pee girl gets the belt
by Tara McGowan-Ross
I’m not saying Sarah wasn’t my friend, but she pissed me off. Always going on about things. Her parents. A man. There was always a man. I once had her over for dinner with my other work friends, with Portia and Susanna, and Sarah left early. Susanna had stayed back to help with the dishes.
“I’ve met a hundred girls like that,” Susanna had said, flicking a little cloud of dish soap off of her French manicure. “It’s like their whole thing is everybody hurt me.”
#
Our office was between Chinatown and the old part of the city. Sarah was popular with the clientele. I heard her say she was basically a nurse to someone on the phone, once, and Portia had to talk to her about it. She was a receptionist. Receptionists have to do more if they’re receptionists for the kinds of people we worked with. Sarah would sit in that intake room like the Virgin Mary herself, milling those crazies like wool. Methadone treatment. Supervised detox. The assistant program for street-involved expectant mothers.
She was always so serious about everything. Treating minor cuts like a medic in a war zone, coming back to Portia and I and letting us know the business. She had this way of tucking whichever long sweater she was wearing around her little waist as she relayed information to us and there were always a few elegant strands of hair falling out of her chignon. I used to call that front room the piss room. It smelled like piss. Everything the colour of piss. Sarah, queen of the world. Sarah queen of piss.
Her job was never in danger. She was good at it. We’d never get through to any of the addicts without Sarah and we all knew it. Our clients infuriated us. Our enemy was whatever was making them sick, and most of the time it was them, which meant we hated them a little, and they could tell. We tried our best. Sometimes it worked. It usually didn’t. Sometimes the peace they felt with Sarah, for a few minutes after coming in the door, was the only thing they got from us that actually helped.
#
Sarah liked to act like we didn’t have anything in common, because I was a doctor and she worked by the hour, but I was more like her than I was like Portia or Susanna. I was a charity case at my high school, I tried to tell her. The towns we were from were only a couple hours apart. I just stayed in school for longer. Sarah would always get that look on her face when we talked about it. Like I didn’t understand. I’d leave the piss room feeling bad. Wanting to buy her coffee, or something.
“Don’t bother,” Portia would tell me when we went out for drinks, or when we brunched on the weekend. “She wants you to feel like you don’t understand so you try harder to understand. It’s an attention thing. There’s always going to be some reason it’s not her fault. It’s always something with girls like that.”
I wanted to be less like the queen of the piss room and more like Portia and Susanna. My French manicures chipped a few days after I got them. I was uncoordinated and heavy at the barre class, walked through the upscale department stores feeling like a fugitive.
I made the same salary as Portia and Susanna and it wasn’t supposed to matter that I came from the part of the country where most houses had a couple disassembled cars in their front yards when they came from the Beaches and Kitsilano. They’d gotten cars for their sixteenth birthdays. I’d gotten a second job. They didn’t make me feel bad about it — not on purpose, anyway. Portia and Susanna were perfectly nice to me. I could tell, because of how they talked about Sarah to me. That was what sisterhood was all about, for girls like them.
Sometimes I’d get sick of it and spend my lunches in the piss room, with her.
“I can’t tell you how much I love them,” she’d say to me. About the clients. “It’s like every one of them teaches me a little more about myself.”
#
One night, early on, we’d closed together. There’d been a sea of crazies milling around the front, and she’d parted them like the red sea. We’d walked and talked up to one of the only bars in Chinatown. I’d offered her a drink, but she ordered a coke, placed a chip on the table between us.
“Four years,” She’d said, tucking that flyaway from her chignon back behind her ear.
“Jesus, Sarah, I’m sorry,” I said, putting my hat back on, moving to do the same with my gloves. “Let’s go somew—”
“No, it’s fine!” She said. “Eventually in recovery, you get to a point where — ” she shrugged, and looked around, and then looked back at me. She was so happy to be there to share her own strength and resilience with me. “You get to the point where you don’t even want to, you know?”
