She remembered the summer for its smell. The summer of the garbage strike when the air was weighted with a rot that could not be ignored. One weekend that summer, she stepped onto the subway, surveying the train for a seat away from anyone else. She chose an empty subway loveseat, done up in faded red velvet. Anna played a game on subways. In this place where human contact was discouraged, she looked for young men to see if they would glance at her. Then she would look direct in their direction, and confirm her suspicions as their eyes then moved to the floor, as if ashamed. Anna emerged blinking from the subway, a gremlin in a sundress.

“How was class?” asked her mother, all the while absentmindedly stroking the head of Anna’s dog, Jackie, perched between the driver and passenger’s seat, keeping vigilant watch of the road. Her mother had what Anna considered to be an unnatural attachment to the pet, insisting on taking it everywhere she went, claiming “she didn’t want to be alone.” Her mother, that is. Anna wasn’t sure of the dog’s opinion.

“Fine.”

“Did you get the emails I sent you this morning?”

“All six of them? Yes, I did.”

“There’s no need for that tone you know, you can say it nicely.”

All her life the same old tape, and from the same player.

“I think you should tell ABC Gardens that you need to work less hours.”

ABC Gardens had been her after-school job six years ago. She distinctly remembered quitting three or four times.

“I can handle my own shit, mom. I’m a big girl now.”

“Don’t swear like that. It really isn’t attractive. All I’m saying is, I know they’re desperate to get you in, but you take care of yourself and your family first.”

“Okay…?”

Her mother wrinkled her nose in distaste.

Anna let this one go. With Ipod engaged she stared at the concrete fringes of the city as it passed by. West Toronto always depressed her.

It was funny her mother should talk about family.

“You know, you’re not always the easiest person to get along with.”

They both knew that.

***

Her mother drove up the long gravel driveway. The house was built on top of a small hill, and it surveyed everything. It was a cooler day at the end of August. Compared to life in the city, the seasons here were always just a shade more vivid. Her mother didn’t mention any of their conversation in the car as they brought groceries into the kitchen.

“What do you want me to make you for dinner?”

***

The Morgens were known in the community. That is to say, they volunteered with the Rotary and were engaged most every Saturday night. Anna hated the sound of polite laughter at her father’s jokes.

They had moved to the area ten years ago, when they had built their country dream home on eighteen acres of virgin woodland. The house was painted a light shade of green, and Maria Morgen’s bougainvillea framed the omniscient bay windows that overlooked the pond.

The pond had not been swum in since Anna was a small girl. Now she was beyond catching frogs and squelching mud between her toes. She was off at university, learning to be an adult. Anna’s parents, who had met at the university, had been married there as well, both ceremony and reception. When Anna had applied to university, she didn’t have much choice. Her parents had high expectations of their only child. She had even higher expectations of herself.

***

She grabbed a beer from the fridge. She’d been introduced to just about every Belgian beer that summer, when the Morgens took their yearly trip to some European destination. Years before Anna was born, her parents had made friends with a French family they had stayed with on the outskirts of Paris. This family had three young children, and in the subsequent years the two families often visited each other. The youngest, Marc, had decided to study English and had often stayed with the Morgens. He claimed that he remembered her being four and ridiculous.

“Not much has changed,” he had said.

She took another two beers from the fridge, and a bottle opener. The sun was setting earlier now. She put on a heavier sweater and quietly opened the door. Her parents had always hated her going out at night, but not snow, rain, or her parents’ displeasure could stop her.

Her caressed golden rod where the manicured lawn surrounding the house stopped and wilderness took over. She was looking for the small path to the pond. It was grown over, and so she crushed plants with her shoes untied.

There was a boulder on the west side of the pond that jutted out into the shallow water. Here she had sat with Marc when she was eighteen, drinking beer and skipping rocks. She remembered the sun and the sand on her knees and hands, as she begged for a rock from the water.

He had asked her to sing him English folk songs. He was trying to perfect his English. She sang him a Scottish lullaby her father had taught her as a child, trying to instill in her the little culture his side of the family had.

She slowly taught Marc the words and the Scottish lilt as the sun had set over a perfect sky. He had looked at it, looked at her, and said, “Il est jolie, comme toi.”

Later that night laying down exhausted in her family’s corn field, they looked hopelessly for shooting stars. They had been playing like children, wrestling, a challenge she could not win but did not mind losing. He sat on top of her, the conqueror, breathing hard and holding down her arms at the wrists. There was a pause, as if there was one thought, one breath between them. Then he suddenly let go, rolled off her, and pointed upwards.

His words came quickly. “In France we say a soul is on its way home when a star is like that across the sky. That is why you make a wish on it, because it goes straight to heaven. Let’s both of us make a wish.”

“De quoi est-ce que t’as souhaité?”

What did you wish for, he had asked her.

“Prince Charming.”

He laughed. “You are too young to be thinking of this.” He was twenty-two. He had been her older brother for as long as she could remember.

“You’re right. I lied. I’m looking for a lover I don’t have to love. A boy so drunk he doesn’t talk. Is that better?”

He had rolled onto his side, looked at her in the dark.

“You are my family, Anna. I like you. I really like you. But I feel you are my family.”

