Too Close to the Falls (10 page)

All this lore was intermixed into my everyday life. It was rare for me to pass a new spot in town without my mother telling me how it played a vital role in history. When we walked together hand-in-hand on our way to Schoonmaker's Restaurant we eschewed this century. We left Toni Perms, the Driftwoods, and the newly fashionable crinolines to those locals grounded only in the present.

Mother and I took imaginary travels back to the time when the Indians ruled the cataract and threw a virgin over the Falls every year to appease the fierce god who roared at the bottom of the foam. The legend suggested the spray from the Falls was the tears of weeping Indian virgins who were dubbed the “maids of the mist.” At that time I thought “virgin” meant a woman who gave birth to a child who was the son of God. Mother said anyone who gives birth to a son usually
thinks
he's the son of God, anyway.

Sometimes we moved on to 1812 when our own historic home
was used to billet soldiers who lined the shores fighting for Commodore Perry against the British. We had lots of time for history, never cluttering our lives with cooking, company, or having relatives for unwanted holiday stays. In fact, my mother said of Thanksgiving, “Can you imagine putting your hand in either end of some dead fowl, pulling out its innards, then restuffing it with your own concoction and boiling up the gizzard? Sounds like ‘Hansel and Gretel.'”

One thing I admired about my mother was she never stepped out of character. She died as she lived. When she found out she had leukaemia, she said that at least now she would have an excuse for sleeping in and people would say she was brave for getting up at all. One of the perks of a fatal disease is no one pushes you to host the bridge club.

When I told her that I believed Hooker Chemical had poisoned my family with carcinogens more toxic than Love Canal, citing evidence that my father died young from a brain tumour and our dog died the same year — also young — from the same brain tumour, she said, “Relax, everyone has to die of something.” When I suggested that everyone in our immediate and extended family had died young of cancer she said that at least now no one would have to go to old-age homes, which was fortunate because she'd spent all of her retirement income on restaurants.

After her diagnosis, one of her major worries was what season she would die in. Would she be buried in spring, summer, fall, or winter colours? She kept one complete outfit plus full accessories for each season in four plastic bags. After she explained the full seasonal fashion agenda to the funeral director, he said, “I guess you're worried about leaving your daughter alone.” My mother
looked puzzled and said, “She's taken care of me since the age of four. I'm not
worried
about leaving her, but I'll miss her.”

What's a mother supposed to do anyway? I guess most mothers cook and clean and have household rules. It's true I never learned to be a housewife, but I also never heard a harsh word from my mother. When I stabbed Anthony McDougall and had to go to a psychiatrist, she simply said, “Oh, for heaven's sake.” When I was described by the school as unmanageable after I spiked Father Flanagan's holy water, she said I was perfectly fine at home, but if they felt they could no longer contain me then she understood perfectly and perhaps it was time to move on from “the confines” of the Catholic school. She never defended me but let me take my own rap for things, never feeling my behaviour had the least thing to do with her.

Although she was a stickler for the minutiae of fashion rules and other bourgeois affectations, she never placed any confines on my behaviour, and what other people in the town referred to as “strange” she referred to as “novel.” I realize now that she needed the conventional cover-up to carry on what was quite an eccentric life in the 1950s. She never made me anxious about doing anything or trying something different outside of the parameters of the town.

When I took the plane alone to New York City for the state high-jumping meet, where I was to be billeted in Harlem, her only speech of preparation for a ten-year-old girl who had never been away and was now going for a week to
Harlem
was delivered casually as she waved her white lace monogrammed handkerchief from behind the fence on the airport runway: “Have fun! I know
you'll love New York, and don't forget to give the box of chocolates in your suitcase to your hostess. Bye-bye.”

She never punished me — she let the rest of the world do that. When our neighbour, Trent McMaster, crashed through the ice of the Niagara River, descending into the swirling whirlpool, and lost his fingers to frostbite after taking me and the Schmidt brothers up on our suicidal sledding dare, his parents told me I should never have let him do it, but my mother said that although the incident was unfortunate, ultimately Trent had to take care of himself. Because she never criticized me, I often took on the job myself, saying I should never have let Trent go down on the sled knowing he wasn't emotionally equipped to handle the gathering speed and actually be level-headed enough to make the ninety-degree turns he needed to slow down. I should have known he would freeze both physically and emotionally. My mother just listened to my lament as she read the word-power quiz in the latest
Reader's Digest
, finally saying she knew how I must feel. She reminded me I was just a little girl and I wasn't responsible for the Schmidt boys' dares or for Trent McMaster's suicidal missions. She added as an afterthought, “After all, if someone told
you
to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, would you
do
it?”

Once when I told my mother about a neighbour who said that the Donnellys were wrong to send their severely retarded boy to a “home,” my mother answered me with the story of a tribe in Tierra del Fuego who believed that if the wife was unfaithful to her spouse, the husband had an obligation to kill her for the good of the tribe. One man moved away without killing his wife but wasted away from guilt and shame for having committed such an immoral act as shirking his duty to his tribe. While we in North
America are appalled by the act of murder, the Fuegian was ashamed he hadn't done it.

