The other changes were gradual. Or maybe it was that the effects of sudden changes took awhile to be noticed.
Her mother stopped paying the bills, stopped opening any mail.
One day the phone was not working. “Well, damn,” said her mother when Arie told her. Her mother might not have noticed for ages: she seemed to have stopped making or receiving calls.
“I didn’t know you swore,” Arie told her.
“I don’t,” said her mother. “Damn isn’t swearing. At least for grownups.” She stared at the black heavy instrument for a moment. Her own father had had it installed many years ago. It had never been out of service since.
“Arie, tomorrow on your lunch go to the phone company and pay the bill.”
“How?” Arie wanted to know.
“Oh, I don’t know. A cheque. The drawer.”
Arie considered this. It made her feel very grown up and responsible all of a sudden, to be so casually entrusted. In later years she would have moments of amazement that she had accepted and succeeded. She had never been asked to do anything except behave herself, be good. Be quiet, overall.
She assumed her father had taken care of everything. She soon came to realize that it had been her mother who had taken care of everything, came to understand that she had found it overwhelming. At her husband’s death she abdicated.
“How much do we owe?” Arie asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. I think the bill is in the piano bench.” Her mother had stopped staring at the phone and was on her way back to whatever she was now finding the time, or the relaxation, to do. Possibly sorting through the boxes of recipes she – and her own mother – had collected over the years.
Arie went to the piano bench. There was the phone bill with two overdue notices, several other bills, a letter addressed to both her and her mother with a short note from her uncle with the pictures he had promised them, other correspondence. She left the letters addressed to her mother on the hall table. Then she moved them, days later, still unopened, to her mother’s place on the breakfast table. Finally she opened them herself. And any others as they came. She put them on her mother’s bureau, then into a drawer. After awhile few, if any, came.
She spread the bills across her bed and looked at them solemnly. Then she smiled. Her chunky little body stood up tall and she marched down to her mother.
“How did Dad pay the bills?” she asked.
Her mother gave her a most curious look. “I paid the bills,” she said. Again in that chilling, silencing tone although her face remained without expression. “I wrote cheques. In the desk.”
Arie discovered she had an orderly mind when she delighted in the neat contents of the desk but it never occurred to her to credit her mother for this trait. “So that’s why I’m good at Math,” she decided, cause and effect reversed.
One more question she needed to ask her mother.
“Where does the money come from into the bank account each month?”
Her mother made an effort to think. “Pension. Investments. Insurance. Inheritance. Rent. Maybe others.”
Years later she would become more involved. At first she simply stepped, anonymously, into her mother’s caretaking of their finances. Her mother’s signature was no problem to copy.
When the cash in the secret drawer in the old desk was nearly gone she went to the bank to get money to replace it. Her mother went with her the first time, showed her how to withdraw money, the last time she would drive the car for many years.
“I never liked driving,” she said, hanging the keys on a ring on the back of the side door. They would whisper jingle unless someone had hung a scarf or hat over them in the winter.
From then on the thousand dollars in twenty dollar bills would be handed over to Ari who would take a taxi home, the money in her little purse. The taxi was the suggestion of the bank manager when he became aware she was on her own and entrusted with that amount. She did so. And when she told her mother she said, “Oh, good idea. There are some strange people about.” Arie knew she meant those who would grab money away. She also became aware that ‘strange’ applied to her mother now as well. She had not appeared in public for ages. She was dressed in a pair of her husband’s trousers, one of her own blouses, a vest of her husband’s. And his watch. She also was almost always barefoot now. Arie would glance occasionally to see if her mother’s feet were “spreading flat” as he father had said they would so insisted she always wear shoes. “Aren’t your feet cold?” Arie asked once or twice when it was especially cold. “Yes,” her mother said, surprised that she had to ask. “I like the freedom,” she explained once, and then Arie understood and asked no more. When she was pregnant with Timken she developed feet that objected to footwear. It seemed a curious legacy.
The time Arie took the taxi home for the first time and realized how oddly garbed her mother had become she must have showed it in her face for her mother tilted her head in a certain way, with a certain expression on her face, and turned away. Arie would speculate on this change, feel confused, then duck behind pleasant speculations – like how she could spend money as she pleased. Her mother never inquired, never interfered.
