Just Like Family

by Kate Hilton

  “Message received, Avery,” says Peter. “You can stop now.” He pushes his glasses back up, turning his attention back to the drawings.

  I raise my hands in the universal sign of surrender, but he isn’t looking at me any longer. “What do you want to do next, Peter?” I ask. “Do you want to meet with the artists personally?”

  “Not unless you think it absolutely necessary,” says Peter. “Can’t you handle it yourself ?”

  This is Peter’s favourite trick for getting out of unpleasant assignments. “Seriously, Peter?”

  He grins. “Thank you, dear,” he says.

  “I’ll handle Tara, too,” I tell him. “You’re welcome, by the way.”

  “Tara?” he says. “You lost me. Were we talking about Tara?”

  “No, because I was handling it by myself,” I say.

  “And doing it beautifully,” he says.

  “You are such . . .”

  “A pleasure to work for. I know. I feel the same way,” he says.

  I smile in spite of myself. It’s impossible to stay irritated with Peter. Or at least, it’s impossible for me. “You’re going to love this,” I say. “It turns out that Roger Wozniak writes poetry.”

  “Did you say ‘poetry’?” says Peter.

  “I did. Prepare to be amazed,” I say. And I read:

  Bar Girl

  by Roger Wozniak

  She moves her hips from left to right,

  Her shoulder bears a tattooed star.

  Her waist is bare, her skirt is tight,

  The girl who dances on the bar.

  She comes here every Friday night,

  Collecting money in a jar.

  She floats above us like a kite,

  The girl who dances on the bar.

  I wish I may, I wish I might

  Love her near and not afar,

  And pull her close and hold her tight,

  The girl who dances on the bar.

  “It goes to show,” says Peter, “you never really know anyone.”

  “I see some Leonard Cohen influences in the piece,” I say.

  “The man is spinning in his grave right now,” says Peter. He points to the couch. “Go sit over there. I don’t want to be caught in the crossfire when God strikes you down for blasphemy.”

  “You don’t believe in God,” I say.

  “I believe in Leonard Cohen,” says Peter. He shakes his head, as if to clear it. “And Tara Gillespie? I’m having trouble connecting the dots here.”

  “Tara’s dad is one of Hugh Crane’s best friends,” I say. “He’s like family to her.”

  “A dirty uncle?”

  I give him a look. “More like a cousin,” I say sternly. He grins. I continue. “Rick told me that it’s his father’s dream to have his poetry published. Hugh is the editor-in-chief of a magazine that publishes poetry.”

  “And you can’t ask him yourself because . . .”

  “Because I can’t. As you well know,” I say. “But Tara can, so I’ll ask her to ask him.”

  “No need to get snippy, dear,” says Peter. “Sounds like you have a plan. Go make it happen.”

  “I have lunch booked with her tomorrow,” I say. “Oh, and I’m going up north on Friday for the weekend. I have to show my face at the cottage before the end of the season.”

  “It’s a bad time,” says Peter.

  “When is it not a bad time?” I say. “It’s a command performance. But why don’t you come too? Bring Hannah and the kids? You’d be welcome.”

  “No,” says Peter. “I wouldn’t be.”

  I wish I could knit up all the strands that unravelled when Peter’s father left Jenny’s mother. But I can’t, because Jenny’s childhood resentment of Peter has hardened into an impenetrable, incomprehensible antipathy, no matter what she says about moving on and letting go. Berry Point is Jenny’s home now, and Peter isn’t welcome. I drop the subject.

  I want to shake off the mythology of childhood friendship, the idea that the bonds of our youth are the closest ones we’ll ever form. Best Friends Forever: we repeated these words to each other so often, Tara and Jenny and I, that I’ll never completely disbelieve them, even though I know, rationally, that they promise the impossible. How can it be otherwise, when all we do is change?

  “So, to return to the business at hand,” says Peter, “if we solve the neighbour problem, we have the Wozniak vote?”

