Vanishing and Other Stories (37 page)

 

WHEN I WAS SIXTEEN
, I took the bus to the hospital after school and visited Mom by myself. I felt I had something to say to her, but once there—confronted with her thinned face, her bruised and ropy arms, the tubes and smells—I couldn't remember what that something was. She was asleep, and I was relieved. I studied her face, how the painkillers had slackened its muscles. I left after only ten minutes, because I knew my father would want me home for dinner.

Two days later, she died. This wasn't a disaster; it didn't destroy me. I didn't cry or shout. In fact, I didn't feel anything but a constant grogginess.

The funeral was traditional, with a reception at our house. After everyone left, my father sat us at the table, which was piled with bagels, lox, devilled eggs, and salad. He said, “We all knew it was coming. At least it wasn't a surprise.”

Sam nodded. I stared at the wood tabletop.

Then my father stood and said, “I think we all need some sleep.” There was a weariness about him I'd never seen before. He kissed us on the cheek, and his five o'clock shadow scratched my skin.

We spent the next week sitting shiva, which was the perfect way to remember my mother. We covered the mirrors, including
the one Simone would later use for her makeup ritual, and observed a week of near silence.

 

 

IN AUGUST
, Simone started to act differently. She was always tired, and slept until noon on her days off. Some days she'd lock herself in the master bedroom and refuse to come out, even when Sam begged her to go with him to buy Sour Chews.

He was always over-sugared and hyperactive, so as a favour to her I got him out of the house. I took him on delirious searches for the perfect shade. The two of us walked along the city's streets, smelling the fermenting garbage, until Sam would say, “Can we go home now? Please?”

One afternoon, we came back to find Simone at the kitchen table, crying into her hands. It was a wet, ugly weeping. We watched this for a while. Then I passed her a napkin, the cloth kind my mother used to save for special occasions.

“Shouldn't you be at work?” By then I'd memorized her schedule.

She gave me a look. There was annoyance in it, hatred even. “I called in sick.”

Sam sat at her feet. “Do you want some ice cream, Simone?”

She shook her head, then blew her nose into the napkin.

I pulled up a chair beside her. “We could go somewhere. Like the park.”

“Sorry, Al.” She gave me a weak smile. “Maybe tomorrow?”

That night, she didn't eat any of the peppercorn steak my father served, and he used the same jokey tone he'd taken with
my mother. “What's this? Miss Summertime isn't hungry?”

“She's sick,” I said.

My father kept his eyes on Simone. He spoke with the impatient voice he sometimes used on Sam and me. “She's upset, that's all.”

Simone stood and left the table. We heard her steps on the stairs, then the click of the bedroom door. My father didn't follow her. In my darker moments, I wonder how things would have changed if he had.

 

 

ONCE, YEARS LATER
, I asked Simone how she felt about him. This was long after that summer. I was working construction, ten-hour days to save up to start my degree in history. I worked at a site on Spadina, converting an old textile factory into lofts and studio apartments. At the time the style seemed original and edgy, though I'm sure the tenants later found it regrettable: the walls were cinder blocks and the piping was left uncovered.

From the scaffolding, I could see my father's shop. He still worked there, I knew, and somehow that fact made the hours seem longer and my job more humiliating. It was after one of these days, spent sweating under a hard hat, that I asked Simone what she thought of my father.

“Then or now?” She was in our kitchen, flossing her teeth. I remember thinking it was odd that she would floss her teeth in the kitchen. I remember thinking that I didn't know her at all.

“Whichever.”

“Oh, I don't know, Al.” She had the same pale, freckled skin as when we'd met, but her body had changed: her shoulders were
rounded and her stomach soft. I wanted to stand behind her and place my hands on her waist, where the seam of her skirt met her skin. “It's hard to explain.”

“Try.”

She squinted thoughtfully, floss looped around her index fingers. “He was funny, I guess.” Then she smiled, perhaps remembering a private joke. “He always made me laugh.”

