Wallflowers (19 page)

Behind the sliding steel divider I can hear the tigress pacing her cage. She’ll be getting antsy soon too. Outside the trailer, the nearest food I see is a barrel of barley pellets, so I jump out and stuff my pockets. When I climb back in, one of the camels faces me straight on. The other stands sideways, bending his hind legs for a stretch. Both camels are single humped, fur the colour of toasted oats, spines arching up. I wave a handful of pellets under the nearest guy’s nose and back slowly toward the door. The bent camel snorts, and that starts the one opposite me, who works his jaw like now he’s about to spit.

“All right, assholes. Get out or I’m going to find you each a piece of straw.”

The tiger’s groaning. Diaphragmatic whines that reverberate down the wall. Then a roar—thin from the roof of the mouth, resounding deeper.

“Headed out?”

My love stands at the trailer door. She shades her eyes with one hand and holds her belly with the other.

“I found pellets,” I say, and let the oats slide through my fingers, palm still outstretched.

“You were leading them outside.”

“Well, I figure we couldn’t ask for a finer dead drop.”

“Dead drop,” she repeats, her syllables slow and evenly accented.

“For the camels. I guess I don’t see them at the ranch.”

“Ranch,” she says. Then silence. She stands very straight—pageant posture, sternum lifted. Her stare shifts from me to the camels to the folks at the stalls.

“Listen, Rich. Let’s see how far west we can get by sundown.”

Eighty klicks an hour on Autoroute 20. Towing wild cargo. Call me Frank Buck. We made headlines. I caught the glamour shot of our tiger on the front page when we stopped outside Drummondville for gas. TRAILER WITH TIGER, TWO CAMELS STOLEN IN QUEBEC.

We say nothing as we leave the station. Blanche marches ahead, juggling travel wipes and a bag of corn nuts as she manoeuvres her belly into the passenger seat. I take my time, slide behind the wheel a few moments later. Her eyes stay locked to the window, travel wipes and nuts still cradled in her arms.

“They didn’t include the plate numbers,” I say.

“No. But the trailer make.”

“Fear not, love—”

“Just drive, okay?”

“We’re heroes, you and I. That’s what’s missing today: heroics. Gone are the days—”

“Why are you still on the 20? We should be headed north.”

“But first, the butcher.”

“What?”

“Then Loblaws.”

She touches my arm, her hand very cold.

“Maybe we should stop in Drummondville after all,” she says. “Get some rest. Didn’t the Motel Couchant look nice?” Her other arm braces her belly like the baby might spill out.

There were no problems until the desk boy showed us our room. When he squinted at the trailer, I knew we should get out. Keep driving to Ontario. Or north, to the Arctic. But my love the engorged sun queen needed rest. The boy nodded at the parking lot, spoke in Franglais as thick as cheese curds: “
C’est comme le trailer
in
journal
, uh? I should
prendre un
look,
okie
?” I flapped my limbs at Blanche when he faced the other way, mouthed
Distract
. Then I stopped because I realized he was watching my shadow on the pavement.

She stared at me and shook her head, then turned to the concierge. “Show me how to work the coffee maker,” she said. “I can never figure those things out.”

They entered the room. I darted to the trailer—though when I got there, I hadn’t a clue what to do. Maybe I could have enticed the tiger with a couple of T-bones. Pushed back the divider and lured her to the camels, forced them to respond more agreeably too. I could have herded my herd into the poorly pruned rhododendrons and waited for the desk boy to emerge from the room. But we never stopped at the butcher, and I didn’t like the idea of that cat without bars. I only had time to lower each window blind before the boy jogged down the motel stairs.

“Yep, sold our stallions at the horse show today,” I said, intercepting him at the curb. “Fix the coffee okay?”

He knew. I could tell by the way he smiled at me like I was waving a machete or driving a stolen trailer of zoo beasts.

“
Oui, bien
, yes,” he said, and peered at the licence plate. “Okay,
d’accord
. Enjoy your stay, uh?” He grinned like that fucking camel and ducked into the office.

If we left then, the police would have been on our tails in minutes. So we stayed. I entered the room and found Blanche sitting very upright on the arm of a chair.

“Did he find them?” she asked.

“No.”

She nodded and looked away. Then: “Someone should probably stay out in the trailer.”

The camels communicate in throaty belches, both competing to hold their notes the longest, their eventual diminuendos reverberating through the floor into the arches of my feet. I found vitamins and a box of Medjool dates in a hideaway compartment behind the divider screen, which I removed in the interest of ventilation. I crouch atop that compartment now, the farthest distance I can manage from the dung. The beasts seem trained in that respect, or habitual, each favouring a particular corner, so the shit’s not ubiquitous, just hilly. It stinks and it’s cold, my toes clamming together in my open-air huaraches. But mostly my hair rises at how that giant cat poses so erect at the edge of his cage, yellow eyes on the door like he can will it open.

So the start sends me to my ass when she knocks. Soft and tinny, like she hopes I won’t hear. Then she opens the door. It takes me a moment to realize she’s carrying a pile of blankets—her silhouette grotesque and backlit by moon, an indefinable glob of pink, humanized only by the handbag off her shoulder, the tangle of blond adrift in the linen. The tiger stands at her entrance, rears his chin in a playful sort of way that is perverted by the bulk of his neck.

She walks to him, squats before the cage, and coos something sweet before turning to me. “It’s chilly,” she says, and releases the blankets.

I nod and tug a sheet from the pile, wrap it around my legs. She’s changed into new clothes—jeans and a loose linen top. Cable-knit sweater tied around her waist.

“I was thinking,” she says. “About Florida.” She drapes a comforter over her shoulders and sits between me and the cage. Her nose flares in and out as it acclimatizes.

“About Ray-Anne,” she says.

