“That's nice,” says Grandma.
“Yes, yes. You remind me so, so much,” he repeats, keeping his hand on her back.
2:21 p.m.
GRANDMA INSISTS ON
paying. I tried. I said I'd pay. She said she wanted to treat me for picking her up, and shot me her eyebrow. She doesn't use her eyebrow only when pondering but also subconsciously lifts it as a sign of authority, a facial exclamation point. It's understood by all of us in the family that when it rises, it's her little ninety-two-year-old way of visually suggesting,
Cut the crap. Do as I say.
She gives me her credit card and asks me to go up and pay for her. I suspect the machines with tip options and
PIN
numbers are becoming increasingly difficult for her to navigate. She'll meet me at the car. It's okay, this is only day one.
We're starting on a trip. I'll have plenty of chances to treat her.
Back inside my car, I'm sucking on my red-striped mint. Grandma is struggling mightily with her seatbelt. The humidity and dew point in here feel analogous to those of an equatorial rainforest. I'm already buckled in. Grandma's managed to coil the twisted belt around her like a wrinkled beauty pageant sash. She's found the latch with her free hand but can't bring the metal ends together. I've stopped in the alley. I let her struggle for a moment, unsure how to help, pretending to examine the laces of my left shoe. “Oh, here, Grandma, let me try. That damn seatbelt has a mind of its own.”
“No, it's okay,” she's saying, bracing herself with her right hand on the door. “It's just so silly. It's my fault.”
I lean over the armrest and tug forcefully on her belt. She grunts. Fuck. “I'm sorry,” I say. I can feel my forehead starting to dampen. “Look,” I say, “I think it's tangled up there, near the top. Let me try this.” I tug harder. She grunts again, louder.
I'm up kneeling on my own seat. I need the extra leverage. My arms are stretched out in front of Grandma's face, close enough for her to bite my forearm. The car is idling. She's tilting back as far as she can, stuck to her seat like an astronaut at takeoff.
Finally I'm able to untangle the tangle. I give Grandma the okay, but still the belt needs another inch or two of line before it'll latch. Maybe it just needs a firmer pull. I try again, more firmly still. A third, more guttural grunt echoÂes throughout the car.
“I'm really sorry about this,” says Grandma. “I know I ate a bit too much, but I couldn't have grown this much from lunch, could I? I shouldn't have eaten so much. Sometimes I just can't resist.” She's starting to laugh now. “It's from those little dandies.”
“Sorry, the what?”
“Those doohickeys.” I've got my right arm all the way behind her seat now and am trying to work the belt from underneath. I can't see her. “Those silly little wontons. I didn't need them but I can never resist.”
She's giggling hard now; I'm fake-laughing harder. Her twitching torso is making this belt brouhaha worse. Another car has pulled up behind me. I'm getting flustered. “Why don't you just drive, I'll be fine,” she says.
“We better get you buckled in, Grandma.” I peer at the person behind me in the rear-view mirror. They don't look annoyed or angry, more perplexed at what's happening in the car in front of them to the little old lady with white hair.
It's when Grandma's laughing subsides that I'm able to latch the belt. “There,” she exclaims, “you got it! Way to go, Iain!”
Still concerned that she can't breathe with the restrictive belt, I distractedly turn out into traffic. Grandma is still praising me. Instantly, we're almost struck. I have no idea how I didn't see the oncoming car, but I didn't. It was very close. Maybe I was still thinking about the belt, the car behind me, or the wontons. The encroaching car is able to swerve nimbly into the left lane, narrowly missing the left side of my back bumper. Grandma doesn't notice the near miss. She hears the horn blast, though. My heart is pumping.
“What's their problem? I hate those stupid horns.”
“I know, eh. Just a jerk, Grandma,” I say. “Clearly he has an axe to grind.”
“Those people shouldn't be driving.”
“You've got that right.”
Arriving at the next traffic light, I timidly pull up alongside the car I almost hit. I'm still rattled by the near miss. I look through my window and through theirs. The jerk with the axe to grind is a middle-aged woman with a deflated perm. She doesn't look over at us but stares straight ahead pacifistically. She has a plastic yellow air-freshener in the shape of a foot dangling from her rear-view mirror.
