Happiness of Fish (14 page)

Gerry helps Carole with her over-sized bag at Halifax. They say goodbye in the terminal.

“Watch out for deer.”

“I hope your mother's okay.”

He stretches his legs around the terminal, buys an over-priced coffee and boards his flight for Ottawa. On this leg he sits next to a morose man from federal public works. The man had booked at the last minute to get home for some family emergency. He isn't saying what
the emergency is, just that he has to be there. He had paid the top ticket price. When the cabin crew serves a snack he looks sadly at the big chocolate chip cookie they give him.

“This is a fifteen-hundred-dollar cookie,” he says. Then he fires up his laptop and plays solitaire.

Gerry returns to his puzzle for a while over the darkness of the Maine and Vermont mountains and woods. When the lights below thicken into clusters for Montreal and its suburbs, he puts the magazine away in his shoulder bag. For the last half hour he watches the lit lines of roads come up to meet him. The geography is neater than that of Newfoundland. The rows of headlights and streetlights follow surveys of old farmland that's been cleared and harrowed flat. When the plane descends low enough for trees to show against the snow, they're in separate woodlots and groves in the fields, like clumps of hair in warts. The intercom tells him it's five-past-ten, local time, if he'd like to set his watch.

Gerry meets his friend Doc for a late Chinese dinner. He has picked up a rental car and checked into a motel near the old-age home where his mother lives. Duane and Gretchen had offered to put him up. So had Doc. He pleaded distance and unfamiliar country roads with Duane and Gretchen. With Doc he had pointed out that if things got worse Vivian would be coming up and he couldn't put them both up. In fact, he just felt like being alone.

It's an old motel. He remembers the family driving past it when it was still in a semi-rural area. It was a farmhouse converted to a guest-home then. Now the original house stands far back from the road with its front lawn covered by a parking lot for the modern two-storey “convenience units” that hem it in on two sides. It's halfway out a long divided street that used to be a main route west out of town. Now the street is ten miles of strip malls, motels and ice-cube office buildings for tech companies with two-syllable names.

Dadoo, Ronron, Gerry thinks when he drives by them. He sings the old Crystals' song and drums on the steering wheel at the stop lights. Da doo ron ron ron /Da doo ron ron.

The restaurant they go to is called The Jade Gate and is a time capsule of the '60s.

“Because, after all, the '60s were just like the '50s until '67,” they will argue as they try to pin down the chronology and horoscopy of their lives.

“No. '63. Beatles. We were in grade eleven. It was different after The Beatles.”

The restaurant is still busy when Gerry and Doc meet there shortly after eleven. Gerry can't remember it ever not being busy and they've been coming here since Doc got his driver's licence in '63. Maybe it was that driver's licence that made the '50s turn into the '60s.

“It's the same waiter,” Doc hisses in a stage whisper, standing up at the table to greet Gerry. “You're going to have to show him ID.”

“For soda water? I think I'm old enough to handle soda water.”

“Maybe. Don't get rowdy though. You sing and they'll throw us out of here. They probably remember you.”

Doc is tall, thin and wears dusty, Work Warehouse work clothes. He's a contractor who specializes in restoring old houses and lives nearby in a loft full of tools and old newel posts and tin ceiling rosettes. He got into the trade after a stint as a theatre set designer and carpenter, but twenty-five years ago he was married and needed something steadier. Yuppification was sweeping old neighbourhoods then and work was plentiful. He knew where to get old bits and pieces from dressing sets. Doc collected a following of customers, and although he's not married anymore, he's still at it.

Gerry remembers passing through town in the '80s, as he was breaking up with Patricia. He had gone to supper with Doc and his wife Hilary and Hilary's kid, Timothy. It was the first time he'd been anywhere as anything but half of a couple for years. He remembered how odd it felt. It seems hard to believe that Doc has been split-up for as long as Gerry's been married.

“Timothy's the manager at a computer store,” Doc says. “We get together for a beer every couple of months. We helped Hilary move down to Ganonoque last summer. She's got a glass studio there now.”

