Don't I Know You? (19 page)

Then he mixed some Grey Goose vodka with ice and made a noisy show of shaking it up. He poured it into three martini glasses and added curls of lemon zest.

Rose sat up, smoothing her hair behind her ears. She had an urge to cut it very short, and dye it patent-leather black, or fuchsia, or both. Bangs with fuchsia tips. Her daughter would be appalled. But there was the rest of her life to live now, after all. The martini glass felt silvery cold in her hands.

Keith held up his drink and tipped his head forward like a monk. The fingers on his right hand were a little gnarled with arthritis, Rose noticed. But they had moved so gently inside her. She had a fleeting desire for something more—an appendectomy?

He met her eyes.

“To your continued health.”

 

Before the World Was Made

Our bus driver was a little red-haired guy with bushy ginger muttonchops. We were heading north out of the city into the faded high rises of Don Mills, on one of the routes where they still announce the stops live. “Chipping Road next,” he said with his lips against the mesh of the microphone. Then he began to croon.

Down on Cyprus Avenue … with a childlike vision leaping into view …

He was driving like a show-off too, swinging the bus way out on the curves like a matador flaring his cape. Across the aisle from me was an elderly woman who gave me a fearful, what's-with-our-driver look. The only other passengers were two teenage boys with corpse-sized duffel bags slumped at their feet, and hockey sticks. But they didn't seem worried.

Ahead of us was a cluster of schoolgirls, long hair whipping in the wind, waiting by the curb. As cars honked the driver plunged across two lanes of traffic to pick them up. I'm not even sure it was a regular stop. The girls were dressed identically in white knee-highs, white shirts, plaid ties, and micro-short tartan skirts. When the door opened they came bubbling up the steps, all long legs and knapsacks—so much beauty, like five young Cate Blanchetts. As they moved down the aisle their unzipped parkas shed cold winter air on us.

One of them, ginger-haired like the driver, punched him on the arm as she went by.

“Hey Van, 'sup. Would you kiss-a my eyes?”

This caused the other girls, who had already staked out the back of the bus, to shriek with laughter. It was three o'clock on Friday afternoon and they were revved up for the weekend. Everyone on the bus seemed to be heading home but me.

I'd given myself a full hour to get to my interview on Castlefield Street, a long street on the Google map that petered out into blankness. The street view showed carpet outlets, appliance warehouses, and the headquarters for Flo-Q, a company that sold upscale bathroom fixtures and spa water features. The LinkedIn listing had said they were looking for a writer who could “bring sparkle” to their online catalogue copy.

Lately I've been writing fiction but my last novel,
Night Crossing
, didn't perform well. Too literary, my agent said. So my new plan is to use my “skill set” to get an undemanding job in “communications,” in the “water-feature field” if necessary, while I get up every morning at five a.m. to write. I'm already 120 pages into my next novel,
Havoc
, which has thriller elements. I'm pretty happy with it so far. I just need this job.

We were crossing a bridge over a ravine, with a browny-silver thread of water twisting below. The Don River, presumably. The girls at the back of the bus were passing around a phone video laughing with self-conscious loudness as they fell against one another. The driver began to sing, gripping the wheel with both meaty, freckled hands.

And I'm conquered in a car seat …

Good voice, vaguely familiar, although it sounded more like a musical instrument—a tenor saxophone? The girls clapped. The woman across the aisle tucked her scarf more tightly around her throat. She was wearing a tailored wool coat and a proper felt hat with a little brim. I looked down at my puffy parka with the ski-lift tag still dangling from the zipper. They're almost impossible to get off.

The thing is, when you work at home, eccentricities can start to pile up. Maybe you leave the house in the morning without checking for toothpaste at the corners of your mouth. Or you bike to the corner to buy milk, then leave one leg of your jeans rolled up all day.

“Attention,” the driver said into his mike, “would the people in the back of the bus please move up into my lap?” The girls whooped and the redhead ran up the aisle to perch on one of his thick thighs. He nuzzled her neck, making fart-noises like someone blowing against a baby's stomach.

