Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab

by Shani Mootoo

  I remember how Sydney smiled—was it a begrudging smile or a wistful one?—as he added, Of course the past is never erased, and is even always present. And as he spoke I saw how I myself could have been, that very day, the author of those same words.

  Was it clutching at straws for me to believe that Sydney had been alluding to the idea, however veiled, that I was a part of his not-so-erasable past? Yearning and peevishness are a messy mix: I now realize that I heard less what he said, and more what I thought he ought to have said—that he wished not to erase aspects of the past.

  He interrupted himself often, but he always returned to this essential story. And I had heard the story so often that I could picture the scene as if I had been there with him. If he were still here, I believe I could recite the details alongside him. That first day of the wake I imagined his words. I heard his voice saying: During bouts of wakeful anxiety the night before, I heard the growl, groan and scrape of snowploughs. I had passed the night watching their yellow safety lights dart up the far wall of my bedroom and slide across the ceiling in a one-two-rest, one-two-rest pattern. But despite their efforts, I knew, when I stepped outside that morning, that the sidewalks, with the snow, rain, freeze sequence that had been that season’s predictable model, were bound to be slippery—as they were. Surely, he said, it would have been reasonable for me to break my resolve under the circumstances, to have tried flagging down a taxi.

  I could almost see the darkness at seven in the morning as Sydney had so often described it, and although I have never been to the apartment he described, I feel as if I know it. I certainly have walked past the area, and know exactly how much time it would have taken to walk from the apartment to his appointment at the clinic.

  Once again, I imagined his voice. I stood there between the lobby and entrance doors, he would tell me, and observed large snowflakes, flimsy and light, floating down on the other side of the door. Street lamps remained lit. The one nearest the door of the building in which I lived carried on a single-note buzzing, and its light had an irregular tremor that gave a pink glow to the dustlike flakes. The buzzing was louder than usual that morning. I supposed the bulb would blow soon. I remember all of this because it was as if everything in my environment was aware of what I was about to do, and was marking the auspiciousness of the day for me. There was a rosy aura to the darkness of the sky behind that lamp. How still the street was, with its evenly spaced rows of ginkgo trees on either side. I can see it all, as if this had all happened just weeks ago: the ginkgos bare of greenery, new snowfall delineating their branches, that pink glow above, and lower, mid-height to the row houses opposite, a yellowish tinge from the tungsten lighting over the doors of the row houses to the left and right of the red-brick tenement in which I lived. How clean and pretty the neighbourhood was in that moment, swathed in the snow’s whiteness and in the pastel shades of light that, even as I watched, was dissipating. Day consumed night like a magician swallowing a string of pastel-colour silk kerchiefs.

  The blushing light down Bergamot was replaced soon enough by a low and heavy sky that cast a pall of grey over everything. Cornwall Street, the main thoroughfare, had already been ploughed. The bank of pushed-aside snow that formed a barrier between the sidewalk and the road was crowned by a new layer of snow and sludge mixed with broken slabs of packed ice that had been formed in the night by the machines I had heard. I was hungry. I had been given an orange sheet of paper with information and directions: no food or drink except for water after midnight, and no water after 3 a.m. I was trying not to think of food, not to notice my light-headedness, the need, as one who was pre-diabetic in those days, to eat not long after awakening. I was wondering if I would be able to walk for half an hour in that horrid weather and not faint before arriving. But you know, Jonathan, that is something I could never quite get used to when I was in Canada. That pervasive sense of aloneness: you could live in a building with seventy units and not make friends with a single person in it. I also found that, in Canada, even among friends, independence was practised and appreciated. Even among lovers, even among family members. The question I always ask as I think of that day is not how could any human live in such a climate, or why; but rather, how could one have lived in a city for a period of almost twenty years, yet have not one soul she could ask to accompany her on a mission such as mine?

