Home Free

by Marni Jackson

  My letters home from Europe that year were superficial, chipper, and full of evasion: the Goya paintings in the Prado were so much more impressive in person; there are a million stray cats in the Coliseum; the hostel in Thessalonika has this neat rooftop café; and so on. “Greg got a nail in his heel from his old boots—I keep telling him to get new ones,” I would report with wifely exasperation. “ Greg is writing a very detailed journal—thank goodness one of us is keeping track!”

  I do not tell my mother about the man with the knife in the Marrakesh hostel. I don’t tell my father that while hitchhiking to Bari, in Italy, we were picked up by a convicted rapist who kept us hostage for hours, until the police came to our rescue. And I don’t mention that my gentle poet boyfriend slept with the girl in the cave next door. I went through my betrayals and depressions by myself, without my family—or, for that matter, the comfort of girlfriends. The sexual revolution predated the women’s movement by a few ragged years.

  Meanwhile,we were taking heavy-duty drugs: birth control pills that delivered veterinary levels of hormones and left us vulnerable to disease; acid:mushrooms and assorted mind-benders that other cultures surround with protective rituals and wise mentors. We put evil-looking IUDs like the Dalkon Shield into our wombs, devices that left thousands of women infertile. The notion of “free love,” in short, was a crock. But we went along with it. It was our equivalent of new software.

  My parents hadn’t travelled widely, and they feared the worst about European capitals. They imagined streets riddled with thieves, derelicts, and drug addicts—and, as it happened, when they did make it overseas that is exactly what they managed to attract,wherever they went.

  On their first flight to London, the man sitting in the seat across the aisle from my mother died of a heart attack or a stroke. The flight was completely booked; dragging a body up the aisles was not an option, so the attendants had to drape a sheet over the poor man until they landed at Heathrow. In relating this story,my mother was quite sanguine and worldly, as if dead bodies were simply one of the little glitches one encountered on transcontinental flights. I was aghast. They were stepping into what they thought of as “my world,” and it was turning out to be as lurid as they had imagined.

  I accompanied my parents on one of their first experiences riding the Underground in London. Burlington does not have a subway. Saskatoon did not have a subway. I’ve always looked upon urban public transit as a heartwarming democratic vision, where the citizens of a big city peaceably huddle together. I was eager to show off the splendour of the labyrinthine London Tube to my parents; my engineer father in particular, I thought, would be impressed by this clever inverted system of bridges.

  We were in the Underground, on our way to the Tower of London. My parents sat side by side, smiling in their encouraging fashion at the commuters around them, who either ignored them or gave faint, stiff smiles in return. Across the aisle from us was a tall, painfully thin man, hanging onto the overhead strap. He seemed boneless and loose as he swayed like a weed in a stream with each lurch of the subway car. It was my mother who first noticed the hypodermic needle dangling from one bicep. Then I saw it, just as his head lolled back.

  “Oh dear, how can he stand up,” she said, reasonably enough. In all my wanderings through all the wrong parts of foreign cities, in the back lanes of Tangiers or Istanbul, I had never encountered a junkie who didn’t bother to take the needle out of his arm.

  Miraculously, the man continued to hang from his strap, head pendulum-ing, chin bouncing off his chest, pants inching down his ass. Other passengers stared straight ahead. My father gave me an “Oh well!” sort of thumbs-up look, which made me feel better. We hustled out of the car and rode the escalators up, up into the daylight without discussing the incident.

  A day or two later, on their way to Hampstead Heath,my parents encountered a homeless woman begging. Instead of putting coins in her hand and moving on, they sat down on the curb and got in a conversation with her.

  “Her husband left and took all her savings with him—boy, she sure knows how to pick ’em,” said my father, relating their street adventure with relish. They gave her a little money and wished her well before they went on their way. I worried that they might have invited her to move to Canada and into their spare room (my room). My parents in their forties were innocents abroad—more innocent, I realized, than I was at 21.

