On her way through the rain to Ingrid’s, Sandra passed the field. An older man walked his dogs across it, seeming to have no idea what sometimes went on there.
Ingrid’s house blinked into view. Ingrid wanted to break up with Tom today, and she wanted Sandra’s help. Tom was thirty-six.
Ingrid’s mother, a secretary in Scarborough, wasn’t home, and the rule was that Sandra could walk right in.
Triumph blared—“Lay It on the Line.” In the living room on the couch, Ingrid’s older brother, whose arms were too short for his body, smoked a fat joint with the tallest boy in the neighbourhood, Eddie, who had curly hair and skinny lips. Before he had killed himself a year ago, Sandra’s brother had supplied them with pot from plants he grew in his bedroom closet.
“Sniffer’s almost ready,” her brother said. He and his friends called Ingrid Sniffer after he’d claimed to catch her smelling her mother’s underwear last year in grade seven. Ingrid always said it wasn’t true.
Sandra pushed open Ingrid’s bedroom door and found her baby-powdering the insides of her thighs. She wore a white sundress, nylons, and a pair of her mother’s black high heels. Two yellow ribbons dangled from either side of her head. The baby powder container exhaled as she set it on the dresser beside her three glass unicorns that faced each other in a circle—a gift from her father. Ingrid was the only one allowed to touch the unicorns.
“You’re going to get soaked in that,” Sandra said, following Ingrid to the front hall.
“So?” Ingrid said. She grabbed a beige dress coat with a belt from the front hall closet, and her hands vanished into the sleeves.
“Whose is that?”
“Mum’s. Gave it to me.”
“Why are you so dressed up if you’re going to break up with him?”
“Doesn’t hurt to dress up once in a while, Bitch.” Sometimes they called each other Bitch instead of by their names. It didn’t mean they weren’t friends.
Ingrid grabbed an umbrella from a hook beside the closet, then pushed open the screen door. The rain was even heavier. Sandra pulled the hood of her rain coat up. Ingrid’s heels snagged the pavement.
They plodded through the schoolyard, and the rain on Sandra’s face felt like sharp, cold pins. Ingrid didn’t share the umbrella. By the time they stopped at the store, the rain had stopped and the sun was coming out. That always happened in summer.
Sandra yanked open the door and pushed herself in. Two little boys were picking out bags of chips. Ingrid went and stood by the candy and chocolate bars, reading ingredients because she was allergic to flour. Sandra vibrated with the need to humiliate Forehead, the young man who worked behind the counter. He didn’t care that he was ugly and weak. The feeling was bloating in her stomach. She slapped a package of red licorice down on the counter. The two little boys lined up behind her.
“Get laid last night, Forehead?”
“Did you?” he said, the words squashed and limp.
“At least I do it with the opposite sex.”
His face went red like a baby’s when it tries to go to the bathroom, and she had to hold herself back from slapping it, making it redder, making it sting.
“You’re mean,” one of the little boys said. She turned, and he was looking at her fiercely, his eyes almost lost in his freckles. He kicked her, and then, seeming to like the feeling, punched her breast. “I could kill you,” he said. “I know how.”
“Right,” Sandra said, and she went outside, not bothering with the licorice, trying not to cry from the pain, wiping at her eyes. She wanted to touch her breast to make it feel better, but she didn’t. She first stood by the garbage can, full of pop cans and chocolate bar wrappers and popsicle sticks, but a wasp dove at her ear, so she stood by the fence, leaned against it. She had a flash—she often had flashes—of her father, straightening a pile of paper at work.
The boys came out like they’d won something. They grabbed their bikes that leaned against the front of the store. They didn’t hurry at all.
“Think you’re big, don’t you?” the little boy who had hit her said. His voice shook like a girl’s, and he was blushing. His friend concentrated on his ketchup chips, his eyes narrow and unafraid.
“Fuck off,” she said.
“Ooh, I’m scared,” he said, and got on his bike and, nosing the front wheel at her legs, ran over her foot. She grabbed the handles to stop him as a man walked up with his Lab, and the boy whispered to Sandra, “I’m going to kill you. I’m going to dig your grave tonight.”
