On Consent, Chocolate Walnut Brownies and Perfect Timing -B.G.
Thursday, November 24th, 2022
American Thanksgiving (i.e. Just Another Normal Day in Montreal):
I said “no” to Gale.
Me! Saying no! I said no! To Gale!
Well I mean, I didn’t actually use the word no. But I said I wasn’t sure, and couldn’t commit, and might need to hibernate, and also, “You know how I feel about shabbos.”
What happened was, when I saw her last night, she said she wanted to see me soon. So I offered to bring shabbos to her, and she accepted. But then the kids and the out-of-town guests wanted to go watch a movie, so now she was asking if I wanted to go to the Imax that’s literally around the corner from my house and watch Black Panther with them. We could grab dinner downtown before that.
Okay, now that I wrote it all out I’m starting to think I might change my mind.
But I think I need to hide from the world cocooned in my Happiness Palace, and write.
So I’m going to say “no” to Gale’s movie invitation.
I think.
I’ve got dumpling soup on the stove! I’ve never made it before. I’m using the stock I made as the result of the weirdest random purchase I’ve ever made: At the Chinese grocery I bought duck fingers.
I felt like I was stirring a witches’ cauldron. It was so strange.
The stock turned out great.
So now I have to use it before it goes bad. It’s a full time job, shopping, cooking, and eating-it-all-before-it-goes bad as just one person. And it’s so shameful to waste food, so I’m trying not to, but it’s so hard!
Whatever. I’m the only one on my block that composts.
Which begs the question, is it worth the fossil fuels? Over the summer they stopped coming, and I think it’s because nobody else on the block puts out the brown bins, and I was away for vacation.
They’re probably annoyed at whoever the karen was who called the city to complain, and now we’re all paying the price of their extra gas so that I can feel like a good environmentalist.
I’ve never made dumpling soup before. I had all the ingredients except the green onions, which is upsetting because when I asked my Chinese classmates for advice back in school, that was the one thing they said for sure for sure for sure: ALWAYS use green onions.
Oh well. I’m fudging it.
Gah gah! That was yummy.
Last night, Mommy and I made up for lost time. ‘Cuz on Monday she came over but only for like five seconds. Then she was ‘sposta come over Tuesday after the dentist but her mouth felt all pokey-holied afterward and she said she needed to rest without bouncing baby girls, outrageous!
Then she was gonna come over yesterday during the day only she never even texted to say she wasn’t coming. And I was so busy I barely even noticed…she would have only been here to watch me be in meetings, anyway.
At 5pm I finished for the day, and there it was: a text.
I’m coming over tonight. There are no Etiennes in your bed, are there? Well, let me know, and if I accidentally walk in on you I shall head straight to the living room with my ear plugs and laptop until you say the word.
No, no Etiennes. Well, at dance there would be one, but maybe I wouldn’t go to dance?
Of course Mommy didn’t tell me her ETA, so I didn’t know if she meant 6pm or midnight.
Always assume it will be later than you want it to be.
I waited on the couch for an hour, de-toxing from my day and wondering if I should skip out on dance. I waited and waited for an ETA from Mommy so she could make up my mind for me.
She was still working though and it was just radio silence. I ultimately decided that moping around waiting for Mommy was a terrible idea. Cell phones were invented for this very purpose. She would tell me when she was coming, and in the meantime, I would get off the couch.
I walked out into the fresh air, the first time I’d left the house all day. The crispness did me good. It’s easy to bear Montreal winter when Panama is approaching…
I took the metro up to Mont Royal and met the whole troupe.
It was intimidating. I was the first one to arrive, but pretty soon there were like 35 of us, forming into little groups, jellyfishing in and out and in between.
I danced with Bryan.
Two years ago…no, three. Gale threw a party for Richard.
Gavin and I went, for once. It was the miracle of the century, that he had left the house, number one, but also for an event of my choosing.
We were the first to arrive, closely followed by Jessie and Karen.
Etienne came in and I recognized him, a familiar face from improv groups over the years. I suppose there were sparks already, but they lay dormant. Embers smoldering slowly, waiting for the right moment to burst into flame. I introduced him to Gavin.
It was Richard’s birthday and he was flying in from somewhere that day. Gale had gone to get him at the airport, and he thought she was taking him somewhere, I can’t remember what. Some falsehood conjured up, so fifteen people could yell “surprise.”
It was an epic party.
Around eleven I took a pill. Mushrooms, a fraction of a dose.
The room became greenish and Gavin turned into a frog.
He had a habit of doing that, when I was on mushrooms.
Like the reverse of the frog turned into a prince: My prince, turned into a frog.
I felt safe with him still, though, and in the haze of the mushrooms I held his hand and it anchored me to the room.
He left the party before I did, told me to have a good time, do whatever I wanted, have all the fun.
What a good Master.
Around 2am, the back room turned into a cuddle puddle. Something, probably Gale, inspired me to take off my top. I lazed on the floor near Richard and Gale, who were like an Egyptian king and queen, the royalty of the party. I watched a girl doing handstands against the wall, her legs tracing lazy arcs through the air, giggling. Her name turned out to be Iris. I haven’t yet managed to become friends with her, but we’re mild acquaintances and I haven’t given up hoping yet.
Bryan sat nearby. He was a dancer. I recognized him from some prior meetups. I was pretty sure he was a massage therapist, too. The one everyone was always raving about.
He started to rub my shoulders.
It felt nice.
