Good Girl, page 13
18
Sasha is there the next day when I come home from work, slumped on the couch, with my laptop propped open on the coffee table in front of her pumping the sounds of a slasher movie. “So we can agree to never discuss your computer’s search history, yeah?” she calls out, eyes not moving from the screen. Nigel is gently snoring at her feet.
I don’t respond. Instead, I put down my keys and coat and go stand in between her and the laptop. She looks up at me, eyebrows furrowed like she suddenly just realized something is blocking her view.
“What’s in the bag?” She gestures to the brown paper bag I’m holding.
“Tequila.”
“Tequila?”
“Tequila. And,” I pull out the produce bag that I threw in with the haul from the liquor store, “limes.”
“Limes?”
“Limes. Tequila and limes.”
“What’s that for?”
“The limes are to follow the tequila, and the tequila is to precede going out to a bar tonight,” I explain. “Well, I guess the tequila precedes the lime, and the lime precedes the bar, if you care about semantics.”
“Why are we doing tequila shots?”
“Because the booze at bars is way too expensive when you’re not there working to hook me up.”
“And why are we going to a bar?”
“To take advantage of our fleeting youth.”
“I only care about youths fleeing from Freddy Krueger,” she says. “And it’s hard to do that with you in the way.”
“Sasha, come on,” I close the laptop and sit on the couch next to her. “When was the last time we had fun? Like, real fun? When was the last time you went somewhere that wasn’t to work?”
“Ugh, Lucy. It’s a Tuesday night, and I’m dressed so blah.”
“So, your first problem solves your second. It’s Tuesday night. No one will give a shit about how we’re dressed. And wherever we go, we’ll have the place to ourselves.”
“Fine,” she says. “We’ll carpe the stupid diem. But only because you already bought the limes, and I hate wasting produce.”
*
We end up compromising. It’s still early enough in the night when we start getting ready, so we do our tequila shots while watching another horror movie. Sasha turns off Freddy Krueger, because she knows I can’t handle the concept of hell when I am inebriated, and puts on Vertigo instead. We’ve seen it before, but right now it feels like the funniest movie in the world.
“Everyone is so well-mannered and so horny,” she says. “God, why don’t they just fuuuuuuuck?”
“It’s called suspense, and he is the master of it.” The word master, of course, only serves to turn me on.
“Suspense is just horniness dressed up for Halloween.” She looks down at me, lying on the floor, petting a sleeping Nigel. “Fuck it, let’s go out.”
Outside there are other people and sidewalks and traffic lights and all these rules we need to follow to be a part of society. Sasha starts listing bars nearby, and I think how each one brings in more rules, with IDs being checked at the door and coats hung on those little hooks under the table and it’s so overwhelming and I just want to eat potatoes. “I just want to eat potatoes,” I tell Sasha, so we postpone our bar plans and start our night at McDonald’s for fries and coffee. It’s one of those deluxe McDonald’s with two storeys, and we find a seat on the nearly deserted second floor. The fluorescent lights and smell of caffeine have a sobering effect. Not literally sobering but I am suddenly reminded of being a body among seven billion others, at least five of whom are currently inside this McDonald’s. The drunk kind of sober.
“Did you ever imagine this is what life would look like at twenty-five?” she asks.
“Eating McDonald’s on a Tuesday night with my best friend after drinking tequila I bought myself just because I could? This was, like, my dream in high school.”
“I’m not even offended he mistook me for a bartender!” It takes me a second to figure out what she’s talking about. I focus on the fry in my hand. This part of the conversation we already had last night. Tonight is supposed to be the part where we move on, where Sasha is fun again. But she wants to keep talking. Fine. There is still time for Sasha to be fun again later tonight. “I never wanted to be defined by my job. I think I hated that he didn’t seem to recognize me as Ryan’s partner. Isn’t that fucked?”
“Your feelings are valid,” I say for good measure, hoping she doesn’t realize it’s all I have to say.
“And now, I can’t imagine . . . I can’t just throw away everything I have with Ryan and start over. Literally, this is what I have.”
