The Journey Prize Stories 22 (19 page)

“Now where's the fun in that?”

“I've never lifted weights before, so I don't think I'm going to be any good.”

Alana lifts my right arm and straightens it, squinting alongside my forearm the way someone trains the sights of a rifle. Her breath on my skin makes the tiny hairs I wish weren't there stand up on end.

“It's a shame,” she concludes. “The distance between your chest and your arms is short and, judging from the length of your legs, it would take nothing for you to squat with your ass to the floor. Perfect dimensions for weightlifting.”

“But I'm not even a hundred pounds.”

Alana shakes her head. “It's about strength and weight, yeah, but it's also about physics. The less distance the weight has to travel, the easier the lift is. Like look at him. With those long arms, he'll never lift much more than 250 pounds.”

I turn to look at a tall, skinny guy lying on a bench, lowering the weight quickly to his chest before slowly pressing it up.

“Imagine if his arms were a foot shorter, how much easier it would be.”

“I guess.”

“Go grab some weights and I'll teach you some things.”

I wander away and pick up a pair of small dumbbells covered in pink plastic.

As I walk, my sneakers announce my awkwardness with every step. I sit on the bench while Alana lets her head fall from side to side, a small crunching sound accompanying every movement.

She looks down at me and sighs. “Leave those tiny pink things for the cardio bunnies.” She pulls me to a crate filled with old metal weights rusting along the edges. “Use these. Now lie down on your back, holding the weights by your chest. Grab them in the middle.”

I do as I'm told. Her hands close around my wrists and guide my movement. In a few minutes, tiny blobs of moisture start forming on my shirt. Alana kneels behind me and says, “Good. Slow. That's right.” Her grip loosens as I get the hang of the movement, until only the undersides of her hands graze my skin.

I become a building Alana is constructing, each limb a brick shifted into place. The movements are awkward, nothing like Alana's fluid presses. Every time she moves to get a drink of water from the fountain, she leaves the bench glistening behind her.

“Before I tore my pecs, I was doing more than this,” she laughs, kicking a dumbbell that weighs almost as much as I do. “The doctors said I was this close to ripping the muscle clean off the bone.”

“Shouldn't you be taking it easy?”

She shakes her head. “This is taking it easy.”

In the next hour, I learn how to spot a bench-presser and
how to bench-press myself. I learn about forced negatives, supersets, and how to use cheating principles for better results. I learn how to squat with a metal bar on my back and lift plates properly from the floor. When we're finished, my shirt is soaked. Alana has already taken hers off, piling 45-pound plates back onto steel racks in her sports bra. Some people are looking at us. Like Wonder Woman, Alana is impervious to stares.

The next day I'm sore, but in a good way that's impossible to explain. I poke at my arms, those broomstick-thick cylinders of flesh, feeling for muscle. I imagine that they're pregnant, not showing signs of new life just yet, but with the seeds of growth already planted. I shrug my shoulders, letting them lull back, the way Alana does before she does a bench press. I stare into the mirror, into my own eyes, until I become blurry. For a second, between blinks, I'm gigantic. I can lift cars and tear lampposts in half. Then I hold my eyes closed for a split second too long and I'm small again, a speck, a fraction.

It's raining. The droplets of water sound like Wonder Woman's high-heeled boots stamping against the balcony. Alana has asked me if there are any boys I like at school and the only response I can think of is laughter. “Most guys forget I'm even there. It's like, unless I have big tits and lips like Angelina Jolie, I'm invisible.” I regret taking Angelina's name in vain but it's true.

Alana raises her arms and crunches her bicep with a wink. “Me, I'm too much woman for any man.”

I am aware of how hot it is in her apartment, how much her arms are like something Michelangelo could've carved out of stone. We're sitting close again, in a configuration that's
become natural: her with her arm around my shoulders, feet on the coffee table, me absorbed by her mass. She smells like perfume and sweat, like the gym and some kind of fruit I can't pin down.

I entertain the thought of resting my head on her shoulder but say instead, “Thanks for showing me how to work out. I mean, how to lift weights.”

