The Erratics

by Vicki Laveau-Harvie

  I remember a moment’s surprise that she would cut something other than fabric with her sewing scissors. It was a rule. We were forbidden from borrowing those scissors to cut paper or string or liquorice, anything other than material. They had to remain shiny and sabre-sharp to do their job.

  What did she do with the ponytail she sheared off close to my scalp? It must have lain intact in her hand, still held together by the elastic I had wound around it that morning. I wonder what she did next, because I do not remember. From that moment on and for a period after that, from the moment of cold metal against the back of my head and the crisp whisper of the blades closing, I remember nothing.

  There will have been an aftermath. I will have been taken to a hairdresser, surely. What does my mother say to her? Do I go to school, shorthaired, be careful what you wish for, tonsured like a monk?

  No idea.

  My sister, however, remembers. She tells me that she cannot, even now, pass a girl with a ponytail in the street without shuddering and thinking, I know exactly what it would look like if someone came out of nowhere with her sewing scissors and cut your hair off. She carries that. I don’t.

  I have had short hair for decades. My granddaughter tells me gently, her little hand on mine, that if I eat more vegetables, she is sure that my hair will grow. She doesn’t believe me when I say I like it this way. She just shakes her blond locks and pats my hand.

  I am in fact unfazed by bad hair days and even bad haircuts, untroubled by the sometimes startling results of someone mixing my colour when not fully awake. I don’t believe in skimping and frequent a reputed salon, but if things do go haywire in spite, or maybe because, of that, it’s only hair. There are worse things, and chances are that I do not remember them either.

  So, this flight from Calgary to Vancouver I remember clearly, the mountain peaks and then the Fraser River Valley leading us to the coast, the delta laid out flat, shining like silver and going, Yo, hey, look at me all temperate and fertile, you can even grow fruit here, no snow, why in blazes would you live on the prairies when you could be here, eh?

  I do not remember after that – what I told my sister, how I spoke of my fears for my father, what I said and what she said, how I dealt with the reflex anger she must have felt toward me after the relief of seeing me exit the baggage area safe and sound. Nothing, until I am home again in Sydney days later.

  I do know this: where there is nothing, there must have been pain. That’s why there is nothing. Be glad if you forget.

  Chapter 17

  Every story has a before and an after, a pivot point like the turntables rich people in Hong Kong and on the California coast install in their driveways so you can drive in and then, with a click of a remote, rotate the car 180 degrees to face outward, ready to loop back through roads already travelled but now seen differently, or to head off somewhere completely new.

  This story does not feel like that, life being messy. There is a before and an after, but it is more of a watershed affair than a pivot point. One always hopes that the pivot point, or the watershed, will be a Eureka moment of blinding discovery, or even a gradual process of developing awareness, an increase on the side of hope.

  This time, not so much. Here, the point where before becomes after is a banal and somewhat inevitable event, the result of ageing: the crumbling of a large bone in the hip of a bitterly unhappy and vindictive old woman, getting crazier and more dangerous by the day, but who she has been and will become is neither here nor there.

  This banal event will allow my sister and me the time to make sure she will be forever confined in an institution because she is mad, and to ensure she never returns to the property where my father is slowly recovering.

  So when my mother leaves this ranch house in an ambulance on that cold December night, never to return, we shift into the after and begin to pick up speed.

  The before was a very, very long run-up.

  If we are doing life as landscape, think of it this way: the black and crevassed surface of the earth near the active Hawaiian volcanos, the lava cooling but still hot and dangerous, just a crust on the top, nothing you would really want to put your weight on. You could drop through into the molten surge below just by putting a foot wrong.

  If you pause to look beyond your feet and raise your eyes, you see that in the distance, farthest from the volcano, the surface has hardened. It is black and shiny, making inaccessible most of your childhood, but you can distinguish from early on some signs of the long apprenticeship of duplicity that allows you to be standing where you are now, picking your way cautiously through life, not just a puff of smoke and a carbonised crisp of memory in the depths.

  Here are two examples of how the lava of lunacy can pervade a life, even when you think you may have escaped it. One is from childhood and the other from adulthood. Consider them bookends to any number of episodes in the struggle never to be caught off guard or to let crazy become the new normal.

  Example one.

  The autumn afternoon is warm even though the leaves are yellowing fast. People are listening to football on the radio. The crisp new apples are in the grocery store. My father is driving me to the drug store to buy a comic book and he is in a snit. I have insisted on the comic book because I am to babysit my sister tonight and I want a reward for doing this.

  My father is in a state of high moral dudgeon because I should, in his words, be happy to contribute to the family. It should be a reward in itself. Everybody in this boat rows, he says, grumpily counting three nickels out of the palm of his hand to pay for Dick Tracy.

  I’m not fazed because I know full well that at seven I am much too young to be left in charge of my bumptious two-year-old sister, or to row for that matter. I know that he knows it too, and I figure he is getting off lightly, even if this is extortion. He knows that not everybody rows, that somebody is actually punching holes in the bottom of the boat. He is pretending not to notice.

