Melt

by Heidi Wicks

  “Wait. I’ll help you in.”

  “Nope. I’m good, thanks.”

  “Cait, come on. They said you shouldn’t walk alone. You could fall.”

  “Stop it, Jess. I want you to leave me alone now.”

  Cait’s parents aren’t home from Mass yet. It isn’t quite noon. With Bambi legs, she walks up the driveway and turns the key in the door. Locks it behind her. Crawls up the stairs to her bedroom. In the far distance, ships barmp in the harbour and the sound reverberates in her chest. There’s a stinging within. Salt water seeping into an open gash. The steel that invaded her body has extracted something that would have been a sturdy, fierce, force of life.

  blitzed in a mall at an inapproprite age

  2016

  Jess’s phone wiggles in her pocket. A text alert.

  Cait: I need to get stoned. And go to the mall. You in?

  Jess: I dunno about

  getting stoned in public.

  Cait: Ok fine. Well, what about the mall?

  And do you mind if I still get stoned?

  Jess: Are you serious?

  We’re almost 40.

  Cait: Oh so frigging what if we’re

  almost 40? Our brains are fully

  formed (possibly). I use my vaporizer

  a couple times a week; it’s just great.

  It’ll be legalized soon, anyways.

  I need to be silly today. Too much going on.

  Jess: I’ll see. Lemme just

  double-check with Dan, but I

  should be able to get

  you in an hour?

  Cait climbs up into the passenger seat of Jess’s SUV, crunching her boots onto the superhero figurines and empty Ring Pop wrappers littering the floor.

  “Sorry, my car is a fucking mess.” Jess says this same exact line, it’s the very first thing she says, every single time Cait gets in her car.

  “You do know I have a child too, right? Mine is a bigger fucking mess than yours is, I promise. I found a hairball in Maisie’s car seat the other day. She took it with her after a haircut, had it clutched in her little hand, shoved it in the cup holder.”

  “Lovely.” Jess glances in the rearview mirror before swerving into the other lane, a bit abruptly, and Cait’s heart secondarily lurches a little further into her throat. Jess’s driving is unnerving.

  Whether or not Jess is fully in this current dimension and this current moment, is questionable. Her thoughts, as usual, flit from the kids to her father to her mother to Dan. To Matt, annoyingly. She hates herself for it.

  “Why do kids hold on to such weird shit?” Jess jolts herself from inside her head, back to the present.

  “Who knows? It’s true, though. Maisie picks up little twigs and pebbles and leaves everywhere she goes, and shoves them into her pockets, constantly.”

  “Once, I found a piece of poop in Liam’s pocket.”

  “What?”

  “Yup. I was throwing his coat into the washing machine one Friday after daycare, went through his pockets, as per usual, and pulled out a little baggie of poop.”

  “Jesus Christ, what the fuck? Why?”

  “He pooped in his underwear at daycare, and for some reason, the daycare people put it in a little baggie with his soiled underwear, he found it, he put it in his pocket.”

  “Oh my God. Did you say anything?”

  “To the daycare workers?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Of course. You know I did. I asked them that in the future, if Liam poops in his underwear, to please throw the works of it in the garbage.”

  “Did they explain why in the Jesus they put it in the baggie in the first place?”

  “They said the underwear looked in decent shape, so I might want to keep it. Said they wrote ‘BM’ on the baggie, but sometimes the parent doesn’t see it.”

  “That is disgusting.”

  “Uh, yes. Yes it is.”

  They’re gliding over the Prince Philip Parkway, towards the Avalon Mall. The Holiday Inn still has the Christmas red-and-green lit globes on posts surrounding the parking lot. Up until now, there has been too much snow for the employees to get out and switch them out.

  “Man, it’s rotten out.” Cait gazes into the drizzly night sky. The cold damp of the early April air hurts her bones and freezes her skin.

  “March and April are the rottenest of months.” Jess pops her chapped lips together. That morning, Dan told her she needed to put a bit of Vaseline or something on them.

  Cait pulls her vaporizer out of her pocket and clicks it on to heat up. “Don’t worry, Nan, it doesn’t smell like anything, it’s just vapor.”

  “Why do you need that?”