“You have potential, Libanka.”

“I'd like to go again sometime.”

I aim to rest my head on her shoulder but find her breast instead.

“Me too,” she says in a voice that's probably as close as it can come to a whisper.

I'm visiting Aunt Olga for the first time in months. Olga is my mother's younger sister. She was only seven when she came to Canada, to Mom's thirteen. In Olga's cosmology, men are either chivalric knights or sleazy ogres. Women are either chaste or whores. It's a bright, bright sunshiny day or it's a deluge outside. Conceptually, Aunt Olga doesn't believe in middle ground.

I accept a glass of Coke. “Can you translate this into Ukrainian for me?”

Aunt Olga puts on her reading glasses, the thick ones she keeps hidden from the rest of the world. Her eyes follow her fingers, moving over each word on the piece of paper I've handed to her. She smiles.

“Who's the boy?” she asks.

I've come to her because she revels in taking part in conspiracies, hoarding forbidden knowledge, that kind of thing. She's
our family's Eve, only she guards what she knows ruthlessly. To let the secret slip would be to ruin the power it gives her.

“Sorry?”

“There's no sense denying it, Libanka. You don't write love poems to nobody.” She sucks on her cigarette and blows a stream of smoke over my head. “At least you've got the good sense to pick a Ukrainian.”

Olga's boyfriend of two months – an American working in Canada for an advertising firm – recently broke up with her via email. History has shown that anything Aunt Olga touches wilts. Dead plants litter her apartment. Romance novels about chesty Victorian women and even chestier Victorian lords are strewn on the floor, their spines broken. Her cat, a mangy tabby, has yet to make an appearance during my visit, leading me to believe that it's either dead or has had the good sense to escape.

A part of me is afraid that Aunt Olga will screw the translation up. Another part of me concedes that there's really nobody else to ask.

She puts out her smoke in an ashtray the shape of Elvis's head and leans over the table. The tiny fissures in her makeup remind me of a Da Vinci fresco that's starting to crack. “So who is this boy?”

“You wouldn't know him.”

“From the sounds of what you've got here, he sounds like quite the hunk. ‘Arms like oak trees?' ‘Lips thin as the ice I find myself on around you?' A bit sappy, but the thought's nice.”

“Um.”

“Don't be so embarrassed. You should have seen the crap I've written to men in my life. Feh.”

“So you'll translate them for me?”

“Into Ukrainian? Sure, why not.”

Her smile is the outstretched hand of a waitress waiting for a tip. I know the rules.

“Only, can you not tell anyone, Aunty?”

She winks. “It will be our little secret. Just promise me I'll be there first to meet him.”

It's Saturday. I dipped into my father's beer and after one and a half cans I'm drunk enough to take Olga's translation and seal it in an envelope. I consider stamping the envelope's flap with a kiss but question my ability to put on lipstick. Slipping out of the apartment is easy. Dad's asleep on the couch, his reading glasses sitting low on his nose, a boxing match muted on the television. My mother's working on her memoirs in the bedroom, pecking ferociously at the typewriter Dad got her last Christmas. I wait in the lobby of Alana's building for twenty minutes before a pizza delivery boy gets buzzed in. I press my ear against Alana's door and pretend that the heartbeat I hear belongs to her. It sounds like someone's watching Jerry Springer. I can't bear to look down, so I drop the letter and use my foot to slide it under the door. When I step back I notice that the half sticking out on my side has the crescent imprint of my sneakers. I bend down and lick my finger, hoping to rub it off. I'm on my knees when the door opens. Her hand touches my shoulder. I stand and hold the letter out dumbly. She's wearing a housecoat, lime green, her hair a frizzy bouquet of blond helixes. She steps back and I step forward. When the door closes, I feel the chaos of atoms colliding.

—

We've started playing a new game. For every word or phrase I get right, she loses an article of clothing. Every time she stumps me, something of mine is stripped and cast off to the side.

She writes:
“Pes volossia.”

