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has been published in Story, Washington Square, Scribner's Best of the Fiction Workshops 1999 and elsewhere. Stories are forthcoming in two Canadian publications: B&A New Fiction and Pagitica in Toronto. She was a New York Times Fellow in the MFA program at New York University. Entertainment for Women
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| * |
Was I looking for Katie? I wasn't entirely exaggerating. Katie had fled the premises as soon as she got engaged. Katie had taken leave of her senses.
My transformation into bridedom was insidious, steeping my brain in a poisonous, bouquet-scented tea: Where I once discussed hockey and jazz, I now spewed helpful tips about veil lengths and hot-weather blossoms and the etiquette of seating divorced parents. The wedding magazines I had promised never to buy—outside of a skiing magazine, I'd never seen so much white—had broken the door off my mailbox. I had even come to hate the word "bride": it connoted a level of naiveté I hadn't felt since I went off to the University of Toronto in a pair of plaid legwarmers.
In a recurring dream, Ethan and I were walking up the aisle. He was wearing a kilt with a breeze underneath. I was wearing nothing with nothing underneath.
"Can you believe those birthday suits?" whispered one guest to another. "They start at $3,000."
| * |
"Am I early?" asked the stripper, checking his watch. Like its owner, it had an ugly face: big gothic numbers handcuffing his wrist. "You said we were supposed to start by seven."
"Shouldn't you have a special costume?" I asked. "Like policeman, fireman?"
"You said you wanted just the basics." He shifted his weight, the helmet bouncing off his leg.
"Yes…right," I said. The basics. "The party has been postponed-" I quickly did the math that would gauge my sister's ETA after her evening commute: Jane slipping her key in the front door after an easy drive from the architecture firm, her microfiber suit as smooth as a business letter.
"-till nine. Why don't you come back later?" I figured the stripper could use the time to ride his motorbike around the block a few times or get a new tattoo.
Instead, he said, "Can I come in and use your phone?"
| * |
On an estrogen excursion two years ago, I accompanied three of my closest friends to Fantasies, a strip club on Yonge Street. The men were all long-haired and waxed to a high tan and as dumb as a bag of hammers. The special occasion was the thirtieth birthday of my pal Sophie, whose husband dropped her off at the club, waving goodbye as if entrusting his wife to the public library. Throughout the course of the evening, Sophie not only unzipped a performer's sequined pants with her teeth, she also polished off three Tom Collins and a table dance. I sat as far away from the action as I could, sulking into the tropical eye of my screwdriver while trying to drown my ice cubes with a straw.
Sophie's divorced now.
| * |
"What's your name?" I asked the stripper.
"Platinum Delight," he said. "Here's my card." Obviously home-made, it was authenticated by a gyrating silhouette of a go-go dancer. I had half a mind to inform him I was a website designer, and wouldn't he like me to rework his business card?
Instead, I glanced at the crown of his head, where dark roots battled his dye job. "What's your real name?"
"Guy." He yawned. His boots resembled the chewed tires that are easily mistaken for roadkill.
I let the door swing open, an invitation to something that, unlike my wedding, I was planning as I went along.
"Katie should be home really soon," I said.
He looked around the apartment, appraising various symbols of my sister's personality: a costly but uncomfortable red wingback couch, a table composed of rose petals floating between two panels of frosted glass, a collection of dull stones sliced open to reveal their true selves—geological candies polished to a watery sheen and arranged in Stonehengian formations. A staircase corkscrewed into the upper floor.
"Quite the pad," he said, head back, lips loose.
No matter what the shower invitation said (Come to Katie and Jane's!), this was my sister's apartment, my own personal space restricted to a futon. Jane had convinced me that living in sin was deeply unromantic.
"Besides, I don't think Mom would approve," she said, tugging at her jade necklace. She polished each link between thumb and forefinger, the Janesian equivalent of running your tongue over your teeth.
"Is that right," I said. I suggested we place a call to the South of France to confirm this with our newly tan and remarried mother, but both of us just stared at the phone.
