Believing Cedric

by Mark Lavorato

  But when she was seventeen and caught throwing a house party without permission, a line was drawn. On the evening in question, Cedric had slapped one of Melissa’s friends (if you could call him that), and in so doing had (according to whispered conversations between Julie and Melissa) crossed a line himself. Either way, Cedric clamped down. It was high time she learned some respect, he’d said, giving her a grounding that was severe by any measure, even his. It was a punishment she readily, almost gladly, accepted. What it meant was more time at home with her mother, the two of them making the most of the evenings they had to spend together, cooking their favourite dishes, meals they knew Cedric would be late for (or more likely not show up for at all—calling at the last minute to tell Julie he would just have to microwave it when he got home, obliged into another cocktail with a very, very important client).

  “You do know he’s screwing other women, don’t you?” Melissa inserted after one of these phone calls, the same night she convinced her mother to nurse the first gin and tonic of her life.

  But Melissa’s casual comment appeared to be going too far, costing Julie something that she couldn’t quite afford. “Melissa. Please. I don’t think that’s any of your business.”

  “Mom, you say that like it’s none of yours either.”

  Julie paused to look tiredly into her glass, then through it. “Maybe it isn’t. You’re young. These things are complicated.”

  “I think you’re young. Nobody awards medals for living a miserable life, you know. At least martyrs can justify their suffering, have their belief to break even for them. While the rest of us are just too scared to take a daring stab at our own contentment. And sure, maybe you’re not shooting for medals and monuments. But what about some peace? Just a bit. Haven’t you earned at least that much by now?”

  Whenever Julie failed to answer, Melissa felt a little more respect for her. It would take her another two years, with her daughter living at home throughout university, coaxing and prodding her toward it, before Julie would finally ask for a divorce.

  When she did, Cedric was gobsmacked. He agreed almost laughingly, spitefully, as if he were daring her to try to survive out there in the big bad world-according-to-CNN without him. The settlement was a generous one for Julie, and within three months Cedric had moved the last of the things that had been deemed his out of the house. It was less an ordeal than either of them had expected. With an innocent old-fashionedness, they were stunned at how ready the system was for such an eventuality, a procedure already in place for them, with protocols to minimize the snags along the way and a modus operandi where, to combat the sensation of falling, you could merely cling to the handrails of the process itself. When the formalities were over, their relations remained amicable enough, even if Cedric went to great lengths to avoid hearing or seeing how, in the end, Julie could get along just fine in this scary world on her own. Better than fine really. In fact, Julie even came to enjoy her bi-monthly problem-solving quests, getting replacement light bulbs and oil changes; it was so much simpler, and less intimidating, than she’d imagined it being. While Cedric, unsettled after hearing from his mechanic about an easygoing run-in with Julie and a set of new brake pads, decided to find himself another garage, someone who was closer to his new place and who better understood the importance of keeping his mouth shut.

  Meanwhile, Julie’s relationship with Melissa took on a new shape, entered a confidence that often pushed the mother/daughter boundaries. It was no longer a taboo of loyalty to talk about Cedric’s failings, which allowed for unspoken things about his youth and age to rise to the surface. Like the time they’d been at a dinner party and the wife of one of Cedric’s clients, sitting next to him, calmly cleared her throat during the dessert, smiling politely, and stated that his hand seemed to be on her lap and would he please remove it. Julie had shot to her feet to clear away whatever dirty plates she could grab and remembers sniffling over the sink in the kitchen for no other reason than the fact that she wasn’t able to slink out the back door and disappear from the debacle. She had to say goodbye to everyone, put on her shoes and coat, grin and bear it through the front door. Always having to face the music that she’d had no part in composing.

