A Girl Like Sugar

Chapter One

By Emily Pohl-Weary

The day Marco died, I didn’t exactly bawl my eyes out. I just walked home from the hospital, avoiding busy streets in case his face was already splashed across the newspapers. I lay on the couch in a puddle of greasy hair and sweat, watched fifteen straight episodes of E.R. and ate two huge bags of ketchup chips. I tried to forget seeing him between the starched sheets of the hospital bed, with tubes sticking out of his neck, nose and arms. At the end, he turned grey.

Marsha-Mom was the first to call. “You’ve got bad taste in men, Sugar. Always have. I’ll tell you how to get over him.”

“How’s that?” I asked, muting the TV.

“Have a baby.”

“No way, Ma. That’s the last thing I need right now.”

“Focus on someone other than yourself.”

“Ma, I’m on the pill.”

“That’ll kill you one day. Cancer or blood clots. Just give me one little grandchild.”

“Uhn.” I didn’t feel like talking, so I left the video tape on and watched the exaggerated acting while my self-obsessed mother talked to herself. I thought, Oooh Lucy, when are you ever gonna realize you belong with Dr. John? Then again, maybe things are fine the way they are. Maybe Lucy and Dr. John should stay in limbo-land for the next three seasons. What would happen to the show if they got together? Lucy would have to die suddenly of a drug overdose and Dr. John would be helpless to stop it from happening. Tragic.

“Fine,” said my mother sharply, jolting me back to the conversation she was having. “If you want to come over for dinner, tell me ahead of time so I can make enough food. Bye, Sugar. You can make it through. Think happy thoughts.”

“Sure, Ma.” I turned off the cordless and pressed the mute button on the remote at the same time. The sound filled my room. An episode about a drug addict came on and I decided I’d had enough. I hate when television overlaps with real life. It’s like the TV people are laughing at you and you can’t do a thing to them. Your life is so predictable, they can tie it up in a pretty package and feed it back with a laugh track.

I called my best friend, Marlene, at work and left a message to call me A.S.A.P. Marlene was a student intern at Sick Kids’ Hospital and a religious E.R. watcher. She loved it when the TV doctors saved someone on the verge of death. Suddenly she could glimpse the glamour in her crappy job again. I just watched the show because Marlene taped it and Dr. John’s little brother had the same freaky hair as Marco when we first started to hang together.

For the millionth time in the past few days, I counted backward from grade 11. Marco and I’d been together seven years. It felt like my whole life. I could barely remember a time before him.

I put on the movie Party Girl. When I was seventeen, I wanted to be Parker Posey: skinny, popular, a bit of a freak show. By twenty-four, I’d advanced to wondering what it would be like to have Parker as the lead in a movie about my life. She was the perfect actress to play a girl struggling to make sense of her meaningless life. I wondered who’d play Marlene, maybe Lisa Bonet from The Cosby Show, if Lisa put on a few pounds. And if she was a little more nuts, that tough old broad from Judging Amy could play Marsha-Mom.

Marlene finally called back, but I was in the bathroom. When I got out, the message waiting light was flashing on the phone. “Hey Sugar, it’s Marlene. I, well, I went over to check on Marco during my lunch break and heard... Call me. Maybe I can come over after work?”

After work, for her, meant midnight. I didn’t care. I called her again and left a voice message telling her to bring salt and vinegar chips. I’d stopped eating about an hour before, but only because I finished all my Cheezee Tacositos.

I was still lying on the couch, watching the tube, when Marlene burst into my basement apartment. My door was never locked and Marlene didn’t approve. “Sugar, you really should keep your door locked.”

“Somebody might steal my TV,” I said, standing up reluctantly. That was a big joke. My TV was no treasure, heavy as a fridge with wires sticking out the back.

