Bottle Rocket Hearts Read online

  Something about the way she says baby. Fucking caramel. A trap.

  It’s just that, well, you haven’t been to work or gone home ...

  Della hasn’t gone to work, either. I don’t point this out. Her job is vague and changes often. She’s told me in quieter moments that sometimes she hates to be outside. It makes her star-eyed, heart-paused and falters her forward motion. The winter she was fifteen she didn’t leave her house even once.

  Della doesn’t generally choose to be outside alone, or alone in general. She is most at ease in the middle of a cocktail party or a crowded dance floor at a bar. Her posture shifts, she’s charming and warm, occasionally cocky. She has an anecdote for every silence. She lights up when she’s insulated by a crowd. I don’t think I have ever known her to spend an afternoon by herself. But I haven’t known her all that long, I guess.

  “Fine, I’ll go.” Getting up from the plush chair, I head towards the kitchen to rinse my plate. I sway my hips and flip my hair dramatically. I note that it is flip-length and this makes me happy in my goal to cultivate some femme-like status. With my scrawny torso, A-cups and slight hips, any physical femininity was going to come through my hair. I dyed it white blond last weekend. Another goal to get to. List it in a column. Check it off. Done.

  “No, stay! I didn’t mean to imply that you should leave. That’s not what I meant.”

  Home is about three bus rides west to my parents’ house, where I keep a simple bedroom half-packed-up in anxious anticipation of my Very Own Apartment. My mother cries when I mention the V.O.A. dream. She calls Della “that woman.” That woman called. That woman is very rude on the phone, that woman doesn’t even say hello.

  Della’s apartment is in the east end of the city, where Papineau and Ontario Street intersect, a part of the city I’d only ever visited to go to gay bars and, once, to get my tongue pierced while playing hooky during a grade nine field trip. The apartment is a minimal three-and-a-half with an eat-in kitchen, old moulded archways, the plaster on the ceilings in the shape of whipped cream swirls. Kitchen walls the Incredible Hulk could blend into seamlessly. Silver doorways and kitchen cupboards. Hot pink bathroom that screams at you while you pee. One living-room wall is orange, another red and two are bright blue. It’s like living in the middle of an exploding comet. Mannequin parts are everywhere, jointed arms and legs strewn about. Her bathroom is covered in doll parts and toys hot glued to every surface. Her bedroom is all white with a simple black wool blanket on a futon bed. One full-length mirror. A shelf from IKEA holding some books. A drawing table. There is one poster, on the wall above her bed, featuring big-busted amazons from a Russ Myers movie, advertising a popular weekly dyke night at a bar in the village.

  If I go home, I’m not certain when I will see Della again. She lives in the extreme present. When I am in front of her, I am certain that I am beautiful; I am wanted. When I am tapping my fingers on the cash register at work or standing at school waiting to fill up my travel-mug with hot black coffee, thinking of our last kiss, she could be anywhere, kissing anyone, my fingers far from her thoughts. I don’t have bad self-esteem, I’m realistic.

  This is what we call a Revolutionary Relationship: depending on our own conventions, not falling into traps set by expectations, codependency and unreasonable romanticism.

  No definitions.

  The trouble with deciding not to define anything is that it usually means you have to talk a lot more about what you’re not defining than you would if you employed the time-honoured grade nine approach to Going Steady.

  I will be fine with our ultra-postmodern relationship. It isn’t anything but what it needs to be right now. I always leave my mark, rubbing against the walls like Tomato, leaving a trail. Lip-gloss prints on her wine glasses. From the bed to the bathroom: my dropped crumbs, my lighter, a scribbled phone number on an envelope. A towel. My gloves. I give extra-long goodbye hugs. She never answers her phone. I forget to check my voicemail messages. We may as well live in different countries.

  When my textbooks are open in my lap, trudging through Foucault or Butler, reading the same sentence over and over again, wondering if I’m secretly mentally retarded and no one ever bothered to tell me, I pick up a pen and go on and on in the margins about love being a terribly boring preoccupation, a convention, a construct. That’s when I know things are not going well. I press my palms to my bulging eyes. I forget to flinch when I should, instead I embrace each bright light moment that is Della. Then I feel as though I’ve been snapped up like a bug in her net.

