I guess the going notion says the worst possible thing that can happen in a relationship is a breakup. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl. That’s the hetero boilerplate, right? If I was a dude at this very moment, I would be plotting my reunion strategies. I would try to win her back.
According to Tamara, the real lovers’ cliché is feeling needed, feeling special. If I follow her logic, I’m a hundred-pound, walking, talking, nonstop cliché. I am special. Fucking miraculously special. People do need me. Well, they need what I currently have to give them.
It’s going to take about three hours to walk back to The Point. I start simply, by putting one foot in front of the other, and march east down Tamara’s street, turn onto the Niagara Boulevard, which is as scenic of a route as there is around here, and follow the water. The sidewalks are stupidly wide. Why do we need such wide sidewalks? It’s not like there’s pedestrian traffic to warrant such wide sidewalks. The sidewalks are cracked and always sprouting crabgrass. Step on a crack, you break your mama’s back. Kids are so cruel.
No one is around to hear me, so as I walk I sing, “Little bird, little bird, I am going to pluck you. I’ll pluck the feathers from your neck. I’ll pluck the feathers from your neck. From your neck, from your neck.”
Then I sing, “Lizzie Borden took an axe, and gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one.”
I’m distracting myself, yeah, no, duh. I live to distract myself from my life.
I sing, “Ask me no more questions, please tell me no more lies. The boys are in the bathroom unzipping their … Flies are in the city, the bees are in the park, the boys and girls are kissing in the dark dark dark! Darker than the ocean, darker than the sea, darker than the underwear my mommy puts on me.”
Sweet fucking Mary, kids are cruel because they hate their mothers. I really am a cliché. Can survivors be cliché? Is not being believed a survivor cliché? Is not knowing if your truth is legitimately true a cliché? I suppose a Cassandra complex lacks a certain originality. Aeschylus told that story 2,500 years ago. Phobos is the Greek god of fear. Christougenniatiko dentrophobia is the fear of Christmas trees. Christmas fucking trees! The fear of not being believed has no name. It’s not listed as a phobia. There’s no diagnosis, only myth and tragic plays and children’s rhymes.
Showing Tamara the x’s hidden behind my childhood bed was tender, as she wrote in her break-up letter, tender and fine. I wanted her to touch me then, the way she lets me touch her. I wanted one of those howling female orgasms, as loud as hers, as wet. I wanted my body to perform desire, to perform love, and maybe just maybe real desire and love would follow. I wanted to meet her on her beautiful feminine orgasming pedestal.
And I wanted a long-term relationship to follow? Or I wanted the other stuff, the other-than-sex stuff. The intimate emotional stuff.
If I was in Toronto now, perhaps walking the goddamn length of Yonge Street, I could stroll into any sports bar, any shopping mall, any subway station, any public library, any public place really, and find sex. Or, if not sex, someone would touch me just enough to remember there’s blood in my body. Men, yes. Men, easy and always available. Even the men who’ll decline sex want to nourish a flirtatious moment or two. And women, straight-laced women, always seem to be ready with kind shoulder taps and accompanying concern: “Are you okay?” If I was in Toronto, or any city, it would take me less than ten minutes to find someone willing to ask me if I’m okay.
Along the stupidly wide sidewalks no one passes me. No one dots the stupidly large expanse of thirsty green grass before me. Walking alone is not a metaphor. Sing something else, I tell myself. Recite a poem or a scene from a favourite film. But it’s muggy hot and too bright and there’s no corner stores for another few more kilometres and besides I don’t have my wallet.
I could hitchhike, not that there’s many cars. Should have taken Garrison, darn it.
Eventually, the stupid sidewalk ends, leaving me on a single lane road, which soon turns to gravel and dirt. I’m close to Crystal Beach. Brush thickens on either side of me. I’m quickly attuned to the particular music only heard on rural roads on hot days, a sort of chorus of insect and bird chatter and the oddly specific sound of dry leaves and bush weeds holding still in the absent breeze. Occasionally, off either shoulder, I spot something that has been left to rot in the woods. The rusted flatbed of an old truck. Coils from a box spring mattress. A grim threesome of oil drums. And a few lean-to piles of boards and plastic sheeting that must be the secret forts of children. Squirrels wave their anxious tails at me. A toad basks in the middle of the road; I almost miss it until it hops away from my footsteps.
A woman waits fifty feet in front of me. At first I think it’s Bobby, then I think it’s just wishful thinking, and then I realize it is actually Bobby. She beckons me with a hush-hush gesture. I slink up beside her, follow her gaze up the side of willow tree. She juts her chin in the direction she wants me to look.
“In the daytime?” I ask, spotting the screech owl looking down at us. How can something with a heart-shaped face look so terrifying?
“A young one,” says Bobby. “Betcha she left her parents’ burrow no more than a month ago to find her own tree. Maybe she hasn’t found the right tree yet, so she ain’t sleeping well. Only reason you see an owl in the day is if her sleep’s interrupted. She’s looking for a place to sleep, I bet.” Bobby laughs, and I wonder what’s funny about a young insomniac owl until she says, “Either that or she’s come to tell you you’re gonna die.”
