Mira works part-time giving music lessons. Her husband Jim is a dentist, and works eleven till seven, to accommodate people who want later appointments. He gets the kids off to school in the morning so Mira can sleep in. They knocked out two walls in their house to make that one great room and the big kitchen. They use their living room as a family room. The two older girls sleep in the master suite, and have their toys and computers there, Mira and Jim have one of the smaller bedrooms. They do a two-week bike trip every year with Mira’s brother’s family. Even when the children were small, they did this. Jim runs every morning to keep in shape. The children all take piano and play soccer. They all go to the symphony. Mira reads the Globe and Mail every morning. She listens to the CBC; she has the radio on while she cooks, cleans, drives kids around. She can talk knowledgeably about anything. She is genuinely interested in what other people think. She makes you think about your opinions.
Come back any time, Mira says, as she leaves. I’m usually here, after school and evenings. If I’m busy I’ll tell you.
Cleo feels, walking home, as if she has been dreaming. She wonders if a week is enough time to leave before arriving on Mira’s doorstep again.
HERE’S THE DEAL, Kate says. You work two-and-a- half days a week. Twenty hours. You can spread it over three days or five. You get one sick day or daycare-issue free card per month, on top of your legal sick days. You have to make up anything else you miss. More about that later. You’re on probation for three months, then you have a review. Your salary is eighteen thousand plus pro-rated benefits until your review. If your review is successful your salary goes up to twenty-one. If you’re not successful — well, you won’t be working here, so it’s a moot point. You wear business attire every day. We don’t do casual Fridays. You can take lunch or not; you don’t get paid for lunch breaks. You have to attend biweekly office meetings, but you are paid for that.
Kate is her age, Cleo thinks. Dressed in a suit. Cleo will have to buy a couple. This isn’t a suit like women wore when she was a grad student applying for jobs, with their padded shoulders and pleated trousers, but a slim outfit: sleek charcoal-grey flared pants, almost like yoga pants, a silky blue shirt, a jacket that looks like a motorcycle jacket, with zippers and snaps, except that it’s made of some matte black fabric she’s never seen before. Kate has a no-nonsense haircut, a short bob that looks like it has just been cut straight around and tucked behind her ears, though Cleo suspects it takes a very expensive stylist to get that look. She wears little or no makeup, has striking features, a strong, cool, even hard manner.
Mira had warned her about the manner, which is a good thing. Kate is a friend of Mira’s sister-in-law. Kate has her own home design business, which she runs on equitable and green principles. She likes to hire women with young children, to give them an entry back into the workforce. She makes sure they’re paid properly; she gets them benefits. She is flexible about hours so that people can work around daycare.
You have to be in the office twenty hours, Kate says. I realize you could do this from home on your computer, but I feel people produce better when they get out of their pajamas and come to the office. I also like the interchange of ideas. If you want to do some work at home, you can do that too, and for that you can achieve bonuses. But not during your probation time, and not unless you’re producing up to expectations during the salaried part of the week.
It sounds fair, and ideal. It’s only the coldness that scares her. Even when Kate wrinkles up her nose and crinkles her eyes in a twinkly way while she says “get out of their pajamas,” she seems frighteningly focussed, in charge.
You’ll find I’m fair and consistent, though firm about deadlines and expectations, Kate says. Also. If I have to give you negative feedback, which I will, especially the first few months, don’t take it personally, okay? It won’t be meant personally.
About the making up time, she says. Kids get sick. I have kids, I know that. You can’t take them to daycare when they’re sick. So you can stay home then. But you will have to make that time up in hours on site, over the next billing period. So if you miss a few days one week, you might have to work forty hours the next. It’s not negotiable. How you manage it is your business. I don’t want to hear daycare excuses or sick child excuses, ever. That’s why I’m flexible. But I need people to produce, too. To give to the job. I’m generous and supportive of hard work and initiative. But I’m not running a charity.
It’s very odd. She has never met a woman so impersonal in her life. And yet what is being offered her seems the most fair — and yes, generous — situation she could imagine. She feels like her perspective has altered, as if a strong cold wind has blown in, blown away all of the dust and heaviness of late summer.
Will she take it?
She’ll take it.
Olivia starts kindergarten in a week. She’ll have to make arrangements for Olivia and Sam, but she’s already talked to Lacey Lennox about taking turns, already contacted the daycare Lacey uses about spots for Olivia (occasionally) and Sam. She’ll see what’s available; she’ll plan her workday.
She’ll leave an afternoon or morning a week, at least one, for herself.
She won’t always be there to meet Olivia after kindergarten, which is only half the school day, less than half. She will be apart from Sam, her baby, who has just started to engage with her verbally, to follow her around babbling words, to lie beside her before his nap just looking into her eyes, holding her gaze, sometimes for ten minutes, until his eyelids close, to play with her. Just this week, he has started bringing her folded up pieces of paper with crayoning on them: mail. She opens them, reads them. Has to guess what they say. Has to guess right. Sometimes he includes a gift: a piece of crayon, a penny. She’ll be apart from him now at least twenty hours a week, not including travel time.
