“But I want him to forget about it,” my mother moaned.
“No,” said my grandmother. “If you forget it, then it no longer exists.”
My mother did calm down then. It seemed to comfort her that this incident probably wouldn’t remain on her record of the things she’d done wrong in her life.
I said something once to my grandfather when my grandmother was in the hospital, to the effect that she had been an invalid for her entire life. In spite of everything I’d seen and lived through with her, I could hold this view. For me, somehow, the hospital blotted out everything that had come before it.
My grandfather said, “Don’t forget that your grandmother had a long life before the one you knew her in.”
I suppose I stopped giving her credit for having had a younger self. Biking through London on a fall afternoon. Tobogganing in Switzerland, playing tennis in long white dresses, siestas in the dusty summer afternoons of colonial Trinidad. These became matters of conjecture. A life lived in sickness was my view, the last years became the whole.
Once when I went to the hospital, my grandmother looked different. The student hairdressers had come. Her neat bob had been cut short and permed, the way older people are expected to wear their hair.
I was very upset and was not careful to conceal how much I disliked her haircut.
My grandmother had no mirrors in her room, and she couldn’t have held a hand mirror even if she had one.
“What’s the difference?” she said, smiling at me. “I can’t see it.”
MY GRANDMOTHER kept a picture of Beau at her bedside. She also kept a book there, a lifelong habit, though she could no longer hold books.
After several months in the Wellesley Hospital, she was moved to a chronic care facility, against her wishes. She wanted to go home.
One Sunday close to a year after she first went into the hospital, I arrived to find her sitting in a large orange geriatric chair, looking out the window. I hadn’t seen her for two weeks because I’d had school exams and my mother had begun seeing someone new, having discovered that Chuck was the kind of man who looks at a woman and easily sees the flab on her stomach. Finally, I’d come alone in a taxi, intending to take her to mass in the basement. She refused. When the nurse came in, she also refused to return to bed.
It seemed that earlier that morning, after her breakfast tray was taken away, she had looked up and seen a fat brown spider on the ceiling. My grandmother had been terrified of spiders all her life, and she watched it as it sat directly above her head. She tried to remain calm; she felt embarrassed to disturb a nurse over a harmless spider. It meandered around and eventually began to lower itself slowly on an invisible string. She watched it as it swung lower and lower, and she told herself that any moment it would spring back up to the ceiling and be on its way. When it continued its way down, she buzzed for the nurse. She waited, but the nurse didn’t come, so she rang again, but still the nurse didn’t come. Finally, the spider lowered itself directly onto her knee. The room had been overheated at breakfast time and the nurse had pulled the covers back so my grandmother could feel a pleasant draft on her legs. This was why the nurse didn’t respond now—she had tended to my grandmother not long before. The nurses were kind and attentive, but irritable sometimes because many of the patients rang them for no particular reason. The spider had deposited itself on my grandmother’s bare skin.
She was trapped. Without help, she could move only minimally. Even her arms she could move only within a limited range, certainly not with enough force to locate and kill the spider. Her bed was positioned so that her upper half was more or less in a seated position, so she watched mutely, unable to bend, as the spider moved its legs thickly up her bare thigh.
“Why didn’t you call out for the nurse?” I asked her.
This was a silly question. My grandmother regarded need, vocalized, as obscene. In the same way that she would never have asked you to repeat yourself, though she was hard of hearing, she would never have allowed herself to call out, even in the most dignified voice. She had heard too many patients cry out for help. She was determined never to be like them.
When the nurse finally came, the spider had made its way under her gown and had settled on her stomach. The nurse had to undo the hospital gown from behind and take it completely off in order to find the spider. My grandmother mentioned that while the nurse had looked around for the spider—it had by then scurried down to her other leg—she seemed skeptical, as if she suspected hallucinations were at play.
I understood only then the meaning of the word chronic, its highway stretch of sameness.
She saw me looking at her picture of Beau.
