story

by Sara Cassidy

Ya Tebe Lyublyu

Larry, my probation officer, thinks I should take up a sport. It will help me manage my anger, he says. Every two weeks, he comes through town and we meet in a tiny RCMP detachment office with a dirty aquarium on a credenza.

“Did you do anything athletic in high school?” Larry asks.

“Just cunnilingus.”

“Cunni – what?”

“Like contact tai chi, with your tongue and—”

“I see where this is going. Nothing else?”

“Some billiards.”

“Justin, seriously. Billiards is not a sport. It’s a game. We want your heart rate up.”

“I played against some crazy-ass dudes. Money on the table, powder too, half a kilo once. My heart rate was up.”

“Visit the community center. Sign up for an activity—a legal one, please—and keep a diary. Track your energy levels, stress, your anger.”

A diary? I want to grab the fucker by his sideburns and slam his head against the wall. But I don’t need another drywall patch to my name. I take a deep breath. In through the nose, funnel it out through my lips. And again. A fish appears in the murky water.

“Okay,” I say. “I’ll see where this can go.”

Larry smiles a kind, optimistic, genuine smile that pisses the fuck, shit, hell out of me.  I breathe again. In through the nose.

•

My most recent job has landed me in Buttfuck, Manitoba, where I pack produce at Smarty’s. The job is a step up from short order: no grease stains on my jeans and instead of bags of frozen French fries, I squirrel home cauliflower heads. Plus there are women to flirt with. “Do you like them hard?” I ask, helping them select apples. Or if it’s broccoli, “Do you like a long stem?” Always subtle. Always room for misunderstanding. That’s the trick: the possibility at all times of innocence.

Two weeks into the job I had enough money to travel to the big smoke and got re-inked. Lifting the crates has rounded out my biceps, and the produce manager, Sterling, doesn’t seem to mind that I’ve torn the sleeves off my uniform. I pass off the hairnet as gangster. Which is all to say that I’m looking good. One woman handed me a twist tie one day, saying it was “faulty.” She raised her eyebrows in a way that suggested more and, sure enough, she had written her phone number on that narrow strip. I never called her though, so now when she comes in she acts pissy and sends my grapefruit pyramids tumbling to the floor.

I squeak through the snow to the Buttfuck Community Centre. Two classes are on offer: cake decorating and pole dancing. Neither really grabs me. 

“My husband’s curling team lost its fourth a while ago—heart attack,” Pearl at the front desk says. Pearl is a good-looking grey-haired woman who buys a cantaloupe every two days even at ten dollars apiece in winter. It helps with her arthritis, she says.  I don’t know if she eats it or rolls it over her joints or what.

“Shuffleboard on ice?”

“Some call it chess on ice.”

“I don’t know the first thing about—”

“Seven-thirty at the Archie Bronson Rink. Be there.”

“You’ve got to be—”

“I’m not nuts, and I’m not joking. Ron will have a broom for you and curling shoes. Size ten and a half?”

“How did you—”

“Raised eight sons. A couple of them”—she eyes my neck tattoo—“were challenging.”

I take my shortcut across a wheat field to the hotel room I rent by the month. The sun is going down, and the wind is sharp. I turn up my jean jacket collar. In front of me on the path a jackrabbit squats on its bony haunches staring at me through black territorial eyes.

“You want your neck twisted?” I ask.

The jackrabbit twitches its nose. Twitch, twitch.

“Cat got your tongue?”

I step off the makeshift path and go around the rabbit, snow getting in my runners, cold nuggets pressing into the hollows of my ankles. I look back. The jackrabbit is still looking.

“Fuck off!” I yell. I wave my arms, stomp my foot to say I’m coming after you and finally the rabbit hops across the field into the brush, ragged tail between its skinny legs. I’m a shithead. Later, when I pick my way across the same field to meet Pearl’s husband at the rink, I’ve got a Nantes carrot in my hoodie pocket. I squat at the showdown spot until my earlobes snap from the cold, but the jackrabbit never arrives. I raise a little snowman with my bare hands and plug the carrot into its head, low enough for the rabbit to reach.

•

At the Archie Bronson, games are in full swing on three of the rink’s sheets. On the fourth, seven men chat in a stuttered way.

