07/02/2000

Shall I start at the very beginning?

I barely slept. How could I? I went to bed in the black bra and thong I bought especially for today, just in case Lawrence surrendered to temptation and took me to a hotel. Wore the short grey dress my mom always says is too see-through to leave the house in. The grey dress, no pantyhose, and my black platform sandals.

Left early, took the bus to the subway. When the driver didn’t pull into the station, I started to panic. I asked him what was going on. Turns out the subway doesn’t run until 9 on Sunday mornings. How did I go 19 years without ever knowing that?

I asked the driver how on earth I was supposed to get to my destination when the subway wasn’t running, but he didn’t have much to say. “You’ll have to take a bus, I guess. Or walk.”

Walk? Walk 7 kilometers before 8 in the morning?

He gave me a transfer and I managed to catch a bus along Eglinton, but my second bus wasn’t scheduled to come for another 45 minutes! How could I possibly wait that long? It would be almost 9 before I got to the station.

So I walked. Raced. Ran, until my sandals cut between my toes and my feet bled. Then I had to slow my pace, which was worrying for three main reasons:

1) Even on a Sunday morning, the area was sketchy as hell;
2) Some of my dad’s family lives nearby and they were the last people I wanted to see wearing a see-through dress;
3) It was already after 8 and who knows if Lawrence was still waiting? Maybe he’d left…

I was hobbling by the time I got close to the golf course, and that’s when I spotted something in the street.

A fox.

A dead fox, crushed by cars, lying in the road with its guts hanging out of its belly.

For the first time during this whole race to the station, I stopped. I stopped and stared and I had a terrible, ominous feeling. I identify strongly with foxes, for obvious reasons. The fox was me, and just look at it. Dead.

When I got to the little parking lot outside the subway station, Lawrence’s awful little shitbox of a car was waiting for me, and he was inside reading the paper. I told him what had happened and how afraid I was that he would leave.

He said, “I was going to. I was sure you’d changed your mind.”

But I would never do that. Never.

Lawrence gave me bandages for my toes, and I put them on as we drove, retracing the steps I’d just run. He asked where we were going and I said, “To a hotel?”

He just laughed.

Wouldn’t you think he’d have something planned, after all that time thinking about it? But he didn’t have any plans at all, so we drove to Edward’s Gardens.

I always hate it when people breed in public places; I guess I got my chance to repay some karmic debt. He fantasises about our wedding—that’s what he told me. What can I say? It’s not something I’ve ever caught myself doing, but to each his own.

Our first kiss was strange. Maybe I just wasn’t expecting it when he tried to pry my teeth open with his tongue and ended up licking my gums instead. I guess I got used to it quickly enough, though, because we didn’t stop making out even when other people walked by our park bench.

Just kisses. Just mouths. No hands, even. We were in public, after all. It actually surprised me that he’d kiss me with other people around. What if Victoria’s friends saw us together? Or Kennedy’s, or Bess’s? Wasn’t he worried about things like that? He just couldn’t help himself, I suppose. I could hear his passion in every breath he took, like he wanted to throw me down and take me right there in the park, and it took every bit of effort imaginable just to keep his clothes on.

As for me? After so much wishing and waiting, the physical affection made me feel sort of… weird. Different than what I expected. It’s hard to describe. Good or bad? I’m not really sure yet.

After Edward’s Garden, we drove downtown until I wasn’t exactly sure where we were. He took me to a restaurant and we ate on the patio. I felt like people were staring, and not in a good way.

I didn’t have much to say, I suppose, because he kept telling me, “You’ve gone silent again.”

Contemplative.

So no hotel after all. Not that I was surprised. That’s one rule Lawrence would never break.

He dropped me back at the subway, which was running by then, so I came straight home. The whole family was out. I went to my room, got out a pack of crayons, and drew pictures of apples.

Lawrence feels that it’s wrong of him to be in Love with me, but I can’t help thinking of that line from The Grapes of Wrath: “Maybe there ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue; there’s just stuff people do. And some things folks do is nice and some things ain’t so nice, but that’s as much as any man got a right to say.”

Giselle