Notes Towards Recovery

by Louise Ells

  Aunt Sally - I think it was Aunt Sally - said it was more than that, it had to be, watching the plants grow and flourish. Knowing that, even now, the cycle continued and every fall there were apples on those trees. That they were weathering the years. And then there was a discussion about ‘weathering’ - about how it meant withstanding the elements and the opposite too, being worn away by them. And my mother’s offer (in my memory it is a desperate plea) to buy you a plot of land so you could grow more fruit trees.

  I must have fallen asleep at some point and been found and tucked back into my sleeping bag. In the morning the house smelled of cigar smoke and sweet wine and Judy smiled at me. She’d been smiling for weeks, but this was the first time it was just for me. My baby sister. That was the moment I truly fell in love with her. My cousins and I played with her all morning, putting on a puppet show while she lay on her back smiling up at us all and in the kitchen Mum and all the Aunts washed and put away the dishes and reheated leftovers for lunch.

  It has become so important a memory, that weekend sixteen years ago, because it was the last time we were all together. One aunt got a job out west. Uncle Daniel had an affair with his secretary, packed a single suitcase and left. And you left too, you moved to a commune in Madawaska, and you stopped taking your meds.

  Judy doesn’t know you. She barely thinks of you when she’s researching our family tree and I hesitate before reminding her. I’m home for a month of holiday before I start my doctorate and amazed at how poised and beautiful my baby sister has become in this last year that I’ve been away. In awe of this remarkable person my parents have produced and raised, I tease her about her boyfriend and she teases me back about my lack of one.

  Uncle Daniel was wrong. Despite the climate and lack of knowledgeable care, Judy’s tree produced for the first time the previous year and now it is again heavy with nuts. One day I make her pose for photographs, sitting under the tree on a blanket. Just because.

  Dad has taken to serving drinks and snacks before dinner, joking that this is practice for his retirement, and this evening I choose that time to ask about you.

  When the phone rings at three in the morning, says Mum, I always know it’s your Aunt Hazel.

  Judy rolls her eyes, suddenly a child. If she asks for money they always send it, she tells me, no questions, no demands. So out of character for our parents, she says, though to be fair Mum always tries to needle out an address so she can visit. Not right now, seems to be your answer, or not yet.

  I ask if there is really no information beyond a post box number. Then I tell Judy the story of my A+ report and we laugh at the naughtiness of french fries for breakfast. She grows pensive. “I wish I’d known her.”

  “She’s the best, my favourite of all the Aunts,” I tell her, making sure to speak of you in the present tense but wondering, even as I do, if you have left instructions so we will be notified of your passing. “We should go and look for her,” I say. I make a list of places we could start, communes, orchards, maybe the Niagara region. Judy, practical as our mother, adds a list of hospitals and mental health care services we should contact. Then, ‘tell me about her,’ she asks.

  She is the Keeper of the Stories, I think, not me. But I start to talk about the orchard and the magic flames and your love of Janus words. “To splice,” I say. “It can mean to join together or to cut in two.”

  Mirrored

  I thought I’d manage without a map. I could have stayed on the Queensway with its impossible-to-miss signposted route to Ottawa airport but instead I’d turned off the highway, confident I’d be able to navigate my way along a parallel back road. And I got lost.

  The farming community I’d known as a child had been paved over. Streets of houses, one indistinguishable from the next, and strip malls, and a cluster of office blocks, and apartment towers all rippled out from a stadium which appeared to be the heart of this community. It was a fluke - the wedding of a dear friend’s daughter, which had brought me back to the Ottawa Valley. Before I caught my plane home I wanted to smell some freshly turned earth, hear wind through a field of corn, and buy a bag of the local cheese curds that would squeak as I ate them.

  I finally left the box stores that edged the suburb and over a slight hill I saw two buildings at a dip in the road. Drove by a gas station, clearly abandoned, where I half expected to see a pop machine selling long-forgotten brands of soda for a nickel a bottle, and then a long, single-storey structure, the weathered grey of an old barn. As I went past I turned my head, and there, in a dusty yard displaying a hodgepodge of old furniture, was my grandmother’s mirrored washstand.

