When I Was Young and In My Prime (22 page)

To Mom's for Christmas dinner. James has come with me, but we're stiff. My mother has just had new white carpets laid in her house. White. Why on earth would a person choose white carpets? For Christmas, my stepfather gets her a cordless iron that turns itself off. She says, “I hope it didn't cost too much.”
 

I've offered to put together the traditional basket of cheeses and preserves to bring to Aunt Deborah and Uncle Nick's. Later she says the basket looks nice. “You're good at that,” she says. “You're not as stingy as I am.”
 

We meet eyes.
 

It shocks me sometimes. Not the fact that I love her, but that I forget.
 

Gloria's building seems to have an unlimited hot water supply and her utilities are included in her rent, so I'm taking advantage while I'm here. I run a bath right to the top, hot as I can stand it.
 

I've lit candles but don't have enough of them to read by so have to switch the overhead light back on. You'd think there'd be more light with the candles, but somehow there's less; they take the edge off the glare of the glass-shaded bulb screwed into the ceiling. I read until the bath is lukewarm and the story—
The Death of Ivan Illich
—is finished and my fingertips are puffy and wrinkled and then I sit for a while longer, feeling clammy and blue, and indulge in a little private wallowing. Time is passing. The bath is cooling. I'm getting older by the second.
 

I stare at my fingertips and imagine my body fifty years from now—when it's like Liza's or Mavis's or Grandma's. When I'm pushing eighty will there be anyone in my life with enough history with my body to love it for the story it tells? I don't allow myself to think of the specificity of James' body. The calluses on his chording fingers. The hair starting to grow on his shoulders. His shoulders.

Any moment now I'll make the effort, lift myself out of the bathwater, stand naked, briefly streaming like a cataract, then bend, pull the plug, step out. But not yet. I'm not done wallowing.
 

Is it okay to be lonely? Is it permissible? Or is it a sign of a lack in me that should be addressed. Maybe the intensity of my loneliness when I'm away from James proves me to be backward, like a country whose people haven't yet learned to govern themselves, a country that still longs for a king. I sit in the cooling bath and look at the blue bathroom tiles, at the shapely white porcelain of the toilet. How does matter hold its form? There are very basic things I have no idea about. I sit in the bath and stare at the tall white candles burning at half-mast in Gloria's brass flea-market candelabra. What is it in us that craves intimacy? Is it that I want distraction? Is it simply the biological urge to procreate?
 

Or is it—please let it be—something indescribable. Something more.
 

A conversation between regulars, overheard at the bar:
 

“You ever spent so long at your computer you find yourself sitting at the bar or on the streetcar expecting little drop-menus to come down in front of you?”
 

“I know whereof you speak, man. You spend all day working on an image file then work on it more at night asleep and then wake up and go to work and can't remember what you've done and haven't done. It's like a revolving door you can't get out of.”
 

I stand behind the bar listening, sipping beer from a mug. Bartenders aren't, of course, supposed to drink on the job but dark beer looks remarkably like a latte when it's in a coffee mug. Listening, I'm washed by mild relief that other people feel that way too. The relief ebbs quickly, though, and is replaced by a deep undertow of dismay—dismay at the thought that being stuck in a metaphysical revolving door is normal.
 

Spit me out, I keep saying into the darkness. I don't know if it's prayer or demon-taming or superstition. I don't know if we are all fundamentally alone or fundamentally loved. I find I don't know a thing.
 

I sit on the streetcar these days and simmer in envy. I watch a mother two seats up nuzzling her toddler nose to nose, giggling, tickling—they're like lovers, except they need no privacy. A low low boil in me, a thickening liquid. Every once in a while a languid pop.
 

I close my eyes. Spit me out. I think I used to have something like faith. I vaguely remember having some kind of faith in something. No doubt it was misguided, but it seems to me it felt good at the time.
 

Give me some of that, I think. Some good old-fashioned feel-good faith.
 

I open my eyes and look out the streetcar window: a bearded man in an apron and short-sleeved t-shirt carrying stacked flats of eggs down the snowy sidewalk. Beaming. Dozens and dozens of eggs in his tattooed arms. Beaming.
 

And I grin in spite of myself.
 

