Shut up youre pretty, p.6
Shut Up You're Pretty, page 6
“I know. I’m so surprised you answered.”
I told Junior that I had done seven Hollywoods and that I was sorry for it. My brother was caring. Always willing to search that beautiful brain of his for some optimism. In my high, I kept trying to touch my nose with my tongue, while still going on and on and on about how I really didn’t mean to get this fucked up, but it just helps with the noise. So much noise, Junior. I had been candid once before with my brother. And then I ignored him for several months. And now I was looking ahead at my future, and I knew it would be a year before I spoke to my brother again, after tonight, after this phone call.
Then I heard a banging on the door. And then I heard a scream down the hall. It was Mother. I told Junior I had to go and hung up.
Mother didn’t cry at the sight of her dead husband. I had never seen Mother cry, and I felt a bit relieved not to have to suffer through it now for the first time. Not like this. I listened to her hurling. And then she began to sing. All gospel. Songs I recognized from other people’s deaths. Then I could hear footsteps. A marching band. A herd of bulls. Sirens. Men entering the house. I could hear somebody attempting to reason with Mother, and I could hear her insisting on a moment of praying, please. Somebody said a lot of things to Mother, or to the men, or to me. And then I heard, “Shut up, shut the fuck up, shut it, please.” And for a moment, the house did get quiet.
Mother found me in the tub three hours later. She opened the bathroom door slowly, as though she knew I had been there all along. I was terrified. She’d see that my nipples were pierced. She’d see that I had been shaving my bush. She’d immediately associate the pierced nipples and the shaved pussy with sex. We’d get into a heated argument. It would end with me leaving the house, slamming the door behind me. It would end with her throwing my clothes in the yard. I could see it all so clearly.
“Your father’s dead,” she announced.
“How?” I asked.
I wanted to hear her say it.
“In his sleep.”
Mother closed the door on her way out. The water was cold. But not freezing I heard her walk to her bedroom. Though she mustn’t have closed the door behind her, because the door makes this sound. Like a mouse. Like a rooster in the morning. It was then that I realized I hadn’t put any soap in my bath. Hadn’t put any bubbles. So I reached for the shampoo, and then I felt satisfied. Fatigue would hit me any moment. In two or three more hours, fatigue would come. The waiting was painful, like waiting for air to fill cupped hands.
I found Mother frying bacon. She wore her hair pushed back in a high bun. I hadn’t seen so much of her face in such a long time. She looked quite like herself.
“Going back to the morgue later,” she said.
“Why? Haven’t they already ruled the cause of death? Didn’t you already identify the body?”
“Your father?”
“Yeah, sorry. That’s what I meant.”
She knew I was coming down. She knew I had been in the bag, but so long as she didn’t address it, we could pretend.
“Do you want me to come with you?”
“You have school.”
“True.”
She finished with the bacon and ate it from the pan. Strip after strip. And she ate it naked, without any bread or toppings. Then, she kissed me. She left for the day. And I left for school. I didn’t want to go, but I figured I’d be able to score some pills. Perhaps I could then come home for some sleep.
I walked by Mrs Broomfield. She was sitting on her lawn, throwing salt on the sidewalk. The snow baked quickly overnight, causing the pavement to glisten. She didn’t give me sad eyes. She just kept making her lawn chair rock like a baby’s cradle.
I suppose she’d seen the whole thing. I suppose she’d watched my father get carried out to the ambulance, the paramedics moving too slowly so as to not step on a crack, or a branch, or some ice and, you know, drop the dead. And I suppose she knew too, without needing the confirmation, that it was my father. And that there was no way he could have been saved. And that it was only a matter of time before he was successful.
I found Mason behind the staircase in the west side of the school. He sold me some Xanax and Klonopin, and then he asked if I’d give him something in return. Normally, I’d say no, but I was suddenly a person in reduced circumstances.
