Savage (25 page)

"Maybe I'm losing my mind," Mom said. Holly stared straight ahead, not yet adjusted to the abject core the afternoon offered all of us.

The food kept coming in trays, courtesy of our second cousins, the heirs apparent. As she undid the dips and vegetables and sandwiches, I remembered my great uncle Carl bragging how Carol didn't ever have time to cook food because she was so busy as a real estate agent. Then I saw Mom with her action-figure accessory—a loaf of homemade banana bread. Her earnest baked signifier sat on a paper-plate slab, high on an emotional altitude. Mom pontificated about the unique ingredients and how recently she made it for this occasion.

"I was up late last night," Mom said. We sat drinking terrible wine, and the neighbour came over and began to cry on the couch beside me. "I'm sorry," she said. "He was so nice." We were silent.

"I don't have time to bake, Diane," Carol snorted.

I read from a folded piece of paper with nothing on it but waving lines and a sparse grocery list:

"There's a fire in life that burns," I said, pretending to read from a note.

These phrasings came to me; I forgot them immediately, like wiping the database. I improvised another line, "We're lost in a beach-shell memory, a photographic paradise," closing with "...and you always said the right things to me."

I figured someone should say something, beyond the stock phrases.
He liked to travel; he came to my hockey game; he was a fan of country music; he was the youngest of four brothers; he liked going to Mexico...He liked Playboy and chocolate, kept them in proximity
.

Unable to discuss the reality, the will and money, the fight over his estate, the obvious divide, the strain—we were all improvising. "Gonna just take these dishes to the kitchen," Mom said.

We passed a tiny black-and-white photo of the four brothers from Saskatoon with Uncle Carl being the youngest, sitting on a chair next to his brothers—a faint image of a blonde boy awaiting his mother's joy, the ultimate momma's boy. They lived together here from 1953 until her death in January 1976.

This was a collage of a family, masking-taped together for an afternoon in Saran Wrap prestige, one last visit in the iconic bungalow, a solid twenty-minute walk from Eglinton and Brimley in what I called early Scarborough.

Tears streamed purple down Mom's face as she braced herself in the stairwell. Her deep buckshot sobs soared down the basement into forgotten pockets. "That's all we have now, our memories; we knew him the best," Mom howled, mouth now webbed in saliva and ruin. Holly took the remaining bits of food and a small box of photographs into the car. I threw my body on the bed that night in my uncle's spare bedroom, wearing his clothes, endeavouring a sensation of ghostly presence as I fell into deep slumber.

I don't know if my uncle was a well-read or emotional person, though some Moments I have recalled with great depth in the shrapnel of his rattling voice a shade of regret.

"My friend Eddie didn't like the idea of having a boyfriend." Eddie was a friend he had met while working in East General Hospital in the '60s and '70s, who worked in labour. They would hang out over an occasional cup of coffee. Uncle Carl's sentence about Eddie's reluctance for his friendship always resonated with me. I don't think I ever met Eddie, but remember him being some fat plumber in a Polaroid.

I was disturbed by the most detailed dream of Jimmy. He was sitting on the lap of a large brown bear in a junkyard. I wanted so badly to wake up next to his sleeping face, tiny nostrils breezing at me. I awoke to the harsh tone of Uncle Carl's rotary and pulse-tone phones simultaneously going off.

In the morning, what I believed was an outline of my uncle Carl's skeleton passed right by me, thrown in the raging morning sunlight. My eyes were sore and raw. The dust in the house was thicker than a century, sprawled out in an outline of a large recumbent hand.

19 )
Special

Late November 2009

S
teps from Dundas south of Ossington, the waitress at the Burger Shack was explaining to me how the long glossy banquet tables were made from old bowling alley lanes. Holly spotted me. We had been hanging out again on a regular basis for about six months when we decided to take Mom out for a lunch and then back to her place to sort through some of her belongings in an effort to downsize her wardrobe, books and carbohydrates.

I was now working three days a week for a sports-media website (
Shooting Star Wrestling Review
) that had a focus on vintage and contemporary pro wrestling. I was one of five people who gathered material from archives or recently recorded "shoot interviews," which were usually by retired or semi-retired wrestlers pontificating on their careers, inside gossip and any other assorted details fans might want to delve into.

