Difficult People

by Catriona Wright

  The next morning Uncle Harris apologized for what he’d said the day before. “You’ve done an excellent job,” he said. “Considering… considering everything. I had no right to say that.”

  I pretended to accept his apology, but inside I fumed and raged. I scrolled through all the darkest corners of Toil and Trouble but nothing was dark enough. I searched elsewhere, every witch site I could find, bookmarking curses that would cause boils to erupt on his skin, sorrow to eat at his soul, spiders to consume his dick. The anger gave me a purpose, a dense centre to circle my thoughts around.

  I pressed Gavin and Bill to tell me what the three of them talked about.

  “Mount Doom!” Gavin said. He was wearing a shirt I didn’t recognize, an orange polo with a tiny zebra stitched on the chest. Had Uncle Harris started buying them clothes now, too? Wasn’t it enough for him to make the laundry smell like a mountain spring and to clean the windows so thoroughly that birds crashed into them?

  “And?”

  “The ring!” Bill said, imitating the gravelly voice Uncle Harris sometimes used when he read.

  “And? His wife? His house?”

  “He has a big backyard,” Gavin said.

  “And a pool,” Bill added. “He said one day he’d take us there.”

  I grabbed Bill’s shoulder. “When?”

  “He says it a lot,” Bill said. “Maybe you can come, too!”

  “Don’t ever leave without telling me or Mom okay?”

  “Die, dragon,” Gavin said, poking his index finger into my stomach.

  Falling to the floor in mock agony, I wondered if I was strong enough, witch enough, to curse him. I thought about the useless jar I’d buried in the backyard.

  The morning before the coven meet-up, Gavin and Bill burst into my room. I hadn’t joined them for breakfast. I didn’t want to eat Uncle Harris’s pancakes or omelettes or stacks of French toast with their pretentious dusting of nutmeg.

  “Are you coming to school tonight?”

  “Why?” I said. Would the other people at the coven be older? Cooler? Would they offer me red wine or marijuana or magic mushrooms?

  “It’s Games Night!” Bill said. “I’m going to beat Henry and Gavin and Uncle Harris at darts.”

  “I’m going to smash, bash, crush the piñata until it poops candy,” said Gavin.

  Games Night was an annual tradition at their school, one I remembered well from being a kid. Dad let me win at everything, and afterward my reward was to get a piggyback ride all the way home.

  “Sorry, guys.” I ruffled their hair. “I have other plans.” I was going to find the most powerful witch and ask her to help me banish Uncle Harris from the house.

  “Uncle Harris says whoever wins the most games gets to choose a prize.”

  “I’m getting a waterslide,” Gavin said.

  “Cool,” I said. “Now be gone! You’re going to be late.”

  After school I went straight to Amy’s, but I was distracted. We changed into our outfits. The velvet itched my skin and the boots suddenly seemed clunky and oversized, like clown shoes. Sandalwood incense swarmed my throat. Amy was talking about binding spells and the many therapeutic uses of quartz. I pictured the mason jar vibrating in its backyard grave, rotten tulip petals whirring, my newlywed parents grabbing and shaking the pentagram lines, trying to free themselves. I could barely breathe. What exactly was Gavin planning to do with a waterslide? Amy applied eyeliner to herself and then tried to get me to hold still while she applied some on me. Use it at Uncle Harris’s pool? With one eye shakily lined, I excused myself, rushing out of Amy’s house while she yelled after me.

  I pushed my way through the parents and kids and scanned the gym for Uncle Harris’s lanky frame, his tweed coat. I poked my head under a parachute. I checked underneath the snacks table. I was just about to bust into the boys’ washroom when I saw Mom dressed in actual non-Spandex clothes for once. She wore a blazer and jeans, even cute yellow flats; her hair was blow-dried and her lips were lipsticked.

  Bill and Gavin ran over and hugged me.

  “What happened to your eye?” Mom said. “And what are you wearing?”

  “Where’s Uncle Harris?”

  “It was time for him to go,” she said.

  “Did you kick him out?”

  “Don’t be so dramatic. He had to go. He wanted me to tell you goodbye.”

  “But,” I said. “Why would he just leave?”

  “His wife was being discharged,” she said.

