Shut Up You're Pretty: Stories by Téa Mutonji.

[midnight_birth]

Title: Shut Up You're Pretty: Stories.
Author: Téa Mutonji.
Genre: Fiction, short stories, race, class struggle, homosexuality, .
Country: Canada.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2019.
Summary: A collection of 18 inter-connected short stories which center around a young girl's, Loli's, coming of age in Scarborough's Galloway neighbourhood after immigrating in her adolescence from the Republic of Congo. Tits for Cigs is about Loli's meeting her first friend in Canada, Jolie, who teaches her the ways of the neighbourhood, starting with how to get men to buy them cigarettes. In Parchment Paper, Lou discovers her sexuality through an odd experience with her cousin, an enigmatic girl that comes to stay with her family. In The Event, Jolie finds a way for Loli and her to earn money, by putting on increasingly more pornographic shows for males at the park. Down the Lakeshore described Loli's complicated and sad relationship with her father, absent for the first half of her life, as they take a trip down a partially-imaginary memory lane. In If Not Happiness, Loli has to deal with her and Jolie growing apart, as her friend begins a relationship with a significantly older man and moves out of the neighborhood. In This is Only Temporary, the neighborhood has to deal with a death of a young man, and the way the city misrepresents him and the community. In Phyllis Green, Loli has a crisis of conscience when her girlfriends come up with a questionable initiation for a new black girl in her prestigious private school. In Ten Year Reunion, Loli deals with her father's suicide while on a drug binge herself. In Theresa is Getting Married, Loli's pregnant cousin is forced into an arranged marriage with a stranger, and the two have a suiting send-off at her wedding. In The Boy from My Youth, Loli stays with a nice man from her younger days in Galloway after leaving her home, but while she loves the stability and domesticity of her safe new arrangement, Dylan has different outlook on their situation. In The Common Room, after moving out of her parents' house following her father's suicide, Loli moves in and develops a very intense sexually-charged but platonic relationship with her new roommate. In Men, Tricks, and Money, Loli works in a happy-ending massage parlour, and develops a connection with one of the other girls there. In The Waitress, Loli has a hard transition going from the volatile but exciting world of prostitution to just being a student and waitress, struggling with the daily mundane. In Shut Up You're Pretty, in her sophomore year Loli gets into an intense relationship with a TA, and has to navigate the intensity, abuse, and eventual heartbreak of it with the help of her roommate. In Women Talking, Loli strikes up a conversation with another young woman as they both wait for an abortion at a clinic. In Old-Fashioneds, Loli has an odd sexually-driven relationship with an older unhappy man who has a girlfriend. In Sober Party, Loli attends an alcohol-free women-only party with her roommate, but is incapable of getting into the spirit of the concept. In Tilapia Fish, Loli reconnects with her mother and the memories of their family when they first immigrated by cooking a traditional fish from back home.

My rating: 7.5/10
My review:


♥ Unlike Jolie, I had perfectly ashy elbows and naturally lacked poise, and this was my advantage on Galloway. People could relate to that. As for Jolie, she was simply unattainable. To want a person like her was to want too much from life. To have a person like her was to have everything and, perhaps, too soon.

♥ "Is she a girl or a boy?" Jolie tilted her head.

My English was still just so-so, but this I understood. It had become a frequent question, though my hair had grown significantly since we landed. Before we left, I was given a buzz cut to match the picture of the boy in the passport I had used to come here. Nobody thought that it would work. I looked too feminine: too soft-soft nose, soft eyes, soft mouth, soft ears, soft cheeks. But by the time we got to the security gate at the airport, the soldiers were distracted, and nobody questioned it. But for a week after we arrived in Canada, I copied the way my brother walked, the way he ate, yawned, and brushed his teeth. Nobody told me when it was safe to stop pretending, and I found that I enjoyed this very much. I seemed to be more liked. More respected. But it might have been that people who knew what we had to do as refugees pitied me. So they showered me with gifts and compliments as though any of those things could confirm anyone's sex. But I wasn't confused. I knew who I was. I just found Junior's jeans more comfortable. And his shoes made more sense. So I never quite stopped dressing like him. I played video games. And for as long as I could, I kept my hair short.

♥ Jolie was wearing a jean skirt and tank top that had been cut to reveal her midriff. She had fuchsia on her lips and her hair in a high side ponytail. She was a strange mixture between child and angel, the kind you see in religious picture books, designed to inspire hope in you. But she also had that rag-doll look that made her one of us-hard, used, and tired.

♥ We were stopped at the intersection of Lawrence and Galloway. You got the best of Scarborough exactly here: the low-income houses attached to the getting-by houses, attached to the getting-there houses. But something felt so telling and obvious about this exact intersection. I had the sense that my life was changing, far more than it already had.

♥ "Tits for cigs," Jolie shouted.

"Excuse me?" the man said.

"I'll show you my boobs if you buy us cigarettes."

The man adjusted his shirt. "What about her?" he said.

"She'll let you touch them."

The man disappeared inside the store without another word. We stood silently, trying not to make eye contact, watching the cars drive by, certain they knew what we were doing, that life was coming and we weren't trying to stop it.

~~Tits for Cigs.

♥ I met my cousin Theresa several months after my family moved to Galloway. I was well acquainted with the neighbourhood by then. Had made friends. Had people who knew me by name and would knock on the door and ask for me. Had grown my hair. I felt quite secure with myself and mu status among my peers. But then Theresa came to visit that summer.

