Help Me, Jacques Cousteau Page 5

  My mother is perplexed by people, disappointed by them. I try to figure her out, try hard to understand her. But at the heart of it, my mother is a mystery to me. And I believe, at the heart of it, she is a mystery to my father.

  You can know basic things about my mother just by looking at her. Such as: she’s big; she’s tall and muscled and stately. Her feet are men’s size ten, so she often can’t find dress shoes in her size. She stands at parties in her stockings, a habit that gives people the false impression that she lives at the host’s place. She is complimented on the furnishings or asked for directions to the bathroom. My mother makes an airy gesture and says, “Oh, over there.”

  Her legs are long and slim and seem to come straight out of the ground, out of her feet, and up until they get lost in her clothes. She has trouble finding shirts that fit her well.

  “Pygmy clothes,” she mutters, scowling at blouses in stores. “These wouldn’t fit Andrew.” This attitude may account for the giant size of Andrew’s formal clothes, as if one suit should suffice until he’s old enough to buy his own. The act of growing is something my mother estimates poorly, having herself grown far too big, too soon. She told me once that when she was a girl, she grew fifteen inches in one semester; she would sometimes yelp in class, clasping her arm or her thigh, which seemed to be tearing within itself.

  Without heels, she is as tall as my father, which makes her six two. She hates rainy days because umbrellas come at her eyes with their tiny metal spikes. She bumps her head and her shins when sleepy, stands on bent objects to straighten them. She bends over the counter in the kitchen — cutting tomatoes, tearing lettuce — leans back and cracks her neck, sighs. One of her wishes is for my father to build a higher countertop; but when can he do that, he asks: she is always using the kitchen.

  On the other hand, Dad will make all kinds of things for kids while they watch: Jacob’s ladders, wooden swords and shields. There are kids up and down the street who own boomerangs my father has made from plywood, the angled surfaces carefully sanded and shaped.

  Another thing I know about my mother is that she’s strong. I hand her the jar of spaghetti sauce to open, and she pops it and hands it back. Baking a cake, she holds the bowl of batter in the crook of her arm and whips with a spoon, her arm flexed, never stopping or slowing or changing direction. Dad gets her to brace things while he hammers, hold ladders on which he teeters and reels, catch the ends of pine planks as they drop away from the screaming saw blade. She clamps her eyes shut and then, when her part is over, walks away rattling a finger in her ear.

  My mother is practical, whereas I am not. Neither is my dad. He’ll take two machines apart to fix them, then mix up the pieces. I’m even worse; I forget my wallet at home, go back to get it, and on the way leave my school books on the bus. Mum, on the other hand, can reach into her bag and bring out anything she needs: tape, a screwdriver, a spoon, notepaper, scissors, coffee, sugar packets, an eraser, elastic bands. She uses the screwdriver to jimmy the back door because Dad always locks her out. She uses the notepaper to abuse him about it, taping snarky messages to his windshield.

  She has a voice that is so like the one inside my own head, I can never remember its exact sound. She and Dad take turns reading books to Andrew at bedtime, as they did to me when I was young. At night, I listen to her spreading the story out, soothing Andrew to sleep, her own existence disappearing into the many forests and riverbeds and snow-covered plains, the hovels and caves, the bad sisters, the evil witches, and the beautiful men. She sits upright on a chair beside Andrew’s bed, leaning towards the light, unimpressed by what she reads, privately extracting from each story the dynamics between men and women, the perverse lessons being delivered, the critical warnings that are withheld.

  She tells my father that “The Little Mermaid” is an evil pile of nonsense, and “The Ugly Duckling” is for saps. It’s mean, she says, to suggest to ugly little kids that someday they’ll walk into a room and all heads will turn and they’ll instantly get dates and end up on TV. My mother says we all have to face facts, eventually.

  My mother is the only one who slams doors in our house. It’s not an angry gesture, though, it’s just her excess energy. She whangs the car door shut, deafening the rest of us. She elbows the fridge door shut, and jars within rattle in muffled complaint. She walks out the front door and pulls it shut behind her and the frame lets go a few more slivers. The slivers fall down through the air and land on little piles of other slivers; this is how archaeology happens: layer after layer of what happens, falling down and, after a time, covering each other up. Facts, hidden away.

