Home Free (23 page)

The men run up and down with bed frames and 50-pound amps. Soon I've done the small bits and stand around on the sidewalk feeling redundant. This becomes our last parental chore—to dwindle, to clam up, to say,“Well, you may be right,”and step aside. Once we eclipsed everything, bending over their cribs. We were the whole sky. But eventually, at 16 or 26, they realize that whenever we come in to cover them up,we also block their view.

On the other hand, I did leave the gym early in order to show up at the apartment in good time. Katie was away for the weekend, so I'd opened the windows in the apartment, moved the mail off the stairs, and put some flowers in a vase. Bought some milk and put it in the fridge. That wasn't meddling, was it, to buy some milk? The thoughtful gesture of one adult to another?

Brian arrived breathless and clapped Casey on the back. “Your first Toronto apartment,” he said. “This is a landmark!”

Up and down we went with bins of clothing, camping gear,my father's old record turntable, crates of our vinyl albums. Bikes and canvases. Casey gave me back the lamp I had ordered online for Seasonal Affective Disorder.

“I appreciate the gesture,” he said, “but I don't plan on being depressed this winter.”

No problem, I said. I know lots of depressed people who could use it.

His small room quickly filled up. The overflow went into a porch-like storage space at the back of the apartment.

“You know,” I said to Casey,“you should just keep your bed in the room and put everything else back in that space—you could even put up shelves there for your clothes.”

“Sounds like a plan,” he said, as in, “I'm going to ignore that.”

Stealthily, I lugged some crates from the bedroom back into the space. I began to organize a “music corner” at one end, a “tool and equipment corner” in another.
Stop it
,
stop it
. I slid open the windows for more air and looked down into the jumbled yard. Yes, this place had potential. I happened to have brought along a plate of jerk chicken so I put that in the fridge too.

“Will you be eating here or somewhere else?” I asked.

“I've got to drop off more stuff to another address, then I think I'll come home to sleep because it'll be too late to get myself set up here.”

Home? Here, or back with us? The meaning of the word was shifting.

Then he barrelled off to deliver a mattress to someone in north Toronto, a moving job to help defray the cost of the truck. Brian got back on his bike; I carried the Saran-wrapped plate of chicken back to our car and drove home, where the two of us would eat it. The centrifugal household.

I felt fully in the ambiguous grip of family, this long-term arrangement in which the connection feels either too attenuated or too claustrophobic. It's also a lot for three people to sustain, architecturally speaking. We'd come through shaky times but here we were, still standing. How hard we make our children work, to absorb all our love, fears, and hopes.

What we could really use, I thought, was some new weight-bearing members . . . a daughter-in-law. Grandchildren. The wider circle.

The Dump

T
HE MOVING-DAY adrenalin was still flowing, and Casey had one more day left on the rental fee of the truck. xxx xx xxx“Maybe we should clear some of that stuff out of the basement.”

Ah, the basement. The lurking id of the family.

“I'd rather do it now and get paid for it, than have to do it after you guys die,” he suggested in a rather too businesslike tone of voice.

“Fair enough.”

Our unfinished basement is scary. Half of it is too low to stand up in, causing Brian to navigate around it like a troll with scolio-sis. There is a damp patch on one wall that I keep spritzing with anti-mould poisons, and the drain in the floor suffers reflux after heavy rains. There was our Barbie-sized set of washer and dryer;we had tried several times to install new machines, but the turn down into the basement was too narrow;we'd have to tear down the walls to get new appliances down there. So eventually, we gave up and began using the local laundromat. We did this for three years until we finally caved in and repaired the original dwarf appliances. Sometimes late at night I would lie in bed and think about the basement and all the things that were down there:

Two mirrored doors. A slab of cedar from a 40-year-old homemade bed frame. Suitcases full of orphaned electronic cables. My old Selectric typewriter and Brian's first manual, an Underwood. The red Afghan tribal dress my girlfriends gave me for my birthday in 1972, which I still hope to fit into again. Five drums. Two roasting pans. Snarls of Christmas lights. Dale Carnegie books on how to influence people, from my parents' shelves. A crate of cookbooks I have never used. And many banker boxes fill with drafts of plays, books, and screenplays, the things I'd written that had come to light, or not. Typing typing typing.

