My True and Complete Adventures as a Wannabe Voyageur

by Phyllis Rudin

  “Quit handling me, Ben. I haven’t lost my marbles yet.”

  “I just sort of feel in my bones that Lena would probably rather you gave it up. If she were to know about it I mean.” Okay, so call me a flip-flopper. I’d sworn off meddling on this particular subject, but under the circumstances I felt I had to swear myself back on. Besides, the ground had shifted. I wasn’t strictly speaking interfering in the life of a couple anymore, I was simply interfering one-on-one.

  “I don’t need you to instruct me in what Lena would say if she were here.”

  “You’re right. You don’t. So this here, it’s coming straight from me. Have you gone crazy or what? It’s way too dangerous and your luck’s bound to run out.”

  “I’m willing to risk it.”

  “Why, when you don’t have to? It makes no sense.”

  But then it did. All the pieces clicked together. “You want to get caught, don’t you? You want to throw your life away. It’s an easy out. That’s it, isn’t it?”

  “All of a sudden you’re a psychiatrist? I don’t remember seeing your sheepskin on the wall at the museum.”

  Okay, so I didn’t have a framed diploma. But I’d clocked enough couch time with shrinks over the years that I could diagnose with the best of them. “Why else would you be so stuck on an idea that’s bound to end you up in jail? If you’d just sell the house you could relax. You’d have more than enough money.”

  “You’re back on the house already?”

  “Yeah, I’m back on the house and that’s where you ought to be too if only you’d quit being so damn pigheaded about it. What do I have to do to ram some sense into you?”

  “I’m old enough to make my own decisions.”

  “All evidence to the contrary.”

  “Thank you for your vote of confidence. I knew I could count on you.”

  Verdict in. I was a total screw-up. My role as under-mourner was definitely not to get the primary mourner all worked up. Where did I get off pushing his buttons? You’d think I’d know better, me of all people, when my father’s shiva sent me round the bend. I remember wanting to chomp down on the jugular of all those sympathy callers who delivered me their higher wisdom. And now I was shmuck enough to be doing the same.

  “I was out of line. I’m sorry.” Morrie humphed his acceptance of my apology.

  “It’s just that I’m tired Ben. I’m so tired.”

  “I know.” And I did know. Exactly. I was whupped too. Falling down on the job has a way of sucking all the wind out of you. It made me wonder how my dad ever got out of bed in the morning.

  15

  “So what royalty are we expecting?”

  Rena was setting the table with the über good dishes, Mum’s precious gold-rimmed ones. The ones she kept zipped up in special quilted china protectors. The ones she separated from one another with circles of felt to avoid chipping. The ones she nestled deep in the armoire instead of in the regular kitchen cupboards so anyone carelessly flailing a ladle or a serving spoon would be less likely to accidentally whack ’em one. Mum kept those plates better swaddled than she ever did us.

  “It’s Serge. Can you believe it? A first. An actual suitor at our dinner table. So what’s he like, this charmer? Tell me. And don’t leave anything out.”

  “How would I know? We’ve never had the pleasure, him and me.”

  “But you work in the same building.”

  “Yeah, me and a cast of thousands. Besides, he’s new-ish. And the guys with the ties and me, we don’t mix. Do you think the cleaners and the big shots from up on six ever talk to each other? In my lofty position I might as well be carrying a bucket and a string mop.”

  “Well Mum broke through the sound barrier somehow. Maybe he goes for the tightly-wound type and he saw through to Mum’s inner, you know, sproing. Women like her, when you cut ’em loose they go bouncing off the walls. Could be his idea of fun.”

  “You’re sick.”

  “If you’ve got a better idea of what drew them together I’d be glad to hear it.”

  Odd how the world unfolds. You do one little thing, and it gives a hip-bump to the next thing down the line, which then bumps into the next and then the next and then the next until before you know it you’ve bollixed up the future. I’m telling you, it makes you scared to sneeze. Who knows what that last domino might knock up against? Here I’d asked Mum to do me some simple research, and that rubbed her up against head office, and that put her in the path of Serge, with the result that now I had the guy coming into the house interviewing for the step-father position I wasn’t even aware was being advertised. But maybe I was jumping the gun.

