The View From the Lane and Other Stories

by Deborah-Anne Tunney

  “So, how did you know that guy who called?”

  “We grew up in the same neighbourhood.”

  “And you’re going to meet him?” His look became intent and he held his fork over his plate, his foot bouncing on the brace of the chair beside him.

  “For a drink, and maybe dinner.”

  One of the scientists with a lab close to my office sat down in the chair beside Paul. “Well I hope I made the right choice with this roast pork,” he said. It was smothered by thick gravy that looked suspiciously like my soup.

  z

  A few nights later when I approached my old friend in the bar where we’d agreed to meet and he looked up from his drink, his expression was hooded and intense, as if I was a hunk of meat that had escaped, through folly or luck, the stab of his fork. I had only to see that expression once to know I would not meet him again. His self-congratulatory talk was suffocating and as I watched his mouth stretch into a wide smile and his eyes budge, I named him Toadhead. The next week he left roses with Irene, who brought them to my office when Paul was there and said, “I’m not really supposed to be a receptionist for personal deliveries, you know.”

  “What’s this? An admirer?” Paul said.

  “Oh God, it’s from Toadhead,” I said, opening the tiny envelope and reading the note, To our impossible union.

  “Toadhead? That’s what you call him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Nice.”

  “No, not really,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, I guess I thought he’d be smarter, I certainly thought he’d be kinder.” Paul was leaning against my desk, hitting his palm with a ruler, in feigned nonchalance.

  “So, what about you, any plans for the weekend?” I asked.

  “Karen has a hockey game but other than that I’m not sure. The usual I guess.”

  “I just wonder how that boy who’d been so funny could turn into such a jerk.”

  “What? Toadhead again?”

  “Yeah, I was just thinking.”

  “You do that all the time, off on another topic before I can follow.” But he was smiling and tapped my head with the ruler before leaving the office. Alone, I was left with the image of Toadhead, how when we left the bar to have dinner I looked down, saw his shoes and imagined the feet inside, fringed with crooked toes. He pulled my chair out and sat facing me. Perhaps the thought of his feet planted below us, flat as fish, or that I could still feel the grasp on my elbow as he steered me toward the table, spurred me, so that I said, “What the hell happened to you?”

  “I understand, you’re angry because I left you all those years ago,” he said. “I can understand that.” He lifted his hand to move my hair away from my face and I jerked back to avoid his touch.

  z

  When I went to see my mother at the nursing home the next day I told her about Toadhead to see if she remembered him and she said she recalled a boy who waited on the street for me, smoking cigarettes. “I thought you were too young for those shenanigans,” she said. I had made us tea and she was sitting in the lazy-boy chair where she often fell asleep watching television. “There were always kids around,” she said and then became thoughtful. “Oh, but you were the one, such a scamp.” She looked up, meeting my eyes, “And secretive, so secretive. I never knew what you were thinking.”

  z

  A cold March day, the year I was thirteen: I was in my bedroom and the boy who would become Toadhead started pitching rocks at my window. My mother called from the kitchen, “Amy, I think there’s someone outside who wants to see you.” I ran down the stairs and rushed to the front step, breathless to speak to him, to see what he was wearing and to hear what he would say. But today I wish I’d paused instead to look at my mother in the kitchen. Her dark hair would’ve been piled on her head and she’d be wearing an apron streaked with gravy over her skirt, having just arrived home from her job in an office downtown. And the kitchen, with its café curtains that she’d sewn, would have been warm with yellow light and smelled of the meatloaf she was cooking. If I had looked. If only I had looked. Her high heels were in the hallway and I kicked them out of the way to get to the door.

  z

  A month after meeting Toadhead there was a Christmas party at my office, and because I’d stayed to help with the clean up, I was one of the last to leave. There was still a sense of the forced gaiety of such an event and I could hear people in their offices, shutting down their computers and calling out their farewells. In the cafeteria, streamers swayed from the ceiling and the banner that stretched across the entrance drifted in a current of slow air. The hallway was dark and quiet, the rooms also, and despite how familiar those rooms were, they appeared in that moment to be foreign and brooding.