♥ She told me that my family was poor, as an explanation for the lack of food and air conditioning in the house. She told me that poverty was like cancer, that there was no cure, but that I could live a fine life anyway.

♥ It was the first week of August. I liked this part of the summer. It was the limbo. We had exhausted our imaginations, had played every single street game, sport, and exercise. All we could do now was fill our days with repetition.

~~Parchment Paper.

♥ My best friend Jolie and I spent every evening after school in the park. I twas an abandoned soccer field behind our housing complex that nearly got turned into a cemetery. It was where gang members used to host meetings or throw parties-which looked exactly same. But the park was also a place of serenity. It sat across from the main road, tucked behind a row of mature trees. Green instead of salmon, like the bricks of our units. A wall between us and them.

We were the kids of Galloway and they were anyone who judged us for it.

..But there was no prize and no other rules. In fact, there was barely a game. It didn't have an end goal. There was just the two of us and the park. Somewhere to go. Somewhere to run away. We lay together.

♥ Dylan had a very sober face, earnest and strong. And behind the dark circles under his eyes, I saw a little boy dreaming of a Jamaican waterfront. Dylan was sweet, sugar-coated.

♥ It was a weekend and it hadn't snowed yet and we were enjoying the simplicity. The park would have been empty if not for us. But the shadows of the housing complex felt like company. We could see Mrs Broomfield behind the fence that led to the south block sweeping leaves in her backyard. Next door, Darnell's silhouette seemed to be stroking guitar strings in the dimness of the kitchen light. And outside, though we couldn't see them, we heard younger girls laughing.

~~The Event.

♥ It was true what they said about my father. He was a dreamer. He was a poet in his mannerisms. In his own personal torture. All intense and empty eyes. The contradictions could make you uncomfortable. But even when I first met him, after Mother, Junior, and I immigrated to Canada from Congo, I knew he was my father. I was six years old, but I knew. It was like hearing my own heartbeat.

♥ Most mornings, I felt as though he needed a second to remember who I was. I'd wave my hand and say, "Hello, it's me? The daughter you abandoned? You know? The only one."

He took such remarks well. He would lean forward and say, "How do you know you're the only one."

♥ "Did I ever tell you I used to live in the West End? Lakeshore West." He was looking out the window, fondling the edges of the train seat.

"In the city?"

"The exact opposite of here. Before they started with all those tall buildings, I lived in a small apartment, and it had a window from which I could see the water, like this. This is the strange thing about any pond or stream or ocean-much like this, it is the exact same water, same frequency, same movement, no matter where you're standing in the world."

"Are you sure about that? I would imagine that the water would be different in Asia than it is here."

"Water's water. No matter how you put it."

What do you do with a man who's desperately holding on?

"You talk about your lived experiences like they happened in a dream," I said, finally.

His words never felt sincere to me. If my father were a flower, it would be a flower we would overlook because of its beauty. It would be a flower we'd lose interest in, for its lack of complexity, lack of texture-no pricks, no thorns.

"Of courser, baby," he offered, now drawing hearts on the cloudy window. "Memories come to you the same way dreams do, and for the same reason."

"But then how do you know you're not confusing the two."

"If you can place it in your future, that's how you know it's just a dream."

♥ "There is no love of life without despair about life."

He was quoting Camus. I think it was a defence mechanism. One that I adopted later in life, but differently. I would reference a good text or a poem to lighten the mood. He did it to distract from the unknown.

♥ He held my hand. In public, to perform the correct role of Father and Daughter, he often held my hand. I didn't mind. But I didn't like it, either. I was a straight shooter. I was growing up too quickly and preferred the real and honest. It would have meant much more to me if he had taken me out of school and said, "Loli, we need to get to know each other," as opposed to pretending that we already did. All I knew were stories. So many stories of where he had been. So many stories of why he had left. He had permanent wrinkles around his mouth. Unusual. Most people only have wrinkles around their mouth if they're smiling. Or, alternatively, only if they're perpetually frowning. He was doing neither. He just talked and talked and talked. "Did I ever tell you about my first winter?" I think that my father had enough words in him to rewrite Don Quixote. His favourite book. Because he believed in so many of his stories, I never knew which one belonged to either one of us.

We sat in a coffee shop. Lakeshore was big. And endless. The streets narrowed and remained void of pedestrians. Being there felt like starting over. My father drank his coffee in silence. So did I.

..He wanted to impress me so bad. "The money is good. The money is very good. Maman can focus on her studies. Finally become a real nurse. It will be like old times."

I had so much to say. So much to object to. So many questions. But I worried my words would hurt him. So I smiled. And I tilted my head. And I let him fill the room with memories of me. I suppose he was trying to tell me that this was the great sacrifice. Him leaving after I was born. Him hustling through country after country. Him loving me. Him loving Mother. And in every anecdote, there was so much excitement. Even the mundane and the uninteresting. I looked more like him than I did Mother. And I had taken from him his fascination with the world. His interest in people. Perhaps I had taken some of his pain too. Though I did 't know it yet, and I wouldn't come to know it until it was too late.

I let my father speak because he spoke well. It was easy to mistake his voice for the voice of a siren: calm, quiet, brushing against the shore.

~~Down the Lakeshore.

