Happiness of Fish

by Fred Armstrong

  “You order,” Doc says. “You’re braver than me. I buy TV dinners.”

  “God, do they still make them?” Gerry asks. “Why don’t you cook something?”

  “Too much like work. Besides, I like TV dinners.”

  This Chinese feast has become a tradition whenever Gerry hits town, usually every six months or so. It’s part of the legend of the tradition that Gerry is deprived of the benefits of The Jade Gate, marooned as he is supposed to be, in Newfoundland. Still, Doc lives practically around the corner and lives on pre-cooked cardboard turkey and the waiter acts as if he recognizes Gerry.

  He expects to be almost-recognized, like a kid expects Mickey to wave to him or her at Disneyland. Gerry finds his former hometown has a Disney-feel to it now, not quite real. Gerry had read somewhere that Disneyland buildings are five-eighths scale.

  Welcome to Soo guy Land, he thinks, looking around the restaurant. Only the reason for being here is full-size.

  “So you’re going to see your mom tomorrow?”

  “Yeah, I told her I was getting in early in the morning. They put them to bed about eight at the home. I told her I’d see her in the morning.”

  They order too much food, eat too much of it, and still have a doggy-bag full for Doc to take home.

  “A nice change from the TV dinners,” Gerry says. “But doggy-bag can’t be politically correct, can it?”

  “Companion-animal container, maybe?”

  It’s late when Gerry parks his rental car outside his motel room. The parking lot is like an empty hockey arena under the cold sodium lights. He had turned up the heat before he went for supper. The room breathes warmth at him when he opens the door,

  A hotel room can be a retreat. The simplicity of living between a bed and a suitcase appeals. Gerry gets into bed and flicks the TV remote through its channels. There seem to be more here, more languages, and what appears to be a soft-porn channel.

  Is your porn soft? Gerry muses. Get Viagra and jump over hydrants in commercials: hydrant humping, the new metaphor for sex.

  When he awakes hours later it is the weather channel he’s dozed off in front of.

  The Disneyland feel of the city is with Gerry again the next morning as he walks around a shopping mall near his mother’s nursing home. He has learned from bitter experience that it’s hard to get a parking spot at the home on a weekend. He parks at the mall a couple of blocks away and walks.

  Gerry is up early, still running on Newfoundland time. He is waiting outside a restaurant in the mall when it opens at seven. This neighbourhood around the mall is peppered with retirement homes, seniors’ apartments and condos. The restaurant is like a halfway house on his pilgrimage to see his mother, a warm-up. There are specials with fruit and bran and prunes and the tables fill up with old people who seem to be regulars. Plastic pill boxes are produced from the pockets of bright jogging suits or golfy-looking cardigans. Tables fill up by ones and twos. The old people greet each other in a congratulatory way. They’re Disney-bright automatons. They’ve survived another night.

  At the nursing home, music is frozen in the 1940s. Glenn Miller plays over the sound system. Presumably somebody has done the demographics. The ’40s are the decade where the greatest number of residents’ musical tastes solidified. Presumably in another decade or so, the music from the speakers will be Elvis. Give it twenty years and it will be Doors and Jefferson Airplane.

  Gerry signs in at the desk. The woman behind it scans the signature and who he’s seeing and sort of remembers him.

  “You’re visiting from...Is it Nova Scotia?”

  “Newfoundland.”

  “That’s right, I remember. Your mother will be so glad to see you.” Upstairs, he supposes she is glad to see him. At least she clutches his hand and smiles in a bemused way when he wakes her in her chair in the day-room. For a year now, she’s been on a floor where she can’t operate the elevator buttons herself. She still goes down to the dining room, but she’s taken.

  “You’re here,” she says, sounding surprised.

  “Yes, dear, I told you I was coming, remember?”

  “Is Patricia...no...I’m all balled-up...I mean is Vivian with you?”

  “No, Mom. She’s home.”

  “That’s nice.”

  It sometimes seems to Gerry that his mother awards some kind of brownie points for knowing who he’s married to at the moment and where she is. There are times when he suspects she thinks Patricia was mislaid through some negligence on his part. At other times she seems to think that he’s a bigamist. However, she’s diplomatic about this and waits to take his conversational lead as to who’s the spouse of the moment.