"It's a fucking zoo out there," Holly said, shoving her big leather purse under the table. "Sarah says she wants you to come over and play monster."

"Tell Sarah to take a number," I said. Sarah was an energetic three-and-a-half-year-old, capable of long deliberations and inquisitions, frantic doodles and misplaced vowels, bowls of cereal and talking stuffed animals. She was my estranged niece, and at this point, I'd met her only three times.

"Burgers are a neutral food," I said, my tone as sincere as I could manufacture, adding "and besides, the city is obsessed with them—gourmet burgers, onion rings on top, bacon, seaweed; they're everywhere, Hol."

"Yeah, I guess so," Holly said, "good to keep Mom abreast of all civically ordained glow trends." The waitress was filling up some ketchup bottles and glanced over. "I always end up asking the waitress to tell me what to eat."

"So what's new?"

"Nothing much. I woke up this morning."

"That's a good start," Holly said.

"How is life with your husband and only child?"

Holly mouthed a thank you to the waitress who brought us both large glasses of water. "You sound like an ESL student," she said. "So, any girl in the picture?"

"I like this one person named Sherri. She's a bit slippery."

"Where's she from?"

"Earth. Not too long ago, actually," I said. "We're not dating. I just like her and try to talk to her. I see her at work, and we worked this conference together for, like, a weekend, but I think she has a boyfriend."

"What is she like?"

"She's twenty-three and looks like Katharine Ross from
The Graduate
, minus the wedding veil and with thinner lips, cleaner hair and she wears pompous berets sometimes. Comes into work hung-over a lot."

"
Coo-coo catchew
," Holly said, glancing over the menu.

"She also played the shrink in
Donnie Darko
."

"Your office teen crush?"

"No—
Katharine
."

I didn't want to explain all the details of Sherri to Holly but I let her listen to the messages. The first was about her hair being curly today and buying too many grapefruits.

(The gorgeous details: supersize horizon-greedy blue eyes, a pinkie of perfume behind her mouse ears, lips pursed together, taking in air and time, almond-toned skin, ski-slope nose, curves along the cheekbones and a brutal bomb of hair hidden in soft light-brown piles under a tartly red felt beret. Our first few encounters, in which I fumbled my way into an after-work drink, I'd felt anxious, like I was being tipped over on a carnival ride. I said something weird, like she was the
caramel apple of her father's eye
, which led to absolutely no reaction on her part; denying comprehension, sympathy, presence. A few weeks later, we worked a conference together for two days straight, which led to a showdown of misguided proportions: her staying over one night, watching old VHS movies and taking a shower at three a.m. to cool off.)

The second message was softer, quieter, and at first, didn't even sound like her at all. She described her wrecked evening: "I guess you are out [pause, exhale]. I was in a car accident tonight. I spun out and hit the guardrail, smashed my side of the hood and door. I was so scared of what it would feel like to come up against the rail and how close I came to flipping over it and drowning in the lake. It happened so fast. Now I'm in bed and I just want to curl up into you and never feel scared again. I want you to draw me up into your arms and call me a warm bagel and stroke back my salty tears. Goodnight, sweet prince of darkness."

"She sounds sincere. A bit weird, but when was this?"

"Three days ago."

"I'm starving. Where's Mom?"

"Oh, I was reading on PHYSURG.COM, and they have this article about scarred women and men and how hot they are. Like girls would only want me for a short-term deal. It says, though, that men don't care; they'll keep a girl forever if she's scarred. So there you go, Hol."

The waitress sauntered up, black apron with burger-bun dust on it.

"Can I get you guys something to drink to start?"

"We're waiting for someone," Holly said. "Our mother, actually."

"Oh, that's nice," the waitress said.

"We're hoping for the best," I said. "In the meantime, I'll have a ginger ale."

"I'll have a tea, please," Holly said.

"Sure," the waitress smiled, pausing before her departure.

*

When Mom arrived, she had windy tears in her eyes. She was decked out in a hefty beige winter coat, and her walk resembled that of a near-blind sports-team mascot.

"I wasn't sure which place it was," she said, sitting down beside me.

