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Melody

– I –

Melody lets the first half dozen cars go by; she says she has a bad feeling about them.

The trip will take as long as it takes, she says. There are no more cars for an hour. She pulls her cigarettes out of her jean jacket and some matches from the El Dorado. We had been dancing there last night until the owner snapped on the lights. The band immediately aged; they could have been our parents. They wore acid-washed jeans and T-shirts that said ARMS ARE FOR HUGGING, VIVA LA SANDINISTA, and FEMINIST? YOU BET!!!

Outside the El Dorado two mangy Camaros, souped up for the weekend Smash Up Derby, revved their engines and tore out of the parking lot. I watched their tail lights swerve and bounce in the dark. They dragged near the mall and sparks lit the snagged fenders. A soprano yelp of rubber and then near silence. I could smell the ocean far beyond the army barracks. The revolving Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket still glowing in the pre-dawn light. Waves shushing the pebble beach; Brian Fiander falling in beside me. He had been downing B52s. He was lanky and discombobulated until his big hand clasped my shoulder and his too long limbs snapped into place like the poles of a pup tent.

The clock radio in my dorm room came on in the early afternoon and I listened to the announcer slogging through the temperatures across the island. Twenty-nine degrees. Mortification and the peppery sting of a fresh crush. I’d let Brian Fiander hold my wrists over my head against the brick wall of the dorm while he kissed me; his hips thrusting with a lost, intent zeal, the dawn sky as pale and grainy as sugar. Brian Fiander knew what he was doing. The recognition of his expertise made my body ting and smoulder. My waking thought: I have been celebrated.

I felt logy and grateful. Also sophisticated. I’d had an orgasm, though I didn’t know it at the time. I didn’t know that’s what that was. I could count on one hand the number of times I’d said the word out loud, though I’d read about it. I believed myself to be knowledgeable on the subject. I’d closed my eyes while Brian touched me and what I’d felt was like falling asleep, except in the opposite direction and at alarming speed: falling awake. Wildly alert. Falling into myself.

I made my way down the corridor to the showers, the stink of warming Spaghetti-Os wafting from the kitchenette. Wavy Fagan passed me in her cotton candy slippers and she smirked. I had a crowbar grin; his hand on my breast, slow, sly circles. Wavy smirked and I knew: Oh that’s what that was.

The showers were full of fruity mist. Brenda Parsons brushing her teeth. Her glasses steamed. She turned toward me blindly, mouth foaming toothpaste. She had been going out with Brian Fiander.

We can see anything that’s coming long before it arrives, and nothing’s coming. The highway rolls in the sulky haze of midafternoon and Melody and I are eternally stuck to the side of it. The night before comes back in flickers. A glass smashing, swimming spotlights, red, blue. Hands, buttons. The truck, when it appears, is a lisping streak, there and not there as it dips into the valleys. A black truck parting the quivering heat. A star of sunlight reaming the windshield.

I say, Do I stick my thumb out or what?

I’ll do the thinking, says Melody. She ties the jean jacket around her waist in a vicious knot. We don’t hitch but the truck pulls over. I run down the highway and open the door. Melody stays where she is, she just stands, smoking.

My friend is coming, I say. I climb up onto the bouncy seat. The guy is a hunk. A happy face on his sweatshirt. Smokey sunglasses. Brian Fiander barely crosses my mind. Brian is too willing and skinny; he’s unworthy of me.

This guy tilts the rearview mirror and puts his hand over the stick shift, which vibrates like the pointer of a Ouija board. He has a wedding ring but he can’t be more than twenty. A plain gold band. The fine hair on his fingers is blonde and curls over the ring, catching the light, and I almost lean toward him so he will touch my cheek with the back of his hand.

I’ve had too much sun, may still be drunk from the night before. Is that possible? I experience a glimmer of clairvoyance as convincing as the smell of exhaust. I close my eyes and the shape of the windshield floats on my eyelids, bright violet with a chartreuse trim. I know in an instant and without doubt that I will marry, never be good with plants, suffer incalculable loss that almost, almost tips me over, but I will right myself, I will forget Melody completely but she will show up and something about her as she is now — her straight defiant back in the rearview mirror — will be exactly the same. She’ll give me a talisman and disappear as unexpectedly as she came.

Melody is still standing with her cigarette, holding one elbow. She’s looking down the road, her back to us, the wind blowing a zigzag part in her hair. A faint patch of sweat on her pink shirt like a Rorschach test between her shoulder blades.

