by Alex Pugsley
I was wary of Commander Cody. On a winter Wednesday at the newspaper drop-off, he once chased me into a snow bank and put snow down my back. In May, I was kicked out of the rec room so he and Uncle Lorne could watch a Clint Eastwood movie. And lately, now that both had grown greebly moustaches, Chris Cody had taken to commandeering my uncle on missions into the musty Halifax downtown—to the Hollis Street Tavern, the Ladies Beverage Room, and something called the Fabulous Lobster Trap. On Dominion Day Sunday, stepping out our backdoor to walk to St. Matthew’s United Church, my younger sisters and I happened upon Chris Cody’s recent vomit, some of which had fallen through the porch slats, but most of which was still intact, congealed in a kind of fractal dispersion pattern, swirls and streaks emanating from a wet epicentre not far from an unfortunately situated Malibu Skipper doll. Chris Cody was found in his clothes in our basement bathtub, Uncle Lorne in the wicker armchair, and our family’s station wagon on a sidewalk on Barrington Street, the passenger’s side of the vehicle wrapped around a utility pole. My father, not known for his severity, grounded Uncle Lorne for the rest of the summer and grimly recommended he seek out a better class of companion than Christopher Cody, who had been driving the car.
“Commander Cody has crash-landed,” my uncle said afterwards in his Boris the Spider voice. “He will be flying with his Lost Planet Airmen no more. He has been marooned on the Red Planet. Commander Cody, over and out.”
My sister Bonnie was blunt in her relief. “Thank God—that guy was such a gook.”
“A gook?” Uncle Lorne said, in his normal voice. “Bitsy, do you even know what a gook is?”
Bonnie used the term as she and Carolyn always did—to mean an awkward or unseemly person. “Chris Cody’s a gook,” said Bonnie, flatly.
“No, Bitsy,” said my uncle, with some impatience. “A gook’s a Viet Cong. As in Victor Charlie. As in they were blown up with gelignite. Why don’t you get that straight?”
~
That Wednesday there was no race home after the paper route. Uncle Lorne’s mood precluded it. He chain-smoked all the way back to Tower Road, preoccupied and changed. In the last few years, I’d noticed divagations. For most of my youth, Uncle Lorne was the lilting fall of the Byrds’ high harmony line in “Mr. Tambourine Man.” He was the kid staring with steady excitement at the movie poster for The Endless Summer. He was that brief half-second when he dipped his face forward before clearing his bangs from his eyes with a flick of the head. But now—now he was no longer the sort of candid, open-air kid you might approach on your first day in the Scout Troop or the Soccer Skills camp. He was no longer a kid. In one moment he was my colleague and pal, ironing the creases out of a Teen Titans comic or giving me the stick of bubble-gum from his baseball cards, and the next he was bringing home a fluorescent black light to place above a felt poster, or watching a Bruce Lee movie marathon, his dark bangs so swoopy and shaggy they barely allowed for a sight-line. By July of that year Uncle Lorne had become a longhaired freaky person, a hippie in a hemp poncho and bell-bottoms fraying beneath the soft heels of his suede Adidas sneakers. He was reedy, gangly, finishing a surge of growth that put him well over six feet, taller by far than Dompa or my father. He was still proudly himself, equal to any context, unsurprised by developments great and small, but he was losing interest. Just as I was beginning to really read and appreciate and care for The Justice League of America, Uncle Lorne couldn’t care less. For a while his curiosity was stayed by the Marvell Comics universe, especially the metaphysics and Kirby dots of The Silver Surfer, a loner adrift in the cosmos, as well as the Kirby titles started at DC, The New Gods and Mister Miracle, but his previous absorption was no longer evident. It was an effort for him to dream the superheroes, when before they’d sort of dreamed him. His thoughts entered their mythology only when my presence reminded him. “This place, Kink,” he said to me on that walk home, dropping a last cigarette on the sidewalk and scuffing it out with his sneaker. “This burg—” He sighed as if unable to delay a judgment that had become screamingly obvious. “It’s like living in the Bottle City of Kandor. It’s so cut off, it’s bogus. It’s beyond bogus. It’s so bogus, it’s rogus. It’s an embarrassment of rogusness. And everywhere fossified. Fwa!”
