by Darren Greer
So he had to settle for the street behind the river. He made up for it by building the largest house in the area. Bigger and more impressive houses were built later, but when I was a child my grandmother’s house was still intimidating — six bedrooms, a spacious living room, dining room, a washing and sewing room, and a glassed-in, insulated sun porch in the back where every once in a while if she was in a genteel mood she would serve us lunch on Sunday after Mass at the white wicker table with the sun pouring in on us like lemon dish soap.
The bedrooms were never all occupied. My grandparents had three children, and after my grandfather died and Uncle David moved away, my grandmother named the extra bedrooms guest rooms, though we never had any guests. These were off limits.
Once a month she made my mother and Aunt Jeanette change the sheets and dust.
“Why on earth do we have to?” Jeanette complained. “No one ever sleeps there.”
“Because someone might decide to stay tomorrow. And I’m not having them see tumbleweeds on the floor and grimy sheets on the bed, little girl.” My grandmother always called my Aunt Jeanette “little girl” when she chastised her.
And because my mother and Aunt Jeanette lived under my grandmother’s roof they did what they were told, once a month tidying the guest rooms.
“I feel like a chambermaid,” Jeanette would say. “Maybe we should leave a mint on the pillow.”
My mother was less vocal than her sister. She did not argue with my grandmother, and didn’t mind cleaning the rooms and doing any other work my grandmother wanted done. She said housework was good for the soul, and would sometimes give me a duster and let me help, though I was more interested in stirring up a string of dust from the windowsill into a tiny cloud or mini tornado and watching the motes dance in the sun.
My grandmother disapproved of me working with my mother and aunt. “He needs boys’ work, not housecleaning,” she said. “If you want to give him chores I can find him something more suited to a young man.”
I had no chores other than to fetch the paper when the paperboy would inevitably toss it into my grandmother’s marigold patch. In her opinion fetching a paper was not enough responsibility for me. I should’ve been chopping kindling — an irony, as we heated the house with oil — or fixing pipes or changing fuses in the cellar when they blew. It didn’t matter I was only six. My grandmother wanted me to be a man. She worried because I had no male figures in my life.
“David’s a man,” said my mother.
“Very funny,” said my grandmother. “And since when have you seen David around here? Jacob needs a positive male influence. You should apprentice him to someone in town.”
“This is not the nineteenth century, Mother. We’re not making him into a chimney sweep.”
“Maybe not. But he needs to be hewing, not dusting. Work defines character. You have to start them off young, before they get away from you.”
Arguments over the best way to raise me were common in our house. My grandmother, as matriarch, believed she should get as much say as my mother. My mother quietly but firmly disagreed.
I responded to my grandmother’s gruff authority, but secretly kept my heart aligned with my mother. I did not like man’s work, or man’s toys. If my grandmother said I had to be a chimney sweep, I would be a chimney sweep, but one who disturbed the piles of ash to see them pirouette in the sun. I played with dolls and tea sets in the privacy of my own room, though even at a young age I knew enough to hide these from my grandmother. I watched soap operas with my Aunt Jeanette when she was off in the afternoon, and I was fascinated by my grandmother’s gardens and the variety of flowers and plants that grew within them.
All my grandmother’s attempts to make me a man’s man over the course of my childhood would fail. Once she paid a young man from town to take me fishing in the river. I found it boring, and I did not like the squishy feel of the worm between my fingers as it was strung upon the hook. When my mother asked me how I liked it I told her I didn’t, and she told my grandmother I didn’t have to go anymore.
“Mark my words,” my grandmother said. “That boy will end up different, if you don’t get him doing normal boy things.”
“What’s wrong with different?” asked my mother.
“Fine,” said my grandmother. “Just don’t blame me when he ends up a social misfit.”
My grandmother had it wrong. I would not end up being a social misfit — I already was, and had been since the day I was born. I was an eerie, quiet child, and I think this bothered my grandmother as much as my proclivity for girls’ toys. She didn’t know how to take me. I think she was afraid I would turn out like her only son, though she never said as much. It was my grandmother’s habit to say everything on her mind except that which had true bearing and relevance. She continued to hound my mother to get me engaged in what to her mind were suitable boy activities, and to guard against effeminacy and softness of character when she saw it. Fortunately for me I had a mother who did as she pleased and did not heed my grandmother’s warnings at all.
▪ ▪ ▪
one of my clients who sees me every two weeks is Randy. He is unlike many of the men I see, in that he is not homeless or living in a boarding house. Nor does he abuse drugs or drink much alcohol. “No more than a couple of cocktails at a dinner party,” he told me when I asked. He has a good job as a graphic designer at an ad agency, and he owns a condo in the Annex. There was a day when agencies like ours were filled with men like him, but no more. The message has spread: use condoms, be selective, think with your head and not your prick. The number of affluent and middle-class gay men living with hiv dropped considerably in the nineties and early two thousands. The number of poor, addicted men and women, both gay and straight, has risen.
We’ve had to adapt.
