The Spectacular

by Zoe Whittall

  “Just think about it.”

  I heard my daughter sigh dramatically. This was the moment we always reached, if I ever tried to offer her advice. And if I continued, she shut down even further.

  “I have to go. I’m sorry about Chris, Mom. That must be hard.”

  “It’s fine. We’re all getting older.”

  “Right.”

  “Right.”

  Larry walked by with the dog food, and the dogs jumped up and followed him into the kitchen. Outside the cicadas roared.

  Missy said, “Bye, Mom.”

  “I love you,” I said.

  “Bye.”

  I got up and took the .22 off the gun rack by the back door, loaded it, and went outside. After the first shot, where I hit the tree instead of the can, the family of raccoons who were tumbling around the compost ran off. The sun was going down, but I hit the can a few times. Larry came out and watched from the porch, amused.

  “I think it might be too windy out to be practising.”

  “Okay, then,” I said, and brought the gun back in, took the bullets out, and put it back on the rack.

  “Talking with Missy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hard?”

  “Yeah.”

  Larry brought me a cup of mint tea, placing it on the end table and then squeezing my shoulder as I sat on the couch, troubled. Missy and I had a history of stops and starts, long stretches of estrangement over the years. Our relationship was pretty good these days, but we never quite got to great. She had decided not to speak to me for most of her twenties, even after we were reunited by Ruth, but then invited me to her wedding. I couldn’t predict how things would ever be between us, but I’d learned to be grateful for what I could get.

  Larry settled in his chair beside the fireplace and picked up his latest book on boatbuilding. I thought about Larry coming with me to the memorial, and meeting Bryce, who was his opposite in every sense. Larry had a low tolerance for socializing.

  “I really am happy to go alone, to the memorial,” I said.

  Larry looked up, nodded.

  “That’s fine with me.”

  This man was a balm against my chaos. All of the emotions that came up at my retreats, and in my other relationships, they all found a safe place with him. Not to mention my own sensitivities, being a Pisces with Cancer rising. All feeling.

  After some time, he took my hand and brought me to bed. We made love for the first time in a while, and I fell asleep with his arms around me, a sharp wind rattling the windows.

  Chapter 3

  missy

  navid moved out exactly one month after I caught him cheating. I wanted him to leave, but I was also insulted by how quickly he found a new place; the rental market in San Francisco was a nightmare compared to when we’d arrived. Now it was a city where only millionaires could afford a small apartment, especially anywhere near our house in Noe Valley. Of course, he could only find a place in Oakland, where nearly everyone we knew lived now. I wanted him gone, but not too far. Oakland felt far.

  While he packed, I took to my bed like a Victorian-era heroine. When I got up, I wrote discursive songs on the electric guitar, real indulgent Sonic Youth noise-type songs with no beginnings or ends.

  The day after he signed the lease, he walked into the bedroom holding a rose-gold ceramic bird. It had hung from a short length of twine looped around a nail on the front door.

  “You cool with me taking this?” he said. The bird was wrapped in his fist, sharp beak poking out as if he were squeezing it to death.

  “I want it.” I got out from under the covers, then crossed my arms tight. I stank like neglect and sorrow, after three days in a blue silk nightgown, picking at the frayed hem, a coffee stain on the heart.

  “I bought it!” he argued.

  “No. We bought it in Petaluma, together. That garage sale on the side of the road. The religious kids in the ankle-length dresses.” I wasn’t sure. But I knew the detail would sound convincing.

  “No, that’s where we bought the rose-gold lamp. I got this at that pawnshop outside of Vegas with Dave.”

  “That’s an utterly fabricated memory,” I said. “We got it together, right before we got the house. It was the first thing we put up.”

  “You can’t take everything,” he said, defeated, dropping the bird onto my dresser.

