Later that night, before I’ve thought of an excuse to give my mother for bolting from the rehab centre, she calls with more news. She’s received a letter.
“From Father?” I ask.
“From his lawyer.”
“He has a lawyer?”
My father’s petition for divorce sends my Catholic mother to her bed for a week. I’m delegated to pick up Richie from his program. “Where’s Ma?” he asks, every day suspicious.
“She’s not feeling well. Let’s go shoot some baskets.”
“Bye Richie!” one of the workers calls. The Human Parrot does her thing. “Bye Richie Bye Richie Bye Richie Bye Richie Bye Richie Bye Richie!” She suffers from some avian syndrome: small head, tiny close-set eyes, beak. As we leave, she stomps around the door, wingless.
Richie shuffles to the car dragging his Canucks lunch kit. “Where’s Ma?”
I have to move the passenger seat back before he gets in, way back, and even then push his head against his chest so he doesn’t brain himself on the door frame. “She’s at home. She’s not feeling well.”
We drive over to Point Grey High where a group of kids is already on the asphalt. Their bagging jeans nearly drop every time they take a shot. This does not look very cool to me. Richie carries the basketball against his stomach. Without him, I probably wouldn’t venture over to a potential youth gang and suggest we share the court, but my brother has an effect on people. He parts a crowd, like Jesus. The kids decide right away to abort their game and walk off with their backpacks and Big Gulps, holding up their pants.
I do the legwork, dribbling, feinting. Richie stands on one spot and waits for me to pass him the ball. No matter where he stands, he scores. In this small regard, he’s a savant. He’s NBA material. But this week he’s feeling too insecure to enjoy himself. “I want to go home,” he announces before I’ve even worked up a sweat.
Erica takes the evening shift during the crisis. My mother’s collapse seems to lift her from her own depression—or maybe it just takes her mind off things. Every night she goes over to keep Richie company, but when I offer to keep her company keeping him company, she declines. She takes a tray in to my mother. She asks how my mother is feeling. Apparently it’s been years since anyone asked my mother this because she’s confiding in Erica now and may not with me around.
When I take the ferry over to see my father, he’s been living on Bowen Island for a month. We have a cabin there, but haven’t used it as a family for years. In adolescence Richie developed a fear of water. He flaps his hands and rocks and moans, so can’t be taken on the ferry without unsettling the other passengers. Since then, my father has taken the short trip alone two or three times a year.
Both my mother and Erica asked me to go. It’s a warm June morning, so I stay on deck with the car and from halfway across Howe Sound can see the long bank of Point Grey and the silhouetted towers of the university. The island seems a stone’s throw away, humpbacked and green. I haven’t spoken to my father since that afternoon in the hospital last winter. A few days before that, I’d gone to see him at the house. This was when we had our fight.
I found him in his study off the billiard room on the main floor where he hides from Richie and my mother. At first he wouldn’t answer my knock. “What do you want?” he finally barked. Seeing it was me, he looked surprised, then, rightly, suspicious. “Oh. You must need money.”
I laughed.
“I don’t recall you’ve paid me back for the last loan.”
Did he even remember what it was for? Two years had gone by. “We’ve saved about half of it,” I told him, “but now our plans have changed.” He returned to his reading. I pressed on. “We’re not asking you for more money. We’re asking the bank. But if you would co-sign the loan and give us an extension on paying you back.”
“What’s wrong with you? You’re an adult. You’re supposed to make your own way in the world, not keep coming to your father for an allowance. You made a decision against my better judgment not to pursue any kind of career. Now you come crawling to me for these handouts. No one gave me a handout, let me tell you.” He said all this without lifting his eyes from the page he was reading.
“Erica’s forty.”
“What has that got to do with anything?”
I didn’t expect him to understand. “We’d like to adopt.”
Now he reared up. “Are you mad? You want to take on someone else’s crack-addled bastard?”
“I’m sure Erica would, but unfortunately it would take too long.”
