Charity

by Keath Fraser

  “Mother?”

  “The singer. Your mother came from Saskatoon, right?” To memorialize her, he was finally going to butt out. “The least I can do. Atone for my intrusion at her party, and for much else. She pretended she’d forgiven me. I realize now she hadn’t.” Surrendered once, moral high ground for my mother was too fertile a position to abandon again. “We all like to feel aggrieved,” suggested Rudy. “We’re reluctant to give it up.”

  She had never been able to persuade my father, unlike Rudy, to give up cigarettes. Or pastries, which didn’t appear to threaten Rudy, but whose sugar, amidst a gamut of other desserts, had eventually brought down Daddy.

  “I’m also planning to live longer,” he added.

  No one had ever expected to be asked back to Rudy’s place and no one had been. As for anyone dropping by, as he himself liked to do at other homes, social etiquette seemed to require not embarrassing a bachelor in his own. Who knows, he might have welcomed a visit. He had lived by himself for decades in a large house with a peekaboo view of the mountains and a bright copper kick-plate on its Haida-carved cedar front door. Patrick had driven past to drop off my casserole, along with a card to thank him for babysitting Greta. She had drawn him a chair, quite a fancy one with knobs, which he promptly called up to tell her he didn’t deserve. She rabbited on to him about Princess Mouseskin. I refrained from mentioning the cigarette ash on her bedspread—a curious lapse on his part. I didn’t think less of him, although I would have expected him to abide by a more astringent social etiquette than at home. He had just sold his business, having no family member we knew of who wanted to get his hands dirty installing air conditioners, even as the climate had begun to heat up and larger profits must’ve seemed, if not ripe for the picking, tempting.

  *

  When Patrick’s ex-wife, Margaret’s birth mother, got wind of an old coot dating our daughter, she drove down to Powell Street to see them in action herself. She believed the devil lurked in details and I suppose felt she was the person to exorcise him by paying more attention than Patrick and I to the nature of the rapport between the two of them. I suspect she was trying to impress Patrick. We would see Judy from time to time, not exactly the callous cougar you might expect in someone who preferred tennis players to fullbacks—yet one who’d been willing to give up her husband, as well as her daughter, for a tennis pro with a bulging forearm. She lasted two years on the Asian circuit with this wunderkind from Veracruz, before drifting back across the Pacific without him. No shame at all in sharing her photos from happier days abroad.

  “Black, thickish hair, mussed up here on his backhand.”

  Living alone now, she seemed to believe the world still belonged to her, and assumed this included access to her daughter. Patrick, never quite over his cuckolding, agreed to her visits. I should have pushed back more. Began to suspect he was supporting her again, because she had no obvious income after returning from overseas—apart, that is, from a dress-designing sideline she aspired to profit from one day. Brazenly, from my point of view, he hired her as our babysitter. I made sure she did the laundry, hoping to discourage her willingness to show up in her fine natural fibres. Not to be put off, she would ask what I was feeding “Margie,” appreciating that her ex-husband’s genes probably had something to do with the child’s cheeks shaking abundantly when she laughed—and, when she was older, her thighs from spreading noticeably across the sofa while watching Lost.

  “She’s getting very large, Denise. Her laugh’s starting to sound like it needs a pill for the fits.”

  I asked Patrick if hysteria was what we used to call the fits. He supposed it was, but thought laughter in Greta’s case acted as a sedative. “It’s a harmless addiction, like core breathing.”

  “She’s such a darling,” said Judy. “Have you thought of stripes?”

