Act I — Finale

It takes some measure of courage to cry on public transit. At least, that’s what I tell myself — red-faced, disgusting and sniffling — that I’m brave. I’d find it far too shameful otherwise. The women pretend they can’t hear me. They don’t see me; they turn their faces away, bury their noses in their novels and magazines, turn up the volume on their iPods. I don’t mind, though: in fact, I consider theirs the proper response to such openly aired grief. I want to preserve the illusion of loneliness, because that’s basically what I’m crying over, after all. And it’s exactly the kind of sadness that an audience ruins. 

The men, on the other hand, stare with their eyes wider than they’ve ever been while riding the bus, full of sympathy but bereft of action — a situation they strongly dislike, I think. It reminds me of the times I wear shorter skirts to the office: the older women glance at me, askance and narrow, but the men look right at me with their eyes sort of stuck open. They blink a couple times and get all flustered when they talk to me, but that’s okay. Actually, I’ve grown to prefer my men flustered: it gives one a generous advantage in the interaction, and one needs that sometimes, with men.

I’m listening to one of the saddest songs I know (a Leonard Cohen number, drawn up from the depths of a playlist my father made me when I first left home) and really trying to get into the spirit of this grieving for a lost love thing. I’ve had a lost love before — at least, I’m pretty sure I have — but it was different, and the letting go was softer, slower, and more brutal. This, my ending things with Carter, was quick, clean, almost effortless: like getting ready to hack through the trunk of a tree with your axe and then realizing the wood cuts like butter. He was nice, sure, but we were only five months into the thing, and he didn’t really like my cooking, or find me funny. I certainly didn’t find him funny. Two nights ago, he rolled over to me as I was trying to sleep and caught me tightly in the crook of his arms. I remember the stale smell of his sweat, and the oil from the French fries we’d had for dinner on his breath. He spread his big hands over my abdomen and pressed a little.

“Are you still running a lot, then?” he asked, his breath on my earlobe. 

 

“Well —” I said, hedging, not sure quite what kind of answer he wanted. I hadn’t much lately, that was the truth. I was in the throes of my last final exams of my undergraduate degree, and everything else had briefly ceased to matter.

 

“Oh,” he said, with a slight sadness to his voice; a disappointment, like I’d taken something away from him. 

 

“Well, I mean, not as much as I usually do — I probably went out four times this week instead of six, or something.” It had actually only been two. His hands had ceased their movement on my stomach. On my gut. 

 

“Huh,” he said, rolling away and turning his back again.

I try to force myself to romanticize it all — to see him, rosy-cheeked and lovely and warm as he was, holding my hand and my umbrella and lending me his coat — but I can’t do it properly, and soon enough I realize all this stupid salt water was never for him. I’m not crying for Carter; I’m crying because I can’t believe this bus will keep running the same route every day when I’m no longer riding in it. Someone else will sit where I’m sitting and look out the window at the same sun shining on the same buildings, and have different, wrong thoughts about it all. It seems like the worst kind of injustice that the high-rises and the apartments that line the transitway, the bus stations with their red metal piping around the outside, the parks with their new spring grass struggling up from the dirt, will just go on being without any help from me, and that they won’t change simply because I’m no longer looking at them. One of the saddest thoughts in the world, according to me and my likely foolish, broadly inaccurate interpretation of Mr. Cohen’s song, is that things carry on just the same without you once you’ve gone.

Mum called yesterday (and I was on the bus then, too) suggesting we go to IKEA to shop for my new apartment. “Just like we did when you were moving out for undergrad!” she said, cheerful at the thought of my return home for the summer, and my upcoming move to a city much nearer to my hometown.

“Not just like,” I said. How unfair it is to have nostalgia for a place I haven’t even left yet.

 

Act II — IKEA

 

I was never sure why we all had to go shopping together when I moved out for undergrad, but I also don’t remember having much choice. If we hadn’t all come, it probably wouldn’t have taken us about a million years to find a parking spot. Mum was driving, ostensibly, but really everyone else might as well have been piled on top of the vinyl seat with her, considering how much they had to say about the process. Finally, we parked in such a way that all concerned were at least halfway satisfied and stood stretching and groaning in the early autumn sunlight. The morning was crisp, cool, clean — delicious with possibility. The air smelled of leaves and soil, city traffic and coffee, and late-blooming flowers. I loved this — I still do — the way autumn is an ending disguised as a beginning. I suppose it’s that decaying leaf smell, mainly. It reminds me of the fertilizer my mother uses for new flowers. 

Harriet and Tom ran, racing each other to the doors of the store like they used to when they were children. The slapping of tennis shoes against asphalt echoed back to my parents and I as we lagged behind, watching. 

We followed each other up the escalator and into the showroom, “eyes peeled” (as instructed by my father), for anything we might have forgotten at the Toronto IKEA without which my undergraduate university life might prove unlivable. Tom and Harriet soon lost themselves in the Bedroom section, while dad went to Offices and mum and I walked behind, remarking on things we passed by but not talking, really. Children were everywhere that day, crawling over the furniture like ants, pulling at their parents’ arms and jumping over perfectly made beds; they were tipping baskets out of shoppers’ hands by accident and on purpose, falling, crying, screaming and laughing. 

“Je-sus,” said Harriet, who had come up behind me without my noticing, “I am never having kids — what absolute demons.”

 

I had felt happy though: excited about starting school and moving out and all the new things of mine, packed into the car outside and yet to be bought downstairs; so I shrugged, giving the demons the benefit of the doubt.

 

“Never say never, Harriet,” said my mother mildly. She smoothed the top of a rumpled duvet cover as my sister rolled her eyes. “That’s what your father said and look at us now.”

