Cake or Death (15 page)

Third, I had a miserable childhood. I never remember being hugged by my mother. Being a weirdly self-confident young person, I neither noticed nor cared. But after forty, it struck me as truly odd that I am so physically affectionate with other humans without having had any training as a child. Perhaps I had seen people embracing on TV. Ah, so that’s a bear hug.

So what does my mother do? In a casual phone conversation this year, she said, “You know I’ve been thinking and I can’t remember ever hugging you when you were little. I must have been a bad mother.” You can see why I love her. She said this unprompted. She’s nice.

I was completely sucker-punched, left holding a non-anecdote. “You’re right,” I said. “You never hugged or kissed me,” and then I fell over myself saying that she’d had a tough time as a mother. She was stressed beyond belief and was very ill most of the time, often hospitalized and in great pain. “You did the best you could,” I said. “God, you were so sick. It terrified me. Don’t worry about it. You were fine.”

So the grievance of decades was settled. Done. She did her best. What more can you ask? I was entirely sympathetic, especially since my mother did have a hard time in the early part of her marriage, always stuck in some godforsaken part of the world and I mean places that could only be reached in summer by paddle steamer. She
prefers older children and I wouldn’t have wanted to be stuck in a house with me as a baby either. I bet I was a high-maintenance infant, and since I know I was a nightmare teenager, the in-between years can’t have been grins and giggles. Americans spend billions in therapy over the question of a legacy of being loved or unloved. My mother, who has never sought therapy—she does not know what it is—figured out that she had never led me to believe I was loved. So she apologized, I was charmed silly, and that was it: one grievance down and maybe one more to go.

She then mailed me a large cheque.

I’m an acceptable stepmother. I threw myself into it from the first time I saw those two girls, and when they come over for dinner now, I get maudlin over the elaborate dinners their father cooks them and remember what chubby little cuties they were in Grade One. Not surprisingly, they don’t come over much. Imagine how much worse it would be if they’d come out through my “birth canal.” Man, they’d owe me. As it is, they owe me nothing and yet I cling to an invisible debt.

Their side of the family is yelly. Mine is not. I prefer yellers. It seems more honest. Isn’t it better to be sixteen and scream at your mother that she never hugged you as a toddler than to wait for forty resentful years for her to mention it over the phone, casually collapsing your house of resentment cards?

Now, rather than seeing an argument as a bloodletting, I see it as artwork and therein lies pleasure. I love still lifes. That’s some nice crockery, I’ll say admiringly of
Giorgio Morandi who basically paints white jugs. But the still lifes I really love are the Northern Flemish painters of the sixteenth century, who really go at it. They painted slaughtered birds and serpents—Metsys was the best—and these things were splattered all over the table. Still life is not an adequate phrase; still bleeding would be more like it.

I’m all for vegetarianism. It sounds terribly fine. But not being a cook, and since left to my own devices I will eat cheese for breakfast, lunch and dinner, I’m a vegetarian by default. Someone in my house keeps roasting bleeding haunches for me—I mean, roast oxtail—for dinner. Seriously. You don’t know where it’s been. But you can imagine. It was the tail of an ox. Or is this a euphemism? I can just see the fly-ridden thing flapping in the pasture. But now it’s skinned and doubtless marinated and I am sitting with my husband, eating the swatter from a cow’s ass and talking about people who suck the joy out of life.

I bet you thought I couldn’t find my way home.

When I was a young girl, I developed starter breasts. I remember a girlfriend at school suggesting I should be wearing a bra and then literally biting her tongue, as someone as hopelessly uncool as me could not manage such a thing. So I summoned up the blood and asked my mother for a bra.

She looked at me and said in her coldwater Glaswegian accent and a note of what I accept thirty years later was indeed genuine, not faked, puzzlement, “What good would that do?”

How do you answer that?
I’ll get practice? All the other girls wear one and I’ll fit in? Oh, go on, be a sport?

