. . .
After the race I go home alone even though Sol and Giselle want to take me out for ice cream and Sol promises to buy me a Peanut Buster Parfait (my favourite) at the DQ. The house is quiet. I run a bath and sit in the tub till the water gets cold, till the skin on my toes is transparent and I can rip up the little holes in them. My feet are really awful things. Mom and Giselle keep threatening to take me for a pedicure. Once, last summer, Mom came at them with a pumice stone and a bottle of foot lotion, and after she massaged my feet, filed my toenails down, and painted them a pretty shade of pink, she held them to her face and kissed my blistered soles. Of course, not two days later I ran a cross-country race in the rain and wrecked them. Then I crawled into Mom's bed after a hot bath, showed her my chipped toenails, and asked her to redo them. "I can't always be doing these things for you, Holly, you've got to learn to do them yourself," she said. But then she sighed and asked me what colour I'd like and I picked a deep berry purple.
It seems she's right; it takes a lot of time and care to keep a body together, to be a girl. Sometimes it seems too hard, and I can't really be bothered. My hair is cropped short and when I'm not wearing my uniform I wear jeans and men's button-down shirts and sneakers. I do like baths, but the rest of it—the plucking, the shaving, the eyeliner application—it's bad enough having to watch Kat and Giselle do it. I remember being about seven and sitting on the hamper in our shared bathroom, watching Giselle do her makeup. She spent hours in front of that mirror in high school, but now she's more like me and doesn't spend a lot of time on her looks. The only concession she makes is washing her face and plucking.
"Doesn't that hurt?" I asked her as she plucked her eyebrow at a severe angle.
"It hurts like hell. Don't ever pluck or shave, Hoi. If anyone can get away without doing it, it's you."
My feet are soaked enough to peel now but I feel lazy, so I turn on the hot water and splash it on my legs and wash off the cuts on my elbows and knees, then drape my legs over the edge of the tub. I make a diamond shape around my stomach with my hands, thinking about how some of Giselle's friends have their belly buttons pierced, how mine would look pretty good pierced but how Mom would probably kill me if I did something like that. Then I place my finger inside me, feeling how tight and warm I am. I feel the tender skin around the opening of my vagina; it has a name, a funny one, hymen. So much trouble and worry over such a little piece of skin that makes a woman bleed, once only. Giselle told me that in China some women put egg white on their vaginas to pretend that they're virgins. I like mine. I feel it open when I stretch my legs before I run. I wonder if you can find it after you've had sex for the first time. I'll ask Giselle. She'll probably laugh though and make some dumb joke.
"It's not afterbirth, Holly. What, you want to bury it?"
Maybe, I don't know, I'll say. There's so much fuss about sex, it seems like you should do something to mark the occasion.
The bathwater is thoroughly cold now, but I still don't want to get out so, half out of boredom, half out of curiosity, I stick my finger deep inside myself, till I can move the tip of it around. When I pull it out, a jolt of pleasure. I do it again. Hey. It's a little button, a tiny electric button. Then I spread my legs wider, my pelvis just out of the water, arched, and I rub the top again till the feeling gets more golden.
Suddenly, for some terrible reason, Sol's face is in my head, not his body or his arms but his smiling, shy face. His blue-black eyes dance at me the way they sometimes do before he makes a joke. The more I try to erase the image of his eyes watching me, the clearer it becomes, and soon I stop trying to erase it and imagine him watching me in the bathtub, how sexy I look, with my knees in the air, my hair wet and slicked back. The more swollen and wet I become, the wider his eyes get until his face is wiped away entirely, or maybe swept up in the rush of blood shooting down from my brain to the top of my legs.
Is this what love is? Having someone touch you in these tiny, hidden, wet places, without complaint? And then it's over and I can't wonder about love anymore because there's no one here but me in this terrific yellow surge of fever, throbbing through my legs, my heart.