  As I remembered Sydney’s voice telling me this, I saw that, over time, I had become used to the switches in Sydney’s pronouns when he talked in this ironic manner about himself. Moreover, I had myself learned to be quick and creative in concocting sentence structures—often, I thought now, humorously complex structures—so as to avoid using pronouns when I spoke of his past as Sid.

  In the end, continued Sydney, I felt unusually brave that day, a soldier alone in the trenches. It is satisfying to realize that even when one is alone, one is not denied the highs and lows of life. When I lived in Toronto and used to return for visits to my parents here in Trinidad, to this place where I was born and grew up, I would lie in my bed in my parents’ house and listen to the coconut branches in the wind as they scraped the roof. To my ears this sound was wind chimes. In the evening I would sit on the patio and watch parrots and parakeets, their black bodies against the golden sky, and I would feel as if they were on the ends of strings I held in my hand. The rice plains, cane fields, swamplands, mangroves, mountain ranges, the sea that like an eager child scatters jewels about your feet, and then like a mischievous child runs away again, were oxygen coursing through the blood in my veins. I would know on those visits that nowhere else on earth could be my home, and I would feel a love well up in me like a tsunami. But even as the wave swelled I knew I dared not let it overcome me.

  That morning of my walk to the clinic in Toronto, I wore a forest-green knapsack from Mountain Equipment Co-op. In it were letters from a very dear friend, some loose clothing recommended for my stay at the post-op facility, toiletries, my wallet and an envelope in which was a rather large sum of money in bills. I tugged every so often on the knapsack’s belt around my waist to make sure it was secure. I wouldn’t have wanted to be relieved of that cash! I bent my head against the cold wind and held the front of the coat’s hood down. I had to reach under my glasses and wipe away cold- and wind-induced tears again and again. One eye would always tear up more than the other in a wind, and that morning it wouldn’t stop. I pressed a finger against the closed eyelid towards the inner corner of my eye, as if doing so would force out all the remaining moisture, but no sooner had I done so than tears cascaded again. I had pulled the front of the wool scarf that was wound about my neck up over my nose, and took in the warmth it momentarily trapped from my breath. It didn’t take long for condensed breath to bead on the scarf, dampening it. All of this, every detail, that is, seemed critical, and I wanted to experience it all, even the sensation of wet wool threads that clung to my lips and found their way onto my tongue.

  I bent into the wind that swept up and down the street and walked briskly toward Eldon Street. From there it was a straight walk in a westerly direction to the health centre. There was less wind on the east–west streets, but only marginally less. My brain would still have frozen, I was certain, had my head not been covered. And yet, there was a girl—I recognized her from the neighbourhood and knew that some days she looked no older than ten years, and other days like an old woman who had already experienced the gamut of life’s harshest blows—not only wearing no hat, but sporting a white hooded denim jacket, cropped at the waist. A collar of blond faux-fur hung at her back around the hood. The zipper of the jacket was pulled up until it reached not a fraction higher than the apex of her meagre breasts. The white tights she wore rode low to offer a view of her exposed belly button, emphasizing her skimpy legs. And so, even as I was on my way to alter myself, my female body, I wondered who, or what, had ever convinced these young girls that such thinness, such fragility, such exposure in that kind of cold, was in the least attractive? The girl wore running shoes and s
moked, striking a pose to catch the eye of every driver who passed. She glanced at me, turned away, and then looked at me again, and this time I could see her wondering. She must have made a decision, because she primped her pose, distributed her weight on one leg and swung her hip at me. Then she transferred her weight to the other leg and swung again. She puckered her lips at me. I couldn’t suppress my delight in her mistake, nor could I contain the smile that followed. At that she stomped her foot and gestured with a fist, slowly unfurling her middle finger, pointing it to the sky. Without waiting a second longer she turned her precious time to the driver of a passing car, and I was reminded that before I had left Trinidad and come to Canada, people who recognized me as the offspring of Amresh and Sita Mahale would say when I smiled that I looked exactly like my mother, and when I was serious that I was the image of my father. I would have to ask the doctor, I thought wryly, about fixing that smile.