  On our first real date she served me hash brownies from a crumpled napkin in her coat pocket when she picked me up outside St-Laurent Metro. I kissed her face and giggled. We went to a warehouse party on Ontario Street where Della knew everyone. I drank martinis from these oversized pink plastic martini glasses that a gorgeous drag queen named Mabel kept bringing to me. “You’re just a tiny little angel!” she’d say, and hand me a new one. “I can’t even believe you’re allowed to be here. I have shoes older than you!” I stood up front dancing while a band called The Snitches played. They were mesmerizing. The drummer was a woman with a shaved head and lip piercing and the singer had more energy than anyone I’d ever seen. I fell in love. I was under some sort of spell and I didn’t want it to end.

  Walking to the party she told me she was only going to live for two more years, tops. Not one woman from her mother’s family has lived past the age of thirty. It’s a Johnson curse. Della turns thirty next year. We are just under ten years apart. She’s hoping that her father’s tough Tremblay genes will win. Her mother died when Della was twelve years old. Cancer. I didn’t know what to say when she told me that. I think I said sorry. Not a good enough thing to say, but I couldn’t think of anything more appropriate. I remember thinking how weird it was — how much she divulged to me so quickly. One of her many quirks, I suppose.

  I find it hard enough to say even the basic things I’m thinking. For some reason they stick to the roof of my mouth, dissolve before they turn from emotion to language.

  I stayed that night at her place, drunk, giggling and falling into the bright walls. Della was the kind of untouchable cool you never think you’ll get close to, and then you’re stretched over her naked body, but you’re still not close yet. The next morning I walked to the subway and the cool fall air was a baptism.

  The first time I met Della, she was wearing a white wife-beater tank top. She’d scrawled boy beater across the chest in red marker. The shirt showed off her muscled arms painted in two bright sleeves of tattoos. She was wearing baggy green army pants and had scraggly blue and black hair that was moulded and pointed in peaks like she was straight out of a comic book. At first glance I wasn’t sure if she was a boy or a girl and it didn’t matter. I was slack-jawed and near tourretic and trying unsuccessfully to hide it.

  She was helping my art teacher in CEGEP hang our first-semester student vernissage, painting benches for visitors to sit on in blue and silver. We had a moment at the oversized sink, washing our hands. I couldn’t look at her, I felt her watching my hands, watching the colours bleed into the running warm water. I couldn’t figure out if my hands were still a part of my body, I stared so hard. I felt her beside me like a wall of white light, an eclipsing moon. I felt the same way I did when I hid under the blankets during The Exorcist. I just couldn’t trust my eyes with her. She was too much to absorb. She broke the moment with a laugh. I think your hands are clean now, baby. The way she said baby, so presumptuous, like she was holding all the answers in her hands instead of several long paint brushes.

  We’ve been dating, or whatever, for almost two months now. A relationship starting in January in this cold city shouldn’t feel so optimistic, it should feel practical and insulating. But it doesn’t. The winter can’t touch this.

  Della’s apartment exists inside a rip in the space-time continuum. I feel as though if I can stay still in the valley of thrift-store furniture hugged by the bright walls on Cartier Avenue, I
can rest. Whenever I feel like it I can jump back into the rotating skipping rope: my life. Living out of my knapsack is a strange comfort. The folds of canvas fabric are my own four walls. Kept and containing.

  It feels like we are waiting for something. Like we can sense the impending explosion.

  I crawl back into the armchair. We stare at each other, from the cat, to the tv, to the couch. I don’t want to leave because I’m comfortable. I am also replaceable. The fingerprints on the door handles, the cutlery, the wine glasses, Della’s belt buckle, they aren’t all mine.

  Before we started this hibernation holiday, we’d gone out to launder the sheets on Thursday, after an overnight date. Hungover and hopelessly honeymooning, we fucked against the washing machines while an old man slept in the corner of the laundromat.

  When we arrived back at her apartment, giddy and high, Della patted down her jeans pockets, the inside of her coat, closed her eyes tightly and exhaled a frustrated sigh. She’d left her keys inside. We were locked out.

  “Why don’t you keep a copy under the mat?”

  Della rolled her eyes.

