All I Ask

by Eva Crocker

  “The Pope,” she said.

  “Imagine,” my nan said.

  Great-Aunt Alice pointed out the spoon on the decorative spoon display hung above the kitchen table and Nan took it down. It left an empty slot in the otherwise-complete spoon display. I would have rathered the spoon that said “Florida” on the handle and had a cartoon image of a palm tree bent over a pink sunset, or even the Nova Scotia one with a bright red lobster on the tip. But I could see that leaving an empty slot in the front of the spoon display was a sacrifice.

  “I’ll keep that safe until you’re old enough to take care of it,” my nan said. She polished the Pope’s face in the hem of her shirt and put the spoon in a zippered pouch inside her black leather purse.

  On the way out to the car she patted her purse and said, “That’s a very special gift, you’ll appreciate that when you’re older.”

  “This car is going to rust out here,” my grandfather said, kicking the tire of my great-aunt’s Sunfire. All the grass beneath the car was yellow.

  I scanned the side of the house for the bird but it had sunk down into the grass or flown away.

  * * *

  Dana, who I worked with at the theatre, told me there was a joint production between Newfoundland and Ireland happening, a feature-length film. A period piece with a huge cast. They were hiring people in both locations. Dana told me I should audition.

  “You look Irish, you’ve got the dark hair and blue eyes,” she said. “Worth a shot. You’re busty, they love busty in a period piece.”

  That same night Viv’s friend Clara made a post on Facebook offering free headshots — she was trying to put together a portfolio to get gigs like wedding photography and grad photos, to make money to support her real art. She used that phrase, “my real art.”

  For her last real art project she’d installed cameras in queer couples’ homes and recorded them 24/7 for a week to capture moments of everyday intimacy. She made looped videos of things like a man laying a plate of fried eggs and toast in front of his partner. Or someone calling out from the shower to ask their partner to bring a towel. She projected five loops of small domestic gestures like that on the walls of the gallery. Audio of people saying “I love you,” “What should we have for dinner?” and “Can you bring me a towel?” lapped over each other. Viv thought it was sappy and probably staged but I liked it.

  When I messaged Clara about the headshots I hadn’t quite admitted to myself that I was going to try for the historical feature.

  “You could use them, though, she’s good at portraits,” Viv said.

  Clara took my picture in her apartment above the record store on Water Street. I was nervous walking over there and sweated into the armpits of the white shirt I’d chosen for the photos.

  “We’re going to have to wait for that to dry,” she said. She made a French press of coffee and we smoked a joint at the kitchen table.

  “That’s enough,” she said. “I want you to be relaxed but I don’t want you to look stoned. Do you look stoned when you smoke weed?”

  “Sometimes.” I passed her the joint; I liked her ordering me around. “How did you meet Viv?”

  “I think at Decadent Squalor in Montreal,” she said. “Come stand over here in this light.”

  She took my arm and moved me in front of the window. Then she put her fingers in my hair and tousled it.

  “I thought you met in Vancouver,” I said.

  “Maybe it was Vancouver.” She was close to my face; she had crow’s feet around her eyes.

  She had a fancy digital camera set up on a tripod. She dragged it across the room and got between me and the window. She directed me to lift and lower my chin, to smile with and without teeth, to cross and uncross my arms.

  “Look sad,” she said. “Not sad but solemn, we want a range of emotion.”

  Gabrielle and I struggling to regain a normal rhythm of conversation when the nurses helped her lower herself back into the bed after using the washroom. The smell of hospital, piss and plastic and floor cleaner. A single wool blanket scrunched up at the foot of her bed. The sky a brilliant, cloudless blue outside the window.

  “Nailed it,” Clara said. “Now laugh.”

  The guy who auditioned me for the joint production was younger than me and from Toronto. I’d heard there was a woman from the Ireland side of production in town for casting, so I’d been expecting a woman. There was a video camera on the table in front of him.

  “You can stand there.” He pointed to a strip of green painter’s tape on the floor. “I’m Ryan.”

