Years ago
we used to drive down the Don Valley Parkway, past the old brick
factories on our way to the old Toronto Zoo, at Riverdale. We'd pass
great mounds of leaves gathered by the Parks Department, to moulder and
turn into compost - anyone who wanted to, could go and get some to
fertilize their gardens. We had no gardens then. Once, we saw two
hippos at the zoo, a young one and an older one, and watched them cavort
in a shallow pool of water. They snorted water joyfully from their
great snouts, diving and surfacing. It was fascinating. I read once
somewhere that the hippopotamus has an unique method by which it claims
territorial imperative. Waving its silly little switch of a tail at the
end of its locomotive-heavy body like a fan, it defecates. The fanning
action of the tail spreads a uniform spray of excrement everywhere.
Where the ordure falls, that is its territory.
All of which isn't
terribly relevant, but interesting. We mark our territories
differently. The ponds we inhabit bear no resemblance to the hippos'
and we think we differentiate our territories elegantly, but in actual
fact, we throw dirt around just as extravagantly, only we think we
don't.
And oh yes, I remember now - about the Riverdale Zoo -
when Ben and I were a lot younger, oh, maybe about twenty some-odd years
ago, when I was working and he was out of a job, he'd call for me at
lunch time. Sometimes we'd eat our bagged lunches across the street in
the little park at Avenue Road and St.Clair near where I worked, sitting
near the statue of ageless Peter Pan. And sometimes we'd drive
hurriedly down through the Rosedale Ravine, under all those bridges. It
was a wonderfully private place, no other cars at all. We'd pass the
Toronto Crematorium. We'd hurry to get to the zoo before the factories blew
the twelve-noon whistle, and if we were on time, we'd get there on the
second level, or was it the third? to stand before the wolves', the
coyotes' and the foxes' cages in time to watch them lift their heads as
though on cue and all howl and yodel with the factory whistles. Now the
zoo's moved, what do they howl at, I wonder?
****************************************************************
In
a supermarket last week I shoved my buggy up to the check-out counter,
trying to decide whether my purchases could legitimately go through the
express check-out. Ahead of me was a young woman with a maybe
month-old baby in her buggy, surrounded by food. A five-year-old,
obviously her older child, was sneaking his fingers into boxes of
chocolates at the end-of-aisle counter. He had a plastic gun in one
hand and while munching chocolates, banged the gun down on the display,
smashing the chocolate boxes. I can't remember ever letting my children
behave like that. Then I saw the boy slip behind his mother's buggy
while she was busy putting her groceries onto the counter, and quickly
look around him. The little brat stood on his toes and reached over to
pinch the peacefully sleeping baby. Hard, on the nose. Of course the
baby screeched and its tiny nostrils looked painfully red.
Never
one to mind my own business, I said to the startled mother "It's your
other child, the little boy. He deliberately hurt the baby. I saw
him." She glared at me as though she saw the indelible mark of a child
molester engraved on my forehead.
****************************************************************
Watching i musici
play a piece for solo violin and bass continuo by Viotti, I was struck
by their intensity; as though only they alone in the universe existed.
As though, aside from their abstracted vision of sublimely soaring music
of the spheres, nothing else is real. The sensitivity of the violinist
manifested itself plainly in the exquisite pain on his mobile face.
His face seemed that of an angelic mafioso. The earnest little bassist
climbed all over his bass - a symbol if I ever saw one. Decadence is
everywhere.
*****************************************************************
I've
got to stop collecting recipes from newspapers and magazines. Every
time I see an interesting recipe, I tear it out and stick it behind the
cheese board, meaning to type it out on a card after I try it. Kind of
amass an interesting collection. Well, I've got a mass of newspaper
bits-and-pieces now and I've still not typed any of them up. I guess I
should toss them out, but I wanted them for something to do, kind of
stretch out the time. There's so much of it.
Yesterday I tried
one of the cakes. It was called a Daffodil cake and I thought it
sounded intriguing. It failed, and I looked at the dismal mess, trying
to decide whether to scrape the rubber uck out of the pans onto a plate
and pour chocolate sauce over it, to serve as a 'special dessert' or
just throw everything in the garbage, when Teddy came in from school and
gave me his generous sympathy.
"Too bad, Mom. Don't feel bad."
