All I Ask

by Eva Crocker

  Me and Viv and Viv’s boyfriend, Mike, were all living together on Patrick Street when we met her. Viv and I first noticed her waiting for a cab outside Sobeys. She was standing near a rolling rack of wilting flowers. She had tote bags full of groceries at her feet. Her hair was cut in a jagged bob and dyed a yellow that deliberately clashed with her dark eyebrows and made her pale skin look sallow. She had wide-legged jeans with a shaggy trim hanging around her ankles. Everyone in St. John’s was still wearing skinny jeans with a clean, hemmed cuff and no one put their groceries in tote bags. She had plastic nails with neon green flames on the tips.

  “You’d think they would put these on sale,” Viv said about the flowers, smiling at Holly as we walked past.

  “I was thinking the same thing,” Holly said.

  “They’re half-dead.” Viv stopped and rubbed the wrinkled petal of a violet pansy between her finger and thumb. The pansy was one of a bunch in a hanging basket hooked on the side of the rack. A mix of black and violet pansies, each with a splotch of yellow in their centre. The soil was wet but the leaves were brittle. Holly reached up and rubbed a leaf, unconsciously copying Viv.

  “Everything is so expensive here,” Holly said.

  I was standing awkwardly by, Viv’s silent sidekick. A cab pulled up and Holly climbed in with her cloth bags and shut the door. She waved to us through the window as the car pulled away.

  “Do you know her?”

  “Nope,” Viv said.

  We started across the parking lot, the handles of our plastic grocery bags digging into our palms. The wind whipped my hair straight up and across my face. A teenager in a safety vest pushed a long snake of grocery carts towards us. His chest was bent over the handles and he took slow, determined steps, fighting the wind to get the carts across the lot.

  * * *

  For a while I was addicted to ChatRoulette, a site that connects you with strangers via webcam and a chat window. I don’t know if it still exists — it might, or maybe there’s a new version. This was early 2000s, and I’d never heard anyone use the phrase “revenge porn.”

  I was living with my first serious partner, Dan Kent, in an apartment above a closed-down laundromat on Alexander Street. We’d met in Corner Brook when I was in university and had moved back to St. John’s together. We weren’t having sex anymore and that was part of it. The end of sex was slow and awkward. When he couldn’t stay hard I would cry into my pillow and he would rub my back.

  In the beginning I didn’t put my face in it at all. Mostly I clicked from person to person, unzipping a tight hoodie to show I was only wearing a bra underneath. When the person on the other end responded I would pause the cam, zip the hoodie back up, and click to the next person.

  Text at the top of the chat window told you where in the world the other person was. Sometimes it would just be the country and other times it would be more specific, right down to the city. It was almost always men — lots of men in England, lots in Egypt, occasionally men in other parts of Canada. Once a group of teenage boys in soccer jerseys, clinging to each other, filled the screen and whooped at me. I clicked away from kids immediately. Always. Once there was a man in Morocco, working at a convenience store, a wall of cigarette packages behind him. Occasionally other women, usually fragmented like me, hiding identifiable parts of themselves. Most of the women clicked away from me. Once a woman with long, pointed nails waved to me by wiggling her fingers before disappearing. She was lying on her side in a bra and underwear, and like me, most of her face was hidden. There was something conspiratorial in the wave.

  I did it while Dan was at work. I smoked weed that I bought from the thirty-year-old skater guys who lived in the apartment above us. They had pet rats and their apartment stank. I kept the weed in an old sprinkles container, a clear plastic bottle with a bubblegum-pink lid. Rolling a joint was part of my ChatRoulette ritual. The men loved it when I blew smoke at the camera.

  Eventually I started letting more of myself into the frame. I stacked couch cushions on the floor, balanced my laptop on them and then knelt in front of the webcam. I showed from my lips to the waistband of my jeans. Sometimes I dipped my hand into my underwear. Sometimes I put my fingers in my mouth and then slid them into my underwear.