  She wasn’t jealous of me, possibly because she never intended to be a mother and was grateful someone else had been willing to take on the job, freeing her up without guilt for more interesting pursuits than feeling responsible for “Margie’s fits,” or for anything else. Greta called her Judy, saving Mommy for me until she was ten, when we connected the triangle for her, after which she began calling me Mum and Judy “Joos.” Never a moment of reproach, that I recall, nor had we come to expect one from a precocious child who expected none from us. Her once-removed relationship with Joos probably accounted for her willingness to tell her things she never told us. About her smoking—that had been news to Patrick and me. Judy persuaded her to ditch the habit if she ever hoped to attract a boy. It hadn’t worked. Not that a date was the lubricant it had been in my day for social acceptance. Girls now went to proms by themselves and even slow-danced with each other. The only remaining stigma was the Sadie Hawkins Dance, if the boy you asked happened to decline your invitation. These days, I told Patrick, a choosier Dogpatch had probably contributed to the high rate of smoking recidivism among girls.

  “I’ll have to remember that when I prescribe Nicoderm. What’s the dog patch?” Sometimes his quickness flies right past me.

  The Living Room patrons’ table manners were too much for Judy. “They hide their half-eaten plates and shout for seconds. Not just a few of them either, acting greedy. Nobody’s all there . . . you can tell most of them are on meds.” Reporting back to us she said Margaret and her “bosom buddy” delivered dinners from a stacked metal trolley, pushing it back to reload in the kitchen, before reemerging with butterscotch desserts.

  “The pair of them act like Mother Theresa doling out mouth swabs to the dying. It’s love-forty and they’re serving one more hunger artist who can’t return a thank-you. Yet a dinner he gets! Personally, I’d knock off his noggin’—or her noggin’.” One drug-skinny creature with henna-ed hair, we learned, had dumped her plate on the floor, screaming that vegans like Margie were Hindu people spreading diarrhea.

  Judy wondered, though, if their teamwork really translated into couple-compatibility. “Like you and Patrick, you two never look like you don’t belong together.” She paused. “Afterwards, I noticed Margie in the kitchen scarfing down more than her share of leftovers while he scrubbed pots with the Baha’is. Not a lot of eye contact between them. They don’t seem to share a wavelength.”

  Her reconnoitre had left Judy with a feeling that their “courtship” wasn’t anything that was going to last. “Fools rush in, I guess. Does he have money?”

  Adding, “He certainly has no buns to speak of.”

  *

  One morning near the end of July I sniffed the first forest fire of summer. I was sitting in the gazebo. The province’s dry interior was late blowing its smoke down passes to the coast this year. The redolence carried me back to a time of burning leaves, when outdoor fires were still legal and the city encouraged this manner of disposal instead of dump trucks. In those years, smouldering fires along curbs produced the same scent as wood fires from chimneys. Their smoke hung in the air through fall, braiding bare branches of elms and chestnuts in an ethereal haze. I still think of it as the smell of transience, conjuring up dead ancestors in carbon molecules stretching forward from wild forests to the present city’s weed-free lawns. Time condensed to a blissful breath of smoke. Normally a smell that lifted me out of myself, like pungent seaweed or a whiff of club cigar, in spite of my resolve to become less nebulous.

  This morning was different, the quality of ash not a mellow memento mori but a source of foreboding, so I took myself indoors. In Canada, where cremation smoke is scrubbed, it rises from a smattering of gas furnaces sanctioned by municipal decree— firewood isn’t fed onto one of those outdoor pyres as it has been in India for millennia. Here, traces of carbonized human flesh aren’t intended for public consumption, sparing an older woman like me, slowly losing her olfactory cells, from a reminder of the furnace door.

  But cremation wasn’t the smell, nor was it from a forest fire exactly. The radio said the smoke was com
ing from Burns Bog, adjacent to the city, an ancient scrubland underpinned by peat moss and liable to smoulder for months and even years if its fire wasn’t dug up and soaked down.

  Rudy, I thought, in a yoking as low-grade as any by Patrick—if Greta knew what she was getting into with his peat bog, she’d walk away before he collapsed again, leaving her to attend his lingering demise in a wrinkle of smoke.

