by Louise Ells
I looked down at my hands, still playing with the drawer pulls. Thick blue veins showed through wrinkled skin marked with faded age spots and I blinked and saw my chubby little-girl hands, playing… with painted ceramic pulls, not glass. And remembered three smaller drawers across the top, and a darker stain on the wood. This wasn’t my grandmother’s washstand after all.
“I knew a farm like that,” I said, patting the dresser one last time. “I wish I could take this but I live in a tiny apartment.” I smiled. “Thank you.” And I drove off before he could see the old-lady tears that were gathering in the corners of my eyes.
Three miles on I passed a brown stone church, on a street of triple-garaged homes, no sign of red brick farmhouses and land divided by split-rail fences. A subdivision named The Elms was the only remnant of the farm I could find. See? I told my ex-husband in our imaginary conversation. See, I wasn’t lost after all.
I glanced at my watch as if to justify my choice not to stop or even linger, as if catching the plane back to my empty apartment was more important than touring the basement of St John’s church. It was a benchmark of my childhood, that summer, and the holiday by which I’d judged all others since and yet it occurred to me that I had never once told my husband about it. I sped by rows of cul-de-sacs and more of the cookie-cutter houses, and a general store whose window advertised local artwork and maple walnut fudge, and a one room schoolhouse turned into museum. ‘Step back in time - see how we lived a lifetime ago.’ I shook my head as I drove on, arguing that it wasn’t a lifetime ago, it was my lifetime. Mine.
What was the washstand to my grandmother, I wondered, a family heirloom or just a useful piece of furniture? And what about the impostor that I’d wasted half an hour looking at. Had I paid the twenty dollars asked, would I have been buying a piece of junk or an antique?
How had I thought for a moment it was my grandmother’s washstand? I shook my head. It must have been the sun’s glare, making me think I could see a map on the mirror where there was none. Almost all the silver backing had peeled off, so much that I hadn’t even been able to make out my own reflection.
Moon Jellies
I could have said no. Richard was away on one of his business trips, delayed by the threat of an early summer hurricane working its way up the east coast when he called to remind me we were due to collect his grandmother from the airport and look after her for the day.
I could have booked an airport limo service to meet her and deliver her to his parents’ house, the oversized home in the suburbs with its four-car garage, but I was introvert, not unfriendly. I reminded him that I’d never met her.
Hold up a sign, he said. Her name is Marit Smid.
That wasn’t what I’d meant. I knew that much about his grandmother. When she immigrated to Alberta from the Netherlands after the war, her only son, Matthijs Smid, became Matthew Smith because, he said, she wanted him to be Canadian. She herself had never changed her name, nor ever moved away from Lethbridge. Every year Matthew asked her to come live in Ontario and every year she refused.
“Take her out to lunch then drop her at my folks’ place. She’ll be tired, she can have a rest until they get home from work.”
“Where should we go for lunch? What does she like?”
Silence. I imagined him rolling his eyes. “I don’t know,” he said. “Anywhere. It doesn’t matter. She’s an old lady, not like your grandmothers.”
This is what I knew of grandmothers: one was a farmer’s daughter, capable of fixing tractors and sewing curtains, an excellent cook, she spoke of the boom and bust of the mining industry, swore in French and treated both my grandfather and my father as if they were twelve years old and in need of constant supervision. The other was American, wore blue jeans, dyed her permed hair blonde, drank beer from a bottle and arrived every summer of my childhood with a suitcase full of presents my mother deemed inappropriate. Richard had met them both, but was not interested much in families, which maybe explained why I had never met his grandmother.
About airports I knew far less. For the first fifteen years or so of my life my family left town four times a year. We spent Thanksgiving long weekend with my paternal grandparents up in Elliot Lake, went down to Toronto in mid-December for a weekend of Christmas Shopping and the Nutcracker Ballet. At the start of the summer - those brief weeks when the mosquitoes have died off but it’s not yet stinking hot - we went camping for seven days, and at the end of August we went on a two-week road trip. Every year somewhere else - the Eastern Townships, the Maritimes, New England, and the year I turned twelve, all the way out to Vancouver.
