Next door, the old widower with the bagpipe music had finally given up trying to take care of himself and had moved out east to live with his daughter in the navy, who had two daughters of her own and an ex-husband with chronic fatigue syndrome. Across the street, Nicolas had gotten thicker, while his brood of white-haired children had gotten thinner – there was only one left at home now, and he no longer looked like a younger version of his father. Now when the boy greeted Jeremy in the morning, it was with a voice that was tenuously, willfully adult, and Jeremy would respond by deepening his own voice with mock formality.
“Your kids keep growing up,” Jeremy said to Nicolas.
“It’s the one thing they do without me telling them.”
Jeremy looked to his parents for clues as to how his own old age would go, and was usually heartened. They looked and behaved like people at least a decade younger, though they were both already older than some of the drooling skeletons he saw parked outside in the sun at the seniors’ residence. Gord and Anne were still self-sufficient, which was good. His mother and father kept the house clean, cleared the driveway, maintained the yard, and did almost all their own shopping. Once in a while he would get a report from his sister about there being all kinds of food rotting in the fridge or about the state of their bathroom, which Jeremy never ventured into when he visited. Marie had regular meetings with their parents’ doctor, and knew all the troubling details about blood pressure, eyesight, arthritis, and bad joints. She would come to the Shack on her way home from those meetings and want to sit and fill him in. She sat in the middle of the booth, relishing all the unencumbered, childless space around her.
“He says Mom is losing sight in her left eye. It’s not panic mode yet, but it will be if it keeps going.”
“Will it?”
She didn’t know. She was only ever given their current status. Their doctor, an Indian man whom Marie thought was gay because of his careful manners and soft voice, would not make predictions, even when pressed.
“And Gord still has his blood pressure thing and his clumsiness. Did you know he nearly broke his neck last week taking out the recycling?”
“Nobody told me that.”
“Nobody told me, either! Apparently, he went right off the back stairs and whacked his head so bad he couldn’t see for a while. He twisted his arm, too. Mom had a fit. They don’t tell us this stuff, because they’re afraid we’ll put them in a home. You know what they’re like.”
“They’re proud, and don’t want people taking care of them. I get that.”
“You get that – oh good. Except it’ll be me who gets one of them when the other kicks the bucket.”
“Why would you even say that?”
“Because it’s true? Jer, this is something we will have to deal with. It’s not all getting put on me. You’re not going to pull a Gord on me and just pretend it doesn’t matter.”
Their father didn’t like to talk about getting old. Getting old was getting old – what alternative was there? It was as pointless as trying to imagine the forms life might take at the far end of the universe. We’ll know when we know. Gord had survived the first years of his retirement by throwing himself into the making of wine and beer using a kit. He still had cases of the stuff in the basement, some of it in green bottles and some of it in brown bottles, all of it foul and undrinkable. After the first few batches, he stopped pretending it tasted good and was a desirable drink, though he went on making it. Everyone was glad when that passed. After that, he attended weekly aqua-fit classes, and would bob and twist with a dozen other old folks while the young instructor danced on the deck with a scowl on her face. He told Jeremy the only thing he didn’t like was how long he had to wait for all the fat old turkeys to climb their way up the shallow-end ladder and out of the pool at the end of the classes. He was sure some of them were secretly peeing during the classes, too. A suspiciously warm current would suddenly appear around him every once in a while.
“That’s disgusting. How can you keep going?” Jeremy asked him.
His father gave him a scornful look. Once you started something, you had to stick to it, and he’d had worse things on him than a little pee.
His mother kept putting herself and her husband on life-extending diets. She always insisted, however, that staying alive for as long as physically and medically possible was never her goal: “My mother, your Gramma Jackie, used to say there was such a thing as an over-ripe old age,” she told Jeremy. “Her father held on until he was 95. She got so bitter about it, about everything she had to do for him.”
Of course, she added, Gramma Jackie hung around herself until she was almost the same age.
“But my father died when he was 70,” she said. “Younger than me!”
“He was the exception, though.”
“That’s exactly what he was. I have a feeling that, no matter what I do, I’ll still be here when people start travelling back and forth to the moon every day like it’s nothing.”
One afternoon, his mother appeared in the Shack without having called ahead the way she usually did. Her favourite booth was occupied, so he found her a table in the corner, as far away as possible from Donnie and the Tactix players. They made her nervous. She was wearing a floppy hat and a big pair of sunglasses, though it was overcast outside.
“I’m sorry if I’ve got you in the middle of things.”
“So you’re a celebrity now? You still have your sunglasses on.”
She reached up to touch them, but left them in place.
“Everything okay?”
Charlene brought over a bottle of sparkling water and two glasses.
“I like your hat, Anne.”
When she’d gone to take care of another table, Anne said, “She’s very nice, I’ve always liked her. Does she have any kids?”
“Not that I know of.”
“She seems like she would be good with children. She shouldn’t wait too long. Everybody waits so long now.”
