Savage (26 page)

Mom was watching a car park in the driveway across the street while a small pot of tomato soup bubbled over the right rear element. Our lives were not at all comparable, each of us on Earth unique and special, as special and unique as the next set of circumstances, DNA and pulse. We, the amoebas from the memory pond, go belly-up from time to time.

"Michelle is fighting to keep me on board, but I just have this awful feeling."

Holly was standing beside three boxes of books.

"So we can put some of these away?"

"Sure."

"Then we'll put the bookcase in the spare room. That's the plan right?" Holly said, now taking charge of all things.

"Yes," Mom replied, now aware she was chewing on her fingernails. I toiled with screws and tacks, looking at the peg holes along the planks carefully. Sadie sauntered into the room where the construction was taking place.

I pressed two pieces of wood together successfully, standing half the structure upright, flipping the rectangle shell of wood when required, studying the line-drawing instructions, mimicking the man's position with the pieces of wood with acuity.

"Your father has been secure for years off his investments from the house, you know. I don't have any rich relatives who can leave me anything."

"That's true; you don't," I said.

Mom's economic weakness was news to me, as I had, up to this point, believed Mom was a mythological pioneer of survival. She had somehow managed to cultivate an ongoing existence: partial excess, part restraint, in order to facilitate life for herself and Sadie.

"So, we'll see," Mom said, disappearing down the hallway.

Sadie was like a main organ in Mom's world, an occasional vocal signal post that measured her own mortal coil. She curled up on the empty cardboard box the bookshelf came in. "And Sadie is sick. The doctor doesn't know exactly what's wrong with her."

I looked at Sadie, pawing at the empty plastic bags the screws came in, regressing into kitten-like behaviour a decade and half too late. From the kitchen mom's stereo blared classical music.

"It's like an institute in here," Holly sniggered.

"Be careful, Nate," Mom said, hands on her hips, a piece of muffin shrapnel lodged in her mouth. She studied her new bookshelves.

"So I've been talking with Susan," Mom said, twisting a plastic bag of freshly baked muffins with a big knot and swollen air inside, "and she thinks it's a great idea to move down for a bit."

Susan was another Kodak apparition, late-1970s, my only recollection being a photograph of three blonde kids on our couch on Mann Avenue, some in pirate newspaper hats, and one, Tracy, too cool for their childish leanings, sat bored, her pirate hat beside her, never worn.

By the time the first row of hardcover mystery novels made their way onto the bookshelf, Mom had unfurled a massive get-away plan, a relocation program that would, as she put it, "solve all of my problems, you know?"

"It's far away, Mom."

"It's my safety net, I guess, for now. I can rent this place out."

"And you'd live with Susan?"

"She works at one of the local colleges, says she might be able to make some calls for me, get me a job on campus," Mom said.

"Why do you have all these football clippings, Mom?" Holly asked.

"Just a scrapbook I'm making for my class."

"Sports class?"

"No, it's a general interest course on broadcasting, different kinds, you know?

The phone rang. It was Dad. "Nate's here, yes, he sent you his things for taxes. Well, you'll probably get it tomorrow. I have to go."

She returned to the small table where we were drinking tea, talking, shuffling and sniffing. "Your father is in his usual mood," Mom said.

"Taxes are sometimes late. Big deal," I said.

"I know what you mean; I think that your father is just impatient sometimes."

Her walk, now a physical stutter, was combined with an irritated cough, a trickle of arthritic pain, and the slow sashay of her silver-haired Vader-helmet-shaped bob with each step as she observed my IKEA trance.

"So you have a passport?" I asked, "deportation forms?"

"Yes."

"Why do you have twenty coats? You can get rid of some. Keep two, and we'll take this to Goodwill," Holly suggested.

"That's my decision."

"And these books, you can't ship a thousand books to Dallas."

"I can't think about that now," Mom said.

"Better to get rid of the stuff now," Holly said, trying to be both sensitive and diplomatic.

"I don't know!"

"OK, you decide. I'll go and get some more garbage bags."

I shuffled some papers. "These continuing education courses sound like astronaut school."

