The Erratics

by Vicki Laveau-Harvie

  Somehow, somehow, we turn into my parents’ drive, everything intact – the people, the car, the brittle little crescent moon above us in the black sky.

  The snow is hardening, the cold settling in. My boots break through the icy crust as I leap out and swing open the big iron gate. If I were a child, I would step onto the lowest rung and ride in on it, but I’m not, and it’s dinnertime.

  My father wants the same meal every evening, and for the few nights he was alone after my mother went to hospital, he managed to make it for himself. He still wants to do that, so I hover and hand him things.

  There is a chicken breast, pan-fried, asparagus boiled in another frying pan in an inch of water, carrot rounds boiled until soft in a pot and a potato nuked in the ancient microwave that hums and shakes ominously on the corner of the counter.

  When I first arrived, I thought he might want some variety, some fish, a steak, but he doesn’t. Starving people in camps obsess about the meal they will have when they get out, and I guess Dad is having that meal night after night now. He will brook no substitutions: no pine nuts, no snow peas, no crunch anywhere. Maybe a roast chicken from the Supersaver on the highway instead of the chicken breast, but that is his line in the sand.

  I watch him shuffle across the kitchen, intent on his preparations, and my heart cracks. He was once tall and fit and strong, barbequing T-bone steaks as thick as your arm on the patio, dicing potatoes to cook in tin foil on the grill with a dash of Worcestershire sauce and salt and pepper, my sister and I sitting at the redwood picnic table, kicking each other in the shins, with a big wooden salad bowl between us: iceberg lettuce, avocado, crab meat, ranch dressing. The Hallmark moments, such as we had, involved food.

  I set the table and butter him a slice of Wonder bread, pour him a glass of milk. The dining room table has a tablecloth, a lace overcloth, placemats on top of that and paper napkins on the placemats to put the plates on. When did they start doing this? There are two buffet sideboards in the dining room filled with silver and crystal, things we did not have when I lived with them, things that I have never seen. Where did all this stuff come from? What is it for?

  I put Dad’s pills in a little bowl in front of his place and we sit. He fingers them. What’s this, he says, peering suspiciously at an orange one. My sister would know; I don’t. I take a guess. It’s your iron pill, Dad. It’s ok. Those are the right pills. I got them out of the blister pack in the kitchen.

  Out of the blue, my father says, I don’t know if she can come back here.

  I don’t either, I say. We’ll see.

  I love her, he says, darting me a piercing little glance. He waits for me to say something. I certainly do not doubt that for a moment, I say, thinking that they would not be living out here and he would not be in this mess, that it wouldn’t have been decades since he saw us, that he would not have trouble telling his daughters apart, if he had not loved her.

  He lowers his eyes to the chicken. I just don’t know if she can come back, he says. I understand, I say, and I do. He isn’t talking about her hip and the quasi-impossibility of navigating in this house if you can’t climb stairs. He’s talking about the fear that she will come home and finish him off.

  I know that’s what he is talking about. I can’t tell him that my sister and I are all over this, that we are using the breathing space our mother’s hip rehab affords to have her mental capacities assessed and hopefully judged way below what it takes for a person to be released back into the real world. We will do our damnedest to make sure things come out the way he wants.

  We’ll do things for the best, Dad, I say. We don’t have to worry about that for months. Just worry about your chicken getting cold for now.

  We hear the dry squeak of tyres on packed snow and then the slam of a car door. The loud slam of a car door.

  My sister opens the front door and stamps the snow off her boots. A glacial gust rushes as far as the dining room, straight from the North Pole, bringing us the pure and unmistakeable scent of winter, expanses of black ice and drifting powder snow carried by a whistling wind.

  She steps into the dining room. Her cheeks are red. Oh good, she says, you didn’t wait.

  Yours is on the stove, I say. He was hungry.

  I said good, she repeats. So, good. Good.

