One Good Summer
The summer after I finished grade eleven, I moved back to London to escape my life. I lived there with an Italian girl named Gina Pezzi, inspired initially, in my melodramatic phase, by Friedrich Holderlin, ‘the William Blake of Germany,’ who prayed in a poem: “Give me one good summer.” Even after all this time, when I breathe in, I can still conjure up the scent of the mould and mildew that grew in the bottom corners of the kitchen of the drafty old house where we lived. When I listen, I can hear the clang of the hot water radiator that sat in the front window of the living room and shook when it reached its peak. And when I bring myself to remember, I can still see clearly all that went on and happened there.
It was at the beginning of that summer after I’d lived on Sunnypoint Crescent for a year, above the Scarborough Bluffs; it was that same summer when my mother began a love affair with the TV repairman. It was right after I’d brought home a kitten in a shoebox and named him Rundle—because he was too small, a runt, taken too soon from its mother, rescued from being drowned in a bucketful of water along with the rest of the litter. I used to soak my fingers in warm milk for him to lick, then later fed him from a doll’s bottle until he was big enough to drink from a bowl.
A week and a half later, when I arrived in London, I walked up and down Adelaide Street, searching for the house. Through dapples of sunlight came deep purple shadows on the skyline, azure at dusk. I found the address my friend Dave had given me and looked up to see one of those grand old character homes, painted in an odd mix of colours, at once both unique and familiar. Then, at the end of the cobblestone path leading up from the trodden-down hedge of blossoming rose bushes, I saw the girl. Somehow, I felt like I already knew the stained-glass window above the alcove, the wide set of stairs to the front door. Like a dog with a sixth sense of danger, I knew the narrow passage up to the apartment and its tarred linoleum floors. I knew the furniture and sideboard cupboard filled with chipped blue willow dishes, the oxidized aluminum pots and tarnished cutlery.
I arrived on the doorstep of the old house wearing my long, blue silky rayon coat and a silver Cleopatra necklace I’d bought from the Salvation Army. I balanced Rundle awkwardly in his shoebox under one arm, carrying a few books of Russian literature and Kahlil Gibran’s Thoughts and Meditations under the other.
On that first day, as I walked down the cobblestone path towards the front door before my friend Dave introduced us, I thought Gina looked quiet and unobtrusive. Easy to take.
She sat on the top step, wearing a sleeveless cotton top and blue jeans, holding an Export A between two fingers. She sucked and dragged in on it, long and slow, then exhaled. Her print blouse made her look very womanly, almost matronly, I thought. Her hair was still wet from her shower, and a meadow of soft golden tufts sprouted from under her armpits, like a Russian or European girl. A whiff of her deodorant drifted up into the air and lingered; a faint scent of baby powder.
Dave stood to her right, looking pensive. Gina glanced up at him, with a bit of a curled lip and an expression on her face that seemed to say, ‘fuck me if you’re man enough.’
“You’re Dave’s friend,” she said, with a slight nod and a nervous laugh, not bothering to rise to greet me. Instead, she sucked in another long drag. “And who’s this,” she said, sounding blasé again, pointing to the shoebox.
She was soft-spoken, but she had a bit of a presence about her, I thought. She was not overly pretty, though, with thin hair, a big nose, and a joyless mouth. Nevertheless, she gave me a crooked smile that momentarily transformed her when I said, “Hi,” and I smiled too, pleased that she’d asked about the kitten.
Dave knew Gina from the group home where he worked, and she was looking for a roommate too, having just come off a stint in a foster home that ended when she threw a party while her foster parents were on vacation, and their place got trashed.
In his book, Kahlil Gibran says, ‘He who loses his mother loses a pure soul who blesses and guards him constantly,’ and I wondered what he would make of this.
We shared the house with the new owners, a young couple with a baby who lived on the ground floor. Gina showed me around the apartment at the top of a narrow set of stairs. The house felt old-fashioned and smelled musty and cramped. In the bathroom, a clawfoot tub sat on polished black and white squares. A large window in the darkened living room overlooked a tree-lined street. A wash of nostalgia came over me as I thought of my bright, modern bedroom at home, with its glass door that led out into the garden. But then I remembered my mother’s lover, and it strengthened my resolve.
During that first week as I got to know her, Gina seemed free and easy, heedless even, as though she didn’t have a care in the world. Laisse-faire as the expression goes. After I’d hung out with her a few times, I noticed all the guys were crazy about her. I couldn’t understand it. She had an average figure and was a bit broad in the hips, but she dressed well in her colourful tops and prints that complimented her. She wore blue jeans, everyone’s uniform, but hers were always clean and neatly pressed. Her hair shone and smelled faintly of Baby Shampoo.
“She’s sexy,” Dave said when I asked him why he wasn’t the one moving in with her. “But you know what they say—it’s the quiet ones you’ve got to watch out for.”
But I still couldn’t see what the fuss was all about with Gina. I guess you had to be a guy to understand it. And because of that, I never would have thought in a million years that any guy could actually break her heart. Or that it would ever mean that much to her. She didn’t look like she needed anyone. And yet, what she seemed to want, more than anything in this world, was to marry Rome Kurlig—even though he was almost ten years older than her and she’d known him for only a few months.
