Then she said that she and Graham had seen me with the cameo the night before Heidi was supposedly caught with it in her room. Did this contradict my account of things, she wanted to know. Oh, yes, it did, my mother replied in a hard voice. It certainly did. According to this timeline, the girl, Heidi, would have had no opportunity to steal the necklace, she told Celia.
It didn’t take long to break me. My dishonesty didn’t run that deep. I was forced to call Heidi’s family and apologize. I was also forced to write a card of apology, to emphasize my remorse. Agatha suggested that my mother contact the city to see if we could get men down in the sewer.
Through her two-year relationship with Jamie, Heidi never once came to our house when I was there.
My mother bought a new jewellery box with a lock on it. She put all her old clothes in a trunk, also with a lock. In the absence of my ability to answer for what I had done, she seemed to have connected what happened with my imagination, my inability to have respect for the solid and ordinary in life, and she was newly restrictive. She insisted that the women’s group meet at Linda’s house or Agatha’s because she feared the adult conversations were having a harmful effect on my mind.
Jamie barely spoke to me for four years, at which time he left home for good.
AN OVERREACTION, people said, when, as an adult, I told them about Jamie’s response to my lie. Far, far out of proportion with my sin, or sins. I’m not sure even Jamie intended so much.
Jamie wasn’t home often, so it was easy for him to ignore me at first. He made it onto the basketball team, so he spent two or three evenings a week at school practising. When he was home, he kept to his bedroom. Never did he even eat breakfast at home. I found out later that Heidi would meet him at the corner with a homemade muffin and a banana. On weekends, he spent almost all day at her house. Jamie passed me sometimes in the hallway or the kitchen. If I asked him a question, about the basketball team or a television show, or whether he’d like a cookie, he answered me in a callous monotone, almost barbarically repetitive, so far was it from his true, soft way of talking. He could make me feel, with the way he positioned his body in relation to mine, as though we were not even in the same room. Jamie knew how to ignore—his was not a pose that emphasized your abandoned status, but one that suggested you were not there at all. My mother told me to give him time.
I often looked at myself in the mirror, to see if I could spot my contamination, physically. I couldn’t. How could you know what made you repulsive when, looking in the mirror or listening to yourself speak, you could only encounter something too familiar to be repulsive?
The summer Jamie left the house, for a year of living downtown with our uncle and working at his bookstore before going off to university, I caught a glimpse of him on Harbord Street. There were many people on the sidewalk, but I was sure it was him. I was standing in the doorway of a card store, and he was walking with a woman. Immediately my mind went to the things that were unattractive about her. Her face was too round and she had a slight double chin. The roundness of her face contrasted unpleasantly with her long, rather pointed nose. Her lips were thin. I made an inventory of these flaws in my head as I watched them. I thought I saw him mouth to her, “That’s my sister,” in a cool, informative way. He might not have said that at all. There was no recognition in his face.
Again, I hated the woman immediately, and with intensity.
Sometimes, I think I waited all my life for a moment that would stick with me so unpleasantly. Misfortune no longer seemed glamorous, but I did confront it with a satisfied defeatism. I was like Linda, hoping Larry was having an affair, or that he was a latent homosexual. I had eagerly anticipated my own betrayal.
WE CANNOT believe we have lost things. Even when we bring about the losing ourselves, we can’t believe things are gone. We rail against it. We write pleading letters. We invent lives we haven’t had.
I tried to be a keeper.
My mother liked to tell me the story my grade four teacher related at a parent-teacher interview. The teacher had asked us what things we collected as a hobby. She had gone around the room, starting at the back and I was at the front. The other kids spoke of stamp collections and doll collections, book collections, stickers, and when my turn came I said, “I collect memories.” The teacher had been enchanted by this, and my mother had too, in turn. They spoke glowingly of my originality, the depth and sensitivity of my collection when the other students simply amassed objects.
I remember this day only vaguely. I had not been trying to say anything special, but I panicked as the teacher neared me. I collected nothing and felt envious of all the hobbying going on in the room, the foreign currencies, the Barbie dolls, the model cars. I said I collected memories to cover up the fact that I collected nothing at all.
My mother often paraded this story around, and she brought it out one day in September soon after I had started grade seven, after our summer of spying, when we had invited for dinner the young English teacher who had moved in next door. They laughed together and agreed that it was not every day that nine-year-olds possessed such magical, sad-eyed wisdom, such delicate sensibilities. Afterwards, I confessed the truth to my brother.
“Ever the fraud,” he said.
EXPECTING
It isn’t until three hours after the beginning of labour that you learn that somewhere at a hospital in downtown Toronto, your baby is being born. When the call comes, you are out jogging along the cold beach, and by the time you return, your husband has already left to find a crib that can be delivered in a day. A brief informative note is taped to the front door. Your husband’s efficiency, his ability to circulate rapidly through possibilities and arrive at action, always seems a close relative of an optimism you deeply admire, and deeply revile.
So while he drives the green rental minivan all over the suburbs, through the flat grey mall landscapes of Richmond Hill and Brampton and Mississauga trying to find an in-stock crib, you sit on the couch and paint your toenails red.
