The Petty Details of So-And-So's Life (3 page)

She turned to Elaine then and commented on her dress. “Interesting” was the word she used. “Did you make it yourself?” she asked patronizingly. Elaine nodded, and Mary-Ann said, “Oh, good for you! I'm just
useless
with a needle and thread.”

It went from bad to worse. Peter and Mike took turns dancing with Mary-Ann all night and Elaine spent a great deal of time staring at her shoes (which she hadn't, incidentally, made herself). Peter kept coming up to the table and asking her if she was all right, bringing her a
glass of punch each time. Halfway through the night, she was sitting alone at a table with six glasses of punch lined up in a row, none of which she had touched. Mrs. Petrie, the gym teacher, must have felt sorry for her, because she pulled up a chair beside Elaine and asked her if she was having a lovely time.

“Terrific,” Elaine said drolly.

Mrs. Petrie looked sympathetic and said, “I wouldn't worry, dear. They haven't got half your intellect,” nodding her head in the direction of the two boys flanking the now near-hysterical swirling blonde. “You got accepted to Harvard, didn't you?”

“Yeah, so?”

“Well, that's better than any of them could do.”

“Well, I'm not going.”

“You haven't accepted?”

“I never wanted to apply in the first place. I just ghost wrote my mother's application. It wasn't me. It isn't me. I'm getting the hell out of Boston.”

“Where are you going?”

“Canada.”

“Canada?” said Mrs. Petrie with such surprise you'd think it were a penal colony.

“Montreal. McGill.” Montreal was only six hours away, but it was about as far away from the sordid demonstration in front of her as she could imagine.

“Well, that's brave,” she commended her.

Not really, thought Elaine.

Despite feeling self-righteous and determined, Elaine did still, of course, secretly hope that Peter was just being coy and saving the last dance for her. Anticipating this as the night wore on, she excused herself
from Mrs. Petrie and went to floss her teeth in the ladies' room. “Shhhh,” she heard as soon as she walked in, followed by a succession of hiccups and muffled giggles. A bottle of cherry brandy crashed to the floor inside the cubicle behind her and Mary-Ann let out a high-pitched screech: “Oh shit, Peter! You've stained the front of my dress!” Mary-Ann burst out of the cubicle then and ran to the sink beside Elaine, hitching up her dress to her navel in an effort to get it under the tap. Elaine was staring into the mirror as Peter emerged, his reflection slightly drunk and stupid.

“Hi,” he waved lamely at Elaine's face in the mirror.

“Hi,” she waved back, mockingly.

“Peter, you could at least help me!” shouted Mary-Ann, frantically scratching her nails into the fabric of her dress.

When Peter didn't move, Elaine said, “It's the least you could do,” and gave him a patronizing glare designed to make him feel like a pathetic fool.

“Elaine—” Peter stammered, indeed feeling like a pathetic fool.

“Fuck off, Peter,” she said simply.

Peter and Mary-Ann both looked shocked. “
Such
unladylike language,” Mary-Ann chided. “No wonder your father had to pay someone to ask you to the prom.”

“Mary-Ann!” Peter cringed.

“Oh,” Mary-Ann crooned with false pity. “You didn't know your daddy paid Peter to ask you? Come on, darling. You didn't really think Petey Wetey was interested in you, did you?”

Elaine called Sam from the phone in Mrs. Petrie's office. “Come right away,” she said. “They're a bunch of cretins.”

“He could have at least driven you home,” Sam said in the car after he picked her up on the corner. “I mean, jeez, Dad paid him enough.”

“You knew?” she screamed. She sank back into the plush burgundy seat in defeat. She closed her eyes and erased the world in front of her, imagining Montreal instead, a city of exotic light at the end of this tunnel of horrors. The rest of the world and all the people in it could go straight to hell as far as she was concerned. She locked her bedroom door until late August, until it was time to pack nothing and leave for university.

“I want to be a writer,” she told the shaggy-haired Scottish boy in the smoky coffee shop the following November.

