by Dian Day
“Eat first,” said Salvador. The rest of my brothers ran up behind him, exploding land mines and firing sub-machine guns. It did not bother them in the least to confuse the timelines of warfare and weaponry.
“Swim,” repeated my mother.
“Eat,” repeated Salvador.
My mother looked at the six of them, standing above her like a battalion of twins on the grass. She was outnumbered and surrendered quickly.
“You’ll take Fred,” she insisted. It was always her one condition. “And behave yourselves!” She handed over the ten-dollar bill.
Another war cry. Salvador took the money and clenched it in his fist. Nicholas swept me up into his arms so abruptly that the pseudo-pail in my hands spilled its meagre load of greased rocks onto an empty towel with a clack. My brothers ran unevenly toward the far side of the park, half carrying, half dragging me. Salvador held the money ahead of him like a torch to guide the way in battle. Over Nicholas’s shoulder, I could see my mother lie down awkwardly on the towel and shrink into a pink brush stroke on a strip of turquoise paper.
My brothers ran through the park and right past the people in the line-up for hot dogs. There was a small thicket of trees behind the canteen, and they made their way there. I never knew if they planned such things when out of earshot, or if they operated so instinctively that consultation was unnecessary. Without speaking the four of my brothers wearing swim suits undid the flys of their jeans and pulled the drawstrings from their tartan trunks.
“Here’s a good one,” said Abraham, and he kicked hard at the base of a maple tree about as big around as my body.
They sat me down facing the tree, with one leg on each side of the trunk.
“Hug the tree, bat-boy,” said Samuel. I put my arms around the tree, and leaned my cheek gently against the bark. I knew I only had a moment to get as comfortable as possible.
They tied my arms and legs together with the four drawstrings. They were not boy scouts, so the knots were untidy and plentiful. In short order I was a boy with a tree growing up through me, in a small glade in a busy park, and my brothers were gone.
If anyone had looked closely, they might have seen enough of me to make them curious. But no one did, until, much later, my sunburnt mother wandered through the whole of the park calling the names of her boys, Nick-Nat-Sam-Sal-Abe-Al-Fred! and came across the margarine container, like a solitary crumb, pointing in my direction. I didn’t cry out, even then.
“Where did they go?” she asked the tree wearily.
“I’m here,” I answered quietly. The pattern of the bark was imprinted into my face for hours afterwards.
I READ IN NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC that one in every four hundred sets of fraternal twins will have different fathers. I knew this was possible with dogs—that some of the puppies could be fathered by a bull mastiff while their litter mates could be fathered by a poodle—but I thought it was just an urban legend about humans. But with National Geographic, you know you have to believe what you read. So then I was thinking about different fathers and that maybe I wasn’t my father’s child after all. Maybe my brothers were only half mine. Maybe I didn’t have to own any more of them than that.
I flipped through the rest of that issue very carefully, and thereafter was always on the lookout as I stood in the grocery store checkout line. I read through countless headlines: “Boy Bites Shark” and “Flying Saucer Crushes Cow” and “Hot Tub Time Machine Takes Elvis Impersonator to Ancient Egypt to Meet Cleopatra.” I wanted to read something somewhere that would make it possible for my brothers to have been the genetic product of some woman aside from my mother. I would have read that anywhere, even in the National Enquirer, and believed it.
SOMETIMES I GO TO SEE MY MOTHER and find her asleep in her room. The lights are on and her bedside radio is tuned to static. I brought her the radio a few years ago—the second radio mistake I’ve given my mother—thinking that music would calm her, and knowing she wouldn’t be able to handle inserting a cassette tape or, later, a CD, into a machine and pushing Play. I thought that a radio wouldn’t have to be operated. I thought the staff could turn it on in the morning and off at night, and that the cost to them of a few seconds of their time bracketing the day would pay dividends in terms of the long hours in the parenthesis. I thought she would sing along with the oldies, and somehow be more content.
I was wrong, as I am about most things. The knobs that control volume and tuning are a perpetual fascination to her when the machine is on. Passersby in the hallway might hear a few syllables from an eager broadcaster, or a few chords whispering like an aborted lullaby; they might catch a glimpse of my mother up on one elbow in bed, bent over the device like a scientist conducting an experiment of earth-saving magnitude. Her fingers turn the dial quickly or slowly, but she always ends her study on the space between two stations, at top volume. And then she rolls from her side to her back and goes to sleep.
When I go in and sit, the way I did this morning, I turn the volume down slowly, so she will not wake up. I examine the ragged lines of her face, noting which of them are beginning to appear in my own mirror these last few years. I feel her skin, which is often clammy when she sleeps, as if the heat inside her body runs to static like the radio, and alternates hot and cold. Sometimes I even reach out my hand and stroke her forehead or her wrist, tentatively, because touch between us is a foreign country. It is a land we visited rarely during my childhood; some things, it seems, need to be practised for a lifetime for them to come easily. I look at other visitors here greeting their aging parents, saying goodbye at the end of their visits, reaching out readily for an embrace that seems second nature. I practise while my mother is unconscious and can’t judge my clumsy efforts to comfort her.
