When I Was Young and In My Prime

by Alayna Munce

Her feet are ticklish. They jump as I wash them.

  Last night she told me a joke as I helped her off with her clothes—a joke about a truck driver picking up a hitch-hiking little girl and asking her to take off her pants and the girl giggling ’cause there was no way her pants would fit that man. Liza laughed then sobered. “It’s not fair,” she said to me, “you all dressed and me naked.”

  She said it so plainly that for a moment, I had a genuine impulse to take off my clothes.

  The Russian formalist literary theorists have this word I love. Ostranenie. It translates more or less as defamiliarization. To tilt things at such an angle that we can see them new, beyond the patina bestowed by habit. Often the goal is to reveal a horror or hypocrisy we’ve become used to. Or to reveal a beauty we take for granted. Sometimes the goal is even more elusive—to steal a glimpse of the essential hard-to-get-at strangeness of being here at all.

  Which, I think, is maybe the seat of beauty. I’m in the reference library photocopying an out-of-print book of philosophy for James for his birthday. He’s been looking for it for ages. It’s called, On Science, Necessity and the Love of God. In my hands is the only copy in the entire Toronto Public Library system. I’ve phoned all the second-hand bookstores in the city so know there aren’t any copies there. I found one for sale on the internet, but it was a first edition in mint condition and out of my price range. I have to admit I’m enjoying the feeling of photocopying a rare, out-of-print book. Makes me feel special. Nothing wrong with that; nothing special about wanting to feel special.

  I keep having to fend people off when they stand behind me waiting for the copier. I’ll be a while, I say calmly, over my shoulder. I’m copying the whole book. The people pause then wander off, bewildered to find they have no recourse.

  The reference library is a grand, stadium-like building with five high-ceilinged open-concept floors arranged in rings around a cavernous centre space. I stand at a photocopy machine on the third floor, looking out over the hushed library, its rings. People of every race and creed, each of them on a mission—to do the research for their political science essay, to find out about the rash in their crotch, to extend their family tree, to pass the afternoon quietly in the presence of other human beings.

  I think of Dante, his rings.

  Of my Buddhist friend Gloria who says she thinks the hell realms are here on earth, and we all go in and out of them.

  I lift the lid, turn the page, close the lid, press the button.

  Two young Asian girls in a corner on the first floor are practising the slow movements of some martial art, taking turns, whispering modifying instructions to one another.

  I lift, turn, close, press.

  Tonight in the bath I will read Simone Weil on quantum physics by candlelight. James is away again—a few shows up north. I’ll take the portable phone into the bathroom with me in case he calls from the road and when he does he’ll say I can’t understand a word you’re saying, it sounds like you’re under water.

  When I’m finished photocopying I ride my bike home westward into the sun, squinting. People waiting at street corners keep smiling at me. After a while I realize that my face squinting must look like it’s smiling, beaming in fact. Through no fault of my own, completely by accident, I’ve been riding through the city making people smile. The sun so directly in my eyes I can only make out shapes, not details of the cars ahead. Probably not even safe to be riding.

  A wave of strangeness takes me; it’s one-part time, one-part eternity, one-part secret ingredient. It comes to me that fear of death is, from another angle, love of the world. The desire not to be excluded from the world. That perhaps at the heart of all my miscellaneous fear is the assumption that after death I will stop being a part of things. I stand on my pedals and coast westward along Queen.

  Barb is very strict with the residents about their scheduled showers and baths. They get washed whether they feel like it or not. At first I thought her unfeeling, even cruel. But gradually you see what she’s up against. Somebody has to make sure the old people don’t smell. And if I don’t shower Mavis tonight, the morning girl will have to do it on top of the forty beds she has to strip and the round of meds she has to give. When a resident declines emphatically enough though, Barb sometimes acquiesces. She’ll sigh then and say to me, “Why don’t you go get Henry and do the halls?”