I turn on the cold water and duck my head under the tap. Then I plug my nose and wade my head under the dirty grey water of my filth. I don't come up for air with my secret lonelies until I hear my sister banging on the door, begging to be let in.
chapter 11
Broken bones (youths): If the bone ends are rigidly fixed together, healing occurs without callus formation. However, youths' bones take longer to achieve normal strength.
Three nights running I dream of Solomon jumping off the edge of a small cliff, wearing small paper wings just to make me laugh. Part of me is scared 'cos I think he's going to hurt himself, break every bone in his body, and part of me can't stop screaming and howling with laughter.
On the fourth night the wings begin to tear, his broad white shoulders begin to glow through the backing, his hair is dirty, he smells of tinny sweat and the sea. Then one night, instead of jumping, he walks right up to me. Kneeling beside me, he presses his hand between the folds of my skirt and, bending in, he says:
Love me, love me more.
chapter 12
On Saturday I play pick-up with a bunch of older guys at the courts at school because there's a big game next week and I need to be on top of my game. Me and Chantal, a six-foot-tall black girl, are the only girls. At first the boys didn't want us to play with them but then they said it was OK.
Chantal and I are on opposite teams, so we have to cover each other. The guys have this weird way with us. For example, if we travel or double-dribble they won't call us on it, or, if we get knocked down by a good block they'll yell, "Foul!" and one of us gets to take a shot. But this favouritism also has a downside because they're always telling us what to do, like we don't know the rules of basketball or something.
Roy, who just missed a perfect layup, tries to blame it on me by saying, "You should've been roving the key, Holly. You weren't there."
Roving the key my ass. You rove the key! Chantal and I usually suck it up. We just roll our eyes at each other, but Chantal had had enough: "Screw you, Roy! Me 'n Hoi are always roving, pass us the ball for a change. Make it worth our while."
Today is our big tournament downtown. I can't decide if I love or hate these inner-city games. Riding on a yellow school bus all morning just to get your ass kicked by girls who can outrun, outshoot, outreach you, every time, is kind of depressing. They're good. They're fast. And if you try to foul or slap the ball away you're finished.
Jen gets fouled out by the second period and I can tell by all the teeth-sucking and cussing going on, on both sides, that there is going to be trouble after the game. I think even Saleri, who is usually clueless, can sense it too.
"Go on home, Jen," he says.
"Fuck 'em." Jen sits down beside me, massaging her fingers, thinking she's so butch, so tough.
Saleri lets me play in the last two periods even though my knee is acting screwy and nothing goes right. The other team keeps slapping the ball out of my hands and we keep missing passes and blaming each other. It's a mess, really hopeless. We lose by twenty points. I can feel the hair on the back of my neck stand up in straight, sweaty spikes.
And sure enough, after the game, the other team sends a messenger into our locker room.
"They're waiting for you in the parking lot!" a small grade-six girl with thick glasses yells before hightailing it out of our change room. I meet Jen's eyes. Her eyebrows go up.
"Did someone say rumble? Yeah! They're on!" Jen yells, slamming her locker shut and slapping my back. Full of anger about losing the game, Jen's got an excess of energy suddenly. "What do you say, Hoi? You in?"
"I don't know, Jen, they're, like, pretty huge girls."
"We can take'em."
We limp outside like a bunch of soldiers, Jen in front jumping around, ready for a scrap. Kat lags back a bit, looking scared, watching the other girl
s swarm around us.
"Hey, losers." A tall girl with long black hair and beady eyes appears in front of me and pushes my chest. I push back, my heart suddenly in my throat.
"Don't touch my fucking girl," Jen says, exploding from behind me like an unleashed dog. Something inside me is trembling, shaking, until the guard on the other team steps forward and snatches Jen up by the collar of her coat, like in an old gangster movie.
I am tired in my eyes. The world is without colour except for the white maddening motion of the guard's jacket up against Jen. Her knuckle under Jen's chin looks like a rock and I hook my arm through Jen's thinking if I can keep her next to me it will be OK. OK . . .
