Cadillac Couches

by Sophie B. Watson

  “I haven’t had my period in four weeks. It’s true I can be irregular, but this is definitely out of the ordinary irregularness. What am I going to do? My parents will kill me. I’m only twenty-four, I’ve got no income. I’m Catholic. And besides that, I’m not ready for a child. I want to travel. I need to pursue decadence and a career, and champagne consumption would have to go way way down. Chriss . . . Osti de Tabernak!” She always swore in Québécois when she was really worried.

  “Whoa, Iz. Calm down. We don’t have the facts here. First of all, you’re not really Catholic, c’mon now. What we need to do is get you to a doctor and get you a test, you’ve got to know for sure. Didn’t he have a vasectomy?”

  “I thought so, but I don’t think it’s the kind of thing a girl can check. There are no visible vasectomy signs, are there, like strange wrinkles? Fuck fuck fuck. Listen, I have a pregnancy test in my purse that I’ve been carrying around for two weeks. I keep going to the toilet but not doing it. I can’t actually bear it . . . finding out that I’m pregnant . . .”

  “But you can’t not know. You’ve got to know. You have to make decisions. It might be Finn’s.”

  “Do the math, Annie,” Isobel said. We’d both failed Math 30 in high shool. It was hard to see her expression in the dark.

  “Do you have any symptoms? Morning sickness. Sore boobs?”

  “I’m not sure, I might have just wound myself up so much that I’m convinced I’m queasy. And I’ve been drinking and smoking and worried sick about fetal alcohol syndrome. And, Jesus, how would I support a baby? I am a baby. My credit cards are all full . . . maybe I could get some department store cards . . .”

  “Don’t talk crazy, Isobel, you don’t know yet. You’re very irregular.” Four weeks late, what are the chances? Man oh man.

  “Remember when I had sex with that sleazy guy by accident. And how I freaked right out and thought I had to get an AIDS test? That was the scariest day of my life, waiting in the waiting room. You came with me that day and waited with me. And we survived that whole scene. We’re going to go through this together!”

  If Isobel was pregnant, our whole lives would change. Could we still chase Hawksley? My mind wandered selfish terrain. If she was pregnant, might that possibly put her into a less sexy category and might I be elevated? Horrible, selfish, bad Annie thoughts. I reprimanded myself.

  Just then a car passed us before we could even think to stick out our thumbs for a ride. Luckily the orange neon sign for Chateau WaWa loomed on the horizon.

  “All right, I’ll do it. I’ll take the test,” said Isobel.

  The hotel had a vacancy. It was no palace, no charming pensione, but it was warm and friendly. And it offered forty-buck rooms—good for budget warriors. It was the kind of place where tired and lonely sales reps stay after a day on the road covering their rural territories, schlepping dental floss products or microbrewery beer or whatever. The lounge was open until 2:00 AM. In the lobby, there was a flip-chart advertising KaRa-O-Ke and Hot Buffalo Chicken Wings (twenty-five cents each)! Isobel looked twitchy under the fluorescent lighting. I saw sweat above her upper lip. I wasn’t used to her being the nervous one. Now that she had finally let out her secret, the anxiety was contagious. I took care of the credit card stuff while she carried our bags up to the room. I felt sick thinking, PREGNANT, she’s pregnant, she’s definitely pregnant. She shouldn’t be carrying suitcases, she’s pregnant!

  We settled ourselves into the room. It had thin, beige carpet, a small double bed with a golden chenille bedspread, beige curtains, and some bad nature art: a squirrel eating an acorn with a helpful heading that said, NEVER PUT OFF TIL TOMORROW WHAT YOU CAN DO TODAY. Isobel surveyed the mini-bar for supplies. I cranked up the radio for some acceptable tunes. Pulled the end table drawer open and the Gideon was there like it always was. Opened the blinds to see what kind of view we had: a parking lot with two long-haul trucks, big rigs with the engines left running.

  Leading up to the test, we didn’t speak. Isobel drank four glasses of water, and we waited until she needed to pee. I thought about baby prams and car seats, baby hats and shoes. The logistics of it all. I racked my movie brain, running through any relevant and helpful baby plots. Three Men and a Baby was the only thing I could think of, and Tom Selleck was hardly helpful to us now. I imagined a baby Hubert and a feeling of horror washed over me. He was a chubby baby wearing a lime green tennis shirt with a sweater tied around his neck, the way only Europeans or serious preppies do. His baby hairdo was Brylcreemed like his father’s and he looked askance at me, pursing his puffy baby lips. “Of course jou can’t have vater!”