"I don't, just inept."
"Aw,
you're not. You're pretty good. Anyway, everyone has failures", he
tells me and I long to tell him it's not the little failures that bother
me but the big, big ones that band-aids won't cure.
"Tell you
what", he says, his face brightening, "It's like this Mom, like when I
get a rubber airplane kit and work like mad to get it done and then it
won't fly. I know the fault isn't with me, 'cause my workmanship is
painstaking, so it must be the faulty aerodynamics of the kit, Mom", he
beams. "Buy cake mixes."
************************************************************
When
I was a little kid I always suffered from constipation. I used to get
really desperate. I'd complain to my mother. She was indifferent.
When I got older, I learned about nutrition and bulk and I guess, in
retrospect, that I hadn't a proper diet as a kid. Now I know I'm a
better mother than my own mother was and I know what constitutes a
healthful diet and my kids don't suffer from constipation or anything
else. I have no more problems - that way. Sometimes just a kind of
mental diarrhoea, but that's all right.
I know my mother suffers
from chronic constipation now. She's always complaining, always letting
wind, always going for long walks, drinking hot water.
God, she
used to drive us crazy, me and Ben. Our families disliked each other
and we weren't supposed to meet. Well, we used to sneak out and meet at
Christie Pits Park. I was supposed to be taking care of my youngest
brother, Sammy.
Now Sammy's a cheerful twenty-six year-old
bachelor. Last time he visited, he told us about his latest trip up to
Tuktoyaktuk. He's an environmentalist, goes up there for Indian and
Northern Affairs to check pollution, the effects of a possible oil spill
on the flora and fauna.
"Me and two other guys, we were sleeping
in this tent. We were bushed. All of a sudden I woke in a panic -
someone was screaming. I saw one of the guys banging a long-handled
frypan against the side of the tent, shouting. He's nuts, stir-crazy.
We'll have to tie him up and wait for the helicopter to pick us all up, I
thought. I started to move slow and easy toward him, kicking the cot
of the other guy to wake him up. He slept like the dead and I was
hoping that he wasn't yet - like the nut hadn't got to him yet or
anything, when the screecher turned to me, his eyeballs rolling and
yelled Bear! Polar Bear!
"I ducked my head around the corner of
the opening and saw a mean looking bastard standing a few feet away,
like it couldn't make up its mind to leave the tent area where Omar the
Tentmaker was yelling like crazy, or assault the canvas and get all our
edible goodies and us too. I started to yell and bang things around,
and so did the third guy. We were all groggy and scared stiff. We
must've been yelling and hitting each other with anything we could get
our hands on long after the bear ambled off. Next time we'll take a
rifle. We had to leave it behind that time, because the helicopter was
loaded so heavily with all our equipment..."
He would've made a
lousy meal anyway - all bone and gut. Ben always looks a little dazed
and wistful when Sammy tells his tall tales. Like he's missing some
great life's adventure.
*********************************************************************
One
day, an early spring afternoon, I answered the doorbell and was mildly
surprised to see May Ennis standing there. She looked like spring
herself, cool and promising. For some reason, I didn't want to ask her
in - I don't know why I felt that way. I kept her standing in the
doorway and asked yes? It was crazy, but I had a sudden premonition.
Later,
we sat in the living room, me the stiff matron, her the courageous
young beauty. Hell, she's not that much younger than me - she has a
child by a previous marriage and I'm not bad looking myself.
"I love him", she said.
"Very nice. I love him too. I'm married to him. I've borne his children. What's more, my dear, he loves me."
A barely perceptible frown creased her smooth exterior. "But you don't understand, Mrs. Frier, he doesn't love you! He told me. He said he loves me!"
**************************************************************
I
can remember when I was really young, that my mother helped a friend of
hers get rid of a tape worm. She described for me in disgusting detail
how she pulled in the bathroom and the tapeworm kept coming and coming.
I vomited and never again asked her where she had been when I came
home from school and no one was at home.
Much later I learned
that anyone who tastes the raw fish she's grinding for seasoning when
making gefulte fish, is a likely candidate for worms. My mother
regularly tasted the raw fish she was grinding. She never got tape
worm.
