The Spectacular Read online

  Dedication

  Dedicated to the memory of Alexandra Olsen

  and to queer femmes everywhere

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Book One: 1997

  Chapter 1: missy

  Chapter 2: carola

  Chapter 3: missy

  Chapter 4: carola

  Chapter 5: missy

  Chapter 6: carola

  Chapter 7: missy

  Chapter 8: carola

  Chapter 9: missy

  Chapter 10: carola

  Chapter 11: missy

  Chapter 12: carola

  Chapter 13: missy

  Ruth

  Smyrna, 1922

  The Empress of France, 1952

  Beaurepaire Village, 1952

  Vermont, 1987

  Beaurepaire Village, 1997

  Beaurepaire Village, Two Weeks Later

  Izmir, 1997

  Book Two: 2013

  Chapter 1: missy

  Chapter 2: carola

  Chapter 3: missy

  Chapter 4: carola

  Chapter 5: missy

  Chapter 6: carola

  Chapter 7: missy

  Chapter 8: carola

  Chapter 9: missy

  Chapter 10: carola

  Chapter 11: missy

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Praise

  Also by Zoe Whittall

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Book One

  1997

  I left home and I faked my ID.

  I fucked every man that I wanted to be.

  — Neko Case

  Motherhood is a mental illness.

  — Ramona, from the movie Hustlers

  Chapter 1

  missy

  i fought my way through the group of protesters, my eyes liquefied from the cold wind. A grey-haired leviathan, fetus pendant asleep in his chest hair, leaned over me and whispered a guttural “Slut.” The pink plastic pendant knocked against my forehead. He sank back into their slumpy circle, was made anonymous by the grind of their group shuffle. They chanted. Circled. Chanted some more. When they tried to block me from the door, I lost my shit. A clinic volunteer appeared through the blur and gripped my wrist. “I don’t even want an abortion!” I shouted above their heads from the top of the steps.

  The volunteer ushered me inside, to the near-silent administrative shuffling of any waiting room. Instead of following the volunteer, I turned and reopened the door. I like to have the last word. “But abortions are great! I wish you’d been aborted!”

  He lunged up the stairs, and I ripped the fetus from his neck.

  The volunteer yanked me inside by the back of my jacket, slamming and locking the door as the old man’s full weight came charging up against it.

  He reminded me of a horse we had when I was ten, the years we were trying not to use money and barter for everything. My father gave my neighbour an old rifle and in return he gave us Sugar, a palomino with a charcoal heart on her ass. She never acted like her name. She had a mean glare and liked to bite children. She was supposed to be mine, but I wasn’t allowed near her. I sat on the top of a manger a good stall away and tried to soothe Sugar with songs from the soundtrack to Hair. She kicked at the stall door so hard there were permanent hoofprints, even after we traded her for half a frozen deer and a washing machine that only worked when it rained.

  The old man continued to throw his body against the door.

  The incantations outside rose in volume.

  “That wasn’t smart,” the clinic volunteer said, sending rolled eyes toward the security guard.

  “But it was satisfying.”

  The plastic fetus grew hot in my closed fist. The volunteer wasn’t charmed by me.

  “Nothing you can say will ever matter,” she said, handing me a form to fill out. The pen slipped from my fingers and hung limp from the clipboard string. I dropped the fetus into a nearby garbage can; it stuck to a clump of gum.

  Name: Melissa Wood. Age: 21. But soon I would be Missy Alamo, all spring and summer. My fingers were solid calluses from all the rehearsals. I returned the clipboard to the receptionist.

  Twenty minutes later I sat in a ripped pleather chair across from a doctor with a salt-and-pepper crewcut. She seemed amused by me.

  “What can I do for you?”

  “I would like my tubes tied,” I explained, as though ordering something off a menu. When I said the word tubes I imagined the black rubber inner tubes inside my bicycle tires. The doctor had feminist watercolours on the wall—all vagina flowers and wispy goddesses. I’d dressed like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. My skirt was so short I was sure she could glimpse my cervix with a quick pointed downgaze.