My father worked for the government all his life, and never took more than three weeks’ holiday a year, not even when he’d put in enough time, rising up the scale, to merit a full five.
What can a child guess? Everything our family did was the only normal I knew. In the small town where we lived most people took similar holidays, for sure everyone camped. Some people spent the winter school break skiing or lying on a beach somewhere warm but I couldn’t imagine flying; what I knew was driving.
Mother made picnics to eat in the car - big enough for many meals. Sandwiches of home-made bread, thick slices stuffed with baked ham and mustard, grilled beef and horseradish, and my favourite, roast chicken with mayonnaise. Meat pies cut into great wedges. Bags of carrots and radishes pulled from the garden, zucchini sticks, raw broccoli and tiny tomatoes that my brother squirted at me through his missing front teeth. Apple slices which we were allowed to dip into cinnamon sugar. And a five gallon jug of lemonade, frozen overnight so that it was icy cold for hours into the first afternoon, warm and sickly and tasting a little of plastic for the rest of the trip.
Dad liked to get an early start and stay on the road until we reached our day’s destination and he’d mutter under his breath at times, “keep moving, keep moving.” I longed to stop at the new McDonald’s drive-through, with its bright yellow and red plastic, especially in the States when it became a drive-thru, or the neon-lit place where you rolled down your car windows and your food was brought out to you by a girl wearing roller skates and given to you on a tray that attached to your door.
After I left Richard I adopted my father’s mantra as my own, hearing his voice when I reminded myself to keep moving, keep moving. By then, I understood the fear of not being able to start again if I ever stopped and wondered if I should blame my parents for not teaching me how to have a healthy argument.
They argued once a year, when we got lost in the city. As a teenager I listened for complaints about money, my brother’s low grades, my poor choice in boyfriends, the things my friends’ parents shouted about, but if those discussions took place in our house, I never heard them. Only ever in the car, only ever in the city.
It seemed every time Dad entered the city it was along a different road, an unknown route, a new way to get lost in the dark, narrow one-way system.
“Turn here,” Mum would tell my father.
“Where?”
“There. There! You’ve missed it. Turn back.”
“How?”
“I don’t know! Make a U-turn!” she’d shout.
“I can’t make a U-turn. This is a one-way street, Dorothy.”
“We’re only going one way, Francis. The wrong way.”
Once, that had been a joke.
As soon as my parents, Frank and Dot, became Francis and Dorothy, my brother and I squished ourselves as far back into the station wagon’s seat as possible, and looked away from each other. Even as a child I sensed it was never about driving in the city, it was never about the one-way system. The overtime, the cost of my braces, the neglected yard work. We all had to endure that hour of stress to truly appreciate the holiday that followed, which, as far as I recall, we always did.
I fell in love with Richard when, during our second year at university, he suggested we join a group of his friends flying down to Florida for reading week. I was speechless at the extravagance of the proposal beca
use when I told him there was no way I could afford such a holiday he said he’d pay. Once it was booked I splurged on a new bikini, a pair of sunglasses and a manicure and tried not to act too excited about the prospect of my first airplane ride in front of my fellow students, for whom flying was no big deal. Cheaper, they said, and so much faster than driving down that we’d have an extra two days there.
We left the dregs of a Toronto winter, with piles of muddy snow heaped at the back of every parking lot and the wind off the lake still bitter as it whipped up Yonge Street. Stepping off the plane a few hours later there was a wall of heat, and sunshine so bright I had to close my eyes. It was magical then, and the memory of that moment still is. In a bid to recapture that extraordinary sensation I sometimes book long haul-flights; leaving Toronto at night so that I can wake up to a new climate in a different time zone.
