ONE
■

 

i was nineteen when I first stepped off the path that had been laid out for me. It seemed at the time, like most major decisions in life, arbitrary — coincidental even. I had no idea that one decision would colour the rest of my life, and move me away from my chosen field, mathematics, towards something far more difficult and less precise.

That decision came in the form of a course selection at the beginning of my second year of university. I was flipping through the course calendar in my tiny apartment on Brunswick Street in the Annex in Toronto, looking for an elective, something to round out my complement of courses and that was not related to mathematics. Most students took an art history course, something they could breeze through. For some reason, I found myself in the biology section and came across Virology 201.

I knew nothing about virology.

I knew nothing about biology.

I knew algebra, calculus, quadratic equations, and trigonometry.

But this course, virology, struck me as something that might be interesting. I did not realize at the time what my motivations were. I had been in the city for a year, and though I had come with the intention to study and explore, I had yet to meet anyone. Among the community I was nominally a part of, an epidemic was raging.

I was afraid. But I was also fascinated.

I registered for the course. It was a second year biology credit and I had not the prerequisites to get in. I had to obtain special permission from the instructor, who asked why a second year math student was interested in virology. His name was van Denker, a sixty-year-old balding Dutch man in a white lab coat. He had dirty fingernails, which I found out later were stained because of a dye used in the isolation of bacteria and other microbes in a Petri dish. He was sitting behind his desk when he asked me this question.

“I’m interested,” I said. “I know it’s not math, but I can’t help thinking that a working knowledge of microbiology couldn’t harm anyone.”

“No,” van Denker said, looking up at me. “But it usually doesn’t interest anyone either, besides microbiologists and medical students. Is there some aspect of the class that attracts you specifically?”

I didn’t answer him, though I’m sure he knew.

He gave me permission to take the course, though he warned me I would need a basic grasp of first year biology in order to excel. “Cellular theory, genetics, homeostasis,” he told me. “Are you prepared to learn all this in addition to the course material?”

I told him I was.

And I did.

I studied hard for that course, not so much to pass, but to understand. Van Denker took a personal interest in me. After class he’d sometimes stop by my desk to ask how “the mathematician” was doing. I gave myself away during the two classes we spent learning about hiv by asking more questions than the other students. When he first put a drawing of the virus on the wall with the mini-projector I held my breath. It was shaped like a dodecahedron and coloured green, with small barnacles all over it. It looked like a child’s toy, or a badly made Christmas ornament. That something so small could cause such significant trouble seemed almost a miracle in reverse.

“There you are,” I whispered, under my breath.

At the end of the year, van Denker asked if I had learned what I needed from the course.

“Very much,” I said.

“Your mark is excellent,” he said. “You can see it posted outside my office. Perhaps you’ll think about switching majors.”

“I don’t think so,” I told him.

Van Denker smiled. He knew, I believe, exactly where I was headed, and why, though he refrained from asking details. We said our goodbyes, and I never saw him again. But I never forgot his course, or his passion. To van Denker, viruses, which he often called the “antithesis of symbiosis,” were a puzzle, an intellectual pursuit of the grandest order. He saw nothing personal in them.

To me they were the enemy.

▪ ▪ ▪

 

“i think you should come home,” my mother says when she calls the first Thursday evening in July. “The doctors think your grandmother is dying.”

My mother says this practically every time she calls now. She is not being alarmist. My grandmother is so often sick that the doctors are always predicting this week or that will be her last. She is ninety-one. She has congestive heart failure, a buildup of fluid around her heart. She feels weak and tired all the time. She sometimes finds it difficult to breathe. There are days she does not get out of bed. Her eyes are too weak to read or knit, and she is too tired to go anywhere. She does not have Alzheimer’s; she is spared that final indignity of having to be spoon-fed while her mind unravels like an untamed thread from a spool. What she does have is mild old-age dementia. She forgets names and faces, dates, and sometimes her own family. The last time I was home she did not know who I was. When I kissed her cheek, wrinkled and dry as parchment, and stood back, she looked up at me slyly, but without recognition, as if to ask who was this strange man taking liberties with her?

I ask my mother what makes this time different from all the other times the doctors were prognosticating death.

“She has a lung infection,” says my mother. “And her heart has slowed down. She’s on oxygen. She’s rarely awake. Dr. Willis says her body is shutting down.”

“Is she in the hospital?”

“She’s home,” says my mother. “By the time we caught the infection she was too weak to move. And Dr. Willis believes if she is going to die, she would rather be at home than anywhere else. Jeanette’s taken some time off work to be with her, and a von nurse comes every day. I really think you should come home and say your goodbyes.”

