“Oh, bullshit, Maurice. The signs are gigantic.”
She turned around to look at Bohdan in his car seat, singing at high volume with his CD player. “Are you having fun, baby?” she said to him, squeezing his knee. He smiled and I felt an absurd twinge of jealousy.
“Don’t you think I’m doing better than before? We’re not in Schaumburg, delayed for three hours,” I said earnestly to Betsy, back to the fraught subject of my driving.
“Yes,” she said, voice heavy with irony, “you’re doing so much better. You keep asking me to read the road signs, like you always do.”
“Don’t you think people can change?”
“No, I don’t think people change very much.”
I kept a dignified silence. My belief in self-reform was at a level of passion that Oprah herself would have admired. I almost missed the next turn, trying to figure out what was making me so angry.
The Mennonite funerals that were part of my childhood always had an open casket, so everyone could view the peaceful deceased in their state of heavenly bliss, accompanied by ponderous, beautiful hymns and ponderous, ugly sermons. After the formal ceremony, the reception always took place in the church basement.
Molly’s memorial, at a country club, was what my parents would call a reception. There was no ceremony, no body, no casket, nothing to view. People milled around with cocktails and tiny bits of food. The men wore closely-fitted golf clothes and the women used a lot of hair products and makeup. Betsy never wears makeup.
A computer displayed photographs of Molly at different stages of her life, a boisterous woman converted into a digital museum of eternal silence. When it was finished we were all ushered outside for a photograph, and then it was over.
That evening we were to join the rest of the family at a restaurant in franchise-land near the edge of town. On the drive there, Peter talked non-stop. “Look how high the lights are. And there’s four of them! See the arrow? Why does that car have so bright lights?” Bohdan said nothing, which was normal when Peter did his machine gun chattering routine.
“If you want to change lanes, you’ll have to be aggressive,” said Betsy.
“Changing lanes with all this traffic weaving around makes me nervous.”
“Maurice, it’s a small town.”
I said nothing, but something beyond her nagging bothered me.
The waiter at the nominally Italian restaurant insisted that we call him Todd, and bragged about how they served olive oil instead of butter. We ordered pizza for the boys, which they’d never had before, and they didn’t like it. But both of them sat happily on the laps of uncles and aunts they’d never seen before. Betsy had told me about how her parents had operatic, screaming fights when she was a kid, but this next generation seemed very polite. Even so, I felt tired and disoriented, worried that one of my sleek-looking in-laws would ask me what I did for a living. Of course no one did.
Except for mild irritation with my driving Betsy had displayed no emotion all day, and in the van after dinner I asked her why. She had done her grieving before now, she said. Her mother had been gone long ago, and now Betsy wanted to be the kind of mother Molly had been to her. What Molly’s premature death showed her was how little time any of us have.
That night Betsy stayed up late talking with her brother and sister. In bed I rolled myself up in a blanket for shelter from the air-conditioning and read poetry that extolled the natural world in all its pullulating glory, birds and wilderness and the inexorability of plate tectonics. The poet’s cosmic view seemed to point out all my trivial feelings of insecurity.
The birds and the continents were moving on — just like the boys, running headlong into a life of aunts and uncles and new experiences. I seemed to be the only one trapped in the past, unable to let it go. Like the future, the past was a dark place, but it was also a stable one: nothing changed there, no one demanded anything of me.
III
When we arrived back in Winnipeg I had to take the cats to the vet for their annual shots, buy a month’s supply of table wine, and get the car stereo fixed. We’d replaced the factory one but the new radio made hissing noises whenever we listened to AM. I’d taken it back once already and the technician claimed nothing was wrong.
“Then why does it still hiss?” said Betsy. “They should fix this. We spent a lot of money there.”
“Yeah but they have no obligation.”
“You have to push a little. Call him back.”
“They sell these things every day. They won’t do anything.”
“Why can’t you assert yourself? Talk to the manager.”
