After Tamara drops me at home, I walk from room to room trying to calculate how many consecutive hours I’ve been awake. Thirty-one maybe. In the kitchen there is a “remember to eat” note for me placed beside a plate of raspberry scones.
An empty popcorn bowl has been left on the coffee table in the living room. Barbara’s buttery fingerprints smear the inside and I wonder when we last watched TV together. I place the bowl on the ground for Songbird to lick.
The shower in the white-on-white-on-white bathroom never gets hot enough. The cheap Irish Spring soap smells sickly strong. I rinse quickly and turn the water off. Lightheaded, I creep into Barbara’s room and lie in her bed. Her sheets are dusty rose-coloured cotton. Three blown-glass hearts hang over her bed, like an adult mobile. Maybe a different bed will allow me to sleep.
Minutes later, I’m frantically sifting clothes from my closet. Etta is in my room. I knock on the stunt above my bed to draw her nearer. She’s attracted to anything from the Park. Right, Etta? That’s what binds you to the living world? I knock on the stunt again. The Park is sacred. No answer. She isn’t speaking today. Instead she nudges my thigh. Tugs my hair. Sweeps behind me, feather-light. Her touch feels alarming and heightened on my body, like I’ve been blindfolded by a lover. Like I’m about to sex cry. Like the endorphin high that is particular to bringing a lit cigarette close to one’s own skin. Amygdala ammunition. Fire. I reach my arms at random, grasping. Etta chooses to remain dark and void while I go mad.
I pretend I’m not going to do what I’m about to do. That’s part of it, the pretending. Pretending facilitates many of my fuck-ups. I pretend not to notice my white T-shirt is see-through, or that the bra underneath is red lace. I pack Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (the twenty-third edition in paperback—a worthless printing) and a hot-pink bottle of pepper spray in my purse.
On the bus, I bow into my book to avoid eye contact with the driver, reading, “She wanted to be the reason for everything and so was the cause of nothing.” Oh, Djuna Barnes, in 1937 I would have been your lover, your puppy dog, your boot licker.
I get off at the stop closest to the Peace Bridge. Here is my hitchhiking origin story. Karla Moses and I donned head-to-toe black, including black lipstick, bound for Toronto for an all-ages Love and Rockets concert. We were smart girls. It’s safer to hustle a ride from truckers on this side of the bridge than to thumb it on a highway on-ramp. With on-ramps, you’ve got to jump into just about any car that stops. At the bridge, a girl can chitchat for a minute, watch where the driver lays his eyes when he speaks.
I pick the trucker with a handshake that is the right amount of shakes: three. No revolting finger lingering. He states his first and last name, “Neil Thompson,” then heads straight to the driver’s side, not bothering to open the passenger door or offer me a boost into the cab. As I pull myself up, I notice my right wrist is cramped from fucking Tamara. Can I be in a relationship? Fall in love like a normal idiot? Like brushfire, the crick in my wrist spreads. I yank the truck door shut as pain shoots up my arm. My chest tightens as I fasten my seatbelt. Why am I doing this? I can see the very tip of Pure Platinum’s neon sign from the bridge parking lot as we pull out. It’s not too late to bail. Drink boozy coffee and run a tab at the strip club instead.
Neil Thompson is hauling frozen goods, and that’s why I chose him. I figured a man with a temperature-controlled transport would be especially high-strung and on the clock. I’m surprised his cab isn’t littered with empty cans of Jolt Cola. Neil Thompson says he’s going directly to Marshall’s Truck and Trailer in Hamilton for a fuel-up and that’s as far as he’ll take me. I trust he won’t boot me out half-naked along the outer reaches of Rural Route 107. A driver with a temperature-controlled transport wouldn’t do that. But now I can’t quit thinking about meat. I imagine large cubes of ground beef boxed in cardboard. Meat boxes packed like bricks. A wall of meat. A fortress. Or whole hanging cow carcasses. Rump up, neck down, swaying on icy metal chains as we merge lanes on the highway. Aged beef twice the size of me. White with fat on the outside. Cut down the middle so their ribs jut out like crooked red ladders.
“Quit scratching,” Neil says.
My thighs are pink with nail marks. Crawling hot skin. Fever leaching through my pores. Where’s Etta? Why didn’t I wear my pendant? Did I tuck a strip of ride tickets in my back pocket?
“You worried about something? Because if you’re worried about me, quit worrying. I said I’d take you to Hamilton. I’m not looking for anything in return.”
“What if I want to give you something in return?” I ask. This gentle man with two-day stubble on his chin could distract me. My mind has already placed us in the back of his rig. I have to cool down. Breathe chilled Freonic air. Press my bare back against a frozen cow. Fuck atop a gutted carcass big enough to feed a family for months. I want a cock in my mouth. I want to close my eyes and listen to the rattle of meat hooks and become nothing.
