Snapped

by Pamela Klaffke

  Olivier’s birthday. Of course. He’s turning one. I know this. Or at least I know this now. I will pretend to have known this all along.

  Back in my office I dial Eva’s local and put her on speakerphone, which I know is obnoxious, but I’ve never had an assistant before and that orange button, neglected for so many years, is just begging to be pressed. “Eva, could you come in here for a sec?” Like I couldn’t walk the ten feet to her desk. I swear I can feel my ass spreading wider.

  “What’s up?” Eva couldn’t be cuter today, in her mint-green summer suit and old-fashioned silver sandals with a short square heel.

  “I’m sure you have plans already, but would you like to go to a party tomorrow morning?”

  “Tomorrow morning?”

  “It’s for Olivier—Ted’s son. He’s turning one and I know it’s going to be all these Pointe-Claire mommies and their husbands and their kids and Jack’s in Toronto—”

  “No problem. Done. What time?”

  “Eleven.” I have fallen in love with Eva all over again this week. My life has never been so organized.

  “Sounds perfect. What did you get him?”

  “Who?”

  “Olivier?”

  “The baby. Right. Nothing yet. I mean, what do I get a one-year-old?”

  “You wouldn’t believe how many adorable baby things are out there now. You guys should really think about doing a baby-style issue.”

  “For Snap?”

  “Sure. A lot of the readership must be having kids by now.”

  I groan and bury my head in my arms. Pull that ugly, crystal marketing award off my shelf and give me some blunt-force trauma.

  “I could help you,” Eva says. “There’s a great little shop in Pointe-Claire that sells wooden European toys and fifties vintage-style kids’ clothes—well, they’re new, repros, but they’re the sweetest things. You’ll wish they had them in your size.”

  I look down at my schlubby 501s and black Converse I’m not sure I should be wearing because Converse is owned by Nike now and Nike’s not very courant but they’re comfy and the blisters on my feet haven’t yet healed. I’m quite sure that dear little fifties mini-clothes are not for me. Even for Olivier it sounds a bit gay but I have no other ideas so I tell Eva yes, I will go to this great little shop in Pointe-Claire with her and buy some retro baby sailor suit or something.

  Eva snaps her fingers. “You know what we should do?”

  I don’t know, maybe gorge on sketchy seafood at some cheap Chinese buffet place until we’re so sick and bloated with MSG there’s no possible way we’ll make it to the party tomorrow? I’ll write Eva a hundred-dollar check if she’ll dig through the tepid warming bins at the buffet to find me a handful of closed mussels I can eat to increase the odds of violent food poisoning.

  “We should swing by your place, pick up some stuff, go to the kids’ store and do the gift thing, then you can stay over at my house and we can just walk to the party tomorrow—it’ll be fun!”

  I’m not sure about this. “What about your parents?”

  “Oh, they’re away for the weekend. Come on, Sara. Think of it as an adventure.”

  “A suburban adventure,” I say.

  “Exactly. An exotic suburban adventure.”

  I have no plans except maybe talking to Jack on the phone and sampling CDs from the overgrown pile on my desk. And I was thinking about going for a walk to snap some DOs and DON’Ts before eating a grilled cheese sandwich at bedtime that I will be punished for with nightmares for eating so late. I guess I could go to Eva’s.

  Ted will kill me if I buy the gayest little summer sailor suit for Olivier—gayer than any baby sailor suit I could have possibly imagined—which means I have to and I know Genevieve will think it’s darling. The one time I’ve seen her drunk since the baby was born she confessed she had hoped for a girl she could dress up and have tea parties with and shop the boulevards with arm in arm when she was grown. Who says she can’t play dress-up and have tea parties and shop the boulevards arm in arm with her swishy sailor boy? In fact, I decide on the spot, I’m going to buy Olivier a sailor suit every year until he’s, I don’t know, forty, and he’ll wear it because Gen and Ted will raise him with impeccable manners and I am his beloved Auntie Sara whom he’ll never want to disappoint.

  I decline a gift receipt when the shop girl asks if I’d like one—I can’t have Ted thinking he can return it. I do, however, ask for the complementary gift-wrapping service the sign above the counter promotes and the shop girl sighs.

