Life on Mars

by Lori McNulty

  A boy stands on a white sandy beach next to his dog, which is snapping at waves. Cool air rushes inland, the wind shifts, heavy rains begin pounding the shore. A boy is there; suddenly, he’s gone, the tide sweeps him away. No one goes in after him, Jess thinks.

  She pops the stand-up collar on her sunflower-coloured cotton polo, smooths out her scarf, and wades into sale racks. Two more weeks without setbacks. Cinderella has lost her balls, now she needs a gown. Sifting through a dress rack, she pulls out a white scooped-neck DKNY blouse from the rack. “Dinky is right,” she grimaces, then spots a simple black sleeveless wrap dress, some tan slacks, and heads for the change room.

  “Take any one,” a saleswoman gestures, looking down as she sorts a pile of clothes. Jess hooks her dress up and then, about to draw the curtain across, comes face to face with the masque of death.

  “Jess?”

  “Ursuline?”

  Ursuline. From her Queer West days. Pity-filled, Viking-faced Ursuline, still sporting her Hurricane Katrina bangs.

  Jess steps out of the change room.

  Ursuline examines her as if inspecting a sweater, a cheap poly blend, looking for flaws, pulling at loose stitches.

  “Wow. Haven’t seen you since Robbie’s.”

  Robbie’s Play Palace had been an underground drag bar off Church Street, where trannies and hipsters paraded their chains and puckering PVC. Sweaty crowds gathered on weekends to watch Miss Demeanour play two shows nightly. Robbie stood behind the polished brass bar, sporting electric-blue Alice Cooper hair and a pet boa named Seymour. She pushed signature cocktails and, tucked inside her blue napkins, pushed a little E.

  Terry came into Robbie’s three nights a week, stood alone by the bar, dressed in soft chiffon, throwing shade against the burning night. Robbie took notice and tucked Terry under her wing. Terry began doing Robbie’s makeup. Robbie turned Terry loose on her wardrobe. Within two years, Terry was calling herself Jess, ordering estrogen and anti-androgen pills through Robbie’s US connections. Jess began to distribute candy bags of E for Robbie, pocketing a profit. Soon, Jess could afford to make herself over. First, her pimples disappeared, then the facial hair. Her chest, once covered in chestnut wisps, grew smooth and soft. Jess became fatter around the hips and calves, prone to barfing, sometimes in public. Suited up in a chenille skirt, she was no longer the terrible mistake her parents had made.

  Somewhere between the fatty hips and sweater sets, Jess fell for Robbie. Maybe it was the hormones. Or Robbie’s fuck-you demeanour. How she heaved her breasts over the bar, handing out her signature blue-ball cocktails ringed with cocksucker candies. Or her extraordinary Jamaican and Chinese mix with blue-black hair and pewter eyes, the fathomless deep of a wishing well. “Make a wish,” Robbie said one night, winking as she caught Jess staring across the bar too long.

  “You left in a hurry after Melody,” Ursuline says. “Blasted off like you were on some one-woman mission to Mars.”

  Police cars. Yellow tape. Spotty mascara. How fluid and fast her old world had slipped away. Then she was floating, an earthly alien.

  Jess blots a tear, but says nothing.

  Ursuline directs an impatient customer inquiring about sale sweaters then turns back to Jess. “Everything went to shit so fast. She was a headline for two fucking days. Nobody wanted to go out after that.”

  Melody was Robbie’s dream girl, a bottled honey blond with a henna tattoo across her wrist and a permanent pucker. Her pantyhose were found next to her in a bloody puddle off Bloor Street, sometime between the bar closing and sunrise. Just like that, Robbie boarded up the bar, sublet her apartment, and left. No one knew where. Maybe to stay with friends in the US.

  Jess moved to the Annex, crowding in among the hot and hungry U of T students. Too lurid for their pansexual play, she became their ticket to little green pills. In a local grunge bar, she sold a dozen pills to a man in a smart suit who offered her a weekend tour of his townhouse. She stroked his lust all night, giving him another taste of his adventurous youth, oblivious to her own pleasure. When the pills and the whiskey began to wear off two days later, Jess awoke and saw that her rough skin, swept of primers and creams, filled him with remorse, even loathing. Maybe it was the comedown, but she knew that if she didn’t leave the city then, she would be incapable of happiness.

