The Wondrous Woo Page 4

  I had wanted to get a new haircut before I left for Ottawa, but in the flurry of The Gifts I got derailed. My hair hung all over my shoulders like a forgotten lawn. My bangs reached the middle of my eyes, covering my glasses. I hadn’t realized how often I was pushing strands off my face in order to see.

  At least I still had my good skin. Ma often told me I should be proud of this feature. I sighed, looking at myself. I really didn’t want to take this old Miramar to university, but like it or not, she was going.

  I thought about taking the subway to the bus station, but I had more bags than hands, so I doled out some of my carefully squirrelled away money for a taxi and tried to keep my heartbeat steady.

  On the bus, I sat back and watched the flat Ontario landscape roll by with its: endless fields and occasional cluster of cows. Sometimes, there would be a house, and a lone figure in the strands of grass. I wondered about the people who lived out there along the highway, and what it would be like to watch the world speed by yet remain so still. I felt lonely, more than I had ever felt before. I leaned my head against the cold glass of the window and thought of my friends.

  My high school friends were all like me — a small cluster of Asian girls who also wore glasses, got As from the teachers who valued standardized testing (usually multiple-choice), and Bs among the teachers who wanted participation. We had collected each other along the way through junior high and high school. Instinctively, we had gathered, became friends, and bonded at the outer margins of the complicated social organization that was high school. We had eaten lunch together in the corner of the cafeteria, and talked about films and celebrities from Hong Kong, to Bolly/Hollywood. But mostly, we had talked about the small world of Holloway High — our classes, assignments, and teachers — while the rest of the school saw us as shadows pressed against the hallway walls, mere props to the larger drama of high school in which the popular kids were the stars.

  Outside of school, though, we had been as randy as the next teenager. One of our favourite games was “Who’d you do.” It always started innocently enough by Denise Pak — “Who’d you do? Mickey Mouse or Mighty Mouse? Fred Flintstone or Barney Rubble?” — but it would just as quickly devolve. Often times, it ended with Tina Chan refusing to choose between Mr. Troy (the Phys.-Ed teacher with B.O.) and Grant Banderby (the skinny nerd with acne who brought her gifts of his mother’s homemade cookies wrapped in heart-shaped doilies).

  We slandered the cheerleaders (“Sluts!”), the jocks (“Hunks of burning love but dumb as doorknobs!”), the brainiacs who ran student council (“Pretentious and annoying!”), and the beautiful people who didn’t have to try very hard at anything but got first-rate everything (“Fated for tragedy sometime in their lives because they just had it too easy!”). We called ourselves the 4Somes, after a Hong Kong pop band by the same name, and also because there were four of us.

  I could have used an afternoon with my friends just to gather their strength, but they had their own lives now: Nida was already at Western, Denise at Queen’s University, and Tina at Centennial College. All we were to each other now was unfamiliar phone numbers on slips of paper floating around somewhere. And where was I? On a bus midway between home and Ottawa, a place I had never been and knew little about.

  I pulled out the jam sandwich I had made myself and chewed to my reflection in the window. Once in a while, the bus would pass a town with its rise of buildings, a few houses, a shopping centre off the highway, and then be back to fields again. Signs gave me my bearings. Places with old English names like Prince Edward County, Kingston, Cornwall, peppered with native ones, Gananoque, Petawawa, and finally, after five hours on the road, Ottawa.

  The bus station was a closet compared to the station in Toronto. I spotted a single taxi parked across the street, so I dragged my three beautiful new powder blue suitcases across the pavement to get to it. The driver was chatty and in what seemed like mere minutes (was Ottawa really so small?), we pulled over to a mammoth red house set on a steep hill that resembled the house from The Amityville Horror. Looming on the edge of two-dozen uneven steps, the house looked like it was going to swoop down and eat me.

  I couldn’t help but imagine how things would have been if my family had been here. Ba would have gotten my luggage up the stairs in no time. Ma would have carried boxes of food, all neatly packaged in foil or freezer bags. And Sophia and Darwin would have agreed with me that I would definitely have nightmares in this place.

  I took a deep breath. My suitcases thudded and scraped on every step.

