Catch My Drift Read online

  “Yes, here.”

  “I’m not living there.”

  “Hey,” she says. “We’re just taking a look. There’s a pool.”

  “Probably filled with Band-Aids.” I know this will hurt her feelings, but I don’t care. She should know how disgusting this whole idea is.

  “When you see your new room, I think you’ll change your mind.”

  “My new room? What happened to just taking a look.”

  I look at Jed. He shrugs. “I know a guy who lives there,” he says. “They have Super Breakout in the tuck shop.”

  If people see me go into that building, they’ll think I was lying about the house with the garage. They’ll think we’re poor. I shake my head.

  Mom takes in a big breath and lets it out slowly. “You know, I thought you were starting to look forward to this.”

  I want to smack Mom in the shins with my racquet. “If you make us move there, I’ll go live with Dad.”

  Mom laughs. “We’ll see how that works out for you.”

  “I swear.”

  Mom sighs and hikes her purse up on her shoulder. “You have a choice, Cara. Come in with Jed and me, take a look, give your informed opinion — ”

  “Or?” I look at the white bricks, stained like the teeth in a denture commercial before the fizzy pill goes in. I want to Super Breakout the whole thing.

  She squints at me. “Or you can stay right here, have no say whatsoever, and act like a big baby.”

  “Stay here.”

  “Fine,” Mom says, turning toward the road.

  Jed looks at me. “You’re really not coming?”

  “Not in a million years.”

  And then Mom and Jed leave me. They cross the street, climb the few steps to the building’s main doors, and disappear. Mom doesn’t look back for me once.

  The schoolyard is almost empty now. I lean against the car’s hot metal, squeezing the rough strings of my racquet. Across the street, an old woman in a grey coat waddles up the front steps with a bunch of plastic bags hooked to her wrists. I don’t want to live near people like that; you shouldn’t wear a coat in June.

  A truck pulls up in the space next to Mom’s, and some song about a highway to hell is blaring from the radio. I grit my teeth and jam my eyes shut, trying to build a wall around my brain, trying to stop hell from coming in. I walk around Mom’s car, tapping my racquet on the doors and windows seven times each, but what’s the point? The worst things are already happening. And what if I made them happen? My whole body feels sweaty and hollow. I want Mom and Jed to come back out and say, “Whoops! That was a mistake!” But they just stay and stay.

  When I glance back at the building, I see Jed up on one of the balconies. He looks very small from here. I wave, but he doesn’t see me. I jump up and swat my tennis racquet in the air. A man gets out of the truck and looks at me. He says, “You got a problem there?” His eyes are red and watery and there’s a blue tattoo of a dripping knife on his inside arm. I can hear a little kid crying in the back of his truck. He says, “Jesus Christ. Knock it off, Angelo.” I rush across the street.

  Standing on the sidewalk in front of the building, I look up at the balconies again, but I can’t see Jed from underneath. I can’t hear him breathe and my heart is hammering inside my chest. I try to count seven floors to where he is, but it’s easy to lose count when everything looks the same. I take seven breaths, one for every floor. I can’t hear the music anymore, and I try not to look back at the truck across the street. My heart calms down, but only just a little.

  I don’t want Mom to come out and see me in front of the building, so I move over to the quiet, shadier side where the windows don’t start until high up. I pull a tennis ball from my backpack, take seven steps back, and whack it hard against the brick. Stupid building. The ball comes off the wall with a soft thump, and I slice it with a two-handed backhand, a loud grunt exploding from deep inside me. I’m at Wimbledon and the grimy brick is Petra with her ugly stick-up bangs. I smash the ball as hard as I can. A brown man in one of the high-up windows is looking down at me, his hand resting on his chin. I think of the applause and the British voices on TV: “She’s incredible! So small, so strong!” My heart speeds up and I fly to the right, just in time to fire an unexpected return.

  Girl Friday

  Summer, 1991

  Before driving home from Mississauga, Ian suggested dinner at the Veranda, a California-themed restaurant next to the Holiday Inn where he and Lorna had just held focus groups. The dining room at the Veranda had five extra large TVs showing extreme surfing and extreme skiing, but Lorna and Ian found a table outside on the actual veranda. It was a balmy evening in late spring; the strip of trees separating the restaurant from the parking lot was in pure green fluorescence.