She had never been denied anything so there was nothing she was longing to buy. The one purchase she did regret, a pair of shoes with heels that did not make her feel taller but merely silly and in which she hobbled rather than walked (down the halls and around the house, she never attempted to wear them anywhere) – and for which she had paid nearly one hundred dollars, she hid behind some old windows in the basement – they were too good and too new to throw out. Daly found them years later, tracing the smell of mould.
It was fun and interesting taking over the finances. It was fun shopping for groceries and having them delivered. She didn’t mind too much if the grownups around her, in the bank, in the grocery store, in the town hall when she took in the cheque to pay the taxes, if they ‘petted’ her with their response. But if they tried to learn more about the situation she had a way of, oh, not exactly tilting her head like her mother could, but more so she looked through them.
With friends at school, recess acquaintances, she made pouty faces or acted dumb if they asked her personal questions.
More than one person who had known her then would be more than surprised when they learned later she had been called to the bar, become a lawyer. She had appeared stupid.
The decline of the condition of the house after her mother’s abdication was not pleasant. It had been kept spotless, shining, even Arie’s room.
Arie washed the dishes, a new experience for her. After a few weeks she cleaned the sinks but ignored the toilet. She figured out how to wash clothes and buried the disasters of two sweaters and a pair of trousers deep in the garbage pail when she realized what happened to wool in hot water.
The house got dustier and dustier. She picked up the balls of dust that collected on floors and threw them away.
One day she could no longer ignore the brown line in the toilet bowl and the green around the seat. She gagged as she was swishing around the brush she had found behind the bathtub and then threw up, the resulting mess in the toilet bowl making her sit on the edge of the bathtub and cry.
“For goodness sake get someone to come in and do that,” her mother said, drawn to the sounds.
“Who?” Arie asked, tears mixing with the curls that were often in her face.
“Oh, I don’t know.” She made the effort to think. “When you were born someone came in for a few months, once a week.” She stirred herself to seek out the number. Arie called. The woman was not available for house cleaning any longer but her sister-in-law was. Would she suit? She would. She did.
“You want some help with the garden?” the neighbor behind them (not the one who had been responsible for her name) asked that autumn. “Just heard about your Dad.” Arie was in the garden picking apples up from under one of the trees. The one thing her mother had continued to do was cook – not plan or shop – simply turn whatever food appeared in the kitchen into a meal. When she thought to buy yeast, bread began to appear. An eggplant was left untouched – Arie had liked the colour and the shape and thus bought it, thinking it was a fruit. She threw it out when it sat for days on the counter and turned soft. The apples would turn into a pie or cobbler.
The neighbour was peering at her through a small gap in the thick hedge.
“I guess so,” Arie said. She thought the time for gardening was over.
“Man I use is good. You can trust him. I could have him drop around. See what your mother thinks.”
“My mother isn’t well.” It was the only thing she could think to say to explain the fact that her mother did not answer the door, would not take part in regular life any longer.
“Sorry to hear that. Well, he would just do the regular stuff. You know. You could ask her.”
“Yes, I will,” Arie said.
Walking back to the house with her apples she realized the grass was long and there were leaves tangled in it.
She talked to the man on the side verandah where he had presented himself. He had a long face and a habit of raising his nose as if his glasses were slipping. He also had an accent and they both stared hard at each other while speaking to help the understanding.
”The usual things,” Arie explained. “We want the usual things done. Cut the grass. The leaves.” She had no idea of anything else.
“Usual things,” he repeated. “Yes, I do them.”
“How much?” she asked.
He was uncomfortable doing business with this child – he thought then she was eight or nine, the age of his youngest.
“I talk to your mother?”
“She is not well. She said it was okay for me to take care of it.”
He caught the “okay” but “formetotakecareofit” escaped him. After a moment he replied to the “okay”. “I come on Tuesday. You have mower?”
Arie was puzzled. “More what?” she asked, politely.
He thought she was describing some kind of mower.
“O-kay,” he said and left.
When he came on Tuesday he brought his own rake and cleared away the leaves. Then he knocked on the door and asked for the mower but this time his hands gripped the imagined handle and he made a back and forth motion so she knew what he meant.