Her chin trembled, but the man came closer to them and the boys sped away, the one with freckles laughing in his throat, as if meeting Sandra had given him a million good ideas.
Ingrid appeared with her Fun Dip and they made their way to Tom’s. A light wind from the lake floated through the trees and down the street. The sun was fully out now, warming the top of Sandra’s head.
When they got to his three-storey house, Ingrid knocked and, after a minute, Tom answered in black jeans, a white shirt tucked in. He had black hair that winged out at his ears, one of which was pierced with a gold stud. He smelled of soap and sweet chemicals. Classical music played in the house.
“Hey, Queen Bee.”
“Can we come in?” Ingrid asked.
Sandra could tell that Ingrid’s body had started humming—her skin became a deeper pink, and one bird hand fluttered up to her temple, then fell to her side.
“Entrez,” Tom said, and Ingrid’s shoulders came together as she stepped in. Her giggle sounded like a gag. One ribbon dangled from her hair and her eyes squinted as if they suddenly stung. She dug into her bottom lip with her top teeth.
“Come upstairs. Tell her to go home,” Tom said, motioning toward Sandra. Ingrid’s red lips opened, and now her eyes widened. She turned to Sandra.
“Go home. I’ll phone you,” Ingrid said, and walked up the stairs without waiting for a reply.
Outside, Sandra felt temporarily free. She took off her rain coat and carried it.
The air reeked of grass and flowers. She walked along the shoulder of the road toward the lake. The lake was hers. It had always been hers. It was rough today, a vicious beast. When she was eight and nine, she’d swum in it bravely, done somersaults and handstands, lashed out to the sandbar. Today, even though the sun poured down, the water discouraged her. The mouths of waves choked up foam, and she had the feeling she always had that she was ugly, a pulsing blob of flesh—she didn’t want to die, but hated to be a living thing. She headed away from the lake along a path that ran beside the field. It was empty and quiet during the day. At night, when there were boys there, things could happen, things a girl wanted to happen. The ones who wanted it never ran fast enough. She was going to have to go there, and she was going to have let them, and it couldn’t wait. She needed to be altered.
The house was empty and quiet when she got home because her mother went to the gym in the afternoons. Stiff and wary in the silence, Sandra set her key on the front table. The hush of the house always invited Sandra to do the thing she didn’t want to but had to do. She climbed the stairs, excited and full of dread. She walked to the end of the hall and entered her parents’ bedroom. A school picture of her brother sat on their dresser, and Sandra glanced at it briefly and guiltily. She slid her mother’s mirrored closet door closed and glanced at her watch. Then she pushed down her jeans, pulled her top over her head, unclipped her bra. Laying on her back on her mother’s side of the bed, Sandra glanced at herself in the mirror. Her face was spotty and despicable. She closed her eyes and raised her hands above her head—she was out of control now, and hated herself, could taste the hate like onions in her mouth, and she wasn’t going to let herself have Oreos after. Sandra kept her hands above her head, imagining what she had to imagine, that she was helpless, tied up. A line up of boys from her class stood outside the room, and they were determined, and Sandra was their slave—an ache in her body, a deep down thrumming. Then she hurriedly went down the hall to her own room, put the pillow between her legs, and she finished—melted warmly all over it.
The day had become an even hotter one, and when Sandra’s mother came home from the gym, she cranked the air-conditioning. Sandra wore socks and jeans and a sweater as she lay on the couch watching General Hospital. Her mother was upset with her because she had called home to tell Sandra to take chicken out of the freezer, and Sandra hadn’t been home. Now Sandra was saying that she hadn’t heard the phone because she was sleeping, but her mother didn’t believe that for a minute; she said she could tell by Sandra’s eyes that she was lying.
“And get off that couch. Lying like that is terrible for your posture.”
At first, Sandra said nothing, then she said, “Leave me alone.”
Her mother stood in front of the television.
“Get up.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
She rolled over to her other side and buried her face in the upholstery, a comforting, long-ago smell.
“Sandra, what is wrong with you?”
She was comforted by the sound of her own breathing, could almost block her mother out, go into her own, lovely, quiet world.
