Where We Live, page 16
His hands are shaking. He kneels by the boy, sits him up. A bruise is coming up on his forehead, already. Shit. The kid looks dazed.
The woman hands him the kid’s glasses, which must have gone flying. I can’t believe you did that, she says. You let the door swing back on him.
Typical man, another woman, says.
The rage is like a soft-nosed bullet expanding in him. But his other need is more urgent, distracting him. He picks the kid up. Sorry, bud, I thought you had it, he says.
The woman who picked up the glasses plants herself in front of him. Her mouth is ugly. What’s his name?
What?
What’s the boy’s name?
Fuck, she thinks he’s abducting the kid. As if.
Oscar, he says. It’s Oscar.
Is that your name? the woman asks the kid. Do you know this man?
The boy looks terrified. Thanks a lot, crazy bitch, Ben thinks.
But the boy nods. He gets a grip around Ben’s neck, and he nods.
22
My generation, Olivia says, is the first one in ninety years that will be less well off than our parents.
I think that’s an oversimplification, Cleo says.
My generation won’t be able to afford to own a house, Olivia says. We won’t have pensions. Your generation, Olivia says, has destroyed the environment and blown up the economy. Now we have to deal with it.
Cleo feels her muscles sag, her bones turn to lead. She wants to sit down, to lie down, but they have only started their climb. She can’t stop yet.
It’s not that she hasn’t thought much of this herself. She’s quite aware that expansion can’t be maintained indefinitely. It’s that she can’t bear the blaming. It’s not fair. She thinks of her birth family, living off-grid, eating what they grew, wearing hand-me-downs. And her foster family, frugal and practical farmers. Cleo had not owned a new article of clothing until she was twelve; she had worn Zellers jeans and sweatshirts until she went to university. She had been given a radio-CD player for her sixteenth birthday and had bought a used electric typewriter in grade eleven, to type up her assignments.
I had much less than you, growing up, she says. My generation had very little compared to yours.
It’s not about what you gave us materially, Olivia says. That only raised our expectations for a standard of living that is unrealistic for us.
I don’t think it’s that simple, Cleo says. You can’t lay everything on one generation.
It’s your generation that has enjoyed the best of everything, and caused huge economic and environmental problems.
Hardly, Cleo says. I was born in 1968. You have an overly simplified grasp of history.
You are so naïve, Olivia says. I find it difficult to talk to you.
Cleo doesn’t have the words to describe the sensations running through her at this moment. Alarm? Anger? Panic? Nothing is adequate. Also, there would be an appropriate way to respond to her daughter’s rudeness, but she can’t think right now what it would be.
Right now she has to concentrate on getting up the Grouse Grind.
Olivia is home for a brief visit. She’s assiduously dividing her time between Cleo and Trent, although staying at Cleo’s house, her own home. Cleo has booked the week off work, this visit, to give herself more time with her daughter. To be available when Olivia wants her to be.
It’s early May, and a day borrowed from summer. Warm already, and cloudless. A week day, but the trail is busy with climbers. Cleo hasn’t climbed Grouse Mountain for years, probably not since she was in her thirties. It’s fierce. The trail is steep and twisty and knotty with roots of arbutus and pine. Olivia’s idea, and Cleo was glad to take her up on it. Olivia likes to do things outdoors; she’s in a better mood when she’s doing something physical, even strenuous. But it’s requiring a lot of exertion. Cleo runs a couple of times a week, but not up steep hills.
She says nothing, for a few minutes, just climbs, tries to keep up with Olivia, who is climbing effortlessly ahead of her in her Lululemon shorts and tank top and her deep-treaded running shoes.
Olivia calls over her shoulder, Am I going too fast for you? She doesn’t slow.
Nope, Cleo says. I’m fine.
What does Olivia want from her?
Olivia has just finished the first year of her master’s program in economics. She has chosen to go further in that field, rather than apply for law school. She has a research job that pays her tuition and part of her living, and another job that covers the rest. She knows more than Cleo does, now, about her field;— she quotes experts and has theory at her fingertips. Cleo is not uninformed; she reads. But Olivia dismisses her contributions to the conversations.
More unbearable than Olivia’s rudeness is the idea that her daughter feels so hopeless about the state of the world, the future. Her own future.
An hour into the climb, Cleo feels she has finally got her second wind. Endurance has always been her specialty. Now she’s right behind Olivia, keeping a good pace.
Cleo says to Olivia’s back: I think things are actually getting better. People are trying to do financially and environmentally responsible things. We’ve learned from the last couple of recessions. And cars are going electric, and there’s so much research and new technology in building, these days.
You don’t know anything about it.
But I’m agreeing with you, Cleo says.
No. You clearly don’t understand anything about it. You shouldn’t pretend you do.
Why are you so gratuitously rude? Cleo asks. She has asked this more than once. She makes an effort to keep her voice light, to express curiosity rather than accusation.
I’m sorry if I seemed rude! I’m just being blunt.
It’s rude and hurtful, Cleo says, mildly.
