Cherry Bites (2 page)

By springtime I had a new roof courtesy of Roy and his boys. I chose red shingles to brighten the place up. I wanted something to show for the thousands of dollars I spent.

It was late May and I was sitting on a bench in Lyndale Drive Park thinking about my parents. Spike was on a long leash, sniffing around in the brush. I could smell the river, a wet catfish smell. The reedy scent reminded me of the one time I had caught a fish. It was a jackfish and Murray helped me undo it and set it free.

That simple unhooking of the fish was one of my favourite memories of my dad. He had been so gentle and sweet, talking to the fish the whole time, hoping we hadn’t done him any harm. Little fella, he called him. Maybe he knew it was a boy fish, but not likely. Those were just the words that fell out of his mouth. My dad didn’t go fishing again after that day and neither did I. I hadn’t known till then about hurting the fish. Maybe it hadn’t really sunk in with Murray till then either.

I miss my dad.

There’s no opportunity for me to miss my mother. Nora is always with me in my shame and my guilt. The oddest things remind me of her, even all these years later, when I am no longer young: red lipstick, the smell of it; crowded buses where people jostle against me with their hot breath; old women who forget to hold their knees together.

The first of the three events I mentioned that caused me to do some serious remembering happened on that May morning. It was the arrival of Nora’s journal in the mail.

I thought at first that Dougwell Jones had sent it to me. There was nothing else to think. He was my mother’s second husband and the keeper of her worldly goods. I didn’t know why he chose the spring of 1995 to send it. My life was going okay, with my work and my small circle of friends. I’d even been taking a night course in Italian cooking. I went with Hermione, my friend and haircutter, who has developed an interest in food preparation.

Maybe Dougwell had been going through the last of Nora’s things, clearing them out, and hadn’t been able to bring himself to either keep the journal or throw it away.

My mother died of bone cancer nine years ago in 1986. At the time of her death Dougwell sent me other stuff, like the deed for our house on Monck Avenue where I still live, like Murray’s all-important life insurance policy, things like that. He asked me if I wanted to come out west and go through Nora’s belongings. There might be a piece or two I would like to have. He wasn’t wrong in thinking I might still be needing something from my mother; he was trying to do the right thing. But I declined his invitation, told him I didn’t want anything else, no jewelry or personal items of any kind. I think he understood how I felt; he just didn’t know what to do with all her stuff.

Now the little green book sat closed on my dining room table. When Stan, my letter carrier, had handed me the parcel that morning I thought very little of it at first. It could have been anything: a coffee sample, perhaps, or a new detergent. But then I saw my name in big block letters.

There was no return address. The small parcel weighed heavily in my hands.

“Are you all right?” Stan asked. My apple tree reached out over the sidewalk and he stood inside the lower branches, camouflaged by blossoms.

Spike strained at his leash, which I had tied to the iron railing. He wanted to be nearer to Stan.

“What?” I said. “Oh, yes. Sorry. I just wasn’t expecting anything package-wise.”

Stan stepped out from under the tree. He had a cigarette in his mouth and the ash portion was longer than the rest of it. He approached my dog and stroked his silky brown ears.

“Hey, Spike,” he said.

“I’m sorry about the tree,” I said. “I’ll trim the branches back after the flowers are finished.”

“Don’t worry,” Stan said. “It’s a beautiful tree. Your birch is beautiful too.” He pointed to the weeping birch with his cigarette and the ash tipped off onto his shirt. He didn’t do anything about it. His hands were full of mail and Spike’s ears. He was juggling a few sets of flyers along with the real mail; they were sticking out of his bag here and there and he even had one set in the pocket of his unzipped spring jacket. They looked kind of precarious and I worried that they would spill out onto the ground. “You don’t see a lot of birches anymore,” he added.

“No?” I hadn’t noticed or thought about that.

“You look a little…stunned,” Stan said. “Maybe you should sit down.”

I sat on the front steps and stared at the small neat package. A brown paper bag had been sliced open and used as wrapping paper. It was fastened with masking tape.

Stan moved slowly away down the sidewalk. He looked back and smiled, squinting through the smoke.

I undid the brown paper. It was the first time I had ever seen Nora’s journal. I hadn’t known she’d kept such a thing. A familiar sick feeling swooped up into my throat. A family feeling. When I opened it to the first page I saw the word,
Thoughts,
written in her hand. Her penmanship was dramatic, with swirls and tails and curly bits. Where had she learned to write that way? They didn’t teach it at any school I ever attended. I was afraid to turn the page.

“Stan?” I called. He was leaving my neighbours’ yard now, sticking to the sidewalk between their neatly trimmed plum trees.

