Wintering in the Bubble

The Empress

The only NDP bar in the province, maybe the country, is one block away from our apartment. On election night, it’s snowing, and the floor under the tables is crowded with fat boots and purses and parkas, and I’m drinking beside two women in their forties. One of them is a bartender off-shift, my former boss. The other is an anthropology professor, an unashamed alcoholic who has six Trads and two shots of Jack every night before walking the three blocks home to a man she refers to as Husband and two elderly cats. Two years ago, we published books at the same time. Mine, a novella about my mother. Hers, a scholarly treatise on Indigenous childbirth and postpartum practices. Night after night, she sits here with her phone, waging war against conservatives on Twitter. She remembers a time when ‘union’ wasn’t a dirty word in Alberta. She’s part of every faculty labour dispute at MacEwan. Her work is thankless and it drives her here,

where the whole room is suddenly thumping on tables, yelling and cheering. A single orange riding has appeared on the election map on the screen they pull down for three perennial occasions: election night, hockey finals, and Salty’s country and western Mondays. I like to come here and write and watch videos of Dolly Parton in the sixties. I don’t know how people find the stamina to come into their power a second or a third or a twentieth time. I look up from my notebook and it’s weeks later and Salty is pouring a beer, impeccable in his cowboy hat and bolo tie. Yes, New Democrat Heather McPherson has been elected as our MP. But meanwhile, in the domed and frozen-fountained legislature building across the river, Kenney (elected in April) is reopening legislation on abortion. Soon we’ll be downtown with the grandmothers, protesting Bill 207. Haven’t we been here before?

Sundays

Since Thanksgiving, it’s been cold but not as cold as November used to be. Nevertheless, my husband and I get very serious about nesting. On Sunday mornings, we make waffles and watch movies by Spike Lee and Ingmar Bergman. Then we have sex. Then we have a second pot of coffee and make hash with onions, potatoes, eggs, and sometimes ham. Dylan and I arrange ourselves on the same couch to read our respective books. Or I read and he watches basketball. No matter what he claims to be reading, our dog Ranger invariably sleeps until it’s time to go on the long Sunday walk. We go through the ravine, across 76th, across the rugby field, and into the neighbourhood. Then it’s time to pack up the laundry and the compost and pick up Dylan’s girlfriend and go to Sunday dinner with his family. We eat roasted chicken, quinoa, and ice cream. We talk about the state of the world and my mother-in-law reminds all the artists at the table that it’s our responsibility to imagine alternatives to the future we see unfolding before us. When we get home, we fold all the laundry. I make a cup of tea. And we read again, in bed.

Borrowing Books

Dylan has become a book conduit. Every Monday, he spends the night at Sarah’s. Every Tuesday, he returns home with one of my books that Sarah is returning, and one of Sarah’s books that she is loaning to me. 

One week, the book is twice-loaned. After reading it, I don’t send it back with Dylan; I take it straight to the Strathcona Public Library. And while I am there, I pick up my holds. In the D section are my several volumes on neoliberalism and witchcraft. One shelf over I see Sarah’s last name on a book called simply Polyamorous. Then my friend from the Metro shows up, eating an ice cream cone in spite of the weather. She is also here for her holds.

Meanwhile, my boyfriend has recently founded The Hilltop Lending Library, which operates out of his bedroom and his named after his house. Whenever he acquires a new book which, he believes, will help us learn how to behave in the new world order, he posts the information on Instagram. An open-access spreadsheet keeps track of where books are in circulation. When I return a book I’ve been borrowing all winter, I see it pop up on the list the next day.

Posters

We are weak, petty drama queens like everyone else. The posters, more than anything else, make me doubt our eligibility for membership in any new order. I don’t trust the poster makers any more than I trust CEOs.

Let’s look at two posters that can still be spotted in the bus shelters of Whyte Avenue, though many of them are scribbled over with black marker and many of them are partially torn off.

Exhibit A: I do not know if this tattoo artist with the bad goatee is a Nazi or a rapist. The posters declare he is both. The posters proclaim his Instagram handle, his phone number, his full name, and his place of work. (Doubtless, by now, his former place of work.)

Exhibit B: It was only a matter of time before someone took a hit at Shirtless Rollerblading Guitar Guy. Whose real name is Arthur. For years, he has spent eight months of the year troubadouring up and down the avenue—shirtless, yes, thank god, rollerblading yes, smiling broadly, and playing a simple lick on his guitar. Early this spring, he broke his leg and as soon as I saw him hobbling around in a cast, I knew the provincial election was going to go badly. I knew the forest fires would return. I knew we were, at least temporarily, fucked.

But then I saw him standing, waiting for a walk light, still shirtless in October, his eyes closed, his arms raised to the sky, smiling, saluting the sun.

Two weeks later the posters showed up. How best to summarize the nature of the accusations against him? That he had written and possibly distributed a manifesto. That he had offered to teach a young woman to rollerblade. That he had dated and subsequently stopped dating the poster maker’s friends. That he seemed weird and creepy.

A set of counter posters appeared a few days later, suggesting that we should try to approach each other, despite our rumoured faults, as human beings.

All I know is that when a poster advertises a concert or workshop as a “safe space,” I stay home. 

