Suitable Precautions

by Laura Boudreau

  My mother told me what she remembered, which was not much. She said the picnic tables were leaned up against the various trees and covered in ice and snow. She had crawled between one table and a tree trunk, feeling safe and snug and somewhat proud of herself for finding this lookout. Her mother was resting on her elbow and her legs were both out to one side, like she was on a beach. Her father was teaching Larry how to strike a match. Her sisters, giggling for once, were making sodden snow angels.

  “It was,” she said, “a very happy moment.”

  My grandmother told me about the noise, which she said was like a tree screaming. It was a horrible shriek of wood on wood, and it made her remember a story from her childhood that she had not thought about in years, a story about hell and the way the devils there cheered when a new soul came to them. Watching that picnic tabletop score the tree trunk as it slid down to her daughter was the worst moment of my grandmother’s life. Worse, she said, than seeing the table teeter like a perverse playground on top of my mother, her one wildly shaking boot the only part of her body not smothered and smashed.

  “It was the slide,” my grandmother said in Russian, ashamed. “When there was still time for it to be my fault.”

  My grandfather ran towards the sound before he even turned around. He tripped over a thermos and the spilled coffee burned Eva’s hand, though it was Marlene who screamed. My grandmother followed him. They fell over and over again as their feet sank through the crystal-fine crust of the melting snow on the hill. My grandmother crushed the flower on her new hat, trying to keep it on her head.

  My grandfather reached my mother first. He bent down low and heaved his body under the edge of the tabletop that jutted up slightly like an expectant diving board. Thick ice coated the splintery wood, encasing the table legs, black against the bright sky, in an uneven layer of solid dead weight. The table was like a massive overturned beetle. The skin around my grandfather’s eyes went white as he strained. My grandmother threw herself beside him and the two of them pushed, shifting the table several inches. It slid backwards in the snow and caught a corner of my mother’s red jacket, tearing the sleeve away from the shoulder. They pushed again until they heard the cracking of bones. The table dipped to one side as my grandmother fell back, crying and slapping at my grandfather as he kept working. “Stop it, stop it,” she screamed. “You’re killing her.” My grandfather called to Eva and Marlene. “Your sister,” he yelled as they stumbled up the hill. The four of them tried to lift the table, but the two girls were small for their age and Eva’s hand was badly burned. My grandfather screamed as he let the table down gently. Eva and Marlene sat in the snow and cried as they watched him run to the road, his arms wheeling, looking like a drowning man.

  Larry was already there, waving his stubby arms at a car as it drove by. The car stopped and Larry ran to the driver’s window, my grandfather far behind. Larry, who was not even five years old and too fat for any of his cousins’ clothes.

  It took a long time for the ambulance to get to the pond. My grandmother waited with her hand on my mother’s foot. She tried to keep it still.

  The courts concluded that the melting of the snow, combined with my mother’s clambering, dislodged the picnic table. It was essentially an accident. But regardless of these natural, unavoidable, and admittedly contributive facts, the judge still found the City of Toronto negligent and ordered it to pay my parents damages, which went towards my mother’s care. She suffered a compressed spine, a fractured skull, a concussion, a broken wrist, a dislocated shoulder, deep lacerations to her face that would leave scars, and a punctured lung. Several of her ribs had splintered like chicken bones. Part of her liver had to be removed. The picnic tables should have been chained up, the judge said. “There is no excuse for there not to be chains, considering the tables each weigh several hundred pounds,” he went on, “and while it is a tragedy that your daughter suffered, it is a miracle that no other persons, child or adult, have yet found themselves at the mercy of one of these picnic tables.” My grandmother cried into a freshly ironed handkerchief. Today if you go to a Toronto city park in winter, you will find that any picnic table leaned up against a tree is chained. The bylaw is the legacy of my mother’s injuries, which left her in hospital for the better part of a year, the first half of it in a coma.

