This Is Running for Your Life

by Michelle Orange

  Before her reinvention, in her late seventies, as a silver-backed picara, I had not formed any defining ideas about my grandmother. Not particularly loving, or present, she wasn’t cold, or absent either. Although we lived in the same city while I was growing up, I didn’t see much more of her than birthdays and holidays obliged. She is a figurative outline in my early memory; whereas my paternal grandmother, Margaret, comes to me with a sensory fullness and emotional freight—the reward, perhaps, of the inscriptive force of her personality: everything she said and did seemed to tell the story of our family. Weeklong babysitting stints yielded forty-page novellas crafted for my parents, with highlights including my five-year-old self’s acquisition and subsequent overuse of the word attractive, and abridged transcripts of the phone calls she took from each of her five other children. It never occurred to me to wonder why one grandmother would travel seven hours to look after us when another lived a short drive away.

  Rooted in the same northern-Ontario home where my father was raised, Margaret Orange embraced the role of matriarch, bearing three children with my grandfather Robert, a widower who already had three toddlers (including my father) when they married in 1948. She was a powerfully social woman and became socially powerful in turn. Impeccably mannered and a little imposing, she was the kind of antiquated lady who might advocate for women’s education but never learn to drive. If you were a well-behaved child, her warmth was infinite.

  She was my first pen pal. I wear the University of Toronto ring she never took off and graduated from the same school—where my parents met—sixty years after she did. Three generations in a sentence, on a finger. Tough to compete with that even if you wanted to, and Rita was disinclined to play family narrator. A champion gabber, talking with her was like watching someone unpack a rummage closet: you were less a partner than an implied observer, waiting for the last pack of mummified golf tees to be placed at your feet.

  I never knew much about my mother’s family, who seemed half-composed compared to the epic sprawl of the Sudbury Oranges. Watching Rita endure her eighty-fifth birthday party, I realized that her story had eluded me in part because it was under constant and private revision. It was told only in the present tense, and then under great editorial restraint.

  * * *

  Marie Antoinette Rita Meunier was born in 1915 in Montreal, Quebec, the second of five children born to a redoubtable French Canadian woman and a proportionally degenerate gambling man. The family moved to Toronto, Ontario, when she was a girl; financial burdens forced Rita to drop out of school at fourteen to work as a full-time secretary. In 1939, Rita and Latham Boyle—a red-cheeked Irish Protestant with a big laugh and a bigger temper—huddled into the sacristy of Toronto’s Sacré Coeur church. His parents had threatened not to attend the wedding; her Roman Catholic parish insisted on protecting the Eucharist from heathen cooties. Latham played hockey for the Toronto Maple Leafs’ farm team—the Marlboros—as a young man and was deployed to the Queen Charlotte Islands, off the coast of British Columbia, during World War II. He returned home months after my mother, Jacqueline Claire, was born and paid the hospital bill—a grand total of $54.50 in pre-health-care Canada—from afar. The check was accompanied by a note:

  Dear Rita,

  RBY June 14

  Jackie has sort of taken care of my membership at Cedarbrae [golf course] for the year 1944 for which believe it or not I am most happy.

  Latham

  P.S. Save this + we will show it to her when she is twenty.

  When she was just shy of that age, my mother and her sister were the subject of a Hamilton, Ontario, newspaper article titled “Moving Didn’t Hurt Jackie, Jeannette.” The sales job Latham took upon returning to Toronto was itinerant, which resulted, among other things, in my mother’s enrollment in seven different schools before her high school graduation. Written in the blithe, can-do style of the days when the local paper would publish your address along with your name, the op-ed seeks to reassure a generation taught to equate a thriving family with a stable community and home equity that even those who must follow the work can have it all. The Boyle girls’ story, which ends with scholarships and my mother’s placement at a good university, “should prove to many families who get transferred now and then, it is possible to live a rich, full life and do well in spite of these small annoyances.”

