The Petty Details of So-And-So's Life

by Camilla Gibb

  Oliver’s inventing was going nowhere, but he was sure it was all a matter of location, location, location. Montreal was too Old World, too European, he declared. What he needed was the contagious spirit of American entrepreneurialism to spur him on. In the middle of a blistering snowstorm, six years into their mostly miserable marriage, Oliver begged Elaine to pack up and move to Niagara Falls. “We always said we’d do it one day, Elaine,” he encouraged.

  “But we said when we retired,” she disparaged.

  “What the hell are we waiting for? The kids’ll love it. All those positive ions: they’ll grow up full of good air and promise.”

  Elaine didn’t have the strength any more to start kicking the bricks out of his foundations and topple the grand scheme of the moment. By the time Oliver had declared he was going to be an inventor and set himself free from the conventions of nine-to-five, she had already given up. So in the middle of the worst blizzard to have blighted Montreal in decades, she resigned herself, with the faint hope that a change of scenery might do them all good.

  They packed up the contents of the apartment above the Portuguese bakery on Rue St. Dominique into a blue minivan and a rented U-Haul. When everything from their four-room flat was crammed in, there was little space left for actual human bodies.

  “They’ll have to take the bus,” Elaine declared with a shrug. “They’ll manage.”

  Emma thrust a protective arm around her little brother, who, although only a year younger than her, was still saying little more than “mumble,” “wumble,” “bambam bolly.” “Booly boo?” he asked his sister.

  “Of course,” she nodded and squeezed him reassuringly.

  Elaine made two huge and humiliating signs reading: “Niagara Falls or Bust,” hung them around their necks and ordered them not to let go of each other’s hands. On the bus, they sat behind a kindly grandmother-type, the sort with an endless supply of Kit Kats. She sucked the chocolate off the wafer sticks noisily and then let the wafer dissolve in her mouth because, as she explained to Emma and Blue, “When you get to be my age, you’ve got to save your teeth in case you ever have to bite a mugger.”

  “Biteamugger, biteamugger,” Blue repeated with a giggle.

  “He’s a sweet little boy, your son,” the sticky-mouthed granny said between the crack in the seats.

  “He’s not my son,” Emma said. “He’s my brother. And I’m only five years old.”

  The granny laughed, “Goodness, me. Seems my eyesight’s really going! I thought you were his teenaged mum and the two of you were on the run from the law or something! Here—have some more Kit Kat,” she said, shoving a soggy bar through the crack between the seats as if to say, “And we’ll just forget about my little mistake then and carry on.”

  “We’re going to Niagara Falls,” Emma said flatly.

  “A good thing too, because that’s where this bus is going,” the granny chuckled. She then leaned back into her seat, suddenly nodding off in the middle of her chocolate high.

  A wailing, high-pitched whistle squealed over the quiet rurr of the bus. The ridiculous noise was apparently coming from the sleeping granny’s left nostril. Blue attempted to whistle and started to giggle uncontrollably. Emma clasped a loving hand over his mouth to shush him and leaned forward to listen more carefully. The granny’s nose was whistling a song: Summertime, and Niagara is sleazy—

  Emma already knew that she would prefer the winters, when the place was whitewashed by wind and ice. She imagined the Falls frozen into the most gigantic icicles on the planet, she and Blue tobogganing down their slippery slopes on their bellies.

  When the bus pulled into a station, Emma worried that this might be the end of the line. Blue had kerplunked in his pants by this point, and was squirming uncomfortably beside her. He was still holding her hand. When he felt her grip tighten with worry he began to blubber. She offered him false comfort as sweat bubbled on her forehead. The bus hurtled forward again and she breathed a sigh of relief.

  This was their first journey, and like every other journey that was to follow, Emma was never certain where to get off. She hoped that one day, when Blue could speak, he’d be able to tell her.

  The Language of Home

  Emma’s sixth birthday party. The obligatory snapshot. The children from her grade one class are lined up in a row along the corrugated tin fence in the backyard and none of them look remotely happy. The girls wear long skirts and look like they’re picking cake out of their hair, and the boys stand with their legs apart and their eyes cast downward. Emma is not wearing a skirt and Blue’s hair is far too short for 1975, and the two of them look pale, nervous, and embarrassed.

