Next Year, for Sure Page 12

  Kathryn dear, his mother says, I am so delighted to see you, and they hug for longer than usual, Chris thinks. Will you show me around, dear, his mom asks Kathryn, grasping her arm.

  Kathryn gives Mom the tour of their smallish one-bedroom apartment. Chris tags along behind.

  His mother has many good things to say about the apartment—the use of space, the choice of colours, the coziness of the furniture—and these comments are all directed to Kathryn. Kathryn, I love what you’ve done with this corner, his mother says. You’ve made a lovely home, Kathryn. Like Chris had no part in making things cozy, like Chris hadn’t spent two hours in the paint store choosing the perfect shade of plum with Kathryn, like Chris is not part of the team.

  It dawns on Chris that he is in trouble with his mother.

  —

  Mom says she might like a nap, and they get her installed in their bedroom with minimal fussing.

  We’ll need to leave for dinner around six, Chris says, so shall I wake you around five? Chris never says shall, but he isn’t used to being in trouble with his mother. Shall seems like something one might say.

  You won’t need to wake me, she says and disappears behind the door.

  Does she seem weird to you? Chris asks Kathryn as they tiptoe around the apartment. But Kathryn’s threshold for weird mothers is too high. Her own mother once didn’t speak to her for a full week because Kathryn, age three, had drawn in a hymnal with blue crayon. Later, when Kathryn was well into puberty, her mother had confiscated her diary and, what’s worse, did not burn it. Kathryn begged her to burn it in the tiny hibachi where they destroyed desirous things, but her mother kept the diary somewhere and would occasionally hurl lines from it as weapons.

  So to Kathryn, Chris’s mom is the perfect mom.

  She’s probably just tired from the trip, Kathryn says.

  Chris thinks things will be easier once they get to dinner. Emily has that effect on people.

  —

  At five o’clock, Chris’s mother emerges unrumpled from her nap and says she doesn’t think she’ll be wanting dinner. You should go on without me, she says, and retreats to the bedroom. Chris follows.

  Is something wrong? Chris asks.

  I’m fine, she says. She is refolding the clothes from her suitcase into neat piles. I simply don’t feel the need to meet anyone new.

  Because I invited someone to dinner?

  Who is this girl, Chris?

  She’s Emily, he says. She’s a friend of mine.

  When have you ever introduced me to a friend?

  Chris realizes this is right. He has never introduced his mother to a friend, only girlfriends. At the moment, he can’t remember ever having a friend.

  Chris wants to say the most honest thing he can about Emily and who she is to him, but he doesn’t know what it is. They haven’t exactly decided what they are. He remembers something he once heard Emily say about the Other Chris: that they were seeing each other. And as the words come out of his mouth he thinks, this is the wrong thing to say.

  And what about Kathryn? says his mother, clearly upset now.

  Kathryn and I decided this together.

  His mom looks at him skeptically, then returns to her refolding.

  Kathryn is fine with it, he says.

  I doubt that very much.

  Chris doesn’t say it was Kathryn’s idea, though he honestly could: Ask her on a date, Kathryn had said. Hurry up and have sex, she’d said. But Chris says none of these things. He would never do that to Kathryn.

  Do you want me to tell Emily not to come? he says.

  You do what you want, Christian.

  —

  PHONE CALL

  THURSDAY 5:20 PM

  CHRIS: Hey, is it too late to call off tonight?

  EMILY: Oh no! What happened?

  CHRIS: My mom’s being weird.

  EMILY: Do you want me to bring food over?

  CHRIS: I don’t think so.

  EMILY: Naveed made this giant thing of stew.

  CHRIS: Actually, I think we’re still going to dinner, I just don’t think we should have any extra people.

  EMILY: Oh. [here, a difficult pause]

  CHRIS: I don’t mean extra. I mean new.

  EMILY: Chris, it’s fine. I’ll meet her tomorrow, right?

  [Emily is coming tomorrow to help decorate the tree.]

  CHRIS: Absolutely.

  EMILY: Perfect then.

  CHRIS: Perfect.

