by Linda Kenyon
They greeted me politely as they passed, suddenly on their best behaviour. “Hello,” they’d say, or “Okay, okay,” which puzzled me. Were they asking me if I was okay? Telling me that they were okay? I just wasn’t sure. But I did get the feeling that they had been trained from a very young age to be polite to tourists.
“Do you want to take my picture?” a little girl with at least a dozen red and blue and green plastic baubles in her hair asked me.
The laundromat had turned into a hair salon by the time I got back. The woman who owns the place had moved one of the plastic chairs from inside out onto the front porch. In it sat a young man, his hair brushed straight up in the air. She was applying some kind of goo to it and braiding it into tiny cornrows.
“Looking good!” I said as I passed.
“Look better soon.” He grinned.
I moved our clothes from the washers to the dryers, inserted more quarters, then leaned against one of the dryers, looked out the window. There were steps carved out of the stone going down to the water, and a dock. We could have landed there and saved ourselves some hauling. There was a blue and white fishing boat at anchor just off the dock, bobbing gently in the waves. The water was so clear you could see the concrete block the boat was tied to, could see the shadow of the boat clearly on the sandy bottom. I was doing laundry in paradise.
I was scared of Mom’s wringer washer — all of us kids were.
“Stay back,” Mom would say as she fished the clothes out of the steaming water with a wooden spoon and fed them through the wringers. “If your arm gets caught in the wringers, your bones will be crushed.”
This puzzled me — I’d seen the wringers pop apart when she tried to feed too many clothes through. Surely an arm, even a kid’s arm, would trigger the safety release. But we stayed back.
Mom continued to use her wringer washer long after everyone else’s mother had moved to an automatic.
“I don’t trust them,” she’d say. “And they use too much water.”
Mom would start boiling water for the whites as soon as Dad left for work. She would actually boil enough water to fill the tub, add detergent and a cup of bleach, stir it with her wooden spoon. She wouldn’t use the agitator, because without clothes in the tub, it splashed too much. She didn’t want to risk getting bleach water on her apron or, worse, in her eyes, or ours.
“Stand back,” she’d say, as she stirred cautiously.
Then she’d add the whites, poke them down, set the timer for ten minutes, let them agitate while she sipped her now-cold coffee, run them through the wringers when the timer went off. The rest of the clothes would follow, according to colour and level of grime. The tea towels and tablecloth came next, then the sheets, then the bath towels, then our underwear and shirts, then our muddy pants. Sometimes she’d wash our running shoes before she drained the machine and filled it again to repeat the whole process for the rinse.
It took her until midmorning to finish the washing. Then she’d haul everything out to the backyard, give each item a fierce shake and hang it on our flimsy inverted-umbrella clothesline. She would discreetly hang our underwear behind the towels and sheets, but I was mortified at having it out there at all. I didn’t understand why we couldn’t get a dryer like everyone else.
“Uses too much electricity,” Mom would say.
When I left home, the first thing I bought myself was an apartment-sized washer and dryer, which I hauled from place to place. No way I was going to use a wringer washer, and there was something shameful, it seemed to me, about going to a laundromat. Too public. Too many bored people waiting for their clothes to dry, nothing better to do than watch you fold your not-quite-clean tea towels.
Now I seek them out — all that hot water, and dryers that leave the towels nice and fluffy. So much better than washing things in salt water in a pail, rinsing them in the smallest amount of fresh water possible, hanging them from the rigging to dry. On a good day, you don’t have to retrieve your bedsheets from the water and start all over again.
I understand now, in a way I didn’t then, that perhaps my mother wasn’t just backwards. Maybe she took pleasure in doing laundry the way she’d always done it, the way her mother taught her. I remember watching her patiently fish our little socks out of the water and feed them through the wringers one by one. She would linger as she folded our corduroy pants and plaid shirts, shook the wrinkles out of our Sunday dresses, tied the ribbons at the back into pretty bows. She always smiled as she smoothed the baby’s sleepers, folded the flannel blankets with bunnies on them. And there was no mistaking the satisfaction on her face as she carried the baskets of clean laundry into the house.
