Our Lives in Brief

Our little black poodle whimpers and twitches. The feel of my hand reassures her. She falls back to sleep. I do not. Not so my husband; even after submitting to the nightly urgencies of his prostate, he slumbers. And I recall, and cannot sleep, even when I don’t seek out these memories.

Before she plunged into the abyss beyond awareness, I heard her mumbled satisfaction that her children had turned out well. Perhaps we have, some of us, despite having been sucked into the vortex of her anger, in our formative years. Her unpredictable, bitterly incendiary nature, her untranslatable curses frightened and silenced us.

My sister is four years younger than me. I’ve a memory of my mother with this baby, my longing to share the imagined closeness. When I was seven, my parents rented a cabin somewhere along Lake Ontario. By then I also had a brother. On the shale beach, my sister tossed a stone at our toddling brother’s head. Both children were carried off, shrieking. In the days that followed, I found comfort in solitary hours clambering among boulders lining the lakeshore. There I dreamed, limbs wet with spray, watching clouds take whimsical shapes, rotting fish hurling themselves at the rocks, gulls shrieking overhead.

I recall being taken to Massey Hall when I was about five, where I saw an array of seated people holding musical instruments on a stage below the balcony where I sat. My father, I was told, was the tuba player. At that distance I could not recognize him behind the gleaming brass behemoth. Fact is, I could hardly see him; he was dwarfed by the instrument. I was shamefaced, hearing someone seated behind snigger that observation.

Some time after the birth of her third child, my mother succumbed to what was termed a nervous breakdown. She was placed in a rest home, I was sent to live with my mother’s oldest sister, in Hamilton. I adored my gentle aunt. But I was miserably humiliated when my cousin’s friends called after me: ‘Reeta, Reeta, kiss my feeta, down the streeta’, to gales of laughter. Shared by my cousin. After which I refused to play outdoors.

My father worked for Fashion Hat and Cap on Chestnut Street in Toronto. I was taken there once. I watched, fascinated, as my father operated his hissing press, steam-moulding shape into one hat after another at dizzying speed. He showed me an orange that had been left beside the steam press, transformed into an exquisitely desiccated golden orb.

My father once gave me a book entitled Palaces on Monday, published to commemorate the Moscow subway system. As money was scarce, I had few toys. I was, however, sent to an after-hours parochial school where over the years I learned the language, history and culture of my people. I had a head-start on the language, listening to evening kitchen-table discussions with my parents’ landsmen, friends. Immigrants like themselves. They spoke of starkly devastating political events beyond my comprehension. Their energy and passion fascinated me. That they seemed to defer to my father pleased me.

My father instructed me carefully. Remember: you are Canadian, Canadian first, everything else follows from that, he said. He told me also that when I reached his age there would be peace in the world, there would be an end to all wars among nations. People would be accepted as equals among equals. There would be no discrimination, an oft-heard word in my parents’ conversations. By then I knew he had been sent to this country by a benevolent society, when he had been found wandering the streets of Warsaw, an orphan.

Before I began kindergarten at a school on Manning street, where I saw a stained glass window of a little Dutch girl with the word “Kindergarten” inscribed on the door, and I felt a startling recognition of the word’s meaning, I suffered a child’s accident. Intent on fulfilling the task entrusted to me, I rushed down the stairs from our flat and tumbled. Hotly clutched coins and the milk bottle I grasped shattered about me. My mother’s younger sister took me to the hospital where I shuddered as a doctor wound plastered strips of cloth around my arm, building a cast. Trying to lift the cast-covered arm, I discovered that it had become inert, impossibly leaden. I wept in the certain knowledge that I would never walk again.

I stayed overnight at my aunt’s apartment on Queen Street. That night, as I lay on a makeshift bed, my uncle molested me. This was the uncle who laughed when I wrinkled my nose in disgust at the smell of the beer he drank. This was the uncle who would go up on the roof of the apartment building to capture pigeons which my aunt would obligingly prepare for the table. This was the uncle who, at a later time, confided that he would give me a gift just like the one he gave his daughter, a little older than me, if I 'behaved nicely' to him. This was a man of Ukrainian peasant stock, a man with an inbred love of growing things, a master gardener.

My mother had a friend who taught her how to curl my hair into sausage ringlets, with strips of rag cloth. I loathed the process and the curls, and once, when my mother was pulling my wet hair around the rags, I blurted my nasty secret of what my uncle had done. There was silence. I shook with fear. She tugged my hair, and forbade me to ever again utter such disgusting tattle.

Horse-drawn wagons were a frequent, celebrated event. They were not seen as often as the small, square cars and trucks trundling our streets. Children lingered, watching the iceman hack at large ice blocks, awaiting flying chips. Hoisting small blocks with large rounded pincers, he hauled them from wagon to kitchen iceboxes. Once, it was rumoured that a horse had panicked and smashed into a car – blood and guts everywhere. In my bed, seeing myself cold and unutterably alone in a dark casket buried in damp, wormy earth, I wept in a frenzy of grief.

When I was thirteen, there was a fourth child, born before term, its arrival hastened when my mother slipped down cellar steps carrying a basket of laundry. She screamed that it was my fault. Later, I accompanied my mother to a clinic for the baby’s post-birth examination. The wizened, swaddled baby was thrust into my arms to be borne home, while my mother shopped. A year later, my tiny brother was transformed into a serviceable pretext, enabling me to meet my friend at innocuous places like area parks or libraries. He would even walk me in the early evening to my parochial school classes across from Christie Pits, wait until they were over, and walk me home again. Our clandestine meetings went undetected for some time.

