Bliss
On our drive back into the city, we’d sometime stop on the side of the highway.
On our drive back into the city, we’d sometime stop on the side of the highway. We’d fool around in the back of the car and talk about how we were almost home because we could see where trees were standing in the water. Tall, thin, and brown, they looked like lonely, stranded poles in that marshy water. Our city was named after the Mohawk word for this image. Tkaronto. Toronto.
The two of us could be very metaphorical together. We said the new trees were the buildings, and the streams were now the grid-system of grey-black streets. If we left the comfort of the rental car, it was to pee in the bushes or climb trees. Or it was to lie back on the land and hold hands and talk about how lucky we were to have found each other. We made small, silly jokes, that contained only us. “How is it that I love you so much, huh?” we’d say, disbelieving.One of us had gone up to the other in a dingy, neon pink lit bar on Dundas West, a place no larger than the size of one of our tiny apartments, and said, “You look so much like my first love.” How ridiculous, that this was how we’d met in the early spring, laughing together to forgive each other our cheesiness. It was a coincidence that the other thought the same. The theory—that perhaps we were each other’s first loves—never crossed our minds.
In the fall, we were bored and broke. On a drunken whim, we signed up for a free trial month at ancestry.com and made fun of how we were becoming old already. On thick pieces of white cardboard we bought from the Dollar Store on Bloor Street, we drew our genealogical trees side by side. We wrote the word “Us” at the tops of them, and from there worked on branching our histories. There was Nathaniel Smith, one of our great-great-great ancestors, a drunk and foul-mouthed Englishman who’d been shipped to Australia in 1788 only to find God and swear sobriety upon arrival. There was Maeve McCrossan, who watched her family starve to death during the potato famine, before bravely negotiating her passage to Boston. There was John Brown, who’d built his wide, red-brick bungalow near the Niagara Falls US/Canada border to be a check point in the Underground Railroad. There was Bogdan Kuznetsov from Russia who’d moved to then-Persia during the Bolshevik Revolution with his bags of money, and married a descendant of Alexander the Great, Laila Ghorbani. And there was Waabigwan who had the gift of storytelling. At the age of nine, she was kidnapped and sent to a Canadian residential school, re-named Marie, and was never the same, telling stories in a thick, alien language. These were the stories we told, some of them true, most of them not.
We made the names and stories up when our free membership expired. It was a game to us, to pass the cold winter months. We’d bought a baby name book at the Goodwill near Lansdowne and Bloor, and this was how we’d managed to fill the tree. In the book, the previous owners had circled some names on the thin, brownish paper using a black Sharpie marker or a blue ballpoint pen. We argued over which print mark had belonged to the father and which the mother. It was one of the rare times we argued over anything, and afterwards my face was flushed. The woman, I thought, had used the black sharpie because it had circled both the boys’ and girls’ names. Blue ballpoint had only marked up the boys’. “Only a father would want so badly to have a son,” I said. “What’s that supposed to mean?” “It means that men always want more men to help them bash their iron fists onto the world and to carry their names and they can’t bear the thought of creating anything that might get fucked.”
Loving each other was like living in a dream world where all of the walls were mirrors and the sky was a mirror and the birds were the echo of our own cries.We were not even very drunk but I was livid. There was frost on the windows. We were on one of our beds, legs crossed. Until then we had been having fun. “Do you really think that of me?” he said. “I do. I think it of all men.” I left the room. Which of our two apartments we were in, we could never figure out. Loving each other was like living in a dream world where all of the walls were mirrors and the sky was a mirror and the birds were the echo of our own cries. When I shuffled back onto the bed, he rolled over and, in my ear, he whispered, “I’m sorry. Let’s not think about this. Things will be better in the summer.” And I believed him.
Another evening, we waited for the College streetcar at Yonge Street and I hit a man in the head with my umbrella. The roads were slick and the wet pavement made the cars very loud against the road. The city was in rush hour, though we were as calm as boats, and the man turned to us, and said, “Ow.” He was tall, with broad shoulders, and tightly carved cheekbones. His skin was brown. We could barely contain our excitement. We apologized profusely. The man smiled vaguely and looked back out onto the street. “We want you to know,” we said, we smiled despite the cold gusts of wind and the rain, “we want you to know that we are so sorry for what we did to your people, and how we took all of your land. We’re so sorry. We have Ojibwe ancestors, you know.” The man, whose hair was very long, to below his shoulders, turned to look at us, and when he did, we felt some wrongdoing like it were our own. Then he lifted his head back up. We were silent, and he didn’t look at us again. The streetcar never arrived. A whole mass of people breathed and sighed their impatience. We left, to take the subway North to Bloor Station, which when we walked down into its tunnels, was only more chaos and disarray. The subways were down, and so we returned above ground, and roamed the wet streets. Rain fell in smacks against the pavement. I imagined it falling into wide, shallow streams, feeding into the lake south of us, like the days before the tarmac and skyscrapers took over. I looked up at the shiny glass buildings, umbrella above our heads, and holding hands, I tried not to think about the man. “We shouldn’t worry, right? We were being nice, right?” “We were. It’s not our fault.” “You really think that?” “I think that we should take a cab home. I’m tired and I’m hungry.” We flagged one down. The cab driver was Pakistani. He spoke Urdu on his hands-free device and once he had hung up, we tried to strike up a conversation. “How are you?” we asked. “Good. Good.” “Busy day?” “Rain. Rain is good for business. People are scared of rain.” He laughed, added, “People are scared of everything!” Tiny rivulets of water clouded our windows and made the city confusing to look at. Then his phone was ringing and he picked up loudly, leisurely. At home, we ordered Chinese food from the greasiest place on Spadina Street that we knew, and we ate it on the couch, slurping noodles and stuffing chicken balls into our mouths.
