Before lunch the next morning, Celeste shows up at our door. “I’ve got the truck. You have no choice, my dear. Get in quietly and I won’t make a fuss.”
My mother shoos me out the door like I’m a sickly kid who needs fresh air, and Celeste gives her a mock salute. “Leave her to me, ma’am.”
Celeste is very good at most things, including giving off an easy, respectful confidence adults find reassuring. The only exception I can think of is our French teacher, Mme. Martin, who has some kind of chip on her shoulder when it comes to smart young women.
Outside, the sun is glaring and the March ugliness is on full display. The snowbanks are coated in grit and sand. It’s been so long since the giant elms on our boulevard made a cozy arch of green, it’s easy to believe they’ll stay gray and dark forever. The side streets are covered in snow that’s melted and then frozen again into tire-chewing ruts. But Celeste is unfazed; she drives with the same steadiness she always does.
“So what’s with you?” she asks. “You not answering your phone?”
When I don’t reply right away, she knocks on my head with her knuckles. “Hello? Are you there?”
I bat her hand away, and the truck swerves a little toward the curb. For some reason, this makes me laugh. “Hands on the wheel,” I say.
She’s like a dog with a bone though. She will not move on until she’s dug up an explanation.
“Nothing’s with me,” I say. “I’m just enjoying doing nothing.”
But this is obviously not enough.
“Is it about Kyle?”
This is truly laughable, but I don’t dare, because Celeste takes it very seriously when she tries to fix me up. Last month it was, “Okay, he’s really into music, and he does karate, and Carson says he’s really into Asian girls.”
She always says this last part as if she’s half joking and half thinking it should seal the deal. The first time she came inside my house, she said, “You’re more Chinese than the Chinese,” which is sort of true, but which I found strangely irritating. Who was Celeste to make smart remarks?
Celeste is Métis, about as native to Canada as it gets without being full-blooded Aboriginal. Her great-great-grandparents settled the traplines and the trade routes but don’t have much to show for it now. Celeste plays the fiddle, and her sisters created their own “dirty jig.” But all in all, the Métis are the big historic losers—they’re just now getting a bit of land back—and their biggest cultural pursuit is arguing over who gets to be Métis.
She always speaks about these “set-ups” as if I don’t see these losers every day at school. I already knew Kyle liked to talk about obscure bands. I knew he had great abs. There was nothing wrong with Kyle. I even let her talk me into thinking I was interested. I actually imagined he and I getting all sweaty at the dojo together. He’d come in close behind me and position my arms just so, breathe against my neck and say, “This is a defensive position. Keep the hands high and they can’t get your eyes.” Maybe he’d see me as one of those classical pin-up babes who sell out concert halls. He’d ask me to play my cello for him, swaying and sexy, in just my underwear.
But then he got back together with his old girlfriend, who is busty and freckled.
“Kyle and Sara belong together,” I say to Celeste. “They kind of look alike.”
Celeste looks at me with pity now, which is hard to take. I hated karate class. I hated the jumping jacks, the group yelling, the stupid air punching. Words cannot express how much this isn’t about Kyle.
“Think about it,” I say. “Thin lips, pointy nose. There’s something ferret-like about both of them.”
Celeste keeps her eyes on the road. “When did you get so nasty?”
“What’s wrong with ferrets?” I ask.
She shakes her head, but I can tell she’s ready to let it drop. She’s ready to let things become normal and easy between us again. “No wonder you never get lucky,” she says.
At the mall, she tries on jeans, and every pair is tailormade for her athletic perfection. I try to convey the right amount of enthusiasm without crossing the line into insincerity.
She asks what I’m doing tonight, and I tell her Emma is flying in tomorrow.
“Your old orphanage buddy?” she shouts from the change room. They’ve met before, and she pretended to like Emma until finally pronouncing her “a tremendous geek with Toronto pretensions,” which is true enough. I tell her yes, that Emma.
“So what?” she shouts. “That’s tomorrow.”
I lie with alarming ease. “I need to tidy up. Wash the sheets and stuff.”
Celeste manages to open the curtain with an armful of jeans and hands full of hangers. She dumps them on a chair meant for loyal boyfriends.
“You’re the queen of anal,” she says. “The absolute queen.”
Celeste has a part-time job at a grocery store. She has a driver’s license. She has the marks for med school but wants to be a politician of all things, like her father. There are times when she makes me feel as immature as I look, and yet I know there are some things she will never understand.