“Not bad,” he told me. He always told me that I was not bad, never that I was good. Mason reminded me to mix the Xanax with a bit of melatonin but to take the pins straight. This too was part of my circumstances—I had two options. One that would shock my body and one that would lay me down. Both leaving me worse off than I already was.
I went home without speaking to anyone. Nobody was on our street. And, of course, nobody was home. I only took a third of a Xanax. It was stronger than the stuff my father took, and I didn’t want to be asleep that long. I was terrified that if I slept too long, I’d miss it. I’d miss all of it.
Almost every dream I had was a memory of my father and me. And in every single one we were playing this game where I was a princess. In one of the dreams, we were at a tea party. It was my birthday. I was six or seven. He let me dress him up as a princess too, and I told him he looked just as beautiful as a little girl. He told me something extra lame, like, “Je pourrais mourir pour toi.” I woke up instantly. It was six p.m. I could hear that the house was empty but figured Mother was in the basement doing laundry.
I found her in the kitchen. She looked like she hadn’t moved since this morning. Under each eye, she had moisturizer. Hydrating gel. She still cared about her beauty. And her youth. She was eternal.
“You’re awake,” she said.
“Surprise, surprise.”
“Okay, you should freshen up.”
“When will Junior get here?”
“Haven’t called him yet. Maybe when I have an idea of the funeral stuff.”
“Do you have enough money for that? I mean, I have some saved up.”
“We’ll figure it out.”
And that was that. That was the most Mother and I would ever talk about it.
I was still feeling buzzed and dragged out. Mother and I sat on the front steps. The night was good. And the sky so clear, empty of all its wonders, divorced from the stars, autonomic of the moon. The sky was usually so full this far east of the city, and I seldom missed the opportunity to watch it dissolve.
I pulled out a cigarette and lit up in front of Mother. It was one of the scariest things I had ever done. But given my circumstances, I trusted I would get away with this too. Mother made her fingers into a peace sign. This was smoker’s lingo for Give me one. I gave Mother the one I had been working on. Lit a new one for myself. When she exhaled, I wondered if it was the first time she had done that.
“He wanted to paint the porch red.” Mother coughed a little in between each draw. “You know, like the gates in Kinshasa.”
“That would have made no sense. It wouldn’t have gone with anything.”
“Yeah, but you know your father.”
“He’s so fucking weird, right?”
“He’s just nostalgic.”
“The last thing he said to me, when I was leaving last night, was that he’d see me in ten years. He was like, ‘On se donne rendez-vous dans dix ans?’ And I was like, sure whatever.”
Mother laughed. “That’s a song. I mean, it’s his favourite song.”
“What?”
“You know the one. By Patrick Bruel.”
Mother sang parts of the song.
Now I was laughing too. “He’s so lame. He’s such a weirdo.”
Before bed, I crushed some Xanax for Mom. Tonight, she was Mom. She was soft.
We removed the sheets from her bed. We slept on the naked mattress. Of course, the smell was pronounced. But, fuck it: we let our bodies sink deep through the covers, deep through the second floor, deep through the basement, deep until we were in the ground. Underneath all that dirt.
The next morning, he was still dead, but not like an exclamation point, like a set of ellipses. I was still coming down from my weeklong binge. I could never be satisfied with just one line. Or just one drink. Or just one kiss. I was the most like my father.
Last minute, I decided not to apply for university.
It was mid-December. I thought a funeral during the holidays would be depressing. And all the light in the world—we could use some of that. I told Mother, “What if we had the funeral in the new year. What if we waited for spring?”
“That feels like a drag.”
“But do you really want to make people come out just before Christmas?”
“It won’t be a funeral. You know your aunts—it’ll be a celebration.”
“What if we just cremated the body and waited until Junior finishes his semester?”
“You want to wait four months to have a funeral?”
“Sure, why not? Junior won’t be able to handle all of this. He’ll be hysterical. He won’t make it through.”
“So we burn his body, and then what?”
When Mother and I spoke, we’d change positions. I would become the one with all the answers. She would remain the one with all the questions. But this time I had no answer. And this time she had no questions. We both just knew what we knew.