  “Well, I do not get that request, uh, very often, from someone your age.”

  I explained my dilemma. She actually listened to me, which I wasn’t expecting.

  “I don’t want to sound condescending, but you’re just too young. You may regret it.”

  “Well, you do sound condescending,” I said.

  Staring contest.

  Beat.

  Beat.

  I won.

  She shuffled papers and looked up at the clock.

  “Look, I respect your autonomy and your considerable confidence on this issue, but I don’t want to be responsible for the implications of this choice when you’re older.”

  She didn’t want to be responsible for future me being upset, which seemed ridiculous. Current me is very upset. Future me doesn’t exist yet. She could be hit by a car.

  “I’m going to regret a lot of things,” I said. “You can’t know. What I do know is I don’t want to try to get an abortion in Kansas while my bandmates are partying. It’s your feminist duty!” I pointed out her Your Body Is a Battleground postcard. “Come on. I can adopt if I regret it. Biology doesn’t matter.”

  She exhaled upward, stared above my head at the ceiling fan. It clicked in three-quarter time. “Even if I refer you, the doctor won’t do it,” she said. “I’m sorry. This province wants you to have lots of babies. That’s the way it is.”

  “Isn’t this the same country that sterilized poor women of colour in jail?”

  I’d read that in a women’s history course at McGill before I deferred my studies so I could go on tour. She frowned.

  “We don’t do that anymore,” she said, shuffling papers on her desk again and looking like she wished she’d chosen any other profession.

  Do you know how hard it is to get sterilized when you’re young and conventionally pretty from some angles, when you appear to be middle class even though you’ve only got seventeen bucks in your savings account, and when all the doctors think you’re misguided, because eventually you’ll want to blossom, ripen, and suckle?

  The doctor continued to stare at me, unmoving. This time I broke her gaze first. I hate losing.

  I had already tried several clinics. The male doctors were the worst because you look like the girls they jerk off to, and if they really thought you didn’t want their jizz stuck up inside you, they’d have no reason to go on. They’d shrivel up and die, self-immolate from the existential crisis.

  I knew the limitations of my body and mind, but no doctor would help me nip my problem in the bud, so to speak. We were about to be on the road for months, first stop Rochester, last stop Los Angeles. I was getting a tetanus shot, filling my purse with B vitamins, lip balms, Polysporin, Visine, and Band-Aids. It seemed prudent, really, to fix a crucial design flaw in my body, when there was no opting in or out of its most perilous action, and one I knew I’d never desire. The tubes tied expression made it seem like a sn
ap, like they could reach inside and grab your fallopian tubes and do the bunny ears ritual they teach you in kindergarten. Bunny ears, bunny ears, then jump into the hole!

  Do you know how many things I don’t need? I have a closet filled with ten pairs of the same jeans. I have two pairs of boots, one pair of sneakers, two pairs of army pants. Three dresses, five of the same hoodie in different colours. That’s all I really need to be a body in the world right now. I don’t need my own eggs, or the useless hollow space designed to house an invader.

  Besides, I was busy. I rehearsed every day. I worked my last few weeks as a receptionist at the conservatory. I’m a future-oriented person. When friends were talking to me, I wasn’t really listening that closely. I was thinking about the day I’d be getting in the van with Tom, Alan, Billy, and Jared, our new fiddler we’d started calling the Temp. The day I’d been waiting for since we got signed by a major label, after a few years of opening for bigger acts. This tour meant hotels, and a manager taking care of the money, the details, everything that had previously fallen to me. I wasn’t going to be peeing into a Big Gulp cup in the back of the van anymore, surviving on drink tickets or sleeping four on the floor of some punk kid’s living room that smelled of cat pee and empty beer cans.

  I could think about performance, about the high of playing a really good show, one the bootleggers would brag about having on tape. And I could think about pleasure. Like a reunion with James in Baltimore, Hayden in New Orleans. Hayden could really fuck. He had endurance.

