by André Alexis
We were neither of us able to eat our pork in mushroom sauce, nor the mint jelly she served with it.
* * *
—
This wasn’t the first time we’d laughed together, but it sticks in memory for several reasons:
the sound of my mother’s laughter
the sensuous details (to this day, I can’t stand cream of mushroom).
This was also the first inkling I had that there was more to my mother than my resentment allowed me to see; a crucial moment in our relationship.
One of the most striking differences between myself as a child and myself now is the discovery that my mother was an amusing woman. It raises all sorts of questions. I mean, I wonder how much of what I took to be distance and lack of affection was actually distance and humour? Are distance and humour preferable in a parent? Are “lack of affection” and a “sense of humour” mutually exclusive? Perhaps there was no distance at all…? Perhaps it was all humour…?
Of course, where humour’s concerned, I’m far from expert. For most of my childhood, I was too serious to laugh at myself, too serious to laugh at much of anything. I’ve made up for it since. There’s very little I find as hilarious as myself, I can tell you.
My mother laughed at me quite a bit, now that I think of it, but she laughed at herself as well. Perhaps laugh isn’t the best word. She didn’t so much laugh…It was rather that she couldn’t take her own darkness all that seriously.
She even managed to find humour in her relationship with Gerald Perry, the only man I ever saw strike her. Him I remember exactly: tall, overweight, and blond. He never took off his leather jacket, and he smelled of motor oil.
– The fuck you lookin’ at?
he asked me before pushing her against a wall and stomping out of the apartment in a rage. (Even at the time I thought I was dreaming.)
Of him, she said
– Cost me a fortune in make-up
and
– He was a good man, sweetheart. He only ever hit me on this side of the face, you know.
Her words upset me at the time, but it wasn’t Gerald Perry she treated lightly, it was herself. She was her own object of ridicule, or she was at times.
It’s in this that I feel closest to her.
* * *
—
It must seem odd, my going on about my mother’s sense of humour, but, aside from bringing us gradually closer, it was like her shadow in later years.
More than a shadow.
It was after I accepted this aspect of her that she began her subtle change from Katarina to Mother, or from Mother to Katarina, depending. I mean, if mothers are autocratic and frightening, then she was my mother first. If they are loving and kind, she was most a mother just before she died.
I realize mothers are both/and – both frightening and loving – but I think of her kinder self as Mother, and it is disconcerting to have less vivid memories of my mother as Mother than I do of my mother as Katarina.
There is a moment that stands out, though, a moment on the cusp of Motherhood.
It was before I left my two homes, the beginning of my second year at the university: 1977.
I was twenty.
We were meeting for lunch, my mother and I, somewhere around Tunney’s Pasture; the name stays with me, the neighbourhood doesn’t. We almost never met during the day, so I would have resented the break in my routine.
I don’t remember why we had lunch together, but we were talking about Erwin Lewis, a Jamaican whose accent I never managed to decipher, the latest man to disappoint her, though he’d been on the scene a long time, it seemed to me. Eight months? A year?
The cafeteria where we ate is white in my memory; white walls, white-tiled floor. Perhaps it was winter. No, even the trays are white, and the fluorescent lights were unusually bright. Perhaps I was on the verge of illness.
My mother was wearing glasses, which she never did at home. She was dressed in a navy-blue jacket, a canary-yellow blouse, a narrow navy skirt, a pearlish necklace. She looked more like a matron when she went off to work, but less motherly.
Her hair was short, with very little grey. Her face was still smooth, no crows’ feet, save when she scowled. Her lipstick was, as it always was, too vibrant. It looked as if her lips hovered about her mouth, but aside from that she was a beautiful woman.
I don’t remember how Erwin came up. How long had he been gone? Why had he left? How could he be so cruel? It all struck me as pointless.
– Why do you get involved with men like that? I asked.
– What should I do? she asked, smiling.
– You should be sensible. The way it looks to me, you like being miserable…
(That was a good one.)
– I don’t have any sympathy for you, I said.
And I told her why. She hated herself. She was irresponsible. She lacked consideration. Moved by my own rhetoric, I made a variety of suggestions, from psychoanalysis (for her) to self-restraint. And it seemed to me we were finally communicating, that I was telling her things she hadn’t heard.
I didn’t believe in psychoanalysis then. I don’t believe in it now. It’s no more a science than testicle scratching, but I suggested it because it sounded adult, and I remember talking on and on, looking up to see her smiling face, taking her smile for encouragement.
And then I looked up and she was crying. How long had she been crying?
– Did I say something wrong?
– No, Thomas…I’m sorry.
She took a handkerchief from the sleeve of her jacket, took off her glasses to wipe her eyes.
– I thought you didn’t love Erwin?
– But I don’t…
– Why can’t you be honest?