Olivia has stopped and is standing, legs apart, a little above Cleo. She has taken out her water bottle; she unscrews the lid, though it’s one of the straw types, throws back her head, and drinks deeply.
Cleo stops climbing, though it’s difficult to do that on such a steep stretch.
Olivia’s poise is victorious. But what has she won? Why beat down Cleo?
Cleo climbs up the few meters that separate them and sits on a gnarly root. She takes out her own water bottle.
Is this climb too much for you? Olivia demands.
Maybe Cleo’s daughter is just a bully.
Trent is often bullying, and Olivia used to pick on Sam mercilessly.
But she was a paragon of sweet reasonableness and gentleness, according to her friends’ parents and her teachers.
It’s only with Cleo now that she shows her teeth.
What does she want?
They’re two-thirds of the way up. Cleo doesn’t remember the mountain being this steep or high. She pauses to catch her breath; other hikers and even runners surge up past her.
Olivia looks back at her. Are you going to make it?
Is she going to make it?
She remembers Trent saying to her: Why do you even get into those discussions with her?
Think of something else.
It’s difficult; Olivia sidesteps questions about her courses, her social life, even her pastimes.
Cleo says: Oh! I heard from Lacey that Claire and her fellow are planning to get engaged! Is that even a thing? Doesn’t getting engaged just mean planning to get married? How can you be planning to get engaged?
I wouldn’t know, Olivia says.
Claire had been Olivia’s best friend, up until high school at least.
I just thought it was a bit absurd, Cleo says.
Olivia stops, turns. I don’t find gossip very interesting, okay?
Cleo says: I don’t understand why you are so rude. You speak to me so disrespectfully.
You’re just so frustrating, Olivia says.
I can guarantee you, Cleo says, that if you speak to a partner the way you speak to me, he will leave you. Guaranteed.
A spasm passes over Olivia’s face. I don’t speak to anyone but you this way, she says, furiously.
Right, then, Cleo says.
She can feel the sting of tears, and hot hard lumps have risen in her throat. Her legs are like heavy pegs. She stumps past Olivia on the pathway, forges upward doggedly.
In the evening Cleo cooks dinner while Olivia and Sam play a complicated board game involving tokens, dice, game cards, and several different kinds of possible moves. It’s like a mashup of several different board games and Cleo, playing with Sam, has never quite managed to get her head around it, but her two offspring play it very fast, with much laughter.
Cleo hears Olivia’s infectious, throaty chuckle. Olivia has always laughed a lot. Cleo has never known a child who laughed so much.
Why does she seem so unhappy with Cleo now? And what is Cleo to give this adult child of hers to satisfy her?
It’s not as simple as boundaries, she thinks, though the time of unconditional love is drawing to an end. It’s every parent’s job, of course, to show their children that balance between overweening confidence in their own opinions and respect for the opinions and experiences of their parents and other adults. But with Olivia, she is stymied. She has no clue.
It’s probably too late to repair the mistakes she has made. Perhaps all that she can do is carefully, carefully avoid blowing up any bridges.
At the top of the mountain, Olivia had flung herself down onto a patch of grass, and Cleo had sat down beside her, cautiously, silently.
Are we going to take the cable car down? Olivia had asked, presently.
It’s either that or roll myself over the edge, Cleo had said.
And Olivia’s laugh, so spontaneous, so joyful, so delighted, that the other hikers passing them had smiled.
She asks Olivia: Do you need any money? Can I pay for your trip? Do you need anything for your apartment?
They are doing up the dishes: Cleo washing, Olivia drying. The dishwasher has broken down again. Cleo will have to get a new one, though the expenditure will be inconvenient. Olivia says, stiffly, No, thank you.
Aha, Cleo thinks. She says: I’d be happy to help out.
I don’t need it now, Olivia says. It would have made a big difference a couple of years ago, when I wanted to travel with friends for a year, but now I am paying my own way, and I’m doing fine.
You don’t have to do it alone, Cleo says. I want to help you out.
It’s important to me, Olivia says. It’s a point of pride.
The footing is very slippery here. Cleo must guard herself so carefully. But she’s moving over completely unfamiliar terrain, and in the darkness.
It occurs to her that her concept of family, of friendship groups, even the workspace, has been one in which normally, any mem-ber can make certain reasonable assumptions. There is a shared language. If one or more members disturb the assumptions, the unit’s shared, unspoken constitution is spotlighted, shaken out and dusted, and whether or not members want to, it’s up for review. It can feel as though this member has made an attack on the institution itself.
And for the member who challenges the group assumptions, the institution, it can feel like personal existence itself is at stake.
So we come to war with one another.
It’s a long way from this thought, though, to the conversation that is happening at her kitchen sink. And she needs to meet Olivia where she is, for once. To engage with her as a fellow human being: to see past the various bombasts and bombardments.
I’m truly sorry, she begins, and then stops herself. Amends a word she had almost spoken. Not if. Not if.
She looks directly at her daughter. I’m sorry, she says, that I have not given you the support that you needed.
