How Happy to Be (14 page)

Elaine has a rental car, and as we are leaving, she offers to drive us to the city. I hesitate. At the happening, she had engaged lightly with the group, smiling politely and cocking her head to hear above the music: “I’m sorry? I didn’t get that.” There was nothing to get, really, just druggy chatter about the day, the bad art, the air. It’s not shame that makes me want to reject her offer of a ride, it’s more that I’m scared of what she might witness, and the confrontation it’s sure to bring.

But I am not making this decision. “Oh, thank God. I can’t bear the bus again,” says Sunera, sprinting to the muddy lot.

What Elaine has is not, it turns out, really a car at all but a Rent-a-Wreck, a bones rattling, second-hand pile of crap all the jigglier for Elaine’s terrible driving.

“It’s been a while since I’ve been on a highway,” she says redundantly, jerking into the centre lane for no apparent reason other than to cut off an eighteen-wheeler. The eighteen-wheeler bleats an angry dinosaur noise and speeds past, just missing us by a fingernail. Sunera screams from the
backseat, grasping for her cigarette case of mood evener-outers. Theo mutters, “Okay, okay, okay,” and Marvin doesn’t seem to notice. He says, “Elaine, I love your poncho!”

My foot has a little inner life of its own, shaking and vibrating in tune with my ferocious lip-licking. It feels like moving confetti has been injected into my lips.

“So I’ve been in Toronto for nearly two weeks, Max. Didn’t you get my messages?” asks Elaine, not angrily, but impatient, like she’s trying to convince a child not to put her mouth over a light socket.

I answer, “Kind of.”

I don’t elaborate. In the backseat, Theo seems to sense that I need a way out. He says, “What are you doing in town, Elaine?”

“Representing some of the island artists at a gallery, and I heard about ACCLIMITIZE,” she says, making little air quotes around ACCLIMITIZE and, in doing so, nearly sideswiping a motorcycle. “It’s so great to see you, Max. Are you happy?”

Elaine doesn’t exactly mess around.

“What did you think of the piece?” I ask, putting her off, but I know she’ll return with the happiness question. Elaine is less easily distracted than most of the adults I grew up with; partly it’s that she didn’t do as much acid, partly it’s some hard nut of ambition inside her. It was she alone who kept the compound running all those years after the will had run out. She made sure the food was grown, cooked, served, that the bills were paid and the children educated, if badly. When the compound dwindled down to one family, and then no one, she
cleaned up the mess. She must have sold it, boarded the windows, and got ride of the garbage. I never heard the details of that transaction; it would have embarrassed her somehow, that all her work had been work in the end, a business dealing not unlike those done by her family in Philadelphia.

She stayed on the island, teaching painting in schools on the mainland. Now she cajoles the island artists out of bed and places paintbrushes in their hands. Then she takes boxes of their folk art around the country, and people buy it too, wood-carved fishermen with wonky eyes and papier mâché whales who double as umbrella stands. She is determined. If she hadn’t been a freak, she would have made a good lawyer.

“I thought the piece was silly,” says Elaine. “Why haven’t you returned my calls?”

I make a fist and stamp prints in the smudge on the window with the curled palm of my hand. I press five dots along the smudge. “A foot,” I declare. Elaine looks, swerves. Sunera screams.

“You used to do that in the van when you were a kid,” says Elaine.

“What kind of kid was Max?” asks Theo.

“Oh, she was pretty sullen,” says Elaine, and the peanut gallery laughs. “She was bright. Very funny, but a sad little girl.”

“Jesus,” I say. I turn to the backseat. “I had a haircut like a cabbage and I was living on nuts and berries. We had no television!”

“That’s an outrage,” says Theo, smiling. Marvin asks Elaine some questions about the West Coast and everyone
listens as she yammers on about clear-cut logging and rain. A funny vibe in that car, how polite everyone is, sharp edges rounded off in the presence of a grown-up, this lulling back-and-forthlike conversation. Still, I’m sitting on my hands to keep from tapping my fingers to the bone. Every third person is flipping the finger at Elaine as she weaves in and out of traffic, going about fifteen kilometres lower than the speed limit.

Elaine drops everyone off, idling on the street until Marvin and Sunera are safely inside their buildings. When Theo gets out, he knocks on my window. The car is so old that I actually have to roll the window down by hand.

“I’ll see you soon,” he says, breath cold in the air. Then, more quietly, “Are you okay?”