  Henry is the vacuum cleaner—a squat red thing on wheels with decals of eyes on either side of the hose. I pull it along the hallway by the nose, smiling at residents, raising a hand, nodding. Some of them ask me how my boyfriend is today, meaning Henry. I’ll have to think of a witty response. I’m not very good at the witty response.

  I am, however, starting to think I might be good at radiating warmth. Mavis today, for instance: when she didn’t answer my knock, I let myself into her room to ask when she wanted her shower. She’s been reluctant to have her showers lately. When I stepped in, she was sitting on the side of her bed staring at the wall as if waiting for a portal to open up and take her away. I sat down beside her and chatted for a while. She was slow to respond, as if scared to trust that my warmth was genuine and wouldn’t be snatched away the moment she began to lean on it.

  On the way home that night, I caught myself calculating that, if I worked the extra job another six months, my student loans would be paid off and I could quit.

  Mavis and Barb are right to be suspicious.

  Imagine that you are sitting with a group of old friends. In the middle of the conversation you start to daydream, when suddenly you hear someone saying to you, “What do you think about that?” Or think back to when you were part of a group of three or four people who were having a wide-ranging conversation for a half hour or so. Suddenly, someone said, “How did we get onto this topic, anyway?” Did the question disturb you?

  We drive, the four of us—me, Mom, Grandma and Grandpa—in the old Plymouth, the car rattling and jolting, my forehead shivering against the window. I have a vague image of cogs under the hood, large watch-like parts and, to account for the rattling, something coming loose, something no longer connecting on its way around with the other things on their way around. Grandma counts the cows in the passing fields and tells the car of cranky adults that there are six of them. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Then she asks me for the fourth time if I live with some nice girls, and I lie to her for the fourth time and say, “Yes Grandma, I live with some nice girls.”

  Grandma’s met James, of course, but her decline was already well underway by the time he came around. As far as I know, she’s been officially informed of neither our marriage nor our co-habitation; I think Mom figured the thought of a wedding she hadn’t been invited to would be almost as bad to Grandma as the thought of her granddaughter living in sin. And besides, what would be the point when she wouldn’t retain the information anyway?

  I turn and press my forehead against the cool glass of the window again, as Grandpa slowly, ever-so-slowly tells how Mom and Uncle Nick used to skate to school on that creek. We pass the one-room schoolhouse (now with a deck and a two-car garage), and Mom tells how on days when the weather was too harsh to go outside, the kids would spend recess in the basement by the wood-burning furnace, jumping over the logs. The car rounds the corner of their old farm. I remind myself that I asked for this. I wanted to see the particular roll of these fields, the angles of the farmhouse roof against the sky.

  Yes Grandma, I live with some nice girls. What if it’s not just the disease that keeps her coming back to the question? What if some untamed element in her is hell-bent of late, hollowed by urgency, hungry for what is. Yes Grandma, I live with some nice girls. The taming instinct handed down, in skewed relay, to me.

  We turn up the long driveway, and I close my eyes—the sound of gravel under slowly rolling tires, a farm dog barking from the porch. “Something’s different,” Mom says, then gasps. “They took off the gable where my bedroom used to be, took it right off.” Grandpa says that the bright green kilns have a
fresh coat of paint, but they’re the same old kilns alright. The old irrigation pond is gone, filled in, but the oak tree in the yard is still there, even grander now. I watch Grandma. She blinks. Mom does a three-point turn, and that’s it.

  On the way out we pass a tiny white clapboard house on the far corner of the farm, a curly pattern in the aluminum of the screen door, the windows boarded up with plywood. “That’s the house where Mother lived,” Grandpa says reverently, as if it were the childhood home of a great artist or statesman.

  I close my eyes and see the work-battered hands of Great-Grandma Helena Friesen. She lived in that little house all the time Mom was growing up. I know the stories like my own neighbourhood. Mom used to round the corner on her way home from school, ready to spend the afternoon with Great-Grandma and her huge, cracked fingers teaching needlework while the radio crackled out its soap operas. Needlework was a guilty pleasure for her; Mennonites saw it as frivolous.