  And so Sydney carried on, recalling the minutest details of this walk. He had at the time noticed, and, so long after remembered, even slight changes in the daylight en route to the Irene Samuel. He spoke of the nuances of scents in the cold air from the just-opened automotive shops, and from the row of North African and Pakistani grocery shops he passed. He recalled the sound of snow crunching, sludge peeling off car tires as the vehicles went by, police sirens wailing in the distance, a car alarm hailing from yet another direction, children on their way to school calling out and chatting. He spoke, once, of a particular household he’d passed on that route, recalling detail after detail even as I felt that he was trying to snatch the words back the moment they left his mouth. This household that was, to quote him, a boil on the fragile skin of the small enclave of respectability in the neighbourhood just east of the health centre and west of the Don Valley. The bank of ploughed snow, he told me, had cut off the near sidewalk and forced Sid to cross the street to use the far one. She therefore had to pass immediately in front of the house and its occupants. One of two motorized wheelchairs that belonged there was on its side, blanketed with the snow, beside the wheelchair-access ramp. The small yard in front of the house was crammed with furniture, all covered with an undulating duvet of the last night’s snowfall. As Sid approached the house she played a game with herself, recalling and identifying the shapes beneath the snow blanket. Metal chairs, a lawn mower, a picnic table on top of which were a child’s tricycle and a broken pram, recycling and garbage bins and a long metal box, the kind that the city used in parks to store small equipment. Sid remembered that there was usually a propane barbecue tied with a thick iron chain to the fence that separated this house from the one next to it. She noticed that it was gone and conjectured that the occupants of the house had traded it in to pay their rent, or for booze or drugs. Even in deep winter the two women who lived there would each get into a motorized wheelchair, he told me, and barrel down Cornwall and Eldon streets, against the flow of traffic, berating each other all the while for all to hear.

  Just as Sid was directly in front of the house, its front door opened slightly. Her heart leapt, Sydney said, and the fright of being confronted by one of the occupants almost caused her to slip. But then the door simply closed again, without anyone appearing. She hurried on, but couldn’t help recalling one Halloween when she was returning after midnight to her apartment and had passed that house. A party had spilled into the street, and a man had launched a rocket firecracker, aiming it across the street. A whizzing whistle rang high into the night and then a bang reverberated, followed by a procession of electric red and blue starlights, a trillion flashes stripping across the street and onto the lawns of the houses on the far side. Sid had held her breath and waited. The two women had screamed at the firecracker launcher, who was howling with pleasure. Sydney addressed me, saying: And I hope you excuse me, Jonathan, but this is exactly what they said, “You fucking asshole. You crazy or what? Cut it out.”

  I had never known Sydney—nor Sid, for that matter—to use expletives, and I admit that I was perversely pleased. Granted, he was simply reporting what he had heard, but he and I were both made shy by this. I remember laughing aloud, for he looked like a child, though one who was pleased to have been caught. On vandalized walls here on this island, the F word is often sprawled in paint, as it is in almost every English-speaking country, but here it is usually spelled f-o-c-k, and I can still hear Sydney pronounce it, that one word lower in volume than the others, the f soft and feathered, followed by a hollowness, as if an h trailed the f, the vowel being neither an o nor a u, and again followed by that h sound, and then the cking as usual: fhu/ohcking. His handling of that one word, with apology but with some delight in its illicitness, gave him the air of a stereotypical affected and effeminate gay man. But as amused as I was, I was also reminded of my mother’s long-ago accusations—made directly to Sid—that Sid felt she was too good, too classy to cuss. My mother would say this when she was attempting to come down off her own high horse, and to bring Sid down with her.