  Melissa joined in with the same sentiments, recalling when she was fifteen and sitting bored at a barbecue in their backyard with some new guests, one of whom had pointed out how, lately, there were getting to be way too many panhandlers downtown, shoving their tinkling cardboard cups under everyone’s noses, accosting passerbys with their hard-luck stories. And they were getting pushier too, he warned ominously. Which set her father off on his famous mugging tirade, telling the story of how he’d been robbed blind at a gas station once, in broad daylight. But then he took it a step further, mentioning how, if he’d owned a firearm, things would have been different. “I’m tellin’ ya, if the same thing’d happened in the States, a regular guy like me, he would’a had a gun. And he would’a turned around, pulled it out, and pow, just like that . . .” he’d snapped his fingers, “just like that—the world’s a better place. You know? I mean, these people, what do we . . . how can we just let them roam the streets like that? Shouldn’t somebody be doing something about them? And I honestly don’t care what. Just do something. You know?” He had searched the guests’ faces for signs of accord, which they attempted to procure in as noncommittal way possible before quickly changing the subject. Hey, was that a new barbecue? And what was the marinade Julie was using for this chicken? Melissa remembered feeling suddenly nauseous, excusing herself to ease the door shut in her room where she could press play on her Cranberries CD and flop heavily onto her bedspread.

  Julie and Melissa swapped these one-sided anecdotes until they’d run out of them, had grown weary of their simplistic villain-mongering, and began trending toward other topics, more productive ones, and, at times, things that they’d never thought of breaching before. Like what do you think or feel about such-and-such? What, if you could go back, would you do differently? Is there something you’d like to know, or do, or understand before you die? Is there anywhere in the world you’ve always wanted to go, and why? What (Melissa lifting her gin and tonic and motioning at the night sky, a salt spill of stars running along a smoggy pane, the quarter moon of her lime pinching the rim of her glass) do you believe?

  She learned that her mother had always wanted to go to Ireland, to see the threads of hand-piled stones that macraméd the fields of rain-muddied grass there, and to listen, for one entire day, she’d said, to the most lovely accent in the English language. For Melissa, it was southern Spain, for the cubes of its Berber villages, the ornate ruins of its Moorish architecture, and to eavesdrop on the teenaged guitarists that she’d always imagined practising their flamenco in the parks. When Julie had heard this, she made a few phone calls, asked around, and managed to find Melissa a two-month au pair placement in the Andalusian city of Granada, if she wanted it, over her first summer break in university. Melissa couldn’t wait, though kept offering to stay behind, even after she’d checked her bags in at the airport. But Julie had promised that she both wanted and needed the time alone. It would be good for her, she’d said, unpersuasively.

  The months that Melissa spent in Spain taught her three things: she wasn’t particularly gifted with four-year-olds, was even less talented (and potentially hopeless) at second language acquisition, and there was something about travelling that she absolutely adored. She thought that it had to do with the normalcy one found in other places. The way people got up, went to work and paid their bills, watched TV, walked their dogs and scolded their children, all in a different tongue, of course, but in roughly the same way we all do. However appealing the idea of ethnology was, it was really only the study of nuanced variation.

  Melissa soon found her favourite place in the city, a barren hilltop above the Albayzín, crowned with an ancient wall and overlooking the Alhambra, far from the tourist squares below. It was a spot where she always felt somewhat daring, edgy, wa
tching the young gypsy women with their flawless bellies bronzing in the late sun, their unwashed hair, so black it was indigo, glinting in its own oils, seedy men trailing behind them, scuffling along the dusty footpaths that snaked to the grottos and shanties of their homes farther off. None of them acknowledged her with anything outside of mild contempt, a dismissive enmity. She wasn’t part of the landscape there, had no intimacy with it. She was only there to record it and move on, sitting on the bare clay with her Levi’s blue jeans, a spiral-bound notebook pinned against the slope of her thighs, busily scribbling—a sketch, they thought, maybe a diary, travelogue. Whatever it was, they all seemed to judge, it was sure to be girlish and sentimental, have nothing to do with their reality.