  When I was little, at school, we used to cover sheets of drawing paper with wax crayon scribblings of colour, until the entire sheet was a riot of waxy greens and blues and purples. Then we would brush black paint over the whole sheet and let it dry. With a metal teaspoon, we would do a drawing on the black surface, carefully scratching away the black paint to reveal the swirling colour underneath, like aurora borealis in the sky.

  I have an idea that people are like those sheets of paper, that every person is a black surface, jealously protected, but if you can get at the person with your spoon, if you can trace a bird, or a house, a tornado in the sky or a spaceship, and scrape the black away, what you will see underneath is the essence of that person, what really lives in her heart.

  Scratch me and you get grief. It will well up surreptitiously and slip away down any declivity, perhaps undermining the foundations but keeping a low profile and trying not to inconvenience anybody.

  Scratch my sister at your peril however, because you’ll get rage, a geyser of it, like hitting oil after drilling dry, hot rock for months and it suddenly, shockingly, plumes up into the sky, black and viscous, coating everything as it falls to earth.

  Take care when you scratch.

  Chapter 6

  Looking around the kitchen the next morning, I feel touched that my father trusts us enough to swallow the pills we give him, the ones his doctor prescribes and which my sister has efficiently arranged for the Wal-Mart pharmacist in Okotoks to package in a plastic folder for the whole month, all labelled. Monday morning, Monday noon, Monday evening, little compartments measuring out his days and our time here with him.

  I am touched because the cupboards in the kitchen tell me that before my sister and I arrived, what he took was anyone’s guess.

  The Area Health coordinator arrives at the door and bangs authoritatively on it. When she steps inside, she sighs dramatically and tells my sister that they have been trying to get in here for years to help ‘these people’. My mother wouldn’t let them in. Hearing her clarion voice from where I am in the kitchen, I don’t actually fault my mother on that one.

  My sister brings her in to introduce her to me, explaining all the while that what we need is the roving nurse to take my father’s blood pressure fortnightly and draw some blood every month for his tests.

  The lady is not listening. She is taking in what I am doing, looking, as appalled as I am, at the incredible variety of alternative, complementary, and downright insane potions and powders and tinctures and capsules I am pulling off the shelves by the armful, sweeping them into the large black garbage bags that are my friends. I am keenly aware that these are my mother’s dreams I am disposing of without ceremony. They are speaking to me and I can hear them, like people who pick up the local radio station broadcasts through the fillings in their teeth.

  Good grief, the coordinator says. I nod. We really will need to know what your father was taking before you got here, she says. She looks at me disapprovingly, like I might be destroying evidence.

  I consider this. No, I say, we won’t. We can’t know. Anyhow, almost all of this is years out of date. The only thing I recognise is Saw Palmetto. Maybe he took that.

  She looks blank. It’s for prostate problems, I say. Mum wouldn’t have taken that, ergo, he might have. Or maybe nobody did, who knows. Or Mum might have, for that matter. We can’t be sure.

  My voice trails off. I am making a bad impression. Maybe she doesn’t know ergo.

  Prostrate, she says, conjuring up for me an image of my father reclining in a sunny field. How recently would he have taken that? What dose?

  I wave my hands in the air like a stoner at a folk festival, to dispel the irritatio
n I feel at this new manifestation of the human need to put a normal spin on whatever presents. I decide to show, not tell. I stride across the linoleum flinging cupboard doors open as I pass, to display the entire pharmacopeia, stacked up, crammed in, threatening to tumble out in a wave as I progress.

  She puts her palms forward to stop me, like a traffic cop. I can see in her eyes that she is remembering who my mother is and that I am her daughter. I could be mad. Could run in the family.

  We just need to know, she says coaxingly.

  No, we don’t, I say, trying for a tone of voice that will reposition me firmly beside her, inside the camp of the sane.

  Look, I say, he isn’t dead. Whatever he took, it didn’t kill him. I lower my voice. She didn’t kill him, I say, stepping on a tube of something and gliding smoothly toward her like a wraith.

