This meal suddenly seems cumbersome and unmanageable. Like peering into a kaleidoscope expecting pretty colours and designs, and ending up instead with countless selective reflections of the parts of the past that most hurt and shame. It matters not that we are politely avoiding certain topics of conversation. Uninvited dinner guests, they occupy space.
“Can I have some water, too?” Jason extends his glass back over his shoulder. When he still can’t reach Fee’s outstretched hand, he leans back in his chair, reaching even further. Then he loses his balance. Jason, chair and glass clatter to the kitchen floor.
“Mom!”
“For the love of Jesus!”
And for the first time since I’ve come back, I begin to laugh. It staggers out of my mouth, a hibernating bear emerging from a cave, thin, hungry and not really sure it is supposed to be there. I’m surprised to hear the unfamiliar sound. It falls flat when I become conscious of it. Creeps back into the darkness from whence it came.
*
Ed Malone hands me a paper adorned with black fingerprints and waits, crookedly, on Fee’s front porch while I look it over. I have problems finding the final tally.
“I know a little about your situation – and I’ve done the best I can with the figures.” I see the bottom line: $35,750. “And there may be contingencies –” He lifts the palm of his dirty hand, a question mark that hangs over my bank balance like a sword. “I won’t know for sure about the foundation until we’ve dug around a little more. You want to go over it?”
“Can’t you build a whole house for thirty-five thousand dollars?”
“That’s an option, I suppose. But then the old building would need to be razed and disposal’s no joke these days.” He scratches his stubbly cheek. The skin beneath looks dry and soft.
I make a sound somewhere between a laugh and a cough. “But I don’t have this kind of money.”
“I’m sorry. Everyone I do an estimate for says the same thing. In your case, I actually believe it.”
I think for a moment. “What can you do for – say, ten grand?”
He gives me a look. “I take installments. Let me know. I’m kinda booked the whole summer, but given the circumstances, I could work on my schedule.”
But neither his schedule nor installments matter. I do not have the money and there is no way I can get it, short of robbing a bank or winning a lottery. The only one who could help me won’t even speak to me. How can I ask Surinder for one dollar, let alone thirty-five thousand? It’d be easier for my daughter to vote for the Communist Party, certify the union at her law firm or ladle gravy at a soup-kitchen for drunken men and prostitutes. She has made it perfectly clear – there is no room in her life for a common thief like me.
*
The watch, well used, though hardly of heirloom vintage, had belonged to Graham. It was found on the lawn of the home where he had tumbled from the ladder, and delivered to me at the hospital. I had bought it and a card from the racks at London Drugs when such spending was a newly acquired extravagance. I wrapped it and wrote in the card: happy father’s day to the world’s best daddy. In the shaky script of a five-year-old, Surinder had signed her own name, and when Graham saw it, he squeezed her until she squirmed.
In the hours I spent alone, in our bedroom or aimlessly wandering the streets of our neighbourhood, I tried to understand his death. Nothing helped. The watch came closest though. The strap held the shape of his wrist. It smelled of his soap, sweat and his work with earth and plants. And because he wore it when he died, the exact moment of his fall permanently set on its now-cracked face – 4:18 – I imagined a small piece of him being caught on the buckle, on the stem, on the second hand. It offered neither solace nor an explanation; still, I vowed to keep it forever.
During the funeral service, I played with it, turning it over in my fingers. When I felt a howl build at my core, I ran my fingertip along the cracked crystal. As long as I could do that without cutting myself, I was charmed. I would not make a spectacle of myself. That’s how I got through the droning sermon – one stroke of a finger along cracked glass at a time.
Surinder, sitting beside me, must have seen, but she said nothing. It wasn’t until she was moving out of the house, three years later, that she asked for the watch.
“Please Mom.” She’d taken a suite in an old house on West Eleventh with two girls also heading for law school. Though the move reduced her commute to a single, seven-minute bus ride, instead of the forty-five-minute, two-bus trip she took from our home, I knew she was moving because she was ashamed of our working class, east side address.
“Let me think about it.” I knew better than to refuse outright. She’d nag and badger, think of arguments and counter-arguments. She was already perfecting her courtroom technique. But I wasn’t going to let that watch go.
“Have you had a chance to think about the watch?” she asked weeks later, when I’d invited her over for some home cooking. I’d prepared a big Sunday dinner: roast, gravy, vegetables, the whole works. We’d eat in the dining room instead of the kitchen. Such culinary feats are not normally within my repertoire, but I wanted to do something motherly for my only child whose presence under my roof I was sorely missing. I fantasized introducing a regular Sunday dinner and talk into our schedules – much the same way my father had done with me – and saw this meal as the beginning of a tradition. I thought I’d lose my sanity when it came to the gravy, but miraculously, it turned out rich and velvety.
“I don’t eat meat,” Surinder sniffed.
“What are you talking about? Since when?” She set in front of her a plastic tray of sushi picked up from Safeway at the last minute. “Fish is meat.”
“Wrong. Fish is fish. Beef, pork, chicken – they’re meat.”