  QUESTIONS

  Is this the way he loses Emily? Is this the moment it starts to unravel? Should he call back and uncancel? Should he call back and not necessarily uncancel but tell Emily everything and ask what she would do? Why hadn’t he done that in the first place? Why had he jumped to cowardice? And what would Emily do? If Emily were saying to her own mom, Mom, I want you to meet Chris, my __________, what would go in the blank? Friend? Boyfriend? Nothing? And what would Emily’s mom say then?

  —

  Dinner is liverish and congealed. Chris’s mom puts herself to bed as soon as they get home. It’s not even eight o’clock. Chris and Kathryn pull the futon onto the living room floor.

  Do you think it’s bad, Chris says, me seeing Emily?

  Kathryn is mashing down lumps with her foot. Bad? she says.

  Immoral, Chris says.

  Kathryn snorts at the word. There is real evil in this world, Chris. I don’t think you kissing someone counts.

  She unfurls a fitted sheet and they try to wedge the futon into it. Corners keep slopping off.

  Just leave it, Kathryn says after multiple attempts.

  But Chris wants to make it right for Kathryn. He doesn’t give up until he has all four corners secured, though during the night three come off.

  —

  At breakfast, Chris asks for it. He and his mother have just ordered omelettes. Kathryn has absented herself, saying to Chris’s mom that she had some last-minute gift wrapping to do. To Chris, she said, You and your mom need to get this out.

  So Chris asks for it. Mom, do you have thoughts about me being in a relationship with Emily?

  His mother has many thoughts, lined up like missiles. She has always been proud of him, she says, and the way he treats women, so loving and gentle. But this. This two-timing. Well, for the first time in her life, she is ashamed of Chris. She does not know what she would say anymore if someone back home were to ask how her son is doing these days, and people do ask, she says.

  She feels, too, that Kathryn is not okay with this, could never be okay with this, even if Chris has convinced himself that this is something they have decided together. What choice did Kathryn have, really?

  Furthermore, his mother wants to assure him that she would not have come if she had known this was going on. She would have gone to spend Christmas with Claire and her squalling family, and she still might.

  I never expected this sort of thing from you, Chris.

  She does not explicitly compare Chris to his father, and Chris does not, for the most part, argue with her. He offers some relevant facts here and there, but mostly he listens and swallows it all down.

  —

  PHONE CALL

  FRIDAY 11:20 AM

  EMILY: Let me guess. Tree-trimming is off.

  CHRIS: I’m so sorry.

  EMILY: What’s going on over there?

  CHRIS: Oh, I’m a womanizer. And I bullied Kathryn into going along with my self-serving agenda.

  EMILY: Wow.

  CHRIS: Also, I’m using you for sex.

  EMILY: Double wow.

  CHRIS: I don’t know.

  EMILY: You know none of that is true.

  CHRIS:

  EMILY: You know Kathryn is a strong, smart, capable woman who can make her own decisions.

  CHRIS:

  EMILY: She’s Kathryn the Amazing.

  CHRIS: Yeah.

  EMILY: And I assume you know that in order to be using me for sex, we’d have to be having sex.

  CHRIS: Yeah.
>
  EMILY: We’re going to get through this.

  CHRIS: Yeah.

  QUESTIONS

  What does getting through this even mean? Long-term—ten, twenty years from now—what does getting through this look like? Is he taking both Kathryn and Emily back home for Christmas, letting his mother’s neighbours say what they want? Is he fifty years old and still going on dates and making out in parking lots? What are they trying to accomplish?

  —

  A quiet truce settles over the day. His mother has said everything she might reasonably say and Chris has borne it. There is nothing else to discuss if Chris is not going to defend himself. So they pull the dismembered tree from its box and lay out the limbs by size and shape on the floor. The instructions are missing, they discover, which is perhaps good fortune. It gives them a problem to struggle with and unite against, mother and child against the Christmas tree.