  I followed him into the kitchen, where he was packing up the porcelain espresso cups. He was just tossing them into a box, with no protective wrapping. He’d taped the stainless-steel toaster oven shut and left it unboxed, like he didn’t care if it broke in the moving truck. Both of us could afford to buy another one, but I grabbed it, electrical cord trailing, pushed the door open with my foot, and dropped it onto the decorative stones of the patio.

  “You don’t even make toast!” I screamed, taking the baseball bat I’d hidden inside the barbecue and bashing the toaster with it.

  Navid began to laugh hysterically, raising his arms up like What the fuck is happening, which made me bash the toaster harder. It was so satisfying, watching it buckle with dents. Jackie, the neighbour next door, opened her window and peered out at the commotion. She squinted down at us, then put on her giant glasses. I was wearing my nightie and one grey wool sock, that’s it. My hair was a mop of greasy, mashed curls.

  “You okay out there?” she yelled.

  “Yeah,” I said, pausing with the bat aloft.

  “Then shut up, for god’s sake!”

  Navid’s laughter turned to crying.

  The day Navid finished moving out, I went downtown to the fertility clinic to discuss options and the results of the ultrasound tests I’d had done earlier. I could have a baby. I wasn’t in a reasonable state of mind, but I felt a sudden razor focus about having a baby. I mean, why not now? But filling out forms in the waiting room, I began to fall apart. Who would I put for my emergency contact number? Agatha? Tom? My mother? Then I accidentally checked the No box next to the question Have you ever been pregnant before? It took me a minute to remember. It felt like a lifetime ago, going to that clinic in Lachine with Amita, driving back to my granny’s house to recover.

  The day after my abortion, I found out Granny had died in Turkey, fallen from a boat unnoticed. It was also the first day my mother and I had an honest moment together as two adults. We’d walked down to the water together, the way I used to after dinner as a teenager. I was in shock that I would never see Granny again, feeling terrible about how we’d left things. Thinking of her in the water by herself, it made me curl up in her bathtub inhaling the smell of her awful overly scented soaps, weeping in a way that felt unhinged, helped by the still-lingering pregnancy hormones. Grandparents are supposed to pass quietly, in bed, surrounded by loved ones. That she’d gone alone, struggling, it was too much to bear.

  When I got out of the bath, my mother was there, holding out a spoon of blackstrap molasses, the kind we used to feed the sheep at Sunflower. “You need iron,” she said, putting the spoon in my mouth like I was a baby bird. It was cold and I was wrapped in a towel, like a child after a bath. We both thought it would be good to take a walk, even though I was still bleeding and cramping. The house felt as if it were closing in on me.

  We walked slowly, my hands jammed in the pockets of the old jeans I’d left behind from high school. My mother was gesticulating while she talked, and the loud jangle of her dozen or so thin copper bracelets punctuated her small-talk nattering. Eventually she was quiet for a few moments, and then turned to me as though just realizing I was there.

  “How are you feeling? This is your first death. I know how hard it can be.”

  “My first death was Taylor.”

  “Oh, of course, of course.”

  She got quiet for a block or two. I was expecting her to talk about it, but she didn’t. Taylor died at sixteen, a blood clot from the birth control pill. That Mom forgot was so telling. There hadn’t been a funeral. My dad had mumbled something about being sad about it over dinner that n
ight and we never talked about it again.

  I hooked my thumbs through the belt loops of my jeans to keep them from falling down. They’d built more houses by the lake. The street had been a dirt road when Granny moved here. There had been farms. Now it looked as if it could be any 1990s suburb.

  “I go from feeling overwhelmingly sad, to feeling nothing. Like right now, is it strange that I don’t feel anything?”

  “No, no, it’s common to feel numb at first. It’s shock.”

  “I know she wanted me to have the baby, she was so Christian and everything. But it’s weird timing, don’t you think, that she’d die while I was pregnant?”

  “Did she tell you straight out not to have an abortion?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that’s a bit rich. Your grandmother had one. She told me about it for some reason, never told Bryce.”