Before Bev arrives, my parents leave for their first curling game, which they find too cute for words. They are wearing overpriced vintage curling sweaters that someone’s grandma knit forty years ago, and they traipse off ready for an evening of ironic detachment.
“As a Scottish Canadian, I’ve let down my people sorely over the years,” my father says. “But as God is my witness, that ends tonight.”
People curl every day, but my father must turn it into a farcical return to his roots. I wonder what would happen to his self-satisfied grin if I told him Bev Novak would be arriving soon with her unwanted, unborn kid.
When she comes to the door, her nose is extra pink from the cold, and with her hair in pigtails, she looks like an adorable cocker spaniel. She’s wearing a plum-colored parka that barely clears her waist. It couldn’t be done up if she tried, and I wonder if it’s possible for a baby to feel cold in the womb.
She kicks off her untied runners and squeezes past me. Hands still in her parka pockets, she walks right in. “Still the same,” she says.
I follow her into the front hall, where she spins around slowly in her sock feet. Some pregnant women look like they’ve swallowed a beach ball, but not Bev—every inch of her is just a little more round.
“The same,” she says again.
This seems to please her, but I feel the need to point some things out. “All those bookshelves are built right into the walls now, and everything’s a shade darker. And the stairs aren’t painted anymore. We stripped it off. It’s all natural oak now.”
She crinkles her nose. “Really?”
Before I can say, Really, I sucked in dust and fumes for weeks, she takes off into the living room. “Green walls,” she says, “and a million books, that’s what I remember. That’s the same.”
She picks up a lacquered box from the coffee table. My father got it for my mother the Christmas they decided to adopt from China. It’s egg-shaped and glossy black, with tiny shards of inlaid pearl in the shape of a bird.
“This used to be somewhere else,” Bev says. She looks around. “Like on the piano or something. I remember thinking a flamingo should not be white.”
As far as I know, our piano has always been covered in family photos, but I couldn’t say for sure. “It’s a whooping crane,” I say.
She laughs like I’ve made a joke and carefully puts the box back in exactly the same place. “Remember when we almost broke it?”
I shake my head. “When?”
But she’s already on to something else. For maybe twenty minutes, she pokes around, keeping up a running commentary as if the whole point of her being here is to tour the house. She points at the wall over the loveseat and squeals in delight. “That painting!”
She kneels on the cushions and fingers the scroll, tracing the Chinese characters as if they’re braille. “I used to wish I looked just like her.”
It’s a relatively simple piece. The scroll isn’t covered with intricate birds or meaningful leaves or mountains rising gloriously in the distance. There’s just a woman in a flowing robe, holding a fan over her shoulder. She is willowy, with sad, delicate features and black hair piled up on her head like scoops of ice cream. For years, I liked to imagine that she was my birth mother.
Bev shoves down the waistband of her leggings and reveals three Chinese characters tattooed in the small of her back. “I got this two years ago. I had to forge Lara’s signature.”
I need to think for a moment to remember who Lara is—Bev’s mother, Lara, the only mother on the street who didn’t have a job. Who was never in-between—either laughing or crying, in our way or holed up in her room, fat or skinny. The only thing that never changed was her gorgeousness.
“Did it hurt?” I ask.
She shrugs. “‘Beauty plus strength equals woman.’ That’s what it says.”
Though I never made great strides with written Chinese, I’m skeptical. I straighten the scroll, even though it’s not crooked. “She’s a prostitute,” I say. “Tang Yin, the artist, loved to paint ladies of ill repute. The poem on the side is about how hypocritical people are.”
Bev claps her hands and laughs as if I’ve just performed a clever trick. “Well, I guess I always did have big dreams for myself, didn’t I!”
I don’t mention that I haven’t actually read a whole translation of the poem, just a little about Tang Yin, how he liked to depict outward calm and inward pain, so he painted a lot of prostitutes.
Bev wobbles a bit and has to grab the arm of the loveseat.
“You okay?” I ask.
She shrugs again. “I should probably eat something. I never feel like it and then I forget.”
In the kitchen, she opens the fridge and makes a face. “Does your mom still drink that stuff?”
I look at the row of shiny pink cans as if seeing them for the first time. It seems my mother has been addicted to diet grapefruit soda for over ten years.
“Remember she didn’t let you drink it because of the chemicals,” Bev says, “and I dared you to sneak one and down it in the basement? You were such a sweetie pie though. Daddy’s little girl.”