“I think she’s doing fine.”
He knew exactly what was happening in his mother’s head: visions of her son lying on his deathbed, wracked with guilt over never fathering a child. He poured them both a glass of water and waited.
“I did something stupid,” she said finally.
Jeremy felt ice form in his chest, imagining her sending the rest of their savings to a phantom Nigerian prince.
“What is it, what happened?”
“I had a little accident. It was stupid – I shouldn’t have gotten up so fast.”
She quickly removed the glasses, looking irritated, as if someone had put them on her face as a prank while she’d been sleeping. Surrounding her right eye and spreading up her temple was a dark bruise the colour of a grape. Her right eye was bloodshot, and there was a blood-red glow to her nose he hadn’t noticed before. His first instinct was to tell her to put the glasses back on – quickly, before anyone saw. But having revealed her secret, she seemed wretchedly proud of it. The glasses stayed on the table. She’d fallen, she said, in the bathroom. She could laugh a little now at the whole situation. If he had to know, she had been sitting on the toilet and stood up too quickly, so that all the blood suddenly drained out of her head and she felt dizzy. Before she could sit down again, she found herself falling forward, and her head caught the edge of the sink. His father heard it happen, and almost broke down the door coming into the room. He’d wanted to take her to the hospital.
“Did you go?”
“Go and sit for hours, just to have them tell me to lie down and put ice on my face?”
Did Marie know about the accident?
“I tried to tell her, I called her, but she and Brian were in the middle of some fight about something. She’s busy with those kids all the time, anyway – she has enough to worry about.”
It was sore, and she still felt so embarrassed about the wh
ole thing, but that’s life, isn’t it: things happen, and you have to get through them. She finished the rest of her water and put the glasses back on.
“If I don’t get back, Gord will call the police to come looking for me. He must think I am completely useless. I guess I don’t blame him after this.”
Jeremy was sometimes alarmed to discover that his mother and father didn’t look as old to him as they once did, their ages no longer like grotesque things kept in the upper loft of a barn with the ladder pulled up. He was climbing up there himself, however slowly, getting a better and better look with each step. Somewhere, in an interview Jeremy had watched, Theo Hendra said that the only thing he feared about getting old was being unable to help people as much as he wanted to. The interviewer objected, saying his work would go on helping millions of people even after Hendra himself was gone, and Hendra reluctantly agreed. Jeremy was less certain about his own impact: the good he was putting into the world – some of that would outlast him, maybe, but mostly it would all crumble the moment he stopped building it up and packing it down.
He gave the situation some thought: if things ever got so bad that he was becoming helpless, he would borrow a rifle from someone, drag himself into the woods, and swallow the barrel. Or else he’d drive to Niagara Falls, climb the little wrought-iron fence in the middle of the night, and drop down into the swirl and the foam. Assuming he could still drive and climb. They’d have to scoop out his body, fatter and wetter and whiter, a ways downstream. Maybe the only mess-free way was in the Jeep with the engine running and one end of a hose attached to the exhaust pipe, the other end poking in through a back-seat window. He debated with himself about the exact right music to have playing while he waited for the fumes to do their thing – “Bridge Over Troubled Water” was an obvious choice, but he’d never really liked the song. And he wasn’t a big Pink Floyd fan, so Dark Side of the Moon was out. “Superstition” seemed inappropriate somehow, like tempting fate. He abandoned the idea without coming to a decision. If he did ever go through with it, he’d have to be spontaneous.
* * *
Jeremy shared a birthday with Glenn and Phil, two regulars at the Shack who often ended up sitting together at the bar, but who rarely betrayed any actual affection, as if their physical proximity were merely an ongoing coincidence. Jeremy hardly ever encountered them outside the bar. When he did, it was as if a crucial support beam for their relationship were missing. Glenn was a little older than Jeremy, Phil a few years younger. The three had an agreement to celebrate their shared birthdays quietly at the bar, with no singing, no gifts, no nonsense. It was less of a birthday party than a wake for the year that had just fallen away. The staff was under strict orders to nix any plans to surprise them with cupcakes and cards.
Jeremy asked the two men if they had any plans to end things early. “Let’s say nothing’s working anymore and you’re totally at the mercy. Do you wait it out or take matters into your own hands?”
“You mean kill myself?” Phil asked. “Oh no, not a chance.”
“You want to stick around as long as possible.”
“I absolutely do. For the sake of my daughter.”
“But does she want to see you stick around that long? It’s not like the two of you will be going on road trips together. It might be a relief for her, too.”
“It doesn’t matter. Life is too precious a thing, too rare. You can’t just throw it away like that.”
Glenn declared that, if he were too old or sick to be of any use, he would take care of himself in a heartbeat.
“It’s not like I have a plan – I’m not that morbid. But if I had to decide right now, I’d probably go down to the lake on a hot night, drink a bottle of vodka and swim out as far as I can, then just let myself drop.”
“That’s a good one.”
“Oh don’t say that,” Phil said.
