My Grandmother's Pill Read online

  My Grandmother’s Pill

  Lisa Pike

  GUERNICA - FIRST FICTIONS SERIES 6

  TORONTO • BUFFALO • LANCASTER (U.K.)

  2014

  Contents

  I. Mean Drunks and Happy Drunks

  Bay Street and Bloor

  1 2 3 4 I declare a thumb war

  Walt’s World

  II. Inch by Inch

  III. Slip

  Acknowledgements

  About The Author

  Dedication

  Copyright

  I. Mean Drunks and Happy Drunks

  The women in my family always classified men as either mean drunks or happy drunks. With happy drunks, they smiled as they dried their dishes with cotton dishtowels or sat at the Formica top and chrome leg kitchen table with their cigarettes and tea. Uncle Art, for instance, was a happy drunk and they would recall fondly how he joked and played the violin. Too bad he had to die. With mean drunks, they talked less of what the men did and more of how they hoped they were getting theirs in hell. That’s just how it was, milling around the kitchen table, bored, till someone offered me a cookie, two arms pulling me in, a voice happy in my ear, “Come here Maudie, come sit on Gramma’s lap!”

  Bay Street and Bloor

  “It has to be shit from the ‘70s, that’s the rule. You’re only allowed to translate shmaltzy cheese of the Tom Jones kind. God the old boy used to torture me with that shit in the car. And there’d be nothing you could do till the ride was over.”

  Seamus always called his dad the old boy. The old boy’s coming in for Christmas, the old boy’s having something done to his kidney, one of his sisters might be mad ‘cause the old boy’s bringing up the girlfriend for Easter dinner.

  “Well I don’t know any Tom Jones songs.”

  “Good for you!” he says, rolling over on the bed to kiss my belly. He caresses my legs, up my inner thigh — “you’re so soft,” his lips, mouth, murmur — kisses climbing up my chest.

  “You always say that.”

  “‘Cause it’s true!”

  “What about Beatles songs? Could they count?”

  “Hmm, maybe.”

  “We could do a whole series — just songs from the early 60s.”

  “Well, that certainly counts as cheese!”

  Seamus begins to lick around my nipple and move his hand, fingers in between my legs. He doesn’t stop till he makes me come and then enters me slowly, gently building momentum till it’s his turn. We lie naked on my bed, sweating, exhausted, the busy intersection of Bay and Bloor twenty stories below us.

  “Maude! Do you realize we’ve been shagging for three days straight? I mean, I know you’re a sexpot divorcée and all, but I really don’t know how much more I have in me.” He reaches up over to the dresser for his cigarettes, Players King Extra Light. He’s trying to quit. “When are your kids are coming back?”

  “Tomorrow.” I lie on the bed, flat on my back while he smokes his cigarette sitting cross-legged, using one of the small coffee cup saucers from the wedding set my mother once bought me as an ashtray. I rest my hand on one of his knees, the smell of salt, sweat and semen, all mixed in now with the smoke that he blows in rings drifting and disintegrating overhead. Listening to the sound of his deep rich baritone voice finding its way through the lyrics of Detroit City in French.

  When we weren’t shagging or playing the translating cheesy-songs-into-French game, Seamus and I loved to sit in the green room, a kind of uninsulated sunroom popular in the early 1970s when these apartments were built. It was someone’s idea of a solarium but that’s not why we called it the green room. Ruby and Geoff started calling it that because of the old green indoor/outdoor carpeting that was in it, all stained and frayed, on which they sometimes played. The room was freezing in the winter and sweltering hot in the summer. In short, a beautiful view but basically useless for anything practical. That was the reason why I took the apartment, walking through here with the cranky lady who still works the front desk saying yes, I’d like to rent it even though I knew I wouldn’t be able to afford it for long. I could see the water from here and there was a clear sense of where the city ended. The CN Tower, bank buildings, offices all rising up, rows and rows, masses of concrete all clumped together suddenly dropping off into nothing. Ending. And then, water.

  This is what I loved about this place when I walked in, the sense that the city could be contained, controlled. That it couldn’t go beyond the limit of the shore.