A claw on her shoulder. “Get up. I want the lawn mowed before your father gets back.”
“Cunt,” Sandra said. “Fucking stupid cunt.” She had said it before, but only in her head. She liked the way the words sounded together, like rocks being thrown at something, killing it.
Her mother whipped her around and smacked her jaw so hard that her molars hurt. Her mother’s eyes were full of dislike and bitterness. She wished that her mother could have been more attractive, for her own sake. Her silk blouses didn’t soften her or make her prettier. Her eyelashes were long and dark with mascara, her lids dull brown with shadow, but the eyes were full of contempt. She knew her mother wished it had been Sandra and not her brother.
“I’ll do it, just leave me alone.”
“You better,” her mother said. In a moment, Sandra heard footsteps going down the basement stairs.
Early in the evening, Sandra drove with her father to pick up the pizza they’d ordered. Her father was so tall that he had had to duck and fold himself into the blue Mustang.
It was the end of summer. Dusk fell all around them, and even though it was warm, Sandra felt a deep chill, as if water had pooled inside of her.
She drove with him whenever it was possible because she worried about her father. Sandra worried that he would die in a car crash, and something that she wanted to say to him—she didn’t know what exactly—would be forever unsaid. She believed her presence would prevent the accident. Metal crashing into metal, blood pouring out, her father’s face stony and satisfied, pleased at his unexpected escape.
Sandra kept glancing at him, trying to think of what she wanted to say. His hair was grey, and he was thin and, since her brother had died, he didn’t like to talk. He sometimes spoke to the newspaper, which he read when he got home from work, a glass of stinging whiskey in his hand. If Sandra needed to speak to him at all, it was important she did it early in the evening. After a certain time, a few hours after he got home, her father’s face became more and more open, and his eyes looked different—bigger, glassy, leaking desperation. Sometimes, when he was like this, her father would want Sandra to sit beside him, not talk, but just sit beside him, and he liked to put his long arm around her. He’d tell her how much he loved her and he’d ask her to say it back, but because of the smell of his breath, none of what he said went in. All of it exhausted her, made her squeamish and depressed. Soon he’d fall asleep, snoring and gasping, and she’d creep away. Her mother was always trying to live in another world, a world that was muted, where nothing happened, and she could live in her own thoughts and not be disturbed. On Saturdays, her mother would sit on the end of the couch with one of her thrillers, her thin, long, brown hair hanging straight down to her shoulders. After she finished the book, she’d lie on the couch with her hands pressed together like leaves under her cheek. In the house on Saturdays, Sandra sometimes felt like an abomination, too alive.
“I can’t wait to eat,” Sandra said, putting her hand on her stomach.
“Yes,” her father said, and she wasn’t sure if he was responding to what she had said or if he was answering a thought.
He parked outside of Pizza Hut, pulled the gearshift back.
She stayed in her seat while her father went in. He walked on a slant, how rain fell. The heavy door closed behind him. He had left the radio on for her and she turned the knob, trying to find “Every Breath You Take.” No station was playing it.
After a few minutes, her father emerged from the restaurant with a pizza box in his hands. He opened the car door.
“Hi,” she said, but he said nothing, just nodded and handed her the pizza. He started the car, reversed, turned toward the exit, and it was on the tip of her tongue—the boys at the store. Maybe she would even tell him they had had a knife. They drove across the bridge, then along the long, curving road that bordered the marsh before turning into their little neighbourhood on the edge of the lake. Sandra wanted to stay in the car with her father, even though they seldom spoke. She wanted the car to keep moving, she wanted to be perpetually in motion—it would save her from something, she wasn’t sure what. The creeping chill she had felt earlier simply made her anxious; the leaves flipping and turning in the wind that had come up off the lake filled her with a strange, tense worry about herself. She was a small figure in the world, and nothing was attached to her, and she was not attached to anything. Her skin hurt, and suddenly she felt dizzy.
Sandra glanced at her father. He smiled at something in his head—it couldn’t have been at the thought of her, or the thought of her mother. He couldn’t have been thinking about her brother, either.