  Later, as they leave the house in a cloud of my mother’s perfume to the Bolero accompaniment of her stiletto heels on the wood floors, she reminds me again that I must not open the door to anyone. If someone knocks, we must not open the door or even listen to what the person says, because it will be lies, all lies. If we knew what she knows about people in this neighbourhood, she adds, if we knew half of it, we would understand why we must believe no one, never open the door, and be very afraid.

  Well, hubris.

  She comes home early, alone and without the house keys my father probably has in his pocket back at the party. She knocks, and knocks. I stand behind the front door with her on the other side and converse with her, my heart pounding.

  She tells me to go to the kitchen window and to look out at the porch. She will wave at me and I will see who she is.

  I won’t. I can’t, I say. My mother told me not to open the door to anyone. She said that anyone who came to the door would tell me lies to make me open the door. In low and vibrating tones, she orders me to open the door. I don’t, repeating that my mother told me I could never do that.

  I am your mother, she says in those same tones that make the door vibrate. I don’t believe you, I say. I don’t believe you.

  I learned recently that another babysitting incident about a year after this one is at the root of my sister’s perception that she has always protected me.

  The person who came to the door that evening was not my mother, but an unidentified man. He had the porch light behind him and his shadow stretched diagonally across the opaque glass panel beside the door. He was wearing the kind of fedora my father wore.

  I pulled my sister back into the hallway, away from the door. I didn’t want him to realise we were there. I thought he would go away if he thought there was nobody home.

  My sister, deducing from this retreat that I was afraid and unwilling to defend us, pulled free of my grasp and rushed to the door. In her biggest voice, she issued a command. Go away, man, she said. Go away. We’re only eight and three.


  We still see each other through the prism of this incident. Where I see in her a reckless propensity to rush in without thinking, she credits herself with a selfless determination to get things done. And while I like to think that I am rational and considered, she only sees procrastination and fear.

  When I could, I took to fleeing ever farther, a moving target working at making herself fainter in the cross-hairs, while my sister stood her ground, solid in appearance and stern, modelling her life like play-dough. Neither strategy was successful.

  Example two.

  The phone rings in the flat I share with my husband and my two children, far from Okotoks, on a different continent.

  I answer and find myself speaking to a friend from university, who is now working on her doctorate at the same eastern Canadian faculty where my mother has landed a casual lecturing gig, leaving my father to fend for himself for the better part of the last few semesters. This friend crosses paths with my mother on campus and speaks to her occasionally.

  I am so sorry, she says. So sorry.

  The friend and I communicate sporadically, in writing. This is before mobiles and Facebook and texting. For her to phone, it must be bad.

  What’s wrong? I say. Tell me what happened.

  Your mother, she chokes.

  I take this in. What did she do? I ask. I hear silence.

  What do you mean what did she do? my friend finally says.

  What do you mean what do I mean what did she do?

  I mean, my friend says in a rush, she can’t do anything, can she? Not anymore. She can’t ever do anything again anymore.

  She can’t? I say.

  My friend stammers, I’m so sorry. I know you must be so upset, this is so sudden, and I’m expressing myself so badly. I’m just so sorry she’s dead. We all are.

  You are?

  I would have called sooner, she adds, but we’ve only just read the obituary in the campus newspaper.

  I am at a loss. There are obituaries in the campus newspaper. I get a grip and ask, Why do you think my mother is dead?

  My friend is sobbing now, trying to catch her breath. Not only, according to her sources, have I lost my mother, but I have also obviously lost my mind, maybe crazed by grief.

  Listen, I say. She’s not dead. Somebody would have told me. Even as I utter this, I realise I am not completely confident that this is true.

  Your poor father, she says.

  Yes, I say. Listen. Not dead. Not dead in any way.

  She leaps on my words. I know, she says, I know. She’ll always live on in your hearts. She’ll never really die. That is the best way to see it. I’m sorry I’ve upset you.

  I take the phone away from my ear and peer closely at it, in case it isn’t really a telephone and I am not really having this conversation.

  Not upset, I say.

  Bye, she whispers. My condolences.

  As it turns out, my mother had accepted two teaching posts for the same up-coming semester, one at this Canadian university and one in Alaska. She signed contracts for both and only then realised that, however superior she might be, she still couldn’t teleport.

  The obvious course of action presented itself to her. She composed a letter and signed my father’s name. It informed the HR department of the Canadian university where she did not want to continue of her sudden death from unknown causes and her consequent unavailability to teach Intermediate French. HR sent my father a sympathy card, which my mother intercepted, and put an obit in the campus paper.

  Chapter 18

  It’s just a respite.

  My sister and I know this when we fly out of Calgary on that Christmas Eve after spending those long days, those short weeks with Dad in the house where my mother’s sudden absence is palpable.

