This Is Happy

by Camilla Gibb

  Anna and I hadn’t had to sacrifice anything. Our commitment was never tested in this way. Our livelihoods did not depend on each other in the ways that exist in a family like Tita’s. Our choices had not been limited by poverty, lack of opportunity, citizenship. It is no more than a lucky accident that we were born in the West, that we should find ourselves and each other in a country where the laws would shift during our lifetimes in favour of our rights to marry and raise children.

  “If you marry, you must be sure,” Tita said. “It is not like food that is too hot and spicy and you can spit out. You have to swallow.”

  Oh, I swallowed, Tita. Hook, line and sinker. The hook, in fact, is still inside me.

  18

  At three weeks, my daughter took her first plane ride. We were on a book tour from Montreal, to the east of us, to Vancouver in the west.

  I took the baby with me to interviews. She sat in Tita’s lap and stared at the lights in radio stations while I was on-air. She stared at walls of books in bookstores. She was part of the story of the person who wrote the book that brought us here. I couldn’t compartmentalize my roles as writer and mother; her life was not separate from mine, my life not separate from hers—not even my body was yet.

  The day we arrived in Calgary she smiled her first smile. At just six weeks, she was speaking to us from her inner world. Hello, tiny person. How much easier it becomes to speak aloud inanely when there is a someone responding back.

  I had last read at the writers’ festival in Calgary eight years before. When I arrived at my hotel then, a message had been waiting for me. It said simply: your father called. I felt my stomach burn as I read those words. My father? Was it possible that whoever took the message had misheard? I knew my father was in Calgary thanks to the private detective I had hired a couple of years before, but the chances of his knowing I was in the city seemed remote.

  I called the festival director right away. I was afraid, not least because much of the book was about my father. What if he turned up at the reading? What if he made a scene? I didn’t even think I could step on stage wondering if he was out there in the audience.

  Anne, the director, was wonderful. She and her assistant locked arms with me that night as we moved through the atrium of the theatre. A tall, lean man came toward me. He said: “I am a friend of your father’s. He is here.”

  I felt my knees buckle.

  Seeing my reaction, the man added: “He looks good. He bought a new jacket.”

  Anne and her assistant kept me standing and moved me through the hall.

  I have no recollection of getting on stage and doing the reading.

  Afterwards I sat at a table between two other writers, Anne’s assistant standing guard behind me. A large man was talking to me about a dog he’d once had, a dog named Blue, like one of the characters in my novel. That much I remember. Behind him I suddenly saw a weather-beaten man clutching a book, my book, between his hands. He looked hunted. Haunted. And I started to burn with guilt and anxiety and fear.

  The large man moved aside. Now my father was standing right in front of me. He opened his mouth and spoke. I fixated on his teeth, black nubs like charred kernels of corn. He wanted me to sign his book.

  I stammered: “I don’t know what to write.”

  “Why don’t you write: To Dad, love Moo.” It was the pet name he’d given me as a child.

  He’d bought a new jacket. And a ticket for the event. And a book. How much had it all cost him? He couldn’t afford any of this. Why was he here?

  He asked if I would meet him for coffee the next day. Since it could have been so much worse and I was down to monosyllables, I said um, yes.

  The next morning we sat in the cafeteria of city hall, where a cup of coffee was only sixty-five cents and smoking was still allowed, as if time had stopped in 1980. He rolled a cigarette between his sepia-stained fingers and threw back mouthfuls of black coffee. He was a man without a filter, telling me things that didn’t make a lot of sense, theorizing about incidents in his personal history, trying to link cause and effect.

  “The world terrifies me,” he confided.

  “You mean the people in it.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you assume everyone is hostile,” I said.

  On this, he completely agreed.

  “It must be very painful to move in the world,” I said, as if Dr. P had replaced me at the table.

  It was painful, so he didn’t move. He hid, eked out, scammed, squeaked by and drank himself to sleep every night. He described himself as asocial—“Not antisocial,” he told me, “but asocial.” He called himself “the world’s ultimate loner.” He said he couldn’t have relationships, that he had never actually loved anyone, except his daughter, because she loved him unconditionally, at least she had once, when she was small.

  I was steely: resolved to be unmoved. I could listen, but I wouldn’t absorb it.

  He was introspective, or perhaps desperate enough to ask tough questions about why he was the way he was. He wondered if it was because he was dropped on his head as a baby, or because he was put in an orphanage temporarily as a toddler, where he was punished by being tied to a banister. He wondered if it was because he was sent off to boarding school at such a young age, molested by the headmaster, bullied by other boys. He wondered if it was the army.

  He told me my first novel had devastated him. Every day he would go to the same bar and nurse two beers before going home to drink a lot more. The waitress there was kind to him—talked to him, let him linger. He told her that he had a daughter who was a writer and that she’d written a book that had gutted him. Perhaps this woman read the book, I can’t remember, but what she said in reply helped shift his thinking. “But it’s not really about you,” she said. “It’s about her.”

  And then, he said, he understood. He understood that the novel was about a secret, a family secret I couldn’t talk about. Once, long ago, he told me, he’d been in such a blind rage that he had come home from work and kicked our dog to death.

