side a, track 6

“You are a china shop and I am a bull

You are good food and I am full”

“You Had Time,” Ani DiFranco

Day 4

2,360 km behind us

Kenora, Ontario, to as far as we could get

Rosimund was starting to feel like an old beast at twenty-five years of age with thousands more kilometres of asphalt behind her. Bangers were like the senior citizens of the highway; you had to respect them and revere them for their mileage. Each day when I climbed on board I said a small prayer to St. Christopher, the patron saint of road trips and rust­buckets. Tom Waits had that funky song that went: “Hang on, St. Christopher,” something something something, that had been growling in my head for several klicks.

Throughout the morning I couldn’t help periodically checking the rear-view mirror. I was half expecting to see Finn again, this time maybe lying on the highway, weeping, after being dumped by Isobel yet again. Getting dumped by the same person in multiple provinces gave Finn a tragic trans Canadian epic character. The car felt massive without him in it, though. He and his voice had commanded a lot of room.

“Do you think he’ll be okay?” I asked.

“Who . . . Finn? Of course he’ll be fine, he’s a grown-up! Besides, if he can follow me to Manitoba uninvited, he can de-invite himself back home.”

“That’s pretty harsh.”

“Tough love, baby, tough love. Guys are born heartbreakers. If I hadn’t busted him up a little, he might never understand the value of a girl’s heart. C’est pas evident, mais I’m clearly doing the female race a favour.”

“That’s a bit arrogant, don’t ya think? Besides, don’t kid yourself, Finn isn’t like the others. He didn’t need your guerrilla training.”

“Musicians, especially, need to be tamed,” Isobel argued.

“He’s not really a musician and you know it. He’s only learning. You just don’t date anyone you like too much, that way you’re in control. And that’s cheating, you’re never in danger . . .”

“The stupide thing is, Annie, guys actually like being treated this way. I’d cut him loose already, and he was back for more. It’s bizarre but simple: girls like jerks and guys like bitches. Or if you prefer, some of us are cats, some of us are dogs. I’m a cat.” She lit a cigarette and reclined her seat. “You like him, Annie, because he’s a male version of you in some ways. That’s why I like him too.” She took another drag and exhaled vigorously. She often punctuated her dialogue with cigarettes—sending smoke signals to end conversations.

We drove across northern Ontario heading toward Thunder Bay in silence, listening to tunes and watching the lines get swallowed up by the car. Isobel seemed to want to stop at every single gas station can. It seemed she’d developed a toilet obsession. Meanwhile, I was focusing on the music to stay sane. I calculated that most albums would take us just over one hundred kilometres. We had played REM for three hundred kilometres. Going though their backlist. Crooning to “Everybody Hurts.” Thrilled with “Losing My Religion.” Loving “Ain’t Got No Cigarettes” except feeling a little schmuckish because I did have cigarettes and was puffing away again.

There was no keeping track of the amount of dead bugs on the windscreen, but we kept count of the roadkill on the tarmac. So far, we had counted sixteen gophers, thirteen unidentifiable smashed and bloodied feather piles, obviously former birds, a few domestic cats, and lots of rubber.

As we drove past bloody gopher number seventeen, I wondered if it was possible that a girl could have experienced one night that could just skewer her off into mankillerdom. A bad enough night. A bad enough man. That was too simplistic, it couldn’t actually have been just that night or just that man that made Isobel the way she was with men now. Her own father had been no beacon of male evolution; he had left her mother for his two mistresses, ending up in therapy for being a pigamist (one of Isobel’s word fusions), and apparently even his therapist fell for him. Too much disappointment in the male species had given Isobel the armour that I coveted. I was a turtle without a shell, while Isobel acted like she was all shell.

I chose to blame Hubert. Hubert was her Sullivan. For both of us there was a discernible before and after. It was definitely AH (After Hubert) when her heartbreaking career started: Jimmy, Johnny, Bill, Donald, Justin, Sebastian, two Davids, three Daves, etc., like bloody gophers strewn across her past.

Five songs and two cigarettes later, I could see her in my peripheral vision deliberately jutting out her lower lip so that smoke came streaming out perfectly positioned right under her nostrils. She was trying to learn how to French inhale like we saw someone do in a pop video the other day. I was nostalgic for all things smoky. We had first started fooling around with smoking at fifteen with our headbanger friend Florence. Florence and her unicornesque feathered hairdo. She tried to teach us how to blow smoke rings in the air while we skipped math class.

