Daryl will be home soon, and they’ll be off up the highway to his parents’ house for turkey and a lively game of Rumoli. Daryl’s mother, Peggy, will pick her nose throughout the game, and everyone else will pretend not to notice. Alice wishes they would play charades or some other game that didn’t entail touching the same chips or cards or playing pieces. Daryl will nudge his mom, remind her that it is her turn, and she will look up, and — woosh! — out will come the finger so that she can fully concentrate. After her turn is up, back will go the finger, inserted well past the fingernail, twisting and scraping. When Alice and Daryl were first married, Alice managed to find some amusement in this grey-haired old school lady, watching her glasses bounce up and down on the brim of her nose as she dug away. But after years of marriage, the nose picking just isn’t funny any more. Very little is. At least when she’s stoned, Daryl’s parents seem more like Fellini characters, and it eases the pain a bit.
Thanksgiving is shit. Alice wishes she could just stay home alone, cry, and watch TV. Get stoned and eat everything in sight. Laugh at shows that aren’t even funny. Watch The Sound of Music or Mary Poppins or some other holiday favourite. She wonders if she has enough time to make herself sick, turn her teary face up to Daryl’s, and tell him she’s far too ill to go after all. He’ll understand. He understands being sick. A physical ailment, an injury — these draw his compassion. Alice makes certain she is sick on a fairly regular basis.
She tells herself she’ll get stoned first and then think about it. Sometimes the drugs bring her around, and she wants to observe people and socialize. She pops the dime down into the empty beer bottle and heads out on the deck. As she smashes the bottle against her boot, she is careful not to knock out the entire bottom. Just make a nice neat hole, big enough to slide the cigarette into, with a little compensation for her shaking hands. Smack. Glass flies out onto the deck and the dime rolls across the wood, falling on its side and stopping, just before it falls into the slats between the wood planks. The paper at the end of her cigarette burns quickly, and Alice taps the small piece of hash with experience, letting the smoke curl inside the brown glass, her left thumb over the mouth of the bottle. When it’s ready, she inhales quickly and deeply. The distinctive smell and the smoke held in her lungs quickly make her feel better. Just a couple, she thinks, just a couple of bottlers, and I’ll be ready to go. What the hell. How bad can it be? Facilitating rationalization. A smile. A shrug. Just one more.
When she sucks up the last bit of smoke from the bottle, she turns to go back in the house. She will have a quick shower, drop in the Clear Eyes, make herself a drink (or two), and find something tight to wear, so Daryl can appreciate her breasts. But as she collects her things, the hash, small, the size now of a pebble, rolls from her hand and, with one fatal bounce, falls between the cracks of the deck, down to where the dime found its resting place.
“Jesus Christ,” Alice fumes. “Jesus H. Christ.”
That small pebble of hash was her only stash. It’s so hard to secure some without Daryl finding out, without the neighbours talking. She wants it for later, when they return home. She wants it for tomorrow. What in the hell is she going to do now? Panicked, Alice lies on her belly and peeks through the crack in the deck, but sees only a black void. She finds a flashlight, but all it illuminates is rocks. Everything looks like rocks. Everything is brown and black and round. Alice can’t believe she was so stupid not to wrap it in tin foil, which would have made it easier to spot. “Shit!” she screams and hurls the flashlight down the driveway.
Next, with a hammer, she tries prying out the nails that hold the latticework across the front of their deck. Again on her belly, like an iguana, she slithers in the dirt, sifting her fingers through the soil under the deck, stopping to sniff and bite each small brown round substance that resembles her chunk of hash. Nothing. Rocks and mud and god knows what, but no hash. She starts crying. Hard. Desperate, she searches for another half hour, and when she eventually crawls out, she punishes herself by hitting her head on the railing of the deck. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. If only she had wrapped it in foil. If only she had held onto it tighter. If only she had a nicer deck. If only she didn’t have to hide her pot from Daryl. Or go to dinner. Or live in this stupid town. Fuck.
