Sweet Affliction Read online

  For my parents

  And in memory of Thompson Owens

  There is no rest, really, there is no rest. There is just a joyous torment, all your life, of doing the wrong thing.

  — Derek Walcott

  Why do I always do the wrong thing in the middle of the night? I only want some attention.

  — “Bomb Song”, C. Hutchison

  Gravity

  Sweet Affliction

  Moving Day

  Last Man Standing

  Horseman, Pass By

  Maitland

  Helga Volga

  Frenching the Eagle

  Glory Days

  The Shirt

  The Polar Bear at the Museum

  A Goddamn Fucking Cake

  The Yoga Teachers

  Wellspring

  A Favour

  Gravity

  The pregnancy test is called “Assure,” except it’s spelled “Asure,” which kind of results in it having the opposite effect. I bring it to the cash and the checkout woman gives me this little wink and goes “Good luck,” even though they’re not supposed to make moralizing comments about your items.

  The funny thing about buying a home pregnancy test is that you are holding your breath either way. It’s just not a neutral purchase. So “good luck” is a safe bet because no matter what’s intended, it applies. They should make two different kinds of pregnancy tests, one for women who really want to have a baby and one for everyone else. Each test would have the same two graphics: a bunch of exploding fireworks with the words Way To Go under it and, like, a frowny face. The same symbols for both tests, but for opposite results.

  I walk across the parking lot to the car, where my parents and sister are waiting.

  “All set?” says my dad.

  I give him the thumbs up and strap myself in. I look over at Angela. She stares out the window, absent and solemn as a cat. We pull onto the highway and Mom turns the car toward my cousin’s wedding.

  My sister is in love with a man named Henry. I have always loved the name Henry, which is almost the same as being in love with a man named Henry, because when she says “I love Henry” I can think Me too.

  All the boys my age have faces like half-baked buns. Henry’s face has character. His face looks like it might have spent some time in the desert, surviving on cactus juice and lizards. Angela tells me he once got into a fist fight over the principle of a thing.

  “What thing?” I say.

  “Does it matter?”

  “I guess not. Unless it’s like Nazis or something.”

  “I think I ovulate just looking at him,” Angela says.

  Mom sometimes wonders out loud what Henry could want with a nineteen-year-old girl. But really, what couldn’t he want? It seemed so obvious to me. Angela was it—the real deal, the whole enchilada. I came with her, like an accessory. It wasn’t the worst position to be in. Where was Barbie without her pink high-heeled shoes, her pink vinyl purse? Broke and teetering.

  We’re not twins but I always thought we looked the same, that looking at Angela was like looking into a distorting mirror, a mirror of my future. We have the same wide-set eyes and square chins, and when we hit twelve, two years apart, we both got the same dusting of acne on our cheeks; I thought made Angela even more beautiful because she looked tough and kind of oily, like a mink. But almost no one guesses that we’re sisters.

  Although she is beautiful beyond reason, Angela dresses like an Amish child because she can never find clothes she likes. My best friend Camille and I once followed her through the Le Château warehouse as she rejected every outfit we suggested with enough scorn to make us feel like we actually were raised in a trailer park on Mars. Angela is a genius of rejection, a grand master. She brings rejection to a new level. Her contempt covers areas unknown to regular women like our mother and her friends; knobby knees or “Hadassah arms” are problems miles beneath her criteria, which are obscure, baroque. Her disdain goes beyond regular language; she has to make up words to express it. She’ll say things like “It’s too froofy, I hate how it bargles like that at the collar, it makes my stomach all gronchy.” I handed her a shirt the exact underside-of-a-cloud grey-blue of her eyes, and she snorted wearily. “I would look like David Cop-a-feel in that,” she said. “I would look like Tom Ass Pinchin.”

  As soon as we cross into America the roads become smooth and gently curving, no longer the pockmarked highways of southern Quebec. The signs are different too. “This road maintained by Boy Scouts of America, Northampton Chapter,” I read aloud. “This road maintained by Hoover Electric.”