  Poor guy. He didn’t know what he was in for. How does that quote go? Happy families are all alike. Every dysfunctional family is dysfunctional in its own way. Those Russki authors got it dead on. Only it doesn’t seem like dysfunction when it’s just you around the table going about your family rituals. It takes the presence of a newcomer to shine a spotlight on how nutso your family actually is. For all I knew our visitor was the spawn of Kermit and Miss Piggy but he had the advantage because his folks were way the hell off in Blanc Sablon freezing their warped asses off and it was us on display. I hoped for Mum’s sake that we’d all be on our best behaviour, keeping the opportunities for this Serge guy to witness any freak-show behaviour to the bare minimum.

  Hold on. Look in the mirror, you’re thinking. It’s you who’s the family fruitcake. It’s you and all your fur trade garbage that snapped the family moorings. And you’re hoping they’ll keep a lid on? Talk about gall. Well, my detractors, I would beg to differ. By the time I threw my lot in with the voyageurs my family was already clinging to the ledge. My new avocation, shall we call it, well it just stomped on their fingers. Still, for the length of tonight’s dinner I was prepared to keep my calling closeted in the interest of social peace.

  Mum’s heartthrob showed up at seven on the button, right on time. A good omen. In the Gabai house we’re sticklers for punctuality. If you aren’t fifteen minutes early you’re late. We’d never give our family stamp of approval to anyone with too many tardy demerits on his report card.

  Mum was busy introducing Serge to the cast of characters when I came in from the dining room. I recognized him right off. Not as a suit. What I’d told Rena was no lie. I’d never seen him bossifying around the store. Where I did know him from was the museum. He’d come in a couple of weeks before with his little girl. Élodie was her name. Cute kid. About seven maybe. She was on the shyish side, spent most of their visit under the protective custody of Serge’s left arm. She had a head on her shoulders, though, that kid, and it was loaded with curiosity about the place. Clearly she had excellent taste. The way we worked it that day was that she’d whisper her questions into her papa’s ear, he’d relay them to me, and I’d answer them back to her. After a while, when papa started botching her questions on purpose, she nerved herself up and proved that her voice really did have a few decibels to it. We passed a fun hour together, the three of us, and at the end she thanked me very politely with hardly any urging. In all that time the guy never introduced himself, never once mentioned any connection with our mutual employer. As far as I was concerned he was Monsieur Jean Q. Public.

  “Good to meet you,” I said as we shook hands in our front hall.

  “Same here,” said Serge.

  I was playing tit for tat. Childish? You betcha. But in a tight spot maturity was never my first port of call. Serge had held back on me at the museum, I was holding back now. And he was going along with the charade. I guess he figured he owed me. I couldn’t tell you why exactly I was pretending that we’d never met, my mind operates in weird and mysterious ways, but I think it was because I wanted to start out on an equal footing with everyone else in the house who figured Serge was coming to Mum as a free agent. Why should I be the one to bring up the subject of Serge’s progeny and risk drekking up dinner like a fly in the soup? Let the man himself reveal his encumbrances.

 
Now, vetting a prospect, this was new to us. Dad came to us fully formed. We kids never had any say, as is the way of things in the parental crapshoot. You get what you get. But this time around we had plenty of up-front time. Enough to run the full battery of tests. Too bad none of us knew what they were.

  Things looked promising out of the gate. Mum’s beau knew his p’s and q’s, didn’t show up empty handed. But he wasn’t a traditionalist. Flowers? Chocolates? Vino? Nope, none of the above. Instead, in front of all of us he handed Mum a small black velvet pouch with a drawstring, the kind meant to have jewellery inside if I knew my movies. All of us edged in closer. We weren’t expecting such a dramatic turn of events before we’d even made it to the bruschetta. But when Mum reached into the bag she pulled out something rough and brownish, about as big around as a peach pit. It had the look of an overamped kidney stone. I’d seen one before on my Uncle Perry’s dresser that he kept as a surgical souvenir. It sat there right next to the petrified foreskin pared off my cousin Jeff. But what the thing actually turned out to be was a piece of quartz that rock-hound Serge had dug up and hand-buffed. Mum didn’t seem at all disappointed that the contents of the bag were geological. She gushed over his gift, turning it this way and that to admire the facets and then passed it around to the rest of us so we could likewise sing its praises. Maybe I didn’t know how my mind worked, but Zach’s was an open book. “A rock?” he was thinking. “He wants to make an impression and he brings her a rock?” The fingers of his right hand went shooting northwards so they could form a loser L up against his forehead.