“But your relationship doesn’t have to define you any more than your job does. It’s okay to not know about either.”
She dips a few fries in her little paper carton of ketchup but doesn’t eat them.
“I love Ryan,” she says firmly. “We fight sometimes, but I love him.”
“I know.” I decide not to add anything else. She eats her fries.
“Do you think you want kids?” she asks. I laugh, mostly at the randomness of the question, but Sasha is serious, sober even. “I’d fuck it up,” I say. “Think about it. Every serial killer, every murderer in the history of forever, had a mother. And whenever something goes wrong, whenever somebody makes the news for some notorious reason, the first thing people look at is how they were raised. And a lot of times their moms were these nice, wholesome women who didn’t know what they were getting into.”
“So you’re scared your kid would turn out to be a sociopath?” she asks.
“No, because at least if they’re a sociopath I’m absolved of any responsibility. I’m scared my kid will be a nice normal human being who would stand a chance if they were being raised by anyone else, but that I would destroy them.” I try to find the right way to express this, to make it make sense to Sasha. I focus on the carton of ketchup. “Like, you’re this naturally nurturing person who could have a kid tomorrow and be great at it. But I’m scared that even if I try really hard to do it right, all my fears and anxieties will be projected onto them, and they’ll internalize it, and it’ll fuck them up, and not only will I have caused harm to another person, but they’ll go forward and cause harm to other people, a giant chain reaction of pain that all started with me. I can’t even ensure I’m a good person; how am I supposed to raise someone else?”
Sasha rests her hands on mine, to hold them steady. I hadn’t realized how much I had been fidgeting, twisting my hands around each other like they were both trying to grip onto something.
“Wasn’t tonight supposed to be about cheering me up?” she says with a small smile. “C’mon, Lucy. It won’t work if you have a panic attack. Breathe. In. Out. Like you know how to.”
I take a few deep breaths and slowly calm down a little. Sasha doesn’t let go of my hands.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” She doesn’t have to tell me that my feelings are valid. My feelings are always valid with Sasha.
“Why is it always so complicated?” I whine.
“Listen. We went about this all wrong. We’re supposed to do the drunken late-night heart-to-heart after we go dancing. Release those endorphins. So let’s go. You got me out of the house and medium dressed up. Let’s leave this McDonald’s. It’s destroying us.”
I nod decisively, and we stand up, still holding hands, and leave the fluorescent lights in our wake.
*
We end up at a mildly trendy bar that’s too crowded to get into on weekends. Tonight, it’s pretty sparse. There’s a DJ who looks barely old enough to drink, self-consciously fiddling with his laptop, playing popular R&B songs. Sasha lets out a whoop as he puts on an early song by a Toronto rapper that seemed ubiquitous when we were living together, one that I never deliberately listen to but somehow still know all the words to. “Come on!” she says. “I haven’t heard this one in forever!” We put down our bags on one of the sticky tables. We’re the only ones dancing. Sasha closes her eyes and raises her arms, spinning in a slow circle, out of sync with the music but utterly content, and I join her, feeling like I’m in a music video while looking like I’m at a kid’s bar mitzvah. We forget about Ryan, about work, about good and bad and everything in between and dance until the bar closes and it’s time to go home.
Sasha flops on the bed and falls asleep almost as soon as we get home. I brush my teeth and take off my makeup and change into pyjamas, but I don’t feel like sleeping. I open up Facebook on my phone and idly scroll through my newsfeed for a few minutes, stopping occasionally to like a friend’s selfie. I look up Henry’s name and see he’s recently gone to a party that resembles a rave; in every photo, he’s with a different woman, mugging for the camera. He’s growing a beard, it seems. I decide it looks terrible on him. Then I see what Malcolm is up to. He doesn’t update his Facebook much. He’s much too smart for social media. Except for Twitter, but he only uses that to follow news outlets, politicians, and meme accounts. Still, there are enough photos to click through, and I feel a sense of calm just looking at his face. This guy likes me, I think. This handsome man thinks I’m great. I send him a message, a quick :), something for him to wake up to. It’s been a full day. This is the longest we’ve gone without seeing each other since we started hooking up a couple weeks ago.
