This Is Happy

by Camilla Gibb

  Every few days he complains of nausea and fatigue. He sleeps for half a day, then drags himself up, excusing himself, disappearing back to his rented room, promising to come back and finish the basement as soon as he feels better.

  He doesn’t take care of himself. The chain-smoking and constant drinking can’t be good for him, and he eats erratically and cheaply, eating well only when I am feeding him or he is cooking himself some stolen meat bought from a guy with a duffel bag outside the grocery store nearby. My freezer is full of steak—trunk meat, he calls it: Four bucks! Still frozen!—that I won’t touch.

  I grow impatient with him—both for the lack of care he shows himself and for the slow progress on the basement—but I recognize how far he has come to get clean, and he is doing me such a huge favour, doing his best, and his best is beautiful, and it’s good to have a brother again, even one who fades in and out.

  When he returns after three or four days away he is always raring to go, full of life, at the other extreme of his emotional spectrum. I wonder if he might be bipolar. He’s good company when he’s up. We take the baby out in the stroller, trudging through the snow, and have breakfast at his favourite diner. She sits on Tito Mike’s lap while we eat. He calls her babycakes. “My niece,” he tells the cook. “Cool, eh?”

  For all the complicated feelings my brother has toward our father, Micah still needs to eat bacon and eggs every day just like he used to. Before my father moved to the farm, he used to come and pick us up some Saturday mornings and take us to his favourite diner. We sat in a red booth and he would order himself bacon and eggs and call the waitress “love” or “darling,” mortifying us with his misplaced terms of endearment and his accent. My father never asked us if we wanted anything to eat—being both poor and cheap, he conveniently assumed my mother had fed us breakfast—but he would order us vanilla milkshakes that we could see being made in an old-school blender behind the counter. And he gave us quarters for the jukebox.

  I had forgotten about the jukebox. These are the kinds of details Micah and I fill in for each other. The ones the other forgets or never knew.

  After breakfast we head to Home Depot or make the trek to Ikea, and then Micah gets to work again on the basement, never before noon, breaking for dinner with Tita, the egg, me and often Miles. After dinner he insists on treating us to dessert—Oh Henry! bars, 3 Musketeers, chocolate bars he loved as a kid—and lottery tickets that he buys from the corner store. He calls me Min, Minna. My dad did too. My little brother. Breaks my heart.

  8

  Tita, the egg and I are taking a respite from winter, visiting friends who are building a house by a Mexican lake. We have left Micah and Miles behind. They’re mudding and sanding the basement walls, rebuilding the basement stairs, getting carpet quotes, dealing with the electrician, looking after Leo the cat. Miles should be writing her thesis, but in the spirit of determined procrastination, she has decided instead to learn how to frame a ceiling and install drywall. She’s sleeping on the living-room couch in her clothes while Micah sleeps on the couch in my office in his. She says learning how to drywall might come in handy in the future. There are so few academic jobs to be had, especially in the study of lonely gays.

  Tita and I walk through the cobblestoned streets of a pretty lakeside town in the late afternoon, taking turns carrying the baby. We stop to buy coconuts. Tita is selective. She knows how to scramble up the trees on her family’s land and hack the perfect coconut from its mooring, letting it fall twenty feet to the ground. We perch on a stone wall and drink the juice. The egg reaches for the straw, has her first taste of something other than milk.

  We wonder aloud if there is much snow at home and how Miles and Micah are getting on in the basement.

  “Wouldn’t it be good if they are together, Mum?” Tita says.

  “Never going to happen, Tita.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, for starters, Miles likes girls.”

  Tita is not convinced. And who am I to argue. What do I honestly know about love and attraction anymore?

  The day is ending and the village is coming to life after the long siesta of the afternoon. Shutters unfurl, revealing small grocery stores selling vegetables and tostadas and beer. Taco stands appear on the streets, music plays. Women sit on the front stoops of their small houses and chat with each other, televisions blaring in the background, their children playing in the road.