I have trouble reconciling this version of my mother, so content with her small life, so fearful of everything — with the woman who understood my decision to go sailing, who pushed me away, in fact. I had been dreading going to the home to tell her that I was thinking of going sailing with Chris. But she didn’t hesitate for a minute. She put her good hand on my chest, pushed me, hard.
“Go!” she said. “Go.”
When the laundry was dry, folded, and packed back into the plastic bags, I hauled it out onto the back porch, planning to sit on the stone steps and watch for Chris. Perhaps I could wave him in to the dinghy dock, save us lugging our laundry back through the town.
Outside the door, two women stood talking. Well, one was talking, the other was listening. The one doing the talking wore a brightly coloured dress, red and blue and orange, and was holding a bible in her hands. The other woman had a baby on her hip and was wearing a white blouse, a red skirt, and a wide-brimmed hat with elaborate trim. She looked like she had just come from church. They stopped talking, turned and looked at me. Uh-oh, I thought.
“Hello,” I said.
“Okay? Okay?” the one with the bible sang out. She looked out over the harbour. “Where ya boat?”
“It’s in Staniel,” I explained. “I’ve just come here to do my wash.”
“May I pray wit you?” she asked.
There was no getting around it. She tucked her bible under her arm, took both my hands. Both women closed their eyes. I stared at the baby. The baby stared at me.
“Lord, we t’ank you for dis woman, dis beautiful woman. We t’ank you for bringing her to our beautiful islands, the mos beautiful islands in the world.”
“Amen,” the other woman murmured.
“T’ank you for dis woman, and keep she safe on the water, keep she safe on she boat, keep all a ya on the boats safe, on ah own beautiful water.”
“Hear her,” the woman in the hat agreed.
The baby was still staring at me. I lowered my eyes.
“Lord, bless dis woman, dis beautiful woman, and keep she safe. Amen.”
“Amen,” murmured the other woman.
“Amen,” I said.
They opened their eyes and smiled at me. The woman was still holding my hands.
“Thank you,” I said, squeezing her hands and releasing them gently. “Thank you.”
And I really meant it.
The second squall has come and gone. I stand in the companionway where I’m safely (I hope) surrounded by wood. Chris studies the radar.
“There’s good news and bad news. The good news is I can see the other side of the next squall and it looks like it’s the last one. The bad news is it’s four miles wide.”
I brace myself for the worst. How can four miles of thunderstorms pass over us without at least one direct strike? Never get caught out on the water in a thunderstorm, I can hear my mother saying. You’ll get hit for sure. Never stand under a tree. Or anywhere outside, for that matter. Lightning can travel through wet ground, strike you dead before you know it. Not that you’re safe inside. Don’t ever touch an aluminum window. Or stand near the stove. Or the sink. Or worse, between the two. If lightning hits the house, a fireball will come out
of the stove and arc to the sink. Go to the basement. Stay there. It’s the only safe place.
You’re just like your mother. Afraid of everything. Why don’t you go down below, pull the covers up over your head?
After the first half hour, I find myself releasing my death grip on the sides of the companionway and even watching the lightning rather than squeezing my eyes closed at every flash. The wind is fierce, the rain torrential, but they are nothing compared to the lightning. A deafening crash, then a jagged streak of light, how close now? I start to count, one thousand, two… I never get past two. The storm is right on us. Lightning strikes the water to the left of the boat, to the right, leaving us completely blinded between flashes. It’s terrifying. But it’s also really quite beautiful, in a holy-cow-I-wish-I-were-watching-this-on-TV kind of way.
Bless this woman, I keep repeating to myself. Bless this man. Keep them safe on the water, the beautiful water.
Something happens during that first storm at sea. I find myself surrendering — what else can I do? I feel very small out in the wide ocean, in the violent storm. But I feel something else, I feel free somehow. And it’s a kind of release. There’s nothing I can do.
