How Happy to Be (15 page)

Mrs. Aleksiuk with her Tupperware containers of beet soup, brushing my hair so hard my eyes watered. “There now, ready for church.”

We arrived just late enough so everyone could see us from their seats, prayer books in laps, Mrs. Aleksiuk marching me toward the front. I was a prize, the orphan-in-waiting, a good deed in a pink sweatshirt, hair unknotted and smooth for once.

Before, when the town was at church on Sundays, my mother and I went walking up and down the streets and she gossiped about each house: “That’s the Millers’. He’s a bank clerk and she’s diddling the bank manager.”

“That’s the Hodsons’. She came from North Vancouver money and left it all for mountains.”

“Now that” – she would say, in front of the Polnocheks’ garden of wet colours – “is a beautiful house. Those people have some love to show, don’t you think?”

I remember the small, sanctimonious ways of little towns and I think that there was also real goodness, real genuine goodness that still comes up in my throat when beckoned, lingers like a recent taste. In warm weather, I would leave my parents and sit on the front porch, spelling words on my teeth with my tongue, one letter at a time – b – r – a (molars) v – e – back and forth for hours, my escape hatch. The young woman who worked at the drugstore saw me, and she took me to her one-room apartment above the drugstore to watch television
and feed me Kraft Dinner. I was happy to be distracted. I breathed the air and it didn’t smell like hospital chemicals. I exhaled and breathed again.

And then, my dad’s face in the door, terrified, “Where were you? Your mother was worried sick.” (
Worried sick
. Had I caused this? Had I welcomed it, brought it into our home by running down the street too far ahead, by reading under the sheets with a flashlight, by stepping into traffic? Had I worried her cells to split and bunch in her veins? Would I worry her to death?)

When my father began calling people to notify them about what was going to happen, he often said, “She was tired. She was tired from looking after Max and me, and working too hard. She could make an entire soup for the week with just a hambone and vegetables from the garden.” (I tired her out. I tired her out …)

This was his version of her, the earth mother with her hands in the soil, but she liked crap too. She fed us packaged noodles with shrimp powder just as often as homemade soup. She smoked and drank and swore. She had a temper so bad she once spit in my father’s face, something I had never seen a human being do, though I learned about it from a picture book on camels. Then she collapsed weeping on the kitchen floor and he stormed out the back door.

But in between, she was dying, and my father was making up for it, rebuilding her with his stories. It seemed false to me, even so young. He began to seem like a liar, stroking photos of the two of them swimming in lakes I’d never been to, marching in protests for issues and wars resolved when I was
a baby. I found this version of my mother foreign, and it made me miss her more. I didn’t know yet that a person could be so varied; I liked the silly parts of my mother, the way she stuck her tongue out behind the back of a mean postal clerk, her sometimes lipstick. My father scoffed at the church women with their manicured nails and doilies, things I thought were pretty, but soon, he was winning. Everything was serious all the time now. Machines hooked to my mother wheezed on her behalf. She was neither self any more; she had holes in her uterus, a whiffle ball where a baby should be. She didn’t know we were fracturing.

But I knew. I knew things I shouldn’t have known because when the sickness moved in, I became invisible. I could walk through walls, curl up in closets, and listen. I could put my finger down on the phone cradle, slowly release the buttons, and listen in silently while upstairs my dad muddled through conversations with doctors and lawyers, crying without shame. In weeks, I learned I didn’t even have to sneak, that I could just pick up the phone with an aggressive click and listen in: “Analgesic …” “Morphine …” “… normal?”

One day, on a whim, I broke my imaginary perimeter and walked upstairs. I drifted past a ball of sheets in the hallway, pushed open the paint-peeled door. I expected to be chastised. I expected to be flesh again, but my borders had been false: I was still invisible. I stood right in the room where my mother lay on the bed, inflated with sweat and dreaming in a bald head. I stood and watched her for hours and no one noticed, my father jogging in and out of the room, down to the kitchen for ice chips that he made by
smashing the plastic bag with a hammer over and over, then back upstairs to place the chips on her slack tongue.

And she got better again. Her dying was like that, a series of retreats and returns. It dizzied me.

The treatments stopped and she slowly walked, her footsteps overhead on the second floor, soon padding down the stairs into the living room, where she looked around and noted out loud how things had changed: a table out of place, a lamp in a different corner. I moved objects at her asking. Sleeping Beauty awoken, again and again. Her hair – her long, straight brown hair – grew back in little corkscrews. “Touch it,” she said. “It’s like a poodle.”

