The Most Precious Substance on Earth Read online

  * * *

  I run into the high school principal at Pete’s Frootique, a city grocery that sells charming things you can’t get at Superstore, like Montreal bagels and chocolate-covered potato chips. I end up at Pete’s three or four days a week, a reward after my long city walks, though I can no longer afford to shop there. The principal is reading the back of a package of Cadbury jaffa cakes. There’s a whole section for British snacks.

  He sees me before I can pretend I didn’t see him. “Nina, you’re back from your trip!” He hastily re-shelves the jaffa cakes. “How was it?”

  I say something about elephants. “How’s your summer going? Have you had any time to relax?”

  He vaguely references a trip to the cottage. We both know he will never relax. He’s the kind of principal who spends the summer developing motivational seminars on introducing iPads to the classroom. It’s possible he has a Pinterest board devoted to it. I realize now how much time his planning must take.

  “I didn’t have a chance to give you your teaching evaluations from the last semester,” he says.

  “Oh, that’s okay…”

  “Aren’t you curious?” he asks, softly but frowning. “Anyway, I’ve left them in an envelope for you in the office. No pressure to pick them up.” He tugs on the neck of his T-shirt and I’m startled by how old his skin looks, how exposed. “Nina…you were a good teacher.” He coughs into the side of his fist, then tells me to enjoy the rest of the summer vacation—it must be automatic, since he knows I’m not coming back.

  Of course, I pick up the evaluations immediately. The alternative is to leave an envelope full of anonymous critiques of me out there in the world. The hallways are busier than I expect, the building under loud construction, students loitering in tentative summer-school cliques.

  At home, I prepare myself. I make a jug of iced tea with tea I picked up in Sri Lanka. I float a lemon slice in my glass. I use a straw, though I vowed to stop using straws to save the environment one straw at a time. I spread the evaluations out on my kitchen table, careful not to let condensation from the glass get on them. Some comments are written in all caps, as though shouting. Some are written in tight black script, others in round purple ballpoint letters. In a few cases, I recognize the handwriting.

  Thank you so much for your kindness this year.

  I may have been quiet, but I was listening.

  She told us she divides her classes into 15-minute segments to keep us from getting bored. What a great idea!

  Her passion comes through in every class she teaches.

  Her jokes are hilarious.

  She’s so patient when explaining things.

  I bring up facts I learned in her class in conversations all the time.

  It’s because of your class that I decided to become an English teacher.

  She cares.

  * * *

  There are some classes where you spend the whole time laughing. Where you say something and somebody else responds and then somebody else, and nobody raises their hands and you just talk—as if you’re having a brunch conversation with old friends, as though a waitress is coming around shortly to refill your mimosas. On the last day of those classes, students applaud and shake your hand on their way out. Or did I imagine this? Did this ever really happen? If it did, I know it wasn’t me who made it happen. It’s chemistry, the crackle of personalities in the room. It’s luck, pure luck.

  Once in a while, in those classes, I’d start talking and find myself more articulate than I ever was in real life. I would forget that there was anybody or anything outside that classroom at all. Here was a spider in my mouth spinning music, and here was the crescendo like a pouring of silk, the delirious feeling of epiphany.

  Facsimile

  I’M ORIGINALLY FROM HALIFAX, I type, and then delete. Halifax born and raised, I type, and then delete. I used to be a high school teacher, I type, and then delete.

  It’s 3:30 p.m. at Uncommon Grounds, my favourite coffee shop in Halifax because of how big the scones are. My laptop is open in front of me—a Dell Inspiron I just ordered on sale. With one hand I’m crumbling my cheddar-chive scone, while with the other I work on my dating profile. I wipe crumbs on a napkin before opening a photo in Photoshop. It’s one of the few pictures I have of myself, because usually I’m the one holding the camera. In this photo, I’m standing on the Halifax Waterfront, smiling blandly. A tall ship casts a shadow over me, its spars decorated with festive, multicoloured pennant garlands. I search online for an image of a shark, extract it from its background, and paste it onto my photo. Then I clone-stamp and blur and filter until the shark looks like it’s really there, eager-jawed in daylight, leaping over my head towards the ship. This will be my profile picture. My hopes are that it will make people laugh and that it will start conversations, so that I don’t have to.