***************************************************************
That
bloody little dog from across the road - Myra's pet, keeps coming over
to do its job on our lawn. Once, Ben said he was going to collect the
feces and put them in a paper bag. "Then I'll put them on the Adlers'
verandah and set the bag on fire."
"What then, Dad?, Teddy asked, mouth agape.
"Then, of course, I'll ring the bell and leave." We all waited, blank-faced.
"Stupid! Old Adler'll stomp on the burning mass to put out the fire, won't he?"
Well,
he never did, and that dog keeps coming around. The Adlers aren't bad,
just kind of vacuous. Years ago, when we first moved here, we found
out that they had a kind of cozy thing going with the Bensons.
The
first neighbourhood party we went to was at the Adlers'. A swimming
party. this must have been around two a.m. by then. There were around
eight couples from the neighbourhood. Maybe ten. Lou Adler was kind of
happy and he pulled Marg Benson's bikini top off and then Myra's (so
she wouldn't feel neglected, I guess). Myra laughed, but Marg ran home
next door, crying. She has tiny breasts and I imagine she was
mortified. The party went on and Marg came back dressed to kill in a
long white georgette dress.
That night, they switched and neighbourhood gossip has it they've been doing it regularly ever since.
*************************************************************
"Look honey, how can you even think I don't love you? Of course I do! You and the kids. What would my life be, without you?"
"Then
how could you? How could you do that to us ... to me? How
humiliating! This little tramp comes to my door, invades my privacy and
tells me to get ready to give my husband up!"
"Look honey, it's
all a big mistake. She's been working too hard lately. It's gone to
her head. I gave her a little gift, kind of a gesture of appreciation
for all her hard work ... and then her kid's been sick lately and
causing her all kinds of worry. You've got to pity her, all alone."
"Are you kidding? What's to pity? I don't mind if she's looking for security, but not mine!"
"What're you talking! Don't think
things like that, you scare me. Look, if it makes you feel any better,
I'll speak to her. I'm going to tell her to behave herself. If worse
comes to worse, I'll fire her."
****************************************************************
When
my mother comes over for a visit, she sniffs around everything.
Anytime I get something new, she pounces on it. How much did it cost?
Where'd you get it? What for?
I bought a pair of late
Nineteenth-Century terra cotta Blackamoor busts and marble plinths for
the archway between the living room and the dining room and she sniffs
'Schvartzes!'. I tell her the Blackamoors were highly respected princes
during the Italian Renaissance. She sniffs disdainfully.
"Where's Ben?" she asks. "'Ent he coming home for dinner? He's working late, lately?" She pries incessantly, infuriatingly.
*******************************************************************
Ruthie
thinks I'm crazy. I should have kept my mouth shut. Now everyone'll
know. She says no. She says I can trust her. She doesn't want her
mother to know. It would break the old lady's heart, she says.
"He's too damn good-looking for his own good", she says. "Where does he sleep?" I'm startled.
"Where? In his bed. Where should he sleep?" She's aghast.
"Rhoda, you're crazy! You let him sleep with you? From her to you? How could you!"
"Ruthie, I love him!"
"You
stupid fool. He's a naughty kid - you catch him with his grubby little
paws in the cookie jar and you give him candy? Make him pay!"
"He's
going through a phase. What good would it do if I threw him out - I'd
just be throwing him at her." She looks at me suspiciously.
"You don't ... you wouldn't let him ..." She's disgusted with me. I don't care.
****************************************************************
Kathy
knows something is wrong. I'm broody and pensive all the time. She's
very sensitive. Even when she was a toddler she used to say intuitive
things, as though she had a psychological line running from my head to
hers in place of the umbilical cord. Strange, she's a mystery to me. I
can't begin to imagine what goes on in her head, but she always seems
to know about me.
I thought that teen-age girls, when they
realize their father's sexual interest is wandering, viewed their
mothers with contempt.
Last night, when she was at the piano
playing a lovely little piece, Hayden, Ben crept up on her as he often
likes to do and planted a big kiss on the nape of her neck. She turned
and angrily brushed it away, called him a creep. I was embarrassed for
him. I've told her nothing's wrong, that she should stop picking on
Ben. I don't want to turn our children against their father. Ben would
never forgive me.
******************************************************************
When
I was watering my house plants I noticed those squiggly little things
on top of the soil again. I guess I've been keeping the soil too moist.