I don’t mention my longstanding fear of our cellarlike basement full of spiders and broken furniture. She cracks open a can and chugs, then wipes her mouth with her parka sleeve. “And that time when your dad gave us stalks of rhubarb and told us to lie down on the grass so he could put the sugar for dipping in our belly buttons? And you believed him?”
I have no memory of Bev being in our leafy backyard. In my mind, we were always at her place, sitting on the roof of their toolshed, pointlessly shouting at joggers as they huffed down the lane on a perfect summer morning. “Hey, mister, your fly’s undone!”
“Oh”—Bev groans—“and your dad’s nachos. Those were the best ever. I still hate black olives, but I totally loved them on those nachos.”
When did my father ever make Mexican for Bev?
“I could totally go for those nachos,” Bev says.
“My mother’s banned all chips and sour cream,” I say.
Her lips have gone almost as pale as her face, and she’s using the fridge to hold herself up.
“What about yogurt?” I ask. “We’ve got the high-protein Balkan kind.”
By the time she sits down with a spoon at the kitchen table, I swear she’s ready to pass out. She starts shoveling in peach-mango yogurt like a robot programmed to open and close its mouth every 2.5 seconds.
“So where did you move?” I ask. “I mean, back then. I don’t even know.”
She talks between spoonfuls like there’s nothing to it. Swallow, speak, swallow, speak, repeat. “After my dad sold the restaurants, we went to Sarnia. Then I went with Lara to Vancouver. Then Ray came back here last year, and so did I.”
I remember there were always leftover desserts at her house—day-old cheesecakes and mixed-berry pies—and her father, Ray, left a satisfying scent of cooking oil and cigarettes and vanilla.
I try not to stare at her stomach. It’s hard to believe skin can expand like that, stretchy as Silly Putty. “Whereabouts are you?” I ask. “What school?”
She finally pauses, turning the spoon over on her tongue as if to ensure that every last bit is consumed. “Doing correspondence. With the move and everything, it seemed stupid to start somewhere new for my last year.”
“Right,” I say, like I talk to people doing high school by correspondence every day.
She leans back in the chair and groans, resting her hands on her belly. She lets her head drop back, but her lips have regained some of their adorable pinkness. She waves her hand in a square, following the crown molding around the ceiling. “We had that in our old house too. Then Lara took it down because she was all into clean lines. She still talks about it. She says going all modern was the beginning of the end.”
I don’t know what to say to this. I remember the day Lara’s new egg-shaped coffee table was delivered and we spent a happy half hour pressing our faces into the glass, imprinting every inch with kisses and nostril marks.
She lifts her head and smiles her slightly crooked grin. “Remember that glass coffee table?”
Pregnant Bev Novak, groaning in my parents’ kitchen chair, has read my mind. “I remember the mess we made of it,” I say.
She laughs, and her belly moves with her. “It busted in the moving van. And not into just a few pieces. A million pieces.”
My phone buzzes, and I act like I have no choice but to check it out.
Hey, birth buddy. Weather news, plse. Rubber or fur? To-do list: cool toy store by museum, Greek place with gravy/fries, vintage. Bringing surprise. Hint: green hair, schoolboy tie. Flight 134 from TO arrives 4:12 pm, your time. TTFN...Em/Liang
“Excuse me a sec,” I say, but Bev has already gotten up and is nosing around the dining room.
I sneak upstairs and check my messages for the first time since this morning. My doctor has said that OCD symptoms are exacerbated by stress. I stand for a moment in the dim quiet, with nothing but the familiar hum of the computer hardware, and try to collect my thoughts.
“You still play this?” Bev shouts.
I come down and she’s pointing at the hulking black case in the corner. Twice I’ve moved the cello case from that corner onto the back porch, and twice my father has put it back. “Not for a while,” I say.
I remember the one and only time I played my cello for her. I was eight, and my latest big accomplishment was Gounod’s Meditation on Ave Maria. We were outside on the front porch, and the acoustics of the breezeless evening weren’t bad. For once, she was speechless.
“So?” I had asked.
She looked at me as if I’d just pulled a rabbit out of a hat. “I didn’t know you could do that.”
I shrugged. “I want to quit. It’s boring.”
“Shut up,” she said. “You’re a crappy liar. Play something else.”
Now, she cocks her head and looks disappointed, like when I told her about my father’s heart scare. “Really? You quit? You’re lying.”
