1. A broken tooth.  Tooth number four, to be exact, cracked like a karate block.  It’s a middleman tooth, negotiating mastication between the noble upper canines and those long, low, omnivorous molars.  My dentist let slip the words that no dentist should utter out loud: “This does not look good.”  I tried to distract myself by observing the strange power dynamic between dentist and hygienist.  Drills were produced, and needles, and something that I was scandalized to learn was a dental dam, and all the while I went to my happy place of social speculation.

The dentist was French and very efficient.  She reminded me of mothers I knew in France, especially those with a great big Catholic brood of children: practical, surgically precise in the dispensing of chores, and largely unsentimental except for sudden, blinding flares of kindness.  Her assistant was just the opposite, and much more like me: she wanted everyone in the room to get along.  She was grimly determined to maintain a cheerful atmosphere, and even sacrificed self-respect for the cause by humming along to the EZ listening crap dribbling from the radio.  ”I can’t wait until February,” she said at one point, inexplicably.  The dentist did not acknowledge her, so I tried to make up for it by emitting a neanderthal yelp from behind the dam.  She, in turn, dabbed away a gob of pinkish drool from my chin.  In this way, we established a language of kindness between us.

When it was over, I found myself on the receiving end of a stern lecture about protecting my sizable filling from the terrors of hard candy and shelled nuts.  I appreciated that; this was why the dentist was a good dentist.  She gave me practical instructions.  The hygienist was responsible for something more ethereal; she gave me a personalized smile which said, don’t worry, we’ve seen worse.  I needed both of them.

2. A race.  Every time I finish a 10-kilometer event, I am lassoed and hauled off in two different directions.  I can’t wait for the next one; I never want to do another one again.  I break my neck trying to accommodate both pulls, though it’s the former that always wins in the end.  So.  I am out there once more, flailing along the canal path, trying to approximate something like a training schedule while May 26th slinks terrifyingly closer.

It’s actually a bit of a thrill to run along the canal in winter, once I have overcome those first few moments of paralyzing cold.  It’s also nice that I haven’t yet had a spectacular wipe-out, though that’s only a matter of time.  In a way, running on snow and ice is akin to being in a dentist’s chair: you feel at once pleased with yourself for finally tackling something you’ve put off for too long, and terrorized by the sudden very real danger of pain.  Also, humiliation.  After the dentist, I took my anesthetized face to the grocery store, and half wondered/half chose to ignore how weird I must have looked, completely unable to detect or control any rogue strings of drool.  Ditto for winter running.  I refuse to default on my student loan in order to afford an armory of sanctioned fitness threads, so my cold-weather costume is a motley assemblage of retired pajamas and discounted spandex, crowned by a tasseled toque whose steady tap on the crown of my head is a reminder not to stop running.  Because when you stop running, you are forced to look down at yourself and realize how very close to public humiliation you have dared to tread.

On the upside, because I’ve been such a lazy sack of yams for the last two months, my running mix is new to me once again.  Hearing James Brown’s primal scream as I crest the Corktown bridge is something magical.

3. A car.  Derek and I are temporarily mobile, and it’s both glorious and irritating.  Irritating because, without a parking spot to call our own, we are in a constant cat-and-mouse game with parking authorities.  Glorious because the only practical solution is for me to take the car to work each morning.  I enjoy the bus, and I mourn the loss of that built-in reading time twice a day, but now that I know what it is to be home immediately after leaving the office, I fear having to return to those prehistoric days of waiting for twenty or thirty minutes in the squinting cold for a ride that never shows.

I also don’t miss sitting in uncomfortable proximity to the sort of people who ride the 85 route.  I even wrote a poem about one memorable experience:

The Eighty-Thrive
(Or: Ode to the Man Sitting Next to Me)

To you who sat, with buttocks wide,
And moved around to let me ride
So close to you, in the seat
Which heretofore had held your feet:
I loved you, instant, strong, and true.
I loved the silly things you’d do.
Like open up your old-school cell
Hold it tight, and scream and yell
Of secrets that you once held dear,
Now all of ours who strain to hear.
I loved your unencumbered sneeze,
Anointing neighbours with its breeze.
I loved the daring things you’d say.
How clever to use “fuck” that way!
But most of all, I loved how brave
You were inside your nostril’s cave
And how you held that glistening slug,
Then wiped it on the seat’s blue rug.
And then you stood to leave the bus!
Depression for the rest of us!
Your absence marked by that wet smear,
And on my face, a single tear.

- Megan, celebrating 2012 one string of mucous at a time 

Lone Wolf Euphoria: I knew it most acutely in Dublin.  I ate penne pasta under a blue awning in Temple Street.  The waiter pitied me; I saw it in his eyes, but I didn’t mind.  For the first time I was the one with an accent.  I had just finished reading Edna O’Brien’s biography of Joyce, and the day behind me had been spent chasing the end of his rope around Dublin.

I was on the edge of a Joyce obsession.  Ulysses weighed on me, though I only understood as much as my professor could explain to me across a classroom table from 5 to 8 on Wednesday nights. I had no business being in Dublin.  The week before, I’d given a paper at a conference in Belgium.  Montreal’s Centre for Irish Studies, where I worked, had bankrolled my trip.  I felt that I owed them something more than a thank-you note dampened by the sweat of a Stella bottle (brewed in the Belgian conference’s host city).  I owed them something absurd and precious, like a stone polished by the Irish sea.  This is what Europe, or thinking about Europe, does to me: it stamps out reason and inflames romanticism.