  “Nice to meet you,” I said from the painter’s tape.

  “I’m going to turn this on now, if you’re ready.” He pressed down on the button. “Stacey Power reading for Aideen.”

  “Sorry, are you going to read Cathleen?” I asked him.

  “Yup. Just begin whenever you’re ready, we’re rolling.” He nodded at the video camera.

  Earlier in the week they’d sent me three pages of a scene where Aideen’s younger sister tells her she’s pregnant out of wedlock. In the office at the theatre I had printed a set for me and a set for Viv. We’d practised in her kitchen while she greased her hands with olive oil and sculpted chickpea burger batter into patties. Viv kept telling me not to go overboard with the accent. Ryan read Cathleen’s lines without any emotion. The scene was done in about five minutes.

  “Let’s do it one more time, and this time read Aideen a little angrier, she’s pissed that her sister fucked up.” Ryan took a sip of coffee from a glass travel mug with a cork lid.

  We did the short scene again and then Ryan pressed the button.

  “Great, thanks very much for coming down, we’ll be in touch.”

  After the audition I went to Viv’s and she took out a Tupperware filled with stacks of cold chickpea burgers.

  “How’d it go?” She took two plates out of the cupboard.

  I went to the fridge and found a jar of bread-and-butter pickles.

  “I hope you’re right about the accent,” I said.

  “Have I ever led you astray?”

  Viv ripped the buns open, she laid the patties inside and squeezed swirls of ketchup on them. I stuck my fingers in the pickle water and pulled out three slimy slices to drape over my burger.

  “Are we just having these cold?” I looked around the kitchen to see if she had a microwave. “I know what you’re saying about subtle is better but maybe those people don’t feel that way.”

  “Yeah, I thought cold. Do you think you did a good job?”

  “I don’t want to jinx it.”

  “Don’t say anything then,” Viv said. “I want pickles too.”

  * * *

  The day they searched my house and took my things, I went out after work. Because I had been planning to go out, and because I didn’t want to sit at home alone thinking about them going through my pictures and text messages, maybe driving past my house in unmarked cars. There was still no sign of Holly. I wanted to get wasted, to wipe everything out of my mind for a little while.

  That night, I met Kris at a party on Pleasant Street.

  I arrived at the party a bit drunk — I had gin and soda while I was getting ready, out of a short, amber-coloured glass embossed with a swirl of fall leaves. From a set Viv and I had picked out at the Wesley United Church sale. I tapped the top of the soda can with my fingernail so it wouldn’t spray out. A big glug of gin and then soda up to the rim. Normally I would play music from my phone through a shitty Bluetooth speaker while I got ready, but the house was silent.

  I wore a white dress that I’d hung on to for years and only took out when I got thin. Getting thin was always a surprise. It didn’t seem to have anything to do with my diet or how much I exercised. Usually I thought of myself as pudgy and mostly I didn’t mind that. But every two or three years my body morphed, hip bones rose up on
either side of my stomach and muscles shaped like the top of a loaf of bread appeared on the backs of my calves.

  When it happened I felt strong and competent. It felt like having money in the bank.

  When I was thin I would run my hands over my belly in bed, feeling one curved hipbone then the other, tightening my stomach muscles and poking the skin on top of them. I knew it was a window. Soon the new space between my body and the waistband of my jeans would disappear.

  Usually the thin phases lasted two or three months. When I felt a thin phase coming to a close I started skipping meals. But nothing had any effect on the transformation. It was like a spell, something to do with lunar cycles and shifting weather patterns. Or maybe I have an overactive thyroid. Once I found a bald spot the size of toonie on the side of my head. The doctor prescribed me a steroid cream but warned me not to overuse it or it could eat through my skull. For two or three months each evening, I’d sit on the edge of my bed with my head tilted and Viv would part my hair and rub the cream onto the bare stretch of skin.