We talked. Mostly she did. She was happy to let me know about exactly what she’d had to overcome to be there. It wasn’t the things she said as much as the way she said it. The perfect timing of all of it. The way I felt like I’d been cast in a role for a play I hadn’t read and had never agreed to be in. The womanly gentleness of her: her face tilted just like that, her wrists always relaxed when she held her drink. I was an ogre in a size-fourteen dress on the bar stool next to her.
She told me about the people who hurt her in a way that made it very clear that she didn’t need my sympathy but would take it if I was offering. She told me about the grief of not being protected, and this was when I realized I’d been casing the exits, trying to mentally calculate how many of the drunk Chinese guys I could take if it came down to it. If she needed protecting, tonight it was my job. Whether I liked it or not.
#
“It’s a girl thing,” Portia had clarified at our meeting on Monday. I was raised by men: my disabled dad, and my older half-brother. My mother was always gone. Working. I’d done enough therapy to know that I resented her for this, as much as I also understood, and that for reasons that had to do with her, and with me, there were things about women I would probably never understand. In contrast, Portia had three sisters, and a stay-at-home mother, and money and knowledge of what women had to do to earn status and then protect it. Sometimes it sounded like her life had been a nonstop chess game of psychological warfare from the moment she’d been born.
#
Sarah wanted to have a baby. She wanted to have a baby in that carnivorous way that some women begin to want these things, at a particular age.
“You might not understand this,” she said, on another after-work outing. She demurely sipped her full-sugar coke while I gnashed my teeth on the ice in my second vodka soda. “But I’ve been talking to this guy, online, and I’ve started having dreams about our baby.”
Despite myself, I did understand. I’ve wanted a baby exactly twice, with two ex-boyfriends. Both times I’d had dreams about the baby.
One of these boyfriends had been a dockworker when I was a med student. This man had been thick all over and was in the later phases of being able to control his meth addiction. He used to drive his truck around filling potholes in his spare time, sometimes until three or four in the morning. He knew almost nothing about me. All we did was fuck. When I dreamt about our family, he was sober and our son was big and healthy, his ruddy white skin three tones darker than his pale yellow hair. Just like his dad.
My boyfriend eventually got busted filling potholes and booked for the meth in his pockets. When he’d called me for bail money I’d lied and said I didn’t have it. I started having different dreams, ones where I was running around an empty house after a crying boy I could hear but couldn’t see. When he dumped me, in court-ordered rehab, the dreams stopped altogether. I was relieved, because I was spending four days a month feeling like I was tied up in the back seat of my own body, and I was watching someone else drive me somewhere I didn’t even want to go.
When I told her this, Sarah pressed her fingers — not painted, but perfect, nails naturally long — to her nose while her eyes filled with tears.
“I knew you’d get it,” she said. “I just knew it.”
#
The man whose baby she wanted to have had found her on Instagram, where she often posted pictures of herself looking beautiful and talking about the people who had hurt her. She showed me his profile. He was a musician.
“Sarah,” I said. “This man is very famous.”
“I know,” she said, her eyes glassy with joy. “I manifested him.”
She explained that she’d been paying a woman in Oregon to teach her, over video call, to use meditation to meet someone exactly like this man from Instagram — someone handsome, and exciting.
“And well-resourced,” she said. “For our family.”
“Sure,” I said.
“This must be how you felt with your fella,” she said.
I looked at my drink and the ice melting in it. “Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”
#
Sarah began to insist that she and I had a very special bond. I started staying up too late on work nights, drinking expensive Cuban rum and eating caramel corn with a silent intensity, scrolling my phone, opening her Instagram over and over.
“I don’t have a lot of girl friends,” Sarah told me, at work. “I need to know the women I spend time with aren’t going to get competitive.”
“Yeah,” I’d say. “Sure.”
#
The second man whose baby I’d wanted was the bassist in a glam rock band in Brooklyn who I had dated for four months in the latter part of my early thirties. I’d just gotten the job I still have. It was my first community health placement. We had a four-day work week. I’d only ever worked in emergency rooms and I didn’t do well with so much free time.
