THE DAY THE INVITATION ARRIVED JOAN chose to ignore it. Oh, she opened it all right. Felt the thick embossed letters on linen paper, read the greeting requesting her presence at the Madden High thirtieth reunion. Then she tossed it on the hall table among the real estate, pizza, and dry cleaning fliers. Whoever had sent it hadn’t bothered to check the records. If they had, she wouldn’t have been on the invitation list. She wouldn’t tolerate that kind of carelessness in herself. Exhausted from too many nights at work, she had no patience for it in others.
It was several weeks before she could finally hang up her smock and emerge from the lab before dark. The front office was abuzz with news of the award. It wasn’t everyday that Constellation Ltd. received the industry’s highest honour for developing a new food flavour. Even the receptionist, Rosy, was giddy with pride, handing out cake and pouring champagne in the middle of the afternoon. Joan, though, just felt like going home and crawling under the covers. It was all too much. She was the one who had gone through a thousand compounds in the past year, testing and re-testing until she’d narrowed it down to just the right combination of flavours: a satisfying licorice, a subtle hint of spearmint with a whiff of peppermint, and a bare trace of wintergreen. She’d spent months consulting on texture and colour, insisting on rigorous international product testing of the “adults only” chewing gum. If they could nail a flavour that appealed to both the North American and Asian markets, they’d have a shot in the highly competitive world market.
Joan had two remarkable gifts. The first was a memory that helped her instantly identify over half of the six-thousand scents in the Constellation Ltd. inventory. The other was an ability to reach deep into the web of human emotions with her creations by engaging her keen senses. Smell was her most precious but each was a valuable tool: taste, for knowing how much sour would be too much or if another dash of salt would be perfect; touch to feel velvet on the lips, heat on the tongue; and sound, to hear a musical crunch or the delicate smacking of lips. She’d been on the ground in Japan, Korea, and Hong Kong to witness individual reactions, watching for the slightest tilt of the head, drop of an eyelid, shift in the body to tell her just what test subjects were feeling. Finally, after living in airports and out of suitcases for six months, she had presented Hint of Midnight gum. It was her baby. The award had her name on it. Dr. Joan Parker was an international celebrity in the cutthroat world of food flavour and aroma design.
Today she didn’t feel like any sort of star. The dark service elevator was never her first choice of departure from the lab. It was infused with the sickly sweet smell of pineapple that had leaked from a cracked beaker months ago. But this route allowed her to bypass the Marketing Department. She couldn’t face another “Way to go, girl!” Why did middle-aged women cling to Valley Girl lingo? It was like breathing stale summer air. The thought of being forced into water-cooler chat was more than she could stomach. Research chemists have never been hailed as social extroverts, and in Joan’s case, it was true. The socializing that had been required to get the product launched had sapped her energy more than the actual work to develop Hint of Midnight.
Just when she thought she had escaped detection, Ted Harman caught up with her in the parking lot. Her boss was the high priest of the team approach.
“Not staying for champagne?”
She tucked her blunt-cut brown hair behind her ears and braced herself for an argument. “I have to get back here early tomorrow.”
He studied her for several long seconds. “No, you don’t.” He wasn’t smiling.
Joan waited.
“Take some time off. You deserve it. Tony can clean up the paperwork. I don’t want to see your face around here for at least two weeks.”
Anyone else would have been thrilled, but Ted had hit her most delicate nerve. She was afraid to go away. Deep in the marrow of her tired bones, she was afraid she’d lose everything, that she’d be found out. Despite her years of hard work and the accolades heaped upon her, she didn’t believe she deserved success. She felt like an imposter.
“I’m fine, Ted. A good night’s sleep, that’s all I need.” She unlocked her car door. Before she could slide in, though, he clasped her shoulder, turned her to face him, and solemnly looked her in the eye.
“No, Joan. Two weeks, minimum. Spring break.” There was something else. Something she couldn’t put her finger on. “I can’t afford to have you crash and burn.”
“And . . . ?” She knew that there was more. He paused then continued uncomfortably.
“Some of the staff interprets your distance as aloofness. It’s affecting morale.”
Her jaw dropped but she couldn’t find words to protest.
Ted added, “I know that’s not it. We all know you care, but it will help all around if you recharge.” He held open the door to her Honda hybrid and she climbed in without a word.
When she arrived home, Mort was in the condo kitchen packing his gourmet-cooking utensils.
“Baby, you look like crap,” he said with a smile.
“Thanks a lot.” She poured herself a glass of red wine from the kitchen stash and studied him. “Why do you come in here when I’m out?”
“I have two forks and a spatula in my apartment. How am I supposed to cook anything?” He looked at her with those big, droopy eyes. He had aged handsomely.
“Take what you want. It’s mostly yours. You bring anything to eat? I’m starving.”