  “What?” Isobel asked.

  “What do you mean, what?”

  “Why are you in spasm?”

  “It’s nothing, I just got a chill, that’s all. Are you ready?”

  “Guess so.”

  We pulled out the instructions. Isobel lit a cigarette for courage. Pretty straightforward stuff. She was to pee on the stick. Red meant no and blue meant yes.

  “This is like diving into a cold ocean. Just gotta plunge, Iz, plunge.”

  “Technically, it isn’t plunging, Annie. I gotta splash on it.”

  “You can do it. I’m right here.”

  I climbed into the bathtub for moral support. She shook as she pulled down her underwear to sit on the porcelain. A cigarette hung out of her mouth. I handed her the white plastic strip.

  “Go for it. It’s gonna be fine . . . You’ll see . . . We’ll deal with it . . .”

  “Geronimo,” she said as she peed a big stream, deluging the stick.

  “Jesus, it didn’t say piss like Niagara Falls . . . but that oughta do it! Give it to me.”

  She gave me the stick, and I sat in the bath holding it, staring at it, willing it to be red. Isobel got up, went over to the sink, splashed water on her face, and then started tweezing her eyebrows overzealously.

  I stared at the miniature well in the plastic.

  It was supposed to take a few minutes to turn colours.

  “Stop tweezing!”

  I stared at the stick. The first hue was faint violet.

  “Do you see anything?” she asked, still tweezing. Her eyebrows were getting thinner and thinner.

  “Not really.” I scrutinized the violet. “Take it easy on your poor eyebrows.”

  “What do you mean, not really, what the hell is it?”

  “Well, the first hint of colour is a bit violet. I’m not sure what it means. Isn’t violet what you get when you mix purple and blue? Maybe it means maybe. But anyways, we’re supposed to wait five minutes, I think it’s only been two point five minutes.”

  Isobel scrambled for the instructions, puffing on her smoke.

  Three minutes could change everything in such a massive way. So many problems. The Proclaimers’ song “500 Miles” started playing on the radio, and we sang out loud, pledging our love to each other in thick Scottish accents, trying to drown out the problem, knowing that when the song ended the stick would have a verdict. Tears streamed down Iz’s face. Tears of the last days of freedom.

  The song ended and morphed into the DJ’s voice booming chatter.

  I looked down at the stick. It was a red cross. It meant no. But, no, wait, didn’t red mean alarm, emergency? “It’s RED,” I yelled before I could process what it meant for sure; stress had wiped out my short-term memory.

  “Red?”

  “Red!”

  Isobel whooped and flapped her arms like she was a great crested crane.

  “That’s NO, right, red?”

  “Uhh . . . uh . . . uhh . . . I . . .” My mind was stuck in a frozen panic, what did RED mean? My eyes scrambled through the directions.

  “If you see a reddish cross YOU ARE NOT PREGNANT. YOU ARE NOT PREGNANT!” I read out loud.

  “Wooooooooooooooooooooooo-hoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.”

  She was delirious, inventing a new kind of celebration dance. She threw her head around and shook her
whole body like a woman taken by the power with an invisible hula hoop. I leaped out of the bath and joined in and danced my way over to the mini-bar. Normally a good idea to avoid the mini-bar’s up-the-ass prices, but I took out the cheapest bottle. We chugged it back: syrupy Grand Marnier. All the muscles in my neck, my hands, my jaw, even my knees, unclenched. Isobel pretended the bed was a trampoline, leaping up and down in a liberation frenzy.

  “I feel like making calls! Spreading the good news. Do you have any credit left on your calling card?” Isobel asked.

  “Who were you thinking of calling?”

  “I don’t know. I guess it’d be rude leaving a message for Finn or Hubert like, ‘Hey, pal, congratulations: you’re not going to be the father of my child?’”

  “Isobel. No. Let’s just dance.”

