We Have Never Lived On Earth Read online

  “A riff on loneliness. Exquisitely written. Profoundly moving. A must read.”

  —ROSEMARY SULLIVAN, OC, award-winning author

  “Few writers can work with memory as vividly as Kasia Van Schaik—fusing fiction and remembrance with confidence, sensitivity and the shivering logic of dream. These are stories that glitter and then duck away from view, like a swimmer half-discerned. A beautiful book you can't forget.”

  —SEAN MICHAELS, Giller Prize-winning author of Us Conductors and The Wagers

  “Full of diffuse longing and hallucinatory memory, these stories shimmer and compel like half-remembered dreams. Van Schaik's poetic linked collection brings the reader on an evocative journey across decades and continents.”

  —SALEEMA NAWAZ, author of Songs for the End of the World

  “We Have Never Lived On Earth contains a bright humour, a sharpness. There's an authentic, human thrumming behind these stories. With their focus on mothers, fathers, and daughters, these linked stories explore how initial models of care feed into our romantic loves. Kasia Van Schaik captures the souring phase of relationships, where the glue has become brittle and two individuals begin to lean away from each other. Yet the characters forge their way through these moments of dislocation with grace, humour, and the perfect amount of self-awareness, which makes the reader laugh out loud, or nod knowingly. At least it did for me.”

  —ELIZA ROBERTSON, author of Demi-Gods

  “An elusive, exacting gallery of mirrors illuminating that rootless lifelong yearning for a place to stop searching. The result is heartbreaking. I wish I'd had these stories with me when I was Charlotte.”

  —PAIGE COOPER, author of Zolitude

  “In Kasia Van Schaik’s visionary stories a generation will recognize its rootlessness and frail sense of futurity, as well as its desire for grace. We Have Never Lived On Earth is a beautiful collection that explores all realms of experience—what we see and what we dream. I couldn’t get enough of this work’s exquisite precision and depth.”

  —SEYWARD GOODHAND, author of Even That Wildest Hope

  “We Have Never Lived On Earth speaks to many readers’ own experiences of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, which involve the difficult work of figuring out how to move through loss and grief and, ultimately, how to be most alive in all of our imperfections. I have read many novels and collections that capture the feeling of threat the world can impose upon female bodies, but the quality of Van Schaik’s prose made these experiences alive, honest, and corporeally real throughout each story in a way I had not encountered before.”

  —HEATHER JESSUP, author of The Lightning Field

  “Traversing themes such as transience, loss, painful attachment, and belonging, Kasia Van Schaik’s stories recall literary icons Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro, though with a more immediate, youthful, contemporary lens. The vital introduction of topics such as parenthood in an age of climate crisis, Canada’s history of genocide against Indigenous peoples, as well as immigrant women and girls’ experiences in Canada, make this a powerful and much-needed addition to Canadian publishing.”

  —JENNA BUTLER, author of Magnetic North

  Published by

  University of Alberta Press

  1–16 Rutherford Library South

  11204 89 Avenue NW

  Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G 2J4

  amiskwaciwâskahikan | Treaty 6 | Métis Territory

  uap.ualberta.ca | [email protected]

  Copyright © 2022 Kasia Van Schaik

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Title: We have never lived on Earth / Kasia Van Schaik.

  Names: Van Schaik, Kasia, author.

  Series: Robert Kroetsch series.

  Description: Series statement: Robert Kroetsch series

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20220250685 | Canadiana (ebook) 20220250707 | ISBN 9781772126280 (softcover) | ISBN 9781772126648 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781772126655 (PDF)

  Subjects: LCGFT: Short stories.

  Classification: LCC PS8643.A595 W4 2022 | DDC C813/.6—dc23

  First edition, first printing, 2022.

  First electronic edition, 2022..

  Digital conversion by Transforma Pvt. Ltd.

  Copyediting by Kimmy Beach.

  Proofreading by Mary Lou Roy.

  Cover design by Alan Brownoff.

  A volume in the Robert Kroetsch Series.

  Cover photograph: Vuk Dragojevic (www.vukdragojevic.com), from the photo series Regretfully, Alexander Moyle. The image shows a plaster pattern in the artist Alexander Moyle's studio being prepared for bronze casting. Used by permission

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without prior written consent. Contact University of Alberta Press for further details.

  University of Alberta Press supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with the copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing University of Alberta Press to continue to publish books for every reader.

  University of Alberta Press gratefully acknowledges the support received for its publishing program from the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Government of Alberta through the Alberta Media Fund.

  For my family

  Life is beginning. I now break into my hoard of life.

  —VIRGINIA WOOLF, The Waves

  Contents

  How Will You Prepare for Happiness?

