Well, says the cop, one of the main things we hope the driver takes away from this particular lesson is the severity of the crime. The cost is administrative, minimal, but the offence itself is egregious, potentially.
That’s true, I say, um … How much is it?
He asks to see my car registration and when I show it to him — it’s my mother’s car — he slaps the roof and says no way! I play Scrabble with Lottie down at the Waverley Club. You’re her daughter? I smile too and say yep, one of them. Upshot of it all (that’s an archery term, by the way, meaning the last shot of the competition) is that the cop spends ten minutes telling me how crazy he is about Lottie — she kicks my ass, man, she kicks my ass every time! Are you aware of her vocabulary? — and then pulls out his pad to write me a ticket. Just doing my job, he says You know, you, my friend, are an asshole, I say. That’s seven letters, incidentally, a-s-s-h-o-l-e, a good bingo word.
The cop leans into the car. You’re not really supposed to call cops assholes. He sounds apologetic. We finally agree that he’ll give me a warning only and I promise to pull over next time I want to send someone a text and I won’t tell my mom that he’s been a bit of a jerk.
I sense she’s already slightly contemptuous of me being a cop, he says. She really hates authority, man, have you noticed?
I’ll pick my mother up at the airport later that evening. She will have taken a boat, a train, a plane, a cab and another plane and a car to get home. I picture it all in my mind, all the various legs of her journey, and am comforted by this effort of hers to come back to us.
Julie and I sit on her back steps and are quietly amused by the sweet antics of Shadow, the family dog she has joint custody of along with her kids. She has made us smoothies with mint from her garden and we eat the perogies and salad she’s managed to whip up magically in her chaotic kitchen that has bicycles and guitars in it. She used to play bass guitar in a band called Sons and Lovers. She has just bought this house and is in the process of fixing it up. She shows me a dildo she found wedged behind a cabinet in the bathroom.
I’m going to smoke a cigar, she says. Don’t tell Judson. Judson is a guy she’s been seeing on and off since splitting up with her husband. He says it’s a condition of our relationship that I don’t smoke, she says.
We laugh. We are tired. Too tired to confront conditions.
Shadow the dog is too old and arthritic to run but is still very excited by the idea of running so Julie plays a game she calls Run for Shadow and it involves her saying things like shed or fence and then running there herself while Shadow sits still in the yard and barks excitedly. When Julie has exhausted herself playing Run for Shadow she plops down beside me on the back steps and finishes her cigar.
Do you think you’re still suffering from your grandparents being massacred in Russia? I ask her.
Am I suffering? she asks. It was just my grandmother. She couldn’t run because she was nine months pregnant. My grandfather made it with the other kids.
Do you think that all that stuff can still affect us even now?
She shrugs and takes a big haul off her illicit cigar.
SEVEN
LONG HUGS AT THE AIRPORT. We have missed each other. One of us is slightly tanned and smells like coconut and is wearing a T-shirt with a Scrabble tile on it with the letter P. We don’t know about tomorrow. I smell fear and realize that it’s coming from me. It feels like I don’t have quite enough skin, that parts of me that should be covered are exposed. And we hold on to each other for longer than usual. On the way home we stop in on Nic, it’s too late to go to the hospital to see Elf, and my mother tells us of her latest adventure at sea and we laugh a lot, too much, and Nic sits on Elf’s piano bench while we talk, occasionally turning around to plunk on the keys tunelessly, and then we all head home to our beds. But strange things happen in the night. I have a dream about Elf. She’s been discharged but nobody can find her. She’s not at home. We can’t reach her. Then I dream that grass is growing everywhere inside my house, it’s tall, silky grass. It’s coming up through the stairs. I don’t know how to get rid of it and I’m worried. Then, in my dream, the solution comes to me: do nothing. And in an instant my anxiety is gone and I’m at peace. I also have a dream that I have a stone angel like Margaret Laurence’s, the same one, and I have to take care of it, keep it safe and warm. In my dream the stone angel lies beside me in my bed, the blanket pulled up to her chin, her eyes perpetually staring up at the ceiling.
I wake up and call the nurses’ station at the hospital and ask if Elf is still there. They tell me she is. I lie in bed for a while listening to the ice breaking up, and hear my mother moving around in the living room. I get up to see if she is okay. When she sees me she tells me she has a bit of jet lag from the trip and can’t sleep. She is sitting at the dining room table playing online Scrabble with a stranger in Scotland. I tell her I met her cop friend and she frowns. He’s ambitious, she says. To be ambitious, in her opinion, is the lowest a person can sink. I hear a trumpet sound the beginning of a new game. The Holy Bible, King James Version, is sitting on the table beside her computer. I ask her if she’s been reading the Bible and she says yeah, well, you know with all of this … She makes a dismissive gesture. This life, I think she means. She tells me she has decided to read Psalms One but hasn’t liked it. She doesn’t like the way it talks about the ungodly as being like chaff in the wind, blown about, lost, so she reads Proverbs One instead but she doesn’t like that one much either. She doesn’t like the way it orders us to seek out knowledge and wisdom because … obviously!
She tells me the only reason she is reading the Bible right now is that she’s been communing with her dead sister Mary who has somehow indicated to her, from the grave, that she should read the Bible more often. I nod and tell my mother to say hi to Aunt Mary from me next time they talk. I wonder if that’s the real reason she’s reading the Bible or if this evening she needs hope and solace and is looking to that oldest of friends, her faith.
I ask her if she wants to play a few rounds of Dutch Blitz, the only Mennonite-sanctioned card game, because instead of sinful-connoting things like clubs and hearts and diamonds and spades on the cards it has ploughs and buckets and wagons and pumps and because it’s a game based on speed and concentration, not sneakiness, and the small room glows when she smiles.
My mother sits in the torn orange chair and I sit perched on the edge of Elf’s bed. Elf lies smiling, her stitches have dissolved, and she has washed her face and brushed her hair. There’s been a change according to Janice. She tells us that she had a long conversation with Elf that morning and that she is showing signs of improvement. My mother asks what improvement means and Janice says it means that Elf has eaten her breakfast and taken her pills. In the past my mother would have rejoiced at these tiny victories but today she nods and says hmm, so she’s doing what she’s told to do. I know that this doesn’t please my mother. She believes in the fight, in sparks and pugilism, not meek subservience. On the other hand, she wants my sister to eat and take her medication. But wants Elf to want it herself.
I don’t know exactly what happened, Elf tells us, but I woke up feeling like a different person. I think I’m ready to do the tour. I’m going to call Claudio. I want to play tennis again. And maybe Nic and I will move to Paris.
If ever there was a delayed reaction for the ages this is it, a vast, forlorn space like the Badlands, a no man’s land, universes between her words and my mother’s and my response. My mother and my sister smile at each other like it’s a contest and I freeze. Rearguard action, I think. I stare out of the window and reflect on the similarity between writing and saving a life and the inevitable failure of one’s imagination and one’s goals and ambitions to create a character or a life worth saving. In life as in writing as in any type of creation that sets off to be a success, knowable and inspiring.