Rose stood outside of a Judas Priest concert at the Pacific Coliseum wearing a dog costume, one arm over the shoulder of a teenage boy.
“Hug him closer!” yelled a girl holding a Polaroid camera, presumably his girlfriend.
Rose obliged and yanked his head closer to hers.
“Wait, just a sec,” he said, sweeping back his mullet. Rose smelled weed.
The kid wore a Judas Priest T-shirt. The band’s lead singer was a vision in black leather from head to toe, all of it studded. The sleeveless vest to show off his guns. The knee-high military boots. The gladiator cuffs on both his forearms. The police hat with a death’s head instead of a badge. He looked like some of the men Rose had seen at a gay leather bar in Toronto that Trevor took her to when she visited last year, Cell Block. The lead singer and his bandmates had the same brooding, tough guy stance and come-hither glower. Rose smiled, thinking how much Trevor would appreciate the irony of the metalhead group’s album title emblazoned on the boy’s shirt: Defenders of the Faith.
Rose thought about Trevor all the time these days, ever since his diagnosis.
“Now smile!” the girlfriend shouted in a chirpy, pep rally voice, lurching Rose back to reality.
Rose held up a paw and waved in lieu of a smile. Pain shot up her arm. The product safety mascot’s massive noggin was growing heavier the longer she had it on. She could swear it was digging permanent grooves into her shoulders. She thought she could feel her vertebrae collapsing and colliding as her spine compressed beneath its weight.
The Coliseum was on the grounds of the Pacific National Exhibition. It was the end of Labour Day weekend, the last day of the exposition. Rose was supposed to be strolling through the presentation halls, past the midway rides and along the game concourses, handing out product safety comic books to children and parents. But the heat had become so unbearable that she decided to settle on a stationary strategy and exploit the high traffic footfall outside the concert venue. Instead of passing them out one at a time as she’d been doing, she placed a towering pile of comics close by, which were rapidly disappearing. She could get back to the booth when they were all gone, shut it down for the night, and then grab some dinner with Sol.
An excruciating late-summer heat wave had been going on for weeks. Rose’s burdensome costume enveloped her in heavy, unbreathing, synthetic fabric piquant with the dried perspiration of dozens of previous wearers. She accessed air though eyeholes covered in tight black latticework that masked her face. The tiny apertures allowed a limited, pinhole view of the world. From which, at this moment, she could discern more and more people crowding around her clutching their cameras. They were oblivious to the stifled lesbian sequestered inside, suffering in silence. Which, from Rose’s experience, was pretty much par for the course.
“‘Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.’ Oscar Wilde wrote that,” Rose remembered her professor saying during a lecture in the gender studies course she took her last year of grad school, as an introduction to a slideshow on the day’s topic, Sadomasochism and BDSM: Role-Playing in the Queer Community.
It was the university’s first course in a new academic field. Intrigued, Rose had signed up on a whim. The professor was a middle-aged woman so earnest that she always seemed on the verge of panic. She had a perpetually astounded expression exacerbated by the long, severe ponytail she wore yanked back so tightly that her forehead never moved, and she always wore turtlenecks. Her appearance and manner seemed at odds with the slideshow she was presenting. Rose was familiar with the homoerotic illustrations by Tom of Finland — Trevor had a book — but most of the other students were not, gauging by the nervous giggles and a thumbs-down review from a back-of-the-room critic: “Give me a fucking break.”
The professor began her lecture, clicking through cartoonish images of macho-man sailors, cowboys, cops, and leather daddies with skyscraper penises, Brobdingnagian bums, and chest to waist ratios so waspish they were Barbie-level ludicrous. The professor posited that gay men appropriated outmoded signifiers of masculinity to subvert biases about male identity. She said that leather play was an act of defiance and political transgression. “Thoughts?” she asked the class as everyone scrambled for their dictionaries.
“Oh please,” was Trevor’s clipped response that night at Cell Block. Finding herself surrounded by what looked like a live-action version of Tom of Finland, Rose had mentioned her professor’s theory while they were grabbing a beer at the bar. “We dress like this to get fucked,” Trevor continued, shouting above the dance music and adjusting his harness. “To get laid, not make a statement about gender norms. For pleasure. And girl, nothing is more subversive than pleasure.”
“My professor said it, not me,” Rose responded, smiling as Trevor handed her a beer. “Besides,” she continued, looking around the bar, “I’m more interested in the female mystique than the male mistake.”
“Good one!” Trevor replied, and they clinked bottles. “Oh, I love this song!” he added. The DJ was spinning “Sex Crime” by the Eurythmics. He grabbed Rose and yanked her onto a dance floor surrounded by bars meant to emulate a prison, a prison where all the inmates just got their Get Out of Jail Free card.
Rose always got a kick out of getting a rise out of Trevor, and vice versa. A mutual fondness for banter, puns, and repartee brought them together back in high school, where they wielded words as weapons to keep the bullies at bay. Or, more aptly, armour.
Incapacitated by cuteness, Rose squirmed, trying to get comfortable in her dog outfit. Oscar Wilde was only partly right. Her disguise hindered not hastened telling the truth. She was wearing it because she needed the money. Sometimes masks are transactional.
“Say cheese!” chirped the girl with the camera. There was a whirring sound, then a click, then out popped a picture.
“It’ll take a couple of minutes to develop but I need to take another one,” she said, giving her boyfriend a sour look. “Why’d you have to make the devil horns? You know my parents already think you’re a bad influence. I want to be able to put this on my dresser mirror. If Mom comes into my room cleaning and sees you doing this” — she held up a hand with her two middle fingers and thumb pressed against the palm, her pinkie and index finger raised like horns — “she’s going to go all Jesus on me. You know what she’s like. Why do you think I have to hide my Madonna albums?”
“Okay, what-the-fuck-ever. How about a peace sign?”
“Sure, fine. Just don’t look like an asshole.”
Rose noticed a silver crucifix around the girl’s neck. Rose guessed it was meant to be ironic. Christ dangled at the epicentre of substantial cleavage further enhanced by a low-cut crop top. The big hair, the scrunchie, the stacked bangles, the crinoline miniskirt, the army boots — she was one of millions of Madonna clones mass-incubated by MTV.
“Okay, smile!” shouted the girl with the camera. This time her tone was demanding, not encouraging.
Rose half-heartedly raised her paw again. The kid made a peace sign.
“Perfect!” said the girl as her Polaroid regurgitated a snapshot. She waved the picture in the air to dry it, then brought it over to show them. “You’re both SO cute!”
Rose nodded her head in agreement, then pointed at the pile of comic books.
“The comics are a little young for us,” said the girl. “But I have two younger brothers. They’ll like it.”
The coupled drifted away into the crowd. Rose posed for more pictures, all the time keeping an eye on the quickly dwindling pile of comics. The last thing she wanted was another lecture from her supervisor, Ocean, about not meeting her quota. Team members were tasked with handing out a minimum of five hundred comic books every day of the three-week fair but somehow Rose almost always ended up with a substantial amount leftover. It wasn’t Rose’s fault that Ocean had overestimated how many they’d be able to distribute, got too many printed, and now had to justify the overrun to her manager.
The line for photographs was thinning. Weary families stumbled through the park’s exit gates. Last-minute concertgoers rushed into the Coliseum before the doors closed. Things were still hopping at the other end of the fairground where the rides were, mostly high school and college students out for a final summer hurrah before classes started.
Rose looked around before removing her head to cool off. She didn’t want a repeat performance of the other day when she’d taken it off and put it on the pavement to grab a quick drink from a water fountain, oblivious to a group of preschoolers lined up to ride the Teacups. Several broke out bawling when they saw the decapitated canine.
But before Rose had a chance to remove it, an older woman with two young children approached her.
“Do you think I could take a picture of you with my grandchildren?” she asked.
The woman reminded Rose of her own grandmother: the vestiges of an Old World accent, impeccable manners, intelligent grey-blue eyes. The physical resemblance was uncanny, and her clothes a little unsettling. She looked the way Rose’s grandmother looked in photo albums, in pictures taken decades before. The vintage cream 1950s Chanel suit worn effortlessly. Coiffed hair, ropes of pearls with matching stud earrings, a pillbox hat topped with a hint of veil, and of course, white kid gloves. She wore a silver cross pendant, dutifully not ironically, sans the son of God. She radiated grace and confidence just like Grandma Esterhazy did. And, just like Grandma Esterhazy, Rose suspected you wouldn’t want to get on her bad side.
