In My Fucking Prime (first edit! erotic memoir)

It’s not that summer grew tired of her fragrant clothes, went off in a snit and returned rebelliously without color, head to toe, a winter nun. A serious stoic. I’m sure there were fazes in between—like that decadent one when she shed all her clothes, all, and became autumn. And later mourned; maybe she had gone too far taking those blunt scissors to her hair to compliment her nakedness, crying for her bareness including her hair. Like late autumn, when it rains and rains and the dank wetness penetrates your bones, she cried like that. And then she grew cold, after all those tears, yes, there are always clues, turning rain to snow the way it does every year and did with Garth and me. Except we still have those glorious winter days like the ones in St. Agathe when my grandfather in his shirt sleeves sat on those metal and royal blue striped canvas folding chairs on the veranda overlooking his vast snowed-in garden and the lake, the sun bathing his skin, transforming it to ruddy brown, that sweet shade I have grown to love.

I was going to write about not knowing when things started to go really wrong with Garth and me. I was going to slide in leaving the girls to shack up with him and how his young son with the curly auburn hair called me Mama. And now his young son is overweight and has his head shaved which Garth says is Talon’s mother’s doing since she thinks it looks both neat and black which I don’t understand with his glow-in-the-dark tight curls. “She’s gay,” Garth offers, and he and Talon grin at each other.

Garth works at Main Street Investment with other brokers whom he says are a waste of skin, yet still goes out with every Friday night, which has something to do office politics and playing the game. “Why don’t you take me anywhere anymore?” I say and then wince. “I’m a builder, damn it—in my fucking prime.” He says I look down on him, that I don’t like his TV shows, sneer at his comics and his playing Duke Nukem with Talon. “But I watch Spawn, and that other guy, you know on Saturday morning, the one with the gargoyles, and that other one with extraterrestrials and good graphics, what’s the one?”
“Goliath to the first one,” he says in his flat voice, “and Reboot to the second.”

Every morning Garth phones Diamond cab.
“Why don’t you take the bus like most people? Who takes a cab every morning?” I plant myself in front of him, my arms across my chest.
“You asking my son to wake up at 6:30 and stand in a packed subway?” he says, a dark cloud crossing his face. My heart aches to kiss him under the sheets; in my head, I’m slamming the door on his cocksure face. What if he leaves now? What’s stopping him from leaving now?
“No—it’s just that it’s so much money, so much money going out, don’t you think?”
“You’re asking me to wake my seven-year-old son up at six-thirty so he has the pleasure of experiencing rush hour.”
“No. I’m not saying that.”
“So what are you saying?”
“I’m not saying anything. Nothing at all.”
“No. You did say something. And I want to hear it.”
“Listen, I’m going to be late. They don’t like when I’m late and I always am. And Lynette’s waiting.”
“You wouldn’t want to keep Lynette waiting.”
“No, no I wouldn’t.”
“You shouldn’t leave and let this fester.”
“Can’t we talk about it later? I’ve got to go, really, these are my steadies.”
“You asked me to tell you. I’m telling you, it’s not a good idea what you’re doing.”
“Fuck you both, fuck you fuck you, someone’s got to pay the bills,” I say on the other side of the door as I sling my gum bag over my shoulder. Even though I’m mud-slinging pissed off, I’ve got this springy step. Different from my builder’s strut, this one is flexed and tightly coiled.

I wanted someone to take care of me, which I didn’t know the moment I saw him and my cunt shimmied across the floor and landed at his feet. I was a serious builder in those days. There were other big guys working out that night, some I knew from my days at hardcore gyms, others from The Workout, Gold’s on Yonge, Worlds, Fitness Connection on Don Mills. Every day he breaks my heart.

