They Left Us Everything

by Plum Johnson

  I discover that the swimming pool at the Centennial library three blocks away has an aqua-fit class. I’m able to swim with the seniors using the set of tickets I found in Dad’s top drawer. After his retirement, Dad used to walk down to the Centennial pool every day to luxuriate in what he called their “free hot water.” They offered free swims for senior citizens, but Dad went for the showers. The tickets are so antiquated they cause the young girls at the check-in desk to giggle. This group of women in aqua fit, roughly my age, gives me an instant community and leavens my days of solitude. I start to feel reconnected to what used to be my hometown. There was a time when I knew everybody. Now I know only the immediate neighbours. Sambo’s best friend, Pucci, lives in a house across the garden, and sometimes I take Sambo there to play while Pucci’s owners, Phil and Lesley, feed me cappuccinos and keep an eye on me. At night I feel comforted when I can see their lights glowing through the trees.

  The following week my friend Jan arrives to help me clean out Mum’s kitchen. Jan is a loyal and nurturing friend, a thoughtful artist who used to work as a chef. Her disposition is as sunny as her wavy blond hair, but Jan is meticulously stylish and I worry that she’s in for a shock: nothing in her world is ever out of place, while here in Mum’s kitchen, the mess is like a creeping mould. I’ve explained to her how onerous this house-cleaning task might be, but she passes no judgment. She just laughs and says she’ll be happy to do it. This is, of course, before she sees what’s in the cupboards. I’ve warned her that we once heard Chris’s teenage daughter scream, “Omigod, this jam’s best-before date is before I was born!”

  The kitchen is a large square room with the harvest table placed smack in the middle, like a traffic obstacle. The electric stove and fridge sit next to each other on one side of the room, while the sink and cupboards are on the opposite wall. The third wall is a bank of tall windows overlooking the garden. The toaster is plugged in next to the sink, but the electric kettle is plugged into the stove—as far away from a water source as possible. There are no counters to speak of and the table is unsuitable for this purpose since it holds all the clutter of Mum’s desk. The dishes and dishwasher are in a separate room altogether—in the pantry. The glasses and cutlery are even farther away—in the dining room.

  The simple act of making tea seems to require a meditative hike of a thousand memories—back and forth and around the traffic obstacle, stumbling over chairs, knocking over vases of plastic flowers, circling through three different rooms. I collect my cup from the pantry, spoon from the dining room, tea bag from the kitchen, then back to the pantry for the teapot, and back to the kitchen for the sugar. Then I make three trips around the table to fill the kettle from the stove with water from the sink. It’s almost as ritualistic as a geisha ceremony.

  The fridge is totally unidentifiable: it’s camouflaged as an oversized scrapbook, with dozens of pots and pans stacked precariously on top. On the door, grease-stained magnets— shaped like carrots, orange slices, ice-cream cones, and letters of the alphabet—hold hundreds of overlapping family photos, grandchildren’s crayon drawings, and newspaper clippings. There’s a printed potholder, stuck there by Dad, that reads A FAT WIFE AND A BIG BARN NEVER DID ANY MAN HARM.

  The kitchen cupboards are packed with stale, outdated food. Jan asks why there are so many tins of stewed tomatoes and mushroom soup, and I tell her this is because Mum was a devotee of The I Hate to Cook Book, written by Peg Bracken in 1961. Like most good cooks, Jan is unfamiliar with this book, but Mum had a first edition. All Peg’s recipes had either mushroom soup or stewed tomatoes as their main ingredient, and Mum learned that to be a good cook all you really needed was a good can opener.

  Curiously, it was published the same year as Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, mirroring the choices and double messages given to young wives in the fifties. Back then, you could don your lacy apron, have martinis waiting when your husband got home, and be proud that your kitchen exuded the aroma of boeuf bourguignon or, like my mother, you could be liberated—wearing a favourite green apron with pockets for tennis balls and emblazoned with I’D RATHER PLAY TENNIS THAN COOK in big black letters. If we needed Mum for anything, all we had to do was walk three blocks down to the Oakville Club. There she’d be, standing on centre court, facing opponents half her age, running them ragged and winning every shot by strategically placing balls on the tape with a spin.

