The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.”
Quoting Sylvia Plath never lightens the mood.
There is nothing to do. Rose warned me that The Point is quiet until May two-four weekend. I suspect she hired me on early for her own comfort. “Consider these three weeks your warm-up,” she told me. Tonight, without the maelstrom of Lucky’s illness, Hal’s booze blowout, and the terror of jumbo Care Bear, The Point has returned to the tense stillness I sensed on my first shift.
I should be working on that book that will be a future bestseller. I manage to write a few pages about the first woman I fucked in Toronto before I give up the pen. Helenka was a dance theatre dropout who vehemently hated men and had an affinity for amphetamines. We understood one another. We understood one another tremendously for seventy-two hours, after which time she disclosed that she was engaged to a guy named Dougie who lived in Moncton, New Brunswick, where she would be moving immediately. I’ve tried to write about her a few times now. Each time, I write about her feet. They were so wonderfully warped. Bunions and hammer toes. The kind of feet that, if I had a cock I’d want to foot-fuck. The memory of this desire is so much better in my head. The words I use to render it, contrived. I re-read my pretty handwriting, the fastidious cursive far more impressive than the prose itself. Embarrassed, I tear out the pages and feed them in small strips to the candle’s flame.
12:40 a.m. I survey the property with a flashlight, picking up an occasional cigarette butt or bottle cap. Only one window is lit throughout the entire campground, and in that window I spy a man watching me. I bet he’s the catcaller from the day I applied for the job. His moustache gives him away. I shine the flashlight at his window and wave. He shuts his blinds and retreats from his trailer window.
1:10 a.m. I open the boathouse and inflate a dozen or so lake toys. Toddler-safe pink starfish and smiling turtles. Blow-up lounge chairs. Inner tubes. I patch invisible holes with duct tape, then deflate the entire lot and pack them away again. It will be a few weeks before the quarry is warm enough for swimmers.
1:40 a.m. I find the pay phone receiver hanging from its cord. There’s the beep beeeep beeeeeeep of the dial tone as the receiver swings ever so slightly in the non-existent breeze.
2:10 a.m. I find the pay phone receiver hanging from its cord again. After I just righted it. I dial zero. “Can you tell me if a call was made from this pay phone in the last twenty minutes?”
“No, ma’am. I can’t give you that information,” the operator says. An uneasiness hits me as I hang up. Quit acting like you’re in a spy movie, I scold myself.
2:45 a.m. I glove up to sift through the dumpster for empty Coca Cola cans. Maybe I make a little extra noise, hoping that one of the residents will emerge from their trailer to keep me company. I mean, I did help save a child from rabbit fever and stage an intervention with the local drunk and witnessed a super-fucking-natural phenomenon. Doesn’t that warrant me a fan or two? In the city, a young woman doesn’t have to perform any awesome acts to find company. She simply needs to go outside, ride the train, or sit alone at a coffee shop. No one comes for me in Crystal Beach, but I do pile up an overwhelming tower of aluminum cans. Mental note: sign The Point up for the blue box program.
Pity there isn’t a local community college I could attend just to do homework at night. There must be somewhere I could enroll, excel for the first few weeks, then plummet into a practice of missing classes and handing in incorrectly completed yet defiantly clever assignments before dropping out. Maybe there’s a practical skill I could learn during the wee hours? I could crochet toques and scarves for the Rebekah’s auxiliary. I could take late-night private guitar lessons from one of the old hippies who live at The Point. I could practice conversational Italian with one of Rose’s relatives. I might buy a metal detector and comb the grounds for buried treasure. I’d make a great pen pal for an isolated kid in up in Minaki, Ontario. I am sort of writing a book. There are so many gosh darn prospects for me to gradually fail at. Wow.
3:10 a.m. I just heard an owl hoot three times. The crook is on the cabin roof. I strain to hear the rake of its talons directly above me. Barn owls are bad luck on wings. Moony-eyed death omens. In Romania, owls are said to be the only creature that can live with ghosts. In Spain, the onomatopoeia associated with an owl’s call is “cruz, cruz”—translated “cross, cross”—perpetually reminding all the sinful people of the earth that Jesus was crucified for us. Why in the name of fuck did I have to study Classics? Pair that with my useless course credits in Religion, Literature, and Women’s Studies, and I may as have well enrolled in a Bachelors of Dissolution and Betrayal. My mother once warned me that too much education and not enough practical experience would leave me jaded. But I too have lots of what Barbara would call “experience.”
I open the wooden chest, remembering that I spotted some books under the first-aid boxes and assorted spray cans of cleaners. There’s nothing but a modest pile of what looks like personal journals and four high school yearbooks: ’81 through ’85. I graduated in ’86, so I seize the ’85 to find my junior class photo.
