The Big Dream (4 page)

“You want to know if I'm still a virgin?”

Now he didn't want to know at all. But he'd started it. “You don't want to discuss it with me?”

“Why would I?”

“Then why tell me where you were? It's not my business if it's not your father's.”

“You're not my father.” She tipped back on her elbows, looking up at him.

Theo pushed his mouth into a grin. “Nope. Pretty sure not. So, you'll tell me?”

“I didn't say that.”

“But will you? It's easy – I'll ask, you answer.”

“That's
too
easy.”

“Ok. What would be harder? Do you want to embed your sexual status in a crossword clue and have me work it out?”

Her smirk went blank. “No.”

Was the joke too complex? Theo was trying to think of a suave explanation when he heard a shriek. He stood abruptly, knees crackling, as the stroller emerged from the bush, leaves in the spokes and through the front bar. The children were both screaming, but with faces neutral, as if the noise were only an assigned task. Jake, now hatless, shoved the thing through the yard, onto the driveway, then out of sight towards the backyard. Theo took a step after them.

Colleen said, “He does that all the time when I sit. He's a good stroller-pusher.”

Theo sat back down on his step. He really hadn't wanted to pursue or punish.

Colleen said, “It's six twenty-nine.”

“She'll come. She's coming.”

“Wouldn't she have called if she was running late? She's a half-hour late.”

“She didn't . . .” Colleen didn't interrupt, so Theo was forced to finish the sentence. “. . . didn't say
six
exactly. She said
after work.”

She rolled her eyes, but not in a teenaged who-cares way. This was an adult, pitying eye-roll, such as any of his tougher friends would have given such banal manipulation. Joe was not one of his tougher friends.

“So, really, she could show up anytime. And I rushed for nothing.”

“She usually gets home
around
six, anyway.”

“How do you know her
usually
if you haven't lived with her for six months?”

“She still has the same job. And we've talked since then. We talk all the time.”

Colleen silently tugged her tunic over her knees, over and over. It wasn't long enough not to flick right back up over bare round knees. Flick up, tug down, flick up –

“Stop that.”

“It doesn't fit,” Colleen said without stopping. “I'm going to get in trouble on uniform day for showing my panties on the stairs. They'll think I'm like those hiked-up whores who do it on purpose.”

“It's just because you're tall, though . . . right?”

“Right. But the VP is an asshole.”

“I am the king,” Jake announced. The kids had re-appeared in front of the garage without Theo noticing. Jake was standing on the underseat rack of the stroller, his head between the handlebars. “I am the master of everybody.”

“Jake, you can be king with your feet on the ground, please. And where's your toque? We can't buy another if it's lost – they're not for sale in summer.”

Marley's tiny fat hands waved like a conductor's.

“Marley is my slave. I am in charge. I am the king.”

“Jake, really. Down, now.”

Jake stood perfectly still and screamed, “You aren't the king. Where's Mommy?” He began to bounce on the rack, bending and straightening his knees, not actually jumping, though the whole contraption jiggled. Marley tossed her head as if to see what disaster had befallen her. Her navy eyes were humungous.

“Mommy's on her way from work
right now
and she'll be
so mad
to see you jumping on your sister's stroller.”

A bark of laughter from Colleen.

Marley began to punch the air, loudly cooing, “Ohmmy ohmmy ohmmy!”

Startled by the noise, Jake jerked backwards, fell, heaved up and grabbed the stroller to push it full-tilt back into the bushes.

Colleen nodded slowly, as though her chin were weighted. “They say divorce is always hardest on the children.”

Theo jolted to his feet, conscious even as he did of how awkwardly similar his motion was to the six-year-old's a moment ago. “We're not getting divorced, we're
working through this.
What did Joe tell you, anyway?” Theo wasn't actually sure he was right about the divorce, and less sure he could convince Colleen, who was quite capable of eavesdropping on his sad drunk conversations with Joe. Or just reading his mind.

A breeze lifted snarls of ginger curls around her shoulders. “He said it's a trial separation. And that I shouldn't ask about it.”

“And how are you doing on that?”

“Yeah, Joe accidentally put the hydro bill into a recycling bin instead of a mailbox yesterday. I don't obey him on principle. Am I getting dinner tonight?”

Theo willed his ribcage to expand with air, then contract to press out all the frustration and tension and rage. He'd been doing Rae's yoga DVDs after the kids were asleep, but by then he was so exhausted he might not quite have had it right.

“There's, yeah, some scalloped turnips in the fridge, just microwave'em. And tofu steaks from the weekend, if you want. The kids will probably just want the turnips, but give them the tofu if they ask.”

Colleen put her face on her knees. “The kids will
want scalloped turnips
?”

“It's a free meal, Colleen.”

She raised her head, suddenly bright and interested. “Are we going to argue?”

“What?”

“You sounded . . . exasperated. If I'm mean, will you be mean back?”

“I wasn't being mean, I just didn't want you to – ”

“Yeah yeah yeah. Better than Joe, just sitting there like a lump of – ”

“That's why you threw the shoe? Because your father is an insufficient debater?”

“He didn't even make a sound when it hit him. That's how I know it didn't hurt.”

“That's not a way to know. Especially with Joe.”

“She's not
coming
, you know. This is a joke.”

He sighed, and then tried to make the sigh into a yoga breath. “You can't make me angry, and you can't make me think Rae won't come. People get held up at work. Buses get stuck. Those are reasonable explanations. And there are others.”

“Not for why she wouldn't have called and used two 3-cent cellphone minutes to tell you that.”

