The Petty Details of So-And-So's Life (15 page)

“I think it'll be interesting,” she defended. “Remember the dinosaur teeth?” she said, hoping he'd remember.

“Dinosaur teeth?” he mocked.

“Yeah, from the back of my closet.”

“They weren't dinosaur teeth,” he scoffed.

“But it was fun to pretend they were.”

“That was a joke, Emma. Not the basis of a career.”

But it was our joke, she thought. We unearthed a secret together, and you drilled a hole so I could carry that secret around my neck, and I wore it for so long—in and out of the bath and rainstorms and winter after winter—that the rope rotted and my neck turned green. I'm still carrying our secret around, Dad. Right now, under my sweater.

“Take it from me,” he said. “University is a waste of time. Didn't do your mother or I any good. All it does is raise your expectations so your disappointments are that much greater. Spare yourself.”

“But you can't get a job without a degree these days, Dad.”

“Oh, come on. I had a degree back in the days when they were still supposedly worth something and I still had to work my ass off to support the three of you. I don't think you and your brother know what hard work is,” he said.

Emma knew it would be pointless to interrupt, tell him that it was Mum who had worked her ass off. She remembered Elaine receiving a cheque from Oliver after he left. Some attempt to compensate her for the money he had drained from their joint account. The cheque had bounced so high that it had disappeared like an Indian rubber ball over a schoolyard fence.

“Do you think you're too good to work or something?” he continued.

“Pardon?”

“Where on earth did you even get the idea of going to university?” he barked.

Emma noticed his eyeteeth: long and yellow, projecting from his mouth. He was mutating into the wild, unwashed dog of the photograph. Clearly not from you, she thought. “I always had it,” she said defensively. “I just never knew I could do it. I didn't think I was smart
enough. But then I met Andrew and he really made me believe that I had it in me.”

“That your boyfriend?”

“Dad,” she protested, embarrassed that he was raising his voice.

“Who is he?”

“He's this really smart guy, a brilliant scientist. And he makes me feel special. He makes me feel smart. He's the guy I'm going to marry, Dad. When I finish university.”

“Did he say he'd marry you? Don't be naive, Emma. Men'll say anything for a screw.”

“It's not like that,” she said, shaking her head. We're in love. So in love, and we have a plan for our lives, a plan we've made together. We're going to move to California. Get married amongst palms in botanical gardens in Pasadena. There will be ivy-covered tables sprinkled with rose petals. We will be happy. We will be professors with adjacent offices in some small college and have our graduate students round for potluck suppers. We will take sabbaticals together in Tuscany where I will unearth ruins and Andrew will invent theorems over red wine and dinner on warm nights. We will be friends with people like Julia Kristeva and Umberto Eco. We'll have a rich and brainy life.

They would be just the sort of people that Oliver would despise.

Oliver just stared at her: his pupils swimming in a sea of yellow. Hepatitis, rabies, wolf-man. Possessed by something inhuman.

She said nothing more. He had ripped into every word she spoke like it was raw red meat. She recalled then what she'd tried to forget—that things that started out like normal conversations with Oliver tended to end up in some ugly place. Halfway through her potatoes, Oliver was sitting across a sea of smoke and starting to froth at the corners of his mouth. She had to force herself to remember this wasn't
the only place to be. That at another table, with other parents, people listened, and she had things to say.

She left him that night feeling more depressed and disillusioned than she had in years. He'd been gone for so long and she'd been angry because she loved him and hated him and missed him, but she wondered now if she would prefer to miss him than know him as strange and cruel.

She left him that night, but he wasn't going to let her go that easily. Two weeks later, he showed up at Andrew's parents' house. She caught sight of him coming up the drive. “Fuck, Andrew. It's my father,” she said anxiously.

“You're kidding,” he said, pressing his face against the windowpane. “He looks …”

“He looks what?” she prodded him.

“Well,” Andrew hesitated. “Emma, sorry, but he looks like a bum.”

“I know. It's bad.”

“Well, what's he wearing?”

