Cheryll lived on the street behind ours. Sometimes she would walk into a neighbour’s backyard, hop the fence to get to our yard, and knock on our back door. You could do that in those days—use other people’s backyards as shortcuts around the neighbourhood without being screamed at about trespassing on private property. We were taught to respect the boundaries of others and to keep to the fence line. Other times, Cheryll and I would take the long way to our respective homes.
Cheryll was one of those extraordinary childhood friends, slightly wiser, slightly more daring, the one with the more interesting toys. She had a mass of long, bouncy, gingery-blond hair that framed a galaxy of amber freckles on white skin. She had a maturity beyond her years that my parents appreciated. She spoke to them on a chattier, more relaxed level than I could ever manage with adults, let alone my parents. She was full of news from around the neighbourhood about who was moving away, who was moving in, who was sick, who was off on a trip. My mother, as a local-newspaper columnist, was particularly appreciative of Cheryll’s intel.
Along with her facility in social situations, Cheryll possessed a big imagination. Her head was a vivid, exciting playground. When we played house, it was never anything as predictable as mimicking the home life of our surroundings; no, our pretend house was in Japan, or Holland, or in ancient Egypt, and Cheryll ensured that we dressed the part. She had a dress-up trunk to die for. I have no idea where she got her ideas or all the outfits—probably from a travelling grandparent—but the stuff was always thrilling and surprising.
She was an easy friend; a forgiving one, too. Ours was a fluid, relaxed friendship. One day we would play with dolls, the next it was house or drawing, the day after we might raid our brothers’ toy boxes and spend an hour or two playing with trucks and cars. I can still hear the tinkle of conspiratorial laughter as she directed our play. She did not allow herself to show hurt feelings. If anyone called out childish taunts against her, she would shake her head of thick curls, wrinkle her nose, and laugh as if to say, “Aren’t they weird?” and continue on her merry way. This was the fundamental difference between Cheryll and me: she laughed off stuff like that; I would have taken to my room for two days. As my mother frequently pointed out, Cheryll was the type who could roll with the punches.
I slow down my wallpaper stripping and listen to the past. Nostalgia is a welcome blood clot to the present. Soon, Cheryll’s big laugh comes bounding out from some far quadrant of my brain. This is not the first time I have thought of her in the last few weeks. Strange that she keeps popping into my head. Whatever happened to her? Where is she now? What is her life like? Why did we lose touch? I am overcome with a sudden determination to find her, to be reassured that her life turned out okay. Yet, how ridiculous. I have a hundred things to deal with right now. Focus, I tell myself. Get this renovation done, then you can look for Cheryll. But that has been so much my pattern, of fixing myself to a single direction, and delaying another avenue of interest until I have more time, more money, more nerve. I resolve to start looking for Cheryll.
I continue scraping the wall in tiny, incremental movements, as my mind methodically works through the steps I would need to take to locate Cheryll. I have no idea where on the planet she lives. Is she still in Canada? That alone is a big search area. I do not recall her married name; maybe she is still under her maiden name.
My arm feels weak. I take a break, step back from the wall, and look at the work ahead of us: this is going to take ages. I move in and resume scraping. Bits of wood chip flutter to the ground, forming a small pile at my feet. Possibly, just possibly, if I find Cheryll, I can resurrect our friendship, and I can begin to restore—renovate, yes!—a bit of my past. The thought rumbles like a long train coming into the station, and there is an unexpected moment of clarity. I had never considered the possibility that all this moving and renovating might be about me trying to rebuild and renovate myself. The rape attack is a definite spur, but so, too, is my disjointed upbringing and chasing after perfection. Maybe this is not about a house; maybe it is about me. As that possibility enters my head, my scraper eases under a corner of the wood chip and a huge sheet lifts away miraculously and easily from the wall.
At the sound of it, The Husband pokes his head around the corner. He eyes me jealously. “Well done,” he says. “I’m putting the kettle on. Want a tea, a coffee?”
