9
GWEN
On a cool autumn Saturday, Gwen drove Eli to the suburbs for a hockey tournament. High on a hill, after another strip mall, Gwen caught a glimpse of a housing development in process, backhoes and tractors stilled for the weekend. From above, Gwen could see inside the tiny half-finished houses with their roofs missing, walls and staircases already inserted.
Eli was watching a movie on the screen suspended from the ceiling in the back seat. Suddenly he said, “Conrad’s dad collects Porsches.”
“No, he doesn’t.”
“Swear. He showed me pictures. There are only two at the house, but they have this place somewhere in the country where he stores them.”
“What a strange hobby.”
Gwen pulled into the parking lot. The arena contained six rinks. TV monitors told parents which dressing room to go to, as if they were passengers waiting for flights. Eli scuttled off with his huge bag on wheels.
Gwen wandered between the rinks with a styrofoam cup of herbal tea, scanning the players hidden beneath their helmets and swollen with gear, trying to find the Everwood team. She took a seat low in the stands, surrounded by parents in brightly coloured outdoor clothing and winter boots. Shearling poked out of the top of one woman’s leather mittens. Everyone looked ready to hit the lifts at any moment.
But once the puck dropped, Gwen was confused. The cheering was backwards; yays should have been awwwws; nos should have been yeses. The woman next to her stamped her feet with joy when an Everwood boy missed the net. Gwen realized that she had sat in the wrong section of the stands. These parents wanted Eli and his teammates to fail.
Gwen moved to the correct side. She recognized a few faces from drop-off at Eli’s new school, and gave a brief, stiff smile over the edge of her tea, generating some nods in return. There were more fathers at the game than she had ever seen in the row of idling SUVs that circled the school’s driveway. They were stomping and clapping, necks whipping back and forth, brows twisted.
“On it, Dylan! Come on, Dylan!” Dylan’s father was furious. “Ref! Offside, Ref! COME ON! Are you blind?” He smacked the Plexiglas divider. Dylan, who was number fourteen, Gwen deduced, skated in a circle, head down. Dylan’s mother, presumably, sat silently checking her phone. At the stomping of her husband’s feet, the bench she sat on bounced up and down ever so slightly.
A tall woman in a parka appeared in front of Gwen, blocking the game. “We met the other day. Elizabeth Morton, Conrad’s mother.” She smiled, extended a downy mitten. Gwen remembered Conrad chatting with Eli at pickup—another boy with short badger-cut hair, blazer and tie. Elizabeth Morton had gathered him up and shaken Gwen’s hand firmly before rushing back to her car. People were friendly enough, but Gwen kept wondering if her sudden appearance at the school would be questioned. She expected to be called out any day. So, how exactly are you affording this school? You couldn’t afford it last year, could you? But among the moneyed, no one discussed money. She had heard that somewhere.
“I wanted to ask if you might be interested in joining the Art Night Committee. I don’t want to pressure you, of course.”
“Oh—”
“The event is at Christmas, or as we call it now, ‘the holiday season.’”
“Mmm.”
“I’m not looking for anyone to reinvent the wheel, but I could use some administrative support.”
In Shadow Pines, Art Night meant a trip to the Dollar Store for face paints and googly eyes for the craft stations. Gwen wondered if there might be a possibility of felting with the Everwood boys. Perhaps there was a sensitive one who might want to make some felt woodland animals.
Elizabeth Morton continued, “I’ve seen three boys pass through the school, and I know that when Art Night is unsuccessful, it’s usually a result of poor planning.”
“Conrad is your fourth?”
“Yes, four boys.”
“What’s that like?” asked Gwen.
Elizabeth sat down, reaching into a soft leather tote. She pulled out a tablet. “Exhausting. A lot of talk about erections. It didn’t help that we sent them to a school called Everwood.”
Gwen laughed. “I never thought of that.”
Elizabeth hit a button and the tablet hummed. “I’m the kind of person who doesn’t waste time,” Elizabeth said, as if to underscore that the previous flicker of personality was an anomaly, nothing to get used to.
