How Happy to Be (6 page)

The cab I’m targeting is blocked by the Flock of Critics. I know it sounds glamorous, I’m aware of the palpable envy
around this job, but have you met any film critics? Would you really want to live among them? Film critics are mushroom people. They dwell indoors, light is not a friend, conversation not of the species. Spongy, white, male, between forty and sixty, a little socially stunted, incapable of eye contact, clad in depressed denim shirts and cords. This is not the eighteenth-century salon: exchange, analysis, debate – oh no. Just uncomfortable nods before and after screenings, the occasional suspicious “What did you think?” in the lobby (Proper answer: “What did
you
think?”).

One pops out from the fold, stepping in between my beloved cab and me. “Hello, Maxime,” says the critic from
The Examiner
, local tabloid with a propensity for the all-caps front page featuring the word
shame
, as in
SHAME! SINGLE MOTHER CAUGHT WITH
T
ORONTO RAPTOR!
Or
SHAME! GOVERNOR-GENERAL GETS PEDICURE, JET!
The Examiner
invented the hyperbolic six-star movie rating, and as the hobbity old critic scampers my way, he manifests those six stars in human form: “You look fabulous! It’s going to be a great festival!” He delivers the two-cheek kiss, smelling like cigarettes and computer screens.

“World class,” I tell him, trying to deke around his body and get to the cab.

He leans in: “I just interviewed Ethan Hawke. Super nice guy! Are you going to catch him while he’s in town?”

Ah, a reconnaissance mission. My answer will determine when they run their piece. I should be like
The Examiner
guy: stealth and dog loyal to my newspaper, willing to kiss and hustle so
The Daily
will be first. But I’m too tired and
hungover to protect my corporation. Instead, I give up all information.

“Yep. For Friday,” I say, knowing that
The Examiner
will now run their piece on Thursday.

“Well, he’s a super nice guy!”
The Examiner
steps to the side. I pull at the cab door, but it’s stuck. I jiggle and
The Examiner
watches for a moment, then leans across me – oh, God, is he coming in for another kiss? – and grabs the handle, giving it a strong pull. A moment of kindness, or a declaration of triumph.

“Thanks,” I murmur, off guard, swinging my legs into the backseat.
The Examiner
waves as we pull away.

No call from Theo McArdle. I can’t call the Ex back, so I do something half-good and I call Elaine’s hotel, waiting until the exact moment that the car is entering the ravine that divides the city in half so the message goes: “Hi! It’s Max! Great to –” and then the gnarl of confused satellites. When we emerge, it’s still bright and leafless February and I am guilty – I really do feel it, thinking about Elaine. After my mom died there was a lot of movement, and Elaine, who emerged at the end of our travels, brought welcome stillness.

The first months after the death had been quiet, a slow accumulation of squalor in the house that my father and I both silently consented to live with. The compost bin, a cutout milk carton on its side, overflowed with rot. I had to pick up my father’s strewn clothing from the hallway and carry it downstairs. These things felt like an insult, more unfairness to add to the steaming pile of it I’d been walking around, trying to avoid. So I started lighting garbage cans on
fire at school. Dad drove me home silently, and as he pulled into the driveway in his pickup, he said, “We’re leaving, and that is what we’re leaving in.”

A rusted milk truck. He let me paint it, a gift I later recognized as one for himself; something more he didn’t have to do.

I attempted a mural of Big Bird, which my dad would never have allowed anyway (“So commercial, Max!”), but my skills were lacking and the bird looked like a big yellow cloud, which was beautiful to him. (And these are all stories I have told so many times that I now just float away while they tell themselves. So beware, beware, beware of lazy embellishments to keep me awake, and out-and-out lies, the by-products of the very relativistic girlhood that’s turning you on.)