  Rena’s Zach decoder worked way faster than mine. She swooped in beside him before his digital diss could make it past the impulse stage. She grabbed him by the right arm as if she needed an escort and together they led the processional into the living room where the appetizers were weighing down the coffee table. It was always a good tactic with Zach to park him near food so his hands and his mouth would be safely occupied. Mum borrowed Serge to go play muscleman with the wine cork in the kitchen before we dug in. Or maybe just to psych him up. I suppose en masse a newbie might consider us imposing even if two of us were octogenarians. While they were gone we did a preliminary scoring. Serge had three thumbs up, Rena, Nana, and Grandpa, and one thumbs down ‒ Zach. I abstained. It did surprise me that the grandparents took such an early shine to him. I thought they’d be harder to bring around since it was their late son’s chair Serge’s derrière was angling to fill.

  Serge had been well briefed by Mum. She’d fed him enough screenshots from our past so he had plenty of chat fodder. This lubed the path for him with everyone else around the table, but for me it was touchier. The guy had to know I wasn’t a happy camper employee-wise and that I’d be holding him accountable. Indirectly, granted. He hadn’t yet popped up on the scene when they made the decision to shut me down, but guilt by association and all that. “So your mother tells me you run the store’s museum?” he asked me after they’d exhausted Rena’s starring turn in her college play and Zach’s post-grad Bill Gates ambitions.

  “That’s right.”

  “What does that involve exactly?” I gave him the shrink-wrapped version since we were only play-acting anyway. Why waste my breath?

  “And you, what do you do exactly?” Borderline snotty but Mum, chief of the tone police, was in no position to ream me out for it.

  “Well, I troubleshoot you might say. That’s what the job boils down to. They send me in to the stores that have an issue of some kind and I try to resolve it if I can.”

  “And what’s the trouble you’re shooting at our store?”

  “The takeover. You know. The Americans’ ways and ours, there’s always some friction there. And then there are all the language issues. So I try to get us on the same page.”

  “You mean you help them out with the union busting, that kind of thing?”

  “Ben, please,” Mum said.

  Jeez, Zach wasn’t the only one who needed a handler. The thing of it is, I always knew when I crossed the line, I just couldn’t do what it took to rein myself in. Ever since Dad did his number on me I developed this quirk where my brain sent out the proper signals to my mouth, but once they got there, my mouth would spit them out onto the sidewalk. Instead it would act on its own, without any direction from upstairs. I said a lot of stupid things was the upshot.

  “A job like yours,” Rena edged in, “it must mean you travel a lot.” She might genuinely have been trying to gauge if the guy could be juggling a woman in every port, but more likely she was just aiming to cut me off at the pass. You had to feel for Rena. She’d always served as Mum’s understudy, but lately running interference for me and Zach was taking up more and more of her time. Having another troubleshooter in the house, a professional yet, could lift some of the weight off her back. Even I could see this was a point in Serge’s favour.

  “It used to,” Serge said, leapfrogging over my question in favour of Rena’s. “I’d be on the road three weeks out of four sometimes. And I hated that part of it to be honest with you. I have a little girl at home and it was rough being away from her so much. But the good news is that new owners have offered me a different position once the transfer is complete, one that’ll keep me in Montreal permanently. Believe you me I’ll be glad to stay in one place.”

  “Élodie’s a great kid,” Mum piped up. “She’s only six but she can already read anything you put in front of her.” Hold on now. Mum had already done the step-parent tryouts on his end? We came second?