By the time he got to my chest bone I tensed a bit, and you’d think that he’d have noticed, the intuitive massage therapist that he is, but he didn’t.
He didn’t notice me tensing, or trying to pull away.
I could have gotten up, but I didn’t want to.
I just wanted him to stop touching me.
I actively took his hand and removed it from my breast.
I think I did, anyway. My memory is a bit hazy.
I saw him from time to time after that, maybe a couple times a year, and I would always feel a bit of the butterflies in his presence, my chest tightening at the mention of his name.
I thought about it for a long time. It ate at me slowly. Because people kept saying such nice things about him. And he didn’t seem creepy to me, just maybe a bit misguided and perhaps I could clear the air and he could learn about consent?
“Hey, could we talk a moment?” I said to him last August at the park.
“Um…okay, yeah, what’s up?” he said. It felt strange, because we don’t really know each other, much less have planned conversations.
“Like, a bit more private?” I asked, and led us away from the others, suddenly nervous. What the fuck was I going to say?
It came out in a rush.
“Ummmm remember a couple years ago, we were both at this party, Richard was in town?” he nodded, and I kept going: “I um, I don’t know if you remember, but well, you touched my boobies and it made me feel really awkward and upset and I didn’t know how to tell you that and ever since I’ve felt weird around you and I wanted to tell you so you would…know.” I finished lamely, suddenly embarrassed and rather regretting my decision to dig up old misunderstandings.
“I’m so sorry I contributed to you feeling weird,” he said, and I started to feel a bit more hopeful.
“I do remember that, because you said, no boobies, please. And I think once I knew, I stopped.”
Baby Girl sat up, alert. HA! I HAD spoken up! I thought I had. I just couldn’t really remember. I only remembered the moments that felt like hours when I couldn’t find the words to talk to him.
But wait. He may be sorry but…“It’s just, in the future, you shouldn’t assume. You should always ask,” I said.
“I have learned that,” he agreed. “I remember being there and thinking that was the way the party was going, and people were getting sexy, and I just thought that’s what we were doing. But I know now that I should have asked.”
It was a weird night. After we talked I wasn’t sure I’d done the right thing, going digging like that. I became incredibly self-concious, wondering if I’d ruined things for myself socially, if now Bryan would avoid me.
He was married now, with a baby, and I somehow ended up talking to his wife. She was awesome!
Well, if he tries to avoid me, hopefully she’ll still know that I’m a good person.
Later that night she came up to me.
“Bryan, um, told me about what you said. That happened to me one time, too,” she said kindly.
Perhaps my social standing would be just fine. And if they were a bunch of gaslighters, I wouldn’t want to be friends with them anyway.
Last night, he saw me and held out his hand.
“Would you like to dance?”
“Yes,” I said, because I actually did.
And we danced. A crazy, acrobaticky, improvised dance, where we checked in carefully and kindly.
“Would it be alright if I put my hands around your waist, and then you leapt from here to here? How would it feel if…”
That night at the party, I should have felt comfortable enough to speak up. He should have asked before touching me, checked in throughout, and after I told him to stop, he should have checked to see if I was okay.
But we have closure now, and last night, we danced.
A text from Mommy came in, finally.
ETA 8:30. Mommy will be hungry.
I considered staying longer, knowing that “8:30” in Mommy-speak usually means “9:00 at the earliest, probably much later.”
But I had danced enough. I ran over to Etienne, kissed him on the lips, and blew a kiss to Gale.
As I left the studio I realized that I hadn’t told Etienne that I’d stuffed a chocolate walnut brownie in his backpack.
Baby Girl says baking in the winter is mandatory. Super Boss Bitch says that’s fine, as long as we don’t eat all the brownies, so I’ve been carefully distributing them to my friends all week. I sent one home for Gale with Riley when they came over to get my advice on an English essay for Cégep. (I helped with MLA formatting. Gross. MLA formatting is the worst thing in the universe.) I gave another to Karen and sent one home to Jessie, and Mommy took one back to Matt, too.
I texted Etienne:
By the way, the mystery snack in your backpack was left by me!
At the Mont Royal metro, I got another text from Mommy. She was coming now, from Jarry.
Jarry??
Are you on the orange line?
Yes, at Laurier.
Seriously? I think you’re on the train I’m waiting for.
I double-checked the wall: the next train was 2 minutes away. I reviewed the metro map I have inside my brain: If Mommy was at Laurier, and I was at Mont Royal…
Get on it. I’ll find you.
I got on the train, and there she was.
Hilarious. Never in a million years would that have worked out if we had planned it.
We started talking at 8:15 when our perfectly synchronized timing led us into the metro at the exact right time, and we didn’t stop talking until about 2:30am.
We did pause for orgasms, food, and occasionally to pee, although we mostly talked through that, too.
I had a lot of reporting for her. I didn’t realize how busy Super Boss Bitch had been until I started telling her everything I had done in the last two weeks.
It took me hours.
She gave me all the positive affirmation in the universe.
It was wonderful.
Finally we fell asleep. At 5:30 her alarm went off, and pretty soon after that she slipped out the door.
I woke up to Mommy perfume lingering in the air, and checked the time. She would have arrived in Ottawa an hour ago, traveling while I slept.
I looked at my phone.
Etienne, 10:30pm and 10:50pm:
Me very loudly: “Whose brownie is this??” until Gale explained to me that it was from you.
Holy shit baby. Delicious.
Love,
Baby Girl
