by Camilla Gibb
“What?” she shouted. She couldn’t hear a thing outside her ear-phoned world.
“I said, do you fancy yourself a Caterpillar Girl?” she heard the boy-man saying in an English accent as she pulled her earphones off.
“Do I what?” Emma asked.
“It’s The Cure, right?” he said.
“Yeah. So?”
“Do you fancy yourself a ‘Caterpillar Girl’?” he repeated.
“I don’t know what you mean. What do you mean, ‘fancy’? A fancy caterpillar?”
“Fancy, as in ‘take a fancy to.’ Like.”
“You mean do I like caterpillars?”
“Not to worry. Sorry to have disturbed you,” he said somewhat sarcastically, and went back to his reading.
Emma put her earphones back on and stared at the cover of the magazine he was reading. Stared through it to a place she couldn’t see. Are you there, mister? she silently wondered.
He was there again the following Saturday. Reading the New England Journal of Medicine this time. Emma couldn’t resist sitting down across from him and asking him if he fancied himself.
“Do you mean in some kind of autoerotic way?” he asked her.
“Yeah, sure,” she smirked.
“I’m not a wanker, if that’s what you’re trying to ask,” he laughed.
“No, I’m sure you’re not,” she said.
It sort of started from there somehow, with him saying a lot of things Emma didn’t really understand, and Emma telling jokes that fell like lead balloons, but neither of them budging from their chairs. Emma didn’t know whether he was a loser or whether he thought she was, but there seemed to be a strange tug of war going on between them, as if they were both pulling on a piece of fishing line. It was unclear which one of them was holding the rod and which one was caught on the hook. Neither of them wanted to move too abruptly and have the line snap back in their face.
Over the course of several Saturdays, Emma found that, despite her resistance, her angry poetry was starting to yield to even greater clichés—ones about (God forbid) longing and love, although she used every other word possible. Weeks passed in this way until the boy-man, whose name was Andrew, asked Emma if she wanted to come and see a band playing at McMaster University, where he was a physics student.
“Sure, why not?” Emma shrugged, cool and cavalier, although saying yes propelled her into an epic clothing crisis for the rest of the week where she tried on every item in her closet and thought she was fat—fatter than fat, obese, criminally so—despite what the mirror said, the lying mirror.
She applied toothpaste to the zit that emerged the morning of their date and thought about cancelling because of it. Fortunately, he didn’t seem to notice. He picked her up in a battered Suzuki jeep without any heat, and they drove to Hamilton, where they spent the night dancing and drinking beer. Emma thought the beer tasted like piss and would have said as much if she weren’t so determined to look cool. She plugged her nose and swallowed it instead.
He escorted her out of the hall some time after midnight and she promptly threw up all over his shoes. She sat in the passenger seat beside him with her head between her knees the whole way back to and beyond Niagara Falls. They pulled into a circular drive in front of a huge house that seemed to stand alone in the middle of a wooded park overlooking the Niagara Gorge. He left his vomit-covered shoes on the front porch and then, once they were inside, Emma threw up on the Persian rug in the front hall. “Not to worry,” he assured her. “There are plenty of others.” He hoisted Emma over his shoulder and climbed the stairs with her alternately groaning and apologizing.
They slept in a four-poster bed in their clothes and she woke up in the night and listened to his breathing, inhaling the sweet smell of alcohol leaking from his skin. He was nothing more than a gentle body in sleep, nothing to be afraid of, and she gingerly traced her finger down his tanned, hairless arm.
Emma woke in a huge room with dark wood panelling and plush mahogany drapes. “Who lives here?” she whispered to the boy-man lying next to her.
“I do,” he said matter-of-factly.
“Alone?”
“For the time being,” he acknowledged somewhat sadly. “It’s the house my mother grew up in. She inherited it after my grandparents died. My parents are only here during the holidays. They teach in Montreal and my sister is away at school.”
“But doesn’t it give you the creeps living here alone?”
“Sometimes,” he nodded. “It’s a little big. A little empty.”
“My house is like a shoebox,” Emma said. “There’s nowhere to hide. That’s why I come to the library all the time. To have some privacy.”