Gwen nodded. She herself probably radiated wasted time; why else would this woman point it out?
Elizabeth Morton informed Gwen that she had already written up a list of tasks. “I’ll email them to you right now. Ready?”
Elizabeth sat very still, expectant. Gwen stared at her, and then realized she was meant to get out her phone. She dug around in her purse and heard a ping, but couldn’t find it beneath the wadded Kleenex and her wallet, overstuffed with receipts and family photos. Finally, she fished it out. Elizabeth watched as Gwen struggled to log in.
“Can you see it yet? How about now? Did it come in? The subject is ‘actionable items.’”
“Come on, Ref! You don’t know offside! What are you—blind?” Dylan’s dad pounded the Plexiglas. His wife bounced.
Gwen’s phone was painfully slow, with a spidery crack on its face. She was tempted to shake it like an hourglass to make it go faster. She would buy a new phone tomorrow. This was another difference between the before and the money: the ability to meet every whim. Organizing upgrades was Gwen’s new job. She spent days corralling service people to bring in new appliances, change the landscaping, install high fibre-optic cable. Now blinds could close and heat could be adjusted with the click of a button. There was now, Eli had pointed out excitedly, the possibility of opening the bedroom blinds from blocks away, via phone, revealing someone half-dressed.
Finally, the document popped up. Elizabeth’s list of actionable items did not include felt foxes. Number one was the name of a well-known local architect who had designed the ceramics museum.
“Do you know Nobu?”
“No—I mean—I know his work,” said Gwen.
“His son is in Year 8, so he’s willing to contribute. He wanted to do something involving geocaching and a public art tour.” She raised an eyebrow. “I talked him down. He’s donated a painting. It’s quite a prize, the largest item of the silent auction.”
The father was cupping his hands over his mouth and shouting, “Dylan! Head in the game! Dylan!” His wife had left.
“I’d love to give you flowers,” said Elizabeth.
“Oh!”
“Flower pickup.”
“Right,” Gwen said quickly.
“Could you take on pickup at the florist and delivery to the school by 5:30 p.m. at the latest?”
Gwen agreed enthusiastically. Once this task had been decided, the women sat side by side, facing the ice. They kept their eyes on the game, cheering lightly.
Finally, when the silence grew too thick, Elizabeth asked, “Where do you cottage?”
At that moment, Dylan scored. Gwen looked over at the dad. He had his hands jammed in his pockets and a small, grim smile on his face.
During the three-hour break before the next game, while Eli ate pizza with his team, Gwen drove to a mall. She didn’t know this suburb, but she intuited where a mall would be. Nearby, probably east of the subdivision, north of the hockey complex.
She was correct. Oh, the consistency of new places, she thought, padding across the parking lot. All suburbs, like all happy families (or was it unhappy families?) were the same.
In the mall, between the teen mannequins with their midriffs showing, and the matronly mannequins clutching their little pocketbooks, Gwen could not find her tribe.
And then she saw the store. She had been in this chain once before, in the city, before the money. She had walked in, checked a price tag and walked out.
But now she went in and let the doors close behind her, locking her into a cool, dark room scented with jasmine. A happy son
g played in Spanish. Her eyes focused in the dark: tables of folded sweaters and shirts, everything a little beaded, a little “ethnic.” A clerk spun by, gossamer in her blouse, tinkling from her silver jewellery—“LetmeknowifIcanhelpinanywayma’am”—and then vanished.
It was a grand act of theft, Gwen knew. A Navajo blanket pattern popped up on the asymmetrical front of a shirt. A sudden burst of beadwork around a neckline hinted at Africa—tour bus Africa, she suspected. Gwen fingered silks and wools, soft and seamless. She lingered at the perfumes, arranged on what looked like an old wooden box, found washed up on the shore. Many smelled vile and food flavoured—a new trend?—but one was lovely: clear blue, in a small glass bottle like the kind a lady of the manor would have on her dressing table, in an atomizer, with a tiny balloon to squeeze. It smelled like air and ocean, and bougainvillea. The price was more expensive than she would have spent on groceries in a month back in Shadow Pines.