Arriving at our house, we saw my mother had left a note taped to the door, “Dinner at the Abbotts! Love Mom.” There’d been considerable interplay between the two households since the solstice. My sisters Faith and Katie were turning seven and five that summer and September and Autumn Dawn were turning six and four—and so best-friendships were made fast and fixed. It worked for my mother not only because she was in Midsummer every evening but because she was rehearsing a new play during the afternoon, something called Godspell, so she was at the theatre day by day by day, from eleven in the morning to eleven at night. When he wasn’t in New Brunswick volunteering at a summer camp, Mr. Abbott was building sets for Godspell, so Mrs. Abbott became the go-to parent for both families, a responsibility she met with deliberate composure. Of the two, it was Mrs. Abbott who seemed to me saintly. Vivien Abbott was the calm of a Peter, Paul and Mary song. She was slimness and silence and ovals. She wore her hair long and unstyled and parted in the middle, shaping her face in the oval of a cameo brooch. Soft on her nose were the side-lying ovals of her granny glasses. From her neck, a pendant swayed in elliptical arcs as she stirred a vegan stew made from backyard zucchini. Beside her, leaning against the kitchen wall, were two twin-arched gothic windows rescued from a falling-apart farmhouse, and, as she looked at us kids with calm, impassive eyes, supplying us with a very patient, open-ended expectancy, it was as if, in all her self-effacing ovals, she were somehow transparent—as if she were merely a frame through which to view the world. She was, on the contrary, at least to us kids, highly palpable for she conveyed in an instant her respect for the aims underlying a child’s inarticulacy, mystification, and helplessness. Vivien Abbott was one of those vigilant, soft-talking mothers who never had to raise her voice because children, sensing her intrinsic decency, never wanted to disappoint her. She went about braless in paint-flecked peasant smocks and overalls, sometimes the side-swell of a breast plumping into open sunlight. But Mrs. Abbott, and the Abbott family in general, acted as if nakedness wasn’t anything to particularly panic about—a principle rather new to our street. For some reason she had a reputation as a free-thinker and radical—censures I tried not to hold in mind as I was worried they would lead to restrictions on our visits. Earlier in the summer she let September-and-Autumn-Dawn and Faith-and-Katie paint the kitchen furniture any way they wanted—I was sitting on a chair splashed with many colours—and I decided these kinds of experiments explained her reputation for licentiousness.
The Abbott’s house, while not actually under construction, was primitively open concept. An interior wall had been partially demolished, plaster-and-planking standing by for the insertion of those gothic windows, and the place had the air generally of a workshop or folk art atelier. There was no real distinction, say, between Kitchen and Bedroom, where Autumn Dawn had forgotten three dinner bowls on a bedside table, or Painting Studio and Bathroom, where four silkscreened canvases were furled and stored in the plunger stand beside the toilet. Delivering the evening meal to Mr. Abbott in his garage workroom, it was not a shocker to pass a salamander’s terrarium given pride-of-place in the middle of the dining room table, or to find the back steps littered with yarn-and-stick God’s Eyes, or the backyard walkway strewn with books, where, for example, Harry the Dirty Dog, a long overdue library book, competed for space with two hardcover copies of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, an apt combination, as the day would have it. For Mr. Abbott, wispy in a denim shirt, wide-wale corduroy trousers, and Wallabee shoes, was working on cleaning and reassembling the Honda Black Bomber he and Mrs. Abbott had ridden to Canada six years before. Now, even to me, this looked like a never-ending side project, with all those parts and pieces lying on the floor, sacred relics of their four
teen-hundred-mile pilgrimage across the Allegheny and Appalachian mountains. But, as a single moth sputtered against the swaying light bulb that hung overhead, shadows forming and reforming under Mr. Abbott’s eyebrows, I remember shivering with an augury of different days to come as Uncle Lorne, placing the bowl of zucchini stew on a plywood worktable, asked in an unusually clear and respectful voice if Mr. Abbott might like some help repairing the motorcycle.