When I first met him, I thought Rome looked like a drugged-out hippie who thought just a bit too highly of himself. Not necessarily marriage material in my eyes. He wore tinted, wire-rimmed shades most of the time, even indoors, and was on the quiet side too, like Gina. He was very handsome, though, with shoulder-length dark hair and a beard he’d run his fingers through when he sat with his elbow on his knee, deep in thought. An air of self-assurance hovered over him like he could take care of himself—and like he’d take care of Gina too. He sat languid and rigid most of the time, with his dark hair and sunglasses keeping anyone unwanted at bay.
“There’s no way I want to end up alone—a spinster. Or old, fat, and divorced like my mother. I want a family of own,” Gina confided to me one night while we were drinking gin and tonics. Suddenly her eyes looked softer, vulnerable almost.
She told me that her mother wanted her to move back home, and she couldn’t bring herself to tell her Family Services wouldn’t allow it. Gina went into foster care when she was fourteen due to a history of violence between the two. Dave had told me it was something about her coming home past her curfew one night and her mother charging after her, chasing her into her bedroom with a broom handle, ramming it at her stomach, then pummelling it through to the other side of the door as she slammed it in her mother’s face. She went to a youth hostel first, and they contacted the Children’s Aid Society, then they put her into a foster home. My parents had always been kind to me, had never laid a hand on me. I couldn’t imagine what that would be like, to be hurt by those who are supposed to be there to protect you. It was like Gina didn’t even have a chance, right from the start.
She asked me to come with her the day she went to tell her mother we’d moved in together.
“Fungoula, la merda, la fica, pisciare,” Mrs. Pezzi ranted in Italian, kneeling on a thick ragged towel as she scrubbed the kitchen floor. Crucifixes hung on the walls, and pasta sauce bubbled away on the stove. “You never for want to make me happy,” she cried. Gina was silent on the walk all the way back to our apartment.
Dave’s mother, Ruby, was a psychiatric nurse and advised me strongly not to move in with Gina. “She’s a very unstable young lady,” was all she said when I asked for an explanation. I hadn’t seen much evidence of anything that would give me that impression, though, and I thought she must be mistaken, being over-protective, trying to encourage me to go back home.
Gina and I both managed to get jobs for the summer, working nights twenty-five hours a week at the brand-new Ponderosa Steakhouse. My uncle had just started working in their head office and helped us get the jobs. It took up most of our time, between getting ready for work, getting to and from work, being at work, and then recovering from work. We were excited, though—our own jobs, our own apartment, independence. Despite protestations from my parents about me leaving home and not having a telephone, my father insisted on paying for one. Initially, I didn’t want to take his money. Afterwards, I knew I wouldn’t be staying for that long.
On opening night at the Ponderosa, Martin, the boss, handed us our uniforms—brown cowboy hats and short-sleeved dark yellow cotton blouses with brown bolo ties and plastic pin-on badges with our names on them. Chocolate brown culottes finished them off with a thick leather belt and a western buckle.
Martin wore the same uniform we did, except he had brown slacks instead of a culotte, and his badge had “Manager” stamped on it. He gave us a form to sign, authorizing Ponderosa to take a weekly withdrawal from our paycheques to cover the cost of the uniforms. Martin was tall with sandy-coloured hair and looked so impossibly young it seemed almost comical to be taking instructions from him. He even had a giant pimple in the middle of his forehead. After giving us our uniforms, he took us to the back room, behind his office, and showed us our lockers for our coats and boots and purses.
The next time we came into work, Gina brought her shoes and the rest of her stuff in a backpack. Then, while Martin was out on the floor, she filled it with items from the supply room—a package of serviettes that were to go in dispensers on the tables, rolls of toilet paper, a bottle of industrial cleaner and a few sponges. Each week she added to her stash.
“What?” she said when I stared at her the first time as she unloaded her stolen items out of her backpack onto our kitchen counter.
“My uncle got us these jobs. What if somebody sees you?”
“Well, with what they’re paying us, we shouldn’t have to buy our own uniforms, so now we’re even.”
“Why would you turn yourself into a thief over a few bucks’ worth of lousy cleaning supplies?” I asked.
“Oh, save me,” she said as she slammed a bucket into the sink and poured in some of the industrial cleaner she’d just pinched.
We started off bussing tables at the Ponderosa—walking around the wooden picnic-style tables, picking up plates dripping in excess mushroom sauce, meat grizzle, and baked potato peels, then scraped it all into green garbage bags hanging on the sides of our trolleys. Afterwards, we loaded the plates into grey plastic tubs on our carts, slid silver coins from the tables into the tip jar, and wheeled the dishes over to the kitchen to be washed.
After a few weeks, Gina and I were both promoted up to the cafeteria-style food-order counter, where patrons lined up behind glass to choose from a variety of steaks with sides, pictured on a giant menu board. We stood on either side of Martin, who was training us how to take orders. We asked each customer what dressing they wanted on their salad, then scooped it on; whether they wanted bacon bits or chives or sour cream or butter with their baked potato; we asked how they liked their steak cooked and if they took mushroom sauce; if they did, we put one of those little brown plastic tents on their tray.
