Eleanor Rigby

by Douglas Coupland

  Mr. Burden was hasty to inject, “We met at a line dancing class. Nothing inappropriate happened on that trip.”

  I said, “Remember that horrible little gas station?” Our hostel’s toilets had been plugged with what was essentially papier mâché. As the country’s plumbers were on strike that month, we had to find other options.

  “How could I forget? And the guys who worked there—never seen any better, before or since.”

  Mr. Burden looked at Christy. “You never told me any of this.” He sipped his Americano. “I almost gave myself cancer from stress on that trip. It was the last school trip I did. I had to make sure none of you brats were kidnapped or killed, though it might have taught you a lesson.”

  There followed an awkward pause, during which Christy looked at my ringless fingers. “Have you been married, Liz?”

  “Me? No. Not yet. Never fell in love.”

  “Huh.”

  Take it from me—the moment most people in relationships find out you’re single, their eyes start to wander. I thought I’d try to grab their attention. “You know, my own theory on love comes from a TV game show.” They both gave me their Liz-is-a-freak stare. “It’s not as if I spend my life watching game shows, but when I do, I remember everything,” I said.

  “Really, now?”

  “Oh yes. One show I caught asked the contestants how many times the average person thinks people are able to fall in love during their lifetime. The answer was six.”

  Christy said, “Six?”

  Mr. Burden—Dan—said, “That sounds a bit … excessive. How did they measure that?”

  “I have no idea, but no wonder people have affairs. They have all of these unused love credits inside them, and they want to use them up before they die.” I could tell from the looks that Christy and Dan swapped that I’d pushed a button, but I’ve never found out which one. They abruptly stood, coffees left unfinished.

  Christy said, “It was fun seeing you again, Liz.”

  Mr. Burden was clearly annoyed at Christy—over what, I’ll never know—but he said a gruff goodbye and they were off into the packs of scavenging birds, dithering people and buskers singing Neil Young songs out of key.

  I thought about how different Mr. Burden had been back in school. He was the Latin teacher who had to teach PE—he was never without thick white terry cloth socks and a nickel-plated whistle dangling across his grey kangaroo jacket. I was barely a blip on his radar; he only began remembering my name about halfway through my second year with him. When I raised my hand, it seemed to annoy him just because it was me and not somebody else.

  Don’t start thinking, Oh, just another case of low self-esteem. I’ve never disliked myself. In my teens, I was merely clueless. Nobody had ever sat me down and told me about the currency of looks and bodies and—in later life—about money and power. William and Leslie, masters of those realms, were like movie stars to me. It was only when they matured that they became friends or counsellors, there to fill me in on the world’s ways. Until then my impression was that everybody started out more or less equal, and behaved as such.

  * * *

  The charter landed first in Montreal, where we drove to another airport, Mirabel, an hour away. We camped out there for six hours for the much-delayed Atlantic leg. By the time we boarded, Mr. Burden and our class, twelve in all, pretty much staggered down the 747’s teeny aisles, buzzing from lack of sleep and grotesque food; all sense of fun had evaporated. Elliot was sick from rye he’d pilfered from the drinks wagon, and I was humming away on anti-nausea pills that made me tired but not sleepy. Somewhere over Ireland, noises and images began to blend together, and I remember everybody’s face having tweed-like dimples from the plane’s seat fabric. Then, over, I suppose, France, Mr. Burden snapped to life as if for a Monday morning gym class and shouted, “Everyone up. We land in one hour.”

  * * *

  Back to me in the hospital chair watching Jeremy sleep, wondering what he might be seeing in his dreams. I’d fallen asleep trying to guess what sort of guy he really was. Twenty is too young to be a complete adult, but most everything is there in some form or other. I didn’t see track marks on his arms, or tattoos, but … I wondered about his childhood, and … I simply had no idea what to do now that he was in my life.

  When the sun came up and he didn’t stir, even amid the bustle of nurses, patients and machines, I left a note for him, giving him explicit directions that he was to call me once he woke up, and then I drove home. I hadn’t thought about my wisdom tooth sockets in hours, but now they felt sore. For the first time in ages, my condo didn’t feel simply bleak. I suppose you could say it now possessed a kind of charged bleakness.