Ice and Snow

My body relaxes when it gets down to minus twenty like it’s supposed to. Dylan’s dad helps us with the snow tires. Ranger grows his natural boots. 

Landlords

When our elderly neighbour is discovered dead in his apartment after smelling up the hallway for over a week, our landlord sends his wife in to investigate, claiming a weak stomach, and announces that he needed to rip out the carpet in number 4 anyway.

Our friend Joanna moves out. She gets a job in Athabasca; her leaving has nothing to do with the body. Our landlord uses an estimate from a cleaning company he owns to try and cheat her out of the entire sum of her damage deposit. Then he charges her an extra four hundred dollars. I write a letter of corroboration when Joanna takes him to court. I detail the ways in which this very landlord has exploited me before, four years ago, when I lived in a different building. He must own at least five or six in this neighbourhood. I can’t seem to escape him. 

Of course, if you dredge up the digital record, supplied by me on the blog I’ve been posting on since I was fifteen, my hatred of landlords is hypocritical. I had my own stint as a 20-year-old landlord. My ex and I bought a house on the north side soon after we almost got married. We lived in the basement and rented out the upstairs for the precise amount of our monthly mortgage payments. When our tenants couldn’t make rent, we couldn’t make rent. I evicted a mother with twin daughters in the middle of winter. 

Lifeguards

My best friend works as a lifeguard in the suburbs. According to her, lifeguards are a species we, the boys in the bubble, do not and can never understand. She begins by patiently explaining the mindset of a group of people who, she reports, are afraid to be seen in public without gel nails, refuse to date outside of the income brackets of their parents, do not vote, and believe that Netflix is a both a verb and a sufficiently specific description of any and all media entertainment.

In desperation, I ask her about The Catcher in the Rye. What about it? Well, don’t these people still have to read it in high school? Surely even a budding lifeguard would be susceptible to the primal desires for independence, for rebellion, for worldly knowledge, for the undeniable, erotic, bloody steak of a private life contained within that book?

She laughs at me. They don’t read it, she says. Sometimes they read the summary on Wikipedia. Sometimes they get the notes. 

I don’t believe her.

Sex

Imagine all the clothes we put on. Imagine Dylan’s muscular legs in his long underwear, almost better than nakedness. Imagine the way wool slightly abrades and sensitizes the skin. Imagine nipples under a sweater. Imagine thighs under a velvet dress. Imagine bra straps under a cardigan. Imagine the coyote fur lining the hood of my blue parka. Imagine the way we strip down as soon as we get in the door. 

Our apartment is always warm. 

For a long time, we were almost the only married people we knew. Everyone thinks we’re doing it wrong. Husbands and wives are not supposed to take lovers, and polyamorous people are not supposed to take husbands or wives. Everyone is afraid of us. They’re worried we’re going to ask them to have sex. Truthfully, I’ve only slept with three people this year, and the year before that I think it was two.

Meanwhile, Old Man Mikula paints lurid nudes of Jason Kenney and sells them on Kijiji. Meanwhile, my boyfriend has been learning tricks from his other girlfriend. One night, he sucks on my toes. My husband likes to top, but my boyfriend likes to be topped. When I say that nothing turns me on like giving a blowjob, he says he feels the same way about eating ass.

Mason Jars

We buy most of our groceries from Earth’s General, where Michael, the owner, can be seen every day in December shoveling the parking lot in a long, witchy black dress, the hem of which is clotted with snow by the time he is done. For several weeks leading up to the election, Michael campaigned as our riding’s Green Party candidate. A few days before, he dropped out, asking his supporters to vote for McPherson. 

Earth’s General is a small miracle. You can refill almost anything there. You can bring a clean plastic bag with you and buy three frozen perogies. You can scrape organic deodorant into a jar and then walk down the aisle and fill an old carton with eggs. When Joanna comes in from Athabasca, she goes to Earth’s to stock up.

Yes, our countertops are bubbling with kombucha and sourdough. Yes, we soak chickpeas and avoid flushing the toilet every time. No, not even our grandmothers hoard as many jam jars or yogurt containers. No wonder the lifeguards don’t like us.

No Land

Over and over, I go to see movies that fail to portray dystopias more dystopic than the real world inside or outside the riding of Edmonton-Strathcona. Imagination is no longer required. 

Caught in limbo as we are, we are still enjoying certain literary elements of society’s dire and dying condition. The pleasure of fictional dystopias is in how the truths of the body must come to the fore. Sex. Food. Alcohol. Perfume. Cigarettes. Physical touch. Even violence. I secretly keep hoping that a fight will break out at one of the climate protests.

The combination of our unpayable loans and our rich parents have, in a funny way, freed us from the delusion of money. We are incapable of taking money seriously. Of course, if we couldn’t eat, we would take it very seriously indeed. 

The debt we refuse to apologize for has replaced the sky with a ceiling, a smoke screen to rival the emissions of refinery row. We crawl around under it, believing if we stay on our bellies, breathing shallowly, we will escape notice, we will get what we need, we will remain free to write and make films and attend school and cook dinner and get drunk and reach and touch each other.

“Wintering in the Bubble” appeared in the Fall 2020 issue of The Antigonish Review