Snapped (6 page)

“Not a bit. Help yourself,” I say. I’m quite sure the particular
Snap
shirt she’s wearing is one of the originals. There are only a few left and they’re in the locked archive room, not the Swag Shack. Then again, we did reissue them for our tenth anniversary and there’s a pile of those in the Swag Shack. I shake my head. It’s a
T-shirt
. I am ridiculous.

Precious Finger is the last to arrive for breakfast. Her nose
is runny and she looks like she’s been crying. I want to tell her that Zeitgeist isn’t worth it, but decide not to. If I say that she’ll start bawling and then we’ll be in the bathroom and she’ll tell me about riding his skinny stub and how she’s never felt like this before and knows he feels the same, but he’s scared. He’s married, with two kids and he lives in Chicago, but it’s not impossible. They have so much in common: they both work in advertising, they both love Depeche Mode, they both eat their fries with mayonnaise. I could be brutal and tell her that Zeitgeist is a prick and he only fucked her because he was drunk and she was there, but she’ll say that I don’t know him the way she does, that I couldn’t possibly understand their connection. But she’d still want to be my friend and she’d call me and want to visit and stay at my place and talk about Zeitgeist. Sometimes it’s better to hand someone a tissue and say nothing. But I have no tissues, so I bury my face in a menu even though I already know I’m having the eggs Benedict.

I lead the tour of
Snap
headquarters and the Bootcampers are suitably impressed. Eva’s DOs begin to arrive for the roundtable and out of the corner of my eye I spot a girl who looks familiar: long dark hair, pretty. She’s wearing a pleated miniskirt with a fitted boy’s suit jacket that’s been tailored and carefully deconstructed. She’s wearing flat suede ankle boots and slouchy fuzzy socks. She’s a DO. I lead the Bootcampers past her and I catch a glimpse of a tiny diamond stud in her nose. The girl gives me the biggest grin. It’s Parrot Girl without her parrot. Eva has invited Parrot Girl to the roundtable. I hate Parrot Girl. I call over to Eva and ask to speak to her in my office. I usher the Bootcampers into the boardroom for what I call an
informal mixer
to chat with the DOs who have already arrived.

“You invited Parrot Girl to the roundtable?”

“Excuse me?”

“The fucking Parrot Girl, Eva.”

“Parrot Girl’s not here.”

“The girl in the boy’s suit jacket—that’s Parrot Girl.”

“No!”

“It’s her, Eva.”

“I saw her at the gig last night, after you left. She had a great look, and gosh, I guess I didn’t notice.” Eva’s voice is warbly. She sounds like she’s going to cry and I know I have no tissues. “Please don’t be mad, Sara. I’ll ask her to leave.”

I sigh and fall into my fuchsia velvet chair, my anger deflated. “No, that will just make it worse. We’ll do the roundtable, we’ll keep it brief, we won’t ask her any specific questions. Then before she leaves take her picture with the Polaroid—take Polaroids of all the DOs so it doesn’t look weird—and put it on your desk so you don’t forget what Parrot Girl looks like ever again. Now, I’m going to talk to Ted and fill him in.”

“Let me tell him, Sara. I’m the one who messed up, it’s my responsibility.”

“Okay, but make it quick, and don’t make him mad.”

“I promise,” Eva says and scurries off. I swivel in my chair and think about the whereabouts of Parrot Girl’s parrot. Is it home? Alone? Does Parrot Girl have a roommate? Does she live with her parents? Does she have more than one parrot—maybe different colors for her different outfits? A gaggle, a herd, a flock, a
gang
of parrots would be good. I could get them and bring them here. No one would notice me gone, not with Miss Eva and Mushroom-Head-Dick Ted busy fellating the Bootcampers and the Bootcampers going down on
the roundtable DOs in one naked orgy of trend and style bullshit. Precious Finger would like that; maybe she could get Zeitgeist to fuck her again.

There would be plenty of time to get Parrot Girl’s gang of parrots here. I could lure them into the taxi with bits of some flavored nacho chips that I have about a trillion mini-bags of in my office that some PR company sent me last week. The chips are disgusting and my fingers are coated orange and smell like vomit after I eat them, which I frequently do simply because they’re there.

