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

by Camilla Gibb

  “Dad’s a real Houdini!” Blue said in delight.

  “Your father,” Elaine said, “seems to have more than just one screw loose.”

  The inside of the garage smelled rank with dirty human. “Pee-yu,” Emma said, pinching her nose.

  “Pee-yu, it stinks. What a bunch of lousy Chinks,” Blue chanted.

  Elaine slapped him on the back of the head then. “Blue, that’s a nasty little rhyme.” He had absolutely no idea why what he’d said was nasty and Elaine, having already downed a glass of Scotch that morning, and underestimating her strength, had slapped Blue so hard that he fell to the floor. It was Emma who helped him up and held his sobbing face against her chest. Elaine, although she apologized profusely, said it was all Oliver’s fault for creating such a mess in the first place.

  Emma looked around the garage in silence. Her father had obviously spent months engaged in some strange tasks. The entire ceiling was covered in pennies glued in methodical order. He’d arranged all the tools on the wall into circles: hammers and saws and screwdrivers forming the spokes of wheels going nowhere. Emma looked in a bucket on the floor then and screamed. There was a mass of grey hair floating in oil in the bucket. It seemed Oliver had cut off his hair, and had been trying to preserve it somehow.

  “That is just disgusting,” Elaine said, gagging. “Don’t go near it, Llewellyn!” she shrieked.

  “But it’s just his hair,” Blue shrugged.

  The police weren’t willing to do a missing person’s report, but because Elaine managed to imply murder when she mentioned there were body parts in buckets in the garage, they said they’d be right over.

  “Hair,” an officer noted. “His own, I imagine, but we’ll take it in for testing.”

  “I’d just be grateful if you could take it away,” she shuddered.

  We found bits of my dad in the garage,” Blue whispered to his best friend Stewart in the playground the next day.

  “Gross,” said Stewart. “Like his legs and stuff?”

  “His hair.”

  “But my mum has a piece of my hair from when I was a baby.”

  “Well, my dad’s hair was grey.”

  “Oh,” Stewart nodded like he understood, and then said, “But I don’t get it.”

  “Neither do I,” Blue had to agree. “I guess that’s why my mum called the police.”

  “Holy drama, Batman,” said Stewart.

  Kiss

  It was under the front porch that Emma and Blue had their first kiss. She and Blue were coughing on a stale cigarette stolen from Elaine’s purse a month before, when Emma suddenly mashed her mouth into Blue’s. Then she snapped back and shrugged her shoulders, saying, “Huh. I don’t see what the big deal is about.”

  “Me neither,” said Blue, although he was more than a little bewildered by the abrupt smack on the lips. They’d been rubbing bodies in the basement since he was little, but this was different somehow. It had a guilt-free air of purpose and finality. She was thin now, and in the grand scheme of the mad, mad world that meant that kisses were just around the corner.

  In fact, it actually took Emma more than a year to work up the nerve to kiss anyone again, and when she finally did, it was only under duress. In grade seven, Fraser O’Donnell, who she thought was a geek, but a cute geek, asked her to slow dance with him at the end of the first in a series of awkward junior high school parties. She’d never danced to a slow song before and there she was with a boy’s head on her shoulder, looking over at her almost-best friend Charlene Boysenberry who was moving around in slow circles with bad-boy Dillon and mouthing: “Do this,” as she rubbed her hands up and down Dillon’s back.

  “No way,” Emma mouthed back at Charlene.

  In the alarming glare of the gymnasium lights, after seven whole minutes of “Stairway to Heaven,” Fraser said, “Uh, thanks,” and then popped the big question: “Hey, like, you wanna go around with me?”

  “Sure, I guess so,” Emma said, looking at her shoes.

  “Well, I guess I’ll be seeing you then,” he said, leaning over and giving her a peck on the cheek.

  “Sure, see ya,” she said, still standing there staring at her shoes.

  He walked off with his hands in his pockets and Charlene came running up to Emma and squealed, “Score!”

  “Charleeeene,” Emma protested.

  “Did he ask you to go around with him?”

  “Yeah. So?” she shrugged.