  They have gone past conversation. She goes nowhere. He does little that has any meaning here in the warm limbo of the home. He gives quick updates on what the kids are doing. She actually asks about Tanya. She knew her better than the other kids. Gerry and Vivian had brought her with them when they first came to visit before they were married. She and Gerry’s Aunt Louise had babysat while they went out in the evenings. Gerry’s mother sent Tanya birthday cards with cheques in them until fairly recently. Now Gerry wonders just how recent it was. Tanya’s been in Alberta for more than a year and away from home for longer than that. He mentions the grandchildren but they don’t seem to register. His mother’s posterity cuts off at Viv’s kids. She doesn’t seem able to fathom that they have children now. The last time she visited them in Newfoundland was the year Diana was born.

  They sit, side-by-side, in two armchairs that Gerry remembers from the living room at home. She was allowed to bring some furniture to the home. He tries to get her involved in a conversation that is more than a monologue from him.

  “How’s Carmen? Does she call you?” He asks after her younger sister.

  “Not so much. I don’t know if there’s something the matter.”

  “Let’s call her.”

  He phones his Aunt Carmen and confirms what he suspected. She calls, but his mother often doesn’t answer. She doesn’t hear the phone. He puts her on the phone to chat with Carmen and roots in the dresser for hearing-aid batteries. When she gets off the phone he changes the battery in her hearing aid.

  He looks at the clock radio on the bedside table. He has been here a little over an hour and has virtually run out of things to talk about. Grasping, he throws out that he’ll be glad to get back to sailing when the spring comes.

  “Just be careful, dear.”

  And if you’re careful you’ll end up here, Gerry thinks. This is the prize for being careful for ninety years.

  They go down to lunch together, leaving the room at exactly twenty to twelve.

  “You have to go down early. The elevator gets crowded.”

  It does too. Even twenty minutes early, they have to wait while old people and their attendants untangle legs of walking frames and back an electric scooter into the rear corner of the elevator. Mrs. Adamson has vetoed any suggestion that a walker or even a cane might help her be steadier on her feet.

  “When I need that, I’ll just sit.”

  Lunch is a pale cream-of-something soup, a slice of quiche and a salad. Gerry’s mother doesn’t care for the quiche. They send it back and get her a chicken salad sandwich instead. She eats only half. Dessert is a strawberry sundae which she devours. Gerry has a second cup of coffee which she seems to consider daring. When they finish and go back to the elevator, they have to wait while the early arrivals for the one o’clock sitting untangle their walkers.

  After lunch, the home’s doctor drops in. He’s British, professionally cheerful, and has his volume control pitched to the elderly. He gets Gerry’s mother to do some hand movements and asks her questions about the date and if she remembers his last visit.

  “She’s not in bad shape, all things considered,” he says chattily, talking to the two of them. Gerry finds this talking about his mother in front of her off-putting. He follows the doctor into the hall when he leaves.

  “She thought
she might have had a stroke.”

  “Yeah, well, she might have, a little one, but there’s not much change in her awareness. She’s not doing all that badly for what, ninety-five?” The doctor looks at Gerry. “You don’t get in much, do you?”

  “I live in Newfoundland,” Gerry says, defensive now.

  “Well there you are then. You’d see a bigger difference because you don’t see her day-to-day. She’s not doing all that badly.”

  Gerry’s not sure if he’s been reassured or put in his place. He decides to take the optimistic view.

  “That’s good to know, and of course you do know where to get in touch with us?”

  “Oh, the lodge has all that. Not to worry.”

  Not to worry, Gerry thinks as he walks out in a bright winter afternoon. His mother is taking a nap and he needs to move, to get clear of the petrifying air of the home. He has contrived a few errands to run. She needs some hand cream, cough lozenges, and a battery for her watch. She wants a bottle of milk of magnesia.

  “They steal it.”

  Gerry has heard Vivian quote the same complaint from her mother in a home in Gander.

  It’s a big syndicate, he thinks. The Russian mob is muscling in on the laxative black market.