We left Squamish for the year-long road trip, our bags sloshing in the empty space behind us where the milk bottles were before. Rainy nights we slept on foam and sleeping bags, the sour smell of gas and dairy on our bodies in the morning. In every province as we headed east, we crashed with people my father knew but I didn’t, people we would never speak of or see again. Often these mysterious acquaintances lived in unfinished houses half-covered in orange tarps, pieces of land barely conquered by stacks of lumber, good intentions abandoned. Grown-ups who spent their lives at kid level, down on the floor, cross-legged or propped up on elbows and stomachs. The talk, the endless talk, came from lips moving somewhere under Brillo pads of facial hair. My dad hovered on the periphery, reading or staring into space. Perhaps if there had been dogma to go with the
lifestyle, it would have made more sense to me, a vine climbing a strong trellis. But the ideals that others railed about late into the night (me lying on a piece of foam in the corner) were rarely parroted by my father. What I remember is that my mother was the political one, her fist pummelling the newspaper in outrage. Later, I could see that rhetoric was just a place for him to vanish; he was unnoticed, gazing skyward while the rest of them decided what mattered. Maybe they mistook his silence for consent, or maybe it was. But I always thought that he would live the same way in any time, which is to say, out of it.

Near Weyburn, Saskatchewan, we slept in a tent on an abandoned oil field beside the giant, stilled bird-machine, its beak frozen, poised to peck the unfruitful land. At the Winnipeg Folk Festival, I saw a woman make a wiry braid from three strands jutting out of a mole in her chin. We hit the stormy season in Newfoundland and turned a slick corner to find a car teetering over the edge of a hungry cliff, no one inside.

When we had used up all the road, we went west again, retracing our steps. We moved to the compound on Gambier, an island across the bay from Vancouver. The strangest, most unshakeable memory from those first weeks has nothing to do with my father: Taj Mahal is on the turntable in the dining hall, and I’m planting sea monkeys in a glass bong. They never grow but quickly start to stink like rotting shrimp.

There was rarely more than thirty people on the compound at any given time, though they changed so often that I
never bothered to learn many of their names. They were city women, mostly, leaving behind husbands and jobs, screaming children tucked under their arms like briefcases. The few men who stayed, most of them single, spent their days in the rain building the boathouse and clearing the land for more gardens. In the most surprising ways, the great experiment bore tradition. The women ran things from the kitchen and raised the children; the handful of men stayed away until darkness and rose up with the sun to vanish again in the morning. Once in a long while, usually when a newcomer arrived, there were heated arguments and philosophical debates about the reason for all of this, but soon, the routine settled back to dull consensus and meeting after meeting to debate the quotidian. Voting for a new septic tank. Voting for selling eggs and milk to the mainlanders until we could become entirely self-sufficient. Arranging a boat schedule with the local farmers to get us on and off the island.

But there was never any real panic that it would fall apart because everyone knew that Elaine, my father’s girlfriend, born to a wealthy family who owned department stores in Philadelphia, quietly funded the fantasy. She pulled out a black leather ledger and wrote cheques to the government for taxes, and to the grocer for staples, and to the plumbers who arrived in a speedboat to fix the overflowing toilets. It was not that different, then, from serfdom, except that Elaine worked the land as best she could too and got nothing in return but a reason to stay far away from Philadelphia.

On occasion a boatload of tourists would float by looking for whales, tossing plastic water bottles overboard,
squealing and pushing one another with glee. Watching from the dock, someone at the compound would always declare bitterly, “Americans,” without evidence. If Elaine minded, she never said anything. It was a given that the people we were hiding from were Americans. No one mentioned the department stores in Philadelphia that fed us. I could never figure out these contradictions, but the dining hall rage – “Look what they’re doing now! Acid rain! Clearcuts!” – was such a force that I kept my mouth shut.

So to anyone who finds this girlhood among the unwashed romantic, I always say permissiveness comes with so many rules, so much disapproval. They’re just less spoken, meaning you navigate them blindfolded. I wore fishbowl headphones to listen to ABBA or Blondie so as not to pollute the living space, but Bob Dylan never stopped moaning from the speaker.

If you really wanted out, it was simple to float away; the trick was to make it look purposeful. While the grown-ups did their thing, planting the vegetables (that never really grew – more trips to the co-op – because people with degrees in Marxist philosophy don’t make good farmers) and talking talking talking, I would hitchhike across the water and spend hours in the drugstore reading
Tiger Beat
, tucking the good issues in the waistband of my pants and walking out slowly, smiling, because if you look happy like that, you can get away with anything. Then in the evening, I sat on the fence at the local drive-in staring at
The Wiz
, imagining lyrics to songs I couldn’t hear without a speaker. Sometimes I would bully a smaller, snot-encrusted kid into acting as sidekick, but
these kids were too hyper to sit still and too close to their parents to be good liars, so usually I went off alone.

