Girls’ Night Out
Fiction by Yasuko Thanh
Featured art by Derek Von Essen
Friday night and we’re ready to hitchhike to The Brass Rail bar, wearing spandex and stilettos and satin camisoles. Fifteen with easy thumbs in the air, we hitchhike. Flouncing over dandelions growing in the sidewalk cracks. Hitch-hiking down the strip where all the motels are. It’s 1987 and Aida and I live in the Oakmont Group Home for Girls in Victoria, BC. We steal things and sell them for a third: butane curling irons, Black Diamond chocolates, diapers. We became boosters to pay for motel rooms. That way we’d have somewhere to come back to, after sneaking out of our group home to go to the bar.
I dig for matches in my purse, light a joint of honey-oil and Export “A” tobacco. Aida, jutting out her hip, grins at the passing cars. We share the joint, Aida playing up to the traffic under the anemic streetlights, my stolid smile bringing up the rear.
I looked boys in the eye when I spoke to them and never sweetened my voice. Aida danced and baited, skirting around them, dropping whiffs of perfume. Still, there are not that many people one can party with, or take guys home with, make love to in the same room with, and still go for coffee with the next day.
Aida asks, “Do you believe in fate?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on, if you could imagine yourself into the future, what would it be?”
“What’s fate got to do with it?” I spit over my shoulder and flick the roach with my index finger and thumb, expertly, decadently, into traffic. I don’t know whether to give a serious answer or a flippant one, so I give none at all. “Fate-shmate.”
Aida says, “No one chooses where they land. Love happens to you.” It’s why I liked her: she would say things like that; come out of left field and hit you with it, even when she was high. “It’s something you fall into, and can’t escape.”
“Like a cesspool?”
A white half-ton van with Led Zeppelin panels, exhaust belching blue smoke, pulls over. I climb in the dented door. Aida flutters theatrically on top of me and sits on my lap. Aida has an innocent, me-oh-my smile for the driver, for all men. He peels out into traffic, a silly grin on his face.
When we arrive, we join the line-up inching for- ward. The doorman shuffles people in, guys wearing Miami Vice suits and canvas loafers, women wearing miniskirts and ski jackets, their hair teased into lion’s manes: 1, wait, 1-2, wait. Two cigarettes later, smoked in cupped hands, we’re at the entrance. The chain still blocks us, but at least we can see inside: strobe lights, hands touching on the dance floor.
Randy, the manager, talks with the coat check girl. He waves at me. I don’t know why he never ID’s me. His pinky ring flashes. The bouncer looks down at me, lifts the chain, his index finger pointing me inside. Just me. Then onto the next line of business. Aida. He lowers the chain.
I’m shocked. Proud. I feel this way every time. Looking back once, I dive into a cloak of dancers. If I turn back, the bouncer may notice his mistake.
But Aida’s still outside the chain. The bouncer is asking her for ID. Shit. Why do I feel so competitive with her?
I circle the dance floor, squeezing through conversations, elbows, to the bar by the pool tables. I order a Paralyser and find a stool. Then Aida sneaks up behind me, bites my shoulder.
“I thought you were right behind me,” I lie. “Where’d you go?”
Aida wrinkles her nose, smirks.
“Hey, I knew you had stolen ID.”
