How Happy to Be (25 page)

“Where has he been all this time?” I ask her.

Elaine wipes her hands on a dishtowel and goes to the cupboard atop the refrigerator. On tiptoe, she pulls down a plastic container filled with postcards and photos, bills, keys. She removes a newspaper clipping, smoothes it on the kitchen table.
Volunteers build housing for needy in record time
. It is a small community paper from San Francisco with simple, high-school yearbook layout, the kind of thing a street person tries to sell. The article is dated three years ago. The photo is of young men and women, younger than me, standing with their arms linked in front of a flat-roofed bungalow. On the edge of the grinning chain is my father, head slightly bowed, smiling sheepishly. The article identifies him as “a hitchhiker from Canada,” one of many non-locals (“a surfer from Australia” “a Kiwi student”) who showed up one day answering an ad for help and stayed several months.

“How did you get this?” I ask Elaine.

“He sent it to me,” she says.

The clipping surprises me. In his travels to the woods, my father was always stopping to trap and construct lean-tos from the brush, always lining his caves carefully with leaves and tarps. I would encounter them sometimes on my own wanderings. Building housing for other people seems like a version of that, but it’s hard to imagine him finishing one of the houses, nailing the last board, closing the door. What’s stranger is that he sent this article to Elaine. I never knew him to look for approbation of any kind. It was as if he needed my mother so profoundly that when she died, he shut off the valve and stopped requiring anyone. I always assumed this is why he and Elaine never worked; she was ever forgiving of
his isolation, but in the end, he didn’t need her forgiveness.

And yet, moved by pride, my father took the time to cut an article out – a slightly self-aggrandizing article – and send it to Elaine. He managed to stamp and address the envelope. He opened a mailbox in San Francisco and dropped it in. I’m struck by jealousy, and for a moment I think it’s because he has never sent me such an envelope. But that’s not it; if what he wants is engagement, Elaine, with her praise and enthusiasm, is the person to go to. I wouldn’t come to me either. So the jealousy is something else and I think it’s this: even my father is able to need people now. It is a skill he never taught me.

“Then he was living with the Hopis for a while,” says Elaine. “He’s a nomad, really. If it hadn’t been for your mother, he never would have stopped moving.”

Before the illness: my father and I, walking home before dusk. He spots it first, lifts a finger, and points at a shape lying on the road, stomach swelled from illness, quick, small breaths. My father says, “Wait here.” And I wait with the deer. It looks past me, hazy and poisoned.

I don’t remember ever being scared, even looking at this great dying thing. Nor was I sad, really, just curious: Who will miss this deer? What got into her veins? Why did she come here to lie down? Where was she going before she fell? I believed I could ask these questions, and there would be answers, and those answers would make up for the awfulness of dying alone, stomach ballooned like bellows. I was young enough to see order, even in disorder, to have faith in reason.

I sit in the front seat as my father shoots the deer, so it’s just a sound behind me. He lifts her carcass into the truck. I
know that we will return home and my mother will squeeze my shoulder, looking at the deer with concern as my father drags it into the garage. We can’t eat her because of the poison, but my father will take the skin and sell it. Money comes from anyplace, and sometimes no place, but there is always food for the three of us somehow.

“Are you two back together?” I ask Elaine.

“God, no,” she laughs. “But we matter to each other. We know things about each other.”

“Like what?”

Elaine considers the question.

“Well, this is probably not as profound as you might wish, but did you know that your father’s hearing is terrible? He probably didn’t hear you yelling at Franny.”

A pang: there is so much I don’t know about my father.

Elaine is going into the city, she tells me. She has a doctor’s appointment, and she’s made me one.

“What for?” I ask her.

“This is a small house, Max. If one person is throwing up every morning, everyone knows about it.”

Things happen to make a person plug in. A sudden midnight slap awake, a cold breeze through the window that tells you no one else alive feels like this. I know that I only exist because other people tell me I do, so I flip a switch and suddenly I am accessed, hacked, entered. My cellphone is in the corner, adapter plugged into the wall under a basket of wool. It blinks to life with green words in the dark: 13 MESSAGES. Thirteen
messages from the same five people: Theo McArdle, Sunera, work, Marvin, Ad Sales. I listen to their voices, and for the first time in days of rain and wood, I miss words.