“Yes?” He turned and began walking back towards me. Pink petals covered his shoulders. Spike squealed with excitement.

“No! Stop!” I shouted. “Don’t waste your steps!”

Stan clutched the front of his shirt then and I thought I’d given him a heart attack.

“I just wanted to say to be sure to cut across the grass if you want to. You don’t have to stick to the sidewalk.”

“Oh.” He smiled. “Thanks. I just may take you up on that.” He shifted his bag on his shoulders. “I thought I must have given you the wrong mail or something. That’s usually why people call me back.”

“And if you ever need to get warm,” I went on, “or cool off, or if you need a drink of water or anything, please knock on my door.”

I wanted to say, if you have to go to the bathroom, but I thought that might sound as though I had been thinking about his penis.

“Thanks, Cherry. Thanks kindly. Actually, I’m going to be moving to a downtown route in a month or two, so I won’t have to worry about grass or those kinds of things.”

“Oh.” I felt unreasonably bereft. I had taken Stan for granted. “I’ll miss you,” I said. “We all will.” I gestured to include the neighbourhood.

“Thanks,” he said. “The mail’s heavier downtown but you don’t have to carry it as far or do so much walking.”

I didn’t want Stan to go. He had been my mailman for several years. It had taken me till I was never going to see him again to offer him anything.

“And there’s more shelter from the weather,” he said.

“It makes sense, then,” I said. “Well, good for you.”

He gave a little salute and trudged away.

I watched till he had dropped the mail in Darius Widener’s box, two doors down. The sadness I felt in my chest was alarming. Maybe it was the timing of Stan’s announcement, when all those family feelings were creeping in.

Turning back to Nora’s journal, I flipped through it quickly so that I couldn’t focus on the words. There were dates on the right-hand corners of certain pages and I let myself zero in on those. They went all the way back to the late thirties when Nora was a young girl. And I saw that many of the pages contained few words, incomplete sentences, just, as the front page indicated, thoughts. There were some drawings, too, scattered throughout.

One line on its own page fastened itself in my view:

He seems so feeble.

The date was 1960. She was talking about Pete.

I should never have started with the nickname; it made him seem less than he was. I remember our babysitter, Elaine, accidentally calling Pete Assface once, even though she was always yelling at me for saying it. We were playing in the living room and Pete was showing her a magic trick that involved a never-ending series of scarves.

“
Assface the Magnificent,”
Elaine announced in a loud voice and immediately covered her mouth with her hand. It had just slipped out. She didn’t mean anything by it. She liked Pete, thought he was inventive. I laughed and she felt terrible.

Murray was shocked when he heard Elaine say it. He scolded us both, worried that the name would stick. I never heard her call him that again.

I called Pete Assface all the time.

That’s how the kids in the neighbourhood knew him for several years. The name spread quickly once it escaped our house and by the time he was in school, that was pretty much who he was.

I said I didn’t want this to be a story about blame, but I can’t help it. I blame myself for that.

He seems so feeble.

That was all I had managed of the journal so far. Even those few words seemed too much: Nora’s thoughts on Pete’s feebleness. I couldn’t look further. Not yet, anyway. I closed the book and took it into the house.

I didn’t know when I’d get to it again. The river seemed a better idea, with its muddy banks and water sounds.

My house is just a block and a half from the Red River. Filthy as it is, the river has always been a comfort to me. I walk beside it, along the path in Lyndale Drive Park.

The park didn’t used to have a name. It was just called “down by the river.” I remembered laughing with Joanne, when we were kids, because the city had decided to declare it a park. It made it too official, too public, for something that we owned.

We had shouted to kids on the other side of the river—boys too tiny to make out. We chose to make them handsome and worldly, superior to our own boys. And I guess they did the same with us. We would make dates with them and spend hours getting ready, washing our hair and choosing what to wear, only to shout at them for an hour or so, back and forth across the sluggish brown water of the Red. It didn’t take long to lose interest. There wasn’t much satisfaction in it and we knew better than to meet them up close. I guess we understood, deep down, how great the disappointment would be.

On windy days the water gets riled up and it’s easy to see how the force of the current could pull someone under. It happens every year. The Red River claims at least one life.

There is a marina across the way. Sometimes in the summer there are parties on the boats and again, in the old days, my friends and I would shout across, never with much success. These were older kids, or even adults, and we weren’t of much interest to them with our questions and comments: “So, are you guys drinking beer? We have cigarettes but no beer.” Those were the types of things we said. Very sophisticated.

