The Petty Details of So-And-So's Life (19 page)

“It's not me you have to apologize to,” she said, not looking at Emma.

“What's wrong, Ruthie?”

“Nothing wrong with me,” she said abruptly.

“Don't be like that.”

“Emma, it's just … what the fuck do you think you were doing messing around with her boyfriend? That wasn't very smart.”

“I know.”

“And you know it's not him. You're just on the rebound. You've got to chill out for a while. You know, give yourself a chance. Find your feet, don't just run to someone else. Sorry to say it, but it looks a little pathetic, you know?”

Ruthie was right, though her wisdom came like a punch in the stomach. Emma buried her face in her hands. “It's just that I feel like I don't have anything left.”

“That's not true.”

“Well, what's left? Seriously?”

“Me, for starters. But more importantly, your work. Why are you here, Emma? You're not here because of Andrew, you're not here because of Blue, you're here because you want to be an archaeologist. Why don't you just focus on that for a while.”

Emma would have to make a choice—perhaps the first choice she'd ever made on her own. Instead of going home and finding some shitty job and being depressed all summer in Niagara Falls, Emma could spend the summer working on a dig. Archaeology and Andrew weren't
inherently pieces of the same pie. It had never been something she was just going to dabble in like a dilettante while her husband was off at the lab.

This summer, she could get her hands in the dirt, dig deep, and create a new life. She'd begin with the act of ceremonially throwing all previous neuroses into the back of a dump truck headed for the sea. Like an entombed Pharaoh, she would take with her only those things that she wanted near her in her next life: the broken dinosaur tooth she carried now in her pocket, and the book of wild imaginings she and Blue had made as children. She'd recited their entries to Blue in the basement while war waged in the kitchen above them.

“Imagine that I had gills and that whenever I wanted to talk I had to stick my head in a fish tank,” Emma would read to Blue.

“I'd like to be a fish,” Blue would say.

“So would I,” Emma would reply.

When the plates came crashing to the floor above them, Blue would quickly ask his sister to recite another.

“Imagine that there was one magic word in all the universe that could make the sky crack with thunder and I was the only person who knew that word.”

“I wish I knew that word,” Blue would say.

“So do I,” Emma had to agree.

Those lines had offered them comfort then. Now Emma recited them to herself.

Emma had obviously taken the photograph of herself. Held the camera at arms' length and snapped off the top of her head. A dangerously slanted grey building leaned over in the background and the hot-dog buns of some vendor dominated the lower left-hand corner of the frame. Blue had to laugh when he saw the picture. She thinks she's being artistic, he thought, as he stared at the photograph on the back of which she'd written, “I am somebody else.”

She was always trying to be someone else. She would make bold proclamations about who she was and what she was going to do but she seemed to spit them out of her mouth before she'd ever even tasted, let alone digested them. She would get things in her head that she didn't get in her heart. It was harmless enough when they were children—
I'll trade you my marbles, if you'll give me your life
—but the older she got, the more was at stake.
I'll give away all sense of humour
—
hell, I'll even give away my brother
—
if you'll just let me be the slightest bit like you
.

At some level he understood. There was always a sacrifice to be made. He looked at himself in the cracked mirror of his tiny hotel bathroom—saw a big, burly man with thick skin and a chin covered in
black stubble as rough as porcupine's quills, and thought, They think this is me. It bewildered him. Whatever was going on inside certainly didn't look like that.

He wondered if Oliver had felt that way. Confused by the fact that people looked and treated him as a single person, when he probably experienced himself as scrambled pieces of jigsaw puzzle scattered across a linoleum floor. You could put the pieces together, but there would always be several missing—critical pieces, like the bow of a ship, or California on a U.S. map.

Blue wasn't sure if all the things he felt could be part of the same landscape, let alone the same person. He'd known that the last time he visited the butterfly conservatory. He'd been reminded of it several times in his life by incidents that exaggerated the distance between the inside and outside of him.