Clucking her tongue in disapproval, she peeled off her yellow rain jacket and hung it on a hook near the stairs, then came and hugged me. Her kinky hair tickled my nostrils. She smelled like soap. How Marlene managed to have that just-walked-out-of-the-shower smell after a long day at the hospital was always a mystery to me. I pulled away, looking pointedly at the plastic bags. “Did you bring the stuff?”

“Yeah,” she said, pulling out a frozen cake, frosty and dripping. I took the box from her, shuffled to the kitchen, opened it, ripped off the cover and plopped it, as is, on a brown plate. I took two forks out of the chipped wooden drawer and held one out for her.

Marlene didn’t notice. She was pulling stuff out of the bags. “I brought you tea, potato chips, milk, apples, soup, People and Lifestyle,” she said, pushing aside the crap littering my kitchen table and setting out a colourful display. “The rest is for me. Hard to shop when you work fifteen hours a day.”

We sat down at my table and dug in to the chocolate cake.

“Marlene,” I said, wagging the fork in her face. Little globs of brown icing clung to the prongs. “I need to talk to you about something.”

“What?”

I paused and took another bite of the cake. “Don’t think I’ve gone crazy.”

“Never.” She crossed her fingers on both hands and held them up.

“Hey, it’s only supposed to be one hand--two means the opposite.”

“Just tell me,” she said, leaning in and pushing her thick Elvis Costello glasses up the bridge of her nose.

“I died, too,” I said.

“You’re crazy,” she deadpanned, wiping crumbs off her mouth.

“Maybe so,” I said. “But I can eat and eat and never get fat.”

She screwed up her face. “Whaaat?”

“Before Marco, I died. I just can’t remember the exact moment. Or maybe I disappeared from this dimension, like that little girl in Poltergeist.”

“Hello?” Her face scrunched up like an apple doll. “Now you think you’re some eight year-old Drew Barrymore who’s been sucked into a TV set? Sugar, the living dead don’t eat chocolate cake.”

“Okay, whatever,” I said, putting down my fork dismissively.

“You’ve lost it,” she said. “You’ve been watching too many Buffy reruns. You’re alive. Marco’s dead.”

“Well, I guess if I’m dead, that would mean you’re probably dead as well, and my mom’s definitely a zombie.”

“Exactly. How would we be able to see you otherwise,” she said logically, biting into cake.

“And if I’m dead, why can I smell your stinky fart?”

“Shut up,” she said, licking her fork. “You are so not dead.”

“Fine. Wanna watch Dinner at Fred’s?” I asked.

“Sugar loves Parker,” she sang. Making me laugh, unbelievably.

“So what. You’re in love with Bill Murray.”

**

I woke in the middle of the night sweating so hard my bangs were plastered to my forehead. I rolled over and blinked until my eyes could focus on the poster for the Pink Chicks album, Earth to Man, One Two, on the wall next to my bed. The light through my one window washed everything in the greyish-pink of five in the morning.

Marco swooped down out of nowhere. I rubbed my eyes. He was still there when I opened them, looking exactly like he did during the last painful hours of his life. Greyish-white skin, black smudges under his eyes and tubes poking out of his arms, throat and nose. The tubes dangled down in wisps, like the tentacles of a giant jellyfish.

Sugar, he rasped, hovering closer. I shivered. He flitted backward. My chill disappeared.

“Am I dreaming?” I asked, but my voice came out all cracked. His fingers looked grotesquely long, much longer than I remembered them. I needed to touch him. My left hand swept out from underneath the comforter to grab a handful of his dressing gown. He eluded me, a backward surf of light-green cotton and bony legs. I pushed up into a sitting position. One crappy old pillow was bunched under my back and the other had fallen on the floor out of reach, so I leaned against the hard wall. “What are you doing here?”

Visiting.

He reached up and touched the nasal tube. It hurts. He tried to work the tube out by wiggling it. It slid a few inches, but he winced in pain and gave up. At the hospital, I watched the doctors remove a couple of them. They always did it as quickly as possible. The next time he dipped down, I grabbed the tube and yanked hard. His back arced in pain. The tube slid out and disintegrated in my hand. He zinged around in the air for a few seconds, holding his nose and throat and screaming noiselessly.