Wow. How can he get away with this? I wondered. Maybe he's already given his notice, and this is his last day on the job. The hat lady now looked truly frightened. We were moving through fringes of the city past boarding kennels and scrap-iron lots.

“
I maaaay go crazy
,” the driver sang, “
be-fore that mansion on the hill…”

“Too late for that,” said the girl as she twirled his red hair into ringlets. “Where's your crazy little captain hat, Van?”

He reached into a briefcase at his feet and pulled out a brown corduroy cap with gold braid. She put it on. A bright-eyed, pointy-nosed girl who looked like a young Winona Ryder came up the aisle and started taking pictures of them.

I checked the time: less than half an hour left to make my interview. Out the window, Don Mills had vanished, replaced by farm fields with a scattering of sheep here and there, like soft gray boulders. The syringelike spire of the CN Tower grew smaller and smaller behind us.

I rehearsed what I would say in the interview. (“The taps and faucets we use every day can either enhance or diminish our quality of life…”) and reminded myself to act fifty percent more animated than felt sane or normal.

I made my way to the front of the bus.

“How much farther to Castlefield?”

He looked up at me with his wide, flushed face and smallish green eyes. Squinting, he put a finger to the center of his forehead for a few seconds, then stabbed it in my direction like a fork.

“
Night Crossing
, right?”

Now I was frightened too.

“Underrated, man! The last third, with the Nigerian stowaway dude in the container ship? Fan-tabulous.”

I couldn't speak.

“Hey, don't worry about Castlefield,” he said, checking his mirrors. “You don't need that bath shit anyway. We're taking the scenic route today.”

“I can see that, but—”

“Just loosen up, angel,” he said, giving my hip a fist-bump. “The next one's cookin'.”

“Are you referring to … my current book?”

“Yeah!” He gripped his forehead. “Gimme a sec—
Hassock. Hassidic
…?”

“
Havoc
.”

“Right! But here's the problem.” He eased up on the gas and looked at me again. “You okay with a little feedback?”

“I guess so.” Anyone who said that was going to give it to you anyway.

“You're too on the beat. You need to stay
behind
it a little, know what I mean?” He drummed on the steering wheel to demonstrate. “Unn-chukka,
unn
-chukka…”

I nodded.

“There's a kind of a
choke
thing going on with you.”

The road curved ahead of us. He accelerated, causing the schoolgirls to shriek and cling to one another. I braced myself against a pole. As we pulled past an eighteen-wheeler the trucker gave us a long, angry blast of the horn.

“And I'd rethink the title.
Havoc
sounds like something you'd buy at IKEA.”

I could feel my face burning.

“I like the title.” I said. “It sounds like a thriller.”

The hockey boys had scrunched up a piece of newspaper and were kicking it up and down the aisle like a soccer ball. No longer trying to hide her panic, the hat lady was on her feet, yanking on the stop cord. We pulled over to the curb and the doors hissed open.

“Have a shagadelic day, ma'am.”

Then the two hockey boys left, shouldering their duffel bags. I didn't want them to go.

“Thanks, Van,” shouted the last one out. “Stay cool.”

“
Ding-a-ling-aling, ding-a-ling-aling
,” he sang back.

Now it was just the schoolgirls and me. Outside, the fields had given way to a forlorn strip mall, where the late-afternoon sun flashed gold in the windows of a Blinds to Go outlet.

“Excuse me, is this seat free?” It was the Winona girl. “I just need to make a private call.”

What, is sitting beside me like being alone?

She tilted her head toward her friends chattering in the back.

“It's quieter here.”

I took my briefcase off the seat. There was nothing in it but my three-page résumé and two magazines, for bulk. Winona sat down and applied a phone to her cheek.

“Rebecca? Can you hear me? I'm on the bus. So…”

I took my CV out and pretended to read it.
Honors B.A., English Language and Literature.
Maybe I should add “with a minor in bath fixtures.” Winona held her phone and said nothing for quite a while. I could hear rushed, tinny words on the other end, an inflection of hysteria. She shielded her mouth with her other hand and spoke quietly.

