by Alex Pugsley
“After Dompa died,” my mother explained. “Things took a turn.” My grandmother became quite close with a widower in Tampa but, when he couldn’t commit, she focused her attentions—briefly—on a tennis instructor, after which she made a move to Bermuda. “You should’ve seen her in Bermuda! Now Nan’s a good-looking woman—big bosom, long legs—but there are age-appropriate clothes, you know? Your father and I arrive in Bermuda and here’s Nan tricked out like a Vegas showgirl. Seventy-three years old in hot pants and a lace-up tube top with matching headband?” My grandmother’s bachelorette adventures resulted in some confusion and real infirmity so she’d been relocated, not without protest, to Halifax. “Here’s the thing with Nan. All she wants is a man. She doesn’t care what kind. She just wants someone to make her feel special. Well, her parents spoiled her. Her husband spoiled her. Her boyfriends spoiled her. But when there’s no one left to spoil her, what’s she going to do then?”
~
When we arrived at Saint Vincent’s, the ambulance that had passed us was flashing in the parking lot, a paramedic loading through its backdoors someone strapped to a wheeling stretcher. “Good God,” said my mother, as the ambulance rolled on to Windsor Street, its siren sounding. “Who do you suppose it is?” My mother walked across the yellow-painted lines of the parking lot, her face set in a pensive frown, as if there were two or three plot twists still to be endured. Inside, we moved past the reception desk into the lobby and there, at the far end of the hall, as if only a few beats behind cue, my grandmother appeared, frail and quivery and checking behind her, as if persecution might arise from some new quarter. Summoning her strength, she began to walk very evenly, with chin held high and a frozen smile—the expression of a visiting head-of-state—and she stared at a point in the hallway ahead of a heavyset elderly woman in a Lindsay tartan dress. Though I vaguely recalled this second resident as a family acquaintance, I saw that, for the moment, my grandmother was choosing not to favour her with recognition.
My mother, sensing something very unfinished about this interaction, but reassured to see my grandmother among the quick, was about to greet both women when my grandmother—spotting my mother—stumbled for her and grabbed her hand, as if on the verge of complete collapse.
“Oh Mackie,” she said, her voice shaking. “There’s been the most horrible accident.” She took a stagey sort of breath. “It’s Dolly Hollibone. We were coming out of the service and this little boy came roaring around the corner—some people here don’t care who their children knock into—well this boy banged right into Dolly and her glasses went flying and she fell and—crack—she’s broken her wrist. The ambulance just came and took her away.”
My mother, while listening closely, was also noting my grandmother’s slightly overdone appearance. Her bouffant curls and blonde highlights had been newly maintained and she was wearing hoop earrings, burgundy lipstick, a low-cut burgundy dress, and matching slingback heels. “You look awfully nice, Mum. What service was it? I see you got your hair done.”
“This? Same thing I always do.” My grandmother sniffed. “It just breaks your heart. Here she was, all set to go to her granddaughter’s concert, and Dolly ends up being taken to the hospital!”
My mother nodded and asked, “Was that Elsy Horne in the tartan dress?”
“Life’s full of surprises, I suppose,” said my grandmother, her face twitching with worry. “But my God, that could have happened to anybody.”
As my grandmother talked, we’d travelled—without particularly deciding to—down the hall toward the elevators. Stepping into the nearest car, my grandmother resumed her earlier, imperial manner, and I saw she was performing in her imagination an entirely different drama from many of Saint Vincent’s other residents, one of whom, in an inside-out turtleneck sweater, shuffled toward us looking fully bewildered.
“He lives in the Twilight Zone, that one.” My grandmother pushed the close-door button. “Sometimes you can get a straight answer out of him. Other times? Jabberwock.” She shook off a shiver. “And homely? Imagine having to kiss that every night.”
Taped inside the elevator was a variety of colour photocopies. These announced Jazzercise sessions, Christmas carolling, prayer groups. I was reading a bulletin about a memorial service when my grandmother said, “That’s what Dolly dragged me to this afternoon. I didn’t mind going to funerals when they only happened once in a while. But this place?” She made a pained smile, as if there were further details to be divulged. “And do you know what hymn they chose? Mackie, you won’t believe what hymn they chose. ‘They whipped and they stripped and they hung me high and they left me there on a cross to die.’” She smirked at us, as if her own dismay had just been wonderfully validated. “I mean it’s the tackiest, most God-awful hymn you can imagine. For a funeral?”
~
My grandmother sat at her dressing table reapplying her mascara, the table surface busy with poinsettias, an eyelash curler, a slim rouge brush, a silver hand-mirror, a square-bottomed decanter of bourbon, two cut-glass tumblers, an unopened box of Thank You notes, and, in a pine frame, a photograph of my grandfather, the print so dislodged most of the image was lost within its matting. A smell of floral perfume pervaded the environment, seeming drenched into everything from the padded coat hangers in the closet to the embroidered linen doilies on the dressing table to the white lace collar of my grandmother’s burgundy dress. A television, in another resident’s room, was loudly tuned at the moment to a Christmas special where a tenor was quavering through “O Holy Night.”
