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

by Camilla Gibb

  It was never entirely clear to Emma and Blue what their parents were fighting about. Money was definitely part of it. Emma knew this because Blue started looking for pennies on the street on their way home from school. “It’s our nest egg,” he told her wisely when she asked, repeating verbatim something he had obviously overheard.

  “What’s that?” Emma asked him.

  “Our protection,” he nodded. The little boy, who only a short time ago had stopped talking baby babble, was obviously sucking up critical life lessons like a sponge. A good thing too, because Emma wasn’t taking notice—she was busy daydreaming, preoccupied with the adventures of Tabatha the baby witch, trying to figure out how to disappear from one room and appear in another rather than deal with the here and now of how to survive life as Emma.

  She and Blue spent most of their after-schools and evenings whispering in the basement, or sitting on the ugly orange carpet in Blue’s room, engaged in their respective silent passions. Emma would sit with her legs crossed and her back against the radiator and read book after book from the school library. She read about dinosaurs and Lilliputians, and journeys to the centre of the earth, space-time travel, and ancient pyramids full of hidden treasure. She’d morph into characters contained in pages she wished wouldn’t end.

  Blue wasn’t a reader, but they did share one book between them—a scrapbook that had been sent with a package of mouldy ginger-snaps one Christmas from some relative Oliver denied having. Imagine you were a woolly mammoth, Emma wrote on the first page of the scrapbook.

  “Write: ‘And you had fur instead of skin and you were on display in the museum,’ ” Blue said with excitement.

  Emma loved the ideas they came up with, loved the way they looked on the page. She sucked on the letters like lollipops, while Blue became obsessed with trying to draw pictures to accompany the wild words. Pictures were his thing. He would tear images from magazines Elaine had brought home from the doctor’s office, and glue them into haphazard collages on bristol board. He had a box of art supplies under the bed that included broken, discarded, and lost bits of things he found at the bottom of drawers and under the sofa, and pine cones and chestnuts he’d picked up on the way home from school. He was in the habit of painting things blue after his nickname.

  Elaine showed some sign of life when Blue presented her with a collage for Mother’s Day. He’d torn up tiny bits of glossy paper into squares and assembled a face with long auburn hair, and mysterious eyes, and lips curved into a beautiful smile. He’d taken bits of Elaine’s broken jewellery and given the face earrings and a tiara. “It’s you, Mum,” Blue said, as she unwrapped it.

  While Elaine was touched, she worried that this was an early indication of the same creative predisposition that had driven Oliver to spend increasingly more time in the garage. “It’s beautiful, Llewellyn. It looks like Picasso. But don’t let it overtake your ABCs, okay?” she said, and then gave him one of those rare hugs that he and Emma so often daydreamed about.

  His creativity worried Elaine enough that it kicked her into action and she started taking her children to the public library on Saturday mornings. Emma was fine to wander around on her own, but Blue, because of his habit of tearing pictures out of books, needed constant supervision.

  When Elaine asked Blue what he wanted for Christmas that year, Blue said, “I want to see Picasso.”

  “I think he’s dead, Llewellyn.”

  “I mean his pictures.”

  Elaine sighed. “I’ll make you a deal. If you have a decent report card next June, then I’ll take you to see some Picasso at the end of the school year.”

  Poor Blue. He tried so hard to read over the next six months that the blood vessels in his eyes burst. The pages he read stuck together as their lines melted and books he touched ceased looking like books at all. Despite all his effort, his report card proposed remedial English for the following year.

  Elaine blamed Oliver, or rather, Oliver’s neglect. He had at least tried with Emma—reading Macbeth and Aerospace Construction for Beginners to her when she was tiny. He hadn’t even offered Blue language, and now, as Blue got older, he barely spoke to him at all. Oliver finally consented to a few afternoon efforts at male bonding, but the pressure was so enormous, and Blue so desperate to impress, that they were destined to fail. He was too little to handle the unwieldiness of the circular saw, too fearful to ever go near a hammer again, and too worried that he’d disappoint his father to try his hand at much. Finally, Oliver, totally exasperated, said, “All right, Llewellyn. Is there anything you can do?”

