Missed Her, page 5
“He was the sweetest fucking kid in the world. Your little friend in that story reminded me of James. There were five of us kids, but he was always my mom’s favourite. The old man blamed her, said she babied him, but we all knew he was just born like that. That was just who he always was.” He cleared his throat and wiped his eyes on the hair on the back of his hands. Looked a bit sheepish all of a sudden. “Anyways, just wanted to thank you for that. Good stuff.”
Then he shook my hand and was gone. I’ve never forgotten him, and I imagine him standing behind me whenever I find myself scared of the next story I am about to tell, or afraid of the people I’m about to tell it to.
Last week I walked into a classroom at the college in Powell River, to tell stories to a bunch of Adult Education students. Working-class town, working-class guys all lined up in the back row. I found myself wishing with my whole heart I had not chosen to wear a paisley dress shirt that morning. What was I thinking?
Then I took a deep breath and told them a story. I started with the one about my dad. The one where I had almost given up wishing he would quit drinking, but then one day he did. Afterward, this guy with biceps the size of my thighs came up and thanked me. He had sleeve tattoos and could barely squeeze his muscles into his white Stanfield crewneck.
“I really liked the one about your dad,” he explained. “I could totally relate to him. I used to be a welder, too.”
Gifted
I finally got my stuff out of storage and went through it all. There was the usual garbage bag full of clothes I wouldn’t wear again and didn’t miss, and I bundled them all up to donate them.
It was one of those days: take out the recycling, pay the bills, mail stuff, buy dish soap, drop off the old clothes. I took the little dog with me. He is friendly, and I am prone to chatting up strangers, so it wasn’t unusual when halfway up the block the lady bent down to pet the dog and the two of us got to talking.
“He’s so sweet, and friendly.”
I nodded proudly. He is. He had flopped his head over her bent knee, and was reaching for her hand with his face.
“It’s like he can tell I was having a shitty day. That I needed a bit of love.”
This was all I needed.
“Actually,” I told her, puffing up a little, “he is a gifted therapeutic pet.”
He blinked at her with his watery brown eyes. I continued.
“My puppy-sitter takes him to visit her father with Alzheimer’s. That’s how we found out about his natural ability to comfort the sick. And then he started visiting her mom, who has since passed away. The nurses take him around to visit the other patients. They say he’s better than the trained animals that come in. He was always good at knowing when someone wasn’t feeling very well. He’s extra sweet if you are sick.”
He had his forehead pressed into her thigh now, his tail wagging slowly, the rest of him motionless.
The woman raised her face up at me, and that was the first time I really looked at her. Her hair was cropped close to her scalp, and she had amazingly beautiful big eyes, which were shining full of tears. She let out a long breath.
“You should take him into the cancer ward. They would love him there. He really is a special guy. They could use him there. I should know.” Her eyes met mine. “I’ve just come through my third battle with cancer myself.”
I knew I had seen that hair cut before. My friend Carole from Ottawa, most recently. The short short hair of a woman who recently had none at all. Not short hair like mine. Short hair like hers. Short hair that her girlfriends try to tell her just makes her look younger, like a super-model, or that gymnast in the seventies, what was her name again? Short hair that is growing in a different colour, so much more wiry, or curlier than her hair used to be, before all … this.
I didn’t say much, just mumbled something awkward around the lump in my throat.
She stood up, wiping her hands on her slacks. Then she pulled a giant ring of keys out of her handbag and opened the trunk of her car. She hauled out a vacuum cleaner and turned again to grab milk crate full of cleaning supplies. I stumbled over the dog’s leash to help her with the crate, but she beat me to it. Pine Sol, ammonia, bleach, Pledge, Windex, stuff like that.
“You moving in here?” I motioned to the empty house on the other side of the hedge that bordered the sidewalk where we were standing.
She shook her head. “I run a housecleaning business. The real estate agent hired me to do this one.”