  I get up, toss my napkin in the compost, put my empty plate in the bin for used dishes, and head to the washroom. When I return to my table, my laptop is gone.

  As a Haligonian, I trust other Haligonians. Maybe not every Haligonian, but Haligonians as a group. Halifax is a city where everybody’s on a first-name basis with Glen the busker, who plays the accordion from his electric wheelchair on a corner of Spring Garden Road. Where folks wave back at the Harbour Hopper, the amphibious tourist vehicle full of Americans on a cruise-ship excursion. Where a city bus driver strums a ukulele to entertain passengers at long red lights. Where Global News featured a story about masked men wandering the city performing random acts of kindness. I always thought Haligonians would watch my stuff when I went to the washroom.

  There’s a student sitting a few seats over. “Did you see somebody take my laptop off that table?” I ask him, pointing and trying to hold back panic.

  He pulls out one earbud and says, “Wha?”

  I repeat my question, but he shakes his head and claims he didn’t see anything, then puts his earbud back in and is no help at all. I go back to the table and inspect it thoroughly, as though this will make the laptop rematerialize. Bizarre that my handbag is still there—did the thief just miss it, hanging off the back of the chair, beneath my sweater? Perhaps they assumed correctly from the quality of the bag itself that there was nothing in it worth taking. Perhaps they didn’t have enough time.

  * * *

  I catch the bus to my parents’ house, and it stops by a high school. A big group of students gets on. It’s been a couple of months since I’ve been in such close proximity to so many teenagers. Everyone has a backpack on. Standing directly in front of my sideways-facing seat are two girls in high-cut soccer shorts that expose their splotchy thighs. To their left stand a boy and girl in mid-conversation. I can’t see their faces and don’t want to be caught turning to look, but the girl’s backpack is in my periphery. It dangles a pair of anime charms—a squat pink bird with black pupils; a doll with an aggressive countenance and blue painted-on hair. I wonder at what age she will decide to retire these to the back of a desk drawer.

  “So, what would you say are the flaws in my personality?” asks the girl.

  “Flaws?” the boy repeats.

  “Yeah, I want to know what you think.”

  “Well…” He thinks for a second. “You’re not confident in yourself. And that makes you awkward around other people. It shows that you’re not confident.”

  “Right, right, confident,” she responds, her voice trailing off.

  “Okay, so what about me? What’s wrong with me?”

  “Nothing,” the girl says. “There’s nothing wrong with your personality.”

  * * *

  “You recently bought that computer, no?” my mom says when I tell her about the laptop, shortly after arriving at their house for dinner.

  “Yeah,” I admit. “I can’t believe somebody just took it.”

  “But you’ll need that though, no? To find a job?”

&n
bsp; “And to watch Netflix,” I joke.

  She shakes her head.

  We’re in the kitchen, and she’s unfolding a sari she ordered on eBay, draping its raw silk weight over her forearm. UPS delivered it with unexpected duty charges that were more than double what she already paid the seller, defeating the whole purpose of buying a sari on the internet.

  My dad limps into the room, clutching the piriformis muscle that’s been bothering him lately. “Oh ho ho! That must be Nina’s wedding sari!”

  “Ayyo, such a cheap sari? No way man,” says my mom. “And you must be dreaming.” She drops her chin and peers at me over her bifocals. “This one is never going to get married.”

  “Hey, don’t say that. Knock on wood.” My dad raps his knuckles on the kitchen table before giving my shoulder two squeezes. He sits in the dining chair across from me, grabs a handful of crispy chickpeas from a bowl on the table, and starts crunching. “How is the ‘online’ dating going? Do you have anyone on the line yet?” He mimes a laugh.