I escaped house meetings to hide in the woods with my magazines and pin-ups, circling the addresses of fan clubs. I discovered that the farm down the road had a tidy blond family in it, and a girl in a skirt who was nearly my age. I watched TV there constantly, and began to skip out on the things I used to love: getting the shit-streaked eggs from the screaming chickens, milking the cows. I had fallen for Jaclyn Smith, the silkiest of Charlie’s Angels, and also, in my estimation, the smartest. Her character was called Kelly, a name like mine, a name for a boy or a girl. We could be friends.

The back of the milk truck was littered with my dad’s tools and thinning Mexican carpets. Without windows, I could go unseen in there. I got out my thesaurus and wrote, “Dear Ms. Smith,” because I never knew Miss or Mrs. existed, “I find your show superlative. Your hair is very comely. How did you become an actress? Will you write me please?” On the envelope, I wrote the return address: Rural Route 1, Gambier Island, British Columbia, Canada.

I didn’t notice the doors opening, my father a half-foot back, tentative. He stared at the envelope.

“Who are you writing?”

“Nobody.” I shoved the letter in the pocket of my hemp flares, the ones the draft dodgers brought across the border like offerings to the families that protected them.

My dad nodded, but he looked sad. “I respect your privacy,” he said slowly. Then he thought about this and
revised it. “But we shouldn’t have secrets.” More thinking, a condition I could identify by the wrinkles curling out from the corners of his eyes. My dad is so biologically slow that any mental exertion registers across his face like a piece of paper crumpling. “You think about it.” Uh-huh. “And tell me later.” A direct order? Impossible! “If you want.” That’s better.

It was one of those cyclical moments of parenting at which my dad excelled. I nodded. Then he held out a fuzzy mass, seemingly offering me a dead cat.

“I made you something,” he said, placing the object in my hand. It was rough and knit from yellow yarn with a pink explosion of ribbon on its head and two red buttons for eyes.

“Elaine showed me how to knit,” he said very quickly, looking away.

“What is it?” I asked, instantly realizing I sounded cruel. I added, “It’s nice.”

“It’s Holly Hobbie, you know. That girl with the bonnet and the skirt …”

I turned it over in my hand. The skirt was a square of dishtowel.

“You said you wanted one, remember?”

I nodded. “Thank you,” I said. I’d asked for Holly Hobbie a year ago. Now she was over. I had developed an acute sense of fashionable timing that would have shocked my father.

My dad stood shuffling and made a quick gesture toward me with his hand, like he was reaching out for something, maybe trying to take back the present. Then he halted,
shoving his fists in the pockets of his pants, the belt around his skinny hips puckered and sagging, a dad in a drawstring bag.

“Thank you,” I said again.

I don’t usually tell it like that. I just describe the grotesque felt-pen grin on Holly’s face. Many laughs ensue. Lucky you. True version.

I
T’S STILL A FEW DAYS BEFORE THE OFFICIAL OPENING
, but the festival has already rolled into town. A few carnies barking into cellphones give off an L.A. scent, but the entourages have yet to arrive in full force. The newspapers are still covering other events soon to be shunted to the back pages
(TENT CITY GROWING
.
Homeless gather, light toxic barrels for warmth)
.

On Bloor Street, next to designer clothing boutiques and stores selling thousand-dollar pens, a handful of teenaged girls fan out and cover the celebrity-spotting corners, pagers
and BlackBerries at the ready: The Starbucks in the Chapters bookstore. Club Monaco at Avenue Road. The restaurant Prego. Within days, there will be more of them, underdressed for winter, jackets open to show their pudgy midsections, armies of Lana Turners looking for Schwab’s.

Around the corner from Bloor at the Four Seasons, the crowds have yet to descend. There is only one man on a lawn chair staking out a square of sidewalk near the curb, drinking coffee with his mittens on, a camera around his neck. He looks proud, as if he did some investigating and discovered that this little patch legally qualifies for public space and he is going nowhere. The doorman has his eye on him.