  A briny smell at the beach that evening reassured me. We watched her from the Showboat bleachers putting on her wetsuit. Not that we could spot her in the distance, among a hundred and fifty ocean swimmers. Her club welcomed all comers so long as the weaker among them towed a pink float warning stronger swimmers to give them room, or maybe, when they tired, offered something to grab onto as they bobbed for breath. We speculated about their pecking order as soon as the dark swarm of them dove in like penguins and thrashed the sea in pursuit of a lifeguard’s rowboat along a string of buoys circling Kits Point in direction of the West End. Patrick said he was glad we’d started her off with swimming lessons as a child. Ironically, now, she would be one of the marathoners nearest the lifeboat with the least need of one. Slowly, thrashing, they disappeared from view.

  “For a chubby,” said Patrick, I don’t know where she gets the velocity.”

  “Not by towing Rudy, that’s for sure.”

  “Unless he’s floating atop her like a goat.”

  I slapped his shoulder to stop us howling again like lunatics.

  There was a wait past sunset for the swimmers to circle back along the seawall to shore. Then another wait for the barge after dark to ignite China’s contribution to our Celebration of Light, a smug euphemism to avoid any civic embarrassment of having to mention fire. We had come down early to secure seats for the fireworks. The bleachers were now full. You had to wonder why the world’s greenest city, as we hoped to become, would invite to this bay every summer vast egressions of smoke from countries notorious for poor environmental hygiene and from others like Sweden who should know better. I suppose we hoped to soften if not incinerate our unofficial epithet No-Fun City, lit underneath from erupting Roman candles, a vast pall of smoke draping downtown towers and enshrouding us all. Was leaf-burning, punishable by lethal injection, so much more toxic to our lungs than an atomic cloud?—than this ruinous disorder of a quarter million fun-loving folk, snacking on grapes and polluting shorelines, crowded into beery Bayliners, circulating overhead in Piper Cubs? All of these made it harder to breathe. Not so healthy either, E. coli, a high count of which had just been issued for the waters of two local beaches including this one. Offshore yachts pumping sewage, runoff from goose leavings, dogs with their own strand. Poor, forked creatures now officially enumerated as part of our own mess for the sake of explaining it away.

  In their rubber suits and goggles the marathoners should also have worn mouth dams. The flooding tide had brought in a scum of apple cores and woodchips, bull kelp and beer-can webbings—and this evening, instead of grey-green the water looked brown, hinting at red tide. Greta for some reason preferred this open ocean to the more sensible surrogate of filtered seawater in the public pool’s long shimmering lanes below us.

  Surrogate for what, you wondered, the choppy real world? You imagined her equating pool-swimming, the subject of her favourite rant, with an equivocal demise. If she ever went down, she’d go down with guns blazing in her body-positive swimwear.

  She joined us later in the gloaming, carrying her gear in an oblong hockey bag the size of a small coffin. She exploded into wild laughter.

  “Did you see us?”

  “Yes,” lied Patrick.

  “He drove it into the ocean. Out of the parking lot, around logs on the beach.”

  “Who?”

  “Rudy.”

  “The Nash?”

  “It’s a boat too.”

  “I’ll be,” he said. “I do recall those harebrained ads from childhood. I think you could float a bug, too.”

  Volkswagen he meant. Maybe in a rain shower.

  Excited, she spread out on our narrow bleacher. “Maiden launch . . . well, ocean launch. Fifty years ago he said he sailed it in Skaha Lake.”

  “I’m surprised his chassis hasn’t rusted out.”

  “An ATV cop ordered us ashore. He joked we needed sand tires. And then wrote us a ticket for operating a boat without a license.”

  “Rudy? He’s lucky they didn’t retire his driver’s license.”

  Her hair was still wet. She had wedged her huge hips in beside her father’s, the hockey bag now smothering her neighbour’s lap. Patrick suggested I sit between them to leave more room for the bag and to imperil her neighbour less. Greta said she was pretty sure she’d come fifth, behind three men and a woman, all of whom out-swam her by a furlong. They spoke French and were probably tri-athletes. We let on we’d spotted her, but hadn’t really, as they all seemed to lift their arms in similar windmill mode to clobber the surface. A lot of roiling foam. “A lot of wake,” said Patrick, the marathoner’s stroke in his opinion not the most efficient. His barrel shape no longer attested to the compact efficiency of his own stroke, in the days he used to crawl up and down a lane at the Aquatic Centre before we hooked up. I went down once to watch him.