Mort could create a meal out of nothing. Necessity had been his mentor. When they had first moved in together a dozen years ago, they had both been struggling. They were thrilled to have snagged a little cottage with creaking floors and a stove with three functioning burners. Joan was finishing her dissertation and working as a lab assistant for a multi-national food supplier. She had no time to eat, let alone cook. Mort had just landed a job as produce manager with a local Grocery Cart food store and would haul home over-ripe fruits and vegetables at the end of the day, often exotic foods that the middle-class customers were wary of buying. Every evening their cottage welcomed her with the spicy aromas of a busy, happy kitchen. Now Mort was general manager for the western region and being groomed as V.P. of Human Resources for the entire Grocery Cart chain. Since he moved out four months ago, Joan had been busy with the Hint of Midnight project, and the kitchen now smelled of ripe garbage.
Mort’s other preoccupation, besides food, was figuring out what made people tick. After a dozen weekend workshops, he fancied himself an amateur psychologist. “By the way, Joan. What’s this?” He picked up the gold-trimmed reunion invitation from the kitchen counter and waved it at her. “Are you going?”
“Someone sent it by mistake. Or as a joke.” As she spoke she grabbed it from him and nervously folded the invitation into a tiny square.
“You don’t know that.” He didn’t take his eyes off her.
“If they wanted me there they would have invited me to the tenth reunion or the twentieth. No, someone’s made a mistake. That or they want money for their alumni fund. They probably saw my name in the paper or they’ve got some new hotshot development officer who’s turning over every rock to find cash.” She dragged her sleeve across her eyes, mindless of the streak of mascara. “Madden’s the distant past. I just need some sleep, is all.”
Mort knew the tragedy that had been her final year in high school, why she’d left without graduating. Was he being cruel because she’d asked him to leave or was he just playing analyst? At that moment he put one of his big arms around her shoulder. She sank into his chest, quivering. She hated herself for crying.
“They want you there. Who wouldn’t want you around?” He was fingering the top button on her blouse. “Sleep? You sure?”
“I’m sure, Mort.” She moved his hand away firmly.
“Go, Joan. It would be good for you. There must be someone you’d like to see again. What about the geek and the dyke?”
She bristled at his flippant reference to Gabe and Hazel, her two best friends from high school, her only close friends. Mort could be so shallow, so insensitive, and he wasn’t even aware of it. No wonder she kicked him out. Gabe and she had kept in touch for a couple of years after high school, then she’d lost track of him. He’d been a brilliant anarchist and was probably running a small Latin American revolution by now. She’d heard that Hazel had gone to San Francisco, the only place you could be out and happy thirty years ago.
Mort read her tight-lipped silence. “Sorry.”
“They won’t be there. They’d never go. I’d be all alone. Still shy, single, and plump.”
“Demure, Rubenesque, and I’ll go with you.”
Her jaw dropped. “No! Absolutely not.”
He raised one eyebrow and grinned.
Forty minutes later the light was fading and she was watching him sleep. Why did she do this to herself? Every time she let him stay it was harder to make him leave again. Shaking him gently, she whispered, “Did you mean it?”
“Huh?”
“Did you mean it when you said you’d come with me?”
He pulled her toward him. “Can’t wait. Now go to sleep.”
Joan lay awake watching the late-afternoon shadows on the spackled ceiling, imaging the contours of Madden as it had been thirty years ago. Thinking how the tradition of taking yearbook photos in the autumn sometimes misrepresents the truth. A lot can happen between September and June; yet on picture day, the record is set. On that crisp day thirty years earlier, Joan’s greatest concern had been whether she should wear her hair in a ponytail, as she did most days, or down and straight, which was hipper. She couldn’t ask Gabe Theissen, who was in line ahead of her. Her best friend had no patience for vanity. He’d only lecture her about all the cancer patients in the world who had no hair.
Joan wrinkled her nose. Someone was wearing too much candy-scented perfume and it mingled with the musk of three-hundred teens packed into the gym. As the line shuffled forward, she daydreamed, imagining the message she’d write in the yearbooks of her classmates when they were issued in the spring. Those words and that photograph would be how people remembered her for eternity. The flash of white light brought her back to the moment. Her photo had been snapped. There’d be no second chance.
As the spots cleared from in front of her eyes, the principal entered the gym. A teacher pointed in her direction. Her first thought was that one of her brothers had done something wrong. Anthony had started tenth grade that fall and she’d been waiting for embarrassing repercussions.
When she reached the office she saw her mom through the large glass window. Their eyes met and she knew that something had happened to her dad, and at that moment she became the caretaker of her mother. In her darkest hours she’d wondered if her dad’s heart had given out because he could no longer cope with having a child for a wife.
Leo and Vi had both been twenty-two when they married and he had adored her wide-eyed wonderment at the world. She never lost that awe but it also meant she seldom bothered with the responsibility of adulthood. It had been Leo who had made sure that the three kids got off to school on time, that there were groceries in the house, and the utility bills were paid. Vi cooked dinner, occasionally did laundry, and never broke a fingernail over dishes or yard work. And she always, always looked beautiful when Leo arrived home. Despite the demands on the home front, he managed to build a successful roofing company. Vi never had a day of worry.