  Long before fast food became the Holy Grail, Mum was an avid pioneer: the faster the better. In fact, to Mum, food was mostly irrelevant. Good conversation—with lots of laughter— was the essential ingredient. To this end, she delighted in mixing guests who might otherwise never have met. She might introduce her Portuguese cleaning woman to the Portuguese trade commissioner or, at a dinner party, seat a bishop beside a draft dodger.

  Her sense of humour had a mischievous quality. I remember the night Dad asked her to prepare a five-star meal for some visiting dignitaries from his head office. You’d think he would have known better. Once the guests were seated, Mum carried in the casserole dish. But before Dad could start serving she ran into the kitchen, giggling, and grabbed me.

  “Here,” she whispered. “Put this in front of your father!”

  I naively took the large plate, which was covered by an upturned silver bowl, and placed it in front of Dad. Mum followed after me and made a grand speech to the guests about how proud she was that Dad had become such a bigwig that he spent his whole life travelling and ignoring his family. Then she whipped off the cover. Sitting in the middle of the big china plate was a small round tin that said RAT POISON.

  “Don’t get indigestion,” she told him as the guests roared with laughter at Dad’s expense.

  Mum learned from The I Hate to Cook Book that to make a regal appetizer all you had to do was slop consommé soup straight from the tin into a pretty cloisonné bowl and sprinkle dried celery seeds on top. Her favourite recipe was something called Dr. Martin’s Mix—a scrambled mess of ground beef, rice, and mushroom soup. It could sit on the stove forever, and frequently did. Once when Mum took off for the States to visit an old school friend, she left this casserole for us to eat while she was away. Dad reheated it every night for eight days until we refused to eat it anymore. Then he put it on the floor—and even the dog walked away.

  But Mum’s worst meal was liver, which she felt compelled to feed us every Thursday night. It was good for our blood, she told us. She’d lift the meat like a slimy, dead rat, throw it in the frying pan, slam on a lid, chunk ice in her scotch, and go off to watch Walter Cronkite deliver the CBS evening news. As soon as we heard Walter say “And that’s the way it is …” we knew what we’d find on our plates.

  We weren’t allowed to “get down” from the table until our plates were clean, but Robin—who was blessed with a face like a chipmunk—learned to hide whatever food he didn’t like deep inside the pockets of his pudgy cheeks. When we later got ready for bed and climbed into our communal bath, Robin would pretend to go deep-sea diving, gradually releasing from his mouth bubbles of grey-speckled scum that would float to the top of our bathwater.

  Before Jan chucks out the old tins and packages, I ask her to document them.

  “What do you mean?” she asks.

  “You know … like copy down the name, manufacturer, and best-before dates.” I hand her a pencil and pad of paper.

  “Why would you want to do that?”

  “Robin is documenting all the books in the library,” I tell her, “so why shouldn’t the food in the kitchen have equal significance? The food tells an even better story of the life lived here—don’t you think?”

  Jan just laughs and shakes her head, but I describe the documents Robin has found relating to our great-great-grandfather’s ships in the early 1800s. The receipts with their prices for items like food, rope, fabric, and wine are fascinating to me—real domestic glimpses of history. If someone hadn’t recorded them, how would we ever know?

  I show Jan Mum’s cook
books and ask her to document those, too, since I don’t trust Robin to do it. They take up a whole shelf above the kitchen sink. They’re a slanted, jumbled mess, most of them crammed with clippings and held together with elastic bands. Pages are stuck together with whatever she was slopping around that night, and there are mummified maggots in the bindings. Despite all these books, I don’t ever remember Mum baking—except to make us each a birthday cake once a year, and this she did with a Betty Crocker mix. For dessert, she gave us Jell-O. If she was feeling particularly festive, it had bits of canned fruit floating in it. Sometimes, she just gave us the whole box of powder and we licked it off our fingers.