“I have no intention of being a vegetable waiting to die.”
“Me, neither,” Jeremy said. “The trick is knowing when to pull the cord though, right? What if they find a cure for cancer the day after you do it, or figure out how to make people young again?”
“Exactly,” Phil said. “You have to live with hope.”
Glenn shook his head. “Most great men in history accomplished everything they were ever going to do before the age of 30. There are exceptions: you have Winston Churchill and a few others. Nelson Mandela, I guess, though there’s some black marks in that guy’s past – no pun intended. But for the most part, the show’s over before you turn 30. So unless you’re one of those, Churchill or Mandela, you’re pretty much done.”
“I’ve still got a lot to do,” Jeremy said.
“Alexander the Great died at 32. Think about it: 32. And that was old. My son will be 25 next year.”
Phil gave him a friendly pat on the shoulder. “He’s still got time.”
“It never used to bother me,” Jeremy said, “but sometimes I have to think about what my exact age is, for taxes or something, and I literally can’t believe the number.”
“I look at every year after 40 as a gift,” Glenn said.
Phil liked that idea. “That’s the best attitude to have, I think.”
“I didn’t say we were doing anything with the gift. We waste it. We do all this shit just to get another 10 or 20 years, then we flush it all down the toilet. Might as well go when you go. Or even better, go when you can. Before you’re a total waste.”
“I don’t know if I can go along with any of this,” Phil said. “My father-in-law is 83, and to see him, you’d think he was no more than 60. He built a storage shed behind his cottage a few years ago, almost on his own.”
Glenn went on, a little annoyed at being interrupted: “Think about apples – with most of them, once they’re ripe you get three, maybe four days before they start looking like shit. One little bump and they’re fucked. Then you have green apples. Doesn’t matter what you do – drop them on the floor, drive over them – they stay green, and they’re like that for weeks. They never change, like wax fruit, because of radiation and dicking around with the genetics. We all want to be green apples. We waste so much effort trying to look ripe all the time. What’s wrong with a few bruises, for Christ’s sake? What’s wrong with getting old?”
“Hear, fucking hear.”
“A time to be born, a time to die – you don’t fuck around with that formula.”
“The Byrds, right?” Jeremy said. “My mother loves that song.”
“It’s Ecclesiastes, you pagan. From the Bible.”
“Is it really?” Jeremy looked to Phil, who confirmed it.
“They left out the best part though,” Glenn said, “about how men are no better than beasts and will die like beasts, and all is vanity. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.”
Glenn owned a men’s clothing store in the neighbourhood, a long, narrow place crowded with plain grey pants and white shirts on the first floor of a building he also owned. He had started the business with his ex-wife. When they split, she got the house, he got the business and the building, and moved into the apartment above the store. Their son, already an adult and living in Calgary by that time, showed his neutrality by never coming home. The only thing Glenn regretted leaving behind when he moved out was his hulking, silver barbecue. There was no way the thing would fit up the stairs to his apartment, so he abandoned it to his ex-wife and bought a little portable one that he stuck on the roof of the building. In the summer and fall, he would sit up there in a patio chair, cooking his dinner and drinking cans of German beer, throwing sausages to seagulls and pigeons.
Phil was also divorced, though much more freshly and messily so than Glenn, and it showed. Glenn treated his divorce like a public insult he refused to let bother him; Phil’s seemed to have sucked out of him everything that had once been vital. He taught at a community college downtown and had been on his way to heading up the
adult education department before his wife caught him fucking around with a woman who taught small business management and who saw sleeping with him as the least stressful way to burn off the excess lust she accumulated throughout the week. After getting kicked out of the house, he lost a lot of weight, shedding pounds like a cat sheds hair under stress. The weight walked away from him and so did a lot of his old friends. His shoulders sharpened and his chest sank. Occasionally, when the booze washed away the thin emotional struts that kept Phil upright, he would collapse at the bar like a downed weather balloon, leaking tears and apologies. Or else he would work himself up into a fit about his ex-wife until he was clenching and unclenching his fists and yelling about bitches and cunts, and Jeremy would have to get him outside and into a taxi. The next morning, he would return, looking for his car keys and smiling guiltily.
“I hit the giggle juice a little hard last night.”
“Forgiven, forgotten.”
After his wife kicked him out of the house, Phil moved in with his sister Paula and her friend Barbara. He and Barbara, having burned through most of the sustaining illusions they had about themselves, got along great, occasionally acting like a platonic couple: buying groceries, cooking meals, planning and executing repairs to the house. Barbara even helped Phil pick out a little folding bed for his daughter to use on her rare visits. It was Phil’s sister who, still believing she deserved better out of life than to have her weak brother living in the basement, was resentful of the new arrangement.
“She makes me wear flip-flops in the house.”
“What for?”
“She says my feet sweat a lot, and doesn’t want me getting bacteria all over her floors. Even if I’m wearing socks.”
Congratulations On Everything Page 10
