They Left Us Everything (30 page)

“It’s so lonesome here,” Mum had said as she trailed her oxygen tubing into the TV room. “Let’s watch
Lawrence Welk
!”

This Christmas feels ironic: my own house feels alien after a year away. The air smells musty: the radiators
ping
and
clang
as I turn up the heat. There are dust bunnies everywhere. The refrigerator is empty.

When I bought this house thirty years ago, all three of my children were under the age of seven. I had enrolled at York University in its MFA theatre program, giddy with the freedom of divorce, deluded into thinking I might finally achieve one of my childhood dreams of becoming an actress. After walking the children to school I took classes all day, then rushed home, fed them dinner, and lugged them back to rehearsals, where
they sat in the back of the darkened stage and watched me perform. Mum was appalled.

“Acting is no career for a mother!” she said. “You can’t abandon those precious children of yours. At the end of your life, which do you want: a bunch of old movies you’ve acted in … or memories of watching your children growing up?”

I wanted it all, but fate agreed with Mum. Six months later I was in a serious car accident, bedridden for weeks, unable to dress myself, unable even to hold up my spine for longer than ten minutes. Mum came in each day to help, happy I was forced to withdraw from the program. She thought I had come to my senses. She hoped I would buckle down, remarry, and become a stay-at-home mother again. But I wanted more. I loved my children—yes—but I didn’t want to spend my days on the tennis courts like she had. Mum had never resumed her career as a copywriter and a columnist after she had children. I wanted to use my talents. Besides, now that I was divorced I needed to support myself. How could I have a career and be there for my children, too? I plunged into a depression.

Dad came to see me. “First Daughter,” he said, “there is something I learned in the navy: you only have to turn your ship a few degrees to end up on a completely different shore.”

I did end up on a completely different shore, but then so did Mum—and she didn’t sacrifice her marriage to do it; she chose to sacrifice other things. I remember Dad telling me that the “grass is never greener on the other side”—it just looks that way. Did Mum have any regrets? Did her life turn out the way she’d expected? Did she ever think back to her choices and wish she’d made different ones? I wish I had asked her.

I spend the first day grocery shopping and the next day cleaning. On Christmas Eve I put up a small tree, throw an old
wreath on the front door, and fill a pot of boiling water with cinnamon sticks and cloves to give the house a festive scent. My table should be laid with fancy garlands and Christmas crackers, the aroma of roast turkey and shortbread wafting in from the kitchen, but the big convivial dinner I always envisioned doesn’t happen. People have other plans: my children alight only briefly on Christmas morning to exchange presents and then rush off for turkey at their father’s house; Robin has no reason to drive up anymore; Chris has moved away; and Victor has flown south on a holiday with Peni.

I remind myself that I’m the grandmother now.

I’m alone on Christmas afternoon, surveying the wreckage of crumpled wrapping paper, idly wondering if I should iron the ribbons. Is this how Mum used to feel after we left? I can hear her saying “Careful what you wish for, you just might get it.”

From every window of my city house, I see nothing but brick walls outside. Mum was right: I can stretch out my arms in the front hall and almost touch both sides. She was right about so many things.

The house feels small now. I feel hemmed in, missing the sky and the lake. I’ve no sooner put up my tree than it’s Boxing Day and time to take it down again.

The very next day I speed back—west along the highway, back to Point O’ View.

Separation

In the mail on the boathouse step there’s a touching letter from Chris in B.C. He writes,
So much has happened … I feel like events have overwhelmed our ability to process them together.
He remembers Dad’s and Mum’s deaths as being so closely linked that they seemed like two sides of the same page. He reminds me how I and my toothbrush “won the toss” the night Dad died … how Victor had to hold me back from running after Dad’s coffin as the hearse pulled away from the church … and how we all went to the vet together to say our last goodbyes to Sambo.

Then he writes,
One of the things I’m not sure I ever told you was how concerned Mum was about her relationship with you. She loved you deeply and wanted to be close to you, but I honestly think she didn’t know how.
Chris says he kept urging Mum to share her own self-doubts with me.
Did she ever do that?
he asks. He tells me that Mum’s struggle with me was a constant theme in their conversations together.

As he reminisces about our childhood, he says,
I know how much you would have rather played with your friends than look after your baby brothers, and I wish you hadn’t had to do that, for your sake … but I want to give thanks for the role you played as my big sister. When you went off to Boston (to university) I felt a mixture of fascination and desolation. One of my rocks was disappearing. I came to visit you there, do you remember? You took me to Tufts University so I could explore some alternative possibilities. When I was at boarding school in Tonbridge, you sent me a towel with a heart sewn in the corner … I held on to that towel for the longest time. When my first child was born, where did I go when I left the hospital? To your house—that’s where. When my marriage broke up, you sent me a television and a set of kitchen pots. What an extraordinary gesture! Mum couldn’t do that—not even close. She was too conflicted about divorce. No, that gesture of love came from my other mother—you! I still have the pots!