My father’s body was cremated the next day. I came home from school and he was sitting in a gold urn on top of the coffee table.
In my room I had a bit of cocaine left, but I didn’t want to do any of it. Still, it took a lot of convincing to get me not to do it. I flushed it down the toilet. And then I noticed the water in the tub from seventy-two hours ago was rotten now. I left it there. Death is slow. It takes a long time to settle. It feeds from the inside, like a fetus. Death is like being pregnant and never giving birth.
I took a taxi to a bar. Everybody looked decent. Not happy but not not happy. They talked to each other, mindless and distracted. Old men, mostly in their late fifties and sixties, sat on the wood and discussed their wives, and their cottages. Like they were interchangeable. That’s when I saw Dylan.
Ocean-eyed Dylan.
He recognized me too. Walked up to me with a grin. Last I saw Dylan, he was a little boy. Now I was standing in front of a fully realized man. The kind women in Galloway would pray their sons would turn out to be. Where had time gone? Why hadn’t it told us it would be leaving? Had I been in love with Dylan too? Maybe once.
“You’re so—”
“Skinny?” I interrupted. I had gotten tired of hearing it.
“But more than that.”
“Thanks, you look well too. You’ve always looked well, but now you look very well.”
The conversation flew between us. No tension. No bumps. No stopping to wonder if rekindling old euphoria could stop new growth. Dylan didn’t live in my neighbourhood, but he used to hang around there all the time. When he was much younger. Before the facial hair.
After last call, I took Dylan to a cemetery. It was next to the water. You could smell it. Icy, with a burn. Good in the air. Good everywhere. We walked around for hours and he not once asked what or why or how come. Then I saw a headstone that I liked. It looked like it could belong to my father. It was grey and simple. It just had a name and a date. No fuss. No show. No party. Just the truth. I loved that gravestone so fucking much. I stood there, loving it for some time.
Then I was pulling Dylan towards me and walking backwards towards the gravestone.
“Did you ever met my father, Dyl?”
“He was always in and out, but I saw him around. Such a happy man.”
“You think he was happy?”
“He seemed like it.”
Then, Dylan and I fell silent.
I slipped my hands inside of his. They were cold but stern. He held me tightly.
“You know he killed himself, right?” I asked Dylan.
“I know,” he said.
I didn’t look to see his reaction, but I could imagine it was accepting. I didn’t bother to ask how he knew. News travels fast. Even news that isn’t news and is just a matter of fact. I could picture everybody from church praying all at once. I could hear it echo into the night—God called on him, and he solemnly obeyed. That was the story, and though it was a falsified story, it was the one that would get us through the next ten years.
I pulled Dylan close to me, and I kissed him. I stretched out on the cold grass and opened my legs for him. Without hesitation, he pulled down my underwear and mounted me. He stroked deeply enough to sober me up completely. Still, I moaned “Daddy,” as if I was supposed to feel exceptionally close to him now but couldn’t.
Afterwards, we sat where I had bled and where he had come. We listened to the noises that the night made: hearts beating, cars racing, people in the distance.
THERESA IS GETTING MARRIED
My cousin Theresa got married a month after my father was cremated. She got married to a guy she met the night before her wedding day. She was nineteen years old and pregnant. She was not allowed to have the baby—and be uneducated and unmarried. My cousin Theresa had to agree to marry, and to get an education, and then, only then, the baby could be born.
Theresa wanted to have the baby but was so miserable she couldn’t plan the wedding. But when she emailed after years of silence, I was more than happy to help. Anything to get away from my house. Anything to get some space from Mother. Her sadness was overwhelming. Her sadness was an illusion. She’d pretend to be fine but then wash the same dish for twenty minutes.
My brother, Junior, didn’t come home from university in Montreal for my father’s funeral, but he called to say he’d be present for Theresa’s wedding. My immediate family was small, so the day was filled with members of our community. They were family nonetheless: aunties, mammies, and uncles all dressed in the same fabric showed up at the house, though nobody had actually invited them.
