Dear Pa,
It’s Easter weekend, which means I’ve been at church more than usual because of some extra services, but since I get paid by the hymn, I don’t mind. The highlight today—or, maybe more accurately, the thing that marked a break in my routine—was that I drove over to see Jordana, who’s home from Boston for the long weekend.
She’d emailed me a couple of weeks ago to let me know she’d be free to get together, but when I wrote back and she didn’t respond, I’d shrugged and figured that was that. Then when I got home last night, Ma told me Jordana had called our landline to summon me to a restaurant called the Chew Chew, located in an old train car on an abandoned track in downtown Guelph, today at noon.
Sometimes, when I haven’t just seen her, I tell myself that the great thing about me and Jordana is that we can pick up where we left off, even when we haven’t been in touch for months. Like Ma and Beverly, except that Ma and Beverly like each other. But I don’t like Jordana anymore. I don’t like what she’s become. And I don’t like how I become when I’m with her. Yet I hang out with her sometimes when she’s home and try to stay in touch with her when she’s not, I guess because I like the idea of our friendship. I thought I was having a good time while I was there, but I ended up sighing a lot on the drive home.
I got there a few minutes after twelve. Jordana hadn’t yet arrived, so I got a table, sipped some water, and tried to ignore the pangs in my stomach whenever the cute waiter came by to ask if I needed a few more moments to make up my mind. To pass the time I pulled up my pant leg, played with my leg hair, and wondered if Ma had got the message wrong and Jordana had actually wanted to meet at midnight instead of at noon.
Finally Jordana breezed in, her eyes fixed right on me as soon as she entered, as though she’d known all along where I’d be sitting. I stared at her all-black outfit and her side ponytail and her “cultural studies glasses,” as Sophie and Jenice would have called them, and tried to shake off the sudden wave of weariness that hit me. I stood up and tried to look game for anything.
“Dally.”
“Jordi.”
I hate those nicknames. They bring back memories of kids calling me Dilly Dally, which infuriated me when I was eleven. I tried to figure out from Jordana’s body language whether she expected me to hug her or not. In the end, she held my hands across the table like we were at a seance, and then she asked if we could switch places because the seat I was in would allow her to have a better energy flow.
In a way, the fact that we’ve been friends for so long is part of the problem: we know how to push each other’s buttons. As soon as I sat down again she made a crack about sideburns that made it abundantly clear she found mine idiotic, and to get back at her I ordered the eggplant parmigiana because I remembered she’d once told me even the word “eggplant” made her want to gouge her eyes out. Thankfully the waiter kept calling me “buddy” and “fella” as he took our order, and that made me feel better.
Jordana has changed a lot since the last time I saw her. She’s grown into an intelligent, articulate young woman. Which is one way of saying she spent most of the time talking—about what she’s been playing on the cello, her friends, her classes, the boy she’s been “hanging out” with (that’s the phrase she used), and what it’s like to live in a boarding school full of artsy teenagers where the students outnumber the adults thirty to one. Apparently she’s gone New Age, which means she had a lot to say about her chakras. She’ll be traipsing off to Vienna this summer—as much as it’s possible to traipse while lugging a cello—where she’ll attend a week-long string orchestra workshop that’s apparently so intense that quite a few people have died from it. She told me she went online and diagnosed herself with oppositional defiant disorder, and because of her school’s student-centred approach to health, now she can pretty much do whatever the fuck she wants with total impunity. Or do I mean immunity? You know what I mean.
Normally I’m only too happy to keep the focus off me in a conversation, but with Jordana I didn’t even have to try. She reminded me of Burt, except she had more than one trick in her playbook.
“My eye swelled to the size of a golf ball because I’d been wearing a super-old contact lens. I made the mistake of googling it and for a while I thought I had oracular herpes. No! I mean ocular. God—was that a weird Freudian slip or what!”
“We call her Greasy Bangs because she has greasy bangs.”
“He was becoming ridiculously high maintenance with his super-toxic energy, so I had to cut all ties with him.”
“A woman in a green woollen Victorian cape frowned at me, and I burst out laughing for no reason.”