I would get the parrot gang in the taxi with the disgusting flavored nacho chips then march them into my office, right past the orgy in the glass-walled conference room, right past Ted and Parrot Girl and weepy, idiot Eva whose fault this is in the first place. So after she’s had some mind-blowing DO of a multiple, triple-X orgasm she can come on into my office and take that fucking responsibility she seems so eager for by lying on the floor as the parrots take turns shitting orange nacho poo all over her and imitating her pleas for mercy as she cries. I could do this and Eva would learn her lesson and then we could set the parrots free together on the roof, while I smoke.

“Is there anything I can bring?” I ask Ted. I’m fishing for information about the mysterious 11:00 a.m. party tomorrow. I replayed Genevieve’s message all week and still couldn’t make out what she was talking about. I finally deleted it yesterday. If I subjected myself to Olivier’s recorded screams one more time I feared I might have a seizure.

“I think Gen’s got it under control. Just bring yourself—bring a date if you want to. I can’t believe we’re finally getting you out to the ’burbs.”

“Jack’s in Toronto,” I say. I haven’t quite come to terms with the fact that I’m breaking my steadfast no-suburbs rule for a party I know nothing about. There had better not be hats.

“Bring a non-date then. Bring Eva—or whoever. And a present would probably be good form—it’s kind of ridiculous, I know. He’s one, it’s not like he knows what’s going on. But Gen wants a big to-do, all the moms in the neighborhood throw big
to-dos.
”

Olivier’s birthday. Of course. He’s turning one. I know
this. Or at least I know this now. I will pretend to have known this all along.

Back in my office I dial Eva’s local and put her on speakerphone, which I know is obnoxious, but I’ve never had an assistant before and that orange button, neglected for so many years, is just begging to be pressed. “Eva, could you come in here for a sec?” Like I couldn’t walk the ten feet to her desk. I swear I can feel my ass spreading wider.

“What’s up?” Eva couldn’t be cuter today, in her mint-green summer suit and old-fashioned silver sandals with a short square heel.

“I’m sure you have plans already, but would you like to go to a party tomorrow morning?”

“Tomorrow
morning?
”

“It’s for Olivier—Ted’s son. He’s turning one and I know it’s going to be all these Pointe-Claire mommies and their husbands and their kids and Jack’s in Toronto—”

“No problem. Done. What time?”

“Eleven.” I have fallen in love with Eva all over again this week. My life has never been so organized.

“Sounds perfect. What did you get him?”

“Who?”

“Olivier?”

“The baby. Right. Nothing yet. I mean, what do I get a one-year-old?”

“You wouldn’t believe how many adorable baby things are out there now. You guys should really think about doing a baby-style issue.”

“For
Snap?
”

“Sure. A lot of the readership must be having kids by now.”

I groan and bury my head in my arms. Pull that ugly,
crystal marketing award off my shelf and give me some blunt-force trauma.

“I could help you,” Eva says. “There’s a great little shop in Pointe-Claire that sells wooden European toys and fifties vintage-style kids’ clothes—well, they’re new, repros, but they’re the sweetest things. You’ll wish they had them in your size.”

I look down at my schlubby 501s and black Converse I’m not sure I should be wearing because Converse is owned by Nike now and Nike’s not very
courant
but they’re comfy and the blisters on my feet haven’t yet healed. I’m quite sure that dear little fifties mini-clothes are not for me. Even for Olivier it sounds a bit gay but I have no other ideas so I tell Eva yes, I will go to this great little shop in Pointe-Claire with her and buy some retro baby sailor suit or something.

Eva snaps her fingers. “You know what we should do?”

I don’t know, maybe gorge on sketchy seafood at some cheap Chinese buffet place until we’re so sick and bloated with MSG there’s no possible way we’ll make it to the party tomorrow? I’ll write Eva a hundred-dollar check if she’ll dig through the tepid warming bins at the buffet to find me a handful of closed mussels I can eat to increase the odds of violent food poisoning.

“We should swing by your place, pick up some stuff, go to the kids’ store and do the gift thing, then you can stay over at my house and we can just walk to the party tomorrow—it’ll be fun!”

I’m not sure about this. “What about your parents?”

“Oh, they’re away for the weekend. Come on, Sara. Think of it as an adventure.”

“A suburban adventure,” I say.

“Exactly. An
exotic
suburban adventure.”

I have no plans except maybe talking to Jack on the phone and sampling CDs from the overgrown pile on my desk. And I was thinking about going for a walk to snap some DOs and DON’Ts before eating a grilled cheese sandwich at bedtime that I will be punished for with nightmares for eating so late. I guess I could go to Eva’s.