We often imagined Mom in various states of Audrey Hepburn—scarves aflutter, our mother's espadrilles barely leaving footprints on the rocky coast of the Mediterranean. After I announced my engagement, she and Jean-Charles sent me a check for $2,000. We will definitely be coming to the wedding. I hope this little gift meets the requirements of your imagination.
"She's paraphrasing Henry James," I said. "She's taking this expat thing a little too far." My mother was the one who read to me when I was a girl—illustrated fables of lions that tiptoed and princesses who roared. By moving overseas, she had created her very own picture book, one that was closed to me. Except for the odd foray into Buffalo, I had never been out of the country and was looking forward to my honeymoon the way a 16-year-old anticipates her driver's license. She would have been amused by my recent taste in books, my favorite quote leaping from the pages of Mansfield Park: "All is safe with a lady engaged; no harm can be done."
As Mom was not around to inspire my imagination, Sister Jane automatically became the head architect of my nuptials. Instead of offering me the cabana of my dreams, however, she proposed one of those bloated Tudor mansions with strategically cultivated ivy. The blueprints changed daily. Filet mignon! A symphony! A celebration at the top of the CN Tower!
"Why not have a clambake?" I said. "On Lake Superior. I'll wear my bestest jeans."
After the divorce, my father said, "Your mother never quite belonged with us." He glowered into the distance as if shooting skeet. I saw it another way. We had never quite belonged with her. I even doubted that Jane and I shared the same blood: I kept expecting a fairy to knock on our door one day and say she wanted the changeling back.
| * |
When we were little, Jane and I assembled the neighborhood girls to play Beauty Pageant. I was usually Miss Poland, weaned on potatoes and cabbage. She was always Miss Argentina, already at home in the precarious glamor of my mother's high heels. The girl we liked best could be Miss Canada for the day; we would dress her in the sheepskin rug the cat slept on.
One day in the semifinals, I was whistling "God Save the Queen" when Jane shouted, "Now dance!" with all the finesse of a cowboy firing at my boots. I refused, longing for the comforting embrace of the sheepskin rug instead of the baby doll nightie that was truly designed for a baby doll and not a real girl.
Next time, determined not to be chosen third-runner-up again, I draped myself in a Christmas tree skirt, threw on mom's beaded holiday top, and raided her makeup bag for the most dangerous lipstick I could find, ready to emerge from the transformative darkness of her walk-in closet, an ugly duckling no more.
Only to find the door locked. I groped and tugged, my fingers small and laughable, like cocktail sausages. A skilled locksmith, Jane often infiltrated the bathroom while I was showering, just so she could flick the light switch and plunge me into darkness. A bobby pin was the instrument of choice, an implement I could have used if I'd been Miss England, whose hair was always in a bun. Unfortunately, there were no bobby pins here. The closet had everything else: a full-length mirror, an army of shoes so smooth and exotic they could have been birds, leather handbags drowsing in their dust sleeves.
I heard giggling from the other side of the door. "Lemme out! Come on!"
The laughter pricked me all over like I'd seen my mother do to pie crust to keep it from exploding in the oven. She baked pies on a weekly basis, and our game was to guess the main ingredient. All of her dishes spoke of the hidden—the mystery of stuffed meats, bloated bell peppers with their dramatic lids. Looking back, we should have known.
The sounds outside began to fade, my loneliness creeping over me like sweat. I bashed the knob with my mother's suede boot.
Resigned to the likelihood that Jane and her cronies were munching on cookies by now, I plowed through my mother's dresses to reach the window on the far side of the closet. Whenever my sister decided I was too boring a playmate, I often took refuge here, scanning the highway for cars that looked like my father's. Inside his Chevy, he'd be driving barefoot for better mileage.
Our apartment overlooked a ravine shared with two other high-rises. On my mother's stepstool, I felt myself ghost out the window and over the valley, following the stain of taillights toward downtown Toronto—a garden of metal and glass complementing the perfection of a lake visible from outer space. Beauty and ugliness both.
