Saturday, March 24, 2007

Theory XV

Sara stayed with Notty while she’d finished her work and held on the to the cup of tea until it had gone cold. She’d been offered the little iron cot in her grandmother’s sewing room for the night but the springs creaked every time she turned around so after a few tries she got up quietly, dressed again and let herself out.

She knew her grandmother wouldn’t talk about Tom, it would only stir up resentment and jealousy and remind them both how very wrong things had gone those years ago when the two halves of the family had split and never spoken again. She knew in the past Tom had come by to see their grandmother but she was mum on the details. Sara only knew that he’d slept on the sewing room cot from time to time when he’d had no place else to go. And in the beginning it happened frequently – soon after his sixteenth birthday, their father had disappeared again, leaving him in the care of a woman he’d taken up with and a savings account with two thousand dollars for his ‘board and care’ like he’d been some kind of dog. But even then, living with someone he barely knew, Tom had refused to come home to his sister and mother. He seemed to blame Sara in particular for the reason his father had taken him and left home and wanted nothing to do with them.

Her last glimpse of him had been the only time he’d come by the house, but refused to leave the car. He’d glared at her through the front-seat window of a battered ’85 Datsun, sitting beside her father’s ex-girlfriend. The two of them were equally defiant and both had the smeary looks of alcoholics on a bender. Then they’d roared off, smoke billowing out the tailpipe.

That had been ten years ago and since then he had fallen into the black hole of anonymity a city could provide. He might as well moved to Winnipeg or died for all Sara knew. He was as invisible as her father, whose whereabouts were just as mysterious.


The city was sleeping. She walked through the park toward Queen Street where she could get a streetcar. Men drunk from the bars and a fifth of something in paper bags were sprawled under the trees even though it would definitely get below freezing. She couldn’t help peering at their darkened shapes for a sign of Tom, but they turned away or were snoring already, open-mouthed and oblivious. She realized that any one of them could have been him, with their marred and swollen features they had morphed into one mushy brotherhood. The same Sally Ann dark coat, the same cauliflower ears, the same rheumy eyes, the same, the same. One was indistinguishable from another and they liked it that way.

She put her head down and followed the tarmac path as it wound its way toward the edge. The giant oaks branched above her and rent the moonlight, making the way difficult in patches. Toronto was not a frightening place after dark, even when the midnight bells had stopped tolling and the last of the revelers had found refuge in the dive of their choosing, but Sara kept her wits about her just the same.

The steamy bright warmth of the Queen car was a comfort and within minutes she was asleep, lulled by the rumbling of the wheels on the track and the rhythmic swaying as it raced past empty stops. She woke up just before her's and stumbled out onto a deserted block of shops. Only now did the darkness feel threatening. She quickened her pace as the cold and the uncertianty seeped in with a vengeance. Someone was watching.

When she got home, exhausted and shivering, Bertie didn’t even have the decency to come to the door to greet her. He looked up briefly from the Queenstown sheared sheep doggie bed she’d bought on a whim a few months before and then curled back in even tighter.

Bertie!” she whispered urgently. He ignored her.
“Bertie!
He looked up.
Come.”
The standoff last for a while, Sara bent down, tense, Bertie feigning sleep.

“Come!”
His mistress drew up, ready to spring. On this cue Bertie yawned, stretched slowly, one leg and a time, and then ambled over. Sara scooped him up in her arms and took him upstairs to bed where he burrowed deep under the covers and kept his own counsel. Curled as close to him as she could get, Sara watched the oak tree move to frame her view in the windless night and thought about the faceless shapes beneath the others, also looking for shelter.

Thursday, March 08, 2007

XIV: Tom

In 1985 when Tom was born his picture was published in the Star. “Record-size baby welcomed in Toronto General!” the caption read. He was a hefty fourteen pounds with a barrel chest and huge feet. And because he’d been carried to term in the heat of a particularly sweltering summer by a woman who was thirty-nine and reluctantly pregnant, he was also bad tempered from the get-go. His full-lung squall dubbed ‘the rebel yell’ by Delys could be heard down the block even when all the windows were shut (which they frequently were to keep family matters private) and he cried more hours than he was silent.

