by Bill Gaston
But Neil is proud how no one in his family lost their cool in the face of hostility. Joanne is off on the trails having a last little hike, in the sun. And Neil has some business of his own still to attend to. Their taxi won’t be here for another half hour.
When it does come, Vicky gets up front with the driver, who introduces himself as Chris. He pivots awkwardly and shakes Neil’s and Joanne’s hands. In the air is that it’s going to be a long ride.
As they begin taking the curves, Neil watches Joanne closely. She’s alert and smiles at all the sights they pass. He no longer knows this woman.
“Have a nice walk?”
“It was wonderful.”
“Nicer in the sun?”
“Still cold by the water but it wakes you up.”
Neil calls forward, “Ever get warm here, Chris?”
“Nope.”
“Well, that sucks.” He waits. “I’d say that place sort of sucked in general.”
Joanne doesn’t look at him to say, “It was wonderful.”
“You don’t seem all that sad to be leaving.”
“No, I’m not sad. I’ve seen it.” She adds, softly, “It isn’t for outsiders.”
Neil settles into his seat-back. It was almost better when she was crying. He waits until he thinks of something good to say. “Joanne? It doesn’t mean they’re better.”
“I know that.” She watches more trees go by. She looks completely okay with things. “They wouldn’t get Drumheller either.”
“No. They damn well wouldn’t.”
It’s a long ride but no one speaks. Neil feels hollow, and alone. He pictures Drumheller in a tourist brochure, then sees the inside of the dinosaur museum, and he knows what those giant trees reminded him of — they were like dinosaurs, the same thigh-bone thickness of dinosaur bones, only they were alive, and black in the fog, and he didn’t like being in them. He thinks fondly, almost pleadingly, of his garage at home, its cement-cool in summer, and the old console TV he has in there for hot weather. For some reason he pictures a show last week when a beaten-up son squints up at a mean father and yells that he’ll die a lonely death. Neil looks at Joanne over against her window and it only makes sense that he stay over here leaning against his. He’s had enough crazy thoughts for a month and he wishes he could snooze, and then he must have because now he’s being elbowed awake by Joanne who says, “Vicky and I are thinking Vancouver. The driver needs to know.” Neal sees they’re not even in the outskirts of Victoria, the meter reads $111 and is flying up fast. He’s still working out how to charge all this to EdenTides Resort.
“Your call, honey. Your vacation.”
“Yes!” whispers Vicky, clapping the tips of her fingers together. Somehow Vicky already knows where to go in Vancouver and apparently Joanne has promised her money for shopping. Neil finds it hard to look at his daughter. Out all night and he let her off the hook. When he does look at his girl he gets a feeling that, as of now, she’s gone for good.
Joanne, nodding her head with each destination, says, “Hotel downtown, we do restaurants, we do the casino.”
“Your money,” says Neil, steadily.
He’s wondering what it will be like back in Drumheller, with his wife, who will now not be working, and whom he no longer knows. He pictures her finishing up the dishes and turning to him with expectations. She hates riding on the back of his Harley. He doesn’t like to bowl. It will still be morning, clear and sunny out, all day long.
“You don’t seem that okay.” Joanne is staring at him in a way that tells him she’s been doing it a while.
“I’m okay.” He thinks, lonely death in the sun.
“I wish — I wish you’d had a good walk.”
“I did have a walk.”
“I mean like my walk.”
He can’t look at her any more. He wants to be home, despite the feeling that Drumheller will be gone now too.
“What’s this on your hand?” Joanne taps his wrist near the smudge of bright orange paint.
“Nothing.” He hides his wrist against his stomach. He’s no longer proud of what he did.
“No, what?”
“Was helping buddy out with a little maintenance.” He lifts his wrist and turns it in the light. It’s an oil-based enamel which will take days to wear off his skin. It’ll take more than that to come off the rock. “I was being, I dunno, passing aggressive.”
Joanne leaves it at this. She smiles at several gulls wheeling over a dark, house-sized pile of something smouldering.
