They Left Us Everything (15 page)

I go into the pantry and bring out two of the wavy, scalloped glass plates faceted in diamond patterns that sparkle in the light. These were the dishes reserved for special occasions and they could never go in the dishwasher—they had to be hand-washed. I grew up thinking they were the most valuable things in the house, but in the 1970s, after I’d married and moved away, I discovered the truth: that how you’re taught to treat something is what gives it value. I’d gone to a hardware store to buy light bulbs, and moving down the aisle towards the back of the store, I saw a stack of the very same dishes. Stunned and delighted, I bought every one they had and gave my mother a new batch for Christmas.

“I found these at a hardware store!” I told her, thinking she’d be thrilled at my find.

Mum couldn’t stop laughing. “What did you pay?”

“Only $1.25.”

“Well you got gypped!” she said. “Mine only cost thirty-five cents … at Woolworth’s!”

In a twist of fate these pressed-glass dishes are now described as “vintage” on eBay and sell for twenty dollars each—increasing more times in value than Granny’s Tiffany clock from 1865.

The next morning, Jan and I are back at work: she’s still taking inventory in the kitchen, unearthing more rusted tins from the far reaches of the cupboards, and I’m in the dining room, itemizing kitsch in the cutlery drawer.

Dad believed that in the dining room children should be models of manners and discipline—seen but not heard. He ritualized Sunday lunches into agonizing, drawn-out affairs that tested our patience to the limit. Especially when we were hungry. And if we fidgeted or misbehaved he stood us in the corner. The dining room’s square alcove meant that Dad could stand all five of us in corners at the same time, and he frequently did—probably wishing he could stand Mum in the sixth. He and Mum often ended up alone at the ten-foot-long table, carrying on their conversation as if we weren’t there.

In the corners, we picked at the dining-room wallpaper in silent revenge. The leafy green toile of red-coated fishermen casting their flies over rivers has been here since Mum pasted it up in 1952. I notice now that, halfway up the wall, all the fishing rods have their tips picked off.

I find the “Cuss Bank” that used to sit on the table. It’s a ceramic head of a man with a grimaced expression and a money slot in the top of his black hat. We’d never been exposed to swear words at home (I’d never even heard the word “shit” until I went to university, and when my roommate said it as she slipped on a bridge, I almost fainted from
shock), but as children there were two really bad things we were never allowed to say: one was “Shut up!” and the other, “I’m bored.” If these words slipped out we forfeited five cents into the Cuss Bank.

To Mum, boredom was almost an offence against God. She believed nothing was boring and anybody could be fascinating, so long as you were clever enough to ask the right questions. If you were bored, then this was your failing, your lack of imagination—it made
you
boring. Furthermore, to tell somebody to shut up was unpardonably rude—even though, or maybe especially because, with Mum it was hard to get a word in edgewise.

I also find Mum and Dad’s wedding cake topper, made of plaster by an army chef during the war; prophetically, it was a battleship. Now it looks like a shipwreck, its hull encrusted with barnacles of ancient icing, its masts dripping with stalactites of dirty-white tulle. Beside it is a small silver jigger that Mum gave Dad on their first wedding anniversary in Hong Kong. On its rim is inscribed
HERE’S TO MANY MORE!
—and it’s so like Mum, hedging her bets with a sarcastic double entendre. This time, though, the joke was on her: she was the one who got driven to drink by their marriage. Dad tried to embarrass her by stacking her empty gin bottles beside the woodpile in the garage until he had a wall of glass, but it was only Sandy who could get Mum to quit. On his deathbed, he asked Mum for two things: that she’d stop drinking and that she’d stop fighting with Dad—and she granted him both wishes.

I open the cutlery drawers, which used to be so neatly arranged by Dad. Now everything’s a jumbled mess, another of Mum’s “junk drawers.” In amongst the sterling flatware and engraved napkin rings are plastic bananas, green ceramic
frogs, paperweights, candle stubs, rubber bands, pencils, and crocheted doilies. It’s all too much for me now. I need a break. Dumping the clothes was easy, but sorting through this miasma is a different thing altogether.

Suddenly, I hear Jan shriek from the kitchen.

