There was a picture of this woman sitting on a bed with her legs open. And I mean wide open. She had her fingers down there, like she was checking to make sure that everything was in the right place, or something, but her eyes were looking off into the top right corner of the room in a way that made you wonder what she was thinking about. Maybe
something like, Is my dentist appointment on Tuesday or Thursday? or What time did that pot roast go in the oven? Touching herself the whole time like the answers were in her hoo-ha, which is the word my mom uses instead of vagina. Lauren, she'll say to me in the summer, you should get out of that wet bathing suit before you rot your hoo-ha. I don't know why, but all I can picture when she says that is a big hot air balloon full of mould. Go figure, but it makes me put on underwear.
The woman on the bed had her mouth open, not in a smile, but you still saw her teeth, white like she'd never puckered up to anything but bright clean sunshine. Really you know that no amount of Colgate or Ivory or even Javex will ever get that mouth clean. Which is the point, obviously.
Alice said, Doesn't your mom get mad about these?
I thought about that. I tried to imagine my dad taking the old Leica off the shelf in the bedroom closet and saying, Okay, Karen. Sit on the edge of the bed. Spread your legs. Yep, be more pinchy with your fingernails. Now, look at the corner of the ceiling like you're trying to decide which of the kids' Halloween costumes to sew next. And my mom, purple spider veins on her thighs, holding the pose like she was sitting for one of those oldie timey photographs you can get at Pioneer Village, saying through her closed teeth, Are you almost done, Eric? I think the dishwasher's finished and I don't want spots.
No, I said to Alice. I bet she probably doesn't mind. And Alice said, Well, I would. Who'd want her husband looking at pictures of other girls' you-knows. And I was like, What, hoo-has? Snatches? Twats? But Alice gave me this look and said, God, Lauren. Sometimes you don't know when to quit.
I get that a lot.
Sorry, my arm is tired. Okay, I'm good.
Yeah, Mrs. Ogilvy said those exact words to me, except for the part about God, because I don't think you're allowed to talk about God at school anymore. Not like when my mom went to school and they made her pray before every math test and spelling bee, and do creepy stuff like kiss her crucifix before trying to jump over the pommel horse in gym. But then again, what do you expect when you go to Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow and all your teachers are named Sister Mary Jehosephat, or whatever? So Mrs. Ogilvy didn't say God, because I don't go to a Catholic school, and because if anyone's got a pickle up her bum about what you're allowed and not allowed to do it's Mrs. Ogilvy, but she definitely said, Lauren, sometimes you don't know when to quit.
She said it because I did this thing that I do sometimes, this thing where I fall over. I've perfected my technique so it looks really painful, but it isn't. I roll my eyes back in my head so people can only see the white parts, and then I twist my lips up into this weird kind of face. I've learned to keep my mouth closed and my teeth clenched so I don't bite my tongue. Then I click my shoulder blade out of placeâI'm double-jointedâand jerk my shoulder up to my ear. After about a half-second I let one side of my body, I'm better at the left side, go limp and I just kind of crumple in on myself. Blam. I jerk my left arm up at the elbow in kind of a spastic way when I do it, so it looks like maybe I'm having a seizure or a stroke, or something, but really it's for balance. It's a controlled fall.
I got the idea from reading this book by a girl with epilepsy. The girl had to go to this special school for epileptics that was run by nuns, and one of the things the nuns taught them to do was fall. That way if the girls felt a seizure
coming on, they could fall on their own time and be on the ground when it came, and they wouldn't seize standing up and crack their heads open. I don't know how the nuns knew what they were talking about. I mean, they were nuns, not physiotherapists, right? But their training methods made sense. First they got the girlsâthey were all girlsâto fall into a swimming pool, so they could get used to the feeling of falling, the loss of gravity, and stuff. Then they made them practice the same sort of thing but on these cushy gym mats. The girl in the story described the process in very poetic terms. She wrote that the girls in the water were like spreading lilies and that the girls on the mats were like drifting snowflakes, and all of that. It was cool to read but not all that helpful when it came to learning how to fall, especially because I don't have a pool or a cushy gym mat and so I had to start with my bed, which was okay, and then move on to thick basement carpet, which gave me rug burn.