  They would pay us no attention if it weren’t for the baby. Qué linda, preciosa, guapísima. The baby is the interface between me and the world, and this is heightened in a situation where we do not share a language. The focus has shifted, as I always knew it would. It is evident in the only Spanish I learn: terms of endearment, words for babies.

  We stop at a small grocery store to buy lettuce, avocados, tomatoes and green onions for a salad. We can hear singing from the church in the square. The doors are splayed open, congregants still filing in. We follow them and stand at the back of the church. I have done this one other time this year—for Tita, on Christmas Day. My brother had even come with us. We were raised without religion, told we were atheists, that religion provided answers for the weak among us, those who could not tolerate the lack of answers to life’s imponderables. This was my father’s church. I have no concept of God. But I do have a significant degree of spiritual envy.

  Occasionally, Tita will position the egg’s hands in prayer and, despite being entirely irreligious, I leave it be. Tita has her own relationship to my daughter. She has ways of interacting with her that are specific to her personality and culture, ways of childrearing that she has learned over her years working as a nanny, and a soft but firm hand.

  The first time I thanked Tita for being so affectionate with my daughter, she said: “But how could I be nanny without love?”

  That love should be a given. What other job has in its description an implicit expectation of love?

  I share with Tita the work, the joys and the memories. And like all intimate relationships, Tita and I have created a shared language: ours is part Tagalog, part Visayan, part baby, part English, part spoken, part not. Ours is a complex interdependence: financial, practical, emotional. Friendship can be hard to negotiate when one person is the boss. Friendship can erode privacy and result in feelings of obligation. I try to be aware of this, but Tita has the added burden of having to intuit and draw boundaries of her own because I am not terribly good at it. The built-in boundaries that would normally exist do not in our case. There is no spouse coming home in the evening to join me in being a parent. There is no one else with whom either of us can share the day.

  I miss Tita when she’s not with us on the weekends. Not just her help but her company. I like her insights into people, her sense of humour, her imagination and ability to play. I like who she is with my daughter, who my daughter is with her. I like who she is with me. Who I am with her. At home, she disappears when she needs to. She is present where she assumes I need her present. She pulls up the slack when she sees me flagging. I relieve her when I sense she’s had enough.

  Now we’re together, not on a book tour but on holiday. When our friends offer us two separate king-sized beds in rooms at opposite ends of the house, it is Tita who asks if we might share a room. We have shared a room before, in the earliest days with a newborn, but not a bed. It’s peaceful; the baby asleep between us.

  A friend recently remarked on the peacefulness of my house, the absence of tension. “It’s because I’m a single parent,” I said. There’s no resentment over who gets to go back to work, keep a career going, engage with other adults, read the newspaper, over who has more time for a social life or exercise, over not having time together as a couple, over not having sex, over whose turn it is to get up in the middle of the night.

  But wait: I also have a nanny. And not just any nanny, but Tita. She’s three steps ahead in anticipating what both my daughter and I might need. She is so far ahead, in fact, that as Vibika has observed, I never have to
ask for anything. But I do ask her for advice, for guidance. I appeal to her confidence and expertise with children. She will tell me if she thinks there is a better way. And I will listen. We have a rapport that is so familiar to me it is familial. Tita could well have grown up in an English family. She makes me laugh at times when I find it hardest to. She makes me laugh, most often, at myself.

  The church service is well under way and Tita is dabbing her eyes with one of the egg’s burping cloths. She kneels on the floor to pray. While Tita is on her knees, praying to God, thinking of home, the egg reaches for the hands of the child of the woman beside me in her mother’s arms, trying to stuff them into her mouth. The brown-eyed girl, perhaps two years old, is intrigued, and they play with each other’s hands throughout the mass. It feels clichéd to be a romantic about it, but much as Tita is moved by something universal, so am I. Children are children everywhere, curious and uninhibited, encountering the world for the first time with eyes, hands, mouths.

