Gerry and Philip are sitting in the over-stuffed chairs of The Coffee Shop of the Space Debutantes. It’s a Saturday morning and Gerry is explaining that spring is an alien concept to St. John’s.
“You disappear into the fog in March and have a few blizzards to keep you edgy until about the twenty-fourth of May and then, if you’re lucky, you pop out into summer in July.” Gerry feels fussy and old as he says it. When did he start caring about the weather?
“At least the sidewalks are clear again,” Philip says. “Snow clearing here doesn’t make any allowance for people who don’t drive.”
“It’s Dickens season,” Gerry says. “The best of times and the worst of times.”
That’s the way he has felt since he came back from visiting his mother. He feels weighed down by the smallness of his problems. He remembers what he thinks was an old Reader’s Digest joke about the priest who said that hearing nuns’ confessions was like being stoned to death with popcorn. Orville Redenbacher winds up for the pitch.
The writing group has come to an end and Gerry has been busy filling-in at the radio station again. Somebody slipped a disc shovelling and he’s found himself with a month or more of steady work. It’s evening work. He goes to work at four in the afternoon and works until midnight, so he tends to goof off in the mornings. His characters, George, Paula and Ellen, seem too heavy to push around. It’s easier to write about scenery in his Chinese notebook.
“Maybe I’m a landscape writer,” Gerry says to Philip. “Maybe I shouldn’t do portraits.”
Philip fetches a bagel with vegetarian cream cheese and shovels three spoons of sugar into his coffee.
“Maybe you should write non-fiction. Most Canadian novels I read are just people whining.”
“He whined,” Gerry says.
“Point taken,” Philip says. “But remember, I like Marcus Aurelius. You don’t see him trying to write novels.”
“No. Just ‘Poor old me. I’m emperor of Rome and I have to meet a lot of people with bad breath. Roll on death.’”
Later in the day, Gerry sits at his computer and transcribes notebook pages. He’s reverted to putting down random jottings in the hope that they’ll gel into something significant. His muse skids wildly. The phrase “like a pig on ice” floats into his head. To pretend that he’s not just rambling, he dusts off “George” and writes in the third person, but he can’t fool himself into getting George to take off on his own.
Fragment: Only George
George has a short attention span, or maybe an only-kid self-satisfaction with one’s own doings. When he was a child, people used to ask him if he didn’t wish he had a brother or sister. It was an alien concept. They might as well have asked if he wished he had a truss or a cream separator. He needed neither, although both had a certain robotic allure as pictures in the Eaton’s catalogue.
Paul Simon may have got it right in “Kodachrome.” People often don’t match one’s sweet imagination.
Easter is coming, fertility feast of horny rabbits and over-stuffed eggs; call it Spring, if you’d rather. The idea of a religion from Wind in the Willows occurs to George as it has before. He thinks about Rat and Mole meeting their god when they go looking for Otter’s lost son. Worship Pan in the island glades without knowing about it afterwards. George thinks Kenneth Grahame knew a thing or two. He came up with a religion with no hangover. Spend the rest of your time feasting in badger banqueting halls.
Gerry can’t bring it off the page. He thinks about a party they were at a week or so before. Vivian had complained that he faded into the wallpaper.
“You were like somebody dead. You might as well have stayed home.”
“I wasn’t rude to anybody,” Gerry said. Vivian sniffed.
He’s been thinking about manners as a substitute for morals lately. In some ways they seem to work better. He thinks eastern religion has a grasp on this. The mannered universe is easier to take. However, he knows he doesn’t work like that. He dives into despondency and dithers and snarls at the drop of a hat.
Perhaps the ability to dither inwardly is enough, he thinks. Absence of visible dither is enlightenment.
Partway through the party, as the talk swept by him, Gerry had envisaged himself alone in his boat with a middling sea running. The boat was sailing as it does sometimes when he’s alone, like a giant perfect sailboard, with a fulcrum right under his feet when he stands at the forward end of the cockpit. The vision of the boat was devoid of any practicalities about how he’d stop or survive, how he’d eat, keep warm or leave the helm to go for a shit. Instead it is just a screen-saver vision of the sea rising to the boat and the boat splitting it and raising itself on the swell. This was the Rat and Mole after-life perhaps, an open, endless sea and no bodily functions. Maybe Mole would like something a bit more confined though, an infinite summer hedgerow with a companionable pub around the corner.