As a waft of burger fume came forth in a cloud of sweat, I recalled Mom's infamous Sisyphean patty-slapping ordeal in Technicolor, and Dad's insanity joke.

"I got Growing Pains on DVD. I liked Mike, D-student, always trying to cover up broken lamps with glue and parental distractions."

"You never tried hiding your destruction," Mom interjected, as another cloud of food smell floated by, all tender and toying. "Remember the time you threw fabric softener all over the basement walls?"

I didn't play the "remember" game back:
remember the porch coffee, tossed as I passed by on my bike, like I was a rodent you were trying to fumigate with caffeine.

It was a pure war; part of me was summoned from hell to battle through. Those were the clothes I wore, the weapons I used.

"So how is Sadie?" I asked. "Still in school?"

"What do you think is in the burgers?" Holly said. "She's like a leading monster in a horror-film franchise," Holly said. "She can't be killed."

"She's twenty next week," Mom said shuffling within her large beige winter jacket, which now sported a fresh glob of mayonnaise, with just a hint of it on her cheek. I watched the coat glob glisten as I passed her a napkin. "We could sell tickets to see Toronto's only two-hundred-year-old cat," Holly suggested.

"Yes, Pay-per-view funerals are getting expensive."

"Anyway," Mom said, her face glazed now in a near-frown, "How's work?"

"Still working for that media company, writing stuff for their site," I said, adding, "Cut and paste and JPEG shuffling."

"What media?"

"That's classified."

"It's wresting, Mom," Holly said, her voice a shorter fuse now, anxious, insistent as if partially defensive, suggesting not to doubt me.

"Oh," she said. "Do they pay you?"

"Yes, just me; everyone else works for free. Including my boss."

"Oh, stop it," Mom said. "So what do I feel like eating for lunch?"

Holly turned to me; I saw her eyes get all bright and direct. "Hey, do you have a blog?"

"Why?"

"I Googled you and it came up."

"No. I mean, I don't know how to delete it," I said. "Shall we rent a movie?"

The winter sun was relentless now. Mom adapted with a pair of amber-tinted sunglasses. She was wearing a mauve blouse and a bank-robber neckerchief.

"I still remember the time you made us watch
Cape Fear
for that first Christmas without Grammy."

"I didn't make
Cape Fear
, Mom. There were other rooms in the house too. You didn't have to watch it."

Holly shook her hand in front of me. "The blog? What's it called?"

"Shapes and gardens are fun," I responded.

"No, seriously, what was it again?"

<< TheGlenvaleWarDidNotTakePlace.blogspot.com >>

"I fell five times last year," Mom said. "Just got to be careful."

The statement billowed into a daydream: a sensational sports-stat graphic, suitable for the back of a baseball card.
Diane, 66, fell 5 times in 2008. 2 head colds. 3 migraines. 4 cavities.

"I was rushing for a bus one time; the other time I fell off the bus, getting out at my stop at Mount Pleasant."

Neither Holly nor I had ever witnessed these falls, but Mom's partial recreation on a loop busied us in delirious late-night bonding sessions. Mom's sporadic tumbles made her more human. We wanted to know why she was falling.

The burgers and fries were consumed in under an hour, but the caravan of family excess spilled into late afternoon.

Holly had mentioned to me that Sadie was sick and she was thinking of taking our antique cat from Mom for a while. Sadie was known for her low-mirth disposition since her arrival in mid-1989, replacing Benji, who had died four years earlier, having arrived a year before Holly was even born and three before me.

"Knee deep in banana bread, as usual," I said, bringing a box of books from the hall closet into the living room.

Holly was washing a cup for a drink of water.

"Mom, why do you put Sadie's food in the kitchen sink? It stinks. My God, open the window," Holly said, her face clenched.

"It's cat food; it's supposed to smell that way. Jesus," Mom replied.

"Real cat," I said.

"Yeah," Holly said. "She's all cat."

Mom told us about work: Slocombe & Michaels, an investment firm where she worked part-time, had started trimming the fat.

"They're laying people off left, right and centre," she said, holding the fold-out instructions over the cadaver of wood I held in my hands. Holly cut up an apple.