Vanishing and Other Stories (14 page)

If you were in a room with the three of us, I would be the last person you'd notice. You might notice our cats, Percy and Beau, before you noticed me. I was almost a foot shorter than Karen, and I had dull brown hair. It brushed the tops of my ears in a style someone's kid sister might have. I wore flowing skirts and blouses because I was not proud of my body. It was—it is—scrawny and flat-chested. Sometimes generous people would say that I had a dancer's body, but I'd never been able to dance. And I didn't like to look in the mirror because, when I did, it seemed that all my features—my eyes, nose, mouth—were of one nondescript colour.

But somehow, we were all happy together. At least, two of us were.

 

 

I HAD PREPARED MYSELF
for something bad to happen, because I'm the kind of person who thinks ahead. I'd imagined that, one day, Lawrence and Karen would sit me down and tell me that they were engaged or they were pregnant, and they wanted to live alone, as adults, as two people in love. I had never been in love, so I didn't know much about love's progression. I thought it might increase, grow until it got so big that there wasn't room for it and me in one house.

I was not prepared for what actually happened. I was not prepared to come home from work one afternoon and see, parked in front of the house, a pickup truck with the words
Revolution Now!
spray-painted across the back. I was not prepared to find Karen and Lawrence and the owner of the truck—a big guy with a goatee and a polite smile—in Karen and Lawrence's bedroom. I was certainly not prepared to see Karen shoving clothes into a backpack as Lawrence watched, and as the
Revolution Now!
guy scratched Percy behind the ear.

“Hey,” I said. “What's up?”

Karen looked at me. “Oh god. Oh god, Lise, I'm sorry.”

I picked up Beau. He was fat and cross-eyed and the best thing to hold on to when there was a crisis. The cat and I stood in the bedroom doorway and watched Karen grab things from the closet—a pair of flip-flops, a handful of underwear—and stuff them into the backpack. I held Beau so tight that he started to squirm and dig his claws into my arm, but I didn't let him go.

Karen also took her pillow and her sketchbook, and she held up a T-shirt that said
I am a sports fan
. “This is mine, right?” She
was asking Lawrence, because sometimes they shared clothes. I guess sometimes they forgot whose was whose.

“I don't know.” Lawrence said this so quietly that I hardly heard him. “I don't remember.”

Karen looked at him and blinked. “I'm pretty sure it is.” Then she put the T-shirt in the backpack and said, “Okay, babe, let's go.” This time she was not talking to Lawrence. She was talking to the other guy, the
Revolution Now!
guy.

The two of them walked out of the house while Lawrence and I stared after them. We heard Karen kick the door shut with her boot, and we heard their steps on the deck. Then we didn't hear their steps anymore. We didn't hear anything. Then it was just me, Lawrence, Percy, and Beau, who had scratched me so deep that I was bleeding.

 

 

THAT FIRST WEEK
after Karen left, Lawrence and I were sure she'd come back. We said, “She probably just went to Seattle to go shopping.” We said, “She'll come in here dressed like Rita Hayworth and holding Chinese takeout and it'll be hilarious.”

Because she had done hilarious things before. She had once come home holding a gigantic white wedding cake with the words
Happy Common-law!
written across it in pink icing. This was to celebrate the second anniversary of when we'd all moved in together. And she had once found an old electric guitar on the road, had it repaired, and learned to play a very fast, very rock-and-roll version of “Puff the Magic Dragon.” She and I had also shared a secret love of Rod Stewart. When Lawrence was out, Karen
would take her boyfriend's artsy CDs out of the stereo, put on Rod Stewart's greatest hits, and say, “Take that, Radiohead! Fuck you, Mercury Rev!” Then we'd dance in the kitchen to “Tonight's the Night” and “Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?”

Karen was the only person I'd ever allowed to see me dance. Sometimes she'd take my hand and spin me, and I'd twirl through the kitchen without worrying about how dumb I looked, or that I might kick over the cat-food dish. When Karen danced with me, I felt like myself, or like the self I wished I could be.

