The Spectacular

by Zoe Whittall

Genres: Family Life; Historical Fiction; Women's Fiction; LGBT & Pride

Synopsis

It’s taboo to regret motherhood. But what would happen if you did? Shifting perspectives and time periods, The Spectacular is a multi-generational story exploring sexuality, gender and the weight of reproductive freedoms, from the author of The Best Kind of People

It’s 1997 and Missy’s band has finally hit the big time as they tour across America. At age twenty-two, Missy gets on stage every night and plays the song about her absent mother that made the band famous. The only girl in the band, she’s determined to party just as hard as everyone else, loving and leaving someone in every town—until she’s left stranded at the border because of a forgotten party favour.

Forty-something Carola is just surfacing from a sex scandal at the yoga centre where she has been living when she sees her daughter, Missy, for the first time in ten years—on the cover of a music magazine.

Ruth, eighty-three, is planning her return to the Turkish seaside village where she spent her childhood. But when her granddaughter, Missy, crashes at her house, she decides it’s time the strong and stubborn women in her family find a way to understand one another again.

In this book, by turns sharp and provocative, Zoe Whittall captures three generations of very different women who struggle to build an authentic life in the absence of traditional familial and marital structures. Definitions of family, romance, gender and love will radically change as they seek out lives that are nothing less than spectacular. 

Release date: September 14, 2021

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Print pages: 368

Sample

Chapter 1missy

i fought my way through the group of protesters, my eyes liquefied from the cold wind. A grey-haired leviathan, fetus pendant asleep in his chest hair, leaned over me and whispered a guttural “Slut.” The pink plastic pendant knocked against my forehead. He sank back into their slumpy circle, was made anonymous by the grind of their group shuffle. They chanted. Circled. Chanted some more. When they tried to block me from the door, I lost my shit. A clinic volunteer appeared through the blur and gripped my wrist. “I don’t even want an abortion!” I shouted above their heads from the top of the steps.

The volunteer ushered me inside, to the near-silent administrative shuffling of any waiting room. Instead of following the volunteer, I turned and reopened the door. I like to have the last word. “But abortions are great! I wish you’d been aborted!”

He lunged up the stairs, and I ripped the fetus from his neck.

The volunteer yanked me inside by the back of my jacket, slamming and locking the door as the old man’s full weight came charging up against it.

He reminded me of a horse we had when I was ten, the years we were trying not to use money and barter for everything. My father gave my neighbour an old rifle and in return he gave us Sugar, a palomino with a charcoal heart on her ass. She never acted like her name. She had a mean glare and liked to bite children. She was supposed to be mine, but I wasn’t allowed near her. I sat on the top of a manger a good stall away and tried to soothe Sugar with songs from the soundtrack to Hair. She kicked at the stall door so hard there were permanent hoofprints, even after we traded her for half a frozen deer and a washing machine that only worked when it rained.

The old man continued to throw his body against the door.

The incantations outside rose in volume.

“That wasn’t smart,” the clinic volunteer said, sending rolled eyes toward the security guard.

“But it was satisfying.”

The plastic fetus grew hot in my closed fist. The volunteer wasn’t charmed by me.

“Nothing you can say will ever matter,” she said, handing me a form to fill out. The pen slipped from my fingers and hung limp from the clipboard string. I dropped the fetus into a nearby garbage can; it stuck to a clump of gum.

Name: Melissa Wood. Age: 21. But soon I would be Missy Alamo, all spring and summer. My fingers were solid calluses from all the rehearsals. I returned the clipboard to the receptionist.

Twenty minutes later I sat in a ripped pleather chair across from a doctor with a salt-and-pepper crewcut. She seemed amused by me.

“What can I do for you?”

“I would like my tubes tied,” I explained, as though ordering something off a menu. When I said the word tubes I imagined the black rubber inner tubes inside my bicycle tires. The doctor had feminist watercolours on the wall—all vagina flowers and wispy goddesses. I’d dressed like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. My skirt was so short I was sure she could glimpse my cervix with a quick pointed downgaze.

“Well, I do not get that request, uh, very often, from someone your age.”

I explained my dilemma. She actually listened to me, which I wasn’t expecting.

“I don’t want to sound condescending, but you’re just too young. You may regret it.”

“Well, you do sound condescending,” I said.

