Home Free (11 page)

Down by the pathway that wound along the riverbank, I found a bronze plaque almost overgrown by shrubbery that paid tribute to the engineering triumph of the structure. If I could scramble down the banks and surreptitiously pour the ashes into the river, this could be the official spot. Eyeing the current, I calculated that they would be carried under the bridge.

I had left behind the vase, thinking that a woman with a full urn on a bridge might draw attention. Public scattering tends to be illegal. The ashes, in a plastic bag with two garbage ties twisted around the top, were as heavy and big as two bricks. I had decanted the ashes from their original bag, which kept springing open, into a bigger one, a task I did as quickly and unthinkingly as possible. The ash was light grey, very fine, and clinging, except for the larger bits, which were honeycombed like bone marrow. Not like, but were. What does it matter if these are his ashes or just whatever was on the bottom of the crematorium, I thought, but I continued to address the vase as “dad.” I put the new bag inside a dark blue velvet sack supplied to us by Just Cremation. It had a drawstring and reminded me of the old Seagram's bags we used to keep our marbles in.

The river was wide, a milk chocolate brown,with a steady, powerful current. The word Saskatchewan means “swiftly flowing river” in Cree, and one of its tributaries flows 1,200 miles, to the Bow Valley in Alberta. A good long ride. It gives breadth to the city and had dictated the scale and modest majesty of the bridge. In the public library I had found black-and-white photographs of its construction, how the supports were sunk in clay and the engineers had to compensate for the ferocious cold of winter which caused the materials to shrink. “Only four men died in the construction of the bridge,”one news item reported.

I found a picture of three workers standing behind the rebar skeleton of the bridge's steel supports. One figure, not the tallest, wore a cloth cap that did not hide his ears, which stuck out, just like my dad's. The face was obscured, but there was a certain jaunty eagerness in the posture. I was convinced it was him.

My cousin Margaret Ann, from Colonsay, stood behind me on the riverbank. She didn't know my father well, being from my mother's side of the family, but she was kind enough to tour me around Saskatoon and to witness this increasingly odd ritual. The moment was awkward and unceremonial, but still, when I squatted by the water and looked up at the rib cage of the bridge, my mind filled with thoughts: of my father and mother skating on the river, which they loved to do; of my father working at the YMCA a few blocks away, typing the witty, flirtatious letters with which he wooed my mother; of my mother in the frame house on 10th St. wondering when my father would come home for dinner from the bridge-in-progress. of my mother quitting her job as a switchboard operator, because the “relief project” hired only married men, and couples could only hold one job.

Traffic gleamed on the bridge, and my good shoes slipped on the stones at the water's edge. I untwisted the ties and tried to shuffle out the ashes, but they had been tamped down, and I had to dig them out. They sank, except for a few small clumps that caught on weeds, sticking like frog's eggs. I shook and shook the bag—it took a long time. Margaret Ann clicked her disposable camera. The fine grit got under my nails, and when I had emptied the bag I saw that my hand was grey, cadaver grey, gloved with the dust. I clambered back up the riverbank.

“Well, that's that,” I said to my cousin, in my mother's words. She smiled and said nothing. Sentiment is not a prairie thing. We walked back to her car and drove past the city limits to the RV campground that she manages with her husband, in the great curving space west of Saskatoon. It had been farmland until the farms failed. Colonsay's grain elevator, one of the old wooden ones, was scheduled to come down soon. My hand, with its ghostly coating, lay radioactive beside me on the handle of the car door. Like having something stuck between my teeth, I urgently wanted the grit out from under my fingernails. But there was nothing to be done until we reached the campground,where I was staying in the guest trailer, a perfect, surreal bubble of shag-rug domesticity up on cement blocks.

Margaret Ann went back to the house to prepare dinner. Inside, I went over to the sink and turned on the taps. I watched the last filaments of grey dust run off my hand and down the sink as the trailer rocked a bit, buffeted by the soft, strong, constant prairie wind.

