Inland Passage

by Jane Rule

  “Learning to read has turned Sally into a bigot. She generalizes about everything.”

  “Did you people ever have a grandmother?” Joey asked.

  Anna and Harry stopped to consider. Harry had a faint memory of his mother’s mother, crying over the word ‘divorce,’ but that information would simply serve to confuse Sally further.

  “I had a grandmother,” Anna admitted, and her face softened. “She was a handsome old lady with sharp thighbones. The most uncomfortable lap I ever sat in, but she had a wonderful hole in her neck, right here, where her skin draped, just the size of an egg. I always wanted to fit an egg into it.”

  “Did you ever?” Sally asked.

  “No, I never did.”

  That bit of Anna’s past didn’t set exactly the tone of nostalgia Harry might have wished for, but in it he felt the first weakening of her resistance. After the children had gone to bed, he raised the subject again when he could elaborate on the dangers of a grandmotherless childhood without giving Sally nightmares or Joey ideas.

  “I don’t know,” Anna said even then, “grandmother shopping at the Y just doesn’t have much appeal for me.”

  “If you can get the kids’ winter coats at the Sally Ann, what’s the matter with getting them a grandmother at the Y?”

  “I think it may be carrying recycling too far.”

  “She might even enjoy baby-sitting occasionally.”

  “That’s exploitation,” Anna said fiercely. “I’ve been wondering all along why this grandmother obsession. Why not a grandfather while we’re at it?”

  “Grandfather?” Harry repeated.

  “Sure. We might find one who could fix the plumbing and do other little odd jobs around the house.”

  Harry was ashamed of himself, not because he had a secret plot to exploit a lonely old woman but because he had suddenly discovered a real prejudice in himself against lonely old men who were sad on public benches feeding the pigeons but who would not do at all in Harry’s about-to-be purchased rocking chair. Granted not all old men would lust after Anna or Sally, but the plumbing didn’t really need fixing. Anna was very good at that herself. And most children just didn’t have grandfathers, did they? Grandfathers, by definition, were dead. His were anyway and always had been.

  “Just to begin with,” Harry said cautiously, “I think a grandmother would be easier since we’re all pretty much amateurs at this sort of thing. I mean, we haven’t had any practice at being relatives for years.”

  “We haven’t had to live through a lot of other natural disasters either, floods, earthquakes, fires. Some people would think we were just plain lucky.”

  “Then later,” Harry conceded generously, “we might think about a grandfather as well.”

  Harry and Ray had a really good discussion over coffee the next day about the potential human resources right out there in the urban jungle, which once tamed…

  “Become a zoo,” Anna said, taking her less enthusiastic part when Harry tried to repeat the experience with her that night. “Warning: don’t feed the grandmothers.”

  Harry brought home the rocker on Friday night. The cane seat had broken through, but Ray had told him the blind repaired caning very reasonably and very well.

  “I can repair caning,” Anna said, the lines of the chair too handsome for her to be distracted right away by its implications.

  It occurred to Harry that one of the reasons they didn’t take more advantage of urban resources was that Anna was a city of resources in herself. Though Harry sometimes regretted that most of his solutions were for problems they didn’t have, he couldn’t regret his wife who saved them money for the fun of it and therefore never objected to his spending for the fun of it.

  “Are we going to get a grandmother this Sunday?” Sally asked.

  “It’s beginning to look that way,” Anna said.

  “Do we have to wear shoes?” Joey asked.

  “The way we did when we bought the house?” Sally added.

  “Real shoes,” Harry said, “not sneakers.”

  Joey even put on a bow tie, the sort that snapped on with an elastic band so that he could pull it out and shoot himself with it and practice dying on the back seat all the way down to the YWCA. Anna threatened his real life if he did it once they got there, a mortal vocabulary he cheerfully understood. Sally had a real ribbon in her hair and was trying to remember not to stand with one foot on top of the other in her patent leather shoes, but one of Joey’s more energetic expirings had already outlined in brown the sole of his shoe on her white knee socks.

