This Is Happy

by Camilla Gibb

  I cry too much when it’s just the two of us. I cry and count the hours. The only joy I am able to take in my daughter is seeing her through the eyes of others. Being outside my experience offers a glimpse of what might have otherwise been.

  I leave Heidi’s house and take my baby out into the cold, dark middle-of-the-night. I go to the downtrodden mall near my house before any of the stores are open. I sit on a bench, my baby in her stroller, and burst into tears. I call the parenting mediator as soon as dawn breaks.

  Get out of that ugly mall, she says. Go somewhere beautiful.

  But you don’t understand, I say. There is nowhere beautiful.

  You need people, she says. You need new friends.

  A lot of friends fall away when you have a baby; a natural evolution. You just can’t do the things you used to do. You don’t have the time, the energy, the attention, perhaps the inclination. You might try to participate for the first little while, as I did, afraid of disappearing, only to realize the extent to which your rhythm and focus have changed.

  The life I used to know carries on without me.

  I have some idealized notion that the loss of friends and the lifestyle you used to share is eased when you are part of a couple. You have each other to share in the wonder and exhaustion of it all. You’re different, but different together. You have sidestepped out of the world you used to know, but there is love in the new place, and so you are warm and surrounded. I have married friends with children who have tried to disabuse me of any such romance, but still, the fantasy persists.

  You lose friends, too, for so many different reasons, when you are no longer part of a couple. Not immediately, necessarily, but over time. You try to hold on to people for different reasons, but the tacit knowledge they have about your former spouse, their ongoing friendships with her, and the embrace of her new girlfriend who was also once your friend, make it painful and impossible.

  You lose friends in grief. Grief turns you into a foreigner in a world you used to know; its persistence can render you a depressed and undesirable alien. People prefer you at a distance where there is less danger of contagion. If you have to appear in public, you must at least have the courtesy to wear a mask.

  3

  One change I did not anticipate is how much more present my mother and stepfather would be in my life. I have produced their only grandchild. My mother’s feelings toward her granddaughter have an intensity I have never seen in her.

  My mother’s parents are dead, her brother far away, her first husband, my father, long gone. Her son is back, though for how long we’re not certain. But she and I are no longer just the two survivors of a family; we are, with my daughter, now a line. I wonder if my mother looks at us and thinks: I created this. Two generations. Two full and complicated beings.

  I think about those who came before—her parents, my grandparents. They were cold as a frozen lake; rigid, without evidence of fault lines or spring melt. They had denied all existence of interior lives, expressing disdain for anything but the most socially sanctioned, class-determined performance. My grandfather died just a month before my daughter was conceived. He was almost ninety-seven. I had had a lifetime of exposure to him—I’d even spent weeks looking after him in his early nineties when his wife broke her hip—but I never knew anything of his heart or soul. My grandmother, an austere and remote woman, had died when I was a teenager, and I remember my surprise when this news didn’t make my mother cry.

  But I never loved her, she’d said.

  I remember being struck by the fact that not loving a parent was even an option. But of course now I can see that you cannot love someone you do not know, and you cannot feel loved by someone who does not know you. My mother’s parents were completely unknowable. She was raised to be unknowable herself; she was raised to be alone, a legacy passed on to my brother and me.

  My mother’s glow in my daughter’s presence can help me momentarily overcome what ails me. It is a gift to be unexpectedly altered in this way, late in life.

  My stepfather shares the depth of feeling toward his granddaughter. He did not have children, and my brother and I were too old to become his. When the egg was tiny, either crying or inert, my stepfather kept his distance, afraid to break her. But in just a matter of weeks, now able to smile and coo in response to people, and very responsive to him, she has become his little girl.

  I am watching them with their granddaughter. She brings out different sides of each of them, surprises. They are Lola and Lolo, having embraced the Tagalog terms for grandparents offered by Tita, she who has named us all. They are growing into their new roles together, and their love for each other grows bigger as a consequence.