Eventually I got it, though. At first Alice thought it was stupid, but then I showed her that it's actually pretty crazy. Like I said, sometimes I just have to do stuff first.
I used it at this variety store across the street from the school. The man behind the counter is an Indian guy with a turban. He's got this weird rolled-up twist of hair that comes out from the turban on one side, goes under his chin and then gets tucked up into the turban on the other side. It kind of supports his double chin. I know that's not the reason behind it, but it seems sort of rude to ask, Hey, what's with that hair strap that you've got under your chin? So I just let it go. I went in there one day and asked him for a pack of cigarettes.
Belmont Lights, I said, leaning on the counter in front of the candy bars and trying to play it cool. Like maybe if he
noticed that I wasn't staring at his hair strap, he wouldn't give me a hard time about the cigarettes. They're for my mom, I said, pointing across the street to a car that had a bored-looking woman in it. The woman was checking her watch and flipping her hair in the rear-view mirror, putting on lipstick and drinking a coffee, all at once. She looked like the type who sent her daughter for cigarettes, I thought, but the guy hesitated. He looked at me like maybe I was just another punk kid trying to shove jawbreakers in my pocket when he turned his back, which, for the record, is not the kind of person I am at all. I had already calculated the exact change for the cigarettes. So I decided to fall.
I rolled back my eyes and twisted my mouth and twitched my shoulder and then did the arm thing. Blam, there I was on the floor in front of the counter, a few chocolate bars spilling off the shelves, and the guy looking like he was going to crap his pants because now he had a dead girl in his store. I got up quickly and was all like, Sorry, sorry. My mom . . . I need to go. I acted all embarrassed and apologetic and scared, like my mom, waiting in the car and plucking her eyebrows, was going to beat me if I was five minutes late with her cigarettes. Like maybe I was subject to all kinds of nic-fit beatings and that's why I had the falling problem. I don't know what he thought, but he gave me the cigarettes and hustled me out of the store. I'm a really good actress.
From then on, I'd just walk into the store and he'd have a pack of Belmonts in his hand like that, like the faster he sold me the cigarettes, the less chance there was of me falling and dying in his store and clogging up the aisles that were already jammed with kids who were trying to tuck porno magazines into the sleeves of their jackets. He had enough to deal with, I guess, so it was just easier to sell the cigarettes
to the girl with the exact change and the freaky falling problem and not question it. It worked out well.
One time, though, the regular guy wasn't there. It was some young dude in a homemade t-shirt that said Sikh and Destroy on it. For a second I thought he might be cool with just selling me the cigarettes right off, but then I thought I'd better do the falling thing, just to be safe. But because I was out of practice, I actually hit my head on this giant Doublemint gum cardboard display and gave myself a little cut. It wasn't a big deal. Anyone who has taken the St. John Ambulance babysitting course knows that head wounds can really gush and it's usually not something to go ape about. Evidently this guy hadn't taken the course and he completely freaked out. He ran out of the store, shouting for an ambulance, a doctor, the police, you name it. It was kind of ridiculous. There he is trying to be all tough and religious in his Sikh and Destroy shirt and he's crying and waving his arms because a twelve-year-old girl knocked over a gum display thing. I tried to shout at him that I was fine, to never mind about the cigarettes, but by that time there were people running down the street towards the store. Even the crossing guard man who has Down's Syndrome was coming over to see what was wrong. Seriously.
Mrs. Ogilvy was on bus duty that day and she was the first one there from the school. Mouth open, she saw my bleeding forehead and the whole smashed up Doublemint display. She leaned forward, moving her whole body back and forth like she was one of those drinking bird toys. That's when she said it: Lauren, sometimes you don't know when to quit. You almost felt like the words
For God's sake
were on her tongue, but they never came out, even though I suppose we weren't
technically at school and so it was fine to mention God.
