by Darren Greer
“I should go,” I say.
“No,” says Pavel, and then he leans over and kisses me. He places a hand on the inside of my thigh of my jeans, near my crotch. It is not grossly sexual, but the invitation is unmistakable. I don’t know what to do. I do not move away, nor do I move his hand, but I can tell before Pavel will act I must make some concession of my own. Just a shift of the body slightly towards him will do it. The door will open, and I know, from the little I understand of Pavel, that a shift like that would mean everything. An entire future would open itself up to me.
I cannot do it. I subtly shift away from him. He smiles.
“Do you want to go?” he says.
“Perhaps,” I say. My hands are trembling. Pavel notices, but says nothing. He gets up, and takes our empty wine glasses to the kitchen. Just that quickly, it is done. All the potential in our relationship is expunged in that moment. Pavel seems to understand. When he shows me to the door he is wearing a maddening, enigmatic smile. I try to convince myself the relationship is not over, but that smile tells me everything. I truly do not know what he wants from me. I look forward to the drive home. I want to think about what has just happened. The kiss. His opening up to me. I should have shifted towards him. I wanted to, but could not bring myself. What if he wants sex? What if he wants a relationship? One of the reasons I never have luck with men is I simply don’t know how to act around them. They either want baseball scores or blowjobs, and I don’t know how to give either with any skill or authority.
My mother is waiting when I get home and asks me how it was.
“Fine,” I tell her.
“Just fine?” she says.
“What do you want from me?” I ask, now equally annoyed with her. “Do you want me to say we’re getting married and you have a new son-in-law?”
“That would be nice,” she says.
I shrug, and tell her I am going to my room.
“Your grandmother is awake,” my mother says. “That’s why I’m sitting here waiting for you.”
In the time I have been home, Grandnan has been awake a very few times. She has never been lucid. I ask my mother if she is so now.
“As she is going to get,” my mother says. “Jeanette and the nurse are with her now. You should go see her.”
“I will,” I say, and climb reluctantly up the stairs to my grandmother’s room.
▪ ▪ ▪
i no more like coming into my grandmother’s room than I did going into my uncle’s all those years ago. Many times, I have stepped into the room of one of my clients who was dying, and I always thought of my uncle. I dread the day when I will be forced to witness something similar with my aunt or my mother. As selfish as it is, I sometimes wish I could go before them. I simply cannot imagine a world without them in it.
My grandmother is sitting up in bed. This is remarkable for a woman who has been near comatose for the last three weeks. Jeanette is sitting beside her, stroking her hand above the coverlet. The nurse is changing the iv. I stand by the door, and listen as my grandmother speaks. She seems confused and sluggish. She keeps looking around, as if searching for someone.
“I don’t get half a minute to do what needs to be done around here,” she is saying. “The beds. The floors. You girls always up and down the stairs and makeup stains in the sink in the upstairs lavatory. You think it all gets cleaned up by magic, but it doesn’t, I tell you. Someone has to clean up after you.”
This is the grandmother I remember. The grandmother of complaint and derision. Except what she is complaining about is all in her head. She hasn’t cleaned this house for years. Jeanette and my mother do all of it. She is living in a different time, twenty years before, when she did her “little work” — those daily cleaning jobs in between her large housecleaning projects.
She looks over at me, and barely sees me. When she looks at me again she asks, point blank, “Who are you?”
Jeanette turns and sees me. She motions for me to come closer to the bed. “That’s Jacob, mother. Your grandson.”
“Jacob?” says my grandmother. “Clean up your room. It’s a pigsty! How many times have I told you not to leave your toys lying about. I’ll step on one, fall, and break my back!”
“She’s not really thinking straight,” says my Aunt Jeanette. “But it’s better than what she has been.”
“I hear you!” crows my grandmother. “Don’t you think I don’t!”
My mother steps into the room, and my grandmother glares at her. “Shame!” she says. “Shame on the family!”
My mother sighs. “This is about as good as it’s going to get, I’m afraid.”
My grandmother stays awake for hours. It is almost possible to imagine she was never sick. Dr. Fred arrives after my mother calls him. It is a Saturday. He was not in his office, but we have his home number and instructions to call him whenever needed. He examines my grandmother, and asks her questions. He wears no white jacket or stethoscope, but my grandmother seems to mistake him for her dead husband. She calls him “dear.”
“This is remarkable,” Dr. Fred tells my mother and Jeanette. “She’s surprisingly responsive.”
“Does this mean she’s getting better?” asks Jeanette.
“No,” says Fred. “Her heart is still terribly laboured. She still needs the oxygen. It’s a phenomenon, I’m afraid.”
The rest of that evening we spend as much time in my grandmother’s room as we can. We do not know if she will ever be this lucid again. She still has no idea who any of us are. I am tempted to ask her about the eulogy, but my mother already warned me not to. “She won’t remember,” she said. “And if she does you’ll just upset her.” And so I reluctantly stay in the room with my mother and Jeanette while my grandmother cycles between prattling on and falling asleep. Whenever we think she is about to go under for good she wakes up again and starts talking gibberish, or about disconnected events.