But there's another girl on top of me by then and the others are receding like they're running backwards, slowly, their running shoes kicking my face, the smell of rubber and scum in my skull and then, out of nowhere, there's, like, five girls jumping on us at the same time. Me and Jen, still tangled, collapse onto the pavement, crushed at the bottom of the pile. But then I am cut from her, am alone, in the air, landing on cold metal.
Then Saleri's voice and the smell of blood in my broken nose. In my eyes a warm liquid pain, feeling the tread of someone's shoe on my chest. Someone grabbing my hair, yelling at me but I can't hear them. I can't hear anything except Mr. Saleri's calm voice and the whoosh of blood in my ears.
I'm on top of a car. Can't move. Jen's face hovering and Saleri pulling me up by the arms and leading me to another car, asking, "What happened? What happened? What happened! Who started this? You girls, you girls . . ."
And all I can do is fold my hand over my face to keep it from leaking out, to keep it arranged and contained in my hand and Saleri saying: "Jesus, Jesus, JesusChrist." He's starting up the car and I know Kat and Jen are in the back seat, all quiet-like, and this, along with Mr. Saleri's taking the Lord's name in vain, gets me worried, so I try pulling the mirror down to see if I look like a fucking Picasso painting or what and there's a leak that feels like a sparkler just exploded in my nose and blood, ah blood, so I don't even get to see how messed up my face is 'cos my chest feels like it's collapsing.
Though my nose is broken, I don't cry on the way to the hospital. I don't cry either when the doctor sticks his fingers in the cracked and searing regions of my chest, saying, "This won't hurt a bit." And then there's a roll of thunder in my head and the world is a tunnel. And then I am finally home free.
. . .
The hardest thing about being in the hospital is having to sleep over, alone. After Dad died, Giselle and I started sleeping with Mom almost every night. Most nights Giselle slept turned away from me but sometimes she and I would face each other, curled up on one side of the bed, our fingers locked together.
When Dad was alive, sometimes all four of us would sleep in their bed: me tucked safely under his arm and Giselle curled around Mom's hip. If we were camping or on holiday, we'd push all the mattresses together. My father would tell us stories until we dropped away to sleep, or he would tell weird jokes Giselle and I never got.
When we were kids and we'd come climbing onto them like little animals, clawing our way into their soft flannel warmth, Mom would laugh loudly at my father's standard joke: here he was, thousands of miles away from his peasant upbringing, and still sleeping with his children. We'd all, especially my mother, laugh hysterically, as if it were the first time we had heard it.
"Dammit, girls, why'd I spend so much money on beds?" he'd say, pretending to be annoyed, shifting his body and pulling my knees onto the mattress so my too-long legs wouldn't hang off the bed.
"You know, it's too bad we don't have a goat, because the goat could sleep with us too. And look at this one," he'd say, picking me up by the ankles while I squealed with delight. "Wearing socks to bed! And mismatched! One red, one green! A regular gypsy princess!"
We slept like animals, rolling into their arms with our grizzly girl dreams. Giselle and I were just happy that they never kicked us out of their room when we crept in latd at night, worried about something, sick, or not tired enough to sleep.
I liked the mornings best, when Giselle and I would pretend to sleep and they covered us with their duvets. He'd sit there stroking my calf, or my hair, drinking his coffee, the smell of his strong black espresso filling the room, waiting for Mom to return from the shower and, when she did, she'd move to the other side of the room to dry herself. With my eyes half-open, I'd watch her put on her clothes. I was fascinated by the dark Caesarean scar weaving its way from her pubic hair to her belly button, marking my entry into the world. Then I'd slant my half-closed eyes across the room and pretend I was asleep, that I didn't hear their soft voices murmuring about the day ahead, about us, in a language I couldn't understand.
After he died, we didn't laugh at all about goats or socks and gypsies. Most nights, I'd just hold Mom's hand, while she lay there staring at the ceiling and Giselle turned her back to us. And our mourning, which had been a sharp and stinging absence at first, became a dull ache.
When I started junior high, and joined the basketball team, I also started falling asleep on the couch with the TV on.
