Part 10 (2/2)
No patience remained in me after a day spent managing the sort of librarians who bring stereotypes to life. I called my mother. The old dial phone, how outrageously time-wasting! Two zeroes, a nine, three full rotations.
”You've called here twenty-three times.”
”h.e.l.lo, Lauren. How is Henry? How was your work today?”
Wozz. Her p.r.o.nunciation was off. Wobbly.
”Mother, are you all right?”
She cried.
She also cried when at UBC I quit history for electronic languages.
My father rea.s.sured her. ”Modern, precise. Like our Lauren.”
During childhood evenings when I played and he did crosswords, my mother talked with him while skimming French periodicals. Even in English she was good at anagrams. Or she'd read aloud, translating as she went. These exchanges grew to full converse, allusions, flirty disagreements, laughter-until they remembered their witness to intimacy. Sent to bed, I'd read. That's how I started with novels. Because of their war, my parents slept badly. I'd wake, sensing vacancy in the big bedroom, and from the stairs hear that companionable murmur in the kitchen. In three decades they never ran out of things to say.
Grand-mere's gallbladder surgery was on Remem-brance Day.
Always when I reached the hospital, the patient slept, Henry by her side with homework or a crossword. Later, I dropped him at soccer. Because of Tom & Jerry's, he and Jake weren't home till I'd had enough solitude to be sociable. All the machine's messages were real.
The rains began with The Progress of Love. Lesley's new therapist led her through rebirthing. Soon, weaning. Myrna's lover wanted to try bondage. Dared she? Everyone was supportive.
Andrea took a breath. ”Lauren, we all open up. Why won't you?”
A planned intervention, I could tell.
”Acting so superior, holding back,” said Lesley. Also, conceited.
Wilfully blind: Rosalind.
Emotionally unavailable, selfish, so left-brainy-Robin had resented me, apparently, ”Forever! Time you got the message.”
Such cliches. I went home raw. Another.
Necrotique, my mother termed her gallbladder. ”Henry can use that adjective at school.” From her surgeon she'd got her stones, forty small grey polyhedrons. ”For science cla.s.s.” She refused to recuperate with us, but minutes after we'd deposited her at home our phone rang.
”You may suffer this too, Lauren. At least there is a predisposition.”
Troubling, how soon that call came.
Her recovery seemed slow. She, subdued.
Jake got her housecleaner to come more often, Henry took extra trips to library and video-shop, I blended her grocery shopping with ours. She accepted the changes. Did they make her sad?
Henry reported, ”Grand-mere's scar was red like spaghetti. Now it's getting pink.”
”Madame showed you?”
”I hope you didn't ask her?”
”She showed me in the hospital!”
”At least she stayed awake, for you.”
Henry visibly decided to say, ”Grand-mere wasn't asleep. She's scared to be a burden, like her own mother. She hurt for ages before she told you guys. I sat with her.”
It came to me: if I went back to book club I could present her. Mother-daughter stuff to share. Kind of heavy. When the child becomes the parent? You know?
A most suitable issue. If.
Rea.s.suringly, when Private Lives opened my mother did her wave thing.
”In the movie I have seen the best. Why spoil the memory?” Nor would she see Equus. ”I have read this work. Kinky.” This came out Frenchly, quinqui. ”Unsuitable for Henry.”
My book club went. Jake reported they'd bought him a drink afterwards, praised his set. f.u.c.k those harpies. When Henry and I went, what impressed him was the animal. Jake's twisted aluminum strips only implied an airy shape, yet the tall creature was for sure a stallion, who bore his desperate rider powerfully.
So long ago.
Christmas approached. The Beta/VHS war was over; a new machine would gleam under our tree. I'd bought one for my mother too.
I asked her, ”How is it, having your cleaner twice a week?”
”Certainly the house looks better.”
Careful. ”I meant, how do you feel about it?”
A blank look. No words. No one-two. So much for open communication. I tried! For my report at book club. If.
I drove home fretting, was still fretting when Jake and Henry arrived.
Our son threw his pack on the floor, shouted, ”Why do we have to stay so long?”
”Son, you were glued to the TV.”
”TV's boring there. I see Curtis every day.”
”Stop, Henry! I'm tired.”
My parents, watching movies at home, got up to lower the volume if the characters shouted. To demand, to show anger-no, no, unless alone in my room. Grown up, I never swore in my mother's presence. Tried not to in Henry's. At work, such restraints don't apply. The Fiery Mouth of the Seventh Floor, that's me.
”Dad, I'm tired. Of him, of Melanie.”
As with any complex problem, first comes meditation, often conscious, sometimes (as here) not. Certainty fills the dark mind then. Even if the solution looks peculiar, correctness s.h.i.+nes. Cliches bounce up. How could I be so slow? Why didn't I read the code? Like other parents, Jake watched the practices. Like Melanie, lively and humorous on Mon Wed Thurs, plus weekends as league play moved on. A charming single mum. Sugary mugs, the boys absorbed. Not a reader. Not computer literate.
Jake and I soothed Henry. We ate, laughed, watched TV with him cosy in the middle.
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