Holding Still for as Long as Possible (17 page)

“I have no idea!” Josh said, laughing. He took a long sip. “Work, I suppose. Triple time.” He smiled warmly. I smiled back.

“So, I hear you need another job. I heard about this telephone research place that my friend Jenny was working at while she was in school. It's crappy but good money.”

This always happened: As soon as I quit or got fired from one service job, another one fell into my lap within twelve hours. And while I excelled at letting my anxiety render me unreliable, my ability to interview enthusiastically and convincingly allowed me to recoup.

Josh wrote a number on a piece of paper. “Here. I'll tell Jenny you're calling the place, and she'll tell her friend to make sure you get the job. I mean, a monkey could do this job. As long as you're not a criminal, it's pretty much a sure thing. She was doing it during school, and she just graduated.”

“Thanks.” I'd always wanted to get a job with such low expectations.

“But,” continued Josh, “I've always wanted to ask you this. It's kind of invasive, but don't you, like, have tons of money from your songs?”

I hated this question above all questions, but was used to answering it. “Well, I didn't write the one that was really popular. My uncle gets the royalties. And he's been really stingy with me since I quit the business. And I spent almost everything I did have during my first two years in Toronto. I paid for Maria's tuition and mine, paid for our apartment. I took us on vacation twice in the wintertime. I bought fancy groceries and $400 jeans. It went fast. It's really amazing how fast it can go. I don't have anything to show for it, really. Pisses me off.”

“Yeah, I guess it would.”

I sounded like a wash-up. I don't like to talk about money. Someone careful and not eighteen might have lived on that money for a decade. I spent and spent like the money was a burden, a glass I had to empty as fast as possible. It panicked me. Maria always said,
You should be more careful
,
tried to reign in my spending. I didn't listen.

In my bedroom I had the remnants of that bank account: two laptops, some home recording equipment, two vintage Gibson guitars, Seven jeans, sheets softer than rabbits. If you looked closely around our apartment, which mostly looked like the apartment of every slightly trashy artist-kid in the neighbourhood, there were some expensive objects amongst the dollar-store dishes and collection of kitsch.

Josh was eyeing me.

“What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Like what?”

“That!” I squinted my eyes, smiled a half-smile.

“I guess I just really want to know you, Billy. You intrigue me.”

I swallowed the last of the hot, sweet rum. It stung the back of my throat. “Well, Mr. Medic, the feeling is quite mutual.” I reached under the table and touched his knee, pulling it back fast.
Good Will.
When Roxy came back in the room, I gained control of Australia and fortified my troops. By the time we'd emptied the bottle of Malibu, I had won the game.

I took my guitar out of its case and tuned it while Josh and Roxy cleaned up the game and split the last beer in the fridge. “Play us a song!” Roxy said. “I haven't heard you sing in so long.”

“Only if we all sing.”

I started in with “All Along the Watchtower” and by the time the sun rose we'd covered every song for which we knew more than two verses. My fingers hurt from lack of practice, but it was good to play again. A little bit of myself had come back.

[ 15 ]

Amy

I could feel it looming, like the day of aches you get before the flu hits. This was acceptance, I supposed. I was dropping things. First, a wet filter full of coffee grinds. Then I swept a glass of wine into the air with a swing of my wrist, and it crashed onto the floor of the bar in the Gladstone Hotel, where I'd been trying to work on my laptop.

I wasn't even trying to illustrate a point. My arm just took flight. I'd been avoiding home. Drinking in the afternoon. I kept tapping away at my table, watching the red wine stain seep into my skirt, and I didn't even bother dabbing it away. It set in the shape of a running leg on thick blue cotton.

The waitress with computer-screen tattoos said, “It's okay, honey. It's just gravity.” She swept the glass shards into the dustbin while a line of sweat formed on her hairline. I was tearing up, trying to help her with some half-hearted mops of my cloth napkin. My fingers dry-stained with house red. I cried softly, shading my eyes with my right hand, wishing myself invisible. I don't think I'd ever cried in public before.

The bright Google notifier in the right-hand corner of my screen lit up. A tiny box of text indicated a new e-mail, an unfamiliar address. The subject heading:
AMY AMY AMY, it's Jay. Your One True Love!
And as though eight years had not passed, my heart pounded at the mere sight of his name.

We'd been alone on the dock at summer camp in upstate New York. Jason McAuslan and me, pushing a canoe out into the water. Across our feet were sandal tans that wouldn't fade until the following March. Sixty-one sleeps on thin plastic mattresses in simple wood cabins, bright-coloured plastic friendship bracelets making tiny cubes on our wrists.

The week before I left for camp, my grandmother had died. I'd stayed with her every night in the hospital. I turned sixteen holding her hand, telling her terrible jokes. The funeral was the day before camp started.

For the first time, my mother didn't monitor my packing. My father didn't drive me up the laneway awkwardly talking to the other fathers pulling large knapsacks out of their expensive cars. I drove myself in my grandmother's navy Oldsmobile, smoking American Spirits, listening to The Counting Crows. I didn't cry.

Every night from midnight to 5 a.m., Jason and I slept in the same slim cot. Before sunrise, his watch would beep and he'd cross the rugged dirt path to the boy's
CIT
cabin and sleep until the wake-up bell. From the age of thirteen, six of us had returned every year. There was a religious quality to our connection; we would have trusted our lives to each other. Jason and I had those two months together from ages thirteen to sixteen.