  “I hated myself for doing that,” he said. “I abhor violence. It sickens me, it makes me physically ill.

  “You must have a memory of it,” he said. “You were old enough.”

  “I don’t,” I said with conviction.

  “You’ve repressed it, then,” he said, insisting that this was what the book was about.

  I didn’t even know we’d ever had a dog. He could tell himself what the novel was about; he could tell himself whatever he needed to. But he couldn’t tell me.

  I haven’t seen my father since that coffee in 2002. I have wondered whether he was disappointed by my subsequent novels because there was nothing in them that suggested he existed. People are funny that way, I’ve discovered. Sometimes they would rather be demonized in a story than left out of it.

  I would be reading at the same opening night where my father had been in the audience eight years before. I knew somehow that he wouldn’t be there this time, but part of me had been hoping he might. I just wanted to tell him one thing: that he had a granddaughter. I wanted to remind him of something he had once felt: of being loved unconditionally, as he had been by his daughter, when she was small.

  19

  I introduced my daughter to Ara instead. We had become reacquainted ten years before, when I sent him a copy of my first novel. In that novel, a single mother meets a younger man—a Sikh at medical school—a gentle and imaginative man from another world. His presence transforms both the mother and her daughter. A brooding, damaged girl blossoms in the short time Suresh lives with them; a mother’s mood grows light.

  Ara had written back to me, shocked and flattered. He didn’t understand how he could have been a source of inspiration. What might have seemed a short time in his own life had echoed for years in mine.

  After moving out West, Ara had changed his first name to Alan, chopped the Armenian suffix off his surname, given up acting and become a chartered accountant. I had been disappointed th
at he had discarded so much of what I had romanticized over the years, but I needn’t have been. When we met a couple of years later it was immediately obvious that although he had taken on a public persona that was anglicized, respectable and conventional, he remained himself—Ara the slightly mad Armenian, volcanic with expression.

  We meet whenever I’m in Vancouver. He calls me his daughter; he never did have children of his own.

  Tita and I were waiting for him in a restaurant overlooking the water. It had been a beautiful warm fall day, and now night, everything sparkled—the water, the boats, the candles on the tables.

  Alan was still Ara. He walked into the restaurant, filling all the space around him, and embraced me with the biggest of bear hugs. He shook Tita’s hand in both of his, then fearlessly picked up the egg. He held her high, astonished. He rocked her little being back and forth and made the funny faces he had made for my brother and me as children. She responded—she had a voice now, a soft, husky voice in addition to her smile.

  We sat close together on one side of a round table. Ara-Alan said: “I have to come to Toronto. I should move to Toronto!” He had not been back to Toronto since he left us thirty years ago, I reminded him, not a single visit in all those years. “But I have a granddaughter now,” he said.

  We talked about my mother, my brother, his mother, his wife. We talked about my life and his. We talked about the past, but more about the present. We talked about this remarkable creature in my arms.

  Then Tita, whom I had taken to calling the resident psychologist, said to Ara: “Why did you and Camilla’s mother break up?”

  An excellent question. Why hadn’t it ever occurred to me to ask it? He had left so abruptly. So had David, for that matter. And my father. And Anna.

  My best conclusion is that people do what they need to do for themselves and ultimately that trumps any other consideration. Perhaps they want to spare you by not telling you much. Perhaps they just want to spare themselves. Without the whole story, though, you are left with only shards of evidence and your own imagination, bits out of which to construct a story that might allow you, eventually, in a best-case scenario, to integrate the loss and continue living. Or else you just continue to spin: to speculate and obsess, much as I had been doing for the past ten months.

  Tita had opened up the space for the possibility of an answer that could perhaps give me some understanding of a recurrent theme in my life.

  “Ah,” said Ara, “that is something we agreed to never tell the children.”

  “But I’m not a child anymore,” I said.

  At just that moment, another writer passed by, brushed my shoulder, said hi. I looked up and realized the restaurant had filled with fellow writers, most of whom I have met over the years. Many of them were there with their spouses. I am usually on my own at writers’ festivals. I tend to feel shy and awkward in these situations, so I most often disappear into my room rather than linger in public spaces. I don’t eat alone in public or visit the hospitality suite to socialize. I treat these trips as work.

  I had more enthusiasm for these things at the beginning of my career. But then once, in fact not that long ago, I found myself very far away in the company of writers from around the world who seemed a good deal more important. One of them told me I was beautiful—from the nose down. The rest—my eyes, my forehead—she said, waving her hands around her ears, looked like that of a crazy person.

  I have no idea who she was. She was just a stranger who stripped me of any strength, peeling away my thin exterior to expose what I felt was some inescapable truth. We were in Bali, a place of improbable beauty, and all I wanted was to be home, with Anna, that rare person who could give me back my skin.

  “I’m not a child anymore,” I repeated once the writer I knew had gone back to his table.

  “I made an agreement with your mother,” Ara said, shaking his head.