  The reason I’m online dating is that I’m in my mid-thirties and have never been in a serious, long-term relationship. This is cause for concern, given that I have Indian parents, who exist to bear children who get married and bear children who get married and bear children, and so on until nuclear war renders us barren. “How can your dad be happy when his only daughter isn’t settled?” my mother asks me, on a semi-weekly basis. Every once in a while, I get a call from an unknown number and it’s an Indian man she has urged to phone me up.

  “The dating would be going well, except that my laptop was stolen so I never finished my profile.”

  “What, really? Oh, gee whiz. Criminals lurking everywhere these days,” says my dad.

  “You know, your parents have a computer,” my mom chimes in. “Parents are also very good at managing dating profiles.”

  “Very true,” says my dad. “We are natural experts at such things.”

  “Ah, thanks but no thanks.”

  “Did you tell the police?” my dad asks.

  “Police won’t do anything,” says my mom, refolding the sari and tucking it back into its brown paper. “Nirmala Aunty’s bicycle was stolen and police were useless. Now she walks to the office.”

  “If you need, you can borrow one of our computers,” says my dad. “We have too many of them.”

  After dinner, he brings me down to the basement where he keeps all his electronics. He has a joyous passion for owning devices but lacks an equal fervour for making them work. Also, he throws nothing away. If a computer contracts a virus, it’s banished to the basement. Against an unfinished concrete wall, he has a row of off-brand Billy bookcases (he’s boycotting IKEA because he disapproves of the store’s labyrinthine layout). The shelves are a thicket of wires: unused USB cables wind around abandoned laptops. Chargers and adapters are jammed in among nearly every defunct generation of BlackBerry, a brand he continues to buy out of loyalty to Canadian enterprise. A VHS player reigns from the top shelf, next to a stack of 5¼-inch floppy disks. There’s also a disassembled Christmas tree on the shelf for no good reason.

  My dad digs until he finds a laptop. We spend another few minutes searching for a power cord to match. “Here, try if this works,” he says, handing the cord to me. He hovers nearby while I plug it into the wall and sit cross-legged on the carpet, waiting for the laptop to boot up.

  “So, how are things going otherwise?” he asks.

  “Oh, you know, same old.” I face the screen and type in the internet password.

  “Finances and all are okay? Without the job?”

  “You don’t need to keep asking.” I pause, attempting to flatten the ripple of irritation I’m feeling. “I’m looking for a job. I really am. It’s just not that easy in Halifax.”

  “Test the sound. I think it has some problem,” he says.

  I open up YouTube and play the first video that comes up—a clip from America’s Got Talent. A girl sings soundlessly onstage with such obvious sincerity it makes me cringe. My dad is right—the sound doesn’t work, but the computer can access the internet, and that’s all I really need.

  “I know you are trying, Nina. Don’t take it that way. I am only saying, if you need money, we can help you. If you are having difficulties paying rent, there is always a place for you back at home.” His voice frays at the edges. “Why did I work so many years, if not to help my only daughter?”

  I know I should be grateful and thank him for this generosity, but the idea of moving back home is like being pulled under a wave. It’s wholly unbearable. On the laptop screen, the four judges sit waiting, each above a giant, slightly squashed letter X that will light up either in red or blinding white, depending on whether she wins their approval or not. I nod, and keep nodding for a while, until my dad wipes his eyes and goes back upstairs.

  * * *

  Though my profile consists only of a photo where I’m about to be eaten by a shark, when I check my inbox there are seven messages.

  hey there beautiful

  how’s it going?

  great smile, let’s chat over a coffee…

  Only one has commented on the shark: Nice photoshop skills. :)

  I delete all the messages except the last. I scan the guy’s details: he’s 6’1”, of mixed European descent, has a job (though he doesn’t say what it is), and likes baseball, Indian food, and snorkelling. In one of his photos, he’s standing on land while wearing a snorkel, which I’m hoping is code for having a sense of humour. The photo is captioned I look below the surface.

