by Kyo Maclear
From early September to late November, she barely left her bedroom, sleeping through the day while Kana and I were away at school.
One childhood fear, still with me, comes from the mystery of my mother’s collapse, the lack of any advance signal. At times, I have wondered, as children do, what genetic surprise awaits me. How would I know? What was her snapping point? What did it feel like to crack? A sudden pop, a jagged rupture, a slow seep?
My father ended up moving to England. A few years ago, when he came through town for a geography conference, I asked him, during a rare heart-to-heart, what he might have said to her during that ill-fated phone conversation.
He replied, “I can’t think of anything in particular. I merely told her to take care of herself.”
Perhaps he said it in such a way that she felt the entire wall of her ego cave in. Or maybe he didn’t say it any particular way at all; maybe at that moment he was genuinely full of sympathy and concern. The words shattered her nonetheless. They were divorcing words.
Well then, my dear, he might have said as he held her over a canyon, legs dangling in mid-air, take care of yourself.
The truth is that my father has always been a bit curt. The thing he most dreaded being was tedious. It was a quality he despised in others. He believed that most people talked far too much, that fewer words denoted thought. But to my mind he simply feared the emotion of words. He should have had the courage to say more. The week before he went off to England, where he planned to investigate some breakthrough in electronic cartography, he took me out for ice cream. His parting speech lasted a confusing thirty seconds.
“I know it’s hard but during this difficult interval, it might be beneficial to concentrate on your studies. Try to be generous with your mother and sister. Before you know it, everything will come back together. Dissolution and renewal are a part of life. What makes us human are our failings and flaws.”
When I finally figured out what he was saying, I felt hoodwinked. He didn’t really believe that dissolution was a part of life. Or if he believed it, he certainly didn’t like it. As for our failings and flaws—my father loathed imperfection. He couldn’t stand the asymmetry of his face, for example, the way his nose curved to the left, how one eyebrow was noticeably higher than the other. He abhorred the freckles covering his body. He judged himself relentlessly. He shuddered at people’s image of him as a pure-blooded Scot, not out of ethnic dislike but because he despised clannishness—especially its rituals of kilts and pipes.
What he did like were straight lines and straight A’s. He had a fondness for triangles. The equilateral was his favourite (three equal sides), next he liked the isosceles (two equal sides) and last of all the scalene (no equal sides). As a geographer, he looked for near-perfect formations: mountain chains, waterfalls, coral reefs. Best of all were near-perfect triangular formations: deltas, ice caps, the province of Madrid. He wasn’t without a sense of humour. He liked making geography jokes such as, “No man is an isthmus.” (An isthmus, I later learned, is a narrow piece of land connecting two larger bodies of land. When my parents separated, I became an isthmus.)
My father looked at his wife and saw someone too opposite. He was a minimalist. She was a maximalist. He was regular in everything, from his choice in coffee to his bowel movements. She was irregular—tea one morning, hot chocolate the next. He was a pessimist. She was an optimist. He liked the refined pleasure of listening to opera alone in his office. She preferred to pile up with us on the couch and watch television. Deep down I think he wanted to do the right thing for his family, but in the end he suffered from a failure of hope.
Yet at one time hadn’t he thought she was the very incarnation of perfection?
In my memories of my mother’s period of collapse, she is always lying under her comforter, the same floral mofu she’d had for years, originally shipped from Japan in an enormous piped-plastic package with a matching towel set that, once faded, was used as bedding for the cat’s basket. A dark slab of television rises tomb-like at the foot of the bed. Bouquets of elastic-bound junk mail are scattered across the floor. The warm autumn sun, then the white winter sun, slants through a gap in the curtains, casting a coffin of light on the bed. It is surely the dictionary definition of wretchedness. Her hands are folded on her chest. She looks like the dearly departed. And this is when I start to mourn her.