Be Home by Dinner

I
'M THREE OR FOUR years old. We're living in a two-storey brick house on Stillwater Crescent, a dead-end street that peters out at the edge of Lake Ontario. On the other side of the bay are the smokestacks of the steel plants, with their tongues of flame. But they're a long way off, and the lake itself is huge. We swim in it in summer (until the polio epidemic hits), skate on it in winter. The lake lives alongside us like a large, gently breathing silver mammal that we all take for granted.

During the week, my father drives to work, through the small town of Burlington. My older brother Bruce rides his bike to school because there are no buses. Most days, it's just my mother and me, alone with the dogs. I have no idea how we spent our days. I can't come up with any memories of us doing things together, apart from ones I've reconstructed from photos in the family album. Perhaps this was because she was always there in the background: mother as weather.

My father came and went, which may explain why I have more distinct memories of him. The time I fell off Mrs. Perry's dock next door, down into the lake, and he caught the end of my long blond hair and hauled me back up in the air. I have a memory of sitting in his lap, in the armchair with the plushy red stripes. He's reading me Scrooge McDuck, our favourite comic, especially the part where he dives naked into a swimming pool full of money. When he was young, my father was a gifted cartoonist who had been offered a job with the Disney studios in the early days. But they couldn't pay for his trip down to California for an interview, and neither could he, so he stayed in Saskatoon and became an engineer instead.

We both loved reading comics.

My father drives home for lunch every day. Every day my mother prepares lunch, as well as dinner, including desserts for both. It might be just pudding, but cooked, not instant. Butterscotch or chocolate. I especially like the skin that forms on the pudding. One day we're at the table, I'm perhaps four years old, wearing my terrycloth slippers with the thick foam soles, and I want lunch to be over because
Small Types
is on. This is a radio program on CBC for kids. It includes a rather ghoulish traffic-safety jingle, sung in an operatic soprano:

Looook to the left, and loook to the right,
And you'll never never get run oooooohver. . . .

I hear the jingle come on, and ask my mother if I can please take my lunch into the living room to hear the rest of the program. She lets me, and I curl up in the chair beside the big furniture-sized radio, the plate balanced on one arm of the chair as I carefully tuck my slippers under me. But not carefully enough; one slipper catches the edge of the plate and it falls upside down on the rug, oozing sauce around the edges. My mother, at the end of some rope I have not detected, rushes into the living room, sees where her cooking has ended up, and spanks me.

This is out of character: my mother never shouts or hits. It's the first time I've been spanked and it makes me feel diminished and shamed. I creep up to my room. Later, I come to the top of the stairs and see my mother sitting in the big armchair. She looks troubled. Something about her long days on Stillwater Crescent alone in the house, and thinking about lunches, had clearly got the better of her. The spot on the rug has been cleaned but is still damp. She calls me down, and I climb onto her lap. An apology is extended, but not a satisfying one. I am quiet and dignified in my response.

It's my first glimpse behind the maternal curtain of someone I don't recognize,who isn't always mother.

When I was in my teens and precociously reading the British psychoanalyst and author R. D. Laing about the basic insanity of families, I took it upon myself to “cure”ours. I initiated social hugging. I hugged my parents whenever I arrived or left. They slowly adopted this new habit. They were devoted, loving parents, but physically undemonstrative.

When I grew up and had my son, I went the other way: I revelled in the physical intimacy of breastfeeding and caring for him. As he began to walk and climb, my body was the handiest set of monkey bars. He scaled me, swarmed me, inhabited me. In pictures of the two of us at this stage, he is always hanging off my neck and arm, like an ornament on a Christmas tree. I spent hours down on the rug with him, running a plastic car around a cardboard expressway, doing my best to make engine noises.

Our mothers were not down on the rug with us. They were too busy keeping house and stage-managing the world of home, with its scientific draperies and avocado-coloured appliances. They were putting on lipstick for the arrival of their husbands and wondering if 4 p.m. was too early to pour a biggish glass of sherry because they were bored and lonely. They played bridge. They joined school committees and pursued creative hobbies—my mother had many in her life, from ceramics to dressmaking. The children were part of this
mise en scène
, but not necessarily the central characters.