Sara, who was five at the time, found the silence to be worse because Tom’s infrequent moments of reflection seemed to be focused on her and the stares became more aggressive with time. She began to believe, fueled by her father’s imagination stories at bedtime about monsters emerging from dark places to eat little children, it was not impossible her brother was a changeling, and that his stare was far too intelligent for his infantile status. She wondered what he got up to in the dark hours of the night when he slept behind locked doors, locked only after he’d been found one afternoon stripped of his diaper and taking a casual pee in the neighbor’s prize azelea bushes.

As a baby Tom had a definite size advantage, with a low center of gravity that made him a force to be reckoned with once he got some speed up. This was how Sara, who should have known better than to be on the flat roof of the garage behind Notty’s apartment, had come to be cannonballed into the abyss by her brother, who was then barely three. She had been standing near the edge looking at a particularly high snowdrift (and thankfully clad in a bulky snowsuit) when Tom somehow slipped his harness and had run at her full stop. She’d barely turned when he caught her at the waist and before she could right herself she’d gone head over heels. She remembered even now how surreal it had been, and in her memory the fall had been more like a gentle drift downwards followed by a very soft landing into the new snow. But in truth she must have had the wind knocked out of her for she’d lain there for a quite a while half buried, until Tom, who had played on the roof (in considerably more danger given his size) for over a quarter of an hour, finally wandered to Notty’s back door with his announcement.

“Ganma, Ganma, she falled off the roof!”

But his size advantage mysteriously evened out by the time he was five and much to his chagrin he no longer towered over his playmates which meant his bullying tactics were not as effective. The first time he was slapped back by a fiery little redhead he ran straight to Delys and when met with little sympathy changed tactics and focused his attentions Sara who seemed both bewildered by and a little afraid of him. He found it quite amusing to torment her when they were alone, beginning with crude devices (picking his nose and flinging at her was an early favorite) and then graduating to more subtle forms of torture. Unlike most siblings who exercised power based on birth order, Tom-the-younger had the edge almost from the day he was born and he never conceded the advantage.

Delys seemed unaware of the danger brewing between her two young ones, busy as she was trying to shore up her failing interior decorating business. She blamed the demise of “Done by Delys” on the birth of her children and at one point was so overwhelmed that her alarmed husband had hired a nanny. Sara remembered the woman well, she had come advertised as the grandmother-type but when free of Delys’ oversight her pale blue eyes hardened into steel and both children feared her grip and her tongue, which lashed out at unexpected moments and kept them servile. It wasn’t until Tom had kicked a grapefruit size welt into her thigh that she’d packed her bags in a huff and scrubbed out. It was the only thing Sara had ever been grateful to Tom for.

Notty was watching Sara at the table. Even in the steamy warmth of the kitchen, Sara held onto herself as if to preserve body heat. Her legs were too skinny, she thought. And the hair….
Bubala…”
Sara shook her head. She knew what was coming. Notty sighed and turned to the cooling confection. She put down a yard of wax paper and began dropping spoonfuls of caramelized brown sugar mixed with pecans and candied popcorn into neat rows. When the first batch had cooled she put a few on well-worn Staffordshire saucer. Sara had once asked about the Blue Willow pattern, with its ornate Chinese landscape in which two doves cavorted while men toiled in the fields below. She’d asked about the doves and Notty had told her the pattern was based on an ancient Mandarin story about two ill-fated lovers who had perished and been reborn.

As a teenager she learned more of the story and discovered that they had been murdered, burned alive in their home by the father who felt the young man unworthy of his daughter.

“Some people are just not meant to be together,” Notty had said to her.

And a few months later her father, whom she’d worshipped for his patience, his courage, and his intelligence, had disappeared and taken her brother with him.

Thursday, March 01, 2007

Theory XIII: Notty

Bundled up in her fur-lined maxi coat and tam she braved the dark streets, cakebox in hand. The long block stretched before her, and she held off the unkind wind with the cardboard offering firmly dug into her breast. Night trips were so difficult in the winter and her grandmother was on the other end of town. For a fleeting moment she wondered what life would be like with a car.

It was possible to live one’s entire life in Toronto and never own one. For Sara the idea of driving was so frightening she sold her mother’s aged Citroen even before the will had been read because its very presence in the garage was akin to a kernel of popcorn lodged in her back tooth.