  When I settle back into being chubby — my thighs spreading out on the toilet seat, a bit of pudge hanging out of my bra by my armpit — I’m fine with it. I still feel sexy. People come on to me the same amount, regardless of my size. But on this night, the night after they had presumably started sifting through my hard drive, I happened to be thin and I put on the special dress.

  The cats knew I was going out. Snot was turning tight circles on the bed, digging at the comforter with his front paws. He had already ripped a hole in the bottom of the blanket doing that. I’d stuffed the synthetic fluff back in and closed the opening with a bulldog clip. When I pushed him off the mattress he jumped up on the dresser with his brother. Their heads moved in unison, following me around the room.

  The white dress had two layers of fabric, a silky layer that clung to my body and a gauze layer that hung loose over it. The top layer had gotten nubbly and there was a cigarette burn. I liked the burn, I thought it gave the dress a sexy Courtney Love vibe. I stood on the lip of the bathtub to look in the medicine cabinet mirror. I steadied myself by holding the shower curtain rod. I twisted my hips in the mirror, admiring how the flare of the hemline made my thighs look.

  Snot jumped off the dresser to stand in the doorway of the bathroom. His eyes were saying don’t go don’t go don’t go. I stepped down and lifted my glass off the back of the toilet.

  “Lie down, Snot, go to bed,” I said and finished my drink.

  I picked a mascara out of Holly’s things and dragged the wand through my eyelashes. I did the top lashes, screwed the tube together and returned it. Then I picked it up again and did the bottom lashes.

  The plan was to meet Viv at the Pleasant Street party and then go somewhere else; there was another party and a show at Bar None. Normally I would wait for a text from Viv saying she’d left her place, we’d meet at a midway point and arrive together. But I didn’t have my phone so I headed to the party alone with the neck of a bottle of wine in my fist.

  I nodded to the coughing woman as I locked my door. She knew the cops had come that morning, she saw their big macho display. I tried to find a reaction to it in her face: judgement or commiseration or even curiosity, but she gave me the same neighbourly nod as always. The night was warm, the sidewalks were wet with melted snow and the air was damp and heavy.

  When I got to the party Viv and Mike and Heather were in a tight huddle with a fourth person. A petite woman wearing her T-shirt sleeves rolled up around her shoulders and stiff jeans, big brown eyes. Her arms were thin but muscly, her hair was shaved on the sides with tight curls on top that flopped into her face and a messy ducktail in the back. I could see she was wearing a black sports bra under her white T-shirt.

  I caught Viv’s eye and she shifted to welcome me into the conversation. I edged into the circle. The new woman looked me up and down and said, “So this is who we’ve been waiting around for.”

  “Rude,” Heather said and smacked her on the shoulder. The woman kept her eyes on me, daring me to say something saucy back. Viv introduced Kris before I could come up with anything: “This is Kris, she’s a poet; this is Stacey, she’s my best friend and an actor.”

  “I don’t know if I’d call myself a poet,” Kris said.

  “Why not? You write poetry,” Viv said.

  “I work at Ready to Ride. I repair bikes, pedal bikes,” she said.

  I threw my coat on the post at the foot of the stairs and held up my wine. “I need a glass.”

  Viv followed me to the kitchen and tried to ask how I was feeling. I stretched up on tiptoe, reaching for the only glass left in the cupboard. Her eyes were too wide. She was high.

  “I don’t want to talk about that,” I said. “And don’t tell people I’m an actor.”

  “Okay.”

  “Is Holly here?” I asked. “Have you heard from her?”

  “I texted her, haven’t heard back,” Viv said.

  “Are you doing drugs tonight?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you have more?” I filled the glass to the rim and hid my wine behind the bottles of olive oil and vinegar on the counter.

  “Ask Heather,” Viv said.

  We all got too wasted to make it elsewhere. All night we were finding each other, gearing up to leave, someone was just finishing a cigarette and then someone really had to pee and then we’d be sucked back into the party. Hauled into a conversation or down to the basement where people were dancing to someone’s favourite song, handed a fresh beer.

