ggirl in five acts
Vange Schramek
This piece would not have been possible without Sachiko Murakami.
Thank you to Alicia Elliott for reading it.
I STUCCO-LAND
she couldn’t make it aesthetically possible
since she didn’t know that that was the question
she sits beside the front door, glass shards from the stucco
rubbing the grooves of her corduroy overalls
old Ford pulls up outside, his Friday night come down saunter up the stairs,
package of noodles and a six-pack in a plastic bag swishing and tinker-
ing what is to be abstracted anyways? his paycheque? her day-care fees?
the price of her first cavity? he wishes he could leave her
with the neighbour, but what would happen?
next to the neighbours, but not of them
she’s a second-generation for crissakes
if we moved any farther east, we’d cease to be legible
if we can’t abstract the pieces of ourselves out of this
then let’s just get rid of the pieces altogether
II Best coast
He had taught her how to chop up garlic really finely and how to tie a bowline so that the small dinghy that was their mode of transportation to and from the island would not float away. She was making spaghetti sauce (his recipe) while he lay on the back deck in the afternoon sunlight, smoking Players’ Regulars and talking on his cellphone. She didn’t know who he was talking to, but she hoped that he would get off the phone soon and come and validate her sauce. He was only there two nights a week, and otherwise she lived alone in the woods, in a four-walled shack without running water or electricity. Every morning she awoke at 6:00 a.m. to walk down the hill, jump off the dock in her bathing suit, swim to their dinghy on the mooring, get the motor started, scoop up her dry clothes she had left on the dock and boat across the Georgia Straight to her job as a gas girl at Secret Cove Marina. Every night she would come home alone, walk up the hill in the dark and light a candle from a matchbox she always kept in the same place. Every night, that is, except Friday and Saturday, when her dad would come up from working on the mainland. She waited for him all week long, made sure to keep the cabin spotlessly clean for his approval, and did her utmost to soak up every second and fibre of love and interaction she could attain from their forty-eight-hour visits. That was her shot at having a dad: a few weekends a summer, before she was shipped back to her mother’s for the school year, the courts having decided that he was an unfit fulltime parent. But she knew it was better than what most people ever got from a parent, because her dad was fun. He took her fishing, and they went running together. He taught her how to make cocktails with clam, tomato juice, and vodka, and how much she could drink before she got too spinny or out of control. He came out with her when her cabin friends were up visiting for the weekend—he’d come down to the dock with her at night and teach her that people would like her more if she was more confident; taught her that in life there were leaders and there were followers and that the former was always the desirable position, at whatever cost.
“Smells good, g girl,” he said as he re-entered the cabin, nose in the air, his lean body always strutting around like he was under a spotlight. She was proud that he liked the way the cabin smelled; it made her feel good to have her hard work acknowledged. “Is it time to put the noodles on?” she asked. By this point he was standing on the couch, looking at himself in the mirror, doing exercises with his eyebrows and flexing his arms. He didn’t answer her. She asked again, “Noodles on now?”
“I’m just going to take some sauce back to the city with me. I can make noodles down there,” he replied between an eye-widening facial stretch.
“I thought we were having dinner together, it’s Saturday,” the girl replied.
“Aww g girl, I gotta go back today. Have some stuff to take care of.”
“Like what?”
“Just some personal stuff, but it’s all good.” He pulled out a mat and began doing push-ups, breathing in and out audibly, making the girl have to listen to noises she would not get to listen to for the amount of time she had been promised. She crawled up the ladder to her cot in the loft above the one-room shack and pulled out her notebook. Noticing she had left the kitchen, he called up to her.
“You writing about your feelings again?” he said teasingly between exhales. The girl scrawled hard against the paper, hoping he could hear her disappointment through her pen.
III vestigial
“That should be in your book.”
“What?”
“Your pills, in your bag. They sound like maracas. You just toddering along, your happy pills swishing, making your music for you.”
