Chapter 8
late on friday morning , Judy’s G-Wagon screeched to an abrupt stop, spraying gravel onto the sidewalk where Alice stood waiting.
She had put on a floral midi dress and a light denim jacket.
The March sunshine pooled around her shoulders, and she was happy, dopey in the way you could only be in the sun.
“Are you dressed for high tea?” Judy shouted as Alice stepped into the car.
“With the queen?” She adjusted her black sunglasses and snorted at her own joke.
She wore faux leather pants, a cream silk blouse, and a shiny black bomber jacket.
At fifty-nine, Judy was young for a grandmother, and she never let anyone forget it.
She tapped her long pink nails on the steering wheel.
“Get your seat belt on. I don’t have all day. ”
As they drove through the cherry blossoms falling like snow in puffs and drifts, Judy going on and on about the low mortgage rates, Alice leaned her head against her hand and let her eyes follow the road and the passing small, wood-sided houses painted yellow and blue and grey—a tasteful, heritage carousel.
She had lived in this neighbourhood, Cedar Cottage, almost her whole life, had run down its alleys when she was a little girl, stopping at the corner store run by Mr. and Mrs. Tran, and climbing the chain-link fence that separated the school from the cracked and uneven parking lot of the strip mall next door.
The houses contained big families, with grandparents, parents, and children all sharing rooms, cramming the basements with wobbly lawn chairs and canned goods and boxes of tools no one used but were too potentially useful to throw away.
The houses needed power-washing and the lawns needed aerating, but the rooms smelled of stuffed peppers and lamb curry and sticky rice wraps.
The moms might wave you in, or the dads might turn the television slightly so you could watch the hockey game, or the older stepsister might secretly teach you to smoke in the mouldy garage out back.
On nearby Kingsway, there had been takeout dosas, Chinese herbalists, a dark pub with tarnished brass doorknobs that Alice never dared touch.
A quarter of the storefronts were vacant, or simply signless, with dusty registers in the window, their drawers open and empty, a note perched on top that read “No cash on premises.”
After school, when the other kids splintered off to go home, Alice had carried on walking by herself, peering into the window of the discount bakery and inhaling, hoping she could catch the scent of the sweet white dinner rolls that her mother never bought.
If she had money, she wandered into one of the shops that carried everything from polyester bras to pagers to chewing gum.
This was where they had the blackcurrant gummy candies that she liked the most. And the snow globes with scenes from downtown Vancouver or Toronto that she carefully turned over, nervous that she might drop one, spraying shards of glass, water, and plastic snow all over the store.
She went home just before it got dark, not because anyone was looking for her, but because walking blindly into an empty, dim house where her father had died was something she would not—and could not—do.
As the light faded, Alice did her homework, waiting for Judy to rush through the door, her hands full of papers and takeout containers. “Did the lawn guys come today?” she might ask as she dropped everything onto the kitchen table. “Where did I put that hydro bill?”
Alice made a plate for her mother first, before filling her own.
Her mother never ate carbs, so the rice noodles were for her alone.
Once they were sitting, Judy would look at Alice’s face for the first time and click her tongue against her teeth.
“There’s that black eyeliner again. You’re too young and pretty for raccoon eyes.
” And she would reach out with her napkin and wipe a smear of mascara off Alice’s cheek.
When Alice turned eighteen, she moved out and rented the top half of a rickety house in Kitsilano with three other girls, a place she had found by searching the notices pinned on the bulletin board at the student union building.
She lived there until she graduated from university, almost never going home unless she had to pick up something she had stashed in her old bedroom.
In Kits, she could walk to the beach, get a slow-brewed coffee, stagger home from the neighbourhood bar at two in the morning.
She could bring home boys—frat boys, musician boys, boys who were training at the bank—and they could leave in the morning on foot, walking back to their apartments across the bridge or up the hill or east on Broadway.
Here, Alice was in the middle of everything, not on a funny half block radiating off Kingsway, behind a noodle shop and an out-of-business dry cleaner.
Maybe for the first time, Alice felt as if she was engaged in her own life, as if her two feet were planted firmly in every moment, every decision, all day and all night.
Here, when she went to bed, it was simply to fall asleep, not to burrow into the blankets muttering to herself about her dead father or weird, hard-boiled mother.
The rental house was older than the one she had grown up in, but it seemed lighter, with taller ceilings and windows that opened upward.
There was too much fresh air for the ghosts to fester.
It was in that apartment she had first slept with Grant, after their third date. And it was on the back deck, beside a card table littered with takeout containers, that he had asked her to marry him.
Before the wedding, Alice and Grant had returned to her old neighbourhood to have dinner with Judy.
As they drove in, they saw that the small houses were being renovated, painted in tasteful designer colours and gutted on the inside for open floor plans.
There were shiny Volkswagens and Subarus parked outside now, new picket fences delineating one property from another.
Alice saw two kids playing in a yard, both blond, both smeared with a thick layer of sunscreen.
White kids. When had there ever been white kids living in Cedar Cottage?
It wasn’t long before Grant suggested they look for a home there. “Look how it’s changed,” he said, waving his arm. “There is so much untapped potential here for a solid family neighbourhood.”
Quietly, Alice replied, “There have always been families here.”
Grant didn’t hear her. Instead, he continued. “One day, it could be like where I grew up in Tsawwassen. Our kids could know what it’s like to live in a really safe Canadian neighbourhood.”
This time, Alice spoke a little bit louder. “Do you mean a white neighbourhood?”
Grant’s face flushed pink. “No, of course not. You must know what I mean.”
She looked out the car window then and saw one of the original houses, still clad in its discoloured stucco with two different satellite dishes on opposite corners of the moss-covered roof.
When she had left this place all those years ago, she hadn’t known that not all neighbourhoods were like this, that in some places, she would always be the one Asian woman at the gastropub, or the only person of colour at the farmers’ market, or the only Chinese person sitting with a cocktail at the jazz club.
She grew to hate this feeling, of being both hyper-visible and invisible at the same time, but told herself she’d get used to it, as if the tense relationship between identity and belonging could be solved with a callus.
Maybe coming back home, where she could feel just herself —as she did when she was little and running through the alleys to Mr. and Mrs. Tran’s corner store for a Twinkie and a White Rabbit candy—was what she needed, was what every adult deserved.
In the end, after Grant wrote up a prospectus on why Cedar Cottage would be a sound investment and bought her an eighty-dollar bottle of champagne, Alice tipsily consented to the idea of moving back.
Grant immediately called Judy, because she would know, wouldn’t she, what the best possible deal was?
By the end of the week, after they had combed through all the listings and walked through seven open houses, Judy had sold them her house, the house Alice had grown up in, for 100,000 dollars below market, so they could renovate it as they saw fit.
“I always wanted a new condo,” she trilled, signing the papers with a confident hand. “Yaletown is nice for single older ladies.”
On moving day, Alice stood on the front lawn, staring at the house with a box under her arm, and wondered how this had happened.
She didn’t hate the house; in fact, it was the opposite.
She loved the house in a way that she could only call a trauma bond, a term that now made her wince whenever her neighbourhood mom friends claimed that their group’s bond was founded on postpartum trauma.
The house had contained loss and tragedy, had watched her family grow and disintegrate, just as she did, and it was as close to a sibling as she would ever get.
When she’d left at eighteen, it felt freeing, necessary even, to shake off her childhood and adolescence.
Perhaps now she could return and make peace with the past, and with the house itself.
She breathed in the sunshine and then walked inside.