On the way out of the school, both children are crying. Cleo sees the Community Room door open, some parents and children from the Kid Planet preschool group still hanging around in there. She sees, too, even as she marches Olivia and Sam out, the table and chairs set up in the Community Room, the table with the coffee urn and the plates of cookies. People standing around, like a little party. She has chosen the wrong thing, will be an outsider forever.
In the evening, she goes back, with the car and Olivia’s birth certificate. Here is a new group, now: It is lined up, patient, docile. There are few children this time, but she thinks she recognizes two or three from Olivia’s preschool class. The children are all patient and docile, too. The adults are all strangers — lots of women or couples, talking quietly, or not at all, as if at a formal event; more Asians and South Asians than in the morning. Most in their business clothes, still: severe suits, white shirts. They all look like accountants, perhaps. She ought to have brought Trent. There are no younger or older siblings here, just the few composed children.
The Asians and Indians are elegant, but she sees the Caucasian men and women are less so, their suits or business wear drab, not as well-fitting, the men’s haircuts very short, the women mostly with severe practical hairstyles, little makeup.
The nerd’s lineup, she thinks: But this is where she and Trent really belong, maybe, not with the cheeky convivial confident group of the afternoon. Perhaps she should have worn a suit. Or her University of Ottawa Engineering T-shirt.
She stands quietly in line like the rest, even though she doesn’t need a form, needs only to show the card and see that the number is copied down. The secretaries from the afternoon are absent, and the registration is being overseen by a young-middle-aged man, and an efficient, perhaps officious, determinedly cheerful woman. Principal and vice-principal, she guesses. (Do elementary schools have vice-principals?)
She seems to be the last one in line — the others must have all been here when the evening registration opened — and then the gym door swings open and a slim woman in a smart dress and scarf, tall leather boots and designer handbag, and a haircut Cleo has only seen in Vogue sashays across the glossy floor. There’s a stir from the others in line, but nobody greets the woman. Cleo turns, though, and gives her what she hopes is the right kind of friendly smile.
Oh my goodness, the woman says. Am I late?
At that the principal or vice-principal — whichever the male official is — looks up and beams.
Hello! the woman calls, in a tone that somehow manages to be friendly and mocking at the same time. She’s really quite attractive, Cleo sees, glancing at her again. By far the most glamorous of the women in the room.
The woman turns her attention now to Cleo. I’m such a flake, she says. I came earlier today but forgot to bring Claire’s birth certificate.
Me too, Cleo says. I mean, I did that too. She thinks of high school again; this time it’s as if the prom queen (not that they had prom queens at her high school) had started up a conversation with her by mistake. She’s grateful that she put on her decent pair of jeans and her good jacket before she left the house. Some makeup would have been a good idea, though. And she must own half a dozen scarves. Would it be so much work to wear one, once in a while?
I guess we just have too much going on in our pretty little heads, the woman says.
She’s kidding, right?
She winks. Cleo laughs, a little too late.
You have a little girl too, the woman says. I see you walking sometimes, with your stroller. That’s a good way to keep fit! You put the rest of us to shame. I always feel guilty when I go by you.
Her voice is so light, so brittle, or not brittle — glassy, like a wind chime, or like the sound of a crystal wineglass, rubbed along its rim. Cleo can’t tell if it has malice in it, and her face, or eyes, seem sincere. She says her name is Lacey. Cleo asks if Lacey’s child is also in the Kid Planet preschool, and Lacey says, Oh, who has time for that? Claire goes to the Parks and Rec one. I work those days and the daycare person takes her.
(The efficient woman with the triple stroller and two preschoolers, Cleo thinks.)
What does Lacey do? But she can’t ask. Won’t ask. Does she look a little familiar, or is it just that she has the kind of face that is instantly memorable? The other people in the line do not seem to speak to her, but then, they all seem intent on not noticing anyone around them, focusing on their own conversations, if they are in couples, or on their Blackberrys.
When she gets to the front of the line, Cleo tells the principal (it is the principal, it seems) that she has already filled out a form and is just bringing the birth certificate, and Lacey says, Me too! and the principal says, Oh gosh, you didn’t need to make a special trip for that, you could have just brought it in the first week of school in September.
Then he pulls both of their forms — Look at that, he says, right next to each other, Lennox and Lewis.
And on their way to their cars, Lacey touches her arm and says, We should get together for a play date sometime!
Cleo says something like yes, then climbs into her car but just sits. She doubts that this will happen, somehow.
All of this social possibility has been going on around her, and she oblivious, or cut off by lack of a car, or by her house being on the wrong street, or something.
It could change now. She sees that. She remembers one of Trent’s colleague’s wives saying that all of her friends were people she met through her children: the parents of her children’s friends. It will change. She has already met new people, been invited to their houses, for what it’s worth. Things could be looking up, socially.
