Free Love Is a Canoe: A Novel by Ben Schrank Page B

Peter Herman had kissed and later married. She realized, suddenly, that that was twenty-one years ago. And ever since, she had kept a copy of Canoe with her wherever she lived.
    She hated people who made fun of Canoe . She loved the elegance of it, the simplicity of its lessons and the fact that they were undeniably right and true. The book kept the dream of the ideal marriage alive. Canoe had helped her look away from her parents’ marriage, which was cold and New Englandy and had lasted fourteen brittle years. She and Sherry always joked that it had gone on about a dozen years too long. By the time Emily was in seventh grade and Sherry was in fourth, her mother had refused to celebrate Christmas and her father wouldn’t celebrate Chanukah, so the winter holiday arrived heavy and silent in the house. Emily and Sherry mutely understood that their home life was stagnant and wouldn’t last, so Sherry forced herself on their friends and Emily spent much of her time alone, reading. This marital outcome was precisely unlike the ones described in Canoe , except for much of chapter eleven, a chapter Emily always skipped when she reread. Emily loved Canoe . Though, ever since college, she kept the book on a high shelf where friends wouldn’t see it and tease her about it.
    She paid and smiled at the cashier and thought about how she ought to share more about herself with people, to not be so tight-lipped and interior. But she only really knew how to talk about objects—she didn’t see a way to explain herself. And maybe that was beginning to crop up as a problem with Eli, too.
    She called Sherry from the street.
    “Emily, what the hell are you up to?”
    “Nothing!”
    “Have you talked to Mom this week?”
    After her divorce, their mother had left the house in Milton where she’d brought up her daughters and cooked healthy dinners for her lawyer husband, and she’d reclaimed her existence as Rebecca Bauman. Now she taught English composition at Bates, had the sense of humor of a mid-career Joan Baez, and talked to her daughters nearly exclusively about their relationships and her academic career. She revealed almost nothing about her personal life. It was possible that she was gay, and embarrassed about it. Though both things felt wildly improbable, Sherry and Emily hoped that was the explanation. That or something like it. They both preferred to imagine that their mother hid a life better and richer than the one she shared with them.
    “Yeah.” Emily nodded. “She suspects the worst so she wants to rip Eli’s head off. I’m not sure how that’s supposed to help. Then I had to hear about all her problems with the Henry James book. She says she’s close. I know she’s lying to herself.”
    “What?” Sherry asked. Emily could hear Nancy, the other woman in the play, also talking on the phone in their shared dressing room. Sherry was always tense before a performance, and her teeth were chattering. Emily listened to her sister’s clicking teeth and remembered her mother yanking open the door to the master bathroom where Emily had thought she’d locked herself in. Her mother had found her reading Canoe and she started laughing hysterically. “Great, Emily! Keep reading! Keep dreaming! That fucking stupid book—memorize it! And pretend you can’t hear another word of this!” And then her mother ran out of the bathroom and back down to the living room to continue fighting with her husband. Emily didn’t much care for her mother’s full sentences or her sarcasm. But Emily also wasn’t forthright enough, even as a child, to tell her mother that was exactly what she had been doing.
    “Emily? I’ve really got to go. It’s true Mom will never finish that thing. Call me later, or tomorrow morning. Look, it’s probably not as bad as Mom thinks, and please stop hanging up on me! It’s just a work-wife thing which is exactly what they’re both saying. That’s all it is.”
    “ Hugs with a work wife. I hate it.