Peach & Slate

Annick MacAskill

Floating in the middle of the laptop screen, the cursor looked like a fly on the satin finish of the wedding gown. Jamie chewed her lip, cross-legged on the oak chair she’d inherited from her grandfather, both hands clutching a half-empty bottle of craft lager.
The cocktail-style dress was perfect. She didn’t know what to do about it because the whole thing had started as a joke just a couple hours before, when Lara mentioned proposing to Cait.
“It’s too soon,” Lara had whispered into her pint, sitting across from Jamie on the patio of the Lower Deck, her back to the ocean, its surface glinting in the light of the setting sun. Jamie had started to comfort her friend, the words rushing out of her.
“Not too soon,” she said. It was barely six months since Lara and Cait had started dating, but Jamie couldn’t stomach the thought of Lara feeling embarrassed. “You’ll need a dress, though.”
Lara’s laugh rung her surprise.
“Simple, sleek,” Jamie continued, the outfit quickly rising to the surface of her mind. “Calf-length. Strapless. Maybe a headband—no, nothing on your head. Maybe earrings, but no necklace. Satin, or satin-y. Creamy, not too too white.”
Jamie meant ivory, but couldn’t think of the word for the shade she saw in her imagination. It was a clear, sunny May day, still chilly enough by the water that the pair had their windbreakers zipped up to their chins. It felt at once lovely and absurd to talk of wedding dresses.
When Jamie finally stopped rambling, she noticed the smile spreading across Lara’s face. She felt a tightening under her breastbone, an emotion darker, deeper than her initial instinct to encourage her friend. Like a balloon blown up too far—a big, stupid, ivory balloon in her chest. Jamie put up a hand before her face, palm out to the ocean, pretending the tears were brought on by the glare off the water.

Why not be happy for Lara, why not bring the focus there? Jamie reasoned to herself later, walking home alone and half drunk from the bar. Cait was the butch lawyer she and Lara had daydreamed about together. Jamie even liked her. Cait was a bit uptight, but also sweet and funny. She had driven the three of them to a sugar bush outside the city one Saturday that winter, bought them all lunch at a diner on the way, asked Jamie thoughtful, interested questions. In the snowclad forest, bright pink circles appeared on the tops of Cait’s cheeks, her green eyes constantly darting back to Lara no matter what they were doing. The pair had matching tartan scarves around their necks, matching silky trails of breath rising from their mouths, that same stupid grin, even as kids shoved by them, even as the tour guide droned on for too long. Together Cait and Lara were too cute, too perfect.