Though now as she sits in the car, in the chill spring evening, she remembers that it will be better not to be too hopeful. It is likely, after all, that she will be disappointed. If she does, in fact, get to know some new people, it is likely that they will turn out to be unsuitable: not capable, because of lack of education or innate smarts, of intelligent conversation, or radically adherent to some doctrine or cause, or possessing bizarre personality traits. She foresees the possibilities of boredom, discomfort. Perhaps it is safer not to bother.
What she misses, maybe, is work: the kind of significant work that will fulfill her. She has not had this for some time. Maybe, if she could get back to work, she would be less bored. And she’d have relationships there, too.
She and Trent had met just as she was finishing her Master’s, and she had got pregnant with Olivia, married and moved with Trent, giving up the job she had lined up. She thinks sometimes, resentfully, that Trent had talked her into it, assuring her that she’d find work in her field on the west coast. But it is also true that, burned out from several years in school, tired from the pregnancy, she had maybe been relieved not to start a job right away, to let someone else make the decisions.
She had moved with Trent and had worked part-time drafting for an engineering company — she had taken some drafting courses during her Master’s — until just before Olivia was born, her belly jutting against the drafting board. And worked again for a year before Sam was born. It did not pay well, part-time drafting for the engineering company — not even enough to cover daycare for both Sam and Olivia. She had not been part of the social and professional fabric of the firm. She had done her work (and redone it, patiently, taking criticisms without comment) and gone home: she had not been expected to go to meetings, be part of consultations.
She had worked part-time, and summers, all through her years of university. She had not travelled. She had been poor and diligent. In her first year, her foster parents had loaned her money, but she had paid it back, had borrowed no more.
For the last five years, she has been partially or wholly supported by Trent, which neither of them had intended. (Well, of course, a voice in her head says. You’ve been home with very young children. And it’s not him supporting you. It’s your family income. But she does not believe this voice.)
She has h
eard Trent’s colleagues say that they loved their university years — meeting different people, having all of those wonderful opportunities to learn and not much responsibility. They talk about their university years as if they were an extended adolescence: hanging out with friends, going to parties, travelling, learning a little bit.
Cleo had not had that experience. She had worked, she thinks now, eighty-hour weeks between her part-time job and her courses, supporting herself, keeping her scholarship. She had not gone out to dinner for six years, probably. She had not bought clothes or records or books new, had not gone to any full-price movies or concerts.
She had not been unhappy. It’s only now that she feels she missed out on something. When she goes back to work, she knows, she’ll likely be designing office buildings or malls, highway off-ramps. She’ll be expected to put in sixty-hour weeks. She’s not enthused. She actually can’t imagine how that will work, with having two small children. (She imagines herself coming back to the house, late in the evening, standing outside, while inside a nanny is talking to, laughing with, a slightly older Olivia and Sam. Or worse — ignoring them: They sit, miserable, alone, in darkened bedrooms.)
She’s not even sure that she wants to work at engineering. She had missed something, somehow made a mistake, though she can’t put her finger on it exactly. Some early, foundational mistake. She had liked her courses well enough — she was good at math, good at spatial logic — but then, in her last year, taking her obligatory electives, something had shifted. She’d seen some other possibilities, felt her mind stretch and rouse itself in a new way, as if it had up to then only been pretending.
But it had been too late to start over.
And now. What now?
The car is cold, the parking lot emptying. Her hands on the wheel are stiff. She starts the car. She puts on the heater, though she knows it won’t throw out any warmth, in the short distance back to her house.
Merger
THEY GO OUT FOR DINNER — or dinner and some sort of music or entertainment — two or three nights a week, mostly on weekends. They go to gourmet restaurants whose prices shock her, restaurants that are featured in tourism brochures. They have elaborate Japanese dishes where sashimi is sliced in front of them and arranged to look like coral reef creatures; multi-course Italian dinners beginning with plates of antipasto. They eat Salt Spring Island lamb and little crisp-skinned birds, tenderloin that seems to melt in the mouth, duck and venison and bison, salmon and swordfish and lobster.
Mandalay has been more or less a vegetarian for fifteen years, but she finds herself daydreaming about the tiny savoury portions of meat. They eat vegetables so young and tender that she imagines them plucked by hand out of a garden behind the restaurant: potatoes the size of grapes, multi-coloured carrots, button-sized squashes with their flowers still attached. They eat grains and mushrooms whose names she has never before heard. The foods and the ways they are prepared are an education, she thinks. She reads the descriptions carefully, she listens to, and then sometimes joins in, the conversations Duane has with the waiters. She eats slowly, pays attention. She thinks that she is learning to understand nuance and complexity. She thinks that the restaurants are grossly overpriced, and then she doesn’t.
She says, You always pay. I can pay sometimes. Or I can make you dinner.
He says, I appreciate your sense of fairness. But it’s not necessary.
She says, If you pay every time, I feel like. . . . She doesn’t want to say mistress or kept woman.
Like you’re exploiting me? Or that I’m trading dinners and concerts for sex?
Well, yes.
Which? he asks. You can’t have it both ways, you know. Both of those possibilities can’t exist simultaneously.
That doesn’t mean that one of them isn’t true.
