The Sudden Weight of Snow (26 page)

When you pull away, Anise sobs on your shoulder until your shirt is soaked through. “I’ll get you a drink,” you finally say – this is something Peter would do at a time like this. You pull a bottle down from the cupboard above the fridge and a can of pop from under the sink and make a gin and tonic, feeling suave and adult for doing so.

“Go ahead, make yourself one too,” Anise says, almost in a whisper. The two of you sit at the kitchen table in the dark, listen to the crickets in the yard and the ice in your glasses until the alcohol melts it away.

A
fter Thomas left the cookshack, I stayed, waiting for a light to go on in the shed, telling myself I wasn’t looking for it. I kept the fire going, sat with my boots off, feet balanced on an upturned log in front of the stove. I felt desire as certain and sharp as a knife then. Not necessarily for Thomas, not even necessarily for things sexual, but desire like a fine, absolute edge between something, and something else. I thought about Thomas’s hand along the line of my jaw, my neck. That was mine. I knew he meant that gesture to be mine and no one else’s.

Then I remembered a baby-sitter Nick and I had when I was in the second grade. Her name was Melody – not Melanie but Melody, like a song or something hummed – and I had idolized her. She had hair that was long and layered in a way that if she parted it down the middle, curled each layer into a wave and combed it from her face, it would meet in a perfect line down her scalp to the nape of her neck. This was just one sign of her
perfection. Melody smelled like the colour pink – sweet and slightly spicy at once, like bubble gum and cinnamon.

I had decided that Melody, at thirteen, was the perfect woman, something that I, as a girl who aspired to be a boy, was sure I could never become. How could one aspire to be both? Melody made it easier. She would attempt to curl my lank hair, dab purple eyeshadow on my lids and pink gloss on my lips, then announce to Nick and me that we were going to war. We weren’t allowed to play with toy guns so we made do with our hands, shaped them into pistols or wrapped them around air grenades, and battles would ensue that led the three of us, ducking, diving, and climbing, across every inch of the property. After this, when Nick and I required baths and scrubbing to come clean, Melody needed only her white leather purse. Out of this she would pull her fat Goody comb, sweep her hair back into place and hold it there with a deft shot of Tame hair spray from the same bag. A layer of lip gloss and she was as beautiful as she had ever been.

I discovered that lip gloss was one of the things that gave Melody her smell. Her purse was full of different kinds of gloss. She had lip gloss shaped like a crayon, one like a chocolate chip cookie that twisted in two, plastic tubes of liquid pearl that were applied with a wand. It was the gloss disguised in a pack of gum that fascinated me. One evening, instead of launching grenades from the ravine, I snuck back into the house, pulled the plastic pack of gum out of her purse and hid in the broom closet. There, I crouched and slid it open to two perfect rectangles of sweet, pink gloss. I don’t know how long I was there, applying thin layers to my lips and licking them off for the
taste. I believed I could taste everything to come – a teenage-hood of jeans as tight and pliant as skin, white leather purses, strawberries, and cinnamon. I slipped the gloss back into the purse and waited inside the house, saying I didn’t feel well when Nick and Melody came in red-cheeked and out of breath. I felt like I had stolen something elusive and unnamed. A small part of whatever made Melody perfect. The unattainable. It filled me with the same sense of buoyant peace. A full, clean place inside me that no one else had access to.

It was nearly midnight when I returned to the shed, turned on the space heater and lit balled newsprint and twigs in the woodstove to start the fire. I got into bed to keep warm and waited. Gabe came in when I was slipping into sleep and he unplugged the heater and added wood to the stove.

“Where were you?” I mumbled, turning over.

“Thinking.”

I opened my eyes, but they hadn’t adjusted to the dark yet. I could hear one boot drop, then the other, the sounds of denim and buttons. “Where, though?”

“It doesn’t matter. Go back to sleep.” I heard him rub his hands against his skin, then inhale quickly, as though testing cold water. I had begun wearing fewer and fewer clothes to bed, piling on more blankets, collected from around the farm. By this time, I was sleeping naked.

When he got into bed, I turned to him. “Why do you want me to go back to sleep?” The whites of his eyes were four
quarter moons. He was propped up on one shoulder where his skin caught what little light came in the window and shone, looked buttery and thick.

“I just didn’t want to bother you,” he whispered and dropped onto his back, eyes to the ceiling. He shivered once and I rolled on top of him, wanting my heat to blanket his skin. When I did, I realized Gabe still had his long johns on. I sat up and rolled them over his hips, down his legs, over ankles, then crawled back up slowly, letting my breath settle on his skin. He stared at me, pressed his hands into my hip bones. When I put my head between his chin and collar bone, I could feel something tense there. My will was strong – a drive to keep him open, to warm whatever seized up in him. I moved against Gabe, put my cheek against his, my breath on his ear, didn’t say anything. I breathed lightly there, felt the alchemy of his skin and my breath become heat, and waited.

