How Happy to Be (20 page)

The kids at my new high school lived in mansions in the hills of North Vancouver, glass and cedar A-frames and bungalows with swimming pools. I blended in easily, dropping television references to win their favour, learning sarcasm and meanness to keep it.

Grade twelve was the year they carried university catalogues with them like accessories. One girl, a thin, boneless blonde who took great care to care very little about anything, complained that she would wake up in the morning and find applications on the pillow next to her, placed there by her anxious psychiatrist father. My own father nodded when I showed him my grades and said, “Good, Max,” handing the report card back to me. He looked puzzled when I thrust it at him again. “You’re supposed to sign it.” I said.

“Oh yes. Like a very important legal document,” he laughed. He thought everything that was serious in the real world was silly, but the real world fascinated me. Some nights I slept in my friends’ houses in a guest room, or on a couch next to a television as large as a wall. In the morning we would have fresh-squeezed orange juice and scorn whatever grown-ups passed through the kitchen. In principle, nothing excited us. When the sun set, we went to the beach to smoke and flirt with boys we hated.

Most nights I went back to the compound because these parents, while ridiculed, still held sway somehow, and the girls needed to be in their own beds by midnight or police would appear, flashlights in car windows at the dock or in the liquor store parking lot. I was jealous of these moonlight rescues orchestrated by fathers protecting their daughters’ virtue.

Somehow, with very little effort, I earned As, and this mattered to me, though I could tell no one: not the girls competing to be dumbest, not the mothers at the compound, competing not to be competitive.

The spring of grade twelve felt endless. The frail friendships of high school fell apart once and for all, as if everyone knew there were only a few months left, and gave up pretending. I had final exams on my mind, and was plotting my escape, fashioning a raft out of university and scholarship applications.

One afternoon in my final months, I attempted to study at the long slab of table in the dining hall. Two little girls jammed twigs in their hair and danced around screaming, “Chicken, chick chick chicken!” The doors were flung open and the sun was warming the mothers on the porch, a pair of them smoking and giggling, looking out at the water, the other islands hunched like grey whales on all sides. I knew the cold tang of that water, the naked midnight swim off the dock with everybody laughing and Elaine smiling at me, saying,
This is the life, huh?
And for them, it was heaven, and I was going to leave it, and never come back.

I hadn’t yet told my father that I was leaving because I didn’t want to be hurt when he didn’t mind. But it seemed that now, spring was upon us, and that meant momentum, and change. I walked across the wet field toward my father’s room.

I had an essay in my hand, typed on the compound’s large electric typewriter. What was the subject? Something about poetry.

I planned what I would say:
I’m going to university. You won’t have to worry about me any more
. But that was wrong; he never worried. Something different:
It’s time for me to leave. I’m ready for you to let me go
. Wrong too; he had never kept me. But it would suffice, and the drama of the words pleased me.

I opened the door to his room slowly. My dad lay on his side on the bed, facing the wall, socks dangled from his toes in a point. I knew he wasn’t asleep by the easy breathing.

“Dad,” I said, my heart racing. He rolled over onto his back and looked up at me milkily. We were breathing two different kinds of air: Mine was thick with anticipation, the electric chaos of expecting a fight. His was dull, flat-lined. Then, instead of the rehearsed speech, I thrust my essay out in front of me, surprising myself. “Dad, will you proofread this for me?”

He took the pages in his hand and flipped through them a long time, with unusual deliberateness. I wondered if something I wrote struck him. Watching him read, I felt dizzy with optimism. That’s how it was with him: I swung between hope and disappointment, a violent oscillation.

And then his hand dropped. The papers drifted to the floor and he said, “Max, I took something a while ago. It’s hard for me to focus.”

I bent quickly to gather the scattered pages, face burning.

“I’m sure it’s great,” he said.

I stood up. The paper was out of order. Hatred surged in my gut. I loathed him for his dumb stillness.

“I’m leaving,” I said, quickly, hoarsely.

My father nodded, eyes half-closed. “Mmm,” he said. “Can you wake me for dinner?”

