Brilliant (19 page)

“Have you told him what you expect?” Deborah had asked, but she knew how it would go. He would talk and the student would listen attentively, nodding, letting him have his little teacher rant. The next day out would come the phone. Kids like him were untouchable. And, Harris said, unteachable.

“Should I pack my bags as if we're not coming back?” she'd asked. And he'd given her a look that made her feel small and stupid. There were no jobs at his level back home and even if there were, they wouldn't pay nearly as much. Then there was the matter of taxes, the reason so many expats stayed on and on. Income tax, who needed it?

“We're here for a while, aren't we?” she said.

 

She didn't have an interview, per se. The Grand Erie District School Board was looking for a special ed teacher, according to their website. She hadn't taught in a Canadian school for more than a dozen years, had moved into advocacy work in the years before Abu Dhabi. While she couldn't quite imagine facing a room of jaded faces again, there was always the resource room. With more kids being coded, she might be able to find something part time. She'd go to the school board, fill out an application, act as if she was moving in a constructive direction.

But the map didn't make sense when she looked at it on Fiona's screen. Upper Middle Road? Was there also a Middle Middle Road? They hadn't explored Burlington or the neighbouring area yet, not that there seemed much to explore. There was an Ikea and a Lee Valley, a store she used to dream about the first year in Abu Dhabi. And reno store after reno store, as if people here lived mostly for their granite counters and in-ground pools. It was enough to make her want to sleep till noon.

“Which, of course, is what I'm doing, isn't it, Fiona?”

“Recalculating,” said Fiona, and Deborah realized that instead of getting on the 403, she'd taken a turn toward another generic strip of box stores and chain restaurants. She passed Kelsey's and Montana's, Jack Astor's. Ribs and more ribs. But there on the left was a shawarma place. Sana Grill was a hole in the wall and packed.

“Arriving at destination on left,” said Fiona.

 

“Can you believe it? She took me there after I'd been thinking I'd kill to have a shawarma. I didn't tell her to do it, but she did it,” she told Harris that night. He'd arrived home early, looking grey around the edges and not especially talkative, though she got a smile out of him about the shawarma. “Was the food any good?” he asked. “Should we go back?”

That wasn't the point, she wanted to argue. But she knew that grey look. “Why don't you watch a little
TV
, go to bed? I can clean up.” He hadn't resisted, pushed off wearily from the kitchen counter. “What were you doing out there anyway?” he asked.

“Cruising,” she said.

“Oh,” he said. And she understood she could have said almost anything: I was looking at houses, I was meeting a man, I was going ape shit at Ikea, and he would have nodded and said good, sounds good. She didn't tell him about the job or that she'd stayed in the shawarma place for over an hour, eating, watching people, chatting with the owners, who were from Lebanon and had lived in Dubai in the '90s. She didn't tell him that after, she'd driven home, made a cup of tea, pleasured herself and napped.

 

The beginning of their fourth Abu Dhabi year was so different than the beginnings of the previous three that it felt as if they
had
been reinvented. After a summer of cottage stays and hotel rooms, the new villa felt vast, luxurious. The neighbours were dazzling, too, high-flying diplomats, lawyers, investment bankers. None went beyond “good-morning” friendly, though Talbot and Molly, the Scottish family next door, seemed down to earth. Not that they needed the neighbours for a social life. They were being invited everywhere now: cocktail parties at various embassies around town, openings at the new gallery space on Sadiyaat, eighties-music nights at the Sheraton.

“Get someone in to help with things,” Harris suggested in November. “Free yourself up.” Leena, tiny, smiley and fluent only in Bahasa Indonesia, had been the nanny of a family they'd known through the French school. Now after six years on a
CAE
flight-simulator project, they were headed back to Montreal. “I don't know how we'll manage without Leena,” the wife told Deborah. “My kids will have to learn how to make their own beds again.
En tout cas…
”

Transferring Leena's visa went quicker than expected, though it had involved an excessive number of photocopies, staples, stamps and signatures. Leena had worked for one family; now she worked for them. She arrived on a Saturday with two suitcases and headed straight for the kitchen. “Indonesia okay?” she asked, scaling the
hamour
she'd found in the fridge, then expertly filleting it. An hour later, the twins were going for thirds. “Don't bother cooking any more, Mum,” Terry said.