I do not, but I agree anyway. It feels as if I am on the verge of a big self-discovery, and at this point I would rather continue to work away at the wood-chip wallpaper and play a bit longer in memory land. It is not so much escaping into the past as it is about processing the past. Sometimes the present becomes clear only when the experience of the past is allowed to settle and mature. It takes time to process a lifetime. Scraping wallpaper: this is manual labour with benefits.
The Husband and I go out to the backyard and sit on a pile of bricks. The sun and the vivid blue of the sky make a mockery of our surroundings. The yard is still a mess of rubble, weeds, scattered bricks, and rotted lengths of lumber crawling with wood lice. I cannot even visualize how it might look all fixed up. I glance at the collapsed section of fence on one side: the entire run will have to be replaced. Another expense.
“Having fun?” I ask him brightly. If I allow my mood or my enthusiasm to waver, if I look as if I am distracted, The Husband might think I am rethinking this whole project.
He rolls his eyes. “‘Fun’ perhaps for you.”
“It’s an adventure, or rather, we should look at it as an adventure. Remember, this is our bonding exercise. Strengthening our relationship.”
I do not blame The Husband when he snorts derisively. My mother used variations of that line on my brother and me: “Renovating is fun.” “It is an adventure.” “You should be grateful to do such work.” And, “This is what families do—a family that works together stays together.”
Actually, no family I had met then or since did the scale of renovation that our family did. Come to think of it, I am surprised our family survived intact.
Mug drained, I walk back into the house, pick up my scraper, and start chipping away at the wood chip and the past.
AT DAY’S END, WE RETURN to the relative sanity and cleanliness of our Little Britain home. I rustle up a quick supper—frozen vegetarian pies tonight; thank you, Linda McCartney—and then head upstairs to the room that serves as my office.
I scrounge through piles of boxes, haul out smaller boxes and manila folders crammed with crimp-edged snapshots from the late fifties and the sixties. Must organize these, I remind myself for the umpteenth time.
How is it possible for so much memory to exist in a single, small celluloid print? I dump the contents of one envelope and rummage through random pictures from a host of decades. I am sure I have a picture of Cheryll and me. There it is. One of my parents must have taken this photograph, because the picture places us in my backyard, against the dense bottle-green spruce hedges my parents favoured. In the photograph, Cheryll and I are standing either side of a white-stone bird bath, holding hands. We had raided Cheryll’s dress-up trunk that day, and she decided to dress me in a Dutch costume complete with wooden clogs. She dressed up in a quasi–Native American tunic and sash. Funny, my memory of that day had us reversed: the Dutch costume suited her flouncy strawberry curls, while the Native American one better suited my tanned olive skin and long, straight, dark-brown hair. I am struck now by her generosity; I had not recognized it at the time. Most friends would have taken the more attractive outfit for themselves, but not Cheryll.
Our friendship fizzled once my family moved. I am surprised my parents did not do more to nurture my existing friendships. As I said, they liked Cheryll a lot. She was the standard to which I was unfavourably compared: “You are so glum and shy. Why can’t you be more upbeat like Cheryll?” Or, “Why don’t you dress like Cheryll? She always looks so smart.”
I last saw Cheryll at a shopping mall on the outskirts of Toronto. Was it thirty or so years ago? I first hea
rd the sound of her voice—familiar, animated, slightly hoarse—and my head swivelled toward it like a divining rod. There she was, talking to someone. She could talk to anyone. I stood off to one side so as not to interrupt her conversation. But at that moment it was as if she had sensed a change in the air: she turned her head, saw me. Her mouth made a big O, and she squealed. She hustled toward me, grabbed my arm, and dragged me back to introduce me to the person with whom she was speaking: “This is Jane! She was my best friend from school! We were in kindergarten together!” Cheryll always spoke in exclamation marks.
I was on a lunch break from work; so was she. She worked in a women’s clothing store in the mall, she said, and was expecting her first child. I gave her my phone number, with the promise of a longer chat when we both had more time. It was a hurried conversation, and by the time we went our separate ways, I had no real sense of what her life was like.
A month or so later, I returned to the mall and went to the store where she worked. I learned she had gone on maternity leave.
