Between
Page 1
“Angie Abdou writes with power, grace, and a fearlessness
Vero and her husband Shane have
that takes you deep inside a seldom-seen world. Masterful storytelling.”
moved out of the sweet suite above his
—Terry Fallis, author of THE BEST LAID PLANS
parents’ garage and found themselves smack
B
in the middle of adulthood —two kids, two
“There are no easy targets in Between, Angie Abdou’s fiercely
engaged novel about the culture clash generated when a privileged family
cars, two jobs. They are not coping well.
with hidden problems hires a young and insightful Filipina nanny. Smart
e
In response to their looming domestic
and fast, both troubling and funny, Between accelerates as you read, a crisis
t
breakdown, Vero and Shane get live-in
looming all the while the idea of home holds hope. You won’t see
w
help with their sons—a woman from the
the ending coming. But it’s right when it arrives.”
kie
Philippines named Ligaya (which means
il
—Timothy Taylor, author of STANLEY PARK and THE BLUE LIGHT PROJECT
een
happiness); the children call her LiLi.
vin w
Vero justifies LiLi’s role in their home by
“Between is not a novel that you’ll forget easily with its dark humour,
insisting that she is part of their family, and
its lifelike characters, and a story of many complicated relationships that
lead to a jaw-dropping conclusion. Pick this book up—you won’t
she goes to great lengths in order to ease
photo by ke
be able to put it down.”
her conscience. But differences persist; Vero
—Jowita Bydlowska, author of DRUNK MOM
ANGIE ABDOU has a PhD in
ANGIE
grapples with her overextended role as a
mother and struggles to keep her marriage
English Literature from the University
“In her unflinching portrait of a marriage in crisis, Angie Abdou bravely
of Calgary and teaches full-time at the
Between
passionate, while LiLi silently bears the
goes where few Canadian novelists would dare. The result is riveting.”
burden of a secret she left behind at home.
College of the Rockies in Cranbrook,
—Trevor Cole, author of THE FEARSOME PARTICLES
British Columbia. Her first novel, The
ABDOU
Between offers readers an intriguing,
“In
Bone Cage (NeWest Press), was a finalist
Between, Angie Abdou doesn’t take the predictable road. She deftly
searing portrait of two women from two
steers us into the deepest of emotional potholes, lands us in the ditch, and
in CBC’s 2011 Canada Reads. She
then finds a way back out again. This book is hilarious and disturbing, and an
different cultures. At the same time, it
is also author of The Canterbury Trail
honest look at marriage and parenthood and the ways that entitlement
satirizes contemporary love, marriage,
(Brindle & Glass) and Anything Boys
and sex can drive wedges between us.”
and parenthood by exposing the sense of
Can Do (Thistledown). Angie lives in
—Farzana Doctor, author of SIX METRES OF PAVEMENT
entitlement and superiority at the heart
skiing mecca Fernie, British Columbia,
of upper-middle-class North American
with her husband and two young
existence through a ubiquitous presence
children. abdou.ca
in it: the foreign nanny. Angie Abdou
comically and tragically tackles the issue of
international nannies by providing a window
Fiction
on motherhood where it is tangled up with
ISBN 978-1-55152-568-6
$18.95 Canada | $18.95 USA
ANGIE
ARSENAL PULP PRESS
ABDOU
class, career, labour, and desire.
arsenalpulp.com
Author of CANADA READS finalist The Bone Cage
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Between
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Between
ANGIE ABDOU
ARSENAL PULP PRESS
VANCOUVER
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BETWEEN
Copyright © 2014 by Angie Abdou
US edition published 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any part by any means—graphic,
electronic, or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a
reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or in the case of photocopying in Canada, a
license from Access Copyright.
ARSENAL PULP PRESS
Suite 202–211 East Georgia St.
Vancouver, BC V6A 1Z6
Canada
arsenalpulp.com
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council
for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for its publishing program,
and the Government of Canada (through the Canada Book Fund) and the Government of
British Columbia (through the Book Publishing Tax
Credit Program) for its publishing activities.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to persons either
living or deceased is purely coincidental.
Cover photograph: Getty Images © PM Images
Design by Gerilee McBride
Edited by Susan Safyan
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication:
Abdou, Angie, 1969–, author
Between / Angie Abdou.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-55152-568-6 (pbk.).—ISBN 978-1-55152-569-3 (epub)
I. Title.
PS8601.B36B48 2014 C813'.6 C2014-903544-6
C2014-903545-4
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With gratitude, I dedicate this book to Andy Sinclair,
who has read it nearly as many times as I have.