  In 1969 and 1970, there were many things I couldn’t share with my parents, despite their loving support and my respect for them: drugs, for instance. The first time Greg met my family, he was on acid. “What a big smile Greg has,”my mother later remarked, approvingly. And sex, of course. Apart from giving me a book called The Wonderful Story of You and telling me to drink cranberry juice to prevent cystitis,my mother and I never discussed sex or contraception. There may have been a few forced jokes while watching a movie. “Well, I hope that she’s on the pill, or she’s in for trouble,” she might say in the course of Gidget Goes Hawaiian.

  We never talked about writing either, a perilous pursuit in their eyes. In my parents’ eyes, creativity was for hobbies. They wanted me to be a schoolteacher or a secretary, en route to marriage and motherhood. “You’ll always have your typing”was what my mother said when she bought me my first typing book, in Grade 8.

  And, indeed, I do.

  The rule of the generation gap was for both sides to put on a good face—at least, in middle-class WASP families this was the case. There were other households where fighting, cursing, and door-slamming went on, but not in mine. As a result, they didn’t know what I went through, as I grappled with sex, love, and my sanity; and I didn’t hear about their struggles either.

  How close should families be? I am still confused about that.

  A big contributing factor to the new intimacy in families is the utterly different ratio of parents to children in this generation. The old balance of two parents vs. a bunch of siblings has become rare in North America (unless you’re on reality TV). Single children, or two at most, are the norm.

  Only children grow up with enormous pressures upon them to fulfill the family destiny. Compounding the situation, the number of single parents living with only children has risen since my upbringing. It’s easy for the single parent to fall into a quasi-marital relationship with their school-age kids, bringing them along to adult occasions and absorbing them into the culture of the parents. The thing is, kids are often better company than the departed spouses. And sometimes the power struggles aren’t as daunting as they are in adult relationships, because in the end they are the parent, in charge of the child. There is no anxiety about the relationship ending because it will never end; they will always be the mother, or the father. The role is permanent, a tattoo—unlike other kinds of love, alas.

  I worry that these only children, cast in the role of mini-wives and mini-husbands,will grow up with a deep sense of being indispensable to their parent.

  I’m not peering over the fence here, by the way. There was a degree of singleness involved in my own early motherhood, when Brian was freelancing and often out of town on assignments. The daily stuff of raising Casey belonged largely to me. So I was grateful for my son’s company. Even at four (especially at four, actually). He liked to talk, he was reflective and funny—I deeply enjoyed our relationship. But I hope I didn’t count on his company.

  I’m sure he has felt the weight of being an only child and the weight of our love for him, our desire to solve his problems and see him happy. I wish he had siblings. He’s had to grow a bit of armour in order not to respond too quickly to other people’s expectations. Or to ours.

  In my family, I have a brother seven years older and a sister seven years younger. Twenty-one years of diapers. And while I was drifting around Europe, as it turned out,my parents were coping with serious family issues. Teenage rebellions, shaky first marriages, health crises—it was all going on back home, and my parents had to perform some search-and-rescue missions. It must have been
mystifying for them: the family they had so carefully engineered, their great life achievement, seemed to be buckling under various stresses. Meanwhile, their middle daughter, while not yet in rehab, was gadding about the world wasting her education and talents.

  When my well-behaved little sister ran off to Quebec City at the age of 16 my father phoned me, upset. They had just read her note, saying she’d be back in a few days and not to worry.

  “Maybe there’s still time to intercept her at the airport,” he said. Of course I thought they should “trust her” and let her go.

  “It’s your lifestyle that’s partly to blame for this,”my father said in a rare angry outburst.

  Now the pendulum has swung to the other side, from the Generation Gap to the Fused Family. We share so much with our children that carving out our autonomy, and letting our kids pursue theirs, has become another something we must work at. Note to self: back off. I await the new manuals on “Learning to Un-Mother.”