The giddy joy of that holiday was enough to carry our relationship through the next two years, and then we moved in together. I continued on at school, working towards a doctorate in Anthropology, while Richard took a sales job that involved frequent travel across North America. To be fair to him, I don’t think he realized how little money I had; we didn’t discuss the imbalance in our incomes, and I was too proud to suggest a joint bank account.
So when he said over the phone, so casually, take her out to lunch, I said sure, and I took down her flight details and ironed my pale yellow sundress and cleaned the car and then, just in case, the tiny house we rented behind Eglinton bus station. I checked the weather report and thought about restaurants with back patios or roof gardens and wondered how I could ask Richard to reimburse me for a meal I couldn’t afford. Then I rang my brother for advice, asking him what I could talk about with an elderly woman I didn’t know.
“Meeting the grandmother, huh? Must be serious,” he teased.
I hadn’t yet told him of Richard’s marriage proposal, or my acceptance. (The two men I loved most in the world had little in common; I’d discovered that infrequent dinners with lots of alcohol was the best way to merge my past and my future.) “Yeah,” I said, and changed the subject.
I gave up trying to find a suitable, affordable restaurant and instead made and packed with care a picnic my mother would have recognized. I studied the map carefully, compiling notes about parks between the airport and Richard’s parents’ house and I made a big sign to hold. Planning for the possibility of a road closure or early flight arrival, I left the house an hour early. What I didn’t plan for was the thunderstorm that shut down the airport for an hour and fifty minutes. Maybe, I thought, Richard’s storm was real. According to the woman at the gate, the plane had landed but it hadn’t pulled into the designated unloading space, so the passengers had to wait.
When they finally came through the doors, every traveller looked old, tired, and slightly discombobulated. A thin white-haired woman wearing a cotton skirt and cornflower blue blouse approached me with a smile. “You must be Richard’s fiancée,” she said. It was the first time I’d heard myself described as such and I was startled at the unease I felt at her use of the word. This stranger knew something I’d not yet told my brother. “It’s so kind of you to meet me. I could have taken a taxi cab.”
“Nonsense,” I said, reaching to shake her hand, realizing too late that I was still holding the sign. “You’re family. Richard’s parents are so sorry they couldn’t meet your flight. And Richard too, naturally.” I took her bag and led the way to the car.
I asked after the flight, the weather out west, made small talk until I had manoeuvred our way out of the parking lot. Then I turned to her with what I hoped was a friendly smile. “If the sun comes out-” I said. “I’ve made us a picnic for lunch.”
“What a treat,” she said. “Home-cooked food instead of an overpriced restaurant with a menu I can’t decipher.” I loved her from that moment on. She asked about my studies and my career options and really listened to my answers so I found myself speaking carefully rather than tossing off my usual replies. It was only when I saw an exit for Morningside Avenue that I realized I’d missed the 404 turn-off. I swerved the car across two lanes, admitted my mistake, and told her I was my mother’s daughter. That made her laugh. “So, we have an adventure.”
There was a sign for the zoo, so I took it. When I stopped the car the windshield wipers thudded off and I peered through the rain. “We’ll have to have an indoors picnic. I think there’s a lunchroom for school groups. If you don’t mind-?”
“I am very content.”
Content. Not happy, but content. I wondered if that was a deliberate word choice, or a transliteration from Dutch. “Please,” I said, as I used most of my cash to buy one student and one senior ticket at the entrance gate. “Tell me about your life in Alberta. I know so little about you.”
She shook her head. “Not so interesting. Let me tell you about Richard when he was a young boy.” And we made our way to the end of a long pine table where we could sit across from each other, in a room filled with the noise of excited children who traded their treats back and forth, a cookie for a fruit roll-up, grape juice for a soda pop, a chocolate bar for a bag of potato chips.
“Squirties!” said the little boy sitting next to me when I unpacked the cherry tomatoes. “I love squirties.”
“I grew them in my garden.” I offered him the punnet.
He looked downcast. “I don’t have anything to trade in return.”