“That’s funny,” he said. “I go for company.”
“I would love to have all this room to be alone.”
“Trust me, the novelty wears off. It gets lonely. But you’re welcome here. I mean, to spend some time here if you want. I wouldn’t mind trading you.”
He couldn’t possibly mean that, she thought. Trade me for what? And have me here? Throwing up on Persian rugs and breaking mirrors and clogging the bidet? I’m not the most domestic of creatures. Boys had never been particularly nice to her. She knew it was because she wasn’t pretty, didn’t have big tits, and didn’t wear inviting makeup and a Wonder Bra like the other girls at school. They still called her a loser and when they really want to be cruel, a dyke. She hadn’t outlived her reputation as the girl who preferred hermaphrodites to boys.
“What’s this?” he asked her, fingering the tooth around her neck.
“Dinosaur tooth.”
“Is that right?” he laughed. “And where does one get a dinosaur tooth?”
“There’s only one way,” Emma told him. “Your father has to reach through a hole in the back of your closet and find it for you.”
“Can your father find one for me?”
“I don’t have a father any more.”
“Is he dead?”
“Vanished.”
“Vanished? How does a father vanish?” he asked her.
“Poof,” she said, and gestured with her hands—up in smoke.
“Is that why you always look so sad?” he asked her.
“I don’t know,” she said, her eyes filling with tears.
Saturdays were fast becoming the days when the world was different. Imagine if I actually lived here, she thought, looking at the walls of books in Andrew’s house. Imagine if I’d grown up here. Supposing I’d grown up in a rich, literary household rather than a silent and broken home—I’d be nothing like Emma Taylor at all. The books in Andrew’s house were worlds away from the sickly sweet trash she was used to tearing through. They were denser, heavier, older, and the more famous they were, the longer they took to read. Everything was slower, calmer, and quieter here.
She read books on a long divan in front of French doors through which sunlight streamed and imagined she was the long-lost daughter of Bavarian aristocrats who had searched for her for years and finally brought her home. There were no neon lights in this wilderness. She imagined herself a caterpillar girl in a garden full of vegetables and knew she was falling in love.
Andrew played the piano in a room in the near distance. Late in the afternoon he would find Emma lying in the very spot he had left her hours before, engrossed in the pages of the same book. Emma stretched her limbs and smiled at him and asked him to tell her about Truth. Andrew had introduced her to this big, elusive love of his life. He’d been reading about the properties of quarks named Strange, Charm, Up, Down, Beauty, and the as-yet-undiscovered sixth partner in all this—a little girl named Truth. Andrew wanted to spend his life in heroic pursuit of this elusive quark. He wanted to be the Little Bo Peep of the subatomic world. He dreamt of Geneva, where he hoped to one day smash atoms in a particle accelerator that straddles the border between Switzerland and France.
Emma had no trouble inserting herself into his fantasy. She wondered if they would give her a job sweeping nucle
ar dust off the accelerator floor. She would be the Border collie guarding the five other sheep in the pen if he asked her to. She wanted to smell him, dusty, in bed beside her every night. That’s all she wanted. We don’t even have to talk, she thought to herself. Even if he just crashes into bed late in his lab coat and dirty shoes—I really don’t care—just as long as I can wake up to the smell of him every morning.
“I suppose it would be time for tea,” she said playfully. She liked his strange rituals.
“Why, yes,” he said. “Spot on. I think you are instinctively British.”
Emma pulled open all the cupboards in the kitchen looking for teacups like the ones on “Coronation Street.” She found them—all gilt-edged and frilly with saucers to match.
“Shall I be Mother?” Andrew asked, gesturing to pour.
“As long as that doesn’t mean I have to be Father,” Emma laughed, but her smile turned down as she realized the seriousness of what she’d just said. If Oliver could see her right now, he’d be shaking his head. Thinking: Christ, Emma, who do you think you are? What kind of pretence have you got yourself caught up in? Whose house is this? Looks like it belongs to some mercenary bastards who inherited a whack of cash from some decrepit aunt and haven’t had to work a fucking day in their lives.