No, it doesn't hurt. I told you, I'm double-jointed. And I don't have to be home until five.
My sister is the quitter. Ballet, gymnastics, floor hockey, piano, guitar, high school. Whatever. Sometimes when people, mostly people like old Girl Guide leaders, the ones with pleated pants and dumpy bums, run into her at the grocery store where she works, they'll ask her what she's planning to do in the fall. Get pregnant, maybe, she says. Or drunk. There have been lots of complaints to the deli manager. She wears midnight blue eyeliner and black and white striped arm warmers that she cut thumbholes into, even though we're all like, Um, hi, but it's twenty-seven degrees outside and your elbows have a rash from the wool that sat in some hobo-infested donation bin for the past six months. But when she's working she has to take them off so she doesn't contaminate the meat, thank God, and instead she wears an XXL polo shirt that says Food Giant in fluorescent yellow letters. She has to roll up the sleeves of the t-shirt six times so they don't get sucked into the meat slicing machines. My mom says it's a safety hazard. My sister also has to wear steel-toed work boots that she says make her look like a dyke, and a nametag, so people know who to complain about. Her name is Margot.
Margot was a vegetarian for a while. Really she was on some crazy crash diet and not eating, period, but the meat thing was her excuse. Everything my mother cooked had come into contact with meat, or animal fat, or honey from exploited bees, or something, and so Margot was able to hide her whole no-food diet thing until she got anemic and started fainting at work.
I refuse to eat lips and assholes, was what she said when my mom barbecued hotdogs. I kiss enough ass as it is at the store.
You and everyone else, my mother said above the sizzle of wiener fat. But get used to it, Margot, the whole world is one big behind. Now watch your language. Your sister's here, and we have company.
But the company we had was just Alice. My mom thinks that because Alice always says please and thank you and doesn't push her peas onto her fork with her finger that she's some kind of angel child, and that hearing a swear word might tarnish the glow of her halo, or something. But who do you think I smoke those Belmonts with? Alice is actually the one who taught me how to smoke and told me that it helps keep you skinny. She learned from her grandma who has emphysema. She knows what she's doing.
And that's the thing. I didn't mean to make Alice sound like this priss and me like this jerk who falls on the ground to get what she wants. It's actually not like that. Alice only does things that she wants to do, and she's not an idiot. Like if some bozo in a white van asked her to help him find his lost puppy, she'd tell him where to go, and scream bloody murder if he tried anything. She knows a pervert when she sees one, no offense. And when we took that self-defence class, Alice was the best at it. She kicked the guy in the balls.
Oh yeah, she did. The girls in grade six had to go to the gym for this class every Monday for about a month. This female cop came to lead a seminar called I Am Not a Victim that mostly seemed to be about my bum falling asleep on the gym floor while we watched videos about girls in miniskirts sneaking off to lame parties where guys with pimples gave them spiked drinks. The girls were always named Tiffany or
Crystal, or something, I don't know what that was about. They drank the booze and then got raped off camera. More often, though, they just almost got raped and then had to run home through an alleyway to their moms who made them tea and told them they were proud that they hadn't been a victim. I don't know what planet these videos are made on, but if I came home at three in the morning looking like an extra from
In Living Colour
and stinking of booze, my mom would have a conniption, and for once it'd be me, not Margot, who was going to send my dad to an early grave.
The cop also made us do these weird partner exercises, which I was glad of because at least they brought my ass back to the land of the living. Alice was my partner. For this one, Alice was supposed to close her eyes and I was supposed to walk towards her, and when Alice felt that her personal space was invaded, or whatever, she was supposed to put one hand out in front of her and say, Please back up. You're in my personal space. It was supposed to make us assertive about the rights of our bodies, or something. I forget exactly, now. But the point is that when we did it I just kept walking closer and closer to Alice until our noses were practically touching, and she didn't say anything. Finally I was so close that I could smell her skin, the heat of it, I mean, and I was like, Alice, am I invading your space yet or what? She just shrugged, her eyes closed and said, I know it's you.