“Still civil?”

“Oh yeah.”

They sit under an ornate ceiling of gilt dragons and flowers with tasselled Chinese lanterns. The décor hasn't changed in forty years. A dozen elderly waiters in black trousers and short red mess-jackets rush in a sore-footed way with heaping trays.

“You order,” Doc says. “You're braver than me. I buy TV dinners.”

“God, do they still make them?” Gerry asks. “Why don't you cook something?”

“Too much like work. Besides, I like TV dinners.”

This Chinese feast has become a tradition whenever Gerry hits town, usually every six months or so. It's part of the legend of the tradition that Gerry is deprived of the benefits of The Jade Gate, marooned as he is supposed to be, in Newfoundland. Still, Doc lives practically around the corner and lives on pre-cooked cardboard turkey and the waiter acts as if he recognizes Gerry.

He expects to be almost-recognized, like a kid expects Mickey to wave to him or her at Disneyland. Gerry finds his former hometown has a Disney-feel to it now, not quite real. Gerry had read somewhere that Disneyland buildings are five-eighths scale.

Welcome to Soo guy Land, he thinks, looking around the restaurant. Only the reason for being here is full-size.

“So you're going to see your mom tomorrow?”

“Yeah, I told her I was getting in early in the morning. They put them to bed about eight at the home. I told her I'd see her in the morning.”

They order too much food, eat too much of it, and still have a doggy-bag full for Doc to take home.

“A nice change from the TV dinners,” Gerry says. “But doggy-bag can't be politically correct, can it?”

“Companion-animal container, maybe?”

It's late when Gerry parks his rental car outside his motel room. The parking lot is like an empty hockey arena under the cold sodium lights. He had turned up the heat before he went for supper. The room breathes warmth at him when he opens the door,

A hotel room can be a retreat. The simplicity of living between a bed and a suitcase appeals. Gerry gets into bed and flicks the TV remote
through its channels. There seem to be more here, more languages, and what appears to be a soft-porn channel.

Is your porn soft? Gerry muses. Get Viagra and jump over hydrants in commercials: hydrant humping, the new metaphor for sex.

When he awakes hours later it is the weather channel he's dozed off in front of.

The Disneyland feel of the city is with Gerry again the next morning as he walks around a shopping mall near his mother's nursing home. He has learned from bitter experience that it's hard to get a parking spot at the home on a weekend. He parks at the mall a couple of blocks away and walks.

Gerry is up early, still running on Newfoundland time. He is waiting outside a restaurant in the mall when it opens at seven. This neighbourhood around the mall is peppered with retirement homes, seniors' apartments and condos. The restaurant is like a halfway house on his pilgrimage to see his mother, a warm-up. There are specials with fruit and bran and prunes and the tables fill up with old people who seem to be regulars. Plastic pill boxes are produced from the pockets of bright jogging suits or golfy-looking cardigans. Tables fill up by ones and twos. The old people greet each other in a congratulatory way. They're Disney-bright automatons. They've survived another night.

At the nursing home, music is frozen in the 1940s. Glenn Miller plays over the sound system. Presumably somebody has done the demographics. The '40s are the decade where the greatest number of residents' musical tastes solidified. Presumably in another decade or so, the music from the speakers will be Elvis. Give it twenty years and it will be Doors and Jefferson Airplane.

Gerry signs in at the desk. The woman behind it scans the signature and who he's seeing and sort of remembers him.

“You're visiting from...Is it Nova Scotia?”

“Newfoundland.”

“That's right, I remember. Your mother will be so glad to see you.” Upstairs, he supposes she is glad to see him. At least she clutches his hand and smiles in a bemused way when he wakes her in her chair in
the day-room. For a year now, she's been on a floor where she can't operate the elevator buttons herself. She still goes down to the dining room, but she's taken.

“You're here,” she says, sounding surprised.

“Yes, dear, I told you I was coming, remember?”

“Is Patricia...no...I'm all balled-up...I mean is Vivian with you?”

“No, Mom. She's home.”