  It’s a neat little bite of 1962, that clipping—pert, narrow, and yet deeply insinuating. That it has a place of honor in my grandmother’s scrapbooks—which I hauled out, to her dismay, whenever I visited—seems inevitable. Being named in the paper without having committed a felony or otherwise disgraced your family was (and, to a lesser extent, still is) a major event. But beyond that—say, fifty years beyond it—the clipping suggests the way the stories we are told about ourselves develop an agency outside our control, whether one is a public figure languishing in a tide of bad press or a private citizen pulled into the cultural narrative. In this case, a family of neo-gypsies is held up as an example of what it means to persist in a restless new world.

  In my memory the article was hard evidence of my mother’s triumph, which felt often enough like evidence of my lack. For us, the usual patterns of “in my day” parent-child coercions had a particular design: I was attached, in the most physical way, to the comforts of family and community; my mother believed change put hair on your chest and prepared you for a world that favors the adaptable. Our crucible in this regard was my refusal, at age eleven, to move from London to Toronto, where she lived, to attend a fancier middle school. For me it was never a consideration; if my attachment to home was a weakness, I had no interest in the alternative. The one-bedroom apartment of my mother’s disappointment had many mansions.

  Only in recent years have I learned that my grandparents never owned a home, that the constant displacements were a strain on Rita’s mental stability, that my mother was still sharing a bed with her sister when she graduated from that good university. Only recently has it occurred to me that chagrin scans as an unspecified emotion to a child, and chagrined is precisely how my mother felt about that article—a complex scenario and its consequences overwritten in the authoritative abstract. I hardly suspected that she had been dazzled by my father’s family—with their open-house chaos and habit of lingering at the table for heated, postmeal debates—in the exact way that I was. There was little sense that I would ricochet between the same competing ideas of what it means to be a woman: independent and agile versus rooted and stable. If the article left no hint that the noted scholar Jacqueline Boyle would eventually leap from cosleeping with her sister to a marriage bed and deferred career at twenty-two, certainly it was effective in keeping me off the scent of what those moves meant for my grandmother.

  The second of the family’s transplants, from the outer Toronto suburb of Scarborough to the eastern-Ontario city of Kingston, triggered Rita’s descent into the earliest of the depressions that carved an alpine pattern across her life. Separated from her family and friends for the first time and alone with two young children, she kept the house and organized the schooling, taking her daughters to see Bambi, The Wizard of Oz, and Gene Autry oaters, the entertainment of choice in Latham’s frequent absences. But neither domestic routine nor the movable oasis of moviegoing could prevent the abyss from pulling open. Within the year she grew shrunken and opaque, functioning basically and saying little. On bad days, the kind of chiding mothers sometimes use as a scare tactic—maybe I’ll just drop you home and get myself some ice cream; I’ll put you out of this car if you don’t cut it out—acquired the tone of a soothing mantra. In her most wretched moods she would threaten to take my barely school-aged mother and her little sister to the movie theater and leave them there. Then one day she did.

  My mother doesn’t remember how she got herself and her sister home, except that it was a long, bewildered trudge, her child’s mind punctured by the sense that something was terribly wrong. Their afternoon’s affliction suggests a rough scheme of depression
itself, extreme versions of which have been described in terms of obscurity: black veils lowering; black dogs blotting out the sun; blackness indeed visible, the palette of consciousness run to an unyielding monochrome. But what cornering violence is done behind this cover? By what cunning is the formidable mechanism of a human being suspended, inverted?

  Though inclined toward the idea of depression as a complex but fundamentally responsive phenomenon, when I have looked at my grandmother’s face these last few years, translucent and ravened of its flesh, her eyes trained and expectant and her mouth parted on the cusp of speech, I think of it in not just clinical but conquering terms. I envision the tunneling of better angels, pursued to the ends of a quiet mind by a bouldering force, a cancer without cause, a morbid, ungoverned appetite whose ultimate, consuming will for release confuses the sufferer and then elicits her collusion. I imagine the sufferer knowing, within a last, windowed attic of consciousness, that she is in trouble; and that the tunnel, sensing a remaining source of light, will eventually seek and swallow this place too.

