The Petty Details of So-And-So's Life (2 page)

If it were the fear of being lost and not found that compelled him to etch a deep, dyslexic “LT” into his arm, she would have suggested a different set of initials. Ones that would lead you back to a house with a swimming pool, or a family with twelve kids, or a mother who would buy you skates and take you to hockey practice. Initials you might want to have monogrammed on a set of towels that belong in a house with a finished basement on some street with a name like Thackley Terrace.

Instead, there they were with Elaine and Oliver, all crammed into a tiny three-bedroom house in Niagara Falls, across the street from a restaurant offering french fries and chow mein available twenty-four hours, even though a big
CLOSED
sign hung across the door at night because of lack of business. The house, a decrepit building that they'd bought for next to nothing, stood on the tawdry main street, sandwiched between a hardware store and a used-clothing store. In its previous incarnation, their house had been a pet food store, evidenced by the basement full of dog food that was part of the bargain. Before that, as Elaine and Oliver deduced on the basis of what lay behind the cheap drywall, it must have been a porn shop. The building was apparently insulated with mouldy copies of
Penthouse
.

Oliver painted the storeroom window over with red paint, until Elaine pointed out the obvious—it looked like they were advertising themselves as a whorehouse when they turned the living room light on
at night. He remedied this by covering the red paint over with thick lashings of industrial grey, creating the feeling that the world outside was perpetually overcast. Oliver liked it that way because it reminded him of his childhood spent in a grungy two-up two-down with windows clouded over with bacon grease on one of Glasgow's dodgiest streets—where that mysterious entity called Granny still lived.

In the porn-pet-shop-cum-house, there were three tiny bedrooms lined up in a row off a narrow corridor, at the end of which was a damp brown bathroom. The upstairs had obviously been a boarding house because each of the bedrooms smelled like dead bodies and old cheese and there was a fridge in one of them and a cooking element in the closet of another. But Emma and Blue each had their own room for the first time in their lives and this was better than anything that had ever happened before. Even better still, Elaine allowed each of them to choose a colour for their bedroom walls. Blue, of course, chose his namesake, and Emma asked for the colour of the sun, wherein a long debate ensued between Elaine and Oliver about just what colour that was. In the end, Oliver painted Emma's bedroom a colour that turned out to be more custard than sunshine. Emma helped her father, pointing out all the spots he'd missed and getting underfoot and nattering on inanely while he strained his neck to paint the ceiling.

“You're getting in the way,” he finally said, irritated.

She opened the door of the closet then and sat on the floor, out of Oliver's way, but still in full view of the change of seasons. When she leaned back against the flimsy, fake-wood panelling at the back of the closet, though, she discovered a hole the size of a saucepan lid. Curious, she reached inside and wrapped her fingers around a hard, mysterious object. She tugged and pulled and finally yanked a grey bone longer than her leg out from the noisy clatter behind the panelling.

“Daddy! Look! A dinosaur bone!” she shrieked.

“What on earth have you got there?” he asked, puzzled.

“I told you—a dinosaur bone!”

“Fancy that,” mused Oliver, putting down his paintbrush. He crawled inside the closet with her and said, “I wonder if the rest of its bones are here.” He reached down into the hole and said, “Yup. There's definitely something here, all right,” and told her to wait while he went to the basement to get a crowbar.

He ripped the panelling down and there, amidst dust, used condoms, and fossilized chocolate, were several large teeth. “Dinosaur teeth!” Emma squealed in delight, picking them up in her hands.

Oliver chuckled and said, “Doubtful, but interesting nonetheless.” Later that day he drilled a needle-sized hole through one of the molars and strung it on a piece of string so that Emma could wear it around her neck. She wore it proudly, even though a boy at school called her a cave woman, in the hope that if she rubbed it the right way, she would be teleported into a secret world where animals larger than trucks ate clouds for breakfast. She and her dad could travel back in time and discover lost cities and people who spoke languages before English was ever invented. Worlds far more interesting than Niagara Falls.

They had moved to Niagara Falls in 1974 because Oliver had lost his job as an architect in Montreal the year before. Something about him losing sight of the third dimension. He'd sneezed so hard on his way to work one morning that the world in front of him had suddenly collapsed. It was flatter than anyone before Copernicus had ever even imagined: far too flat to even consider continuing on his way to the office.

“Oliver? Don't you think it's a little arrogant to think you have the power to change the shape of the earth?” Elaine had to ask when he showed up at home only an hour after he'd left. He just shrugged and went to bed for the next six weeks.

Perhaps that was the beginning of the end, it's always been hard for Elaine to say, because ends by definition shouldn't have beginnings. Something definitely changed from that day on, though. She'd long ceased imagining him as a lover, but an architect missing a third dimension was really pushing the limits of shared reality.

What Oliver didn't confide was that in place of the third, he'd discovered an altogether different dimension. Fair enough, he'd never be able to design buildings according to other people's conceptions of space any more, but his new sight brought him the remarkable ability to see things lurking in places where other people didn't see them. A gift. Superior insight, he congratulated himself with a smug grin.

“Elaine, my real talents were wasted there,” he declared when he woke up after his six-week nap.

“Really,” she droned sarcastically. “And how might they be more meaningfully employed?”

“As an inventor,” he said.

“You're not serious.”

“Damn right, I am.”

“And what, exactly, are you planning on
inventing
?”

“Don't worry, Elaine. You always worry. There's divinity in these hands,” he said, raising his palms in front of her face. “I'll let them guide me.”

“Did you suddenly get religion, or something?”

“Just a little perspective,” he said.

She sighed. “Will you do me one favour?”

