When I Was Young and In My Prime (23 page)

Something hisses under my skin these days, insistent, like the Freon that time I was impatient and used an ice pick to defrost my fridge.
 

Catching me steal a look at my watch while I'm waiting for him to manoeuvre his walker into position, Fred, the brain-injured man I shower on Wednesdays, says to me,
Is it now?
 

Mornings by the lake, I think about the word
design
, about the organic nature of even the least organic thing, about the ancient story in which Love is the bastard child of Resource and Poverty, about the symmetrical helplessness of infants and elders. The on-ramp and off-ramp of each life: disability. And in between?
 

Can't help feeling that somewhere we've missed a connection.
 

Did I mention what it said on the hand-lettered sign held by the woman on the sidewalk?
 

Spare some change or I'll touch you.

Love
?
 

Though we all know the word is distended and threadbare with too many wearings and mendings and bleachings and though lately the moral of each day's story seems to come back to how impossible it is to know another person and though I could very easily be deluding myself, I think maybe just maybe I might be feeling the shape of it rising in me lately like a kind of groundwater ever-so-slowly by fractions and increments
 

toward places I hadn't expected to feel it. And it's not at all romantic. It's
 

terrifying. I think of him taking care of her all those months of her decline. A river draining, emptying faster than it fills. Somewhere else, in some realm I can't see,
 

a flood.
 

Mother, I want to take your hand from the steering wheel.
 

Hold onto it for

 

dear life. I want to feed you a little of
 

everything.

things that still have not left her (2)

1
 

chewing

with her mouth closed

2

smiling
 

when kissed

The other day I went to the hospital with Grandpa for his cataract operation. Mom and Uncle Nick, being teachers, both had to work, but my schedule is flexible so I said sure.
 

Two older women in the waiting room were talking about the weather. They seemed strangers but had somehow managed to strike up a conversation. Normally I could just ignore that sort of thing—
blah, blah, blah, retirement communities, blah blah blah, bladder control, blah blah blah, can you believe Christmas is over already oh well it'll be back before you know it
—but for some reason, maybe because I was slightly hungover and had forgotten to bring a book, that day I couldn't stand it. Their conversation wasn't going anywhere. It was all I could do to keep from leaning over and telling them to just
shut u
p. I actually had to get up and go to the washroom.
 

When I came back from the washroom I paused in the doorway for a moment and looked at them—seated side by side, turned slightly toward each other but still facing forward, staring at their clasped hands or at the floor, taking turns speaking and nodding. And I got it: old ladies in waiting rooms speak a dying language, the subtleties of which can easily pass you by.
 

What they're really saying is:

it's important
   

that we be civil to each other

yes,
             

I believe in that

memory may go but the details
 

are still
 

important

I agree
 
the details
 

are important
 

I lie in Gloria's bed thinking how I want to be less predictable, more various and flexible and hospitable to surprise. I want to have many children and live in a shoe and somehow manage. I've been thinking I need to say no more often, but really I want to say yes. I want to be inconvenient and alive. I want to have a one-night stand tonight with my husband of seven years. I want to seduce him.

The city makes a hollow roaring sound around the apartment, like something large and empty exhaling endlessly.
 

What have I done with these years? Always reserving part of myself from any one thing—art, work, politics, my relationships—just in case. Afraid I won't receive the recognition I need in order to justify spending myself fully. Always keeping back a nest-egg, a private little hoard of self.
 

I'll go home in the morning.
 

I lay waiting for the night to be over, heavy-limbed with the thought that it could be too late.
 

James and I go out, just the two of us, the way we used to when we first met. We choose a pub out of the neighbourhood, a place with good nachos, where it's unlikely we'll run into anyone we know. I can tell he's making as much of an effort as I am. We're careful with each other, but not in a bad way, not in an edgy, stepping-on-eggshells way. More in a reverent, careful-with-the-newborn way.

He asks me about the writing I did at Gloria's. I tell him I'm trying to get over my embarrassment about how tame and domestic it all is. “Guess there's just something compelling to me about the mundane,” I say.

He considers for a moment then says, “I think in an ideal world we'd each have our own bard.”
 

I laugh and sip my beer, thinking how wrong-headed my need some space instinct is—it's when we don't spend time together that things go wrong. On the other hand, would I have been able to see this without having taken the space?

“Think about it,” he says. “Every single person on the planet with his or her very own personal bard, the way Celtic chieftains all had a bard in their entourage. A guy with a lute slung across his chest, following each and every one of us around, composing lyrics about our every little triumph and defeat.”

 
“Yeah, the mountain of dishes conquered, the battle of the diaper change won but the war grinding on.”
 

“Exactly! Imagine—each paper cut and parking ticket properly lamented. A whole song for your new hairdo. A whole song for the day when you were a kid and you ran away from home and no one noticed and when you came home your goldfish was belly up in the fishbowl and your mother had made liver for dinner.”
 

“A whole song for the first kiss,” I add, “and the bard plays it in the background every time you kiss anyone after that. With appropriate variations, of course. And a whole song for the first fight. The first fight preserved in all its agonizing detail.”
 

James and I meet eyes across the table.
 

“But at the same time,” he says, “the whole thing sung in metred verse—as if it couldn't have gone down in any other way.”

We're quiet a moment, eyes locked.
 

Then the moment passes. The waitress comes and we order two more pints. I decide I don't care how I'll feel tomorrow. I decide I love everything about this night. Every last detail.
 

Some days I can almost understand
 

why she might want to forget it all—

like the temptation when carrying a
 

heavy load, a load too big for your
 

arms, to drop the whole thing rather than
 

choose
 

what to put down,
 

what to carry on. So much to hold

like how the day of the spontaneous watermelon seed contest

—Who can spit one into the bird bath first?—

was the same day Grandpa told us he was going to sell the house
 

and how, when my stepfather brought back cigars from Cuba, one for everyone, Grandpa saved his for his birthday, kept it in the fridge, folded in a plastic milk bag with a stub of carrot,
to keep it fresh