Deep Girls Read online

  Table of Contents

  Deep Girls

  The Girl in the Purple Pants

  Captivity

  Out of the Woods

  Ice

  My Cousin Jack

  Pink Lady

  Smart Aleck

  Relativity

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  DEEP GIRLS

  Lori Weber

  DEEP GIRLS

  Copyright © 2018 Lori Weber

  This edition copyright © 2018 DCB, an imprint of Cormorant Books Inc. First published in the United States of America in 2019.This is a first edition.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free 1.800.893.5777.

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for its publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation, an agency of the Ontario Ministry of Culture, and the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit Program.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Weber, Lori, 1959–, author

  Deep girls / Lori Weber.

  Short stories. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-1-77086-531-0 (softcover). — ISBN 978-1-77086-532-7 (html)

  I. Title.

  PS8645.D24D44 2018 JC813’.6 C2018-903806-3 C2018-903807-1

  United States Library of Congress Control Number: 2018946339 Cover design: angeljohnguerra.com Interior text design: Tannice Goddard, bookstopress.com

  Printed and bound in Canada.Printer: Sunville Printco.

  DCB

  An imprint of Cormorant Books Inc.

  260 Spadina Avenue, Suite 502, Toronto, Ontario, M5T 2E4

  www.dcbyoungreaders.com

  For my mom, Maureen, the most deeply beautiful and beautifully deep woman I know, with love.

  DEEP GIRLS

  “You can buy clothes to hide that, Lizzie,” my mother says, pointing to my stomach, like she can’t say the word. She has told me many times that the only time she had a stomach was after she had me, but sit-ups took care of the bulge pretty fast — one hundred a day. She still does them, sixteen years later. When I catch her, I imagine her chanting, A hundred a day keeps the flabbies away, a perversion of Huxley’s, A soma a day keeps the jim-jams away.

  “And your skin …” she continues, patting her own cheeks, as though our skin is connected. My mother is the regional rep for MoDerm, a natural skincare line that originated on a farming co-op in Vermont. Skin is her life.

  “You want me to hide my face, too?” I ask.

  “No, silly. The pimples.” She pronounces the p’s hard, spitting them out, like seeds. My mother didn’t have pimples at my age. Her old pictures prove it. Besides, if one had sprouted, she’d have attacked it, full-force, with creams and potions. My mother is like the Joan of Arc of beauty. Even now, at seven a.m., she’s wearing an elegant satin housecoat and has already brushed her hair and pampered her face. She’s sipping green tea, because its anti-oxidants are good for aging. MoDerm products are supposedly full of them.

  “That stuff I bought you, with zinc and cinnamon,” she says, “have you tried it?”

  I gulp down the rest of my coffee, shake my head, and walk away. That lotion, along with all the other MoDerm products she has given me over the years, made with honey or dandelion root or witch hazel, are sitting, unused, on my bureau.

  To tell you the truth, between my mother and Joe, I get more advice on how to improve my looks than I can stand. They just don’t seem to get that my body isn’t my main priority. Not in the same way Joe’s body is for him. That’s because he’s a runner. He runs for an hour before school and an hour after school. Sometimes he even runs at lunch. Before he became my boyfriend, I used to watch him run the track behind the school. I thought he was kind of cute, in a rugged sort of way, but he wasn’t the type of guy I usually talked to.

  “Why don’t you join me?” he asked one day.

  “Because I hate running,” I said, moving on. After that, the more I watched, the harder Joe ran, like he was giving me a private performance. Eventually, he’d run past me as I was walking home, doing each block three times for my one time, looping around me like a cattle rancher rounding up his steer. Finally, he began waiting at the foot of my driveway, running on the spot. He became extremely hard to avoid.

  “I’ll take you to a movie Friday,” he said one day, as though I’d asked him to and he was now accepting my offer.