In the weeks that followed, we told ourselves it was daylights savings that confused our wildly fragile internal clocks, and when we still couldn’t sleep, we called in sick from work. We watched nature documentaries that took over the backs of our eyes. We couldn’t sleep but when we did, it was this other-worldly surface dream state that we entered, and each dream was stranger, more traumatic than the one before. On the news, the city debated the exorbitant cost of housing, talked of condo fees. We walked through Dufferin Grove Park with our No Frills bags and wondered aloud what it would look like if the trees could talk, if the city could become trees, if we lived in enormous tree houses bordered by water. “Yes,” we said. “That would be ideal.”
After the last thaw, in mid-April, our moods did improve. When we looked at each other, we saw what we had seen again, the memories of each other’s first loves, that excitement. We wanted to exist in the honeymoon forever. I know this now but we didn’t know it at the time. It was the summer, and again we chased it like we told ourselves we’d chase the streams and the creeks running underneath our city. We drank more, later into the night. We went dancing along the Ossington Strip. We flirted, danced with other people, forced jealousy to spark arousal. We had dates on douchey King West and pretended to be strangers. This was our greatest game, our greatest foreplay, too. Some nights, I pretended to be one of my ancestors, and he did, too. “We would never have loved each other if we were anybody else than who we are,” he pointed out to me, once. His back was to the window. Behind him the sun set. I couldn’t see his face. The sunlight shone in my eyes. “But let’s not talk about that,” he said.
We’d take long walks to places we imagined no one had ever been to before. We wanted to be explorers, when we were young.We hugged. But it was overwrought, tight, insipid, selfish, underwhelming. His fingers, his hands were very cold then suddenly very hot. We let go of one another. We kissed. We moved to the bed. We sat propped up against one of our headboards, and we tried to argue about which movie we should watch but what we saw of each other now was shifted, at least for me, it was shifted, something in the sunlight behind him, how he’d moved his face, and I saw, I noticed for the first time, how much older he was than he was. I left the bedroom, and in one of our little, decrepit bathrooms, looked at my face through the stained mirror above the faucet, and just as I’d suspected, I was older than I thought, too. “I’m sick of watching TV,” I said to him, after I’d come back out. “That’s fine by me. Let’s go do something.” “What do you want to do?” “Didn’t you say you wanted to climb a tree?” “The trees in the city are too small and too low,” I said. “Chase streams?” “How will we get underground?” “"Fine. Then we can do something else. We can do anything," he said. “Absolutely anything we want.” He listed them all to me: “A movie, a restaurant, a walk to BMV bookstore, walk to the lake, walk through Bellwood’s Park, High Park, we can pretend we’re rich enough to buy a house and visit one, we can go to Duff Mall, we can buy new shoes, we can buy new shirts, we can add a generation to our trees, we can go to the Dollar Store and buy knick-knacks or do an arts and craft, we can call our mothers because we haven’t done that in a long time, we can smash our heads against walls, we can sit quietly and read a book, we can rent a car and drive out of the city, we can sneak onto a roof downtown, we can pick up smoking, or try a new drug we’ve never tried, we can troll celebrities on the internet, order things from Amazon, or creep people on Facebook, we can go for a walk,” he said, “or we can have sex.” I walked to the edge of the room, and picked up our genealogical tree, which was leaned against the nightstand. I laid it on the bed, and staring at it, my boredom was absolute. “One day, we should make a baby,” I said. He laughed. He smelled faintly of sweat. “Someday,” he said.
The summer was brutally hot. We worked long hours, sometimes outside, so that we spent whole evenings with the yellow memory of the sun pressed against our eyes. We lived in the same apartment now, a dark, two-bedroom in the basement of an elderly Portuguese couple’s house in Little Italy. On the weekend, we went back to renting cars and driving out of the city. We’d park the rental on the side of the highway. We’d take long walks to places we imagined no one had ever been to before. We wanted to be explorers, when we were young. “Being in love, that’s like being an explorer, too,” he’d said. He pointed at a tree that was tall and ragged, with low branches. “Is that what this is?” I asked. We sat at the foot of the tree. We kissed under the shade then he’d gone off to pee in the bushes. When he returned, we lay down on top of each other in the grass, and we couldn’t tell, which of our bodies was where, and which of us the land was, and which of us was the sky, or the branch of the tree that shaded us from the torrential heat of the sun. “This feels so nice,” he said. “We’re not really explorers. There were people here before we came.” “I know. This feels nice though, to be with you.” We were hugging each other so tightly. “The Mississaugas of New Credit, I think. In 178—” “Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.” He pushed my body off of his and squinted at the horizon, where the outline of skyscrapers blurred into the city smog. “Shut up for God’s sake. How else am I supposed to enjoy this?” So I did.
In the fall, he proposed. We married the next year. We had three beautiful boys. Then for many years, my husband drank, and my grandkids were my only source of joy. Of course, by then, we’d all moved out of Toronto. It was too expensive. In our backyard sometimes, if the weather was clear, I’d have a good, clean view of those tall buildings, but standing at the edge of the lake, it was always the distance between us and then that struck me as unforgivable, as if time itself had played a trick.