  “It would help if we could grant Roger’s wish to be a published poet, but yes.”

  “It’s a modest request, as wishes go,” says Peter.

  “You’ve obviously never tried to get published,” I say.

  “Fair comment,” says Peter. “I forget that you were a writer.”

  “I try to do the same,” I say.

  {CHAPTER 4}

  September 1998 and January 1999

  There was a brief period in my late teens and early twenties when I decided to take a break from being responsible, organized, and goal-oriented. My mother refers to these as my “lost years,” or “the years you took off my life.” Occasionally, she also says, “I’m going to have a word with Brian about all that next time I see him.” “All that” is my dad’s decision to leave a substantial chunk of life insurance money outright to Ethan and me without considering how mature, or not, we would be at the age of eighteen; “next time I see him,” is, obviously, when she, too, dies.

  My father wasn’t expecting to die when he did, and he didn’t think through all the details. He’d made Ethan and me beneficiaries, along with our mother, of his life insurance policy; our portions were held in trust until we turned eighteen.

  My first year of university was a disaster. I’d gone to the University of Toronto—my dad’s alma mater, and Peter’s too—but it was a huge school, and in my hometown. I needed an experience that was both new and comforting, and I got neither. I knew I was grieving, but I didn’t know how to heal. So I ran away.

  For the next four years, I was more often in Europe than not, on some internship or exchange, trying to cobble together enough credits for a degree. During this period I antagonized registrars at several institutions of higher learning; honed my advocacy skills petitioning for extensions, independent studies, and extra credit; irritated friends and family by extolling the virtues of “studying at the University of Life”; and spent a great deal of money.

  By the end of the summer of 1997, though, it had begun to dawn on me that I wasn’t the sort of person who was going to marry a European and spend the rest of my life teaching something to do with literature at an ancient university while raising multilingual children. I’d spent a month backpacking with Tara and Jenny that summer, and they’d reminded me, persistently, that I had a life back in Canada that I could resume if I returned. I suspected that my mother had given them a secret mission to brainwash me into coming home with them. But she didn’t really need their intervention. The other travellers I met were getting younger, and my conviction that personal tragedy had matured me far beyond my cohort was beginning to waver. There were moments now when I wondered if, in fact, it had done the exact opposite. And I was gratingly, achingly homesick.

  Jenny and Tara, having graduated, had returned home with purpose. Jenny was doing research for a professor in the art history department, which was going to look fantastic on her graduate school applications. Tara was starting a one-year public relations program, but more importantly, she and Ethan were getting married in December, and planning to use Dad’s insurance money to buy a house. A house.

  It would be hard to overstate how much this information undid me. Disconnected from the day-to-day progress of life back home, I found myself, for the first time, trailing the pack. I wanted, suddenly, desperately, to catch up. I wanted to hit a milestone. And the only one within striking distance was a master’s degree.

  That Christmas, back home for Tara and Ethan’s wedding, and sentenced to serve my last semester at my degree-granting university—which had told me in no uncertain terms t
hat it would not be granting my degree if I didn’t show my face on campus—I lolled on the couch listening to Alanis Morissette and writing in my journal and watching old videos of The Breakfast Club and Say Anything and weeping. My mother’s only comment on all this was to come down to the rec room one afternoon, hand me a box, and leave.

  The box was full of admissions materials from schools all across North America, for master’s programs in every subject I’d ever mentioned with enthusiasm: English, art history, psychology, sociology, social psychology. There were applications for law schools, too, which I set aside for the fireplace. And then there were applications for MFA programs in creative writing.

  I have no idea what deep maternal insight had prompted my mother to include them, but it was inspired. I was hooked. I went through the brochures, thumbing them, folding down pages, annotating them. I hadn’t done any creative writing since high school, but I liked the idea of being a writer, and I thought, with a kind of tuning-fork clarity, that it was something I could do well if I set my mind to it.