  I hit the brakes, then slowed the car properly, backed up and pulled neatly to the side of the road, already parked before I was quite aware of my need to go and touch the maple washstand I hadn’t thought about for more than fifty years.

  ‘Valley Valuables’ said a hand-painted sign above the store’s double doors. Underneath, in smaller letters: ‘We Buy Junk - We Sell Antiques! Oil lamps, Butter prints, Ceramics, Collectibles!’ Heaped on wheeled pallets, the haphazard display of furniture was labelled with faded hand-written notices. I didn’t stop to look at anything else - there, wedged between a grain scale ‘great as a coffee table!’ and a buffet ‘with pie shelf!’ was the washstand.

  A big, boxy base on short legs with a rectangular swivelled mirror attached to the top that creaked when I pulled it square. It was functional rather than beautiful, the only ornamentation the cobalt blue glass drawer pulls. I held two of them in my hand and pulled open the top drawer, leaning over it to breathe in the musty air, imagining hints of the moth-repellant cloves, thyme and rosemary sachets Grandmother kept tucked between the dark green towels on which she’d crocheted borders of daisies.

  I blew away a layer of pollen and dust from the top of the stand, to reveal the orangey-brown wood with its grainy pattern. ‘So much storage space!’ said the note. True. It had held all the towels as well as everyday toiletries which my grandmother believed ought to be kept out of sight and the specially hidden vanity items: a sliver-backed hairbrush and mirror set, a tube of Max Factor Rose Red lipstick and a white box called Modess.

  A kid in a plaid shirt and blue jeans ambled over. “Nice dresser,” he said. “Bird’s eye maple, probably made right here in the Ottawa Valley. Solid. Twenty bucks.” He smiled, tilted his head in a friendly way and wandered off to the far corner of the lot where he lit a cigarette, clearly his primary reason for venturing outside.

  Not a dresser, a washstand, I wanted to correct him. But I could see that he was right; it was a mirrored dresser. Because it had lived in the bathroom and held basin and pitcher, I had always thought of it as a washstand. I used a tissue in my pocket to rub off a patch of grime in the middle. The washbasin and pitcher, white ceramic with a faded pattern of pale pink flowers, with a chip on the handle that could catch you if didn’t pay attention, they had sat there - just there, just so.

  My grandparents’ bathroom was off the kitchen; not an unusual floor plan in rural Ontario back then. Water for bathing was heated on the wood stove in my father’s day and the shorter the distance it had to be carried the easier. I knew from his stories that when he was a child baths were a weekly event; Saturday evenings, the night before church. St. John’s, the same church our grandparents took us to worship.

  The township had raised funds for a new oil furnace and that summer they were digging a basement to install it. Two men shovelled out the earth and two more brought the buckets up through a hole in the floor with a rope pulley. My sister and I were allowed to help empty the buckets, but I suspect we mostly rushed about the yard with the other children, waiting for the women to set out the fried chicken, potato salad, dills, date bread and thick wedges of watermelon. A skull was found once, various theories were offered, and then it was buried in the graveyard.

  I recall little about the Sunday services themselves other than the smell of the communion bread which filled the church as it baked. Every so
often I walk past a shop which purports to cook bread on the premises and am taken back to those Sunday mornings and the warm, yeasty scent I associate with prayers. I daydreamed through the sermons, and often opened a single eye to peek about during the heads-down prayers. Once I met the gaze of another child, a boy with red hair and a splatter of freckles across his face. He saw me looking at him and winked, then crossed his eyes as if challenging me to laugh. I scrunched my own tight shut then, and didn’t look back in his direction, ever.