  “Americans like to give their roads up for adoption,” Dad says. “It’s called neo-liberalism. You hand over responsibility for public infrastructure to private entities. Then if someone skids on a rough patch and breaks their neck, or throws out their transmission, you have someone to sue.”

  “The Boy Scouts of America?” I ask.

  “More or less,” he says. “It’s about individual accountability. It’s much easier to assign blame to a person or group of people than to a system or a class.”

  “This road maintained by Cheryl and Maude,” I say.

  Dad keeps talking about the erosion of the state’s economic and social responsibility, and I stare out the window and think about Cheryl and Maude, and what kind of life they have together. Do they live in a ramshackle bungalow covered in wisteria vines? Is it decorated with Georgia O’Keeffe prints? They must have a pair of cats named Gertrude and Alice. Why did they decide to become accountable for this stretch of Vermont highway? Was it, for them, like having a child?

  I repeat the words “ramshackle bungalow” to myself, savouring them. Angela cracks the window and lights a smoke.

  As kids me and Angela used to squeeze each other’s biceps, pretending they were breasts. “Nice rack,” we’d say. We had a game we called “dating.” We’d strip down to our panties and undershirts. Angela’s was V-necked and had a small pink bow in the nadir of the V. Mine was plain and ribbed, like a boy’s. Angela would put two clementines in her shirt, and I’d drop one down my undies. Then I’d take her on a date. This consisted of sitting side by side on my parents’ brown corduroy sofa, me left and her right. Using a plate as a steering wheel, I’d drive her around, maintaining a macho silence, while she’d talk about getting her hair done and the shoes she wanted to buy. Then she’d give me a directorial aside: “Try to make a move on me.” And I’d go “Hey baby, enough chitchat,” and drop a hand onto her leg. She would slap it away and giggle, and I’d go back to driving, doing complicated three-point turns and flipping through channels on the radio.

  “Try again,” she’d whisper.

  Once I reached a palm onto her leftmost clementine. It was awkward; I almost lost control of the car. Angela stared straight ahead with a look of grim concentration. Then she said, We’re going off the road. I dropped the plate. It didn’t break, it just rolled around on its rim for a while making a hollow croaking sound. If it had broken we would be different people, people who things happened to; I think we were both hoping it would break. But it didn’t break.

  Afterwards the backs of our thighs were pink and striped from the corduroy.

  I never got past first base on those dates. But I liked the way the orange felt.

  My cousin Jill, the one getting married, is thin and nervous, with fine hair and bug-eyes, like she’s missing some kind of protective layer. She has horse teeth and a matching laugh and is altogether adorable. Once she told me she thought she might be gay because she had a poster of Linda Evangelista she couldn’t stop staring at. “She’s just so radia
nt,” she had said. Now she’s getting married to Harris, a skinny balding orthodontist who plays a lot of squash. He’s the exact opposite of Linda Evangelista, but they seem totally bonkers for each other.

  We pass an LED sign that says Don’t Drink and Drive! For extra emphasis the Don’t is blinking on and off, which means that half the time the sign says Drink and Drive! “God,” Angela says, “I’m so dehydrated.” Angela is never thirsty, only dehydrated. Dad pulls over to buy some bottled water and Mom disembarks for the gas station bathroom.

  Still not looking at me, Angela says, “Did you get the goods?”

  My best friend Camille once bought a home pregnancy test after she slept with a guy in the back of his truck outside the Orange Julep.

  She took it in the bathroom of the mall because she was worried her family would see the box in the recycling bin and confront her about it. “They wouldn’t have been mad,” she said, “but my mom would have made this big feminist ceremony out of it, with like herbs and incense and ankh symbols, and I would have got a whole lecture on choice as the greater part of freedom and brave pioneering women and stuff like that. I wanted to keep it just for me.”

