Keeping Things Whole (7 page)

Part of this is a
war story, and in war there's always a catch. Sometimes a feeling gives us a phrase and sometimes a phrase gives us a feeling. Catch-22—you know the phrase even if you don't know its war, Victor-Conrad's war. In our teens, we can't get sexual confidence without sexual experience, but we can't get sexual experience without sexual confidence. Kate really got me, stirred me between the shoulders and ears, not just the hips, with a simple little card, a scene of slashing Japanese rain daubed with red lanterns. All she wrote was:
I don't love you, yet
. Later, she amended it with a speech
.

“No doubt we've both wasted the word in the past, used it on people who didn't deserve it. I'm not going to do that with you. I also hope, if love does bloom, I never say
I love you too
. If it comes, it's not going to be a contract, or an exchange. It's going to be admiration, respect, helpless attraction. I don't love you, yet. But, well, I'm knocking on your door.”

The vixen. Half-love. Potential love. And a very adult admission of doubt. Catch-Not Quite 2 + 2.

At fourteen, you can't get a job because you don't have work experience, yet you can't get work experience without a job. Catch-14. Well, you can't get a job you like. Let she who lives without embarrassment cast the first stone. When I was fourteen and wanted parts or tools to build trebuchets, I signed on at McDonald's. I couldn't envision an improvement to the treb then not try it, and I'd outgrown doing extra chores around the house to earn a few dollars off Glore for hardware store money. One night over supper I announced, “I start next week at McDonald's.” I hadn't mentioned the application or interview.

“Your first job, congratulations.” After another mouthful she added, “Wash your uniform after every shift. Grease and polyester won't be good for your skin.” No questions about when I applied or who my references were, just a little salt in the congrats.

“It's the one off the bridge. I'll be able to bike there.”

“Good. Good for you. Try to resist the free food, though. You wouldn't eat a handful of free get-fat-and-sick pills, so don't eat the food.”

McRaunchie's. So easy to blame them, their chemical warfare of sugar and fat, their propaganda, but they're us. Everything they've done, we've voted for with our dollars.

Two weeks in I was already hoping it'd be the first and last time I wore a uniform, yet every month for fifteen years I could have gotten myself zipped into a prisoner's uniform. Those orange jumpsuits are freezer bags: you never come out as fresh as you went in. A decade after my McJob I also gladly buttoned up a valet's vest at Casino Windsor.
Uniform
. One form. In uniform, the soldier is no longer an individual, but one spoke in a mighty wheel. I wore a uniform to fund a trebuchet I had no clear purpose for other than touching America.

Don't let me sound naive, America=bad, Canada=good or even =all right. An early adopter on gay marriage, sure, but the tar sands and an asbestos export industry. And no Windsorite, not a one, is content to sleep beside the elephant without occasionally stealing his peanuts. Whatever water Mom and I have under the bridge now, I'll always treasure the second education she gave me at the Detroit Film Theater and the Motor City's pair of art-house cinemas. Classic film (Fritz Lang's
Metropolis
), French New Wave (
Bob le Flambeur
), international movies old and new, good and bad. A lush Korean guilt-fest or Kurosawa's
Throne of Blood
, that Japanese
Macbeth
(you'll see that one touched us equally). In Detroit, but not Windsor, we could actually see Canadian movies in a cinema. Kate and I caught Montreal bands in Detroit, not Windsor. I was never more my young self, yet also less so, a non-me, not me but just awed life, than when Mom took me to see a vintage print of
2001: A Space Odyssey
on the big screen for my thirteenth birthday. If anything, that movie put me into the McUniform.

If you're wondering why I still live part of the year in Cancerville, even now when the money's clean, there's one answer: mega-city art (courtesy of the D) but Windsor housing prices. I first saw
2001
in a cinema, not on a TV screen, saw that bone club rising up and smashing down, a bone twelve feet long on a public screen, not twelve inches long in my living room. Bone=club, here we are at a space station. A-fucking-men, Brother Kubrick. Every tool is a lever moving something. The stirrup. The compass. Gunpowder. Movable type. The bicycle. Detroit's cars. People tinkering away, turning the old into the new, individual and species changing in the process. The personal computer. The pill. The hanging, half-public library of this Web.