I have no patience for such self-serving semantic rubbish.
“That watch means a lot to me,” I said.
“Don’t you have chopsticks?”
“Didn’t you bring any?”
“Never mind.” She speared a piece of California roll with a fork. “He was my father, you know.”
“I know.”
“I gave him that watch.”
“I said I would think about it and I am.”
“How long are you going to think about it?”
“What’s your hurry?” I said. “You’re going to get it eventually, when I die.”
Her fork clattered to the table. “Well, congratulations. That’s about the most hurtful thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“What?”
“I loved him, you know. And it’s not like I’m sitting around waiting for my own mother to kick the bucket.”
“I know you loved him. I loved him, too.” I picked up my utensils. “And I’m glad you’re not counting the days to my funeral. Just forget about it, okay, and enjoy your meal. I’ll let you know.”
“You know what your problem is? You’re greedy.”
I laughed. “I’m greedy? God, Surinder, cut me some slack.”
“It’s always about you, isn’t it?”
“Look. Let’s talk about something else. How’s your sushi? Have you seen any good movies?”
“You are a pathetic communicator.”
“Yes. It’s always about me, isn’t it?”
“Does it please you to throw it right back in my face?”
“I promise you: I’ll let you know. But I won’t stand for any more talk of it tonight.”
She huffed and speared a prawn butterflied over a mound of sushi rice. We finished the rest of that meal barely speaking. So much for my Sunday dinner plan.
So when, in the middle of November, I noticed the watch was missing from the old, satin-lined jewellery box I keep in a bureau drawer, I knew exactly where it was. “You have to give it back,” I said, over the phone that evening.
Thankfully, she didn’t pretend
she had no idea what I was talking about. “Why? Let it go. I never ask you for anything.” That was true, and had been since puberty through which she flew with barely a tear or pimple.
“Because it’s not yours.”
“It’s not yours either. It was Dad’s. And I gave it to him.”
“I’m not going to argue. You bring that watch back.”
“What are you going to do about it if I don’t?” She hung up.
But her question got me thinking: what was I going to do about it? I couldn’t live without the watch. Not yet. I needed to know it rested in that box, in that bureau. I needed to know that Graham was somehow still accessible. If Surinder wouldn’t give it back, then I had no choice but to go get it.
Rachel, her roommate, answered the door. She was a big girl with a jowly bulldog face, helpful in a way that you knew meant she was really just plain old meddlesome and needed to get a life. “She’s not here.”
“I know.” Her weekly three-hour lecture on constitutional law delivered by a retired supreme court justice who mumbled, the one she’d been moaning about all term, had just begun. “I’m here on a secret mission.” I told Rachel I was planning a surprise party for Surinder, and needed to get a few of her friend’s phone numbers. Rachel oozed delight. She not only let me in, she led me to Surinder’s room and helped me find her address book.
“Why didn’t you call? I would have got the numbers for you.”
Is it possible she didn’t know Surinder’s birthday wasn’t until April? I thought girls knew these things about one another. The only other explanation – that Rachel was gullible enough to believe I needed five months to organize a party – said more than enough about the mental capacity of prospective lawyers.
“That’s very sweet, but I was worried Surinder might pick up the phone.” I began writing down a few numbers so Rachel wouldn’t become suspicious.
“Oh, Sue’s at the library all the time. She’s never here to answer the phone.”
Sue? This was the first I’d heard of that.
Rachel continued. “I love a surprise party, though my cousin’s wife in Calgary organized one for him and it completely back-fired. He got laid off from work the very same day, so when he came home, he –”
“Rachel, could I trouble you for a glass of water?”
“Would you prefer tea?”
“That would be lovely.”
And in the time it took for her to boil the water, steep the bags and come back, I found the watch. A mother knows the nature of her child’s preferred hiding places.
I gulped that tea and burned my tongue. “Gotta go.”
“Call me if you need anything else.”
“Not a word. Remember.” We sealed our pact with a small hug.
I imagined Rachel there, anticipating the party, gleeful and a little smug about her involvement, until Surinder found the watch missing. She came to my house as soon as she figured it out.
“This is the worst thing you’ve ever done to me.” Even in the dim glow cast by the porch light, I could see tear stains.
“You shouldn’t have taken the watch without asking.”
“I did ask.”
“And I said I’d think about it.”
“You never gave it a second thought. Anyway, what right do you have to waltz onto my private property and take things?”
She forgot that when it comes to waltzing onto people’s private property and taking things, she is not the only one with talent. “I took what belonged to me.”
“You’re so nasty. Making up that stupid story for Rachel. Do you have any idea what you’d get in court for that performance?”
“So sue me. You’re the one who took my watch.”
“Well, I never broke into your home to take it. Besides, I have a legal and moral right to that watch.”
“A moral right?” I would have laughed if I wasn’t so angry.
“He was my father.”
“He was my husband.”
“Blood is thicker than water.”
“Oh come on.”
“I will sue you then. Don’t think I won’t. If nothing else, I can prove your negligence as a mother, and your complete abrogation of your parental responsibilities.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Come to court and find out.”