Jamie had met Lara late the previous summer, in August, only a few months before Lara met Cait, when Jamie was preparing to move out of the apartment she’d hastily leased in the west end after an unexpected breakup with her girlfriend. The landlord of this new apartment was letting Jamie out of her lease early because she’d shown him the mould flourishing like graffiti over the basement walls. He’d denied there was any reason to be concerned until she pointed out the green fuzz spread over the silver gleam of her tools. It was disgusting, she told her friends later, but disgusting in an amazing way, not like centipedes crawling the bathroom floor or spoiled food in the refrigerator. Impressively disgusting.
Her friend Liz came over one muggy evening to help her pack. Jamie had met Liz at the bookstore when Liz was still at NSCAD. Jamie appreciated the way her co-worker quietly straightened Jamie’s haphazard book displays and showed her how to process refunds. After Liz graduated and left the bookstore for a job in a gallery by the waterfront, the two gradually became friends. Liz kept busy with work, bookbinding classes, and the journals she made with her own marbled paper, selling these at a couple of stores downtown, but she was always up for a pint, or more practical tasks like talking through breakups and organizing apartment renos and moves.
Liz showed up that day with her curly hair secured in a high bun. She brought a six-pack of cider and her friend Lara, a girl whose legs revealed a deep tan under the impeccable fringe of her cut-offs. Lara was quick to organize the three of them into an assembly line, neat stacks of cardboard boxes laid flat by their feet. As if it were Lara and not Jamie who was moving, she put herself at one end, taping the cardboard seams shut, instructing the other two women on how to best combine books, pots, and dishtowels so that the boxes were full but not heavy.
The next day Jamie got Lara’s number from Liz. That evening, after working her way through three beers on the front stoop, Jamie texted, asking if she could buy Lara a drink or lunch as a thank-you. Lara replied two hours later, when Jamie had already given up and gone to bed, suggesting they meet at the flowering agave in the Public Gardens. They got together on a weekday afternoon when they both had the day off, Lara’s legs now concealed by a tropical-print dress that came to her ankles.
From the gardens, Lara and Jamie weaved their way through downtown to the seaport market, where Jamie bought them a pork bun and a latte. They watched as disappointed-looking cruise ship passengers strolled by and as bleary-eyed straight couples led preschoolers to get ice cream at the chocolate shop. Lara tore the bun they shared into bite-sized pieces and told Jamie about her job teaching English and Portuguese at the language centre in town. She talked at length about the school’s clients, how the international students had charming and sometimes mordant things to say about Halifax, how the local Anglophones had trouble imitating the throatier sounds made in Portuguese.
The afternoon at the market became a weekly ritual. Sitting by the water, stretching their legs out in the sun, they talked about being single, about scrolling Tinder on lonely Friday nights, scanning for girls who were cute and looked like they liked camping, or at least were open to being taken camping. When fall came, they moved their meetings to cafés and bars, trading anecdotes about co-workers, past relationships, parents. They shared a fuzzy fantasy of meeting a high-powered butch lawyer, a woman who knew how to construct and install floating shelves, charm their mothers, and win over their fathers with a firm but casual knowledge of Scotch.