  Lorna ordered a glass of Chardonnay and a chicken caesar. Ian ordered potato skins and a diet ginger ale. He had been in alcohol rehabilitation once in his early thirties and then again, nine years ago, after his fortieth birthday. This was all before Lorna knew him. She was used to drinking alone, with him.

  A delivery truck pulled up next to the veranda, and Lorna looked at their reflections in its large rear window. She did the thing she liked to do sometimes, which was to imagine she was someone else, watching herself and Ian out for dinner. Now, see. There’s a couple who stayed in love. Look how interested they are in each other’s opinions. How respectful. Equals in every way. Ian was married, and she and he weren’t in any way involved, but Lorna acknowledged that she’d like to, someday, meet a man like Ian. Distinguished, ambitious, tall: everything that Alex hadn’t been; everything she hoped her children would become. Well, the tall was less important, though it might give them more confidence. When Lorna was with Ian, she liked running into people she knew, and she tended to avoid detailed introductions. “This is Ian,” she’d say, mysteriously, letting her dentist or swim acquaintance draw their own conclusions. A smile, paired with an enthusiastic, “I’d like you to meet Ian!” produced the same effect. Nearly fifty now, Ian still resembled a youthful Burt Lancaster. Quick grey-blue eyes, plenty of hair, a straight nose that was only lightly spider-veined in the crevices. He had a habit of squinting that showed both how closely he listened and how neatly his eyelids folded at the corners.

  Ian relaxed into his chair. “That went well.” He started conversations when he was good and ready. Until then, there wasn’t much point in saying anything at all.

  “Sure,” Lorna agreed. They’d been testing reactions to a political ad with an emphasis on service-sector job creation. Ian facilitated; Lorna sat on the other side of a two-way mirror and made sure the clients had enough bottled water. For years, she’d taken meticulous notes for Ian, but he rarely asked for these, so she’d stopped bothering. Ian drew his own conclusions. He often made things up, quite frankly, but they were usually clever, useful things. Lorna’s forte, her reason for being there, was what Ian called “client effervescence.” She was a terrific host, he said, and because clients felt so comfortable with her, they automatically trusted him. Hostessing wasn’t something that came naturally to Lorna, but for Ian’s sake she was happy to pretend. She did her best to recall clients’ favourite sports teams, recent vacations, children’s graduations. Hostessing made her feel like a whole other kind of woman, someone Alex and her children wouldn’t recognize.

  “They hated the fat woman,” Ian said. “Put a beautiful woman in an ad and people get their knickers in a knot. Say they’re being manipulated. Put the uglies in, they complain twice as much. And you can’t just use a man.” He sucked his drink to the bottom. “Not on employment.”

  “How about a woman who looks like a man?” Lorna said. “A handsome woman.” But she didn’t feel like working. A jaunty song was playing over the restaurant speakers. The Beach Boys, or a new group like them. She watched a little white dog with a pale pink tummy roll in the grass a few feet away.

  “A handsome woman,” Ian repeated, lighting a cigarette. He smoked with such ph
ysical animation that Lorna felt she could see the smoke descend to his lungs, catch, and turn over before coming back out again in a neat line. He looked better smoking than anyone she’d ever seen. Compared to Ian, everyone else looked like they were faking it. “I wouldn’t know any of those.”

  Was that a wink? Sometimes it was hard to tell with Ian. Lorna glanced back over at the grass. “Maybe I’ll get a little dog,” she said quickly. “When the kids go to university.”

  Ian glanced vaguely at the dog and then looked back at Lorna. “So,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to mention something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A rumour at the office. Something very silly, actually.” He knocked a fleck of ash off his shirt. “They’re saying that you and I are, let’s say, unprofessionally involved.”

  Was Ian now so good at reading people that he could tell what she’d been thinking moments ago? She felt heat pumping into her neck and face. Her certainty that the blushing would not escape Ian’s notice made it all the more intense. “Sorry?”