  He’s not dead, I repeat.

  I’m right here, Dad says cheerfully from his chair out of sight in the dining room, where he is eating his porridge. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, he adds.

  And now my sister is escorting her into the great room to talk, casting black looks at me over her shoulder. Let’s just try to move forward, I call after them, probably contaminated by New Age emanations from the vials on the floor. Have a nice day.

  It’s kind of a bottom-line situation here, I add.

  Bottom, Dad says, reflectively. Where are my suppositories?

  My sister maintains that medicine past its use-by date can almost always be taken safely. She is irritated with me for throwing out things that were best before 1990, a bit like us, and I’m afraid she might start searching for articles on the internet, the kind with footnotes, to prove her point.

  It starts much earlier this morning, as I am beginning on the kitchen cupboards. She sees me on my ladder with dust cloths wrapped around my arm, sweeping the contents of the shelves into bags, and tells me about the possibility of using out-of-date meds. She uses an expository voice, one you might keep for those who have not yet seen the light, to tell me that out-of-date meds probably don’t work anymore, but that in most cases they won’t do you any harm.

  I laugh, thinking that she is still a funny woman. I am up on my ladder and I don’t break my rhythm: sweep of the arm, clatter and clink in the bag, sweep of the arm, and so on. I am trying to finish this before Dad wakes up.

  I only realise I have given offence when I turn around and she is not in the room. I go to find her.

  Please explain to me, I say, why a person would take medication if it probably won’t have any effect? Even if it will most likely do no harm. For my part, if my sole object is to avoid being adversely affected, I will just have a glass of water.

  If I want my headache to go away however, I persist when I should shut up, I want some results. And if I am risking all the side effects, I don’t want the drug companies getting off on a technicality of date when I develop a persistent cough, clay-coloured stools and a propensity for cross-dressing.

  We stare at each other in a surprisingly unfriendly fashion and I understand those family feuds in rocky, drought-worn landscapes where whole generations go by without speaking to each other. This is how they start.

  So now, with my dad muttering over his porridge in the dining room and the sound of women interrupting each other in the great room, I pick up a bottle of 222s and remember popping these like Smarties in high school, when I had a lot of headaches. My mum took 292s, always ready to go the extra mile in search of superiority. I read the label, which is yellowed and doesn’t even have a date, that’s how old these little white pills are: aspirin, caffeine, codeine, 8 milligrams. No wonder I was not as unhappy as I might have been.

  Ha, I say out loud, then clamp my hand over my mouth, thinking that laughing alone over spilt pharmaceuticals is only going to give the Area Health lady more ammunition than she needs.

  What’s funny? Dad asks from the dining room. I can’t tell him the joke is that I don’t need to feel embarrassed any more about being the only living person who didn’t take drugs in the 60s. Turns out I did, an opiate by any other name. And here I was a ground-breaker all this time, doing way back then what Hollywood celebrities and Vicodin would make fashionable forty years later.

  I pour some coffee and go sit with Dad. He’s forgotten the question, so we just look at the giant Douglas fir that he and Mum planted too close to the house decades ago. It has prospered, cutting off the view of the Rockies from this room, even though it never should have flourished. Conifers only grow this big on grasslands if they are planted over an underground water source. The water witch with his forked branch who surveyed the place when my parents moved here missed this hidden stream behind the house. The long boughs brush the windows when the wind blows from the west.

  The tree is full of tiny birds, red-breasted nuthatches who live in it year-round and are members of a select minority of birds that can walk head first down a tree trunk. In summer they pull insects out from where they hide under the bark and in winter they live on the seeds of the tree.

  The snow is shining like glass as it melts on the branches and the little superbirds dart in and out, faster than a speeding bullet. In the sky is the gauzy stratus-cloud arch of the Chinook that blew in at dawn, air warmed over the water in the Pacific Ocean and flowing over the Rockies from the west coast, bringing the temperature here up from freezing to balmy in six hours.