I stared at him, eyes hot, then turned to go. As I turned, I spotted the glass orb on his dresser, a random thing he’d found in the ocean and been so proud of. I removed it from its woodchip bed. I took it in my hands. My dad watched, a look of defeat already crossing his face. I lifted the ball over my head, held it still for a moment. He closed his eyes, and so did I. Release. Glass sprayed up into my jaw, my bare legs pocked with blood, drifting downwards.

Are you sorry?
I wanted to scream it, to puncture his calm, to bruise him awake.
Are you sorry you left me when she did?
But I knew he was only sorry for one thing: Sorry that she died first.

I didn’t scream. I said nothing, and neither did he.

I walked to the door. I thought of all the things that were ahead of me: I would wet a tissue and clean the blood from my knees and ankles. I would take an airplane east and read and work and live in buildings with central air conditioning and dishwashers. I would be gone, and in the grip of that thought, I didn’t want to turn back but I did. I saw my father looking at me, not moved, but afraid. It was one of the last times we were alone together.

I kept Elaine’s mad money zipped in the top pocket of my army surplus backpack when I left. I took that wallet with me my very first night at university on the other side of the country in Kingston, Ontario, my bags unopened on the floor of my residence room, following a train of people to
the four-block-long downtown. I sat in a smoky bar designed to look like London, with a red English phone booth in the corner and a bobby hat for tips. The kids I sat with came from places I couldn’t picture: upstate New York, Montreal, Toronto. I bought them a round of two-dollar Molson Drys; it came to twenty-two bucks with tip, and I was happy to hand over the soggy bill at last.

O
NCE A MONTH OR SO, SUNERA THE GOOD DAUGHTER
stays at her parents’ house for the weekend, helping her mother cook and shop for the unending series of family weddings. I take the College streetcar east, past Regent Park, a city of government-subsidized high-rises with cracked windows and small, proud rowhouses built around gravel-floored parks. With the snow melted, a few people have laid out blankets to sell their things, as if they’ve been waiting to unload them all winter. The streetcar stops in front of one desperate yard sale manned by an old black woman squatting
before her offerings: a foam-filled lion won at a fair; faded T-shirts laid out flat; a plastic toaster with a burnt, raggedy chord.

The streetcar continues through the crowds of the city’s second Chinatown and, finally, Little India. I open the window an optimistic crack and the smell comes first, cardamom and ginger. Stalls of purple orchids, battered saris on plastic torsos attached to store awnings, twisting in the wind. The women stand in clusters, plastic shopping bags dangling from wrists, voices overlapping loudly against the Bollywood soundtracks blasting from the video stores. The men stand apart with their legs planted wide, smoking, talking to each other, rarely glancing at their wives and daughters. A few women have taken off their winter coats, and here and there a sausage-arm pushes through the gold-threaded sleeve of a sari into this freakish warm air. The weather is an anomaly, first taste of the spring that will come in a few weeks. Skin has returned.

Sunera’s mother opens the door and peers up at me. “Sunera, Maxime is here!” she shouts. She gives me a kiss on the cheek and takes my coat, perusing my black turtleneck, jeans, black boots combo with a sigh of disappointment. Sunera’s mother scares me. She starts every relationship from a place of disapproval; her daughters will inevitably let her down; the food placed in front of her is bound to be terrible; the man at the grocery store is robbing her blind.

The house smells like milk tea. Sunera’s father sits in the living room surrounded by piles of newspaper, the snouts of his slippered feet resting on an ottoman. He looks
up, makes a grunting noise, a waving gesture, then returns to the papers.

“Girls like black,” says Mrs. Singhal, irritated. Mrs. Singhal prefers to pack her snowman body into red overalls, a pink T-shirt, and white, no-brand running shoes: a toddler’s clothes.

“Mummy, leave her alone,” says Sunera, looming over her mother, twice her height and half her weight. Sunera is wearing a hot pink sari disco-balled with tiny mirrors. A thin gold chain disappears up one nostril.

“You look beautiful!” I say.

She raises an eyebrow, does her best Bollywood voice, half nodding, half shaking her head: “I am a good Indian girl, yes?” ushering me upstairs.

“Sunera, don’t forget about the flowers! You must pick them up by four o’clock.” Sunera shoves me up the staircase. Her mother follows, still talking.

“Okay, Mummy!”

She slams the door, basically in her mother’s face, but somehow she does it politely.

