“—Seriously, though—” Tan was laughing, snorting in her childish way, despite her proportionate body, perfect hair and enviable skin, “What if we live like our pets?” Bumper-Grinder who just wanted Tannis to be his bedtime plaything, let out a chuckle of his own, one that said he thought she was trying to be funny, not serious. He cut it short when no one joined him. Oblivious, she continued, in a lower voice that sounded entirely sober. “What if you caught a secret glimpse of a giant alien hand reaching out of the clouds and switching off the sun one day at dusk? What would you do then?”
Without a word now, he looked across the table at Tan, then back to his silent compadre, his eyes doing a subtle watusi. Then he even looked at Hannah. Tan took a sip from her thin yellow straw, then gaped, wide-eyed, with open, pleading hands, and shrugging shoulders, waiting for Bumper to respond. He got up, looked at her, then at the rest of them, and said, “I’m going to go get a drink.” He never returned to the table, actually, but that wasn’t a surprise to anyone else, or even to Tan. She watched him go, then took another slurp from her yellow straw. “I need to pee,” she said, got up, pulled her panties out of her bum crack, through her skirt in a not-so-feminine manner, then walked off in the direction of the washrooms.
Silent Compadre turned out to be a truly genuine guy. He was Jean-Marc, originally from Montréal. He was built well and his chest held out his short-sleeve silk shirt that was, admittedly, a decade out of date. He was in his late thirties, but you couldn’t tell until you got up close and saw the few sparse grays at his temples, or the fine lines around his eyes. This one had either laughed a lot in his life, or grimaced a lot. After two vodka mixers, Hannah was sure that it had to be the former. His smile turned her on. And those arms didn’t hurt either.
She thought a little harmless flirting was no big deal. It’s not like this is going to lead anywhere. He’s not going to get what Mr. Bumper-Grinder was after. Not with me.
And he wouldn’t. Not with Hannah.
Jean-Marc’s English was spotty—he’d only been out of Montréal for less than a year. Coupled with the music, his choppy English was hard to understand. He became frustrated, hunted for words and repeated things several times to Hannah, though she didn’t mind. He finally asked her if she wanted to talk outside.
Nice, she thought. There’s a line if ever I’ve heard one. Next it’ll be, “Hey bee-you-tiful, I have dis great book of French poh-ettry in my car. I want to read you a pass-ej.” Or maybe “I have dis great Cee-Dee you should hear. My car’s right over dare in da parking lot. Yeah, da red one wid da rilly big wheels.”
She went with him, not wary, not nervous, because she knew there would be dozens of people milling around the Carlton’s doors. Hannah has been proud of her sound ability to judge a person’s character and simply knew he wouldn’t try anything. But even if he did, they were only a few steps away from the general populace. The crazy, drunken, self-centered populace. Why that was a comforting thought, she didn’t know.
When Hannah and Jean-Marc left the club they discarded two half-full drinks—his Corona and her vodka mixer—because drinks weren’t allowed outside. Drinkless and sobering, they went out into the cool ocean air, leaned against the wooden deck railing where there were a few potted geraniums a half-story above a full parking lot. Like a good boy, he stood a little apart from her on the deck.
Jean-Marc’s French-Canadian accent made her cheeks pink more so than the Vodka mix did. He had a charm about him, a willingness to smile and wait for her to speak her piece, a desire to please her first and to bring laughter by way of some gentle self-deprecation. He lost the occasional English word, fouled others up completely, but the way he looked at her! He watched her lips as they moved, and hung on her every word. She was positive he would be a generous one in the bedroom—Jean-Marc, JM to all these younger, English-speaking sailors—had been a sales executive at a clothing manufacturer in Montreal. He wore a jacket and tie, pressed his shirt each night before bed, recorded a voice mail greeting every morning at eight sharp. At thirty-seven he had woken up with a terrible, how do you say, Ache, in his heart. He had felt, what is the word, Empty. Alone. Living like this, he would never meet the woman of his dreams, the woman he was meant to, what is that expression, Spend His Life With. Not with his world moving in that dull direction. No direction. There were only work functions and after-work functions. The only people he could honestly say he knew were his band of buyers and the people in his office and the guy behind the bar that served drinks to him and his office amis each Friday afternoon. His life felt so devoid of adventure, so different than he had imagined it growing up. So he quit that well-paying job, sold his condominium on Rue de la Gauchetière, and had walked into the nearest Armed Forces recruiting office. He signed a seventeen-year contract with the Navy and they moved him here, CFB Esquimalt. Leaving his comfort zone, moving away from family for adventure and newness—maybe it was the effects of the night’s drinks, or the intoxication of speaking with this stranger out in the cooling ocean air, but Hannah thought this the most idealistic personal myth she’d ever heard.