Ted will kill me if I buy the gayest little summer sailor suit for Olivier—gayer than any baby sailor suit I could have possibly imagined—which means I have to and I know Genevieve will think it’s darling. The one time I’ve seen her drunk since the baby was born she confessed she had hoped for a girl she could dress up and have tea parties with and shop the boulevards with arm in arm when she was grown. Who says she can’t play dress-up and have tea parties and shop the boulevards arm in arm with her swishy sailor boy? In fact, I decide on the spot, I’m going to buy Olivier a sailor suit every year until he’s, I don’t know, forty, and he’ll wear it because Gen and Ted will raise him with impeccable manners and I am his beloved Auntie Sara whom he’ll never want to disappoint.

I decline a gift receipt when the shop girl asks if I’d like one—I can’t have Ted thinking he can return it. I do, however, ask for the complementary gift-wrapping service the sign above the counter promotes and the shop girl sighs.

As we tool around the West Island in Eva’s Saab, I find myself relaxed and surprised at the boutiques and the number of smartly dressed people on the streets. We buy some wine, boxes of fancy crackers and paté and Eva tells me that she’s having some of her friends over for what she calls cocktail hour. “Is that okay with you?” she asks.

“It’s great! Go for it!” I say this and immediately want to stick out my tongue and demand that Eva give it a harsh caning. There is no way to say
go for it
and not sound like you’re pitching a campaign to the government designed to motivate kids into going outside and exercising instead of playing video games and eating cheese puffs all day and getting fatter and fatter until a TV crew from
Entertainment Tonight
has to cut through the drywall to get them out for a weepy face-to-face with D-list stomach-stapling pioneer Carnie Wilson.

Eva’s parents’ house is not as big as I thought it would be: a boxy two-storey of pale yellow vinyl siding, no wraparound veranda, no porch. The lawn is green and freshly shorn, the flower beds are tidy. The house is plain and unassuming, not a monster sprawl of fake Roman pillars, rock gardens and fountains or wavy terra-cotta shingles for a touch of Santa Fe.

Inside it’s eggshell walls and muted colors, everything is tasteful but not untouchable. I notice a stained-glass lamp that isn’t quite right. Eva’s bedroom has hardwood floors and it’s big, with its own en suite washroom. There’s a queen-size bed covered with a patchwork quilt. I sit on the edge of the bed and can see that the stitching has been done by hand, not by machine. There’s a daybed by the window, a white chest of drawers and matching vanity. Antique cologne bottles are arranged on a silver tray. Everything smells of lavender.

Eva says I can sleep in her parents’ room or in the computer room that has a sofa with a fold-out bed. I opt for the computer room—sleeping in Eva’s parents’ bed is somehow wrong.

For dinner we eat roast chicken her mother has prepared and left in the refrigerator. Eva tells me her brother won’t be
home all weekend so I eat his. I didn’t know Eva had a brother. I mean to ask her about him, about her family, but her mother’s mashed potatoes have rendered me speechless with their deliciousness. This
is
an exotic adventure.

I take my camera out and take pictures of Eva as she arranges plates of crackers and paté. She poses like a pert fifties housewife. I help her fill decanters with gin and scotch and vodka. I make sure the ice buckets have ice. Eva empties a bottle of red wine into a carafe. She checks ornate crystal glasses for spots and I line them up according to size. “How many people are you expecting?” I ask.

“A half-dozen, maybe, but Chris said he may not be able to make it.”

“Seems like a lot of work for just a few people,” I say.

Eva shrugs. “Not really. We do it every week—we take turns playing host.”

“Does everyone live out here?”

Eva nods and explains that almost all of her friends live at home. They’d rather do that than spend what little money they make renting some shitty basement suite in the city. Besides, she adds, their parents let them come and go as they please. I don’t tell her that when I was her age living at home was unheard-of, an offense that resulted in public heckling and extreme forms of social shunning. After high school, we moved out, we found a way, we lived in shitty hovels and ate Asian insta-noodle packs every day if we had to. If you went to college or university, you maxed out your student loans, bummed cigarettes off your friends and went to preppy rich-kid parties at McGill to loot their coolers of beer that you’d smuggle out of the party and into a club in your jacket or your
purse. You did not live with your parents. You did not host revolving cocktail-hour parties in their homes.

The friends arrive all at once. They have a system, the blond boy in the sweater vest tells me as he pours me a scotch. They all live close by, but whoever lives the farthest from the host’s house calls on whoever lives the second-farthest, then they go together to call on the third-farthest and so on. That way they all arrive together and get to have a lovely after-dinner stroll which, Sweater Vest adds, helps keep the digestive system running as regularly as a Swiss train. He’s premed, he tells me, at McGill. Wants to be a G.I. man.