Even with years of every-other-week housekeepers, Deborah had often felt uncomfortable having someone clean her stove, her bathroom, her mess. But here it felt almost okay. They would pay her well by Abu Dhabi standards — 4,000 dirhams a month, the equivalent of $1,100, nearly $500 more than the Quebecers had paid. Leena would have the summers off to visit her three children back in Indonesia, plus every Friday and Saturday during the school year. The twins wouldn't demand much in the way of care and Harris would eat just about anything. What was there to apologize for? It helped that Leena was hardworking, grateful for a job and overjoyed to have them as employers (“Canada good!” she said often, her small teeth bared in a perpetual smile). She was a breath of fresh air after the stories Deborah had heard from other expats. “It's like having a fourth child,” one woman had complained at a coffee morning. The bad-nanny stories were fodder for much griping, sniping and nastiness on the Abu Dhabi Women's chat board.

“Can you believe my nanny asked for a raise? As if 1,200 dirhams a month wasn't generous enough!”

“I caught my husband looking at our maid last night. You all know what I mean:
looking
! I'm going to have to forbid her to wear T-shirts.”

“Think our nanny's screwing around. Should I do like some of my friends and lock her in at night?”

Deborah had only gone on the board occasionally in the first years. Now she checked the back-and-forth messages several times a day, though she changed her board name frequently: Canuck Gal,
MOM
x3, Desert Deb. Some of the discussions made her nearly sick with embarrassment and rage. Who were these people who wrote so callously of the women who made their new lives possible, the women who cared for their kids, washed their cars, scrubbed their toilets — all for a fraction of what they would have paid at home? Had these women always harboured a sense of superiority, thwarted only by political correctness back in Atlanta or Adelaide? Or did this place do it to them? Maybe one of those bitchy women lived in the villa across the way. Maybe one was a colleague of Harris's.

“Why don't you stop reading that stuff?” Harris would ask when she'd vent over dinner, using the excuse that she wanted the twins to know what was
really
going on in this country.

“Do you like feeling mad all the time?” Jon asked.

“Yeah, why can't you just be happy here?” Terry said.

Harris might have been happy, should have been happy that fall, but if he was, it was lost on them. Mostly he seemed distracted. And frantic, over even small things. “Does Dad have
ADD
?” Terry asked one morning after Harris had torn up two rooms looking for his office keys. He seemed to barely register Thom's absence, even sometimes missed their Skype chats. “Where's Dad?” Thom would ask, looking pale on the laptop screen. “Tell him hi for me, eh?”

Thom was gone and Leena was now cooking, cleaning, laundering, shopping, even ironing, something Deborah hadn't done for decades. It left time, swaths of time. She was, as Harris put it, freed up. An affair? Harris was so absent these days he deserved it, she thought in her loneliest moments. But you had to have real desire, a knack with lies — not to mention an interested, willing man — to pull that off. Instead she signed up for an Arabic class.

“It's going to be really, really, really hard, Mum.”

“Face it, Mum: You don't even speak French that well.” The twins, in their fourth year of obligatory school Arabic, were not encouraging.

Arabic wasn't hard; it was impossible. For ten weeks she sat in an overly air-conditioned room at Mother Tongue Language School, moving further back each class in the hopes of not getting called on. Nabil, the instructor, was a lovely Egyptian guy, full of stories and teasing humour, used to hand-holding Arabic-challenged expats. And her classmates, half a dozen German businessmen and a handful of Indian doctors, were also lovely guys, helping her with homework, clapping when she answered a question almost correctly. If only she could just sit and listen to Nabil's stories about the revolution in his country, his lyrical riffs on Islam, the joking of her classmates as they faltered, though far more nimbly, in the new language. It was such an effort to utter even a throaty
kayf halek,
so difficult to keep up with the daily vocabulary. She didn't sign up for Arabic
II
.

