Keeping Things Whole (3 page)

Windsor. Where else could you
fall for a Scottish-Chinese Canadian? Kate Chan. Scottish father, Chinese mother, met in Windsor. When they split up, Father Scotsman returned to the motherland, and Mom took baby Kate to Toronto, changing her last name as quickly as she could. Bit of a pattern, that.

I could date her with a drug smuggler's wallet but had to hope this law student could look around the fact that, to her at least, I was just a house painter. She had rocked the LSAT; ostensibly, I rocked a roller pole. A self-employed house painter with deep pockets, but still. I wanted to pull out all the romantic stops from the get-go but couldn't tell her the most exciting thing about me.

A first date. The pre-date. The maybe this is a date, maybe it isn't date. What to do for the exhibition game? A drink or three? Sure, it's convenient and enabling, but if I'd wanted another bar girl, I'd have gone to a bar. A drink is too predictable, every dude's reliable grease. And Windsor wasn't big enough to have nice watering holes where we weren't certain to see people one of us knew. Time for Voodoo to earn his keep.

That's right,
Voodoo
. Part border collie, part attitude. (What colour is he? See, we're getting to know each other already.)

On the phone with Kate, I was instantly tipsy on the cello-y sound of her voice. “You free for a dog walk in Ojibway Park?”

The park was crucial. First and foremost, Ojibway is genuinely beautiful, especially in the fall. Every tube in nature's paintbox opened up. And more than just trees. Think grass but not that cancer carpet you kicked a soccer ball on. Seven-, eight-, even ten-foot-tall grasses, brown by June but standing proud 'til late November, countless stalks clattering in the breeze. And the trees are forest trees, not rakes of ordered pine. Windsor sits in the most treeless non-Arctic county in Canada. What isn't paved is ploughed. With its meandering, mulch-covered trails, the enormous park was a dog's delight, sometimes even frolicking ground for deer. The pumpkiny smell of leaves underfoot. Half-naked branches and tall grasses swaying in the breeze. All this, plus wingman Voodoo.

When Kate agreed to the walk, I pumped an unseen fist above my phone. “Would you like to meet me there or should I pick you up? I gotta warn you: in the car, my dog will sniff your hair.”

All week I increased Vood's teeth brushing to get his breath down from dragon foul, then gave him his quarterly bath the night before.

She didn't dress as if nature required a hundred zippered pockets on easy-to-clean fabrics. Ass-music jeans and a soft sweater she was sure to show me was a V-neck before zipping up her vest. Her black hair was pinned up in half a dozen places, a flickering little movie of two crows fighting. The sight of her worn hiking shoes flooded me with interest and relief. For some, the Ojibway Park walk risked being too un-urban, no thump-thump music, no lattes. Not Kate. “Wow,” she said when we arrived, “so this is what life outside the library looks like.” She stopped to read a plaque I'd never bothered with that claimed the grasses around us were the last preserve of species that used to blanket the entire region. “From tall grasses to tall gases,” she joked, and nodded at Detroit's Zug Island smokestacks visible above the tree tops. “Ojibway Park—right. The park's for the First Nations, while the local police force have scabs on their knuckles from the last time they got to write up a Driving While Indian.”

When the three of us hit the large and shallow pit Vood and I called the Thunder Bowl, Kate spotted its doggie potential without a word from me. This leafy, dirt-walled bowl spilled down off the trail and was about the size of an Olympic swimming pool. Vood was rarely happier than when he was running in it, around it, or up and over its metre-high dirt walls. “Hey, dog,” she called out spontaneously, “you run in here?” And they were off, all chase and feint, old smugsy me bringing up the rear. I didn't get proprietary and call him to me, just joined in the communal chase. I'll get you; no, no, you get me. Only when a panting, ecstatic Voodoo finally rolled over at her feet, her hands rubbing his traitorously exposed belly, did I too bend down and get a piece of Mr. Fluff. Our fingers repeatedly brushed each other's across his soft, white belly fur. We were closer to the ground, catching its mossy smell. “This is where you kiss me,” she said, unlocking me with a grin. “Lightly.”