I adjusted my mother's opera glasses while counting familiar sights: a woman watering her ferns, cars clinging to the highway like metallic ants, the plunge and scurry of the Don River. And then something else. Something I'd never seen before.
I spun the knobs, focusing wildly. On the 13th floor of our sister tower, a rectangle of family-room glass became my very own TV: There in the window, a committee of women sat primly, their hands tethered to their laps. They wore flowered prints and corduroy and loose suits. And in the middle of them all, in the spot the nucleus would have occupied in a scientific sketch of a cell, was a man. Naked from the waist up, he sashayed from one lady to another, his body gleaming like the rainbow trout my Dad caught on his most recent fishing expedition. It had thrashed so much on the deck of the boat, he'd had to beat it over the head with a club. A fish bonker, he called it.
The man pirouetted so that his nether region flashed into view. He was wearing a loincloth. I had seen such things on Tarzan and in watercolor prints of Indians, but I wasn't prepared for this real-life penis napkin with the real-life loins underneath. Some of the guests looked away while others laughed openly. And when he took it all off, the women's hands finally tore away from their laps to protect their open mouths.
I dropped the glasses. When I recovered them, the man was taking a bow (someone had politely handed him a robe). The women were applauding, one of them making the rounds with a silver tea set, the dancer taking a cup and saucer as well as a seat, thank you very much.
I focused and refocused, sharpening various blurs into the etched relief of guests embracing, cups of tea blessed with lipstick, a hand fondling an earring, the live wire of a woman's hair escaping her hat. The dancer leaned back, tossing his black curls. He called out to a figure headed for the door. She turned back in a way I recognized, a swift and sure motion, as if trying to catch you in the act of filching a Coke from the fridge before noon, as if swiveling around in the front seat of the car to see if you really were pinching your sister all the way to Niagara Falls. My mother was deep in the act of blowing a kiss, starting toward the man with a smile that shorted my heart.
As she approached him, the stripper was all octopus: one arm encircling her shoulder, the other taking possession of her hand—the grip of competitive tango. They began to sway. I thought of the song about the girl who caught her mother kissing Santa Claus. This was much, much, worse.
A guest brushed past, spilling tea down the front of my mother's outfit. It was a red dress I had seen before. She had worn it to my birthday party. She had sewn me a replica in exactly the same shade.
The walls of the closet began to shudder—my refuge blown open, a belt diving to the floor, hangers chattering against one another. Jane stood at the door with ice cream on her face, a monstrous pipe-cleaner tiara engulfing her head. She had defended her title yet again.
| * |
Being engaged is like waking up and discovering you've been nominated for an Oscar, even though you've never acted a day in your life.
I had an entire year to diet and exercise my way into a reasonable facsimile of anorexic royalty. So what if Ethan said I was just fine the way I was? Easy for him to say. When my fiancé entered the weight room at the gym, men scattered. He had cheekbones that could cut rock salt. I felt healthy just walking by his side. Jane arranged for a personal trainer anyway, Lean Cuisine skyscrapers blocking the views in my freezer.
After the first 15 pounds melted into the ether, odd flirtations came my way, beginning with the dude on the couch at Indigo Books who offered me a kiss on Valentine's Day. I turned to see a torn bag of Hershey's Kisses on the armrest between us. Then there was the gentleman who slid into my booth at a restaurant on the corner of Yonge and Eglinton (Young and Eligible, we call it), whispering, "Man, you look like you could be delicious." My spoon clattered into the bowl of cottage cheese salad.
I remember taking the Kiss, the cloying dullness of the chocolate against my teeth. I was so hungry, it took me forever to unwrap the candy, the foil resisting my fingers. I recalled taking another, and another, a string of teardrops to quell my unease. "Thanks," I said. "I skipped lunch." I got up and gravitated toward the door as if he had a gun pointed at my back.
