When I Was Young and In My Prime (19 page)

and to hold

After a while we settle into a routine of visiting. Mom and I usually drive out together, have an early lunch with Grandpa, then walk over to Extended Care and feed Grandma her lunch. I often have to rush back to the city to work.
 

Whenever I have to work a shift at the bar after a visit with Grandma, I always feel like a foreigner in my life. Invariably I drift through the whole evening at a slight remove—
how odd, these people's customs
—though the distance is never quite as intense as it was the shift I worked after the day we moved her.
 

Suddenly it seemed a strange and unasked-for mission to move among the living and count out coins for change. To balance a cork tray stacked with empty glasses through the crowd then set it down on a gleaming copper pass-bar. Each customer impressed me: the act of choosing one beverage over another, the unlikely reliability of skin as a border to the body, the bravura of being out in public.
 

All night I watched them with the same gaze I'd levelled on Grandma all day.
 

Who knows her? What's he thinking? What's she loyal to? Does someone love him?
 

Love?
 

The band performed a disjointed sound check. A regular watched the hockey game on the TV above the bar, his face tracing a live map of passes, shots and saves.
 

What's it like to be inside that skull? To look out from behind those eyes? Inhabit that walk? That slouch?
 

Buddy in the corner had had one too many and his face had slipped its anchor, was drifting out to sea.
 

What do we mean when we say we know a person?
 

How can we know anything?
 

Four people around a table all tipped their faces back to laugh as if opening a passage for some amber draught to pour into them from above.
 

Careful observation? Extrapolation? Imagination? Contemplation?
 

The music started in earnest and the drunk in the corner revived enough to heckle the band a little.
 

A good guess? A wild guess?
 

Love?
 

That word again.
 

The drunk lurched from his corner toward the door, calling over his shoulder, “Don't forget to laugh behind my back when I leave.”
 

Unaware of him, the table of four laughed again, about something else.
 

And all night my mind kept stealing back to the window of her face, its kitchen curtains closed.

James told me once that I almost always twitch just after I've fallen asleep. Not little twitches, he said—two or three leaping twitches, originating in the thigh, rabbits springing from the brush of my body. As if a starter pistol trigger has been pulled, as if I were leaving. It gives me an ache, this picture of him lying curled around me, his chest against my back, holding my body for me while I'm gone.
 

There are a handful of moments like that, which make it all seem worthwhile.
Beads of sensation,
Virginia Woolf called them. Making time stop flowing in just one direction, a vertical pressure felt against the horizontal, the pull of eternity. The moment breaks off, beads—a balanced sphere, a wobbling, tiny whole.
 

Then fill in the rest: distractions, defences, blame, bickering, pettiness, breaches of trust small and large, ego trips, expectations. Taking each other profoundly for granted. Knowing exactly what sentence will hurt the other most. The injustice of the fact that the one time you utter it outweighs by a long shot the thousand times you held your tongue. The morning breath. The shared popcorn. The silly dances while undressing. The customs your bodies develop while you sleep. Laziness. Irritability. Loneliness. Pride. The pause in lovemaking to remove a pubic hair from your tongue. Could you look at this thing on my back? Is it a zit or a bite or cancer?

It's such a strange thing, attention. How it can shift—past, present, future, there, elsewhere, everywhere—and all the while your body is here, your skin making contact with the air, parasites living their lives out in your eyelashes, maybe a cancer forming from the tiniest of cells in your left breast and ten years from now it will announce itself on the scene, finally getting your attention. And your elbow itches, and you scratch it with only a fraction of your attention, and the man you share a life with and say you love is reading to you from some dense philosophical text about pre-Cartesian conceptions of the Self, and part of your attention is with him but another part is thinking about the moment of peace you had this morning and how it seemed to you for a second that you didn't need to prove anything to anyone and how fleeting it was and what will you cook with the fish that needs to be used up, probably should have something green. He teases you about your need to have something green every day, how farmers used to eat greens every day in spring and summer then not at all during the winter, the two of you always trying out different angles for arriving at the most basic formula for a good human life and once you put it that way how absurd it sounds, but the compulsion is there and oh the ivy in the window needs watering and all the while he's reading to you about the Self and you realize you've only taken in a fraction and there's a swell of resentment because he never asks if he can read to you, does he? He just goes ahead and does it, walks into the room where you are working—you've established this before about when you're working—but he just walks into the room and says, Listen to this, but it would be more trouble than it was worth at the moment to take him to task over it—you know, because you've done it, because it would turn into a Big Deal (or is it just that you've never found the right way to do it?), and if you just listen (or half-listen or pretend to listen as you're doing now) it will be over sooner than a fight would be and, though you know there's a dishonesty in this, a shirking, you do it anyway because you're lazy.

