Happiness of Fish

by Fred Armstrong

  “With only the costly imported ketchups,” Gerry kids her.

  “Would you like to see the ketchup list, madame?”

  “You got it,” Melanie says. Gerry thinks she seems tougher now, with the sapping growth of Darren removed. She goes clubbing with the other girls from work. While Vivian complains that she drinks too much, when babysitters are a problem, Diana stays with her and Gerry. They play Crazy Eights.

  “You got the ace, Grampa Gerry. That’s twenty-five.”

  “You and your grandmother are card sharks.”

  Outwardly, Melanie and Diana seem to take the departure of Darren pretty much in stride. Gerry doesn’t remember Melanie fighting with Darren much. Darren always seemed to lack the metabolism to fight. His temperature topped-out at a sense of grievance and victimhood. Gerry wonders if that was his and Melanie’s version of the polite phase he and Patricia had gone through. He vaguely remembers a grade-school science lesson about leaves falling. Cells form, cutting off the connection. Maybe Darren and he had just dropped off stems that had invisibly scabbed over.

  He wonders if Darren ever found Melanie’s right-ness squeezing him out. He could remember that feeling. Patricia was eminently more sensible than he was. She had an instinct for the reasonable. He was a cowardly nihilist.

  “Talk to me about what you want,” she said. The walls closed in.

  Gerry punched holes in walls. He broke his little finger when he inadvertently found a stud behind the plaster. He found it a relief to slide away for an affair that had no redeeming social merit, where wrong was the given. Still, he had generally wanted to come back in a day or two. Low-metabolism Darren was braver. He burned his bridges.

  “It’s ironic,” Gerry says to Vivian while they’re having supper one night.

  “What is?”

  “When I punched holes in walls I broke my finger on the stud. Now when I want to hang a picture, I can’t find the damn stud.”

  “Jack used to punch the walls, “Vivian says. “He used to beat the place up.”

  It occurs to Gerry that if Vivian started writing vignettes from her past, they would be the mirror-image of his own musings.

  Heroes and villains are where you find them, he thinks, and wonders if he’s a change in quality from Vivian’s first life, or just a fluke of better timing: post-wall-smashing, post-sulking-with-a-one-night-stand.

  It’s an early morning and Gerry is the only one up, sitting at the computer trying to write. The sky is starting to lighten outside. The days are getting longer.

  He looks at the last bit he wrote about Vivian as Ellen, but doesn’t feel courageous about the present this morning. He dodges back into the past. He settles on a pile of jottings that deal with a time in the mid-’80s, after Patricia and before Vivian, between Paula and Ellen in his recycled chronicle.

  Fragment: Weasel Lodge

  They called themselves The Loyal Order of Weasels at the bar. They said Weasel was an acronym. It stood for “Week-End-Adventurers-Sans-Ethical-Luggage.” What they mostly did was drink and wait for bars to fill up so they could complain about them being too crowded and go somewhere else.

  Today the Weasels are meeting in a place that justifies being a bar by having pretensions as a restaurant. It isn’t anywhere near noon yet and only thirsty Weasels are there. There is nothing less trendy than an empty trendy restaurant. It will be an hour or two before the place can pretend to be either a restaurant or trendy. It’s almost entirely in its loser-bar incarnation, except that it smells of old mussel shells. There was a dirty clot of blood on the sidewalk outside. One of last night’s lined-up trendies must have smacked another as they waited to get in. Courage must have failed the victim. He had decided to stay in one spot and bleed a quiescent pool on the pavement rather than snort a red froth in the face of his attacker and charge.

  Today the Weasels consist of a broker named Simon and Lem who owns a greasy spoon where the group can get beer at breakfast time. Then there’s Chuck who works for a collection agent but says he used to be a pilot in the air force. The other members are George and a woman called Fiona and the obnoxious FM disc jockey she’s been going out with. He goes by his on-air name of Lance, but Fiona says he was christened Heber. Currently she is auditioning George as the DJ’s replacement. Lance/Heber has made the mistake of demonstrating how easy Fiona is to boss around in social situations. George doesn’t boss her around and, because he’s between jobs, has lots of time to drink with her. Fiona was divorced from a dentist and hasn’t bothered to go back to work yet. They have already been to bed when Lance was doing an all-night shift and are toying with becoming an item.

