When I Was Young and In My Prime Read online

  When I Was Young &

  In My Prime

  Alayna Munce

  NIGHTWOOD EDITIONS

  GIBSONS, BC

  2005

  Copyright © 2005 by Alayna Munce.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario M5E 1E5, www.accesscopyright.ca, 1-800-893-5777, [email protected].

  The characters in this book are the product of fancy; any resemblance, in whole or in part, to any person, living or dead, is unintentional.

  Nightwood Editions

  Box 1779

  Gibsons, BC, Canada V0N 1V0

  www.nightwoodeditions.com

  Edited for the house by Kathy Sinclair

  Cover design by Anna Comfort

  Nightwood Editions acknowledges financial support from the Government of Canada through the Canada Council for the Arts and the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), and from the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council, for its publishing activities.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Munce, Alayna, 1973-

  When I was young and in my prime / Alayna Munce.

  ISBN 978-0-88971-209-6 (paper)

  ISBN 978-0-88971-284-3 (ebook)

  version 1.0

  I. Title.

  PS8626.U53W48 2005 C813’.6 C2005-903448-3

  Note from the Publisher

  In this digital edition, Nightwood Editions has endeavored to remain as true as possible to the original formatting of the print version of When I Was Young and In My Prime. However, due to the variety of e-reading devices that may be used and the innumerable programs and formatting choices offered by e-reading devices, the formatting of this e-book version may be affected or altered in ways that are beyond Nightwood Editions' control. By transforming Alayna Munce’s work into digital form, we hope to capture the fundamental spirit of this book, rather than create an exact replica of the print edition.

  ...which is to say

  a truth in nostalgia:

  if we steel ourselves against regret

  we will not grow more graceful,

  but less.

  — Jan Zwicky

  orbiting

  I lie in the dark listening to the creak of the clothesline outside, shirts catching punches of wind. A siren whines listlessly for an emergency somewhere. Pigeons flap against the eaves and settle again. James sleeps beside me, his breath letting itself in and out of his body as if it’s always lived there and always will.

  I lie there with a fat lip of a heart, watch his eyelids twitch in the moonlight.

  Eventually I pull my knees up and slip out from under the quilt, its dark wool squares cut from old men’s suits. My side of the bed is against the wall, so I have to climb—gingerly— over him.

  Some nights I stay in the kitchen, put the kettle on for tea, turn on the radio and trawl through bands of static for a voice to keep me company. Other nights I go to my desk and sit by the window, waiting for the sun to rise and relieve the streetlights, writing a little.

  In the middle of the city, this delicate effort: to reel a clear voice in from the cluttered night air.

  HEYANDwho’llgimme50forthewashboardhere

  who’llgimme50andgo50andgo

  longest day of the year today

  the old bird feeder on the dresser beside Mary’s reading glasses

  it’s all downhill from here, Peter said

  the creak of line through pulley

  aerial, they call it

  furrow by furrow ’til you can see the whole of the crop

  Watch that step folks, the last one’s a lu-lu

  The end begins with a whole fall and winter of Mom going to the house every weekend—every weekend, a new project. Occasionally she bargains with my stepfather until he agrees to go with her. Sometimes I tag along.

  One week she untangles all the jewellery, making piles on the bedspread: to be cleaned, appraised, kept, given away. Piles according to size, worth, style. Costume jewellery here, heirlooms there. She throws out some unmatched earrings, puts others aside to be re-set. She finds hinged boxes for the rings. The details crowd until I feel as if I’m surrounded by setting cement and have to excuse myself to take a nap on the couch.

  The next week Mom goes through the closet washing all the clothes, making Grandma try them on. The skirts and slacks and cardigans that no longer fit, she packs into green garbage bags, replacing them gradually over the course of the winter with brightly coloured oversized track suits on sale at Eaton’s, the Bay or Sears. I can’t help thinking I’d rather be a childless baglady than someday find myself wearing a fuchsia track suit.