Aunt Adele was incredibly stressed. But it was nice seeing Mother and her sister together. I thought that they could really help each other out during this time. Aunt Adele hadn’t recently become a widow, but she still talked about her divorce as if it had happened yesterday. Aunt Adele asked me not to tell Mother about the baby. And then she asked me not to tell anyone about the baby.
Theresa had always wanted to be pregnant. She thought pregnancy might give her an escape. Like me, Theresa had taken on the role of mothering Aunt Adele after her father left. And though Mother didn’t need any reminders, I still felt responsible for her well-being. I felt guilty for having moved on. I felt even worse because I knew how much I looked like him. But this weekend was about Theresa. This weekend was about making sure she’d get through it. All of it.
Theresa wore wax for the dote ceremony. The pregnancy was new, and the arranged marriage happened overnight, but it was possible to hide both.
Theresa’s fiancé was accompanied by his uncle and his father. They brought drinks, uncooked goat, and money for Aunt Adele. “How many goats do you think she’s worth,” the ongoing joke went. “Twenty if she’s still a virgin,” I heard someone say. “Twenty-two if she knows how to cook,” somebody else said. Then, the room got quiet. Normally, the ceremony was held underneath a tree, and normally the father of the bride hosted the event. But my family had given up on real tradition years ago. Instead, we were making things up as we went.
I spent the entire night telling Theresa that she was beautiful. And the entire night, Theresa and I thought of names for her unborn child.
Then, when it was time to dance, Mother and I sat on the balcony. We watched the party unveil itself.
Jugs of palm wine used to kick off the celebration, but the family seemed content with boxed merlot. After the presentation of gifts, the house filled with music. Mostly drumming, and the popular sounds of Franco Luambo, Papa Wemba, and Koffi Olomide.
Mother and I brought fish. And Junior stood in the corner with his new girlfriend he refused to introduce to anyone. Theresa’s dad showed up eventually, got gloriously drunk, and announced that his daughter was in fact a whore. The music kept going. Some uncles and aunties came up to Mother with late condolences, which we accepted, as members of the bridal family. As women. Armed with our willingness to overcome this too.
Finally, I got Theresa alone.
“Tell me you brought goodies,” she said.
“A whole bag,” I told her.
“Shrooms?”
“And liquid G.”
We called this her last supper. Though it would be by proxy.
“And you’ll do whichever I want?”
“Yeah, but when did you even get into all this stuff?”
“I live in the middle of nowhere. There isn’t much else to do.”
I didn’t say anything to that.
From the bag, Theresa picked blow. Which was good, because it was the only stuff I could actually stomach. We were sitting in her car parked inside the garage. She reached in the back seat and grabbed an envelope, handed it to me, and said, “I kept this—don’t laugh. I’m not crazy.”
I was in my feelings, so my mind went immediately to endings. This was her goodbye party. Inside was something I had written for Theresa, nearly a decade ago: a “How to Insert a Tampon” guide. I had learned this from somebody else and was so excited to share it with her.
“I’m giving it back to you because I want you to give it to my daughter, one day.”
“It’s a girl?”
“I think so. I’m just going to put that into the world and hope.”
I had no words.
“If I just sniff the bag, will it affect the baby?” she said.
“No, I don’t think so,” I said.
Theresa took a deep breath. “Eight more months and I can drink. But you promise. After this line, you’re done. No more.”
“Yes,” I said.
I could do it too. I could put it into the world and hope.
We seldom talked about this either, but it was there.
“Last line and last wish,” I said.
“Kiss on it,” Theresa said.
So we kissed. Which I know was an odd thing for cousins to do, but we weren’t ordinary cousins. And these weren’t ordinary circumstances. And there was a field filled with grown-ups who believed in an unknown God more than they believed in us. And we were alone now anyway, so if we wanted to fucking kiss, blood or not, we would kiss.
