Order of Good Cheer

by Bill Gaston

  “Well, maybe. Maybe ten feet, like I said. But just in one corner.” When first telling her, to protect her he’d deliberately low-balled his description of the damage.

  “Well, that can’t be good. Surely it can be fixed?”

  “I don’t think we’ll get the land back, but I’m looking into ways of not losing any more. You know, rocks barged in, or a cement wall.”

  “That’ll be expensive, dear.”

  “I’m looking into it.”

  Rita tossed in, he thought for his benefit, “That was really quite a storm.”

  “It sure was,” he agreed. The thing is, it hadn’t been that big a storm at all and this was the worrisome part, but not something to bring up at the moment.

  “Any more news?” Andy nodded at the tv, an immense flat screen over in the corner. It was always on. Tonight, two talking heads, pictures of what might be Afghanistan in the background, the sound turned off.

  “Nothing yet,” said Rita. She had the remote at the ready beside her ashtray. “They’ve ruled out a chemical spill. They’re talking about a ‘dead zone.’ Something about oxygen.”

  “It’s so sad,” offered Doris. “Those south winds are just...” She let it trail off, looking unsure what came next.

  “Are you feeling all right, dear?” his mother asked. Andy knew she’d been staring.

  “I’m fine. I just need some —”

  “You look awful. Are you eating?”

  “Is this the oil spill again?” asked Mrs. Schultz.

  “Marie, there was no oil spill,” said Rita, a little harshly, perhaps repeating herself. “It’s the mystery of the dead fish.”

  Doris said to Andy, “There were some very, very good pictures of the bears near Port Edward coming down and scooping fish up!”

  “Teddy bears’ picnic,” said Rita. “You’ve played Sorry before, Andy, isn’t that right?”

  “A couple times now.”

  “Then you know what happens if you kill me.”

  Of his mother’s three housemates, Andy liked Rita best. She behaved most like a friend, like a contemporary. She could relax, meet his eye, and actually be funny. It was sad how fat she was, and worrisome that she smoked as much as she did. Laura’s mother he liked the least, first because Mrs. Schultz was a hard piece of work and second because she’d never liked him either. Marie Schultz was the reason Sorry had replaced bridge as the house game — a shift they would never recover from, since bridge was why the foursome had moved in together in the first place. It’d been about a year now since she lost the short-term capacity for bidding and trump and partner’s signals. Then there was the habitually speedy Doris, who tried to please everyone and only say the right thing. Andy suspected that the real Doris, if one existed, had been locked away inside for sixty years or more and no one had a clue what she was really like. As for his mother, Andy sometimes wondered how much he’d like her if he wasn’t forced to love her. He tended to think not much. It was hard to get through that stilted elegance.

  “I’ll sit out the first one,” his mother announced. “Andy really needs something to eat. The winner can sit out the next. Unless it’s Andy.”

  Andy explained that he was full, he just needed to catch up on some sleep, but his mother ignored him. He didn’t like the look of that macaroni salad she was dishing out. He yawned then, some delayed proof of his poor sleep, and both Doris and then Mrs. Schultz yawned in response. Something in this made him suddenly antsy, desperate to be away from this place.

  The Sorry board allowed only four players, so his mother’s sacrifice was necessary, the shared attitude being that Andy had come over to play Sorry and could hardly wait. That he might just want to sit and talk was unheard of. This was a house of games. The “puzzle table” over in the corner held its ongoing jigsaw, with a lone chair in front of it, where one might choose to spend a quiet half-hour. On tv, Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy were watched as a group, as was Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, until it changed hosts.

  “What shift are you on?” his mother asked musically, smiling. While not playing, she would officially initiate conversation. She knew full well what shift he was on.

  “Days.” He had to stop himself from standing. Also, he’d figured out his restlessness. Leaving wouldn’t help, he’d be restless anywhere. Leaving wouldn’t make Laura come sooner.

  “And what are you reading, dear?”

  Andy didn’t have the energy to get into the Canadian history. Plus it was something someone might know about and a discussion might ensue. So he mentioned the Nijinsky biography. He told them what a colourful mess the man was.

