Holding Still for as Long as Possible (9 page)

Outside the Gladstone Hotel, a few buildings south of our apartment, there was a bright pink
BMX
bike locked to a gas line. I wished I could steal it and give it to Maria. She needed some cheering up — she'd been working nineteen days straight. In the spring, she'd graduated from school and started working at a homeless shelter downtown.

She'd texted me earlier in the day to say,
Client threw bike at my head — wish I hdn't duckd so id b off on comp!

The last time I saw Maria was two weeks ago. A few days after we had lunch with her mother, she showed up at my house in the middle of the night. Dating someone for seven years had its advantages when you needed comfort but couldn't talk about it. When Maria got stressed, she didn't eat. She took care of everyone except herself, and when she couldn't function any more, she called me. I was surprised by the randomness of her dropping in, but not put off. I held Maria the way I had hundreds of times before. After we finished eating, we sat on the couch in silence. I flipped channels, occasionally glancing sideways at her as she regained some colour in her face and her posture relaxed.

In the morning, I got up and scrubbed the pink and green bathroom tiles, then rearranged the canisters on the kitchen counter, while she kept sleeping. I sat in the living room with Roxy, watching
CNN
footage from New Orleans, not talking. I was particularly comfortable lately when I was with someone but not talking to them. When Maria got up to take a shower, Roxy simply turned, raised one eyebrow, and ripped another string of red licorice from the pack on her lap.

“Walk me to the door?” asked Maria, wearing her shiny sky blue coat and courier sack.

Standing on the cement step, she placed a brief kiss on my neck before approaching my lips. Turning instead so her lips caught my cheek, I offered a hug. There was something final in it.

We agreed to stay close, eventually to become good friends, but for now to take some time for solitude, reinvention.

Even so, I hadn't counted on the reality of that agreement. I counted on things like the summer turning too quickly to fall, the healing power of repetitive words and motions. Maria grounded me in my history and my present. Have you ever met someone who was just
good
? Who, when you came across complicated moral questions, was programmed into your phone as “certain virtue”? This was Maria, exactly. Two weeks ago, when I watched her unlock her beat-up ten-speed, place her bag carefully in the ample front basket and ride away, I had no idea when I would see her again. Up the stairs I went, one leaden foot at a time.

Today I checked the lock on the pink
BMX
, and felt a wave of guilt for even contemplating stealing it. It was my day off. I had planned for the sweet, calming tedium of grocery shopping, perhaps a magazine read cover to cover while sipping a fourth cup of coffee, no random crimes. But there was something in the air: expectation.

I stood at the corner of Dufferin and Queen waiting for the light to change en route to the doughnut shop, the tight V-shaped pockets of my jacket weighed down with bacteria-coated pennies and dimes from the change jar. Coffee is easy to accomplish.

I was outside, breathing fine and elated by this normalcy. Jasper, one of the homeless people I see almost every day, said, “That's what I like to see! A smile on your worried face! What's the good news?”

“I don't feel like I'm being strangled today,” I offered, in an uncharacteristic moment of complete honesty.

“I know what that's like,” he said, pushing his shopping cart past me.

Good Will.

I spotted Amy and a guy walking two tiny black and white dogs that were bounding up the hill from under the bridge. Amy was one of Roxy's oldest friends, from the anti-poverty coalition in their teens. I'd only met her a few times, mostly when she dropped in at the café where Roxy and I used to work.

There were thirty-two squares of sidewalk between my front step and the doughnut shop. Some days Toronto still looked like it did the first day I arrived. Everyone was a stranger, all talk was small. When Amy called out my name, I was almost surprised at first that anyone knew me. I thought I might walk by them, unnoticed.

“Hey, Hilary!”

Amy approached while I stood frozen.
Do I nod or say
hi?