“In the garden shed,” she said, pointing. “The key is on the ledge over the door.” Unconsciously she mimicked his actions and reached up for the imagined key, turned it in the imagined lock.
At the end of the day he named a sum and she had the money in her pocket to pay him. She had asked her mother how much she thought it would be. She was learning to avoid the difficulty of needing to make change, or not having enough.
Before he accepted the proffered bills he swept his hand across the yard. She was puzzled.
“What you be pleased?” he asked.
“Oh, yes, it looks very nice. Very neat.” She would never again fail to comment on his work. He was amused at this child playing at being grownup but across the years came to see she had always been an adult looking like a child.
“See you next week. All the good of my wishes to your mother.”
She hadn’t understood what he said about her mother.
Before too long they would begin to understand each other. For all the rest of the years Arie lived in the house this man would come once a week and make sense of the garden. Arrange for repairs of the house. Help her move furniture when she moved to the Carriage House. Help her move it back to the Big House years later.
His name was Dale Yee. She called him Daly and he found it odd that she used both his first and last names but he never corrected her.
In the back of her grade five history note book there was a list to do with her initial housekeeping role and Timken would come across it by chance as he was going through the masses of stuff in the house and marveling that she and her mother seemed to have saved everything. The list, in a round schoolgirlish hand:
Mrs. Saunders every Friday. Leave in envelope on counter.
Daly every Tuesday. Just give him the money.
Garbage every Monday.
Milkman – cancelled.
For a long time Arie thought her mother was reacting to her husband’s death by acting helpless. Then, one day doodling on the blank space inside a package of cigarettes while waiting to take her driver’s test, a distraction tactic, complaining to herself about her mother’s ongoing refusal to participate in life, she wrote, “I think she is hoping a man will come along and rescue her. I think she wants another husband!”
Then she was speechless and writeless at the thought that her mother had turned into a husband. And Arie was the wife.
She took her driving test in a daze, failed to parallel park, stalled twice at stop signs.
“You must have been nervous,” Daly consoled her. He had taught her how to drive. “Did the tester realize you are eighteen?”
“I wore lipstick and pulled my hair tight,” she reassured him. She passed it the next try.
By then she had dealt with her discovery about her mother. She moved into the rooms over the Carriage House. [years later Timken remarks that it is just a garage.]
When she told her mother she was going to do this, that men would be coming to put in a proper kitchen and bathroom, new carpet, fix the windows, Lily had simply looked at her.
“You could stay here. There’s room,” she said. “It’s your house too.” The exact same words and tone she had used with her brother seven years ago.
Kenneth had escaped.
“I won’t be far,” Arie told her. And then answered the unspoken question. “I’ll continue to take care of – everything.”
“Oh,” said her mother and Arie could hear the relief and the acceptance.
That same year she graduated from high school and was accepted into law at three universities. Two were far across the country. She enrolled in the one at home. It never occurred to her to wonder why she had applied at those other two. It never occurred to her to wonder what she would have done if the local one had not offered her a place.
“A great honour,” Daly told her.
She didn’t think so; it was just something she had done. The good marks. The choice of profession.
“Now, some of you may become nurses or teachers,” an earnest Health teacher had told her female class. “But there is no reason you couldn’t become doctors or lawyers. Do I see any doctors or lawyers out there?” She had raised her voice, shaded her eyes with her hand to increase the importance of her question, and peered over the classroom.
A few girls put up their hand, some seriously, some jokingly. Arie had no idea why she suddenly raised hers. But she did, and since she had no desire at all to become a doctor the notion of being a lawyer took hold.
University was merely an extension of school.
She tamed the curls by pulling them into a severe knot at the back of her head and suffered the headaches. She wore tailored clothing and glasses with plain lenses and dark frames.
Real life never interfered in her portrayals which became more and more her companions when she wasn’t in school or studying.
The lukewarm friendships of her classmates and then her colleagues were never a threat.
When she was twenty-nine someone said, “Approaching the big Three O,” Arie had been startled enough to take a non-portrayal look at her life. She was not dissatisfied. She was comfortable. Nothing had changed. Her mother, in the Big House, seemed content with her non-demanding life. Arie had taken an interest in gardening and expanded her cooking experience each winter when her mother had bouts of flu. Another woman at the law firm where she worked convinced her to join a monthly women’s discussion group. She went occasionally and found she had opinions.