They rest their eyes on my snow-encrusted jean cuffs. The tallest one puts out his hand. “Ron,” he says, voice wavering like a small town preacher. “Pearl is my wife.”

“You’re her husband.”

“That’s the equation.”

Then a burly guy extends his hand. His name is Malcolm and he is clearly an asshole—it takes one to know one. Malcolm doesn’t remove his glove to shake my hand, and his handshake is loose as if I have leprosy and might leave something behind.

Next is a bobbing, smiling guy with hair like Peter Frampton. Elliot, my age.

“Ron and Pearl are my parents.” He pumps my hand and claps me on the back. “Welcome to Buttfuck,” he says, or something like that. “When spring comes around, because it always does, I’ll give you a tour on my Kawasaki.”

Ron hands me a broom and a pair of curling shoes that fit perfectly, and I step onto the ice, and land on my ass.

“Gripper foot first,” Ron says.

Elliot helps me up. Then he and Ron show me the ropes, or the stones: how to throw, how to sweep, how to read Ron’s calls. I do well. I tend to throw the stones too heavily, but I give them the right amount of spin. I’m a whiz at calculating angles too, a skill I credit to my physics teacher, who was so boring I skipped class preferring the pool hall, where I learned about transfer of momentum and the 90-degree rule.

 Elliot elbows his father whenever I hit a good shot. “You can’t ignore that!”

Ron agrees, but Malcolm the Asshole isn’t convinced. While he and I vigorously sweep one of Elliot’s stones into place, our heads inches apart, he grunts, “I think you know my buddy Larry.”  He gives me a look that says you’re going down.  I raise my broom and beat him until he’s blubbering on the ice, covering his fat bleeding head with his fat arms. No. I breathe in. Out. In again.

It takes a while to get a good breath since I’m already struggling for air, getting the most aerobic activity I’ve had in a year, since that afternoon I hopped the wall behind Mustard’s Garage, running from the cops in Screw Yourself, Saskatchewan. The charge was possession for the purpose of trafficking, and I got one month in jail for three pounds of Prince Albert weed, as good as strong coffee.

“Larry?” I say, as if trying to place the guy. “Right. He was hired to help me with some outstanding legal requirements connected to my most recent business enterprise.”

“He . . . what?”

 Malcolm will be my bitch for the rest of the season. If curling has a season. Or perhaps it’s like church and never ends.

“That was good,” Ron says when we wind up the practice. “Quite good for a beginner. Next time we’ll play a game.”

“Thanks,” I say. I move to step off the rink and fall flat on my ass.

“Slider first,” Ron says.

Elliot puts out his hand and helps me up.

•

A few weeks later over coffee, Elliot is explaining how Buttfuck is divided into two camps: the wide-hipped gregarious Ukrainians on the north side, and the thin serious Icelanders to the south.

“In the summer, you can tell who lives where because the Icelander gardens are like grids,” Elliot says, leaning to slurp his coffee. “But us Ukrainians, our gardens are crazy. Beans, onions, squash, beets, garlic, lettuce, leaves bigger than your head—they’re jungles. In July, you can have a whole conversation with Pearl while she’s weeding and never see her.”

Elliott and I meet most mornings at the Yeasty Does It where the crullers are eggy and buttery, and damp in the good way that sex is damp. Outside, Main Street is soaked in a blue fog of truck exhaust. People leave their vehicles running while they have their morning coffee since it’s thirty below outside and there’s no public outlets for your block engine heater.

 “There are other differences,” Elliot continues. “See that guy’s sweater? Tightly knit, fine wool. Icelander. And over there? The thick sweater with big stitches? Ukrainian. Of course, the babushka’s a tip-off.”

The kerchief on the woman’s head is red with pink flowers and for some reason it puts my heart rate up. Way up. In through the nostrils, out through the mouth, slowly. Again.

“You okay?” Elliot asks.

In. Out. “I just have to breathe sometimes. Anger management. I’ve had issues with my temper.”

“Oh, gee. I don’t even know what it’s like to be angry.”

“You’re a lucky man.”

“Pearl says anger is hurt turned inside out.”

I shrug. “I don’t know where it comes from. It’s like pressure builds up.”

I force myself not to look at the woman with the kerchief. I haven’t felt a wave of anger in over two weeks—since taking up curling.

“My broom arrives today,” I say.

“Cool. You’ll have it in time for Lac the Lake.”