“I see those people every day. I put them in jail.”
“We’d like to pursue an international adoption. There are fees.”
“International,” he said.
“China.”
I thought he was going to say, “Connaught Drive, the new Chinatown,” or bring up the Shaughnessy leases. Instead he leaned back in the chair and looked at me—again! “What do you want children for?” This time, he was not being rhetorical.
The fact is I don’t want children. I hated being a child and having to look out for and cede to my brother at the same time I was expected to achieve for both of us. It would give me no pleasure to put someone else through that. I’m afraid a child of mine would turn out like Richie. Afraid of the kind of father I might be. I’m afraid of children. On my route I pass a playground and I can’t help overhearing how inordinately concerned the underaged are with justice. No fair! My turn! Liar! I don’t think I could live with a Utopian underfoot all day long.
“It would make Erica happy,” I told my father.
“Divorce her.”
“What?”
“Divorce her. You have grounds.”
During the fertility treatments, I had to give Erica her injections. Her scrunched-up face and little yelp nearly demolished me each morning. Everything scientifically monitored, timed to the hour, I sat at her side in the clinic, holding her hand, hating the doctor with his face between her stirrupped legs for knowing deeper parts of her than I did.
A nurse led me off to a room not much bigger than a closet. Recliner chair, TV, selection of T. & A. on a side table. She opened the door of the cabinet the TV sat on and showed me how the VCR operated. “Here are the videos if you need them.”
I scanned the labels. “Do you have The Greatest Story Ever Told?”
My mother tells me that the thing she finds most exhausting about caring for Richie is keeping him from touching himself. When we were children, she was fiercely vigilant on this account. I glanced at the magazines, but was uninspired. Where to look? If I closed my eyes, I pictured my mother wagging a finger at me. Down the hall, they were extracting Erica’s carefully cultivated eggs for me to fertilize. Along with the pain of the injections, she’d had to endure daily ultrasounds and blood tests, headaches, fatigue, bloating, my mother mentioning three times at Sunday dinner, “Erica, I do believe you’re putting on weight.” All that was required of me was to produce a tablespoon of jism.
I tried a video but couldn’t figure out the story.
In the end I settled on Erica, as I would the whole next year we were celibate. Before I met her, I used to read the personal ads to learn what other men actually thought of themselves. I am WM, 5’ 10”, bald, lacks self-worth, ambition. I might have ended up like my brother, on Connaught Drive forever, except that Erica married me.
My epitaph: Here lies a man who masturbated to the thought of his own wife.
And my father advised me to divorce her.
Exactly what we yelled at each other I don’t recall. My mother met me at the door and tried to stop me from leaving. “I didn’t even know you were here. What is going on?”
Normally, I’m not so foolish as to get into an argument with a judge.
The ferry bumps into the Snug Cove dock. It’s been more than twenty years, yet as I drive off I see that, though the village has been tarted up for tourists, the old library is still there and even the Bow-Mart coffee bar where Richie and I, spooning
sundaes, used to jostle each other on the stools. Surprising that I know the way, turning onto Bowen Bay Road as though I’ve actually driven here before. These hills and curves I’ve travelled only in a back seat, growing queasier and queasier until, reaching the cabin, I threw up in the driveway.
I leave the car in the public parking area and walk up the road dense on both sides with ferns. Looking up at the trees invites vertigo. The cabin is exactly as I remember it, but for the thicker thatch of moss and the paint peeling like arbutus bark. I climb the three wooden steps up to the porch.
I never came back because I didn’t want to spend a weekend alone with my father. He’s expecting me now. I called ahead. When I see him through the screen coming to answer my knock, I realize that what I feel is dread. I’m both afraid of him and afraid of seeing him lamed, though the latter makes no sense considering all the times I’ve cut him down in my mind. Though limping, he moves at a fair pace with his cane. When he pushes open the screen and stands aside to let me in, I see that he’s given up for good his biweekly visits to the barber. He’s lost weight, too, thirty pounds at least, not counting what the leg weighed.
