Brutes, p.8
Brutes, page 8
‘Have a good night?’ she says, her voice a question mark. I leave.
I take the train downtown to the gallery. A group of teenage boys eat slices of pizza. One’s cheese slides off onto the dull floor, and the rest dare him to pick it up and eat it. He does and they all scream. A grandma knits across from me. A few women seek my eyes in solidarity of judgement but I close them. I look safe, a girl in a uniform. Women are always looking at me. I have an effect on them. I am broad, unfeminine, I awaken no envy, no nostalgia, no what-could-have-been. I don’t know what they think I can do for them. I often have the urge to kiss these women, to rise up and plant my face onto theirs, women with wedding rings and grey hair, women with mascara stains and seeds in their teeth. A smack, a slap, a slammed door of a kiss. The kind of kiss that wakes you up and leaves you.
I’ve never trusted artists. They’re so sleazy it almost makes me laugh.
As a waitress, I’ve met enough of them to know they are all the same. The first person I ever loved was a dancer. We met in a fast food line at 4 a.m., a few weeks after I moved away from home. He was compact and small and I am tall and wide. I’ve always liked to hold people and he liked to be held. He never danced in front of me but he asked me to dance sometimes when we went to bed, playing pop songs I liked. I was eighteen, I loved to dance, I jumped over him on the bed, knocking myself against the walls, eager to please him.
Before we broke up, he choreographed a solo piece for his school. I was excited. I went alone, I didn’t know anyone else in the city. He looked gorgeous on stage, curled in a white ball of light. His muscles looked carved. I was so turned on I wanted to eat him, like a cake with my bare hands. Then he started. He began in front of a mirror. Someone offstage pushed a trolley out toward him. He donned a white shirt and a bow tie. A silhouette of a city appeared behind him, the travelling light of a subway car. He walked in an absurd way, his shoulders hunched, his large strides almost circles. He pirouetted and a table full of food and wine glasses was rolled out to him, knocking him in the ass. He mimed shock, as if bursting out of a reverie, and the audience laughed. He put four plates full of food on his arms, balanced from his wrist to his elbow, and then staggered around, dropping them all on the floor. He drew ten wine glasses into his balletically curled fingers. I had taught him these tricks, ones I’d known since bussing in high school. Then he started to dance badly, the glasses cracking, knocking against each other in his fingers, the food smudging all over the floor beneath his feet. He looked insane, turning circles, his hands clenching to fists as the glasses dropped to the ground. I wanted to nudge the person next to me. I wanted to be rude. ‘What is this guy doing!’ I wanted to say. Some people started to chuckle. I laughed, too, a mean, loud laugh. I had always thought there was something beautiful about the way I danced. The girls had always made me feel that way. The way they watched me dance! The way they danced with me, the way we rippled away from each other! I couldn’t believe how stupid he looked. I left. He still calls me sometimes. For a long time, I didn’t understand why, but now I think that to humiliate a woman is the only way some men know how to love one.
The gallery is empty when I arrive. I hate working at these kinds of events. Too many people crammed into a small room. And all the whiteness. Light that shows everyone too clearly.
His name is painted onto the front glass wall in a trendy font. The name that signed my mother’s pay cheques for years.
Nathan is at the bar. I like Nathan. He has high hips, high cheekbones. ‘I was born to flirt,’ he told me once. And it is true, he does not even have to try. There is something devilish about him, his bones so close to the surface, his eyes shiny but metallic, cold. I would love to be cold but it is difficult for a woman. People seem to see warmth in me even when I offer none. Maybe if I was thinner it would be easier, but it seems to me sometimes that a woman with flesh is a woman who must always be grateful. People don’t hesitate around me. I am always being asked favours, and causing offence when I say no.
Nathan tried this at first. He asked me to close down the bar while he cashed up. Closing down the bar was a ten-step job, the accounts a one-step, sit-down ordeal you could do while drinking. When I said no, he smiled guiltily, poured me a whisky, and hauled out the trash.
He hands me a whisky now, and I start cutting the fruit.