“Oh, don’t, Emma,” Andrew said gently. “You were looking so happy. You’ve started to look so much happier than when I first saw you come into the library. You were so foul-tempered then.”
“I’m happier now, especially on Saturdays,” she brightened, adding shyly, “thanks to you.”
“It’s funny,” said Andrew, relieving her of embarrassment, “but so am I.”
Saturdays soon rolled into Sundays, and then began on Fridays, and Emma started taking up more room. Moving from the divan through various rooms, cautiously at first, but with an increasingly greater sense of courage. She wanted to take steps in the shoes of every person who lived in this house; there were so many of them that Emma could be distracted from being Emma for a good long time.
In Andrew’s parents’ room she became his father—a caricature of the distinguished archaeologist. Pipe-smoking, professorial, scatterbrained, and obsessed with detail. She would comment on the furniture: “I say, old chap. I do believe that is a Ming vase. Notice the detailing around the filibuster and the Cornish hen.”
Andrew easily fell into the game. “Why, Russell, that is a remarkable discovery. And to think I have lived my whole life with this treasure right under my nose and never been aware of it. How careless of me never to have noticed the mushrooms on the hedgerow. I do believe they are psilocybin cubensis,” he would muse, stroking his imaginary, yet ample beard.
In the kitchen Emma played Andrew’s mother. “Mary,” she would gesture to her servant. “Do find me the egg beater so I might whip up a lovely Stilton soufflé for my charming family.”
“Here you are, madam. I just polished it this morning.” Andrew would curtsy, handing Emma a piece of fine silver.
“Be a dear, will you, and wash the fiddleheads.”
In Andrew’s sister’s room Emma became a very spoiled daughter. With all the pink in her room, Emma could not imagine her to be anything but. “Andrew, do get rid of him, will you?” she would say. “He’s such a dreadful bore even though he does have pots of money. I can’t bear to hear him ask me to marry him and wave that horrendous crown jewel in front of my face one more time. And by the way,” she said, her expression brightening, “what’s happened to that chum of yours from the academy?”
“Becks, you are difficult to please,” Andrew would chide. “I don’t think I can afford to lose any more of my mates to you. You have your wicked way with them and then—off with their heads. You’re like a praying mantis, devouring your lovers in turn.”
“Poor Andrew,” Emma would say. “At least I have love and admiration, which is more than I can say for you, dear brother.”
Andrew didn’t respond to that and Emma feared that she had perhaps taken the game too far. She ran out of the room and into the next one. The guest bedroom. Of course, this was the room of ghosts. There has to be one, doesn’t there? The Dead Baby Brother’s room—the still-birthed, or murdered, or simply self-suffocated little boy whose presence would forever linger and haunt. The parents, who had decorated the boy’s room while he lay in utero, still, twenty years later, could not bear to use the room for any other purpose than to hold a space in which the Dead Baby Brother’s name could never be mentioned.
“Andrew?” the Dead Baby Brother would call out.
“Tiny Pip?” Andrew would ask cautiously. “Can it really be you?”
“It is I. Your Dead Baby Brother.”
“Oh, how I have longed for you my whole life, Tiny Pip. Spoken to you as if you were alive. It is as if a part of me has always been missing. Thank God, at last, you have spoken. Now I too may die in peace.”
“Rush not toward my light, brother. Live long and prosper. Be fruitful, fanciful, and multiply. Fare thee well, dear brother,” he said waving, fading, fading, fading from sight, leaving Andrew open-mouthed and saddened. Emma had obviously hit a nerve. There were secrets somewhere in this house.
“And you?” Andrew asked her later in his bed. “Where are you?”
“Me?” Emma stared at the ceiling. “Where am I? Here am I,” she said, arching her back and raising her face to his. “The Caterpillar Princess,” she whispered. “At home among the cabbages.”