Lily Esterhazy had been formidable in her day. She was the real brains behind the success of the flourishing seed company Rose’s great-grandfather founded, and which his son — Rose’s grandfather — had almost brought to ruin. Rose never met her grandfather. He died before she was born. He had quite the reputation for enjoying spending whatever the company earned, until Grandma Esterhazy reined him in.
He’d inherited the company from Rose’s great-grandfather but didn’t have a clue about how to handle money, according to Rose’s father, who now ran the firm. Her grandfather was a “good-time Charlie” who would have ran the company into the ground. But Lily, Rose’s paternal grandmother, could spin gold by pinching pennies. Lily and her grandfather fell in love after she was hired as a bookkeeper in the Winnipeg head office when the previous bookkeeper, Rose’s Great-Aunt Daisy, retired. Lily could play the corporate purse strings like a virtuoso, and soon took over the company’s financial management.
Rose recalled Trevor swooning when she showed him a photo album filled with pictures of her stylish grandmother in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. How could she forget? From the moment they became friends when they were sixteen, Trevor had embraced Rose’s indifference to fashion as a cause and made it his calling to educate her from his encyclopedic knowledge of who wore what when, and why. The comments came fast and furious as he flipped through the photo album pointing at pictures, and no exclamation mark was safe. “Oh my God! I can’t believe she’s wearing mix and match from Givenchy’s first couture separates collection! Give me strength! Look, she’s wearing an original Balenciaga barrel suit! And a Dior evening gown! This is beyond!”
Flying to Paris to see the shows was a rare diversion for Rose’s workaholic grandmother. True, she was beautiful and fashionable, but behind the scenes, in business, Lily Esterhazy wielded an iron fist in an evening glove. She made the family rich.
Other than taking bookkeeping courses, her grandmother was self-taught. An avid reader, she amassed an immense library over her lifetime, which she bequeathed to Rose in her will, along with a considerable trust fund. Rose wouldn’t have access to it until she turned thirty. Her grandmother’s will had stipulated that Rose needed to get an education and to experience the world first. Rose and Trevor had planned a trip to Paris when the trust fund kicked in, in honour of her grandmother, but that seemed unlikely now. There were no drugs for what Trevor had, and everyone who got it died.
“Grandma, why is the dog just standing there?”
Rose heard a child’s voice and came to her senses. She saw that the woman they were with was wearing a blue tracksuit, not Chanel, and sensible walking shoes. Rose’s heart sank. She was having visions again. She hadn’t had any for a couple of days and was hopeful that maybe they’d finally stopped, once and for all. But no. Why wouldn’t her grandmother leave her alone?
Rose waved the kids over. Each grabbed a paw. Their grandmother pulled an old camera from out of a leather case strapped to her shoulder, so old that it had a viewfinder and an accordion lens.
“Say cheese!” she said.
“Cheese!” her grandchildren shouted, grinning.
The kids hugged Rose, then scrambled back to their grandmother.
“Now who wants McDonald’s?” she asked them as they walked away.
Rose wouldn’t have minded some McDonald’s right about now. She hadn’t eaten all day and was ravenous despite the appetite-suppressing aroma of stale corndogs and rancid popcorn swirling around her, and the pungent history of body odour contained within her costume.
The flaming blue summer sky was starting to simmer down with the approach of twilight, suffused with an orange glow from wildfire smoke seeping over the mountains and into the city. Early evening brought little relief. The haze formed a dome that trapped the heat like a pressure cooker. The air hung heavy, and impatiently still. Even the birds were listless. Normally, seagulls and crows would be circling in a feeding frenzy, ready to swoop and snatch fairground treats. Now they perched silently on power cables, railings, and rooftops.
Rose noticed a solemn row of ravens lining the gutter along the Coliseum’s roof, black beaks pointed in the same direction, westward to the ocean, as though collectively sensing a storm on the way, or some kind of truth hidden to humans, perilous, hopeful, and indifferent. Then something set them off. They launched en masse from their various perches, screeching and squawking as they spiralled upward, swarming over the top of the Coliseum, then off into the distance.
Rose felt herself rising into the air as though lifted in the wake of their wings, uncoupled from her body, and no longer fettered by her cumbersome costume. Suddenly there was a poof of smoke from which emerged a disembodied hand. Rose recognized the white glove right away. It reached out and caressed her cheek.
“Rise up, Rose, rise up!”
“Grandma?”
“Rise! Show your power. Dance toward the sun!
“What the fuck?” Rose muttered under her breath.
“It’s time to celebrate, Rose. Spirit time has come!”
Why was her grandmother reciting the lyrics to “Rise Up”? The song by Parachute Club was one of Rose’s favourites. It was her coming out song, and her coming out album.
“Those who are easily shocked should be shocked more often,” her grandmother’s voice reverberated in a series of gradually diminishing echoes.
It was a Mae West quote, one of Trevor’s favourites. Why was her grandmother quoting Mae West?
But before she could think anymore about it, loud shouting brought Rose crashing back to Earth. She arrived in her body with a jolt and looked around. A couple of teens with a boom box were walking by playing Parachute Club. Then, from around the corner of a closed candy cotton kiosk, appeared Ocean, flapping the product safety comic book in one hand, and looking fit to kill. Sol was following closely behind, lifting her arms in a shrug as if to say sorry. Rose sighed and removed her head. Ocean was in her face ranting before she had a chance to enjoy the rush of comparatively cooler air.
The comic book had been written for ages four through seven, but the insert Rose and Sol had put inside it was for adults and teenagers. It would raise eyebrows, no doubt. There would be outcries of moral outrage, for sure. That was the point. Rose was having last-minute doubts that morning when they were stuffing the comic books, worried they’d be cornered and assaulted by an angry mob. But Sol calmed her down, assuring her that no one was going to see it until they got home.
She was probably right. No one ever opened and read the comic book right after they were handed it. Some just took it out of politeness, then tossed it in the nearest trash can. Others glanced at the cover with mild curiosity, or in some cases chuckled over the cute artwork, then stuffed it away to look at later. Parents grabbed it from their kids, citing sticky fingers and saying they could read it later when they got home.
Rose and Sol had waited for the PNE’s last day to distribute what Sol liked to call their “message in a bottle,” for two reasons: their contract ended at midnight so they couldn’t be fired, and, if they were lucky, the media would pick it up the same week college students were flocking back into town. The chapter on guerilla media tactics in Sol’s ancient, dog-eared copy of Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book had proved invaluable. They’d also mailed copies to local papers, and TV and radio stations.
Now, apparently, the cat was out of the bag.
“What were you two thinking?” yelled Ocean. “I’m going to get fired for this! Is that what you wanted? I’m going to get fucking fired!”
That was the last thing Rose heard before she passed out.
“The most important thing is to stick to the script,” Ocean announced on the first day of training three months earlier, as she inserted her right hand into one of the puppets. She held it up to show everyone the proper way to manipulate its arms and head. “The second most important thing is to respect your puppet. Think of it not as an extension of yourself, but as your avatar.”
Rose looked around the room. There were eight of them besides Ocean, a motley crew of arty university students hired to be puppeteers for a federal summer program to teach children about product safety. At twenty-seven, Rose was older than the rest, whom she deduced were all undergrads. There was a lot of black: clothes, hair, makeup, attitude. Except for Rose, who wore a peasant blouse and heavily adorned jeans, her usual colourful mash-up of patterns and prints.
They sat around a long wooden table in a boardroom in a government building downtown, one of those rooms that take beige to a whole new level, with fibreboard ceiling tiles and jaundiced lighting. A long floor-to-ceiling window faced the reflective glass facade of a skyscraper across the alley. Rose could make out a sliver of the North Shore Mountains through a space between it and an adjoining building.
Ocean stood at one end of the table beside an AV cart set up with a VCR and TV, on which they had just witnessed the puppet show they were training to perform for the edification and disaster-avoidance of preschoolers and early grade schoolers across metropolitan Vancouver and the rest of the province. Posters along the wall opposite the window promoted The Adventures of Kronk and Bongo. Someone had done a haphazard job thumbtacking them. They were unevenly spaced, and crooked.
Tall and lean, with long, straight blond hair, Ocean seemed as fresh as laundry dried outside on a breezy, sunny day, then taken inside to be starched and treated with stain guard. She looked like she did lots of yoga, or maybe dance. A physique like hers could only have come from years of training and sacrifice. Her movements were fluid. Her eyes sparkled like tidal pools. Yet not far beneath the surface there seemed to churn a flow and eddy of competing currents. Something tensile lurked in the shallows. Her carefully manicured demeanor of well-being seemed forced and fragile, as though menaced by an undertow threatening to pull her under.