  “Well, I suppose I don’t necessarily need it, in the same way that neither of us needs wine, but it certainly helps when I’m feeling as shittily as I do these days. It gives me a little glow, a little lift. It makes me feel happier, and feeling happier, I do need.”

  Arriving at the mall, Jess rolls the car into a spot next to Sears. “Alright, fine, give me a puff of that.”

  “Seriously?” Cait coughs. After just two hauls, Cait is already starting to feel that lovely, glassy glow of a freshly stoned person. She feels such a chest swell of gladness that her friend will join her, she could burst. She hopes Jess doesn’t freak out and ruin the whole ride, but she’s choosing to shift her thought pattern to an optimistic path. No paranoia in the Avalon Mall, she thinks.

  Jess is sick to death of being called Mom. Nan. Wife. “Yes I’m fucking serious. Give it to me.” She snatches it from Cait. “Is it on?” She shakes the device furiously. Taps it against the steering wheel, a little too hard.

  “Don’t break it, now! Jesus. Here, give me that.” Cait makes sure Jess hasn’t broken it. “Now, just hold the button down for a second to keep it heated.”

  “Ok, and then what do I do? Suck on it or something?”

  “Yes, just sip on it, like you’re sipping from a tea cup.”

  Jess sucks too hard.

  “Not too hard!”

  It’s too late. Jess is choking and hacking.

  “Well, if ya don’t cough, ya don’t get off. Pass it to me, let me show you how it’s done.” She sucks some in, and holds it in her throat for a moment. Then gently exhales, a thin, white float of vapor curling into the car.

  “Alright, let me try it again.” Jess does as Cait has done.

  “Now hold it in your throat for about thirty seconds,” Cait coaches. Jess coughs a bit more.

  “Ok, this feels kind of nice now.” Jess’s grin is classic Cheshire-cat stoned.

  Cait’s satisfaction bursts from her being. She’s glassy and glowy and the world has a popsicle-pink filter. “See? I told you. Wanna go in?” She nods towards the doors of Sears.

  “Yup. Let’s do it.”

  Cait is pleasantly surprised at Jess’s level of cool in this scenario. Passing through the sliding doors, through the glass vestibule, the fluorescent lighting assaults their retinas, and the smell of the perfume counter shoots up their nostrils and into their brains. Sears is a time machine, zooming them back into a sprawling Shangri-La of brazen lights and soul-sucking elevator music.

  The glow from the cosmetic counter is a beacon, beckoning them back into adolescence.

  Cait towards

  floats the Estée Lauder counter.

  “Oh my god I loved this in grade nine.” She displays a bottle of Beautiful, showcase-showdown style.

  “Oh yes, I remember you wearing that.” Jess rolls her eyes.

  “What’re you rolling your eyes at? You wore that Clinique garbage—Happy.”

  Everything is in halogen lights hyper-technicolour.

  “Remember when you were pregnant with Maisie, and Happy made you have diarrhea all the time?”

  “Yup. That was sexy.”

  “I stopped wearing it then.” Jess wore the same perfume ever since Matt Bohmer bought some for her their first Christmas together.

  “That was nice of you.
I appreciated that.”

  A skirt-suited woman with fuchsia lipstick the exact precise hue as her skirt-suit approaches them. “Ladies? Can I help you find something?”

  Oh fuck, I’m so fuckin stoned, Cait thinks.

  Shit, thinks Jess, what if I know her from school? What if she’s a parent? Or no—she’d be a grandmother. Oh man she’s wearing some lot of bronzer, holy fuck.

  “No, thanks! We’re good! Thank-you!” Jess just wants her to leave, please leave. The woman’s overly blonde, overly bouffant hair, sprayed into perfection, looks hard enough to knock on, and Jess is actually, physically resisting the temptation to do so. Her mind is willing her hand not to reach up, and her mouth not to smile. The woman is hardly saying anything, yet she’s so loud. She’s making Jess’s brain antsy.

  Cait links her arm into Jess’s, sensing her discomfort. This is a bad move and causes them to buckle into cackles. The woman stares at them, her brow furrowed, and takes a step backwards.