“D’ya wanna know what a girl in the youth hostel told me about how you can tell how much a guy likes sex?” Gina whispered into my ear on our first night as servers.
I looked at her blankly.
“By how he takes his steak. If he’s rare, he really likes it, and if he’s well-done, he’s a dud. Not into it. He probably wears thick leather shoes—the kind that lace-up—and reads science books every night.”
Gina started a game where she tried to guess how a guy would want his steak cooked as she watched him come down the line-up towards us. Thumbs up for rare and down for a dud.
One night a couple of guys came in wearing western hats, and we heard the chubby, more boisterous one, talking and laughing loudly. His buddy was quieter and maybe a bit of a bookworm, tall with long blonde curly hair, a pleasant face. A musician, perhaps? We gave the boisterous one a thumbs down and smirked when he ordered his steak blackened. When his friend said, “he’s black, and I take mine blue,” we broke into a fit of giggles. He caught our titters and, maybe thinking Gina liked him, grinned back at her, then flushed red.
Rome was sitting in the corner with Dave that night, drinking coffee and waiting for Gina to get off her shift, and she kept eyeing over to his table. She was worried that Pascale, one of the pretty waitresses, was flirting with Rome. Pascale kept passing by his table, seeing if she could get him anything. She could tell he was interested. When Gina saw Rome touch Pascale’s hand, her face flushed hot, and she steamed through the rest of her orders.
When it got slow, Martin sent us out onto the floor to help bus the rest of the tables. The musician-looking guy with the western hat—Gina dubbed him Mr. Blue—hadn’t been able to stop staring at her all through his dinner, and she went over to their table and started chatting him up, occasionally glancing over at Rome. I cleared off their table while they were talking. Mr. Blue was all over Gina with his eyes. She was telling him what time she got off work. I scraped the other cowboy’s leftovers into the garbage, and when I turned back to the table, Mr. Blue was holding onto Gina’s hand. She gloated in Rome’s direction and told him they’d offered her a ride home. Rome’s face fell, but he wasn’t going to show her he cared. Gina wouldn’t look at Rome or speak to him the rest of the night. Finally, he walked out in a huff, leaving the butt of his cigar smouldering in the middle of his baked potato.
So much for my hopes of a carefree summer with friends, I thought. Instead, I’d begun to feel as though I’d walked from one melodrama into another, captive to the consequences of someone else’s bad choices.
Gina didn’t come home from the pub until very early the following day. She flew in just as I was waking up. She fell back on the bed, face flushed, and spread her arms and legs apart like she was going to make an angel in the snow. She was still wearing her Ponderosa uniform and reeked of beer and cigarette smoke.
“I’m in remorse,” she told me, but she was smiling when she said it. She didn’t say why or who she’d been with.
I glared at her for quite a while, but she said nothing more. “Why would you?” I said, finally.
“…I don’t know,” she said. “Because he wanted me to, I guess.” Gina looked up at me from the bed, suddenly shy and girlish. “It was nice,” she said softly. She twirled a string of hair around her right index finger like a child. “He said my name again and again as he made love to me.”
We were silent for a few minutes. “Rome said it didn’t mean anything, you know.” I wasn’t sure what else to say. “He said he was stoned.”
Gina’s face fell. “Well, nobody said I have to marry him.”
“I thought that was what you wanted?” I paused, waited.
“Ah, what do you know?” Gina scoffed. “The last of the virgins.”
“Yeah, well, Kahlil Gibran says, ‘Love is the blind ignorance with which youth begins and ends,’ I quoted. So, I think you’re off to a pretty good start.”
I didn’t say what I was really thinking—that if he’s unfaithful or can’t commit that he isn’t good enough, that he can’t really be “the one.” I thought this applied to Gina too. But maybe I was young and arrogant because I hadn’t been in love yet, had never known what it might mean to walk away.
Gina didn’t speak to me for the whole shift that day. Instead, she kept looking around nervously. I figured she must be watching out for Mr. Blue, but he never showed. I looked in the back room when I finished work, but she’d left without me, so I decided to hitchhike home. That’s when I met the Polish guy for the first time. His real name was Ivan, but later Gina dubbed him ‘Mr. K.’ When he pulled over, he eyed me, shyly, I thought, from the corner of his eye. Mr. K. looked to be quite a bit older than me—about thirty, I’d say, maybe more.
My habit when I hitchhiked was after a car pulled over, I opened the passenger door and checked the driver out, saw what kind of vibe I got, and if I didn’t feel comfortable, I’d say, “no thanks,” and shut the door. The first time Mr. K. pulled over I could tell right away that he was a real gentleman. He drove a Plymouth or Cadillac or one of those long, expensive-looking Sedan-type of cars that he kept immaculate. Unfortunately, one of those deodorizers shaped like a Christmas tree with the scent of Pine-Sol dangled from his dashboard, and the odour made me feel sick.