So I took one of those mythologized one-dollar flights on an airline no one had heard of from Leuven to Dublin and found myself in a hotel with a view of the Liffey, all the conference jitters and self-fulfilling anxieties of everyday life blinking at me from far, far away.

I rode the DART out to Sandycove, where Joyce’s Stephan Dedalus wiped the contents of his nose on a rock.  Dublin was about to host a marathon and hundreds of lithe Europeans were stretching their calves up and down the road.  A little old man sitting next to me in the train tapped my shoulder.  His look alone was a gift: tweed hat, aran sweater.  He had seen me studying the Dublin map.  Canada, he repeated, when I told him.  Coming from him, it sounded like a Tolkenian place.  I felt a controlled, pleasant sort of homesickness.  He said something in Gaelic, then translated: one hundred thousand welcomes.  All the coziest bits of an Irish stereotype.  He laid finger on the copy of Ulysses in my lap, with a picture of Sandycove and its Martello Tower on the cover.  Don’t bother yourself with the museum, he said.

Truth was, Edna O’Brien held more appeal for me than Joyce did.  I could see why she chose to write his biography, though; the entire volume indulged in the most scandalous details of his life with an inviting sort of glee.  Maybe she felt an affinity for him because of the controversy surrounding her own literary career.  In rural 1960s Ireland, her mother eliminated all the filthy words from her first novel with a black marker and then banned it to a shelf in the family outhouse, worth only cursory attention while its reader strained over the toilet.  Priests decried her for writing about sex and miserable children who swore at nuns.  Books were burned in witchy fires on the moor.  That’s what she’ll tell you, anyway.  In interviews she is very forthcoming about her early struggles as an anti-establishment novelist with a scandalously beautiful physique (later bought out for shampoo commercials).

After getting off the DART that day, I walked the strand alongside a specter of Stephan Dedalus.  It was a grey, low-slung day.  I set up the self-timer on my camera so I could get a picture of myself mocking, or honouring, Stephan Dedalus (just as Joyce did in fair and equal measure).  There was a carnival in a nearby parking lot.  It had begun to rain.  Parents held umbrellas while the merry-go-round turned in a minor key.  When I got back into the city, I ordered a pint of Guinness in Davy Byrnes’ pub but I could not stand to drink it.  And all the funny things that happen during a day of solitary tourism: they were all for me.

One weekend this summer I rented a car and drove home alone.  Fourteen hours there and back.  Navigating alone, listening to NPR alone, singing and stopping for ice cream and for turtle crossings and for bathroom breaks in the ditch weeds – all alone.  Even favourite activities that usually involve at least one other human being were done in pristine solitude, like book browsing: as though making the moral of this lesson REALLY CLEAR to someone as daft as me, the gods poked me into a country bookshop on highway 503 which was completely deserted.  Not a soul.  Just a coin box with a sign asking visitors to pay three dollars a book.  Alone, alone, alone, and despite the fight I picked with D because he had declined to join me, the feeling was pristine.  Like turning down the volume and listening to my own innards beating and breathing and purifying away, reminding me of the mechanics of being Megan.

As I drove home this summer, I found myself missing that trip to Dublin, and the moment in my life that precipitated it.  I had been living alone in an apartment the colour of tangerines.  I took that time for granted, as we all do, and spent much of it moping around or assembling family-sized meals that I never finished.  Companionship, regular and steady and always a few inches away in the bed, is a pleasure, but who wants to read about pleasure?  Confusion and lack are much more interesting emotions.  At work, I am with people I love.  At home, I am with a person I love.  But I so rarely seem to be just simply, wholly with myself and no one else.  Now that we live together, D and I share almost everything – an office, a cat, a routine.  On the one evening a week when he is regularly out of the house for an art class, I usually find myself catching up on some neglected chore.  Turning on the radio, evading myself, even while I’m craving my own company.

In those moments, I remember Dublin, and Joyce, and the penne I ate by myself under a blue awning in Temple Street.  It all happened years ago, but it still sustains me in some small, solitary, elemental way, and reminds me that I am more than the person who gulps companionship and approval like a magic elixir.  That has to be important.

To me, this place is music beamed in from a former life.  Rapture indeed.

I found some writing rigmarole to apply for so I can legitimately say that I’m “on deadline,” a thrillingly careerist expression that makes me feel all light and possible inside.  As a result I am thrashing through another amateurish — but slightly, microscopically better – attempt at a novel, or at least the concept of one.  I walk around everywhere holding Kent Haruf’s Plainsong to my chest as though I’ll improve just through osmosis.  This effort of mine stars a studly high school algebra teacher and a pot-bellied pig.  Why do I do this to myself?  If I’m not going cross-eyed over online tutorials in quadratics, I’m dissolving into a puddle on the floor because of things like this.  Research comes with its own burdens and rewards.