“I used to know the name of that song,” said my grandmother. “Is that Andy Williams?”
My mother, after a brief frown—for my grandmother’s failure to remember a favourite Christmas carol was another of the day’s mysteries—sat on the bed and, following a moment of private deliberation, gaily leaned into the room. “So, my dear, how are things in Glocca Morra?”
“Well,” said my grandmother. “Seventy-four isn’t sixty-four, I want to tell you. I’ve got three more years and then my looks are really going to go.” She reached for the decanter of bourbon and, with a slight palsy in her right hand, poured herself a drink. “Now normally I wouldn’t take a drop of hard liquor—”
“No,” said my mother. “Just a forty-ouncer.”
“But my nerves today are shot. Put everyone in such a state, what happened to Dolly.” She raised the glass, a bit erratically, spilling a dewdrop on her wrist. “Cheers, my dears.”
For the last few minutes, my grandmother had affected a mood of playful detachment but, as she smiled and over-sniffed some moisture in a clogged nostril, the rest of the room began to sense the mood’s essential falsity. My mother was about to say something, probably to inquire after Saint Vincent’s reasons for thinking my grandmother missing, when footsteps approached in the hallway.
My grandmother turned and directed a radiant smile toward the doorway. When this visitor, an elderly lady in bifocals, hobbled past, it was clear this was not whom my grandmother was expecting and she reacted with a series of micro-expressions—a spasm of annoyance, a flinch of pain, and finally a slow-building pout, as if she were concerned a conspiracy was being somewhere set up against her.
“Who’s that?” asked my mother.
“Joyce,” my grandmother replied, firmly, clutching her glass of bourbon. “Her daughter, Mary-Lou, she sings with St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields. She won a Bafty—She won a Bafter—She won an award. Her mother’s a Morrow. Well—” My grandmother inclined her head. “Was. All the old families are gone. The Mairs, the Morrows. They hardly exist anymore. Oh, people used to care about each other. But it’s all segmented now.”
“Who are you kidding? You never cared about anybody. You couldn’t wait to get away.”
“Well,” said my grandmother, bitter. “I still can’t.” She stared at her jewelled wristwatch as if she feared it might be broken. “I’ve got to get out of
this place. I’ve got to.”
“And go where? Back to Florida?”
“How am I going to do that? I have no money.”
“What about Dompa’s pension?”
“Ha! I drank that away.”
“Well,” said my mother, reaching for something on the floor. “As long as it didn’t go to waste.” She picked up a fold of toilet paper. It was vivid with a smear of lipstick where someone had blotted their lips. “You’re looking pretty good, Mum, for someone who’s supposed to be sick—”
“I called to say I wasn’t coming.”
“So why get your hair done?”
“For the—the service.”
“Mmm-hmm. This is the real world. The one I have to live in. Hoop earrings and high heels? For a funeral? Something’s going on.”
Nan’s attention was drawn again to the doorway where a looming shadow preceded the appearance of the woman in the Lindsay tartan dress. For some minutes, this woman had been lurking like Hamlet’s ghost—a rather portly, slow-moving Hamlet’s ghost—but she now looked in and fixed my grandmother with a distasteful, vindictive stare.
“She’s always got something up her skirt, that one,” whispered my grandmother, going to the door. “Making a big to-do. I’d just as soon trip her.”
A few murmurs passed between the two women before my grandmother carelessly swung the door shut.
“That was Elsy Horne,” said my mother. “Dodie’s godmother. What’d she want?”
“I have no idea.” My grandmother flipped her hair. “The Catholics, they’re always ganging up on people. Thinking their way is the best because it’s the oldest. Well, let me tell you, I was in Rome once and I’m so glad I’m not Catholic. All that blood.”
“What’d you say to her? Because you said something.”
“I don’t know,” said my grandmother, reaching for the decanter of bourbon. “Go screw yourself and your dispensation from the Pope.” She refilled her glass. “Oh, she gives me the pip, that Elsy Horne.”
My mother was frowning. It was the day’s starkest frown, a sort of intricacy of thoughtfulness, but in another moment all frowns would vanish as the pieces of the play for her came together. “Oh, Mum.” She stared at my grandmother with real helplessness. “You did not. Tell me you didn’t. Tell me you’re not carrying on with Dodie’s father.”
Moisture came unbidden to my grandmother’s eyes. Another fit of expressions began to form in her face but none really seemed to take. It was all somehow terrible to see.
“That’s who you were expecting? But he didn’t come today, did he?” My mother rose off the bed. “Mother. Look at me. His wife’s upstairs. She’s right upstairs. What in the name of God were you thinking?”
My grandmother was staring at us, but staring without any recognition. Attempting to speak, her mouth began to form words but no sounds were coming out and instead she made a simpering, crooked smile. Pushing on the dressing table, she suddenly started out of her chair, went over on a high heel, and toppled to the floor. She lay where she’d fallen, shivering.
My mother knelt beside her and felt for a pulse. At this touch, my grandmother screamed, as if she’d been stabbed with a letter-opener, and clutched at the foot of the dressing table. There was real madness in her eyes, a sort of feral cunning that showed no idea but resistance.