  Dad goes off to root around in the bathroom drawers for his glycerine suppositories, and I put my head down on the table. I need to go into the bathrooms with black garbage bags once I have finished in the kitchen. I need to open the closets where Mum’s clothes hang, everything in multiples, the same dress sewn by her dressmaker ten times in different materials, multiple fur coats, multiple shoe boxes full not of shoes, but of cancelled cheques.

  But most of all, I need to get into town today. I need to sit in the Okotoks café called Sacred Grounds, which is a pretty out-there name for Southern Alberta. I need a decent cup of java, not decaf. I want a blueberry scone too, a big sugary mound of a thing that weighs a pound and would leave the CWA speechless.

  The trouble is my name is not on the rental car contract so I can’t drive. My sister will, but only if we have a list of tasks to accomplish. I grab a paper and write: garbage bags, prunes, wine for her, more suppositories (what does he do with them?), a newspaper for me and a few minutes sitting in the steamy, sweet air of the café.

  At the bottom of the list, giving in to despair, I write: front loader. To shift what is in this house.

  It will come to that, down the track.

  Chapter 7

  December wears on. It is dark at four in the afternoon. We can’t stay here forever. We have lives.

  But we could. There is so much to do.

  I feel transparent, like a wonton wrapper in a steamer basket. The longer I stay, the less real I feel. I could turn out to be the daughter who never actually existed or, at best, the one who died years ago and whom they mourn, although my sister seems to have dibs on that scenario.

  I sleep in one of my mother’s bedrooms, the one where the mink coats are, under the jaundiced gaze of a flat-cheeked Renaissance Madonna with no eyelashes in a gilded frame. The walls are bile-green and the wrought iron carriage-lamp light fittings dispense a yellowish clarity that gives up and dies halfway across the carpet.

  There are hats on shelves in the closet. More mink, right out of Dr Zhivago. I can hear Lara’s theme in my head each time I go to bed. And there are Bally stilettos lined up on the floor, long, straight-skirted dresses with set-in sleeves, pleated bodices and pearl buttons at the neck floating on hangers above them.

  There are two highboy dressers facing each other, one on each wall. Their shallow, elegant drawers are filled with carefully folded lengths of expensive dress fabric, yards of patterned silk and wool so fine you can see through it.

  I almost understand this. The virtual garments contained in the neat folds of material are perfect, and remain perfect as long as the le
ngths lie folded, asleep and safe in their tissue paper, unpierced by needles, uncut.

  I am reminded of a friend from my past, clearly descended from Vikings. Thick straight white-blond hair, heavy features but flawless milky skin. She refused to wear make-up, reasoning that someone looking at her made-up face would decide that this was as good as it got for her whereas, with no make-up, any degree of stunning was virtually there. It was all up to the imagination of the beholder. She ranked her suitors by how beautiful they imagined her, an accurate reading of how intensely they loved her.

  My sister and I will go home, but in the interim I feel the need not to melt like Frosty the Snowman when the weather breaks and the thaw comes, a withered carrot nose and two raisins for eyes in a puddle of water the only proof I was ever here at all, plumpish and jovial if a bit underdressed.

  I take to listening to Radio Canada which broadcasts Australian radio programs in the middle of the night, no doubt as a cost-cutting measure, the same way that in Australia we can hear the BBC in the wee small hours. I can’t sleep and I want to hear Australian voices, like the fellow on the sports program I catch at 4 am expounding on athletes making a shit-load of cash.

  I endeavour to explain to my sister at breakfast why I find this refreshing. She is shocked by the language and can’t see why I prize this sort of straight talk, national broadcaster or no national broadcaster.

  While I ponder how to make her see this, I admire two neat sets of animal tracks that bisect the fresh snow on the lawn, running roughly parallel and disappearing behind the bare-branched lilac bushes, one set bigger than the other.