The Spectacular

by Zoe Whittall

  “Sure,” I say.

  But Tom keeps talking. “You’re not a child. You guys all take risks. It sucks and it’s not generally fair, but you should at the very least feel a bit responsible,” he says.

  “Maybe now’s not the time to be a moralist,” I snap, pushing a finger into his chest over and over. He turns away from me, climbs back into the van, and slams the door.

  Chapter 12

  carola

  the day after our moonlight meeting, I was exhausted. Depleted. I hadn’t gotten home until the sun was beginning to come up. Some of the women probably could have talked until the next night’s moonrise, jonesing off one another’s energy and trauma. But I had had enough. So had Ocean, who finally said, “So here’s what we’re going to do. We will give him the option to go and we don’t press charges. But he leaves us everything.” We all agreed it was the right plan.

  I made myself a cup of porridge, some tea, and sat cross-legged on my bed. Instead of my morning stretches—because who was I kidding, it was hardly morning any longer—I was starting my day with the Swearwolves. I placed the cassette in my little bedside player, which I mostly used to listen to guided meditations before going to sleep.

  I was not surprised that Melissa ended up a musician. I knew her grandmother had started her on cello lessons the moment they moved in with her. But this kind of musician . . . I couldn’t say I understood it. I liked the energy sometimes, and of course the rebelliousness. She had so much freedom. To know herself. And I suppose, reading the article, that she had those things. But did she?

  I slid a fingernail through the Cellophane seal and pulled out the liner notes of the cassette. The Swearwolves—Claws Out. As you accordioned out the insert, there was a full photo of the band looking very serious, and then on the other side, one where they were goofing around. In that photo Missy was standing up on a BMX bike wearing big chains around her neck. I didn’t even really see the other members of the band. I examined her expressions, her shoelaces, her stance, her tongue piercing. I looked at the credits for each song, impressed by how many my daughter wrote. The design, the song titles—everything was so aggressive.

  I put the cassette into the player and clicked forward to Melissa’s ballad, “Not Looking for You Anymore”—the one that’s supposed to be “about her mother.” But I pressed stop at the chorus.

  It was too much.

  Shouldn’t I be glad that she stopped looking for me, stopped wondering, that her pain stopped? I had to leave. It would have been worse if I hadn’t. But she would never get that.

  I left the cassette in the tape player, placing it on the window ledge, perhaps hoping an errant bird might come and spirit it away. I was due to lead a guided meditation for the new volunteers in an hour, so I began to gather my things and re-centre myself. I find that when my own emotions are overwhelming, it helps to give back to others. Just the other day, one of the new arrivals cried through her whole first practice. She reminded me of myself the summer I first arrived. The bafflement of why I was there, the release, the sorrow of what I had left behind, the emptiness. It’s taken all these years to fill myself back up.

  After class, I approached her.

  “Are you okay?” I asked. “The first time can be intense, I know.”

  She sniffed, gathering up her mat and water bottle.

  “I’m fine. But thanks.”

  Later, after lunch, I saw the same woman rolling a suitcase out to a car.

  “Leaving so soon?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said, opening her trunk. She had a bumper sticker that read A Woman Needs a Man Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle.

  “Can I ask why?”

  She looked uncomfortable.

  “I guess I just needed a moment to myself, you know. Time away from my kids, my husband. But there’s so much pain in there, it was overwhelming. I’m not as lost as I thought I was. So I need to go home.”

  I was stunned by this answer. I read the evaluation forms when residents left; they were always effusive. They wrote about reconnecting with joy, finding resilience, self-actualization, independence.

  “It takes courage to stay and really look at yourself, to do that true soul searching,” I offered.

  “You don’t know me,” the woman said, and shut the door.

  I watched her drive away and I felt anger flood my entire body.