  While Jan works away in the kitchen, I start taking inventory of every piece of furniture, china, glassware, silverware, and artwork in the house. I go room by room, making a list and taking digital photographs. The fact that this house has space for everything is both its beauty and its curse. In the mudroom I take a photo of the cast-iron woodstove. The last time we used it was in 1954, during Hurricane Hazel.

  I remember the fierce roar of the winds and the seemingly endless rain, but what I remember most was the warm, smoky air in the mudroom, the crush of people’s legs, and the camaraderie of our neighbours who, with all the electricity knocked out for three days, had come to cook on our woodstove. Today, though, when I open the stove I find nothing but mismatched woollen mittens.

  Next, I take pictures of Dad’s workroom. The walls are covered in corkboard, to which are nailed packages of old ski wax, lassos of twine, boxes of putty, and odd metal brackets. Small baby-food jars hold nuts, bolts, screws, and nails. Brackets hold hammers, saws, and various lengths of rope. Beside every bracket, Dad has traced the outline of the tool that belongs in the spot and thumbtacked a sign: ANNE! PUY BACK! Since Dad’s death, the room has accumulated wicker baskets, plastic flowers, broken lamps, old china, and tinfoil plates—something Mum could never bring herself to throw away. Dad would be appalled.

  It was in this room that Dad taught us how to build things— everything from water wheels to bookshelves to lamps. And it was here where, as a surprise for my ninth birthday, Dad built me a set of footlights for my theatre in the basement. I found them under my bed when I woke up in the morning. Dad had built the set out of old mahogany, shaping it like a window box tilted on an angle and wiring it with four electric light bulbs. We painted the bulbs different colours with some old house paint, which meant that when they heated up during my plays they gave off the steamy smell of burnt turpentine.

  The windows overlook what used to be our sandbox, where we played all day with buckets and spades, creating sandcastles and imaginary battlefields. It’s a graveyard now, full of decapitated tin soldiers just below the surface. An incinerator stood beside it in the form of an old oil drum, flaky with rust. Every family had one—it was early recycling; garbage was taken to the dump while paper products were burned in the backyard. Dad burned ours each weekend, filling the air with acrid smoke.

  But he never burned newspapers—they were too useful.

  After Mum had read them cover to cover, they became Dad’s caulking gun—his answer to everything. He had a special cupboard in the pantry where he saved them, stacked in a neat, precise pile. He told of using newspapers during the war, inside his boots when his soles were worn out and inside his greatcoat for added protection when he was marching against the wind. Newspapers drained our bacon in the kitchen, wrapped good china, insulated the beds between mattress and springs, cleaned spills, lined shelves, trained dogs, formed the base of our evening fires in the old lake-stone fireplace, and kept drafts from seeping in around the edges of the windows. Each spring, when the heavy storm windows were taken down, neatly folded strips of newspaper would tumble out. Dad saved those folded strips and used the same ones year after year. Some strips have been here since we moved in, dating back to the Eisenhower era. One strip documents Queen Elizabeth’s coronation.

  In the long winter evenings Dad taught us the finer points of folding newspapers into mini fire logs, almost willing them to return to their original incarnation. It was a precise art, like origami. We wove them into tightly compacted accordions, guaranteed to burn slowly. If our accordions didn’t pass muster, we had to unravel them and start again. I could fold those flaming origami accordions in my sleep, but I could never understand putting all that energy into something that went up the chimney in a puff of smoke.

  In the evening, Jan and I take a break. She stops counting tins of stewed tomatoes and volunteers to make us a glamorous dinner while I relax with my art project on the computer. When I finish the first few layers of Romeo and Juliet, I call her excitedly to come look. I point to the abstract squares of pink and orange on my screen, made up of thousands of tiny letters.

  “Look at this! I’ve just compressed some layers … and there’s a broken heart! See it … in the middle?”

  “Omigosh!” she says. “It’s beautiful! How many letters did you use?”

  I check my paper, full of counted letters crossed off like marks on a convict’s wall. “Thirty-five thousand two hundred and sixty-two!”

  She looks shocked. “You counted every single one … like all the a’s … and all the b’s … and …?”

  “Yep—it’s taken a week, but I’m almost a quarter of the way there.”

