Mennonites Don't Dance (23 page)

The house too, has deteriorated. The original wooden front steps have bowed even deeper for not being shovelled all winter. And the whole structure leans more to the left, away from the prairie wind.

I climb the worn, arthritic steps up to the porch and discover that one of the front windows is broken, probably by a neighbourhood boy throwing stones. I pick up the larger pieces of glass that have sheared from the rotted frame and set them on the porch rail.

There are other small vandalisms, too. A pair of lover's initials carved into the crumbling paint behind a plastic loveseat — an addition of my father's that never sat well with my mother. And hanging from her unpruned rosebushes, which stubbornly insist on blooming year after year, are banners of toilet paper which, having been rained on and dried in the sun, drape like papier mâché ghosts across the thorny branches.

The front lock still requires some finesse, calculated jiggling and a specific click like a password for gaining access to a club. Once the door is open I step over the splintered threshold and instinctively turn out the porch light, left burning all this time. Even though everyone in the neighbourhood knows that the old yellow house bordering the CPR line has been empty these months, leaving a light on at night is still what people around here do to let everyone know someone's home, whether they are or not.

I expect to find that the mice have moved back in. All through my childhood they'd always found ways, no matter how many holes were boarded up on the outside. And now, judging by the trail of droppings along the floorboards, they've made themselves at home.

Except for a thick film of dust, everything else is as it was. Heavy drapes are drawn across the windows, the furniture arranged not for comfort, but as props. The thirty-year-old lampshades still wrapped in their original cellophane.

After a walk-through of the main floor, trying to appraise it as a buyer might, I take the staircase to the second storey. The banister is so thickly waxed it feels like a candle, and when I touch it, dust sifts down around the spindles like silt settling in a pond after it's been churned up. It's going to take a lot of work to scrape away all the evidence of the lives lived here. Much more though, my realtor says, if I want to sell the house rather than pay someone to push it over.

Upstairs in my parents' bedroom, there is more damage. Beads of moisture have collected under the windowsill, some calcifying over the years into little, rounded stalactites which, when I touch them, feel like calluses. Early last spring, when Mom complained of a draft — there had always been drafts — my father carefully caulked all the seams. But no amount of sealing was enough to keep the house from losing what little heat the ancient furnace in the basement was still able to breathe out. Cold has always seeped in through the single-paned windows. And now that my father has gone willingly, maybe even gratefully, into a retirement home, there's no one left to care for the house but me.

This room never suited my mother. The walls and switch plates are papered with an insistently cheerful, thornless, yellow-rose pattern chosen by my grandmother when the house belonged to her. Mom inherited the wallpaper more than fifty years ago, along with the heavy dressers which, if moved, would reveal dents in the floorboards under each of their feet. My grandmother died when my mother was still a young girl and, since then, only one thing in this room has ever changed. On the floor, at the side of the bed, there's an oval of darker wood where, until I was a thirteen, a rag rug was always placed just so. When I kneel down and touch the floor there, I remember how it was like so many other things that once belonged to my grandmother. For reasons I didn't understand, it was sacred.

One day the only cat my mother ever let me have became trapped in that bedroom and vomited on her precious rug. Rather than toss it out as a ruined bit of otherwise worthless nostalgia, or throw it in the wash with the rest of the rags, Mom carefully bathed it in the tub, easing away the crust of digestive fluid with my old baby brush.

By the time I came home from school my cat was gone. Mom had stuffed him in a cardboard box and driven to the farm, where my grandfather lived with my Great Aunt Gutherie, a sour spinster who made herself useful enough to stay.

An indoor cat that was used to predictable dinners, Socks was found dead a few weeks later, killed by a coyote that must've found him easier to get at than the chickens, which were kept safely shut inside their coop at night.

The last time I saw my mother alive was early last December. I drove all night, blowing snow making the usual two-hour trip from Regina a wheel-gripping four, until I finally pulled up in front of the house near midnight.

As always, my father had left the porch light on for me and was dozing in a living room chair when I let myself in. It was an old habit of his, waiting up for me. Mom couldn't go to sleep if she thought there might be a knock at the door in the middle of the night. With Dad keeping watch, if I didn't come home and was discovered lying in a ditch somewhere, he'd be the one to meet the police at the front door. He could break the bad news to Mom, gently, after breakfast.

“Hi, honey, rough trip?” Dad had yawned and stood up when I came in and shoved the front door shut hard against a gust of wind and snow and an ill-fitted frame. I stomped my boots, snow slagging away from them to melt on the rubber mat that filled the entryway.

“No worse than usual.” We both knew it was a lie, the kind we always told if Mom was in the room. Even when she had still been lucid. “How is she?”

My mother had been diagnosed with dementia a year earlier and ever since we had watched her give in to it as though she were crawling under a warm blanket for a long and needed sleep.

“I think she's still awake. Why don't you go on up and check on her before you head in.”

Abandoning my suitcase, I flapped my arms out of my winter parka and headed up the stairs, padding softly over the hallway floorboards without causing a noise.

“Mom?” I said quietly when I reached her half-opened door. I leaned in and found her sitting up in bed, an afghan and lamplight draped across her lap along with a picture album open to the middle. She was staring off into a corner of the room as though she truly was somewhere else. Off wandering through those pictures, perhaps. Re-imagining our history.

“Mom? It's me. I just got here.” I stepped round to the side of the bed and knelt on the bare floor where that old rug used to be. When she didn't acknowledge me at first I rested my head on the mattress, tired from the trip, tired of pretending I didn't think dementia was just another way for her to keep me at a distance.

After a few minutes I lifted my head when my mother spoke.

