Meaghan Rondeau
1999
I announce that I don’t want kids. My mom’s reply: “You’ll change your mind
when you’re older. Life is meaningless—”
She actually says this! I shit you not! Meaningless!
“—without children.” Years later, I tell her that remark
still bothers me. She says, “I never said that.”
(She always says that.) “Yeah you did.”
“Well if I did,” she says, “I must have meant for most women.”
2001
On the fourth rainy day of our vacation, my dad is bored
enough to ask for a book from my stack. I loan him a novel,
carefully chosen. (Male author—but!—
female protagonist.)
He reads it. Likes it. Beneath my pleased surprise
some ineffable lifelong fury festers. I decide to test him
further. “Would you ever read a novel by a woman author?”
“Probably not,” he says. I wait a few seconds, then
prompt him: “Not even mine?”
“Oh,” he assures me, “of course I’d read yours.”
2003
On the phone one morning, my brother tells me about
an upcoming fishing trip. “Men only. No girls.”
He’s so serious, I have to laugh. He says
their girlfriends have been driving them nuts lately,
they need to get away from the “bitching.” But then,
two weeks later, he calls again. “Meg. Come fishing with us.”
I’m confused. “I thought it was a boys’ trip.” He says,
“You don’t count as a girl.”
2010
“I’ve never dated one,” I tell her. We’ve been hanging out
for two or three months. She’s asking
about men. The inevitable
discussion. Empty highball glasses festooned across the table
magnify and distort mandatory late-night candlelight.
Drinking makes it harder to find words, easier
to say them. Most of the glasses are hers. She’s a feminist
when she’s sober, but now her eyes are fondling me
with the trademark unsubtlety of the shitfaced. Her pretty little brown slip-ons
sidle up to my clunky blue velvet boots in the dark below.
She’s my friend. Supposed to be. She begs me
to kiss her, to come back to her apartment.
I withdraw my feet, hide
them underneath my chair. I say, “Don’t you have a boyfriend?”
(A futile question: she’s been texting him all night.)
Wide-eyed, she shakes her head
yes. She says, “He wouldn’t see it as cheating.” She says,
“He’d love it if I brought you home.”
Meaghan Rondeau is an escaped academic who eventually found her way to the UBC MFA program and is living the spinster dream with six overflowing bookshelves, a cupboard full of baked goods, and her sister’s cats. She mostly writes poetry, short fiction that’s inappropriate for most contexts, nonfiction, and translations of Greek and Latin poems. Her first short play, Cassandra in the House, will be produced at the Brave New Play Rites festival in March. Past things of hers have appeared in The Moose and Pussy and Room, and she was shortlisted for Room‘s poetry contest in 2013.