  His mother tells the story of her childhood Christmas tree catching fire. Trees were always catching fire back then, burning down entire homes full of still-wrapped presents. The newspapers made sure to emphasize the still-wrapped presents. In her own case, their dog, Derby, a Jack Russell terrier, barked and barked until her father ambled over with a fire extinguisher and put the blaze out with a single white blast. The powder looked like snow on the tree.

  Chris doesn’t tell the story of him and Kathryn and Emily choosing this tree together and how they’d had to portage it across town, the box disintegrating in the sleety rain, because the bus driver wouldn’t let them on with it, and how they’d felt like polar explorers, trudging through the slush and snow, or that since then they’ve started referring to themselves as the Nimrod Expedition whenever they do something together, the three of them. He doesn’t mention Emily at all. And by the end of the day, there is an almost festive feeling between them, like hostage and captor exchanging presents on their first holiday together.

  —

  That night, when they are safe in bed, Chris says to Kathryn, Did I coerce you into this?

  How would you coerce me, Chris?

  I don’t know, he says. He knows that Kathryn is strong and smart and capable. What he can’t figure out, and what he wants to ask, is how did Geoffrey coerce her? How did Geoffrey convince the strong, smart, capable Kathryn that she deserved so little? That’s what’s eating into Chris.

  Look, Kathryn says, there’s nothing immoral here, or bad, or wrong. No one’s coercing anyone. But can we try not to freak your mom out?

  Sure, Chris says.

  Can we just not bring it up?

  Yes.

  Kathryn rolls over, her spine to Chris, and then scootches back into him. He snakes his arm through her arms and around her. The plastic tree looms up over them, off-gassing into the room.

  —

  PHONE CALL

  SATURDAY 3:45 PM

  EMILY: How you holding up?

  CHRIS: Still alive.

  EMILY: Oh, friend.

  CHRIS: I don’t know if it’s going to work out this time, you meeting her.

  EMILY: I get that. I might actually go away for a few days.

  CHRIS: Away where?

  EMILY: Chris’s band is in L.A. for a week.

  CHRIS: [silently hates L.A.]

  EMILY: I’d be back for New Year’s, or just after.

  CHRIS: Wow, that’s great. Can you afford that?

  EMILY: Chris said he’d buy the ticket. He’s trying to book something right now.

  CHRIS: [The spontaneity of it bothers him. Who decides, on Christmas Eve practically, to fly to L.A. to see a band? He hates that it’s L.A.]

  EMILY: I promised months ago I’d come see him on tour. Now seemed like a good time.

  CHRIS: Makes sense.

  QUESTIONS

  Why does it have to be L.A.? Why couldn’t the band be playing in Guelph or Akron or Missoula? And where would she stay in L.A.? With the band in some motel? Four guys in a room? Will there be a little kitchenette, or will she have to eat all her meals out? Will they sleep together? That guy on top of her, sweating and grimacing in his Guns N’ Roses t-shirt? Or do they splurge for their own room? Order room service and smear their bodies with custard and spend the whole day eating it off? And why shouldn’t they? What right does Chris have to wish she wouldn’t? Won’t he be sleeping with someone every night? Showering with someone, kissing someone, and, if his mom weren’t in the next room, conceivably having sex with someone? Why shouldn’t Emily? How is it any different, asshole?

  —

  Over the next few days, Chris is gradually let back in by his mother. Together they install the hand-held shower nozzle with just the right amount of difficulty. They find a Methodist church in the phone book and go to the Christmas service and sing the songs they grew up singing. They make twenty pints of pickled beets while Kathryn practises piano chords on the kitchen table. They make and eat several batches of gingerbread walls until they find the right blend of edibility and load-bearing integrity. By the time his sister phones for her annual belated Merry Christmas call, Chris and his mom are a team again.

  Chris doesn’t hear from Emily and isn’t sure if he should expect to. He calls her cell, but it is Naveed who finally answers. I thought she was in L.A. with you, Naveed says.

  Chris can’t stop thinking about her and the still-wrapped present he never got to give her and how it could burn up in the night, and how none of this would have happened if his mother had only said, Yes, I’d love to meet your friend.

