by Camilla Gibb
“Did you suddenly get religion, or something?”
“Just a little perspective,” he said.
She sighed. “Will you do me one favour?”
“What is it?”
“See a vocational counsellor.”
“What on earth for?” he barked.
She winced. “If you really are entertaining a career change, it might be helpful to talk to someone about it.”
“But I know exactly what I’m going to do. I’ve found my calling.”
“Just this one favour, Oliver—could you do me this one favour? I promise I’ll respect whatever decision you make after that.”
He stared at her blankly.
“For me?” she pleaded.
“All right,” he conceded. “But my mind’s made up.”
“All right,” she sighed, diffusing what she knew could have otherwise mushroomed into something large and toxic. She was relieved that he was simply out of bed.
The vocational counsellor quickly dispatched Oliver for a psychological assessment. He spent what he said was a useless hour and a half staring at ink blots, but was pleasantly surprised by the report sent by the psychologist the following week. It was full of words: superior IQ, delusional, overinflated sense of self-worth, self-aggrandizing, and paranoid tendencies. The report offered more of a career-related prognosis than definitive clinical diagnosis: Oliver Taylor was an employer’s worst nightmare.
“It simply means I’m of much more use on the planet when I’m marching to the beat of my own drum,” he said proudly, taping the assessment to the fridge. He repeatedly punched it with a firm finger, demanding each member of his family acknowledge the scientific proof of his superior intelligence. He’d stopped reading the report after superior IQ, completely failing to register that the words that followed were suggestive of dubious character and unstable mental health. Oliver Taylor was thirty years old and had just received the last pay-cheque of his life.
Elaine had always known Oliver was different, and that was precisely why she had married him. Her path down that slippery slope toward him had begun in 1967, when she was at the zenith of her adolescent life as an angry young woman. As the end of her senior year approached, it became obvious she wasn’t going to be asked to the prom at her Boston high school. Since this was a stigma akin to having leprosy, her parents decided to intervene in the hope of preventing her from being banished to some remote colony where she would spend the rest of her days losing bits of her body and soul.
They weren’t sure if she even had a soul, though. She had what they termed “socialist leanings,” a tendency which was so thoroughly offensive to their class pretensions that she had, for the last two years, dined alone with her books in her room, and spent the summers waitressing while her parents holidayed at the cottage in Maine. She knew she had a soul—just one the world around her considered alien. She’d hitch a ride on a satellite one day and wander the universe in search of like aliens. Until then, she had her books, and an industrial-sized lock on her bedroom door.
When Peter Wainright asked her to the prom then, she was deeply suspicious. The prom was at the end of June, and dates for the great event had been secured as early as January. It was the third of June when he asked her, so she knew she couldn’t be his first choice. But she was a choice, and although this mystified her, she couldn’t help but feel flattered.
On the fateful day, she had thrown her bookbag down on her bed after school, and in and amongst the dog-eared textbooks, feminine hygiene products, chewed pens, and lint-covered lip glosses was a postcard of the Great Wall of China. On the reverse it read:
Dear Elaine,
It’s taken me such a long time to work up my nerve to ask you, that you probably already have a date for the prom. If you don’t—I’d be honoured to take you.
Yours sincerely,
Peter Wainright
She stared at his minute, precise scrawl, thinking, Surely, this must be a joke. Peter Wainright was the son of Dr. and Mrs. Derek (“Tilly”) Wainright, the snooty couple with whom her parents played bridge every other Sunday afternoon. Dr. Wainright was a plastic surgeon, and Mrs. Wainright was just plastic, and Peter was apparently going to dental school in the fall, presumably because, like every other boy in her year who was off to dental school in the fall, he’d failed to get into medical school. Despite all that was not in his favour, Elaine actually thought Peter Wainright was all right. Still, this surely had to be a joke.
“What do you make of this?” she asked her older brother Sam.
“Well, I might be stating the obvious, but it looks like Peter Wainright is inviting you to the prom.”