He says I’ve become mean. I come home, walk into the bedroom, and shut the door.
He says I don’t listen to him anymore. I interrupt him as soon as he starts talking.
He says we don’t talk anymore.
I say why doesn’t he get a job. I’m dying I say.
He just sits and doesn’t say anything.
Don’t you hear me? I say. I’m falling. Can’t you see I’m falling?
Yes, I see, he says.
You’re a young man. I can’t take care of you this way.
I looked, he says. Dishwasher, gas attendant. They say they don’t need anyone.
Why didn’t you tell me?
That I couldn’t get a job as a dishwasher?
I kiss him. What has happened to us? I say.
Come, I say, and taking his hand, lead him into the bedroom.
The next time I don’t kiss him or lead him into the bedroom. Sometimes I sleep on the sofa. I used to sleep on the couch to get away from Abie.

One night I lie face down on the gray carpet. I stay there for a long time and weep on and off. Like a ghost through a wall, white arms and hands reach into my back.
“Garth!” I say, standing up now. “Garth!”
He is beside me in an instant.
“An angel came to help me. I felt an angel dipping into my back, so I could stand up. And when I did, it had passed, all that made me so sad—I was in a Greek tragedy, like Odysseus’s wife wailing with piercing cries. Did I tell you I played the Chorus in Antigone?”
“Yes,” he says, “you told me.”
“I love you Garth.” I say, leaning my head on his warm chest.
“Oh Janice, you just don’t get it, do you? I never stopped loving you.”

On Nina Street I asked Garth how many years he gave us. Five years, he said. It’s four now and already he’s talking of leaving. “Five months,” he says. Until he saves some money. And then five months pass and he says, “Five months, until I save some money.” I learned about money on Bluffwood Drive when the chair I was sitting on, a sturdy ladder-back chair relocated from the St. Agathe country house, was yanked out from under me. Still more lessons rained down on me until I had nothing sparkling left to lure men with. It was on a slushy sidewalk outside the Deloraine house that I remembered my soul. I hadn’t realized cash had sweet-talked its way into the cartilage between my vertebrae.

All those years I’d spent nourishing that soul of mine, art, music, words, the works, until I didn’t have to feed it anymore. I could go anywhere and that soul would seek out and suck in. The ladies at gym set aside empathetic moments—“How are you? How’s your daughter?” one would say. “What a fine soul you are. This has got to be the most caring place.”I’d say while searching my pockets for a hug, like used gum, with the flavor still intact. And they’d smile, I was their mitzvah. I never knew those words before Abie and his family and then the ladies entered my life. “And yet, you stay smiling, you’re always smiling.” “I have a rich soul,” I’d say.
Given the choice of money or soul, Garth would say money, every time. He says he’d rather his impoverished soul hang out in decent surroundings than on some street corner. I tell him I’m going for both. “Sure,” he says. “Why not?”

I know how to work the floor. My end-of-the-month write-up of accounts consumes a night. The accounts confuse me. I have to match payment receipts with workout times I’ve logged on my client sheets and that been recorded in the training binder. Sometimes I make mistakes and my cheque rings in at one or two or even three hundred dollars less. And other times I invoice again since I have a stash of copies to back me up. All month I add up training fees. I need to know where I stand. The gym has two or three master trainers and I’m one, having the look as I do. Also I’ve been a trainer on and off since I was thirty-eight at the Inn on the Park gym where I also looked the part though not the way I do now. Abie talked me into rowing so I took those learn-to-row classes at the Argonaut club until I heard about Hanlon. I was bow seat on an eight, although I also rowed fours, pairs, and doubles. My second year, I got it into my head that I’d like to single so Michelle, our coach who by the way had the hots for her coach and married him, much as I fell in love with all my coaches and some of them with me, taught me first on a Paluski touring single scull and then on a traditional single Hudson. Rowing is something else. I loved rowing though not as much as building, I guess having started out with building, strayed into rowing, and came back to my first love with as much longing and lust as I’d had in our beginning.