Wimp. Who had said that? Her mother or Chip. Certainly not her father, who had taken the subway to work good weather and foul, his fedora abandoned only in the heat of summer, along with the boxy merino overcoat (in grey) and half-rubbers (unless raining). She had a picture of him trudging down Collins, beaten and tired in the last stretch of a day that had begun the same way in pre-dawn. He got out of the house as early was decent, ostensibly to beat the rush-hour crush on the Public but really it was to escape the burnt toast and pithy orange juice served up by Delys in the breakfast room. It wasn’t until years later, when she was old enough to accompany him to the office that daughter learned from father that he spent a good hour in the steamy confines of Yonge Street breakfast diner with a cup of coffee, cinnamon Danish and the newspaper.

Sara and her brother hadn’t been so lucky. Their mother, though well-intentioned (although perhaps not upon reflection) had the delicacy of a jackhammer when it came to the culinary arts, and she cared not a whiff if the milk was lukewarm, the peanut butter hardened to the consistency of cement, or the tuna salad studded with bits of left-over spine. The daily chore of providing sustenance to her family was steamed, beaten, boiled, and fried to an unpleasant death, then slid without ceremony onto plates.

Delys’ penchant for ruining everything except the Christmas feast and the occasional roast beef dinner on Sundays, was a mystery to her husband and children because her own mother was so good at it, if a bit peculiar. Delys’ mother, a warm and kindly spit of a woman who had been in her youth what she referred to as "the theatricals", cooked everything on a two-burner hotplate in the tiny walk-up flat she'd lived in since her only daughter had left home to marry. Notty was an expert at making things in one pot, a skill she claimed to have learned while accompanying her tap-dancing husband on the Vaudeville circuit. She could make an entire meal including biscuits and dessert with a collection of nesting pots she hung in descending order above the apron sink in the nook that passed for a kitchen. Everything she made, absolutely everything, tasted wonderful. Light and airy if it was to be so, dark and rich if it was to be so.

It was Notty who had taught her only granddaughter how to make a cake from scratch, among other things in her odd collection of road-recipes. Because Sara wanted to remember and preserve the memories of afternoons spent in conversation across the table from her with a pot of tea and some delicious confection all crumbly and sugary she was a very good student indeed. And soon she became the official baker for every family occasion. Her cakes were as whimsical as she was reserved, some sported plastic animals parading under paper umbrellas, some were towering with multi-colored layers ascending into the heavens until they listed at a crazy angle like the Cat in the Hat’s hat. She learned to make fairy cakes, iced finger squares with tiny flowers sprouting new buds and delicate stamens made from spun sugar. Once she’d even created a Greek temple with a hollowed-out center filled with tiny marzipan people which you could count if you were brave enough to peer through the tiny windows.

As it happened, Notty was made of stronger stuff than her daughter, and at 85, divorced from the tap-dancer for more than half of those years, she was still going strong. Still walking up and down two flights of stairs, still shopping one item at a time along six blocks of specialty shops with her wheeled carrier filled to the brim. Still handicapping the trotters in front of her ancient television console, apron folded between her knees, pencil in one hand, paper in the other. Still cooking on her hotplate and sharing the proceeds with everyone, including the homeless guy who had staked out her doorway decades ago and never left.

It was thus Sara found her, two streetcars and a subway ride later, above the fish-and-chips shop in Cabbagetown, stirring something in the kitchenette, talking to herself.

She jumped.

“Lordy! Why on earth did I ever give you a key?” The confection in the pot burbled.

Sara put the cake box down on the Formica table. The grey marbled surface was worn through to white it had been scrubbed so many times. Her coat came off around her and flowed in waves of fur around the chair. She had taken off her boots by the door.

Notty was all she had left.

Her grandmother stirred the pot with singular concentration until something about the sound of the mixture or the aroma rising above it satisfied her and she took it off and put it on the ceramic drainboard next to her sink to cool. There was no talking yet. Sara was content to sit quietly and be still within the light and the warmth, to put her back to the framed square of darkness outside. There was a flap of something white on the line off her back porch. The one she'd fallen from so many years ago.

Ganma, ganma, she falled off the roof....

“Notty….”
The older woman turned.
The pot cooled.
“Where is Tom? Where is my brother?”