  As we tool around the West Island in Eva’s Saab, I find myself relaxed and surprised at the boutiques and the number of smartly dressed people on the streets. We buy some wine, boxes of fancy crackers and paté and Eva tells me that she’s having some of her friends over for what she calls cocktail hour. “Is that okay with you?” she asks.

  “It’s great! Go for it!” I say this and immediately want to stick out my tongue and demand that Eva give it a harsh caning. There is no way to say go for it and not sound like you’re pitching a campaign to the government designed to motivate kids into going outside and exercising instead of playing video games and eating cheese puffs all day and getting fatter and fatter until a TV crew from Entertainment Tonight has to cut through the drywall to get them out for a weepy face-to-face with D-list stomach-stapling pioneer Carnie Wilson.

  Eva’s parents’ house is not as big as I thought it would be: a boxy two-storey of pale yellow vinyl siding, no wraparound veranda, no porch. The lawn is green and freshly shorn, the flower beds are tidy. The house is plain and unassuming, not a monster sprawl of fake Roman pillars, rock gardens and fountains or wavy terra-cotta shingles for a touch of Santa Fe.

  Inside it’s eggshell walls and muted colors, everything is tasteful but not untouchable. I notice a stained-glass lamp that isn’t quite right. Eva’s bedroom has hardwood floors and it’s big, with its own en suite washroom. There’s a queen-size bed covered with a patchwork quilt. I sit on the edge of the bed and can see that the stitching has been done by hand, not by machine. There’s a daybed by the window, a white chest of drawers and matching vanity. Antique cologne bottles are arranged on a silver tray. Everything smells of lavender.

  Eva says I can sleep in her parents’ room or in the computer room that has a sofa with a fold-out bed. I opt for the computer room—sleeping in Eva’s parents’ bed is somehow wrong.

  For dinner we eat roast chicken her mother has prepared and left in the refrigerator. Eva tells me her brother won’t be home all weekend so I eat his. I didn’t know Eva had a brother. I mean to ask her about him, about her family, but her mother’s mashed potatoes have rendered me speechless with their deliciousness. This is an exotic adventure.

  I take my camera out and take pictures of Eva as she arranges plates of crackers and paté. She poses like a pert fifties housewife. I help her fill decanters with gin and scotch and vodka. I make sure the ice buckets have ice. Eva empties a bottle of red wine into a carafe. She checks ornate crystal glasses for spots and I line them up according to size. “How many people are you expecting?” I ask.

  “A half-dozen, maybe, but Chris said he may not be able to make it.”

  “Seems like a lot of work for just a few people,” I say.

  Eva shrugs. “Not really. We do it every week—we take turns playing host.”

  “Does everyone live out here?”

  Eva nods and explains that almost all of her friends live at home. They’d rather do that than spend what little money they make renting some shitty basement suite in the city. Besides, she adds, their parents let them come and go as they please. I don’t tell her that when I was her age living at home was unheard-of, an offense that resulted in public heckling and extreme forms of social shunning. After high school, we moved out, we found a way, we lived in shitty hovels and ate Asian insta-noodle packs every day if we had to. If you went to college or university, you maxed out your student loans, bummed cigarettes off your friends and went t
o preppy rich-kid parties at McGill to loot their coolers of beer that you’d smuggle out of the party and into a club in your jacket or your purse. You did not live with your parents. You did not host revolving cocktail-hour parties in their homes.

  The friends arrive all at once. They have a system, the blond boy in the sweater vest tells me as he pours me a scotch. They all live close by, but whoever lives the farthest from the host’s house calls on whoever lives the second-farthest, then they go together to call on the third-farthest and so on. That way they all arrive together and get to have a lovely after-dinner stroll which, Sweater Vest adds, helps keep the digestive system running as regularly as a Swiss train. He’s premed, he tells me, at McGill. Wants to be a G.I. man.

  I make sure I get his last name so ten years from now when I’m really old and colonoscopies are part of my regular routine, I can make sure he’s not the one sticking that tube with the tiny camera up my sure-to-be size-twenty ass and giving me the news that my decrepit body is ravaged by untreatable cancer. I’d rather hear it from a stranger.