While Neil was waiting for the taxi, he did have his little walk. He knew what he was searching for, even what colour the paint would be, because ten small boulders lining EdenTide’s driveway were freshly painted with it, a bright, ugly orange. The lock to the maintenance shack was a Schlage, which wasn’t coming off, so he pried the latch screws. There was a half-can left, and a clean acrylic brush, medium-stiff, just right for the job. He also took a wire brush for scouring off any broken shell and for cleaning the rock down to base.
The sun had dried the square of rock face nicely. He did a neat job, but with all the alertly strolling ladies around he knew that news would get back to Andrew sooner rather than later so he kept it quick. In the four-foot square he painted a glossy orange M-U-S-C-L-E-S. He wasn’t positive that’s how you spelled it but he really didn’t care much one way or the other.
THE WALK
Andy stood in his rented room. September again. The heavy familiarity of this childish purple bedspread, that smell of talc in the hall. He had been back mere minutes and already regretted it. He’d barely unpacked before old Mrs. Barastall invited him downstairs to be with her real family and watch her die. Why hadn’t he just found an apartment this year, like everyone else? Even residence might have been better than this, especially now, with her dying right below.
Andy had no experience with death. When her son, Roger, the landlord, gave him her invitation, explaining about her being home from the hospital to die, the first thing Andy thought of was her chicken roll-ups. Old Mrs. Barastall cooked Sunday nights, the only meal Andy looked forward to here, and chicken roll-ups were his favourite. They took her all day to make, and she “made everyone pay for them” — Roger’s little joke about the way his mother complained — by calling people to the table ten minutes before actually serving them. Then she’d appear with the dish and stand to ladle out the toothpicked, dripping folds of breast meat and always say, “These take so much darned time to do right, but they’re worth it.” From his seat to her left, Andy always agreed with her.
But now, up in his room, unpacking his books and ripping open a new six-pack of white socks, he felt guilty for thinking about chicken roll-ups before attaching any weight to her death.
Whenever he told friends he lived in a boarding house, their first response was to glance skyward at an angle, attempting to picture what one was. Their second response was to ask, Why?
He didn’t know why. The first year, he’d been late getting to town for the start of term, didn’t know any better and ended up answering the Barastalls’ newspaper ad out of hasty innocence. Just because Sandra showed him the room he felt obliged to say he would rent it. It hadn’t registered at the time that he’d be eating with the family and watching TV with them and the old grandmother and all the rest of it. At first there was another boarder, but then only Andy, because in his second year they stopped renting the other room and moved old Mrs. Barastall down to it, telling her they didn’t want her “tackling the stairs” any more. Andy suspected another reason: as he helped them move her dresser downstairs, he saw Roger’s wink and Sandra’s little bottomslap that followed mention of the newly empty room beside them. Now they could make noise.
“I’m just an old boarder now,” Mrs. Barastall said, not smiling. Everyone including Andy laughed politely, assuming, hoping, it was a joke. It was her moving day, and she wore a grey track suit.
“You still own the place, Mom,” Roger said back, smiling to tell her
his was something of a joke too.
“Doesn’t mean a thing,” the old lady replied. She was good for that expression at least once a day, and what exactly she meant by it was no clearer now than usual.
That original ad had said, “Room for rent in character house,” and though he knew what that meant he had fun for a while trying to think of the Barastalls as characters, though they were all fairly ordinary in most ways. As far as the house itself went, “character” was just a hopeful word for old.
Only gradually did Andy learn that boarding houses were archaic. In his second year, a potential girlfriend asked him if he lived there because he missed his family. He told her no, not bothering to fill her in on the detail of having only a mother he’d not seen since he was nine. She asked why else anyone would live at a boarding house. Andy didn’t know what to tell her. He said, “Meals. I hate to cook.” But it wasn’t that. He didn’t care for Sandra’s cooking much at all.
