A Life That Fits (10 page)

"I'm not busy." Not busy any nights, but I
didn't share that. I wanted to change it, though, and remembering
how I'd enjoyed chatting with the knitters I said, "I'd love to
come."

She grinned. "Perfect. And yarn's ten percent
off during knit night so you can buy this tomorrow if you'd
like."

I did like, so she tucked the skeins I'd
picked, more wool for my scarf and some pleasantly crisp cotton for
a summer shawl and some amazingly soft angora that would be
something although I didn't know what yet, behind the counter and
we said goodbye.

I strolled to the subway station, toying with
the ends of my scarf and enjoying the warm spring day. I could do
whatever I wanted with the day, and indeed with my life. My life
and schedule were wide-open now and awaiting my decisions on how to
fill them. Nobody to answer to but myself. It felt good. Also
scary, but good.

I would fill the rest of that lovely morning
with the trip to get my clarinet from my parents' storage locker on
the east side of Toronto. It would only be fifteen minutes or so
each way by subway, so I'd be there and back well before lunch and
then I could spend the afternoon and evening crocheting and playing
the clarinet.

A full hour later, I still sat in the
half-dark of the subway's tunnel on my disabled train. There'd been
several announcements that we'd be 'underway momentarily', but
their definition of momentarily clearly didn't match mine.

Wishing I had something to crochet, I was
reduced to reading and re-reading the subway's advertisements for
entertainment. Reduce your debt. Lose your body fat. Locate an
adult who'd gone missing. Cut your mortgage. Recycle instead of
throwing things away. Other than the missing adult one, everything
was about making your life smaller and tighter.

A good thing, in a lot of respects, but I
wanted mine bigger and more expansive. Not my body fat or debt,
obviously, but my life itself. More freedom, more openness. But not
openness like Elaine and Tina. I didn't see sex as a diversion like
they did. At its best with Alex it had been almost a religious
experience, and even at its worst it had bonded us together. I
didn't ever want to have casual sex, not even with someone as
good-looking as the blond.

My mind filled not with him but with the
other guy's aquamarine eyes. I'd never seen eyes that color, almost
teal, but I knew if I ever saw them again I'd recognize him at
once.

I thought about him for a few moments, then
pulled my mind away. I wasn't likely to see him again, and even if
I did I'd probably need seven years or so to be ready for a
relationship, so why bother focusing on a man, no matter how cute
he was? Instead, I shut my eyes and considered the pink angora yarn
I'd be buying the next night. A warm fuzzy cowl? Or mittens? Or
trim on something. I could make a sweater, maybe...

I was half-asleep, leaning against the
subway's window, when we suddenly jerked into motion. Everyone
cheered, looking around at each other as if we'd accomplished
something, and I found myself grinning at complete strangers and
feeling an odd sense of connection to them. It didn't last, of
course; once we reached the next station a bunch of people left and
new ones arrived and the bond was broken forever. But I liked that
it had happened in the first place.

At long last, I reached the storage place and
found my parents' locker. When they'd moved from my childhood home
north of Toronto to their retirement community in Vancouver they'd
left a ton of things behind, and since it had all been arranged in
the locker with my mother's legendary lack of organization I
couldn't immediately find the clarinet.

As I searched, though, I spotted a hot pink
box, about the size of two shoeboxes stuck together, and my eyes
filled with tears even before I consciously recognized it as my
memorabilia box from high school.

No doubt almost entirely full of memories of
Alex. I put it by the door, though, so I could take it home and see
what else had mattered to me back then, and kept looking until I
found the clarinet case beneath a bag full of winter coats and a
box labeled 'stuff box #18'.

Ah, Mom. So not the source of my analytical
skills.

*****

Back home, I had lunch then ignored my
clarinet in favor of spending two hours browsing through the
memorabilia box.

