There wasn’t anyone specific I wanted to kiss. I hadn’t felt desire like that for someone in such a long time, and the one-night stand I’d had with a co-worker after the Christmas bowling tournament was like a snack of empty calories that just left me hungrier.

  It wasn’t sex, really, that I was after but something else. Something big and gothic and implausible. I wanted to be swept away.

  The day after ABC announced it was cancelling My So-Called Life—just half a season in and already I’d wedged myself so deeply into that TV high-school clique—I cried for a solid day like I’d saved it up for years. I cried and wandered from room to room, thinking that I’d done all the things I was supposed to do, that I’d put all the scaffolding in place. That now I was ready for my real life to start.

  95.

  IN 1995, THE province opened its Debt Services Department, a kind of ride-along for a new era of fiscal constraint. When I saw the classified ad, it all added up. Everything I’d ever done had prepared me for just this unlikely calling: debt counsellor. On paper, I looked remarkably qualified—that’s what the woman who greeted me said as she led me down the hall to the interview. Qualified on paper, and then revealed to be even more perfect because, after all—above all—I was virtually debt-free. They didn’t ask about that, but I offered. I said that I paid every bill on time and never carried a balance on my credit card. That I had a diligent mortgage repayment plan. That I had mastered the art of living within my means.

  I actually said that, and no one rolled their eyes. Both interviewers, in fact, nodded earnestly. Neither asked how being unacquainted with debt could possibly qualify me to advise those who were drowning in it. And I was so eager to share my money wise skills, so focused on all the good I could do that I didn’t see how preposterous it was, either. Like hiring someone to teach swimming who’d never even been wet.

  In the three months before the Debt Services counselling centre officially opened, while the carpet was being laid and the paint was drying, I went for training. It turned out all the inter-personal manoeuvres I’d been trying to master had names and theoretical platforms: affirmative listening, cognitive reappraisal, conflict resolution. That last one made me think of Dad on the showroom floor, expertly defusing an irate customer whose new truck had turned defective right there in front of five other guys at the coffee shop. Dad nodding, suitably horrified, agreeing that it was absolutely unacceptable. Saying, “Let me tell you what we’re going to do to make this right,” a simple line that never failed to squelch a lit fuse, even though what Dad was prepared to do was always less than what the customer had initially demanded.

  When I moved from role-play to real clients, it was the easiest thing in the world. Sitting behind my laminate desk, listening as strangers detailed their financial circumstances—the complicated details, the hard times, the excuses—was like watching talk-show TV, nodding at the right moments, leaning forward like a camera zooming in.

  At first I feared my clients would see through the thin veneer of learned technique and false concern. They didn’t, though, because it turned out my concern was real. I cared about them—all of them—all the exhausted single mothers who had a deficit of everything but desire; all the thick-fingered middle-aged men who’d believed their union jobs would last a lifetime; all the addicts and the compulsive shoppers who couldn’t look me in the eye when they claimed they couldn’t help it. I knew most of them would land, over and over again, in the column for doubtful accounts, but I still cared.

  I even developed a fondness for the over-extended show-offs like Marko, whose gelled-stiff hair and gleaming teeth masked the soft underbelly of his fiscal stupidity. What finally broke him was a pyramid scheme, though Marko called it something else and still couldn’t believe it wasn’t a legitimate investment.

  “So many people,” he kept saying, incredulous, “so many guys I know doubled their money. And all I got was charged.” Charged, fined, his huge investment lost, and now his wife certain to find out. Marko allowed that sure, maybe he should have known better, but could I please explain to him how this was so different from what the fellows on Wall Street did every day, swapping other people’s money around and making a fortune for themselves?

  I was only in my second week of appointments, so I didn’t have an answer for that one.

  96.

  THE CRITICS TOOK no pains to spare Daneen’s feelings. Her second novel, they agreed, was a big misstep, a book full of monied stereotypes in over-burdened scenes. A national newspaper review said, “She’swritten a soap opera. Unfortunately, she’s used a vocabulary that’s sure to put off those who gravitate toward such confectionary.”

  The next weekend, my local paper offered a big picture of Daneen’s most beatific smile. The headline gave me a jolt, causing me to spill coffee right across her teeth: “Novelist strays too far from her prairie roots.” The review was a little gentler, perhaps in deference to the author’s local roots, but it wasn’t positive, either. “Does anyone really need to be told that money isn’t everything?” the reviewer asked before concluding, “Her first work succeeded because the author wrote about a world she understood. De Cario should stick closer to the life she knows.”

  97.

  CHUCK TOLD ME just the day before that he wanted me to attend the Board of Trade dinner in his place. He didn’t give any reason at all why he couldn’t, so I knew he’d finally realized he was the boss and could just tell someone else to go to the dinner and listen to the federal finance minister talk about balancing the national budget.

  “Special invitation,” he said. “Someone from Debt Services has to be there, and it should be you, Meriel.”

  I’d never reattached the Claire to my name. Even the plate on my office door and the print in the corner of my cheques read Meriel Elgin. To everyone who met me as an adult, I was utterly unhyphenated.

