My Life Among the Apes Read Online Free PDF Page B

restaurant it isn’t the same. You try one of these.”
    She holds up the plate and I take one. It is almost too hot to hold and leaves oil on my fingers. It is savoury and delicious.
    â€œAmazing, Mrs. K.”
    â€œYou need a wife to cook for you. Maybe a nice Indian girl, what do you think?”
    â€œI need to learn how to cook. Then I’ll bring you over something.”
    We both laugh and she puts the plate down on the grass and retreats back to her own house. I return to my gardening, knees pressing into the still-new grass, the smell of the earth in my nostrils. The cries of seagulls and the steady hum of traffic from the highway remind me of the ocean.

I Find I Am Not Alone on the Island
    IN THE SUMMER OF 1989, Chloe Tillman was working in a diner while dithering about going to graduate school. She had been accepted at Princeton and offered a scholarship, but had so far failed to convince herself that the intense study of difficult texts was a worthwhile or even defensible pursuit. It was one of those rare periods when she was without a boyfriend, having dumped Tim Veldhuisen in April. Tim had started to say “I love you” and give hints that he was working up the nerve to ask her to move in with him. The thought of waking up every day beside him had filled her with dread. The truth was she hadn’t been in love with any of her boyfriends, a nagging secret that she had kept from even her closest girlfriends. She did miss Tim for a couple of weeks, but she took the measure of her happiness and decided that she had made the right decision.
    The diner was at Yonge and Wellesley, before that part of town had begun to change. The customers were tourists walking down to the Eaton Centre, strippers on their way to work in the nearby clubs, provincial government office workers, and those who Liana, the owner’s daughter, lumped under the category of “freaks.” Chloe always gave large portions to the strippers, who called her “dear” or “honey.” Her favourite customer, a pleasant, balding man with round black glasses who always left a twenty percent tip or better, liked to sit under the framed print of the Parthenon by the kitchen door. He was friendly without trying to flirt, and he was funny but didn’t try to make her linger at his table. His order was a western sandwich, a Greek salad, or occasionally a tuna melt, which he blamed for his “middle-aged swell.” Every so often he would joke about his daughter, his son, or his wife, but always in an affectionate way (she despised male customers who made cracks about their wives). He claimed that one day he would quit his government job, buy a sailboat, and take them all to the Caribbean — this despite his never having gone sailing in his life and being, he said, afraid of large bodies of water. He’d been working for the province for seventeen years but claimed not to know what his actual responsibilities were other than to furrow his brow and tap his pencil on those rare occasions when the minister came in.
    He always carried a book and read over lunch — one of the classics of western literature:
Madame Bovary, Crime and Punishment, Middlemarch
. She asked him about his reading and he told her that he’d only developed a taste for fiction in the last few years and was now trying to catch up. “But I’m hoping to die of old age before I get to James Joyce.” He’d heard a little about her, too — where she came from, what she studied, her dilemma over graduate school. “Well, I’m impressed by Princeton. If I were you, I’d go just to make other people feel stupid. I mean, you’re making me feel stupid right now and you haven’t even accepted.”
    And then he stopped coming. He had occasionally missed a day, and so it was half a week before she registered his absence and another couple of days before she began to really wonder. Perhaps he was on vacation with his wife and kids, or was sick. Perhaps he’d dropped dead or been