She finally drops the cigarette and crushes it with her sneaker. She walks toward the truck with her head bent down, climbs up beside me, and pulls the door shut. She doesn’t even glance at the driver.

Skoochie over, she says. My arm touches the guy’s bare arm and I feel the heat of his sunburn, a gliding muscle as he puts the truck in gear.

We all set, the guy asks.

We’re ready, I say. There’s a pine-tree air freshener, a pouch of tobacco on the dash, an apple slice to keep it fresh, smells as pristine as the South Pole. It’s going to rain. Melody changes the radio station, hitting knots of static. The sky goes dark, darker, darker, and the first rumble is followed by a solid, thrilling crack. A blur of light low and pulsing. The rain tears into the pavement like a racing pack of whippets. Claws scrabbling over the top of the cab. Livid grey muscles of rain.

Melody and I are working on math in my dorm room. She kisses me on the mouth. Later, for the rest of my life, while washing dishes, jiggling drops of rain hanging on the points of every maple leaf in the window, or in a meeting when someone writes on a flowchart and the room fills with the smell of felt-tip marker — during those liminal non-moments fertile with emptiness — I will be overtaken by swift collages of memory. A heady disorientation, seared with pleasure, jarring. Among those memories: Melody’s kiss. Because it was a kiss of revelatory beauty. I realized I had never initiated anything in my life. Melody acted; I was acted upon.

I’m not like that, I say, gay or anything.

She smiles, No big deal. She twists an auburn curl around in her finger, supremely unruffled. Aplomb. She’s showing me how it’s done.

I like you and everything, I say.

Relax, she says. She turns back to the math, engaging so quickly that she solves the problem at once.

What I feel on the side of the highway, ozone in the air, the epic sky: I am falling hugely in love. Hank, the guy who picked us up in his black truck. Brian Fiander. Melody, myself. Whomever. A hormonal metamorphosis, the unarticulated lust of a virgin as errant, piercing, and true as lightning. A half hour later the truck hydroplanes.

Hank slams on the brakes. The truck spins in two weightless circles. I listen to the keening brakes of the eighteen wheeler coming toward us, ploughing a glorious wave of water in front of it. The sound as desperate and restrained as that of a whale exhausted in a net. I can see the grill of the eighteen wheeler’s cab through the sloshing wave like a row of monster teeth. The transport truck stops close enough, our bumpers almost touching.

After a long wait, the transport driver steps down from the cab. He stands beside his truck, steely points of rain spiking off his shoulders like medieval armour. Melody opens her door and steps down. She walks toward the driver, but then she veers to the side of the road and throws up.

The driver of the transport truck catches up with her there. When Melody has finished puking he turns her toward him, resting his hands on her shoulders. She speaks and hangs her head. He begins to talk, admonishing, cajoling; once bending his head back and looking up into the rain. He chuckles. The thick film of water sloshing over the windshield makes their bodies wiggle like sun-drugged snakes. After a while he lifts her chin. He takes a handkerchief from an inside pocket and shakes it out and holds it at arm’s length, examining both sides. He hands it to her and she wipes her face.

Hank whispers to me, I’m not responsible for this. He lays his hand on the horn.

Melody gets back in the truck. She’s shivering. The other driver climbs into his cab. His headlights come on. The giant lights splinter into needles of pink and blue and violet and the rain is visible in the broad arms of light, and as the truck pulls out the lights dim and narrow, as if it has cunning. Then it drives away. Hank takes off his sunglasses and folds the arms and places them in a holder for sunglasses glued to the dash. He moves his hand over his face, down and up, and then he rests his forehead on the wheel. He holds the wheel tight.

What did you say to him, Hank asks. He waits for Melody to answer but she doesn’t. Finally he lifts his head. He flings his arm over the back of the seat so he can turn the truck and I see the crackle of lines at the corners of his eyes.

I watch Melody inside the Irving station a couple of hours later, her pink sleeveless blouse through the window amid the reflections of the pumps and the black truck I’m leaning against. She passes through my reflection and, returning to the counter, passes through me again like a needle sewing something up. Hank opens the hood and pulls out the dipstick. He takes a piece of paper towel from his back pocket, draws it down the length of stick, stopping it from wavering.