Instead, I melted into a small puddle. A year later, I developed breasts out of nowhere—indeed I have them to this day and take them with me everywhere I go—and I dealt with it somehow. Girls need an adviser. The straps on the bra I eventually obtained used to keep falling off my shoulders. It took me years, I swear, to figure out that the little buckle on the strap means it’s adjustable … oh never mind.

I won’t tell you the story of my mother’s reaction when I got my first period. I mean, you can guess. But I always envied Carly Simon, the singer who is the love of my life and a big hunk of my personal soundtrack, because when she got her period, her mother took her up to the deck at the top of the house and together they saluted the moon with a glass of wine and a toast to men. (Simon’s mother was a real piece of work, by the way, a mother-lode, so to speak.)

Whereas my initiation involved paper grocery bags and bulk purchases of menstrual pads (in the early seventies, they still came with belts you could buy in grocery stores) that my mother collected from a catalogue delivery outlet.

Talk about sucking the joy out of things, I have a Great-Aunt Mavis who is a maestro, a Tenszing, an Olympic champion Mark Spitz (who’s a dentist now) at it. She is fantastically unkind to my mother, and that I cannot forgive. She’s a Razorblades Heidi, a holder of grudges, a hater of small children, the wettest blanket in my family, which is
saying something dire indeed. Her grown-up children are the dullest people I know. Even their toddlers are dull. Is that even possible?

She’ll discuss her approaching vacation. Japan? Norway? Dare I suggest India? “Well, if it’s as hot as it was in 1952, they can keep it,” she’ll say, dismissing the entire Indian subcontinent with a wave of her hand. All you can do is gobble silently to yourself—
I imagine it is. I imagine they have kept it. And will continue to keep it. It’s not like they’ve been waiting agog for forty years for you to come pay another visit
. But I don’t say this. I just stare at her like Malcolm in the Middle. She’s a big mannish woman with cruel hair and a slice for a tongue and frankly I’m frightened.

She’s the kind of person who makes fun of retarded children, borderline tormenting them when their parents are looking. She won’t let you read the newspaper in her living room because you might get ink on the chesterfield. I would normally sympathize with this, having a touch of cleaning disorder, but in her case, it just means she’s too cheap to get her upholstery cleaned. She has one of those houses that are furnished, beyond question they are furnished, but you sit down and think, What now?

There are no bookcases, no snacks or televisual devices or even a magazine or a pet. She’s the most
discomfort
-making woman.

I have a stalker. She used to be my best friend, a loyal, gentle person then, if prone to inexplicable rages that we used to puzzle over. Later, she grew more like a sharpened
knife twanging unnervingly, and some years later I dropped her. It gives you no grace to drop someone, but she was too cruel by then to have in the room. It made no difference that she was later diagnosed with a particularly harsh mental disorder. I could no longer cope with her.

The weird thing is that despite the things she did to me (and they were things girlfriends don’t do; ask a girlfriend and she’ll tell you), the greatest grudge I held against her had to do with gabled roofs. Gables are the upside-down V you see on the roofline of a house. They’re there because they repel rain and snow, they look good, and they give you an attic if an attic is what you want. The alternative to gables is flat roofs, brought into fashion by a little shit named Le Corbusier. What ensued was a century of leaking roofs.

I and my nutter gal-pal were riding on a train and I noticed a roofline. I then said something about it being odd that they still clung to flat rooflines in Canada, even when gables were so much more attractive and practical in a snowstorm.

My off-centre friend lost it. Why do you even notice things like that? she hissed. And this is what they mean when they say something takes the cake. I was disgusted. I managed to get through high school without anyone noticing I was brainy (I wasn’t that smart in university, so no problems there), but she seemed to think I had made what verged on an intellectual remark. Girls aren’t supposed to know about the deterioration of architecture between the two world wars.

Okay, I’m saying it. I dumped a friend over a remark about rooflines. You’d think it couldn’t be done, but it can. The fact is, I’m irresistible to nutcases, always have been. And generally, they’re women. It’s not flattering. They’re always damaged people, in some way. What is there in me that calls out to them? I’m sending out “Oh bugger off” thought waves but perhaps Peasblossom (Titania and Oberon’s most annoying sprite) has mischievously translated them into “Let us be bosom friends. Literally. Here’s some serious glue.”

