I stood up. I threw out the take-out boxes that had piled up in my condo like little, grease-stained bodies killed by the Black Death. No more dawdling. I was hurting, sure. But as I jammed the boxes down the garbage chute, I realized I wasn’t hurting as deeply as I should have been, and therein lay the problem: that I didn’t hurt as deeply as I should have proved Zoe right: I was “irredeemably frigid.” But did I want her to be right? No. I wanted her to be wrong. But for her to be wrong, I needed to hurt more. And I didn’t want to hurt more—I wanted to hurt less. I needed to hurt less. I needed to hurt less so that I could do important things, like sweep my bedroom floor, draft titles for the cosmic baby mush tube (“Big Bang Baby”?), and find a new roommate. Read more →
I was dying here. Not figuratively. I mean I was face down on the ground, blowing scarlet bubbles in a pool of blood, distilling slowly from a bullet wound that undid my face and all I could think was—there’s no way he intended to kill me.
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Today is garbage day. I’ve been wearing the same unwashed pajamas for weeks. (They aren’t ALF pajamas, though I have searched eBay for some that are.) I haven’t shaved in a while, either. I roll our plastic trash receptacle to the curb. I open the lid. I scream into it. This helps, but not as much as getting all those Facebook likes when I post a photo of ALF blowing out the candles on a birthday cake. I smell worse than our garbage.
That was his official story. Later I learned he’d followed a grad school lover from Boston, a woman who turned out not to have much interest in Julius. Often, when I delved into the reasons for my students’ displacement, they were unable to articulate a logical progression of events. It brought to mind the words of my Vietnamese friend who’d arrived as a boat person in the seventies. When asked why he’d left Saigon, he would shrug. “Because everyone else was leaving.”
That night, I dreamt about the rabbits. I was in the woods, chasing streaks of white and the glow of red eyes, and I couldn’t catch them. Finally I stopped, unable to catch my breath, and when I straightened up I saw them in a small clearing several feet ahead of me. They too had stopped, in front of a man. He had Tony’s face, hooded by his green rain jacket. He looked at me and seemed about to speak. I had a hundred questions on the tip of my tongue, and something told me he was ready to answer them. But then I woke up.
Po Po asks, how’s school, and you tell her about Mrs. Wiebe, who wrote the drama club play Let’s Make the Most of It and who you adore. Your character Abbey, a housewife who loves to shop, dismisses her husband’s neck pain and is a stereotype. You don’t want your mothers at the performance because they’re feminists. A chubby grade five boy called Felix plays your husband, and he has great potential and you try to be a role model, but right now that’s impossible because you’re in Vancouver at the Pink Flamingo in a skirt and French braids. You tell all this to Po Po.
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