But the idea of turning thirty caused a major nudge to her complacency. She’d be thirty and she had never been anywhere. The trip to Vermont when she was eleven was the furthest she had ever been from home.
Thus the passport. Thus the plan for a trip abroad.
She considered asking her mother to accompany her. But as much as she tried she never managed to include Lily in any of her portrayals. So she never mentioned her plans.
The trip never came about.
She planned to go the autumn she turned thirty. But somehow autumn slid by and the plans never went beyond the brochures and the travel articles and the one book she bought on France. She read the chapter on Paris but then the book got buried in stacks of magazines, moved with them when they were stored in the attic. [She had only just overcome her lifelong fear of books other than those one studied. She felt suspicious of books that did not require clear cut answers.)
By the time her passport expired she had forgotten her angst over having been nowhere and the expiration date passed unnoticed along with her passport in a drawer in the desk.
A decade and more slipped by. Work changed in small increments. Daly remained. The cleaning lady moved but her niece took over. And then her daughter.
Arie maintained the house well. “We may live like hermits but our house is not going to look like a cave,” she told her mother. A house two blocks over was said to harbour a weird woman and it looked witchlike.
Her mother gradually worked her way through her husband’s wardrobe, not by wearing out the clothing but by tiring of a garment after wearing it for a few months. Out of curiosity Arie once looked into her mother’s closet and found all her clothes still hanging there.
A decade or more. And then she went to pay the hydro bill after hours, got stuck in an elevator for eight hours and her life changed completely. Later she would think it appropriate that a hydro bill had turned her into an adult and then turned her into a mother.
She was four months pregnant before she realized she was. It had never occurred to her after the elevator episode that this would be a result.
“You’re going to have a baby,” the doctor, the first female physician in the yellow pages who was accepting new patients, told her. She was young and new and trying hard to regain a personal approach after medical school.
Arie’s mouth had formed a perfect O and then she snapped her lips together. “I thought I was starting the change.”
“Oh, not at – “ the doctor started to say but then glanced down at the patient’s chart and was surprised at her age. Forty-four. She had not thought this woman much older than herself.
Arie went blind for a moment and then dragged back her vision. The doctor wasn’t sure exactly what she had just witnessed but she knew it was a whopper. She couldn’t wait to discuss it with her husband across dinner. Let him top this report with one of his own.
“You’re sure?” Arie asked.
“Very. Past the first trimester, I’d say. I could order a pregnancy test but there’s really no need. About four months, I’d say.”
Arie stared at the doctor, again not seeing her, but this time it was because she was somehow staring at what had been started. Best not to think of the how.
She put her hands flat on her usually chubby stomach which, of course, had gotten chubbier and her face panorama’ed, in slow motion, the most foolish of grins. She did not need to wait for the actual birth to bond with the child in her womb.
During her care of Arie across the rest of the pregnancy the doctor would decide she was a bit odd but thoroughly likeable.
Arie was not going to tell anyone until she got more used to the idea herself.
That night at supper her mother suddenly asked, “Are you pregnant?”
“Yes!,” Arie said. “I just found out. How did you know?’
“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve suspected for some time. I was very happy when I learned I was pregnant with you.”
Arie answered the unspoken question. “I am very happy. But awfully surprised.”
“I was married,” her mother continued, sorting her lima beans into a pattern on her plate.
“I am not,” Arie agreed. “Nor do I intend to be. The father is not at all – um, available. It was an – unfortunate alliance.” She could have been writing a brief.
“Does he know?”
Arie stopped fussing the food around her plate and slowly looked up at her mother. “No,” she said.
Lily sighed. “Good. Then you can have the baby all to yourself.”
Arie tried to stare an explanation from her mother but Lily was now back to eating and she looked at her food as she did so.
Two days later Dale Yee came by to see if the burlap he had put around some of the newly planted trees was still snugly in place; January had come in blustery.
“Goodagod, you’re expecting,” he said when he saw her but so flustered was he that his words made no sense to her. He had known her for more than thirty years and this was the most astounding thing that could have happened to her.
