“Molly and some friends are going to the mall today. Can I go with them? Her mom’s driving,” Magda said one Saturday when the calendar said it was spring but the weather didn’t agree.
“Of course you can.” Her mother clucked like a fretful hen as she reached into her purse and handed Magda five dollars. One of many little love bribes that she’d handed over lately. “I want you home early though, so I’ll pick you up by the Yogen Früz at four o’clock sharp. Don’t be late, okay, honey?” Calling Magda honey was part of the whole happy charade, too.
“Sure, whatever — I mean, thanks. Really.”
For two hours Magda and her friends roved from store to store, giggling and trying on new clothes. Everywhere they went they were watched closely by suspicious sales clerks who had no patience for anyone under twenty. But the girls didn’t care. It only made it more fun to have an audience when, with mock despair, they lamented their too-big bums or breasts that refused to grow, even though there were girls in their class whose had. Just before four o’clock Magda finally spent her money on a large Coke from the food fair, and a T-shirt that she found in a discount bin.
“The mall doesn’t even close until five,” Molly said when Magda announced that she had to go meet her mom. Molly was relatively new to Magda’s school and had become instantly popular for her hair that was the colour of fresh beeswax and always looked as though she’d just had it cut, and for the way she made faces behind the teachers’ backs and always got away with it.
“Yeah, but she’ll freak if I’m not there.”
“Whatever. But you’re missing out,” Molly said to Magda’s back as she hurried towards the Yogen Früz, the ice in her Coke rattling against the cup.
“Crap,” Magda said under her breath when her mother wasn’t there. If there was anything she and her mother had in common, it was that they hated to be kept waiting.
Magda plonked down on a mall bench and, for the next fifteen minutes, jiggled her foot impatiently. She glowered at the glass doors until her mother was half an hour late. “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” she said under her breath, looking at her watch every few seconds. “Okay, now. Okay, now,” she said, over and over, after it had been forty-five minutes. She blinked hard and willed her mother to magically appear every time she opened her eyes.
When she finally did show up it was five past five and the mall was closing.
“Have you been here long?” her mother said. Her voice was high and sweet but she was flustered.
“Yes!” Magda said, standing up. “Where have you been?”
“I got busy at home. Besides, I thought you’d like a little extra time with your friends. Did you have a good afternoon?”
“How could I have a good time? You told me to be here at exactly four o’clock and I’ve been here since exactly four o’clock.” Magda waved her arms. “Now I’m starving.”
“Don’t you raise your voice at me,” her mother said, a whisper ground to an edge. “I gave you five dollars. Why didn’t you buy yourself a yogurt? You’re not the only one who matters here, you know. You think I wanted to come pick you up today? I have enough to do and think about without you always wanting something from me.”
“I didn’t want you to pick me up. I could’ve come home with Molly.”
Magda’s mother pinched Magda’s arm hard and started to pull her towards the door, where Magda could see that the car had been left running. She twisted herself free before they got there and stomped away in the opposite direction. When she looked back, expecting to see her mother coming after her, she found that she had left. When Magda walked into the house an hour later, soaked to the shoulders with wet snow, neither of them said anything.
The next day, the flowers fell off the African violet in the kitchen window. Magda’s mother packed up Magda’s things and they drove to her grandparents’ farm, six hours away and as far removed from the life Magda knew as if they’d driven to the moon.
“It’s not your fault, Magda. It’s not you. I just can’t do it anymore, not alone,” her mother said, words spilling from her mouth when they finally turned onto the gravel driveway that led to a white farmhouse with black trim. “Just — just promise me you won’t be too happy with them, okay?” She bit her lips as she pulled up to the back door, shifting the car into ‘park’ a moment too soon. The car rocked to a stop as Magda’s mother grabbed one of Magda’s hands in hers and pressed it to her face, which was hot and damp. Magda knew her mother wanted her to cry too, wanted it to be something they did together. But Magda just looked out the passenger window and thought about grasshoppers.