“There might be something wrong with the – ”

“There
isn't.
Just for argument's sake say there isn't.”

“Fine. But how do you explain why she'd
ask me
to dinner and then not come?”

“Cruelty?”

“Separation doesn't mean Rae hates me. Even divorce wouldn't mean that.”

“Doesn't have to have hate involved. Might not even be about you, or anyone. Some people are just naturally cruel.”

“Rae is not cruel,” he said fast and involuntarily, words expelled like the
whoosh
of breath that would have come out had Colleen punched him in the stomach.

“No?”

“Marley, sit
down.
It won't
work
if you
do
that.”

The children were at the backyard gate, almost behind the porch. Marley was flopped forward over her chair-bar, with Jake in front of her, a long stick in his right hand, drawn up
as if to stab. But of course he would not do that. Theo gathered himself to speak sharply, to take the stick away, to parent.

Without turning her eyes from Marley and Jake, Colleen murmured, “Do you think
I'm
cruel?”

Theo froze half-standing, in a kind of pre-modern hunch. “Cruel?”

“Because I threw a shoe at my father, who is basically a nice person that just doesn't know what the hell is going on? Should I just have let him be, in his ignorance?”

Theo felt his shoulders relax, let himself sink back onto the step. He suddenly knew what to say. “I do think you should have let him be. Because the punishment didn't educate him, did it? There should only be punishment when it has the capacity to reform. Otherwise it's just energy wasted, pain – cruelty. Joe learned nothing about your wish for privacy from that shoe, so nothing was gained. You were cruel.”

Colleen seemed to slip backwards without actually moving, shrink into herself. But then she said, “So you'll learn nothing, then, if Rae stands you up tonight?”

“Colleen, I told you, she'll – ”

“There is no lesson she could teach you, that she could be hoping to teach you, by not showing up tonight?”

He gave her his gaze again, though he was starting to suspect he shouldn't. “What could I learn, from that?”

She wiggled her whole body, a wave from ankles to ears. “Oh, you know, that she doesn't love you, that you shouldn't be married to her.”

He ignored the soap-operatic tone, the high-schooler's conception of marriage as a poker-hand that can be won or lost once and never replayed. He concentrated on
she doesn't love you,
tried to hear it as a statement, and then to believe it.

It didn't take – he just pictured his wife bent over a tortoise skeleton at the ROM, then her pacing the living room with
Marley in her arms and graham cracker crumbs down both their sweaters. Then Rae with her head thrown back at orgasm, mouth open pink, dark hair strewn on an orange-juice stained pillow.

“Maybe I got the date wrong. Or she did.” He was pleased to hear ease in his voice, dreamy absent-mindedness, and assurance.

“I'm not a virgin.”

He choked on air.

She gazed at him, the green of her eyes greyer than her father's, more muted, although not dull. Like a camouflaged python. “It's your turn to talk.”

“That's not a rule that's strictly observed.”

“I'm observing it.”

“So . . . are you ok with that?”

“Well, I wasn't
raped
or anything.”

“I'm just not certain what you want me to do with this information, Colleen.”

“
Do
? Does anyone
do
anything with information? It's just for knowing.”

“Some information, yes, requires a reaction.”

“So what could be the reaction I want? What could I want you to do?”

“I can't tell you what you want.”

“I'm not asking that. I didn't know I could want
anything
. I'm asking you to give me a list of options and I'll choose.”

“Well . . .” He knew he was being baited, but Jake was at the hedge unfastening Marley from her stroller, his best meal all week had been turnips, and his wife was a) in her Post-it feathered cubical, b) in her snug bachelor apartment, eating spaghetti out of a tin and thinking of the lesson she had taught him, c) fucking a stranger or, at least, a stranger to Theo, or d) something he couldn't ever imagine.

The worst part was that he knew d) was correct and no matter what course the future took, he would never know what Raeanne
had been doing at six that evening. At least Colleen was there, with her ugly dress high on her straight narrow thigh, which was parallel his Zellers jeans. He loved her because she was there, speaking to him, passing the time. This had always been his undoing.

“Well, Colleen, if you don't see any options, there probably aren't any. Really.”

“That's how it works?”

“In this case. It's not like a menu, the lemonade or the boilermaker. These are internal choices, about what you want.”

“Boilermaker?”

“It's a drink, a beer and a shot . . . It doesn't matter, you're too young to drink.”

“I am?”

“Oh, god, what part of teenager class did you miss? You don't tell your dad's friends this stuff.”

She nodded as though taking notes on the customs of foreign tribes.

“. . . .unless you are seeking some sort of reaction from them, which you claim you can't even imagine.”

“But
you
choose your reaction. So how should I know what you'll do?”

“So you told me about losing your virginity . . . to see what I'd do?”

For the first time that afternoon answers didn't bounce out of her throat the moment he stopped speaking. She flicked the skirt up, down, up. Finally, with the whisper of a smile on her chapstick lips, she said, “More or less.”

Theo let the silence slide on. The children had laid themselves down on the grass, side by side, either sleeping or pretending to sleep, probably not dead. He didn't know how Jake had wrestled Marley out of the stroller, got her lying supine in the grass, high blades nearly covering her pink arms and legs. Jake himself was facedown in the green, apparently taking no questions.

It was nearly seven o'clock by the thin silver hands of his watch.

“Dolly . . .”

Colleen smiled more broadly in answer, a half nod.

Theo turned his head to the west, where his wife would come from, and to the pink hot beams of the setting sun. He wondered what she would see if she came walking down the street right now. Or whenever she finally did.