  She was relieved that Ian didn’t repeat himself. “Like I said, it’s silly. But I think you know what I mean. Marcus raised it with me last week.” Marcus O’Connor, the O of OpinioNation Ltd. (Ian Needham was the N), was thought to be the most reliable pollster in the country. People said he could smell rain underwater.

  Ian offered Lorna his cigarette across the table. She shook her head. She hadn’t had a cigarette in nearly a year. He took another drag. “Because, apparently, we both extended our trip to New York last month by precisely one night.”

  “But that’s not so strange.”

  They had both extended their trips, but for entirely different reasons. Lorna’s high school swim team had a reunion. Ian was meeting an agent about a book proposal; she didn’t know the first thing about his book.

  Ian sighed. “I gather that people were just looking for proof,” he said. “To make sense, I suppose, of our closeness.”

  “But we’re a team.”

  Lorna was the office research coordinator. Ian was the top qualitative research guy in the city, an oracle for public opinion. But everyone knew he was lost without Lorna. In a game at the office Christmas party, Lorna was voted least likely to say, “That’s not my job,” and Ian was voted most likely to say, “Someone get me Lorna!” Privately, Ian referred to Lorna as his Girl Friday. This past Christmas, he’d given her a pen with this moniker engraved.

  “So you told Marcus that’s crazy.”

  Ian sat back in his chair, cigarette tipped up. “Is it? Crazy?”

  “Silly, then.” Lorna wasn’t the least bit sure how to respond. As Ian leaned forward to tap his ash, for a heart-stopping second, she thought he might kiss her.

  Ian leaned back and pushed the hair off his forehead. “Anyway, I think you ought to know what’s being said.”

  “All right. Do you think I need to be concerned?”

  Ian tilted his head to one side. “On a scale of one to seven, where one is extremely concerned and seven is not concerned at all, I’d suggest a four, maybe a five. Because the other reason to mention it, Lorna, is I’d like to promote you.” He put the cigarette down on the little foil ashtray and folded his hands in front of him. “To be our new operations gal. I think it would be unfortunate for both of us if there were uncharitable speculation as to why.”

  “But what about Doug?” was all Lorna could think to say. Doug was currently in charge of operations: a huffy creep with a habit of picking his scalp and sniffing his fingers. Very likely, Doug was the source of the rumours about her and Ian. His job, which as far as Lorna could tell involved distributing timesheets and ordering telephones — tasks that seemed to make him furious to have to perform — did not include anything Lorna had ever expressed interest in.

  Ian swiped the cloud of smoke in front of him, shooing away the idea of Doug. “I think you’re the one for the job.”

  “I’m flattered,” Lorna said

  “I hoped you’d be pleased.” Ian crossed one leg over the other, his feet jutting into the aisle between tables.

  “I am. Pleased.”

  He glanced at the approaching waitress. “And I wonder, in that case, if we oughtn’t to behave very professionally.”

  “Let me think about it,” Lorna said.

  Ian let out something between a snort and a laugh. “Oh?”

  Lorna shook her head. “About the job, I mean.” A new layer of heat sank into her face.

  “Well, I hope we’ll agree.”

  “Yes.” Lorna agreed, but to what? The job? The end of dinners like this?

  Ian smiled at the waitress, and she set down his food. He raised his empty ginger ale glass with a little shake. “Thank you, love.”

  Within ten days, Lorna began her new job in operations. She managed timesheets and reviewed the budgets. She reorganized the file cabinet and supply cupboards. She also got a small bump in pay. Her new office, an upgrade from the front desk, had a clear glass wall facing the corridor. To the people walking by, Lorna had the sense she was either too visible or completely transparent. Every morning, Ian tapped the glass with his fingertips, making Lorna feel like an oversized goldfish in a Chinese restaurant. This tapping was part of the shift to unnaturally distant behaviour between them, the sort of behaviour Lorna imagined you’d put on if you were having an affair.

  This, Lorna had to admit, wasn’t an entirely unwelcome idea. Since the conversation at the Veranda, she had turned the possibility of actual Ian, not someone like Ian, over in her mind. And why not wonder, if everyone else was wondering? When he drove her home from Mississauga that night in his red Saab convertible, she let the sun press down on her eyelids and pretended they were on their way to his house in the country: in her imagination, the sort of distant red barn she was asked to identify through a scope at her annual eye exam. But unlike at the eye doctor, Lorna wasn’t sure how clear she wanted the picture to be.