  “But—”

  “Leave it.”

  I could sense she wasn’t telling me everything but I didn’t press her further, too frazzled to care about the details and enjoying Mom’s mom-like tone, authoritative for once. It seemed strange that he hadn’t said goodbye to me. Could he feel how angry I was? Was I the reason he left?

  Mom and Bill went to wait in line for some game and I challenged Gavin to a beanbag toss. A low ringing filled my ears, getting louder and more insistent. Gavin grabbed the hem of my skirt and blew his nose on it, leaving a thick mucus slug clinging to the velvet hairs. On the other side of the room, Bill reached for Mom’s hand, which kept slipping in and out of his as she raised herself onto the tips of her toes and lowered herself again, mouthing the rep count under her breath.

  The Emilies

  Every morning before work Emily straightens her hair and curls her eyelashes. She alternates between Sparkling Lilac Mystic and Sea Breeze Clean Burst antiperspirant because she can’t decide whether floral or fresh scents best express her authentic self. Around her neck she wears a tiny gold heart on a thin gold chain. She irons her clothes every Friday night, even the jeans she only wears on weekends. Everything in order. People often ask her to speak up.

  Emily has two friends. Both are ceremonial holdovers from elementary school. Friendships as dutiful and potentially pointless as washing dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. Emily wants more. She wants a friendship that’s a perpetual scooping of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream. One long pillow fight. A continuous revelation of secret crushes. The kind of friendship with inside jokes, with whole days spent texting smiley faces to one another. But there doesn’t seem to be room in her friends’ lives for this kind of friendship. Both her friends have boyfriends. When Emily calls them, she can sense their hesitation. They make excuses, drop her for incoming calls. It’s obvious she’s become a burden. And it’s not as if they’re exactly her first choice for bosom buddies, but what other option does she have?

  Emily has more namesakes than friends. Her mother named her after three Emilies, specifically: Brontë, Dickinson and Davison. Two of them, literary recluses. The other, trampled to death by a king’s horse. All beloved by feminists and all single, like Emily. Probably virgins like her, too. Whenever Emily is stuck in some expanding moment of socially induced panic—her breath coming on faster, the inner voice goading speak up, you’re sweating, touch him, hug her, do something for fuck’s sake—she tells herself not to worry; it’s just a case of the Emilies. The naming of this awkwardness consoles her, makes it pathological, flings the blame out centrifugally, away from the self of herself. A self best expressed with deliberation over what she can control: clothes that flatter her mildly pear-shaped body, the perfect shade of blush, periods every twenty-eight days on the dot. Despite her virginity, despite the fact that she’s only been out on one date and never even kissed the guy, Emily has been on birth control since the eleventh grade. She couldn’t bear the uncertainty of irregular menstruation. The body is untrustworthy, full of potential mutinies.

  Emily works at Phil’s Consulting, a small firm in downtown Ottawa that specializes in strategic planning for non-profit organizations. The other four employees are Tony, Roger, Mary and Lydia. Phil of Phil’s Consulting is short not for Philip, but for Philanthropic, an abbreviation that Roger says makes the company seem “more approacha
ble” and Tony claims makes it sound “snazzier.”

  Lydia, the employee closest in age to Emily, has been working there for two years, a year and a half longer than Emily. Lydia’s business cards are gilt-edged and read, Assistant Project Improvement Officer. Emily’s are plain white and read, Assistant Project Enhancement Officer. Emily has been promised she will get gilt-edged cards after she’s been there for a year.

  When Emily first started her job, she enjoyed the work. All she did was copy-edit reports before they were sent out to the clients, yet she derived satisfaction from her association, however tangential, with the important philanthropic work being done. Lately, though, the routine of it, the tedium and isolation of spending so many hours editing and re-editing a single sentence, has strained her. Even more than the work itself, the office environment has stoked her Emilies.

  On her first day, wishing to give the impression she was someone with a vital and fulfilling personal life, she’d brought a framed picture of her and her girlfriends from prom: their hair curled and, beneath their dresses, their stomachs sucked in. She’d placed it on her desk before noticing that Mary was the only other person with photos on display. She was about to hide it when Roger ambled over and picked it up.

  “Looking pretty smart,” he said. “College?”