  In my mind every afternoon Mom rounds the corner and Great-Grandma is there—in her overalls because she is gardening, a dress over top of them because she is a woman, a large white bandage wrapped again and again around her head for her migraines and a babushka on top of it all.

  I try to think what in the world Great-Grandma would have thought of frivolous me. Poetry, for godsake.

  Grandma’s hand closes even more tightly around mine, and I glance at her profile. Her eyes are closed. I try to picture what’s going on in her head. A little girl rounding some corner, rounding it and rounding it again.

  What’ll I be like when I’m her age? Sometimes a thought doesn’t bear thinking. Like serving a piece of a pie that hasn’t set, it slips off the lifter when you try to pick it up.

  Peter Friesen, the bachelor who works the Dowswell farm, has been paying me visits. Mrs. McKinnon becomes terribly excited when she sees him pulling his team into the drive. She’s begun referring to him as the teacher’s beau, which I think is rather hasty and more than a little alarming. Of course he’s nice in his way, but he has been all over and is not what one would call the settled sort. I have always said I didn’t want to be a farmer’s wife. However, one thing does stand out—Mr. Peter Friesen has begun to attend the Presbyterian Church. Fancy that. You can always give an old dog new spots, he said to me Sunday evening when he took me out for a drive. Isn’t that dear? Oh he’s nice enough, but as far as I’m concerned I have not chosen to be Mrs. Peter Friesen. Somehow I can’t help feeling though that simply by not saying no to his friendly gestures and to the invitations of others who invite the two of us on the same day to their homes, I am consenting by increments to something larger.

  Is that how one gets married? Not so much by saying yes as by not saying no?

  “I don’t know why people think they can pursue happiness directly anyway. It doesn’t work that way,” James says. He’s back from his tour and we’re celebrating his birthday with a bottle of wine on the steps of the front porch. Streetlights on. My head in his lap.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean happiness is a by-product. Happiness is beside the point.”

  “What is the point then?”

  “I don’t know. Doing right by people. Becoming really good at one or two things. Noticing shit.”

  “And if you do those things—living right—then you’ll be happy on the side?”

  “No, not necessarily. Not exactly. No guarantees.”

  “No guarantees?”

  “Nope. No guarantees.”

  “Promise?”

  I shift my head from his lap and look up at him.

  “I do,” he says.

  On Friday night during the busiest part of the evening the cops crept up the back fire escape and did a surprise “takedown” in the apartment above the bar, a manoeuvre complete with deafening stun-grenade to blast open the door, the whole crowd below ducking expertly at the sound, pints in hand. As far as anyone can figure, the man who’d been renting the apartment had been gradually befriended and usurped and, over a period of weeks or months, the place had become an actual instance of that infamous thing: a crackhouse.

  Apparently the day after the takedown a woman called the police saying she’d been locked out of her apartment. The cops came in the middle of the brunch rush and started hassling Roxanne about it. Roxanne is the owner of the bar and landlord of the apartment. She dried her hands on her apron and said, “Uh, maybe you boys should talk to your friends back at the station about the takedown they did last night upstairs?”

  The cops looked flustered and went back out to their car. Meanwhile, a wiry woman on the sidewalk screamed at their backs, “I know my rights you fuckers.” You’ve got to admire the guts.

  Roxanne can’t get her insurance company to pay for the damage to the apartment because her rates would skyrocket to the point of putting her out of business, so today a bunch of the staff—me, Leona, Sammy and Ursula—gather to clean

  out the apartment. The new manager is going to move in.