They're the larvae of flies, I think. Sickening things. I consider
whether I should try a folk remedy; pour a thin layer of boiling water
over to cook them dead, or use the spray can of insecticide I bought and
suffer pangs of conscience.
There, that's something. If we all
contracted skin cancer from the radiation of the sun because we've
destroyed the ozone layer, we'd be so busy moaning about our disease,
we'd forget our pursuits. Monogamy by default.
*******************************************************************
A
while ago, for my thirty-sixth birthday, Kathy built me a birdhouse in
Industrial Arts. Sparrows inhabited it as soon as we put it up, and
started their families. We'd find the occasional featherless blue
corpse under the Maple. One year we counted five separate broods, all
from the same pair of adults. The following autumn a miserably behaved
black squirrel bit away at the opening until it'd been stretched large
enough to admit it entry. The birdhouse was only made of thin plywood.
The squirrel was one of our regulars. We had about four who came around
for handouts all summer. All that winter we'd see the black tail
switching around outside the opening in the blowing snow. Occasionally,
the squirrel would come down for peanuts. If we weren't quick to put
them out, he'd climb the screening on the storm door and make a racket.
When spring came, the squirrel abandoned the house and made a regular
squirrel nest of leaves and twigs over in the park.
A new sparrow
family came along. We were always hoping for a more exotic kind of
bird, but we had to be content with sparrows, they were the only kind
who nested in our backyard. Then the starlings came along and bothered
the sparrows. I understand they lay their eggs with the sparrow eggs
and the baby starling bird-curmudgeons, when they hatch, do in the
sparrow-innocents. Well, we didn't want that happening, so Teddy and
Kathy, him holding the ladder and her hammering on a new front, put up a
smaller hole.
But it was too small and the sparrows couldn't get
in and soon we noticed a regular ingress and egress of bumble bees
which didn't really bother us all that much.
One of the last
things Ben did before he left for Honolulu was to take down the
birdhouse with the intention of fixing up the front for a new crop of
birds, next season. But when he looked inside, he found it full of all
kinds of larvae, different sizes, colours and shapes. The house, he
said, was beyond redemption. Like some futures.
**************************************************************
"You've
got to understand, Rhoda. It's true I still love you. But, God help
me, I love her too. She's so helpless! She needs me!"
"God
won't help you. You can't love us both. You love me and you letch
after her and she's helpless like an aroused bull. She's hoodwinked
you; she wants the security you give us, that's what she wants."
"You're
wrong, dear. She would never do anything to harm you or our family.
We're both helpless in the face of our love for each other. It's pure."
"Pure!
You mean Platonic? Honest? No sweating between sheets? Just holding
hands and looking into each other's limpid pools? And we've been doing
all those gross things in bed all these wasted years!"
"Don't be
bitter ... it's not like you. It's not like you to be so coarse.
Please, please try to understand, Rhoda. You don't know what it's like
to be a man and never to have any kinds of experiences. What did I
know? I was just a kid and there you were, before I had a chance to
live, to know anyone else. I want to know what I've missed! I want to
live a little too!"
**************************************************************
Tartini,
that dazzling violinist, that brilliant composer, was also not
satisfied with his life, with his prolific, admired output. Nothing
would do but for him to make a bargain with the devil. His soul for a
scintillating work of art par excellence, a tour de force of heavenly -
pardon me - devilish melody - and so was born "The Devil's Trill".
What
have I got to bargain with? Would I wish a tape worm on her? A
dybbuk. A dybbuk should inhabit the temple of her defilement.
My uxorious husband. I want him back!
******************************************************************
I
was crabby at the supermarket yesterday. Told two different people,
almost snarled at them, to put their cigarettes out until they got out
of the store. I don't want my meat and vegetables ashed upon; my air
polluted with their second-hand carcinogens.
I meant to get some
wheat-germ and looking close at some torn packages on the shelf, saw
unmistakably, rodent droppings. I marched right up to the manager and
demanded the place be cleaned up. He ignored me. I was stunned. He
said he was busy.
Funny. I tried pointing the mess out - and it was
a mess; on the lower shelves of the loose-packed cereals there were
even small dried pools of urine among the feces - to other shoppers and
no one was interested.