I used to take great joy in watching the Buffalo, New York real estate channel (until they took it off because no one in their right mind was buying a house in Buffalo, New York, where there are no jobs and nothing to do except self-harm on a Sunday afternoon) because I had a running bet with myself that I would never see a house with a bookcase. And I never did.

If the problem were illiteracy, I wouldn’t mention it. But it’s not, because what are the odds? I grew up in small northern towns all over Canada and every single one of them had an excellent library even if it was housed in an abandoned gas station. No, the problem is a suspicion of books and people who read them.

I used to be book review editor at a tabloid. They were the happiest working days of my life (and my working life has been a tattered flag of misery; I hate newsrooms) because no editor at the paper had ever read a book and they were much too intimidated to approach or, I imagine,
ever read anything I wrote about books. This was not surprising. But I used to get calls from readers who’d say, “That sounds like a great book! Where can I buy that?” And I’d say gently and slowly, “At … a … bookstore.” I’m ashamed that I tell this story as if it were funny.

There was something in those years that felt masturbatory in reading books at the rate I read them, and I read even more of them now. I read so much that I get a federal tax break on my reading glasses. I take great joy in my reading, propping books up on a small pillow on my belly as I lie at 120 degrees on the couch, as though I were feeding the words into my body as well as my eyeballs. I feel like Malcolm. I don’t want to be in the gifted program, the Krelboynes, as they were called in the show. I’m not gifted. I’m normal. I wanna be with the other kids. I just have this trick in my brain—I was born smart and I’m ambivalent about it—that only adults are comfortable with. And I secretly think it’s worthy, if misery-making.

But the nice thing about adult life is that at some point, it ends.

Cheese-paring tippers; people who don’t tip chambermaids (vacuuming up your eyelashes is way worse than serving you drinks, buddy); airlines that serve McFood boxes (I don’t mind paying, but I’d like something better than a pork-patty melt made with mashed pig vulva); airline passengers who pour Metamucil into their bottled
water after dins and shake shake shake; anyone with an SUV; men who drive their Humvees home and let them overhang the lawn; women with handbags Kevlared with chrome holes, buckles, studs and bumpers; women who change their names after marriage (unless original family name horrible, new name is great escape after tunnelling under ze family prison camp walls).

I hate raindrops on roses if they’re hybrid roses. I hate brown paper packages tied up with string because modern postal machinery will hook the string and shred your Christmas present. Whiskers on kittens are weird. Are they nerves, and if so, is it an act of torture when the pet groomer trims them? Bright copper kettles are miserable to polish and I know nothing of schnitzel and strudel but it all sounds Teutonic, bloating and not very nice. I have no objection to white dresses with blue satin sashes, but as for snowflakes and silver-white winters that melt into springs, it’s the factories of Nazi Germany and its little pal Austria that contributed to the black ball that choked our planet when the Nazis took over, so farewell, Austrian skiing industry.

I don’t like George W. Bush’s “heh heh heh” and I despise him for resenting Yale for taking him in just because his daddy went there. Take the freebie, George, you took all the other ones. George could have gone to technical college and made a nice living as a panel-beater in a garage, from which people with dented cars emerge with smooth, slick machines that give them a slidy, shiny satisfaction. But no, you had to get back at your dad. What did Iraqis and Iranians ever do to you, George?

I don’t like plastic. I like plastic buckets that ease the burden of African women carrying water for miles to their families, but that’s only because the men don’t bother. Plastic littered the planet with ugliness. I return to my original point: wooden computers, that’s the ticket! How about a nice wooden telephone and a wooden bed instead of the iron bedstead thing with perpendicular rails that always traps my head late at night. It’s stylish but it could stand some plywood, frankly, Mr. Art Shoppe who sold it to me.

I used to like drugs until they became necessary. I don’t mean for actual illnesses, but for coping with life. Is Peter D. Kramer at all embarrassed about
Listening to Prozac?
It never worked out, did it, Peter? We’re as miserable as ever. This means that there was something implicitly wrong with your theory.