  He buys the things on his list at the mall and walks back to the lodge. He knows that by the end of the week he won’t be so quick to buy a whole list at once. He’ll split it down into quick trips for one thing as the need to move gets stronger. Today is only the first day. When he gets back, they get through the afternoon by reading the newspaper together. The inside pages yield enough news of their old neighbourhood that he can read snippets and make small talk. He lasts until it’s time for her to go down to supper at five o’clock. As he signs out at the desk and steps into the gathering evening, again he feels that school’s-out thrill. He wants to yell and run with his arms swept back like jet wings.

  In the name of getting it over with, Gerry visits Duane and Gretchen and the kids for supper. He follows directions Duane has given him and drives south and west of the city. The city extends much farther than it used to and apparently plans to keep on going. Gerry arrives at a crossroad that used to be on the family’s route to the cottage. It’s a blank intersection in the middle of featureless fields, almost at the divide where farmland yields to cedar swamp. A harshly vertical brick church stands aloof, a quarter-mile back down the road. There are no signs of life around the church and virtually no traffic, but over the intersection a big modern stoplight hangs from a curved and polished aluminium pole. For now the light is talking to itself over an empty landscape, but if the city ever reaches this far, it’s ready to take charge.

  Duane and Gretchen’s house is at the end of a road that straggles to a halt against the edge of some woods. It’s a long, low house, somebody’s country dream house from the ’50s, built at the edge of the swamp. It probably seemed safe and far away from city taxes then. There is a much newer plastic-sided, two-storey shed behind with a rail-fenced paddock and a snow-covered manure pile. Gretchen’s horse is tucked up for the winter. Beyond the horse shed is the winter ghost of a garden. Stakes and dry stalks push crookedly through the snow, giving the impression of an abandoned winter battlefield. A black metal satellite dish seems to have its muzzle in the air, baying silently at some electronic moon. There is a brass-plated fish symbol on the front door.

  In Cod we trust, Gerry thinks as he rings the bell. He restoreth my sole.

  Duane answers the door in jeans, a flannel shirt and work socks. Joshua and Natalie look around him from the hall.

  “Gerry,” he says. “We’re glad to see you. We surely are.”

  The “surely” niggles Gerry. It has a soapy, southern, TV-preacherly feel to it. Duane is starting to talk like the representative of a congregation or a board of trade. It strikes Gerry as a new thing. He doesn’t remember Duane sounding like this when they visited at Christmas just a couple of months back. He was earnest but not so pompous. He decides it’s because Duane’s in his own world here, home-field advantage. Gretchen just comes to the kitchen door and smiles shyly and waves.

  Gerry had stopped in an upscale toy-store in a mall to buy presents for the kids. He’s got a sort of loom for Natalie. It will make a strip of weaving that can be a belt or a narrow scarf. For Joshua he’d picked up a sort of beginner’s palaeontologist kit. It had a pocket magnifier with little folding legs. There was also a packet of “real fossils” to look at: some snail-like impressions and some things that looked like earwigs and carpenters in sandy-looking stone, shaved thin. There was a book that said how many millions of years old the fossilized bugs might be. That’s where Gerry gets into trouble.

  “Joshua,” Duane says. He never abbreviates. “You’d better give the book here, son. Dad wants to see what’s in it before you read it.”

  Shit! Gerry thinks. Joshua doesn’t mind. The book was the least interesting part of the present. He’s examining things through the double, plastic lenses.

  “The carpet looks like trees from a plane.”

  “I’m sorry, Gerry,” Duane says blandly. “You’ve got to understand where we’re coming from here. When it comes to creation, we believe in the scriptures. I don’t want to confuse Joshua.”

  “You don’t think a billion or two years of evolution is more impressive than a seven-day parlour trick?” Gerry asks. He hopes he’s keeping it light, but doesn’t feel like apologizing for the book. Duane purses his lips.

  “The length of the days may have been much longer than what we understand now,” he says. “But even scientists are finding now that mankind is much older than they originally thought.”

  Shorter and furrier too, Gerry thinks. Pictures of “Lucy,” the hominid fossil, come to mind. The serpent probably offered them a banana or some choice beetles and grubs.