  Oliver and Elaine had tried, but the games were all unusually complicated and the loot bags were filled with articles for personal grooming instead of technicolour jawbreakers, Good and Plenties, and cinnamon-flavoured toothpicks.

  Emma had just begun to realize that their father was different from other fathers. Having a father who was different wasn’t all bad. Having an inventor at home was something to brag about in the schoolyard and Emma had learned such useful skills as how to distinguish an eighth-inch drill bit from a sixteenth before she had finished first grade. She, in turn, had taught the difference to Blue because Oliver constantly lost patience with his son.

  She remembers their father poised with a hammer at Blue’s temple. After arriving in Niagara Falls, Oliver had had the ingenious idea of financing his creative endeavours by selling “antiques” to tourists. A sandwich board dominated the front lawn and invited curiosity and ridicule. The “Emporium” was the garage. The “Antiques” were chairs and tables Oliver whacked together out of scrap and then set Emma and Blue to work distressing with toy hammers, barking orders like, “Bash the fuck out of it, you two layabouts!”

  At Emma’s sixth birthday party he offered a prize to the child who could do the most damage with a hammer in half an hour. Much to Elaine’s embarrassment, Emma, with her considerable experience, won the prize, propelling a whole garage full of children into tears of envy and defeat. Emma had refined her technique: the trick was in the breathing. She’d inhale deeply as she raised her hammer and exhale like a burst balloon upon contact, a method that seemed to produce the biggest dent with the least effort.

  While Emma was quite content banging inanimate objects, Blue developed an unfortunate habit of employing his toy hammer as a defensive weapon against smaller children and the occasional animal. “Boys will be boys,” Oliver had initially shrugged, but when Blue took a swipe at Elaine’s fat red goldfish, Oliver raised his voice and said, “Llewellyn. Now you’ve really crossed the line.”

  Blue’s eyes welled up with tears and he stammered out an apology, saying he should have taken the fish out of the tank first, rather than trying to hammer its head in through the glass. He was sorry about the mess of water soaking into the carpet. Oliver unhooked his hammer from the wall of the garage and then held it against Blue’s temple. “How would you feel if I put this through your head?” he threatened.

  This was typical of Oliver’s parenting: arming his children with weapons and telling them to shoot, although they didn’t know where they were supposed to aim or why they should do so except to please him. So they aimed, and invariably pointed at the wrong target and ended up with their own heads on the chopping block. It became safer to take aim at themselves in the end. Before he did, and before they hurt anyone else.

  Emma could never pinpoint the moment when she began to realize that being an inventor wasn’t the only thing that set their father apart. She didn’t know what the difference was, but whatever it was, it certainly did invoke fear. Emma’s classmates were scared of her father and didn’t want to come over to the house after she’d turned six. But Emma thought fathers were perhaps built to bully—that it was part of the paternal mandate to reduce children to tears by calling them stupid or lazy, which their father did, not infrequently. It was certainly embarrassing, but it was understandable because it was fa
miliar, and people become fond of the familiar, no matter how strange.

  It was the night after Oliver threatened Blue with the hammer that they built their bubble in the basement. Emma lay in bed looking at the iridescent stars on the ceiling, worrying about her baby brother. She knocked the secret knock on their adjoining bedroom wall and awaited Blue’s reply. The silence from his bedroom was loud enough to make her wonder if the hammer was lodged in his mouth. She crept to his room in her fuzzy Minnie Mouse slippers and checked for him under the duvet, under the bed, and in the closet. No sign of little life. She tiptoed past her parents’ bedroom and down the stairs at the end of the hall. In the green-tiled kitchen, over the drip drip of the tap, she heard the muffled sound of crying coming from the basement. She found Blue down there crouched by the furnace, next to an industrial-sized bag of Purina Puppy Chow, sobbing into his flannel-covered arm.

