Happiness of Fish (5 page)

Vivian had Duane when she was eighteen, so now he doesn't look all that much younger than the reception committee. He's a short, square man, with his mother's snub nose. After Vivian's divorce from his father and before Gerry came along, Duane had fixed things around the house and kept his mother's beat-up car running. She'd been clerking in a store then, studying for her real estate licence, and money had been tight. Duane put himself through technical school by joining the militia, where he worked on radios with the communications squadron. Early on, Gerry always thought of him as “Master Corporal Duane,” the rank he achieved before he landed a job in Kanata, just outside of Ottawa, and moved out. That was shortly after Gerry and Vivian got married. He laughed in a guarded way at Gerry's stories about his unsuccessful year in the navy. He laughed in the right places, but seemed wary of the fact that Gerry had been an officer and that he had failed some courses and emerged again as a civilian. Duane hadn't the luxury of trying things on. That said, he didn't socialize with his militia buddies and dropped out entirely when the job in Kanata came along. Gerry grew up in Ottawa and gave Duane some names of people to look up. Duane called on Gerry's elderly mother a couple of times, but other than that, did little to get in touch with anybody Gerry knew. Instead he got in touch with Jesus.

Gerry doesn't remember Ottawa as a born-again kind of town but he supposes it's changed. He knows, for example, that a building which won a Massey Medal for Architecture when it was a brand-new Chinese restaurant in the '60s is a “community temple” now. He saw its scruffy hand-painted sign when he went to Ottawa to visit his mother in her retirement home. He supposes that it's probably no stranger for it to be a church than it was for a Chinese restaurant to go out and hire an architect and win a design medal back when he was in high school. He knows it won the award because he and his buddies, Doc and Mort, were hanging out in the art gallery on the night of the presentations. They were dressed up in sports jackets and skinny ties, trying to look older and cool and not spend any money. They tagged along behind a crowd of people in evening clothes to get free sandwiches and coffee and look at photos of the winning buildings. It occurs to Gerry that Ottawa was a very small town when he lived there. People would put on evening clothes for coffee and sandwiches.

At any rate, Duane started going to church and met Gretchen and got married. Gretchen sounds German but isn't. She comes from Trail, B.C., and her parents just liked the sound of the name. She always strikes Gerry as a bit like Duane in drag, not fat but slightly thickened, with thick, shoulder-length hair. She makes her own clothes and wears a lot of denim. Tonight she's wearing winter boots with thick light-coloured sponge soles. They have a '70s, bargain-basement look to them. Gerry suspects Duane and Gretchen don't waste much money on shoe leather. She and Duane and the kids don't actually live in Kanata. They've bought a place somewhere in the country beyond Richmond, and Duane commutes. They have a horse and are thinking about getting some sheep. Gretchen looks after the horse and a big vegetable garden.

The kids are quiet and big-eyed, half hiding behind their parents. Gerry wonders what they've overheard about Vivian and him. Are they the grandparents from hell?

Joshua is ten, delicate featured. Natalie is eight and carved more like her parents, round cheeks, a Cabbage-Patch-Kids look to her. Vivian wades in with hugs. Gerry grins but hangs back a little.

“How are you doing, guys?” he asks.

He wishes he could do an
Exorcist
head rotation for them and then
wink to show that demonic possession isn't really so bad. He shakes hands with Duane and kisses Gretchen on the cheek. She smells of oatmeal and airplane. Gerry wonders if economy airlines can possibly serve porridge, or did she bring her own?

Tanya is making her way down the stairs now. She is the child Gerry had the most to do with. Duane and Melanie, her older sister, moved out fairly early on in his and Vivian's life together. Tanya, now twenty-five, was only eight or so when Gerry appeared on the scene.

“You raised her,” Vivian will say. Gerry wonders how true that is, but she arguably is raised. A couple of years ago she went to work in a hotel in Banff. Later she stayed for a while with Vivian's sister in Calgary and got interested in a wildlife technology course that was being offered there. She took it and now she's back in Banff counting elk. When she calls or e-mails she says how much better she likes it than the business courses she started at the university at home.