In the parking lot after
2001
ended, Mom reached for my shoulders, each of us noticing how she no longer had to bend down to hug me. “I knew you'd love it.” We drove home over the bridge. I was beside Mom, guide to my splendour, yet thinking as never before of a trebuchet's buck and swing. The air hanging beneath the bridge was international yet familial. Some of my genes might have been buried beneath the bridge while others had come over on it. Archimedes said, Give me a place to stand and I'll move the world.
2001
, my McJob, Windsor, my family, and especially Gran were helping me learn that if I could stand near a border, I could move the world's pot.

Normally Gran was even less likely to say something to my back than Mom was. In her late nineties, the woman was 105 pounds of scar tissue in a 110-pound body. She and Mom always fired straight from the hip. Only when Kate began complaining of Melissa and her “passive aggression” did I even begin to consider that aggression could be anything less than direct. Imagine my surprise one day when Mom and Gran dropped me off at work and Gran spat a wad at my back. Her timing couldn't have been accidental. “A uniform,” was all she said, but she said it in the brief interval between my stepping out of the limomom and my shutting its door.

I heard and reheard that little taunt of Gran's while I worked the job for eighteen more months. Her poke and a history essay I wrote about the influence of World War I on North America's fast food industry eventually helped me quit. History teachers must lead exasperated lives, with 99 percent of their students not giving a damn about anything other than themselves or young celebrities. Worse than being in the other 1 percent of those who cared and were willing to work, I had scores to settle, empty chairs at the dining room table.

We climb a few mountains in life, and we're always different coming back down. Everything in my life to date had led me to that essay on the war and fast food, yet I felt so different having written it. Snakes and lobsters have something going. We too should shed our old skins. I quit the Mick by leaving a copy of my essay for the manager.

After I quit, Gran waited a week before she offered to pay me to paint her house. She let me stew a little, gave me worry before a reward. But I'd made her proud with every gob of dirt I'd flung in the essay about mechanization, centralization, and fake uniformity (of soldiers and meat, excuse the redundancy). What was Mom's big problem when she found out Gran hired me to paint her house? I called Gran as soon as Mom backed out of the driveway.

“She's on her way over.”

“Of course she is.”

When Mom got back home, I felt like the fuming parent for a change. “Why don't you talk to me instead of Gran about my quitting my job?”

“Family isn't business,” she said, announcing some previously undiscussed law.

“You always hated the Mick.”

“And I still do. But you should have replaced it with a real job, not taking your grandmother's money.”

“One, I'm earning her money, not ‘taking' it. Two, the place does need painting, and some splasher and dasher might rip her off. Three, isn't this between Gran and I?”

“Gran and
me
. No, this isn't just between the two of you. I'm between the two of you.”

“What about all those burns you'd told me I'd get? What about the environment?”

“Work outside the family, not in it.”

A good exit line, I had to admit. It didn't stop me from painting Gran's house, but it sure drew a few lines in the sand at Mom's. For a start, I bought my own painting gear rather than use hers. Splurged on the brush, cage, and pole, saved on the drop cloths and rags (thank you, Value Village). As unpleasant as it was, Mom's disapproval also forced me to second-guess that near universal delusion that I already knew how to paint. People all think they're funny, have good taste, and know how to paint. No. No. No. Anyone can get paint onto a wall, not everyone can do it well. With Gran as my customer and Mom as my critic, I took out books and videos from the library, perfected the W-method of rolling, learned how to slide then draw my brush. Tape was for amateurs. Eventually, we'd all have to wonder if Gran wanted me to work on her house to get to know it better. Maybe that was Mom's problem.

Abou
t Trevor Reynolds. I'll tell
you in the order I got told.

I could probably recognize four poems. The rhyming, hurry up and shag one; the rainy chicken wheelbarrow; Ginsberg's “Howl” (because of the drugs); and the Larkin one about parenting. Larkin's opening sounds just like talking and is bang on the nose: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.” Wisdom of the ages there.