  “No problem, we’ll break in the back room.” Della is one of those people who could state something outrageous, like I can eat a light bulb, and say it with such conviction, you’d immediately believe her. Later you might find a burning question mark abandoned in your stomach.

  In the alleyway behind Cartier Avenue, a tiny corridor peppered with puddles and litter, she tried to wedge her body into the hole in her apartment wall.

  “Why do you have a hole in your apartment wall?”

  The circular hole from the alley into the apartment was the size of a basketball. It was filled with pink fiberglass insulation, brown fabric quilted in triangles, the skeleton of an old coat. Della was skinny with no hips to speak of, but I really didn’t think she could get through without the help of a genie in a magic lamp.

  “The landlord told me the old tenants stole the dryer, and this is where the air filtered out. He never filled it in or bothered to get a new one. That’s why I only pay $300 for the place.” Her voice was muffled inside the hole. I ran my hand up her legs. “Stop it!” she giggled.

  I could hear that we’d left a CD on in the living room. It was skipping. Portishead’s Dummy.

  Della removed her head and arms from the hole and exhaled in defeat, pieces of dust and dirt clung to her sweaty forehead. She tells me, with some reluctance in her voice, that we’re going to have to go to xxxx’s house. “She has an extra key.” Della looked away deliberately, fiddling with her clothes, pretending she didn’t normally avoid saying xxxx’s name around me. “Baby, don’t give me that look.”

  “What look?” I firmed my face into complete non-reaction. xxxx’s name is too evil to write or say out loud. It’s the kind of name that blinds you. xxxx is the Other Lover and she lives ten or twelve blocks towards the almost frozen Rive Sud.

  She had a key? I didn’t have a key. I had Della’s hand pulsing near all of my precious internal organs thirteen minutes before we discovered this problem, but no key to her home.

  I held the plastic laundry hamper in my hands, Della carried the red hockey bag on her back. We walked in silence away from the abandoned break-in mission and towards where xxxx lived.

  xxxx was Della’s real girlfriend, wife even, for five years, when Della used to do things like have girlfriends, before she learned it was important not to imply ownership with labels and restrictions. Della insists she is not even one bit in love with xxxx anymore. Occasionally they still sleep together, but it’s no big deal, just habit. When I tell her I feel like the other woman, she laughs. That’s just learned sexist bullshit. We are all in charge of our own bodies and what we decide to do with them. We are all our own.

  I believed it when she said it, like she’d opened up a new valve that had been stuck. I felt unconfined and open-minded and totally confused. Intellectually, non-monogamy made complete sense; emotionally, it felt like sandpaper across my eyelids.

  Arriving at xxxx’s apartment, it was almost cold enough for me to feel relieved. We climbed cautiously to the third floor on a twisted iron staircase, caked in ice, that curled around in front of a three-storey red brick apartment building. xxxx opened the door after three long rings of the tinny doorbell as Della and I stood in complete silence, indicating our hollow need. She was wearing a red towel. She blushed at Della with a smirk that faded when she saw my small frame hovering beside her. Or maybe I imagined that. Maybe she doesn’t have hang-ups.

  In a towel, she was a stunning woman. Long black curls, muscled arms, feminine lips, small curves. Real. She is a real woman and I am a child.

  I am invisible. I willed this to happen. If I believed in God, which I do sometimes, I would say please God, make me invisible. My relationship with God is like my relationship to vegetarianism. I eat bacon at 11:15; at 11:18, I stop. Then I am a vegetarian again. I don’t believe in God. But when I need something, there He is. Please, just this once. I feel like I might eventually grow out of this kind of perfunctory infantile spiritual relationship to the world, but so far, He was still some Santa Claus Polaroid at my imaginary disposal during a crisis.

  I studied my feet carefully. They looked like baby feet. Why did I wear pink platform sneakers? Under my coat I wore a snug, white Sonic Youth baby tee, baggy skater pants stolen from my last boyfriend. I patted my head to see if I left the plastic baby barrettes at home. No such luck. They were mortifyingly the ones with little ducks and stars on them. I wanted to bolt. But I’d left my wallet in Della’s apartment and had no money, no keys to my own house.

