Rules for Life

rules for life

rules for life

DARLENE RYAN

O
RCA
B
OOK
P
UBLISHERS

Copyright © 2004 Darlene Ryan

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data:

Ryan, Darlene, 1958-
Rules for life / by Darlene Ryan.

ISBN 1-55143-350-8

I. Title.

PS8635.Y35R84 2004     jC813'.6     C2004-905222-5

Library of Congress Control Number:
2004112453

Summary:
When her mother died two years earlier, Izzy thought the world would change in some identifiable way, but it didn't even slow down. She has managed to get by using her mother's endless “rules” as guidance, even making up some of her own as she goes along.

Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Department of Canadian Heritage's Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), the Canada Council for the Arts, and the British Columbia Arts Council.

Cover design and typesetting by Lynn O'Rourke
Cover illustration by Kathy Boake

In Canada:
Orca Book Publishers
Box 5626, Stn. B
Victoria, BC
V8R 6S4

In the United States:
Orca Book Publishers
PO Box 468
Custer, WA USA
98240-0468

07 06 05 04 • 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed and bound in Canada

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Lori Weber and Stacy Juba for reading an early draft of this book. Thank you as well to Sharon Wildwind for answering my questions about hospitals, Everett Runtz for letting me pick his brain about cars, and Ann Cavan for trying to teach me where to put the commas.

Thanks as well to Kevin Major, a wonderful writer and teacher.

And thank you to The New Brunswick Arts Board for support and encouragement.

For my mother and sister.

Contents

1

2

3

4

5

6

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13

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36

1

I knew my father had had sex the minute I walked into the kitchen. It wasn't as though he was smoking a cigarette and basking in the afterglow. It was subtler than that.

But I knew.

It was his hair. Dad is really particular about his hair. It's strawberry blond, like mine. He spends more money on shampoo and conditioner and gel than I ever would. I just wash mine and twist it up in the back. He goes to a stylist at a salon where you have to make an appointment two weeks in advance. I go to the walk-in place and take whoever has a free chair.

Dad wears his hair sort of long for someone who's forty. And the whole left side was flattened against his head, with a few pieces coming out at weird angles, like he'd slept on it funny. Which meant he'd slept somewhere else, because the first thing he would have done here when he got up was shower and fix his hair.

So I knew he'd had sex. Plus I could see the neck of his T-shirt in the vee of his sweater. It was inside out.

And backward.

I got my cereal out of the cupboard—two blobs of shredded wheat—boiled water in the microwave, poured it on my cereal and drained it off. My breakfast looked like a dish of soggy hay. It's what I've eaten every morning since I was four. My mother always made it. I ate it. When she wasn't here anymore, I made it.

A bowl of fiber to start the day was one of my mother's rules. She had a lot of rules, and if you asked her why about any of them, she'd smile and say, “Because I'm the Supreme Ruler of the Universe, that's why.”

And I almost thought she was, until two years ago when she died and the universe didn't even slow down, not for a second. It just kept on going.

But I liked knowing my mother's rules, even the weird ones that I didn't really get. So I started writing them down—all that I could remember—in a little red notebook I kept on my dresser. I got up to fifty-three.

One of my mom's rules—it's
number eleven
on my list—is
Don't talk to Izzy in the morning
. Now it's not like I'm some kind of foul, nasty person when I first get up. It's just that I like to think about things and chew and not talk for a while. Shredded wheat takes lots of chewing, you know. And the more you chew, the bigger it gets.

So my dad didn't say anything to me. He sat at the end of the table with his smushed hair and his turned-around T-shirt and a big, goony grin on his face.

After half a dozen spoonfuls I glanced over at him, and his face flushed, as though he knew that I knew what he'd been doing. The thing is, we talk about everything. My friends think it's either so cool or deeply weird, but realistically, who else am I going to talk to? My mother is dead. Unless I want to hand out $3.99 a minute to the Psychic Seers Network we're not going to be doing a whole lot of talking. And my big brother Jason is not someone you talk to. He's usually someone you talk about.

So my dad and I have this deal. I can tell him anything, and he can tell me anything, and neither of us tells anybody else.

Dad cleared his throat a couple of times. It sounded like Spencer, my cat, trying to hack up a fur ball.

“I spent the night with Anne and I think I'm in love with her,” he said. (My dad, not the cat.) He said the words so fast it took me a few seconds to sort them out into some kind of sense.

I looked at him again. Who was Anne?

“No. No, I don't think I love her. I know I do.” He looked surprised by what he'd just said. “Truth is, Izzy, I liked Anne from the moment I met her. I always felt great around her. She's kind, she's gentle, she's smart. So we started spending all this time together, as friends. And I thought that was all it was going to be.”

He got the dopey look again. I'd finally put a face to the name. Anne.

My dad is a consultant on a TV show where these two designers go around decorating rooms for people. It sounds boring, but the two guys are so funny and they bicker like an old married couple, so lots of people tune in who would probably never watch that kind of program. Anne had started working on the show at the beginning of the year.

