When I Was Young and In My Prime

by Alayna Munce

  A five-storey building of bachelor apartments, twenty apartments on each floor. When in human history have people lived alone like this unless they were hermits or outcasts?

  I take a walk by the lake. When I get back to the building, I decide to take the stairs, both for the exercise and to avoid having to small-talk in the elevator.

  There’s a guy in the stairwell playing his guitar. I climb into his sound. He’s singing a song with a chorus about the grand design. You go your way and I’ll go mine. Ah, the grand design... He stops playing as I pass.

  “Great acoustics in here,” he says, shy.

  And, feeling genuinely sociable for the first time in weeks, I say, “I’ll say.”

  Every Tuesday at the nursing home, Liza’s nephew signs her out for dinner and returns her twenty minutes late for her scheduled bath. She and I small-talk as I soap her back. Tonight Liza can’t remember the name of the restaurant but remembers they got lost on the way. Can’t remember what she had for dinner but remembers—quite emphatically—that it was delicious. I smile, though to be honest the better part of me is already home, book in hand, cat in lap.

  When I do get home, the cat won’t settle, noses my book, kneads my thighs, sniffs my tea, turns round and round as if to rouse or quell some invisible vortex. I stare at the ceiling—the cat’s tail swishing in my face, her asshole a repellent pink pucker, her purr infuriating—and picture myself at work, capable, needed, irreproachably earning my keep.

  It’s not lost on me, the absurdity of bathing other people’s grandparents for a living while other people bathe mine. The disconnect there too far gone to be reasonably mourned. A whole economy wedged in the gap.

  Sorry, I say to Liza, when the water’s too hot or too cold. She looks up. Oh, no worry, it’s neither here nor there.

  Last night I forgot to put the milk back in the fridge. This morning it clots uncooperatively in my hot tea. I know if I were to make a new cup and drink it clear, I’d drink it thinking, I should have just gone to the corner store. So I go to the store thinking, I should have just had it clear. I pay for the milk with a painstaking pocketful of nickels and dimes, the cashier looking over my shoulder as I count, and head home cradling the carton in the crook of my arm, a tipped column of sloshing white liquid, miles and miles from the nearest milk cow. I try briefly as I walk to burrow under the surface of the moment but immediately hit bedrock.

  Outside Holy Family Catholic Church a woman squats on the sidewalk, back against the wall, panhandling—hairy-chinned, an air of contagion—my eyes at once drawn and spurned by hers as I pass. I raise my gaze. The signboard outside the church suggests I go forth, be fruitful and multiply.

  My cousin Clara has what I think of as a knack for life, her uncanny power for spotting four-leafed clovers a case in point. Give her an hour on a lawn, she’ll pluck a dozen—no kidding—and I can’t even find one. When she and her juggler/psychiatrist husband found they couldn’t conceive, they turned to technology. All three eggs took and, when doctor offered the irrefutable advice that it would be better to abort the weakest, she refused. So now Clara is the mother of triplets.

  Harrowing how each yes seems to call for yeses in triplicate, yeses rivering outward, exponential.

  Years ago, when Grandma was drawing up the family tree, Grandpa made an uncharacteristic stand: he refused to let her leave off the childless divorces as if they’d never happened. How I love him for that, for preserving the branches that seemed to lead nowhere.

  Most mornings I walk by the lake. I have to cross the expressway to get there (the on-ramps and off-ramps sketching compulsive cloverleafs). Last Christmas, having just seen ultrasound images of her mother’s cancer (all the veins drawing from the surrounding cells to feed the tumour) Gloria said that flying into Toronto (all the roads drawing from the countryside to feed the city), she couldn’t help but think.

  Something hisses under my skin these days, insistent, like the Freon that time I was impatient and used an ice pick to defrost my fridge.

  Catching me steal a look at my watch while I’m waiting for him to manoeuvre his walker into position, Fred, the brain-injured man I shower on Wednesdays, says to me, Is it now?

  Mornings by the lake, I think about the word design, about the organic nature of even the least organic thing, about the ancient story in which Love is the bastard child of Resource and Poverty, about the symmetrical helplessness of infants and elders. The on-ramp and off-ramp of each life: disability. And in between?

  Can’t help feeling that somewhere we’ve missed a connection.

  Did I mention what it said on the hand-lettered sign held by the woman on the sidewalk?

  Spare some change or I’ll touch you.

  Love?

  Though we all know the word is distended and threadbare with too many wearings and mendings and bleachings and though lately the moral of each day’s story seems to come back to how impossible it is to know another person and though I could very easily be deluding myself, I think maybe just maybe I might be feeling the shape of it rising in me lately like a kind of groundwater ever-so-slowly by fractions and increments

  toward places I hadn’t expected to feel it. And it’s not at all romantic. It’s

  terrifying. I think of him taking care of her all those months of her decline. A river draining, emptying faster than it fills. Somewhere else, in some realm I can’t see,

  a flood.