  Back when I had been accepted, I had lost the lottery for a dorm room, which meant I needed to find a place off campus. But with the commotion from The Gifts and Ba’s death, I had forgotten all about dealing with that. When I had finally decided I would go to school after all, I realized I didn’t have a place to live. I had agreed over the phone to this place the minute the landlord said, “It’s still available.”

  I was going to be sharing the main floor apartment with three other people. When I opened the unlocked door, I was greeted by a petite woman in a printed tunic and leotards. She was perched on a chair on her tiptoes, wiping a hall window. I dragged in my luggage and shut the door.

  “Well, hello, new roomie,” she said, smiling. She hopped down, wiped her hand on her thigh and gave me the strongest handshake I had ever had.

  “Um, hi,” I stammered. “I’m Miramar Woo.”

  “Welcome, Miramar Woo! I’m Kathleen Longbridge. Obvious name for the kind of nose I have, eh? Well, I think it gives me dramatic flair,” she turned to show me her profile.

  Not knowing what to say, I looked down. She had on silver ballet slippers. Sophia would have immediately liked her. “Here, let me help you with these. I’ll show you around.” Kathleen grabbed hold of the biggest bag and gave me a pointing tour of the place while we walked to my room. It was hard to keep up with her because she walked as quickly as she talked. During the five-minute tour, I learned that she was an ex-cocaine addict, and had returned to school at the age of twenty-eight.

  “I’m in English Lit. I’m a writer,” she called over her shoulder while I followed. She had lived in the house for the last two years. The phone rang, and she dropped my bags in the doorway of what I presumed to be my room, turned around and skipped away. She waved at me, which I took as a sign that our conversation had ended. I dragged the rest of my bags into my new room and closed the door, exhausted.

  Later, I met Lara, an architectural student with tattoos on her arms. “You’ll never see me. I eat, sleep, and shit at school,” she said.

  I also met Dave, a freshman like me from somewhere called North Bay.

  The house was settled into a hill, which made the apartment a semi-basement. I got the underground part, its only window a slit of light at the top of one wall. The room had a single mattress on the floor, a dresser, and a large wooden desk. In the first two days, I stayed mostly in my room, sitting on the mattress and staring at the veneer-panelled walls. School wouldn’t start until Monday, and I had missed most of frosh week. Unpacking took me three minutes. I thought about the posters of Duran Duran and Simple Minds rolled up in the corner and debated putting them up. In the end, I decided not to decorate because the emptiness of the room felt right somehow. All of life was reduced to this square. It was a good blank space from which to start again.

  I could hear my housemates outside, chatting and laughing as if they’d known each other forever. Like normal people. I tried to make myself leave the room and join them, but frankly, they terrified me. What would I say? They were so different. Go out there and embark on this new adventure already, stupid, I told myself. Only when I worried they could hear my stomach growl through the walls would I finally emerge to cook dinner in the small kitchen. I cooked quickly, a pack of instant noodles from the giant stash Ma had insisted I take since I had never learned to cook. She had always said I would pay the consequences for not observin
g her more closely in the kitchen.

  I made sure to clean my pot thoroughly before rushing back into my room to eat. I was afraid to use the phone to call Nida in case one of my housemates needed it, so I waited until late in the night to dial Nida’s number in London. Nida, unlike me, was having a rocking time. When I got her on the line, our conversation was full of her animated stories of new friends, parties, frosh week, all told without punctuation so everything spilled out in one large rush. Afterwards, I tiptoed back to my room in the darkened apartment and pulled my covers over my head.

  After a couple of nights, Kathleen knocked on my door. I peeked out while Kathleen tried to peek in. “Hey, whatcha doing in there? Come on out. Watch TV with us,” Kathleen spoke as if she were talking to a wounded animal.

  Not knowing what else to do, I said, “Okay,” and followed her to the living room.

  Dave was sprawled out across the couch with a can of Blue and scooted to one end when he saw me. He was large, over six feet, and looked odd as he tried to fold himself into a little package. “Hi, housemate,” he waved.