MY MOTHER GETS A LITTLE BETTER and then much worse and then a little better again, in the way that people with damaged brains often do. The brain is a strange instrument. When some of the synapses get broken or frayed, these minute electrical strings can sometimes play one note over and over, like a harp being tuned. Other times those broken connections cause the spoken words to leap and tumble and turn and crash like the noise made by a small unmusical child hammering away at the piano.
I take her for walks in her wheelchair. It is often easier to deal with tragedy from behind, without having to look at it face-on. So I push the chair, and my mother sits passively and talks vivacious nonsense into the empty air in front of her as we tour the streets around the nursing home. It is probably more accurate to say that we creep along, adagio, going nowhere. The woollen blanket around her knees slips every half-block or so, through some unknown force, since, while we walk, I never see her move so much as a gloved finger. Her body is merely an unresisting house for her ruined mind.
The obvious tragedy is that my mother suffered, too early in her life, a blood clot in her temporal lobe that left her with a peculiar kind of dementia: Wernicke’s aphasia. She was young when it happened, and has grown old only in the intervening years—as though her body finally caught up with her mind. Even now, she is still one of the youngest residents of her nursing home. The others stand resolutely on the threshold of death and beckon her forward into old age.
It is easy for anyone to see that such an event, and its aftermath, is indeed tragic. But we all have a human tendency to personalize tragedy. I have no idea who she is, or I should say, was. Maybe most of all I want to know who she was—beyond being my mother, beyond being the overwhelmed single parent of three sets of identical twins and one disappointing singleton, a mother who would do anything to keep a roof over her children’s heads, however much it might have leaked. I want to see beyond the details of her harried life to the origin of her exquisite voice. I want to know why she only ever sang alone. I see her always in that childhood kitchen, where there was never enough light. I can see so clearly the paint peeling from the walls, the cracked linoleum, the tilted wooden chairs, but I remember her only dimly
. She is slightly out of focus, and, what is more, almost always has her back to me. Perhaps it is a family trait to turn away from tragedy. I can still smell damp plaster and overwashed clothes and overcooked meat—we boys thrived on root vegetables and cheap cuts of beef—but I cannot remember her younger face at all. I can hear the creak of the kitchen floor and the tennis ball against the front of the house and Mrs. Bern’s raised voice through the thin walls between our houses.
And I can hear my mother singing. Her voice rose and fell like the beating of birds’ wings, their tempo at times languid, at other times volante. I realize now that Mrs. Bern would have heard her—getting up after a bad dream for a glass of water at three a.m.—must have heard her, through the shared kitchen wall. I wonder what she thought of those sounds, that “live” music, whether she ever said anything about it to my mother, whether it was acknowledged between them that my mother sang alone in the kitchen when even her twins were soundly asleep in their beds, and that her voice was something remarkable and unearthly.
With clipped wings, my mother sits in her wheelchair while I push her across the road to the coded entrance doors of her final home. The last leaves skitter in front of her, and she points along the road at some unseen vision. “There is the peanut feed it chiplets, no it’s a, no, I have never seen one that, I’ve seen it, black and white. I won’t do that! The sign is mis-crossed, miss-matched, cross-crissed. No way to, go downstairs. Please. Don’t tie me up. Not manmade! Not marmalade!”
I did what I always do when she starts to get agitated.
The water is wide, I cannot get o’er, I sang.
And neither have I wings to fly
And she continued:
Give me a boat that will carry two
And both shall row, my love and I.
I punched in the security code posted in large numerals beside the keypad—designed to keep the residents in rather than the public out—and we went in through the yawning doors, singing. The reception staff all looked up, even though they are used to our musical entrances. They are my mother’s most appreciative audience.
A ship there is and she sails the sea
She’s loaded deep as deep can be
But not so deep as the love I’m in
I know not if I sink or swim.
We went up in the elevator to the kitchen on the third floor, the song ending as the door opened. I made her some toast, and I found the jar of marmalade with her name on it at the back of the fridge, but she wouldn’t eat it. She just kept saying “No.”
“No, no, no, no, no, no, no.”
“What is it you want, then?” I asked her, eating it myself. “Strawberry jam? Peanut butter?” There were always little packets of things in a basket on the counter.
“Wagner,” she said, “sand wishes.” There was only the slightest of pauses before she was off on a monologue, stretto, never finishing one thoughtless fragment before she veered off with another.
WHEN I WAS TEN, our neighbour Mrs. Bern died. For some reason, my mother took me with her to the funeral. It was the first time I had seen anybody dead. It is still pretty much the only time I have seen anybody dead, unless you count Mr. Willard J. Sexton whose unmoving feet I saw through the sidelight of his front door when I was delivering his mail. I never saw any of the rest of Willard, just went in to the first shop on Princess Street and called the police and an ambulance, and I heard the sirens cry through the neighbourhood and stop in the correct northeasterly direction, and a few weeks later I saw the family bickering on the lawn about his belongings, and after another while a “for sale” sign appeared in front of his house.
We never had a dog or a cat or a hamster, so we never had any little life lessons about death. We were not animal people; or perhaps it was just that my brothers were so wild that we did not need any more of the jungle inside than we already had.
So, Mrs. Bern was it.
