“Yeah,” she stared out the window, but office supply stores and Italian restaurants didn’t say
Punjabi
to her. “I can’t believe we could miss it.”
He stopped checking street signs and headed back towards Gastown. “Well, we probably didn’t miss anything.” But she didn’t feel like that at all.
She attempted to re-fold the map, but its original shape remained a mystery. She tried to see how each fold naturally fell, but she’d bent a section in when it needed to bend out, and the rectangle it began as eluded her. She unfolded and started again, thinking of all the glories not on maps anymore, like dragons and unexplored continents. She supposed they were one and the same. Dragons were probably drawn in exactly where continents remained unexplored, places like the new world, ripe with change and beauty.
She’d draw a dragon over the Punjabi Market, a destination now Eden-like in her mind with its golden curries, painted silks, and teas dotted with exotic fruits. Maybe there’d been a new world there she’d missed, a world where the bite of ginger in the air would change something for her.
“Should I take you home?”
Maybe the Punjabi Market had been a new world for her and Dan.
He’d dropped her off in the silence they’d found useful in the garden, but silence didn’t have the same ease without the rhythm of walking side by side. In the car, in the stairwell, and at the loft’s door, silence just felt like nothing to say.
She sat alone in the loft. Even the ability to order take-out, with her newly acquired fifty, couldn’t move her off the couch. She leaned over far enough to snag the phone off the coffee table where her watch still lay face down. She dialed and waited for Lois. Instead she got the Mulligan answering machine and its awkward recording done by a woman who’d reached adulthood without ever imagining messages would blink on a tiny machine in every home.
At the beep, she took a breath. “Hi, it’s Mar… It’s Mom, Logan. Hope you’re all having a nice evening. Oh, it’s Friday night. You’re out for dinner, aren’t you? Well, enjoy, and I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” She hung up, tossed the phone to the end of the couch, and jumped when it rang. “Hello?”
There was language, but it shot by so quickly, with squealy sounds punctuating words. The only reply she could give was, “uh…”
“Right now!”
“Celia?”
“Gretchen’s coming to get you!”
“Back up. What’s going on?”
“DidyounothearanythingI’vebeensaying?”
“You’ve been saying? Uh, no, sorry. You’ve got to slow down, Celia.”
“I’m singing. With Renny. Tonight. Mara, you’vegottocomeyou’vegottocome.”
She laughed from the pure pleasure of hearing Celia so excited. “Keep breathing, okay? I’ll be there.”
Keep breathing
was easy advice to dole out but difficult advice to take when John’s thigh was touching her thigh in the booth. She should have slid in next to Gretchen or Jodi or Stella, but no, she sat beside John, or John sat beside her. She hadn’t yet decided where to place the blame.
She turned her body to the left where tiny Sadie took up more than her share of space with a handbag that could double as a picnic cooler for twenty happy campers. She’d chat with the little gal and distract herself. “Have you heard Renny sing before?”
Sadie shook her head, her miniature gray curls bouncing, “But my Celia sings like an angel.”
“Celia’s your…”
“My grandgirl. My great grandgirl.” Sadie’s face crinkled up in joy, and Mara could see it. Celia, in all her golden retriever happiness, had come from adorable Sadie stock. Celia had just thrown her energetic passion into singing, not milkmen.
Mara reached for her pink martini glass, flinched a little when her skirt rubbed against John’s pant leg. Breathe and keep breathing. She had to because she’d return to her life soon. She still needed to finish her parenting, slide into grannyhood, and enjoy the end of her life watching her grandgirl sing in a lesbian bar. Well, whatever the grandgirl was called to do, Janie would be there with pride.
Of course, she wasn’t at that stage of life yet. She’d relax a little into the freedom she’d carved out but not too much. She avoided John’s eyes as she smiled down the table at Gretchen, who returned her greeting but immediately turned to the empty stage with alert energy. Jodi sat next to her and appeared to be enjoying some success flirting with a woman at the next table. And on the other side of John, Stella poured tomato juice into her beer, a disgusting combination Mara had never understood.