Cartons full of Casey's high-school books, university essays, sketches, journals; metal filing cabinets full of Brian's interviews with Madonna and Mick Jagger and Michael J. Fox. Stars in the cellar.

The bothersome part was that none of this—the letters, the drill bits, the bolts of Chinese silk, and lumpy pillows—was accounted for. It represented both the worthless things we hadn't bothered to throw out along with the treasures that we have not treasured. In Burlington, the basement was where the family imagination held sway,where my mother painted or fired pottery. Our basement, for all its evidence of diligence, had become the graveyard of our carelessness. Every now and then I would try to take a stab at it, carting garbage bags of clothing to the Goodwill, throwing out the talk-show mugs and the posters for long-forgotten events. But this is not a one-person job, and Brian is less haunted by the basement than I am. To put it in a positive light, he is better at archiving. In his line of work, he is also the recipient of a steady stream of film-industry swag that walks the line between hopeless junk and stuff I can't bring myself to throw out. His passions come with many material objects attached to them,too: conga drums, a 30-pound bag of percussion instruments, camera tripods, computer drives. Gear. Stuff.

On the other hand, the obsessively rewritten lost novels and the rolling racks of clothing in the basement are mostly mine. The other day I pulled out a 1980s pair of knee-high suede boots whose time had come round again. If only novels were like boots.

If Brian catches me making a pile of stuff to throw out, he will go through it and reclaim things.

“Why are you keeping your press pass from the Cannes Film Festival of eight years ago?” I will ask.

“I collect my press passes.”

For the last two years, Casey had been eyeing the items he had inherited from us. The useful things (the silver family flask, his grandfather's three-piece suit,my old Pentax), the pointless things (a microwave omelette maker), and the junk (thousands of paper drink umbrellas).

Now it was time to get rid of it.

Down in the basement, we began sorting. He held up a strange garden implement, a long metal pole with a spidery set of prongs on one end.

“What is this?”

“It's for twisting out weeds,” I said defensively. “It's so I don't have to bend over.”Casey does not have to point out how unweeded the garden remains.

“This is the kind of stuff we have a million of,” he said.

He finds my chromatic harmonica,which I never use, and plays a tune on it.

“How's it going with this?”

I take it away and put it on the “keep” pile. I plan to play the harmonica when I am old and bedridden. Casey rummages on.

“Dad would never do this, you know.”

“He doesn't have the time.”

“Anyway he'd just want to pay someone to do it, and nobody but me could sort all this out,what's valuable,what's not.”

“That's true. But if we'd been more organized, we would have thrown out our old vinyl.”

“What about this?” He held up a chipped china baby's plate.

“That's my great-grandmother's baby plate; that stays,” I said. I pulled out an oil painting my mother had done, yet another still life with flowers. Maybe reframed? I didn't have the heart to throw it out. This was, I realized, how people ended up on reality TV shows about compulsive hoarding.

We began to paw through a dreadful dark space under the stairs, the Swag Hole, where we tossed the cheap bags and satchels that Brian brings home from the film festival circuit.

“There must be over 20 in here,” said Casey, pulling out a tangle of logo-festooned items. “Talk about baggage.”

We looked into the maw, where one last suitcase lurked. An old-fashioned hard-shell one. I clicked it open to find a nest of mould and my first bits of published work. Yellow carbon copies of book reviews I had written in my twenties, when carbon copies still existed. Letters from my high-school boyfriend. Some were too damp to salvage, but most were fine. I sat down in a broken chair and began reading one.

“See, if you just keep plowing through it, valuable things turn up,” said Casey the archivist.

“We have to stop doing this,” I finally said,“or we'll get sick. The mould is bad.” It was hard to make him stop, though. He was on a dumpster bender.

Then we began The Removal, hauling up lumber, cobwebby baseboards, defunct sewing machines, and roof racks. The front yard filled up. Soon there was a small ski hill of matter.

