Happiness of Fish

by Fred Armstrong

  Gerry waits on the couches by the nursing station while Dr. Huta, an intern and a nurse go into his mother’s room to put the tube in. When they usher him back in, it is dark outside the windows. An overhead lamp highlights the new additions to his mother’s medical hardware. A plastic bag of eggnog-looking stuff hangs from a hook. A plastic gizmo on a trolley turns a little wheel that massages the liquid down the tube that runs to his mother’s nose.

  “She’ll probably sleep now,” the doctor tells Gerry. “We’re adding medication through the IV now so we don’t have to keep jabbing her. She’s getting something for pain in the IV.”

  The doctor is right. She does sleep while Gerry sits, holding her hand for a while, and later, working the crossword from an abandoned National Post from the waiting area. She is still sleeping when Gerry leaves about eight that night.

  When Gerry goes to the parking lot, the two Somalis are gone. At a sodium-lit kiosk, he picks up his keys from a little beige man in round glasses, an astrakhan wedge hat and an army-surplus parka. His rental car now has a space of its own and much of the lot to itself. It’s nosed against the fence, separating the parking lot from a backyard. Across the yard, Gerry can see into a back dining room window. There are candles and people moving around. It looks warm. He shivers, looking around the unfamiliar dashboard to turn up the car’s heater and blower.

  Because Gerry doesn’t know how long he’ll have to stay, his friend Doc is putting him up. They had made the arrangements the night before over the phone. If Gerry’s mother dies and Vivian comes up to join him, they’ll move to a hotel. Until then he’s camped on a couch in Doc’s loft.

  Doc lives in the building he runs his business from. It’s in a small island of commercial buildings that would have been on the edge of the city forty years ago but has been surrounded by suburbs. It’s a two-storey cinderblock building that began life as a sign company when plastic signs were new. It has a tidy shop front in one front corner and warehouse doors at the back. There are double doors to the second-storey loft as well, with a jutting boom for a block and tackle. However, since he’s been living upstairs, Doc has winter-sealed those with silicone goo and sheets of plastic.

  Over the front-corner sales office, Doc has a neat, old-fashioned green and gold sign: Mariposa Carpentry. Doc took a long time coming up with the name. It’s supposed to make boomers think of the Leacock stories in old school readers and big Victorian houses. At the time, Gerry and Mort had suggested Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and There Goes the Neighbourhood.

  The sales office, with its window full of bits of stained glass, antique tile and brass lamp fittings, is shut and dark when Gerry pulls up and parks in the Mariposa lot. Doc had a bit of luck finding a retired teacher and antique fan to run the retail end and answer the phones.

  Next to the shop is Doc’s front door, an oak and lead-glass monster with an arts-and-crafts knocker. Gerry knocks. There is a muffled clatter of feet on stairs and Doc welcomes him in.

  “Young Gerald.”

  “Doctor. I do appreciate the place to crash. Here, a small token.” Gerry has stopped off at the liquor store on his way from the hospital. He presents a bottle of something single-malt and obscure. “It’s made by bi-sexual Hebridean trolls out of peat water run through a sheep dip on the Isle of Muck or somewhere. Enjoy!”

  Later that evening, Gerry and Doc do their traditional Chinese meal at The Jade Gate, but it’s a quiet meal.

  Gerry is still running on Newfoundland time. He’s wrung-out from a day of flying and hospital. Doc has spent a long day trying to make a Victorian working-class row house into what the new owners insist on calling a bijou town residence.

  “It’s a nice enough old house,” he says. “It’s between Elgin and the Driveway. Actually it was a co-op when we were in university. I remembered going to a party there when I saw it. Anyway, these people think because it was built in 1900, it’s got to be fancy. She’s telling me she wants wainscoting in the ‘drawing room.’Whoever lived in this place originally probably drove a streetcar and called it the parlour. If the place ever had any wainscoting they probably burned it in the Depression. There’s some genuine ’60s psychedelic sunflowers on the back bedroom ceiling though.”

  Their favourite sore-footed, red-jacketed waiter brings the distinctive Jade Gate egg rolls, open at the ends and cauterized by the deep frying. This is what egg rolls were like when egg rolls were exotic. Gerry remembers eating them with Aunt Louise after being taken to a parade of streetcars. It was the last day of streetcars in Ottawa. The big red and buff cars, with big single headlamps, clanked and sparked past the corner of Sparks Street. A new diesel bus followed them.