  “I knew it!” Charlene shrieked.

  “It’s no big deal,” Emma said, taking a stab at sounding dismissive.

  “Oh, yeah,” Charlene groaned, rolling her eyes. “Like, Miss Snotty-big-tits Brenda Tailgate doesn’t even have a boyfriend. She’ll be so mad!” she giggled. “So, is he a good kisser?”

  “How should I know?” Emma said defensively.

  “Well, didn’t you?”

  “No. Gross.”

  “Well, you’re going to have to kiss him.”

  “What for?”

  “Else he’ll think you’re a lezzy,” she declared.

  Ugh. Emma was now obliged by the perverse protocol of junior high to let him be a disgusting boy. But only the once. She and Fraser walked home together awkwardly after school the following Thursday. They sat in the park on swings opposite each other as he blathered on about his drum set and the band he was going to form. Emma stared at her hands and picked at her cuticles. Fraser asked her if she wanted to do backup singing on one of the tracks he wanted to lay down. “You know, you look a little like Karen Carpenter,” he said, nodding his dopey head.

  Emma wasn’t sure if that was a compliment, but she blushed anyway, and that was when Fraser made his big move. He stood up, stumbling over his big flat feet, and lunged across the sandbox with his tongue outstretched. He plunged the purple splatter into Emma’s mouth and she felt the horrific sensation of peanut butter over bristly taste buds. She thrust out her arms like an automatic weapon and pushed him and his purple peanut splatter about seventeen feet across the park.

  After that, Fraser did start calling Emma a lezzy. In fact, so did Charlene. “I don’t know if we can be almost-best friends any more,” she said one day after school. “You’re ruining my reputation.”

  So for the next three months it was Charlene and Fraser holding hands in the schoolyard, Charlene rolling her eyes melodramatically every time they walked by Emma and claiming that Brenda Big-tits was her new best friend.

  But Emma didn’t care. She had Blue. And Blue had her. With Oliver’s disappearance, they’d lost whatever had remained of Elaine. It seemed he had dragged Elaine’s entrails with him: she was the vessel of their mother, but with the contents poured out. She put a brown casserole dish into the oven every morning before she went to work and didn’t return home until late. She slammed the door when she got back, gave her children a refrigerated glare that collapsed into a frown, and made her way straight to the liquor cabinet.

  Emma and Blue, hungry for her, buzzed around like flies. She greeted their frenzy with bitter silence and switched the lights off in her head. She was too tired, too angry to be Mother, but they gravitated toward her, sticking against her flypaper skin, flailing their limbs, struggling frantically.

  “Ma?” pleaded Blue.

  “Llewellyn, not now,” she groaned, putting her palm to her forehead and squinting under a headache as dense as concrete.

  “But when then?”

  “If you could think of anyone other than yourself, not ever,” she snapped.

  “But all I—”

  “I don’t want to discuss it.”

  “Discuss what?”

  “Jesus, Llewellyn, stop playing games. Just … leave your mother in peace, will you? I’ve got enough problems as it is.”

  The fantasy of being orphans was only appealing when they actually had parents. They needed her now—more than they wished to—but the more they needed, the less she had to give.

  Emma and Blue gradually learned to stand at greater and gre
ater distances. Emma filled the tumbler with two cubes of ice and three fingers of Scotch, and wordlessly handed it to her mother. Blue just slept most of the time. This was the new language of home.

  “I saw Dad today,” Blue said one day after Elaine had slammed her way back into the house. It had been about eleven months since Oliver had done what Blue saw as his Houdini-like disappearance from the garage. Elaine had no observable reaction. She sat back in the comfy chair and raised the glass to her lips and asked Emma and Blue whether they’d finished their homework.

  In bed that night Emma stared at the stars on the ceiling and wondered what her mother had done with that piece of information. It seemed to have gone in one ear and straight out the other. Maybe it was living like a rotting rodent in the pit of her stomach. She was beginning to think Elaine might have animals living inside her—blood-sucking, flesh-eating reptiles that were turning her brittle and cadaverous.