May 27
Day 6
The next day we’re gliding over glassy seas. The storm has completely flattened out the waves — when you look over the side, you can see your reflection in the deep blue water. My hair is getting long and, for some reason, falls into curls at sea, long brown ringlets. Is that really me? That woman looks so happy.
The wind is so light that even with the spinnaker up, we’re barely holding three knots. But every now and then a gentle gust pushes us up to four. It’s enough.
We’re both pretty tired. The storm last night completely messed up our watch schedule. It let up just after midnight, and Chris insisted on taking the first watch — he was still on full alert, I think. I slept fitfully for maybe an hour, then I made us a couple of mugs of milky tea and we sat together watching the clouds disappear in the distance, watching the stars slowly emerge. It was just getting light when Chris finally went down. He slept through breakfast, then I slept through lunch, and now it’s late afternoon and neither of us is sleepy.
I’ve washed my hair in the rainwater that filled the bucket tied to the radar arch — this makes me very happy, for some reason — and I’m lounging against the sailbag on the foredeck, letting the wind dry my hair. I should get out of the sun, but not yet, not yet.
I close my eyes, listen to the murmur of the bow wave, the whisper of the spinnaker as it fills, then relaxes, fills, then relaxes. Dad would love this.
I don’t think Dad was meant be a family man. The urge to run away was always strong in him. When he was a little boy, his family lived briefly in a rented house on Victoria Street in Kitchener. When he got tired of playing with an old railway spike in the dirt in the backyard, he would sit on the curb in front of the house and watch the streetcars crest the hill on Victoria, disappear from view, then reappear a few minutes later in the distance. If he had a nickel, I think he would have risked his mother’s wrath and boarded one. But he grew up during the Depression, no one had any money, least of all his parents. His father was on relief, and struggled to feed his growing family and keep a roof over their heads. They moved from one place to another, sometimes in the middle of the night. Each was worse than the last.
One day Dad came out of school to find his father waiting outside the gate.
“Come on,” he said, and took him to their newest place, an apartment in a tenement above a Greek restaurant and a fish market on King Street. The building was old, dark, and dingy, the once-varnished front stairs layered with dust and grime. At the top of the stairs was a windowless corridor, dirty grey walls just visible by the light of dim bulbs strung out along the high ceiling. The apartment itself was bright enough, though — long and narrow with windows overlooking the street. The Capitol Theatre was right next door, and at night, Dad would fall asleep in the bed he shared with one of his brothers, bathed in light, then plunged into darkness as the marquee flashed on and off.
But this was much better than their previous place, which had been completely overrun with cockroaches.
No wonder Dad dreamed of escaping. In high school, he figured out a way to get to the ocean, if he could just get his hands on a little boat. He had traced a line in his geography book from the Grand River in Kitchener to Lake Erie, across the lake and into the Erie Canal, then down the canal and out the Hudson River to the Atlantic. I’m not sure what he thought he’d do once he got there. But he never did.
When he finished high school, he took a job as a transmitter operator at the local radio station, then was offered a job as an engineer at a station in Niagara Falls. There he met Mom, and as soon as they were married, the babies started coming. That’s all she had ever wanted in life — babies. They moved back to Kitchener and in with his parents, and that was the end of his dreams.
Dad joined the army in order to support his growing family, and Mom moved with his parents to a cottage in Wasaga Beach. Mom, a timid young bride, pregnant now with her second child — me — tried to stay out of Grandma’s way.
“Yes, Mother,” I can hear her saying. “Peggy — take off your shoes! I’ll sweep that up, Mother.”
I can picture Mom heaving herself to her feet, Grandma standing at the screen door, arms crossed, a frown on her face.