“You look great,” I say, not daring to look down.
Astonishing, the thing he does. He lifts the left leg to show me—khaki pant leg, brown sock, leather loafer. It looks real, except when he strikes it with the cane I hear a plasticky thump. The astonishing thing is he grins.
Inside, I’m subsumed with nostalgia. The mildewy smell of the cabin, the yellow and brown plaid sofa, coffee table piled with old fishing magazines, though the fish are gone now. The orange net curtain on the window, driftwood and shells crowding the ledge. It’s clean. He must have hired someone. I wonder about the cooking because, as far as I know, my father has never cooked a meal in his life. Glancing through the pass-through window to the kitchen, I see, along with all the old appliances, a microwave and some very shiny pots in the draining rack beside the sink.
“Drink?”
I nod and he canes his way to the sideboard still jammed with board games for us to play on rainy days, though Richie mostly threw the cards around. “You’re managing?”
He smiles again, slyly. “I am.”
I’m confused by these smiles. He seems almost gleeful, and all at once I understand: he’s trying to prove a point. He wants to show that he can tackle these domestic chores, and on one leg, simply to nullify the claims my aggrieved mother has made. These smiles are about the divorce.
He hands me the whiskey. “What ferry are you taking back?”
“The 3:05, I think.”
“The 2:05 will be less crowded.”
“That doesn’t give me much time.”
“Time for what?”
“I’d like to look around. It’s been a while.”
“What does your mother want?”
“To know how you’re doing.”
He makes a familiar sound through his nose, an exhalation of contempt. “Come out on the deck.”
The sliding door is open. He goes ahead, startling a hummingbird off the hourglass feeder that hangs from the tree beside the deck. A flare, metallic green, an angry squeak—the bird buzzes off. It’s so much brighter than inside the cabin I have to shade my eyes. Side by side, leaning on the deck railings, we look out over the bay dotted with coloured buoys. Pasley, Gabriola, Vancouver—the islands recede in lighter shades of grey.
“I’m going to build a new cabin,” he announces.
“Where?”
“Here. I’m going to tear this one down.”
I feel an actual pang.
“You can tell your mother that. Go down and look at what they built on the old Pederson place. Go on. I can’t negotiate the beach yet.”
The stairs from the deck are half rotted. In the grassy fringe around the bay the rowboats and kayaks lie with their keels to the sky. I step over the driftwood logs that have washed in during the winter and scrunch along the sand. Though I don’t remember where the Pederson place was, I see a new cabin, all blond wood and glass, a modern take on the traditional longhouse.
The tide is out. For a while I nose around on the beach and search the crevasses between the rocks, clogged purple with starfish orgies. I find flat stones to skip. These were Richie’s and my childhood occupations. We also liked to bury each other.
“You’d better hurry if you’re going to catch the 2:05!” my father calls.
When I’m back on the deck stamping the sand off my shoes, he asks me, “What do you think?”
“We had fun here.”
“Of the Pederson place.”
There’s a fifty percent chance he’ll be legless in five years. There’s also a fifty percent chance he’ll be dead. These are the statistics my mother has relayed to me.
“Impressive,” I say.
Before my father hurries me out, I use the bathroom. I want to take one last look in the bedrooms too, but both doors are closed. I would even drive around the island, then catch the 3:05 as planned, if I could be sure that Erica had a good day.
I depend on antidepressants, currently Paxil. My mother has that other drug, religion. But Erica insists she’ll work through her feelings in her own good time. For now she’s angry and bitter and disappointed. She thinks my father refused to help us with the adoption out of spite. Principle, I told her, not spite. He’s a judge. In law, spite—indeed all the things we feel now—is irrelevant. My father has no feelings. Certainly he’s never concerned himself with how his family feels, nor demonstrated any more emotion for Richie and me than he would for two tablespoons of jism.