I coped by becoming a fitness nut and spending my weekends raving and going to live gigs in New York City. That’s where I’d met the bassist. He was twelve years younger than me and a lot less smart than he thought he was. He put on fun, high-energy shows playing stupid music I did not enjoy. When I dreamt about our baby, she was school-age or a teenager or middle-aged with kids of her own. She always looked the same, with my blonde hair and bad posture and her father’s Italian nose, and she always said she was happy to see me even though I could tell she was resentful about something. She would have this air like she knew something I didn’t, whether she was a little girl or an adult woman, and it always pissed me off. When we hugged, in my dreams, I knew that the way I loved her was a thousand times more powerful than anything else I had ever felt, and also that I’d known her my entire life.
The bassist dumped me because my job made him feel bad about living off his trust fund. I didn’t try to get him back. Instead, thin and hot in a way I had never been before and have not been since, I drove to New York one weekend and fucked his entire band.
While blowing his drummer, I started vomiting profusely, and then passed out. I woke up hours later in the New York Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital to discover that the drummer had dropped me off, and then split, and that I had somehow contracted a serious stomach infection, and since I did not get travel health insurance I spent the next three years paying off my American medical debt. In the first year, I stopped working out completely and re-gained all the weight I’d lost. In the second, I met my husband — at a dinner party hosted by our old executive director, the one we had before we hired Susanna.
“It’s girls like us,” Sarah would say, at work, “Girls who really understand love, who understand this kind of thing.”
At night, when I was done eating caramel corn and was drunk on the fancy Cuban rum, I’d crawl into bed with my husband. My husband is kind and attentive. We have things in common. We get along. We make about the same amount of money, which is plenty, and before we got married he helped me pay off my American medical debt. We both have plans to become health nuts but we haven’t gotten around to it. I’m happy when I see him and sad when he goes and I have never once wanted to have his baby. I don’t ever dream about it.
#
Sarah came in to work one day with a wild look in her eyes. She was too loud, with the clients. Susanna had to talk her down.
“Let’s make sure we bring the energy level our clients need,” Susanna said, tapping on Sarah’s desk with one manicured finger.
“Of course, of course,” said Sarah. I could see the whites of her eyes from across the room. Her chignon was messier than usual. We made eye contact across the piss room, and I’d never seen her so lovely. Like she wasn’t standing on the earth. Like she was rising from it. When our eyes met, the smile she gave me made the whole piss room glow like a frizzy marigold.
What is it? I mouthed.
Manifesting, she mouthed back.
#
She explained over lunch that she had some friends who ran an arts collective, in one of the few old bohemian lofts left in a borough that’s all condos now.
“I would have invited you, but they keep it really exclusive,” she said. “They barely let me in.”
The very exclusive arts collective had thrown a secret show that past weekend. Nobody knew who was playing until they got there.
“Who was it?” I asked, but I already knew.
#
They’d spent the whole weekend together. He’d decided to delay his return to LA, and she was staying with him at one of the nicer hotels in the city.
“This must be how you felt with your fella,” she said. “Getting spoiled every day. Making love all night. Dinners and shopping and such.”
I thought about the medical debt my husband had helped me pay off. “Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”
She was more blissfully happy every day she worked that week. Then, on Saturday, she called me, wailing.
“He’s gone,” she said. “This morning, he made love to me, and then ended it, and now he’s gone.”
I didn’t want to talk to her, but I couldn’t leave her like that. I sat on my old couch, in my living room, staring at a strip of hanging flypaper I’d been meaning to change, this ribbon of death in front of my faded grey polyester curtains, while Sarah cried on the phone for two hours that day and three the day after. On Monday, she put in a request to Susanna for vacation.
“‘It’s more like bereavement,’” Susanna had quoted with a snort.
“What did you say?” I asked.
“Yes, obviously. She’s entitled to it. Hope it helps.”
#
One of the interns would cover her post at the front for the time she was gone. The front room smelled more like piss than ever. I didn’t drink as much rum in the evenings, didn’t eat as much caramel corn.
