Sweet Affliction (2 page)

A few hours in to the drive we stop at a scenic lookout—some ragged cliffs and a waterfall. My legs feel stiff and creaky. We hike to where the water crashes over the edge, so busy it makes you tired to look. Angela leans on the railing, facing us instead of the waterfall, like she's posing for a travel brochure.

There's a little girl being led down the path by the elbow, both hands covering her eyes. Halfway to the lookout she freezes, locking her knees and refusing to move. Her mother lets go of her arm and starts walking ahead.

“I'm going now!” she says. “Bye!”

The girl stays put, whimpering. Several hikers stop to try to talk to her, but every time they approach she takes a step backward, palms still pressed to her face.

A smiling middle-aged woman crouches beside the girl. “Don't be afraid of the waterfall, sweetie. It's very pretty.”

“I hate pretty!” the girl shrieks.

By the time we get to the resort, a light drizzle is falling. My aunt Lydia is nearly in tears. The ceremony was supposed to be outside, by the lake, but a couple of guys in tuxes are herding everyone into banks of folding chairs inside the reception tent. Mom braces Lydia's shoulders and talks her down in a low cooing voice, like she's comforting a high-strung poodle. I sneak around the back of the boathouse and find Jill puffing a skinny menthol cigarette under the overhang, the hem of her dress rucked on the long grass.

“What happened to your face?” I say.

“It's airbrushed,” she says. “All the girls do it now.” Her hair is highlighted and set into sprayed sausage rolls on top of her head.

“You look gorgeous,” I say.

“I feel like I'm gonna puke.” We hug, her cool damp arms around me. Her cigarette is hovering dangerously close to her fire-hazard hair, so I pluck it out of her fingers and take a drag. She adjusts the top of her strapless dress, peering down at her cleavage. “I feel like a lemon meringue in this,” she says.

“Where's Harris?”

She shrugs. “Some kind of groom thing. Out in the woods, playing bongos and beating his chest.”

The idea of Harris performing any kind of masculinity ritual almost makes me laugh out loud, but then I can't help picturing him and Jill in the dark together, his skinny hairy fingers stroking her throat, his mouth inching crablike along her thigh.

“You better go before you dissolve in the rain,” I say.

She reaches out and pats my head. “Good old Stacey.” I hand her back the smoke; she takes a last long drag and flicks the butt into the weeds. “Okay,” she says, hitching up her skirt, “let's get this gong show on the road.”

Angela and I file into the tent, where a klezmer band is toodling away in the corner. Our parents are already seated next to my dad's old friend Sally, whose wheelchair is festooned with white bunting and lilacs. She is talking animatedly to my mother, but when we arrive she looks up at us with pale bird eyes.

“Doppel and Ganger,” she says, “fancy meeting you here.” This is what she's called us for as long as I can remember. She holds out her arms and we each in turn bend down to embrace her.

When we were kids Sally made us mix CDs and gave us diaries with stickers inside that said “Ex Libris.” She took us to art galleries and let us watch movies with nudity and violence. She called them “advanced.” She'd say “This movie's pretty advanced, so don't get any ideas.” She taught us how to put on liquid eyeliner and how to break out of a headlock. Her friends all seemed to be drag queens or women with a lot of tattoos.

As we got older we saw Sally less. I don't know if this had to do with her having MS or something else. Knowing my dad I assumed something else. To the wedding she is wearing brown high-waisted Katharine Hepburn pants, a white blouse, and a vest that matched the pants. Her hair is short brown with a band of grey around the sideburns and bangs, and her ears are pierced with small diamond studs. Around her neck is a chain whose point disappears below the vee of her blouse, but I know for a fact it holds a small gold double-headed axe. I had noticed it as a kid, swinging as she picked us up or leaned forward over a hand of gin rummy. Dad called it The Old Battle Axe. She once told me its true name: Labrys. I didn't know what it meant, then.

Lately she's been experimenting with homeopathic healing, reiki. She tells my dad she's really into vibrations.

“What's reiki?” I ask.

“It's an energy thing,” she says.