She looked ahead. The lake lay before her; it would always be hers. But she wasn’t going to be able to tell him; he might not have said anything. He might have told her none of it sounded likely, or that she’d be fine, they were just little boys. Before, when he had picked her up from a basketball tournament in Oshawa, she’d told him about the boys in the field, how they held girls down and the girls didn’t struggle, how they laughed and liked it, and he had peered at her, peered at her as if he could see her, and he had said, “That sounds awful. That doesn’t sound like something you want to have happen to you.” For weeks, she had played that over in her head, his voice and how he had looked at her, absorbing her; she could feel herself being almost physically absorbed by him. For those weeks, it wasn’t something Sandra had wanted to have happen to her. She had been pure. She had been in control.
Sandra led the way. At night, the field was a different place: it was neutral. It inhaled and exhaled without feeling. Sandra and Ingrid had snuck out. Sandra phoned her after pizza and they made the plan. It had been easy, and she had done it once before. She quietly and slowly opened the bedroom door, quietly and slowly went down the front stairs, then squeezed herself out the front door. She didn’t bother bunching clothes up under her blanket. No one would look, she was sure. The last time she’d gone out with Ingrid, they couldn’t find anything to do, and Sandra had been grumpy and cold, not realizing how much the temperature dropped at night and how wet and chilly the grass was. They had trampled a couple of gardens, broken one antenna. They hadn’t even talked about going to the field, and had finally parted on the corner they always parted on. Sandra had run home, and she had felt like an animal, hearing her jagged, harsh breath in her ears, feeling ropy and fierce. She had kept looking behind her.
But tonight, she had a purpose.
The field breathed, and Sandra fiddled with a loose thread in the pocket of her green jacket. There was a hole in the pocket, and she could stick her hand right through it. She did that now, and found a small pencil. She held it in her hand, squeezed it. It was the one she chewed on in school; her mouth often tasted like pencil wood.
Sandra and Ingrid sat across from each other in the pit, a dirt hollow surrounded by skinny, leafy trees and bushes. Sandra sat on a piece of board, and Ingrid sat on an IGA supermarket bag that she had brought with her. “He popped my cherry,” Ingrid had said earlier, smiling, but with a tense mouth. From where Sandra was sitting, she could see a portion of the street; she saw two boys walk under the street lamp. They had long hair and wore jean jackets—both of them. They were older boys who were in high school. They might have known her brother. One might have said, “We miss that guy.” The boys vanished.
Every time Ingrid puffed on her cigarette, her long nose and wide eyes were narrowly lit up.
“Why are we here again?” she said.
“I want to see what it’s like at night.”
“You know what happens here,” Ingrid said, and she tapped ash off her cigarette, as if she were now ten years older than Sandra.
“So. We’re fine.”
“My ass is getting cold.”
“Ten more minutes.”
Ingrid got up. “I’m getting the hell out of here.” She stood in a way that was artificial, like a grown woman talking to a child.
“Ten more minutes.”
“You want them to,” Ingrid said. “You’re so gross.”
“Want them to do what?” Sandra asked, and she felt her chest freeze.
“I just think it’s disturbing,” Ingrid said, using a tone she’d never used before, and Sandra wondered where she’d heard it. “And I’m probably the one they’d chase anyway.” She smiled at Sandra, and Sandra imagined what it would have been like with Tom; had Ingrid taken all of her clothes off.
“Sorry.” She got up.
Sandra watched her progress across the field. She had small, bony shoulders, long, thin arms. She had told Sandra before that the only thing she didn’t like about her body was her feet. Ingrid stepped onto the road and headed home, and the tall bushes on the side of the road concealed her.
Sandra was alone. She tried to stay still on the board and to breathe through her fear. She looked at her white running shoes, then at her hands on her thighs. She had that dizzy sensation again. Whose hands were those? Whose legs and feet were those? Then the field was sucking her in, folding her up; it wanted her, and would get her. She got up automatically, something from deep inside pushed her up, and she started running.
That night, when Sandra opened the front door, her mother appeared in the kitchen doorway with a mug of coffee in her hand, her narrow, flabby face wretched with exhaustion and worry. She was wearing her rose velour robe, tied up tightly at the waist, and the pink collar of her pyjamas was sticking out.