A few days later, she called me.
“If you say you’re in LA, Sarah,” I said. A fresh fly on the paper writhed and kicked his six little feet to heaven. “I swear to God.”
#
To justify herself, Sarah quoted her Oregon manifesting coach.
“Sometimes,” she explained, “two souls will decide in a previous life to meet up in this one, and continue their journey — ”
“A soul contract,” I said. She’d told me this before.
“A soul contract,” she said. “Yes. Exactly.”
It was a public show he was playing. Anyone could buy a ticket. “It’s not like it’s a secret,” she said, and I could hear her adjust herself violently in her car seat. “It’s not like he doesn’t want people to come.” It would be a surprise. It would be romantic.
“I think that people these days have been too thoroughly conditioned against what makes things really romantic,” she said. “Everyone’s all woke and like, reasonable. It’s like nobody wants to fall in love anymore.”
When she’d gotten to the venue, she’d gone right into the alley next to it for a cigarette. Sarah didn’t even smoke. But it was like she was sitting in the back seat of her body and someone else was driving. She’d bummed off a loitering roadie, and then her musician had come out of some service door. With another woman.
“I’ve never seen him like that,” she said, and she started to cry. “So at peace. Like she made him happy.”
She’d left before he could see her. She’d gone back to her car across the street. The club was old, and music leaked out of the walls. She’d bought a pack of smokes and sat in her car with the windows down, smoking and listening to the muffled rock show until it was all over.
“And then you went back to your hotel, right?” I asked.
“Jason drove them,” she said, sniffing. “Fucking Jason. He knows me. We spent that whole week together. We talked about our dads on MDMA.”
“Right,” I said. I figured it wasn’t the right time to bring up her sobriety. Instead, I asked, “Who’s Jason?”
“His driver,” she said, the pep back in her voice for a second.
“Right,” I said. “Sure.” I cleared my throat. On the paper, the fly’s legs were moving more slowly.
“Sarah, where are you?”
“I followed him,” she told me. “I followed him to his house.”
#
She explained that her dreams had changed. It’s like, our baby is crying behind a closed door, and to get to the baby I have to get through this room, but he’s in that room with another woman and he thinks that woman is the mother. I have to fight for him. I have to convince him the mother is me.
For the first time in years, I remembered my own baby dreams. Really remembered them, how they felt: relief and pride for my sober meth head boyfriend. The way I knew my daughter.
When she spoke again, I could hear she was crying.
“I’ve had it every night for three nights,” she moaned, her voice strained to the edge. She made a sound like a very quiet scream. I could hear the wet, hot hollow of her mouth open, hear her rocking back and forth.
“What do you think I should do?”
#
The week she’d met him, I’d taken a lunch in the old part of the city with Portia. I was livid for reasons I couldn’t justify.
“If she marries this guy,” I said, shoving a forkful of expensive pasta in my mouth, “and ends up rich and happy and like, at the Met Gala? I am going to burn our office down. I am going to rip up my medical licence. Like, what’s the point? Did I do this wrong? Should I have just been hitting the gym this whole time? Learning to tie my fucking chignon?”
Portia just looked at me. Like she knew something I didn’t. Like there were things about women I would never understand.
#
“Sweetie,” I told Sarah. “I think you should go to your hotel and get some sleep, and then I think you should come home.”
Sarah didn’t say anything, but she didn’t hang up. Then I heard the short clicks, and the long, and then the shift of the earth beneath the car as Sarah put it in drive and started to pull out. The fly on the paper was dead and still.
“I’m leaving,” Sarah said.
I was quiet on the line.
“It was just nice,” Sarah said. “It was nice to want something for a little while.”
#
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Tara McGowan-Ross is an urban Mi’kmaq multidisciplinary artist and writer. Her work has appeared in print and online, and has been anthologized in Best Canadian Poetry and Anthologie de la poésie actuelle du femmes au Québec. Her debut work of nonfiction, the memoir Nothing Will Be Different, was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writer’s Trust award for nonfiction.
Instagram: @girthgirl