  Premium Girl

  Highwayman

  House on Carbonate

  The Peninsula of Happiness

  A Girl in Nova Scotia

  A Girl Called Helsinki

  Swimming Upright

  How to Be Silent in German

  Notes on a Separation

  Visitor to Crete

  Houseboat

  Youth Orchestra

  Stingray

  Cellular Memory

  The Cascades

  This Is Fine

  We Have Never Lived on Earth

  An Ounce of Care

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  How Will You Prepare for Happiness?

  IN MY LAST YEAR OF CHILDHOOD, I hired myself out as a housekeeper to a pair of cognitive psychologists whose son and daughter attended my high school. The Salloways owned two houses, a low, rambling ivy-brocaded house in the centre of town, where they met with clients in two large renovated offices in the back, and a tall modern house built into the cliff face, surrounded by hemlock and lodgepole pine, several miles outside the city limits. This other dwelling, Grace Salloway told me, was their dream house—one they had designed and built themselves. I knew that she didn’t mean designed and built literally, because the family didn’t do very much themselves when it came to physical work, but I thought I understood what she meant until, no, she explained to me, it was an actual dream house—the architectural blueprint with its wall of windows that looked out onto the shuddering blue treetops, the basement set in rock, the wrap-around deck that always conjured nautical metaphors from visitors had come to her and her husband in a collective dream. Our spiritus mun
di, she said, when we still had one. She cracked me a knowing smile.

  When I got home, I looked up spiritus mundi and was disappointed to find that it was not a sex act but rather a term made up by a poet. The collective soul of the universe containing the memories of all time. After that I began to associate the house on the hill with the Salloways’ collective soul, containing, I told my younger sister when I got home from cleaning out their fridge, the decomposing cheeses and microbial odours of all time.

  Once a month I cleaned out their fridge, the one in town and the one on the hill, and miraculously the fridges would again fill up with food that would go untouched until I was summoned thirty days later. Over the six months I’d been working for them, I felt like a scientist hired for the purpose of divining how life might spring from a refrigerated vacuum—how such an environment might create a new life form, one that would remain long after the world dried up. This is what was happening to the earth. The school library subscribed to the kind of magazines that told the future—or at least gave the most accurate prediction of the future—and our future was hot and dry and filled with famine.

  It was hard to picture famine when I was cleaning out the Salloways’ fridge. I dreamed of breaking into their home—either one—and licking icing sugar off the counters, ripping open the Norwegian salmon before it could go grey, chugging carton after carton of full-fat milk before it could sour. I wanted to ask them why they rammed so much perishable food into their fridge every week if the food was never to be touched, but questions invited questions and that might lead to Grace asking me about my home life or my Five Year Plan. I knew her son Charlie already had one, as I’d discovered it pasted above his desk. When he caught me trying to read the plan, he’d grown embarrassed, and next time I came over to clean, the list had disappeared.

  I could understand that. Ever since my mother had gotten sick and we’d moved to a building that was known locally as the Cauliflower Flats because of the smell, I had become evasive about my family and my future. There were three of us: me, my mom and my sister, Nina, who was three years younger than me and who would be starting her junior year at high school next fall—by which time I secretly planned to be gone. In a sudden vanishing, a sudden peeling away, I would erase myself from this particular town’s map in the interior of the province. I’d go somewhere closer to the sea, or to a city, or to an airport that would take me to those things.

  We had not had a recipe-followed, ingredients-acquired meal since 1997, which was shortly after we moved to Canada, when my mother started increasing the time she spent asleep by one minute a night. Now she didn’t leave her bed for days, except to brush her teeth in the mirror. She had always been very concerned with hygiene and posture, a trait that persisted stubbornly even when she was sleeping sixteen hours a day.

  Don’t hunch, she told me when I brought her a meal. When you stand with your stomach sticking out, you look like a used-up old woman.

  Your body will harden like that, she would say, and no one will want to marry you. Bodies are like water, always seeking the path of least resistance.

  This was certainly the case for my mother’s body, now absorbed by the comforter. A flooded riverbed.

  It only occurred to me years later, when I no longer had any relationship with my former employers or that landlocked town, that our family’s situation might have been the reason the Salloways offered me employment in the first place. I’m not suggesting that they filled their fridge with food out of charity for my family, but rather, the reason they chose me—a seventeen-year-old, conspicuously foreign, sullen at school—as their cleaner was the underlying fear of the broken family.

  I cost less than a professional housekeeper, too, but money, I’d heard Grace Salloway declare over the phone, was no object. This saying had always confused me, though, because money was an object. A very finite and important one. At home, money was an object to be stretched, like a teabag, which, our mother showed us, could easily be reused two or three times. Other items rationed in our household were toilet paper, only two squares per use, and hot water. Our whole family was to share the same bath and therefore there was a strict policy about urinating in the tub unless you were the last member to have the bath—then peeing would be a reward for foregoing the hot water and making do with a slightly cloudy, lukewarm tub.