I can’t tell if she’s trying to mock or flatter me. She sounds so sincere, as if she’s going to say something like You should never give up on your dreams. I tell her what I’ve basically been telling everybody. “I guess I just needed a break.”
She nods, having already moved on to examining the Scottish teacups my father inherited when his mother died. “They’re a little twee for us,” my mother had said, but she’d put them on display anyway.
“Listen,” I say. “I’m sorry, but my mom just puked at work and she needs me to pick her up.”
Bev finishes off the last of the soda and holds her hands up like she’s about to dance. “Hey, no problem. I should get going anyway.”
I silently plead with her not to ask for a ride. “Sorry,” I say.
“No problem, Faye,” she says, handing me the can. She pretends to try to do up her parka zipper and laughs at her own joke. “You guys always were three little peas in a pod.”
The cab company is on her speed dial. She gives them the address of her old house across the street, then has to correct herself. “It’s the Little Alien,” she whispers to me. “It’s stealing my brain cells.”
Her arms are around me before I know what’s happening. “Thanks for the refreshments. I’ll be in touch. Winnipeg is such a great place to raise a kid. We know that, eh?”
She’s out the door before I can answer. There’s no way the cab is even on its way yet, but I let her go. I let her go stand out on the sidewalk in the frigid spring night, or walk to the corner, or whatever her plan is, because I don’t know how to stop her.
I don’t want to stop her.
Alone in my bedroom, I shove my face into Sasha’s sweatshirt and inhale. This scent, his scent, usually brings back the night, but really, I’d smelled him long before that. Like in the school band, where I played the flute and he pretended to.
I tell myself our story, from the beginning, for the thousandth time, because I have borderline OCD and because I don’t want to imagine where Bev and her belly are.
Sasha showed up in September, the beginning of school, but rarely came to class. When he did, he would slouch in a few minutes late and park his conspicuous sixfoot-three-inch frame in a chair behind me. He always sucked on one of those hard citrus candies that are wrapped in cellophane, the kind a restaurant might hand out with your bill. He’d quietly assemble his flute and then pretend to join in with whatever we were playing.
As lead flautist, I should have got to the bottom of it, but what could I have done? What would have been the point in confronting the exchange student who probably didn’t even know how foreign he really looked in the middle of the girlie instrument section? Now and then, when someone wasn’t quick enough to look away, he would smile, showing off his silver tooth, and nod formally, as if to say, Good day to you, miss. Celeste dubbed him the Freaky Russian and dismissed him with “nice long legs, nice blue eyes, shame about the bad teeth and general weirdness.” I pretended not to notice that, miraculously, he could suck candy and maintain his embouchure at the same time. Whether he noticed me, or even gave me a second thought in those lead-up weeks, is unclear.
Cut to the night. For the band trip in November, I’m billeted with a nice enough jock named Hannah, who’s obsessed with skiing in some future Olympics and whose sprawling Calgary bungalow is covered in cat hair. We go to a party at another sprawling Calgary bungalow, somewhere in the foothills. Celeste is not there. She’s in Winnipeg and has no say in what I do or don’t do. She is not there to tell anyone who will listen that if you can’t have a good time without alcohol, she feels totally sorry for you.
It’s unclear who gives me the first beer. The fat percussionist who is hosting, or someone I know from school? It is a light amber lager with snow-covered mountains on the label. It’s unclear whether I finish three bottles or four. Or what makes me go outside—the bloated feeling or the spinning feeling? I close my eyes and watch the stars do their little dance.
There are others outside, mostly smokers, scattered in small groups around a vast backyard pool that’s been covered for the winter. I find a dark corner where a faulty solar light has failed. I lean against the edge of a waterless concrete fountain to get my balance. I breathe in the mountain air, cool and yet unusually warm for this time of year.
“You no smoke?”
He appears out of the darkness, a slouched outline, dim except for the orange glow of the cigarette hanging from his lips.
I shake my head.
The glow grows stronger for a moment before it’s sent flying into the yellow November grass. He looks down at his feet. “Is good. My father smoke and smoke and then lung cancer. That’s it. But that is Russians. We smoke, smoke, drink, drink, and we don’t live too long.”
The Freaky Russian is speaking to me like we’re old friends. It’s like I can feel the world spinning on its axis. I hug myself in the chill, but my insides burn. My voice is hardly my own. “I’m sorry. About your father.”
He looks up and shrugs. I can’t make out real color, but there are contrasts in his face. Dark lips. Light eyes. “This happens.”
I nod, like I have a clue.