“I’m not calling him back. They already re-wired it once. So we listen to CDs now or FM.”
Her eyebrows went up. Betsy listened almost exclusively to AM radio.
“I could go back there I guess.”
“You guess?”
“I think it’s pointless.”
“Well which is it?”
“Don’t yell at me. I don’t do that to you.”
“Not yelling doesn’t make you any better, it just makes you more like your father.”
“That’s not fair!” I yelled. “There! I’m yelling! Is that what you want?” As I stomped off I saw the boys in the next room staring at me. They looked worried. They weren’t the only ones.
I met Betsy in the spring of 1998. She came to the gym at R.B. Russell High School on a Wednesday night to scrimmage with my senior men’s basketball team. She scored on me several times from the top of the key and my teammates trash-talked me. I became more aggressive on defence and bumped heads with her, but she kept scoring. Within a week I asked her out, intrigued by a woman who was both highly educated and athletic, and beautiful.
After we’d dated for two months, Betsy came for dinner at my apartment. I cooked dinner and also picked about a dozen pieces of music to play on my stereo for her, each record marked with a yellow Post-it note: Louis and Ella singing “The Nearness of You,” Chet Baker’s soft, sensual trumpet on “If I Should Lose You,” Jimi Hendrix playing “Little Wing.” We ate chicken curry — one of two or three meals I could cook — and I told the story of each piece: where I first heard the music, bought the record, details of the artist’s life.
After dinner we held hands on the floor in front of the stereo. Betsy’s hands were dry and strong. I imagined putting them on my face and crying. But I couldn’t express my feelings, even to Betsy, so openly. What I could do was play songs eloquent with emotion, songs that said all the things I couldn’t say.
I had not planned a seduction. But Betsy stayed with me that night. I felt grateful and stunned.
The next morning Betsy got up early and went to her office. I watched a videotape of Let’s Get Lost, the Chet Baker documentary. Baker’s sadness, his sunken face, his self-destruction, they all got to me that morning. Betsy called and I cried. I was in love with her, vulnerable in a way I didn’t remember being since before adolescence.
For months afterward, every time we made love I made a small X in my daybook, as if living in the present was more than I deserved.
In the fall, after four blissful months of dating, Betsy asked me if I wanted to have children with her. She did not want to get more deeply involved with me if our relationship couldn’t include children. The topic did not surprise me. I knew she loved kids. She talked a lot about her experience coaching them on basketball teams, her ideas about child-rearing. And, like Captain Hook, I knew about ticking clocks. Gazing at her intense, narrow face I hesitated. I had a sudden vision of my father, diving off a twenty-foot cliff into apparently shark-infested waters when we lived in Jamaica.
I said yes, I’d love to have children. As long as I had time to write. Betsy assured me I would. I loved and trusted her, and above all, didn’t want to lose her. But seven years and two kids change many things. We no longer fell into each other’s arms when the lights went out — more often than not she fell asleep, while I brooded over our lost romantic past. If I complain
ed about our sex life she said she needed me to engage with the boys and our family life. I found myself thinking longingly of all those Xs in my daybook.
My parents finally came to visit in July. I was walking home with the boys from the corner grocery when I saw Mom and Dad waving from their van. Peter and Bohdan jumped into the vehicle through the big middle door, opening it themselves and trapping my parents in their seats with enthusiastic hugs. After my father disentangled himself he hugged me, an unusual gesture.
During the past year Mom had started obsessing over small details. She’d only drink one particular brand of bottled water that I hadn’t been able to find in Winnipeg, and had brought only a limited supply. With a sudden abandonment of the topic, she said she wanted to make borscht for us and insisted our bone-in beef ribs, which she hadn’t even seen, weren’t good enough. One crisis at a time, I thought.
I drew Mom a little map to the grocery store around the corner, a five-minute walk. Half an hour later she wasn’t back, so Dad and I went looking. We found her half a block away at the street corner, holding the sirloin beef strips in a bag, uncertain which way to go, staring at the traffic on Maryland Street.
