When I Was Young and In My Prime Page 3

  She was the first Native woman to ever be a supervisor in the Children’s Aid Society, but she quit all that years ago, fed up with the generalities of policy trumping the particularities of people every time. These days she’s planting seeds she stole from the seed heads of flowers she admired in other gardens last year—or, like yesterday, she’s waving me over to give me a box of twenty-four jars of sun-dried tomatoes packed in olive oil. Connie volunteers at the food bank.“We got a whole truckload,” she said,“but no one in the lineup will have a thing to do with them and the soup kitchen volunteers can’t be bothered figuring out how to fit the things into a meal.” Last week it was a truckload of kiwis. I looked up a kiwi jam recipe for her on the internet. Once last summer, as I was on my way out of the house for my morning walk, she summoned me over for a serving of the chicken cacciatore she’d made at four that morning because she couldn’t sleep.

  When James and I moved in four springs ago, she called out from her porch and introduced herself, then got me to follow her inside so she could give me a slab of carrot cake. I watched her transfer it from her Pyrex pan onto a green Styrofoam tray, the kind they use to package snow peas in the grocery store. I took it home and shared it with James. The cake was exquisite, moist as anything, thick cream- cheese icing. On my way out later that day, I spotted her still on her porch and called over, saying it was the best carrot cake I’d ever had.

  The next morning there was a knock at my door: Connie with the carrot cake recipe written out on a piece of cardboard from a pantyhose package. “It’s from the Sun,” she said.“There’s a helluva lot of oil in it.”

  Then she eyed me as if she knew all my secrets and said, “Don’t skimp.”

  Spring means time for a garage sale.

  Though we’ve been organizing for weeks, the basement is still filled chest-high with artefacts. Mary and Peter Friesen have saved everything that has ever come their way. Wooden chairs—with cracked seats and spindles missing—float stranded in corners, legs in the air. There are striped and polka-dotted hat boxes with hats inside that look like birthday cakes. Cream separators and butter forms. A step- ladder. A skill-testing puzzle of coat hangers, which I utterly fail to solve.

  Three large boxes full of plastic milk bags, all slit open at one end, cleaned, folded once and bundled in stacks of twenty, wrapped with twine like presents.

  An old violin with a bowed fretboard and a black- lacquered cardboard case.

  Crates of Christmas ornaments, grade-school test papers, sheet music. Stacks of moth-bally quilts and old board games—Chinese Checkers, Yahtzee, Parcheesi, Monopoly, Scrabble and Clue—the boxes crushed and most of the pieces missing.

  A small black album displaying sepia photographs of a flood.

  Rows of glass-topped mason jars, some with labels saying what they once contained, some still full. Apple butter, 1973: the year I was born. Pickled asparagus. Homemade eye ointment. Plum jam.

  The garage sale doesn’t even make a dent. Grandpa is gruffer than I’ve ever seen him, and Grandma is hoarding trinkets, throwing subtle tantrums, shaken to see the contents of her basement appearing on the front lawn, haphazard and shabby in the sunlight, spread out suddenly in public, strangers taking it away piece by piece. She’s by turns generous and fierce: “Would you like these dear?” offering me a stack of old Reader’s Digests, then refusing to give up a red plastic poinsettia, clutching it.

  When Grandpa finds out that Mom has sold the bird bath right off the lawn, gruff becomes bewildered. “I didn’t even know it was for sale,” he says. He says it in the tone of someone who’s slept in because of a time change and missed something important. He keeps on saying it, to anyone who will listen.

  things that might survive a lifetime

  1 the answer to the question, what do you do?

  This almost always survives a man’s lifetime.

  my great-grandfather was a farmer

  mine was a steelworker

  mine a butcher

  mine a preacher

  my great-uncle was a harness maker

  mine a labour leader

  mine a soldier

  mine gambled a fortune away

  2 refusals

  Sometimes refusals

  survive a woman’s life: oh it was a scandal when Aunty May

  refused that widower’s offer of marriage.

  (I have some of her paintings,

  hang them as reasons why.)

  And I am told my namesake, Great-Grandma Helena,

  refused to marry her murdered husband’s brother

  until his invalid mother died—

  said she wouldn’t be a slave to another man’s burdens.

  For eighteen years she refused.

  Then, after the funeral, accepted.

  And Aunt Olga refused

  to roast a chicken if she didn’t have anise seed.

  3 odd details

  Aunt Anne hated blue jays

  because they were greedy at her feeder.

  And that, as I said, is all I know

  about Aunt Anne.

  (Oh yes!

  and that she lived in a place called Turkey Point.)

  4 secrets

  Not the content, perhaps, but the

  silence, the wariness surrounding them (a pocket

  of stale air in rock where a living thing

  is preserved for a time after death

  then dissolves, leaving fossil).

  The way the whole family lifted

  a leg to step over Arnica the dog lying

  in the kitchen doorway long

  after Arnica was dead and gone.

  5 habits and tricks

  Grandma would buy no ketchup but Heinz, no grape juice but Welch’s, said toothpaste gets out certain stains and only bought Crest, said baking soda takes away fridge odour and only bought Cow Brand.