She exhaled and dropped the crate of cleaning supplies next to my boots, then turned to grab a Home Depot bag full of what looked like paper towels and rags. I looked down at all those chemicals.
“You’re back at work already?” It sounded stupid, even leaving my lips.
She smiled, shrugged a little. “A girl’s gotta work. Cancer doesn’t care about who pays the rent.”
The little dog was wagging around her feet now, flipping his ears back like he does, looking for some more pats. I pulled on the leash so she didn’t trip over him. I told her it was nice to talk to her, wished her best of luck.
We exchanged a few more niceties, told each other to have good days, then she bent down to pick up her vacuum cleaner. I got about ten steps down the sidewalk before I stopped and turned.
“You wouldn’t happen to know anyone who needs some clothes, would you? They’re all clean and in good condition.”
Her eyes glanced up and down my frame. “They would probably be too big for me.”
“They’re all men’s clothes,” I told her. “Shirts and ties and stuff. I just thought maybe you might know someone who could use them.”
Her eyes lit up. “Someone like my nineteen-year-old transgendered son?” She reached out her thin arm to take the bag from me.
I smiled wide. “Yeah, someone just like that.”
She opened the bag, and closed it again. “He just came out to me recently. He will love this. We can’t afford a whole new wardrobe right now.”
“Tell him someone named Ivan Coyote gave them to him.”
“I thought that was you.” She was beaming now. “He loves your books. I didn’t ask because I didn’t want to seem weird.”
I didn’t hug her because I didn’t want to seem weird, I thought, but said nothing.
“Tell him hello for me. I’m not sure if any of them are cool enough for a nineteen-year-old, but tell him hey for me anyways.”
“It was a pleasure to meet you.” She started to shake my hand, and then pulled me into a stiff, awkward hug. She smelled like something vaguely lavender. “You take good care of yourself.”
“You too. You take care.”
Me and the little dog left her there, dragging her cleaning stuff up the stairs of the refurbished heritage house that wasn’t hers. There was so much I wanted to say to her, but I couldn’t speak.
So I wrote it down.
Talking to Strangers
I was on tour again, just landed in Calgary, and more than a little jetlagged. I heaved my suitcase into the trunk of the cab and slid into the back without even looking at the driver. I laid my head on the leather seat and closed my eyes, which were burning and felt like they had sawdust in them.
“Beautiful day today, right?” the driver broke the silence. His voice was soft and syrupy, supple.
I sighed and opened my eyes. He was right. It really was a beautiful spring day on the prairies. I hadn’t even noticed. I sat up and passed him the printed out e-mail with the name and address of the hotel on it. He reached over his shoulder into the backseat, and when he gently took the paper, I noticed his hands. His fingers were remarkably long and slender, poised like praying mantises. His nails were a little bit too long, and buffed to a high gloss. They almost looked like they had a coat of clear polish on them. Gold pinky ring with a sapphire in it. I’m not one for stereotypes, but the man had gay hands. I followed his gay hands up his arms and found his face in the rear-view mirror. His facial hair was immaculately trimmed, and his eyes sparkled velvet and brown from under caterpillar eyelashes. Handsome fellow. His eyes met mine and he raised one eyebrow, almost flirting.
“You travelling alone?”
I nodded. We exchanged the usual: no, I didn’t live here, yes, I was here on business. He was almost finished for the day, he had started at four a.m., no, he didn’t mind the long days, it left him time to study at night and take classes, University of Alberta, kinesiology. That kind of thing.
Then he cleared his throat. Asked me if I was married. I told him no. His eyes caught mine again in the rear-view mirror for a little too long, and he squinted at me for a second, like he was pondering something unsaid.
“Can I ask you something personal? Something I’ve always wondered about you people?”
I shrugged a bit, told him sure, he could ask, but I couldn’t speak for all of us, I was only the one person, couldn’t really speak for the many. I wasn’t quite sure if he thought I was a dyke, or if he was asking me to comment on behalf of gay men everywhere, but I figured the answer to this query might be found in his question, so I told him go ahead, ask, and I would try to answer.