Staring contest.

Beat.

Beat.

I won.

She shuffled papers and looked up at the clock.

“Look, I respect your autonomy and your considerable confidence on this issue, but I don’t want to be responsible for the implications of this choice when you’re older.”

She didn’t want to be responsible for future me being upset, which seemed ridiculous. Current me is very upset.Future me doesn’t exist yet. She could be hit by a car.

“I’m going to regret a lot of things,” I said. “You can’t know. What I do know is I don’t want to try to get an abortion in Kansas while my bandmates are partying. It’s your feminist duty!” I pointed out her Your Body Is a Battleground postcard. “Come on. I can adopt if I regret it. Biology doesn’t matter.”

She exhaled upward, stared above my head at the ceiling fan. It clicked in three-quarter time. “Even if I refer you, the doctor won’t do it,” she said. “I’m sorry. This province wants you to have lots of babies. That’s the way it is.”

“Isn’t this the same country that sterilized poor women of colour in jail?”

I’d read that in a women’s history course at McGill before I deferred my studies so I could go on tour. She frowned.

“We don’t do that anymore,” she said, shuffling papers on her desk again and looking like she wished she’d chosen any other profession.

Do you know how hard it is to get sterilized when you’re young and conventionally pretty from some angles, when you appear to be middle class even though you’ve only got seventeen bucks in your savings account, and when all the doctors think you’re misguided, because eventually you’ll want to blossom, ripen, and suckle?

The doctor continued to stare at me, unmoving. This time I broke her gaze first. I hate losing.

I had already tried several clinics. The male doctors were the worst because you look like the girls they jerk off to, and if they really thought you didn’t want their jizz stuck up inside you, they’d have no reason to go on. They’d shrivel up and die, self-immolate from the existential crisis.

I knew the limitations of my body and mind, but no doctor would help me nip my problem in the bud, so to speak. We were about to be on the road for months, first stop Rochester, last stop Los Angeles. I was getting a tetanus shot, filling my purse with B vitamins, lip balms, Polysporin, Visine, and Band-Aids. It seemed prudent, really, to fix a crucial design flaw in my body, when there was no opting in or out of its most perilous action, and one I knew I’d never desire. The tubes tied expression made it seem like a snap, like they could reach inside and grab your fallopian tubes and do the bunny ears ritual they teach you in kindergarten. Bunny ears, bunny ears, then jump into the hole!

Do you know how many things I don’t need? I have a closet filled with ten pairs of the same jeans. I have two pairs of boots, one pair of sneakers, two pairs of army pants. Three dresses, five of the same hoodie in different colours. That’s all I really need to be a body in the world right now. I don’t need my own eggs, or the useless hollow space designed to house an invader.

Besides, I was busy. I rehearsed every day. I worked my last few weeks as a receptionist at the conservatory. I’m a future-oriented person. When friends were talking to me, I wasn’t really listening that closely. I was thinking about the day I’d be getting in the van with Tom, Alan, Billy, and Jared, our new fiddler we’d started calling the Temp. The day I’d been waiting for since we got signed by a major label, after a few years of opening for bigger acts. This tour meant hotels, and a manager taking care of the money, the details, everything that had previously fallen to me. I wasn’t going to be peeing into a Big Gulp cup in the back of the van anymore, surviving on drink tickets or sleeping four on the floor of some punk kid’s living room that smelled of cat pee and empty beer cans.

I could think about performance, about the high of playing a really good show, one the bootleggers would brag about having on tape. And I could think about pleasure. Like a reunion with James in Baltimore, Hayden in New Orleans. Hayden could really fuck. He had endurance.

Hmmm, Hayden.

Hay-den.

That was a nice visual.

He asked me to be his one and only, but I couldn’t deny other women that kind of devotion, especially since we lived several thousand miles apart. It felt greedy. I had a lover at home in Montreal, but Scott would tell me he was going to come by around ten, and then show up three days later. He really loved me, I knew that, but he liked speed more. I tried it once and I could see his point. I couldn’t possibly make him feel like an exploding star or the smartest guy on earth. I could only make him come, but so could anyone. He was twenty-two. He could fuck a hole in the ground and feel pretty good.