  After the moment of levity for both of us, Sydney became serious again, telling me that after that first firecracker, another whizzed into the air. The sound of the man’s delight followed it again, Sydney said, and the same women screamed again—but this time before he repeated the woman’s words he apologized. And here I will swear, Jonathan, he said, but to clean up what they said dulls the dazzle of that neighbourhood: “Cut it out right now, you crazy son of a bitch, or I’ll come out there and cut your balls off!” Sid had stood frozen, trying to seem calm, as if these events were quite natural, and one only had to be patient and wait one’s turn to continue on down the sidewalk. But she hadn’t looked over at the women and the man as she didn’t want to be dragged into any conspiracy or camaraderie. I feared being knifed, he said, or bashed, as a consequence of some innocent engagement, and having to explain to my family, by which I mean Gita and Jaan, from an emergency hospital bed what on earth I was doing living in a neighbourhood in which that sort of thing could have transpired.

  There was no one around who might have heard us, yet Sydney lowered his voice and added: My parents—who had passed away by this time—had never been able to understand why in Canada I’d lived in such different circumstances from those in which they had brought me up. You, Jonathan, he told me in that same low voice, had no idea, of course, that I was living over there in that wretched neighbourhood, but your mother did. She knew where I was. After living with her in the big old rambling Victorian house on Pellatt Green I felt like a failure for having to make such a move. I think of India, and even now—so far away, so long ago—I imagine that she must have dismissed me as being no different in the end from anyone else in that infamous area of Bergamot Avenue. Sydney paused, then said wistfully, I don’t believe your mother ever really quite understood who or what I was.

  Sydney’s concerns about my mother’s opinion of her brought to my mind an image of India at home in that house in the Annex, just south of the subway station at Dupont and Spadina streets. I saw India’s back as she faced her desk in front of the window in the attic-floor study. And then another image: there she was, leaning against one of the kitchen counters staring up at the ceiling, unaware of my presence, writing in her head a chapter or fleshing out the plot of one of her books. I had never thought of the house on Pellatt Green as being any particular size, large or small, until I went off to look for a place of my own only to find that what I could afford without assistance from my mother or dipping into my portion of the inheritance left to us by her parents was a semi-detached house in Little Italy a third the size of 191 Pellatt Green. In contrast to the disappointment Sid imagined his family of origin felt about him living in a rented apartment in a disadvantaged area of the city, what my mother felt was pride; she thought it charming and immensely brave of me to take up the challenge of a “smart little hovel,” as she called it, in what she thought of as a semi-residential neighbourhood, where, on weekends during the summer, a section of nearby College Street would be closed to traffic, and pe
ople from “just about anywhere,” as she put it, would flock in the thousands to gorge on pizzas and calzones and panzarotti and gyros and gelato, and on every corner listen to older immigrants croon in foreign languages to awfully loud accordion music.

  Of course, India is always the novelist; she exaggerates to a fault, which says more about her than about her subject. But I happened to know that Sydney’s uneasiness about India’s opinions of Sid were actually well founded. India might think my house—the house of her son—charming, but she had been critical of Sid’s choices after leaving our home in the Annex.

  I had always wondered what my mother and Sid had first seen in each other, what it was that had brought them together. Once, I had asked this of India. She and Sid had met, India told me, while sitting next to each other at the bar in the Elgin Room at the Yorkville Hotel—which was a hotel only in name; really it was an artist-run building of galleries and artists’ studios. Each was taking a break from an event. India was reading at the launch of an anthology in which her work appeared, and Sid was attending a marathon video screening. As India recalled it, they turned to face each other and began to chat. On learning that India was a novelist, Sid had pulled out a rather smart black rollerball pen from the pocket of her jeans and asked India to recommend one of her novels. India took the pen from Sid, and while Sid ordered refills on their drinks, India wrote on a bar napkin the title of her most recent book. Beneath that, she wrote her phone number and underlined it twice. She folded the napkin and handed it to Sid. She said that there was instant attraction between them—and why not? They were both good-looking people. She remembered the pen, she said, the silkiness of its finish and its weight, and was immediately curious about this South Asian woman who had the taste and means to own such an item. She thought Sid well spoken, and into her mind, out of nowhere, popped the phrase third-world aristocracy. She was amused by this thought, and instantly hooked.