by Darren Greer
I was fascinated.
Not just that my mother and Aunt Jeanette played with these things when they were little, but they were a whole new category of toy. I was tired of my own toys. For the first time I took what I’d found in the attic downstairs to my room, and over the next couple of weeks I played with them.
I saw nothing wrong with this.
I had tea parties, filling the pot with water and pouring for imaginary guests. I dressed the paper doll in outfits. I built costume jewellery from pieces lying at the bottom of the box that must have been a do-it-yourself kit.
My grandmother caught me when I tried to make something in the Easy-Bake Oven. I took flour and water and salt from the kitchen — I had no idea what went into baking a cake — when I thought no one was around, and my grandmother discovered the flour all over the kitchen counter. She knew something was amiss, and burst in as I was busy watching the pan boil in the little oven.
At first she said nothing. She only asked what I was doing.
“I’m cooking,” I said.
“And where, pray tell,” she said, “did you get that?”
She was pointing to the oven, and the other toys scattered around it. I was also having a tea party, for when the cake was ready. Three people already sat innocently on the floor waiting, though my grandmother couldn’t see them. When I didn’t answer, she asked again.
The one thing I was absolutely not allowed to do in her house was lie. My grandmother didn’t like it. It reflected a corruption of the soul, she said. My mother didn’t like it either. She told me that honesty solved problems and dishonesty created them, and she always wanted me to tell her the truth, no matter how bad I thought it was.
Aunt Jeanette lied sometimes to my grandmother, about little things — where she was, where she was going. She said it was hard to live with a puritan and not tell a few. But I knew in this case lying would not help. They would know eventually where I got the toys, and that I had been where I was not supposed to be.
I actually thought the attic was the issue.
▪ ▪ ▪
as soon as my mother came home from dinner, my grandmother met her with the words and in the tone she usually adopted when there was trouble in the house. “Caroline! I need to talk to you!”
Aunt Jeanette had already gone to her room. She had no interest in these intergenerational squabbles over my behaviour. They happened frequently enough, and my mother usually could handle them herself.
My mother was tired. It was a Friday, and Fridays were a busy day at the diner. “What now?” she said wearily, taking off her scarf and coat and laying them across the deacon’s bench in the front hall.
I stood at the kitchen door with my grandmother. She tried to herd me back into the kitchen so she could get my mother alone, but I refused. I knew it was better, when I was under discussion, to keep myself in my mother’s sight. It softened her heart, gave her more of a defence against my grandmother’s harangue.
I was to be thwarted this time.
“I want you to come upstairs with me,” she said to my mother. “And I want Jacob to stay downstairs. I have something to show you.”
My mother sighed and kicked off her shoes. “Let me get a drink of water first,” she said. “And I’ll be right up.”
“You better,” said my grandmother. “This is important.”
She went first, perhaps to make sure no one tampered with evidence.
I didn’t see what my grandmother was getting so upset for. Whenever I had done something wrong in the past she dressed me down, waited for my mother to come home, then dressed me down again when she considered my mother’s response too mild or permissive. This seemed different.
“What did you do?” my mother said, as she went to the fridge for her water.
I figured I’d forestall my grandmother, rob her of the element of surprise. “I went into the attic when I wasn’t supposed to and I took some stuff.”
“What stuff?
“Just stuff,” I said. “Old toys I found. That’s all.”
“You know you’re not supposed to go into the attic, don’t you?”
I lowered my head, partially in shame and partially, I admit, in calculated humility. “I know,” I said. “It’s dangerous.”
“And you know how touchy your Grandnan is about her old things. You really shouldn’t touch anything without permission.”
“I know,” I said again.
“And now I have to deal with the fallout,” my mother said. “Remember, Jacob. It’s not just you who has to live in this house. It’s all of us, including your Grandnan. I know some of her rules are hard, but the attic rule I happen to agree with. It is dangerous. So next time you think you want to go up there, or do something else you’re not supposed to do, I want you to remember it affects us all.”
This was what I’d expected from my mother. The usual talking to — balanced and reasonable, not too harsh, but effective enough to make me swear on the spot I would not disappoint her again, even if I would forget and make the same or a similar mistake a few days later.
“Okay,” I said.
Now she would go upstairs to my grandmother and they would have it out, and though it would start out about me, it would end up being a discussion about the best way to raise a child.
▪ ▪ ▪
the issue my grandmother had with the toys in my bedroom was not that I had gone without permission into the attic — though that was infraction enough and worthy of severe punishment, in her opinion. It was that I was playing with girls’ things. An Easy-Bake Oven. Tea sets. Paper dolls.
This should have been a minor issue, an anomaly, perfectly natural for a young boy with a curious nature. These days, I’ve heard, some progressive parents no longer make distinctions between boys’ toys and girls’ toys. They let their children play with whatever they want.
Jeanette, a self-proclaimed hippie, did her best to inject the reality of a changing world into our daily lives. In retrospect, she accomplished little. Jeanette was too quirky to be taken seriously. Even my mother had little time for her pet causes and intellectual discussions. Jeanette read books, and mounted protests, and indulged in windy arguments over dinner that all of us, me included, did our best to ignore.