And almost every day, I'd come home from work to find her wearing something outrageous—she might be dressed as a goth Barbie or a sad clown. She had all these M•A•C samples that she was allowed to take home—lipsticks and foundations and eyeshadows—and each day she looked like a different person. It was as though there were a lot of Karens living inside her body. In a way, it scared me.

It didn't scare Lawrence. When Karen dressed up, he would say, “You look great, sweet pea.” Then he would take her hand and they'd go into their bedroom and I would have to turn up my music.

 

 

THE SECOND WEEK AFTER KAREN LEFT
, Lawrence and I didn't go in to work. He told the manager at Blockbuster that he'd had a family emergency and I faked a scratchy voice and told the librarians that I had laryngitis. Then we spent the whole week in our pyjamas. We ordered pizza, drank all the beer in the fridge, and smoked hash from an old, sticky Sprite can. We let the cats crawl all over us, we didn't shower, and we didn't smell very good.

 

 

THE THIRD WEEK
, we did go to work because we realized that there were now only two of us to pay this month's bills. We picked up as many extra shifts as we could and we ate canned beans or Ichiban noodles for dinner. We didn't have enough money to go out, so we spent every night at home, watching
Seinfeld
on DVD.

Once, during the Bizarro-world episode, Lawrence started to cry. I had never seen Lawrence cry before, but I remembered that Karen said he sometimes did.

“At least you know you'll be okay.” He wiped his eyes and nose on his sleeve. “At least you were just the roommate. I thought I was going to marry her.”

I knew this wasn't true. I was not okay. I wasn't good at making friends, so even if such a thing existed, I wouldn't be able to go out and find a Karen-replacement. My heart was broken, like Rod Stewart's when he sings “I Don't Wanna Talk About It.” And like Rod, I didn't want to talk about it, so I didn't say any of this. Instead, I said, “If Elaine left—I mean, just up and walked out—what would Jerry do?”

Lawrence did that thing where you start to laugh even as you're crying. “‘What Would Jerry Do?'” he said. “That would make a great T-shirt.”

But then, as the credits were rolling, he said, “He would kill himself.” He said this as quietly as he'd said
I don't know
when Karen asked him about the sports-fan shirt. Then he said it again: “Jerry would kill himself.”

Of course, Jerry wouldn't. But still, I took the Advil and Sinutab and Gravol out of the bathroom, and all the knives except
for the dull one out of the kitchen drawer, and I hid everything under my bed.

 

 

KAREN WAS GONE FOR WEEKS
. She was gone for months. She was gone so long that it started to seem like she'd never lived there at all. The stuff she'd left behind—the clothes and half-used tubes of lipstick—started to seem like it'd been forgotten by some previous tenant whom we'd never met. Her stuff seemed like it was up for grabs, so I began to wear her weird architectural shirts and her vintage skirts and her wool hats. I didn't fill them out properly, but they made me feel like a different, glamorous person. And I only wore them around the house, and only when Lawrence was out. That is, until one Tuesday he got off work early and came home to find me in a pair of Karen's purple tights, a long shirt Karen used to wear with a belt, and Karen's little beret. Lawrence stood in the doorway and let his eyes travel up and down my body. I was so ashamed that I couldn't move. I couldn't even make a joke out of it. I felt like a man who'd been caught trying on his wife's underwear.

Lawrence said, “You look hot, Lise.”

No one had ever said that to me before. People had told me, “You look pretty today.” Or, “But you're so cute.” Or, “Nice shirt.” But no one had ever used a word like
hot
. So I started wearing Karen's stuff more often. Just around the house at first, then on the occasional errand, then to work. I hemmed the skirts and pants that were too long for me, and I wore extra socks so I could fit into Karen's tall boots. I even started to wear her pyjamas and her lacy bras. And in secret, I would lock myself in the bathroom and apply
her makeup: the iridescent pressed powder, the Pleasureful blush, the Cinnamon brow finisher. That's what I was doing one evening when Lawrence knocked on the bathroom door.

“Lise, can I come in?”

We were the kind of roommates who were so used to each other that we could pee with the other person in the room. We could shower—the curtain was not transparent—while the other person was brushing his or her teeth. So when I said, “No,” Lawrence was understandably annoyed.