I’m still pretty drunk. Opening my laptop, I see Vertigo is paused, and, in another tab, the Freddy Kreuger movie I refused to watch because I know at some point in the franchise Freddy goes to hell, and I don’t have the bandwidth for that. It reminds me of a Looney Tunes cartoon. A few seconds of googling and I find the short, “Satan’s Waitin’,” from 1954. The whole thing is online. “The future is magic,” I drunkenly whisper before clicking play, closing a pop-up, closing three ensuing pop-ups, and clicking play again. The cartoon unfolds on the screen almost exactly as I remember it.
Sylvester is chasing Tweety Bird over the roofs of tall buildings. As a kid, I was never sure which characters I was expected to root for in these cartoons. Tweety and the Road Runner were the obvious victims, the hunted, the innocent, but there was something so pathetic in the way the hunters kept trying. Wile E. Coyote and Sylvester were just doing as nature intended; Elmer Fudd got the proper hunting permits before he set out. And they would be punished, humiliated in the most dramatic ways. Not only were they the bad guys, but they were failures. I would sit uncomfortably on the couch, eating my chicken nuggets, trying to muster laughter for the cartoons that were catered to me, after all, with the crispy dead birds on my plate that I dipped into plum sauce. My vocabulary at seven years old was not sophisticated enough to explain the nuances of the situations, but I felt it, deep in my gut. I am the bad guy.
Sylvester is chasing Tweety, the perfect victim with his perfect lisp, and Sylvester falls off the roof, lands splat some dozen storeys below. His little cartoon spirit hobbles off, descending an escalator down to hell. Like, literal, actual, biblical Hell.
The gatekeeper to hell is a big red bulldog with heavy-lidded eyes. Dogs because . . . they’re the natural enemies of cats? Just as cats are the natural enemies of tweety birds. So I guess cats just don’t stand a chance in this world; they’re condemned to hell for following the same instincts birds and dogs do. From the very beginning they’re doomed. Sylvester stands trembling among the fire and brimstone.
The bulldog tells Sylvester that he’s been a bad pussycat with a delivery that now happens to make me completely horny. Then he orders Sylvester to sit and wait until his other eight lives catch up. He laughs sadistically as Sylvester submissively slumps off to a bench and sits patiently, waiting for certain doom.
Back on earth, the still-living Sylvester decides he’s going to do what he can to put off going to hell. I mean, not right away; he tries chasing Tweety Bird again, gets hit by a steamroller, and loses life number two, only to be taunted by the truly terrifying dog. The spirit of the dog-devil goads him into continuing to pursue Tweety, at one point physically pushing him in the bird’s direction. Eventually he learns his lesson: he’ll repress all his natural urges because he doesn’t want to be tortured for eternity. He’s so scared, alone, and unloved. But it’s too late for him. He dies a ninth time and is sent to hell forever, and the credits roll while the cheerful Looney Tunes music plays onscreen.
I close my laptop. I thought watching the video would be reassuring, the way watching episodes of Goosebumps that terrified me as a kid are now no big deal. But the weight of the episode, of Sylvester’s fate, bears down on me. It’s dark in the apartment, and Sasha looks so peaceful sleeping, so I grab my bag and head to the bathroom. My bathtub is spacious; definitely the centrepiece in my minuscule apartment. It’s big enough that I can sit in it, fully clothed, and stretch out my legs and take out my notebook. I’m only doing this because Malcolm isn’t awake to text me back right now, I tell myself.
Dear Sir,
I was very good at math growing up. You don’t know that because you don’t know much about me, but also because it’s not a fact I easily share. Math isn’t something I associate with in my day job or aspirations. Math isn’t sexy or romantic or poetic or revolutionary. Or maybe I just never thought it was because those are all qualities I have to work really hard at, and math always came easily to me.