“Hey kid,” Gerry gives her a hug. Tanya's lean and blonde. She has become the type of woman Gerry associates with patting a whippet, fine bones just under the surface. She's wearing a Michelin Man down ski-jacket and jeans and her old air cadet boots. She'd e-mailed to have the boots found and shipped out.

In case I decide to have a formal wedding, she wrote, followed by: Joke, ha ha!

She hardly feels there when Gerry hugs her in her marshmallow coat.

“Still wrestling elk there, Hulk?”

“Oh yeah. Bears too, except they're all asleep now.”

Gerry tries to picture Tanya doing anything with a bear and gives up. When they lived in a townhouse in an outlying suburb he used to have to walk in front of her to the bus stop on windy snowy days. He broke trail in the snow and cut the wind that held her back in the long pink parka Vivian had bought her that year.

Gerry had been puzzled about being a late-blooming surrogate parent to Tanya. He never knew how much he was supposed to give or expect. Before her teens they had mostly been pals, co-conspirators. He had told her to call him Gerry, reasoning that she already had a father, whether or not he was still around. He sometimes wonders now if he
should have left well-enough alone and let her decide what she wanted to call him.

How he and Tanya got along was often an irritant between him and Vivian. He tried to be what he hoped was reasonable, supportive, civil. Vivian was louder, more bloody-minded. She acknowledged no need to be consistent.

“Go! Get! Get upstairs before I smack you!” Vivian could shout. She also invoked unspecified threats. “You're in trouble now, maid! Just you wait!”

Gerry felt he couldn't threaten because he didn't know what he could realistically carry out. He was pretty sure smacking other people's kids wasn't an option.

“You leave all the discipline up to me,” Vivian would complain. “Support me a little, can't you?”

However, she'd threaten dire punishments when Gerry got home if he wasn't there when things went wrong.

“You blow me up into some kind of monster,” he complained. Then Tanya and a friend got picked up for stealing lipsticks at K-Mart and Vivian thought he over-reacted.

“There's nothing worse than a sneak,” he'd grated. “It's not like you needed the stuff. You've got pocket money, you could have bought it. One of these days you're going to be living with other people at university or somewhere. Are you going to steal from them?”

Tanya said nothing. She just looked down, hot and red. She wasn't much of an arguer-back, not with Gerry anyway.

“Kids steal,” Vivian had said, shoes off, relaxing with a beer in front of the late news after the cops had left and Tanya had been sent to bed. “She's just acting out.”

Gerry wondered if he was just a property-worshipping, middle-class wimp. Was his homily on sneaks hypocrisy and a wimpy cop-out? Maybe he should have congratulated Tanya on taking on the system, becoming a lip-gloss commando, a make-up martyr.

Gerry supposes the ripples of the incident are still expanding off into outer space somewhere, gone to reverberate in some elk pasture in Alberta. He thinks of the times he's been startled when he opens his mouth only to hear a ventriloquist's rendition of his genuine, born-in-1898,
Victorian father. Maybe some wayward elk or back-sliding bear is in for the lecture of its life when Tanya starts channelling him from some buried memory.

Gerry takes charge at the baggage carousels, positioning people where they can spot their bags easily and give warning so the rest of the tribe can snatch them from the circling current of Samsonite, duffel bags and Canadian Tire tool boxes with locks and rope and duct tape. It's a small family myth that Gerry is a practical traveller, familiar with airports and all their mysteries. They load a cart and head out past the triage of cab companies and rent-a-car reps sorting the incoming passengers.

Outside the pinball-machine brightness of the terminal, it's gone drizzly. The tall lights in the parking lot are haloed in drifting sodium-yellow haze. Duane and Gerry pack suitcases into the boot of Gerry's mud-and-salt-stained Honda wagon and crowd five into the back seat, kids on laps.

“It's only a minute to home.”

“Can you breathe back there?”

“Yeah, we're fine, we're good...”

The third of Vivian's kids is waiting for them at home. Melanie is the middle child. She lives across town with her husband Darren, who isn't with her tonight. He runs Darren's Donair and Pizza and he's working. Gerry privately calls him “My Other Brother Darren,” a reference to Brother Darrel on the
Bob Newhart
TV show.