No matter how much she slept, there were dark stains under her eyes. Not a normal tiredness but undiminishing exhaustion. As the weeks passed, Kana and I did our best to hold the house together. Kana was the mother now. She did the laundry and laid out our pyjamas in the evening, our clothes in the morning. For dinner, she beat four eggs, added some slices of pepperoni, diced tomato, a large toss of salt and pepper, put some butter in a pan and prepared her one specialty: pizza scramble. On other nights, our meals came from boxes and cans. The papery corpses of dead bugs gathered on the kitchen floor by the fridge. I used plastic cutlery and pretended we were on a long camping trip.
When I tired of eating Kana’s scramble, I thought briefly of asking the lady next door to help out on meals, but then she might have called Children’s Aid—and such intrusion wasn’t worth the risk. Looking back, we held up pretty well considering the strangeness of a mother who kept nocturnal hours and even then rarely left her bed.
At least I could count on knowing where she was. I experienced a rush of pleasure whenever I entered her bedroom after school. I knew that she’d be just waking up, that her body would emanate warmth. One day, while Kana stayed late at school for gymnastics practice, I joined my mother in her pillow fortress, crouching in the soft king-size bed, inhaling her faint sweat smell and glancing at her profile as we watched television together. By now, my mother had spent three weeks in bed, and I had a sudden irrational desire to be shut up with her, the security of her and me in an otherwise hazardous world.
Our stomachs were growling for food, but I paid no attention until I was starving and then ran downstairs to prepare a selection of snacks. I remember enjoying the hickory salt left on my fingertips from the potato chips and the thick texture of Nutella pressed off a spoon with my tongue. We passed hours into the evening, lying side by side. At one point, I went downstairs and prepared a tray with chocolate milk, a sludge of brown syrup at the bottom of each glass, a tin of Del Monte mixed fruit for my mother and a bag of trail mix for myself. When I entered the bedroom the cats were scratching up the woven silk wallpaper, shredding the brown fibre with their unclipped claws. There was a nest growing on the carpet.
My mother rested the glass of chocolate milk on her collarbone, taking baby sips as she watched a rerun of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Mary had just knocked on Mr. Grant’s office door. Suddenly there was a dull thud—in the room this time, not on the television. The unopened fruit salad tin had rolled along the downy slope of my mother’s blanketed legs and onto the floor. I waited but my mother didn’t stir. I let a minute or so pass, but it bothered me knowing that the tin was on the floor, so I went to her side, picked it up and placed it on the bedside table.
Perhaps at the time I wasn’t entirely normal myself. What I felt inside me during those first few weeks seemed more like a strange curiosity than fear—not unlike the way I felt when my father drank too much at Christmas one year and I watched him waltz into a glass door.
My mother’s face looked as if she had just competed in a marathon, conquering a task so strenuous that she had now earned as long a rest as she desired. Under the covers, she wore an old T-shirt and grey sweatpants. Though she didn’t wear makeup, the room always smelled sweetly of honey skin lotion. A thousand pills of wool formed on a baby-blue cardigan she draped over her shoulders. Even her clothes were returning to an atavistic state.
Weeks passed, and Kana and I stopped waiting for our casserolemaking, euchre-playing mother to return. I convinced myself that all mothers, even the good ones, maybe particularly the good ones, needed to take time for themselves.
The arrangement w
as that we would see our father once a week, but more and more frequently he would cancel or postpone at the last minute. I could always see the hurt on Kana’s face before she could hide it. Our father had stopped being reliable. The more we needed him, the more distant he became.
My father always had a knack for fixing things. He spent much of my childhood sitting at a work table in the garage surrounded by warped bicycle wheels, lopsided picture frames and uneven table legs. The state of the concrete floor, strewn with nails and splintery scraps of wood, made entering off limits, but I counted on him to be there, and often stood at the doorway watching him. As winter approached, my mother would wander over and try to convince him to bring his workshop into the house so he wouldn’t have to be alone and in the cold. But he insisted he liked it out there by himself. He said it was his “bit of crust,” a geographer’s way of referring to his portion of the earth.
