by Jan Redford
“Isn’t that what you and Pam were doing? A quick walk-through?”
A few years ago, Nona and Pam had been working a block like this one. They’d come around a corner and almost bumped into a grizzly sow and her two full-grown cubs. They’d tried to back away but Pam had panicked, started to run, so Nona had run too. The sow charged, Pam tripped, and when Nona looked back, she could see Pam’s hands sticking out from under the mama bear. Nona reached the truck, jumped in, and backed up while leaning on the horn. The bears took off, and Pam had been conscious enough to crawl into the cab, in spite of the hunks of flesh missing from her back and shoulders, the scalp missing from her head. The girls had told me this story on my very first day of work.
We headed into the bush with our dogs on leashes. Chaba and Rocky stayed near, didn’t pull ahead like they normally did. We walked heavily, talked loudly and blew our whistles every few minutes. I put my flares in my shirt pocket and kept a hand on my bear spray. Nona looked around often, stopping every once in a while to listen, but we passed massive areas of dug-up dirt—bear diggings—without turning back. The bear had rolled good-sized boulders looking for insects. I felt very empathetic toward Pam and wished we’d never stepped out of the truck, but Nona just kept pushing on. The mauling had made her belligerent, almost territorial in the bush.
As we were crashing through the brush, she looked back and said, “So how’s it going with Grant this week?”
This week. The girls were getting used to my marital problems. I tried to stop myself from spewing, but it was like trying to plug a punctured artery.
The more I heard the others’ stories, the more I wished I could stop whining. Nona’s husband’s liver was on its way out; Shawna, with her two kids, had escaped a physically abusive husband; Jane had been unhappy for years but didn’t feel she could take her three kids away because her husband was neither an alcoholic nor physically abusive. Sher, Pam and Bonnie were genuinely happy after years of marriage. Their men doted on them. If I ever worked with them, I’d grill them and take copious notes.
“I’m starting to wonder about school. I don’t know if it’s worth the fight.”
“You have to go to school.”
All the women said the same thing. That I had to go to school. Sometimes I thought they were trying to live vicariously through me.
“The kids are so young.”
Nona sighed impatiently. “If you want to go to school, you’ll go to school.”
Irritation crept up my scalp. It wasn’t that easy to just pick up and leave. I had two kids. A dog and a cat. A house. A husband who didn’t even want me to go.
We walked on in silence, listening to the bush.
“I’m leaving John,” Nona said.
“What?” I quickened my pace and came up beside her.
“I found a house in town and the boys and I are moving this weekend.”
“Are you serious?”
There I was, so hung up with my own marital conflicts that I hadn’t even noticed what was going on with one of my best friends. She and John had been together for fifteen years. They lived down the road from us on over a hundred acres with a couple of woodlots, but it was John’s. He had grown up there and inherited the property—Nona would never try to take it from him. I couldn’t imagine her in town, down on the flats without her garden, without the woods all around her, without her little log home.
Nona stopped and put up her hand. “Did you hear that?”
I listened. Breaking branches. Something was crashing around out there.
I unsnapped my bear spray. “I vote we go back.”
Nona veered away from the sound, in the general direction of the truck, but not as directly as I’d have liked.
“What are you doing?”
“We’ve hardly seen any of the block. I don’t want to come back tomorrow. Let’s take the long way back. Show him he can’t push us around.”
“But he can! That’s the problem.” Chaba pulled me toward Nona and Rocky so I took the safety clip off my bear spray and followed. We crashed around, blew on our whistles and made a wide arc in the general direction of the truck. I followed Nona, wishing I were half as gutsy as her. She had the balls to take two teenaged boys and move to town, leaving her husband and a property she loved, and she had the balls to stand up to a grizzly.
“If you see him, whatever you do, don’t run,” she said in a low voice, as if the bear were listening. The same thing she’d said to Pam.
My mouth was dry. I wished I’d brought some water. Our arc slowly got more in line with the direction I wanted to go, back toward the truck. Soon I saw the double track and knew the truck wasn’t far.
“Would you play dead or fight?” I asked.
“Pam played dead and the bear kept chomping away at her. I’d never stop fighting.”
More branches snapped. It was far away and the truck was near, but Nona’s hand jumped to her bear spray. It rested there. Her fingers trembled.
She was scared shitless and she was going for it anyway.
* * *
—
With my paycheque, I headed to the bank to meet with the bank manager, Fiona.
“I’d like to open a savings account,” I said, sitting on the edge of a plastic chair in front of her desk.
Fiona passed me a form. “You’ll need Grant to sign if it’s joint.”
“I want it just in my name.”
Fiona dealt with Grant for the mortgage and our joint account and measly RRSPs.
I looked up at her before I signed and said, “I’d like this to be confidential.” Having an affair must feel just like this.
“Of course,” she said. Her eyebrows rose only slightly.
I signed the papers, deposited part of my pay, and left quickly.
30
MAMA SPIDERS
“Mommy! Haley won’t play Barbies with me.”
Oh, Christ. I white-knuckled my pen and stared down at my list of things to pack for our trip to my parents’ place in Victoria. The words blurred. I was so tired I could barely see straight.