Of course, while all the front-end mental engines are firing off basic commands like WRITE WORDS and GO TO WORK and DON’T EVER WEAR THOSE PANTS AGAIN, the whole underbelly of my mind is still consumed with France.  I don’t even mind making a driveling cliché out of myself.  I want to be in Paris long enough to be casual about it, to dismiss tourists with an eye roll, to stop noticing the Eiffel Tower.  What privilege that would be.  Instead, that first sparkling sight reduces me to sentimental weeping EVERY TIME.  I wind up with a series of terrible photographs that I will use to paper the inside of a journal which my children will try to conceal from the rest of the family like a shameful secret.  This kind of over-exposed zeal will not be fashionable by the time I’m a mother.  It’s not even fashionable now, but while in France I always surround myself with people who are polite enough to look the other way while I make out with the ground.

Altogether, I’ve spent just under two years in France.  Which is what?  7% of my life?  But what a 7% it was!  Percents 1 and 2 were spent living with the Dewavrin family in Rouen, when I was young(er) and foolish(er), scurrying around trying to find Internet cafes so I could email a Canadian boyfriend who probably wouldn’t have been able to find France on the map.  It took a few years of retrospection to realize just how lucky I’d been to tumble from my nest and land among that bunch, though I must have had some inkling of my dumb luck because my emails to family at home all begin with off-the-charts enthusiasm (these are emails that I printed, trimmed with a pair of kitchen scissors, and pasted into a scrapbook, which in turn begs the question: what were all the other sixteen-year-olds doing while I went all Art Attack in my bedroom, and were projects like this the reason why I could never graduate from the social B-list?)

A small selection of excerpts:

February 21, 2000: “hi everyone, I’M IN FRANCE!!!!!!!!!!!” [ed. note: Dear God, I was irritating.]

February 25, 2000: “I could really get used to this life!” [I guess I found our CHALET in the ALPS to be moderately acceptable]

And then, April 26, 2000, after nearly three months: “I really feel like I have a second family here and I can’t even imagine saying goodbye to them.”

Eleven years later, with better hair, D and I attended the wedding of a sister in that very same “second family.”  I’d seen some of them just three years earlier, during percents 5 and 6, wherein I taught high school in Lille.  This last visit was truly the victory lap (and just as good for my ego: everywhere we went, D and I were treated like royalty.  Royalty, and cultural anomalies with hang-ups about tipping the waitress, which gives away every undercover tourist).

We spent one night in Lille, and I don’t even remember what I ate for dinner because I was too busy keeping my hands clamped on the top of my head to prevent it from flying off.  Surrounded by friends, in a city that I love, having just spent the afternoon marinating in nostalgia: HEAVEN.

With one of my Lillois faves, Annabelle. It does the soul good.

In Paris we stayed with Olivier, the one who began it all, my original exchange brother who (this is hard to believe now) spent three months in Dundalk eleven years ago.  He is all Parisian, all the time: tall and lean, managing a tailored appeal even at his most casual, unfazed by the murderous street traffic.  And while he’ll deny that he’s Parisian (like Newfoundlanders, you’re either born one or you’re from away), he knows the city like one.  We followed him through the streets like ducklings, tripping along the cobblestones, suddenly finding ourselves tangled in the skirts of the Moulin Rouge or a Montmartre cafe scene concealed from tourists or the shaded courtyard of the National Archives, where we ate sandwiches and built up the courage to rent bicycles from the famous Vélib.

On our Vélib bikes, just outside of the gates to the Luxembourg Gardens, where children push toy boats around the fountain with sticks. "Cute" in French is spelled Luxemboug.

I suppose it was because of how perfect our trip had been, because of the fun we had in Brighton with D’s family and in London with old friends, the disbelief of returning to Lille, the sunshine that followed us everywhere we went in Paris – because of all of that, I counted a sizable debt with whatever karmic instinct maintains balance in my life.  I had to get kicked back, just a little, or I’d break through the invisible membrane that keeps me separate from experiencing absolute, sustained perfection. I was getting dangerously close.  Even the day that our camera was pinned under a leaking bottle of wine at the bottom of a picnic bag, never to function again (least of all for the most picturesque part of our trip: the wedding-in-a-castle), my mood dipped a little, but: PARIS.  The word that repairs every mental flight course.

Outside of the Louvre, in the hedge maze that takes you, turns you around five times, then spits you out at the foot of the Champs-Elysées.

Strep throat.  That’s what checked me back in.  The night Oliv and D and I got back to his apartment from Montmartre, I was ready to tear out my neck.  I didn’t need this extraneous corridor that blazed each time I swallowed, and that kept me awake all night.  I lay in a narrow bed under a high ceiling and listened to podcast after podcast, trying to distract myself from the fire that squeezed tears from my eyes with each swallow.  The next day we would leave for the wedding in Lyon.  At 3:30 a.m. I started to cry in earnest.  The pain was enormous, but it was the thought that I’d ruin the wedding for D and I, that I wouldn’t be able to eat or talk or drink or revel on the one night that I’d been looking forward to the most: that thought cut my legs from under me.

Our evening in Montmartre: The Throat Inferno 2011 was just beginning to set in.

I did manage one small act of self-preservation: I found my Routard Paris and, in the moonlight that bled through our window curtains, read these lines:

For minor ailments, go in the first instance to a pharmacy (look for the green cross), where highly qualified pharmacists should be able to give you valuable advice. 