By dusk time Rosimund was struggling. Something felt kind of off. Nonsensically I focused on the axle. Oh God, not the axle, I thought, not that. Not that I had any real understanding of what an axle might do. Isobel was snoozing obliviously until the bumps woke her up. She had become more despondent as the day wore on and unusually quiet. The more we drove, the worse the car noise got. It started to feel like we were the Flintstones, in a dinosaurmobile, as each spin of the wheel wahlumped. It was mysterious and sinister. I missed Finn.

Eventually it dawned on me with forehead-slapping-reality: we had a flat tire!

I knew I didn’t know how to change a tire and Isobel definitely didn’t get that in her Hubert training package. I pulled over to the shoulder. I had learned from wrecking Sullivan’s bicycle that you can seriously damage a vehicle by driving it with a flat tire. I could hear him saying, “Jesus Christ, what is it with you and flat tires, already?” Shaking his head but still smiling.

The inside car light had probably died sometime in the 1970s, and we had no flashlight. Luckily Isobel had her ’50s vintage bronze Zippo lighter. We looked at the map. There was a place called Wawa about three klicks away. Wawa. What kind of name was that? We stood beside the car with our thumbs out ready to hitch a ride on that quiet stretch of highway. My mother’s voice rang through my mind with her various mantras for me: “Stay away from the bushes, strange men hang out in them. Never hitchhike, only murderers pick up hitchhikers. Druggies hitchhike too. There’s more to life than the mattress. Men don’t buy cows when they get the milk for free . . .” The aphorisms of my youth have stayed with me all these years, but nothing about flat tires had stuck.

“Annie, I can’t do it anymore, this rough-and-tumble lifestyle of ours. I need some goddamned luxury. Maintenant!”

No cars came and the darkness was spooking us out. You never knew what maniacs were lurking. Though you had to wonder if maniacs wouldn’t want to be closer to amenities? We hoofed it up the black highway. I think it was almost eleven o’clock, and the last of the late summer light had faded for the night. I thought I could see a light on the horizon. A hotel where we could splash out and spend the night. The neon gave me hope.

“I’m ashamed I don’t know how to change a tire. We’re grown women. It’s the 1990s. How can this be, we’re so backwards? I don’t even want to tell them at the hotel,” I said.

“Look, relax, dammit. We’re urban people, not mechanics. We’ll just pretend we didn’t have a flashlight, and it was too dark to do it. I’ll sweet-talk the front-desk guy,” she said.

I was hungering for some scapegoating, I was bloodthirsty, given our current state of lameness and my unresolved anger about Finn and probably even some angst over seeing that two-colour-eyed hussy woman. “For some reason, I’ve been thinking about Hubert,” I said.

She looked at me, wide-eyed. “That’s odd that you should mention him.”

“Why?”

“I do not want to talk about it now. How far is this Wawa town?” She was blowing air up to her fringe to keep her hair out of her eyes, a sure sign of exasperation.

“On the map it looked pretty near, I don’t know . . .” If I strained my eyes it almost looked like the neon blob in the distance was a castle.

We kept walking. I thought about the Bistro, glad that we were now in a new era of our lives. Before Sullivan and pre-Isobel-mankilling, just after graduating from high school, she and I used to go to Bistro Praha after going to the Princess to see foreign films where women with pouty lips smoked long cigarettes and men listened to opera in the bathtub. Stranded in our rodeo-riding, big-trucking, mullet-wearing northern wasteland, we lusted for the cultural orgy of Europe. Luckily there were some real live Europeans in our midst.

Hubert, the thirty-six-year-old waiter at the Bistro, had the same name as the cheap pink champagne that we liked to drink. They both had travelled all the way from Czechoslovakia. He was suave in that brooding Eastern European way. Maybe if we hadn’t seen The Unbearable Lightness of Being over fifteen times, he wouldn’t have seemed so sexy and appealing to Isobel. He had thick black hair with swirls of silver. He wore a stiffly starched designer white shirt with French cuffs and silver cuff links. He had a flashy watch and Italian shoes. Immaculate, he was more movie star than waiter, and at thirty-six he was way too grown up for eighteen-year-old Isobel—or so I thought.

Bistro Praha was famous in Edmonton. Through the restaurant grapevine, I had heard that Wilhelm, the owner, paid his waiters a real salary instead of the normal minimum wage that most waiters earn. It meant that the staff weren’t overly concerned about tips, which made them complacent and even picky about who they felt like serving. Anyone who looked too vulgar, or like a hockey fan rather than a theatre patron, was told at the door: “Dis place is not for you.” Young women, though, were pretty much always welcome. When difficult customers aggravated his waiters, Wilhelm was famous for confronting them: “Are you being rude to my waiter?” He was well liked around town for his gregariousness and for his notorious belching. His trademark party piece was to guzzle champagne straight from the bottle; all those bubbles speeding down his throat caused some historic burping. On special nights I had seen him sabre the neck of the champagne bottle with his special blade that he said he’d robbed from a Soviet soldier in Prague, circa 1967.