To her baffled look he made a big belly motion in front of his own now rotund shape. Understanding, she replied, “Oh, yes,” and told him what he wanted and needed to know. “I am happy about it.”
“Getting a husband?” he also wanted to know.
“No,” she said. Firmly. Calmly. He put the thought of going after some scoundrel out of his mind. “Darn, no chase the scoundrel,” he said making a fist in the air.
She loved his fascination with words. He said he read the dictionary and she believed him. “No chase the scoundrel,” she told him, pronouncing it correctly. And watched his lips form the word with its acceptable sound. He had asked her to say words properly if he didn’t so he would know the right way.
“When?” he asked her now, bending over a bush. She stood with her arms wrapped loosely around herself; it was a mild day. For ages she did not speak, having no intention of telling him when it had happened.
“You don’t know?” His voice was muffled because of his position.
“Of course,” she said, annoyed.
He was surprised at her tone. “I just wonder so when I tell my wife and she say she want to knit something she know how much time.”
“Oh, I see. I’m due in May.”
“It’s a boy,” he told her, straightening. “I’m never wrong. All mine – grandkids too – I knew ahead of time.”
“Then tell your wife to knit blue.”
She knew it was a boy. She couldn’t imagine not knowing.
Everyone at her work was astonished when she gave her notice and why. But no one would really miss her. They mostly all liked her and wished her well. She was no threat to any of them in any way.
Her relationship with her mother changed.
Arie had morning sickness in her fifth month.
The doctor was doubtful. “You shouldn’t be having this now,” she told Arie.
About to apologize Arie laughed instead and said, “Well, I am!”
“The baby’s lying transverse. That’s likely what it is. Compromising your stomach. Try sleeping on your stomach. With a pillow under your ribs.”
That didn’t help. She felt drowned by her body if she lie face down.
One morning Lily came looking for her when she did not appear for breakfast and found her sitting on the edge of the bathtub, still in her pajamas.
“Every time I start to get dressed I think I am going to throw up,” she explained. “But as long as I sit here I feel fine.”
Lily sat on the laundry hamper. She had walked from the Big House across winter morning grass and her feet were dewy.
She was thoughtful. “Well, I don’t know, but I think you should move back up to the house. Then I could bring your meals into the bathroom. Give you something in your stomach to throw up.”
Arie wasn’t sure if her mother was joking or cajoling.
That night she slept in the bed of a spare bedroom in the Big House and did not have a trace of morning sickness.
That afternoon she called Daly and he and one of his sons moved her stuff back to the Big House and she serenely slept in her own bed back in her old bedroom.
In early May Arie had to rush to a washroom four times during a morning shopping excursion. When she was sopping herself up the fourth time and wondering if such a leaky bladder would continue once she had the baby it suddenly occurred to her that maybe this was part of having the baby. Maybe the ‘water’ didn’t have to gush when it ‘broke’ but could ‘trickle’. She didn’t want the embarrassment of giving birth in a department store washroom. She did not want to repeat the “thought it was menopause” pregnancy discovery foolish feeling.
“I’ll drive you to the hospital when the time comes,” her mother had assured her more than once. Lily hadn’t driven in more than thirty years.
Seated in the car in the mall parking lot Arie thought about driving home and getting her mother. Then she leaked again. She drove herself to the hospital. She parked in the day lot. She did not expect to be that long. When she left a few hours later she still had time on her parking coupons.
At Admissions someone guided her into a wheelchair and then her water definitely ‘broke’. Arie was somewhere between laughter and tears.
Someone else whisked her somewhere and she was on a bed and someone said, “Well, left it to the last minute, didn’t we? How long have we been in labour?” as the bed was moving somewhere. Arie looked at the person “we’ing” her and grinned and whoever he was in the soft green cap, trotting along beside the gurney, grinned back. “I’m going to finally see this baby,” she told him.
Arie thought it was backache she’d been experiencing all morning but with the water gone her body got down to business and she realized what labour was.
“Call my mother,” she said between contractions, thankful that Lily had finally started to answer the phone again.
The irrevocable aspect of birthing would haunt her dreams for a year or two and she would wake in terror that once it was started there was no turning back, no changing of mind, no refusal to take part.