  “Hi.” I gave a little smile and settled in beside him. Magnum P.I. was on the small TV that they had perched on a long wooden coffee table. The room was a motley collection of second-hand furniture, like the rest of the rooms in the house. Prints of the great masters hung on the walls. Mona Lisa smiled from one, and Monet’s water lilies bloomed on another. I sat stiffly on the sixties-style green couch, my hands in my lap.

  “Sooooooo,” Kathleen began. “Who are you, Miramar Woo? Tell us about yourself.”

  I stared at the TV as Magnum, Tom Selleck, in his ubiquitous Hawaiian shirt, wielded a gun from behind a palm tree. “What do you want to know?”

  That may have been too open-ended. I realized this instantly because it triggered a long list of questions from Kathleen who seemed to want to know a lot, while Dave just watched us with the dopey grin of someone who smiles when he doesn’t know what else to do.

  By the time Magnum had caught the bad guy and zoomed away in his Ferrari, Kathleen and Dave knew this about me: I was Chinese (I was accustomed to this always being something gweilos wanted to settle first). I was from Scarborough, a suburb of Toronto. I was eighteen years old. I had one brother and one sister. No, I did not drink, but it wasn’t for religious reasons; I just hadn’t ever been presented with the opportunity. Heroin? Nope, never. Not pot either. I liked to read. Novels, mostly. Sometimes magazines, but I didn’t tell them about True Confessions. Yes, I liked to write (which made Kathleen very happy) and planned to major in Journalism.

  Kathleen flipped her curtain of chestnut hair and sank her tiny frame into an armchair. She seemed temporarily satisfied. But then she sat up as if struck by lightning. “Wait. Your parents.”

  “What about them?” I asked.

  “In what ways are they fucked up, and how did they fuck you up?” I would learn later that Kathleen minored in Psychology, which she drew on for her own recovery process. I swallowed, feeling a knot in my throat.

  “My father is dead,” I began. It was the first time I had said it out loud, and it felt wrong to hear it in my own voice. “He was killed by a car a couple of months ago.”

  The perma-grin dropped off Dave’s face, and he took a long swig of his beer.

  Kathleen just stared at me with unblinking eyes. “I’m so sorry, kitten,” she finally said softly. No one had ever called me “kitten” before, but I could see in Kathleen’s face that it was heartfelt.

  “Same here, Miramar,” Dave said. “That’s rough.”

  “Thanks. It is,” I answered. And just like that, the tears fell as if from an unclogged spigot. They fell in big sloppy drops on my arm and then onto the sofa where they made circles that bled into the fabric.

  I felt Kathleen sit on the edge of the couch beside me, then her arms wrap around my shoulders. She whispered, “It’s okay. It’s okay, kitten,” while Dave unfurled a roll of toilet paper, square by square, and handed the pieces to me.

  Chapter 8 ~

  She was called a good-time girl. If you were feeling weary, you could go to the teahouse and see Gin. She could put a smile on the most sour of faces with her songs, her quick jokes, and rice wine that she poured generously. What they did not know about was the thin blade of metal tucked into her sleeve. She was ready to roll with the good and the bad.

  UNIVERSITY WAS LIKE entering a foreign country and I was the tourist. The campus was exactly what I had always thought a university campus would look like: green common spaces, a river bordering one side, a sprawl of buildings and a hive of students that set it alive. Ottawa in September was also exhilarating; the giant maples and elms dropped leaves the size of my hand, transforming the campus into a swirling vignette of gold, crimson, bronze, and corals. Sometimes, I had to stop walking just to experience being still inside such a kaleidoscope of colour.

  My classes were enormous. We, the students, were shrouded in semi-darkness in the expansive lecture halls, pens hovering above our notepads, our eyes focused on the lit stage where the professors presided. Faculty was comprised of two camps: sixties hippies who had joined the establishment but were reluctant to admit they were comfortable, and old men who clearly had been there for a long time and took to the stage like royalty.

