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But now, all I thought about was kissing Garrett, having sex with him, smelling his skin, brushing my hands through his hair, sleeping in his T-shirts—and it was unfair.
Rob wandered back into the living room with the cordless phone. “Sounds good. Yes, we’re really looking forward to it too. Yes, I promise, I’ll drag Kelly kicking and screaming to make sure she’s on time.”
Rob hung up. “You know, there’s no way we can be late. My mother will never survive the affront.”
“She does not even remotely get me.”
“No, she gets you perfectly. She doesn’t believe in being late. She thinks it’s rude and disrespectful of people’s time.”
“I am notalwayslate.”
“Youarealways late.”
“Things get in my way.”
“You let things get in your way.”
“Stop.”
“Realize this: if we are late on Christmas for any reason, even if a snowstorm, a crazy Quebec-like ice storm or something as bizarre and totally implausible as a freak sandstorm threatens the entire city, we will still need to be on time for dinner.”
“Understood.” I yawned and stood up. “I’m going to bed. If you can pause the lecture for the night, please kiss me good night.”
Rob leaned over the back of the couch and did just that.
* * *
As I lay in bed with my book, having finally had a proper shower, removed all the makeup from the last few days, and put on my insanely comfortable pajamas, dread filled me like a helium balloon. Part of me wanted to be late, simply to spite Rob’s mother. It had been years since I stopped trying to make her like me. We hadn’t gotten off on the right foot. I hadn’t gone to private school, and my choice of career (or lack thereof) had always been a bone of contention. Over dinner, my position would be referred to as my “little job,” or it was backhandedly implied that when Rob and I got married (which was simply not happening), I would have to quit work to adequately set up hearth and home for my ever-brave man who had to set out into the mean world of corporate finance every day. Oh, and babies—don’t even get me started on babies. Not wanting them was out of the question. And there was no way I was telling Rob about my sister before this dinner, for him to blurt out the news over Christmas cake and for his mother to say something snarky like “Isn’t she your younger sister?” Or “That should set your biological clock straight, Kelly. There’s nothing like a little competition between siblings.” And I’d want to reach over the hors d’oeuvres and strangle her.
At Rob’s family occasions, I kept quiet, kept my head down, sipping whatever glass of expensive wine his father poured for me. I would not have an opinion. Andthatwasn’t easy. I’m naturally outspoken, and in my family, if you didn’t speak your mind (or end up yelling at each other by dessert), it wasn’t considered a successful holiday gathering. At my mom’s house we had roaring arguments about politics, entertainment, books, our lives, our decisions, and between the three of us women, my stepfather and two stepbrothers often didn’t know what hit them. Deep down I thought that our differences were the reason Rob and I had ended up together. Beyond the buzz and pitfalls of finding each other while we were so young, he loved my mother and had an infinite amount of patience where she was concerned. He’d always been that way with my family; he doled out advice to Josh and Daniel in a way that didn’t make them feel like idiots. He’d helped Meghan out with her finances more times than I could count on my fingers and toes. And since my stepfather was an accountant, there were always long conversations between the two of them about the markets and a whole bunch of other stuff that the rest of us ignored—but it always woke Carl up, and that, too, made my mother happy.
After terrible high school boyfriends and watching my mother’s brutal decisions about men, I had been ready for Rob. Ready for someone to love me properly. To call me his girlfriend, to hold my hand, and to make sure I was okay. In my cobbled-together family, I was proud to have chosen him, to have found him. The struggles to fit in with his family? His older brother who was already a sports and entertainment lawyer and his wife who was equally qualified to love him (she has an MBA from Western and does “consulting,” whatever that is) are nice people, but we have nothing in common. “Oh, Stephen and I don’t watch TV,” she said to me once when I tried to talk aboutThe SopranosorSex and the City. Who doesn’t watch TV? Apparently, they sit in bed swapping copies ofThe Economistand listening to opera.
To each his own, and I’m sure the pair of them work such long hours that anything other than a quick dinner at the end of the day is impossible. But I’m such a sore thumb in those situations, and Rob tries so hard to ignore it, to make me feel comfortable, that it only ends up making me feel worse. Inadequate. They’re always trying to hoist a career change on me, to convince me to go into marketing, to “parlay” my skillset, to update my resume, to talk to a friend of a friend of a friend in the never-ending network that is their social circle. Hard pass. They’re good people. They’re just notmypeople.
* * *
I had met Rob through my friend Tanya, who was his cousin, at the university pub one drunken St. Patrick’s Day. He kept buying me green beer and trying to convince me that because I had a Gaelic-sounding name I must have Irish blood somewhere down the line. I laughed and kept insisting that my name was my dad’s and I had no idea if there was anything in my family history that suggested I needed to be out celebrating on March 17.