  When she returned to Toronto, still drunk with adventure, she transferred out of most of the courses she’d chosen the previous spring. She then registered into the recreation and tourism program, thinking that this was a sure way of getting her out of the city and travelling again. She wasn’t a fan of the classes themselves, or of the sociable and cheery students that the curriculum drew, but she went through the motions anyway, wrote mediocre exams, uninspired papers, somehow sure that it would all pay off in the end. Meanwhile at home, Melissa shared her enthusiasm of “the new” and “dynamic” with her mother, giving her gifts of enrolment for her birthday, Christmas, Mother’s Day, and, for no occasion at all, evening classes in Indian cooking, pottery, yoga, an introduction to painting. At winter’s end, she bought Julie packets of exotic seeds for her springtime flower garden, and while she planted them in the cool yard, Melissa went through a list that she’d printed out with all the co-op positions and summer jobs that were open to her as a tourism student. Finally, the benefits. They narrowed them down to the four best-sounding jobs and Melissa applied to every one, receiving a single offer, a position helping to run a campground in British Columbia, on a beach in Tofino, Vancouver Island. She’d held out the minimum-wage contract for Julie to hold—with its stipulations of scrubbing bathroom stalls and quelling partiers that weren’t abiding by the quiet curfew—as if it were a fragile and invaluable heirloom. Julie said she hoped she found what she was looking for.

  One of her classmates, Annette, got the same job and proposed they use her hand-me-down car to drive them across the country, split the gas, keep each other awake. Annette wasn’t Melissa’s favourite of classmates, but she supposed the lure of the voyage would be enough to compensate for it. They left the day after their last exam and took the better part of a week to drive across the country.

  The second day of the journey they’d driven too far, too late, having agreed to always find a place to camp before nightfall. Now they were on a desolate stretch in northern Ontario, the long dark becoming increasingly oppressive, both of them too inert and tired to search for a pull-off that would hide the car and allow them to set up their tent in the headlights without the worry of rural rednecks cruising by and discovering that they were alone, the scenario already played out in their heads: greasy dungarees and a baseball cap craning over the steering wheel to look for any boyfriends present, a gun rack and trophy feathers pinioned into his dash, the window rolling down with slow sadism. Gerls-needah-han-ith-anathenh? So they drove on, an eighth of a tank left, on the stereo Sarah McLachlan turned up to the cusp of distortion, the sorry sun-crusted speakers coughing dust, a familiar five-year-old cassette blathering on in order to ward off the squabble they both felt they could sink into. Finally, ahead, an oasis of streetlights with a roof of fluorescent tubing, harbouring a set of gas pumps. There was scaffolding along the walls of the store, the apparent tracing of a future wildlife mural; a moose, wolves, a trout on a fishing line flailing above water.

  They stretched outside the car, electric buzz of fluorescence, nocturnal insects pattering the tin eaves above them, the lights so overswarmed with them they were foaming. It was Melissa’s turn to stand at the nozzle, Annette’s to pay and refill their Thermos mugs with the syrupy and jitter-inducing “gourmet coffee” that was found in push-button machines at every roadside gas station—Mochaccino, French Vanilla, English Toffee, bastardizations so far removed from their originals they’d become a creation unto themselves. She was also going to ask for the closest and safest paid campground, a cost, they’d agreed, they were willing to swallow.

  Melissa pulled a sweater and the road atlas out of the car, slammed the door in the humming quiet, and ran her finger along the red line of the highway as if to measure how far they were from Thunder Bay. Just then a sizeable moth plopped onto the map next to her hand and became instantly still, probably sensing that there was something large and breathing hovering over it. The moth was pale green with a delicate maroon outline and a set of discerning eyes painted onto its wings. Two long lobes dropped from the mimicked face like tusks, the insect’s body in the centre making up a kind of furry nose. It was the most striking moth Melissa had ever seen, and she found herself looking up at the lights, as if to find more of them there. Once, her friend Nathan (some might have referred to him as her old boyfriend), who was a great collector and retainer of factoids and useless trivia, had told her about the way moths had evolved to navigate by the strongest celestial light: the moon—if it wasn’t new—or one of the brighter stars, Sirius, Arcturus, Alpha Centauri. Which is why, he’d said, when they pass by an artificial light, naturally assuming that it’s going to stay in the same place in the sky, directly above them, for example, they have no choice but to circle it in order to keep it there, at that one fixed point in their vision. They’re not, contrary to popular belief, attracted to light; they just can’t seem to get past it, disoriented by their only means of orientation—like an arctic airplane heading continually west in a spiral around the magnetic pole. They’re drawn into danger by a set of intuitions that they know only how to trust, into a blindness by the very way they see. And there was some aspect in that, considered Melissa, folding the map as the moth flew away to bounce off the lights again and Annette stepped out of the store, that was really, and quite wonderfully, human.

