Believe Me

by Patricia Pearson

  It can’t just be me and Calvin who get these songs stuck in our heads. Or maybe it is, and that’s why we don’t have jobs on Madison Avenue and Wall Street.

  “So what do you think you’ll do with Bernice and Stan’s watercooler when Bernice passes?” asked Dana, firing up another cigarette.

  “Her watercooler?” I echoed, perplexed.

  “You haven’t seen it, hon? It’s right behind ya! I fixed it for her last summer, and she told me if she ever took sick for good, I could have it, because what good would a water-cooler be, fightin’ cancer?”

  “Well, that’s a point,” I offered, tentative, “but it’s not really up to me, I don’t think. Bernice will talk to Calvin, or Shirley, when … you know … when it gets to that stage.”

  Dana regarded me with something like mirth, and then snorted. “Bernice isn’t gonna admit she’s dyin,’ Frannie, not even when you’re ready to wheel her to the morgue. She’s just gonna keep on complainin’ and carryin’ on about how sick she is until one day God agrees with her.”

  7

  It turns out that there are a limited number of activities for small children in hospitals. Lester blew through his options in our first week. His to-do list looked something like this:

  Examine Grandmother’s oxygen mask, and experiment with it as a suitable helmet for Sir Ruff the Dinosaur Hunter, until Momma freaks out.

  Visit vending-machine room repeatedly, investigating how much ice can be made to tumble into one’s cup, and after that into one’s toque, and after that onto the floor.

  Plea for rides in wheelchairs. When no one is looking, attempt to push wheelchair down the corridor and crash into someone’s IV pole.

  Wander into strangers’ rooms and gawk like a junior Lookie Loo as patients are administered injections, CPR or a sponge bath.

  Crawl under beds and pretend that you’re a panther, waiting for a choice moment to attack the unsuspecting, crepe-soled feet of nurses.

  Die of boredom, and beg Momma to take you home. “Please?”

  Calvin agreed to come out for Christmas, and this, in turn, persuaded Bernice to spend the holiday in her own house. It was a good idea, although somewhat fraught. She was enormously terrified of being more than ten feet from a nurse, for one thing. While she claimed to despise being in the hospital, wouldn’t take her pills, and kept minimizing her illness, she clearly felt safer there. With good reason. I had forgotten where I’d put her blood-pressure gauge, and had absolutely no idea where I’d stuffed the extra package of Depends. In any event, she had no intention of going anywhere until her son personally escorted her, and in the meantime I set about trying to decorate her house.

  Bernice, I discovered, had roughly eleven hundred battery-operated holiday ornaments, which made it quite easy for me to proceed. I assigned a wreath to the door, a foot-high spinning angel that sang “Joy to the World” to the living room window, and for the TV, a Santa Claus that climbed up and down a chimney, up and down and up and down, like an inexplicably jolly Sisyphus. I found them in her wide-open, dust-free basement, in seven boxes marked XMAS. All of the boxes were stacked neatly between two deep freezers packed with jars of homemade jam, cabbage rolls, pork pies, turkey-rice soup and spaghetti sauce. On the other side of the freezers was a cupboard containing, unexpectedly, a dark mink coat. I wondered if it would be fair to consider these things together as the sum of a life in objects. Singing elves, provisions to ward off starvation lest Cape Breton’s cranberry bogs fail, and elegant apparel for a long-lost girl who wanted to look swell and maybe even did, once, before she abandoned fashion for the vanities of illness.

  I was familiar with Bernice’s mania for cooking. She fries and roasts and bakes obsessively, but doesn’t ever eat her own meals, preferring KFC instead, or furtive spoonfuls of Kraft Dinner late at night from a Tupperware container in the fridge. She cooks for social status, and of course she cooked for Stan, to whom she related adoringly and almost exclusively through ham. After he died, to judge from the content of these freezers, she scrabbled like a gerbil on a wheel, still cooking with the same energy but to no purpose. Then suddenly she stopped. As I scanned the Tupperware labels, I noted that everything in the freezers dated back to last summer.