“Something like the lining of a coat,” Emma said, ashamed.

“I'll get the door, okay?” Andrew offered.

“Mr. Taylor,” said Andrew, greeting him. “I'm Andrew. This is a surprise.”

“Emma here?” Oliver said abruptly, barely acknowledging him.

“I'm here, Dad,” she said from behind Andrew.

“I've got to talk to you about something,” he said over Andrew's shoulder. “In private,” he added.

“Well,” she hesitated. “Okay. Do you want to come in?”

Oliver stepped inside and rubbed the soles of his running shoes repeatedly against the Persian runner. “Posh,” he muttered.

Andrew stood there protectively and said he would be in the library, putting a hand on Emma's shoulder.

Oliver sneered, “I'm her fucking father.”

“I'm aware of that,” said Andrew. “And I'm just leaving.”

“Patronizing son of a bitch,” said Oliver as soon as Andrew had closed the door to the library. “Who the fuck does he think he is?”

“Dad,” Emma objected as she guided him down the hall into the kitchen. She put the kettle on and took a seat at the table. “So, what did you want to talk to me about?” she asked him, trying to control her apprehension.

He remained standing. “Right. Well,” he said, clearing his throat. “I've got a business proposition for you,” he whispered.

“A what?”

“A business proposition,” he repeated. “This way, you won't have to go to university at all.”

“But I want to go to university,” she said. “I mean, I
am
going to go to university. It's all arranged.”

“But why waste four years when you could be making money? That's what it's about, Emma. Here, look at this,” he said, pulling a wad of Canadian Tire money out of his back pocket. The bills were stapled together at one end. “That's what it's all about,” he said, flapping the wad against his palm.

“Thanks, Dad. I appreciate it. I do, really, but I want to focus on my education at the moment,” she said, staring at his thick torn hands and wishing he would just disappear.

“Won't you just hear your old dad out?” he pleaded. “You see,” he continued, undeterred, “security's a real issue these days. And with all these welfare cases around today you want to make sure you're protected … A man's home is his castle!” he exclaimed. “Security starts in the home! And you know how many people have sliding-glass doors these days …”

“Sure,” she nodded, although she suspected that not a whole lot of people did.

“Then you see what I mean!”

“Not exactly.”

“Security risk!” he shouted. “Big security risk. Which is why”—he fumbled, reaching down into his pant leg—“which is why I've invented this!” he announced, waving what to her looked distinctly like a wooden pole.

“A broom handle?” she asked, dumbfounded.

“See? It's the most simple yet ingenious thing. We could charge hundreds of dollars for this. You just place it at the base of one of the sliding doors and it prevents the other one from opening. Even if it's unlocked.”

“Uh-huh,” Emma nodded. “I don't really know if people are going to go for it, Dad,” she said, apologetically. Better that than telling him she thought it might have already been invented. Once it was elaborate plans for global telecommunication, now it's broom handles?

“Which is why I need you as my partner!” he went on.

She nodded, bracing herself to hear that she “lacked vision,” was “naive and unrealistic,” or was “missing the point altogether.” She stared her way blankly through his delivery.

He wanted her to make the pitch to potential customers because “marketing surveys suggest that the association of youth and femininity with a product appears to influence customer purchasing decisions.” While Emma was busy wooing and seducing, he would just whip to the back of the house and install it before they'd even had a chance to turn them away. “They won't believe it unless they see it,” he explained. “People lack vision. They have to be shown.”

Emma retreated to her earlier stance. “Dad, you know, thanks for thinking of me and everything, but I really am going to go to university.”

“You're just as bad as the punters!” Oliver shouted. “No fucking vision. No imagination. No drive. Just like your mother. I don't know why I fucking bother to try and help you.”

“Sorry, Dad,” was all she could say.

He stuck his hands in his pockets and stared at the floor, shaking his head. “Yeah, well, just don't come running to me when you haven't got any money,” he said bitterly. “And by the way,” he added. “What about that twenty bucks you owe me for dinner the other night?”

“I thought that was your treat.”