We’ve become a welfare agency as well as a support network. Addiction counsellors as well as safe sex proponents. Men like Randy in our office are now rare, and they feel uncomfortable sitting in the waiting room with street junkies and prostitutes.
But Randy is a special case.
He contracted hiv eight months ago, on an ill-advised outing to a bathhouse. He negotiated a string of partners without using condoms. He came down with a violent flu and went to see his doctor. He told his md of the outing, and his belief he might have caught something. The doctor got suspicious and tested Randy for the virus.
It came back positive.
Flu-like symptoms directly after hiv seroconversion are common.
Randy was devastated. Only losers and the self-destructive get aids anymore. Men like him, bombarded over the years with safer sex campaigns and condom promotion, are supposed to know better.
What makes it worse is Randy’s partner does not know about his one-night escapade. Eight months later and Randy has still not told him. He fears his lover will leave him. He also fears he has passed it on. Before he found out he was positive, they had had one bout of unprotected sex, as they always had when they were both negative and monogamous.
The situation terrifies him.
His work has suffered. He is unable to concentrate and he misses deadlines. He is depressed and does not sleep. His lover is growing suspicious, because they’ve not had sex in months. He thinks Randy is seeing someone else. In desperation, Randy came to us. I have been seeing him for over a month, but so far have been unable to convince him to deal with the growing crisis and tell his lover the truth. Despite the invention of medications that prolong the patient’s life, and keep the worse symptoms at bay, aids continues to wreck lives. It wreaks its own special brand of havoc.
Randy is at the stage of being angry at the man who gave it to him. He keeps talking about finding him, and suing him. “Having his ass slapped in jail for the rest of his life,” he tells me. I see this stage often, one of Kubler-Ross’s stages of grief I studied in college. It is always interesting, if a little alarming, to see something we studied so blithely on paper suddenly manifest itself in real life. It’s the di
fference between reading about the resurrection and actually seeing it.
I try to guide Randy through his anger, to validate it, and move him forward into the next stage. I tell him he can try to find the man who gave it to him, though with the multiple partners it would be difficult. I hope, I say, Randy can find him and he can be charged.
I also hope that Randy will focus his attentions on his own issues and prepare himself to tell his lover the truth. “Getting hiv is not your fault,” I told him. “Regardless of the unsafe sex or how you feel about yourself. If he loves you, he will work with you to get through this.”
“I wouldn’t,” Randy said flatly. “I’d be so angry I’d leave. And that’s just what he will do too.”
“Have you started medications yet?” I asked him.
“I can’t,” he said. “He’d wonder what they were for.”
“You need to start them as soon as possible. Which is another reason to tell him. You can’t keep putting your own health on hold because of your fear. This really is a matter of life and death. As long as you’re medication-free, your life is at serious risk.”
One of the reasons I initially liked him so much when he first came to see me was that he, too, was interested in the technical aspects of the virus. Like me, I think he believed that the more he knew about it the more power he had. Our first few sessions were spent talking — in highly technical language that Randy, with his obvious intelligence, clearly understood — about the mechanics and function of the pathogen.
Randy reminded me of me. I knew I was experiencing transference, but I was powerless to stop it. I am overly invested in his life, which diminishes my effectiveness as his counsellor. What I should do is transfer him to another counsellor in the centre. We are often warned about the dangers of over-investment, about how we can harm rather than help our client by becoming too close.
But I cannot do that. I like Randy. I worry about his reaction if I suddenly stop seeing him. The last thing he needs is to feel rejected.
The day after I book my flight to Nova Scotia, he comes into my office. He forgets to shut the door, so I get up and do it for him. He is only a few years younger than me — thirty-four to my thirty-seven — but today he seems like a teenager. He is more anxious than usual; he keeps crossing and uncrossing his legs and can’t seem to get comfortable.
“How are you,” I say, as I sit back down at my desk.
“Better,” says Randy. “I figured a way out.”
“Good,” I say. “Tell me about it.”
“It’s like this,” Randy says. “He’s gonna leave me if I tell him. That I know for sure. I can’t take meds if I don’t tell him, so that puts my heath at risk. So I figure the best way to deal with it is to leave him. I can tell him the relationship isn’t working for me anymore and I want out. He can keep the condo. I’ll get an apartment. We can still be friends but he never has to know about the hiv and it’ll solve all the problems.” Randy says all of this in one breath, as if he has been practising for days.
I am taken aback.
Not at the audacity — and, let’s face it, stupidity — of the plan, but by how earnestly Randy believes it to be the only solution. He is not a dumb man. Very few of our clients are. I am amazed he cannot see the dozen or so holes in his schematic; it leaks water like a sieve.
But my job is not to point out the problems. It is to get the client to see them for themselves. And the way we do that, somewhat underhandedly, is to start with praise.
“That would seem,” I say, “to get you out of the mess you’re in.”
“Wouldn’t it? It came to me only a few days ago, when I was lying in bed. I don’t know why I didn’t see it before.”
“It would also get you immediately on the medications, which is my primary concern.”