  Della explained to xxxx, in French, that we’d left our keys in the apartment, we were freezing our asses off, est-ce qu’on peût fumer a l’interieur?

  xxxx invited us in with all the decorum of a proper English hostess who’d been expecting diplomats for tea. She walked with a side-to-side sway in her hips, barefoot and in a towel. If I tried this, the effect would be ridiculous.

  There was no etiquette for this situation. I read The Ethical Lesbian’s Guide to Polyamory but it was way too West-Coast-New-Age to make any sense to me. How do you find time to have sex with all that discussion? Della and I sat on the plush couch while xxxx disappeared into her room and re-emerged moments later in a black blouse and jeans.

  xxxx and I looked at each other with the strained effort of those who try desperately to match their political belief in polyamory with their emotional need to be warm at night. Sleeping soundly with the knowledge that you are someone’s every need and want fulfilled is a hard thing to give up, even if it is ultimately a lie, a game of Scrabble without enough vowels and the salt-filled timer discarded and unused.

  We small talked the paintings on her wall (her own — a pastiche of pastel goddesses — yuck), the AIDS art show she was organizing called Day Without Art and the impending storm. My hands thawed. xxxx emptied a desk drawer onto the living room floor, trying to find the extra key.

  When xxxx bent over to paw through the drawer’s contents I noticed her ass. It was faultless, two perfect teacups. My hatred and jealousy was ... turning me on? I pinched the inside of my right arm to avoid the awkward eroticism. I’d never been with another girly-girl before, this was an odd moment, to feel so gay. I stared at the protest signs leaning in a clump in the corner of her room. They had hand prints on them with the text The government has blood on their hands. I looked around the giant double living room and office, messy, filled with books and objects I recognized. Her furniture wasn’t from IKEA. It was oak, teak, cherrywood, solid and shining. Antique and sturdy. The kind of furniture my mother talks about buying, but never does. Her couch was L shaped, the kind of fluffy you sink into for days — but can just jump out of. xxxx had cash. I expected her place was going to be like a girl version of Della, less comic book, more organized, more reds than earth tones.

  “Well, I was just fixing some food, if you guys are hungry.”

  Della grunted something that soun
ded like yes. xxxx left us to an awkward silence. I picked up her copy of Slingshot, an anarchist newspaper. Della turned on the tv. It felt like we were polite strangers in a waiting room.

  xxxx came out with a tray of shrimp, like a shrimp roll or whatever they are called, as though she had expected us. What’s next, finger sandwiches? Tiny spring rolls? She offered me one first. When was the last time I made anything that wasn’t encased in plastic from a microwave?

  “No thanks ... allergic.” I lied. Something about taking anything from her didn’t sit well.

  “Oh. Had a strange craving this morning and took these out of the freezer.” She offered one to Della, who bit into it with a snap.

  “The shrimp’s heart is in its head you know,” Della said, holding the tail like a cigarette filter. She bit sharply. They shared a look only people who’ve known each other for years can. But I sat, with my nipples hard through my thin shirt, aware that at eighteen, I was the reason women like Della decided to open their relationships.

  I thought about how I was going to be eighteen for another week. Turning nineteen on February 20 would be a quiet victory. Della thought I was twenty. “You look like jail bait,” she’d said, taking my hand at the bar. Yeah, I get that a lot. I still use the fake id I’ve had since I was sixteen, for consistency, which would now make me twenty.

  I keep my impending adulthood to myself, staying quiet when she says things like, You’re like a cross between Ginger and Mary-Ann from Gilligan’s Island and I don’t know what she’s talking about.

  I got up to rinse my cup and snoop around the kitchen. xxxx had a lot of garlic hanging on the walls, an empire of tea boxes displayed in a cupboard with glass doors, dried herbs in mason jars labelled nettle tea, pennyroyal tea (that’s where Nirvana got that song title, I noted), lavender, green tea, detox herbs. Her fridge door displayed a collage of postcards that said things like, Your body is a battleground. Stonewall was a riot, not a brand name. Against Abortion? Have a Vasectomy. We’re Here, We’re Queer, We’re Not Going Shopping, and QUEER NATION. When I turned the water off, I heard her saying, “Now I know why you didn’t want me to meet her, Della. What is she, some fucking baby dyke kid from NDG or some shit?”