  “Do grandmothers speak English?” Sally wanted to know.

  “Of course,” Harry said, his nervousness making him impatient with her.

  “Well, not all of them,” Anna reasoned, “but a lot of them do.”

  “Joey said grandmothers…” Sally began and stopped abruptly.

  “Grandmothers what?” Anna asked, turning to look at the children.

  “Nothing,” Sally said, responding to some secretly delivered threat from Joey, and then both children began to giggle.

  Grandmothers what? Harry wondered and then began to catalogue in his mind the frailties of age which might inspire his children’s primitive humor. Should he have talked more realistically about old people, about failing memory and eyesight and hearing and digestive systems? He hadn’t wanted to put them off an enterprise so much his responsibility, and anyway surely at the YWCA there wouldn’t be anyone who was…old. The sweat began to trickle down Harry’s back.

  “Now we don’t have to make any big decisions today,” Harry instructed his family as they bunched along the sidewalk from the parking lot.

  “Like when you bought a car and were sorry?” Sally asked.

  Harry did not know why the whole project was beginning to seem to him too much like a commercial enterprise, too, and he resented Sally’s sharing his sentiments, but he couldn’t muster the haughtiness to say, “We are not buying a grandmother,” perhaps for fear that Anna would simply point out that instead they were trying to get one for free. She was, for the moment quiet, broodingly quiet, but quiet.

  There were far more grandparents than there were grandchildren in the large reception room, and they behaved like people waiting for a chartered flight or tour bus, chatting cheerfully among themselves to display their talents as genial companions. Several of them even had cameras. What surprised Harry was the average age, particularly of the women. Either grandparents were getting younger or he was getting older. The women who approached him behaved just as his own mother did, flirting with him as if no one, least of all Harry, should assume they were old enough to be his mother. Few of them seemed to be. Harry, long ago resigned to his mother as an exception, one of those rare women who simply shouldn’t have had children, had the uncomfortable impression that she might not be as odd as he had thought. Then across the room he saw Anna talking to a woman with genuinely grey hair whose intent expression suggested that she might be slightly hard of hearing. Relieved and hopeful, he excused himself from his several admirers and went to join his wife, who was listing the ingredients for her blackberry wine.

  “I’m teetotal myself, and I don’t believe in having drink in a house with children,” the woman said loudly, and with a glare at Harry she turned on her tennis shoes and walked off.

  “The shoes misled me,” Anna said with a shrug. “I usually get along with little old ladies in tennis shoes. How are you making out?”

  “The ones I’ve been talking to are more indifferent to children than to drink,” Harry admitted. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all. Why don’t we get the kids and go to the zoo?”

  At that moment it seemed to Harry it would be easier to teach the children kinship with all of nature than with their own species, a cynicism he would turn into a sentimental revelation once they were out of this terrible place and actually with grandmother seal and grandfather bear.

  Sally and Joey were, however, absolutely absorbed, alon
g with several other children, with a dozen small sets of magnets made to look like lady bugs and spiders and bees. They were rather absent-mindedly attended by a woman who was reading Loren Eiseley’s Immense Journey. She looked up and smiled a greeting to Harry and Anna.

  “Children don’t want too much attention paid to them. It just makes them silly,” she said.

  Harry would have observed that it was, nevertheless, sad that none of the potential grandparents seemed to have any interest in the children and left them to the professionals, but he didn’t want to be rude, and the book she was reading had fascinated him.

  “That man’s marvelous,” he said.

  “Yes. It takes a lonely man to have that kind of kinship with life, but it’s a big compensation.”

  Anna had squatted down to take a closer look at the magnets.

  “They’re funny stones,” Sally said. “They can walk. They’re maggots.”

  “Magnets,” Joey corrected. Then he turned to his mother and jerked his head back toward the woman. “Could we have her?”