Gwen thought of all the dinners she’d made, and the fevers she’d vanquished, the bums she’d wiped, the carefully folded laundry she’d placed in drawers. She thought of the long, slow hum of the Shadow Pines years. She hadn’t resented it at all, or she’d never believed that she had. But now, in the store’s half-light, she thought: I deserve this. She took out her credit card and bought two: one for her, one for Maddie.
In the blank air of the mall, swinging her tiny bag of perfume, Gwen stopped in front of a hair salon, its interior sparse and white. She regarded the white tulips in a clear glass cylinder, reflected in a mirrored wall. Then another reflection, and on and on and on. She walked inside.
“We’ve been waiting for you,” said the man behind the desk, who was wearing mascara. “You’re twenty minutes late.”
Gwen was about to explain that she didn’t actually have an appointment, but instead she said, “Remind me—how long did I book for?”
He sighed and read from the computer impatiently. “Three hours: cut and colour.”
That would be enough time. A woman walked by, paused slightly at the salon entrance—Gwen felt a little anxious—and then continued on her way. Gwen exhaled.
“So Shelly can get started, then?” said the receptionist.
Shelly had short, platinum blonde hair. She pulled out Gwen’s long greying locks and spread them in the air like bat wings.
“So what’s the plan, my dear?”
“Something like yours,” said Gwen.
The stylist made a happy clapping gesture without actually allowing her hands to touch. She put all of Gwen’s hair in an elastic band first, and then sawed through the horsetail. Gwen felt nauseous, suddenly, to see the bodily waste that was her hair, severed and held in a stranger’s hands. She had kept locks of the kids’ hair from their first haircuts in a little cardboard jewellery box. Then as they got older, she accumulated enough hair to fill a shoebox, stealing from their hairbrushes. Finally Seth said, gently removing the box, “This is getting to be like something a serial killer has in his closet.”
“Ta-dah!” Shelly waved the slab of grey in the air. “We can donate this.”
“Who would want grey hair?”
“Oh, you’d be surprised. Everybody gets cancer.”
As Shelly cut, and bleached, and coloured, and cut again, checking her watch as the hours ticked away, Gwen thought about the woman who had reneged on her appointment. The stranger had missed an opportunity for change, and Gwen had seized it. That woman would never know what had happened, but Gwen looked at herself in the mirror, boyish and foreign, white blonde, and sent a thought to this shadowy, forgetful person: thank you.
* * *
When the tournament ended, and the boys had lost, Gwen made her way to Eli’s dressing room. As soon as she pushed open the door, she knew she shouldn’t have. A dank, damp synthetic sweat smell overtook her. There were no parents, only boys, sitting and standing in various states of undress. Their bodies were surprising in their pronounced differences. Some chests belonged to little boys, smooth and narrow with the nipples of toddlers. But there were a few who had broadened and coarsened, hair sprouting on legs and poking out from armpits.
The team was bereft from the loss, and therefore quiet and angry. One boy threw his glove across the room. He looked at her in a way that Eli’s friends had never done until that moment. He looked at her the way a man would look at a woman, appraising and dismissing in a single beat.
Ah, there was Eli—off in the corner, head down, gathering gear for his bag. He still had his hockey shirt on. He wouldn’t get naked in front of other boys, she knew. He had put his sweatpants over his long johns. I know everything about you, she thought. For now, I know everything. He looked up and saw her in the doorway. His eyes widened and darted. She raised her hand to her new hair, and saw herself as he would see her: a woman in a costume.
She could feel in her son the tension between his instinctive love and the impossibility of expressing it here. She could feel him breathing fast, trying to blow away the social transgression of having your strange-looking mother in the locker room. All of this happened so quickly. She took it in, her son’s pain, caused by her, and walked backwards out the door.
Gwen leaned on the snack bar, using her phone to avoid eye contact with the other parents. An unfamiliar email address popped up, but that wasn’t surprising. Pleading emails had continued to trickle in from strangers, guessing at her Gmail address. But the subject line was odd: Meet up.
