In Search of the Perfect Singing Flamingo

by Tacon, Claire;

  “Why is he selling vitamins?”

  Kath places her hands flat on the table. “That’s not what’s important right now. Melly and Chester have decided that this is their safest option.”

  If they’ve worked it all out, I don’t know why I’m being included.

  Chester speaks next. “I know it’s been sprung on you here. But we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this.”

  “You know my co-worker June,” Kath says. “Her daughter struggled with infertility. They went to the same clinic and now they’ve got happy, healthy twins. Boy and a girl.”

  “Any other surprises?”

  They all look deeply uncomfortable. Melly’s on the verge of crying and I don’t know what the hell I’m doing wrong.

  “It’s a state-of-the-art centre,” Kathleen says. “All the online reviews say the doctor is a miracle worker. They’re young so there’s an excellent success rate and likely they’ll get several embryos to freeze for next time. But it’s not covered by OHIP.” Kath sweeps bread crumbs off the tablecloth to avoid meeting my eye. “It’s ten thousand with all the testing.”

  Never in a million years did I expect to be asked to pay for my own grandchild.

  My pants start buzzing and I pull my BlackBerry out, despite our rule about phone calls during dinner and setting limits for Starr. Kathleen starts clearing plates. Melanie motions for her to sit down, she’ll do it, and pretty soon they’re all up and outdoing each other. Chester flicks on the coffee machine and I remember that he has to go to work after this. It’s half past nine and his shift starts at midnight.

  Starr is upset because her roommate, Della, isn’t talking to her. The TV’s on in the background and I wonder how long she tried to self-soothe before calling. She’s grasped the phone to her ear, her fingers muffling the mouthpiece. It’s going to be a long time before she calms down. If we can’t get her to settle, that means a Lorazepam and Kath coaching Starr through her fear of choking. Take a sip of water and count to five. Try again. Good girl. She should have been here tonight, with her family.

  Kath motions for me to hand over the phone. She’s furious with me, but she’s trained her voice to project composure, whatever the situation. If Starr thinks that her mother is unhappy, it will upset her more. She’ll worry it’s something she’s done. “No, sweetheart, it doesn’t sound like you did anything wrong. Della might just be upset because of personal problems.” Personal problems is one of the few code words that can ease Starr’s anxiety. “I’m going away for the weekend, sweetie, but I can make an appointment with Della’s parents. We can all sit down and have a friendly conversation.” As the primary contact with the community agencies, school boards and medical team, my wife has always been better at handling those conferences.

  Chester is in the kitchen, laying out a plate of biscotti. His willingness to keep up the social niceties, to prolong the evening, strikes me as both valiant and depressing. I take up Melly’s abandoned post at the sink. Her pink rubber gloves are draped over the lip of stainless steel. She’s gone I’m not sure where.

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t more enthusiastic.”

  He can’t read what I’m trying to say.

  “You had us over for a nice dinner.”

  He takes a glass from the tray. “I’m sure it’s fine.”

  “Well, if I’ve offended.” I let it hang there. “You two will have children one day.”

  Something sharp comes over his voice, “I hope so.” We have no rapport, this kid and I. He goes off with dessert and I’m alone again.

  From the other room, I hear Melly tell Starr she’ll go over next week with a video.

  When we leave, Kath pulls our daughter into a tight hug and whispers encouragement. I know exactly what she’s promising. Melly’s goodbye to me is like a 1950s slow dance – plenty of room for the Holy Spirit. I have a terrible feeling that when the door closes, she’ll be crying until Chester has to leave.

  “I’m sorry,” I repeat. “We’ll think about it.”

  Chester shakes my hand before wrapping himself around his wife like an oversized beach towel. “It’s been a rough year.”

  And then Kath pushes me out the door.

  When Melanie was born, Starr took to being a big sister right away. She found it hard to hold the baby because of her muscle tone, but she loved to sit on the couch with Melly propped in her arms. She’d talk to her sister non-stop, calling her “my sweet baby.”

