All That and Then Some

ALICE - You Can't Always Get What You Want

AS HAS ALWAYS BEEN my first instinct when faced with a setback, I've called my mother. I don't know why I do this. A conversation with my mother is like going to a Christmas pantomime: you think you're getting one thing, then you're suddenly having fish pelted at you by a man in a Marie Antoinette wig and far, far too much makeup.

Lately, our conversations have centred around her prolific dating life. Her late husband Gordon, a lovely man who she met in the fruit department of her local grocer, passed away just a year after their wedding. It was sad, but she took it in stride. This is what I get for marrying an octogenarian with 17 children from previous marriages, she told me. The poor man was absolutely worn out by all the family gatherings. Next time, I'll go with someone younger.

True to her word, Mum waited a respectable three months after the funeral — the amount of time you have to remain single after losing a spouse being relative, she insisted, to one's own age — then dusted off her best profile pics (most of which are from 1974) and got right back onto Tinder.

"Do you really think you're going to find love on an app?" I asked her. "It's a meat market. People swiping left and right, passing snap judgement like they're choosing a sausage from the butcher's counter. Do you really want to be someone's sausage?"

"No offence, my darling, but I'm hardly looking to you for dating advice. You've been off the market for two decades if we don't count that little misunderstanding with your boss a few years back. This is how it's done in the modern-day. And anyway, I trust the science."

"Science," I'd snorted skeptically. "There's no science to it. Just a bunch of lazy, horny people trying to hook up."

She sighed. "Well, I can't argue with you there. But why shouldn't they? Life is lonely without a partner, and I've wasted enough time. With Gordon, I discovered how wonderful passion could be. I underwent what I can only call a sexual blossoming—"

"—Oh god, stop, Mum, NO."

"—and now I find I don't want to live without that connection. I want to Netflix and Chill like everyone else!" she said outrageously.

And what does one say after that? I could only shrug and let her get on with it.

But today, thankfully, we are NOT discussing her blossoming love life and instead are focused on Maeve and her sudden, mysterious return from school.

"What do you mean she's home? How did she get home all by herself?"

Like every grandparent, my mother believes her grandchildren to be caught in some kind of physical/mental stasis that stopped their ageing process sometime around six years old. In her opinion, they are eternally adorable, utterly helpless and, if I only I'd do a better job parenting, completely under my command.

"She took the train, Mum. She must have taken a cab to the station, bought a train ticket and made her way home from Union Station."

"Is that safe? At her age? She could have been abducted!"

"She's legally an adult. And perfectly capable of not getting abducted."

"Tell that to my friend Rose's daughter-in-law. Her cousin twice-removed was abducted from a parking lot as a child."

"That's awful, but...."

"Oh, it was fine in the end. It was the 70s. They only meant to steal the car, not the child. The thief must've had the surprise of a lifetime when the girl finally spoke up from the backseat. They found her in another parking lot, next town over, eating the world's biggest box of Maltesers, happy as a clam."

"All's well that ends well, in that case," I interject, hoping to steer the conversation back onto its intended course. "Anyway, the point I'm trying to make here is that she's refusing to tell us why she left campus. She's upstairs in her old room right now, skulking around. I don't know what we should do. Should we confront her? Force her to go back?"

My phone beeps in my ear, drowning out her response. I look at the screen and see it's my father calling.

"Dad's calling, but I'll call him back later," I say.

"Go ahead and take it," she says brightly. "I need to go anyway. My creative writing group meets in an hour. We're dabbling in fanfiction erotica!"

Gross.

I CATCH HIS CALL just before it slides into voicemail.

"Hi, hi, sorry, Dad. Was just talking to Mum on the other line."

My parents have been divorced for more than 20 years which is just about the same length of time they were together in the first place, so there are no resentments or eggshells to walk on when referring to one about the other. Except that my father has never entirely gotten over my mother. He'd never say as much to her directly, but it's plain in the way he asks about her all the time.

"And how is she? Is she well? I was thinking the three of us could...."

I cut him off before he proposes something I don't want to involve myself in, like 'meet for brunch' or 'take a family camping trip.' It's one thing being the adult child of two amicably divorced people, but it's another entirely having to play your father's wingman while he tries to woo (or re-woo?) your mother.

"—she's good. Busy. Kittenfishing and writing Twilight porn."

He clears his throat uncomfortably. Unlike my mother, who has evidently embraced her sexuality at the late-ish age of 70, my father remains utterly uncomfortable with the mere mention of sex.

"Ah," he offers by way of response, but I can hear him cringing. "Great the way she's embracing modern technology."

I murmur my agreement and hope he's taking note. My Dad is the most technophobic person I know. He refuses even to have a tv in his house because 'remote controls are too complicated these days.' Like any television after the kind you had to get up, cross the room and turn the knob on is somehow so mystifying to him that he's afraid to pit himself against its overwhelming complexity. Last Christmas, Vic and I set him up with a smartphone and a Facebook account so he could see pictures of his grandchildren, but to my knowledge, he's never once signed in. I do occasionally get a text message from him, which is something, but he hasn't quite mastered the medium. He starts every text with a prosaic Dear Alice, and signs off With love, your father as if I wouldn't otherwise have guessed who was sending me this 4 paragraph missive.

So it surprises me when he says, "It's a great photo she's got on her Tinder profile. Very becoming."

Hang on a minute. How the heck does my Luddite father know what Tinder is, never mind how to get onto it and creep his ex-wife's profile?

"How the heck do you know what Tinder is, Dad?"

"Maeve explained it to me. Showed me how to get on it just before she left for school. Speaking of which, I hear she came home today."

"How did you hear that?"

"She electronic-messaged me before she left campus. I reminded her to be careful not to get abducted."

"Oh," I say, inexplicably put out by this new information. Why was my daughter telling her grandfather things she wasn't telling me? "Did she mention to you why she's come home? Something going on at school?"

My father pauses, choosing his words carefully. "I suspect she doesn't want you to worry."

"Well, I AM worried. She says she just missed us. Is that what it is? Was she homesick?" My voice steadily escalates as I press my Dad with questions he seems reluctant to answer.

Finally, he says, "Ask her about Kierkegaard."

Kierkegaard? I think, confused.  What business does a first-year Economics major have with a 19th-century Danish philosopher?