Maybe Neil is crying. His tears are the kind that could be mistaken for perspiration. Glistening. He wipes his forearm across his face, but he’s wearing short sleeves and his bare skin only spreads his damp tears around. He cranes his head into his hunched shoulder to dab eyes on the yoke of his work shirt. The movement is strangely macho. Dominate those tears, Neil Thompson. Don’t let them fall. Or what if he’s a sex crier, like me? We could drain our tainted fluids together. We could ugly cry. “There isn’t a proper rest stop with a pay phone until the Husky station in Saint Catharines. I won’t take you that far north. I’m gonna pull off Exit 5 and let you out. You can call a cab from the Border Town Grill nearby. I’ll give you a few bucks to go back in the direction you came from.”
“You’re kidding me,” I say.
“You’re a working girl. How old are you?”
“I’m not. Did I ask for money?”
“I have too many friends, if you can call them friends, who go out looking for a fight. They say they’re going out for a beer or to watch a band play. Truth is they’re out to fight. Doesn’t matter if they win or lose, as long as fists meet cuffs. I’m going to tell you exactly what I tell them. If you got a fight in you, stay home. Stay home.”
“Fighting wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.” I hitch my fingers around the crook of his elbow. This is my last chance.
“No way. A young girl like you, no thank you. What you have in mind is even more dangerous than a fist,” says Neil Thompson. He flicks his turning blinker on and glides into the exit lane. “You got people you can talk to? Girlfriends or a mom?”
“It’s okay. You don’t need to get all paternal. I gotta work tonight anyway.”
“Work tonight,” Neil repeats, humming out the words.
“Not as an escort or stripper, if that’s what you’re thinking. I got a square job, just like you.”
Neil’s hum tells me our conversation is finished. I think about Tamara in her electric blue underpants. I really should have gone to Pure Platinum. An Irish Cream toothache would be a thousand times better than judgmental man humming.
“Not that there’s anything wrong with being a stripper,” I say, mostly to myself.
Neil leaves me outside of Stevensville, about a two-hour walk from The Point, tops. I’m actually closer to home than when he picked me up. Is this Etta’s doing? Can I not leave the area? The nearby on-ramp is a quiet one. Still, I’d be picked up within the hour in my wet dream outfit. White cut-off jean shorts say drive me to Toronto, don’t they? In the midday sun my white T-shirt is more see-through. I ogle my own bra. Red lace. I think about meat again. Red meat under a layer of white fat. I’m a cow carcass. I’m a cow carcass hanging in the back of a truck driven by a man too stupid to receive a blowjob. What’s wrong with my body?
I’ve always wished for one solid irrefutable reason to be as messed up as me. Somehow being molested by my needy-slut-of-a-single-mother’s boyfriend doesn’t measure up. I was poor, but never starving. I party, but was never an addict. Now I have a reason. Etta. I can’t even wonder if I’ve made her up. Others have seen her.
And tomorrow, the May Two-Four Weekend will bring campers, many campers, and conceivably they’ll see her too. Should I be comforted by these witnesses?
Can I be a witness to myself? I should write that down.
I walk Stevensville Road, leaving the slow rumble of the highway behind. My future book will be called A Hitchhikers Guide to the Fallacy. So long and thanks for all the bullshit. Too derivative? Pity Parade: A Memoir. Pity, from the Latin pietas, closer to devotion than sadness. I’m devout. Rapturous. I haven’t slept in, like, thirty-four hours.
I use the lousy five dollars Neil Thompson gave me to buy a strawberry milkshake and a side order of hash browns at Mae’s Place. The waitress is so rude I suspect she knows I’m only going to tip her seventy-five cents. I bet the old guy half-asleep at the table by the window only tips her seventy-five cents, too. No, the waitress rudely bangs down my milkshake so that strawberry goo spills down the side of the glass because I’m dressed like a tramp. This red bra is cursed. Everything is cursed except this milkshake. This milkshake is saving me. I don’t feel a trace of Etta in my body, only milkshake. The photograph of James Lewis Kraft mounted above the cash register is not cursed either. He grew up here. A Crystal Beach boy, and he invented processed cheese. Velveeta. Miracle Whip. Kraft Dinner. Kool-Aid. Junk food billionaire. White trash to white cash. When there’s only, like, six famous people from your hometown, you recognize every single one at a glance. “One day there will be a photo of me hanging right there,” I say to the waitress, pointing at Kraft. “I’ll be your poster girl.”
“Get a life,” says the waitress.
I have a life, I think. What now?