Mr. K. always wore a suit—navy blue jacket with grey slacks and a crisp white shirt and navy tie, black lace-up shoes that always looked like they’d just been polished. That first time he picked me up, he told me he was coming home from the office where he worked. He said he had his own business, but I can’t remember now what he told me he did—insurance maybe? He said he still lived with his mother in a house in a lovely part of town.
The first time he picked me up, he leaned across the passenger seat and threw open the door for me with his long arm, and after I slid in next to him, he said, “I’m only picking you up so no one else will.” When I said nothing and sat in the passenger seat with my hands folded in my lap, waiting for him to finish, he said, “Young girls shouldn’t be out hitch-hiking alone.”
“I know,” I said, “but I’m late for work, and the next bus isn’t for an hour.” I stole a glance at him and blushed a little, then dropped my eyes when he stole a glance back at me.
Gina was already there when I got home. She was still in a bit of a sullen mood because of what I’d said about Mr. Blue. She took her blanket and pillow and went to sleep on the couch. She kept me awake, out there tossing and turning and trying to stifle her sobbing. For the first time, I began to worry about Gina. I thought she might not be able to cope, living on her own without an adult.
The following day, she awoke in an even darker mood, and there was a deep sense of hopelessness about her. However, by the time she got dressed and ready to go to work, she seemed suddenly calm. She still hadn’t spoken to me, though, and then she left without saying goodbye.
After that, Gina and I avoided each other and started making our own way to and from work; Rome would usually drive her, and I hitchhiked instead of taking the bus because I was always running late. I was sad that we weren’t talking anymore because I’d thought we’d started to become good friends. But Mr. K. took to being there, before I’d even stuck my thumb out. Each time, he asked me when my next shift was, and then, out of the blue, there he’d be.
Mr. K. was a real gentleman, just like I thought he would be. He spoke politely, and asked me about my job and what subjects I liked at school as my father would. Of course, he always wore a suit and tie, as my father did too.
I could tell, over time, Mr. K. was getting to like me, but he never asked me on a date or anything like that. But he was beginning to get a little possessive because he said things like he didn’t want me to take rides with anyone else. That he didn’t want anything “unfortunate” to happen to me, that I was to wait for him. But he never asked where I lived or came to the house.
A week or two later, Gina and I were talking again. I woke up one morning, and she was putting away the toilet paper and serviettes she’d pinched from the supply room the night before. She was in a foul mood. She looked agitated. She and Rome had another big fight when he picked her up from the Ponderosa after her shift. Somehow, he’d found out about Mr. Blue. He knew that she’d slept with him.
It was Saturday, and Gina wanted us to clean the apartment. My parents were driving to London from Scarborough to check up on me and see our new pad because we still couldn’t afford a phone. I didn’t really care, but Gina wanted to get the place tidied up before they arrived to create a good impression, and we were up early. I was sitting at the table in my caftan and hockey socks and wanted to finish my game of solitaire first. And I was preoccupied. I’d had a stormy night with Mr. K.
Somewhere along the line, Mr. K. started mentioning that maybe we could get married. That he owned his own house, the one he lived in with his mother and had a good job, and he wanted to take care of me. The evergreen deodorizer in his car swung back and forth from the dash as we wound around a corner and made me feel nauseous.
“I’m not old enough to get married yet,” I said.
Then, as I got out of his car, he grabbed hold of me by the arm, and the touch of his fingers on my skin shivered down through me. I leapt out the door, and after I was on the sidewalk, I wiped his breathy kiss from my mouth. “Ugh,” I thought; it felt like a lizard had licked my lips.
That’s when the real trouble began. After that, Mr. K. not only waited for me to drive me to work, he asked if he could pick me up after my shift too. Of course, I kept saying no, he didn’t have to, that Rome or the manager usually drove me home, which seemed to make him jealous.
“Must have been the Goddamned kiss of the century,” Gina said afterwards, and that’s how we came to call him Mr. K. For Mr. Kiss. For Mister Kiss of the Century. Gina was always calling everybody Mr. something. Mr. Black. Mr. Blue. Mr. K.
Afterwards Mr. K. started to ask me out and asked if he could pick me up after I finished my shift. I kept repeating that I was too young to get married; he persisted, and I lied and told him I already had a steady boyfriend.
The night before, after our shift at the Ponderosa, I’d gone into the back room to get my backpack, and Gina came waltzing in, giggling, and she said, “you’ll never guess who’s waiting for you.” So I took off out the back door before he could see me, and she and Rome drove around to the back, and they gave me a ride home.
That following morning, as I was waking up, the day before my parents were set to arrive, I heard Gina bang her backpack onto the counter. Then I heard nothing. Then the lid of the pail clinked against the tap. She turned on the water and started to fill the bucket. I turned to look as she removed items from her bag and set them on the counter. A sponge. Industrial cleaner. A container of Comet. She went to the hall closet and pulled out the mop.
