When I Was Young and In My Prime (2 page)

Then the same day the next year:

Did the washing. Singer Sewing Machine repair man fixed bobbin. Ruth telephoned tonight. Spent an hour at the piano. Letter to the Editor regarding moving War Memorial. Rick and Bonnie's 3rd son born (harelip). Turned Furnace on.

I flip back, to September:
Started new school year today. Fresh coat of paint on school. 16 students in my class, five of them new...
and the first and last names of the five new students.

I keep reading, skipping around—list after list of tasks completed, meetings attended, occasions marked.

Peter and I drove to the funeral home this afternoon. Ruby and Lorne were there. Peter and I ordered flowers. It was very warm. I don't seem to stand the extreme heat very well. Ruby gave us peas, already shelled.

Surely, I keep thinking, surely she must break out of it once in a while. There must be a little anger or elation. Confusion. Maybe despair. I look up Mom's wedding day. She describes the weather and the menu and writes,
What a lovely day for Ruth
.

I flip to my birthdate and read the calmly recorded fact of her first grandchild: weight, length, name and exact time of birth. I start to laugh—it's so absurd—and that's when Mom appears behind me and asks what's funny.

I'm surprised at how angry she is. “Well,” she says, “you'd no doubt go on and on about all your feelings but she only had four lines.”

The next morning I wake and remember I have the day off. Today I am not a waitress. Bliss. I lie in bed for a while, and when I remember the diaries, I find myself thinking about the few spaces here and there without writing, the days she didn't write.

I keep thinking about those days.

I find myself thinking more and more about my grandparents. I try to think of them one step removed, as names, say, on a charity mailing list: Peter and Mary Friesen. Ordinary as can be.

Wandering the aisles of the No Frills supermarket around the corner from our apartment, I think about their garden and preserves. Their secret recipe for gooseberry jam. Their plastic milk bags of frozen green beans. How they pickled everything from plum tomatoes to asparagus to carrots, the jars lined up on shelves in their basement, an inconceivably intimate grocery store. How, when I was a child, the jars were a lovely quirk particular to my grandparents: no one else I knew grew and preserved their own food; it seemed an elegant and ingenious enterprise. How it took me years to realize it was simply the remnants of a mode of survival, universal, obsolete.

I sit on the streetcar and listen to people talk into cellphones, keeping each other utterly up to date
(Hi yeah I'm on the streetcar yeah just passing, uh, Dufferin, I'll be there in five minutes)
. I listen and think about the one time my grandfather left a message on my answering machine, his voice hesitant like a horse's front hoof in the air, saying he'd bought the cabbages for the sauerkraut. His voice signing off like in a letter,
Okay then. Goodbye. Love, Grandpa.

I lie awake in bed next to James and wonder about their marriage. What was left unsaid between them? What was simply understood? I'm only now beginning to see that sometimes words can dilute things between people. How do you tell the difference between leaving something unsaid to keep it pulsing and whole, and leaving it unsaid to avoid its whiff of discomfort and change? Are there things they always meant to say? Things that will never be said, now that their decline is so thoroughly underway?

Don't get me wrong. I don't think about my grandparents constantly. Relatively speaking, I hardly think about them at all. I think about my new schedule at work, and I think about the new waitress who has a pierced lip and an open relationship and whose cheeks are always ruddy and flushed as if she's burning at maximum efficiency. I think about time. I list errands in my head. I think about an off-handed comment James made last week about the woman who plays bass in his friend Dave's band, how sexy she looks when she concentrates, and was it really off-handed, and should I just leave it or ask. I think about a poem I'm working on and wonder how many more layers of certainty I'll have to scrape off it before I get to something that shines.

I lie there like a leaky flue.

Longest day of the year today. Peter and I watched the sun set from the porch swing, and I had a feeling of unevenness, like a fever or undone shoelaces or a job left unfinished.
It's all downhill from here,
Peter said, and I couldn't for the life of me remember whether that phrase is meant to be uplifting or melancholy.

All downhill from here is good if you're walking or bicycling or pushing a cart, I thought, but it's bad if you take it to mean up is good. As in t
hings are looking up, or he's moving up in the world or the politics of this country have really gone downhill in the last few years.

