“Ms. Mackenzie, I’m just returning your—”
“I’m sorry, can you hang on? I will get you a Fruit Roll-Up in a minute!”
“Anyway, I thought—”
“Lester, don’t press that button, you’ll hang up the—”
BEEEEEEP—BEEP-BEEP-BEEP—
This is the meaning of the word “hampered.”
Far braver and stronger women than I am are actually being work-at-home moms voluntarily all over North America, to the point where it’s become a sort of movement—with chat groups and conventions and newsletters. How viable is that? Are there sins of omission being committed in the stories of triumph, wherein Judy So-and-So of Louisville claims to pull off a six-figure salary as a wool-diaper-cover designer with three kids in the house? I wonder, because when you phone someone at work, and their assistant says they’re “in a meeting,” what they would have meant in my case was that I was trapped in the bathroom, where I couldn’t get up from the toilet because Lester wouldn’t let go of my leg. If I stood up to pry him loose, he would immediately plunge his hand into the toilet, so that I wouldn’t be able to fling my arm back fast enough to flush, and there we would be for hours, practically, involved in an absurd Mexican stand-off.
“I’m sorry,” my receptionist would have had to say, “Ms. Mackenzie is unable to wipe her own ass at the moment, may I take a message?”
The work-at-home-mom thing lasted for ten stunningly unproductive months, after which I banished Lester to Tweedle Dee Daycare. A few months ago, Calvin got a taste of what I’d been complaining about when he agreed to be interviewed by BBC Radio in London while Lester was at home with a case of lice. Calvin was in the kitchen, discoursing expertly on the illustrious career of Gim Knutson, just deceased, an experimental jazz musician who had pioneered the use of electrified windshield wipers in improvisational quartets, when Lester picked up the phone in our bedroom.
“Who are you talking to, Daddy?” he inquired, live on air.
“Lester, hang up please, sweetie, I’ll be done in a minute.”
“Hi, Granddaddy.”
“Lester, it isn’t Granddaddy, please get off the phone.”
“Can I have a cow piñata?”
“Yes, you can have a piñata, but only if you get off the phone.”
“Okay.”
“Lester?”
“Hi, Daddy.”
Children hamper professional life, it seems to me, because they remind you how much you’re pretending.
“Can I have another Coke?” Lester asked me now, as if I hadn’t sailed off in my head to the land where the wild things are, and had been sitting there this whole time, alertly watching him achieve a work of genius with a condiment.
“No.”
“Pleeeeease? Can I have a Sprite then?”
I cupped my chin in one hand and smiled. Lester’s face is long and narrow, unusually so for a small child. It must have something to do with his diet of carbohydrates and air. With his flat bangs and collar-length chestnut hair, I often think that he resembles the actor Christopher Guest, playing that earnest heavy-metal guitarist in This Is Spinal Tap. Nigel Tufnel. “It goes to eleven.” There is something in Lester’s look—a combination of innocence, gravitas and helmet hair—that makes me laugh.
“What about ice cream instead?” I asked.
“Yesss! Okay! Yesss!” Like he’d won the lottery.
Not that he’d eat it.
I waved over the waitress, and when she delivered two scoops of strawberry in an odd metal dish, Lester grew quickly absorbed in the task of ice-cream-sculpting with a straw and a butter knife. At some point, I had discovered that children approach eating as an arts-and-crafts activity. What do you want to do today, Lester? Go to the museum, or suck icing through a straw?
The revelation was extremely liberating, in that it often freed me to muse or make phone calls. Or fret. I had a great deal of fretting to catch up on, it seemed to me, and most of it sprang from the task on the table just now.
6
“So, how is she?” Calvin shouted into a pay phone later that night. He was at the Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto, watching a show. I could barely hear him over the hubbub. It made me feel lonely. I was sitting at Bernice’s plastic-covered dining room table in a silence so complete that it seemed to hum, staring at a jar of twinkly-wrapped toffees and a vase full of plastic roses.
“Well,” I began—how to explain?—“the chickens have come home to roost and the cows are in the barn.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I have no idea! I finally ran into Dr. Richardson, and that is what he told me. I was going to ask him if he could be a little more specific but Lester distracted me.”