When Billy got a vasectomy last year he had no problem with the first doctor he saw. “I told him I was the lead singer in a band. He got it immediately. Isn’t that sexist?” he’d said, but he laughed. I’ve overheard him bragging about it to his future conquests. They think it makes him a considerate person. He just hates condoms because he’s watched too many pornos. They don’t feel right. He was tired of handing over fistfuls of his father’s money for abortions. I advised him to get some antibiotics before we left.

I don’t have Billy’s familial safety net, nor can I afford the arrogance of assuming everything will work out okay. I was preparing to sublet my room in my shared apartment, teaching my roommate Amita how to water all my high-maintenance plants, getting health insurance, buying a new backpack. Safeguarding my uterus seemed like a logical item to cross off my list. It felt like a good preventative step. Condoms aren’t foolproof and the pill made me into a monster. The idea of getting knocked up by accident felt like the plot of a horror movie, yet it was entirely possible. Was I supposed to be a nun on tour, while all the guys were having fun? Surely that wasn’t the point of the sexual revolution everyone was so nostalgic about lately. There’s always a program on TV about the 1960s, about the second wave of feminists. Oh, the nostalgia.

What other choice did I have? I don’t like to rely on luck and the stars or whatever. I don’t believe in fate. I like to have a plan.

I knew I had to show up at the next clinic looking self-assured and older than my years. I left mascara from the night before under my eyes to blur and bruise, traded my baggy army pants for some slim-cut, high-waisted pants, the kind that unstylish moms wore. I took the gaudy scarf my granny had given me, which I usually threw over my lamp for ambience, and tied it around my neck. It clashed with the blouse I’d borrowed from Amita for the occasion, trying to look like I was a thoughtful and mature adult. She’d coloured in my lips in a neutral pink, took duct tape to the cat hair on my sleeves. She feathered my bangs, turned me around to look in our hallway mirror. “You’re so unfuckable right now, you’ll surprise them into saying yes.”

At the walk-in clinic near my apartment, I was polite and deferential, calmly explaining that the pill made my moods unmanageable, that filling prescriptions while travelling is next to impossible anyway, that condoms don’t work all the time. I explained that I wanted to be responsible. “I’d like a tubal ligation,” I said, thinking that using the proper terminology might help.

“You’re too young to know the consequences,” said a doctor who looked like Wilford Brimley.

I wanted to tell him I wasn’t ashamed, that not every slut’s origin story evolves from trauma, from lack of or a shifting sense of self. Though of course I was a young girl and had all of those things to deal with, but sex, in comparison, was simpler than anything so thorny. In fact, my problems seemed to stem from too much self. You’re too much was frequent feedback. At twenty-one, I wanted the richness of the present moment, and that was all. Why not be loud about it? Being demure is for suckers. I’m old enough to join the army and kill people, to have five babies if I feel like it. Why can’t I also decide to have nobabies?

I went home, made a pot of coffee, and drew up a plan. I made more appointments.

I went to a clinic in a wealthy neighbourhood next. A middle-aged doctor with long shiny hair and photos of her moronic-looking family all over the office was impatient from the moment I walked in and sat down across from her.

“I need my tubes tied, because any child I’ll have is going to inherit my mother’s terrible disease.”

I was trying to appeal to this doctor’s Catholic guilt and ableism.

“What disease does she have?”

“It’s rare, and it has a long name, I can never remember it, but it’s brutal.” I pretended to try to remember it. I hadn’t prepared for any follow-up questions, and thus I faltered. I hadn’t heard my mother’s voice in nearly ten years. I had no idea where she was, or why she had left. My mother’s only terrible disease was maternal indifference, and that was something I knew I’d inherited.

She tapped her pen on the desk, then curled a shiny piece of hair around it and stared blankly until I was even more uncomfortable.

“I don’t believe in abortion, but I want to have sex with my monogamous boyfriend, my fiancé, actually, and I know condoms are only ninety-eight percent effective. I’m a pragmatist,” I said. Of course I believed in abortion, but she had a crucifix peeking out of the top of her blouse. She leaned back in exasperation.

Then she narrowed her eyes and said, “Getting sterilized isn’t a quick fix so you can run wild and fuck indiscriminately. It’s a medical procedure, not a safeguard for sluts.”

Damn.

I pointed to her garish wall crucifix. “Your entire religion is obsessed with a whore! The entire culture revolves around the worship of young pussy!”