As I'd expected, nearly everything inside was
Alex-related. I flipped through what I remembered as my bad poems
about how much I adored him and had to smile at how much worse they
were than I'd thought. "Eyes like the richest hot chocolate"
indeed. I'd made one using the first letter of 'Alex and Andrea'
for each line, and I remembered being so thrilled that our names
started with the same letter. At fourteen, that seemed like enough
to prove we were meant to be together.

Under the poems were the tickets to various
semi-formal dances and our prom, along with my carefully pressed
corsages, and pictures of us grinning away in our formal wear. I'd
felt so grown up in the fancy dresses and I remembered thinking he
looked gorgeous and mature, but now I saw how
young
we'd
been. Scary to think that the girl in those pictures had determined
the course of my life before she was even old enough to vote.

Not that I couldn't change it, of course, but
she'd certainly carved out a pretty definite path. If I could go
back and ask her, she'd have been sure that by the ripe old age of
twenty-eight she and Alex would have been married for years,
married and blissfully happy. Poor kid.

The condom wrapper from the first time we had
sex. I shook my head, chuckling at my seventeen-year-old self. Of
all the things to store! At least I hadn't kept the condom. We'd
had no idea what we were doing, but over time we'd managed to
figure it out to both of our satisfaction. He was, naturally, the
best I'd ever had. Now, of course, he had at least one other with
whom to compare me, so maybe I didn't top his list any more.

I hid the wrapper under a few deflated
balloons from my eighteenth birthday party and moved on, not
wanting to dwell on Alex's newly active sex life.

Another picture, taken the summer we
graduated from high school, with me standing next to Alex and the
tiny baby he held. He didn't quite have the kid, his cousin's son,
at arm's length, but nearly. His awkwardness was clear in every
line of his body, though I remembered that he'd thought the baby
was cute. I flipped over the picture, knowing what I'd find written
on the back.

The future. Love, Alex.

Hardly. I'd assumed that when we graduated
from university we would marry and then have kids, but as the years
wore on he became less and less into marriage. That same cousin,
not long after the picture was taken, left her husband in a truly
hideous divorce which dragged on for years, and watching the drama
changed Alex's opinion of matrimony.

As we neared the end of our last year of
university he told me he didn't think he'd ever want to get
married. I was shocked at first, but then came around. What
difference did that piece of paper make? We were together in every
way that mattered, so why did we need to legitimize it?

I'd begun to change my mind on that in the
last few months, as more of our friends got married. We'd discussed
it before I left for my conference and he'd said he still wasn't
sure but would think about it; of course now I knew he'd been
thinking more about leaving me for Kelly than about marriage.

We'd also decided not to have kids, which had
helped me not worry too much about the marriage thing. I had never
felt the desperate drive for children that tormented some of my
friends, and so I'd gone along with Alex when he made it clear he
didn't want them.

I sighed, realizing how many of my recent
memories seemed to involve some variation on the phrase, "I went
along with Alex." How had that happened? Back in high school I
hadn't been like that. When we hadn't agreed I hadn't automatically
given in to his way of thinking.

In fact, what struck me most as I looked
through the box was how
feisty
I seemed. Pictures could lie,
of course, but as I looked into my photographed eyes I saw fire and
spark and a refusal to settle. In nearly all the pictures Alex and
I were cuddled up together, but I didn't look soft and squishy and
google-eyed over him. Instead, there was a wildness and boldness
about me. I stood up straight even when Alex had his arms wrapped
around me, and I looked more alive than I'd felt for a long
time.

I wanted that back. I wanted to do something
definitive to take back control of my life. The reversing project
was slowly making that happen but I felt a strong need for
something more, a marker, a line in the sand, to underline to
myself, "I am doing what I want now. I'm in charge."

But what?

"Harrison!"

I shifted my position on the floor and smiled
at the woman sitting across from me.

She called him once more, then smiled back
and said, "When I want him gone he's all over me, and when I need
him he's nowhere to be seen."

"Typical male."

"So true."

