Eleanor Rigby by Douglas Coupland
Mother said, “I’ve thrown thousands of dollars at the system for years, and I could never find out anything.”
“You what?”
“I pray in a closet for him. I haven’t had a proper night’s sleep since the day we signed the papers.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“We never talked about him—you—Jeremy. Ever.”
Jeremy said, “I insist—you two need coffee.”
Mother began speaking like she was talking in her sleep. “I’ve also thought about you during the days, too. Usually it’s when I’m preparing dinner, and in my head I’m wondering how many portions to make. I’m at the sink peeling potatoes, or maybe it’s while I’m ironing a shirt. Don’t ask why. I’m standing up and doing something dull with my hands. Leslie and William have kids, but for some reason it’s you I’ve missed. You were the first. I worry about Leslie’s kids, but when I think about them, I’ve never pulled over to the side of a road, out of the blue, feeling like I’ve been kicked in the chest.”
A bit of my wind had left me. “I don’t think I can take any more emotion here.”
Mother ignored me. “Leslie says you’re sick. That you called Liz from the hospital.”
“In a sense.”
“You look fine. What’s wrong with you?”
I said, “Multiple sclerosis.”
“Oh.”
I tell you, those two words are charged, yet nobody knows with what. Perhaps bones darkening and shattering; bruises that come and go without reason, or skin feeling stung by a bee, the skin then wasting away, even while in bed. The dreaded wheelchair, or a plastic bubble, and doubtless dozens of brown plastic medication bottles. I don’t know. Even now that I know what the beast is, it still makes no sense to me.
Seeing us both standing there at a loss for words, Jeremy had mercy on us and launched into a brief description of the disease. Mother bit her lips; afterwards she asked Jeremy how he was feeling right then.
“Okay. I had a nap.”
“He’s going to be staying here tonight.”
Mother said, “Here? Why would anyone want to stay here?”
“Thank you, Mother.”
Jeremy said, “I’m sleeping on the couch.”
“No you’re not. You’ll come stay at the house with me. I have two perfectly good guest rooms, and one has an ensuite bathroom. And I just made Nanaimo bars, too.”
“Nanaimo bars? You drive a hard bargain, Mrs. Dunn, but no, I want to stay here with Liz.”
The sun had gone down, and the sky was a dazzling deep blue. I said, “Mother, let’s just let Jeremy sleep. Jeremy …?”
Jeremy had started to tremor slightly, as if his whole body was stuttering. We helped him out of his trousers, leaving him in his underwear and a T-shirt. He quickly fell asleep.
He was a beautiful boy, and Mother and I stood there watching him as if he were a painting. I was unsure of whether I could make any artistic claim to having created him. He was the wonderful Christmas present, and I was merely the box, the wrapping paper and the postage stamp. He opened his eyes briefly at one point, but unwarranted attention clearly didn’t seem strange to him, and he fell asleep once more.
I was bagged. For the time being, the old pattern of silence Mother and I shared would remain in place. We had a quick hug and agreed to meet again the next day.
After she left, I walked around switching off the condo’s lights. This must be what it feels like to be a normal person at the end of a day: small and large dramas; secrets and revelations; coffee cups and plates caked with dried food. With just the stove light on, I sat on a kitchen chair and gazed at the sleeping form on the couch. Was it really just days ago that I believed this room to be incapable of life?
Jeremy’s body twitched like a perch on a dock.
“Jeremy, are you okay?”
“I don’t know.”
I walked over and sat beside the couch. “Bad dream?”
“Dream? No. Not at all. It was the farmers I saw earlier.”
“Oh. Okay. What happened?”
“If I tell you, you’ll keep it between us, right?”
“Yes—but can I ask you first, real quick, how you know the difference between a dream and a vision?”
“That’s easy. When I see something, I’m really there. It’s like in the movies, when a character travels back in time, everybody thinks he’s crazy, and then he pulls a ring or something out of his pocket, and everybody suddenly realizes he was telling the truth and truly was back in time. It’s that feeling.”
“Okay. What about the farmers?”
“They were still out on the road, wearing their dungarees and looking at the sky and waiting to be told something more. I could tell they felt cheated, and I could tell they were confused and probably angry. Then they heard a voice from just over a hill. It was a woman’s voice, and as I heard it I thought how voices in visions are only supposed to come to people like Joan of Arc burning at the stake, assisted by angels, but instead this voice was like the woman at the end of the 1-800 number you call to order stuff off of TV.”
“What did she say?”
“She said she had news that the farmers wouldn’t like. She said that the farmers were unable to tell the difference between being awake and being asleep.”
“Like we’ve just been talking about?”
“I don’t know about that. But the woman’s voice told them that the farmers had lost their belief in the possibility of changing the world. They asked her what she meant by that, and she said that the farmers just assumed that the lives of their children or grandchildren would be identical to their own lives, that there wouldn’t or couldn’t be any difference.”
“It sounds like they had to choose between certainty and peace.”
“Kind of. I guess what was weird was that the farmers had no trouble with this. They said, ‘Okay.’ And so the voice told them that this was foolish, and because of this there had to be a change of plans.”
