I want to feel calm. I want a signature scent. I want to be the kind of woman who whips up a galette. I want to enjoy stretching. I want to mean it when I tell someone, “no worries.” I want to be good at sports or at least a good sport. I want a partner who thinks my best qualities are the Real Me and my worst qualities are manageable. I don’t want to date someone who thinks I’m only okay. I want to love easily. I want to be gentler. I don’t want to drink so much. I want to be open and nonjudgmental and warm. I want to look pretty with my hair wet.
I want to do more than sign petitions and go to protests where I feel shy so I mouth the chants. I want to provide help where help is wanted. I want to be a vegetarian, not someone who talks a lot about the day or two a week she doesn’t eat meat. I want to delete Facebook. I want to delete Instagram, which I understand is basically Facebook as well. I want to make things that feel useful. I want to be useful. I want to retire one day. I don’t want to write any more bad essays about Hamlet.
I want to make a positive first impression. I don’t want to “sweat the small stuff.” I don’t want to habitually look at the social media profiles of people who have hurt my feelings, or who make me feel bad about myself, or who I think I am better than. I want to have literally any idea what I look like. I don’t want to spend all my time telling myself and everyone else that I am “enough.” I want to know how doomed we actually are, as a species. I don’t want to look at my face every day. I guess I want to do something about the earth? I want to know what that something is.
I want to think about anything other than the shape of my stomach, or if I’m a good person, or who wants to fuck me, or if anyone will ever really love me for me. I don’t want to celebrate the pimples on my ass or honor my spider veins. I want to know that I am an alright person trying very hard, who deserves love and has spider veins, sure, they just don’t occupy a lot of her time.
I want to know what kind of stuff to want. I want to not be completely embarrassed by this activity and most other things I do in a day. I want my tortellini to cook faster.
Chapter 20
Classes finished, and I had even fewer reasons to visit Toronto. I made a few trips out of picking up exams and helping out at Merris’s place, but I no longer stayed overnight, so coming to the city meant driving six hours in the same day or taking the very unpleasant bus or very expensive train. It was nice to have somewhere to be, even if I was finding my work uninspiring and certainly not worth the train ride—over two hours and eighty-five dollars each way.
I went down to clear out my office for the summer and let myself fall into familiar routine: a cup of weak coffee from the machine in the kitchen, an hour or so of clicking around online, a few minutes of desk-friendly stretches, some filing and organizing. I found a crumpled receipt in a copy of Utopia and rolled my eyes at the eager marginalia I’d left in it a few years earlier. I closed the never-ending Word doc with my dissertation on it and browsed a few resumes.
I was in the process of finding Merris a new research assistant. We’d both agreed that would be best, although our post-physio tea dates were getting longer. She had started telling me about her life, working forward chronologically from an apparently formative skating accident, age eight. We’d recently reached her first marriage, at nineteen, and I was trying very hard not to ask her to skip ahead to the sort-of-secret daughter. I ate a cheese sandwich and forwarded a few applications that looked promising.
Olivia walked by, tote bag brimming with exams. The bag had a poorly rendered cat on its front, and when I inquired about it, I learned it was a gift from the cat shelter at which she was a volunteer. The idea that a person could a） perform a charitable activity in a long-term way and b） keep that information to themselves for any amount of time was incomprehensible and impressive, and I asked if she would take me along sometime. “Of course!” she said. Then, concerningly: “Don’t wear shoes you like too much.”
A week later I was outside Paws4Thought No-Kill Feline Rescue and Shelter （I had notes about the name）， on an east end street full of warehouses and drab dental practices almost directly under the highway. It was either very near a bunch of those trees that smell like cum, or someone had done something awful in the parking lot. Inside it was sterile and harshly lit and loud, the chaos of its animal charges barely balanced out by the insistent tranquility of the volunteers in their stirrup pants and fun vests.
My trial shift was horrible. Olivia frolicked with a batch of new kittens as I cleared out piss-soaked cages and tried to give sad animals their dinners in a non-traumatizing way. My big victory was getting a hulking three-legged beast called Colin to come eat in the center of the room, apparently an indicator of trust. I tried to give Colin a comforting pat to show him that trusting humans was okay, even if one had hurt him in the past. He hissed at me and threw up.
Nearby, Olivia played with her litter of tabbies. “They always give the grunt work to newbies,” she said, just absolutely covered in kittens. “Weeds out the people who are only here for cuddles.” She giggled and dangled feathers for her tortoiseshell army while I wiped up Colin’s mess and sprinkled deworming medication into chunks of brined tuna.
Other than Olivia, everyone who worked at the cat rescue place was weird, which was fine. Being there probably meant that I was weird too, and I’d already learned my lesson re: adult hobbies. Plus, I liked the cats, even the mean and stinky ones, even big Colin. I understood and could easily meet their needs. I filled in the requisite forms, acquired the requisite branded polo, and was given access to the shared Google Calendar.
It was soothing to be around animals, to have quiet time among people I didn’t know, to see kids and couples and old men on their own come in and encounter their future pet. It was gratifying to help a cranky, nervous creature understand that it was safe, its life would no longer be as hard as it had been. When I went home I looked up the adoption profiles of my new friends, which I felt undersold them a little: Don’t be put off by Dunstan’s scrappy looks! Carrie is a dramatic girl who may seem strange at first. Tomasina is NOT for everyone. Did we need to lead with this information? These animals had already been through a lot. The names were another thing altogether: what kind of disturbed individual calls a cat “Meaghan”？
A few weeks into my time at the shelter, Olivia took a shine to Tinker, a charming old boy with a grizzled face and one bad eye. （His bio read, A classic grandpa, Tinker is not afraid to give you a nip to assert himself. Whose grandpa behaved like this?） After talking it over, she and her fiancé decided to “add him to their growing family” and started the adoption process. I was running the front desk when she and Aidan the Egg King came to claim him. I watched them fuss over their new charge and thought, that cat’s gonna have to get into hiking. As they walked away, I admitted to myself that I was jealous of Tinker.
When my shift ended, I threw my vest in a hamper and pulled on a new, less-hair-covered dress. I touched up my makeup in the tiny staff bathroom and tried to make my hair do something normal. Most of the time I went straight back to Kingston after the shelter, but Lauren had given me special permission to stay at hers for two full nights. I was excited to be in the city for a longer haul, to take a stab at a wilder version of existence, or at least one where I went to parties. I’d booked Sunday off from the cheese store and stolen a pair of shoes from my mom, and Clive was having us all over （plus seventeen strangers I hoped to mostly ignore） in celebration of Amirah and Tom’s engagement.