Each year, with something like surprise he found he’d ended up here again. Here again eating Sandra’s runny casseroles (and waiting for Sundays, and wishing Mrs. Barastall would cook more often). Here again listening to Sandra bicker with Roger, a navy man who filled the house with his presence during the weeks-long stretches he was home. And listening to Roger Junior, eleven, bounce an eternity of balls and taunt his older sister, May. Roger and Sandra also fought with May, who in Andy’s first year was fourteen and shy and looked younger than she was. But she bloomed rapidly, and the family brawls really started “that night” — as they referred to it still — a couple of years ago when she came home with beer on her breath. Sandra’s subsequent search through May’s purse uncovered not only a condom but a ceramic moon amulet on the back of which was engraved, Coven of the West Kind.
From the yelling it was hard for Andy to tell what enraged Roger and Sandra more, the condom or the amulet. It didn’t help any when old Mrs. Barastall, who had been listening too, entered to interrupt and say that witches weren’t so bad, not at all, in fact. She’d known some in her time and — Roger’s hissed “Mother! Leave!” put an end to her story.
Maybe the worst part about the boarding house was having to sit beside old Mrs. Barastall, in front of the TV, with nothing to say. (He sometimes thought he could smell her: under the waft of floral façade an undertone of sour.) Andy joked to himself that Mrs. Barastall was the main reason he struggled in school, and it was true that he did watch lots of TV with her, more TV than he normally would have. He just found it hard to walk by — harder than her own family did, in any case — without sitting down and watching a show with her. In his opinion she was too often left alone, especially after her cancer was diagnosed.
Friends would still ask how he could stand living “with, you know, other people around.” They seemed to love being away from their families, and spoke with dread, only half joking, about a coming Christmas. Andy knew now that boarding houses were weird. He didn’t know why he stayed. He didn’t really like it, but he didn’t really hate it.
He walked down the creaking back staircase to Mrs. Barastall’s bedroom. “She says she wants to know how your summer went,” was what Roger had said when inviting him down, his look suggesting his mother shouldn’t be believed. Roger was only forty or so, yet Andy could not feel friendly toward him. Roger was always stiff and severe, even with him, the other man of the house. Andy wondered if maybe it had to do with Roger being in the military, that he was somehow always on guard, always ready for war with other men. He reminded Andy of off-duty policemen he’d met.
He stood quietly at Mrs. Barastall’s door, a hollow wooden one identical to his own. He heard voices, and then silence as a reedy whisper asked what sounded like a question.
Oh, he dreaded this. No so much Mrs. Barastall herself, whom he got on with well enough. Early on they’d developed a kind of rapport where it was tacitly agreed to say nothing controversial, thereby guaranteeing a comfortable sit at the TV. One should have a pleasant relationship with boarders, seemed her credo. Though she would break her own rule by sending him a sly glance after a risqué TV joke. He sometimes wondered whether he knew this old woman at all. Once, after a silent hour of watching two bad sitcoms in a row, she sighed and tilted her head in such a way that their age difference vanished, and said, “I wonder if there’s nothing better for us to do than watch this crap.”
No, what Andy dreaded was entering into family intimacy. Family was where Mrs. Barastall tried to toss her weight around. But no one listened to her. That’s what made the arguments worse. That’s what started them, in fact: she got nowhere and grew frustrated. It was her frustration Andy hated. Her frustration made him hate the whole family.
He saw the process as clear as day. Mrs. Barastall would say something reasonable enough, something starting with “In my time” or “Not that you asked my opinion but.” No one would pay much attention. Roger might raise his eyebrows but keep on reading. Mrs. Barastall’s next statement would come out harsher, quicker. Then a fight would start, Mrs. Barastall would make less sense and condemn “this poisonous age” and refuse to listen to them now, and the room would fall to a feuding silence.
And while Andy stayed clear of these feuds, he couldn’t help but notice, for instance, that when Roger was gone Mrs. Barastall complained to Sandra about the setting of the thermostat, or the salt in the gravy. Because Mrs. Barastall was on a salt-free diet, Andy knew Sandra saw this particular complaint, tossed off with almost amiable chattiness, to be a huge accusation indeed. Andy actually thought it might be a macabre joke on the old lady’s part, one that stung Sandra before she had a chance of getting it. Sometimes Andy thought that no one in the family knew old Mrs. Barastall very well at all. Not that the old lady helped much.