Thanks for the friendship and support.
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ONE
Hangga’t makitid ang kumot, matutong mamaluktot.
When the blanket is short, learn how to bend.
—Filipino proverb
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CHAPTER ONE
Vero Nanton’s life has been hijacked, and she hates herself
for being surprised. Every woman she knows told her this would
happen—motherhood would change everything—but either she
didn’t hear them (because her fevered response to the biological
imperative to procreate had drawn all power away from her ears and
redeployed it to
more biologically useful parts of her body), or she
paid these naysayers no heed because, simply, she believed that she
and Shane would be different (because they had before, on so many
counts, been exactly that—different). For whatever reason, Vero did
not process the warnings that female friends and family members,
generously or otherwise, fired her way the moment she stepped over
the threshold of thirty-five and displayed the usual symptoms of baby
fever, intensified (as they so often are) by delayed onset.
“You want a career,” Cheryl, Vero’s mother, said when she saw Vero
turning doe-eyed over new babies. “Women of your generation don’t
have to do all that nose wiping and gah-gah-ing. Thanks to us. Be
whatever you want.” Cheryl had stepped out of parenting somewhere
around Vero’s thirteenth year, choosing instead to focus her energy on
what she called her womyn’s group. The closest Cheryl got to moth-
ering was to ask Vero to join her and a circle of friends in some asanas
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or a heated discussion of The Golden Notebook. Vero, of course, did not.
At twenty-two, after completing a Masters in English Literature,
Vero had softened to Cheryl for a time. She went as far as to par-
ticipate in one of Cheryl’s yoga sessions, as a gesture of good will.
“Puff up your chests,” Cheryl chanted. “You’re proud pigeons. Carry
that pride into the rest of your day.” But there was no pride for Vero;
there was only pain, intense and sharp, stabbing deep into the core
of her hip socket. Vero vowed to rebel. She would lead a picket line
around Cheryl’s living room, waving her placard: “I am not a fucking
pigeon.” She wondered if hell has a ring where sinners spend eternity
in pigeon pose. If so, Vero could be inspired to live a pure life.
“I want to be a mom,” Vero said in the flat, steady voice she reserved
for Cheryl, “and I want to be a publishing academic. I can be both. I
will be.”
“There is no both.” Cheryl’s eyes drifted to the window. Her own
daughter bored her.
Now the sheer magnitude of the change in Vero’s life flattens her.
“I’m the robot Wall-E.” Eliot bends his arms in jerky robot move-
ments. “JJ-Bean is my best friend Eve. Mommy, you can be the
Robot-Who-Cleans-Up-So-Much.”
They’re crawling up and down a makeshift slide in the basement.
It’s Wall-E’s spaceship. He lives in a garbage dump in space, and he’s
trying to get back to Earth. Or something like that. Vero can never
quite follow. She sits in front of a daunting pile of warm clothes,
hands in her lap. Stacks of colour-coded paper circle her. She works as
an editor for a manufacturer of light armoured vehicles—LAVs, they
call them. Because it’s slow season—no government inspections this
month—she can work from home some days and save on childcare
costs.
“Peace-making machines,” she calls the light armoured vehicles.
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Never “army tanks. ” “Peace-making machines” jibes better with her
pacifist sensibilities.
The Engineers write the operational manuals. Vero adjusts The
Engineers’ punctuation. “Just sign on the line and off she goes, Vero
Baby!” So Vero moves the commas around, and she signs. Shifting a
few punctuation marks from here to there, or changing an effect to an
affect, hardly makes her a war-monger, she rationalizes.
“I can be the Robot-Who-Cleans-Up-So-Much?” Vero asks Eliot,
her hands still clenched in her lap. “That’s about perfect.” She aims
her words straight for the heap from the dryer. Her own shirt is splat-
tered with coffee, mushed carrots, and—perhaps—a spot of poo. This
laundry needs doing. If she looked closely at herself, she would be
forced to admit that a lot of things need doing. She, for example,
needs to get one of those mommy-cuts, so close to the scalp it never
needs combing. Her shapeless mass of black hair falls to her shoul-
ders in tangled dreads. She ties some of it in a knot on top of her
head to stop the itching at the back of her neck. She wears a faded
T-shirt with the logo of Shane’s favourite football team, a wet circle
of breast milk staining the football. “I can also be the Robot-Who-
Does-Laundry-So-Much,” she tells Eliot. “And the Robot-Who-
Fixes-Grammar-So-Much.” She makes a conscious choice to laugh
instead of cry. Laundry and apostrophes—not the life she dreamed
of as a child. She piles literary journals by the side of her bed, hoping
she’ll occasionally squeeze in an essay, a story, or even a poem before
she’s bludgeoned by the hammer of fatigue. One day last month, she
miraculously got through an entire essay. Before she fell asleep, she
grabbed a notebook from under her bed, stashed there with a pen in
case she should have any late-night profundities that need capturing.