Rose adjusted the batik scarf tying back her curly, red-hennaed hair, then reached into a backpack and pulled out a steno pad and a pen in case she needed to make notes. The backpack had seen better days — certainly more exciting ones based on the mosaic of buttons, badges, and patches from faraway places that conjured up vistas of swaying palms and ancient temples, rice paddies and crystal lagoons, wind chimes and incense, land mines and Agent Orange. It smelled of cinnamon bark and cloves, and was quite pungent apparently, based on the side-eye Rose was getting from a girl with big hair sitting next to her.
Rose countered with a smile. “I like your scrunchy,” she said. She clocked the girl’s stick-on name tag. “Tamara.” She pulled a pack of herbal cigarettes from her pack with a flourish, waving it at Tamara as an explanation. Tamara shifted uncomfortably and looked away.
Rose had picked up the habit while travelling through southeast Asia on a gap year between earning a graduate degree in playwriting at UBC and her upcoming pursuit of a doctorate in theatre studies at the University of Victoria. She was planning a dissertation on the history and use of puppetry as a political tool. Part of the reason she’d been in southeast Asia was to spend some time studying shadow puppet theatre with puppet masters in Thailand and Indonesia. Rose’s parents cut her off when she came out, and her grandmother’s trust fund didn’t kick in for another three years, so Rose relied on loans, grants, and whatever work she could get. When this gig came up, she happily gave notice to the restaurant where she’d been dreading a summer of waiting tables. It was a good wage, you got a car for work, and they gave you a per diem for out-of-town trips.
“What the fuck is an avatar?” asked someone seated down the table from Rose, in a tone laced with a subtle incredulity suggesting that they were all being fed a bunch of baloney.
It was 1985. Computer avatars weren’t a thing yet. Rose knew what an avatar was but didn’t want to come across as a know-it-all. As the brightest student in her high school graduating class, she’d learned her lesson. Always being the first person to raise your hand in class and correcting other students — or worse, your teachers — banishes you to solitude in the Siberian corner of the lunchroom, cold shoulders and sneers in the halls, and the perpetual taunting of self-appointed apparatchiks who dictate social norms from atop their pedestals of populism and self-aggrandizement. She’d hang out there with her equally disdained best friend, Trevor. He was gay, didn’t try to hide it, and had it worse than she did. She hadn’t come out yet.
Over lunch they’d discuss schemes — pipe dreams, really — for toppling the status quo, searching for succour in the annals of socialism, temporarily uplifted by the early Lenin-era Soviet acceptance of homosexuality, only to be let down by Stalin making it a crime again. China was no better. Che Guevara was a homophobe. And Castro jailed queers. This made them wary about becoming puppets of Communist ideology. Capitalism too was out of the question. No way would they support the West’s military-industrial complex. They decided to settle on being anarchists. This seemed the most flexible option, and appropriate considering that they were too young to vote anyway.
“That’s why babies are so happy,” Trevor had reasoned one day over lunch, as he and Rose surveyed the adjoining tables with seating arrangements that reflected who was at the top of the athletic, art room, and lab geek hierarchies, and who was at the bottom. “Because they’re anarchists.”
Living in a capitalist democracy meant you had the right to exercise free speech, as currently evidenced by a popular headline scrawled on washroom walls and transit stalls, “AIDS kills fags dead!” This was a popular sentiment, albeit lacking journalistic jurisprudence: the disease was killing everyone who got it, not just fags. The slogan, a take on an ad campaign for a well-known brand of insect repellent, was popping up everywhere, especially in toilets, churches, and other places where shit went down. Missing the memo about loving the sinner but hating the sin, religious zealots trumpeted that AIDS was God’s way of punishing homosexuals. They were mum on the fact that somehow the Lord had overlooked lesbians.
Trevor had been diagnosed a few months back. Although he lived in Toronto now, Rose kept in close touch with him. They talked on the phone almost every week. Every month she received in the mail a copy of his own exercise in self-expression, a photocopied, hand-stapled zine called Roach Clip. As explained in his introduction to the first issue, he’d started the zine as “a voice for people with AIDS like me. People treat us like cockroaches because they’re ignorant, so why not give them some clips of what life is really like for us? I mean, it’s not like I have anything left to lose.” Trevor desktop published the zine using a new Mac that had been donated to an organization of PWAs he belonged to. Rose had the most recent issue of Roach Clip in her backpack. It included his most hard-hitting article so far, “My Life as a Monster.” There was a picture of Trevor looking thin and gaunt, his face spotted with lesions.
“That’s a good question, Solange, but let’s keep our use of language respectful,” Ocean said. “What’s an avatar? Maybe Kronk can tell us.”
She was referring to the puppet draped over her right arm, which was supposed to be an alien from outer space. It had a large, bulbous, green head with pointy ears, tufts of orange hair, stocky antennae, and yellow eyes, and wore a sparkly, azure kaftan trimmed in gold. It was bald; its head had a seam at the back that made it look like a bum. According to the puppet show script, Kronk and his friend Bongo — who looked identical except that Bongo’s glitter kaftan was periwinkle, not azure, and his tufts of hair were yellow, not orange — visit their friend on Earth, a goofy-looking dog called Buddy who wants everyone to get along. And not kill themselves using everyday household products.
“Kronk is always happy to help,” Ocean continued in a voice Rose guessed was supposed to sound extraterrestrial but instead sounded suspiciously like Santa Claus — a C-list department store Santa in a big box mall in a distant suburb far from talent or verisimilitude.
“Um, you can call me Sol like you used to at home, Ocean. And yeah, sure, let’s hear what the puppet has to say. Bring it on!”
Rose turned to get a better look at Sol, drawn by the dripping honey of disdain in her voice, not to mention her revelation. This seemed to get everyone else excited too. “Like you used to at home …” What did that mean? Shoulders unhunched and swivel chairs squeaked as everyone twisted in the direction of Sol’s voice. Nothing motivates a group better than gossip. Or wakes up a roomful of world-weary liberal arts students, now all staring at Sol.
Slender and boyish, Sol sat slumped back in her chair, idly doodling in a scribbler, her legs stretched out, feet crossed on the table. She wore ripped black jeans, topsiders, and a Like a Virgin T-shirt from Madonna’s Virgin Tour. Ironically, no doubt. Her thick black hair was shaved at the sides and back. Long at the front, it tumbled down over her forehead and eyes.
“Everyone, meet my sister Solange,” said Ocean, staring at her with a cautionary look. Rose marvelled at their lack of family resemblance. “Solange Sparrow. Sorry, I mean Sol.”
“Give us what you got, Kronk,” said Sol, putting down her pen. She looked at Ocean with a big albeit disingenuous smile. “Tell us what avatar means.”
Ocean sighed as she held up Kronk. “An avatar,” she said, making Kronk’s mouth move and using the Santa Claus voice again, “is something that is a visual representation of what you are supposed to be. In other words, Ocean has become me!”
“Really, Ocean, that’s what an avatar is?” Sol asked. “I thought it was a Hindu-Sanskrit word that meant the earthly materialization of a religious deity. Are Kronk and Bongo Hindu?”
Ocean sighed and let Kronk fall to her side. She slumped slightly and her eyes briefly clouded over but she quickly rallied herself, widening her toothy grin to full beam mode. “It also just means when someone becomes the embodiment of something else. Now everyone come and get a script.”
Ocean heaved a cardboard box off the floor and onto the table, opened it, and pulled out a stack of coil-bound manuscripts. The Adventures of Kronk and Bongo entailed Buddy’s efforts to stop his interstellar guests from inadvertently committing suicide, killing each other, or maiming themselves for life by drinking, ingesting, touching, and/or breathing in the fumes of toxic household products, and to teach them the universal hazard symbols. These were displayed prominently on large black spray cans positioned on the board table in front of Ocean, emblazoned with graphics in Day-Glo colours: a bony hand, the skull and crossbones, Earth exploding, and a flame that looked like a racing car decal. Ocean had already regaled them with a lurid recitation of household horrors, factual events from police reports across Canada.
“Remember everyone, the third most important thing is to have fun!” said Ocean as she handed out the scripts.
Bongo and Buddy dangled on hangers on a rolling rack next to Ocean. Some costumes also hung on the rack. There was an outfit for a character called Patches the Clown that included a long colourful patchwork vest, striped balloon pants, a synthetic orange wig, and a big red nose. Apparently one of the two puppeteers on each team would take turns playing Patches, whose job was to introduce the show and engage in some lively banter with children in the audience. It would end up that no one wanted to be Patches because it meant having to put on whiteface, clown makeup, and a big red nose, not fun outside during the peak of summer, resulting in inter-partner bribing, deal-making, and in the case of the Victoria regional team, blackmail.
