Twenty Miles (10 page)

‘No prob.’ Her eyes dropped to the Jill strap resting on my lap, worn as a belt, the through-the-legs strap they’d severed swinging taillike between my knees. On it, Toad had scrawled,
DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT, PERV.

‘Hockey Barbie’s very own two-in-one Jill strap and chastity belt!’ she’d said brightly. ‘Watch her fend off hockey crotch shots by day and horn dogs by night! Hockey Barbie, defending her reproductive organs and her virginity all at once!’

‘Why do they call it Jill strap?’ Pelly asked the table.

‘Oh, Pelter-Skelter,’ Toad sighed, head down to the lobster, elbows pointing right angles over her plate. The candle splashed kaleidoscope spots across her face.

‘You know the nursery rhyme “Jack and Jill”?’ Boz said. Pelly shook her head. ‘You know, Jack and Jill went up the hill – ’

‘Oh yeah. Yeah.’ Pelly nodded rapidly. ‘Oh, okay. Yeah.’

Toad abandoned the lobster, clattering her knife onto her plate, and filled her wineglass as she leaned back in her chair. She threw her hand up like a cheerleader as she chugged the wine, then dabbed daintily at the corners of her mouth with her napkin. I examined the cartoon on the Jill strap. I wondered if I could turn it backwards
without them noticing. A bit later, I decided. I could already feel the wine in my legs, a slow tingle working its way up.

‘Whatever happened to Jill?’ Boz asked. She wore a purple scarf woven with gold flecks that trilled across her chest in the candlelight.

‘Jill who?’ Pelly said.

‘As in Jack and Jill. Jack fell down and broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after. Then what, you know?’

‘If women weren’t so bad with directions, she could’ve gone first and they might both be alive today,’ Toad said, raising her glass as though offering a toast. Pelly made a clicking sound.

‘Oh, Toady, why do you do that? You’re such a chauvinist,’ Boz said.

‘Boz, I’ve told you. Why must you make me relive the trauma?’ Toad pretended to cry. ‘I remember when my mom brought home the skates. But there was something wrong with them. I told her there was something wrong with them, and she laughed. What the hell was wrong with them? I thought they were freaks, these albino freaks, you know? My mom, she just laughed. Oh, the horror, when she forced them onto my feet. The horror. And there you have it, ladies. The truth: I was once a ... I can’t speak the words. I was a fingerpainter. I was a hockey player trapped in a figure skater’s body. There you have it. I swear on Mooner’s track suits.’

Toad pretended to blow her nose into the napkin. Pelly rolled her eyes and turned to me. She held the wineglass with her pinky finger raised.

‘You like?’ she nodded at the lobster. I hadn’t touched it yet. I nodded, and took another sip of wine. I watched Boz wipe pretend tears from Toad’s face. The other tables buzzed like hives around us. Perfume everywhere.

‘Shit,’ Pelly said under her breath and then Mrs. Pelletier glided up to our table behind Toad and Boz. She wore her hair in a bun and had the same stretched-forehead look Pelly did when her hair was in a ponytail, the corners of her eyes pulled back. Pearls, French manicure. I smiled idiotically at her, my hand travelling instinctively to my hair, pushing it down. Hal and Toad had ultimately decided to compromise on the hair: a crimped pigtail on one side of my head,
and one huge back-combed snarl on the other. When Mrs. Pelletier looked at me, I felt the black eye makeup as pointedly as though it were a real bruise, roots plunging into my eye socket.

‘What a lovely gown that is,’ Mrs. Pelletier said to me, without a trace of irony.

‘Ma!’ Pelly chided, mortified. ‘She’s one of the rookie – it’s a joke!’

‘Well.’ Mrs. Pelletier turned to Pelly, nonplussed. Toad bowed her head and closed her eyes in concentration, trying not to laugh. ‘It is time now. Before the dessert.’

Pelly wiggled around in her seat a bit in protest, then Mrs. Pelletier dragged her off toward the black piano, angled open and gleaming at the far end of the room, the domino floor pouring shrinking diamonds toward its small stage.

Hal and Toad waited for Mrs. Pelletier to disappear into the kitchen, and then retrieved the garbage bag they’d left between the front doors when we came in. Hal cradled the plastic bulk as she and Toad walked over to our table.

‘We’re going alphabetically through the rookies, so you’re up,’ Hal said to me.

‘B is for Barbie,’ Toad chanted.

‘I’ll go first!’ Woo yelled from the next table, swivelling around in her chair, pompadour wobbling. Her mascara had already streaked below her eyes.