John tipped his head towards his mother. “I’ve never figured out the appeal of that drink.”
He’d known exactly what was crossing her mind. She wondered if every thought she had showed on her face. She was like one of those old drive-in movie screens angled so even nearby traffic could watch it. She thought of the appeal of John’s warm body brushing up against hers and tried to unthink it. She’d think about something else, something like work. She curved her body towards him because she suddenly had a perfectly legitimate reason to. It was work on her mind. “About the last catalog page for the bubble bath…” She hadn’t been inspired yet, but maybe talking about it would help and also keep thigh-thoughts off her face. God, that sounded wrong. She didn’t even want to know what showed on her face after that little gem ran through her head.
His eyes held good times and invitations, so he knew precisely that skirts and trouser legs were on her mind. She felt his thigh muscles bunch and choked on her drink, forcing him to pat her. His hand warmed through her blouse, and he left his arm along the back of the booth even after she’d recovered. He leaned closer. “Tomorrow.”
“You want…”
“I do.”
Her palms felt sweaty, and she worried about hanging onto her martini glass. It had a tippy shape anyway and once slippery it could really get away from a person. Slippery? She would instantly
unthink slippery,
unthink it, unthink it.
John inched closer, his arm dropping to her shoulders. “We’ll talk about the catalog page tomorrow. I’ll pick you up at ten.”
A pick up? She’d be in the loft, and then he’d be in the loft, and they shouldn’t be in there together. She shouldn’t open her door at ten any more than Granny should have welcomed the wolf. Of course, Granny thought it was Little Red Riding Hood. Granny had been the good one, the innocent victim.
Mara hated to admit, even to herself, that in the fairy tale she spun with John, she needed to be the good one too. She played the bad guy with Dan, with Lois, with Logan, if he knew his mother had flaked out for a month and run away from home. But with John, who could at any minute be the seducer, the flaky one, the son who would take off from Abundance and leave his mother in charge, she was the heroine, the one in danger. “I should come into the office.”
“Won’t be there. There’s a…” He glanced down the table as if to check on how much attention Stella was paying him. “I’ve got this Abundance thing until ten.”
She knew it. She knew the single, childless, business-gypsy, sexy, I-don’t-care-if-you’re-married guy wasn’t just a temporary player in her life. He was a temporary player in
his
life. Somehow it just felt like relief to have that confirmed. It made him safer than any man she could have met when she only had eleven Kisses left in her own temporary life.
The spotlight kicked on, illuminating two microphone stands. To the left, the pianist slid onto the bench, turned her piano lamp on, and began to play.
The bar quieted down gradually as everyone turned towards the stage. Renny, in a tank top, tight black jeans, and boots, walked out alone. She acknowledged the applause and waited for quiet before her rough voice gave a one word introduction. “Celia.”
Celia, blonde and smiling, reflected the spotlight as fully as Renny’s dark absorbed it. They stood, side by side, the piano slowing for the moment the voices added to the music. Renny’s came first, a little rough, worn, but in a Velveteen rabbit kind of way. Her voice sounded both used and loved by experience. Celia’s joined her, clear and sweet. Their voices met in a kind of perfection Mara wasn’t sure she’d ever heard. That was it. Renny had struggled for years. Celia might have done the same right behind her, but together they had greatness.
Mara scanned the faces in the bar and could tell that everyone heard the same thing she did. At the end of the booth, Gretchen’s eyes glistened with tears.
John leaned closer and breathed out a
wow
. She nodded and started to take in the words beyond the beauty of the sound. They were singing about unraveling riddles and individuals in trouble and pain. It was folky but more soulful than that. She wondered if she knew the song. Celia sang it with such joy, and Renny anchored her. Maybe hope and struggle were two characters in the Chinese symbol for music.
And then the words clicked for her. They were wishing for a heart, and
if I only had a heart
could only be The Wizard of Oz. It was so beautifully done, she longed to physically holding everything near, every second of what she was hearing, seeing, and feeling. When the scarecrow sang
If I Only Had a Brain
, she hadn’t noticed the same kind of longing, but she felt it when Celia and Renny sang it, felt it with every one of her senses.