I worked extra shifts fluffing green leaf lettuce to make enough cash to order curling shoes and a broom from Winnipeg. I went full out and got the horsehair broom, not the synthetic. I wanted the real thing for my first bonspiel, which is this weekend at Lac the Lake. We’ve been on a winning streak.

“Come to the house tonight,” Elliot says. “For cabbage rolls.”

I don’t exactly know what he’s talking about. I imagine people rolling cabbages down a bowling alley.

“You can meet my brother Wayne. He’s visiting from Brandon.”

“The one who’s into massaging wrestlers?”

“He’s a physiotherapist. Carol will be there too, of course.”

“I’ve got stuff to do.”

“Like what? You’d rather hang out in your crummy hotel room than eat holubtsi with homegrown tomato sauce?”

I want to tell him the problem, but of course I can’t. Holubtsi? The steam is building up.

“You’re doing the breathing thing again. I shouldn’t have insulted your hotel room.”

“It’s not that,” I say. “I’m just coming down with a cold.”

•

It isn’t a cold. It’s Carol. She’s the reason I spend the evening in my crummy hotel room, eating raw turnip and Mr. Noodles cooked in the coffee maker. It all started two weeks ago when Elliot invited me out for a beer with his buddies after a practice that ended abruptly when Malcolm, eyeing the blonde on the ladies’ team on the sheet beside us, got hit by a stone, which knocked his feet out from under him. While Ron drove Malcolm to Gimli for stitches, I got stuck mopping up the puddle of frozen blood with hot water.

I agreed to go to the bar. I kept my jacket on to cover up some ink and fretted over my white runners. I hate looking down at my feet these days. I’ve been wearing the same vinyl runners since high school.

Elliot’s friends Earl and Karl weren’t overly friendly, but they weren’t assholes.

“Here’s Carol,” Elliot says after a while, looking toward the door.

I turn around and everything goes slow-mo. I can replay the scene of her coming through the door of the Cart and Bull, and I do. Her long, brown curly hair bouncing, tight jeans, a man’s shirt, open, with a tank top underneath, not too much makeup, loads of freckles—a tomboy with womanly curves. My type absolutely. Christ! I’ve learned the hard way—a two-by-four wielded by a cokehead—not to lust after a friend’s woman, so I put Carol out of my mind, out of my zone. We have a great evening, drinking, playing darts, watching NHL.

But apparently things went slow-mo when Carol laid eyes on me too, because the next day she shows up in produce and spends a long time selecting oranges.

“Hey.”

“Oh! Justin, right?”

I lay my hands on two oranges, give them a squeeze, twiddle the green ends with my thumbs. “These are ripe.”

This could be considered innocent, just some fun, but Carol pushes out her chest and gives me a smile with some tongue action. My mouth goes dry. I’m speechless but not uncomfortably. I’m naked. She’s naked. We’re surrounded by apples, pineapples, kale, and carrots. We’re in fucking Eden!

“Elliot here?” I ask, hoping to kill the buzz.

“I’ve heard you’re really good at curling.”

“I’m picking it up.”

 “You’re probably really good at landing on the button,” Carol says, smiling again, the tiniest glimpse of tongue.

I just stand there praying she doesn’t lower her eyes and see my runners.

•

Elliot shows up late for coffee at the Yeasty Does It. “I know why you didn’t come over for holubtsi,” he says.

“Fuck.”

“She likes you.”

“I didn’t do anything—”

“I know. Look, it’s okay. I felt like shit at first. I wanted to throw you in a snowbank.”

“Ooh, scary.”

“Then drive over you.”

“Okay.”

“But I talked to my brothers, called every one of them. Talked the pain out until I felt all right again.”

“So you aren’t mad at me?”

“Well, you’re buying the crullers today,” Elliott says. “Anyway, she’s really bad in bed.”

•

That night, there’s a knock at my hotel room door.

“I told him,” Carol says.

“Usually something has to happen before you tell someone about it.”

“Better make it happen then.”

And boom Carol jumps up, wraps her legs around my waist, I fall back on the unmade bed and three minutes later we’re naked, really naked this time, looking into each other’s eyes, and for the first time I feel like I’m about to lose my innocence. Like the world is going to be bigger from now on. We screw all night. Thank fuck I can’t figure out what Elliot was talking about. Carol is crazy in bed. We do it forward, backward, upside down, bent over. It isn’t like anything I’ve ever known. As we finally drift off, I reach for my notebook and scrawl a big fat zero on the page.        