  The darkness of night pressed against the window, making it a black mirror where I could see the assortment of office furniture and equipment, the clock on the wall, and my own image sitting behind the desk. I looked up and saw Paul enter the room. Filing cabinets blocked my direct view, so that I could only see him in the dark of the window. We stared at each other without speaking, until a few moments later he said, “I love you, I have since the first moment I saw you.” He stared another moment while I stood, then he turned and left so that I was left to wonder if I’d imagined him there.

  His car was gone when I passed the parking lot on the way to the bus stop. On the ride home I leaned against the window as we drove through the bitter night, stopping at traffic lights and to let people on and off. When I left the bus and walked to my apartment it began to snow so that the streetlights above the sidewalk glowed like orbs of frost. When I entered my apartment I stood for a moment in the dark, my back against the door, the sounds of the street settling into the space before me. When I turned the lamps on, the room that I’d created with its white sofa, sheer curtains, red Oriental rug, leaped out and calmed me with its promise of home.

  z

  “So, what did you do?” my mother said. She was feeling well, alert and interested in my story. A Sunday afternoon, between Christmas and New Year’s, out her window cold stretched into the hard blue sky while the winter sun shone bright on the sill and wall behind her.

  “Nothing. I did nothing. And I haven’t seen him since.”

  “And what about that other guy, from the old neighbourhood?”

  Ah, yes, Toadhead. “Yeah, he’s gone.”

  At the end of the television show we were watching, when I got up to leave, she said, “I’ll go with you.” She pushed her walker before her, a folded cane and purse in its basket. “I’ll tell you something. I think you care for him, that Paul person. I always did,” she said at the door.

  “Really?” I said. “That’s good to know.” I leaned to kiss her goodbye, straightened. When had she become so small? Pulling my coat around me, the day brittle with cold, I turned to face the street and breath in the icy air. Houses with frosted windows huddled in rows, with smoke steaming up from their chimneys. A sudden gust of wind hit me and I knew, with the same force and spontaneity as that wind, what I would say to Paul on Monday morning and what it would feel like to sit before him in his office, quiet, watching his face cloud with worry and then smooth into a grin, full of a dangerous and expensive joy.

  Visitations

  Iturned ninety last July and in November I was forced—by my family, by the doctor at the hospital, by the social worker in her crowded office, and by the worst, the saddest of truths—to move from my apartment to a residence for the elderly. The day of the move was blistery cold and I saw in its bitterness, in the pale, absent sky, a cruel omen. From my first day here, I haven’t liked it and I haven’t liked Sue, the woman who runs the place, who told me I must join the other residents for meals, that I haven’t made an effort to adjust. I’ve adjusted enough in my life, I said. She folded her arms across her scrawny chest and said she woul
d have to speak to my family about this defiant attitude—as if they don’t already know.

  Tonight my youngest daughter Amy visited; she sat on the end of the bed, fanned herself and said the heat of my room was oppressive. She is in her early fifties, divorced almost a decade, and divides her life between working in a government office and living alone in an apartment on the opposite side of the canal to the neighbourhood where I grew up. I watched her leave, clutching her coat closed, bracing herself against the cold February night. At the glass doors of the main entrance I saw her cross the street to her car, then turn, hesitate and wave. I waved back, then pushed my walker along the hall, my purse and room key in its basket, and returned to my room. I was restless during her visit, opening dresser drawers and cupboards. “What do you want, Mom?” she asked following me, but I did not answer. It’s a good question though, what do I want?

  z

  It gets dark early these days, before dinner. I hate eating anyway. I hate looking around at the mass of us in the dining room, the walkers and wheelchairs lining the walls and tables, the stoop of heads over tasteless soups and mounds of food the consistency of porridge. The darkness at the window reflects the room back, showing an alternate, darker landscape where these rooms are locked in their routine of meals and bingo.