Jamie’s new apartment was just a few streets down from the mould-infested basement she’d left behind. The ground floor of a renovated semi with lots of natural light, it seemed too good to be true, especially at that price, especially in that neighbourhood.
The house’s wood-panelled exterior was a pale peach, the paint faded and chipped, but the door was a rich, muddy slate. Why not white, or just a darker shade of peach? Jamie wondered after moving in. She wasn’t the most aesthetically inclined person—she hadn’t, after all, stopped to consider the colour of the house when she checked out the apartment—but now it occurred to her what an odd combination the colours were. The first time Lara visited, Jamie found out why the door was grey. Lara knew the couple who had lived there before Jamie: a sous-chef Lara met in her undergrad and his girlfriend, a doula who decided she hated both the east coast and her boyfriend about a month after they moved into the apartment. Jamie was only a bit surprised that Lara knew the backstory. Halifax was small like that—everyone knew each other through former roommates or hookups or school or the music scene. Jamie was still getting used to it.
Lara, who wasn’t from Halifax either, but who had lived there a few years longer, explained that her friend Miles had painted the door slate as a surprise for his girlfriend, who loved the colour. The door was to be a present for their nine-month anniversary. After that, Miles planned on getting painters to come over and finish the rest of the house in a lighter grey, maybe a dove grey. He had already talked to the landlord and the upstairs neighbour, offering to cover the cost of painting the door, reasoning that the rest of the paint job would be a worthy investment in the house’s value. But when Miles showed his girlfriend the freshly painted door, she blew her perfect bangs off her face and told him she was moving out. Jamie got a good price on the apartment not because of a stranger’s generosity but because the previous tenants had bailed on the lease.
A week after Lara shared the story of Miles and his ex-girlfriend, Jamie came home from her shift at the bookstore to find palm-sized white birds stencilled in a loose pattern over the door. She moved the pads of her fingers over the shapes, wondering if they had been drawn on in chalk by some of the kids on her street, but the birds were too carefully executed, a small flock flying in all directions, and when she touched the shapes, the white stayed put. As she pulled her hands away, she felt her phone buzz in her pocket. She took it out and scanned the text. Lara had used a temporary paint that could be washed away with a sponge and some tap water. Welcome home, Lara wrote. Hope we last longer than that str8 couple.
Lara was what Jamie secretly called a lesbian lesbian. Lara had never dated a man and couldn’t imagine being with one. She had spent herchildhood dreaming of running away with She-Ra. As a teen, she fell for Jennifer Aniston and her early-nineties shag haircut while watching Friends reruns with her older brother. Like Jamie, she used the word queer because of the flexibility it suggested, but her desire seemed to flow cleanly in one direction, while Jamie was constantly running up against the reminder that she was attracted to men as well as women.
Jamie’s first crushes had been on both the male and female Planeteers from Captain Planet, a show her father recorded every week on VHS, which meant Jamie was able to watch and rewatch episodes as she pleased. In high school, she became infatuated with both Leonardo DiCaprio and the smell of her best friend’s lip gloss, a heady mix of artificial strawberry and beeswax.
Lara had come out to her parents when she was still in high school and claimed her sexuality had never been an issue for them. Jamie had come out to her mother halfway through her second year of university, when she was two months into dating a girl for the first time. Her mother had sat on the couch across from Jamie, listening to her daughter’s confession, then sighed and gone back to draping a popcorn chain over the Christmas tree.
Years later and Jamie had still not come out to her father. After Vanessa she dated Nick, then Taylor then John then Hilary. Girl, boy, girl, boy, girl. For a while it seemed like she had to come out again every time she started dating someone new. Her mother’s soft sounds of interest and understanding did little to detract from the dazed look she got when Jamie talked about her partners, as if her daughter were constantly transitioning from heterosexuality to homosexuality and back again, just to confuse everyone.
“I’m just queer, Mom,” Jamie had said once, unable to hide the frustration in her voice. What seemed so natural always became complicated when she tried to describe it. “Just, like, bisexual, I guess,” she added, though she hated the word.
“Well, I knew that,” her mother replied, turning to inspect the seam in the couch cushion. Jamie wondered if it would be easier if she could tell her parents that she was a lesbian. If she were simply gay, her father might still never be able to acknowledge her the way she wanted, but at least her mother wouldn’t be so confused. Whenever Jamie brought up the idea of telling her father about a girlfriend, her mother brushed it off, encouraging her to wait. Even when Jamie moved in with someone, her mother found a way to imply that it made more sense to let Jamie’s father keep thinking her girlfriend was just another roommate, just another friend.
“When’s the last time you went home?” Lara asked one afternoon late in September, the two of them watching the ocean.
“Home?” Jamie asked, sipping her bubble tea. She examined a wrinkle in her skirt, a sporty khaki piece with too many pockets that pinched her waist whenever she shifted on the bench.
“Like, do you go back to Ontario every summer?”
“What for?”
“To see your parents?”
They were sitting on the boardwalk along the harbour. Throngs of tourists dressed in denim and pastels snaked by, tugging on their collars. It was muggy, the kind of weather that lagged before a thunderstorm finally broke, and Lara and Jamie were still in short sleeves. The spectre of a cruise ship hovered over the market, clean and white like a giant bathtub toy.
“I don’t know.” Jamie frowned. “I go home for Christmas, if I’m single. But it’s expensive. Why? What about you?”
“Twice a year, usually. I’d go more often, but my parents are coming out here this fall. They’ll stay with me for a week or so.”
“Isn’t that awkward?”
Lara laughed, an easy, light sound. “I mean, sure. You’ve seen my place. It’s tiny.”
“No, but like—if you’re seeing someone.”
“They’re not like that.”
“Really?” Jamie wrinkled her nose, wishing Lara would change the subject.
“What are you getting at?”
“I guess—what if you were dating a girl? Like, seriously?”
The crease between Lara’s eyebrows returned. “It’s not the 1950s. Wait, is that what you’re worried about?”
Before Jamie could answer, a fuzzy pink-and-yellow ball bounced up to the bench, whacking Lara on the knee.
“Ow!”
Jamie lunged for the ball. She moved so quickly that later that day she’d find a small tear in the seam of her skirt, a puckered hole along her left hip, revealing a glimpse of her underwear, cotton that had once been white but had worn to the colour of dishwater.
“Watch it,” she snapped at the woman who chased after the ball.
“I’m so sorry.” The woman winced. “I told you to be careful when we walk by,” she said to the boy at her side. He ignored her, staring out at Georges Island, a clump of land that had been used by the British military in the eighteenth century as a deportation centre for the Acadians. Now it was inhabited by a colony of snakes, or so Lara had told Jamie.
“Maybe take the ball from him, then?” Jamie asked.
“It’s fine.” Lara tugged at the hem of Jamie’s shirt. She smiled up at the mother, who relaxed her face. Jamie almost startled, realizing the woman was probably no older than they were.
“It wasn’t that hard,” Lara continued, her voice smooth as she offered the woman a small smile. “I wasn’t hurt, just surprised,” she added, glancing at Jamie out the corner of her eye.