I am getting tired of it.
Dr. Fred and the nurse have left. Jeanette decides to go downstairs to make a snack, and tries to ask my Grandmother — who hasn’t eaten in days — if she wants anything. But my grandmother’s eye falls on me and she waves Jeanette aside. Jeanette stops speaking and my grandmother softens, her eyes going from accusatory to contrite. Almost fearful. She holds out her hand towards me.
“Take it, Jacob,” my mother says. “Take it.”
I do not. I cannot. I stand there with my grandmother reaching out to me from her position on the bed.
“David,” she says suddenly. “David my darling.”
And my grandmother starts to cry.
NINE
■
of all the friends my uncle had in Toronto, none came to visit him. No one called. My mother told me years later David had a lover in Toronto, who left him just before he came home. She regretted not asking him more about it. The signs my uncle’s life was unravelling were there before he got on the train back to Nova Scotia. But the long-lost lover was just that. Uncle David never mentioned him. I didn’t even know his name. It has occurred to me I would have liked to get in touch with him. I could have called him up and asked him how undying love gives way before sickness and stigma. How “until death do you part” is conditional upon the kind of death, and “in sickness and in health” mere empty sophistry.
My uncle, had he been alive, would not have approved. He was not a confrontational man. He did not enjoy protest.
I have heard the terminally ill, confined to their beds while the rest of the planet spins, can become difficult. They get jealous of the living. Hateful. This did not happen to my uncle. I remember him as being serenely complacent. Then again, I may have made him out to be too saintly, given the circumstances of my meeting him. He was often tired, and in some pain as various infections swept through his body. Dr. Fred had him on pain medications which he took in moderation — not enough to impair his perceptions. He told my mother he’d rather not spend his final days a drooling idiot.
My uncle continued
to give me lessons. Some days he would be lucid, and some days either confused or just not up to it. My mother took over on those days.
Some days he was so exhausted the walker would not do. He had to be helped to the bathroom by my mother and Jeanette, who wore hospital gowns and gloves and face masks when they did. After each bathroom visit, my grandmother made them scrub down every exposed surface with bleach, which they did, still wearing the hospital gowns. All of us, even my grandmother and I, began using my grandfather’s toilet off the study. Upstairs was only to shower. Even then, I worried the germs had somehow crawled to the downstairs toilet seat, so I held myself above it with my hands on the seat proper — a remarkable feat of strength it seems to me now — and relieved myself that way. My grandmother draped tissue all over the seat to use it, and sometimes forgot to remove it.
Deanny often visited with my uncle. Of all of us she was the only one who had the nerve to touch him. Deanny had never known my uncle as a well man. He was always an invalid to her. But she liked him. On his good days he would joke with her and call her Bernadette. No one called Deanny Bernadette. If I had tried I would have been eating five-knuckle sandwiches. But my uncle got away with it. When I asked Deanny why, she looked at me like I was the stupidest person on earth. “Because he’s dying, idjit. Dying people can get away with a lot.”
Despite this justification, I sensed Deanny actually liked it when my uncle called her by her full name. He asked her questions about school, and home, and her life. She often made him laugh, which could be painful to watch if he was having trouble breathing. Once or twice he laughed so much his face turned purple and he had to be given oxygen out of the canister that sat beside his bed. Jeanette asked my mother if Deanny’s presence might not be more harmful than helpful. My mother said no.
“Deanny’s good for him,” she said. “He’s not going to laugh himself to death. And I’d rather he die laughing than any other way.”
Outside the bedroom, Aunt Jeanette and my mother discussed the possibility of his death nearly constantly. They knew it would be soon. Dr. Fred had told him so. The antibiotics were no longer fighting the infections.
The incessant pneumonia bothered Dr. Fred the most. “If I can’t get it under control, it will take him. He could go tomorrow, or weeks from now. But he will go, unless I can stop the rising tide.”
“Has anyone ever stopped the rising tide?” said my aunt.
“No,” Dr. Fred said. “It’s a matter of when and not if.”
▪ ▪ ▪
in the small hours of the morning on July 24, 2008, I awake to alternating red and blue light spilling into my room through the bedroom window. I dress and go into the hallway, where I find my mother standing outside my grandmother’s room talking with Dr. Fred.
“Jacob,” she says, as if I am still a young boy. “I was going to let you sleep.”
My mother tells me that Jeanette got up at two o’clock to check on my grandmother, as either she or my mother did at least once through the night. When she turned on the light, she thought at first my grandmother was just sleeping heavily. But there was something too blank about her expression, something too limp about the way her head lay sideways on the pillow. She checked her mother’s pulse. Unable to find one, yet still uncertain of her mother’s status, she laid her ear against her mouth and nose and tried to feel her breathing.
She could not.
Her forehead felt cold.
Jeanette woke my mother from her sleep. “Caroline,” she said. “I think Mom is gone.”
“Gone where?” my mother asked, in sleep-induced stupor.
We wait while the paramedics prepare my grandmother. Dr. Fred pronounces her dead and signs the death certificate. I watch in fascination as they carry the body into the upstairs hallway, sealed in a black body bag. My mother gives a single, muted cry as it goes by, and when Jeanette emerges from the room her eyes are red.
