That’s the first thing she remembers him saying to her. They were in a taxicab and he was holding her hand. She didn’t know how she had gotten there. She didn’t know who he was. She looked down at his hand holding hers and she looked up at his face, his smiling face, and she decided to just trust in it. She decided that this must be her life, her life and any moment she would remember it.
The reason why she couldn’t remember what had just happened was that she had flown over the handlebars of her bike and smashed her face against the pavement. She’d been knocked out, not for long, but she had been totally gone for the time that it lasted. The reason why she couldn’t remember him was that they had never met before.
“You were so beautiful,” he would say.
“I was covered in blood, my nose was all on one side of my face,” she would say. “I was hardly beautiful.” But she would smile.
She was afraid to tell her parents they were living together and so he was never allowed to answer the phone in their apartment. She was, it had to be said, not quite grown up. She took pleasure in pretending to be an adult, attending lectures at the university, taking notes in blue ink and underlining things she needed to remember with red. When she bought new clothes she would phone her mother to tell her, as though it was essential that she still be able to imagine her clearly although she was far away. At Christmas break, she went away and left him and when she came back she promised she would never do that again. While she was home, sleeping in her old room, wearing the flannel pyjamas that she’d found folded neatly under her pillow like the old days, she kept dreaming of her apartment in Vancouver, empty, and it frightened her in a way that she couldn’t say out loud.
It wasn’t perfect. There were whole long days of monotony and washing dishes and the clothes left behind in the laundromat and not enough money to buy dinner and the hydro cut off and the three days in the cold dark wrapped in blankets, reading library books by candlelight.
She didn’t like it when he used her pencils and didn’t sharpen them again before he put them in the pencil case. There were fights about using the wrong tone of voice, and some strange guy at a party, and the past and the future and all of the rest. There were misunderstandings and missed dates and mistaken intentions.
Life was extraordinary at the beginning and then it was ordinary and on reflection she liked the ordinary life best. She was taking classes, studying to be a librarian because that was the kind of practical girl she was. He had a shared studio space over on the east side and he made sculptures out of things he found in dumpsters and then painted them all white so that you could hardly tell what the bits they were made up of had been to begin with. It made everything clean and new. It transformed things in a way that continued to amaze her. He brought home things that he found: a television that only worked on three channels, an enormous potted tree, and once, wondrously, a beautiful wooden cradle. It sat at the foot of their bed and sometimes when he was taking his socks off at night he would set it to rocking with his foot. He was the most impractical person she had ever met.
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