Simple Recipes (14 page)

Inside, Harold called out, “What is Alsace and Lorraine?” Josie’s mother got up, nudged the door open, and slipped inside.

Josie kept her back to them. There was a stiff breeze coming from the west, so she folded her legs together and hugged them
to her chest. In Social Studies, she’d learned about Alsace and Lorraine, too. Those little provinces in France. But now Harold
had quieted down, and Josie could picture them sitting arm-in-arm on the fold-out sofa. She knew they never got any privacy.
This was a one-bedroom apartment, and her mom and Harold slept on the couch. Josie slept in the bedroom. When it was just
the two of them, before Harold moved in, her mom used to knock softly on the door. She would push the door open, her face
creased and pale, her dark hair swinging loose. Josie would pull aside the covers and her mom would clamber in beside her.
Even though Josie was fully grown, seventeen years old, she liked sleeping beside her mom. She liked her mom’s clean, antiseptic
smell. Even though Josie had gotten used to Harold, and she called him “old man,” and they yukked it up in front of the same
TV programs, she missed the way things were before.

She’d stopped counting the times she’d lain in bed, listening through the walls while her mom had sex with him. Josie even
put a pillow over her head to drown it out. She reprimanded herself for listening,
called herself a freak, and a loser. Once, she even burst into tears. She flirted with the idea of running into the living
room, yelling, “Cut it out!” and then slamming her bedroom door behind her. It infuriated her because she was supposed to
be the one with boyfriends, the one illicitly sneaking them home. Josie had a boyfriend, but she suspected that her mom cared
more about Harold than Josie cared about Bradley. It was her mom who was the girlish one, the one who daydreamed and doodled
and preened in the bathroom. And Josie just sulked on the couch, flipping channels, boring herself to death with television.

She propped her legs up on the balcony railing. Still, she loved Bradley enough. She planned to run away with him. He had
asked her, last week. He wanted to be an actor. There was work, he told her, in Toronto. She saw him in a new light then,
as someone whose dreams could make her happy. In this apartment, Josie thought she might drown. Her mom tried so hard but
it wasn’t the same. Now that Harold was here, it would never be the same again.

When Josie was young, she wanted to be a diver. She loved their stretched limbs and taut bodies, their arms cutting the water.
Part of her wanted to just dive off this balcony, her body in perfect position while the highrise fell away behind her. Through
the backdrop
of this city, on and on and on, not caring at all if the water ever came.

The worst thing her mother ever did to Josie was hold her under burning water. She didn’t argue that she deserved it. In hindsight,
Josie thought she was lucky her mom hadn’t lost her temper and smacked her good. The thing was, Josie had only been trying
to help.

She had taken the silver-plated bracelet, the one her father, the helicopter pilot, had given her mother, and tied it to the
balcony. Her plan was simple. She was sending a message, the same way people used telegraphs, carrier pigeons, or prayer flags.
When her father searched the mountains, he might see the chain fluttering from the post. It might catch his eye like a dry
spark. At dinner time, she and her mother would see his helicopter hovering outside the patio window, his eyes searching through
the glass for them.

She looped a long piece of thread though one end and knotted the thread to a post on the balcony. The bracelet lay flat, but
when a gust of wind came, it shook very gently.

Josie left it there while she went to school. She was in grade four. All day she thought of it, a glinting that would stop
him, out of the corner of his eye, make him stop in his tracks and look up. When she
came home in the afternoon, the piece of thread had come loose from the balcony. The bracelet was gone.

That night, when her mom realized the bracelet was missing, she walked in on Josie in the bath. She held the empty box out.
“Sweetheart,” she said, “where is Mommy’s bracelet?”

Josie dipped her hands into the bathwater. She lowered her eyes. “I lost it.”

“Where?”

Josie looked up at her mother. She gave her most innocent smile. “I dropped it,” she said, shrugging. “Off the balcony.”

Her mom wrenched the hot-water tap on, shower spurting, steam filling the room. The water was burning. Her mom started crying.
“You terrible girl!” she said. “You had no right. It was the only thing I ever had.” The water burned her skin, it scalded
her right to the bone. Josie screamed hysterically. Her mom wrenched the other tap and the water turned freezing cold. Then
she pulled Josie out. Josie’s skin was raw. “I’m sorry,” her mom whispered, all her rage gone. She repeated it over and over
again. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Josie wished she could go back, retrace her steps, have the bracelet in her hands again before
all this happened. For the first time, she looked at her mother in a new light, full of love and hate and incomprehension.
Her mom applied an ointment to Josie’s skin and kissed the air so her lips wouldn’t hurt her.
They slept beside one another that night, and no matter how Josie moved, her mom kept her arms tight around her, and Josie
couldn’t pry herself loose.

Josie admitted to herself that she didn’t really love Bradley. She liked him well enough. She liked the way they held hands
and walked through the empty schoolyard. It made her chest burn with warmth, as if from exertion. He called her by her full
name, Josephine. She thought it made her seem more important than she really was.

When Josie was a little girl, she had worried that her mother would abandon her. A common fear, she later learned. A sign
of the child’s first awareness of the encroaching world. She remembered lying on the couch, asking her mother, “Will you always
take care of me?” and her mother nodding fervently, “Yes, I always will.”