  That first year we didn’t sleep for more than four hours at a stretch. Less because Melly was fussy, more because any amount of crying would wake Starr up too. She found the pitch deeply upsetting. She needed constant reassurance that the baby wasn’t dying, that the crying was normal. Kath would get up to feed the baby and I’d go quiet Starr, trying to make her laugh with my rendition of “Big Girls Don’t Cry.” In the end, we moved the baby’s crib into our room and I ripped out the drywall in Starr’s room, packed in decent insulation and replaced the door with something heavier.

  For a while, the girls were inseparable. Melly was the only kid whose older sister never minded her tagging along. By the time Melly turned eight, however, she’d started to catch up. Her social circle became more about school than home. The other kids liked Starr, but they didn’t always want her around. I still grieve those years before Melly’s seventh birthday, that time we were happiest as a family.

  Kath saw the switch coming. I think she was annoyed that I didn’t. Things couldn’t go on like that forever, she’d said, even if they were both typical.

  The van is still rolling to a stop as Kath steps out. The rubber of her tennis shoe catches on the concrete driveway and turns her ankle. She insists on hobbling inside without any assistance. When I hand her the bag of frozen peas, she lets it thaw on the table, inches away from her raised foot. I place Robax and a glass of water next to it.

  “You hate wearing flats at trade shows.”

  Professional Imprints has two hundred square feet booked this weekend in an Ottawa exhibit hall. Kath taps out two pills and swallows them in such a way that it’s clear she’s not accepting my kindness as an apology. She flaps the bag of vegetables onto her heel.

  It always comes back to the same complaint, our fights. That I’m too indulgent with one, not tender enough with the other. As if Kath’s manner is the yardstick of parental involvement.

  “Isn’t this something they could have registered for at the wedding?” My joke comes out flat, too hard-edged.

  “You’re better than this, Henry.”

  “We’re still paying that off.” A full sit-down with four courses, over a hundred guests. “And we helped with college.”

  “You know what I’m going to say.”

  We both know neither of those expenses will be duplicated. And that, over the years, we’ve spent far more on our oldest. But no one said that the expenses for each of your kids is meant to work out like a balance sheet. During her TVO phase, Kath once sat me down for a documentary on Marx. The only thing that stuck was that line – “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” If I could, I’d get a bumper sticker of that. Pay Kath’s company to embroider it on a cap. Break it out when the discussion starts up about equal treatment.

  She knows we don’t have ten grand. After borrowing on our house to buy the condo, we’re more in the hole than Melly and Chester. Retirement’s not a word in our vocabulary.

  “Does she know that she won’t be able to do that job with a kid?”

  “Chester’s schedule is flexible and his mother got packaged out at the bank.”

  If Kath’s going to do it anyway, why bother pretending? Another canker we’ve been picking at for decades.

  My wife returns the peas to the freezer and rests her weight on the fridge door. She’s locked into herself, trying to control her anger. I shouldn’t be so combative. I should be softer to her. I give her my hand, half-expecting her to ignore the gesture. She takes it and rubs it along her cheek.

 
“I’m going to tell you something that you’re not going to like. If you ever let on to Melly and Chester that you know –”

  I give her hand a squeeze.

  “No, I mean it. God knows we have too much shared responsibility to split up. But if you betray my trust on this.”

  Never once, in thirty years of arguments, mild to blowout, has Kath ever threatened me with divorce. She doesn’t look angry anymore, just terribly sad.

  “Melly’s baby had too many chromosomes. The specialist said it wasn’t likely to live for more than a few days outside the womb.” Kath threads out the words evenly, but her arms are shaking. “They did all the tests. Melanie asked and I gave her my blessing.”

  They didn’t tell his parents either. It must have killed Kathleen that, to keep up the pretense, she couldn’t have been there with our daughter until after the procedure.

  “The past year, she’s had to tiptoe around you and your complete lack of understanding about how much it broke her heart. Now, with the help of medical science, Melly has the chance to make sure she never has to go through that again.”

  I don’t need to be told twice. I pull Kathleen close and she pours herself against me. All night she wants to be held, my arm around her ribs, her hair swept vertical on the pillow. I lie awake a while, counting her breaths, feeling like some dumb mouse nosing the cheese who hasn’t figured out what’s about to fall.

