She was indeed dead. The young Dot had never seen a dead person, but she knew this bulky presence on her floor had passed to the other side, as folks said back then. There she lay, face down on the ash-strewn carpet, a heavy woman, stiffly corseted, and padded with layer upon layer of woolen clothes, her checked skirt immense across her buttocks and her knitted jumper rucked up. Her hips and calves were bunched clumsy and lifeless as meat beneath her, and the pink edge of her knickers obscenely revealed. A queerish smell of rubbish rose from the body. It can’t be, it can’t be, Dot remembers thinking as she tugged at the inert figure, its solid, unmovable heft. Then a thought occurred to her: heart attack. The words formed in her head, bringing a rush of relief - so this is what happened! - and, even in the midst of her comprehension, she experienced a whiff, no more, of shameful self-congratulations, for she had recognized and named the phantom before her. She had been witness, moreover, to one of the body’s great dramas.
But it wasn’t a heart attack that brought on her mother-in-law’s cataclysmic end. Oh, if only it had been, if only! Mum Weller’s death - as was revealed later through laboratory testing - was caused by severe type C botulism. The source of the botulism was Dot’s stewed runner beans, inadequately sealed, insufficiently heated - the same beans that had been standing in their pretty glass jar for the last two months, as purely green and sweet as innocence itself.
Dot Weller is fifty-six now, and her husband Stu fifty-eight. Stu’s parents died in their mid-fifties, his mother from the botulism, and his father, two years later, from rage - though the death notice specified a massive stroke. His rage, closer to biblical wrath, had bloomed into existence on that terrible Sunday when his wife fell dead on the hearth rug, poisoned by her stupid imbecile of a daughter-in-law. Murder was the word Dad Weller used. Even, deliberate murder. He said as much to the reporter from the Manchester Evening News who sent a photographer to take a picture of the Wellers’ garden, catching in one corner the dark row of beans that had been the agent of evil. There was no reasoning with him, although he’d been all his life a reasonable man. His world had been cleft in two by calamity, and he refused to put down the finger of blame.
In the end that blaming finger drove Stu straight to the immigration office in Stockport, and soon after he brought his pregnant wife and child to Canada where, in fact, thousands of other English workers headed in the late forties. There were factory jobs to be had in Winnipeg. It was possible to aspire to a house and garden of one’s own, to buy a car in time, a washing machine, a refrigerator, to make a better life for the kids. And to escape the sourness of ugly scenes and family angers. When news came that the old man had died of a stroke, Stu didn’t trouble himself to go home for the funeral.
Larry knows the poison episode in all its tragic rhythms and reverberations. This is what it’s like to grow up with a bad chapter of someone else’s story, in the toxic glow of someone else’s guilt, a guilt that became a rooted sorrow. He’s had his fingers in the mouth of his mother’s sick grief and now it’s his; every crease and fold belong to him. He knows about the offered cup of tea and the hot-water bottle; his ears can hear the precise sound of the body thudding on the hearth rug; he sees the inky photograph in the newspaper and its headline: “Bolton Woman Poisons Mother-in-Law.” All this has entered the doors and windows of his childhood, without his really noticing. It was simply - there. Like the oxygen he breathed. Like a banked fire. And he can imagine even his mother’s most covert thoughts, that which could never be said: thank God little Midge refused the beans. And even: thank God I passed them up myself.
And for Larry, who was born just two months after his parents settled in Winnipeg, the flight from the home country has the flavor of Old Testament exodus. He finds it hard to believe. He looks at his solid, slow-moving parents and tries to imagine the force that urged them to gather up their possessions and voyage, sight unseen, to a new country. They were eight days on a rusty Greek liner, then three days by train to Manitoba. Dot Weller was sick every mile of the way, and she must have looked back over her shoulder more than once and wondered what she’d left behind and why. Catastrophe drove them out, catastrophe coupled with guilt that was cut like an incision on his mother’s brain. How were they to survive in the heat of a parent’s punishing anger?