“What is it?”

“See a vocational counsellor.”

“What on earth for?” he barked.

She winced. “If you really are entertaining a career change, it might be helpful to talk to someone about it.”

“But I know exactly what I'm going to do. I've found my calling.”

“Just this one favour, Oliver—could you do me this one favour? I promise I'll respect whatever decision you make after that.”

He stared at her blankly.

“For me?” she pleaded.

“All right,” he conceded. “But my mind's made up.”

“All right,” she sighed, diffusing what she knew could have otherwise mushroomed into something large and toxic. She was relieved that he was simply out of bed.

The vocational counsellor quickly dispatched Oliver for a psychological assessment. He spent what he said was a useless hour and a half staring at ink blots, but was pleasantly surprised by the report sent by the psychologist the following week. It was full of words:
superior IQ, delusional, overinflated sense of self-worth, self-aggrandizing
, and
paranoid tendencies
. The report offered more of a career-related prognosis than definitive clinical diagnosis: Oliver Taylor was an employer's worst nightmare.

“It simply means I'm of much more use on the planet when I'm marching to the beat of my own drum,” he said proudly, taping the assessment to the fridge. He repeatedly punched it with a firm finger, demanding each member of his family acknowledge the scientific proof of his superior intelligence. He'd stopped reading the report after
superior IQ
, completely failing to register that the words that followed
were suggestive of dubious character and unstable mental health. Oliver Taylor was thirty years old and had just received the last pay-cheque of his life.

Elaine had always known Oliver was
different
, and that was precisely why she had married him. Her path down that slippery slope toward him had begun in 1967, when she was at the zenith of her adolescent life as an angry young woman. As the end of her senior year approached, it became obvious she wasn't going to be asked to the prom at her Boston high school. Since this was a stigma akin to having leprosy, her parents decided to intervene in the hope of preventing her from being banished to some remote colony where she would spend the rest of her days losing bits of her body and soul.

They weren't sure if she even had a soul, though. She had what they termed “socialist leanings,” a tendency which was so thoroughly offensive to their class pretensions that she had, for the last two years, dined alone with her books in her room, and spent the summers waitressing while her parents holidayed at the cottage in Maine.
She
knew she had a soul—just one the world around her considered alien. She'd hitch a ride on a satellite one day and wander the universe in search of like aliens. Until then, she had her books, and an industrial-sized lock on her bedroom door.

When Peter Wainright asked her to the prom then, she was deeply suspicious. The prom was at the end of June, and dates for the great event had been secured as early as January. It was the third of June when he asked her, so she knew she couldn't be his first choice. But she was
a
choice, and although this mystified her, she couldn't help but feel flattered.

On the fateful day, she had thrown her bookbag down on her bed
after school, and in and amongst the dog-eared textbooks, feminine hygiene products, chewed pens, and lint-covered lip glosses was a postcard of the Great Wall of China. On the reverse it read:

She stared at his minute, precise scrawl, thinking, Surely, this must be a joke. Peter Wainright was the son of Dr. and Mrs. Derek (“Tilly”) Wainright, the snooty couple with whom her parents played bridge every other Sunday afternoon. Dr. Wainright was a plastic surgeon, and Mrs. Wainright was just plastic, and Peter was apparently going to dental school in the fall, presumably because, like every other boy in her year who was off to dental school in the fall, he'd failed to get into medical school. Despite all that was not in his favour, Elaine actually thought Peter Wainright was all right. Still, this surely had to be a joke.

“What do you make of this?” she asked her older brother Sam.

“Well, I might be stating the obvious, but it looks like Peter Wainright is inviting you to the prom.”

“For real?”

“Well, what other kind of invitation is there?”

“Maybe it's a hoax.”

“You read too much,” Sam groaned. “I'd say you better say yes. Might be your only chance of being normal.”

She dared to brush by Peter Wainright's desk the next day on her way to her seat in calculus class. She peered down at his notebook and flushed red at the sight of his handwriting—as minute and meticulous as the letters on the back of the Great Wall of China. She sat nervously in front of him, wondering if her hair looked like a battered meringue from behind, and scribbled a note to him on the last page of her notebook.

As soon as the bell rang, she bolted from the room, dropping the note on Peter's desk as she ran past him. In her haste she dropped her calculus text with a humiliating thud, but was far too embarrassed to turn around and pick it up. Peter retrieved the book from the floor and followed her to her locker, where she was rummaging clumsily in search of nothing in particular.

“You dropped this,” he said.

“Oh? Did I?” she said, feigning surprise. “Silly me.”

“Thank you for your note.”

“Note? Oh yes,” she said, as if she'd forgotten having dropped off her unabashed “yes” five minutes earlier.

“So, I'll pick you up at seven?”

“Oh. Yes, fine. Thank you,” she nodded and returned to the catacombs of her locker.

“I'll be seeing you, then.”

“See you!” she chirped inside the dead space of her locker. She didn't dare look at him. She was sure she was turning green. She leaned further into her locker and breathed deeply, and then quietly threw up into her running shoes.

After a jocular exchange full of “Haar yes,” and “Of course, sir,” between Peter and her father in the foyer, Elaine and Peter drove off in his father's white Buick.

“First stop, Mike's place. Then we pick up Mary-Ann,” Peter announced. Elaine froze. Mike was Peter's best friend, and Mary-Ann, his date, the type of girl who was a cheerleader with all the sickening potential of being chosen prom queen.

In fact, when Mary-Ann plopped down in the back seat, all flounce and ringlets, she said as much. “Petey! You know, if you guys don't make me prom queen, I'll have to burn the hair of the girl who wins!”