1979

by Ray Robertson

  Then one year she was hospitalized with a shattered knee after she’d slipped on some ice and couldn’t come to Chatham for Julie’s birthday, although she made sure to telephone and send a card. Then she was in physical therapy and couldn’t come to visit at Christmas either, and then it was difficult and dangerous for her to get around in the snow and ice with her big brace and cane, and then it became normal for her not to come to Chatham to visit us at all anymore; it became normal for her to telephone on all the important dates and to stick an inflation-resistant five-dollar bill in a Hallmark card. Everything is odd until it isn’t.

  Of course, if I really wanted more Mom time, I could have phoned her whenever I wanted. Dad might have made a face about the cost of the long-distance call, but he wouldn’t have said I shouldn’t have. That she was three hours away and content to stay there was good enough for him. Besides, if I did talk to her on the telephone and he happened to be hanging around the kitchen, he always seemed pleased to see the mix of boredom, disappointment, and sadness on my face when I hung up. Boredom, because who knew that the ups and downs of a struggling courier business could be almost as boring as the steps it takes to get into heaven? Disappointment, because I’d look forward to her birthday or Christmas calls and two minutes in I’d be bored. (“So you’re another year older.” “Yeah.” “And you’re a teenager now.” “Yeah.” “Are you excited?” “I guess.”) Sadness, because boredom and disappointment weren’t what I wanted to feel about my mother. She’d—Julie’s words—“flipped her lid,” gone away, stayed away, and everyone had gotten used to it, more or less, had moved on, more or less, but she was still my mother.

  When she first started attending the Cornerstone and Dad was still waiting it out, hoping she’d get her fill of God and gradually drift back to us, she hung a cheaply framed picture of Jesus on my bedroom wall. I’m sure Dad didn’t like it, but there it hung over my mirrored dresser drawers. I didn’t mind—I only knew Jesus from the morning Bible scriptures that were read over the intercom by the principal, Mr. Park, before classes started, after the playing of the national anthem and before he read the school announcements. Jesus had long hair, for a man, and wore sandals and his clothes sort of billowed around him, but he looked all right, kind of like some of the musicians on Julie’s album covers. Plus, she was my mom—if she put the picture there, it must have belonged there, she wouldn’t have done something that was bad for me.

  A week or so after she hung it, it was hot and my window curtain was pulled to the side to allow a breeze, even a warm breeze, and I woke up to the moonlight illuminating the picture. It looked as if Jesus was staring at me. I screamed—I didn’t mean to, I was surprised when I heard my own voice—and Mom and Dad ran into my room and turned on the light and rushed to my bed and asked me what was wrong. Julie stood in my doorway rubbing her eyes and asked what was going on, why was everybody awake. I pointed at the picture.

  “He scared me,” I said.

  I was sitting up now and my mother sat down on the bed and passed her hand through my sweaty hair, rubbed my cheek. “That’s your saviour, Tom. That’s Sweet Baby Jesus. He’s only here to protect you and love you. He could never hurt you.”

  “Oh, man,” Julie said, turning around and going back to her room.

  “You see?” Dad yelled. “You see?”

  Still stroking my face, “Why are you shouting?” Mom said.

  “I’m not shouting,” Dad shouted. He picked me up like he would sometimes do when we were horsing around in the backyard, but this time no one was laughing. “C’mon, buddy,” he said. “You’re going to sleep in our room tonight.”

  Mom stood up and moved to turn off the light when Dad said to her, “You can sleep in here with Sweet Baby Jesus. You two can keep each other company.”

  “Collecting!”

  Monday through Friday after school was for delivering the newspaper; Saturday was for distributing the week’s final Chatham Daily News and for punching holes in collection cards. Whatever day it was, the first thing you noticed when you cut the binding on a fresh batch of newspapers was the headline on page one, big black type shouting out what was oh-so-important today. It rarely was, though. Election results and earthquakes overseas and federal inquiries into improper spending on Parliament Hill didn’t stay in your head once you’d turned the page. And tomorrow they were just yesterday’s headlines.