One afternoon after he left, I ventured into the garage. I was desperate to be in the spaces he had occupied. The garage was dim, but as soon as I entered I saw something wedged in the bench vise: one of my mother’s shoes. My father had mended the wooden heel and left it there for the glue to dry. I walked over, unscrewed the vise carefully, and placed the shoe on the wooden table among his clamps and filing tools. It was the last thing he fixed before he left his marriage.
I tried to kept busy. In the morning we had school. I ate arrowroot cookies and orange juice for breakfast. In a burst of maternal feeling, Kana suggested I explore other food options, but I didn’t like cereal and I was tired of eggs. So I continued eating cookies, added La Vache Qui Rit cheese triangles to my diet and sometimes substituted milk for juice. I begged off scrambled eggs forever, explaining, in a note I left for Kana on the fridge, that I had a “klorestral problem.”
It was near the end of the first month that the novelty wore off. I hit a wall. Whatever my mother was thinking and feeling on the inside just wasn’t getting through to us on the outside. No longer did she seem serene. She was comatose. Yet according to our family doctor—who paid a house visit after Kana called and pleaded with him to come—there was nothing physically wrong with her. He took her temperature and pulse, ran a few other tests and concluded that she was suffering from shot nerves, a “woman’s problem,” something we’d understand one day when we were grown up. Kana was ready to kill him when he said that, but I just thanked him and showed him out, feeling secretly guilty that I had wished our mother had a bona fide illness, something that involved wounds or lumps or spots. (Could the doctor show me an X-ray of her shot nerves? Would it look something like Swiss cheese?) I wanted splints and gauze and ointment. Maybe my mother was permanently deranged and the doctor was trying to protect us from the truth.
Oddly, I now found myself turning to television in a search for social explanations for my mother’s unresponsive behaviour. At first, this convergence of fact and fiction was a lark. After watching an episode of Gilligan’s Island, I told Miss Lowry, my grade four teacher, that my mother couldn’t attend a parent–teacher night because she had a tarantula bite. (It was 1970 and, for some reason, television was glutted with stories about deadly spiders, piranhas and sharks.) Then a week later, after watching an episode of General Hospital, I told Miss Lowry that my mother had contracted septicemia.
“Won’t you stay and talk with me? Please do,” Miss Lowry said one afternoon in October, leaning forward in her swivel chair. “I know this has been a very difficult time for you.”
I cut out of the conversation. My eyes flicked over the room.
“…divorce…immigrant mother…”
I stared at the orange-and-brown-striped curtains, then at a cluster of paper jack-o’-lanterns taped to the window.
“…at lunch or after school…someone to talk to now and then…So how does that sound?”
“Thank you, Miss Lowry. But I think I’m fine.”
I knew she was genuinely concerned that I had lost a grip on reality. I tried to explain that it was just a game, but she simply stared at me, nodding.
Despite Miss Lowry’s intervention, I kept telling stories.
Just before Thanksgiving, my father stopped by unexpectedly. My mother was still in bed. I was on the wood floor beside her, crawling forward on my belly the way commandos do in war movies, playing with the cats, trying my best to ignore the fact that my mother had been watching a mute game of Family Feud for over an hour. It was late afternoon. The doorbell rang and Kana let my father in. My mother remained upstairs.
“For you,” he said when he arrived, and handed us an odd-shaped package.
I balanced it while Kana peeked through the foil wrapper and sighed. “Great,” she muttered. “A plant.” (For my sister that was the clincher. Our father had brought us something else to care for—the surest sign that he had no clue.)
“Pretty.” I smiled.
“I thought your mother might like it,” he said sheepishly. “She always liked mums…mums for Mum. Perhaps it’ll brighten things up a bit.”
Kana and I had grown accustomed to ordering in. We had collected takeout menus for every pizza and barbecue joint in the area. As supper hour rolled around, Kana made a dramatic performance of arranging our menus in a fan on the dining room table. Her eyes were flickering with defiance.