♥ We used words like "certain" and "particular" to make us sound older. Our mouths had gotten used to swallowing bad air-we found it felt good to spit out words that did not fit.

♥ "Tell me, what's it really like?" I said.

"You know, some men want too much from the world. That's the problem. Too many people want too much of it, and then they take until there is nothing else. But with Henry, I don't know. He doesn't want anything."

"How can you be so sure he wants you, then?"

"That's the thing-he has me, so it doesn't matter."

♥ We were walking to the park, where we spent most of our nights. It was close enough to where we lived that we could rush home in case of an emergency, far enough that nobody who looked could ever find us.

♥ Henry and I laughed even when the stories got sombre. It was impossible not to. Jolie had wit. She was facetious. It was comforting. She told Henry that, most importantly, the kids on the block took her in like one of their own.

"That's because poverty doesn't know race," I said.

Jolie turned around, undid her seat belt, leaned in until our noses were touching. "Even so," she said, "family is family," brushing my braids behind my ear, kissing me wet on the mouth. When she settled back in her seat, Henry smirked. He had hit the jackpot and we all knew it.

♥ I wanted to ask how old he was. Where exactly did he plan to take this relationship? But he pulled her in, pressed his palm on the small of her back, and suddenly, it made sense. Jolie smiled as though she was breathing for the first time. I got settled on the sofa and sucked on the cigarette. They danced, and then they laughed. Even today, remembering her at fourteen, she never looked more like herself.

♥ Back at the park, Jolie and I stretched out on the grass. Jolie scratched my scalp, ran her fingers through the spiderweb of my braids. She asked me what I thought of her boyfriend, and I took a moment to consider this.

"Isn't he a little old?" I said.

She smiled. "It's not that simple. Well, happy birthday, Mermie. Fifteen is a godawful year, but you've got me."

I suddenly realized that my life prior to this day was misleading. That Jolie would make it out of here because she didn't belong anywhere in particular.

♥ For dinner, Mother fried tilapia fish. She served this with rice, lemon, salt, and water. My brother, Junior, picked at his fish, stabbing it with a fork and eating only the parts that looked cooked.

Mother served herself a small portion, put the tail end of her fish in a container for my lunch tomorrow. Told us about work. The usual: an old man with white hair thought that she was his slave, called her "Annabette, the pretty Negro," and when he became lucid in the middle of his speech, he said, "How wonderful to see you bright and early this morning. How high is the sun today?"

♥ I decided to swing when it got dark enough that I could pretend I was fucking the night.

♥ By February, I learned how to be extra fine. If you stand close enough to a window and it's raining, you can feel the drops pierce your skin. The illusion is spectacular. If you sleep with the lights on, you're never truly alone. Now I had lunch by the window in the open cafeteria. I calculated how long it would take the creek behind the school to melt, because on that particular day, I was most certainly fine.

♥ "You haven't answered my question. What's it like? Really?"

"Jesus, you perv. I am talking about love, that's the good stuff. Nothing else matters. There is love and there is a willingness for happiness. The rest is child's play."

"Well, that was pretty cliché."

"I was being romantic."

I was happy I didn't have to explain myself. For a moment, we could pretend nothing had changed between us.

"You suck as a romantic."

"I did the best I could."

Your best was literal dog shit. I didn't say this, out of fear she might agree and I would have to live with knowing that she loved me, but only enough to serve me dog shit. I thought of what she would have said if I had been the one who left for what felt like a decade. Then I was immediately angry with myself for the perpetuating itch I felt to imitate her. The itch began in my head and spread to my mouth, then to my arm, then to my breast. It ended where her hands used to poke.

"You've got balls, and that's a good thing," she would say. "But don't ever try that shit again." Eating me up and spitting me right out.

♥ I asked, "How was it?" "Does the age gap worry you?" "Is there true consent?" And "Are you happy?"

She answered, "Fine." "Sometimes." "Sure." And "I don't know," which was strange to hear because she had always been very certain about everything.

We watched the houses on the other side of the intersection and behind the forest. Four rows of peeling townhomes glued together like one large building that survived a fire but couldn't afford a rebuild.

.."You can stay with me if you want."

"Thanks, but Henry has a place downtown. Besides, your mom certainly hates me."

"Mom doesn't hate anybody in particular. Except maybe Mr Roberto."

"She has a warm way of showing it."

"Yes, well, she came from nothing."

"We come from nothing," she said.

I wanted Jolie to hold me like she often did, to apologize, or to at least push my hair behind my ears. Our shoulders could have been brushing against each other, but the distance between us had become both literal and figurative. I couldn't bring myself to look at her. Instead I looked at the houses beyond, hers and mine, awkwardly existing where everything else had been destroyed.

♥ The water was very blue, unlike what I expected. It seemed to begin where the sky ended, or was it the other way around? Jolie stood on the shore looking more like an image than an actual person. She belonged beyond the water. It crept at her feet, then tumbled away gently when she lifted her toes. Her hair blew in the wind like a sailboat. The entire world was waiting to see if she would run inside the tide and never come out.

♥ "What's going on?"

"What do you mean?"

"You're distant."

"Isn't distance a state of mind?"

"You're answering my questions with questions."

"That's definitive."

"Something's wrong."

She stared at the buildings with their lights perpetually on as if they had something that belonged to her. "I can't live like this anymore."