  I didn’t know what to make of this. I come from a background in which deep freezers are as alien as butter churns. Everyone in my extended family purchases just enough groceries to last two days, and anything assigned to Tupperware—which, in my mother’s case, tends to be a single cooked carrot—invariably perishes from neglect at the back of the fridge.

  I think of it as a fusion of Scots frugality—in which an abundance of provisions is somehow considered unseemly—with that weird, upper-middle-class cuisine aesthetic you find in certain restaurants, where you order filet mignon, and it arrives wobbling atop a little dollop of whipped potatoes, and the rest of the huge white plate is scattered decoratively with parsley minced so fine that the only way you could actually consume it would be to pick up the plate and lick it off. When Calvin and I go for dinner at my uncle’s house, Calvin has learned to consume a cheeseburger first, because he knows that there will not be a sufficient meal. “Calvin,” my aunt Rose will say, ladling one tablespoonful of beef stroganoff onto a Royal Doulton china plate destined for Calvin’s end of the table, “the asparagus is wonderfully fresh right now, will you have a stalk?”

  In my experience, WASPs derive the bulk of their calories from scotch and cashews, neither of which are much prized in Cape Breton.

  Lester and I decided to set up a Christmas crèche on the dining room table. I wanted to teach him the Christmas story, now that he knew about Heaven. I was a lapsed and untutored Christian, true, but still I found it discomfiting that my son understood Christmas to be an exceptionally lucky day, upon which ten new model dinosaurs from the Carnegie Museum collection arrived in bright packages, along with a sock full of sweets, plus Granny and turkey, all for no apparent reason.

  Now, in Bernice’s house, I felt a certain childlike delight in laying out the figurines for her crèche. I began to remember my mother’s little display on the credenza in our Toronto house when I was young, which she laid out over a great spread of green felt. She stacked The Art of Mexico and other coffee-table books beneath the felt to create a topography, placing the manger triumphantly atop a plateau created by Ontario Summer Cottages. My mother’s crèche was a colorful, mismatched array of figures: a tiny holy family she had purchased in France, some sandalwood camels from India that got knocked over by the mere breeze of someone passing by, a collection of Masai herdsmen made of ebony leading their cows, some hand-painted polka-dot chickens, and three oversized, papier mâché kings who stomped toward the manger like a trio of Godzillas and threatened to squash its inhabitants. I used to snitch Jesus, as I recall, and offer him as an adoptive son for Barbie until my mother took stock on Christmas Eve and invariably demanded him back.

  Bernice’s crèche was much more harmonious. Everyone in it was Bavarian. She had imported all the figurines from a German company that specialized in nativity scenes. Lester and I unwrapped them from their clumps of tissue paper and prepared to re-create the holy night when all was calm and all was bright. And silent, like at the end of Goodnight Moon. Goodnight stars, goodnight air, goodnight noises everywhere. I unwrapped a pair of bearded, white-robed men in sandals, and had no idea who they were.

  “So these men,” I murmured to my son, flipping them over to read their labels, “are the Jünger, die Christus bewachen.”

  “The what?” asked Lester.

  “Never mind.”

  “Donkeys!” he exclaimed, letting two or three miniature beasts of burden tumble to the table from their tissue wrappings. He scrambled off his chair and ran to find his allosaurus, whose new job was to menace the donkeys, and then at some point engage in a highly eccentric conversation with them. I unwrapped a fourth donkey that had a blue-gowned woman seated sidesaddle on its back. “Ah!” I said, consulting the chart. “Die Herbe
rgsuche!” Ambivalent, I placed her beside a little clump of bushes on the outskirts of the scene, making a note to myself to move her closer to the action if it turned out she was important.

  Eventually the jackpot: die Heilige Familie. I set them up in the manger, with baby Jesus in an oval-shaped bed of painted clay straw. By now, all the donkeys and sheep had been cornered by large, predatory dinosaurs and were part of a hitherto-unknown subplot in the Christmas story involving livestock slaughter and a time warp. I found the three Wise Men, and arranged them in a humble queue that faced toward the manger. I salted in a coterie of angels.

  “Okay, Lester, pay attention,” I said. He came over from his end of the table for a closer look. “See this mommy and daddy and baby, here? This is why we celebrate Christmas, because it’s baby Jesus’s birthday. This is Jesus, and these are his parents, Mary and Joseph.”