“Cool,” he said. He fingered a Rizla intently and rolled a perfect cigarette, which he then offered to her. She took it from his wide, black-ink-stained fingers and said a shy thank you. She liked his deep blue eyes and his throaty, smoke-laden laugh. She liked that he was here in this café every afternoon, looking moody and making a single cup of coffee last for hours.

“So let me see what you're writing,” he said after he'd lit her cigarette.

She looked sheepish and said, “It's really rough.”

“I like it rough,” he teased.

“Where do you come from?” she asked him.

“Oh, the wilds,” he said, his eyes widening. “The land of bracken and heather and haggis.”

“Scotland?”

“Right y'are, missy,” he growled in becoming brogue.

“And what are you doing in Montreal?”

“Ahh. I'm escaping a terrible past,” he said flirtatiously.

“Are you on the run?” she asked, hoping for danger.

“I am.”

“From the law?”

“From all laws that say a man must live out the expectations of his parents.”

“What did your parents want you to be?”

“A military officer like my dad, married to a wee hen from the Hebrides who would serve me tea at six, and wouldn't often have an opinion—unless, of course, she agreed with me.”

“I'm on the run from that law, too,” Elaine confided.

“Did they want you to be a schoolmarm and give it all up to marry a doctor from Philadelphia?”

“How did you know?” she said, rolling her eyes.

“I could tell, missy.”

“Could you?”

“You've got the look of a dreamer about you. A bird like you would bite through metal bars if she were trapped in a cage.”

Elaine smiled. She'd never thought she had the look of anything in particular about her, except perhaps that of an alien. Certainly nothing with a bite strong enough to chew through metal.

His name was Oliver. He'd been sent to live with his uncle Hugh in Montreal a couple of years before and was now studying architecture just a few buildings away from where Elaine was studying English. He didn't want to talk much about his past. “As far as I'm concerned,” he said, “my life didn't begin until I arrived in Montreal.”

“Are you happy here, then?” she asked him.

“Yeah,” he said, sounding a little surprised. “Not forever, but for now, yeah.”

On cold afternoons throughout that winter she let him read her rough drafts, and rather than respond in words he would doodle in the margins, framing her stories with colourful gnomes and one-eyed
animals. He made her laugh, and each time she laughed the vice grip around her heart loosened another notch. In a matter of months it was beating regularly, without restraint. When he'd worn down every one of her defences with fun and flattery and long dreamy rants about how he was going to paint billboards in New York City and she was going to write a famous novel and they were both going to be fantastically rich without having compromised their “socialist leanings,” she said yes to his repeated proposal of marriage.

“But I'm never living in the U.S. again,” she declared, standing flanked by pasta and Cream of Wheat in the middle of the last aisle in a supermarket.

“Oh. But
New York
,” he said longingly, tossing a carton of eggs carelessly into their basket.

“That's my one and only condition.”

He thought about it for a minute. “Would you ever consider Niagara Falls?”

“The Canadian side?”

“Sure.” It didn't matter to Oliver—the Falls paid no attention to the border—they were the simultaneous wonder of New York State, Ontario, Canada, the U.S., and the world. They
were
the world, in his mind, or at least the central destination of its people, and he fancied himself at the centre of the universe. “Let's have our honeymoon there,” he said excitedly.

“Kind of clichéd, don't you think?”

“Charmingly so,” he agreed. “We'll sleep in a heart-shaped bed and go bowling. What do you think, missus?” he asked, picking up a honeydew melon from a pile and bowling it down the length of the aisle until it crashed into the heel of an innocent senior citizen pushing a cart full of Pablum.

“Sorry!” he called saccharinely when she turned around in fright. “That would have been a strike,” he muttered to Elaine, grabbing her hands in his and kissing her hard on the mouth. Their kisses were always hard, and she liked their determination.

She moved into his rundown apartment with sloping floors after the honeymoon. First there were termites, and then there were two babies, and all of a sudden, there they were with Oliver punching his finger against the fridge declaring himself a certifiable genius and prophet of invention. His inventing would never prove to be a big money-maker, and his big dreams would never provide the warmth to heat them adequately through harsh Montreal winters. Elaine began to wonder when exactly they were going to start living the life of artistic expression and political integrity they'd once imagined.