“She was trying to redefine herself. I don’t know how successful she was. I listened to the first track and it sounded okay. I thought the bridge happened too soon. I don’t know about the rest of it.”
“I mean, I know he’s supposed to be her boyfriend, but he’s, like, so gay. Like—soooo gaaaay. It’s like, face the facts, sweetheart!”
“Like, whatever happened to Billy Ocean? Did he drown?”
Her phone buzzed a couple of times a minute, too, which meant she kept interrupting herself to read and answer text messages. One time, she glanced at her phone, her eyes widened, and she placed it back on the table right away. When I asked her what was wrong, she made a face and told me she just couldn’t even.
I’d wanted to tell her about playing the organ, about Sophie and Jenice’s wedding, about living in Waterloo—hell, even about what’s been going on with Rusty. But every time I tried to jump into the conversation, she skilfully steered it back to herself. Once she even did it while in the middle of asking me a question.
Every once in a while she’d pick up her sandwich, bring it to her mouth like she was going to bite into it, leave it hanging there for a few seconds, then return it to her plate. She kept doing this, like it was a type of physical exercise. Eventually I started interjecting random things when she paused to sip her water, but she didn’t seem to hear me. It was strange—like we were talking at each other, not with each other.
We ended up staying for three hours. That was how long it took her to finish her lunch because she literally would not stop talking, and even then she had to pack up part of it. The whole time we were there, I couldn’t help but remember what had happened right before she’d left for Boston almost three years ago. Basically she told me she’d always been crazy about me and started sucking my face off. And I was kind of into it, which you’ll probably find surprising, even though you’re dead. I wonder if she remembers that.
What am I thinking? She can’t possibly have forgotten. And yet we’ve never spoken about it. It’s this weird thing between us now.
I did manage to tell her a bit about the coffee house at Sophie and Jenice’s wedding reception. When I tried to describe the wedding, she cut me off to tell me lesbian weddings are all the rage at her school and apparently you’re not considered cool until you know someone who’s been to one, which led to this long explanation about all the things you can do at her school to show people how cool you are. Later I told her about the woman who’d asked me to perform at an event coming up—I forget if I’ve mentioned this to you yet, but she got in touch with me and wants to set something up for July. Jordana’s response, or at least the thing she said after that, was how happy she was to have her scholarship so she could focus all her energy on music without having to—I forget the exact way she put it, but it was something like “prostitute her art.” I was halfway home before I figured out she’d meant that as a dig.
Eventually she threw out hints about me going to visit her in Boston at some point, which made my eyes widen. Judging by the number of unanswered texts on my phone, I’d honestly thought our friendship was in the last stages of dying. But I didn’t ask her why it seemed so hard for us to keep in touch—in the end, I realized I didn’t want to know. She seemed disappointed that I wasn’t more enthusiastic about visiting her, but the idea of being trapped with Jordana in a strange city for more than a couple of hours made me want to kick the table in self-defence.
Our lunch depressed me, so when Jordana invited me to spend the afternoon with her, I said I couldn’t because my mother needed the car. Instead I drove to our old house, parked across the street, and looked at it for ten or fifteen minutes. Then I drove to the high school I would have attended if we hadn’t left Guelph—a red-brick building I hadn’t seen in years—and played a game I invented called What If as I sat in the otherwise empty parking lot. What would my life have been like if you hadn’t died? If I’d gone to school here, would I have had a friend my own age by now? If we’d stayed here after you died, would I have found it comforting or upsetting whenever I bumped into someone who knew you? If you hadn’t died and we’d stayed here, would I have been happy?
It was a relief to visit our old house and my might-have-been school without needing to ask anyone to take me there or to explain to anyone why I wanted to go. Like Ma. Especially Ma. I thought about heading to the cemetery next, but I didn’t want to be late for supper. So I drove home and listened to a lot of sad music. I have a playlist on my iPod called “Gut-Wrenching” that usually does the trick. And oddly enough, I felt better.
One thing Jordana told me was how competitive her school is—and not always in a good way. Apparently there’s such limited opportunity and attention that the super-aggressive students do whatever they can to stay on top. It sounds even more cutthroat than my school, and that’s saying a lot. Sometimes I think it’s just as well I didn’t get in.
Your loving son,
Dale