You have not allowed preparation because you believe that preparation leads to failure. Wiping the excess polish from the brush, you rethink the moment: somewhere at a hospital in downtown Toronto, a baby is being born. Such revisions are often necessary when you are someone who is always ready not to have.
Your heart rate is 100 beats per minute. Somewhere in your mind, in snapshots that linger like fantasy and grip you like memory, a baby is taking to a nipple. These flashes have been coming at you for days. Yours is not an ordinary kind of waiting, for the heralding cramps, a cervical shifting. Occasionally, you do think you feel your uterus contract, but you know this is just the clench of absence, the tightness of a responsibility displaced, uncredited. You ease yourself off the couch and walk like a penguin so you don’t smudge your toenails and you turn on the old air conditioner full blast even though it is the beginning of March. For a week, you have been too hot. You hold up your nylon running shirt and let the air cool the moist underside of your breasts. The living room still smells faintly of latex paint, and you worry that you have made the first in a long line of bad choices. When a year ago you first saw this small house down near the beach, a white house with one and a half floors and chipping grey shutters and stained glass along the top of the living room window, you called your husband at work and told him you would never forgive him if he didn’t love the place as much as you did. The two of you had spent all your weekend mornings for half a year combing the real estate pages of the Globe and Mail, but it was only when you took a wrong turn on Queen Street on your way to the doctor that you came across the right house in the corner of a dead-end street. All of your savings went into the down payment, your parents joined with his to buy you a new roof, and that was the end of the money. You didn’t want to change anything anyway. You didn’t want to peel the paint off the shutters and repaint. You didn’t want to flood the lawn with herbicides to get rid of the weeds. Whatever was decrepit about the house made it seem romantic, like a country
cottage with whitewashed walls and family antiques at the end of a long dirt road.
So in love were you already with the outside of the house, with its tucked-away charm, that promise of a sweet new life, that you were able to ignore the neglected interior. Instead of old plaster walls painted a fresh, warm white, you faced cheap drywall like dented cardboard and an ill-considered dark, dirty pink everywhere. Not the place of your country fantasies, not worn and well-loved, with hardwood floors rubbed pale by years of children and dogs padding in and out, walls dotted with holes where pictures had been hung—none of what you pictured when you were imagining bright rooms piled high with books and whimsical decorations, the laughter and calm of a summer house. On all the bedroom doors were locks, and in the wall of the master bedroom was a small hole the size of a fist punched in. You and your husband made minor changes—artwork on the walls, sheer curtains to let in the light—but you consented to live here, for a time, in this pink bloated place, this intestinal cage. After the realtors and lawyers, the roof, and growing concerns about an unstable foundation, you and your husband had no energy for painting. And your sister had said that you needed to live in a house for a time before you knew what you really wanted.
Lying in bed one mid-winter Saturday morning, your husband had sat up suddenly and said, “I can’t live with these pink walls anymore. This place needs some personality. Don’t you think some warm, rich colours would be just the thing?”
He is able to live with things endlessly, your husband, never complaining, until he is suddenly no longer able to tolerate them for a second. He surprises you often with his gift for momentum.
“You feel like painting?” you asked. “Really?”
“We’ve put all our money here. We’ve put on a new roof. This is where we are now. We’re not in transition. It’s time we made a full investment in our emotional future.”
You looked around at the pink walls and up at the ceiling, where someone had stuck glow-in-the-dark stars. You get used to things.
“I don’t know about all that work.”
“How about dark red in here?” he said.
He pulled the sheet tight under you and flipped you out of bed. “No excuses. I’m tired of living in someone else’s house.”
When he went out to the paint store that afternoon, you called your friend—the friend your husband doesn’t know about—who said, “What are you doing this afternoon?”
“I’m busy making an investment in my emotional future,” you replied.
And when your husband came back that afternoon, he stacked ten cans of paint in the kitchen and pulled you close. “Let’s be daring.”
You had said, “I can do that.”
The plan was for a quick turnover, sorcery of a kind. In the end, you were no help. You moved so slowly with the roller that he said it would be easier to paint by himself. Seven days later, your kitchen was a bursting yellow, your dining room an inky blue, your bedroom the deep red of a library.
“What do you think?” he asked, a smear of green across his cheek.
You and your husband have a pact that you are not allowed to criticize that which you have refused to become involved in.
“At least we’re not living in a stomach anymore.” You smiled and accepted his high-five.
You made phone calls from the orange bathroom.
“You’re living in a fun fair,” said your friend.
You agreed and told your friend about something that had been getting on your nerves for a while: that your husband gets bored in bookstores.
“I correct myself then,” your friend answered. “It’s Disney-world you’re living in. A world of animation and songs. Words not welcome here.”
A vision of your husband stretching the orange roller up to the ceiling with a tired grunt presented itself before you, and you were newly defensive.
“You’re wrong, you don’t get it,” you said. “Who else would do all that work without any help? And he doesn’t even hold it over my head.”