Gerry had talked about Wind in the Willows at the party. He talked about the interaction between the animal characters and the humans. Animals slide like shadows through winter villages or give them a wide berth. On the other hand, they sue, go to court, land in jail and carry out the social duties of the landed gentry.
“Is the lesson to remember that you’re an animal, as you do the social thing?” Gerry asked somebody who’d backed him against a mantelpiece.
The man had just done a hiring board for a promotion. They’d asked him what kind of an animal he’d like to be.
“That’s the worst kind of anthropomorphism,” Gerry said. “Eagles and lions aren’t proud. They’re just unaware of any values but their own. Hyenas and sculpins and crab lice are probably just as proud.”
The man said he’d told the board he’d like to be an otter because they played creatively. He got the job.
Gerry is still thinking about it. He decides foxes aren’t sly. They’re just good at being foxes. They just fit perfectly into the blind spots of their enemies or their prey. The mouse that gets eaten probably isn’t much concerned with slyness. The person hit by an asteroid or a falling piano isn’t thinking about astronomy or music, except by chance. Foxes look smart because they work along an adjacent set of premises that are magic to us.
Gerry rehearses things he could say to a suit on a hiring board who asked him what kind of animal he’d like to be.
Why would I want to be another animal?
Would it not be better to just be good at being the animal I am?
Why do you distinguish between us and the other animals?
Gerry’s hypothetical questioner suggests that it’s an exercise in “imagination.”
Have you ever tried using your imagination to get the best out of the species you can claim membership in?
In Gerry’s imagination, the board members flee like startled weasels and he’s guest of honour at a bash at Toad Hall for that one.
On another spring Saturday morning, Mr. Dickens gets it right. It is the best of times. Gerry wakes up early to a completely silent house. When they went to bed, it had been raining and they had been arguing about the need to paint the kitchen. They went to bed a half hour apart and silently, and the mouse-foot skittering of the rain on the vinyl siding had put them to sleep. At least, it also seems to have eroded their fight.
As first light creeps into their bedroom it has a watercolour pallor. Gerry gets up and pads down the hall to the bathroom in his ancient terry-cloth robe. Then he goes to the kitchen and puts on a pot of coffee, looking out at the morning. The rain has cut the snow. Almost the whole lawn is visible, with only a spine of thawed and refrozen slush down the middle. Around the foot of a tree, their half-dozen crocuses aren’t in bloom but are visible, pushing up like lurid, cheap ballpoint pens through the winter-kill beige of dead grass. Gerry goes back down the hall to the bedroom. Vivian has the covers pulled way up. Only the tousled top of her head shows.
“Boat day, I think, kid,” Gerry says, tentatively, checking that peace has really broken out. “Have you got any open houses?”
The blankets stir. “No. The one I’ve got is tomorrow.”
“No viewings?” Gerry thinks the jargon of her business sounds like undertakers’ euphemisms, but sometimes he finds himself using them.
“No. Nothing today.”
“Are you up for the first injection of boat for the year? It looks like it’s going to be a nice day.” Gerry is feeling benign. Sometimes he just sneaks away to do boat stuff. Vivian doesn’t particularly mind. The preparation part of boating doesn’t interest her much, but this morning she senses that some sort of private Easter is on offer. The winter’s dead are being offered a day out of the tomb to go and play.
“I’m not going to do much work,” Gerry says. “Just uncover and air her out. We can take a picnic.”
“I guess so, but later. I want to sleep.”
“Don’t sleep too long. It’ll probably blow up a blizzard by lunchtime.”
Gerry gets dressed and goes back to the kitchen. He finishes his coffee. Then he goes to the basement and drags up a tool box, an electric drill and a couple of coils of orange extension cord. There is still no noise from the bedroom. The sun outside becomes more assertive, angling into the kitchen. Gerry feels he has to be moving. He shifts into picnic-planning mode and heads out into the day.
He stops at a Tim Hortons to plan his picnic and make lists. Chinese notebooks are excellent for making lists in. Sometimes it worries him that the stir-fry ingredients and to-do lists are threatening to swamp the journal entries. Today it doesn’t bother him. He’s feeling efficient.
Polish sausage, he writes. Cheese, French bread, margarine from home, olives, Pinesol, WD-40, J-cloths, garbage bags. Gerry can never recall, from fall lift-out to spring, what he left on the boat. Vivian says it’s going to sink under the weight of carefully hoarded, virginal, economy-size packages of garbage bags.