I’m hoping this is you, it began.
Gwen scanned, then went back and reread it, her chest constricting. It’s not quite right to say congratulations when it’s only luck that you won and someone else didn’t.
It was happening, then. The walls had been breached. Gwen’s eyes went in and out of focus, and then landed on the neon line: I wouldn’t want anyone to get hurt.
She had left her kids alone for the weekend, all weekend while she and Seth were drinking by the firepit with Tom and Julia. He could find where they lived. No one was impossible to find anymore, and they had been there, in that big, new house, alone for two nights.
Gwen rushed back into the change room. Eli was the last boy, zipping his bag. He was small again, nothing manly about him. He smiled when he saw her.
“Cool hair. You look like an avatar.”
“We have to go,” said Gwen. As Eli grappled with his gear, another email popped into Gwen’s inbox. Heart racing, Gwen opened it. He had sent a postscript, an afterthought.
Gwen, I have a question about your daughter, the one the article said is seventeen. I looked at the calendar and figured it out. It’s bold to keep a secret like that. Did you tell her about me?
Cold came over her. “Hurry up,” said Gwen, grabbing Eli’s bag.
“Hey—I can carry it . . .” he said, following.
I wanted to say also that I did love you.
MADDIE
Maddie stood outside the house with Joshua.
“We just moved here,” she said. “It has a stupid heated driveway.” She hadn’t thought of it as stupid until precisely that moment. She unlocked the door, knowing that no one was home. Gwen had taken Eli to hockey, and Seth was always at work these days.
They took their shoes off and walked across the shiny wood floors.
“Do you want something to eat?” The kitchen had a second, smaller fridge just for drinks. Maddie looked inside. “My mom won’t let us have pop, but we have juice and water.”
“This is a really nice house,” said Joshua plainly. He never said anything to her about money, or envy.
She passed him a can of mango juice and watched him take a sip, looking out the window at the empty pool.
“Let’s go upstairs.”
Her bedspread was perfectly made, courtesy of a housecleaner. A housecleaner! Her name was Lana, and she came every Friday. Maddie had overheard Gwen outlining her “expectations” (her teachers at the U loved this word, too) on Lana’s first day. Gwen’s expectations seemed pretty basic to Maddie—i.e., clean the hous
e—but Gwen broke it down in agonizing detail: the baseboards; the inside of the refrigerator; the folded laundry in three baskets, one for each kid, one for Gwen and Seth. She asked Lana a bunch of questions about her life in Serbia, which Lana answered curtly. At one point, Gwen said, “Oh, we’re exactly the same age.” Sometimes Gwen was so oblivious.
Lana had lined up Maddie’s three teddy bears so they looked like they were holding hands. Maddie threw her jacket over them. She didn’t want to think about Lana, or the driveway, or the fact that she had borrowed this whole life, checked it out like something from the library she would soon be expected to return. She just wanted to think about Joshua’s black hair, the softness of the sleeve of his T-shirt that she’d brushed accidentally on purpose with her hand.
Maddie and Joshua spread out their binders and laptops on the carpet and sat across from each other.
Joshua read, “A certain lake has an irregular shape. In order to estimate the area, the north–south distance across the lake is measured every fifty metres down an east–west line . . .”
It sounded like music because it was coming from him. Even as she wrote down her solution, her body was linking to him, cell by cell. But she didn’t know what he was feeling, with his head down, working the numbers.
She’d heard that with certain guys, the girls had to do the hard labour. She was almost certain that if she made the first move, he would turn animal. She wanted that, too. Her breath sped up.
Maddie placed her laptop on the bed, and sat up on her knees. It was awkward; he was cross-legged, so she was taller now, looming above him. Joshua looked up. Maddie dropped down so her knees were to the side, close to him. Joshua tilted his head, raised his eyebrows in a question, and Maddie leaned in. But then he suddenly did something unexpected: he leaned down as she went forward, smashing the top of his head into her torso. It wasn’t a sexy brush against her breasts. It was bony and brutal, a collision.
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