Home Free

by Marni Jackson

  And what happens to the clots in my lungs, I asked. I almost thought of them as pets. Or rats.

  They will resolve on their own, in time.

  Resolve, dissolve? How long does that take?

  It depends. A few weeks or a couple months.

  So this is serious, I said wonderingly, trying to catch up. The doctor was leaning against a gurney, hands folded over his clipboard. Oh very serious, he said,with a slight air of chagrin.

  “You could die,” he said. “But that usually happens within the first hour.”He looked at his watch.

  My first thought, apart from dull alarm, was that I hadn’t been overreacting to my symptoms after all. A lesson: honour your instincts.

  They wanted to keep me in ER overnight, to “monitor things.” I was in Women’s College Hospital, where the ER is small and curiously peaceful. I had my own curtained cubicle. The doctor left. I sat on the edge of my gurney, by myself, and thought about whether I was ready to die.

  I went down the list: my robust and youthful husband would miss me, but survive (if not move on to an immature, demanding, over-talkative trophy wife. Then he’d really miss me . . .). And despite his current dilemmas, I realized that my son was resourceful, strong, and on his way. In fact, the world would spin on quite nicely without me. Perhaps . . .my sense of being indispensable to everyone was up for revision?

  Then I scanned my conscience; there were a few shadowy corners in the old hard drive but nothing to panic about. When I called Brian at work with the news, I lowballed the implications of the diagnosis but suggested he get on over. I punched in Janet’s number again—“It’s a much smaller ER this time”—and made light of the situation. My arm’s doing really well, I said, but there was a tiny, tiny possibility that I could also die in the next few hours, and so I needed something decent to read and a pair of slippers. I heard her voice quaver, and that’s when mine did too.

  I decided not to phone Casey just yet. He’d be at work anyway. I’d give it another day. Presuming I had one. (He later rebuked us for this decision.)

  Then calmly, calmly, I looked at my life, and thought: okay. If necessary I could wrap it up right now.

  That fall, tired of working nine-hour days for minimum wage, Casey had switched to bike couriering and driving for a French meals-on-wheels organization. Staying in various sorts of motion. We are, I keep forgetting, a family of cyclists, skiers, and restless people. The love trouble with its attendant angst continued.

  Then, in February of the broken year, Brian racked up a bike accident himself. (I suspected a competitive element at first but he was sideswiped by a car.) This left him with a mild concussion that made him act weird for several days and caused his groin,where it had been impaled on his handlebars, to turn an awesome shade of eggplant. He had to take a cellphone photo of his purple genitals for insurance purposes, and for months this image kept randomly popping up in our slideshows.

  As for me, the embolisms “resolved” but the fallout continued, with a case of shingles over Christmas followed by news from the dentist that I had also broken a small bone in my jaw during the accident. Well, that would explain the constant headaches. I had to keep taking Coumadin. I was convinced that it jacked up my anxiety, but my hard-assed hematologist claimed there were absolutely no side effects from Coumadin—apart from the risks of internal bleeding and fetal defects in pregnant women. What other side effects does a drug need to invite skepticism, I wondered.

  All I know is that for nearly a year, I felt as if I was operating inside my own electrically charged enclosure. I expected blue sparks to leap from my fingers when people shook my hand. I realized that the post-traumatic fallout from the whole life-and-death drama could account for my anxiety, if not my entire personality. But I preferred to blame the drug.

  Nevertheless, I functioned and cooked dinner. I drove to therapy and did yoga, drank red wine, called my son, saw my friends. Everything felt like a mild ordeal.

  Brian’s mother was also in and out of hospital that winter,with alarming collapses. I became a connoisseur of different emergency rooms around the city, the ones with the best triage nurses or the worst coin machines for snacks. I learned that being 91 doesn’t make a bit of difference but “Shortness of breath” (SOB) as a presenting symptom will sometimes help you jump the queue.

  Meanwhile, the hard times were piling up for Casey, in fiendish new ways. When his friend moved in with him, Casey said to him, half-jokingly, because there was a history of this, “There’s only one rule in this household—no sleeping with the roommate.”Not unreasonable, in a three-person situation.

  Need I drag this out? Of course the friend slept with the pixieish new roommate. In a twinkling they fell in love and became inseparable, doing everything as a couple. No more bocce ball outings for the boys.

  Casey was under no illusions that he was the perfect roommate, given the craziness he was going through. But the irony of coming home from one obsessive romance to watch another one unfold was not lost on him.

  “It’s like Dante’s description of Purgatory,” he said on the phone one day, revealing that he had in fact read some books at McGill. “The punishment fits the nature of the crime. You’re doomed to witness your own behaviour, enacted in front of your eyes, over and over.”

  I did think that Casey should cut his friend some slack—the guy didn’t mean to fall in love, and roommates aren’t forever. But he was irked by the way men can let their friendships languish as soon as a girlfriend comes along to take care of all their emotional needs. Women do that too, as I recalled. Courtship will dominate the whole agenda, if you let it.

