boonies,’ she wailed. ‘This is where things are happening.’ He shrugged and slurped on his three-fifty Coke. ‘I knew it was a waste of money to send you anywhere.’ Now that Dad was on disability, Doug was taking over more and more of the store and in his opinion, which he took every opportunity to repeat, his sister’s education was a useless and risky expense.
The drive home took two or three hours, depending on the traffic. Her family owned a rest stop that sold cheeseburgers and onion rings and calendars and ceramic mugs and inauthentic maple fudge. It was on the side of the highway and cars stopped on their way to and from cottage country. The cars that stopped usually had children in them who got what they wanted by screaming. The women all seemed blonde, even when
they
he was from Aberdeen and they crowed with laughter and asked if she’d ever heard the man speak. They all liked him because he was young and would occasionally buy them drinks. He’d gone to Cambridge and was mocked for it out of earshot. When Annabel suggested this was jealousy, they insisted they’d rather die than be one of those types. Everyone said he was very young to be a tutor and she had to agree. She couldn’t get used to the idea of drinking in a bar with a teacher and calling him by his first name. And then one day it would be over. By the time she left there had usually been a few days of mild weather in Aberdeen, when everyone called in sick to work and sat on the grass, starting to drink at eleven and getting up every so often to kick a ball around. The men would take their shirts off to boil themselves red in the weak April sunshine and the girls would reveal white bellies and fat little side-breasts squeezing out of tops bought too small. But she never saw any real summer and, from what she heard, there never would be any. Summer meant home, meant Canada. Her older brother would pick her up from the air-conditioned corridors of the Toronto airport. She liked to linger in the city as long as she could, pretending that she lived there and could take the subway home instead of driving with Doug out to where their parents lived.
Her brother would take her for lunch somewhere downtown and grumble about parking and the price of a beer, wondering how people could stand living like this, while Annabel watched the sway of people on the streets, stared at apartments crammed on top of variety stores and in old warehouses, thought about living here with a gorgeous boyfriend who did something interesting like photography. The plan had been to move here after high school and let her real life begin. Then her mother’s church group gave her a scholarship in the some doddering old woman who’d come over on a boat and left behind enough money after her weekly tins of tuna to send a congregation girl away to school in the town she’d left decades ago. Her mother told her Toronto would always be overpriced and down the highway for her to waste her youth on and told her to pack her bags, acting as though they’d all won the lottery. name
of
Her first summer back, she’d started crying over lunch with her brother. They were eating Thai food on a patio. The sun was on her back and she could hear reggae music coming from somewhere behind her. Everyone’s body was so beautiful she couldn’t stand it, and no one was perched on a fire hydrant drinking cheap beer or beating each other up in the streets before throwing up messes of undercooked fat white chips. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ ‘This is where I’m supposed to be, Doug.’ ‘This place is a rip-off. This Coke cost three-
fifty.’
‘Look how cool and happy everyone looks.’ ‘Annie, these people are morons. Anyway, Dad showed me some pictures of where you live now. That’s a nice castle.’ This only made her cry harder. ‘It’s the
weren’t blonde, and everyone complained about the price of gas and bickered over what to feed their kids. The mothers would poke the bulging plastic-wrapped muffins with a doubtful finger and then buy the small glass bottles of juice Doug called retard nectar. After that first lunch in the city, there would be no more Toronto until it was time to fly back at the beginning of September. She would work at the rest stop every day and once in a while see her old high school friends. The second summer she’d spent far less time with them than the first summer, and the third summer she only saw them a few times. Not only was she usually tired after working all day, but it wasn’t easy to borrow the car. And whenever she did meet up
THE YEAR OF OPEN DOORS
with them she was weirdly anxious. None of them went to university, although a few took courses at the community college. They always asked bizarre questions about Aberdeen and it was hard to explain that she didn’t want to talk about it, that she was sick of talking about how you couldn’t get cream for your coffee or that people going to soccer games were seated according to what team they were cheering for. They all seemed to think she was living in the big city and it did no good to remind them of the truth. The rest stop was endlessly busy and before noon she would be streaked with sweat and able to smell the air conditioning on the bodies of the people who came in and asked her where they sourced their meat from and if their hamburgers were organic. She would tan in less than a week, pulling flats of pop and juice off the delivery truck, unwinding the garden hose to water the buckets of geraniums that, according to her mother, attracted customers. She would eat behind the door to the small kitchen, leftover onion rings that had been re-fried too many times to sell and cartons of milk that were close to expiry. She was allowed to read the
WHEN THE WINTER TRULY STARTED SHE WOULD TAKE HER DUVET OFF HER BED AND WEAR IT LIKE A CAPE
magazines if her fingers were clean and she didn’t bend the pages. At night she would have dinner standing up in front of the fridge, eating out of Tupperware because she was too tired to get out a clean bowl. And now, finally, it was the beginning of the fourth and final year. This year she had managed to get Doug to drive her down early in the morning; her flight wasn’t until nighttime. It was close to forty degrees and it hadn’t rained in weeks. The air was heavy and hazy - everything in the distance seemed gritty and silvery at the same time. To compensate for wasting his entire day in the city she had taken his night shifts for the past two weeks. Sometimes whole families came in at night, but usually the night shift meant pouring extra-large coffees for haggard- looking single men driving up to meet the rest of their families. Every so often one of the men would watch her stir his coffee and fit the plastic lid on before talking to her.
22 Jul–5 Aug 2010 THE LIST 23