Back in June, Marcia graduated from high school second out of 197 students and won a scholarship to York University. Her parents presented her with a twenty-four volume set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in its own two-level mahogany bookcase, her father holding her shoulders and standing her back from the case for the panoramic view. “Try to read them before Joanie does,” he joked. In July he cashed in a Canada Savings Bond to pay for her textbooks. But in August she tells him that she has decided to keep on working at the employment agency.
“I need a break from school,” she says as he prods the ceiling tiles with his fingertips. It is a thing he does when the news is bad. Maybe one of the tiles is a magic door. He will lift her through it and angels wearing mortarboards will haul her off to the registrar’s office. “Dad,” she says, “I know how proud you are and everything, but I’m tired of being a student.”
“You can’t help being a student,” he says. “You’re a natural student.” He pulls out a chair and sits across from her at the kitchen table. “I’m going to ask you a question. Are you on drugs?”
“Of course not!” She means, drugs have nothing to do with it.
“Well,” he says. He tugs at his new sideburns, which have grown in like balls of cotton batten. “I’m sorry, but I had to ask.”
When her mother finds out, her question is, “Is this because of you and Paul?”
Good idea. “I suppose,” Marcia says, giving it a try. “I mean, I’m so depressed.”
“Sweetie, Paul was a very interesting, very nice boy. I wasn’t crazy about his hair, but that’s another story. But he’s not the only boy in the world! Boys are like buses. Miss one, and twenty minutes later”—she snaps her fingers—“along comes another.”
Marcia bites her lips as if she isn’t thinking that twenty seconds later is more like it. She blurts out a laugh, and her mother laughs and says, “I’m telling you! Buses!” Snap! Snap! Snap!
By playing up the heartbreak angle Marcia reconciles her parents to her taking one year off. That’s what they think. She is never going to university. What her father doesn’t know is that the “natural student” he allowed out on weeknights because she seemed to be one of those lucky people who could get straight A’s without studying, that natural student did homework until two, three o’clock in the morning on the bedroom floor in the feeble wedge of light from Joan’s closet, and now she’s more blind than ever. What he doesn’t know is that she needs a steady paycheque so that she can go on surprising her boyfriends with little gifts—cigarette cases, silk scarves, belts, gloves. There’s nothing like seeing them all flustered and happy. Or stunned. Scared! Opening the box like a demolitions expert.
Keeping up the heartbroken act requires keeping her two new boyfriends secret, even the one her mother has been pushing at her since she was fifteen. Andy McPhee, the clean-cut Catholic boy who lives across the street and calls women “Ma’am,” and went to St. Mike’s where he was a famous quarterback known as “The Hands.” Whenever he used to walk down the street in his school uniform her mother would say, “If I were thirty years younger…” and roll her eyes in Marcia’s direction.
“How many times do I have to tell you he’s going steady with Susan Boylan,” Marcia would say. Still says, although as she recently discovered that shouldn’t have stopped her. “I wish Sooze would do this,” he moans when she has his penis in her mouth. He holds her head between his hands and she wonders, Is he thinking of a football or when he’s holding a football is he thinking of her head?
Afterwards he worries about having hurt her. He can’t stop fingering the bruises on her legs and upper arms. “What kind of guy—“ he mutters.
“I bruise easily,” she says, but he’s convinced she is protecting some thug because he doesn’t bruise her. (That he never touches her below the head during sex she can’t bring herself to point out.)
He tells her that when she was a little girl and her eyes were always swollen, his parents thought that her father was beating her up.
“I had styes!” she says. “Oh, my God, that’s terrible they thought that!”
He says, “We prayed for him. Teach Mr. Canary to be a patient and gentle father.”