Over the two days they stayed with us, I noticed Dad working a lot in the kitchen. He kneaded the dough for the white buns Mom always made with borscht. Then he helped her shape the dough so each bun had a little knob on top, the way she baked them when I was a boy. I’d never seen my dad cook anything before; the most he did in the kitchen was to dry the dishes that Mom washed. But instead of asking Dad about his new kitchen duties or Mom’s memory problems, I talked to him about where to park their van, how to place fans so Mom wouldn’t be too hot at night, what to eat for breakfast that wouldn’t upset her stomach.
The boys took to my parents right away. Bohdan stroked Dad’s bald head while sitting in his lap. Peter chattered so fast none of us could understand him. During our final dinner, while we ate the last of the borscht, a work crew insulated the back wall of our kitchen. The injection tool made a sound like an amplified rubber cup hitting a board. Bohdan turned pale. Then he got up from the table, which was against the rules.
“You need to sit down, Bohdan,” said Betsy.
“Nee likey.” He pointed to the kitchen, where the sounds got louder.
“What’s he saying?” asked my mom. Neither of my parents spoke a word of Ukrainian.
“Took, took, took,” said Bohdan, “No likey.” He covered his ears.
“He hates loud noises,” I said. “Don’t worry, Bohdan. They’re working on our house to make it better.” I put him back on his booster seat. He was still short for his age and his English was more limited than Peter’s.
“Bohdan is scared,” said Peter, recognizing the problem.
“He and Bohdan haven’t had a single fight since they got here,” I said to my folks. I’d told them very little about our difficulties with the kids. “They are very good brothers.”
“They love borscht,” said Mom.
“Smetana?” asked Bohdan, and I passed him the sour cream that he ladled into his soup in glogs the size of his fist. He didn’t care about the took took sounds now. Peter used both hands to shake Tabasco sauce into his bowl. The smell of dill and hot butter and baking rolled over us.
After my parents left, I took out Dad’s autobiography that he’d written in 1999 and read it again, looking for the connection that always seemed to elude us when we were together. The document consisted of nine single-spaced pages with the title “A Personal History: My Search for Freedom.” He had prepared it to present as a sermon in church. His style was abstract — “I had within me the ability to decide to be free” — and resolutely distant. He told crucial stories in summary, never lingered on sensual detail, and never revealed his feelings about even the trivial events. The traumatic ones he intellectualized. Like father, like son.
He described his experience of the Soviet army’s invasion in 1945, when he was eight years old, like this:
My most vivid memory of the Russian Army was not the sight of soldiers raping women, which I did not understand, but the sight of soldiers throwing hand grenades into our beautiful lake and killing its innocent fish. THAT I DID understand!
Dad told me this story when I was in my twenties. When I asked who these women were, he said they were strangers. I’d written a poem then about his story, trying to make something out of the splinter of narrative:
Soldiers
They marched wobbling into our yard, drunk as the fish in the pool. They threw grenades
into the water, lily-pads exploding in soft white pieces, frog heads jumping on the grass.
That afternoon they lay on top of our neighbour’s wife while she screamed more and more quietly.
In the last couplet I’d accidentally hit on a historical truth. The neighbour’s wife was raped, according to Lil. But then, so were most of the women and girls.
One of the things I had hoped for when I first read Dad’s autobiography was some explanation for why he’d trotted our family around the globe so relentlessly, and what role, if any, my mother played in those decisions. Mom told me that after finishing his doctorate, my dad had declined a tenure-track university position. Before she began losing her memory, she often wished for the pension that would have gone with that job.
When I asked him why, he said his religious convictions had led him to work for the American Bible Society in Africa. But his autobiography revealed that he had developed other, less orthodox ideas about God. I couldn’t believe that God told him to reject job security, or to jump off cliffs.