At a school concert — the twins were now playing alto and tenor sax — she met a British woman in expensive, hip clothes who seemed to want to talk about something other than A levels versus O levels, Cambridge versus Oxford. (“My sons,” Deborah had grown weary of explaining, “will be attending Canadian universities. We have some excellent schools back home.”) “Ever think about volunteering at St. Edmonds' thrift shop?” Judith asked when Deborah mentioned her stab at Arabic, her search for something satisfying.

“I'm not Anglican,” Deborah said. “I'm not really anything.”

“No worries,” said Judith. “Father Dave's one of those We're-All-One pastors. One of the shop ladies is even Jewish.” And her blue eyes had widened, as if she'd just said something slightly shocking. “Of course, she doesn't tell that to too many people here.”

Judith was pleasant enough — and decent enough not to give Deborah the usual eyes-up/eyes-down greeting of other British School mums — and seemingly eager to pursue some kind of friendship. She was also boring as hell, Deborah discovered after two lunches at Café Arabia. Her sons, her husband's job, their summer house on the Costa del Sol, the thrift shop, her former career as a wedding planner back in the
UK
. Deborah learned all about it. There was barely time to nod and smile between the stories; at some point Deborah gave up trying to do either. As for the church thrift shop, after shuffling through old trainers and being bossed by two elderly British ladies for an afternoon — “No, no, it goes
here
!” — she knew there had to be something else that needed her time and attention.

“What about going back to the Horizon School, Deb?” Harris suggested one Saturday afternoon. “I hear they've gotten some new funding. Who knows?” The twins were out in the desert for their favourite annual event, the camel beauty contest. Having begged off going with the boys this year, they'd just had taken-by-surprise sex on the sofa. And because Harris was so with her in that moment, she'd said, “All right.”

 

Had Novembers always been like this? Deborah remembered bright, if cold, days from her childhood in Gatineau. Novembers brought the promise of Christmas and hot chocolate and new skates, a glorious Canadian childhood that seemed now to belong to some other girl.

Fiona was unplugged again, Deborah having no particular destination in mind this morning. The walls of their rented condo had felt too close; even the prospect of more frozen fields would be better. But the sky! Had she never noticed the November sky before? So heavy, so dispiriting. Jobs, sons, friends, house — these had kept her eyes straight ahead for nearly two decades, no time to look up.

“I am not going to turn into one of those women whose kids have left, whose careers have petered out, who now spend their days driving from sale to sale,” she'd told Harris again the night before. “I am not going to turn into a cliché.” Harris had come home later than usual, the old cloud over him.

“It's just going to take time, Deb. Give it time.” He'd looked so spent, she'd let it go: time would make it better. She would find her way again, make friends, find work, get her groove (what a stupid expression) back. He said so.

But time for what? She wasn't sure what she wanted to happen next. She'd spent four years waiting to come back, but here she was: still suspended.

“Where should we go today, Fiona?” she asked, plugging in the
GPS
again.

That morning there'd been a story in the
Hamilton Spectator
about a new mosque opening somewhere on Hamilton Mountain. It was a warm story, full of quotes from city councillors, local imams and worshippers — photos of men in skullcaps, men bent in prayer — and she'd felt a momentary swell of appreciation for this tolerant country, this Canada, where if you wanted to wear a hijab or a yarmulke, or Native headdress, for that matter, you could. So why wasn't she enjoying it more? Why was she finding all this tolerance smug, even showy? The place was still run by white guys with money. She'd spent four years scrutinizing Abu Dhabi's ills and contradictions, its secrets and abominations, but she'd never looked at her own country that critically. (Sure, Harper was a jerk, but that was an easy position.) What was valued here? How did people
really
live? Did it hold up so much better?

“I miss Abu Dhabi, Fiona. I hated it, but I loved it too, and I want to go back.”

“Please drive to highlighted route,” said Fiona, apropos of nothing, and Deborah saw on the screen that the Sana Grill was still listed as the destination.