 

I scanned the store and found my father’s tall, slope-shouldered figure next to a large writing desk across the room. His dark jacket and hair seemed bizarre next to the primary-coloured giddiness of a fake library in which he stood. He inspected the shelves closely as I watched, chose a book, and read for several seconds, utterly absorbed, long after mum and Harriet passed where he was standing and called him to come away.

When they left for Kitchens in the next room, I walked to the place where he had stood and picked up the book he was reading. I got through the first two paragraphs before I realized that’s all there was: it was a prop book, a dummy created to fill the shelves. The first half-page of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women was printed over and over and over again, spread out across two or three hundred pages, indented at random intervals, echoing itself. 

When I tried to catch up with them in Kitchens, they’d gone. I went back to Offices, then to Bedrooms, then forward to Bathrooms and Closets, and all the way back again. They were nowhere to be found. The children were still there, but Harriet, Tom, mum, and dad had all vanished. I watched a mother and daughter discussing the price of linens to my left, and felt, absurdly, like a kid left alone in a grocery store; the aisles too high to see over, the linoleum cold and unfamiliar, the store clerks uncaring and unfriendly. Lost. Alone. Forgotten.

Tears sprung to my eyes unbidden. When they found me, after no less than fifteen minutes of looking (“high and low!” said dad, “even in Bathrooms!” said mum, “called your cell phone twice!” cried Harriet), I was sitting, red-eyed, on a miniature single bed with a rocket ship duvet cover, heartbroken and angry over nothing.

 

Act III — Travelling

 

Watching the backs of houses flit past in the golden light of early evening lends train rides the sweetest, softest kind of nostalgia. Half-finished treehouses and abandoned renovation projects sit lonely on yellowed lawns. Forgotten debris covers everyone’s yards: children’s toys and outdoor furniture, tiny blow up pools, and those swing sets made of wood and rope. Everything frozen in time, waiting to be picked up again. The very real possibility that it might stay that way forever. The old trampolines get me the most, which is funny, because I never had a trampoline growing up.

I make these kinds of observations to Laurel (quite frequently) and to Carter (less often) but neither of them are interested. Laurel doesn’t even bother to fake it anymore, which I suppose is a good thing. I tell myself it shows how honest our relationship has become — though I’ve never really liked that expression, “honesty is the best policy” — partly because it doesn’t really rhyme but people act like it does anyway, and partly because I find that lying, as a policy, is severely underrated. 

We’re bursting through town after town with that blend of ferocity and tranquility only a train can muster, all rushed and frantic on the outside, peaceful and quiet as a library on the inside. Watching a train go past is so different from one’s experience of being inside the thing while it’s moving. Just one of those things, I guess, as Carter would say. I think of him; or rather, he crosses through my mind one way as the thought about the train runs out the other. I think of what he would look like if I were travelling to see him. I think of his brown eyes and his big hands and his always pleased, invariably content golden-retriever energy. He’d been threatening to cut his hair, so possibly that’s finally happened. He told me last week to keep mine long for when I was supposed to meet his parents this weekend.

“And then later you can cut it, if you like,” he’d said. “I just feel like it looks classier this way.” He’d looked me up and down, in my light blue dress, and smiled a little. “You look softer like this.”

We’d been together about five months, but it felt like so much longer somehow. By our fifth date, I already felt like we’d known each other for years. His voice was already as familiar to me as Laurel’s, it had already begun to fade into the background in the same way. The way he kissed, the way he held my hand, the way he brushed up against me accidentally-on-purpose as we made dinner together — it was all touched with the same feeling of inescapability. There was a simpleness, by the end, or maybe there always was — a complacency to everything we did.

I really didn’t see why we had to get our parents involved, though, and I didn’t understand the urgency he had about meeting them. Things were going fundamentally well: why discolour it all by bringing in four more people, two other whole relationships? 

My mother called me asking about him yesterday, while I was doing groceries.

“How’s Carter doing?” she asked. There was something horribly naked and hopeful in her voice that made my stomach feel irritated, acidic. 

“Fine,” I said, gritting my teeth a little on the lie. “As fine as he was last time you asked.” 

The train lurches to a stop just before my platform to let another train pass. I don’t know why they turn the power off for this, but I am grateful: the steaming, chugging great mess of steel and diesel, upholstery, and plastic seems to sink into itself, resting on its tracks. The lights click off, too, and the power outlets, so everyone’s plugged in cellphone gives a little “beep” of annoyance, and then all is quiet — silent and still — like there was never a train to begin with.  

I will have to tell her soon, I suppose. I’ll have to tell them all, and it will be dreadful. I think of moving, of leaving my university life, Laurel and Carter and all I’ve known for four years in exchange for the internship in the city. I feel a little melodramatic, and in the silence of the train car I put headphones on and turn a sad song up to max volume. 

I don’t even notice the sounds coming back as we start forward again, but soon we are picking up speed and then slowing once more, the familiar outline of my town starting to lay itself out in front of me. A barn. A clothesline. The cheery red brick of the train station.

I see, as the conductor announces my stop, my mother waiting with our dog on his leather leash, both angled slightly toward the tracks, motionless with anticipation. I quit gathering my things and look at her: she hasn’t seen me yet, though her eyes are scanning each window diligently. I watch as people start to trickle out of the station door, onto the platform, into the arms of their loved ones — relaxed, because they’ve come home and they know it — and it’s like watching the backs of houses all over again. I stand up, and another train pulls in between me and the platform. My mother’s image is swept from my view as quickly as it appeared. All I see now is the inside of the almost empty train car, shuddering with newly halted momentum, in front of me, through the window.