The Amazing Absorbing Boy (14 page)

Early the next morning as I was coming out from the bathroom she glanced at my towel and told me, “I hope you not involve still with this comic book nonsense. Tying your mother good towel on some mangy
pothound
.” I was surprised she could still remember when I had brought home a stray puppy and tied
a red towel around its neck so it would look like Krypto. I was eight or nine then. “Superman-pooperman.” She almost cracked a smile. “Now tell me about these senior bus tours.”

So it went every day. By the end of the first week, the blue recycling box was completely filled with newspapers, and during that time, Auntie Umbrella had discovered there was a zoo with animals from around the world, an Exhibition place with many activities, a science centre with all sorts of fancy gadgets, ballrooms packed with rich women in fancy clothes dancing, and all sorts of art galleries. In the nights, while I was sleeping on my foam, I would spot her on the balcony gazing at the lights from the CN tower shining in our patch of the city. “It look as if somebody sprinkle jewels all over the place,” she told me one night. “The Lord take his time when he was making Canada.”

I was sleepy but still alert enough to tell her, “And it is a real safe place in the night too. Old people does be walking around in the parks all the time.” I was tempted to mention the Coffee Time in Parliament Street.

She took my advice but went out in the days instead, and from then, I heard about the squirrels walking around as if they were not afraid of a single soul, and ducks that were not muddy and nasty like the Trinidadian variety but green and white, and flowers which were a perfect shade of red, and no miserable vines and stray dogs and rubbish all over. I never liked the area close to Regent Park but she seemed to see a balance between the lanes and the boxy apartment buildings and the little parks. “Everything design so nice.
A place for everybody.” She made Regent Park seem like one big playground, and I have to admit that on my way to and from work, I started to notice all the things that I didn’t have time to study before. The big greenhouse for flowers in Allan Gardens and all the grassy areas with benches for sleeping people and old people with no shoes. I sometimes varied my route and saw some pretty old houses that where not
mashed up
and haunted looking and hiding in the back of junked cars and bushes, but well kept like those cartoon gingerbread cottages. I observed how all the buildings in some areas were alike and matching, and that there were no
macco
big mansion right next to rundown shacks like in Trinidad.

Eight days after she materialized I felt a rough hand on my shoulder. I was returning from work and when I turned, I saw my father with an old plaid hat and little grey stubbles all over his long face. “She went back as yet?”

I knew who he was talking about but he made me so nervous that I asked him, “Who?”

“Who? Who the hell you think I talking about? The
Dolly
Lama? Or that blasted woman you bring in my apartment without asking for permission? Eh? Your damn hypocrite aunt, that is who.”

“No. She still there.”

“When she intend to leave?”

“I don’t know. She didn’t say anything about that.”

I saw him thinking. He looked a little like a dangerous spy in his hat and long coat. “She brought a lot of luggage?”

Just for spite I told him, “A lot.”

“The bitch! What she does be doing all day?”

“Cleaning the place. Singing. And walking about in the park and watching the squirrels and flowers and ducks. She like the place.”

He looked at me like if I was mad. After a while he said, “And with that damn umbrella stick up on her head, I sure.”

Because he didn’t say anything else I asked him, “When you coming back?”

“When that miserable old Presbyterian leave.”

“Where you staying?”

“You is a blasted police inspector or something now?” He walked away with his coat flapping around his legs. I wondered if he was returning to a shelter. Surrounded by chanting molemen.

If my father was upset about Aunt Umbrella’s visit to Canada, I think the place had the opposite effect on her. She stopped peppering me with questions and even her voice seemed to soften from its flat, criticizing scratch-bottle tone. She bought a broad straw hat and one evening, I noticed a brand-new red umbrella parked next to the couch. I started to get used to her and to tell the truth, I really enjoyed all the cakes and pies and cookies she baked. In Trinidad she would mention bake sales at the church to my mother but I thought this was just a Presbyterian habit. Now, she baked every single day, experimenting with the recipes she cut out from the newspapers. Fish, chicken, eggplant, sweet potatoes, apples, and pears—everything landed up in the oven. It seemed she had come with a good stock of money.