The doctor stood up, looked me straight in the eye. “You’re clearly a smart young girl, but maybe too smart. Maybe think about the future, and what might be important in life besides yourself,” she said before leaving the exam room. I was then offered hepatitis vaccines by a stout nurse who smiled, happy to see her boss taken to task by a hysteric dressed like a choir girl.

It was all a very stark contrast to the first time I visited an OB/GYN, at fourteen. My cramps had become unbearable, and my father thought I should see a doctor, probably because he had no idea what to say to me. He made the appointment, wrote down the address of the clinic, and told me where to get off the bus.

I hadn’t even kissed a boy, but a young doctor thrust a sample pack of birth control pills at me, insisting I take them.

“I don’t have a boyfriend,” I whispered.

“Ha”—he laughed—“they never do.”

I felt like his grin was going to swallow me.

“I don’t need them,” I insisted.

He held out a bowl of condoms, pressing the lip of the bowl into the waistband of my tights, which had formed an itchy red line across my stomach since homeroom. “Take a bunch of these too. Never trust boys to be responsible.”

The condoms felt awful in my hand. I didn’t have a purse to put them in. Was I supposed to carry them home in my hands?

I ditched the pills and condoms in the dumpster beside the bus stop, livid. I wasn’t the kind of fourteen who wanted to be eighteen. I wanted to be twelve forever. Every change in my body felt aggravating, like I was growing a second skull, like my limbs were out to get me. It’s why I chose the cello in orchestra class, because I could hide my body behind it.

But something happened in my first year of university. I looked around at all the formerly repressed kids with their wind instruments and it felt inevitable. It was as though I saw our bodies for the first time, our buttoned-up blouses and awkward knee-length skirts, the boys in shirts their moms had packed in boxes and put in the trunk of their car. I learned to fuck from a tender man named Josh who played the oboe and lived in a shoebox apartment across from the music building where his bed was the only place to sit. We would share one tall can of beer, let it warm beside the bed as we figured out what bodies could do. He was not a good lover, but he was tender, and better than I was. He had, according to him, touched six boobs by that point. By the end of our relationship, I’d figured some things out.

Of course I knew what sex was. I spent my childhood with adults who were stuck in the free-loving 1960s. While sitting on a batik blanket, playing with my Barbie dolls from the church donation box—whose hair had been sheared into tidy gender-neutral bowl cuts before my mother let me play with them—I’d overhear them arguing about monogamy as a tool of the state. When I was a toddler I liked to be as nude as everyone else at Sunflower, but somewhere around six I started wearing full-length overalls every day and pointing to the dangling bits and wayward breasts of the adults around me and saying “Ugh.” One thing I understood about adults very young was that they loved to kiss, and not always their own partners. It was gross. I wasn’t into it.

So, growing up, sex wasn’t something I could use to rebel. I was expected to seek it out, to be curious, to experiment. So naturally I didn’t want to, until a little later than most. And my body cooperated. It was like I had a defective puberty switch that made me look like a teenager but still feel like a girl. My friends had stories about humping their stuffed animals and playing doctor with the neighbour kids but I never did any of that.

The last doctor I tried was at a private clinic in the West Island near my grandmother’s house. You got to the clinic by going around the side of a giant stone house on a residential street near the airport. I used the student Visa card I kept in my freezer for emergencies. It was my last shot at getting a yes. I assumed the doctors would be used to taking demands from rich people who didn’t want to use the free and relatively excellent public health system like the rest of us. But that doctor also wasn’t having it. “I didn’t want kids when I was your age either. Now they’re the reason I get up in the morning. You’ll regret it, I promise you.”

But I knew I wouldn’t.

Since I was in the neighbourhood, I decided to visit Granny. I got on a bus that took me to the village where she lived. I checked in on her every now and then, made sure she was keeping the place up and doing okay. I brought her a bag of oranges, some tea, a carton of milk, and a fresh loaf of bread from the store at the end of her street. The last time I visited, she’d been using powdered milk for her tea, and I worried she wasn’t able to get to the store as easily anymore. She’d never tell me that herself. I pulled a printout of my tour schedule out of my canvas shoulder bag and taped it to her fridge. It was still a month or two away, but I wasn’t sure I’d be back to visit her before I left for tour.

