Content notes: COVID-19, depression, loss of parent (to cancer) in childhood
A few years earlier…
“How are you doing?” Jane Yin asks. The video cuts out for a moment, but then her face is back on my computer screen. She’s wearing a gray T-shirt, her damp hair loose.
I rub my eyes as I debate how to answer. She’s genuinely asking, not just saying it as a greeting.
“I’m better,” I reply at last, and it’s not a lie. It also doesn’t say a hell of a lot because the past few weeks have been not good, to put it mildly. We’re in the middle of a pandemic. Outside of the essentials, the province has mostly shut down.
And I’m pretty sure I had COVID-19.
I got sick at the beginning of March, before a state of emergency was declared in Ontario, and at first, I assumed it was a cold. Most of the COVID-19 cases I’d heard of? They involved people who’d recently traveled, and I hadn’t been gone anywhere. Besides, I wasn’t all that sick. Yet I stayed home out of an abundance of caution, and I’m glad I did. Although I didn’t have any acute symptoms, I still don’t feel quite right, and it’s been a month.
“I’m tired,” I say. “It’s a different sort of tiredness—hard to explain—but I’m slowly improving. Thank you for the groceries and toilet paper.”
“It was the last package. I nearly had to fight someone for it.”
The package was open by the time it arrived at my door. Jane had taken half of the rolls for herself before giving the rest to me.
“Next week, I’ll do the shopping myself,” I say. “I can’t imagine I’m contagious anymore, right?” Though it feels like the information on the disease keeps changing. It’s just so new. “I’ll fashion myself a mask out of…something.”
Jane holds up her mask, made from an old shirt and hair elastics.
“Very cool,” I tell her.
There’s a rather awkward silence.
Normally, I’d fill it, but I’m just not on. Aside from going out on my balcony, I haven’t left my apartment in four weeks. I miss seeing people, and I’m not used to socializing only on Zoom. That, combined with being sick—and the fact that my girlfriend broke up with me in February—is putting a damper on my mood.
“I’m envious of people who don’t live alone,” I say. “Some men are complaining about how they have to spend all day with their wife and kids, but that sounds better than being by myself.” I punctuate this with a smile so it doesn’t sound like I’m whining…too much.
I don’t want to bring people down; I’m very conscious of my mood around others, especially now that my depression is getting worse.
“Although, if I lived with someone, I probably would have gotten them sick,” I add. “Better this way, I guess, but it would be nice to have the company now.”
Jane takes a healthy sip from her glass.
“What are you drinking?” I ask.
“Vodka and grapefruit seltzer.” She shrugs. “It’s what I had. I thought drinking while on Zoom was better than drinking alone, although if you—”
“No, no,” I rush to say. “You’re welcome to drink while talking to me.”
I’m reminded of an article I saw the other day about a distillery that has switched to making hand sanitizer. The world has turned upside down.
She has another sip. “I wish I didn’t live alone, either.”
“Yeah?” I’ve known Jane since our first year of university, which was more than a decade ago, and she’s always liked her space.
“Well, if I had someone else in this five-hundred-square-foot apartment? God, no.” She wrinkles her nose. “But it would be nice to share a house in the suburbs. To eat dinner and watch movies with someone in the evening.”
“And bake bread? I hear that stores are running out of flour.”
“They are,” Jane confirms. “There was only whole wheat at the grocery store today.” She pauses. “I don’t want to make bread or pies or whatever people are doing, though I’d be happy to do the eating if someone else was baking. Now that you’re feeling better and shouldn’t be contagious, you could live with your parents for a bit?”
“True. Might do that.”
It’s not an option for Jane, though—and not just because her dad lives on the other side of the country.
She drums her fingers on the desk. “It’s a pity we’re not married and living in a house in the suburbs together. With both of our salaries, we might even be able to buy something.”
“Two people don’t need to get married to live together.”
“But if I’m going to buy property with another person, I’d want some kind of commitment, and since I don’t see any romance in my future…”
“No?” I say. We haven’t talked about Jane’s love life in a long time.
“Dating is such a minefield, and how am I going to meet anyone on an app? How can I swipe left or right when I have no idea who I might eventually find attractive, once I know them better? Plus, there’s the pandemic.”
“Yeah, it’s kind of rough.”
“Maybe it’s the vodka talking, but I wish I could have an arranged marriage. Even though I literally haven’t had a relationship in five years, I think I’d like to get married, and that sounds so much simpler.”
“I guess your dad wouldn’t—”
“Ha!”
“You could arrange it yourself,” I suggest.
“Who would go for that? Would you?”
It’s certainly not what I imagined for myself. But relationships haven’t worked out well for me, have they? I’m tired of getting my heart broken.