  Saturday was also for getting paid, and getting paid was good—was the whole point—but getting paid sometimes meant being invited inside to wait while someone got their purse or their wallet or their cheque book and having to listen to whatever they said because they were nice enough to invite you in off the sleety porch, after all, and they were the customer and therefore always right, even if not always interesting.

  “Mrs. Gibson and I would have been married forty-two years this April.”

  I nodded. “That’s great.”

  Mr. Gibson continued to rummage through his late wife’s purse without actually looking inside. I continued to stand on the rubber mat in the front hallway, the cuffs of my favourite pair of Levis frozen solid. Mrs. Gibson had died of cancer a few months earlier. She’d been the one who always paid me.

  “That’s—how old are you?”

  “Thirteen. I’m thirteen.”

  “That’s over twenty-eight years longer than you’ve been alive that Mrs. Gibson and I were married.”

  I didn’t know what else I was supposed to say. “That’s great,” I repeated.

  His hand now motionless inside the purse as if it was stuck there, Mr. Gibson looked like he either had more to say but wasn’t sure what it was or he knew but was hesitant to say it.

  “Mrs. Gibson kept her change in the front part, I think,” I said. “There’s a pouch inside at the front that—”

  Mr. Gibson handed me his dead wife’s purse. “Take however much it is I owe you,” he said. “I know I can trust you.” Shuffling out of sight in his slippers into the kitchen, leaving me alone in the hallway, “I know you know what it means to be lost, too,” he said. “What happened to each of us, it’s not the same, but I know that you know what it’s like.” It had been several years since I was lost then found, but people still remembered. Especially people who seemed like they needed to.

  I didn’t say anything. I counted out the money he owed me and put the purse on the table by the door and let myself out. It was snowing just as hard as it had been before.

  Recent Widow—“Happily Married” for 41 Years—Feels Renewed Sexual Longing

  “It’s Not Something I Wanted or Even Expected”

  IF YOU MEAN it—if you really, really mean it—a marriage vow is like joining the mafia: betray that oath, and you’re as good as dead (inside where it matters, if not in corporeal fact). He never did and she never did and only in death (hers) did they part. He got used to living alone (their daughter worked in Vancouver as a speech therapist and came home when she could, but she had a family of her own now and was busy building a career) and at 64 he still went into the office five days a week at the Royal Bank and there were model tall ships to assemble in the evening and a cup of hot cocoa before bed and the days have a way of adding up to weeks. Still strange at times—occasionally surprised she wasn’t there when he got home from work; wishing he could talk to her about how odd it felt not to have her there to talk to; bad thought days that can’t be out-thought, only endured—but a good end to a good life fouled only by an innocuous-looking little lump in her right breast, the banal beginning to her agonizing, then merciful, end.

  Now this. But why this now? He thought he’d outlived his genitals. But young women on the city bus that his wife used to be. Young women at the bank who didn’t need to be beautiful to be desirable, only young. Pushing a shopping cart with a sticky front right wheel up and down the aisles of Dominion, ripe cantaloupes and perfect pears and bright red cherries superiorly aphrodisiacal
to pages 83-84 of Penthouse (no matter how well lit or tastefully photographed), the lonely latter only a slick centerfold squirt and sigh. Godamnit, he hadn’t felt like this while she was alive—not for years and years, anyway—so why now? Why?

  He’d watched the box slide into the furnace after the funeral. Dust to dust—that part of the minister’s blah blah blah did make sense. And now her in a vase on the bedroom bureau where he kept his underwear and T-shirts and socks and him a schoolboy again. To every thing there is a season, they say. They’re godamn liars.

  Some sagacious words, someone, please.

  ~

  Mr. Gibson’s sidewalk was always shovelled clean within an hour of any snow fall, his eavestroughs always empty of congesting leaves and twigs. The red brick exterior of his house looked bright and warm on sunny winter days, no matter how cold, and the blue-striped cloth awnings that hung over every window cast invitingly cool shadows on the spongy green grass of his lawn throughout the summer.

  Not that everyone’s house on my route was as nice as Mr. Gibson’s. I also delivered to King Street businesses and their cramped upstairs tenants and to the houses on the tree-lined streets clustered around Tecumseh Park and a little further south. Most of my friends at school lived either in the suburbs or in the country; the houses on my route tended to be like the people who occupied them: older and more interesting.