He laughs. The laugh is over the prayer, not the praying. He still goes to mass and is always praying. Before digging into a bag of popcorn he murmurs, “For thy bounty, Jesus, I am truly grateful.” Before sex he says, “Forgive me, Jesus.” Before he comes it’s, “Sweet Jesus!” After he comes it’s fingering her bruises and saying a dozen what-kind-of-guys, if-I-get-my-hands-on-the-guys. He’s such a throwback. For the wall over his bed she buys him a poster of Ursula Andress in a cave-woman get-up. She buys him a near replica of the hula-girl cocktail shaker her father used to have.
“For me?” he says, awed. “You shouldn’t have.” He says this.
He is studying physical education on a football scholarship. He lives in residence, so they have a place where they can make out, but his roommate is always barging in and there’s the risk of Sooze, a nursing student, suddenly showing up. Twice they have gone to a sleazy motel on Kingston Road, Marcia’s treat. It’s the same motel her other boyfriend takes her to, and as she tells Andy the first time, when he balks at checking in, “You don’t call your motel The Seven Year Itch if you’re not catering to illicit escapades.”
Her other boyfriend, Chuck, isn’t really a boyfriend. He’s a married man with three daughters. Thirty-five is how old he says he is, and even if he hasn’t knocked off five years she has decided she’s interested only in boys around her own age. Baby-smooth skin, small tight testicles. Right out of the package, that’s how she wants her boyfriends.
Chuck, though, was her first lover, and when they ran into each other again on the street (he was walking a little white poodle shaved so severely it looked like a poodle twisted together out of balloons) he begged. “For old time’s sake,” he said. “For me,” he finally said, “do it for me,” and considering that he once rescued her from what she’d been sure at the time was a lynching, she concentrated on his laugh lines and scraped up some love. Besides, he buys her lunch and is an expert at giving oral sex (he calls it “balling”), which she never would have believed of a steam-shovel operator.
Here’s how she met him the first time. She was sixteen. It was mid-July, and she hadn’t been able to find a summer job. Then, in a magazine that Sonja’s friend, Gail, left in the bathroom, she read an article about how teens could earn extra money over the summer. “Make paper dresses and sell them door to door.” “Make vinyl aprons and sell them to restaurants.” Were they nuts? In comparison, “Make box lunches and sell them at factories and construction sites” sounded like such a good idea she immediately worried that every girl from her school had already thought of it. Especially since, at the end of her street, there was a construction site.
That same day she borrowed twelve dollars from Sonja and bought two loaves of white bread, three cans each of tuna and salmon, a large jar of mayonnaise, a head of lettuce, a basket of Mcintosh apples and another of carrots, two ready-made apple pies, waxed paper and paper bags. The next morning her mother helped her fix the sandwiches. Twenty to start with.
“Let’s cut off the crusts,” her mother said. “Go that extra mile.” It was her suggestion that Marcia write on the front and back of an old white shirt of her father’s “Fresh Homemade Lunches. Only $1.00” and wear the shirt over her shorts and tank top.
At eleven-forty-five Marcia carted the lunches up the street in her mother’s bundle buggy. The shirt came down to her knees. Her legs were bare, she wore thong sandals and her hairpiece in a French roll. A sex-kitten look except that she suspected her scrawny legs ruined it. What if the workmen laughed at her? Some of them would be foreigners. What if they hated tuna? Her stomach leapt up. “Al was here,” she chanted to herself because she had been reminded of that other shirt she wrote on when she was six and because she was hearing the words in an altered and fear-quenching sense—“Al was here, Al was here”—as if an orphan named Al who sold box lunches many years ago under terrible conditions lay down his life.
The site was surrounded by a plywood wall. At the entrance she paused and squinted (this was almost two years before she bought her contact lenses). An enormous pit. Bulldozers, a steamshovel, a long white trailer. A machine roar that buzzed down her bones, and twenty or so red-helmeted men moving like doomed shapes in a beige haze she tried to blink into focus. She walked in and along a wooden plank, stopping next to a Johnny-on-the-Spot. It seemed to her that a few of the heads turned her way. She smoothed down the front of the shirt to draw their attention to the message.
