Douglas Coupland - Girlfriend in a Coma

PAMELA SINCLAIR

"Pam the Glam." "Pamster." She's so good looking that … we can't keep our eyes off her! Hey, Pammie—thanks for being so beautiful and making our volleyball and basketball teams winners. Don't know what you see in Hamil— (just kidding!) and we expect you to be in Hollywood some day.

Supertramp / Charlie perfume / That little blue comb in the rear pocket / Smokin' in the Boys' Room / Gain two pounds and make us happy / Always looking out the window … clouds!

ALBERT LINUS

We dare not say anything about Linus, since he might wire a laser beam satellite to blow up our houses. Not a talkative fellow, Linus (we always thought Linus was his first name!) spent his years partying with other sci-fi's inside the fume hood and rigging the computer dating system so as to land Jaclyn Smith as his grad date. Good luck, Linus: We see much zinc in your future.

"What planet are we on?"/ same shirt two weeks in a row / "Umm … " / Photography Club / Kleenex / dustbunnies / lint

I'd known Karen all my life, her family's post-and-beam rancher lying just below our house (mock Tudor) on Rabbit Lane.

Through elementary school we'd been friends and by high schoolwe were one of those couples that nobody remembers ever not being a couple.

Karen: Her yearbook description was correct in saying she had a smile for everyone. And she did laugh all the time—not a nervous titter, but a gnarling Komedy Klub guffaw that could occasionally make us the unwanted floorshow in quiet restaurants. She was an avid photographer, flash-bulbing away at school, at Park Royal mall, at parties, or in the wild: seagulls, bare trees, mountain mists, and water ripples—yearbook stuff. Yet when any one of us searched for stray photos of Karen, we looked almost in vain, rifling through boxloads of our teen-filled snaps, finding the most meager rewards: a left arm here; half a head there; legs cut off at the thighs. We realized that Karen must have gingerly yet effectively pursued a life-long campaign to avoid being photographed. Her preoccupation with the deficiencies her mother kept telling her she had: Your nose is too plump; your hair's too straight; you're pretty enough hut no beauty. Her graduation photo became almost the sole exception, one solitary image we were able to remember her by. Over time, the photo gradually leeched away our real memories of Karen—ultimately becoming the "Official Version": oval face with long brown hair parted in the middle, dripping off her head like sleek water (a style Karen called "Bumhead"); a neck she considered too scrawny sheathed beneath a sweater's cowl; and small, nice features with no one feature eclipsing any other. Karen is gently looking out—not toward us, the viewers, but to her left—to that place where she went on December 15? Maybe.

What did Karen see that December night? What pictures of tomorrow could so disturb her that she would flee into a refuge of bottomless sleep? What images would frighten her out of her body, making her leave our world? Why would she leave me? C'mon, Karen—Beb, Sugar Pops, Starbaby—we all know life's hard … we found that one out pretty quick. You told me we were all going to be dead-but-alive zombies in the future. That's what you said. Fair's fair: Tell us what you meant, Karen. I want an answer. Wake up, wake up, okay? We'llgo to a place that's quiet and dry and talk about precious things. We'll drive downtown and have an Orange Julius. Hey!—we'll drive to the States for a steak dinner the size of a mattress. We'll drive to Europe and drink champagne, and we'll stop in Greenland for ice cubes along the way. Knock-knock. Who's there? It's me, Karen. No joke, no punchline—c'est moi. Will you come out? Or will you let me in?

Karen's family:

When we are young, we assume adults behave according to a strict adult code. Only years later does it dawn on us that Mr. Phillips down the road was a manic depressive wife beater; that Mrs. Owen's liver was bloated like a diseased water balloon; that Mr. Pulaski perved out on all his kids and that's why they beat him up one night and left him facedown in a ditch on Good Friday. In this same tradition, Karen's mother, Lois, exhibited behavior that was, to younger eyes, downright random but adult, nevertheless.

A minor example springs to mind: When I was young, lunching chez McNeil, Lois boiled water for Kraft macaroni, banged pots and colanders like crazed jungle tom-toms ("She wants us to know how much work she's doing," whispered Karen.). Then, right in front of Karen and me, Lois whisked away the crumpled cheese sauce packet like a victorious toreador, flipping it into the cupboard, saying, "We'll save that for a more special occasion." Quietly, Karen and I would eat the semi-cooked noodles in margarine while exchanging glances. Beverage? Tap water. Napkins? "Oh, just use your pants, Richard. You're a boy."

Karen, it might be surmised, had grown up with a bizarre relationship with food. Lois, a former Miss Canada runner-up (1958), saw food as alien, alive, requiring passports, visas, and security guards before allowing entry into the mouth. Fads came and went. One week she might be a vegan, the next week it was "Starch only!" Karen was dragged, holus-bolus, into Lois's cockamamie nutritional vogues. During one particularly fevered patch of vegetarianism in the seventies, I made the mistake of saying I'd been to Benihana's steak house; a brisk, half-hour anti-meat jeremiad followed. When Karen interrupted, she was met with icicle stares from Lois: "Really Karen, if you'd just eat, you might become attractive and then I wouldn't have to worry so much about your future." To me, Lois said, "Karen's in her 'awkward stage.' Now about that steak house, Richard …"

George, Karen's dad, owned a body shop where he spent sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, all year, choosing to dine in Lois-free restaurants. He was essentially nonexistent, and this absence bred a good cop/bad cop mythology: Mrs. McNeil, the fevered shrew who drove the quiet, honorable George out of his own home. Neither of them could be described as "happy."

"Oh, I wish I knew what Mom's secret was," Karen would moan. "There's obviously a biggie. But how to ask?"

Lois grew up in Northern BC, and by dint of her looks, her cultivated smile, and her fathomless misguided snobbery was hypersensi-tized to those in life who didn't work hard enough (in her eyes) to earn their keep. Little digs: "My husband works with his hands— unlike other parents around here who've never had a callus in their lives." This referred, of course, to my accountant father who, like most others in the neighborhood, made an okay, but only okay, living as the middlest of middle classes. People across the city believed ourhillside neighborhood to be the cradle of never-ending martini-clogged soirees and bawdy wife-swaps. The truth would have bored them silly, as it was middle-class dull to the point of scientific measur-ability. My mother, while barbecuing one fine summer evening in 1976, said prophetically that this neighborhood was "like the land that God forgot." Yes.

The first month of Karen's coma was a write-off—strange yet drab, hope dripping away bit by bit, making us unaware of its overall loss. We were all of us poleaxed with the flu—a good thing in that we didn't have to attend school for the final week before Christmas.

We shambled around to each other's houses and yakked on the phone a good deal. Hamilton phoned on Friday night: "Of course," he said, "we're beacons of gossip at school now." I had to admit we were. "They're ghouls," he said, pausing to honk his nose, adding, "God, my brain feels like a furry clump of dog shit." There were voices in the background at Hamilton's: "My Dad's marshaled up his sap tonight. He's dating a young twinkie in the payroll department. Aggh. My future stepmother is spoon-dancing with Daddy-O as I speak. Well—they'll have a litter of golden little brats together." The background music crooned Brasil '66. "You really should see her, Richard. She's not a mother—she's a golden retriever. You just wait until she turns into a slut. Won't that be jolly." A sigh: "Must go, Toots—owww! My head. Is. In. Pain. Bye."