She didn’t know how long they’d been up there, just that when they stopped singing, she wasn’t ready to stop listening. They hadn’t even made it back to the table yet because they’d been stopped by nearly every person they’d walked by. She spotted them sitting at a table near the stage, engaged in conversation with a man Mara realized was the only one besides John in the bar.
“Want a ride home?” He smiled as if asking two questions with one made for great entertainment, and she took in a quick breath because there lurked in her shadowy brain the possibility of saying yes.
He eyed her empty martini glass. “You may be under the influence, not capable of thinking clearly, and no one could really blame you for anything that would happen under the circumstances.”
He delivered it with such humor and handsomeness, she cursed his charm. He was plenty wolfish, but so charming, she found herself smiling back at him even as she shook her head no. “I’m fine, thanks.” She tapped the rim of her empty glass. “I finished this more than an hour ago.”
“Yeah, but those pink ones are deadly.”
“The pink is pomegranate juice.”
He quirked his head to the side. “Really? Well, some of the romance has gone out of it for me now.”
She laughed. “They use pomegranates in Greek weddings.”
“Well, that’s nice.”
“I think it’s for fertility though.”
“Romance. I said romance.”
She got that. Romance and fertility might just be as opposite as night and day, sweet and sour. She noticed the drop left in her martini glass and sipped it, imagining pomegranate sweeping across her palate, the sweet red juice, bitter white seed. Maybe there was a reason bitter and sweet resided in separate spots on the human tongue, not next to, but near enough that they seemed to be designed in concert perfection. Across the bar, where the man still held the attention of Celia and Renny, she saw them as opposites as well, opposites that worked beautifully.
John squeezed her hand, and she hadn’t noticed he’d taken it. The two of them would be what spots on the tongue? Sour? No, neither was that. Sweet? She’d probably been that the first thirty-nine years of her life, although her sweetness might have been mislabeled. She’d been so accommodating that her sheep-like nature just made people think she was nice and good and sweet. So, what were the other options, anyway?
She could almost call up the diagram of the human tongue from biology class, further evidence that she needed to remember less. Salty was located forward but towards the sides, she thought. She’d label John a salty-sweet. And for herself? Maybe she didn’t currently have a place on life’s tongue at all. She was experiencing taste confusion. It must sometimes occur for even the most careful eater. Didn’t everyone sometimes bite into life and have it slide down, only to later have it burn a line along the tongue and all the way down the center?
She let go of John’s hand and slid out of the booth. “I’m going.”
“Are you sure?”
“No.” She gave a wave to the table and left.
“I promised you Granville Island.”
John drove them across a large bridge, all concrete and traffic, and she wondered how he’d talked her into his car again. “You promised you’d stop by at ten to discuss the catalog.”
“Before that.”
“Before that? Before that you said you had an Abundance thing to do, a project maybe?”
“Way before that.”
What was the first thing she remembered John saying to her? Their hands had been in a vat of vanilla cream. She remembered it so clearly, she had to let out a breath to calm herself. And after she’d untangled her fingers from his, he’d said, “happy Independence Day.”
“After that.” He took an exit at the end of the bridge and drove along an unassuming street.
“I give up.”
“I was hoping you would.” He wiggled his eyebrows, and she gave him her disapproving teacher face, but it only made them both smile. “I was drinking a Gastown Amber Ale, and you said—”
“Was this the night we went out to the movie with the Woody Allen train?” She considered she’d just used date words. Night. Movie. Woody Allen. Went out. “I mean not went out, went to, but went together. Not together, of course, because you were there, and I was—”
“I promised you Granville Island.” He steered the car under the bridge, and she barely caught sight of the slim green Granville Island sign. She’d never have found her way onto the island. Alone, she would have driven back and forth across the bridge, searching for such a small guidance. She would have had to give up another Vancouver experience.
He stopped at the first of a series of crosswalks and waited for groups of visitors to make their way by. She might not have been able to find her way onto the island, but plenty of people had. Shaded by the underbelly of the bridge, they streamed in front of the car by the dozens.