“Yes. They eat it before it falls out of the clouds. And they put it in too-hot hot chocolate.”
They begged her to make an angel herself; she fell over and flapped her arms, the boys sprawling beside her. Snow dropped down their necks, jumped into their boots. The only way she could get them inside was to promise tobogganing at the park on Saturday morning. There was just one more day of school.
—
“Maaaaaawm!” That was Jake. Marcus was hammering away on the piano, his fifteen-minute turn long over, but still he pounded out Old MacDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O.
Jake shrieked, “Marcus! It’s my piano, too.”
“It’s Mom’s piano, stupid.”
“I’m not stupid.”
“Marcus!” she yelled as she put the colander in the sink. “Don’t be rude to your brother. Come down and help me set the table.”
“But I’m still practising.”
“It’s Jake’s turn. Would you please come down here right now?” She hated her cop-voice. She cut the broccoli and stirred the hamburger. The boys were fighting openly now. Jake started crying.
“Marcus! One of your chores is to set the table.”
He screamed, “No! I will not set the table.” He boomed away on the bottom keys. He was the defiant son, even as a baby. His first utterance was not “Da,” not “Ma,” and definitely not “Mama.” It was “No.” Don’t put that dirty cookie in your mouth, sweetie, she’d said. He was holding the sandbox Oreo tight in his fist. The sugary filling was pitted and grey. He said, “No,” and bit the cookie in half, chewing through his smile. How she and Andrew had laughed, delighted that he had said his first word.
If only they’d known how often they were going to hear it. She already worried about his adolescence. He was a popular, bossy child, striding cockily into a world of violent video games, Internet porn, alcohol, drugs, cars, crazy parties, knives….She made herself stop thinking about it. He was seven.
She could hear the TV. Which one of them had turned it on? Probably Jake, in pure frustration. The piano stopped; the boys went silent before the cable glow. She dumped the broccoli, steaming, into a bowl, and lifted the sizzling hamburger from the stove. Poured in the tomato sauce, stirred dutifully. The slow-bubbling domestic cauldron often made her think of the past.
Kids’ spaghetti had brought her low. And breast milk. She had been mighty, once, in the kingdom of food. Thalassa. That had been the name of her restaurant. The Greek word for “sea.” Her late father’s best friend was her silent, generous partner. Her timing had been perfect. She’d opened at the crest of the wave of good, expensive, but accessible food in the city. No precious towers of vegetables or over-extravagant deglazings. Nothing stuffy. Even though she was the chef, she sometimes served the dishes herself. The kitchen was in plain view of the dining room, making food an act of community theatre, with Eliza as the attractive leading lady. She wanted the high-end lunch crowd, the high-end dinner crowd, the weekend moneyed hip. She got them all, with Greek and northern Italian dishes, brightened up and degreased, accompanied by a solid, reasonably priced wine list.
Ah, Thalassa, she thought, swaying nostalgically in the spaghetti sauce vapour. She wasn’t the only one. She still had women friends in the food world, though none of them were chefs anymore, because they had had kids. It was just short of impossible to run a restaurant kitchen and a home kitchen at the same time. Eliza had not even tried. After Zoë, who had been her right-hand woman at Thalassa, had twins, she had opened a pastry shop on Bloor Street; after Kelly had her first baby, she opened a successful fresh tortilla business.
Eliza smiled down into the boiling vat of water, fondly remembering the adrenalin rush of restaurant work. She forked out a strand of spaghetti—it needed two more minutes—and turned away to set the table. Though she often complained, and regretted, and wondered what it would have been like if she’d stuck it out with Thalassa, she wasn’t complaining at this moment. She was thinking. Considering. That was another starry Latin word, con sideris: “to be with the stars.” It must be a consolation of age, that she could sift through her forty years of life, pull out one section or another, like the different drawers in a jewellery box, and consider the treasures inside. Single earrings were plentiful, and rings without their stones. But you couldn’t get rid of that stuff. Every experience became valuable loot, including the sleep deprivation, the children fighting, and routine problems at work.
