We Are Not in Pakistan (21 page)

Those hospital guys. This house. A million kilometres from the Windsor apartment where she grew up — and she ain't thinkin' physical distance.

She's living some other woman's life.

“You sound crazy when you sing out loud,” says Philip, coming up behind her. He hesitates, then says with effort, “I'm going to have a look through the telescope. Care to join me?”

Before Philip said “Care to join me in matrimony?” five years ago, Tania's life was going to be a dirt-track stock car race, obstacles and pitfalls everywhere. But Philip was ten years older, had a map, and seemed to have it all worked out. So Tania hopped into his bed to make sure all the troubles of women like Ma couldn't happen to her.

Ma, worn out, buying Lotto tickets, spending all her money at Casino Windsor. She could sell anything at craft fairs, and did — doll houses, spoon rings, china, wind chimes, ice cream, temporary tattoos, candy apples, tarot readings, hot dogs, feathered harlequin masks. She'd tried selling books for a while, but back
then you had to know what was in the books to sell them, so books were about the only things Ma couldn't sell.

Tania could sell anything too; all it took was a pucker of her lips, a sidelong smirk at the camera, the angle of her pelvis tight against silky fabric. “Tania never has to raise her voice,” Ma used to say. A flurry of camera shutters got her out of Windsor and into auto shows in Detroit. She exhibited long expanses of leg as the stages revolved and the cars offered their glossy flanks to men — mostly men — below. For a while Tania thought the crowds were admiring her as much as the cars.

Dr. Philip Trent was in the crowd one day when Tania was posing beside a sleek banana-yellow too-eco-friendly-to-ever-be-profitable model. Other men stood and gazed at the Lexuses, BMWs and Mercedes, and Tania scented a hunger already wistful, whipped and cowed. But there behind Philip stood the gargantuan maw of his hunger. Eighteen-year-old Tania understood in a flash that no adman would ever have to prod it; Philip would be a glad slave to it daily.

So she walked down the ramp in her zircon-studded red shoes, doing her best imitation of Madonna. “I'd like a ride home — would you mind driving?”

And the next week, when Philip called to say he was organizing a bachelor party for a friend in Windsor, she suggested he stop by to see her perform at Jason's Gentleman's Club. The guy she went with till he got picked up for ferrying drugs across the Ambassador Bridge had talked her into dancing there part-time — said it turned him on, watching the guys watch her. From the age of twelve, from the time of her first boyfriend, Tania's “fortay” was whatever her steady-du-jour wanted it to be. All she needed to know then was, What did Philip really want her to be?

Come to think of it, they hadn't done much talking.

And she's come a long way from Windsor — even gave up smoking Slims after she met Dr. Philip.

•   •   •

“Why must we look at Jupiter?” Tania stands on the patio, scanning the sky for the shooting flash of a meteor. A path at her feet, each stone grooved and molded to its neighbour's shape, leads from the patio to the dark hollow of the empty pool at the centre of the lawn.

“It's the biggest,” says Philip. “It will fill the whole lens.” The telescope has been pointing at the planet ever since it came out of the box. Philip put it together on the back patio, following each step in the manual with laser concentration.

He offers her a look.

She puts her eye to the lens and moves the scope slowly. Jupiter's just a big ball of hot air. She wants to see its satellites and maybe the Leonid meteor shower the CBC said could happen late tonight.

“Why do they keep revolving round it?”

“Which?”

“The moons.”

“Gravity and inertia, Tania.”

“Crap. They're just stuck in their orbits and can't figure out how to get someplace else in the universe.”

“Don't say crap, Tania. It's still too cloudy.”

“You've missed the news,” she says as he goes indoors. But he strides upstairs, leaving her standing in the kitchen. In a few minutes, she hears the rush of a modem in his office, calling to another of its kind.

Philip reminded her a few weeks ago, as he did every time they drove past the university, that he took his viva voce there, in that building. With a whole bunch of guys like him.

“That one?” she pointed, pretending to have forgotten.

“No, that one. The newer one.”