~
Godspell in our town was an event, a portent, an advent of the Sixties a few years after the decade had passed. Stages in Halifax were mostly determined by Noël Coward and George Bernard Shaw and, as my mother called them, “those jeezly Agatha Christie adaptations.” My mother’s loathing was a by-product of her rising animosity for Dawson Redstone, the artistic director of Neptune Theatre, a cunning Yorkshire man from whom she got, or sometimes didn’t get, parts in plays. But these pommy, cobwebby dramatic choices faded into the shadows beside the bright lights of Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell. My mother was forbidden to audition for Hair. Regardless of the purity of the work’s vision, my father thought it professionally questionable to pursue a situation whereby a client might hire a lawyer in the morning only to see that same lawyer’s wife “flouncing naked downstage” later that night. A deepening feud with Dawson Redstone precluded involvement in Superstar. But Godspell, the Broadway soundtrack for which was rarely off our living room turntable, set off my mother’s sense of possibility and vocation. Now in the newsreels of my mind, my father often appears in black and white. There he is in skinny suit and tie, holding a swaddled Carolyn for her christening photo. Or there he is in a formal grey-toned studio portrait to mark his appointment to Queen’s Counsel. Or there he is in a white-bordered snapshot where he seems to be giving the toast to the bride in the dining room at the Waegwoltic Club. But the images of the 1970s were suddenly free of borders and crowded instead with perky instamatic colours, just as the designs of the day were crowded with starbursts and poppies and flowers. My father’s concession to this freedom was to grow—for a few months—frizzly sideburns and to acquire, while on vacation in Antigua, an absurdly-speckled batik sports jacket that he was permitted to wear in continental North America exactly once. But my mother’s response was manifold. My mother came of age in the 1950s when Doris Day was the very model of the modern wife-and-mother. When a social situation required my mother to be on her best behavior, she went first to her Doris Day routine. She twinkled with good humour, good will, and good grace—with what a young woman thought was pleasantly expected of her in Polite Society. There was a pressure of unsaid opinion, yes, most often released in the steam of an awkward pause or an abrupt turn in topic. This implied what was thought but was never directly stated, so, moving on, no one need feel embarrassed. My sister, Faith, thinking later on this distillation process, would say, “You could never say anything bad with those ladies but the truth would always come out in a kind of backhanded compliment—making everyone feel weird and uncomfortable anyway.” Now my mother, after managing five pregnancies and six children, more than once blew a gasket. “Motherhood sucks,” was her postpartum remark when bringing home a final baby from the Grace Maternity. But her policy in public—in her mind—was always on the safe side of convention. She was a 1950s mom stranded in the 1970s. But meeting Vivien Abbott (and to a lesser extent another woman, Madge Wicker, who lies outside the purview of this current history) changed my mother, adjusted her understanding, and moved her to consider new schemes altogether. Why should she have hors d’oeuvres and dinner prepared every night at six o’clock—hurrying home to float olives and sliced radishes in a cut-glass water dish? Why should she be the one to ferry the kids to gymnastics and piano and soccer? There was an informal Sunday drop-in session at the Abbotts and, with Godspell up and running, my mother began attending what Gregor Burr, a colleague of my father, described as “some leftist, radical women’s lib bullshit.” How much value my mother saw in Vivien Abbott’s steadfast logic and fairmindedness I don’t know, but these meetings appealed to something not yet fully formed in her character and my mother, who for various reasons was always looking for the other half of her personality anyway, began not only to question the assumptions and conditions of her life but to cast around for a means to transform them.
~
All of this belonged, of course, to the doings of the adult world, a parallel universe a ten-year-old boy did his best to disregard. I kept to my crafts and sullen arts, mostly on the lookout for mutant zombies, radioactive spiders, and the remains of the space rocket that had brought me here to Earth. Charging recklessly down the basement stairs, I touched only the steps that didn’t creak. This meant leaping the bottom three stairs and immediately somersaulting—purely as a means to dissipate the tremendous shock of impact. This feat accomplished, I swung my hand into the darkness of the rec room, not wanting to be ambushed by supervillains, found the wall-switch and flicked on the overhead light. Satisfied I was alone, I turned the television on and, in a show of private athleticism, jumped backward into the wicker armchair. There settled, I began to consider my future with the cast of the PBS series Zoom. They were not the Justice League, true, but there was a costume of a sort (blue-and-maroon striped shirt, bare feet) and one did have to bring to the side one’s own signature power, witness Bernadette’s arm-swinging thaumaturgy. My musings were interrupted by my sister Bonnie. She walked between me and the glowing television, flicking the pull-tab of an unopened can of Fresca.