The hollow sound of her feet pounding down the front steps – doom-doom, doom-doom – is with me still.
I asked myself then as I have so many times since if I was a bad mother. A breed of woman with a piece of genetic material missing from her DNA, otherwise, why wouldn’t she be sweet, loving, kind, nurturing, giving, forgiving – all the so-called natural things that are a squeeze for me to manifest? What mother steals from her child? Not even an animal mother. A wicked mother.
I took the watch out of its place in my bureau. But all the rubbing I could do along that cracked crystal made no difference. My charm did not work when it came to my child. I cried into the early morning, and sleep, when it came, was flat as death.
*
If I had my time back, what would I do differently? When Surinder asked if she could go to gymnastics camp in Oregon that spring, would I have said no, not this year, wait until you’re sixteen – instead of nodding my head, procrastinating, thinking she’ll never go? When she came home selling magazines and chocolates to raise money to pay her own way, could I have taken one less subscription, bought one less box of almonds, and said, good effort, try again next year? When her teacher came by the house one afternoon to discuss the situation, could I have pleaded a long-planned family vacation, a pressing medical problem, anything – except what I did say – that I would never allow my daughter to go to the United States of America?
“I’m very sorry.” Her teacher shook her head sadly. “This is a lost opportunity for her.” I closed the door, angry at the interfering teacher, and no less certain in my principles.
“You can’t tell me what to do!” Surinder shrieked from the bathroom that evening, where she had locked herself in. Behind the door, water ran. Things thrown hit the wall. With a rattle and a thump, something collapsed on the floor.
“Surinder, please try and understand.” I hit the door with the heel of my hand.
“Don’t touch that door again – or I’ll go and I’ll never come back.”
From another teenager, it would have been an idle threat. From her, it was a distinct possibility.
She calmed down enough to listen to Graham when he arrived home an hour later. She let him in the bathroom. I tried to listen, but their voices were indistinct, and I couldn’t bring myself to squat beside the keyhole. Thirty minutes later, she went to her room and he came downstairs.
“What did you say?”
“I just tried to tell her about the Vietnam War – and the draft.” He shrugged. “I don’t think I did such a hot job.”
“Well, your audience is not exactly receptive, is she?”
He took the lid off a pot of soup and inhaled. “Sometimes you’re a little hard on her.”
“What?”
“I just think you should lay off her a little.”
“That’s so unfair,” I cried. God, I hated it when they both ganged up on me. “Don’t you hear the way she speaks to me?”
Graham ladled soup. The subject was closed. But more importantly, the gymnastics team went without Surinder.
“Did you and Dad live under a rock or something?” she said three years later. In her final year of high school, she was working on a history project. She had spread a file of newspaper clippings from the library across the kitchen table. “How could you just turn your backs and walk out?”
“It was important to your father,” I said. “And, by extension, important to me. It was a matter of principle.”
“Principle? Principle is staying back
and fighting for what you believe in. At least, that’s what you and Dad taught me.”
“Dad could never go to war. He could have never killed anyone.”
“I’m not talking about that. Look. It’s all here. Here’s a guy from Minnesota who went to jail for three years. Here’s a guy from Florida who got elected to the state legislature and fought to change the law. Here are three women who started their own lobby group in Washington. The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time and Newsweek, and even the frigging Vancouver Sun. They’re filled with examples.”
“Don’t say frigging.”
“You had a choice. You make it sound like you didn’t. That’s cowardice.”
“Your father was not a coward.”
“And then you skipped Grandpa’s funeral. Unbelievable. Nothing would’ve stopped me from being at Dad’s. Nothing.”
Surinder’s accusation hit a nerve. For I had many doubts still about missing Dad’s funeral, about having never again seen any of the rest of my family left in Michigan. Though, at the time, it seemed the right thing to do, as every year passed, I wondered if my fear had been misplaced, if I had misjudged the situation. The voices inside me veered back and forth, until I couldn’t stand it anymore, and I’d dismiss them – until the next time something raised that memory, and I had to once more deal with my misgivings. How could I explain to that angry face when I myself didn’t even understand, when I didn’t have an explanation good enough for the voice of judgment that confirmed I had failed my father?
“I’m sorry about that,” I said. “I wish I had gone.”
“Sorry? That’s the best you can say after fucking up so majorly? You’re not fit to be anyone’s mother.” She swept the papers to the floor and ran from the room.
*
When Mac gets back, he and Fee have a private conversation. Together, they decide he will bunk in with Jason for now – and they will loan me $5,000, no interest, repayable by the time their son enters university or college. That gives me about eight years. It is a stretch for them, and a far cry from the amount I need, but I accept. Perhaps it will get Ed Malone started.
For the rest, I try the bank. Under its tasteful clock tower, Saltspring’s version of a skyscraper, an equally decorous loans officer conjures up impossible figures. The payments will leave me with less than fifty dollars a month for food, taxes, clothing and other expenses. Though I am accustomed to living off very little, this will never work. Even if I could find some new students to tutor. So I have no choice. I must ask Surinder.
This Innocent Corner Page 16