***************************************************************
A
week ago, I wandered into Robert Dirstein Interiors for a look around.
I hadn't really meant to. I hadn't planned on buying anything. I just
thought that looking at beautiful things would cheer me up.
I
liked a 17th-Century Flemish landscape, unsigned, a la Bruegel the
younger. But I liked even more a French commode in the style of Louis
XV. Serpentine-fronted with exquisite floral marquetry, brass-mounted
legs and escutcheons with a pie-crust bracchiated brown marble top. I
was almost certain I had seen a similar one at the Royal Ontario Museum,
once. It was expensive for a mid-Victorian reproduction of an earlier
era, but I figured I could afford it. It was meant to grace my living
room, lighten my heart.
The piece was delivered today. Two men
clomped their heavy shoes through the living room and set it down beside
the blue velvet loveseat. After some deliberation, I topped it with an
earlier acquisition from the shop: a French baroque rococo clock with a
cunning suspension, ornamented by a bronze shepherd boy fluting to his
bell-wether.
It hasn't cheered me up, it hasn't lightened my mood
at all. I feel forlorn, strangely removed from pride of acquisition.
It doesn't mean anything now.
*************************************************************
"How long is he going to be away?" Ruthie wants to know.
"Who
knows?" I shrug. "He's there, finding himself. When he discovers
exactly what it is he's looking for he'll come back. There's no hurry,
Morley is looking after the business."
"You seem unconcerned. Not at all what I'd thought you'd be like. Don't you care?"
She wants to see me bleeding. My nerves are shot, my stomach churns, my head aches, and I can't sleep.
"Of course, I care. Would you like to see me wear sackcloth and ashes?"
"Rhoda,
take my advice. An ultimatum. Give him an ultimatum. You're entirely
too calm. When he comes back, scream and rage. Tell him it's either
the tramp or you and the children. He adores the kids - it'll be battle
over. And don't sleep with him until you're sure!"
"He'll make
his own decision, unassisted by any histrionics on my part. I want him
back because he wants to come, not because I've issued an ultimatum."
"Listen
to me, Rhoda. Don't be so proud. You think he's a man? All men are
babies; they need to be told what to do. Show me the man who's a true
adult and I'll show you a man with more than his share of female
hormones. Men are just grown-up kids. As long as you don't get upset
by his fooling around he'll take it for assent. You're just fooling
yourself!"
*********************************************************
I
find myself wondering how his ice-maiden shapes up in that hemisphere
of Gauguinesque beauties. I wonder what she's done with her daughter.
If we were truly civilized I could have offered to look after the girl.
The height of sophistication. My head is splitting.
***********************************************************
Teddy's
read his way through Ryder Haggard. Nordhoff and Hall, and now he's
working on Joseph Conrad. Doing his adventuring vicariously. Like me.
I wonder if he'll mature earlier than his father.
Kathy is
reading, of all things, Machiavelli's 'The Prince'. What's she
plotting, I wonder. What a crafty adversary she'll be in some future
life.
Speaking of precocious children; although I don't mean to
imply that I feel my children qualify for the genius category. I've
read about Leonardo da Vinci, apprenticed as a child to a guild of
artisans and already turning his brain and cunning hand to works of art.
Then there was Beethoven, a reluctant marvel whose father insisted
that genius come to fruition. And clever Mozart who at three and a half
followed his sister to the Clavichord; a virtuoso before he was five, a
composer of sparkling music toasted by cultured Europe, and just
incidentally delightedly exploited by his loving father.
Will
Teddy read Darwin next and relish his voyage of discovery to the
Galapagos? Will Teddy be influenced by him as Darwin as a child had
been by von Humboldt, and will Teddy go on to discover new frontiers?
For example, that mankind doesn't really exist? That we are demented
figures of our own tortured imaginations?
Will Kathy go on in the
shadow of tyrannical Indira Gandhi, tempered by the clever political
finesse of Golda Meier to become Supreme Ruler of this Earth, to
complete a manifest destiny of a people that doesn't exist? Angels of
Destiny!
I am a babbling idiot. All that Honolulu sun and play
has gone to my febrile brain. I can actually feel my brain bubbling and
fermenting in the heat of the Pacific. There'll soon be nothing left
of me but a mechanical shell, a dutiful automaton.
Ben, come back!
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