Since there’s little she can do, she has an extra couple of drinks.
Every now and then Alice cries and wishes away thoughts that creep into her mind and whisper “sleep alone, sleep alone.” If she didn’t initiate contact, there likely wouldn’t be any. Daryl would coexist as her friend, nothing more, and sometimes, if Alice was honest with herself, she preferred it that way. He might be tall and handsome, but by day’s end he seemed to fall apart and present himself as thin, frail, and gangly — a translucent figure who lay beside her in the night, liquid gurgling in his throat, air whistling through his nostrils, and perspiration glistening on his skin. In that state, he disgusted her. Though she wanted to have sex, she didn’t want to risk touching him. If he initiated physical contact — if the moon was full and he awoke — Alice responded to his touch with eyes closed.
Oh, how complicated this all made things.
Alice was furious that he seemed indifferent to her, but she picked him apart with precision of a NASA scientist. By early evening Daryl was stripped down enough to be comfortable, and it took all of Alice’s inner mother voice to stop demanding he put his clothes back on. It was hard to tell where his pale body ended and his greying worn briefs began. Alice felt that if not for the “Hanes” lettered across the waistband, any clear distinction would vanish.
Without his clothes, he looked crudely put together — muscular, yet disjointed. He seemed to lack the self-assurance that would allow him to effortlessly pick her up and tear her from a burning building. In his briefs, feet up on the glass coffee table, head buried in popcorn, he didn’t look like a man who would seduce her. As far as she could tell, he was never going to try. He kissed her now only when she asked, and his lips were hard and pursed like a grandmother. She got four quick pecks before he pulled his mouth away and his mind returned to more stimulating things, such as the TV guide or the fly smacking itself against the window, desperate for outside air.
And Alice wanted to be kissed. Kissed by someone who knew how to kiss, someone who understood how to tease with his mouth and tongue. Kissing was lovemaking. A true kisser could make Alice wet without ever using his hands. These were the men Alice missed in the night, as she lay beside Daryl. They were so vivid in her mind that she could nearly taste them, which only made her nights longer and lonelier. Daryl was worse than a brother because she cooked his meals, too, and took the trouble to keep her legs shaved, and sprayed Alfred Sung in her hair, and wore mascara. She wore tight T-shirts to show off her breasts, and gelled her hair so that it fell in perfect ringlets, and forced diet pills down her throat before and after the ice cream.
But he never looked.
She was afraid if she closed her eyes and asked him what the colour of her eyes were, he wouldn’t know.
Alice knew she was pretty. She remembered men who had passed through her life and named the freckles on her tummy, bought her lotions and lace teddies, and kissed her with their tongues. These were men who insisted they could not possibly wait until they got home and instead found bathrooms and darkened alleys where Alice let them slip inside her. She knew she was desirable, but Daryl seemed to see nothing but her imperfections — her limp hair, the acne on her back, and the new, fine facial hair that was growing frighteningly darker. His teasing only made Alice remember those other men.
She reminded herself that it was Daryl who stayed and loved her even when she was a bitch, who gave her a home and fussed over Delane when she pouted. She took some solace in that. Those other men were from another time, from the years when she would find herself curled up on some unfamiliar, foul-smelling sofa in some alien apartment. The cigarettes and alcohol and sleepless nights had aged her face and her soul.
She decided she needed to lie down for a minute, long enough to enjoy the buzz, and push from her mind the thoughts of those other men, those other apartments, long ago. At least Daryl wasn’t mean to her.
Not like Ross.