Gerry eats a cinnamon-raisin bagel and works on his list at one of several tables where a group of regulars gathers on Saturday mornings. They’re a collection of first names and single identifying facts. There’s Wayne who paints houses, Clyde who works at the mental hospital, and Harry who is retired and keeps beagles. Vern sells cars and Wally repossesses them. Gerry imagines he’s “Gerry who’s got the sailboat.”
“It’s a great day out there.”
“You don’t have your boat in the water yet, do you?”
“I’ve got to get over to Wal-Mart. They’ve got a special on the big bags of dog kibble.”
Their days organize themselves into simple tasks. Everybody wants to get out in the sun and do something.
Gerry drains his coffee and heads for the supermarket. He’s got his picnic in his head, peasant stuff, sausage and gooey cheese with a skin to it, or maybe two kinds, sharp cheddar too, to break into hunks on big chunks of bread, a pagan folk sacrament.
“Kielbasa, kielbasa, kielbasa,” Gerry chants under his breath as he mentally goat-dances through the deli section. He buys a crunchy, resistant stick of French bread. He buys bulk olives from a tub. They look sleek, bloated with their own importance and potential, oiled, like some sort of vegetarian ammunition. He picks up a packet of miniature cinnamon buns, tight spirals of scorched brown sugar. Shag diets. It’s spring.
He is at the door of the liquor store when it opens at ten and buys a bottle of wine. He buys French. It’s cheaper than the domestic now and, after fifteen years off the booze, he’s out of touch and not very interested in what’s supposed to be good among the new designer domestic wines.
Gerry stops for yet another coffee and reads the Globe books magazine at a chain coffee shop in a mall. He collects Viv at home at eleven on the dot.
Gerry had never expected to have a boat, although he has always bought boating magazines. They pile up in the bottom of closets and on basement shelves. When he drank, there was no money for a boat, although for a number of years in the late ’70s and early ’80s he had real jobs. Now, thanks mostly to Aunt Louise and the house in Ottawa, he seems to have the money, although he doesn’t have a real job.
Gerry wonders what his father would have made of the boat. The Old Man saved a 1927 Buick engine in the back of the garage for years. It was a big, old twelve-cylinder out of what used to be called a touring car. Gerry’s father said he was going to build a boat and convert the engine to power it. The boat was going to be a cabin cruiser. Each spring, magazines advertising plans for do-it-yourself boats appeared in the house. The engine stayed where it was. The garage was an old one. It had housed the car the engine came out of. When the snow broke some rafters in about 1960, it had to be replaced. Gerry’s Uncle Cyril took the engine. Cyril was building a small sawmill, not far from where Duane and Gretchen live now. He was Gerry’s mother’s brother and he had never had a steady job.
“His nerves are bad from the war,” Gerry’s mother or his Aunt Carmen would say. Cyril raised a few sheep and chickens. He trapped muskrats in the winter and when Gerry was about six, he showed him how to set off a spring trap with your nose. There was nothing to it, really. You just tipped one jaw of the trap up and went in from underneath, but it looked impressive as the steel jaws clashed shut, inches from your vulnerable face. Apart from that, Cyril hung out in the Legion with some other bad-nerve victims. His wife Enid worked in a cheese factory down the road to keep them going. It was decided the sawmill might steady Cyril down. After a few years, it settled him down completely. He passed out drunk in his sawmill shed and somehow managed to set the whole thing on fire. Enid was at work and Cyril’s sawmill wasn’t close to any neighbours. It was a while before the fire was spotted.
About the time Gerry was starting university, Enid married a reliable Dutchman who had a small dairy herd and did business with the cheese factory. Gerry’s father never built his cabin cruiser.
“Your Uncle Cyril was a damn fool,” he would say. “But when he was sober, there wasn’t a better man to walk in the woods with.”
Gerry thinks the Old Man would have liked the boat.
Gerry would be the first to admit he’s not the world’s keenest sailor. Often in the summer, he just potters. He’ll spend an afternoon doing small things, like re-sewing the sun-rotted stitching of the zipper on the sail cover. He’ll fuss with wear on the plastic covering of the lifelines. In places, it’s wrapped with white tape like a cartoon character’s sore foot or a vinyl mummy.
Gerry has spent afternoons hemming the Power Squadron pennant or the club burgee that beat themselves to nylon fluff against the shrouds. On a rainy day he knelt in front of the plywood cover that folds down over the marine toilet and makes a chart table of sorts. There he plotted positions in handy places around the bay and punched them into the hand-held GPS. He punched in the middle of approaches and safe-distance-off spots and various obstructions. The rain drummed on the fibreglass over his head as Gerry constructed the boundaries of his little marine universe.