Treasure, she repeated to herself. That’s all there was. This is mine, my own life. She turned off the taps and watched the water swirl down the sink. When she blinked, two tears dropped straight into the basin. What was wrong with her? He would be home soon. Or he would call. She wiped her eyes. Something had happened, but nothing terrible, not an accident. Not a disaster. But why didn’t he call?
“Marcus! Jake! Dinner’s almost ready. I know you’re watching TV. You’re going to have to turn it off! In five minutes!”
One more minute, one more kiddie dinner on the table. Cooking at Thalassa had never been so monotonous. She tasted the sauce—fine—and frowned. She went to the front of the house, the sitting room, and stared glumly out the large window. She wouldn’t shut the blinds until Andrew was home. The wind gusted snow off the rooftops across the street.
Back in the dining room, she checked her phone.
Finally! His name blinked in her list of messages. Relieved, she read:
Picked up skis for boys. Martin in town!!! For
lay-over. Going to airport, dinner w him. Home
by 9.
She read the lines again, nodding. Then shaking her head, anger clotting behind her eyes like a headache. Just like Martin to have a layover that wasn’t long enough for him to visit his nephews. Too busy saving the world, the fucker. No doubt they were having a lavish dinner at that new restaurant in the fancy airport hotel. She unclenched her grip on the phone; no need to crack the screen. Andrew, she noted, had sent the text at six. While she was with the boys in the front garden. She tossed the phone back into her bag and swore under her breath. Then yelled, “Oh, shit!” and rushed across the dining room.
Too late. The spaghetti was overcooked.
6
Lost to the World
SHE WORKED THROUGH THE EVENING ROUTINE DOGGEDLY, wondering how single mothers did it. Night after night, day after day, they managed the weight of total responsibility. Her own mother had done it.
Eliza was sitting beside Marcus, trying to help him read, but she was so tired her eyes were crossing. He wasn’t reading at grade level yet, so practice was part of his homework. His difficulty with reading made her impatient, which was the worst thing; he was already self-conscious about how slowly the words came out of his mouth. Tonight, unable to sit still, he played with an elastic band, then an eraser, then a piece of Lego. She snapped, “Stop fooling around, right now! I’m sick of this!” She instantly regretted the meanness in her tone. Marcus responded by pounding his pencil, sharp end down, into the kitchen table. “Marcus!” But instead of remonstrating further, she sagged back against her chair. He scowled at her, preparing to do battle. She met his glittering eye.
Why bother? she wondered. What battle? She murmured, “I’m so tired,” and kissed the side of his head. His hair smelled doggish with sweat and dirt. The charismatic, good-looking son was also the one who didn’t like to bathe. She eyed the shallow hole and pulled away in surprise. “Our poor table! It’s bleeding!”
“Is it?” he said, leaning forward to look. “Mommy! It is not bleeding.”
She whispered, “I think it’s bedtime.”
He snuggled up against her. “Thank god it’s bedtime!” he said, and she laughed.
It was ridiculous for six- and seven-year-olds to have homework every night. Andrew was supposed to help Marcus with reading but the job usually fell to her. Like cleaning out the dishwasher, doing the laundry, wiping down the counters and the fridge, washing the floor. Rinsing out the compost bucket. Dusting the windowsill
s. The baseboards. The thousand slats of the window blinds. Vacuuming the crap out from under the stove. Filling in school forms, renewing the healthcare cards, calling the babysitter, fundraising for the school.
Her mother—she adored Andrew—told her that the way to ruin a good marriage was to keep score of who did what. So Eliza did many tasks herself, resentfully, or in a state of resigned oblivion, often late at night after the kids had gone to bed. When Andrew told her to hire a cleaner, she asked him, “Why don’t you hire a cleaner?” He did. After a couple of duds and one klutz—the woman knocked their wedding portrait off the wall: the broken glass, scratched photo, reprint and repair bill came to $400—she went back to doing it herself. Even now, while she shepherded the boys into the bathroom to start teeth-brushing and washing up, she critically eyed the mess. The toilet was like a Jackson Pollock painting, artful sprays everywhere.
