button when it came time for nuclear apocalypse. Technically there were no buttons, but rather two keys to turn. They just used the word button as it made it easier for civilians to visualize what they were doing down in their missile silo. In actuality, each man would have to insert his own key and turn it. Together they would have to decide whether or not to destroy the world.

  Wayne and Dwight paid attention in alternating shifts, each ready to wake the other if the signal to act ever came through. They were not allowed to leave the missile silo and so each night and each day—the sixteen-inch poured concrete walls made it hard to tell which—they slept locked underground, not too far away from the huge hole that cradled a massive warhead already pointed up at the sky.

  When Wayne and Dwight were both awake they either played Nerf basketball on a small court they’d rigged in the control room or shot the bull. They’d discuss the moment they were both waiting for. They would try to imagine what would happen when it came down to it, if they’d be able to turn their keys and end the world. They had decided that they would do their duty. They would turn their keys and then they would forsake the canned provisions that had been supplied for them in order to survive the months after the apocalypse down there in the silo. They thought instead they would turn their keys, open the hatch, climb back up to the surface of the earth, and watch the fireworks as the world died.

  While they waited, Dwight used to ask Wayne the big questions, like “Why do you think we’re here?” or “Do you believe in God?” or “What are you most afraid of?” Wayne always tried his best to answer Dwight’s questions, but sometimes he didn’t know what to say and the two men would sit listening to the quiet clicks and whirls that the control console made inside their nuclear silo.

  The call never came. The keys remained on chains around their necks, never getting to sink into the dark keyholes that Wayne had spent hours, days, and weeks studying. And then their time in the military was up, and then Dwight and Wayne drifted apart as people do.

  But Wayne remembered.

  On their last night in the silo they’d opened up a bottle of sparkling cider to celebrate the end of their term. Soon they would be seeing the sun again on a regular basis. They would see other people as well, and while it was a little frightening to leave their secured zone after two years together, they both tried to smile and concentrate on the good that would come from returning to the surface. Dwight and Wayne were close that night in a way Wayne’s not been able to recall since, as if there were a small man in his brain who remembers exactly what happened that last night down in the silo but whenever Wayne tries to remember for himself the little man says, “Well, I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”

  This all happened after ROTC, before the FBI, and now, from time to time, Wayne misses Dwight. He misses having someone to share the long hours with, the waiting. And so Wayne finds himself thinking about Dwight, about the cold war, while he twiddles his thumbs in a van, on an FBI stakeout in Montana.

  Wayne’s on assignment, Operation Bombshell, a pet project of his. Wayne has done well for himself the past five years at the Bureau, accessing higher and higher levels of security. He’s racked up top-secret clearances like poker chips. Operation Bombshell is his brainchild, though sure, he’d have to credit the team of guys from Development and Fabrication who’d actually built her down to the very last detail of weaving human hair, mostly collected from wives and sisters, into a wig that they’d bleached and later on conditioned with a hot oil treatment for softness and scent. And there were the guys down in Robotics of course. They’d had a big hand in developing both her language and mobility functions. And of course there was Marc from Explosives. He’d been a big help. Still, everyone down at the Bureau generally agrees, she, Operation Bombshell, belongs to Wayne.

  And so here they were in the Montana woods, she and Wayne, down the road a small stretch from a cabin that belongs to one of the most wanted criminals in all of America. Wayne has been on the trail of this scumbag for so many years now almost no one at the Bureau believes the guy will ever be caught. Well, that’ll change when Wayne brings this sucker’s charred remains into the lab for dental and DNA analysis. He’ll show the naysayers and all those hot-shot agents who’d make fun of Wayne behind closed doors, joking about his inability to make an arrest stick on this guy. He’d heard them. He’s a surveillance expert for criminy’s sake. He’d heard, “There goes Wayne, down the drain” and “Operation Bumshell,” and, the worst, he heard his name, Wayne, followed by an explosion of giggles as if his career were the punch line.

  A branch ticks and scrapes against the roof of the van. Wayne studies the dark speedometer. The vehicle has been made to resemble a pool cleaner’s van, but outside of the surveillance equipment stashed in the back, there is little in the way of high-tech luxury. Wayne rests his feet up on the hard plastic console between the driver’s and passenger’s sides. He sticks his heel down into the cubbyhole made to hold hot beverages. Leaning back in the captain’s seat, he rubs at a small swatch that he keeps in his pocket. It is a bit of her skin, a square silicone sample. He raises the skin up to his nose, tickling a number of his wiry nostril hairs. He inhales her faint plastic scent, recalling moments of bliss, some that transpired mere hours earlier in this van as he smiled and selected an outfit for her to wear, helped her test the charge in her battery pack, stuffed her body cavity full of explosives, and then saluted her as she signed off on her mission with a quick nod and the word “Sir.” He’d taught her how to be a proper soldier. He’d sent her off to knock
on the door of the cabin.

  “We don’t want any!” Ted screams through the bolted door. But Ted isn’t a “we.” He’s just an I.

  In the cabin there is one small window from which he often peers out across the valley, startled by how steadfast the mountains can be. Ted waits for the mountains to move or exhale or explode. He’s got all the time in the world. He could wait all day, but nothing ever happens besides the mountains changing colors with the sun at night. Ted tries to achieve such stillness himself and would be able to if not for an itch he always gets right where his hair parts and the grease of his scalp dredges up a dull ache so that he must scratch the itch or be driven insane.

  Ted has been alone for a very long time.

  Some nights, as the sky turns pink at sunset, he lies on his back staring out the window. The trees’ limbs become a darker shade of black, outlines that resemble huge dendrites of nerve endings against the sky. Some nights he will lie there until there is no light left at all, until one shade of black swallows the subtleties and he is alone lying on his back staring at the square window of black as though it were a TV set.

  Or other nights he’ll spend his time building small bombs, some that are thin enough to slip into the open arms of an envelope.

  The knocking hasn’t stopped. “We don’t want any!” Ted screams again to no effect. He cannot believe someone is knocking on his door. He is a million miles away from any civilization. But there it is, steady and rhythmic, the knocks fall like the footsteps of an approaching giant. There is a joke in this somewhere, Ted’s sure. What dedication. The knocking continues at a regular pace for thirty, thirty-five minutes. He almost can’t believe a passion so unparalleled. This knocker is no quitter, or else, he thinks, this knocker is a robot. Ha! He laughs, finding the joke. A robot in the wilderness of Montana. It’s not a very funny joke, not really a joke at all, but he laughs anyway.