  “So, I have to ask,” Urs tilts her head. “You went through with it, right?”

  Jess holds up her clothes. “Look, I’ve got to get back.”

  “By all means, go. Like we were the problem. Not you,” Ursuline sneers, tossing Jess back onto the pile of polyester. “Well, I hope this works out for you.”

  “And I really hope you find a stylist,” Jess snaps, reaching out to stroke Ursula’s dirty-blond hair, “because this shag is animal cruelty.”

  Jess turns abruptly toward her fitting room. Stepping in, she drags the curtain across, her hands lost in an uncontrolled fury shake. She glances at the full-length mirror, tries to gather the pieces of her refracted self: face, chest, legs, a blue tide retracting, leaving bodies strewn across the beach.

  “By the way,” Urs says, sharply, as Jess hurries past the dressing-room counter on her way out. “Robbie’s back in town. Didn’t she call?”

  Jess lurks like a prowler at the end of her mother’s block, watching the bridge brigade hurry back to their North York townhouses. Entering the front door, she hears her mother crash-landing coffee mugs in the dishwasher. Quietly, she slips upstairs into her mother’s walk-in closet to try on her new dress before the full-length mirror. Pressing the tight-fitting dress to her hips, she frowns. Damn fluorescent lighting. Too much scoop, off shade, not enough shimmer.

  “Back it goes,” she declares.

  She scans the rows of blocky jackets and mismatched skirts and tops in her mother’s wardrobe. Thumbing through a dreary line of polyester, Jess spots a long, elegant black A-line zipped in plastic. Tugging on the zipper, she smells sweetness on the sleeves. Lily of the valley.

  Slipping the dress from its hanger, Jess inches the mid-length over her shoulders and it falls easily across her hips. Admiring the open back and V-neck in the mirror, Jess doesn’t hear Margaret arrive at the doorway.

  Her mother walks over to her dressing table, plops down, holding a bottle of Merlot in one hand, pinching the rim of a half-empty glass in the other.

  Jess reaches for a cover-up housecoat.

  She emerges from the closet, drawing the belt tight around her fuzzy, pale-blue waist. “Sorry,” she says, fanning out the frayed trim of her mother’s old housecoat. “Do you mind? Bloody cold in Harold’s office.”

  “Harold’s a cold bastard,” Margaret muses, smoothing a tangle of hair. She drains her glass and reaches for a brush, the bristles swarming with grey strands. She runs it awkwardly through her unruly nest.

  Jess notices her mother’s puckered elbows, the soft wattle beneath her chin. Overnight, her mother has become an old woman.

  “Girls are telling me to get back out there,” Margaret says, dropping the hairbrush on the table with a sharp clatter. She tugs on one eyelid. Reaching for more wine, she manages to swipe the bottle with the back of her hand but rights it before it topples over.

  “He’s getting married,” she says and rubs her eyes. “Harold called me tonight, and I let him have it while the girls were ravaging my cinnamon buns.”

  “Maybe you should lie down.” Jess points to her mother’s swollen ankles.

  “Not sleepy,” Margaret grunts. Her eyes drift, clouds slipping over a translucent moon. She rises, roams about the room, picking up objects, turning over frames to lay the photos face down.

  “Found himself a younger lady underwriter,” she says, scanning a silver-framed wedding photo she tosses into the waste basket. “He’s been fooling around on me for a year.”

  Margaret reaches across the dressing table, refills her glass, downing another long swallow of tobacco-stained Merlot.

  “Gin Kii!” Jess shouts, and grabs the gl
ass from her mother.

  “Give me that.”

  Jess holds up the glass. “Gin Kii,” she says, then returns the glass to her mother.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Practising my wedding toast. Heard it on a Phuket beach. Means Eat shit, bitch, and watch your back.”

  Margaret manages a smile. She drops the glass, moves unsteadily toward Jess, who steps just out of reach, feeling a stabbing pain snake up her left leg.

  Margaret stops, grabs her own breasts then lets them drop. “Am I not enough woman?”

  Jess braces when her mother takes another tentative step forward, reaching out awkwardly. She holds her mother by the waist trying to keep her steady.

  Margaret buries her face in the collar of Jess’s soft housecoat. Their lightly pancaked cheeks touch.

  Jess feels her mother’s body fall heavy over her. Together, they sway in grief’s slow, steady rhythm.