"Jolietta, please!" I said this, and then it occurred to me that I had been weeping in distress. Messy and childlike. I'm not entirely sure when the crying began, but now it was uncontrollable. Jolie pressed on her face, checking for tears that were supposed to be there but wouldn't come.

"Tell me something, please, anything," I said. Somewhere between the sobbing and the holding my breath and the shutting my eyes and the throwing of myself on the floor, I remembered that Jolie wanted happiness, and this was not it.

~~If Not Happiness.

♥ After Darnell was beaten to death at the intersection of Galloway and Lawrence, everybody kept their doors unlocked, wide open.

..On the television, we heard that the complex where we lived was the ghetto of the poor. We heard that Darnell was a thug who had stolen some money from another thug, and his death was an accident of frustration. We heard that there were no witnesses, and that the criminals were still on the run. We heard that it might have been self-defence, because they found a small knife meant to clean underneath toenails hiding inside Darnell's pocket. We heard that Darnell was a high-school dropout who sold dope and fucked sex workers. We heard that Darnell came from a family of mentally ill people. On a different channel, we heard that government housing should be banned. We heard that Regent Park's revitalization plan was the best thing that could have happened to Toronto. And that Scarborough needed the same chance. We heard that immigrants were taking advantage of taxpayers' money. We heard tat everybody should be on the lookout for two young black men in black hoodies. We heard that the residents of that area-our area-should stay indoors.

♥ In Galloway, Mrs Broomfield was legend for witnessing the Rwandan genocide. Her attitude so much positivity and optimism, like, "This is a war, child, it's not going to last." I liked to apply that to everything else: this world is a war, this neighbourhood is a war, this street, this house, this body, this person, this feeling, this war.

♥ Darnell was in love with a boy named Cory. Some say this led to his death. Some say this is what kept him going when times got rough. Darnell used to go Christmas carolling by himself every July. We never knew when he'd come. We just knew that he would.

This was everybody's favourite story. He spent hours icing his ass afterwards: Darnell was the first kid Mrs Broomfield gave a whooping to.

I looked out into our street. It hadn't lost its colour. It hadn't lost its spirit.

♥ We crossed a few parks to get to the water. We sat on the beach, some adults, mostly kids. We played games all afternoon, and it was intense. Monopoly and Go Fish. When it got dark we made a fire. There were twenty to thirty of us toasting marshmallows for s'mores. Our parents didn't care how late we stayed because they knew we'd be safe. We were safest when we were together. Plus, Mrs Broomfield was there with us.

"What is the difference between this and a genocide?" she asked.

Nobody knew, but everybody understood.

~~This Is Only Temporary.

♥ I began to wear my hair really straight and roll my Catholic school kilt so that my ass cheek would show whenever I bent down. Obviously, I bent down quite often. It wasn't a matter of getting attention. The girls who kept to themselves were the ones constantly being scrutinized. This way, with my blouse unbuttoned and my high heels, I was just like everybody else.

♥ "I'm saving myself for marriage," Phyllis Green said.

"For God?" Tiffani asked, straw stuck between her front teeth.

"No," Phyllis Green persisted. "For marriage."

♥ Before the bell rang, Phyllis Green leaned forward. "I didn't want to ask in front of them. They're so intimidating. What does brainer mean?"

I didn't like the way she had chosen me to be the one she leaned on. I didn't like the way she had created a barrier between us and them. And I especially didn't like the fact that I had never in my life considered Tiffani and Pamela to be "them." And myself to be "the other." I knew in that moment that Phyllis Green was doomed. There was nothing I could do to save her. And, frankly, I didn't want to. I enjoyed my ability to blend in. I was passing.

♥ "I wouldn't read that if I were you," Mason said from the back of the class. He was beautiful like a mistake, with blond curls that would make you question his sexuality.

"Another love note, Mr Corner?"

Mr Parfait was living out his high-school fantasies. In this class, he was the king. In this class, he was God. This could have been true for most of the teachers. Desperate for affection. Getting off on their attention of fifteen-year-olds.

♥ Finally, I looked up. He had a soulful smile. The only thing worse than making a man angry was disappointing him.

♥ I don't know why he was always so kind to me. I couldn't tell if it was genuine or sexual. I tried not to make everything about sex, every act of kindness, every well-wish, every hello. But you go through life being touched, you go through life being looked at, you go through life with an uncle commenting on your breasts, or your brother's friend giving you a condom for your birthday then denying it, you go through life being called a cunt on public transportation, you go through life being followed at midnight, you go through life being told you're pretty, you're pretty, you're so fucking pretty-it gets complicated.

♥ They were whispering now, and I was thinking of nothing. Or the opposite of nothing. Which is everything. But when you're thinking of everything altogether, it's like having no thoughts at all.

~~Phyllis Green.

♥ 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.

♥ 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 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.

♥ 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.

♥ 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.

♥ 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.

..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 form the inside, like a fetus. Death is like being pregnant and never giving birth.

♥ Where had time gone? Why hadn't it told us it would be leaving? Had I been in love with Dylan too? Maybe once.

♥ 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.

♥ 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.

~~Ten-Year Reunion.

♥ 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.

♥ 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.

♥ "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.

♥ She sat on the porch to pray first. In the time it took her to pray, I began to pack. I was putting things that mattered inside a duffle bag. I had no plan. I had no idea where I was going. But I knew it had to be away from here.