  And after the briefest pause, his mother offered, “All are not merry who dance lightly.”

  Her proverbs, maxims, chestnuts. Sometimes he suspected her of having one ready for him every week, but that just couldn’t be, because she typically had one at hand for any topic, as she did today. They were irritating, not because they were appropriate, or wise, as any saying that has stood the test of time tends to be. Her proverb, a month ago, to describe Drew’s latest scrape with the authorities at work —“Mettle is dangerous in a blind horse”— had felt like a new glimpse of his lifelong friend’s brand of stubbornness. It was her delivery that was irritating. Or that she said them at all.

  “Well, he more or less invented modern dance,” Andy offered.

  “Nonsense,” said Mrs. Schultz, tapping her piece along the board, not looking at Andy. “Modern was ‘invented’ by Isadora Duncan.”

  Amazing how Alzheimer’s let a person retain arcane facts, even let them mock an iffy use of the word “invented,” and yet not remember a best friend’s name. Though, having been one of Prince Rupert’s most notorious dance mothers, urging Laura’s career on its way, Mrs. Schultz had soaked up lots about dance, especially modern.

  “Ahh,” Andy said, nodding as if corrected. In the book, Isadora Duncan had watched Nijinsky dance and it changed her. In fact she approached him right after the performance to insist that they make a baby together. Andy didn’t mind letting Mrs. Schultz’s incorrect fact stand, though he didn’t like being accused of “nonsense.” It was getting harder to sit still.

  Rita won the first game. She laboured out of her chair to the kitchen to make tea. Andy’s mother took her place and the second game started.

  Mrs. Schultz asked, “What?” three times running when it was her turn and Doris nudged her. Twice she was told that the game was Sorry, and the second time she looked down her nose with the one eye, snorted, and said haughtily, “We should be playing bridge.”

  Andy watched for the other women’s reactions. No one moved or spoke. Laura’s mother looked less sad than angry. She, whose fault it was that bridge had ceased, had just berated them for not playing bridge. Was she claiming she was still able? Or had she forgotten her failing state and was giving them hell for what she saw to be their whim? Or was she in effect apologizing, and giving life hell for doing this to them?

  He didn’t like how he felt about her. But was it so unnatural to feel vindicated when life humbled someone as nasty as Mrs. Schultz? Someone whose gaze still fell on him like a sneer, someone who refused to accept that he had been loved by her daughter? You didn’t want anyone to suffer, but he admitted ambivalence at seeing that arrogant stance of hers being contradicted by the growing hunch, by the fester of liver spots climbing her forearms. And there was the pink eye patch which, because it reflected absolutely no light, looked like a neutral hole into a brainless head.

  Mrs. Schultz had almost been his mother-in-law. Resistance to the image lurched through his body, it was actually physical. According to Darwin, and probably also Freud, it was natural for him to want to crush her.

  “Well, I have a feeling,” Andy said, “that you’re all playing Sorry for my stupid sake.”

  He stretched, leaned back, and smiled at his mother, lifting his eyebrows. Affirming he had done well to say what he’d said, she nodded regally, a queenly dip of the head, with soft-closing
eyes. She often acted as if this were salon culture in Rosedale, or old Budapest. What had she said to news of Laura’s marriage coming apart? “Marry in haste, repent at leisure.” Drew found her funny. Andy found it depressing being made to wonder, about his own mother, whether her elegance was other than sane.

  He moved his piece and landed on his mother’s; she pretended it angered her. Doris and Rita laughed at the naughty son. Andy did generally enjoy himself here in this house. Despite the several hurdles — the incandescently boring talk, his mother’s elaborate display, and now the disintegration of Mrs. Schultz — despite these things these four old women had found a kind of oasis of good humour. Maybe he simply enjoyed being fawned over, being treated like a sixteen-year-old. Maybe he liked witnessing again that his mother was safe, provided for. But he also liked being seduced by the ladies’ lighthearted mood. Forced or not, a habit of their generation or not, these four creaky souls knew to keep things light. Even with the tv always on, their house seemed a refuge from the outer dark: the suicide-bomber newspapers, morose monosyllabic friends slumped in a dead town, the smothering blanket of endless rain, even the sun dragging its light away for the winter.