While the food was baking, she would sit before the television and switch from channel to channel. I thought she might not have approved of all the kissing and cursing and the rude boys and girls on television but while she was watching, she would pull the couch forward until she was just a few inches from the screen. One night she told me, “Look how friendly this politician mister is.” I noticed a fat smiling man making chopping gestures with his hands as he spoke. He looked as if he was wringing a baby’s neck. “And his cheeks so fat and nice. Just like a little child.” The politician was saying something about clamping down on immigrants. “I feel I could just reach over and pinch them up good and proper.” Another night, she frightened me when she mentioned that old people here didn’t hideaway in rockers and settees but went about climbing and exercising and roller-skating. I had this picture of Auntie Umbrella with roller skates on her feet and umbrella on her head, scattering people on all sides. But she was interested in another type of show: those where people were selected to have their houses fixed up for free.

Listening to her, you would think there were packs of renovating people roaming all over Toronto just looking for people with old houses. “Who would believe that?” She would say over and over as old carpets and cabinets were ripped out and mildewed walls repainted and couches and tables replaced in fast motion. When there were advertisements, she would sing one of her hymns and I had this idea she was picturing the grey Presbyterian Church in Mayaro getting spruced up by muscular men and pretty women with tight jerseys.

I think these shows encouraged her to fix up the apartment in Regent Park because she bought doilies and vases and glass angels and wire flowers from a dollar store and I would see her sometimes glancing around and scratching her head before she shifted this or that. One night she discovered a channel that fixed up not old houses but ugly people. This show starred a woman who looked like she could frighten away bats but by the time the doctors had scraped her face and dug out a piece of her nose and siphoned out a bucket of nasty fat and capped her teeth, she resembled a movie star. Her boyfriend and family were waiting for her in a big hotel room and when she walked down the steps, everybody began to cry, don’t ask me why.

“Look at that, eh. Look at that,” Auntie Umbrella said, and I felt she was imagining her church people in Trinidad clapping and bawling as she entered the church fixed up, good and proper, from the top of her flat head straight down to her bandy legs. I don’t think this thought was far off the mark because I soon noticed she began to wear colourful bow clips and would constantly tap back her teeth, which to tell the truth, were sort of pushed out. Whenever she did that, I would remember Mothski the moleman who could fix her up for only forty dollars. But it seemed she had come to Canada with a tidy sum of money because she bought new dresses and shoes and grassy green purses and frilly shawls. “Who would ever know,” she told me one night. “That old people could get such special treatment. Discounts on every side.” She thought for a while and added, “Is the small things
that add up to the big picture.” She was happier than I had ever seen her, and one day she surprised me by saying, “Your mother would have liked this place.”

That sentence remained with me and while she was baking some pecan pies, I asked why she believed this. “Listen, boy. Who in their right mind would prefer to live in an old house doing the same thing day after day after day? Wearing the same clothes. Cooking the same food. Thinking the same thoughts. Day after day. Nothing nice to remember and nothing nice to look forward to. What sort of life is that? Always waiting, always waiting.” She sounded a bit like the stern old Auntie but a few minutes later, she added, “She would have been happy to know that you living here now. God bless her soul.” That sparked out a couple of hymns. It sounded as if she was praising God for giving her this opportunity in her old age.

A couple years ago I had heard her telling my mother, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh, and about thirteen days after she appeared outside the door, I felt she had reached the end of the giveth phase. Out of the blue, my father popped up. They began to quarrel ten minutes later, as if they were picking up from where they had left off in Trinidad. It started when Auntie asked him if he was still sinning or had found it in his heart to repent. He replied that he must be still sinning because her visit was a heavy punishment. Then she started to complain about the condition she found the house in and he told her she was free to leave if she didn’t like it. They went on for close to half an hour like that. Finally Auntie
walked away and turned on the television. That night though, she didn’t look at her makeover shows but kept moving from channel to channel. And when my father stormed past her to the balcony for his smoke, she got up and went into the bedroom. I saw my father flicking his butt over the railing and then peeping inside. “Where she went?”