I have rarely been so happy to see morning break.  I sprung from bed like a Disney peasant and was taking the mediaval stairs ten at a time, still pulling on my shirt, when the earliest businesses were only just opening.  The flashing green cross of a French pharmacy was my beacon: this would end NOW and all would be saved.

There was a time in my undergrad when I was caught disastrously unawares by my period in the henceforth ironically named Health Sciences Building.  I cowered in a bathroom stall until most students had disappeared to class and then hobbled down a hallway designed by Bentham until I found a bank of payphones.  I had only one option, and that option was D, and he managed to break into my house, find some clothes, then come to school and feed them to me over the lip of the bathroom stall.  The sight of those jeans, gloriously clean and unremarkable in every way, was one of the most relieving sights of my life.  The green pharmacy cross in Paris is its only rival.

The pharmacist was sympathetic when I threw myself at her feet.  The little paper bag she handed me contained fairy crystals that, when administered with the magic words (S’IL VOUS PLAIT POUR L’AMOUR DU CHRIST), would grow me a whole new esophagus.  I swung that bag in my arm like it was Charlie’s winning ticket.  At Olivier’s, where he and D were stuffing clothes into suitcases and generally behaving like responsible people preparing for a road trip, I coiled into a boil, popped three pills, and squeezed my eyes shut.

My mood darkened as the morning progressed.  It’s difficult to maintain a darkened mood when you’re with Olivier and his older sister Anne-Cecile.  Anne-Ce, who was my first ally in France, running damage control for my younger, spottier self who made a social gaffe every thirty seconds or so: she buoys up everyone around her.  She and Oliv don’t ever really stop laughing.  Never.  And Anne-Ce’s husband Nadim, who sat in the navigator’s chair of the tiny French car we piloted towards Lyon, was a charmer.  He had lived in Canada for a few years once upon a time and counted himself as one of us.  We adored him as much as Anne-Ce did.

It should have been paradise, being shoehorned into that minuscule car with people I loved.  But: the drugs had not worked.  I developed a fever; when we stopped for snacks, I bought a pot of yogurt and sat at a curb beside a public toilet to eat it, one agonizing spoonful at a time.  Olivier did what I would ordinarily do: bought chocolate and candy and potato chips and goofed around with the plastic souvenir display and pushed every button on the drink dispenser just to see what would happen.  I ached, watching him.  Even D recovered from car sickness and was glowing with the good time.

I would have traded in my left foot.  My hair.  Any joy I’d have in the next five years, just to be restored to normal for that one day that I’d never get to repeat again.  Self-pity: the last stronghold of the sufferer.  We drove into a thunderstorm and saw lightening crack down in a field just meters from our car, putting up a column of smoke.  I wished I had been standing under it.

But, salvation: Anne-Ce, in true Dewavrin form, noticed a situation developing and came up with a plan to salvage my own life from the pits to which it had descended.  Before we reached Lyon she had made me a doctor’s appointment and had drawn a map in my Moleskin of how to get there from our hotel.  The map is a crooked V, with the Rhône up one arm and the Saône up the other, and two Xs in the middle, one for the Best Western and one for Dr. Guillot.  No treasure map has ever mattered more.

I hardly remember the walk to the doctor’s office, though I still carry the feeling of tempered doom when we stepped from the sun-drenched sidewalk into the darkness of the ancient building.   In the waiting room, Kate and William smirked at us from the cover of gossip magazines.  Stupid Kate.  She probably never had a sore throat in her life.  No sore throats, and then a prince to marry.  I loathed her.

There was no receptionist.  Just a doctor who went back and forth between the waiting are and an exam room that looked more like Dickensian smoking chamber, all books and dark wood and the impression of dusty wisdom.  She shined a thin light down my throat and said, with delicious concern, “Oh la la.”  I began my upswing.  Having a professional confirm your situation is worth the sympathy of at least ten friends.  I wanted to hug her.  My voice was only at a whisper, but I must have been basically okay (ie. not edging the gravesite like I had thought) because as she tapped on a circa-1994 computer I managed to ask one little question: would I still be able to drink at the wedding?

“Are you the one getting married?  No?”  She flourished the prescription paper at me.  ”Then do as the French do.”

The placebo effect had taken hold even before I paid for the drugs.  I must have had an extra spring in my step because Derek suggested we go sit by the river to watch the sunset.  For a brief, soaring moment that seemed like the excellent idea.  We’d enjoy our first night in Lyon like normal people, indulging and cooing and strolling the quays.  But when I tried to reply, the pain swooped in on me like a bloodless bird of prey.  I gripped his arm to stay upright.  All right, he said.  Don’t push it.

I was asleep inches before timbering onto the bed.  Derek shook me awake for the drugs.  It was a whole performance: one needed swallowing, the other needed to dissolve on my tongue (shaddup), and the last needed mixing in a glass of water.  I think the French design drugs this way as a preventative measure, to make sure you’re really desperate enough for that painkiller that you’ll spin three times with hand on your nose while naming the ancient kings in just for the right take one.  Afterwards, D went on a romantic walking tour all by himself.