  She laughs. “Maybe tomorrow you should come help me count the tins of stewed tomatoes!”

  Tonight there are no tomatoes in Jan’s recipe. She’s made a moist, stuffed pork tenderloin, artfully arranged on the plate. Dessert is baking in the oven—a bread pudding made from croissants slathered in a caramel sauce. The kitchen is filled with a rich, buttery aroma. I tell Jan that we’ll serve it on Mum’s best dessert dishes.

  I go into the pantry and bring out two of the wavy, scalloped glass plates faceted in diamond patterns that sparkle in the light. These were the dishes reserved for special occasions and they could never go in the dishwasher—they had to be hand-washed. I grew up thinking they were the most valuable things in the house, but in the 1970s, after I’d married and moved away, I discovered the truth: that how you’re taught to treat something is what gives it value. I’d gone to a hardware store to buy light bulbs, and moving down the aisle towards the back of the store, I saw a stack of the very same dishes. Stunned and delighted, I bought every one they had and gave my mother a new batch for Christmas.

  “I found these at a hardware store!” I told her, thinking she’d be thrilled at my find.

  Mum couldn’t stop laughing. “What did you pay?”

  “Only $1.25.”

  “Well you got gypped!” she said. “Mine only cost thirty-five cents … at Woolworth’s!”

  In a twist of fate these pressed-glass dishes are now described as “vintage” on eBay and sell for twenty dollars each—increasing more times in value than Granny’s Tiffany clock from 1865.

  The next morning, Jan and I are back at work: she’s still taking inventory in the kitchen, unearthing more rusted tins from the far reaches of the cupboards, and I’m in the dining room, itemizing kitsch in the cutlery drawer.

  Dad believed that in the dining room children should be models of manners and discipline—seen but not heard. He ritualized Sunday lunches into agonizing, drawn-out affairs that tested our patience to the limit. Especially when we were hungry. And if we fidgeted or misbehaved he stood us in the corner. The dining room’s square alcove meant that Dad could stand all five of us in corners at the same time, and he frequently did—probably wishing he could stand Mum in the sixth. He and Mum often ended up alone at the ten-foot-long table, carrying on their conversation as if we weren’t there.

  In the corners, we picked at the dining-room wallpaper in silent revenge. The leafy green toile of red-coated fishermen casting their flies over rivers has been here since Mum pasted it up in 1952. I notice now that, halfway up the wall, all the fishing rods have their tips picked off.

  I find the “Cuss Bank” that used to sit on the table. It’s a c
eramic head of a man with a grimaced expression and a money slot in the top of his black hat. We’d never been exposed to swear words at home (I’d never even heard the word “shit” until I went to university, and when my roommate said it as she slipped on a bridge, I almost fainted from shock), but as children there were two really bad things we were never allowed to say: one was “Shut up!” and the other, “I’m bored.” If these words slipped out we forfeited five cents into the Cuss Bank.

  To Mum, boredom was almost an offence against God. She believed nothing was boring and anybody could be fascinating, so long as you were clever enough to ask the right questions. If you were bored, then this was your failing, your lack of imagination—it made you boring. Furthermore, to tell somebody to shut up was unpardonably rude—even though, or maybe especially because, with Mum it was hard to get a word in edgewise.

  I also find Mum and Dad’s wedding cake topper, made of plaster by an army chef during the war; prophetically, it was a battleship. Now it looks like a shipwreck, its hull encrusted with barnacles of ancient icing, its masts dripping with stalactites of dirty-white tulle. Beside it is a small silver jigger that Mum gave Dad on their first wedding anniversary in Hong Kong. On its rim is inscribed HERE’S TO MANY MORE!—and it’s so like Mum, hedging her bets with a sarcastic double entendre. This time, though, the joke was on her: she was the one who got driven to drink by their marriage. Dad tried to embarrass her by stacking her empty gin bottles beside the woodpile in the garage until he had a wall of glass, but it was only Sandy who could get Mum to quit. On his deathbed, he asked Mum for two things: that she’d stop drinking and that she’d stop fighting with Dad—and she granted him both wishes.