“Will you all be okay?” says Dr. Fred.
My mother nods.
He says he will be back to check on us later today. “I could give you something to sleep, Caroline,” he says. “If you think you need it.”
“No thank you,” says my mother.
After a fifty-year reign, my grandmother is no longer in the house. Nor will she be returning. This is hard for me to accept. There will be no more sleep for us that night. Jeanette makes coffee, and we go downstairs to drink it with her. It is four in the morning. As soon as we sit down at the kitchen table I notice Jeanette lighting a cigarette. My mother gets her an ashtray from under the sink. No longer will grandmother be there to tell her she can’t smoke indoors. No longer will my grandmother be there to tell them anything.
They can do anything they like in the house.
Eat in the dining room.
Track mud on the floors.
Princess the cat has long been dead, and my grandmother never got another. But Jeanette can get a dog, which is something she has long wanted to do. My grandmother hated them. “Slavish, dirty beasts,” she said. “The Bible dismissed them as curs, and so do I.” Jeanette could now get a whole houseful of dogs if she wants them. I’m sure my mother won’t mind. The two of them have waited for dominion over their own lives for decades, but now it is here they don’t know what to do.
“I can’t believe she’s gone,” says my mother.
“Truthfully,” says my aunt, “I never thought she would be. I kept thinking she’d come out of it somehow, and start bossing us around again.”
“Stubborn to the end,” my mother says. “She compromised nothing in her whole life. You know, it’s hard not to admire that a little.”
The three of us sit and talk about my grandmother until dawn. We remain respectful, discussing her attributes and relating anecdotes about the days when my grandmother was young and headstrong. Occasionally my mother or Jeanette cries. I remain dry-eyed, not necessarily out of any hardness of heart, but because it is hard also for me to believe she is gone. Like Jeanette, I too half-believed one day my grandmother would rouse herself from her stupor and start ordering the house again. It is hard to believe that domineering personality is gone from the world.
Death always makes me relentlessly existential. It does everyone I suppose. I probe myself to see if a portion of my resentment has died with her, but my own emotional nature, at this point at least, is unavailable to me. I feel sorry for my mother and Jeanette. I can barely comprehend the reality of my grandmother’s death. I drink my coffee and bum cigarettes from Jeanette. I rarely smoke, but this occasion seems to call for it. I can hear my grandmother screaming the house is blue with smoke, and insisting we go outside, and I do feel a slight satisfaction at the thought, which tells me my resentment is not gone completely. None of us able to sleep, we sit for four hours in the living room.
Then, at eight o’clock, and somewhat predictably, the phone begins to ring.
▪ ▪ ▪
news of my grandmother’s death spreads about the town as quickly as Spanish Influenza. She was a paragon. Phone call after phone call offers sympathies, from the high born to the low. Deanny calls at ten o’clock. She is a mess. My grandmother had been a champion to her. Helped pay for her schooling. Always held her up as an example. Always kept in touch. Deanny’s emotional reaction is stronger than my mother’s and Jeanette’s. She weeps noisily into the phone, and says she will be home as she soon as she possibly can.
“The funeral is Thursday,” I say.
“I simply can’t believe it,” Deanny says. “I thought she’d never die.”
“We all did,” I say. “Mom and Jeanette are still shaking their heads.”
The funeral home calls our house at ten o’clock sharp. They inform us that Grandnan took care of all the arrangements several years ago — what kind of service she wanted, right down to the casket.
Dalton Freeman is my grandmother’s lawyer. He called once to express his sympathies, but he did not discuss particulars of the will. I can’t help but compare these arrang
ements to those of my uncle twenty-five years ago. The alacrity versus the reluctance. The constant ringing of the phone compared to the silence. I try not to think about it. This is no time for advocacy. There are times even the spirit of protest should not be given free reign.
Dalton says there should be a reading and discussion of the will before the funeral, and before I go back to Toronto.
“Before the funeral?” I say. “Doesn’t that usually come after?”
“Your grandmother requested this specifically,” he tells me. “I’d like to do it tomorrow.”
I get off the phone and tell my mother what Dalton said. “That’s odd,” she says.
“What’s odd?” says Jeanette, coming into the kitchen. My mother tells her about the reading. “Is that normal?”
“Not at all,” I say. “I wonder what she’s up to.”
“Jacob,” my mother says. “She’s dead. She’s not ‘up to’ anything.”
I can’t agree. Even from beyond the grave I do not trust my grandmother entirely. It feels like she has a final card up her sleeve. One last attempt at control. Perhaps a posthumous improvement project. Perhaps she is going to dictate what we should all wear at her funeral.
For the first time since her death, I consider her eulogy — and for the briefest of moments I feel angry at her again for putting me in such a position. My mother would have given her a fine eulogy. Or the mayor. Or even Deanny or Henry Hennsey, as old as he is. What have I to give her? My old resentments still stand. Anything I do say — either accusation or accolade — will feel false, because a part of me feels the opposite.