by Darren Greer
April also marked the beginning of what my Aunt Jeanette called our annual “midget convention” — the placing of my grandmother’s variety of little garden gnomes and ceramic angels in the yard. She had a passion for these sculptures and she infested her property with them. There were dozens of these — cherubs in tiny fountains or leaning on walls, gnomes with shovels or red pointed caps — which she sprinkled throughout her azaleas and geraniums and petunias and marigolds. She didn’t defend her choices. It was her property and she could do with it as she liked.
When I was younger I liked the placing of the statues, but my grandmother was afraid I might drop them so I was only allowed to consult on the best places to set them. She did let me place them myself when I got older, and when I turned ten she handed the whole business over to me. By then I had outgrown them. They were no more to me than ugly little plaster statues, and I viewed placing them as much a chore as hauling rocks. I never said this to my grandmother, though. She had entrusted me with something she cared about, which was rare enough, and she was still interested enough to come out and inspect my placement and give me a statue-by-statue editorial. “That little man is looking too much towards the front step, don’t you think?” she’d tell me. “Shouldn’t we turn him a little bit to the north?” Or, “I think the fountain angel should be in the very front of the yard this year. He just feels like he should be closer to the road.”
The times we placed statues are the only ones I remember, in all my childhood, of having some kind of intimacy with my grandmother. It was our project. We consulted on it. We worked together. I don’t remember her once unduly criticizing my choices. When it came to garden gnomes, as in no other area of her life, she became a diplomat. It is a testament, perhaps, to how much I craved a relationship with her that I continued to do this and feigned enthusiasm for it long after the work itself ceased to interest.
▪ ▪ ▪
one afternoon in late May, while my mother and Jeanette were at work, my grandmother received a phone call.
I paid no attention at first. I was at the dining room table doing homework for geography class. I had to identify all the continents, and at least three countries and their capitals within each. I had an atlas. It was easy work, and boring. I was eleven, in grade six, and the year was nearly done.
My grandmother didn’t like me sitting at the dining room table. It was antique, left to her by her mother-in-law. It had eight chairs with the likeness of Queen Anne carved in the back. Those chairs were some of her most precious possessions. My deceased grandfather used to say, or so I’ve heard, that those chairs were “A good place for the arse of a Scot. In the face of a queen.” My grandmother was afraid they would break if sat on, so we ate our dinners at the kitchen table, even though it was crowded with the four of us.
I couldn’t use the kitchen table for homework, because my grandmother never stayed quiet long enough to let me concentrate, and I found my room too small and oppressive. There was more room in the dining room. I could spread my books out on the mahogany surface and get comfortable. But I was only able to use it if my grandmother wasn’t paying attention. Eventually she would catch me and chase me back up to my room. “Good heavens,” she’d say. “Don’t you know those chairs are priceless heirlooms?”
I heard my grandmother answer the phone and talk into it, though I couldn’t hear what was said. A few minutes later she came into the dining room. I knew she was distracted because she didn’t mention me being there. She said, “What time is your mother getting home from the diner?”
“Five o’clock,” I told her.
“That late?” said my grandmother. “I thought it was three.”
My grandmother knew perfectly well what time my mother got off work. I knew it must have been the phone call upsetting her but when I asked her who it was she wouldn’t say.
“Just never you mind,” she said. “And get up off those chairs. How many times do I have tell you, Jacob Owen McNeil, those are valuable antiques and not for sitting on?”
Reluctantly I gathered up my books and carried them to the kitchen, hoping my grandmother would tell me something about who had been on the other end of the line. I had inherited a streak of nosiness directly from her, and a part of me — albeit a small, naïve part — thought it might have something to do with my father. The man who had sired me. The man I had never met and who had decided, I was told by my grandmother, not to marry my mother. It was a shame my grandmother had to bear — a pregnant nineteen-year-old daughter and a bastard grandson who had not been christened because my mother wanted me to make up my own mind when I was old enough. How she ever explained this to her fellow Catholics, to whom decency, marriage, and childbirth were sacrosanct, we never knew. She never mentioned my father. She never mentioned her eldest daughter was an unwed mother.
All I know about my father is he was an itinerant worker who worked on a tree-cutting crew in the county for a season in 1971. My mother fell in love with him, and by the time she knew she was pregnant, the season was over and he was gone. She was never able to find him again.
My grandmother didn’t speak to me while she cooked supper. She was roasting beef and was busy basting it and getting it ready to put back in the oven. She muttered to herself all the while, but I could make nothing out. My grandmother did not have a poker face. We always knew what she was thinking by her expression or the way she held herself, and whatever news she had received was not good.
I was determined to wait until my mother came home, when the story would come out. I finished geography and went on to algebra. I was a good student, thorough and conscientious about my work. I hated to make mistakes, and I liked to line my figures up perfectly on the paper so large equations could be distilled magically down to one final and irrevocable number equal to a variable of x or y.
By the time my mother got home, my grandmother had finished her cooking and I had finished my homework. I was still to be disappointed. My grandmother wanted to speak to my mother in my grandfather’s den. I stayed seated at the kitchen table, not bothering to strain to hear because the door was shut.