  When I lie in my room with my eyes closed, as I tend to do when I am not either eating or attending to my person, I return to the house on Nelson Street, where I lived as a child. I see the Sunday table set, a dinner of roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, roasted potatoes, and apple pies in the kitchen cooling for dessert. The smell of the food mingled with the smell of furniture polish and floor wax and mixed with noises from the roadway, or the conversations as members of my family took their seats. I was the youngest of four sisters and every night we’d sit in the same position around the dinner table. Closest to my father, sitting straight with wide shoulders was my oldest sister, Margaret, beside her Dorothy, who projected an aura of fragile grace, and beside me Rita, who was always distracted and usually speaking. On the other side of the table were three of my five brothers, who would take the opportunity of my father’s distraction to punch each other. Martin, the oldest boy still at home, worked for a company that made coffins. As a wedding gift he’d made me a cedar chest, and in the years to come when I’d see its bulky shape at the bottom of the basement stairs of the house where I lived with my own children, it would always remind me of a coffin and of Martin, long dead by that time. I kept the pale blue wedding gown my mother made in it and remember to this day the smell of mothballs when I lifted the lid. Where is it now? Amy cleared out my apartment when I was first in the hospital, but that chest had been long gone before I went there.

  1927. Ottawa. My mother at one end of the dinner table, my father at the other. I remember him on the street, his determined stride, the way he swung his walking stick, how proud he was and how inside him, like a tightly wound coil, was the deep and satisfied sense he held of himself. He was born in a time when roads were unpaved, when horse travel was common, and when streets were lit by kerosene, if at all. At the dinner table he and I were the quiet ones, the only family members who ate with an even pace, in the midst of the chattering crowd. Was it for this reason I was so unforgiving? My mother always considered him first and that expectation was passed on to his daughters. After I left home, I came to miss the velvet touch of her soft fingers on my skin as she’d fix my hem or straighten my collar and how she’d look at me closely and call me her ‘girly’ before I went out. But my father I remember preening before the mirror in the front hall, as I watched from the top of the stairs, my hand tightening on the rail.

  After my mother died and he remarried and moved to Florida, I was the only family member who refused to meet his new wife, to visit him and marvel at his routine of walking on the beach before breakfast, even at ninety. I did this for my mother, for the memories I had of her sitting at the end of the table during our dinners, listening with her head tilted, offering calm reassurance and sympathy. She had become a large woman and wore long dresses with lace down the front and on the sleeves and collar. It was her way of caring for each of us, humming while she baked in the kitchen, that I always wanted to give to my own children. But it was my father who I was most like, who I understood with an instinct that, in later years, marked me as irascible, and allowed me to recognize treachery, perhaps even appreciate it.

  The last evening I slept in my childhood house, the night before I married, alone in my small bedroom, I thought how now I would only be a visitor to those rooms. I did not know then, as I started out, that those rooms would be waiting for me to visit now, all these years later. But what good are these memories in the dark of my old age? Enough. I will turn on the television; the blur of faces, their gibberish, and my own inability to follow will fill these remaining moments before sleep overtakes me with its welcome amnesia.

  z

  Every death is a struggle lost. I heard these words, spoken by my sister Dorothy and as I lay alone pondering what they meant I saw her sitting in the reclining chair across the room. Somewhere in my mind I knew she’d been dead more than five years, and yet I also knew she was sitting quietly across from me. I accept such visitations these days, look forward to them even. We watched the television for a while and when the attendant came I thought she’d tell Dorothy to leave but she didn’t notice her.

  It was the Dorothy I knew when we were young, eighteen perhaps, dressed in a shift that our mother had made, her blonde hair pulled into a ponytail. She was so thin the armholes of her dress looped down five inches below her armpit and her long legs were bare. Once the TV was off and we were alone she spoke of her memories from our childhood. “You were Dad’s favourite,” she said in conclusion.