I look at the photographs on the walls. Huge, stretched canvases. They are so in focus they make my head hurt. They are boring and badly lit.
The series is called Doors.
There are European doors in flaking pastels, English doors at the seaside, bright red doors covered in Chinese characters, the rounded doors of a mosque, revolving glass doors, doors ajar, half-broken doors, a hotel hallway of identical doors, the dull white doors of a hospital, door after door after door.
‘I hate photos without people,’ says Nathan. He squints at the doors. ‘These make me nervous.’
I pour another whisky and he raises a singular, slick eyebrow.
‘They piss me off,’ I say, and drink.
We are only responsible for the drinks. Another caterer is serving food which makes the floor so full it is almost impossible to navigate. Blonde waitresses swerve through the crowd like tiny sharks. I hear the squeak of their voices announcing their offerings, monkfish livers, kohlrabi, truffled devilled eggs. I hijack a few when I go to the bathroom and put them all into my mouth together in the stall. It’s hard to swallow. I come out, and a woman is waiting, clad in velvet, chunks of turquoise pegged onto her ears. ‘They let the staff use the toilets?’ she says to no one. She goes into the stall I’ve vacated and I hope I peed on the seat. I smile at myself in the mirror, the food stuffed to my gums. Some of the mush falls into the white sink. I don’t wash my hands.
I circulate with flutes of champagne, holding the tray on the pads of my fingers, lowering it only when necessary to avoid crashes. I enjoy making them reach for the drinks, I enjoy making them look at me. This is out of character. Normally, I like the numbness, the invisibility of waitressing. But tonight I meet their eyes. They look away immediately but I do not blink.
A man winds his arm around my waist and pinches my hip bone. His speech doesn’t flinch or falter, and he continues his smooth way to a punchline as the two women beside him laugh. They notice, as women notice everything, but women are as good at ignoring things as they are at understanding them.
Another man asks for a neat whisky. I fill it with ice because I want to make someone angry. He turns purple when I present it to him, recoils when I pretend not to notice and knock the cold glass against his hand.
My heart feels like a solid dead thing. I can’t even feel it beating. I feel the old stirring in my gut, to light a match and play with the flame.
I stand at the bar and look at the warm swirl of bodies, prodded and injected and polished by money. The women look oiled. The men look dry. They talk to each other but their eyes move all around the room, scanning for an exit. Laughs scatter competitively throughout the crowd, increasing in length and volume until they dissolve, and then it starts again, like a wave at a baseball game.
I wonder what they know.
I suspect they know everything.
I hate that he picked something as obvious as a door.
I pick up a fresh tray from the bar.
‘Are you okay?’ asks Nathan.
I move to the centre of the floor.
A dozen claws lift up toward my tray.
I look up at the glasses full of gold.
The blonde heads swim around me.
It is a dance as good as any other.
It takes the tiniest effort to cause significant damage, or at least a lot of noise.
I have always loved breaking glass. It is so easy to do that it is like the glass wants to break. It wants to be free. It wants to be a thousand flecks of shrieking glitter, announcing an entrance, a star of the show.
People scream as the tray falls from my hand. They throw up their bejewelled fingers to protect their eyes from the splinters of glass. The champagne creates a yellow puddle in the middle of the shining floor, like dog piss.
The men and the women and the waitresses back away from me like I am something rabid. They look like they expect me to cry. I almost do. I think about laughing, too, but in the end, I do neither. I toe the yellow liquid wider with my sneaker. The silence is gorgeous. It ripples out of me like the most brilliant piece of art.
7
The mall parking lot looks spectacular, vast and white-tipped, like an ocean that we are not afraid of because we know exactly what it is. The light rains down upon it, picking up the chrome on the car hubcaps, whiting out the wing mirrors and the tinted windows, beaming off the sunroofs, causing the faint scent in the air of scorched flesh as the bugs burn in the crevices of the windshields. We run. The light seems to cheer us on, cheer on all humans in their capacity, if nothing else, to make mean and shiny things. The dogs stuck in the backseats of the cars force their jaws into the thin free space of the left-open windows. They begin to bark as we fly by, harmonising our calls of her name.
