Savage (12 page)
"I don't know."
"What movie is this?"
"I think it's
The Thing
or
The Blob
. The something." I didn't answer her. She rattled her cup of ice water.
In the film, a bright-eyed wino saw an asteroid. His dog was equally disturbed before the film cut to two varsity boys at a drugstore planning their sexual escapades for the weekend, when into the store walked the local priest.
I hit PLAY. On a tape labelled
Dec. 7, 1991
, I watched a recent rerun of my own life: Sunnybrook Park, the bucolic winter nothing, and me. In the video, I move through the thickets, the twisted thorns and burrs as I took my
GT Sno-Racer
down into the cement path, past the rippling woods on either side.
"Swear to accomplish this task before nightfall!" Holly shouted, pointing her finger at me.
"Huh?"
"Mom wants you to vacuum your room. Do you know if we're eating the midwinter boar for Easter or what?"
"No idea," I said.
"I'm sure there's a big cadaver in the fucking freezer."
"Oh." Holly looked at the television.
"What fresh hell is this we're watching?"
*
By mid-afternoon, Holly had disappeared again, so it was just Mom and me visiting Grammy at Central Park Lodgeâa retirement home in Thorncliffe Park, an offshoot neighbourhood in East York, a ten-minute drive north of our house.
The area was a ghettoized suburb comprised largely of stuffy high-rise apartments, a dilapidated mall (Zellers, a bowling alley, shoe repair, custom T-shirt print shop, food court, BiWay, women's and men's fashion, designer footwear, Radio Shack, Pizza Pizza, a large grocery store, beer store, electronics, lotto-and-cigar shop, dentist, optometrist) a feeble library, and a high school recently renamed after a Canadian astronaut, Marc Garneau.
For nearly two years now, Grammy had slept each night in a tiny metal-rimmed bed and puttered around the miserable confines of her walk-in closet-sized room, which was furnished with a crummy desk and dresser, a one-seater chair, and a terrible view of the gaping parking lot seven floors below. Her room was barren, devoid of the rat-packing bounty for which she was known. Even her trademark geraniums, which in her former apartment, could always be seen spread out on display, were never replaced. Instead, two greeting cards and some photographs lay warped on her dresser. She would, on occasion, ask me about the whereabouts of her cassette tapes, which featured recordings of random evenings in her Etobicoke life with my Grampy: playing the piano, having friends over, indiscernible merriment. I told her they were safe, stashed neatly next to my own cassette inventory. I found it depressing that Grammy had been reduced to this miniscule quadrant. Our visits were short-lived, overheated, with nowhere to even hang our big dumb winter coats.
When we got to her room, Uncle Carl was already there, standing by the window.
"Hi Unc," Mom chirped.
Uncle Carl wore a dull grey suit with old and new dandruff caked on his shoulders. A tattered red sweater-vest was worn underneath, while his dress shirt was light blue and accompanied by a crusty clip-on tie. He looked like a vacuum-cleaner salesman from a 1961 episode of
The Twilight Zone
. His hair was slicked back (grey/black), cut extremely short on the sides. Sparse white hairs could still be seen from within his dark, neat coif.
Mom said he dyed his hair with a tonic. "It's what a lot of elderly men do," Mom once told us. "It sometimes doesn't looks very good, but we shouldn't say anything."
"So it's women's hair dye?"
"No, it's a special tonic cream," Mom had told us without getting into any clairvoyant detail. I just filed it under
Mom's War Room Mystery Facts
.
"You're looking fine," Uncle Carl said to Grammy, who lay cork-screwed and twisted in starchy sheets, his dwindling sister-in-law, both aged seventy-four years, who had known each other since the late 1930s. Uncle Carl was my godfather, my "Great" Uncle Carl, the arbiter of my on-call super-VHS glory reel, the controversial camcorder that cost $1,276.56, the one who slipped me twenties, developed my rolls of film from my insatiable documentation of driveway hockey or Han Solo poses, or prop
Star Wars
models or any other evidence of my inability to socialize in normative levels. Through Uncle Carl, I had become a mental tourist, photographing and videotaping the nothing around me.
"Just fine," he said, nodding to her and glancing at me for an endorsement. "It's warming up. Soon you'll be able to go outside for a nice walk," Uncle Carl said, with a denture click, giving Grammy a big diplomatic smile, talking in an elevation of tone, bordering on condescending baby talk.