Suddenly I heard my mother squeal.
Someone’s dead, I thought.
Less than a minute later my mother came running out of the den, through the living room, and into the kitchen. “Your Uncle David is coming home!” she cried.
“Uncle David?”
I’d never met him. I sometimes forgot he even existed, though my mother and Jeanette talked to him on the phone occasionally, and once in a while they passed it to me. They had not told me much about him. Only that he and my grandmother did not get along, and he left home a long time ago. My grandmother never talked about my uncle.
No wonder she was upset. She was also annoyed her daughter should be so excited over news she found so disconcerting. “I don’t know what you’re getting in such a fuss about,” she said. “It’s only for a visit.”
“Did he say how long?”
“No,” said my grandmother. “I presume a week. Any longer and we’ll be put out. I shouldn’t agree to it at all.”
“Why not?” said my mother. “We’ve got scads of room.”
“It’s not just the room,” said my grandmother. “It’s the extra food and the extra washing. This house is bursting at the seams as is.”
My mother ignored my grandmother’s grumbling. She called Jeanette at the diner and told her the news. She acted like the screaming, giggling girls in my sixth grade.
I did not share my mother’s excitement.
I didn’t know my uncle.
I also wasn’t used to disruptions at the house on Tenerife Street. I couldn’t begrudge my uncle a meal or a bed, like my grandmother did, but I had never seen my mother, usually so cool-headed over everything, get so excited. It bothered me. This Uncle David was an interloper, a rival for my mother’s affections, and I resented his intrusion already.
One thing my mother forgot to ask in all the commotion was when my uncle was c
oming.
“In two weeks,” my grandmother said. “By train.”
“We’ll all go to the train station to meet him,” said my mother. “Won’t it be great?”
“I certainly won’t be going. It’s a Saturday, and Saturday is my bridge day, and the church auxiliary meets Saturday night.”
“Surely you can miss those things for one day,” my mother said.
“I most surely cannot,” said my grandmother. “The world may stop for you, Caroline, when someone comes to town, but it doesn’t stop for the busy and beholden.”
“It’s not just someone,” said my mother, her mood dampening. “It’s your son.”
“Makes no never mind,” said my grandmother. “I’ll see him well enough when you get home from the station. Though why the man would pick now to come see us, when he hasn’t been home in a dozen years, I’ll never make out. And what happened to the rest of his school year, I want to know? Doesn’t high school go into June in Ontario?”
My grandmother went on, but my mother and I tuned her out.
We went for a walk up Tenerife Street instead, then down to the water along River Street. It was sunny and reasonably warm. She told me about my uncle, but not why my grandmother was so dead-set against seeing him. I was surprised. This was the woman who told me the secret of menstruation at the age of seven when I first began to notice thick white strips of padding in the bathroom garbage can upstairs. I found it interesting that women bled from secret parts of themselves while men did not. My grandmother was horrified that my mother explained it to me. “My heavens!” she cried. “You’ll ruin the boy by the time he’s ten!”
My mother was not as forthcoming about Uncle David as she was on female reproductive biology. As to why he left home so long ago and never came to visit, she said only that shortly after her father died in 1969, David and my grandmother had an argument and she asked him to leave.
“Why?” I asked.
“Just because,” said my mother.
“What kind of because?”
“Your grandmother didn’t like the things he did,” said my mother.
“What things?”
“Just things.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.” I said, with the inherent logic of a child. “You got pregnant out of wedlock and Grandnan didn’t kick you out, and Jeanette told me she smoked so much reefer she threw up all over the living room and she didn’t get kicked out. Why should Uncle David be any different?”
I could see I had bewildered my mother. It was an effect I could occasionally produce on my teachers and Jeanette or even on my grandmother. “The questions!” the latter would cry. “The poor boy’s tongue flaps at both ends!” But I was determined not to let up on her. I was relentless, tenacious, in pursuit of the truth, as any good mathematician — as I already considered myself — should be.
Finally my mother said, “Your uncle is different from most people.”
“Different how?”
“Just different,” my mother said. “He’s a wonderful man, really. It’s just that he’s never gotten married and your grandmother doesn’t like that.”
I knew, or sensed, the situation was more complicated than that, and my mother wasn’t telling me everything. She told me when uncle David came I could ask him myself.
“Ask him what? Why he’s not married?”
“Yes,” said my mother, “if you want to.”
“But why don’t you tell me?” I was eleven now. Not the eight-year-old who found the boxes in the closet.
When she saw she was not going to get away with a euphemism, or a vagute generalization, or even a good old-fashioned bait and switch, my mother told me the truth. “Your Uncle David is a homosexual,” she said flatly. “And your grandmother hates the fact. When she found out she told him never darken her door again.”
“A homosexual?” I said, pronouncing the word very carefully, as if it were loaded with explosives. Which, in a sense, I suppose it was in our house. “What does that mean?
“Jacob,” said my mother softly, but sternly. “That is something you’ll have to ask your uncle. This information belongs to him. It is not mine to tell.”
“And so that’s why Uncle David never visits? Because of Grandnan?”