  Over the next few days I listened to all of Missy’s songs, over and over. The music sounded grating at first, and then it became catchier, and I found myself singing along and humming some of the poppier selections from memory while gardening, and minding the gift shop, while doing the dishes. I drove the ashram truck into Concord to pick up supplies and stopped at the library. I looked up newspapers from across the country, finding and photocopying every bit of press I could about her band. One of them had an advertisement for the entire tour, so I knew where she was almost every night. I took my bank book out of my dresser drawer and looked at my balance. I’d been saving my weekly volunteer stipend for years. I had a little something there. I had made up my mind: I wanted to see her.

  Chapter 13

  missy

  there is always a comedown when touring ends, but usually it coincides with going home and seeing friends and family, writing music again, tilling the creative soil. I am completely unprepared to be in Vancouver, alone, pregnant, and with only one good leg. I realize that I’ve never travelled by myself before. I wasn’t like the other kids in the conservatory, who grew up travelling around the world. I’ve never left North America, and I’ve never been in a hotel alone—I never even went to the airport by myself! The only travelling I did as a kid was camping. Another thing to thank my parents for.

  But here I am, stuck in a Vancouver hotel room until our manager can book me a flight back to Montreal. I can’t go for a walk because at this point my ankle is throbbing. I certainly don’t feel like writing music and everything on television—even the porn—feels achingly pointless.

  I realize I haven’t eaten anything in nearly twenty-four hours, but I’m also hardly hungry, the combination of hangover, sadness, anger, and probably some alien fetus making my stomach roil. But nonetheless, I go down to the lobby to seek out a smoothie or salad. I find a place next to the hotel and settle down at a table by the window and grab the abandoned newspaper on the table next to me. I skip the headlines, turning a straw in my smoothie, since it’s all mostly about Princess Diana and the horrible tunnel car crash. I remember watching the wedding of Charles and Diana with my granny when I was a kid. She got so into it. She must be so sad about how it ended.

  I fish out the back pages and do the crossword, read my horoscope, skim the comics. I’m just about to ditch the paper when a headline catches my eye: Sex Scandal at Ashram. There is a photo of a bunch of smiling hippie ladies of various ages. I feel a strange uneasiness come over me as I scan the names under the photo, confirming my suspicion, my sixth sense, that my mother is in that photo.

  A group of residents at a New Hampshire ashram have accused the former guru of sexual misconduct.

  “It’s difficult to think of him as guilty, since we regarded him as our guide. But we had, and still have, a spiritual study. We are still on that journey, with or without his dishonesty,” said Juniper Neligan.

  She has the exact same hair: blunt bangs, straight sides to her shoulders; everyone used to say she looked like Joni Mitchell. A beautiful, deadbeat-mom kind of Joni Mitchell.

  There is a photo of the guru, too, and I can’t believe that my mother left us for this guy who looks like someone’s pervy grandpa. He is so shrivelled up, with the glassy eyes of a creeper. Did she seriously not know what she was getting into?

  And then it dawns on me. New Hampshire. I know where she is. I. Know. Where. My. Mom. Lives. I have wanted to know for so long, and now I just don’t know what to do with it. I read the entire article over and over until I’ve basically memorized it. Then I go back upstairs to my hotel room and try to dial my dad’s numbe
r. It takes three tries because my hands are shaking so much.

  “I found Mom,” I say into the machine. “She’s at a yoga centre in New Hampshire. She left us for . . . yoga.”

  I’m about to pick up the phone to call Granny when Gord calls. They’ve arranged a ticket back home and a cab to the airport for a red-eye.

  I hang up the phone and slide off the bed, and begin to cry. Pain is everywhere. I am sore and nauseated, throbbing inside and out. My body that has held me in a state of suspended pleasure for months is betraying me, and my spirit is slowly eroding.

  Ruth

  Perfect happiness is the privilege

  of deciding when things end.

  — Sarah Manguso, 300 Arguments: Essays

  Smyrna, 1922

  1.