  —

  Emily is part of my life, he says on the way to the airport. His mother acts confused, as if she doesn’t know who he’s talking about, but Chris presses on. If you want to miss an important part of my life, he says, that’s your choice, but.

  His sentence simply runs out. He had thought he had a but.

  His mother studies her lap. She picks a fibre off her dress and lets it drop to the floor of the cab.

  Then you should break up with Kathryn, she says.

  I told you, Kathryn is fine.

  That’s baloney, Chris. Can’t you see how sad she is?

  She’s always sad, Mom. We’re both always sad.

  Chris wonders how long this has been true. How long they’ve been trapped in this sadness together.

  You’re not sad, his mother says. It’s called being an adult.

  JANUARY

  CHAPTER 14

  Housecleaning

  Emily came back from L.A. vomiting. Cheerful and undying, but vomiting. On the plane, in the cab, up the front steps of Ahimsa, and, for two days now, into a large Tupperware bowl beside her bed. This is how Kathryn ended up at Emily’s housecleaning job with a key around her neck and a list of tasks in Emily’s shaky handwriting.

  Emily had called Kathryn the day before and said she hated to ask, but Kathryn was in fact glad to be asked. It was a big favour. An imposition, actually. Kathryn had her own work to do. But it felt good to be asked, and Kathryn liked the idea of her and Emily being indebted to each other, imposing on each other, back and forth, until they could come to each other with anything, big or small, because they had already tramped down the brush and brambles.

  —

  Kathryn eases the front door open, just wide enough for her head, and calls into the house. They’ll already be gone by eight, Emily had said, but Kathryn remembers something else Emily had said, months ago, about always half-expecting to find the body of Janine Marten, the unhappy mother, waiting for her. So Kathryn calls out as she enters, in a friendly sing-song. Hellooo. It’s Emily’s friend. Here to do the cleaning.

  Kathryn checks the whole house, room by room, pausing outside each doorway to visualize what she might find inside—a body in the tub, a rope creaking under weight—and how she wants to react, not with a shriek and horror, but with compassion and solemnity.

  But the house has only signs of life. Bath toys still wet and dripping. Picture books left open, mid-story. Nightlights burning steadfastly. Kathryn circles back through each room
again, gauging what she can accomplish in five hours. It’s invigorating.

  —

  Vacuuming is the main thing, according to Emily. The place is always so clean when I get there, she’d told Kathryn, there’s not much else to do.

  But as Kathryn pushes and pulls the vacuum through the house, she finds more and more that wants doing—the light switches ringed with a grey film of fingers, the base of the toilet woolly with dust, the frosted globe of a ceiling fixture dotted with the unmistakable shadows of spider carcasses.

  The house is not clean, Kathryn thinks. The house is tidy, with a smothering under-layer of grime. Once Kathryn sees it, she sees it everywhere. It could pull a person under.

  —

  She works on surfaces first, then the creases and folds where surfaces meet. The kitchen counter, she can see, is routinely wiped, but the small gap where the counter meets the stove is crusted with jam and slops of sauce. You have to move things to get a deep clean. You have to wrestle the stove out from the wall and clamber behind it.

  Kathryn remembers the women at the trailer park, descending on a home. It happened sometimes that a family would leave in the night. Invalids, they’d be called the next day in church, and then never spoken of again. After a week or so, the women would converge on the abandoned trailer early on a Saturday morning and scour into the night. Kathryn was brought along occasionally, once she was old enough to really work.

  The women did not talk about the deep clean. They didn’t sing hymns while they worked about the cleansing power of Jesus. They worked mostly in silence, with a wrathful joy, as if the affront of the task fuelled them and nourished them.

  Kathryn feels some of that now. The harder she scrubs, the more energy she has for scrubbing. Whenever she discovers a new seam of muck, she feels a twinge of relish. She wishes now that she had more than five hours.

  Kathryn wonders if the women convened when she left the trailer park. If they pressed themselves into her tiny bedroom and elbowed each other in their vehemence. Or if her mother had sent them away and done the thing herself, scrubbing and scrubbing until she found satisfaction.