First somebody wolf-whistled. Then a short, black-haired man (no red helmet) ran toward her, socking the sky with both fists and yelling in a thick accent, “Young lady! What you doing! Young lady! No sandwiches here!” He came right up to her, so close she was sprayed by his spit.
“I’ve got… I thought…,” she stammered, backing up.
“You no business!” he shouted. “No sandwiches!” She backed up, he stepped forward. “I have licence for here!” he shouted. He jabbed his chest. Jabbed in the direction of a small truck—a lunch wagon, she realized, although it was a blur. “Who you think you are, young lady?” She could see right down his throat. His teeth were corn kernels. He shouted, “This private property, young lady!” All the while she was backing along the plank and pushing her bundle buggy behind her but he kept stride like an infuriated flamenco partner.
By now the workers were gathering round, laughing, hollering at him in their language. “I call police!” the man yelled. His rage just kept soaring. “What you say, young lady?”
Nothing. She could no longer even open her mouth or she would cry.
“Leave her alone, Giovanni,” a friendly, unaccented voice called.
That was all it took. Giovanni turned like a dreamer toward the voice. The workers parted like the Red Sea and another of their number, only taller, appeared.
When he looked into her face, his jowly, fatherly smile started her sobbing. As she later learned he wasn’t the boss, he was only a steam-shovel operator, but he had pull. He took her into the trailer, poured her coffee in a Styrofoam cup. Gave her a twenty dollar bill for her sandwiches and gobbled down three of them and two pieces of pie. Said, “Honey, you bake one hell of an apple pie.” Patted his beer belly. Patted her knee. Patted her thigh. Locked the trailer door.
Four years later, due to a back injury, he drives a taxi. He picks her up a block away from where she works, and either they park for a dollar in an underground lot and make love in the front seat or, if he’s had a lucrative morning, he forks out three bucks for half an hour at The Seven Year Itch. Some Saturdays she meets him in the ravine where he walks the dog, Perky, and while Perky keeps an eye out for passersby, they lie back in high grass.
By November she’s tired of him. His assets—generosity, kindness, prowess—are lost on her, although she recognizes them and can appreciate them when he’s not between her legs. It boils down to, he’s too old, a close-up preview of the bodies she might be stuck with twenty years from now. Not a sight you can’t get enough of. Anyway, she never was all that crazy about being on the receiving end of oral sex. Lately when he’s down there flicking away, she is repulsed and anxious. What goes through her mind is that he is dead except for his tongue, which has gone into fibrillations. She fakes instant orgasms.
“One last time,” he begs.
It’s a Saturday. They are standing on the sidewalk at the end of her street, Perky leashing their ankles together. As it happens her parents and Sonja are spending the afternoon at a winter fair in Uxbridge where Sonja has donated a hundred of her knitted hats as free give-aways if you contribute to the local Humane Society. So, since it will be the last time and it’s too cold to do it outside, Marcia says they can go to her house. “I’ve never done it in my own bed,” she says, warming to the idea.
She returns home alone and uses the front door, and five minutes later Chuck and Perky arrive at the back door by way of the woods behind her yard. Perky’s toenails tick across the kitchen floor to the hall. At the stairwell Chuck nudges her and points down, his eyes signalling something more than anxiety. She has told him that Joan is in the laundry room. Over the past few months she has corrected the stories (Joan was deformed, a retard) that he’d heard from his daughters. But when he points, it’s as if to ask, Is that where you keep the deformed retard? and what’s left of Marcia’s love drops dead. She could slap his face, if she wasn’t suddenly feeling so free of him that it would be like slapping a side of beef. If she wasn’t feeling the superiority of her entire family to his family (his stupid daughters, his frigid wife) together with a sense of herself—which somehow exonerates him—as being no part of her family, although she’d kill for it.
“Don’t worry,” she says at the bedroom door. “She won’t come up.”
Well, she does come up. Floats up, maybe, because Perky doesn’t bark until she scrapes back the piano bench.
Marcia whips the sheet over Chuck. At the foot of the bed Perky yaps and pops in and out of view like a dog on a trampoline, ears sailing.