For a second, I hated my father. Because, for all I'd done for Simone, all I still did, I rarely made her laugh.

But then she went back to flossing her teeth, and I put thoughts of my wife's past out of my mind, which was a skill I'd perfected over the years. And that was it. The only time I ever felt raging, heart-burning jealousy. Which is different from the guilt and loss I always carry with me.

 

 

THE NEXT MORNING
, there was no coffee, no eggs, no buttered toast. In the kitchen the linoleum was cool under my feet, and Sam poured himself a bowl of stale cereal. My father sat at the empty table, his hands pressed flat to the surface.

“Where's Simone?” I asked, but nobody answered.

After a week of cereal, it was clear she had moved out. She'd taken all her clothes, including the yellow dress, and my mother's Billie Holiday record. For his part, my father settled into the respectable life of a widower. He packed the records back into their boxes and drank far less gin.

“I just don't know,” my father said weeks later, over grilled cheese sandwiches. He leaned back in his chair and seemed tired.
For once, he looked his age. “I don't know what I'm supposed to do.”

I didn't know what to do either. I checked the park, half expecting to find her on one of the swings. But I didn't think we should chase her. I remembered the way my mother would suddenly emerge from her days of silence, on her own time and never because of my father's coaxings.

“It's best to just leave her alone,” I said, and my father listened to me as though he were my apprentice. He was as anxious and lost as a child, and I touched his arm. The sleeve of his shirt was newly ironed, but I didn't think he'd mind if I wrinkled it. I said, “It's best to just stay in one place and wait.”

 

 

SINCE THEN
, Simone and I have lived all over the city, mostly in basement suites. We learned to cook meals on one hot plate. We learned to pay rent on minimum wages and my meagre scholarships. We learned to look around a cramped, dirty apartment and say, “This isn't a bad life.”

More recently, we've had good luck with real estate. When I got my first teaching job—at the same high school I'd attended and despised—we bought a half-duplex on Robert Street. It's only a block from where my father's shop used to be, where Sam now runs a clothing store that stocks three-hundred-dollar jeans.

We've been in this place over ten years now, and we've had an ordinary life, which doesn't imply a simple one. Simone works as an administrative assistant—my father would still call her a secretary, which would be more truthful. She manages to grow an
impressive garden on our porch. We vacuum when we think of it. The girls have grown up, and our existence now revolves around mutual funds and keeping our cluttered house from falling to ruin.

Sometimes, I reimagine history. I see myself as a tailor, a bachelor who lives above the shop and works beside his father. I imagine years of listening to that off-kilter whistling and those same stories. I would have been annoyed with my father every day of my life. But I wouldn't have been unhappy, just as I'm not unhappy now.

Earlier this year, my father died in his sleep, a direct consequence of those extraordinary meals he loved. Until his death, he never missed a day of work. And he refused to visit our home. Though sometimes, from our upper-floor window, I thought I could see him on his morning walk to the shop—his pace slower, but proud and steady.

 

 

BY SEPTEMBER
, the temperature had begun to drop. Old people weren't dying of dehydration anymore, and I could look out at the street without seeing it waver in front of me. That's when Simone came back.

I was in bed, under my sheet and using a flashlight to read about the tombs of Petra, which were built to imitate the front of a typical house. I didn't hear Simone until she opened my window.

“Al?” She stuck her head into the room, and her face looked ghostly in the dark. “Are you awake?”

I shone the flashlight on her. “What are you doing here?”

“Get that thing out of my face.”

“Did you and my dad break up?”

“I don't want to talk about your dad.” She swung her legs through the open window. I kept the flashlight beam on her as she shimmied into my room. Her yellow dress rode up and it showed how her body had changed. She was less bony and girlish. Maybe it was all the ice cream, or my father's rich cooking.

“I said stop it.” She grabbed the flashlight from me and flicked it off. When the room went dark, neither of us said anything. Then, “Hey, Al.” I felt her weight on the bed. “I have an idea.”