The Journey Prize Stories 24 (20 page)

The Abbots’ house, if not actually under construction, was primitively open concept. An interior wall had been partially demolished, plaster-and-planking waiting by for the insertion of those gothic windows, and the place had the air generally of a workshop or folk art
atelier
. There was no real distinction, say, between Kitchen and Bedroom, where September Dawn had forgotten three dinner bowls on a bedside table, or Painting Studio and Bathroom, where a collection of unframed canvases were furled and stored in the plunger stand beside the toilet. When we delivered the evening meal to Mr. Abbot in his garage workroom, it was not a shocker for Uncle Lorne and I to pass a salamander’s terrarium given pride-of-place in the middle of the dining room table, or to find the back porch steps littered with yarn-and-stick God’s Eyes and covered in sundry books, where, for example,
Harry the Dirty Dog
, a long-overdue library book, competed for stair space with two hardcover copies of
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance –
an apt combination, as the day would have it. For Mr. Abbot, wispy in a plaid shirt, wide-wale brown corduroy trousers, and Wallabee shoes, was working on cleaning and reassembling the Honda Black Bomber he and Mrs. Abbot had ridden to Canada six years before. But, even to me, it looked like a never-ending side project, with all those parts and pieces lying on the floor and work table, sacred relics of their fourteen-hundred-mile pilgrimage across the Allegheny and Appalachian mountains.
But, as a single moth sputtered against the swaying light bulb that hung from the garage ceiling, shadows forming and reforming under Mr. Abbot’s eyebrows, I remember shivering with an augur of different days to come as Uncle Lorne, placing the bowl of zucchini stew on the plywood work table, asked in an unusually clear and respectful voice if Mr. Abbot might like some help repairing the motorcycle.

Godspell
in our town was an event, a portent, an advent of the Sixties a few years after the decade had passed. Stages in Halifax were mostly determined by Noel Coward and George Bernard Shaw and, as my mother called them, “these jeezly Agatha Christie adaptations.” My mother’s loathing was a byproduct of her rising animosity for Dawson Redstone, the artistic director of Neptune Theatre, a cunning Yorkshireman from whom she got, or sometimes didn’t get, parts in plays. But these pommy, cobwebby dramatic choices faded into the shadows beside the bright lights of
Hair
and
Jesus Christ Superstar
and
Godspell
. My mother was forbidden to audition for
Hair
. Regardless of the purity of the work’s vision, my father thought it professionally questionable to pursue a situation whereby a client might hire a lawyer in the morning only to see that same lawyer’s wife “flouncing naked downstage” later that night. A deepening feud with Dawson Redstone precluded involvement in
Superstar
. But
Godspell
, the Broadway soundtrack for which was rarely off our living room turntable, set off my mother’s sense of possibility and vocation. Now in the newsreels of my mind, my father often appears in black and white. There he is in skinny suit and tie, holding a swaddled
Carolyn for her christening photo. Or there he is in a formal, grey-toned studio portrait to mark his appointment to Queen’s Counsel. Or there he is in a white-bordered snapshot where he seems to be giving the toast to the bride in the bigger dining room at the Waegwoltic Club. But the images of the 1970s were suddenly free of borders and crowded instead with bright instamatic colours – just as the designs of the day were crowded with starbursts and poppies and flowers. My father’s concession to this freedom was to grow for a few months frizzly sideburns, and to acquire, while on a vacation in Antigua, an absurdly speckled batik sports jacket that he was permitted to wear in continental North America exactly once. But my mother’s response was manifold. My mother came of age in the 1950s – when Doris Day was the very model of the modern wife-and-mother. When a social situation required my mother to be on her best behaviour, she went first to a Doris Day routine. She twinkled with good humour, good will, and good grace – with what a young woman thought was pleasantly expected of her in Polite Society. There was a pressure of unsaid opinion, yes, most often released in the steam of an awkward pause or an abrupt turn in topic. This implied what was thought but was never directly stated, so, moving on, no one need feel embarrassed. My sister, Faith, thinking later on this distillation process, would say, “You could never say anything bad with those ladies but the truth would always come out in a kind of backhanded compliment – making everyone feel weird and uncomfortable anyway.” Now my mother, after managing five pregnancies and six children, more than once blew a gasket. “Motherhood sucks,” was her post-partum remark when bringing home a final baby from the Grace Maternity. But her
policy in public – in her mind – was always on the safe side of convention. She was a 1950s mom stranded in the 1970s. But meeting Vivien Abbot (and to a lesser extent another woman, Madge Wicker, who lies outside the purview of this current history), changed my mother, adjusted her understanding, and moved her to consider new strategies altogether. Why should she have dinner prepared every night at six o’clock – hurrying home to float olives and sliced radishes in a cut-glass water dish? Why should she be the one to ferry the kids to gymnastics and piano and basketball? There was an informal Sunday drop-in session at the Abbots. With
Godspell
up and running, Mom began attending what Gregor Burr, a colleague of my father, would describe as “some leftist, radical women’s lib bullshit.” How much value my mother saw in Vivien Abbot’s persevering logic and fair-mindedness I don’t know – but these meetings appealed to something not yet fully formed in her character and my mother, who for various reasons was always looking for the other half of her personality anyway, began not only to question the assumptions and conditions of her life – but to cast around for a means to transform them.