Mother was still outside when I was done packing. I sat with her on the porch. My heart was heavy. Everything about being next to her suddenly made me feel uncomfortable. It was like I was feeling years of oppression in that exact moment. I wanted to cry, but I had given up on tears. I wanted to fight, but I felt too weak.

So I just sat there. And I waited. I waited for the courage to go. I didn't know where I was going, but I knew it had to be away from there.

~~Theresa Is Getting Married.

♥ I left home with a duffle bag and no plan. I didn't have a place to go. Didn't have a place to sleep. It didn't matter. I did what I was taught to do: I survived. I found shelter inside of a boy. I had let him pop my cherry, so for a week I thought he owed me this much. He was all I had and there was no turning back. I was grateful he had taken me in. It became romantic because we were both lonely and miserable and young.

♥ Cleaning was what I did to stay occupied. I would look for poetry inside an empty bag of Doritos, or a damp sponge.

♥ He was honest while his head lay on my chest. He was most honest immediately after he came. He'd tell me his side of the story. His version of our childhood. He would tell me what it was like hanging out on Galloway, knowing that he had all the privilege of the bluff. In return, I would give him what he needed. The "You're Perfect for Me" and the "I Like You Just the Way You Are," as a way to regulate his serotonin levels. And Dylan would tell me that he was good, that he was the happiest he'd ever been, and I had much to do with it.

I figured this was better than sex-the real orgasm was the way he looked at me, from afar, from up close.

♥ Dylan told me everything so as to not hurt my feelings. Was it vulnerability that brought people together at the worst times, and so quickly? Or was it the rhetoric. Was it a miscommunication? A matter of translation? When he said, "It's not working out," was it the "it" part that was not working out, or was it the whole damn thing?

So I dug. Maybe growing up in a silent house had made me an expert at hearing the crack in things-the wall, the mattress, the kettle boiling dry. Maybe it was my need for proof of payment. I pushed and pushed and finally:

"I just never pictured myself with a black girl, you know?"

I didn't know.

He said more. It's not you, it's me-well, it's a little bit you, but it's mostly me. I'm just not attracted to black women. But you, you were different. You were hurt, and you're like family. And, I don't know, you needed me, and I guess it was fun, at first, but then it got too real. And it's not that I don't love you, you must know, you're really such a lovable person. And, and, and.

I didn't cry. Not because I didn't want to. But because this was Dylan. This was me. And by the time I was done packing, Dylan was broken. He was still going on about the sorrow. Still fitting me into his narrative. I sat next to him, brought his head to my chest, and let him sob. I imagined how strange it'd be if I just pulled out a nipple and let him suck on it. I rocked him until it hurt him less to leave me.

♥ I love this so much about men. How they can hate a woman and still want them. How they confuse fucking for an "I'
ll see you later.'

♥ I got out into the night, and it felt freeing. That's the funny thing: Rocks lifting from your chest without you knowing they were there in the first place. The moon guiding a path without a pavement to walk on. I liked the night. I liked how it came at the end of every day, no matter what.

~~The Boy From My Youth.

♥ I arrived with a duffle bag and a box of used books. The books I had stolen from high school. I took all the ones we read and then some. It was my fuck you to the school board. It was my proof that I had been somewhere, and I that had left that place. I had nothing else.

♥ Mother and I didn't hate each other. Nor did we owe each other any apologies. We were just not compatible. She would want the house to be set at a certain temperature, and I would have a problem with it. I would leave the door unlocked when I left for school or whatever, and she would ave a problem with it. Those were the little things. Also, after my father's suicide, she lost her voice trying not to cry. We just mourned differently, you could say.

♥ Olivia did this often. She told you who she was. She would laugh, this incredibly alluring laugh, and then she would confirm, "That was me laughing." This wasn't a flaw. I don't believe she had any real flaws. She was just sure. And in case you had her confused, she'd set you straight.

♥ "Have you ever been in love?"

Silence, silence, silence.

"I'm seventeen-what do I know about love?"

♥ I didn't leave the apartment much. Only for groceries, which we did together. Sometimes I might leave to walk down the street and turn at the first sign of drama: a homeless person asking for a cigarette, a car honking at a pedestrian, the traffic light stuck on green. I felt suddenly overwhelmed by sound, by evidence of life being lived and unfolding.

♥ Olivia and I had forgotten about the people we knew before each other. I hadn't heard of Alice in weeks, hadn't thought of Mother in months. We were concerned with the temperature of the apartment and the books we were reading. After that initial month, the conversations were usually like a book club meeting. Still with that same pizzazz of "Do you think Emma Bovary is a justifiable character?" Olivia went out a lot. She'd go to bars but would come home as if she had only been down the corridor and back. Nothing to tell. Nothing to report about the outside world. It as easier to believe it was just the two of us.

♥ A good thirty minutes went by and we ordered another round, and then a third. We waited until we were both feeling it to talk. It felt as if we were meeting each other for the first time. She seemed to me prettier, underneath the dimness of the bar. Her skin glistened. If you looked at her closely, you could see the glitter. It might have been literal. It might have been a residue of her day spent playing with shapes and textures and colours.

"I missed you," she told me when we were drunk, and I told her I missed her too.