What a bitch.
3:19 p.m.
THIS WASN'T PART
of the grand plan. We've stopped speaking. Not for any discernible reason. We're just not talking. Silence isn't usually bad in itself, but this one is uncomfortable. Maybe it's the heavy lunch. It could be all that greasy food that's muzzled us. Or the realization that we'll be spending every minute of every day, for the next five, together. Grandma's half-whistling, half-humming meekly through her teeth. She's thinking,
Why has my grandson taken me on a trip when he has nothing to say?
Without the distraction of chatter, my sense of smell has been heightened. I'm holding my nose high like a tentative marsupial. But I can extricate only two smells. My usual car smell: a mix of burning oil and metallic grinding. The second, more unpleasant smell is reminiscent of lunch. I'd been anticipating a third â old lady scent. I have no idea what old lady scent is, but I was legitimately concerned. I feel like most grandmas in their nineties would either smell oddly sour or, if they resorted to perfume, too flowery, too manufactured. Grandma is determinedly scentless.
“How about a goofball, Grandma? My treat.”
“What's that, dear?”
While driving, even cruising, my car gives off a tremendous groan. The muffler is long-ago shot. I have to speak up.
“A coffee. Would you like a coffee?”
“Sure. But what did you call it?”
“A goofball. I don't know why, but that's what I call coffees on road trips.”
“I like that. Goofballs. Let's get some goofballs.”
We pull into a Tim Hortons on the main street of Smiths Falls, a town about an hour or so northeast of Kingston. “What do you want in your goofball, Grandma?”
“Milk in my goofball, please. And here, take this.”
Her hand grabs mine. My instinct is to pull away, but she forces a five-dollar bill into my squished palm with unexpected strength. I open my mouth to protest, but only muster, “Okay, be right back.” I push the note into the back pocket of my jeans.
There's only a short queue, so I don't wait long. I order our drinks from a short, chinless man who is more interested in asking about my glasses than handing me our goofballs. They are ready, sitting right beside him on the counter, as we chat about the cost of prescription lenses.
The coffees are (still) steaming hot when I get back to the car. They taste good. But they do nothing to get us talking. Maybe I should have invited the employee from the coffee shop to join us. It's tricky to tell how long it's been since we last spoke. I mean, I'm focused on driving. Other than the Hank Williams tape playing, it's probably been twenty minutes or so, maybe half an hour, of obtrusive quiet. It's Grandma who finally breaks it. “Oh, the tape player still works.”
“Yup,” I answer, turning it up a hair. “Still sounds pretty good.”
She leans forward and pats the dashboard affectionately.
“Amazing, you're still hanging in there,” she says, patting the dash again. “Like me.”
“Yup, it's getting up there. About twenty years old now.”
“Well, I'd say that's about ninety-two in human years. The old blue bird looks pretty good considering.”
I'd forgotten; that's what Grandma has always called this car. Grandma loves nicknames. The blue bird. My ninety-two-year-old car.
INSTEAD OF THE
major four-lane highway, I've opted for the slower, more scenic two-lane route. We're on vacation, and efficiency isn't our aim. Unlike Highway 401, this track doesn't bypass each small town. It passes through them. The mention of the radio/tape deck seems to have uninhibited us. Grandma is speaking more freely.
“That looks like a new house. Over there, is that a new place?”
As we continue on, Grandma's interest in the local real estate swells. She mentions several more homes and asks specifically about the newness of three others. It's always too late when I look, and I can't confirm or deny their age. Although the vast majority of homes on this stretch of highway are old. “Which one?” I ask again, looking back over my shoulder.
“We've passed it now. But I didn't recognize it. There seem to be lots of revived properties on this road.”
Between the new houses in the old towns, there are green meadows and brown fields. Many of both. Some are impressively manicured and await seeding. Family farms still exist in this part of the country, and evidence of their workings is scattered around the fields like children's toys â wagons and tractors, bales of hay, pickup trucks. Rusty swing sets occupy lawns. Tire swings hang from branches. Other fields are less polished. They are uneven, and instead of equipment are often shaded by groups of trees and bushes. We pass rocks and fences, streams and ponds. We've seen varying barns, the most common being the nineteenth-century log variety. There've been more farm animals than we could count â lots of cows, horses, sheep, even a donkey or two. Grandma mentions it all, reflecting aloud.