There were also life-sized Kronk, Bongo and Buddy costumes. Ocean had mentioned that the two most successful puppet teams would be chosen to staff a product safety booth at the Pacific National Exhibition for three weeks near the end of summer, and that they would wear the getups to walk around the fairground, greet children, and hand out The Adventures of Kronk and Bongo comic books.
“I’ve put you all in teams. Team Prince George and Northern BC: Daphne Goretski and Tom Eagle. Team Kelowna and Southern Interior: Elizabeth Orenstein and Tamara Glebe. Team Victoria and Vancouver Island: Albert Choy and Marina Balaskas. Team Vancouver and Lower Mainland: Solange Sparrow and Rose Esterhazy. Everyone, find your partner!”
“Now I want you all to do a line reading,” Ocean continued once everyone was seated with their partners. “Play, experiment. Try different voices. You need to give your characters personalities. Maybe even backstories. The more subtext, the more depth you can give them, the more entertained the kids will be, and they’ll recall the messages better.”
“This is going to be like putting lipstick on a pig,” Rose stage-whispered.
“No kidding,” said Sol. She flipped the hair out of her eyes and pondered. “Hmmm … a backstory. What do you think?”
“I think that the script doesn’t give us anything to work with.”
“But the puppets do,” Sol responded. “I mean, look at them.”
Rose and Sol regarded the puppets hanging lifelessly across the table.
“Look at what they’re wearing,” Sol continued. “They look like drag queens. Maybe they’re lovers on their home planet and do drag shows there.”
“Sorry, I didn’t hear you properly,” said Rose, cupping an ear. The room had erupted into a cacophony of silly voices as the teams read through their scripts, trying things out.
“Maybe they’re lovers on their home planet and do drag shows,” Sol said, so loudly this time that a hush fell over the room.
Ocean overheard the comment. “What part of sticking to the script do you not understand, Sol. This is a government program. We can’t change anything. Especially, we can’t make the puppets gay. It’s not appropriate for kids.”
“So what you’re saying is that drag queens are inappropriate for kids but horrific death by exposure to poison, fire, explosives, and skin-melting acid is?” asked Sol.
“No, I’m saying that teaching kids how to avoid a” — here she inserted air quotes — “horrific death by exposure to poison, fire, explosives, and skin-melting acid is appropriate. Not everything has to be a Gay Pride parade, Sol. Safety doesn’t have anything to do with politics.”
“I guess it depends on whose safety you’re talking about,” Sol whispered under her breath as Ocean walked away.
Rose was starting to warm to her new partner. Plus Sol was kind of hot.
“I’m going outside for a smoke,” said Rose, holding up her pack of green tea cigarettes. “I need a break. Want to join me?”
“Sure.”
Rose wanted to get Sol alone so she could get the lowdown about her family connection with Ocean. They stood outside the building’s main entrance, huddled beneath an overhang next to some planters to escape a deluge of late-May rain. Sol clutched her notebook close to her chest.
“No thanks,” said Sol when Rose offered her a green tea cigarette. “My father used to smoke them. When we lived in, you know, Saigon.” She gave Rose a sly glance. “That’s what you want to know, right? Everyone’s curious when they find out Ocean’s my sister — well, sort of sister. I get it. I’m used to explaining.” She smirked. “Sometimes I think I should print up a cheat sheet and hand it out. It would save a lot of time.”
Sol was from Vietnam. She was eleven when her family managed to get out of Saigon, just before the Viet Cong entered the city. Her father had worked with the Americans, who abandoned him. They hid out in a village until they could secure passage on a refugee boat. Her parents didn’t survive the sea voyage. Sol barely did. She had a younger brother, but they got separated in the refugee camps in Hong Kong. She never saw or heard from him again. A church group in Vancouver sponsored her and several other Vietnamese orphans, most of whom were adopted.
“The Sparrows took me in.”
“So that’s how you and Ocean are sisters.”
Sol smiled. “No, not really. More like stepsisters, kind of. Her parents were hippies and moved the family to a commune in the Gulf Islands when she was, like, seven or eight. Her two younger brothers were born there. That finally ran its course and they moved back to Vancouver. Her parents met my adopted parents at a Gestalt Therapy centre. You know, mindfulness and all that stuff. Living in the here and now. Getting in touch with your true self. Exorcising the would haves, should haves, and could haves. And in their cases, fucking each other’s spouses.
“Ocean’s dad started sleeping with my mom, my dad started sleeping with her mom, and then they thought it would be great if we all moved in together. So we did. None of us four kids wanted to. It was okay for a while, I guess, until it wasn’t. The jealousies and resentments started to mount. There were fights, bad fights. Then Ocean slept with my father and things got nasty, so I got out and found a place of my own. Next, my mom left and moved to Victoria. Then my dad and Ocean’s mom moved in together. My stepbrothers went with them.”
“Now Ocean and my dad have that big house all to themselves. But not for long. Ocean recently let us all know that they’re trying to get pregnant. That’s part of the reason I got this puppet gig. Ocean did it last year and the year before, then got bumped up to supervisor. She knew I needed a summer job, and feels guilty, so put in a good word for me. But if she thinks it makes anything better, she’s wrong. Free love sounds like a good idea but sometimes polyamory is just a fancy word for clusterfuck.”
“Wow,” said Rose. “That sure is a lot of information. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate people who can be as candid as you are. But you know that cheat sheet you mentioned earlier? You might want to think about it for real.”
“Yeah, I know,” said Sol. “I’m a talker. There are some things I keep close to my chest.”
Rose eyed Sol’s notebook, took a last drag of her cigarette, and tossed the butt into a nearby trash can. She slowly exhaled, but the smoke didn’t have its usual grassy green tea aroma. This was a sweeter fragrance, a floral scent. She sensed notes of rose and jasmine, citrus and vanilla. Then it hit her. It smelled like the Chanel No. 5 her grandmother always wore. As the smoke dissipated, Rose noticed a shadowy figure emerging from a thicket of rhododendron bushes in one of the planters leading to the office tower’s revolving doors. The apparition started to walk toward Rose, and quickly came into focus. It was her grandmother. She was wearing the Schiaparelli evening gown she’d asked to be buried in, and her face was painted with mortuary makeup.
She stopped abruptly in her tracks and pointed at Rose.
“Ask about the notebook, Rose.” It sounded as though she was whispering in Rose’s ear even though she was standing some distance away. “Ask about the notebook.”
Then she vanished back into the bushes, disappearing as quickly as she’d appeared.
“Rose? Rose?”
Rose heard Sol’s voice. It sounded like it was coming from the end of a long tunnel. Rose came to with a jolt. Sol was staring at her with concern.
“Rose, are you okay? You stopped talking and were just standing there staring into the distance, like you were in a trance.”
“I’m fine,” Rose said with an unconvincing smile. “Can I see your notebook?”
“What? My scribbler? Why?”
“You were doodling in it upstairs.”
“I wasn’t doodling. I was drawing.”
“I’d like to see.”
“I don’t usually show anyone my art,” said Sol. “But what the hell, okay.”
She passed Rose the notebook. Rose opened it up and flipped through the pages.
“These are amazing,” she said quietly, passing the book back. “I think you should see this.”
Rose yanked Trevor’s zine from out of her backpack and handed it to Sol to read later. It was time to head back upstairs to training. Rose cast a cautionary glance over her shoulder before entering the revolving door. The rain was falling harder now. A bus passed, splashing pedestrians. There was a big ad on its side for New Coke. “Change for the Better!” read the slogan beneath a picture of a beautiful young woman holding up a can of soda and smiling. A prankster had blackened some of her teeth. The devil horns were a nice touch.
“I look like Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?,” said Rose. The clown nose made her sound congested. She was inside the puppet tent putting on her Patches the Clown makeup. She stared at her face in a small mirror. Her makeup had started to run. Her big red lips were bleeding out. So was the black makeup around her eyes. Small streams of red and black trickled down her whiteface, which was starting to decompose.
It was mid-August, a week before the PNE, and the hottest day of the heat wave so far. The tent was made of polyethylene. There wasn’t a proper air vent, so it could be stuffy even on cooler days, but today it was intolerable. They were doing a series of shows on a searing concrete plaza outside the Vancouver Art Gallery downtown. They normally performed three shows a day, usually driving from one location to another. This time, they were doing three shows all in the same place. Sometimes they were lucky and performed inside in air conditioning, like in a mall or a school gymnasium. They could usually find a shady spot to set up when they were outside at a park or playground. But here, there was no relief from the sun. The puppet tent was like a pressure cooker. Rose couldn’t stop her makeup from melting.