(Another good one.)
– What are you crying about?
– I don’t know.
That put an end to the conversation. Her eyes were puffed up, her hands unsteady. Sniffling, she rooted in her purse for a compact mirror and make-up. She was thirty-nine, younger than I am now, but she seemed impossibly old.
And I was resentful, at first, because I thought: This has something to do with me…but I was only trying to be helpful. It’s her fault for being so sensitive. She didn’t have the right to take my words so seriously. She’s never done that before.
It was as if she’d betrayed me.
And then I was resentful, because I thought: This has nothing to do with my words. She misses Erwin, the silly woman. She hasn’t taken me seriously at all. As if it were wrong not to take me seriously. Did she listen to me at all? Had she ever?
Yet, in those moments, wiping her eyes and fixing her make-up, she was what she had never been to me: fully human, not at all divine.
* * *
—
Really, these contradictions are typical of my feelings for Mother. Where my mother is concerned, it’s as if I had evolved a loving relationship with chaos.
I mean, as far as order is concerned, it seems to be true that I slipped from my mother’s womb, from that particular womb, some time on January 15th, 1957. It follows, from what I’ve been taught, that she, Katarina MacMillan, provided half of the elements necessary for my existence.
So, of the woman who whelped me, I know a name, a date of birth, something of her parentage, and a handful of incidents from her life. Essentially, I don’t know her that much more than I know my father, and the things I do know are almost useless where knowing is concerned. I mean, I can barely scratch the surface of “Who was your mother?”
Mind you, I can barely scratch the surface of “Who am I?” either.
Know thyself? Pardon my language, but the ancient Greeks should bugger off. Knowing so little of my origin, of my parents, of anything at all, how much chance is there of knowing myself? Besides, who I am is a function of when
I am, and when I am is only a near fact, as evanescent as breath on a window pane.
Yes, yes. It’s the old story. Human ignorance is as common as dirt, and if I could take comfort in my ignorance, I’d be better off.
But although it has brought no comfort, ignorance has brought the only lasting passion I’ve known, not only a passion to know but a passion for things in place, and things in place is connection, and connection is love, or next door to it, as far as I can tell.
I’m sorry, what I mean to say is, being who I am, I might have loved my mother less if I’d known her better. My ignorance is the generator of our intimacy.
I’m not obsessed with my mother, but, as it happens, she has been the most unpredictable element in my life, the one to whom I’ve most often sought connection; for love, yes, but for self-protection as well.
I wonder if this makes any sense at all?
* * *
—
The day I moved into my apartment at Gilmour and Lyon, I invited my mother to supper.
I had no table and only two chairs.
It had taken no time at all to unpack my belongings. My books were neatly piled against the bedroom wall. My bed was covered with the only sheets I owned. The sheets were white, too small for the frame. My clothes were in a squat chest of drawers.
My kitchen utensils, or such as I had, were in a drawer I’d lined with waxed paper. They were in the same drawer as my four knives, three forks, and half a dozen spoons. There was only one kitchen cupboard, so it was just as well I had only three cups, four plates, two pots, and a frying pan.
The apartment smelled dank and earthy, though here and there it also smelled of the pine panelling the landlord had nailed to one wall. The floors were concrete and cold. There were only two windows, one in the kitchen and one in the front room, both of them such small, grimy rectangles there would have been little light from either, even if they had been higher than ground level.
The previous tenant had left a lamp, a circular rug whose black tassels made it look like a colourful insect, and a small black-and-white television that worked erratically, sometimes giving only an intimate blue light and scratchy sound.
I thought it was home and I was happy in it.
The first meal I made, in this my first apartment, was corned beef and cabbage with white rice. It must have been pretty miserable. I fried the corned beef to mush, filled the frying pan with water, added gouts of ketchup and a dose of Worcestershire sauce. I emptied a tin of corn over the beef and put a layer of cabbage on top of that.
When it had boiled into submission, I put this food-for-the-toothless on a bed of rice, and my mother and I, plates on our knees, ate in my front room.
– It’s good, she said.
Even so, she only managed a mouthful or two.
– Are you sure it’s all right?
– It’s very good.
– Why aren’t you eating?
– I want to live, sweetheart.
I couldn’t hide my disappointment.
– I thought you liked it.
– I do like it, Thomas, but I’m not hungry.
She set her plate down and came over to put her arm around my shoulders.
– I don’t remember the last time anyone cooked for me, she said.
– What about Henry?
– Except Henry.
She kissed my forehead.
* * *
—
And it occurs to me, having written so much about knowing and unknowing, having spent so much time remembering her difficult behaviour, her flaws, her indecisions…it occurs to me again that my mother was, often, an affectionate woman.
Over the years, she was more loving than not.