  Later I started wearing a pair of sunglasses I bought at the dollar store and showed my whole head. The glasses had big, square frames that covered most of my face; the lenses were dark purple at the top and faded to clear. I wore a frilly bikini top I got at a clothing swap. I would reach behind to undo the string tied around my ribs and then tug at the knot around my neck so the bikini fell into my lap.

  You could turn on the microphone but I didn’t. The men spoke to me but I typed replies. The men begged to see my eyes in voices that were sometimes stern, sometimes whiney. At this point I was full-on masturbating for the camera, reclined on the floor with the laptop’s webcam hovering above me on the wobbly tower of cushions. They would say, “Baby show me those beautiful eyes please,” “Baby I need to see your eyes.” The glasses weren’t even completely opaque.

  Once, a man in New York City wearing aviators and a baseball cap pulled down over his forehead appeared in the little window. He was holding a Smile You’re on Camera sign, the kind you can buy from a rack with House For Sale By Owner and Beware of Dog. He had a line of digital cameras on the coffee table in front of him and a silver video camera on a tripod. He smirked at me, this mean smile. I got up and slammed my computer closed. But after a few minutes I opened the page again. I agreed again to the terms and conditions. I smiled at a new man, a pudgy middle-aged guy rubbing the crotch of his grey sweatpants.

  It was easy for hours to slip by, clicking from person to person. I learned how to angle my body to make it look the way I liked, and by the end of a session my back ached and my knees were strained.

  Afterwards I’d feel like I’d been in a trance. Sometimes when I stood up my ankles had fallen asleep and I stumbled around on cold, bloodless feet for a moment. Then I would put the couch back together and delete my browser history.

  * * *

  A few days after we saw Holly at the supermarket, we ran into her at the Wesley United Church sale. The sale happens once a week for two hours in the basement of the church. An older lady in a wheelchair sits at a table by the door with an open cash box. A piece of loose-leaf with 25 Cents Admission written in ballpoint pen is laid in front of the cash box. The same wrinkled piece of paper gets reused each week.

  Usually there’s hardly anyone at the church sale, besides the women who sit around the perimeter of the room in folding chairs. Sometimes elderly people come to shop. They lift up pieces of clothing with shaky hands and then slowly refold them. Young mothers come with toddlers and collect armfuls of bedding and dishes while their kids dig through a bin of toys in the corner. The children haul things out and let them clatter against the cement floor. A toy vacuum with coloured baubles that bounce when you push it, a rotary phone with painted eyes, a baby doll with a stuffed body and a hard plastic head. Every item has a handwritten price tag stuck to it.

  Viv and I had rushed to the sale when I got off work — I was still working at the restaurant then. I was wearing my serving clothes under my spring jacket. A black collared T-shirt, a stretchy black skirt, black tights and ugly non-slip sneakers. I noticed Holly as soon as we arrived.

  “That girl is here,” I said, dropping a quarter into the cashbox.

  Viv nodded.

  For a while the three of us moved quietly around the room; occasionally me and Viv would hold things up for the other to evaluate. We were looking for kitchen stuff, cake pans or salad bowls or funny mugs. Most of the clothes had been donated by old people, or more likely by their families after they’d passed away. It was all either really big or really small because of how people tend to shrink or expand at the end of their life.

  Holly held up a navy cardigan with brass buttons. Viv walked o
ver to her.

  “That’s so great, is it hand-knit?” Viv asked.

  “I don’t know,” Holly said.

  Viv took the sweater from her and looked it over. “No tags.”

  “We met at the supermarket,” Holly said.

  “I recognized you, I thought I’d say hi,” Viv said. “This is Stacey.”

  Again, I was silently useless between them. I smelled of sour fish chowder, coffee grinds, bleach.

  “I just got off work,” I said, trying to explain my clothes.

  “Anyway, just thought we’d say hi, great sweater,” Viv said.