I woke the next morning and did not move.  There was too much at stake.  I stared at a banana peel and prayed.  I prayed to the same god that orchestrated delivery of clean pants over the door of a bathroom stall.  The one that had gotten me over to France in the first place, and set my life down among the Dewavrin family.  There was nothing else to attach to, so that god became the banana peel.  I stared at it.  It stared at me.  Okay?  Okay.

OH GLORY IN THE HIGHEST HEAVENS PEACE ON EARTH JINGLE BELLS

People, I have never been so relieved.  I ate and ate and ate just for the pleasure of it, because I has once thought that I would never be able to eat again and would eventually roll off like a tumbleweed, there goes Megan, she got The Strep and that was the end of her.  Nope, all of that gloom and doom lifted and suddenly I was dancing through the street, eating the scratchiest things I could find just to flip pathology the bird: crutons, potato chips, carrots.  God, it was good.

And so was the wedding.  The Catholic mass, the twilight champagne toast, the rock ‘n roll dance floor where we sweated off the ten extra pounds we’d been carrying since Camembert and Red Wine happened to us.  I wish I had photos, yes, but maybe that was my trade.  Camera for health.  A transaction I’ll never know about, happening in some spectral universe outside of my experience.  If being sick for a day or two made everything afterwards feel that good, well – maybe it was almost worth it.

At the Rodin Museum, with Thinking Man in the background. Was he also tormented by The Strep? "If only there was a cure..."

It was an unlikely day to find a new home.  A Sunday, and raining.  I stood in D’s bathroom combing my hair, a nest of post-shower frizz, not quite wet, not quite dry.  It was a terrible moment.  Nothing to look forward to but twenty minutes of plain, bare-minimum grooming, looking at myself framed by a grubby mirror.

We had agreed to move in together, but were approaching the actual work of it like we usually do: unsystematically, haphazardly, glacially slow.  From time to time I would leave the bathroom, looking not too much better than when I had gone in, and he would say “What about this one?” and we’d squint together at the dusky photographs and unpromising grocery lists of features.  I did not hold out much hope.

I have friends who have blithely mined the Internet for all they could ever need: toasters, bed frames, a ride to Montreal, an adoring husband.  My own cat came from a meek online classified that pierced me with love before I even laid eyes on him.  But a home seems like an odd thing to seek out that way.  A home should not preexist you.  You should not see photos of it online with someone else’s clothes draped over the shower rod, and someone else’s bed where yours might be.  You should need more than a simple checklist – two bedrooms, south-facing, laundry on-site – in order to find the place you will return to at the end of every day, the place you will wake up in, dance in, drink in, weep in, write in, bathe in, mope in, make plans in.  Homes are too intimate.  My criteria for the right place was too nuanced, too indescribable to find a match among what Kajiji had to offer.

This one, D said, has a pool in the building.  We examined the water, which was a surreal colour of blue.

I sighed.  I have a tendency to get defeated easily by things; I feel strong and optimistic, and then I see a cluttered shelf or a browned apple core and I lose all hope.  The rain did not help.  The leaden bellyful of pancakes that I carried and caressed all morning did not help.  The hair and hair dryer and the melancholic vision in the bathroom mirror did not help.

That one, I said, pointing to the last one we’d seen, where we’d lingered for some time.  Let’s just go see it.  Let’s just get the first one over with.  For psychological reasons, if nothing else.

D is not like me, thank goodness.  The everyday mess of life does not weigh on him quite so oppressively.  He was just looking for a home that afternoon, while I was also fighting my hair, planning my groceries, thinking about taxes, the next day’s work, the guilty shadows of unanswered emails and forgotten birthdays.  This would all be fine if I could systematize these thoughts, find solutions, put out each fire one by one.  But I become manically fragmented—I start work on one problem, then wring my hands and sidestep to another.  It’s maddening for me.  I can’t imagine what it must be like for him.

I mean, it’s not cheap, said D, leaning back in his desk chair, eating a pear.  I did not know about pears before D, not really.  Now they are one of the many daily objects that suggest him to me when I’m otherwise not paying attention.

But look at the fireplace, I said.  We should go see it.  We really should.

He pointed out that the lease would start April 1^st.  It was March.  Could we find someone to sublet his place in time?

Walnut floors!  I said.  White pillars!

D is not given to being spontaneous.  He likes to think things over.  When there’s a shirt for sale that he like, he will visit it fondly over several weeks, fingering the stitches at the cuffs, picturing himself putting it on and going out somewhere.  It will take him a long time to buy it, or not buy it.

It won’t hurt to see it, I told him.  I leaned in the bathroom doorway.  He has sprawled across the chair like a towel that had been thrown there, giving himself time with the decision.  See the apartment, or not see it.  We would have to go out in the rain.  We would have to remember all the questions you’re supposed to remember when you’re interrogating a landlord.  We would have to take that decisive step forward, out from the abstract world of imagining and into the real-time moment of making it happen.  But we wouldn’t have to commit, not quite yet, not really.  It was just a recon mission.  The apartment looked acceptable; we’d check it out.  It would jolt us out of our rut.  Get us a little more excited, a little less daunted by the work of searching.  So, in the end, out we went.