  Camille told me when she crouched over the little dipstick and peed on it she was filled with a great sense of pride in her body. “It was this almost horny feeling,” she said, “like I was some kind of ancient fertility goddess, fucking and giving birth to all creation.” Camille weighs about seventy pounds, is completely flat-chested, and looks like a pink-cheeked, tousle-haired boy, so it’s hard to imagine her as any kind of sex goddess.

  When the little plus sign appeared in the dipstick window, Camille went straight to a pay phone outside the food court and called the Morgentaler clinic. She told me that now whenever she hears the words “a woman’s choice” she automatically smells french fries.

  “Got ’em,” I tell Angela.

  “You’re a pal.”

  “You’d do the same for me.”

  She turns and looks at me, finally. “No, I would not. I would never let this happen to you. I would kill the guy first.”

  I say nothing.

  “Anyway,” she says. “It’s not like you have to worry.”

  I pass her the plastic bag with the box in it and she stuffs it in her purse. Mom comes out of the bathroom and waves like she hasn’t seen us in years.

  We met Henry last fall, at a costume party someone had wittily titled The Communist Party. Everyone was wearing a fur hat or an eyeliner goatee, and I saw at least three ice picks in different head-stabbing configurations. I spent an hour trying to convince a dubious undergrad that I was dressed as false consciousness, and then I went looking for Angela.

  She was talking to the only other person not in costume. He was wearing a plain black T-shirt and blue trousers in a way that let you know he had a nice body, but that he didn’t put a lot of effort into it, at least not in the way other people do. He didn’t go to the gym or play team sports, he had just gotten that way accidently, from building houses for political refugees or sandbagging flooding rivers. He was probably a volunteer firefighter or something.

  “Ang,” I said, “I want to go home.”

  “Stacey! I’m so glad you’re here.” As if she had just run into me by accident and we weren’t like seventy-five percent of the same DNA.

  “I want you to meet someone,” she said, putting a hand on my arm. “Henry, Stacey, Stacey, Henry.”

  “I’ve always loved that name,” I say.

  “You guys must be sisters,” he said. “You could be twins.”

  Not knowing how to respond, I sipped my beer. Angela giggled, but she looked a little pissed off, as though being recognized in this way threatened her personhood.

  “I admit to a certain family resemblance,” she said, tossing her hair a bit.

  I don’t remember what we talked about after that. Or what they talked about. I didn’t talk. I felt like I was watching one of those old film reels of the atom bomb tests in Nevada, or a volcano erupting. That same feeling of helplessness and awe.

  He asked if she wanted to hang out later and she said k. Just k. I thought, abcdefghijlmnopqrstuvwxyz. There are the rest of them. Maybe you could use them to make some more words. In fact, there are some useful words in there already, like hi, and also no. I didn’t say this out loud.

  Walking home neither of us said a thing. I thought about doing something extreme, making some grand gesture, like smashing a window or throwing myself under a bus. I felt ready for some really big emotion. Finally I worked up the courage to kick a pile of leaves. They were damp and instead of flying around everywhere they stuck to my sneaker and smelled perceptibly of dog shit. Angela didn’t notice.

  Angela once broke up with a guy because of something he said. He said, “The button fly. Girls always have trouble with the button fly.” People thought she was frivolous, but really she just had a very strict aesthetic that was its own kind of moral order. Henry was different. He was like insulin. He created a need for himself that was almost chemical. I wanted to free her from him. But she didn’t want to be freed.

  A few hours in to the drive we stop at a scenic lookout—some ragged cliffs and a waterfall. My legs feel stiff and creaky. We hike to where the water crashes over the edge, so busy it makes you tired to look. Angela leans on the railing, facing us instead of the waterfall, like she’s posing for a travel brochure.

  There’s a little girl being led down the path by the elbow, both hands covering her eyes. Halfway to the lookout she freezes, locking her knees and refusing to move. Her mother lets go of her arm and starts walking ahead.

  “I’m going now!” she says. “Bye!”

  The girl stays put, whimpering. Several hikers stop to try to talk to her, but every time they approach she takes a step backward, palms still pressed to her face.

