Home from the Vinyl Cafe (22 page)

She is my mother, thought Morley. I am not supposed to look after her. She is supposed to look after me. Except Morley didn’t want a mother anymore. Bristled every time Helen told her how to do something or kissed her good night. And found it maddening when Helen wouldn’t accept her help.

“She wants to be independent,” said Dave. “She doesn’t understand dependency.”

That was what the car was all about. If Helen stopped driving, her world would become smaller. And it would never become larger again. Morley wanted her mother’s world to become more restricted. But she understood why it terrified Helen.

When Roy had given up driving, Morley had tried to persuade Helen to quit, too.

Helen had said, “How would we get around? I don’t walk well anymore. My back bothers me. I can’t walk and carry stuff at the same time.”

Dave said, “What about the subway?”

Helen said, “I can’t take the subway. All those stairs.”

Morley said, “Sell the car. With the money you save on insurance and gas and repairs, you could afford to take taxis anywhere.”

“How would we get to the supermarket?” said Helen. As if it couldn’t be done.

“Taxi,” said Dave.

“But how,” said Roy triumphantly, “would we get home?” To a man who used to run a mile every day to save a five-cent
streetcar fare, the idea of taking two taxis in one day was unthinkable.

Helen stayed over at Morley and Dave’s on Friday night. After she helped with the dishes, she watched television.

“I saw a special on the invasion the other night,” she said again. “It’s so hard to believe it was only fifty years ago. Roy would have liked the show.”

It was two months later that Helen found the old clipping. She was in a sorting mode, going through some old papers, when she came across an announcement that someone had clipped from the police newsletter. At first it confused her. It said that her father had won the Policeman of the Month Award. But it wasn’t her father who had won that—it was Roy. She couldn’t make sense of the clipping. Had she gotten her father and her husband mixed up in her mind? She started to get scared. Then she saw the date on the clipping. April 1912. She suddenly understood that both her father and Roy must have won the same award, at different times. She remembered when Roy had won. They had gone out to dinner at a restaurant, and a man had taken their picture at their table. She wondered what had happened to the photo. God, she wished Roy were here. She wanted him to know this. She wished they could tell her father. She looked at the clipping again and felt her heart sink. There was no one left to tell. No one who would appreciate it. Anyone who knew her father would know what a thrill it would have given him to know this. He was so proud when Roy had joined the force. She thought, I hope he knows. She thought, I hope he and Roy both know. She started to cry. She thought, I wish I had someone to tell.

-----

She phoned Morley and said, “Can I come over? I have something I want to show you.”

She didn’t say what it was.

It was four o’clock.

The early-spring sun was low in the sky. As she turned west onto Roxborough, she squinted and reached for the visor. When she came to the crosswalk, the sun was still in her eyes, and she didn’t see the man step off the sidewalk, his arm extended. Only heard the sickening thump when she hit him. Only saw him lying in a heap on the road in the rearview mirror. She stopped the car and struggled with the seat belt and ran back to help him, but some young men had appeared from somewhere and pushed her away and said, “We don’t need you here.” She felt sick. She felt faint. She went back to her car and started to cry, and a nice woman came and sat beside her. She said, “Could I call someone for you?” Helen said, “No, it’s okay.” The woman stayed with her until the police came. Helen told her the story of the clipping. Told her how both her husband and her father had won the same police award and that neither of them knew it. All the time she kept twisting in her seat, trying to see the man. Wishing he would sit up. She started to shake when she saw them take him away in an ambulance. A policeman came over, and she said, “My husband was a policeman. Is the man all right?” The policeman didn’t know. He said he wasn’t going to take her license. He said she might have to take the test again.

She made herself drive to Morley’s. After dinner Dave phoned all the hospitals, and they said there had been no serious accidents. That gave her hope.

She stayed two days. She fussed a little in the kitchen, but mostly, she watched television. She didn’t talk a lot.

“I’m worried,” said Morley.

“She’ll be okay,” said Dave.

On Wednesday, when Dave came home from work, Helen had gone home.

“She left this afternoon,” said Morley. “She came down after lunch and said she had to get going.”

“Did you drive her?” said Dave.

“She drove herself.”

“Huh. I didn’t think you’d let her.”

“She said she was scared to drive. Then she said, ‘But old age isn’t for sissies.’ What could I say to that, Dave?”