“What the hell?” Chuck throws the sheet off again. “Shit.” Back comes the sheet. Gripping it at his neck, he rolls over and shunts up to the pillow.
Joan is also yapping. An impeccable, faint echo that after a minute or two shuts Perky up. For a few seconds longer Joan stares at him. Then she turns to the keyboard and starts playing the Goldberg Variations.
“Get dressed,” Marcia whispers.
“She’s sitting on my clothes!”
“Shh.”
“Shh.” From Joan. Otherwise it’s as if she doesn’t know they are there. What’s going on? It took her a year to work up the nerve to meet Paul. “Joanie?” Marcia says softly and is ignored. “Joanie, stop a second, okay?”
“How old did you say she was?” Chuck asks.
“Shh.”
“Shh.” The echo.
Chuck folds his arms over his chest. “This kid’s unbelievable,” he whispers loudly.
“I guess we’ll just have to wait. She usually only plays it through once.”
By the fourth variation Chuck’s foot is a metronome and he’s stroking Marcia’s thigh. In the middle of the fifth variation he ducks under the sheet.
“Don’t!” Marcia punches him.
“Ah, come on,” he says. “It’s like balling in front of the dog.”
When spring arrives and her father starts pestering her about the university application she hasn’t filled out yet, she decides to leave home. He’s one reason. The other is needing a place where she can entertain her boyfriends. Lately, in front seats, she wants to break out, smash her foot through the windshield. The Seven Year Itch is all right, but three dollars a time adds up, and those rooms are not paradise. The water is Coke-coloured, the vibrating mattresses smoke and give you shocks.
She’d have left home before Christmas if it wasn’t for Joan. The thing is, she still sleeps in Joan’s bed. Should she believe it when she hears, “Go”? Never before has she doubted that the voice in her head, when she is looking straight at Joan, is other than Joan’s.
“Are we sure?” Marcia says. “We won’t miss us too much?” Cupping Joan’s small white face in her hands. Skin cool as stone, eyes undetectable behind the dark-green lenses of her cat’s-eye sunglasses. All Marcia can see is her own face. There and there. Murky and bigger-eyed, as if floated up from a mind so unselfish that whatever enters it shines back not only improved but twice.
She goes to see about a furnished basement apartment in a house on St. George Street. The landlord is a middle-aged Italian thug named Danny Vitalis who says, “Anybody give you any trouble, I’m here day and night.” “Here” is directly above the apartment in a living room of beer-case high-rises and at least ten framed photos of a younger him as a boxer.
“Pretty girl like you,” he says, “don’t need no creeps hanging around. Nice guys, why not? I got no problem with that. You’re young. Live it up.”
There is only a fridge, stove, card table and two rickety wooden chairs, but when her parents finally accept that there’s no changing her mind, they ply her with furniture and small appliances. All Grandma Gayler’s worldly goods—the maroon wing-backed chair and mouldy carpet and brocade drapes that smell like broccoli, her dresser, her bed with the huge picture of Queen Victoria’s head glued onto the headboard, her silverware with the engraved “G” that Marcia used to think stood for “Grandma,” her hand-embroidered pillowcases and linen towels, her rusty electric kettle, her electric clock whose face is Queen Elizabeth’s, her rusty toaster whose sides open so you can turn the bread, her dented pots and pans. With some ceremony her mother gives her the set of china that used to belong to Grandma Canary. “These were hers?” Marcia says. Who would ever think to connect the dainty rosebud patern with the Battle-axe, as Marcia’s mother affectionately refers to the insane-eyed old woman in the photo albums?
As for Marcia’s own possessions there are only books and clothes. And her dolls. She looks at the dolls lined up along her bed, pink and frilly, leaning into each other like drunken débutantes. She sees them through the eyes of her boyfriends and says that she’s throwing them out.
“Oh, no!” her mother cries. “You’ve kept them all these years. You’ll want to give them to your own daughters one day.”