  Kris lived around the corner from the party. Ostensibly we left to look for a pack of cigarettes. It was four in the morning and the stores were closed. There were people out front smoking and pissing on the side of the house. Kris’s roommate, Frankie Castillo, had wandered up the hill after a drag show. I’d met Frankie in university out in Corner Brook — they were from Belize and had come to Newfoundland to study visual art at Memorial. That night they were wearing a yellow latex dress and a pair of hot-pink boxing gloves.

  Frankie was beneath the neighbour’s porch light circling the gloves above their head while someone took photos with their phone. People stood behind the photographer, leaning in to see the screen. The group directed Frankie in and out of the light, to the left and to the right, and Frankie obliged.

  I felt the little crowd notice me and Kris leaving together. I’d jammed my feet into my boots and left without doing them up. I relished the laces slapping my calves on the way down the steep hill.

  In her bedroom, Kris bent over, taking books and papers out of a knapsack. The room was very clean and almost empty. There was an expensive-looking single-speed bike hanging off a wall mount. There was a stack of thin books on the bedside table. Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson, This Wound is a World by Billy-Ray Belcourt, Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong, Chelsea Girls by Eileen Myles. I sat on the bed, pulled the hem of my white dress down to cover the thickest part of my thighs and tried to think what underwear I had on.

  “Viv saw Eileen Myles read in Toronto,” I said.

  “Cool.” Kris straightened up, holding the cigarettes triumphantly.

  “There’s only three in here, though,” she said when she opened the pack.

  “Still,” I said. I’d misjudged the mission. The soles of my tights were stiff with dried sweat, I worried they stank. I had assumed that because a gay girl invited me over she wanted to fuck me, but Kris seemed genuinely excited about the cigarettes.

  “Let’s smoke one here before we go back. Want to?” Kris said.

  “Sure.”

  We went up a set of stairs and out onto a patio supported by tall stilt legs. Kris opened the door for me, stepped out behind me and then reached back in to flick a light on. The deck was slippery, the wood was dyed dark by disintegrating leaves. I could see into the backyard of the party, a couple of quiet gardens over. Figures
filled the kitchen window, arms lifting beers, hands gesticulating.

  Kris passed me a cigarette and her lighter; I noticed how much smaller her hands were than mine. Her nails were short and clean.

  We smoked in silence. I’d forgotten about the cops for a long stretch of the night. At the party I’d had conversations about Heather’s shitty ex-boyfriend and people walking out of the government’s library consultations and more arrests at the Muskrat Falls site. When I’d caught myself slurring I realized I’d become too drunk for the serious conversations happening upstairs and went down to the basement where I danced until I could smell my armpits.

  On the deck with Kris I felt sober and tired. I still hadn’t seen Holly, I hadn’t told her about the cops. There was a good chance she’d been home. She couldn’t call or message me if she had. I watched people wander in and out of the back door of the party. Close enough to hear me and Kris if we called to them but unaware we were there.

  I went home after the cigarette. Kris went back to the party with two beers from her fridge and the last of the smokes. When I got to my house I stretched out across my bed, on top of the covers in my underwear. I couldn’t sleep because of the drugs. I kept wishing I’d gone home with someone so I wouldn’t have to be alone in this violated house. Every unfamiliar noise sent a jolt through me — The cats, it’s just the cats, I kept telling myself.

  * * *

  I’ve slept with lots of women. And one of them I loved. But even her, Nicola Stevens, we only slept together when we were drunk. We’d find each other when parties were thinning out or when everyone was leaving the bar in clusters. Once, at an overflowing New Year’s Eve party where the host had covered the floors with ripped-up cardboard boxes, we’d made out in the upstairs hallway. My back was up against the humps of a hot-water radiator.

  At midnight I’d gone out to the muddy backyard where people were lighting fireworks and passing around a novelty-sized bottle of Baby Duck with a bent straw bobbing in the neck. I let Greg Locklear shoot a plastic water gun filled with tequila into my mouth and then Greg and I made out on the side of the shed. I invited him to come home with me and Nicola.