I have a lot of resentment against my grandmother. We all do. And although old age and her condition make it harder to express, it’s still there, like a subcutaneous wound. But this has never stopped me from going home before. I go at Christmas, and sometimes during the summer. I am not like my Uncle David, who left in 1969 before I was born and did not come home until 1984.

I have never discussed my work with my grandmother. Not once has she asked me about it, though she knows from my mother and Aunt Jeanette what I do. She also knows about my personal life, that I have turned out different, that I have become what she sometimes refers to as “a man of questionable demeanour.” This euphemism of my grandmother’s has made its way around my office, as I once told a colleague about it. He was delighted, and though that was years ago I still hear men in my office refer to themselves and their co-workers this way. At the outreach centre, we are all, for the most part, “men of questionable demeanour.” A few of the women have demeanour issues of their own.

My grandmother would no more ask me about this than she would my bowel movements. She was raised in a culture of denial and ignorance, and she did her best to instill those values in the generations who followed.

She failed.

In the work I do we do our best to smash denial, to root out ignorance.

I make absolutely no promises about going home to see my grandmother on her deathbed. My mother asks me to give one good reason why.

“You keep saying she’s going to die,” I say. “But she keeps hanging on. I suspect she isn’t as sick as you said.”

This is a lie, and my mother knows it.

“It’s a miracle she’s still alive. Stop dithering. You’ll have to come home sometime. Even if it’s after she dies, for the funeral.”

“But my work …” I start to say, but my mother cuts me off.

“Don’t give me that, Jacob. You can get a week or two off work. I bet you have six weeks of vacation, don’t you?”

Seven, I could tell her.

Normally my mother and I don’t discuss my job. I am bound by codes of confidentiality. My mother finds it difficult to discuss. I am a counsellor at a men’s outreach centre in the city.

My mathematics degree is a running joke among my colleagues. I can explain Fermat’s Last Theorem and deal with radicals and imaginary numbers. But my education does not make me a better counsellor. The language of the psyche is so much more inexact than the language of the material universe. When our office receives copies of the epidemiological reports on sexually transmitted diseases, they are given to me to decipher and present to the staff in plain language. For this reason alone I am a valuable employee, which is good, for I frequently wonder about my abilities as a counsellor. My words and advice seem so feeble in relation to what these men are going through. Some use drugs. Some live on the streets. They have no idea how to protect themselves from the machinations of the world they live in.

I have never lived in this world. I grew up sheltered. I’ve always had a home. I went to university. How can I know what it is like for these men, who every day wake up to face another nightmare?

Men have died on my watch.

I watch them, growing thinner and sicker with every visit to my office, until one day they don’t come at all and we hunt them down on the streets or in hospitals, eventually to go to their funerals. The courses I took at community college were at what I used to think of as the fuzzy end of the social sciences. Like most science students, I had a well-rounded contempt for anything that didn’t resolve. But I set aside this prejudice for the sake of my studies, and by my third year I had decided that, though I would get the math degree, I would likely work in the counselling field. I studied addictions, family abuse, and disease management. I took part in mock sessions, suicide prevention courses, and youth sensitivity training. Our studies were hands-on, our instructors both passionate and practical. We were being trained to make a difference. In the final year of my math degree I already had a part-time job on a suicide hotline. By the time I finished I would work at a youth shelter for two years before finally getting this position at the outreach for men living with hiv.

My mother was proud of me, though confused. She couldn’t help but wonder what happened to the serious, solemn boy who was going to be a mathematician.

I could have told her I was still serious and solemn. Only the mathematician had been lost. By day I was trying to help others. At night I came home and tried to make sense of my life.

“That’s about par for the course,” my mother said. She worked at a diner in Advocate and had since I was a child. “Did you think I wanted to be a waitress for the rest of my days?”

I was often reminded of van Denker and his passionate descriptions of viral replication and dna incorporation by integrase enzymes. He would explain something to us in the most technical of terms and then turn around and face the class — an auditorium full of students with neutral or bored expressions — and say, “Don’t you see how amazing this all is?”

I think one of the reasons van Denker liked me is that I reminded him of himself. I wasn’t there to fulfill a course requirement, or ace a credit. He sensed passion in me, even if it was perverse, or misguided. Sometimes, when he asked “Don’t you see?”, he would look at me, and I would nod as if I did.

I didn’t.

