The Push & the Pull (7 page)

What do you do chez Mom? Flop? Scratch aging pets? Resume biathlon training?

— Andrude

Work, Andrew, work. Fill one door, cut another. Simple. But how do I know I'm not cutting into wires?
By the time he had found and disengaged the appropriate circuit and dug out an extension cord to wire Stan's aging circular saw from another room, he'd rechecked his library books enough to realize he needed to open up most of the living-room wall just to make a single doorway into the bathroom.
Rough-stud opening
. Is that architecture or a job ad?

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: Lesbos

Scratch old friends. No, sadly I made the mistake of telling Mom I've left Dave. She must have taken the cordless with her when searching out “that special white,” because she returned to the table with a whole Ottawa Valley Social Tour. Pumpkin Soup at Doug and Irene's. Tea at Cheryl's. A Drink at Rachel's. (Thanks to Martha Stewart, a dish is now an event). I might just have to schedule a private Pound Vodka in the Kitchen.

Remind me to tell you about the Chardonnay Mafia. (Burn this letter.)

Placing my bets,

He added
one sheet drywall
to the list for tomorrow morning's trip to the hardware store, not quite admitting that this would mean digging out the ski rack and bungee cords and not yet knowing that he would drive home unsafely at sixteen kilometres an hour.

Pantry
. Where does that come from? Panty re-entry? (No more beer until you're done with the saw. Yes, Dad.)

When stairs became more and more mountainous to Stan, and his fading sense of touch numbed his bladder, he coveted his wife's neighbouring space and proposed converting the pantry into a downstairs bathroom.

“Stan, it's a kitchen! Even animals know not to shit where they eat.”

It was Andy who said “most animals,” but he was talking alone in his bedroom, his door almost closed. Architecturally, Stan was right. The pantry was the only non-invasive, unobtrusive place for a downstairs washroom. But atmospherically, Pat was also right. The stove was now just a metre from the bathroom door. When the door was left open, one cooked in sight of a toilet. The toilet was so close to the stove that, a decade after it was installed, Stan and the teenaged Andrew referred to it as “the spittoon.”

One more email to Betty.

From: [email protected]

If you were in a fairy tale, not your mom's house, what colour would the magic door be that transported you out of the Nine Circles of Mom/Martha?

Tap. Tap. Andrew sank a new pry bar, its sticker still shiny and un-wrinkled, into the moulding around the bathroom door frame, sharp metal biting easily into the soft old wood. He couldn't have seen many meals with Pat and this bathroom, but he does remember once standing behind her while she worked at the stove. He couldn't see her face, but he could see Stan's as he walked out of the bathroom, and that had been enough. Stan wore his usual mask of resignation, his getting-by face. Then Pat sent him back a look Andy couldn't see, some jab or lash that immediately swamped Stan's face with a mix of confusion, helplessness and rage.

“What, Pat? What do you expect?”

Andy continued to see his mother from behind. He saw the hand she calmly reached out to turn off the stove burner and then the oven mitt she wrapped around a pot handle. She removed the pot from the heat and then herself from the kitchen.

“What is it
you
would do?” Stan called after her. “What is the solution you can see that I can't?” Stan had been yelling after Pat, but only Andy was in the room.

Now Andrew stood at the same kitchen/bathroom doorway, hammer and pry bar in hand. Wham. Wham. The bar bit deeper and deeper with each tap of the hammer. A black seam opened between wall and wood. He had spent years strolling past this cream-coloured wall and its wide moulding and never once thought of them as separable pieces, let alone of the moulding as two strips of wood, not just one. He leaned a shoulder into the sunken bar. The first strip backed away from the wall in two-foot sections, nails hanging like bared teeth. In seconds the entire length of moulding was free, and its straight, sharp nails rode snugly in the dusty air. Looked at individually, each nail appeared
efficiently vicious. Secure in the moulding, though, each nail was but a tiny splinter compared with the hard, tooled bar in his hand.

From: [email protected]

Definitely an orange door. Drunken orange. Burnt orange. No,

no — scorched orange.

When the door frame finally released into his hands, he danced it across the room.