  The elements

  of daily life, more basic now than air earth fire water.

  Nothing but Ivory soap, nothing but 2%.

  In the grocery store, my hand is drawn as if by tractor beam

  to her brands.

  6 a violent death

  Almost fair, isn’t it? How if you die, as they say, in an untimely fashion, at least the memory is likely to survive?

  We all know (though can scarcely imagine) how Grandpa’s father died in 1919. He was the overseer of an estate in the Ukraine amidst war and revolution—the landowners long gone, the peasants hungry. He held a meeting, decided to start the threshing early and pay the peasants out in grain. Slept that night in a neighbouring village for safety.

  Next morning, pregnant wife at his side, on his way to the first day of threshing, two young men stopped him, demanding the ox and cart. He gave it up, helping his wife down and then was

  shot

  through the neck as an

  afterthought

  on the road

  blood

  leaving him

  neutral and

  red.

  7 a grand story or two

  The morning after I met James, we went walking in a snowstorm and he told me one of the only stories he knows about his great-grandfather:

  One winter morning he decided to paint cherubs on the living room ceiling, one on either side of the light fixture. When he stepped down to look at his work the little angels weren’t balanced, so he painted another beside the smaller one,

  which called for another on the other side,

  which called for another on the other

  and on and on he see-sawed

  through the day until his wife came home that afternoon to a ceiling teeming with cherubs.

  And though I try in general to be wary of romance, that day I was thinking who knows? That day I was thinking, Someday (ridiculous!) maybe someday I’ll tell my children (absurd!) maybe someday I’ll tell my children that (madness!)

  I fell for their father because the morning after we met, we went walking in a snowstorm and he told me his lopsided story y
es

  that day I was in love with how one thing leads to another.

  When Father was shot at the estate where he’d been the overseer—and a good one at that—Mother, and mind you she was eight months with child at the time, she found a man willing to escort us back to our village. Dangerous times in the Ukraine. No way in hell a woman could make that journey alone with six children and another on the way. The arrangement she fixed was he’d take us home in the landowner’s horse and covered wagon in exchange for keeping the beast and rig when he’d got us there. The men who’d shot Father had taken our ox and cart, and the landowner was long gone so Mother always said, how she figured it, it was only fair.

  It was a two-day journey home, Mother and the man up front, Father’s body wrapped in Mother’s finest linen tablecloth just behind them, we children at the back, hanging our legs over the edge. In between, all our earthly goods. Anything that didn’t fit in the wagon got left behind. When we arrived, the village men nailed a few pine boards together into a box, and we buried him in the orchard. They cut slits up the back of his suit and made it known among the neighbouring peasants. So his grave would be left undisturbed.

  We spent a few years back in the village after Father was killed before we got the passage to Canada. The road into the village came over the hill, and there was a fair view of the communal orchard from the top of it. In summer I’d crouch up there on the hill hours at a time and let my eyesight go loose so the orchard was a green pool and Father inside.

  That orchard was the pride and joy of the village. Took years to cultivate. We Mennonites—the settlers I mean, my forefathers—they planted it. First thing they did when they arrived. The Ukrainian peasants, they were jealous as Judas over that orchard but, as Father used to say, it didn’t just appear from nowhere.

  That orchard had every kind of fruit you could want. Apples, peaches, pears, apricots, cherries, plums. Especially plums. Always plums. Zwieback buns with stewed plums. Or pluma moos with cream. Or plum plauts hot from the oven. And of course we dried plums to make prunes. And a mulberry hedge all around the orchard with silkworm cocoons all over it like an old wedding veil. So much dried fruit from that orchard. Even now, the insides of my cheeks water just thinking of the place.

  I can remember standing there at Father’s graveside trying to figure how many plums I’d eaten from that orchard over the years. How many plums in a dish of pluma moos, how many dishes of pluma moos in a month, how many months less the ones we’d been away at the estate.

  The day we buried my father was my ninth birthday, and no one had to tell me I was head of the family now.

  I’ve taken a second part-time job to help pay off my student loan: attendant at a nursing home in the neighbourhood. White Eagle Retirement Home. Saw a sign in the window. I help old people wash themselves two nights a week. I have to say it worries me slightly that my experience at a summer camp for disabled kids when I was sixteen seems to be good enough for them.

  First shift last night. Ninety-seven-year-old woman, nearly deaf, pulls the call-bell. When I come in she’s puking in her garbage can, vast amounts of diarrhea in her commode, both of which, I realize, will have to be dealt with by someone. The other worker, Barb, points me to where I can find disposable rubber gloves and goes off to call an ambulance. I manage, just barely, not to puke myself. When I’m done the woman pulls me toward her hearing aid and shouts into my ear,“Oh I feel bad.” This somehow without self-pity; just information. Eventually the ambulance comes. Barb has the foresight to take out the woman’s hearing aid and teeth so they don’t get lost at the hospital.“Just in case she comes back,” she says.