  Sometimes I would take the kids down there, to the edge, feel our shoes on the sand and see, hear where the water and land met. The act somehow proof of what I saw each day from my window. Yelling out to Geoff to stay clear of the garbage and to not go near any needles as he wound his way along up over rocks, logs, strewn branches looking for sand crabs, dead or alive. Ruby meandering alongside the edge of the beach and the boardwalk between me and Geoff, carrying the snacks we’d packed together: chips, cheese sandwiches, a washed apple wrapped in a paper towel for us each.

  Sitting cross-legged, surrounded by windows from which you could see north, east, and south down Bay from the twentieth floor, Seamus and I would drink our coffee, the little ashtray-plate from the wedding set my mother bought on the green between us. Seamus intermittently getting up to refill our cups, make another pot for the conversations that started our day: interesting books we were reading, the time we’d each spent travelling in Europe when we were younger, my divorce, Geoff and Ruby, war in the Middle East. All this before 10 am when I’d head down to the library at the university and Seamus would be going down somewhere on Parliament Street to meet his boss Sue who had a contract for her Language Instruction Company to teach government employees French. There were a few who were pretty good, Seamus said, people who could speak reasonably well, but on average they were beyond hope. They would never speak French no matter how many classes they took on their lunch hour. And of course you can’t tell them that, that they may as well quit while they’re ahead, that if they ever went to France no one would understand a word they said. And Quebec? Forget it! There are a couple of guys who are really persistent too. They got all the little extra kits, workbooks and tapes and new dictionaries that they keep referring to, checking things during class. And then, of course, there’s always the one who tries to trick you. Asking you some particular word that is so obscure and useless that you’d never need it for anything practical, any conversation between real people. Probably thinking that shit up before bed. Fucking feds! Seamus had laughed, getting his black book bag ready.

  ∞

  I try to find Seamus’ old set of keys on my ring. Sunday is approaching and I have to give them to my friend Lynn so she can water the plants. That’s the day my mother arrives and we go for the eight-day vacation of our lives to Disneyworld. Another one of my mother’s spoonfuls of medicinal elements, herbal remedies and self-help books, trying to make our pain go away, make everything alright. Like when she used to take me to the herbalogist on Wyandotte Street in Windsor where I grew up.

  Climbing up onto the tall teetering wooden stool so the herbalogist could read my eyes. I never heard of any other kids who had their eyes read. But my mom insisted it was necessary, rationing out the paycheque money from her latest new job, calculating everything in her head as the assistant measured things out onto scales to put in the capsules that would be wrapped up with plain brown paper and popped into my mother’s faded bird-patterned purse with the round wooden handles. The heavy string of brass bells ringing in a low, solemn matter-of-fact way as we opened the door and stepped out into the sun to wait for the Wyandotte Street Crosstown 2 bus. My mother standing
there tall beside me in her loose flowing bell bottoms, wide light brimmed hat, purse with the birds and wood-ring handles held with both hands against the tops of her thighs looking quite resolved and satisfied, as if she’d just successfully solved some very big problem.

  But now it’s her two grandchildren who are involved so she’s going to “do it up right!” as she’s said more than once over the phone. Saving up a hundred bucks off every paycheque, planning out all the details inside her standard issue light blue fabric-covered cubicle of the permanent job she finally landed at the gas company when I was a teen. Flipping through her various brightly-coloured brochures in between pushing the flashing orange buttons of her phone to the “NOT READY YET” position. Going over and over the different options and packages for what every kid really wants: a trip to Disney! Fifteen grand for eight days: five days at a resort, a three-day cruise, pools of all sizes, islands, all the food and drink you can consume. Disney characters and all kinds of things that are supposed to make us crazy with joy!

