Savage (17 page)

"I guess," I said.

"They need another pallbearer," Dad said, making a series of little vocal pulses that just skimmed across our nearly fifteen-year-old sand-coloured broadloom.

"You may borrow my overcoat," he told me. "I have an extra tie."

On Sunday morning, I filmed myself getting dressed for the pallbearer gig. I was still recording a low-grumbled VHS diary entry.
Low grumbled
only because I didn't want anyone to hear what I was talking about on video, or because I usually would record late at night as I had perpetual insomnia.

Dad pulled into the parking lot, the familiar signage "Beverly Funeral Home" in white letters, permanent and regal, greeting my gaze from the passenger's seat. The building's grey brick and shutters were painted the same colour as parts of Andrew's house. It was emblazoned in my psyche, nudging me with familiar warmth.

When I walked into the funeral home, I immediately saw Andrew. Andrew was working too. I had no idea he would be there, and I must have looked as shocked as he did when he saw me walk in with Dad.

We didn't say a word to each other. I hadn't talked to him in over a year. I thought:
We were doing a job; this was professional, and this wasn't personal. I was being paid and so was he; this will be over and no one will remember a thing
—but all I could feel was my giant red heart accelerating as if a lead foot was pressing down on it and I was aware, now, that something else controlled all. That it was never ever me.

I can't speak for Andrew, but I was consumed with a huge raw discomfort as we got into the car, as we lifted the casket from the service room to the hearse, as we nodded hello to the priest, as we took instruction from our director, as we moved slow and somber from the car to the gravesite and then back.

As we approached Laird Drive, I asked to be let off; no sense in traveling all the way back to the funeral home, which was on Mount Pleasant, another fifteen minutes east.

"I can get out here," I said, and was pleased when the driver slowed down for me, happy not to be going back with the rest of Team Death.

"I'll see you at home," Dad said. And I got out of the car and walked from the red-light intersection on the northeast corner of Laird and Eglinton, where Andrew and I had bought a thousand freezies, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and half-litres of chocolate milk to amplify our foul nights of teenage excess.

When the cheque from Beverly Funeral Home came two weeks later, I photocopied it before cashing it, feeling smug, glad that I'd been paid for a portion of our time spent together.

13 )
Ruined in a Day

Sunday, February 6th, 1994

O
utside, the gusty winter blustered away, and I knew it would soak my pant cuffs and add to my torment. We were going to visit Aunt Rebecca and Uncle Tom in Kingston for dinner. Grandmother and Grandfather were also going to be there. I opted to wear double socks in my clumpy, overheated boots. Mom had packed us both snacks. A riot of colours lay blurred in the twisted plastic-bag cocoon.

"Share these with your father," Mom said. "I need to lie down, and this cold is killing me."

"Just take it easy; don't throw out my room," I said, adding, "I'm serious."

Mom had this consistent habit of throwing things out of my room in sporadic bouts of amnesia or some weird game in which I had to guess which memento she had sacrificed to indifference.

Don't throw out my room
was my latest jingle in a series of catch phrases designed as a type of mutiny against the unauthorized purging of things in my bedroom: some minor object or trinket would invariably go missing, snatched up into a an ethereal nothing and now floating in the home in sad purgatory.

We
¹⁷
drove in silence with sparse radio traffic reports and one coffee stop. "What time are we supposed to be there?"

17. Dad and I were the only ones willing to go that weekend, when at the 11th hour, my mother got the flu, and of course my sister Holly was studying for exams. (Even though we were about ten minutes from her campus in Kingston, she insisted she couldn't spare the time away from “cramming.”)

"Half past five," Dad said.

Aunt Rebecca and Uncle Tom's house was blanketed in predictable snow, resembling a structure you'd see in a sketch on a gift-shop greeting card. The snow had subsided and for the first time that day, the sun emerged bright and real.

Dinner was still a few minutes away, my Aunt Rebecca
¹⁸
informed us. It was our first time at her new house, which was located in a remote wilderness, miles from the highway in Kingston.

18. My Aunt Rebecca was the second eldest child next to Dad. She had ears that stuck out like his and mine but had surgery in the early 1980s to pin them back. She married Tom, an architect who enjoyed acting like the useless husband who couldn't get anything right, always laughing at his own domestic shortcomings, whether it was making coffee, setting the table or hanging guests coats. Tom loved to fail and get a rise out of my Aunt. It was their thing. Rebecca had been a nurse for twenty-five years and was now only taking sporadic shifts at the main hospital in Kingston. Though not as religious as her father, or Dad, Rebecca did possess an amazing ability to give sermons on just about any topic. You didn't even have to know the person to visualize their shortcomings. Her succinct sound bites and re-enactments were completely believable, be it something stupid Tom did with his sailboat or a fabulous recipe she had improved on and impressed a room full of boating enthusiasts with one summer afternoon.

After the cold snakes of scarves and hats, coughs and galoshes were removed, I detected the bright, harsh tones of my aunt's middle-of-nowhere country home. The hallway walls were filled up with family photographs. They might as well have been portraits of aliens, I had no idea who most of these people were.

The dining room table was set, all crisp and angelic, long and empty awaiting clutter and population. In the living room, my grandparents were sitting on a couch. A small bevy of snacks had been put out. The way Dad said "veggies" drove me nuts, I found it degrading to them somehow. The house was filling with gravy scents, high-octane red wines and the pithy scent of cranberry sauce minced alchemic with my ghastly cologne, borrowed from Dad's bureau that morning.

"So how was the drive up, Dave?"

"Fine."