“What’s that?” Carol murmurs.

“My anger log.”

“Are you angry?”

“Not at all.”

Carol squeezes my hand and nuzzles my neck. “Me neither.”

I’m about to close my eyes when I see my runners by the door, two ghosts tired of running scared.

•

I imagined a book with a pink padded cover and gold lock on the side. The drugstore didn’t have that kind, only Hilroy notebooks like we used in school. I hated school. Especially English. The kid at the next desk would scribble away like words were flowing through her, liquid from the source, and I’d sit in front of the empty page as if in shock. For hours. Nothing would come up.

Three times a day, I rate my anger level from one to ten, ten being blind rage. When I first joined the team, I couldn’t follow the conversations on the rink—“it was hittin’ the broom, but lost its handle,” “too tight between the guards to get in the picket.” So I began filling the Hilroy’s back pages with curling terms. Around the horn, across the face, split the house, play the freeze. Out-turn, in-turn, hogger, hammer. Spinner, double-off, tee-line, hogline. Biter, burned stone. Wrecked shot, wobbler. Reading through the list calms me down.

As for anger levels, they are going down. When my broom and shoes were late arriving, and it looked like I wouldn’t have them in time for Lac the Lake, I shot to a seven. But Elliot drove me down to Winnipeg and we got what I needed. A couple of times I saw the lady with the babushka and soared to a nine, but other than that I’m mostly down in the fours and fives, and when Carol is around, zero.

Not always, of course. One night some friends of hers were coming for supper. I’m not always good at meeting new people. Carol asks me to sweep the floor. But I’m doing all I can not to jump her. I mean at one point she’s at the fridge, bent at the waist jiggling the crisper drawer, which is stuck. Jiggle, jiggle. I don’t do a great job sweeping. And Carol notices.

“Honey, could you go over the floor again. I’m seeing crumbs and stuff still.”

I’m this bubbling stew of anxiety and horniness and now annoyance. I take a breath through my nose. Out through my mouth.

“Just go over it again,” Carol says. “It’s no big deal.”

“I’ll do it again,” I say. “I’ll sweep this whole fucking house.”

And I go at the floors with a fury, knocking things over, crashing into walls. I sweep and sweep and sweep until the floors shine and for a few moments there isn’t a single speck of dust in my way.

•

Spring melt is around the corner. Everyone is talking about culverts and groundwater levels. The team has won eight games in a row and landed first place at two bonspiels. There’s talk of making it to Provincials next year.

One day as I’m misting zucchinis, my manager Sterling pulls me aside. “If you ever have to miss a shift to train, just let me know,” he says. “We’re proud of you. You and your guys could put Buttfuck on the map.” Or something like that.

Elliot’s got a new girlfriend who he says is awesome in bed. I don’t want to know what that even looks like. The night before we head to Pine Grove for the last bonspiel of the year, he invites me again for supper. “Perogies and koubassa. You can’t miss this one. Bring Carol.”

“You sure?”

“It’s fine.”

So Carol and I show up for supper. Pearl embraces me at the door. “I knew you had it in you,” she whispers.

After some chitchat in the living room, we sit down to eat. My plate is piled high with perogies, sauerkraut, sour cream, and coleslaw. The perogies raise me to a four, but Ron fills my glass with his plum wine, which though it tastes like prune juice mixed with rubbing alcohol, gets me down to two. Then the microwave goes beep-beep and Pearl leaps up. “Just warming up some cabbage rolls.”

So plunk this thing called a cabbage roll lands on my plate. The smell makes me gasp. I know the smell. High-pitched, vinegary, then it bottoms out with the lower aromas of meat and rice. I breathe the steam in through my nose, over and over. I want everyone to go away so I can just smell the cabbage roll. I pick up my knife and my fork. Cut myself a piece and raise it to my mouth. My eyes start to water. I eat another bite, and another. Tears are pouring down my face. I feel a kick under the table. Carol is like, WTF? I tuck a chunk of the cabbage roll in my fist, ask to be excused, and head to the can. I close the door behind me and crumple in a heap on the green shag carpet. Between sobs I nibble at the cabbage roll.

