The Petty Details of So-And-So's Life (16 page)

Oliver had sprinkled hot pepper on Emma's ambition. Her conviction to become an archaeologist grew even fiercer. She'd wear that dinosaur tooth around her neck until she found a mouth big enough to take it. She'd find a place for broken bones and put them back together again. She'd throw out living relations in the search for remains of value.

She was a little concerned that Oliver would be able to smell her government loan from wherever he was hiding. She could picture him begging her for a loan from her loan, or else trying to convince her that if she bought shares in his brain, they would be sure to pay off. Worse still, if she could pay for the insurance on their mother's house, he could burn the building down. Fifty-fifty split.

She left for the University of Toronto in September, hungry for her classes to begin. She'd enrolled in two archaeology courses, a class in Middle Eastern history, and one in introductory Arabic—all this to stock the arsenal that would help her blast her way out of Niagara Falls. She was drawn to the East: she could almost feel the sand between her teeth, the particles of silicone forming grit-filled words and creating mirages of other worlds.

On the way to all this glamour, though, there were a few hurdles, the first of which was enduring the ritualized torment of a week of orientation before serious learning could begin. Emma masked her shyness with derision. She called the bonding exercises “puerile” and took a moral stand on drinking. The truth was, she was awkward around people, especially people having fun, and she'd never been much of a joiner. All around her people were linking arms and shortening each other's names and throwing up in the same bucket. In three days they had abandoned old familial ties and adopted a whole new army of best friends. Not Emma. She lingered at the edges and opted out altogether where she could.

She was most resistant to the activities of the last day, which included some perverted organizer's favourite humiliation—mud wrestling. The orientation committee had dug a pit in the middle of a field specifically for this purpose and even erected bleachers for the crowds of onlookers they obviously anticipated. She could picture herself writhing there in semi-naked torment, an Amazon above her, knees pinned against her chest, the crowds screaming, “Kill her!”

She found respite under a willow tree where she leaned her head back against rippled bark and started to cry. This isolation, in the midst of throngs of happy others, was killing.

“I totally agree,” said a voice from somewhere.

She looked around, confused.

“Up here,” said the voice. There was a woman perched like a bird in the branches above. Emma could see her purple underwear.

“What are you doing?” Emma laughed, brushing away her tears.

“I'm hiding. Staying the hell away from this sordid activity.”

Emma laughed again. “It's awful, isn't it?”

“A nightmare,” the bird-woman agreed, sliding across the limb of the tree and jumping down to land at Emma's feet. She had leaves in
her matted dreadlocks, a gold-capped tooth, and a mole the size of a dime on her cheek.

“I'm Emma.”

“I'm Ruth. Except everybody calls me Ruthie. Or at least they did, but my mum said I should probably stick to Ruth at university because Ruthie sounds a bit juvenile.”

“Oh, and everybody's so grown up here,” Emma said facetiously, pointing at the mounds writhing in the mudbath.

“Let's get out of here,” Ruthie said.

“Really? But won't they do a head count?”

Ruthie shrugged. She really didn't care. “You hungry?”

“A little,” Emma answered.

“I found this amazing roti place.”

“What's a roti?”

“You've never had a roti? Where do you come from?”

“Niagara Falls.”

“Oh,” Ruthie nodded knowingly. “I see. A little lacking in culture, I guess.”

“Where do you come from?”

“Guyana. Well, Sarnia really. That's where I grew up anyway. Wait here. I'm going to get my skateboard.”

Ruthie led the way to Kensington Market that day. Her left foot pushing the pavement, her right on her skateboard, her right hand on Emma's shoulder. She nattered on incessantly, made Emma laugh harder than she had laughed in too long. Ruthie was a rebel with a brain the size of Oklahoma and they were bound to become fast and furious friends.