My father never criticized my mother's somewhat murky anthropological parables of cultural relativism, although I could tell he preferred something more grounded. Once in a while he would offer a John Wayne–style homespun “never-judge-a-man-till-you've-walked-a-mile-in-his-boots” version of moral justice with a biblical chaser such as “No one who hasn't done it knows what it's like to parent a severely retarded child for twenty-four hours a day. Never judge another lest you be judged.” Although far more plebian, it was a message I could, at least, understand. I think my father understood that I, as a six-year-old, needed more grounding in how people
should
behave in Lewiston, New York, in 1955. However neither he nor I ran the house. Since I wasn't offered a clear game plan at home, I was a sponge absorbing human behaviour wherever I went. That's why the people of the town were so important to me — I studied them for clues.

I think one of the reasons Mother never cared too much what I did was because she never saw herself as totally of this world, particularly of Lewiston. In some unimportant ways she toed the line, but in others she was emotionally absent from the here and now. Each night when we walked to Schoonmaker's Restaurant we talked about the stars and pretended we were explorers from another country, or else we envisioned ourselves as two ancients on camels trying to read the stars to find our way to the diner. To this day I can always recognize each constellation on a starry night. We never passed the local landmarks, the red-brick school, Dr. Alderman's home office, the park bench and gazebo, without her talking about the Mau-Mau movement in Kenya or some tribe
she was reading about in
National Geographic
. As we passed the school she'd tell me about life before schools and home tutoring. As we passed the doctor's office she'd tell me about theories of illness before the germ theory and how people had to be ostracized instead of their germs. If we saw boys fighting in the park she would tell me how Indian boys fought to the death at the age of thirteen; the one left was considered “the bravest” and then deserved the title of man, which translated to “brave.” When we passed the octagonal gazebo she would tell me how the pioneers had to make their homes waterproof and snowproof. She would ask me if I was an Eskimo how I would build an igloo and how I would trap cold air yet have ventilation.

Lewiston was just her home base. She was really all over the map and she took me with her on all of her time travels. She never told me how anybody in history figured out the next step without asking me what I would have done or how I would have fixed it. When I gave my explanation, she always acted amazed at my perspicacity and then told me how it was in fact discovered or done; however, she always included at least a kernel of my idea somewhere in the explanation and found
some
way to implicate me in the history of ideas.

People used to ask us how we could walk all the way to the restaurant without freezing, but I never noticed the cold when I was with my mother on these walks. The snow seemed magical, transforming the town into a sparkling backdrop for our time together, which was always warm. These moments of my life were the only times I've ever felt perfectly happy and an integral part of the universe.

We were trapped, enveloped in a cocoon of ice. The dawn was trying to light up the opaque frozen window, but we couldn't see out, nor could we even see our own reflections. The phone was dead. The doors were iced shut. My father had chiselled for an hour to get out the back door and finally made it to the garage by
5:00 a.m. but he couldn't manage to open the garage door. Having been through this before, he knew he'd be high on the emergency list, so he decided to wait for the fire department to come with a blowtorch. Besides, my mother kept opening the milk-box door and telling him he'd have a heart attack if he didn't stop.

This, of course, meant we couldn't go to work and it also meant we couldn't have breakfast at The Horseshoe restaurant. My hunger finally spurred my mother to find a sample of shredded wheat dropped through the door
last
Christmas. As we sat gnawing on our dry wheat pellets by candlelight, we listened to the school closings on the battery-operated radio. I waited with bated breath until the announcer said, “Hennepin Hall!” All my life people have been telling me what the greatest feeling in life is, or should be, but the best I ever remember is when they announced my school was closed due to bad weather. It was as though the angel Gabriel had alighted upon my shoulder and handed me twenty-four glorious hours on a silver platter.

I immediately got on all my winter gear, except for the baby straps on my mittens, which I cut with scissors, and headed out for the day. My mother tried telling me that it was only 6:10 and most people would just be waking up, but I wanted to get a good start. Besides, I couldn't see waiting around for another dried cube of shredded wheat for lunch.

It was cold, really cold. Whenever I took a breath I got a stabbing headache like the one I got when I ate ice cream too fast. The snow was deep, and preserved with a thick layer of ice on top of it, like paraffin on jam. Having no traction, I glided over the ice in whatever direction the wind decided to take me, which was great since I really wasn't in a hurry. I kept tumbling down, feeling
like an umbrella that had been turned inside-out in the wind, and I had trouble righting myself. Walking on top of the snow made me feel like Christ walking on water. I began blessing trees to my right and left like Jesus on Palm Sunday. I took a run and slid ten, maybe twenty feet. I fell, laughing my head off, and lay on the ground gazing above me at all the trees that looked heavy, burdened with diamonds. The sun reflected off the swollen branches. Some were so overloaded they'd snapped right off their trunks. The wind made the ice-dipped trees tinkle like the Chinese glass mobile we had at the beach.