“To sleep.”

“The damn nastiness. In my own bed. What happen to all the generosity and sacrifice she always quacking about? Hypocrite.”

I didn’t tell him that, in spite of all of Auntie’s faults, she was still far better company than him.

From the room came the sound of
Jesus loves me, this I know
. That night I had to coil up on a corner of the foam because my father was sleeping next to me. I fell asleep with him grumbling and cursing about hypocrites.

That was the pattern every single day. In a way, it reminded me of some of the Mayaro families and I wondered if the neighbours were able to hear Auntie telling my father he was the cause of my mother’s death, and he saying that he now figured out that she used her umbrella to hide from God, and she hitting back with a parable about Joshua and Jericho and tumbling-down walls and fake illnesses. On and on and on. Once she picked up her umbrella and pointed it at him like the Penguin. “This workman-pokeman scheme going to give you a seat right next to the devil. Mark my word!” I would like to say that the situation was better when my father was away but during these periods
Auntie would now warn me about idleness and worthlessness. “Philandering” was a word she used all the time. Her old scratch-up, complaining voice came back too.

One evening I tried to cheer her up. “These lights on the buildings outside really look like jewels.”

“Souls burning up,” she said flatly.

And this was the start. From then, all the
sweetmouth
about Canada came to an end. She still collected all her newspapers but instead of talking about the cleanness or the flowers and squirrels in the park, she would ask me, “You ever notice that all the people who get in accident or fall from building or get burn up or drown in some lake, have foreign names?” Or “You ever notice how nobody willing to smile back at you? Some of these people in the park can’t recognize a blessing if it run up and bite them.” I couldn’t understand why she was turning against the country just because things weren’t working out between her and my father. It was almost like she was taking out all her vexation on this place, which less than a week earlier, she could find nothing bad about. Now nothing could please her. She complained about the urine smell in the hallway and children smoking on the stairs and one night, with a heap of clothes in her hand, she asked if the basement laundry room also doubled as a drugstore. “Smoking-poking all over the place.” Even the television shows she had enjoyed so much began to eat her up.

“Look at these girls,” she told me one evening. “Stooping to any level just to win a little prize. Fighting and complaining and backbiting just like … I better bite my tongue, yes.”
She took off her hat and fanned her face tiredly. “Everything is always a big competition. Fight-fight win-win.” Another day she was flipping channels idly when she said, “In some countries, people have respect for their elders but not here. Not here at all.” I remembered her earlier statement about old people but said nothing. “Hello. I don’t think so. Talk to the finger.” I had to laugh at her imitation and the way she pushed out her hand and waggled her head like one of the black girls on the show. She gave me a hard look like if I was somehow involved with the group of teenagers who were criticizing their parents with a tall glasses-woman who looked like a lonely bird.

I can’t pick out the exact moment when she turned against me but I soon noticed that she began to lump my father, Canada, the people in the park and on TV, the condition of the Regent Park buildings, and me, into one big frustrating ball. One night soon after an argument with my father, she screamed out, “Oh Lord Jesus! I could feel this cold seeping inside my bones. Eating me out from the inside.” I jumped and wished I could follow my father out of the apartment but felt it would be disrespectful to leave her alone. That night she baked for hours. From my foam, I heard her slapping the flour and singing her hymns so angrily, I felt she was chasing out all the bad spirits from around her. When my father got back late in the night, she was still bawling out her hymns. To tell the truth, I think this got him a little frightened because he went quietly to the television instead of putting up an argument. When Auntie saw him
there, she said in the same tune with her singing, “He sitteth alone and keepeth silence, because he hath borne it upon him. Gadarene swine!”