“Aubrey—” My mother stood up. “I’m going to tell the duty-nurse to call a doctor. Stay with Nan. And—” She looked at my grandmother’s wristwatch. “It’s six-forty. Remember that time.” She opened the door and fled in rubber boots down the hall.
My grandmother’s face was pale beneath smears of rouge, her eyes gleaming with tears, her lower lip dribbling a gossamer line of phlegm. I was aware of a smell of raw urine—there was a dampening in her burgundy dress—and when I got down beside her she made me understand she wished to be taken to the bathroom. We rose to a hunchbacked, standing position and I guided her to the bathroom, her hand feebly shooting for and grabbing the diagonal safety bar on the wall beside the toilet. After a few side-to-side leveraging movements, I was able to remove from the crumples of her dress and pantyhose her incontinence pad, the absorbent lining for which was thoroughly soaked through. She pulled up her dress, established herself on the toilet, and waved me out of the room. I closed the bathroom door and went to the hallway, wiping my hands on my jeans. I scanned the hall. Seeing no one, and mindful of my mother’s direction to stay put, I went back and opened the bathroom door, startled to see my grandmother sitting naked on the floor beside the toilet, a moist bit of feces mysteriously balanced in the groove of her collarbone. The burgundy dress, pantyhose, foam-cupped brassiere, and high heels were discarded on the tile floor. She sat stricken with fright, vulnerability, and—what was worse—an absolute confusion as to where she was and what was happening. Which was when my mother returned. Flicking the dirt from my grandmother’s shoulder, she said, “Let’s get you to the bed, Mum.” I helped heave my grandmother off the floor. A flush of sweat had risen all over her, making her skin slippery, and I dug my fingers tightly into the wattles of her underarm to make sure she didn’t slide away from us. We staggered across the room and bumpily lowered her to the bed.
Scarcely conscious, making no effort to conceal her nakedness, my grandmother sprawled on the bedspread, a hoop earring bending under her cheek.
“Aubrey,” said my mother, watching her. “Go see what’s taking so long.”
My sprinting steps in the hall overlapped with a second shriek from my grandmother and, swiveling around, I saw, framed in the proscenium of the doorway, both women lying on the bed, my mother looking alertly into my grandmother’s eyes. “You be strong, Mum. Doctor’s coming any minute. You squeeze my hand. Just like that. That’s it. You hold on now. I’m right here.”
Karin
In my later teenage years, I belonged with helpless ardour to an outfit called The Common Room. We were an autonomous arts collective, a semiotics research team, a coed gang of adventurers. We were Nova Scotian, mostly Halifax-born, and we had plans, projects, crushes, crusades. We rowed the waters of the province in second-hand suits. We formed punk bands. We wrote letters, songs, treatments for books. We established a joint bank account that is still, as far as I know, collecting interest on its remaining fifty-seven dollars. Our ongoing and evolving relations were sort of fucky and devoted and inexplicable. There is a preface in Thurber where he suggests that, for a certain type of figure, “the confused flow of his relationships with six or eight persons and two or three buildings is of greater importance than what goes on in the nation or in the universe.” For me those six or eight persons were my colleagues and associates in The Common Room and the flow of our relations was my nation and universe. Who were they? We were Tom Waller, Gail and Brigid Benninger, Babba Zuber, Cyrus Mair, myself, and Karin Friday. Did it all arise because of Karin? She had the tape, she was the voice. She was the girl and the adventure. Babba Zuber, full of endogenous goodwill and long one of the city’s most acute noticers—and I will quote her extensively, deferring to many of her analyses, as we go forward because more than any of us Babba has been a class secretary who’s kept track of our brave new world, that has such people in it—Babba once explained her take on Karin like so: “To tell the truth, at first I sort of dismissed her as a rah-rah, go-to-Queen’s, daddy’s-little-girl girl. You know, the preppy athletic girl who’s used to male companionship and male interest and who kind of ends up with gorgeous children and a distant husband and a drinking problem. But why would that girl like Cyrus Mair?” As she always did, Babba paused for my reaction and normally she regarded me with a slightly cringing expression, her amber eyes skeptical behind black-framed glasses, listening in the way she listened to any of us, as if she were more than slightly worried some new catastrophe might overwhelm one of us—if we were superheroes Babba was Ultra Cautious Girl—but in this moment, faced with the severity of the histor
ical circumstance and both of us having come out the other side of it, she gazed back at me only very directly, as if listening without preconception, without bias, as if setting an example for listeners everywhere. “I just think,” she said, “that Karin was trying to create a family in us, the family she didn’t have, really, and of course that got all fucked up by the end but people forget how spontaneous and charming she was when we first met her. She was one of those people you feel you’ve been waiting your whole life to meet. She had a way of becoming this gorgeous person for everybody maybe without even knowing it herself. She could make another person mean everything. Wasn’t it that way for you?” I can’t recall my reaction to Babba that day, I wasn’t sure then as I’m not sure now—I can confuse my sharps and naturals—and, try as I might, I’ve never been sure what to make of Karin Catherine Friday.