“Mommy!”
I put my hands over my face and pretended not to hear. That old childish urge to stick my fingers in my ears and sing la la la la washed over me. I squeezed my eyes shut under my hands. If I can’t see her, maybe she can’t see me.
“I hate stupid Barbies,” Haley said.
“Let’s watch a video!” I said, getting up from the table. Bribes and threats, threats and bribes.
The two four-year-olds sat on the big overstuffed couch with their legs sticking out in front of them. As I pried Insect World out of the plastic rental box, I noticed its rating: PG. I always got G-rated movies but it must have been a typo; it was a nature film. I pushed play and the deep, male voice of the National Geographic commentator filled the room. The caring mother spider spins a protective web around her babies…
The kids were immediately enthralled. I had no idea how mothers had survived before the invention of television. How my mother had survived in the North, where we had only CBC-TV in black and white, starting at six in the evening. Wayne and Shuster and Walt Disney kept us out of Mom’s hair, once a week. Videos hadn’t even been invented.
The spiderlings are relatively helpless in their early days, and need lots of care.
I turned down the volume so as not to wake Sam. Once he woke up, that’d be the end of the packing. As I was pulling a tray of brownies out of the oven—more tools of bribery for the long drive—the phone rang. When I heard my father’s voice I panicked.
“What’s wrong? Has something happened to Mom?” My father never called; it was always my mother and he’d listen in only until I started complaining about Grant. Then all of a sudden there’d be something urgent he had to do in the garage.
“No, no, your mother’s fine. She’s at one of her bloody Newcomers’ meetings. We’ve been living in Victoria for four years, for chrissake.”
I calmed down and propped the phone on my shoul
der, continued cutting brownies. “So what’s up, Dad?”
“You’re all ready for your trip?”
“All ready. Tomorrow we’re going to blow this godforsaken Popsicle stand.” The well was dry again. I was back to hauling water from town in big blue jugs, using the outhouse, showering at friends’ places.
“You’ve got good snow tires? The conditions can get bad on the Coquihalla Highway this early in the spring.”
He was worried about us. That’s why he’d called. At thirty-two years old, I was still desperate for scraps of affection from my father.
“Yup. We’ve got good tires.” And we finally had a reliable car. Just before Sam was born the heater had gone in the Skylark, so we took out a loan for a brand new Toyota Tercel in Calgary. A red one. Grant had almost missed Sam’s birth because he’d had to go back to Golden to insure it.
“Good, good,” my father said.
“Don’t worry. I’ll drive carefully. I’m used to the snow. And we only have to get to Kelowna tomorrow.” Grant’s mother, conveniently, lived halfway to Victoria. If we could survive a couple of days with her.
“So, how long are you planning to stay?”
“I don’t know. Couple of weeks maybe. As long as it takes Sarah to fix my life.”
Sarah was a counsellor in downtown Victoria who my sister had worked with in her social work program. She’d guided me through two previous upheavals, the first one being Niccy’s death, and I’d decided I needed a counsellor you pay, not a freebie at the family centre for this next one. I’d just received a notice from university student housing. We had a two-bedroom unit for the fall and had to put a deposit down. I just had to convince Grant to move away from the mountains for four years, which would take my growing some big cajones. Sarah had her work cut out for her.
My father cleared his throat, paused. “Just want to make sure you aren’t staying too long.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, look what happened last time, for chrissake.”
“What happened last time? I thought we had a good visit.”
“Those bloody kids were into everything. I had to rearrange the house so they wouldn’t destroy all our stuff from the North.”
How could I have thought he was concerned about our safety?
“That’s called baby-proofing, Dad, and it was months ago. Jenna’s over four now.”
“I’m more concerned about Sam.”
He had a point there. I, too, had been dreading what Sam would do to their house. Last fall he’d only been ten months old and just starting to walk. Now he was fifteen months and running, climbing and pushing stuff over, pulling stuff down. My friend Laurel called him Bamm Bamm, from The Flintstones.
“Dad, they’re kids. That’s what kids do. They destroy things and make life miserable.” I didn’t even get a chuckle.
“Those soapstone carvings are worth a lot of money, you know.” I’d always attributed his attachment to stuff to his childhood poverty. As a kid, he’d had to work hard for everything, and then his dad would turn around and do something like sell the bike he’d bought with his own money. So as an adult he was incapable of putting up with atrocities like one of his kids leaving a water ring on his teak coffee table.
“And that bloody dog crapped all over my yard.”
“I cleaned it up. And besides, Chaba’s going to the kennel this time.”
“Two weeks is a long time.”
…spiderlings start drinking blood from her leg joints and within a few weeks, she cannot move at all.
“Eew! Gross!” The girls were close to tears. I looked at the screen and saw a fat, black spider sitting immobile, with millions of tiny spiders swarming all over her body.
At this point the spiderlings attack their mother just as they would prey, injecting her with venom and digestive juices and consuming her entirely.
“Jesus! Dad, I gotta go. I’ll call you back.” I slammed down the phone, raced around the couch, punched the power button and the screen went black, just as the fat, passive, nutrient-laden mother disappeared under her babies.