The miracle of cellular function and pathogens escaped me. I wanted only to know the how and why. I was studying the virus not because it fascinated me but because I was frightened of it. Whenever I picture the virus swimming in the bloodstreams of my clients, I think of millions of those little dodecahedrons as I saw them in van Denker’s class, waiting to swarm and overcome the first T cell to cross their path. I can’t help but think of his words: “A virus is the opposite of symbiosis.” I thought, by learning about it, I would conquer my fear. All learning about it did was clarify my fear. It is knowledge that has undone me.

“So just tell me,” my mother says finally. “Why aren’t you coming?”

There is silence on the phone while my mother waits. I decide to tell her part of the truth. “If I came home,” I say, “I’d be afraid I’d tell Grandnan what I thought. I’m afraid I’d ruin her last days on earth.”

“Is that all?” says my mother. “We’ve been telling her the truth for years, and she doesn’t pay any attention. It’s unlikely she’d start now, particularly as she’s asleep most of the time.”

“Well, you wanted a reason,” I say. “I gave you one.”

“It’s a bad one,” says my mother. “I want you to talk to your boss tomorrow and book your flight home.”

I relent. “Okay. I’ll do it.”

When I explain to Anne, my supervisor, in her office at the end of the next day that I am leaving, she asks if I am close to my grandmother.

“I grew up in her house,” I say. Which is not exactly a direct answer.

“You must be very sad,” she says.

I surprise myself, by telling the truth. “Not really,” I say. “She was a difficult woman, and I hold a lot of things against her.”

Anne shouldn’t be surprised. She deals with counsellors all day, and we have a tendency to practise what we preach. We spill our guts at the slightest provocation. But I am not normally one of these.

“Well, I hope this visit resolves some of those issues,” Anne says. “Death has a way of healing, whether we want it to or not.”

“Thanks,” I say, leaving her office and heading home. I make dinner, read a book, think about Advocate. At ten o’clock the phone rings and I can see by the display it is my mother. I answer and give her my flight information.

“Aunt Jeanette will pick you up,” she says. “I have to work.”

“Fine,” I say.

“And don’t think,” says my mother, as if we were still having the conversation of the evening before, “I don’t know what it is you want to tell your grandmother. I’ve been wanting to say the same thing for years.”

“And have you?” I ask.

“No,” my mother admits. “It’s too painful. And she has never mentioned it.”

“You understand why I might have to,” I say. “My job. What I do. It’s affected my whole life.”

“That was a terrible time,” my mother says absently. “I don’t like to think about it.”

“None of us do,” I say. “That’s the problem. That’s how they got away with it for so long. But someone should hold them accountable.”

“By ‘they,’” asks my mother, “who do you mean?”

“All of them,” I say. “The whole town.”

“You’re going to speak to the whole town? What are you going to do? Hold a public meeting? No one would come.”

“I know, but someone should try.”

“My son,” says my mother wistfully. “My marvellous son. Where did you get the idea you have to save the whole world?”

 

2

 

it was always a source of annoyance to my grandmother that her house was one street back from the river and not on the river itself. By the time my grandfather was ready to build in Advocate all the waterfront property had been claimed. The old settlers’ houses, with a few exceptions, had been torn down, and Cape Cods and colonials built in their place. There was plenty of room in the south, where Main Street turns to River Road and runs for five miles into the village of Great Falls, but that was the poorer section of town, and my grandfather, with an eye to his medical practice, wanted to build somewhere more prosperous.

So he had to settle for the street behind the river. He made up for it by building the largest house in the area. Bigger and more impressive houses were built later, but when I was a child my grandmother’s house was still intimidating — six bedrooms, a spacious living room, dining room, a washing and sewing room, and a glassed-in, insulated sun porch in the back where every once in a while if she was in a genteel mood she would serve us lunch on Sunday after Mass at the white wicker table with the sun pouring in on us like lemon dish soap.

The bedrooms were never all occupied. My grandparents had three children, and after my grandfather died and Uncle David moved away, my grandmother named the extra bedrooms guest rooms, though we never had any guests. These were off limits.

Once a month she made my mother and Aunt Jeanette change the sheets and dust.

“Why on earth do we have to?” Jeanette complained. “No one ever sleeps there.”

“Because someone might decide to stay tomorrow. And I’m not having them see tumbleweeds on the floor and grimy sheets on the bed, little girl.” My grandmother always called my Aunt Jeanette “little girl” when she chastised her.

And because my mother and Aunt Jeanette lived under my grandmother’s roof they did what they were told, once a month tidying the guest rooms.

“I feel like a chambermaid,” Jeanette would say. “Maybe we should leave a mint on the pillow.”