  Lester studied the manger scene. “Why did his mommy name him after a swear word?”

  “Well, no,” I said, laughing, “the whole reason that Daddy shouldn’t say ‘Jesus H. Christ’ when he’s driving—you know how he says that?—is because that’s taking … that’s saying Jesus’s name in a bad mood.” I held up the baby Jesus and waggled him gently. “And we’re only supposed to say ‘Jesus’ when we’re happy. Yay Jesus, halleluja, that sort of thing.”

  “Is Santa going to bring him a present?” he asked.

  “These three Wise Men do.” I tapped each of them on the head. “They each have a present for him.”

  “What are Wise Men?”

  I thought about this, and realized that I could not say why they were called that, exactly. “They’re smart people,” I proposed. “Wise is another word for smart. They were wise because they knew that Jesus was born, and that he was very important.”

  “Are they giving him toys?”

  I gestured helplessly. “You know what? They’re not giving him toys, actually, they’re giving him”—no point reading the labels—“frankincense and myrrh … which are … which are … I think one of them was a smokable perfume? kind of thing, and the other one was, like, an herb.”

  Lester’s eyes widened as if I were completely mad. “Why don’t they give him a car?”

  “No, look, the point is that when baby Jesus was born, that was the first Christmas, his birthday, because he was the son of God, and the Wise Men knew that … somehow … and that’s why they showed up, and those were the kinds of presents available then. They hadn’t invented plastic, yet, or toy stores.” I leaned forward and brushed cracker crumbs from his chin. “Jesus was the one who first told us all about Heaven—you know how Granny was telling you about Heaven?” Of course, that wasn’t right, what with Abraham and Moses and so on, but it would do.

  “How could baby Jesus talk?” Lester asked, skeptical.

  “Well, when he got older.”

  He stabbed his finger at the figure of Joseph. “Is that God?”

  I sat back and scrubbed at my face with my hands.

  “No, that’s Joseph, who was cuckolded by a dove. I don’t know where God is.”

  “What’s cuck—”

  “Never mind.”

  Lester generally knew when he’d come to the end of Twenty Questions with me and it was time to back off. He returned to the business of massacring sheep at the other end of the table. “Can I have some juice?”

  I got up and padded into the kitchen. The radio on Bernice’s blond vinyl counter was playing “Santa Baby,” and outside, I could hear the crunch of a fender-bender on King Street, the sound of honking horns muffled by the thickly falling snow. I cracked open the fridge and reached for a bottle of Sunny Delight. “Santa Baby, slip a sable under the tree for me …”

  Lester followed me, in his restless, zigzaggy fashion, and climbed onto the counter to drink his juice, banging his feet back and forth against the cupboards beneath.

  “Momma,” he asked, changing the subject to something he hoped wouldn’t frustrate me, “if you spat on a plant, would it grow?”

  8

  “Oh, Lord in Heaven!”

  We had just come off the elevator with a bag of apples and some coffee, and we could hear Bernice’s wail clear down the corridor.

  I broke into a run, slamming my hand over the lid of my coffee cup to keep it from spilling, Lester trotting behind in his ungainly snowsuit. We reached the threshold of Room 12 and found four helpless women crying out in unison, with Bernice on the floor beside her bed, and the others trapped by their various casts and IVs, unable to assist her. Bernice’s nightie was twisted around her stomach, and she had her knees up and was scuffling at the floor in her sock feet like an enormous overturned turtle.

  “Granny!” Lester exclaimed, “why are you wearing a diaper?”

  “Shhh!” I waved him back. “Bernice,” I asked, kneeling down, “what happened?”

  “I tried to get out of bed to go to the bathroom and—oh!—I fell, and I’ve smashed my head! Jesus take my soul.”

  She moaned, eliciting murmurs of sympathy from her bedridden roommates, and an absolutely stricken look from Lester.

  “I won’t let him take your soul, Granny, I won’t let him,” Lester vowed, beginning to cry. I don’t know what he thought a soul was, exactly, but he stood there uncertainly, on guard, with his little fists bunched to show his bravery as the snow melted and puddled around his boots. I picked him up, nuzzled his ear and placed him gently on Celia’s bed, tugging off his boots while Celia unzipped his jacket.