  Harry laughed, embarrassed. “I guess all the children would like to take you home.”

  “Could we?” Sally asked. “She has all kinds more maggots in her purse. Her name’s Mary.”

  “You’d better give them back to her now so that some other children can have a turn,” Anna said.

  “She gave them to us,” Joey said.

  “That’s right,” Mary agreed. “I didn’t think it would do any harm, just to bring along a few little gifts.”

  “Don’t you work here then?” Harry asked.

  “Heavens no. I just came to meet some children.”

  “Would you like to go to the zoo?” Anna asked. “We thought we’d all go to the zoo.”

  Mary smiled and shook her head. “I don’t really like to see all those animals behind bars.”

  “We could go to the beach instead,” Joey said. “Couldn’t we?”

  “Sure,” Harry said. “Of course we could.”

  Standing on the shore, tearing up bread for the seagulls, Harry said conversationally, “I see your point about the zoo, but it can be educational.”

  “Not for the animals,” Mary said.

  Anna laughed and took Mary’s arm.

  “Is she going to come home for dinner?” Sally asked. “Do grandmothers come home for dinner?”

  “Not when they have a grandfather at home waiting for his dinner,” Mary said.

  “He could come, too,” Joey said. “Couldn’t he?”

  “Sometime, certainly,” Harry said in his hardiest tone.

  “Like tonight,” Anna said.

  If Harry had any objection to his wife, it might have been that she sometimes took him more seriously than he took himself. She sometimes didn’t know the difference between giving in and taking over.

  “He wouldn’t come,” Mary said. “He said since God didn’t see fit to make him a grandfather, he didn’t see what business it was of the YWCA.”

  “It’s a Christian organization,” Harry said, suddenly indignant.

  Anna burst out laughing.

  “Why is Daddy mad?” Sally asked.

  “Because he’s having an argument with somebody who isn’t here, and that’s frustrating,” Mary explained. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, Harry, but there’d be no way to lie about how George feels. I told him nobody owns children in the first place, but he went on about what sort of a rummage sale it would turn out to be.”

  “How can he talk about children like that?” Harry demanded.

  “Oh, he likes children well enough.”

  “I understand exactly how he feels,” Anna said. “I thought Harry was crazy. A ready made grandmother appealed to me about as much as a tv dinner.”

  “I like tv dinners,” Sally said. “I have them at Linda’s.”

  The following Sunday, George and Mary came to dinner. Mary sat in the rocker and looked right in place there. George sat stiffly in Harry’s chair while Harry prowled in and out of the room on errands, unable to think what else to do with his displaced body.

  “You’ll have to buy a chair for George,” Joey confided as he dragged his box of sea shells along the hall on his way to show them off to his new grandparents.

  “No doubt,” Harry said.

  After several glasses of Anna’s wine, George had Sally on his lap and was teaching both children a variety of hand tricks which Harry himself had known years ago and could have taught the children himself if he’d thought of it.

  “Come over here and talk to, me, Harry,” Mary said. “You and I were right, and I think we should be able to gloat about it a little. Anna won’t let me help in the kitchen.”

  “There’s a grandmother labor law,” Anna said on her way out of the room, “No exploitation.”

  “The children get their humor from Anna, and they get their trust from you. It’s a happy combination in them.”

  With that compliment, Harry had to take his suspicious eyes off George and concentrate on Mary, who thought so many of the same things he did about human resources and the urban question that she kept him entertained until it was time for dinner.

  “Leg of lamb?” Harry asked, looking down at the platter as if his sight betrayed him.

  “Oh, Harry, you carve it perfectly well,” Anna said. “He always threatens to take a leg of lamb down and have it x-rayed.”

  “Would you like me to have a go at it, Son?” George asked. “I used to be a butcher.”

  Harry felt the protest at being again displaced rise and stop at the word “Son.” “Why…thanks. That would be great.”