  “High school.” Emily tried for nonchalance. “My best friends.”

  “You haven’t changed a bit.”

  Roger put the frame down. Emily cringed at the coarse, curly hair on the backs of his fingers.

  “Better pretend I work here,” he said.

  He winked and walked over to his corner of the office. Following this exchange, Emily worried that it would be too conspicuous now to remove the picture so she left it where it was.

  Later that day, she attended a short introductory meeting with the rest of the employees. Emily took an empty seat beside Lydia. She found Lydia intimidating, though she couldn’t have specified why. Definitely wasn’t her looks. Her hair was part greasy, part frizzy. She did have a striking face: huge, protruding eyes and small, heart-shaped lips. She didn’t wear makeup. At the meeting everyone was boisterous and friendly. They were all dressed casually, more casually than Emily had expected. Roger wore wrinkled khakis and a bulky light blue sweater. Tony wore black jeans and an open, plaid, button-down shirt with a black T-shirt underneath. Mary wore tapered charcoal trousers—polyester with a slight sheen—and a lime green, short-sleeved shirt, untucked.

  But it was Lydia who struck Emily as the most egregious case. Lydia’s knee-length jean skirt was hemmed unevenly with safety pins. Her faded, black cardigan was too small, buttons popping open across her breasts. Emily would never show up to work looking so unprofessional. Her smugness dissipated as banter buzzed and spun around her like a swarm of bees. She had trouble concentrating on individual voices.

  The majority of the meeting was spent sharing anecdotes about the previous Assistant Project Enhancement Officer. Emily didn’t remember all the details. Mostly she remembered the ironic look on Lydia’s face, the easy flow of words from her mouth.

  “Remember those fruit leathers she used to eat?” Lydia said. “She would lick those things like a cat.”

  “I’m just glad I won’t have to smell her perfume anymore,” Roger said. “Awful stuff. I’m allergic, you know.”

  “We know,” Lydia said.

  “She had the nicest penmanship,” Mary said. “You can’t teach penmanship like that.”

  “She had other assets,” Tony said.

  “Oh please.” Lydia looked disgusted. “Can’t you recognize a padded bra when you see one?”

  Listening to Lydia talk, Emily was struck by a need to align herself with her. She’d never known someone so audacious and self-assured. Emily’s desire for Lydia’s recognition was overwhelming. It seemed to condense the room down to the two of them. Emily wished that she’d known this previous employee so she could gossip about her, too. Gossip viciously, like girls do. Like friends do, drawing a boundary between themselves and everyone else.

  “Jealous?” Tony challenged Lydia.

  Emily tried to cut in, her mouth open, poised, but couldn’t find an opportunity.

  “You got me,” Lydia said sarcastically. “What more could any woman want out of life than a D cup and a dunce cap?”

  “Children, children,” Roger said. “Can we please try to stick to the agenda?”

  By the end of the meeting, Emily noticed that she’d chipped off all her nail polish. She’d stacked the thin sheets of discarded varnish on top of each other. Looked like a hunk of mica.

  Emily sat with her new colleagues at the round table in the small kitchen nook. She fumbled at the microwave, trying to figure out which setting to use to heat up her portion-controlled cayenne pepper and celery soup.

  Tony sidled up to her. “Need a little help defrosting?” he said, draping his arm on her shoulder.

  Emily winced. She prefers to be warned before anyone touches her. Taken aback, Tony removed his arm and muttered, “Sorry.”

  “Don’t mind him,” Lydia said dryly. “It’s not called Philanderer’s Consulting for nothing.”

  Mary smiled. Roger guffawed. Tony groaned.

  “Oh,” Emily said.

  Routine insulated the relationships at the office. Agendas, reports. Emily continued to admire Lydia’s confidence and to question her taste. Memos, clients, coffee. Fridays, the plate on Mary’s desk began with baked goods and ended with crumbs. Photocopier jams. Roger told Emily that she’d “mastered the fine art of punctuation.”

  One day after Emily had been there five months, Mary called Lydia, “Emily.” Realizing her mistake, she said, “Sorry, I always get you two mixed up.”

  Emily smiled and looked over at Lydia, who frowned.