Addicted to Tolstoy lately. I'm a sucker for his impossible blend of moralistic romanticism and brute realism. Plus, War and Peace is quite simply a page-turner. Who knew?
 

When I'm caught with a stranger in the elevator in Gloria's building I can't help thinking about the peasant Nikita from the story
Master and Man
who, from kind-hearted politeness, always says something to anyone he's alone with. In the elevator, I try at least to meet eyes, nod. It's exhausting. So many people. Some of them unwilling to meet you halfway, stonily thwarting your noble effort. Some of them too willing, bottomless pits. Makes me want to hole up in the apartment and never come out.
 

A five-storey building of bachelor apartments, twenty apartments on each floor. When in human history have people lived alone like this unless they were hermits or outcasts?
 

I take a walk by the lake. When I get back to the building, I decide to take the stairs, both for the exercise and to avoid having to small-talk in the elevator.
 

There's a guy in the stairwell playing his guitar. I climb into his sound. He's singing a song with a chorus about the grand design.
You go your way and I'll go mine. Ah, the grand design...
He stops playing as I pass.
 

“Great acoustics in here,” he says, shy.
 

And, feeling genuinely sociable for the first time in weeks, I say, “I'll say.”

Every Tuesday at the nursing home, Liza's nephew signs her out for dinner and returns her twenty minutes late for her scheduled bath. She and I small-talk as I soap her back. Tonight Liza can't remember the name of the restaurant but remembers they got lost on the way. Can't remember what she had for dinner but remembers—quite emphatically—that it was delicious. I smile, though to be honest the better part of me is already home, book in hand, cat in lap.
 

When I do get home, the cat won't settle, noses my book, kneads my thighs, sniffs my tea, turns round and round as if to rouse or quell some invisible vortex. I stare at the ceiling—the cat's tail swishing in my face, her asshole a repellent pink pucker, her purr infuriating—and picture myself at work, capable, needed, irreproachably earning my keep.
 

It's not lost on me, the absurdity of bathing other people's grandparents for a living while other people bathe mine. The disconnect there too far gone to be reasonably mourned. A whole economy wedged in the gap.
 

Sorry,
I say to Liza, when the water's too hot or too cold. She looks up.
Oh, no worry, it's neither here nor there.
 

Last night I forgot to put the milk back in the fridge. This morning it clots uncooperatively in my hot tea. I know if I were to make a new cup and drink it clear, I'd drink it thinking,
I should have just gone to the corner store.
So I go to the store thinking,
I should have just had it clear.
I pay for the milk with a painstaking pocketful of nickels and dimes, the cashier looking over my shoulder as I count, and head home cradling the carton in the crook of my arm, a tipped column of sloshing white liquid, miles and miles from the nearest milk cow. I try briefly as I walk to burrow under the surface of the moment but immediately hit bedrock.
 

Outside Holy Family Catholic Church a woman squats on the sidewalk, back against the wall, panhandling—hairy-chinned, an air of contagion—my eyes at once drawn and spurned by hers as I pass. I raise my gaze. The signboard outside the church suggests I
go forth, be fruitful and multiply.
 

My cousin Clara has what I think of as a knack for life, her uncanny power for spotting four-leafed clovers a case in point. Give her an hour on a lawn, she'll pluck a dozen—no kidding—and I can't even find one. When she and her juggler/psychiatrist husband found they couldn't conceive, they turned to technology. All three eggs took and, when doctor offered the irrefutable advice that it would be better to abort the weakest, she refused. So now Clara is the mother of triplets.
 

Harrowing how each yes seems to call for
yeses
in triplicate,
yeses
rivering outward, exponential.
 

Years ago, when Grandma was drawing up the family tree, Grandpa made an uncharacteristic stand: he refused to let her leave off the childless divorces as if they'd never happened. How I love him for that, for preserving the branches that seemed to lead nowhere.
 

Most mornings I walk by the lake. I have to cross the expressway to get there (the on-ramps and off-ramps sketching compulsive cloverleafs). Last Christmas, having just seen ultrasound images of her mother's cancer (all the veins drawing from the surrounding cells to feed the tumour) Gloria said that flying into Toronto (all the roads drawing from the countryside to feed the city), she couldn't help but think.