  Blue hesitantly picked up the pencil beside Oliver’s plan for an underground wine cellar. He stared at the blueprint for a moment and then started scribbling on the page. Oliver looked horrified. “Blue. What are you doing?” he shouted.

  “But now it looks real,” Blue said, putting down the pencil. Sure enough, Blue had added a third dimension. The plans were suddenly intelligible—at least they would have been to anyone with a grasp on reality.

  “You’ve desecrated my work!” Oliver yelled at him. “You’ve obscured it with graffiti!”

  “But it makes sense now,” Blue said, confused.

  “You’re telling me what makes sense? Who do you think you are?” Blue’s eyes welled up. “Jesus Christ, stop being such a pathetic little mama’s boy, Llewellyn,” he snapped in disgust.

  Before Elaine had stated the inevitable—that there’d be no seeing Picasso—Emma had stolen two books of prints for Blue from the public library. These were not the first books she’d stolen. One by one, she’d been accumulating an arsenal of Nancy Drews. This time, not only did she steal the glossy volume on Picasso she’d been eyeing for Blue, but on a whim, she also grabbed the book of Aubrey Beardsley prints lying next to it. It was full of black-and-white prints of people without legs pulling off each other’s heads, and she knew Blue would love its bold lines and graphic images.

  Blue was captivated for most of a summer. He filled in the white spaces between the thick black Beardsley lines with bold swipes of yellow, red, and blue paint. He drew butterflies in the margins. Monarchs bound for Mexico. Then, working his way through the volume on Picasso, he stopped dead at the paintings Picasso had done during his Blue Period. “Em,” he said, pointing to a face made up of blue squares. “But this looks like me,” his voice caught between fascination and terror.

  “I guess so,” she shrugged.

  “But I’ve never met Picasso.”

  It must have unnerved him more than Emma initially realized, because from that day forward, Blue stopped tearing up bits of paper. His next artistic effort would be the initials he carved into his skin. What Emma didn’t know then was that it was Oliver, not Picasso, who had implicitly conveyed the idea that creation was necessarily painful. He dug as deep as he could stand it with the needle, and ripped, rather than drew, those initials into his skin.

  Although Emma and Blue were eventually forced to stop holding hands at school, they were always aware of the precise whereabouts of the other. They met at the corner store three blocks from school every day in order to walk home together, well out of eyesight of cool Brenda Tailgate. For two blocks it was safe to hold hands.

  With his hand safely in the grip of his sister, Blue would natter on about how Joshua, a boy in his grade four class, had peed all over his hands, or how he had a new best friend called Stewart who had a hockey card for every one of the Boston Bruins. Emma would tell him that Sandy, the girl with eyebrows that met in the middle, was wearing a bra, and that Mrs. Daniels, their art teacher, had let out a fart when she bent over to pick up a piece of pottery that Gary, the hyperactive boy, had thrown on the floor.

  “Do you think these pants make me look fat?” she asked him.

  “But you are fat,” he responded, in all innocence.

  “That’s why boys don’t like me,” she sighed.

  “But I like you,” he had said in his wide-eyed way.

  “I know, Blue. But it doesn’t coun
t.”

  Elaine wordlessly handed Emma a book at the end of that year called Dr. Nelligan’s Diet Book for Girls. She had offered her daughter the first silent lesson of being female: dieting was the road to love; thinness, in a mad, mad world, was the answer. The world was becoming like this—less and less spoken, much more in books. The world above the basement had grown quiet since Oliver had started to sleep in the garage on a camp cot from the army surplus store.

  “Dreaming is an essential part of any creative process,” Oliver had said, defending his self-imposed exile to the end of the garden. “I simply need my psychic space to be free of distraction in order to invent.” Distraction obviously meant human contact, particularly that with the members of his immediate family who seemed to him more wanting and needing than other human beings. “Look, Elaine. Just give me some time and space. I’m on the verge of something big.”