By the end of the first term, Ruthie and Emma had swapped hungover roommates in order to share a room. Emma wasn't interested in
the drunken parties that took place at the end of the hall, and Ruthie couldn't afford to be because she'd had a bit of a drug problem in high school. In their room, Ruthie worked out chemistry problems and Emma memorized Arabic vocabulary and the details of potsherds. They would make dinner together in the small kitchen at the end of the hall. Emma would have to steal someone's butter because someone had finished her milk from the tiny fridge jammed with rotting vegetables and identical cartons of two per cent. Someone's pot full of burnt rice invariably sat soaking in the sink.

Ruthie spent most weekends at her sister's apartment in Scarborough, and when she was gone, Andrew came to stay. Every other Saturday he walked through Emma's door, stripped off his clothes, and climbed on top of her. They slid and ground their bodies against each other with wordless yearning, rubbing skin in lieu of speech. Emma could still smell Ruthie's sweat in the air; sense it hanging above her like a pungent wet cloud while she spread her legs beneath Andrew and pulled him inside her. In the sensuous silence between them she would fantasize about lying in a bath full of sand and warm butter. There was poetry in the silence, but there was something not quite right when they spoke. He would fall asleep, his body good and heavy, her breathing slow and suffocated as she fell into sleep and dreamt her dreams of ruins. She was migrating elsewhere, in search of bigger castles.

Over the months they became strangers to each other, looking and sounding less familiar. Outside Andrew's parents' house it seemed harder to share dreams. They needed those walls to contain them, hold their shape.

The distance between Emma and Blue was even more vast. She could feel it between them when she went home to Niagara Falls that
first Thanksgiving. He was sitting there in the living room with his boots on the coffee table, flicking through the channels with the remote control. He clearly wasn't happy to see her.

By Christmas, it dawned on her that Blue resented her absence. She hadn't gone that far, but far enough that she'd begun to forget the smell of water hurling itself over the escarpment.

They'd gone to pick up a Christmas tree together and they were standing arguing in the living room.

“I told you it was too tall,” Emma said.

“So we'll saw some of it off, it's no big deal.”

“All right,” she said. “But it won't look the same.”

He rolled his eyes at her and went to the basement to get a saw. When he started to saw the top off the tree, she interrupted: “Do it from the bottom. You need to leave the top for the star.”

“What star?”

“The star that goes on top of the tree.”

“Since when?”

“Since forever.”

“Emma, we haven't had a star since that Christmas when Mum and Dad had a huge fight about it. Why do you think Mum's not here? She hates decorating the tree. Don't you remember? That freakazoid who used to live across the street? He made this star for Mum out of stained glass one year and Dad flipped out and accused her of taking the idea of Christmas cheer a little too far?”

Emma looked at him absolutely blankly.

“Emma! Dad said, ‘Where the hell did this come from? Look's like that old bugger's handiwork. Did you pay for this?' And Mum said, ‘He gave it to me.' And then Dad said something like, ‘What for? What did you give him?' And then he grabbed the thing and stormed outside and
threw it down on the driveway and ran the van back and forth over it. Don't you remember?”

“Well, I remember something about the star, but I don't think it happened like that. Like Dad thought it was a tacky piece of tin or something so they put something else there instead.”

“You've got some kind of mental block, Emma.”

“I think you're embellishing the story somewhat.”

“Embellishing,” he repeated. “Sounds like a cooking method. Sorry, but your big words won't change the way things were.”

They continued to bicker about everything—Andrew, who Blue thought was a git, Emma's ambition, Blue's lack of it. Finally, Blue charged, “What I don't understand is why you can't just stay here in Niagara Falls and get a job like everyone else. Like a normal person.”

“Like what? At the Donut Castle? Like Brenda Tailgate? Wear a brown polyester uniform all my life and get paid minimum wage? Besides, Blue, it's not like I'm qualified to do anything.”

“Do you think you're too good to work at the Donut Castle, or something?”

“No. That's not what I'm saying. It's just that given the choice, I'd rather not.”

“I can't believe what a fucking snob you've become,” he said, picking dirt out of the treads of his boot with a Swiss army knife.

“Well, I'm glad
your
chosen profession has such meaning and purpose,” she couldn't help saying.

