Be Ready for the Lightning, page 6
I miss you. I wrote you a song, and I’ll try to get it on a tape soon. I sit up on the deck sometimes and think about you. Then the words I like you were crossed out and followed by That didn’t sound big enough. I adore you. Your letters are so great. Yer so great. Yours, Ted.
I read the short note probably fifty times, and I turned the postcard over (Nessebar, Bulgaria, a headless statue in front of a lot of red-roofed buildings) and then back over and then back over again. I looked at Ted’s name, signed in messy cursive; the rest of the note was in block letters.
My mother called up that she was headed out, and I could hardly wet my mouth enough to shout back a brief Okay, see you later. My father was out on a job, even though it was only days before Christmas.
As I clutched the postcard so hard it started to take on the shape of my fingers, I heard a knock, and I thought for one brief moment that it was strange my mother was knocking. But I realized then it was glass, not wood, being rapped on. The patio door in the kitchen.
When I got downstairs, I saw Conrad in his familiar post-incident form—hair messed up, hands curled in on themselves. The surprise was Al holding him up. Al was too tall to put Conrad’s arm around his shoulders, so he was supporting him from behind in a sort of awkward bear hug. He had a scruffy beard, which he must have grown in his first university semester. He was home for the holidays, and a bruised Conrad was apparently his gift.
I opened the door, and Al lifted Conrad inside like a child.
“I’m fine, man, you don’t need to carry me over the threshold.”
“You weren’t so fine an hour ago.” Then, to me, Al said, “Hey, Veda, happy all the holidays. How are you?”
“I’m fine. When did you get home? And how did you—?” I gestured to Conrad.
“I just got in yesterday. We were out for a drink. Apparently you don’t need ID in the classy establishment where Connie works.”
“And?”
“And suffice to say, I think your brother needs a new job as of today.”
Conrad gave me his impish basement smile as he lowered himself awkwardly into the closest chair, but it felt different in front of Al. When he saw I hadn’t returned it, he said, “It’s just a busted finger. My beautiful face is fine, we will all be relieved to hear.”
“Well, you look like hell,” said Al. “To be honest, you didn’t look like a million bucks even before that guy came over.” Turning, he asked, “Are your parents home?” and I shook my head no. “Okay. Conrad, why don’t you take a shower. Veda and I will figure out some dinner and get Annie over here, if she’s around.”
Conrad gave us each a jaunty salute, the swelling of his twisted finger spreading the others wide.
Alone with him in the kitchen, I studied Al, who was holding on to the back of the chair Conrad had sat in. I noticed he was wearing a different cologne than his old high school body spray, something spicy and subtle. More than anything, more than the beard, that smell drove home that Al really had left us.
“How long are you home for?”
“Just a week. I’ve got papers to write. But my mom really wanted me to come home.” Spreading his own, uninjured fingers out on the pine chair back, he said, “So he’s still…”
When he didn’t go on, I nodded.
Al scrubbed a hand over his face and beard, a gesture too old for his eighteen years. “Has it been going on the whole time? I thought it was just those two things last year.”
“Now and then.”
“What an idiot.”
I exhaled all in a rush. What an idiot. That seemed so easy to say. “Yeah,” I said, the one small word swelling in my mouth like something too hot to swallow.
“Sorry,” said Al. “I just think he needs to get his shit together. I can’t believe people still even get into fistfights. This isn’t a Springsteen song.”
I looked at Al. So tall, so steady. Busy writing university papers. His smooth, unscarred skin interrupted only by the new beard and a couple of blemishes on his forehead. I wanted to take it for myself, greedily, his healthiness, his bright future, his grown-up smell, like a blanket I could strip off him for warmth.
“How are you doing this year?”
“I’m okay.”
After a moment, he said, “I left. You could too, you know. When you graduate. You don’t have to come to Alberta. You could go wherever. Toronto. Halifax. Whatever.”
