Famous Last Meals

by Famous Last Meals (Candidates; Famouse Last Meals; The Woman in the Vineyard) (v5. 0) (epub)

  “If we were going to live on a houseboat—and it sure looked like that’s where we were headed, because we were inside a big marina complex now and driving along a private stretch that led to all these docks—we’d need electricity hooked up for heat in the wintertime. I wondered if we would have to pull the boat out of the water or leave it there. If we let it get frozen in the ice, that might damage the hull. Maybe the hull was built super strong to withstand the pressure. I wanted to sleep in a captain’s bed with the raised wooden side designed to keep you from rolling out during heavy seas. A friend of mine built captains’ bunks for his kids. I pictured keeping my clothes in the drawers built in to the bottom part of the bed. That appealed to me, still does. I don’t mind small spaces as long as they’re designed good. Funny thing for somebody my size to say, right? But it’s true, I like the feeling of being tucked in.

  “I remember it was fall, school had started and Scouts, so it was maybe late September, early October, getting nippy, the air. Nice time of year, maybe my favourite. Francesca and me, we like to drive up on Mount Royal with the kids and have a picnic at Beaver Lake. You ever do that, Colin?”

  Yes, I said, we did, all the time.

  “It’s too tough a climb for them, my nippers. I usually get roped into carrying them. They’re light as feathers. I can take both of them on my back and hardly notice it, they’re that little, my girls. They’re growing up too fast. You turn around, they’re up to there on you. You know what I mean? Blink and you miss it.

  “Anyway, there’s other cars parked on some of the docks. All these white masts rocking back and forth, the plinking sound of ropes and wires slapping against hollow things. Like all these boats are talking impatiently to each other. When you heading out again? What you rubbing up against? Sounds like Styrofoam, it’s squeaking so much. He fix that cracked keel on you yet? How does a kid know he loves boats so much when he’s never been on one? Don’t ask me. All I know is I was into them instantly. I wanted to get out of the car and step down into one and squeeze down into a cabin, press my face up against the glass of a little round porthole, maybe see underwater when the waves splashed high. And we could go anywhere we wanted. Head out on a good day. Up the seaway to the Gulf, around to who knows where. The Maritimes, Boston, New York, Florida. The freedom of it, the whole idea—how does something like that take a hold of you in an instant? Where does it come from? It must have been hiding in me and I never knew it. A boat. Sails. Something about floating, not being in a car, not having to stop and buy gas and drive alongside a million lunatics who think they’re in the Grand Prix. I could take classes by two-way radio. We could sail around the world and I could go to school wherever we happened to be. Or not. Learn some other languages. What a feeling. Getting on toward night, it’s dark, we’re finally stopped on one of the docks, the whole scene is like out of a movie it’s so new and strange, and fuck if I’m not planning the rest of my life around one of these sixteen-footers.

  “Jane roused and said she had to go to the bathroom. I think, in her state, for her to say that out loud meant she couldn’t hold it any longer. I’m jolted out of my daydream. Mom is sitting like she’s waiting for something, a signal, maybe. Both hands gripping the wheel tight even though we’re idling and in Park. At least I thought we were in Park, until she takes her foot off the brake and we start rolling forward, headed for the end of the dock. It’s concrete, solidly built with substantial pylons or whatever you call them that the lines are tied to. These people who moor here, they must have money. Only rich people can afford to buy boats like these. The rental cost of keeping your boat there. I know how it is now. Did I, back then? I can’t say for sure. I do know that whatever feeling I was having, that boff daydream about living on a boat and sailing around the world, when Jane spoke, like the bubble I was in broke and I knew we didn’t belong there. Don’t ask me how.

  “Jane said again how she really had to go, she wanted out, and the car was picking up speed even though I don’t think she had her foot on the gas. I looked at her, then ahead to the water, to her again. No change of expression. Stone rigid. Mom, Mom, I say to her, Jane has to get out. Not, Stop immediately, you crazy nutcase psycho, pathetic obsessive loser, self-destructive suicidal mental case. Jane has to go to the bathroom. Nobody else is on the wharf. There might’ve been people in the boats themselves, but I don’t remember seeing any lights on.