It didn't make sense. We spent every single moment together, every day. But the fondness was there. Or the lack thereof was felt. There was this newness we had experienced when we first met that was gone. This excitement and electricity. There was this terrible feeling that we had experienced this great big love story and it was coming to an end, that we had been madly in love and then left each other for years, and now we were meeting again as new people. As the people we were meant to be all along.

♥ I said it and nothing happened. The roof of the bar didn't crack open, and no birds flew from heaven, and there was no earthquake. Olivia didn't offer me any condolences. She didn't tell me everything would be all right. She didn't look at me any different either. She ordered two more drinks and we cheersed. Whatever I said didn't lead to any psychoanalytic conversation. It was just put out into the world, and nobody died because of it.

By the end of the night, when the bar was closing and we had been on our feet dancing, I had forgotten what day it was. I had forgotten about everything in the world except what I knew: we were there, and now we were here, dancing.

♥ I laughed and laughed, and everything in that laughter felt sweet.

~~The Common Room.

♥ "How'd you do it?" I asked.

Lisa/Sugar walked across the room and pressed a button. The blinds came down to cover the floor-to-ceiling windows. She looked so happy, knowing exactly what was hers and how to operate it.

"You can't get too in it-you have to go in, get what's yours, and then go home. Church and state. You just have to decide what's your church and what's your state. What's more important to you? The prayer or the god?"

♥ It went like this every morning. The girls, Lisa/Sugar, and I would meet in the laundry room, where we would hear about each other's real lives while washing towels filled with come. That much load in one basket was enough to kill your nostrils. For the first few days, I thought I was constantly smelling acid. The mood and the stories only got sombre during the night shifts. We heard about assault so often it became as common as good morning. But it never happened in the spa. The room was ours, and we were equipped with buttons that could signal distress. We were actually safer working in a place where there were so many of us and only a few of them. But it was the knowing that we were opening ourselves to that possibility that made us so kind to each other. Every good morning sounded like I'm here if you need me.

♥ "We all know what goes on in those rooms," I said.

"That's the kind of shit that's gonna get you sick, and get us shut down," she said.

"It's not a big deal. Everyone does it."

"There's a difference between fucking for money and pretending you'll fuck for money."

♥ I knew Lisa/Sugar was quitting to complete her master's away from the smell of sued condoms, yet I felt cheated by her departure. Normally, when I knew somebody was about to leave, I distanced myself. I hated goodbyes. People walked out on me without warning so often that I had gotten used to living without them. They came with too much expectation. But in this case, the leaving didn't come with a permanence. I would always know where she lived. I would always know where she'd be working. I would always know how to find her.

On the night of Lisa/Sugar's last shift, I was so happy for her I nearly died. The night came. I stroked some cocks. I imagined my life if I were to become a dentist. The night passed. I walked out of the spa a bit disoriented. It had been months since I had done this walk alone.

~~Men, Tricks, and Money.

♥ For the day, I had coffee instead of wine, wore my hair down instead of up, took the bus instead of a taxi, answered questions instead of asking them. Not vital things, but still-tears.

I took a moment to compose myself. I did not want anybody to see me this way. I did not want anybody to look at me and say, "What's the matter?" with so much pity I'd go off in tears again. I did not want to have to explain that I was not entirely sure what was the matter, but that the matter was here, and had been here the day before today, and the day before that.

♥ She said this smiling very wide. Then she walked away to greet a table. I watched how she did this: used her right leg as a pivot point, held her shoulders pinned backwards, tilted her head slightly to the right, smiled, introduced herself, smiled some more. Next, the table was laughing, and she was laughing. Then she turned in my direction. For a moment, her face was blank, she blinked too slowly, as though to remind herself how to breathe, then she smiled again. The thing was permanently printed on her mouth. She entered the order into the computer, smiling.

I kept watching her. I kept thinking: How does she do it? And then, suddenly, that feeling transferred from server to server. We were all going through it. We all had lives outside of here, and we all came here to forget about them.

~~The Waitress.

♥ Sometimes I didn't know if it was Jonas I wanted or Patty. They both had a holier-than-thou attitude-it's just that Patty didn't know this about herself. I let her have it because there's so much beauty in oblivion.

♥ "Loli is such a fine name. Curious, even if you listen closely. Loli, Loli, Loli. You can hear the intentions in that name."

Jonas told me that in some religions, the ocean is female. It was the oldest, most alive, most beautiful woman he'd ever seen.

"Loli means sorrow," he said. "It derives from the name Dolores, made famous by Vladimir Nabokov."

"It's actually a stream back home," I said. "When my mother was trying to get pregnant, she threw in gold and wished upon the Loli River."

♥ "My most recent was with a boy named Mr Fly. I ate him ad he died. I didn't mean to, he just flew right in front of me."

Jonas didn't laugh. I didn't know that my intention was to make him laugh until he looked at me blankly instead and said, "You're so pretty."

After he kissed me, I pinched together my thumb, index, and middle fingers and said, "A little insecty but good," and then, finally-laughter.

Neither of us said anything the rest of the trail. I followed along behind him. Sometimes he would grab me by the hand and pull me forward so that our bodies could be linked shoulder to shoulder. He towered over me, so it was more like shoulder to elbow. And every time we'd swing together again, what I felt wasn't electricity but the opposite. Like fingers putting out a light.