My mother was less vocal than her sister. She did not argue with my grandmother, and didn’t mind cleaning the rooms and doing any other work my grandmother wanted done. She said housework was good for the soul, and would sometimes give me a duster and let me help, though I was more interested in stirring up a string of dust from the windowsill into a tiny cloud or mini tornado and watching the motes dance in the sun.

My grandmother disapproved of me working with my mother and aunt. “He needs boys’ work, not housecleaning,” she said. “If you want to give him chores I can find him something more suited to a young man.”

I had no chores other than to fetch the paper when the paperboy would inevitably toss it into my grandmother’s marigold patch. In her opinion fetching a paper was not enough responsibility for me. I should’ve been chopping kindling — an irony, as we heated the house with oil — or fixing pipes or changing fuses in the cellar when they blew. It didn’t matter I was only six. My grandmother wanted me to be a man. She worried because I had no male figures in my life.

“David’s a man,” said my mother.

“Very funny,” said my grandmother. “And since when have you seen David around here? Jacob needs a positive male influence. You should apprentice him to someone in town.”

“This is not the nineteenth century, Mother. We’re not making him into a chimney sweep.”

“Maybe not. But he needs to be hewing, not dusting. Work defines character. You have to start them off young, before they get away from you.”

Arguments over the best way to raise me were common in our house. My grandmother, as matriarch, believed she should get as much say as my mother. My mother quietly but firmly disagreed.

I responded to my grandmother’s gruff authority, but secretly kept my heart aligned with my mother. I did not like man’s work, or man’s toys. If my grandmother said I had to be a chimney sweep, I would be a chimney sweep, but one who disturbed the piles of ash to see them pirouette in the sun. I played with dolls and tea sets in the privacy of my own room, though even at a young age I knew enough to hide these from my grandmother. I watched soap operas with my Aunt Jeanette when she was off in the afternoon, and I was fascinated by my grandmother’s gardens and the variety of flowers and plants that grew within them.

All my grandmother’s attempts to make me a man’s man over the course of my childhood would fail. Once she paid a young man from town to take me fishing in the river. I found it boring, and I did not like the squishy feel of the worm between my fingers as it was strung upon the hook. When my mother asked me how I liked it I told her I didn’t, and she told my grandmother I didn’t have to go anymore.

“Mark my words,” my grandmother said. “That boy will end up different, if you don’t get him doing normal boy things.”

“What’s wrong with different?” asked my mother.

“Fine,” said my grandmother. “Just don’t blame me when he ends up a social misfit.”

My grandmother had it wrong. I would not end up being a social misfit — I already was, and had been since the day I was born. I was an eerie, quiet child, and I think this bothered my grandmother as much as my proclivity for girls’ toys. She didn’t know how to take me. I think she was afraid I would turn out like her only son, though she never said as much. It was my grandmother’s habit to say everything on her mind except that which had true bearing and relevance. She continued to hound my mother to get me engaged in what to her mind were suitable boy activities, and to guard against effeminacy and softness of character when she saw it. Fortunately for me I had a mother who did as she pleased and did not heed my grandmother’s warnings at all.

▪ ▪ ▪

 

one of my clients who sees me every two weeks is Randy. He is unlike many of the men I see, in that he is not homeless or living in a boarding house. Nor does he abuse drugs or drink much alcohol. “No more than a couple of cocktails at a dinner party,” he told me when I asked. He has a good job as a graphic designer at an ad agency, and he owns a condo in the Annex. There was a day when agencies like ours were filled with men like him, but no more. The message has spread: use condoms, be selective, think with your head and not your prick. The number of affluent and middle-class gay men living with hiv dropped considerably in the nineties and early two thousands. The number of poor, addicted men and women, both gay and straight, has risen.

We’ve had to adapt.

We’ve become a welfare agency as well as a support network. Addiction counsellors as well as safe sex proponents. Men like Randy in our office are now rare, and they feel uncomfortable sitting in the waiting room with street junkies and prostitutes.

But Randy is a special case.

He contracted hiv eight months ago, on an ill-advised outing to a bathhouse. He negotiated a string of partners without using condoms. He came down with a violent flu and went to see his doctor. He told his md of the outing, and his belief he might have caught something. The doctor got suspicious and tested Randy for the virus.

It came back positive.

Flu-like symptoms directly after hiv seroconversion are common.

Randy was devastated. Only losers and the self-destructive get aids anymore. Men like him, bombarded over the years with safer sex campaigns and condom promotion, are supposed to know better.