When she was a fourteen, she had been so thrilled when Ross, who was new on the street and in grade eleven, put his arm around her and touched the back of her neck with his fingers that she had agreed to take off her shirt and show him her breasts. She had been embarrassed, but she attributed that to being clumsy around boys who looked like Ross. He had Sid Vicious hair and an earring. When he complimented her, she agreed, reluctantly, to kneel down and take him in her mouth while he moaned and stroked the top of her head. After he tied her wrists to the bedposts, she stopped caring that he had cool music video hair. She knew from the taste of the sock in her mouth what his feet smelled like, and after he yanked her pants down and forced her legs apart she felt breakable, fragile, not alluring and sexy. He left her tied up and she heard him dial the telephone and call his friends over. When he returned, he inspected her as if she were some hideous mass. He said that she’d better perform better for his friends. He told her she was so gross that it had taken him a good forty-five minutes just to come and his friends didn’t have that kind of time to waste on some useless piece of ass.
Had it been rape? Christ, even she didn’t know. She knew she had felt cut open. That was about it. But was it rape? Who was there to tell her? To let her know what had happened was indecent. What if she told someone what happened, asked if she had been raped, and what if they said, no, you’re just a slut? You can’t rape a slut. Part of her had wanted it to happen. Part of her wished she had made it up. She wished Ross had never moved down the street. Didn’t have an earring. Didn’t know that she would be too confused to even cry out in pain.
What made it all worse was when they taunted her, on the school bus, outside the Mac’s Milk store, that even though they had forced her, she wasn’t very good. Not a good lay. Not sexy, not stimulating enough to get Ross or his friends off quickly. Despite the awkward way they had rammed themselves, despite the fact she had choked, involuntarily, she wasn’t any good. “Forty-Five Minutes,” they called her. Forty-Five Minutes. “Hey, Forty-Five, whatta ya doin’ after school?”
“Hey, Forty-Five, I’m feelin’ kinda lonely. I hear you’re just the kinda girl I’m looking for!”
Alice would turn away.
It had all been too fast, too rough. They had scared her. She had never done anything like that before. Just the guy at the fair and that had felt okay.
Maybe if she had been good, they would have been gentle. She would have returned to school and everybody would have wanted her. She had a feeling that wasn’t what would have happened, but she was sure no one wanted to date you if you couldn’t get him off. No one wants you if it takes forty-five minutes.
Soon they all knew. The whole goddamn school. Everyone had told her the importance of putting out. Otherwise you were a nun, a prude, or even worse, a lesbian. Alice figured she just hadn’t got it right. Technique needed refinement. She needed more experience so that nothing like that would ever happen to her again. She was determined to be a goddess.
Alice spent the next few years redeeming herself.
There was the East Indian cab driver who drove Alice and her underage girlfriend to the Salty Dog, a biker bar, on Highway 21. Alice, tall in her friend’s borrowed boots, invited the cab driver in to play pool. After four tequila shots, she wandered back outside to the back seat of the cab. She didn’t think it was a terribly good idea. She thought he smelled bad and she couldn’t see straight. Her friend had wandered off with another man. There was a degree of fumbling and awkward poking before they were interrupted by her friend, who leapt into the front seat of the cab yelling, “Get me outta here! Holy shit, he’s got a gun!” The driver pulled up his pants and they took off. The cab stopped once on the way home at the side of the road so that Alice could get out and puke. She did it on her friend’s boots.
Some told her she was fortunate to be alive, given the dangerous choices she was making. For instance, there had been her trip downtown to Larry’s Hideaway on Carleton Street, just down from Maple Leaf Gardens, where the district grew seedy. The bar was infamous, though no one could remember why, but Alice looked upon it as a challenge. There were men there. She took her girlfriend.
Alice got dolled up in 1980s white rock-concert leather. Her friend was wearing a yellow and black plaid jacket. Alice thought her friend looked like a bee, but her friend thought it made her look at least twenty-two.
The bouncer at Larry’s Hideaway noticed them as they stopped on the sidewalk in front of the bar and came over. Alice was convinced he found them unbelievably attractive. “He’s gonna ID us,” her friend said. But the bouncer told them to take their business elsewhere.
Shocked, they stood motionless.
“Beat it,” the bouncer said more forcefully, “I said, take your business someplace else. We don’t need you hanging out right in front of the door.”