My mother was not at the forefront of gender equality. She wore dresses and pantyhose and heels, whereas Jeanette, somewhat ahead of her time, dressed as androgynously as possible. My mother liked perfume, and makeup, and frilly things.
My grandmother approved of my mother’s femininity, sometimes as a curative to Jeanette’s purposeful manliness. She often referred to my mother as “my prettiest daughter.” This infuriated Jeanette, not because she had lost out in the contest of who was better looking, but because my grandmother would think of having such a contest in the first place.
Despite all this, my mother emphatically did not agree with my grandmother when it came to what toys I should play with.
Whatever the results of their argument, I never got to hear any of it. I learned only what I could overhear from snatches of conversation my mother had with Jeanette over the next few weeks. Usually when there was an argument about me, my grandmother was more than happy to drag me into it. She would berate my mother over dinner in front of me, and try to sway me to her side after school when my mother wasn’t home. But this time she did not discuss it, and my mother did not carry to me any instructions about what I was or was not to do in my grandmother’s presence. She never mentioned the attic.
When I went back up to my room the tea set and oven were still there. No one told me to put them back, or not play with them. I stored them in my closet to be safe, and when I played with them again I did so with my bedroom door shut.
My grandmother wouldn’t speak to my mother for two days. My mother told Jeanette my grandmother was being “ridiculous and neurotic.” Jeanette told me I could play with whatever toys I liked and I should just ignore the adults around me who thought differently. My mother came into my r
oom once and sat on the edge of my bed while I was reading a comic. She said she loved me and she would always love me no matter what kind of man I grew up to be.
The whole thing was confusing. It was the first time I remember thinking all adults, not just my grandmother, were slightly crazy. I had never considered playing with girls’ toys would make me act like a girl when I got older. I was a boy. I knew I was a boy, and I didn’t believe I would end up wearing women’s clothing or makeup because of it. But this is what my grandmother thought. She had experience, she said. It was a proven fact. One had to be vigilant and correct that kind of behaviour when it happened.
My mother put her foot down, which she didn’t often do. She told my grandmother she didn’t believe in the theory that playing with girls’ toys made a boy less masculine, and I could play with whatever I wanted.
Once, my grandmother snuck into my room, took the toys and hid them. They weren’t in the attic, or at least in any of the places I could reach. I complained about this to my mother, who found them and gave them back. There was no argument this time. My grandmother never mentioned it, though I suspect my mother had to go into grandmother’s room to find them.
Then my grandmother changed tacks. That year, for my birthday and report cards and Christmas, she bought me Tonka trucks, GI Joes, and plastic guns. But trucks were just trucks. I didn’t have any inclination to push them through piles of dirt and pretend I was in a job half the men in town already had. I was afraid of the guns. I preferred puzzles and electronics and art kits. These stirred my imagination.
I kept the toys my grandmother gave me, but I didn’t play with them. I continued to play with the toys from the attic, because I could imagine people having tea and cake with me, and I liked dressing up the dolls in new outfits. Later, to counter my grandmother’s overtly masculine toys, Jeanette and my mother bought me whatever I wanted, including a more up-to-date paper doll set and a newer Easy-Bake Oven with all the pans and pots intact and the packaged mixes to make my own cakes.
Weeks after the argument, when my grandmother came in to call me for supper and caught me playing with the paper doll, she only pursed her lips and told me to come along. Halfway down the stairs, I heard her in the kitchen telling my mother it was too late.
“Too late for what?” said my mother.
“That boy,” said my grandmother. “You’ve got him ruined already. Mark my words.”
“I don’t care how he turns out,” I heard my mother say. “I’ll love him anyway.”
“I can’t believe you’re saying that. Of all the irresponsible, ridiculous, dangerous …”
I came into the kitchen. My grandmother never finished what she was about to say.
TWO
■
coming back into Nova Scotia after being away for any length of time is always a shock. From the moment we turn off the 104 highway at the Advocate/Trenton exit, I begin to brace myself for the sameness of it all. My mother and Aunt Jeanette are always complaining to me on the phone how everything is always changing, but I see no evidence of this. The first building as we pull off the highway onto Trunk #7 is the Farmer’s Co-Op with its tall, cylindrical steel silo jutting up a hundred feet. There are pickup trucks parked irregularly in the yard. Beyond that, the Irving truck stop and small industrial mall, and the Veinot’s paper shop, before we turn onto the upper end of River Road and begin the slow sojourn past the Indian reserve and along the river into town.
It is a short jaunt, without time for reflection. Aunt Jeanette chatters the whole way. She picked me up at the airport wearing, typically, a pair of sneakers, faded jeans, and a baggy white t-shirt with NO WAR printed on it. Her greying hair is pulled into a bun. She drives hunched over the steering wheel like an old woman, which bothers my mother, who says she looks like she is preparing for an accident. My aunt’s driving makes me nervous, too. After she fills me in on all the details of Advocate, she tells me there are several gay men living in town now. I should try to meet them when I’m home.
“Don’t tell me you’re trying to set me up?”
Jeanette laughs. “It’s about time you found someone.”