She opened the first page (still blank) and copied out the essay’s con-
clusion: “If you’re not pushing against the boundaries, if you’re not
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making at least one librarian mad, what’s the point?”
That’s the kind of person she used to think she would grow up to
be. That’s the daughter Cheryl wanted.
“Well, actually, Mommy, robots don’t usually do laundry.” Eliot
holds his hands in front of him, palms toward the ceiling, and speaks
slowly, professorially. He rolls his eyes upward as if addressing his
lecture to his own brain. This particular demeanour is new, and poten-
tially annoying.
“What?” Vero rubs her eyes. “I mean pardon. Pardon me, Eliot?”
“You said you’d be the robot who does laundry so much, but actu-
ally, Mommy, robots live in garbage dumps, usually. They clean gar-
bage. You’re the Robot-Who-Cleans-Up-So-Much. Your name is
Mop.”
Jamal, whom they call JJ-Bean—though Vero can’t remember
why—has fallen face-first into the carpet at the bottom of the slide,
legs splayed above him, and he screams, “uck! uck! uck!” His heavy
diaper reeks of asparagus pee. That’s the smell of Vero’s new life: pee
and peanut butter. Always.
Vero’s best friend Joss was raised by Buddhists and her husband Ian
is a Quaker. “Silence is what Ian and I have in common,” Joss once
told Vero. “It’s a better base than you’d think.” This seemed odd, back
before Vero had kids, back when she only dealt with Joss’s boys in
brief intervals involving wine, but at this exact moment, Vero recog-
nizes the value of silence.
“That’s okay, Mommy, Jamal’s just crying. Babies always cry.
Because that’s what babies do.”
Vero gets Jamal unstuck, righting his little body with one tug
on his heavy diaper, and returns to her stack of laundry. She wants
to stick her whole head deep into the warm, fresh pile and leave it
there. She’ll breathe in the organic lemongra
ss scent until it fills her,
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cleaning her from the inside out. Ding! goes the timer. Fresh new
Vero .
“What if I don’t want to clean up anymore? How about if I be
the captain?” Vero forces herself to list the things she loves about
Eliot: his thick tussle of coarse hair the colour of sand, his sturdy little
linebacker’s chest, his sticky-outie ears. She loves the warm curve
where his neck meets his shoulders, his moss-coloured eyes that slant
slightly downward like Shane’s, and his respect for order, which was
just like hers, until she traded it in for kids.
Although it’s too early to know for sure, Jamal looks like he’s more
of a replica of Vero: slight and dark.
“You can’t be the captain, silly!” Eliot’s so shocked by her sugges-
tion that he forgets his professorial tone and is a three-year-old boy
again. “You’re a girl. Daddy can be the captain. When he gets home
from work. He has very important work. He helps sick people. He
needs to rest when he gets home from work.”
Eliot’s reverence for work should surprise Vero more than it does,
but she’s already checked out of this conversation. Eliot lost her on:
You can’t be a captain because you’re a girl.
From the child of a feminist. Grandchild of a feminist. In the
twenty-first century.
Vero knows who to blame: The Engineers. Vero Baby! That’s what
they call her. On her days at the plant, in their e-mail exchanges, it’s
always “Vero Baby! ”
“Didja get those proofs, Vero Baby?”
“You need a deadline on that, Vero Baby?”
“Just pop that bastard right back in my box when you’re done shuf-
fling the commas, Vero Baby!”
Vero knows The Engineers don’t like being corrected by a younger
woman, and “baby” is their sharped-tipped dissection pin, sticking
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her hard and fast to her rightful place. But she feels sorry for the old,
paunchy guys—so easily threatened—and she lets it slide. A “baby”
here and there never killed anyone, she rationalizes. (Vero is an excel-
lent rationalizer.) But then Shane picks up on it: “What’s for dinner,
Vero Baby?”
“Got a welcome-home-hug for your old man, Vero Baby?”
“Save some of that mama’s milk for Daddy, Vero Baby!”