“Do you live alone?”
I told him yes, I did.
“Don’t you love your family?”
“Of course,” I told him. “But most of them live up north. I need to live here, in a bigger city, for work.”
“I live with my brother,” he nodded firmly. “And his wife and their two sons. Also the mother of my brother’s wife, and her sister, the great-aunt, I think you call it in English. It is very good for all of us. Especially my nephews. No daycare. My brother drives this taxi cab nights. And I am learning from the children how to be a father to my own.”
I nodded, and then asked the obvious. Was he married? He couldn’t have been older than twenty-five or so, and was kind of obviously at least a little bit gay, but it seemed like the polite thing to ask.
“My parents have arranged for me to be married in Pakistan this August. I will fly over and my wife will return to Canada with me.”
“Your fiancée lives in Pakistan? Do you get to see her much? That must be hard.”
He shook his head, smiling. “I haven’t seen her since we were four years old. But my mother sends me pictures. She is a very beautiful girl.”
“Do you love her?”
“She is a very beautiful girl,” he repeated.
I nodded. He was trying to understand my lifestyle, so the least I could do was return the courtesy.
He took another deep breath. “So, forgive me if this is a rude question, but don’t you think living alone without any family is a little bit selfish? And don’t you ever get lonely?”
“I get home to the North at least twice a year, sometimes more, and I talk on the phone to everyone all the time. In fact, I just talked to my grandmother for an hour while I was waiting for the plane in Ottawa. And yes, maybe living alone is a little bit selfish, but I’m a writer and work at home, and I need the solitude to get any work done.”
He nodded. “Your people, I’ve noticed, are often very creative. I get a lot of movie people in my taxi cab these days, one time a very big star. Fancy guy. Big tipper. Why are you all so creative?”
Again I told him that I couldn’t really speak for all of us, that I was only one person, and I wasn’t sure that there were any more creative types among us per capita than any other segment of the population, maybe just those of us he noticed, blah blah blah. He didn’t seem convinced by my half-assedly politically correct argument.
The cab pulled up in front of my hotel, and a gust of wind twirled a mini-cyclone of dust and bits of trash across the road in front of us.
He shivered a bit in the wind, wearing only a deep blue dress shirt. He gingerly placed my suitcase on the sidewalk, and turned to shake my hand. His palms were almost unnaturally soft. I thought about his wife. I thought about him. He blinked a few times, his giant eyelashes dusting his pretty boy cheeks.
“I want to thank you sincerely for answering all my questions. I hope you didn’t find me too rude. I’ve never met one of you that I felt I could ask before this, but you have very kind eyes, and I’ve always wondered these things about you people. About you white people.”
The Rest of Us
I got the call on a Sunday night. My gran was in the hospital, and the doctor had advised the family that it was time. Time to call everybody home.
I arrived bleary-eyed at the Whitehorse airport the next day. My mom and Aunt Nora were both there to meet me and my cousin Robert and his girlfriend. They looked so tired and worried; the skeleton was showing behind their faces, their eyes red-rimmed and puffy. They took us directly to the hospital, our suitcases stowed away in the trunk of the car.
I knew my gran wasn’t going to look good, and I thought I had steeled myself for the worst. Still, my heart stopped and dropped when I laid my eyes on the tiny shape of her, the outline of her hips and legs barely visible under the green sheets and blanket. Impossibly frail and little. Almost gone already, it seemed. I had promised myself I would be strong for my mom, that I wasn’t going to cry. So much for that.
“Talk to her,” my Uncle Dave said, waving two fingers at Robert and me. “The nurses say she can still hear us.”
And so we did. All afternoon we sat and talked. To her, to each other. Remember her bad cooking? Baloney roast? Boiled hamburger? Lemon hard cake, cousin Dan had dubbed her attempt at meringue. How she loved us all, no matter who we were, no matter what we did. I volunteered for night shift, and sat next to the laboured breathing shape of her with my two uncles, whispering stories through the dark to each other, into her ear, slipping our warm hands under the covers to grasp her limp, cold ones.