  The generation gap made it easier for us to stay selfish, confused, and adrift in the embrace of youth culture,which helped us believe that our world was more interesting than any other world. Of course, everyone in their early twenties enters a self-involved orbit to a greater or lesser extent. It’s the decade when you give birth to your adult self, and an inward focus is part of that. But my lack of trust in my parents’ ability to handle my real life only increased the emotional gap between us. We loved each other and were unusually tolerant of our different paths. Classic post-war liberal optimists, the bunch of us. But I think we settled for too much distance.

  Landscaping

  the Family

  WHEN WE MOVED into our current house, we inherited a number of extravagant touches from the concert-pianist, flute-playing, interior-designing woman who lived here before us. The bedroom was painted a glossy eggplant black with gold trim. The bed not only had a canopy but flaming electric torches.

  “That’s a lot to live up to,”Brian remarked.

  The little room that would become my office had nothing in it but a harpsichord and a dressmaker’s form wearing a French Empire gown, like a headless Marie Antoinette. The first floor featured an impressive copy of a painting by the 18th-century French painter Fragonard, executed right on the wall. For an extra $20,000, we could keep it. (Think of the resale potential: “Three bdrm semi, hdwd flrs, blt-in Fragonard. . . .”) But we declined. The owner,who wore a bustier and drove a red pickup truck, peeled it off the wall, and took it with her.

  The house was small but theatrical—perfect for family dramas. The kitchen had a working wood stove and doors that opened onto a garden, where the owner had set out a white wrought-iron table for two, with linen napkins and wine glasses. Not my usual workday lunch . . . but it could be, if we bought her house.

  The garden was a lush, feminine affair with pink roses, lilac trees, and a minuscule pond. More of a basin. But with a water feature, I thought, my life could really turn around. A flagstone path also led through the garden to a gate that opened onto the lane. The escape route.

  The house is a narrow, fine-boned Victorian, perfect for one. Casey was 17 when we moved, with bicycles, amplifiers, and skateboards. Brian is over six feet tall; whenever he walks down the main hall the floors bounce slightly, like a suspension bridge. He looks like a sailor on a small craft making his way to the forward deck. The ceilings are high, and the doorbell is 110 years old. Casey’s friends were just across the bridge, in our old neighbourhood, so he was okay with the move.

  But Brian wasn’t convinced.

  “We’re already living in a three-bedroom semi,” he pointed out,“why move to another one?” By then I had looked at 57 properties, from crumbling rectories in Port Hope to time-warp cottages in Mimico. This eccentric house, on a lilac-laden street, was the one for us, I knew. So when Brian continued to come up with more sensible reasons not to buy it, I didn’t argue. I simply went to bed. It wasn’t a calculated sulk; I was just giving up on my pond-worthy future.

  Several days passed.

  “Well, I’ll take another look at it,”Brian said.

  We made an offer, and the deal was done. The middle bedroom, we rationalized, would soon become an office for one of us when Casey left for college the following year. This, of course, has not happened, because that was his room when he came home from school for visits. We got used to the close quarters, though. We live in a Victorian sailboat, snug and trim.

  I had visions for the pond and bought a small motorized pump. I wanted to hear gentle plashing whenever I sat out at the wroughtiron table in a French way. I plugged the pump into a long extension cord that snaked through the garden, turned it on, admired the turbulence, and then went to bed.

  But the street is close to a ravine and its wildlife. I had already noticed the evidence of raccoon slumber parties—flattened crop circles—in the peony beds. The next morning, the pond was silent. The raccoons, offended by strange pulsings in their ensuite, had hauled the pump out of the pond and hidden it in the bushes nearby.

  I reinstalled it and turned it back on. Plashing restored, I ate a tomato sandwich at the patio table,with a cloth napkin on my lap.

  Next morning,more silence. This time the raccoons had stashed the motor farther back in the bushes. It was time to get industrial. I sank a device the size of a shoebox into the pond and stepped back from the great gush of water that now rocketed out of the tiny basin. The raccoons were about to be hosed down by the riot police.

  That evening, I watched five of them plumply scuttle along the top of our fence. They gave a wide berth to the pond, churning like a hydroelectric generator. In the lane, the garbage was lashed down with bungee cords. I slept soundly that night.

