Hardly Working - Betsy Burke

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filled with vital activities like scouring the rough skin off my feet and giving my hair a hot oil treatment. By evening, I’d slumped onto the couch to wait for Joey’s immortal three seconds in an ancient X-Files rerun. I was going to have to resign myself to a life of solitude and strawberry mousse.

      Then the phone rang.

      I jumped up from the couch too fast and tripped over the plastic bowl on the floor, scattering salty buttered popcorn all over the Persian carpet. It wasn’t too late to hope. Someone had remembered after all.

      Some ex-boyfriend from my past?

      Or Mike—my ex-true love?

      Or an ex-boyfriend-to-be from my future? Some guy I’d met at a fund-raiser then forgotten about, who might be a friend of a friend of a friend and had gone to a lot of trouble to get my number?

      Or Thomas? My therapist? For all the money I was paying him, he was supposed to be making me feel better, wasn’t he? And a little birthday call would make me feel better.

      And then I remembered.

      The Tsadziki Pervert.

      He’d been phoning me up and, in an eerie hissing voice, proposing to cover my whole body in tsadziki. You know that Greek dip made of yogurt and cucumbers? Then he was going to scoop it all up with pita bread until my skin showed through. It had to be some guy who had seen me around. Probably with Mediterranean looks and visible panty line, knowing my luck. He knew who I was because he was able to describe some of my physical features. If it was him again, this would be his third and last call.

      I skidded into the hallway and found the shiny silver whistle, the kind that crazed PE teachers use. It was supposed to be dangling from a string next to the phone for any kind of Telephone Pervert Emergency that might come up, but I’d forgotten to do it. I’d made a mental note to avoid all of Vancouver’s tavernas and Greek restaurants but I’d forgotten to tie on the secret weapon. I held the whistle near my lips and got ready to pierce the Pervert’s eardrum.

      I know what you’re thinking. Why didn’t I have a call-checking phone or an answering machine? And you’re right. I should have. But that would have taken such a big chunk of mystery out of my life. Not knowing who was on the other end, and anticipating something good, or something evil involving sloppy exotic foods, burned up at least fifty stress calories. And there was always that got-to-have Gap shirt to spend the money on instead.

      My buttery hand grappled with the receiver. “Hello?”

      “Happy birthday, Di Di.”

      “Mom.” I was relieved and let down at the same time. If my own mother hadn’t called, it would have meant that things were grimmer than I thought. “I didn’t expect to hear from you. Aren’t you supposed to be out in the field up there in the Charlottes?”

      “Cancelled that, poppy. Off to Alaska in a couple of days. They want me to go up and take a look at the Stellar’s sea lion situation there. Been following a project on dispersal and we’ve got quite a few rather far from natal rookeries. Shouldn’t you be celebrating with friends, Di Di?”

      “I am.” I turned The X-Files up higher.

      “Sound a little odd. Not on drugs, are they? By the way, a couple of things. Now…what would you like for your birthday? I think it should be something very special. Thirty. You’re on your way to becoming a mature person.”

      As if I needed to be reminded.

      “I’ll give it some thought, Mom.”

      “Righto, Di Di. We’ll be seeing each other soon anyway. I’ll be popping in and out of Vancouver. Have several guest lectures to give up at the university. Migration of the orcinus orca is first on the schedule. They’ve organized an entire cetacea series this year. I told them I was quite happy to do the odd one as it would give me a chance to see my daughter. Oh, and another thing I keep forgetting to mention. Mike and his little wife came around several weeks ago.”

      “His little WHAT?”

      “Tiny limp thing, Dinah dear. Believe they’ve been married for about three months. I should think she might just blow away with the first strong wind. Don’t think she’ll be helping old Mike much with the hauling.”

      “What hauling?”

      “She and Mike were just about to move to Vancouver when I talked to them. I gave them your address and phone number. He seemed very eager to see you again.”

      I could feel the popcorn backing up into my throat.

      I liked to blame my mother for the fact that I was cruising into the end of my thirtieth birthday and flying solo. And even if it wasn’t her fault, I needed to blame my manlessness on someone. She was the logical choice.

      I’d often whined to Thomas, my therapist, “How am I supposed to deal with a proper relationship? I’ve had no role models. My mother thinks that men are beasts of burden who are useful for mending your fences, mucking out your stables, feeding your seals and whales, and worshipping at your feet, but should definitely be fired if they can’t be made to heel.”

      My mother is a zoologist. Marine mammals are her specialty.

      And Thomas would reply, “No life is accompanied by a blueprint.”

      As for a father, well, that was the main reason I was paying Thomas. There was just a terrible lonely rejected feeling where a flesh-and-blood father should have been.

      Thomas was very attractive. I’d shopped around to find him. I went to him twice a month. He wasn’t your full-fledged Freudian—I couldn’t have afforded that. He was a bargain-basement therapist with just the right amount of salt-and-pepper beard and elbow patch on corduroy. He cost about as much as a meal at a decent restaurant but wasn’t nearly so fattening. His silences were filled with wisdom. And he had a real leather couch. This probably worried his girlfriend upstairs. I could picture her creeping around, but then having to give in to her suspicions and stick her ear to the central heating grates, just to be sure that nobody was pushing the therapeutic envelope down in the basement studio.

      I talked and Thomas listened wisely. Then he’d pull on his pipe, expel a plume of smoke, and sprinkle his opinions, suggestions and bromides over me.

      All through my childhood, I’d fantasized about this father of mine. When I was six, and asked my mother who my father was, she gazed coldly and directly at me and explained that he was out of her life, and therefore out of mine, and that I was not to ask about him again.

      My mother is tall, lean, white-skinned, rosy-cheeked and blond with the beginnings of gray. She looks like a Celtic princess and is considered beautiful by almost every man she meets. I’m medium height, black-eyed, dark-haired, and on the good side of chubby. Genetically speaking, I had to wonder if that made my father a short, dark stranger.

      My mother had been orphaned young, and my great-grandparents, whom I vaguely remember as a couple of gnarled, complaining, whisky-drinking bridge players, had left her a trust fund. My mother is the triumphant product of an elite private school in Victoria where she and other rich girls bashed each other’s shins with grass hockey sticks and studied harder than the rest of the city. There, she acquired her slightly English accent and a heartiness that plagued me all through my childhood. There was no ailment that chopping wood, cleaning fish or a good hike along the West Coast Trail couldn’t cure. I was fit against my will.

      From the day I hit puberty, I couldn’t wait to get somewhere where the fish, feed, and manure smell didn’t linger on my clothes.

      I’m convinced that if my mother had grown up without a trust fund, and had been forced to have a man support her through a pregnancy, things would have been different. I would be a well-adjusted girl with a steady permanent boyfriend. Studying marine mammals is not exactly a lucrative profession. Only somebody with an independent income could carry out the kind of field work or maintain the kind of hobby menagerie my mother had over on Vancouver Island. The animals; the seals, raccoons, hawks, dogs, cats, sheep and ponies required extra hands and lots

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