We sat in her living room and exchanged our usual ripostes: her in the armchair and me sprawled on the sofa in a way that she used to say was unbecoming of a ladywhen I was a teenager but had since given up commenting on. She asked me a few questions about what I had been up to, about my music, if I “had a boyfriend yet.” And, in turn, I informally tried to quiz her to make sure she was remembering things. Are you still teaching the boy with curly red hair, what was his name again? She was, as always, sharp as a tack. Yes, Jonah still comes every week. In a moment of rare straightforwardness, I told her what I was trying to do.

The look on her face told me that was a mistake.

“I don’t even understand. That is an operation women get once they’ve had children already, or because they have cancer. Why would you want it? It just doesn’t make sense.”

“I’m being practical,” I said, a defensive tone coming into my voice before I could stop it. “I don’t want any mistakes.”

“You’ll change your mind! Your generation is just so angry.” She laughed. “It’s ironic. You have so much freedom, you have no idea. Your feelings on this will change. Wait till you find the right man.”

Any time I shared problems with her, she ended her advice with and then you’ll find the right man, which is sooooo ironic because she never did.

My granny doesn’t know what it’s like to be twenty-one and unattached on purpose. I’ve never asked her but if I had to guess, I’d say my grandmother probably never enjoyed sex in her life. I’m not sure if her life in particular looks sad, or if all people have lives that look sad from certain angles, and she’s just the only access I have to the really old version of sad. Granny immigrated from Turkey (but she’s British/the whitest person on earth, long story) with a husband who moved his mistress into a house down the block without telling her. Yet she’s always telling me that marriage is the only way for a woman to be happy, which seems insane.

And then there’s my mother, who thought she was so liberated on the commune, with the lack of conventional expectations, but it was always the women crying in the sunflower patch, and the men shrugging and using words like We agreed on this, You’re so uptight, This was your idea, It didn’t mean anything! They talked a good game, the women on the commune, but I could see that sex wasn’t for them.

Now I’m the age my parents were when they started Sunflower, their intentional community, and I don’t want a community at all. I want to cross the country with the freedom of any man my age. I want to experience every spectacular, vivid detail of life on the road, to play our best songs, to jump out into the crowds, to fly on top of their outstretched fingers, to kick one leg in the air during the endless final solos, to be grabbed and kissed by the life of it all, to have a great time.

A great time like I’m trying to have right now. With Bernie. He plays the bass in our opening band, from the first stretch of the tour. This is his last night with us, so I figured he was fair game.

But it’s not working. I’m not going to come thinking about all those doctors, remembering the stressful weeks leading up to the start of the tour. I’m trying. Bernie isn’t completely without skill. I close my eyes tight, lean my head back. There’s not a lot of room in this tiny bunk and all I can think about is whether Bernie is going to pull out in time.

He fucks like a bass player. He smells like spicy arboreal cologne, and after developing some banter and flirting all day, we’d curled up to watch Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense on the little monitor in the back of the bus that had a half-working VHS. The tape kept getting stuck whenever the bus hit a bump. One thing led to another. I like the feeling of the motor under the bunk, the whirring vibration, the feeling of his bare chest against mine.

He’s wearing a condom, but I don’t like to chance it.

“Are you there yet,” he whispers.

Nah, but it’s cool.

I’ve had the same sexual fantasy since I was seventeen or so, when my body finally woke up. By fantasy standards, it is pretty tame. In it a man leans over and kisses my neck, whispers baby girl, and then lifts my long skirt up slightly and tugs at my underwear. And that’s it. It always stops there. Of course, as I got older I had much more intense daydreams or imaginings, a rotating filmic clip of images or words I responded to in pornography. But I often think of that image right before coming, always works.

I conjure it now, but it doesn’t do anything.

I love sex, but I’ve never come with another person in the room.

Bernie makes the same face when he fucks as he makes when he’s playing bass. Up close it is monstrous. He’s about to come, his teeth are clenched, his eyes floating off his face. I can see it in his expression, hear it in the speed of his breath, the things he’s starting to mumble.

Like most, I can’t come just from being pounded, no matter how skilfully, but fucking feels better than a lot of other things I could be doing, and I like the way their faces look when they come, like you’re giving them the thing they’ve been desperate for since they first drew breath.