  * * *

  Loss of interest in once-pleasurable activities is a fast track to a depression diagnosis. No one had to tell Rita that the demon had returned; her daughters recognized it quickly as well. But if hope and disbelief mingled in my initial response to her sudden withdrawal, when I learned that she had stopped going to the movies, my understanding of her suffering shifted.

  Many Catholics Rita’s age, including my father’s parents, developed a lifelong aversion to moviegoing in the 1930s—a measure of the success of the Legion of Decency, which at the back of Catholic churches posted lists of the films whose contents would condemn one’s soul to hell. Save the apparently infallible South Pacific, my father never knew Margaret to see a film. “I think she thought movie theaters were filled with rubby-dubs,” he told me, “or filthy midgets.” But if Rita ever paid any heed, she was long through abnegating by the time I came along.

  My first memories of both my grandmother and moviegoing are combined. She loved a matinee, though for Latham, who wore a hearing aid all his life, movie theaters were dens of frustration and extortionately priced snacks. For a year or so in the early 1980s I became her movie buddy, a sidekick invariably as excited about the chocolate-filled bulk baggies tucked into the far reaches of her purse as I was about the show. What we saw was always her choice, after all, and I’m less concerned now that I was taken to see Arthur and Night Shift as a six- and seven-year-old than saddened that I was the most viable candidate for the job.

  I made my first plane trip during that period, a flight to Rita and Latham’s mobile home in Tampa, Florida, on a Wardair 747 airbus. My brother and I were dressed to fly in pressed blazers and shiny shoes. Photos show us nestled into middle-row seats, heads clapped by giant headphones, his and hers comic books propped in our laps. My main memory of the flight, aside from the seizure and mastery of one more in life’s long series of opportunities to prove my mettle, is the appearance before me of a shrink-wrapped cornucopia that contained, among its personalized treasures, thimble-size plastic shakers of salt and pepper. This, I thought, scanning the individually wrapped items for things to season, is the life for me.

  Another photo from that trip: the moviegoers are posed in a golf cart: me on the left, properly pleased to be riding shotgun in a tiny car, Rita at the wheel, browned and shrunken, baring a few teeth in lieu of a smile. I hadn’t noticed the details of her expression or posture until she pointed them out to me, two decades later, when I gifted her with a calendar featuring pictures of our family where, say, Chippendales or rare English roses might be.

  “Oh,” she said, recoiling at the old back-nine snap. “I can’t look at that. Look at me—you can see how sick I was.”

  What might a child understand about that kind of illness? Death, with its absolute terms and dramatic scope, might engage a porous imagination more readily. Choosing that photo as an emblem of our bond was a clearer expression of it than I could have known. Shortly after it was taken, Rita was hospitalized for the second time, a six-week stay. During her first hospitalization, in 1969, she received electroconvulsive shock therapy that temporarily redacted her long-term memory. She was released in time for her youngest daughter’s wedding.

  In the moment, I let her reaction to the photo pass without comment. A reflex, maybe, and one honed with good reason. Soon after that, an outside conversation was begun, and for the first time I learned about her suffering over decades when mental illness was treated variously with indifference, quackery, barbarism, and mercenary cant. I plied family members reluctant to discuss the bad times, especially when she was doing so well. “Look at me,” she’d said. It’s the only reference I had ever heard her make to her depressions, or would hear.

  Those years—after learning of her illness and before the relapse—formed a peak in our relations. The pattern indicated a bout of depression every ten to fifteen years, but instead of triggering an earlier onset, my grandfather’s sudden death in 1987 seemed to head it off, and her renaissance commenced. She wanted to go to the show again. And she wanted to talk.

  Over the years I have been told stories about her neighbors and golf buddies and grocery clerks many times over, three generations back and several marriages across, but I never heard her say her father’s name. As a teenager I avoided her calls if I didn’t have at least ninety minutes to spend counting the words I wedged in on one hand. During my university and early working years in Toronto, the odd letter would arrive (Rita’s prodigiousness on the horn had a proportional aversion to long-distance fees), filled with news of her meals, her neighborly adventures, and her next transcontinental tour (only Antarctica went unseen).