We had a washing machine with two hard rubber rollers mounted on top. After the clothes sloshed around in the tub part, my mother would feed the wet clean clothes, lump by heavy lump, through the rollers. They emerged from the other side thin and flat as cardboard, curving down into the laundry basket.

Don't get your hand caught in the rollers, my mother would always warn me.

We lived near a peninsula of homes, some quite grand, known as Indian Point. This wasn't a developer's moniker; the Mohawk chief Joseph Brant once had a settlement here, long before the smokestacks of Dofasco and Stelco arrived across the bay. My brother and I used to find arrowheads in the ravine. For the first years of my life, the way I spent my days was probably more Mohawk than minivan. Okay, Joseph Brant didn't listen to
Small Types
. But I spent more time in the ravine than inside a car.

There were no other kids my age on Stillwater. We always had a dog on the go, and they ran free. Frisky, a border-collie/shepherd, was my brother's dog and my mother's favourite. Ricky (we had bad pet names, always), a cocker spaniel with weak hips, was mine. The house had a coal furnace; once or twice a winter a delivery of coal roared through a basement window down a chute into a dark little room. Then my father shovelled it into the furnace. Milk and bread were delivered to the house too, left in the “milk box,” an ingenious compartment that opened both ways, to the outside and inside. I am not really as old as Susannah Moodie but I do remember a horse-drawn cart hauling blocks of ice covered in sawdust. I used to feed apples to the ice man's horses. The warmth of the horse's breath on my hand.

Much time and labour were required to keep the household running smoothly. Home was a kind of theatre for the performance of family; curtains that opened and closed smoothly were important, as was the discreet box that covered the curtain-drawing mechanism—the valence. Parents focused on the material side of things rather than the inner life of their kids.

Mothers weren't expected to drive off to mom 'n' tot yoga classes. The job of preschoolers was to go outside and play, which is what I did. I went hunting for water rats down by the lake. I went next door to visit old Mrs. Perry, who would lend me her powerful binoculars so I could watch the fire spitting out of the steel-plant stacks across the bay. On weekends, my father might take my brother and me skating on the lake, and in the summer we would ride our bikes to the second hydro tower on the beach strip to swim. My mother swam, too, a fine figure in her black woollen suit.

There were no music lessons, no play dates, and, for that matter, no friends in my first five years. My brother occasionally deigned to let me hang around with him and his slightly delinquent friend Derek, as the two of them collected snakes and shot at things with their BB guns. You could order many wonderful things from the backs of comic books then: BB guns, Chihuahuas the size of teacups, bust enhancers, and sea monkeys.

So I had the ravine, the lake,my comic books, the company of two dogs plus some sea monkeys, and my mother, who was there but also absent in a way. Or just an adult. I remember her back, as she stood at the sink, or the stove, or sat curved over a panel of fabric at the sewing machine. Always making something.

My father worked for a company that manufactured pesticides and water-purifying chemicals. He was overseeing the construction of a new branch, which was the reason we had moved east from Saskatoon a year after I was born. Job transfers often determined the destiny of families in those days; Brian grew up in a Toronto suburb because his father, who worked in insurance, was transferred there from England. My mother had been whisked away from her own family to a strange new town and a house that my father had bought in the weeks before she arrived.

It must have been lonely for her at first. What I registered as a kind of emotional absence in those early years was probably nothing more than a current of depression, the isolated housewife's affliction.

Once I asked my mother if she had ever wanted to work at a career. “No, I was happy to stay home with you kids,”she answered. Pause. “But I think I would make have made a good geneticist.”

Too true.

“Oh, your mother's a smart one,”my father liked to say with pride, whenever she produced some showcase dessert or upholstered a couch. He adored her. She was endlessly ingenious and artful in her homemaking. There was, however, the slightly disarming advice my father liked to give Casey, many years later: “Be sure you marry a girl who's smart—but not too smart.”