The Petty Details of So-And-So's Life (5 page)

Dad isn't a grown up? Emma wondered.

“You're the most irresponsible person I've ever met,” Elaine snapped. She thoroughly resented being the sole wage earner. Since they'd arrived in Niagara Falls, Elaine had been working two jobs: substitute teaching whenever she could, and booking tours of Niagara Falls for busloads of tourists who would have been millionaires if they got paid to complain. She'd begun to wonder if she wouldn't have been much better off doing what her parents had wished and marrying some bug-eyed dentist from Philadelphia. Even if he did have a personality as dull as a used drill bit, she could at least have been able to afford to keep her kids' teeth clean.

Oliver paused. “What happened to your dreams, Elaine? Where did they go?”

He sounded wistful, and that made Emma and Blue feel sorry and sad.

My dreams? Elaine thought. How dare he? Perhaps she could just declare she was going to write a novel and go to bed for six weeks in order to dream up a plot. Maybe Emma and Blue could quit school and support them. Her dreams? She didn't have the time or the energy now to write much more than a shopping list. “Life, Oliver. Life got in the way,” she finally said. “It does. For most people, anyway.”

Oliver took up full-time employment in the garage after that, engaged in the puttering and putzing that apparently constituted the process of giving birth to great invention. When he did come into the house at the end of each long day, Elaine expended so much energy yelling at him that she had little left for Emma and Blue. The world above the basement became full of noises like crash, fuck and hiss.

It was never entirely clear to Emma and Blue what their parents were fighting about. Money was definitely part of it. Emma knew this because Blue started looking for pennies on the street on their way home from school. “It's our nest egg,” he told her wisely when she asked, repeating verbatim something he had obviously overheard.

“What's that?” Emma asked him.

“Our protection,” he nodded. The little boy, who only a short time ago had stopped talking baby babble, was obviously sucking up critical life lessons like a sponge. A good thing too, because Emma wasn't taking notice—she was busy daydreaming, preoccupied with the adventures of Tabatha the baby witch, trying to figure out how to disappear from one room and appear in another rather than deal with the here and now of how to survive life as Emma.

She and Blue spent most of their after-schools and evenings whispering in the basement, or sitting on the ugly orange carpet in Blue's room, engaged in their respective silent passions. Emma would sit with her legs crossed and her back against the radiator and read book after book from the school library. She read about dinosaurs and Lilliputians, and journeys to the centre of the earth, space-time travel, and ancient pyramids full of hidden treasure. She'd morph into characters contained in pages she wished wouldn't end.

Blue wasn't a reader, but they did share one book between them—a scrapbook that had been sent with a package of mouldy ginger-snaps one Christmas from some relative Oliver denied having.
Imagine you were a woolly mammoth
, Emma wrote on the first page of the scrapbook.

“Write: ‘And you had fur instead of skin and you were on display in the museum,' ” Blue said with excitement.

Emma loved the ideas they came up with, loved the way they looked on the page. She sucked on the letters like lollipops, while Blue became obsessed with trying to draw pictures to accompany the wild words. Pictures were his thing. He would tear images from magazines Elaine had brought home from the doctor's office, and glue them into haphazard collages on bristol board. He had a box of art supplies under the bed that included broken, discarded, and lost bits of things he found at the bottom of drawers and under the sofa, and pine cones and chestnuts he'd picked up on the way home from school. He was in the habit of painting things blue after his nickname.

Elaine showed some sign of life when Blue presented her with a collage for Mother's Day. He'd torn up tiny bits of glossy paper into squares and assembled a face with long auburn hair, and mysterious eyes, and lips curved into a beautiful smile. He'd taken bits of Elaine's
broken jewellery and given the face earrings and a tiara. “It's you, Mum,” Blue said, as she unwrapped it.

While Elaine was touched, she worried that this was an early indication of the same creative predisposition that had driven Oliver to spend increasingly more time in the garage. “It's beautiful, Llewellyn. It looks like Picasso. But don't let it overtake your ABCs, okay?” she said, and then gave him one of those rare hugs that he and Emma so often daydreamed about.