Full-term single mothers, those alone, aloof, or abandoned from the get-go, have two to four years to rehearse answers to the question everyone's been thinking since they first slid into a pair of stretch-front jeans. For once, the cramming and the exam are far apart.

As parent, teacher, actor, and director, Gloria planned, planned, then planned some more. She did the groundwork and only then let spontaneity blossom. Trained intuition. With Toddler Antony growing up into a question, she rehearsed her lines, assembled her props, and waited for the inevitable but unscheduled showtime. Her MFA wasn't her only contingency plan.

For the start of her dad campaign, Mom gave me a child's illustrated dictionary and introduced me to puns.
The Book of Spells
, she called it, and showed me the difference between spell as a verb and spell as a noun. Har har.

By the time she sat me down for act one of the dictionary dad show, I'd already asked my way through the basics.
Who is my dad? Where is he?
Six years old, seven, I was graduating into the most explosive of those quick questions. I knew the when and was the what. To a degree, I had already learned the who. When Mom sat me down at the kitchen table with the dictionary, I definitely had no interest in the how. But even then I knew that the real question was why.

All of this one evening over the kitchen table, Mom, her props, and her plan.

“All right, Antman, let's see if you've been paying attention in school. Boats without motors are powered by…?”

“Sails.”

“Sails. One point. A
sail
is a noun, a thing. And when we see sailboats out on Lake St. Clair, we say they are…?”

“Sailing.”

“Sailing, right. A
sail
is a noun and
to sail
is a—”

“Verb, Mom. I know this.”

“Then let's move on. Look up
dad
.” She nudged the dictionary towards me. “Let's see whether
dad
is a noun or a verb. Just look for the little
n
or—”

“It's a noun.” I'd interrupted her twice without reproach. That should have been a clue.

“Now look up
father
. A noun or a verb? Keep breathing, we're just looking up words here.” Her hand encircled my shoulder, cupped its little ball.

The crawling letters and words marched straighter than ants. “Both,” I finally answered.

“That's right.
Father
is a verb and a noun. A dad is someone doing a job, like a doctor or an electrician. A dad and a father can be the same thing, but look again. Sometimes
father
is just a verb.”

Suddenly I was the only Canadian grade three student not in French immersion who would always distinguish verbs from nouns.

Mom dug library books out of a large tote bag. Little purple and pink flags marked several pages. “Here, look at these penguins. Sometimes in nature being a father is a job. Male penguins, they're dads. They keep the eggs warm just like the moms do.” She opened another book. “And the Darwin frog carries the fertilized eggs in his throat. You like Darwin.”

Even within this swirl—
dad, father, dad, father
—I recognized that “fertilized eggs” was classic Mom. I'm selling her short if I say that was Mom the teacher. There are plenty of lax teachers out there—union drones, babysitters, lifers. Not Mom.
Fertilized eggs
: her voice an excited label on a diagram.

More of her pictures. A snarling wolf and, nearly identical, a coyote, curled their lips high over gleaming teeth. “But honey, for many mammals the male does little, or little good, beyond impregnating the female. Even in a single pack, male dogs are not monogamous. They mate with various females and don't know or care which puppies are theirs.” The next image was of two bears fighting, patches of gelatinous blood slick on their brown coats. “Male bears—sorry sweetie, this isn't nice—male bears have been known to eat their young. When a male lion fights for control of the pride, he usually kills the cubs of his rival. These animals father children, but they're not fathers to them. They aren't dads.” She put an arm around me, but not tightly. “These fathers are just verbs. They don't make being a father their job.”

I held one edge of a glossy page beneath my finger and thumb so I could curl and uncurl it, covering and uncovering the lion's roaring mouth.

“Antony, you can't ever, ever feel this is your fault. Your father left before you were born. That shows you that his leaving was all about him and had nothing to do with you. Your father wasn't a dad kind of animal.”

She didn't try to hold my hand or ruffle my hair. She was beside me, breathing very steadily. Eventually, she rose to tidy the kitchen counter yet again.

“If a lion fights for what?” I finally asked, pretending to still look at the book.

“Control of the
pride
,” she said, half-turning around. “A group of lions is called a pride.”

Years later, for the kitchen table sequel, she'd show me an entire note, not just single words.