What makes it worse is Randy’s partner does not know about his one-night escapade. Eight months later and Randy has still not told him. He fears his lover will leave him. He also fears he has passed it on. Before he found out he was positive, they had had one bout of unprotected sex, as they always had when they were both negative and monogamous.

The situation terrifies him.

His work has suffered. He is unable to concentrate and he misses deadlines. He is depressed and does not sleep. His lover is growing suspicious, because they’ve not had sex in months. He thinks Randy is seeing someone else. In desperation, Randy came to us. I have been seeing him for over a month, but so far have been unable to convince him to deal with the growing crisis and tell his lover the truth. Despite the invention of medications that prolong the patient’s life, and keep the worse symptoms at bay, aids continues to wreck lives. It wreaks its own special brand of havoc.

Randy is at the stage of being angry at the man who gave it to him. He keeps talking about finding him, and suing him. “Having his ass slapped in jail for the rest of his life,” he tells me. I see this stage often, one of Kubler-Ross’s stages of grief I studied in college. It is always interesting, if a little alarming, to see something we studied so blithely on paper suddenly manifest itself in real life. It’s the difference between reading about the resurrection and actually seeing it.

I try to guide Randy through his anger, to validate it, and move him forward into the next stage. I tell him he can try to find the man who gave it to him, though with the multiple partners it would be difficult. I hope, I say, Randy can find him and he can be charged.

I also hope that Randy will focus his attentions on his own issues and prepare himself to tell his lover the truth. “Getting hiv is not your fault,” I told him. “Regardless of the unsafe sex or how you feel about yourself. If he loves you, he will work with you to get through this.”

“I wouldn’t,” Randy said flatly. “I’d be so angry I’d leave. And that’s just what he will do too.”

“Have you started medications yet?” I asked him.

“I can’t,” he said. “He’d wonder what they were for.”

“You need to start them as soon as possible. Which is another reason to tell him. You can’t keep putting your own health on hold because of your fear. This really is a matter of life and death. As long as you’re medication-free, your life is at serious risk.”

One of the reasons I initially liked him so much when he first came to see me was that he, too, was interested in the technical aspects of the virus. Like me, I think he believed that the more he knew about it the more power he had. Our first few sessions were spent talking — in highly technical language that Randy, with his obvious intelligence, clearly understood — about the mechanics and function of the pathogen.

Randy reminded me of me. I knew I was experiencing transference, but I was powerless to stop it. I am overly invested in his life, which diminishes my effectiveness as his counsellor. What I should do is transfer him to another counsellor in the centre. We are often warned about the dangers of over-investment, about how we can harm rather than help our client by becoming too close.

But I cannot do that. I like Randy. I worry about his reaction if I suddenly stop seeing him. The last thing he needs is to feel rejected.

The day after I book my flight to Nova Scotia, he comes into my office. He forgets to shut the door, so I get up and do it for him. He is only a few years younger than me — thirty-four to my thirty-seven — but today he seems like a teenager. He is more anxious than usual; he keeps crossing and uncrossing his legs and can’t seem to get comfortable.

“How are you,” I say, as I sit back down at my desk.

“Better,” says Randy. “I figured a way out.”

“Good,” I say. “Tell me about it.”

“It’s like this,” Randy says. “He’s gonna leave me if I tell him. That I know for sure. I can’t take meds if I don’t tell him, so that puts my heath at risk. So I figure the best way to deal with it is to leave him. I can tell him the relationship isn’t working for me anymore and I want out. He can keep the condo. I’ll get an apartment. We can still be friends but he never has to know about the hiv and it’ll solve all the problems.” Randy says all of this in one breath, as if he has been practising for days.

I am taken aback.

Not at the audacity — and, let’s face it, stupidity — of the plan, but by how earnestly Randy believes it to be the only solution. He is not a dumb man. Very few of our clients are. I am amazed he cannot see the dozen or so holes in his schematic; it leaks water like a sieve.

But my job is not to point out the problems. It is to get the client to see them for themselves. And the way we do that, somewhat underhandedly, is to start with praise.

“That would seem,” I say, “to get you out of the mess you’re in.”

“Wouldn’t it? It came to me only a few days ago, when I was lying in bed. I don’t know why I didn’t see it before.”

“It would also get you immediately on the medications, which is my primary concern.”

“I’ve already mentioned it to my doctor,” Randy says. “We’re gonna start as soon as everything is arranged.”

“Have you said anything to John yet?” John is Randy’s partner.

Randy shakes his head, a smidgen of enthusiasm floating away. “Not yet,” he says. “I don’t know exactly what I’m going to say.”