  This week we’re going through boxes of old papers: letters, exams, bills, clippings, lists. Grandma is smiling, amiable, reading old Christmas cards from her students. She spots me in the door frame and, beaming, says,“Here, you can take these home with you if you like.”

  Mom reaches for them with an overly bright,“Thank you!” and puts them in the box of things to be thrown away.

  A few minutes later Grandma is crying, demanding she be allowed to keep the name tag from the UCW conference. HELLO my name is: Mary Friesen. And though Mom must know it would be so much better, so much easier to just let her have the thing, something in her won’t give.

  The house is a brick bungalow, trim and squarish, squatting on Silver Street in a subdivision on the outskirts of town. They bought it when they sold the farm, chose it for the double lot (which meant lovely big garden) and in spite of the swimming pool (which meant nothing but nuisance). No one has yet mentioned selling, but it’s becoming increasingly obvious that the current arrangement isn’t sustainable. So, though we don’t talk about it, we are, like good Protestants, preparing for it.

  I volunteer to sort the books. The Scrabble Dictionary, three bibles, an etiquette guide, Grimm’s Fairytales. In among all the Encyclopaedia Britannica volumes and Reader’s Digest condensed classics, I find two small five-year diaries of Grandma’s from the ’60s and ’70s. The usual kind: leather bound with a flimsy gold lock, four lines for each day, five years worth of January first on the first page, five years worth of January second on the next.

  Kneeling on the musty grey rug by a shelf in the far corner of the basement, I hesitate, taking a moment to sound the absence of a sound mind from which to ask permission. It’s for form’s sake, I suppose, more than anything else; as if a hesitation before an act of invasion somehow softens or buffets it.

  Last Christmas, while rooting through some photo albums, I found a notebook of Grandpa’s, a kind of journal or ledger from his farmhand days out west. It was clear to me in that case: permission should be granted before it was read. When I asked, he consented with a shrug so nonchalant that I wondered at first if he’d really understood what I was asking. Or maybe it was a shrug of resignation—one more invasion, one more indignity in the gathering mob of indignities that seemed to comprise old age. In the end, though, I settled on the assumption that the notebook simply represented a self so far gone he no longer cared about that character’s privacy.

  In the basement, with Grandma’s diaries in hand, I hesitate politely, then pick one of the locks with a bobby pin.

  It’s filled: all four lines for all five years on almost every page. I start reading somewhere in October:

  Peter got new tires for the car today. Irene brought me a blue clothes hanger,
covered. Tonight I attended “Our Wedding Gowns Past and Present” at the Paris Presbyterian Church, with Marjorie McPherson and Hazel Pelton.

  Then the same day the next year:

  Did the washing. Singer Sewing Machine repair man fixed bobbin. Ruth telephoned tonight. Spent an hour at the piano. Letter to the Editor regarding moving War Memorial. Rick and Bonnie’s 3rd son born (harelip). Turned Furnace on.

  I flip back, to September: Started new school year today. Fresh coat of paint on school. 16 students in my class, five of them new... and the first and last names of the five new students.

  I keep reading, skipping around—list after list of tasks completed, meetings attended, occasions marked.

  Peter and I drove to the funeral home this afternoon. Ruby and Lorne were there. Peter and I ordered flowers. It was very warm. I don’t seem to stand the extreme heat very well. Ruby gave us peas, already shelled.

  Surely, I keep thinking, surely she must break out of it once in a while. There must be a little anger or elation. Confusion. Maybe despair. I look up Mom’s wedding day. She describes the weather and the menu and writes, What a lovely day for Ruth.

  I flip to my birthdate and read the calmly recorded fact of her first grandchild: weight, length, name and exact time of birth. I start to laugh—it’s so absurd—and that’s when Mom appears behind me and asks what’s funny.

  I’m surprised at how angry she is. “Well,” she says, “you’d no doubt go on and on about all your feelings but she only had four lines.”