  As winter deepened, the new couple went into domestic high gear. There were doilies for the drinks, discussions about the state of the bathtub, and much folding of tea towels. The two of them were in bed by 10 p.m.

  “It’s a glass coffee table,” Casey would report to us, wearily, “you don’t need a doily on a glass coffee table.”

  “I put so much into making this work,” he complained. He’d found the flat, furnished it, supplied the roommate, and now he was eating his dinners most nights down the street at the Vietnamese café rather than being the third wheel.

  Homes don’t usually last at your age, I sometimes said. Or just thought.

  He had tried hard to get his life up and running this first year after college. To get work and love and friends in place around him. Instead, everything had fallen apart.

  That Christmas Rebecca finished school, and they agreed to finally let it go. She moved back to Toronto and her family, with a plan to travel and do volunteer work in Chile. Five thousand miles of separation might do the trick.

  In the New Year,his roommates announced that they had found an apartment in Little Italy but they had to move right away, in two weeks. They felt badly about the whole situation and not giving more notice, especially since it was the middle of January. But the new place was really perfect.

  Casey began scrolling through Craigslist again.

  Spring

  I’VE COME THROUGH MONTREAL by train. Things have finally settled down on the health front, and I’m going up to our summer cabin to get some concentrated work done. Brian will drive the car and catch up with me on the weekend. It’s been a while since I’ve visited the city, and I’m curious to see Casey’s new place.

  The apartment is back in Mile End, a few blocks from where he used to live on Jeanne-Mance. A neighbourhood full of beautiful girls on bicycles. He’s sharing with two women his age with messy bedrooms who have painted the kitchen a great shade of red. It’s only a sublet, but that might change.

  His new room is long and spacious, with blond wood floors and tall windows that open wide and have no screens. He demonstrates, standing on the ledge.

  “Montrealers don’t worry about suicide,” he says merrily.

  I haven’t seen him since Christmas. He’s been following a post-breakup health and sanity program—swimming, biking, working on various job proposals. He’s
got a contract doing some archiving for a film company downtown. It’s heavy on the data-processing but leaves him lots of freedom.

  He looks good, clear-eyed. New jeans, too, I notice, for the office. He has some money in the bank now and has bought a bottle of wine for my arrival,which we open.

  A tour of his room: the main feature is an organized cockpit of turntable, amplifier, recording stuff, beside a clean desk. His headphones hang neatly from a nail in the wall.

  “The whole thing about work, I’ve figured out, is appearances,” he says. “When the job has no actual content, which mine currently doesn’t, all that matters is that you look busy and dress appropriately.”

  Before I left Toronto, I had resorted to a diagnostic tool I don’t often use these days. I consulted the I Ching. Very 1971 of me, I realize. And yes, it’s a military-minded text with antique views on gender, but I’ve always found something useful in the readings. They tend to throw a fresh light on whatever is uppermost in my mind, regardless of what question I ask. Usually my question is “What’s going on here?”

  I tossed the coins six times and arrived at the 48th hexagram, The Well, with two “moving” lines. It’s always good to get moving lines, because they offer more specific commentary and indicate change.

  The reading described a situation where a communal well was under construction but couldn’t be used until the town around it became more organized and the well was properly cared for. I read the text for the first moving line:

  The well is cleaned, but no one drinks from it.

  This is my heart’s sorrow, For one might draw from it.

  If the king were clear-minded, Good fortune might be enjoyed in common.

  Then the second moving line:

  True, if a well is being lined with stone, it cannot be used while the work is going on. But the work is not in vain; the result is that the water stays clear.

  In life also there are times when a man must put himself in order. During such a time he can do nothing for others, but his work is nonetheless valuable, because by enhancing his powers and abilities through inner development, he can accomplish all the more later on.

  I sit down at his desk and look out the window, through the rain that is falling, at the grey stone apartments across the street and the spring garbage on the wet lawns. The curl of the black balconies down to the street, like diagrams of DNA. Montreal is so Montreal. Ten frames of a movie and you can recognize that it was shot here. Long ago Montreal imagined itself as bigger, more urban, more ambitious, and the mood lingers on. One block over is Saint-Urbain, Mordecai Richler’s turf. All the fireworks of Brian’s twenties took place here, a few streets away. It’s a city that asks to be written about, that makes you feel as if you’re in a story.

  Casey calls up some of his music files on the computer and plays me some of the tunes he has been recording.

  “They’re mostly quiet ones because I have to record them at night when there are people around. I’ll burn you a CD to take up to the cottage,” he says, pointing out the tall, handy stack of blanks. He starts scrolling through his list, choosing recent songs of his own. “I’m trying to sort out some of the more bitter ones,”he jokes.

  He plays one, a spooky late-night blues called “Blessing in Disguise.” About the bad taking you into the vicinity of something new and good.

  “Check this out,” he says, switching to some whirling Turkish numbers with an ululating female vocal. He turns and gives me one of his wide, blazing smiles as we both listen to the woman sing, riding the crazy waves of the music like someone on a Jet Ski.