Hannah reluctantly agreed to see him again, after his training exercises had finished late Monday afternoon. They would meet at All Ways Bean in Colwood, a chocolatier and coffee shop. Two of Hannah’s favorite things together under one roof, she joked. This idea came after Jean-Marc had bragged about the chocolate shops back home, one in particular at a place called Marché Atwater. Her challenge to him was whether he could lower himself and try some of her western chocolate in lieu of his fabled stuff from home back east. Having dropped that hint, she could hardly say that she had other plans. She couldn’t gracefully back out now.
But he didn’t try anything with her that night. Didn’t lean in to kiss her, or put his hands on her. Didn’t ask her to follow him to his car. And, after talking for a couple of hours out there on the geranium-filled deck of treated lumber, Hannah Garretty found herself doing something she had never done before: she gave her phone number to a stranger she met at a bar.
As they began their goodbye, he told her in his alluring accent that it would be his honor and pleasure see her at the coffee shop, and, more importantly, he laughed, that he loved chocolate. Hannah was pretty sure he had only said that once he knew of her weakness for it. As they finally parted ways, he had asked her, “Don’t all women love chocolate?”
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If pressed, Hannah wouldn’t be able to explain why she couldn’t meet Jean-Marc at All Ways Bean after telling him she’d be there. It wasn’t that he was a navy boy and it wasn’t that he was older—even though Hannah had been with one much older man and that had turned disastrous. And it wasn’t the language barrier—Jean-Marc’s English was improving, she told herself. He wasn’t a whack-job. Why shouldn’t she at least just spend the evening with him? They could meet at the Chocolatier’s, sit at a cozy little table for a bit, get a few samples of chocolate, a latté, or an iced mochacinno, then if all went well, go for dinner together.
After rear-ending the Westfalia van on the island highway, after seeing that bloody-eyed face in her fraction-grasp, after hearing Mr. Mean Man say through polished corn teeth, one black and bleak, “Drive Careful,” she just can’t see Jean-Marc. She’s shaken. And now she just can’t imagine strolling into the café and making small talk, with the late afternoon’s events still so fresh.
Beta would noisily deliver her obligatory judgments if Hannah brought a sailor home to the house in Oak Bay. And, heavens, if it ever ambled down Relationship Road and got to SeriousVille with Jean-Marc (not that such a preposterous idea was even padding around the insides of her head, her heart, or her below-the-belt places), Beta would say things like, “You can’t trust a navy boy, Han. All the clichés are true: they cheat, they lie, they’re never around. They drink, they smoke up. All they want is a warm berth to launch their torpedoes. And in the middle of the night—I promise you this—you’ll get calls from younger girls looking for him and asking for �
��another ride on the boat’. There’s no sense in letting this get too far, Hannah-Banana. You know it deep down. He’s just gonna trample your ‘lil heart. Just you wait and see, Han-Banan. It’ll be messy.”
So she doesn’t go to All Ways Bean. This castle in the sky of spending the whole week with him non-stop before he sails out—going to restaurants, hitting the downtown shops on Douglas, renting motor scooters and high-tailing it up and down the inclines and valleys in the south of Oak Bay—she feels like she’s already let those ideas go. And in the deepest grotto of her mind, these imagined photographs simply fade into the dark, and disappear.
Instead of heading directly south to Colwood, after her literal run-in with the Unwashed Hair Girl and Mr. Mean Man, she puts on her blinker and turns right onto Goldstream, heading further west to the Langford Caprice where she gets into a romantic comedy just as the previews and commercials are ending and the house lights are coming down.