When Andrew’s family came home that summer, Emma quickly got the sense that they wouldn’t appreciate her caricatures of them. They were all terribly, terribly serious, and she was altogether intimidated. Annelisa wasn’t quite the domestic and culinary character Emma had imagined, but rather, an acerbic and aggressive woman with clear and determined aspirations for herself and her children. Russell was not a doddery professor, but a slightly lecherous, although relatively benign, and obviously unhappy middle-aged man. And Rebecca was far from a spoiled debutante: she was a recovering anorexic prone to violent mood swings.
Andrew was no longer as playful. He was serious and scholarly in their presence. Emma could still feel him solid beside her though, even if he didn’t laugh much any more.
There were dinners, usually cooked by Russell, during which they all engaged in intense debates about political issues. Emma would mostly sit mute, feeling completely inadequate. She tried to look attentive, but she often failed to understand what made them so excited. She couldn’t help flinching when Annelisa tore, as she habitually did, into Russell in opposition to his views.
Andrew’s family overwhelmed Emma: she mistook the ideas, the opinions, the words, the information passing loudly over a single meal for anger. She heard her father—Pretentious bloody gits. Noses up their arses—but at the same time she heard Andrew. “It’s just conversation,” he reassured her. “You know, discussion.”
Perhaps Emma just wasn’t used to conversation. There certainly wasn’t anything like it in her house. Before Oliver left, the soundscape had been dominated by Elaine and Oliver snapping at each other, and Oliver ranting on to himself. After he left, it was even less human: just “hush hush,” “ring ring,” and “clink clink.” The language of home had become one of silence: shadows orbiting around planet Elaine.
“If you could just make a little more effort to contribute, you’d see they weren’t so bad,” Andrew encouraged.
And so she ventured, beginning tentatively. When they talked about disarmament one night she dared to say, “I agree.” Annelisa cast her eyes over Emma and actually looked pleased. When they talked about the situation in Burma one night, Emma said again, “I agree.” When they talked about soil erosion, or toxic waste, or the way to achieve peace in the Middle East, she nodded, “I agree.”
“You seem to agree a lot,” Annelisa observed one night. “Is there anything, Emma, with which you don’t agree?”
“Uh,” Emma stammered. She wasn’t used to having all eyes upon her, inviting an opinion. “
I think that television’s probably not a good influence on children.”
“Well, that’s a start,” Annelisa mused. “Any specific reasons why?”
“Violence.”
“Profound,” Annelisa muttered sarcastically.
“Annelisa,” Russell interjected in Emma’s defence. “I think you’re right, Emma,” he said, mustering support. “Although there is some debate as to whether watching violence actually breeds violence.”
“I think it must,” Emma said.
“Well, how do you solve it then? Ban depictions of violence on TV? Monitor everything your kids watch? Throw out the television?”
“I’d probably throw out the television.”
“But then kids would grow up without a set of common cultural references,” Russell continued.
“I hadn’t thought about that.”
“Well, what do you think about it now?”
“I think I don’t know what I think.”
“Indeed,” muttered Annelisa.
“She thinks I’m dumb,” Emma said to Andrew later that night. “She thinks I’m a complete moron.”
“She doesn’t, Emma,” Andrew tried to reassure her. “You’re not dumb. You’re just not used to having discussions. What did you talk about at home? I mean, with your parents?”
What did we talk about? she wondered. We didn’t. We got talked at, and when we were old enough, we talked back. But even that was rare. We listened for noises. We didn’t know when things were going to blow up. We tiptoed. We choked.
“It’s okay to ask questions, you know? I mean, if you don’t know what someone’s talking about, you can tell them. You can say, ‘Actually, I’m not familiar with that situation,’ or, ‘What are the implications of that?’ or, ‘I’m not sure whether I agree or not because I’ve never really considered it a realistic possibility,’ or you can say, ‘It’s something I’ve always wanted to know more about,’ or, ‘What is the historical background to that particular issue?’ or turn it on them, and ask, ‘What’s your experience?’ or, ‘Has this issue concerned you for long?’ Or just throw out something that they’ll respond to, like, ‘You seem quite passionate about this issue,’ or, ‘That’s very interesting,’ or even change the subject and say, ‘That reminds me of the time …’ or, ‘What I think is even more interesting is …’ ”