“Like who in what?” asked Sol, busy prepping the puppets for the next show.
“Bette Davis. She was a big star in the 1930s and ’40s. She did this movie in the early 1960s to revive her flagging career, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? They were making ‘hagsploitation’ movies back then with movie stars that used to be beautiful but had aged. People went to gawk at how far they’d faded, like watching a car accident you can’t look away from. Bette Davis plays a batshit-crazy, over-the-hill alcoholic who’s trying to revive her career as a child vaudeville star, even wearing the same kind of clothes. She ends up looking like a horror movie clown.” Rose sighed. “Like I do now. It’s actually a great movie. It’s one of Trevor’s favourites. Joan Crawford’s in it too. She was —”
“I know who Joan Crawford is. You made me sit through all of fucking Mommie Dearest.”
“I didn’t make you,” Rose remarked. She was powdering her face to try and stop the makeup situation from getting any worse. “You wanted to rent Alien but lost the coin toss. Oh God, now I look like a horror clown in a fog bank.”
“What is it with gay men and famous old female movie stars?”
“I don’t know,” said Rose. “What is it with lesbians and U-Hauls?”
“No more wire hangers!” said Sol, laughing as she strung up Buddy on a hook made from a bent clothes hanger. “You know, while we’re on stereotypes and clichés.”
Rose and Sol had devised a system for putting up and organizing the puppet tent. It came in a huge duffel bag, an assemblage of tarps, tent poles, pegs, clips, and guy lines that took about half an hour to assemble. First, they had to lay out the tarps and slide the tent poles into their pole sleeves. Then they had to connect them with snaps and the clips and secure them with the guy wires. Next came the puppets. There were three puppets but only two sets of hands — sometimes only one, when Patches was out in front of the crowd. While whoever was doing Patches got ready, the other would string up Kronk, Bongo, and Buddy on a wire in such a way that all the puppets were easily accessible.
They had to be careful to check they were sliding the right puppet onto their arms. No way did Rose and Sol want a repeat performance of the West Point Grey Daycare debacle, when Sol mixed up Buddy and Bongo to the consternation of a dozen three-, four-, and five-year-olds. “That’s not Buddy!” “That’s not even a dog!” “That’s Bongo not Buddy!” “I have to pee!” “Where’s Patches?” “Can Buddy live with me?” “I have to pee too!” “Can we have ice cream now?”
Rose, at the ready with Kronk on her arm, kept telling Sol to vamp. “Vamp! Just vamp!”
“What? What do you mean?” Sol hissed back. “What the fuck is a vamp?”
“It means improvise. Just make something up.”
“Then why didn’t you say that?”
Unfortunately, by this time Sol had completely forgotten about Bongo. The puppet was flailing back and forth like it was having a seizure.
“What’s wrong with the spaceman?” shouted a child.
“I think he’s dancing!” shouted another.
A few kids began copying Bongo, swaying side to side, thrashing their arms, and jerking their heads up and down. Then a couple of them began to cry. Rose and Sol couldn’t get back on track after that. Kronk made a quick appearance to announce that the show wasn’t going to proceed because Bongo and Buddy were sick. Stand-up comedians say that there’s nothing tougher than a comedy club audience, that if you lose them once, you’ve lost them for good. They should try cutting their teeth on the daycare circuit.
The first show of the day on the plaza at the Art Gallery was coming up. Sol peeked through a side of the puppet curtain to suss up the audience. There were lots of tourists and the place was packed.
“There’s at least a hundred kids out there,” she told Rose.
“How do I look?”
“Like hell but I still love you,” said Sol.
“Yeah, well, thanks.”
“Now get out there!”
The Adventures of Kronk and Bongo started with Patches the Clown running around from behind the puppet tent honking a clown horn and yelling, “Hello everybody!” To which, most times, a couple of kids would yell hello back. This time was no different, until Rose got to the part where Patches asks the children to guess his name.
“Can anyone guess what my name is?”
There was a stony silence. A couple of kids shrugged.
“Can anyone tell me what I’m covered in?”
Normally, at this point a few would yell out “patches,” to which Patches was supposed to say, “That’s right! I’m Patches the Clown!” Next, Patches would introduce Buddy the Dog, they’d banter, then Buddy would tell Patches that his friends from outer space were going to arrive for lunch soon and that he had to get ready. Then the puppet show would start. This time, however, things didn’t go according to plan. For some reason, this was the moment that Sol decided that she wanted to vamp.
“Can anyone tell me what I’m covered in?” Rose asked the crowd.
“Makeup!” came a voice from behind her. Rose turned around to see Buddy the Dog staring at her.
“You’re covered in makeup! You’re Makeup the Clown!” Buddy shouted, turning to the audience. “Hi, everyone! I’m Buddy!”
“Hi Buddy!” responded a little girl in a cornflower dress sitting on the ground in the front row.
“And this is my friend, Makeup the Clown! I want everyone to say a great big hello to Makeup!”
“Hello Makeup!” yelled the same girl.
“Hello Makeup!” followed the rest of the children.
Rose managed to muster a horrifying smile. The red greasepaint spreading from her lips made her lips look like a crime scene. She turned to wave at the little girl, only to see her grandmother Lily sitting there instead, shaking her head disappointedly. She was wearing a green, checkered Guy LaRoche coat, if the fashion liner notes Trevor had emblazoned on Rose’s brain all those years ago were accurate.
“You look terrible, Rose,” she said. “Are you getting enough sleep?”
“It’s makeup, Grandma. Clown makeup.”
“Not a circus I’d care to see,” said her grandmother.
She chuckled, stood up, and walked toward Rose. “Oh, well, now it makes sense. You never were one for makeup, at least not to make yourself pretty. Which is fine because you’re as pretty as can be without it, to me. Though when you were young, you liked to get into my makeup bag while I wasn’t looking. And then you’d put on a little show. You had a flare for the theatrical back then, before you turned shy and bookish. Here, let me clean this up for you.”
She pulled a handkerchief from the sleeve of her coat, wet it with her tongue, and began wiping off Rose’s makeup.
“What the fuck, Grandma!”
Her grandmother pulled back with a startled expression. “I don’t recall you having a salty tongue.”
“I picked it up after you died. Life goes on.”
“Speak for yourself. And hold still!”
Rose’s grandmother sighed and lowered her handkerchief.
“I’m sorry, being dead doesn’t always bring out the best in me. Take it from me, Rose, resting in peace has its drawbacks. It’s not as easy to keep up with things. And it’s not like anyone drops by to visit and fill you in on what’s been going on. Oh sure, they show up once a year with flowers. But they don’t stick around. They say, ‘We miss you,’ talk about you like you’re not even there, then rush away to get on with their lives. And before you know it you’ve got a granddaughter with a mouth on her like a sailor.”
“What are you doing here, Grandma?”
“I know where you got it from,” her grandmother continued, ignoring Rose. “You got it from me. I never swore around family, especially you grandkids. But at the office, well, there were times when a few colourful bon mots — strategically placed, mind you — was the only way to get through to some of the men who thought they knew better.
“No one saw me coming. Everyone saw a nice, well-dressed, well-behaved Christian lady in pearls. I know that you young women today, with your blue jeans and Gloria Steinem, think lipstick is the enemy, but fashion gave me the element of surprise. I mean, at the end of the day, fashion is just a calling card that gets you into the right places — or gets you kicked out. Clothes, makeup, keeping a trim figure — that was my Trojan horse. It got me through the door. Then I showed them my brains. And, when stronger measures were called for, some lip.”
“How Helen Gurley Brown-ish of her,” Rose heard Trevor whispering in her ear. Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl had been on the reading list in Rose’s gender studies course. Rose applauded Brown’s early feminist celebration of female sexual empowerment. But her advice to women to exploit that power and get ahead using sexy clothes, makeup, and other feminine wiles belonged in a museum, under plexiglass with the other fossils. Brown went on to run Cosmopolitan. Rose imagined that the road to hell was paved with Cosmo articles about how to satisfy your man. She gave Trevor an informal book report one night after they’d smoked a joint. He wanted to read the Gurley Brown book, so she loaned him her copy.
“Well that explains Madonna. And Mae West too,” he told her after he’d read it. “And Coco Chanel and Marilyn Monroe, come to think of it. They were different times, Rose. Your grandmother has a point.”
“Of course, I have a point,” interjected her grandmother, snapping her fingers to get Rose’s attention. “Focus, Rose!”
“You heard what I was thinking?”