“Uh-oh.”
“They were told that death without the possibility of changing the world was the same as a life that never was. The voice said that they’d soon hear words that would make them believe again in a future.”
There was a silence. I said, “That was really crazy and scary what you were doing today, out on the highway.”
“Sorry. But when I get in that state, I can’t stop myself. I really need some sleep.”
“Good night, Jeremy.”
“G’night.”
What was I to make of this strange young man?
* * *
In the few remaining weeks of summer following Jeremy’s birth, Mother and I weren’t enemies, but we weren’t friends.
To our mutual satisfaction, in the local shopper paper Mother found a divorcee named Althea down near the ocean who gave painting lessons from her basement. She was an aging, scatterbrained, shawl-wearing fertility goddess. Her students, all of whom were far older than me—and all emotional disasters—showed up at eleven each morning, and we painted still lifes composed of Althea’s bottles from the night before. Around two, once Althea’s gin headache faded, we took our canvas boards to the sunbaked rocks around Lighthouse Park, where we painted arbutus trees, salt- and wind-warped cedars, the calm August ocean and maybe a few rogue clouds. We sat in tribal clusters, and as it was the seventies I had all of these damaged adults around me spilling their guts about multiple orgasms, erectile dysfunction and cocaine abuse. I could barely control my palette knife while a modelling ingenue confided about how much sex and cocaine she’d had the weekend before, and how it “fatigued” her, “but you know, cocaine is non-addictive—” All of those seventies lies. My paintings were dreck, sold at a garage sale ages ago, and doubtless some smart-aleck youngster has found them for sale in Salvation Army thrift stores and has now hung them up as cheesy ironic monstrosities—which is what they were.
My parents and I obviously never told William or Leslie about the baby. It was simply ea
The good thing about Mother being erratic is that when her behaviour became even wilder after the birth, William and Leslie just thought it was a bad patch and gave it no more consideration.
Father threw himself into his job at the engineering firm and was gone much of the time. Around me he was quiet, but no more quiet than usual. He gave the occasional sigh, but I think he mended from the experience quickly. Mother, though, had nobody in her life to speak with, and she stewed about the birth far more than I did. Teenagers can be mean and oblivious, and I was no different in that regard. It didn’t occur to me that Mother would be undergoing something major. I now cringe at my callousness, but what’s done is done.
* * *
Oh—before I forget, my mother never knew about the cluster of abortions that occurred in the few months after the Italian trip. It was common lore at the school, even for outsiders like me: those girls sauntering off to the Elf station brought back souvenirs, four in all. I still have a photo of the Elfs, who probably have offspring circling the globe. I took the photo the day before we left. The bus crapped out on us and we were marooned at the hostel, so we all went over for a group shot. The photo is yellowed, and you can sense the stinking, noisy autostrada just to the side of the station, and you can see something in the eyes of the girls. They’d changed.
* * *
After Jeremy fell asleep again that first night, he woke up sweating into his second hour. I’m not sure if he even knew it was me, but he said, “The women on the porches! Oh! Suddenly they’re far more beautiful than they were before. They’re in white dressing gowns. There are flowers in vases on porch railings and in their hair—shasta daisies and bachelor’s buttons. These beautiful women are asking the voice what it was they’re supposed to do next.”
“What is it?”
“They’re told to believe that we’re all sick in our own way—and that life is work—and rewards often seem more accidental than based on merit. And they’re told about the delay, and that they won’t be receiving their gift—not that year—they have to make it through the winter first.”
“And?”
“The voice stops there. The men and women are frightened. It’s too late to plant seeds. Their stored foods have been destroyed. They know winter will soon arrive, and they don’t know what to do.”
Jeremy paused, then fell asleep once more.
* * *
It’s an axiom of family life that children in their late teens yearn to meet and befriend aunts, uncles and cousins across the country, relatives of whom little has been said over the years, and whose presence throughout their life has been fleeting. I bet Mom and Dad never gave so-and-so a chance. I’ll be the one who discovers their unmined charms, and I’ll be the one who uses my spunk to knit the family closer together.
The newly discovered aunts, uncles and cousins are then revealed to be just like our immediate family, except funnier and more charming and less disciplinary. They inflate our sense of adulthood.
And then the years pass, and with them the ease and confidence around the new-found relatives. Intractable personality problems emerge and tempers flare. Chances are that you, yourself, are turning into one of your parents—the exact people your relatives chose to avoid in the first place. It all turns into a mess, which is fine; families are messy.
I mention this because that’s the way it started with Jeremy. He was an undiscussed relative living far away who showed up on my doorstep one afternoon. Of course I wanted him to be witty and smart and wonderful, but Jeremy, to his credit, never tried to see me as perfection embodied. Which is probably why I liked him so much. And he’d been, if not spying, keeping his eye on me for all that time before we met. My life couldn’t have surprised him in any way.