Dirty clothes in the hamper, pyjamas on, storybook chosen, another day of helping them to be clean, kind, healthy humans. As opposed to the wild animals they would naturally be. She loved the little beasts, too, curled up against her, one on either side, in Marcus’s double bed. Jake would hop over to his own after the reading was finished. She was a page away from the end of the storybook when they heard the back door open. Jake threw back the covers, ready to leap out of the bed and rush downstairs, but she put out her arm as a barrier. “Daddy will come up here to kiss you good night. Let’s finish the story.”
—
“Why the hell didn’t you answer your phone?”
“I was teaching all day! I forgot to turn my phone back on until I got to the airport. When I finally read your text messages, I texted you back right away.”
She stared at him, a spatula in her white-knuckled hand. Then she spun on her heel and stomped off to the kitchen island. She filled the spaghetti pot with tap water, poured out half and scrubbed the metal unnecessarily hard. “You could have called me at some point. I’ve been worried about this snow all day long.”
“What am I, a mind reader?”
“No, it’s fucking clear you’re not a mind reader because if you were, you’d know that all I want right now is an apology.” She dumped the rest of the water out of the pot; it tidal-waved out of the sink, flooding half the island countertop. “Have you forgotten that my father was killed in a car accident in a snowstorm?” She was yelling. “My mother waited and waited for him to call, but he never did, did he?” She stalked off.
“Where are you going?”
“To pee!” She pounded upstairs and slammed the bathroom door as hard as she could. Then stood still, hoping she hadn’t woken up the kids.
She didn’t have to pee. She just had to get away from her husband, now that he was home. She sat down on the toilet seat and let the wave of the past rise up and crash through her—it had been there all evening, waiting to break—and just like that, she was crying. She cried silently, not wanting Andrew to hear, but hard, two streams pouring down her face. She cried like a child, unsurprisingly, remembering the child she had been, whose father had died. She wished the impossible, that she could somehow embrace that girl now, send her love backwards through time.
Her childhood ended at ten, with her father’s passing and her sudden transformation into her mother’s best friend and helpmate, the adult girl who put the adult woman to bed those nights when she’d sat up too long, one hand propping up her head as she blinked uncomprehendingly at the bills, the bank statements, the business letters. Genevieve Keenan did not have her own bank account; it was joined to her husband’s in holy matrimony. She would sip at her small glass of rye and Coke until it was gone, then pour another and sit a while longer, to write the numbers down again, more carefully. She did the addition in pencil over and over, until Eliza went after school one day and bought a calculator with her babysitting money. Even then, the sums always added up to not-enough and there-are-still-outstanding-debts-Mrs.-Keenan.
During those nighttime sessions with her mother, little Eliza saw many things blurrily, through her own tears, but she saw one thing clearly: the power of money. She was so sad, the first year after his death, because she missed him—his mild humour, the dark blue eyes magnified behind his glasses, his funny little stories—but she was also angry because his death marooned them on an island of poverty. Genevieve lost the heavily mortgaged house; she had never known about her husband’s other debts. The family moved to the poorest neighbourhood in Calgary and rented a duplex with holes in the walls. Eliza made a solemn vow in her diary (a small notebook she would later burn, ashamed that she had been so judgmental toward her mother): When I grow up, I will have my own bank account, my own business, and my own kitchen table without any bills on it, or stupid crying.
The early loss gave her an eerie intimacy with death. Anyone, she knew, could disappear. At any time. You could be average. You could be great. And you could still die in a snowstorm. She became practical and organized yet secretly wild—stormful—knowing that despite carefully saving her money and cleaning the house for her mother and taking care of Rachel and tolerating her bossy brother, any disastrous thing could happen. If the world was wild, she would match it. But carefully.
She believed that her older brother and younger sister came out of it more wounded than she was. Fourteen-year-old Dean dropped into a gang of troublemaking kids, dropped out of school, then lost years to alcohol and drugs before going to a technical college. Now he was a crane operator in oil-booming Calgary, making scads of money. He owned a house, but his smart, pretty wife had recently left him, taking their daughter with her. Eliza suspected that a lot of his boom money was still going up his nose.