  Keeping all the buttons there, flashing, until she feels ready to answer the calls of people who can’t pay their gas bills this month one by one. “You won’t believe the call I got today,” my mom would say when she first started. I’d be at the kitchen table leaning over my science homework when she’d get in the front door, her clothes and hair with that all crumpled-up deflated look you get after a long day at work and ride home on the bus. “Some woman’s husband left her after ten years of marriage, four kids, and she was the one who put him through school. Encouraged him, gave him her savings for tuition. Now he’s some sort of doctor and she’s alone, not even enough money to pay her bills. The court saying she should support herself, it is after all the eighties. And of course the woman he’s with now some young bimbo.”

  “And they tell you all this stuff over the phone?”

  “Well not so much tell as sob.”

  Women whose husbands or boyfriends had run out on them, elderly people who couldn’t afford to have housing, eat, and pay their bills, people who’d lost their jobs to the downturn in the economy. My mother getting herself ready to listen to their stories and to try and arrange for some sort of payment plan, some now, some later, “are you able to do that?” she asks into the black plastic headset she’s attached to all day long.

  “Maude, I have to be careful,” is the thing she says these days, looking at me from across the table on the first floor of the Manulife Centre on the other side of Bay, across from my building. “They’ve started screening all our emails again. And last week, a woman got fired for doing a job that wasn’t hers! It doesn’t matter that she was just trying to be nice, help a person out. I’m telling you, they’re watching us like hawks!” She searches through her big black leather purse with the tassel for one of her own herbal tea bags she brought from home. When she finds it, she pushes it down into the hot cup of water she’s ordered from the coffee shop with a plastic spoon. “So don’t send me any more messages, okay?” This she almost whispers, as if management might be listening, eavesdropping in from more than 400 km away.

  1 2 3 4 I declare a thumb war

  ... bow ... kiss ... begin

  Downstairs at my apartment building’s indoor pool my kids’ plastic toy fish with the numbered tails, bright pink purple yellow and neon green, sink. Slowly the flat plastic disks with the holes simulating gills twirl and twist till they lie there quiet, motionless on the bottom of the pool. My ten-year-old daughter Ruby does handstands; Geoff, two years younger, sits crouched by the side of the pool, ready to jump in. The fish will be retrieved by them and then thrown back in, again and again.

  Beer bottles and cans and an animal-shaped giraffe-patterned pillow are caught outside the window on the apartment building’s entrance canopy.

  “But who put that stuff there?” Geoff asks me. “How’d it get there Mom?”

  “I don’t know. I guess people throw it down from their window and it lands there. People thinking that it’s funny or cool when it’s really stupid.”

  “That’s too bad. I really like that pillow. I’d like to take it and keep it if it wasn’t all mixed up with that garbage.”

  “Come on Geoff! Jump back in!” Ruby holds onto the edge in the deep end, her eyes red already from the heavy chlorine. Strands of hair mixed with dirt clog the drain on the old brown and beige tiled deck of the pool a few inches from Geoff’s feet, miniature versions of his dad’s. The two pair of neon green and pink water shoes my mom bought for them the last time she came to visit sit uselessly on the bench made of grey concrete: they hurt their feet.

  Geoff leaps off the edge of the pool to do a cannonball, trying to make his body extra small and tight, hitting the water hard and purposeful so that his splash is as big as possible, hopefully covering the all of me.

  ∞

  The pub on Baldwin Street. The Pour House on Dupont. The Artful Dodger on Isabella, Hoops on Yonge. The usual haunts in Kensington Market, serving women and bartenders who know him, wondering what they’re in for this time. What sort of state, degree of drunkenness? When Seamus and I were still drinking together, I could see that moment of doubt, hesitation in the waitress’ or bartender’s eyes, “hi” long drawn breath in, wipe of the table, counter, before taking our order. Lingering for a moment on me, my face, smile, mouth, smell, wondering: is she a drunk too?

  Multi-coloured plastic Christmas lights, red, green, blue and soft yellow hang overhead, the kind my grandmother had every year on her tree with its fake branches full, brimming with presents for the kids: Light Bright, Baby Alive, GI Joe and a doll’s miniature pram carriage. The lights’ old-fashioned pointed but gently bulbous shape, small indentations made to simulate bevelled glass appearing crude in the cheap plastic. The same string of lights hung carelessly and haphazardly in the branches of the one lone tree planted in the centre of the Student Union Pub’s outdoor patio under which Seamus and I sit, pouring out beer from our second pitcher. The bartender comes by to pick up the empty.