‘Mia!’
‘Mia!’
‘Mia!’
We feel like men in every movie our moms watch.
We are halfway across the lot by the time we hear her crying, and we love her for this. Of course, she cannot wave or call out to us. We have to find her and save her. We feel inflated with purpose.
We find her in a dark wedge of shadow between a pick-up and a Ford Focus, scratching at the white line that marks the parking space. She is hunched over, but she looks up as we darken her further with our shadow. We see ourselves in her glasses, our outlines jostling, one clumsy, wavering creature. She looks at us like she does not know us. We do not know what to do next except watch her.
Leila elbows her way to the front, even though she is the slowest runner and arrived last. She crouches on her big bare feet and peers at Mia, or herself in Mia’s sunglasses. Then she leans over and kisses her on the lips.
We feel a crackle between us. We close our eyes because we want the kiss to belong to all of us, but we also know that it does not. We feel glass spring up between us and where Leila and Mia sit, kissing. We know we can break the glass in a shower over their heads if we want to. We clench our fists.
Leila breaks free and rocks back on her heels. She hugs her knees and rests her head on them.
In the quiet, the kiss seems to shrivel in the air like a popped balloon.
We cannot look at Leila or each other. We cross our arms over our chests. We wait for the kiss to be handed back to us like our discarded shirts on the basketball court.
Mia moves her head slowly from one of us to the next. She takes the time to fill her sunglasses up with each of our faces. We feel separated and weird. Then she turns back to Leila and sticks out her tongue. She takes a yellow clump from its tip and forces it between Leila’s closed lips. Dry flakes fall and we think that Leila does not use enough ChapStick and was probably disgusting to kiss. Leila takes a hesitant chew.
Mia sits back on her ass. She opens her mouth as if to speak or scream or vomit. Something seems to be rising in her that is heavy and foul, direct from the gut. It takes us a second to translate the sound that comes out of her mouth because we have never heard a sound like it before. It is high-pitched and rough and reminds us of when Hazel had an asthma attack.
‘I think she’s laughing,’ says Leila.
We are relieved Leila is still going to narrate the world for us even if she has betrayed us and been alone. We nod.
‘Oh!’ says Jody.
‘Duh!’ says Britney.
Mia laughs so hard she falls over onto the asphalt. Her cheek scrapes against the rough black surface and her sunglasses fall down to the end of her nose, revealing that her eyes are dry. We realise that she is not crying. We suddenly doubt she ever was. We look at Leila. We are suspicious. The false tears seem like a trap, like the traps our mothers set when they dance for men. We wriggle in the wet ropes she’s wrapped around us. Our soft hearts thump and we think of the girls we broke on Leila’s blog with our promises of love.
‘Where is she?’ says Mia, and collapses in laughter again. ‘She thinks she can run away from me!’ She keeps laughing. We do not know what else to do except wait for her to stop.
It takes her a long time. The sun slaps our skin. We want to go back to the mall and see Eddie, but we feel guilty for leaving him. We feel we have betrayed him. We have betrayed Sammy. We have fallen under Mia’s spell and now we cannot escape it.
‘Let’s go to my house,’ she says. ‘You stay with me.’ She takes Leila by the hand. We scuttle behind them because we do not know how to sever ourselves in a clean or dignified way. We will cling to Leila until she hangs on to us by a single fibre and there is blood and bone all over us.
Christian tries first. He wriggles as close to them as he can without forcing his way between them.
‘This town’s roadkill,’ he says. He can barely speak. ‘I can’t wait for LA.’
Mia does not seem to hear him. Leila does not look around. He slinks back between us. We take his hands but they slip through ours, and he puts them in his pockets.