  Chuck handed me the envelope with his name on the front and a ticket for one tucked inside like he was handing me a dirty diaper. He may have thought going to hear Paul Martin speak was worse than a stick in the eye, but I was thrilled. Debt was, by this point, a national crisis. The size of the deficit had achieved a kind of celebrity status that had everyone talking. There was a vast and inescapable shortage of good fiscal news and now, finally, a finance minister willing to hand us the fistful of bitter pills we’d have to swallow for our own good.

  I took the invitation to my office, then headed straight back to Chuck’s. “What do you wear to something like this?” I’d never been to a gathering of the who’s who outside of Calder. Chuck shrugged. “Blue suit, burgundy tie.”

  That evening, I walked the mall in search of the sweet spot between sophisticated sexy and seriously businesslike. What I found was a silk dress the colour of canned asparagus that fit like it was tailor made—but the price was twice what I’d come willing to pay. With little time left for rifling through racks, I was rushing to get out of them all and over to the thrift store when the display in Coles Books stopped me cold. They were stacked in a pyramid, “From the Author of Hidden Bargains” emblazoned on every cover and across the display poster, too, and I guess reviews didn’t matter all that much to book marketers.

  I picked up a copy, flipped open to Daneen’s black and white image. She was flawless, radiant, and it struck me that I was closing in on thirty years old and I didn’t own a single decent thing to wear on a special occasion.

  The next night, wrapped in that green silk dress, my makeup impeccable, I carried myself like someone who belonged in that expansive hotel dining room full of lavishly-set tables and well-dressed men. I found Chuck’s place card near the back of the room. As I pulled out my chair, the man next to it looked up, then he looked me up and down.

  “Hey, you’re not Chuck.” He picked up the place card and pointed it at me. “Are you Chuck?”

  “No. Yes—” I stumbled like a kid caught in a lie. “Chuck couldn’t come. But he thought it would be okay if I did.”

  “It’s not okay. It’s fantastic. We’d much rather have you than old Chuck.” When he smiled, the creases beside his mouth spread all the way to his eyes like a stone thrown in a pond. “I’m Roger Hardy.” A solid handshake, a navy suit with a burgundy tie.

  When a bottle arrived at the table, Roger poured wine into every empty glass, even the ones at the unoccupied settings on either side of us. Then he got the introductions moving around the table. The four people across the table all worked for the Royal Bank. They were terse and complained about their back row seats, and after Roger referred to our table as the Hinterland Who’s Who and I laughed, they lost interest in talking to either of us. But Roger was determined to turn the event into a proper party. He asked for another bottle of wine even before the main course and kept up a steady banter, though eventually he gave up on the bankers and turned all his attention on me.

  He said he was a distributor for a big brewery, that he’d been roped into attending the dinner by a boss who didn’t want to come. He said really, he didn’t want to come either, he was a beer and pretzels kind of guy, but he was okay with playing the game. Then he asked about my work and when I told him“debt counsellor,” he had about a million questions—what was the biggest debt I’d seen and could I really get people out of that kind of hole? I kept my answers light and vague and felt grateful for the distraction of chicken cordon bleu.

  During the long introduction at the microphone, I spooned tiny domes of chocolate mousse into my mouth, but I had to set my spoon down to applaud when Paul Martin leapt, far more energetically than I’d anticipated, to the podium. He began by showing us where we were. Behind him, the national debt appeared and then appeared again, bigger, compounding, the gargantuan figure somuch more alarming lit up on a big screen.

  “No one can deny the stark arithmetic of compound interest,” the Minister intoned. A bar graph climbed right off the top of the white screen, then reappeared to make the rapid, downhill descent of recent years. When we were sufficiently full of numbers, he moved on to the national psyche, talked about a willingness, finally, to endure the pain of restraint. “Azero deficit is of great symbolic significance, a benchmark that has been embraced by the public.” The room erupted in applause.

  Roger leaned over so our cheeks were almost touching. “Do you believe this guy?” The screen behind Martin changed to government program expenditures, another precipitous decline. “See, here’s the real story—breaking the deficit over the little guy’s back.”

  I met Roger’s eye for a second, then turned back to the podium. Martin was saying, “Deep and necessary,” and though I kept my hands clasped, my head bobbed in unison to the percussive approval of applause.

  And I did approve. If Canada had walked into my office right then, sat down and unfolded its balance sheet, I would have recommended exactly the same thing. Tighten and tighter, I’d have said, and never mind whose fault it is. There’s no point even talking about that now.

  Roger nudged his chair closer to mine. “Jesus, you must see the tragedy of this all day long in your line of work.”

  I shifted into high alert, held his gaze. “The people I see have generally dug their own holes. It’s the high interest rates that are killing them.”

  His eyebrows went up, which might have meant, “I stand corrected.” Then he leaned back in his chair, away from me. Even his long leg, which had been so close to mine, withdrew.

  Martin had turned the corner, was taking us toward a future unhampered by all that debt, but I’d stopped hearing him. I was formulating my next line and working up the nerve to deliver it. Finally I leaned over and whispered, “It’s all about stealing from Peter to pay Paul Martin.”

  Roger’s laugh was a fast, loud bark. The Royal Bankers glared. Roger moved in close again. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  98.