“Are you, like, bleeding a lot?” The gulping sounds on the other end ran together. “Did Evan go with you?” The pitch of the phone voice rose.

“Sorry. Dumb question. What if I came over—I could bring you something … a chai latte?”

“
The cool room
,” sang the driver softly into the mike, “
Lord, it's a fool's room
.”

Outside, flakes of snow began to whirl down. I checked my watch; five minutes left to make it to my interview. Clearly, this was not going to happen, which filled me with a wave of relief and even optimism. My future was changing, right this minute! Of course, I could call Flo-Q and reschedule, but what would I say—that my bus got lost? The driver likes my writing?

“Hey don't worry, Becca,” Winona said into her phone, “it'll be okay. But what's the story if your mother calls me, or like, the school…” More burbling. “Of course not, I'm not a moron. Call me later.”

She hung up and looked down at her phone with a sigh.

“Is your friend going to be okay? Sorry, but it's hard not to overhear…”

Winona looked at me for a beat and decided I wasn't crazy.

“She had to have an abortion. She just got home from the clinic.”

“Oh dear, I'm sorry. How old is she?”

“Sixteen. But she wants to be a vet, which takes like eight years. And her boyfriend's a total douche.”

“Sounds like she did the right thing then.”

We rode together, as I thought about how it could be the right thing and yet feel like just the opposite.

“I had an abortion once,” I said. The words fell out of my mouth, I don't know why.

“You're kidding,” said Winona. “Really?”

I ignored her amazement. I thought my generation had invented sex too.

The fact is that I rarely think about it, except around the anniversary, in early December. Or whenever I have to fill out medical forms. Then I remember that my “number of pregnancies” is not one, but two. (My daughter is in Hong Kong right now, doing an exchange semester in engineering. She thinks the bath-fixture job is a terrible idea. Eric's son is back living with him in Philadelphia, so I'm on my own for the first time in ages.)

“How old were you?” Winona asked.

“In my early twenties. I was using a diaphragm. A very unreliable method, by the way. You might as well use a tube sock.”

“So what happened?”

“I picked a gynecologist out of the phone book because I was too embarrassed to go to my family doctor. Remember, these were the days before the pill, the days of secret shameful homes run by churches for unwed mothers.”

“What about the guy? The father?”

“He was good about it. He paid for half. But we weren't in love—we weren't even a couple, and I had no job, I was trying to write. There was no way I was ready to have a child on my own.”

“I don't think even people who have children are ready to have children,” said Winona spiritedly.

The driver smiled at us in the mirror. He was happy to see his passengers getting along.

“We were so insouciant about abortion back then. It was almost a feather in your feminist cap. I remember a girlfriend came to pick me up at the clinic, and brought a bottle of champagne.”

“That's sweet.”

“It was. But in fact there's nothing merry about it. Afterwards the body grieves, whether you think you care or not.” I looked at Winona and corrected myself. “Which is not to say that abortion's wrong. Nobody else should make that choice for you.”

“Right. Cause it's like, our bodies…”

“Right. But it's not something you forget, either.”

“So what happened with the guy?”

I laughed.

“Well, he sort of lost interest in me after that. I didn't blame him. It's hard to have casual sex when your body is plotting the future.”

Winona laughed too. Her blue drop earrings swung.

“I still check him out online now and then. He ended up owning a vineyard near Niagara-on-the-Lake. Ice wine. Married, divorced. No kids. But he changed his status recently. He's with someone new, a young actress, and they just had twins.”

“Yuck. Twins scare me.”

“A boy and a girl.”

Outside, fake-looking white flakes whirled around, melting as soon as they landed. We were back in rolling farmland with thin rails of snow in the creases of the fields.

“Where the hell are we?” I asked Winona.

“Oh, he never takes the same route twice. It's okay. He just likes to improvise.”