  In between giving baths I do laundry. Folding pee-stained underwear fresh from the dryer. Such unearned intimacy, I could weep.

  At the end of the shift Barb asks me what took so long when I showered Edith. I said we had a hard time getting the temperature right. The look she gives me over her glasses tells me quite clearly she thinks I’m too soft to last.

  I walk up to Queen Street wearing my new red leather satchel and my grandfather’s well-cut wool coat. When I get to Queen and Lansdowne I suddenly feel self-conscious as I sometimes do at that corner among the sockless addicts and the latest wave of immigrants. I walk toward the greengrocer, downtown Parkdale, feeling stuck-up and well-to-do.

  After the greengrocer I walk to the video store to return a video, thinking to myself, I don’t even have a VCR or TV, have to borrow them from my downstairs neighbours if I want to rent a video; wanting, absurdly, to tell this to the men with the bottles sitting on the bench outside the store as I turn to go in; wanting, also, to tell them, It was a big decision for me to buy this satchel; knowing all the while I think this that no matter what I have or don’t have, buy or don’t buy, I’m rich and could say nothing to these men about it. I push the door to the video store open more forcefully than I need to, sick of myself.

  When I come out of the store, a tall skinny guy stops me. He’s younger than the men with the bottles, limp orange hair and freckles, tobacco stains the colour of old newspaper at the corners of his mouth. “Hey miss,” he says, putting his hand out toward my arm but not quite touching, and I think, absurdly, I’m caught in the act. But before I can even ask myself, Caught in the act of what, for godsake? he reaches into the pocket of his parka, pulls out a brass bell with a black wooden handle, and rings it in between us on the street corner as the twilight sets in.

  “You wanna buy this bell? You could get twenty bucks for it in one of those antique stores down that way on Queen. I just don’t feel like walking. I been walking all day and night. I just wanna buy myself a meal. All I’ve had is a donut,” he says, still ringing the bell. It’s the kind teachers used to have sitting on oak desks, once upon a time.

  I shake my head as if from a spell and say,“No. No, I don’t need a bell.” But I give him a two-dollar coin, pick it out from among the pennies and nickels that came up when I stuck my hand into the pocket of my grandfather’s coat.

  “Can I have that too?” he asks, pointing to my fist as I go to return the change to my pocket. I’m usually quick to draw the line when somebody gets pushy, but this guy has an artlessness about him that disarms me. His hand, outstretched, is shaking. I nod and dump the change into his outstretched palm. He pockets it along with the bell.

  “You sure you can’t spare some more?” he asks, aware, I guess, that he’s caught a live one.

  I say,“No, that’s all I’ve got,” even though I’ve got a twenty in my wallet and am on my way to more shopping. As usual, I’m now on to the next layer of it all—starting to feel more sheepish about my middle class guilt than my middle class privilege. We part ways and I don’t look back, just squirm inwardly and wish, in spite of myself, that I hadn’t spent almost a whole night of tips on the satchel.

  I meet him again about fifteen minutes later as I’m coming out of the hardware store with a little yellow plastic bag holding a newly cut key and a very good quality can opener that I don’t strictly need but that will make opening cans a much more pleasant experience. He opens his mouth to ask me for change, then recognizes me and says, “Hey, don’t I know you?” I smile genuinely, more at myself than anything. At my awareness of the yellow bag—caught in the act again. He doesn’t even glance at my purchases, just steers me off to the inside edge of the sidewalk and leans in toward me almost as if confiding—though a little ominously as well.

  “Hey,” he says, “you sure you can’t spare any more? It’s a good bell, look nice on the mantel.” He gives it a little ring, just above his pocket, and cocks his head. For a second I’m not sure if I’m being mocked—am figuring, Yeah, probably I’m being mocked—when he leans in and says softly,“I just wanna get something to eat. You sure you can’t spare any more? It’s bad panhandling around here. I could go down to the banks at King and Dufferin and panhandle there, but I’ve been walking all day and all night.”

  Nodding, almost nauseous with the cocktail of compassion,
shame and rattled annoyance (at him and at myself ), I open the satchel to rummage for my wallet. I give him another two-dollar coin, even though I still have a five. I offer him an apple that I have, too, regretting it the moment I do, the wholesome condescension of it.

  He says,“Naw, I don’t eat apples,” and then he says,“You’re a nice woman, you married?” I roll my eyes and start walking. “Yeah,” he calls after me,“I should have known it—I woulda jumped on you too.” Is he nodding at my effort, thanking me for giving more than most, just trying to have some casual human contact, or subtly asserting the only power he has over me? Probably—no, definitely—all of the above. I hear him walk off down the sidewalk behind me in the other direction for about ten paces, then stop and yell,“Hey.”

  I turn to face him, ready to be firm, but he just waves again.

  I wave back—and that’s it.

  It’s not until a moment later, as I jaywalk across the street, that it occurs to me, I could have bought the bell. It would have been nice to have. On my mantel, even. It didn’t have to be a rip-off. It could have been an exchange. Twenty bucks for a constant reminder. Though of what, I couldn’t exactly tell you.