Back behind the loom is an IBM clone the size of a small airplane, but wired for e-mail. I hunker down, listen to the ring and static bouncing back and forth – there and the earth, there and the earth – and I’m thinking about how I have virtually no understanding of things like e-mail, cellphones, electricity. What is it that I could teach a child? What will I tell the alien toddler with the tear-shaped head that I’m bound to give birth to, the one who holds my hand and says, “What’s e-mail, Mama?” I’ll have to say, “Well, there are tiny men the size of the stem on a thumbtack, they live inside the computer, and they run through giant pulsating underground veins …” I like the Flintstones answers: the ancient birds who play records with their beaks. Fleshiness appeals.

T
ODAY I TURN THIRTY-FIVE. I KNOW THIS BECAUSE I’M
woken by Franny Baumgarten whispering in my ear with her scentless child’s breath: “Happy birthday, happy birthday, HAPPY BIRTHDAY!” Then she looks at me very seriously.

“You have to go to the doctor today,” says Franny Baumgarten, who is wearing an adult-sized T-shirt. It hangs to her knees, sloping the slogan:
HERE TO SAVE THE INDUSTRY
.

“Yes, I do.” I reach for last night’s water glass on the ground next to the futon.

“Are you sick?” asks Franny.

“No.” I sit up and rub my eyes. I keep a pile of saltines nearby at all times to slow my churning belly. I eat two.

“But maybe?”

“No.”

“But you have to go to the doctor
on your birthday”
This is clearly unfathomable to Franny Baumgarten, who begins pulling at the loose threads on Elaine’s tapestry, threatening to undo it.

“And also your mother died,” she announces.

“A long time ago,” I say. “Your father died too, huh?” She pulls at a string, wipes her nose with her free hand, dances a little.

“Yes, but I don’t know him, so it’s not so sad.”

“Really? I think that might be sadder.”

Franny looks at me, eyebrows squirming, puzzled.

“I guess so. Sometimes I feel bad I don’t remember.”

“Do you remember anything about him?”

She ponders for a moment. Then: “Don’t move!” She runs from the room, pulling that piece of yarn with her, slowly unravelling Philoemelia.

“Franny,” I call after her. She runs back in, huffing and puffing, holding in her hand a photograph. A clear blue swimming pool, a handsome young man with a proud brow, his chest dripping with water, is linked at the hands to a toddler in water wings. She floats on her frog belly, grinning at the camera.

Franny leans against me, warm. “I remember he taught me to swim.”

“He looks like a good guy, Franny.” She points out some
things about the photograph: Her mom took it. Her water wings are orange, and she outgrew them a long time ago. Her father didn’t know it but there was a lump in that wet chest. Smoking is bad.

“Do you have a picture of your mom?”

I make Franny fetch my bag, thinking how useful kids are. I dig around, and Franny peers inside. “Cigarettes!” she whispers, so no grown-ups will hear.

“I quit. Seriously.” I realize that’s true: when did I last smoke?

I pull out the Tic Tac case that holds a black-and-white passport-sized photo of my mom. She has a small-town bouffant and a tight-lipped smile, as if she’s afraid to show her teeth.

“She was younger than I am now,” I tell Franny, and then I point out some things to her: how my mother never actually used her passport because she never got to go anywhere outside Canada, how she hated having her picture taken, how she got this done in a photo booth in an old drugstore in Vancouver that was torn down to make way for a McDonald’s (I made that up years ago but what can you do? Some stories just endure).

I’m holding the picture of her father, Franny is holding the picture of my mother. The yarn lies in a pile in the centre of the room.

“Wanna trade photos?” I ask her. She considers the proposition.

“No,” says Franny Baumgarten. “I like mine.”

I take a water taxi with Elaine to the mainland, and we walk the newly cobblestoned sidewalks of the harbour town toward the doctor’s office. It’s one of those days that’s neither hot nor cold, the streets patchy with sun. The ferry town has acquired a patina of fake rustic quaintness – Ye Olde Fudge Shoppe – that breaks down after a few blocks, the town reverting to its natural environment of strip malls and parking lots. The doctor’s office is between a nail salon and pet-food chain.

This doctor is all twenty-five-year-old Doogie Howser genius brimming with West Coast cheer, telling me how he works in rural communities one week a month and do I know what it’s like for the Haida and he’s actually asking me this while he’s buttering my stomach with clear jelly and rubbing a cellphone-like machine back and forth really hard, like he’s trying to pull the thing out of there with some supermagnet.