I smiled up at Al. He put his big hand on my head, clumsily patting me. Annie would have shrugged him off, but I liked it. His big-brothering was of a wildly different brand than Conrad’s, and I couldn’t let myself look too long at the comfort of it, but that moment felt good.
I knew I wouldn’t listen to him, though.
—
By the time the Tragically Hip concert I’d given Conrad tickets for rolled around, he was on a curfew and a suspended sentence for something else, some man who was hassling a girl who was maybe Conrad’s girlfriend or maybe wasn’t. Because of the curfew, he couldn’t go to the concert. He gave the tickets to me and Annie, and Annie talked me into waiting around afterwards, so we could meet the band. We stood in a crowd of people across the street from the General Motors Centre, where the bus was parked, and the lead singer, Gord Downie, signed my forearm with a Sharpie, because I hadn’t thought to bring any paper or a CD with me.
After that I told Annie that I was tired and went straight home. When I got there, I licked Gord Downie’s signature and pressed it against Conrad’s arm, so that he had the autograph too, ghostly and inverted.
SEVEN
Annie kept her high school promise, and the summer before our first year at UBC, over the protests of both sets of parents about the debt we were accruing, we moved into a cramped apartment in Marpole.
“You’re actually farther from school than if you lived at home,” Annie’s father had moaned, nearly apoplectic with horror at the wasted expense.
Conrad was out of our parents’ place by then, into a little place in Gastown. He’d moved in before it got hip and now took great delight in paying a fraction of the rent his graphic designer and yoga teacher neighbours were being charged.
When discussions with our parents about the debt became too much, Annie was good at ending the conversation. “Think of how much more I’d be spending on flights if I’d ended up at McGill. And,” she would say to her mother, “French boys.”
After spending my freshman year pinning my hopes to Ted’s increasingly infrequent postcards, I finally started dating. The first time was a double date that Annie more or less tricked me into. I was surprised at how easy it was. You just sat there and asked a boy questions about himself and touched your face and hair a lot. To keep up your end of the conversation, you just rephrased what he said a moment before and repeated it back to him, sometimes as a question. So it was really hard for you having the pressure of being first-string soccer and lacrosse? That makes sense.
It wasn’t that I didn’t like the boys. I liked them a lot. But they felt temporary, like something I was taking care of for a friend. They felt like people I should be polite to, go out of my way to keep happy, like house guests.
I had a series of boyfriends in those years, mostly a little older, all very busy. They worked a lot or travelled a lot or were in very demanding school programmes, like the medical student who fell asleep on our first date. I was accommodating and uncomplaining and silly and made lots of little jokes with these boyfriends, who would break up with me eventually, saying things like “I’ll never find another girl like you” or “No one else lets me just be myself.” Every time it happened, I was both heartbroken and relieved.
These were the times that Annie and I were closest, though she scolded me for the way I was with the boyfriends, the passiveness and silliness and chatter. Sometimes she said I was a bad feminist, that I was letting these boys (Annie called them men) walk all over me. She read The Rules when we were in second year and made fun of it, but she also said that, seriously, it did kind of make some good points, and men were, after all, men.
—
In my second year, my physiology class was strongly encouraged to attend a visiting professor’s evening lecture. The prof was a research audiologist from North Carolina, and she spoke about two studies she had been involved with: one regarding the effect of posture on tympanic membrane displacement measurements and the other centred around sensorineural hearing loss and its effect on psychoacoustic measurements.
“Oh my God, that sounds boring,” said Annie, reading the notice, while I got dressed to head to the lecture. “And I’m in Engineering.”
At the lecture, I sat beside two girls I knew from my bio lab, who were playing MASH, the fortune-telling game, passing the paper to one another and turning their snorty laughs into coughs. They had offered to let me play too, but I’d declined. I couldn’t stand the thought of giving them Ted’s name, seeing the round eyes and mouths: Who’s Ted? I don’t know a Ted. Tell us about him! How to explain Ted, who despite my confidence in high school, still hadn’t come home. But I couldn’t bear to leave him off the list of possibilities for my future, a superstitious paranoia.