"Gotta get some fresh air in here," Mom said, beginning her usual tirade of blunt commentary.
"Yes, dear," Grammy said, on her back, head tilted on a slant, as if sunk deep in her thick mattress,
"Yes, Mom," Grammy said, reversing order, reversing roles. As Mom tried to get the window open, she continued, "You've been eating too many bananas, Mom."
"Pardon dear?" Grammy's tiny voice asked.
"Eating too many bananas, I said," Mom repeated, this time louder.
"Gonna get fat," Mom added, finally cranking open the window. "Hot in here." She was chewing her Trident peppermint gum wildly on one side, smashing the tiny piece of malleable sugar-free goo like a factory piston up and down.
We took our coats off.
The nurse came in with a big smile and hellos and a loud narration of her intended actions: "JUST GOING TO CHANGE YOU NOW, THEN TAKE YOU DOWN FOR DINNER SOON, YES, IT'S DINNER TIME, THELMA, IS THIS YOUR GRANDSON SO NICE OF THEM TO COME VISIT NOW ISN'T THAT RIGHT MOM OH SO KIND SO NICE LOOKING SUCH A NICE FAMILY I RECOGNIZE YOU BOTH FROM YOUR PHOTOGRAPHS..."
When we left Grammy's furnace of a room and headed to the elevator, Uncle Carl began his escape route story. I was still filming. An elderly woman approached Mom. I took some shots out the hall window before I spun the camera down the hall when I heard the interaction, trying my best to capture some of it.
"It's so
hot
; you've got to tell them to do something about the heat," she said in a half-voice. You could tell it was a struggle for her to speak.
"OK, I will," Mom said, her gum-chewing now coming to a standstill.
"It's
terribly hot
," the woman said, her voice flinty, bits of the words truculent over mucus slime in the larynx, reaching her hand out towards Mom. She looked as though she was about to fall over. "I'll see what I can do," Mom assured her, as the woman disappeared down the hallway, clutching the rail the whole way.
"I should probably go before it gets too late," Uncle Carl said, as he entered the elevator. "Traffic and such."
"It's not even five yet, though; stay for dinner, why don't you?" Mom said encouragingly. "I'm making a nice pork roast and
patatays
," she concluded, matter-of-factly, as if the meal she had in store for us would bring our scrawny, elderly relative rushing to the table, napkin around his neck, salivating.
Mom's lips were wrenched in a question mark, her eyebrow cocked, sheer eye whites on pause, looking at me with a tinge of anxious concern.
I lowered the video camera, turning the power off and slid the cumbersome machine into my duffle bag. "It's so hot in this place," I said to my uncle, who was once again clicking away inside his mouth, his dentures and his jaw at work in a symphony onto itself. The small reserve of energy that remained in my uncle's day wasn't going to get him through the variables of the ever-tense innards of
good ol' 161 Glenvale Boulevard
.
"Maybe there's a hockey game on," Mom said with a hopeful chirp, now desperately trying to entice him. "David gets back from work at seven, soâ"
"No, no, I should get going," Uncle Carl concluded, now looking straight ahead towards the UP/DOWN eyes of the elevator's electronic door.
"I'll be seeing you soon; give me a call sometime."
"You sure?"
"Say hello to Dave for me," he said. "I'll see him next time, I'm sure."
"OK, well, I'll give you a call next week, Unc," Mom said.
Uncle Carl nodded, car keys just rows of glint, indistinct teeth, losing colour in the rainy darkness. Hunched, he vanished into the early evening melancholy.
Mom and I walked to the car. "Gosh, it's still horrible out," she said, quickening her pace through the parking lot. "Holly wants us to pick her up at Yonge and Eglinton."
I nodded. "And when's
Greyskin
coming back?" I struggled for a second with the slickened door handle, my other hand carrying the duffle bag. She now accepted
Greyskin
as my official nickname for my undead undertaker of a father.
"Seven, I think," she said, starting the ignition, my mixed tape automatically continuing to play George Michael's song
Heal the Pain
. We slowed down as we approached the familiar corner of Yonge and Eglinton, trying to sort through the cluster of youths in puffy parkas and neon scarves. Billows of smoke and breath hovered above them.
"There she is," Mom said, slowing down.
Holly waved goodbye to a selection of smoking friends.
"Hey, guys," she said, cheekbones awash with rain, her eel-coloured hair flattened in chaotic ropes against her head.