Her grandmother nodded, holding a compact and powdering her face to conceal the necrosis.
“How?”
Her grandmother sighed and put down the compact.
“Waves.”
“What?”
“Electromagnetic waves, Rose: radio waves, microwaves, light spectrum waves. I’m a projection bobbing like flotsam on a million frequencies travelling through you and around you everywhere all the time. I know everything you’re thinking.”
“Why are you here, Grandma? Why do you keep showing up?”
“But I’m not here, dear. Weren’t you listening? I’m dead.” Rose’s grandmother sniffled and began to softly cry. “I am six feet under. I have shuffled off this mortal coil, gone the way of all flesh, and given up the ghost. I have passed beyond the veil, Rose, and paid the ferryman. I have ceased to be.”
She paused to dab the tears under her eyes to macabre effect, casting a quick glance to see if Rose was commiserating. She seemed unaware that while dabbing her face she’d rubbed off some of the mortuary makeup, revealing a cadaverous pall beneath.
“Are you in heaven, Grandma?” Rose asked.
“Clearly not,” her grandmother said, looking around with a bemused smile and tucking away her handkerchief. “Unless heaven is a public plaza leading to an art gallery. Which, come to think of it, might not be such a bad thing. Besides, you don’t believe in heaven so don’t patronize me.”
“Sorry. But what are you doing here?”
Her grandmother sighed. “You tell me. You manifested me, after all.”
“I didn’t manifest anything,” Rose protested.
“Yes, Rose, you did. You won’t let go. Of me or your friend Trevor. Except you’re burying him before he’s gone. You’re turning him into a memory while he’s still alive. I deserve to be a memory. Not him. Not yet.”
Rose felt something tug at her clown vest and looked down. It was the little girl in the cornflower dress. “Don’t cry, Mister Makeup.”
Rose realized that she was sobbing uncontrollably. Panicked preschool faces looked up at her with pained expressions. Some parents exchanged concerned whispers. Then a few of the kids started to howl. Rose looked around and saw why. Sol had emerged from the puppet tent with Buddy dangling off her arm, realizing too late that the optics weren’t great.
“Buddy’s dead!” yelled a toddler at the back. “That man killed him!”
“Are you okay?” Sol whispered into Rose’s ear.
Rose nodded.
“Good,” said Sol. “Then let’s vamp.”
“Don’t worry kids!” said Rose. The smile she forced to buoy their spirits appeared more crazed than comforting thanks to her Grand Guignol visage. The only reassurance it offered was a promise of nightmares come bedtime. “This is my assistant, Solange. She’s not a man. Tell everyone that Buddy isn’t dead, Solange.”
“That’s right, Rose,” Sol said nervously. Rose gave her a look. “I mean Patches. I mean Makeup.”
“Then why don’t you tell everyone what is wrong with Buddy.”
“Sure, Makeup. Buddy’s suffering from heat prostration. That’s when someone overheats and faints. Because it’s too hot. Like it is now. But we can help him.”
“How?” Rose remarked, the sweat trickling uncomfortably down her back and legs.
“Let me show you.”
Sol stood behind Rose and gingerly slipped the puppet back onto her arm. She crouched, laid Buddy on the ground, and pretended to give the puppet mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. She jerked her arm to make it seem as though the puppet was coming to.
“See everyone, Buddy’s just fine,” announced Rose while Sol stood up.
Sol made it look like Buddy was whispering something to her, then she whispered into Rose’s ear.
“Buddy says thank you for caring so much about him,” Rose announced. “He’s still not feeling very well. He needs to rest. We’re going to postpone the show, but you can come back in an hour for the next one. In the meantime, why doesn’t everyone help themselves to an Adventures of Kronk and Bongo comic book!”
The next morning, Rose and Sol received a summons to come into the office. Ocean was livid. Several parents had filed complaints with the Federal Department of Consumer and Corporate Affairs, which sponsored the program.
“You can’t keep cancelling scheduled shows,” Ocean said. She was trying to be officious but seemed more weary than managerial. Rose sat with her arms crossed, staring out of the window behind Ocean’s head as she spoke. Sol doodled in her notebook. “I can’t fire you because it’s too late in the season to find and train someone else. And stop doodling, Sol. It’s inconsiderate.”
“Oh, gee, sorry,” Sol replied sarcastically. She put her Sharpie away and looked at Ocean with a fed-up expression. “It’s not doodling, Ocean. It’s drawing. I do it when I’m bored because I have an artistic temperament, not an attention deficit disorder.”
Ocean’s eyes darkened like the sea before a storm. “I’m sorry I’m boring you, but the both of you need to get your acts together. And you, Rose, these ‘fits’ you keep having are a problem. Maybe you need to see a doctor. Whatever, they need to stop.”
“They’re not fits,” said Rose. “They’re visions. They’re, I don’t know, numinous.”
“She means spiritual, divine,” Sol weighed in.
“I know what numinous means,” Ocean responded tersely. She turned to Rose. “Are you on drugs?”
“No,” said Rose. “But they sound like a good idea right about now.”
Sol snickered.
“It’s not funny, Sol,” Ocean fumed. “This is a program paid for by taxpayers and I’m accountable. We represent the Canadian government. ‘Makeup the Clown’ is not an appropriate ambassador. Which brings me to another issue: the kissing. There’ve been reports.”
“The kissing?” Rose queried.
“Reports?” added Sol.
“On three different occasions, children reported seeing the two of you kissing behind the puppet tent. Their parents contacted us. They weren’t happy about, in one parent’s words, ‘my kid being exposed to homosexuals.’”
Sol rolled her eyes. “Then maybe we should add a fifth hazard symbol to the puppet show. We could add Lesbian to Poison, Flammable, Explosive, and Corrosive, with the symbol of combusting labia.”
“There’s no need to be so graphic,” said Ocean.
“Yeah, there is,” Sol responded, heatedly. She held up her notebook. “I’m a graphic novelist, Ocean. Being ‘graphic’ is who I am. Not that you care or would even notice. You’re too busy fucking my father.”
“That’s enough,” Rose said gently, worried about how things were escalating. She reached over and placed a hand on Sol’s leg.
“Listen, I don’t care but other people do. And my job’s on the line,” said Ocean. “It’s bad optics.”
“You’re one to talk,” Sol countered in a deadpan voice.
“Okay, we’ll be more careful. It won’t happen again,” Rose said. Never comfortable with confrontation, she was eager to ease the tension.
“All right,” Ocean replied. “But if I get another complaint, there will be consequences.”
Sol was sullen and quiet on their way out. She turned to Rose as they were taking the elevator down to underground parking.
“She’s pregnant,” said Sol.
“What?”
“Ocean. She’s pregnant.”
“Oh.”
“I was thinking about the plan. Should we go ahead? Trevor said he’d be into it if we did.”
“I don’t know. I guess so. Yes, let’s do it,” Rose replied, feigning conviction.
Rose had been having doubts about their plan all along but hadn’t said anything because Sol was so enthusiastic about it. Now the doubts were creeping back. Rose never thought that they’d really implement it. She figured that their plotting was capricious, for fun. She was also conflicted about Sol’s reasons, worried that Sol was treading the fine line between altruism and vengeance. Did she want to make a political statement or get back at Ocean?
Rose had guessed correctly; Ocean had been trained as a dancer. She stood over a credenza littered with framed photographs of Ocean at different ages: a six-year-old girl at the barre in ballet class, leg extended; a teenager in a black body stocking entangled in a cluster of other teenagers in black body stockings at a modern dance recital; performing in a cruise ship production of Cats. Rose had spent years quietly observing dancers as she studied and earned experience behind the scenes in theatre. She could always tell which ones would be successful. Their eyes had a certain quality. They, well, danced. She didn’t see that quality in Ocean’s eyes, at least not in any of the photographs. They churned with the same contained conflict Rose had noticed her first day of training, The spotlight captured her focus and determination, and her ambition, but her gaze lacked the joy, revelation, or sense of freedom Rose was used to seeing in people born to be onstage. Instead, her eyes brimmed with defiance, and secrets. They didn’t let you in; they kept you out.
Above her head, Rose heard the repetitive whoosh of a printer spitting out pages. They couldn’t use the office to make copies of the insert or go to a library; they’d be found out. Sol still had a key so they’d snuck into her family’s house to use her father’s photocopier. He was away on a business trip and Ocean was at work. Rose was keeping watch just in case someone showed up.
“Are you nearly done?” Rose shouted.
“Yeah, almost!” Sol answered from upstairs.
