Authors: Joan Thomas
She straightens up her bed and crawls back in. At Thanksgiving they lay curled in this bed for a whole afternoon, she and Noah, when Kajri had gone home and all the jocks from the dorm were out at some sporting event. Sylvie drew Noah an awesome sleeve tattoo with Sharpies and wouldn’t let him shower before he went home for turkey dinner. She expected to have a whole new stash of memories to draw from after Christmas, but the Christmas holiday was totally stolen from them. She saw him twice, not counting the airport run. Just twice – it’s unbelievable. And on New Year’s Eve, after she’d said no to three house parties so they could be alone, he invited Zach along, and they were both totally wasted by the time they picked Sylvie up. The whole night was a bust.
She hugs her pillow, trying to call him up. It’s the parts of his body that have nothing to do with sex that move her most – his neat ears, his bony ankles, and the slight widening of his nose where it was broken when he was little (something she never comments on, because she doesn’t want to remind him that it was her fault). Last summer, when they met after twelve or thirteen years of not seeing each other, he was naked. It was night out on Lake Winnipeg, and he was caught in a spotlight, balancing on the gunnels of a canoe with his arms out. He dove into the water the instant the light hit him, but not before a vivid picture had etched itself permanently in Sylvie’s mind.
They were out at a diving rock at Zach’s cabin, which was close to the research station at Presley Point. They – five girls counting Sylvie and Thea – had driven out late and found an empty A-frame cabin all lit up. They could hear the guys out at the rock. Jenn wanted to swim out. “Don’t be stupid,” Thea said. “You’ll drown and take us down with you.” In the boathouse they found an old rowboat with oars in its locks. They waded in and drew it out and stepped into it off the dock. Creaking their way across the lake, they were laughing softly because they knew the guys would be skinny-dipping. Sylvie had a very special feeling that night, because she had just broken up with her Neanderthal boyfriend Seth. She was herself again, but more than herself: her new, experienced, single self.
Thea was carrying a great big flashlight. When they got close, she shone it at the rock and spotlighted this new guy. Up on the gunnels of his canoe, he looked like Leonardo da Vinci’s man in a wheel. Not perfect in some muscle-bound way, just neat (neater and younger than the Da Vinci man), well-proportioned, his penis drooping from the hair on his abdomen in the normal, beautiful way. Like a representation of
Homo sapiens
(masc.) at this stage of evolutionary history. The light hit him, and everybody shouted and
laughed and he dove neatly into the water. In a flash, Sylvie pulled off her T-shirt and shorts and bra and panties and rolled out of the rowboat. She was clumsy rolling out – she almost tipped the boat – and she heard Thea and Jenn scream as she fell sideways into the cool water. When she surfaced, she lay on her back and looked up at the Big Dipper pouring stars into the lake, aware of the new guy treading water close by in the darkness.
Eventually everybody stripped and jumped in, and they fooled around in the water for a long time. The guy with the canoe was the only actual stranger, but they were all shy with each other. They’d been friends since junior high but most of them had never seen each other naked. Zach’s golden lab was there, and they threw an orange ball and he swam after it like a fool. They started to play keep-away. Sylvie caught the ball deftly in one hand – and it wasn’t a ball at all, it was a little stuffed animal, wet and yucky, a cheap Kmart toy a kid had left in the bottom of the boat.
She threw it at the new guy (Canoe, they called him), high, so he had to jump out of the water up to his waist to catch it. He caught it easily and threw it back at her and she tried to puzzle out the mystery of where she had seen and loved him before. He looked like an actor she knew (that’s what she figured at first), so crazy familiar, the straight, dark line of his eyebrows, the way he tossed his hair back as he levitated in the water to throw the orange toy, as if this were a moment on a
DVD
she had watched over and over.
He’d beached his canoe on the rock. Later, when she had her shorts and T-shirt on and her damp panties and bra scrunched into a pocket, she went up to him and said, “I’ll be your bowsman.”