  On this day, Lance is elsewhere. Fiona has brought her ex’s camera to the bar.

  “I want to get some pictures for my friend in Calgary,” she says. Fiona went to university out west.

  It’s a mild day with winter cautiously trying on spring. There’s actually a bit of heat in the sun as they walk around the town. They take pictures of fish stalls and the court house and the Anglican graveyard.

  “Taking pictures. It’s like George Formby, ‘Washing windows.’ It ought to be a music hall song,” George says. He is wondering if this afternoon’s walk is going to end up in bed. He hums the Formby song for her. She’s too young to have heard it.

  “When I’m taking pictures,” she sings along with him then.

  George keeps his questions about where the afternoon is leading to himself, tucked, like their hands, in their pockets.

  “Wanna go downtown and look for answers?”

  “No, let’s just sling our questions over our shoulders and go take pictures.”

  When there are no pictures to take and Lance is in the ascendant, George fills the lulls in his love-life with drinking and people-watching. He looks for hidden messages and portents in the mundane.

  Over breakfast beers, he talked to Lem at the greasy spoon about his grandmother’s shroud.

  “Gran had it all made and put away,” Lem said. “She showed it to the wife and told her to try it on.”

  “Like you would,” George said. In a world that drank India Beer at seven in the morning, why wouldn’t people try on each other’s shrouds?

  “It had a flap down the front,” Lem continued. He was the perfect witness, no emphasis, just detail and pure chronology. “The wife asked her, ‘What’s that? What’s that flap there for?’The old lady says, ‘They pull that up over your face before they closes the coffin.’ The wife got the shivers then.”

  When he wasn’t gathering Lem stories, George threw himself into the various silly diversions that the Weasels held dear. It became enormously important to buy the most horrendous greeting card, the chamber pot with the smoke alarm or bicycle bell. They became members of “The Cruise Club.” They paid ten cents extra on drinks and filled in little cards. When the cards were full after twenty-four drinks, they went in a big jar behind the bar. The draw was to be on St. Patrick’s Day.

  On Paddy’s Day we’re sending our snakes on a vacation, George wrote in his notebook. Somehow, though, he wasn’t there for the draw.

  Gerry sits and sifts through some of his old notebooks and bits he’s tried to write before about those times. A dozen pages after the Weasels in a notebook, he finds the first jottings that refer to Vivian and Tanya, a first Saturday, waking up at her house:

  I’d not given a lot of thought to hopscotch in recent years, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have considered playing the other morning. It was Saturday and the sun was emotional Alka-Seltzer. A few bubbles in your psyche will get you thinking about hopscotch if you’re asked by someone who is either nine or a leprechaun, with her hair in elastics with neon plastic balls on them and earrings to match.

  There are worse things than to listen to someone run a bath. The shuffle of bare feet in a kitchen goes well with the morning kettle sounds and the smell of sleep-tangled hair blends with the toast smell.

  Thank God it’s not a race. I’m not up to racing. However, if as
ked by blasé, neon-eared leprechauns, I could probably play a passable game of Hopscotch.

  Underneath he had jotted down a bit of Chuang Tzu:

  The white fish are swimming at ease. This is the happiness of fish.

  nine

  MARCH 2004

  It’s snowing gently as Vivian drives Gerry to the airport on a Friday evening. They’re in an armed truce. She complained about having to drive in the snow, but when he said he’d just as soon take a taxi she accused him of being extravagant. He’s going to Ottawa to see his mother. It’s one of those emergencies that may, or may not, be an emergency.

  “Could you come up?” she’d asked on the phone. “I think I’ve had a stroke.”

  “She’s been a little agitated,” the nurse at the home said. “The doctor was in to see her. She gets a little depressed. I’m sure if you came she’d love to see you, but there doesn’t seem to be anything much wrong.”

  It is part of the guilt-price that Gerry pays for living far away that he has to over-respond. It’s two days since the call and he’s on his way.