Amy and I offered each other overlapping staccato greetings. She looked amazing, as usual. I sometimes tried to glimpse imperfections on her — a scab on her arm or a yellowed bruise; or I watched for her to lift up her arm and expose a ring of effort, the smell of exertion. Usually I scrounged up nothing but scrubbed, polished glory, a magazine page come to life. When Roxy used to work at the café, Amy would breeze in, her sunglasses on, her arms jangling with expensive bracelets while stirring Stevia into a tall iced soy latte. She'd sneak back into the kitchen to chat with Roxy and all the food orders would be late for about half an hour. But she grew on me, I suppose.

Together Amy and her boyfriend were attractive in an offbeat way. He was wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with a silkscreen from a local band and long baggy Dickies shorts. He looked vibrantly, purposely unkempt, but clean. Amy wore a red-and-white '60s stewardess dress and vintage gold boots. Her hair looked as if it had been professionally styled that morning. Her skin was flawless, her purse a gorgeous hand-made number. She was thin like models are thin. But she had a slight cough. Excellent. She curled her fist to her lips and sputtered into it.

One of the dogs stopped to sniff me up and down and I fell in love with his scruffy lopsided head. “Oh, who's a good dog, who's a cute little piece of angelic perfection? Who's gorgeous? Oh, you are! You like your head scratched, don't you? Oh, cute boy!”
Total retardation, the inane things that dog people who didn't have dogs mumbled intuitively
.

Her boyfriend: “We're dog-sitting for a friend.”

“We're thinking of getting our own,” Amy said.

“He's an attention slut, this one,” he said, pointing to the dog curled up around my leg.

“We can sniff out our own kind.” Was that even funny?

He laughed.

“How are you doing, Billy?” asked Amy. “I suppose I'll see you a lot now that you've moved into the Parkdale Gem.” Her white plastic bracelets jangled as she reached up to put her arm around Josh.

Dog #2 wanted some action, and nudged his big head towards my other leg.

“Oh, this is Josh, by the way. Do you two know each other?”

“No.” I offered up my hand to Josh from where I was kneeling. “I'm Hilary, but I'm going by Billy now.” My hands were dry. So dry.
Touch my sandpaper hands, cute boy. They're awesome! Shut up. Good Will.

Josh chewed on his lower lip and cocked his head. “So you live with Roxy?”

“Yup.”

“Roxy and I go way back,” Josh said. “We were in a band together. She told me she had a new roommate.”

“The Accident, right? Oh, that's cool.” I successfully pulled off not looking like a total idiot.

“Well, kind of embarrassing in that heavy metal revival way.”

“That's how we met, actually, through Roxy,” said Amy.

“Small world. Roxy's how I meet everyone in Toronto.”

Silence. I looked at Josh and he looked back at me, and I suddenly felt the way guys talk about feeling when they're fourteen and all they can think about is sex. This was unusual for me. It was his arms, I think. They were very defined and muscular, not in a beefcake way, but like he could have been a drummer. Drummer arms. Mmm. I was usually too concerned with potential danger, airborne viruses, sweaty handshakes, my breakup drama with Maria or possibly embarrassing blurt-outs to get this turned on by a stranger's arm.

I focused on giving the dogs love, hoping my face had returned to its usual pallid, anemic wash while I tried to secure a good exit line. A woman with an oversized purse and very small dog sighed heavily trying to push past me.

Amy piped up, “Billy used to be famous. She recorded under Hilary Stevenson. Remember that song . . .”

To my horror, Amy sang the chorus. Inwardly I raged, while trying to look humble. I felt like someone was choking me, or as if I'd swallowed a sock.

“Oh yeah, I remember that song. I was in Grade Eleven. My girlfriend at the time was a big fan.”

So the whole story is this: When I was sixteen, I cut an album with my uncle, Jonny Brandon. Yeah, that Jonny, from the '70s Canadian super-group Epic Horizon. The kind of band that had one song everyone knew but no one remembers the name of the band. Except the
CBC
. The
CBC
still called Jonny at least twice a year to speak on the radio or be on a panel discussion about which small-town bar is the best for travelling musicians, or to judge their best new Canadian musicians. Anyway, my has-been uncle discovered me, and I had a year or so of experiencing some Canadian fame and one minor hit song in the States that got played during a Walmart commercial. Jonny got all the money for that one, 'cause he wrote it.