Freezing rain over Ottawa.  Water that pooled in the streets was filmed with ice, shattered by bus tires and Wellington boots.  We sat close and damp on the #1 Rockland.  The apartment was on the same street where I’d lived before, a few blocks further West.  It was odd to get off the bus at the old familiar stop but turn the other way, past a dental office I’d never seen, a spa, a pair of Golden Retrievers looking sullenly at us from the window of a red-brick townhouse.  We stopped trying to keep our feet dry and trudged right through the puddles.  It seemed a mistake to have come outside at all; the weather thrashed at us.  These were not the circumstances under which we’d find our home.  I wanted honey-coloured sunlight spilling into breakfast nooks.  I wanted the wedding-white smell of spring pouring in every open window, the prospect of summer barbecues and lingering evenings.  When we finally got to the apartment we barreled right in.  We were far more eager to be warm and dry for a few minutes than to cast a calculating eye on the house’s exterior.

We followed the landlady into a living room with pale green walls and a floor that reminded me of Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, who endures the horrors of a freezing wartime trench by imagining himself sliding across a polished dance floor in dry, warm, white sweatsocks (Slaughterhouse Five, 62).  The comfort of it, and the reckless promise.  Veins of dark wood patterned into the pale walnut.  Old-fashioned hot-water radiators painted the same pale green as the walls.  A white pillar in the small back room that suggested regency.  Large, heavy doorknobs.  Deep windowsills.  Everything seemed a little bit more deliberate and ornate than it needed to be.  And because no one was living there at the time, I could very easily, very freely graft my life onto its warm walls.

We felt less of the rain when we finally reemerged.  We were chattier with each other than we’d been all day.  There were moments, D told me, when he wasn’t so sure.  And other moments when he knew that we absolutely had to have this apartment.

I know, I said.  I know!

We were so exhilarated that we ran to the bus stop, a block or two away, wanting more than ever to be drafting the next set of plans.  He noticed his phone was missing when we got there, and we had to turn around and look for it, poking our toes around murky-black puddles and scanning the gutters and sidewalks.  It was an odd thing, to be forced down from the thrill of finding our home so immediately and unexpectedly, and made instead to perform a systematic retracing of our steps in order to find something else.

And we did find it, in the hands of a girl who was huddled below the awning of a computer repair shop.  She was calling everyone on D’s contact list see if someone could claim it.  She was nice.  She was, to me, a sign.  This neighbourhood will look out for us, I told D.  We belong here.  D is not prone to seeing things that way, but he was relieved and supple, clutching his phone, forgetting the rain, loving the moment.  We’re definitely onto something, he said.

So you can force it, and you should force it.  All the time.”

- Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist

I’m consumed with madness, but it’s more or less the helpful kind.  Back soon.

This morning we announced on our website the names of the writers who have been short-listed for the 2010 CBC Literary Awards competition.

Unfortunately, your name was not among them. However, we still wanted to congratulate you on your accomplishment!

Making the long-list is no easy feat. In such a competitive year (we received more than 5,000 submissions) your text rose to the top and was considered one of the best by some of our country’s finest writers. This is an incredible achievement!

We encourage you to keep on writing and resubmit to the competition next year. We will be launching the 2012 competition in the fall. So be sure to bookmark www.cbc.ca/literaryawards and check back at the end of summer.

Again, congratulations for making it this far!! And thanks for writing!!

Awards Administrator

I like my terrible thesis.  I wouldn’t want it to be any less terrible.  I wouldn’t want chapter six to begin any other way than it does: “At the end of July the rain comes.”  It makes me laugh at myself.  Was I writing a sub-equatorial saga in the depths of monsoon season?  No.  I was writing a novella about a little girl who drowns in a manure pit.  Yes.  She drowns in pig shit.  It took me this long to realize how funny the whole tortured effort of this thesis really is.  I was taking myself so damn seriously at the time.   All of it is contrived, from the awful CanLit title “How We Left and Why” [answer: we drowned in the manure pit] to the affected thousand-yard stare that I spent hours perfecting when I should have been trying to perfect my writing.

The whole book is a revenge fantasy about a terrible friend I had in grade eight.  I’m not sure if I even realized this at the time of writing, though it seems obvious now.  She was a year older, already in high school.  We lived on the same dirt road.  The laws of rural geography decreed that we would be friends.  She was a bully with wildly unpredictable moods.  One day she would be close and conspiratorial with me.  On those days, my heart would soar.  But a week later I would be greeted with an icy stare.  Nothing short of her forgiveness could console me on those dark days.

She lived with her mom, step-dad, and little tiny step-sister.  Theses were the first step-anythings I had ever met, I think.  They did not impress me.  The tiny step-sister got spanked a lot.  The step-dad chain smoked and was rarely around.  The whole family went to a forbidding evangelical church in Durham, and I tagged along to many youth group events where I would invariably make some social faux-pas that would brick up her kindness.  I was strung out on eighth-grade anxiety and thought that having a friend in high school was the most important thing in the world, so I accepted her abuse and lived for the days when she would be sunny and full of big-sister advice.