Truth be told, I had not tried terribly hard to find Cheryll. It was the mid-1980s: my first marriage was on a nosedive, and I did not feel sociable, or up to talking about my failure as a wife. With divorce looming and two little boys to care for, my mind was heavy with how I was going to support them, and how I was going to survive the ignominy of being a single parent. My reluctance to seek out Cheryll and re-establish our friendship was also due to a deeper sense of personal disgrace: My rape had happened a few years earlier and was still a shameful secret. I wanted to erase it from my memory, and to do that I needed a clean slate—a new set of friends, a new job, a new life, a new place to start over. It would not do to have an old friend like Cheryll learn the truth of what had happened to me. These days I think I could tell her, and I do not think she would judge me.
Was this something I should do now: find Cheryll? Perhaps it was better to sit with the idea. Reconnecting with old friends can sometimes leave you wishing you had not made the effort.
I once drove 125 miles to visit an old school chum with whom I had reconnected online. When I arrived, I did not recognize her; was, frankly, shocked by her appearance. She was grey and bitter, dressed in a patterned housedress, the kind that women in the 1940s might have worn while doing housework. During our entire visit I could not see anything of the mischievous and happy friend to whom I had once been so close. I kept my car keys in my hand, stealing glances at my watch and wondering how soon I could leave without appearing impolite.
Life had not been kind to her, and it appeared she was intent on returning the favour. Her home was unkempt. Unwashed dishes sat piled in the sink and spilled over onto the countertops. Ashtrays teemed with spent cigarettes and ash, which the summer breeze blew onto her worn furniture. Dust coated everything, and in the unforgiving rays of the afternoon sun you could see more of it hovering, waiting to land. She had a collection of owls in every conceivable medium, and their saucer-like eyes looked eerily like the black stare my friend wore behind her large, round glasses.
I had tried to cheer her up with lively conversation, but she would not have it. She told me she had cancer while she puffed furtively on a cigarette. I asked how her treatment was going, but she shifted the conversation back to me and asked sternly why I had looked her up.
“Because we were friends, and I wanted to see how you were.”
She countered abrasively that what I really wanted was to compare how much better than hers my life had turned out. It was a lie, and it stung. She was evasive and prickly on every subject; loaded for bear, as they say. Nothing I could do or say generated any warm feeling. Much later, after I returned home, I discovered that she had embezzled from her place of work and was under house arrest at the time of my visit.
Surely Cheryll would be different. I think of her bubbly, sunny disposition; her bouncy walk. Surely time and life had not sucked the effervescence out of her, too.
My mind wanders from Cheryll to the other little playmates I had back then. What of Sharon Scott, who lived across the road on Malabar Court? Or George Lawrence, who tied his shoelaces to the piano leg in kindergarten and for whom I gave up my recess to help unknot them? What of Bill and Laurie Austin? Kate Rainsberry? The names percolate like a dormant gene zapped to life, but instead of happy reverie, ruefulness swoops in. I am back to blaming my parents. How could they not see that their compulsive moves, their fixation with homes and social aspiration, denied me the foundational pieces for my own development, such as a solid circle of playmates? How much better all our lives could have been, how much more emotionally stable we could have been, had my parents understood that children need to feel fixed and rooted to a place. But they put no currency in that. It was always about them, always about their bloody houses.
11
The Layers Revealed
We are still on the wood-chip wallpaper. We have discovered more of it, on the hall ceiling of all places, and scraping it from an awkward angle ramps up our annoyance levels. The Husband offers to take the bullet on this one. He is taller, so he can reach it easier. Plus, he is a gentleman. Still, there is no mistaking a touch of self-flagellation in his offer, that scraping wood chip off the ceiling will be penance for buying this dump in the first place.
As for me, I am warming to the house. I do not totally love it—maybe I will not ever totally love it—but I have a morbid fascination of seeing where this renovation takes the house, where it takes me, and us as a couple.