I knew the basic functions and elements of the ear from my biology and physiology courses. I’d always had a secret fondness for it, its twisty diagrams, its tininess. But I’d never thought much about audiology. The visiting professor had geared her talk mainly to the master’s students attending, but at the end, she spoke generally about the field, and I was fascinated.
“The ear,” she said, “is tiny but hugely influential. Hearing loss affects every aspect of life, physically, psychologically and socially. As you know, the ear affects balance, orientation. I could make you experience a feeling of falling simply by manipulating the conditions of the ear. What we think of as hearing only scratches the surface of clinical research.”
After she finished, I went down the steps of the lecture hall and hung around waiting to talk to her, along with a handful of other hopeful-looking nerds. For me, it wasn’t dissimilar to when Annie and I had waited to meet the Tragically Hip. When my turn came, I asked the researcher what I should do if I was interested in learning more about the field, and she offered to put me in touch with a local audiologist.
“You aren’t qualified to help out on tests or procedures, but they might have something administrative you could work on,” she said.
As I thanked her, I found myself marvelling at the words, the sound of them, inside my head and out, my ears prickling with every little ambient noise.
I got a part-time job processing patient and insurance information at the clinic the researcher had referred me to. I answered phones, booked appointments and tidied up the little break area behind the testing rooms. I was glad to leave my job waiting tables at an off-campus Italian restaurant, where other undergrads went on dates and took their visiting parents and where my weak wrists ached from carrying heavy serving trays. Annie worked at a bar across the street from the Italian restaurant and grumbled about my new work schedule, which was now different from hers.
—
I started getting headaches soon after I started working at the clinic and gearing my classes toward audiology. It took me a week or two to work out that I was clenching my teeth constantly and squinting.
Annie pointed out the squinting. “You’ll give yourself crow’s feet,” she said, her fingers touching the corners of her own eyes.
I was listening too hard, straining to hear and to filter sounds I’d never paid attention to before. I was listening to the water in the pipes in our tiny apartment, to the sound of Annie’s bare feet squeaking on the parquet floors. I was listening for sounds that weren’t even there. This is what was causing the clenching and squinting that gave me the headaches, and it was also affecting my posture; I was starting to hunch over. When I realized this, I told Annie.
“Well, cut it out,” she said, amused. “Or you’ll end up as a squinty hunchback with terrible headaches and fantastic hearing.”
“That’s not really how it works—the hearing part, anyway.”
“Still, my advice is probably worth listening to,” said Annie, and she laughed at her own joke.
Amelia, the ear, nose and throat specialist who owned the audiology clinic, had made things homey and stylish, with couches and bright cushions, a real stove and a spring water dispenser. She was one of the new Vancouverites, an upscale hippie, yoga devotee, with a pleasantly jumbled philosophy of sage smudging, vegetarianism and earth-mother feminism. The break room was surprisingly comfortable, not like the sterile, tiled kitchen I’d expected. There was a sign on the wall that said, What do you call an audiologist’s assistant? And below, in a smaller font, it said, A hearing aid!
I decided to put my own sign up beside it, and Amelia came in while I was taping it to the wall. It was a cartoon I had cut out, a sketchy outline drawing of three old men sitting on a bench. The first had a speech bubble that said, “Windy, innit?” and the second had one that said, “No, it’s Thursday.” The third man’s bubble read, “So am I—let’s go get a pint.”
“Is it okay?” I said. I hadn’t asked about putting it up.
Amelia smiled. “It’s great,” she said.
—
Conrad would pick me up from work sometimes, after I got the job with Amelia. He always had a car, no matter how crummy his job was. I didn’t know why—he didn’t really need one. He would drive to the corner store, to the library, anywhere he went, even if it was only a few blocks away. As if he were hiding.