It seemed like the most straightforward subject in school. Science and history were based on memorizing facts. English and art were too subjective; it seemed hard to fail at those, which meant it seemed hard to know if you were really succeeding, which is not appealing when your idea of virtue is wrapped up in approval and binaries. But math, at least at the most elementary levels, was based on learning a few tricks and rules and then applying those rules to problems involving numbers. There was always a right answer, and it seemed possible to find them out on my own without textbooks or punctuation marks. Just me, my brain, and my consciousness figuring out pure simple truths in the world. And it felt so right.
At least, it did in the beginning. When did I first start learning about division? Maybe second or third grade. The thing is, when they first teach you division in school, you don’t learn about decimal points. You learn about remainders. So when you divide ten by three, the answer you get is three with a remainder of one. And then a little while later the decimals come in. You add zeroes to the divisor and continue doing the math until you get your final answer. So dividing ten by four, the answer is a neat two point five. But not every answer looks like that. Go back to ten divided by three. You get three with a remainder of one. Add a zero next to the one to make it a ten, and divide by three again. Three point three. Keep going. Three point three three. Again. Three point three three three. You could sit there dividing tens by threes for a million years, and you would never get to the halfway point.
I wasn’t raised religious. My mother was Hindu growing up, but mostly lost the thread of her religion when she assimilated in Canada. I couldn’t tell you one deity from the other. I think my dad’s parents were Lutheran, though they never really practised. I grew up opening presents on Christmas, hunting eggs on Easter, and doing all those general Western Christian cultural things, but, you know, without all the Jesus stuff. Any of the actual religion I know, I picked up by osmosis.
I remember the name of the girl that fucked it all up for me: Stephanie Prince. Steph P., for short. Like me, Steph P. was a nerd. Good at school, never dreamed of breaking rules, read big fantasy books. I mostly ate lunch with the girls from my soccer team, because this was before Kenzie got boobs and stopped hanging out with me. But I spent a lot of time in the library, where Steph P. was, and we struck up a comfortable friendship. One day she asked me if I was a Christian. I said yes, sure, because I watched the Charlie Brown Christmas special every year and grew up excited over the idea of Santa Claus, and if you believed in Santa, you were Christian, right? So she asked me what church my family went to, and I said, “Oh, we don’t really do that,” and she said, “Well where do you go on Christmas?” and I said “Nova Scotia?” because that’s where my cousins live. And she said, “Wow, I don’t know any Christian who doesn’t go to church on Christmas.”
I went home and demanded to know why my mom hadn’t taught me about church and God growing up. She said, “We live in a country where who you are and what you believe in don’t matter.” I didn’t understand how that was relevant. She went on. “You celebrate all the normal things that everyone else does.” This seemed to be enough for her. I realized, if I was going to be okay, I had to completely take care of myself.
I took a Bible out of the library and hid it in my room, under my mattress next to my pink padlocked diary. I didn’t know how I would explain it to my mother. I didn’t know where to start. Were you supposed to read it from the beginning? Is that what they did in church? I read the table of contents, or whatever the Bible version of that is called, and saw there were sections on “humiliation.” I dug the idea of humiliation (as I did the idea of serving “the heavenly Father”), but I didn’t understand why. It seemed to be the wrong takeaway from that section. I asked Steph P. what the most important lesson the Bible can teach was. “Definitely accepting Christ into your heart,” she said. I liked that she had an easy, definitive answer. “What happens if you don’t accept Christ into your heart?” I wanted to know. “Well if you don’t follow the teachings of Christ,” she says, “you go to hell.” I knew about hell already. Hell was everywhere. Hell was in my Saturday-morning cartoons. Here’s what I understood about it: it was bad, and it was infinite. Infinite like what happens when you divide ten by three, but you wouldn’t be doing math forever. You’d be tortured.
I couldn’t fathom torture any more than I could fathom infinity. I tried to think of the worst thing I’d ever felt and decided it was definitely my nausea when I had the flu. But when that happened, I got to sleep in my comfortable bed and my mom brought me medicine. In hell, it would be that feeling of nausea all the time—I would constantly be on the verge of throwing up—but I would have no soft bed, no mother to take care of me. In fact, I would see no one I loved ever again. Billions and billions of years would pass, and I would not even be one percent of one percent of my way through.