  It is raining hard outside, but we put on our jackets and walk a few blocks over to find somewhere to eat. People are in the streets despite the weather. On the corner is an Indonesian restaurant with white tablecloths, its windows rectangles of warmth and light in the rain. We step inside.

  Not My Job

  IHAVE DONE IT AGAIN, overstepping my boundaries as a “helpful” mother to my job-hunting son. All with the best of intentions of course.

  The problem with an arts degree—one of them, that is—is that unless you want to be an academic or a museum curator, you end up looking for work in a swampy field called “communications.” These job descriptions are often written in something like Esperanto, a highly evolved form of gibberish that obscures the true nature of the job. “Office management” could mean six hours of photocopying a day and “excellent interpersonal skills” can be work-speak for “receptionist babe with a nice smile.”

  Until recently Casey had spurned this end of the work spectrum, preferring to live the non-cubicle life. Then he began applying for more professional positions.

  Sometimes I’d troll through the jobsite listings myself, an unwise activity that can lead to “forwarding.” These sites can also be slightly addictive, like taking online house tours. But it cheered me up to be able to contemplate careers other than freelance writing. I was sure that I could “participate in designing both print and digital design strategies” for someone. It wasn’t too late, perhaps, for me to become a professional cake decorator.

  One day he sent us the descriptions for a couple jobs he had applied for that sounded promising. Both were well-paying positions requiring years of experience in their respective fields. Neither was out of his league in terms of his skills (“communication” and writing) or strengths (working with people, managing projects). But in the past decade the etiquette of applying for a job has ramped up to a level where every detail matters, no matter how picayune. Did he know this?

  Only 24 hours earlier, when I was bugging him about a barista gig he didn’t even want, he had asked me to lay off with the job advice. But I couldn’t restrain myself; I didn’t want him to waste his time collecting no’s.During my stints as a magazine editor, I’ve been on the receiving end of pitches, queries, and cover letters. I knew how quickly one misspelling can land someone on the rejection pile.

  So I sent him an email with a few carefully chosen suggestions regarding the art of résumés and cover letters.

  This did not go over well.

  He did not require redundant professional advice, he informed me, and indeed he found it “fundamentally insulting.” Everything I advised him on, he already knew, thank you very much. He had already talked to a career counsellor at McGill. He understood cover letters. Yes, he tailored his CV to each different position. THIS IS NOT YOUR JOB, he emailed in caps. And if I wanted him to continue to take my advice seriously, I should consider not giving it unless asked for.

  Gulp.

  I phoned him, apologized, and said I would try harder on the not-meddling front. The air was cleared. But I knew my impulse to “help”would swing back again. I tend to be meddling and entrepreneurial with most of my friends, so it’s difficult to censor this impulse with my own son.

  This is the stress of motherhood at the twenty-something, middle-management you are confronted with a problem (your son is looking for a job) without having any agency or power in the situation (you are no longer the boss). Much of the necessary un-mothering that goes on with grown-up kids falls into this category, where the main challenge is to shut up and go along with other people’s decisions, good or bad. Breathing exercises also help.

  And it’s not the case that I always leap in unbidden; our son does ask for guidance from us at times, or at least a sympathetic ear. When things get discouraging on the job-hunting front—hard to avoid, given the current unemployment rates among the young, which are twice as high as adult figures—my natural response is: how can we fix this? What practical advice can I offer? I want the world to make use of all the things he has to offer. Instead, my advice can come across as a lack of faith in his abilities to make his own way.

  Doing stuff for him as a child always came easily: the costume-making, hamster-feeding, chauffeuring parts. Being that kind of mother felt like a holiday from other responsibilities. But this category of help is tougher: not doing things for him. Mothers of grown kids must learn new t
ricks of the lip-zipping sort. Empathetic listening, responding in short sentences, preferably while making a large vat of bean soup. “That must be tough” is okay, and “We’ll keep our fingers crossed” is too. “You might think about a haircut before that interview”is not acceptable.

  Then I would remind myself that my son was only a year out of school and still learning the ropes. “Putting on his game face,” as he said. I’ve been officially employed for perhaps a total of five years out of the past 40 so I am hardly in a position to tutor him in the ways of the “real world.” But I still have to remind myself that my urge to edit, to make sure that all the commas and dashes are in place, should not be transferred to my son, his haircuts, or his life.

  And when I was in my twenties, as I recall, I committed some professional faux pas that still give me pain.

  I was freelancing for the Toronto Star, writing entertainment listings (but with a Proustian flair, I thought). I had worked myself into a froth of indignation about the fact that my editors had failed to offer me a column of my own in the newspaper. The thing reporters work decades to earn normally. Hadn’t they noticed the wit and nuance of my listings for fall fairs and outdoor concerts? How long did they expect me to toil in these menial assignments?

  But I didn’t have the nerve to speak to my editor or to do something professional, such as submitting a column on spec. Instead, I wrote a chippy little note about how my talents were far better suited to a column and how could this be redressed? Then, even more bizarrely, I tucked this note into the open purse of my editor, on her desk.