  “Yes, we’re just on our way into a movie, but thanks so much!” Cait snorts, and leads Jess towards the exit into the mall. Soon they’re both convulsing. Shoulders shaking, jerking up and down, desperately trying to jail their laughter.

  “Oh my god I’m going to piss myself,” tears stream down Jess’s cheeks.

  Finally, the sanctuary of the dimly lit mall, just on the horizon. Warm and fuzzy and silly. Nostalgic. They spent much time here as teenagers. In early junior high saving up their allowances to buy sweatshirts with matching scrunchies and slouch socks from Au Coton, or a nice jogging suit from Northern Reflections, with a lovely scene of a lake on the front. In high school, they moved on to Bootlegger and Le Chateau.

  “There’s so much more they can do with the mall, you know.” Jess gazes around dreamily.

  “Yeah…”

  “I mean, that’s all Vegas is, isn’t it? One big mall?

  “Yes, I guess you’re right.”

  “They could have, like, a fake beach in here. A dome. Build it up and have a mini George Street in here for the wintertime. Like with actual nice restaurants and bars.”

  “Oh yeah, that’d be wicked. Remember the Sprung Greenhouse? That government project that everyone makes fun of now? That was ahead of its time.” Cait would move into the Sprung Greenhouse now if it existed.

  “And if it went back to the way it was when The Strand was one of the most popular live-music venues?” Jess remembers her parents talking about their forays into The Strand in the ‘70s. In photos, their corduroy bell bottoms, their cigarettes, their eyes hazy, not unlike hers and Cait’s are right now.

  They pause in front of The Gap.

  “Remember when The Gap opened when we were in grade ten?” Jess remembers going there with Matt.

  The indestructible Avalon Mall, thinks Cait. A juggernaut, a time capsule of revolving doors and evolving stores through the decades. But despite closing doors and crappy stores, here still stands The Mall—the largest shopping centre in Newfoundland and Labrador, still here, after fifty years. The Mall persevered. Became bigger and better. People should strive for such heft. Such growth.

  When I’m fifty, will I be like The Avalon Mall? Cait wonders, her stoned thoughts entertaining her.

  “Oh yeah. It was a big deal when we got The Gap,” Jess remembers.

  “Everyone had a Gap hoodie that year after Christmas.” Matt gave her a classic Gap hoodie with her Clinique Happy.

  “Before it was The Gap it was Ayre’s department store.” Cait has an early memory of standing in this same spot with her mother when she was around four or five years old. “When I was a kid I stood here after a birthday party with my helium balloon. I had on red cords and a white turtleneck and Mom had that stupid mushroom cut on me that every kid in the ‘80s had. I let go of my balloon and there was this other mother and her daughter just a little way away from us, and the other girl had on this frilly old dress.”

  “Like, a Polly Flanders dress?” Jess is laughing again. She and Cait had matching Polly Flanders dresses when they were kids. They’d picked them out together from The Strawberry Tree—a fancy children’s clothing store in Churchill Square. They wore them when they played a piano duet in the Kiwanis Music Festival that year, when they were nine. They came second.

  “Oh, probably. It was very frilly. Puffy sleeves and all that crap. Anyway, of course I bawled when I let go of my balloon, and the girl’s mother looks at me and then looks at her and goes, ‘Hold on to your balloon now, honey, so you don’t lose it like that little boy over there did.’”

  Cait thinks about what a shy child she was. How upset she was when someone made her feel unattractive. How much she fought against that shyness throughout her adolescence, mostly through rebellion. Now, in the midst of her hurt, she felt hardened. Is that really how she wanted to be? Maisie had softened her. She experienced an internal shine of wanting to be open to love again. With Jake? With some unknown stranger of the future?

  “What a sin.” Jess pulls Cait into her. “That stupid bitch. Polly Flanders dresses look stupid.” They press their cheeks together.

  Cait hugs her back, thankful and grateful for the familiarity and loyalty.

  She floats from her inner dialogue, but grips onto to the sense of love and openness she feels for Jess, for Maisie, for Jake, for people who aren’t yet in her orbit.

  They head towards the escalators.

  The tiles in the “new” part of the mall are the same white tiles they have been since the ‘90s.

