Anne Baldo
Motel Party
“You should watch out for deer,” I say. Julian nods but Serj only laughs. We’re out by the salt mine, the city behind us, lights dissolving into darkness. Ditches, trees, the river. Light like salt in water, gone liquid and leaving a heavy emptiness in the sky.
“My friend Ashley hit a deer out here,” I say.
“Well,” Serj says, “no offense, but maybe your friend’s just a shit driver.”
“What happened to the deer?” asks Julian.
Serj swerves, cutting in close to the car up ahead. The driver slams the horn and Serj smiles, signals with his middle finger. “Julian, who fucking cares?”
***
In the motel room, hours earlier, there was still some light. Window glass latticed with frost, and outside, car headlights illuminated the snow, a brief white glow before the darkness resettled.
Telling Ashley on the phone that afternoon I was going out with someone and she said, “who is this someone?” I’d taken the bus as far as it went, to its last stop at the hospital. Got off and walked the rest of the way, twenty-two minutes until I finally crossed the motel parking lot, hooflike click of stilettos on asphalt and salt. Cold in my green dress, neckline low enough I’d had to hide it from my parents on my way out. Candies perfume, cropped black jacket that Ashley lent me, fake fur around the hood, Baby Phat and the feline silhouette in gold. So tight I held my breath zipping it, but I felt almost pretty. When I knocked it was Serj who opened the door, who I’d never seen before.
“I think I have the wrong—”
“You must be here for my cousin. Come on in. Julian didn’t tell you about me? Call me Serj.”
“Me and some friends are having a party at the Bluebell Motel,” Julian had said. We were at work. When his shift ended he came through my line. “Maybe you’d want to come?” He had these tremendous blue eyes, buzz cut blond hair, white shell necklace mostly covered by his stiff uniform shirt. Now inside the motel room, there was no one else, no sign of a party. Faded seascape artwork on the walls, musty carpet. A chemical lemon smell.
“Smells like insect killer in here. This whole room’s probably full of roaches.” Serj shut the door. A low, smoky voice, like the soft grit of warm ashes. Wearing sunglasses even in the motel room, curtains drawn. His neck checked with bruises and a gold ring with a polished tiger’s eye stone on his right hand. “So you’re Diane?”
“Diana,” Julian said. He was sitting on the bed and stood up. Messing with a button on the cuff of his shirt for several seconds before he looked at me.
Serj smiled. “Julian’s been talking about you since summer. Saying he’s got this cute little thing he works with—”
“Come on, Serj,” Julian said.
“—saying how he thinks she likes him, too, and I said, so show me, bring this girl around and let me meet her, finally see who’s so special.”
A blush warmed Julian’s face. I wanted to tell him, it’s okay. That I knew Serj was just messing around. That I could take a joke, a little teasing. But I didn’t say anything.
Double bed, dark floral bedding, full bloom, gold curlicues. The lamp on the night table cast a duet of yellow light, one triangle above, one below. Julian and Serj were both smoking despite a sign on the wall, a fee will be charged to guests who don’t comply. Serj leaned back against the headboard, exhaled, not bothering, like Julian, to try and blow the smoke away, while Julian hovered on the bed’s edge. On TV, the six o-clock news announced winners from a local lottery.
“These are all fake names,” Serj said. “Elton Buttons. John Pepper. Ain’t nobody named this stuff. Make yourself comfortable, you can sit down. Julian, you gonna offer her a smoke, or what?”
“Oh, yeah, did you want one?” Fumbling, he took out a pack, tapped it twice against his palm. I didn’t smoke, but I took it. Saying no seemed too complicated.
“Julian,” Serj said. Sunglasses off, his eyes were the hard, cool blue of tinted glass. “Why don’t you show her how to hold it?” He winked. “Never done this before? Put it in your mouth, let him light it.” When Julian’s hands shook, Serj took his lighter, deftly lit it. “There you go. Let me help.”
Where Julian was delicate, slight, almost fawnlike, Serj was massive, built like a prizefighter, his long-sleeved button-up not concealing his solid chest, his muscles, hulking shoulders. I sat between them, traced the petals on the bedspread, touched the burn marks on the sheets, fabric with a slick feel. Room 107 at the Bluebell Motel. Short Stays Available on the sign in the parking lot, visible from the window.
“Don’t forget to tap it. You’re ashing all over the bed. Julian, get this girl a drink. Time to get the party started.”