  There were Mr. and Mrs. Jones, both of whom had taught for decades at CCI—the nearby high-school that Julie went to—and who didn’t have any children but who did have two blue-eyed Siberian huskies, Karl and Marx, who used to go barking berserk whenever I approached the house until Mr. Jones gave me a bag of dog treats to feed to them every time I came by. Within a week they were whimpering with expectation as soon as they saw me and my grey paper bag coming down the street. There was Mrs. Henderson, a widow whose husband had been the Henderson in Henderson, Lowell, and James, the law firm that occupied the vine-covered stone building near the Cenotaph downtown, and who had a library with two ladders on rollers in the front room where you’d normally see a couch and a coffee table and a big TV. There was Dr. McKay and his blond family who lived across the street from the old court house, both of the sons doctors now too, the two younger sisters, twins, still at home and biding their time being dauntingly beautiful as well as CCI’s best athletes and smartest students. The entire family looked like a benign argument for the wisdom of eugenics.

  Past the high school all the way to the end of Murray Street and over the Colborne Street bridge was where I completed my route, would start back home by about five p.m. with an empty bag slung over my shoulder and with thoughts of what Dad was making for dinner and what record I was going to buy that Saturday at Sam the Record Man and how little homework I could get away with doing before slouching in front of the TV with a bag of potato chips and a tub of French onion dip and a bottle of Pop Shoppe black cherry cola. The houses on this side of the bridge were as old as those on the other side and with just as many architectural idiosyncrasies (gables, wrap-around porches, screened sun rooms), but with peeling paint and weather-buckled shingles and the occasional broken window pane replaced by a garbage bag taped in place. Whites and blacks tended to cluster together according to colour (the Royal Tavern was where black people drank; the Merrill Tavern was where white people got drunk), but front car seats with stuffing poking through in place of porch swings were a home furnishing preference of both races, and the anger and suspicion and weariness in people’s eyes was skin pigment neutral.

  There was Mrs. Davis, whose several children ranged from my age to older than my sister. One of them, Jackie, had a baby of her own that I never saw her taking care of; it was always Mrs. Davis doing the bottle-feeding and rattle-shaking. Mrs. Davis took care of all of them. “Mr. Davis” was just a name I heard. One of the sons, who was around my age, was called Sammy. I wondered if he was named after Sammy Davis Jr. I wondered if wondering it made me prejudiced. Mrs. Davis’ oldest daughter worked at the hospital. I never saw her at Mrs. Davis’ house, never saw her visiting her mother or brothers and sisters.

  There were the Scanlons—no one called them by their individual names, they were always just the Scanlons—four virtually identical skinny, jug-eared, buzz-cut white boys with acne-smeared faces who went around all summer without their shirts on, and their equally emaciated mother and father, cold pizza and a plastic pitcher of orange Freshie on the dinner table when I’d come by to collect—sometimes it was just cereal—and accusatory stares through the screen door like somehow it was my fault.

  There was Mr. Lupien, an old man with more bushy white hair sprouting out of his ears than on his head and a French accent that made him hard to understand, who’d outlived not only his wife but two of his three children. His oldest son, he told me, lived in a nursing home in Sarnia. He visited him whenever he could.

  There were more, there were a lot more, and I delivered to all of them.

  Funny how sometimes it’s sunniest outside when it’s coldest. Mr. Bennett’s science class, the period after lunch, the snow that covered the blacktop a frozen mirror reflecting lasers of sparkling sunlight into my blinking, slightly watering eyes. Eyes that should have been on the blackboard defaced by Mr. Bennett’s near-incomprehensible handwriting, but which were looking out the window watching Mr. Dunlop, the school custodian, pour salt from a plastic bag over the sidewalk. Mr. Dunlop did all of his outdoor jobs with a cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth, but on bitter days like this, frozen breath escaping his lips whenever cigarette smoke wasn’t, he looked like a salt-pouring machine with a mouth for a muffler.