  Hmmm, Hayden.

  Hay-den.

  That was a nice visual.

  He asked me to be his one and only, but I couldn’t deny other women that kind of devotion, especially since we lived several thousand miles apart. It felt greedy. I had a lover at home in Montreal, but Scott would tell me he was going to come by around ten, and then show up three days later. He really loved me, I knew that, but he liked speed more. I tried it once and I could see his point. I couldn’t possibly make him feel like an exploding star or the smartest guy on earth. I could only make him come, but so could anyone. He was twenty-two. He could fuck a hole in the ground and feel pretty good.

  When Billy got a vasectomy last year he had no problem with the first doctor he saw. “I told him I was the lead singer in a band. He got it immediately. Isn’t that sexist?” he’d said, but he laughed. I’ve overheard him bragging about it to his future conquests. They think it makes him a considerate person. He just hates condoms because he’s watched too many pornos. They don’t feel right. He was tired of handing over fistfuls of his father’s money for abortions. I advised him to get some antibiotics before we left.

  I don’t have Billy’s familial safety net, nor can I afford the arrogance of assuming everything will work out okay. I was preparing to sublet my room in my shared apartment, teaching my roommate Amita how to water all my high-maintenance plants, getting health insurance, buying a new backpack. Safeguarding my uterus seemed like a logical item to cross off my list. It felt like a good preventative step. Condoms aren’t foolproof and the pill made me into a monster. The idea of getting knocked up by accident felt like the plot of a horror movie, yet it was entirely possible. Was I supposed to be a nun on tour, while all the guys were having fun? Surely that wasn’t the point of the sexual revolution everyone was so nostalgic about lately. There’s always a program on TV about the 1960s, about the second wave of feminists. Oh, the nostalgia.

  What other choice did I have? I don’t like to rely on luck and the stars or whatever. I don’t believe in fate. I like to have a plan.

  I knew I had to show up at the next clinic looking self-assured and older than my years. I left mascara from the night before under my eyes to blur and bruise, traded my baggy army pants for some slim-cut, high-waisted pants, the kind that unstylish moms wore. I took the gaudy scarf my granny had given me, which I usually threw over my lamp for ambience, and tied it around my neck. It clashed with the blouse I’d borrowed from Amita for the occasion, trying to look like I was a thoughtful and mature adult. She’d coloured in my lips in a neutral pink, took duct tape to the cat hair on my sleeves. She feathered my bangs, turned me around to look in our hallway mirror. “You’re so unfuckable right now, you’ll surprise them into saying yes.”

  At the walk-in clinic near my apartment, I was polite and deferential, calmly explaining that the pill made my moods unmanageable, that filling prescriptions while travelling is next to impossible anyway, that condoms don’t work all the time. I explained that I wanted to be responsible. “I’d like a tubal ligation,” I said, thinking that using the proper terminology might help.

  “You’re too young to know the consequences,” said a doctor who looked like Wilford Brimley.

  I wanted to tell him I wasn’t ashamed, that not every slut’s origin story evolves from trauma, from lack of or a shifting sense of self. Though of course I was a young girl and had all of those things to deal with, but sex, in comparison, was simpler than anything so thorny. In fact, my problems seemed to stem from too much self. You’re too much was frequent feedback. At twenty-one, I wanted the richness of the present moment, and that was all. Why not be loud about it? Being demure is for suckers. I’m old enough to join the army and kill people, to have five babies if I feel like it. Why can’t I also decide to have no babies?

  I went home, made a pot of coffee, and drew up a plan. I made more appointments.

  I went to a clinic in a wealthy neighbourhood next. A middle-aged doctor with long shiny hair and photos of her moronic-looking family all over the office was impatient from the moment I walked in and sat down across from her.

  “I need my tubes tied, because any child I’ll have is going to inherit my mother’s terrible disease.”

  I was trying to appeal to this doctor’s Catholic guilt and ableism.