“I know what it is you think,” she said sourly. “I’ve brought this on myself.”
She had never let on before that moment that she thought less of me because of my vision of the world, my version of it.
There was a new sign over her bed, “This patient is deaf.” I pretended not to notice.
WE HAD THE SAME name, my grandmother and I. My grandfather called us Big Nora and Little Nora. The rest of my family called me Hutby. It wasn’t until I was around ten that I asked what Hutby meant.
My mother said, “Old woman. Like a gaffer is an old man, a hutby is an old woman.”
I liked that. It seemed a reflection of my unlikely wisdom. It seemed an honour. They had started to call me Hutby when I was too young even to think about it, but I decided, at ten, that my naming had been unintentionally prophetic.
Only when I was a grown woman, married, a resolute atheist, did it occur to me to look up hutby in the dictionary. I discovered that it did not mean old woman, and was not even a word at all.
Then, my naming seemed unintentionally prophetic in an entirely different way: my family had known, when I was as young as three, that my grandmother and I should not have the same name.
THE FIRST TIME I set foot in a church was with my grandmother. I was three and a half, and my mother had called her in a panic. Several months before, my sister had been born, and my mother was breastfeeding, something she hadn’t done when I was a baby because she had been afraid, but she was entirely different by the time my sister was born: educated about the health benefits of breast milk, sensible and determined in a way that seemed more competitive than maternal. On this Sunday morning, while my sister had been having her nap, my mother and I took a bath together. At first, all was uneventful. I played with my bath doll and my mother splashed me and pretended the rubber duck was a shark on its way to eat my foot. Out of nowhere (this part, later, was emphasized: we were having the loveliest time and this nastiness came out of nowhere), I leaned forward and bit my mother’s nipple. Hard.
It is clear to me now what I was thinking. I was old enough to understand that my sister was being fed by my mother’s breast, but what exactly was going on hadn’t been explained to me. My mother’s nipple brought food. I bit my food. I bit the nipple. My mother refused to accept this interpretation, offered calmly by my grandmother. Instead, she saw it as the advent of a mean streak, the coming of a taste for violence too horrific to contemplate. As evidence she produced the drops of blood on her white towel. She called on my grandmother to remove me from her presence. This was in the days when my grandmother still went to mass several times a month, before she became bored with it and realized she felt less spiritual in church than anywhere else. My mother requested that something be done to stem my ugliness, so my grandmother took me to church.
The singing is what stays with me. My grandmother was known for her singing voice, for her clear soprano too pure and thin to be opera, too interesting to be chorus. I sat on the hard wooden pew while red, yellow, and blue light streamed through the stained glass into the dark space as my grandmother sang hymns from memory. She knew all the words and kept the pitch while others faltered. Her voice was not ambitious. It did not trill showily or hold notes too long so its song could outlive the others. But still it came through beyond the rest. Hers was the voice your ear
sought out. She stopped halfway through “And Did Those Feet in Ancient Time” and turned to me.
“Hum along, darling,” she said. “Everyone wants to hear you sing.”
My grandmother had it in her head that I had a beautiful singing voice, which I did not, and she encouraged me to sing in the car, at home, in the park. Even then, I sensed that I did not have a good voice. Later, I knew I was not like my grandmother in many ways.
Years later, long after my grandmother had died, I was at the National Gallery in Ottawa, standing next to a botanical exhibit, outside the reconstructed nineteenth-century Rideau Chapel, thinking of where to go for lunch, when I heard choral music inside the chapel. It was a sound exhibit by Janet Cardiff called Forty-Part Motet, a recording of the piece “Spem in Alium” by the sixteenth-century composer Thomas Tallis. Positioned all around the gilded chapel were tall black speakers. There were forty voices altogether, and each had been separately recorded and assigned to one of the speakers. When I stood in the middle of the room, the voices resonated as a choir, and when I walked a path next to the speakers, I felt I was next to each singer. The voices were like dominoes, one standing, the one behind it falling. I moved from the centre of the chapel to the sides, back and forth again and again, so I could hear the change from singer to chorus, the merging and the retreat, the one into many, many into one.