I was a pretty girl. (How many women say that about their teenage selves?) At the time, I didn’t know what it meant to be pretty. Looking now at the stamp-sized black-and-white photo, it seems I was trying to hide the pretty. Typical teen angst hair, not backcombed into a jaunty arch over my forehead like my classmates, but crimped forward to blanket my eyes. Black lipstick just like my favourite punk divas of the day: Siouxsie Sioux, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Paloma Romero, Poly Styrene, Lydia Lunch, and Poison Ivy Rorschach. Obscure divas. So obscure in Crystal Beach, I felt like they were mine, all mine. My first loves. I couldn’t yet copy their pointy wide swag lips. I doubt I owned a lip pencil. My teen mouth was a smear, like someone had taken an eraser to the photo and failed to rub out my lips. More profound existential thoughts may be had when looking back at yourself as a teenager. Nuts if I know what those thoughts are. I’m just grateful I learned how to do my makeup. I wonder if I’ll lose that art by working graveyard shifts and sleeping all day. Will my careful pout once again become a naïve smear?
Ridgeway Crystal Beach High School, home of the Blue Devils. Per ardua ad astra is the motto written on the school’s emblem. Through adversity to the stars, it means. Solid words, if they weren’t borrowed from the Royal Air Force. The school’s emblem is the Masonic lamp of knowledge, identical to the one painted across the front of the Masonic Lodge. When I was a freshman, I mistook our emblem for a genie’s lamp. A year later, I mortified my grade ten history teacher with an oral report on our school’s shady military and Masonic roots. When I veered into conspiracy theory, the school called Barbara in for a parent-teacher meeting. Perhaps this is when my mother began to believe that book smarts would make me jaded. Really, what did my mother or my teachers expect? You can’t swing a cat in Southern Ontario without hitting a conspiracy theory or a fabled sea monster or tales of ghosts from the underground railroad or the great fire or a UFO sighting. Do rural places have stranger tales than cities? Is it because we’re bored? Do we make up shit to shock and entertain ourselves with?
Flipping through my year, I read surnames: Armstrongs and Doxtators, Labontes and Murdochs and Hills, Trembleys and Trentinis, the lone Zang. I think about capture-the-flag football. Red floods and strobe lights at Halloween dances. A noisy ring of onlookers around two boys fighting. Smoking poorly hand-rolled cigarettes on the beach. And field trips to the Park just before school let out—queuing for the flume ride or waterslides. And I remember hiding from my classmates, too. A talent for avoidance that allowed me and other outliers to slip through high school mostly unscathed. Amongst the graduating class I find my perverted painter. Not Rocco, but Ricky Esposito. He certainly is Rose’s son. Same square jaw and Roman nose. Tell-tale gap between the front teeth. The grad photos are bigger and in colour. I can make out the gold stud in his right earlobe. Gay? Or merely a touch of glam rock?
“Where are you, Ricky?” I say. “You blow this popsicle stand just like I did?” Maybe Ricky’s living in Montréal, speaking a crap mix of French and Italian as he orders a smoked meat sandwich. Or all the way in Vancouver, playing bongo drums beside the Pacific Ocean, eating marijuana brownies, kissing braless women or possibly bearded men. Is Ricky embracing every darn identity that Crystal Beach is not? Great, now I’m jealous of a photo in a yearbook. Doesn’t take much, I suppose. Jealouser still when I find Tamara Matveev’s signature at the back: Ric, Thanks for being the big brother I never had. xo T. Matveev. P.S. I’m keeping your shirt. Ha Ha!
I flip pages to find Tamara’s perfect junior photo. Ricky, or maybe Tamara herself, drew a heart around it. Were they sweethearts? Lovers? What if he brought her to this very cabin? There’s a question. As I lie back on the straw, the show takes shape in my mind. She wears a cheerleading outfit, which is pure fantasy because our high school was too rinky-dink for a squad. Ricky slowly removes his pink button-down Oxford—the prep costume that boys wore to blend in. This is the shirt he’ll never get back from Tamara. She straddles him, toying with the burgeoning black hair trailing down the centre of his chest. A week ago, she straddled me just the same way. For money, sure. I can recall her tequila breath on my neck all the same. How her thigh muscles relaxed and flexed. I should push down this arousal. I knew that, in leaving Toronto, I’d also leave behind bars and house parties and any familiar place where casual sex could be found. I’ve lost more than fish in the metropolitan sea. I’ve recently been made sexless. More than sexless. I have a sex shortfall. Sex in the red. Like my money debt, I’ll have to work my way back up to zero. I can’t masturbate in my childhood bed, not without fixating on the x’s penned on the wall beside me. Without fixating on how Barbara’s probably had sex with a hundred men in the room right next to mine. If I reached orgasm I’d be sick. Sicker. I’d die. Barbara could deal with my fucking corpse. Poetic justice.