People also went to the Bistro to hear the wisdoms offered by Shahi, the Hindu dishwasher who boasted he was one hundred and two years old. He claimed he stopped eating long ago and sustained himself on Holy Brown Cows (kahlua and milk). He liked to come out from the kitchen on slower nights and pronounce a few mantras. One night he walked by our table and said, “Girls, you must approach all matters slowly, calmly, and peacefully.” I wish to this day, I’d properly absorbed that maxim. Mindfulness was not one of my fortes. Nor Isobel’s. I never saw how she managed to think Hubert was charming.

“Vat do you vant?” was his standard opener. He had a boxer’s puffy lips. He didn’t smile. He stared at you with an I-am-so-sophisticated-and-European-and-you-are-clearly-uncultured-Albertan-hicks look. Isobel, as usual, was less intimidated than I. She liked his bossiness and gave it right back at him. “Pink champagne, two glasses—and quickly!”

“Could I please have some ice water?” I would ask while Isobel pouted provocatively like femmes do particularly well in French movies. I knew that Hubert had a personal policy of not serving water. I always asked, though, as a matter of principle.

“Oo, I feel a frisson in the air, I think he’s starting to notice me!” Isobel whispered one night when he walked away from our table. I think this was the fourth time he’d served us.

I leaned forward to reply, “That’s not a frisson, that’s a goddamn draft from the front door being open.”

The Bistro was downtown on a quasi-European boulevard in a row of terraced cafés. It had mahogany furniture and antique lamps. One wall was covered in a wallpapered-mural, a pastoral scene. I thought it was kind of cheesy and so, trying to make light conversation the first time I met Hubert, I blurted, “You know, I think this wallpaper has gotta go!” Then I smiled at him.

“This is a scene from a very special place in the countryside of Czechoslovakia, outside of Praha. It means a lot to Czechs who come here, people who have been exiled from their homeland.”

“Oh . . . I . . .”

He turned away, to focus on Isobel. “Zo, tell me again, vat you think about Milan Kundera?”

“Well he’s a pretty smart guy, obviously, but, what do you think?”

“You do realize he is Czech?”

“Of course,” Isobel said, flaring her nostrils.

“I think, you couldn’t possibly have an understanding of such things at your age. He is a genius, light, heavy, light and heavy, you understand?”

“Well, I . . .”

“More champagne?”

“Yes, please.”

He snapped his fingers, and his brother Josef came over; they spoke in Czech. Josef smirked and went to get another bottle and a flute for Hubert to join in. He opened the bottle expertly, easing the cork out slowly so it let out an elegant quiet pop, the bubbles frothing like a diamond waterfall.

My toes were now aching from this long Ontario highway walk, and my backpack was making permanent indentations in my shoulder. Isobel somehow walked elegantly, her high-heel sandals clickety-clacking, sashaying up the road.

Eventually I had stopped going with Isobel to the Bistro. Hubert got on my nerves too much, and I had developed a bad habit of snorting over his pomposity. The snorting got so regular, Isobel finally had said to me, “Frankly, Annie, you sound like a farm animal, and it’s cramping my style.” So she started going in to the Bistro by herself with Milan Kundera novels tucked under her arm. Usually she described these evenings in detail on the phone when she got home. She said she normally read and drank until he was finished serving tables and then he sat down with her and taught her what he felt she needed to know. Once he took her for dinner on the north side of town. He stared at her aggressive way of clutching the knife and fork in her fists and plunging into the food. He looked her in the eyes. “Don’t.”

“Excuse me?”

“Don’t.” He gestured to her iron-fisted cutlery grip. “Look at me, look at my hands. You see der is no need to use your whole hand to hold dem. Just use your thumb and dis finger here,” he said, pointing to his index finger.

“What an asshole! Unbeelievable. Who does he think he is, trying to dampen your gusto?” I said when she told me the story. I still remember the feeling of my blood boiling.

But Isobel kept going back. His lessons included outfit consultations: “Vear red, very good for your complexion. Vear short black skirts, very good for your legs. Vear less eye makeup and less perfume.” He edited her with almost free rein. He got her some fake glasses, gave her a silk scarf. He told her to cut her hair in a Juliette Binoche blunt. He said it was unattractive to snort when she laughed. She started to look thirty instead of twenty. It was like she’d gone to Ye Olde Hubert’s Boot Camp for Nymphs.