“Oh my god! You believe that?”
“Nope. Just getting a rise out of you.” Bobby turns and walks toward Crystal Beach. I ask her where she’s going. “Now that I found you, back home.”
“You came for me?” I clutch Tamara’s break-up letter inside my pocket.
Bobby sighs peevishly, “Yes, who else? Leanne telephoned Rose. Said she saw you walking one of your trance walks. I figured someone better get you before you wound up underwater.” Outside of The Point and without Lucky clinging to her, Bobby appears younger, physically looser, almost drifting. Her toes pitch in slightly as she walks, hips sway. Shoulders so bouncy I can’t help stare. I think, she must have been a hot number when she was young, a real man magnet, then I feel guilty for thinking it.
“Bobby, um, did you talk with Jaguar at all before he left?”
She keeps her eyes forward. Unwavering stride. “Hal came clean about the photos of Lucky, if that’s what you’re asking.” That is what I was asking. Though I’m unsure of what my next question should be. What exactly did Hal tell her? Where are the photos now? Is she pissed? Is she pissed at me? Maybe it’s better not to ask. If she wants to tell me, she’ll tell me, right? Bobby veers in front of me, bends to pick up something in the dirt. “Found a loonie,” she says, holding up dollar coin. “Good luck.” She passes it to me. I slip it in my pocket with Tamara’s break-up letter. “So, I tossed Hal outta the house. He’s set up camp at one of the sites.”
“I’m sorry, Bobby.”
“Everybody’s sorry.”
“Are you going to divorce him?
“Divorce, ha!” Bobby hip checks me along the path, playfully. I stumble a step or two. “No, Hal needs a good long think, is all. So do I. Divorce is what thirty-year-olds do. When I met Hal, I was already thirty-nine and he was forty-four. I thought he looked just like Lorne Greene from Bonanza. He shaved his beard back then. Had the leather vest and everything! Both of us were as bitter as we were sweet. But our fights were always going someplace. Listen now, Starla. Our fights were always going someplace. Can you guess where we needed to go?”
Is this a question I can literally answer? I slow my steps as Bobby walks a few paces in front of me.
“Back!” she says, as if the answer was obvious. “We needed to go back to all the screwed up stuff and be okay with it. It’s okay that he was in jail. It’s okay, all those years I got tossed around—”
“It’s okay that you were in foster homes?”
“I mean, no, it’s not okay. You got to listen, Starla. Let me get there. It’s not okay, what happened. But we’re okay. We’re okay. There’s nothing wrong with us. That’s what loving taught Hal and me. There’s nothing wrong with us. I bet we even love harder than regular folks after all we been through.”
The dirt road turns back into pavement under our feet. Soon, sidewalks reappear on either side of us. I am hanging on Bobby’s every word. “When I got pregnant, Hal didn’t even blink. We got married. No family came. No church—not even a cake. But we were as happy as any young couple. Happier because we knew all the things it meant, the good and the bad, when we said ‘I do.’
“Everything was going real smooth until Lucky started talking and asking questions like little ones do. The bigger Lucky got, the more Hal got mean. Drinking. Kicking up all kinds of fuss. Going off for who knows how long by himself. Anything he could do to turn away from his son. You know what I think it is?”
Bobby pauses again, and I panic a little that I should have an answer ready for her. We’re passing Willowwood Street—the last of the tree-named streets—and we’ll be back at The Point soon.
“I think he started seeing himself in Lucky, seeing himself as a child, and that got him thinking about childhood, eh? And not being okay. And when you’re not okay, nothing is. You stop loving your own, like you’re supposed to. Hold a grudge against your own son.”
The sidewalks recede again. The brush closes back in, wilder and buggier and noisier than it was a mile back. The narrow birch trees ahead glow a peculiar white that tells me Etta knows I’m coming. I wonder if Bobby sees the trees the way I do?
“That’s what those photos were, Starla. He’s more concerned about proving to the world that he’s shoulder-to-shoulder with some phony baloney angel than he is about his own son. You got that Bambi look in your eye, Starla, but I know you’re a good listener. This is what me and my Lucky and Hal are going through right now. I already told you: they are all I got.”
We stand together at the entrance to The Point. The driveway is skid-marked from so many cars racing in and out for the last couple of months. Bobby takes my hand. Her palm is cool; mine is sweaty. She makes eye contact; I look down. She’s going to ask me something that I don’t want to answer; I can feel it coming.
“Are you being hurt? It’s not gonna to do anything for us to watch you grow thin as a rake and sicker than a dog. You have to say it. You have to tell us. Are you being hurt?”
You think you’re hurt? I’ll show you hurt. I can’t see Etta anywhere. I don’t know from which direction her voice speaks to me. The driveway smells like gasoline. The tar and gravel is hot against my cheek. Maybe I’ve fallen, or maybe I just lay down. Bobby towers over me, she yells for Dolores, for Rose, for help. My answer to her question comes out of my mouth as black retch. Blood and sour spit, cursed spit. My raw throat swells shut.
I am being hurt.