  How do you protect a child from heartbreak? All I know is that the egg wants to be held all the time, and perhaps if I hold her all the time she will know that she is loved in such a fundamental and profound way that when her heart is broken as an adult, she will not fall apart, will know she is still loved and lovable.

  Micah recently asked if I didn’t think she’d grow up spoiled as a result of being carried all the time. He does not think we were spoiled in this way. Perhaps English children of our generation weren’t, perhaps my mother just had her hands too full with two of us and a troublesome husband. I honestly can’t remember. Micah’s memories start much earlier than mine. I remember best the years when there was no one to change a washer, and I was of no help.

  I will ruin the egg in some way, I told Micah, it’s in the job description. Given the options, I think this one is pretty good.

  9

  Micah and Miles have cooked a roast beef to welcome us home. There is a package on the table for Tita. Her last employers have finally sent a cheque and her things after I threatened to contact our MP and a lawyer. Inside the package is a used bar of soap, some men’s deodorant, a bath plug and a chipped mug. They have deducted thirty-two dollars—the cost of sending these things by courier—from the amount owed to her. Unbelievable.

  Dinner is a prelude to showing us the basement, now complete. Micah and Miles are bursting with pride and accomplishment, having done a beautiful job. They have made me a proper office with a desk and bookshelves and a closet. I can move out of the bedroom I’ve been sharing with my daughter and into the bedroom that has served as a neglected office until now. I can sleep on my own and work in the basement. I can try to write again.

  That’s the idea, in any case. Instead, I find myself buying my brother a bed, duvet, sheets, pillows, towels and two sets of pyjamas, and Micah moves into the space he has just finished renovating. He will live in the basement, giving up the room he rents and rarely uses in a town an hour and a half away.

  Now that he lives with us full-time, the pattern of his moods is clear. I irritate him with questions, trying to diagnose him, wanting to help him find relief.

  He finally admits that he is trying to wean himself off methadone. I hadn’t understood that being clean can mean that while you are free of a particular drug, you are hooked on something else in its place. Something legal, prescribed and, arguably, even more addictive than the drug you have just quit, sold as a “cure.”

  He doesn’t think methadone is any kind of solution—liquid handcuffs, he calls it—but the clinic will not reduce his dose. And so he has chosen to withdraw from it himself. He describes this as the feeling of his bones being crushed, ants crawling over the pulverized ruins, his guts liquid. He takes the edge off with other opiates, prescription pills bought or begged off the street, as most people trying to get off methadone do, but he’s developed a high tolerance for those; he takes enough of them every day to kill a person, and they no longer even blunt the edge. When he can’t take it anymore, he hauls himself to the nearest methadone clinic. Unfortunately, the longer he waits between visits to the clinic, the more room his dark moods occupy.

  I’m angry at his failure to disclose this while at the same time feeling immensely proud of him. I still want him here. He’s safer here than anywhere. A grown man is trying to liberate himself from drugs in the presence of a baby. She is pure and innocent and uncontaminated. He becomes a baby himself, down to basic bodily functions. He is trying to rewind the decades, start again.

  And I’m the mother. He emerges from the basement after three or four days of sleep, not having eaten that whole time. I make him something manly to eat, then present him with a list of chores. I keep him busy, focused. He behaves well because he doesn’t want to lose me again and because he feels ashamed and because there is a baby in our midst. He knows that the baby comes before everyone. He is exceptionally well mannered, deferential to us all. I love him more than I have ever loved him in my life.

  10

  Tito Mike feeds the baby her first solid food at five months. Tita, Miles and I watch in anticipation. This is a major event. We are poised to video the moment for Lola and Lolo.

  “Let her play with it first,” I direct Micah. “Let her smell it, touch it, paint her highchair with it if she wants to.” I’m repeating something I read in a book.

  The egg just opens her mouth and swallows the mashed avocado off the spoon Tito Mike is holding as if she does it every day.

  “She’s eating!” he shouts, far more astonished than she is. He’s as proud of himself as he is of her.