Now I’m on the other side of the country and you’re in Oakville once more. I know it’s complicated, but I want you to know that I recognize that this is one more example of the oldest child taking care of things. Thank you for caring so much for so long. Thank you for creating a little bit of space where things were safe and less crazy … Thanks for paying attention and for reaching out. Thanks for being my sister!

I am so overwhelmed by the letter I can’t absorb it in one sitting. It triggers so many flashbacks—wonderful memories, and sad ones, too. I had no idea Mum worried about our relationship or that she cared so much she was constantly asking Chris for advice. I take the letter upstairs with me and reread it before I go to bed. Chris often criticized Mum for what he called her “triangulated” relationships: where she would speak to one of us about the other, instead of going direct. But I saw her habit in a positive light; it caused us to consider each other. I think she was trying to keep us connected.

The following morning, I read it again and find the part where Chris reminisces about our Christmas parties,
especially that giant wooden bowl filled with nuts … It had a honker of a nutcracker attached in the middle … remember?
He used to marvel at its “cracking triumph” when the machine finally broke open the shells to reveal “the strange pulp” inside. He feels that the death of our parents is similar:
The great big nuts have finally been cracked wide open.

Two days later, as I’m shivering in Dad’s workshop, stirring Mum’s eggnog with the wooden spoon, my eyes glance over at the debris of bolts and nails strewn across Dad’s worktable. There—in the mound of brass and iron—I see the top of the “honker.” Dad has conscripted the wooden bowl to hold miscellaneous screws. It is nowhere near the size Chris remembers as a child, but I rescue it, package it in bubble wrap, and send it to him in B.C.

Victor and I hold a New Year’s Eve party, which we know may be our last in this house. Food is prepared, family members gather, and friends of all ages are invited. Nobody much likes my eggnog. Tastes have changed and eggnog has gone the way of suet and Christmas pudding—stodgy recipes better remembered than served. A few neighbours arrive laughing through the garden gate at midnight, fumbling with the fox latch in the dark, holding out a bottle of champagne. We decide to walk along the lake to the end of the pier. The sky is so clear I want to see the stars in all directions. When we get there, the horizon is popping with firework displays.

I stand on the end of the pier, thinking about all the things we’ve inherited, all the carefully saved fragments from another time—George’s Napoleonic pardon, Great-grandfather’s family Bible, Mum’s World War II identity card, Dad’s Hong Kong
newspaper, our “Wowance” book, even the beads from Sandy’s baby bracelet—each generation preserving them in turn, wanting future generations to know of this long, braided chain of genes, habits, and attitudes that binds us together as family: our history and stories. I think about something Pat once said to me: “You didn’t just inherit from your mother—you inherited from your father, too. You and your brothers are the best part of them.”

New Year’s Day is grey, misty, drizzling, and warm. People are carrying umbrellas as they walk their dogs along the lakefront. Tiny sparrows flurry up from the grass to settle on the uppermost branches of a bare tree, giving it what looks like instant leaves. Commingled ducks and geese quack and squawk in high and low registers as their wings flap through the water at liftoff.

Will this be my last winter in this house?
Conflicting thoughts— wanting the house to sell and not wanting it to sell—clang around in my heart. It feels unsettling that the timing of my “moving on” is in the hands of a stranger. I could, of course, move on now, hire someone to house-sit, and dictate my own future. But why would I give up a moment of this? I try to live in the here and now, to embrace the unpredictability, to feel gratitude for this chance, to make the most of every day. If everything has a purpose, then there’s a reason the house hasn’t sold yet. There’s still something more I’m meant to discover.

Some days, the waves on the lake dance forward in pairs, as if they’re holding hands, flirting and flashing white petticoats.
Other times—more ominously—the waves don’t break at all; they just roll under the surface, heaving up and down, going nowhere, like a suspenseful blanket. This is when the ducks flock in and huddle in groups, taking cover, resigned. Mum said the birds know everything. Tonight, they seem to know a storm is coming.

On TV, weather stations are mapping a raging monster—a swirling orange eye surrounded by blotches of white and blue—churning angrily up the Eastern Seaboard, heading straight for Toronto. They’re calling it “the mother of all storms.” Like everyone else, I go to the hardware store to buy a new shovel and a bag of salt and to the grocery store to stock up on necessary food: coffee and chocolate mousse cake. I’m going to stay home, warm and cozy, and start reading Mum’s letters. I’ve been waiting all year to finish the task of clearing this house, saving Mum’s letters as my reward. Now it’s time.

I dive into the binder marked “1941 Working Girl NYC”— when Mum is twenty-five years old and describing her new job as advertising copywriter at Macy’s. Although war had been raging in Europe for more than a year, Mum’s life in New York seems like a non-stop party. I find tearsheets from the fashion ads she wrote: “Dress for one man, not for many!”
…
“Live on a budget but look as if you didn’t!”