“For real?”
“Well, what other kind of invitation is there?”
“Maybe it’s a hoax.”
“You read too much,” Sam groaned. “I’d say you better say yes. Might be your only chance of being normal.”
She dared to brush by Peter Wainright’s desk the next day on her way to her seat in calculus class. She peered down at his notebook and flushed red at the sight of his handwriting—as minute and meticulous as the letters on the back of the Great Wall of China. She sat nervously in front of him, wondering if her hair looked like a battered meringue from behind, and scribbled a note to him on the last page of her notebook.
Dear Peter,
Thank you for your invitation to the prom. After seriously weighing the options of my various offers, I have decided that I would, indeed, like you, above any one else, to take me. I’ll be wearing pink and I’m allergic to roses.
Yours sincerely,
Elaine Howard
As soon as the bell rang, she bolted from the room, dropping the note on Peter’s desk as she ran past him. In her haste she dropped her calculus text with a humiliating thud, but was far too embarrassed to turn around and pick it up. Peter retrieved the book from the floor and followed her to her locker, where she was rummaging clumsily in search of nothing in particular.
“You dropped this,” he said.
“Oh? Did I?” she said, feigning surprise. “Silly me.”
“Thank you for your note.”
“Note? Oh yes,” she said, as if she’d forgotten having dropped off her unabashed “yes” five minutes earlier.
“So, I’ll pick you up at seven?”
“Oh. Yes, fine. Thank you,” she nodded and returned to the catacombs of her locker.
“I’ll be seeing you, then.”
“See you!” she chirped inside the dead space of her locker. She didn’t dare look at him. She was sure she was turning green. She leaned further into her locker and breathed deeply, and then quietly threw up into her running shoes.
After a jocular exchange full of “Haar yes,” and “Of course, sir,” between Peter and her father in the foyer, Elaine and Peter drove off in his father’s white Buick.
“First stop, Mike’s place. Then we pick up Mary-Ann,” Peter announced. Elaine froze. Mike was Peter’s best friend, and Mary-Ann, his date, the type of girl who was a cheerleader with all the sickening potential of being chosen prom queen.
In fact, when Mary-Ann plopped down in the back seat, all flounce and ringlets, she said as much. “Petey! You know, if you guys don’t make me prom queen, I’ll have to burn the hair of the girl who wins!”
She turned to Elaine then and commented on her dress. “Interesting” was the word she used. “Did you make it yourself?” she asked patronizingly. Elaine nodded, and Mary-Ann said, “Oh, good for you! I’m just useless with a needle and thread.”
It went from bad to worse. Peter and Mike took turns dancing with Mary-Ann all night and Elaine spent a great deal of time staring at her shoes (which she hadn’t, incidentally, made herself). Peter kept coming up to the table and asking her if she was all right, bringing her a glass of punch each time. Halfway through the night, she was sitting alone at a table with six glasses of punch lined up in a row, none of which she had touched. Mrs. Petrie, the gym teacher, must have felt sorry for h
er, because she pulled up a chair beside Elaine and asked her if she was having a lovely time.
“Terrific,” Elaine said drolly.
Mrs. Petrie looked sympathetic and said, “I wouldn’t worry, dear. They haven’t got half your intellect,” nodding her head in the direction of the two boys flanking the now near-hysterical swirling blonde. “You got accepted to Harvard, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, so?”
“Well, that’s better than any of them could do.”
“Well, I’m not going.”
“You haven’t accepted?”
“I never wanted to apply in the first place. I just ghost wrote my mother’s application. It wasn’t me. It isn’t me. I’m getting the hell out of Boston.”
“Where are you going?”
“Canada.”
“Canada?” said Mrs. Petrie with such surprise you’d think it were a penal colony.
“Montreal. McGill.” Montreal was only six hours away, but it was about as far away from the sordid demonstration in front of her as she could imagine.
“Well, that’s brave,” she commended her.
Not really, thought Elaine.
