by Alex Pugsley
Before my father could answer, the doorbell rang.
~
Dodie Rumboldt was a sweet, dithery woman who dropped by our house for the flimsiest of reasons. She worried about everything and lived in a tizzy of worsening possibilities. My mother was loyal to her because they’d grown up next door to each other in Truro. “Dodie Rumboldt has wanted to be my best friend for forty-six years,” she said, on her way to the door, seeing who it was. Dodie: A Selected Oral History: “She was always big, you know? I mean big. I never knew her when she didn’t look like a tent coming toward you. And her wardrobe went purple for a while. She was one of those ladies in purple. Like you don’t know how much weight she’s gained because you’re distracted by all the purple? Let me tell you something. You’re not fooling the cheap seats. Then she got a boyfriend. Did wonders for her. She lost over a hundred and fifty pounds. Jogging with weights. Eating right. Looked great. But now? She’s gone too far. Can’t stop. Some thin. Scared skinny. She’s going to give herself a nervous breakdown. Well, her mother’s had terrible Alzheimer’s. Her mother’s in Saint Vincent’s on the third floor just out of it. Not much fun having a mother whose memory’s gone. But Dodie and her father have been bricks. Visiting every day. Every day one of them’s gone to see her.”
The doorbell rang again. Composing her face into a smile, and with a very convincing demonstration of calm, my mother opened the door.
“It’s Dad,” said Dodie, putting a hand to her throat. “First it was his heart. Now it’s his hip. He fell doing the snowblower. They have him at the hospital and I think they’re going to keep him overnight. You just never know if this one’s—”
“Oh, Dodie,” said my mother. “It’s his hip? I’m sure he’ll be fine. He’s had a replacement before, hasn’t he?”
Dodie nodded. “I could just feel something was going to happen this month. All month I could feel it. My mind’s just been racing. I mean I know life’s what happens when you’re doing something else but this?” She pressed her lips together. “I’ve been down at the hospital all afternoon. I just left.”
“Was he awake when you left? Were you able to talk to him?”
Dodie was nodding again when she spied Katie in the dining room. Katie had her hands full of silverware and was setting fourteen places for dinner. “Oh?” said Dodie. “Mackie, you have company coming. I should go.”
“Don’t be silly. Wouldn’t dream of it. You stay for supper.”
“But I’m not dressed for it.”
“We’ll find you something. You come talk to me. Ever peel a potato?”
“Well,” said Dodie, with a surprised giggle, as if this might be the third funniest thing she’s heard in her life. “I might’ve peeled one or two.”
~
And so the evening, for some minutes, advanced without further ruckus, my youngest sister setting the table, my father shaving in the upstairs bathroom, and me rising from the basement, while my mother sat Dodie down with a glass of white wine at the kitchen table. Which is where Dodie learned of my mother’s plans to poach a salmon in the dishwasher. “I have never heard of anything like that,” said Dodie, watching my mother drizzle two large fillets with white wine, lemon juice, and butter. “In tin foil? On a wash cycle? Mackie, honestly, I’ve never.”
My mother, holding in buttery hands a bottle of Chardonnay, was pouring herself a glass of wine when the telephone jingled. She glanced into the dining room and with a look indicated that Katie should answer it. Katie walked into the kitchen and shyly picked up the receiver. “Hello?” After a moment, she covered the mouthpiece to say, “It’s the real estate lady again.” She held out the receiver to my mother who was wiping her hands with a blue J-Cloth. Which is when my father entered and with a nimble two-step filched the receiver from Katie’s fingers.
“What are you doing?” My mother turned to Dodie. “What is he doing?”
“Sh, Mumsy,” said my father. “Go have an olive.”
“An olive? Give me that phone.”
My father turned his back to the room, effectively blocking all access to the telephone.
Deciding on another course of action, my mother grabbed her glass of wine and was on her way to the hall extension when my father, after several curt, somewhat inaudible, but mostly professional-sounding, instructions, replaced the receiver.
With glaring eyes my mother re-appeared. “What did she say? What did you tell her?”
“There’s an offer.”
“The couple from Boston?”
My father nodded.
“I knew it.”
“They made an offer this morning and—”
“What is it?”
“It expires tonight at six o’clock.”