“The one with the old facade, I see it now,” she said, quoting Philip because she knew he liked being quoted. Philip voted regularly “to ensure that interiors could be rearranged or redesigned, but the facades must be retained.” He didn't notice the village growing ever quainter and cuter than its inhabitants, commuters to Mississauga and Toronto. Thirty-to-forty-something range, like him.

“You keep saying you'll get back to school some day,” he chid-ed, turning homewards.

She had told him she was on the verge of college but never said she'd have to get her Ontario Secondary School Certificate first.

“I should do what I know best,” she said brightly as they sailed down the main street of the village in the Merc. “Look, there's that nice little restaurant that just opened. Maybe I could wait tables.”

Philip's expression said over his or her very dead body.

“I'd need a car for school,” she said. “And if I got a job. Any job. Unless you want me to get a job at Mississauga General and go to work with you.”

“We can't afford two cars,” he said. “And I wouldn't want you getting in an accident.” She would have thought that remark was real sweet only a couple of years earlier, but since she can't go as far as a neighbour or the village without a car, it's not real sweet any more. Maybe he doesn't want her working at the hospital.

If he weren't so opposed to her driving, she might have proposed getting an office job, but her typing isn't good enough, and every job advertised had a computer that came with it.

She tried a different angle. “I could get a few shoots — might feel good to be in front of a camera again —”

Philip cut her off. “Ta-ni-aa.” Turning her name into three syllables, each of them upbraiding.

Oh-oh, maybe she shouldn't have said “feel.”

“Besides,” he went on, “I've signed you up for a course.”

“Hel-lo? Did you ask me?”

“Etiquette lessons. Two hours on Friday nights.”

Surprise turned to wariness. Once Philip encouraged her to sign up for the Junior Women's League but then found so many things for her to clean at the last minute that she'd ended up missing the monthly meetings. Another time he suggested she volunteer as an organizer with the local book festival, but he could never get home in time for her to take the car to meetings.

“Etiquette lessons? Where does anyone get etiquette lessons?”

“At the university. A four-week extension course. Fifty dollars, that's all. You'll enjoy it.”

“The hell I will.”

He winced, and the back of her hand went to her lips. She knew he thought mentioning the price would make her attend — spare change to a guy raised in Toronto, fifty dollars not to be wasted, to Tania, lately of Windsor.

So last Friday night, Philip gave Tania the keys to his Merc. She drove off alone.

Instead of two hours at etiquette class, she drove the country roads, feeling only a gentle vibration as she sped along alone in her bubble. Five top-shelf finely calibrated stereo speakers exhaled some classical thing on CBC Two — a violin? a viola? Some piece she might have known the name of if she'd finished school. Lullaby-nice.

Someone should have given her directions — she wasn't sure who or whom. Someone should have said, This is what you can expect from the country-club set when you didn't graduate from private school and have difficulty with three-syllable words, when you've been making love to a pole, panting, arching your back like a cat in heat. Which is what the other doctors' wives were thinking, even if they never said it. Someone should have warned
her, but you couldn't explain this to anyone without sounding like some poor dumb little whining rich girl, and who the hell'd believe it? Half the girls at Jason's would give their first-born — what's a D. and C. but a once-a-year routine for most of them anyway — to be in her low-heeled two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar Ferragamo pumps cruising the back roads of Ontario in her husband's Mercedes that very minute.

She drove and drove, timing her return to coincide with
The National.
She had her commentary about class all ready to spill, but luckily she didn't have to.

As the car keys clinked to the hall table, Philip was standing at the kitchen door holding the phone at arms length; he whispered theatrically, “Your mother.” Then Ma's smoke-thickened Michigan drawl gave Tania the latest instalment of her car troubles, this week's list of bum checks, details of the newest telephone rip-off she hadn't fallen for and the multi-level marketing scam for which she had …

Half an hour later Ma asked, “How're ya then, Tania?” And as Tania searched for an answer that wouldn't make her sound like a platinum blond debutante, she signed off with, “That's real nice, dear. Gotta go.”

