Measuring Up

by Dan Robson

  The drinking is still a point of contention. She thinks it’s a problem—and I think she’s overreacting, searching for a way to tear me down while I’m weak. The truth is, I can’t really see what I’ve become; what it looks like on the outside. I can’t see what it is to be in a relationship like that. I can’t see the absence. The lack of attention. The disappearance of my heart.

  The argument that quickly escalates into a shouting match is one it seems we’ve both been waiting for. My heart is pounding. I’m spiralling. And I resent Jayme for not comprehending why.

  I can’t process what we’re saying. It’s just anger. My anger. I don’t know how to get rid of it.

  I stare through her.

  “You’re scaring me,” she says. “Where have you gone?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “But I don’t think I can come back.”

  I don’t live in the present anymore. I walk around in a constant dream, trying to grasp old memories that slip away like sand. That night, I take another long detour through the past.

  * * *

  —

  When I was finally done playing competitive hockey, I went and sat in a gazebo in a park by a lake and cried. By that time I was at Queen’s University, where I’d been the second-string goalie for a few years, never playing a full game. It was embarrassing. An upper-year goalie was the starter—and it was clear I’d never get a chance to actually contribute to the team.

  We were on the ice six days a week with practices and games. It consumed a ton of my time. But over those few years away from home, I’d become a different person. I got involved in other things, beyond hockey—like, actual school, and extracurriculars like running my Concurrent Education program’s Frosh Week, which involved painting my body silver, wearing a toga, and learning choreographed steps to “The Dancing Queen.” I was the only hockey player in the production.

  I’d shed the fanciful dreams of my youth, which always ended in me somehow playing in the NHL even though the highest level I’d ever actually played was Tier II Junior A. We’d won a provincial title with the Brampton Capitals—it felt as big as the Stanley Cup—and then some key players went on to the NCAA and OHL. When I was accepted into Queen’s (a real shock to everyone at my school) and recruited to play for its hockey team, I decided to head there instead of hoping for a scholarship to arrive from the States after playing another year of Junior.

  In terms of hockey, it was a terrible mistake. Queen’s was very bad at the sport. And without a spot to play regularly as a rookie, the coaches asked me to get some time in with a Junior C team a half hour away in a small town called Gananoque.

  It was a nightmare. In my first game there, one of the players picked up a spider off the bathroom floor and ate it. It was his pre-game routine. I hated taking those trips out to play for the Gan Flyers. I hated carpooling with other players who’d either been set aside by the varsity team or weren’t good enough to make it. It shredded my pride.

  Just before reading week that February, Dad called. He told me to sit down—and then told me that our golden retriever, Brandi, had died. I was gutted. We’d had her since I was in grade three. She was a gorgeous blonde who never barked or bit or did anything wrong except sleep on the couch.

  We were just finishing up our season in Gan, so I wasn’t going to be able to go home for reading week. Instead, Dad took a week off work and drove three hours to stay with me in Kingston.

  I showed him around campus—all the beautiful old limestone buildings, the library that held first editions, hundreds of years old. I took him to the Epicure, an amazing little breakfast spot named after an ancient Greek philosophy I’d learned about in the first year Classics course I was failing. I took him to the park by the lake, where sometimes I’d go to sit between classes and call him. I showed him my new world, a world he’d never had the opportunity to be part of.

  Then we drove out to Gan together for a hockey game. It was a quiet ride through a snowy night. And it was during that ride when I first realized that I didn’t really like this sport very much at all.

  It stressed me out. Being a hockey player carried too much of my perceived value. I’d tried to build my life on a dream that was never going to work out. And frankly, being a goalie is really, really hard.

  It just hadn’t been the same since I’d left home. It wasn’t the same without the hot shower after a nap in my childhood room, or the plate of tortellini I’d wolf down as the garage door opened and Dad came in, changed quickly, and then rushed out to the rink with me.

  It wasn’t the same without those stars streaming past the window through the night. Or without Dad’s whistle rising above all the noise in the stands.

  It wasn’t the same without him.

  I started that game, and it was terrible. I let in four goals in the first period. I was anxious and angry. Every shot seemed to find its way in. Dad was in the stands and I was devastated. I’d wanted to show him that all the time and money he’d spent on my hockey dreams hadn’t been a giant waste. I knew my heart wasn’t in it, but I didn’t want him to know. In the second period, the goals kept coming. I could feel my heart panic. I could hear the other team chirp. I could see my own players slam their sticks. Another goal—and another. It was a nightmare.

  I could hear Dad’s whistle above it all. I could see him at the top of the stands, at centre ice as always, clapping his hands together and signalling to me as loud as he could.

  I looked at him—and then I left the ice. Before the ref could drop the puck after that last goal, I skated towards our bench and motioned to the coach to take me out.

  The coach waved at me to go back in, but I kept skating. I felt a lump in my throat. I couldn’t look at my father. I sat on the bench with my head down and the game went on without me.

  Dad didn’t say much when I loaded my gear into the back of his truck afterwards. He gave me a hug, and on the ride home he patted my leg. We drove in silence while I looked at the stars.

  He knew it was over too.