***
I met Julian at the grocery store where we worked for eight dollars an hour. I was a cashier with women like Darlene and Debbie, who had done this for years, who I thought were so much older, reminding me to take my hat when I collected shopping carts in the parking lot, offering me their cheesecake recipes. This was years ago when we still accepted cheques as payment, asked paper or plastic? We stood at our tills beside racks of glossy tabloids promising upskirt pictures of celebrities, answers to whether Jen had become sexier than Angelina.
Reading In Cold Blood during one of my breaks, Julian asked me how it was.
“Depressing.”
“Yeah, like the title, I mean I guess it would be.”
And later when I needed to cut the twine on a stack of paper bags, he offered me his boxcutter. “But if I let you use it, you won’t, like, cut your finger off or anything? You’re not going to hurt yourself?”
“I’ll be careful.”
Forgetting my mittens one snowy Saturday, Julian said “here, use my gloves,” before I went to collect carts.
“Such a sweetheart,” Darlene said.
“A nice boy,” said Debbie. “And so handsome.”
Julian always said thank you, ma’am, carried heavy paper bags out for shoppers. “You can tell he was brought up right.”
***
Julian handed me a plastic cup. Serj poured whisky from a mickey. “Diana, can you drink it straight?”
“Okay,” I said, took a sip, closed my eyes when it burned. I hardly drank at all. Just a handful of times, with Ashley. Sweet drinks you could swallow too easy and in the mornings, hungover and worried, I hated myself, that I was starting to do things I’d told myself I never would, that I was beginning to lose control.
Serj laughed. “It’s okay,” he said. “I can make you something sweeter.” “Am I early?” I asked, suddenly self-conscious. “No one else is here yet—”
Julian glanced at Serj, but he didn’t seem to notice.
“We aren’t staying here,” Serj said. “We changed it. Our friends got a place out in the county. By the water. Everyone likes the water, right? Better than this room Julian got us here. Sleazy no-tell motel. But we can have a couple drinks first. Your cup’s empty, Diana, you got to let me know. A closed mouth don’t get fed. Here, I’ll pour you another, try and keep up with me. How do you like it? It’s not too strong? I gave you a little extra ginger ale this time, didn’t think you could handle whisky straight. I can tell you’re not used to it, I’ll go easy on you.”
“It’s good,” I said, wishing I’d brought Ashley, too. Or told my parents where I was really going. Even Debbie or Darlene. Anyone. If I’d ever just said me and Julian, but I hadn’t. The room felt too hot. I took off Ashley’s jacket, kept it on my lap, held against my chest. Her perfume lingered in the fake fur. She always wore Glow, orange blossom and vanilla.
“Julian said you just turned eighteen. Look at you, brand new.” I must have frowned, because Serj said, “I don’t mean anything by it. It’s a good thing. Still young, not like me, I’m old as hell.”
“How old is he?” I asked a moment later when he disappeared into the bathroom. “Who?” Julian asked, as if there was anyone else.
“Your cousin.” “My cousin?”
“Serj. He’s your cousin, right?”
“Oh, yeah,” Julian said. “Of course.”
***
Ashley had said, “you’re in creative writing but what can you write about?” We were on the bus we took from university together. “What have you ever done? And how can you write about love when you’ve never been in love?”
“You don’t have to write about love.” I almost told her about last week, the couple I’d seen on the bus. A girl, lashes crunchy with old makeup, hospital bracelet on her wrist, arms locked around the neck of an older man in a cardigan beside her who kept hushing, “Shhh, keep your voice down.” When a woman asked “Is that your daughter?” he laughed and the girl said, “Mind your own fucking business.” I thought I might write about them, the girl and her fury, the fierce smear of red lipstick on her face, a girl you could tell was dishevelled not because someone had messed her up but because she’d messed someone else up. But I couldn’t explain it to Ashley. We were best friends but sometimes it bothered me, what she said, and I’d begun keeping more to myself. I never said how it bothered me when she said I didn’t like American Pie because I was uncomfortable with the human body, when she asked if I got dirty jokes. Even in front of other people. “Diana,” she’d say, “you just don’t understand.”
Or when I told Ashley how some things were hard to write about, really write about well, like sex or death, and she said, “I think it’s weird you equate the two.”
“I don’t.”
And she said, “you must, on some level. But maybe it makes sense, cause you’ve never experienced either.”
“I guess not. I mean, I’m alive.”
Ashley smiled, lips slick with MAC Lipglass, Candy Box, a creamy pink. “Are you really, though?”