Alice and her friend walked to a nearby park that had drunks and paper bags and used condoms and needles. They sat on a bench.
“He thought we were hookers.” Alice said.
Alice didn’t feel like a hooker. She felt like an idiot. She wanted to go home and put on her pajamas.
“I guess we can’t very well try and get in the bar now, eh?” her friend said.
Alice shook her head. Her friend didn’t look like a hooker. She looked like a bee. Alice had never seen a hooker in a yellow and black bee jacket. It must have been her, dressed in her white leather.
“So, what do we do now?”
And as if on cue, several older boys approached them. They weren’t quite men. Not yet. Alice could tell that even from a distance.
The boys asked them what they were doing. Alice thought they should be running away, but they didn’t. They stayed on the bench and talked with the boys, who invited them to a party at a hotel at the back of Larry’s Hideaway. Following them up the fire escape at the back of the buildings, Alice thought, this is a very bad idea. This is when they find you dead. A hooker and a bee.
The wallpaper was peeling. Cigarette butts littered stained carpets. Empty glasses and cardboard beer cases were strewn about. There was yelling, laughter, coughing, and the thump, thump, thump of the drums from the band four stories below.
“Hey, come on, smoke a joint,” one of the boys said, leading them through an open door into a dark bedroom. A mattress was on the floor. On it was girl with short brown hair, face down. She wasn’t moving.
“Step over her. She’s all fucked up.”
Alice asked them if she was alive.
“Last time we looked.”
One of them kicked at her. There was a tiny grunt.
“See, bitch’s alive. Just a waste case, that’s all.”
They fired up the joint. Alice eagerly waited for it to be passed to her. Drugs eased her, made the hassle worthwhile. She could feel herself salivating. She tried to smoke as much of it as she could without appearing selfish. You never know when it’ll come around to you again.
“Band’s shit tonight. You girls aren’t missing much. Party’s up here!” There were high fives. “Roll another one, man. Roll a couple.”
By some miracle, Alice was able to reject all advances. Her friend was off in the corner for a while, her tongue down someone’s throat. Alice sat on the corner of the mattress beside the not-quite-dead-yet girl.
“Why do you keep checking your watch?” one of the boys asked her. “Got someplace better to be?”
“Gotta get home,” Alice replied. They needed to get on the subway in time to make the connection with their bus. She couldn’t tell them that. She needed to make eye contact with her friend to let her know it was time to wrap things up and get back down the fire escape. They were still alive. They hadn’t been raped. They’d gotten high for free. It was time to leave.
Suddenly, her friend pulled her tongue away from the boy and rushed wildly into the hall, heading for the fire escape. She didn’t make it. She vomited down the front of her black and yellow jacket.
“Oh, Christ!” one of the boys yelled. “We ain’t got no towels or fuck all! Wipe it on your sleeve!”
Alice could tell her friend was humiliated, even though she was drunk. While the boys looked for something to scrape the sick off, she dragged her friend down the fire escape and across the park. They raced down Carleton Street, past the Golden Griddle Pancake House, to the subway. Alice was laughing so hard, she could barely run. The vomit had become nicely absorbed into the pattern of the jacket.
When her friend’s mom picked them up from the bus station, she sniffed the air around them.
“You smell like one big cigarette,” she said and remained silent the rest of the way home.
Numb, not so bad. This is just the way men are.
Numb, not so bad. This is just the way life is.
When Alice has had some time to reminisce, she cools off. Everyone has fucked her but Daryl. Why does she always look for reasons to hate him? She doesn’t really. She loves him with all her heart. She just doesn’t know how to tell him.
Sometimes, even the drugs don’t work.
She will love Daryl. The way she is supposed to.
When he comes home, he is strangely amorous. Alice surrenders. His touch never scares her. It might not affect her, but it never frightens her.
That needs to count for something, she reminds herself.
That needs to count for something.