She broke silence to give one long scream at the final push to free the head. Everyone in the delivery room, including herself, was extremely startled. Then the pain stopped as the baby slid out and she peered past her stomach to what the doctor was holding and mouth clearing.
He was a stranger and yet he was the most familiar thing she had ever known. It was most confusing. She held out her arms to him. He stared at her with owl eyes and hiccupped.
“A perfect little boy,” the doctor said, herself a bit giddy with excitement and relief. This was her first delivery but Arie did not know this.
Arie was sitting up in her hospital bed waiting when her mother appeared. Lily was wearing a dress. Arie, astonished, stared. She’d never seen the dress before. And she couldn’t really remember her mother wearing one.
“My mother’s housedress,” Lily said in a whisper. The curtain between the beds was drawn but there was a woman in the other bed. “None of mine fit me any more.” Later Arie would help her mother take in her own dresses to fit her ageing, shrinking form. Now she leaned over the bed to look at Lily’s feet. She had on pair of her husband’s Oxfords. “He was right. My feet have spread by going barefoot.” They had traces of smiles on their faces as they considered each other.
“How are you?”
“Fine.”
“How was it?”
“Awful.”
“I know. Can I go see him?”
Arie looked sideways to the bassinette at the other side of her bed.
“Oh,” said Lily. “In here with you? What if he cries?”
Arie laughed. “I think that’s the whole point.”
Grandma and baby did some bonding things.
Then Lily turned back to her daughter. “I didn’t bring you anything. I didn’t know if you wanted your – pajamas” (she lowered her voice) with a glance at the curtain between the beds, “or if you had a nightgown somewhere. I have a bedjacket somewhere.”
“I’m going home,” Arie said. “I won’t need anything.”
Lily blinked at her. “Going home? Today?”
“Now. It’s okay. I checked with the doctor.”
“I stayed in a week with you.”
Except for the trips to Niagara Falls and Vermont and two embarrassing sexual experiences in university she had slept in her own bed even when that bed was in the Carriage House. She wanted her own bed now.
“Well, I don’t know,” Lily said.
“It’s fine,” Arie told her and suddenly saw the age of her mother in her own mother’s housedress. “It will be okay.”
They insisted she ride a wheelchair down to the entrance and when there was no car waiting for them and they learned the car was in the lot they insisted she be ridden to the car. It was two young nurse’s aides. And they both looked a bit shocked when Arie handed her mother the baby and opened the passenger door.
“Oh, I don’t know, I think I’ll sit in the back seat with him,” Lily said.
Arie got behind the steering wheel. She fit much better now.
Halfway home, stopped at a light, Lily said, “I’m amazed at how nervous I feel with him,” she said. “You’d think I never had a baby once.”
“I’m amazed at how relaxed I feel,” Arie said and she locked eyes with her mother in the rearview mirror. They both knew it was an expression of gratitude, daughter to mother, for being there.
It was her mother who first called him Timken.
“Do you like his name?” Arie asked.
“It’s a new name,” Lily answered. “I never knew a Timothy. What’s his second name?”
“Kenneth.”
“Oh, like my brother?”
“No, not really. I just like the name.”
“Timothy Kenneth. Quite a name for a little baby.”
The name James was never mentioned, never considered. Father had faded in memory.
As they were getting out of the car Lily handed out the baby and said, “You take Timken.” And gave him his milk name.
The household was not at all disrupted by a baby. It made room for the ‘visitor’ and adjusted to his ongoing stay. His clothes were new, his toys were new. But he sat in his great grandfather’s high chair when such seating was necessary. He had no use for cradle or crib, sharing his mother’s bed, a double-sized walnut which had been his paternal grandparents’.
As he acquired things of his own they were added to a house that never seemed to throw anything away.
Arie came back from her mental journey to the Big House, back to her chair in her suite in the Impossible Wing. For a moment she was engulfed in a panic of what she had done by fleeing so precipitously. A momentary blindness. Like the handknit shawl, her one and only knitting adventure, she had accidentally discarded but rescued before the garbage collection had arrived to take it away, she knew she and Timken were temporarily absent from the Big House. She hadn’t expected it to last a year. But that was how long it took for her to drift out of the waiting period when someone might – or might not – come seeking them again.
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