I can’t give up hope, though. Not yet.
An acquaintance once said it should be easier for me to find someone because I’m not limited by gender, but it’s not that simple.
“In three years,” I say, “if neither of us has found anyone, we can have a small wedding and buy that house in the suburbs.” I’m not sure how serious I’m being. Everything is kind of weird these days.
“What about kids?” she asks. “I’d like one or two.”
I nod. “Sounds good.”
“But I, uh, won’t want to have sex, except for procreation purposes. Or we could have kids another way. You could sleep with other people, as long as it’s fairly discreet. I don’t want friends coming up to me and telling me that my husband is having an affair.”
It’s strange—in a nice way—how matter-of-fact this is. In my last relationship, we still hadn’t had a discussion about children by the six-month mark, and the idea of bringing it up made me anxious. But ultimately, that had nothing to do with why the relationship ended.
While not having sex in a marriage might not be my ideal situation, this does sound appealing. I mean, I know we get along—and for long periods of time, too. There are some friends I enjoy in small doses but nothing more. Jane, however, has traveled to Europe with me, and we weren’t about to murder each other at the end.
“That’s fine,” I say.
“I thought you were too much of a romantic to go for this.” She taps her finger against her chin. “Let’s make it more than three years. How about if we’re both still single by my thirty-third birthday, we’ll get engaged?”
About three and a half years, then. Her birthday is in early December.
I hold out my hand, my pointer finger touching the screen, and she holds out hers. We pretend to shake on it.
“Do you think handshakes will ever come back,” she says, “after this is all over?”
“I don’t know, but surely the pandemic won’t last beyond the end of the year, right?”
It’s here. The day I thought might never come.
My thirty-third birthday.
It’s not like I expected to die young, but there’s some small part of me that couldn’t fathom living to be thirty-three when my mom didn’t make it to this age. How can I be older than she ever was?
It seems impossible, yet it’s now reality.
As I get ready for the workday, my thoughts drift to the spring of 2020. When we were more or less locked down, Evan Mok and I made a marriage pact. I was a little drunk, and somehow, it just made sense. We even shook on it, as best we could.
I didn’t expect anything to come of it, though. I figured Evan—who’s objectively more lovable than I am—would be in another long-term relationship by this point. When he started dating Graham a year ago, I assumed this was it.
I was more disappointed than I ought to have been.
I knew I should be glad that my friend was happily in love. It’s not like I’m in love with Evan; I’ve known him for fifteen years, and in all that time, I’ve never had a crush on him. But marrying a friend really does seem like a solid plan. Dating is far too painful, yet for some reason, I’ve always secretly thought I’d get married. And it’s not because I have some old-fashioned notion that this is what you do if you’re a woman.
No, I just like the idea of long-term companionship and commitment, and nothing made it clearer to me than the well of loneliness that consumed me early in the pandemic.
I’m tired of being alone.
So, after Evan and his boyfriend broke up, I start thinking more about that Zoom call. In October, when we were enjoying lunch outside on an unseasonably warm day, I reminded him of our pact. I said I wouldn’t hold him to it if he wasn’t interested, but…
He was.
For the first time in ages, I felt a flutter in my chest. The kind of flutter that people normally associate with romance, but that wasn’t the reason; it was just the thrill of taking my life into my own hands. Making things happen, rather than waiting for them to happen to me.
Yes, I’m getting engaged tonight.
* * *
Evan sets the bakery box on my kitchen table and lifts the lid with a flourish.
“You didn’t!” I say, laughing.
“I most certainly did.”
Inside the box is a small cake with “Will you marry me?” written in chocolate.
“Yes,” I say, “I most certainly will.”
There’s no ring—I told him that I didn’t want an engagement ring—and no kiss. Kissing on the lips is against our rules. I said I’d appreciate casual touches, like the sort we already do, and perhaps cuddling during movies, but nothing more.
Evan leans forward and envelops me in a hug, one that lasts a little longer than our usual hugs. Then he pulls back. “I guess we should eat dinner before we dig into the cake.”
I nod and help him set out the containers of food from my favorite Thai restaurant. I’m about to start serving myself when my phone buzzes. I pick it up, feeling a foolish burst of hope.
An unknown number.
I put the phone aside, annoyed with myself for even looking.
As we start eating, Evan turns to practical matters. “When should we tell our families?”
“I was planning to tell them when I’m in Calgary.” It can be such a hassle to fly at Christmas, so I don’t always go, but I’m going this year for four nights.
“Okay. I’ll do it then, too.”
The last time I was in a relationship, our interactions were rather combative, especially near the end. It was exhausting.
But I can’t see that ever happening with Evan.
Marriage might not always be smooth sailing, but I think this will give me what I want.