  I don’t spoil this by talking about my feelings, the persistent pain, the bouts of rage. Yet I can feel my mother simmering with a quiet yet fierce protectiveness toward me.

  There has always been a certain wildness about me that I sense she has regarded with some fear. Perhaps it’s the aspects of my father that she sees in me and certainly in my brother: the range of moods, a certain defiance of authority, lack of convention, the propensity for darkness. I wonder if I am just as alien and threatening to her as my father was in some ways.

  Perhaps I have become more recognizable to her as a mother. Or rather, as a woman on my own with a child. She was alone at my age with two children, her marriage over. I have gained more of a mother from having a baby in these circumstances. But the parenting mediator is right: I do need new friends.

  An old friend of mine offers to set me up with someone. I’m in no shape to date—in truth, I won’t be for years—but of course there is the fantasy that someone will swoop in and overwhelm the pain, so I agree to meet Harry’s friend.

  I am a disaster. Melissa is funny as hell and a bit of a disaster herself. There is no way we should be dating, but we like each other too much not to become friends. It’s an odd time for a new friendship, particularly with someone who doesn’t have children, an odd time when you are breastfeeding and exhausted and crying all the time.

  But Melissa is in need of new friends herself. She is from the East Coast, doing her PhD in a neighbouring town, and she misses her home and her family and the Maritime way of life. She is a decade younger than me—the age I was when I met Anna—and lives the itinerant life of a student, a life I used to know, one that has room for the possibility of new friendships. And she has big feelings: both dark and light. We are familiar to each other in these ways. She encounters me in my new life and reminds me that I am someone worth knowing.

  Tita calls Melissa Miles, because the town where she lives and goes to school is miles and miles away and because, in Filipino culture, as I am quickly realizing, nicknames are de rigueur.

  At the dinner table one night, Tita asks Miles about her thesis. Simply put, she is writing about loneliness and queerness. The intersection of two societal evils.

  “So,” Tita concludes, a little bewildered. “You are a lonely gay, Miles?”

  “Well, Tita,” says Miles, laughing, “yes, I guess I am.”

  I had made so many assumptions about Tita’s conservatism in the beginning based on her attendance at church on Sundays and her prayer before every meal and the fact that she apologizes to Jesus every time she throws any leftover food into the organic waste bin; based on footage of self-flagellation in Manila at Easter, and the little I know about Filipino culture, having visited the Philippines on a book tour a few years ago.

  We’ve come a long way since. Tita has introduced me to the fairly elaborate taxonomy of gender and orientation that exists in the Philippines. If I am wearing my boyfriend jeans and boots she will remark that I look badoy, which seems to mean butch without being lesbian. Lesbians are all tomboys, regardless of how butch or femme they may be. There are the double cara—those who can be either masculine or feminine. Tita’s own best friend “used to be tomboy” but is now preparing for her wedding to a man.

  Tita thinks of orientation as a fluid propositio
n. She jokes that her own husband is bakala—a gay man—every time he gets the slightest bit sentimental. In Tita’s mind, it is actions, rather than proclamations of identity, that make one queer.

  Miles fits into that understanding; she left a husband behind in the Maritimes. A man with whom she’d raised a teenager, not as a stepmother as such, more a big sister. She left her island because there was no way to do a PhD in her field there, but also, more importantly, because there was no room there to be gay. She has a heart full of guilt as a consequence. A heart full of guilt and hope and goodness and complicated longing.

  As our friendship evolves, she begins to spend the night on the couch after she comes for dinner, which she does at least once a week, because she lives so far away. Increasingly these sleepovers extend into part of the next day. My sense is that she’d rather not go back at all: she hates that town miles and miles away and she loves it here, both being in the city and being here with us. She jokes that she is in the family way. In my house, ours is the simple routine of life with a baby.

  Miles designates herself the egg’s playmate. She writes stand-up comedy in her free time and tries out her ribald sketches on my daughter. She is boisterous and physical and can make the baby girl laugh in that way Tita can make her laugh. She is long and lean and strong and lifts the egg high in the air for a different view of things. She alters all of our perspectives, in fact. Miles falls easily into our domestic rhythm.