  The one thing I had that differentiated me from other applicants, I believed, was material. I put my mind to distilling it into a single short story, twenty pages in length, with more focus than I had brought to any academic assignment since high school. My mother, again, made no comment when I handed her ten completed applications and asked her to mail them for me, other than to say, “Sure, honey. I was going to the post office anyway.”

  And NYU, by some miracle, admitted me.

  The miraculous nature of my admission was confirmed when I arrived on the first day of classes in September 1998. The line of students awaiting course schedules snaked down the corridor, and most of them were dispatched inside of two minutes. But the registrar pulled out my file, flipping through each page. She asked for my letter of admission and examined the entire file a second time, much more slowly. I could feel tension rising among the waiting hordes behind me.

  “What happened here?” she said, apparently rhetorically. “You’re missing several prerequisites,” she added, the first question obviously addressing a broader issue of suitability than mere course requirements.

  “I know,” I said. “I’ll make them up.”

  “You will if you want to graduate,” she said. She’d met the likes of me before. She handed me a package. “This is a very unusual academic record, Ms. Graham,” she said. “You have a lot of work ahead of you.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “You’ve been assigned Professor Crane as your advisor. Go and see him during his office hours on Friday and arrange a weekly meeting time. Here is your class schedule and course handbook.” She slid a heavy envelope across the counter. “Next!”

  I stood on the steps of the administration building and tapped my last cigarette out of the package. I’d been saving it for either emergency anxiety abatement or celebration. This was a bit of both. I knew I didn’t deserve to be here, at least not by virtue of my academic achievements. But this was an MFA, and artistic potential mattered; it could, and had, in my case, created a loophole in the system.

  A blonde girl sat down on the steps nearby, smoking. She looked as though she belonged. I asked her for a light. She flicked her lighter, held it for me.

  “Horrible habit,” she said, taking a long pull of her cigarette.

  “Disgusting,” I agreed. “This is my last one.”

  “Mine too,” she said. “Are you new?”

  “Fresh off the plane,” I said. “Is it that obvious?”

  “The orientation package is a dead giveaway,” she said, pointing to the fat envelope sitting on the step beside me. “Where’d you fly in from?”

  “Toronto, most recently,” I said. “But I’ve been in England and Italy for most of the last four years.”

  “Nice,” she said. “Why on earth did you come back?”

  “Time to grow up,” I said. “Well, sort of grow up, I guess. I’m in the creative writing program, so maybe that’s debatable.”

  She laughed. “Completely debatable,” she said. “Wait until you meet your classmates.”

  “Worldly, mature, and sophisticated?” I said.

  “Only in their own minds, alas,” she said. “I’m Liz. Second year of the program. Aspiring poet, future waitress.”

  “I’m Avery,” I said. “Aspiring novelist, attempting to avoid thinking about the future in any respect.”

  “Welcome,” said Liz. “Who’s your advisor?”

  “Professor Crane,” I said.

  She crinkled her nose. “Too bad,” she said.

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “He’s old school,” she said. “He has a hard-on for anything written by a man before 1965.”

  “You talking about Crane?” An extremely tall woman with a nose ring sat down next to us. “I’m Cara,” she said.

  “Avery,” I said. We shook hands.

  “Our friend Craig had Crane last year. Craig said he doubted that Crane had read any post-colonial theory at all.”

  Liz nodded. “Stephanie said that he was completely dismissive of her paper on intertextuality,” she said to Cara. “I read it. It was good. She argued that literature could only be understood intertextually in the digital age.”

  “Interesting,” said Cara.

  “Crane didn’t think so,” said Liz. “He made her spend the next three weeks writing about a single paragraph in Anna Karenina. About a ball.”

  “Brutal,” said Cara. “Sorry, Avery. That sucks.”

  “You win some, you lose some,” I said. I had absolutely no idea what they were talking about. “Listen, I’ve got to go and meet my roommate, but I’ll see you guys around, okay? It was great meeting you.”

  “You too,” said Liz. “Good luck.”

  I took the subway home to the Lower East Side and walked up three flights.