“I’ve already mentioned it to my doctor,” Randy says. “We’re gonna start as soon as everything is arranged.”
“Have you said anything to John yet?” John is Randy’s partner.
Randy shakes his head, a smidgen of enthusiasm floating away. “Not yet,” he says. “I don’t know exactly what I’m going to say.”
“Why don’t we figure it out together?”
Randy tries to come up with an excuse that doesn’t mention the real reason why he is leaving him. Dissatisfaction, another man, seven-year itch. All of these seem inadequate, mostly because they aren’t true. By the end of the session Randy has realized he can come up with no suitable reason for the simple fact that he loves John. It is his love for John that has made all of this so difficult. He leaves my office more dejected than when he came in.
It should count as a successful session. I have talked him down off the ledge, as I’ve been taught to do. But I don’t feel good about it.
I call my mother and make sure Jeanette is going to meet my plane.
3
my favourite room in my grandmother’s house was the attic. It could be accessed by a door next to the upstairs hallway closet and a climb up a short set of stairs. One could disappear into it, if one wished, for hours on end.
I was not allowed in the attic.
Both my mother and grandmother considered it dangerous, because there was no solid floor, only beams crossing the upper side of the upstairs ceiling. My grandmother claimed if you set foot in between the beams you would plunge right through, and if she didn’t have the bother of cleaning your broken body up from the room below, she would be put to the trouble of repairing the damage to the ceiling of whatever room you happened to break though.
I was always careful to stay on the beams.
The attic ran the entire length of the house. The ceiling was sloped, and when I first stepped up from the last stair I had to duck my head. In order to move around, I had to navigate my way across the beams to the centre of the room under the peak.
I liked the attic for two reasons. One, it was a place where I could get away from my family. I liked the musty, dust-laden, old leather-and-mothball smell of it. There was something comforting about that smell, something that reeked of history and forgotten narrative. I couldn’t put this into words, of course, but I sensed that in the attic secrets were kept.
The second reason I was fascinated with the place was that it was full of boxes. My grandmother never threw anything away. If something was not in immediate use, but she had judged it being useful someday, up to the attic it went. My grandmother’s fear of me plummeting through the floor into the bedrooms below was ill-founded: there were so many boxes, hardly a square inch of space remained for an ill-placed step.
When I first started sneaking into it, I cleared a path to the centre of the room so I could make my way through box after box. All this was done in stolen moments. I couldn’t be gone long before someone would start to wonder where I was. My progress was slow. I studied each item I pulled from the boxes carefully. I read old newspapers. I puzzled over receipts and deeds and math scribblers filled with figures written in faded ink from 1962.
In many of the boxes were clothes, thus the camphor stink of mothballs.
My mother and Aunt Jeanette tried to convince my grandmother to give her old clothes to the Salvation Army or St. Vincent de Paul. The Salvation Army was out, because it was Protestant. St. Vincent was also out because my grandmother said she didn’t believe in making first-hand things second-hand things.
“It’s an invasion of privacy,” she said. “I don’t want everyone to know what I wore when I give my clothes away.”
“They know what you’re wearing when you wear them, don’t they?” said Aunt Jeanette.
But there was no arguing with my grandmother. Up into the attic each batch of discarded clothes went. It occurs to me now that, sitting amongst those boxes and working my way through to the heart of them, I was engaged in peeling back strata of time — moving from present through past, trying to read the history of my family through cast-off clothing, old shoes, paperwork, and mementos.
My grandmother was not pleased on the rare occ
asions I was caught. Several times she threatened to put a padlock on the door, though she never did. I suppose it was because she often lost keys, and because if she ever did need to put anything up there her arms would be too full to stop and undo a lock. She did give me fair warning. “If you go up there again, you’ll get a hiding you won’t forget.” I needn’t have worried. My grandmother never “hided” me — my mother wouldn’t allow it. But when she caught me playing up there, she would give me a severe dressing down until I swore I would not step foot in the attic again.
I always did, though. It was the only place in the house where I could be entirely myself. I didn’t have to worry about sitting up straight or washing my hands or brushing my teeth. I didn’t have to listen to anyone argue, or hear the news on tv. For such a big house, it was rarely quiet, and the attic offered peace. The dust lay so heavily on everything it muffled the present. Only the past spoke, in whispers.
▪ ▪ ▪
i was eight when I discovered the attic. Some of my earliest finds were boxes of Jeanette’s and my mother’s old toys. These, for some reason, were not deep in the piles of boxes trapped in some far corner of the room. They were close to the front. Later I concluded they’d been stored in another part of the house until recently. Perhaps my mother and Aunt Jeanette had held on to them for sentimental reasons, and only lately found the heart to store them away.
Whatever the reason, I was delighted with the find. I had my own toys, of course. But the toys in the boxes in the attic were old. And they were girls’ things. A tin doll’s house, a tea set, cardboard cut-outs of dresses and outfits for a paper doll. There was even a turquoise Easy-Bake Oven, without directions or mixes but with all the pans. It actually worked when plugged in.