  “You’re divorced, then,” Zach said, flat. He was running a quick spreadsheet. Crass maybe, but in his heart, and I was prepared to admit despite all our bad blood that he had traces of one, he was looking out for Mum. See, when Dad crapped out on us he hadn’t left too much cash socked away in the mattress. Stay-at-home Mum had to go out and dig herself up a full-time job. The Bay gig she landed only paid so-so, but with that little influx of cash, her fifteen percent employee discount, and her genetic moxie, she pummelled us kids into adulthood. A rough assignment. In my case especially. Alimony payments could be a drain on the already stretched household economy. This wasn’t exactly marrying up.

  “Zach!”

  “It’s okay. I don’t mind Carolina.” He stroked Mum reassuringly on her arm. Nothing showy but intimate all the same. And what was with this pet name? He pronounced it Italianish, Cahroleena. I’d never figured Mum for the pet name type. Probably because Dad never saw fit to treat her to one. Stingy bastard. All those standbys like baby or honey or sweetie collected dust in his bureau drawer. He always just called her by her given name, Carol. He didn’t shorten it. He didn’t lengthen it. He didn’t anagram it. With Dad, it came out sounding like a bark. But when Serge said Carolina it flowed like melted chocolate.

  “Why shouldn’t they know about me? It’s only right and proper,” he said to her. Then he turned to face the family. “I’m not divorced, no. I’m a widower. I lost my Maude when Élodie was three and a half. It’s been just the two of us ever since.”

  That shut Zach up good. The rest of us too.

  “This new job,” Serge said, trying his damndest to save us from ourselves with a strategic redirect, “I can’t tell you how thankful I am that it’s come along. It means we can be together all the time now. The Bay’s been very good to me, I’ve got to say. Very good. I’ve had offers here and there over the years, but I’ve never been tempted to work anywhere else. The Bay, well, it’s my home.”

  So we didn’t have to wait till we saw him at the beach to find out that the tattoo across Serge’s heart read God Bless the Bay. The one inked across my deltoid had a slightly different message. Piss on the Bay it said. The gap between us wasn’t plain old wide, it was titanic. Mum had once told me Serge was a serious employee. Okay, that I could live with. Wasn’t she one too? Only she’d carefully sat on the fact that he was so disgustingly, everlastingly loyal to the Man, a veritable Bay suck. But now here it was, out in the open. I could see the dread in her eyes.
She was waiting for me to let fly with the zinger that would send both dinner and her prospects swirling down the crapper. I mean how could I hold back after he admitted straight up his mad passion for the Bay? It all but qualified as inciting to riot. No jury on earth would convict me.

  I let it pass. I just sat by while the conversation took a harmless turn minus yours truly and Mum’s shoulders ratcheted down from her ears back to their at-ease position. It was that Carolina thing that did me in. Go ahead, call me sentimental, but it softened me up somehow. Or could it be I was belatedly growing up?

  Mum had cooked her head off. Good thing. With her magnifico spread laid out in front of us, we had something nice and neutral to talk about while we recovered from our previous conversational cock-ups. And as recoveries go it didn’t take long. By the time we were halfway through the soup, the laughing gas Mum had stirred into it started to take effect and things took a pleasantly loopy turn around the table. Serge offered us up a story about his incendiary first (and last) night as a short-order cook, the night that cost him half an eyebrow and his taste for fries. And since our guest so generously took the lead in embarrassing himself, the rest of us, in humble appreciation, put ourselves out there. Inhibitions? Out the window. Rena even opened up about the time she got all jumbled up in her cues, and walked onstage when the character she was playing was supposed to have dropped dead of consumption three scenes earlier. She had everybody cracking up. When the phone rang just as we were starting to dig in to the plum tart, we could hardly hear it for all the laughing. Rena was nearest, so she slipped out to the kitchen to answer it.

  “It’s for you, Benj,” she said when she came back in.

  “Tell whoever it is I’m busy, can’t you?” For once I was happy wallowing in family and wasn’t itching for an excuse to duck out. Used to be that I’d pray for the lifeline of a phone call to liberate me from the dinner table. But this night was different from all other nights. Tonight we were behaving like that other kind of family I’d heard rumours existed out there in the cosmos. The normal kind.