  CORINNE, THE RECEPTIONIST at Debt Services, was hurtling toward the Wal-Mart checkout, her cart loaded with paper and highlighters and notebooks of varying sorts and sizes. I was heading for the same short line unencumbered by a cart and carrying just a few items, but I stepped out of her way. We both knew it mattered more that she got back to the office on time. Besides, I didn’t want to lay a box of condoms down in front of a co-worker.

  Corinne was the only other woman on the Debt Services team in those early days and we’d tried, though not successfully, to be friends. She was a single mother with two kids and when she’d talked to me in the coffee room about her life—how she wasn’t getting any support from her ex, financial or otherwise—I’d wanted to help, to point out all the avenues available to her. She’d only shot down my advice. When I’d suggested she get a court order for family maintenance payments, she’d told me she couldn’t afford a lawyer. When I’d suggested Legal Aid, she’d smirked and said, “I’m not poor enough. I checked.”

  Frustrated, I’d suggested she at least give up smoking. I had no idea how much, exactly, she smoked but I knew she had a cigarette every day after lunch. The last time I’d splurged on a pack, they were up over five dollars. Corinne had stood up at that suggestion, smoothed her skirt and sighed. “You really don’t have a clue, do you?”

  In Wal-Mart, she waved a piece of paper at me like a half hello. “Back to school. It gets worse every year.” Then she turned away and began unloading her cart, stacking and wedging and piling so the stuff all fit on the belt. When a price check at our till dragged on, she opened a package of markers, drew one out and started crossing off items on the mimeographed list. Then she crammed the marker back into its plastic pouch and pulled out her credit card, waving it as if to say, “Let’s hurry this up.”

  I clutched my items to my chest, though Corinne kept her back to me as her purchases crawled forward on the conveyor belt. I thought she’d forgotten I was there, but handing over her Visa, she called over her shoulder, “Stand back, it might burst into flames.”

  I smiled, but I guess my eyes followed the card like they believed it could actually combust. Corinne pivoted to face me square on then. “I know what you’re thinking—that I shouldn’t be racking up the debt.” She glared like I’d actually said it. “But the kids’ll be in trouble if they show up at school without all this shit. What the hell else am I supposed to do?”

  I shook my head and then I nodded because I wasn’t sure which looked more like I was on her side. Then I turned over the box of granola bars I was using to shield the condoms and I scrutinized the label.

  99.

  I READ, IN some waiting room in a pricey woman’s magazine I’d never buy, that the essential value of friendship is in being known. “Our girlfriends know our true selves in a way even our romantic partners can’t, and our parents and children shouldn’t.” The article was accompanied by a photograph of four women leaning in at a café table, laughing, glasses of red wine glittering in front of them and their teeth uniformly white. The photographer had chosen a diverse racial mix to ensure we knew that intimacy and joy knew no boundaries, though of course all the women were exceedingly thin.

  Maybe I didn’t have enough experience with sustaining female friendships, but I knew that article was wrong. None of my girlfriends had ever known me as well, as deep down and absolutely, as Roger did.

  From Roger I hid nothing. I stopped draping the sheet just right over me, stopped tightening my abs when he ran a hand anywhere near them. A few months in, I was barefaced as I moved on top of him, morning light falling over us and his gaze never wavering. His hands grasped my hips, pulled us tighter together. I was getting used to that full feeling under my ribcage every time our eyes met. I was learning not to be afraid.

  “I know it’s too soon to even talk about it,” his voice deep and hoarse, “but I would love to spend my whole life with you, Meriel.”

  Roger was so certain of me, though he saw me naked and asleep and completely unguarded. I forgot to hide embarrassing things like how ragged some of my panties were, how I nibbled on raw potato chunks while I was slicing them, how I still listened to hokey soft rock from the early eighties. For the first time in my life, I understood what all those pop songs were saying.

  On Gord’s birthday, Roger helped me gather a bouquet of found flowers and deliver them. When I placed that funny little bunch down on Gord’s grave and traced the name carved into the granite marker with my finger, Roger was right beside me. I didn’t know how to explain about the ritual with the flowers, why it was important to pick them from the ditches rather than buy them, why any of it mattered. I knew Gord wasn’t there, in that cemetery, hanging out hoping someone would drop by on his birthday. I knew it was pointless, but still, I needed to do it and Roger never questioned it.

  Plus, my parents adored him. At his first Labour Day barbecue, Dad even asked him to take over at the grill for a spell. Later, the barbecue turned off and pushed aside and the early-out people drifting toward the driveway, Mom started to tell Roger about Daneen, calling her “my little writer” like she’d adopted her or maybe even invented her. Then she rushed off to get her folder full of clippings. It was thicker than ever. I wondered if the bad reviews of Daneen’s second novel were in there, too—if Mom lived on the side of any-publicity-is-good-enough. From a safe distance, I watched Roger dutifully make his way through them, pausing to read often enough to seem interested.

  When he finished with the folder and we finally got a minute alone, I apologized for my mother, for all of it, and thanked him for being so good and patient. He just laughed, took a gulp of beer and said, “Relax honey, I’m having a great time.”

 

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