  I respond: Thanks! Have you seen anything interesting in Halifax waters? My online messaging style is falsely jovial.

  I exit his profile and check boxes to select my search filters: single, monogamous, looking for a relationship, employed, speaks English, age thirty to forty. That seems like the bare minimum. What comes up is a catalogue that’s unsettlingly infinite—I click through pages of results with no indication of how many pages of results there are. You could scroll on forever. Results appear in a different order if you refresh the page. Do the results repeat? The site’s unintuitive interface includes a section that works like Tinder—their biggest competitor—for those who’d rather just swipe through photos. I swipe left on three and then instantly regret it. Those people are gone. Released into cyberspace. Perhaps they no longer exist at all.

  * * *

  A week later, I’m back at Uncommon Grounds to meet the Snorkeller. I arrive early to avoid the awkward shuffle of bill-paying. Instead of my usual scone or coffee, I’m drinking a cup of genmaicha to seem like somebody cultured and hydrated with perpetually fresh breath. I had a job interview here a few weeks ago, and this feels like déjà vu—rehearsing questions and answers in my head, reminding myself to sit up straight, make eye contact, and to smile, but not too much. I choose my usual table far back, near the window, which was shattered and repaired so recently there’s still a small pile of crushed glass swept into one corner.

  I have a full view of the café so I’ll be able to see when the guy enters. We’ve only exchanged a handful of messages, mostly about ideal snorkelling locations. This is a topic in which I have neither knowledge nor interest. He suggested we meet, and I said yes, because it seemed rude to say I’d prefer to chat longer and about a greater variety of subjects first. I watch the door. A man comes in and I look questioningly at him and he returns the look, before turning to hold the door open for his wife, who’s pushing a stroller. A short while later, another man enters, and I try to picture him in a snorkel mask to figure out if it’s the right guy, but then a group of his friends waves him over. A third man enters. He checks the right side of the café, where there are displays of fancy chocolate bars, packaged rum cake, and sweatshirts screen-printed with Halifax word collages. When he turns to his left, he catches my eye and smiles. When I stand to greet him, I realize that 6’1” is much taller than I th
ought, or maybe it just seems that way because he’s so skinny. I imagine him crouching in a shallow bay, wearing a wetsuit and spitting water. We’re a complete physical mismatch—he’s about half as wide and twice as tall as me. The way he takes a quick up-and-down glance and then retreats into blankness makes me think he knows it, too. Unless I’m “mind misreading,” a phenomenon my therapist told me about where you incorrectly assume people are judging you, when they’re just thinking about baseball stats or the rare variety of trout they spotted yesterday.

  “Hey!” I say.

  “Hey.” His eyes wander around as though I couldn’t possibly be his date, and then he squints at my face like maybe he expected a clearer complexion. “You got your own drink?” he asks, pointing at my tea.

  “I was just early, so…”

  “I would’ve gotten your drink, but okay.” He seems a bit offended. “What’s good here? You want anything else?”

  “Oh no, I’m okay. The scones are massive. Also, the granola bars use marshmallows as the glue—you know, to bind the granola together?”

  “That sounds fattening.” He gestures towards the coffee counter. “I’m going to grab something.”

  “Oh, sure, go for it.”

  He returns with peppermint tea. “Those scones are far too large. Can you eat a whole one of those? I bet you can’t, you’re so tiny. Like a bird!” He reaches out and grasps my wrist between his thumb and index finger.

  “Oh, no, I usually just eat three bites and save the rest of it,” I lie. I’m not so much tiny as average-sized, but I can tell he likes the idea of a woman with bird bones, someone delicate enough to tuck into a napkin and pocket like leftover pastry. “I’m more of a tea drinker,” I add. Eighty per cent of what I’ve said so far is a lie. How do I fall in love with somebody who prefers hot toothpaste water to marshmallows? Maybe he’s a vegan. Maybe he’s an empath who believes he can feel the pain of butchered animals. Maybe I will give up butter for him. “Are you a vegan?”