Mrs. Smid (“please, call me Marit”) leaned across the table. “You could trade a piece of information,” she said. “What’s the number one best exhibit we should go and see?”
The boy looked serious as he considered her question and ignored all his friends who were yelling out the polar bears, the lions, the baby giraffes. “The fish,” he said, before taking a handful of the tomatoes.
She thanked him for the advice, and looked at me. “What fun.” I chose to believe she meant it all - the picnic, the children, the zoo. I sent a silent thank you to my mother for teaching me how to make a picnic. And after our lunch we made our way to the aquarium. She petted the stingrays, we watched an octopus, and we looked at every tank of fish. At the mouth to a narrower hall she paused, and then read out the sign. “Invertebrates.” And I held her arm and helped her down the steps, waiting until I was sure her eyes had adjusted to the dark.
A series of black back-lit tanks held neon-coloured anemones, clams, and corals. We admired the bright jewel tones, the odd shapes. In front of the next display she stumbled, stopped. I steadied her, then looked at the sign: Aurelia aurita.
About five dozen of them, the jellyfish were the pale colour of the moon just before dawn, when the world is still black and white. Drifting up towards the surface then gliding down to the bottom of the tank, like fallen poplar leaves caught in the gentlest breeze. I was fascinated; it was only when I heard the older woman slowly release her breath that I remembered she was there, and in the dim light saw tears at the corner of her eyes.
“You’re sad,” I said. I took her hands in mine. “And cold.” We were both dressed for a warm summer day, not an air-conditioned building. I led her to the coffee shop, sat her at a table, and then I unfolded my emergency ten dollar bill from the secret compartment of my purse and bought the fanciest coffees they sold. It’s difficult now to remember what a rarity a cappuccino was back then with its frothed milk and sprinkle of cinnamon.
When I carried the drinks back to the table she was dabbing at her eyes with a cotton handkerchief. “You must forgive me,” she said.
There was nothing to forgive, I assured her. I was so pleased to have had this time to meet her before next summer’s wedding, and I wondered if she’d be back to visit before then, at Christmas perhaps.
She shook her head. Soft, sincere, straightforward, she told me she had come to say goodbye to her son, her daughter-in-law and her grandchildren. It was cancer, and she was grateful to have been diagnosed in time to make this last trip east.
It was my turn to grow silen
t then, and because it felt there could no longer be any secrets between us, I asked her what the moon jellies meant to her.
There was no way I could leave her by herself at Richard’s parents’ house when we left the zoo, so we went back to our tiny house; the sun reappeared and I wiped off the lawn chairs so we could sit in the garden. I made a pot of tea and took it outside, where she was kneeling by the flowers, plucking off the deadheads.
“I’m always forgetting to do that,” I said, crouching down beside her.
“I do just a few of mine every time I walk by. And then I throw them,” she said, scattering them across the lawn. “You never know; sometimes flowers bloom unexpectedly.”
Richard called that night, when I was back at home, having safely delivered Marit to his parents. He’d be back the next afternoon, he said. He didn’t ask me how the day had gone, how his grandmother was and there was no mention of the storm, whether or not it had hit.
“You were wrong,” I said, as we were about to hang up.
“What?”
“You said your grandmother was old. Frail. Weak. She’s the strongest woman I’ve ever met.”
I never shared the details of that afternoon with him, yet I always blamed him for not knowing. The colleague he was sleeping with was a convenient reason to call off the wedding, but if his grandmother had lived I might have gone through with it.
She was twenty-nine in September nineteen forty-four. “You have heard of Operation Market Garden,” she said. “Perhaps you have seen the photographs of the American parachutists.” (Had I? I wasn’t sure. The next morning I went to the university library and stared at Robert Capa’s photographs of the Second World War and read about Nijmegen and the revenge the locals took on the moffenmeiden, the women they believed guilty of sleeping with Germans. Then, sitting in a study carrel I burst into tears - noisy, snotty sobs, which I had to wipe away with scraps of paper torn from my notebook.)