This Is Happy

by Camilla Gibb

  ALSO BY

  camilla gibb

  Mouthing the Words

  The Petty Details of So-and-so’s Life

  Sweetness in the Belly

  The Beauty of Humanity Movement

  Copyright © 2015 Camilla Gibb

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Gibb, Camilla, 1968-, author

  This is happy / Camilla Gibb.

  ISBN 978-0-385-67812-4 (bound). ISBN 978-0-385-67813-1 (epub)

  1. Gibb, Camilla, 1968-. 2. Authors, Canadian (English)—20th century—Biography. I. Title.

  PS8563.I2437Z53 2014 C813′.54 C2013-906256-4

  C2013-906257-2

  Cover design: Kelly Hill

  Cover and text image (egg in nest): Jill Battaglia/Shutterstock.com

  Cover background textures: Flas100 and Nik Merkulov, Shutterstock.com

  Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada,

  a division of Random House of Canada Limited,

  a Penguin Random House company.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part One: Incubate

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part Two: Hatch

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Part Three: Roost

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part Four: Flight

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Postscript—August 2014

  Acknowledgements

  To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.

  Simone Weil

  prologue

  It is a crisp fall Saturday and I am alone with my daughter, without plans, daunted about getting through the day. My parents have two new cats—I welcome the spontaneous invitation to come over and meet them. My daughter has become a cat herself; it takes two hours to wrangle her into a diaper and a dress, and then the fight over sitting in her car seat begins.

  She is two years old. No, I don’t want to, I don’t have to, I won’t—she has various ways of expressing a consistent opinion.

  It is 11:15 a.m. and we have been up for six hours. We have had a bath and cooked breakfast and made tea and read books and done art and sung songs and played soccer and I am ready for adult company and the distraction of cats and grandparents. But my daughter wants to drive the car. She wants to play with the lock and tune the radio. She wants to do anything but get into her car seat.

  I’m promising cats! Grandparents! Riverdale Farm! Goldfish! Dora Band-Aids!

  My daughter sits in the driver’s seat punching the buttons on the CD player. She helpfully pronounces it broken.

  I give up. I sit down on the pavement and tell her I’ll wait until she’s ready to get into her car seat. I wait a very long time.

  Okay, I finally say, standing up, impatient. Would you like to have my Saturday? Go for a walk, maybe buy some flowers, a paper and some bread and sit and read for a bit in a café over a coffee?

  Yes, she says, much to my astonishment.

  So now we are sitting outdoors as I have an Americano and she has a glass of warm milk and a slice of baguette and some fancy French cheese. The basket of my daughter’s tricycle holds the pink and yellow flowers she chose from a bucket at the corner store down the street. She eyes me reading my newspaper. Would you like the magazine? I ask.

  Yes, she says.

  I give her the magazine. She flicks through it, slowing at cleavage and jewels, while I read the paper. Birds hover at her feet, hoping for a crumb. I tell her we can feed the birds, ask her if she wants to. Little pieces, I tell her, they have tiny mouths. She studies them as they snatch the pieces from the ground.

  I drink my coffee, scan the newspaper and watch my little girl. You are my daughter, I realize. You are the daughter of someone relatively quiet and tending toward the serious. I’m sorry for not understanding that these things are part of who you are, too. I am sorry for having been so afraid. For having failed to relax enough to know this about you; for having failed to share with you who I am.

  We come to know ourselves only through stories. We listen to the stories of others, we inherit the stories of those who came before, and we make sense of our own experiences by constructing a narrative that holds them, and holds us, together. Stories are how we make sense of our lives.

  “All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them,” Isak Dinesen once said. Sorrows are all pain otherwise, pain without sense or meaning. But joys, too, it seems to me, need their context. And sometimes their coexistence needs to be borne. The coexistence or possibility of the opposite can be what gives an experience its meaning. At its simplest, that is a story.

  And this is mine. It can only be mine, the way I have found to make sense of things. It risks the involvement of others because we do not become ourselves in isolation. Telling such a story, furthermore, relies on memory, that most fallible of sources. It demands the creation of something coherent out of disparate bits and pieces and gaps in knowledge. It is flawed in the way every memoir is inherently flawed. Still, we continue to relate such stories. Because they are necessary. We are the storytelling animal; our stories are what make us human.

  1

  I never expected to be happy, to have a sense of belonging somewhere. I didn’t grow up with a sense that this was possible or even desirable. I’m quite sure my parents didn’t either, so I come by this honestly. Still, they did try to find a way out of what was unhappy. Forty-something years ago, they hatched a plan to escape their English lives. They felt stifled in England, trapped by the expectations of family, of class. They drew up an alphabetical list of Commonwealth countries, ruling out Australia because of distance (and a slight penal tw
inge), and chose Canada as the place to immigrate with my brother and me, two children under four.