My creeping days were over. My mother had a sense of where I was at all times. In a sleeping bag on the front porch, her reading glasses (a new necessity, as if all of her was weakening) around her neck, a toque on her head in May, me up in a tree, silently watching.

“Max,” she would say, without looking up. “Come down from the tree, please.”

Someone gave her a television. It sat in the corner of the living room, the screen covered in plant tendrils.

“Let’s read
The Secret Garden.”

“I’m too old for
The Secret Garden.”

I got cruel.

“I don’t want to come down from the tree,” I said. “Your hair feels gross, not like a poodle.”

I refused to touch her outstretched hand with its easy-to-tear skin. I sat in the chair farthest away from her. I was a spy, not a daughter; tribeless, getting orders from the bottom of
a shoe, like on that TV show. “Track your suspect,” said the voice in the shoe. “Only when she’s been back seventy-two days will you know she’s staying.” Seventy-two; my two favourite numbers, the round happiness of two; the severe rightness of seven.

I watched from windows and trees for seventy-two days until spring came. Her hair was finally longish, down around her ears now, and she looked beautiful again, her high cheeks neither sunken nor overblown. She could catch me. Day 73, she climbed the same tree from a different angle and grabbed my foot. Terrified, I howled like a stubbed toe and she laughed and laughed and my father brought us lunch to the rotted picnic table with only one bench. We sat in a row, my father, my mother, me, eating sandwiches off paper plates, shoulders touching in the summer, our limbs sighing with relief where they met.

R
IGHT UNDER THE SPEAKER IN THE USUAL BAR
there’s not much to say or hear, really, just drinks to be drunk and so I have drunk some. Sunera has decided not to leave with me but to stay, holding court at the back of the room, surrounded by a pair of unpaid, awestruck interns from her magazine. On my way out, I brush by Allissa Allan’s table, and she reaches out a hand to block my exit.

“Max,” says Allissa, as if we are friends. “How’s the film festival going?”

I look at her, at her low-cut white blouse, her asparagus body bent into the wire-backed chair. Her crowd tonight is leather-clad vegetarian types, faces obscured by clouds of smoke. I lean closer to examine Allissa Allan’s flawless skin. I swallow a very real temptation to lick her cheek to see if it really does taste like a cold apricot. I stick out my tongue, thinking, I might do this, then catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror above the bar – a giant puffy coat, a tall toque, a tongue sticking out: a very ugly totem pole. I straighten up, muttering, “I’ve had a few beers …”

Allissa Allan gives me a concerned look.

“Do you want to sit down?”

But it seems I am already sitting down, squeezed in between Allissa Allan and a guy I recognize from TV, my puffy coat cushioning both of them, airbag style. I saw this guy recently on a cable show plugging his book on happiness. Drinking martinis and shopping wasn’t the problem, he said, but part of the solution.

“Your friend digs that Situationist shit, huh?” I say to Allissa.

“What?” there is a speaker at her head too. Instead of answering, Allissa Allan shakes her red ringlets and delivers a speech that sounds prepared.

“Listen, Max, I wanted to tell you, I know that there’s some kind of perceived rivalry between us, perpetrated more by the promotional departments at the newspapers than by us,” she says. I lean in and take a sip of her drink. Allissa Allan is one of those people who talks with her eyes half-closed, a look that resembles sex and is, I think, kind of a hit
with the men. The advantage for me is that through those sleepy bedroom eyes, she can’t see my not-so-sly sipping of her Cosmopolitan.

“But I wanted to tell you that I don’t buy into it. I’ve never had anything but admiration for your work. I think you’re a scream,” she says.

“Me too,” I say into my collar, beginning to sweat under the down.

Then she says it, shouting directly into the canyon wrinkle that’s formed between my eyebrows, like she might get an echo if she’s loud enough: “When I was in university, I read your work. I always hoped that somehow you could mentor me.” Allissa widens her eyes. “I think women have to stick together, don’t you?”

I consider the word
mentor
and I see the Editor’s pointy teeth.

“I’m not sure,” I say. “I don’t know that many women.” I stand up, held to the ground by my boots.

“Are you leaving?” she asks, and I cannot tell if she is being sarcastic when she says, in lieu of goodbye, “Hot date?”

Snow falls, maybe the last snow of the season, muting the noise of College Street late night, the stumbling bridge-and-tunnellers on the sidewalk cowering under the hot-dog vendor’s umbrella. Five years ago, this street was mostly textile shops and Portuguese bakeries. Then neighbourhood bars where old men congregated for satellite soccer gave way to lounges with neon signs, then lounges went out of fashion
and became clubs. Still, the Portuguese women hold their ground, displaying buttons and zippers in their windows while next door a gourmet delicatessen features kumquats and gooseberries in theirs.

