Keeping Things Whole Read online

  Picture Gran (or Mom doing Gran) as she tried to get the lowdown on Monsieur Belliveau. She’d approach village women with her dead soldier-boy mime and her bag of goodies. Finally she’d point to the curate’s letter, to his name, and raise an eyebrow. Legit? Un peu.

  A suitcase full of butter, sugar, coffee, nylons, and cigarettes. A handbag full of money. Those bags were my grandparents. By the time she finally went to the orphanage, Gran had already acclimatized to not speaking, had grown perhaps even to prefer it. Silence the mother tongue for a mother who’d lost husband and child. She hadn’t forgotten that Belliveau had written to her in English; she’d ceased to care. Her baby’s baby might have been within walking distance of her. She was frantic to inhale, to touch, to feel with her lips. She used the minimum number of words possible to get to Belliveau. When he greeted her, she interrupted him to say, “Show me,” and held a hand up to silence his pitch about local depravations.

  What matters as much as where we are born? Drinkable water utterly refutes the idea of karmic reincarnation. How can anyone cling to a belief in fate or destiny when half the hospital beds on the planet are filled because of water-borne diseases? Geography determines aristocracy. Then there’s the roulette wheel of genetics.

  Crucial nursery-room fact: babies don’t always look like a little squalling version of just one parent. Spin the genetic wheel and you could get one of four grandparents or unseen great-grandparents. A nose will form, but its template is completely unpredictable. And a baby’s face can change.

  Gran’s house has a mantel lined with framed photographs, never a speck of dust on them when she was alive. Bill grinning in uniform (the one he stripped off when tunnelling). A wedding photo of Gran and Bill. Victor-Conrad in uniform, taunting his bullet. Gloria’s headshot as a young actor. My high school graduation. And, much earlier, the two of them, Gran and Glore, caught in a London portrait studio. Well dressed but neither of them smiling. The faces of victory.

  In photos, baby Gloria only looks plausibly like ol’ Vic. True, Gran held her, smelled her, traded stares with those little blue eyes. No doubt she could calibrate bone and body in ways I can’t just staring at a small photograph. Adult Gloria, okay, plenty of Victor-Conrad across her eyebrows and in that blade of a jaw. But baby Gloria? We have to wonder if Gran wasn’t just seeing what she wanted to see. Was it perception or preconception that had her turn back to Monsieur Belliveau ready to haggle? Is the propaganda true? Do women somehow just know?

  You can probably tell I’ve done some reading about born-again fathers, those bio-dads who, for whatever reason, don’t meet their children until the children are already some version of adults themselves. One emotional wanderer writes of getting tracked down more than a decade after a brief fling. He was presented with photos of a tween girl. No. Yes. His soul-searching included a talk with his own mother. When he asked her opinion on whether or not he should go ahead and arrange DNA tests, she took one look at the photos and said, “Don’t waste your money.” Still, I can feel Gran’s gamble.

  The French were finally getting bread again, but they hadn’t tasted butter in half a decade. The next day, when Gran summoned the grifter to her rooms, she left her beefy chauffeur outside her door and was sure to be buttering bread when Belliveau arrived. Money does have a smell, mostly of the filth it has absorbed. That little tang is associative to a degree (trust me), but the literal smell of money will never turn as many keys in a hungry man’s brain as the smell of food. “Café, monsieur?” she asked, pouring another rare smell into her warm room.

  Gran described this scene to me as the last threshold of her life. “I had already changed more than I ever thought possible. First with the war. Then moving, Canada. And the Windsor business—ooh, la, la. Then death. One, two, nearly my own. I knew that baby was my life again, was all the goodness I had left. But I also knew Frenchy was trying to squeeze me. Well, his grip wasn’t anything compared to Death’s.”

  “Café, monsieur? Please, sit. Sugar?”

  Once he sat, she began. “I don’t know that this baby is my grandchild. How could I? But I do know that she is in need, that you are all in need.” Here she must have opened a suitcase. “Five pounds of butter. Ten pounds of coffee. Five pounds of sugar. And two hundred American dollars.”

  His reply was part spittle, part venom. “Missus Williams, you insult me. You insult my country. You insult your granddaughter.” He rose to leave. “And the memory of your son.”