  If it weren’t for Libby, Ian’s wife, the spiky-haired woman responsible for selling Lorna’s house above asking, maybe Lorna would allow herself to imagine things clearly. Libby was doughy faced in the way that spikey-haired middle-aged women tended to be, but she was the type people called “a firecracker”: bright, energetic, not to be messed with. Funny, Lorna thought, how men were never called firecrackers. Ian, certainly, would never be called one. He was the most coolheaded person Lorna had ever known. Self-possessed, unflappable. He would never get carried away, and so he would never leave Libby. Still, when the office air conditioning was too intense, Lorna found herself holding warm photocopies to her ribs, imagining Ian’s heat.

  The very week Lorna moved to her new office, Lizbeth Kotsakos came on as Lorna’s front-desk replacement and research coordinator. Chosen by Ian and Marcus, Lizbeth was fresh out of community college with a diploma in business administration. She would take over Lorna’s role assisting Ian with focus groups, eating dinners in suburbia, riding in the Saab. As the staff gathered for her introduction, she explained that she was looking for a role where her people skills would shine. “To me, it’s gotta be people before paper,” she said and nodded at her remark repeatedly. She was a plump girl with a soft, smiley face and a preference for bright skirts and frilly blouses with elaborate clasping systems. In Lorna’s view, Lizbeth laughed too much. Ian, for example, was hilarious, but it was the sort of humour that took truly knowing him to laugh as hard as Lizbeth did. And Lizbeth’s laugh was truly awful; it sounded very much like an orgasm. That was the first thing Lorna didn’t like about her.

  The second thing that Lorna didn’t like was Lizbeth’s failure to observe the limits of what was appropriate for her role. Lorna noticed it first during Lizbeth’s training. The girl nodded earnestly as Lorna went over the steps of how to book focus group facilities, how to read cross-tabulated data, and the little tasks that would fall to her, like where to order birthday cakes and flowers, but Lizbeth’s mind wasn’t focused on the task.

  “Wow,” Lizbe
th said, combing her fingers through her bangs. Lorna smelt dewberry, the cloying scent also favoured by her thirteen-year-old daughter. “How long did you do this job for again?”

  “Four years.”

  “Holy.”

  “Holy what?”

  Lizbeth swivelled in her chair. “Nothing, sorry. But I think, for me, this will be like a one-year thing. I want to just sponge it all up. Next year I want to be, like, moderating focus groups, doing interviews. Really be in the guts of it.”

  Lorna shook her head. “I don’t know, Lizbeth. Marcus and Ian – all the associates, actually – have very advanced degrees in psychology.”

  Lizbeth scrunched her lips to one side and shook her head. “No,” she said. “Ian is self-taught.”

  “Sorry?”

  “He told me he’s not a book guy.” Lizbeth laughed as though the memory was of a truly witty exchange. “He said there’s nothing to it. Just smoke and mirrors.”

  “Well,” Lorna said. “Ian’s sort of a genius. Geniuses make the impossible look effortless; that’s their trick.”

  “But he started pretty young, so I figure that—”

  “Before you were born,” Lorna interrupted. “Still, it’s a very Gordian thing.” Lorna was pleased with finding a word that Lizbeth most likely didn’t know. She hadn’t known it until she met Ian. “They say he can squeeze blood from a stone.” A client had described him that way once. Ian would find a better way to describe his talents. Stones didn’t have blood. Or was that the point?

  “I can’t wait to just sit and watch,” Lizbeth said, starry-eyed.

  “Well. You’ll be pretty busy with the details. You need to keep the clients happy back there. Keep them fed and watered. Be useful and friendly.” The chaste chirp in Lorna’s voice reminded her of Mary Poppins: all spit-spot. She didn’t even speak this way to her children.

  Lizbeth nodded. “That also.”

  “That’s the job.” Lorna filled the silence with a throaty laugh that she felt made her sound about seventy-five. Lizbeth had a jaunty orgasm.