I also wondered why, in the late 1960s, we had not returned to Africa. As a kid I’d wanted to stay in a hot country, a place with no winter: we would have gone to Congo, a hotter place than I understood at six years old. Occasionally he did choose the safer path. His autobiography explained our sudden removal from Africa in the summer of 1968 this way:
… we came to a very difficult decision, which was not to return to Africa where we had all suffered from either malaria, intestinal parasites, or stomach ulcers. I began to feel very uncertain about my hopes for a career in the field of linguistics, and worse still, I had developed a serious problem in my failure to communicate adequately with my wife.
In her diary from the same period, Mom wrote: “Eric told me he has decided NOT to go back to Africa.” She made no reference to Dad’s “failure to communicate adequately,” nor to her endless complaints about living in Africa, or her impassioned prayers for God to deliver her from tropical illness. But later she often alluded darkly to that year as a troubled time in their marriage.
My father landed back in Winnipeg assembling cabinets at A.A. DeFehr Furniture for $1.60 an hour, ten hours a day, five days a week. We lived in a tiny apartment in North Kildonan and he gave violin lessons for extra money. My mother had escaped Africa but she was still miserable, and communicated that misery by slamming doors and banging pots in the kitchen. My father’s diary ended on October 2, 1968.
Now I wondered if I was as remote a husband as my dad, but married to a woman who fought back and cursed instead of just praying for deliverance.
In the last week of August we went to a lake in eastern Saskatchewan to visit some friends of Betsy’s. They were home on holiday from a CIDA assignment in Africa. We told Peter and Bohdan how nice and cool it would be swimming in the lake. The weather had been scorching hot for a month.
The man-made lake was invisible from even a mile away on the unchanging Saskatchewan plain. Close up it looked like a swamp where several giants had died, leaving only their pubic hair behind: the water was so full of algae blooms that no one ever went in. Betsy’s friends Jim and Lenore had a family cottage here and a motorboat. With his beard and flip-flops, Jim reminded me of what my dad looked like when we lived in Jamaica in the ‘70s. He pulled the kids through the algae-clogged lake on a big rubber tube behind the motorboat. Peter and Bohdan wore lifejackets and shrieked with delight as Jim pulled them in big circle
s through the dank, shallow water.
Betsy and I sat on shore watching the lake in separate deck chairs as if we were seniors in a Cialis commercial. After Jim came in on the boat he called Bohdan and Peter to him and they jumped on his lap. I was surprised how little they hesitated — they’d just met him an hour earlier. He roughhoused with them, yanking their hair and arms, turning them upside down, making them squeal with delighted laughter.
I felt jealous of Jim’s ease with the boys, but also uncomfortable with the physical play; my dad never roughhoused with me, nor had I with Jeremy. Dad did play with me often, usually building sandcastles or Lego forts. An only child, Jeremy had played on his own.
At night the cottage felt like a steam room. Our bedding was damp in the first hour from humidity and sweat. The four of us slept on the floor and waves of mosquitoes attacked us like the Luftwaffe over England. There were so many they formed black clouds on the ceiling.
Just before school started I took Peter to the Health Sciences Centre in Winnipeg for a follow-up on his positive test for tuberculosis.
The boys and I drove to the hospital early so we’d have time to park. The clinic’s large waiting room brimmed with kids and toys, and the boys were excited. While I read a magazine, they climbed on a miniature slide made for toddlers. Bohdan dove down the slide head first and got stuck while Peter pushed his feet from the top. They both whooped. A toddler tried to get on the slide, but she couldn’t get them to move. I showed them some toys on the floor, but they were distracted by a riding car in the next room. Soon Bohdan pushed Peter in the car at high speed past the desk and into one of the examining rooms. I followed to impose a time-out, frustrated at having to be in a constant state of vigilance. Jeremy hadn’t been like this; from a very young age he sat still when we had to wait, allowing me to read or gather my thoughts.
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