Nominally and legally, if not
biologically, I'm Antony Williams, third-generation Windsorite. This much you may have been told.

Each generation, including the one that brought us here, Gran and ol' Bill, had its war. Peg and Bill started out English, grew up around Manchester, miners and miners' wives. Young widows and a lot of coughing in cramped company houses. The widow part proved true even on this side of the Atlantic. In the Great War, William Williams was a tunneller, a former Manchester clay-kicker exempt from basic training 'cuz Jerry was always digging through from the other side.

There's that scene in
Goodfellas
. No, not the garlic and the razor blade. One where he comes home from prison to an apartment he's been paying for but hasn't seen. Guy's been peddling inside. Decent bread, apparently. He's not in the apartment five minutes before he says,
Pack your bags, we're moving
. Swap the war for prison and across the Atlantic for across the state, and you've got Bill and Peg in pasty-faced England after the guns went quiet. Legend is Bill couldn't come home from thousands of men dying every day to slog out a life no different from that of his parents, didn't want to bring children into the same old mould. So across the Atlantic they went, all hopes pinned to the beaver.

Windsor didn't prove different enough, the automotive assembly lines too much like that insatiable, mechanical war or simply intolerable after it. In the early 20s, Ford personnel managers did evening spot checks on the homes of line workers. Bill had watched bloated rats gleaming with midnight blood eating their way out of teenaged corpses. After that, how was he to endure his employer inspecting his icebox and linen closet? Gran didn't just sit through all this with her hands in her lap. The same Windsor-Detroit ferry that smuggled in America's first copies of Joyce's
Ulysses
also carried my great-grandmother with bottles of whisky strapped beneath her skirts. When she showed Bill the money she'd been making, he quit the line and began digging a different kind of tunnel from their riverside basement. We'll get to that gold mine and grave in a bit.

Then we had our lost generation, Victor-Conrad, my brief, maybe grandfather. Peg and Bill's only child, raised big and strong on New World bounty. His meat-and-potatoes chest caught a bullet in WW II, though not before he supposedly left something behind with a French working girl. In 1946, Gran, already a widow and now mourning her only child, replied to a French curate's letter by sailing to France with a suitcase full of butter, nylons, sugar, and cash. Came home with a baby she had christened Gloria, her glory, survival plan for her grief, and legal if not biological heir.

The wars changed and so did we. Gloria, definitely my mother, possibly Gran's granddaughter, came of age in the late 60s beside, but not quite in, hippie America. Came of age on stage. In her early twenties, Mom was an actor. Don't worry, this isn't fiction: while she could eventually feed herself by crawling around screaming in tights one month then being fake British the next, she couldn't feed us both. Those who can't afford to do, teach, and Mom's been a drama teacher for decades. Half battleaxe, half den mother.

Every story's a detective story, though this memoir (or, indulge me, mem
wire
) starts out with a missing person or two, not necessarily a murder. Immigrant great-grandparents, a bullet-magnet grandfather I never knew, a stern but liberal mother with frustrated dreams, then me. After, of course, a little help.

Trevor Reynolds, sperm smuggler extraordinaire, was an American draft dodger who drove over the Ambassador Bridge in 1969 into a country that would make more art in a decade than it had in all the previous decades combined. Canada's supposed artistic coming-of-age was actually run by any Yank or Brit who could stand. Publishers, actors, editors, professors, broadcasters, journalists, and directors—anybody who could sign their name on a citizenship application got Canadian taxes to tell Canadian stories (however real). Trevor Reynolds was one of them. Actor, director, and a man who found that after he'd left a family and country once, it wasn't so hard to do again.

Then there's my war. Gulf War I? No, no room for small criminals there. Think globally; grow locally: the War on Drugs. Big difference is, those other wars all ended.

I can't separate starting from being able to start. I thought
catapult
long before I ever thought
catapult weed
. Okay, okay, no Cuban: I thought
catapult something to America
long before I ever thought
catapult weed
.