  The mirror swung in a breeze and I felt a rush of unrelated fragments of memory from those long-ago months. Picking broccoli and tomatoes and beans, making up the honeycomb boxes in the barn’s attic, the taste of fresh milk. My morning ritual that summer: using both hands to pour water from the pitcher into the basin, then standing on my tiptoes to wet, soap, wash and rinse my face. There was running water by then, a sink similar to the one at home. But I suppose I thought it was romantic to use the old-fashioned pitcher and basin, or perhaps I was pretending to be some storybook child.

  In the yard of ‘Valley Valuables’ I knelt and opened every drawer, in case there was something - a scrap of paper with my grandmother’s confident handwriting on it, a thread from one of her green towels - imagining as I did so, my ex-husband’s voice. Stop looking for things you’ll never find, Miriam. But see, I silently argued. See what I’ve found. Our map mirror.

  It was my big sister, Janet, who named it. The silver backing had peeled away from the glass in trails, leaving behind what looked to us like a map. Our grandmother bathed us together, giving us thick bright crayon soap to play with in the claw-footed tub. We played tic-tac-toe and drew Noah’s Ark on the waterline and all the animals waiting to board. And one evening, as the water turned murky and started to cool Janet said she’d ‘do’ my face and instructed me to close my eyes. I leant towards her, squealing with delight at the smooth crayon on my wet skin, just as I imagined real make up felt. “Stay Still, Miriam. Stop moving,” she ordered and I obeyed, not because of her bossy tone of voice or because I’d always been told to mind her, but because she was my best friend and I’d have done anything she asked. I could feel her drawing on my cheek and imagined it was a beauty spot like that movie star had. I guessed she was giving me a bright red lips, blue eye shadow and pink cheeks like a fairy-tale princess. I sighed with pleasure and as soon as she was finished I jumped out of the bath and skipped over to the mirror, cleaning away a bit of steam so I could see.

  It wasn’t a beauty spot she’d drawn on my cheek, but a tear. “Oh.” I wanted to love what she’d done. “But you gave me a clown face,” I said, and reached up to mark a big X across my reflection in the mirror.

  ‘X marks the spot,’ said Janet.

  Suddenly we’d discovered a treasure map, and my clown face was forgotten. For the remainder of the summer we worked to decipher our map mirror and translate its message into buried treasure hidden somewhere on the farm.

  The farm’s real treasures were the heirloom potatoes my grandfather grew. No potato, not from St. Lawrence Market or the best organic grocery store in Vancouver, or the top restaurants I’ve eaten at around the world has ever tasted as rich and creamy as the ones I took for granted that summer. My grandmother served potatoes at every meal, like meat and milk they were considered a necessity rather than a side dish. Roasted, boiled, mashed with butter and the creamy milk we drank. (Skim milk, then, was feed for pigs and chickens.) There’d be a roast with gravy and stuffing, biscuits, and bright green beans served glistening with butter and more cream, salt and pepper. That’s the taste I return to when I want to recapture my childhood, although I don’t recall my mother ever serving us beans in the same way.

  And we were allowed to dig for potatoes whenever we wanted, just as we were allowed to roam about all day, explore as we wished and even go paddling in the stream by ourselves. A thousand miles from Toronto, where I had to look both ways, beware of the street cars, and hold my mother’s hand to cross the street. There was no sound of traffic, just the tractor, the chickens, and some afternoons the sharp snap of each downy green bean as we topped and tailed a milk pail full of them, sitting around the kitchen table, my grandmother, my sister and I.

  “Tell me about the day my Daddy was born on this table,” I often said.

  My grandmother would look at me, stern, though not unsmiling, above her cats-eyes glasses.

  “Please,” I’d add. The magic word. Years later, when I raised my own daughters and tried to teach them basic manners, I’d ask: What’s the magic word? and it worked just as well.

  That was my favourite of all the stories, and my grandmother told it well. First she’d run her hand across the pitted pine, as if smoothing away the wrinkles from a sheet when she made the big double bed my sister and I shared. “Your Grandpa was out in the barn taking care of the morning chores and I was fixing breakfast. I’d known that your father was due, but I thought he might wait a few more days. When he made it known he was ready, right then, I called your Grandpa, who came in saying that whatever it was had better be important because he still had five cows to milk.” She’d smile then and pick up a handful of beans, breaking off the ends - snap, snap.