The picture above the toilet is missing; the nail hole and the darker rectangle of yellow betray the absence. I don’t remember what was there. A photograph? I wash and dry my hands then open the medicine cabinet. This is when I realize how wrong we are, that he has, in fact, remade himself precisely because of something that he feels. Calamine lotion, Dettol, Band-Aids are the things I expect and indeed hope to see, but the balms of my childhood summers have been cleared out and replaced by mouthwash, deodorant, a profusion of prescription bottles, lancets, needles. When I close the cabinet, the mirror confronts me. Deep parenthetical lines cut my face, the scars of a perpetual frown.
My father is happy. This is why he smiles.
“Well?” Erica asks when I get in. Freshly showered, she passes me in the hall, a solemn Bedouin. In the bedroom she gets into bed, removes the towel and begins combing out her wet hair.
When I tell her what I’ve concluded, she hurls the comb. It smarts against my shoulder. “Ow.”
“He’s happy? That’s just swell. But what about his shattered family? What about our unhappiness? I can’t believe you didn’t tell him off. Why don’t you stand up to him? I can’t stand how passive you are! You’re hopeless! The lot of you!”
She thinks I’m passive? Well, that hurts. All my life I’ve struggled. It took no small effort to fail at every goal he set for me. It was a test of wills. I won.
Just look at me.
At dinner on Connaught Drive that night I ask Richie if he remembers going to Bowen Island. He interrupts the painstaking sawing of his meat to look up.
“Don’t remind him,” my mother says.
We are arranged as usual along the twelve feet of waxed mahogany, Erica and I on one side, Richie and my mother on the other, my father’s place at the head, in the only chair with arms, the throne, empty. What is my father doing now, I wonder. Microwaving his dinner and eating it out of the plastic tray?
My mother asks, “Did you talk to your father, Lachlan? Did you talk to him about it?”
“About what?”
“You know what.” She points her chin at my brother counting to ten over and over in his head as he chews. (I know because I once asked what he thought about while he ate that made him look so stern.) We are forbidden to utter the D-word in his presence.
“No,” I tell her.
Erica sits with her elbows on the table, pressing her temples. “Isn’
t that the whole reason you went over?”
Sarcasm again? I don’t think I like this new mother-and-daughter-in-law alliance.
“I don’t want him back,” my mother says. “Did you tell him that?”
Richie remembers. “I’m scared on the ferry!”
“As far as I’m concerned it’s good riddance. He can go to the Canary Islands for all I care.”
“Are we going on the ferry?”
Erica tells him, “No.”
“But why D-I-V-O-R-C-E?”
“Erica?” says Richie. “Do you want to watch a video after dinner?”
“I do, Richie. I’d love that.”
“It’s The Greatest Story Ever Told.”
“Why not a legal separation? Why isn’t that good enough? Does he hate us so much?”
The cutlery makes pained sounds against the Royal Doulton.
“How can you live with someone for forty years then walk out without an explanation?” my mother says a minute later.
An animal caught in a trap will chew its leg off: this comes to me in a flash.
“It’s unconscionable,” Erica agrees.
“Over forty years.”
“But the thing is, he’s not here anymore.” Erica points to his chair. “Look. He’s gone. He’s rid of us, but we’re not rid of him.”
“When is Daddy coming back?” Richie asks.
Erica gets up and comes around the table. With Richie looking on in alarm, she takes his plate, his spoon and knife and glass of milk and carries it all to the head of the table, where she lays it out. “Sit here, Richie.”
Fork clutched in fist, he shrinks right down to the size of a normal man. We stare at him, hopeful he will save us. Richie begins to rock. The hand not holding the fork rises and flaps beside his stricken face.
“Oh, never mind.” Erica turns and stalks out of the room.
My mother looks at me, startled by this flagrant breach of etiquette.
“She’s depressed,” I explain.
“Erica told me what you and your father fought about that night, Lachlan. Why didn’t you come to me?”
Pleased to Meet You / The Sky is Falling Page 12