* * *
As soon as dessert is over, Peyton and Kaden pull out their phones.
That’s fine. They don’t need to be paying close attention when I make my announcement. It’s not important news to them.
Evan is telling his family tomorrow, but I’m doing it on Christmas Eve, my first full day with my family in Calgary. Outside, it’s dark and miserable, but in here, it’s warm…though I can’t say it’s particularly cozy.
“I have something to tell you.” I look around the table at my father, my stepmother, and my teenage half-siblings.
My stepmother gestures for me to continue.
I’ve always called her Suzanne. Nobody has ever tried to make me call her anything else, which I appreciated. Nobody has ever expected us to be close. But maybe if we’d been closer, my dad wouldn’t have forgotten about me. He would have seen me as part of his new family, rather than an inconvenient reminder.
I don’t know. Our relationship had started disintegrating before then.
I take a deep breath. “I’m engaged.”
“Congratulations,” Suzanne says, and my father echoes her a moment later.
Kaden looks up from his phone. “You’re not wearing a ring.”
Peyton rolls her eyes. “You don’t need a ring. When men get engaged, they aren’t expected to walk around with a symbol that they’re taken, but women are?”
This morphs into an argument about something else, but then Suzanne says, “Not now,” accompanied by a meaningful look, and Kaden returns to his phone.
“Congrats,” Peyton says to me. “When are you getting married?”
“This summer,” I reply.
Peyton is in her last year of high school. When she was born—before the move to Calgary—I was a year younger than she is now, and I wasn’t particularly interested in having a baby sister. As with Suzanne, we get along well enough, but I don’t feel like we’re family. I’m the outsider here, the one who doesn’t belong.
“Who’s the man?” my father asks.
“His name’s Evan,” I say. “I’ve known him since university, but we only started dating this past summer.”
My father nods, his face impassive.
There are no comments about how I never told them I was seeing someone, how could I be in a relationship without them knowing? I’m not disappointed; it’s what I expected, even if it’s accompanied with a blank feeling that matches my father’s expression. After all, I’ve only talked to my father twice in the past six months. He didn’t even call or text on my birthday, which wasn’t a surprise—he never does. Yet a part of me had still hoped, especially since it was a rather significant birthday for me.
Evan and I discussed what to tell people, and we agreed to pretend we’ve been dating for a little while—not too long, though, because he and Graham broke up in June. Easier to pretend we’ve been in a relationship than to explain the situation to everyone. Where we live, young people don’t usually get married because they’ve given up on finding romantic love and don’t want to be lonely.
And I wouldn’t get married just so I didn’t have to be alone. Better to be single than to tie yourself to the wrong person, but Evan and I are good friends, and I’ve thought about this rationally.
After we get up from the table, my father beckons me to his office, which is on the first floor. My family has lived in this house since they moved out west when I was eighteen. I know it well, but it will never feel like home, unlike the house we shared with my mother.
My father sits down at his desk and writes me a check.
A large postdated check.
I don’t have a checkbook, but my dad is old-fashioned in some ways. Peyton likes to tease him about it.
“For your wedding—or a downpayment,” he says. “It’s dated for January because I have to make sure I have the money in the right account.”
I nod. “Thank you, Dad. This is very generous.”
And not unexpected, to be honest. My dad and I might not be close—not like we once were—but he paid for most of my schooling and gives me money every Christmas. It’s the only way he shows that he cares about me now. I feel like an obligation.
I put the check in my wallet, then help Suzanne in the kitchen. When we’re finished, I tell her that I’m going for a walk, and she seems a little puzzled as to why I’d willingly go out in this weather, but she doesn’t ask.
I head down the driveway, and the sting of the cold wind on my cheeks is a nice change. Inside that house, I just go through the motions. I’m not really myself.
I wonder when I’ll come back here for Christmas again. Maybe never. Evan will want to spend the holidays with his family, and to be honest, I’m looking forward to it. Some people dread dealing with in-laws, and I harbor no illusions that we’ll be super close. But I look forward to having family of some kind in the Toronto area, a mother-in-law and father-in-law who will occasionally invite us for dinner.
I met his whole family once, many years ago. It was my second year of university, and my family had just moved to Calgary. I wasn’t going to fly out for Thanksgiving; I planned to stay at school. But then Evan asked if I’d want to come to Toronto with him.
So this is what it’s like, I thought as we stepped inside and Evan hugged his father. I was an outsider in that situation, too, but I didn’t mind. I enjoyed seeing him with his loved ones, and I didn’t feel the need to shut down emotionally so I didn’t get hurt.
I assume that tomorrow, when he tells his family about our engagement, it’ll be very different from when I told mine.
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Jackie Lau 