There is a picture of me sitting in a high chair outside the cottage, wearing only my diapers — and a big smile. My face and arms and stomach are smeared with cottage cheese, and there’s some in my hair. I’ll bet Mom got in trouble for that. A later picture shows Peggy and me sitting on the cement slab in front of the cottage, wearing matching dresses Grandma made for us out of some leftover curtain material, hard black shoes, white ankle socks. Our hair is tightly braided. There. That’s more like it.
Not that Grandma was always old and sour. She was born on a farm in Minnesota in 1892, one of sixteen children. Like many Swedish immigrants, her parents decided to move to California, where the weather was better and farming much easier. When she was old enough, she was sent to work for a respectable Swedish family, but she ran off to San Francisco. She was working as a telephone operator at a hotel when she met my grandpa and they were married shortly after.
I have a picture of the two of them taken around that time. They’re sitting together on the running board of a Model A Ford with “MADRONE RODEO July 4-5-6” painted on the side of it. Grandma’s hands are folded demurely on her lap, but shockingly, she’s wearing loose bloomers tucked into stockings that come up to her knees. She’s a stout woman, with legs like a pool table’s. Her tiny feet are squeezed into a pair of dusty boots. She has a loose bandana around her neck, tied at the back, red, I think, though the photograph is black and white. I think she’s dressed as a cowgirl. All that’s missing is the hat.
Her hair is cropped short — in itself scandalous, I’m sure. Tight finger curls frame her broad face She’s looking at something off to the side, smiling broadly. Grandpa sits beside her, looking almost clownish in a suit that’s way too big for him. You can see a big hole in the bottom of one of his boots. He’s holding a top hat in one hand, a fat cigar in the other. He too is smiling. They both look so happy. I wonder what happened.
I know some of the story — Grandpa goes to the school in the middle of the day and collects the children, takes them home. For some reason, Grandma is sitting on a chair in the dining room with her back to the wall. Grandpa walks into the bedroom and comes out with a shotgun, puts the gun to her chest, tells her calmly that he’s going to shoot her first, then the children, then himself, unless she agrees to move to Canada. Which she does.
After that, according to my dad, their relationship was more of an armed truce than a marriage.
It was a happy day for my parents when Dad was discharged from the army, now trained as an x-ray technician, a
nd the two of them could set up housekeeping together. Far away from his parents.
But he went back to visit from time to time, like a dutiful son. He tells the story of watching them play Scrabble after dinner one night, sitting at the scrubbed wooden table, an ashtray between them, Grandpa with a glass of whisky in front of him. Grandma put down a word.
“What the hell is that?”
Grandma looked at him coolly.
“It’s another word for a prisoner, Louis.”
Grandpa studied the board, finally put all his letters down.
“What is that supposed to be?”
“A pimple on a goose’s ass,” he said, getting up from the table.
Another night Dad arrived to find his father drinking pretty hard. Grandma had already gone to bed, and Grandpa decided that he wanted something to eat. A friend of his owned a restaurant in town, and even though it was late and the restaurant would be closed, Grandpa knew his friend would open up for him.
Grandpa opened the bedroom door. “I’m going to get a hamburger,” he said. “I’ll bring one back for you.”
“I don’t want a damned hamburger,” Grandma replied. “What time is it?”
“I’m bringing you a hamburger.”
“Well, I don’t want one.”
Dad went with Grandpa, who was too drunk to be out on his own. And sure enough, Grandpa brought a hamburger back for Grandma.
“Here’s your hamburger,” he said to the darkened room.
“I don’t want the damned thing,” she said.
“Well, I’ll put it here on the dresser.”
“It can stay there till hell freezes over,” she said.
And it did. The next time Dad visited, it was still there. Neither of them would throw it out.
I watch a pair of tropicbirds drift lazily towards us, long white tailfeathers trailing behind, funny little legs and feet tucked in tight. I can clearly see the black masks and bright orange bills as they scan the water for fish. One of them spreads its wings wide, hovers for a minute — has he seen something? — then lands gently on the water beside the boat, rises and falls with the swell. His mate lands beside him.