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Processing.
Processing was a patented Lindaism. Whenever a huge life event happened, she would shutter us away in our rooms or on a long drive—no radios allowed, television forbidden. If handheld devices had been a thing when I was a kid, those would have been outlawed as well.
“Take the time to think,” she’d say, her eyes on the road and us going nowhere in particular. When she’d made the decision to marry Carl after they’d lived together for about a year, she had taken us away to a remote cabin in Algonquin Park. To call the three of us camping novices would have been generous. She hadn’t even allowed us to bring books.
“Notebooks only. Two pencils each, and don’t forget a sharpener, because we’ll be processing. Our lives are going to change, and we need to ruminate on what it all means to us and our underlying psyches, as a family and as individuals.”
We ate cold SpaghettiOs out of the tin and a lot of peanut butter. Not being campers, we didn’t have any of the right gear, and we froze our asses off at night when the temperature dropped dramatically even though it was August. But we laughed and laughed.
I had so many mixed memories from that weekend, the kind where enough time has passed, and they’re easy to laugh about now. My sister refusing to take off the wool mittens she had found buried under the backseat of the car, left there a season ago. My mother constantly swatting away mosquitoes and horseflies with shock and awe that they would bother her at all while she was so deep in thought. How dare they interrupt her concentration?
We stayed out there until the bitter end of our camping permit and were actually a little sad to see the experience come to an end. I hadn’t been camping since, and I never again ate tinned spaghetti. When the three of us had gotten back to the city, the packing up seemed easier that time around. We’d had time to forgive my mother for Toly, for the swift nature of her courtship with Carl, for sticking us in a house that was crammed with kids every other weekend. We arrived back at Carl’s with some of the tension surrounding the situation released, and that let my mother concentrate on getting us organized for our new school year.
Here was the crux of the matter: I’d made a decision. It was the right one. Getting married was the right thing to do. I didn’t want to think about Garrett anymore. I needed to get him out of my system and recommit myself to Rob. To the life I had chosen. To my future. I needed to show Camille that I was worthy of what Rob and I had together, of him. The Starbucks kitty-corner to the park was open, so I went inside and settled for their acrid, bitter brew. Their coffee always made me agitated and jumpy, but it was warm, and they didn’t charge me an arm and a leg for a disposable cup. By the time I re-entered the park, the snow was falling harder, making it difficult to walk, but after multiple coffees my head felt clear for the first time in days.
It was last summer. Rob and I had come back from the cottage, and I was at work for the first time in two solid weeks. Even in the summer, when many of the networks were on repeats, we still had meetings, listings, complaints, and so I hadn’t noticed the time when Garrett popped into my cube.
“I’m so glad you’re back,” he said. “It was murder here without you.”
“You’re still alive so it can’t have been that bad.”
“Bored to tears. Beth was off with Raj most of the time, and so I spent lunch hours aimlessly wandering the streets of Toronto.”
“I can’t imagine it was that bad.” I laughed.
“You remember when Oliver sits down in the David Lean version of the movie and the whole city’s bustling around him, and he looks all lost and forlorn?”
“Are you comparing yourself to a nineteenth-century street urchin about to be conscripted into a gang?”
“Yes.”
“Must have been a terrible couple of weeks, then.”
“Brutal. Do you know how lonely it is doing all of our lunch things by myself? People were giving me funny looks, Kel,looks.”
“I’ve been on vacation before, you know.”
“But I missed you.” He paused. “Like, really missed you.”
“I’m back now,” I said quietly.
“I’m so glad.”
There, that was the moment, when it all shifted, and we drifted beyond work and into something else. Because I had missed him, too, desperately. My BlackBerry didn’t work up north, and while I’d spent glorious days by the lake in my bathing suit simply dipping my feet into the water and reading, I had been anxious. Rob kept asking me what was wrong, and I couldn’t explain—Oh, I can’t text Garrett every five minutes, or I’m missing my midweek bibimbap at the noodle place on Yonge. That was the moment where I knew I was staying at the job because Garrett was there and not because of its viable career opportunities.
The pathways hadn’t been cleared yet, and the only people out and about were a few random dog owners desperate for their pets to do their business so they could get back inside. The fresh snowfall had enticed the families who lived near the park to pull out their sleds, racing down the hill side at impossible speeds. I walked in the other direction toward the benches north, near Dundas. I was the only one sitting there. Because rational people were not sitting outside on a park bench on Boxing Day contemplating the rest of their lives.
I sat there, just inside the gates, for what felt like hours, thinking about the two men who defined my life. I felt lucky that I hadn’t made too many mistakes. My high school boyfriend, who’d introduced me to the concept of being the other woman. How it messed with my heart, how awful I had been to the other girl, and how I expected romance to be maudlin, mixed up, miserable, because that’s how little I thought of myself at the time. Not worth it. Never enough. If I hadn’t been through all of that, I would never have known that a man like Rob was even an option. And now I could ruin it all by running off with Garrett, or, really, by daydreaming about having a torrid affair at the hotel across the street from our offices. Because I’d been with Rob for so long I’d avoided a lot of the heartbreak that other women my age suffered through. The constant wondering of will he, won’t he commit, or call, or even show up at the prearranged time. I was lucky. My friends were lucky. Beth had Raj. My sister had Jason. Even my mother had it all worked out now. Annie would be Annie forever, but I was sure she would have gotten married again if any one of the six or seven fellows who had asked to marry her over the last decade had remotely interested her.
After Meghan and I had acclimatized to our new high school, I had fallen in with a group of kids in similar home situations to mine. We all had a decided lack of parental control in our lives. We had cars, we had fake IDs, and we spent hours downtown at dance clubs before finally rolling home well into the night. It wasn’t like Linda to keep so quiet about my behavior, but she never said a word. My grades never suffered, and also, I was pretty sure Carl told her it was a phase, and that to rein me in would make it all worse. I wasn’t rude to him, or to my mother for that matter. I just didn’t come home. When I picked a university, I made sure it was as far away as I could get because I needed to be separate from them, away. Plus, I had been such a selfish twit that I needed a fresh start, and I’d convinced myself that Queen’s was the answer—the exact opposite of the kids I’d been with at school, who weren’t planning on even going to university.
Before the awful boyfriend I had dated, and dated, and dated in high school—a different boy every couple of weeks. I found them abroad on class trips, around the corner at our part-time job among the drivers of the dry-cleaning delivery trucks, in Meghan’s math tutoring sessions. They were everywhere, these boys. Preppy, punk, older, younger—I went out with pretty much anyone who asked. Meghan told me to calm down and find someone like Jason. “Uh,” I said over and over again, “I don’t want to be you.”
“Good,” she’d retort. “You couldn’t have a normal relationship if you tried.”
I was constantly burning and flaming out, fighting with my so-called best friend after she slept with my so-called boyfriend. Screaming matches in the parking lot after school. I’m mortified thinking about it now—still, I got straight As and had enough extracurriculars, mainly organizing the school’s many dances, that I got accepted to university.
But just because I got into the school didn’t mean I was comfortable there. I’d never been so lonely. Alienated, frustrated … and then, somehow, I found Rob. We were so different. Even back then, taking completely opposite classes, but at the end of the night, that didn’t matter because we’d be out at the pub, absolutely plastered, come home, and have great sex. Eventually, we fell into each other’s lives. His friends were my friends. His world was my world. My sister teased me once she met him, saying that I was settling for straitlaced because I knew he would never hurt me. Who would have thought she was right?