We follow. We try to remember how we used to walk when we were only ourselves but we cannot. We take a stride and it is absurd, like how we walk in the chorus of the school musical when we are jovial villagers. We take another step but it is too short and we lurch forward, almost knocking our heads between Mia and Leila’s shoulder blades. Mia turns around to look at us and we freeze. We remember the game our grandmas used to play with us, when we crept up behind them to bang on their butt cheeks before they noticed, spun around and roared at us like wolves. We stay still. We hope she will roar. We are in the mood for a roar.
‘You are so funny,’ says Mia. She looks at Leila. ‘Aren’t they so funny?’
Leila jerks her head. It could be a nod or a shake. Britney hovers a little behind us, and we hear the low beginning of a bark in her throat, the sound she makes before she breaks something or starts to dance.
‘You’re like dogs still waiting at the pound,’ says Mia. She pushes up her sunglasses, widens her eyes until they start to water. She looks at us like she wants to be loved. Then she laughs and puts her sunglasses back on.
We are embarrassed. We feel our faces turn to fur. Bars descend before our eyes, and Mia and Leila look giant to us, looking down on us to judge our possible place in their pretty lives. We are furious at the same time as we would do anything to be chosen, wag our tails, look sad, cry, play dead.
‘Don’t worry,’ says Mia. ‘I’m a dog, too.’
She opens her mouth and produces a bark so realistic that the dogs in the cars begin to cry and howl with longing. We move closer to her, but she turns back to Leila. We stop, bumping into each other, banging shoulders. We want to be the girls at the front, the next ones to be picked. Mia lifts her long nail and moves it toward Leila’s face. Leila’s eyes cross, trying to keep the nail in focus. We hold our breath, but then Mia softens, takes a strand of Leila’s dark hair and tucks it behind one of her ears.
‘You know, you’re really pretty,’ says Mia. ‘You should model or something.’
It is so much better in real life than when we had practised saying this line to each other, sitting in a circle at lunch or on the apartments’ playground, taking turns to choose each other and be chosen, brandishing our claws of painted nails and whispering,
‘You know, you’re so pretty.’
‘You’re perfect for this movie.’
‘You have to make out with him in one scene!’
‘Pack your bags, sweetie.’
‘You are so crazy beautiful.’
‘No one’s ever told you that?’
We could pack our moms’ suitcases in five minutes. For the end of the game, we dragged them to the curb and then took turns pretending to be our mothers, wrapping our arms around each other’s legs, sinking to our knees and wailing,
‘How could you leave me?’
We shook each other off, our eyes starry.
‘Mom, this is a really big deal for me.’
But we stopped playing this summer. None of us played fair. We stopped taking turns and none of us wanted to be our mothers or the agent. All of us wanted to be the newly discovered star.
‘You’re so pretty you’re so pretty you’re so pretty.’ We said it very fast so no one could butt in. We swatted at each other with our nails. We left scratches across each other’s cheeks. Our voices turned hoarse. Hazel had her asthma attack.
Leila smiles. ‘I’ve thought about modelling some, I guess,’ she says.
‘Sure, your mirror’s thought about it, right?’ says Mia.
They both laugh.
We want to throw up.
We cannot believe Leila has become pretty without us notic ing, but we realise we have never really looked at her. We assumed she belonged to us so wholly that we had forgotten to.
We look now.
Her eyes are brown with small flecks of gold. We notice that she has the first hints of cheekbones to scaffold her beauty, holding it up to the light.
Britney spits onto the tarmac. We are angry, too. We are sure Leila is hoarding spells and potions, beauty secrets enmeshed in some other Internet we do not have access to.
Mia’s phone rings. She lifts it to her ear.
‘What do you want?’ she says. She listens.
‘I’ll be at the lake,’ she says. ‘I’m with the girls.’
She hangs up.
‘Eddie got a plane ticket to LA,’ she says.
We shiver with excitement. We see Eddie dragging along a full suitcase and wonder if we can zip ourselves inside it. Plane tickets are only for kids destined for lives we can barely taste, lives far bigger than local car commercials or mall catwalk shows for prom dresses. A plane ticket is the promise of real fame, glorious, shining, terrifying fame. Fame that lives in big white-walled houses and movies set in big white-walled houses.