  “We were going to be modern,” Gerry says. “We would ride diesel buses and eat exotic foods like egg rolls every day and Sparks Street was going to be a mall, whatever that was.”

  “So how’s your mom?” Doc asks.

  “Pretty scrambled. I don’t think she knew I was there.”

  They order fewer dishes than they normally do and eat all of what they order. On this tired Friday evening it’s as if some special discipline is in effect. Grown-up rules apply. They are back at Doc’s by eleven.

  “I’m going on a job early,” he tells Gerry. “You’ve got a key. The place is yours. I’m going to bed.”

  Although he is tired, Gerry is not sleepy yet. He undresses and settles in his sleeping bag on the couch. A tensor-lamp throws a tight pool of light over him. He looks beyond it at Doc’s world.

  In a corner is the stuffed owl, a fixture in Doc’s apartments and houses since university. The owl is wearing a pair of plastic safety glasses. Against a wall is the harmonium that Doc rebuilt with a vacuum-cleaner blower so you don’t have to pump the pedals. Doc had once had piano lessons. Years ago, he could vamp out baroque-sounding tunes on the harmonium. Now it doesn’t seem to have been played in a very long time. The cover is closed over the keyboard and a stuffed squirrel holding a cocktail umbrella sits on it. Gerry remembers the squirrel being there the last time he visited.

  On a shelf is the anteater silhouette of the electric robot arm that Doc had bought for Timothy, his ex’s, Hilary’s, kid. The arm had been brand new in ’86 when he was here to bury his father and get used to being split from Patricia. He remembers the three of them sitting at the kitchen table in another house, Doc and Hilary and Gerry. They drank beer and took turns playing with the arm after Timothy was in bed. They dumped a packet of seashell pasta on the table and had a contest to see who could pick up the most in a minute. Hilary had won. With the tip of her tongue between her teeth and her eyes squinted with concentration she had buzzed the pincer claw back and forth with unerring precision. Now the robot arm sat hunched and gathering dust.

  Tomorrow I must call Duane and Gretchen, Gerry thinks. His musings about Doc’s former family get him musing about his present one. Vivian, when she visited Doc with Gerry a couple of years back, found Doc’s loft strange.

  “That owl would give you the creeps,” she said. “I wouldn’t even want to touch it.”

  But is he any creepier than Duane and Gretchen? Gerry wonders. How does Melanie’s Darren stack up against a stuffed squirrel with a parasol for general utility or artistic merit? How do we pick the tangents that define us, the stuff we choose to have hanging around or, at least, neglect to get rid of?

  He puts out the light and is not conscious of having to wait for sleep.

  Gerry is actually up and about when Doc goes out on Saturday morning. His Newfoundland internal clock wakes him before daylight. Twice he hears the clack and splat of Doc’s newspapers coming through the mail slot downstairs. When Doc gets up for work, Gerry gets up too and makes a pot of coffee.

  After Doc leaves, he sits at the computer on the desk and plays a Space Rocks game for an hour. He can’t match even the lowest high scores that Doc has recorded, but the game is comfortingly cheesy. The asteroids you shoot at appear to be made of crumpled-up aluminium foil. The flying saucers and meta
llic mushrooms that are the enemy have the look of ’50s kitchen utensils, shiny and bright, Corning Ware in space.

  It’s too early to phone Duane and Gretchen or his Aunt Carmen or anyone else in his sparse circle of family. He puts on a chunky pullover and a shell jacket and goes to a diner around the corner for breakfast.

  An hour later, with eggs, sausages and the morning papers under his belt, Gerry returns to the loft and gets busy on the phone. He calls his Aunt Carmen first.

  “I don’t think I can get in to see her, Gerry. I’m just waiting here to see if I can get my other cataract done.”

  “That’s okay, Aunt Carmen. There’s nothing very much you can do. She didn’t know me yesterday. I’ll keep you posted.”

  He touches base with a handful of cousins he hasn’t seen in years. They’re all his age or slightly older, retired or close to it. He’s strangely pleased that they all remember him, apparently kindly. They make practical offers of rides and meals. He explains that he has a car and is sticking close to the hospital. He decides his mother must have put out only the carefully edited version of his ups and downs over the years, or they were too busy with their own to notice. His presence now is accepted, whatever guilt he may feel about having kept his distance. Still, he feels warmed. It’s like finding money in a pair of pants you haven’t had on for a long time.

