Chapter 1. High Beams

Two nights before the date printed in silver italic on her wedding invitations, Erik called, the guy she’d ridden with through all those dust-hung after-darks on country gravel roads in his mom’s long Meteor, boat-like in the night. He was on his way through the city, he said. They should have a drink. In her right hand Sylvie held the clunky weight of the phone receiver, and in her left she held a half-made yellow wedding flower. Begin by stacking half a dozen squares of coloured, see-through plastic. Pleat the stack accordion-style, then bind it at the middle. Spread each side into a fan; fluff. Repeat four dozen times. Get married.
“Hang up the phone,” said Margo. “Pay some attention already.” She took the flower from Sylvie’s hand and fluffed the unfinished side and handed it back. Among the rules for nuptials in 1974: decorate the wedding car with flowers the colour of the bridesmaids’ dresses. Or, in Sylvie and Jack’s case, decorate the wedding truck. They might have used Jack’s Corolla, but rust had made macramé of its lower regions; Sylvie’s dad’s Dodge pickup was the better choice, looking new except for a few pocks in the paint along the driver’s side from stones and speed, her father’s refusal to concede ample passage to oncoming traffic.
Sylvie angled the receiver away from her mouth. “I am paying attention.”
“Course you are, it’s just not all that obvious.”
Sylvie held the flower to her nose as if she expected perfume. Somewhere in this city was Erik, also with a receiver in his hand and a cord leading away from it. Tug. She looked out the high, small window. Living in a basement suite, you see the lowest quarter of anyone walking around to the back door at the head of the stairs. She knew her friends by their legs, their shoes, the size of their feet. Here came Cynthia’s sneakered feet now, cousin Cynthia arriving to help with the flowers.
Things get away on you, the better part of a year goes by, next thing you know your dad’s booked the United Church back home and your aunts have made arrangements for the midnight lunch: assorted cold cuts and homemade buns and Uncle Davis’s special pepper pickles.
“Yes, let’s,” Sylvie said into the phone.
“Good,” said Erik. “I’ll meet you at that club, what is it—The Yips?”
“Sure.” Sylvie thought how he sounded like a hick, referring to Yip’s as The Yips. She hung up and said, “Let’s wrap this up, Margo. I’m going out.”
“Without Jack?”
“Without Jack.”
“Who then?”
“Not your beeswax.” She went up to meet Cynthia. “Thanks for coming,” she said, “but it turns out this isn’t a good night for making flowers after all.”
“But Sylvie, you only have tonight and tomorrow and then that’s it.”
Yes, Sylvie thought, that’s true.
They used to drive at night, she and Erik, along the back roads near Ripley looking for parked couples. Once they found a vehicle, they’d train their high beams on the rear window for a bit, then back up, turn around and take off to find another car, laughing to think of Paulie or Stuart bare-assed in the back and Shelley or Beth struggling to do up her blouse, the buttons so big and the buttonholes so small and the fingers so suddenly fat. In the wee hours Erik would drive up Sylvie’s street, headlights off, and let her out three houses ahead of her own so as not to disturb Snoring Dad and Laid-up Mom.
(“I get it, Syl. If you didn’t love them you wouldn’t give them nicknames.”
“Think you know me?”
“Think I do.”)
Sylvie and Erik called their game birth control. Let’s go do some birth control tonight. Let’s go do some back seat interruptus in Ripley, Saskatchewan, Playground of the Prairies. In those days Sylvie’s Grandma Fletcher had in her living room a green satin cushion that dated from the forties. It was silkscreened with the Playground of the Prairies slogan and pictures of babes water-skiing and men golfing and fishing. In the real-life Ripley, there was no lake where a person could launch a boat or water-ski. There was no fishing hole, no river. There was a nine-hole golf course that would flood in the spring, and for a week or so kids would put on rubber boots and go out and sink the rickety rafts they knocked together out of branches and tail-ends of lumber. These days, Grandma Fletcher’s satin cushion sat on the couch in Sylvie and Jack’s basement suite, a slippery joke.
The day after tomorrow Sylvie and Jack would get up and have breakfast, then take their finery, sheathed in plastic bags, four hours out to Ripley where they would tape the yellow flowers to the Dodge and have the ceremony. Tonight the boys had already come to pick up Jack. Took him out to party. The girls had given Sylvie a bridal shower last Thursday where they made her wear a tin pie plate with an orange pot scrubber stuck over to one side, supposed to look like a bow on a bonnet. They played parlour games. Margo won a Tupperware citrus peeler for having in her purse the item voted most unlikely to be found in a purse, specifically, a moo-cow creamer from the truck stop south of the city on Number 11. Tea and instant coffee and Tang had been the beverages on offer, so it was no wonder the thought that came to Sylvie’s mind now was, You have to make your own fun.

“Okay,” said Erik as they raised their bottles of Boh and brought them together in a clumsy kiss of glass. “Okay, you’re already living with this guy anyway, and day after tomorrow you’ll drive out to Ripley for the wedding, and then what?”
“What do you mean, then what?”
“Then you just come back to your same place?”
“No.”
“No?”
“Too far to drive. We stay overnight at the Capri in Foster and drive back the next day.”
“And you get up Monday morning and go to work at, what did you say, the basement of the library, same as always?”
“Yes.”
“Is there a point?”
She stamped circles on the tabletop with her bottle. “Eight months in Edmonton pouring concrete for, what did you say, driveways? And now you’re moving back to Ripley.”
“The job was great, the boss wasn’t. Bags of money, though.”
“Anyway,” Sylvie said, getting out of her chair, “this place has a dance floor.”

They drove barefoot in the long dark car, shoes and socks stripped off and thrown in the back. They took turns at the wheel. When Sylvie drove, the hard rubber ridges of the gas pedal and the brake pedal pressed into the sole of her naked foot, patterning her skin. When she was the passenger, she sat on her heel, switching legs when her knee cramped. They never once parked as a couple, though one night, after backing away from Paulie’s old Buick and laughing at the idea of Paulie with his trademark white pants around his ankles—he wore them pretty tight and it wouldn’t be an easy dance to pull them up in a hurry, wiggle waggle, and would he even care or would he simply carry on?—after turning around and a few miles later driving slowly past Panchuck’s grain bins and seeing that no one had rolled the signal tire out to the middle of the lane to show that the spot was taken for the evening—Sylvie and Erik did each press a look on the other across the wide space between them in the front seat. Sylvie, sitting on her heel, allowed herself to grind against the bone. She wanted him to notice, and she wanted him to not.

[End of excerpt]

This novel asks big questions.

Is there a right path and a wrong path, or does each possibility hold its share of pleasure and pain? Does a person have an immutable self, or is her essence dependent on circumstance? Where does our all-too-human insatiability lead us? This energetic and innovative book creates a world without the usual limits and a protagonist who is conflicted, charismatic, brave, and full of curiosity. If Sylvie had Nine Lives is for everyone who has ever asked, What if...?