The first spring that Magda lived with her grandparents, her grandfather gave her a new pair of gardening gloves and a watering pail filled with shiny new hand tools: a spade, a weeder, and a trowel. The three of them went down to the garden and planted flowers. With seeds from last year’s blooms, they filled in rows that were roped off with her grandmother’s kitchen string. There were petunias and sweet peas and marigolds which, when they finally bloomed, nodded their heads in the breeze. Everywhere else in the garden were sensible pickling cucumbers and carrots, radishes, green onions, kohlrabi, peas, musk melons, strawberries, and prickly canes of raspberries. The garden was like a patchwork quilt, with the flowers, Magda learned, covering the place where her uncle had died. When the sweet peas were tall enough, Magda helped train them to grow up kitchen-string trellises, until they became a screen of colour.
Now when Magda wanders through the rows of flowers, she picks the pink and purple sweet peas that look like little lips. She litters the soft petals behind her as she walks. When she comes to the marigolds she pulls the nearest plant up by the roots, some of which gets torn away and left behind in the soil.
Magda pushes the plant back into place. She wonders what will become of it now, whether it will be able to root itself again. She brushes her hands on the thighs of her jeans, leaving soiled handprints, and begins to kick her way through the rows of vegetables, feeling a constriction of guilt over ruining her grandparents’ careful work. Yet she knows they won’t be angry with her.
“Doesn’t it make you sad to use this garden?” Magda said to her grandfather once, when they were weeding between the rows of green beans.
He stopped and leaned on his hoe, bobbing his head as he looked around. “Your grandma and I, we’ve forgotten what happened here,” he said. “And the Lord, He has forgotten, too.”
“What does that even mean?” Magda scowled, chipping at a clod of dirt with her hoe. “You’re remembering it right now.”
He was quiet for a moment. “It means we choose not to remember.”
“Well, whatever. God might forget,” Magda said. “But people don’t. They just leave.”
“Miene dochta,” he said a little sadly. “Look at these beans you helped me plant.” He bent over and plucked a slender, green pod. “See, you have to pick them so there’s room for new ones to grow. Some day, I think, you will know how to forget, too.”
Standing alone in her grandparents’ garden, Magda knows it’s just a matter of time before she’ll have to return to the house and face her mother. As she turns to go, she finds her grandfather sitting on the bench swing he built for her, next to the grass she had tried to hide in.
Magda breathes as deeply as she can and lets out a long, uneven breath. “Has she come to take me away?” Magda says. She sits next to her grandfather on the swing. He smells like rollkuchen from her grandmother’s kitchen.
“I don’t know,” he says, taking her hand and holding it tight.
“It’s not up to me, is it?”
Her grandfather is quiet for a while, nodding his head in quiet thought.
“Some things are up to you.”
UNDONE HERO
INSIDE THE KITCHEN CUPBOARDS OF THE farmhouse, pots are stuck to the shelves, cemented with condensation as cold seeped through the hundred-year-old sawdust insulation.
Leaning against the sink, Alec listens to th
e storm. Even the air in the house has begun to stir as wind finds its way in through cracks that have opened up around windows and doors. The gas has been turned off since his father stopped paying bills and the wood burning fireplace isn’t able to keep up.
If Alec’s mother were alive, she would use her hair dryer to shrink-wrap the windows in winter plastic. Without her, the musty old curtains swell softy and go flat. The whole house bends to the wind and hunches under the weight of snow.
“If I ever start shitting myself, you just take me out back and shoot me, eh?” his father says from his chair in the living room. “Better to go to hell a little early than be stuck here in my own shit.” He has tried to make this pact with Alec dozens of times over the years. But where it used to sound like a threat, now there’s a tremble in his father’s voice.
“Yeah. You already know I won’t do that, Dad.”
His father reaches down beside him for his cane and thwaps the floor with its crook, showing more strength than Alec thought he still had. Enough perhaps, to keep on this way for weeks.