Sometimes he just goes aboard and takes naps.
Lately, Viv humours him with the boat although she used to complain that they never went anywhere. Now they agree that she’s not happy to be left at the helm to spell him off, so short cruises are their best bet.
Gerry has tried to teach the rest of the family to sail. Early on, when she was still in high school, Tanya had brought out several boyfriends and had looked on as Gerry tried to be polite to them and let them steer. Melanie had sailed with other people before she married Darren and had been useful as crew. Darren was only moveable ballast.
The last couple of seasons, they have cut their losses.
Vivian spends a weekend or two on short, overnight trips to nearby places. She’s come to terms with the heel of the boat and is sufficiently at ease to take a nap or read below if she gets tired of just watching the water roll by. On weekend trips they have made love in the V-berth, which is arguably the roomiest part of the boat.
“If the boat is rocking, don’t come knocking,” people joke over drinks at the club or at weekend anchorages. Mostly though, Gerry day-sails single-handed or rounds up a few buddies to race on the weekends.
Gerry hasn’t planned a very busy day at the boat. As they drive to the sailing club, a patch of overcast sidles across the sky and seems to threaten rain, but it blows by when they get to the boatyard. A pale sun skims across the yard like spotlights at a skating show as the wind parts the clouds. Then it clears again.
The boat is on its cradle and they have to un-padlock the chained-on ladder and scramble up into the cockpit. Gerry guides Vivian up first and then passes up the tool box and the lunch and the various bags and bundles he’s brought along. They find a piece of frozen snow in a corner of the cockpit and throw it over the side to smash on the boatyard gravel. They fiddle companionably with little things. He takes off the winter covering he screws over the hatch every fall. Vivian passes him tools as he wrestles the screws out of the damp plywood. The sun heats the wood and it gives off a faint forest smell. When they get the plywood off, they unlock and open the hatch. Vivian sniffs the crypt-cold air of the cabin.
“It’s not too musty.”
“It shouldn’t be. I put pie plates of Kitty Litter around to absorb some of the damp,” Gerry says. “All the cushions and cloth stuff went home so there’s not much to mould.”
“It’s probably bad in the cupboard under the sink.”
“Locker,” he corrects her. “Besides, I’ve got to have a major clean-up in there anyway. I’ll hit it with the Pinesol and the Murphy Oil when she’s in the water.”
Opening lockers is like unpacking Christmas decorations. You forget what you have and familiar things become surprises. Salt-crusted sunglasses at the back of shelves and plastic bottles with dregs of sunscreen are artefacts.
The cabin is bare without its cushions, but the boom and a lot of the fenders are stored inside. They move stuff out to the cockpit lockers to make room in the cabin.
“Last year Darren helped you get ready,” Vivian says.
“For what it was worth, “Gerry says. “I mean he poodled away with a scraper for a bit, but he got tiresome to listen to.”
“He respected you,” Vivian says.
“I doubt it,” Gerry replies. “Are you ready for lunch?”
Vivian has always been impressed with Gerry’s ability to make picnics. They were not a feature of her previous existence. Gerry has his picnic-prone aunts in his genes and he and Patricia had spent a good deal of time out of doors. He sometimes feels he has scored some easy points with picnics.
They use the boat’s emergency knife to cut up chunks of cheese and spicy sausage and slices of crusty bread. He opens the wine with the corkscrew on his Swiss Army jackknife. He’s brought a big thermos of coffee for himself.
The wind is cool, but the sun comes more than it goes and the day is almost warm if you stay out of the breeze. Gerry sits on a cockpit seat and leans on the cabin. Vivian leans back against him. The boatyard is spread out below their ladder.
“We’re like kids in a tree-house,” she says.
More people arrive as the afternoon ripens. Orange and yellow extension cords snake around the yard. The whir of sanders and drills emerges from under boats, and here and there, there’s the iron flatulence of a winterized diesel being turned over for the first time.
Vivian’s hair is against Gerry’s chin. It smells lightly of herbal shampoo but seems to have additional scents of warming wood and clean new rope.
“How are you doing there, sport?”
“Great. How about you?”
This is how things might endure, Gerry thinks, scented moments of nothing. Think too hard and you’ll destroy them.