  Emily puzzled over that frown. What did it mean? The Emilies volunteered theories. You’re too awkward and shy. She thinks you’re ditzy. A kinder Emily suggested, Lydia doesn’t know you yet… she doesn’t like being compared to anybody. She thinks of herself as unique, one of a kind. An iconoclast like us, a Brontë or a Dickinson or a Davison.

  That was exactly what made her so attractive.

  Emily is eating her container of ten raw almonds when Lydia whirls into the break room. She is wearing jeans, a white T-shirt and a navy blazer with the sleeves pushed up to the elbows. She doesn’t look at Emily, concentrating instead on pouring herself a cup of coffee.

  “What you up to tomorrow afternoon?” Lydia asks.

  Although she’s alone, Emily is unsure whether she is being addressed. “Me?”

  “What?”

  “I’m free.” Emily can’t believe this. She holds her hands still in her lap, tries to keep her smile small.

  “I assumed so. Can you come with me for this procedure thingee?” Coffee spills over the rim of the mug. Lydia stops pouring but doesn’t bother wiping the puddle.

  “Sure. What—”

  “A routine abortion. Tomorrow after work then?”

  “It’s a date,” Emily says, immediately regretting her eagerness.

  Lydia nods and exits, leaving the full coffee on the counter, steam rising.

  That night Emily, flattered by the afternoon’s conversation, tries to imagine how Lydia must be feeling. How Lydia must despise the tampon ads on television. The white-clad women twirling around, cooing about absorbency and freshness, spilling blue liquid everywhere. And of course, she wonders about the guy, if he’s ever shown his face around the office and if he knows about the pregnancy or not. But mostly she wonders about Lydia. Is she lonely, too?

  “At least there aren’t any protesters today,” Emily says as she and Lydia walk up the front stairs of the Morgentaler Clinic.

  A pair of teenage girls are leaving. “So you won’t tell anyone?” Lydia whispers. One of the girls leans heavily on the other.

  “Of course not,” Emily says. She’s promised three times in the past forty-five minutes.

  “Who would you tell, anyway?
” Lydia smiles.

  Emily brushes the question off as another example of Lydia’s biting humour. “Right.”

  Emily had imagined that this experience would be intimate and vulnerable, like an after-school special, that it would cement a bond between them. But now that she’s here, part of her wants to flee. All those bodies in there, leaking their secrets. Spilling their guts. She pictures a bedpan brimming full of miniature organs, secreting, throbbing, uncoiling and uncoiling. She climbs the steps ahead of Lydia and opens the door.

  Inside the air is solemn. As they walk down a hall, Lydia’s flip-flops come down in smacks, Emily’s heels in clicks. They walk to the front desk. On the counter Lydia holds her left hand over her right to stop it from trembling. Emily notes Lydia’s bitten cuticles. When the nurse asks for Lydia’s name, she looks lost, so Emily answers for her.

  “Please take a seat,” the nurse says.

  Another pair of girls sits in a corner. Their voices are low, sloshing against each other in a gentle rhythm. Lydia takes a seat and hunches behind a Times. As there’s no available chair next to Lydia, Emily sits across from her. She reads a Sass from fall 2002. The words sexy, secret and diet are used among photos of elfin celebrities with prominent collarbones. After a few minutes, a wiry nurse with a stiff clipboard calls, “Lydia Mayes!” from across the room.

  Lydia and Emily stand up and walk toward the nurse. Emily gets there first.

  “Lydia?” the nurse says.

  “No,” Lydia says. “I’m Lydia.”

  “You’ll have to stay here then,” the nurse tells Emily.

  “I’m coming, too,” Emily says, emboldened by the dread in Lydia’s eyes. “She needs me.”

  “I’m sorry,” the nurse says. “That won’t be possible.”

  “It’s okay, Emily.” Lydia doesn’t look at her. “I’m fine.”

  “I’m right here,” Emily says.

  The nurse escorts Lydia to the back.

  Sass recommends a hotel where you can shower in champagne and flounce around all day in bright dresses with low necklines. It says that Grey Goose martinis are fabulous and that purple crocodile, elbow-high gloves are both luxurious and demure. Right now, Emily thinks, Lydia is probably putting her feet into stirrups. Soon the doctor will guide a tube into her uterus.