Hi, It's Me, page 3
20 Your naturopath, Marc, protesting your burial. (As if I didn’t think of that.) It seemed important to him, and he had our attention. He’d littered the cemetery with flyers, and I thought for a moment that they all, thousands of them, had your name across the front. I awoke to a pounding at the front door, with a jump, but was mistaken. Silence.
21 On page 108, Mrs. Copperfield has a fight with her husband and goes downstairs to the hotel bar where she finds Pacifica.
22 Page 108 is the section title page for Part II: “The Airborne Toxic Event.”
23 On page 108, Jamaica Kincaid writes of having learned the difference between pelargoniums and geraniums—the latter can be left outside in the cold.
24 On page 108, J.R. Ackerley fails to mate his dog Tulip, again.
25 On page 108, a pair of men’s shoes are split down the heel to accommodate Sethe’s swollen feet.
26 On page 108, Aristotle explains that “people are more careful of their personal possessions than of those owned communally […] the thought that someone else is looking after it tends to make them careless of it.”
27 On page 108, a priest comes to speak with Meursault in his prison cell, before his execution. Meursault will not admit that he wishes for another life. At most, he offers, he would wish for “a life that resembles this one.” At the bottom of the page, something inside of him bursts.
28 On page 108, Claudius and Laertes concoct a scheme for how to murder Hamlet.
29 On page 108, four men carry Mr. Shimerda’s coffin up a hill.
30 On page 108, the family go to the beach to cheer up the mother, who has returned from a funeral.
31 On page 108, the poem “Here the Frailest Leaves of Me”: Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting, / Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them, / And yet they expose me more than all my other poems.
32 On page 108: “Death is certain.”
33 On page 108, Molly Bloom asks her husband, “What time is the funeral?”
Chapter 2
VENENUM
9:00 A.M.
WHEN I ARRIVED AT the farmhouse it had already happened. My mother was killed intravenously at seven in the morning by a team of two nurses and a doctor. Now, at nine o’clock, the remaining four women tidy the house, sip coffee, spot a bird or some other movement out the windows every so often. Each act of normalcy seems a slight against my mother. While I was late to arrive, they awoke this morning, hatched into the soft, subtle violence of the event with such proximity that they must be numb to it, at least somewhat. To me, the whole place is heavy with death. My lateness hinders any chance of kinship with the women; the moment has passed.
The women received me at the door as if I was injured. They took my things and led me in, buzzing with concern. This is the house where my mother and her sister Mariam were born, and lived until my mother, the youngest, turned eighteen. It was sold after their own mother’s death in 2001, and bought back by my mother and Mariam and Sue and Andrea and Lynn in 2016. Mariam and my mother, of course, are sisters, as are Sue and Andrea (in-law), and Lynn is a painter who was hired to fix up the upstairs rooms when the women first moved in, and evidently she never left. Now she too owns a share. They lived one year in the house before my mother’s diagnosis. It distracted from their purpose. I wonder if they are eager to get back on track.
The house is a story they tell themselves over and over. The way it all came together perfectly naturally, like a flower blooming. This is what Sue says, it “bloomed like a rose.” It is hard for me to ascertain the true origin of the idea. Somewhere between divorces, between recollections of oppressive childhoods. Somewhere between the internet and the cellular phone.
Upon arrival I kept waiting for somebody to address the situation at hand. I’d practised so many times before. She’s gone! I expected someone might say, or How can it be?
Instead, I am watching Lynn wash Andrea’s hair in the laundry basin. We are in the conservatory, which runs parallel to the living room like a train car, and the walls are all glass. It is an addition built by the intermediary owners, before the property was repurchased. There is a mustiness to the rest of the farmhouse, but here the air feels light and clear.
Shortly after the repurchase, before the furniture was moved in, my mother and I sat on the floor between the long narrow shadows cast by the window muntins, stoned with our sunglasses on, and laughed at nothing in particular. I liked the house, its energy, the stark difference of this place when compared to the home I grew up in. But I worried assimilation was only a myth my mother was inventing. She still kept a certain distance, did things differently than the rest of the women.
Lynn is arched heavily over the basin and Andrea is in a plastic bath chair with her head craned back under the white pressure of the industrial faucet. The hands work the scalp.
Andrea encourages the continuation of the massage with a noise like “Mm.” It is too intimate a moment, and I take a step back toward the doorway.
The repurposing of the plastic medical chair seems yet another insult to my mother, but I do not dwell. It is sturdy, grey plastic, freckled with small bumps of traction. Soon it will be returned to the pharmacy from where it has been rented. Other ominous machinery, blooming with plastic tubes and frantic wires, has been piled into open boxes and placed by the door. More rentals to be returned.