***
Serj left to get ice.
“I’m sorry.” Julian and I sat side by side on the bed. “Serj changed the plans last minute…”
“It’s okay.”
“Are you nervous?” he asked. Without waiting for me to answer, “I got you something.” A red rose, the kind they sold at 7-11. He handed it to me, cellophane crinkling, petals already darkening.
“I should put it in water.” No one had ever done that for me before. I wanted to keep it, preserve it. Something like proof. But things come and go, I know that now. “I called in sick to come ere,” I said. “Kenneth picked up the phone. He was like, what’s the matter, Diana? You got a little cold or something? Don’t bother coming back without a doctor’s note.”
“So did you get a note?”
“No. I got nothing.”
“Kids today,” Julian said. “No responsibility. Back in my day we never called in. Be glad you’re not my daughter. You’d be grounded.” His blue eyes had gone slushy. “Kenneth’s a dick, anyway.” At work, Julian said yes, sir when Kenneth spoke to him. He wore ties in colours
pre-approved in the employee guidebook. Deep greens, blacks, charcoal grey. Ties your dad wore to weddings when you were a kid—outdated geometric prints, dark floral. Here at the motel, he looked so different in a collared white Hollister shirt, buttons left open at the top, showing off a gold chain around his neck.
When he kissed me at first I said, “isn’t Serj—”
“Don’t worry, he’ll be gone awhile, relax,” moving Ashley’s coat off my lap. I closed my eyes, tried to relax. I’d only ever kissed one person before, Ashley’s ex-boyfriend’s friend Scott at a party at her house last summer. He’d sucked my lower lip till it hurt, then slid his whole tongue in my mouth. The next day he messaged me on MSN and said that he liked the picture I was using, and to send it to him.
You already know what I look like. And the picture’s not good anyway.
I like it, he typed back. That’s sufficient for you to send it to me. But I didn’t, and I didn’t hear from him again after that, a loop of disappointment and secret relief.
Julian was still kissing me and I wasn’t sure what to do, where to put my hands. When I put them on his waist, it didn’t feel right, so they fell awkwardly at my sides, palms against the bedspread’s slippery fabric. Car doors slammed in the parking lot. The motel was on Huron Church
Road. You could hear heavy reverberations of trucks on their way to the Ambassador Bridge. In the hallway, someone shouted.
“What’s that?”
Julian shrugged. “Maybe Serj picked a fight with someone. He’s like that.”
I shut my eyes and we lay down. The room smelled like damp dirty laundry and Serj’s sweet cedarwood cologne. I could let it happen, and no longer be on what felt like the other side of a great divide from Ashley. Just do whatever Ashley did until she finally had nothing left to hold over me.
Ashes on the bedspread and a bloodstain on the sheets. Let it happen here. I knew Ashley was right, and I didn’t understand. The subtleties of sex eluded me. The skeleton of it, I understood, but not the flesh and blood. Like digging up the teeth and bones, the rest was guesswork, bound to be flawed, like the way the first paleontologists dreamed up dinosaurs. All the finer details, the etiquette, these little things evaded me. I knew I was missing something, knew it couldn’t be normal, to want someone and not want them at the same time, and maybe Julian sensed my strangeness. Pushing himself up, he moved away.
“It’s like you’re not even into this,” Julian said.
Before I could answer, someone banged on the door. “Julian, let me in. Hope you’re being good.”
I got up, tried fixing my dress. “I’m just gonna go to the bathroom.”
The bathroom had grime caked in the tiles and a pink ceramic sink, a swirl of dark hair stuck in the drain. A window with gauzy yellow curtains overlooking the parking lot. The sky had gone dark, now, a hard lacquer finish without any stars. In the cloudy mirror, my desilvering reflection—clotted mascara, smeared lip gloss. I wiped my mouth with the back of my fist before opening the bathroom door, found Julian waiting.
“Diana,” Julian mumbled. “Look, I’m sorry about earlier—”
“It’s okay.”
Serj mixed drinks on the nightstand, his back to us.
“Usually with girls I like, I keep my distance. Like we’ll hang out once or twice and it’s like, whatever, you know?”
“Diana,” Serj called. “Grape pop okay? Vending machine in the lobby’s busted.” “But for some messed up reason, no offense, I just really like you—”
“Get your asses over here. We’re playing a drinking game.”
I still had my stilettos on. One snagged on the carpet and I stumbled.
“Are you drunk already, Diana?” Serj laughed as he handed us cups. “Truth or dare, all right?