Removing the wood-chip wallpaper does not faze me. There is a hypnotic quality to the work that gets into my pores and cells. With scraper in hand, I dig gently but firmly at a corner and use the smallest of actions to wedge under an edge until there is enough of the paper to allow it to be torn from the wall. As I home in on one stubborn section, my focus becomes concentrated, like narrowing one’s gaze on a pinhead. Scrape, scrape. The rhythmic action, the intense shortened field of vision deliver me into a contemplative trance. Soon, the scraping is nothing but white noise, and my mind is tumbling down the rabbit hole, straining for the sounds of my past.
With one exception, all my previous homes permitted me to have my way with them, to do what alterations needed to be done so that I could settle into them. This Bristol house is different. Each morning when The Husband and I leave Little Britain and drive toward it, I do not approach the prospect with the excitement of previous renovations but with a cautiousness, a preparation of mind. Like going to church. It is a common house, nothing special. Its location, its architecture are, as they say in this country, bog standard. But for some reason this ordinary house seems determined to draw me into a level of self-reflection that I was not expecting, nor had wanted. It has taken me in hand and led me to a scraper and a bucket of warm water, apparently believing that this is all I need to direct my mind to the past, consider the present, and to glean from this exercise patterns, symmetry, and insight. My guide is not the grumbling old man I sensed on our first visit to this house; I think he was just the caretaker, a squatter. I think he got fed up and left. This other manifestation is benign and definitely more task oriented in terms of getting me to meditate on why home—and by extension, moving—has been so dominant a force in my life. This house is a spirit teacher.
HOW DO HOMES LAST SO LONG? Bricks are essentially sand, clay, and water; stone is nothing but sediments of sand, minerals, and water. Furthermore, when we look upon a home, why do we categorize it as an old home or a modern home? Are not all homes ancient? Are they not all built from sand sifted up from some long-vanished lake or ocean, and of stone hacked from the vast strata of bedrock that comprises the earth? Whether the sand or stone comes from the crags of Scotland, the Apennines of Italy, the Picos in Spain, the Canadian Shield in North America, or the Andes in Peru, our homes are birthed from a geological lineage millions of years old. Even the sharp-squared brick of a newly built home is fired from the earth’s prehistoric quarry of sand, soil, and lime. All our homes and buildings are literally
as old as the hills.
How is the rubric of stacking stone or brick determined to ensure the durability and stability of a home? And what is it in that conglomeration of hard materials that go into building a home—of brick, concrete, stucco, stone, wood, plaster, glass, steel, aluminum, PVC pipes, and copper wiring—that makes the whole ultimately soft to us, one that so readily absorbs our emotions and memories and fears?
When a marriage breaks down, does the marital home suffer, too? It is one thing for houses to resist centuries of battering by Mother Nature, but what of the blunt forces of human nature? How do houses withstand the reverberation of anger, or of inconsolable grief, within their walls? How do they withhold secrets and pain without cracking, or absorb extreme joy without their windows shattering in their frames?
What is it about the homes of other people that makes us swoon with desire? That makes you want to pull up a chair, stare, and luxuriate in the surroundings and imagine that the home belongs to you? With some homes you are happy to leave, and the sooner the better. Some do not try hard enough to evoke comfort. Then there are the ones that try too hard, exuding the perfumed and surgically enhanced glamour of a superannuated movie star.
A third type of home enchants at an almost cellular level. You want to take in every inch of it—the arrangement of knick-knacks on bookshelves; the sight of a row of herbs on a windowsill; the interplay of light and shadow; the choice of colours and furnishings; a passageway leading into the garden. I confess to being mesmerized this way when visiting or seeing images of Spanish, Italian, and Moroccan homes. Is there an alchemical formula at work in the homes to which we are attracted? Is it 20 percent nostalgia, 30 percent colour, 10 percent furnishings, 15 percent botanicals and plants, 25 percent lighting (natural and electrical)? Surely the formula is different for everyone. In the same way that a meal tastes better when someone else cooks it—their specific ingredients? the convivial nature of the conversation? the surroundings?—some houses look, feel, and smell better than our own. Is it a case of the other person’s grass being always greener? Perhaps it says something about our lack of confidence in putting together a home, or about our general state of discontentedness.
Open House Page 11