  Emma rapped the secret knock on her bedroom wall and listened for the hinges on the door to Blue’s room.

  Blue sat waiting for her on the cement floor of the basement and yawned. He was wearing what Emma saw as his embarrassing Smurf pyjamas.

  “You really saw Dad?” Emma whispered.

  “I think so.”

  “Did he have any hair?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But where did you see him?”

  “At the schoolyard.”

  “He came to your school?”

  “Hmm.”

  “Did you talk to him?”

  “No. But I waved.”

  “Did he wave back?”

  “Kinda.”

  “I wonder if he came to my school, too,” Emma thought aloud. “Did he look okay?”

  “I guess so. He looked, you know, like Dad.”

  “Just the same?”

  “Yeah. Like Dad before he slept in the garage, except old.”

  “Mum thinks Dad is mentally ill,” Emma said. “Did he look mentally ill to you?”

  “I don’t know. What does mentally ill look like? I told you—he looked like Dad,” Blue shrugged.

  “Do you think he’ll come to your school again?”

  “I don’t know,” Blue said, frustrated now with all his sister’s questions.

  Emma kept a lookout in the schoolyard the next day, wondering if it was her turn to see their father. She hoped it was, but at the same time she didn’t want her father to see her being taunted in the schoolyard now that she had a reputation for being a lezzy. Junior high school sucked. She wished her dad would come roaring by in an expensive European car and pick her up and take her out for ice cream. She didn’t care that all the other kids would tease her, call her a daddy’s girl or a loser because it was uncool to have parents, let alone have parents who picked you up at school. She might have felt that way about Elaine, but Elaine was still technically more of a parent than Oliver. She did at least live in the same house. Elaine was Elaine, but Oliver wasn’t always, necessarily, Oliver.

  She kept a lookout for the rest of the school year, but if he came by, which Emma was sure he must have, she never saw him. She felt like she and Blue had their very own ghost, their ever-present invisible father. She couldn’t tell anyone. It was bad enough they called her a lezzy—she didn’t want to be called a lezzy who saw ghosts.

  Seasons in Hell

  Elaine had wanted to scream when Oliver left, one endless, bloodcurdling wail that would put every banshee in history to shame. She’d hoped for months, she’d even prayed to a god she didn’t believe in, that Oliver would emerge from the garage an even partially reformed man, one who’d seen enough of a light to renounce the descent into madness in favour of a more reasonable existence.

  She had wanted to scream, but instead, she did the middle-class thing she’d inherited from her parents and swallowed it down with a litre of toxins, keeping it inside where it could fester and poison everyone around her in ways much more insidious and enduring than a single howl.

  She wouldn’t have had children if it weren’t for him—she shouldn’t have had children period. She should have moved to France and become a poet with a pension and eaten baguettes for dinner and had a string of exotic lovers half her age. Instead, here she was in a lonely town full of strangers with a mortgage to manage single-handedly and two children too many. Emma and Blue were heading into the crushing horror of adolescence, she could see it all too plainly—Emma who would always struggle to find a place of acceptance, Llewellyn who didn’t have the smarts to do well at school. She could see they both had their father in them—Blue more physically, Emma more emotionally. In neither case was the prognosis good.

  But nor was hers at the moment. A few too many fantasies of driving the car over the Niagara Escarpment had forced her to seek out help. The doctor she saw was an octogenarian with a hearing problem who had handed her a prescription for Valium like she was a 1950s housewife. The drinking made her drunk, but the Valium made her stop caring. Her children had no idea just how thick the wall that separated their mother from them had become. Their tears, their moroseness, their pleading, their sulking, none of it could put a dent in this lead-filled barricade.

  She had, of course, heard what Blue said. He’d seen his father at the schoolyard that day. It was possible, she supposed, but unlikely. She decided not to attach any meaning to it, and took the bottle upstairs with her to her bedroom to say a quiet hello to the face of misery in the mirror. But Oliver was everywhere in that room. He was in their wedding photos, in the paint on the walls, in a framed antique map of Scotland above the bed. She pulled a book from the shelf: Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell. Oliver had underlined passages, passages she hadn’t read since those early days in a Montreal café. They were only poetry then, but now they seemed like prophecy.

