Open House

by Jane Christmas

  Returning to the issue at hand, she says, “Your father and I knew what we were doing when we took on a renovation. We certainly did not spend what you are spending.” She pauses and tilts up her chin. “I can tell you that he is as disappointed as I am about this.”

  Ah, the dad card. Typical Mom. Whenever she wanted to drive home a point, she would throw my father into it, knowing that I took his advice to heart more than I did hers. I avoid the bait.

  “That was a different time,” I counter, drawing the conversation back to the cost. “Things were cheaper then.”

  “You have no idea,” she says with a sigh of resignation and a slight change of subject. “We worked on those renovations with enthusiasm and a sense of fun. You two have not got a clue. You should be looking into retirement homes and taking it easy. Look at what you’re doing to that poor man of yours.”

  From the guest room window, I observe The Husband in the backyard, sitting in a chair with The Times and a mug of coffee. He does not appear to be suffering. My mind swings back to memories of my father’s suicide threats, his non-existent DIY skills, his obedience to my mother’s whims and plans. I do not ever recall him sitting down with the paper and a coffee during their various renovations. So long as she was around, he was on his feet doing what strength and limited expertise would allow. In the end, it worked out for them: each renovation moved them up the property ladder and up the social scale. But at what personal cost?

  During one of their moves—my father’s last one, as it turned out—Dad was in the final stages of cancer treatment. He had wanted to move because he did not want to die leaving my mother alone in a country home. He wanted her settled in a town, close to everything. But the move overwhelmed his state of health and mind. The morning after that move, their belongings piled into their new home, my mother was on the phone to me:

  “Will you please talk some sense into your father? Honestly, he does not know how to roll with the punches. He’s in a state . . .”

  And then my father had picked up the extension phone and started railing against “this woman who will not sit still. I have cancer and she moved me!”

  “You wanted to move, John. This was your idea . . .”

  “I’m sick, Valerie, and I need rest, but everything around me is in chaos, and now you want me to go and look at new bathrooms. I don’t know how I’m going to get through this . . .”

  “Oh, John, stop being dramatic.”

  I jumped into the conversation: “Look, I am going to come over right now, okay? See you in a few minutes.”

  When I arrived, my dad was standing by the front door, wearing his corduroy jacket and a hangdog expression. Poor guy. He put up with so much without hardly raising his voice, hardly a complaint. Now he was dying, and still there was not any rest for the man. My mother, meanwhile, was in the kitchen making a list. (Writing that sentence tells me exactly which parent I turned into.) I looked at the teetering piles of boxes and furniture piled to the ceiling. Gosh, so much stuff. My mother’s idea of de-cluttering was to take a few things to a charity shop, and then hit the shops immediately to restock.

  They left to do their various errands, and I stood amid the mountain of boxes and mess and wished I had a magic wand. I wanted to sprinkle serenity on their lives; I wanted to be the fixer so they would be proud of me; I wanted to cure my father’s cancer.

  Two hours later, seventy-five boxes of books had been sprung from their confines and decanted onto the bookshelves in the den, and most of the furniture had been arranged.

  “Who helped you?” my parents asked with amazement when they returned home.

  I felt a pinch of pride, but also of irritation: What else did they expect given all the times we moved house? Where else would I have learned the art of the quick unpack-and-organize?

  To my friends, my mother was sweet, sharp, and a fascinating conversationalist. To me, she was all that plus talented and decisive. But she was also feisty and unforgiving. I feared her every day she was alive.

  I desperately wanted to love her, but she made little room for me in her world. Instead, I was her never-ending renovation project. When her gaze landed on me, she would critique me like a room: “That hair needs to come up about four inches, just pooling around the shoulders. And it needs some colour, some brightening. That complexion—so dark. You must stay out of the sun or people will mistake you for a . . .” I refuse to write the word. “Those legs of yours—keep them straight or you’ll end up looking like a Duncan Phyfe sofa.” When her eyes fell on my bitten nails, “like chipped china,” she would sigh and shake her head at the lost cause that was her daughter. “You better do well at school, because you will not get anywhere with those looks.”

  I was the one renovation project that never lived up to her abilities. When I was fifteen, she booked me in for a nose job. The kids at school had taken to calling me “Ringo” and “Jew girl,” and my mother felt that surgery was the only way to stop the taunts. There were no words at home to soothe me; to tell me that the kids were idiots, and that my nose was just fine. No, I was the flaw that needed fixing. My mother made such a compelling case for the nose job that by then, even I wanted it. I prayed that the post-op transformation would finally make me acceptable and interesting to her, but once the bandages came off all it did was consign me to a life of fretting about my appearance and equating acceptance with attractiveness. Decades later, I saw the movie The Hours. The prosthetic nose Nicole Kidman wears in her portrayal of Virginia Woolf was exactly my old nose, and I desperately wished I had it back. It would have better suited my personality and face shape than did the streamlined version my mother drew for the surgeon.