The three-hour drive, peppered with traffic, was slow at times, so I put in the only tape that Dad could tolerate, which was the Barenaked Ladies.
¹⁹
He would expunge little half-syllables of what I believed was approval that would ping-pong in the car; his effort to loosen perhaps, an emotional muscle. He had the same type of half-cocked interest when I started listen to the Beatles ten years earlier.

19. When the album came out and was getting substantial Toronto video and radio play, Andrew used to sing the line from the song “Enid”: “I took a beating when you wrote me those letters,” as a conversational stilt. At this time, I was writing him notes almost every week.

Dad sat down and leaned in for a piece of celery, while his sister, my aunt Rebecca, brought him a glass of wine, calling him Dave over and over again and speaking in a tight, loud pitch as she entered the room with her five-foot frame.

I had a miniscule glass of ginger ale with ice and watched Dad take the first sip of his adult beverage, as more relatives appeared in the living room—some still coming, some in the washroom, some still in mid-greeting.

"There you are now," Grandfather said, grinning all holy and slow as a vampire, shifting on the couch, looking a bit uneven in his sweater and priest collar, restricted to the standard threadbare he'd worn for sixty years.

"And school? How is school? University now?"

"School is fine." I didn't know what to say. "And your sister? Mom?"

"Mom is sick, has the flu," I said. That much was certain.

Just like history does, like a flagpole exploring soil, Dad was deep in the conquering.

"If Diane wants the house, if she tries to take it from me, I'll tie her up in court for years," Dad began to say, shifting his weight, half a cracker awkwardly juggling in and out of his jaw.

The vegetables and roast's steam coaxed things: sleeves, sweater collars, rims of eyewear. We had only been in the house for a short while before things got messy, before I balled up into a myriad of clammy symptoms, hands hurting, dry throat, nauseous stomach, thick salty tears aborting, and the swell of a panicked, bull-like breathing pattern.

"I'm in control; she's not going to get the house. I'll keep her tied up in court for years; if she wants to leave me, she'll get nothing," Dad concluded, legs crossed like a talk-show guest, and now awkwardly stuffing that final bit of cracker and cheese into his mouth, as if the piece of food was afraid to enter.

I began to tear uncontrollably. A sickness flamed up in my stomach and dried out my heart.

My embarrassing tears pulled me up from the couch and told me to leave the house, to cry in the snow in the afternoon, and so I put on my jacket and boots and went to the car to smoke a cigarette.

I shuffled into the passenger's seat, smoking sickly, jarred by his callous words. I stared blankly at the scenic house—white and blue tones, simple stone brick base—and smoked and panicked. Things would change, they would surely change, the storyline would swerve and change.

That second, that little Moment, that time trickle:
Dad was all Real Estate, sip of drink, cracker-and-cheese cough
.

My heart was on fire when I saw Dad opening the front door. He was walking towards the car.
What the fuck?!
He opened the driver's side seat and slid in...
I could smell Dad: the worst stink known to mankind.
I felt sick with rage; the cigarette not enough, his words still barbed and bleeding in my throat.

"Thought I'd join you," Dad said, sitting beside me in the car. Was he just going to sit down? I'll never know, because his presence spurned me to leap from the passenger's seat and, like I'd seen so many times on police dramas,
they'd race around to the driver's seat and open the door...

"How could you say that shit about Mom!" I said with a gusty shout, and pulled him out by his winter-coat collar. "Asshole!" I threw him down on the ground. "You fucking piece of shit!" As he tried to get up, I kicked him twice hard in the stomach; bits of snow exploded around each leg thrust.

The words would get erased. Just me kicking him. That's it.

"YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE!" I blasted with hateful fangs.

The gargantuan winds had subsided. All that remained was a cold and brutal afternoon, the fake sun hanging benign.

I was dead and could no longer breathe. I went back into the house, smelling of half a cigarette and smarting with hate and frosted skin. Dad entered shortly after. I was still taking off my shoes and putting my coat on a hook. He motioned to Aunt Rebecca, coughing, holding his ribs, "I need to lie down." And so he did, on a couch in a spare room.

"It can be difficult with family sometimes," Grandmother offered in a soft, unspooling murmur, unaware of what went down outside, the wintry, abject unravel. I felt sick.

The three-hour drive home loomed ahead.
What would Mom think? What would we tell her? And Holly...

Why did I agree to drive out here with him?

I was still fuming in silence as I clenched my teeth, sucking up the remaining ginger ale and ice.

"Smells great, Rebecca," Tom offered.

"Tom, why don't you finish setting the table!" Aunt Rebecca shouted. Tom looked at us with an impish smirk, rising from the couch to assist his wife.

Dinner was swelling now. It was time to eat.

To this day, I know that I was right, that I had done the right thing, that Dad had started on a venting rant and that I was right there, watching him monster it up, talking over everyone in his chalky voice.

Dad eventually made it to the dinner table. I said nothing, save for the necessary table responses like, "That's fine," as I watched the dense mashed potatoes cascade from the serving spoon to my plate. My uncle returned the large silver spoon to the hot white mound, and then pulled out a fresh snowball-sized clump of carbohydrates for the next plate.

Dad and I avoided eye contact. Grandfather said grace.

"Amen," everyone repeated. I ate fast.

No one else knew the real, I thought. No one cared about the meaning of things, the way it felt. I just wanted it to be over.

We drove in silence for nearly three hours, back to Toronto. The road was imperfect: cuts and nicks, bumps and snow swells. Reverse. Acceleration.

Besides the cold wind that trickled in and the intense empty highway's infinite darkness, the drive home was put on mute, permanent, save for the sound of lighting and extinguishing cigarettes in the culpable dark.

14 )
State of the Nation

Late April 1994