“It's so green here,” Grandma says. “So green, especially for this time of year.”
“You're right. It is green.”
“It's quite . . . moggy.” I've never heard Grandma use
moggy
before. Sometimes she has her own words or pronunciations for things. I know what she's getting at.
“Yeah, fairly.”
“More here than Ottawa.”
“Yes.”
“There are more swamps along this road than I remember.”
“I guess it is green and swampy and . . . moggy.”
“Oh, yes.” She's slanted in her seat, gazing out the window, her right hand up on the glass. “Lovely and moggy.”
“Nice to still see some of these farms, too, isn't it?”
“It is, dear. I can remember when I first came out to Ontario, from the Prairies. I couldn't believe what they called farms out here. They were so small. You haven't seen farms until you see what they have in the Prairies.”
“I'm sure you're right, Grandma. These are what I think of when I think of a farm.” These small stone houses and scatterings of barns and wood fences. Lots of trees around. A few cattle, maybe a field of a corn. But even these farms, especially closer to Ottawa, are disappearing. “But the land is more valuable as real estate.”
“Makes you wonder where we'll grow our food,” she says. “These fields are so nice.”
Our chatting has grown so continuous I've turned the tape down low. It was difficult for Grandma to decipher between me, the speakers, and the engine. She'd either ask me to repeat something or, more commonly, I could just tell by her void expression that she hadn't caught what was said. We've been talking mostly about the scenery around us, which has become very rocky.
“It's funny,” she's saying, “we went for a lot of drives and little trips like this, but we never once went to Kingston.”
“You mean you and Grandpa?”
“Yes, George loved going away.”
“You guys used to take a lot of drives?”
“Oh, sure, even just for the weekend. We both enjoyed a change of scene.” She's tacked her focus back inside the car.
“Did you often go away?”
“We did, yes. We were just lucky we were able to. Some of my fondest memories are the small trips we made around Ontario.” I'm not sure if this announcement should make me feel more pressure to show Grandma a good time or just reinforce the notion that she enjoys this species of trip. “But,” she continues, “we never went far.”
“Still nice to get away.”
“And I often did the driving.”
“Neat.” Shit. I knew it. She thinks I'm a bad driver. Maybe she wants to take over?
“Your grandpa liked to navigate and I liked doing the driving.”
“I can believe that. So do you want to drive now?”
“What? No, no, dear. I'm happy to just sit here and look out there.”
She sounds genuine. I guess I should just keep driving.
“Once, I remember it very well, George told me to pack up, that we were going somewhere as a surprise. I had no idea what to pack. We ended up driving five minutes away, to a motel in Bells Corners.”
Bells Corners is really only a short stretch of road in western Ottawa. There are a few restaurants, some shops, and (apparently) a motel or two.
“So is that where you stayed?”
“Yup, for the whole weekend. Ten minutes from home. You used to have to sign in, in an actual book in those days, when you checked in.”
“Like in
Psycho
.”
“And after we signed in, the guy gave us a room way at the back even though it wasn't busy.” I'm not quite sure what Grandma's implying, and she must sense my momentary daze. “He read the address on the sign-in sheet and knew it wasn't far.” My face is still blank, my wheels turning faster than the car's. “He assumed we were having an affair.”
“Oh, right, yes, yes.”
“I told my friends I'd gone to B.C. â as in Bells Corners â for the weekend, which was true.” She leans toward me, grabbing my elbow. “You see, doing something like that, that was typical George.”
WE'VE BEEN BEHIND
the same car since our coffee stop. I think I'm following too closely. There is a small sticker of Calvin (from
Calvin and Hobbes
) above the bumper. Calvin is grimacing while urinating on an indecipherable shape, which is smaller. Both the urine spray and the secondary shape are part of the same sticker. It might just be a car logo I'm unfamiliar with. But he's definitely peeing. The car was in the Tim Hortons parking lot with us.