Olivia’s face changes: her forehead scrunches up; the corners of her lips pull down deeply, and her chin forms itself into a little puckered ball. Cleo looks back at the sink. A silence hangs between them, transparent, fragile, trembling, begging to be breached.
Cleo normally fills that space with a reasonable explanation.
Her lips are actually parted, and she’s about to continue: But I did the best I could at the time. Which is true.
Or maybe not completely true. Or maybe, just irrelevant, at this moment.
She closes her mouth.
She hears Olivia, to her right, draw air in through her nose, expel it through her nose. Again.
Olivia says: You’re just so critical. You’re so judgemental of everything and everyone. Nothing is ever good enough. I’m afraid to tell you anything about my life. You make me feel bad about everything I want to feel happy about. You’re so hard on Sam that he’s afraid to get off his computer or come out of his room. You try to be a good mom but you just drive us away.
It must be like this to be shot, Cleo thinks.
I’ve given twenty years of my life to taking care of you two, she says, calmly, though Olivia is sobbing, and she can hardly speak. I stayed home with you when you were little and after I went back to work, I spent all of my weekends and evenings doing things with you, taking you places, making sure you had everything you needed. You were the focus of my life.
I know that, Olivia sobs. But you’re so mean. You’re so mean.
I just want you to succeed, Cleo says. To have good options. It’s a tough world, and if you don’t succeed, you’re vulnerable to terrible things.
But even as she says that, she recoils. She knows this, of course. All of her life she has seen this: anyone who falters, even a little, will likely crash and fail. She has seen it in her parents’ lives and in the lives of the troubled boys at her foster home, in the mishaps of her neighbours’ and colleagues’ kids and in the news.
But what a thing to believe, and what a terrible view of the world to impart to her children. Because that is what she has done, she sees. She has tried to manage and insulate and contain; she has tried to intuit potential dangers, predict faults, engineer against all possible failure. And she has not been wrong to do this, but she has not done it skilfully enough: she has let her anxiety be her blueprint; she has overdone.
She has assigned herself responsibility for fixing the world, and has convinced her children that it is her job.
There is nothing she can say that will change this. And so many things she might say that would achieve complete demolition.
Sam comes in from putting out the trash cans, making so much noise washing his hands in the powder room that he must have heard them, wanted to give them warning.
Cleo thinks: I must find a way to defuse. But it is Olivia (wiping her eyes on the dish towel, leaving mascara streaks) who says: Why don’t I put the kettle on? Does everyone want tea?
And so they manage to go on.
23
Mandalay is puzzling over a first-year portfolio. Something is off;— there is something she doesn’t quite understand, doesn’t quite know how to articulate;— but that is common, in first-year portfolios. What she must do is see it clearly, as a whole, as its individual components, as an item in an almost infinite collection of like items, the early attempt of a visual arts student, and then, having seen it, articulate its strengths and weaknesses to the student in a way that will both make sense of the grade she’s going to attach to it, and illuminate the work to the student, hopefully with the result that the student will discover other possibilities and want to learn more.
The grade, she has already decided, is B. It’s a useful grade, a grade for a student who has done careful, competent work, who has met the criteria for the assignment, and shown that she has considered the discussions, the lectures, the slide shows of the term in her own output, but who has not, actually, made something unique to herself.
She hates this part of her job, having to assign a grade to a student’s work, having to judge it and measure it.
I’d like to see more flow, more expression, in your line, Mandalay types, in her comments. Try to translate the feeling of the weight, the mass of the hand, into varying pressures on your pencil. Try to feel the line as language to communicate mass. Will this communicate to the student? She has grave doubts.
She flips through to a block print in the student’s portfolio. The print is technically fine: no bleeding or blank spots; well-matched layers showing a precise use of register marks; an appropriate design, one which allows the student to create texture out of their lino block. But again, there is something expressionless, mute, inert about this image of a skull. It adds nothing; it’s a pastiche of the skull logo popular with brands of surfing (or is it skateboarding?) merchandise.
At least the student had not added a heart and rose to her design, as some others had done.
Now she is feeling disrespect for the student, and that is not a good place from which to teach. She flips to another assignment. She must get faster. She has a stack to finish, and then a department meeting, and she’s helping to set up the graduating year-end show. And she needs to return to her own work, to the next of the series of prints she’s making.
She is fifty-two years old, and still an apprentice at her job. Still new enough that every task requires a million separate considerations. She’ll get better. But she is starting out in a teaching career at fifty-two. It’s the hardest thing she has ever done in her life.
She has had many jobs; she has raised two children. She has been practicing her own art for decades. She is employed at a provincial college that pays well, has a good union. The students are mostly talented; some are gifted. But teaching art is very hard.
She is lucky to have a teaching job at all, of course. But what is expected of her, the managing of several first and second-year studio classes, the administrative work, the grading;— especially the grading;— has been an assault on her equilibrium. She feels at the end of each term that she has pulled a handcart carrying all of her students;— a few dozen;— up a steep hill.