  Like the fact that she left us when I was very little. No one has told me, but I know something about that, having heard halting references to it through walls and doors, the silent challenge of man to woman, or woman to man, the strange unequal dialogue between unequal people. I know that she was gone for a week. I know that she took the white car. I know she came back, missing her husband, lost without her baby, came back in a different car, not the white one anymore, but our green Valiant.

  I look in the photo album, at the one picture of a white car, just the back end of it in the frame, a dog looking at the camera and my grandfather laughing, and my mother’s long, tanned arm reaching in from nowhere, reaching for the dog. I look at that photo the same way people look at the lines on their palms, trying to analyze the signature hidden there.

  Bad luck hides in your life, masquerading as something simple, something pleasant. I learned this from my mother.

  This winter there’ve been a ton of bad-luck winter weddings, the cold seeping into churches through coloured glass and loose doors, people hustling through the vows. My mother has been in agony, and Andrew and I haven’t been happy either, what with the dreadful clothes, worn and dry-cleaned and worn again. My mother made my father promise: no more commitments. But then there was the girl down the street who was visibly pregnant. We had to go to that wedding or people might think we were stuck-up. At the reception, the bride’s father and the groom’s brother got into a slug-fest that rocked two tables, crossed the dance floor, and spilled out into the hotel lobby, where it was stopped dead by a large doorman in a top hat. After that one, my mother said she had trouble relaxing. She took all the iron heating grates out of the walls and scrubbed them until the paint was thin.

  My mother tries to be rational and logical, tries not to let us see the many times she leans over and surreptitiously touches wood.

  “Superstition is a terrible thing,” she says, “and I’m glad I haven’t infected you kids with it.” But Andrew thinks stepping on a crack will break his mother’s back — just like all little kids. He also believes that a hat on a bed will get someone killed.

  “Where did he get that?” I ask her.

  “Not from me,” my mother says, sounding unsure. As for me, I believe all bad luck comes in threes, except for the kind that comes in fours.

  One night not long ago, Andrew dreamed that grandfather died at sea, drowned in the thick, black waves, and he woke up shouting for someone to help.

  “Don’t worry,” my father said, holding and rocking him. “Your grandfather would never die; he’s too much of a bast —”

  “North!” my mother said.

  “Well, it’s true! He’s stubborn. And anyway, he floats. All old men do.” The next day, Mum worried about grandfather, as if my dad’s flippant talk would bring on some kind of disaster.

  “Think how we’d feel if something did happen to him,” she said.

  “Sure,” my father replied. “I’d feel terrible.”

  The next day was my fifteenth birthday and we were out in the backyard with paper hats on. There were streamers strung along the fence, snarling together in the breeze, and a howl of tires as my grandfather arrived to celebrate. He had a long scrape down one side of his Cadillac. There was also a bag full of my granny’s dresses in the back seat, which he pushed me into trying on, one after the other. His birthday gift to me.r />
  “There!” he bellowed, as I stood before him in polyester paisley. “Doesn’t she look fine in that?” I gazed down at an unravelling hem whiffling in the breeze. When I looked up again, I saw my mother, her eyes locked on my father. She’d decided he was to blame for this, but she hadn’t figured out how, exactly. And just then, Andrew came crashing out of the house, skipped down the steps, and hugged grandfather’s leg.

  My father is aware of his place in this system of trouble. For one thing, there’s his family — that alone would do it. Then there’s his ability to sleep through anything: movies, bad parties, weddings. Then there are all the little mistakes he has made, such as the time he washed his gardening shoes in the kitchen sink, the smell of dinner combining with the odour of warm fertilizer. He looked up, the shoe suspended over the drain, and noticed my mother’s horrified expression.

  “What?” he said furiously, trying to bluff her out. “Do you want me to track this stuff through the house?”