  There was Gran, not a scrap of post-secondary education, no corporate experience, no job shadowing, yet snarling like the best of them. Where was the meeting? Her turf. The fact that it was unscheduled, that monsieur was summoned and had answered her summons showed them both how hungry he was. What did she do first? Offered him some of the fruits of her power (Café, Monsieur?). Then she gave him a (polite) command. (Please, sit.) Carrot and stick. Carrot and stick. (Sugar?) And when he tried to snarl, she snarled back.

  “Monsieur,” she answered without rising, “we both know that the world is now an insult. Money lives beyond insult. It doesn’t see or remember. It has no pride. And if you don’t want my money, others will surely do much more for much less.” Her mime and nylon work with the local women had already unearthed his home address. “The butter alone could get plenty accomplished at 51 rue Delambre.”

  When Gran told me this she paused to ask, “What was he going to do, hit me? No man could hit me harder than life already had. He just breathed heavily for a minute before giving me a little shit-sucking smile.”

  “English in voice, American in spirit,” he concluded.

  “He asked for four hundred. I got him at three. I would have paid five times that. More. Everything. I couldn’t stand any second I wasn’t with her. But we weren’t going to start life as a pair of doormats.”

  Another life change for a fistful of dollars. Baby Gloria spent the night bawling in the backseat of the car as Gran pressed the driver to move on. “Do not stop. I will pour you more coffee in half an hour. Drive. Drive.”

  She didn’t pause to see extended family in England. “I knew I’d never see them again, but that was somehow the deal. The old or the new, not both. I held the future to my chest and wouldn’t let it go.”

  Gloria would grow up to understand and agree with all but one of Gran’s acquisitive gestures. Yes, you have to spend to get what you want. Live prudently, then spend when opportunity and fortune coalesce. And it’s good for your character, not just your wallet, to fight for better terms. Gloria would also have shunned the uncles and aunts in Manchester, would have spared them a ruddy-cheeked intrusion in their lean years, would have dodged all questions about the bundle in her arms and the holes in her heart. But Gloria disagreed profoundly with Gran’s disposal of Belliveau’s letter.

  On the return crossing, a second sail to Canada she never thought she’d make, Gran made her way to the rearmost deck, tore the letter apart and tossed it into the salty wind. “Why cling to a lie?” she said for decades of her wiping that French slate clean. Gloria was told the story at twelve, hated it by fifteen, then simmered with quiet resentment for the rest of her life. Over the years she would tell me, “That letter was the only link I had to my mother.”

  If she’d been honest, Gran would have replied, “Exactly.”

  31. Homeschooling

  Pregnancy, the inner shadow. You’re never not pregnant. Here a zygote, there a zygote. We were pregnant as we packed to leave Gail’s and we’d be pregnant when we got back to Windsor. Before we left Toronto, I took us CD shopping for the drive home, each of us glad for mutual consultations and headphone auditions. We wanted anything save the admission we were nervous of a four-hour drive with nothing to do but talk. On the highway, new music only rescued us for a while. During the first CD Kate reached over to turn down the stereo. “I just don’t know, okay. I don’t know, and I don’t know when I’ll know.”

  “The
jury’s still out?”

  I got the first of many looks for that. Fine by me. I’d take a few weeks of sharp looks and huffy sighs to get us out of a lifetime of disappointed looks and frustrated groans.

  “That it is.” She raised the volume again.

  Several songs and dozens of kilometres later I tried an entirely rational (if scheming) line. “You need to see a doctor. That’s the first step. We still don’t even know for sure.”

  She patted my thigh. “You don’t know. I do, but not you. This time you’re rowing in de Nile.”

  Well it was hard to believe. I’m a lapsed engineer, not a lapsed “pure” scientist, in part because seeing so easily equals believing, seeing and touching. In ways, pregnant was still just a word. And hopefully a temporary one.

  Admittedly I’m telling you things about Kate I never knew about my mother. Well, generations accelerate. Now that fourteen is old for a girl to never have given (but not received) oral sex, probably at school (maybe even on a school bus), what’s inappropriate on a controlled-access blog?