  The writer was now beckoning to me from his table. I excused myself, picked up my daughter and went to introduce her to the other writers seated there. I didn’t feel the slightest bit awkward or shy. I agreed to meet them in the hospitality suite later. It was as if having a child had suddenly allowed me to assume my place as a member of the species.

  Later that night I would call my mother. I would ask her what she and Ara had agreed not to tell the children.

  I have no idea what he’s talking about, she would say, leaving me, once again, to my imagination.

  20

  The company Anna worked for had an office in Vancouver, so she timed a business trip around our being there. She came and took the baby for walks while I caught up on sleep. She hung out with the baby in our hotel room while I did my readings onstage. She held the baby on the flight we shared home. I saw the woman I loved. The family I had imagined.

  The morning after we returned to Toronto, I left the egg with Tita to go grocery shopping. I was loading up a cart with diapers, formula, fruit and vegetables for an empty fridge when I heard the ping of an incoming text. It was from Anna. No biggie, she prefaced her news. She wanted to give me the heads-up that she’d recently had a date with a woman who was a friend of both of ours. The same friend who had invited us to her daughter’s hockey practice. The night I was too exhausted to go. The night Anna ended our marriage.

  My knees started to shake. Anna is not a dater. She is a decision maker. This was, in fact, one of the things I loved about her. Ten years before, I had been the decision.

  So here it was: the fatal blow.

  Anna was not coming home. She had never been coming home.

  My stomach felt as if it was full of razor blades. I am not the first woman to have felt this, nor the last. The particulars of my circumstances were a bit unusual, but the situation was not. You have a baby at home, an empty fridge, groceries to deliver. It doesn’t matter that you are bleeding all over the grocery store floor. You have to stand. You have to stand. The fuck. Up.

  21

  Words begin to spill out in the middle of the night: fragments, short staccato sentences—the rhythm of pain and fury. I take up my neglected pen. The first thing I write is that I must write because I want to scream and pound my head against a wall but I cannot scream and pound my head against a wall because I have a baby. Because the person I wish could hear my rage isn’t listening and the person who shouldn’t hear any of it is right here, breathing bubbles, dreaming of milky boobs and first snow.

  The love I feel for my child, the love that feels like ache in the marrow, does not mitigate or murder the anger. They exist together, a potent soup in the stomach. I would take a knife to myself to stop the feeling if I could. But I am trapped.

  It is the end all over again, and perhaps worse: the death of the remaining fantasies, the delusions of reunion that have sustained me over the course of the past few months. Anna is not coming home. She has never been coming home. I’m looking upon the scene of a murder and all I have is my notebook and pen.

  1

  I am standing in the doorway of our bedroom, hovering like a ghost in a frame. I watch Tita with her wide eyes and big smile, leaping like a frog for my daughter’s amusement. I just don’t have it in me, I think, standing at a remove, that capacity for joy or abandon.

  It should be my daughter’s other parent playing peek-a-boo in this moment, me watching her lose all inhibition—becoming innocent and childlike—and welling up with love for them both. It should be my partner seeing me anew, at greater depth, as a mother, moved by the brave extent of what we are capable of as humans, amazed by how far we can travel in the course of a lifetime, to this place of love that is so stripped bare, so elemental.

  Is it possible to mourn what should have been? What never even was? Not even those first weeks of this pregnancy were happy. If I look back on it now, Anna was already gone. At the time, I just trusted in the bigger commitment we had made to each other. But perhaps I was just unwilling to face the possibility that I might be doing this on my own. That Anna might want something, or som
eone, else.

  Our blind spots are of our own making. They protect our sense not of how things are but of how we wish or need them to be.

  I stand here watching Tita leaping like a frog and wonder where she finds it. She, who is burdened with so much, the lives of at least ten other people on an island far away, still possesses the capacity to be light, to be free. How lucky my daughter is that someone in the house can make her laugh like this. How grateful I am. But Tita won’t be here forever. Without Tita, I fear my daughter will know the extent of my sadness.

  Tita still misses the children she looked after in Hong Kong and Singapore. She loved them; they loved her. She has been the primary support to five mothers now, four of them with husbands. Most painful of all, she remains separated from the man with whom she hopes to have children.

  It is not uncomplicated for either of us.

  2

  Tita leaves on Friday nights to spend the weekend with her elderly Filipina friend. I dread the long and lonely weekend, the boredom, the hours, the exhaustion, the early mornings. The weekends are for families. My friends are with their own.

  I take the egg to 24-hour grocery stores and drugstores, spend hours wandering the aisles. I take her to empty parks twice a day, push her through winter winds in her stroller, drink more coffee than I feel like drinking, drive without destination trying to get her to sleep.

  I knock on my neighbour’s door when I feel desperate in the early morning, drop in for a visit, finding her and her husband and kids having breakfast in their pyjamas. I have no pride anymore; I am well beyond the possibility of humiliation.

  I invite myself over to Heidi’s house in the afternoons and stay on for dinner with her and her boyfriend. I lay the egg down to sleep in their spare bedroom and crawl into bed beside her later. I feed her and bundle her up when she wakes, feeling guilty for taking up this kind of room in Heidi’s house, for my inability to settle into being alone at home with my daughter.