On the ride home, clinging to a pole near the front of the bus, I misread the sign "Please Move Back" as "Please Love Back."
| * |
When I announced my good news to Jane, I called up and said, "I am Miss Universe now."
Ethan was an architect in her firm, a talented drafter who'd quickly moved up from sketching stairs and bathrooms to designing whole visions. My sister had introduced us at an office Christmas function. He was painfully beautiful—tan slacks, a shirt that matched his curls. I'd naturally assumed that a girlfriend had dressed him, so I was surprised when he kept throwing conversational lifelines at me. Despite his looks, his manner was comforting and known, like a permanent address. So what if he preferred renting movies to going to the movies? So what if all he wanted to do on the weekends was lie on the couch?
Jane, Jane, Jane. Let's get it straight. She never stole any of my boyfriends. She never ruined my favourite sweater. She never got me grounded. Then again, she didn't steal my boyfriends because hers were better. She didn't borrow my clothes because they were hopelessly below her standards. When I got my first period, she told me the tampon went in the other hole.
The most crushing blow was that she never believed my story about our mother.
"I saw her," I said. "Mom. She was wearing a red dress." Jane had dragged me out of the closet for spumoni, her hands sticky.
"Liar," she said. "Mom is out shopping." Jane's hair had gained a charge from the tiara, like a cat with static cling. "You're a pervert."
When I brought up the subject again, we were both in our twenties. She claimed not to remember a word of it.
| * |
As I pointed the stripper in the direction of the phone, I passed my computer and noticed an e-mail from Jane.
K,
Don't forget our appointment with the string quartet tomorrow at 2 P.M.
-J.
Ever since I'd stood her up for our session at the bridal boutique, she preferred to communicate with me via e-mail. I don't know what happened that day: I'd arrived 15 minutes early, eyeballing the gowns in the window until they resembled snow angels. Why not purple? I thought. Why not yellow? I went to a phone booth, forgetting I had a cell phone, and called Ethan.
"The dresses are ghastly," I said. "Can't we just skip the whole thing and go straight to Venice?
"I don't speak Italian," he said.
I ended up phoning Jane from Pearson Airport, where I found myself tracking all arrivals and departures on Air France. If I simply waited there long enough, disintegrating into the benches like a lost crumb, my mother might actually deign to visit. I would be the first to greet her at the gangway, the first to confirm that I was marrying Ethan to impress her.
| * |
Escaping to the bathroom, I soaped the engagement ring off my finger and called out over the sound of the tap, "Would you like something to drink?"
The stripper hung up the phone. "No thanks. I'll just come back in a couple of hours."
I killed the water flow and took a yogic breath. "I've got champagne. How about it?" Three congratulatory gifts of sparkly—Veuve Clicquot, Mumm's, Möet—had charmed their way into my fridge. A top to pop whenever you're up! read one of the notecards.
My anger was up. Jane had intended to sit back and watch me squirm. She'd hired this man solely to humiliate me. She'd probably handpicked the ugliest stripper she could find, knowing he'd be dancing in my face.
From the living room came the verbal equivalent of a shrug. "All right."
"Champagne it is," I said, drifting to the kitchen. The foil ripped off easily, mocking the memory of my struggle with the Hershey's kisses, the wire twisting, the final pop releasing a wisp of air, like dragon's breath.
| * |
When I heard the stripper ringing the doorbell, I'd been prepared to meet the police and admit to my one and only crime. While redesigning the website for a snotty china shop, I had stood by while the webmaster hacked into customers' online bridal registries. I was now an accessory to a prank.
In lieu of the 16 bone-china place settings that Lawrence Shields and Amanda Reese coveted ($150 per dish) was a modest collection of plastic picnicware infested with cartoon dogs. As for Sandy Lamoureux and Jude Hall, we cruelly changed their silverware to stainless steel, transforming their gold tissue holder into cow-shaped salt-and-pepper shakers.
When I confessed this to the stripper, he laughed so hard that I had to wait a minute before handing him the champagne. His eyes creased at the corners, and I noticed for the first time that they were the same oyster gray as Ethan's.