  She knelt down beside him and made like a mama bird and wrapped him in her wing. He had language now, but they didn’t speak. Even when he did speak to her he didn’t use the language of the rest of the world. It was still all “boo” and “booly boo” and “bambam bolly” when it was just the two of them.

  “I know,” she said, in response to his silence. “He doesn’t hate you. But we could pretend we’re orphans.”

  The following week, Oliver told his son he was going to build him a bicycle. Blue didn’t know what to make of this, at once elated by and wary of his father’s gift. He was beginning to get a sense of Oliver’s rhythm. Whenever Oliver knocked him down he would pick him up a week later with some promise: a trip to the butterfly conservatory, a ride on the Maid of the Mist, a hamburger with fries and a chocolate milkshake. Those days were the happiest for Blue, even though he knew they would be short-lived.

  Oliver did build him a bicycle—a fast but strange-looking beast over which he took much abuse from the other kids on their street. His dad had built it for him, though, and he was so proud that he would pedal furiously past the taunting and teasing with a baseball cap pulled down so far over his eyes that he could only see the pavement beneath him, never the road ahead. He heard Oliver shout, “That’s my boy!” as he watched him tear off down the street. As Oliver’s boy, he flew without restraint, holding on to the handlebars for his life.

  Oliver did take him to the butterfly conservatory. They stood side by side in a lush, tropical jungle amidst four thousand dancing wings. Oliver narrated the visit with a thousand and one handy facts about butterflies drawn from a colourful pamphlet. Blue would never cease to be amazed that monarchs know each other and the world without a map. He imagined them congregating in late summer for a family picnic in a favourite tree—drinking themselves stupid on nectar before making their way en masse to their villa in the Mexican forest. Is that where we go when we die? he wondered. To Mexico? He imagined old people in their beds falling asleep at night and waking up wearing cocoons instead of pyjamas. Leaving their beds as butterflies bound for the heavens of Mexico.

  Oliver did take him for a hamburger, fries, and a chocolate milkshake, but on one of these occasions, Blue received a brutal blow. Oliver was delivering a sermon over a bottle of ketchup when Blue excused himself to go to the bathroom. Blue stared at the big man standing at the urinal beside him. The man stopped peeing, but continued to stand there, running his hand up and down his ridiculously long cock. Blue had never seen anything like it—he’d only seen his father’s penis once and it was nothing like this man’s, which was more like a baseball bat.

  “Pretty big, eh?” the man said, pumping the thing up and down. It frightened Blue into wide-eyed silence. The man’s breathing made him uneasy. He wanted to shout for his dad, but instead he just said a meek “I guess so.”

  Oliver walked in then. “What’s taking you so long?” he said, coming around the corner.

  The large man stopped his pumping, stuffed the baseball bat back into his jeans and walked out of the room. Blue, standing there with his own little penis in his hand, didn’t know what to say. He’d been too scared to let go.

  “What are you doing, Blue?” Oliver shouted. “Playing with yourself? What are you—a faggot or something?”

  Blue had heard the word once before. He had only grown just past Oliver’s kneecaps when Oliver refused to take his searching hand any more on the way to the liquor store. “Men don’t touch other men unless they are ho-mo-sex-uals,” he had said, pronouncing each and every syllable like a sneering British broadcaster. “Don’t want people thinking we’re a couple of faggots now, do we, Llewellyn?” Oliver had said, slapping him on the back.

  “No, sir,” Blue had coughed, just about choking on a caramel.

  Blue didn’t know what he’d done wrong in the washroom that day but he knew he’d done a bad bad thing. He sat in terrified silence beside his father all the way home. “What were you staring at that man’s prick for, Blue?” Oliver began, after an interminable silence.

  “Nothing,” Blue mumbled through his tears.

  “Do you know what faggots do to each other?” his father asked him. “They bugger each other. They stick their pricks into dirty bums, Blue. Like dogs.”

  Blue was so mortified that the hamburger in his stomach began to moo and the milkshake started to sour, and he would never again eat at McDonald’s. Never again in his whole life. He had a secret so shameful and dirty that he couldn’t even tell Emma. “He hates me,” he told her in the basement. “He just does.”