"I'm halfway through my course on famous trials."

The pantry was full of ants. "It's 'cause you carbo-load," I said. "It's in the Bible, they just—"

Mom interrupted, "OK, just help me move the things out of there so I can clean up a bit."

In the storage room, I found Holly. "Remember these?"

"Not really. The '90s are a blur for me, thankfully," I said.

Holly put The Doors T-shirts back into the garbage bag. "We have a lot of crap in here," Holly said. "What's this? A
Cape Fear
colouring book?"

"I wish," I said. "Are you hungry?"

"A bit. But I don't want to eat here," Holly said, dragging a garbage bag towards the exit.

*

Now recovering from the bookcase ordeal, I collapsed down on the beige-striped sofa, with all its foreignness.

Enter Mom.

"How you doing?"

"I feel fine and I feel good," I said. "Feeling like I never should."

Occasionally, when there was nowhere else to go, to be, I'd find myself washed up on the shores of this small co-op apartment Mom owned for an awkward meal or tea over harsh lighting, and she would update me on the state of the community, blasé names dropped as if she were reading off a predictable list, a grocery store extra, a former babysitter or area hood, the boy who broke into Northlea United church to vandalize it is now a radio host in Oshawa, things like that. The throwaway characters from those stretches of years who rode their bikes, who screamed obscenities, who appeared on swings with girls and then disappeared, who were early smart bombs of divorce, relocated into an anecdotal trough.

"What's this?" Holly asked, holding an old black-and-white photo up.

Mom squinted. "That's our basement on Elmer Avenue, just after we moved in. The army offered to pay for a down payment on a house, and the navy gave Uncle Carl his college education as a pharmacist. That was the deal I think the government made when you got out of the war. Mom and Dad bought the house at 46 Elmer Ave. I don't know the year they moved in, but I do remember starting kindergarten at Kew Beach Public School, which was at the bottom of the street. That's why I always liked taking you guys to the Beaches when you were younger, because I grew up there," Mom said, opening a recycled plastic bottle full of tap water—dribbling some down her chin.

"And now you're moving to the desert."

"I've known Sue my whole life; it seems surreal. She got me my first job at the CBC, because Grampy wanted me to work for the government when Sue and I finished Weller Business College, so I did for about six months then decided to join Sue and got a job in the TV Drama Department, which was located up above a restaurant at Gerard and Yonge. Sue was in the Radio Department nearby, and I worked in the Children's Department for about three years as the secretary to the supervising producer.

"And you met Mr. Dressup and Mr. Rogers?"

"Not Mr. Rogers, which was an American production, but yes, Mr. Dressup and the Friendly Giant."

"And that's when you met Dad?"

"No. I got my job at the University of Toronto in September after I came back from Ottawa and I met your Dad around the beginning of October 1969, and we were married in September the next year."

"And that's when you had Benji, our first cat, and he got trapped on the ledge?"

"He was just a kitten...your dad, you know that picture of him inside of your dad's coat, right?"

"Yeah," Holly said. "I love that picture."

"Oh yes, it was terrifying for me because the windows would blow open and sometimes close, and one time he was out on the ledge and it blew closed and he was pawing at the window, and I had to get him to move away from the part of the glass that I was trying to open, or he'd get pushed right off, so I had to trick him and get him to walk the other way by shaking his Yummies so he would want to come in, and he walked back across the window ledge, and then I was able to open the window, and once he'd pass, was able to close it and then open it again."

"Benji was way cooler than Sadie."

"I remember when we were going to the cottage we hit a whiteout on the 400. Your dad had to drive really slowly, hoping to be able to see the red tail lights of the car in front of us, and Benji sat right up on the dashboard so he could see where we were going—fascinated, I guess, by all the snow. He was never upset about going in the car because I guess he knew he was going on holiday with us."

"When we actually went on holidays," Holly said, flipping through photographs.

"Why did we go to a cottage in a blizzard?" I asked.

"Because it was available, and cheaper I guess."

"Seems insane," I said, adding, "like
The Shining
."