“There’s a two-for-one deal at Pizza Palace,” she said.
“It’s chicken-and-rib night at Roasters,” I said.
“Good idea,” Kana said, pointing her finger at me.
“They have good sauce,” I explained to our father.
“Or, if you’d prefer“—she turned to him—“I’d be happy to whip up a peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwich.”
He smiled. “How Julia Child of you.” There was an awkward silence, then he said, “Actually, I had a late lunch. You two go ahead. I’m not hungry.”
“I could make spaghetti,” I offered.
Kana shot me a killing look.
“I’m fine, Naiko,” my father said, his voice thin and tired. He stood up and started moving toward the living room. He looked pale. On his face there were wrinkles I had never seen before. I ran ahead of him and scooped a pile of dirty clothes from the couch so he could sit down. I was afraid he would dash off and leave us alone again.
He spent the remainder of the visit trying to get Kana to look him in the eye. She behaved as though his presence meant nothing at all to her, but I knew better. Whenever he turned away, I saw her watching him. I wanted to catch his eye, roll mine knowingly at Kana’s behaviour, but he kept passing over me. Ping, ping, ping, our eyes ricocheted around the room.
Kana was sullen. I rubbed my socked feet on the carpet and touched the cat to watch the sparks fly. I felt my heart zip itself up.
Thank you. Yes. Yes. Great. Not at all. Not at all. I’m really glad you came…
The only emotion I seemed capable of expressing that afternoon was accommodation.
Perhaps the exaggerated way we discussed takeout options tripped a guilt wire in my father. The next week he packed us in a rented car and we headed for the Caledon Hills for Thanksgiving dinner in the country. This time he insisted that our mother join us.
Suddenly we were one family among many on Highway 401, cars braiding their way across the three lanes. I remember watching other people pass in their hatchbacks and station wagons, replicas of us—father, mother, two kids—other odd-acting clusters, and wondering, Were they better or worse?
I was wearing a pair of Mary Janes that I had polished with cooking oil and a blue-and-white sleeveless dress my mother had sewn for me years before from a McCall’s pattern. The dress was now a size too small and much too summery, but I wore it all the same, layering it on top of pants and a turtleneck. I played with the long trailing ribbons attached to the bodice, dangling the ends in front of my mother’s face during the car ride. Perhaps I wanted to remind her that she did once make things. But she was lost in her own world, concentrating perhaps on the soft drone of tires on the highway.
My father broke the silence by asking if we had ever tried venison. I asked what it tasted like and he said: “Gamy. Like strong liver.” Kana made a moan of disgust. “Now, now,” he continued, “it can be quite excellent with a dash of clam marinade and a spoonful of pork gelatin.”
Kana and I were clutching our stomachs and writhing in mock pain. Our mother, sitting in the front seat, wasn’t blinking.
Our father dropped us off in front of the inn while he went to park the car. We entered the restaurant foyer. My mother was dressed in a special-occasion outfit, selected by Kana. It consisted of a yellow silk blouse and a long skirt with a black-and-red diamond pattern. Kana was wearing a brown duffle coat over her favourite velour jumpsuit. We must have looked like a family of hippies on our way to a jamboree. The fact that we arrived without a reservation did not endear us to the maître d’, who seemed, in the particular long-necked manner of maître d’s, to challenge our right to be there.
The room smelled of buttered yams and roasted turkey. There were hunting pictures on the walls. The other diners looked very dignified, satisfied: life going as planned, members of a circle. Our presence seemed to make them uneasy, hostile in a genteel, don’t-display-it sort of way. Even if we had dressed in black gowns, the other diners would have seen what a calamity we all really were. But as soon as my father arrived some unspoken agreement was made, some secret aristocratic handshake exchanged, and we were seated in that tiny, crowded room. Soon, the waitress was bringing us our menus, and no one seemed to entertain any grudges, at least not openly. I picked up a fork, held it under the tablecloth and began scarring the soft surface of the wood table.