It seems like a good fix at the time: if she’s bound and determined not to give Jean-Marc a chance, she can at least watch a fictional woman find her own version of him, then lose him, then find him again. It’s a fair compromise.
“Stumble then rise,” she thinks again, as she takes her seat in the darkened theatre. “Stumble then rise.”
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The glimpse of the bloody eye and the bruised cheek with its swath of dirty blonde hair is not Hannah’s first Grasp.
And they always come true. And that’s probably why they bother her so much. She doesn’t get them right off, doesn’t know what they stand for, what they foretell, but when the real thing happens, like that dirty-ashamed one, she wants to run and hide. She wants to rip them out of her mind and throw them as far away from her as she can.
She wishes, just as she has for most of her young life, that she would stop seeing them, that they would wither up and leave her for good.
There was the time she saw Dickie’s foot caught in the drain vent in the Kawalski’s above-ground pool. This was before Dickie had even been invited to Ivan Kawalski’s thirteenth birthday party. There had been some questions about which kids in the neighbourhood would get the green light from Ivan. Everyone wanted to go to the pool party but not everyone was on the A-list and Dickie didn’t know yet either.
Dickie is one of Hannah’s three older brothers, the next oldest in fact, and he hates being called ‘Dickie’. It’s Rich. Or Richard. Not Dick. Never Dickie. “Got that, Little Giiiiirl?” he would demand, holding Hannah down as she giggled. It was playful, usually, but as with most older brothers, sometimes got rough.
Hannah had seen his red trunks and his small pink foot under water, stuck between the slats of the white plastic vent in a Grasp even before he’d been invited to the party. Hannah wasn’t there, wasn’t even six at the time but there’s Dickie, a little more than a week later: diving in head-first, all the boys taking turns to see who can splash the biggest. And there he is: Dickie obviously wins, sends a spray into the air so far it reaches the Kawalski’s upstairs den window, dappling the glass with a wide spray of fat, impressive drops of pool water. Only thing is, Dickie’s not coming up now. The kids are all elbowing each other, the awe and laughter is coming to a gradual end but Dickie’s just a flesh-colored blob in red trunks at the bottom of the pool. Way down below the agitated surface of marbled blue-white water. The water is settling now and still no Dickie. Just bubbles. Calming surface. A few more bubbles.
Dickie obviously got out of the predicament, lived on to torment his one and only little sister and to teach her and her brother how to drive a stick years later. Ron Kawalski, the birthday boy’s dad, hollered for everyone to “GET OWT THE WAY!”, dove in and yanked little Dickie’s foot free of the vent, letting him rise gently to the surface like a boiled egg. He was sent home with his party favours and a hunk of cake stabbed with a small striped candle. Sure, he had a bruised and swollen ankle, a sore throat from some swallowed water, and red eyes from the pee and chlorine cocktail but the adult men all gave a healthy chuckle and a “you’ll be fine, won’t ya son?” then a hearty open-palmed hair tousle before Big Ron dropped him off at the Garretty’s front door with his feet still squishing in wet sandals as he walked.
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There had been the relatively benign stuff: like helping mom pick winning numbers on the Western 49 when she won ten thousand dollars and change—which had come in very handy later on, she once told Hannah years past, after a few drinks. Hannah knew she would get a 99 percent on that Causation and Tort Law in Canada paper in her tenth grade Law class with Mr. Dunleavy—a week before he even looked at the thing. There had been rumors about Mr. Dunleavy before this. And she understood why after he handed the paper back without a mark on it except for the small “99” in pencil on the upper corner of the cover page. “Mr. Dunleavy? Where did I lose this one mark?” “You didn’t lose any marks. But I only give out perfect scores under very special circumstances.” Then his creepy wink.
There was that one time she thought her big brother Dan was going to have a burn in his lap, either by fire or some hot coffee. Turns out that he just got a minor case of VD from Dora Robertson. They had ‘hooked up,’ as Dave called it, after a bonfire down the beach from her parents’ place in the Saanich Peninsula, north of the Garretty house in Oak Bay.