  She awoke after months of artificial light and intravenous food, but my grandparents’ joy was tempered by the discovery that their little girl had become a baby again. My mother had to relearn how to talk. Then walk. Then feed herself. Each new milestone was celebrated with a cake and pictures. “Look,” my grandmother said to the nurses, “look at how well our little Anna is doing,” and she got out the album to point out pictures of my mother mashing oatmeal into her mouth.

  Over time it became clear that the treatments my mother received were extraordinary—there is a significant article about my mother’s recovery in The New England Journal of Medicine—but they were also expensive. Even with the settlement, my grandparents sold their house and moved into an apartment that forced Eva and Marlene to share a room with Larry, who was instructed to wait in the hallway when his sisters were changing clothes. My mother came home just after her seventh birthday. She had her own room. Nobody complained.

  My mother had been a solitary child before the accident. She was content to play with her doll or make up stories for herself while her sisters fought over hairpins and Larry tried to wheedle extra sweets out of my grandmother. As a result of her ability to entertain herself, my mother had been my grandfather’s favourite child. “Look at Anna,” he said, ruffling her hair as she poured pretend tea for her doll, Marguerite. “See what a good girl she is, what a quiet girl she is.” It was as though good and quiet were two halves of some unnamed, indivisible quality that children worthy of love possessed. As I said, he worked very hard.

  The accident did not change my mother’s nature; she remained a good, quiet girl, but she was unable to occupy herself with the imaginative play that had come so easily to her before. If my grandmother passed her Marguerite, for example, my mother examined the doll as though it were a strange artifact from another culture, the significance of which she couldn’t quite determine. She gently passed Marguerite back to my grandmother, respectful of that which she did not comprehend. If my grandfather began a story while he rolled his cigarettes, perhaps something about the family history in Koryakia, and he asked her, “And then, little Anna, what do you think happened to your great-great-grandfather?” Anna, instead of launching into an elaborate story of her own as she had once been fond of doing, simply shrugged her shoulders and said she didn’t know. My grandmother and grandfather exchanged looks, but they were just glad to have their Anna back, and this version that walked about blankly, standing confusedly in front of the pictures on the walls, would do.

  My mother’s inability to think abstractly became much more obvious in school. Her teacher was a slim British woman named Miss White. She was sensitive to my mother’s healing process, and she often encouraged her with her schoolwork. “Pull up your socks, Anna,” she said to my mother, who wanted to give up on a frustrating math problem. My mother misunderstood. She put down her pencil, stood up from her desk, and pulled up her knee socks. If one of her classmates remarked that it was “raining cats and dogs,” my mother rushed to the window in hysterics. Symbols were cryptic for her. My grandmother packed napkin notes in her children’s lunches that said, I ♥ you, and I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that it broke her heart when my mother asked her to explain it. Even the explanation proved futile. Love is in the abstract, it seems, not the details.

  My mother’s specialists could not explain the exact nature of her condition. They advised the family to speak to Anna in unambiguous, factual sentences that referenced concrete, physical objects. Even though this manner of speech became natural to the Vosmaks, they understood that something precious had been lost.

  “Poor Marguerite,” my grandmother said once in a while as she
smoothed the doll’s hair, which was made from real horsetail. She left it at that.

  The best diagnosis of my mother’s condition came twenty years later. At the age of twenty-seven, my mother announced at Sunday dinner that she was pregnant by an exterminator who had come to the house and been delayed by a sudden downpour. My mother had invited him to stay for coffee, she explained, and then sex.

  My grandmother, in tears, berated herself for this turn of events. During my mother’s pregnancy, which was difficult, my grandmother spent hours in the living room, fingering each picture in the yellowing hospital album, saying over and over again, “An exterminator? Such a lack of imagination.”

  I might put it slightly differently. I might, though biased, suggest that the most generalized—and yet most accurate—description of my mother’s condition is this: through no fault of her own, an inability to love.