  With the pregnancy, I was always going to be on the margin. The only question was how far out. Soon enough, Kate would be the glowing, growing centre. In my frustration I later yelled, “What do you mean the pill ‘didn’t work’? You think I can sell drugs that don’t work?” Agreed—tremendous asshole. Tremendously lost too.

  Along with Kate’s breakfast, the pregnancy brought up another of Mom’s lessons. Gloria began each year of acting classes by having students stand and be silent. “Raise your hand as if you were going to pat yourself on the head. Raise it a few more inches. Now slowly lower your flat hand in front of your face.” The adolescent shoving and joking would evaporate by the time their hands passed their foreheads. “Keep going. Pass your eyebrows. Pass your nose. Below your chin.” Uncomfortable and uncertain, they’d always move their hands in unison with hers. After she had passed her collarbone, she’d say, “There. Most of you have already disconnected. Once your hand passed your throat, maybe even your eye sockets, your mind wandered, didn’t it? When you moved away from your head, you thought you’d moved away from you. Not in this class.” (Oh, Mom, another artist sacrificed on the altar of a dental plan—and for me.)

  With the pregnancy, I had to hope Kate was still in the first day of class. Stay head, please. Be your brain. Whatever you do, don’t start to feel from the bottom up.

  Pregnancies begin so privately. However divisive, unwelcome, and corrosive our pregnancy was, it was ours. Kate hadn’t told Gail, and in August at least she hadn’t told any friends. Hopefully this was more than just nervousness over a miscarriage. Safe Sister Melissa told me that as many as one-third of Canadian pregnancies end in miscarriage. Trust an escort to know how many pregnancies stick. (And trust Kate to double-check the stat.) I’ve now seen, read, and heard that some women announce later and later, hoping to outlast those first, uncertain months, while others announce earlier and earlier, claiming they want to destigmatize miscarriage. That or they want to elbow their way into expectancy’s limelight ASAP. Kate would have kept quiet, even in better circumstances. She’d have treated a miscarriage like her body had fired her from a job. She also liked her privacy. Or so I thought until Safaa left an invitation on our answering machine.

  Kay, Ant, listen: Bryan’s parents are going to a wedding over Labour Day! We can have the cottage to ourselves! Call me before he gets itchy to invite anyone else.

  We were invited out of the city to breathable air, had a chance to walk on earth or pine needles, not vomit-stained concrete, yet suddenly Ms. Prior Proper Planning was non-committal about going.

  Notice how the word apartment begins with apart. You might be distant emotionally, but in an apartment it’s hard to constantly separate yourselves physically. An apartment is a boxing ring, each wall a set of ropes you can bounce off and come back swinging. In our swelling yelling I began to suspect that houses have multiple storeys just to give couples room to separate during a fight. As I’d pack my casino uniform into a bag and prepare to bike to work, she’d yell or mutter or say to my face, “Business to take care of?”

  “Like we don’t need money here, either way.”

  If you think an invitation to a northern Ontario cottage couldn’t possibly offset that kind of nastiness, you’ve never been in Windsor in the summer. Night after night with temperatures in the 30s, a daily humidex pushing 45, all of it ripping straight out of Satan’s ass. The pollution cooked the air and the air cooked the pollution. Dare to try to escape the ankle-nipping fakeness or the eco-costs of air conditioning and your open windows could find you awakened by the stink of Zug Island and the other refineries when the wind shifted. Please, bathe me in lake water.

  For better or worse, Kate and I were all each other had for the pregnancy. We’d snarl then lick, hurt but heal.

  Invited to a cottage for Labour Day. Labour Day, hah! At any other time, this was the grand prize of the cottage invite raffle. Labour Day weekend, the holiday of the working class, has become the perfect weekend for the affluent to head to the cottage. Slow to warm but equally slow to cool, lake water is at its warmest. The days are hot but the nights no longer slow roast you in a tongue-and-groove sauna. Most of the bugs are dead. That Bryan’s parents were unable to go due to some anti-cottager’s inconsiderate wedding was a once-in-a-decade occurrence. If we had all been twenty, not twenty-five, Bryan might’ve invited a dozen so-called friends. (In a lifetime, how many genuine, life-enriching friends do we have? Six?) Instead, we’d be just two couples. A long weekend at a cottage with only the 4.1 of us.

