When I Was Young and In My Prime

by Alayna Munce

  Anyhow. When my blood settles down I do it all over again. With the other foot.

  Goddamn fingers. Sometimes I wonder why I bother. A man’s got to wear socks though.

  13 the cockatiel (nymphicus hollandicus)

  My cousin Clara’s triplets have turned two and she can’t look after Sven, her cockatiel, so Grandpa is nominated to take the thing—a companion for Sandy, his canary.

  He walks slowly around the seniors’ complex on his way to visit Grandma in extended care, and the bird perches on his shoulder all the while, picks crumbs from the side of his mouth, pulls at his earlobe, shits down his back. In the Home he becomes known as the birdman, a claim to fame (though people talk even less to him now, too busy cooing to the bird).

  The social coordinator is taken with it all, devises a contest to rename the cockatiel.

  Perky

  is the winning entry, but Grandpa

  calls him by no name,

  coddles and curses him, chides him

  if he hasn’t sung a note by noon.

  Clara took back her cockatiel because of how much Grandpa complained about it, but then he seemed so depressed that Uncle Nick figured he’d better do something about it and gave him a bird clock for his birthday. The best of the best—mail-ordered from the Audubon Society. Twelve different birds, each perching at their appointed hour complete with English and Latin names. But the best part is the calls. The most realistic of any of the bird clocks, Nick was told. At one o’clock the house wren conjectures a long, almost haphazard line of thought on into the minute. At three o’clock the black-capped chickadee is matter-of-fact and predictable. Grandpa says the robin song at seven o’clock is the very essence of the hour after a spring storm, the worms surfacing and plentiful. I have to take his word for it; I never arrive as early as seven, never stay as late as seven. The place smells too intimate—skin gone loose and rubbery, pots of ointment long past their expiry dates—and after a couple of hours I’m ready for fresh air.

  At noon and at midnight the owl sounds. Sitting down for lunch right under the clock in his small apartment yesterday, Grandpa opened his mouth to the sound of the noon-owl and, for a brief moment, I thought the moan was coming from him. The clock marked several minutes before my limbs stopped tingling and I could lift my fork, join him in eating the dinner he’d prepared: chicken roasted with onions and anise seed.

  On the way home, I try not to imagine the owl-call at midnight. Grandpa, alone in his small apartment, upright, trying to fall asleep in the easy chair, opening his mouth in the dark. Behind him, chicken bones everywhichway in the wastebasket under the sink.

  Holy mother how that bloody call lasts.

  When the one real bird that’s left, the canary in the cage, begins to sing in his small apartment, Grandpa says, Give ’er hell, Sandy.

  and to hold

  After a while we settle into a routine of visiting. Mom and I usually drive out together, have an early lunch with Grandpa, then walk over to Extended Care and feed Grandma her lunch. I often have to rush back to the city to work.

  Whenever I have to work a shift at the bar after a visit with Grandma, I always feel like a foreigner in my life. Invariably I drift through the whole evening at a slight remove—how odd, these people’s customs—though the distance is never quite as intense as it was the shift I worked after the day we moved her.

  Suddenly it seemed a strange and unasked-for mission to move among the living and count out coins for change. To balance a cork tray stacked with empty glasses through the crowd then set it down on a gleaming copper pass-bar. Each customer impressed me: the act of choosing one beverage over another, the unlikely reliability of skin as a border to the body, the bravura of being out in public.

  All night I watched them with the same gaze I’d levelled on Grandma all day.

  Who knows her? What’s he thinking? What’s she loyal to? Does someone love him?

  Love?

  The band performed a disjointed sound check. A regular watched the hockey game on the TV above the bar, his face tracing a live map of passes, shots and saves.

  What’s it like to be inside that skull? To look out from behind those eyes? Inhabit that walk? That slouch?

  Buddy in the corner had had one too many and his face had slipped its anchor, was drifting out to sea.

  What do we mean when we say we know a person?

  How can we know anything?

  Four people around a table all tipped their faces back to laugh as if opening a passage for some amber draught to pour into them from above.

  Careful observation? Extrapolation? Imagination? Contemplation?

  The music started in earnest and the drunk in the corner revived enough to heckle the band a little.

  A good guess? A wild guess?

  Love?

  That word again.

  The drunk lurched from his corner toward the door, calling over his shoulder, “Don’t forget to laugh behind my back when I leave.”

  Unaware of him, the table of four laughed again, about something else.

  And all night my mind kept stealing back to the window of her face, its kitchen curtains closed.

  James told me once that I almost always twitch just after I’ve fallen asleep. Not little twitches, he said—two or three leaping twitches, originating in the thigh, rabbits springing from the brush of my body. As if a starter pistol trigger has been pulled, as if I were leaving. It gives me an ache, this picture of him lying curled around me, his chest against my back, holding my body for me while I’m gone.

  There are a handful of moments like that, which make it all seem worthwhile. Beads of sensation, Virginia Woolf called them. Making time stop flowing in just one direction, a vertical pressure felt against the horizontal, the pull of eternity. The moment breaks off, beads—a balanced sphere, a wobbling, tiny whole.