  The women had come up with the idea eight years ago. Mrs. Schultz had been the chiding force. Andy remembered her asking them, loud and accented enough to sound angry, “Giff me one reason why not.” With real estate crashing, four bridge partners bought a four-bedroom house. They drew up a constitution. Anyone could sell her quarter-share, as could their family if she died. They each cooked one house supper a week, Mondays was leftover night, Saturday they ordered in, Friday night was Go Your Own Way. When needed, they voted on things. If, for instance, Doris spent ten days in Calgary visiting her son, did she still owe her share of the monthly food bill? (The vote was yes.) When Rita was in her wheelchair for that half-year and couldn’t cook, clean, or grocery shop and they had to shoulder her burden, should she in some way be penalized? (The vote was no.) Andy found it remarkable that old ladies, as a species famous for crankiness over pennies, could overcome complications like these. There’d been small feuds and pout-fests and one threat to leave, but by and large the group affirmation was that most things in life are petty. They made level-headedness and fair play a point of pride.

  But you could see that their dam was going to burst. Years had added complications that no amount of fair play would solve and no one could brush off as petty. The house contained a diabetic, two iffy hearts, one hearing aid, a cane, various skin lesions, and at least one operation Andy wasn’t privy to. Two no longer drove. Tonight, the smell of old cooked onions and faint garbage reminded him that it never used to smell in here at all, except maybe of too much lilac.

  But Mrs. Schultz was the main crack in the dam. The other ladies didn’t have the energy for her next stage. Two weeks ago she had been gone all afternoon and was found walking several blocks past the grocery store, unclear where she was. The Alzheimer’s was accelerating and her leaps of anger weren’t helping her case. Democracy was about to bring down the gavel. Fair play was about to pounce.

  Her mother was one reason why Laura was coming back. As Laura described it in her most recent letter, it would be a case of the sick looking after the sicker.

  PINCHING THROUGH HIS beard in the mirror, yawning, Andy came to when he saw his own eyes. The water was running hot and he had a mound of shaving cream in his hand.

  Apparently he had decided to shave. He was getting tired of looking at his beard and applying to it the question, in that two-pronged voice of hope and fear, “What will Laura see?”

  Beard or no beard it was going to be bad. Andy knew the visual jolt of running into an old friend after twenty years. So really the question was, What will Laura see in this face that’s shocking and repugnant? What will look like the opposite of sex? Andy smiled his gentlest, calmest smile, and held it. Lots was unchanged from two decades ago. That skin was okay. The crow’s feet suggested he’d been having a decent time and not sitting stewing in it. His hair was good too —hairline maybe only a half-inch back and the grey scattered, not even salt and pepper. If anything the grey made his hair look light brown instead of brown. He was still handsome enough. A neutral good looks. He knew women didn’t generally look at him with hunger, except maybe in certain moods, maybe when blind with ovulation’s most brute flux, for instance. The younger women he dealt with these days, the fake-nail bank tellers and push-up bra waitresses, might still call him “cute for his age.” Maybe they noticed his nice shoulders, his smile. His hands were maybe too delicate for some, as they looked more suited to a deft flipping of pages than swinging a pipe wrench at a stuck lug nut.

  Trying to stay objective, if he tilted his face under the light he could see the puckish angularity of a male model. Or at least a musician. There was maybe a confused relationship between nose and lips, spacing not quite right. Maybe his forehead was a bit flat. But people wouldn’t think, There goes a guy with a something. If people ever cared to argue about his imperfections they probably wouldn’t agree. He was probably handsome enough for the assumption to be that, as a longtime single man, he had navigated his way through a few women. Which was almost the case.

  Anyway, his skin was too pale for these dark whiskers. Drew was right, they were too far apart and patchy. If a woman sharing the same pillow turned her face to his and looked closely she’d see too much skin.