We shared 'been there, done that'
half-smiles, and I realized I wasn't as alone as I sometimes felt.
Women all over the world had been hurt by their men and they
survived. I'd survive Alex's departure too. I already
had
survived, and now it was time to thrive. And Harrison might well
help with that. If he ever showed up.

"Come
on
, Harrison. Oh, there he
is."

I turned to look where she was pointing and
burst out laughing. "He's gorgeous!"

"You mean funny looking."

"Well, a bit. But in a gorgeous way."

"Now, he doesn't always warm up to people
right away so--"

As she spoke, Harrison walked by her and
stepped into my lap as though he'd known me for years.

"Well," I said looking down at him making
himself comfortable, my heart suddenly so full it hurt, "aren't you
adorable?"

"I have
never
seen him do that."

I didn't look at her, too busy watching the
fuzzball in my lap. Harrison's orange fur was longer on his head
than on the rest of his body, giving him a baby lion appearance,
and the tufts of fur sticking out between his toes were quite
possibly the cutest thing I'd ever seen. I reached out and ran my
hand over his fluffy back, amazed by the softness that put the
angora yarn I'd chosen to shame, and was rewarded with a deep
rumbling purr.

"Oh, Andrea?"

I looked up.

She smiled. "I think you've got yourself a
cat."

"Or he's got me. But yes, I think you're
right."

I signed the paperwork and the check to adopt
Harrison from the cat rescue group while still sitting on the floor
with him in my lap. I couldn't bear to let him go. When I was all
done, though, the woman said, "I'd let you stay but I have to get
dinner going. Let's get him in his carrier."

She watched me struggle to slip Harrison,
whose half-asleep form was so relaxed he seemed nearly boneless,
into the carrier I'd bought from her. Once the puffball end of his
tail was inside and I'd latched the door, she said, "Good stuff.
Congratulations on your new best friend."

Tears rose but I pushed them back. I wasn't
crying over the cat, of course. It was the
finality
of it.
Alex had never wanted a pet and now I had one. I'd been watching TV
that afternoon and saw a cat food commercial and I'd
known
it was time. An Internet search for local pounds and cat rescues
had found me Harrison, and now he was mine. I had drawn that line
I'd wanted, a plushy orange line, between my old and new lives and
it felt wonderful.

Harrison and I headed home, and to my
surprise and relief he didn't meow at all in the car. He more than
made up for it, though, once I got him and the food and the toys
and the litter and the litter box and all the other goodies his
former foster mother had so graciously provided into the apartment.
He toured the whole place, meowing the whole time and hardly
seeming to take a breath, and I was just beginning to wonder where
the off switch was on this adorable but mouthy creature when he sat
down on the floor and stared at me.

"Hungry? Need the bathroom? Want a hug?"

As it turned out, all three, in that order.
Once he'd eaten and made a truly unbelievable stink in his litter
box in the ensuite bathroom, where I'd put it so guests wouldn't be
faced with it, my new furry friend came to me on the couch and
hopped up into my lap. I squeezed him tight. "How about some TV and
crocheting?"

He purred.

He also tried to eat my yarn for a few
minutes, but I kept telling him not to and moving the strands out
of his reach and eventually he gave up and put his head down on my
knee, and his purring gradually gave way to a surprisingly loud
snore.

"You're going to be interesting to get to
know, Harrison," I murmured, stroking that amazingly soft fur.

My very own pet. My first-ever pet. A dream
come true.

To see if that teenage girl I'd been, the
strong-willed one, could be coaxed out of me, on Monday morning
while dressing for work I decided to wear the hot pink skirt I now
suspected she'd made me buy. With the matching jacket I felt like a
big piece of bubble gum, so I toned the pink down with a black tank
top and the sweet ivory cardigan I'd been saving for a special
occasion. I didn't want to do that any more. I loved that sweater
and should have been wearing it constantly. Why couldn't today be a
special occasion?

The guys on the subway seemed to think it was
special. I could feel them staring at my exposed legs, and it both
amused me and made me profoundly uncomfortable.