* * *
—
We hit the snowstorm about halfway up the first pass on the Coquihalla Highway. Big, white, wet flakes stuck to the car like spitballs. The plough hadn’t gotten this far yet, so there were only two tire tracks to follow in the slow lane. The fast lane was covered in a pile of slush a foot deep. The windshield wipers thunked back and forth and I had to lean forward to squint through the narrow path in the ice they were clearing. Brown snow was glued to the back window, leaving me with only my side mirrors, which I’d never been good with. At least both kids and the dog were asleep. The kennel had been full.
Maybe I should have stayed in Kelowna—I’d known the weather report was calling for snow—but I probably would have committed matri-in-law-cide. Dorothy had been pickled when we’d arrived and was worse after supper.
“You’re just using him for his money,” she’d said, as though I were married to a billionaire philanthropist. “You’ll let him put you through school and then leave him.”
She couldn’t believe I was serious about university. She had thought having a second baby would cure me of my subversiveness. She went on and on. “…You knew what you were getting into when you married a logger….You have a duty to follow him wherever he has work….You have a duty as a mother and a wife….”
The same bile, almost word for word, that had been coming out of Grant’s mouth. A few months ago he’d been talking about going back to the Himalayas with Barry, and now he wanted to move us all to Port Hardy, way up on the northern tip of Vancouver Island, so he could work in big wood. Away from family, friends, my job, school.
The next day Dorothy apologized, was contrite for an hour, then picked up where she’d left off—a pattern I’d noticed in her son. So I packed up the car and left. Now Dad would get us four days earlier than planned. With the dog. He’d be overjoyed.
Crawling along, the needle barely reaching sixty K, I came up behind a semi-truck with its four-way flashers on, going about fifty. I eyeballed the passing lane, imagining all that heavy snow sucking at the tires and throwing us into a 360, right under the semi, crushing us all to a bloody death. But the truck was kicking up snow, like a bombardment of sloppy snowballs coming one after another, and for seconds at a time, everything went dark as night, even though it was just past noon. I almost wanted my ’67 Buick Skylark. At least it had been more of a contender than a tiny Toyota Tercel.
I steered the car into the passing lane to make a break for it but didn’t notice another semi coming up behind me. I would have seen his lights in my side mirrors if I hadn’t been too terrified to take my eyes off the road. I almost jumped out of my seat belt to the deafening blast of his horn, and my foot slammed automatically on the gas. The car started to fishtail. Think think think! Was I supposed to turn the wheel into the slide like I did with my Dodge Darts? But they were rear-wheel drive, not front-wheel. Maybe I was supposed to step on the brake! But the semi on my ass was having trouble slowing, so I stepped on the gas again. The car straightened and kept us a few feet in front of death. I pulled in front of the semi I’d been tailing, and the idiot behind me blasted past, leaning on his horn and spraying a huge tidal wave of slush.
I slowed right down to forty, too terrified to go faster, and the semi I’d just passed flashed his lights. In my side mirror I could see more headlights coming up quickly through the snow. I wanted to put my head between my knees.
“Mommy, I’m hungry.”
“Not now, Jenna.” Please, please, not now.
In response to the insistent flashing behind me I managed to get my speed back up to fifty. At least that driver didn’t use his horn.
“Mommy, I’m really, really hungry.”
“Jenna, I can’t talk right now. Please, just wait a few minutes.”
Another semi passed and pulled in front of me to let the next one pass, and we were hemmed in on all sides, like a
tiny ladybug engulfed by big cockroaches.
“I’m going to wake Sam,” Jenna teased in a singsong voice. I looked in the rearview mirror and Jenna was poking her little brother. His head rolled to the other side of his car seat.
“Jenna, no!” If he woke up and started crying, I’d lose it.
She kept poking at him. He rolled his head again.
“Jenna, if you wake your brother I’m going to pull over and drop you on the side of the road and drive away. I swear to God!”
She withdrew her hand like it had been slapped, tucked her blanket under her chin and stuck her two fingers in her mouth. Self-loathing gripped me like a bout of food poisoning. I wanted to take my words back, tell her, I’m so sorry! It’s not you! It’s me! but my throat clenched up.
I needed her to stay quiet.
31
REMEMBER THE LILAC
“Ron!” My mother shook my father, who was slumped on the couch in front of the TV.
“Ron. Get up and go to bed.”
He grunted angrily and swiped at her hand, then opened his eyes, looked around, got up and staggered up the stairs without saying goodnight.
For a moment I was back in our living room in Munster, classical music cranked, watching my father pretend-conduct the orchestra—arms thrashing, sweat dripping, black hair flopping over his bald spot. Even now, when I heard classical music, I felt queasy.
“He didn’t last long.” I looked at my watch. It was only nine.
“He’s had a big day.”
“What, he pruned the stupid apple tree?” Why was I angry with her? She hadn’t done anything. No one seemed safe from my smouldering irritability these days, even my own mother.
“You know what I mean.”
“Why don’t you just tell him to fuck off?”
She didn’t react to my choice of words, though I knew it irked her. She used to wash my brother’s mouth out with soap when he said the F-word, now here she was with a daughter who swore like a logger, and worse, was married to one.
