Melissa's lips hinged open.
The last time she'd seen him was four years ago. Which isn't to say that their communication had been severed by a dramatic episode, it was just that, as the years went by, there were fewer reasons to stay in touch. He did call her every year on her birthday, sounding pressed for time as usual, as if he were making the call between appointments, or snapping his fingers at a waiter to get the bill, maybe in traffic and changing lanes on his way to the golf course. Melissa ended these annual conversations with the feeling that he was just as happy as she was to hang up, each of them rolling their eyes as they pressed the red button on their respective receivers. Her last two birthdays he'd only gotten around to leaving a message on her answering machine, which suited her fine. She sure didn't call him for his birthdays. And he sure didn't call for Christmas, when Melissa and Julie were alone in the house together, the unilateral team of his opponents, as he likely saw them.
It was true that Melissa and her mother had become faithful allies leading up to the divorce. In fact, it was Melissa who'd instigated it. Cedric had always been far from the limelight of her grade-school plays and soccer matches, coming in late only to stand in the dim at the back with his standard set of excuses, which seemed to wear thin and weaken at the speed of Melissa's maturity. Until she was sixteen and her disappointment had turned into offhand acerbic remarks. Once, while Cedric was admonishing her about her physics grades, she'd asked him flat out, as if questioning the marks he'd had back in his own high-school English, what he thought the word “neglectful” meant. It snubbed him into a silence, encouraged her antagonism. Though it was a challenge she aimed at her mother instead of Cedric, pressing her with irksome questions when he wasn't around, gradually nudging her out into the wide agoraphobic open. Questions like: Are you happy in your marriage? How does it nurture you? Would you hope for me to find one just like it? Really? Why not?
But when she was seventeen and caught throwing a house party without permission, a line was drawn. On the evening in question, Cedric had slapped one of Melissa's friends (if you could call him that), and in so doing had (according to whispered conversations between Julie and Melissa) crossed a line himself. Either way, Cedric clamped down. It was high time she learned some respect, he'd said, giving her a grounding that was severe by any measure, even his. It was a punishment she readily, almost gladly, accepted. What it meant was more time at home with her mother, the two of them making the most of the evenings they had to spend together, cooking their favourite dishes, meals they knew Cedric would be late for (or more likely not show up for at allâcalling at the last minute to tell Julie he would just have to microwave it when he got home, obliged into another cocktail with a very, very important client).
“You do know he's screwing other women, don't you?” Melissa inserted after one of these phone calls, the same night she convinced her mother to nurse the first gin and tonic of her life.
But Melissa's casual comment appeared to be going too far, costing Julie something that she couldn't quite afford. “Melissa. Please. I don't think that's any of your business.”
“Mom, you say that like it's none of yours either.”
Julie paused to look tiredly into her glass, then through it. “Maybe it isn't. You're young. These things are complicated.”
“I think
you're
young. Nobody awards medals for living a miserable life, you know. At least martyrs can justify their suffering, have their belief to break even for them. While the rest of us are just too scared to take a daring stab at our own contentment. And sure, maybe you're not shooting for medals and monuments. But what about some peace? Just a bit. Haven't you earned at least that much by now?”
Whenever Julie failed to answer, Melissa felt a little more respect for her. It would take her another two years, with her daughter living at home throughout university, coaxing and prodding her toward it, before Julie would finally ask for a divorce.
When she did, Cedric was gobsmacked. He agreed almost laughingly, spitefully, as if he were daring her to try to survive out there in the big bad world-according-to-
CNN
without him. The settlement was a generous one for Julie, and within three months Cedric had moved the last of the things that had been deemed his out of the house. It was less an ordeal than either of them had expected. With an innocent old-fashionedness, they were stunned at how ready the system was for such an eventuality, a procedure already in place for them, with protocols to minimize the snags along the way and a modus operandi where, to combat the sensation of falling, you could merely cling to the handrails of the process itself. When the formalities were over, their relations remained amicable enough, even if Cedric went to great lengths to avoid hearing or seeing how, in the end, Julie could get along just fine in this scary world on her own. Better than fine really. In fact, Julie even came to enjoy her bi-monthly problem-solving quests, getting replacement light bulbs and oil changes; it was so much simpler, and less intimidating, than she'd imagined it being. While Cedric, unsettled after hearing from his mechanic about an easygoing run-in with Julie and a set of new brake pads, decided to find himself another garage, someone who was closer to his new place and who better understood the importance of keeping his mouth shut.