There was a photograph of Ocean with Sol’s father. She smiled at the camera, sitting on his lap while they shared an intimate moment. The age difference didn’t bother Rose the way it might bother other people. The first woman she had an affair with had been almost thirty years older too. Rose realized it was the only photograph in which Ocean’s smile seemed genuine. And her eyes were dancing. She looked genuinely happy, and safe. But safe from what?
To some, the lens might suggest a potpourri of underlying complexes at play — Oedipus, Electra, Madonna/Whore, and other so-called neuroses dreamed up by straight, long-dead men. Rose commiserated with Sol’s distress about her family’s internecine sexual dramas, but she was reluctant to judge, let alone diagnose. It took a lot to rile Rose. When she was eight, the first time she took communion, the priest had delivered a fire and brimstone sermon about the evils of homosexuality. It was 1969. Canada had just decriminalized sodomy and its awkward side bit gross indecency.
After the service, outside the church, Rose’s grandmother had taken her aside to tell her that she disagreed with the priest. “Father McNamara is wrong, Rose. I don’t know what he’s thinking. An open heart starts with an open mind. Jesus couldn’t have made it any clearer. Everyone deserves love, even homosexuals. Oh, and please don’t tell your parents what I said.”
Rose ran straight home right after, went to the bookshelf where they kept the Encyclopedia Britannica, and looked up homosexuality and sodomy. It was way more interesting than Father McNamara’s sermon, and much more informative.
Looking closer at the photograph, Rose could understand the attraction, sort of. Sol’s father looked good for his age. He had curly, shoulder-length, salt and pepper hair, a well-groomed beard, and a trim physique from doing outdoorsy things. There were pictures on the wall above the credenza of him kayaking, rock climbing, and running a marathon. There were also photographs showing various stages of the house’s construction.
Sol’s dad was an architect. He’d designed the house. It was situated on mountainside property in North Vancouver, surrounded by rainforest and straddling a creek. The weekend Homes section of The Vancouver Sun had featured it several years earlier with the headline “West Coast Postmodernism.” Rose remembered because she’d come downstairs one Sunday morning to find her mother reading the article at the breakfast table. She’d asked her mother what postmodernism meant but her mother didn’t know either. Once again, the Encyclopedia Britannica came to the rescue.
The house was made using mismatched, reclaimed wood, with doors retrieved from residential teardowns. One of the walls featured flagstone salvaged from a demolished hotel. The house had vaulted ceilings and floor-to-ceiling windows and was meant to “respect the local ecology” and “integrate the natural and man-made environments,” according to the newspaper. Rose stood in the main living space, an open area concept that eradicated barriers between rooms and “motivated flow from living space to living space.”
She looked out the window at a primordial landscape of ancient firs, pines, and redwoods soaring skyward and casting shade. Far below, life tussled for space in the light, needy and chaotic: massive ferns, alien-looking plants with thick stalks and elephantine leaves, mammoth mushrooms jutting out from stumps and tree trunks, colossal boulders glistening with wetness, carpeted with squelching moss. Mosses and lichens of myriad textures and shades clung to every surface: dark green, thick and velvety; olive green, bulbous and clustered; sage green and wispy, dripping from boughs and swaying in the breeze.
By contrast, Rose thought that the house’s neat and tidy interior was self-conscious and overly organized, compulsively so. Furniture was spare, arranged for visual effect. The word “staged” came to mind. Tones were muted to highlight paintings and photographs strategically mounted and spaced as in a gallery, meticulously lit. Constricted by curation, its lifeblood drained, the art inside contradicted the anarchy outdoors. The immense windows were supposed to create a connection with the natural elements outside and impart a sense of openness. Instead, the airtight space seemed hermetically sealed. Rose felt like she was in a biosphere, not a home. Or maybe a mausoleum.
Oddly, there were no other family photos. Two families used to live here but now it was just Ocean and Sol’s father. The rest were long gone, their photos removed, walls and tabletops wiped clean of their memories. Now Rose started to understand Sol’s rage. Abandonment and betrayal aren’t so easy to forgive.
Suddenly, from out of nowhere, Rose heard the sound of a splash coming from the other side of the room, the sound someone makes when they dive into water. She turned in the sound’s direction. It seemed to be coming from a framed picture on the far wall. She walked over for a closer look. It was a print of a painting, a hyperrealist image in bright colours that suggested someplace warm. There was a signature: David Hockney. Rose had never heard of him. A woman and a man stood at the edge of a pool watching a young man swimming underwater wearing a white bathing suit, or maybe tighty-whities. The three figures seemed detached, isolated from one another. The woman faced away, her back to the viewer. Until, that is, she turned her head and stared at Rose.
“Grandma?”
“Hello, dear. We’ve been waiting.”
“Waiting? Waiting for what?”
Her grandmother smiled like a young mother patiently putting up with her toddler’s antics. “You know.”
“No, I don’t,” said Rose. “I really don’t.”
Now the man who was standing at the edge of the pool looked at Rose.
“Trevor?”
He pointed at the swimmer. “Let me drown, Rose. Let me drown beautifully. Save me when I’m dead.”
“Huh?”
“All done,” said Sol, interrupting Rose’s reverie. “Now all we have to do is fold, staple, and stuff them into the comic books.” She stood in the doorway at the bottom of the stairs, holding a large box weighed down with reams of paper. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” said Rose, trying to sound chipper.
“You had another vision, didn’t you?” asked Sol. She carefully lowered the heavy box onto the floor, stretched, and kneaded the small of her back.
Rose nodded.
“Are you still nervous about doing this?”
“Yes. But you’re right, it’s important. I think I’d regret it now if we didn’t.”
They each took one side of the box and lumbered out of the house.
“It’s about damn time!” Trevor had said over the phone from Toronto two years earlier when Rose told him that she’d slept with her gender studies professor. “And don’t worry that you’re coming out later in life. You’re lucky there’s a market for older lesbians. Not like us fags. One crow’s foot or grey hair and we’re ready to slip into a faded wedding dress and wander a ruined mansion like Miss Havisham, pining for a love that never was and will never be. Or pay for a hustler.”
“I’m only twenty-five, just like you, you drama queen,” Rose replied. This was before Trevor’s diagnosis. Now aging was the least of his worries.
Rose had had a complicated relationship with men. Not that they weren’t attracted to her. Plenty were drawn to her curves, porcelain skin, and thick ginger hair. Several had called her an “Irish beauty” over the years, when they first met her. Hungarian, she would correct them. Inevitably they all hightailed it for the hills, threatened by Rose’s brains, opinions, and tongue. In the beginning, they said that being smart made her even hotter. But the smart men she fucked wanted her to be a little less smart than they were, and eventually broke things off. Those less cerebral vamoosed post-coitus the minute they spied her bookshelves, never to be seen again.
Rose didn’t really mind. She finally admitted to herself that she liked sex with men but didn’t want them hanging around. It was time to plunge into the lady pool. The realization — or admission, rather — proved timely. It coincided with a female ejaculation workshop she found out about at an end-of-term Womyn’s Potluck at the university.
She was surprised to encounter her gender studies professor there, who always seemed so uptight. Rose was more surprised by what her professor was wearing: a black leather, body-hugging catsuit with matching ankle boots and gloves. It reminded Rose of the pictures of Emma Peel her professor had shown during a lecture called Women Warriors. The term “warrior” was suggestive, not strictly literal. As well as the iconic crime fighter played by Diana Rigg in the 1960s cult classic TV show The Avengers, the professor’s roster included paintings of Joan of Arc, armoured and ready for battle; Moving Robe Woman, a formidable Sioux warrior; writer and critic Gertrude Stein, whom Rose thought looked like a tough-guy union boss; iconic 1930s movie star Marlene Dietrich, being seductive in men’s clothes; Ripley, the ass-kicking astronaut in Alien, wearing a military jumpsuit and carrying an assault rifle; statuesque pop singer Grace Jones, looking severe in an angular brush cut and sharply tailored suits; and so on.
Later that night, they snuggled, listening to the Parachute Club tape her professor wanted her to hear. Her professor drifted off, but Rose couldn’t. Sex had been a real eye-opener. She’d never used a strap-on before. Their brief affair was strictly sexual, no strings attached. Rose was indifferent when her professor was offered a tenured position at a college in the UK and moved away.
“You need to go through your slut phase and get it out of your system,” Trevor had said on the phone, and Rose agreed. She didn’t want anything to interfere with her studies and travels. She took Trevor’s advice and embarked on a series of flings. Meeting Sol complicated things, especially when Rose saw the illustrations in Sol’s notebook, and all the other notebooks piled in her closet.