We went to summer camp together one year, and at the last minute she refused to be my cabin-mate.  We were standing in the trampled soccer field beside the camp mess hall, our luggage piled beside us.  Her mom had just dropped us off.  I cried and groveled and bargained like I usually did, and she relented like she usually did.  This was her camp; she’d been going since she was a kid, and I was a newbie.  I needed her.  I was terrified of being alone, especially because it was the worst camp I’d ever been to in my life.  They organized games that involved eating as much food as we could out of jumbo-sized garbage bags, and they punished us by pouring honey over our heads and then covering us in Rice Krispies and chasing us through the woods to the life-sized crucifix nailed over a Lake Huron bluff. Our counselors performed elaborate skits about our parents being tormented in Hell because they weren’t saved.  By the time I got home, I was fully brainwashed.  I begged my parents to accept Jesus so that their flesh wouldn’t be torn from their bones by demons with forked tongues.  It took a long time to get over that.

In the glorious, much-too-late wisdom of adulthood, I can see that my friend from that era was just as miserable and vulnerable as I was.  She cycled through a long list of vague illnesses in order to avoid school and read books about horses.  She tackled most challenges in her life with a sort of bleak determination that always waned towards the end.  When I finally reached grade nine and joined the cross-country team, so did she.  On every race day, though, she would invariably beg off, claiming she had bronchitis.  She’d pierce me with a look that said, “You’d better not race without me.”  Sometimes I obeyed her.  Gradually, though, I stopped.  I gave up on that terrifying, resentful Jesus, and I gave up on our friendship.

And eight years later I wrote a sickly little novella for course credit in which I drowned her in a manure pit.  Subconsciously, but still.  It helped.

________

“I don’t think this is a good idea,” I say, stepping back and glancing towards the house.  Leslie turns to me in the rain.  She puts a hand on each of my shoulders.

“Adelaide,” she says, in the slow, careful voice she uses when she’s teaching me something.  ”This is for your own good.  Remember when you were afraid of the train?  And when you cried because of Jesus?  And when you were so scared that you crashed my brother’s dirt bike?”

I wilt as she stares at me, gripping harder.

“Answer me.  Do you remember those times?”

“Yes.”

“You’re still so scared.  You haven’t learned anything from me all summer, have you?”

She’s holding my shoulders so tightly that I can feel her fingernails digging into my skin.  She’s starting to talk through her teeth, sounding really angry.

“This is your chance to be brave, Adele.  Like the boys.”

I look past her at the manure pit, which churns in the dark, its stagnant colours shifting and sinking.  A tremendous flash of lightening sparks the world around us and we both look up at the sky.  The rain pours harder and I long for the bright kitchen, my mother’s tender questions, the teddy-bear loaf that I dip into pots of jam…

“Adele,” she says again, her voice softer now.  She drops her hands.  I look down at myself and see four crescent-moon welts where her nails had dug into my skin.  Leslie turns and drags the pallet towards the edge of the pit, grunting with the effort until, finally, it reaches the steep bank and slides down the mud, landing with a thick suction noise on the surface of the manure.  Without even look at me, she scrambles after it, half sliding and half crawling down the bank, reaching out her foot near the bottom, the pink rubber boot nudging the pallet away from the edge.

I step closer.

Leslie climbs onto the pallet and gives a final shove-off with her boot.

“Come on!” she calls, lowering herself onto the wood until she’s kneeling.  I hold onto one of the fence posts and step down the steep bank.  The stench of manure is overwhelming.  I let go of the post and move in a backwards crawl, looking over my shoulder at her, my heart exploding with each beat.  Don’t be scared, I think.  Don’t let her see you be scared.

I’ve almost reached her.  She’s looking up at me, beckoning with one hand, using the other to push her clinging hair away from her face.  She doesn’t notice the pallet starting to tilt, the mud and manure starting to close in around the edges.  She hollers at me again to hurry up before it’s too late–

The raft turns over.  And Leslie disappears.

I’m not sure how fast everything happens.  I stop where I am and look in disbelief at the spot where she was just crouching.  The pallet is on its side and slowly sinking, lit up for a split-second by another flash of lightening, then darkened by thunder.  My mouth falls open and I taste the rain and hot stench.

An arm plunges out of the slime and grabs for the wood, which only pivots and slides upside down.  The hand flails, grips again, pulls hard.  The pallet spins.

I turn and lunge for the fence post above me, my feet churning in the slippery mud, one hand clawing, the other up against the rain…down, my knees grinding into the flesh of the earth, up again… below me I think I hear her voice, tiny in the wind and rain: “Adele!  Help me!  Adelaide!”

As much imagination as real.

[How We Left and Why, 2006]

Belle du Jour: The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl made me get a Brazilian!

It started off as a book club selection.  I had only joined this club a few weeks earlier, but there is nothing like an erotic memoir to abolish all social protocol and draw a group of women closer together (mostly via Facebook messages along the lines of: “The book has been READ!  So much fisting, OMG.”)