“That’s why,” said my mother.
“Grandnan has trouble getting along with people. There’s a kid in my school, Scott Findlay, who’s like that. Our home room teacher says he’s obstreperous.”
My mother laughed, as we turned on off the river road and up Fartham Avenue back toward Tenerife. “That is a perfectly fine description of your grandmother.”
But I was still not satisfied. I had exhausted my mother with questions, so knew asking more would not yield extra information. I swore to look up the word homosexual in a dictionary to find out exactly what it meant before my uncle arrived, but I never did.
2
the year before Uncle David came home, when I was ten, my grandmother had a shower installed in the upstairs bathroom at the end of what she called the “north hall.” Jeanette and my mother had been arguing for a shower in the upstairs bathroom for years, ever since they were teenagers. The bathrooms hadn’t been remodelled since the house was built. They had not installed a shower. Practically every house in Advocate had one, according to my aunt and mother, and it was just silly, in their view, not to have this most common of conveniences in the last half of the twentieth century.
I do not know my grandmother’s reasons for having only a bath and not a shower. But I do know whenever my aunt or mother would pester her for one, she would only say a shower was useless and a bath was not.
“A woman’s got to soak her parts,” she said.
I was too young to understand this argument, but my Aunt Jeanette and my mother seemed to.
“That’s medieval,” Aunt Jeanette said. “A shower is just as good as a bath. Better, because it doesn’t take so long. Look at us now when we have to go anywhere! The three of us and Jacob having to scramble to get in the tub, leaving soap scum everywhere.”
“There would be no soap scum if you cleaned up after yourself,” said my grandmother, who never missed an opportunity to instill a lesson.
“If you don’t do it,” Jeanette said, “I’ll hire a plumber and have one installed myself.”
The argument continued for years.
Because we didn’t have a shower, and a bath was such a time-consuming ordeal, I was forced to wash, not every day, but only twice a week, on Wednesday and Sunday night. As I watched tv with Aunt Jeanette in the tv room next to my grandfather’s den, my mother would come in and tell me it was bath time. She would have drawn the water and pulled out my favourite inflatable toys. I would stay in there an hour, until the bubbles disappeared and a white scum of soap lay on top of the water like an oil slick, and the water was tepid. Usually it was also black from the dirt that had been on my body.
When Jeanette supervised me, she would always look into the tub and cluck. “See how unhygienic that is?” she’d say, as if making another argument to my grandmother. “How can someone get clean in that?”
After years of resistance my grandmother gave in, though Jeanette did pay for it, as promised, on her meagre wages from the diner. What made my grandmother decide a woman no longer had to “soak her parts” I never knew. Only that one day Jeanette told my mother she had convinced “the old woman” and the plumber would arrive on Monday.
My grandmother refused to use the new shower. She complained about the amount of water being wasted now that Aunt Jeanette and my mother and I were taking showers far more than we bathed.
I lost my Wednesday night bath — my mother said I could just take a shower Thursday morning before school instead — but I insisted on the Sunday night one. Even at the age of eleven I secretly liked the toys, and the bubbles, and the quiet of the bath with only the occasional drip from the faucet marking irregular time.
My mother still took baths occasionally too, by candlelight, with
the radio sitting on the toilet seat tuned to an fm classical station. She did not particularly like classical music, she said, except when she was in the bath.
I understood.
At eleven, I should have been more interested in skateboards and bicycles and firecrackers than plastic toys. But I always had my rubber ducky and sailboats in the bath with me. I reverted to some supremely ideal age. I was never a particularly secure boy, despite the efforts of the adults around me to make me so, but I felt perfectly safe and secure in the bath. Enveloped by cool air, silence, and warm water, I was more at peace with myself than I was anywhere else.
▪ ▪ ▪
aunt jeanette had a habit of spending twenty minutes or more under the showerhead, driving my grandmother to distraction and forcing her to say Jeanette was draining half the Atlantic and driving the power and water bills into the “elemental stratosphere.”
The “elemental stratosphere” was a favourite expression of my grandmother’s for defining excess. She had a host of others.
The shower was a source of ongoing tension for them. Whenever Aunt Jeanette emerged from the bathroom and my grandmother berated her for staying in so long, she always said the same thing. “I was spraying my parts.”
The Saturday morning my uncle was due to arrive at the train station at eleven o’clock, Jeanette stayed in longer than usual, perhaps because she wanted to be particularly refreshed for her brother’s arrival. My mother and I had awakened late.
My grandmother was up at six, as she always was, but neglected to call us. Jeanette accused her of doing it on purpose. “Why on earth would I do that?” exclaimed my grandmother. “I don’t care what time you get out of bed. Sleep until noon if you want to!”
This was not entirely true.
It annoyed my grandmother that, on their days off, her daughters sometimes slept in. She considered the hours between six and nine to be her most productive, and anyone who did not get out of bed to take advantage of this was being lazy, wasting half the day. She would never roust us out of bed directly. My grandmother did not enter our rooms, except occasionally to see if they were clean. Instead she would decide to vacuum outside our doors at seven a.m., or turn the radio in the kitchen so loud we heard it upstairs.