When I Was Young and In My Prime Read online

  Funny enough, it wasn’t the killing that did it. Wasn’t whole families being bayonetted in their beds. Or Father being shot. Tried putting my finger on it in the years since and finally figured it: the lack of foresight was what really shook me. Shook us.

  You might say that’s mighty advanced—a boy all shaken up by a lack of foresight, but what you don’t understand is children were a different breed then. Whole other animals. More serious. More expected of them. Especially the eldest boy in a family of six and no father.

  I suppose I took my cue from Mother. Watching her eyes watch the bread. Always aware how many days worth of bread we had left, how much dried fruit. We measured food in days and let me tell you we were experts in calculating the stretch of it in seven mouths with seven different limits as to how much hunger they could tolerate before they’d cry out or their legs give out from under them. There’s a saying: What bread really is, only the hungry man knows.

  The food would have to stretch even further when the bands of looters came through, moving in and boarding with us for weeks at a time. Soldiers they called themselves. The Reds one week, Whites the next. Then the Anarchists. They all looked the same to us children, and I remember Mother whispering, Different leaders, same appetites. I remember the look in Mother’s eyes the time they slaughtered our cow right when she was about to calf just because they had a hankering for a roast of meat. They’d kill all the chickens and still be wanting eggs. And winter just around the corner. And when a neighbour came with the news that the men staying with them had taken to sawing off the rafters of their house for firewood, Mother didn’t say anything, just raised her chin and pressed her lips together and looked aside. Great blazing fires and those men in their undershirts with their feet up like there was no tomorrow. And then they began to cut down the pear and cherry trees in the communal orchard for firewood as well. All those years of dried fruit and me watching Mother’s knuckles whiten as she wrung the soldiers’ laundry, her back to their fire.

  Remember how frustrating it can be to sit in traffic in rush hour and have no control over how fast you can move or when you will get to your destination?

  Did you ever take a vacation in a country where you did not understand the language and you had difficulty communicating with the people around you? Imagine the problem being compounded by the use of a different alphabet, such as Hebrew, Arabic, Greek or Russian.

  Have you ever watched a movie with a very complicated plot and had a lot of difficulty following it? Have you ever walked into a movie halfway through, or turned on a television show when it was half over, and not known who the characters were or how they related to each other?

  Stuck in traffic on the westbound streetcar I close my eyes and drift, somersault backwards into warm waters, summers at the house on Silver Street: the world map wallpaper in the guest room, the pucker of gooseberries in my cheeks, Grandpa’s drawer full of shoehorns, harmonicas and pipes, the cousins in the covered pool in the backyard, the inflatable canoe. We were always on the brink of having all the leaks patched, always on the cusp of having it float. We struggled inside it as it hissed—shrinking, sinking—paddled for all we were worth, wanting to get in some movement across before the down took over.

  I settle on Grandma. On Mary Friesen and whoever’s in her head, pulling it apart like a small closet stuffed with forty years of clothing and she’s looking for that burnt-leather belt that Ruth made for Dad in 4-H and little Nick borrowed for Halloween 1959 (cowboy, of course). In the evening she is going through her closet as Grandpa sits in the darkened kitchen with his head in his hands, elbows resting on the table that once had farmhands chewing and yes-ma’am-ing around it, failing sturdily in their efforts to be polite. She goes methodically through her closet. It’s time

  for bed. She hasn’t turned on the light so squints. It’s time

  for bed, so she takes off the clothes that he dressed her in this morning—the bra he fastened with cracked fingertips, the pantyhose he insisted upon. She goes through the narrow closet beside the bed, puts on the grey woollen dress,

  the one with the red belt

  can’t reach the zipper

  Christmas 1968.

  She pulls back the covers that she straightened this morning in a comfortable interlude of habit. She sits down on the bed, swings her legs up, leans back. No need to turn out the light. It’s already dark. Backwards somersault into dark water

  a deepening closet

  bare V of her unzipped back against the bedspread,

  an arrow of elegance in disorientation.

  I’m tipping backwards over and over again in the covered pool in the backyard. The sun goes down. The patio lanterns are switched on. I continue, water up my nose, body tucked, arms out, fingers pressed close, symmetrical. Hands efficient fins round and round in small circles, propelling my form, surrounded by the sound of the world slowed down. I love to dive in and be slowed. I am utterly at home underneath, the world gone slow, sound gone swollen. I will have water in my ears. Inside, Grandpa with his elbows on the table, head in hands, Grandma trying to remember which way is backwards, gratefully remembering that wool is warm.

  One of my showers is a burly, brain-injured man in his forties or fifties named Fred. Too young to be here, but where else are they going to put him, I guess.“Motorcycle accident,” says Barb. Hard to tell how much he understands. He uses clichés and catchphrases, repeats them with uncanny appropriateness. “Time will tell,” he kept saying to me my first night. “Patience is a virtue.”

  Whenever I ask him how he wants something done—whether he wants to wear slippers to the shower room, whether he feels he can dry himself off—he says with what feels like a stubborn and sage ambiguity, “You enlighten me.”

  Hard to say where injury stops and humour begins.