From: [email protected]

149 Collingwood. $10 cab. I've planned a small Ice Cream Straight From the Carton With Two Spoons. (The fuck-me caramel in Dulce de Leche is decidedly orange.)

This was more than just a binge clean before a date, more than just shaving the toilet and sandblasting the stovetop.
To Undo:
The giant handles on each side of every door frame.
Wood-filler.
Railings beside the toilets.
More drywall mud
. The shower rails are fine. Do the taps look like handicapped taps? Where do I shut off the water for new taps? Hacksaw for the old pipes? How do I rejoin?

More than a decade after Andy had watched that half-wordless exchange between his parents in the kitchen, when he had seen Stan's face but not Pat's, he finally asked Stan if he remembered that day. What kind of look had she given him that had angered him so much?

“Pity,” Stan answered. “Pity and fear.”

In the damp air under the overpass, Richard the motorcyclist shakes his head in exasperation and asks Andrew, “How do you stand going so slowly?” Biker and cyclist are wet and dirty and pleasantly high.

“Any faster hurts too much,” Andrew replies. “And it doesn't feel slow when it's yours. You see more.”

“Trees, trees and trees. How much more is there to see?”

“My dad had two big jokes,” Andrew says by way of explanation.

“Two bulls — one older, one younger — crest a hill. Below them is a green valley full of grazing cattle. Sweet, the young bull says, let's run down and fuck some of the cows. No, the old bull says, let's walk down and fuck them all.”

Staring down the concrete slope to a bike he'd have abandoned an hour ago, Andrew sees through a pannier to his one book from the family library and thinks of another. On his eighteenth birthday, the most tender of Stan's gifts had been a copy of Patrick Leigh Fermor's
A Time of Gifts,
the memoir of an impecunious collegiate youth whose attempted walk across Europe was cut short by World War Two.
Which is the time of gifts, travel or youth?
Stan's spidery inscription still asks inside a box inside a stuffed storage room in the Kingston house.

“It's loaded with recurring questions,” Stan had continued over the birthday dinner. “These gifts, are they given or received? Are they exchanged during the trip or because he's young? If there is a time of gifts, when does it stop? Why?”

Now, wet, dirty and hungry under an overpass, Andrew asks Richard, “So, what do you have to eat?”

“Pepperoni sticks,” comes the dreaded reply.

Stomach growling, head adrift on multiple breezes, he contemplates asking Richard whether motorbikes still have tuned exhaust. One of his later undergraduate essays, those private dances, compared someone's evolutionary, revisionist poetics to the harmonically tuned
exhaust systems of older motorcycles. Grossly inefficient port-engines, such as those on motorcycles or snowmobiles, routinely lose as much as one-third of their fuel as uncombusted exhaust. Knowing that the belched gas exits the exhaust pipes in a series of waves, motorcycle engineers replaced cylindrical exhaust pipes with conical ones to create an internal vacuum. Waves of unignited gas would then leave the combustion ports like swimmers, and some kick-turned off an inverted centre-point to swim back up the pipe and return for one more chance at explosion. Instead of asking, though, he simply stares down at the still cough pipe, the cold gun barrel, the exposed bone.

High, he also sees through the grey air and his damp panniers to one of Betty's Turkish postcards.

Dalyan, Turkey

Christian/Islam. Greece/Turkey. Fresh water/salt. Arrived from Greece and am so glad to leave the sandy nipple tourism behind. Much more polite here. On the little van-buses whipping around a city, you board and the driver takes off, entirely confident that you'll hand up your fare and others will hand back the change.

Went to an island's turtle beach today. Not the right time to see them, but the island's their breeding ground. Darwin started with turtles on islands. You?

Not in a shell,

You fucking bet.

If Betty arrived at all that Sunday, after their Friday kiss and weekend emails, she would be arriving with one knapsack, not a moving van, and he wanted her to have the (promised) option of her own bed. He'd give her his room, as it was the cleanest, the most recently painted and the only room that didn't, he suddenly saw, look like part of a 1970s museum exhibit. Okay, yes, she'd get his room, but which bed? His own mattress was fine, but Stan's was speckled with pee stains. Another motive to give her his room was seduction by immersion, as if her spending time in a room thick with layers of Andrewness would make her more likely to cross the hall and seek him out. And then what? If she crossed the hall to find him in Stan's old room, the sheets of that bed would be more likely to get pulled off. He'd have to double-sheet Stan's bed.