  IF YOU WERE BORN in Canada between 1976 and 1984, and especially if you were born to middle- or upper-class parents who were also white, suburban, between the ages of thirty and forty-five, and if they answered at least “3: Somewhat Important” to a Likert scale survey that asked them to link the answer to the question “How important are books to your child’s development and education?” to a five-point rating system, you are probably familiar with the details of my childhood. And not just because we share the homogenous connection of suburban Canadianness, which makes so many childhoods frighteningly similar across the provinces and territories, but rather because your parents were my mother’s target market. I was the product.

  If you fit the demographic, odds are that you know about my first visit to the dentist, which ended in the bloody extraction of an impacted baby tooth. Or maybe you’re familiar with my trip to the zoo and my fear of koalas. Either way, you know me not by my name, Dora, which publishers at the time considered variously boring, ethnic, and unpopular, but by Nora, the name my mother insisted upon, given its similarity to my real name, for the heroine of her children’s books.

  That my mother became an author is surprising, considering her condition, but whenever she was confronted on that issue, she seemed insulted and said, “The best stories are true.” She was difficult to argue with. She wrote the first book shortly after I was born.

  We were living in a small one-bedroom apartment on College Street, above a restaurant named El Greco that was run by Mr. and Mrs. Stephanopolous, a childless couple who served cuisine they referred to as Italian with a Greek flair: spaghetti with a feta cheese sauce, calamari panzerotto. The restaurant was not popular, and that suited us just fine.

  My mother had very sensitive hearing, and when we moved in she was concerned about the noise of rattling pots or drunken patrons. “Nothing to worry about there,” Mr. Stephanopolous said happily. “I only have a few pots.” Mr. Stephanopolous had made his fortune in Greece with an inherited olive farm, and the restaurant was more of a diversion in his retirement than anything else. He enjoyed cooking and would have become a chef had his sense of smell not been obliterated by a war injury that almost killed him—a piece of shrapnel to the soft palate. He experimented with fusion cuisine, anxious for customers’ honest feedback; if a dish turned out terribly, the meal was on the house. Students from Central Tech came after school and abused the policy, sprawling over the chairs and dumping their backpacks in the doorway while they ordered mountains of lamb and pita and olives, only to return the dishes to the kitchen once they were more than half eaten, but Mr. Stephanopolous was eminently good-natured. He said that his childhood had been hard and hungry. “Feeding children, even insolent ones, makes me feel like I am doing God’s work.” Even so, he tested the most experimental dishes on the rowdiest, loudest boys, the ones with leather jackets and gold chains who had girlfriends in skin-tight jeans. “Those kinds of boys,” he said, drumming his fingers on the counter, “they’ll try anything once.”

  Mrs. Stephanopolous was fat. Her legs were like telephone poles and her feet, shoved into black loafers, lacked ankles and looked like hooves. Mrs. Stephanopolous smelled of bread, vaguely yeasty and warm. To this day when I walk into a bakery, I think of her. She wore a crucifix around her neck that Mr. Stephanopolous had given her for their fortieth wedding anniversary, and when she was nervous she squeezed it in her fist. If ever I cried for too long, she knocked gently on the apartment door and asked my mother if she would like some help. It’s not that my wailing bothered her. She simply wanted an excuse to hold a baby in her arms. Mrs. Stephanopolous carried me around our apartment, chattering away to me in Greek while my mother slept or did dishes and Mr. Stephanopolous took care of the customers. If I was very fussy, she whispered in my ear, “I love you, little one. I love you just like you were my own grandchild.” I, a colicky infant with a brain-damaged mother, was lucky to be the recipient of all that pent-up love.

  It was Mrs. Stephanopolous who started my mother’s career with a chance comment. Mrs. Stephanopolous had come up to the apartment because she was lonely. Mr. Stephanopolous was visiting a supplier in Burlington, and with no one to cook the lamb lasagna (Mrs. Stephanopolous was terrible in the kitchen, a fact that, she felt, underscored her inability to have a child), she had closed the restaurant.

  “How is little Dora today?” she asked, full of expectation, when my mother opened the door.

  “With her grandparents, actually,” my mother said. “For a few hours.”