  My grandfather does not have fishing stories; he has injury stories. He collects them.

  There is, for instance, a whole set of broken arm stories: the time he was examining the chimney and the ladder fell, and the one when Uncle Nick fell from a tree during an ambush while playing Cowboys and Indians (the branch snapped—Two limbs broken in one go, Grandpa used to say). And of course there’s the one where the boy tripped Grandpa with his hockey stick when Grandma had her class out to skate on the irrigation pond. Not to mention the famous lesson Grandpa taught the boy. That time he broke his wrist so thoroughly his hand flopped against his forearm and, if I have it right, the only available doctor was drunk and set the bone wrong and it had to be rebroken a few months later.

  It seems to me they were always breaking their arms so hard their bones came through the skin.

  And it wasn’t just broken arms. Sprains, concussions, missing fingers, bleeding noses, dislocated shoulders. Accidents, fights. Bravery and foolhardiness of all kinds. Farmhands, relatives, friends, neighbouring farmers, adults, children—all were swollen, bruised and bloody.

  Then they sold the farm and he went to nursing school, and there were more stories. His first job was nurse at the Massey Ferguson plant. A man’s hand was cut off in the machinery one day, blood everywhere. While everyone else was panicking Grandpa stayed calm, made a good tourniquet, slowed the blood until the ambulance came. There was a Red Cross blood donor clinic across the way at the Legion Hall that day, but none of the boys had the stomach for it. They closed the plant and everyone went home early—except Grandpa. He unwrapped his ham sandwich from its waxed paper and strolled on over to give blood.

  “Peter stop telling stories like that at the dinner table,” Grandma would chime in.

  “Always had a strong stomach,” he’d say to me. “Now eat that horseradish. It’ll put hair on your chest.”

  Today we’re in the workshop. Grandpa’s telling James the story of the irrigation-pond-hockey-stick incident. My back turned, I’m flipping through seed packets, fingering the dried basil and dill hanging from the rafters. Grandpa launches into the story of the apple tree and Nick’s broken arm and the drunken doctor fro
m Fergus. James laughs in all the right places, scoffs appropriately, is manly but sufficiently amazed and at the same time manages to avoid effusiveness or undue enthusiasm. There’s a subtle, unspoken scorn in the air for men with soft handshakes.

  When James reaches absently across the sawhorse to rub the small of my back, I flinch and move away towards the wall where my old red wagon is hanging. He doesn’t seem to notice, continues listening to Grandpa, hooting at the circumstances of the concussion on Christmas Eve 1956, Santa Claus costume and all. His hand, lacking my back, is now wandering over the tools on the counter. He picks up an old set of wooden clamps, weighing them with a kind of entitlement entirely foreign to me, and for a moment I’m no longer sure about anything.

  James and I have been together seven years, going on eight. When we met, we fell instantly for each other’s instinctive earnestness, because it meant that our own—which was embarrassing out of doors, in public—could have company. We had a shared suspicion of technology, a shared awe for the concept of the vow. He was a practising Catholic, and this freaked me out until he assured me that he was also an anarchist.

  “Nietzsche didn’t have any particular problem with Jesus,” he said.“It was Christians he couldn’t stand.”

  On our second date we went to an anti-NAFTA protest. I remember someone was carrying a huge banner that said, DOWN WITH THE CONTENTED.

  He quoted Whitman to me: Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes. I quoted back: As the child sees the world the world is. We knew everything.

  Who can ever say exactly what makes us open to another person? Chance, uncanny passwords. I remember a cartoon torn from a newspaper. He’d tacked it to the ulcerous, uncleanable, paint-flaking, layer-a-tenant wall beside his bathroom mirror. It was an image of people mingling at a cocktail party. A huge thought bubble hovered over the crowd, fed by little tributaries of bubbles from each person’s head. Inside the bubble, this thought: Everyone’s having a good time but me. It made me trust him.

  Squalls of irritation: sitting at the kitchen table together, him reading the paper, me making notes on a book for a course I’m taking and my pen is running out of ink and he’s chewing his yogurt (who the hell chews yogurt?) and it’s all I can do to keep from stuffing my pen up his nose.

  Moments of intense seeing: watching him swim alone in an Algonquin Park lake one autumn afternoon, something about the sight of him treading water way out—his back to me, the sky darkening above—makes me want nothing more than to love him well.

  “Can there be any love without pity?” A couple of years ago I came across this line in a novel and, even though it was a question rather than a statement, I remember feeling absolved by it somehow. Absolved of a crime I hadn’t quite known I suspected myself of having committed.

  His father was a violent man, and this means that James is awkwardly tender, a tinman afraid he didn’t inherit a heart. There’s an ache in his eyes that makes them look constantly astonished. When we met, I quickly became addicted to giving him a new reason for that astonishment. It was like facing a man who’s falling backward; if you catch his outstretched hands and immediately fall backward with all your weight, both of your falls are transformed into the first gesture of a dance.

  We were introduced by friends one night and within five days we’d pooled all our money. We moved in together within three weeks. We gave the biggest coin we had between us to every beggar and busker we passed. We married—just the two of us at city hall—within the year. I was nineteen and he was twenty-four.