"I left your breakfast on the table and some money for juice on the counter," Mom would say, touching my shoulder. "It's almost eight-thirty." And I'd slip from sleep into my mother's brown eyes each morning, a pain in my neck from sleeping in a sitting position.
"Mama, why are we so sad?" I'd whisper as she pulled her hand through my hair.
The first night Giselle came back from the hospital, she eyed me strangely when I sat in Mom's bed reading a comic book. "Don't you think it's time you slept on your own, Hoi?"
I shook my head and tried to ignore her. But that night, Giselle, wrapped in a sheet, crawled in between Mom and I. "I'm so cold," she whispered, though it was May and already warm.
And as I stroked my sister's bony shivering spine, I felt the down, the soft white anorexic hair that had grown there to protect her when she'd slept alone all those nights away.
Now, like her, I am in this hospital room alone. If I close my eyes long enough and do not move at all, it is like I am nothing. It is not sleep, and not a quiet prayer. It is just disappearing, with no sound or heat or pain. Out of time, an absence. I am absent. In this room.
chapter 13
Strapping broken ribs is discouraged,
After the call, Mom and I go to the hospital in silence. We walk through the brightly lit halls, down to the children's section, where Holly is sitting up, stoned on painkillers. There's a bandage over her nose and she's arranged on a pile of pillows. I check to make sure they haven't strapped her ribs. She has a wan smile on her face and says, "Hey!" a little too cheerily as we pull chairs up next to her bed.
Mom's face is riddled . . . with what? I can't tell anymore. Perhaps a mixture of anger and relief, or simply the exhaustion of someone used to hearing bad news. But she's smiling too as she takes Holly's hand and mine in the other.
I am the first to speak, reaching out to stroke Holly's hair.
"You OK?"
"Yeah." She tries to smile but her chapped lips crack.
"Don't ask me what happened. Whatever. Don't."
Holly looks straight ahead at the drawing of Winnie-the-Pooh scooping honey from a jar. It's not a very good depiction: old Winnie looks like a jaundiced, jovial rat.
But I wasn't planning on asking. I know the aggression of Catholic girls in Holly's world, how they love to fight. It was my world too, for all of grade school and high school; seven long years of untenable hell. I also know what Holly is capable of: I've seen her do handstands on gravel, belly flop off a six-foot diving board. Holly lives for this stuff, but then I'm surprised because she starts talking, slowly, in her old-Holly baby voice:
"I'm sorry, Mommy. So sorry."
Injuries known as "crash injuries" are due to severe pressure.
While Holly stays in the hospital overnight, Sol takes me to a nice Italian place in the east end. He looks handsome; he's clean-have
n and smells of soap, though he manages to spill red wine on his shirt before we've even ordered food. He's even gotten his cast off and shows off his dextrous wrist by rotating it in circles over the table. It looks thinner and paler than his other wrist.
"Did it hurt when they cut it off?"
"Naw, but I hate hospitals. Makes me nervous being in one, no offence."
"I know. Most people don't like hospitals. I keep thinking of Holly, looking so small in that blue hospital gown. I keep thinking of her nose," I say as Sol peruses the menu. I don't look. I already know what I want. I always order the same thing at good Italian places: mussels in white wine sauce and garlic bread. Filling, but the lowest possible calorie count.
"Did you find out at least if Holly got some punches in?"
I shake my head. "No, she likes to do daredevil stuff. This one time she tried to jump off the roof into the driveway through the basketball net. But she doesn't like to fight people. Except me, of course."
"So, when's she coming back?"
"Tomorrow, or maybe the day after. They say she landed on her head, well, her face, really, so they want to keep her for observation."
He nods.
My glass misses my mouth and I end up spilling water on my face. Sol takes his napkin and wipes it off.
"I miss your hair," he says. I've got it wrapped up in a blue scarf tonight, presentable.
"Oh, I used to have really great hair, not to be vain, but I take pride in five things in life—my studying skills, my hair, and. . ."