  “Something made me roll my window down. Maybe I was trying to get out or thinking about jumping out. Just as my hand stopped, not able to get it any lower, she hits the gas, like stomps on it full throttle, and we kick ahead, laying rubber like a dragster until the tires catch. The front wheels hit the raised edge of the dock, the impact is this jolt that brings the rear end up off the ground for a sec and then we’re over. The funny thing is it’s not like one of those rides. You ever been on that log ride at La Ronde? La Flume? Your stomach rises into your throat for a couple seconds, then you hit bottom and all the water splashes over you, especially if you’re sitting in the front? Well, it didn’t feel nothing like that. It was this slow-motion feeling. We’re over, the front of the car goes down, we hit the water, start to sink. The water is coming in the window fast, holding us in. The whole car fills up in no time. I remembering breathing in some water, choking, coughing it out, taking a breath before the air pocket disappeared, and undoing my seatbelt.

  “Somehow, don’t ask me how, I pull myself up out the window and I swim to the surface. It doesn’t take too long. The water’s maybe ten, fifteen feet deep and the car’s on the bottom. Not much of a current there. We’re in this protected bay. I start yelling for help and before I’ve stopped yelling and crying I hear a splash in the water and then another, close by me. Two men on another dock must’ve seen the car go over and they come running over. Dive in. I try a duck dive to go down to the car again, but it’s too dark to see anything. I have to come back up. It feels like I can hardly keep my head above water. Somebody’s arm comes around my chest from behind and I’m being pulled toward the dock. He gets me to grab hold of the ladder. Can you get up? Yes, I think so. I tell him Jane is still down there.

  “I try climbing up the ladder, but got no strength left, so I loop my arm through and float there, waiting for I don’t know what. It’s too long a time. There’s people now above my head. They’re asking each other what happened and is anybody down there. Beams of light move across the surface. I try to get up the ladder again. Somebody spots me from above. A life ring on a rope drops beside me. I put it over my head and shoulders so it’s snug under my armpits and then they’re pulling me up. Fresh catch. Look everybody, caught me a live boy! I don’t realize I’m cold until they lay me out on the wharf and put a jacket over me and I start shivering, my whole body shaking uncontrollably. Somebody says, ‘He’s in shock.’

  “I try to ask about Jane and my mother, but my teeth are chattering too much. I hear a siren. Strong red light flashing. An ambulance backs down the dock until it’s close. The back doors open. ‘Bouge pas, p’tit, sois calme,’ a man says, wrapping me in a heavy blanket. They lift me onto a stretcher, it rises up on wheels, and I get slid into the compartment. It’s a nice feeling. Snug, like I was talking about before. The lights are on and I start looking around at the equipment. It all looks important. Everything has something written on the side in French. One of the attendants gives me some water, asks me if I’m hungry. No, I say. Where’s my...? Where’s my...? But I can’t get it out. Don’t worry, he says. They’re okay. They’re in the other ambulance. I don’t remember nothing else. I guess I passed out.”

  It was eight on a Saturday morning when Max came by in a rental truck, and we drove first to his office to get some boxes of personal effects. His hair, still black, was returning in soft, wispy patches. As he unlocked the office door, he said, “Of all the people she knows, Chandra will miss you and Beth the most. She wanted me to ask Beth not to come today. Did you know that?”

  “Not
hing would have kept her away, Max.”

  “Oh, I know, and I told her that. She was adamant, though. I asked her if she felt it was just too hard to say goodbye, take too much out of her. She said no, it wasn’t that exactly. She said she was afraid that if she saw Beth again she might not be content to go. She said something about it being messy, her wanting to drag a piece of this world away with her. Funny.”

  I didn’t think it was funny at all. Max grew quiet and his breathing laboured as we carried cartons down the corridor from the office to the elevator. The upper level of the mall was beginning to fill with shoppers.