“That's easy. Dog hair.”

Alana removes her shirt. “Fine, what about ……
Raduha?”

“Rainbow. You're going to have to try harder than that.”

Off go her pants, her boxer briefs a glint of white between the tanned muscles of her thighs. “Okay, try this one:
Brodjachaja sobaka.”

“Dirty dog?”

“Vagrant dog, but very close.” She points at my shirt and I strip it off.

“That's a weird term. Is it common?”

“No, not common.” She stops, considering my body. “It's what my mother called me when I told her I was in love with a woman. She didn't know how to say lesbian so she just said that. It was the name of a gay bar in Kiev that was near our house.”

The game stops after she says that. The pen she's been using runs out of ink. I kiss her mouth, my hands moving against arms, feeling her pulse through a vein that's like rope on her bicep.

That night, Mom asks me to write her something. Dad stands next to her. His newspaper from Ukraine is rolled up and tucked under his armpit, which means he means business.

“Go on, Libanka,” he says, rubbing my shoulders as though I'm a pole vaulter or a boxer or a 10-pin bowling champion about to roll the ball. Shrugging him off, I ask what they want me to say.

“Anything,” Mom says. “Whatever you spend all day doing.”

Without meaning to, I flex my blooming abdominal muscles. They're armour and a cage at the same time. My hair is messy and I think I smell like the balm Alana rubs on her sore body after she works out, a pungent odour that I've grown to find sweet and inviting.

I take the pencil from Mom's hand.

In the moment where pen meets paper, Wonder Woman folds her arms and gets into her invisible jet and there's just me and Alana and the blank page in front of me.

I try to think of something like poetry.

Brodjachaja sobaka
is the only thing that comes to mind.

1600

Light breeze from west. Temperature warm. Clear skies except one cloud the exact shape of the birthmark on my thigh, which looks like a bicycle wheel with spokes.

I'm knee-deep in a hole to China. Progress has slowed since my Nan's noon inspection – must shovel for width now, as
well as depth. “China's a long drop,” she said. “We'll want room to stretch our limbs.”

1630

Went in for a glass of milk at quarter past the hour and Madame Dubois from No. 12 parked her Flivver over my hole. Progress further slowed. She's brought fruitcake and belated regrets re: Granddad.

Weather as above.

1633

I think Dubois's Flivver is a jabberwocky. (See
Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There
, page twenty-eight – “The Jabberwock with eyes of flame came whiffling through the tulgey wood and burbled as it came.”)

1640

Dubois's fixing a pot of tea. Visit will be longer than hoped. Tried crawling underneath Jabberwock. Shovel wouldn't fit.

1650

In China, people walk upside down. That's why they wear those limpet-shell hats. The wide brims prevent the Chinese from falling out of the sky.

1654

In China, the sea is made from tea. During the third century, tea was so prized that neighbouring provinces boasted their wealth through triannual tea festivals where every member of every town paraded to the beach with masks and fireworks
and dragon kites and offered their leaves to the waves in a celebrated public sacrifice. That's why each coast tastes different. Most of the South China Sea (near Hong Kong) tastes like jasmine, but the Gulf of Tonkin is rosehip, and the Bay of Bengal, chai. The East China Sea is primarily green (there are a few local variations), and the tides of the Yellow Sea ebb and flow peppermint. The Formosa Strait swells with a particularly strong brew of ginger root (Nan says Taiwan prevents open-ocean dilution.) The Chinese don't drink their seawater, though. It's too strongly steeped.

1700

Madame Du
bore
still here. She asked me why I haven't kept the roses hydrated. (The ones on the dining table, from the parish memorial.) “Un petty dry,” she called them.

2100

Temperature: warm. Wind: not there. Sky: the colour of Granddad's toe after he sailed home from Panama last May to fight the German alphabet boats, which he never did in the end because they wanted him in the Pacific aboard an “armed merchantman,” which is stupid because ships aren't men and they don't have arms and we're fighting the Germans not the Chinamen so why send my Granddad to Hong Kong?