The walls of Sunera’s childhood room are covered in adolescent obsessions: Model UN participation certificates in cheap frames on the wall, a poster of The Velvet Underground. I touch a yellow push-pin and wonder what happened to my childhood things, to my mother’s things, and I remember how stark my walls were, in the barracks, the van, how every bat and ball and book belonged to everyone and no one. Then this: my mother had hoops of silver dangling from her ears.
What happened to her jewellery? Somewhere, that silver still exists.

When Sunera announced that she was moving out right after high school, her father read the papers and her mother ranted and cried, Why must you go to school so far away?, even though it is only five hours from Toronto to Montreal. Mrs. Singhal threatened to turn Sunera’s room into a sewing room, but her anger came in fits and spurts and she could never finish the conversion. She doesn’t, in fact, sew at all and for her mending needs likes to visit her friend the tailor on Gerrard Street where they talk for hours while the tailor sews a single button onto a wool overcoat. But the idea of a sewing room seemed right symbolically, so Sunera’s rolltop desk houses a high-end electric sewing machine that’s still in the box. She shoves aside bolts of silk and kicks at balls of yarn until there’s space on the electric flower-patterned polyester bed throw. We sit cross-legged on the twin bed, each of us perched at opposite ends like we’re about to play cards, and my knees click and burn. It’s been a long time since the learning circle. Sunera’s skirts spill over the edges, her neck poking out of the melting folds, treading water in a big pink puddle.

“My cousin’s wedding is in two weeks and my mom’s gone apeshit with the shopping,” says Sunera. “What do you think?” She puts her hands together like Shiva, does that side-to-side head-weaving dance. Then she pulls the gold chain from her nose.

“Glue,” she says and pretends to flick me with it. She pops an evener-outer, a pink pill that looks like baby Aspirin. “Want one?” I do, but I don’t.

“Which cousin is this?”

“The one from Scarborough. Remember my birthday? You met her. Tall?” I nod, but Sunera’s family gatherings are packed with brilliant, beautiful cousins and sisters and second and third cousins ranging from twelve to forty. The only way to tell them apart is by the varying levels of disappointment their mothers exude.

“She’s never met the guy,” says Sunera. “She’s lived here her whole life, he’s fresh off the plane from Delhi. Interesting power dynamic, huh? He has to give up everything for the woman and come here.”

“Is it a money thing?”

“No. He’s a successful computer programmer back in the motherland, but his family wants him in the New World. The fantasy endures,” she says, hopping from the bed. In one fell swoop she opens the window, places a bolt of fabric at the crack at the bottom of the door, lights a stick of incense jutting out of a mottled houseplant, and reaches under her pillow for a pack of Camel Lights. It is an elegant routine perfected from years of practice.

“Smoke?” I shake my head no (pickle baby puckers up its fish mouth: thank you, mama), but damn it looks good there in her hand. It’s the look – grown up, certain – that I miss more than the taste right now.

Sunera leans back, rattling the bedframe. “She’s twenty-seven. She lived with a white guy and it turned to shit. She can’t meet anyone she likes in the city. You know what she said? She said, ‘How could it possibly be any worse?’ And you know the strange part?” Sunera drags. “I found myself
going, ‘You’re right.’ I mean, why not? I don’t see a lot of successful relationships either.” She laughs. “Maybe I should ask my parents to hook me up.”

I don’t say anything. I’m thinking: I haven’t talked to anyone in three days. Sunera looks at me, mistakes my broken expression for concern, and adds, “I’m kidding, by the way.”

“Everyone’s getting married,” I say, picking at flowers on her bedspread.

“What? Who else?”

“John.”

“Get OUT!” Sunera kicks me in the shin in disbelief, ash flying all over the pink waterfall dress. So I give her the scoop, all the best details about meeting John in the park and the green toque, the girlfriend anxiously waiting at home. She says the right things – how the new wife is probably a nightmare, how he’s such a mess and a bad artist and how I’m better off without him but aren’t I glad I loved him then? All the perfect kind things that always roll out of Sunera so easily. Then she says, “What possessed you to call him anyway?” And she looks at me with her dark eyes and she is like some goddess of friendship in that stupid dress, and I start crying. I lose the fight with gravity and flop right over in a big wet pile.