  He’s proud of me, too; he keeps telling me so. He would like nothing more than to have a baby and a house. He’s talking about moving to Vancouver. He needs a new life and he doesn’t feel, given his past associations, that he can reinvent himself here. My brother hopes not to be alone in his new life. There’s a mess of a girl who pecks holes in his heart; he hopes she will join him in Vancouver. After she’s finished her sentence.

  He’ll build a white picket fence around them and they’ll get a dog and have a baby. A union job might be the way to go, he tells me: overtime, benefits, workers’ comp.

  We need some air in this house. It’s been a long and intense winter with too many big personalities in too small a space, but I don’t want him moving so far away and I don’t like the sound of this girl one bit.

  “Can’t you at least stay in the city?” I ask him. He is making new associations here, after all, with us. He’s Tito Mike. I want my daughter to have an uncle. I’m afraid to lose him again. Afraid to lose this family, however fragile, that we have formed.

  If I can keep my brother in projects, perhaps I can hold on to him long enough that he will discover he has reinvented himself here with us. My backyard, for instance. The snow melts and spring reveals the extent of the disaster. A leaning fence pushed out by the stubborn roots of Manitoba maples frames a square of red brick and flagstone, both ugly and problematic—water puddles on the surface, taking days to seep away. It is likely seeping right into my basement—by the end of March we’ve had two floods.

  I did a lot of staring at this backyard last summer, watching the light through the trees, imagining what this hard surface could otherwise be. A lot of staring and not much else.

  I like the containment of a garden. I like the possibilities, the constant shifting within parameters that are clearly defined. I like making a garden in an urban setting; the juxtaposition of shapes, the lobbying for light and nutrients, the negotiation with fences and buildings and sidewalks and hydro poles and trees a hundred years old.

  Tito Mike starts by building cedar beds against the fences; two low, narrow beds, twelve feet in length. We repurpose the flagstone, laying it at the base of the beds to create walkways to stand on while planting. And then we tackle the bricks. We load them into a garbage bin on wheels in lieu of a wheelbarrow, pulling them out to the front of the house and stacking them on the sidewalk. Less than four hours later, an elderly Chinese couple
comes by with a bundle buggy and looks for us to nod in encouragement. They make two dozen trips—her pulling the bundle buggy, him stacking bricks on a carrier on his ten-speed—taking away hundreds of bricks. We will later recognize them in the front yard of a triplex down the street, framing small plots of bok choy and onions and garlic.

  “Chinese like that,” says Tita approvingly. “Nothing waste.”

  Next we have to excavate the foot of sand and the foot of gravel that underlies the bricks. No wonder the rain had simply puddled here. Digging it out is a huge project. Tita comes outside wearing winter boots and yellow rubber gloves. “Not in your job description,” I say. She waves her gloved hand dismissively and starts shovelling sand into the garbage bin.

  Tito Mike digs a trench from the back of the house to the fence and puts in weeping tiles. Then we begin moving the three cubic yards of topsoil I’ve had delivered from the laneway into the backyard. We fill in the yard garbage bin by garbage bin. It takes two days in the rain.

  My brother helps me plant two Korean lilacs and three bridal wreath spireas against the back fence. In one of the beds, I plant lettuce and basil. “When we harvest, Mum?” Tita asks.

  We spread grass seed, mostly fescue, between the beds. The shade dictates. I am thinking of my daughter, toddling and tumbling, hoping to create a lawn she’ll encounter with her feet next summer. In the other bed, I plant a sandcherry, variegated sedum, barberry, deep purple flowering sage, white-flowering catmint, chokeberry, “Husker Red” penstemon, painted ferns. Back here, north-facing, it is a palette of purple, maroon, red, white and green. Pinks, oranges and yellows are strictly at the sunny south-facing front of the house—itself a considerable project undertaken with Tito Mike’s help. He builds a raised cedar bed against the porch, which I plant with Japanese grasses and Russian sage. In the ground below I plant lavender, irises, delphiniums, butterfly bushes, mock orange.