When I Was Young and In My Prime (10 page)

Peter Friesen, the bachelor who works the Dowswell farm, has been paying me visits. Mrs. McKinnon becomes terribly excited when she sees him pulling his team into the drive. She's begun referring to him as the teacher's beau, which I think is rather hasty and more than a little alarming. Of course he's nice in his way, but he has been all over and is not what one would call the settled sort. I have always said I didn't want to be a farmer's wife. However, one thing does stand out—Mr. Peter Friesen has begun to attend the Presbyterian Church. Fancy that.
You can always give an old dog new spots,
he said to me Sunday evening when he took me out for a drive. Isn't that dear? Oh he's nice enough, but as far as I'm concerned I have not chosen to be Mrs. Peter Friesen. Somehow I can't help feeling though that simply by not saying no to his friendly gestures and to the invitations of others who invite the two of us on the same day to their homes, I am consenting by increments to something larger.
 

Is that how one gets married? Not so much by saying yes as by not saying no?

“I don't know why people think they can pursue happiness directly anyway. It doesn't work that way,” James says. He's back from his tour and we're celebrating his birthday with a bottle of wine on the steps of the front porch. Streetlights on. My head in his lap.
 

“What do you mean?”

“I mean happiness is a by-product. Happiness is beside the point.”
 

“What is the point then?”

“I don't know. Doing right by people. Becoming really good at one or two things. Noticing shit.”
 

“And if you do those things—living right—then you'll be happy on the side?”
 

“No, not necessarily. Not exactly. No guarantees.”
 

“No guarantees?”

“Nope. No guarantees.”

“Promise?”

I shift my head from his lap and look up at him.

“I do,” he says.
 

On Friday night during the busiest part of the evening the cops crept up the back fire escape and did a surprise “takedown” in the apartment above the bar, a manoeuvre complete with deafening stun-grenade to blast open the door, the whole crowd below ducking expertly at the sound, pints in hand. As far as anyone can figure, the man who'd been renting the apartment had been gradually befriended and usurped and, over a period of weeks or months, the place had become an actual instance of that infamous thing: a crackhouse.
 

Apparently the day after the takedown a woman called the police saying she'd been locked out of her apartment. The cops came in the middle of the brunch rush and started hassling Roxanne about it. Roxanne is the owner of the bar and landlord of the apartment. She dried her hands on her apron and said, “Uh, maybe you boys should talk to your friends back at the station about the takedown they did last night upstairs?”
 

The cops looked flustered and went back out to their car. Meanwhile, a wiry woman on the sidewalk screamed at their backs, “I know my rights you fuckers.” You've got to admire the guts.

Roxanne can't get her insurance company to pay for the damage to the apartment because her rates would skyrocket to the point of putting her out of business, so today a bunch of the staff—me, Leona, Sammy and Ursula—gather to clean
out the apartment. The new manager is going to move in.
 

The smell is the first thing. Surely the only way such a reek could have accumulated would be if people were peeing directly on the plywood floors. We stand huddled in the middle of the room for a few minutes, rotating as if surrounded by a hostile force: stained and sheetless mattresses listing off the sides of equally stained box springs; matching couch and armchair, a light grey with greasy darker grey patches on the armrests, impossible to tell their original colour; everywhere you look, bulky black stereo equipment, obsolete, unplugged, forlorn; in one corner some stacks of hardcover books, a stubborn lump of order not yet dissolved into the generalized chaos; in the kitchen sink a half-inch of bloated rice in a watery reddish sauce; Stouffer's TV dinner boxes inexplicably stapled around the kitchen door frame; the floor carpeted with newspapers, plastic bags, lone socks, cutlery, flimsy towels, coat hangers, an argyle sweater, a broken-off chair-leg, ashtrays, pocket change, candle stubs, tinfoil. And over it all, debris from ceiling tiles the police broke in their adrenalin-charged search for drugs—that and a sense of intensified gravity.
 