Her own daughters. Marcia thinks about that. The balloon heads of newborns come to mind but burst when she tries to concentrate on them. She looks at her mother and draws back a little because her mother’s rabid expression makes her feel like a tube at the other end of which are priceless granddaughters. For the first time Marcia realizes that since Sonja and Joan will probably never have kids, it’s up to her or the Canarys will die out. This particular line of them, anyway. They’ll be like one of those disappeared countries on old maps.
Marcia picks up Little Lovely and puts her upside down in the bag of garbage. A small, pained sound from her mother. “I’m twenty years old,” Marcia says. “It’s sick that I even still have them.” Her throat tightens. “They’re my dolls,” she says angrily. “I’ll throw them out if I want to.” She snatches them by their heads, by their white shoes. Their rigid limbs graze her wrist as she shoves them down into the bag. A hand rips through, fingers splayed. That’s Betsy Wetsy. Her mother sighs and leaves the room. Marcia grabs another bag, tosses in the last three dolls. Out the top, Cindy the Mardi Gras Doll towers, one eyelid stuck shut but she’s waving. She’s smiling. Marcia takes the bags outside and drops them in the pails. Thunder.
It isn’t until the next day when the garbage men have emptied the pails that Marcia’s mother says, “Oh, we should have given them to the Salvation Army.”
For the move, her father borrows a delivery truck from work. All that morning they load the furniture, Sonja lifting the heaviest pieces, saying “Upsadaisy” as she single-handedly hoists the solid-oak dresser (to spare her father, his bad heart).
“We’ll miss you around here,” her father says.
“I’ll be home every Sunday,” Marcia reminds him. He tugs at his sideburns. “Dad,” she says, “I’m doing the right thing.”
And he says in a slightly puzzled tone, as if testing this out, seeing if it fits the occasion—“For the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light.”
“Honestly,” she says, exasperated. She has been through her religious phase.
So has he, forty years ago, and now he’s in another. A strange, half-hearted one, it seems to her. He goes to church and is taking private Bible-study classes with Reverend Bean, her old minister, but he confesses that he doesn’t pray and doesn’t believe in God. “I’m still feeling it out,” he says. “Keeping an open mind.”
Well, it’s his life. None of her business now that she’s leaving home and won’t have to listen to his quotations from the Bible. They get to her, she hates to admit. It’s like hearing him read from her old love letters. It’s like being forced to remember what she saw in the guy who wrote them.
She adopts a split personality. One for day, one for night. Day is longer skirts and her glasses. Hardly any make-up. Day is the serious young career woman she now half is. She is accustomed to working hard, standing first. She tells her boss that she would like to go places in the company, and he says he’ll tell her what—as a reward for not wearing a girdle, she is promoted effective immediately to overseeing typing and I.Q. tests to job applicants. So now she sets a timer and says, “Go.”
In November she is given a raise of thirty-five dollars a week, the better to spoil her boyfriends with. First, though, she buys herself a red leather mini-skirt to wear at the Corral, which is a student nightclub decorated to look like a barn. Boys straddle hobby horses and chew pieces of hay. Watch her squint-eyed. Night is padded bras and hairpieces and black false eyelashes. It has taken her years but she has finally figured out that, for boys, the illusion lasts even after it is strewn all over the bedroom. The next morning is when they snap out of it. Opening his eyes and seeing her standing at the foot of the bed dressed for work, one boy asked where Marcia was. “In the hospital,” Marcia said. “Her appendix burst but she said not to wake you.”
She still finds three boyfriends the optimum number. Three at a time. When she loses one, inevitably there is a stretch of one night stands before the position is filled. That’s right, “position.” She tests them, sets the timer, in a manner of speaking. A boy who can’t get or keep an erection is out of the running. So are boys who want to marry her, want to have her all for themselves. Boys who are mean to her or start acting weird she doesn’t give time to get dressed. When a farm boy slapped his belt on the palm of his hand and said he’d “sure like to thrash her little backside,” she didn’t care if he was joking, she shouted, “Danny!” up through the grate, and her Italian thug landlord bellowed, “Yeah?” and the boy was hopping across the floor into his cowboy boots.