Her sister, Rachel, never complained about the past, though the present was a source of constant fury. Only six when their father died, she had lost two parents, one forever, the other to grief, fear and minimum wage. Genevieve worked long hours as a waitress, a chambermaid, a clerk at the mall. In her absence, her youngest child withdrew. Rachel barely spoke. She had trouble learning to read, just like Marcus. Eliza read to her, played with her, took her to the park. She remembered boiling the water, day after day, to make Kraft Dinner. Kraft Dinner and her mother on the phone, her voice tight, arranging another visit for Rachel with a useless school social worker, trying to find out the results for her learning disabilities test.
During that time, Genevieve took solace in God. A handsome man named Garry came to the door one Saturday morning with The Watchtower in hand, and, in short order, Genevieve saw the light. She began to go to meetings on Monday, Wednesday and Sunday at the Kingdom Hall, where Elder Garry and his fellow elders often gave beautiful, stern Bible talks about wickedness, goodness, paradise, Armageddon. Eliza and Rachel sat beside their mother, doodling on notepads, sucking on candies, and trying not to fidget. Dean categorically refused to visit the Kingdom Hall; he was already “lost to the world,” as Elder Garry said of those who were offered The Truth but turned it down.
Lost to the world. She secretly loved the phrase. How to choose between being Lost to the World and The Truth? The truth was depressing. It made her mother cry. Eliza received Genevieve’s confidences late at night, when no one else could hear. “Oh, Eliza, I’m so glad to be in The Truth now. Because I’ve met him. And he is a very…He’s so…persuasive. I can’t help myself,” Genevieve said. Eliza wasn’t entirely sure if her mother meant God or Garry. “But it’s wrong.” And her tears would begin.
If it was wrong, it couldn’t be God. But why was having dinner with Garry so wrong? What was he feeding her mother anyway?
Dean often said, sneeringly, “Elder Garry is just after one thing.” Eliza was too embarrassed to ask: What thing? It couldn’t be money because they never had any. Her mom’s pancakes? When Garry came for breakfast, he always said Genevieve was the best pancake-maker in the world.
One night, Genevieve whispered her good news to Eliza: Garry loved her. He had said the words. “He loves you, too, Eliza. And Rachel. And even Dean.” By that time, Dean
was sixteen, Eliza was almost twelve. She’d lied about her age and started working at McDonald’s to get out of going to the Kingdom Hall. Poor eight-year-old Rachel didn’t want to go, either, but Garry loved having her there. Genevieve confided, “He feels like he could really be a father to her.” On meeting nights, he usually drove them home and tucked Rachel into bed.
Soon after Garry’s declaration of love, Genevieve took a shift off from the hotel one Saturday morning to make the family a big breakfast. To the delight of her children, Garry was not invited. As she set the pancakes and bacon on the table, she told them she had an announcement to make. Uncharacteristically, they did not begin to fight over the food or compete for the syrup bottle. They just stared at her. She smiled bravely. “Garry has asked me to marry him. And I have said yes.” Rachel folded in on herself and started crying. Eliza shook her head, mouth open.
Only Dean could find words. He stood up from the table. “If you marry that fucker, I’ll kill him with my bare hands.” He raised his future murder weapons, showing her how large and calloused they were. He’d been doing the grunt work on construction sites for a whole year; he was extremely strong. “I’m not kidding, Mom. That guy is a creep. I’ll kill him. I’m only sixteen. I won’t be in jail for that long. It would be worth it.” Then he left the house, calmly, like an adult. He didn’t even slam the door.
So. Their mother left The Truth and became lost to the world again. It was a relief. Rachel started reading. Two years of night school and computer courses later, Genevieve was offered an excellent position with the Calgary Police Department as a 911 operator. The shift work was exhausting but she was good at her job; she had a knack for dealing with tragedy. Eliza flipped burgers, finished high school, became a line cook, started university (wondering: Was it the Jehovah’s Witnesses who gave her an interest in dead languages, metaphor and literature in general?) and graduated to sous-chef. Dean continued to work at both legal and illegal trades and ingested a copious amount of drugs. After high school, Rachel did a criminology degree, trained for the RCMP and became a forensic investigator, mostly of sexual crimes against children. She was the funniest person Eliza knew, and the most outraged.
The Change Room Page 4