The river freezes solid in winter, of course, which makes getting to the other side untroublesome, once the paths have been trampled down. It would have been simple to visit the tiny boys then, but in the winter they were never there. We tobogganed, a sport that scared me. For a while I assumed that that was how I was going to die, especially if Pete was with us, because he couldn’t see me. It would have been so easy for him to glide over me and drive a jagged piece of wood from a broken toboggan through my eye and into my brain.

I walked back home now, breathing in the scent of the plum and the cherry and the apple blossoms. Whatever Nora’s journal had to tell me, I wanted to believe I could take it.

Reading Nora’s journal was hard work. I took it in small portions, usually reserving a chunk of time for it in the late afternoon. I figured that way it would be too late for Nora’s words to colour my whole day but early enough that they wouldn’t keep me from sleep. It didn’t always work.

Thoughts
was a misleading title. There were facts and events and dates and times, descriptions of the weather. Codes and secret words for Nora’s eyes alone. And thoughts, too.

Another reason for reading it in the late afternoon was that I could accompany it with a drink: gin and tonic with a squeeze of lime.

I didn’t always follow along chronologically. Something, maybe impatience or fear, maybe both, caused me to leap ahead, then back again, starving for pieces of my mother and then wishing I had never seen her face.

The day after Stan dropped it off, I read this:

July, 1937.

Mr. Trent had his men friends over for cards tonight. Jack Logan, Herb Howland, and Darcy Root. I don’t think Darcy is a man at all, but she’s the biggest and scares me the most. They played on the vranda because it was so hot. Luce served them whiskey and pikkled eggs. Darcy touched Luce on the behind. Who do you like the best? she said and all the men laughed. Luce turned red as blood.

Nora would have been nine.

My thoughts wandered to a morning long ago when I was alone in the kitchen with my parents. I was eating white toast with grape jelly and peanut butter; my dad was eating a soft-boiled egg from an eggcup; Nora was drinking instant coffee. Pete must have been getting washed or dressed, or maybe he was practising card tricks in his room.

“Who do you like best, Pete or me?” I asked.

The radio was tuned to
CKRC
and Ricky Nelson was singing “Poor Little Fool.”

Murray got up from his chair and put his arms around me. “We more than like you, Cherry. We love you to pieces and we love you both exactly the same amount.”

Nora got up and threw the dregs of her coffee down the sink. “Of course we do,” she said, as if it went without saying. She didn’t even look at me.

I’ve come to know that parents are usually lying when they say that they love their kids equally. They have favourites and it’s a lie you can’t blame them for. Anyway, I knew Murray loved me best, though he loved Pete too. I suspected that Nora loved no one. For as long as my dad lasted, I did okay. He took care of all of us.

Sometimes I think everything would have been different if Murray hadn’t died when he did, if he had lived on.

And the way it happened was hard on us, Pete and me. We were too young for that kind of shock. I was nine and Pete was six.

Murray had been looking tired, his features blurry, lost in the greyness of his face. When he came home from school at around 4:30 he would usually lie down on the Toronto couch for a short nap before supper. He always placed a little cushion on his chest. I guess it was his version of a teddy bear.

One Friday after school I went into the living room to watch my dad sleep. I know it was a Friday because I had Explorers after supper and we were eating early because of me. Explorers was a group at the United Church for girls who weren’t old enough for
CGIT
—Canadian Girls in Training.

“In training for what?” our boys asked us, later, when we were in
CGIT
. We always called the boys from school
our boys
as though they belonged to us. They did in a way; we were all they had for girls at that young stage of our lives.

“To be spies,” we said, “in training to be spies, like Mata Hari, only a million times more beautiful.”

“Hardy har har har,” they shouted and pelted us with snowballs as we ran shrieking down the lane.

Anyway, that Friday before supper I watched my dad sleep. I admired his snores and the way he could drop off in a matter of seconds. He was an expert napper.

He didn’t have the cushion on his chest that Friday, so I placed it there for him, as gently as I could. His eyes opened when I did this and he smiled and removed it.

“Thanks, Cherry, honey, but the cushion feels kind of heavy on my chest these days.”

That scared me a little, but not too much. I was in grade four by then; Pete was in grade one. Dads of kids that age didn’t die. Sometimes they disappeared. There were two kids at school that I knew of whose dads weren’t around. Joanne and I suspected something sinister, like divorce or desertion.

But no one I knew then had a dad who died.

Except us.

It was one week later exactly, a Friday in early May. The crocuses were up in the yard, but not yet blooming. Spring seemed late in coming that year or maybe I was more impatient than usual.

I was wearing my Explorer uniform, which I put on before supper so I would be ready to head out as soon as I finished dessert and brushed my teeth.

