Really Good, Actually(77)
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Chapter 18
The weather turned from hard wet (ice, hail) to soft wet (rain, mush), and I was still living at my dad’s, a three-bedroom bungalow near Sydenham he had begun referring to as “Divorce Club.” I had planned to stay with my mother, historically the more tolerant parent, but things were getting serious between her and Jeff, so Divorce Club it was.
To my surprise, my father and I had settled easily into a cohabiting rhythm, sharing breakfast and then going our separate ways until dinner. On Wednesdays I would borrow his car and drive to Toronto, where I would teach and hold office hours, see Helen, and sleep on Lauren’s couch. On Thursdays I taught another class and took Merris to physio or to run other errands before driving back to my dad’s to pedal a stationary bike in the den and consider my credit card debt. On weekends I worked at a cheese store that smelled terrible.
The house had been purchased after I’d moved to Toronto, so it was not enormously familiar to me. I would occasionally open the linen closet door thinking it led to the bathroom, and I had no idea where pots and pans went in the cheerful, jumbled kitchen. I slept in a single bed in a room with wood-paneled walls that I worked hard to find pleasingly ascetic, if not aesthetic—hygge on a budget. My father was very understanding and gave me a great deal of space and privacy, but I was always on the lookout for the generational difference that would disrupt our fragile peace. On Twitter I followed a few millennials who lived with their parents and were constantly having to school them about how to be good and conscientious people. It seemed easier to live with children; they were always wandering into living rooms saying something accidentally profound—Mom, it’s so important when women vote, etc.—but I had a male boomer on my hands. Nightmare.
“Look at this,” he said one morning, gesturing to a physical newspaper he had somehow acquired. “A bunch of fast-food employees want to raise the minimum wage. Fifteen dollars an hour, to work in McDonald’s.”
He tutted and I cracked my knuckles, readying myself to make a speech. I did not relish the idea of yelling at my father, but he was being a small-minded classist, and I knew, as someone who had read more of the right articles, that I had a certain responsibility. “Dad—” I started, but he was not finished.
“It’s not really enough,” he said. “With inflation, I mean.”
“Oh,” I said. “Right.” I looked down and saw I had adopted a kind of Power Rangers stance, my feet wide, my hands on my hips. “Well, they wouldn’t even have to worry about it if we had universal basic income.”
He took a long sip of coffee and looked at me with a placid expression. “I agree,” he said, and went back to his paper. To purge some of the righteousness I’d built up, I picked a fight about his belief that the property bubble would one day burst, allowing me to purchase a home.
I went back to my bedroom and deleted Twitter, Tinder, Hinge, Instagram, Bumble, TikTok, and Facebook from my phone, then redownloaded them a week later, plus an app that would limit the window during which I could access the internet. I downloaded another app to show me where the moon was in the sky, whether it was waxing or waning. I downloaded something called a “newsfeed eradicator” that promised to claw back my attention span by replacing the endless updates from friends, brands, and journalists deafened by silence with motivational quotes. The first one it showed me read, “Nothing is impossible. The word itself says, ‘I’m possible’!” attributed to the actress Audrey Hepburn.
I unfollowed the tiny Instagram women having picnics in the sun and started following a “radical softness”–themed account that was mostly shots of ecstatic fat women dancing around in their underwear. Sometimes their pets featured. I watched a girl in Korea fill in paintings of her friends’ gracefully sloping bodies. I listened to a livestream of a tulip field in the Netherlands. I visited a website that let you look out strangers’ windows. I cut and bleached my hair and resisted a near-physical yearning to share a photo of it online. As a compromise, I sent seven different Live Photos to the group chat, who all agreed they had been wrong, this was a great move, and I looked, in Lauren’s words, possibly damaged but definitely sexy, so: net positive.
I cut back heavily on posting, though the compulsion was still there—to have something to say or show for myself, to “share.” When I did say or show or share something (a tweet about my menstrual cycle, a photo of flowers by the lake with the caption ok spring!!), I felt instantly and viscerally ashamed and often deleted what I’d posted. This did not help. In fact, the deleting felt, in many ways, just as white-hot humiliating as leaving the posts up, because it was the act of posting in the first place, the expression of the compulsion, that shamed me. No need to admit this publicly too.