“Why don’t we figure it out together?”

Randy tries to come up with an excuse that doesn’t mention the real reason why he is leaving him. Dissatisfaction, another man, seven-year itch. All of these seem inadequate, mostly because they aren’t true. By the end of the session Randy has realized he can come up with no suitable reason for the simple fact that he loves John. It is his love for John that has made all of this so difficult. He leaves my office more dejected than when he came in.

It should count as a successful session. I have talked him down off the ledge, as I’ve been taught to do. But I don’t feel good about it.

I call my mother and make sure Jeanette is going to meet my plane.

3

 

my favourite room in my grandmother’s house was the attic. It could be accessed by a door next to the upstairs hallway closet and a climb up a short set of stairs. One could disappear into it, if one wished, for hours on end.

I was not allowed in the attic.

Both my mother and grandmother considered it dangerous, because there was no solid floor, only beams crossing the upper side of the upstairs ceiling. My grandmother claimed if you set foot in between the beams you would plunge right through, and if she didn’t have the bother of cleaning your broken body up from the room below, she would be put to the trouble of repairing the damage to the ceiling of whatever room you happened to break though.

I was always careful to stay on the beams.

The attic ran the entire length of the house. The ceiling was sloped, and when I first stepped up from the last stair I had to duck my head. In order to move around, I had to navigate my way across the beams to the centre of the room under the peak.

I liked the attic for two reasons. One, it was a place where I could get away from my family. I liked the musty, dust-laden, old leather-and-mothball smell of it. There was something comforting about that smell, something that reeked of history and forgotten narrative. I couldn’t put this into words, of course, but I sensed that in the attic secrets were kept.

The second reason I was fascinated with the place was that it was full of boxes. My grandmother never threw anything away. If something was not in immediate use, but she had judged it being useful someday, up to the attic it went. My grandmother’s fear of me plummeting through the floor into the bedrooms below was ill-founded: there were so many boxes, hardly a square inch of space remained for an ill-placed step.

When I first started sneaking into it, I cleared a path to the centre of the room so I could make my way through box after box. All this was done in stolen moments. I couldn’t be gone long before someone would start to wonder where I was. My progress was slow. I studied each item I pulled from the boxes carefully. I read old newspapers. I puzzled over receipts and deeds and math scribblers filled with figures written in faded ink from 1962.

In many of the boxes were clothes, thus the camphor stink of mothballs.

My mother and Aunt Jeanette tried to convince my grandmother to give her old clothes to the Salvation Army or St. Vincent de Paul. The Salvation Army was out, because it was Protestant. St. Vincent was also out because my grandmother said she didn’t believe in making first-hand things second-hand things.

“It’s an invasion of privacy,” she said. “I don’t want everyone to know what I wore when I give my clothes away.”

“They know what you’re wearing when you wear them, don’t they?” said Aunt Jeanette.

But there was no arguing with my grandmother. Up into the attic each batch of discarded clothes went. It occurs to me now that, sitting amongst those boxes and working my way through to the heart of them, I was engaged in peeling back strata of time — moving from present through past, trying to read the history of my family through cast-off clothing, old shoes, paperwork, and mementos.

My grandmother was not pleased on the rare occasions I was caught. Several times she threatened to put a padlock on the door, though she never did. I suppose it was because she often lost keys, and because if she ever did need to put anything up there her arms would be too full to stop and undo a lock. She did give me fair warning. “If you go up there again, you’ll get a hiding you won’t forget.” I needn’t have worried. My grandmother never “hided” me — my mother wouldn’t allow it. But when she caught me playing up there, she would give me a severe dressing down until I swore I would not step foot in the attic again.

I always did, though. It was the only place in the house where I could be entirely myself. I didn’t have to worry about sitting up straight or washing my hands or brushing my teeth. I didn’t have to listen to anyone argue, or hear the news on tv. For such a big house, it was rarely quiet, and the attic offered peace. The dust lay so heavily on everything it muffled the present. Only the past spoke, in whispers.

▪ ▪ ▪

 

i was eight when I discovered the attic. Some of my earliest finds were boxes of Jeanette’s and my mother’s old toys. These, for some reason, were not deep in the piles of boxes trapped in some far corner of the room. They were close to the front. Later I concluded they’d been stored in another part of the house until recently. Perhaps my mother and Aunt Jeanette had held on to them for sentimental reasons, and only lately found the heart to store them away.

Whatever the reason, I was delighted with the find. I had my own toys, of course. But the toys in the boxes in the attic were old. And they were girls’ things. A tin doll’s house, a tea set, cardboard cut-outs of dresses and outfits for a paper doll. There was even a turquoise Easy-Bake Oven, without directions or mixes but with all the pans. It actually worked when plugged in.