  Having a mother who is cold to you as a child never leaves you. A ceaseless inner chill. In my first childhood memory, my mother is saving my life. Corralling my sister Gail, our nurse Greta, and me into a rowboat. We watch my mother’s pale arms, unused to hard work, row us across several miles of the rough Aegean Sea toward the burning port. Greta, who had been caring for us since birth, stretches her jumper around both of us and whispers soothing thoughts. As we approach, the city of Smyrna is awash in grey smoke. It is on fire. Our father never arrived on the sailboat to fetch us from the vacation house on the island, where we’d fled from our home on the mainland to escape the simmering conflict in the city.

  2.

  Greta taught me how to love. I begin to cry, afraid of the deep, roiling water around us, the splashes that fall across our faces from the slash of the oars. It is a sunny day, but the smoke drains the blue from the sky. As we progress, the chaos of the warring port ahead gets closer. Stop snivelling! Mum says, rowing harder. Greta squeezes me in a one-armed embrace. It’s okay to be frightened, she says. We all fall silent, except for Mum’s breathing, the occasional whimpers from the dog curled at Gail’s feet. I try not to look at the glow of the city on fire. I feel for the first time the precariousness of life, which is perhaps why I remember that day, and no other days from when I was seven. I know for certain how quickly it could all be over. But when it really is over, I’ll ask my son to scatter my ashes next to Greta’s headstone in the family plot in Bornova.

  3.

  The thing about travelling in a rowboat toward a burning city, worrying that your father is dead, worrying the dog won’t make it onto the next rescue boat—and he won’t—is that it turns into a story that almost feels like a fiction, but one you can’t shake. The further you are from being a child, the more your childhood self will feel like a character in a fable. I will feel irritable in Canada when everyone insists on canoeing for a good time. I’ll tell my friends that campfires are a filthy business. Why would we purposely sleep outside in the cold? Any wild wind will set my heart racing. I will keep a box of emergency supplies in the basement: sealed brown paper envelopes of cash, drinking water, Aspirin, tins of beans and fish. But I know we were lucky in 1922. Later I learned that my parents were also lucky in the First World War, escaping internment despite their British passports. That my family’s wealth and foreign passports got us from our own rickety rowboat onto an actual rescue boat once we reached Smyrna, ahead of less fortunate families on the beach. And that my luck in life was a balm to my bad luck in love. I may not be happy, but I am always safe.

  Later in life, I will remember Turkey as a paradise—I’ll skirt over the burning, the wars, the loss, and remember the heat, the way my family moved as though one unit. But when I eventually go back, I’ll surprise myself by wishing to be home in Canada. A place I had always considered rather cold. A home will be the thing I’m always looking for but never able to pin down.

  4.

  When I meet my husband, Frank, we exchange our stories of September 1922. How, at the same time I was in the rowboat, Frank, also the child of Levantines in our village, was in Bornova crouching outside a window of my house, watching while a Turkish soldier got drunk on my grandfather’s liquor and then danced with one of the taxidermy bear heads in our sitting room. Dishes smashed, jewellery thieved, the inhabitants fled and scattered. Some left days earlier on boats back to England and Italy and France, and others, like my family, were in the vacation houses on the islands. Frank’s father had refused to leave, stubborn, convinced the conflict would soon blow over. When it didn’t, he led Frank and his mother to a drainpipe some yards away from our house, where they hid. Frank crouched behind his father, who held a rifle with two bullets—enough for just two soldiers, at close range. Then they moved stealthily in the shadows behind walls and shrubbery, and into the church up the road. They hid under a quilt in the back by the pulpit, listening to the sounds of gunshots and explosions. My great-great-grandfather had built the church after arriving from Liverpool in the 1700s. Frank hid under the heavy quilt clutching his mother as the soldiers arrived. They smashed the stained-glass windows, destroyed the pews, even poked a bayonet under the blanket, but his family remained undiscovered, unhurt. A miracle.

  5.