  “You’re crazy. We could barely stand each other.”

  “No, he used to watch you, praise you more than us. It was obvious.”

  She started to hum and I fell asleep to the sound. In the morning she was gone and the world was once again stark with sunlight when the morning attendant, a slight girl, no more than twenty, pushed the curtains open and said, “Good morning, June.”

  She helped me to the washroom. I’m slow now, I inch along, but I notice everything. In the washroom she bathed me, cleaned my soft skin, in places loose as dough, doused it with powder, and then brought me to the dining room for breakfast. I endure all this silently and feel like an old object, as most surely I am to these people hired to care for me. She walked back with me to my room where she propped me before the television. Another day to stack against all that have come before. I know there will not be many more to add. At times this thought leaves me weary and I push it aside but at other times, it is almost welcome.

  At the table where I take my meals there are three other women. We eat in a room of twenty or so tables the same as ours. Mostly it is silent as we eat, and the sound of our eating seems to mask the nearly hundred lives crowded into that room like birds weaving nests from our pasts, artists with our medium the years of our lives, the places we’ve lived, the families we’ve lived with, all those holidays and lost routines.

  Yesterday Sue came into the dining room, clapping her hands, “now, now, everyone, it’s Edgar’s birthday today; he’s ninety-seven.” Edgar was in a wheelchair, his head leaned to the left and back; he was drooling slightly. “Let’s sing, everyone, Happy Birthday. Come on: Hap-p-p-y Birth-d-a-y to you.” There was a mild response but most of us kept our heads down.

  A few minutes later Amy came into the room, breathing heavily from the cold. Each time she arrives it takes a bit longer to focus on her face and comprehend what she is saying, and I worry someday I will not recognize her. And yet it may be a relief, giving up this pretense of understanding, of living in the present. When she approached me in the dining room, I saw something in her walk that reminded me of the child she had been, in the back yard, practising her majorette routine, twisting the baton and swingin
g it above her head. It had shiny stars embedded in the wand and rubber bulbs at each end with plastic tassels. The pom-poms on her boots swung when she marched. She was earnest in her practice, ignoring the untidy yard as she jumped and slid and threw her arm over her head with the rotating baton. Watching her, everything else faded: the old chain link fences bent and broken, the weeds that overran the back path, the duplex facing our yard with its soiled veranda and awnings and the rusted cars in laneways. Against all that, she gleamed.

  Her mitts were sticking out of her purse, the toque pushed back. She opened her jacket and smiled. “Hi Mom,” she said and leaned down to kiss me.

  Her cheek was cold. “Another miserable day, I take it,” I said as she dragged a chair from the wall to sit beside me.

  “Yeah, bad. Work was crazy too; sorry I couldn’t get away sooner.”

  “Work,” I said, “where do you work now?” As soon as I’d asked her I remembered I’d asked her this before, possibly every time she’s mentioned work in the past year.

  “Agriculture, Mom,” it was the Mom that told me she’d noticed. Oh well, if that bothered her what would she think of Dorothy’s visits, or the other people from my past who casually drop by. “So, Mom, how are you feeling?” she asked.

  How am I feeling? In truth there is a change in my very bones, something wrong, an intrusion that will not leave, a haunting of sorts. I would explain it if I could, but it’s as if a numbing poison has filtered into my blood that at times leaves me etherized. I could have said this to her and seen her face grow blank and uncertain. I could have, but there’s no point; there’s nothing to be done. I know this too. Besides she doesn’t really want to know what is wrong, what can’t be fixed. She wants me back in an apron in that 1959 kitchen where she ate her breakfasts before school, or years later when she was upstairs and I was downstairs talking on the phone to one of my sisters, just as I would have liked my mother back at the head of that dinner table. “Fine,” I answered her.