My mother glanced at the clock on the stovetop. It showed two minutes to six. “How much?”
“Well, I suggested—”
“I don’t care what you suggested! I want to know what the offer is.”
“Three seventy-two.”
“Take it.”
“I said we’d only consider bids over three eighty.”
“You did not. You did not—” She studied him. “Stewart, are you out of your mind? This house, need I remind you, has been on the market for four fucking years! We get one offer in four years and you think you’re John Kenneth Galbraith? Call her back this instant. No—just—move. I’ll call her.”
“You will do nothing of the sort,” said my father, disconnecting the telephone.
From somewhere inside my mother burst a howl—a melismatic mixture of crying and laughter—and with a vicious spin of her wrist she flung her wineglass at the window. After it smashed against the windowsill, she stared at my father, livid. “Why would you do that without talking to me? When you know I’ve been out of my mind with worry. Why would you do that?”
“Mumsy, you’re behaving badly.” My father felt his neck, above his shirt collar, for shards of broken glass, then extended his hand toward Dodie, who was still sitting at the kitchen table, her eyes wide with panic. “Dodie, I’m sorry to say, your friend’s gone berserk.”
“Stewart,” said my mother. “I have met some jackasses in my life—”
“Beautiful, you love me. You wouldn’t change a thing.”
“I’ve got news for you—” In the back hall, my mother grabbed a ski jacket and guided her feet into two rubber boots. “If I had to live my life over again, I’d do it alone.”
“Performance to follow. Applause, applause. Fanfare, trumpets, exeunt omnes.”
“No. Just mine.” She raised her voice. “Aubrey! Get your coat—”
“Mackie?”
“Because I’m leaving. I’ve had it. I’m through. My nerves can’t take it.”
“Sure, sure, Mums.”
“Stewart—” My mother’s voice weakened with a note of frailty. “Why would you do that? Without talking to me? Why?”
My father reached for her hand. But she shuddered away from him, fiercely blinking her eyes, and marched into the hallway. “Don’t touch me!”
Silent on the stairs, Katie and I watched our mother zip up the ski jacket, yank open the front door, and charge outside into the sleet and snow.
~
To me she was incomprehensible—a possible narcissist, a perpetual actress, a charmer, a drinker, a fury. “Your mother’s larger than life, kid,” my father would say. “She’s something else, a singular sensation, and one of the great unsolved mysteries of maritime history.” My mother was twenty when she quit Nursing and went into the theatre and, very arguably, her life from that point became one long, unfinished performance. She started as an ingénue of shaky self-esteem. Feelings of nervousness and shy defiance were useful for some roles—Miss Julie, Juliet, Ophelia—but further vitalities were needed. A Few Digressions: my mother holds the record for most appearances in productions at Neptune Theat
re and ringing the walls of the administrative office on the second floor is a succession of her head shots. Not only do these form a year-by-year photographic biography of my mother, but they also showcase a sort of folk history of commercial photography and period hair styles. Around the time of her Medium Wavy Shag, she and my father divorced. During the years of their estrangement, many were the conversations among my sisters regarding how my parents’ nights were spent, wondering who got together with whom and for how long. “All Dad’s friends have crushes on Mom, you dink. Don’t you want to know who she was with?” I knew my mother cultivated friendships with Art College types, sculptors in hand-knit cardigans, potters with love beads and mandolins, and dwelled for a time in a Volkswagen van with a man named Elkin Duckworth. This was a New Brunswick actor, effeminately gay, the lead in a celebrated local production of Godspell, and afterwards known to us as Jesus of Moncton. Their relationship, my mother maintained, was a love affair in all ways but sexual. She and Elkin took a cabaret to bam, Strasberg on Fifteenth Street, and acid on Halloween, before he transmigrated to Laurel Canyon and she returned to take custody of my two younger sisters. From America, she arrived super-charged. She’d been radicalized. My mother lived less than three months in New York but, for the rest of her life, auditioning for roles in Halifax’s two-and-a-half professional stages, she rather carried herself as if she were only three steps away from walking onstage at the Lyceum Theatre in midtown Manhattan. The expectations of the Halifax audience were irrelevant now. In her time away, she’d gained access to a more primordial emotional life. She’d learned to “go there,” to trade and traffic in her emotions, emotions all the more potent if she actually believed in them. And believe in them she did. There was conflict in her acting