At sixteen, making his way home on Christmas Eve, a police car had sped down the street and pulled up on the curb just ahead of him. Two uniformed men got out of either side of the car, stiffly, with their hands on their holsters. “What are ya carrying there under your coat?” one of them said, eyeing the bulge under Blue's leather jacket.

He had run out of the house in yuletide panic because he didn't have a Christmas present for his sister. It was eleven-thirty at night and the only thing open was the 7-Eleven. He bought a pink stuffed pig that said “I wuv you” when you pulled its tail and snorted when you poked it in the stomach. Emma still has it somewhere.

“A Christmas present,” said Blue, perhaps a little too defiantly, because the next thing they did was throw him up against the side of the car and pin his arms against his back. One man pulled him off the car and the other one unzipped his jacket. A brown paper bag fell into the snow at his feet.

“Do you want to tell us what's in the bag?” the officer said, prodding the bag with his steel toe.

“It's a fucking pig,” snapped Blue.

“Whad'ya call me?” the officer shouted.

“I didn't call you anything,” said Blue, rolling his eyes. “There's a stuffed animal in the bag. A pink pig. It's a present for my sister.”

“Pick it up,” the officer barked. Blue bent down, all his leather squeaking, and picked up the paper bag. “Open it.”

Blue opened the bag and pulled out the pink pig. “See?” he said angrily. He poked the pig in the stomach and it let out a big snort. The officer in front of him jumped backwards at the sound. The officer behind Blue laughed.

“Ahh, fuck off, Barry,” the officer in front said to the officer in back.

Blue pulled the pig's tail. “I wuv you,” the pig whined, and Blue walked off, snickering to himself. That's how he chose to remember it, anyway. In truth, he'd cried all the way home, devastated at the world's wish to strip him of his innocence.

Blue stuck the picture of his sister to the bathroom mirror. “I am somebody else, too,” he said, toasting her with his toothbrush.

Having her own tools made Emma feel like a real archaeologist. It didn't matter that they were just a trowel and a used toothbrush; in her hands they felt like the equivalent of Leonardo's paintbrushes, or Shakespeare's inkwell and quill. She was on all fours in search of native artifacts, or in her most extreme fantasies, some unparalleled discovery that would throw existing theories into doubt and cast entirely new light onto, say, our understanding of human evolution. This would lead to a cover of
Scientific American
with Emma standing parched and freckled, holding some equivalent to the Rosetta Stone in her hands, and then a tour on the lecture circuit, stopping at, say,
Stanford
, where Andrew could wither in the audience as she waxed eloquently about the limits of carbon dating and received her honorary degree.

It didn't matter that their professor, with the unlikely name of Nick Rocker, had told them this was a routine job for the government: the archaeological survey of a building site slated for construction the following spring—the site of a subdivision to be built not in Egypt, or the Yucatan, or China, or Iran, but in the blandest of the bland suburbs of Toronto. It didn't matter that Professor Rocker told them it was
unlikely they'd turn up a single arrowhead, because Emma's head was deep in dirt.

In reality, Emma was squatting, as she had squatted every morning for the past couple of weeks now, with a used toothbrush between her forefinger and thumb, sweeping dust off a fragment of pottery that was meaningless in the grand field of discovery: a piece of Dutch porcelain, circa 1929. She squatted alongside fourteen other students, engaged in the tedious and uninspired motions of scraping, teasing, and flossing, most of them restraining the urge to dig tunnels to the Antipodes. From above, they looked like ants labouring in a field under the dictatorial leadership of an anteater with a clipboard and a Ph.D.

They didn't begin the day with espresso, or end the day with tequila, they began bleary-eyed every not-quite-yet-morning and finished leaden-headed by the end of each exhausting sun-soaked day. But Emma nevertheless began and ended the day with fire in her eyes, scribbling her notes on the subway every morning, oblivious to the fact that she was sandwiched between a bunch of blank-faced people on their way to jobs they clearly hated.