  Eat/sleep/play, eat/sleep/play.

  4

  There will be five of us tonight at the table in my white Ikea kitchen with the bright blue linoleum floor. Through the glass, the leaves are fluttering to the ground. It’s cold and blustery outside and I am in the mood to roast a chicken.

  Everyone has an opinion on how to roast a chicken. I like to insert half an onion, half a lemon and a few buds of smashed garlic into the cavity, grind liberal amounts of salt and pepper over the skin, slip in slices of garlic here and there, place sprigs of tarragon, if I have them, between the legs and breasts. A few dollops of butter will crisp the skin. And if you’re feeling really indulgent, there’s always bacon.

  My brother, Micah, says: Do it, go for the bacon. He has shot and cooked any number of birds himself. It’s the legacy of our English father—what men of a certain class do. I know the taste of lead. I wouldn’t know the taste of pheasant or rabbit without it.

  That my brother is here in my kitchen expressing an opinion about chicken, that my brother is here in this most ordinary of settings, still strikes me as nothing short of a miracle. He was here at the end of the summer and has now returned to renovate my basement. Tito Mike, Tita calls him.

  He is terrified to pick up his niece, though, so afraid that he’ll hurt her in some way. I put the baby in his arms a few times just to prove to him that he won’t break her. He stands in the kitchen with his shaved head and goatee and his tall frame, every inch of his skin covered in angry ink, and looks amazed and terrified by this little white egg in his arms. He jumps back whenever she sneezes. He pulls up Herb Alpert on my iPod. The egg flails her legs enthusiastically to “Spanish Flea” and “Tijuana Taxi,” which never fails to make us laugh.

  We take her with us to Home Depot when we go to get building materials. “You know people think you’re the father,” I say.

  “Cool,” he says.

  Tita and Micah have, I think, a sweet little flirtation going on, though neither of them would ever admit it. They are both beautiful to look at: Tita with her long, thick hair and brown wide-eyed face; Tito Mike tall, dark and handsome beyond the tattoos. He’s a man to admire, one with an amazing breadth of talent. He is a visual artist and a silversmith. He earns a living as a welder. He once built his own cabin in the woods.

  When Tita tells Micah the story of her last employers and how they still, despite my emails and phone calls to them, owe her two weeks’ pay, he gets furious. They claim they cannot pay her until she comes to pick up her things. Tita thinks she might have left a pair of jeans at their house—she can’t think of anything else.

  My brother offers to accompany her, but as tempting as it is to imagine Tita turning up on a suburban doorstep with a six-foot-two, two-hundred-and-forty-pound tattooed white guy, we realize this may be perceived as threatening. I will carry on with the emails and phone calls. I will be a mosquito buzzing around their heads until they can’t stand it anymore.

  Micah and Tita are back to talking about food—a shared passion. He worked in a kitchen for years; she learned to cook in Singapore from an old Chinese woman. “I didn’t even know how to chop vegetable before,” she says. Her father, who was once a cook in a Chinese restaurant on the island of Mindanao, did all the cooking at home when she was growing up. She makes many of her Chinese lola’s recipes now.

  My tastes were a surprise to her: “You know how to eat spicy?” A meal isn’t a meal without a bit of heat, we agree. Tita is at home in our neighbourhood among the Chinese groceries, the Vietnamese restaurants and bakeries. A familiar palate, the taste of home—it matters more than one might realize.

  Tita had worked only in the suburbs before coming to live with me, miles of houses, nowhere to go, no spice. She arrived at my house with recipes for quiche. Canadian food, if there is such a definable thing, is boring to her. The one exception is cheese. “You make me so expensive!” Tita says after she tastes aged cheddar for the first time. She and Tito Mike are locusts for aged cheddar. A brick of it will last only three days in our house. When she and Micah win four dollars each on a lottery scratch card, they buy cheese for the house with the winnings.

