Holding Still for as Long as Possible (12 page)

“That's true. You're all chimneys, angry little chimneys.”

That was my cue to light another cigarette off the one I'd just finished. I heard my mother do the same. She could cut out sugar, dairy, wheat, emotionally withholding men, but she couldn't quit the smokes.

“Not to mention, gay.” My mother was one of those people who thought gay people just didn't ever have children, as if it wasn't possible.

“That doesn't make it biologically impossible, just a little harder, logistically.” I heard my mother start to chop vegetables fast against a wooden cutting board. “And stop labelling me. How's the weather in Winnipeg?”

“Stinky. Toronto?”

“Today the sky could best be described as vomit-coloured.”

“Move home.”

“No.”

“Have you been writing songs?”

“I've been trying to write corporate jingles on the ukulele. Make some cash.”

“You know, mail still comes here for you. Your uncle calls once a week, wants to know when you're going to write again. He won't ever just call you, though. Still mad.”

“Tell Jonny that I peaked at sixteen and now I'm living an adult life of mediocrity. I've embraced it. Besides, I'm the one who should be mad. He's the one who made money off of me.”

Whenever I thought about how much money I could actually have if, I don't know, I had understood one thing about business at sixteen, or had had a mother who understood a thing about business, I got so angry I could hardly breathe. So I just chose not to think about it.

I received a text message from my sister while on the land line with my mother.
Uncle Jonny is going to be a judge on Canadian Idol. CH
EESY
.

I texted back:
Buy some crackers.

Later that night, I had a sick feeling in my stomach. It was confirmed by an e-mail from Jonny Brandon Enterprises dot com.
They want you to come on the show and teach the kids how to perform. It will be billed as your comeback
.

I e-mailed a subject heading message:
I am 25. Too young to come back.
Plus, reality shows are the new opiate for a nation of narcissistic morons
.

He sent back:
You should go to AA, Billy. Find your higher power. I can tell you're drinking too much.

The blue plate sat so still, the sauce hardening. The cat's paw prints were red where they dotted across the tiles and out onto the patio. Smoosh sat licking herself clean on one of the tall wooden stools beside the barbecue. My feet were tingling, the right one numb. Still, I didn't move.

I had got up early that morning to work an opening shift at the café, the dreaded 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. shift. I'd burned my hand on the espresso-machine steamer and couldn't concentrate. My manager, Marla, who had something against me for some reason, kept making jokes that I drink too much, which was kind of funny considering how obsessed I was with being sober and in control lately. I couldn't deal with the hangovers. So I'd taken to having two drinks and watching everyone around me get drunk while I pulled at loose threads in my clothes.

I drank three double lattes and walked home, clutching my heart. In the apartment, I was promptly zombified by Roxy. When Roxy went out, I warmed up the leftover pasta, turned to walk out onto the patio and somehow dropped the plate. That's when time stopped working for me again.

In about an hour, I was supposed to be hosting the punk knitters' group. It was true what those cheesy mags said: knitting is a soothing activity. I officially did not care what this said about me. I could barely put a sentence together most days and now I'd completed a pot holder, half a mitten, and five pairs of leg-warmers, all pink and red. Roxy was knitting tiny finger-puppet monsters. The Gem was peppered with balls of wool and potentially stabby knitting needles. At night my dreams of gun-toting psychopaths and teeth falling out had been replaced by simple repetitive scenes of
knit one, purl two
, a collection of unconscious body memories. Sometimes Paul Simon sat beside me in these dreams singing songs from the
Graceland
album that reminds me of childhood. It was a nice break from the galvanic reality of my body trying to eat itself with fear.

I jumped up when I heard the door click and Roxy bounding up the stairs. Feigning normalcy, I clutched the plate and scooped up the noodle mess with a paper towel. The accident was easy to remedy. I felt silly for having stared at it for half an hour, making it some overdetermined metaphor for all my recent failures.

Roxy kissed my forehead. “I have to redo your black eye, doll. It looks like you smudged it.” She put both hands on my head and tipped it back to examine the extensive fake gash across my neck. “Still slit beautifully! I'm really improving.”

Roxy poured two glasses of beet and ginger juice and reapplied my bruised eye. While she cleaned the kitchen, I scrubbed the tile grout in the bathroom with a toothbrush, dusted the windowsills, then vacuumed the stairs. The domestic details in my life were incredibly spotless, if nothing else. One square inch in front of another — this was how I was determined to see the world.

I took out the
Knitter's Handbook
and placed it on a side table. Clicked on the
TV
to
CityNews
in time for an alarmist feature on bird flu. I turned it off right away. I already suspected I'd be patient zero. Bird zero. I was imagining the plans for my funeral and surmising who'd play my character in the Toronto bird flu made-for-
TV
movie when the doorbell rang.

Amy walked up the stairs holding a Tupperware container of cookies, her shoulder bag overflowing with yarn and knitting needles. “Hey, Billy! I have a terrific pattern for a hat with stars on it.” She'd made her wool hoody herself. Black with a skull-and-crossbones design on the back. She wasn't wearing a costume.

She hugged me awkwardly. “You look so freaky!” she said, her voice a few decibels higher than normal.

I felt like a kid in a cardboard robot outfit.

Amy offered me a cookie from her container, which she had placed on the kitchen table. The cookie was soft and chewy, still a little bit warm. “There's no wheat or gluten in them, and they're fruit sweetened.”

Of course they were. They tasted like sawdust. She leaned against the wall in faux repose, looking as if she could be standing in a magazine, advertising her outfit. Her skirt was a patchwork pattern from vintage T-shirts. I'd seen it in a boutique on Queen Street for $175.