The coffin was open at her funeral.
It is safe to say I did not understand what had happened to her, and I did not understand what death was. I knew Mrs. Bern was not asleep—or I should say, I knew this pale and waxy face would never smile or scowl again, would never call me from her doorway to go and ask my mother for a half cup of sugar, would never whisper that the cookie should remain a secret, since she had not enough to supply all my brothers. I knew this recumbent body would never stand on our corner waiting for the knife sharpening man on his rounds, would never sweep the front step after the rain, would never again wag its finger at my mother with concern about “the boys.” I knew that face and that body would not talk or move again, but I think I did not exactly know that it was Mrs. Bern.
I saw her lifeless body in the coffin, drawn past by my mother’s hand on my thin wrist, jostled by a few ragged mourners in front and behind us. I saw the overdone makeup on her face, could have reached out my free hand and touched the moisture on her upper lip, as if she had broken into a sweat climbing up the ladder to heaven. I looked keenly at her finest dress, smelled the overpowering smell of formaldehyde masked half-heartedly by sparse white chrysanthemums. I took in all that, but still, when we got home I remember sneaking outside to knock at Mrs. Bern’s front door, as if she would answer. All I could think about, standing there in the fog, waiting fruitlessly, was the novel realization that she was perhaps the only person besides me, having been awakened in the pre-dawn by music from heaven, who had known or cared about my mother singing.
THE FOUR CONSONANTS EARLY MUSIC ENSEMBLE meets at my house. The practice room at the shop is full most nights with guitar and flute lessons. Besides, the four of us probably couldn’t fit our bodies in that sound-proof room, let alone our instruments. We hold it at my place because everyone else has a family. We started out by rotating, but it soon became obvious that children don’t stop playing tag around the piano and dogs don’t stop throwing up on the carpet and spouses don’t stop burning the spaghetti sauce and in-laws don’t stop telephoning from Japan just because four people have decided to make music together in the living room.
We’ve been playing together for over fifteen years, pretty much ever since I finished university. We’ve played our way through Varrick’s prostate cancer treatment, Geoff’s affair and subsequent divorce, and the birth of two of Jiro’s three children. This ornamentation no doubt enriches the music—though sometimes it’s overdone and can get tiresome; too many details to listen to at once, the notes overembellished, cutting into the silence.
I’m usually the one who ends up finding most of our pieces, probably for the same reason: that everyone else has a family. All I am is music. I think for them it can be like changing one more diaper or loading the dirty dishes into the dishwasher after one more meal. More of the same, so they just do it without thinking. And I guess it’s true, for them. They don’t always live music; sometimes they just live their lives. Music fits in around the edges, fills in the gaps. They can see where music begins and ends. It is containable, comprehensible, controllable. At times it moves them deeply, but they always come back from it. There is always a final bar played or sung, and then a rest. A return to real living: birthday parties, deadlines at work, a glass of wine with dinner, shovelling the walk, making love to their wives.
I think the others see our time together as a kind of escape. They unwind with music. Geoff, Varrick, Jiro—they’re all getting a bit older; performance doesn’t seem such a big deal any more. Increasingly, they have things to work out with themselves. They no longer need us to have an audience.
It’s been a huge relief for me, this shift. I used to feel like I was holding them back when I said I didn’t want to play in public. There was some tension in the early years. We spent all this time “practising.” It was hard for them not to think they were working themselves up to something, some reward, some Day of Judgement: Would they be good enough? Would they get through the Pearly Gates? Would they be loved?
The word “performance” comes from the Latin per, which means “thoroughly,” and the Old French fournir, which means “to complete.” It’s strange that it refers to men’s sexual achievements as well as to the presentation of a musical or theatrical work in front of an audience. Somehow, in both enterprises, we have to measure up.
I SAVED MY BUSKING MONEY—nickels and dimes and quarters, everything that was left over after paying for voice lessons—squirrelling it away among Ed’s new violin cases and broken snare drums. I emerged from my weekly bank-deposit excursion full of dust and paint chips, with a lighter step and a growing feeling of having successfully pulled something off, while all the while Ed determinedly pretended not to notice.
I’d been saving for over three months when I reclaimed my hidden cash, took it in bulging pockets a few blocks down the road to Steve Packer’s father’s electronics shop, and bought an AM/FM radio. I gave my mother that radio for her birthday the year I was eleven; I suppose she must have been forty or so, but at the time I had no sense of her age.
I don’t remember where the radio idea had come from, or what I thought the giving of it would do for her, or for me. I know I brought the box home reverently, as if it were gospel, capable of saving all of us with the mere tuning of a dial.
I brought it right in and gave it to her, without any wrapping, before my brothers could get hold of it.
“Here,” I said, and I held it out to her with my two scarred hands.
She didn’t reach for it immediately; she had her own hands in the washing machine, fishing for boys’ t-shirts in the cold grey water. “What is it?” she asked me, suspiciously.
“A birthday present,” I said. She dried her hands then, on a ragged tea towel, and took the thing from me to examine the pictures and writing on the box. “It’s a radio? Where did you get this?” And now she was accusing, and I saw all at once that she thought I had stolen it.