There were fewer girlfriends these days, though he still worked at a strip club, albeit a different one. He had Annie and me over once or twice a month for beers and movies. He rented surprising things: Amélie, Moulin Rouge!, Ghost World—movies I tried to get my tired, often absent boyfriends to watch but never could. Conrad hardly ever came to our place, though, for movies or anything else. Annie complained about it, but there was some prickly dread that made me stand up to her. Conrad and I both knew that the less he went out, the better. He started ordering things online. He bought all his furniture from IKEA and assembled it at home. He was the first person I knew to use one of those online grocery services. Insofar as he could, he opted out of the world.
—
After one of my breakups, in our fourth year, Annie and I went drinking at the dive bar closest to our apartment instead of the good bar—because why bother with good on a shitty night? as Annie said.
“Well, he was a moron anyway,” said Annie, putting down the three pints that she had carried from the bar in the triangle of her long fingers. She didn’t mind going out, even though finals were approaching; she had already accepted a job as an associate engineer at a big firm downtown. I’d start full-time admin work at the clinic in the fall, while I saved toward my master’s degree.
“Simon wasn’t a moron. He just published a paper in—”
“These are for you,” said Annie, sliding two of the pints in front of me. “One for you and one for your black little heart.”
“Thanks, friend. You always know what sweet words will cheer me up.”
“And you, me,” said Annie, who had also recently split from a boyfriend. “Will you cut my hair tonight? I want to cut it all off.”
“And you want me to do it? I don’t know how to cut hair.”
“Just chop it off. We can use the sewing scissors. Boom. Done. I could pull it off, right?”
“Of course, but I think you should wait. We should at least be sober. You’ll end up looking like Ziggy Stardust, if I cut your hair after all this beer.” I gestured to the pints, which were rapidly disappearing.
Annie said, “We should eat seventy chocolate bars tonight. Both broken up with in the same month. I’m pretty sure there’s a cosmic law that says in a case like this we get at least one night where nothing has calories or consequences.”
“Seventy seems extreme. How about sixty-eight?”
“Each?”
“Obviously, get your own chocolate bars.”
“Okay. And what else? No consequences. Key a cop car?”
“Boring. How about anonymous sex, no condoms?”
“Oh, like, none at all. Extra-none, somehow.”
“How would that work?”
“Not sure. Maybe make him rub his dick in the dirt first or something?”
“Yeah, that works.”
“Anything else for our night free of consequences?”
“I’m mostly excited about the chocolate bars, to be honest.”
“Me too.”
“Oh,” said Annie, in a different voice. “I meant to tell you something. But then after the Simon stuff, I completely forgot.” She took a long pull from her beer. “I guess it’s depressing timing after getting dumped, but. Al’s getting married.”
“What? Who is he marrying?” The idea of any of us getting married, actually married, was jarring, as if Annie had told me Al was becoming an astronaut and being shot into outer space.
“Some girl he’s been dating for awhile, apparently. Who cares, he’s twenty-four; they’ll probably get divorced.”
“Said his loving sister.”
Annie hoisted her pint in a sarcastic salute and drank.
—
Al’s fiancée was a Belgian exchange student, but she had family in Montreal, and that’s where the wedding would be the following summer. Annie and I planned the trip together, our first post-university, proper grown-up excursion. Neither of us had ever been to a wedding before. A week before leaving, we were sitting on our balcony with Conrad and his new girlfriend, Marta. His unusual presence at our place felt like a special occasion.
“I have a theory,” Conrad said, “that whoever mumbles the most in a conversation is the passive participant. That mumbling is a subconscious abdication of dominance. You know? Like you think the other person’s input is more important.”
I laughed. “Well, voice volume is often connected to hearing. So I don’t know about that one. The loudest person might just be the deafest, not the most dominant.”
“But I’m not talking about volume, I’m talking about mumbling. That’s different from speaking softly.”