  A smiling middle-aged woman crouches beside the girl. “Don’t be afraid of the waterfall, sweetie. It’s very pretty.”

  “I hate pretty!” the girl shrieks.

  By the time we get to the resort, a light drizzle is falling. My aunt Lydia is nearly in tears. The ceremony was supposed to be outside, by the lake, but a couple of guys in tuxes are herding everyone into banks of folding chairs inside the reception tent. Mom braces Lydia’s shoulders and talks her down in a low cooing voice, like she’s comforting a high-strung poodle. I sneak around the back of the boathouse and find Jill puffing a skinny menthol cigarette under the overhang, the hem of her dress rucked on the long grass.

  “What happened to your face?” I say.

  “It’s airbrushed,” she says. “All the girls do it now.” Her hair is highlighted and set into sprayed sausage rolls on top of her head.

  “You look gorgeous,” I say.

  “I feel like I’m gonna puke.” We hug, her cool damp arms around me. Her cigarette is hovering dangerously close to her fire-hazard hair, so I pluck it out of her fingers and take a drag. She adjusts the top of her strapless dress, peering down at her cleavage. “I feel like a lemon meringue in this,” she says.

  “Where’s Harris?”

  She shrugs. “Some kind of groom thing. Out in the woods, playing bongos and beating his chest.”

  The idea of Harris performing any kind of masculinity ritual almost makes me laugh out loud, but then I can’t help picturing him and Jill in the dark together, his skinny hairy fingers stroking her throat, his mouth inching crablike along her thigh.

  “You better go before you dissolve in the rain,” I say.

  She reaches out and pats my head. “Good old Stacey.” I hand her back the smoke; she takes a last long drag and flicks the butt into the weeds. “Okay,” she says, hitching up her skirt, “let’s get this gong show on the road.”

  Angela and I file into the tent, where a klezmer band is toodling away in the corner. Our parents are already seated next to my dad’s old friend Sal
ly, whose wheelchair is festooned with white bunting and lilacs. She is talking animatedly to my mother, but when we arrive she looks up at us with pale bird eyes.

  “Doppel and Ganger,” she says, “fancy meeting you here.” This is what she’s called us for as long as I can remember. She holds out her arms and we each in turn bend down to embrace her.

  When we were kids Sally made us mix CDs and gave us diaries with stickers inside that said “Ex Libris.” She took us to art galleries and let us watch movies with nudity and violence. She called them “advanced.” She’d say “This movie’s pretty advanced, so don’t get any ideas.” She taught us how to put on liquid eyeliner and how to break out of a headlock. Her friends all seemed to be drag queens or women with a lot of tattoos.

  As we got older we saw Sally less. I don’t know if this had to do with her having MS or something else. Knowing my dad I assumed something else. To the wedding she is wearing brown high-waisted Katharine Hepburn pants, a white blouse, and a vest that matched the pants. Her hair is short brown with a band of grey around the sideburns and bangs, and her ears are pierced with small diamond studs. Around her neck is a chain whose point disappears below the vee of her blouse, but I know for a fact it holds a small gold double-headed axe. I had noticed it as a kid, swinging as she picked us up or leaned forward over a hand of gin rummy. Dad called it The Old Battle Axe. She once told me its true name: Labrys. I didn’t know what it meant, then.

  Lately she’s been experimenting with homeopathic healing, reiki. She tells my dad she’s really into vibrations.

  “What’s reiki?” I ask.

  “It’s an energy thing,” she says.

  I can understand this. I’ve seen auras on dogs, stood beside the Hydro-Québec power house at Manic-5 and felt my hair stand on end. Once I rested my head against a vibrating clothes dryer until I puked. I know the things energy can do.

  “How does it work?” I say.

  “It has to do with energy following lines of your body called meridians,” Sally says. She lifts my arm and runs her finger along the inner edge, where the pale winter skin meets the darker summer skin. “This is your heart meridian.” A feeling moves past but not through me, like weather.