She’s found a wicker basket of old spice bottles and holds it up to the light to show me. Despite the fact that the rusted lids are screwed on tight and the bottles should be half-empty, the ingredients seem to have multiplied. The rosemary and tarragon jars are alive, hopping like Mexican jumping beans. Who knows if these ever got shaken onto our food? Whenever Dad found a maggot, he’d tell us to eat it. “It’s protein! Consider yourselves lucky—in the Japanese POW camps, prisoners would fight each other for these!”

The mould on bread was good for us, too, he told us, because penicillin was made from it. And the charcoal on our burnt toast from the wonky toaster was like free Kaopectate—a cure-all medicine Dad bought frequently. He often fed the pink chalky liquid to Sambo.

By late afternoon I decide we’ve done enough for one day, and we take Sambo for a walk. Whenever I’m out in public with Sambo, I call him Simbo so as not to offend anyone. To Mum, his name was a logical Southern name—since he’s black and white—but I cringe when I have to use it in public. I’m sure my childhood
Little Black Sambo
book is now banned in most school systems.

Mum and Dad always had dogs in our family, starting with Scrappy, the large, dignified Dalmatian who protected us as children. We all loved Scrappy, but after he died of old age, Mum and Dad progressed through various breeds: Buffy, the mutt; Jenny, the beagle; Tanzi, the long-haired dachshund; and
Winnie, the Dandie Dinmont—breeds that got smaller and smaller as my parents got older and Dad grew gentler. Winnie died of old age, too—when Mum was eighty and no breeder would sell her a new one. They said she was too old. Insulted, she bought Sambo from an ad tacked up on a bulletin board at the entrance to her favourite grocery store and fell in love. “There’s more than one way to skin a cat!” said Mum.

All of Mum’s dogs have lived a grand life, sprawled out on the verandah in the sunshine, chasing squirrels in the garden, going for long walks with Dad along the lakefront, barking at the geese, sniffing the fragrant rhododendrons, catching treats from the pocket of Mum’s red, fringed wool coat. At night, the smaller ones slept beside Mum’s bed. In the afternoons she arranged play dates for them, inviting other dogs to come visit in the garden. “Can Sally come play with Sambo today? He’s missing her!” Sometimes, Sambo even received postcards from his friend Pucci, who spent the winters in Florida.

Today, Sambo seems listless. As we wander along the lakefront he walks slowly with his head down and seems uninterested in the other dogs we meet, or even in the ducks splashing and kicking. There’s steam rising off the lake, like wisps of smoke kiting along with the current. One little bird is cooing loudly in a high-pitched voice,
oo-ee, oo-ee, oo-ee.
We even see two white swans float by, which I’ve never seen this time of year, but when I call out “Look, Simbo! Swans!” he just keeps his nose to the ground and gives a slow shake of his head as if to say, “Don’t bother me with that stuff.”

I wonder if he’s depressed, missing Mum? At home he lies around all day, and occasionally I find he’s gone upstairs to sleep at the foot of Mum’s bed. I’m not a dog person, but I have a special place in my heart for Sambo. He’s the only dog
who’s been able to worm his way in there. He did this years ago, when he was only a puppy. I’d come out to look after him while Mum and Dad went on a two-week cruise, and on our first night a terrific thunderstorm shattered the skies. The wind howled, the roof rattled, and suddenly the bedroom lit up with lightning—
bang!
Sambo, who’d been curled on the floor beside my bed, shot into the air like an acrobat in a circus cannon and landed—
thump
—onto my pillow. We held each other tight all night, his little heart throbbing wildly against mine.

Mum always said Sambo had special powers. The breed originated in Tibet, she told us, and because of their keen hearing, they were used to guard the Royal Courts—they could hear enemies coming twenty miles away. Sambo looks like a fierce Chinese lion in miniature, with his thick, woolly facial hair splayed back from his nose like petals on a chrysanthemum. He smells like a wet wool sweater. Mum said Sambo was once royal himself—reincarnated. She claimed he was extra intelligent and understood English perfectly—proven, she said, the day Dad lost his eyeglasses and couldn’t find them anywhere.

