by Amy Spurway
“Great minds think alike, and fools seldom differ,” Roger says, holding out the coffee he bought for me, as I pass him the one I got for him. “But if there were no fools there’d be no fun!” He gives me another fatherly wink. “So, I’m to what’s left of the mall down the Northside in Town with one of them stinky spruce. Yourself?”
The breath I draw through my nose rushes in deep and audible, inflating me with the kind of determined courage that would make Mama proud, if it weren’t being used to do something that would make her have a conniption fit.
“You know the Spensers’ place? Big house up on the hill?” I ask.
“Indeed I do,” he says.
“There,” I say.
“Good, dear, good,” he says.
And God love Roger for not letting me go out in the cold in my pretty black dress. He gives me the Toronto Maple Leafs toque and the giant green cable knit sweater that he keeps in the back seat in case of emergency. They go great with my hot, sparkly gloves.
[…]
When I ring the ornate doorbell of the big fancy house on the big fancy hill, I am told by the golden-haired, sour-faced, beige-suited woman at the door that Rosalind Spenser is not here. She’s dead. Just yesterday she succumbed to the cancer that had chased her for decades. I give my condolences. It occurs to me that the woman at the door must be my father’s sister, Sarah. I tell her who I am.
“Oh,” is her tight, flat response.
“I’d like to talk. May I come in?” I say, using my best professionally persuasive face to offset the air of lunacy surely exuded by the Leafs toque, oversized sweater, rhinestone gloves, and trampy black dress I’m sporting.
“If you must.”
This is the woman who stood beside my father at the cottage in the Hall of Shame picture from Mama’s photo album, with her long, pin-straight hair, her pressed and pleated baby blue sundress, and only the tips of her perfect teeth peeking out from between cagily parted lips. She was the lithe, glamourous guardian of the little boys in blue suits, who wouldn’t look at me. She acted like I wasn’t even there on that Christmas Eve when I was eight. Sarah Spenser is pushing sixty now but has done her damnedest to make sure that the march of years didn’t leave any trail on her face. Her hair is carefully shaded with pale blonde camouflage. There is smooth, taut skin where her crow’s feet and smile lines ought to be, and there’s not enough fat on her to grease a skillet. By the looks of things, she’s applied the same aesthetic ethos to the old family home. Erased its lines, its age, its history, and left only the bare bones. Crystal chandeliers and glass cabinets with expensive tchotchkes must have smacked of déclassé excess. Instead of an opulent hum of voices and music, cinnamon scents and warm firelights, the house is eerily silent, and engulfed by the smell of fresh paint and new plastic. Under Saint Sarah’s watchful blue eyes, the Spenser house has been made smooth and modern, and I can’t help but think she might have knocked back a bottle of celebratory champagne on the night her mother died. Alone.
Sarah gestures to a small, awkwardly angled leather chair. I sit, trying not to be rattled or distracted as my eyes conjure what look like patches of black ice on a slush-grey strip of highway weaving all around her head, her shoulders, her chest. She pours a single cup of tea into a delicate china cup and takes a sip.
Her meticulously pencilled sapphire eyes shoot little spitball ice pellets at me when I smile and say, “Some tea would be lovely. Thank you.”
She dribbles some scalding, pallid liquid into another cup she has to leave the room to get, even though there are a half-dozen nice ones on the table right in front of her. From the first sip, it is clear that she can’t brew a cup of tea worth a pinch of shit. But that’s all right. I didn’t come here for the tea. I came here for stories. For truth. I won’t try to break the ice. I’ll melt it instead.
“So, how are your sons?” I say, remembering the two boys I awkwardly had hot chocolate and cookies with here once upon a time.
“Stepsons. Ex-stepsons. Their father received a sizable settlement in the divorce, so I imagine they are fine.”
“Oh. I didn’t know that,” I say, feeling sheepish. The Spensers have always been adept at keeping their stories out of the mouths of the chattering class, and God knows Mama can’t even say their name without spitting venom, but still. Somebody should have tipped me off that Sarah got divorced and Rosalind died. It’s hard to talk with a foot in your mouth.