  “Babies!” his landlady snorted derisively. “I wasn’t smart enough to choose my own underwear when I was nineteen.” But she gave us a wedding present anyway: an “Instant Romance” kit from Zellers, which consisted of a bottle of sparkling wine, a pair of fake crystal champagne flutes and a matching candle holder. We drank it on the roof of the building, spreading a blanket over the pigeon shit so we could lie down and look at the stars.

  Married at nineteen in this day and age. I thought I’d found a shortcut. To what though? I didn’t have a clear idea, but intuited a strenuousness, a muscularity, both noble and animal, in the notion of mating for life.

  Or maybe it was just a kind of RRSP of the heart.

  Sometimes he sets her up to do the dishes when he needs a break. That works for a while, but then it gets to the point where she’s just washing the same plate over and over and over and over until he simply can’t stand it any longer.

  I was there last week when it happened. Grandpa got up, snatched the plate from her, dashed it to the floor and sat down again, all in one motion.

  I held my breath, eyes on a triangle of china near my foot. It was from the edge of the plate. Gold trim. Apple blossom pattern. The good china on the farm, demoted to everyday china when they got the Denby pattern after they moved to town.

  My breath ran out. He let go his fist, pushed his chair back and walked unsteadily to the side door. Didn’t look at either of us, let the screen door slam behind him.

  I was free to look at her then. Her lips were twitching slightly, as if searching for their rightful shape. After a while they settled in an apologetic smile, and she tugged her eyes from the window, rested them on me. All I could think to do was the other thing that Grandpa always does lately when he needs a rest from her. I steered her around the broken plate, out of the kitchen, into the front room. Guided her down onto the piano stool. Opened the songbook. “Tie a Yellow Ribbon.”

  Standing behind her, I placed her hands on the keys, pulled the chain on the lamp and set the metronome swinging.

  She looked back at me; I nodded.

  She looked at the music.

  She pressed the first chord: dissonance.

  She tried again: again, a random, jarring blare. She looked back at me.

  “It’s okay,” I said, trying to make my smile mild—a balm, a sling. I pointed my eyes to the keys. “Try again.”

  So she played.

  Had she missed the flats? She didn’t stop. Was she playing in the wrong key? She didn’t stop. Had she started with her hands in the wrong position?

  The roof was falling in. She didn’t stop.

  When she came to the end of the music her hands slipped off the keys into her lap, but she kept her foot on the pedal, letting the room steep briefly in the sound of the wrong notes, sustained.

  First time I saw my own bone was when we had the farm. Mary had coaxed me into clearing the irrigation pond to make a rink. Wanted to have her class out for a Christmas skating party. I did, and it was a hit alright. The kids were pretty wound up, and near dark one of the boys thought he was being smart and tripped me with his hockey stick as I was skating by. Well I went flying, and when I hit the ice my forearm snapped—you could hear the sound of it clear as anything in the cold air, just like kindling snapped over your knee. Shot clear through the skin. Well I taught that lad a lesson he’d never forget. I got myself seated in the snowbank and then told him to hold his stick out crosswise. I put my loose hand on the stick, put my good hand over it and yelled at him, Pull goddammit! And by golly he pulled. His face like a popsicle with all the colour sucked from it. Together we got that bone back in place until I could get myself to a doctor.

  I’ll never forget that, the sight of my own bone in the open air. The thought of it could get to you, if you let it.

  Monday morning. I walk to work. I’ve taken a day shift at the bar as a favour to someone who recently did me a favour (in this way the economy of the bar keeps going—we all drink there and overtip each other, a potlatch battle to be the one to buy the drinks).

  I hate day shifts. It’s quiet and relaxed and you make decent money ’cause there’s no one to tip out and the weekday afternoon drinkers all tip well (that nucleus of regulars who all make their livings in canny, shifty ways—musicians, bouncers and landlords on disability, a comedian, a chef, guys who maybe gamble or deal a little on the side), but it’s depressing. I hate hav
ing to watch how the first shot-and-beer-chaser of the day steadies the hands of certain paper-reading regulars.

  A woman stands on the corner of King and Dowling. She’s wearing a loose Simpsons t-shirt, bicycle shorts and black pumps with a low heel, almost demure. Nothing exactly advertising sex, except maybe the shoes, but her hip is cocked into the street with such hook, such unmasked intention, that there’s no room to think she might just be waiting for a cab or a streetcar. Passing her, giving her a wide berth so as not to disturb the charged ring she’s conjuring around herself, I see for a second how hard the work is. Pouring oneself out into bottomless streets.

  Liza can’t remember where her washcloths are kept or how the aloe plant got into the basket of her walker, but she teases me so skillfully as I wash her back that I can imagine just how she flirted with her now-dead husband the year they were both working at a summer camp and fell for each other. She was in the kitchen, he was the maintenance man. She was almost thirty then, and I imagine she’d given up on all that, considered herself an old maid. I imagine he woke a dormant rascal in her. I imagine their romance involved threading worms onto hooks and sunlight and swimming.

  The other day Liza was late for dinner because she got halfway to the dining hall and realized she was barefoot, had to shuffle back to her room for her shoes and socks.