I’d been so worked up about Mr. K. the night before that when I got home, Rome and Gina and I started drinking as soon as we got in and by the end of the night, we were all pretty drunk. Before bed, I ran myself a hot bubble bath to sober myself up. When I stood up from where I’d been sitting on the toilet and reached across to turn off the taps, my foot slipped on the shiny marble tiles, and I fell face-first into the tub of hot, soapy water. And now, I didn’t feel well. I was worn out from working nights at the Ponderosa and nursing a hangover, and I didn’t feel like doing anything. I was trying to quell my anxiety too. I’d had this uneasy feeling since I’d first woken up that something was going to happen. It was that same sense of foreboding I’d had when I’d first arrived, that inner instinct that came from constantly having to look out for myself. Alert to any whiff of danger.
“Well?” Are you just going to sit on your ass all day?” Gina commanded as she slopped a bucket of soapy water onto the floor and jammed the mop in.
When she spoke, I jumped. Rundle stopped purring at my feet and ran off, ducked underneath the bed.
I was sitting at the kitchen table with the cards laid out, playing solitaire, ashtray in the corner of the table, cigarette in hand as I held up my cards. I was still wearing my caftan and woollen hockey socks. “I’m almost finished this game,” I said, not bothering to look at Gina.
I was about to lay down my next card when I heard a sharp, violent sound. Whir. Whir. I looked up and spotted the ashtray through the corner of my eye as it whizzed past the top of my head. Gina had picked it up off the table and thrown it, in a flash, towards me.
I shielded my head with my hands as fear raced through me and my heart started to pound. “You could have killed me.”
“Something has to wake you up,” Gina said. She slopped the mop on the floor, winging it around my feet to wash underneath the table.
Anger was the only emotion I ever saw on her stoic face, hidden deep down in her irises. I thought I saw a quiver there that afternoon. A faint flicker of fear or rage or hate or evil or madness. Wild black.
All I could think was that she came by it honestly. When I felt that heavy ashtray hit the wall beside me, I wondered if she hadn’t picked up her mother’s tendency towards violence. I’d half expected her to swear the way her mother did too—“Fungoula, la merda, la fica, pisciare”—but she didn’t.
Come September, I enrolled in Grade 12 at H. B. Beal during the weekdays and still worked nights 25 hours a week at the Ponderosa. I was falling asleep in my morning writing classes but I was loving living on my own and prepared to put up with it despite Gina’s moodiness. Gina was working full-time by then. She liked the money so she’d quit school.
One Saturday, Gina, Rome, Dave, and I decided to meet at the Western Fair. I’d moved so many times while growing up that we’d never lived anywhere long enough to go to a fair, and I was excited to see the agricultural displays, the arts and crafts, the midway, and the rides.
We all arrived at the fair at the same time. It was dusk. Harried parents dragged sleepy children by the hand or carried them over their shoulders, and the night already had the feeling of an ending. None of us spoke. I watched the top of Rome and Gina’s hands get stamped, and their tickets get torn in two. I stood behind like a schoolgirl, looking at all the rides, while Dave got a spot in line. It felt nice, being there next to him, the comfort and familiarity. It was a lightness compared to living with Gina. I smiled up at him as we walked through the gate.
After the Ring of Fire and the Crazy Mouse Coaster, Dave and I went on the Zipper. Then we walked towards the kiosks and found Gina and Rome, standing side by side, shooting it out for a Panda Bear. Rome won the shoot-out and tossed the Panda high into the air in a celebratory victory. Gina scowled, even as Rome handed her the bear. I recognized that look on her face. It was really all about the winning.
I sensed a lurking presence behind me, and when I turned to look, there was Mr. K. He stood so close I felt his warm breath on my neck. Had I told him I was coming? No, definitely not. The evening suddenly had some sort of a pall over it.
Dave sensed my unease and moved in between us, putting a protective arm around me, giving me a bear hug with his thick arms. Mr. K. looked embarrassed and wandered off, back in the direction from where he’d come.
Dave ushered me away and bought candy floss and caramel apples. We pulled cans of beer from my giant-sized hand-crocheted purse and wandered the grounds, sipping, cans plopped into wax paper cups to conceal them. We went off shopping for trinkets in the kiosks, and I bought a hand-knotted meditation mala bracelet. We wandered past Doo Doo the Clown and Water Bark, past the Demolition Derby, and then we went to The Barn and sat down and watched the live bull riding at the rodeo—’cowboys and cowgirls testing their skill and speed, going flat out to beat their rivals,’ the program said.
Hours passed, and it was getting late into the night. Dave and I searched and searched for Rome and Gina until they told us we had to go and closed the gates behind us. Then, somehow after leaving them there at the kiosk, Gina and Rome disappeared after shooting it out for the bears. When I’d last seen them, they’d sat down on the grass, off to the side, after Rome won the Panda Bear. Gina lit a cigarette, and Rome lit up a joint. They finally had it out.
Dave drove me home. He took the long way around the block to my house; he was enjoying the night air, the song playing on the radio.
“How could she just vanish like that?” I said, “Into thin air.”
Dave kept driving, drumming his fingers on the dash to the music.
“I mean, one minute they were just standing there in front of the kiosk, next minute, bam. Gone.”
“Yeah, I don’t know,” Dave said. “Maybe they went off to ball.”
“No. No, I don’t think it was that. In those last few minutes, I could feel the tension. I think they were having a big fight.”