My favourite moments are the ones when we laugh together in bed, gazing at each other from our pillows, inches from bridge of nose to bridge of nose. Those times we laugh at something inexplicably funny, something mild and silly, and the laughing doesn't match it—the laughing extends beyond the boundaries of the slight joke, makes little eaves, and the eaves gesture at sheltering all the sad-funny stuff of the whole day, though of course they can't. No one could recount or explain those moments—their humour doesn't last or translate—but I tell you they are my favourite times, my favourite.

Last week when I got back from visiting Grandma he told me if it happens to me when we get old, he'll keep trying to make me laugh.
 

I stroked his cheek, but to be honest it struck me as far-fetched, and I just barely managed to keep from saying,
If we make it that long.
 

My mother is president of the family reunion, whatever that means. She told me last night over the phone that when it came her turn to give the report on our branch of the family, she tried to be positive, said, “Mom doesn't talk or walk much anymore, but sometimes she seems to know us.”
 

Lillian, Grandma's ever-catty cousin, stood up and said, “Well, I disagree with Ruth. I saw Mary two months ago, and she's just useless—she's a vegetable. I hope she dies quickly.”
 

Mom said on the phone that the word bitch was in her mouth, but, like a good president, she swallowed it, finished chairing the meeting and went home before the potluck.
 

Her voice on the phone sounded peculiar, drained. Though she didn't say and I didn't ask, I bet she cried in the car on the way home, cried harder than that particular incident warranted, cried long. I have an image of her sobbing so hard she had to pull the car over. I bet the crying just kept coming, like a bottle of homemade wine aged to vinegar chugging slowly out of the bottleneck into the earth in the backyard.

In early December the zoo is deserted. James and I spend a long time watching the hippos swim under water. Something presumptuous about peering through an underground window at very large animals paddling and gliding, something too intimate.
 

We walk and James talks to me about how Plato, in the
Timaeus
, investigates the essential nature of things, their origins. I take it in obliquely. Something about atomic structure of the elements as geometry. Earth is cube-shaped. Fire is scalene-triangle-shaped; it's pointiest, that's why it burns. Space is a grand receptacle and it shakes us like a winnowing basket so that like-shaped particles congregate. There is no such thing as above and below, only centres and peripheries, overlapping, only like things massing together and attracting their fellows to their gathering.
 

Sometimes lately I'm afraid that marrying so young has stunted me somehow, made me odd, unfit for modern life. I can't decide whether I'm extremely loyal or extremely clingy, can't tell the difference between beauty and pathology.
 

Often lately a feeling of the timing being off between us, but combined with an urgency—like we're running a three-legged race and have forgotten to have fun, are focused only on the finish line.
 

He wants us to have a baby. No pressure, not necessarily right now, but he wants us to start thinking about it. Right now the thought makes me feel swallowed whole.
 

I'd like to explain zoos in terms of cubes and triangles, angles and attractions. I would like to explain terrorism, romance and regret. Bewilderment for days on end. Underwater zoo animals never giving you more than a glimpse of themselves, sticking to the other end of the pool.
 

James complains that I'm distant, flat. I drive us home in a borrowed car. Follow the traffic signs. Right turn, round steering wheel, parallel parking. The geometry of the meantime.