Say the guys are decorating a bathroom and they decide to put the toilet paper in a basket. Anne was the one who went from store to store to find the best toilet-paper baskets and then dragged them back to the office. Another day she might be looking for old lava lamps or handmade quilts. I'd met her once or maybe twice. All I could remember was someone about my height with short, dark hair.

“I always felt happy when I knew I was going to see her,” Dad said. “I felt … like a teenager again. And then one day I kissed her and I couldn't stop.”

He couldn't seem to stop talking, either. I mean, I know in the abstract that my father has sex. He's a guy. He's good-looking. He's not that old. But I don't want to
know
he's doing it. I don't want any details. Just because we talk about everything doesn't mean he has to tell me everything. I don't want to start thinking about body parts and sweaty sheets.

So I nodded. I couldn't talk anyway. I had a mouthful of shredded wheat that wasn't getting any smaller no matter how much I chewed.
And if you can't say something nice … (Rule #6.)

“I'm going to ask Anne to marry me,” Dad said.

I did a cartoon spit-take. Milk and strings of cereal sprayed everywhere. “Marry you?” I choked out. “You had sex with someone a few times and now you want to get married?”

His head snapped around and his smile disappeared. “Watch your tone, Izzy,” he said softly.

I reached for a piece of paper towel to wipe my mouth and buy some time. “But why get married?” I asked in the reasonable, good-girl voice I use on teachers and authority figures. “Can't you just have a torrid affair?”

“I love Anne,” he countered in his own reasonable voice. “I want to spend the rest of my life with her. And I want us to be a family.”

“We already are a family.”

“I mean a real family.”

I leaned across the table and squeezed his arm. “You feel pretty real to me, Dad. Although you might have a point about Jason.”

He shook his head, but he couldn't help grinning. Then his face got serious again and he stared at me so long I felt twitchy. “Don't you miss having a mother, Izzy?” he asked.

“I have a mother,” I said. I knew where he was going with that question and I wasn't going to follow him. “Okay, we can't exactly go shopping, but I don't like shopping anyway.” I smiled like it was no big deal to me.

“I love Anne.”

“That doesn't mean you have to get married.” I crumpled the paper towel and dropped it on the table. “C'mon, Dad. It took two tries with Mom to get it right. Face it. You aren't the home at six, minivan kind of guy.”

“I've changed. Living with your mother changed me. Living without your mother changed me.”

“But not into a totally different person.” I almost pointed out that he'd stayed away all night and hadn't even called. “And maybe Anne likes things the way they are.”

His coffee cup was empty, but he kept fooling with it, picking it up and setting it down. “What do you have against Anne? You don't even know her.”

“Yeah, I don't know her. I've said maybe four words to her. And you're telling me you want to marry her.” The last of my cereal was a wet blob in the bowl. It looked like something even a horse wouldn't eat. I pushed it to one side.

“Well, if that's the only problem, you can get to know her,” Dad said. He got up and put his cup in the sink. “We'll all have dinner tonight.” He smiled as though everything was fine again and ran his hands back through his hair. “I'm going to take a shower.”

“Hey, maybe I have plans tonight,” I called after him.

“You do. Be ready at six thirty.”

I pulled the bottom of my sweatshirt up over my face, clapped both hands over my mouth and screamed. All you could hear was a faint, high-pitched sound that probably had all the dogs in the neighborhood howling.

I slumped back in the chair and tried to think of one of my mom's rules that might help. The only one that I could come up with was
Rule #26: If duct tape won't fix it, chocolate will
.

I had a feeling this was going to take a lot of chocolate.

2

“Mrs. McKenzie, could I ask you a question that's sort of personal?” I asked. I adjusted the angle of the video camera so the old lady was in the center of the frame. I was working on my Communications project, a documentary on women at work over the last sixty years or so.
Then, Now and
In between
was the working title.

It was a hoot interviewing women at the Seniors Center. I was expecting they'd mostly been teachers and nurses and secretaries. Already I'd met a professor, a pilot and an ecdysiast (a kind of stripper with big feather fans).

“You can ask me anything, dear,” she said.

I tilted the camera up slightly on the tripod. Perfect.

“I don't mean for this,” I said, gesturing at the camera. “It's just something I was … curious about.”

“Go ahead. What is it?” she said.

“Why did you get married again? I mean after the first time.”

“Which time do you mean?” she asked. “I was married three times altogether.”

Three times? Okay, that probably shouldn't have surprised me. Mrs. McKenzie had already messed up my ideas—okay, my prejudices—about old people.

I mean, she looked the way you would expect someone's grandmother to look: fluffy gray hair, flowered dresses with buttons up the front and matching belts, sensible shoes. She made the most incredible chocolate chip cookies, plus oatmeal cookies with raisins and giant gingersnaps too big to dunk whole.

On the other hand, she loved the Rolling Stones.

You want to know what's truly weird? Watching someone who's about a hundred and six coming down a hallway toward you wearing headphones and wailing, “I can't get no satisfaction.”