  “I just moved here,” Holly said quickly. “I don’t know anyone.”

  Viv invited her to a show that weekend. I bought four milk-white mugs with orange daisy chains around the rims while Viv typed her number into Holly’s phone. The lady at the door took each mug in her lap and wrapped it in pages from a Pipers flyer.

  It was sprinkling rain when Viv and I left the church. I held the bag of mugs in my arms like a baby so they wouldn’t bounce against each other and crack.

  “It can be hard moving somewhere new, really isolating,” Viv said on the short walk back to the house. “Especially a small place like this.”

  Viv had spent stints in Vancouver and Toronto and Montreal while I did my theatre degree in Corner Brook. She’d lived in punk houses, where she learned about making tinctures, washing the windows with newspaper and vinegar, making a bed frame by pushing a couple of pallets together.

  She met Mike doing volunteer childcare at the Anarchist Bookfair in Montreal one spring. They spent a muggy afternoon sitting in new grass, reading radical picture books to kids. She slept at his apartment every night for her last couple of weeks in the city. He’d followed her back to Newfoundland and Viv invited me to move in with them.

  Walking home from the church sale, I could tell she was getting wistful thinking about other places. I hated that.

  “Who’s playing that show at the Rose?” I asked. “It’s on Saturday?”

  “Don’t you think she seemed nice?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  * * *

  The morning the cops came I was scheduled to bartend a children’s dance recital at the theatre where I worked part-time. When the last cop finally left, I turned the deadbolt on the front door and walked through the house, closing the drawers in the kitchen, stuffing the cushions back onto the couch. I got in the shower and then picked some clean clothes out of the laundry basket at the foot of my bed. I put a slice of bread in the toaster and leaned over the glowing slots, watching it brown. When it popped up I smeared it with hard peanut butter from the bottom of an almost empty jar. I could feel my pulse in my neck the whole time.

  When I left the house, the unmarked car was still waiting on the opposite side of the church parking lot, nose pointed at my front door. The cop inside was absorbed in the screen on the dash. None of the people who usually hung around the fire escape were out smoking.

  The kids who lived in the house next door to us were in their winter gear, riding in circles around the parking lot on bikes. The girl looked about nine and her younger brother was probably six or seven. Their puffy coats bunched around their hips as they pumped the pedals. They spent hours in the parking lot, chasing each other on bikes or bouncing a basketball off the lid of the dumpster. When it was time to come in, Fatima, their mom, would open the window and call to them in French. I saw her walking them to school each morning and home in the afternoon. We all fell in step one day when I was on my way to the theatre and Fatima put out her hand and introduced herself. Now I wondered if the kids had been out in the parking lot that morning when the cops showed up.

  I speed-walked to the corner and then along Gower Street with my hair wet from the shower. The tips of my hair froze into upturned hooks. It felt weird not to be able to check the time on my phone.

  I’d worked lots of these children’s recitals, and I knew my shift would mostly be selling coffee and juice boxes, occasionally pointing the way to the bathroom. I got to the theatre twenty minutes early; I disarmed the alarm but I left the overhead lights off. I logged on to Facebook on the front desk computer. I knew Mike would be online. I asked him for Viv’s number. I said I’d lost my phone, knowing Viv would fill him in later. I watched the bouncing dots that showed he was typing disappear then reappear. I could picture him sitting on the edge of their futon in his boxers, sleepy-eyed with a joint in his hand, waiting for the PlayStation to warm up. Finally he typed her number and a smiley emoji.

  I called Viv from the front desk landline. The first two times I called, it rang through to voicemail. I could picture her too, looking at the phone, seeing a strange number and sliding it back into her apron. The third time she picked up on the first ring.

  “It’s me. Sorry, I know you’re at work.” A new email notification slid onto the screen, someone asking about comp tickets to a sold-out musical. I pushed the keyboard out of the way and rested my cheek on the particleboard desk.

  “I literally have one second, it’s packed here,” Viv said. It was such a relief to hear her voice.