“Oh?”
When I’d watched them after Rome and Gina got the bear and went and sat off to the side, I heard Gina say she thought Rome wasn’t paying enough attention to her, or something like that. Last week, she told him she wanted to get married, and he never said anything. When we first arrived at the fair, Rome talked to that same waitress, Pascale, the one from the Ponderosa, right before they disappeared. Gina is the jealous type, and I suddenly felt frightened, like anything was possible.
“I’m sure everything’s fine,” Dave said. “Everything’s going to be just fine.”
“I don’t know. I just have this funny feeling, like something’s going to happen.”
“Gina is a big girl.” Dave grinned, baring his teeth. “I’m sure she knows how to look after herself.”
“I don’t mean that. It’s something worse than that.”
“What’s the point of speculation? Maybe they were just tired?” Dave said, sounding exasperated.
“Yeah. That could be. Maybe. It’s a possibility.” A flutter of nerves sprinkled through my chest. I didn’t want to say what I was thinking.
Dave drove around the block a few more times. Finally, he turned the music off. The night was black as we approached my house.
“But I just can’t seem to shake the feeling. Like an omen. Something’s going to happen,” I said again.
“What’s with the Spidey sense? A couple wandering off on their own isn’t such a big thing, is it?”
I had the feeling then that whatever had happened between them couldn’t just be laid to rest. That it was going to have to culminate into a cacophony of sorts in order for Gina to find a way to place it.
My hand clutched the door handle. I hesitated before I got out of the car. I looked up at the house, at our suite, and saw a light burning in the window.
I thought of asking Dave in, but I didn’t want to tell him what was going through my mind. I still wasn’t certain myself whether I was justifiably or needlessly worried. He kissed me, and in my vulnerability, I let him, his lips still tasting slightly of candy floss and candy apples, of the caramel popcorn we’d shared, mingled with the beer. The warm feeling lingered through me, and I didn’t want to go, but my mind was still reeling.
A moment later, I was standing alone on the sidewalk in the dark, watching Dave’s taillights disappear around the corner. I tentatively stepped forward into the darkness. Down the road, I heard dogs’ bark. The air was scented with a dew that hung heavy with the dust on the road and mingled with my own perspiration.
As I walked up the stairs, I was barely breathing. My heart thumped madly against the inside of my chest and rang against my ears in the darkened, silent stairwell. Then, at the first turning of the stair, I heard those dogs bark again, saw nothing but blackness below me.
I climbed one bare step at a time, as quietly as I could. The baby downstairs would be sleeping. Voices from their television set murmured as I passed by their door. As I arrived nearer to the top of the stairs, that light was still there, glowing under the crack in the front door. I stopped at the top of the stairs, held my ear to the door. I listened to the silence. I stepped inside, and everything was dark except for that light which I could see was coming from under the crack in the closed bathroom door. I saw the outline of the big clunky furniture in the living room. The kitchen was tidy and clean. I stared at the light under the bathroom door and called out Gina’s name. Everything was so quiet I heard a ringing in my ears. I waited, then called out her name again. When she still didn’t answer, I began to wonder whether she wasn’t actually there—whether what I had seen in my mind was only a figment of my sugared-up imagination. I rapped lightly on the bathroom door.
“Can I come in?” I thought I heard a stir then, behind the door, but I couldn’t be sure. It jangled my nerves. I began to wish I was somewhere else, thinking for the first time that I wanted to go back home, conscious then that we didn’t have a telephone. Then, through the open window in the living room, I heard those dogs growl, closer now. I knocked, louder this time, and when Gina did not reply, I opened the door as fast as possible before losing my nerve.
There she sat, precisely as in my vision, holding a razor blade in her right hand, the inside of her left arm plucked with red gashes like she’d raked it through the thorns on a rose bush. She was dripping with blood, splashing tiny red droplets onto the white and black checked tile floor. A towel was wrapped around her wet hair, fluffy white slippers on her feet. She clutched at her open terry robe. She wasn’t crying and otherwise did not stir. Instead, she leaned forward and shut off the water dripping from the tap.
“What are you doing?” I tried to sound calm, measured, but inside, my mind was screaming. I felt shock tingle through my scalp, a panic that rooted me still.
Gina said nothing. Her expression was blank. She still did not cry. Instead, she shook her head as if she was trying to make herself feel something. Or maybe not feel anything at all.
“I’m going to get help,” I yelled. My mind spun, not knowing what else to do, fearful and confused.
“No,” she cried, coming to life suddenly then.
“But I have to. Look at your fucking arm,” I screamed.
She insisted she was fine, she didn’t need anyone, but I ran back down the stairs.
I ran two blocks to Dave’s mother’s house and banged on the front door until Ruby woke up and called the police. By the time Ruby drove me back, the police were already there. I asked her to wait in the car.
I walked back up the stairs with two officers behind me. When I opened the door, Rundle meowed at my feet. The light in the bathroom was out, and the scent of cat urine and unclean kitty litter hit me in the face. I was ashamed of what the police would think, how they might judge the way we lived. I switched on the hall light. The cat had crapped in the middle of the hallway, and I was embarrassed by the look of squalor, trivial I knew, in the face of life and death. Gina was nowhere in sight.