“What’s happening?” I asked. “This isn’t possible. How can you be here? I saw you die, in the hospital. You stopped breathing. You’re not with me anymore. You took everything.”

He glared at me over the hand holding his nose. I stared back accusingly. We were frozen like that, until he wisped up into the corner of my room and faded away.

My anger abruptly disappeared. Marco was gone. I willed my body to become a ghost, so I could follow him. I didn’t want to be the one who kept living.

**

The next morning, an hour before I normally woke up, my mother called.

“Sugar!” she screamed, when I picked up the phone. A blender whirred in the background. She was making her morning power-shake, with twelve essential vitamins, wheat grass juice, concentrated egg yolk powder, monosterum-diglucerine and cow placenta.

I put her on speakerphone, rolled over and realized I hadn’t changed my sheets since the last time Marco and I had sex. I sat up and glanced around the floor for a cleanish T-shirt, shook some wrinkles out of a dark orange one and pulled it over my head, then I found some jeans and put them on too. When the racket stopped I said, “Hey, Ma.”

“Did you see the E! Spotlight on Marco last night?”

“No. I don’t watch that shit.”

“Hmm. I was flipping through the channels when I saw his face. The piece was ten minutes long, very flattering. They kept comparing him to that Kurt Cobain. They showed strangers crying over his death. You were on too, hanging off his arm after a concert or something. You were dressed up and waved at the camera. You looked happy.”

“That clip was probably like three years old.”

“Probably. Anyway, I’ve figured it all out. I know what you should do, Sugar, to help you get over that boy.”

“What’s that?”

“An exorcism.”

“No.”

“Yes. Expel the toxins in your soul and start fresh. I know this great Haitian shaman who would love to help…”

I stood up and stretched. “Have you lost it?”

“We could all take part. Me, Marlene, whosit, that Todd fellow. You know, Marco’s friend from the band. He’s part of everyone who knew him. And he’s, well, he’s dead weight we’re all carrying.”

“Ma, I don’t have time for this…”

“Yeah, I forgot. You’re getting dressed for your speech at the U.N.”

I didn’t have any job to speak of and this deeply upset her. I said the one thing that would shut her up: “I got a job.”

“Oh, Sugar, where?”

“The Omega Room. In the aromatherapy section.”

“See, that boy was just dragging you down.”

“Bye, Ma.”

“Throw your life into your work, Sugar, and everything’ll be fine.”

I hung up before she started pouring New Age on thick. I ate some ice cream, then beeped Marlene three times. She finally called back during her lunch break, which was scheduled so late it would have been dinner-time for anyone else. “Sorry,” she said, chewing on something that sounded like toast. “I didn’t get a second to stop until now.”

“You don’t have to make excuses,” I said. “I just want to meet up tonight. You know, get out of the apartment.”

“OK, where? I’m on a payphone in the caf, and don’t have much time.”

“I feel Polish.”

“I feel Thai.”

“How about Japanese?” I compromised.

“Fine. Ematei Restaurant, midnight, corner table. I’ll wear my best dress.”

“Green or blue?”

“Oh, blue, Sugar. Always blue. I never pick those green outfits. They’re for oncologists.”

“Sterile?”

“Completely,” she said, taking another bite. We hung up.

The all-night restaurant was deserted when I got there, on time. Darkness pressed in through the windows. Marlene was twenty minutes late, and not wearing her scrubs at all but dumpy old jeans and a tight red turtleneck with a bad case of fuzz balls. I was eating a California roll when she sat down across from me.

I nodded hello. “Couldn’t wait.”

“I can see that,” she said, rolling her eyes and shoving her shocking blue hair behind her ears. “Sorry I’m late. I assisted in my first birth today. Twins! The first one popped out fine enough although the cervix took a long time to dilate…”

“No details, please.”

“Well, then, I’ll order.”