Aida’s fingers float across the table and settle on my glass; then they grab my Paralyser. She pours half my drink down her throat. Gulping, head tilted back. Gulping, her hair brushing the small of her spine. Aida has the stronger stomach. Aida is tougher. I’m a lightweight but I know how to pace myself. Aida drinks without regard for anyone. I pretend to be disgusted by putting my hands on my hips and raising my eyebrows. Aida spins on her heels and places the empty glass on someone else’s table, belonging to a couple of women old enough to be our mothers with their hair in ponytails, who look up sharply as she comes between them. She lights a Du Maurier cigarette and French inhales, a trick of slender streams of smoke, wafted out of the mouth and into the nose. I have never been able to master it. Then she glares at me. I flash her a grin and do a 180, toward the bar, getting a new Paralyser, winking, smiling, swaying as I walk, legs deadly-straight, my ass wiggling, my back arched, in stilettos with skulls on them that catch the light from the disco ball. I’m in a whir of strobes, Aqua Velva, two-step dancing, running mascara, a pickup-jungle, pick up a girl or pick a fight in the parking lot after last call. A man in a Stormrider jacket, too loose for his frame, grabs me and spins me onto the dance floor. When he tries to pull me close, his gigantic hands on my hips, the dance floor seems to shrink to the size of a closet. I am almost tired of showing off for Aida. Leaning against the counter that encircles half the dance floor, Aida twiddles her fingers at me, waving the way flirts do. For a moment a typhoon of heads nearly drowns her face. The exit sign hanging over the bar door, thumps in time with the bass of the speakers. Aida is notorious in our group home for talking with her hands, telling mile-a-minute gossip. She motions to me, sweeping her arm in a dramatic gesture.
“Come here,” Aida mouths the words.
I finish dancing, put down my new drink next to Aida. Aida scream-whispers in my ear, over “Smoke on the Water” at 120 decibels: “Just what would your mother think? That I have corrupted you?”
“She believes in nature over nurture.”
“Oh. So she thinks you’re naturally evil.”
“She has to, otherwise she’d blame herself,” I answer.
Aida is always trying to trap me. “And are you evil?”
I say, feigning outrage, “Oh, she locked me in a closet. I had to read the Bible and memorize verses for my dinner.” I play with my necklace. “That’s why all I want to do now is fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“You lie,” Aida says and squeezes my thigh. “Who do you think is the cutest guy? Let’s see who can pick him up first?” This is the kind of game we play.
We’ve both noticed him shooting pool long ago, and now we walk to the table. We place our hands above the corner pocket. By pressing my arms together I notice I can manage to increase the depth of my cleavage. Aida’s about to say something. Then I spot police by the door, their blue uniforms. We duck into the washroom before they see us.
We are squatted on toilet seats, Aida in one stall, me in the other. I hear Aida rummaging in her purse for her compact. Even without makeup, Aida has always been more beautiful than me. It frightened me at the time that Aida could be so attractive, and so good with people. It wasn’t that she liked people: she found them easy.
After a minute, the squeaky-hinged door of the stall swings open and I hear Aida’s heels click across the floor toward the faucets. I hear her, first, and then, after a second or so, I emerge from the cubicle, too. Aida brushes her hair. Boys called me cute but called Aida gorgeous. The metal pick clinks onto the counter when Aida takes out her hairspray. She disperses a halo so thick that the air feels sticky; I start coughing.
“You’re using too much of that shit,” I say. Aida narrows her eyes to slits. “No, I’m not.”
“It makes you look fake.”
Aida doesn’t answer.
I make a funny face, because suddenly I feel sorry for what I’ve said, but scared, too, because I’ve crossed a line. I raise one eyebrow. “Hey? Look, I’m Mr. Spock.”
Aida makes a pouty face, applies her lipstick. “I go with what works,” she says to her reflection. She licks a red smudge off her two front teeth. “Don’t be so stuck up.”
We wondered if we would find the right man, find love, have families. Aida said she went with what worked but she questioned, too, if what worked would make her happy. We knew only the path of least resistance, but were looking for signs, in rooms with loud music and cigarette smoke mixed with cologne, l where cute guys played pool and bought us drinks.
Having preened, Aida smiles. Fluorescent tube-light highlights red lips, a different new face ready for a different new situation.
I was looking for love in a way that would make me different from my mother, who told me there was no such thing as a happy marriage, only people who stayed together and those that didn’t. I was looking for Aida’s love. More than that, I needed to love against her—or see myself lumped on the same slope that would send me headed down the steep grade to a domestic hell at the bottom.
I said, in order to smooth things over: “Sorry, I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
Aida walked ahead of me, her wildish hair swinging as I followed her back to the pool tables. I thought maybe I’d insulted her. Aida wanted to like herself, but not always when drunk, like now.
“This guy’s butt’s too flat,” Aida says. “Forget him.”