  As they

      glide

        on

          the

            escalator,

              the air

                is heavy

                  with the

                    smell

                      of

                    buttery popcorn.

  At the kiosks in the theatre, they poke their fingers at the keypads.

  Much more deliberation is required to purchase movie tickets whilst stoned. The white, blocky, sharp-edged lettering on the screen affects her in a foolishly sobering way, as if a schoolmarm has busted her for passing notes. The sensation is synesthetic. She glances over at Jess at her own station. Jess is similarly prodding at her own screen, swaying, squinting, and Cait snorts, cackles, until Jess loses her concentration.

  People beginning to line up behind them, and Jess snaps briefly into paranoia mode and Cait sees her expression change, and manages to finish up her own ticket purchase to move over and help Jess.

  “That time you smoked a joint with Matt, when he got you super stoned and you freaked out…You poor thing.” Cait rubs Jess’s arm, and presses the buttons to print the ticket. Cait once freaked out after eating a weed brownie. She knows the feeling. The panic, the terror, the feeling that you’re about to die.

  They walk, arm-in-arm, into the theatre. Nestle into the cushy movie thrones. The dim lights and the red cushions are comforting. It’s a safe place, their shoulders wrapped with the buttery air that cradles a story from another world, a world about to temporarily release them from their own reality and troubles. Cait thinks about work. Her job, in radio, at CBC. Storytelling. Every day, she tells stories. Searches for the truth. She finds her work invigorating, but also restrictive. The roots of her passion for storytelling came from her interest in filmmaking back in university. An old friend of hers, Melody Angel was her name—Jess was jealous of her—was a filmmaker. Cait worked as a prop master on one or two of her student films, and interviewed her on her campus radio show. The power of film, to nurse the human heart, to enrich the mind, to soothe, to educate, to inspire growth. Internalizing this old, lost passion, sitting here in a movie theatre, fills Cait with a quiet invigoration. There’s something
confining about reporting the news. The freedom that comes with writing from the imagination is satisfying and liberating.

  “So.” Jess pulls open a bag of M&Ms. She sniffs inside the bag. “Remember in junior high we’d always say the bag smelled like puke?”

  Crunches down. “Yes.” Cait thrashes her hand in and hauls out a few. “We were gross.”

  “So,” Jess crunches a few of the candy, “how are you?”

  The pain comes on immediately, like a stabbing. Cait, amazingly, had barely thought about Jake since she got in the car with Jess. The comfort and discomfort of hanging out with Jess is that Cait knows she’ll always get to talk about what’s nearest and dearest. With those four short words, So, how are you? Cait is swiftly back into heartache terrain. The familiar sharpness in her throat, a knife, just floating there, forever, threatening to slice her, letting her sadness bleed out all over the place. The M&Ms get harder to chew. They’ve melted together, gummy, lumpy, clumpy, her tongue too weak to churn the paste. Heavy. She can’t form any words. Her chest hurts and her eyes spill over.

  “Oh, sweetie.” Jess shoves the bag back into her purse. Leans her weight closer into Cait. “I hate that you’re going through this. I can’t imagine.”

  “I think I made a mistake.”

  Now that old disgusting feeling smears the inside of Jess’s chest. Cait is doing it again. Her erratic thinking and reactions. Her emotions are taking over. Heart over head, which all humans do, yet with Cait, she makes stupid decisions sometimes.

  “What do you mean? Why? You and Jake weren’t happy for a long, long time. You know that.”

  “I know…but don’t all couples go through a kind of reckoning period?” She feels herself harden towards Jess. The openness she felt earlier is becoming blocked. Rising within her is a cool steel defense wall.

  Jess pictures her own living room. Dan. Probably sprawled out on the couch by now. The latest craft beer cracked open on the end table next to him. Or he’s lying on one of the boys’ beds, a book open on his chest, his mouth wide open and drooly. Are they going through their own reckoning? If so, Dan seems oblivious.

  “I guess so.” For a moment, she feels a weight thinking about her own life. “But I mean…you trust yourself, right?” She is both guiding Cait, and also herself. “You wouldn’t have decided to leave unless you were really and truly ready, right?” Or would she? This is where Cait’s volatility, her passion, shoots her in the foot sometimes, Jess thinks.