  We were too young to understand what was happening. My father came over a year in advance to find a job and a place for us to live. I cried when this strange man lifted me up at the airport. Three months after our arrival, a package arrived from my paternal grandmother. She was a great maker of fudge and had sent us a box of it. I remember the sense of anticipation as my mother peeled back the lid and the collective disappointment as the contents were revealed: green and furry, having spent six weeks on a ship. I understood, somehow, that something between here and there had been broken.

  We had no history here, no story of belonging. This disorientation didn’t suit my father—a rule-bound, rigid, public-school-educated former British Army officer who had been thrown out of the military for his insult of a black superior. Despite his desire to emigrate to a freer world, his beliefs about race, class, women and children just became more entrenched in Canada. And more obviously peculiar.

  I knew he was odd, I knew to tread carefully to avoid being the target of his not infrequent outbursts, but I loved him very much. He scrambled eggs for me, took me swimming and biking, and he played the violin and the guitar. He did puzzles with me and made me look things up in the dictionary. He called me a boisterous girl, a hoyden. He built things out of wood. I liked the smell of sawdust on him and the feel of his cheeks clean-shaven. I loved him even when I was embarrassed by or scared of him. I think I was the only one.

  Shortly after our arrival in Canada he was “diagnosed” as being an egomaniac without empathy or regard for others—this by a psychologist hired by his employer to do an assessment of him for some undisclosed reason. My mother tells me my father was enormously proud of this characterization, so much so that he sent a copy of the report home to his parents, this report that pretty much ended his formal working life. After that it was a series of failed attempts to start a business. That and a lot of drinking, and not always getting out of bed.

  My mother must have decided she’d had enough. When I was nine, my father went away on a long “business trip.” We went to visit him in Chicago over March Break and he asked my mother if she liked the dining-room table and chairs he’d just bought. That furniture told me everything I needed to know. I didn’t need to stand outside the next day, staring at a half-frozen pond, having my father spell it out for me.

  I didn’t want him to be apart from us; I was worried he would be lonely; I was worried I would be lonely, too.

  We went back to the apartment, where my brother was so thrilled by the news of their imminent divorce that he was jumping up and down on the bed. My father tended to reserve his cruellest outbursts for my brother. He often referred to him as “that boy,” as if to distance himself from their association. He’d take out my mother at the same time. “What’s wrong with that boy?” meant he doesn’t get that from my side. They were a pair, in my father’s eyes. And so were we. But from here on the balance would shift.

  That same year, a new man, the antithesis of my thin, clean-shaven father, appeared in our lives. Again, I knew what was going on before I was told because of a piece of furniture. My mother took us to an apartment downtown where she was picking up a wooden chest she said she was buying from a friend of a friend.

  The apartment smelled of incense and cigarettes. The man was dark, swarthy and very, very hairy. He had scars on his face and spoke loudly with an accent. He was wearing hip-hugging, flared Levi’s and a loose white shirt without a collar.

  My brother bounced around the place. I crossed my arms over my chest, stood firmly rooted by the door and didn’t utter a word.

  Ara moved into our house not long after. He was twenty-eight years old, my mother forty. As soon as he arrived, he tossed out the single beds my parents had always slept in and built a double bed. He planted tomatoes and marijuana in the backyard. He was an actor, which wasn’t a real job, because he didn’t wear a suit and go to an office, not that my father had gone to an office in a very long time. Worst of all, he was openly affectionate with my mother.

  Everything felt slippery and loose. I didn’t like the changes in the house or the changes I saw in my mother. I missed my father. I felt sorry for him, drunk and crying, living alone, moving constantly—Des Plaines, Long Island, Toronto—or camping in buggy woods or farmers’ fields. At school the following year, a teacher I adored pulled me aside and asked me if there was anything wrong at home. I didn’t know how to respond. I thought the only legitimate answer, the only right wrong, was that you were being physically abused, which I wasn’t. I spent the rest of the year wishing someone would beat the shit out of me so that I could say yes to this teacher. I considered taking a knife and slashing my leg so that I had something to show her, even if I couldn’t speak.

  At ten years old I was silent and trapped in my own dark fantasies. I watched what was happening around me from a remove.