On the other end of the phone, a French horn wailed and someone demanded a Pilsner.
“If it’s any help,” I added, “the nurse says she’s doin’ pretty good, and she ate all her lunch today.”
“Jesus,” said Calvin, “that’s nothing new. My mother could be thrown from an airplane and still eat all her lunch. What about Dr. Pereira? Didn’t he run some tests at that oncology clinic in Sydney?”
Dr. Pereira was a refreshingly straightforward guy, one of two cancer specialists in Cape Breton. It was odd that there were only two, given how many people on the island had cancer, either from the environmental disaster out at the Sydney Tar Ponds, or from coal-mining or smoking. In any event, Pereira was an immigrant from Sri Lanka who evidently preferred being called “the Paki” by Bernice and her elderly ilk to being blown up by Tamil Tigers in Columbo.
“I’m waiting to hear from him,” I told Calvin. I carried the portable phone into the kitchen, opening and closing drawers in search of a corkscrew. “Apparently they lost the test results in Sydney and he still has to review them, assuming that they find them, before he talks to me. Where does your mother keep her corkscrew?”
“She doesn’t have one. They didn’t drink.”
Oh, bleh.
“So what do you want me to do?” I asked.
“Can you just stay there for a bit longer? Bill had to reschedule the recording session next week. Rick Mercer’s in the studio doing some sort of Christmas special. Just hang out with her until we get the results, at least?”
“What about Christmas?”
“We’ll figure it out. I’ll come out there, or you guys can come back here, or … oh, I don’t know. Fuck.”
That night, I dreamt my father told me that I got a new editing job, a fantastic one at a famous magazine, but he couldn’t remember which one, which magazine had called and left the message. All he knew was that I had to audition. I was to arrive costumed in a bell-shaped coat made of cast iron, and wear a chef’s hat.
“But why?”
“Otherwise, they’re giving the job to Calvin,” my father said. “That’s all I know.”
It is disconcerting to sleep in the house of your in-laws when one has vanished entirely and the other might never return. There is a sense of haunting, and of trespass, like being in a theater after the play has ended but before the set has been struck. Everything in the little aluminum-sided dwelling on Plummer Avenue remained in place—two La-Z-Boy chairs covered in doilies, a list of important phone numbers taped to the living room wall, Stan’s beloved wide-screen TV, his final National Enquirer, a bowl of wrinkled oranges, a radio tuned to some golden oldies station. But no one presiding. Only a lingering smell of sickness, the indefinable scent of someone old.
Lester’s response to this curious sensation was to transform his grandparents’ house into a diorama from the Cretaceous period. Within days of our arrival, a plastic lambeosaur had been seated in one La-Z-Boy and a plush maiasaur in the other. A small herd of brachiosaurs marched across the mantelpiece. Two velociraptors guarded the toaster in the kitchen, an allosaurus ascended the stairs in pursuit of a fallen-over goat, and a basilosaurus—famed reptilian predator of the prehistoric oceans—bobbed in the guestroom toilet.
I was a guilty co
-conspirator in this transformation, if only because I kept putting Bernice’s things away to fend off any accidents. When we walked in the first night, I found blood-pressure pills scattered about like the Reese’s Pieces in E.T. and had to crouch and dart with a Dirt Devil, one step ahead of Lester, who yearned to follow the path of the candy-red pills and pop them in his mouth. Also hoovered up or swept to higher perches were bottles of tranquilizers, Imodium, tamoxifen, steroids, baggies of codeine.
And then, by increments, the gadgets and geegaws of the elderly: half-empty Depends boxes, an oxygen mask, bathrobes, cans of Ensure, a blood-pressure gauge. I feared that Lester would engage in ad hoc adaptations, just as Calvin once used Bernice’s sanitary napkin as a hammock for his G.I. Joe. The potential for an absurd and embarrassing reassignment of function to every object in the house seemed almost limitless. So, over the course of days, the playthings of a five-year-old took over the space, while the accoutrements of the eighty-year-old disappeared. By the end of the week, I had even removed such benign knickknacks as a miniature toilet bowl down which one flushed pennies, and a covered chuckwagon drawn by ceramic horses.