"Library didn't have what I needed, but I did find some information on Grandfather's Anglican '60s cult and other assorted family witchcraft history," Holly said with a wet snarl.
"Don't start in about that. I had to yell at your aunt and grandfather on more than one occasion that I don't want them to talk about it in front of you guys, especially when you were little. They were obsessed with all that stuff."
"OK, sorry." Holly said. "Oh, I ran into Liz and we went to the record store. Oh, and we're going to a party tonight at ten."
"You need the car?"
"Nope, but you can drop me off. What's for dinner? I'm starving."
"We're having cake and eggs for dinner." I said.
"All right. I'll have mine raw and cracked over my cake." Holly said.
"Me too!" I shouted.
"We're having spaghetti," Mom said, returning us to culinary reality.
"Another recipe from the
No Surprises Cookbook
, hey, Mom?" Holly said with a shit-eating grin, as she fastened her seatbelt and exhaled dramatically.
"Well, the thing is, I don't know when your father is coming home," Mom said. "So it's easy to heat up."
"It's good that he's out of the house, a part of society again, maybe he'll meet a new family," I said in a barbed tone. "I've always thought that he had another family."
"You're a weirdo," Holly said, reaching for the radio knobs.
Mom laughed as we turned east on Broadway, heading towards Mount Pleasant, through to Bayview, Hanna Road, Tanager, Rumsey, Beaufield, to Sutherland to Glenbrae, eventually turning north until we reached Glenvale; our Oldsmobile station wagon acted like a room-temperature-seeking missile as we pulled into the driveway.
"It's hail," Mom said, holding her hands up against the sky.
"I think its sleet, Mom," Holly said, shutting the car door with her butt. I waited for Mom to have the front door open before leaving the car, securing my camera tight in my bag.
*
"Your father's home. Clear the table, Nate; he'll want to eat."
I moved the remnants of dinner and some newspapers Holly had been rifling through for school.
"Hello," Dad said, Mom sprinting in the hallway, status-updating the situation, the blow-by-blow account of the last eight hours.
"I'll read your story tonight, homo," Holly said, passing me in the hallway, her hand covering her mouth as if giving me spy instructions.
Mom opened the oven door, which always sounded like a huge iron drawbridge lowering. She took a plate of hot spaghetti from its dark mouth.
"I was just going to call you at work to see if you'd left," she said, adding, "There's a salad too. You can start with that, then I'll bring your dinner to you, nice and hot."
"Thanks," Dad said, followed by his three to four honking nose blows.
Accompanying Dad was the faint ghostly film of his Craven "A" cigarette stink. Despite the fact that he had quit smoking (or had led many of us to believe as much since the fall), I knew for a fact he was still smoking and would routinely go out for long walks to smoke. Holly said she saw Dad smoking on Eglinton a few times.
Dad directed his comments to Mom in particular as he went through each detail of his day at Beverly Funeral Home: pureeing words and collective opinions of staff on various aspects of this death of a day. In his dull voice, Dad used funeral slang as well now, calling the deceased "stiffs" and shortening the name of the funeral home to "Bev's." He talked with pageantry of each funeral, how the flowers were late and orders mixed up, and what he said to the flower store manager, as politely as he could muster under the circumstances, explaining how the families had spent hundreds of dollars on particular arrangements.
"It was a lovely service," before blowing over a fork full of pasta. "Family came from Vancouver, Washington and even Australia."
"Sounds rough, Dad," Holly said, patting his forearm, "flowers, frost, passports and formaldehyde."
"School going well? Your studies keeping you busy?" Dad asked her, as she headed towards the den.
"My studies are fine, Father," Holly said in solemn voice, sneaking me a toothy laugh, sipping on her ice water. (Later laughing with me at how Dad always called them "studies.")
"Exams?"
"No thanks, I'm good," Holly snapped, getting up. "Um, next week," she blurted out from the hallway, TV remote in hand. She flicked the television on, twirling the remote as if it were a gun from the Wild West. "I'm going to watch the boob tube."
Dad finished the last strand of sauce-tangled pasta as the kettle began to boil.
The way I saw it, Holly could tell all the quick-wit jokes in the world she wanted. It was a cameo for her, one she knew wasn't going to play into any larger, drawn-out battle. She was in and out; no longer here for the long haul, the endurance test, and the moods galore that rotated Russian roulette style on a big invisible whim wheel we all took turns spinning, one that hung enormous in my psyche.