But there were life-and-death Grasps too, ones that ended badly. That bad car accident on Kingsway in South Van when Hannah was seventeen was one. In her Grasp, she saw a thin wisp of smoke through a cracked windshield and a woman’s hand, wedding ring and all, gripping the tan colored dashboard of a car, fingers so strained and white they looked like icicles ready to snap off and shatter. Inside the vision, everything jerked like the woman’s head had come forward very suddenly and cracked across either the window or that dashboard. This Grasp came on a Friday evening while Hannah was looking up-close at her own eyeball in the mirror, a wide bauble of hair-fine veins, tracing her lower eyelid with eye liner, getting ready for her date and a night at the clubs.
Day after next, a Monday morning nearing two A.M., that car accident did happen—with her boyfriend D. in one car and those two nice folks in the other. It was bad enough to send all three of them to the hospital, the woman most serious of all.
D. had such an ego. He was such a show-off.
Drop that relationship onto the heap of successes, Beta would say if she knew all the squalid facts.
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Now. This moment. Hannah is twenty-eight again. Not seventeen, definitely not thirteen.
The movie’s over, it’s dark, and she’s rolling up to the big fuschia house in Oak Bay looking like a lottery winner who’s just lost the golden ticket. She’s exhausted, deflated. Ruined. The house is just a half block from the main strip of medical offices, travel agencies, the odd book shop, and a multitude of little antique and curio huts where old ladies whittle away at their savings accounts and fill up their drawing rooms. The fender is loose on the front of her VW and one end is dragging on the pavement, kicking sparks as she turns into the driveway at the front of the house, under the foliage: the giant oaks, a couple of cherry trees and the honeysuckles that are overgrown and taking charge of the yard.
Today was a grotesque one. First the stinging Grasp. Then the car accident. Then, the gutless dodge from the All Ways Bean Coffee Bar & Chocolatier in Colwood. A few hours ago she stood up Jean-Marc, the sailor from Quebec who undoubtedly waited for her, might still be waiting for her, might sit there till the place closes, for all she knows. He had told her he would be heading out on one of the boats to a stint in Afghanistan in just over a week, his first active tour, told her that he would love to spend his days with her until then, told her that he could think of nothing better before heading off into the unknown waters of the Middle East.
Whatever, she thinks as she yawns, gets out of the car, and walks past the limp bumper without even a glance. She’s spent. Her run-in with Mr. Mean Man after her long day stays with her. Oh yes, and the Grasp she had
, that’s still ticking around in her head, too. Thinking about the romantic comedy she’s just finished, she wonders, Why can’t I find my Mr. Right, have my beautiful children, move into that big stone house up by Craigdorroch Castle and live the life I’ve always dreamed of?
Hannah doesn’t even bother fishing for her house key—which Beta had dabbed with fuschia nail polish. As usual, the doors aren’t locked. As Hannah goes inside, heads up the stairs to her attic retreat, switches on the light of her bedroom and flops on the duvet, she reflects on what she really wants. A man. A good job with stability and challenge. She’s turned into the modern woman’s sticky cliché, she thinks, as her eyelids feel the tug of gravity. She wants it all but has none of it, and no prospect of getting any of it. Another yawn. Forget cliché. She’s the modern woman’s waning paradox. Never happy, always wanting. Still another yawn.
Then she’s out cold.
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Beta’s not home. None of the girls are. No stereo, not even the T.V. making noise. No one was gathered round the table for a chat or sitting cross-legged on the living room rug with a pile of stuff, a stack of rolling papers and a flat Diet Coke. The house was a vacuum of quiet and this was unusual.
Beta’s probably taken Simma and Feyet and little Tan downtown to a club, or one of those health food places on Douglas, where they have their drumming sessions with girls named Engenu and Libra Doon, and then eat greens and nuts and seeds and sip chai tea with mint leaves until the sky starts turning pink in the east. The day that Hannah moved in Beta gave strict guidelines about what could be kept in the fridge next to her tofu and soy products. No meat, you can get your own fridge upstairs if you want to keep dead animals in the house. No real dairy, cows don’t have tits so you take what Mother Nature intended for baby cows.
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