  I couldn’t rest or sit down. In spite of my lack of sleep I had vast amounts of energy and began to do all those dopey metaphorical things people do when their lives are somehow new: I opened the curtains, I walked around the place with a green Glad bag pitching out old magazines, I washed the windows and floors. When I was finished, the place was so clean and orderly I thought, I ought to have flowers in here. So, I got in the car and drove to a place in West Van that had some cool white peonies, very late in the season, and drove back along the highway, enjoying the early afternoon of a summer day. If I’d known that sleep deprivation actually gave me energy, I’d have started depriving myself of sleep ages before. I felt great.

  Then, on the other side of the highway, eight lanes over, before the Lonsdale on-ramp, I saw what I thought was a black dog walking along the highway’s edge. But it wasn’t. It was Jeremy, crawling westward. Oh dear God.

  I slashed across three lanes of traffic and screeched to a stop on the shoulder. Leaping out of the car, I dashed across the median and four more lanes of traffic, shouting Jeremy’s name. He saw me coming, smiled, waved, and kept on crawling.

  “What the hell are you doing? Are you insane?”

  He didn’t stop, and I had to walk alongside him. He said, “I’m crawling toward the sun. To Horseshoe Bay.”

  “What the hell for?”

  “Because it’s a light, and after last night I need to follow a light.”

  “It’s fifteen miles away—and why are you crawling?”

  “It’s humble.”

  It was a ridiculous conversation to be having. “If you want to be humble, why not just walk there with your head bowed?” I looked more closely at him; his hands and knees were torn. “Jeremy, you’re cutting yourself all over.” I looked at the concrete—broken pop bottles loomed. “Come on. Stop right now. The cops’ll come and get you and who knows what that’ll lead to.” I was wondering why nobody had stopped to help him, or arrest him.

  “I can watch out for myself.”

  “Prove it to me by stopping. Jeremy, are you high on something?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Did you get my note?”

  “Yup. I was going to call you at the end of my trip.”

  “From Horseshoe Bay?”

  “It seemed to me to be a manageable goal.”

  I continued walking alongside him, cars ripping past us, unfazed by the sight of a plump woman and a crawling young man. “How long have you crawled so far?”

  “Not too far.”

  “Oh God.”

  He looked up at me and said, “Okay, here’s the deal: crawl along with me for a little while and I’ll stop.”

  “How long is a little while?”

  “From here to that hubcap up ahead.”

  It was about a stone’s throw away. “Deal.”

  And thus I crawled along the Trans-Canada with my son. I’ve heard that parenting can strip you of dignity; here was my crash course.

  He asked me, “How did you sleep last night?”

  “Not much. I felt great today, though.”

  “I’m glad. What did you do?”

  “I cleaned out my condo.” A few cars honked at us, while the absence of a police presence made me wonder about the fate of civilization. “And I bought flowers. I haven’
t bought flowers in—well, ever, really.”

  “That’s nice. What kind?”

  “Peonies.”

  “What colour?”

  “White.”

  “They’re soft, aren’t they?”

  “They really are.”

  “I like peonies.”

  The cool softness of the peonies was the opposite of grit, pebbles and hot pavement.

  “You’ve really never bought flowers for yourself before?” Despite all his spying, I managed to surprise him.

  “For myself? No.”

  “How come?”

  “Because it’s like something they tell you to do in those books that try to teach you to cure loneliness. Buy flowers for yourself because you deserve it! I mean, a man is in a bookstore and he buys a book on loneliness—every woman in the store hits on him. A woman buys a book on loneliness and the store clears out.”

  “So you’re lonely.”

  “Yes, of course I’m lonely. Who isn’t lonely?” We were almost at the hubcap. “I think you’re too young to understand. And there’s our hubcap. Upsy-daisy.”