When Larry thinks about his folks, this is the piece of their life he can never quite take in: that his father, out of love, out of the wish to protect his wife, would uproot himself, and turn his back on a guaranteed job, a snug house, his weekly gin and tonic, and all that was familiar, that he might have elected freedom or forgetfulness, but instead chose to witness his wife’s plodding, painful, affectless search for that thing that would pass as forgiveness. Larry glimpses something heroic at the heart of his obstinate and embarrassing father, who rescued his young wife, who stood by her. Stu Weller is a man who, without a gobbet of doubt, believes in bringing back the death penalty. He rattles on about welfare bums, and sometimes refers to blacks as nig-nogs, and maintains, somewhat illogically, that queers ought to be sterilized, the whole lot of them. Which is why it surprises Larry that his father has committed so manly and self-sacrificing an act, and he asks himself whether he could do the same for his wife Dorrie. Probably not. He admits his love will never be as pure as his father’s, and certainly not as good as the scripted golden love in his head.
Not that his parents, Stu and Dot, managed to blot out all recollection of the tragedy, far from it. Anything, even after all these years, will trip a switch in Dot’s head: the mention of Bolton, of food poisoning, of home preserving, of sponge cake, a reference to mothers-in-law, to hearth rugs, the specter of sudden death, the word beans - above all, the word beans, a substance banned from the Weller household and never, never spoken of. In all Larry’s thirty years he has not once tasted that treasonous vegetable.
Stu Weller loves his job. For thirty years now he’s worked as an upholsterer for a custom coach company in south Winnipeg, the largest of its kind in North America. He left school at fourteen, as soon as he legally could, and went straight on to the railways where he learned his trade. Right away he took to it, and it’s served him well. Switching from trains to buses, when coming to Canada, was easier than falling off a log, and he’s worked on some real beauties. A custom coach is a handmade object, that’s something most people don’t appreciate. You take a few basic sheets of metal, cut them, bend them, twist them, apply bracing and rivets, and there you’ve got something entirely different. Everything but the motor is built right on the Air-Rider factory floor, even the fuel tanks, even the decorative touches, which is where Stu Weller comes in.
It’s a fact that some of North America’s biggest and brightest names in the entertainment industry have ordered customized vehicles from Air-Rider, wondrous rolling homes and offices with white carpeting on the walls and Italian marble for flooring. A country-and-western singer - after a beer or two Stu Weller will drop the odd hint about who exactly this singer is - custom ordered a model with a bathroom floor that dropped open, bingo, to reveal a hot tub where the luggage compartment generally goes. A cool half-million dollars for that package. This same coach possessed a full kitchen with oak inlay cupboards and a hidden berth for the traveling cook. Last year Stu did the upholstery for a hospital coach, a traveling clinic for rural areas, and now he’s working on a coach for relocating prisoners, each seat transformed into a separate little jail cell with bars going right up to the ceiling. Slash-proof vinyl is what he’s installing at the moment, and the barest mininum of padding. Every order brings a new challenge. The floor supervisor always takes him aside and says, “Look, Stu, you’re the one with the experience. We need to have your particular expertise on this design.”
On weekends Stu Weller naps or creeps around the house, waiting for Monday morning to come. His hands understand the secrets of foam and spring and frame, how to make the understructure invisible and at the same time strong. There’s a wide range of fabrics at his disposal, your velvet
s, your brocades, your suedes and leathers. For the president of an American television network he covered the coach walls with a shimmering mauve satin, and received a personal handwritten letter of thanks and appreciation. Next in the works is a special chapel coach for a well-known TV evangelist, and Stu’s planning to go heavy on plum-colored velour and white leather for the doors that separate the public part of the unit from the private. He’s learned that people are willing to spend money for quality; they want the best materials and they’re looking for top-notch workmanship. Over the years he’s been offered jobs in a number of Winnipeg’s better upholstery houses, but he’s never considered them for a minute. He knows the custom coach business inside and out, and can’t imagine working all day on mere furniture, on simple sofas or chairs.
