The Gum Thief - Douglas Coupland [80]
The point here is that everyone’s family is a disaster. Some are noisier disasters, and some are quietly toxic disasters, but we’re all in the same boat. I don’t know if I agree with you about your family’s behaviour defining or limiting what you can and can’t do in your life. I think we’re born a certain way and our family can influence us only a tiny bit. So what if people in your family die? You’ll die too! But in your eighties, in a good nursing home, surrounded by loving family members and staff who don’t steal your brooches and dilute your morphine.
Who do I think I am to lay any of this on you? Frankly, the knowledge of who I am is all I have, in every sense of the word. It’s the one thing I can speak of without fear. It’s the one thing I can give someone else. I earned this knowledge, dammit! And I’m your friend. And your mother loves you too—nay, adores you—and she is a terrific woman, and I think she deserves to be allowed to care for you and care about you. All the tea in China couldn’t make me go through my twenties again, but at the same time I’m jealous that you have such a broad swath of life ahead of you. Needless to say, you’ll make many more mistakes along the way, and I fully expect many of them to be highly amusing. I urge you to keep me in your loop, if only to provide me with entertainment at someone else’s expense.
Bethany, the world is a beautiful place. Life is short, and yet it’s long. Being here is such a gift.
And there’s always going to be someone knocking over the Sharpie pen cardboard display in Aisle 3-South. So go over there right now and clean it up!
Your friend,
Roger
DeeDee
Dear Roger,
Now you’re the one sleeping. Bethany is having a shower down the hall, and I’m sitting here on this amazingly uncomfortable chair, coping. I’m certainly better now than I was last night. Bethany’s groggy and a bit sheepish. I’m not a hundred percent sure she wanted to succeed. She OD’d on a bus, and to me that sounds like she didn’t fully mean to. Besides, I think she’s so malnourished and overworked that one painkiller could have wiped her out. As a child, she’d eat the most amazing things (potting soil, daddy long legs, road salt) and always come out fine, so her constitution is rugged. She’s got a stomach like a cement mixer.
Roger, I didn’t mean to snoop, but I read your letter, and it was lovely. I know exactly what you mean about growing older and knowing who you are. How do you explain that to someone so young? By twenty-five you know you’re never going to be a rock star, by thirty you know you’re never going to be a dentist, and by forty there are maybe three things left that you can still be—and even then, that’s only if you run as fast as you possibly can to try to catch the train.
Me, I have two options right now. I can continue life the way I live it now, or I can take Bethany’s advice in a note she left me on the kitchen table and remortgage our place and spend the proceeds on school, which is exactly what I plan to do. There was nothing malicious in the way Bethany wrote the note, but she was clear in telling me that my current path is death in disguise. Well, what about her! Between you and me, we are going to padlock her to the admissions office door of the local college and make sure she’s on a launch pad to someplace, anyplace, better than right here and now. My eyes are open and can never be closed again.
I can hear her coming back down the hall.
Roger, maybe you want to change who you are too. Do you want to form a club together?