“Take a picture,”Casey said. “We need to document this.”I stood on the sidewalk to get a long shot of the heap with Casey posing on top, like a climber summiting.

“Sure you don't want this lovely batik from Bali?” I said, waving a wall hanging at him. He looked at me to make sure I was kidding.

“And I guess you don't want a sink shaped like a seashell,” I said, admiring the dainty model we had ripped out of the bathroom when we moved in. He got into the cab of the truck.

“It's time to hit the dump.”

On the way down Parliament Street in the truck, we rolled open the windows. The breeze felt good, drying the sweat we had worked up. The truck engine was gratifyingly loud, a workhorse of an engine. We stopped at the lights, glanced sideways, and met the eyes of a row of people.

“Hey,we're on the same level as the streetcar,”Casey said approvingly. I began to see the appeal of driving your own U-Haul.

The city dump is down by the lake, in an unkempt industrial area on Commissioners Street. I've always had a secret affection for the street, an under-travelled straightaway in an area of scrap metal yards and cavernous film studios, alternating with fields of wildflowers and weeds. I used to come down here with a college flame in his father's car. He'd drive right out into the middle of one of these fields of Queen Anne's lace and ragweed, tilt the front seat back as far as it would go, and we'd make out with Toronto's skyline sparkling ahead of us, like the screen of a drive-in movie. It was an ungroomed part of town, the place where freighters come to anchor and then rust for years. The place where things wind up.

We spotted a tall brick building with a concrete ramp leading up into it. It was ominous, that entrance, faintly evocative of gas chambers or something furtive and dire. In one corner of the parking lot, a man in a jumpsuit and a mask was sorting out Hazardous Wastes. He invited us to unload our paint cans. There was a pyramid of shrink-wrapped TVs near him,metal drums full of discarded paint, and a tower of dead car batteries.

The dozen half-empty cans of paint lurking at the back of our basement had been lightly but persistently on my mind ever since we'd moved in. Now we handed them over, and the young man in the gas mask poured some of the citrus colour from our living-room walls into a metal drum. It swirled in with the residue of other houses.

Casey lugged the Selectric out of the truck. I realized that I missed my old typewriter, the loud hum of it and the absolutely committed thwack of its keys. It throbbed like a beast and you really felt you were getting down to work when you typed on it. But away it went, to machine heaven.

“So where do we go for lumber and where for straight garbage?” Casey asked.

“Around the back for recycling, and straight up the ramp for things you're just throwing away. But you have to weigh in first. It's the next turn up the road.”

At the weighing station, they gave us a “before”weight so that when we checked out they would know how much to charge us for the load. Ten bucks per 50 kilos of junk. This faintly thrilled me; in a very small way,we were becoming accountable.

An incongruously well-tended garden flanked the bottom of the ramp to the dump. With the engine gunning, we shot to the top.

“Why do we have to go up so high just to throw things away?” I asked. There was a sensation of motoring toward the end of a long dock, like the last scene in
Jules et Jim
, where the three of them drive off into the pier into the water.

“I don't know. Maybe it's about using gravity to get stuff into the incinerator.” A long white tube angled down from the side of the dump to the place where things were burnt.

A man in a construction hat and a flare-orange vest took our receipt at the entrance. We inched into the dumpsite, a vast chamber with a great multicoloured cliff of garbage bulldozed against one corner and a fresh, uncompressed boreal forest of debris in the other.

“Just back up to the active pile and unload,” the worker told us. Wow, I thought, I didn't realize we could play such a personal role in the disposal process. There were no intermediaries or agreeable facades here, just a cascade of discarded crap,onto which you hurled your stuff. The pile was the opposite of possessions, with which we insulate ourselves from unpleasant realities, like rot and death. We go to so much trouble, installing lengths of quarter round to cover up the unseemly seam in our houses,where the floors meet the walls. But in the end, it all goes on the slag heap. There was something exhilarating in being at the bedside, as it were, of all the objects we were ready to leave behind.