  Tonight at his mother’s cemented it. First, Laura’s mother stared hard at him and wouldn’t stop. Finally she announced, quite savagely, “You don’t have a beard.” He knew she probably meant that she didn’t remember him having a beard, and wasn’t in fact declaring his beard too pathetic to be called a beard, but it bugged him regardless. The last straw was his mother smiling benignly at this and adding, with that limp closing of eyes, “It’s not the beard that makes the philosopher.”

  He brought his hand up and lathered a cheek.

  He’d leave long sideburns, down to the level of his mouth. He’d seen them on younger guys recently, a hip, almost ’50s look except that your haircut stayed short and normal. He could always hack them off before she saw them.

  He lathered up his face, leaned in close, and here were his eyes again. They appear to hold all of your knowledge, all of your self, but of course they’re empty. They’re fluid and lens. It’s hard to really see your own eyes. His were an odd colour, he’d been told. A pale green, with yellow-orange near the pupil. One drunk woman had told him this yellow made his eyes look like a sad sunset. Another slightly drunk woman had told him his eyes were soulful. So apparently he had the good eyes. One defect was that they might be too big. Coming off graveyard shift they were prone to bugging out.

  Laura herself had said something about his eyes. It wasn’t exactly flattering, but he’d liked it well enough. She said that his eyes, when they stared at you, made you realize not only that eyes are connected directly to the brain but that eyes are the brain, exposed. In the hundred times he picked over her comment, he decided she meant that he looked less like Gollum than he did like a bright fellow capable of some insight.

  Andy razored the foam off his face, his “beard” coming with it. He rinsed with warm water, snitched some unfoamed hairs off a spot he’d missed, and then scraped his face with a towel, up, away from the heart. He didn’t stop and pose and check out his new look. Change was always awful at first, so why not skip that part.

  THE DAYS WERE short and getting shorter, dark when he ate breakfast and dark as he made dinner. This morning he had already been at work for two hours and was on his third coffee when he dragged a chair from his annex shack and leaned it against the corrugated tin wall to watch the sun rise pink from behind Mount Hays in a surround of saucer-shaped clouds. Winter sunrises were rare, but this year not. He blew on the top of his coffee. He was wearing only a hoodie and felt fine, it felt like spring, though the air was cold on his freshly naked cheeks and chin. This time of year it should rain constantly and be colder — some kind of sunny-days
record for November had already been set. You could hardly keep up with the weather setting records. A few months back, in Tim Hortons, a fan of global warming had argued earnestly that Prince Rupert Harbour would be decent waterskiing if the water warmed up five degrees. He was talking about water so cold that oysters stopped surviving in it about four hundred miles south.

  Laura, remember how you grew up hundreds of miles not just from cities but from oysters?

  How many mornings had he sat right here, taking in this view? Over the years he’d worked at new ways to see it, reminding himself that the vista was beautiful. Truly it was. Mountains, ocean. If he raised his gaze he could block out the parking lot and road that, around the corner of Mount Hays, became the Highway of Tears. If he edged to the left and squatted, he couldn’t see the coal port. Framed by this bit of avoidance, everything he could see was natural, completely not man-made, not a wire or building or road. No clear-cut mountains farther inland, or beyond no oil sands, or farther still no endless uniform wastes of corporate farms, where the grain under his feet came from. With his view, no country with its primal spirit trampled, coast to coast.

  Another bonus to work: up here he could pretend it was pristine. He could still bring himself to love the place, even if it felt like the love one has for one’s own arms, or feet.

  Final paragraphs in her letter said:

  I don’t know if it was the big bad city that made me sick, but I do know that if I don’t leave it I won’t survive. I need a smaller place, like a nest or a cave, to heal. I need something simple. Not that any place is simple. But where you are there aren’t many streets to choose from, on a walk. Sometimes, choice is stress. I just need to get away from here and go home. I remember how homesick I was, for years. Maybe I should have listened to that, because maybe it helped make my body sick. Moods do work on the body, over time. You were part of my homesickness. It was hard to separate you from the place. I never really knew exactly what I was missing.