  “You’re always on the verge of something big, Oliver.”

  “Well, I’m on the verge of something really big this time.”

  “Another flying what’s-it?” she asked.

  “You’re taking the piss, aren’t you?” he said, annoyed. “That airborne radio receiver had revolutionary potential. Do you hear me? Revolutionary. You just couldn’t see it. You don’t have any vision. Or any faith, for that matter.”

  “What are you working on now then, Oliver?” she asked without the slightest bit of genuine interest.

  “If you’re really curious, I’d be happy to show you. Hey, I’ve got an idea,” he said, raising an eyebrow.

  “When have you ever not had an idea?” she muttered to herself.

  “Why don’t we have a date? Come to the garage on Friday night. We’ll have a bottle of that Chianti you like and look over the plans.”

  “You mean the big something is still at the paper stage?” she asked, rolling her eyes.

  “Oh, please, Elaine. It’s a final draft,” he pleaded.

  “Why don’t you just show me when you’ve actually built the thing. I don’t believe in make-believe any more, Oliver.”

  “When did that happen?”

  “About seven inventions ago.”

  Elaine hardly needed Oliver to share a bottle of Chianti. For the next couple of months she drank one by herself nearly every night while Oliver whittled away in the garage in silence. They didn’t hear much from him except for the occasional torrent of profanities from the end of the yard when he inadvertently hammered some body part. There was a small mountain of empty takeout pizza boxes growing at the entrance to the garage, reassuring them that Oliver was still, in fact, alive.

  Blue took to retrieving the discarded pizza crusts out of the boxes and eating them for breakfast: a scavenger in search of familial debris. The foraging was necessary, because with Oliver retreating, Elaine, too, despite her presence, was becoming just as remote and inaccessible. It was as if they’d each taken on new lovers, and forgotten about all that came before and between: their children, reminders of themselves and the mess they’d managed to create together.

  The first time Emma and Blue really understood the seriousness of Elaine’s drinking problem was when she tumbled down the stairs one late afternoon and ended up with a face full of splinters.

  “Living this close to the States seems to have driven her bonkers,” Oliver had said, having just entered the house for what seemed like the first time in months. He’d responded to Blue’s desperate cry that Mum had cracked open her skull. Oliver heaved Elaine up off the floor and carried her to the couch and then went straight back out to the garage, leaving Emma and Blue staring helplessly at their scratched and bruised mother.

  “Pour me a Scotch, sweetie,” she said, gesturing to Emma. “It’ll help take away some of the pain,” she winced, running her fingers over her face.

  “Mum?” Blue asked with a frightened look in his eyes.

  “What is it, sweetie?”

  “Why does Dad sleep in the garage?”

  “Because he’s an eccentric, Llewellyn, that’s why,” she said, unable to hide her irritation.

  That was generous on her part. She would have liked to have said: Because he’s a lazy, self-absorbed bastard and he’s losing his fucking mind. As time went on, she simply drank deeper and stopped referring to him. When she was forced to acknowledge the existence of the man at the end of the garden in some way, she called him “your father,” as if to deny any association with her.

  After spending months in the garage thinking about his inventions, Oliver had still failed to get the voice-activated circular saw, or any of his other ideas, past the paper stage. No one could see how desperate he was becoming. If he failed as an inventor, he was finished. Paralysed by lack of progress, he was spending much of the day masturbating compulsively in his camp cot. He’d stopped taking garden hose showers and his hair had turned completely grey. He pissed in a bucket, and defecated at night in the flower bed, covering up his fecal lumps as instinctively as a cat—anything to avoid contact with Elaine.

  He was sure he repulsed her, and so he became repulsive. He was certain that she was determined to see him fail. And he was bound to fail: she, like his parents, expected things from him that he’d just never be able to deliver. It was no wonder. He’d constructed the entire idea of a life on the basis of promises, but he’d forget what he’d pledged as soon as the wind changed the direction of his mood. The whole idea of life consequently and constantly changed. He would decide they should all go and live on a desert island, and he would drive them through cruel waters on a leaky boat to get to some weedy shore where, as soon as they’d reluctantly disembarked, he’d tell them he was off to find a better island. Oliver the adventurer: explorer, inventor. Oliver the adventurer: sociopath, madman.