  Once, maybe twice a year my mother would shuffle through the box of photographs we’d brought with us to Canada from South Africa. She’d space them out evenly on the table before her, as if preparing a tarot reading, except it wasn’t the future but rather the past that flickered up before us. Find the pieces of the world that serve as evidence for your life, she’d instruct us. Defend them. But the photographs she’d saved weren’t evidence as much as they were story prompts.

  Five naked children beside a still, black pond: a birthday party.

  A group of people, my parents among them, half-submerged in darkness.

  A bonfire in the centre of the road.

  The homemade masks for a play that, my mother told us, was later shut down by police.

  Sometimes the stories attached to the photographs changed. There were many possible stories for each image, I learned, for each object or face or action in the image. Though we often heard the same stories twice or fifteen times, there might be new details added, and those details could, depending on my mother’s mood, bifurcate into new untold stories.

  After my parents’ separation, long before we moved to Canada, my mom had gotten rid of most of the photographs of my dad. There was only one of the four of us, awkwardly sitting on a leather couch at my paternal grandparents’ house in Johannesburg. I am on my father’s lap in a lacy dress and Nina, the tiny scrap of her, sleeps on my mother’s shoulder. Our father’s hair is parted in the centre. He’s clean shaven, gazing obediently at the camera with a slightly drained, translucent expression, which could also be the impression of the light.

  I’ve stared at this photograph so hard that it has become indistinguishable from memory.

  Grace Salloway had a habit of not buckling her seatbelt until she had already started driving down the hill in front of the Cauliflower Flats, and then she would take one and sometimes both hands off the wheel to wrestle the obstinate belt over her chest and into the socket. She was doing this now, cursing under her breath, her driving glasses slipping down her nose. Five cars lined up behind us. Fred couldn’t pick me up this morning because he was occupied with a client, she said, and the agitated way she said client indicated that the client was a woman. I remembered a note I’d found while cleaning her office a few months before. F’s bday present ideas, it read. Item one: blowjob. Item two: a quiche from the French place on Main. I hadn’t known what to do with the note, so I slipped it into her day planner.

  A crosswalk sped towards us. Grace’s yellow bob lurched forward as she slammed on the brakes.

  Three children sauntered across without glancing at us and I wondered if they knew how close they’d come to being crushed, if they knew that it was drivers like Grace, well-intentioned and distracted, who frequently run over children on quiet streets. I’d listened to a radio program about it when I was cleaning the Salloways’ kitchen. I imagined Grace piling up their three little corpses on the edge of the road, neatening their hair, and driving on.

  I wish you and Miranda were friends, said Grace. She glanced at me, then at the road and the line-up of cars.

  Grace’s daughter had been interning at a well-known athleisure fashion company in Vancouver for the summer, but had left it due to everyone being anorexic and difficult.

  She won’t speak to me, Grace added, abandoning the seatbelt and revving the car forward into the centre of the road. As was her surprising habit, she spoke to me as if I were an adult.

  Common phase in child development, she explained. Instead of acting out she’s acting in.

  Miranda was one year older than me. She had been held back a year and wore Doc Martens and fishnets to class, her hair cut in
a razor-sharp V at the neck—the pixie style that any girl with cheekbones and a healthy level of self-confidence probably due to said cheekbones would try out during the decade following Girl, Interrupted. I had often fantasized about this cut myself, but I knew the messy cropped frame would not suit my round, undefined face. I knew that if I were a Salloway, I would be more like Charlie, who was sixteen, and who didn’t have any confidence or cheekbones.

  Grace, who was an expert on childhood happiness, explained that, despite its name, happiness is not something that happens. It must be cultivated. She had taught both her kids that. As she wheeled the car into her driveway, she asked, how will you prepare for happiness?

  I was once again in awe of the house, its sheet of windows pressed up against the misty void of the valley. Grace didn’t get out of the car but instead handed me a list with the word Fridge in blue pen. She explained to me that while they were away on their summer vacation there’d been a power outage and the fridge had defrosted. It hadn’t been opened since. Would I do the honours?

  Help yourself to anything, everything, she called out as she backed down the drive.

  The sheet of windows flashed in the sun, empty except for the dark bobbing reflections of trees. The sky struck a hot glare on the trampoline.

  In conversations I overheard at school (Miranda never addressed me directly, though Charlie always said hi), Miranda portrayed her life as one long unsupervised sleepover, staying up all hours with Charlie and eating ice cream for dinner while her parents flew to child development conferences all over North America. Miranda and Charlie never learned to cook or clean and despite the full fridge and cupboards preferred to order in or buy snacks at the gas station.

  Wasn’t it weird, cleaning a house—two houses—that belonged to kids I went to school with? Nina asked me one day as I was describing in detail Miranda’s jean jacket collection.

  I work for their parents, I said.

  But you clean Miranda’s room too, right?