  “Are you sure? That sounds out of character.”

  “No, when she first arrived in Canada. She was pregnant, but she found out your grandfather was cheating, and he’d actually brought his affair from Turkey over with them on the boat. He thought your grandmother didn’t know, but she did. Women always know. That man was a dog.”

  I’d met my grandfather once when he visited Sunflower and he didn’t make much of an impression, except he drank this thick Turkish liquor that tasted of black licorice and tried to teach me to play chess. I knew Granny and he had split but she never talked about why.

  I was still trying to accept Granny’s death, and here was a whole new story of her life. I never really thought about her at my age, or at any age other than old, or as being someone who had a life outside of being in our family.

  My mother continued, “Back then it wasn’t legal. She had to pay a lot of money to get it taken care of. She said she wasn’t sure Grandad was going to stay, and she didn’t want to have a baby all by herself.”

  “But she said motherhood was the only thing that made her happy, that saved her.”

  “She lied. She wanted you to have a kid.”

  “Even when I’m still basically a kid.”

  “I had you when I was around your age.”

  “Look how well that turned out.”

  She jangled ahead a little faster so I had to jog to keep up.

  “So, who was the father?” she asked.

  “Father?” I said.

  “Well, not father, really. Who knocked you up, Melissa?”

  “Honestly, I’m not sure.”

  “Really?” I expected her to look vaguely amused. She was the one who told me marriage was a conformist farce when I was eight years old. We reached the edge of the water at the public boat launch and dock. I picked up a few flat stones and skimmed them along the top of the lake.

  Instead, she looked oddly concerned. “I understand you’re young, and it’s a time for parties and celebrating and rock ’n’ roll and all that.”

  “It’s punk rock.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I know. Remember, I bought your record, not really my thing. But the lyrics, Melissa. Your lyrics . . .” Her voice cracked a little. “Well, they were revealing, I guess.”

  My mother waved her hand, like she was pushing that thought away. “But what I’m trying to tell you—what I want to talk about—is that I’m worried that you have a problem. The drugs, Melissa. You almost got arrested. I think I’ve told you that my father was an alcoholic. He used to drink from the minute he woke up in the morning. It ruined him, it ruined my mother. Killed them both. They say it can be genetic . . . addiction. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “I don’t think I’ve got an issue.”

  “You’ve been shaking, you’re pale and sweating. I know the signs.”

  “I went too hard in Vancouver. It’s not always a thing.”

  “I just want you to be aware is all, of the genetic predisposition.”

  “Okay, well, just letting you know it’s fine.”

  It wasn’t fine, obviously, but I also wasn’t half mad and wandering into traffic. I was just having a shitty month.

  But her concern felt like a drug. It made me want to grab both of her hands and confess everything about the tour—getting high, having a boy in every port, about Andie. All of it. But I stopped myself. I was getting giddy from our closeness. I grinned, looked down at the pavement, trying to contain myself.

  “You know, to your granny, the abortion probably meant a moral failure. But it was also a failure to be a single woman with a baby, and that was public. She was always concerned with what people thought. She never acted as if she regretted it. That said, it was always hard to tell what she was ever really feeling or thinking, her being so brutally British and all.”

  “Totally. She had such a poker face about everything.”

  “But so many women have abortions. If you’re a woman who hasn’t, you’re likely the exception. Most people never regret it,” she said.

  Though it would be years before she told me about her own abortion. That was how she was, wanting to be close but never wanting to risk any of her own secrets that might help foster that elusive intimacy.

  I watched my mother staring out at the horizon across Lac St-Louis. But do you regret having me? I was too afraid to ask.

  My mother turned to me abruptly and put both her hands on my shoulders.

  “I know this is a hard time for you,” she started. I braced myself then, for some maternal wisdom, or an apology, something meaningful that I could hold on to. Her bracelets jangled against my shoulders. “And I guess I just really need to go do some walking meditation by myself right now.”