Meanwhile, Julie's relationship with Melissa took on a new shape, entered a confidence that often pushed the mother/daughter boundaries. It was no longer a taboo of loyalty to talk about Cedric's failings, which allowed for unspoken things about his youth and age to rise to the surface. Like the time they'd been at a dinner party and the wife of one of Cedric's clients, sitting next to him, calmly cleared her throat during the dessert, smiling politely, and stated that his hand seemed to be on her lap and would he please remove it. Julie had shot to her feet to clear away whatever dirty plates she could grab and remembers sniffling over the sink in the kitchen for no other reason than the fact that she wasn't able to slink out the back door and disappear from the debacle. She had to say goodbye to everyone, put on her shoes and coat, grin and bear it through the front door. Always having to face the music that she'd had no part in composing.
Melissa joined in with the same sentiments, recalling when she was fifteen and sitting bored at a barbecue in their backyard with some new guests, one of whom had pointed out how, lately, there were getting to be way too many panhandlers downtown, shoving their tinkling cardboard cups under everyone's noses, accosting passerbys with their hard-luck stories. And they were getting pushier too, he warned ominously. Which set her father off on his famous mugging tirade, telling the story of how he'd been robbed blind at a gas station once, in broad daylight. But then he took it a step further, mentioning how, if he'd owned a firearm, things would have been different. “I'm tellin' ya, if the same thing'd happened in the States, a regular guy like me, he would'a had a gun. And he would'a turned around, pulled it out, and pow, just like that . . .” he'd snapped his fingers, “just like thatâthe world's a better place. You know? I mean, these people, what do we . . . how can we just let them roam the streets like that? Shouldn't somebody be doing something about them? And I honestly don't care what. Just
do
something. You know?” He had searched the guests' faces for signs of accord, which they attempted to procure in as noncommittal way possible before quickly changing the subject. Hey, was that a
new
barbecue? And what
was
the marinade Julie was using for this chicken? Melissa remembered feeling suddenly nauseous, excusing herself to ease the door shut in her room where she could press play on her Cranberries
CD
and flop heavily onto her bedspread.
Julie and Melissa swapped these one-sided anecdotes until they'd run out of them, had grown weary of their simplistic villain-mongering, and began trending toward other topics, more productive ones, and, at times, things that they'd never thought of breaching before. Like what do you think or feel about such-and-such? What, if you could go back, would you do differently? Is there something you'd like to know, or do, or understand before you die? Is there anywhere in the world you've always wanted to go, and why? What (Melissa lifting her gin and tonic and motioning at the night sky, a salt spill of stars running along a smoggy pane, the quarter moon of her lime pinching the rim of her glass) do you believe?
She learned that her mother had always wanted to go to Ireland, to see the threads of hand-piled stones that macraméd the fields of rain-muddied grass there, and to listen, for one entire day, she'd said, to the most lovely accent in the English language. For Melissa, it was southern Spain, for the cubes of its Berber villages, the ornate ruins of its Moorish architecture, and to eavesdrop on the teenaged guitarists that she'd always imagined practising their flamenco in the parks. When Julie had heard this, she made a few phone calls, asked around, and managed to find Melissa a two-month au pair placement in the Andalusian city of Granada, if she wanted it, over her first summer break in university. Melissa couldn't wait, though kept offering to stay behind, even after she'd checked her bags in at the airport. But Julie had promised that she both wanted and needed the time alone. It would be good for her, she'd said, unpersuasively.