Jamie met Lara’s parents a month before Lara met Cait. They came to town to visit one week in November. The weather had already turned and they chose to spend their days huddled inside their daughter’s bachelor while Lara was off teaching at the language institute.
Lara texted Jamie intermittently to update her on her parents. Three days into their visit, she called during Jamie’s shift at the bookstore.
“You have to come to dinner with us,” Lara hissed into the phone.
“They’re driving me B-A-N-A-N-A-S.”
Jamie agreed to meet them that evening at a wine bar downtown. She donned her raincoat, a cheery sky blue and much too thin, and took the bus, timing her route so that she would arrive exactly five minutes late. When she entered the restaurant, Lara waved from a booth where she was sitting across from a silver-haired couple wearing cabled cardigans. They smiled at Jamie as she slid next to their daughter. The woman had Lara’s high cheekbones and heart-shaped face, the man her amber eyes.
They ordered a bottle of Okanagan pinot noir in honour of Lara and her parents’ home and enough tapas to overwhelm the table. A bowl of olives shiny as pearls perched high on a Lazy Susan in the centre of the spread. Jamie fixed her gaze on the olives so as not to stare at Lara’s parents. Every few minutes, she lifted a hand to check the side braid she’d pleated in her hair before rushing out the door.
Lara’s parents were both retired teachers. They started the conversation with an extended meditation on the size of their daughter’s apartment and her “curious” position at the language school downtown.
“No health insurance!” Lara’s father exclaimed. “She never knows when she’ll be teaching again!” her mother added, at which point Jamie realized they were waiting for her to acknowledge the absurdity of the situation. She avoided her friend’s gaze and forced a smile.
As the evening progressed, John and Esther found a way to casually tease information out of their daughter’s friend. Jamie answered their questions about her childhood in Ontario, sidestepping the subjects of her mother’s Mennonite roots and her father’s drinking problem. She glossed over the bout of depression she’d suffered after breaking up with Hilary, the first person she ever thought she would marry. She didn’t get into the weeks she’d spent unable to keep any food down before noon, or how she cried the first time she had sex with a man after that. He was a professor in the English department where she’d started and abandoned a master’s, convinced that he’d told everyone about the affair. She alluded to this incomplete degree, but vaguely, she hoped.
At one point, when they had eaten half the tapas and moved on to a third bottle of wine, Lara steered the conversation to the bookstore. Jamie’s cheeks grew hot, and she stared into her drink, raising a hand to tug on her braid, unsure as to whether she was on her third or fourth glass, how long she’d been talking, or what it meant that Lara wanted to change the subject. She worried that if she looked at herself in the bathroom mirror she’d find her teeth stained purple. Lara’s father was holding his wife’s hand, looking right at her. She couldn’t read the expression on his face.
When Lara started talking about Jamie’s co-workers, Jamie’s mind flew to the long, drawn-out fuck-buddy relationship she’d had with a co-worker named Kevin her first winter at the store. Jamie knew Lara hadn’t intended to make her think of him, or to embarrass her, because she hadn’t told Lara about Kevin, a fellow English grad who never went to the gym yet somehow maintained firm arms that Jamie loved to run her palms over. The sex had been so good that Jamie still felt an itch up the back of her neck whenever she thought of him. Whatever ease they enjoyed in bed would dissipate as soon as Jamie’s wool-socked feet hit his hardwood floor. Kevin abruptly decided to move to Calgary in March, a few months into their relationship—or affair, or whatever it was—and would never write to her, and Jamie wouldn’t miss him.