  DARREN

  JEREMY DRIVES HIS MOM’S LEXUS LIKE HE’S THE ONE who bought it. He pulls up in front of our house, raises the volume on the radio and leaves the AC blasting. Waits to see if I’ll come out. Our neighbours, a retired white couple, rear up from their gardening. The woman is on the verge of asking him to stop idling the car. It’s twenty-eight degrees out, pre-humidex.

  Despite the heat, he’s lubed into a distressed-leather motorcycle jacket. It’s a step up from his Weapons of Mass Destruction shirt, the one with arrows pointing to his biceps. Jeremy and I were born ten months apart, which I take as proof that Chinese astrology is bullshit. He’s something that I’ve inherited, like a tendency to developing skin tags.

  After five minutes he knocks on the door. I wait until my mother calls up before bothering to come down. He’s still on the other side of the threshold when I reach the entrance, like a vampire without an invitation. My mother interprets this as shyness. She sucks him into a hug and calls for my father to come greet him. Jeremy follows her into the kitchen, rubbing her lipstick off with his fist. My father sets aside his reading glasses, crumpling the grocery flyers under his forearms.

  “You want some food?”

  “No, thanks, Mrs. Leung. We went out for dim sum earlier.” He rests his hand on his abs. For sure there’s a McDonald’s bag in the back seat of the car. Chicken nuggets are the closest he gets to dumplings these days.

  “Are you still crazy about chive potstickers?” My mother laughs, remembering an earlier outing to Pearl Garden. If I’d eaten the entire table’s order of fried dough and pork, my parents would have made me write apologies to every guest. “You boys going downtown? Going to meet some nice girls?”

  “Not for me,” Jeremy says, his hand up in the air, scout’s honour. “Just helping Darren.” Jeremy’s had the same girlfriend for four years. Being bland and liking Jeremy are the only bad things I can say about her. But every Friday night Jeremy’s dogging it around town, calling it “buddy time” like he’s watched Goodfellas too much and thinks people actually divide the weekend between wives and girlfriends.

  “What time will you be back?”

  “Not too late. Not too late.” He catches my eye and pointedly looks at my feet, lifting his pant leg to show me he’s not wearing sneakers. Jeremy shines the leather toe on the back of his jeans. Another inch and those shoes could be hanging off a witch at the Salem trials.

  Fine. The only cool footwear I have are sneaks. But I have some crappy, uncomfortable oxfords from my cousin’s wedding.

  “No drinking, right?” My mother waggles her finger, but clearly thinks the warning’s unnecessary. If he didn’t have such a nice, Chinese girlfriend, she’d bet Jeremy was headed to seminary.

  “Just a movie. Maybe the arcade.”

  I grab a red plaid bow tie from the back of the closet and clip it over my T-shirt, just to piss him off. And my parents. Vintage clothes are endlessly embarrassing to them – my mother says they smell of poverty. That was another strike against Luz, my ex, the fact that we’d go on dates to Goodwill instead of the mall. It’s why my mother stopped inviting us for dinner with Jeremy’s family. If I was going alone, it was easier to badger me into a newish shirt and tie.

  My mother and Jeremy’s mother have been like sisters since they met in English classes in Etobicoke. Because they came over at the same time, my mother doesn’t want us looking like shabby cousins.

  Jeremy frowns when he notices the tie, but doesn’t say anything because he wants to get going.

  “No drinking,” my mother repeats.

  “I’ll take good care of him.” Jeremy puts his arm around me, all brotherly. With those nutcracker biceps, he can get away with it, but I’m half a head taller than him.

  As soon as we’re out of the door he says, “You look like a douche.”

  “Either this or my tuxedo shirt.”

  “Don’t make a dick of yourself. We’re meeting up with my cousin’s UCC buddies.” What he really means is don’t embarrass me because they’re rich – you could harvest all your organs and still not come up with a year’s tuition to Upper Canada College.