She laughed, wrinkled up her face, thinking about times in the past in which she may have needed happy pills, but how now, thankfully, the pills were just for physical, and not mental, pain. It was a pleasant sound, though. The whole thing was pleasant: the man in the blue teacozy hat, a gift made by an aunt or sister-in-law with good intentions but less craftsmanship, striding down the street, chest forward, nose up, tobacco fumes in his wake. His nose pointed towards the sea, as always, toward the sea or the mountains, like a drug-hunting German shepherd at the airport. She could not keep up with his pace, as she usually could, the incision on her right side crippled her a bit, made her favour one leg, made her a limping snail, like the accumulation of eighty-seven years of walking on twenty-something legs.
“What’s it about, anyways?” he asked, staring straight at the horizon, not looking at her, breathing through his nostrils audibly as though he were showing off in basic training.
“My book, you mean.” She smiled, lilting the word book, like letting a kite fly off into the high-circling wind. Like when she said the word that way, that it was real, it was free, it was moving.
“Well, you’re doing sumthin’ in Toronto, aren’t you?”
“It’s about you, Nellis.”
“Oh, Nellis, that’s nice for me. There’s lots to say, that’s for sure. Don’t call the guy a legend for nothing.”
“Fer sure.”
The legend within and the legend without are different tales, she thought. This kind of thinking just poured out of him, as if on a feedback loop. She watched his brain circle like a vulture hovering over a thought, but then getting distracted by another thought catching the light of the sun for a moment, and then that thought becoming the new centre to be circled around, until a new shiny object appeared, and so on. This kind of thinking was his character and his fate, and though she was his eldest, and though she knew she possessed much of him, she hoped she could beat it. It was a comfort to this end that they had extracted her appendix, and yet his remained inside him. She was adapting beyond him, she could feel it, she would prove it.
IV theoretical fatique
When she bumped the door open with her bum and saw the new graffiti, a smirk curled her lips. She knew Michel would be furious; he would be storming around the parking lot and in the courtyard and on the grassy area by the entrance to the mailboxes of 183 Huron. He would probably swear in French at a level more than audible, but then he would see one of his cats, Mee or Moo, and revert to English drenched in French inflection and intellect, light a cigarette and forget about the new red shiny bulbous word dripping down the wall of the building.
She liked the sound of his foreign swearing—even though she knew what the words meant, they sounded more passionate, more loaded in French. That he could get so worked up over something that seemed to happen once or twice a month, and elicit the same reaction, without fail, each time, made her feel more sane. She remembered the definition of madness to be something like “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Were the most likely teenaged culprits stoned on crappy weed even in ear shot when Monsieur Michel spouted his displeasure about their artwork? She didn’t think so, but then again, maybe they kept up their practice just to wait around to hear the reaction. She was not tired of the graffiti, nor the profanity that followed it. Out in the parking lot, she examined the word, four letters, not making a word that she knew in her own tongue. Crudely sprayed, their artist not seeming to have had any instruction in representing dimension. But the red that they had used was very beautiful with the white winter sun behind them. She looked at the sun and blinked with the harshness of its imprint and layered that image over the new installation. The red looked like it was bleeding now, pulsing.
Repetition and madness, repetition as madness. While an esteemed queer critic entertained her class, she wrote notes and tried to pay attention, amidst irritating questions from her peers. Graduate school was about asking the right question, to show that your brain was capable of consistently producing the right questions, so you could get funding and reference letters to spend your life coming up with such questions. Rarely were real questions asked, it seemed to her, questions that brought the abstract theories they read back into context. People were afraid to ask such questions, lest they be thought dumb. But the only way to leave dumbness behind and move towards smartness in the distance was to ground yourself in your dumbness, truly understand it, and then begin to inch slowly towards something better. Now you could only ask questions that you didn’t understand when they came out of your mouth, using as many abstract terms as you could: “Was there a post-deconstructionist praxis for breaking down the effects of the cultural milieu upon the proletariat’s new historicist self-realization?” The students in her class may as well have recorded such a sentence on their phone and pressed Play when the professor acknowledged their raised hand. She wrote in the margin of her loose-leaf paper: what is my madness?