‘Ooh, not looking good,’ Toad said. ‘You’re up against the alphabet there, Woo, and looks like you’re losing.’

Pelly’s first notes boomed out, slamming shut the noise in the room. The kidney-shaped circles of heads rotated toward the piano. Its top opened out toward the room, so that it resembled, from my distance, the hood of a broken-down car, Pelly tinkering angrily in its belly. The notes vibrated during pauses in the song, like the aftershock of a hit, lingering violence.

‘Let’s go, Barbie,’ Hal said, the music shrinking her voice.

I hesitated, eyeing the bag cradled like a baby in Hal’s arms. I knew the bag contained King Kong Beer Bong. Toad had sat the rookies on Boz’s living-room floor like a group of nursery schoolers and revealed the long contraption, its impressive machinery that
she and Bitty, an Engineering student, had built with their own hands using parts from a hot tub. Its name was written in black marker on the large funnel, a thick snout of tube trailing down, these two parts hinged together with a complicated system of levers and valves. Toad had performed a ceremonial bong. When Hal flicked the switch on King Kong, Toad’s face had grown alarmingly red and a vein pulsed in her forehead, as though she were being strangled.

As they arranged me around the toilet in the handicapped stall, Toad brushed the front of her dress.

‘Do mind the frock, dear,’ she said, holding out her hands like a surgeon for King Kong as Hal wrestled it out of the bag. I gazed into the toilet bowl, the bathroom’s dim chandelier washing everything with moving, honeyed light. The wine had crawled up from my legs to behind my eyes and the dominoes in the floor moved like a game. Air freshener leaked peaches into the stall.

‘Nice,’ Toad said as Pelly began to play a new song, a sad song, its notes creeping muffled into the stall. ‘Beautiful. A slow dance between Barbie and King Kong. This is incredibly romantic.’

Hal retrieved the hose from Toad’s hands and hovered it by my mouth as Toad poured a beer into the funnel. Her heels tapped an absentminded rhythm on the echoing floor, light swimming slowly across her face, red lipstick worn near the inside of her mouth.

‘Ooh, too much head. Shit. Hang on a sec, Hal.’ Toad peered into the funnel for a few long moments. ‘’Kay, ready.’

‘If you have to puke or spit or anything, do it in there,’ Hal pointed to the toilet. She smiled a bit. ‘Open up.’

I opened my mouth with a dreamy, detached feeling. Like I’d just been shot to the gills with Novocaine, making my mouth invincible. I briefly recalled Toad’s advice about confidence as Hal shoved the hose into my mouth.

I didn’t open my throat. They didn’t warn us that opening your throat wasn’t the same as opening your mouth. In that split-second after Toad flicked the switch, I assumed it was the same. And then the choking began. My head became a water balloon, flooded, swelling. My nostrils smouldered and I lunged toward the toilet as
my face exploded, beer spurting out my nose, travelling down and up my throat at the same time. When I sputtered, ‘Fuck,’ the word felt separate from me, an underwater bomb.

‘Wow,’ Hal said behind me. Their shoes braced my knees.

‘I knew it,’ Toad said. ‘Hockey Barbie wears her sailor’s mouth on the inside. What else are you hiding from us?’ A run snaked up Toad’s tights from her shoe. It stopped at a mole-like glob of purple nail polish.

I hacked wetly, grasping a chunk of teased hair back with my glove, Hal’s hand on my back as Pelly played what sounded like a eulogy.

T
he bar moved in a dark glow that bruised the arms slanting bottles to mouths, the faces that opened on to our group as we walked in, Toad pushing us rookies ahead as though herding cattle. I stumbled through first, cutting a hall through the crowd, the crush of chests against my shoulders, beery laughter on my face and the flash of teeth. Bare arms humid against mine, the sway of ribs on the room’s muscled backbeat, damp skin of hands gripping my shoulders, strangers laughing at the gown, the makeup, their voices insistent and smeared. Roxy’s hand curled around my arm from behind as I tugged and pulled her through.

The evening tripping together into a dot-to-dot: blurs and gaps, flares of heady clarity, square moments drenched with light and noise. On the dance floor, my limbs flowing boneless, indigo faces around me exotic among their musky spread of feathers, hips tilting subliminal. I never danced. Why didn’t I dance, I never did, but it was this, it was dancing, and why didn’t I do it every day? Heezer, on the ground doing the worm to a song that had an accent, and the dancers jumped in circles around her – everyone jumping as soon as the song came on – arms raised, shirts bouncing up with flashes of perfect bruised stomach, and Heezer on the ground, body kinking forward, while Toad mimed a spanking. I never realized this – that Heezer was so hilarious, and I had to crouch to the ground, my laughter was so crippling.