The months that Melissa spent in Spain taught her three things: she wasn't particularly gifted with four-year-olds, was even less talented (and potentially hopeless) at second language acquisition, and there was something about travelling that she absolutely adored. She thought that it had to do with the normalcy one found in other places. The way people got up, went to work and paid their bills, watched
TV
, walked their dogs and scolded their children, all in a different tongue, of course, but in roughly the same way we all do. However appealing the idea of ethnology was, it was really only the study of nuanced variation.
Melissa soon found her favourite place in the city, a barren hilltop above the AlbayzÃn, crowned with an ancient wall and overlooking the Alhambra, far from the tourist squares below. It was a spot where she always felt somewhat daring, edgy, watching the young gypsy women with their flawless bellies bronzing in the late sun, their unwashed hair, so black it was indigo, glinting in its own oils, seedy men trailing behind them, scuffling along the dusty footpaths that snaked to the grottos and shanties of their homes farther off. None of them acknowledged her with anything outside of mild contempt, a dismissive enmity. She wasn't part of the landscape there, had no intimacy with it. She was only there to record it and move on, sitting on the bare clay with her Levi's blue jeans, a spiral-bound notebook pinned against the slope of her thighs, busily scribblingâa sketch, they thought, maybe a diary, travelogue. Whatever it was, they all seemed to judge, it was sure to be girlish and sentimental, have nothing to do with their reality.
When she returned to Toronto, still drunk with adventure, she transferred out of most of the courses she'd chosen the previous spring. She then registered into the recreation and tourism program, thinking that this was a sure way of getting her out of the city and travelling again. She wasn't a fan of the classes themselves, or of the sociable and cheery students that the curriculum drew, but she went through the motions anyway, wrote mediocre exams, uninspired papers, somehow sure that it would all pay off in the end. Meanwhile at home, Melissa shared her enthusiasm of “the new” and “dynamic” with her mother, giving her gifts of enrolment for her birthday, Christmas, Mother's Day, and, for no occasion at all, evening classes in Indian cooking, pottery, yoga, an introduction to painting. At winter's end, she bought Julie packets of exotic seeds for her springtime flower garden, and while she planted them in the cool yard, Melissa went through a list that she'd printed out with all the co-op positions and summer jobs that were open to her as a tourism student. Finally, the benefits. They narrowed them down to the four best-sounding jobs and Melissa applied to every one, receiving a single offer, a position helping to run a campground in British Columbia, on a beach in Tofino, Vancouver Island. She'd held out the minimum-wage contract for Julie to holdâwith its stipulations of scrubbing bathroom stalls and quelling partiers that weren't abiding by the quiet curfewâas if it were a fragile and invaluable heirloom. Julie said she hoped she found what she was looking for.
One of her classmates, Annette, got the same job and proposed they use her hand-me-down car to drive them across the country, split the gas, keep each other awake. Annette wasn't Melissa's favourite of classmates, but she supposed the lure of the voyage would be enough to compensate for it. They left the day after their last exam and took the better part of a week to drive across the country.
The second day of the journey they'd driven too far, too late, having agreed to always find a place to camp before nightfall. Now they were on a desolate stretch in northern Ontario, the long dark becoming increasingly oppressive, both of them too inert and tired to search for a pull-off that would hide the car and allow them to set up their tent in the headlights without the worry of rural rednecks cruising by and discovering that they were alone, the scenario already played out in their heads: greasy dungarees and a baseball cap craning over the steering wheel to look for any boyfriends present, a gun rack and trophy feathers pinioned into his dash, the window rolling down with slow sadism. Gerls-needah-han-ith-anathenh? So they drove on, an eighth of a tank left, on the stereo Sarah McLachlan turned up to the cusp of distortion, the sorry sun-crusted speakers coughing dust, a familiar five-year-old cassette blathering on in order to ward off the squabble they both felt they could sink into. Finally, ahead, an oasis of streetlights with a roof of fluorescent tubing, harbouring a set of gas pumps. There was scaffolding along the walls of the store, the apparent tracing of a future wildlife mural; a moose, wolves, a trout on a fishing line flailing above water.