  I have come to understand that my mother’s fixation with renovating was, in part, an effort to conceal defects that no amount of French polish could disguise. She disliked her appearance; complained about her weight while refusing to forgo the food, drink, and snacks that contributed to it. She deflected attention from her girth by turning a critical eye on others, mainly me. When she found her forte—old houses, the more decrepit the better—she discovered that it was easier to transform a wreck of a house than a wreck of a waistline. She could walk into a ruin and immediately envision its glorious restoration. She became a whiz at transforming property and decorating it to magazine standards.

  I once enlisted her opinion of a condo I wanted to buy. It was the last property I owned in Hamilton. My youngest was in her last year of university and would be moving out soon. This was to be my scaled-down home after the Herkimer house.

  The three of us walked into the flat. I was almost embarrassed to show it to them. It had been inhabited by an elderly couple for thirty years. The walls and ceilings were yellowed from decades of cigarette smoke; the dirty rose carpet in the living room had a black circular stain that looked like the result of spontaneous human combustion. Dated, chipped melamine cabinets hung from the kitchen wall. The bathroom had pink fixtures and a mobility frame over the toilet. But the windows in the main space were huge and lent themselves to the open-plan layout with a panoramic view of the city.

  My mother took one look and said, “Buy it.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Sure it’s a dump right now, but you’ll do wonders to it once you fix it up.”

  That she had faith in my renovation and decorating abilities was the biggest compliment she gave me. She was never fazed by my house moves or that I moved a lot. In fact, my moves allowed her to decant her excess furniture into my usually larger space without the finality of parting with her treasures. She would boast to friends, “Jane has so much of my stuff that I always feel at home when I visit her.”

  It is sad that she and I had such a thorny relationship. How wonderful it would have been had the two of us gone into some aspect of the design or property business together. I would have learned so much more from her. As it was, I gleaned some knowledge from her, but mostly I gained her restlessness, the striving for perfection, for “the right house.”
/>
  I had a chance of ridding myself of that acquisitive lifestyle not so long ago when I considered becoming a nun. I had quit my day job, and sudden retirement had opened a field of glorious options. To be a nun, to devote myself mind, body, and soul to something much greater than moving, renovating, and decorating, was tantalizing. I moved from convent to convent in a gyratory state; seeking a place for my soul to settle, and a place to renounce my chattels and possessions. But I was not cut out to be a nun, and from the perspective of this current renovation, religious life would have been an almost unbearable freedom. I am not sure I could have coped.

  I revisit my mother’s remark about me and The Husband being “elderly.” What a shitty thing to say. Granted, I can no longer clamber up a ladder as fearlessly as I once did, and yes, hauling porcelain tiles and bags of cement is hell on my knees. Whenever we help Francis unload tools and equipment from his van, I feel a lacerating pain in my shoulders and my back. Nor can I grip a screwdriver as firmly as I could once, or put enough strength behind the action to loosen a stubborn screw. I hate this ageing thing. But I can still wield a sledgehammer and strip wallpaper. What’s more, my body feels stronger. At some point each day my quads, delts, blades, and pecs are on fire, in a good way. Eight months earlier an arthritis-like affliction crippled my knees and I could barely walk, but the pain has entirely disappeared. Was I now tempting fate? Was I pushing The Husband or myself toward injury? Or a heart attack? Was I endangering our lives? Our marriage? All for a stupid house?

  “Well, I’m already committed to this,” I say to Mom. “I can hardly bail out now.”

  Turning my gaze from the window toward her, I brace myself for her reply, but she is gone.

  16

  The Neighbours

  “Wow! What did you have for breakfast?”

  Francis and The Husband watch, slack jawed, as I shovel rubble from the kitchen floor into a bucket at a furious pace. I am like a machine. It takes me back to my steel-toed-boot days on Stanley Avenue. I wonder why I never thought to buy a pair for this job.

  So to what do I owe this gratifying spurt of energy? Is it sheer determination? Or am I trying to make a point that I still have it; that I am not some weak old biddy, as my mother has suggested; that I am a force with which to be reckoned? I have already noticed, not with any amount of pride, that my biceps are bigger than my husband’s. That said, I know he has physical strength: I have challenged him from time to time to an arm wrestle and he always wins. No, this is just one of those moments when I am overcome with an almost ferocious energy.

  Francis has made quick work of gutting the kitchen and the interior walls that once held the utility room and bathroom. This is the last bit of wall to come down. He is a one-man operation, and we are his dogsbodies, working to save money and time. He demolishes—we clear. We shovel brick and concrete rubble into the plastic recycling boxes and a wheelie bin used for weekly garbage pickup, and drag or roll them out of the kitchen, down the hallway, out the front door, where we hoist them into the skip in front of our house and tip out the contents. As hard and dirty as the work is, I give thanks that at sixty-three I have the physical capability to do it.

  I also give thanks that Francis is the type of worker who puts down his tools each day at 4:30. The noise level from our renovation makes me cringe with embarrassment each time a concrete saw or a power drill is turned on. I want to holler to the neighbourhood “SORRY!,” but then, no one would hear me above the din. These Victorian terraces do not hold noise well.