  “Daddy, how do you do this?” Natalie asks from the floor where she’s trying to wrap yarn onto her loom.

  “Supper’s on,” Gretchen calls from the dining room.

  The meal reminds Gerry of a spartan veggie restaurant he used to go to sometimes in his Weasel days in the ’80s. Some woman he had met in a bar had suggested they go there. Gerry remembers thick soups of coarse root vegetables, not so much cooked as laundered. The way he recalls it, everything had tasted of parsnips, whether they were in the dish or not. The vegetables had all seemed old and woody. Gretchen’s vegetable stew brings it all back. It’s garden cuttings with a muddy background of lentils. Gerry likes lentils, but he likes them with Indian flavouring. Curry has apparently not made it into Gretchen’s gospel cookbook.

  “We’re only eating one cooked meal a day now, “she says. “Everything else is raw.”

  A scrap of a high school football chant floats across Gerry’s mind. Rah, rah, eat ’em raw!

  “Good for you,” Gerry says. He feels he’ll owe himself another debauch at The Jade Gate for this. He thinks of a Garfield the Cat cartoon he saw once. Garfield is asked how he’d like a head of lettuce prepared. Deep fry that little sucker, Gerry remembers.

  There is no coffee in the house and dessert is a bowl of raw fruit, so the meal seems unfinished. There is some sort of herbal tea that has a tang of catnip about it.

  After supper Gerry plays the good and interested guest. He and Natalie manage to load her loom. He is taken out to the shed to meet the horse. It’s a pony really, a stocky pinto gelding, getting fat on bought hay. It appears to be exempt from the family’s dietary laws. No one says anything when he brings out the cube sugar he took from the nursing home dining room and wrapped in a paper napkin as a horse offering. He offers it on his flat palm, a skill learned with milkmen’s and bakers’ horses fifty years ago. He remembers that reaching up a back-arched hand to the big teeth and prehensile leather lips had been his six-year-old equivalent of putting your head in the lion’s mouth. The bored horse deigns to accept his sacrificial offering. The big sausage tongue snakes the sugar wetly away. Gerry breathes the smell of horse and thumps the bea
st chummily on the withers. He finds he’s surprised he knows the word “withers.” It slips into his mind automatically. His mother and father both had country backgrounds. He’d been taught the right words. He thinks he must tell his mother about visiting the horse when he sees her tomorrow. It may be more real than the great-grandchildren.

  When the kids go to bed, Gerry, Duane and Gretchen sit in the living room and drink another cup of the catnip-flavoured tea. The room strikes Gerry as too bright. Gretchen is proud of her hardwood floor under a high-gloss urethane. It reminds Gerry of a high school basketball court, too big and too bright. He recalls that a million years ago, in the early ’60s, there was such a thing as a basketball dance. You went to the game. When it was over, the lights were dimmed; borax was spread on the floor and a DJ set up his turntables. Red and blue spotlights were clamped to the basketball hoops.

  You could use some borax and sexy lighting, Gretchen, he thinks.

  There is a huge, flat-screen TV in the room. It bubbles on, just below the pain threshold. The programming has lots of sparkly animation interspersed with pastoral scenes that have scriptural texts superimposed.

  Thou shalt not spice thy lentils, Gerry thinks. He watches over-dressed people with floppy, phone-book-style bibles urging him to call the numbers below. The women look plasticized, too-bright and urethane-sealed like Gretchen’s floor. The men remind him of the boys who ran high school clubs, earnest-jovial with a streak of dumb and mean just below the surface, the little crazy glint of “conform or else.”

  “We’ve got satellite,” Duane says. “Maybe you saw the dish. We get all the American channels, stuff you can watch, family viewing, family values.”

  “Whose family?” Gerry asks. “Take a tribe like ours. You’ve got a zoo with Mom and me and you and Melanie’s Darren. You’ll have trouble finding common ground for our lot.”

  Duane just looks disapproving. The television continues to mutter. Gretchen offers a bowl of fruit. As they sit and talk, she works at hooking some kind of throw or afghan. It’s in a brightly white synthetic yarn. Similar yarn appears in wall hangings and a covering on a sideboard. Gerry suspects she’s practising to knit a polyester angel.