  “You’re not going to die, Bernice,” I said, returning to her and smoothing her hair. “It’s just a matter of getting back into bed.” I set down my coffee, leaned forward and felt gingerly behind her thin curls. She wasn’t bleeding, and didn’t have what I imagined would feel like a fracture. “You’re fine,” I assured her, and I slipped my arm beneath her rounded back, trying to pull her to a sitting position. She was so lax and uncooperative that it was like trying to manhandle a mattress.

  “It ain’t no use,” she grumbled, “this old carcass can’t be moved no more, I’m just a bag of bones.”

  “It’s okay,” I murmured.

  “Are you going to float to Heaven now?” Lester asked, saucer-eyed, as I pulled her onto her bed.

  “Oh no, dear,” Bernice said, drawing the blanket up around her, “but I certainly don’t mind that idea of floating. Just look at me, all swollen up. My soul’s going to say good riddance to this wreck of a body, I’ll tell you that.”

  “But isn’t your body going with you?” Lester looked deeply confounded. Celia pulled him onto her lap and gave him a squeeze while I tended to Bernice. “We don’t take these bodies with us to Heaven,” she told him lightly. “We get to turn into beautiful angels with lovely white wings.”

  Needless to say, I was made to elaborate on this astounding new concept an hour later, as we headed to the Mayflower Mall for some Christmas shopping. “Sooner or later, animals die and humans die,” I ventured, in reply to his queries from the back seat. “But what that means is that we change, like caterpillars turning into butterflies, only we turn into …” Well, there’s a debate for you. But Celia had answered him; I could go with the flow. We turn into angels.

  I glanced in the rearview mirror and noticed that Lester was craning his head to see the sky, looking totally perplexed. “But where?” he asked.

  As it turned out, there were angels galore at the Mayflower Mall. Blond, for the most part. Hanging from the ceiling, or singing in the windows of the shops. In the toy store, we found angels alongside dinosaurs, who in turn shared shelf space with robots and dragons. All equally plausible, I suppose, from Lester’s point of view.

  In the autumn, Calvin and I had taken him to the Royal Ontario Museum and stumbled across a temporary exhibit on loan from the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. It was all about Aztec culture, complete with a display of sacrificed human remains.

  “Daddy, what are those?” Lester had wanted to know, his nose pressed against the smudged glass o
f the exhibit.

  “Skeletons, buddy,” Calvin had answered.

  “Dinosaur skeletons?”

  “No. Human.”

  “But,” I’d added, worried that Calvin was being too brusque, “humans who died a very long time ago, Les. Ancient skeletons.”

  “Oh.” Lester stared for a very long time, as Calvin and I perused the rest of the exhibit and sought our own small revelations.

  “Momma,” he said, as the three of us walked home, kicking contentedly through drifts of leaves, “tell me a story about dead humans.”

  Hmmm. “You know what? I don’t think I know a story about dead humans.” As such.

  Calvin had chuckled. He loved the idea that Lester thought of dead humans as a separate species that would never include him. Dogs, elves, dinosaurs, humans and dead humans, like the “mysterious race of skeleton people” uncovered by archeologists, as reported in a satirical news article that I once read in The Onion. The archeologists debated whether or not the skeleton people engaged in agriculture, or some other economic system, since it was clear to all that any grain they ate would fall out through their ribs.

  “Personally,” I’d told Calvin later, “I want Lester to have this view of life indefinitely, where there are no beginnings and no endings, neither facts nor fictions, just a whole, wondrous marvel of creatures side by side.”

  “Good luck,” Calvin had said. I could tell he’d been thinking about Stan by the way his cynicism was darker than usual. “Life just has a way of forcing the truth.”

  9

  “Is Santa Jesus’s uncle?” Lester asked while we scanned the shelves at New Waterford’s video store in search of a Christmas film that didn’t star Tim Allen. “I guess so. Sort of.” The extroverted, gift-plying uncle that undermines parental authority and makes God compete for our favors.