Rose was familiar with manga due to her travels through Asia. They were a modern style of comics that incorporated elements of traditional Japanese art, elements that were also evident in the art of shadow puppetry Rose was studying. But she’d never seen lesbian manga before. Sol had appropriated, reengineered, and repurposed the sexist style of heavy metal comics, making a mockery of misogyny. Sol’s women were warriors. Armed, armoured, pulchritudinous, and pneumatic, they were edgy, erotic, and ready to rumble.
One of Rose’s favourite storylines was Sol’s retelling of the Helen of Troy myth. In Sol’s version, a group of sapphic fighters commandeer the Trojan horse, kill and replace the Greek soldiers, enter Troy undetected, then liberate Helen and whisk her away to Lesbos. Rose wasn’t sure she was comfortable with the parts about raping and pillaging but came around when Sol pointed out that “they’re conquerors, Rose, not candy stripers.”
“I love it!” Trevor exclaimed when Rose called him about their idea. “Let me check with Ian,” he added. Rose heard the receiver thud, some footsteps fading into another room, the barely audible rise and fall of Trevor’s muffled conversation with his boyfriend, and then footsteps returning. “Ian thinks it’s insane, which is a good thing, but we both wonder if it’s legal.”
“Just a sec,” said Rose, handing the phone to Sol, who was sitting next to her leaning in and listening. “They want to know if it’s legal,” she asked Sol.
“We could be charged with attempting to promote civil unrest, maybe, or perhaps for piggybacking on a government publication without the government’s knowledge or permission,” said Sol. “But the Department of Consumer and Corporate Affairs will weigh the pros and cons of damage control. We’re criticizing the government’s lackadaisical response to AIDS, which is a consumer protection issue. A day in federal court wouldn’t look good for them in the court of public opinion, and there’ll be lots of opinions, for sure. The homophobes will be out in full force. Let’s not fool ourselves. We’re doing this to incite civil unrest. It’s guerilla theatre.”
Trevor wrote it. Sol illustrated it. Rose imagined it: a graphic novel of Trevor’s zine article “My Life as a Monster,” a visual Odyssean hero’s quest through a nightmare world of bigots, bullies, misinformation, disinformation, malignant physical decay, dying horribly, then the denouement; he rises like a Phoenix, transformed into a superhero fighting ignorance from his fabulous throne in a gay club at the end of the rainbow. At first, Trevor liked the way that Sol’s superhero costume made him look hot. He was a little worried when his boyfriend Ian expressed concern that the storyline was a bit much.
“Some people might think that two hungry aliens from outer space who visit a talking dog and try to eat and drink dangerous chemicals until he teaches them what the hazardous symbols mean is pretty out there,” Rose reassured them both over the phone. “If Buddy really cared about keeping Kronk and Bongo safe, why is he storing poisonous products in his kitchen? He knows they’re coming for lunch. He knows — you’d think, because they’re friends — that they can’t keep out of trouble. If that isn’t a plot contrivance, I don’t know what is. Don’t get me started on the songs.”
The script for The Adventures of Kronk and Bongo included songs for each of the hazardous symbols. Each time after Buddy saved them from a hazard, Kronk and Bongo would break into a song and dance number, teaching the kids the chorus and trying to get them to sing along. “Flim-Flam-Flammable” for the flammable symbol. “Look Mom, No Hands” for the corrosive symbol. “Mister Skull and Crossbones” for the poison symbol. And “Everyone Go Boom” for the explosive symbol. The playschool tunes and cutesy, upbeat lyrics cast a cheerful spin on grisly mutilation and lingering death. Rose and Sol had attempted to up the cool factor by rewriting the song lyrics and applying them to the tune of popular songs on the radio that kids would know, like Madonna’s “Burning Up” for flammable, but were shot down by Ocean. She showed up to do spot checks every two or three days to make sure they didn’t deviate from the script, which was why and how the idea for the comic book insert came about. That, and Rock Hudson.
“Rock Hudson’s got AIDS,” Sol said, handing the front page of The Vancouver Sun and a cup of coffee to Rose, who was still in bed. “It’s on the radio, too. Everyone’s talking about it. He’s in France getting some kind of fancy treatment.”
The he-man movie star and sex symbol had been hiding behind the Hollywood publicity machine’s facade of heterosexuality for decades but now the jig was up. Somehow his illness got shoved aside as the media focused on the “shocking” revelation that he was gay, once more making AIDS homosexuality’s plus one, brooding off-camera away from the red carpet. They even called it “the gay plague.” LIFE magazine came out at the same time with a cover that said, “Now No One Is Safe from AIDS,” but most people preferred the “gay plague” version and stuck with it.
Rose and Sol realized that they had to leverage the news cycle and distribute the insert while the topic was hot. The final morning of the PNE found them stuffing it into the product safety comic books. They were in the booth in the Canada Pavilion, a fake spaceship with amphitheatre seating and a large monitor that looped a video of the puppet show. One of them would staff the booth while the other paraded around outside handing out the comic book. Sol took the morning shift as Buddy, Rose the afternoon.
Just before she donned Buddy’s head, Rose reached over to kiss Sol. “I love you,” she said, but Sol pulled away. She seemed distracted, and a little impatient.
“Sorry, just a lot going on,” she mumbled, and went to freshen a pile of comic books on a table by the booth’s entrance. She didn’t wish Rose good luck as she usually did.
Rose turned around in the doorway before she left the booth, but Sol ignored her. Rose knew that instant that she’d fallen for a version of Sol that Sol wanted her to see. Not the real thing.
Rose donned Buddy’s head and stepped out into the fairground.
Rose woke up on a cot in a medical tent near the Coliseum, attached to an intravenous drip for dehydration. Ocean was sitting next to her, patting her forehead with a cool, wet sponge. Sol was nowhere to be seen. Rose scoured the room for signs of her apparitional grandmother, but she was nowhere to be seen either. The nurse made her stay for about an hour, then she started feeling better. Ocean offered her a ride home.
“What happened to Sol?” Rose asked.
“Who’s Sol?” Ocean gave Rose a worried look.
“Your sister. Well, not really your sister. You know, she was with the family that moved in with your family. And now you’re sleeping with her father.”
Ocean pulled into a parking space in front of Rose’s apartment building. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Why would I sleep with someone’s father?”
“Sol, my puppet partner!” Rose said in earnest.
“I don’t know what’s gotten into you,” said Ocean. “That heat really did a number on you. I’m your puppet partner. And a lot more,” she added as she got out of the car with Rose, much to Rose’s surprise.
“What are you doing?” asked Rose.
“Um, going up to our apartment,” answered Ocean. She opened the car’s trunk and pulled out a box. “Do you want to help me? There’s another box of comic books. I’m actually really proud of us that we’ve only got these many left.”
Rose went round to the back of the car and eyed the box suspiciously. She pulled out one of the comic books and flipped it open. Out slipped the insert, a graphic novel, My Life as a Monster.
“You did it, Rose. You and Trevor, that is. I’m really proud of you. You’re such a talented artist. Now everyone will know, after all the years you spent hiding it. There’ll be fallout tomorrow when the media gets wind, but that’s what we wanted, right?”
“Right,” Rose replied, disoriented and unconvinced.
Upstairs in the apartment, after they’d put the boxes away in the utility room, Rose and Ocean sat down on the living room sofa and had a glass of wine. They lit some candles. The night air was warm, the window open. The soft light of street lamps bathed the room in an amber glow. Photographs jostled for space on a table across the room; pictures of Rose and Ocean, Ocean dancing, Ocean sitting with her father in the cool house he designed and built in Lynn Valley, Rose and Trevor clinking glasses in a leather bar, Rose in Ho Chi Minh City.
During her travels in southeast Asia to study shadow puppetry, Rose had spent some time in Vietnam learning about water puppetry. In the photograph, she was standing in front of a water puppet stage fringed with water lilies, a local Buddhist symbol for rising from the physical to the spiritual world. It was a set for a puppet play based on an epic Vietnamese poem, The Tale of Kieu, about a young woman who overcomes adversity and suffering in her quest for love and redemption. It was Rose’s favourite puppet play.
Rose’s hair was long, thick, red, and curly in the photograph, unlike now. She’d had it straightened, dyed black, and drastically cut as soon as she got back to Vancouver from Vietnam, further estranging her parents. Trevor called her the minute he received the photograph she’d mailed him in Toronto.
“I love it! You look like a whole new person!”
Once, when Rose’s grandmother was still alive but nearing the end, Rose visited her in the hospital. Something her grandmother said had stuck with her ever since.
“You have to kill the woman you were born to be to become the woman you want to be.”