We end up going home with a guy named Gavin. He has a Harley and we all get on. Aida sits in the middle, forcing my back into the steel sissy bar. Gavin, a man we meet at last call, with a Fatboy, a money clip, and a handlebar moustache.
In his bedroom, the curtains are half-drawn and we fall, drunk, onto his bed, blanketed by soft, heavy shadows. The kind of shadows that make you forget who you are with and forget to care, too. Our features turn into silhouettes illuminated by streetlight.
“Do you like each other?” he asks.
“Of course we do,” we answer.
“You know what I mean,” he says, his eyes lazy and half-closed. “Do you like each other?”
This was not where the game was supposed to go—we weren’t supposed to carry the competition’s unfolding: he was.
I mash my mouth onto Gavin’s, startling him by jarring my teeth against his. His body tenses and pulls away from me. When he recovers, he leans into me. I can smell his deodorant mixed with sweat and engine oil. His kiss is more drunk than passionate. I chastise myself knowing this will be an opportunity for Aida to seduce him and not act the clumsy fool. She has experience in bed, more than me. A dog somewhere in the bedroom growls in his sleep.
We slip between the covers still wearing our clothes. The heel of my shoe catches on the bed sheet as I wriggle inside. I kiss him, my tongue exploring his gums, with an intensity I try to fake, having watched pornos, having watched Aida.
I undo the button fly of his jeans and yank his T-shirt away from his belt. Outside, in the distance, a car backfires. Crazy, how life intrudes. I slide my hand over his nipples, trace the contours of his jutting ribs with my palm. He purrs. I grab his cock through a fistful of underwear.
Aida sighs. She sits up and lights a cigarette. She exhales the smoke loudly. I open my eyes, even as I’m still kissing Gavin, to watch Aida. The clouds clear, brightening the room through the curtains and I watch to see what Aida will do next. She sighs loudly again, like an old woman. Gavin makes the next move by pulling away from me, rolling away in the sheet, the way a log floats away on a river.
He sits up. He wraps a wiry arm around Aida’s waist and the two of them perch on the edge of the mattress, in front of a Christie Brinkley poster stuck to the wall with Scotch tape. He whispers something to her in a hoarse voice and puts his hands on her shoulders. She mumbles something in protest. He pushes her gently. The bed squeaks. He leans her back, nestling her head into an embroidered pillow case, sheened with wear. He covers her body with his own; they are two leaves pressed together; I watch his denim buttocks moving between her open legs.
As I undress, I brush each piece of my clothing over their faces; I want them to know how soft I am. I want Gavin to smell me: my camisole, my bra, my panties. Then, as they kiss, I pull down his pants. He helps by raising his hips as I tug. I fluff my hair; I place my body next to Aida’s, our heads an inch apart, our hair twining. When our hips touch, Aida’s skin spooks mine with its bite. I tickle the back of Gavin’s thigh with my toes. I’m growing warm between my legs. Gavin rocks against Aida’s body and even though she is still fully dressed from the waist down, her body rocks back, their speed and intensity match each other. They begin to move harder and faster against each other. I watch for a while. I listen. The warmth between my legs is like a heartbeat. Aida’s really getting into it. I can tell.
Gently I pry the two of them apart, tugging Gavin softly toward me with the crook of my knee. He takes my cue.
He moves from her body to mine. Aida sucks her teeth, rolls over.
“What am I supposed to do when there are two beautiful women in my bed?” Gavin pleads. Aida is angry. She is always angry.
He sits up again. Aida props herself up on her elbow and they talk. I can’t hear a word, just the tone, clucks of reassurance. Aida flops down. Such a pouter. She lays there while Gavin yanks off her spandex as well as her panties with the “A” monogrammed in pink thread at the waistband.
He starts sucking her pussy. The pulse between my legs falls into sync with the rhythm of his tongue. The room fills with the same smell that comes out of the laundry basket in the group home. Aida lets out a moan (heartbreaking to me, since I will not orgasm, no matter how turned on I get—I have never yet had an orgasm in all my life, while Aida comes when she reads a dirty book.)