The head nurse with the oily streaked hair and soothing smile tells me Caroline is going on a medication holiday. “A holiday—I can’t imagine,” I say. “The last time we went on a holiday was fifteen years ago, in Hawaii. It’s not that sort is it?”
Before I’d come in, I’d phone, “I’m thinking of coming in today,” I’d say and the nurse would answer, “I’ll go and ask her.” Sometimes she’d say, “Yes, she will see you,” and other times, less often now than at the beginning, I’d wait until she returned with “maybe today is not such a good idea.” There is a Sawtooth Oak in my Gossamer garden, its limbs so high and wide and open; could I not lie on the earth and open myself to something sweet and metaphysical? But inside, dogs guard me. I cannot remember when I last walked about without them in the shadows. I’m like that Billy Holiday song, “You’ve Changed.” I’ve become a ghost town, my eyelids like roller shades pulled down low.

Caroline is walking with me. It’s spring now. She stops and says something that causes me to turn to her and wrap my arms full around her.

I’m in her tiny hospital room, emptying the contents of drawers and one metal locker onto her cot.

She sits in the passenger side of the front seat, her head against the glass as she watches the passing of shapes and colors, some of which she recognizes. I am with her inside her eyes.

After almost two years, I am driving her away from this place she has renamed Camp Fazeka. She says it had a gun room. I tell her I know it was a frightening place and she says, “It’s true, there’s a gun room in there. I saw it.” I tell her Passover is around the bend, what a celebration we shall have and she spits out “I’m not Jewish. My mother and father were Christian athiests. Hail Hitler!” she says, her voice scaling the window. I pull into the emergency lane. A police car pulls up behind me and a cop with a buzz cut walks up to my car.
“Anything wrong?” she says.
“No officer, I’m just taking my daughter home. From Whitby Mental—”
“They burned it down. It’s burned down,” Caroline says in her new shrill voice.
“Hail Hitler!”
“You sure you’re OK?” the officer says.
“I’ll manage,” I say, “it’s just the first day.”
“How old is she?”
I hate talking about Caroline in front of her back.
“The officer wants to know how old you are honey.”
I have to repeat this with a touch on Caroline’s forearm which I figure might ground her.
“I’m one week old, zero pounds, zero feet.”
“She’s twenty-three, officer.”
“They’re lying!” Caroline casts out, her voice zinging out the car into the middle of the 401.
“Well, good luck. I could accompany you back if that’s what you need.”
“We’re be alright, won’t we Caroline?” I say, placing my arm on her forearm which she shakes off.
“We’ll be alright. It’s just a matter of time.”
“Good luck, then.”
“Thank you, officer,” I say and pull out, carefully merging traffic already on its way and going fast.

I am making a single bed in a room with two single beds and a bureau—where is the bureau? Not between the twin beds or under the tilted venetians missing every third slot—the room is in her father’s third floor walk-up apartment on Weston Road. Cayne’s Appliance Warehouse lures men and women who park gingerly on the street, checking once, twice their foreign cars are indeed locked. Beside Cayne’s, a sandwich shop with bars on its windows and doors sits empty. A used-car lot stakes its land claim beside Abie’s building and after that a street-corner Pentecostal Church with a sign “Nonworhippers Welcome.” When we drive up, I point to the library, an old brick building across from the used-car lot.

Abie has set up his office in the living room, part of which serves as a dining room. In the kitchen, grime has invaded all available crevices. His freezer is half full with frozen dinners and there’s a tin of Campbell’s beef stew on the counter. Whenever he answers the phone in the living room, he motions us away with his hands like a dog desperate to get in. I talk to Caroline in a low voice. “Quiet! I’m talking to Germany!” he hisses. “All of Germany, you say?” and Caroline smiles which gives me hope. “He sure puts a lot of energy into waving that arm of his at us,” I say to Caroline. “Let’s go in your room.”

We sit on her bed.
“Oh my darling,” I say, patting her hair. “Come put your head on my lap,” it’s been so long, honey. Rest now.” And she does. At first a bit stiffly, but soon her fear, that thick fog inside her, lifts and for now, we have peace. My grandmother, my Bobi on my mother’s side, used to rub my scalp. I sit with my lost daughter on her cot that reminds me of another mattress in a glass room as I massage her head and forehead until the right arm, wrist and hand ache, but I don’t stop until her thin lids close. And still I continue.