Of the women, my mother was the only one not to live full-time at the house upon purchase. She kept her distance, mostly enjoying the romance of it all as a topic of conversation. She held on tight to the identity she attached to the big city. Then, when she fell ill, the farmhouse presented a refuge. A place where her silk scarf, her pencilled eyebrows and wilting stature could be hidden away. In a way, she experienced a first death upon leaving her house in the city, and a second death this morning. This one, of course, with more finality. She spoke so often about the farm as a place of giving-up. But, she said, “The city is a treadmill.” The other women long ago rejected the quick pace and the loudness of the inner city. The major streets assaulted them, kept them from their thoughts. Here, they could stay focused. They could pursue their great purpose.
I have shadowed my mother’s movements. Into her house. Out of her house. Into the farmhouse.
All over the house are jobs to be done and this is how the day will go. This is how any day would go around here. There is a list, on the chalkboard by the doorway in the conservatory, and the items on the list will be distributed among the women. There is paperwork to be dealt with, most of which must be done by me, but not before the common rooms are tidied, some product is brought into town, and the obituary write-up is delivered to the newspaper office (the obituary must be taken to the editor in person, as the women have sent so many emails to the local newspaper that their addresses have been flagged as spam). At one point the body will be burned, but not by us, and not on site. It will happen in the background of whatever other chore we have busied ourselves with. The intoxicating chalky scent of the product fills the house and makes me dizzy. It has attached itself to the death.
My mother requested she be buried with some of the lavender from the garden. When I saw boxes of neatly stacked soaps waiting by the door to be delivered I thought: coffins.
On the chalkboard, under “To Do,” in neat slender cursive, is “April 12,” and beneath it, “MAID.” I am uneasy at the thought of the word being crossed, checked, or erased. I previously mistakenly believed the acronym, MAID, to stand for Medically Assisted Intravenous Death, but have since been corrected:
Medical Assistance In Dying.
Dying. It is not exactly euphemistic but it is softer than death.
Assistance implies most of the work being done by the individual; e.g. my mother died, with the help of her doctors.
It is assistance I am providing here at the house, in place of my mother.
I can’t shake the suspicion that the women have asked me here out of pity and protection of my ego, only under the guise of need. The phone calls went in circles around the subject. Some mention of more stock than usual, a new supplier, a new project taken on in collaboration with a university in a neighbouring city. This last detail was said with much excitement. Word is getting out about what they are doing here, is the implication. The movement—that’s what they call it—is gaining traction. Something about a book by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. My focus came and went.
My invitation extends for one month, unless I find somewhere else in the meantime, and if I don’t, I am welcome to stay longer. Uncharacteristically, I have left myself without another option for the time being. Your house, sold; my apartment, rented. While I am here, I will help with the business. It is because I initially declined to come at all that it has become a situation of labour and not one of emotion. They are not skirting the subject for their own sakes. Similarly, they do not mention my absence in recent months. I have been absent for three months. Do they hold it against me? Did she? Months passed consistently between my trips to see my mother. I feel they must resent me for my weakness. I described it over the phone to my therapist as “not within the framework of our relationship.” The illness is what I meant, and how cruel and pitiful a lie to tell oneself. My therapist, anyway, is only my father’s brother, who tells me not to call him that—therapist—in respect of the rules of conflicted interest. His practice is available to me so long as I do not refer to it in clinical terms. Our previous two sessions were superficial and meandering. He’d called because I’d told my father, in passing, that I’d been having second thoughts about going to the farmhouse, because I’d decided that the women must all view me as something vile. Who could abandon their own mother?
“Did she ask you to come?” my uncle-therapist said.
No.
“Did they ask you to come?” he said.
Only after.
She didn’t want to be seen that way. By anyone, but especially by me. It was not within the framework of our relationship.
Therapy seems an aggravating frivolity, though I do not share this with my uncle or my father, who both believe very firmly that I am in need of some clinical readjusting. I do wonder if my uncle is different with his other—real—clients. If he is vague and optimistic with me only because he feels that if the counselling is too successful then it is just that, counselling, and then the conflict of interest is somehow worsened. Who am I to criticize his methods? If it were up to me I would move forward with the same avoidance with which I confront all things relating to my mother.
I resent my father for all of the time he spends explaining to me that paying respect to someone’s death is the most important thing that a person can do. What about, I sometimes want to ask him, spending one’s teenage years supporting my mother through divorcing you? I do not say this to him, either, as there is so little benefit to being childish.
He has insisted also that I have committed some great offence by not keeping my mother’s expensive dining room table, or various other things from her house in Toronto.
“It’s a Stickley,” he said.
My father informed me he will not be attending the funeral out of respect for the women’s feelings toward men and/or out of respect for his new wife. I say new wife, but it has been nearly a decade now that they have been married. The relationship feels new to me because I missed the beginning. In the six years that I was not in communication with my father, he met his new wife and married her. I wonder if because I missed my mother’s death, too, it will also always be new to me.