Public school had never been a felicitous experience. I was convinced teachers thought ill of me and I resented them, envying the achievers, those who had the teacher’s ear and concern. Though the stigma of charity breakfasts and school showers was never imposed upon me, hand-me-down clothing and broken footwear mortified me. Finally, in high school I recognized my ability to comprehend, to respond to learning opportunities.

When I was thirteen, my mother found a summer job for me on Spadina Avenue, in the garment trade. The following summer I worked at a metal-toy factory, while my boyfriend worked at an arborite factory on the same street. Near the conclusion of that summer my mother warned I would have to look for a permanent job and I understood with regret that I would not be returning to school.

Finally, my parents were introduced to the idea that I was ‘going out’. My mother made no secret of her antipathy toward my boyfriend, accusing him at every opportunity of some wretched mischief. His father’s ill repute a likely goad. Still, once our relationship was acknowledged, he was there, every evening, and his presence grated upon my parents. We ambled on long neighbourhood walks. On weekends we chummed with peer groups and went to teen dances where we held one another and dreamily danced to lyrics we knew were dedicated to us personally. I would call him ‘honey’ and ‘dear’; endearments I had never heard anyone else utter, and which earned my father’s derision. When we were eighteen we were married. We wanted a simple ceremony but our parents insisted on a traditional wedding where all their friends would be invited. I wore an ill fitting, borrowed wedding dress. We were awkward participants at our parents’ social event.

We rented our own little flat and divided housekeeping. Several years later we bought a small house in Richmond Hill. When we were twenty-two I retched one morning before leaving for work. The pregnancy was confirmed by a doctor on the very day that I joined my mother at a Mother’s Day luncheon, a yearly event organized by her social club, with featured speakers who lectured on third world poverty; urged action on world disarmament; addressed the empowerment of women. I whispered to my mother that she would soon be a grandmother. She turned away from me.

I worked until I was eight months’ pregnant. I ignored all the dreadful stories of childbirth difficulties people eagerly offered up for my edification. After our baby was born my mother volunteered to stay a week to help with the baby. I refused. Instead, my husband took time off work and we learned, together. In year-and-a-half intervals two more babies followed. With three children in tow, life felt uncomplicated, fulfilling and busy. I was reluctant to release the children, one by one, to school. I volunteered to a school reading programme. We joined Cubs and Brownies. When the youngest was six, we all had bicycles. Although the children’s were new, mine was built from parts their father scrounged. He taught me how to ride it.

We moved to Ottawa when the oldest was twelve. We discovered Byward Market, the Experimental Farm, the Gatineau Hills, and Ottawa Neighbourhood Services. Soon we were equipped with cross-country skis and left long tracks in the snow of the greenbelt where our house was located. Then came ice skates; my husband, an enthusiastic hockey player as a child, taught us all to skate on the Rideau Canal. We snowshoed at night under the light of the moon, stars winking overhead.

Gatineau Park became our summer obsession. We hiked a myriad of trails. We picked and hauled home wild strawberries, garlic, raspberries, blackberries, and poison ivy. We climbed Luskville Falls for fun and spectacular views and bore home bucketsful of blueberries for preserving. When our youngest child was fourteen his father, despite my doubts, bought a canoe, and we explored the park’s lakes, our children echoing the loons’ calls.

We attended concerts at the National Arts Centre; the children began music lessons. We visited the National Gallery; their father started painting. The specimens at the Museum of Man inspired a focus on science and a collection of butterflies ensued; dace, sticklebacks and tadpoles filled an aquarium.

My mother visited and stayed several weeks. She enjoyed the Sparks Street Mall, the Experimental Farm and the Parliament Buildings. While she rested in the afternoon, and the children were at school, I would sequester myself in the basement family room and pound out stories about wistfully sad children.

When I was young I suffered agonies of boredom and embarrassment shopping with my mother at little stores along College or Dundas Street. My pain was particularly acute when she stopped for interminable chats in languages unknown to me. When I was older I was puzzled when my mother marched in peace rallies.

My mother was 84 and I was 62 when she died of frontal-lobe dementia. Her memory slowly faded and became absent. Her body gradually ceased its critical functions. Before her memory completely evaporated, conversations were surfeit with repeated declarations. One: ‘I was a good mother’. Pause. Affirmation required. Finally: ‘I love all my children. Equally’.

My sister and the older of my brothers looked after her, feeding her as one would an infant, wiping her trembling chin, changing her diaper, wheeling her into the sunshine on the hospice grounds. When last I saw her she had no idea who I was. She had become a wraith. Yet one of the nurses laughingly declared that she would recognize my sister and me anywhere as our mother’s daughters. My younger brother flew in from Halifax and although she didn’t recognize him, she slyly informed him that her husband, who had died thirty years earlier, would be dropping by that evening.

Our daughter drops our grandchild off at 7:30 every weekday morning. She romps with our little dog, we read stories together, she has her breakfast, and then her grandfather walks her to the stop at the foot of our street to catch her school bus. Occasionally, my husband rushes up the basement steps from his workshop and pulls me into the kitchen to dance to the music of our youth. Our terms of endearment have altered, but not our need of one another.

Several years after my mother’s death I took possession of a photograph. It was a European studio portrait of my mother and her younger sister in 1920s flapper dresses, arms comfortingly wrapped about one another. Heads inclined toward the camera, they appear shy, expectant, trustingly vulnerable. The world awaited their debut.