  Last to arrive for dinner tonight is Miles, who is coming in by bus from the grey town miles away. I don’t wait to ask her opinion on how to roast a chicken; she has never roasted anything in her life. She cooks Island food—lobster, potatoes, mussels, things boiled in a single pot. On her lonely far-flung island province, “boiled dinner” is a specialty, salt the extent of seasoning.

  My kitchen is full of laughter tonight and the egg is strapped to my front in the BabyBjörn. She likes to see everything that’s going on; she is at her most content strapped against me, watching my hands work. She is helping me mash potatoes. A little horseradish goes into the pot. Next, she is helping me massage olive oil, lemon and garlic into Swiss chard. She is at the heart of this unlikely circle who will gather around the table for dinner. The grieving single mother, the recovering addict, the lonely gay, the temporary worker and the arthritic cat.

  5

  And then there are Tuesday evenings. Anna comes to spend time with the egg. I was supposed to marvel in this, witnessing Anna being a parent, but there is no celebration here. And so I leave my house.

  On those evenings I usually take myself out for a bowl of pho around the corner. I eat soup and read a book. Or I take myself to a movie at the indie theatre down the street. I started going to movies alone when I was pregnant because I was lonely and in need of distraction. I no longer give a fuck that strangers might see it as sad. It’s taken half of my adult life and a healthy dose of personal tragedy to finally make me stop feeling the self-consciousness of an adolescent.

  On Tuesday evenings I watch documentaries about cave paintings in France and child labour in salt mines in India. I can’t tell you much about any of the films I have seen. I can tell you the theatre is under-heated, that it’s winter and that my feet are damp and cold. I watch whatever is showing between six and eight, usually missing the end so I can be home the moment Anna leaves. I go to Starbucks if there is still time to kill. I talk to no one and no one talks to me. My face betrays me; it’s not a face, but a Tuesday heart.

  6

  Tita gives me a blow-dryer for Christmas. I don’t think she thinks I’m enough of a girl. “For when you go on dates,” she says.

  Hard to imagine that. I have never been more exhausted in my life. I don’t have to want to meet strangers for lunch or coffee or a glass of wine or dinner. I want to be reading the paper or doing the crossword wit
h someone, as I used to do with Anna. She was sports, I was geography. I want to be in my pyjamas and parenting with someone together. I want to be a family. I want to be years into a relationship, in that place where you are known and knowing and loving and loved—the place I thought I was.

  “How is your feelings, Mum?” Tita, resident psychologist, asks this morning, as she does from time to time.

  I don’t always answer the question. I don’t always have to.

  “You are not a loser, Mum,” she says.

  I burst into tears. Tita has a way, with her big heart and broken English, of nailing things, and to hear it put so simply cuts me right to the core.

  “You are manhid,” she says, “not ready to love again because your heart is not yet recover.” Tita bursts into tears herself then. Tita, who wishes a new relationship for me, who gives me a blow-dryer in the hopes that I might find one, she who has not seen her own husband in two years.

  7

  Tito Mike is a big male presence, both physically and emotionally. His moods are up and then way down. It’s not difficult to gauge where on the spectrum he is; it doesn’t demand the kind of vigilance living with an erratic alcoholic does. He’s keen to show me the day’s work, the nuances of what he has accomplished, but sometimes I’m just a girl who knows nothing about renovations asking stupid questions. He does his best to be patient with me, he treats Tita with the utmost respect, tiptoes around the baby, but he is a man with demons inside.

  He spends the nights on the couch in my office because the room he rents is in a small town too far away and he has little money to spend on things like gas. He falls asleep on the couch in his jeans, studded belt and Timberlands. He drinks beer all day long and is both never obviously drunk and perpetually drunk. He wakes up in the middle of the night to go outside to smoke. He yells in his sleep, occasionally sleepwalks, once walking straight into Tita’s room, thinking it was his bedroom in the house where we grew up, which had exactly the same layout.