  In the car she adjusted her Petzl headlamp on her forehead and picked up the spiral-bound notepad she kept near her feet, a pen slipped into the spine. As they pulled out onto the dark of the highway, Melissa started scribbling.

  “The lady inside said there’s a campground about forty minutes away. Cool?” asked Annette.

  “Sure,” Melissa said indifferently.

  Annette flicked on her brights, checked the gauges. “So what are you writing?”

  “Uhm . . . a journal,” Melissa mumbled, though was obviously lying. Annette, slightly affronted, made a point to never ask about the notebook, or what it was for, again.

  The next two days the road cut through mounded terraces of spruce and stagnant lakes, chiselled through brief walls of marbled granite, and straightened out through a stretch of aspens that dispersed into open fields and the red of granaries. Nunavut had just been christened its own territory only a month earlier, inspiring travellers to raise an inuksuk atop most of the prominent outcroppings, boulders, and benchmarks along the Trans-Canada Highway, a gesture, the two girls had agreed, that was somehow touching.

  They crossed the Manitoba border into Saskatchewan, where Melissa, whether driving or as a passenger, fastidiously watched the landscape, finding the flatlands to be far from boring, a common complaint of people that traversed the country. It was true that there wasn’t much to look at, but that, for her, only served to highlight what little there was to see. Whether it was the deviations in the geography: the buttes, eskers, draws, and coulees; or the manmade structures that seemed to stand out as a kind of proclamation, a defiance against the overwhelming expanse and isolation, even if they were in the very act of being defied: rusted and squeaking windmills above settlers’ water wells and flattened homesteads, barbed wire draping along tilted fencelines, abandoned barns and farmhouses canting over in sagging parallelograms. The new generation machinery was painted in bold and resilient colours but was
already dusting over with doubt. During her shifts as a passenger, Melissa never slept, not wanting to miss so much as a half-hour.

  “This is like . . .” Annette broke one of their rare no-music-or-radio silences just after Medicine Hat, “it feels so Canadian, you know?”

  “What does?” Melissa put her bare feet up onto the front of her seat, sipped from her half-litre coffee mug.

  “I don’t know . . . just . . . this,” Annette gestured out in front of her, a hand sweeping the windshield. “You know, driving these huge distances with vintage tapes of Blue Rodeo and The Hip, grain silos and roadkill and irrigation sprinklers. All this stuff. Don’t you think?”

  But what Melissa thought was that she was about to come across as a humbug again. Because to be honest, she’d always hated the question, had never seen the point of it really—all the literature and art collectives, the radio programs and television documentaries that explored the query of what it meant to be Canadian. In our scrambling need for an identity, thought Melissa, we’d opted for the worst way of acquiring one: namely by working backwards. We started with the naive idea that we could find a parameter for us all to fit inside, trace a silhouette with all the things we are and aren’t, define a “we” by using the paltry measure of our few, few common denominators. Why should we care about the shape of the one paper-thin shell that might encapsulate us all? What kind of culture would be driven by such a manic search for its own confinement? If we spent half as much energy not in concentrating on what this fictitious capsule might look like, but instead on filling it, on cramming it with original art and thought and science and cuisine, on driving forward unimpeded by our own backward clichés and questions, those blurry lines would draw themselves. The truth was that Melissa didn’t feel very Canadian, didn’t feel moved when she saw her flag rippling in the wind. But she did feel that she liked the wind. And it’s there, she knew, that the drawing should really begin. Right there. At the beginning.