“That’s the essence of why I’m here, I guess.” My smile is soft and warm, even as she glares at me. “I don’t know much about my father, or you, or this family. I’ve been diagnosed with brain tumours and I might not have a whole lot of time, so I thought —”
“Thought what? We owe you something?” she sneers. “Money? A history lesson? The time of day?”
“A cup of tea and an honest conversation would suffice.” I give my head what looks like a friendly tilt, but I’m really just trying to keep a lifetime of cynical questions from leaping out.
“Here’s all you need to know.” Her nails tap the edge of her teacup. “Your mother was a slut, my brother was an idiot, and this whole island is full of lazy, self-righteous have-nots like you who think that my family owes them something. It has been forever thus, from the day my great-grandfather invested in his first mine here.”
“Oh. That the mine where two of my slut mother’s lazy brothers were killed, or the one where they hired goons to beat the self-righteous miners, their wives, and their children for wanting water and electricity?” I say, unable to tilt my head further or bite my tongue hard enough. “Maybe you’re the one who needs a history lesson.”
She stands up and gestures toward the foyer. “I’ll see you to the door. I trust you’ve had your fill of tea and honest conversation.”
I put down the half-assed tea in the second-tier cup and slowly hoist myself to stand. “Well, Mama was right. You are a piece of work, aren’t ya, Saint Sarah?”
I steady myself against a table, as another dizzying bout of technicolour tumour-vision takes hold, this time spilling layers of jade green and sickly bubble-gum-pink around the periphery of Sarah’s face.
“I have no interest in what any of you people think of me,” she says through gritted teeth. “But if you want to know what really happened to Alec, consider that there might be something your mother and her family isn’t telling you. Desperate people are capable of anything. And the Fortunes are nothing if not desperate.” She strides toward me and sweeps an arm toward the door. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a business to run.”
I nod politely as she ushers me to the door.
“Before she passed on, Mother said she encountered you and Effie at the hospital.” Sarah Spenser flashes a perfectly aligned smile. “She knew what you were just by looking at you.”
“Really,” I say as I clumsily wrench my shoes on, simultaneously trying to process what Sarah Spenser implied about my father and my family. “And what’s that?”
“A troublemaker,” she sniffs.
“Well that’s probably the nicest thing she’s ever said now, isn’t it?” I sniff right back just before she snaps the door shut behind me as I teeter down the icy steps.
Roger meets me on the path, waving around my phone as it whines “It’s My Party” at top volume.
“This thing has been singing its brains out for a bit now. I didn’t want to answer ’er for fear of gittin’ you in hot water.” He smiles and winks.
I fumble to answer it as he shuffles back to warm up the Cossack.
“Finally!” Peggy thunders at my hello. “Where the Joe Jesus are you?”
“None of your business,” I say.
“What kind of a stunt was that, not coming home last night? Your mother was worried sick. Tell me where you are. I’m coming to get you.”
“No, it’s okay, Allie will —”
The phone warbles with an incoming text message. From Allie. Saying she can’t come get me.
“Your mother worked an o
vernight, and now she’s home in bed feeling like garbage.” Peggy resumes her guilt trip. “I told her I’d find you and bring you home. Now, I don’t know what you’re up to, Crow, but you’re old enough to know better. Where are you?”
With a fake sigh of fake acquiescence, I say, “In Town. Pick me up at the mall. And do me a favour? Bring me a coat and a blanket or something.”
I end the call before she can ask me any questions. And just past the spot where the lit-up nativity scene would have been thirty-one years ago, I roll up the sleeves of Roger Leblanc’s cable knit sweater, pull the Toronto Maple Leafs toque tight around my ears, and hurl a jet of bitter, weak tea and strong, sweet coffee into a pristine snowbank in the Spenser family’s yard.
[…]
The first words out of Peggy’s mouth when I climb in the car that sputters up into the greasy mall parking lot are, “Didja hear about Chrissy Parsons? Found her this morning with an overdose, barely breathing. And guess where she was?”