I can understand this. I've seen auras on dogs, stood beside the Hydro-Québec power house at Manic-5 and felt my hair stand on end. Once I rested my head against a vibrating clothes dryer until I puked. I know the things energy can do.

“How does it work?” I say.

“It has to do with energy following lines of your body called meridians,” Sally says. She lifts my arm and runs her finger along the inner edge, where the pale winter skin meets the darker summer skin. “This is your heart meridian.” A feeling moves past but not through me, like weather.

Angela nudges me and leans over to speak into my ear, but she's drowned out by the klezmer band launching into “
Here Comes the Bride
,” clarinets wailing like they're announcing the end of the world.

After the ceremony Sally asks me and Angela to take her to the floating dock while white-smocked caterers prepare the tent for the reception. “I want to look at the water,” she says. We bump over the uneven ground toward the stone pathway, past the receiving line where Jill, Harris, and my aunt and uncle brush family palms.

Angela halts the wheelchair at the top of a bluff, before the stone path that leads down to the dock. The wind rifles our hair for a while and nobody says anything.

Aunt Lydia comes over. She seems to have recovered from her earlier episode; her cheeks are flushed and she holds a lipsticky glass of champagne and a pink-tipped cigarette in the same pink-tipped hand.

“Well cry me a
river,
that was a beautiful ceremony. Those two kids, you could just eat them for breakfast.” And she could, too; she has a hungry, wolfish look. She leans on Sally's wheelchair like it's the railing of a ship and pats me on the cheek.

“You girls,” she says. “Which one of you is going to be next?”

“Next?” says Angela. Lydia tilts her head and gives her an eyebrow wiggle.

“I heard you have a suitor,” she says. Angela looks shocked, then laughs. I think about a small cottage, wisteria vines. Two cats, named Gertrude and Alice.

“Oh. Oh yeah, that,” Angela says. “Yeah, we're off to the chapel any day now.”

“You won't forget to invite us, will you?”

“Never.”

Lydia catches me in her unfocused gaze. “And you, Stacey?” She leans in and winks.

I look out at the lake and want so badly to be flying over it, just buzzing over the still water with my arms outstretched, like God, like an airplane.

“You shouldn't be ashamed of your seks-you-ality,” Lydia says. “Your seks-you-ality is a beautiful thing.”

“I'm not,” I say. Sally is smiling now too.

“You know,” says Lydia, “I know the nicest lesbian couple. They live in my co-op. I could introduce you to them sometime.”

I look at Angela, but she's barely there, an outline of a girl looking at a lake.

“That's okay,” I say.

“There's no reason for you to be alone,” Lydia says. “There are plenty of people like you in the world. You just have to be willing to open yourself up!”

Sally takes my hand and says she's sure I will make some girl very happy someday. And I think she's right but it won't be the one I want.

Back in the tent, our parents are already at the table. Mom is talking to a broad-shouldered man in a polo shirt; instead of the standard alligator it has a tiny gun embroidered over the heart. His hair is sandy and swept back. He has the look of an aging college athlete, with slightly leathery skin that's part handsome and part sad.

“Stacey, this is your second cousin Mitchell. He's a writer, just like you.”

“Oh. Hi.”

I'm extended a firm manly-man grasp.

“Ah, Stacey. Aunt Abby was just telling me you have a piece coming out in
Sparkle-Pony
. Congratulations. I haven't heard of it, is it affiliated with a university press?”

“Uh. No. It's kind of an independent publication.”

“Cool, man, cool. Anywhere you can get your start.”

“Mitchell has a book contract with Knopf,” Lydia says. “And he hasn't even finished his book!”

Mitchell smiled and waved one hand dismissively. “It's nonfiction,” he said, “that's standard for the industry. Not like what Stacey's doing. The literary houses want to see
product
.”

“Well I just think you kids are great,” Lydia says. “You follow the rainbow.”

“To find the horn of plenty,” Mitchell says.

“Exactly,” says Lydia.

When the food arrives Mom gives it her usual benediction: “It feels good to be eating.” Angela cuts her eyes at me and leaves the table, her purse with the test still in it tucked tightly under one arm.

