How Happy to Be (23 page)

A thought sends panic streaking down the back of my eyeballs:
If I have this baby, I’ll have to teach it how to speak
. And it will look at me to see what I’ve done with all these words, and what will it see? What will it see?

The screenwriter has a patina of morning over his skin, eyes encrusted with sleep. According to the press notes, the writer went to Harvard. He answers questions in three languages, one of which is Japanese, so let’s give him bonus points and call it three and a half. Looking from face to face
intently, he describes the film like this: “I think that slowly all of us are shying away from intimacy. We’re shying away using clever cynical devices. If you look at films, any truly emotional moment is undercut by a cynical moment right afterwards,” he says. “I think that the way we lead our lives, all of us, is prone to unhappiness because we’re taught to want things, we’re taught to think we’re not complete without something, and unhappiness, like a background drone, pushes us not to feel because what we feel is unhappiness.”

Australia yawns, adjusts his hat.

The Estonia journo gets up and scampers to the buffet for a muffin.

This is my job. Work used to mean digging and building and days dictated by sun and snow. This is some new kind of work, a steady magnetic hum of tape recorders clicking and the electroshock of computer screens. The publicist is the one organic component, huffing and puffing, circling the table, kicking at the carpet with his heel, scribbling the names of non-participants on his clipboard, consulting the stopwatch attached to his wrist.

“By jolting the audience into a strong emotion, you can make them feel. By feeling the unhappiness we reclaim back our humanity with all the imperfections that make us human,” says the screenwriter.

I hear myself speaking before any editing instinct takes over. “No offence, but this is a romantic comedy about a Manhattan career woman who inherits twin babies when her maid, Imelda, is deported. Do you really think it’s a film about emotional intimacy?”

The publicist leans close to my nametag and scribbles hard on the clipboard.

The writer nods, turns even paler.

“You should have seen the first draft,” he mutters.

The panic has turned to pain, lodged itself between my eyebrows. I rub my forehead. The writer is removed and Jennifer Aniston approaches, tanned collarbone sharp enough to slice cheese. She sits, adjusts her tank top, shakes her hair that hangs like medieval chainmail over her face. Two bottles of water – one sparkling, one flat – and two glasses appear in front of her. The screenwriter, it occurs to me, was not offered water.

Several journalists laugh loudly for no reason. Tape recorders slide toward her. Aniston’s hands rise slowly to her face, and she parts her hair, looks out at us with a small, tired smile.

“Hi,” she says quietly.

A starting gun. The questions fly. “Do you-a like-a the Brad Pitt?” asks Italy.

“Will you make the baby with Mr. Pitt?” asks Estonia.

And I’m thinking, Jennifer Aniston in the part of … somebody’s mother.

That screenwriter is wrong. Unhappiness isn’t a jolt; it’s a dull, ignored ache. You can go years without acknowledging it, decades even. But it does find you. One day, finally, it just marches up and demands your attention, a feral child slapping at its captors. This pounding above my eyes then – I think it’s grief, and grief demands to be taken seriously. Grief demands air to breathe. Nothing can breathe here.

I stand up. I place my tape recorder, my notepad, my pen in my bag. I put on my jacket.

The publicist materializes by my side. Faces turn.

“I can’t do this,” I say. The publicist is wearing a nametag; I never noticed that before and I suddenly think of all the publicists I’ve met over the years whose names I never bothered to ask. The publicist’s name is Adam, and Adam scribbles furiously on his clipboard.

“Good luck with your film,” I tell Jennifer Aniston, who nods, and then I push through the room, a swimmer dividing the pool.

I write the Big Cheese an e-mail. I tell him I’ve left the junket early, that I can’t do junkets any more, that no paper should do junkets any more, and I actually type the word
integrity
with the same fingers that are used to typing the words
glam
and
hot
and then I tell him I’m taking a break, that I’m tired and I’m taking a break and he can fire me if he wants to, but I need to sleep.

Send
.

At a time like this, there’s someone you should call: Father A or Father B, men who are somewhere right now, thinking about the weather, their thinning hair, men who don’t know what they’ve started.