I nod. He leans in and gives me a soft kiss on the cheek that stops my chattering teeth.

Elaine has a craving for the late-night juice bar near Theo’s house.

“You need wheatgrass,” she tells me.

Our waitress has an infected tongue stud (I catch a glimpse of a big red mound cherried with silver when she opens her mouth) that makes her sound drunk when she lists the specials. “We have gwaaach choop.”

“Pardon?”

“Gwaach choop.”

“Pardon?” She jiggles a finger, covered in Mexican jewellery, at the specials board. Squash soup. Got it.

With the poncho on, Elaine looks limbless. A platter with a silver domed cover, placed on a red-and-black raven-patterned tablecloth, a hand whipping off the dome – “Et
voila!” – and there’s Elaine, served up, a serious little white-headed lunch.

Or maybe it’s the drugs.

“Do you remember when Dad went a bit psycho reading about Buckminster Fuller and built the yurt by the river?” I ask her, gnawing the inside of my cheeks.

Elaine nods. “He never finished that yurt.”

The juice has an unwashed undertaste.

“Those are vitamins, Max. Don’t look so disgusted.”

Elaine tells me that my father’s been wandering the States for a few years, but he comes back from time to time, unannounced, checks in with his favourite ex-girlfriend (she smiles when she says that). He’s thinner, says Elaine. She tells me about people we knew, a grubby girl with two moms who married a stockbroker and moved to New York. She works in the fashion industry. Elaine tells me about the ones who stayed west: the little boy who could catch flies with his bare hands now leads rich Vancouverites on hikes over the West Coast Trail, gets up before the sun and prepares steaming cups of cappuccino in plastic mugs, leaves the warm containers outside the brand-new tents of his hikers to greet them when they wake up. This detail astounds Elaine.

She mentions parents who died. I nod, chewing my juice.

Elaine puts her hands, lightly liverspotted and soft, over mine.

“You’re going to be thirty-five, Max,” she announces.

“Yup.”

“Your mother was only thirty-five when she died – can you imagine?”

“Not really,” I reclaim my hands for my lap, where they can thumb war each other, and I look at the specials board written in five different colours of chalk.

Elaine tells me how she’s renovated her home, and the coven of witches who were creating problems on the south end of the property have finally left, so there’s not as much tension. She smiles when I laugh at her casual use of the phrase
coven of witches
and I have always liked that about Elaine; she can recognize absurdity, but doesn’t shy away from it.

“Did you know your father’s coming to the island next month? His most recent retreat is over,” she says. I shake my head. I wonder if that’s why he’s been calling, to tell me he’s going back, to invite me home. But I can’t imagine an invitation from him. His voice is too faltering; it would never make it through the phone lines.

“Theo seems interesting,” says Elaine. She doesn’t speak to fill a silence, so I know she means it.

“What makes you say that?” I’m greedy for her answer.

Elaine cocks her head, contemplating the question for an agonizing length of time. When she is ready, she ticks off her reasons, one by one: “Because he is thoughtful. Because he is a scientist. Because he is –” she pauses. “Kind to you.”

It should be thrilling, the outsider telling the story of your relationship, sanctioning the choice, spinning the details into a fairy tale. But then there’s this: What if Elaine is a bad reader? How do you interpret those signs when they arrive in a drug funk, late at night, where everyone is parading around as someone else?

If we were confidantes, if either of us was more girlish or giggly, Theo would be the spark for a dirt session. I could lean in with details of the courtship, our long, strange history and the things we did in his office. I could raise my eyebrows and stage whisper, Are we too different? Do you think it could work? A riot, a purge. I wonder about those women who are friends with their mothers, if talking to your mother feels as safe as talking to yourself. But Elaine is much too serious, and I am much too cautious, and so we have lived like this, inside our strange half-worn intimacy for decades.

I tell her instead that Theo worked in Africa, and she lights up. As Elaine eats, we gather information from one another, Elaine because she doesn’t like to leave any situation unresolved (and I am a situation), and me, because seeing her, I’m suddenly hungry to know what the mood is like in the west, if the ferries are making scheduled runs to the island yet, how much closer spring is out there. Though she asks, I avoid as much as I can this other life, my life in Toronto, which seems watery and temporary next to her old woman life of buildings and friendships and solitude.

Food cleared, we split the bill, and as I’m moving to put my coat on, avoiding her gaze, which is sure to be loaded, she leans in, grabbing my wrists right out of the air, her grip strong.