I don’t have to guess.
“Front steps of your little boyfriend’s dope shack,” Peggy says, rubbing salt gossip into invisible wounds.
“He’s not my boyfriend.” I cocoon myself up in the faded floral of the cigarette-and-baloney scented comforter she brought.
“Good thing.” Peggy nods stoically. “Because Shirl heard that Chrissy Parsons is having a baby for him. Crack baby, by the sounds of it.
“So if he’s not your boyfriend, what is he then?” she needles into my silence.
“Nothing,” I say. And I mean it.
[…]
“The other old quiff finally croaked.” Mama beams as she soaks in her morning ritual of scanning the obits and sipping her G & Tea. “Good riddance, Rosalind Spenser.”
I pretend that I haven’t already known about Rosalind Spenser’s death for days, just like I pretend that I never went to see Sarah Spenser. I’m less adept at pretending that I’m not sicker and weaker, going downhill fast. I throw up fifteen times a day. I sleep ten hours at night and take three or four long naps in between barfing fits. Exhaustion is woven into every fibre of my being. My headache is dull and constant, and only abates when it is supplanted by full-fledged explosions of intense agony. The novelty and amusement of the pseudo-psychedelic vision has thoroughly worn off, too. So now I pretend I don’t see it.
Dr. Divyaratna calls it all “the expected trajectory of the illness.” A sign the tumours are probably growing, because there is no real hope of getting better. Every time I see her and tell her what’s happening, her pretty face stirs and crinkles with consternation as her black pen rips out a manic scrawl of notes. Due to the devious positioning of Parry Homunculus, Ziggy Stardust, and Fuzzy Wuzzy, she lists a whole host of new symptoms I can look forward to. More “sensory abnormalities”: mood swings, personality changes, distortions of memory, cognitive gaps, confabulations. She recommends giving some new meds a whirl and starting an aggressive treatment protocol as soon as possible, which would probably give me a few more months of living, during which I’d still look and feel like death. I ask her about quality of life versus quantity of life. I ask her what she would do if she were me. She says she doesn’t know. There are no easy answers. Just hard choices.
[…]
“Stop bein’ such a sook and help me get the tree off the roof,” Mama orders, letting the trailer door slam shut behind her as she tromps out into the crusty white wasteland of our yard.
Sure enough, there’s a big, bushy, six-foot cat-piss spruce strapped to the roof of Mama’s car with a half-dozen bungee cords. “Crooked as me arse, stinks already, but it was free. Beggars can’t be choosers,” she says, almost cheerfully, as she starts yanking on the cord clasps with her gloveless, gnarled hands.
Cheerful is not generally a word that describes Mama. Not even almost. So when I hear her humming a light and peppy tune as she irons her ridiculous Greeting Gale housekeeping frock, or when she wordlessly shuffles my head onto her lap and slowly, maternally runs her hands over my bristly head in the evenings as I lie on the couch yelling at the dummies on Jeopardy, or when she voluntarily calls Peggy, and the conversation doesn’t send Mama into a fit of exasperated eye rolls . . . I get suspicious.
She’s drinking more these days. Or drinking different, at least. Not getting as deep in her cups at night, but spreading her beverages out through the day in a more creative fashion. A shot of gin in her morning tea. A hot toddy after dinner. A flask of vodka tucked in the side pocket of her Greeting Gale housekeeping frock that she thinks I don’t see. Despite her unsettling cheerfulness and her looser, more leisurely alcohol consumption, Mama looks tired. Thinner. Older. Or maybe that’s just my eyes playing tricks on me. An extension of the other eye tricks that are growing more intense, more pervasive, more common when I look at Mama. More and more, I see this fog hanging above her head. Literally, a fog, thick as Peggy’s creamed seafood chowder but somehow even more unsettling. Like the worst kind of fugitive from the steel-grey stratiform clouds outside has broken into the trailer and claimed squatter’s rights to the space over Mama’s head. Every now and then, a bolt of sangria red or dirty tequila gold comes leaping out of her fog, striking the ceiling or the floor. The bulk of it moves, shifts, but it never seems to really go anywhere. I squint my eyes just right, trying to make it dance and quiver like the other squirrelly vision spells. But this thing that clings to Mama doesn’t budge. It just hangs there, smearing and smothering Mama’s spark.