Look at it this way, he says. I would go out for dinner and to the club anyway. Your company makes the experience more enjoyable for me. As we’ve established, I don’t mind paying more for a better quality experience.
Am I paying for it with sex?
I hope, he says, that our sexual encounters are mutually rewarding. I hope so.
Her mind and body are aroused by his dry innuendo. She has to grip the edge of her chair. She has to turn away, for a moment. What am I giving you in return for your always paying? she asks.
Look, he says. My income is so many more times than yours that it doesn’t make sense for you to even think about paying.
She can see that. In her experience, though, there’s no free lunch.
They go to the symphony, to performances in small public rooms of visiting, famous cellists and pianists, to clubs that she didn’t know existed, where singers she didn’t know were still alive sing jazz or blues. They hear the Vancouver Symphony and John Coltrane and Nina Simone and Pearl Jam and Lenny Kravitz. She listens intently: She must develop her ear. When she hears music on the radio, now, she doesn’t hear it is a homogenous stream of sound; She hears the instruments, their individual notes, sees the movements of the musician’s fingers. The music moves her, galvanizes her nerve endings. Knowing more helps her respond more fully — intellectually and emotionally — to the music.
After concerts the sex is intense, magnified, prolonged. If it’s a weeknight, if she has to be at the café at five in the morning, she doesn’t sleep more than an hour or two, and the next day feels like she has been electro-charged. Everything is heightened and radiant. She takes to sleeping in the afternoons, losing some of the time that she has for maintaining her private life. Some things fall away. She has a new life, she realizes, after a few weeks.
When they are not eating or listening or making love, they talk and talk. They talk in the car, walking between the car and venues. They walk to the market and talk; they talk in bed, before and after sex. There is never enough time to complete a conversation, and two days will go by and she will get into his car and they’ll pick up the thread where they left off. They talk about the food and music, of course, and what they do at work. They talk about what is going on in the province or city — Mandalay has always skimmed the papers that the café gets for its patrons, but now she tries to do more than skim, and sometimes takes them home at the end of the day. They talk about books they have read, though they are not the same books. They see The Matrix and American Beauty, Being John Malkovich and Fight Club, Buena Vista Social Club and The Hurricane (but not The Talented Mr. Ripley or American Pie or Eyes Wide Shut). They talk about the movies.
They talk about their lives, though not as much as she has done in other relationships, where one’s personal stories of family grievances, high school escapades, other relationships are construction materials for the new relationship, materials which will define, and possibly limit it, in the future. When they talk about their personal experiences, they transform them into something more public: still unique, original, but with more objectivity, more deliberation. They talk about their travels: Both have been to Southeast Asia, which is unusual, maybe. He’s also been to Italy and France, and backpacked around Central America, when he was very young, he says. But she has travelled across Canada in a rock band bus, which he hasn’t.
She thinks: There is so much more to us at our age. We have learned and experienced and felt a lot. We bring all of that to this relationship, and so it is more complex, with more connections. It is like a very strong web, and it seems that it can grow and expand and support itself indefinitely. And it must grow, to stay alive. It must keep growing, deepening.
Sometimes she wonders if relationship is the wrong word. There is no such thing as relationship, she says to herself. It is not a thing you build. It is always just two people, and what we’ve said and done, and what we do and say new every time we are together. It makes sense. There can’t be attachment, expectations.
Only it seems right that they should open more and more to each other, and share more and more.
SHE SAYS: What if we got together with my sister and her husband for dinner? I th
ink you’d like them. They’re on their way to an opening in a new gallery on the North Shore, Duane driving. She’d mentioned the event to Cleo, and Cleo had said kind of wistfully that she’d like to go out sometimes.
Without looking away from the highway, Duane says, I don’t do family dinners, nephew’s first-birthday parties, Dad’s surprise retirement parties. I don’t do the guest thing at weddings. I won’t go out for dinner or drinks with your friend Sue from high school and her husband Mike.
She has no friend called Sue, she thinks: a little lifeboat of thought bobbing on a wave of surprising dismay. She says: Unless Sue is a nationally-known radio personality and Mike is an astronaut, right?
Is she? Is he? He’s laughing, though.
Why don’t you want to do these normal social things?
Do you?
No, not always. But I have to. I should. I mean, if I don’t, sometimes, I won’t have friends. I won’t have a relationship with my sister.
Well, you have to, then, he says. You’ve entered into a social contract in which it is necessary. But I don’t choose to spend my time in social situations that are awkward or boring.
What about work parties?
What about them?
Don’t you have to go to, like, your office Christmas social? Shower for your colleague’s baby?
He laughs. Yes. Of course. Sometimes. It’s part of my work culture. I have to do it to maintain relationships with my colleagues.
What’s the difference, then? If you’re in a relationship with a woman, don’t you have to be part of her social network, to maintain a good relationship?
Ah, he says. But I choose not to. I choose not to have that kind of relationship.
And you have that choice, why?
Because I’m asking for it. I’m asking for that consideration, in my private social contract.
What is Going to Happen Next Page 12