  Sometimes I agree with him, or perhaps I just decided to agree with his side of the fuming dialogue of body language. My parents refuse to fight in front of Andrew and me. They think this makes things better. But in the end, it’s just the same.

  Sometimes I feel sorry for my mother.

  “I could call Connie,” she will say, looking at the phone.“It’s been ages since I called Mother.”

  But in Mum’s family you don’t spend money on phone calls; you save it up and come for a visit. That’s why we never see her parents. To my mother’s mother, long distance means one thing: someone died. On the other hand, you never know when my father’s family might come walking up the drive: no gift, no warning, no particular plans to leave. Sometimes we have come home to find a relative in the bath or my grandfather rifling through my parents’ drawers.

  Mum said that when she was little, growing up on the prairies, she would walk out into the field and not stop until she knew she was too small to be seen. “The thing I liked most in the world,” she told me, “was to just be quiet somewhere, in a field or under some trees, and no one in the world knew where I was.”

  I think about my mother, stuck here with all of us, all our stories and fibs and downright lies, our troubled course through life. And today, Uncle Bishop is getting married for no reason. Bishop and his new woman, Auntie Odelia, hysterical and up to her shins in snow; a limo in a ditch; my poor mother in shock.

  We hurry along the winding road in the snow, looking like an assortment of bonbons in frilly wrappings, Andrew tugging at his too-big light blue suit, like a boy in a bag. My father and I cornered him after breakfast and wrestled him into his pants while he wailed. Once they were on him, he was like a broken horse, allowing us to slip the jacket on, do up the top collar button, tighten the little tie. He stood there in the hall, trussed up and glaring.

  Inside the church, we look for a place to hang our coats and, right away, I see what seems to be a little closet against the wall.

  “There, look!” I say and am well on my way before my father snaps me back by the upper arm.

  “That’s a confessional,” he whispers.

  The wedding proceeds in a kind of fluttering rush from badly played organ music to the wobbly-kneed bride fainting and eventually finishing her vows from the floor. The bridal corsage explodes in the icy wind, leaving nothing but stems tossed backwards over the bride’s shoulder, and directly into the eye of Mrs. Furstall, on whom, my grandfather says, the promise of being the next to be married was clearly wasted. On we go in a giddy race until it is mercifully over, people driving into the darkness towards home, loosening ties, kicking off shoes.

  My mother sits upright behind the wheel, her eyes wide and white in the rear-view. My father sleeps, just as he slept through the service, the alcoholic reception, the shrill dispute between grandfather and Odelia, the bride’s storming out, and Mrs. Furstall’s final, acid summation of our family character. We drive, the headlights tracing wearily through the dark, and when we pull up behind the house, my mother sits with her head back on the wide bench seat and the overhead light beaming weakly on her face. We leave her to whatever thoughts she might have, uneasy in our own hearts and wanting to get away. Dad carries Andrew into the house, the boy fast asleep and slithery in his loose suit like a fish in plastic, only to find Bishop, the groom on his wedding day, passed out in his tux on our couch.

  I see my father’s expression before I see Bishop. I imagine it to be the expression people have on their faces the split-second before a car wreck. At that moment, I see the future clearly, recognize the shape of it, the wild and treacherous promise, the way it has always been nearby, waiting.

  BIG FOOT

  ………… MY GRANDFATHER IS STANDing in his housecoat, which he calls his smoking jacket. It’s got guns and dogs and panicking pheasants all over it. On the table in front of us are burnt hamburgers, burnt buns; somehow I even let the pickles dry into little green tongues. My grandmother reminds him, “Hazel made dinner. Sit down and eat. What’s the problem?” But he doesn’t move.

  “Well, yes —” Grandfather starts.

  “Sit down,” Grandmother says again.

  “Do you know that I’ve eaten mastodon?” my grandfather says, shifting from foot to foot. We’ve all heard this story before, and we ignore him, fiddle with our burgers, discover that the buns are really quite edible on their own. Grandfather sits down.

  “Do you know what a mastodon is, Andrew?” he asks, and Andrew stares at him with obvious fatigue.

  “He’s making this up,” my grandmother says. “There never was any mastodon.”