“Sambo?” Mum called. “Where are Bapa’s glasses?” According to Mum, Sambo raced out the screen door down to the bottom of the garden, nosed around in the compost heap where Dad had been gardening, and brought back Dad’s glasses in his teeth.

In Mum and Dad’s downstairs hall there’s a tall, framed portrait scroll of an ancient Chinese nobleman with a white goatee, dressed in a blue jacket embroidered with gold dragons. Mum often carried Sambo over to it. “See, Sambo? That’s your ancestor!”

But like everything else in this house, Sambo is way past his due date. I always thought he lived extra long just to keep Mum company after Dad died. He’s arthritic and deaf and almost blind now, and spends most of every day curled into a ball with his back to us in his warm basket by the kitchen radiator. He seems forlorn. Jan and I try to perk him up, but as the days go by he gets more and more listless. He fights Jan and me at night now when we try to put the prescribed ointment in his eyes.

On Jan’s last day, we decide to take him to the vet. Jan cuddles him in the back seat while I drive. Sambo recognizes the vet in her white lab coat and wags his tail, but when she gently feels his hind legs, he winces.

“Let me take Sambo to the back for a more thorough examination,” she says kindly.

I stare at the slick tiled floor and wait with Jan, absently twirling Sambo’s red leash in my hands. When the vet calls me in ten minutes later, the news is not good. She tells me Sambo has an infection in his jaw that extends up into his eyes. This must be why his eyes have been weeping.

“Here,” she says, stroking Sambo, “let me show you.” She lifts up the corner of Sambo’s mouth and I almost pass out. The jawbone is exposed in an oozing yellow mass—all the way up inside. She lays out the options: there are antibiotics, there are painkillers, and there’s an expensive operation with no guarantees. But when I ask her which one to pick, she hesitates and looks briefly at the ceiling.

“Sambo is very old,” she says softly, “and we know he’s suffering. If we operate, I’m not sure he’ll survive it.”

“What do you advise?” I ask her.

“It’s really whatever you feel most comfortable with.”

I press her. “If Sambo were yours, what would you be doing?”

“I’d probably be doing the kindest thing,” she says, and she has tears in her eyes. We both know what the kindest thing is. The awful truth of it drops with finality down a black hole in my heart. I thank her and tell her I’ll have to think about this. She nods sadly and I take Sambo out in my arms to the waiting room.

“What did she say?” asks Jan as she takes Sambo from me and we head to the car.

“Sambo has to be put down.” I find myself wanting to turn on the windshield wipers as I pull out of the parking lot, but it’s my tears that are blinding my vision.

“Omigod … is it that bad?” Jan is stroking Sambo in the back seat, and I’m looking at them both through the rearview mirror.

“His infection has been there a long time.”

“Didn’t your mother take him for regular checkups?”

“Yes! And the vet showed me the notes. For the past five years she’d been recommending an operation and Mum always refused!”

“What?”

“I know … but it was going to cost thousands and Mum said it was too expensive.”

I can see Jan kissing the top of Sambo’s head. “You poor, poor baby.”

I find myself suddenly defending Mum. “I know most people treat pets like people these days, but as much as Mum loved Sambo, she knew he was just a dog.” I reach for a Kleenex and wipe my eyes. “I wish we treated people the way we treat dogs.”

“You mean, like, the ‘kind thing’?” asks Jan.

“Well … even the vet called it that. I can’t help thinking about Dad … and Sandy. How come Sambo can get a painless release from the end of life with a simple catheter in his hind leg for three minutes, but we have to suffer?”

“Nobody wants to play God,” says Jan.

“But we already play God all the time! We play God when we use a defibrillator to restart a heart … when we hook a comatose patient up to a ventilator … when we perform a Caesarian to rescue a strangling baby … when we give blood transfusions.”

“Watch what you’re doing!” says Jan as she grabs the seat in front. “You just went through a yellow light.”

“You wait,” I continue. “By the time we all get Alzheimer’s, there’ll be so many of us they’ll legalize euthanasia.”

“Okay by me.”

“Me too,” I say. “I used to wish one of my children was an electrician or a plumber … but now I wish one of them was a vet.”