"There are tons of photos, Mom," Holly said, plowing through the Kodak tomb.

"He always wanted to be with us. He loved us. He used to sleep with you when you were sick."

"There's a bunch of photos," Holly said, handing me a glossy stack. "They're mostly of you dressed like Han Solo and Jacques Plante, holding the wooden trophies you made and awarded yourself."

"I earned every one of those trophies."

"Then Dad threw them in the fireplace."

"Sounds like a wicked commercial for self-esteem," I said, taking a few seconds to relish in the deleted scene of Dad taking the time to remove my name plate (a plastic Coke-bottle cap liner) from each piece of wood before throwing it into the flames.

"I remember when I saw your trophies in a stack of wood by the fireplace," Holly laughed. "It was funny."

"Do you want to keep this sweater?" Mom asked Holly.

"No, that's OK. It's too seasick green for me."

"Didn't I get it for you?"

"I don't think so."

"I think I got it for you for Christmas one year."

"You aren't the only arbiter of clothing, Mom," Holly said. "Want some pizza, Mom?"

"Where would we order it from?" Mom asked, walking out of the boxy living room to the tiny hallway connecting the rest of her apartment.

I clamped my hand over my face and ran it slowly down to my neck. "I'm going to make some tea."

Holly scoured through a selection of hulking video cassettes. She lifted up one colourful VHS case, her eyes now bright and alive.

I put the videotape into the aging VCR and hit "play," and was confronted with a VHS flashback of a hand-cut margarine container being fashioned over Sadie's head.

"What is this?"

"It's the first weekend in December of 1991, when I rented the school video camera and I think this is our historic trip to the convenience store, filmed in the back seat, 7:16 p.m on a Saturday night, or as I call them, our family vacations. It was a month before Uncle Carl bought me the video camera and changed the course of our family's history for—"

"Why are you watching it?"

"'cause it's on TV."

"Only because you put it in. Are you leaving?"

"Not sure."

"Well, if we stay, let's watch something normal," Holly said, noticing the video now showed Sadie with a makeshift space helmet on at the controls of a homemade Millennium Falcon cockpit.

In those videos, I gave Sadie feelings and intelligence, threw lines to her as I sat beside her in the homemade sci-fi cockpits of my loneliness, my innovations, fatherless and motherless, loveless. Sadie struggled to perform and find her place in human society. It became an ongoing video metaphor; the cat and I didn't belong in our contemporary forms. We were attempting to right this situation by leaving the planet. We were both struggling with the most fundamental questions of identity and personal history, and together we suffered from the loneliness of never seeing anyone resembling ourselves.

"I just wanted to see what was on it."

As I played the tape, I heard Sherri's soft-sleep voice speak, now a ten-month-old audio fossil from the previous summer. With its brevity and sheen, I tried not to picture her face as she said, "That video camera was like your best friend."

The footage of my lost youth that Sherri wanted to see, that I had promised to bring for our next fumbling sleepover at her house; somehow it comforted her and made her beam in a way she never gave off in any other setting I'd seen her in.

My crisp youthful likeness appeared in VHS glory. She pulled me in, my face wincing as the inane activity spooled out on the screen. Sherri's special feature commentary, live and meteoric: "I would have fucked you right on that couch," she said, and this warmed me all over, knowing she was squirming almost naked under her thick sand-coloured duvet. I heard my own voice on the tape but watched and lived in Sherri's blue-lagoon eyes. Her broken-rose mouth was raw from kissing, and little puffy bags hung under enormous eyes. And then, with the tape ending, dinner starting and the night fading black, Sherri shook her head, her smile flatlining, herself nearly dissolving until the day she did and our unspecific short-term program was officially over. And that was the last time I ever spent any real time with her, Holly, but I can't tell you, I don't want to tell you, I don't want to say her name and relive it aloud.

Holly shook a tape, "Let's watch
Flashdance
!"

"The artwork in the video store always made me uncomfortable, and the poster you had too, so sex-say," I said. "It's like the
Coal Miner's Daughter
version of
Dirty Dancing
."