His creativity worried Elaine enough that it kicked her into action and she started taking her children to the public library on Saturday mornings. Emma was fine to wander around on her own, but Blue, because of his habit of tearing pictures out of books, needed constant supervision.

When Elaine asked Blue what he wanted for Christmas that year, Blue said, “I want to see Picasso.”

“I think he's dead, Llewellyn.”

“I mean his pictures.”

Elaine sighed. “I'll make you a deal. If you have a decent report card next June, then I'll take you to see some Picasso at the end of the school year.”

Poor Blue. He tried so hard to read over the next six months that the blood vessels in his eyes burst. The pages he read stuck together as their lines melted and books he touched ceased looking like books at all. Despite all his effort, his report card proposed remedial English for the following year.

Elaine blamed Oliver, or rather, Oliver's neglect. He had at least tried with Emma—reading
Macbeth
and
Aerospace Construction for Beginners
to her when she was tiny. He hadn't even offered Blue language, and now, as Blue got older, he barely spoke to him at all. Oliver
finally consented to a few afternoon efforts at male bonding, but the pressure was so enormous, and Blue so desperate to impress, that they were destined to fail. He was too little to handle the unwieldiness of the circular saw, too fearful to ever go near a hammer again, and too worried that he'd disappoint his father to try his hand at much. Finally, Oliver, totally exasperated, said, “All right, Llewellyn. Is there anything you
can
do?”

Blue hesitantly picked up the pencil beside Oliver's plan for an underground wine cellar. He stared at the blueprint for a moment and then started scribbling on the page. Oliver looked horrified. “Blue. What are you doing?” he shouted.

“But now it looks real,” Blue said, putting down the pencil. Sure enough, Blue had added a third dimension. The plans were suddenly intelligible—at least they would have been to anyone with a grasp on reality.

“You've desecrated my work!” Oliver yelled at him. “You've obscured it with graffiti!”

“But it makes sense now,” Blue said, confused.

“You're telling
me
what makes sense? Who do you think you are?” Blue's eyes welled up. “Jesus Christ, stop being such a pathetic little mama's boy, Llewellyn,” he snapped in disgust.

Before Elaine had stated the inevitable—that there'd be no seeing Picasso—Emma had stolen two books of prints for Blue from the public library. These were not the first books she'd stolen. One by one, she'd been accumulating an arsenal of Nancy Drews. This time, not only did she steal the glossy volume on Picasso she'd been eyeing for Blue, but on a whim, she also grabbed the book of Aubrey Beardsley prints lying next to it. It was full of black-and-white prints of people
without legs pulling off each other's heads, and she knew Blue would love its bold lines and graphic images.

Blue was captivated for most of a summer. He filled in the white spaces between the thick black Beardsley lines with bold swipes of yellow, red, and blue paint. He drew butterflies in the margins. Monarchs bound for Mexico. Then, working his way through the volume on Picasso, he stopped dead at the paintings Picasso had done during his Blue Period. “Em,” he said, pointing to a face made up of blue squares. “But this looks like me,” his voice caught between fascination and terror.

“I guess so,” she shrugged.

“But I've never met Picasso.”

It must have unnerved him more than Emma initially realized, because from that day forward, Blue stopped tearing up bits of paper. His next artistic effort would be the initials he carved into his skin. What Emma didn't know then was that it was Oliver, not Picasso, who had implicitly conveyed the idea that creation was necessarily painful. He dug as deep as he could stand it with the needle, and ripped, rather than drew, those initials into his skin.

Although Emma and Blue were eventually forced to stop holding hands at school, they were always aware of the precise whereabouts of the other. They met at the corner store three blocks from school every day in order to walk home together, well out of eyesight of cool Brenda Tailgate. For two blocks it was safe to hold hands.