By early the next afternoon all of us were there. Five of her children, eight grandchildren, plus partners. I began to worry that we were pissing the nursing staff off a little, them trying to work around us, asking us to leave the room so they could change her sheets. Ten or fifteen of us at a time, filing like exhausted soldiers out into the hallway to stand around, teary-eyed and sometimes bickering. I asked one of the nurses if we were driving anyone nuts yet, wasn’t it hard trying to do her job with the whole lot of us underfoot? She shook her head and said no, that the First Nations people had taught the nursing staff what an extended family could really look like, and that it is often easier when the family is there to help keep an eye on a patient. She said that what was really hard was when someone was dying without anyone there at all. This choked me up a little, and she shoved a no-name box of Kleenex across the counter at me with a latex-gloved hand. She had said it out loud. The doctor was kind, and had talked around it. Don’t get your hopes up, she had said. We are keeping her comfortable, the doctor said. The doctor didn’t lie, but it was the nurse who actually said the words. My grandmother was dying.
Florence Amelia Mary Lawless Daws passed away a little after eleven a.m. on May 13, surrounded by seventeen members of her family. Our hands made a circle, all touching her tiny body as her chest rose and fell, and then stopped. I hesitate to say her death was beautiful, because it means I have to miss her now, but it was.
My family asked me to write and read her eulogy. Blessing from the family, the Catholics now call it. I call it what it is. Of course I said yes, I would be honoured, and I was.
I wrote about the values the tiny little Cockney/Irish/ Roma woman had lived and died by, and raised us all up to believe in. Love your family, work hard, save your money, have faith, and be grateful for what you have. I worked really hard on the eulogy. I wanted to do justice to her memory, to honour everything she was. There were over four hundred people at the service, and not a dry eye among them when I was finished.
Up at the graveyard, after the internment, I hugged strangers and shook hands. Suddenly I found myself surrounded by Catholic priests. They were being uncommonly nice to me, the queer granddaughter in the shirt and tie. Maybe they make special allowances in the case of a death in the family, I thought. Or maybe they were still hoping to save my soul. The bishop hugged me, and then held both of my hands in his too-soft ones.
“Excellent job, young man. Your grandmother would have been very proud of you today, son. Strong work, young fellow.”
My mother heard him too. I saw her freeze. Waiting.
“Thank you, Father,” I said. That was why he seemed to like me so much. He didn’t know who I really was.
The bishop caught up with me again at the reception, back at the funeral home. We were both leaned over the cheese platters, when he addressed me a second time.
“Once again, I must say, you are a gifted orator. A natural, even. Have you ever considered the priesthood?”
This time it was my Aunt Nora within direct earshot, and she stopped in mid-bite, half a baby carrot removed from her mouth and dropped on a small paper plate. Her eyes met mine, and she tried not to wince.
I took a deep breath. Thought about my beloved gran, about how much she loved the Church, and respected the bishop. He seemed like a nice enough guy.
I’m not going to lie and say that one hundred wise-ass quips didn’t run through my head and gather on my tongue. They did. But what counts is what I actually said.
“No Father, I have to admit, I have never considered the priesthood. But thank you again for the compliment.”
The bishop nodded, and everyone around us relaxed and resumed eating and talking.
I like to think my gran would have been real proud of me.
A Butch Roadmap
A while ago, I came upon an article in the online version of the LGBT newspaper Xtra! entitled “Winnipeg Pride wants parade to be ‘family friendly.’” In it, the then-chair of the previous year’s pride parade was quoted as saying, “We have to remember that this is a public event; part of the parade is to show people we’re not extremists.” When pressed to explain just what she meant by extremists, she responded, “Drag queens and butch women.” She then added it was important to show the people of Winnipeg that there are “mainstream” queer community members, too, like “lawyers and doctors.”