  I stuck with the Queen’s varsity team for another season, knowing I was really just a guy for the players to shoot on in practice. I don’t know why I stayed, except that it was all I’d ever done. Then, during training camp in my third year, a talented first-year goalie showed up. Our starter would graduate in a year and they’d need someone to take his place. It wouldn’t be me. I was called into the coaches’ room after one of the training camp skates and told I no longer had a spot on the team.

  It stung like hell. There was no getting around that. I was angry. But deeper than that, I felt a relief I’d never experienced before. I felt free. I went to the gazebo by the water and sat alone.

  The next day, I called Dad. My heart was pounding. I was upset because I’d failed and also because, despite all the time he and I had spent chasing this game, I knew I didn’t want it anymore. It took me ten minutes to dial his number.

  “Hi, buddy,” he answered.

  I went right to it, because there was no way around this shame. I’ve been cut from the varsity team, I told him. I went on to say that I was pissed and that the coaches sucked and all the other things you’re supposed to gripe about. And then I said what I’d really wanted to say.

  “Dad, I just want to say thank you.”

  He didn’t say anything for several moments. When he came back, he sounded rushed.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I have to go.”

  And he hung up the phone.

  I didn’t know what happened. I sat down on my bed and stared at the floor. Five minutes later, my phone buzzed.

  “Dad?”

  His voice broke.

  “It was always about you, son,” he said. He took a deep breath, and then his voice cracked again.

  “It was always about you and me.”

  24

  After the weekend off, Jonathan and Matt arrive in the b
asement looking like characters from a Dickens novel, their faces covered in soot. They’ve spent the morning bringing down a century-old ceiling in Matt’s bungalow. The night before he’d stood in the shower and thought about how exposing the attic beneath the steep roof would open up the narrow hallway that felt tight and dark.

  Matt got out of the shower and told his wife his plans. Without flinching, Rachael said, Do it. So the next morning, before he and Jonathan came in to continue our reno, they demolished his ceiling.

  Now Matt sits in the tub, smoothing putty—“grouting”—over small white rectangles as we attempt to finish off a tiling job that’s already taken us two days.

  “So how did you take it down?” I ask.

  “We pretty much got in the attic and started kicking out the ceiling,” Matt says.

  “What if you fell?”

  “Well,” he says. “That wouldn’t be great.”

  They just stood on the joists and stomped until the old ceiling fell. It was dicey. They taped the adventure with a Go Pro, and proudly promise to show me the footage later.

  “Jonathan is like two hundred something,” Matt says. “So I tried to stay away from his section.”

  Jonathan huffs a laugh as he returns to his puzzle, piecing together the accent wall above the sink. I suspect the ceiling demolition was a welcome distraction from my constant questions and interruptions while we piece together the bathroom.

  It takes as much time to put up the little tiles on the walls around the tub and vanity as it does to lay the larger tiles on the floor. It’s more intricate, Matt says, requiring more cuts. Sometimes the smallest things take as much time as the big things.

  He uses a grinder to cut the tiles around the tub’s faucet. It has a diamond blade, but it’s on a hand-held wheel, so he just scrolls and breaks the tile as he goes. He’s already used the grinder to cut out a hole for the toilet in the big floor tiles.

  “You have to be brave,” he says. “Because a wheel is spinning in your hand that could cut you. And when you first pull the trigger it torques, so you have to be ready with a good grip, and then you just…” He mimics the action of cutting through the tile. “And the tile particles are flying everywhere and you have to squint—or wear your safety glasses.”

  Matt smiles and smoothes down another glob of putty.

  I’ve learned that mortar is the paste plastered under the tiles and that grout is the putty that separates them. There’s a cement board behind the first foot or so of tile, above the tub. Mould can’t develop on it, Matt explains. The rest is waterproof drywall. It’s all finished with a special drywall compound.

  Jonathan wipes down the dark tiles above the sink with a wet sponge, removing the excess grout, which is black instead of the white stuff used around the tub. Measuring and cutting the small pieces that fill the gaps between the tiles and our flawed corners has been a two-day headache for him. But for all the fatigue and dirt, for all the uneven angles and impossible-to-fill gaps, the tiles have brought life to the bathroom. As we lay them, the room keeps getting brighter and brighter.

  “This is going to look great,” I say.

  No one responds.

  I take the grout blade from Matt and start working it side to side, up and down—right into the cracks between the tiles. I scoop more grout onto the blade, working my way down the side of the tub.

  It’s just filling the cracks, really, Matt says. It’s mostly aesthetic.

  It’s repetitive. We work in silence. Just a few handymen, grouting. Putting in an honest day’s work. Getting the job done.

  After a few minutes, Matt opens up the worksite small talk.

  “Jonathan’s ready to build a house because he watched a whole hour-and-a-half video of Larry Haun,” he says.

  “Oh, yeah? Nice,” I remark. “What did you learn?”

  “Stairs,” Jonathan says.

  “Stairs?”

  “Well, that was the trickiest part of the video,” he says.

  “Is that where you’re learning all your stuff from?” I ask. “Larry Haun videos?”

  Jonathan shrugs and places another tile.