I know the day she means. Her pageant pal had stood at the door, smile as fake as her chest.
I’d invite you in, but I’m in the middle of sit-ups.
She had said her trainer kept her on a stern schedule and offered Blanche his card.

“Still a size two, still doing swimsuits,” Blanche says. She lifts the hem of her top and folds it up her belly.

“I think you look exquisite.”

She tightens the quilt over her shoulders, rises and pads to the cage. “That’s what you said then too.” She regards the tiger calmly and releases the latch.

A protest worms up my throat as she steps inside, but the tiger merely plows his cheek into the floor and rolls into a crescent. She kneels about a foot away. Traces with her finger the brassy glow that haloes his ears from the ceiling lights.

Tyger tyger, burning bright.
In the forests of the night, we recline in the blue-collar
luxe
of polyester bedspreads. Miss Mississauga caged with the cat, and me alone on my perch. Left to dodge the swaying rumps and errant hoofs of camels. In her nest of pink linen, Blanche resumes the role of fertility goddess, legs bowed within the petals of a lotus. Her hair streams Rapunzeline down her shoulders, shrouds her chest. I’m entranced by her third eye. The blouse still rolled up, her belly the only stretch of flesh unsunned—it sits on her hips like a freshly domed igloo. As though every night for the last seven months, invisible children sleighed over her pelvis and added fistfuls more snow, packing the ice smooth with seal-mitted palms. Her navel’s what stares me back. An imperfect O. Lips puckered for a kiss or a wish on a dandelion.

A camel grunts beside me and I feed him another date. His teeth are broader than I figured, and thick. I can smell the sugar off his tongue as he sucks the date from my fingers. I take one for myself. I press the dried fruit against the roof of my mouth until it dissolves into my gums. The overhead lamps shine on my queen elegiacally. Dust motes imprinting her shape onto the air like a projection, like if I switched off the light, her image would flicker into shadow. My love, the Queen of Central Ontario, embalmed by lamplight and in danger of blackout.

The RCMP and their special-suited animal handlers arrive before dawn. Each head for their respective beasts—the suits beelining for the camels and cage, a blue-shirted cop nudging my shoulder with her boot.

An hour or two earlier I pretended to sleep while Blanche phoned a cab from outside, her whispers muffled under a handkerchief or sweater sleeve. I watched from the hood of my bedsheet as she climbed back in, weaved through the trailer, stuffing sweater and loose belongings into her handbag, her footsteps heavy with the weight beneath her blouse. I shut my eyes and shrank deeper into my sheet as she padded toward me. Her belly sinking into my linen bedding, her lips pressing an O onto my cheek. She shut the door. The cat groaned from the cage. A car groaned from the parking lot.

M-I-S-S. But no,
je ne regrette rien
.

Sea Life

A woman marries young and quits her job as first AD for the TV series
Hellcats
. She purchases a teapot for the first time, and a cozy. Before marriage, she steeped her bags in a mug.

She begins a food blog and experiments with summer squash in her baking, like zucchini. She grates entire tubes of zucchini. Chocolate brownies, lavender tea loaf.
You’ll never guess the secret ingredient.

On warm mornings, she walks to the sea. She finds lilac and coral sea urchins. She holds her palm under the water to see how near she can reach to their spines.

=

She and her husband bought a home on the island four blocks from the beach. In the listing, the realtor had written sentences like
Holy Wow Factor! You must come & see. Popular Fairfield spot, ten minutes to Everything.
Their bedroom was on the second floor, with a skylight as long as the bed. The kitchen lay at the foot of the stairs, which facilitated her husband’s fridge trips. He had a thing about milk. He trekked to the kitchen at 2 a.m. and imbibed entire pint mugs. The living room had been converted from a conservatory. The renovators kept the glass roof, and left the walls as full-length windows.
Two-hundred-seventy-degree view of garden and Garry oak tree
. She hadn’t measured, but she suspected there was more window than wall space. From the street, the house looked like an aquarium.

One morning, her husband phoned to say he had invited a colleague for dinner on Friday. She had been in the living room, watching the girls next door play with a water hose. They looked eight, maybe nine years old, and wore sunken pink bikinis.

“She’s a lesbian,” her husband said, though she had missed why this was important.

Outside, the taller girl tried to drag their German short-haired pointer into the sprinkler. The small one darted behind and sprayed the dog’s tail with a water pistol.

On the phone, her husband paused. She sensed that he sensed that she was not listening. She cleared her throat.

“I’ll make beets,” she said.

“What?”

She had seen a recipe that morning, on a cruise through other people’s blogs.

“Beetroot gnocchi,” she said.

“Okay …” He paused again. This was not the answer to his question.

“Beetroot gnocchi in a cognac-and-thyme sauce,” she said.

“Okay,” he repeated. Then after a moment: “That sounds great.”

Outside, the tall girl had yanked the dog right over the sprinkler. The small one stood away from them, her heels wide apart on the lawn. She clutched her water pistol and stared at the woman through the living room window. They made eye contact. She aimed the pistol at her and squeezed a stream of water onto the grass.

=

She could spend hours in a supermarket, even if she knew what she wanted. She liked to roll her cart down every aisle, between the bright plastics and foils, the cardboard boxes of cereal. She bypassed only Household Items. That day, she drove to the market after her husband called. She selected her beets, then fruit for the week—blueberries and nectarines, Gala apples, Ambrosias slipped in the bag with their stickers down. Next, she rolled her cart to the Bulk aisle. She shovelled jujubes and M&M’s together, jostled the candy to hide the brown M&M’s in the centre. Another bag for trail mix. One scoop of the cheap one with anonymous orange cubes. Two scoops California. A scoop of the cheap mix overtop. The macadamia nuts were priced $2.49 per hundred grams, so she released a few of those from the dispenser as well.