In any case it was clear a family war was being fought, a war of grotesque subtlety, but nonetheless a war, and Andy didn’t like his role as foreign observer. They behaved a little better when he was around, but he could still hear the muffled explosions, feel the concussion in his gut.
Only ten minutes after arriving today he’d heard Roger and Sandra in the hall, Sandra crying.
“She . . . she accused me of withholding her pain pills. I couldn’t believe she . . . how can she even think . . . ?”
“What did she actually say?” Roger asked.
“You know how she says things without really . . . I mean, I came with her pill and I wasn’t more than ten minutes late with it and she looked at me and said,‘Do you think I don’t need those any more?’ What did she mean? I just can’t stand . . .”
Roger told her it was going to be difficult, that his mother was afraid. Then he said curtly that Sandra wouldn’t have to put up with it for long, which of course meant to say that his mother would die soon. The way he said it reminded Andy of the double-edged comments the old lady herself was so good at.
Andy eased Mrs. Barastall’s door open and stepped quietly in.
Everyone was here. Roger sat on the bed edge, holding Mrs Barastall’s hand, talking softly, something about sand peculiar to the Iraqi desert. Sandra sat in a chair smiling habitually, staring into the middle distance. May sat on the floor against the bed and looked up when Andy entered. She said “Hi” like a contemporary, like a friend, like a potential lover, in fact, and then quickly looked down. Andy realized she’d be eighteen now.
In the corner, barely able to sit still, sat Roger Junior. He squeezed a tennis ball, alternating hand to hand, to build up his wrist strength. Andy didn’t like the kid much. Roger Junior was one of those kids who didn’t have any friends and was a constant whiner, and you couldn’t tell which of those was the chicken or the egg. And he seemed to have pinned all his hopes on sports. Now he looked scared to death, his eyes flicking to everything in the room except his grandmother. Mrs. Barastall had made a painful turn to watch him, and her eyes were knowing and gentle.
“Andrew, good,” Mrs. Barastall said, noticing him now.
Her curly hair had receded dramatically and her shiny
skull looked like an egg in a grey nest. Her eyes alone looked alive. They seemed to bear all the weight of a life that had got heavy, much heavier than her frail body. Every movement, every thought even, looked wrested up from within through intense effort. The eyes bulged. Perhaps the flesh around them had ebbed.
She was smiling at him. “Look,” she whispered. She flicked a finger at the new TV that sat on the dresser top behind him.
“Some night?” she whispered.
“Sure,” said Andy. “Friends is on tomorrow night.”
He almost added, in case she’d forgotten, Friends is on every night, the punchline to their joke, but didn’t. He sensed the code of her dying, and it said you could be humorous but not frivolous. Perhaps unless you were family. Families forgave all.
“Did you know I have a stomach cancer?” Mrs. Barastall asked, her voice breaking out of the whisper into a sudden deepness, like a teenage boy’s.
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
“Me too, Andrew,” she whispered, and the corners of her mouth lifted. She looked at him in the way that dissolved their ages again.
The Barastalls and Andy sat and talked. Nothing important was said. It seemed Roger tried to steer topics as far away as possible from the reason they were gathered. He tried to get his mother interested in Iraq again.
Andy grew impatient. Something here was crucial, and he felt a sense of waste. They should be summing up her life. Someone should be asking huge things of Mrs Barastall. He wasn’t sure what. Perhaps: What’s it like? Are there periods of peace? What do you think is going to happen when you die? It wasn’t his place to ask anything like this. It occurred to him that he might be thinking these things only because he wasn’t related. He didn’t know what it was like to be related. They all looked clenched with hard, unspoken feeling.
A sudden breeze lifted the drapes, and everyone save Mrs. Barastall turned to the sight. Sandra said, “Hmm, windy.” May agreed. Because of the drapes Andy noticed the pictures beside them on the wall, pictures of a woman he assumed was Mrs. Barastall. In several, looking twenty or so, she wore sporty white skirts and accepted tennis trophies. Another showed her on a beach surrounded by black men and women, some of whom had tattooed and scarred faces.