  When we arrived at the house, I got out of the truck and began to direct him down the steep drive. The slope and design of the laneway demanded three tight turns, a difficult enough manoeuvre in a car, and I had to keep sending him back up to make new approaches. He looked like he was becoming bewildered, as if he had been awakened by my voice, only to find that he was not in bed but seated at the impossible wheel. He’d hired a man with a backhoe to line the entire driveway with large boulders, and these now stymied the truck’s progress. I said as much to him. What I said—and I knew as soon as I’d said it that it was a poor choice of commentary—was that I wondered what had possessed him to make the approach to his house impassable.

  He climbed down from the cab, leaving the driver’s door wide open and the engine running, brushed by me, stomped down the pavement and slammed his way into the house. A man named Tim, who was married to Angela, one of Max’s colleagues, brought the truck the rest of the way down.

  Beth was sitting with Chandra on her bed, helping her sort through various piles of papers.

  “What did you say to Max?”

  When I told her, she said that the best thing I could do for the moment was to mind the children, the Nazreens’ as well as two who belonged to Tim and Angela.

  Chandra’s brother, Gary, who had flown from Colorado to drive the truck once it was loaded, was trying to keep the children occupied in the living room. A large blue cartoon genie was singing and changing shape every few seconds to an inattentive audience. Tim and Angela’s youngest, Manny, decided then that he wanted to see his mother, and began to cry inconsolably when Gary wrapped his arms around him to keep him out of the kitchen. Manny’s wails triggered a similar response in Lori and Vaughan Nazreen, who darted past me in an end-run around the couch. This pulled the women, Angela wrapping china plates in newsprint, and Beth sifting bills, wills, and homemade Mother’s Day cards, away from their work, the exasperation wry on their faces.

  Hearing the heavy rear door of the U-Haul roll up, Gary left to help Tim load boxes. I ducked down the stairs to the basement. Midway down sat a shallow box containing a dozen each of seed packets and empty plastic medicine bottles. I picked it up and brought it into the basement, where Max was hunched over a red toolbox open on the floor.

  “What do you want done with these, Max? I thought someone might trip on them.”

  “I know exactly where those are going,” he said, taking the box and placing it beside the tools.

  “Tell me where to begin, then.”

  Everything stacked against one wall was to be loaded onto the truck, while all else was garbage. Armed with this distinction, I began carrying the larger items, a floor lamp, a set of four kitchen chairs, a child’s bicycle, upstairs. The children were colouring on large sheets of newsprint spread on the kitchen floor while Angela and Beth put cookware into boxes and dry goods into plastic grocery bags.

  “There’s an empty chest of drawers ready to go in Chandra’s room,” said Beth.

  Chandra was asleep on her back on the wide bed, the stacks of envelopes and manila files arranged on either side of her. She was able to concentrate only for short stretches now before having to rest. The papers around her were barely disturbed by the rise and fall of her breathing. I sat gingerly at the foot of the bed. Her deep olive skin that had once glowed, regally, beneath black eyes and a noble nose, so arrogant, always so right, was now like parchment. Her mane of thick black hair, tossed at me more than once in teasing condescension in symposia and departmental meetings and dimly lit restaurants, was now a cropped white cloud. The pupils of her eyes seemed visible through onionskin lids.

  Beth said, “Colin, Tim says he has room for that dresser now. Do you want help with it?”

  I stood abruptly and the room grew dim. She got me to bend down on one knee and lower my head.

  “You’ve been going at it too hard, mister. Why don’t you loosen that?” She unbuttoned my collar. “I bet it’s pressing on your carotid sinus.”

  After a few minutes I regained my head and set out to prove my fitness, despite Beth’s warning, by moving the dresser out to the truck all by myself.

  The rest of the day passed as if I were watching a grainy film of it, including my own efforts, projected onto the bare walls of the house. The family renting the house arrived in the midst of the upheaval to swim in the lake, and changed into their suits in the bathroom. When they announced that they had forgotten their towels, Max dug through already packed boxes to find some for them. During this time a woman arrived to look at the kitchen table and chairs Max was selling.

  “I really like the set,” she said, “but I have no way to get it home. Can you deliver it?”