now, vulnerability alternating with impatient superiority, and the friction between the two sparked real electricity. She was celebrated. She was profiled. She acquired groupies. There was a dental hygienist—known to us as Stalker Don Walker—who did not miss an opening night in twenty-three years. (During my teeth cleanings, he had the somewhat exasperating habit of asking about my mother’s shows when his soap-scented fingers were far inside my mouth.) Donald’s companion was the Dartmouth actor Brandon Merrihew, known to us as Uncle Brandy. Onstage he was Jimmy to my mother’s Evy, Sir Toby to her Maria, and offstage he was her pal and drinksy confidante. Brandy was enamored of, and border-line obsessed with, my mother, and his holiday compliments were so effusive as to veer into a dementia of overflattery. His remarks after my mother’s turn in Streetcar: “There she is! Nothing really astounds me but you, Mary-Margaret, you astound me. You confound me. You wear the crown for me. When I saw you on stage, I said to Donald, ‘There is magic in the world. That Mackie McKee has done it again.’ No one can touch you, can they? Not then. Not now. Not ever. Really, Mackie. Hail to thee, blithe spirit.” Emotive disturbance and evidentiary emotionality—these were her new vitalities but such Method did not belong to my father’s process. Societal and practical exigencies played their parts in my father’s flight from playhouse to courtroom but he contained multitudes all his own. He would learn it was not really in his professional interests to be emotionally open or emotionally uncontained. The practice of law, which was to be his calling and prevailing vocation, demanded he think first, strategize second, emote never. It actually took me years to figure out I was raised within these two mighty monarchies and, digressions done, now might be the time to check in with the subject that was me.
There in the moving car, beside my mother, very much in the passenger seat, sits the lurking figure that is Me at Nineteen. This Aubrey McKee seems a faraway incarnation, a gorky kid beset with contradiction and compulsion and greatly incomplete. A growth spurt has sent me near six feet but left me awkward, pimply—I am known to my sisters as Treetop and Pizza Face—and my signature has not stabilized in years, the capital K of my surname lurching wildly ahead of the final two letters. As earlier explained, it is my tactic, in these Walpurgisnächten, to keep calm and follow the example of my oldest sister. For Carolyn is the sane sibling in a crisis, supremely self-controlled and largely aloof from family politics. So, as my mother fulminates, I suppress All Feeling and mutely stare at a softcover actor’s copy of Hedda Gabler, published by Dramatists Play Services, which has been left in the slush of the plastic floor liner.
“Why is he doing this?” My mother punches the steering wheel. “A month ago he was willing to drop the price to three fifty but now he wants to play tough guy? I would’ve offered three seventy-nine to let them know we’re willing to budge. No one knows. No one knows what I have to put up with. Do up your seatbelt, please.” She checks the rear-view mirror and swings up Jubilee Road. “Your father acts like everything’s fine. This unfounded optimism he has, thinking everything’s going to work out. Well, unless you take steps to make sure things work out, I want to tell you, they don’t. Do up your seatbelt, Aubrey.”
I grab carelessly at the seatbelt but the retractor pulls it from my fingers, the metal latch smacking against the window. My mother does not appear to notice and seems disposed only to stare out the windshield. The evening has become for her a primal assertion of self and despite her questions, I do not think there is a part for me in her one-person show. I do up the seatbelt and peer out the window. Fog is everywhere in the city, the falling snow has changed to wetting sleet, and my window reflection is smeared with moisture.
“We owe three hundred thousand dollars! I was always taught to live within your means. Your father spends it as soon as he gets it.” Speeding into the intersection with Oxford Street, she turns sharply left, our tires slipping sideways on the paint of the wet crosswalk. “I’m fifty years old. I’m too old to be in debt. I say drop the price and rent a place. I don’t care where we live. But your father wants the right address. Maybe he needs it to have the confidence to win cases but—Jesus—who’s this asshole?” My mother squints into the rear-view mirror where the reflection of high beams from an upcoming vehicle has begun to blind her. “For the love of Pete.” She pulls over to allow this vehicle, an ambulance, to pass. After it has gone by, its rotating light flashing on my mother’s cheek, she checks over her shoulder and swerves back into the laneway.