“Well, nothing's for free in this world, Emma. If you haven't figured that out yet, then you're really lost. Quid pro quo. Tit for tat.”

“Andrew?” Emma whispered in the dark.

“What is it, Emma?”

“I don't know if he's just crazy or whether he's really evil. He's so bitter and mean. Nasty. Sadistic even.”

Andrew didn't offer any comment.

“Would you tell me if you thought I was going crazy?” she asked him.

“You're not going crazy. And you're not going to go crazy.”

“But what if I've inherited it?”

“I don't know if you should assume it's a biological thing.”

“But I could still have caught it somehow. I mean, maybe it was the food we all ate, or the fumes from the chemicals he used to use to stain the furniture. Maybe Blue will go crazy, too.”

“I won't let you go crazy, Em,” he said, squeezing her shoulder. She burst into tears then, and he repeated, “I won't.”

From that point on though, Emma decided to always sleep with one eye open. And to never shake her father's hand if she ever saw him again, just in case it was contagious. She imagined her father walking
away from Andrew's family home and wandering back to Toronto, leaving a trail of bitter blue blood all the way. She couldn't help but wonder if she was meant to follow. It disturbed her: I'm part of this family, aren't I? Or are they just being nice to me? Making me feel like I belong. I know I'm different. But I'm trying. I know I don't really speak their language, but I'm not as unintelligible as my dad, am I?

She was occasionally struck with the paranoid thought that she was, in fact, just like him. She was a dreamer, too, sometimes unrealistic, but those fantasies she did at least keep to herself because she knew they were fantasies rather than realistic possibilities. She could be just as pig-headed and stubborn. She wanted to do big things: unearth a mummy, be a famous archaeologist, locate Atlantis. Oliver had wanted to wire the world, send a satellite into space, dig an irrigation ditch next to Niagara Falls. Was there a difference? Or was she actually a homeless person, too? One that simply happened, however temporarily, to have a home.

Blue was overwhelmed by the fear that he would turn out just like his father. He'd hold a job, no matter how shitty, in order to prove to himself that it could be otherwise. He saw his father everywhere. Oliver appeared to him in the way that a mother whose child has been kidnapped by a stranger must see her child in a thousand different small faces every day. He could see him in the faces of men rummaging through garbage cans, old women pushing shopping carts filled with the refuse of other people's lives, and babies who looked like they weren't quite sure they were meant to be born into the world. He could see him every time he looked in the mirror. He pictured Oliver without heat, without sweaters. Wearing the sleeveless lining of a winter coat and sleeping with his greasy head on the exhausted teats of some mutt who'd lost her mind to too many litters. He could see him everywhere but he didn't know where he was.

“He's lost it, Blue. I mean it,” Emma had said after seeing him. “He's cracked. Like, over the edge. Gone.”

Blue was already feeling so guilty about having let Faith call the Board of Health that he decided to seek him out again. Emma's words
proved unconsciously prophetic, because when Blue went down to the beach, he couldn't find Oliver anywhere. He really was gone. Blue circled the warehouse in the vain hope of a Gone Fishing sign, but it seemed his father had wandered off into some strange darkness and vanished into his own miasma. “Dad's done another Houdini,” Blue muttered to himself.

Standing there in that lonely gravel lot, not knowing what to do, his anger started to surface. “Fucker,” he said. “And now I'm supposed to follow you again? Find your fucking ass? Hunt you down, sniff you out? What the fuck, Dad? What do you want from me?”

He hurled a brick with all his might at one of the windows of the warehouse. Watched green glass shatter and then picked up another brick. As he lifted the second brick over his shoulder, an angry face appeared from around the corner of the building.

“I'm gonna nail you for this, you fucking idiot!” the man shouted. He started running after Blue with a brick in his hand, threatening to smash it against Blue's head.

Blue ran across gravel and scrub toward the water. Didn't hesitate and ran straight in—Doc Martens and Levi's and leather jacket and all. All swallowed by Lake Ontario. But Blue rose to the surface despite himself: his belly a bloated buoy filled with rage and secrets.