  When I came down the next morning, I made French-press coffee and took the paper outside to my table.

  Silence.

  This time the raccoons had dragged the pump, still running, into the weeds behind the lilac tree. Now the motor had burned out. Another $280 down the drain.

  Finally, I ceded the pond to the raccoons, but this episode led to an escalating neglect of the whole backyard. I no longer flossed the flagstones or staked the clematis. Every once in a while, I would go on a defoliating rampage, pulling up the spearmint that had overtaken one side, and whacking back the roses, tiny starved blossoms at the end of great pole-vaulting shoots. Then that stopped too.

  Whenever I feel my environment getting out of control, I decide I have “more important things” to do—writing books, ordering bathing suits online, etc. My field of vision begins to iris in until I only see what I need to. I can find the scissors in the kitchen drawer, but I don’t notice the 22 wine corks. I see the last bit of goat cheese hiding in the refrigerator, but not the furry chutney at the front.

  This carelessness is something that our son doesn’t share, despite his own deliberate spheres of chaos. He has always been quietly disappointed by the amount of rot that goes on at the back our refrigerator, with its tubs of boutique olives languishing in their brine. I think our ability to live with a certain amount of entropy—to not take care of things—strikes him as a moral failing, and he may have a point. We waste a lot of food, because leftovers aren’t . . . fresh.

  Brian especially fetishizes freshness, which I suspect is a remnant from his English background, where you go round to the shops every day, chat with the shopkeepers, and leave with some nice pink chops. Fish must be glistening and bright-eyed, barely off life support. His standards for raspberries are also high; at the first little wisp of mould, he’s out the door to buy fresher, dewier, ones. (There is a sexual metaphor here that I’m not going to pursue.)

  Our domestic blind spots are ironic given that we’re journalists, paid to notice details. We can catch the smallest continuity glitch in a movie while overlooking the broken security light above the barbecue, the one that has been swinging open since we moved in.

  This would have appalled my engineer father. When I was growing up,we had a Kenmore dryer that ran for 30
years. Twenty years in, it began to make a funny noise, but “if you just put a drop of oil in the motor before you use it, it works perfectly,” he would say. We got another decade of use out of it before the lint in the lint catcher finally caught fire and filled the basement with smoke.

  Still. It was the thought that counted: the caretaking.

  Now, whenever our son is due for a visit home, I cast a critical eye on the garden and inside the fridge. I want not to disappoint him. If he catches me with greasy black parsley in the crisper, I will feel derelict. It’s not that he’s a prim environmental nag; what I think he means is, pay attention. See what’s really there in front of you, not just what you want to see. This applies to our relationship with him, too.

  We blame our not-seeing on our deadlines and tunnel vision (the writer’s one-size-fits-all excuse). It’s also our leftover 1960s notion that we have better things to do than to Scotchgard the sofa or tend to worldly things.

  On the other hand, at 23 Casey has no interest in acquiring things; his belongings can be stored in several milk crates, three guitar cases, and a backpack. He has more amplifiers than furniture. He’s frugal, but frugality can also be a sort of inverted materialism, one that confers too much negative power to “stuff.” For a long time, he considered shampoo a consumerist ruse and he wasn’t going to fall for it. Hand soap would do nicely, even if his hair had the sheen of someone with an immune disease. That phase ended, but new clothes are still tricky. Last Christmas, I bought him what I thought was a foolproof non-trendy T-shirt with no labels. It did have stripes, but they were vintage stripes.

  “No more buying me clothes,” he said gently but firmly, folding it up and putting it back in the box.

  Casey has always gone his own way,without taking us on as adversaries. At the same time, the three of us also share a lot, including music. We can all listen to Neil Young and Sam Cooke and Louis Armstrong. Sometimes on holiday we’ll play music together (Brian on congas, me on idiot-savant violin, and Casey on guitar). We’ve never been “the enemy” to him, and he has been honest with us about whatever he’s going through. I assumed that this lack of open conflict in our family was a good thing.