  Vivian parks aggressively at the departures gate, but leans across the car and kisses him.

  “You be good now,” she says. “Your mom will be fine.”

  “I know, but when you’re ninety odd...”

  “I know.”

  He grabs his elderly folding suitcase and his shoulder bag from the backseat and waves from the pavement. Vivian, not looking, cuts off a taxi and pulls away through the big soft flakes of snow.

  Gerry knows he’s on a sober, grown-up mission, but feels an out-of-school lightness as she drives away. He humps his bag to the check-in. The flimsy computer print-out they give you now instead of a fat ticket folder adds to the feeling. It’s like a typewritten hall pass. He feels compelled to joke with the women at the counter.

  “The bag’s going to Ottawa. You might as well send me with it.”

  “Would you like window or aisle?”

  “Window if you’ve got it and I’m large and speak English, so if you have one by an emergency door...” Gerry angles for a bit of spare legroom.

  “You’ll be forty-five minutes in Halifax. Change there for Ottawa.”

  “Marvellous,” says Gerry who almost never says marvellous out loud.

  It’s the end-of-the-week, Friday rush-hour flight and security is jammed. Fat bald boys with goatees and rectangular women with blazers and rubber gloves poke through the carry-ons. They seem to be universal types now, varying in complexion, but not in shape, wherever you go.

  Gerry, the seasoned traveller, opens his belt buckle and shows the inside without being asked, gets a tired smile, and is waved ahead. He feels hermetically sealed away from the normal now, an airline monk, cut off from the world behind. The logic of the slaughterhouse applies. The only way out is ahead. He feels like somebody else when he buys Harper’s at the magazine stand.

  When his flight boards he greets the attendants and goes to his emergency door seat with its extra inches of space. One of the attendants comes to tell him about the door.

  “You pull that down, but only when you’re told, and then you push the door out and it just falls away.”

  “Seems simple enough,” Gerry says. The door ritual makes him feel at home. It’s like being an old camper at summer camp. You know the chants and the shortcuts through the woods. He settles down and starts to make surprisingly good progress with the Harper’s crossword, which is diabolical and normally beyond him.

  Gerry even gets a pleasant seat-mate for the leg to Halifax. She is a tall woman with short dark hair. They nod to each other when she stops by the seat to check the number. She has a carry-on that pushes the size limit. Gerry helps her put it in the rack. A bit later, she smiles when he looks up from his puzzle and says, “This is evil.”

  “I only do the find-a-word, sometimes,” she says. She tells him that she travels for a company that sells women’s sportswear. She’s been visiting stores in Newfoundland and she’s going home to Halifax. Her name is Carole with an “e.” She says she has just turned in a rent-a-car and hates driving on the island because of the moose.

  “Speed bumps with antlers,” Gerry says. “You can get a poster.”

  “I hit a deer driving up to Amherst,” she tells him as they drink bottled water. “He came right through the windshield. I got this.”

  Gerry looks at a scar she points to, a three-or-four-inch Zorro slash below the knee. He can’t picture how a deer would make the wound. A deer with a mask and sword? He decides it must have been the windshield, but windshields are supposed to crumble now.

  “You were lucky.” It’s not unpleasant looking at her leg.

  “I used to figure skate. It’s stiff since the accident. My daughter tells me I’m old and crippled.”

  They compare daughters. He tells her he’s going to see his mother who thinks she’s had a stroke. Gerry shares his packet of wintergreen Certs. He remembers the copy of Emmanuelle that kicked around his and Patricia’s various apartments in the ’70s. He can remember the name of the plane where Emmanuelle got it on with her fellow passengers. It was The Flying Unicorn. The twenty-first-century unicorn is a no-frills beast. Its horn docked, it’s more of a flying Shetland pony gelding. The sharing of bottled water and breath mints is the new erotica.

  Gerry helps Carole with her over-sized bag at Halifax. They say goodbye in the terminal.

  “Watch out for deer.”

  “I hope your mother’s okay.”