“Lester,” I protested, when I rescued the chuckwagon, “stop playing with that. It isn’t a toy.”
He stared at me, uncomprehending.
“It’s not for touching, it’s for looking at.”
“Why?”
“Why?” I ran my hands through my hair, trying to imagine the purpose of simply gazing at the thing as an object. I am not a collector. Not of that kind. I do collect quite a lot of clutter at home in Toronto, but that’s because I’m afraid to throw things out. There’s this small red domino, for instance, that’s been sitting on the floor of my living room for a couple of months. I come across it every now and then and ponder what to do with it. I know it belongs to a set of dominoes that someone gave to Lester. I can’t remember where the other dominoes are, and it’s not like I have a drawer in my kitchen that I can label “One Lost Domino.” There’s no obvious place for it to reside that I can think of, other than the box that it came in, which I’m positive is around somewhere. I occasionally come home from Ikea with little storage containers in pastel colors, but they wind up containing one lost domino, a shoelace, some triple-A batteries, two takeout menus, a bicycle key and a flashlight, and to me that doesn’t count as an improvement.
Thus, I had no explanation for my son about why he couldn’t play with the chuckwagon, since I couldn’t conceive of the purpose of deliberately collecting things. I merely declared, “Because it’s not a toy, it’s a thing. It’s one of your grandmother’s things.”
Lester ducked his head. Was he getting in trouble?
“No, honey, it’s not that, no.”
“Maybe it’s better that way,” my friend Avery said when he called on Friday night. Lester was slurping turkey-rice soup at the kitchen table, and I was tugging at a bottle of wine with a weakly functioning corkscrew I’d picked up at the New Waterford Dollarama.
“What do you mean, better?” I asked.
“Well, consider that you have no history there. You can’t attach any sentimental value to these objects, so the worst thing you feel is that you need to keep Lester from damaging them.”
“That’s actually not the worst thing I feel,” I ventured, pouring the wine. “The worst thing I feel is that I’m sitting in the middle of an imminent garage sale.”
I felt laden, indeed, with the knowledge that these things were about to be orphaned, if not by death then almost certainly by a move into the Maple Hill Manor nursing home. Stan was gone, Shirley was absent and Calvin was an only child. “These things are probably going to become our things, do you know what I mean? So every time I handle something that I realize I could use in Toronto, like this unopened box of kitchen knives I found in the cupboard, just the fact that I consider their future utility makes me feel like a vulture. It’s horrible. It’s like I’ve developed this little tic … like, this greed tic.”
“A greed tic?” Avery sounded amused.
“Oh, whatever. You know what I mean.”
“Well then, don’t consider their future use.”
“Thanks, Avery, that helps.” I handed Lester a cupcake.
“But the opposite scenario is more traumatic, Frannie, which is the trouble most people have letting go of things. My uncle died over a year ago, and my cousins still haven’t cleaned out his house, much less sold it. In fact, they’ve inadvertently rendered it spooky. There are cobwebs about, that sort of thing.”
“Well, that’s vivid. But it’s also the point, Avery,” I argued. “Most people feel an emotional connection, and I’m not talking about nostalgia, I’m talking about the world ending. That kind of emotional connection? And here I am, in this little house, and I don’t feel anything. No sentimental memory at all. Just this sudden stewardship of stuff. So, okay, it may not be worse than the other way around, but I’ll stand by odd.”
“Hmm,” Avery mused. “Perhaps you would welcome a distraction, then. At least I hope so, because I need to send you a list of books to assign for review over Christmas.”
Avery was my associate editor at the Dandelion Review, holding down our penniless tree-fort in Toronto. I owed him tons.
“Okay,” I said, trying not to sigh audibly. “Like what?”
“Well, there’s a coffee-table book coming out by a Quebec photographer, called Cows of Vermont.”
“You want us to review a collection of cow pictures?”
“Bear with me. I thought—if I could find a book to pair it with—it could make a nice essay on how colonialized we are in publishing, how we can’t photograph The Cows of the Eastern Townships or Cows of Quebec without forfeiting an American contract. Has to be Vermont cows, that sort of thing.”