  Then fill in the rest: distractions, defences, blame, bickering, pettiness, breaches of trust small and large, ego trips, expectations. Taking each other profoundly for granted. Knowing exactly what sentence will hurt the other most. The injustice of the fact that the one time you utter it outweighs by a long shot the thousand times you held your tongue. The morning breath. The shared popcorn. The silly dances while undressing. The customs your bodies develop while you sleep. Laziness. Irritability. Loneliness. Pride. The pause in lovemaking to remove a pubic hair from your tongue. Could you look at this thing on my back? Is it a zit or a bite or cancer?

  It’s such a strange thing, attention. How it can shift—past, present, future, there, elsewhere, everywhere—and all the while your body is here, your skin making contact with the air, parasites living their lives out in your eyelashes, maybe a cancer forming from the tiniest of cells in your left breast and ten years from now it will announce itself on the scene, finally getting your attention. And your elbow itches, and you scratch it with only a fraction of your attention, and the man you share a life with and say you love is reading to you from some dense philosophical text about pre-Cartesian conceptions of the Self, and part of your attention is with him but another part is thinking about the moment of peace you had this morning and how it seemed to you for a second that you didn’t need to prove anything to anyone and how fleeting it was and what will you cook with the fish that needs to be used up, probably should have something green. He teases you about your need to have something green every day, how farmers used to eat greens every day in spring and summer then not at all during the winter, the two of you always trying out different angles for arriving at the most basic formula for a good human life and once you put it that way how absurd it sounds, but the compulsion is there and oh the ivy in the window needs watering and all the while he’s reading to you about the Self and you realize you’ve only taken in a fraction and there’s a swell of resentment because he never asks if he can read to you, does he? He just goes ahead and does it, walks into the room where you are working—you’ve established this before about when you’re working—but he just walks into the
room and says, Listen to this, but it would be more trouble than it was worth at the moment to take him to task over it—you know, because you’ve done it, because it would turn into a Big Deal (or is it just that you’ve never found the right way to do it?), and if you just listen (or half-listen or pretend to listen as you’re doing now) it will be over sooner than a fight would be and, though you know there’s a dishonesty in this, a shirking, you do it anyway because you’re lazy.

  My favourite moments are the ones when we laugh together in bed, gazing at each other from our pillows, inches from bridge of nose to bridge of nose. Those times we laugh at something inexplicably funny, something mild and silly, and the laughing doesn’t match it—the laughing extends beyond the boundaries of the slight joke, makes little eaves, and the eaves gesture at sheltering all the sad-funny stuff of the whole day, though of course they can’t. No one could recount or explain those moments—their humour doesn’t last or translate—but I tell you they are my favourite times, my favourite.

  Last week when I got back from visiting Grandma he told me if it happens to me when we get old, he’ll keep trying to make me laugh.

  I stroked his cheek, but to be honest it struck me as far-fetched, and I just barely managed to keep from saying, If we make it that long.

  My mother is president of the family reunion, whatever that means. She told me last night over the phone that when it came her turn to give the report on our branch of the family, she tried to be positive, said, “Mom doesn’t talk or walk much anymore, but sometimes she seems to know us.”

  Lillian, Grandma’s ever-catty cousin, stood up and said, “Well, I disagree with Ruth. I saw Mary two months ago, and she’s just useless—she’s a vegetable. I hope she dies quickly.”

  Mom said on the phone that the word bitch was in her mouth, but, like a good president, she swallowed it, finished chairing the meeting and went home before the potluck.

  Her voice on the phone sounded peculiar, drained. Though she didn’t say and I didn’t ask, I bet she cried in the car on the way home, cried harder than that particular incident warranted, cried long. I have an image of her sobbing so hard she had to pull the car over. I bet the crying just kept coming, like a bottle of homemade wine aged to vinegar chugging slowly out of the bottleneck into the earth in the backyard.

  In early December the zoo is deserted. James and I spend a long time watching the hippos swim under water. Something presumptuous about peering through an underground window at very large animals paddling and gliding, something too intimate.

  We walk and James talks to me about how Plato, in the Timaeus, investigates the essential nature of things, their origins. I take it in obliquely. Something about atomic structure of the elements as geometry. Earth is cube-shaped. Fire is scalene-triangle-shaped; it’s pointiest, that’s why it burns. Space is a grand receptacle and it shakes us like a winnowing basket so that like-shaped particles congregate. There is no such thing as above and below, only centres and peripheries, overlapping, only like things massing together and attracting their fellows to their gathering.

  Sometimes lately I’m afraid that marrying so young has stunted me somehow, made me odd, unfit for modern life. I can’t decide whether I’m extremely loyal or extremely clingy, can’t tell the difference between beauty and pathology.

  Often lately a feeling of the timing being off between us, but combined with an urgency—like we’re running a three-legged race and have forgotten to have fun, are focused only on the finish line.

  He wants us to have a baby. No pressure, not necessarily right now, but he wants us to start thinking about it. Right now the thought makes me feel swallowed whole.