After dinner, Lara walked Jamie home, trailing a half step behind her. Jamie’s tongue felt thick and dry in her mouth, her feet heavy. It was a long walk, most of it uphill, but the rain had stopped and she didn’t want to pay for a cab. She walked with her raincoat bunched in her arms, waiting for Lara to say something.
“It’s just—” Jamie started when they got to her house. Jamie would have left the white birds on the door forever, but the rain had washed them away months ago.
Lara took Jamie’s hands in hers, then pressed against her—first her chest, then her torso, then her lips. For a long moment, the two women kissed. There was something straightforward about the embrace, but when she pulled away Jamie saw that her friend had closed her eyes.
“My parents loved you,” Lara said. She paused before adding, “They love all my friends.” In the dark, her irises were large and inky.
Lara texted her first thing the next morning, repeating the simple conclusion of the night before—My parents loved meeting you. Jamie took her time examining the verb, but waited until the late afternoon to answer. Me too! :)
Days went by and Jamie didn’t hear anything more from Lara. Jamie didn’t write, either. After a week they exchanged a few simple messages about how busy they were, promising to get together soon.
Almost a month later they were in a bar again, a different, less expensive one, drinking stout this time, waiting for Liz. The three of them hadn’t hung out together since that first day in August, the intimacy between Jamie and Lara growing so quickly. The overexcited beginning to a friendship that meant it was sure to fizzle out, Jamie would think years later, reflecting on how she’d eventually lost touch with Lara. Already that December there was something new between them. Jamie wasn’t sure what it was, but she knew she felt exposed.
Lara had texted that they should meet with Liz for a drink before the holidays. Jamie accepted, hoping they might start planning the queer Christmas they’d talked about for months. In the back of her mind, Jamie imagined kissing Lara on New Year’s, asking her out. Maybe it would work. Maybe Lara would be delighted, would realize they made sense. Maybe Jamie was as gay as Lara was, one of those lesbians who just slept with men occasionally for fun, but wasn’t actually bisexual.

Jamie and Lara had a few minutes to themselves because Liz was running late. So late in fact that by the time she showed up, handsome Cait had already crossed the bar, pint in hand, primed to charm Lara and Jamie both, her smile broadening the chasm that had come between them.

Months later, barely a week after Lara confessed on the patio that she wanted to marry Cait, Jamie was working in the bookstore on a Thursday evening. It was raining and the store was quiet, just a couple regulars browsing the stacks. Lara kept texting, but Jamie ignored the messages, not even opening them to see what they said. Their friendship had almost gone back to normal after Lara met Cait, and now it felt impossible to talk without saying what she really meant. Jamie tried to distract herself, picking up extra shifts and even vaguely agreeing to spend a couple weeks back in Ontario that summer. Her mom had started emailing links to postgrad programs at the community college in Jamie’s hometown.
She kept her phone in her left hand, glancing at it under the counter when she was sure the customers weren’t looking, feeling it tremble every time Lara sent a text. Whenever she had a moment to herself, she scrolled through images of ivory gowns, sucking her bottom lip. When she realized that the phone had stopped vibrating, Jamie looked up and stared out the window at the rain, steady and loud like static on an old television, wondering who the hell she was going to talk to about this.

annick macaskill’s

fiction has previously appeared in journals such as Canthius, Plenitude Magazine, and The Temz Review. She is the author of three previously published poetry collections, including Shadow Blight (Gaspereau Press, 2022), winner of the Governor General’s Award. Her fourth book of poetry, Votive, will be published by Gaspereau in 2024. MacAskill lives in Kjipuktuk (Halifax, Nova Scotia), on the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq.