“Nana, don’t you want to smell those flowers’ true perfume? Don’t you think life would be better if you could detect these fragrances in the way that God created them?” I asked.
This was a subject I never left for long. I often tried to convince people that my own godliness enabled me to better enjoy life. I insisted that foods tasted sweeter, flowers smelled more fragrant, and fruit was juicier when you recognized that these things were created by God. I almost convinced my sister, who was three years younger than I, that broccoli would taste like chocolate chip cookies if she believed. This was part of the contract we create with God, I explained. You scratch my back, I scratch yours.
“If I want something, I know who to ask,” my grandmother said. “And anyway I’m happy enough with what I smell now.”
I collected the weeds in a white wicker basket and pretended that the conversation was not about to take the turn I knew it was about to take.
“Pray to Beau that we get some rain today or tomorrow,” she said. “These peonies are parched.”
This was the crux of my grandmother’s blasphemy, the problem I had tried, unsuccessfully, to make headway on. My grandmother prayed to her dead dog, Beau.
“I’m willing to pray to God for rain,” I offered.
“Pray to God until you’re blue in the face. I think he has more important things to worry about than whether our flowers get watered. But Beau loves me and I believe he’ll see to it that we get a few drops.”
“Beau doesn’t make rain,” I said. “God does.”
“Well, neither of them makes rain if you want to be technical about it,” she answered.
I tried to ignore her, and she tried to ignore me. She saw my refusal to pray to Beau as a direct affront to her. When the dog was alive, he had rivalled my grandfather in her affections. He was a beautiful dog, gentle and tolerant, a golden retriever with ringlets down his chest. When my sister and I were young, he let us dress him up in pink bonnets and frilly shirts and take photographs of him. When he came prancing into a room, my grandmother lit up.
“Is that my precious love?” she would croon. “Is that my boy, the love of my life?”
Although my grandmother rarely spoke of her pain, she tried everything that was rumoured to relieve it—Aspirin, gold treatment, acupuncture. Nothing worked. Then my grandfather came home one day with a dog from the Humane Society. Beau would lie next to her with his head in her lap, and every now and then, he would lift his head high to give her chin a small, dignified lick. He sniffed her hands and gently nuzzled them. He slept on the floor beside her bed and barked for my grandfather if she had to get up in the night. My grandmother swore the throbbing abated a little, she swore his breath on her skin had the warmth of a light anaesthetic. She produced articles as evidence that animal therapy was approved by medical experts. As a child, I thought that the rheumatoid arthritis was her misshapen hands, her distended knees and feet, that the results were the thing itself, and that pain was a distant corollary rather than the root, the pulse point of it all.
My grandmother was not generally a fanciful woman. She had lived for forty-five years with my grandfather, who was passionate, impulsive, and volatile, likely to waste large amounts of money in fits of gift-buying affection. As the manager of their lives, she was calm and thoughtful. It would not have occurred to her that praying to the dog was strange or laughable. Her prayers were organized and serious. They were like meditations, and quite without histrionic flair. When I think of it now, I realize that she was probably not praying, not really. She was gathering herself, quietly, in some expression of hopefulness towards the world.
It was only when I was much older that I realized what she had to live with. She never spoke of pain except to comment on its improvement.
THAT WAS THE LAST spring I saw my grandmother in her garden. She went into the hospital that summer. I was away at camp training to be a counsellor, although I had never been to camp as a camper and was sensitive to insects and drafts and public toilets. Weekly, I wrote letters home that were full of lies: I had strep throat but the nurse refused to treat it; a gash on my leg, sustained when I cut myself on a rusty nail, grew puffier by the day; a storm had brought a giant old tree down onto our cabin, narrowly grazing my bed. I also resented that chapel was held only once a week. In each letter, I suggested at length that home would be safer, but refused to admit I was homesick. One day two weeks before I was to return, my mother sent me a letter telling me that my grandfather had been helping my grandmother to the bathroom in the middle of the night when he had a dizzy spell and let her fall. Her hip was broken. Surgery was needed to repair the break, to restore some fraction of her mobility, but the doctors didn’t want to put her under general anaesthetic. They had discovered congestive heart failure.
“Down like a tonne of bricks,” my grandfather said to me when I returned from camp. He spoke with wonder, as if amazed and impressed that my grandmother’s body could contain that much substance. I thought it sounded unflattering, and was indelicate, considering the whole thing had been his fault.
My grandparents slept in separate bedrooms, and when their dog Beau had been alive, he had roused my grandfather in the night by trotting into his room and nudging him awake when my grandmother needed help. Since Beau’s death, my grandmother had relied on a silver bell to alert my grandfather, and my mother was intent on blaming my grandfather’s midnight dizziness on the demise of Beau and the birth of the bell. During my first visit upon returning from camp, my whole family went to the hospital together, and we milled around the visitors’ sitting area talking about how this would never have happened if Beau had still been alive. It occurred to me that that wouldn’t have changed anything other than how quickly my grandfather woke up, but for once I kept my mouth shut.