Spurred by her moaning, Gavin squeezes her nipples through her camisole. Her breathing changes as he starts to lick her breasts. I squirm as my lower body throbs. He slips his finger in and out of her vagina. The contest forgotten, I al- most give up, and roll over. What’s the point? But then, maybe. I stroke my clit, imagining his penis inside her. Instead, I decide to keep panting.
Gavin hears my short sharp breaths and starts kissing me. For a moment I am Aida. I taste Aida in his mouth. I dig my heels into his bony ass and I am Aida pulling him inside me. He’s still wearing his underwear, but I’m so wet his Fruit-of-the-Looms slip inside me two inches.
The cotton rasps against my body, spreading my lips apart as he pumps, and as the friction begins to create a good feeling, suddenly he stops. He rips off his underwear, and enters Aida instead. He has chosen Aida.
I sit up. I can’t believe it. I’ve come so close, and now, amid a flurry of springs, to be the loser again. He pushes me down once more. But then he enters her. Then I realise what he wants. He pulls out of her and enters me. He has us both side by side, our knees touching, like paper dolls. He fucks both of us a few strokes each at a time. Aida moans. I try to moan louder, harder.
We are alone when we wake up, with thick tongues and pounding headaches. We tiptoe into the living room where a black–haired woman in her thirties is sitting at a table covered in a batik cloth. She turns up her nose at us. She seems sad. The room smells like patchouli. She pours herself a cup of tea. We don’t know whether she’s his wife or his sister or who. It’s deathly quiet and sunshine is streaming in past beaded yellow curtains. The only sound in the room is coming from a cockatoo, preening in a cage hanging from a macramé cord. She looks at us, shaking her head, as we stumble out the front door.
We have no idea where we are. We try to find a street address on the house. This place with beaded yellow curtains, a home we have imposed ourselves on, that has nothing to do with us, that was never any of our business. We stumble barefoot down an oak-lined street, high heels dangling from our fingers. There are school children and parents with SUVs and we know they must all be staring, but we don’t care, we don’t care because nothing matters to us at this moment but ourselves.
It occurs to us at this point that we will soon be homeless. We will surely be kicked out of our group home—it’s too late to sneak back in the way we usually do at 3:30 or 4:00 A.M. And it’s not the first time we’ve screwed up. Last week we were caught smoking joints in our room.
“We’re probably homeless,” I say, angry.
“Yeah, we probably are,” says Aida, but she’s laughing as she floats along the sidewalk, her hair curling blond behind her.
We find the bus stop in front of a McDonald’s restaurant. I’m mad as hell. This is all her fault. We crash on the grass in front of a life-sized Ronald with graffiti all over it.
“Why did we go with Gavin, anyway?” I say. “You’re so whacked.”
“We both wanted the same thing,” Aida says. “Don’t be so sure.” I lower my voice. “You, you never liked him at all, you know what that makes you?” In that moment I see outside of Aida and inside at once. I’m unprepared for the way her eyes fill with tears. I had to push her, to be the winner; then I couldn’t remember why I had to win.
Soon after we will never see each other again: we’ll be arrested for shoplifting. They’ll send me to Youth Detention. Aida will get released into her mother’s custody. Eight years later I’ll open the paper and read that Aida has been arrested for stealing from a Calgary Zellers—it makes the paper because she has AIDS, and she bit the apprehending security guard’s hand to the bone.
“Why are you being this way?” Aida says.
“I’m sorry, I guess I get jealous sometimes. Of you. How you are. How free.”
After a moment she smiles. Her smile has an immortal exuberance, a promiscuous zest. I cannot imagine her ever getting old. Her eyes, when focused, have a hard permanence like museum spearheads—that piercing, that universal.
I say, “I love you like a sister and I hate you, too, for the same reason.”
Aida beams. “Let us always remember Gavin,” she says. “Let us remember him al-ways, and no matter what happens let’s stick together. Tonight, wherever we are. Will you spend the night with me?”
“Yes.”
“Do you promise?”
The bus pulls up to the curb. I let Aida move away from me, take the first step into the bus. »