  “What disease does she have?”

  “It’s rare, and it has a long name, I can never remember it, but it’s brutal.” I pretended to try to remember it. I hadn’t prepared for any follow-up questions, and thus I faltered. I hadn’t heard my mother’s voice in nearly ten years. I had no idea where she was, or why she had left. My mother’s only terrible disease was maternal indifference, and that was something I knew I’d inherited.

  She tapped her pen on the desk, then curled a shiny piece of hair around it and stared blankly until I was even more uncomfortable.

  “I don’t believe in abortion, but I want to have sex with my monogamous boyfriend, my fiancé, actually, and I know condoms are only ninety-eight percent effective. I’m a pragmatist,” I said. Of course I believed in abortion, but she had a crucifix peeking out of the top of her blouse. She leaned back in exasperation.

  Then she narrowed her eyes and said, “Getting sterilized isn’t a quick fix so you can run wild and fuck indiscriminately. It’s a medical procedure, not a safeguard for sluts.”

  Damn.

  I pointed to her garish wall crucifix. “Your entire religion is obsessed with a whore! The entire culture revolves around the worship of young pussy!”

  The doctor stood up, looked me straight in the eye. “You’re clearly a smart young girl, but maybe too smart. Maybe think about the future, and what might be important in life besides yourself,” she said before leaving the exam room. I was then offered hepatitis vaccines by a stout nurse who smiled, happy to see her boss taken to task by a hysteric dressed like a choir girl.

  It was all a very stark contrast to the first time I visited an OB/GYN, at fourteen. My cramps had become unbearable, and my father thought I should see a doctor, probably because he had no idea what to say to me. He made the appointment, wrote down the address of the clinic, and told me where to get off the bus.

  I hadn’t even kissed a boy, but a young doctor thrust a sample pack of birth control pills at me, insisting I take them.

  “I don’t have a boyfriend,” I whispered.

  “Ha”—he laughed—“they never do.”

  I felt like his grin was going to swallo
w me.

  “I don’t need them,” I insisted.

  He held out a bowl of condoms, pressing the lip of the bowl into the waistband of my tights, which had formed an itchy red line across my stomach since homeroom. “Take a bunch of these too. Never trust boys to be responsible.”

  The condoms felt awful in my hand. I didn’t have a purse to put them in. Was I supposed to carry them home in my hands?

  I ditched the pills and condoms in the dumpster beside the bus stop, livid. I wasn’t the kind of fourteen who wanted to be eighteen. I wanted to be twelve forever. Every change in my body felt aggravating, like I was growing a second skull, like my limbs were out to get me. It’s why I chose the cello in orchestra class, because I could hide my body behind it.

  But something happened in my first year of university. I looked around at all the formerly repressed kids with their wind instruments and it felt inevitable. It was as though I saw our bodies for the first time, our buttoned-up blouses and awkward knee-length skirts, the boys in shirts their moms had packed in boxes and put in the trunk of their car. I learned to fuck from a tender man named Josh who played the oboe and lived in a shoebox apartment across from the music building where his bed was the only place to sit. We would share one tall can of beer, let it warm beside the bed as we figured out what bodies could do. He was not a good lover, but he was tender, and better than I was. He had, according to him, touched six boobs by that point. By the end of our relationship, I’d figured some things out.

  Of course I knew what sex was. I spent my childhood with adults who were stuck in the free-loving 1960s. While sitting on a batik blanket, playing with my Barbie dolls from the church donation box—whose hair had been sheared into tidy gender-neutral bowl cuts before my mother let me play with them—I’d overhear them arguing about monogamy as a tool of the state. When I was a toddler I liked to be as nude as everyone else at Sunflower, but somewhere around six I started wearing full-length overalls every day and pointing to the dangling bits and wayward breasts of the adults around me and saying “Ugh.” One thing I understood about adults very young was that they loved to kiss, and not always their own partners. It was gross. I wasn’t into it.