  I saw my brother, who had always been terrified of our father, embrace this new man without hesitation. In fact, everyone did, everyone but me. I kept vigilant, bitter watch for over a year. Then, one weekend, when we were visiting the farm of a friend of my mother’s, that changed. I had spent the day swimming solitary laps across the pond while Ara, my brother and a host of other children ran around naked and rolled down the muddy bank. That night there was a wrestling match, and Ara was taken on by the combined forces of four children. From my vantage point on the stairs, as the other children shrieked with delight and pinned him down, I found myself overwhelmed by a surge of proprietary feeling.

  It plays out filmically in my memory, in slow and continuous motion. When he was seated again, I stood up. Everyone was silent as I walked across the room toward him. I slid onto his lap. I glared at the other children. He was mine. He belonged to me. The rest of them could just back off.

  And suddenly the world brightened; it was brighter than it had ever been. Ara cooked and yelled and danced in our kitchen. He brought noise and colour into our world, as if firecrackers were being let off inside the house. He invited his acting friends over for long dinners and the kitchen was full of food and laughter and wine and smoke. I don’t remember my parents ever having anyone over for dinner. There were moments of a kind of happiness, a freedom, that I had never experienced before, the four of us together in bed on Saturday mornings, my mother and Ara reading the paper, my brother and I the comics; there was silliness, and play.

  My mother wore a ring Ara had given her and Ara said he wanted to adopt us.

  My father referred to Ara as “that Paki your mother was having an affair with while we were still married.” The fact that it began as an affair was likely true, but that wasn’t what bothered me.

  “He’s Armenian,” I defended. “The Armenians have had a really hard time.”

  Ara had grown up in Beirut, and he cultivated in us a taste for kibbeh and baba ghanouj and we accumulated a vast arsenal of Arabic words for naughty bodily bits and what one could do with them. Many of these dishes and profanities are still part of my diet and vernacular, even though the man himself is long gone.

  He left after just two years of living with us. He squatted on my bedroom floor one night and said things that were probably profound. Crying, he handed me a cheap Avon ring obviously designed for someone with grown-up hands. He was gone the next day. His Ravi Shankar and Arlo Guthrie albums remained in a box in the basement. There was no explanation.

  Things at home became sad and quiet. My mother took a frozen lump of something out of the freezer every morning, dropped it in the sink, put on her nylons and her heels and left for work, never returning until the end of the day. She was never sick, never missed a day of work; in duty, perhaps there lay salvation. In the evenings, she cooked the lump, drank two Scotch and sodas and read a book with the cat on her lap.

  She has never been much of a talker. She is quiet and concealed, even from her children. At an earlier age, my brother and I found the romance in it. Sh
e had worked for MI5 in England. She was a steel trap, which is why she’d made such a good spy. She was the perfect operative: both circumspect and extraordinarily beautiful. She would tell us nothing about her work with MI5. Nothing. This only fuelled our fantasies. She declared she’d only been a secretary. This being classic spy subterfuge, we refused to believe her.

  As a consequence of her lack of revelation, I learned to detect the slightest shadow of mood, the obliquest evidence. I felt the hidden things; I absorbed them. Perhaps my mother wanted to spare us her pain by trying to blanket it in silence, but it radiated from her and flooded me.

  In order to know someone who is at some level unknowable, you must leave yourself wide open. If you don’t, you foreclose the possibility of learning something critical about this person you need, your parent, the person upon whom your survival depends. It’s like time-lapse photography; your lens at maximum aperture in order to capture something fleeting and elusive. The problem becomes one of calibration. How to protect yourself in the process. How to capture something without going blind.

  My brother and I were ready to receive in a climate of relative deprivation. We were often on our own, latchkey kids, not uncommon in that era. We had inherited my mother’s looks: we were pretty children, pretty and vulnerable, my brother particularly so. Once, a stranger stopped him along his paper route and asked if he could show him to a park. My brother said sure, and when they got there the man pulled out his penis and only then did my brother understand something was wrong. My brother fled. My mother called the police. The man was charged with raping two boys in the schoolyard not long after. My brother had to identify him in a lineup.

  Right and wrong were clear because he was a boy. For me, things felt much more ambiguous. A man used to stare at me at the swimming pool. He terrified me. He would follow me part of the way home. A man on a schoolyard tennis court called me over to collect a tennis ball, but he was holding his penis in his hand. A teacher wanted to see my belly button, and a later one backed me into a wall and put his tongue in my mouth.

  I was frightened, but ashamed in every case, and so I told no one. I both assumed this happened to every girl and assumed it was my fault. The messages we got from my father were very confusing. When, at eleven, I first wore eyeliner, my father called me a slut. When Micah tried to greet my father with a hug, he called him a faggot.