You know the kinds of things people say.

I didn't bother asking him, though, figuring that in the end it's all the same no matter what we say about it.

Some of the times in the morning I wait outside the barn door. Wouldn't say it's my favourite time. Not like a Sunday dinner during the tobacco harvest with all the crew eating their fill and the pickers flirting with the girls from the curing house and the one from Quebec telling funny stories in his French accent. No, waiting just outside the barn door of a morning isn't like that at all. Not something a person would look forward to. No, it's a thing that just happens every once in a blue moon. When I'm not looking for it. In spring, mostly. Stepping out of the barn in the dark after milking and something makes me stop. I can see the kitchen light on inside the house and Mary moving around from stove to sink. But I don't go in to her. I know my tea will be ready, but I don't go. I stand there and look out into the tobacco fields and. . . wait. Wait and watch. Until the sun lifts itself up there and the daylight takes the light of my lantern. I wait until the mist lifts too, furrow by furrow, 'til you can see the whole of the crop. See across the width of the field entire. And maybe catch a glimpse of the brown mare in the distance, the one Ruthie loves so much. Whenever I catch sight of that horse on the hill I always think to myself, she's too damn perfect, that beast. And Mary always keeps the tea warm for me, and never asks me why I lingered.

I remember the porch swing, the heavy quilt tucked neatly under our thighs, spanning our laps: Peter Friesen teaching his granddaughter to whistle. Mary Friesen inside, still brisk and competent, still completely aware of where the compost was kept, what the coffee grinder was for. We'd come in to her later for bitter cocoa. We'd come in rosy-cheeked, and Grandpa would say he'd been teaching me to whistle. That was how I knew I was supposed to have been learning.

On the porch swing I'd just swing my feet and lean against him, and he'd whistle and whistle, sometimes getting an answer from a bird. A girl leaning up against an old Mennonite man from the Ukraine. A retired tobacco farmer who metamorphosed into bird after bird and then back into farmer by whistling a song rather than a pattern of sounds. His own call. Farmer in the dell. Old MacDonald had a farm. Farmer Brown he had a dog and bingo was his name-o. His cheeks and lips mysterious in their small manoeuvres behind the whistle. My head against his hard-muscled arm, the quilt made of old wool suits heavy on our laps, my end tucked under my thigh, wrapped carefully around my feet, his end loose and not quite covering him.

He had five languages, six if you included whistling. Bits of them would come out now and then—flung, spat or sing- songy. A rhyme about a rabbit and a hunter to teach me the numbers:
raz, dva, tre, chiteria, piotch, something, something, poogilliotch
. And the curses:
Ay-ay-ay, Matoushka ri Nanka!
I imagined the languages in him like darkly coloured rivers. Wine-coloured, soil-coloured, the black of his bread, the blood of his borscht, the worn colour of his leather boots, the rust colour of the saw blade in the shed. Dark. Rich. Foreign. I imagined they were what kept his muscles so hard. It was the languages. It was the languages I leaned up against on bright winter mornings outside, the porch swing creaking. Though he spoke English without an accent, I always thought it was the whistling in which he was most fluent. Pure sound, unencumbered by meaning. Unadorned. Relieved.

Months ago, when I was here learning to make sauerkraut, I went through the front closet. The days were getting colder, and I was hoping to find a new winter coat. I came across one I liked and tried it on, then went to the kitchen to show Grandpa.

“Hey, do you ever wear this coat anymore?”

He looked up from the crock he was wiping dry.“Nope,” he said, and looked down again.

“Do you think I could have it?”

He turned from me toward the bushels of cabbages we were about to shred for sauerkraut. “What do you want it for?”

“To wear,Grandpa.”

“Suit yourself,” he said. I took that as a yes.

When it came time to go, I stowed the coat next to the crock of unripened sauerkraut in the back seat of the car (a sexy old 1966 robin's-egg-blue Valiant borrowed from a bartender at work, and admired begrudgingly by Grandpa when I arrived). I drove back to the city, my pleasure at the coat's perfect fit tainted a little by his gruffness.