I am still studying my reflection in the rainy window, the Christmas lights of St. Thomas Aquinas shimmering outside, when somewhere in my memory shimmers a scene from four years before, when my family is split and I am wandering smashed on Kempt Road and I see my father inside a brightly lit Harvey’s restaurant. He is alone at a booth, his table covered with case briefs, legal pads, an orange cheeseburger wrapper. As I teeter outside, a stranger exits the front doors and with this airstream the wrapper breezes off the table but my father does not notice, so absorbed is he in his preparations. He has this day ninety-two files in various stages of discovery, development, and trial, and he seems so solitary, eating by himself at ten o’clock on Friday night, when once we’d eaten together as a family, and I consider the ideals he once pursued—a life where his wife wasn’t running off, where his family life was secure, where he could manage everything through diligence and force of will—and I think to wave hello to him, impulsively, absurdly excessively, in a way we sometimes had, but as the doors reclose and within their glass my scruffy reflection appears, I am too ashamed to say hello and have him see me fall-down-drunk—and all of this is getting close to the crux of my feelings of what-the-fuck powerlessness regarding my father and mother and sisters and me and so, returning to the scene-in-progress, and sidebarring for a moment my instinct to smash a fist through the windshield, I twist in the car to ask where, exactly, we are going.
My mother sighs, sensing a change in my manner, and asks, “Do you have the list your father gave you?”
I say I left it at the house.
“Well—” She rubs at her forehead. “Can you remember what’s on it? The Campari, Gouda, the what-was-it?” She glances at me, irritated. “I don’t have time for one of your moods, Aubrey. If y
ou’re going to be like this, I can stop the car and you can get out. In fact, here, I’ll do it myself.” She spins the steering wheel, beginning a very unstable U-turn—which sends me into the armrest of the door—the car coming to a skidding stop on the other side of the street. She gets out, steps over a rain-melting snowbank, and slides toward a payphone beside the Oxford Theatre. As she inserts a quarter and dials, I become aware that her get-up—ski jacket, full slip, sweatpants, rubber boots—is not quite suitable for public walkabout. I am thinking again of Evy from The Gingerbread Lady and her last-chance struggle with, what she calls, this “human being business,” when my mother hangs up the phone, her face grim with new information. “It’s Nan.” She stands very still, the falling sleet fluorescent in the lights of the theatre marquee. “Saint Vincent’s called to ask if we picked her up.” She makes a fluttery sigh. “No one knows where she is.”
~
My mother lived the first years of her life in an orphanage. My grandmother had become pregnant before she and my grandfather were married and the stigma of being an unwed mother, in those days, was such that she chose to give her firstborn away. “It’s not as if she was a pregnant teenager,” my mother recalled later. “She was twenty-four, for Christ’s sake. But Nan grew up in the Depression. In that era, respectability was the most important thing. Respectability, security, appearances.” After my grandmother’s figure recovered, after she’d married properly into wedlock, and after she’d given birth to a legitimate daughter, my grandfather prevailed upon her to repossess the first and so my mother, at thirty-seven months, rotated back into the Wheeler ménage. “Dompa loved Nan. But so did everybody else. So did half the city. And in those days, you didn’t get divorced. What you did was argue. And drink. Their marriage was like a lot from those years, I guess. And during the war, that was a party every night. Up at the Officer’s Club.” My grandmother drank. Liquor was a magic fundamental to her spirits. Dipsomania was everywhere in the years of my childhood, someone or another was always sloshing toward the end of the line, and you learned from an early age not to take it personally. At family dinners, you’d see her sneak away from the table, totter into a hallway, only to later rejoin the room, talkative, flirtsome, hilarious. She was then at ease with herself and her various energies expressed themselves in sweetness and light and contagious unpredictability. She let you operate the electronic ice-crusher for her Crème de Menthes. She sent you a cheque on Labour Day. She grabbed your hand to sing high harmony on “Happy Birthday.” But over the years there was a gradual faltering and aspects of her behaviour—the monomania, the suggestion of paranoid self-involvement, a drift toward delusion—seemed to darken every scene and family occasion. My father, whose preference was to speak well of everyone, conceded his mother-in-law had become “a bit of a loose puck.”