Traditionally, the mothers did the binding, but it appeared the girls’ fathers were more than up to the task. Or as Nigel Kempton yelled through the open window of his planet-friendly family compact as he raced off to Fabricland, “Hey, women hold up half the sky, right?”
We didn’t see much of the girls for the rest of December. Every so often a wan face would appear at a window, or we’d notice one of the daughters hobble to the car, leaning hard on her mother or father, heading to the doctor for a flu shot or to join one of the other families at Floata for dim sum. Susanna came and went, aiming big, angry kicks at the sodden leaves still mounded in the gutters, while her sister sat inside, her own feet growing as small as her circumstances.
Then on Christmas Eve, close to midnight, when most of us were already in bed, our doorbells began to chime. There on our steps stood the adopted Chinese daughters, begging to come in, to peer into the stockings tacked to our mantels, to shake a gift or two and puzzle over the muffled rattling inside, to sniff the nutmeg-scented air, to gaze at their own elongated reflections in the shiny balls that hung on the trees they’d glimpsed through our front windows, to snuggle by our hearths and confide they’d always dreamt each other’s dreams and that they dreamt of the things they had done, or still wanted to do: sleep on ice floes, kiss the Queen’s papery cheek, walk barefoot across burning sand to lay a humble gift inside a stable. To make us pay heed, they peeled their sweaters over their heads, revealing a startling array of undergarments (a puckered training bra, a bronze satin bustier, a frayed, sleeveless T-shirt that read Remember Leon Klinghoffer), and showed us the white pinfeathers erupting from their armpits in tidy rows.
It had already begun to snow and we noticed how otherworldly the girls’ footprints appeared along our front walks. (Some of us later swore we saw little Susanna tumbling end over end across a snowy lawn with stunning alacrity, an illuminated Catherine wheel, her bare heels and tail spitting sparks.) We only said what seemed the right thing to say at the time, before closing our doors. “It’s late. Go home.”
Now we watch, all of us who had a hand in the fate of the adopted Chinese daughters and Susanna. We watch the sky for a flock of long-necked cranes and a flying monkey. It’s early spring, but the houses on our cul-de-sac are decked out in full holiday regalia. There’s even a reindeer on the roof of Huan Yue and Susanna’s old house, Rudolph no less, its red nose a beacon that can be seen for miles. The lights on our houses are of the insistent blinking variety. The bulbs don’t wink on and off at random, but blink in unison day and night.
Come back, come back, they whimper. S.O.S.
The other night we watched as one of the fathers bent to tidy a life-sized crèche, scooping handfuls of wet debris and a crumpled beer can from the manger where baby Jesus should have been. We began to wonder whether it was too late to ask what God might have to do with all this, but instead willed ourselves to think about the girls’ footprints in that snowy field, and we marvelled, once again, at the effort it must have taken to walk even as far as they had.
WHAT ARE WE DOING HERE?
What is she doing here watching this older man, practically an old man, briskly rubbing garlic against the insides of a wooden bowl in preparation for a Caesar salad when she could be at a real party like the party last night where that one guy said he was so angry (angry!) at her for having such a beautiful butt he couldn’t help smacking it with the flat of his hand, and then he did-so hard it stung Didi through her terry-cloth shorts, the same shorts that had everyone joking they should be using her as a hand towel, and didn’t she finally let that freckle-faced little lesbian food stylist do just that to prove she had a sense of humour? The whole thing had been a riot, in fact, even though the butt-smacking guy had turned out to be an alarm salesman for a security company who lived out in Ajax and thought Rufus Wainwright (who was at the party, someone said, although she didn’t see him with her own eyes) was a famous racehorse, so she couldn’t go home with him. Could she?
It had been a rooftop party where you climbed out the kitchen window and then up the fire escape, so if you had to go to the bathroom you couldn’t just bumble yourself down the hall and bang amiably on the door to dislodge some bashful substance abuser, you really had to want to go, although if you were a guy, let’s say a butt-smacking alarm salesman who didn’t wear a belt with his jeans (Rufus came in a sarong, someone said, although no one she knew actually saw him), you could piss into the base of a potted palm tree the hosts had lugged up onto the roof, with no doubt great difficulty, and strung with tiny lights resembling olives with pimento centres. And even though up until then Didi had encouraged the guy-even dribbled some of her martini down the front of his shirt, his handprint still a low-voltage buzz on her backside-after the incident with the palm tree, combined with the living-in-Ajax thing, the belt-loop thing, and the Rufus thing, she couldn’t very well be seen with him and so she stayed long after he left with some overly loud girl in a Lycra T-shirt with a picture of Buddha on it and found herself waking up at about five-thirty this morning with roof pitch spotting her cheek as the sun was just starting to simmer behind the Gooderham & Worts building in the distance.
Now tonight, on a gas barbecue out on the old guy’s balcony, two steaks sizzle and two enormous baked potatoes sit in their foil skins. There’s not a tapenade or a small wrapped thingy in sight. Who eats food like this?
Excuse her for thinking this was going to be a party party or at least a dinner party with a few other people. After an hour of highballs and stilted conversation (during which Didi didn’t know what else to do with her hands so she kept drinking and twisting the edge of her blouse until it looked like the snout of a small, angry, genetically altered monkey, and tried not to stare at the photographs lining the walls-all of older women, some extreme close-ups that turned their faces into what she imagines the baked surface of a Nevada desert looks like, and a few nudes in which skin falls towards earth like putty, like the women are melting, decomposing, in front of her eyes) she realizes no one else is coming, so she starts to wonder, not for the first time, what it would be like to sleep with a man this old, a man who could be fifty, maybe even fifty-five, and thinks she could stand it, that it would at least be an experience she could later use as a conversation piece, a war story. But he hasn’t come on to her, at least not in the usual ways, although maybe older people do it differently. Why else would he have asked her here after she interviewed him last week for that mini-profile in the style section of NOW?
His forte, as she referred to it in her piece, was photographing aging female intellectuals, which Didi, personally, thinks is kind of perverse, although in her article she called him a feminist and praised him for loving women for their minds, because that’s what the press release said-although she didn’t believe it for a minute, especially when he insisted on calling her by her full name and invited her over, saying Wear whatever you like, Deirdre with feigned disinterest after she asked. She’s wearing something filmy, a pastel-blue blouse that floats above her midsection (exposing the only tattoo-free stretch of twentythree-year-old backside in the civilized world-her fear-of-pain thing neutralizing the humiliation she’s entitled to feel over not having a kanji symbol or Celtic knot peeking out above her thong; even her nose ring is a clip-on). And just so no one would think she takes clothing that seriously, she’s wearing track pants with the blouse, a combination she had hoped would keep them guessing, keep them wondering what that Deirdre was all about. But there’s no them here, only him.