  The invitation was a shadow ninja leaping around our apartment. When Kate wouldn’t give me a straight answer as to whether she was going alone or we were going, I countered with “Does Saf know yet?” Yes, yes, I twisted the knife on yet. Once again Kate turned her shoulders and marched out of the room. The next day she’d refer to being away but avoided using clarifying words like we or us.

  Pregnant. Betrayed by a greedy battle within my own genes. Most of my genes said yes to my trade, said if I didn’t live as an individual first I could never truly be me and therefore never really part of a couple. Really, though, there were coups and mutinies afoot even there, selfishly blind genes delighted to copy and paste with/in Kate. Without this unplanned swelling, Gran and ol’ Bill would be unto dust. Victor-Conrad and his unknown mate would be mere points, not points on (intersecting) lines. Glore’s wisdom would all be finite. Abort, and I’d say a kind of yes to Trevor Reynolds having said no.

  Pregnant. The fight was like a brush fire: we put it out in one place then it started again somewhere else, often, it seemed, as a result of our smothering the first blaze.

  “Saf’s your friend. Doesn’t she deserve to know when or if we plan to arrive?”

  “Sure.”

  “Sure what, Kate? Sure you’ve talked to her? Sure there are any plans?”

  “Commitment can be nice, can’t it?”

  Out the door for a double shift after that one. That special glow, my ass. She had an inexhaustible supply of moral trump. Same fight the next day.

  “So, what, I’d be a better person if I just left Saf and Bry dangling in the wind?” I asked.

  “Strangers, strangers you like. Strangers you think of.”

  “Safaa’s a stranger now, is she?”

  There again was a hard stare from the face I was trying to love. “Right now everyone’s a stranger.”

  Yet when she was tired later that night she crumpled into my arms. “How could we go to a cottage and not drink? It would be so obvious.”

  Did I really want a cottage weekend of this? Could I endure others? Could I endure not being with others? If anything, I gambled on funshine. Let her remember pleasure, feel it. My abortion campaign had been all wrong. I’d concentrated on our inadequacy as parents and our derailed love and careers. Maybe I just needed to let her climb into a bikini agai
n and self-interest would rear its smooth midriff. A woman who owned three bikinis couldn’t want twenty years of drudgery followed by forty more of nostalgia for drudgery. C’mon, Kate, stay Kate. She, not I, had previously coined the term lobotomommy.

  “We’ll just say we’re not drinking,” I proposed. “A month off to kick-start your seriousness for final year. Or detox.” Detox—the word batted about in our charged air. Hetox. Shetox.

  “Yeah right,” Kate muttered, her banished grin returning just briefly, “you at a cottage without a drink. Have you ever been on a dock without a joint?”

  “Sure I have.” Finally I was able to stroke her neck again, smell her cinnamony hair. “Sometimes I bring a pipe.”

  “All right, then, let’s go swimming.”

  So off we went, two more Canadians hoping that the temporary north would be beautiful, and able to go there precisely because of the money we made in the ugly, industrial south. All that beauty with a gas pedal.

  Early in a relationship, a car is a bubble of affection, a floating, private island. Let’s play each other music. One of you might read a short story aloud. Hands are not constrained by seatbelts. Then somehow the months transform the car interior into a food processor, a sealed, cornerless space of whirring blades. Four, five, seven hours together, maybe eight inches between you, and nothing but talk. Couples do one thing really well for each other, and it doesn’t happen easily while driving. The hours stretch out and each of you begins to see formerly invisible dashboard gauges marking time and ire. Blitzkrieg invasions and departures on the CD player. Snappy lane changes. Cletus, meet your parents.

  In Windsor, we had piled into the car with hope and bulging knapsacks, with road food and a shared need for fresh air and a deep lake. I had proposed we take back roads, burn another hour but at least see something. But back roads—didn’t I realize?—meant fewer reliable places to pee. There was the start of parenting, two compromised individuals compromising inside a small hot space, a resentful piss the only hope of her shorts coming down. Parenthood, a highway life. We headed back to the 401, baby still on board.