The Petty Details of So-And-So's Life (6 page)

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.

“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.

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.