There was a constant hum of noise on the ward. As I walked along the hallway to my grandmother’s room, patients reached out for me from their wheelchairs. One woman grabbed my hand and asked if I had seen Earl. A man was walking sideways down the hall holding onto the wall with both hands. He winked at me and said, “Are we on for Saturday night, Stacey?” I didn’t say anything and he gazed past my shoulder. Then a change came over his face, and he looked at me again with watery eyes, servile eyes. “I’m wet,” he said. “Can someone please change me?” This was just one walk down the hall. I was proud of my grandmother, that she lay there so quietly.
She was on a special bed, with an alternating pressure air mattress intended to relieve the weight on her broken hip. The nurses came in every hour to turn her, as she no longer could turn herself. While this was happening, my grandmother seemed able to behave as if it were not. She was in a semi-private room, but the bed next to hers was empty. Such was the compromised privacy of her new life. My mother had already handed me bus fare, kissed her mother on the forehead, and hurried off with my sister, whom she dropped at a friend’s house.
“Chuck, Chuck,” my grandmother said. “Her kingdom for half an hour with Chuck.”
Chuck was my mother’s married boyfriend, and he had presented my mother with a narrow window to see him that day, a window through which my mother clambered with ungainly eagerness. My family seemed somehow accustomed to the new hospital routine, as if there was an inevitability about my grandmother’s injury that rendered it somehow inconsequential.
“God does not approve of adultery,” I said.
“Ah, well. We are talking about Chuck here.” There was a mock exasperation in her voice, even a kind of amused respect that suggested she was impressed by my mother’s ability to surrender to inescapable disappointment.
“Have you done your exercises?” she asked.
My grandmother had the idea that young people are exuberant and eager to burn energy by means of calisthenics. Whenever my sister and I slept over as children, she had us do a series of jumping jacks in the morning on the back lawn. She chose jumping jacks because she thought they were my favourite single exercise, my way of expressing physicall
y the abundant cheer inside me. There was a famous story about how I had broken out into jumping jacks at my first sight of an alligator at the Toronto Zoo when I was six.
“And camp. How was it?” she asked.
“The worst, most godless experience of my life,” I said.
I told her all the stories I had already told through letters. I never got tired of rehashing the litany of my discomforts. Then I wanted to analyze why I had found camp so terrible, and why I had wanted to go in the first place, given my dislike of the outdoors. I wanted to analyze why my mother had allowed me to do something I was so clearly going to dislike, why I had stayed in spite of impediments to my safety, why I had so avidly pursued a summer of affliction.
“You used to enjoy camping in our backyard,” my grandmother said. “You and your sister used to set up a tent and sleep outside and pretend that the back of the garden was a swamp full of frogs. So you made a mistake. You thought it would be fun.”
I told her I found it more likely that I was trying in some fashion to atone for my sins.
“Perhaps, dear,” she said, “though I don’t know that you’ve done anything so very wrong.”
In the beginning, I visited her often enough to allay any questions about the future. In the beginning. It did not occur to me then that something had been finalized.
MY GRANDMOTHER was not generally a storyteller. That was my grandfather. If you wanted stories about my grandmother’s life, you usually had to get them from him. She was insular that way. She knew how to prevent you from feeling her absences.
While my grandfather talked about this woman, Nora, whom he’d met in a bakery shortly after she had immigrated to Toronto from England, my grandmother looked on, polite and indulgent but also slightly puzzled, as if she couldn’t believe that anyone could want to hear so much about her early life. She wasn’t troubled by self-fascination. My grandfather said that something about my grandmother made her highly visible. She was dressed plainly, in a grey wool dress and a long black coat, with a white silk scarf about her neck, and she was not decorated with makeup or jewellery, but everyone turned to look at her. And when she spoke, she had the most refined voice he had ever heard. He wanted to sit in a dusky, firelit room and listen to her read aloud. She bought a loaf of white bread and a dozen meringues and was gone. He followed her out, forgetting his wallet on the counter. The only comment my grandmother would volunteer was that it went against all her instincts and her upbringing to converse with a strange man on the street outside a bakery, let alone to agree to have tea with him the following day at a café on Yonge Street.
They married six months later. Both of them were older, thirty-five, which was unusual for their generation (and I never was able to gather a clear account of what they had been doing in the years since they’d finished school). Their wedding was not as small as they would have liked. My grandfather’s many friends had come, and his many Scottish relatives had taken the train from Nova Scotia, and some of my grandmother’s relatives had come the month before for an extended visit. And because they got married at a small church, their wedding felt twice as large as it actually was because their party filled the pews.