  The next morning I wake and remember I have the day off. Today I am not a waitress. Bliss. I lie in bed for a while, and when I remember the diaries, I find myself thinking about the few spaces here and there without writing, the days she didn’t write.

  I keep thinking about those days.

  I find myself thinking more and more about my grandparents. I try to think of them one step removed, as names, say, on a charity mailing list: Peter and Mary Friesen. Ordinary as can be.

  Wandering the aisles of the No Frills supermarket around the corner from our apartment, I think about their garden and preserves. Their secret recipe for gooseberry jam. Their plastic milk bags of frozen green beans. How they pickled everything from plum tomatoes to asparagus to carrots, the jars lined up on shelves in their basement, an inconceivably intimate grocery store. How, when I was a child, the jars were a lovely quirk particular to my grandparents: no one else I knew grew and preserved their own food; it seemed an elegant and ingenious enterprise. How it took me years to realize it was simply the remnants of a mode of survival, universal, obsolete.

  I sit on the streetcar and listen to people talk into cellphones, keeping each other utterly up to date (Hi yeah I’m on the streetcar yeah just passing, uh, Dufferin, I’ll be there in five minutes). I listen and think about the one time my grandfather left a message on my answering machine, his voice hesitant like a horse’s front hoof in the air, saying he’d bought the cabbages for the sauerkraut. His voice signing off like in a letter, Okay then. Goodbye. Love, Grandpa.

  I lie awake in bed next to James and wonder about their marriage. What was left unsaid between them? What was simply understood? I’m only now beginning to see that sometimes words can dilute things between people. How do you tell the difference between leaving something unsaid to keep it pulsing and whole, and leaving it unsaid to avoid its whiff of discomfort and change? Are there things they always meant to say? Things that will never be said, now that their decline is so thoroughly underway?

  Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think about my grandparents constantly. Relatively speaking, I hardly think about them at all. I think about my new schedule at work, and I think about the new waitress who has a pierced lip and an open relationship and whose cheeks are always ruddy and flushed as if she’s burning at maximum efficiency. I think about time. I list errands in my head. I think about an off-handed comment James made last week about the woman who plays bass in his friend Dave’s band, how sexy she looks when she concentrates, and was it really off-handed, and should I just leave it or ask. I think about a poem I’m working on and wonder how many more layers of certainty I’ll have to scrape off it before I get to something that shines.

  I lie there like a leaky flue.

  Longest day of the year today. Peter and I watched the sun set from the porch swing, and I had a feeling of unevenness, like a fever or undone shoelaces or a job left unfinished. It’s all downhill from here, Peter said, and I couldn’t for the life of me remember whether that phrase is meant to be uplifting or melancholy.

  All downhill from here is good if you’re walking or bicycling or pushing a cart, I thought, but it’s bad if you take it to mean up is good. As in things are looking up, or he’s moving up in the world or the politics of this country have really gone downhill in the last few years.

  You know the kinds of things people say.

  I didn’t bother asking him, though, figuring that in the end it’s all the same no matter what we say about it.

  Some of the times in the morning I wait outside the barn door. Wouldn’t say it’s my favourite time. Not like a Sunday dinner during the tobacco harvest with all the crew eating their fill and the pickers flirting with the girls from the curing house and the one from Quebec telling funny stories in his French accent. No, waiting just outside the barn door of a morning isn’t like that at all. Not something a person would look forward to. No, it’s a thing that just happens every once in a blue moon. When I’m not looking for it. In spring, mostly. Stepping out of the barn in the dark after milking and something makes me stop. I can see the kitchen light on inside the house and Mary moving around from stove to sink. But I don’t go in to her. I know my tea will be ready, but I don’t go. I stand there and look out into the tobacco fields and. . . wait. Wait and watch. Until the sun lifts itself up there and the daylight takes the light of my lantern. I wait until the mist lifts too, furrow by furrow, ’til you can see the whole of the crop. See across the width of the field entire. And maybe catch a glimpse of the brown mare in the distance, the one Ruthie loves so much. Whenever I catch sight of that horse on the hill I always think to myself, she’s too damn perfect, that beast. And Mary always keeps the tea warm for me, and never asks me why I lingered.