  “Tell me something sweet,” Margaret’s breath is moist on Jess’s neck.

  Jess leads her mother to the bed, tucks her under the sheets. Pulling away, she hears a hoarse cry, feels Margaret’s life tightening around her.

  “My son is prettier than me,” Margaret says, her voice trailing off as she turns her head on the pillow.

  “Close your eyes,” Jess whispers.

  “I told Harold you’re home. He’s going to invite you to the wedding,” Margret mumbles. “Slip some potassium chloride into the champagne toast.”

  Soon she falls asleep, snoring deeply.

  When Margaret awakens, Jess is gone.

  Two floors above the traffic stream, in her sublet on Queen Street, Jess dials Fran in Stuttgart. The voice at the end of the line is thin, vaguely hoarse.

  “I had some trouble with the Percocet,” Fran admits.

  Fran’s voice is an electric current running through Jess’s fingertips after so long. Listening close, Jess thinks she hears a sob on the line, but it could be the connection. She knows a tracheal shave is risky. Stretching the vocal cords forward, then clipping off the excess. It could raise or lower her pitch. Not as extreme as going from Johnny Cash to Julie Andrews, but you never knew.

  “Glad you called,” Fran says.

  Jess hears the clipped drawl, knowing Fran is too tired for English at this hour. A call the following week is suggested before Fran’s voice trails off again. Jess hangs up, resolved to leave Fran a message every other week, knowing a return call may never come.

  Two months settled into her new place, Jess slips into her first hot bath since before the surgery. Spreading her legs in the chipped claw-footed tub, she probes her shallow depth with wet fingertips, the nerve endings raw, electric. Her body soft and sudden and soon. A deep quiver. Her face flushes.

  Jess pats herself down with a towel, pulls on a camel-coloured sweater dress. Around her neck she knots a bright green paisley scarf, letting her hair curl carefully around her neck.

  Her phone buzzes. Robbie.

  “Carmellina and Baz want curry. We’ll meet you at Saffron’s in a half hour.”

  Feeling loose but awake, Jess brushes her cheeks with pale cream blush. Before heading out, she drops a bag of cherry-flavoured cocksucker candies into her purse.

  Rain, rain, blue and yawning. Jess pops her umbrella on Queen Street and takes a swallow of air, trying to loosen the low pressure storming her brain. She swings her black bead-and-sequined clutch, satin-lined with a kiss clasp, an unwitting gift from her mother, pilfered from the locked box in her walk-in closet. In a white-noise trance, she strides along, watching young faces stare out from behind the windows of foggy, candlelit hideouts. Crossing Bathurst Street, the buzzing club crowds snake around the block. Young men in dark leathers and collared shirts shout out names along the velvet rope. Women in pointy-toe heels and low necklines pose, wrap their arms around each other, arms extended to snap a group mirror pic they’ll post later.

  Margaret can keep the gorgeous A-line, the gloomy mood from draining too much thick-bodied Merlot. Every season demands its bold accessory.

  Jess turns up her collar, braces for the southwest rains to come.

  WOOF

  The day Bella realized she no longer belonged to the tribe of investment managers sacking Toronto, she filled her backpack with powdered eggs and freeze-dried noodles that looked as sickly naked as she felt.

  By dawn the next morning, she had packed her office into a brown storage box. On her way out, scribbled “Eat shit” across the cardboard sleeve of a paper coffee cup abandoned on her boss’s desk. Reduce, reuse, resign.

  The last decade had been earnings forecasts and price patterns, gourmet Chinese takeout and grease-stained spreadsheets, followed by late nights feeling up the dimply lump in her left breast. First jelly-bean sized, then a rubbery popcorn mass just below the nipple. Her paper gown parted, breasts cupped and compressed, Bella sucked in a sharp breath when the technologist’s cold hands brushed her skin.

  On the scans, the white spot windmilled out from her chest like an exploding planet. Irregular, the specialist later affirmed, sitting across from her during the follow-up, using his fingers to navigate the planet’s dense mass on the image. Hand pressed to her dimpled skin, Bella leaned back on the chair opposite the doctor’s desk and swallowed a deep, soundless sob.