Melody comes out with a bottle of orange juice. It has stopped raining. Steam lifts off the asphalt and floats into the trees. Sky, Canadian flag, child with red shirt — all mirrored in the glassy water on the pavement at our feet. A car passes and the child’s reflection is a crazy red flame breaking apart under the tires. The juice in Melody’s hand has an orange halo. A brief rainbow arcs over the wet forest behind the Irving station.

You married, Hank? Melody asks. He’s still fiddling with things under the hood.

I believe I met you at the El Dorado, Melody says.

Hank unhooks the hood, lowers it, and lets it drop. He rubs his hands in the paper towel and gives her a look.

I don’t think so, he says.

I believe you bought me a drink, Melody says.

You’re most likely thinking of someone else, he says.

Could have sworn it was me, Melody says, it sure felt like me. She laughs and it comes out a honk.

I’m going to carry on by myself from here, Hank says.

But you’re probably right, Melody says, the guy I’m thinking of wasn’t wearing a ring.

Good luck, he says. Melody hefts herself up onto a stack of white plastic lawn chairs next to a row of barbeques and swings her legs. Hank gets in his truck and pulls out onto the highway.

I can take care of myself, Melody yells. But now we’ve lost our ride, and it’ll take a good hour to get to the clinic in Corner Brook from here.

The nurse leans against the examining table with her arms folded under her clipboard.

You’ll need your mother’s signature, she says. Anybody under nineteen needs permission from a parent or guardian. You’ll need to sit before a board of psychiatrists in St. John’s to prove you’re fit.

Tears slide fast to Melody’s chin and she raises a shoulder and rubs her face roughly against the collar of her jean jacket.

She wouldn’t sign, Melody says.

The nurse turns from Melody and pulls a paper cone from a dispenser and holds it under the water cooler. A giant wobbling bubble works its way up, breaking at the surface. It sounds like a cooing pigeon, dank and maudlin. I can hear water rat-a-tatting from a leaky eaves trough onto a metal garbage lid.

My mother has fourteen children, Melody says.

The nurse drinks the water and crunches the cup. She presses the lever on the garbage bucket with her white shoe and the lid smacks against the wall. She tosses the cup and it hits the lid and falls inside. Then she wipes her forehead with the back of her hand.

You can forge the signature and I’ll witness it, she says. She takes the top off the Bic pen with her teeth. She flicks a few pages and shows Melody where to sign. Melody signs and the nurse signs below.

I don’t need to tell you, the nurse says.

I appreciate it, says Melody.

That year I live on submarine sandwiches microwaved in plastic wrap. When I peel back the wrap, the submarine hangs out soggy and spent, like a tongue after a strangling. The oozing processed cheese hot enough to raise blisters. I wear a lumber jacket over cheesecloth skirts, and red Converse sneakers. I learn to put a speck of white makeup in the outer corner of my eyes to give me an innocent, slightly astonished look. On Valentine’s Day in the dorm elevator I tear an envelope; dried rose petals fall out and whirl in the updraft of the opening elevator doors and there is Brian Fiander. I see I was wrong; he isn’t skinny. If he still wants me, he can have me. I will do whatever Brian Fiander wants and if he wants to dump me after, as he has Brenda Parsons, he can go right ahead. He seems to go through girls pretty quickly and I want to be gone through.

Melody and I get tickets on the CN bus into St. John’s for the abortion. I wait for her outside a boardroom in the Health Sciences. I catch a glimpse of the psychiatrists, five men seated in a row behind a table. Melody comes out a half-hour later.

What did they say?

One of them commented on my hat, she says. He said I must think myself pretty special with a fancy hat. He asked if I thought I was pretty special.

What did you say?

The same smile as when she kissed me. Learning to smile like that will take time. The rainbow must belong to some other story. Stretching over the hills behind the Irving station, barely there.

After the abortion I hold her hand. She’s lying on a stretcher and she reaches a hand out over the white sheet that is tucked so tightly around her shoulders that she has to squirm to get her arm free.

Not too bad, she says. She is ashen. Tears from the corners of her eyes to her ears.

Sometimes you have to do things, she says.

During the rest of the winter I spend a lot of time with Wavy Fagan. She’s marrying her high-school woodworking teacher; they have to keep the relationship secret. Wavy smokes, holding the cigarette out the window. I fan the fire alarm with her towel.

I don’t spend much time with Melody; time together is exhausting. Wavy smokes, and she taps the window with her hard fingernail and tells me to come