  Before I could rise, he bounced up like a Russian gymnast and reached out his hands to me. I was grateful for the lift. His hands were burning hot, and caked in blood and road grit. My hose were shot, and I’d somehow broken the heel on one shoe. I reached down and removed it.

  Jeremy said, “Give me your other shoe.” I did, and he broke off its heel. “There. Now you’re level.”

  “Thank you. Let’s just cross this highway without getting killed, and I’ll drive toward the sun of your choice.”

  Inside the car, air conditioning blasting away, I felt blood surging through my carotid artery, my head thumping away. “You need to eat,” I said. “I’ll make you something at my place.”

  He was holding my peonies in his lap, looking longingly at the sun. For the first time I let myself wonder: Is Jeremy really nuts? Come on, Liz, be practical. You’re a single woman. This is an unknown man you’re letting enter your life. I was also wondering about the depth and breadth of what appeared to be a religious streak. He certainly knew the language, and yet he didn’t seem like he was the mouthpiece for any particular sect. His upbringing, I imagined. We had yet to touch on that. And of course, I had to wonder about drugs. “Are you on any medications?”

  “No.”

  “Let me rephrase that: are you supposed to be taking something but you’ve stopped?”

  “No.”

  “Do you like pudding?”

  “Do I what?”

  “Chocolate pudding. I only have soft foods in the apartment.” I pointed to my jaw. “Wisdom teeth.”

  We got out of the car and quietly walked to the building’s front door. The inside lobby was as cool as it had been the afternoon I returned from the exodontist. In the elevator I said, “You push the button.” When we arrived on my floor, he already knew the number of my suite.

  He walked around the condo, checking things out. Unlike Donna from my office, Jeremy was no faker. “I’ve been in three orphanages in my life, and this place is more depressing than all three combined.”

  “I don’t care. I don’t understand beauty.”

  “But you like the flowers, right?” He placed the peonies in the sink.

  I fished around inside a bottom cupboard for something I could use as a vase. “The thing about being single,” I said, “is that you never receive vases as presents. I think all single people should be issued vases by the government.”

  He said, “Here.” He took a Royal Wedding cookie tin from on top of the fridge. “This is waterproof, let’s use this. I’ll trim the stems. Hold my hand.” He pulled me up. “These peonies smell nice. Like an old lady’s perfume mixed with lemon.”

  He snuck one beneath my nose. I’d never noticed how peonies smell. They made me think of puffy summer clouds.

  “I used to have to do the flowers at a church one of my foster families stuck me with. If I did the flowers, I could take my time and miss the talking in tongues. Not all, but most.”

  He trimmed the stems with precision and speed. Before my eyes he transformed an old cookie tin and a bunch of flowers into the only truly beautiful thing my apartment had ever seen. He said, “There. You said something about food?”

  My apartment seemed alive, and not ashamed of itself. Jeremy and I began to look through my cupboards and fridge, as I kept trying to sneak peeks at his face. He caught me at this and instantly knew why. “You don’t know who my father is, do you?”

  “No.”

  * * *

  The moment we landed in Rome, my head became light and my stomach clenched like a fist. Once the group of us filtered in slow motion through Italian immigration, we sleepwalked into a European tour bus that stank of diesel, Turkish tobacco and disinfectant. By then I was having a hard time breathing. I thought that once I was sitting down again I’d feel better, but no. Our bus was unlike any bus I’d ever taken, made in some forgotten place, like Albania. Its windows were of unlikely sizes and shapes, and its brown body was covered in brown stripes and stars. It was alien and I hated it. I instantly hated Italy or anywhere that wasn’t home. The Italian roads seemed lawless and veiled in blue smoke, crammed with eggy little parp-parp! cars. Even the sun felt different. My sense of being somewhere other than home was overwhelming. I suspect that Europe is now one big IKEA, but back then you knew you were in a foreign place.

  In any event, the bus promptly got stuck in a Roman traffic jam, and I started crying. Homesickness. The other kids on the bus were so spaced from jet lag they didn’t even ignore me properly. They simply closed their eyes or looked out the windows maybe once every forty-seven seconds.