  “The police were at my house, they took my phone.”

  “What?”

  “It’s okay, everyone’s okay. Well, sort of, it’s pretty fucked up, actually —”

  “What do you mean? Where are you?”

  “I’m at work now. I was in bed when they showed up.”

  “Why? What happened?” I heard a heavy door shut on Viv’s end and the restaurant noise was replaced by static from wind blowing into her phone.

  “I went to the door and I was thinking, you know how with cops they can’t come in unless you invite them in?”

  “They’re like vampires,” Viv said.

  “But they were like, ‘Get out of the way, we have a warrant,’ and then three more of them came in the back door. It was like CSI.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Sorry, I know you’re at work.”

  “There’s three people on today.”

  “They wouldn’t let me use the phone, they were like ‘Sit on the couch,’ I was just screaming, I wasn’t literally screaming, but I was like, ‘What’s going on? Why? Why? Why?’”

  “They wouldn’t let you use the phone? Isn’t that illegal? Don’t you get a phone call?”

  “I said ‘Can I call my mom?’ and they said ‘No.’”

  “Pricks.”

  “I shouldn’t have said my mom, I should have said a lawyer. I should have called your cousin. But I was just totally overwhelmed. I was shaking. The whole time I was just thinking about the Snelgrove thing,” I said.

  “And Don Dunphy,” Viv said. “And Kelly, those phone calls. What was his name? I think Sean, Sean Kelly. And Sergeant fucking Buckle with the BBM messages warning him they knew.”

  I could picture her standing in the snow outside the restaurant’s back door in her waitressing outfit, the winter wind blowing her orange curls around.

  “I wasn’t even dressed. I didn’t have a bra on. I was wearing a T-shirt and tiny shorts.”

  “They didn’t tell you why they were there? Don’t they have to give you the warrant?”

  “They’re so fucking incompetent, I don’t believe anything they say. They were just bored of handing out parking tickets. They wanted to bash down a door in their bulletproof vests.”

  “They didn’t say?” Viv asked.

  “They were looking for illegal digital material.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is it, child porn?”

  “I really don’t know. They wouldn’t say, I was thinking it could be like a credit card thing, or maybe identity theft. I’m just saying it’s an invasion of my privacy. I don’t want some man in my bedroom.”

  “You were there by yourself.”r />
  “What if I had a kid?”

  “How did they get in the back door? Did they damage the door?” Viv was shivering from the wind, I could hear it in her voice.

  “Or if I didn’t speak English, if English wasn’t my first language.”

  “Or if you were elderly,” Viv said.

  “An elderly person would’ve had a heart attack.”

  “I should get back to work, Stacey, I’m sorry.”

  “But you know what? They would have treated me a lot shittier if I didn’t look like me, like a middle-class, cis white girl. By the end they were trying to make small talk. Being like, ‘So are you from town? You grew up here?’ And I was like ‘Just get the fuck out of my house.’”

  “Did you say that?”

  “No, I was thinking it.”

  “I really have to go now, I’m sorry. I’ll call you after work.”

  “I don’t have a phone. The cops have my phone.”

  “Fuck,” Viv said.

  “It’s okay, I’ll call you. I still want to go to that party tonight,” I said.

  “We’ll see how you feel,” Viv said.

  “I want to go.”

  “I’ll talk to you later.” Viv hung up.

  * * *

  I counted the cash at the theatre three times that morning before it added up properly. I was bent over, restocking the bar, when Krista Rice, the co-owner of Tiny Dancers, knocked on the plate-glass window of the theatre’s lobby. I smashed my head off the top of the cooler. I stood up slowly and laid the cans of pop I’d been arranging on the counter. My scalp was throbbing. I felt my head for blood but my fingers came away clean. When I stepped into the hallway between the reception desk and the bar I saw Krista standing outside with a big Tupperware bin on her hip. I flicked on the fluorescent lights in the hall.