Melanie has brought her daughter Diana with her tonight. Diana's eight and has been told she can stay up to greet her cousins. She's dozed off on Vivian's basement couch in front of the cartoon channel and Melanie has made corned beef, tuna, and peanut butter sandwiches and put on a pot of coffee.

Melanie is a slim, tallish woman with a bit of last year's purple-red to her hair. She moved out, not long after Duane, and spent half a dozen years waiting tables and partying. In the course of the partying she met Darren, who was in the process of setting up Darren's D&P, as the family called it. Vivian contended that Melanie married Darren because he was such a hapless goof, a stray.

“He's just like Jack,” Vivian would complain.

Jack was her ex, who had gone bust running a gas bar in Grand Falls and taken it out on her and the kids until she loaded them on the bus and came to town. Darren is often in debt, behind on his payroll or broke because he likes to play the video gambling machines.

“The government doesn't need to worry about him being behind in his sales tax,” Vivian pronounces on Darren from time to time. “They're getting it back triple in those damn machines.”

“You've got to pay your stupidity tax,” Gerry says.

“You should talk to him,” Vivian says. “He'd listen to you.”

“What makes you think that?” Gerry says. “The man's thirty-five years old. He's a grown-up, supposedly. How much advice did you take from your mother when you were thirty-five, or eighteen, for that matter?”

“Melanie should pack up Diana and move out,” Vivian will say, shifting to her other tack in the ongoing Darren debate.

Darren, for his part, rails against the government.

“They shouldn't have those old machines,” he complains. “They ought to be illegal.”

Mostly Melanie appears to let it all roll off her. She spends as much time as she can with Diana, ignores Darren when he's morose, and sweeps around in a patter of sneakers. To Gerry, Melanie sometimes seems to be playing in some internal madcap '50s comedy like
I Love Lucy
. She's unnaturally bright and breezy and does the smallest things with Diana with a decisive toss of her head. Melanie has an expressive head. She nods when making points and shakes when saying something isn't so or didn't happen. The toss is a physical exclamation point.

“Right...” Melanie will announce, shaking her autumn-dyed hair aside. “We are going to the store for ice cream!”

Gerry sometimes wonders if all the head movements aren't an effort to look over her shoulder at what might be gaining.

When they arrive home, Melanie has turned the outside Christmas lights on. Gerry doesn't care for Christmas lights but Vivian says it's not Christmas without them. A couple of Christmases, the light debate has ended in tears and slammed doors. He got them up early this year, un-asked, as part of his personal campaign to make Christmas as painless as possible with everybody home. The eaves drip electric icicles and a big
lit wreath makes a ring of fairy lights.

“A dartboard to throw reindeer at,” Gerry said when he put it up.

The tree is lit-up in the living room. Vivian had it up by the fifteenth of the month.

“It's the best tree we've had yet,” she says.

“Every tree is the best we've had yet,” Gerry jokes. “It's inevitable, fore-ordained, an endless succession of trees that become perfect the minute we get them in the door.” He knows he sounds shallowly avuncular when he talks like this. He finds the jovial-old-cynic role distasteful, but he can't think of another one.

Duane and Gretchen's kids are tired and grumpy from the flight and Diana is out-of-it from being awakened to see them. They all tend to hang on their mothers and whine in vague, distant voices while the grown-ups sit at the kitchen table.

Duane asks a blessing on the sandwiches, “...for this food, thank you, Lord Jesus. Amen.”

Vivian looks mildly perplexed. She was an Anglican as a kid, a low-enough Anglican that sandwiches didn't rate a grace. She's pretty much a nothing now.

Gerry has been eating officially unhallowed sandwiches for years and feels that being hungry is grace enough. If he was being all Taoist and Lao Tzu-ish about it, he'd say that eating and being eaten are as much a part of “The Way” as the automatic perfection of Christmas trees. Gretchen, however, seems relieved that the snack is divinely sanctioned.

“No promiscuous, unsanctified sannies for our Gretch,” Gerry says to Vivian at the sink.

Gretchen avoids the ham sandwiches. “I'm on the Scripture Diet,” she says.

Gerry can't remember tuna or peanut butter in the bible but apparently they pass muster for Gretchen.