my plan before I decided that I did not want anyone else to wear my agnès b. clothes and that I wanted to finish the novel I was reading but mostly the look I imagined on Mum’s face at the sight of my grim and excessively dosed self on the carpet was too unbearable to contemplate. So I put off my date with death. It was a postponement I had in mind, that is all.
Strange though, I thought, my dad will be okay. He’ll get over it. When you are a cowboy, you see all kinds of things, sudden death and gruesome moments of all varieties, and you just have to endure it all. People depend on you to do this.
‘I’ll be darned,’ a cowboy might say over some gory reality, pulling a fresh cheroot from a shirt pocket, maybe tipping his hat back for a second, swiping the heat from his brow. ‘I’ll be darned. Lookee here.’
When my dad finished his gleeful phone call that day, we chuckled for some time. He bought flowers, white ones which Mum especially likes, on the way home.
‘This’ll keep her busy,’ he cracks, in that Wild West fashion. The fact is, he is crazy about her.
He walks with me. I call it a saunter. My dad has a steadfast, ruminative walk. He takes command of his space. I only ever saw him hurry once, when Mum broke her wrist badly, gardening on a slope, when she was in a state of turmoil over his moodiness. It was a terrible break and he had to drive a long way to a good hospital and I was there too, sitting in the back of the car with my broken-up mother who was making cheery comments to keep us calm, despite a lower arm that looked like bits of snapped kindling. My dad’s back, I could see, was dark with sweat and he was leaning into the steering wheel as if he could impel the vehicle onward this way, or maybe speed us into a happier time zone, a place without injury.
4. NEVER GARDEN ON A SLOPE WHEN IN A STATE OF TURMOIL.
My dad walks with me. He is gripping my neck, loosely he thinks, in a manner suggesting fellowship and affection. It feels good although his grip is a little like those sinks in the hair salon, designed to hold your head in place but actually inviting disaster, such as permanent spinal injury and wholesale numbing of the nervous system. But I like walking with my dad this way. The world is ours. No one would dare pull a gun on us, nor even call out a careless remark. Everyone wants to be us, I can tell.
But who is this man, I cannot help asking myself, who believes that a thump will make a thing function? My dad is a pummeller of dashboards, a boxer of boilers, a rattler of fax machines, telephones, turnstiles and parking meters, a walloper of drinks dispensers, a slapper of remote controls. He is the man you see stabbing a lift button eight or nine times. He is also the one kicking the lawn mower, and pulling and pushing on locked doors, wildly enough to loosen the foundations of a house. It is possible this man had children in order to operate machinery for him. Yes, I think so.
My dad is a sportswriter. He also writes children’s fiction under a pseudonym. In these books, he writes about small children organizing the world around them despite themselves, a world full of human failures, cranks and despots, some with endearing and poignant flaws, others with thunderous bad taste and hilariously inflated egos. He finds these types, these faltering embarrassing types, really funny. These are his people.
To relax, my sportswriting dad watches sports on TV. He would like to be watching TV right now and he hears my little sister’s dancing step close by.
‘Harriet!’
My sister dances in. She is five years old and taking ballet classes. She has the right build but lacks discipline. She is a little too exuberant and has no time for the formality of steps.
‘Yeee-ess?’
‘Will you pass the remote.’
‘Oh Daddy, no! There are bad gamma rays, Jem told me. And soon you will fall asleep, snore-snore-noisy! Just like at the zoo, Ben said. No, Daddy, no, no! Hello! Goodbye!’
My sister is merry and exits with pirouettes and fouettés.
‘Goddamnit!’
Ben races past, a flurry of long limbs. He is usually in a hurry and my dad is not quick enough to catch him. Nor does he always know what to say, how to get his attention. Ben is complicated. I am crazy about him and this is not a problem for me. You have to know how to get through, that’s all.
‘Hey, Jude,’ my dad calls from his prone sofa position.
Jude, who was only passing, backtracks and stands in the doorway of the living room. My brother Jude is a man of few words. He doesn’t see much point in talking a lot. He has a bagel in one hand and a book in the other.
‘Pass me the remote. Did you mow the lawn yet?’
‘Not yet,’ Jude says, unruffled, moving very slowly in the vague direction of the remote control. He picks up a magazine on the way and bites his bagel. He is easily distracted and never in a hurry.
‘JUDE!’
I am looking for Jude. There he is.
‘Ahh! Jem! Who’s my favourite child?’
‘What do you want, Dad?’
I wish I had not come in, but I want Jude. Being bossed around and doing silly tasks for your dad when wearing a holster and cowboy hat is seriously disrupting.
‘Stick ’em up!’ he says, laughing.
I would quite like to shoot him now but I can’t. Never shoot an unarmed man.
This is how it was when we were small kids. It is still a bit like this when we come home to visit, even today. We all have our own machines now and we know how to use them. We don’t ask anyone else. We laugh now mostly about my dad when he is thumping machinery with the full expectation that this will be effective. We smile and try to help out. I think he likes that. Once, though, I saw him try to light a faulty boiler with a match. I wanted to yell at him but could not. I took over the situation but I could not yell at him. He is not a kid, he is my dad.
5. ALWAYS GO TO THE LOO IF YOU THINK YOU MAY NEED TO PEE.
Here are the times when passing up on rule number five is a bad idea. (1) Settling into a cinema or theatre seat and the show is about to begin. Too late. (2) Sitting at your table in a posh restaurant and ordering wine and food. The entrée arrives. Too late. (3) Turning off the lights at night when in bed in foetal position and already half-asleep. Too late. Now you will have tortured dreams featuring gruesome toilet-bowl situations. (4) Car rides with grumpy drivers.
I want to blame my dad for this but that is not the way things work just now. In the world today, all things dark and tumultuous are down to me. My dad’s mood is definitely my fault and I cannot bear to hold up the terrible car journey, the fifteen-minute ride which my dad conveys to me with a look will be as gruelling as a forced march across all the central provinces of Canada. No, I cannot hold up the journey by asking to dash to the loo first. My dad says we are going NOW. Some people rub their hands in glee and say, Now! Others, like my dad, mean only one thing by ‘now’. Now is full of terror.
O-KAAAY … co-RAAAALL! O-KAAAAY … co-RAAALLL! I think of this, too, that my dad must believe if he thumps me, if he takes me by the shoulders and rattles my little bones, gives me a shake momentous enough to reorganize all my vital organs and charge up my circulation and spark up all the neurons and synaptic impulses