               
T
he fact that he hated his niece, and had from the moment he met her, bothered Dave. He felt it was wrong to dislike, let alone loathe, a thing that stood no taller than three feet; and in this case, because the thing was his sister’s child, he felt it was shameful. But he loathed Margot, and he had loathed her since she was four years old.

That was when they first met. She was walking down the arrivals corridor at the airport, holding a white vinyl purse in one hand and a large doll in the other. Annie had broken into a broad, toothy grin when she spotted her brother. She dropped her suitcase and held out her arms.

“It’s so good to see you,” she said.

Dave had hugged his sister, and then he had bent down, with love in his heart, and smiled at Margot. But before he could say anything, she said, “You’re late. We’ve been waiting. You were supposed to be here to meet us.”

Annie had left her husband, whose name Dave always had difficulty recalling: Peter? Paul? It was one of the disciples—Matthew.
Matt
. Annie had left Matt that spring and was bringing Margot to Dave’s for Easter.

They had stayed a week.

“We should have done this years ago,” Annie said. “It’s good to see her with the kids. It’s important.”

Margot tagged around Sam and Stephanie like a pet. Margot
and her doll. The kind with the string in the back that you could pull when you wanted it to talk. A Chatty Cathy.

“Have you noticed,” Dave said to Morley at the end of the first night, “how the doll is always interrupting me?”

They would be drinking coffee in the kitchen, talking, doing the dishes, and Dave would say something, and the doll would jump in: “You could feed me now. Oh, I love you
soooo
much.”

He hated the doll’s whiny voice. And he hated everything it had to say—eighteen different statements. He knew them by heart by the end of day two.

“
Ohhhhhhh
,” he said to Morley as they went to bed. “I love you
soooo
much.”

The summer he was seven, Dave sneaked one of Annie’s dolls outside on a Saturday afternoon and sat it in the middle of the sidewalk in front of their house. Then he got his sister’s tricycle and took a run at the doll from down the street. There was such a satisfying crunch that he set up the doll again and then again, until it was first a collection of limbs and finally just a pile of plastic. Unable to stop himself, he went upstairs and collected an armful of her dolls and began running over them, one by one. When Annie saw what he was doing, she started to cry hysterically. He calmed her down and convinced her to join in. “You can be the nurse,” he said. She was four. He had her stand on the lawn and throw her dolls in front of his bike as he flew by. “As if they jumped,” he said.

As he was putting the car in the garage, Dave imagined running over the Chatty Cathy in the driveway. “
Oh
,” he said softly, “I’m
soooo
sorry.”

The next time Dave saw Margot, she was six. He’d been in Halifax at a convention. He had brought Margot a Barbie doll. He wanted to make up.

“Thank you, Uncle Dave,” she said flatly.

But she didn’t play with the Barbie.

“She’s off dolls,” said Annie.

Margot didn’t watch television, either. Or do anything Dave’s kids did.

“It’s all dumb programs,” said Margot when Dave asked about her favorite show.

After dinner she was doing schoolwork. She looked at Dave and said, “Why is the sky blue?” When Dave said he wasn’t sure, she rolled her eyes and disappeared into her bedroom.

“It’s okay,” said Annie. “She can look it up.”

An hour later, Margot was out again.

“Uncle Dave,” she said, “how many moons does Jupiter have?” Dave was sure she already knew the answer. It felt as if she was tormenting him.

He stayed three days.

He was determined not to leave without breaking through.

As he was going, he hugged Annie and then picked up Margot by her wrists.

“I’m getting on an airplane,” he said, spinning Margot around and around.

“Put me down,” screamed Margot.

But Dave kept spinning, making airplane noises, Margot flying around parallel to the floor until her foot smacked the kitchen table and she yelped with pain.

He stopped turning and set her down. She cried, “I hate you,” and then turned to run. But she was so dizzy that she hit the kitchen counter with her forehead and fell down.

They were supposed to come with him to the airport.

“I’ll just go,” said Dave. “I’ll go. You stay.”

“What?” said Annie. Margot was screaming. Dave didn’t bother to repeat himself.

At Christmas, Annie wrote that she was going to France for the summer. She had a six-week tour with a Gaelic group.

Morley said, “Why don’t we take Margot? Give Annie some time off.”

Annie wrote back in a week.
Are you sure?

Margot arrived on July 1. She flew from Halifax by herself.

“You wouldn’t let
me
fly to Halifax alone,” said Stephanie to Dave as they drove to the airport.

Margot, who was now ten, arrived sullen and grumpy.