“Max!” shouts Elaine, shaking my hands. I blink and stare at her fingers on my wrists. “I’m so glad I ran into you. I’m so pleased we could spend time together, Max, but let me say something quite frankly, and take it to heart, my dear,
dear child: I think that something is ruining you, and you need to get yourself well.”

Purple black night, slabs of headlights pile and fall on the empty walls. Elaine is asleep in my bed, offered to keep her off the highway toward an airport hotel, and I’m here in the living room in a slippery sleeping bag on a leather couch and the two materials are at odds, sliding me slowly toward the ground, a reminder that I should buy cotton sheets and wooden furniture and bamboo blinds, block out, keep in, comfort.

(Franny Baumgarten asleep under a clean white linen duvet.)

My head aches, the tinfoil taste of drugs in my mouth. Elaine breathes through the walls; raspy, a man snore. She’s losing her defining girlishness. Elaine never said: I will be your mother. Unlike the other mothers, she never spoke of motherhood or the goddess, never asked for worship. She could not have children of her own, my father once told me, but I never saw her saddened by this. Her life was large, and adventurous, and she shared it with anyone who needed it, without expectation of return. If I kept my distance, it was only because I imagined all those adventures might not include me.

She always seemed tiny, perpetually clad in flowing robes. Robes were everywhere on the island. Grown-ups in soft Japanese silk, or down on the beach, burgundy and monastic in garments left behind by the monks. I would put one on, dragging its train around the muddy garden, knotting
the belt and muttering my favourite word, surreptitiously learned from a contraband Christian
Archie
comic book: “Hairshirt.”

Before all that, we – proper family we, mom-dad-me, we – lived in a rented stucco house, on a road about twenty minutes from the main street of Squamish, a town that looked like it elbowed in and the mountains just moved apart, leaving a lightweight little village right in their seam.

Mom taught English to the women who arrived from Gujarat and Rajasthan with parkas over their saris, and Dad fixed cars, built porches, patched ceilings. Anything with tools.

Then again, that’s just what I was told after. I don’t remember them working or being apart from me or any absence, but there must have been separation. She must have gone off and come back every day. Death makes you forget those spaces. They are small in comparison.

I do remember the dying part. I remember doors shutting and a long, slow silence descending that lasted two years, my seventh and eighth. Someone gave me headphones to attach to the record player so I wouldn’t hear her vomiting. Now come the legends, here they come: she wore red flannel pyjamas she’d sewn herself, covered in floating hockey players. My father hauled oxygen tanks and bedpans up the stairs. I crouched a floor below in the living room listening to Jimi Hendrix on the fishbowl headphones, creeping around like a grunt marking the perimeter, ducking under stairwells and into the basement as the living room and kitchen filled with dirty dishes and garbage, and I watched
my father move with a speed I had never seen, not before, not since. He ran like he couldn’t see me crouched there, ran into town to bring back brown paper bags of medicine, ran to the basement for his tools to fix the car, ran to the sink, the toilet, the bucket. He would take her wherever she needed to go, wrap her in a blanket, walk her slowly to the truck, a little impatiently because she would laugh and wave and he was a bit annoyed, as if she wasn’t respecting enough the seriousness of the situation, as if this was his burden alone.

The treatments made her sicker. From the window I could see her gather herself before she came back in. She straightened the scarf around her head, an intake of breath, a steeling before she rose from the wheelchair to walk the steps to see the daughter.
She puts on a brave face
. I heard this expression and put it together as a new superhero: Braveface! I drew her in red pyjamas and a cape, smiling and beckoning toward a team of flying hockey players; they couldn’t keep up.

I think of this now and I can’t believe how young they were: my mother was thirty-two when she was diagnosed with cancer, my father thirty-one, ages I’ve drifted through already. They spent those years in secret conversation with one another, my mother glancing at me with sadness, turning silent or, worse yet, forcing a big stupid grin. My father was happy to wall the family in, asking for little from the town, but people came around anyway. Good people, said the funeral director. But are people good? Are people good to bring food in plastic containers? Is it good for housewives, flesh spilling over the waistband of their polyester pants, to arrive with brooms and dustbins and sweep in
corners that had never been swept, commenting goodly: “Well, this is awful terrible, awful terrible.” Were they referring to my father’s housekeeping or the thing upstairs?