“God love your mother, she looks like death warmed over,” Peggy says to me under her labouring breath as she wrestles with an ancient angel wrapped in toilet paper.
Regardless of how much of a brain-tumoury, self-centred sook I’m being, and regardless of how fake Mama’s cheerfulness is, or how real her cloud shroud is, none of it’s enough to get either of us off the hook for hosting Christmas this year. Hence the tree carcass now sprawled out on the living-room floor.
“For Christ’s sake, Peggy, make yourself useful,” Mama says, hustling into the room. She grabs the midsection of the supine tree and lurches it into upright obedience.
“Whaddya think I’m doing, unwrapping this stuff? You want these decorations or not?”
“No. I got new ones,” I say, using every ounce of my bodily strength to hold the tree in position while Mama crawls underneath it to fiddle with the stand. “God, why are we doing this again?”
From under the cover of green spiky boughs, Mama snaps, “Shuddup, ya Grinch. It’s Christmas.”
Mama hates Christmas. She especially detested the years it was her turn to host the pack of nuts and delinquents she calls a family in our tiny trailer. But back in the day, the Fortune Family Christmas Eve party was one of the highlights of my year. You never knew for sure how the night would go down, but you could always count on a few things: Uncle Ernie would get out a guitar and play old rock and roll tunes that Peggy would butcher, lyrically and melodically, until I joined in and set her straight. Uncle Mossy would “accidentally” trip and fall on my pile of presents, ripping the wrapping enough so that I just had to open them, right then and there. Mama would make double batches of broc-o-glop and chocolate almond crack. Aunt Audrey would get loaded off the smell of the wine cork and end up flat on her uptight arse in the middle of the driveway by ten o’clock. Uncle Gord would leave a bottle of something unattended somewhere, and Mitch and I would sneak a few sips.
Mama and her siblings — the remaining alive and functional ones — would sit around telling stories about themselves, about each other, about the ones who were crazy or dead. Sometimes one of them would whisper about Black Bernie, and muse about the curse on his bloodline because of his mother’s rumoured sins and sorcery. Did old Black Agnes really read tea leaves and brew pennyroyal for pregnant Catholic girls? Did her people really ride out the Irish famines by playing mad and being sent to the bedlam? Did she really tell Black Bernie what she was up to the night she burned her own house and children to the ground? Eventually, those hushed conve
rsations always shifted to a group gush about what a saint their mother had been, even though everybody in Town knew that Lucy Fortune had named all her children after characters in bodice ripper novels, like the worst kind of Catholic sinner. They’d laugh together about pit boots and payday drunks, and being beaten by the nuns for having dirty fingernails and unholy names.
Before the night was through, somebody would get in a fight. The fight was the most reliable of all Fortune Family Christmas Eve traditions, the only one that Mama and I managed to carry on with any degree of consistency when she’d come see me in Toronto. But we only ever fought about stupid, nitpicky mother-daughter things, like how much money I pissed away, or what took Dave so long to propose, or why I wouldn’t even entertain the idea of getting married out in Mama’s backyard like she always dreamed I would, let alone come for a visit once in a blue moon. It was never as much fun as when the whole family was together.
The tree cleaned up good, with a fresh set of neutral white LED twinkle icicle lights and a few boxes of classy vintage-inspired glass balls in tastefully complimentary shades of chocolate brown and robin’s egg blue. A bowl of fancy potpourri might even cover up its natural stench. This is probably the most valuable thing I learned from my life in Toronto, from Dave, from the gaggle of tony bitches who pretended I was one of them: how to take something sad and wretched and ugly and make it smile and shine enough to pass for almost pretty.