“Where were you?”
“Out,” Sandra said. She hung up her coat in the closet. She took out the small pencil and put it in the front pocket of her jeans.
“Don’t be flippant with me. And what’s in your pocket?”
Sandra held out the small, bitten pencil, then put it back in her pocket. “I was out. With Ingrid. What am I supposed to say?”
“Don’t you know that I worry about you?”
Sandra walked to the foot of the stairs. She stopped. “Don’t think I don’t know the truth.” She climbed up the stairs to her bedroom. Below, her mother whispered, “What truth?” but Sandra closed her bedroom door. If her mother really knew what the truth was, she wouldn’t knock. If Sandra was wrong, if she was all wrong and her mother really couldn’t live without her, she would knock, wanting to know what Sandra thought the truth was.
It wasn’t his room at all anymore. And no one would ever have known what he had done in this room. Still, when Ingrid came over, she wouldn’t step across the threshold.
It had all the possible comforts: a down comforter, a frilly bedskirt, pillows, stuffed animals, a desk, plush blue carpet, a closet full of dresses, like a doll’s closet. Before her brother died, her mother had bought her a dress for every season; after, dresses didn’t seem important anymore, didn’t seem like something Sandra should ask for. Now, she liked jeans and sweaters and running shoes.
When she had said she wanted her brother’s old room, her father had gone to the trouble of fixing it up for her, and even though it was so long ago, it was how she knew he loved her, really loved her. She changed into her yellow nightgown, got under the covers, lay straight out on her back. She liked to feel that her comforter was hugging her. Her blind was up, and from this position she could see the top floor of the neighbour’s house, the sky beyond, and she felt afraid and excited; afraid because the world had no end and excited because she was alive, her blood was moving, and she was Sandra, and no one else was. It was her night feeling; it came at night when she was alone in her bedroom, and the next day, she could only remember the feeling. She took a deep, deep breath, held it for as long as she could, then let it out, a warm stream passing out her mouth.
She closed her eyes, held herself tightly.
Below this room was the living room where she and her brother used to fight, wrestling and attacking each other. He had been three years older, and he could have really hurt Sandra, but he never did. Her body would knock against his, his body would knock against hers—and that was what she had wanted. He pinned her, and she pinned him, holding his warm sweaty hands against the carpet, threatening to spit in his face. Sometimes she kissed him hard and wet on the forehead, pretending it was the worst punishment of all. He smelled like smoke, and sometimes his eyes were red and swollen. After, he’d get up, straighten himself out, and say, “Okay, now leave me alone the rest of the night.” She would. Didn’t he know she had been completely satisfied? She let him close himself up in his room.
Everyone thought it was the pot. That he had killed himself because his friend’s dad caught him selling drugs outside the store while Sandra and her mother and father were at the cottage for the weekend. Sandra had swum and roasted marshmallows and played cards with her mother and tanned with her on a rock they’d swum out to in the afternoon. Her father had taken her out waterskiing, and Sandra had gotten up on the first try. She had risen up, miraculously, and she had not fallen. She couldn’t stop smiling, and wind had blown her teeth, gums, and tongue dry. Her father had boasted to everyone, and her mother kept saying she must have waterskiing legs.
Her brother had been home, and he’d been caught selling pot. Still, Sandra thought it was something else: his nighttime feeling had been different, scarier; it had been hollow and unbearable. She hadn’t been there to hug him and soothe him.
She sat up in bed, trying to imagine the hollowness, the not caring if you lived or if you died, wanting to die. She closed her eyes; she wanted to feel herself disappearing, giving up. She lay back down and opened her eyes. What came to her mind then was the hardness and warmth of his forehead against her lips. Her hands, small in his.
She pulled her comforter up to her chin. Odd thoughts wandered into her mind at night. Sometimes she wanted to know how she was supposed to know that she was supposed to be alive. But tonight she looked out, and it came to her: because I’m not dead.
She heard her mother gently climb the stairs, one step at a time, slowly, so they creaked and groaned; then she passed Sandra’s bedroom door as if she hadn’t seen it in the dark.