♥ Patty was still in that cobra position when I walked in. Sometimes I wondered if that's how she stayed all the time. I would leave in the morning and come back late at night to see her unchanged. I mainly stayed with Jonas, but whenever I came back to the apartment, what made it feel like home was Patty, body lifting off from the ground. It was like a familiar smell. She was the smell. She was the home.

♥ "People back home believe that yoga cures diseases," she told me.

"I think that's just people all over," I said.

"But there's modern-day medicine here. The degree of importance is different."

♥ Patty didn't smile, and I began to wonder if she knew more about Jonas than she let on. It scared me how quickly I went from feeling safe next to her to in need of shelter when she looked at me.

♥ Maybe I was the angry one: I asked him what we were, and I knew that by asking, I would be hurting him.

..When we had sex that night, I wanted to. I thought it might make him stay a while longer. In the morning, when I woke up, I was alone again, and perhaps I had been alone all along.

♥ He didn't open the door when I knocked. I sat on the doorstep and waited. Twenty minutes later, Jonas opened the door. He said I knocked like someone who didn't want to be greeted. He said I walked into a room like someone who was trying to get out of one.

♥ I moved toward him to be held. I needed him to hold me more than I had ever needed to be held. When he didn't, I felt a big suction evacuate my stomach. I felt a sharp pinch on every corner of my body.

This was what I wanted. This was what I came here for. No, really.

♥ The desire to kill myself via incoming traffic didn't feel real. It was like a concussion. It was like my body was a concussion.

♥ I sat on top of the machine, my butt cheeks absorbing the cold. I couldn't locate myself in my skin. Couldn't figure out in which order to arrange the feelings I was feeling.

♥ "Everybody at the bar misses you."

"What does that even mean? Everybody and misses. Misses what. They don't even know me."

I realized that was true for Patty and me. Did we know each other? Or were we only aware of each other's habits? She sang when it rained, and she sang when what she really wanted to do was diagnose me. She sang to study my reaction to her singing. So much about who I was she had guessed by observation. It's all connected, I thought. Even the way she comes and opens my curtains in the morning. It's all the same.

♥ Patty and I lay on the sofa. She combed my hair with her fingers. She curled the baby hairs at my hairline and said, "This little piggy went to market. This little piggy had roast beef. This little piggy had none. This little piggy cried, wee, wee, wee."

I repeated, "Wee, wee, wee," after her. I was laughing. So was the song. So was Patty. I could not have said why. There was just something so funny about childhood-how it attempts to prepare you for the slaughter. How it fails-how it is decorated like a nursery.

♥ When she asked about my mother, it stopped me in my tracks. I'd forgotten I had one.

"Should I call her?" I asked a woman I had never met.

♥ "Shut up!" she said, and I resisted the urge to die, right then and there.

♥ Was there a way to say, "I would kill for you," without sounding erratic?

♥ I went to the park to get away from Patty. It was neatly tucked away inside a neighbourhood on Morningside, up the street from campus. Normally, I wouldn't go to a school park during school hours, but this was urgent. I wanted to see what happened to a baby after it had been born, and then raised, and then given a place to run around.

..At the park, I watched one little boy holding hands with another little boy. They had no idea that people might judge them for the gesture. They held hands and they skipped, running around the park like two little lovebirds. The body doesn't know that a held hand can mean much more than that. Only the mind knows such things. The mind is the greatest nemesis of the body.

♥ If you listen closely, you can hear your body talking to you. It will tell you what it wants. It will tell you what it feels. It will tell you when it's being invaded. That's how women distinguish sex from rape, even if they don't know that's what they're doing. The body does. I remember reading something else, age fifteen: The strongest women are the ones who listen to their bodies. Was I a strong woman? Yes. I could feel the little tug, tug, tug. It was an imaginary tug, but it was the tug of my body telling me that something was inside of it.

♥ "You are coming down from the greatest love of your life. Of course, you want to die. Of course, you can't sleep. There's a bit of a disturbance in being left, don't you think? Being left. It's like, one moment we're fine, and then the next, we're falling apart and there's just no easing into it."

♥ The sky was grey. And if this were another life, and if I were another woman, I would call for rain. But I was stronger than that. I knew the mechanics of my body. I understood the chemicals in the sky. I knew that a grey sky was not definitive.

♥ I went to Shoppers and scanned the family planning section. Condoms, pregnancy tests, cock rings. I took one of each. These were the ingredients for making a family, and I was with child. I couldn't decide if the cock ring was meant to go underneath the condom or on top of it. The cashier looked so embarrassed. I wanted to hug her. I wanted to let her know that it happens to the best of us.

♥ It didn't ring this time. It just went straight to voice mail. And then it was static. And then it was dead. Being blocked is the same as being poisoned. It's like having a plastic bag wrapped around your head.

~~Shut Up You're Pretty.

♥ After the abortion, my life resumed as normal. There was a bit of discomfort as the local anaesthetic faded, but the discomfort felt the same as always.

~~Women's Talking.

♥ So we skipped breakfast.

He poured me another glass of morning apple-bourbon. We walked the dog. We shower-sexed. We stretched out on the sofa. I wrote him a poem. He sat up on the bed and listened to me read. Every day felt quite the same. We'd fuck. We'd drink. We'd eat. We'd say something we'd wish we hadn't. We'd walk the dog. We'd apologize. I'd read to him out loud. In that exact order.