All of this belonged, of course, to the doings of the adult world – a parallel universe a ten-year-old boy did his best to disregard. I kept to my crafts and sullen arts – stayed on the watch for super-villains, mutant zombies, alien invaders – mostly on the lookout for radioactive spiders and the remains of the intergalactic space pod that had brought me here from some distant, red-sunned planet. Charging recklessly down the basement stairs, I touched only the steps that didn’t squeak. This
meant leaping the bottom three stairs and immediately somersaulting – purely as a means to dissipate the tremendous shock of impact. This feat accomplished, I swung my hand into the darkness of the rec room – not wanting to be surprised by enemy operatives – and found the wall switch and flicked on the overhead light. Satisfied I was alone, I turned the television on and, in a show of private athleticism, jumped backward into the wicker armchair. There settled, I began to consider my future with the cast of the PBS series
Zoom
. They were not the Justice League, true, but there was a costume of a sort (a horizontally striped crewneck sweater and bare feet) and one did have to bring to the side one’s own signature power, witness Bernadette’s arm-swinging thaumaturgy. My musings were interrupted by my sister Bonnie. She stood between me and the glowing television, portentously flicking the pull tab on an unopened can of Fresca.

“What are you doing?” I asked. “I said ‘reserve.’ And I’m sitting down.”

“You can’t watch TV right now. You have to water the ficus.”

“What ficus?”

“If you don’t water the ficus, it will die. And you’re supposed to fill the humidifiers. Mom said.”

“She’s not home.”

“She will be. She’s coming home for the family meeting.”

I said I didn’t know about any family meeting, but even if I did, there was no knowing for certain if I would be there.

“Oh, you’ll be there,” said Bonnie. “Everyone has to be there.”

Continuing my own line of reasoning, I made a comment about people being surprised by what I might do. If, for
example, I decided I wished to become a professional decathlete and compete in the Montreal Olympics, then how did anyone know for sure I wouldn’t win the Montreal Olympics? Obviously they didn’t. I was unpredictable.

“Yeah, like you’ll go to the Olympics,” said Bonnie. “You can hardly run. You’ll probably never be able to run like a normal person. And you’re supposed to get a hip replacement when you’re thirty-five. That’s what the doctor told Mom. The orthopedic surgeon. So you probably won’t win anything.”

This interpretation did not exactly square with my own plans for myself and, in a gesture of correction, I slapped at the can of Fresca in Bonnie’s hand, sending it flying towards the wall where it collided with a metal bracket on the exposed underside of the folded-up Ping-Pong table. The can was now spinning on the carpet, a thin mist of Fresca spraying from a dented perforation in its centre.

Bonnie watched it for a moment, unmoved, then addressed me with matter-of-fact sangfroid. “You’re paying for that.”

I said I was not.

“You’re getting me a new one. You’re replacing it.”

I said that if I wanted, I could
run
to the store and replace it. I just didn’t happen to want to run to the store at the moment.

“You couldn’t run to the store.”

I said that of
course
I could run to the store – and back – and faster than she could ever dream of running to any store anywhere in all the worlds of the universe.

Bonnie considered her own thumbnail. “You want to make a bet?”

The proposed race is to The Little General – an ice cream dispensary and grocery store whose storefront is decorated with a bootleg Cap’n Crunch figure. It is on Spring Garden Road, not an insurmountable distance for me, though it does almost double my recent Wednesday runs. Bonnie takes off like a shot. I choose a steadier pace, knowing that these “rabbits,” as Uncle Lorne calls them, tend to peter out after the adrenalin subsides. But Bonnie does not peter out. She vanishes up Tower Road until her shirt is a speck of blue wavering into invisibility. By the time I arrive at the store counter, Bonnie has come and gone, a localized ache is persistent in my every other step, and I am unable to keep from limping. Trying to stay focused on the race, I draw on my reserves of berserker ferocity. It lasts two blocks before a searing pain escapes from my hip, as if my femur is beginning to crack. On College Street, I stop running and swear at the sky, repulsed by my inadequacy, crazed to be living on a planet where such injustice is allowed to occur. In a sulk, I do not finish the race, and a half hour later, I am walking up the back steps with a pint of chocolate milk and a
Haunted Tank
comic. The back door, strangely, is a quarter open, the hallway empty. On the kitchen table, double strangely, a mug of coffee is still steaming and so is the meatloaf-and-rice on the seven served plates. I call out for my mother, my sisters, my uncle, my voice wending its way from righteous confusion to plaintive unease as I traipse upstairs to a vacant second floor. In the bathroom I turn off a hot water tap. There is not a soul in the house and only now do I recall previous evenings when we have been directed to the Abbots’ for dinner. But ten minutes banging on both front and back doors rouse no light or movement. I am in the third stage of
panic, my worried brain flashing with paramedic scenarios, when our station wagon coasts up the street, everyone in it but me: the family meeting. Uncle Lorne, untangling himself from the back seat, is wildly overtaken by my youngest sister, Katie, in such a rush her yellow flip-flop is left on the grass behind her. “Oh, Aubrey!” she says, ecstatic with information. She hugs me around my waist, her head sideways at my elbow. “We’re moving. We’re getting a new house! It’s
so
big. And everyone gets their own room – even me!”