Though she was a woman whose looks invited attention, my grandmother disliked being stared at. She was happy to be marrying my grandfather, but as she stood at the back of the church in her slender white dress and her long lace veil, she couldn’t just then imagine that walk down the aisle (firmly married, she confessed all doubt a week later). She didn’t exactly think of leaving the church, but she hadn’t agreed to so much preening fanfare for two ordinary people who had simply met in a bakery and taken a liking to each other. But the procession began and she was, necessarily, at the back of it. She stepped slowly, at that funereal wedding pace, and watched the enormous cross above the altar. No walk, she was sure, had ever been longer. When she was halfway to my grandfather, someone shouted, above the steady organ music, “Smile!”
It was not said maliciously, but certainly there was reproach there—an amusing comment had gone wrong somewhere and had come out as an indignant correction. People had travelled far for a show. Of course, upon hearing that command, she was less able to smile than ever. She and my grandfather had never been able to identify the guilty party. No one owned up. My grandfather wondered if the voice hadn’t sounded remarkably like my grandmother’s old Aunt Eva. Here, the comment my grandmother would add was that no relative of hers would have shouted such a thing.
At the reception, she had asked her new husband if he had heard. He said, “I heard something, but I didn’t know what it was. I was too busy looking at you. You were a vision of loveliness.”
There was a band playing, and people sitting at tables, talking and sipping champagne. She couldn’t quite hear him. She thought he had said, “You were a version of loveliness.” She thought he was saying that it didn’t matter if she hadn’t smiled, if she had looked sulky and disagreeable heading down the aisle, that he had made his choice and he was prepared to continue believing it was the right one, even if it wasn’t the perfect one, but just a version of what he’d really wanted. She thought he was insulting her. For two days, she went around thinking that, trying to adjust to being the wife of this man who had insulted her on their wedding day. Finally, she brought it up. She let him know that they weren’t off to a good start. (She had married that most vicious species of liar, she thought, one who pretends at happiness, one whose tact and solicitude are a form of hiding.) He corrected her, of course, and she tried to correct her memory of the day.
Except for this single lapse in hearing, my grandmother was an excellent listener. She listened to my grandfather tell stories about her. She listened to me tell stories about school and my friends, and when religion hit me, church and God. She listened to my mother tell stories about my father and Chuck, the shocks of her sexual awakening. And she would say just the thing to put all your thoughts in the right order.
One evening while my parents were still separating, while my grandmother still lived at home, my mother, my sister, and I, along with our dog, a thick-necked black Labrador retriever, went to my grandparents’ house for dinner. Our dog, Pete, was not like our grandparents’ dog Beau had been. Beau was the sort of dog who kept walking when other dogs barked and growled. My grandfather didn’t even need to use a leash; Beau would simply heel at his side. Pete was strong and determinedly friendly, willing to pull my mother over at his first sight of a dog or cat or person he might like to greet. That evening when we arrived at my grandparents’, their neighbour, who looked at us suspiciously whenever he saw us piling out of the car and had once commented to my grandmother that he was terribly sorry, though not terribly surprised, that my mother was divorcing, was out on his front lawn watering his petunias. Pete started barking when he saw him through the window, then, once out of the car, pulled my mother to the ground as he barrelled over to say hello. She was wearing a short stretchy black skirt—a gift from Chuck and a symbol of her emancipation from my sexually staid father—and she skinned her knee badly on the sidewalk.
“I’m going to murder you,” she yelled at the dog. “You bad dog, Pete, you’re a bad, bad dog.”
She limped over to the neighbour’s lawn, and as she collected the dog, she said to Pete again, “I really think I could murder you. I really could.” Then to the neighbour, she apologized, “I’m sorry, but you know, of course, he’s friendly.”
The man set his hose on the grass. “I don’t know what you’re doing with that dog,” he said. “Someone should take him away from you. Clearly, you can’t handle him.”
“I told you that he’s friendly. He’s just young and overexcited,” my mother replied.
“That is not a friendly dog. That is not the kind of dog people like you should be owning.”
“Why don’t you mind your own business,” my mother said.
“People like you shouldn’t have dogs,” he continued, even more emphatically. “I ought to call the Humane Society.
That dog is a menace and you can’t control him.”
Hearing the commotion, my grandparents had come out of their house, just in time to hear my mother venture an observation, that he was nothing but a stupid old man, and to offer the following advice for his next course of action, that he go fuck himself. Then she turned around and stormed up to my grandparents’ porch. Her hands were trembling, and I said to her angrily, “God is listening to you, Mother. You might go to hell.”
“Well, if He doesn’t like it, He can put in earplugs! He can go to hell,” she shrieked at me.
My grandmother put on the kettle for a pot of herbal tea, and we sat at the kitchen table not eating dinner. As my mother’s anger subsided, embarrassment set in. The man had been in the wrong, she affirmed, but perhaps she should have kept her mouth shut so that she could be even more in the right.
Finally, my grandmother, who had seemed amused the entire time, said, “You’ll forget all about this. Isn’t that reassuring? You’ll remember the sense of what happened, but not the specifics. He might recall that you said he was a stupid old man, but you likely won’t. It’s much easier to remember the nasty things that have been done and said to you than it is to remember the nasty things you’ve done and said.”
The Virgin Spy Page 7