  After less than two drinks I have it all figured out. Sweater Vest carries a torch for Eva, who probably knows but chooses to ignore his unrequited love for her. He has a girlfriend, though, who dresses like Eva, but her look is off—her shoes tonight are too pointy to ever be Eva shoes and her dyed red hair is more cherry-red go-go-girl than Montreal old lady. From her frosty tone I can tell Eva Jr. doesn’t like me.

  Edgar is the boy in the mod sharkskin suit. According to Tiff, whose blunt black bob and wide-legged pantsuit make me think she should be carrying a cat-o’-nine-tails, Edgar is gay but tells everyone he’s bi. She tells me she is bi and can tell when someone is gay. Then there’s Ben, who is not gay at all—again, according to Tiff—but a man-whore whom Eva used to date. Ben is tall. He has dark hair slicked back in a mini-pompadour. He takes off his black leather motorcycle jacket and underneath it is a tight black T-shirt and a full sleeve of tattoos. He’s the only other person in the room who’s wearing jeans. When he goes to the backyard to smoke, I join him.

  “You’re Eva’s boss,” he says. He reaches over to light my cigarette with a Zippo. It has a flaming-skull sticker on one side.

  “You’re Eva’s ex-boyfriend,” I say and take a drag.

  “You’ve been talking to Tiff.”

  “She says you’re a man-whore.”

  Ben smiles and winks. He’s sexy. “Don’t believe everything you hear, darlin’.”

  It goes on like this for I don’t know how long. Inside, we drink and mingle, then escape to the backyard and smoke. It’s not quite dark when he kisses me and I don’t stop him. He follows me to the computer room with the fold-out bed. He pulls me to him and kisses me some more. He’s hard and I want to fuck him but I don’t, not so much because he’s Eva’s ex-boyfriend and twenty-four and lives with his parents, but because I don’t want him to see my saggy breasts or my squishy tummy or my jiggly ass. I want him to touch me in all those places but I don’t want him to see them. I twist away from him and find my camera bag. “Let’s go, man-whore,” I say and lead him back to the party.

  Cocktail hour lasts more than an hour—it lasts more than six hours. I drink and take pictures, mostly of Ben, though I convince myself that no one notices this. I’m lying on the carpeted floor clicking away, thinking that I’m getting some great stuff. I’m working, I remind myself. I’m dynamic and smart, I’m into my groove—Sara B.: photographer, entrepreneur, respected arbiter of style.

  “Sara, what are you doing?” Eva is staring down at me.

  I snap her picture and everything is clear. I’m a drunk thirty-nine-year-old woman rolling around on the carpet of a house in suburban Montreal angling for crotch shots of a twenty-four-year-old Rockabilly boy whose mother I could be if I had been the one to live the after-school-special shame of teenage pregnancy, instead of that Mila girl who was in my tenth-grade math class.

  “We should get you to bed.” I’m flanked by Eva and Rockabilly Ben. They walk me down the hallway to the computer room. I watch as Eva and Ben remove the cushions from the sofa and pull out the hideaway bed. They smooth a fitted sheet on, then a flat sheet. Eva’s tucking it in at the corners and I want to help. I say I want to help and Eva smiles but tells me to stay put. Two Rockabilly Bens blur in front of me. He pushes a pillow into a case and fluffs it. I want to help. I want to smoke. I want to fuck Ben but I want to sleep more. I think about sex and sleep and suburbs and parents and how all these kids think it’s normal to be twenty-four and live with their parents.

  “Where do you people have sex?”

  Eva and Ben stop fussing with the linen and look at me. Ring up the neighbors, invite everyone in, stretch a glow-in-the-dark condom over my head, shut off the lights and let me suffocate, martyr myself for stupid drunk women everywhere or die as a cautionary tale.

  “Just for the record, we have sex the same places you would—sometimes a couch or the floor or in a car, but mostly in our bedrooms. And yes—our parents know. If I’m dating someone for a while they don’t mind if he stays over.”