When a low sound came from Gabe’s throat and he pulled me to him, I rolled away, then slid up against him, met his chest with my back, his mouth with my neck. I guided his hands to my hips, palms on the bone, fingers pressing into the dip there, moving in. I threw one foot over his ankle, hooked it around his leg, arched my back. Then we moved together, rocked until there was no difference between the rhythm of bodies and breath, no difference between his skin and mine. When he entered me it was simple, something catching, then pushing through, the tug of something held tight unravelling. Things are never as they say. I expected pain, tearing apart. Instead, I felt pain as heat, both liquid and solid at once, and tasted metal in my mouth. It was as though there was something else
moving between my legs – a big fish, tail pounding. When it broke the surface, I gasped, threw my head back so it hit Gabe’s collarbone. He bent his head toward me, opened his mouth and I could feel the crest of teeth against my shoulder. Then we both collapsed into the mattress. After that night, sex became a place. A place that was wide open and safe only because it was stolen, held so close.

I had became a kind of low-level celebrity at Sawmill Creek Secondary. To my admittedly limited knowledge, prior to staying at Pilgrims I had been known as two things: a religious freak and a prude. Two attributes that said
Stay far away
. Then I became a religious prude turned pagan whore and had cut my hair off to prove it. The Matts, Jasons, and Jeffs who had ignored me in the hall before leered and made low noises in their throats when I walked by. The girls cornered me in the change room to let me know they had seen Gabe in town and thought he was so cute. To ask if there were any more like him out there and if they could come party with us. These were girls who used the word
party
as a verb. They spoke to me in sugared condescension, their smiles like pats on a puppy’s head.

Krista was spending more time with Mike and some days I wouldn’t even see her at all between classes. On those days, I felt slightly untethered, but I couldn’t describe the feeling as wholly good or bad. I thought perhaps this was simply how it felt to get older. In the past, we had spent numerous weekends watching corny romantic videos on Krista’s couch, squeezing
each other’s arms when the young lovers on the screen finally kissed. We thought this desire, this ache we felt, would go away when we were finally with boys and men, kissed in ways we could only imagine. Perhaps, though, joining our bodies to someone else’s just brought that ache closer to the surface.

I thought that if I could share with Krista the fact that I had slept with Gabe, the new loneliness I felt might be abated. I walked the halls looking for her, then staked out her locker. When she appeared, I asked her what she was doing after school.

First, Krista simply stared at me, looking almost annoyed, then she said, “I need to work at my mom’s store, why?”

“I thought maybe we could do something. I could come with you to the mall and we could hang out after you’re off.”

She paused as though considering it before answering, “Yeah, all right.”

We went to the food court before she started work and as we plucked french fries from the tray, filled our mouths with them, I told Krista about Gabe and me. While I did, she dipped her fries into the mound of ketchup, moaning and clutching the side of the table.

“Will you cut that out?” I said.

“Oh, so sorry, Your I’ve-been-laid-by-Gabeness. It sounds all right, though. It couldn’t have been good, not at first, hey, but trust me, it’ll get better.” Krista was looking around the food court as though distracted, or searching for someone.

“Actually, I don’t know. It wasn’t bad.”

“Okay, Harp, if ‘you don’t know’ and ‘it wasn’t bad,’ then it wasn’t great. When it’s great, you’ll know.” She shook her head slowly, still looking away, and scanned the tables.

“Well, what about your first time?”

Krista’s gaze snapped back to mine. “My first time,
my
first time? Shit, you remember that prick Derek Jeffries, no pun intended, just jammed it in me before I knew what was happening – remember, grade nine?”

“Oh yeah, shit, Kris, I totally forgot.”

She ground the last remaining fries into the soup of ketchup and vinegar on the tray. “Yeah, well, I wouldn’t expect you to remember, it was utterly forgettable. No big deal. It got better, that’s the important part.” Krista looked up at me as she put the fries in her mouth.

“So, it’s good with Mike?”

She nodded, chewed. “Yeah, most of the time,” she said through the remnants of a mouthful, then swallowed, continued, “I mean, I can’t even feel the rug burn when we’re going at it on the floor, that’s how good it feels.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

She looked at me. “Oh. Well, I don’t know what else to tell you. I haven’t had any spiritual insights, if that’s what you’re after.” Krista got up from the table quickly and told me to meet her at Rim Rock Records at five-thirty. She left the tray behind and I tipped it toward and away from me, watching the ketchup and vinegar slide across the plastic.

Later that afternoon, on our way to Therese’s car in the parking lot, I saw them, a trail of women and children from the Free Church coming out of Kmart, a bantam parade of
noise and colour. Two young women pushed children balanced in the seats of grocery carts. One had a baby strapped to her and kids skipped and jumped around the rattling freight of cleaning products, large boxes of food, and plastic bags of diapers.

“Sylvia!” Becky from the Free Church said, her baby strapped to her facing outward, blinking and pumping its limbs like it was emerging from her chest. The other woman, Wendy, smiled slightly and looked over her shoulder. The four of us stood like that, without speaking, until Becky went on, “We sure would love to see you two back at service.” Wendy nodded in agreement.