Despite feeling self-righteous and determined, Elaine did still, of course, secretly hope that Peter was just being coy and saving the last dance for her. Anticipating this as the night wore on, she excused herself from Mrs. Petrie and went to floss her teeth in the ladies’ room. “Shhhh,” she heard as soon as she walked in, followed by a succession of hiccups and muffled giggles. A bottle of cherry brandy crashed to the floor inside the cubicle behind her and Mary-Ann let out a high-pitched screech: “Oh shit, Peter! You’ve stained the front of my dress!” Mary-Ann burst out of the cubicle then and ran to the sink beside Elaine, hitching up her dress to her navel in an effort to get it under the tap. Elaine was staring into the mirror as Peter emerged, his reflection slightly drunk and stupid.
“Hi,” he waved lamely at Elaine’s face in the mirror.
“Hi,” she waved back, mockingly.
“Peter, you could at least help me!” shouted Mary-Ann, frantically scratching her nails into the fabric of her dress.
When Peter didn’t move, Elaine said, “It’s the least you could do,” and gave him a patronizing glare designed to make him feel like a pathetic fool.
“Elaine—” Peter stammered, indeed feeling like a pathetic fool.
“Fuck off, Peter,” she said simply.
Peter and Mary-Ann both looked shocked. “Such unladylike language,” Mary-Ann chided. “No wonder your father had to pay someone to ask you to the prom.”
“Mary-Ann!” Peter cringed.
“Oh,” Mary-Ann crooned with false pity. “You didn’t know your daddy paid Peter to ask you? Come on, darling. You didn’t really think Petey Wetey was interested in you, did you?”
Elaine called Sam from the phone in Mrs. Petrie’s office. “Come right away,” she said. “They’re a bunch of cretins.”
“He could have at least driven you home,” Sam said in the car after he picked her up on the corner. “I mean, jeez, Dad paid him enough.”
“You knew?” she screamed. She sank back into the plush burgundy seat in defeat. She closed her eyes and erased the world in front of her, imagining Montreal instead, a city of exotic light at the end of this tunnel of horrors. The rest of the world and all the people in it could go straight to hell as far as she was concerned. She locked her bedroom door until late August, until it was time to pack nothing and leave for university.
“I want to be a writer,” she told the shaggy-haired Scottish boy in the smoky coffee shop the following November.
“Cool,” he said. He fingered a Rizla intently and rolled a perfect cigarette, which he then offered to her. She took it from his wide, black-ink-stained fingers and said a shy thank you. She liked his deep blue eyes and his throaty, smoke-laden laugh. She liked that he was here in this café every afternoon, looking moody and making a single cup of coffee last for hours.
“So let me see what you’re writing,” he said after he’d lit her cigarette.
She looked sheepish and said, “It’s really rough.”
“I like it rough,” he teased.
“Where do you come from?” she asked him.
“Oh, the wilds,” he said, his eyes widening. “The land of bracken and heather and haggis.”
“Scotland?”
“Right y’are, missy,” he growled in becoming brogue.
“And what are you doing in Montreal?”
“Ahh. I’m escaping a terrible past,” he said flirtatiously.
“Are you on the run?” she asked, hoping for danger.
“I am.”
“From the law?”
“From all laws that say a man must live out the expectations of his parents.”
“What did your parents want you to be?”
“A military officer like my dad, married to a wee hen from the Hebrides who would serve me tea at six, and wouldn’t often have an opinion—unless, of course, she agreed with me.”
“I’m on the run from that law, too,” Elaine confided.
“Did they want you to be a schoolmarm and give it all up to marry a doctor from Philadelphia?”
“How did you know?” she said, rolling her eyes.
“I could tell, missy.”
“Could you?”
“You’ve got the look of a dreamer about you. A bird like you would bite through metal bars if she were trapped in a cage.”
Elaine smiled. She’d never thought she had the look of anything in particular about her, except perhaps that of an alien. Certainly nothing with a bite strong enough to chew through metal.