“This was my daughter,” she said. Her words came slowly and she paused, seeming to search for her next syllable. “Tess,” she added with some difficulty and pointed to the page she'd stopped on. Both sides were covered in a tidy collage of pictures. Me as a grass-skirted hula girl in my first figure skating recital, dressed in stiff corduroy slacks and vest for my first day of the third grade. Another of me hugging Socks.

“Mom, that's me,” I said and covered the papery skin of her cool, age-mottled hands with mine. Like everything else about her, her hands had aged suddenly, blotting out the woman she used to be.

“No,” she said. “My daughter died a long time ago. Like everyone else.”

I looked into my mother's face, expecting to find the worry creases she'd always worn at the corners of her eyes between her brows. They weren't there. Her face after all her years, was more peaceful than I'd ever seen. As though in believing she had really, finally, lost those she always pushed away — seeming to test whether we'd keep coming back — she had found a way to let go.

I took the album and closed it lightly, kissed my mother on the cheek, and turned out the lamp. When I went downstairs, Dad was waiting for me in the kitchen with a pot of camomile tea.

“Figured you probably drank a lot of coffee on the way here,” he said and handed me a clunky mug, which I'd always preferred to Mom's dainty china teacups that had been passed down to her from my grandmother. Now, Mom is gone and I can hardly believe how distant that night seems. And I'm here, alone, following my mother's footsteps into her kitchen.

I open the door to her tea cupboard where delicate cups still dangle by their ears from small brass hooks. The hooks were installed because of the trains that sped along the tracks just yards from our back fence.

The whole house rattled when the trains passed by, carrying their heavy loads of wheat and potash out of the province, causing the china to tremble to the edge of their shelf. So I suppose it may have seemed deliberate when, a few days after my cat was eaten by coyotes, I opened the cabinet door and one of the teacups fell, breaking in half against the sharp edge of the countertop before tumbling to the floor and shattering.

My mother rushed into the kitchen, already wringing her hands. “What did you do?” She grasped my arm with anxious, pinching fingers that would leave a bruise.

“It — it fell,” I said. “I didn't mean — It was just there when I opened the door. I tried to catch it.” For proof I held out my hand, which had been cut against a falling shard.

“But you didn't catch it.” She sucked in a thin, serrated breath before she let go of me and stared at the shelf, as though expecting to see the rest of her teacups lined up along the edge, ready to leap down after the first. Tenderly, nervously, she nudged each one to the back of the cupboard, counting as she touched their rims. With one gone, the remaining ones could no longer be called a set. She knelt and, with shaking hands, began to pick up the pieces of broken pottery into her apron.

“From now on you don't touch these,” she said. She glanced at the blood that was dripping slowly from my fingers. I thought she'd offer a Band-Aid, but she only cradled the broken cup in her lap, fitting a few pieces together as though it might miraculously be made whole again if it was all accounted for, and fault assigned.

“We could try to glue it,” I said, tucking my hand behind me.

My mother was quiet for a moment. “And do what with it? Tea would dribble into my lap. It's in a hundred pieces. No. No it's broken, and that's that.” She stood up, found a small box in a drawer, arranged the shards inside and placed the box on the shelf with the rest of the cups.

While I swept up what remained, dust and slivers, Mom went upstairs to lay a cold cloth over her eyes. She disappeared into her bedroom, drew the blinds and didn't come back downstairs until after I'd left for school the next morning. By then my father had installed the hooks.

My mother's name was Penelope Reimer. Her own mother, Ada, was not like those of her friends.

Ada was raised in the city — Winnipeg, an entire province away — and wasn't the sort of woman who could be kept cheerful with the daily busyness that would be hers as the wife of a farmer. After she married Joseph, she seemed to think that anything lacking in the way of society and culture would be made up for in views and experiences to fill her journals and watercolours.

By the time Penelope was about to go into the seventh grade at the country school near their farm, she had known for some years that Ada was becoming increasingly unhappy. When grownups didn't think Penelope could hear them they whispered things like, “That poor woman is like china in a bull shop. Never should've left the city.” They shook their heads and
tsk
ed and prayed for her. Because of their own hardships, however, they were of the opinion that miracles were the exception, and suffering the better evidence of God's love.

As long as Penelope could remember, sadness seemed to come over Ada the way dark clouds stalked the horizon before closing in quickly and completely. Recently there was less and less space between those times. Hardly enough for them to get ready for the next storm.

Ada also suffered from headaches, which meant all the drapes in the house had to be drawn. And Penelope, who wasn't trusted not to carelessly make noise, was sent outside to amuse herself with whatever could be found lying around in the yard. Penelope though, who had gradually taken over Ada's share of inside chores while Joseph picked up the slack in the barn, had forgotten how to play. Her dollhouse was nothing more to her than a plywood box, emptied of the magic that once brought dolls to life.

Penelope spent weeks planting and tending her own little garden on the exposed side of the house, from a jar of miscellaneous seeds that turned out to have no practical use. She was secretly pleased when flowers grew up in the place of the expected carrots and kohlrabi and began to bud, until a windstorm came through and carried off the soil around them, exposing their roots.

In the evenings, when Penelope and Joseph returned to the house, she opened the front door and listened before going in.

Sometimes, Ada might be recovered and at the stove, humming while sprinkling spices into stew, eager for company. Other times, she was still in her nightgown, dishevelled and overwhelmed by the ingredients in front of her. On those days Penelope would quickly take over in the kitchen, but the simplest things would still pluck at the taut strings of Ada nerves. The sound of toast popping up was enough to make her startle, so that Penelope and her father developed a knack for quietly lifting the toaster's lever just when the bread was medium-browned. Between the two of them they almost always got there in time.