“What are you doing?” I asked. “I said ‘reserve.’ And I’m sitting down.”
“You can’t watch TV right now. You have to water the ficus.”
“What ficus?”
“If you don’t water the ficus, it will die. And you’re supposed to fill the humidifiers. Mom said.”
“She’s not home.”
“She will be. She’s coming home for the family meeting.”
I said I didn’t know about any family meeting, but even if I did, there was no knowing for certain I would be there.
“Oh you’ll be there,” said Bonnie. “Everyone has to be there.”
Continuing my own line of reasoning, I explained that people might be surprised by what I could do. If, for example, I decided I wished to become a professional decathlete and compete in the Montreal Olympics, then how did anyone know for sure I wouldn’t win the Montreal Olympics? Obviously they didn’t. I was unpredictable.
“Yeah, like you’ll go to the Olympics,” said Bonnie. “You can hardly run. You’ll probably never be able to run like a normal person. And you’re supposed to get a hip replacement when you’re thirty-five. That’s what the doctor told Mom. The orthopedic surgeon. So you probably won’t win anything.”
This interpretation did not exactly square with my own plans for myself and, in a gesture of correction, I slapped at the can of Fresca in Bonnie’s hand, sending it flying toward the wall where it collided with a metal bracket on the exposed underside of the folded-up ping-pong table. The can was now spinning on the carpet, a thin mist of Fresca spraying from a dented perforation in its centre.
Bonnie watched it for a moment, unmoved, then addressed me with matter-of-fact sangfroid. “You’re paying for that.”
I said I was not.
“You’re getting me a new one. You’re replacing it.”
I said if I wanted, I could run to the store and replace it. I just didn’t happen to want to run to the store at the moment.
“You couldn’t run to the store.”
I said of course I could run to the store—and back—and faster than she could ever dream of running to any store anywhere in all the worlds of the universe.
Bonnie gazed at me, unconvinced. “You want to make a bet?”
~
The proposed race is to The Little General, a grocery store and ice cream dispensary whose storefront is decorated with a bootleg Cap’n Crunch figure. It is on Spring Garden
Road, not an insurmountable distance for me, though going there and back almost doubles my recent Wednesday runs. Bonnie takes off like a shot. I choose a steadier pace, knowing that these “rabbits,” as Uncle Lorne calls them, tend to peter out after their adrenalin subsides. But Bonnie does not peter out. She vanishes up Tower Road until her shirt is a speck of red wavering into invisibility. By the time I arrive at the store counter, Bonnie has come and gone, a localized ache is persistent in my every other step, and I am unable to keep from limping. Trying to stay focused on the race, I draw on my reserves of berserker rage. It lasts two blocks before a searing pain escapes from my hip, as if my pelvis is beginning to crack. On South Street, I stop running and swear at the sky, horrified by my inadequacy, crazed to be living on a planet where such injustice is allowed to occur. In a sulk, I do not finish the race, I wander aimlessly, and a half-hour later I am walking up the back steps with a pint of chocolate milk and a G.I. Combat comic. The backdoor, strangely, is ajar, the hallway empty. On the kitchen table, double strangely, a mug of coffee is still steaming and so is the meatloaf and rice on the seven served plates. I call out for my mother, my sisters, my uncle, my shouts wending their way from righteous confusion to plaintive unease to all-out horror as I hurry upstairs to the vacant second floor. In the bathroom, I turn off a hot water tap. There is not a soul in the house and only now do I recall previous evenings when we have been directed to the Abbotts for dinner. But ten minutes banging on their front and back doors rouses no light or movement. I am in the third stage of panic, my worried brain flashing with abduction scenarios, when our station wagon coasts up the street, everyone in it but me—the family meeting. Uncle Lorne, uncoiling himself from the back seat and stepping to the curb, is wildly overtaken by my youngest sister, Katie, in such a rush her yellow flip-flop is left on the grass behind her. “Oh, Aubrey!” she says, ecstatic. She hugs me around my waist, her head sideways at my elbow. “We’re moving. We’re getting a new house! It’s so big. And everyone gets their own room. Even me!”