  Science was my second-least-favourite subject, a close number two to math. Math was a crossword puzzle, but with numbers instead of words. Get just one number wrong and the entire thing was spoiled. People who were good at math, like Adam Stephenson and Kirsten McDonald, weren’t like the people who always got As in English or history or social studies. Getting their relentlessly red-check-marked tests back from the obviously pleased teacher, more than being simply happy with their gaudy grades, they seemed smug, like they’d figured out how a little piece of the universe worked. It’s not life, it’s just math, I sometimes wanted to say. Because I rarely got more than a C+, though, I knew what it would sound like if I did.

  Science was slightly better than math because at least you could see the things you were supposed to know. Even invisible ideas like gravity had an eventual physical payoff, Newton’s head-bopping apple or the piece of chalk Mr. Bennett dropped into his palm. Today Mr. Bennett was talking about the solar system. He said that we were always discovering new things about the universe, like how until relatively recently people believed that the sun rotated around the earth. A few of the smart kids snickered, someone in the back of the class sneezed, I tried to look like I’d known it all along. Not that it mattered. Either way, Mr. Dunlop would still be outside smoking his cigarette and emptying his blue plastic bag of salt over the sidewalk so that people wouldn’t slip and fall.

  Then Mr. Bennett talked about the sun. It was 4.5 billion years old, he said, and about a hundred times larger than the earth. I wrote that down in my notebook. Those were the kinds of details that end up on a test. The sun, he continued, was a star like any other star you see at night in the sky, except that our star was still alive and burning brightly, making life possible on earth.

  Colin McManus raised his hand. “You mean that stars can die?” Colin was always putting his hand up, even when he obviously knew the answer to his question. He thought it made him look smart. His father was a dentist, and every year Colin got permission to leave early the week of March Break because his family went to Florida.

  “They all die,” Mr. Bennett said, “but they’re so far away, it can take four hundred years for their light to reach the earth. Your entire life, you can believe you’re looking at a star that’s alive when what you’re really looking at is a dead star whose light went ou
t centuries ago.” You knew Mr. Bennett was enjoying himself because he wasn’t standing up in front of the class as usual, but was sitting on his desk swinging his short legs back and forth. Mr. Bennett had a fat wart on his right cheek and a few of us were already taller than he was.

  “But…” I said.

  “Yes? But what, Tom?” I hadn’t raised my hand, but Mr. Bennett didn’t appear to care, was having too much fun introducing us to the universe.

  “But—” I wasn’t sure what I wanted to ask, but I knew I needed to know the answer “—what happens to the earth when the sun dies?” We’d already studied photosynthesis in the fall term, so I knew that plants couldn’t grow without sunlight.

  “Well,” Mr. Bennett said, legs really swinging now, “about five billion years from now the sun will grow even larger and hotter and will either get so big that it’ll swallow the earth up whole like an enormous ball of fire consuming a tiny piece of paper or it will just burn everything up beyond recognition and boil all of the oceans and lakes and rivers until they evaporate.”

  Just was a but-not-so-bad word. But there wasn’t anything not so bad about the earth, people, animals—everything—disappearing forever. Mr. Bennett slapped his thighs through his polyester brown slacks and slid down from the edge of the desk. “But that won’t be for a long, long time, and we’ve got more important things to think about right now. I want everyone to get their textbooks out and turn to chapter three, page 79.”

  I hadn’t done my homework, hadn’t read chapter three, but whatever was in it, I knew it couldn’t have been more important than what I’d just found out.

  I could have switched schools when we moved from the house on Vanderpark Drive to the apartment downtown, but I think Dad believed we’d been through enough change already, so I stayed an Indian Creek Road Public School Sun Devil and my best friend stayed Dale Sutcliffe. Dale and I weren’t on any teams and didn’t have girlfriends, both of which were okay because we collected Monty Python records and memorized Steve Martin stand-up skits and compared notes on our favourite horror movies and kept a notebook of all of the nicknames we had for the teachers we didn’t like and all the dumb things that people would say and even the things we thought were pretty damn smart, just as long as they were also pretty damn funny. Julie was already at CCI by then, so the move downtown made getting to school and back easier for her, but now I needed to travel from one end of the city to the other for nine a.m. five days a week. Luckily, there was Mr. Brown.