  He stretches his legs around the terminal, buys an over-priced coffee and boards his flight for Ottawa. On this leg he sits next to a morose man from federal public works. The man had booked at the last minute to get home for some family emergency. He isn’t saying what the emergency is, just that he has to be there. He had paid the top ticket price. When the cabin crew serves a snack he looks sadly at the big chocolate chip cookie they give him.

  “This is a fifteen-hundred-dollar cookie,” he says. Then he fires up his laptop and plays solitaire.

  Gerry returns to his puzzle for a while over the darkness of the Maine and Vermont mountains and woods. When the lights below thicken into clusters for Montreal and its suburbs, he puts the magazine away in his shoulder bag. For the last half hour he watches the lit lines of roads come up to meet him. The geography is neater than that of Newfoundland. The rows of headlights and streetlights follow surveys of old farmland that’s been cleared and harrowed flat. When the plane descends low enough for trees to show against the snow, they’re in separate woodlots and groves in the fields, like clumps of hair in warts. The intercom tells him it’s five-past-ten, local time, if he’d like to set his watch.

  Gerry meets his friend Doc for a late Chinese dinner. He has picked up a rental car and checked into a motel near the old-age home where his mother lives. Duane and Gretchen had offered to put him up. So had Doc. He pleaded distance and unfamiliar country roads with Duane and Gretchen. With Doc he had pointed out that if things got worse Vivian would be coming up and he couldn’t put them both up. In fact, he just felt like being alone.

  It’s an old motel. He remembers the family driving past it when it was still in a semi-rural area. It was a farmhouse converted to a guest-home then. Now the original house stands far back from the road with its front lawn covered by a parking lot for the modern two-storey “convenience units” that hem it in on two sides. It’s halfway out a long divided street that used to be a main route west out of town. Now the street is ten miles of strip malls, motels and ice-cube office buildings for tech companies with two-syllable names.

  Dadoo, Ronron, Gerry thinks when he drives by them. He sings the old Crystals’ song and drums on the steering wheel at the stop lights. Da doo ron ron ron /Da doo ron ron.

  The restaurant they go to is called The Jade Gate and is a time capsule of the ’60s.

  “Because, after all, the ’60s were just like the ’50s until ’67,” they will argue as they try to pin down the chronology and horoscopy of their l
ives.

  “No. ’63. Beatles. We were in grade eleven. It was different after The Beatles.”

  The restaurant is still busy when Gerry and Doc meet there shortly after eleven. Gerry can’t remember it ever not being busy and they’ve been coming here since Doc got his driver’s licence in ’63. Maybe it was that driver’s licence that made the ’50s turn into the ’60s.

  “It’s the same waiter,” Doc hisses in a stage whisper, standing up at the table to greet Gerry. “You’re going to have to show him ID.”

  “For soda water? I think I’m old enough to handle soda water.”

  “Maybe. Don’t get rowdy though. You sing and they’ll throw us out of here. They probably remember you.”

  Doc is tall, thin and wears dusty, Work Warehouse work clothes. He’s a contractor who specializes in restoring old houses and lives nearby in a loft full of tools and old newel posts and tin ceiling rosettes. He got into the trade after a stint as a theatre set designer and carpenter, but twenty-five years ago he was married and needed something steadier. Yuppification was sweeping old neighbourhoods then and work was plentiful. He knew where to get old bits and pieces from dressing sets. Doc collected a following of customers, and although he’s not married anymore, he’s still at it.

  Gerry remembers passing through town in the ’80s, as he was breaking up with Patricia. He had gone to supper with Doc and his wife Hilary and Hilary’s kid, Timothy. It was the first time he’d been anywhere as anything but half of a couple for years. He remembered how odd it felt. It seems hard to believe that Doc has been split-up for as long as Gerry’s been married.

  “Timothy’s the manager at a computer store,” Doc says. “We get together for a beer every couple of months. We helped Hilary move down to Ganonoque last summer. She’s got a glass studio there now.”

  “Still civil?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  They sit under an ornate ceiling of gilt dragons and flowers with tasselled Chinese lanterns. The décor hasn’t changed in forty years. A dozen elderly waiters in black trousers and short red mess-jackets rush in a sore-footed way with heaping trays.