Bored by the walking, Isobel finally piped up.

“Look, I know you disapproved of Hubert, but it was an invaluable education. And he wasn’t so bad, you never saw his nice side, and you’re hung up on that whole water thing. You know in Europe, nobody drinks tap water. It’s just not done.”

“Whatever. The guy was a major ass.” I said, annoyed by vestiges of his pretentious imprint still on her psyche. But that was nothing compared to his disturbing sex ed curriculum. She had never told me the full details of the Table 12 night, but she had alluded to it in passing. Cryptic mumblings during our sad song sessions.

“What happened with him, Isobel, really?”

“You want the minute-by-minute account of how it finally happened?” Isobel asked as we slogged our way to the neon that was looking more like a constellation from eons ago than somewhere we could stay for the night.

“Yes,” I said, rolling my shoulders and trying to readjust my heaving backpack.

“Okay then . . . If you’re sure . . .”

“Yes.”

“I met him on a Sunday night, after closing time, around nine o’clock. It was strange, going into the empty restaurant with only one lamp lit. He made a point of locking the door behind me. Something that sounded like ‘Napoleon’s March’ was playing. Remember Table 12, the one by the back of the Bistro, near the wallpaper? He had an ice bucket with an open bottle of bubbly with a white scarf around its neck, two champagne flutes, and a plate of chocolate-dipped strawberries. I sat down. He looked at me meaningfully and coughed. It was my signal to stop slouching, so I did. He offered me a strawberry. I had one. It was ripe.

“So then he goes, ‘You like that? Den you can have another one, but first . . .’ and he unzipped his fly and said . . . you’re not going to believe this . . . he said one word: ‘Strip!’”

“Oh God no, tell me he wasn’t re-enacting the scene when Tomas seduces Teresa?”

“Ya, so I played dumb. ‘What?’ I said.

“‘Strip.’

“‘Uh, okay.’ I started pulling off my clothes.

“‘Slowly. And look at me.’

“‘You want everything off?’

“‘Of course. Here, have another strawberry.’

“I chewed the strawberry and pulled off my skirt. I was wearing a garter belt like Sabine. I undid the two snaps on each leg. The stockings rolled to my ankles. When I was done, he said: ‘Take me in your hand. Your right hand.’

“‘Take you? Take you where?’ But then I clued in as he looked down at me knowingly. I was sitting, he was standing. I went for a swig of champagne and thought, What the hell. I reached into his fly and grabbed his cock, trying to pull it out of the flap of his silk boxers. I wrestled it out, bending it and twisting it at an angle.

“‘Be careful. Iz not an ee-lastic band.’

“I got it out, scraping it a bit against the metal of his zipper. Once it was out, I went to pull down his trousers.

“‘No.’

“‘But—’

“‘Much sexier like this. Take me again.’

“So I picked it up, right, and started to try to whack him off. I started out like a freight train kinda, you know what I mean? Chug a chugga chug . . . a chug.

“He put his hand on mine and guided me. ‘Think three-quarter time,’ he said.

“I had to suppress a giggle attack over the oom pah pah thing. After a couple of bars, he put another strawberry in my mouth. I was a little freaked out, but focused, you know. I wanted to get this right. This was way better training than Cosmopolitan magazine. Let’s face it, it’s not like that guy I lost my virginity to was illuminating, with his two minutes.”

I could tell by the look of glee on Isobel’s face that she was proud of her war story: it was when she got her stripes.

“‘Now stand up. Turn around,’ he told me. He grabbed my hips, bent me over at the waist on Table 12. I was eye level with the salt and pepper shakers. He put himself in to me. I wasn’t quite ready.

“He thrust.

“He waited.

“He thrust.

“He paused.

“He thrust.

“My lower back was cramping up a bit. He was breathing heavily. Every time he withdrew, I exhaled. And then he thrust again and this time the salt and pepper fell over!

“‘Don’t vorry, I had a vasectomy. Have another strawberry.’

“He walked away. I heard running water and the sound of him washing his hands as I stood up and straightened myself. I was sore and sticky.

“‘Vee have to go, the cleaners will be coming soon. Come see me this week, ve’ll talk about your performance. You did well.’