Now, Harold had made her mother’s eyes young again. It convinced Josie of what she knew deep down, that she wasn’t meant to
be here any longer. She recognized a hardness in herself, razor sharp, wanting to be set loose. It wasn’t Toronto so much
as the fact that she needed to be gone. Whether she went with this boy or on her own, it didn’t matter so long as she left
here. Last night, she’d struggled with a note to her mom. She’d tried saying it in different ways, but no
matter what she wrote she ended up sounding trite.

Before she left, Josie went into the cabinets and took out the plastic bottle of Aspirin. Under the cotton wadding was a roll
of bills, her mom’s emergency money, in case of earthquakes or disasters. Josie pocketed it, knowing her mother meant it for
her. What did they call it back then? Pin money. The words made Josie smile.

She was leaving them something in return — the bedroom, the living room, the kitchen, and the balcony. Years to themselves.
A missing child. She loved her mother to death, but that wasn’t the kind of thing she could write in a note. They wouldn’t
believe her anyway. They would never understand how much thought Josie had put into this, how much she missed them already.
On a scrap of paper, she wrote that she would call soon.

When Harold walked into the kitchen and saw the money in her hands and the rucksack on the floor, he guessed everything. He
said, “If you do this, you’re going to break your mother’s heart.”

“She’ll recover.” She and Harold stood facing each other, like cowboys in a Western, hands loose at their sides. Josie didn’t
know whether to fight or run. Replacing the cap on the plastic bottle, she said, “I tried to tell her. You heard me trying.”

Harold stared down at the linoleum floor, down at his worn slippers. “I heard you.” When he said this,
he gazed at her steadily and Josie had a glimpse of Harold as a young boy. Stubborn, relentless in his own patient way. He
surprised hen “Better leave now, before she gets home.”

She was running late. She swung her rucksack up. The weight pulled her back and she had to grasp the walls for support. Harold
opened the door for her, and Josie turned to him quickly, planting a kiss on his cheek. Then she took the elevator down seventeen
floors, and walked calmly through the glass entrance. She started to run. She was holding her coat in her right hand. The
grass was wet and her coat dragged along the grass. Josie imagined that the sound of her coat in the grass was her mother
running behind her. She was pulling at Josie’s arms and legs, and begging her not to go. And Josie didn’t know what to tell
her, so they just kept running like that, across parking lots and front lawns. She was sweating, and the rucksack bounced
painfully against her shoulders. Her friend, the boy with the dark hair and brown eyes, was holding the passenger door open
for her. Sliding in, Josie pictured herself falling out of the sky, the bag in her arms, highrise blurred in the backdrop.

In the end, Josie will not marry the boy with the dark hair and the brown eyes. She will move on from him
and from a dozen other men and women. A decade later, when Thea’s hair is fully white and Harold has put on too much weight,
she will go home once more and sleep in her old bedroom. But it won’t be for long. Soon shell be on the move again because
something in her can’t rest, something inside her fights it tooth and nail. Over the years, Josie will ask herself,
What are you running away from?
Each time, she will answer the question differently.
Because I can
is the answer she likes best. Josie will tell people that she has always been a free spirit. Some men will think she is asking
them, obliquely, to pin her down, to give her a reason to stay. They will ask her, “Don’t you want a family?” and she’ll laugh
at them, say, “I already have one.” She leaves these ones faster than the rest.

When standing on high landings — balconies, suspension bridges, look-outs — she still has the compulsion to jump. She believes
in her own recklessness. It is the only faith she has.

When she is very old and she has set foot in most of the countries in the world, Josie will tell her friends that her father
was a boy who jumped from a roof and her mother was a woman who fell from a helicopter. They will know she is lying but she
will never tell them
how,
or which details of the story are true. Until she dies, she will wonder about her real father and the twists and turns that
have marked his life. She tries to imagine his helicopter, the people he has
saved, or more importantly, the ones he has lost. All her life, Josie will wonder how she bypassed love when it was the very
reason for, the root, of her disappearance. When people ask, she will say that her favorite country is one that has not yet
been discovered.

I
n the years after I left home, I used to glimpse my parents in unexpected places. I would see the two of them in the Safeway,
my mother standing patiently by while my father weighed oranges in his hands, feeling for signs of imperfection. I would see
them on the opposite sidewalk, blurred and old, traffic streaming between us. During these sightings, I never felt the urge
to join them. I only wanted to remain where I was and watch while they negotiated their way through the aisles, their bodies
slow with old age.

of course, it was never them. By this time, my father had returned from Indonesia and my mother was living alone in an apartment
outside of the city. I had not seen my parents side by side in almost a
decade. It would be some other couple, vague and kindly looking, who would catch my eye, remind me of things I thought I had
long forgotten.

My husband Will once said that longing manifests itself in sight. In therapy groups, people tell of seeing their loved ones
long after they have passed away — a father, sitting in his usual armchair, a sister in the garden.

To Will, I said that longing was not the point. In any case, my parents were still alive.

Will said, “Death isn’t what I meant exactly. And don’t be so sure about the longing.”