  “Did you notice,” she asked, “the infestation of Ski-Doos? They nearly swamped the guide boat.” Her wild hoot in face of this averted calamity more than hinted at endorphins in full flood. They nearly swamped her neighbour.

  *

  We had felt for some time that such chemical highs helped lessen the associated risks of her obesity. Remarkable, given public intolerance these days for discarded butts and everywhere the clamorous enthusiasm for yoga studios, that her size wasn’t more of an issue than it was. Patrick demurred. Since society was bending over backward lately for transgenders, he wouldn’t be at all surprised to hear from some emeritus dean sipping sherry at his club that our daughter had got into medical school based solely on affirmative action. This irked him. That her admission—notwithstanding topnotch marks, which hadn’t guaranteed admittance when every other candidate’s were too—might have come down to no more than a minority quota for fat people.

  “They have such quotas?”

  “How do you think Rudy keeps his driver’s license?”

  I hoped it was because he was a careful driver, regardless of any age concession. I knew Patrick was already concerned about him driving Greta around in an antique cubicle. She was unable to strap its thinning seatbelt, a retro implant, the whole way across her midriff.

  “Fat-shaming,” he continued. “It’s part of their ethics course now. Is it permissible to mention weight loss to a fat person? At the clinic I can’t suggest to a patient he consider dieting unless he brings it up. And I’m a fattie myself! These days it’s genetic propensity for weightiness we’re expected to consider before mentioning unhealthy snacks devoured in front of Netflix.” The acceptable was no longer acceptable. “Med school is no shoo-in even for exceptional applicants. In my day, it was more or less a shoo-in.” In his day, he wasn’t as fat as he is now, and he was a man. So I was glad of our new consideration of fat people, women in particular, although I would still welcome the smell of burning leaves.

  The fireworks popped and whistled, screamed straight up and crackled sideways, bursting into constellations. Followed a second or two later by sonic booms. It was that night on our way home, too late to stop in at La Brass, and staring hungrily into the park overlooking hazy city lights, she mentioned she wouldn’t be returning to med school in September. We waited. She was spread across the back seat with her wetsuit bag, like a homeless person. She then said she wanted to get some practical experience before committing to an internship in a comfortable family clinic like Daddy’s. She hadn’t called him this in years, so we knew she was joking.

  “You don’t intern in a clinic,” Patrick reminded her. “The ER at St. Paul’s will int
roduce you to enough fentanyl folks to last you a lifetime.”

  Perhaps, but she’d already been accepted by Doctors Without Borders, as an adjunct health worker, and she intended to embark this fall for Africa. What made her news more shocking was Rudy—he’d been accepted too. Classified a construction supervisor, he would be responsible for the camp’s electrical plant and probably combustible latrines. She mentioned one of those bunched-up countries, where the fist of God had made it more or less inseparable from its neighbours along the Ivory Coast, where not one of them is immune to Ebola. We pressed for more positive information. Well, she responded, their contracts were not open-ended.

  “What a bonus,” remarked Patrick.

  But neither were they non-transferrable.

  “Hold on,” he said. “You mean your tour of duty can be bounced about, if the risk in one country gives way to crisis in another?”

  “I guess,” said Greta.

  Acquiring practical experience in this itinerant way was not the kind of acquisition parents wished to hear from their daughter—not when she could procure a good dose of practical specifics, as we did, every night from public television.

  “I don’t suppose you could choose Greece?” asked Patrick. “On Lesbos, it’s mainly refugees.” He was convinced countries in conflict, the sort favoured by Doctors Without Borders, left you ripe for the worst kind of misfortune.

  She went silent. The darkened bowling green slipped by. I floundered for words to soften her father’s disapproval. I hoped she would at least wear white. “Against the heat?”

  “Leaf blowers of the sea,” muttered Patrick.