Of course, he’s not above a weekend project at home. The breakfast nook in the kitchen, built in the early seventies, is his own design, a curving red vinyl bench with bright brass tacking. Smart, modern, comfortable. And last summer he took apart the living-room couch, reglued the frame and reupholstered it in a midnight-blue textured nylon. Visitors to the house think they’re seeing a brand-new piece of furniture. His wedding gift to Larry and Dorrie was a trip to England plus a first-class upholstery job on an old Hide-a-bed Larry had picked up at a garage sale. It looks good, too, done up in one of those abstract prints that’re all the rage now, and it’s Scotchguarded so that when Dorrie leaves one of Ryan’s messed diapers lying around, as she tends to do, there’s not too much damage.
He’s offered to do another upholstery job for Larry’s thirtieth. He could do a padded headboard, he suggested, in artificial leather, but Larry said no, he’d rather have a couple of loads of good topsoil for the yard. Well, if that’s what the kid wants, that’s what he gets. Christ Jesus. Dirt.
From the way Stu’s scratching his shirt-collar you can tell he can’t quite believe he’s got a son who’s thirty years old today. He doesn’t, it seems, know what to make of his son and his slapdash wife (Dorrie, Dor, Dorable) and Larry’s funny-bunny ideas about hiking and the environment and planting shrub “arrangements” in his yard and working in a florist shop year after year, fussing with little leaves and flowers all day long. But he keeps his mouth shut. The last thing Stu wants is a fight.
His son calls him Dad or Da; in return he calls Larry nothing, just you. Neither of them can remember when this started, but Larry recognizes his no-name status as a temporary form of shyness on his father’s part; ha! temporary for life. But shyness is all it amounts to. After all, his dad lent him money for his down payment, didn’t he? And he had a load of top-quality topsoil delivered to Larry’s house yesterday morning before Larry and Dorrie were even out of bed.
Six o’clock. Larry’s folks always sit down for supper at six sharp, even when it’s a special occasion like today, and even though Midge hasn’t turned up or had the courtesy to telephone. The drapes have been pulled shut all day to keep the heat down, and the light seeping into the living room is the color of dusty amber. It’s crowded with the table pulled out and with having to squeeze in extra chairs and the hot dishes lined up on the sideboard. Little Ryan starts making a fuss, grabbing at the tablecloth, and Dot frets about him knocking over the glass dish of pickled onions. She’s really worried about death, that her table of carefully prepared food will bring damage, not nourishment, to those she loves best in the world. “Sit down, Mum,” Larry says, as he pulls out her chair - a rare gesture in this house, an unbelievable gesture - and helps her to settle comfortably. He’d like to lean over and touch his cheek to the top of her freshly combed hair. “Well,” she says looking around, “pick up your forks, everyone.”
At that moment Midge in shorts and an orange and pink T-shirt bursts through the back door, her car keys jingling from the fingers of one hand, a bag of dinner rolls in the other, her contribution. She drops the rolls in the center of the table, still in their plastic Safeway bag. The next minute she’s dragging in an immense unwieldy wrapped parcel which is a birthday present for her brother, but which won’t be opened until after dessert, after the candles are blown out and the pie consumed. Larry already knows it will be something for the yard, a piece of gardening equipment or an exotic plant maybe. His sister has always known how to read him. Mits, he calls her, or Mit-Brain or Pigeon.