  Duane and Gretchen are less warming, although he supposes they mean well.

  “Mom called last night,” Duane says. “Your mother’s in our prayers. We’ll be in.”

  Gerry wonders what they prayed for, what he’d pray for himself, if he prayed.

  “That’s fine, Duane. It’s room thirty-twenty. That’s the old building. I’ll see you kids up there.”

  He returns to Space Rocks and drinks coffee and blasts asteroids until it is time to go to the hospital again.

  To Gerry it seems to be a weather-less day, only temperature, no climate. He notices, as he has on other visits here, that he wants exercise, to move, to explore. He decides that the Somalis’ parking lot will be blocked on a Saturday afternoon and that a walk would do him good. He trots downstairs to tell the retired teacher in Doc’s shop that the car in her lot is his. Then he sets out in the general direction of the hospital, quartering along back streets and mentally giving the neighbourhoods he passes a beagle-like sniff.

  He passes people raking their lawns and contemplating frost-softened pumpkins, past their best-before dates now, more than a week after Halloween. He walks through a neighbourhood of post-war veterans’ bungalows. Some are now in their God-knows-how-many incarnation as somebody’s first house. Others still sport the old, heavy aluminium doors with initials or deer or flying mallards that declare they’re outposts, bunkers where the original inhabitants have held on and are making their retirement last stand. The air smells of damp earth and wet leaves. Broom rakes make an insect scratching on the pavement of driveways. Gerry is no great yard and garden man, but there seems to be a rightness to the careful tending to these small fall chores. He wonders if he turned off the outside tap at home so it won’t freeze. He must ask Vivian when he calls.

  Eventually, after zigzagging up quiet streets, he pops out on a parkway, in sight of the hospital and hugging the parkland edge of the experimental farm. He jogs across a busy intersection and passes by a statue of some early hospital benefactor, a mayor or councillor in a frock coat. Then he takes a deep breath of the fall air and goes into the hospital.

  Because he has walked, Duane and Gretchen have arrived ahead of him. He hears Gretchen before he sees them. As he nears his mother’s room he hears her strangely adolescent voice singing.

  “Yes, we’ll gather at the river, the beautiful, the beautiful river...” Gretchen sings. She’s rocking to and fro in a chair with her eyes tightly shut. Duane is standing, also rocking, also with his eyes shut, a hand on the bed rail like a captain on his bridge in some heroic movie.

  Oh shit, Gerry thinks. Oh sacred shit.

  His mother is conscious but clearly confused. Her eyes are open, frightened, uncomprehending. Her mouth under the clear mask is a pained “O.” Her breathing gurgles. The little mechanical wheel that massages her feeding tube hums quietly along with Gretchen.

  Gretchen’s voice isn’t loud, but it is insistent. It wheedles its way into the hall. A nurse looks in quizzically but says nothing. In the bed diagonally across from his mother’s, a huge old woman with a cavernous face gives a softly roaring grunt, in protest or accompaniment. Gerry can’t tell which. She sounds like a distant lion cage at a zoo.

  “Gretchen. Duane.” He wills himself to speak softy, not to bark. He doesn’t need this.

  “...that flows by the throne of God.” Gretchen brings herself to the end of her chorus before opening her eyes.

  When the singing stops, Gerry’s mother closes hers. Her breath rasps and the medical plumbing at the head of the bed bubbles.

  Gretchen and Duane seem a bit put out at having been interrupted. Gerry concentrates on stroking them and defusing the prayer meeting.

  “That’s Gretchen and Duane, Mom,” he says, squeezing the old lady’s hand. “It’s Vivian’s boy Duane and his wife. That’s who’s singing for you. A nice old hymn, eh?”

  After that, he keeps up relentless inquiries about Joshua and Natalie and Gretchen’s horse. He blathers that his mother must meet them all when she’s feeling better. Eventually he talks out the time they have to spend visiting the sick and walks them down the hall to the elevator, an arm around the shoulders of each. Gerry can’t remember ever being in this pose before. It feels theatrical but theatrical seems to work for Duane and Gretchen.

  “Call if anything changes.”

  “We’re praying for her.”

  So you keep saying, Gerry thinks. For an easy passage, a miraculous recovery, for a few marbles left if she pulls through? What are we trying to accomplish here?