“I’ve only got one paddle,” he said, but she stepped in anyway as he slid the canoe into the water. Two of her friends tried to clamber in and he pried their hands off the gunnels. He wasn’t laughing; he was deadly serious. Sylvie knelt in the bow and they
slid silently towards the empty cabin with its blazing lights. He paddled on the left the whole way – he had a perfect J-stroke – and she sat like a queen on a barge, the water slipping coolly past her dangling fingers. There was no moon, only the darkness spangled above them and the water brooding below. She can’t pinpoint the moment she realized. It was just a knowing that grew in her, like the trees materializing from the dark as the canoe glided closer to shore.
Dawn was streaking the sky when they carried the canoe to the boathouse. They took it in the back door, walking up the rickety steps and onto a narrow ledge of rotting timbers, shuffling along carefully in the perfect darkness. Halfway in he stopped and fed the canoe forward, crouching to lay it gently on the black water. She couldn’t see him, she could only sense his movements. Then he stood up and she felt his hand around her wrist.
“Sylvie,” he said, “listen,” and his voice echoed. They stood still and she heard the dry whir of bats. Then she sensed him take a step closer, felt his hand on her waist, felt the recognition and welcome in the kiss that landed first beside her mouth and then slid over.
“Hey, Sparky!” she said when she got her mouth back.
At supper Kajri tries to get Sylvie to go down to the caf. “You’re turning into an agoraphobe,” she says. But in the end she carries dinner up to their room. It’s the green and purple casserole Sylvie hates, but it’s the only vegetarian option and she manages to eat it. Afterwards they work in silence at their separate desks, their computer screens the only lights in the room.
Somebody’s smoking a cigar in the lounge – Sylvie can smell it. The fire door at the end of the hall slams and Adam Moffat walks by laughing his crazy laugh, and in the next room Amy Winehouse
starts to sing. Kajri turns her face, lit with pale blue light from her screen, and they share a sad smile. Oh, Kajri. She is as kind and lovely as her name.
When they’re ready for bed they watch the news but there’s no mention of the climate summit. Mostly it’s hockey. “Hockey ice is the only ice the media cares about,” Sylvie says. She surfs for a minute, pausing on the nature channel at footage of two big turtles lumbering along a narrow path. One’s ahead, the female, moving as if she wants to be alone. The male is chasing her, going ten percent faster than normal turtle speed. When he catches up with her, he just keeps on walking. Sylvie and Kajri watch in fascination as he climbs her back and the two shells start to clack together. The male’s mouth is wide open in an idiotic smile and you can see the red triangle of his tongue. Then the female pulls forward and he topples to the side and lies with his feet in the air.
“Reminds me of Seth,” Sylvie says, turning the
TV
off.
“He’d lie with his feet in the air?”
“No, but the minute it was over, he’d reach down to the floor for his shorts and then he’d get out of bed – well, not bed, we’d be on the couch in his parents’ basement with a blue plastic swordfish over our heads – and he’d go get a beer from the bar fridge and change the track on his iPod. Once he picked up this hair-zapper thing he ordered off
TV
and started running it over his pecs. I guess what I mean is he always wanted to have sex no matter how we were feeling with each other.”
For a year and a half Sylvie has been unable to resist acting like a wise older sister, taking every chance to enlighten Kajri. Kajri’s parents, who are both doctors and live in a town a hundred miles away, have asked her not to date until she has entirely finished her education. And she’s going along with it – truly complying, not just lying to them. So far virginity is still working for her, as you
can see by her flawless, glowing skin and her perfect
GPA
. “I can date through you,” she used to say to Sylvie, although obviously she’s stopped saying that now.
She makes a pitying noise and Sylvie wishes she’d kept her mouth shut about Seth. It’s embarrassing to have people feeling sorry for her, although if she can take it from anyone, she can take it from Kajri.
“Noah was more sensitive?”
“He was shyer. But I mean, he didn’t have any experience.”
“Yeah, you said. That’s weird, because he’s older than you, and so hot. Well, except for his hair.”
“What’s wrong with his hair?”
“It’s not exactly even. It’s like shingles.”
“That’s ’cause he cuts it himself.”
“Why? Is he that poor?”
“No, he just wants to be self-sufficient. I think it’s very cool. The thing about Noah is he totally lacks the flirtation gene. Girls talk to him and they assume he’s married or something. Or gay. I might not have had the nerve, except that we were best friends when we were little. And he was the one who kissed me first, last summer when we met up again.”