I can’t imagine I’ll extend my stay at the farmhouse past the one month, though in part I do want to. It is just I have developed a certain sense of urgency. I feel that wherever I go next, no matter how quickly, by the time I arrive there I will be so old. I cannot project any of my current feelings onto the older person I will be when I arrive at my next destination. I can only imagine my body will be limp and my senses dull. If I look at it one way it is quite simple, really: the death has done this to me. Now all things seem to be coming to a close. My mother is gone. Time has doubled in speed.
April is a sad month to die. An accomplishment nonetheless. “I’d like to make spring,” she said, pleading with something greater than us. If she’d just held on longer, there’d have been more meaning in my staying another month. A good month, presenting a more pleasing backdrop to the moment. There are so many other, more romantic months. June, for example. I could stay the whole of June in all of its greenness by the blue river. The “green-green of the garden,” as Ernest Buckler says. I long for the sterility of the pastoral.
Now, it is spring. I am here.
A number of jobs have been assigned to me. In part I am to grieve and in another part I am to pack things up and clear out the room to prepare it for somebody else or perhaps otherwise a useful functionality. Additionally, I have a general bodily stamina (comparatively) that will act as a currency on the lot, and, through osmosis, I have come to understand the basics of the production process with the pouring, the cutting, and the presentation of the product. Out back, fuzzy bunches of lavender grow tall and proud. In the basement of the big adjacent barn, the women process it, melt the fats, slice the solidified blocks of soap into bars, and wrap them in mauve tissue paper and a sheath of logo-ed cardstock. The logo is an open-source cartoonish image of a sprig of lavender, encircled with ribbon. In a cursive arc overtop is the company name: foemina.
Though my past visits were different—more of a vacation than anything, sitting in folding chairs in the field drinking iced tea in tall glasses while my mother read her books—I couldn’t help but observe the women’s routines. I am of no assistance with some things—for example, transportation of the heavy crates of stock into town—though I have finally learned to drive. Timidly, for three weeks, I made circles around my block in a friend’s borrowed Jeep. The first time, I barely moved so much as a few feet, back and then forward in the driveway. Once I made it as far as the corner store with the hidden parking spot behind it, and bought something celebratory. The process of squeezing into the spot felt particularly difficult, and the manoeuvring particularly impressive. I bought myself a family-sized bag of balsamic vinegar potato chips, which I couldn’t bring myself to eat, and a skinny bottle of cheap white wine, which I finished.
I took driving lessons from a single father who was quick to jerk the wheel out of my hands when I erred. A feeling of melancholy floated around the driving school; I approached the entrance each week in anticipation of my trip to the farm. There was a vague sense that any time a checkmark was penned into my file I was bringing my mother’s death closer. It was perhaps a way of soothing myself for being a poor and timid driver.
To think I made it all the way here. The car, which I bought off of Kijiji for three thousand dollars, felt clumsy and strange, larger and more reactive than the Jeep I’d been practising in. The only two vehicles in my price range were a dilapidated Cadillac DeVille hearse and the peeling blue Ford Fusion I drove here. The humour of the former was not lost on me. Only once, I stopped on my way here and took long slow breaths to relax my shoulders, and finished the last of the grit at the bottom of a cup of gas station coffee. I have been developing nerve problems in my arms, especially my right, from all of my working at my desk. I sat up straight behind the wheel and did the slow movements taught to me by my physiotherapist as if conducting an orchestra. Then I returned to the road. Tom Petty’s Highway Companion came to a slow sad song my mother loved. Each passing driver on the road seemed to look in at me, recognizing not only that I was uncertain on the road but also the incredible significance of this of all mornings. The way people in movies must feel with all of those eyes on them. I looked out at the same water I would soon be able to see from the room where I’d be staying and felt I was already there.
It is against the law for me to drive without a supervisory party in the passenger seat, and one who holds a specific class of licence: the utmost. But there was a boldness brewing in me and I took my chances. My mood had lifted weeks earlier when I took off from the waste management plant where I’d dropped off the last of the things from your (…!) house. I’d imagined it would be difficult, that I would stand by while men loaded the things into great chewing machines. That I would watch the heads pop off of lamps, the bed fold in half like a great and sad book. But any such machines were kept behind a beautiful and neutral facade. The employees were out of uniform, and they thanked me as if my garbage were a gift. I drove all the way here without once having a brooding thought about the items. In the backseat, a modest bag of some of your papers, my laptop, and some comfortable, practical clothing.
I’ve said it again—your.
I was distracted from my nostalgia by a feeling of great anticipation. Real life happened in the country, I told myself, and though I would be staying in what is really only a suburb of a capital city, it is more country than anywhere I’ve ever lived, and I looked forward to the green, the labour, the relevance of myself in my own life without being cast against the backdrop of the success of others in big sky-scraping condominiums. Plus I felt an unexpected lightness at having emptied your house for the new owners. Lulling myself to sleep last night I read Joan Didion’s essay “Goodbye to All That.” You could say I was trying to set some sort of tone. The book is all marked up from the self-seriousness of my time as an undergraduate student, highlighting passages like, “—was anyone ever so young?”