  The smell is the first thing. Surely the only way such a reek could have accumulated would be if people were peeing directly on the plywood floors. We stand huddled in the middle of the room for a few minutes, rotating as if surrounded by a hostile force: stained and sheetless mattresses listing off the sides of equally stained box springs; matching couch and armchair, a light grey with greasy darker grey patches on the armrests, impossible to tell their original colour; everywhere you look, bulky black stereo equipment, obsolete, unplugged, forlorn; in one corner some stacks of hardcover books, a stubborn lump of order not yet dissolved into the generalized chaos; in the kitchen sink a half-inch of bloated rice in a watery reddish sauce; Stouffer’s TV dinner boxes inexplicably stapled around the kitchen door frame; the floor carpeted with newspapers, plastic bags, lone socks, cutlery, flimsy towels, coat hangers, an argyle sweater, a broken-off chair-leg, ashtrays, pocket change, candle stubs, tinfoil. And over it all, debris from ceiling tiles the police broke in their adrenalin-charged search for drugs—that and a sense of intensified gravity.

  Finally someone strides forward, tears the black garbage bags off the front windows, and we set to, trying not to think too much about how this happens to a life.

  Leona runs downstairs and brings up the snow shovel we use in winter to scrape the sidewalk in front of the bar, goes at the kitchen floor with it. I pull on a pair of brand new bright yellow rubber gloves and begin randomly stuffing things into a garbage bag. Sammy holds it open for me. A drawerful of sealed syringes. A little mountain of condom packages and breathmint samples spilling off the coffee table. A pair of black pumps with a slight heel, barely scuffed. “Crack-

  whore kit,” says Sammy, pointing. Then, “Sorry, black humour.”

  The radio’s on. We all begin to find a rhythm in the work.

  A mostly empty notebook with a list of Favourite Character Actors in the front and an impenetrable and meticulous series of numbers and tiny Xs filling five whole pages in the back, as if the owner had been compelled to keep score for some relentless and sinister game. A sample pack of six sardine tins—lemon, jalapeno, tomato, mustard, jerk and original—wrapped in cellophane and tied with a curling red ribbon. A file of clippings from the Toronto Sun: POWs in Lebanon, plane crash off Peggy’s Cove, death of Trudeau, scandals and natural disasters, the file reading like research for a definitive document detailing the varieties of upheaval.

  On the radio a smarmy-voiced ad for a mutual fund. Someone calls out, “Does this station ever play music?” Someone else goes over and turns the dial.

  At one point Roxanne comes out of the bathroom doing a little dance and singing, “Look what the cops missed and I found!” A baggie of pot in a little brown velvet jewellery case.

  Altogether we collect enough change for a two-four. We also find two crackpipes made from gluesticks. But we all agree that the prize for best find has to go to Ursula, who found the pin to the stun grenade.

  We take a break. As we clink our beer bottles, Sammy sa
ys, “Having friends is better than having insurance any day.”

  On the radio a blues song crossed with a high and keening native chant. Aboriginal Voices 96.1 FM.

  The canned food and books and some of the less offensive furniture we put out on the street for passersby to take. The rest we throw off the fire escape into the restaurant dumpster out back. After we’ve been working for a couple of hours, I look out the front window onto the sidewalk below. A small crowd has gathered around the free stuff, many of them with open books in their hands as if attending an impromptu study group. I watch an older man in a faded jean jacket choose Robert’s Rules of Order and Introduction to Modern Behaviorism, slip them into his shopping bag along with the sardines and ride off on his bicycle.

  For a prolonged and disquieting moment when I turn back to the room, everything—diminishing piles of debris, armchair on its side as if it’s passed out, my own hand on the windowsill, even the reeking air itself—everything seems to bind together into a thick quivering whole as if by chemical reaction, some kind of gelatin in the day that, having been stirred and stirred, has finally taken. I stand there by the window, immobilized.

  Then, just as quickly, the elements of the room unbind themselves from each other and fall back, spent, separate after all.

  When we’re done, I take off my rubber gloves, plucking each fingertip loose like a lady at a ball.

  mary mary

  from Mind Your Manners: A Complete Dictionary of Etiquette for Canadians

  appointments: Be on time.

  (found after lengthy entries for apology and applause)

  personal questions: Never ask any.

  (found between a cryptic entry on perfume and an entry under the heading of pineapple which explains the proper use of cutlery at luncheons)