“Oh, come on, Avery, are we that hard up for a good conversation?”
“Well, there’s global warming.”
“What else?”
“Okay. A new book coming out on what’s called ‘the science of irrationality.’ How to profit from it, or something like that. And—just one second, let me see. Alright: two more biographies of Conrad Black, and another one on Earle Birney.”
“Anything about Santa Claus and religion?”
“Uh … no.”
I finished my wine, poured another glass. Gave Lester a cup of milk.
“Fine,” I sighed. “Just send me the list.”
Misery loves company, and so, it emerges, does Bernice’s cousin Dana. She popped in on Saturday morning with a bagful of Tim Hortons coffee and two dozen sugar-glazed Timbits. Lester went off to watch PBS Kids in the living room with his hands full of Timbits while Dana and I settled ourselves at the table in Bernice’s cheery little kitchen. I sipped my coffee and watched in silence while Dana’s greedy eyes roamed unabashedly over the appliances.
“Don’t mind if I smoke, do ya?” she asked. “God love Bernice, she gives me a right hard time about it. On account of her breathing.” Dana pulled a packet of du Mauriers out of her parka and offered me one. I shook my head. She retrieved an ashtray from another pocket and placed it on the table before shrugging off her coat and running a hand through her short-cropped hair. “What do bin Laden and a pair a pantyhose have in common?” she asked.
“I beg your pardon?”
“What do bin Laden and pantyhose have in common?”
“Oh,” I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“They both agitate the Bush.”
She delivered the punchline so wryly, as she lit her cigarette and exhaled between thin lips, studying me through hard gray eyes, that I wondered if the joke had something to do with being here together in Bernice Puddie’s house. A grim inside joke that should cause us both to nod at one another with small, sad smiles. But … I waited, face frozen with my mouth half open, my bum tense … no?
“Oh, that’s pretty good,” I offered after a beat. “I can never remember jokes.”
“So,” Dana ventured, flicking ashes, “what did Ric
hardson tell ya? I hear from Barbara that Bernice isn’t doing too good, but I coulda told you that. She’s been lyin in bed aa’ll day for months. I come in here cleanin’, make her soup, and she only gets up for that, then right back to bed. It’s Stan what’s done it to her. A broken heart, that’s what brought back her arm cancer.”
I considered this. “To tell you the truth, Richardson didn’t give me a very clear picture, I don’t actually—what makes you think her cancer is back?”
“Oh, I don’t know that, hon,” Dana genially conceded, sitting back and crossing her arms, “but just take one look at her, eh, blown up like that, so’s her feet look like hockey mitts. If that’s asthma, I’m Madonna.”
“True,” I agreed glumly, and sipped my coffee. From the living room, I could hear the intro song for Dragon Tales, a breezy pair of female voices singing in harmony: “Come on now, take my hand, it’s time to go to Dragonland.” Now I was going to have that stuck in my head for the rest of the day. They work in rotation, these children’s songs that stick in my head. Yesterday, for instance, it was the theme song from Elliot Moose. Even as I was combing Celia’s hair and pondering her pallor, the pain she had to live with, the fate of my mother-in-law, the soundtrack in my head was going: “Elliot Moose, de dum de dum, is on the loose …”
I tend to think that there must be millions of working men and women with this Problem That Has No Name, which is that they spend the majority of their professional hours secretly singing Disney songs to themselves, sitting at their desks, driving forklifts, riding elevators and entering boardrooms all over North America, silently humming “Hi diddle-dee-dee, an actor’s life for me.” Truly, I like to imagine that there’s a sleek, six-foot man at a Madison Avenue ad agency who, even as I write, is waiting for a major client to come in for a pitch about how to promote tuna fish or something and he can’t help it, he’s singing to himself, “Ariel’s coming, Ariel’s COMING!” from The Little Mermaid II. Meanwhile, a steely stockbroker like Sigourney Weaver’s character in Working Girl is conducting a major sell-off of bonds on Wall Street whilst humming the high-pitched, fake-Oriental instrumental theme song from Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat: “Da da da, nanananana, da da DA da da daa daa daa …”
Believe Me Page 3