  I thought I loved Frank when we met, but I didn’t know love until very recently. It’s funny how love can be any new feeling. Until you really know it, you’re just guessing. My mother, who never thought much of me to begin with, called me weak that day, with my tears, my helplessness. Years later, my husband would betray me; Frank was the weak one. But he gave me my son, Bryce, and my granddaughter, Melissa. I’ll always thank him for those two blessings.

  6.

  In 1997, I’ll stand in that church again, trying to feel something momentous. I’ll know I’m the oldest I will ever be, in the oldest city in the world. I was born here. I’m going to die here. For the first time in my eighty-plus years of life, I’m not afraid.

  The Empress of France, 1952

  1.

  Most people wouldn’t choose to move 3,139 nautical miles across an ocean to a country they’d never visited with a four-year-old and a marriage that was less than solid. At the time, it felt like the bravest and sanest solution to our problems. We boarded the Empress of France, and as Frank put our suitcases into the shelf above our small bunk, all the anxiety about leaving began to dissolve. We were on the boat, on our way to a new life in Canada.

  2.

  Little Bryce was interested in three-syllable words—the meaning didn’t matter. So to him, everything was elegant. Elegant. Elegant. Elegant. Before we left, he would pick things up from the ground and say, This is elegant, Mum!, even if it was just a dirty feather. At dinner on the ship, I gave him a buttered roll. He held it in his chubby hands and gnawed it, grinning around the large formal dining room. I sipped my soup and blanched—the broth was metallic. Oh no. Just like the last time with Bryce. I was pregnant. Everyone else was murmuring about how delicious it was. I discreetly pushed my plate aside. Bryce chewed his bread, open-mouthed and with abandon, then threw it to the ground and laughed. And that was when I saw her. Of course. I bent down to retrieve the discarded roll, and before lifting my head back up, I glimpsed Frank across the room, standing at the bar. His face bright and engaged, and I knew before I saw her. I couldn’t even see her face, but I’d memorized that reddish-blond hair, the shape of the curls that fell below her neck. I wanted to lie down on the ground. And I would have if Bryce hadn’t begun to wail.

  3.

  I had left Smyrna, left my entire family, to get rid of this thin, childless woman whom my husband was so taken with. And so, when Frank suggested this journey, I was all for it. An ocean wasn’t big enough to put between us, but it was the best I could do. And there she was again, trailing my life like a barnacle. I stood up from the dinner table and went out to the deck, leaving my son wailing. Surely Frank would tend to him if an entire dining room was watching. The boat was in the middle of nowhere. The water stretched out in all directions for farther than I could conceive. The sky was black. The wind pushed me about. It was so windy that no one else was on the deck. Gail had hated the boat. She had gone to Canada first
, and wrote letters from her bunk below, where she had curled up, saying the upper deck made her dizzy. I leaned against the railing and threw up. The woman’s perfect curl, the way everyone remarked that she was just so clever, clever like a man! I felt a depth of sadness as long and wide as the sea before me. I put one foot up on the railing. The ocean below so rough, I felt like I belonged down there in the chaotic swirl. I could dip out and over and this feeling would stop. The feeling of being on fire and drowning at the same time. I put a second foot up, testing. Yes, relief. And then I heard a voice. Mum, Mum? Bryce was behind me, had followed me out. The boat rocked, knocking him to his bum, and he began to cry. Out of instinct, I put both feet back on the deck and went to him. I pressed him to my heart and began to cry, the two of us sobbing together. For the rest of my life I will think of it as the time my son saved my life.

  4.

  Later that night, I would ask Frank, Did I see Frances in the dining room? He said, Quite a coincidence, isn’t it? The steak was just lovely. You wouldn’t think they could cook a steak this lovely on a boat. We left it at that. But I developed a simmering rage that would not leave me for many, many years. I remember when Carola, Bryce’s first wife, used to caution me by saying, All that anger is going to turn to cancer. I told her feelings don’t give you cancer.

  Feelings are everything, she said.