I lead the officers to the bathroom door. One of them had a pad out and was writing everything down as he saw it. I switched on the bathroom light. Gina was gone. There was no blood on the floor, and the bathtub sparkled clean with the scent of the industrial cleaner. I felt afraid of what might have happened to her, mixed with a sudden surge of anger at the predicament she’d left me in; the police likely to think I was the crazy one.
“She must have left,” I said. I tugged at the short strings on the end of my mala bracelet, twisted at them nervously. “She was here. She was covered in blood.”
The two officers exchanged glances. One raised an eyebrow.
“What were you drinking earlier this evening?” the other one asked. And when I told him I had only one beer, he wanted to know if I’d taken any drugs that night. I told him I had not. I rolled the sandalwood beads on my bracelet back and forth between my fingers, counting out a silent prayer.
While I slept over at Ruby’s house that night, Dave and his mother looked for Gina everywhere—the hospital, all the ditches within a few miles of our apartment, the pubs, the Ponderosa. Even at her former foster parents’ house. Eventually, they found her at her mother’s. Of course.
In the morning, I felt a sense of relief that Gina was found safe. But I was still shaky and traumatized from all that had happened. I felt an urge to flee, but I didn’t know where I’d go next, what I’d do.
I walked back over to our apartment and ran into the owners from downstairs.
“How’s her fucking arm?” the woman said, looking tired and quite annoyed. “Next time, try and keep it down, will you? You woke the baby, and we were up half the night.” I walked past, in a stupor, shaky, nauseated.
I found out later that the police hadn’t looked for Gina anywhere or even filed a report. So, when Ruby called to let them know we’d found her, they had no record of it.
“They didn’t believe you,” Ruby said. “Good thing nothing happened to her, or I’d be down there raising bloody Cain.”
It turned out that Gina hadn’t made any deep incisions, just tons of tiny cuts that created a lot of blood but weren’t life-threatening. Instead, she’d cleaned herself up, bandaged her arm, and washed the bathroom floor and tub.
I sat down on the couch and began thinking about all the rejection in her life and that no one loved her as much as she loved them. How alone and unwanted she must feel. But still, I never would have thought she’d have been capable of this.
When I thought about it more, though, reflecting on some of Gina’s behavior, I shouldn’t have been all that surprised. How is it that sometimes we don’t see what’s right in front of us; maybe all of our relationships are like that? Only illusions of how we think people are, how we see them or choose to see them.
When Gina got in, she watched silently as I packed my bags. Finally, I’d decided I was going home. It was all getting to be too much, and I couldn’t handle it anymore. I was frightened of Gina, and I was frightened of Mr. K., and the summer I’d looked so forward to was utterly ruined.
What was I so afraid of? Becoming like Gina, and if I failed, what would happen if I lost control. First, I’d have no one. Then I’d fall apart and have to rely on strangers, need someone to take care of me.
Dave sat in his car in front of the house, engine off, cigarette in hand, elbow leaning out the open window, radio blasting into the street. He’d offered to drive me to West Hill outside of Toronto, where my parents had got back together and just bought a house.
Since Dave had kissed me in the car that night after we’d been to the fair, something had shifted between us. And now, everything felt different, like it had opened a window, letting me into a secret place I’d never been before. Should I really leave Dave now, I kept asking myself. Abandon Gina?
I finished packing by about half-past two, just after I had eaten. Luckily, I was alone. Dave had taken my suitcase out to the car and left me to look around, make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything. I took one last look in the bathroom, gleaming now, the polished tiles spotless, and walked down the stairs to the front steps. The young woman who lived downstairs had a bag of groceries in her arms and was balancing it on the handle of the baby’s stroller. She said goodbye to me. Lost in thought—feeling guilty about whether Gina would be okay after I left—I barely answered her, and she must have thought me rude. I stood in the doorway, sipping the last dregs of my coffee.
Gina was sitting on the front step in a sleeveless blouse, leaning on her knees, even though the fall air was a little cool. She sucked in a long drag of her Export A, holding it precariously between her fingers, halfway to her knuckle, to avoid touching or rubbing wet red nail polish. She sucked in, then exhaled, leaving a pinky red ring of lipstick on the filter, the colour of a rose when it bleeds. She was wearing black sandals with silver studs and had small folded tufts of toilet paper between each toe nail, painted to match her lipstick.
I turned my head away and gritted my teeth. I was exhausted, worn down, with a lack of sleep.
“Well, what are you looking for me to say?” Gina asked.
“I expect,” I hissed, “you to be honest.”
When I looked at the loose white gauze wrapped around her left wrist, it made me quiver, and I felt sick and shaky. I softened my tone, reached across the divide between us, laid my fingertips close to her arm, then pulled back. I took my mala bracelet out of my purse, tucked it into her left hand, and squeezed, my fingers lingering on hers. To my horror, I felt the corners of my eyes sting as my mascara mixed with my tears. There really wasn’t any point, I knew, of breaking down, upsetting Gina now that she was calm.