  Mother, I want to take your hand from the steering wheel.

  Hold onto it for

  dear life. I want to feed you a little of

  everything.

  things that still have not left her (2)

  1

  chewing

  with her mouth closed

  2

  smiling

  when kissed

  The other day I went to the hospital with Grandpa for his cataract operation. Mom and Uncle Nick, being teachers, both had to work, but my schedule is flexible so I said sure.

  Two older women in the waiting room were talking about the weather. They seemed strangers but had somehow managed to strike up a conversation. Normally I could just ignore that sort of thing—blah, blah, blah, retirement communities, blah blah blah, bladder control, blah blah blah, can you believe Christmas is over already oh well it’ll be back before you know it—but for some reason, maybe because I was slightly hungover and had forgotten to bring a book, that day I couldn’t stand it. Their conversation wasn’t going anywhere. It was all I could do to keep from leaning over and telling them to just shut up. I actually had to get up and go to the washroom.

  When I came back from the washroom I paused in the doorway for a moment and looked at them—seated side by side, turned slightly toward each other but still facing forward, staring at their clasped hands or at the floor, taking turns speaking and nodding. And I got it: old ladies in waiting rooms speak a dying language, the subtleties of which can easily pass you by.

  What they’re really saying is:

  it’s important

  that we be civil to each other

  yes,

  I believe in that

  memory may go but the details

  are still

  important

  I agree the details

  are important

  I lie in Gloria’s bed thinking how I want to be less predictable, more various and flexible and hospitable to surprise. I want to have many children and live in a shoe and somehow manage. I’ve been thinking I need to say no more often, but really I want to say yes. I want to be inconvenient and alive. I want to have a one-night stand tonight with my husband of seven years. I want to seduce him.

  The city makes a hollow roaring sound around the apartment, like something large and empty exhaling endlessly.

  What have I done with these years? Always reserving part of myself from any one thing—art, work, politics, my relationships—just in case. Afraid I won’t receive the recognition I need in order to justify spending myself fully. Always k
eeping back a nest-egg, a private little hoard of self.

  I’ll go home in the morning.

  I lay waiting for the night to be over, heavy-limbed with the thought that it could be too late.

  James and I go out, just the two of us, the way we used to when we first met. We choose a pub out of the neighbourhood, a place with good nachos, where it’s unlikely we’ll run into anyone we know. I can tell he’s making as much of an effort as I am. We’re careful with each other, but not in a bad way, not in an edgy, stepping-on-eggshells way. More in a reverent, careful-with-the-newborn way.

  He asks me about the writing I did at Gloria’s. I tell him I’m trying to get over my embarrassment about how tame and domestic it all is. “Guess there’s just something compelling to me about the mundane,” I say.

  He considers for a moment then says, “I think in an ideal world we’d each have our own bard.”

  I laugh and sip my beer, thinking how wrong-headed my need some space instinct is—it’s when we don’t spend time together that things go wrong. On the other hand, would I have been able to see this without having taken the space?

  “Think about it,” he says. “Every single person on the planet with his or her very own personal bard, the way Celtic chieftains all had a bard in their entourage. A guy with a lute slung across his chest, following each and every one of us around, composing lyrics about our every little triumph and defeat.”

  “Yeah, the mountain of dishes conquered, the battle of the diaper change won but the war grinding on.”

  “Exactly! Imagine—each paper cut and parking ticket properly lamented. A whole song for your new hairdo. A whole song for the day when you were a kid and you ran away from home and no one noticed and when you came home your goldfish was belly up in the fishbowl and your mother had made liver for dinner.”

  “A whole song for the first kiss,” I add, “and the bard plays it in the background every time you kiss anyone after that. With appropriate variations, of course. And a whole song for the first fight. The first fight preserved in all its agonizing detail.”

  James and I meet eyes across the table.

  “But at the same time,” he says, “the whole thing sung in metred verse—as if it couldn’t have gone down in any other way.”

  We’re quiet a moment, eyes locked.

  Then the moment passes. The waitress comes and we order two more pints. I decide I don’t care how I’ll feel tomorrow. I decide I love everything about this night. Every last detail.

