famous, especially not the kind of fame that comes boiling out of ignorance, and haunts you for the rest of your life. Dumb Dot. Careless Dot. Dot the murderer. Of course, that was a long time ago.
When Larry was a little kid his mother warned him about the dangers of public drinking fountains. “No one ever, ever puts their mouth right on the spout,” she said, “because they can pick up other people’s germs, and who knows what kind of disease you’ll get.”
This was bad news for Larry. At that age he liked to stand on tiptoe and press his lips directly on the cool silvery water spout, rather than trying to catch the spray in his mouth as it looped unpredictably upward. Besides, his mother’s caution didn’t make sense, since if no one ever touched the spout, how could there be any germs? He recalls – he must have been six or seven at the time – that he presented this piece of logic to his mother, but she only shook her headful of squashed curls and said sadly, wisely, “There will always be people in this world who don’t know any better.”
He pictured these people – the people who didn’t know any better – as a race of clumsy unfortunates, and according to his mother there were plenty of them living right here on Ella Street in Winnipeg’s West End: those people who mowed their lawns but failed to rake up the clippings, for instance. People who didn’t know any better stored cake flour and other staples in their original paper bags so that their cupboards swarmed with ants and beetles. They never got around to replacing the crumbling rubber-backed placemats from the Lake of the Woods with “The Story of Wood Pulp” stamped in the middle. That was the problem with people who didn’t know any better: they never threw things away, not even their stained tea-towels, not even their oven mitts with holes burnt right through the fingers.
People who didn’t know any better actually ate the coleslaw that came with their hamburgers, poking it out of those miniature pleated paper cups with their stabbing forks. Someone, their well-meaning mothers probably, told them they should eat any and all green vegetables that were put in front of them, not that there’s anything very green about coleslaw, especially when it’s been sitting in a puddle of wet salad dressing and improperly refrigerated for heaven only knows how many days. These people have never heard of the word salmonella, or if they have, they probably can’t pronounce it.
Whereas Dot (Dorothy) Woolsey Weller, wife of Stu Weller, mother of Larry and Midge, grandmother of Ryan, knows about food poisoning intimately, tragically. She was, early in her life, an ignorant and careless person, one of those very people who didn’t know any better and who will never be allowed, now, to forget her lack of knowledge. She’s obliged to remember every day, either for a fleeting moment – her good days – or for long suffering afternoons of gloom. “Your mother’s got a nip of the blues today,” Stu Weller used to tell his kids while they were growing up in the Ella Street house, and they knew what that meant. There sat their mother at the kitchen table, again, still in her chenille robe, again, when they got home from school, her hands rubbing back and forth across her face, and her eyes blank and glassy, reliving her single terrifying act of infamy.
Even today, August 17th, her son’s thirtieth birthday, she’s remembering. Larry knows the signs. It’s five-thirty on a Sunday afternoon, and there she is, high-rumped and perspiring in her creased cotton sundress, busying herself in the kitchen, setting the dinner plates on top of the stove to warm, as if they weren’t already hot from being in a hot kitchen. She’s peering into the oven at the bubbling casserole, and she’s floating back and forth, fridge to counter, counter to sink. Her large airy gestures seem to have sprung not from her life as wife and mother, but from a sunny, creamy, abundant girlhood, which Larry doubts she ever had. She smiles and she chats and she even flirts a little with her thirty-year-old son, who looks on, a bottle of cold beer in his hand, but he knows the old warnings. Her jittery detachment gives her away. She picks up a jar of pickles and bangs it hard on the breadboard to loosen the lid. She’s thinking and fretting and knowing and feeling sick with the poison of memory.
This my mother, Larry thinks, my sad soft mother. Most of her life has involved the absorbing of her grievous history, of trying to go forward when all this heaviness lies inside. One ancient mistake, one hour gone wrong, and now she pays and pays.
She’s a housewife, Larry’s mother, a maker of custard sauce, a knitter of scarves, a fervent keeper of baby pictures and family scrapbooks, but this is her real work: sorrowing, remembering. The loose shuttle of her pain flies back and forth so that sometimes she seems just fine, just like anyone else’s mother. Today she’s made Larry a lemon meringue pie for his birthday instead of a cake; she could have made it yesterday and kept it on the top shelf of the fridge just under the freezer section, but with her history she wouldn’t dream of taking a chance like that, and who could blame her? Her anxieties about food are built into the Weller family chronicle – as is Larry’s passion for lemon meringue pie. Dot makes her son a big one every year on his birthday, with a circle of birthday candles poking up through the golden-tipped meringue. A sight to behold.
There’ll be Lancashire hotpot too, that’s what’s bubbling away in the oven right now. It’s a simple oldtime recipe that Dot’s mother used to make on Saturday nights back in England: chunks of stewing lamb arranged across the bottom of a Pyrex casserole, then a layer of sliced potatoes, another of carrots, then more lamb, and all this topped with a handful of finely diced onions. Next you add plenty of salt, pepper, and parsley flakes, and a cup of Oxo, and bake covered for an hour and a half. Larry’s crazy about Lancashire hotpot, or at least he pretends he is, for the sake of his sad and perpetually grieving and remembering mother. Mum, he calls her; he always has. Americans say Mom or Ma. People in movies and books say Mother.
She’s set the dropleaf table in the living room for six, her best damask cloth and the good cutlery and china. There’ll be just the family, her loved ones, as she likes to call them, as though they were characters out of an obituary – her husband Stu, Larry, Dorrie, and little Ryan in his booster seat. Her daughter Midge is coming too, but here it is, almost time to sit down at the table, and she hasn’t turned up yet. Three years ago Midge kicked her husband out after receiving an anonymous note saying that Paul frequented a certain gay bar, and now she swears she’s never going to get married again. She says, with her eyes rolling upward, that she knew something was funny-bunny about him from day one.
Larry worries about his mum. She’s not getting out enough lately, hardly at all in fact, unless you call a trip to Sears’ mattress sale “getting out.” It also worries Larry that his mother frets so much about other people. She worries about Midge, that at the age of thirty-two she’s starting to get bitter, always sounding off like a regular women’s libber, and going on marches and so forth. She also worries about Larry and Dorrie, the way they’re half the time bickering, and Dorrie working full-time for Manitoba Motors instead of staying home with Ryan, who’s still in diapers at twenty-three months, and she worries about her husband who right this minute is in the bedroom putting on a clean sports shirt because she nagged him into it, and is in a bad mood. As a matter of fact, he’s done nothing but grumble all day, the heat, the mosquitoes, his lower back pain, not enough sugar in his afternoon coffee, the mess in the backyard because of the compost pile Larry’s talked him into, and now having to eat at the dropleaf table in the living room instead of the kitchen nook. So far he hasn’t even said happy birthday to Larry, to his own son.
She checks the oven, looks at the clock, glances out the kitchen window to see if Midge’s car is coming down the back lane. Where is that girl? Next she pours boiling water over the silver pie server in case of lurking germs, then sets it on a paper towel to dry. Immaculate. So’s the speckled linoleum. So is Dot’s cutlery drawer. In this house you would never see a tea-bag tossed wet and leaking into the sink, or a pile of coffee grounds. People who let a skin of mold accumulate on the hem of their shower curtain are not her kind of people. This is a woman who carries her meat home from the butcher’s and washes it at the sink. Larry is watching her rinse her hands under the tap, and at the same time he’s kicking his foot against the table leg the way he used to do