You wish you could form an opinion and stick to it. You wish you could blame your hormones.
A week ago, you walked in the front door just as the afternoon sun was spilling into your lime green living room. You went straight back out to the hardware store and bought gallons of white paint and wondered how you had ever slept or breathed in a house with so much colour, so smirking and carnivalesque. Your husband was away on a business trip, and you called in sick to work, you painted from morning to night. When he returned, he nodded and said nothing. He thought it was your version of pregnancy cravings and aversions. It was understandable. He didn’t say this, but you could tell he thought it, with the fatherly dismissiveness that sometimes makes you want to throw kitchen appliances at him. Now you’re worried the latex fumes will give the baby brain damage. Your husband nods at this too. For the first time in your life, you have permission to be irrational, as if fluctuating hormones can be relocated from one body to another.
In the beginning, before the doctors and consultants and social workers, you wandered around baby stores on your lunch hour. You took Polaroids of mahogany sleigh cribs and canopied white cribs and stood in the spare room holding the images up to the empty wall, trying to predict which one would look best. You bought newborn sleepers in pink and blue and spread them on the bed between you and your husband. You measured their length against your hand. When your husband suggested vacations, you started sentences with, When we have a baby. After a while, you threw out the ovulation predictor kit. You burned the crib pictures in the fireplace. You learned not to start sentences with assumptions. After a while, you remembered not to expect.
YOUR HEART RATE holds steady at 100 beats per minute. You wonder how long the heart can sustain such stress.
To calm yourself, you think of the refrigerator, of all the fruit and vegetables that have gone to waste because you have been eating only cereal and yogurt. You think of the shrubs that need trimming in the backyard. You think of waterfalls. On your way to work one morning, you heard on the radio a biofeedback expert who recommended that patients calm their bodies not by focusing hard on a happy place, but by letting their minds graze over something that moves softly, with the tempo of a lullaby, such as palm trees swaying in the breeze. You chose mountainside waterfalls, even though you realized that they moved rapidly, not a languid lullaby but the grand flurry of a symphony’s climax. It seemed to you that you could stand under that sparkling rush and have some good sense washed into you.
Your visions of waterfalls are based mainly on what you have seen on the Discovery channel or in National Geographic. It was not until your honeymoon in Jamaica that you saw a real waterfall. Your hotel organized a day trip to Dunn’s River Falls, which turned out to be not steep and fast, like your fantasy waterfalls, but long and intricate, meandering, made up of many smaller, dome-shaped waterfalls. Visitors were allowed to climb, but only as a group, and were instructed to hold hands all the way up. As the chain of tourists wound its way ploddingly up the falls, you turned to the person next to you—a pasty woman who had informed you at the beginning of the hike that she was not an American—and said, “Don’t you think we’re much more likely to fall this way?” She looked at you as if you had just threatened to pitch her over the falls and aimed her words at your hand, gripped in hers, “In situations like this, you must always follow instructions.”
Your husband was at the end of the chain, at least twenty people removed from you, intentionally. As the bus had rattled down the unpaved highway that morning, your husband sat next to you holding your hand—he had been doing this with an almost maniacal resolve since the wedding—and whispering, Almost there, Almost there. Because you were too busy trying not to throw up, you couldn’t tell him that his efforts to alleviate your queasiness, a sweaty hand engorging yours, hot breath smelling faintly of pancakes, were even less helpful than the potholes in the road and the spirit of song your fellow hotel tourists had fallen into in spite of their discovery that “One
Love” wasn’t working as a round. He was even less helpful than the bus driver, a retired insurance salesman from Kansas who abruptly pulled the bus over to the side of the road to put a stop to the new song, “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer,” as the first few voices rose predictably in the back of the bus. You were actually grateful for the momentary reprieve from motion as the bus driver stood in the aisle and shouted, “Cut,” slicing his hand quickly across his neck. “No songs about drinking on a moving vehicle,” a declaration that put everyone, including your husband, even more feverishly in the spirit of song, as if they were schoolchildren again, left to this meagre rebellion. Less helpful than all of those things was how your husband managed to stop singing five times in the course of “American Pie” to stroke your hand and reassure you, Almost there, Almost there.
You weren’t almost there, though. As a fleet of buses from other hotels joined yours along the way, your pace slowed and by the time you reached the parking lot near the waterfall, you and your husband had participated in a lengthy fight in your head about all-inclusive resorts. He debarked the bus first, saying, “I’m going to ask around if anyone has some Gravol.”
The silence when he left was blissful and disorienting, something that wouldn’t make it into his itinerary, and it seemed your own private rebellion. Solitude is not something committed people are supposed to want on their honeymoons. Your husband speaks often and fondly of committed people. A word with many conjugations, promises of future jailing. “I am being committed,” you said to your mother the morning of your wedding as she looked on approvingly, securing an antique platinum bracelet around your wrist. You knew it was true that in order to enjoy this honeymoon fully, you would need to be committed. You were having your best moment alone on the bus, but you were supposed to be making friends. You were supposed to be getting into the spirit of things.
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