  “Larry Haun, what a man,” I say. “A visionary.”

  I realize that the unnecessary chitchat has taken my focus, and become immediately self-conscious about the row of shower tiles I’ve set in place. I’ve reached the corner.

  “What am I doing wrong here?” I ask pre-emptively.

  Matt assures me I’m on the right track. Then he takes the blade from me and slaps a glop of grout across the edge. “What you have to do is grab a nice chunk at the corner and try to push it up to there,” he says. “That should be the trickiest part.”

  He hands me back the blade.

  “Grab some more material,” he says, pointing to the bucket of grout. I add a glob to the blade and spread more across the wall.

  “Yeah, you have it. Yeah, there you go,” Matt says. “Give it another drag so there isn’t any more excess. Use the edge.”

  “Inside or outside?” I ask.

  “Yeah, at forty-five degrees,” he says. “That’s perfect.”

  I step back and admire the smooth layer of grout halfway up the shower.

  “Look at that. Grouting for Dummies,” I say. “Larry Haun would be impressed.”

  It’s a segue to more proper worksite banter.

  “So what else did you learn from Larry?” I ask.

  “Me?” Jonathan says. “Some of the more beginning stages of building a house—how to square a corner—”

  Matt points at the still untiled top third of the shower. “Maybe start working your way up this wall,” he says to me.

  “Okay,” I say, and go back to Jonathan.

  “You learned how to square a corner?”

  “Using the Pythagorean theorem,” he tells me.

  “Seriously?”

  “It’s simple,” Jonathan says. “You just have to measure out two measurements. If you measure eight feet and six feet, then you get ten feet on a diagonal.”

  As I push those numbers around in my head, I realize I’m incapable of grouting and doing math at the same time.

  “Press it around,” Matt reminds me, watching over my work.

  “Sixty-four plus thirty-six is a hundred, right?” Jonathan says. “So all you have to do is measure eight feet one length, straight to the wall. Measure six feet on the other, mark it. And then measure from the marks on each wall, the diagonal measurement. If the diagonal measurement equals ten, that means you have a right angle—which means that the corner is square.”

  I try working that out for a moment.

  “You don’t have to do the math,” Jonathan says. “You just have to know that one corner is six, the other corner is eight.”

  “I can skip the math then? Pythagoras did it for me?”

  “Because six squared plus eight squared equals a hundred, and the square root of a hundred is ten,” Jonathan explains, again.

  I don’t know what this has to do with building a house, but I nod as though I do—and spread another glob across the wall.

  “So I can build a house now,” I say.

  “That’s it,” Jonathan laughs.

  Matt smiles. “All you need is a tape measure,” he says.

  “And set and sink,” Jonathan says. “Two licks.”

  He’s repeating the words of Haun, our great teacher, who has showed us how to be better, more efficient old-school builders. But Larry didn’t explain the math or that it was the Pythagorean theorem. Jonathan says he just knew that it was.

  “It’s just math.”

  “He didn’t even give Pythagoras credit, eh,” Matt says.

  I’m still glopping on the grout and then sweeping it back with the edge at a forty-five-degree angle. Jonathan continues his lesson.

  “If your
corner is less than six-by-eight long, then you’re going to have to actually do the math,” he says. “If not, you just get a square.”

  I’m overly impressed by Jonathan’s ability to apply this theory to real life.

  “Pythagorean,” I say. “What grade did you learn that in?”

  “Junior high?” Jonathan says.

  “Junior high?” I repeat. “Really?”

  My father was always very good with numbers. He had a knack for doing quick math in his head. His notebooks are filled with small equations scribbled on the spot whenever he came across a problem on a worksite that required some visual thought. He didn’t pass that talent on. I was so bad at math that my high school principal banned me from practice during the start of basketball season until I pulled up my grade eleven math marks. That was embarrassing enough for me to put in a modest effort to get back on the team. I just didn’t see the point in math. I was rather daft about the whole thing, obviously. But numbers bored me—and I’d decided I didn’t need to know about them anyway because I wasn’t going to grow up to be like my father.

  My identity was built on the idea of being what he wasn’t. I didn’t fully grasp that then, but I didn’t feel I needed to excel at what he did because that’s the role he filled. I was going to fill a different role; I was going to become what he couldn’t. And so I didn’t value learning even the basics of what he knew. I don’t think it was out of a lack of respect for him. I felt he understood—and that, all along, it was what he wanted for me.

  So I would never need to know the Pythagorean theorem to build a house. Instead I’d be a professional athlete, or a writer, or a world traveller. And, after all, Dad would do the math for me. I’d be too busy living my dreams to have to get up before the sun and sweat out life on a construction site.

  It seems arrogant now—and it was—but I was young and blind. And dumb, yes. Very, very dumb.

  You never realize how lucky you are to have survived your own ignorance until you’re somehow standing on the other side. I studied “the arts” in university—literature and history—with a plan to become a teacher. I was quite terrible at it, too. But I was at university, which was one step further in life than my father had taken. At least that’s what I allowed myself to think—and it’s also what he told me. I was in a world he’d never had the opportunity to join.