Finally someone strides forward, tears the black garbage bags off the front windows, and we set to, trying not to think too much about how this happens to a life.
 

Leona runs downstairs and brings up the snow shovel we use in winter to scrape the sidewalk in front of the bar, goes at the kitchen floor with it. I pull on a pair of brand new bright yellow rubber gloves and begin randomly stuffing things into a garbage bag. Sammy holds it open for me. A drawerful of sealed syringes. A little mountain of condom packages and breathmint samples spilling off the coffee table. A pair of black pumps with a slight heel, barely scuffed. “Crack-
whore kit,” says Sammy, pointing. Then, “Sorry, black humour.”

The radio's on. We all begin to find a rhythm in the work.

A mostly empty notebook with a list of Favourite Character Actors in the front and an impenetrable and meticulous series of numbers and tiny Xs filling five whole pages in the back, as if the owner had been compelled to keep score for some relentless and sinister game. A sample pack of six sardine tins—lemon, jalapeno, tomato, mustard, jerk and original—wrapped in cellophane and tied with a curling red ribbon. A file of clippings from the
Toronto Sun:
POWs in Lebanon, plane crash off Peggy's Cove, death of Trudeau, scandals and natural disasters, the file reading like research for a definitive document detailing the varieties of upheaval.
 

On the radio a smarmy-voiced ad for a mutual fund. Someone calls out, “Does this station ever play music?” Someone else goes over and turns the dial.

 
At one point Roxanne comes out of the bathroom doing a little dance and singing, “Look what the cops missed and I found!” A baggie of pot in a little brown velvet jewellery case.
 

Altogether we collect enough change for a two-four. We also find two crackpipes made from gluesticks. But we all agree that the prize for best find has to go to Ursula, who found the pin to the stun grenade.
 

We take a break. As we clink our beer bottles, Sammy says, “Having friends is better than having insurance any day.”

On the radio a blues song crossed with a high and keening native chant. Aboriginal Voices 96.1 FM.

The canned food and books and some of the less offensive furniture we put out on the street for passersby to take. The rest we throw off the fire escape into the restaurant dumpster out back. After we've been working for a couple of hours, I look out the front window onto the sidewalk below. A small crowd has gathered around the free stuff, many of them with open books in their hands as if attending an impromptu study group. I watch an older man in a faded jean jacket choose
Robert's Rules of Order
and
Introduction to Modern Behaviorism,
slip them into his shopping bag along with the sardines and ride off on his bicycle.
 

For a prolonged and disquieting moment when I turn back to the room, everything—diminishing piles of debris, armchair on its side as if it's passed out, my own hand on the windowsill, even the reeking air itself—everything seems to bind together into a thick quivering whole as if by chemical reaction, some kind of gelatin in the day that, having been stirred and stirred, has finally taken. I stand there by the window, immobilized.
 

Then, just as quickly, the elements of the room unbind themselves from each other and fall back, spent, separate after all.

When we're done, I take off my rubber gloves, plucking each fingertip loose like a lady at a ball.

mary mary

from
Mind Your Manners: A Complete Dictionary of Etiquette for Canadians

appointments:
Be on time.

(found after lengthy entries for
apology
and
applause
)

personal questions:
Never ask any.

(found between a cryptic entry on
perfume
and an entry under the heading of
pineapple
which explains the proper use of cutlery at luncheons)

I phoned Mother one Sunday

she phoned me the next

I phoned her one Sunday

she phoned me the next

I phoned her one Sunday

she phoned me the next

I'm not sure if it was Grandpa or Mom and Uncle Nick who made the decision. Whatever the case, it certainly wasn't Grandma.
 

There isn't much to move really. Or much to say. It's a hot, awkward afternoon. Mom takes charge, arranging the bright track suits in the little closet beside the bed, pointing things out to the nurse on duty, asking questions about meal times and laundry routines.