  “Thanks Tom,” Seamus says to the back of the mustardy polo shirt heading indoors. “Boy,” he says to himself, laughing, “that guy really hates me!”

  I take a sip from my fourth or fifth beer, talking on about my ex-husband’s fanaticism for building things: decks, rooms in the basement, a pond with some sort of running stream out back. “He once tore up the concrete sidewalk going up to the front of our house, insisting on redoing it all himself. He even rented a mixer! A cement mixer from a construction company. Can you imagine!” I remember all my neighbours thinking he was so great, fixing up this or that, working in ninety degree weather tearing up and replacing a porch, though, thankfully, there were also those who thought he was a nutjob! Everything having to be so perfect and measured and me and the kids always having to stay out of his way while he tied kitchen string around the small stakes he put in the ground to create the squares for his soon-to-be concrete slabs. Going back to the cordoned-off squares of dirt several times, squatting close to the ground, inspecting the string from all kinds of different angles and checking each and every piece with his level. “He must have put about two thousand nails in our deck! All in perfectly straight angles and lines, it was enough to make you sick. Sometimes I just wanted to rip them out with my teeth!” The beer tastes good, sweet and bitter at the same time, and I’m grateful for its slide of foam and numb down my throat.

  “It’s just so bizarre,” Seamus says. “I can’t picture you as a suburban mom. Products and paint and plush carpet.”

  “Ha! I even had a kitchen island!”

  Seamus laughs and pours us more beer. “Hold that thought! I have to pee. I’ll be right back!”

  Tom comes to do a round of picking up empties on the patio. I watch him and then pour the rest of our beer into the glasses before handing over the clear scratched up well-worn plastic pitcher. “Thanks,” he says. Seamus reappears, coming now toward our table. “I hope you’re
not going to get upset,” he announces, smiling to me and to any other patrons who might be listening, “but I accidentally got pee, right here” — he points — “on the top part of my shorts!”

  Finishing the beer under Christmas lights, warm summer night air on our bare arms, legs, we laugh together about people who care about patios and kitchen islands. Seamus suggests we walk through Queen’s Park. Heading toward my place he makes us veer off one of the small dirt footpaths and then stops, suddenly. “Come here honeybee,” he slurs. “I want to kiss you here, underneath this tree.”

  The steady breath now of kids sleepturning in cotton sheets reaches me through my apartment’s thin bedroom wall. I close my eyes here on the bed. Lying alone while Seamus makes the rounds.

  ∞

  2:08 am reads the microwave clock. I can just see it through the half-open kitchen door. I turn on the small lamp beside the couch, its light low and subtle. Even though I can’t sleep, I neither want to get up fully nor do I want to sit in the dark. I pull the cream-coloured afghan my grandmother made as a wedding present more than twelve years ago over my legs. The Rose of Sharon flowers knitted into the centre lying over my thighs and hips. Settling deeper into the burgundy pull-out couch, I look out the window facing Bay Street and then beyond to the spread of lights of the east side of the city. Books and issues of Pharmaceutical Biology lie scattered on the carpet.

  The bottle of Lorazepam sits beside the lamp. 100 Tab reads the label, along with my grandmother’s name in full: Mrs. Ruby Waters. Everyone knows that these pills are addictive, their accumulation over the years growing into muscle, bone, becoming parts of your body of which you can never really be rid.

  “Honey, don’t worry about me,” she told me the last time I went to Windsor to visit. “I got a whole other bottle. Last time I went to the doctor, I lied. ‘Ahh,’ I said to him. ‘You’re not going to believe this but I dropped the bottle you gave me last time right down the sink! I was trying so hard,’ I told him, ‘to get the top off to take a pill that the cap popped right off and they all fell down the drain. Now, that’s what you call a senior moment!’ So Maude honey,” she repeats very earnestly to me, “you just take however many pills you want and don’t worry about it. I got plenty!”