ten toys by December so I have enough time for the last-minute bird or guinea pig toy. This year I decide that cats will get sock gifts. Giovanni gives me a plastic bag full of his old socks and I mess up the living room for a week, making “sneaky peaky serpents.” I put two jingly rubber cat toy balls at either end and tie them in place. I also tuck a little catnip inside, just to keep them interested. Then I sew on two buttons at each end, like taunting eyes, and I attach a long red twisting pipe cleaner for a tongue.
Making the toys keeps me busy for about a week. But then I’m bored again and the thoughts come flooding in, about Michael, or about my mom, or about us not having enough money and why the fuck I’m so angry all the time, and I’m so close to just opening the kitchen cupboard and starting on a bottle of vodka.
I’m so pathetically antsy that I go to a movie with Rachel ’cause I know I won’t get into trouble with her. She’s been asking me to go out a few times, mentioning we should do something after work. We get along well enough. We have some laughs. So finally I mention this movie and we make plans to go after our Friday shift. We drive in her fancy white Mini and I feel like royalty, not having to take the bus.
Rachel is giggly and bubbly and so publicly happy it’s embarrassing. Nauseating, really. She makes such a point of having fun that I don’t want to have fun. I don’t know what it is. It’s as if being around someone really happy just makes me more mad. She takes my arm in hers as we go up the escalator. She texts her friends a thousand times. She insists on playing a game of pinball. She’s not nerdy or naive. She’s just … I don’t know. Clean?
We buy popcorn and drinks and sit in the back row. She immediately puts her feet up on the back of the seat in front of her, and when the lady to the left complains about it, she doesn’t take them off, which surprises me. Impresses me, I suppose.
While we wait for the previews, Rachel insists on giving me a hand massage. She’s taking a shiatsu course at her mother’s wellness centre and says it’s her homework to practise two hours of massage on people this week. I will be her last fifteen minutes. I reluctantly give her my hand. It seems a little strange, two girls holding hands. It’s like we’re lesbians or something. But I don’t say anything, because in these situations it’s more embarrassing to admit it’s embarrassing. And in the end it’s actually pretty good, and I feel myself relax into the seat a little more. My hand becomes this floppy, boneless mush that she prods and pulls and pokes, and I laugh a little to myself, because if one of my friends saw me now, they’d piss themselves laughing.
At the end of the night, she drops me off at a convenience store a few blocks away from my home because I don’t want her to see where I live. It’s partly because I don’t want her to get all clingy and show up unannounced, and also because I don’t want her to see my crappy apartment. In her chipper voice she tells me she had fun and that we should do it again. I say, “Yeah.” But I’m just so happy to get out of the car because I find her totally boring. And I can’t imagine living like this forever: not partying, just going to movies and living life sober.
Twenty-Two
My mom has been trying to turn things around too. She has a new boyfriend named Scott. Current boyfriend, that is. As in, tonight. This one seems okay. He’s a Suit. That’s what she calls him. Which already puts him miles ahead of any man she’s ever brought around here. He’s an accountant at the firm where she’s been temping. Just got divorced. Probably on the rebound with my mom, but that’s okay. As long as they’re not assholes and don’t play stepfather, I’m fine. And as long as they make my mom happy, I couldn’t really care less.
After only three weeks of dating, Scott takes my mom and me away for the weekend to a resort in the country. I sit in the back of