I was fascinated.

Not just that my mother and Aunt Jeanette played with these things when they were little, but they were a whole new category of toy. I was tired of my own toys. For the first time I took what I’d found in the attic downstairs to my room, and over the next couple of weeks I played with them.

I saw nothing wrong with this.

I had tea parties, filling the pot with water and pouring for imaginary guests. I dressed the paper doll in outfits. I built costume jewellery from pieces lying at the bottom of the box that must have been a do-it-yourself kit.

My grandmother caught me when I tried to make something in the Easy-Bake Oven. I took flour and water and salt from the kitchen — I had no idea what went into baking a cake — when I thought no one was around, and my grandmother discovered the flour all over the kitchen counter. She knew something was amiss, and burst in as I was busy watching the pan boil in the little oven.

At first she said nothing. She only asked what I was doing.

“I’m cooking,” I said.

“And where, pray tell,” she said, “did you get that?”

She was pointing to the oven, and the other toys scattered around it. I was also having a tea party, for when the cake was ready. Three people already sat innocently on the floor waiting, though my grandmother couldn’t see them. When I didn’t answer, she asked again.

The one thing I was absolutely not allowed to do in her house was lie. My grandmother didn’t like it. It reflected a corruption of the soul, she said. My mother didn’t like it either. She told me that honesty solved problems and dishonesty created them, and she always wanted me to tell her the truth, no matter how bad I thought it was.

Aunt Jeanette lied sometimes to my grandmother, about little things — where she was, where she was going. She said it was hard to live with a puritan and not tell a few. But I knew in this case lying would not help. They would know eventually where I got the toys, and that I had been where I was not supposed to be.

I actually thought the attic was the issue.

▪ ▪ ▪

 

as soon as my mother came home from dinner, my grandmother met her with the words and in the tone she usually adopted when there was trouble in the house. “Caroline! I need to talk to you!”

Aunt Jeanette had already gone to her room. She had no interest in these intergenerational squabbles over my behaviour. They happened frequently enough, and my mother usually could handle them herself.

My mother was tired. It was a Friday, and Fridays were a busy day at the diner. “What now?” she said wearily, taking off her scarf and coat and laying them across the deacon’s bench in the front hall.

I stood at the kitchen door with my grandmother. She tried to herd me back into the kitchen so she could get my mother alone, but I refused. I knew it was better, when I was under discussion, to keep myself in my mother’s sight. It softened her heart, gave her more of a defence against my grandmother’s harangue.

I was to be thwarted this time.

“I want you to come upstairs with me,” she said to my mother. “And I want Jacob to stay downstairs. I have something to show you.”

My mother sighed and kicked off her shoes. “Let me get a drink of water first,” she said. “And I’ll be right up.”

“You better,” said my grandmother. “This is important.”

She went first, perhaps to make sure no one tampered with evidence.

I didn’t see what my grandmother was getting so upset for. Whenever I had done something wrong in the past she dressed me down, waited for my mother to come home, then dressed me down again when she considered my mother’s response too mild or permissive. This seemed different.

“What did you do?” my mother said, as she went to the fridge for her water.

I figured I’d forestall my grandmother, rob her of the element of surprise. “I went into the attic when I wasn’t supposed to and I took some stuff.”

“What stuff?

“Just stuff,” I said. “Old toys I found. That’s all.”

“You know you’re not supposed to go into the attic, don’t you?”

I lowered my head, partially in shame and partially, I admit, in calculated humility. “I know,” I said. “It’s dangerous.”

“And you know how touchy your Grandnan is about her old things. You really shouldn’t touch anything without permission.”

“I know,” I said again.

“And now I have to deal with the fallout,” my mother said. “Remember, Jacob. It’s not just you who has to live in this house. It’s all of us, including your Grandnan. I know some of her rules are hard, but the attic rule I happen to agree with. It is dangerous. So next time you think you want to go up there, or do something else you’re not supposed to do, I want you to remember it affects us all.”

This was what I’d expected from my mother. The usual talking to — balanced and reasonable, not too harsh, but effective enough to make me swear on the spot I would not disappoint her again, even if I would forget and make the same or a similar mistake a few days later.

“Okay,” I said.

Now she would go upstairs to my grandmother and they would have it out, and though it would start out about me, it would end up being a discussion about the best way to raise a child.