  We know it is just a respite. We have a little breathing room, but we mustn’t lose focus. While she is in rehab for her hip, the other thing must happen. Her mental state must be evaluated and she must be prevented from returning home.

  We have these few weeks of rehab to find a solution, to get a ruling that ensures she cannot be discharged back into the world to put her own life, and Dad’s, in danger.

  A broken hip doesn’t come good overnight, especially when it did more crumbling than breaking to start with, and has been cobbled back together by orthopaedic people with their fingers crossed. This is our window of opportunity, this rehab, our one shot at conflating the physical and the mental with the help of the authorities.

  A broken hip takes time to heal and stabilise, if it ever does. Most old people with broken hips curl up and die within the year. My mother’s doctor, speaking to me on the phone some weeks after my return to Sydney, suggested that my sister and I could probably stop agitating to prevent her return to the house where my father was because, statistically, chances were she’d never make it.

  He didn’t know my mother. I knew she’d beat the odds. He was also the guy who told me stories about how other families dealt with their burdensome ageing parents. One family just bundled their recalcitrant father into a car, drove him quite far away to a nice facility in the country and left him there, the way some people deal with unwanted pets. Like Peabody the Peacock’s original owner had done when he dumped him with my father. I asked this doctor if he was recommending that course of action and he said he thought it probably wasn’t legal.

  But before we get to that point, there is the rehab, more full measures of deep pain for my mother, the kind of pain you have to go through alone, like childbirth, except it is hard to see any joyful outcome at the end of my mother’s travails.

  And despair, because at some point there will be despair. She will realise that she may never get back home, that the wheels are turning to prevent her from doing that, and that my sister and I are making the wheels turn. She will have confirmation that she has always been right to hate us.

  What will she do with the fury and the despair? Who will help her when she comes to see that her thrice-bedamned daughters, which is how she refers to me and my sister in a card she will soon mail to my father, might outfox her? How will she not explode into incandescent microscopic drops of blood-red rage running down the walls of the ward where she is trapped, when she realises?

  As I fly away, back to my life in Sydney, I am keenly aware that when I say that ‘we’ have a small window of opportunity to prevent my mother from killing my father, that ‘we’ must act smart and fast, I would very much like to mean ‘we’, my sister and me. But I’m leaving, my sanity always dependent on living somewhere remote, so it is a kind of rhetorical ‘we’. My sister and her partner will shoulder almost all of what needs doing, because I am so far away that my shoulders are purely metaphorical, and this is not fair, except for the following proviso.

  My sister and I see all situations differently. When at this point I talk with her about what we hope to do, about arranging for our mother to live somewhere where she cannot hurt herself or others, about setting up twenty-four-hour care for Dad so he can stay on the property, because that’s what he wants; when I talk about our efforts, I tell my sister that they are icing on the cake. Icing on the cake, I say, when we get discouraged and nothing seems to fall into place.

  I remind her that our parents have chosen someone other than us, an acquaintance whom we had never met, to decide everything about their health and well-being. Ultimately, years down the trail perhaps, he will be the one to decide when the hospital should pull the plugs and turn out the lights. When they were in full possession of their usual capacities, they legally decreed that my sister and I would be forever excluded from decisions about their welfare. We can, and perhaps should, walk away.

  I have spoken to my sister about this because, however different we are and however badly she judges me, whatever gulf already separates us, she is my sister. I do not want the gulf to fill with the seething resentment she will feel because she is doing it all, but I know this will happen. I am telling her that I know this will happen. I know she will feel violent
annoyance with me when I suggest something because I’m not there and I don’t know, and I’m not the one doing it and I, on my far away island continent, will sit quietly, gnawed by guilt.

  We have nonetheless accomplished much when we leave that Christmas Eve, mostly as a result of my sister’s lists and her bee-like buzzing persistence.

  The cupboards in the kitchen are clear of medication that is outdated, unidentifiable, deadly or weird, and of tins of hardened cacao from the 80s. There is a padlock on the gate of the property and everyone who needs access has a key. This way, if my mother manages to slip her tethers at the hospital, as she shows signs of wishing to do, and get a taxi out here, she won’t be able to get to the house without calling.

  The taxi companies have been warned by the security firm that does the perimeter patrols at night not to take her on board. The owner of the security firm is a neighbour, someone who has on occasion driven my mother into town for more stamps or envelopes or to mail her cheques, and he understands. That he also used to be a very senior local civil servant doesn’t hurt.

  Dad has been introduced to new technology. The house is wired with a Supportline and he grudgingly wears the bracelet with the big, red button on the top. He understands the dangers of identity theft now and has been using the shredder we have bought him with enthusiasm, turning anything that comes to the house with my mother’s name on it into little ribbons of white muttering, well, we don’t have to worry about that any more.

  We have tried to explain that if an envelope comes addressed to my mother from the Tax Office or Social Security, from a doctor or a hospital, from a bank, that he should not shred that, but here we have not succeeded. He is soon muttering, Well, we don’t have to worry about her any more.