(I’m wary of giving her nobility in retrospect. Her two years with Henry were, as far as I know, the only years of home and happiness she ever managed, but, it seems to me now, she fought her own destiny for them. I mean, she was, essentially, a restless woman. She must have loved Henry very much to manage even that small life with him.)
I’m tempted to write “she changed” or “I changed” or “we changed,” but it’s all so pointless. When do we not change? When do we stop?
She is changing now, though she’s been dead for months.
As if death were a vernal state.
HOUSECLEANING
XIII
Time passed as it usually does, not moment to moment but crest to crest.
From 1979 to 1990, things happened around me more than they did to me: Quebec squirmed and stayed, the Constitution was signed on a windy day when I was home and feverish, Clark and Turner made wonderful prime ministers, Meech Lake died, Charlottetown died; ethnic cleansing, the preservation of democracy, fatwa and jihad…so many interesting ways to say death, and then Death itself: buses fell from mountains, trains from bridges, planes from the air…
All of this I learned first from the Citizen, my necessary, distracting window on the world outside.
There was more, of course. There were Ilya Prigogine, Kenichi Fukui, and John Polanyi; Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Carlo Rubbia, and Simon van der Meer…
I fell in love, I think, and out again.
Two of my toes were crushed on a Canada Day. My thumb was broken playing softball.
I moved from Gilmour to Percy, to MacLaren, to Percy.
I fell in love, I’m sure of it, and out again.
What began as summer employment, a negligible position at Lamarck Labs, became my life, professionally speaking. From my graduation in 1979 (Bachelor of Science, University of Ottawa, summa cum laude, despite myself), I began to work full-time at Lamarck. I slowly progressed from observing blood tests and cell counts to helping others observe them and, finally, to supervising those who observed; not a great change in what I do, but a change in status.
It’s a matter of temperament and inclination, I suppose. I like the environment. I’m as charmed by the centrifuge now as I was when I locked my first vial in. I liked looking into the refrigerators in which things were neatly ranged and labelled. The lab, with its various rooms all kept relatively clean, was hospitable to me.
Also, I liked the people with whom I worked: Linda Graham and Ron Webb, John McCann and Linda Mitchell.
I miss them.
These last twelve months, from my mother’s death to now, are the longest I’ve been away from Lamarck since I was twenty-one, and I’ve begun to dream of centrifuges and plasma.
* * *
—
I remember so little of the years between ’79 and ’90, it’s as though they were lived for me.
I rarely visited Henry or my mother, having other things to do, things so unmemorable they’ve left little, save the occasional memory of this or that pleasure, this or that distress.
And then, in 1990, my mother returned to Petrolia.
It’s a decision as bewildering to me now as it was seven years ago. She had paid for a small house in Sandy Hill. She wasn’t all that fond of other women, but she had, I think, a handful of friends. Whenever I saw her, she seemed content.
It would have taken more imagination than I possess to predict her return to such an unhappy town.
– I thought you liked Ottawa, I said.
– I’ve never liked Ottawa, she answered.
That in itself was bewildering.
She wouldn’t, or couldn’t, say why, but she decided to return to her parents’ home.
(Now that was a place I thought she despised, and I was astonished to learn she hadn’t sold it.)
I don’t remember if I helped her pack up, or if I helped her move. I must have. Henry certainly did and, in the years of her self-imposed exile from Ottawa (or her return to Petrolia), he often asked about her well-being.
– Is she all right?
– Does she have money?
He assumed, as anyone might, that I’d have seen her more recently than he had. I was still her son, after all. And, honestly, I had every intention of visiting my mother in Petrolia. We spoke of it often.
– When are you coming to see me, Thomas?
– Soon, soon…
– Why don’t you come this weekend? You can sleep in your old bedroom, you know.
– Well, maybe not this weekend.
To read this, it might seem as if it were my turn to punish her with solitude in Petrolia, as if I’d carried my resentment through the years. Nothing could be further from the truth. To begin with, I was thirty-three when my mother returned to Petrolia. With time, I’d managed to bury most of my grievances. And then, she was not lonely. As I understood it, she had her own life in Petrolia. She worked in Sarnia, came home to her house and friends.
And then, honestly, I intended to visit.
Yet, I never visited, not once before her final week.
You understand, I didn’t realize she was dying; dying faster than usual, I mean. If I’d known…
If I’d known, I’d almost certainly have gone.
* * *
—
I lost touch with my mother, to an extent, but I lost touch with Henry too, though we lived in the same city and saw each other occasionally.
And then, a late-blooming obsession of Henry’s brought us closer before pushing us even further apart.
In the spring of ’95, he began a frantic and, to me, pointless search through his library. He called me at work.
– Tom, he said. I need you.
– Is everything okay?
– With me? Never better.
– What’s wrong, then?
– I need your eyes.