With his hand safely in the grip of his sister, Blue would natter on about how Joshua, a boy in his grade four class, had peed all over his hands, or how he had a new best friend called Stewart who had a hockey card for every one of the Boston Bruins. Emma would tell him that Sandy, the girl with eyebrows that met in the middle, was wearing a
bra, and that Mrs. Daniels, their art teacher, had let out a fart when she bent over to pick up a piece of pottery that Gary, the hyperactive boy, had thrown on the floor.

“Do you think these pants make me look fat?” she asked him.

“But you are fat,” he responded, in all innocence.

“That's why boys don't like me,” she sighed.

“But I like you,” he had said in his wide-eyed way.

“I know, Blue. But it doesn't count.”

Elaine wordlessly handed Emma a book at the end of that year called
Dr. Nelligan's Diet Book for Girls
. She had offered her daughter the first silent lesson of being female: dieting was the road to love; thinness, in a mad, mad world, was the answer. The world was becoming like this—less and less spoken, much more in books. The world above the basement had grown quiet since Oliver had started to sleep in the garage on a camp cot from the army surplus store.

“Dreaming is an essential part of any creative process,” Oliver had said, defending his self-imposed exile to the end of the garden. “I simply need my psychic space to be free of distraction in order to invent.” Distraction obviously meant human contact, particularly that with the members of his immediate family who seemed to him more wanting and needing than other human beings. “Look, Elaine. Just give me some time and space. I'm on the verge of something big.”

“You're
always
on the verge of something big, Oliver.”

“Well, I'm on the verge of something
really
big this time.”

“Another flying what's-it?” she asked.

“You're taking the piss, aren't you?” he said, annoyed. “That airborne radio receiver had revolutionary potential. Do you hear me?
Revolutionary
. You just couldn't see it. You don't have any vision. Or any faith, for that matter.”

“What are you working on now then, Oliver?” she asked without the slightest bit of genuine interest.

“If you're really curious, I'd be happy to show you. Hey, I've got an idea,” he said, raising an eyebrow.

“When have you ever
not
had an idea?” she muttered to herself.

“Why don't we have a date? Come to the garage on Friday night. We'll have a bottle of that Chianti you like and look over the plans.”

“You mean the big something is still at the paper stage?” she asked, rolling her eyes.

“Oh, please, Elaine. It's a final draft,” he pleaded.

“Why don't you just show me when you've actually built the thing. I don't believe in make-believe any more, Oliver.”

“When did that happen?”

“About seven inventions ago.”

Elaine hardly needed Oliver to share a bottle of Chianti. For the next couple of months she drank one by herself nearly every night while Oliver whittled away in the garage in silence. They didn't hear much from him except for the occasional torrent of profanities from the end of the yard when he inadvertently hammered some body part. There was a small mountain of empty takeout pizza boxes growing at the entrance to the garage, reassuring them that Oliver was still, in fact, alive.

Blue took to retrieving the discarded pizza crusts out of the boxes and eating them for breakfast: a scavenger in search of familial debris. The foraging was necessary, because with Oliver retreating, Elaine, too, despite her presence, was becoming just as remote and inaccessible. It was as if they'd each taken on new lovers, and forgotten about all that came before and between: their children, reminders of themselves and the mess they'd managed to create together.

The first time Emma and Blue really understood the seriousness of Elaine's drinking problem was when she tumbled down the stairs one late afternoon and ended up with a face full of splinters.

“Living this close to the States seems to have driven her bonkers,” Oliver had said, having just entered the house for what seemed like the first time in months. He'd responded to Blue's desperate cry that Mum had cracked open her skull. Oliver heaved Elaine up off the floor and carried her to the couch and then went straight back out to the garage, leaving Emma and Blue staring helplessly at their scratched and bruised mother.

“Pour me a Scotch, sweetie,” she said, gesturing to Emma. “It'll help take away some of the pain,” she winced, running her fingers over her face.

“Mum?” Blue asked with a frightened look in his eyes.

“What is it, sweetie?”

“Why does Dad sleep in the garage?”

“Because he's an
eccentric
, Llewellyn, that's why,” she said, unable to hide her irritation.