But instead of making that call, I dial my travel agent and she can do it, and I dial Sunera and she says it’s a good idea, that I should get away, nothing has to be decided right now. That’s true because I saw the pregnancy wheel, the
pocket-sized plastic wheel dotted with a calendar, and the doctor spun it and said, “Five weeks, but with your irregular periods, you’ll need an ultrasound to confirm. You can get a clinic abortion up until fourteen weeks, but if you want an early term MVA, then you have to go in under eight weeks.”

“MVA?” I pictured being strapped in the front seat of a car like a crash-test dummy smashed by hot twisted steel.

“Manual vacuum aspiration, with plastic instruments. Early term abortion.” My doctor says everything in the same monotone: “Spread your legs. Pee in this jar. My husband left me. Plastic instruments.” Until now, plastic instruments meant recorders, Schroeder’s piano, a kiddie drum.

In the hotel room, I throw cassette tapes in a backpack stained from barely remembered trips to Europe, a kid’s thing in my grown-up hand. Why don’t I own luggage? I wonder what Theo McArdle thinks about abortion, what his ex-girlfriend thinks, the one on the refrigerator. I wonder if Ad Sales has a hidden Catholic past and will buy me a ring from shotgunweddings.com or join the picket line at a clinic. Underwear, toothpaste, bottled water, cellphone just in case I want to be found.

The taxi becomes an airplane, the airplane becomes a bus, bus becomes a ferry. Within these different vessels I’m asleep, face pressed up against the glass on the plane, doubled over into my lap on the bus, resting on my backpack-cum-bed on the ferry. I’ve never needed to sleep like this in my life, as if the thick rubber hands of a mobster are holding me under cold water.

I wake up against a coffin box of life jackets on the deck of a small ferry. Inside, a stand sells outdated magazines and key chains of plastic whales. I buy a
Daily
from an acne-scarred teen cashier who spends his days floating back and forth in this boat, the West Coast equivalent of a job working at a highway doughnut shop. Every single person in the lineup is wearing a brightly coloured Gortex jacket so that all together they resemble a cluster of grounded balloons. My jacket is black, my black boots ringed with salt stains.

On the front:
TORONTO LOSES OLYMPIC BID TO BEIJING
(Editorial, A4:
Why human rights is not the issue in China)
. Also, the economy continues to boom, there’s still nothing wrong in the world, the new president is actually the new president and below the fold, good news: they’re working it out, Tom and Nicole, they’re doing what’s best for the kids, splitting up their estates, trying to simplify, clean up their lives. Yoga is helping.

And on the second to last page of the Toronto section: the big box retailer hired bulldozers to clean up Tent City, and in the end, the residents didn’t have the walls to stop the ploughing. The lot is bleeding chemicals into the lake, but no matter; the earth is being primed for the second largest hardware store in North America.

The Other Daily
has chosen to showcase a story that my esteemed paper neglected to cover. There, in prime front page real estate, is Baby Baron, dapper as ever in a taut blue suit, only he’s got handcuffs in place of his cufflinks.
COOKED BOOKS?
the headline reads.
AN
HEIR
DISGRACED
.
The struggling broadsheet with a proudly conservative stance is certain to
be sold or cease publishing within weeks, say insiders …
Baby Baron was bankrolling some very big parties all around the globe on the paper’s dime, it seems. Shareholders are not charmed. Somehow, there is no surprise in this ending. Pundits predict that the media boom will silence, the newspaper warriors will disarm, and the industry will enter a depression. The Brits have begun booking flights home, airlifts to safety or more interesting wars.

I already feel severed from the paper, bored watching the explosion from afar. Then some old gossip sneaks into my head about Hard-Working Debbie from Life. Her husband is a deadbeat dad who left her with three kids. She’s older, late-forties; who would hire her now? I go outside for some air.

This is the first time I’ve looked up in a while, streaks of cloud, mist skimming the islands we’re floating through, rocks like planets on all sides so close you can see the barnacles marking the tide line. We’re big and blocky, but we move sleek, purring engine and seagulls dipping down, the smell of rotting seaweed and old rain. I steady myself on the rail. Beauty is so unfamiliar it feels like anxiety to me, and all around are Japanese tourists clicking away on video cameras and digital boxes as small as decks of playing cards. A middle-aged man sits on a bench with his laptop open, maybe describing this scene right here right now to his daughter in Taiwan, San Francisco, Moose Jaw.