It was after the first baby was born and named after Elaine's favourite family pet and the world became all crap and diapers and cracked, chapped nipples, that Elaine knew they were never going to start living. All they had done was come full circle; managing to create a pathetic imitation of the very type of domestic arrangement they had sought to avoid. Oliver went to work in the mornings and drafted plans for tall buildings and Elaine stayed at home with Emma, and then Emma and her baby brother Llewellyn, and watched as the dream of writing a famous novel shattered into tiny fragments.

Oliver was totally unrealistic. When the baby girl was born he brought her an enormous box of assorted chocolates and tried to cram the bonbons into her mouth when Elaine wasn't looking. He read to the baby from a dusty old encyclopedia and got frustrated when, instead of listening, she threw up in her lap. He asked her if she could remember her dreams and she looked at him with her wide eyes and
burped. When Llewellyn arrived, he'd already long given up even attempting to pretend to be a parent.

Oliver was prone to Big Ideas and Pronouncements. The fantasy of their life was constructed on these BIPs. Oliver could make tangible shapes out of dust spiralling in a sliver of sunshine that pierced a dirty window. He could look at the clouds and say, “Elaine, that quadrant of blue is exactly the colour of the water that will lap against the shore of an island that our descendants will name after us one day.”

Oliver's inventing was going nowhere, but he was sure it was all a matter of location, location, location. Montreal was too Old World, too European, he declared. What he needed was the contagious spirit of American entrepreneurialism to spur him on. In the middle of a blistering snowstorm, six years into their mostly miserable marriage, Oliver begged Elaine to pack up and move to Niagara Falls. “We always said we'd do it one day, Elaine,” he encouraged.

“But we said
when we retired
,” she disparaged.

“What the hell are we waiting for? The kids'll love it. All those positive ions: they'll grow up full of good air and promise.”

Elaine didn't have the strength any more to start kicking the bricks out of his foundations and topple the grand scheme of the moment. By the time Oliver had declared he was going to be an inventor and set himself free from the conventions of nine-to-five, she had already given up. So in the middle of the worst blizzard to have blighted Montreal in decades, she resigned herself, with the faint hope that a change of scenery might do them all good.

They packed up the contents of the apartment above the Portuguese bakery on Rue St. Dominique into a blue minivan and a rented U-Haul. When everything from their four-room flat was crammed in, there was little space left for actual human bodies.

“They'll have to take the bus,” Elaine declared with a shrug. “They'll manage.”

Emma thrust a protective arm around her little brother, who, although only a year younger than her, was still saying little more than “mumble,” “wumble,” “bambam bolly.” “Booly boo?” he asked his sister.

“Of course,” she nodded and squeezed him reassuringly.

Elaine made two huge and humiliating signs reading: “Niagara Falls or Bust,” hung them around their necks and ordered them not to let go of each other's hands. On the bus, they sat behind a kindly grandmother-type, the sort with an endless supply of Kit Kats. She sucked the chocolate off the wafer sticks noisily and then let the wafer dissolve in her mouth because, as she explained to Emma and Blue, “When you get to be my age, you've got to save your teeth in case you ever have to bite a mugger.”

“Biteamugger, biteamugger,” Blue repeated with a giggle.

“He's a sweet little boy, your son,” the sticky-mouthed granny said between the crack in the seats.

“He's not my son,” Emma said. “He's my brother. And I'm only five years old.”

The granny laughed, “Goodness, me. Seems my eyesight's really going! I thought you were his teenaged mum and the two of you were on the run from the law or something! Here—have some more Kit Kat,” she said, shoving a soggy bar through the crack between the seats as if to say, “And we'll just forget about my little mistake then and carry on.”

“We're going to Niagara Falls,” Emma said flatly.

“A good thing too, because that's where this bus is going,” the granny chuckled. She then leaned back into her seat, suddenly nodding off in the middle of her chocolate high.