On Jeremy’s first morning in my place, I woke up to the smell of breakfast in the air. I sat bolt upright: eggs, butter, salt and oil and a touch of chives were like tendrils from under the crack of my bedroom door. I threw on my terry cloth housecoat and poked my head out into the hallway to the kitchen. Jeremy, fresh as a Gap clerk, asked, “Do you like your omelettes chunky or baveuse?”
“What’s baveuse?”
“Runny.”
“Baveuse, please.”
In my bathroom mirror, my cheeks had only slight yellow bruising, and the swelling was down, if not gone. And there was another person in my apartment. Cooking eggs. He was family, but he … I’d never had anybody spend a night in my apartment. I began to wonder about practical things like the bathroom and whether its contents sent out bad signals. Not stupid things like women’s products, but whether or not it seemed like a real person’s bathroom. Whimsical bathroom gadgetry is so embarrassing; dried-out starfish and sponges make me worry about extinction; all-white tile bathrooms remind me of the hostel bathroom in Italy.
I inspected my surroundings, both architecturally and biologically. Odours? Stains? Discolorations? Failures of imagination?
When I finally went into the kitchen, Jeremy said, “Mornings are the best time for me. My body rarely turns freaky until the afternoon, so I try to do what I can as quickly as I can.”
“You didn’t have to cook breakfast.”
“Being useful has always kept me safe.”
“That’s how I feel.”
“You do?” One lip of pale yellow egg was being folded on top of another; he must have beaten extra egg whites into the mix.
I said, “Unless I contribute to society, I pretty much figure they’ll scoop me up in the middle of the night and toss my condo and job and bank account to people who are more deserving than me.”
“How long have you thought that?”
“It’s not thinking; it’s a feeling. Ever since I can remember.”
He handed me the omelette, which was thick like a pancake but full of air, too. It deflated when I forked it.
Jeremy asked if I liked my work.
“I think big companies are like marching bands. You know the big secret about marching bands, don’t you?”
“No. What is it?”
“Even if half the band is playing random notes, it still sounds kind of like music. The concealment of failure is built right into them. It’s like the piano—as long as you play only the black keys, not the white ones, it’ll sound okay, but on the other hand it’ll never sound like real music either.”
“How’s your omelette?”
“Good.” From the kitchen table I glanced at the living room. It was spotless. “Jesus, Jeremy, you didn’t have to clean the whole place.”
“I noticed that there are no family photos anywhere in your place, not even on your fridge.”
“I’ve always meant to put some up.”
“Sometimes when I’d stay with one family for long enough to make friends, I’d go to my friends’ houses, look at their family photos, and it was so strange, seeing the same people, always in the same kind of photos, but growing older together. I only have maybe three photos of me before the age of twenty. School pictures.”
“You were a beautiful baby. Even I could tell that the moment you were born.”
The compliment was lost on him. “I used to steal family pictures from my friends,” he said. “Smaller ones that they’d never miss. Those pictures and my clothes were the only things I ever took from one placement to the next. My plan was that when I finally escaped the system I could hang up all of these photos on my walls, and girls would look at them and think it was great that I had a family, and that I liked my family.”
“Smooth.”
“I’ve always liked those super-healthy girls who smell like freshly mown lawns—the ones who secretly want to make love to chestnut-coloured horses named Thunder. All of my stepsisters had mall hair, and if they tried to make it with me and I said no, they’d blame me for eating the leftover Kentucky Fried Chicken in the fri
I finished eating and lit a cigarette. “I look like hell.”
“So?”
“Point well taken. You know what?”
“What?”
“Let’s go shopping for a fold-out bed this morning.”
“That’s a good idea.”
* * *
Soon we were in my Honda driving to Park Royal mall, the windows wide open on a glorious summer morning. I asked Jeremy if he had a job.
“I was grill cook at a diner, but once I started falling apart I had to stop. My fingers went all numb and I’d just stand there by the chopping board with blood flowing over me like strawberry compote.”
“Not too good.”
“No. And when the numbness went away, I’d get the jitters. Carbon steel blades are no longer a part of my life. A year ago I landed a job doing breakfasts at a tourist-bus hamster wheel of a downtown hotel. Nothing special, but I was able to hold that together, but that’s over too as of last month. Out of nowhere, my arms and legs will seize up—not too often, but enough to make kitchens risky. Lately I’m feeling tired a bit more often. Today’s a good day for me, but it could all turn to sawdust inside of one breath.”
We arrived at the mall a few minutes later, at a chain discount-furniture store called The Rock. We opened its glass doors and I was overwhelmed by hundreds of mattresses and furniture of all types, assembled into no particular departments, the store’s air swirling with the fragrance of spooky synthetic molecules. We found an area that seemed to have slightly more mattresses and, not really knowing what to look for, we just stood there looking dumb beneath unflattering yellowy lighting.
“Hi, I’m Ken. Can I help you?” A man approached us—slightly older than me, with a complexion that said, I like vodka.
“We need a foldaway bed.”
Jeremy said, “And you also need a queen-size bed.”
I was baffled. “What?”
“Look, Mom, sorry, but you just can’t stay with the twin bed. You’re a grown-up woman. Imagine the signal you send out if you bring home some guy and you have a twin bed—like you were fifteen again.”