Bunny Wilson was always there in my consciousness. Standing in her apron, thin grey hairs trying to escape the bun she had put them in that morning. Everything she did was always immediate and everything was often a disaster. She had jaw-dropping, quick-cutting opinions on neighbours, passers-by, the old, the young, the crippled and the blind. She was a Montreal tavern wisecracker and Catholic-guilt survivor, and her knee-jerk, sharp-tongued observations would leave all of us shaking our heads, hiding our faces and stifling laughter, floored in our disbelief that someone, anyone, her—Bunny—could mock the world so perfectly.
In this spirit, Bunny may have hinted at the fact that I had come from another planet, dropped out of the sky onto the small square of backyard, brown grass bordered by a paint-chipped, rotting white picket fence out behind 162 East 36th Street. She told me several times when I was just a preschooler that there were secrets about me that she would take to the grave, secrets that no one, including me, would ever hear.
And there were the turtles. Sometimes she’d buy a ceramic turtle, push it across the table towards me, and stare silently at me for a moment before telling me I came from “The Turtle Clan.”
“Okay,” I’d think. “What the hell does that mean?”
She changed character in these moments. Instead of being her usual high-strung, French-Canadian scalded-cat self, she would act embarrassed or humbled by what she was telling me. Her voice would drop into a lower, slower, more understanding tone, but when I would try to push for an explanation she’d spring out of her kitchen chair and dash over to the sink, putting an end to the topic with something like, “I’m not the person to answer your questions.”
“Well if she’s not, then who is?” I’d think to myself.
Mysterious gifts were always coming my way. Gifts that didn’t make any sense to me. Gifts that the other kids on the street were not getting, that’s for sure. No white kid on the East Mountain received Canada Post parcels with sage and sweet grass, beaded buckskin jackets, handmade lacrosse sticks and Indian rubber balls.
Later on down the road, when Bunny was in her early eighties and I was in my late thirties, and cancer had gotten inside her body, I would drive Bunny up to the old Henderson Hospital, where she met with doctors and prepared for a hysterectomy. The Henderson Hospital on Concession Street, one of the three hospitals where Bunny said I was born.
Doctors were like gods to Bunny. In fact, they were more like priests or shamans. Their words came directly through the clouds from the sky above, from the mouth of our Lord and Saviour. Bunny gave servant-like respect whenever she was in the presence of a doctor. It was at one of these meetings on the mount that Bunny had to answer a lengthy verbal questionnaire. The doctor was sitting on one side of the desk, Bunny on the other, and at Bunny’s insistence I sat quietly in the corner, making myself as small and as close to invisible as I could.
The questions went on and on and on, with inquiries about Bunny’s medical, family and sexual histories, all those x-rays she had back in the fifties for that rare skin outbreak. X-rays that, by the way, were a very odd choice for a doctor to order for a skin rash, but who was Bunny to challenge The Voice of God? Finally, the doctor gets to this question: “Mrs. Wilson, have you ever given birth?” And Bunny answers, “Oh no, doctor, I have not….Never.”
The doctor puts a check mark on his paper and makes a note, and there is this (and please excuse me for my choice of term here) PREGNANT SILENCE that fills the room. Bunny is sitting there transfixed by the doctor, and I’m sitting there transfixed by Bunny, waiting for I don’t know what, and I can feel the panic growing inside of me, and I feel like I can’t quite get my next breath, and I actually feel myself lifting off the chair and reaching my hand towards Bunny and the doctor like a ghost that has wandered off course, or maybe more like Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet when she’s naked and messed up on Kyle MacLachlan’s front lawn and she obviously shouldn’t be there. That’s where I was.
Naked and lost in another dimension and obviously in a place where I was not supposed to be, and yet somehow this was the moment of truth I had been waiting for all my life. I had just heard for the first time what it was that was wrong with me. Why I felt so out of place all my life. There it was, spilling out so easily from Bunny’s mouth. Had Bunny ever given birth?
“Oh no, doctor, I have not. Never.”
So now I’m standing and the only word I can muster dribbles out of my mouth, out of the dark corner of the doctor’s office, and that word is put out there in the form of a question, and that question is “MOM?”
Bunny’s head whips around towards me, and she responds like greased lightning. “Tommy, not now. Can’t you see I’m talking to the doctor?”
And that, folks, was that.
The moment of revelation passed by like so many other moments of revelation had passed by for years and years, dutifully discarded. It was like Bunny was the wizard, instructing me once again to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. I had no Toto to bark and yelp and bite at the wizard’s ankles. In that split second, I became the fool that I was asked to be and played along with Bunny’s lie to me and about me, the secret she would take to her grave. That moment faded and in the next we were all back in our roles of son and mother and doctor, and like I said, that was that.