“That's nice.”

It sometimes seems to Gerry that his mother awards some kind of brownie points for knowing who he's married to at the moment and where she is. There are times when he suspects she thinks Patricia was mislaid through some negligence on his part. At other times she seems to think that he's a bigamist. However, she's diplomatic about this and waits to take his conversational lead as to who's the spouse of the moment.

They have gone past conversation. She goes nowhere. He does little that has any meaning here in the warm limbo of the home. He gives quick updates on what the kids are doing. She actually asks about Tanya. She knew her better than the other kids. Gerry and Vivian had brought her with them when they first came to visit before they were married. She and Gerry's Aunt Louise had babysat while they went out in the evenings. Gerry's mother sent Tanya birthday cards with cheques in them until fairly recently. Now Gerry wonders just how recent it was. Tanya's been in Alberta for more than a year and away from home for longer than that. He mentions the grandchildren but they don't seem to register. His mother's posterity cuts off at Viv's kids. She doesn't seem able to fathom that they have children now. The last time she visited them in Newfoundland was the year Diana was born.

They sit, side-by-side, in two armchairs that Gerry remembers from the living room at home. She was allowed to bring some furniture to the home. He tries to get her involved in a conversation that is more than a monologue from him.

“How's Carmen? Does she call you?” He asks after her younger sister.

“Not so much. I don't know if there's something the matter.”

“Let's call her.”

He phones his Aunt Carmen and confirms what he suspected. She calls, but his mother often doesn't answer. She doesn't hear the phone. He puts her on the phone to chat with Carmen and roots in the dresser for hearing-aid batteries. When she gets off the phone he changes the battery in her hearing aid.

He looks at the clock radio on the bedside table. He has been here a little over an hour and has virtually run out of things to talk about. Grasping, he throws out that he'll be glad to get back to sailing when the spring comes.

“Just be careful, dear.”

And if you're careful you'll end up here, Gerry thinks. This is the prize for being careful for ninety years.

They go down to lunch together, leaving the room at exactly twenty to twelve.

“You have to go down early. The elevator gets crowded.”

It does too. Even twenty minutes early, they have to wait while old people and their attendants untangle legs of walking frames and back an electric scooter into the rear corner of the elevator. Mrs. Adamson has vetoed any suggestion that a walker or even a cane might help her be steadier on her feet.

“When I need that, I'll just sit.”

Lunch is a pale cream-of-something soup, a slice of quiche and a salad. Gerry's mother doesn't care for the quiche. They send it back and get her a chicken salad sandwich instead. She eats only half. Dessert is a strawberry sundae which she devours. Gerry has a second cup of coffee which she seems to consider daring. When they finish and go back to the elevator, they have to wait while the early arrivals for the one o'clock sitting untangle their walkers.

After lunch, the home's doctor drops in. He's British, professionally cheerful, and has his volume control pitched to the elderly. He gets Gerry's mother to do some hand movements and asks her questions about the date and if she remembers his last visit.

“She's not in bad shape, all things considered,” he says chattily, talking to the two of them. Gerry finds this talking about his mother in front of her off-putting. He follows the doctor into the hall when he leaves.

“She thought she might have had a stroke.”

“Yeah, well, she might have, a little one, but there's not much change in her awareness. She's not doing all that badly for what, ninety-five?” The doctor looks at Gerry. “You don't get in much, do you?”

“I live in Newfoundland,” Gerry says, defensive now.

“Well there you are then. You'd see a bigger difference because you don't see her day-to-day. She's not doing all that badly.”

Gerry's not sure if he's been reassured or put in his place. He decides to take the optimistic view.

“That's good to know, and of course you do know where to get in touch with us?”

“Oh, the lodge has all that. Not to worry.”

Not to worry, Gerry thinks as he walks out in a bright winter afternoon. His mother is taking a nap and he needs to move, to get clear of the petrifying air of the home. He has contrived a few errands to run. She needs some hand cream, cough lozenges, and a battery for her watch. She wants a bottle of milk of magnesia.

“They steal it.”