"So when's your sister's wedding?" He held the flute glass awkwardly, as if he'd been asked to drink out of an orchid. He was still standing, eyeing his helmet across the room as if he might teleport it back onto his head.
"August."
"Where's it at?"
I found myself eyeing the zipper of his cracked pants, thinking of Sophie, my favorite divorcée. "How do you know when it's the right time to get married?" I'd asked her.
"You just know," she said.
What did I know? I knew that bridal boutiques tried to pass off Asian polyester as Italian satin, that caterers padded the bill by adding empty bottles to the tally when it was time to settle up. I knew how my mother's voice sounded from 3,000 miles away, how it redefined itself in French, words massing at the back of her throat like bees.
I sighed. The venue Jane had selected was a castle on a hill. With its stained-glass conservatory and extensive gardens, the spot had been booked two years in advance.
"It's going to be a clambake," I lied. "On Lake Superior. We're all going to wear shorts and eat fiddleheads. People with Ph.D.'s can dress up in their academic gowns."
"Cool," he said.
I fed an Oscar Peterson CD into the stereo. The stripper lowered himself onto the black chair in the corner of the room, and the friction of leather on leather made me smile. I thought of the time I made an embarrassing squelch when I shifted in my chair, and how Jane had instructed me to duplicate the noise so people wouldn't think I'd farted.
"Funny, I don't remember seeing you at the club," he said.
"What club? Where?" When I hoisted the champagne bottle again, it seemed to have gained weight.
"Oh, I thought you said you'd been to Hunk-o-rama."
"That's funny. I don't remember going." My sister at Hunk-o-rama, my prissy, cardiganed sibling? He must have confused her with someone else. Gasping, I reached for my poison.
We drank, piano and bass mellowing us into an agreeable silence measured by the tick of the wall clock. I don't know what I intended to do then, the sun at the lowest rung, the silhouettes waiting for guidance. I noticed him noticing Jane's picture.
"Is this your sister Katie? She's beautiful."
Oddly enough, I was flattered by the compliment. I thought of Jane and me twinned together à la Siamese, Jane's symmetrical face and ironed hair juxtaposed with my mousy head. I tried to hide the fact that I was blushing.
"Are you in the wedding?" he asked.
"I'm not sure."
When confusion tightened his face, I said slowly, "I'm the witness." I thought of my fantasy clambake and tried to picture Jane negotiating the rules of beach etiquette.
As he kicked off his boots, the stripper told me about his previous job at the Toronto Transit Commission. After he quit, the uniform proved very popular for his stripping gigs. I pointed out how fitting it was that the subway motto happened to be "Ride the Rocket." We snorted together.
It took all my will to refrain from asking how he got so much work as an exotic dancer, but I remembered my manners (or at least Jane's manners). Instead, I told him that the subway scared me because you descended into a hole in the ground only to emerge somewhere completely different.
For a long minute, he didn't react. Instead, he stared helplessly at the fireplace like I'd done one night when a pigeon fell down the chimney and onto the burning logs. When he started to speak, his voice was forced. "I was in a motorcycle accident over a year ago," he said. "Smashed my arm in nine places. My knee. Five operations on my nose alone. I actually succeeded in dislocating my cheekbone. Before that, I was the headliner at the club."
His face began to waver, my brain playing games: Mr. Potato Head, Operation, the stripper's features upheaving themselves into a semblance of lost beauty. Was this a ploy to earn a better tip? My hand creeped toward him. He moved to open another bottle of champagne.
The phone rang. It was Jane.
"Looks like I'm going to be home late." I could hear her playing with her jewelry again, the jade clacking. I could visualize her manicure, her nails trapped in rosy lacquer. "Don't wait for me."
| * |
Guy and I sat down to a feast of Lean Cuisine favorites: five cheese lasagna, chicken enchilada suiza with Mexican-style rice, fresh from the microwave. We ate like children, and then, gaping at our empty containers, I had the urge to bend over and lick up the last of the sauce.