His name was Oliver. He’d been sent to live with his uncle Hugh in Montreal a couple of years before and was now studying architecture just a few buildings away from where Elaine was studying English. He didn’t want to talk much about his past. “As far as I’m concerned,” he said, “my life didn’t begin until I arrived in Montreal.”
“Are you happy here, then?” she asked him.
“Yeah,” he said, sounding a little surprised. “Not forever, but for now, yeah.”
On cold afternoons throughout that winter she let him read her rough drafts, and rather than respond in words he would doodle in the margins, framing her stories with colourful gnomes and one-eyed animals. He made her laugh, and each time she laughed the vice grip around her heart loosened another notch. In a matter of months it was beating regularly, without restraint. When he’d worn down every one of her defences with fun and flattery and long dreamy rants about how he was going to paint billboards in New York City and she was going to write a famous novel and they were both going to be fantastically rich without having compromised their “socialist leanings,” she said yes to his repeated proposal of marriage.
“But I’m never living in the U.S. again,” she declared, standing flanked by pasta and Cream of Wheat in the middle of the last aisle in a supermarket.
“Oh. But New York,” he said longingly, tossing a carton of eggs carelessly into their basket.
“That’s my one and only condition.”
He thought about it for a minute. “Would you ever consider Niagara Falls?”
“The Canadian side?”
“Sure.” It didn’t matter to Oliver—the Falls paid no attention to the border—they were the simultaneous wonder of New York State, Ontario, Canada, the U.S., and the world. They were the world, in his mind, or at least the central destination of its people, and he fancied himself at the centre of the universe. “Let’s have our honeymoon there,” he said excitedly.
“Kind of clichéd, don’t you think?”
“Charmingly so,” he agreed. “We’ll sleep in a heart-shaped bed and go bowling. What do you think, missus?” he asked, picking up a honeydew melon from a pile and bowling it down the length of the aisle until it crashed into the heel of an innocent senior citizen pushing a cart full of Pablum.
“Sorry!” he called saccharinely when she turne
d around in fright. “That would have been a strike,” he muttered to Elaine, grabbing her hands in his and kissing her hard on the mouth. Their kisses were always hard, and she liked their determination.
She moved into his rundown apartment with sloping floors after the honeymoon. First there were termites, and then there were two babies, and all of a sudden, there they were with Oliver punching his finger against the fridge declaring himself a certifiable genius and prophet of invention. His inventing would never prove to be a big money-maker, and his big dreams would never provide the warmth to heat them adequately through harsh Montreal winters. Elaine began to wonder when exactly they were going to start living the life of artistic expression and political integrity they’d once imagined.
It was after the first baby was born and named after Elaine’s favourite family pet and the world became all crap and diapers and cracked, chapped nipples, that Elaine knew they were never going to start living. All they had done was come full circle; managing to create a pathetic imitation of the very type of domestic arrangement they had sought to avoid. Oliver went to work in the mornings and drafted plans for tall buildings and Elaine stayed at home with Emma, and then Emma and her baby brother Llewellyn, and watched as the dream of writing a famous novel shattered into tiny fragments.
Oliver was totally unrealistic. When the baby girl was born he brought her an enormous box of assorted chocolates and tried to cram the bonbons into her mouth when Elaine wasn’t looking. He read to the baby from a dusty old encyclopedia and got frustrated when, instead of listening, she threw up in her lap. He asked her if she could remember her dreams and she looked at him with her wide eyes and burped. When Llewellyn arrived, he’d already long given up even attempting to pretend to be a parent.
Oliver was prone to Big Ideas and Pronouncements. The fantasy of their life was constructed on these BIPs. Oliver could make tangible shapes out of dust spiralling in a sliver of sunshine that pierced a dirty window. He could look at the clouds and say, “Elaine, that quadrant of blue is exactly the colour of the water that will lap against the shore of an island that our descendants will name after us one day.”