Apple crisp was on the menu that night. It was Murray’s favourite, not mine. I preferred blueberry or rhubarb crisp but it was too early in the season for either of those. Nora never put enough topping on the dessert, enough brown sugar and butter. That was the best part. I told her a thousand times. It seemed to me her heart was never in her cooking.

She was in the kitchen, pulling a salmon loaf out of the oven when she told me to wake up my dad and tell Pete to wash his hands. I was tempted just to yell out their names from where I stood next to her, there by the stove, but I knew that would infuriate her. Sometimes that was what I wanted more than anything, but not on that particular day. I didn’t always feel strong enough for Nora’s furies.

When I entered the living room Pete was on the rug in the middle of the floor playing with his Tinkertoys. He was building a space ship. He should have been on bare floor. The brown rug with its soft worms interfered with his progress.

This was before shag carpets. We had what must have been the precursor: a thin rug with inch long protuberances throughout. There was space between them and they were limp, like night crawlers. Nothing held the rug in place; there was no underlay like at Joanne’s house where everything seemed more civilized, more modern. I would take runs at the rug early on Saturday mornings and slide from one end of the living room to the other. I had to move a coffee table and a stool to do this and it drove Nora to distraction but it was one of my favourite games. It would have been more fun if my brother had joined in, but that was next to impossible considering the state of our relationship.

“Wash your hands, Pete,” I said.

He could hear me; he just appeared not to see me and seldom spoke in my presence. So far he had never spoken directly to me.

Carefully, he fastened one more piece to the space ship and then he stood up and left the room.

I moved to touch my dad’s arm. The first thing I noticed was that once again, he napped without his cushion. It lay propped up between him and the wall. His right arm reached across his chest touching his left one.

Then I noticed the smell of pee. I wondered if Pete had taken a leak in amongst the worms of the rug or even if I had wet my pants inside my crisp Explorer uniform. Wild thoughts: we were both long past that. And then I saw that my dad’s eyelids were part way open, but that he wasn’t awake.

When I touched his skin it was warm. I knelt beside him, but I couldn’t, no matter how hard I looked, see the rise and fall of his chest.

“Dad?” I whispered.

I didn’t tell him that supper was ready.

“Mum!” I screamed and a terrible clatter exploded from the kitchen.

He wasn’t dead when I first walked in the room. The life left him in the few seconds that I stood there looking at my brother. I know that. For a long time I tortured myself with the thought that if I’d come sooner, I could have saved him somehow.

Pete didn’t seem to have noticed anything. He was focussed on his Tinkertoys. It was hard for me, to think that my dad couldn’t warn me with something, a soft cry or a moan before those last quiet moments. He would have, if he could have.

There was no funeral. Nora said she didn’t feel up to it. Maybe later, she said.

A man with very red lips delivered Murray’s ashes to us in a golden urn. Nora placed them on the mantel above the fireplace.

I wasn’t sure how to feel about this. It scared me at first, the idea of my dad in an urn in the living room. I wouldn’t look inside it, in case there was something there that I couldn’t bear to see, a recognizable fingernail or a part of his baby toe.

No one else had a dad in a jar; how would I explain it to my friends? I was also terrified that the urn would get knocked over and Murray would scatter. Parts of him would disappear. So I found myself guarding the ashes, sitting in front of the mantel in a chair I carried in from the dining room. No living room chair was close enough. I pretended to read while on guard, but I couldn’t concentrate on anything but the urn.

When I came home on the last day of school before summer holidays the ashes were gone. There was a framed picture of Murray in their place, one of his school pictures. It had been enlarged.

“The urn is in my closet in the bedroom,” Nora said. “I think it’s better to put it away. We wouldn’t want the ashes to spill.”

I think my guard duty had made Nora uncomfortable. I went to look in her closet. Murray seemed safe enough in his new spot. I didn’t disagree with this move on Nora’s part, but I still didn’t get it.

“Why don’t we bury him?” I asked. “In a cemetery like other people do?”

“We will,” Nora said. “We will, but not yet. One beautiful summer day you and I and Pete will take him out to St. Vital Cemetery and dig a hole and bury him next to…”

“Next to who?” I asked.

“Nobody,” she said. “Next to a big tree.”

This was no good. There were supposed to be other people involved: Murray’s friends, his fellow teachers, our neighbours—people who would say what a fine man he was. And we weren’t supposed to dig the hole ourselves! That was the gravedigger’s job. I was convinced that Nora was missing vast areas of knowledge.

So I visited Murray in my mum’s closet, every day for a while, then every second day. Before long it was just now and then. I knew he was there, in an urn in a box and as safe as could be expected under the circumstances.