  “And who says I want to go?” I replied. It sort of amazed me that Joe was after me. I’m not what guys call ‘hot.’ I’m not ugly, but I guess I’m pretty plain. My mother always tells me I have great potential, if only I’d put in the effort.

  But Joe just shrugged, ran on the spot, exaggerating his knee lifts, and took off. “I’ll pick you up at eight.”

  At the theatre, we couldn’t agree on a movie. I wanted to see Jane Eyre, but Joe had his heart set on the latest Batman. In the end, Joe won out. I couldn’t stand the thought of someone rolling their eyes and yawning over Jane Eyre, the proud governess whom Rochester falls in love with, despite her plain exterior. Even now, I like to picture Charlotte Brontë writing the book with a quill, tucked away in her little country parsonage, surrounded by the mysterious English moors that she and her sisters were always roaming in.

  “There. That wasn’t so bad, was it?” Joe said on our way out of the theatre. “Lots of action, not like a chick-flick.” I couldn’t tell if he was teasing, he had this way.

  “You know, Jane Eyre has action too,” I replied. “There’s a mad woman locked up in an attic, attempted mur-ders, arson.” But Joe didn’t respond. Maybe he didn’t believe me.

  At my place, Joe kissed me goodnight. He was wearing a track jacket made of slippery nylon. When I tried to put my hand on his shoulder it slid right off. I could feel my mother in the house, anxiously waiting to hear about my first date. She had tried to talk me into putting on some make-up before leaving. And she had even chosen clothes for me to wear, my tightest and most revealing. I wore them, but covered up the top with a baggy jean shirt, just to show her I didn’t care.

  Joe and I have now been going out for a whole month and he’s still trying to talk me into running with him.

  “Come on, Lizzie, it would be fun,” he says.

  “No thanks. I hate sports,” I always reply.

  “Sports are good for you, better than reading,” Joe says, hitting a sore spot. I love to read. I finish at least one, maybe two, novels per week. I’ve been working my way through the alphabet of classics, author by author. So far, I’ve read The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot. Before that I read Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens, The Plague by Albert Camus, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. The books belonged to my grandmother, who left them to me in her will. They have gold lettering down the spines and black and white drawings on onion paper inside.

  “You read too much. You’ll ruin your eyes,” Joe says.

  “Yeah, well, you run too much. You’ll ruin your feet.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t just use your feet to jog. You use everything — your knees, your thighs, your hips, your arms, your lungs, and especially your heart.”

  “Yeah, well, reading involves way more than your eyes.”
I want to tell Joe that reading touches your brain, your soul, and especially your heart. But I don’t. He’d only roll his eyes.

  “Deep girls are no fun,” Joe says, a smile curling the corner of his lips. “You ought to lighten up, like your mother.” Then he begins to do the leg stretches that signify the start of another run. Even if I could respond to this blow it would be tough because one minute his face is beside mine, the next it’s down around my ankles.

  I think about breaking up with Joe a lot, but the trouble is this: my parents love him. The first time they met, my mother ushered Joe into the living room and practically pushed him onto our sofa. Then she handed him a glass of white wine, even though he’s only seventeen. Later, she pulled me into the kitchen and told me Joe was a dish. God! What a word. It made me think of Joe’s head on a silver platter, like John the Baptist’s.

  When we returned to the living room, Joe and my father were deep in conversation.

  “We’ll have to put you on the bike, Joe. See how far you can go,” my father was saying. My father is obsessed with cycling. He cycles a hundred miles a week mini-mum, in good weather. In the winter, he cycles in the basement on a stationary bike while watching travel videos. I think he really believes he’s biking around the Pyrenees because he’ll lean his whole body into the curves of the roads that the camera is following.

  I thought Joe would need rescuing, but the next thing I knew, they were fixing a date.

  The following Saturday my father took Joe to Oka and back, a ride of about seventy-five miles. My father was very impressed by Joe’s condition.

  “You kept up well, there, Joe,” he said, putting his arm around Joe’s shoulder and ushering him past me into the house.