  But not until my 2003 move to New York City did our correspondence develop a meaningful rhythm. Within a couple weeks of my arrival her first letter was slipped into my mailbox, a familiar balm during those early, disorienting days. Leaving Canada for the United States was a controversial move in my family; historically the departed were rarely heard from again. Unlike Bulgarians, say, or Sri Lankans or Ugandans or even the Dutch, Canadians cannot pine openly for the land of freedom and opportunity. Because we have plenty of both, dreams of America bring the question of ego close to the surface, and Canadians find very little more unfortunate than ill-fitting britches. Pursuing a move to the States is regarded as unseemly but somewhat inevitable, like an admission to peeing in the shower, or applying to a reality show. Still, many Canadians harbor a detailed defection scenario. Mine involved being trauma-wrapped in Old Glory at the border and swept into a block-long limo bound for the land of relevance, where unlimited credit cards and an abrasive spouse await.

  My parents accepted my decision to enter the film studies program at New York University, but like everyone else they had doubts. Rita, meanwhile, began slipping me provisional missives—always with a freshly pressed “greenback” folded in—every other week. It seemed the farther I went, the more interest I held for her. The encouragement was oblique, as was her way, with the exception of an early curveball sent right over home plate: “Well, you weren’t going to be happy until you did it,” she wrote. “Now it’s done.”

  If proximity blurs perspective and intimacy distorts reason, perhaps the gift of the distance my grandmother has maintained throughout my life is that she’s had me in focus all along.

  * * *

  The Melville complex, conceived in the recent tradition of elder care, gives a graduated structure to inexorable human decline. For the freshman they offer “independent living,” a proto-dorm with dollhouse attractions including an on-site hair salon (shampoo and set for fifteen bucks; updo for twenty-five), a game room, and nurses roaming the halls with the day’s meds nested in little plastic cups, like Mother Pharma’s eggs. On another floor of the same building is the next level of care, for those who need assistance with the business of living. Across the road and down the way is Melville’s nursing home, which makes no bones about its form or function and is therefore
little mentioned.

  My mother and my aunt settled on Melville in early 2007, when Rita’s depression was proliferating beyond the means of their phone calls, meals deliveries, and biweekly visits. Toronto, though closer to her home and most of her family, was beyond consideration financially, with a five-year waiting list and starting rates in the vicinity of five thousand dollars a month for some five hundred square feet. The market is growing as steadily as the population is aging, and people like my parents are already planning for an independent dotage, refusing to be nursed into death in a curtain-lined cot, and never considering that their children might take up the cause.

  Almost four years after that move, Rita is on the verge of being kicked out of independent living for various bodily insubordinations. The terms have an existential vagueness: if you can’t take care of yourself, you can’t stay. My own independent lifestyle couldn’t stand the scrutiny.

  * * *

  On this, Palm Sunday, the lobby is trimmed with secular displays of psycho bunnies, mutant eggs, and an insinuating pink plastic moss. The elevators, papered with cheery reminders about the weekly meetings of the bridge club, the cribbage club, the “news and views” club, the men’s club, the knitting circle, egg painting, and something called Red Fridays, tend to make me melancholy. Your every theoretical desire anticipated and presented back to you in bubbly script.

  The elevator doors, also tailored to the slow-moving residents, are programmed to hang open an extra ten seconds. The halls are wide and have bars along the sides for unsteady walkers, whose ranks my grandmother has recently joined. After a knock at number 407, I open the door and peer in. Inside I see the top of Rita’s head at the other end of the apartment, beyond the galley kitchen. She is sitting in a favorite chair, one of a long-lived, velveteen husband-and-wife pair. It’s just the one now, the second chair having recently succumbed to an accident. Last year she was moved from a one-bedroom into a studio, her surroundings seeming to whittle in ruthless sympathy with her flesh.