  Unless you know someone who already lives on the street you’re moving to and can provide you with the local gossip, your new neighbourhood is a total crapshoot. Who knows what person lives behind number fifteen, or whether that unkempt house four doors down is home to a friendly pensioner or to a young family whose father just walked out the door and out of their lives the previous week? I remember a time—and surely it exists somewhere still—where a few neighbours would pop over on moving-in day, introduce themselves, offer assistance, or an invitation to supper. It is a different and more wary world now.

  Before the renovation began, we put notes through the mail slots of our neighbours on either side of us to introduce ourselves and to apologize in advance for the disruption. So far, everyone is incredibly tolerant. No one seems to mind the bone-numbing noise inside our house, nor the rumble of lorries delivering tiles, windows, doors, bathroom fittings, and kitchen cabinets, nor the disruption of traffic it causes, nor the fact that our tradespeople take up at least two valuable parking spaces on a street that has only on-street parking. Instead, they smile and wave when they see us hauling another load to the skip. A few of them have wandered over to introduce themselves. No one mentions the noise and disruption except us: we raise the issue and apologize for it at every opportunity. They do not ask what we are doing, nor do they ask to see the work in progress. They usually ask where we are from, or if our plan is to fix up the house and sell it on. No, we assure them, this is to be our home. The Husband and I no longer look at one another for confirmation when we say it.

  Cynthia, a Jamaican woman who lives in the house on one side of us, sees me weeding the courtyard in front of our home this morning and has come out to introduce herself.

  I leap to my feet, stretch out my hand, and blurt apologies.

  “Oh, don’t you worry about the noise. It has to be done.”

  She has an aura of gentleness and kindness. She will be a good neighbour.

  “The noisy stuff should be done in two weeks,” I say with fingers crossed behind my back.

  “However long it takes,” she says in an unconcerned way. “Just don’t worry.”

  I dig into the garden and pull out a few raggedy plants. I have already retrieved the small evergreens and replanted them in the backyard.

  “You must be a good gardener,” says Cynthia, eyeing my work.

  “Actually, I do not know a thing about gardening, but I think I know weeds when I see them. Do you like to garden?”

  She laughs. “I probably know less about it than you do. I have no interest in gardening, but I appreciate the gardens of other people.”

  Nodding at her neat front courtyard, I promise her that we will not be one of those people who keep a rubbishy front yard.

  “Yes,” she says, looking worriedly up the street. “I do not know how some people can be so untidy.”

  I long to ask her about the former owner of our house, but there is no gentle way into it without appearing nosy. I am keen to find out what sort of person he was—how old he was, if he had lived in the house a long time, whether he was a considerate neighbour. All we know is what the estate agent told us: that he had fallen ill and had been taken into care.

  With the few plants I have salvaged from the front garden, I say cheerio to Cynthia and take the plants to the backyard for transplanting.

  The Husband is already there, rake in hand, bravely attempting to make things look more presentable. Seeing me, he smiles and nods toward the opposite corner of the yard, where something unexpectedly lovely has cascaded into our patch. A jasmine bush. Its roots are in a neighbouring backyard—I cannot ascertain which one—but the plant has obviously grown to such a size that a considerable amount of it has flopped over the back fence, sinuous branches migrating across its breadth, star-shaped white blossoms standing out like constellations against a bottle-green galaxy. I make a beeline for it and plant my face in it. The scent is beyond heavenly. It is difficult to be upset about anything when you are surrounded by the scent of jasmine. The heady fragrance takes me back to when we encountered jasmine-lined streets during a holiday in Sorrento, before we were married, when the furthest thing from our thoughts (well, his, anyway) was renovating and moving. It seems like an eon, yet it was probably only four years ago. The Husband and I smile at one another, both of us for a moment connected to a pleasant shared memory.

  Of all the plants we put into our garden back in Brixham the one we wished we had been able to bring w
ith us was the jasmine tree, so this immense bush spilling over the fence is a gift: an unexpected housewarming; something to smooth our jagged dissatisfaction.

  Together, we silently attack the brambles and tangle of vines in our new backyard. The two of us. A shared purpose, and one in which we have equal skill; that is to say, not much of it: neither of us has any expertise when it comes to gardening.

  In the midst of our labours we hear the kitchen door open from the house on the other side of us, and a woman comes out. I look up to offer a neighbourly greeting, but she beats me to it, and comes bounding toward us with “Hi! It’s transformed already.”

  All we have done is pull up weeds, shift the pile of debris into a somewhat neater pile, and placed two garden chairs in a corner. When that is all it takes to be called “transformed,” it makes you wonder just how low the gardening bar is set in the neighbourhood.

  We introduce ourselves and return the compliment. Her garden is a bohemian paradise. Apple, fig, pear, and cherry trees crammed into a small space, yet all of them thriving along with a couple of small raised garden beds that sprout rows of veg. A flea market table and chairs, a couple of garden ornaments; I would be entirely content with that.

  “We love your garden,” I say. “You must be a natural.”

  “Nah, I just putter and do what I can. I’m Ali, by the way. Are you getting rid of those old iron fences?”