The DJ puts on Bryan Adams and a few couples start slow-dancing. Dad's holding Mom in a close embrace and murmuring into her neck. The gin and tonic she holds in one hand is dribbling onto the back of his suit jacket.

“Come dance, Stacey,” Mom says. She detaches from Dad and starts toward me, swaying side to side and snapping her fingers like some kind of beatnik chimpanzee. She grabs my forearms and tries to lift me out of the chair. I make myself as heavy as possible without looking like I'm doing anything.

“Oh come
on
,” she says, “loosen up.” She jiggles my arms, and I think about passive resistance. Mom sighs. “Kids can be such fascists,” she announces to the tent at large. I slip away as she begins to twirl like a taffeta hurricane.

There's a very long line outside the portable toilets. While I wait I overhear a couple of the groomsmen talking about their favourite porn star, whose name is Iona Dildo.

“She's off the hook,” one of them says.

“Off the hizzle.”

“Off the hizzay.”

“Fo shizzay.”

A door swings open, and Angela staggers out of a stall holding her high heels in one hand. She spies me in line, takes my elbow and steers me away from the portable toilets and outside the tent.

“I have to pee,” I say.

“Give me a smoke,” she says, ignoring my personal needs for the twenty thousandth time. I dig around in my purse for my pack.

“Mitchell's hot,” she says, lips clamped on the filter as she lights.

“You're serious.”

“Don't you think so?”

“He's like
forty
. And he's a pretentious twatbag.”

“He's thirty-two. And he is not.”

“He was making fun of Lydia to her face.”

“He was teasing her,
gently
. If she's too dumb to catch on, that's not his fault. Anyway he's an intellectual.”

“An intellectual twatbag.”

“I'd still do him,” she says.

“Do I need to remind you that he's your cousin?”

“So? That didn't stop Bubbe and Zaide.”

She has a point. Our grandparents were in fact distantly related. Slim pickings on the shtetl.

“Talk to the hand,” I say.

“Tell me you didn't just say that.” She turns and walks toward the path leading down to the floating dock, her heels sinking into the wet grass. The melody of “
Hava Nagila”
floats over the trees and I can faintly hear Jill shrieking as she and Harris and their chairs are hoisted into the air. I think about a baby that looks half like Henry and half like Angela, and therefore half like me. The idea is both compelling and nauseating.

Angela stops suddenly and I almost bump into her. “Give me another smoke,” she says.

“Why, are you smoking for two now?”

She gives me a condescending smile and holds out her hand. I grab it and we skid down the gravelly path together and walk out onto the dock.

There is a certain kind of vertigo that comes from looking into deep clear water. Angela sits on the edge of the dock and as I look past her into the copper depths my eyes begin to water. I once climbed a fire escape with Henry and Angela, trying to get to the roof of an abandoned theatre on Parc Avenue. Henry went first, then me, and Angela bringing up the rear. The iron fire escape was bouncing around like something from a 1940s cartoon, jiggling in 4/4 time, and my throat started getting sticky and my eyes watered and about halfway up I just froze solid, with one foot up and my hands in fists around the railings.

“What's the matter,” said Henry, “are you afraid of heights?”

“She's afraid of gravity,” Angela said. She offered to carry me, and I said no, that wouldn't make a difference, and then she offered to let me carry her, and I said “What if I carry you and you carry me, then we both get a free ride,” and then Henry shouted down from the roof, “Get an effing room already guys.”

It's the way a rock sticking out of the water looks like a rock, but when you look down you see you're clinging to the tip of a mountain. You count to three, and then you let go.

Now Angela slips off the edge of the dock, into that big empty that somehow holds her and ferries her along, her dress pocketing with air as she breaststrokes through the muscular water. Her back and shoulders glinting.

One.

Two.

Three.

Go.

Sweet Affliction

All the nurses' names end in
nda
: Rhonda, Randa, Amanda, Linda, Little Linda, Panda. No, I made that up. No one is named Panda, though one of Rhonda's tunics is patterned with little pyjama-clad bears. Is
tunic
the right word? Probably not—it's too close to
panic
, which is not encouraged in the ward. People do anyway, but quietly.