If Danny thinks she’s a hooker, he doesn’t say so. If he’s attracted to her, he doesn’t show it. “Anybody give you any trouble …” is his sole hallway greeting, whether she’s alone or not. She tells Pammy that he’s her guardian angel. “The kind God sends when you stop believing in Him.”
“What kind is that?” Pammy asks.
“Hairy.”
Pammy looks up at the ceiling. “I couldn’t sleep at night if I were you.”
“If you were me, you’d have better things to do than sleep.”
“Oh, don’t talk like that!” says Pammy. Who was shocked enough to learn that Marcia wasn’t a virgin. Who—and this is why Marcia stays friends with her—is just as shocked that she herself still is.
Pammy comes by Sunday mornings to vacuum the apartment and do the laundry, gasping at hardened balls of Kleenex between the sheets and at marijuana butts in the ashtray. These regular gasps give Marcia the impression that her place is being ventilated by uprightness, so who needs church? Meanwhile, at the kitchen table, Marcia rewrites Pammy’s essays to her courses in twentieth-century American literature and the Romantic poets. Sunday afternoons she takes the subway to the Broadview station where her father picks her up in the car. He is the only man she knows who feasts on her mousy daytime appearance.
“You’re looking well,” he says enthusiastically.
“So are you,” she says, but how he really looks is different. More different each week.
They all do, except for Joan. Joan, who is going to be fifteen, who of all of them should be changing, is frozen in a six-year-old’s body. That isn’t even it, though, not what Marcia is talking about when she says to Joan, “We haven’t changed a bit.” The Joan before her eyes is the Joan who has been in her mind all week … all Marcia’s life, it seems. Like the kitchen clock, and the tin plates with the deep blue rim, Joan is a surprise because there she is—the same! Or maybe not even the same, just recognizable.
Her parents and Sonja mutate compared. Every Sunday they are taller, shorter, fatter, louder, smarter, dumber than the previous Sunday. What were they like before she left? She can’t remember. Who are they, the elder inhabitants of this house, which itself is a foreign country she feels like a refugee from? She never noticed when she was living here that as soon as you walk through the front door there is a potato odour. It didn’t used to bother her that no matter what they are having for supper her mother puts a plate of white sliced bread on the table. There are coat-hanger ducks on the kitchen wall. In the living room there’s a footstool made out of old manuscripts. Get her out of here!
When her father drives her back to the subway she is anxious in case for some reason they don’t make it—the car breaks down, or he does. The car reeks of turkey or ham from the mammoth doggy bag her mother pushed at her. Nothing is so primitive as that warm, smelly lump in her lap. As is the custom of these backward but kindly people, they have presented her with a goat’s head. A pregnant sow’s uterus. She will stuff it into a wastebin on the subway platform.
Months go by. A year, and another year. Joan turns seventeen and her school lessons with Doris and Gordon end. Doris says she has a feeling she never taught that kid a single thing she didn’t already know. “Who’s kidding who?” she asks Joan. She gets a part-time job at her friend Angela’s lingerie shop on the Danforth, so now Joan spends whole days in the laundry room or “her office” as Gordon started calling it after he moved her books and magazines down there.
The whole family has given up wondering when she will finish her composition. Into everyone’s subconscious a constant, irregular clicking has long since been absorbed to the extent that it is indistinguishable from dead silence. The clicking travels up the cold-air ducts. It is Joan starting and stopping tape and it is her echo of each click. If you are Sonja and sitting next to the duct directly above the editing bench, it is the sound of your knitting needles slowed down, paused over. It is no sound you register except on the level at which you know that the world is good and a click means “yes.”
These days Sonja knits for a living. In 1970 when Schropps brought in automatic clippers she phoned a man who had once offered to sell some of her hats and scarves to department stores, and for what she can turn out in a week that man now pays her more than Marcia earns after tax, although Marcia has been promoted to manager and has her own secretary.