After the end of classes, just before exams, the three of us went to a rock show downtown, and he ended up back at my awful apartment north of Princess Street. We had one of those typical nights when you end up with a near but not total stranger (read: when you’re falling-over drunk), and physical attraction propels the whole mess until it bleeds over into the wee hours of the morning. Tanya had hated the band and had headed home hours earlier, but Rob spent the night sitting at my kitchen table. My roommates came home and joined us, brought more beer, and we played a rollicking game of Never Would I Ever. It was so late it was about to be morning, the kind of night that paused because the dark was so dark and the air so cold. We kept the heat down, and Rob said it was freezing, how could I stand it—Poverty, I explained. He laughed, set the beer bottle down on the counter, and said,Let me keep you warm.
In those days, that was all it took for me—someone showing a little kindness—and I’d open my bed and mistake it for my heart.
* * *
Six weeks later, both of my roommates had packed up, leaving dust bunnies in their wake after their parents had picked them up and piled their stuff piecemeal into family cars. Best friends since grade school, they were co–au pairs for a very wealthy newspaper baron, and they were jetting off to Europe with the family in a week. I envied their job prospects. I still hadn’t made up my mind whether I was going home for the summer or couch surfing with my sister at her new basement apartment downtown until I found some sort of serving job. Rob had practically been living at our place, until I kicked him out so I could study.I’ll see you, I said.After exams.
Rob was a straitlaced, totally preppy commerce student who wore his Queen’s jacket without an ounce of irony; he tossed it on over every piece of clothing, in every season. I spent much of my time in a pair of old combat boots that my stepfather had given me the summer before school. Most of my clothes were old band T-shirts and leftover vintage pieces plucked from my mother’s closet. I wore them unironically. I had exactly two pairs of jeans. I could fit all my laundry, sheets included, into one load at the laundromat on Clergy Street. My winter jacket was an old peacoat of Carl’s—and when he saw me in his old boots from his time as a cadet and his old jacket, he offered me an allowance for school.No, I said.Thank you. I didn’t want to owe him anything if their marriage imploded. Carl wasn’t my dad; he was kind and thoughtful, but I couldn’t take his money. I scrimped and saved and paid for school myself with heavy loans and a food budget that would make my mother weep for its lack of actual nutrients. Every time Rob came over in those heady first few weeks of us sleeping together, he brought snacks—healthy ones like apples, and not-so healthy ones like his favorite salt and vinegar chips.
You don’t have to feed me, I said.I like to, he replied.Plus, have you seen your cupboards? I don’t think they’ve had actual food in them for months.
Rob didn’t have to spell it out. He balked at the fact that I had a part-time job working in a small flower shop downtown throughout most of the year, leading up to exams. He made the mistake of saying that I was like a real townie once while I was studying for my philosophy final, and I remember asking him what was wrong with being from Kingston. He was taken aback, like he’d never thought about being from anywhere other than Toronto.
His family was exactly what I expected. They cottaged. They took expensive summer vacations to places like Paris and London. My family members piled off and on like Lego bricks: mother, absent father, sister, various miscellaneous men and their children, now a stepfather and his two boys. We did not cottage. We came home, argued, left, came home again, argued some more, and shared holiday dinners that were nothing short of epic in terms of who might be mad at whom, who wasn’t speaking, and who simply refused to show up. Sometimes my stepfather would even invite his ex-wife into the mix. Any number of my cousins, stepcousins, or various other relatives might arrive on my mother’s doorstep, and they’d be fed too.
I was part of the earnest Queen’s contingent—the kids who had good grades and didn’t understand the hierarchy of the place before landing there for Frosh Week: the tendrils of contacts that spanned generations and the network of legacies from a world I naïvely didn’t even know existed. I was smart. I wanted a good education. I needed to get as far away from Toronto as I could without leaving the province and doubling my tuition.
Tanya was your typical Queen’s student. She was prelaw, had gone to private school like Rob, and she knew all the same people he did. They had gone to camp together and dated in each other’s circles like nobody’s business. I admired how Rob’s life had constancy. How he knew what was expected of him and didn’t mind stepping forward and filling in the blanks. Respectable career that grew out of his education (check). Responsible use of his capital in terms of its growth and setting him up for later in life (check). The only dangling outlier: a girlfriend with the same background and values. Uncheck? I liked Tanya—we had a couple of history classes together, but we were convenience friends, tossed together because we were both in the same place at the same time. It’s a throughline for this part of my life, hanging around with people I didn’t have much in common with but who were nice, friendly, and solid.