It happened like this. When I was about to turn sixteen, Jonny came to stay with us over the Christmas break, because he'd recently left his second wife and my mother usually stepped in to take care of him when he needed it. Christmas dinner in the afternoon with all extended family and any neighbours without family was a tradition my mother insisted on, even if on occasion she made everyone eat roast tempeh and avocado sushi instead of turkey. It was the kind of annoying ritual you don't get anything out of when you're in your late teens but are tethered to anyway.

After dinner, I sat cross-legged on the couch and practised my six-song repertoire with my mom's old acoustic guitar. I was deep into my Ani DiFranco–obsessed, goddess-pendant phase and Jonny was snoozing on the couch, arms resting on his sizable beer belly, exposed and hairy with his T-shirt riding up. By the time I was halfway through “My Little Pony Ran Away,” a cynical tribute to childhood toys, his eyes were fixed on me. He said, “You have it all. You have what we want right now.” Jonny had been one of
them
since the late '80s, writing songs for teens and easy-listening songstresses, rock bands and pop trios. “You're cute, you've got a pretty voice. You'll totally make it. Let's set up a meeting.”

My mother rolled her eyes and said, “Jonny's an old drunk now, honey. Nothing he says is true. Don't you dare get your hopes up.”

Except this time she was wrong. By spring I'd recorded seven songs — two of my own, five written for me — been given media training, teeth whitening, highlights, a padded bra, and a web site, and had scored an opening spot for a cross-Canada tour. I felt simultaneously lucky and ungrateful and self-important.

I didn't like talking about it any more. It was like one of those embarrassing things you did in high school that you can't help wanting to shed when you're in your twenties. I don't miss people knowing who I am. The more strangers think they know who you are, the less you feel you know yourself. Or worse, you might believe them. You might wake up every day feeling like King Shit of Fuck Mountain and the only thing to do after that is get high.

Josh, Amy, and I stared at one another. I didn't know what else to say. “Well, gotta run!” I blurted. Simple, direct, dishonest. “I'll see you at knitting group, Amy.”

And Amy said, “Yes, can't wait! See ya!”

I'd recently joined Roxy's knitting group in an attempt to meet new people and expand my horizons. The cast of
csi
had begun feeling like my only social group.

I watched Josh and Amy walk away and wondered how their day would unfold. Would they rush home to have sex all afternoon? Would they argue about whose turn it was to do the dishes? Now that I was single, couples looked like orangutans.

I pushed my fingers against the greasy sneeze-guard at the doughnut shop and ordered my coffee, thinking about my previous similar interactions with Amy. Short. Empty. I'd always thought we'd break through the cellophane of perfunctory greetings and friendly nodding and get closer. Sometimes you just have that feeling about someone. Like they're going to be important eventually, so you take note.

[ 5 ]

Amy

I'm not really a secret-keeper. I don't have any big whoppers to tell you. I never hit someone with my car and drove away. I never even shoplifted lipstick or gave an ill-advised drunken blow-job. Never had an
STD
or cheated on a test.

My secrets are just kind of weird. Like when I sit down to pee, I have to count down or I can't go. I don't know when I started doing this, but now, even if I've had seven beers or a quart of lemonade, I say,
5-4-3-2-1
!
before I can relax enough to let it happen. I don't know why. I think it's kind of funny. I giggle to myself most times.

The other thing is that when I'm having sex I have to think about something totally mundane in order to get off. Sometimes I'll repeat a word to myself, like
yellow y
ellow yellow yellow
or
hand grenade hand grenade motorcycle pop-tart
!
Anything completely nonsensical and without sexual connotation.