“I’m not going to any home, whatever you have in mind. You make sure I’m good and dead before they come to take me away. You do it. That sister of yours can’t be trusted.”
“She’s not coming, Dad. You know that.”
“Good. Don’t need her,” he says. “Don’t need anything.” He leans back in his chair and presses his head into the rotten upholstery.
Yesterday Alec called to tell his twin sister. Just in case she might want to make peace before their father dies. Cassandra however, is staying in Winnipeg, uninterested in revisiting what she thinks she dealt with years ago.
Selfish, Alec thinks. If not for Dad, or herself, then — He pushes the thought aside.
“Why don’t you bring us both something for the pain, eh?” Alec’s father says, coughing out each word.
“Sure, Dad. Why not?”
“Why not is right. And hey — ” He spits and conceals the bloody phlegm inside a handkerchief. “We’ll toast that sister of yours. Don’t need her anyway.”
“You already said that, Dad.”
“Yeah and it goes double. Just like the drink you’re gonna pour me.”
Alec spins his wedding ring on his finger. He’d have brought his father home with him to Saskatoon, but the last thing he needs is a crotchety old man to teach his three-year-old daughter, Allison, how to swear. And besides, his father is determined to be right where he is. It would be easier to turn a stone into bread than get him to budge. The same is true of Cassandra.
Even when Alec and his sister were younger, Alec stayed at home until he finished college, driving an hour into the city every day while Cassie ran off the first chance she got. And now, here he is again, back after the hospital called to say his dying father was demanding to be released and was there someone in the family who could come and get him? Who else but him? Who else would know his father keeps his liquor under the sink behind the Drano.
Alec fills a glass two fingers high with cheap Scotch and carries it back to the living room. His father’s sour breath has frozen on the window, near where he’s tucked in up to his chest under a heavy quilt. The layers of frost are uneven and bend and shift images on the other side of the glass into a relief that’s almost beautiful.
“What? My liquor not good enough for you?” his father says, taking a long, grateful snort.
“I don’t drink, Dad.”
“Ha. Just like your mother,” he says. “I knew there was something I didn’t trust about you. Next you’ll be wanting me to get on my knees and beg that God of yours for mercy before I die.”
Alec sits down in his mother’s favourite reading chair and pretends to listen to his father’s rant, wondering whether the old man has been to the toilet. It would be just like him to wait, no matter the agony. He’d wait until Alec went to bed, even though he’s not supposed to get up on his own. Which he must have done last night. Because, if nothing else, he’s at least clean.
“I’ll guar-an-tee you this,” his father is saying. Guarantee. The first ‘a’ pronounced like the ‘a’ in arsenic. Garr-an-tee. The way he says it has always made Alec want to turn and shout “Guarantee, Dad! It’s pronounced guarantee.” But Alec never did, and his father kept repeating himself until someone paid attention.
“What, Dad? What do you guarantee?” Alec says, making sure to pronounce the word correctly.
“That a man can only ever count on his son, that’s what.” He shrinks back into his chair. When he goes on, his voice is a blunt edge. Alec remembers how it once seemed sharp enough to cut spirit from flesh. “Can’t count on women. Where are they when the chips are down?” His mind has drifted and he isn’t speaking to Alec anymore. “Off getting something for themselves. Even my Carol’s gone and deserted me.”
Alec looks into his father’s face, its wrinkles that weren’t there even last year, now covered with a three-day bristle of white-and-grey whiskers.
“Dad,” Alec says. “Mom died. She didn’t leave you.”
“Your father’s a good man, Alec. He just doesn’t know it,” Alec’s mother had sometimes said.
And there were days. Like when he bought Alec and Cassie toboggans for their seventh birthdays, and before the kids could get themselves stuffed into their snowsuits, was already at the door waiting for them. He was more excited than they were, which was almost better than presents.