  “There are countless hallucinations. In truth it is what I have always had: no faith in history and the forgetting of principles. I will not speak of this: poets and visionaries would be jealous. I am the richest a thousand times over, let me be as avaricious as the ocean.”

  Had Oliver been speaking of himself? Had he always been haunted? A few stanzas later he’d underlined: “Then trust in me. Faith relieves and guides and cures. Come all, even the little children—and I will comfort you, and pour out my heart for you—my marvellous heart!” So there it was: Oliver asking Elaine to put her faith in a madman. Elaine accepting, and now, a season, several seasons in hell later, here she was.

  She flipped to the last page of the book. On the inside of the back cover she’d long ago taped her favourite photograph of Oliver. She pried the yellow tape off with her fingernail, liberating a wild-haired man in a poncho, and laid it on her pillow for a single drugged night before putting it in an envelope the next awful morning and addressing it to Llewellyn. For one day, although which day, she didn’t know.

  Greetings

  A couple of weeks later a postcard came flying through the letter slot and landed belly up on the hall carpet. Oliver’s handwriting, and on the reverse, the CN Tower and the words “Greetings from Toronto” emblazoned in red on the blue sky above.

  “I can’t make it out, Blue,” Emma shook her head. “Something about the beach. I don’t know,” she said, passing it to her brother.

  “Yeah,” he nodded.

  “What?”

  “The beach. And this says, ‘In case,’ and he signs it ‘Take care.’ ”

  “Take care? Is that all he says? How are we supposed to do that?”

  “I don’t know, Em. At least he sent a postcard.”

  “Yeah, well big fucking deal. So he’s moved to Toronto to have a whole new life. Thanks for letting us know.”

  A condo on the beach, a car, a dental plan, maybe even a cleaning lady, Emma thought. And we’re stuck here in this crappy town with no money and no dad. How could he just go and dump us like this? He could at least give Mum some money for child support. But the real question underlying her anger was the one she kept asking Blue: “Why does he come and see you bu
t not me?”

  “You’re going to have to ask himself yourself, Em,” Blue said. It wasn’t as simple as she seemed to think it was. It wasn’t pleasant seeing Oliver. It was ugly, sad, and strange: it caused gut rot so painful that it felt like someone was rubbing the insides of his intestines down with sandpaper.

  “Fucking bastard,” she said angrily. “I don’t want you to tell me when you see him any more, okay, Blue?”

  “Sure. Whatever.”

  “You know what I mean?” she said in lieu of saying: because it hurts too much. She didn’t know what parents were really good for, but they were at least supposed to be around. Without contact, without even the desire for contact, you might as well forfeit the title. If Oliver was no longer technically a father to her, then she was no longer technically his daughter. It was simple. It was logical. It was impossible. She would fell the remaining stumps in the landscape of the familiar, Elaine largest among them, unearth her butchered roots and pack them into a knapsack. She’d carry herself over some mountain and fall into the depths of some thick, foreign forest, where the trees had stood tall and firmly rooted for generations. She would attach herself like lichen on a host.

  She thought Blue was with her there, same soil and roots. But Oliver had been like glue between them. In his presence, they had shared a problem, but in his absence, while they shared certain memories, they shared increasingly less experience. The glue had begun to loosen, unhinging a static photograph of them as identical twins.

  “I guess so,” Blue shrugged. He didn’t see new forests though. He saw the sad image of his sister standing at a distance, giving a lame wave and a weak smile as she abandoned the sinking ship that was family as they had once and only known it. “I guess so,” he repeated, as he stood there alone on the deck, the only remaining child left on board. Elaine didn’t want to know; now Emma, too, wanted to be left out of it. His job would be to continue to hold on for life; keep his bruised feet rooted on a bloodied and precariously tilted deck, carry on through the icefields and into the depths until he saw Elaine to safety, and could give Oliver a respectable burial at sea. Emma would just have to learn to be a good swimmer. There wasn’t much else he could do.