Breaking down Stan's bed for this long night's shell and pee game of beds and rooms, he suddenly saw the dinginess of Stan's room. Stains ran through the worn carpet in broad channels and bore down in concentrated circles. A thick vinyl blind sat slack-jawed in a dirty window. The paint appeared to be quilted with dull patches.

His list for yet another trip to the hardware store kept growing.
Paint, 2 gal
. Turquoise? A wheaty green?
Flooring: laminate? laminating? Curtains. Curtain rod
. Normally he was aware of the cost of buying drinks for women, yet here he was dropping hundreds on reno supplies he'd be hard-pressed to find time to use. T minus thirty-two hours until her possible arrival.

Through his roles as both ex-nurse and a student who grew up in a university town, he already knew that no drug creates energy. Drugs simply spend energy the body has tried to keep in savings. Caffeine unlocks banked sugars. Pot, for him, for now, retreats from his body with an insomnious flame. But to really keep the home fires burning, to borrow time, he needed to climb a toadstool. None of the renovation books he had taken out of the library, and none of the DIY
websites recommended taking hallucinogenic mushrooms to accelerate a home makeover project.

By 4:17 on Saturday morning, he was convinced he wasn't simply painting the walls; he was a tanner, stretching skins. The superfine plaster dust coating every single hair on his head, as well as those on his arms and legs, and even his eyelids, made him feel like a powdered doughnut filled with he-didn't-know-what. While these preoccupations came and went, the reach and claw of other rooms, other floors, was constant. One floor down, the pantry/bathroom lay cut open but unsutured, moaning in its post-op corner. Down the hall, a long plaster gash threatened to slip off the wall then fly through the dusty air and garrotte him. High on shrooms, he suffered no risk of falling asleep on the job, not that he really understood what the job was any more. Peeling up the carpet in Stan's room felt like he was skinning an animal, a long-dead and very aged animal. Ripped from jaws of small black teeth, pried and scraped from patches of mysterious tenacity in the middle of the room, the rough carpet and its clammy underpad were shockingly heavy. Pushing from one end did nothing. Pulling from the other moved the top layer but not the entire roll. Only by bowing his chest completely and wrapping the carpet in a bear hug, a hug that sealed his averted cheek to the pasty underpad, could he waddle it out, inch by infectious inch.

He saw individual rooms, or even single surfaces — a wall, a floor — when he should have been thinking of the whole house. He had painted one room a dark, autumnal orange for her without knowing if she would stay, if there were more kisses to come, or even if she'd arrive at all. He flitted from room to room, painting here, dismantling there, to make the house seem healthy, not sick, the house of a bright future, not a near-invalid past. All the while he did this, he ignored the fact that not two days ago, on the ferry, he'd given everything — this house, their kiss and his own future — a rotten foundation. He'd lied about how long Stan had been dead, giving himself thirteen months of mourning in fiction when life had only given him one. Worse, and unbeknownst to him, his was not the first significant house in Betty's life that had been built on a contentious foundation. He tried to see ahead to her in these rooms but could not see ahead to
the other rooms, a restaurant dining room and a lawyer's office, that would send her packing again.

Enough. Enough. The house already had all the doubt it needed. It was time to sand some of the spackling compound. He'd be thirsty with all that sanding. When you're up all night, a beer at six a.m. isn't really beer for breakfast.

The exploding car, the croaking bicycle. When you drive, how often do you think of explosions? We pump liquid fuel into cars but don't see the four mechanical strokes that turn that liquid into a vapour and then explode it to roll the beast forward. Tens of thousands of tiny explosions race past Andrew's left elbow and side, fierce combustion tucked beneath a leering hood. Suck, squeeze, bang, blow the cannons again. Fire on past your need for water. At least a hundred kilometres between gas stations out here. An hour's drive. A day's ride.