She takes her place at the table, squeezing in between her mother and Dorrie, waving her arms. She’s steaming with a jumble of excuses and fresh news, as well as with the humid heat of the day. Sorry, sorry, sorry, everyone, she says, but she’s been away all weekend to an anger workshop at a Gimli resort. Two hundred women took part. If you signed up early you got ten percent off, but she only heard of it on Friday afternoon, so she knocked off work early, said she had a headache, then packed up the car and hit the road. No time to phone, just a spur of the moment thing, an opportunity she couldn’t pass up. There was an anger workshop leader up from the States. Yeah, really, that’s her specialty. What a woman! Gray hair down to her waist, barefoot, and she’s got a PhD in something or other, she’s a doctor, that’s her title, travels all over the place, writes books, gives lectures, TV talk shows, Phil Donahue and so forth. Holler it out, that’s what she demands of her anger groups. Scream, yell, weep till you pee, hang on to each other. Tell your story, then bury it, and that’s what they did. They gathered on the beach early this morning, just as the sun was coming up over the horizon of Lake Winnipeg, two hundred shouting, half-clothed women, and in one orchestrated moment - there was a sort of drum roll provided and a loudspeaker - each of them threw into the mild waves a symbolic pebble, their compacted rage, their flinty little burdens of hoarded injustice. Oh, God, it was beautiful, the peace of it, the relief. Right there on the beach there were these gigantic urns of tea, it’s called peace tea, it’s made from apples and lichen, like it’s from seaweed too. And bread, these great gigantic loaves just passed around and torn apart and eaten like that out of the hand, no butter or anything, just pure grainy bread and the breeze coming off the lake and all those stones buried under the water, out of sight, out of mind, gone forever, and women dancing on the sand with their arms around each other, singing too, or maybe just sitting quietly while the sun bobbed up, the stillness, the light on the water. And then the fucking traffic coming home - it was a nightmare, you can just imagine, and in this everlasting heat!
Dot takes Ryan on her lap - her little Rye-Krisp, her little Ribena, her Mister Man, her Noodle-Doodle - and settles him against her peaceful chest.
“So what were all these chicks so angry about?” Dorrie asks Midge. She can’t stand her sister-in-law, and the feeling is mutual.
“Oh, God,” Midge shakes her head, and reaches for a pickled onion. “Don’t get me started.”
And no one does. They talk about the heat instead, and the ragweed count, and whether or not Quebec should separate. They’re trying to keep on being a family, after all. Nothing real will ever get said out loud in this house, though Midge will bleat and blast, and Larry will prod and suggest. It doesn’t matter; Larry understood this years ago. Today his dad tells a joke he heard at the plant, a long story about a Newfie visiting Quebec and trying to buy some cod liver oil from a Frenchie. Dot Weller hums Ryan to sleep, and Dorrie Weller tells everyone how she’s found this place in the North End where you can purchase cleaning products at twenty percent off.
Larry listens. This is how he’s learning about the world, exactly as everyone else does - from sideways comments over a lemon meringue pie, sudden bursts of comprehension or weird parallels that come curling out of the radio, out of a movie, off the pages of a newspaper, out of a joke - and his baffled self stands back and says: so this is how it works.
You would have thought Larry’s folks would have turned themselves into a grief-hardened set of statuettes, but no. They’re moving, they’re breathing, they’re practicing rituals of their own tentative invention, and Larry’s sucking it up. His mother’s gorgeous bloom of guilt, his father’s stoic heart, his sis
ter’s brilliant jets of anger, even the alternate sharpness and slack of his wife’s domestic habits - these burn around him, a ring of fluorescence, though the zone between such vividness and the plain familiar faces around the table seems too narrow to enter. He’s thirty years old, for Chrissake, old enough to know that he can’t know everything. All he wants is what he’s owed, what he’s lucky enough to find along the way. All he wants is to go on living and living until he’s a hundred years old and then he’ll lie down and die.
CHAPTER FOUR
Larry’s Work 1981
Most of Larry’s friends have had half a dozen jobs in their lives, and quite a few of the guys have suffered spells of unemployment in between. But Larry’s been lucky. He’s worked at Flowerfolks for twelve years now, ever since he completed his Floral Arts Diploma back in ’69
Flowerfolks is a small chain with a reputation for friendly service and a quality product. Usually you can spot a Flowerfolks arrangement by its natural appearance. For instance, they don’t go in for bending stems into far-out shapes and positions, or for those Holly Hobby wreaths, et cetera, or weird combinations like, say, tulips and birds-of-paradise sticking out of the same arrangement. Even their Welcome-New-Baby floral offerings have a fresh earthy look to them. Larry says it makes him shudder just thinking about those styrofoam lamb shapes with pink and blue flowers poking out of their backs. Simplicity and integrity at a reasonable price - that’s what Flowerfolks has always stood for.
Larry's Party Page 6