The dim shrill of a whistle across the dance floor, and I gathered the booze-drenched hem of my gown in both hands, heading again toward the bar.

‘Ladies. Shooters.’ Toad announced when we were all there, all the half-eyed rookies. She had offered the same declaration the past four or five or six times she summoned us with the whistle, extending her palms toward us, a benevolent dip of her chin. ‘Ladies. Shooters.’ As though bestowing a blessing on our weak-necked heads.

I stumbled fast into the bathroom, catching the toe of a Sorel behind me, and waited. Wait. The bathroom lurched under my feet, as though I stood in a boat. And the tequila. Wait. I could still taste the tequila’s burn in the back of my throat as I looked in the mirror and pulled my eyes open with my fingers. I’d forgotten about the hair. God, the hair. I was so incredibly ugly, I had never been uglier.

I pulled myself out of the bathroom, hands on the walls, the room slanted, then lurched through the door, my entrance unintentionally grand. A hand grabbed my arm as I veered back out into the darkness of the bar, and I swept around.

‘Those your dancing boots?’ Jacob said, his hand still on my arm. I stepped toward him, hovered for a moment, words gathering thick on my tongue, then I punched his shoulder.

‘Have I talked to you already?’ I said.

Jacob’s face twisted into a smile. ‘Just got here. The girls got you on some booze, eh? Are you okay?’

I rested my heavy head against the wall, closed my heavy eyes.

‘I’m hot,’ I said. ‘I’m too hot. I’m hot and I’m ugly.’ I traced a lazy circle around my face with a finger.

‘Hey,’ Jacob said. I could feel his breath close to my face. ‘Even dressed like that, you’re not ugly.’

I opened my eyes, and Jacob peered at me. ‘Are you okay?’

The music pushed from inside of my head, trapped. I winced, put my hands over my ears. Jacob’s ears peaked up into triangular points. I wanted to touch one of those strange tips. So I did. He smiled and took my hand, brought it down to my side, held it for a moment, and then let go.

‘I’m too hot,’ I said.

‘You wanna go?’

‘Yes. Yes.’

Q
uiet. Away from the bar, sound played a strange inversion, noise only in my head, on the inside, silence lounging foreign all around the dressing room, the brown velour couch behind me so strangely empty, misplaced in its tattered skin.

I dressed fast – I could never go that fast, usually. Someone should have been timing me, I thought, as I waddled out to the ice. Jacob, skating around the far end of the rink, bent over and laughed. He kept laughing as he skated, hair venting out, and sprayed me in the shins with ice as he stopped next to me.

‘What?’ I said.

‘I was wondering what took you so long – what happened to just gloves and skates?’

‘No. Full equipment,’ I said. Jacob laughed incredulously.

‘Why?’

‘Safety first.’

‘When did you turn into such a comedian, Isabel?’

I stole the puck from Jacob’s stick, jockeyed it around, and looked across the rink. Quiet. The ice lay empty, one-dimensional except in the corners where it dropped into skies filled with the looming boards, the belled lights above.

I gave Jacob a sloppy pass and he began to skate, cutting a trail along the boards, his long strides, and I followed, sluggish. My legs filled with tequila.

Momentum. A flood in my legs then, the flash of my reflection on the glass as I stumbled into speed. Chasing Jacob around the periphery. The scrape of my blades tight against my ears, the hum fading slowly down. And Jacob’s back shifting under his jacket, shoulders rolling, white of teeth over his shoulder as he looked back at me, catching up. And then he was skating harder, I could see it in the way he crouched closer to the ice, in the lengthening of his strides. My breath magnified in my ears. The tinny scrape of my
blades, muscles in my thighs coiling tighter. And my own head caught in the corner of my eye, gliding along the pane of glass, black of the helmet and the cage, and my face unreachable beneath.

Jacob breaking out into the middle of the ice, pivoting backwards to face me, and that smile as though he were cheating and getting away with it, and then the puck on my stick blade, and the instinctive give of the stick. Everything fast now. I didn’t see the puck until it was back on Jacob’s stick, and then my legs moving for the net, and the pass right before the blue line that made the sting come through my gloves, and my stick lifting, and then the awkward twist in my knee, so fast, the blade edge burying in the ice like an axe, my feet too careless, too slow, and I was falling, limbs tumbling away from each other, away from the slick suck of the ice, the ordered memory of my body. The air thickened. And I hit the ice – knee, elbow, chest, elbow, knee, groin, head. I laughed, face down.