Maybe she won’t take the afternoon for herself just yet.
Trent sees it all in terms of money: He’s pleased with her salary. She should have let him think she negotiated it, but it hadn’t occurred to do her to do that. He is pleased that she will make enough to contribute to the household. That’s what he cares about. (No, that isn’t fair. It is a lot for him, to carry them all financially.)
She knows it won’t be really exciting work. She’ll be drafting, on a computer, designs for home renos, for people wanting to put an extra bathroom or a suite into their attic or basement. But she can do it. And she had thought she might end up stocking shelves at night, or cashiering, or waitressing, for minimum wage. She’d thought maybe that’s all that she could get.
When she gets home she tells Trent that she is going out, he can feed the children. (But you just got back, he complains.) She marches down the milky late August streets, fast and hard until she finds the entrance to the wooded park. Inside the park, well in where the trees arch over to form a kind of green cathedral, she stops, sits on a mossy rock.
She wants to howl that it is unfair, that she takes care of everyone and no one takes care of her. Nobody has ever taken care of her. But the park is surrounded by houses; really, it’s quite a little park, though it had seemed formidable when she’d found it, with the children, in the spring. It’s a very small park. If she were to howl, she’d be heard; people would come.
And maybe it is not true. Maybe she’s been as lucky as anyone else. And who knows what will happen? Anything can happen. Look what she has imagined, and set her mind to, and caused to come into existence.
She cries a little then out of the tension of the day, sparingly, as if letting a little pressure out of a tire. It will be alright, she tells herself. She doesn’t know that, but she can’t see that it will make much difference to think it, and saying it actually makes her feel better.
Then she hears the whir of bicycle wheels on the path, and wipes her cheeks, and is dry-eyed and smiling by the time the riders pass by.
No Deal
MANDALAY HAS BEEN PREGNANT twice before. The first time by Tomas: There had been no question of her
having a baby, at twenty, or of Tomas wanting that life. He’d taken her to the clinic, showered her with affection and gratitude after. A realist, but a romantic realist. The second time with Benedict. She hadn’t realized until she got back to Canada. She’d been on birth control pills, but they must have gone straight through her when she had dysentery. Then, when she’d still been deciding what to do — she’d been almost thirty then, had thought she might have the baby, raise it — she’d miscarried — bloodily, frighteningly, but — the gynecologist had assured her — not with permanent damage.
After that she’d got the job at The Seagull and had not looked at any men, until Duane.
She is the type of woman men want as a girlfriend or lover, not wife, she has to admit. Well, that’s not precisely true. Horst had really wanted to get married. And Christopher had said he did, though she doubted it. Or doubted he wanted to marry her.
Maybe it was just that the men who she liked the most — Tomas, Benedict, Duane — were not interested in marrying. Or in marrying her.
It didn’t have to be wife. Life partner? She was good with that. Maybe even exclusive companion? Maybe not.
And now this.
Cleo says she has to tell Duane. Even if you’re not planning to keep it, Cleo says. Even if you want to raise it on your own. You have to tell him. It’s a question of ethics.
She doesn’t see that. It’s a bit of his DNA. How does that affect him?
Cleo says, I think family bonds are mysterious things. You can’t always estimate their importance. And think about the child. Look how upset Bodhi was at being lied to about Crystal.
That is a good point. She can imagine a child — she imagines it as a boy, an older teen or young adult, she can imagine him saying, in shock, You never told my father I existed? — and turning to look at her with disappointment, with resentment, with hatred even.
She thinks, all the way back, on the bus, the ferry, about how she will tell him. On the phone or face to face? She could ask to meet. Or email him. She has forgotten that she can email now. Breaking the ice, that’s what she has trouble picturing. Initiating that first contact, as if they are two countries that don’t acknowledge each other’s existence.
But when she lets herself into her apartment (dusty, curiously cold) her answering machine is signalling furiously, and the messages are all from Duane. Where are you? Please call me. I have some news about your case. Please get back to me, Mandalay. I suppose you’re out of town. You really need to leave messages about where you can be reached. Okay, Mandalay, please call me as soon as you get this. It’s about The Seagull. It’s good, I promise.
She calls.
We should meet, he says. Her heart speeds up at his voice; she thinks: Flutters, though that’s a cliché, isn’t it? What it is, she thinks, is fear, trepidation. But then is all romantic love partly fear? Is that the rush, the excitement that fades? Fear?
Yes, she says. Okay. And hears it in his voice too, a kind of tremolo.