It’s difficult to explain why BdJ made me want to undergo a procedure I’d always completely dismissed as painful, expensive, and certainly unnecessary.  It’s not as though the anonymous author dwells on waxing any more than she does on the rest of her extensive beauty regime, which is described in exhaustive, fascinating detail.  Observe her as she prepares for her first-ever client:

“I put the dress over my head then started on make-up.  Foundation, no powder.  A damp tissue applied lightly to take the excess off.  Violet eyeshadow—only a touch.  A dab of silvery white eyeliner just at the inside corner of my eyes.  Cat eyes or not?  Vamp or girlish?  My hand was shaking slightly.  Unwound the mascara, wiped the excess on a tissue, let it sit in the air a moment.  Brushed on one layer.  Then a second…. Gloss.  More gloss.  I thought of the manager’s advice: ‘Men love glossy lips.’  I suppose it doesn’t take a genius to figure out why.” (38)

Reading this just makes me feel exhausted.  Despite many evenings of tutelage by well-meaning female friends, I never caught the make-up  bug.  Once in a while I am struck down by a twisted sense of girlish duty and I splurge on overpriced M.A.C. essentials that I use twice and then forget.  It’s dumb. I am just not interested enough to do the work.

But something about this book pinned me against the wall.  I wanted to copy her in some small, secret way.  No fisting.  No lingerie weakness.  No dedicated phone line.  But, something.  And it hit me on p. 20, when she extols the pleasure of shirking work to indulge in oneself.  Whether private escort or video producer, I thought we would have similar lists: the privilege of sleeping in until noon, of reading a novel for the hell of it, of eating cereal for dinner.  But she predicated her list with something entirely different:

“The benefits of taking a few days off—apart from the chance to catch up on laundry—are largely spiritual.  But one learns a few mundane things as well.  Such as that it’s nice to let hair grow out a bit to get a good, clean waxing.”

Of course!  When you go for a wax, you leave your narcissism in someone else’s hands.  No fumbling with liquid eyeliner before a badly-lit mirror.  All you have to do is show up at the agreed time, take two extra-strength Tylenols, grip the sides of the bed, and think of summer picnics.  Then you get to leave with a feeling of fresh, responsible beauty that lasts longer than Cover Girl and doesn’t require an arsenal of chemical removers the morning after.  Brazilian, you are my new friend.

I’ve thought a lot about this.  No other procedure needs only one terrifying, sky-high word to tell us exactly what it is, with no modifier.  Its milder cousins have simple, uncomplicated handles: Eyebrow wax.  Upper-lip wax.  Bikini wax.  But then there’s the elusive distant relative, purveyor of many Google searches and disputed definitions, striking exhilarated fear in the hearts of girlfriends everywhere.

Brazilian.

The word stands alone, exotic and sexy, diviner of destination weddings and fierce cocktails and bad behaviour.  Its promise of eroticism and bikini-level confidence is a powerful motivator.  What else could compel me (and so many other women) to undergo a painful, expensive, temporary procedure to please, at most, two people?  Me and him?  [Then again, if you’re a London call girl, I suppose you could chalk it up to a public service.]

Still, the prospect terrified me.

“Think of it as a rite of passage,” D counselled as I tried to summon the courage to go through with it.  We were standing in the coffee-coloured slush under the 417 overpass, just a few blocks from the spa.  My palms were starting to sweat.

“Will you do it too?” I pleaded.  “Solidarity, and all that?”

He just looked at me with the comfortable sympathy of someone who was not about to have his flesh torn from his bones behind the closed door of a medievalist torture chamber.

In the end, I did not scream or wish poxes upon all men.  I’m no dummy.  I prefer my men unpoxed.  I did squeak a little, and said something close to “YIKES” when the aesthetician ripped off a particularly well-forested bit of myself.  To survive the indignation, I imagined pouring hot wax down D’s pants and then tearing it off in quick, deliberate swathes.  This was unfair, since he had never asked me to do this, and was only dimly aware of what “Brazilian” even meant.  But it helps the suffering female to imagine the deliberate application of pain on her man, and to picture him screeching “YIKES” in increasingly panicked tones.

Here is a representation, as close as I can write it, of the whole experience: at first, it does not seem so incredible that women would pay enormous amounts for this. The hot wax feels great.  It’s relaxing and deeply reassuring.  Oh, okay, your mind says.  This is like a hot tub.  Like a warm, forgiving loofa. The aesthetician is telling you about her midterms.  You are imagining summertime and fragrant gardens.  Together, the two of you have created this oasis of detached experience.  You want it to keep going.  It stirs a deeply satisfied vibration in your throat.  It’s worth every dollar.  It’s Heaven.

But then she turns on you.  The searing pain knifes you with incredible, sudden violence.  When you look in the eyes of your aesthetician, she looks back with bald-faced innocence.  Your body starts to remember that level of deception.  Pain follows bliss.  This is what you’re taught at a women’s spa: don’t ever get too comfortable.  She is tearing you open and branding your lady bits with a cattle prod.  You will never have children again.   You will never enjoy sex.  Your eyes sting.  You are ruining everything, and there’s no way out.  But then, slowly, your mind begins to balance out.  When you’re going through hell, you tell yourself, keep going. You remember why you’re here.  Look, there’s a little more hair, right over there.  Ready?  Yes.  No.  On the count of three.  Deep breath.

I think I’ll do it again.  I liked coming up against that clean, oiled feeling of accomplishment, of spending money rashly and putting up with all that pain just to fan a small, pale fire of vanity.  The uselessness and irresponsibility of it is appealing to me.

“Je ne regrette rien,” the anonymous author writes towards the end of BdJ.  “If the textbooks are to be believed, this makes me a psychopath.  If the glossy magazines are to be believed, this makes me an independent modern woman.”

Amen to both.