How Happy to Be

Acclaim for
How Happy to Be

A
FTER SHE DIED, EVERYTHING TASTED WORSE. UNLIKE
my father, my mother had no contempt for the occasional dinner in a tinfoil tray, clean borders between tastes. I would imitate her walk down the frozen food aisle, breath frosting the air, hips sliding, shoulders back. A walk I only later recognized as sexy when I saw it worn by movie stars playing cocktail waitresses.

When she was gone, my father kept his eyes on the road and drove his truck straight past the glass spaceship supermarket. He parked outside the health food store where walls
and food were brown and moist. Pushing through the door was like stepping inside a redwood tree, all flesh and fibre. My dad wandered off by himself to finger the herbal teas and sugar cane, distracted and drifting, as if these foods were the source of all his sadness. He would look up, eyes running, unable to choose. So it was left to me, eight years old, to fill worn plastic containers with peanut butter and honey that lived in white tubs. But our old containers once held feta and butter and applesauce, and the system bred disappointment. Later, looking for the bumpy sweetness of jam, you ended up with yogurt, mean and tart. Longing for yogurt, you gagged on ropy tahini.

After my mother died, bread got crunchier and the house got messier and then we left Squamish, British Columbia, to see the country, driving east to Newfoundland until the edge and the water and then we turned around and went back west. We finally stopped at the Gambier Island compound, almost to the highway’s end, a boat ride from Vancouver, where there wasn’t a house at all but a monastery that resembled a roadside motel. A handful of soldiers had come back from the Second World War with Tibetan texts in hand, claiming a corner of the island. Unbothered by the farmers who lived there, they spent their mornings in walking meditation, barefoot up and down a beach so rocky their soles bled.

Two decades later, the hippies marched in, crossing water to escape the city. The soldier-monks packed boxes of burgundy robes and headed north, out of earshot of the rumble. To them, the Sixties must have sounded like a couple arguing down the street; the window’s open and the noise gets closer
and louder and closer and even though they swear it’s just a friendly conversation, it sounds like yelling to you.

The new arrivals made a compound out of the empty buildings and called it a commune. Our dinnertime, once set for three, became a long Formica table occupied by other people’s children. We slept in monks’ barracks, kids above and kids below in bunk beds and hammocks, swinging in space.

My father faded out gradually, escaping to the woods for days at a time, though this was nothing new. He half-built a yurt, then gave up on pastimes and slept a lot. I was schooled in the gutted prayer hall and sulked in the classrooms, which weren’t classrooms at all but circles of stained throw pillows on cement floors. Other people’s mothers passing out finger-paints and encouragement.

People were everywhere, three or four in the bathroom at a time. Pull open a closet door and there would already be a kid or two crouched, piling rocks or chewing broken guitar strings, looking for some quiet.

On my eleventh birthday, during a walk through the woods, I peeled off from the group, cut across a sheep farmer’s field and onto the island’s main road. I walked in the muddy ridges of truck tracks. The path ended where the beach began. A round ball of an old man in a Mercury 9.9 outboard bobbed by the dock and let me on for free, a conspiratorial look on his face. A willing accomplice.

This was how you got around: foot and boat, boat and foot. The mainland pulled in, wet with rain and loud with cars slicing across the highway. Refrigerator-shaped station wagons driven by pretty middle-aged women escorting shiny
children in polo shirts. Those cars suggested exotic phrases:
extracurricular activities;
study hall; curfew
.

I’d seen the movie theatre before, around the corner from the sweaty windows of the general store, jewelled lights through the rain, a twenty-minute walk from the dock. I paid my two dollars and sank down in the vinyl seat, hardened by the dry indoor heat. That smell was chemical butter mixed with chocolate and I never knew you could miss something you were experiencing for the first time, but I missed it, my whole body ached with loss for those forbidden foods, right down to my soaked-through feet.

The cat with the tail of a rabbit; the big hamster eating the baby hamster; my mother balloon-faced from chemotherapy – all these natural freak shows had never impressed me much. My attention span was limited, my eye already on the next thing. My mother had said of me at seven, squirming during a Punch and Judy puppet show that held the other kids rapt: “You are one nonplussed kid.” But that day in the movie theatre, I learned awe. I felt it in the quiet as the lights went down, in the expectation that plumped up the split second after the first click and whir of the projector when the screen was still dark and anything was possible, even if the story wasn’t good, wasn’t true.

I saw
Saturday Night Fever
. Three times, back to back. It could have been any movie; the joy was in staying in one place alone, silent and watching without being watched; the opposite of the compound’s everywhere eyeballs, like a box of spilled blackberries.

My father arrived in outline first: ponytail silhouetted over John Travolta’s platform shoes. Two policemen stood behind him, slightly bored. I found out later that my father, frantic and bed-headed, had led them all day; the cuffs on his corduroys soaked from running through the woods and combing the shoreline for my broken body, the police less anxious, lagging behind with obligation.

I rose and he put his arms around me to the boos of the small crowd. I felt him crying on the top of my head. I’d become used to it, thinking of my hair lately as a kind of organic matter, grass or sand, and my dad’s endless tears feeding it, growing me.

I waited in that theatre for the perfect word, the dad moment. My father was a fish gasping, his lips moving in an O shape. He said nothing. I patted his shoulder.

All the way back to the compound, I wondered if one of us should say something, and what that thing would be. We sat in silence, the truck spraying mud on the windows, staining the view. I thought of all the people under the earth, their bones shifting as our truck plowed the mud. I thought of all the people who could not talk, and here we were, alive and saying nothing.

In that way, profound moments pass. Later, they become entertainment, banter, and one day you realize you are nothing but a daisy chain of stories, crowns for everyone else’s pleasure. In that way I grew up.

S
O THE SECOND PROBLEM IS THERE ARE TWO CRUEL
yellow Post-its stuck to my computer screen.

You left without waking me
.

And:
P.S. All staff meeting at 11
.

I retired my watch a while ago, dropped it in a desk drawer with unopened pay slips and half-burnt birthday candles because, look around, clocks are everywhere. Right here, right now, clocks along the newsroom wall suggest with just two fingers jungle nights in Jakarta and crisp afternoons
in London even though in the freezing pseudo-Gotham of Toronto it is 11:40, snow-clutched February 2001.

11:40. A brief flash of tardy-girl panic – latelatelatemycareerlate! – then I remember: I’m trying to get fired. Panic scatters and in its place nestles a warm, downy calm. Or maybe I’m still high. No matter. I’m forty minutes closer to losing my job, and that’s the point.

The first problem is morning. My eyeballs were wearing tiny sweaters when I woke up, and I had to drag my recently shaking-it ass into an ice-coated cab and get to work. The newspaper, the place that funds this small life, has the gall to be situated, day after day, several miles from downtown in the grey industrial wasteland that is suburban northeast Toronto. Just left of the strip mall, right of the Tim Hortons doughnut shop, there it is: 80 per cent parking lot, 20 per cent tinted glass and steel, capped by a sign half the building’s height that reads,
The Daily
. Often a man is roped up on that roof with a bucket, washing away the graffiti that turns the D into a swastika. That’s how
The Daily
is viewed by most of the public: the paper so right that Hitler would have made the commute.