Sonja stashes her money away. Marcia spends hers. Not just on clothes but on books (her ambition being to read all the classics from Austen to Zola), china dishes, good sheets and towels, trinkets for her boyfriends. She eats out in restaurants that have linen napkins and wine lists and she has moved from living under Danny Vitalis to living above him in a two-bedroom apartment he renovated himself.
“Okay,” he warned before showing her the place, “this is class.” And she walked into a room that was wall-to-wall red shag carpet (“Hundred percent synthetic,” Danny bragged), red velvet wallpaper and a chandelier you had to claw your way through.
The red shag is everywhere, including the bathroom, which has gold faucets, not real (“You kidding me?”), and a mirror on the ceiling above the bathtub. Along an entire wall in the master bedroom is a fake fireplace made of fake marble. You turn a knob and the plastic logs in the grate glow red. The opposite wall is a mirror.
“For you,” Danny said, “I’ll drop the rent to two ten.” She was touched. “Girl like you,” he said, “professional girl, needs a place that says, Hey, I don’t need nobody.”
Again, it was as if he knew her.
She didn’t rent it just to spare his feelings or because she wanted to stay in his house. Or to pretend she was in Las Vegas. She decided to fall for it and then did (as she occasionally falls for a type of snake-hipped boy who dresses like a pimp, letting herself be persuaded by his version of who he is, since her version will get them nowhere). Her one-night stands say, “You live here?” and screech to a stop at the threshold, but after sex, lying naked in the blush of the plastic logs, they lounge like Hugh Hefner. There are sweet boys who see the place through Danny’s eyes and are afraid to touch anything, and they are worth all the static-electric shocks the carpet can throw at her.
Her one-night stands fill the position of the third boyfriend. She always assumed that the position would be permanent short-term, but it didn’t turn out that way and now she’s glad. She runs into a gorgeous boy on the street, on the bus, and if he is game she brings him home. This happens five, six times a year. Mostly she is content with her two regular boyfriends, who come around on alternate nights and know about each other. Like her, they are constantly falling in love. The last thing they are is jealous. When she raves about the beauty of some other boy’s body, they seem to take it as a personal compliment. They kiss her, softly. She thinks she knows how they feel. When they go on about another girl’s heart-shaped ass or big brown nipples, she doesn’t get mad. She is fascinated and often aroused, but the prevailing feeling is of being appreciated. If they love girls of all shapes and size, doesn’t that include her?
Outwardly her two boyfriends have nothing in common with each other. One is tall, lean, dark-haired, doe-eyed, thoughtful. He is studying radio and television arts. The other is her height, muscular, witty, and has fuzzy blond hair, which is actually straight but when she met him he’d just got a permanent. He works at his father’s shoe store. Both boys are always broke, so she picks up the tab when they go out. She is starting to know wines and can advise them. “A white Bordeaux is nice with trout.” She lends them books by authors she thinks they should like—Durrell and Greene, Kerouac. The dark one handles her books as he does her breasts—as breakable and priceless items he can’t believe she just leaves lying around—and he returns them read. The blond one skims. Returns them, if he returns them, battered.
At midnight she goes to bed alone. Not long after moving to the third floor she discovered that she sleeps better in a room by herself. Midnight is closing time for her one-night stands, too, no matter how much fun she’s having. Some boys she has to push out the door and they thrust a foot back in like travelling salesmen. She turns the lock, switches off the light and goes to the dining-room window, listening to them descend the stairs. If it’s the dark boy, it could be a cat burglar. The blond boy, and the one-night stands who resent leaving, explode down, shaking the house. Only the dark boy never slams the front door. Then three to five seconds and they’re on the sidewalk. From this window, if they’re headed for the subway, she can watch them all the way to Bloor Street. She loves them so much! There they go. Away. “Don’t look back,” she thinks. They never do.