There’s a knock at the door. I let Carol in. She is freaked out. “Are you on something, or what?”

“I’ve eaten this before. When I was really young, I think. I’m having intense memories.”

Carol softens. “I’ve seen something like this on TV,” she says. “PTSD. Post-traumatic something. Maybe a bad thing happened when you were little, while you were, like, eating a cabbage roll or something.” Carol pulls out her cellphone. “How about we call your mom?”

“She’s a drunk.”

“Your sister then. Give me your phone.”

Carol enters 80085 and scrolls through my contacts. “What’s her name?”

“She married a Dyck.”

“That doesn’t help, Justin.”

“That’s his last name!”

I laugh. Carol looks at me. “That was a beautiful laugh,” she says. “It came from down deep.”

I laugh again. I’m crying too though. Snot’s coming out my nose. I’m burbling.

My sister picks up and Carol explains what’s going on. I hear Leanne asking, he what? and cabbage rolls? 

Carol asks, “Did something happen when he was young? Something maybe traumatic?”

And then Leanne says, I’ve got it. I know what’s going on.

Carol puts the phone on speaker and Leanne starts talking: “Mom went back to school when Justin was two, for upgrading to work as like a care attendant. While she was going to school, Justin got looked after by a neighbour. For two years, he spent his days at this older woman’s house, playing, napping, going out with her when she had errands to run—everything.

“The babysitter, Irena, spoke Ukrainian to Justin all day long, and Justin picked it up. He and the woman would whisper together and sing songs and tell jokes, all in Ukrainian. At home, Mom and I never knew what Justin was saying. Ukrainian was his first language.

“When mom finished school and didn’t need Irena anymore, it didn’t end friendly. I think Mom was jealous of Irena. Justin knows how needy she gets. Irena cried. I remember Justin hugging her and Mom pulling him away. It was awful. Justin never spoke Ukrainian after that. I mean he tried for a while, but there was no one to speak it with.”

Carol says goodbye to Leanne, then tells me about a nephew of hers who had bad tantrums. Her sister took the kid to the doctor who said the kid was frustrated because he had stuff to say but couldn’t talk yet. “I think you’ve had something like that for twenty-four years,” Carol says. “It’s like you’ve had this plug in you.”

“Buttplug?” I say, but I don’t really laugh. I can’t stop crying. The tap is open!

There’s another knock at the door. Pearl this time. “You okay in there?”

“Hey, Pearl?” Carol calls. “How do you say I love you in Ukrainian?”

And through the door, Pearl yells ya tebe lyublyu. The tap turns on again. A full flow.

•

The curling season comes to an end mid-May. Pearl gathers the matching fleece vests we ordered for the final bonspiel, our names embroidered on them, and puts them in storage until September. Work at Smarty’s is going full tilt, a nonstop flow of berries and tomatoes up from the American hothouses, so I put in extra shifts. When a 1974 Dodge Dart is advertised in the paper, Carol and I hitch a ride to see it. When the door to the old house opens, I freeze: it’s the old woman with the babushka. Carol whacks me on the back as if I’m choking.

“Dobroho večora,” I say. Good evening. One of the first things Pearl taught me in our weekly Ukrainian lessons.

“Laskavo prosymo!” the old woman answers. Welcome.

Carol and I move in together the first day of June. We’re renting a farmhouse on 160 acres of farmed land. The house is encircled by a windbreak of poplars. In the evenings, we drive to Gimli for supper or to the old quarry for a swim, or down to the river, which is high this year, then we go home and screw our brains out.

The last bonspiel of the year took place in Brandon. One lunch break I excused myself from the guys and found a little shoe store on the main street. I bought myself a pair of brown suede Blundstones, an ankle boot with no laces. They’re different from what I’m used to, but I don’t mind looking down. I didn’t even say goodbye when I dropped my old runners in a garbage can before hoofing it back to the rink.

---

Sara Cassidy lives on Lekwungen Territory, on the west coast of Canada, in Victoria, BC. Her nonfiction, fiction and poetry have won a National Magazine Award, Atlantic Writing Prize, and BC Book Prize. Her children's books have appeared on Kirkus, Smithsonian, and New York Public Library best-of-year lists. She spent a year as a reporter not far from Buttfuck, Manitoba.  www.saracassidywriter.com