Heather O'Neill - Daydreams of Angels

Although Grandfather found her endearing, there were aspects of her personality that got on his nerves. For instance, she would often point out children on passing bicycles and say that they looked like what their children were going to look like. And after having dated for only a few weeks, she showed up at his door with her suitcase in one hand and her houseplant in the other, declaring that she was moving in.

Grandfather was almost relieved when she met a half-swan man who brought up marriage five minutes into their first encounter. Grandfather realized that she didn’t really love him anyway. She would have had anyone who came along and that wasn’t what he wanted.

“To love everyone is to love no one,” he said. “My ego wouldn’t allow it.”

After that he decided to wait until the right girl came along, and not immediately jump into things. He decided to wait until he met a girl who was less forward, which might account for why he ended up with a girl who was half deer. The deer-girl didn’t have a wicked bone in her body, but she was so shy that when he took her out with his friends, she wouldn’t say a word. She would just sit there looking nervous, whispering that it was time to go soon.

He practically had to move in slow motion around her, and when they kissed, he had to keep his finger on her pulse for fear of giving her a heart attack.

Her panic and lack of social skills didn’t bother Grandfather, but her paranoia did. She complained about everyone looking at her funny — talking about her behind her back. She always thought there was someone out to kill her. She would put locks on her front door, and if someone rang the doorbell she would drop the plate she was holding and scream.

Grandfather knew that loving someone is a risky thing that takes a lot of guts, and the deer-girl just didn’t seem to have the courage it takes.

Here, my brother interjected, agreeing with Grandfather for dumping her.

“I would’ve done the same!” my brother cried.

There was a girl who followed him around the schoolyard but was too nervous to say a word. She always wanted to sit next to him quietly, and it drove my brother crazy. Men.

Several weeks after breaking up with the deer-girl, Grandfather attended an island social dance and it was there that he met a half-lion named Leona. She was so much more laid back compared to the other girls he had dated. She slept about sixteen hours a day, and when she was awake, her favourite activity was lying out in the sun. Grandfather would read her poems while they lay together on the beach.

But of course, Grandfather soon began to discover the darker side of dating a lion. Whenever anyone showed any weakness, she said they should be put out of their misery. His friend Paul, who worked in the lab with him, had asthma, and one day when he was using his inhaler, Leona slapped it out of his hand and told him that a man didn’t need training wheels to breathe. At the time, Grandfather had found the remark rather witty; but several days later, when a blister on his heel forced him to walk with a limp, he found her lack of sympathy hurtful.

“Why don’t you lie down and rest, little baby-man,” she said, licking her back molars, and grandfather limped off as quickly as he could, her cruel laughter echoing behind him.

“Love should make you ten feet tall,” he said. “If only in the eyes of the one who loves you.”

Grandfather had really liked the way the lion-girl had stretched out her whole body when she yawned, and she did have a sexy voice that sort of purred when she talked, and so he decided he could get all of that — minus the threat of violence — from someone who was half-cat. And so he asked out the little cat-girl he saw drinking a milkshake by herself late one night.

She was definitely a cutie, but one day, while searching for a cigarette lighter, he discovered that her coat pocket was filled with dead sparrows. Later she even gave him one as a birthday present, a red ribbon tied around its crooked little neck. She handed him the gift with a look on her face that Grandfather found adorable, even though it was revolting.

Everyone told him not to get mixed up with a nocturnal animal, but he ignored them, and soon he discovered that she could never stay in bed at night, preferring to amble across the way to an island bar called the Sinking Ship, where she would get drunk and make out with the bouncer.

She eventually told Grandfather that she needed someone who was also nocturnal, and Grandfather acquiesced.

“I discovered that small cats can be every inch as hurtful as big cats,” he said, “because when your heart is vulnerable with love, even a fly with a mind to can break it.”

After the cat-girl, the deer-girl and the swan-girl, Grandfather was more than ready to give up on dating altogether. But then one day he met the monkey-girl. On the whole, the island’s monkey-people seemed a ridiculous lot. You’d see them at the bar, ranting and raving at one another and then, a minute later, weeping and declaring their undying love. They were so open with all of their feelings that it almost made you embarrassed.

Still, to their credit, they were more at peace with themselves than the other creatures of the island. They didn’t have an inferiority complex about their animal side like the other creatures. They didn’t seem to want to be human. They didn’t like wearing clean clothes or the idea of having to live in a designated hut — or that when they decided to sleep on the beach, they were told to move along.

“She just loved me,” Grandfather said. “She didn’t care that my socks had holes in them or that I was broke. She laughed at all my stupid jokes and could never stand seeing me sad. It was really beautiful, something I had never had before.”

She forgave him for everything. He wrote her a poem filled with spelling mistakes and she didn’t care. He loved how she would look through his hair for nits. He had never imagined how intimate that could feel.

Grandfather told us that he knew pretty much instantly that she was the girl for him. And he realized that he wanted to go back home and start a real life with her in Montreal. Of course the monkey-girl was up for anything, and so she agreed to go.

“But … she was, you know, part monkey,” I said.

“I didn’t care,” Grandfather said. “She was so pure. I think we humans have evolved into a stinking, unhappy, disagreeable mess. If there really was a Garden of Eden, then I think Adam and Eve must have been a couple of innocent monkeys madly in love.”

When they arrived in Montreal, Grandfather taught the monkey-girl all about human society, even giving her the human name Margaret.

“Wasn’t that Grandmother’s name?” asked my brother, slightly alarmed.

“Shush!” yelled Grandfather. “I’m telling a story!”

Margaret didn’t even have the natural sense of shame that full-fledged humans have about being naked. Once, on the island, she had come over to his house on a bicycle, wearing only a pair of underwear, a sweater and a pair of rubber boots. He had found it charming, but he also knew this wouldn’t do, and so he showed Margaret how to act like a proper lady. He showed her how to cut her hair into a bob and comb it, how to bathe herself and trim her fingernails, how to put on high-heeled shoes and wear a scratchy wool dress-suit that limited the movement of her legs. He taught her how to type, make omelettes and use a vacuum cleaner.

They had a gay time too, going out to ballrooms and drinking till one in the morning. His mother was a little concerned that Margaret was too much fun, but he knew that she only had eyes for him. Everything made them happy: their little tiny house on Colonial Street, their first rickety car.