“I got dressed and left. He didn’t call me a taxi. I walked up Jasper Avenue. It was 10:00 PM and Edmonton looked like a ghost town. It hurt a bit to walk, and I felt foolish in my high heels. I imagined I knew what it felt like to be a hooker. A glamorous movie hooker, though. On 105th Street, some rednecks driving one of those cheese-ball Trans-Ams with customized monster-sized tires rolled down a window to yell, ‘Hey, wanna fuck?’

“I went home and drew a bath. I finally felt like une vraie femme.”

I remember the key parts of the Isobel-Hubert saga that followed the big night because I was there. After the Salt and Pepper evening, later that week, Isobel and I were out for a late-night cheese fondue at Café Select. Inspired by its Parisian namesake, it had the best atmosphere of any Edmonton restaurant and was open until well into the wee hours of the morning. You could show up after a gig at two in the morning and still have a croque monsieur or crème caramel and a Kir Royale, our all-time favourite drink. We loved it there, especially the lighting—the main room was lit entirely by candles in little glasses on each table. So romantically dark. And they accepted our student-issue MasterCards!

We skewered little pieces of French bread and swirled them around in the Swiss cheese and kirsch fondue while Billie Holiday sang soulfully. All the good-looking waiters with their great hair and silver jewellery wore black and carried trays high on their fingertips as they manoeuvred like Latin dancers between the tightly packed tables and chairs.

That night I watched the hostess with the dog collar and nose-ring greeting two new customers at the door. They were an elegant couple; he was wearing a trench coat and she had cropped blond short hair and red lipstick. The hostess led them past us. Isobel looked up just in time to see Hubert with his hand cradling the woman’s back. He passed inches away from our table, looked right at us, right into Isobel’s eyes, and said nothing. Smirked a seedy smirk. They sat a few tables away. We could hear them speaking Czech.

Clutching a fondue skewer, Isobel looked like she wasn’t breathing. “Look at that,” she hissed.

“What?”

“He’s wearing a wedding ring! He never wore it at Bistro Praha, the slimy bastard, jerkoff asshole jackass fucker!”

Hubert sat there, out of earshot, looking blasé and unconcerned. He and the woman were drinking champagne, the real stuff, Veuve Clicquot with the orange label. After the waiter took their food order, his wife got up to go to the bathroom. He elegantly tossed his fork on the floor. When he got up to retrieve it, he walked over to Isobel: “Come see me on Tuesday.”

She was too stunned to respond. She looked down at the bill on the table, paid it, and rushed us out of the restaurant.

“Isobel, you’re not going to go see him, are you?” I asked.

“Vat did you expect? Don’t be so naive. How old are you, twelve?” Hubert said on Tuesday.

He made her feel so stupid she gave him a blowjob to prove she was no child.

I felt raindrops on my forehead. Such a novelty added to our plight, almost making it an adventure. Isobel pulled out her pack of smokes and gave us each one. It kept raining. I loved it. So romantic to smoke in the rain, who could resist? Not me. We didn’t get so much of it back in Alberta. A lot of snow but not a lot of rain.

As the sky continued to spit lovingly down on us, we puffed away in silence, contemplating the past. For weeks she had kept going back to Bistro Praha. I tried to get her to give him up, but apparently he was addictive. He unwittingly gave her an arsenal of tricks to please a man; twenty ways to make a man follow you around town. It was mainly an attitude thing. From him, she learned the art of aloof. The more blasé he was, the more she craved him; like a good student she incorporated aloof into her makeup. Isobel was now, as a matter of ingrained habit, always elusive. It did seem to come rather naturally to her, though.

Since Hubert, she said she’d rather that boyfriends left her apartment immediately after sex. He had eroded her A Room with a View idealism into hard-hearted realism. She was now more La Femme Nikita than Lucy Honeychurch.

From what I could make out, her dismissal served to fuel men’s desire. Like Finn, for example—he seemed to want to keep running into the brick wall. I knew the lure of powerlessness. I had tried so hard to inspire Sullivan back, long after his feelings for me had atrophied, long after I knew it was hopeless and I was shaming myself. I deliberately stayed in a purgatory of yearning just for the sweet masochistic sake of it.

The hotel was in sight when Isobel let out a long sigh and said: “But you’re not going to believe the really, really, really, really, really messed up thing about this all, Annie. I’ve got to tell you something else: the sequel.

“We had a reunion for old time’s sake, about six weeks ago. It could be the worst, stupidest most con thing I ever did. Long-term repercussions . . .”

“What are you talking about?” Dark scenarios clouded my mind. I imagined his wife found out, her heart got broken. Divorce. Traumatized kids, the works. Or no, did she catch something from him? No condom usage, that was awful. “Fuuuuuck!” I said.

“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 was 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.