That night, the sun was going down over the hills above the lake. We were in love. Back then, you knew the difference between
in love
and
not in love
because the first time you felt something monumental, you could name it. Throughout the previous year I'd go through the mail Nanny would leave on the front table by the door, scanning desperately for a New York City postmark. Our two best friends, Kat and Alex, were already out in the middle of the lake and we paddled towards them with packages of hot chocolate powder, stolen from the kitchen, in the pockets of our hooded sweatshirts. The water was so still that dropping our chocolate-coated fingers into the cold blackness made tiny circles. No waves. Kat said, “I can't believe how calm it is. It's like we're the only ones on earth.”

“Let's lie down and look at the stars,” suggested Alex. We stripped off our bulky orange lifejackets and stuffed them in the bow and stern as pillows, and shimmied our legs and hips under the wooden seats. Jason and I extended an arm on either side to hold onto the side of the girls' canoes. They liked to paddle alone and do things like swim across the lake every year. The only sound from the three canoes, the water, the surrounding forest, was our breath and the occasional loon. The water was a polished floor. We closed our eyes.

I could hear my grandmother's voice in my head, telling me between delusional mumblings that I shouldn't do anything in my life just to please my parents, that I had privileges she'd never had. I felt weightless. “Maybe this is why people meditate,” Jason said, breaking the silence. I came up to look around, and all the blues had turned to black. The moon was an eyelash curl of white. We'd drifted nearly half a mile down the lake. We could see the campfire on the beach and we knew we were in some sort of trouble. We giggled to each other, then paddled like mad towards the light. Exhilarated. Sat down on a log in the middle of fifty-six youngsters singing a song about greasy grimy gopher guts, holding hands.

Later that night, Jason and I had sex in the boathouse. I told him it was my first time, but it wasn't. He told me he wasn't a virgin, but I could tell he was.

That summer, a seventeen-year-old girl from Michigan showed up as a replacement counsellor after Bette McFadden was carried away for her eating disorder. Her name was Star. She had a shaved head and a nose-ring. She talked about things I'd never thought to think of before. She had a tattoo on her shoulder of a cat and a T-shirt that said “Vegans Taste Better.” I didn't know how to talk to her. When the summer was over she wrote “I Love You, Amy” in my autograph book and I stared at it all the way home. I was so tired I asked Jason to drive. He was visiting me in Toronto over the Labour Day weekend. My parents were in Florida golfing and we pretended the house was ours.

The first night at home, Jason shaved my head in the upstairs bathroom. Red curls in the oversized marble sink. All we could talk about was Star.

“Star hitchhiked across the country. Did she tell you about that? She told me about it that time we took Tyler to the nurses' station together.”

“Star is in love with an older guy named River who lives in a lighthouse. She told me that the day we went canoeing together.”

We were oddly competitive about Star's attention. I was a little jealous when it became clear that Jason had a crush on her, but at the same time, who could blame him? I certainly had a crush — at least, what I understood to be a crush at that time. Maybe it was awe. We agreed she was the most original person we'd ever met.

I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror, opening the two mirrored medicine cabinet doors on either side so I could see the back of my head in the reflection of the one behind it. Fingering the soft stubble, I felt a shift. Jason kissed my head. I shaved his head too, and we sat delirious in the backyard under the stars smoking joints and rubbing our shaved skulls together.

When I kissed Jason at the airport it was with longing and sadness. I felt this every year when we had to part, but the feeling was all the more tragic because I knew somehow this year would change us. People grow a lot between sixteen and seventeen. Jason said, “Don't worry so much, Amy. We won't be apart for much longer. We'll go to the same university. We'll get an apartment together.”

Jason moved to California the following summer and didn't go to camp. We lost touch, fell in love with others. Star and I became best friends, the twin weirdos who returned to camp faithfully every summer until we were eighteen and nineteen. We took a solo canoe adventure for three days, pitched a tent in a wooded area down the beach and spent the whole time having sex and eating s'mores. I was in love and she was experimenting. When we got back to camp she hooked up with a older guy who worked in the kitchen and I never went back to camp again. Last I heard, Star was in South America building a school.

After Josh and I had been together just over two years, I took him to meet my high school friends. We were all twenty-two, and we met in Yorkville at a café. After our lunch, he named each girl after characters from
90210
. I felt awkward. I am conventional amongst my non-conventional friends. Roxy calls me “Gateway” because when she got interested in the stock market, she asked if I could hook her up with my dad. Like, I am “Gateway Girl to the Man.” When any of my friends gets into legal trouble, they call me, because they're pretty sure I know a lawyer. But sitting next to Jenny, Valerie, Amanda, and Amanda's new baby, talking yoga classes and jewellery and the perfect spot to vacation in Cancun, I realized my high school pals still regarded me as their wayward friend. They said, “Oh, Amy. Really? Wow. You're so . . . unusual!” Josh couldn't believe anyone considered me unusual —
except unusually brilliant and pretty
, he said hurriedly, to save himself.

I had to stop myself from returning Jason's e-mail too quickly, using all caps. I had often thought of him, too, wondered who he'd grown up to be. His message told me that he was back in New York City, had started a PhD in history. He'd heard that Star had married an older man who led a cult somewhere in Colorado. He'd heard that I was gay now, or something like that. I laughed. I laughed because Jason had such a
husband
appeal — the
I'll take care of you
machismo that, sometimes, on days like this, I found so attractive.

I started to write back to Jason with details of Amy's Life as an Adult, but stopped halfway through the second paragraph, aware that I sounded like someone trying to write a fake Christmas letter, trying to prove to myself, more than to him, that I'd grown into a successful and happy person.

I could see it all so blatantly on the screen in front of me. I didn't know what I was doing. Probably for the first time ever, I didn't have any answers, or any hilarious bright summations for a long-ago lover. I was in danger of memorializing, giving in to nostalgia. I stopped myself just short of suggesting a clandestine getaway, a reunion of teenaged passion.