Two years later, visiting him in the south of France, she had slept with a friend of his. For that he had called her a slut. This friend was not a good guy, he had told her. What was she doing? She had yelled at him, lectured him that just because he had had the same girlfriend since he was eighteen, it was not the same for everyone.

“People get lonely,” she had told him.

“I think I would rather be alone.”

***

Her father was always home late. He worked in the city, commuting long hours. He always smiled when he saw her, and Anna remembered when her dad had tucked in his little girl. Now when she asked him to come and say good night, he was usually too tired for one of their long conversations. And now there were things she could never confide to her daddy.

Once, putting her to bed, her father had told her, “You’re old enough to know this now. I don’t love your mother. I haven’t for a long time. I don’t know if I ever did really.”

Anna knew her father told her this because he had no one else to talk to.

“I think about leaving every day.”

It was almost worst to know that he never would. They had been married some twenty-five years now. To them it truly was an until-death-do-you-part sort of arrangement, with so much money and history tied up in their union. They would go on in unhappy security until the end.

***

That summer, the summer filled with garbage, a boy had found her. He had pressed her down, gently; he smelled of sweetly of tobacco. She tasted a dark brew on his lips. Something imported, she thought, expensive and spiced. Her palms flattened out against his chest. She moved her hands under his arms, until they followed his shoulder blades in rhythm. Her hands believed and moved over him, seeing the end of the afternoon. He was wearing a gold crucifix. It dangled between them, falling into the crevice between her breasts.

There had been no words between them since this had started, but then he asked,

“Do you want to?” with a brush through her hair, like kids kissing upstairs.

“Kiss me again,” she said, not thinking of him. “I don’t care for this careful behaviour.”

***

She was in the passenger seat as her mother drover her back to the city. Her closest friends, who all lived together, were having a housewarming party she had no real choice but to make an appearance at. They lived in Chinatown, where the smell at the best of times left an impression. Considering the garbage strike, her friends had themed the party “white trash”. To her mother’s dismay she was wearing cut off denim shorts and the Southern Comfort tee-shirt she’d gotten free as a promotion from a store on Queen Street. Ladies don’t dress like that, her mother had told her when Anna had come down the stairs.

Maria had the classical music station on as usual, and hummed along to the Jupiter symphony. She kept splaying her fingers, and it was then that Anna noticed a gold signet ring, the new coat of arms glinting at her in the late summer sunlight.

“Wow, you got that made quick.”

Her mother now purposefully looked at her pinky finger.

“It was an late anniversary present from your father. Twenty-five years is gold.”

“I thought that was fifty. Twenty-five is silver.”

***

She saw him again at the party. She knew his face, but not his name. She felt his eyes on her, as his gaze knew her skin. She had slept with him without knowing his name, but that wasn’t to mean she didn’t know him, as she did, in a sense (the biblical sense, she supposed). It was just someone’s face, their skin, the outward façade of their person as it integrated with yours, but then that person was revealed to you. A person’s name told you nothing about them. It was sound, not substance.

She felt his pull, knew he was watching, waiting for her to recognize him and respond. She took another sip of her drink and felt herself to be the most confident woman in the room. Far from their furtive tryst, she smelled the familiar perfume of tobacco and dark beer. How it felt to her when she was naked.

“Anna,” he said with purpose, like in greeting an old friend. He smiled at her wittingly, his eyes speaking their acquaintance. She nodded, returning his knowing look. Except for this admission, her expression remained blank. She locked away that part of herself that she had only revealed to him because she was sure it meant nothing to her. And she was bitter for that.

She walked away without saying anything more.

Later that night, he sidled up to her as she spoke to some friends. Now there was no graceful escape.

“I… like your shirt.” He said this as if it were the world’s most brilliant pick-up line.

She remembered how he had rustled up his clothes. When he was dressed, he leaned in once more to kiss her, grasping a handful of her hair while he did. She had pulled the sheets over her breasts, her back exposed as she hugged her knees, watching him go. He had left a bad aftertaste in her mouth, which kept her up that night along with her want for a saviour.

“Thanks,” she said, deliberately not taking the cue and looking away.

Jamie, the connection between them, looked at her deliberately. He had facilitated their hook-up the first time, and now his eyes asked her why she was being such a bitch.

The alcohol was starting to hit her. She took another drink, and she felt the capricious tickle that seemed to start from her toes and warm its way up her body. She let her consciousness slide.

Lessons learned when her memory slurred: she knew she didn’t want him again. Her eyes—unfocused— seeing herself reflected in sliding doors behind Jamie. Her hand moved to tuck a piece of hair behind her ear. With her hair swept up and her eyes painted, heightened cheekbones exposed her. She half-smiled and moved away.

“He felt bad about it, after,” said Jamie privately. “You should’ve given him a chance.” She hesitated on this for a moment. Then she left the party.

She walked down the street. It had been a hot day, and she felt heat rising from the concrete; occasionally came the hum of the subway underneath her feet. She knew it probably wasn’t safe but she walked down a back alley, a short cut to her place. Past overflowing garbage cans behind a Chinese restaurant; past dogs roaming through the garbage. They eyed her warily, searching her mind and heart. She knew this look well. She just didn’t know what they would find.

*********************

Published in The Hart House Review, 2010 ed.

http://www.harthousereview.com/