He grins, reaches out for my arm, and his hands feel very big and very hot. “You cold? You want to walk? To go?”
Then we’re walking through the suburban quiet, warming ourselves with the small bottle of whiskey in his pocket. He asks if I’m Chinese, if I’m China-born, and I explain it to him for what seems like forever. It’s unclear exactly what I say.
“Ahh,” he says, “you are a foundling.”
This makes me laugh. It sounds like something out of a fairytale.
“What?” he asks. “Is this not right? Foundling?”
To talk and walk with me, he must not so much slouch as bend. I am laughing so hard I’m afraid I might pee.
Now and then, he holds on to my elbow and we hold each other up.
“So what’s with your flute playing?” I ask, because I am suddenly fearless.
He stops and straightens, then grins down at me. His eyetooth gleams under the streetlight. “You know my secret, yes? You know why I do it? Joan, my church lady who sponsor me, she ask if I read music. Why? I ask. She say I can go to the Rocky Mountains with the school. I tell her, yes, of course. I see at the church there is a flute. I tell her the flute. So here I am.”
I’m laughing again. “Was it worth it?”
“No!” he shouts, joining me, outdoing me, in his laughter. “Nyet. My home, it is dull, it is poor farms, poor factories, it is shit. I think, give me the wild Canada mountains. But now not so much. The day before, the sights are beautiful, but then I feel like they are too close, too big. How you say? Dungeon? Like a dungeon.”
Never before have I met someone who doesn’t dig the mountains. I tell him something I’ve never told anyone. I tell him I felt the same way in China, that the magnificently rising steppes and moving walls of people were suffocating.
He wipes his nose on his sleeve and waves dismissively. “And this rich place. These houses, all the same. I hate them, and I want them. They are, how you say—they are a contradiction for me.”
Then he takes my arm and guides me to a wroughtiron bench placed in a circle of gravel on someone’s front lawn.
“What a moronic place for a seat,” I say. “Who’s going to sit out here watching traffic?”
He ignores me. He puts his hand on my thigh, and I both like it and do not like it. He offers me more whiskey, and I take a long, hot drink. “It’s good to sit,” he says. “I see you now. I see your face.”
The world turns on its axis again and we are kissing. Our breath is steamy in the night air, and his hands move across my back, my stomach, my cheeks, like he’s a blind man trying to see me. Never before has it felt like this. I am not going through the motions. There is no vague sense of letdown even as it’s happening.
Now and then he stops and grins like he did in band class. “Is good?” he asks. “Okay?”
“Is good,” I say.
“This bench,” he finally says. “This bench is no good.” He whispers the words into my neck, just below the earlobe. “We go somewhere. Somewhere different.”
But it’s too late. The hard moronic bench is enough to break the spell, and I’m pulling away, like always. “I should go. My ride will be wondering where I am.”
He pulls his sweatshirt over his head and I glimpse the crop of shiny blond hair around his belly button. “No, no,” he says. “Is good.” I let him wrap me up and pull me toward him. “Like this then,” he says. “Like this a little longer. Is good, no?”
I drop my head onto his chest, and his T-shirt is so thin that I can feel each individual rib.
“You are a little bird,” he says. “I have to hold, or flit, flit, you fly.”
I laugh, kiss him before he can say anything else. It is so, so good, our tongues hot in the cold night, just like this, going nowhere.
Until we have no choice—we must walk together across the dead, manicured lawn, past the cookie-cutter dream homes, past the police cruisers shutting down the party and then separately onto a plane crowded with hungover band students who are one minute of turbulence away from mass vomiting.
Now, I hear my parents coming in the door, eager to share their zany middle-class night of curling.
Maybe perfect Celeste is right. I’m getting nasty. I keep things from her—like Sasha, like Bev—and I don’t know why exactly. Just for kicks, maybe. Or take annoying Emma. She’s the closest link to my birthplace I’m ever going to get, and I wish I never had to see her again. Or my smug, oh-so-doting parents, who only want the best for me—I’d rather get a cavity filled or drink one of those hideous diet sodas Bev poisoned her fetus with earlier than talk to them right now.
I lied to Bev for no particular reason, except that I suddenly wanted to be alone with a cheap poly-blend sweatshirt and my borderline OCD. I just wanted to sit here, on my cesspool of a bedroom floor, with the Chinese robe on my wall looming over it all.
Only its silver embroidered dragon is no longer smiling at me like it used to. Now it’s laughing.