  I’d like to explain zoos in terms of cubes and triangles, angles and attractions. I would like to explain terrorism, romance and regret. Bewilderment for days on end. Underwater zoo animals never giving you more than a glimpse of themselves, sticking to the other end of the pool.

  James complains that I’m distant, flat. I drive us home in a borrowed car. Follow the traffic signs. Right turn, round steering wheel, parallel parking. The geometry of the meantime.

  Grandma can’t feed herself anymore, and Mom and I have found that feeding her gives the visit a focus, even though it’s depressing. They serve everything puréed in Extended Care. Lunch menu for today: puréed ham sandwich. Dinner: puréed roast beef with puréed Yorkshire pudding.

  One day, I’m holding a spoonful of applesauce in the air, waiting for Grandma to finish swallowing the one before, and Mom says, “If it happens to me you have to promise you’ll make sure to feed me a little of everything in each bite.”

  We’ve always teased Mom about how she eats. Whatever’s on her plate—roast beef, mashed potatoes, carrots, peas—she takes some of each in each bite, the mounds shrinking proportionately throughout the meal, always attentive, evening it out, taking a bit more potato with one bite if necessary, timing it so that the final bite will have a little of everything.

  I laugh and say, “Sure Mom.” But when I look at her, she isn’t laughing. She drops her eyes and, after a moment, picks up one of Grandma’s hands.

  “How do your fingernails get so dirty?” she coos.

  Another day, we’re driving home together from the nursing home. She’s offered to drive me all the way back into the city, drop me off at my place. Traffic is sparse. As we near the exit she breaks the silence, says, “Well if it happens to me I just hope to God I have the courage to drive myself off a bridge.”

  I look at her. She looks at the road. Her hands tight at ten and two on the steering wheel.

  There was a story that fascinated me, one I latched onto from Mom’s growing up. I don’t remember in what context Mom told it to me; it’s not really even much of a story, more an image: Grandma waiting behind the curtains for Mom to come home from her dates. She’d wait and wait and watch the chaste kiss on the front porch and then slap Mom’s face when she got inside. That was it. That image explained why Mom couldn’t wait to leave. Why she didn’t come home for a long time after she left for university and why she began going back only gradually. Then more and more when I was born. I wonder if back then she could have imagined herself going every weekend to iron labels into the inside collar of all her mother’s blouses, write her name in indelible markers on the soles of all her shoes, Mary Friesen Mary Friesen Mary Friesen, getting her ready to go to the Home.

  I remember one of those weekends in particular. Mom ensconced herself in the bedroom sorting girdles and slips. I stayed in the living room with Grandma, who was on the couch reading aloud the same section about a bear attack over and over again from a Reader’s Digest. At one point, out of the blue, she looked up, saw Mom’s purse on the coffee table and said, “Whose purse is that?”

  “It’s my mom’s purse, Grandma. Your daughter—Ruth’s purse.”

  “Ruth is here?”

  “Yep, in the bedroom.”

  “For a visit?”

  “Yes, for a visit.”

  “Isn’t that lovely,” she said, struggling up from the couch, and went to the back of the house to greet her daughter.

  A few minutes later, settled again on the couch, reading and rereading a similar paragraph from later in the same article, she looked up.

  “Whose purse is that?” she said. “Is someone here?”

  “Ruth is here,” I said.

  “How lovely! For a visit?”

  And again the joyous greeting in the bedroom was re-enacted. I watched Mom. It was as if by chance she’d taken a simple step aside and missed the usual landslide of bleak discomfort and undiscussed grief, was able to simply put down what she was doing and greet her mother with open, empty arms. All three of us rose, as if through a lesser gravity, to the occasion. We even laughed, playing it up a little, letting Grandma have her day in the sun, letting her lead us through the tender surprise of visitation over and over again, all through the afternoon, like a dish of candies too sweet for you to keep your hand from drifting back.


  James and I watched a film last week, an arty one with a score by Philip Glass and a foreign title I can’t remember but which translated as Life Out of Balance. I’ve been haunted by one of the images from it ever since: a panning aerial shot of acres and acres of abandoned apartment buildings.

  They exist somewhere in the world, I guess, standing there empty. But it felt like watching a prophecy.

  On the subway, afternoon rush hour. I’ve read all the advertisements, so I play one of my little games. Today it’s guessing whether people are single or not just by the way they carry themselves, seeing if you can read the joining of lives on a body.

  Suddenly the subway slows and stops mid-tunnel. People groan and look up from their newspapers and paperbacks, look around over each other’s heads out into the blackness of the tunnel. Some people catch each other’s eyes and shrug—these are the naturally gregarious ones, or the ones born elsewhere.

  Nothing to do but wait. After a few minutes, a voice comes to us over the speaker system. Presumably, the voice is explaining the reason for the delay, but the words are scattered and flattened by the speaker system. We look around at each other again, puzzled. As far as I can tell from the body language of the others, no one was able to make out anything from the announcement beyond the weary, superior and slightly defensive tone of official apology.