When Leo died, that all changed.
At eighteen Joan had planned her father’s funeral. His brother, Uncle Nick, came from Waterloo for the service. Her mom’s two sisters and their husbands arrived a day early from Vancouver to fuss over their youngest sibling. Neighbours left casseroles and cakes. Then, after a week, the circus was over and the bomb dropped. Vi had no idea whether or not Leo had insurance. It had been as irrelevant to her as gas bills and house payments. Joan turned the house upside down looking for a policy. She went through boxes, drawers, and his overstuffed, disorganized filing cabinet, but it soon became obvious that her father had made no provisions for this to happen. Leo didn’t expect to die. And he had lived life large, spoiling Vi and the kids to the point where Joan had thought they were well off.
When he had a big contract, he’d spend big. But in roofing there are slow times. None of them had known that the house had been mortgaged to their own roof to keep the business going. There was nothing in the bank and Leo owed salaries that would never be paid. Their life had been an illusion.
When the cupboards were down to cream corn and luncheon meat that smelled worse than dog food, Joan found a cashier gig at the gas bar owned by Dan Prychenko. His daughter, Marlena, was one of the popular girls at school. The job started as a part-time position at night, but the bills were mounting quickly. More hours became available, and by Christmas, Joan had stopped going to school altogether. She wasn’t around to pick up her diploma the following June and had often wondered if her photograph had made it into the yearbook.
“I’m driving to Madden this weekend.” Joan watched for her mother’s response.
Vi lived in the basement suite of her sister Heather’s house in East Vancouver. It had been her home for over twenty-seven years. Name-brand lemon cleaners didn’t completely mask the underlying mildew and the apartment was in its usual state of colourful disarray, made worse by the ceramic knick-knacks and garage sale treasures. The dust collectors that gave her mother pleasure drove Joan crazy. The living situation had been a godsend for Vi, In the early days she had lived rent-free in exchange for babysitting Heather’s children. It had been crowded back then, when Joan’s brothers, Anthony and David, were still living at home. Now, though, the two elderly widows were good company for each other in the faded and aging splitlevel home.
“That’s nice, dear. Do you have a safety kit in the car? I heard on the radio the other day that you should always carry one.” Vi went off on a tangent about the recommended contents of an auto safety kit, avoiding asking why her daughter was returning to their old hometown for the first time in three decades.
“You were younger than I am now when we left Madden, Mom.”
“Uh huh.”
How many times had Joan felt that she was the one who had had to deal with the real world in her mother’s place? She felt the energy sap from her body. Then, just as she was wondering why she’d even bothered to tell her mother, Vi veered back.
“You’ll have to say hello for me.”
“To who?” asked Joan.
“Well, to whoever you come across.” Vi smiled. “After all, it was our home for nineteen years. Remember all the good times we had? Picking berries by the river, the outdoor skating rink, your dad barbequing steaks the size of tires. Oh, he was good on the barbeque, that man. Those long summer nights. Oh! And the northern lights.”
Joan watched her mother stare wistfully. That had been Vi’s time, so fleeting.
“I’m going to my thirtieth high school reunion,” Joan stated flatly.
“Oh?” Vi’s response left Joan hanging. She didn’t know if her mother remembered that she hadn’t graduated in Madden.
“I have no idea why they sent me an invitation.”
Vi looked her straight in the eye and spoke with clarity and vehemence. “You’re better than any one of them. You remember that.”
That pointed insistence gave Joan an unexpected boost. As she was leaving, Vi gave her a list of people to see, including Joan’s old English teacher, Mr. Fowler.
During the week she prepared for her trip. Months in the lab had left Joan looking as though she belonged in the morgue. She made her first trip to a tanning salon. As a fake ‘n’ bake virgin, she got the willies sitting in the waiting room, flipping through a People magazine. It reminded her of the dentist’s office. She sniffed discreetly and was relieved not to smell burning flesh. After the tanning session she broke down and bought a rinse to hide the needles of grey in her hair. She grabbed a box of royal plum henna, later wondering if the choice had been bold or batty. How could a respected, upwardly mobile member of the science community do these things unless she was utterly deranged? A fraud? Those feelings gradually passed when she discovered that she hadn’t been cooked alive on the tanning bed and that the hair colour had turned out quite well. A couple of visits to Tropic Tans and a decent haircut calmed the nagging feeling that the invitation was a ticket to disaster.
Before going to bed on Thursday, Joan called Mort and got his answering machine. It was probably his turn to work late. Or was he out seeing someone? Another woman? Joan dismissed the thought. If he was, he would have told her. Despite the mountain of differences between them, they’d never told lies. She fell into a comfortable sleep, a whisper of coconut tanning oil reminding her that she was actually going on a holiday. As she slept she dreamt. She was on a bicycle, not her own mountain bike, but the old-fashioned kind where the rider sits upright. She was barreling down the long hill leading into the river valley where Madden was situated. Her mother was perched on the handlebars and Joan had no control over how fast they were moving.