  Most of my professors were of the former. My sociology professor sat on a bar stool on stage, a mike in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He told stories for an hour twice a week, stories about being young in the sixties, listening to Allen Ginsberg first read his epic poem “Howl” in San Francisco’s City Lights Bookstore back in the day; or, about being a draft dodger and how Canada was such a haven then for intellectualism and pacifism. “No more, no more,” he lamented. Journalism 100 was taught by a fortyish woman who wore a long braid that trailed past her waist. She liked Batik-print dresses, and, under those, two hairy calves led to feet always encased in a pair of Birkenstocks. This professor used words like “verve,” “erudite,” and “caprice.” She awakened something in me, and I later spent hours in the library researching the Beat Generation, feminism, South Africa, the Vietnam war. The more I read, the more I realized I had decades, contexts, and generations to catch up on.

  In the first week of classes, groups of students set up tables in the large hall in the University Centre and advertised their causes. There were sororities and fraternities, all colour-coded depending on whatever Gamma Gamma Delta they represented. And then, there were the anarchists, the anti-apartheid activists, the gays, the lesbians, the Christians, the Jews, the “womyn.” In yet another area, the international students’ tables were draped with flags displaying their countries of origin.

  I was curious. I envied the passion, the organization, the certainty with which these upper-year students held themselves. They knew who they were already. As a frosh, you were supposed to find yourself somewhere amongst these little tables, but I flitted quickly past, careful not to get too close or make eye contact so I wouldn’t have to talk to anybody.

  Kathleen took me under her wing and introduced me to her circle of friends. They were in their late twenties and had an air of “been there, done that” compared to the gangly first-years. They seemed infinitely wise. Kathleen liked to talk about her heady coke days. But she also confessed that her sinuses were a complete bust. “Burned holes right through my nasal passages,” she proudly stated, tipping her face so I could look up her nose. It seemed so heroic when she put it like that.

  They took me across the river to bars in Quebec, where booze was cheaper and the clientele a tad sleazier. Fights were regular occurrences. The first time I witnessed one, I was in the line-up for the women’s bathroom. Two biker chicks started brawling by the sinks, and they tumbled through the line and out onto the street. Kathleen and her friends continued dancing, laughing at my astonished face. “Com ’ere, kid,” they said, and hugged me until my ribs hurt. Whenever I was with them, I felt l
ike a favoured child in a commune.

  Kathleen even gave me a mini-makeover. I conceded, even though it was understood that it wasn’t because I was ugly; I just had the kind of looks that made me more background than foreground. Kathleen, luckily, was the grand dame of minor re-modelling. She took me to an optometrist and insisted I get a pair of contact lenses. Never mind that they cost me a whole month’s budget for food. I did it anyway and ate crackers with peanut butter for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

  We left with my new contacts, and pushing my wayward hair out of my face, Kathleen said, “Oh, kitten. You look good. I mean, you were hot already, in a nerdy kinda way. But now! You look really good.” She made a sizzle sound as she touched a finger to her bum. I somewhat understood what she was implying. Without my glasses, I didn’t blend in as much with the other bookish Asians who went to Carleton.

  Kathleen also taught me about makeup, telling me that lipstick was vital to the kind of day you wanted to have. There was a tube of Revlon’s “Rosebud Rhapsody” in a desk drawer that Kathleen guarded with her life.

  “Whenever I wear this, I swear I pick up someone, guaranteed. But I use it sparingly, so I don’t overdo its magical powers.” She took me to the drugstore to find me my own special shade, and we settled for a pale pink called “Spring Blush.”

  When I surveyed my newly feathered hair (artfully curl-ironed), my naked eyes (but ringed in black), my skin-tight acid-washed jeans, and spring blushed mouth, I had to admit that improvements had been made. It was weird, and I couldn’t say I was transformed into a head-turner like Sophia, but maybe, I thought, I wouldn’t be furniture-grade invisible anymore.

  In those first few months at school, there was so much going on, so much new attention from new people, so many fresh ideas rolling around my renovated head, that I sometimes forgot about my family or life in Scarborough entirely. Yet, at certain moments, something would catch at me. One day, I saw rabbits bounding through a field on campus. I had never seen wild rabbits before and hadn’t even known they existed. We had had a bunny at home briefly as a family pet that Darwin named Gremlin. Gremlin had shit a maelstrom, so when someone stole her one day from the yard, we were actually all relieved. I remembered how Ba had told us that back home in Hong Kong people would eat bunnies. Ma had nodded and said, “No big deal. The Chinese eat everything. No waste.”