  “You’re all right, Oliver,” he would tell himself. “You’re just a man who marches to the beat of his own drum. A genius. Bound to be misunderstood.” He repeated such things to himself, likening himself to assorted fearless eccentrics of history, while he paced around his place of exile.

  In his less resilient moments, Oliver would sink down with his head in his hands, lamenting the truth that he’d failed as a husband and a father. Then he’d quickly slap himself out of tears and start wondering why they were all hounding him. Their voices travelled through the back door of the house. Their wanting and needing were like hypodermic needles pushed deep into muscle in order to stifle movement. They’re trying to slow me down, he thought, fastening the lock across the garage door.

  It was when the statement addressed to him from the Bank of Nova Scotia arrived that Elaine finally stormed out to the garage and confronted him. She slid the paper under the garage door and screamed, “Oliver, I need you to explain this!”

  “I have a new bank account, Elaine. And that is none of your business.”

  “None of my business?” she screamed. “Since when have our financial lives been separate?”

  “Since three o’clock last Tuesday afternoon,” he said.

  “But where did you get the money to open this account, Oliver? There’s ten thousand dollars here.”

  “From the Bank of Montreal,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “You mean from our account?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes?” She was aghast. Oliver had just drained the entirety of their savings and opened a new account under his name, and his name only. “But why on earth would you do this?” she asked him.

  “Protection,” he muttered.

  “Protection?” she yelled. “If you’re looking for protection, Oliver, this isn’t going to get it for you. I have half a mind to go straight to the police.”

  “You can’t go to the police,” he protested. “I’m your husband.”

  “But this is robbery!” she screamed. “Oliver, I want you out of there. Out of this garage, just out—away from this house!”

  “But it’s my house, too,” he said quietly. “And besides, where would I go?” he whimpered, though well out of earshot of Elaine who
had by this time run through the back door of the house and picked up the phone to dial the police.

  “He’s not done anything illegal, ma’am,” the officer on the other end of the line said.

  “But he has done something insane!” Elaine shouted, the rest of her drink sloshing out of the glass in her hand.

  “But not criminal.”

  “You don’t call robbing your wife blind criminal?”

  “I don’t know what I’d call it, but I don’t think it’s us you want. Try the mental health authorities,” the officer said, and hung up.

  Twenty-four hours later, she had a call from Dr. Eisenbaum. Elaine had ferreted out the psychological report on Oliver that had been prepared some years before and tracked down Dr. Eisenbaum in Montreal. He didn’t remember Oliver exactly, but he did agree that there was at least one architect at McQuinn and Associates who he’d been asked to see for a psychological assessment some years earlier.

  “That would have been my husband,” Elaine said. “I have the report right here. Signed by you in February 1973. ‘Superior IQ, delusional, overinflated sense of self-worth, self-aggrandizing, paranoid tendencies’—does that ring any bells?”

  “Far too many, I’m afraid, Mrs. Taylor,” said the doctor. “Listen. Is he in any danger of harming himself or your family?”

  “He’s done plenty of harm already.”

  “Physical harm?”

  “Well, no,” she had to concede.

  “Then there’s really nothing anyone can do. You can encourage him to see a psychiatrist, but you can’t force him to do anything against his will.”

  By the time Elaine went out to talk to him the next morning, Oliver, it seemed, had disappeared. The garage was locked and there was no response from inside. Elaine picked up a brick and threw it through the small window and stood on a rotting stump of wood in order to peer inside. Oliver was definitely gone. She enlisted Blue’s help then, giving him a leg up so he could cram his prepubescent body through the small window and open the door from inside. How Oliver had managed to lock the door from the inside and escape would remain a mystery.