  I remember the porch swing, the heavy quilt tucked neatly under our thighs, spanning our laps: Peter Friesen teaching his granddaughter to whistle. Mary Friesen inside, still brisk and competent, still completely aware of where the compost was kept, what the coffee grinder was for. We’d come in to her later for bitter cocoa. We’d come in rosy-cheeked, and Grandpa would say he’d been teaching me to whistle. That was how I knew I was supposed to have been learning.

  On the porch swing I’d just swing my feet and lean against him, and he’d whistle and whistle, sometimes getting an answer from a bird. A girl leaning up against an old Mennonite man from the Ukraine. A retired tobacco farmer who metamorphosed into bird after bird and then back into farmer by whistling a song rather than a pattern of sounds. His own call. Farmer in the dell. Old MacDonald had a farm. Farmer Brown he had a dog and bingo was his name-o. His cheeks and lips mysterious in their small manoeuvres behind the whistle. My head against his hard-muscled arm, the quilt made of old wool suits heavy on our laps, my end tucked under my thigh, wrapped carefully around my feet, his end loose and not quite covering him.

  He had five languages, six if you included whistling. Bits of them would come out now and then—flung, spat or sing- songy. A rhyme about a rabbit and a hunter to teach me the numbers: raz, dva, tre, chiteria, piotch, something, something, poogilliotch. And the curses: Ay-ay-ay, Matoushka ri Nanka! I imagined the languages in him like darkly coloured rivers. Wine-coloured, soil-coloured, the black of his bread, the blood of his borscht, the worn colour of his leather boots, the rust colour of the saw blade in the shed. Dark. Rich. Foreign. I imagined they were what kept his muscles so hard. It was the languages. It was the languages I leaned up against on bright winter mornings outside, the porch
swing creaking. Though he spoke English without an accent, I always thought it was the whistling in which he was most fluent. Pure sound, unencumbered by meaning. Unadorned. Relieved.

  Months ago, when I was here learning to make sauerkraut, I went through the front closet. The days were getting colder, and I was hoping to find a new winter coat. I came across one I liked and tried it on, then went to the kitchen to show Grandpa.

  “Hey, do you ever wear this coat anymore?”

  He looked up from the crock he was wiping dry.“Nope,” he said, and looked down again.

  “Do you think I could have it?”

  He turned from me toward the bushels of cabbages we were about to shred for sauerkraut. “What do you want it for?”

  “To wear,Grandpa.”

  “Suit yourself,” he said. I took that as a yes.

  When it came time to go, I stowed the coat next to the crock of unripened sauerkraut in the back seat of the car (a sexy old 1966 robin’s-egg-blue Valiant borrowed from a bartender at work, and admired begrudgingly by Grandpa when I arrived). I drove back to the city, my pleasure at the coat’s perfect fit tainted a little by his gruffness.

  It’s been four months since. I’ve been back for several visits in the meantime with Mom, but today is the first time I’ve come back alone, and the first time I’ve worn the coat. In fact, I haven’t worn it much all winter. But one day a few weeks ago, in a second-hand shop near the hardware store where I was buying paint, I found a long soft olive-green scarf to go with it. Since then, I’ve been wearing the coat like it was always mine. James has been out of town on tour (a last-minute gig opening for a singer/songwriter slightly more up-and-coming than he is), and I’ve repainted our whole apartment and worked a long string of late shifts, alternating between waiting tables and painting, writing a little, talking to practically no one except, You want another pint? Need some change? One day, walking to the streetcar, I realized the old coat was the only thing I was wearing that didn’t have holes in it.