I make sure I get his last name so ten years from now when I’m really old and colonoscopies are part of my regular routine, I can make sure he’s not the one sticking that tube with the tiny camera up my sure-to-be size-twenty ass and giving me the news that my decrepit body is ravaged by untreatable cancer. I’d rather hear it from a stranger.

After less than two drinks I have it all figured out. Sweater Vest carries a torch for Eva, who probably knows but chooses to ignore his unrequited love for her. He has a girlfriend, though, who dresses like Eva, but her look is off—her shoes tonight are too pointy to ever be Eva shoes and her dyed red hair is more cherry-red go-go-girl than Montreal old lady. From her frosty tone I can tell Eva Jr. doesn’t like me.

Edgar is the boy in the mod sharkskin suit. According to Tiff, whose blunt black bob and wide-legged pantsuit make me think she should be carrying a cat-o’-nine-tails, Edgar is gay but tells everyone he’s bi. She tells me she is bi and can tell when someone is gay. Then there’s Ben, who is not gay at all—again, according to Tiff—but a man-whore whom
Eva used to date. Ben is tall. He has dark hair slicked back in a mini-pompadour. He takes off his black leather motorcycle jacket and underneath it is a tight black T-shirt and a full sleeve of tattoos. He’s the only other person in the room who’s wearing jeans. When he goes to the backyard to smoke, I join him.

“You’re Eva’s boss,” he says. He reaches over to light my cigarette with a Zippo. It has a flaming-skull sticker on one side.

“You’re Eva’s ex-boyfriend,” I say and take a drag.

“You’ve been talking to Tiff.”

“She says you’re a man-whore.”

Ben smiles and winks. He’s sexy. “Don’t believe everything you hear, darlin’.”

It goes on like this for I don’t know how long. Inside, we drink and mingle, then escape to the backyard and smoke. It’s not quite dark when he kisses me and I don’t stop him. He follows me to the computer room with the fold-out bed. He pulls me to him and kisses me some more. He’s hard and I want to fuck him but I don’t, not so much because he’s Eva’s ex-boyfriend and twenty-four and lives with his parents, but because I don’t want him to see my saggy breasts or my squishy tummy or my jiggly ass. I want him to touch me in all those places but I don’t want him to see them. I twist away from him and find my camera bag. “Let’s go, man-whore,” I say and lead him back to the party.

Cocktail hour lasts more than an hour—it lasts more than six hours. I drink and take pictures, mostly of Ben, though I convince myself that no one notices this. I’m lying on the carpeted floor clicking away, thinking that I’m getting some great stuff. I’m
working
, I remind myself. I’m dynamic and
smart, I’m into my groove—Sara B.: photographer, entrepreneur, respected
arbiter of style
.

“Sara, what are you doing?” Eva is staring down at me.

I snap her picture and everything is clear. I’m a drunk thirty-nine-year-old woman rolling around on the carpet of a house in suburban Montreal angling for crotch shots of a twenty-four-year-old Rockabilly boy whose mother I could be if I had been the one to live the after-school-special shame of teenage pregnancy, instead of that Mila girl who was in my tenth-grade math class.

“We should get you to bed.” I’m flanked by Eva and Rockabilly Ben. They walk me down the hallway to the computer room. I watch as Eva and Ben remove the cushions from the sofa and pull out the hideaway bed. They smooth a fitted sheet on, then a flat sheet. Eva’s tucking it in at the corners and I want to help. I say I want to help and Eva smiles but tells me to stay put. Two Rockabilly Bens blur in front of me. He pushes a pillow into a case and fluffs it. I want to help. I want to smoke. I want to fuck Ben but I want to sleep more. I think about sex and sleep and suburbs and parents and how all these kids think it’s normal to be twenty-four and live with their parents.

“Where do you people have sex?”

Eva and Ben stop fussing with the linen and look at me. Ring up the neighbors, invite everyone in, stretch a glow-in-the-dark condom over my head, shut off the lights and let me suffocate, martyr myself for stupid drunk women everywhere or die as a cautionary tale.

“Just for the record, we have sex the same places you would—sometimes a couch or the floor or in a car, but
mostly in our bedrooms. And yes—our parents know. If I’m dating someone for a while they don’t mind if he stays over.”