  “I told him what was happening and he picked up the telephone and shouted for a woman, any woman, to come and help.” I knew how he did this: my sister and I had memorised all the different ring combinations of the party line telephone, knew which one belonged to which neighbour. “Soon enough Mrs. Lowell rushed in. She set to boiling water and she told me to clear off the breakfast dishes and lie down on the table. And by the time your Grandpa came back from milking those last five cows he had a son.”

  I’d run my hand over the wooden table then. “And that’s how Daddy was born.” I loved that story, both that version and the one our grandfather told us, in which the cows all knew something was up and as a result they were slow and disagreeable that morning. Not only did the milking take twice the usual time, but when he got back to the kitchen Mrs. Lowell shooed him out of the way to go and milk the cows in her barn that she’d had to abandon. But not before she passed him the baby that would be his only child.

  “And?” I’d prompt both grandparents.

  “And Mrs. Lowell took one look at your father and told us, my you’ll be proud of that one.”

  And they were, I knew. There was a wall of photographs of my Daddy, and several of Janet and I. None of Mummy save for a single wedding portrait, but I never asked why.

  The farm machinery, the animals, my grandparents’ voices. And the rain that kept us cooped up indoors for days in a row after weeks of freedom to roam about, for the second half of our summer it too became a background noise, summer-soft against the screened porch windows, but constant. It was still a working farm and every day there was still a day’s worth of chores to do regardless of the weather, but it never occurred to me that two children might have been an inconvenience.

  The rain continued through August; I’ve no idea how it affected the digging of the new church basement or the crops or the cows. The paddling stream swelled up and rapids appeared where none had been. The red-haired boy tried to swim across it on a dare, and nearly paid with his life. There was a conversation on the telephone one evening between my grandmother and my parents. We were not given a chance to say hello. I overheard enough to worry that Janet and I were going to be sent back to the city because of the rain. As it turned out, my father asked his parents to keep us for the final two weeks of summer as well; the originally promised family summer holiday was not going to take place as planned after all. It was several years before I made the connection between our having been sent away that summer and my father’s leaving our mother. His floozy, my sister called his new wife, refusing ever to visit them at his new house, refusing ever to have anything to do with our baby stepbrother when he arrived. My poor mother; at the time I only thought how pleased she must have been to start a job that meant wearing high heeled shoes, jackets that matched her skirts, and
lipstick every day.

  The sun must have come out again, and my sister and I must have resumed our carefree exploration of the farmland and forest, picking blueberries, digging for potatoes, racing up and down the elm-lined driveway looking for treasure.

  “We can re-silver that mirror for you. And arrange shipping.” The voice of the kid, back from his cigarette break, pulled me back into the dusty yard. Shipping. I must have looked like a tourist, not from here, or else he’d noticed the rental sticker on the car.

  “Do you know where it came from?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “One of those houses that got torn down for a new subdivision.” He nodded his chin in the direction I’d been heading. “Some old lady asked us to clear out her house.”

  An old lady. But . . even before I finished the thought that my grandmother, my mother, were no longer alive, I realized that to this kid I was also, no doubt, an ‘old’ lady. Had Janet lived, been standing beside me, he’d not have been able to guess who was the older of the two of us. As eldest grandchild she might have inherited the house; I thought of her topping and tailing beans, digging potatoes, and felt a rush of comfort imagining her living in that place where we’d both been so happy. I never knew what happened to the farmhouse after my grandparents died. I grew up, moved out west, got married and raised my own two daughters, naming one after the aunt she never got a chance to meet. I heard the farmland had been sold to commercial potato producers who grew for Schnieders, later Hostess, later Lay’s, for their chips. I always bought that brand of potato chips in case the potatoes came from The Elms’ land, and once refused to eat from a different brand of potato chips my husband picked up. A ridiculous argument, like so many of them.