I’ll start. Where’s the wildest place you ever had—”
“What the hell, Serj, you don’t ask—”
“Why not?” said Serj. “It’s okay, I get it. Only place you ever got lucky was your dreams.
Until now, maybe, right?”
Julian leaned into the wall, staring at the drawn curtains. “Maybe I should bring Diana
home.”
“What are you talking about? The party hasn’t even started yet. She doesn’t want to go
home. Do you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s getting late. I can call a cab—”
“No, no, come on, Diana. My cousin really likes you, but he thinks you’re too good for him.”
“I’m not too good for anyone.”
“You got to give him a chance. Julian, tell her to stay. Stay a little bit longer, okay? You got all dolled up for this party. You’re beautiful. What’s wrong? Don’t you like hearing that?”
I felt bad for wanting to go. Like maybe it was rude, and maybe Ashley was right about everything. When Serj tapped my cup with his, smiled, “Cheers, Diana,” I drank with him.
***
Before we left the motel, Serj put a mickey to my lips. “One for the road,” he said, and I swallowed.
Crossing the parking lot, my throat burned. Julian held my arm as my stilettos skittered on ice. “I don’t want you to fall.”
Serj’s car was at the end of the lot. He held open the door, waited as I climbed inside. My hands dropped the buckle four times before Serj reached over, clicked it into place, two fingers tugging on my seatbelt. “Safety first.”
In the backseat I slumped towards the window, hoping the chill of the glass on my temple could clear my head. “Who else is going to be at the party?” I asked, but Julian didn’t answer.
“Oh, just a couple friends of mine,” Serj said. “You’ll like them.” He waited for a transport truck to pass before he turned onto Huron Church. An arterial road, transportation corridor, a main vein. Three northbound lanes, three south. Serj turned north, towards the expressway, talking in the front seat to Julian, “It’s always the guys talking most about loyalty that don’t got none.”
“I’m loyal,” he said.
“You better be.” Serj reached over, flicked the collar of Julian’s shirt, the buttons on his chest. “Where’d you find this classy shit, anyway?” Even their clothes were a kind of joke between them.
Sometimes it was hard to see something for what it was. Like those picture quizzes in Highlights, an isolated detail of an object magnified beyond recognition. Rose petals or butterfly scales. You knew what it was. You were just too close. With distance, you’d understand.
I said, “I think I’m gonna—”
Serj swerved into the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant and I opened the door just in time to unsnap my seatbelt, fall out of the car, get sick in a snowbank. I felt the ring on his hand, gold with a tiger’s eye stone, clink against my teeth as he scraped my hair back from my face. When I was done, he gave my hair a gentle pull. “You knew this was coming.” I thought he meant vomiting, at first. “Let’s go.”
“Where are we going?”
“How about you guess?”
I rose, cupping handfuls of snow, not soft powder snow but a hard crust that had thawed in the earlier sunlight, then frozen over again. My palms pulsed, an icy ache, but I still tried cleaning my face with what melted. “I think I’ll walk home—”
“All the way from here? In those shoes, that dress? It’s too far, too cold.” Serj touched my face, my lips. “You’re like ice. Let me bring you back. Come on. I’ll take care of you.”
Back in the car my hands were numb from the snow. The lights blurred. Julian stayed silent, only staring out the window, tilting the mickey to his lips. Serj merged with traffic again. “It’s okay, Diana.” But as the expressway loomed ahead, green sign with white block letters E.C. ROW EXPWY WEST, he veered towards the on-ramp even though I’d told him, back in the motel, I lived in the east end of Windsor.
***
Now we are going too fast. Old snow like ashes heaped by the roadside, ditches thick with dead reed grass, dry seed heads. Towards the place on the water. “You’ll love it, Diana.” Stars like salt crystal. It was bad luck to spill salt, at one time so precious, used to purify, to preserve, but now it was everywhere. Still, to be safe, you could throw a handful over your shoulder, reverse the curse.
But sometimes a curse is a cure we don’t understand.
I see the deer first as only shadow of movement, then the headlights cut the darkness down and she starts to take shape. I start to say something and then I don’t, maybe I let it happen. Screech of brakes and shouts too late. I close my eyes when we collide. And then that red flock of birds takes flight from his neck, heads for the sky.
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Anne Baldo's writing has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Hermine, Stanchion, Carousel, Grain, and the short story collection Morse Code For Romantics.
Image by Celia Cortez from Pexels
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