▪ ▪ ▪

 

the issue my grandmother had with the toys in my bedroom was not that I had gone without permission into the attic — though that was infraction enough and worthy of severe punishment, in her opinion. It was that I was playing with girls’ things. An Easy-Bake Oven. Tea sets. Paper dolls.

This should have been a minor issue, an anomaly, perfectly natural for a young boy with a curious nature. These days, I’ve heard, some progressive parents no longer make distinctions between boys’ toys and girls’ toys. They let their children play with whatever they want.

Jeanette, a self-proclaimed hippie, did her best to inject the reality of a changing world into our daily lives. In retrospect, she accomplished little. Jeanette was too quirky to be taken seriously. Even my mother had little time for her pet causes and intellectual discussions. Jeanette read books, and mounted protests, and indulged in windy arguments over dinner that all of us, me included, did our best to ignore.

My mother was not at the forefront of gender equality. She wore dresses and pantyhose and heels, whereas Jeanette, somewhat ahead of her time, dressed as androgynously as possible. My mother liked perfume, and makeup, and frilly things.

My grandmother approved of my mother’s femininity, sometimes as a curative to Jeanette’s purposeful manliness. She often referred to my mother as “my prettiest daughter.” This infuriated Jeanette, not because she had lost out in the contest of who was better looking, but because my grandmother would think of having such a contest in the first place.

Despite all this, my mother emphatically did not agree with my grandmother when it came to what toys I should play with.

Whatever the results of their argument, I never got to hear any of it. I learned only what I could overhear from snatches of conversation my mother had with Jeanette over the next few weeks. Usually when there was an argument about me, my grandmother was more than happy to drag me into it. She would berate my mother over dinner in front of me, and try to sway me to her side after school when my mother wasn’t home. But this time she did not discuss it, and my mother did not carry to me any instructions about what I was or was not to do in my grandmother’s presence. She never mentioned the attic.

When I went back up to my room the tea set and oven were still there. No one told me to put them back, or not play with them. I stored them in my closet to be safe, and when I played with them again I did so with my bedroom door shut.

My grandmother wouldn’t speak to my mother for two days. My mother told Jeanette my grandmother was being “ridiculous and neurotic.” Jeanette told me I could play with whatever toys I liked and I should just ignore the adults around me who thought differently. My mother came into my room once and sat on the edge of my bed while I was reading a comic. She said she loved me and she would always love me no matter what kind of man I grew up to be.

The whole thing was confusing. It was the first time I remember thinking all adults, not just my grandmother, were slightly crazy. I had never considered playing with girls’ toys would make me act like a girl when I got older. I was a boy. I knew I was a boy, and I didn’t believe I would end up wearing women’s clothing or makeup because of it. But this is what my grandmother thought. She had experience, she said. It was a proven fact. One had to be vigilant and correct that kind of behaviour when it happened.

My mother put her foot down, which she didn’t often do. She told my grandmother she didn’t believe in the theory that playing with girls’ toys made a boy less masculine, and I could play with whatever I wanted.

Once, my grandmother snuck into my room, took the toys and hid them. They weren’t in the attic, or at least in any of the places I could reach. I complained about this to my mother, who found them and gave them back. There was no argument this time. My grandmother never mentioned it, though I suspect my mother had to go into grandmother’s room to find them.

Then my grandmother changed tacks. That year, for my birthday and report cards and Christmas, she bought me Tonka trucks, GI Joes, and plastic guns. But trucks were just trucks. I didn’t have any inclination to push them through piles of dirt and pretend I was in a job half the men in town already had. I was afraid of the guns. I preferred puzzles and electronics and art kits. These stirred my imagination.

I kept the toys my grandmother gave me, but I didn’t play with them. I continued to play with the toys from the attic, because I could imagine people having tea and cake with me, and I liked dressing up the dolls in new outfits. Later, to counter my grandmother’s overtly masculine toys, Jeanette and my mother bought me whatever I wanted, including a more up-to-date paper doll set and a newer Easy-Bake Oven with all the pans and pots intact and the packaged mixes to make my own cakes.

Weeks after the argument, when my grandmother came in to call me for supper and caught me playing with the paper doll, she only pursed her lips and told me to come along. Halfway down the stairs, I heard her in the kitchen telling my mother it was too late.

“Too late for what?” said my mother.

“That boy,” said my grandmother. “You’ve got him ruined already. Mark my words.”

“I don’t care how he turns out,” I heard my mother say. “I’ll love him anyway.”

“I can’t believe you’re saying that. Of all the irresponsible, ridiculous, dangerous …”

I came into the kitchen. My grandmother never finished what she was about to say.