The word
American
didn't turn me into a tinkering little thing-maker. I was already in love with cause and oh-so-visible effect before the A-word got its paternal tooth into me. Show me how something works and my life changes a little. Growing up for me divides into loving moving things, making moving things, and trying to make things move to America.

On our early dates I couldn't tell Kate what little I did know about my sire (possibly fake name, criminal absence of rank, no serial number) without telling her about my science fair projects. Grow up the brown-eyed son of a blue-eyed single mother and you're a genetics lesson waiting to happen. And I'd always been crazy for science fair: demonstrable learning + independent construction + competition = Mmm-mmm-mmm.

I started in grade six with an ant farm, low-rent science coupled with childish narcissism. Antony's ant farm. But learning will sometimes get in by whatever door it can. Vanity may have taken me to ant farms, but wonder held me there. I'd grown up in a house without whiskers in the bathroom sink, had been the only one in two Williams households peeing with the seat up. Then suddenly I was copying out information about ants and their “division of reproductive labour,” their “visible overlap of generations working and living together,” the “cooperative care for the young” among “sterile castes” (like artists and pot slingers). I had various teachers and a teacher for a mother and suddenly understood them differently when reading about
eusocial breeding
. In eusocial societies, only a few members of the colony breed, yet every member of the colony shares in the parenting labour. At eleven years old, I thought I was copying out facts and diagrams about ants, not my fate. Gran the real-estate queen, Mom the educated parent, and their heir with his different coloured eyes.

Grade six, an ant farm. Grade seven, genetics. Grade eight, the first in a long line of trebuchets (they're like catapults). Notice that Treb. 1 came after a fight with Mom about genetics.

In the late 1800s, as England drew up the Canadian divorce papers it'd take a century to sign, the Moravian monk Gregor Mendel experimented with pea plants and tried to introduce the world to genetics. The world wouldn't listen to Mendel, but his breeding experiments were simple, reproducible by a twelve-year-old, and great ammunition in the family war.

Perhaps you grew up differently. If I wanted to row to Cuba, I'd say I found my values in even-handed play or by purposeful reason or enlightened common sense. As an adult, I've never shot the messenger. That's not true of my life as a kid, not when I had the messenger's blood on my hands and in them.

In tae kwon do, my only female sensei once gave me a koan-like version of
shut the fuck up
. One day when I was too chatty at the dojo she told me, “You're asking questions your body's not ready to understand,” then showed me again she could break every rib I had, in sequence. When I'd first started asking Gloria, “Where's my daddy?” I'd been old enough to form the question but not old enough to really hear the answer. Apparently I was also old enough to learn that asking the question wasn't a problem. Until grade seven, I asked with words. Ultimately impatient with mere words for answers, I asked with pea plants and my own version (my first version) of theatre.

Every day I looked at my brown eyes in the mirror and thought of Mom's and Gran's blue eyes I saw the genetic laws Mendel found growing peas.
Pisum sativum
, dinner-table peas, revealed that species and individual animals also have internal and external borders. Even genes move to keep things whole. I sought knowledge and independence with
Pisum sativum
long before I did the same with
Cannabis sativa
. Really, I couldn't make this up. Even the ancientness of the name mocks our recent marijuana prohibition.
Sativus
means sown or cultivated.
Sativus
is masculine,
sativum
neuter, and
sativa
is feminine. Mendel may have worked with
sativum
, but my experiments were hardly neuter.

I now confess that the science fair setting was as relevant as the science itself. I made my confrontation with Mom on my stomping ground, not hers. Sure, she was the taxpayer (bit of a pattern, that). She was a passing acquaintance of a few of the teachers at my school and knew countless others throughout the city. But still, the science fair was at my school, not hers.

Kids are hardwired to love, to lie, and to steal. I thought myself scheming, not cruel, when I told Mom that my science fair project that year was going to be a surprise. Then I was tremendously scheming when I asked to photograph Gran's eyes a few days before I asked Mom if I could photograph hers. Remember the economic law that made my pile: scarcity adds value.