“Fine,” I said, waving down the server. He took Marlene’s order for avocado, mushroom, pickle and carrot rolls and left with our menus.

“I can’t believe they let you dye your hair that colour,” I said.

“They had no choice.”

I wondered what it would be like to give birth assisted by a blue-haired intern, while I dug into the California rolls again. Eventually I realized Marlene was pouting.

“Want some?” I asked.

She shook her head. Her lips curled downward into a frown, indicating I was making things worse.

“You know what…” I said, casting my mind back over the conversation to figure out what stupid thing I’d done this time. “I never listen to your work stories,” I added, after a moment.

She stopped giving me the evil eye and reached over to grab one of my rolls.

“Sorry,” I said, chewing. “We can’t all deal with reality. I don’t even read the news.”

“You can deal with Marco overdosing.”

“He had a heart attack.”

“Due to drugs.” She thought for a second. “You know, I thought he stopped doing that shit.”

“That’s why it killed him. Fell off the wagon. Mixed too many uppers and downers.”

“Oh God.”

“Shock to the system,” I said, between bites of toasted nori and fake crab. For the two days Marco was in hospital, he couldn’t eat. He was fed by an intravenous line. I sat next to his bed the entire time, except when I went down to the cafeteria or the hot-dog vendor outside to bring back food to eat in his room. Once, he was lucid enough to let me know he was hungry. I took a bite of my tofu sausage and chewed until it was warm pulp, leaned over and kissed him, passing the food into his mouth. He nearly choked to death.

“You know who I’m mad at?” I asked Marlene. “His dealer.”

“But Todd was his dealer.”

Her food arrived, thank God.

**

We walked home. I was exhausted. Exhaustion was a relief after days of numbness, it meant I could still feel something. It was cold for fall. Frost was forming on the blades of grass and decomposing leaves. Marlene was really dragging her feet.

“Sugar,” she said, stopping altogether when we were a few blocks from my place. “You could have AIDS.”

I stuffed my hands into the pockets of my cords to keep them warm. “Nah. I get tested.”

“Every year?”

“On my birthday.”

She scrunched up her face. “Eww.”

“I don’t miss him,” I said, suddenly. “I feel like I should, but it’s just not there. I want to know he’s all right. Other than that, I just feel kind of empty.”

“You’re weird,” she said, wiping her nose.

I nodded. We started to walk again. What I didn’t tell her was that I still wanted to have sex with Marco, even up until the end, when he couldn’t tell who I was. I sat beside his bed for hours, holding his hand and running my fingers through his soft brown curls, dreaming of pushing aside the white sheet, straddling his hips and pumping up and down. I came close to actually doing it. But the room had only a sliding glass door, no wall.

“Do you miss anything at all?” asked Marlene.

“The sex.”

“Gross.”

“Not at all.”

“He was a junkie, Sugar.”

“So? He was also a rock star. None of it stops me from wanting him.”

“You knew him for…”

“Seven years. Before Romano, before any of those assholes,” I said.

“Speaking of assholes, what rock is Marco’s manager hiding under these days?”

“Oh, Romano’s not hiding. I’ve just blocked his calls. He’ll have to deal with Marco’s family if he wants permission to use the songs.”

“He’ll get permission. Romano’s basic instinct is to keep the money flowing.”

I had to agree with her. I still half-expected him to show up at my door with some papers to sign. He used to do that to Marco all the time--night and day. It drove me nuts.

At home I practically had to kick Marlene out--she wanted to come in for remnants of chocolate cake. The message waiting light was flashing again. It was Mom. “Sugar, I went by the Omega Room today and you weren’t there.”

I sent her a return message. “Hey Ma, I didn’t really take a job at the Omega Room. Sorry. Love you! Keep drinking your power-shakes and reading my horoscope and just maybe…”

I sat down on the bed and turned on the TV, using my remote control. I wouldn’t work at the Omega Room to save my life. Mom secretly knew that, she just kept on hoping.