  My mother had lemonade ready. I was afraid it might be spiked with vodka. According to MoDerm philosophy, a tiny amount of alcohol stimulates blood flow which cleanses the skin — but never more than a touch.

  “Your dad is amazing,” Joe said. “I hope I’m in that kind of shape when I’m older.” I could see my father beaming. This was what he’d always wanted — an eager child to share his passion for sports. He’d been trying for years to get me out on the bike with him, to help control what he calls my ‘weight problem.’ I tried to flash Joe a sympathetic smile, but couldn’t. My mouth just froze in an awkward expression. I tried not to let it show, but as my parents and Joe talked, I couldn’t stop thinking about Neil, this guy in my English class that I’d run into at the park earlier that day. We’d sat on a bench and, before I knew it, we were deep in conversation about the war in Syria. Then we talked about how conservative politicians don’t even believe in global warming, even though the polar ice caps are melting. I could never talk to Joe about any of those things.

  Since that day, Joe’s gone cycling with my father almost every weekend. Sometimes, he comes over to our house in the evening and my father joins him for a run.

  “Break a leg,” my mother calls after them, laughing hard, as though she has just said the wittiest thing in the world.

  As I watch their two bodies growing smaller and smaller down the road, bobbing up and down like far-away insects, I try to sort out how I feel about Joe. I think about how he slaps my thighs and teases me when they ripple. Once, he slapped my bum and said it felt like a bowl of Jell-O. My parents laughed at that one, but I could see my mother cringe, as though she couldn’t believe she was related to someone with Jell-O-bum.

  I know I should break up with Joe, but I’m afraid my parents will give me a hard time if I do. They’ll go on and on about what a fool I am to the point where I’ll feel like I’m breaking up a happy family. So, I just let things continue, as if I don’t really have the power to stop them. Joe grows closer and closer to my parents as I read further and further into the classics, finally hitting Flaubert.

  “You should get a layered cut and have some high-lights put in,” my mother advises me one afternoon while I’m lying on my bed reading Madame Bovary. I know my straight, plain brown hair drives my mother crazy. She doesn’t actually use the word “mousy,” but I can feel her thinking it.

  “I mean, it would add some body,” she continues, bouncing her own hair as she says this. My mother dyes her hair on a regular basis. Whenever I watch her hang her head over the bathtub and rub in the chemical solution, being careful not to let it drip into her eyes, I feel sorry for her hair. I believe hair should just be allowed to be, naturally, instead of getting assaulted by toxic dye every six weeks, totally against its will.

  “Yeah, well, my hair’s okay as it is,” I say, without looking up. I don’t want to see the expression on her face. If my grandmother were here she’d help me out. She’d gone white at forty, her hair soft as a baby’s. My mother thought it was a disgrace.

  “All I’m saying is you could put in a bit more effort. You have such a great guy there. You’ll lose him if you don’t.”

  The real reason for her annoyance is that Joe is taking me out tonight to meet his entire family, including some American cousins, but I haven’t been able to put down my book. Madame Bovary is just about to plunge into her affair with Léon. She’s weighing the pros and cons. Personally, I hope she’ll go for it. She and that drip of a doctor husband have absolutely nothing in common.

  My mother keeps poking her head around my door to see if I’m moving yet. “His whole family will be there, Lizzie. First impressions and all that.”

  There’s no way I can tell her I really don’t want to go.

  “Lizzie! Have some pride.”

  “Okay, okay,” I say, finally. It’s only four and we aren’t leaving until six. I don’t need two hours to get ready, but I’ll pretend I do if it gets my mother off my back. I know that if I gave myself over to her, she’d cut, primp, pluck and color me up, making me over in her image, or in the image of what her ideal girl looks like.