She did not say, “I’m in remorse.” She said, she never really intended to kill herself. She said, she just wanted to cut herself. How good it felt. Then she said nothing, and I said nothing too. No scolding. No admonishments. No show of anger. At that moment, I was too afraid of life.
I had the thought then, of a quote that came to me—I think it was Kahlil Gibran who said it—that ‘one can never truly know happiness until they’ve suffered pain,’ or words to that effect, and I thought to myself what a crock of shit that was. And I thought then too, that sometimes things can only be what they are and nothing more, even when you’d like them to be.
Gina blew a ring into the clean air. Puff, Poof. A soft scent of smoke drifted and then hung in the air behind her. When she finally spoke, she humbled me.
“I wish I were like you,” she said in that soft voice of hers, focussing in on her cigarette. She raised her eyes to me then, for the first time. “Confident.”
I’d like to say I turned to her then held her and told her I’d stay. I’d like to say I was the one who saved her. But I wasn’t. I turned and walked away and saved myself instead.
A few weeks after I leave London, Gina calls to say she and Rome have moved in together, into our old apartment on Adelaide Street. She says he and Dave got jobs at the slaughterhouse, so now they could afford a phone.
Gina laughs when I squeal and say, “ew!”
“Rome’s the strong, silent type,” she says, “and Dave says he can handle it as long as he doesn’t have to look the cows in the eye.”
Pretty soon, Gina is two and a half months pregnant, so she gets her greatest wish after all when Rome proposes to her on her birthday. She mails me a Polaroid picture of herself, sitting on top of those same stairs at the house on Adelaide Street, showing off her engagement ring, and smiling. She asks me if I’ll be her maid of honour at the wedding, and I say, of course, I will.
Shortly before their wedding Gina comes home from work at the Ponderosa one day and finds Rome kissing the girl who was staying with them. In her hormonal state, she races into the kitchen and grabs a steak knife, and stabs Rome in the stomach. He holds a tea towel over his wound, clutching at his stomach in disbelief. The girl calls 911, and the young couple from downstairs throws them out after the ambulance leaves.
Rome doesn’t press charges and tells the lawyers in court at the preliminary hearing that he and Gina love each other and still want to marry. They crash on Ruby and Dave’s couch until they find a new place.
After hearing all this, I am horrified at Gina’s insane, violent behaviour and feel glad I left, thinking it could have been me. I beg off being Gina’s maid of honour, citing the distance as too difficult, but I still go to their wedding on the May 24th long weekend anyway. It’s in a Catholic Church, one of those big Italian weddings where the women come to the ceremony at noon in hair curlers and stretch pants and then go home and wait around for hours until it’s time to get dolled up for a reception with five hundred people and a big five-course Italian dinner. Gina invites me to her mother’s house for the wait with the women and it seems like just one big ordinary happy family.
Gina takes me into her bedroom and tells me she lost the baby the week before the wedding, from all the stress and commotion she says, with Rome and the move. It’s the first time she’s ever let me see her cry. She looks so sad deep down in her eyes but later, in her fairy tale wedding dress, surrounded by family and her bridesmaids and a flower girl, with Rome beside her beaming proudly, she looks the most radiant I’ve ever seen her. At that moment, I am hopeful, thinking for the first time that maybe her life with Rome will turn out to be a good one after all.
Later that night, during the reception, after Rome has removed the wedding garter with his teeth and tossed it into the crowd—Gina’s something borrowed, something blue—she throws her bouquet over her shoulders and into a group of single women, and I catch it.
“I guess I didn’t ruin your summer after all,” Gina says when she sees me look over at Dave, and he looks back at me.
I wrap my arms around her and smile, and she nestles her face against my cheek. I smell Baby Shampoo and Panna Cotta and wine. She lifts her eyes to gaze at me apologetically, and we both laugh and then begin to cry. Who needs those goddamned absent mothers everywhere? When we’ve got this.
In my memory, I leave Gina on the front steps of the old house where we lived, sitting in the sun, looking serene, with a soft breeze that blows back her fine hair. She gives me a faint smile, sucks in on her Export A, and blows the smoke back towards me. She holds it between the middle and forefinger of her right hand, pinky out, and blows on her nails, gauze wrapped around her left wrist as if she didn’t have a care in the world. And even though Gina will always be this way in my mind—a strong, confident girl for whom life rolls right off her back—I think that maybe this is the only way we ever really know anyone, the only way we choose to see the people we have known and with whom we’ve shared the saddest and most profound moments of their lives.
And now, on days when I look back, and I recall her there, sitting all alone on the edge of the bathtub, wearing her short-sleeved white blouse and a robe, where it’s night and the moon dapples through the dark violet hue of the skyline, shining a ray through the top of the window, when I can’t block out the picture of her, as she walks down the stairs, I see her tread along the cobblestone pathway until she’s gone from sight, where I look away as she vanishes into the darkness beneath a rustle of blossoming bushes, and into the moonlight, dripping in rose petals—it is then that I choose to remember the way it was at the beginning of that summer, when we were both once like moons, often shining full and bright.