As I walked along the line of sopranos, I heard a voice just like my grandmother’s. It was a fine voice, and full, more grave and intimate than the others. I wanted to claw through the speaker.
There was one story my grandmother did tell, of her childhood and youth in England. My grandmother was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, but she and her five brothers and sisters attended boarding school in England. There is an old sepia picture, mounted on grey cardboard, of her and her sister, dressed identically in tweed car coats, woven wicker hats, their long braids tied with wide ribbons, about to board the boat to the other country where they lived out the school year. It was a privileged life, but a difficult one in many ways. A child away from her mother and father, my grandmother was forced to embrace independence and self-discipline. At night, she lay in her dormitory bed afraid that banshees were going to appear before her, wailing the death of someone she loved. She looked forward to her time away from the school, her days out in the real London air, and when she was old enough, she was allowed to go out on Saturdays without an adult. Freed from her school uniform, her favourite outfit was a crisp white dress with a pattern of large cherries. One spring afternoon, she was sweeping through the narrow streets on her bicycle when she heard a child call out excitedly in a Cockney accent, “Ow, look at the cherries!” When my grandmother told the story, she imitated the child’s Cockney pitch perfectly. In that one exclamation, I saw it all: the fashionable dress, the old-fashioned bicycle, the cheery, ragged child with an accent so vulgar her life’s possibilities must have been set from her first word. My grandmother loved to tell that one story, and I loved to hear it. There were many other things about her life then that she didn’t remember—and I had tried, I had probed relentlessly, many times—but this single bicycle ride, this brief and delighted exclamation, had stuck with her through her whole life.
“Don’t worry. It won’t stay with you,” my grandmother once said to me when an old man trailed me, crying for his childhood cat, into her room. Just two months after she died, I tried to recall the exact image of her thin porcelain body in her wheelchair by the window, and found that I could not. Forgetfulness is more efficient than memory: we do away with the details.
What remains is something less than memory, and something more: a wet nose nudging your hands; a bicycle, ridden in May; a dozen meringues; that sudden moment of glee; the long life of a voice.
RETENTION with AFTERFLOW
It was the beginning of winter, when threadbare skies and naked trees still seemed romantic, and I decided that having sex too often was making me look dirty. Just after dawn, I looked in the bathroom mirror and noticed that my skin looked greasy and tired, my arms undernourished and sinewy. I turned back to the bedroom, where Stephen was still sleeping, and it smelled like breath, like mouths held open all night. I thought I might be tired of commitments.
This happened in the year I turned twenty-seven, just before I met my old friend Julie again—before I met her husband, Angus, and a jolt of something keen and sly went through me. It was the year I learned that reciprocation need have no part in love.
Each morning and night, I took a hot shower and scrubbed myself with potent antibacterial soap. I massaged my scalp with tingly green shampoo that smelled of men’s cologne. In the dawn cool of our apartment one morning, I examined my hair, which hung in flat ropes, and my cheeks, which had no colour, and informed Stephen that we would no longer be having sex. All he did was raise his eyebrows. He was standing naked by the toaster. His body was wide and stocky, but his face had a prettiness about it—the sort of ordinary womanly prettiness that doesn’t say anything. People sometimes thought we were brother and sister, and I would say, “No! We’re not,” too loudly, without managing, or even attempting, to hide my horror—not the horror, as they thought, of being mistaken for my lover’s sibling, but of looking like someone I considered bland. When I got home, I would stare at my face in the mirror and think of how profoundly insulted I was. Other times, I was grateful and knew I was lucky to be connected to him; I hadn’t had a real job since finishing grad school and he was a biotechnologist who supported me without a word of complaint. His apartment was bare and beautiful, with white walls and high ceilings and the conveniences of someone who appreciates technology, as he did.