  It takes me a moment to figure out what Eva’s talking about. She’s made eggs and has a selection of assorted pain medications arranged on a side plate next to a glass of pulp-free orange juice. I chase down three regular-strength Advil and a liquid-blue migraine capsule one. The juice chokes me partway down when I remember the carpet/camera roll-around and kissing Rockabilly Ben and asking the rudest question then dreaming all night about Ben wanting to play some nasty asphyxiation game with glow-in-the-dark condoms that wasn’t sexy to me at all.

  “I didn’t mean to pry. I’m sorry,” I say. “I was drunk. I was awful.”

  Eva shakes her head. “Don’t give it another thought, Sara. Whenever I meet someone your age and I tell them I live at home, they always want to know, but they won’t ask. It’s annoying.”

  “That they want to know?”

  “That they won’t ask.”

  “So you’re glad I asked?”

  “Certainly. It was refreshing. And if you want Ben’s number, it’s not a problem.”

  Now it’s the eggs that are choking me. “I don’t want Ben’s number.”

  I’m standing in the driveway of Eva’s parents’ house smoking. My head is fuzzy. My camera bag feels like it weighs a trillion pounds. I am regretting having Olivier’s gay sailor suit boxed and gift-wrapped—it’s adding to the weight and I’m melting in a black dress in the sun. Eva walks past me in a demure sleeveless shift and pearls. Her creamy white patent bag and shoes match her dress. She is fresh and polished. I can feel wetness spread under my arms and soak through the stretchy material of my dress. I wish I could wear sleeveless, but my upper arms are too fleshy and the skin underneath swings if I talk with my hands.

  Eva walks to the end of the driveway and stops. “You coming, Sara?”

  We’re walking? “I wasn’t sure if we were driving or—”

  “It’s six blocks, silly goose.”

  We’re walking. My underarms are getting wetter and I suppose stinkier with each step but I can’t stop to do a sniff test in front of Eva so I keep my arms pinned to my sides and move as slowly as possible.

  “What’s she like?” Eva asks. She’s kind and makes no comment about my stiff arms and belabored robot walk.

  “Who?”

  “Ted’s wife.”

  “Genevieve? She’s great.”

  “She was some kind of pop singer, right?”

  “In the eighties, yeah. She put out a few albums—she opened at the Forum for Roxette once.”

  “What happened?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, did she just quit?”

  I don’t like this conversation. “She cohosted a talk show for a while.”

  “I kind of remember that, I think. My parents used to watch it when I was really little. She had big hair.”

  “It’s much smaller now,” I say then add, “Gen’s very beautiful.” I don’t know wh
y I say this. It sounds like an apology.

  “How old was she when she married Ted?”

  The math hurts my head. “Twenty-four,” I say.

  “My age. I can’t imagine being married now.”

  Gen is very beautiful, even in jeans and a pink T-shirt I know retails for sixty dollars but that Ted took home from the Swag Shack for free. Her breasts are smaller than the last time I saw her. Ted mentioned that she was weening Olivier, information I had successfully blocked until now. I kiss Genevieve on both cheeks, hand her the gift and congratulate her though I’m unsure of the protocol. I know enough to know I’m supposed to congratulate a woman who’s had a baby, but is it appropriate to congratulate the woman when her baby turns one? I can’t very well be all, Happy birthday, Olivier! I could, I guess, but he wouldn’t have a clue what I’m talking about and would just gurgle or drool or, worse, cry and then I would be the woman in the sweaty, stinky black dress who made the baby cry.

  Gen says nothing about my maybe faux pas. I introduce her to Eva, whom she seems surprised is there. “She’s my date,” I say. “Ted said I could bring a date.”

  “Oh, dear, I hope I’m not imposing, Mrs. Wright,” Eva says.

  “Not at all,” Gen says with a smile.

  “You have a lovely home,” Eva says.

  “Thank you. Come, everyone’s around back.”

  The backyard, like the house, is huge, exactly how I pictured Eva’s parents’ house to be. Ted leads the men around the perimeter of the lawn, stopping occasionally to point at a plant. He’s carrying Olivier around like a football. The ladies are perched on the wraparound veranda sipping lemonade with napping babies slung nonchalantly over their shoulders. Like Gen they’re all wearing jeans and heels and tight T-shirts the colors of sherbet. I quickly calculate the ratio of fake breasts to real at five-to-three, with Eva, Gen and me being the three.