"I've got one for you. Do you know what happens to people when they get married?" His jaw looked like a milk jug just dying to break free.
"What?"
Guy took a glass of water and, without breaking his eyes from mine, diluted the bubbly with it. We gaped at each other.
"Let's have seconds," I said. "Glazed turkey tenderloins or Southern beef tips?"
| * |
We were so engaged in uncorking the last round that we almost didn't hear the telephone. As the stripper grappled with the bottle, I watched his shoulders tense.
It was Ethan.
"Hey. Have you had supper?" I could hear his mechanical pencil configuring a home. He already knew the answer. I had eaten alone for five of the past seven days.
"Yup."
"Good. I won't be back until 11." Papers shuffling. "And I'll be working this weekend too, so we'll have to figure out the honeymoon some other time."
By now, even the postponements were being postponed. Ethan's passport application still waited in its envelope.
I knew then that we'd never go anywhere, that our window for crossing the pond was closing. I thought of the nearby intersection that was obscured in scaffolding for nine months until one morning I'd found myself walking not in darkness but in light, as if a chunk of sky had been installed.
| * |
"Do you have an Indian costume?"
"A what?"
"A loincloth. Do you have a loincloth?" I wielded the bottle in my hand, thinking of my father and the fish bonker and how blood and scales must have snowed the deck of his boat like the sickest kind of weather.
"Is something the matter?" he asked. "Who was that?"
"My fiancé." I balled the cork in my fist.
"You're getting married too?"
"Huh?" I slammed the Möet down on the counter and winced.
After a minute's delay, Guy was fierce with comprehension. He looked like a trivia champion.
"Where are the other girls you invited?" he said. He didn't need to check his watch to know they weren't coming.
"Late," I said. "They're all late."
He peeled my fingers from the bottle; moist with condensation, they seemed bloodless, a lost set of keys. Since I started dieting, it was the fingers that shocked me the most, so unacquainted was I with my own bones. He brought my hand to his lips.
"Will you take this man?" he said. "Will you?"
I began to cry. I shook my head, my whole body unplugged.
| * |
He listened patiently as I gave instructions. When Jane came home, she would find two things: a farewell note from me, and a man waiting between her 400-thread-count bedsheets.
But beforehand, I asked if he would do me another favor.
The wedding dress fit perfectly, the way Jane had promised. Upholstered in lace and seed pearls, I balanced on a stool in the center of the room, my hands fixed around a cup of Earl Grey. The skirt flowed around me, all tide and no ebb, all silk and no fear.
"You look beautiful," said Guy. He started the CD player.
The zipper seemed to crawl down his torso of its own accord, cleaving the jumpsuit in a weird, slow act of violence. Underneath, he was hairless, and I was surprised to see how smooth his body was. Music warmed the air as he lost his skin and stepped out of himself, toned and graceful and not ugly at all, not anymore. His G-string was hidden with the only loincloth I could find—Jane's red face-towel.
He danced gorgeously, completing the apartment the way a play makes a theater, the way only a human body can adorn a room. He glided among the objets d'art, past Jane's boastful canvases, spinning off shadows I would never see again. When he paused, his body greedy for breath, I handed him a robe and a cup of tea; I could almost hear the applause. When we came together, palm to palm, our bodies slotting together like flatware, we slow-danced for so long that it took some time to perceive that our feet were no longer moving, that we had arrived at the standstill of a hug.
I can't pretend that the dress didn't do something to me, didn't make me stand taller, like I had the skeleton of another woman holding me up as I moved toward the exit the way my mother had so many years ago. Unlike her, I wouldn't marry until it was time; I wouldn't wait until I had a family before realizing that the airport was open late, that my life could be lived on many maps, that two thousand dollars could take me away. My hand on the knob, my heart keeping a new pace, I opened the door, channeling a blast of air that felt as if it had just been let out of a can.
© Dika Lam