Someone must be really anxious to find that next Einstein because Theo has been working late the past week, even sleeping in his office a few nights, which seems tragic, or impossible (“Under the desk?” I asked, joking, and he said, “Yes, sadly.”) Of course, Theo could be capable of sleeping elsewhere. I think of the flower-sniffing ex, and the baby frosh who swarm the university campus, their dimpled backsides winking above the waists of their jeans. I should wean myself from Theo, or the idea of Theo, the possibility of him.

And yet here I am, a block south, on another street of renovated Victorians. I stand on Theo’s sidewalk for a while, kicking patterns in the snow, measuring exactly how pathetic I am. Then I lean down, roll up a ball, and chuck it at his apartment window. Nothing. Nothing means another and another and I’m a little wobbly, it’s true, but there they go, the snowballs knocking at the window until out he comes, Theo McArdle, barefoot on his porch wearing long johns and a ski jacket. I’m drunk and sad, I tell Theo McArdle, only I say it like: “Hello!” and he opens the door for me, half-asleep still.

Theo apologizes for the malfunctioning radiators and I walk to the bathroom toward soap and hot water and I look in the mirror: I am grey pink, old chewing gum. I am thirty-fucking-four.

In Theo’s bedroom I pull a soggy cheque for $333.45 from the pocket of my wet puffy coat, reimbursement for my
fudged expenses from
The Daily
. Instead of getting fired, I’m getting paid.

“Here,” I say, bouncing the wadded-up cheque off his chest. “Maybe you can give this to your friends in Africa, the well-diggers. Seriously, do something good with it.”

Theo looks puzzled.

I take off the puffy but keep everything else on – socks, cold jeans, hot sweater, crawl under his hideous lime green madras quilt. Theo hands me a glass of water.

“Did your mom buy you this quilt in junior high?” I ask, bleary.

He drops his jacket and stands at the edge of the bed wearing long johns and nothing else, but I couldn’t tell you too much about Theo McArdle’s body because he takes what amounts to a running leap and lands under the quilt with me and I can’t stop laughing. He kisses me, soft, then fierce.

“You taste like the colour red,” he says, and I start giggling. Then Theo McArdle’s hands are manically rubbing to warm me up and I am trying to get undressed without resurfacing from the bed into the cold air.

“Seriously, I have synesthesia,” he says into my neck. “Do you know what that is?”

“Is it contagious?” I ask him, and he laughs, which I interpret as no. Then he starts telling me how the more advanced synesthesists feel colour and see music and taste emotion. With Theo, it’s mostly taste that seeps into his other feelings. So when he kisses me, he says, kissing me, I taste red.

Then I shush him, make like a 1940s film diva with stones in her cheeks – “Dahlink, don’t speak” – and we kiss,
and I apologize for being drunk and he says, “Maybe you’re not drunk. Maybe this is the way you always are and the rest of the world is drunk.” He’s kidding, but I hate this idea, and he catches my look, and says, “Hey, it’s okay, it’s okay.” Theo is propped up on one elbow, his hand moving and my skin rising to meet it. And then he’s inside me, both of us loosening our sounds. The self moans, then gives way to cries that sound like desperation, the end of the self, lamented with a shout. We stay like that, eyes open, locked, sober until the shudder and the sigh. And when it’s over, I sleep as if underground, terrified, thrilled, finished.

A
WEEK HAS PASSED SINCE THEO MCARDLE ACCEPTED
my snowballs. He has been locked in his cell at the university, polishing his theories. I have been in a film festival funk, half-awake through press conferences and roundtables, filing daily eight-hundred-word profiles of stars culled from nine-minute interviews in hotel rooms. The articles slide from my hand to the keyboard, hardly a moment of mediation from my brain: anecdote (“She sips a Diet Pepsi clasped in fingers topped with chewed fingernails, the one un-manicured portion of her otherwise perfect body. She looks like an
unusually tanned corpse laid out in a coffin, and then she smiles …”), summary of current film (“… but this is the movie that will make you forget those past three box office flops …”), unusual biographical moment with authorial reference (“How did you know I worked with handicapped animals back in Iowa as a teenager?” she laughs, waggling her ragged fingernail at me. Then, she grows serious beneath her tan: “I still care deeply about those animals, especially this one sheep, Andy …”), end anecdote (“And so the publicist whisks her away to the red carpet, and she leaves as she came in: a mystery, a construct, a star”).