After six hours of digging, they would all sit down to eat soggy egg salad and tuna fish sandwiches on white bread, and moan about tired shoulders and sunburns before packing themselves up to shuffle wearisome and wordlessly back to their homes in the city.

Among them, Emma stood out, engaging Professor Rocker in conversation, questioning him about context and dating techniques. It made her a butt-kisser in the eyes of the other students, but Professor Rocker would have to give her full marks for effort. She was obviously passionate about the subject, but since this particular situation was nothing but sheer drudgery, he could see she suffered from a syndrome that commonly afflicted novices. He was charmed by this kind of naïve
enthusiasm, it made him feel hopeful, it made him feel young again, but he knew it was only a matter of weeks before she discovered the truth: archaeology was a fundamentally boring and predictable occupation which required patience and commitment above all else. It was much more like a marriage than a shipboard romance, and in his twenty years of teaching, he'd seen many of the most enthusiastic fling themselves overboard in the end.

But Professor Rocker couldn't know that Emma's convictions were not simply born of idealized notions about archaeology. If that were simply the case, they would be easy enough to dispel. What underlay them was a determination fuelled largely by anger and sadness. Dreams born of a need to escape, passions inflamed by a desperate desire to reinvent herself, invest life with meaning, and bury the bad of the past. Professor Rocker had no idea what he was dealing with. Her romance floated on a ship the size of the
Titanic
.

Even on her way home on the subway, Emma scribbled notes in her dusty lab book. She attempted to make an overall sketch of the site but failed, because she'd never been artistic, she'd never had perspective. Blue did, not because he'd been taught, but because he just did. She envied that. She flipped to the last page of her notebook and scribbled him a letter.

Ruthie was in the kitchen on their floor of their residence stirring a pot of something that smelled far too exotic for the surroundings. She was stirring blindly, reading from a textbook lying open on the chopping block. She was studying hard all summer, determined to write her MCATs in the fall.

“You look like you've had a good day,” she said to Emma who was looking goofy with a big smile cracking her face.

“He's really good, this Professor Rocker. He makes us sort it out for ourselves.”

“No spoon-feeding,” Ruthie nodded. “Speaking of which. Open up your grinning gob and taste this—” Ruthie held out a steaming spoon.

“That's delicious.”

“Guyanese recipe.”

“What's in it?”

“Coconut milk, chicken, chili pepper, coriander, and a secret Guyanese sauce.”

“What's the secret sauce called?”

“Heinz ketchup.”

Emma laughed as Ruthie ladled some of the stew into a bowl for her. Dinner. Ruthie had left it for her on other occasions. A note on the fridge: “Green bowl, nuke it for four minutes.” Ruthie had more innate sense than Emma's mother of how to make a home.

After dinner, in her narrow, sepia-stained room, Emma tore the letter to Blue out of her notebook, and folded it around a couple of pictures she'd taken of herself. On the back of them she wrote: “I am somebody else.”

She took her dying fern into the shower with her, and watched dirt fall into a puddle at her feet. Every night she watched a brown puddle accumulate as she shed her dusty skin. Shower after shower, the dirt under her nails remained. There was even mud in the sink when she brushed her teeth. She was so tired that minutes after she'd crawled into bed, she fell asleep. Ruthie, whose room was next door, silently came and picked her lab book off her stomach, turned off her light, and shut her door. Emma slept on uninterrupted, dreaming ribbons of dirt and burial and the dead.

The next morning, she slid the letter to Blue under Ruthie's door with a note attached. “Ruthie, I'm sorry to ask, but if you have time today, can you stick this in an envelope and mail it to my brother? I appreciate it. Have a good day. Em.”

Ruthie picked up the letter when she woke up and dutifully put it in an envelope. She looked at the pictures, and decided no one would know if one them was missing. She took the prettier one of Emma, smoothed its creased edge, and stuck it in the back of her biochemistry textbook alongside a recent photo of her parents.