Roxy walked into the kitchen and whistled at Amy. “You sure are prettying up the place,” she said, and kissed Amy on the cheek.

I wondered if they'd ever slept together. Probably. Roxy pretty much slept with everyone when she first met them. She had tried to hit on me, but I was with Maria so we had quickly slid into sibling roles.

Roxy had always appeared odd to other people, so she never really experienced angst about it. Never belonging had given her the strongest sense of self-esteem of anyone I knew. At least, this was how it came across to others. Not conventionally attractive, but undeniably sexy, she appeared weird to just about everyone, even the punk rockers and art kids who tried their best to stand out. Roxy had never been able to change the fact that she stood out, so her authenticity was alluring. I bet that was what Amy was drawn to. No matter how many skull-and-crossbones sweaters Amy knitted, she always looked undeniably approachable, clean, normal.

“I'm going out to the liquor store,” Roxy said. “The freezer is oddly lacking in vodka. Want anything?”

We both declined. I gathered up my spool of red wool, wondering how it would ever turn into an object like a hat. I was just hoping it would become a square of some sort. An ugly square, but whatever.

Amy half smiled at me the way you do when the conversation has died but you still want to appear to be attempting a connection. I dropped a stitch and laughed for no reason. The
CD
that was playing in the background — the Detroit Cobras — paused between tracks. The room stopped being sexy and soulful, and started feeling empty and too clean. Amy and I had always been a little awkward, but now I had a crush on Josh and I felt that she could somehow sense this.

I glanced around at the room at the plain
IKEA
coffee table, the
TV
and
DVD
player on top of an old credenza Roxy and I had dragged home from a roadside goldmine. On the ivory walls hung two canvases of Roxy's — comic-book style paintings — and a shelf with
DVD
s: two complete seasons of
The
oc
, all of
Twin Peaks
, and a bunch of John Waters' films. A small bookshelf contained a few hardcover Taschen art books.

Finally, I stared down at my lap and thought:
If I glance up and across the coffee table, Amy will be a corpse, killed by boredom
. This silence was my fault. “I think I hear the door,” I lied.

I went downstairs, nervously surveying the street for other punk knitters. Tina, Tara, and Lisa were arriving en masse, a frenzied bundle, locking their bikes to the railing outside. Soon after, a tiny gay guy named Phil who was obsessed with knitting pink bunnies with insect legs showed up and settled into the armchair.

It was Tina who got the evening going. She could launch into a stand-up routine for no reason at all. If you got a call in the middle of the night with a slurred yet emphatic voice urging you to come out and help her steal cars, it was likely Tina. If you brought a camera out to a party, half of the photos were likely to show Tina, shirtless, with a lime in her mouth and playing air guitar on the edge of the
DJ
booth. I'd only known Tina a month or two, through Roxy, but felt as if she was the human embodiment of show business: a manic attention-seeking cut-up everyone was drawn to. I had decided to keep her at arm's length, and she responded by looking right through me most of the time.

As everyone settled into the living room, I backed into the kitchen, nearly tripping over the cat dish, and busied myself with a giant plastic bowl of pink icing for the cupcakes. I decorated the tops with red and orange sparkles. I never followed recipes; baking was mostly science and intuition anyway. If you understood the basics and had a keen sense of pleasure, you were pretty much set. Like with sex.

I overheard snippets of conversations from the other room, the sounds of PhD dissertation prep, publishing contracts, auditions, and promotions. Toronto was everybody's lucky horseshoe, the place where accomplishments came quickly. I said a quick prayer of thanks for Roxy, who besides having some vague film aspirations was still as stuck as I, doomed to say
Hi, how may I help you
?
until the scratch cards uncovered three matching numbers.
Come on, triple cherries
, we said on Sunday mornings, which was scratch card and latte time.

Roxy slammed the outside door and clomped up the stairs two at a time. She twisted around the banister, dropped her coat on a kitchen chair, and did a fast U-turn past the bathroom and went in through the living room. The knitting crew stopped purling and knitting to absorb her.

I handed out the cupcakes. Amy didn't take one. She doesn't eat sugar. Of course.

While everyone knitted and discussed their lives, I couldn't stop thinking about the lump in my throat. How I felt as if I were being choked. I swallowed over and over, but still felt it, as if someone was pressing into my neck.

Later, after everyone left, Roxy and I washed the dishes together. I dried the cups and plates, and she washed, careful not to get her new arm tattoo wet. The tattoo was a bunny, softly drawn in brown ink. Roxy was starting a woodland-creature tattoo theme on her arms.

“Amy's so hot for you,” I whispered, handing Roxy three tiny ice-blue espresso cups laced through my fingers. They were shaking. I tried to hide it.

“No, that was over years ago.” Roxy's ears turned bright red. “Plus, I've known her forever. It would be weird, too familial at this point. And she's still with Josh. Josh and I have a rule about not dating the same girl.”

“Really?” I felt curves of disappointment show around my lips.

“Well, it's unofficial, but the relationship is pretty much, like, over. You know. They just won't break up and be done with it. Personally, I think Josh has a bit of a thing for you, Hil-ah-ry!”

“No he doesn't,” I asserted in a voice that said
Tell me more
.

Lately, Josh had been showing up around the house a lot. I didn't know why I was drawn to Josh, really. He appeared very ordinary. His socks always matched. His teeth were always clean. He exuded a kind of polished humanity I could never accomplish. His hair was brown in a uniform way, no variations. I'd never seen him freaked out about anything. He was my polar opposite. Except when we laughed. And I was fascinated by his job. My life was populated with waiter / singers, cashier / actors, student / poets. I regarded anyone science-minded with curiosity. Plus, I was obsessed with random accidents and freak aneurisms, and he dealt with this every day. His work-life terrified me.