  A surgical excision and three-drug cocktail came doctor recommended. Bella sat at her kitchen table scratching out hairless stick figures on a ruled pad, each curled into a sad, intersecting spiral, absent two nipples. Fuck it, she thought. If she had wanted to kill cells she would have set up on a busy patio with friends, ordered double Gibsons, very dry, garnished with chilled pickled onions, and stayed until she closed the place.

  So she did one night.

  Stiff happy-hour martinis flowed as freely as their laughter in the open air. Two pitchers of spiked raspberry punch followed. The sweet fruit and hot sun on her face reminded her of family road trips with leaky tents and fragrant forest walks, brushing fireweed with her tiny fingers. Weekends spent at the lake with her three best friends, swimming in dark waters as the sun fell, joining in guitar-strumming circles, their wild voices pitched and ragged around the smoky fire.

  Sporting her new three-season hikers, Bella gassed up the car, tossing in her brother’s old flannel sleeping bag as the restless sun inhaled then seemed to cast the apartment complex in a soft golden hue. With a glance at the map, away she roared, the engine grinding on her V6 hatchback, the mountain pine bathing her lungs in rosemary, something sweet wafting in from her dreams. Her hands grew numb on the wheel by the time she reached the foothills, her vision a blur of whorled branches poking out from the slopes. She drove on for hours, to what seemed like the ragged outline of a faraway dream, like the uncharted wilderness itself.

  Arriving at the remote northeastern gates, she encountered the dour-faced park warden, who told her he was not at all sure about a woman travelling alone so deep into the backwoods. Bella shared with him her knowledge of SOS mirror signals, flint and steel fires, inventing survival training equipped only with knife, poncho, and potato. When he asked, Bella handed over a detailed map marking her expected route. He finally surrendered the permit, but not before delivering a stern lecture about bear activity in the area.

  “Make noise. Sing. Clap. Especially near streams. Let them know you’re there.”

  The trailhead began at the end of a narrow, winding rough road where she located the parking lot, not much more than a dirt clearing suitable for two cars. Folded trail map in hand, dry kindling zipped into her front pockets, Bella began an uphill scramble, following a flight of orange ribbons marking a trail that disappeared by the time she reached the second stream crossing. By late afternoon, black rains began pummelling the route. Her legs shook as she fought wet, rutted grooves, clambered up exposed slopes, the trail turning braided and muddy the higher she climbed.

  Even at rest, Bella couldn’t stop panting. Her lungs were two spent sponges refusing air. The alpine pass had looked fl
atter on paper. Sagging and stumbling off course for hours, Bella finally spotted a clearing wide enough to set up camp. Squatting, she brushed away pine branches, cursed the deadwood slivers that stabbed the tender flesh beneath her fingernails. Clip-pole-clip, the A-shape tent shuddered in the wind. Penlight clasped between her teeth, she unpacked her multi-tool, her Primus stove and pots, the quick-dry towel with its handy mesh bag, and some waterproof matches. In the last light, she gobbled a shit-shaped protein bar studded with chia seeds.

  Bedding down in the wet, ravenous dark, she couldn’t be sure whether the night howls were coming from outside.

  On the fifteenth day of blustering winds, freezing rain slapped the polyester walls of her shelter all night. Bella awoke to a heavy sleet storm, her balloon hands covered in a pimply red rash. As she curled inside her shape-shifting tent, the moaning winds groaned, their soft, wandering tones the closest thing she had come to company in two weeks.

  Not true. She had spoken, once, to a blighted black spruce; lichen draped from its branches like an old man’s beard.

  “Got a cure for feminine itch, old-timer?” she had asked the lichen.

  “Fuck off,” the lichen had replied. “You smell like toxic waste.”

  She waited out the storm for three full days. Wrapped in her sleeping bag, the decades circled her like a heavy-skirted fog. She had never visited Machu Picchu. Missed the chance to meet her Irish grandmother. Would never take up oil painting from some studio balcony on an Aegean island or run the Boston marathon or ride in the space shuttle. Between here and Mars, an infinite universe, and all she could feel was the absence of everything. A fungal dread crept through her. Looking ahead was impossible; the future kept peeling away from her like the cracked, flaking skin at her fingertips. Even her dreams became wistful, misshapen things. Bella was mumbling, temperamental. Thick-headed and coarse, she grew to the size and shape of every hole and heartbreak she ever summoned.

  Determined at last to pack out with her bug bites and bear spray and delirious aches, Bella pulled up pegs.