  In their basement bubble, Emma and Blue learned how to hold each other’s breath, becoming indistinguishable on the same oxygen. They began to take frequent refuge in the dank and musty grey space where they inhaled deeply, and got so dizzy that all they could hear were hearts pounding in their ears. When they could hold their breath no longer they grabbed each other’s hands and pulled each other up, their heads spinning so wildly that they lost their balance and collapsed against each other, more often than not, crashing back down onto the cement floor. They called this “the hugging game.”

  When Emma crashed down on top of Blue she would rub her torso against him and press her pelvis into his. When fate toppled them the other way, it was Blue’s turn. They were entangled and inseparable: horizontal and upright, they were constant and complex companions. They held hands in the schoolyard, at least, they did until Emma was in grade six and Brenda Tailgate told her she must be a pervert because sisters were supposed to hate their brothers. But until that day, she didn’t let go of her baby brother’s hand.

  In the world above the basement, Oliver had started to renovate. “I’m going to build you your dream home, Elaine!” he announced one day in mid-manic upswing at the dinner table.

  “What exactly does that entail, Oliver?” Elaine asked suspiciously.

  “You tell me,” he said. “You want a swimming pool—I’ll give you a swimming pool. You want a greenhouse or a fireplace—I’ll give you a greenhouse or a fireplace.”

  While Oliver sincerely thought this would please her, all Elaine could imagine was living in the middle of a construction site, picking nails out of her cornflakes, shaking sawdust from her hair. She could picture them walking the plank over a cavernous hole in the garden where the swimming pool Oliver had promised would forever remain a pit of despair. Elaine picked up the dishes and started washing them in the sink.

  “Your mother’s got no vision,” Oliver said conspiratorially to the children. “She can’t picture it. What do you think, kids? A big old fireplace?” Emma and Blue nodded eagerly. “A swimming pool?”

  “Yipeee!” Emma said, grabbing Blue’s hand and throwing their arms up in the air. They loved these moments when their father came to life. Lightning streaked across his face and his eyes wandered like he was watching a meteor shower that was setting the world on fire. They were enraptured and terrified: fully aware of the fact that wherever lightning strikes, things are likely to burn.

  “What’s that?” Elaine said, her back to them as she stood at the sink.

  “Nothi
ng, dear,” said Oliver. “Just garnering a little support over here.”

  “Oliver—don’t do that. Don’t make them choose sides.”

  “I’m not making them choose sides. I’m just showing them how to dream.”

  “Perhaps you could teach them something a little more practical,” she said angrily.

  “Elaine, you know,” he sighed, shaking his head, “you’re just not the woman I married.”

  “Well, unfortunately you are the man I married.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I mean, when are you going to grow up?”

  Dad isn’t a grown up? Emma wondered.

  “You’re the most irresponsible person I’ve ever met,” Elaine snapped. She thoroughly resented being the sole wage earner. Since they’d arrived in Niagara Falls, Elaine had been working two jobs: substitute teaching whenever she could, and booking tours of Niagara Falls for busloads of tourists who would have been millionaires if they got paid to complain. She’d begun to wonder if she wouldn’t have been much better off doing what her parents had wished and marrying some bug-eyed dentist from Philadelphia. Even if he did have a personality as dull as a used drill bit, she could at least have been able to afford to keep her kids’ teeth clean.

  Oliver paused. “What happened to your dreams, Elaine? Where did they go?”

  He sounded wistful, and that made Emma and Blue feel sorry and sad.

  My dreams? Elaine thought. How dare he? Perhaps she could just declare she was going to write a novel and go to bed for six weeks in order to dream up a plot. Maybe Emma and Blue could quit school and support them. Her dreams? She didn’t have the time or the energy now to write much more than a shopping list. “Life, Oliver. Life got in the way,” she finally said. “It does. For most people, anyway.”

  Oliver took up full-time employment in the garage after that, engaged in the puttering and putzing that apparently constituted the process of giving birth to great invention. When he did come into the house at the end of each long day, Elaine expended so much energy yelling at him that she had little left for Emma and Blue. The world above the basement became full of noises like crash, fuck and hiss.