They end up meeting at a restaurant they have often gone to, The Golden Horn, which specializes in little medallions of beef, rare and tender; tiny octopi and large prawns, ceviche, baby vegetables, little birds roasted with herbs. She lets him pour her wine before it occurs to her that she should drink less, or maybe not at all? — those posters in bus shelters — and maybe not eat raw fish. Is that it? Cleo will know. The restaurant is finished in black marble and blond wood, and she feels a homesickness for it, as a place from her past.
She says, Butterfly Lake. He has scolded her again for not answering her messages, but as if she’s endangered herself, not as if she’s inconvenienced him.
Family reunion?
We found my younger brother, who was adopted as a baby, she says. Or he found me. In the spring. This was us all getting together.
You never told me about that.
You said you weren’t into family occasions.
Not the same thing. But okay.
He has something for her: a phone, a cell phone. How small it is, like two packs of cards, maybe, end to end. It’s actually my old one, he says. It’s pretty clunky. They’re getting much smaller.
She doesn’t want it, doesn’t want to take it. I will just toss it, if you don’t, he says. Have it.
No, she says. I don’t need it. No.
Suit yourself, he says. She thinks she can read him enough now to see when he’s repressing irritation or disappointment, and he’s not.
He says: The Seagull has agreed to settle. For a moment she doesn’t know what that means.
We talked to them, he says. My colleague and I. Remember? They don’t want to give you your job back, and really, I don’t recommend that you try to fight for that, though of course you can if you want. You’d be in a hostile environment. They’ve offered a decent payout, though, and I advise you to take it.
She’s still having trouble getting her head around what he’s saying: It’s as if she’s let go of The Seagull in her mind, as if it’s receded to a far shelf. How much?
He gives a number: It’s a year’s salary, basically. She doesn’t know, can’t calculate, if that’s a lot or a little. But Duane thinks it’s a good amount, he said that.
It’s not really generous, he says. But I think it’s the most you’ll get, without going to court, which will be expensive.
He says, you can do something with this. Live on it while you look for another job, which I think you’ll find easily, with your reputation and experience. If you get another job right away, invest it. It’ll be a nice nest egg.
Ha.
She still feels confused, disoriented. She says, making an effort to focus, Thank you, thank you so much. This must have taken a lot of time and energy. Thank you.
Nah, he says. A letter. That’s it. We mentioned the article about you from Aloft, though: that was helpful.
She hasn’t thought about that article for months, it feels like.
If she gets another position, cooking or baking, maybe, right away, she can put the payout away, use it to live on when the baby is born. It’s the cushion she has needed. She can do it, now. She can see how to do it.
He says, I’ve missed you. I really enjoy your company. Any chance you’ll reconsider? Maybe just give it another few months? Unless you’re — unless you have — other — plans, now?
And she thinks, realizes, an èclat, as her old lover Benedict would have said, though she doesn’t trust these sudden epiphanies, that if circumstances were different, she might reconsider. Because it was good, it was. And what was she giving up, really? A kind of ownership, a possessiveness that she doesn’t believe in, anyway. A claim on the future, and she doesn’t even believe in living for the future. She doesn’t really believe in monogamy and nuclear families and all of that. She was happy, when she didn’t think about what he was not offering. And was that, what she thought she wanted, all an illusion? So what was her objection to the arrangement? It was working out so felicitously for both of them.
She had been happy, in the moments of it, in all the moments of it.
But now, of course, she can’t go back to it. Well, she could: She could make that decision, terminate, it’s early days yet. She could do that, tell him or not tell him, and do that. And then they could have it back, this thing they have between them, which is more than just a social and sexual arrangement, which is really the most connection she has experienced with a man, the most intense and clear and joyful connection she has ever had. It’s as if all of the other relationships she’s had have been trials for this, experiments in which she’s learned what she wanted, what she didn’t want. In which she’s learned, maybe (her brain, she feels, is zizzing with these realizations) how to be the person who doesn’t get in the way of having the best relationship possible for herself.
She could do that. She could move on. She’ll have other chances: she’s only thirty-three. Maybe even with Duane. He might change his mind. People do.
Does she really want to have this baby?
Her mind now saying: Is that what it’s all about? Recognizing her competitiveness with Crystal, lining up examples from her whole adolescent and adult life, pinning them up for her, warning her not to keep making decisions based on that useless need. Crystal! She doesn’t want her whole life to be shaped by her need to define herself against Crystal.
She doesn’t need to have a baby. Nobody needs to have a baby, really.
But she wants it. It is hers, and she wants it. She is not seeing it in any romantic, rose-coloured way, she thinks. She has been around babies and children enough. She actually knows that they are only appealing about five percent of the time: The rest is sheer hard work and loss of freedom and loneliness and, likely, ultimate rejection. But she wants it: She has come over the past week or so to want it with something that is not part of the package of her emotions about Crystal or other people’s kids or her picture of her life as a woman. It is something deeper in her gut; it is something from her primal self.
What is Going to Happen Next Page 28