Philip never asked her about the class. Then, or since. Maybe she should attend a couple of them — learn to say “that's wonderful” instead of “crap.” And smile while saying it.

Standing near the screen door, Tania's thoughts spin with the laundry. She slides the door back, goes out on the patio. The fragrance of white alyssum rises around her. The Leonids must be falling out of the sky all around, unseen.

Something different could have happened tonight. Should have happened. Still could happen. But what?

There'll be a sign. Maybe a pattern will reveal itself. Even to Philip, checking e-mail on his laptop upstairs and pretending he isn't pissed.

Let him simmer down.

Would Tania know if she sees a sign? Or a pattern? And how will she know what it means? She'd stopped asking Ma to do tarot readings for her sometime in her teens when Ma said you'd have to do tarot readings every minute to read all the signs and find all the patterns to really know what's coming.

It's when you think you know what's coming that you really don't. Dr. Philip Trent isn't the same guy she met six years ago. Today his needle and the drip sends patients into guilt-free darkness, then conjures them back to consciousness. But back then, he was Party Animal Extraordinaire, when not working toward a seat in what he then called the Canadian Anesthesiologists' Cartel — he'd call it something polite, like “Society,” now he's part of it.

Anyway, the week after that car show, when he came to Jason's, there was Tania dressed in scarlet leather, the way he and all his “gentlemen” buddies wanted her to be. A few months later, he bought this house without her ever seeing it, sure she'd be so excited. And she was. She'd moved in and become Mrs. Philip Trent.

The perm went first, the hair dye changed from blond to auburn. Tania packed all her spike heels and the red leather corsets, the black leather shorts, the little-girl ruffles, the feather boas in a suitcase and drove them down to Windsor to Ma's low-rent apartment complex.

“Find someplace — here, put 'em in the tub,” said Ma. “Those cost ya somethin' —”

“Never know if I'll be needing them again, eh?”

“I'll have a rummage sale one of these days.”

“You are
not
to sell my things,” Tania told her. “That would be really mean, like when you sold my dolls and my comic books. I'm leaving these things with you because I have no place else to put them, okay?”

But Ma held a rummage sale the very next weekend in a ramshackle shed that abutted the complex's parking lot. “Eighty-five bucks.” Satisfaction gilded the smoked voice as Tania's how-could-you's blistered the phone line.

“Eighty-five dollars for all those beautiful shoes, for the boas, my g-strings, my black leather lace-up stays, everything? I could have given you eighty-five dollars …”

“Never took nothin' from no one, not even when your dad didn't pay his support.”

But eighty-five dollars — that's all the props of her life in Windsor had been worth to Ma, hell, to anyone.

“You're on your own, kid.” Ma's affection came in heavy doses of unvarnished reality. “Over eighteen — not my problem no more.”

She was right, technically, except Tania hadn't felt ready to be eighteen yet. And she wasn't ready to be Mrs. Philip Trent. Didn't know what she was getting into.

Tania draws the door closed, shivering a little. She lifts the lid of the washer, digs inside and transfers the damp white mass of clean sheets to the dryer. Philip is just tired from working in surgery all day, and she's gotta try and understand. What does she know about zapping someone into “stasis,” as he calls it, then bringing him right back?

At the dinner this evening, one of the doctors teased Philip about a patient who woke up in surgery and screamed at the sight
of his exposed heart. Philip went pink. “It does happen sometimes. I did the best I could.”

He went from pink to scarlet when she told that asshole to go fuck himself instead of picking on Philip. And maybe she should have said it with a smile like some other wives would have.

But she was thinking of the one time, the only time Philip told her how he felt. The time he talked about his dad dying. A five-year battle with bone cancer, from when Philip was ten. And Philip wasn't Dr. Philip then, so he couldn't do anything about his father's pain. He's had so much college since, he can't even say, I felt like shit, but he must've.

“Did you pray?” Tania had asked. Philip laughed, the way he laughed at Ma for lighting candles in church and praying to the BVM.