A few times that year I'd slept over at Nathan's when he was at his dad's new divorcing-man's apartment. On his token weekends with Nathan he'd rent us movies with explosions and silicone implants, barbecue us something on his balcony, and, as the empty beer bottles accumulated, toss us pearls of dating wisdom like, “Remember something they like, then invest. All women like money.” One night, rather late and related to absolutely nothing, he muted the TV during a commercial and advised us to, “Fuck her best friend.” Notice that Mom agreed to be my photographic model once Gran had already posed.

My project combined pea plants growing in Jiffy pots, some placards of dutiful prose (…
hybrids will show dominant parental character…
), a few diagrams with vectors and circles, and a family tree of photographs that still haunts at least one of us. Deep down I'd known the photographs might prove hard to live with. I didn't know how difficult they'd be to actually take.

You kids with your digital cameras savouring the memories of four seconds ago. I'm not so old/vain to suggest that the paper photographs of my 80s childhood were better. Presumably they pollute more than digital photographs do, and back then everyone snapped photos like ocean-raiding fishermen: take several, keep a few. But there was a pleasure of anticipation when photographs had to be developed. Logged in here, maybe you'll agree: when gratification isn't instant, your wants and hopes have time to clarify.

To accompany my pea plants, I tried photographing Gran and Mom's blue eyes and my browns, but I used my kids' point-and-shoot camera. I anticipated seeing more than just eyes in the developed photos but in fact saw far less. The thing about ignorance—you don't know
what
you don't know or even
that
you don't know. I'd seen countless close-up photographs in magazines: a raindrop suspended from a spiky branch, the legs of a bee coated with nuggety pollen. You can imagine the macro shots available over at Nathan's dad's. Close-up photos existed. Cameras took photos. I had a camera and wanted close-ups—
voilà
, yes?
No-là.
Mom drove me to the photo developers then endured my impatience as the film went off into its chemical bath. When we picked up the pictures, I was crushed before we'd left the parking lot. My intended close-up photos of the variegated tissue in the irises of two eyes were just blurry gobs of possible faces.

Mom waited an afternoon before telling me, “There's a lot more to photography than just pressing a button.” By the next weekend she had arranged a photographer to take the photos I wanted, photos which deep down I knew she wouldn't want to see. Emotional maturity is an oven, and nobody is already cooked before they go in. Also, I was drunk on what science calls “confirmation bias.” It helped me ignore the fact that Ron, Mom's photographer friend, was no doubt being paid by her in some way. He was one of several stylish men she would collect at busy, productive times in her life. During her
Medea
, there was her director, Vlad. By her
Macbeth,
it was Alain, her designer. If they drove at all, they drove once attractive but now aged European cars. They had outfits, looks, a distinct lexicon of clothing. Small vests on this one, band collars on that one, suits and open collars for a third. Photographer Ron helped me speed away from my guilt by using different colour filters to heighten the blues in the eyes of two of his subjects (Gran and Glore) and the browns in a third (me).

Mendel probably discovered even more about genetics than we know. The vanity of his successor prevents the world from knowing. Part Medea, part Cronus, the new abbot who succeeded the deceased Mendel had
all
of Mendel's unpublished papers burnt upon his arrival. Picture the ashes of decades of paradigm-shifting research drifting down into Mendel's monastery garden, birthplace of genetics. What scheming bastard would be so destructive? A celibate one. My family and fortune know that inhibition and prohibition don't eradicate desire, they just make it more expensive.

My write-up didn't name the eyes in the photographs, just labelled them
Generations A, B,
and
C
. I was pushing boundaries, not trying to kill. And besides, this was science; impersonal, observant science.
The hybrids themselves produce offspring in which the parental characters re-emerge unchanged and in precise ratios
. According to Mendel, Trevor Reynolds's dominant brown-eyed gene gave me a three in four chance of having brown eyes. He was only one-half of my parentage, yet that same gene throbbed in me undiluted and (as you know) gave any child I have the same three in four chance of brown eyes. One drop continued to flavour the stew. I illustrated this combination of probability and heredity through my peas in their Jiffy pots, through blocks of data-heavy prose and, staring back at the viewer, an entrapping grid of family photos.