  “No, I’m sorry, I can’t,” said Max.

  “Most places deliver.”

  “I am not most places.”

  “Well, I just thought when I saw that big truck parked outside...”

  “Madam, you go outside and look in the back of that truck. Look at how much bloody room there is in there. If I had room enough for a table and four chairs, I would be sending them on to Mile High City, now wouldn’t I?”

  She left without purchasing anything. Chandra called Max into the bedroom to chastise him for his rudeness and he absorbed her censure patiently. Nothing she said, whether it was that he had tied an antique serving board closed so that it was in danger of being scratched by the cord, or that he was being a tyrant for not having arranged lunch yet, or that the flight to Denver he had booked for her was all wrong because it left in the morning and she would never be able to nap on the wretched airplane in the morning, diminished his attention to her. Nor did he reduce himself in obsequiousness. Never did he reply that bond-weakening utterance, “Yes, dear.”

  When I saw him again, Max was holding a glass filled with a thick, brown liquid that resembled chocolate milk. The drink, Chandra’s Sludge as Max called it, was a bitter concoction that came in the form of a brown powder in a small plastic bottle, the same type of container I’d found with the seed packets in the box on the stairs. The cure was a combination of four wild roots and barks, all common and native to North America, dried and pulverized. To mix the solution, the powder first had to be boiled in water for a number of hours, strained through a clean cloth, boiled again, and then cooled. Its name derived from that of a Canadian nun who had adapted a native Indian recipe to cure a number of her colleagues of breast cancer early in the century. Each twenty-eight-gram bottle cost fifty dollars and lasted about a week. Until recently the Sludge had been a point of contention between Beth and the Nazreens.

  “If you keep ignoring my advice, I can’t be your doctor anymore,” Beth would say. Chandra kept drinking the Sludge and Beth kept driving out to the lake every evening to see her.

  Because the renting family was bringing in its own refrigerator, Max and Chandra’s had to be moved into the basement as the final act of the day. This news came not from Max but Gary, who seemed to be just waking up while the rest of us leaned, sweat-stained and drooping, against various counters and doorjambs in the kitchen. Angela was down at the lake with the children. Beth closed the vertical blinds against the early evening sun, and then stood with her arms crossed watching Gary work with a large screwdriver.

  “There’s a good part of your weight right there,” he said, leanin
g the door against the sink. All the food had been removed and either thrown away or placed in plastic bags with the two families’ names on them. Beth’s and mine, the smaller, contained the food the children would never have eaten: jars of chutney, curry mixes, cans of mushrooms, sardines, pungent cracker spreads. The other, Tim and Angela’s, contained breakfast cereal, cookies, bread, four boxes of lasagne noodles, jelly mixes, juice boxes, raisins, and chicken

  noodle soup.

  Gary marshalled us around the empty shell and we shuffled with it to the top of the basement stairs. Gary and Tim took the heavier bottom end and proceeded down backwards. At the bottom of the stairs the doorway was not wide enough for two to pass through at once. Tim took the weight as Gary crawled under the refrigerator and through the door. During this transfer the pair grunted and swore and laughed through gritted teeth as if this were the activity they had hoped to be doing all day. Tim then had to wait until Max reached him on that side before he could take his share of the load again.

  “You’ll have to let me take it the rest of the way, Max.”

  “No,” said Max, “you are my guests. This is my burden. I have to...”

  Gary swore at him to give up his place.

  “I’m trapped here until you move,” said Tim. “Gary can’t hold that whole back end much longer.”

  Max let Tim take the weight and he stepped back up the stairs. On the other side, expecting another step but finding none, I stumbled and sidestepped quickly to regain my balance. As I did so, I stepped onto the edge of the box of seeds and empty medicine bottles. The contents flipped out, the seeds rattling snake-like, the plastic bottles bouncing with hollow pongs around my shoes. My arms gave out and the side of the appliance I was holding toppled slowly. As Tim tried to correct the imbalance, Gary sang out new profanity, and the whole thing crashed to the floor.

  “How did those get back there? I moved them out of the way,” I complained.