We Have Never Lived On Earth by Kasia Van Schaik

Author:Kasia Van Schaik [Kasia Van Schaik]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Alberta Press

Swimming Upright

IN THE KITCHEN everyone is talking about Kendrick Lamar. Health Goths. Social workers. Lovers being just a little bit mean to each other.

But who am I to judge? I who watch nature documentaries in the bath.

The bride-to-be stretches her toes on the sofa. She’s taking his name, she tells me apologetically.

Kayla Summers, she says. Sounds better than Kayla Banks. Doesn’t it?

For a second, I see the girl in her, my childhood friend, pleading for approval.

I sit beside Kayla and look at photographs of dark-haired children, all relations. She tells me their names, arranged in variations of A’s and R’s and U’s. I stare at her lovely pink feet and remember that when we were girls we were friends out of habit, simply because we took the same route to school.

It was good of you to come, she says. And I wonder why she says this. And then I realize that I am the only guest who has arrived alone.

I used to believe parties were whirlpools where one wore necklaces and silk sleeves and danced around a white piano and the dance floor would be lined with men, strangers and old acquaintances, each with a delicate face and a secret.

Nowadays it’s rare to find a white piano, says the soon-to-be Mrs. Summers.

Or maybe she says, nowadays, there are no secrets.

Or maybe what she says is, this is all that’s left.

The guests stack their shoes in the hallway. I recognize some of them, a few of the girls we graduated high school with, who now all live in Vancouver. They hang their coats over the banisters. They comment on the temperature and the different routes they have taken through the city to get here, to this hallway, to this room where they now stand, shoeless, drinks in hand.

It took one couple forty-seven minutes to drive. Another thirty-two minutes, but they took the bus. One couple spent fifty-five minutes on the highway. They win.

The man who has made the longest commute explains that with the collective amount of time the average American spends sitting in cars or waiting for buses in a year we could build the Great Pyramid of Giza twenty-six times.

Why would you want to do that? says his girlfriend.

Just an example.

I’d rather wait for the bus, she says.

You know, someone else observes, they used slaves to build the pyramids.

And someone else says, I wonder how long it took the slaves to commute.

In the living room a woman draws a pyramid in the air.

Love, Work, Sleep, she laughs and I realize she is not drawing a pyramid but a Venn diagram. She is explaining to another woman how she has successfully divided up her life.

The groom is drunk and charming and half asleep. He hugs me for the first time in ten years and I remember that I once found him attractive. And also that I might have once, ten years ago, called him in the middle of the night and invited him to eat soba noodles.

He declined the invitation.

All the men in the kitchen have started to carry around a little bulge under their shirts.

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