  JOE’S FAMILY TAKES up three tables at an expensive steak restaurant that has a giant cow statue in the front lawn. The cow wears a sign, in the shape of cow bells, with the restaurant’s name around its neck. The menu is white with black splotches all over it. When our steaks arrive, they’re decorated with bits of parsley speared by toothpicks with cows at the top. Similar toothpicks stand in the baked potatoes, like cows in snow.

  Joe introduced me to everyone back at his house before leaving, but I can’t remember anyone’s name.

  “So, this is Joe’s girlfriend,” one of his cousins calls from across the table, as though he’s just noticed me. “Hey, who would have thought Joe could get a girl to go out with him.”

  Everyone laughs, even Joe.

  “How’d he sweep you off your feet there, Lizzie? Did he just scoop you up while running?” I envision Joe running with me in a wheelbarrow, my legs dangling over the sides.

  “Oh, you know, it just kind of happened,” I say.

  “Joe says you’re a real brain,” another cousin chimes in. “I wouldn’t have thought anyone with a brain would go out with Joe. You should’ve known better.”

  His whole family cracks up. They think it’s a joke, but when I look at Joe, I know they’re probably right. Except I can’t say that.

  “Well?” Joe asks, staring at me, his fork frozen mid-air, and I realize he’s waiting for me to say something witty in his defense.

  “Oh, you know, Joe’s not as dumb as he looks,” I say, trying to sound playful. I wait for his cousins to laugh again, but they don’t. They just look back and forth at each other and shrug.

  I try to smile at Joe, but he just shoves a piece of steak into his mouth and concentrates on chewing. My stomach churns. If I were more like my mother, I would’ve said something charming, like, Oh, it doesn’t take brains to fall for someone like Joe, just great taste. And then I would’ve fixed them with a flirtatious and silencing glance.

  But I’m not my mother.

  Nobody asks me another question.

  I continue to eat, taking small, dainty bites so I can chew delicately, like my mom always does. It works, until I hit
a piece of fat. It’s one of those rubbery lumps, the kind you can’t grind down, no matter how hard you try. Even mashing it between my molars has no effect. In fact, it’s bigger than ever, like my chewing has expanded it. If I swallow it, I’ll choke. I look around the table. Joe and his cousins seem to have forgotten me. They’re lost in family stories, reminiscing about shared camping trips and eccentric relatives I’ll never meet.

  There’s only one thing to do. I hold my cow napkin against my mouth and spit. Joe turns his head just in time to see the soggy lump fall out. He twists his face into an expression I’ve never seen on him before, his eyes narrowing to dark slits, his nose scrunching up. It’s like he’s chewing something disgusting too, something he’d like to spit out — the image of me, perfectly gross beside him. It’s the same way my mom sometimes looks when she sees the way I dress, when she can’t believe I’m her daughter.

  I suddenly remember a story Neil told me that day in the park. He said that when he was little and his parents got into one of their big fights, he’d imagine himself retreating into a protective shell, like an egg. He’d literally feel himself curl up inside it and drift far away from the yelling and angry fists. He’d focus all his energy on keeping the shell intact, on not letting anything crack it. I remember how I had wanted to reach out and stroke his face when he told me.

  Finally, Joe shakes his head and turns away. He doesn’t say it, but I know he regrets bringing me. I haven’t made him shine in any way. I can hear his cousins, back at his house, asking him why he’s going out with me, what he sees in me. And him shrugging, as if he can’t explain it.

  I retreat inside my own shell, blocking out the table and the clatter of dishes and the voices of Joe’s family. I curl up, cozy and warm, until I’m only vaguely aware of the people around me pushing back their chairs, going up to the bar to buy drinks, or to dance on the dance floor that’s under some beams made up to resemble a barn.

  Suddenly, Joe’s hand is reaching toward me. I see it at the same time as I think what an awfully long way it will have to travel and how strange it is that he’s trying to touch me. But then his hand swerves behind me. He grabs the elastic that I used earlier to pull back my hair. My mother sighed when she saw me walk downstairs before leaving home. “You had two hours to get ready and all you could manage was a rubber band,” she said.