Stephen dropped two slices of bread into the toaster after I suggested we attempt celibacy for a time. It was his habit not to respond to me. He considered exaggeration the sign of a fanciful character, and was skilled at refusing to indulge it. When he sat down at the table, he slapped thick wedges of cold butter on his toast and said, “You’re perfectly clean, you know. I’ve never seen anyone so clean. So if you want to stop, we’ll stop, but I’m not the one waking up the neighbours at two o’clock in the morning.”
He was right. I did that. We didn’t stop having sex, though. And, in fact, I initiated it at two o’clock in the morning. The more I hated sex, the more I became convinced that it was robbing me of something fine and pure, the more defiantly I took to proclaiming my love of it. When Stephen traced a hand along the side of my neck, I shuddered and moaned at a low, ripe pitch. When we moved from the kitchen to the bed, from the bathroom to the bed, from our desks to the bed, I panted meaningfully, as if I had never known such painful anticipation, such temptation. I shrieked as if sex were returning me to something essential, to a primordial kind of efficiency, as if only sex and breathing could be necessary. The more I wanted to push his body away, the more freely I screamed. Afterwards, I would lie in bed with a burning between my legs and a ringing in my ears. I often couldn’t sleep until I had a bag of frozen vegetables hugged between my thighs.
This became typical. I realized later that we were waiting to fall in love. All that teasing made us feel that it might be on the verge of happening, but it never did. All through autumn, we had been waiting, but we couldn’t have said what we were waiting for. It was nothing palpable, like news of an exciting job opportunity or a windfall of money. Nonetheless, our time together had that useless, meandering quality life has when you are waiting for something golden and idealized, something transformative. This is what made our patience so thin, what made us turn to the militant physicality of sex. We were waiting for something that should have happened long before.
ONE DAY ON Bloor Street near the start of December, I ran into my old friend Julie. We met as teenagers, a time when every day held the possibility of treachery, at a small Toronto girls’ school where our powers of fault observation became attuned like the hearing of wolves. I hadn’t spoken to her since grade twelve, when I decided I was tired of her and started scrupulously avoiding her.
When I spotted her, she was on the far side of the street looking in the window of a store selling yoga gear. I crossed to get a closer look, but pretended not to see her until she saw me. Two days later, we were sitting in a small café, our table ringed with sunlight.
Julie had acquired glamour with age. The intervening years had made her look more appealing, more interesting. She still had that lightly freckled oval face, but her skin was fairly sun-damaged, with lines already deepening around her eyes, and the loss of baby fat made her chin rather pointy, perhaps too sharply defined. But her flaws, if indeed they were flaws, worked to her advantage. When we were fifteen, everyone had wished to look like Julie—to brush in the mornings such pale strawberry hair (now considerably darkened); to offer such small, tidy hands to a reaching boy; to own such round, dewy cheeks and such regular blue eyes; to be so naturally well-groomed, so innocuous. I had sometimes thought Julie too typical-looking, but the years had made her more pronounced, and she seemed to know the advantages of her looks because she wasn’t wearing any makeup. Her clothes, too, were far better considered than my jeans and black sweater. She was wearing a thick white turtleneck and a short black pleated skirt, slightly schoolgirlish, but she had offset the plainness of the sweater, the adolescence of the skirt, by throwing a black cashmere shawl around her neck like a scarf.
We steeped our tea until it was almost as black as coffee and ate the crunchy winter pears she had smuggled in.
“Isn’t this the week for running into people!” Julie said. “Last week I saw Ryan Little, this week you. Has he ever lost his looks. He thought I would give him my phone number, just like that. I mean, even if he weren’t so ghastly looking. Your mother said he would be. He was so pretty back then, but your mom could tell he wouldn’t stay that way.”
“I never thought he was so pretty in the first place,” I said.
“But you never thought anyone was. You never liked anyone! Your mom and I used to wonder.”
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