If I jerk off at work, then I’m a creep, right, I’m the bad guy? I’ve been called worse than a creep. Tamara Matveev has been called worse than a creep. What an awkwardly choice moment for a memory to surface. I remember Tamara’s tailspin into small-town scandal.
Only a few saw her in the football field that June day, and I was not one of them. I was writing a final exam in a cafeteria along with a hundred or so other juniors. The only reason I remember the incident at all is because some kid flung open the cafeteria door and hollered, “Tamara Matveev bare naked,” then sped along the hallway shouting other indelicacies. By the time the teacher called “pencils down” the gossip had already spanned the school. Allegedly, Tamara had drifted out of the examination and into the girls’ change room, then emerged again without any clothing and continued to drift across the football field. She was spotted by a couple of stragglers from senior class who were about to begin their “everybody wins awards ceremony”—a tradition marked by phony certificates for the “Sunniest Disposition” and “The Honest Abe Award.” I bet Ricky was one of those stragglers. This would be a perfect moment to be the “big brother” Tamara wrote about in her yearbook autograph. He must have sped out to her with his big, strapping boy-sized shirt spread open like a blanket. It’s possible. Any number of scenarios are possible. I still couldn’t say why she put herself on display. The only clear detail I remember is that after our exam, a fleet of teachers rushed us past the guidance room and out the front doors. Through the slits in the counsellor’s blinds I thought I could see Tamara’s silhouette. She was folded into herself on a chair. I thought I could hear her sobbing. A tall man or boy stood against the counsellor’s door, his back blocking the square frosted-glass window.
Did this truly happen? Or am I imposing some other teen girl’s humility onto Tamara? I flip to her photo in the yearbook. She’s got a pageant smile—Miss Teen Ontario. This is the girl who returned to her senior year to become our school’s femme fatale. Inciting catcalls was her daily routine. It was impossible not to notice her, not to know her face, her name.
This stain in her history makes me want her more. I want to take her back to our high school football field and make a fresh memory of our own. I press my eyes shut. I dare my fingertips into my underwear, telling myself that I only want to find out if I can still feel sensation or not. When I open my eyes, there’s a glowing sphere on Ricky’s painting. A hot spot of white light. I leap to my feet to see who has pointed their flashlight through the window. Nothing. Quiet and dark outside.
Something? Sparkles in the distance. Small flame? My job is to check it out, right? To go calmly into the iris-coloured predawn and see what’s making the woods glow, but the air suddenly feels at a strange standstill again. I should be brave after the last two days, I tell myself. I should accept that the barrier between reality and the unknown is porous, right? I shiver from my feet to my head as I disrupt the dewy grass. My flashlight beam catches the green bodies of grasshoppers as they skip out of my path. The path toward the curious light turns to shrubland before the tree line. I press on through what I’m sure is moonseed or poison ivy or another vine that gives me a rash. This is what I get for not walking the full grounds on my last couple of shifts; I haven’t learned the paths through the campsites. But there is definitely a flickering light in the woods.
“You can’t start a campfire. Campsites aren’t open yet,” I call ahead, hoping I can avoid getting any closer. It’s an unnatural fire. I hear the snaps and pops, like young branches. Palest yellow glow. Then nauseating fluorescent white. A shadow puppet of a figure stirs nearby—its torso is long and twisted. “You can register to camp. Early bird special. Just let me take your name down. Okay?”
The figure appears to be a woman. The outline of her legs is uninterrupted, toes to hips. The contour of her back, perfectly smooth. Is she nude?
I laugh, stunned at first, then nervously, caught in some appalling delirium. This moment is not human. I’m in the wrong place, witnessing what is unseeable. I don’t feel myself fall, but gradually become aware of my hands in the cold earth. My flashlight has landed several feet away from me. I laugh harder, manically, dry heaving. The shadow is Tamara Matveev naked in our school football field. No. No. My mind is still intact enough to understand that it can’t be Tamara. No. This woman has come to repay me for lusting over Tamara. The small rock I suddenly tongue in my mouth tells me I deserve it. I am shameful. Dirt in my hair, clothes tearing on the thorny scrub as I crawl and skid. I am a slut. My left hand tries to claw its way past the zipper of my jeans. Uncontrollable. Possessed. I will rough myself up. The forest floor will eat me. I will get what I deserve.
I’m so close to the fire now, I can smell ash. The woman remains a faceless shadow. “Who …?” I struggle to my knees, then cast myself toward her.
And all of it is gone.
The sun has risen over the horizon line, and beams of first light wriggle through the trees. Carved on a nearby stump is the number nine. I lie in the fetal position in the centre of an empty circle of hard-stamped soil. This is campsite number nine. I am alone here.