I think I would rather be asleep. Being awake is the dream where everything is too bright, sound comes screaming, the veins on the leaves too pronounced, the edges of the sky curling like wax paper. I look at my hands, shaking
lightly, an addict in withdrawal. It feels like my whole body is expelling itself, making room for this new one.

These rare B.C. skies make me wonder, How did my singular childhood take place in so many eras? The commune was caught perpetually in the Seventies while I lived my teenaged life in the Eighties. My mother died in 1974, but the photographs in my head make it look like the Fifties with sepia-toned housewives in shapeless shifts and men in baseball hats. The Squamish funeral parlour was stuffed with uneven rows of banquet hall chairs, black vinyl seats, and vases and vases of wild flowers. Later, I saw the bank manager stacking and loading those chairs into the back of his car, returning them to the town’s only branch. Still, there weren’t enough places to sit; thickets of people covered the back and side aisles. The whole town came out to watch my mother’s funeral. I could see them when I peeked out from behind a curtain that separated the “family area” from the mourners. I was pretending to be a star in a dressing room, a Bette Davis idea of what a curtain could mean. In my pink velvet dress, my only dress, I felt girlish and breakable and excited, my breath high in my chest, aware that I was about to make an entrance.

They filed in – grown-ups whom I had never seen, and some familiar: the casserole-deliverers, the post office lady, my third grade teacher, Mr. Defflert. My mom knew the post office lady? I wondered about my mother’s secret impact on the world. I had only ever seen her in relation to me, and as she died, in relation to my father, who seemed to need her so desperately. But here they were, adult men and women who had known something of my mother that I never would.
I realized that I had never spoken to her the way that adults speak to one another, the respectful teeter-totter of language, the comforting, musical back and forth of it, heard as I leaned into her waist while she chatted with someone she knew.

Weeks after the seventy-two-day remission, she got sick again. She would not come downstairs, though my father said it was a question of could not. So every afternoon I went up to her room. She took up less space with every visit. I sat next to her on the bed, answering endless questions, me talking and talking, trying not to look at the tubes snaking up her nose and into her wrists, tubes I believed were shrinking her, sucking her dry. I described every tiny detail of my life: how I got the twist-tie to stick into the Plasticine to make the spider paperweight, what Johnny Gundy did with a stick to Jeff Zivic, how I would improve the Narnia books if I wrote them myself.

And now all these adults filing in reminded me how stupid my concerns were. How bored she must have been with me. For the first time, I sensed a boulder-sized space coming toward me. I would never have grown-up conversations with her. She would never know what I became. I was alone. Somehow, in the plume of activity that masked her dying, this had never occurred to me until now, looking at Mr. Defflert’s bearded face, the bush of it dragging so low it merged with the tufts of hair poking out of his V-neck sweater.

The room buzzed with bodies, the sound and smell of lavender and tea, old women fussing over my father, who did a marionette slump in the front row. Something felt stripped
away, flesh off a chicken bone, and I stood stock-still, eight years old, uncrying, knitting a blanket of shame out of the seconds passing before my mother’s body appeared. I dug my fingernails into my arm, thinking, How could I have been so stupid? How could I not have realized that while I was only watching, everything that mattered had changed?

E
LAINE’S HOUSE IS A SYMPHONY OF COLOUR, A BIG
, cymbal-crashing, incomprehensible, modernist German symphony. Far down the road, it rears itself: stained glass in pink-rimmed windows and rainbow-coloured wind-socks on all corners as if a big gust might pick the whole house up off the ground and turn it into a kite. Trees on all sides and then, where the trees end, more trees.

The path I’m walking, the path that brings the house closer to me, is muddy; it’s been raining (B.C. weather report joke: It’s raining, been raining, or about to rain), but it’s
warm out and the white crocuses are balled and ready, the first hydrangeas hanging their heads, a garden on the edge of being wild and green and bent because Elaine never believed in controlling flowers.