  Gerry spends the rest of the afternoon just sitting with his mother. He holds her hand at times. At others, when she seems to doze, he just sits. At one point he pops down to the gift shop and gets himself a newspaper and starts the cryptic crossword but can’t stay at it. Still, he feels at peace and finds it surprisingly easy to sit and be quiet. Even the laboured breathing seems bizarrely companionable.

  Gerry remembers when his father died nearly twenty years ago. He hadn’t felt that way then. Big ball of alcoholic empathy that he was, he couldn’t handle anyone else’s pain well. His father had lapsed into unconsciousness only a day or two after Gerry arrived home from Labrador. They’d spoken, but barely.

  “How’s that little wife of yours?”

  “She’s fine, Dad. She’s getting things packed up in Labrador. She sends her best.”

  “She’s a sweetheart. I don’t know how you ever did so well for yourself.”

  Gerry has always been glad he didn’t have to explain Patricia’s going to the old man.

  After that, he sweated through afternoons like this one he’s having now. He remembers wondering if his father could possibly want to hang on. Should he press a pillow over that painful breathing?

  In the end, the old man died in his sleep. The hospital called Gerry and his mother at home to tell them.

  Perhaps it’s because he went fairly quickly, he thinks. He was only in the hospital for about two weeks. Before that, he was pretty much the way he’d been for the last dozen years or so.

  With the old man, there was never the endless slowing down of time that had come with his mother’s departure to the retirement home. What bothered him about his father’s death was the loss of contact. His mother and he have already dealt with that while she was in the home. While this sitting in the hospital is sad, it’s got more life, more involvement, more struggle, than their last half dozen years. As a way to pass time together, this is far more real than the old photo album.

  Gerry gives up on his visiting about six o’clock. In the late afternoon, a Doctor Khan, Dr. Huta’s weekend replacement, drops in. She’s a se
rious-looking woman with a hijab and, improbably, an East-London accent.

  “Curry take-out in the Isle of Dogs,” she tells Gerry when he asks. “I grew up over the shop. A real east-ender.”

  They walk together to the elevators.

  “Do you see any improvement?” Gerry asks.

  “On paper anyway, she’s beating the pneumonia,” Dr. Khan says, “We’ll take some X-rays tomorrow. I don’t see anything changing much tonight. Her vitals are pretty good.”

  Which means exactly what? Gerry thinks as he punches the endless calling card number and his home phone number into a pay-phone in the hospital basement. The answering machine starts to respond after four rings but Vivian cuts it off.

  “I was in the basement,” she says. “I’ve got all the boat stuff that just got dumped down there put away. How’s your mother?”

  “Not much change,” Gerry says. “Duane and Gretchen were in for a bit. After that we just sat.”

  He decides not to tell her about Gretchen singing.

  “So do you know when she’ll get back to the home?”

  “I don’t know if she’ll get back. I’ve got to talk to a woman from social services on Monday. The doctor says she’s improving, but I don’t think she knows me from Adam.”

  “It’s hard,” Vivian says.

  “Sort of, but not really,” Gerry says. “I mean, so far, I just sit and wait. I’ll call you if anything changes.”

  He decides he sounds a little distant. Vivian’s being supportive. He needs to add something.

  “I miss you, kid.”

  “I miss you too. Call me.”

  Sunday morning is aimless. Gerry wakes up early again, still running on Newfoundland time. He’s up, drinking coffee and playing Space Rocks when Doc gets up.

  “What’s your agenda like then?”

  “Hurry up and wait, I guess,” Gerry says. “I’ll arse around until lunch and then go back to the hospital.”

  “I’m going over to Marion’s,” Doc says. “She has a garage-door opener she wants installed. I’ll be over there for lunch.” Marion is his younger sister. Up until a few years ago she’d been an actress. She was the voice of Granny Porcupine in the Forest Families cartoons. She was also the nosy neighbour in a successful series of toilet-cleaner ads. Then she split up with her husband and moved back to Ottawa with her daughter. She took a bunch of courses and does something with developmentally delayed adults now. Years ago, Gerry had impressed Tanya by telling her that he knew Granny Porcupine and the nosy toilet lady. Now he’s intimidated by Marion’s new usefulness and commitment. He remembers when she was eleven and he and Doc were sixteen and they had to sit home with her until Doc’s parents came home from Friday night shopping.