Well, I’ve stopped pranking the hospital, you’ll be relieved to know. Remember that time I thought it would be a real kick-ass idea to go to school with some of mom’s pantyhose pulled over my face and you quietly whispered into my ear on your way out of the house: Swivelhead, attempt to be cool. You have no idea how often I evoke those words. Essentially, it’s what mom was trying to tell me in the hospital.
So she recovered, as she does, and to celebrate she and Nora and I took a trip to NYC to see Will and Zoe. They took us to MOMA, to a show where everyone was naked and in pain. It was the Marina Abramovic show. It was the talk of the town. All of us gallery-goers huddled in one room wondering how we’d get to the next one. There was only a narrow doorway that we had to pass through, but there were two suffering, naked people standing face to face in the doorway so we would all have to take turns squishing up against them as we went through. Nobody made a move to go through the doorway. The kids and I had lost track of mom when she was wandering around looking at things. We were whispering about certain celebrities we saw in the room. Nora knew them all, they were fashion designers and actors, but the rest of us were clueless. All the people were clustered together getting restless, and murmuring and wanting to move to the next room but wondering how to get through the door. Then Will said hey, there’s grandma, and we looked towards the narrow doorway where the naked man and woman stood facing each other. Nobody had gone through it yet. Then we saw mom in her purple cords and windbreaker standing at the doorway with her hands on her hips. Oh my god, said Nora, she’s going through. She went sideways through the doorway and her stomach grazed the man’s penis. Then she stopped in the middle, right there between the man and the woman, she didn’t hurry through at all, she was savouring it. She looked up at the naked man’s face, into his eyes, he was expressionless, and she smiled at him and nodded. She was greeting him, politely. Then she somehow turned around in that tight space to face the woman and she looked into her eyes too and smiled and nodded and then she smiled back at all of us huddled in the first room as if to say all right, people, let’s go, follow me, and she stepped through and one by one the rest of us followed her.
On our last day in NYC mom took us all out for a giant steak at a place in Brooklyn, close to where Will and Zoe live. It was late and dark when we left the steakhouse. We walked along the streets singing. We tried to remember all the things the mother is going to do for her crying baby in the mockingbird song. We finally remembered them all. Nora and mom and I linked arms and Nora sang a Weepies song called “Somebody Loved.” Will carried Zoe on his back and zoomed around on the sidewalk and she laughed and bounced up and down and lost one of her flip-flops so we had to go back and retrace our steps in the dark which I suppose is the meaning of life.
Sometimes train whistles break through the silence of the day. Those dissonant chords that remind me of your mournful pounding on the keys when I screwed up my page-turning duties. Wait for the last measure, Dodo Brain! There are tracks close to our house. Sometimes I can hear the wheels rumbling on the rails. Sometimes I can feel the ground shake. It’s comforting. It’s a greeting or a proper goodbye. Mom would approve. You know how she is about hello and goodbye.
Remember our neighbour Mrs. Steingart (the one you renamed Signora Giovanna) standing in the middle of our living room with her hands on her hips, glaring at mom for not being a good-enough housekeeper and dad for not being enough of a man and us for not being normal-enough children and how we were all lying, sitting, slumping with books in our hands, utterly oblivious to her admonishments, and she stomped off home saying we were only word people, we were a word family, one day we’d have to open our eyes. To what? A messy house? Now I remember her parting shot. Words won’t feed the admiral’s cat! It did give me pause, I may have looked up from my book, but only because of the words she’d used to compose her threat and not the threat itself.
Remember the way mom used to swim beyond the wake and bob along to god knows where, the deep and choppy sea, until someone noticed and came to her rescue? What do words mean, Elf? Everything or nothing? They can’t just mean something. By the way, I finally checked out your beloved D. H. Lawrence. Remember when you expressed incredulity at my not having read Lady Chatterley’s Lover? God, you’re a snob sometimes. Well, I read it. And yeah, the sex was hot. I’d find time in my busy schedule of needlepoint and flower arranging to visit that guy in the woods too. I wonder if Frieda wrote those parts for D. H. and then just had to keep her mouth shut while he racked up the fame and lived in fancy hotels in France with hippie girls. Anyway, you’re right about the first paragraph. I want someone to project it on the front of my house in giant letters made of light and shadows. And if they flickered a bit, that would be the best. And of course they’d disappear in the sunshine because everything does. And that would be perfect.
“Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.”
And thanks for keeping all my secrets. Remember that midnight cavalcade I led through the wilderness to get to the boys’ camp? You are now the official keeper of my secrets.
You knew I didn’t have the guts to take you to Zurich, didn’t you? And you knew you weren’t coming to Toronto.
I love you, Elf, I have to go. I have to trim the bushes that are engulfing our backyard. It’s so overgrown now that to get to the back lane we have to slither through this jungle on our stomachs with our rifles held high above our heads and this is not an easy thing for mom to do every day before she makes her rounds on Queen West.
Arrivederci, Bella Elf!
p. s. I’ve met a guy. We walk around and around the city talking and having late night Ping-Pong games and the first thing he told me about himself was how he’d been caught suddenly in crossfire in New Jersey. He’d been shot, wrong place at the wrong time, and he died in the ambulance and came back to life in the hospital, then died again, then finally came back to life for good but had to remain naked in an ice pack for two weeks until his heart was ready to start again. He walks me home every Wednesday night and kisses me on the cheek twice before he says good night because he used to live in Paris. Sometimes when we play tennis he jumps over the net and runs to kiss me, too. He has tinnitus which means his head is always humming. He also has an enlarged aorta. He writes his dreams down on his laptop first thing in the morning with a pillow over his head. It’s springtime now, I guess. Mom is at the stove stirring rib sauce and reading Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. Julie called and I put her on speaker so mom could hear her too. How are things? I asked her. She told us that Winnipeg was so green now, the entire province. All of Manitoba just unbelievably green. Do you remember? And do you remember the light? And the warmth? And I told her yeah, I could almost picture that. Almost? she said. No, I said, I can. I see it. How it’s so green? she said. I had to think for a second or two. I closed my eyes. Yeah, I said, I know. It’s an amazing green. I remember now.