  I caught Mr. Burden raising an eyebrow at Colleen. Colleen made a letter P for “period” using her index finger, then shrugged. Mr. Burden sighed and became almost cross. “Liz, what’s up?”

  I shook my head.

  “I can’t help you if I don’t know what’s bothering you.”

  “I want to go home.”

  “A bit late for that.”

  “I do. Now. I want to go back to the airport and get back on the plane.”

  “You’re just nervous about being in a new country.”

  Again I shook my head.

  “Here …” He reached into his coat pocket. “Take two of these.”

  “What are they?”

  “They’ll get you through the next short while.”

  At that point I’d have swallowed a pineapple whole if I thought it’d ease what I was feeling. From nowhere Mr. Burden produced a bottle of Orangina. I took a swig, swallowed the two pills and entered a daze that lasted fourteen hours. During it, we were marched into this bunker of a place and given a hard-boiled egg and a slice of fatty prosciutto. The boys were taken away to some other building, no idea where. When the pills finally washed out of my system, I lay on a cot—suddenly clear-headed—in the darkness of our Italian hostel. The other girls were asleep.

  I felt like a prisoner of conscience. My pillow was the size of a Chiclet, the mattress as thick as a saltine cracker. I curled myself into a ball and cried quietly, doing that thing that only young people can do, namely, feeling sorry for myself. Once you’re past thirty, you lose that ability; instead of feeling sorry for yourself, you turn bitter.

  I’m jumping the gun. Back to that horrible little hostel with its thin-sheeted shabbiness and its aura of the ghosts of ten thousand homesick girls. Back to Italy and its striking plumbers and suddenly having to find a functioning toilet somewhere, anywhere. The hostel’s toilet might as well have been a bucket. I scrambled off my mattress and walked out into the Roman night. My homesick stomach was in free fall beneath the sodium street lights that bathed the industrial nothingness with a burnt yellow tinge. There was a droning from the autostrada bordering the hostel’s neighbourhood. This wasn’t the Europe I’d been led to expect. In hindsight I can see that we’d landed in the Europe of the future.

  Though I was swamped wi
th homesickness, part of me was also enjoying a sense of inner freedom that I now know evaporates after about the age of twenty-five. It was a small joy finding an all-night gas station called Elf, maybe a few hundred yards around the corner from the hostel complex. The guys inside saw me coming from a long way away, and I could tell they were used to having girls from the hostel visit in desperation.

  Okay, here’s the reason we never told Mr. Burden about the gas station bathroom: its employees were the handsomest men any of us had ever seen, sculpted from gold, and with voices like songs. And there they were, in a gas station in the middle of nowhere, going to waste. They ought to have been perched on jagged lava cliffs having their hearts ripped out as sacrifices to the gods. On top of their physical blessings, these guys were charming and attentive—in both a humanitarian way and a frisky way, even charming to me—and … well … I’d never been flirted with before, nor has anybody flirted with me since.

  They spoke their schoolboy English, with heavy Italian accents I’d always thought were a cliché: Hello-a young-a lady. Good eve-a-ning. All I could do was blush, and as I knew only Latin (B+) it was flummoxing to have to ask for a key, but obviously they knew what I needed, and handed it to me like a crystal champagne flute. I may have been desperate for that key, but I still dawdled; it was heaven. And best of all, the bathroom was spotless and even had a small bouquet of irises—plastic, but it’s the thought that counts. When I returned to the hostel, Colleen was just waking up. I told her about the station, and she returned a half-hour later, aglow, saying how much she loved Europe. By the end of the night, all the other girls loved Europe too. We couldn’t wait for daily sightseeing to be over so we could run to the Elf station. We were awful. Nature is awful.

  * * *

  I said nothing, and used a dishtowel and tap water to clean my hands and knees. I’d have thought Jeremy would be crushed to not know who his father was, but he accepted it calmly. “Was it rape?”

  “No.”

  “Incest?”

  “No.”

  “You simply don’t know?”

  “It’s more complicated than that, Jeremy. And seeing as we’re both starving, let’s eat first, okay?”