♥ We crossed the road. The dog took a shit. She looked back at us and swung her tongue. He told me the funniest things she'd ever done: she ran away from a snowman last winter, she hid inside the laundry basket to challenge him to a game of hide-and-seek, she can smell me coming from the elevator, she wiggles her tail like a doorbell. I let him talk at me, and I let him kiss me. The talking and the kissing and the walking of the dog kept me coming back. The bourbon. The world I had outside of him was bad. It was winter now. The snow was uneven.

In the kitchen, he told me about work. Same old. Someone in the office pissed him off. He drank too much during lunch and never went back. Came home. Mixed himself a drink. Got in bed, and now here were are.

♥ The sex was interchangeable. We used it as a home and a weapon. Otherwise, we fucked because it rained a lot on that particular day, and neither one of us liked it when it rained. By month three, the sex became troubling. I couldn't tell if we were having sex to feel closer to each other or to create some distance between us.

♥ Ben was now giving me his back. I still felt the pain of the sex. Or rather the distance of the sex. Or rather the fear that the sex was all we had. Or rather the feeling that the sex was all he wanted. Or rather the knowing that the sex was what kept us together.

♥ As for me, I had been reporting an intense feeling of suffocation. In that, my emotions were coming out of my body. In that, they were taking the form of people I knew.

♥ I don't know why I stayed. And I certainly don't know why I kept going back. Perhaps because I was so used to being there. So used to being that person. I could barely imagine it any other way. I was always the whore. I was always the mistress. I was always the one they reached for when they needed a drink. And maybe, after years of this, I was ready to accept it.

♥ When he left to take a shower, I noticed the self-help book I bought for him for his thirty-fifth birthday. The turning year. The year all men live to die. I wrote inside, For what it's worth, I love you, boobs. I grabbed the book now, ripped out the page, threw it in the garbage. His dog in the corner watched me do this, scorned me for it, told me that I was being a bad, bad girl.

When he came out of the shower, I said, "How far are you in the book?"

He walked over to the closet, hung the towel, moved so slow I watched his entire life unfold on his back. He came over and kissed me on the forehead. This was his way of signalling me to leave.

He said, "We can't go on like this," to which I promptly responded, "Okay," and left without saying goodbye.

~~Old-Fashioneds.

♥ So I fucked a lot, and I drank a lot, and I wrote a lot of apology letters. That's how bad I was. And then one day, I crowned myself a poet.

♥ ..we looked crazy together. In love or in hatred. Being with Olivia, I was terrified. She didn't terrify me. But it was what I was willing to do when I was around her, what I was capable of-that's what terrified me.

♥ I was surrounded by women who had been destroyed by their own imprisonment.

I went out on the balcony and a woman told me it as a smoke-free zone. She gave me a lollipop and told me to suck on it. She watched me for some time, but once she saw there wasn't any light left in me, she ran back with the others.

♥ Outside, rain began to pour. That was my cue to go. I stood up straight. I tried to get inside my pants, but they wouldn't fit. I decided to forget the pants. Anna closed the bottle with a look of pure accomplishment. Nobody drank. Nobody fought. And nobody died.

On Queen Street, I went into the first bar I saw, all wet and smelly and depressed. I ordered whatever was on special, and I stared at it. A thought came to mind: I miss my mother. I drank and drank and drank.

~~Sober Party.

♥ In the kitchen, my mother is dressing big pieces of blue tilapia fish, which she says was imported directly from the Congo River. It's late in the afternoon, and I am thinking of one thing most specifically. How many men have I made this exact meal for? How many women? How many friends, lovers, acquaintances? How many people who had other people, and why?

♥ This was before she began to lose her hair from the cold. We did not have cold temperatures like this back home. We had forest fires, communal ovens for cornbread, outdoor churches, street killings. But the cold, the snow, frostbite-these were foreign to my mother. Every word, every thought, every feeling would be hidden in her pores, and when she began to faint because of low blood pressure, it would be in the way her face hardened that would predict a fall.

♥ She repeated every new English word she heard. Sometimes, in her sleep she would say, "We," or "Buy" or "Here." She slept on the bottom bunk by herself, and Junior and I took the top bunk in the rectangular bedroom we hated. It had a small nightstand facing a window. It was through that window that we saw our first snowfall.

When she struggled to remember where we were, where the snow was coming from, what country and in which year the turbulence began, she would say in a rising voice, "We," while looking out that very window. Then, sombre, she would say, "Buy." Then, calm, "Here," repeating the words in no particular order, until there was a terrible silence in the room. It was what she knew, what she understood: here, we, buy. Words that meant: mother, immigrant, fighter. She wold take her children and hold them tight to her breast, take time kissing them each on the forehead, repeating, "Buy, here, we." And when my father would come visit us at the shelter, before we could afford to all move into the townhome in the small, tight housing complex on Galloway Road, again she'd say, "Here, buy, we," sometimes peacefully, sometimes sadly. With the flat of her palm, she would rub my father's cheek, penetrating.

We don't talk about this today.

Instead, my mother asks me to come home for Sunday dinner. She tells me that I must wrap my hair when I sleep, that posture is important, that I do not need to bleach my skin, that salt and pepper are necessities.

"Chin up, stand tall," my mother says.

I listen very carefully to the humming of the fish, sizzling in the pan, saying: "Here, we, buy."

~~Tilapia Fish.