“It’s so romantic. It could never happen to me. I never had boys as friends, for one thing.”
“Well, his mother was home-schooling, and when all the kids his age started school, he was alone on the street, so he had to play with me. I loved him then. He was such a neat kid. He taught me all kinds of stuff.”
“Like what?”
Sylvie sees them lying on the floor at Mary Magdalene’s, drawing an intricate city with tunnels and tepees in it. She sees them in the sun-baked back lane, the anthills they messed with, the
dandelions exploding through cracks in the pavement. She was tiny then. All she has is still shots: she and Noah squatting in the thistles by Wendy’s garage, or hiding in the dark, spidery shed, peering out through a narrow crack as the kid who was It wandered around the yard calling their names. Memories like little slits into a dazzling world where everything is big and distinct, shining with light. She wants to protect it from scrutiny.
“I don’t know,” she says to Kajri. “Just stuff.” She lies back and pulls the duvet over her. “You know what’s making me feel really shitty now? Can I tell you, Kajri?”
“Sure, of course.”
“It’s my own fault I got pregnant. I told all the parents that I fell into the perfect use category, but it’s not true. I never missed a pill, but I didn’t wait long enough when I started. I was going up to Presley Point for the weekend, so I went to Shoppers and filled the prescription and I took the first pill that Friday. Like, just a few hours before we made love. I was stupid. I was so fucking stupid.” She’d been willing to be stupid because it was so sweet being able to say to Noah, We’re fine, I’m on the pill.
“Did the doctor tell you how long you had to wait for the pill to kick in?”
“I don’t think so. There was a sheet in tiny print in the box, but I didn’t read it. All he said was that it might make me feel a bit sick at first. ‘Your body will think it is pregnant’ – that’s what he said.”
Kajri’s face is tilted sympathetically. You don’t even have to ask Kajri to keep things confidential – that’s the sort of friend she is. “Have you told Noah?”
“No, I didn’t really have a chance. His mother made him go to Calgary.”
“She
made
him? Isn’t he, like, twenty-two?”
“Well, his grandmother lives there, and who knows – she’s really old and they think it might be her last Christmas. He’s a nice guy, what can I say.”
Kajri looks unconvinced. “But will you tell him,” she persists, “when you get a chance?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you afraid he’ll be mad?”
“It’s more that … Well, Noah is more or less perfect as he is.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s so … I don’t know … he has, like, perfect focus and concentration. He lives by his values. He doesn’t screw up. He’s happy in himself. He’s going to do good work in the world. I don’t want this to change things for him. It was my fault, and I don’t want his life to be trashed because of it.” She hasn’t answered the question, but she can tell from the look on Kajri’s face that she’s already thinking of something else.
“You know, you sound like Mileva Marić.”
“Who’s she?”
“Einstein’s girlfriend. Well, his wife, eventually. She had a baby when they were both students, and they were so afraid it would interrupt his brilliant career that they gave it away. Or maybe it died. No one knows for sure.” She leans over, picks up an emery board from her bedside table, and starts to work on a perfect nail. “So,” she says, “is that what you’re going to do? Put the baby up for adoption?”
For the first time ever, Sylvie senses something less than respectful in Kajri, and it hurts her. “If I put the baby up for adoption, it will be because it’s best for me,” she says. “And
my
brilliant career. And for the baby, of course.”
Kajri gives a little smile and goes to the bathroom to brush her teeth. When she comes back out, she flicks off the light. Sylvie
watches her move through the dark in her white T-shirt and shorts. “Adoption would be pretty scary,” she says as she crawls into bed. “Like, you’d never know what sort of people your kid would end up with. Whether she would be abused or something.”
“It’s not that,” Sylvie says. “I’m pretty sure she would be loved. People who want a baby that badly would probably love it. It’s just … It’s a girl. So
how
will they love her? I mean, there’s ordinary consumerism, but with girls there’s the whole princess thing.”
“I know what you mean. The pink canopy bed, the plastic tiara.”
“Right! They’ll take her to Disneyland. And they’ll put her in beauty pageants. She might end up a cheerleader.”
Kajri doesn’t respond.
“Did you ever play
The Sims
?” Sylvie asks after a minute of lying in the dark.