  “I thought of another way to die,” I say. “It’s a poetry slam, you’re on a date. At first you get into it. Then they all start to sound the same. You realize, too late, all the poets are drunk. They hustle into their poems again and again, like a scratched record. Each time one pauses, you think the poem is over – but the poems are never over. Before you can even clap, another voice starts scatting from the crowd. You’re too polite to leave.”

  “So you starve to death?” Jeremy says.

  “No. You finally kill yourself with whatever is available. Probably a tea light. The last word you hear is privilege.”

  Jeremy checks his shades in the rear-view. “You know she’s fucking someone else, don’t you?”

  “We’re just on a break.”

  “She texting you these days?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No, she’s not.”

  I mentally scroll through my inbox. The only message Luz sent this week said she couldn’t Skype until she got back from Chicago. She’ll be there over the weekend, competing with six other horror shorts at the Comic Con student showcase. I wished her luck, said it was too bad I couldn’t be there. Comic Con was something we’d been planning together for a long time; part of me hoped she’d have a change of heart as the day approached. She didn’t write back.

  For a Thursday night, the club is dead. There’s our group and several other huddles of guys in the leather armchairs ringing the dance floor. A few pairs of girls park their elbows on the bar, twirling straws in fuchsia drinks, but the testosterone to estrogen ratio is not what Jeremy had hoped for. The music is too loud and it’s the usual pop shit with Vampire Weekend thrown in to make the DJ feel indie.

  “It’s so fucking quiet,” Jeremy says, hammering back vodka and Red Bull. No one other than me can hear him over the music, so he dips forward to Trapper, his cousin’s private school friend. “It’s so fucking quiet.”

  Trapper twists his watch – who even wears watches anymore? – and says, “Still early.”

  Good. I don’t want to head somewhere else either, unless it’s to the Dance Cave or somewhere with decent music. Besides, if my ID gets rejected at another club, I’ll be ditched at an all-night Tim Hortons while Jeremy looks for his next almost blow job.

  Unsatisfied, Jeremy turns to his cousin Lian. “You think we should stick around here?”

  The cousin shrugs, but Jeremy takes that as backup. “Hey, Trap.”

  �
��Trapper.”

  “Yeah. We’re thinking of heading somewhere else. You know, with more of a mix.”

  “A mix.” Trapper’s face is shiny with money, like Jude Law’s circa The Talented Mr. Ripley. They probably use the same upscale dippity-do hair cream.

  “Yeah, a mix.”

  “More Asians?”

  Jeremy does a quick double take. “No. You’re funny. This guy’s funny.” He punches my shoulder. “Of women. More chicks.”

  “Didn’t know what mix you were thinking of. No offence.”

  Jeremy doesn’t pick up on the tone.

  Lian drops his hand in front of his zipper – be cool – a gesture not unlike Joe Pesci lowering Sharon Stone’s head in Casino. He’s so tight with this crew, he could be doing Kegels on it. Jeremy must take this for the universal hot-pussy-is-on-its-way signal because he raises his eyebrows like he’s just caught the code.

  I head to the bar to cash in my designated driver prestige for free fountain pop. That’s the real reason I’m here tonight. I inherited the Asian alcohol thing, which conveniently skipped Jeremy, and can’t manage more than two. Coke, however, has no effect. I like to think that what I lack in ethanol digestive abilities, I make up for with caffeine and sugar.

  At ten to one, the club lurches into high gear and Trapper’s friends arrive. They don’t look like they belong – their clothes are too understated. There’s a peroxide blonde wearing a grey dress that would look exactly like a sack if it didn’t have extra low arm and neck cut-outs and a braided, pencil-thin belt. She lets our names wash over her. There’s another blonde with her – more honey than bleach, hair cut like a boy’s. A bit Jordan Baker to the other’s Daisy Buchanan. She’s wearing loafers and a button-down striped shirt that’s tucked into high-waisted ’40s chorus girl shorts. The kind of rich girl that thinks looking purposefully ugly makes her fashionable. When we drove Luz to Brooklyn College, the streets were full of them and she explained it to me.

  She’s not his type but Jeremy jostles over to her anyway. “So, you come here from work?”