  “Jenny?” I said.

  “How’d it go?” asked Jenny.

  “Not bad,” I said. “The registrar admitted me, but it sounds like my advisor is an asshole.”

  “You can’t have everything,” said Jenny.

  “True words,” I said. “How about you? How was your day?”

  “Meh,” said Jenny. “I had more fun decorating the apartment. Check it out.” Jenny was doing a master’s degree in decorative arts and design at the New School, which was a compromise with her ex-stepfather, Don, who was funding it as part of the conditions of her parents’ divorce. He wouldn’t pay for art school, and Jenny wouldn’t do a traditional program in art history. The compromise appeared to please neither of them.

  The tiny front hallway was now decorated with small cardboard boxes in various colours, each hanging from a ribbon, and each with a tiny object glued to the inside. There were beads, coins, feathers, scraps of fabric, a medal, postcards, and fragments of maps. “What do you think?”

  I hugged her. “I think you’re a genius,” I said.

  She hugged me back. “What did your advisor do that made you think he’s an asshole?” she asked.

  “I haven’t met him yet,” I said. “But apparently everyone hates him.”

  “Who’s everyone?” said Jenny. “You need to stop worrying about what other people think and make up your own mind. What’s his name?”

  “Hugh Crane,” I said.

  “Hugh Crane?” said Jenny. “From Berry Point?”

  “Berry Point? What are you talking about?” I said.

  “That friend of Tara’s dad’s. The one who comes up every year. Brown hair? Bermuda shorts?”

  I shook my head, drawing a complete blank.

  “I’m sure it’s him,” said Jenny. “Don’t you remember? Tara said to look him up last time we saw her. That he was a prof at NYU.”

  “It’s all somewhat hazy,” I said. “Did she mention it after the vodka shots?”

  “Quite possibly,” said Jenny. “Anyway, Hugh was okay. He was old and had bad taste in shorts, but otherwise he seemed fine. It’s not like you have to sleep with
him.”

  “Very funny,” I said. “As if I’d sleep with someone who wears Bermuda shorts. Give me some credit.”

  Hugh wasn’t wearing shorts the first time I slept with him, in his office, on his leather couch. And we didn’t sleep, although I was exhausted.

  I’d spent too much time over the past few years not sleeping enough or eating properly and having sex with men I didn’t know and generally being aimless. I’d been adrift for so long, actually, that I felt like a complete foreigner (though of no country in particular) with a better ear for European languages than for the cadence, vocabulary, and politics of liberal arts department-speak. I wanted to be reinvented.

  According to the guidelines for advisors and students, Hugh and I were supposed to be working on a plan to turn the short story I’d submitted with my application into a novella. But Hugh thought it was more important in the short term to cure the deficiencies in my reading history. He had designed a reading list for me, and we spent our weekly session together studying the craft of other writers, ones that Hugh admired: Cheever, Hemingway, Munro, Nabokov, Woolf.

  How I anticipated those weekly meetings. The conversation was intense. I prepared for those sessions as if they were final exams. I did extra research, scoured the secondary sources for critical tidbits with which to impress him, carrying them back in my mouth like a cat with a field mouse. I arrived early. I chose my clothes carefully, put on makeup. I accessorized. And really, I didn’t have much else going on, aside from the occasional glass of wine or cup of coffee with Liz and Cara. In addition to my reading for Hugh, I was taking four other courses, one of which (my fiction seminar) required me to produce original writing each week. Over one September, I had transformed from a hedonist into an ascetic.

  Hugh was worldly. He’d lived in Berlin and spoke German fluently. He had read everything of significance. He’d seen tragedy, too: he had lost both his parents in a car accident in his twenties. He wasn’t stylish—Liz and Cara had been correct about that. But he was kind. Until I met Hugh, I hadn’t understood that hard experiences could make you gentle.

  In Hugh’s office that fall, I felt myself click back into place. I felt smart again. I felt energetic. I felt lively and funny and focused.