  They stared at each other. My mother was not very good in social situations.

  “Well, maybe I would like to come in for a cup of tea?” Mrs. Stephanopolous ventured. It was a habit of hers to phrase requests as though she was speaking another person’s lines in a play, prompting remembrance. At Christmas she spoke to Mr. Stephanopolous almost solely in this reflexively interrogative mode. Would I like it if you bought me that coat in the window of Sears? Maybe you should take me to the Ice Capades?

  “I have a bottle of wine,” my mother said. She didn’t drink tea.

  Mrs. Stephanopolous was the closest thing my mother had to a friend. Other mothers at the pediatrician’s office or the park tried to strike up conversations and my mother chatted pleasantly enough, but there was always a moment of awkwardness, a sense of social uncertainty that undermined the effort. A strangeness. The other women exchanged glances that seemed to say, Well, she’s a bit odd, and then the distraction of a child falling off a jungle gym or a baby with a dirty diaper allowed them to move away without promise of coming back. If my mother was hurt by this treatment, she didn’t show it. She seemed to understand the very thin line between being alone and being lonely. I don’t think I ever saw her cry.

  Still, I imagine that Mrs. Stephanopolous, in addition to being a great help to my mother with me, was also someone for whom my mother cared deeply, to the extent that she cared about anyone. It is, after all, quite something to have your landlady pat you on the hand and tell you, if you are worried about your finances, that you are family, and the rent for that month is her Christmas gift to you. Those kindnesses came easily to Mrs. Stephanopolous. Words of praise and encouragement fell from her lips like sugary kisses: I was a beautiful baby, Anna had done such a wonderful job with the curtains, we were welcome in the restaurant any time we liked. So it must have hurt my mother, to the extent that she could be hurt, when Mrs. Stephanopolous expressed horror at my lack of a baby book.

  “But Anna,” she said, “she is your one precious thing in this world! Is it that you don’t have a camera?”

  We had a camera.

  “Well, is it that you need money to develop the film? I’ll give you the money. Do you know how to work the camera? I’ll take the pictures myself. Pictures of you and Dora, together.”

  Pictures held little appeal for my mother.

  Mrs. Stephanopolous shook her head. She held my mother’s hands. “Anna, these days are going to fly by you and one day little Dora will be grown up. How will you remember her baby days? How will you show her what she was like, so small? All children like that—to see themse
lves as small babies. To hear the stories of what they were like when they were young.” Mrs. Stephanopolous paused, thinking that she might have overstepped the bounds of her own childlessness. She squeezed her crucifix. “You have no idea how lucky you are, Anna. No idea.”

  I don’t think it was coincidence that shortly after this conversation the record of my life on paper begins. My mother started cataloguing my daily activities in a flat, unemotional prose that was tinged with the macabre: Dora ate part of a banana and nearly choked. Dora slipped in the bathtub today and gave herself a black eye. It seemed as though all the important experiences of my early life were linked to death, or its possibility. These moments were privileged over the speaking of my first word (unknown), or my taking of a first step (date unspecified, though event recorded—I nearly fell down the stairs). My mother was not a careless or inattentive parent, and I was not accident prone. It was simply an editorial decision on her part. Death and danger make for clear cause-and-effect relationships. This was a baby book that made sense to her.

  The book was especially odd when you took into account my mother’s illustrations. She was a frighteningly good artist. She had much trouble interpreting the world but a gift for reflecting it, such was the quirkiness of her condition. Her black ink drawings were heavily shadowed and featured thick, strong, fast lines. The hyperrealism of her style was breathtaking; the camera Mrs. Stephanopolous asked about was completely unnecessary.

  It was not, of course, the kind of baby book Mrs. Stephanopolous had in mind, but it proved exceedingly useful for us. When I was almost a year old, my mother brought the book to the restaurant to show Mrs. Stephanopolous, and one of the few regulars in the crowd, a marketing director from Crow Toes Press, happened to be eating the lamb lasagna. His name was Richard Layton.