  Sitting down next to Anna, Harry had the odd sensation of being like a child at his own table. He did not feel reduced so much as relieved, as if the whole weight of the evening no longer rested on his reluctant shoulders, and maybe, if he watched carefully enough George’s aging, deft hands, he might learn to carve a leg of lamb himself. To be called “son,” which he never had been before in his life, was to be given time between himself and all he still had to learn.

  “Grandfathers are daddies, too,” Sally announced. “Are grandmothers mommies?”

  “Don’t generalize,” Anna said.

  “That takes a little more time,” Mary said to Sally. “We’ll see if your mother will let me help with the dishes.”

  “I don’t have to dry! I don’t have to dry!” Joey shouted and pulled out his tie in preparation for a fine fall off his chair.

  “Son!” Harry said, as Mary laid a quieting hand on Joey’s head so that for once Anna didn’t have to threaten to kill him, too.

  “Woman came into my shop once,” George said, not looking up from his task, “and asked for the left leg of lamb. ‘Left?’ I said, and she said, ‘that’s the one that always has the tail on it.’”

  “Is that true?” Anna asked amused.

  “Nope,” George said, “but the one she got did. So does this.”

  “Is it a left leg?” Joey asked.

  “Yep.”

  “You’re going to confuse the children, George,” Mary said.

  “Well, you can’t trust a good idea, but you can still enjoy it when it works out,” George said. “Don’t you think that’s so, Harry?”

  SEAWEED AND SONG

  “I DON’T CARE HOW many strays you bring home as long as they’re human,” Anna said, not once but any time either of the children or Harry was tempted by a cat in the back alley or a puppy in a pet shop window.

  “Maybe it will die out there in the rain,” Sally tried.

  “Nonsense. That’s why cats have fur coats.”

  “I could buy that dog with my own money,” Joey said, “and pay for the food.”

  “I don’t get up at five in the morning to deliver papers for a dog!” Anna replied energetically. “If you want to give your money away, send it to Oxfam.”

  “Pets can teach kids responsibility,” Harry suggested tentatively when the children were out of earshot.

  “What doe
s it teach the animals?”

  “That’s not as important, is it?”

  “My point exactly,” Anna said firmly. “People are more important. Do you know how much North Americans spend on pets every year?”

  “Second only to atomic weapons, I suppose,” Harry answered glumly.

  Anna didn’t have many moral passions, was rather of a temperament to indulge convictions and whims in other people.

  Right after they moved from an apartment into their own house, she let Sally tie string from her bed to her dresser to her door and down the stairs and back again. To Harry’s and Joey’s complaint that someone was going to break a leg, Anna replied, “So watch your step.” Day after day Sally slowly tied her way through the house and even out into the yard, the house and grounds an elaborate web until she slowly unmade it all on her way to bed.

  “Are you sure she’s all right?” Harry asked, never having heard of a five-year-old having a nervous breakdown.

  “Sure,” Anna said. “You and I can knock down walls and dig up flower beds to lay hands on the place. It’s just her way of claiming it.”

  Only days after Sally suddenly gave up her spidery ways, Joey decided on his paper route which got Anna up at five a.m. to be sure he had his breakfast. She encouraged his obsessions, saving money and National Geographics.

  Even, Harry had to admit, his own weakness for fad diets didn’t prompt nutritional sermons, perhaps because his interest in them never lasted more than a week.

  Anna was a reasonable woman, except when it came to pets.

  “I don’t care how many strays you bring home…”

  “As long as they’re human,” her husband and children chorused.

  Occasionally walking down the Granville Mall, Harry had fantasies about a positive testing of his wife’s dictum. But whether he chose a forlorn drunk or aggressive young prostitute, he suspected he’d have a harder time passing the test than Anna would. It did not occur to him that Anna had stirred up the same fantasies in their children who were not yet old enough to have developed critical foresight.

  Those kids must have been combing the beach below their house not for shells or bits of tackle, not for an aimless dog or crippled seagull but for a stray to suit their mother’s definition.