  I was a bit stunned by this sudden turn, but it was also familiar. She used to do this when I was a kid, abruptly need to escape from me. Now that I wasn’t a child, if I kept her in my life, every time I got a flicker of potential reconciliation between us, would she always choose herself?

  “Okay, sure,” I said, and started walking up the sloping pavement of the beach’s parking lot. When I reached the street, I turned back, ambling down the gravel as I watched her walk out onto the long dock, doing some sort of movement with her hands, like a bird trying to fly. When I jumped up on the first plank, the dock swayed a little.

  “Mom!”

  She had a look on her face so irritated I had the answer already. When I opened my mouth the question came out differently.

  “Do you consider it a moral failing, to have left me?”

  She closed her eyes as if my face was too bright to look at.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I wasn’t prepared to have this conversation right now. Please, I just need quiet.”

  She turned and went back down the dock. I watched her. If I sat down on the beach, would she drop off the end to avoid coming back to me?

  The rest of that time is a bit of a blur. My father moved back into Granny’s house. I moved to California. I didn’t speak to my mother again for a number of years. I almost never thought about having been pregnant.

  Except now. While cycling to the clinic, I had been filled with purpose and excitement. But the fertility doctor was less perky, full of warnings, gloom and doom. I found myself gripping my purse in my hands as she spoke.

  “Even though your eggs are viable, at your age it could be difficult to get pregnant. Especially since you are now single, yes? But it’s possible. Here are some pamphlets about IVF, pay attention to all the tips on how to prepare. Have you thought about a donor?”

  “No. I mean, not yet. Just trying to narrow down my list.” But of course I thought of Tom. He was my list.

  We went through the costs, the schedule, the details of every potential procedure. It was a lot to take in.

  When I got home, Agatha was sitting on my front stoop wearing a mint sweater dress and giant sunglasses. I settled in beside her and cradled her legs dramatically.

  “Welcome to your new life, babe,” she said. “How was the egg doctor?”

  “I feel like having a baby will bankrupt me.”

  “It probably will, but then y
ou’ll have a baby. Babies are amazing.”

  “Oh really?” I said. “I thought Finch wanted a new one and you were against it!”

  “Babies are great. Toddlers are the devil. I’m hiding from mine right now,” she said, arranging her thick, glossy braid up in a bun on top of her head. “This morning I was so annoyed at Emily I had to leave the room to save myself from turning into a monster,” she said. “She was lying on the floor crying and claiming that she couldn’t walk. Of course she could walk! She just didn’t want to put her shoes on. I tried to reason with her, but she doesn’t understand that kind of complicated thinking yet. I lost it. I’ve tried being patient with her when she gets in these moods, but I can’t. I just can’t. I just slammed my bedroom door and punched my pillow and took deep breaths until the rage subsided. I actually had to give myself a time out! When I came back out, she was walking around just fine, like nothing had happened, with one shoe on. She looked so cute, but like, minutes earlier, I hated her. I can’t describe it any other way, I hated my own child.”

  “It will get easier when she’s older. Three is hard,” I offered, but I didn’t know anything, really, about three. Four. Fourteen. I’d been reading so many parenting books, but the more I read, the less confident I felt. “Did you know that they did a study with world-class athletes, and had them mimic the exact movements of a toddler, and they couldn’t do it for very long, they were too exhausted? It’s a lot. You’ll get through it.”

  “I believe that study. Man, I think every age is kind of cool but also awful,” she said. “You know, if I had to go back in time and decide all over again, I don’t know if I’d do it. But Finch would. She loves every minute of it. She doesn’t even notice that we haven’t fucked in months. She is so fulfilled it makes me sick. By the way, she signed you up for softball. She thinks it will help you through the divorce.”

  “That’s insane. Who actually likes softball?”

  “Dykes, historically. But you could be the token straight.”

  “I’m bi. You always forget that.”

  “I think you always forget that. I think your membership expires after a while.”