Cass was thirty-something-years old. You are not supposed to date the bartender; she knew that. He had a deep, scratchy voice, a dark full beard, and was in the upper of the height scale for beings. He was so incredibly typical; he so completely embodied his clich that she was taken aback, immediately guarded. Bartenders always make promises they don’t intend to keep, she thought. But she also questioned as to where she was getting her information from? What cultural or social source made her both terrified yet fascinated by this character? After work that night he asked for her number; after work that night she gave it to him. A week later, he drove her to IKEA, since over text she had explained that since she had just moved and was still getting organized with school and work that she was probably too busy to get together right away. His response was to offer to help her get organized.
She told herself that this outing was just for research purposes and to get some stuff for her place. But watching him drive brought her back to high school when her first boyfriend got his license at sixteen and he would pick her up and drive her around. That was freedom, and here it was again in a Pavlovian dream. He shifted gears, he changed radio stations, he smoked a joint while driving and offered it to her. There was more to Ontario than just Toronto—there were highways that led to malls and strip malls. But she felt as though the highway was being built as Cass accelerated along it. She was right where she was most happy at sixteen, and she didn’t know if this was escapism, or habit, or whether this sort of behaviour ought to stop, or whether he really was a bad guy; whether she could enjoy this and not think about it in terms of what it meant, or if it would happen again. She breathed. She wanted to be right here. When he dropped her off, he didn’t kiss her. She took her items from IKEA, two tupperwares and an oversized tote bag, into her apartment and put them down and lay back on her bed.
V I love sports feminism
But one look, one acknowledgement from this bearded man, well, it made her want to move into his bachelor pad, clean the kitty litter up off the bathroom floor, devise an extravagant plan to get him to take her home to meet his parents. This is what happens when a feminist meets a bachelor; both have developed systems for living without one another, and yet with contact suppressed biological tendencies are stirred. “I’ll gather if you hunt,” so said the young woman’s biological unconscious. But this was the twenty-teens, gathering and hunting had taken on less primal associations and roles were no longer prescribed. How was one to negotiate their biological drives amidst the breakdown of animalistic behavioural survival patterns? She thought, and the thought overwhelmed her for she didn’t know what she was: animal, woman, girl, independent feminist. She sank into his couch, ignoring his dirty T-shirt, which was acting as a head rest. He was watching football: men in jellybean-coloured leggings swerved and bashed into each other amidst excessive pomp and glory from the announcers. Every five minutes commercials would roll, driven by excessive market research, knowing that exactly these two kinds of people would be watching: men who liked watching other men run around and women who liked being around men who liked watching other men run around. Shiny cars coursed over the screen, larger-than-life cheeseburgers with bacon and novelty toppings with novelty names to go along with them, half- dressed girls bringing beer to parties. This is it, she thought. I’m the girl that gets to feel inadequate about not being that girl.
VI Coda
on the other
side of al-
dente noodles,
an abundance of weightless pretense, too much auto fellatio, enough
therapy for the entirety of the TikTok user base
she is facedown, uncloaked of a girl-ness that once seemed the only
route to
here
VANGE SCHRAMEK
’s (she/they) writing appears in Feminist Media Studies, Canadian Literature, The Ex-Puritan, The Humber Literary Review, Fashion Studies, the Martlet, Grain Magazine, the chapbook Poems from the Round Room, the University of Toronto Quarterly, Plenitude, and is forthcoming in the Toronto Chic Anthology. From a small island on the remote west coast of BC, as well as the unceded territories currently known as New West, East Van, and Vancouver Island, Vange currently resides on the traditional territories of the Mississauga and Haudenosaunee nations where they are completing a PhD in Communication, New Media, and Cultural Studies at McMaster University.