  Sweaty and elated we resumed jumping and hollering in our newly invented Not-Preggers Waltz to the Tragically Hip singing “The Hundredth Meridian.” Finally, we headed downstairs to the hotel lounge. It was a sad sight, but nothing out of the usual for karaoke lounges. We were so relieved and wanting to celebrate it didn’t matter where we were. The bar was decorated in faux-ranch style with fake wood panelling, with the requisite deer head mounted above the bar. Business people sat around drinking Labatt Blues and rye-and-Cokes, smoking aimlessly; a few plaid-wearing underaged-looking kids from the suburbs were shooting stick. Like all karaoke bars it had the men, the men with the desperation, mired in nostalgia and yearning. Fifty-year-olds with plenty of passion who, once they get the mike in their hands, belt it out for Canada and for all their thwarted loves and hopes. Like the one on stage that night, Elvis hair with lambchop sideburns and a belly full of pathos and passion. The next up wore an orange Hawaiian shirt, and he keened away to the Beach Boys’ “California Girls.”

  We sat down as far away from the singing as possible. I said to the bartender, thinking of Withnail and I: “We want the loveliest wines available to all of humanity and we’d like them now please!” He smiled but didn’t move. After scanning the cocktail list, Isobel ordered us two screwdrivers. He poured us generous shots, apologizing for the lack of grand crus and pink champagne.

  Shame and tackiness were thick in the smoky air of this nowhere karaoke bar in a town with a bad reputation for stranding hitchhikers. The vibe was familiar, like the one you get at a bingo parlour, or bowling—subcultures are full of weirdoes unless you’re one of them. But who cared after what we’d been through, at least there was an atmosphere. Some hotel lounges have nothing going on, no aesthetic effort expended other than beer posters with football-breasted women in bathing suits.

  “Wow, I feel so light. No more guilt and fear and loathing!”

  “Ya, let’s toast to no little Huberts! Thank Christ . . . Why did you have another fling with him anyway? I thought you were through with him years ago.”

  “It was a pride thing. I wanted to show him how I’d grown up and become such a femme fatale since we split. I was hoping he would grovel, so I could laugh at him. I thought I could wow him with my nonchalance, but he managed to out-aloof me. No more, I tell you, jamais!”

  “Tchin tchin,” we clanged our glasses together.

  “Could we have two more, doubles, pease, we’re celebating!” I slurred to the moustachioed bartender.

  Round four convinced me that the deer on the wall was our new guardian angel. “No really, look Isobel, look at its eyes, it’s watching us!”

  On stage, a woman with a truly lovely voice was singing Patsy Cline’s “Fall to Pieces.” Behind her there was a five-foot screen playing a cheesy video accompanying the song with lyrics written to follow along on the bottom of the screen. A white ball bounced over the words as the song went on and the audience joined in. The format hadn’t altered since the 1980s. A real show-woman, she clenched her fists in the air and fell to the ground, pretending she was literally falling too pieces. A table of supporters sitting as near as possible to the stage cheered and hollered as she hit and held the notes. The woman deserved a record contract.

  Isobel sang along to “I fall to pieeeeces” with the woman and the other drunks. We clicked glasses almost every few sips. The sweet, massive relief of not being pregnant was almost worth the pregnancy scare itself. I felt as if I had almost been pregnant too. The orange juice swirled with the ice cubes and vodka. People say you can’t taste vodka, but if you just put in enough, you can. Once you get past its medicinal taste, you can learn to like the kick, the bite, the sting, the kerpow factor. Plus, you can feel good about the fact that you are replenishing the vitamin C deficiency you get from smoking.

  “Two please,” I asked the bartender.

  “Two what, eh?”

  “Two, ugh, you know, dinks, drinks, I mean, drinks . . . please . . .” I can’t believe I just said dinks. Oh my God. Mortification seared through my tipsiness.

  “What kind of drinks?”

  What was this, rocket science? “Two cocktails!” God, did I just overemphasize the Cock syllable. Oh man. I tried to give him my best sober look as Isobel pretended she was Edith Piaf beside me. Was he being coy or was this a test?

  “So, any kind of cocktails, eh? I’m sorry, pardon me, I suffer from short-term memory loss.” A fellow dope smoker maybe.

  “Screwdrivers! Screwdrivers!” I yelled with glee, remembering what they were called.

  “Coming right up,” he said as he poured doubles for us.

  I smiled a bit too much at him in gratitude and general drunken goodwill, then worried I was careening us toward another pregnancy scare. I stirred my drink, took a big gulp, felt a rush to my head from the coldness of the ice, and took another big swig to distract me from the frozen-brain feeling. Now my mouth was entirely frozen. On further scrutiny, I saw that the bartender looked a bit like Tom Selleck, which brought back fond memories of Magnum P.I. and the outfit I used to wear especially for watching his show when I was thirteen and even goofier than now. I smiled at him and passed Iz her drink. She was busy singing along with an old guy to Stompin’ Tom Connors’s song about snowmobiles.

  “Here’s to singleness, no kids!” she said, clashing her drink into mine so enthusiastically OJ spilled onto my T-shirt. I went stumbling off to the bathroom to do damage control on the stain. I only had three T-shirts for the trip and this was my favourite one. Pale blue, it said, VIRGINIA IS FOR LOVERS on it. I don’t know why I liked it so much, I’d never been to Virginia. I wobbled down two flights of stairs, careful to clutch the handrail the whole way down. The bathroom looked pretty clean. There was a lurid arrangement of fake flowers and some more squirrel art on the walls. I was conscious of swaying a bit on my feet, but being a successful drinker means being able to function like normal. It just takes focus.

  I looked in the mirror and was amazed by how puffy my eyelids looked and how mussed up my hair was. I tried to straighten my part with my finger. It wouldn’t go like I wanted it to, so I doused it with water and tried to slick it down. The water felt good on my forehead. I splashed my face and neck with it, then bent over to take a long gulp.

  I moistened a paper towel, pumped lots of soap on it, and scrubbed away at the OJ stain. I quickly lost patience with the soap and paper; the soap wouldn’t stop foaming and I had millions of tiny fragments of paper towel stuck to my T-shirt. It looked like the Milky Way. I got compulsive and wet more paper towels and tried to clean up all the paper debris. Yet the more I wiped and wet it, the worse it got. Pretty soon I was going to look like I was the winner of a wet T-shirt contest.

  Stop it, Annie, stop it. I closed my eyes and counted to five and then left the bathroom.

  I think it was two pear ciders later, I felt so happy I could barely see. The bar seemed less full of people and all the ones who remained looked friendly and beautiful. I loved them all. And I loved Isobel. And I loved the bartender. I felt very warm. Tom was beautiful. Hawaii was so nice.

  I adored the deer on the wall.

  I loved coasters and peanuts and even smoke in my eye wa
s only mildly annoying.

  It seemed only right to grab the microphone and hand it to Isobel. She let me drag her to the stage. I couldn’t get over how outrageous it was that there were no Hawksley songs on the machine. What kind of hick-ass place were we in? I looked around the swirling happy room and said to Iz, “Let’s sing ‘Safe and Sound,’ we can do it!” With no karaoke machine, no amplification, just the volume of our hearts we did. I was so enthusiastic, it felt almost holy, singing my heart out in that dingy bar. After we finished one song, two shots of tequila arrived. With Isobel at my side I felt I could do anything. We were a unit. And I was protected. I don’t know how many Hawksley songs we sang and tequilas we shot before I vomited, stage left, and Isobel fell down laughing.

  The next morning I had a serious pasty mouth, a dry throat, and an African drum version of “Safe and Sound” pounding through my head. But I remembered the thrill of performing and I had vague memories of Magnum P.I. carrying first me fireman-style over his shoulder to the room, then Isobel. I scanned the room just to make sure neither of us had accidentally seduced him. Isobel was weighing herself. Since when did hotels have scales in them, I wondered. Unless she’d brought it with her. I closed my eyes.

  We left the hotel at noon. I slapped the whole bill on my card, including the bar tab. I was paranoid that everything about me smelled like vomit, but I felt oddly confident that changing the tire should be in the realm of our capabilities, math failures or not. We could ride the high of not being pregnant for a long time. Hawksley was only one province away.

  side a, track 7

  “. . . singing is about sexual confidence,

  so sing out your guts if you feel good enough

  to let the moment just hit you,

  if the music befits you”

  “Paper Shoes,” Hawksley Workman

  By three o’clock I’d accepted that I was not getting the nuts on the tire to loosen. My hangover had overtaken my optimism. I was strong but annoyingly not tough enough to get them loose. Isobel gave it a try once or twice when it was obvious that I was getting exasperated. Every young woman should be able to do this—my mom could do it, I’d seen her do it. Smudges of grease on her face, she wasn’t going to wait around for a man. I wish I hadn’t been so busy rebelling against her and instead had learned this kind of valuable stuff. Like how to make her unbelievably delicious plum tart, sew buttons on leather jackets, and how in the heck to do an oil change and change a spare tire when the nuts were sealed too tight. Bolts not nuts, Annie, don’t be crude, I could hear her saying.