  Some days I can almost understand

  why she might want to forget it all—

  like the temptation when carrying a

  heavy load, a load too big for your

  arms, to drop the whole thing rather than

  choose

  what to put down,

  what to carry on. So much to hold

  like how the day of the spontaneous watermelon seed contest

  —Who can spit one into the bird bath first?—

  was the same day Grandpa told us he was going to sell the house

  and how, when my stepfather brought back cigars from Cuba, one for everyone, Grandpa saved his for his birthday, kept it in the fridge, folded in a plastic milk bag with a stub of carrot, to keep it fresh

  and how, when I brought him the little mason jar full of cherries that I had dried in his machine, he said, Are they the sour or the sweet? Sour, I said, and he smiled—Just the thought and I can feel it in here, he said, rubbing his jawbone

  and the note he wrote in block letters on cardboard and put with the dryer when he sent it with Mom:

  THIS DEHYDRATOR IS TO GO TO MY GRANDDAUGHTER

  UNLESS SHE ISN’T INTERESTED ENOUGH IN IT

  AND THEN I’LL SELL IT

  and in smaller letters:

  (AND I’M GOING TO ASK FOR $100

  BECAUSE IT COST A LOT MORE THAN THAT

  WITH THE ATTACHMENTS)

  and how, when we were visiting one weekend Grandpa peeled a banana and fed it to Grandma and Mom said to him, Do you remember how you used to always both bring home bananas on the same day?

  and later, when Mom went out to get groceries for him, he brought out his electric razor, held Grandma’s face steady and her shaved chin, rubbing her jawbone and saying, There, now she looks respectable

  and when we were cleaning out the basement for the auction I found a shoebox labelled, strings too short to be of use

  and how Grandma’s house was always full of candy dishes, how her bevelled-glass candy dishes always had candy

  and Grandma pulling out her empty pockets at Thanksgiving dinner, saying, I want to show you something

  and how, when she no longer lived in her house, my

  grandmother’s candy dishes had wood screws and pill

  bottles and fertilizer sticks for violets, and when they had

  candy it was sticky and stale and didn’t come properly out

  of the wrapper

  and how, when watering the violets on the window sill, Grandpa said the grosbeaks get drunk on crabapples in late autumn, after they’ve got a couple frosts on ’em

  and how Uncle Nick brought beer, and Grandpa said he might just get drunk for his eighty-seventh birthday

  but he never did

  and how he never smoked that cigar either

  and how Grandpa said Aunt Dorothy giggled over Grandma’s new Denby Twilight dish set, how he knew what she was going to say before she said it: The teacups are shaped like chamber pots!

  and all I know about Aunt Anne is that she was Grandpa’s favourite sister and hated blue jays because they were greedy at her feeder

  and though everything I thought I knew about what makes a life

  is getting smaller and

  smaller, lighter and

  lighter, I seem to be less

  and less able to

  hold it all.

  details from the urban soundscape

  1

  One morning last winter, I was woken by the squealing sound of a car spinning its wheels in a snowbank outside. The car digging itself deeper and deeper into hysteria.

  I’d been having trouble getting out of bed in the mornings. The whining engine—the sound of no-traction panic—must have been burrowing into my half-consciousness for some time before it finally broke through and made me throw off the covers. And, no kidding, the very moment my feet hit the floor the squealing stopped, tires caught, engine engaged, the car drove off and I stood there, suddenly hungry

  for the day.

  2

  Many of the major intersections downtown now have chirping bird noises so the blind know when to cross the street—a perky go-ahead chirp for the north-south axis and a lower, slower chirp for east-west.

  Would the two sounds be identifiable to someone more literate in the language of birdcall? Or are they shorthand cartoons of birdsong, the way the lit-up walking stick-man of the visual pedestrian signal is shorthand for human?

  Does the call and response of the intersections confuse the real birds?

  3

  In the middle of the night, sirens swoop in my neighbourhood like mosquitoes around the head of a sleeper in a tent, closer then farther. Fluctuations of an everlasting emergency. Just when you think they’ve died down, they return, sirens right inside your ear, impossible to swat.

  4

  In line at the bank downtown, transferring my weight from one foot to the other on the cool, hard marble floors, high-ceilinged hush of held breath, everybody behaving themselves in the belly of the beast. Somebody’s cellphone rings behind me, and it sounds like the bank has been infiltrated by crickets.

  5

  Woken from a deep sleep by a storm last summer, James and I turned our heads on our pillows, met eyes during a lightning flash. His hand found mine under the covers. James is afraid of thunder. It’s a fear I don’t share, so I have to prompt myself to empathize. We didn’t speak. My thumb stroked his. Lying there, we listened to the storm approaching from across the
city until the thunder and lightning were almost simultaneous and they gave my heart a new pace and suddenly my forced empathy broke through, ran fresh.

  And then, somewhere in the neighbourhood, a car alarm began to sound, set off by the flash and crack.

  Which made me, for that moment, inexplicably happy.

  6

  Though I’ve never heard it myself, I’m told that residents of the neighbourhood bordering High Park sometimes hear coyotes howling in the distance.

  7

  Window open, early morning. Again, I’m woken from a deep sleep. This time by the sound of keening, many female voices wailing in unison from the apartment building across the street. I lie there blinking, disoriented. My body scoured by the women’s voices. Somebody has just received a call from overseas maybe. Whatever it is, it’s bad news. The women wail with both abandon and skill, communicating the fact of a loss, getting into all its corners, tunnelling through it so thoroughly it’s linked to all loss, which makes it at once infinitely sadder and somehow easier to bear.