“I’m home for my grandmother’s funeral and you’re going to play matchmaker?”
“Not her funeral,” says Jeanette. “She’s just very sick. It could be any day. Or it could be a month.”
“I can’t stay a month,” I say. “And how do you know Grandnan won’t get better?”
Jeanette shakes her head. “Not at her age, Jake. She’s got pneumonia. Her heart is failing.”
I hate to think she better hurry up about it, but I do. I don’t say this to Jeanette. I won’t say this to anyone.
“Anyway,” says my aunt. “If you do happen to meet someone, you should get to know them.”
“And what if you’re wrong and they aren’t gay?”
Jeanette shrugs. “No harm, no foul.”
By the time we pull up to the house on Tenerife Street I’ve absorbed the few changes she pointed out to me. A shop or two. A couple of benches down by the river, that the town council had re-christened Veteran’s Memorial Park. It had been known as Founder’s Park for years.
My grandmother’s formidable brick house always looks the same.
The grass is neatly mowed and bright strips of azaleas, pink and white hostas, petunias, and geraniums are planted neatly in horizontal beds on either side of the front steps. My grandmother chose the flowers and my mother and Jeanette planted them.
A strange car sits in the driveway. A blue, older model Volvo. Boxy. Sensible.
“The homecare nurse,” Jeanette explains. “She was watching your grandmother while I was gone to the airport.”
“Right,” I say.
Jeanette shuts off the car engine and sighs. “Don’t expect too much.”
I am, in fact, expecting nothing at all, but I don’t say this. We retrieve my things from the car and go inside. I have the disturbing sense the house is swallowing me, that I am being drawn back into the dysfunction — the years of arguments and complaint, the religion, the battling perspectives and opposing principles.
I am not prepared for it.
The nurse, a forty-ish, overweight woman with a name tag that reads Judy and wearing a blue uniform that matches the Volvo, meets us in the hall. “She’s had her medication,” the nurse says. “She’s sleeping soundly now. Everything is fine.”
Jeanette thanks her. I unload my suitcase next to the living room door in the hallway. I avoid the staircase. When the nurse is gone, Jeanette asks if I want to go see my grandmother.
“Why don’t we wait until Mom gets home?” I say.
Jeanette looks at me and tilts her head to the side, the way she does when something bemuses or annoys her. “Aren’t you at least going to take your things to your room? I’m sure you know where it is.”
The problem, and I think Jeanette knows it, is this reminds me too much of other times in this house. I suggest to her instead we just leave everything and have a drink.
Jeanette shrugs. “Suit yourself,” she says. “I’m going up to check on Mom.”
She takes my suitcase with her when she goes.
▪ ▪ ▪
when i was a boy, my best friend was Cameron Simms. He lived on the Protestant side of the river, which made my grandmother suspect he was United, but he assured her he was not. His mother taught biology at the high school. His father was a chemical engineer at the heavy water plant in Trenton. They were, he told my grandmother, both atheists.
It is a testament to the perverseness of my grandmother’s beliefs that it was better to be an atheist than a Protestant.
My favourite place to go was Cameron’s. His parents were always nice to me. We didn’t need to worry about bullies. And if he sometimes became pedantic it wasn’t his fault. He was taught that way and I learned a lot from him. We would sit in his backyard and talk, or play Lego blocks or video games in his room. We played Risk, though I usually got beat — Cameron had a fiv
e-star general’s grasp of strategy — and I could usually wrangle myself an invitation to supper. Then we’d have another hour after to mess around before Cameron decided he needed to get his homework done, and it might be seven or eight o’clock before I was forced to go back to Tenerife Street.
But I didn’t see a lot of Cameron in March of 1984. It was cold, with “lots of weather” as my grandmother put it, and for the last two weeks it snowed almost every day. She would often want me home after school to shovel. My grandmother hired her man to shovel out the driveway, but expected my mother and Aunt Jeanette to shovel the paths to the front door and from the back door to the shed. My job was the stoops. My grandmother had assigned me this, along with a few other small chores, to earn my allowance, though she in fact did not pay it. My mother did. But work instilled discipline, and everyone in the house had to have something to do. I didn’t mind my job. It took thirty minutes to do each stoop and sometimes I would help my mother and Jeanette with the paths if they were out at the same time.
I didn’t mind the snow, but the winters seemed long, and when spring came to Advocate and the house on Tenerife Street, it came as a benediction. The year my uncle returned from Toronto it came early. The first week in April the temperature had risen dramatically to fourteen or fifteen degrees and the snows melted. My grandmother said she could not remember an earlier spring in her lifetime, and she began preparing her yard and her gardens. She removed the burlap from the perennials and bushes. She brought out the wheelbarrow for the rocks that had been forced up through the ground by the frost, picking them up and depositing them behind the backyard shed.
I helped her, simply glad to get out of the house in anything less than a heavy winter jacket and gloves. My grandmother asked me to trim the privet hedge that ran between our property and the neighbour’s house to the north. Some days, when they were not working, Aunt Jeanette and my mother would help, too, and the four of us would be out there in our light jackets and boots, raking and turning soil.