  She is sitting back, her hands in her lap, staring at her plate. Her hair is white-blond, like corn silk, and swept back off her forehead. Her eyes are very blue.

  My brother and I have heard this story before, and we’ve heard our grandmother’s versions, which are numerous and have nothing in common except that they are the negatives of his. That’s what their relationship is like; whatever he says, she says it isn’t true, even on the occasions that it might be true.

  Since our parents left, on a long drive to sort things out, I sleep in Andrew’s room laid out on the floor on an air mattress. Andrew claims that I shout and laugh in my sleep. From the look of him in the mornings, maybe I do. My grandfather is sleeping in my room and my grandmother is in our parents’ room. They creak back and forth during the night, visiting each other, whispering. I sit up late, reading poetry and scrawling in my notebooks, and I can see my grandfather’s shadow move across the crack under the door. The floorboards bend under his weight. I can’t see him, but I know he’s wearing Dad’s blue dressing gown, the one with teeth marks at the hem from the dog. My grandparents don’t know it, but I can hear what they’re saying; they are discussing my parents. After a while, I plug my ears.

  According to family history, my grandparents spent their honeymoon in Russia during the first five-year plan. Granny says that at midday on the day they arrived, the Moscow sun was weak and bluish, and the air smelled dull, like hot metal. She pronounced the food delicious and gained twelve pounds, but my grandfather poked at things, left his plate full. In one restaurant, he complained about the price for fish and, to his shock, everyone in the place shouted at him at once, including the cook. He claims that, at plays, Russians applaud in unison. At intermission they walk in circles, in a clockwise direction. Outside, there is no discernible division between a sidewalk and the street. The Russians, he decided, are big on togetherness.

  Nineteen-thirty-something. That’s when the mastodon was found, emerging whole from a glacial wall, preserved and impossibly huge. And before the scientists could get there, relics were taken, steaks cut, hide removed, the waist-thick tusk sawn off as close to the ice as possible. I imagine the mastodon entering the air shoulder first from a glacier, eyes cloudy, and people standing around, examining the dubious shape, the drip and stream of melting matter. I imagine the smell.

  But it’s all crap, really. These days, I don’t
believe my grandfather any more than his wife does.

  And that’s what bothers me: why don’t I? It’s not like I’m above believing stuff like that. As a teller of tall tales, my uncle Bishop is far worse. Even my father, on the odd occasion, throws fact to the wind and makes things up.

  As for me, I have to stay away from grocery store tabloids because their crazy ideas stick with me. I remember them in detail: Elvis, JFK, Jackie Onassis, walking trees, bloodbaths, Satan, impossible babies. It’s hard to fight the desire for it all to be true. I watch movies made especially for fools like me, my mouth hanging open: The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby. They enter my dreams, woven together into a surreal combination, and I wake with a desire to check myself for marks and signs. Good Kirk fights bad Kirk in the vestibule of time. Body snatchers grow in the pumpkin patch. HAL the computer can lip-read.

  And yet my grandfather can tell me he swam in the lake last night, and I won’t believe him.

  I force Andrew to stay up at night, shining the light in his face to keep him talking. My brother accepts the family history according to Grandfather, the picture of us that he creates, the things he insists are true and solid and real. To Andrew, questioning this is like wondering if the dog bites. Sure he does.

  One evening, my dad calls from somewhere up north and his voice is thin and strung out. My mother is in a coffee shop across the highway, he says, so we speak only to him. I can hear trucks going by in the background. My grandmother takes the phone. I hear Dad’s voice like a mosquito, but I can understand every word. Dad calls his mother “Mother” and his father “Father.” He thanks them for looking after Andrew and me and asks if we’re behaving. When it is over, Andrew goes up to his room and closes the door and stares unseeing at a comic. I go outside.

  For the next few nights I dream about trucks, about driving a huge truck into the dark, the steering wheel going crazy in my hands, the vehicle skidding and barely missing trees. Andrew and I both wake up the same way every morning: it takes a moment or two, but then we realize we’re still stuck with our lives.