All morning, their father helped them drag the toboggans up a hill at the back of their property. He waited until both kids were ready and gave Cassie, then Alec, a mighty push before jumping on the back of Alec’s sled and riding down with him. Up and down. Dozens of times, each time breathlessly fun, right up until the end.
After what turned out to be the last run, Dad sat in the snow at the bottom of the hill and Alec watched as his expression clouded over. By the time they trudged back to the house all three of them were caked in snow and exhausted. While the kids stood in the porch, peeling off their damp parkas and snow pants, their father went to the bedroom he shared with their mother and shut the door.
Just before supper, when the food, which had been prepared in silence, was taken from the oven and brought to the table, Dad’s door opened. When he sat at the table he was so quiet that all the sound in the room seemed to have been swallowed. He didn’t appear angry. Yet, Alec knew that he had spent all that time behind his door thinking hard thoughts.
“Mommy and I made tuna noodle casserole,” Cassie said. She always said Mommy or Daddy instead of Mom and Dad when she was anxious.
Alec looked in his father’s direction to show he was paying attention and not thinking about eating, even though he was starved and worried that his stomach would start to rumble and betray him. But he accidentally met his father’s eyes. He was trapped.
Alec knew that staring back was seen as a challenge. Yet, looking away was an admission of guilt to whatever it was his father thought he’d done. So he couldn’t look away, but if he’d had a clear shot he sure would’ve kicked Cassie under the table to make her stop squirming.
Before he spoke, Dad took a deep breath. “You two think I’m some kind of Santa Claus.”
Silence.
“You know that’s not true,” Alec’s mother said, spooning tuna and noodles onto Dad’s plate.
“No? Well maybe we should start with the fact that these two didn’t even think to say thank you for those goddamn toboggans, or for my dragging them up that goddamn hill all morning.”
On cue, Cassie began to cry. Softly, at first, but then in hiccupping sobs until she could no longer catch her breath. Pathetic.
“Look what you’ve done,” Mom said. “The kids are plenty grateful for those sleds. They’ve talked about nothing else since coming in but what a wonderful time they had out there with you.” But that’s as far as she went. She wrung her frustration into a damp tea towel and led Cassie from the table to help her calm down.
Alec didn’t move from his chair, expecting
that once they were alone his father would go on with his tirade. Dad pounded his fist on the table, once, and glowered at his noodles. Eventually he lowered his face into his hands and shook his head. He got up and left the kitchen, leaving Alec to wonder whether he was allowed to eat.
Now, what feels like a hundred years later, Alec wonders if his father still remembers that day with the toboggans. How, when he and Cassie were older and their mother gone, they were just supposed to know when they were expected home after being allowed to visit a friend. It was the same kind of test as the staring. If they arrived too early, Dad assumed they were guilty of something. Too late, and they must be trying to push their limits, which would quickly get snapped back until there was no slack left in the rope.
There was only ever a ten-minute window of correctness and Alec became expert at climbing through.
Cassie though, never did figure out when to come home.
“You need a nurse to visit,” Alec says as his father lapses into another fit of coughing. “They said your lungs would fill up.”
“No-ho!” he says, catching scraps of breath and using them to expel his voice, together with drops of spittle. “You know what I said about that. When it’s my time I’m ready to go, damn it! Just get out of here if you aren’t going to help me. Or do me in like a good son.” With his fingers shaking he uses his next breath to light a cigarette.
Alec looks up as though God might be in the ceiling, but sees only flaking paint and rotted wood, frozen drops of water from where the heat of the fire meets the cold of the rest of the house. Smoke rises from his father’s chair, covering him with grey gauze.
In the years since Alec and Cassie’s mother died, Dad’s bitterness had slowly eroded any gentleness that once existed. He stopped going to the Mennonite Brethren Church in the nearest village, but insisted Alec and Cassie stand at the end of their driveway every Sunday morning, no matter the weather, to be picked up by their nearest neighbours and ferried to Sunday School.
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