Blue had recently announced that he was going to be a tow-truck driver. “It's cool. And besides, drivers get lots of girls,” he had defended, thinking, It's a good job. At least I can hold one. What the fuck is it to you? “Fuck you, Em,” he responded to Emma's sarcastic jab. “What are
you going to spend your life doing, anyway? Digging up arrowheads? Pretty fucking useless, if you ask me.”

“You sound exactly like Dad,” Emma said contemptuously. She knew immediately from the look on his face that she'd gone too far. Blue walked straight over to the window, gazed out for a moment, and then punched his hand swiftly through the glass.

Emma shrieked. Blue stood stone still in a puddle of splintered glass and didn't turn around. He reached into the pocket of his jeans with his left hand, pulled out a joint, and stuck it in his mouth. He lit up with one hand, the other hanging by his side, covered in blood. Emma didn't know what to do: whether to take him to hospital or yell at him.

“Blue?” she asked tentatively.

“Fuck off,” he said, quiet, not turning around to face her.

She went to the broom closet and got a dustpan and started sweeping up the glass around his feet. He didn't move. He remained by the window, the only sign of life captured in the smoke that fled from his mouth. The pieces of glass slid in slow motion from the dustpan into the garbage can. “Let's wash your hand, Blue,” Emma said. He stubbed the joint out on the windowsill, left the roach sitting there, and walked out of the room toward the bathroom. Emma followed. She reached ahead of him to turn on the tap and held his hand as the water ran over it. He winced, but neither of them said a word.

He stuck his hand inside a sock and turned up the volume on the TV so that the voices in the box drowned out the rage in his head and the piercing curiosity of his sister's silence. Emma slammed the door of her mother's bedroom in confused anger. She stared at the top of Elaine's dresser. There they all were. Family portrait, circa 1974. Blue wrapped in Elaine's poncho. Oliver and Elaine on their wedding day—white
silk and pillbox, black suit and lots of teeth. Oliver framed and still in Elaine's bedroom. Oliver looking, much to Emma's horror, a lot like her. It was all just a little too eerie. All the years that had passed and Oliver still sitting there, getting dusted once every two weeks and, Emma imagined, probably yelled at not infrequently.

Emma wasn't entirely wrong. Behind her closed bedroom door Elaine did occasionally rage at his picture or slap the photo down. Sometimes she just stared at his picture and cried. Still, she never removed it from her dresser. Why? Elaine didn't exactly know. Maybe she wanted to remember that life had once been more than the sight of her two troubled children through a dirty glass. Maybe she wanted to remember herself as she looked then: with a sense of future, framed by a halo of love, however fleeting.

Emma knew Blue would call her a snob if she told him the truth. She did want a life where the castles contained something other than doughnuts. She didn't want to spend her life in Niagara Falls, being fired from job after job. Become a chambermaid in a honeymoon hotel and rip cum-soaked, red silk sheets off beds shaped like hearts. Book hotel rooms for tour buses full of Japanese tourists who treated her like a lower life form the way they did Elaine.

She didn't want to stare at the Falls and see the smallness of life, the inconsequence, the pettiness of being human. Watch season after season of lone rangers come to throw themselves over the cliff in barrels. Be this close, yet worlds away from that great giant United States of America. Wear a uniform all her life. Have to smile and say, “Have a nice day,” when what she'd rather say was, “Why don't you put your eyes back in your head, fuckwit, and pay a little attention to your wife,” and, “Are you sure that at three hundred pounds you really
need
this hamburger and fries?”

She'd built the idea of another life with Andrew. They had dreamt so much about the future that Emma had begun to wonder lately if
they actually had a present. The present seemed to be a lot of sex and a lot of fighting, and not a lot of conversation in between. They would deny the bitchy tediousness of the day to day by hinging all hopes of happiness on the future they were patching together like a quilt. One square for northern California, one for the house they would live in, one for Emma's wedding dress.

Then the reality of the present came crashing ashore. Andrew, who had applied to Stanford for graduate school, got a letter of acceptance. A scholarship even. A ticket some three thousand miles away. This piece of apparently good news, this integral square in their plans for the future, arrived carrying an ominous stench.