“Trevor needs constant looking after. That’s why his friend’s here,” says Flo. She’s set up the board in the living room to watch the late-night news while she irons. “You be nice at supper tomorrow. Not a peep, understand. He’s got enough on his plate without you.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything,” Murray mumbles.
He uses the remote to turn the volume of the TV up one green dash and adjusts the brand new La-Z-Boy to half-recline.
“It’s a surprise. I thought it’d cheer you up,” he’d said, running up behind Flo as she stood at the front door in her baking apron, telling the delivery men they’d made a mistake.
It cheered her up all right. In the three weeks they’ve had it, she’s only been able to sit on the La-Z-Boy when Murray’s at work, when Flo hasn’t got time to. She’s the one who needs cheering up but he’s the one with the bad back. At least he’s passed the point of playing with the controls. For the first few days it was up and down, up and down, up and down. Murray is gadgety. Their toolshed is overpopulated with 1-800 junk. Flo could live without all the miracle products that make life better. Frozen orange juice took two minutes. They got that juice machine, and it took five. When Murray ordered the book of home remedies, Flo wondered what was wrong with doctors and aspirin. She was vindicated when Murray got a horrible earache. He wanted to call the doctor, but Flo handed him the book of home remedies. It said to use a blow-dryer on a low, warm setting. They didn’t have a blow-dryer, so they had to buy one. In the end it didn’t work because Murray had an infection that required antibiotics. Flo’s become more suspicious of products that force you to make do with what you have.
“I was born in the Depression,” she’d told Denise in Tablewares. “I don’t want to die in it.”
Flo raises her voice to compete with the news. “I mean it,” she says. “I don’t want to hear anything out of your mouth that’d make them uncomfortable.”
“I said I won’t say anything. I’m fine about it.”
“I know how you feel. Keep it to yourself.”
“Dammit Flo, I said I won’t say anything.”
Flo leans over. She frowns at his use of language but doesn’t bring it up. There are worse words. She knows it’s her. Flo knows she shouldn’t push him like she does. She just can’t help herself these days. Sometimes she hears her own voice and wonders, who’s that?
“Sometimes you get hotheaded,” she says, her voice muffled, lost in the laundry hamper. She stands up and puts the laundry on the ironing board. “Sometimes you find it hard to keep your opinions to yourself. They’re coming for turkey, not lip.”
Murray gives up trying to watch the TV and turns the volume back down. The line of green dashes shrinks from view.
“Have I got to spell it out?” he says. “O.K.” He spells out the letters in the air.
“They’re out here from Toronto because the doctors don’t give him long,” Flo mentions.
“Doctors can be wrong.”
“Listen to Mr. Home Remedies.” She presses down the iron. A cloud of steam billows up. “Em says he’s got skin cancer, but inside him, on his linings. It’s a rare kind normal people don’t get.”
She stops pressing, puts down the iron, and starts to fold.
“They say it’s something to do with a deficiency of cells. Your body can’t fight day-to-day things we don’t even think about.”
Flo puts the serviette she’s been folding on a pile with the rest and pulls up a section of tablecloth. “I’d like to see you with AIDS,” she says. “That’d be a sight. You’re a handful with a cold.”
She mists a section of tablecloth with a quick spritz of unscented spray starch, pressing the iron down and across. The steam smells nice as it lifts the scent of fabric softener into the air, not of Mountain Fresh Pine Forest as the label claims, but just like every other liquid fabric softener Flo has used, like cotton candy. Fabric softening then starching might seem like one step forward, two steps back, but Flo likes the sweet-smelling table you get from a little extra effort. Murray gets after her for making things twice as difficult for herself and tries to get her to use scented starch. She tells him life wouldn’t be twice as difficult if he’d lay off those gadgets. Besides, Flo finds the scented starch too cloying. She prefers the subtler smell of fabric softener leftover once most has been steamed out.
Flo got into the habit of ironing late at night last January soon after she retired from the Famous Food Floor in the department store up at the Heights. Her retirement was early due to their closing down the chain. Ironing is a thoughtless activity to take her mind off not sleeping. Murray stares at her and keeps silent. The sports report sails by.
“Em says he’s dropping weight like there’s no tomorrow,” says Flo. “It’ll be his last visit, that much is for sure. And Doreen’s out from Toronto too. Em says she’s been like an angel to her brother through all this. Poor Em. I don’t know how she copes with it all. They may be liberal minded, they may be educated, but you can’t bury where you come from in books. Who you are is who you are. Thirty-three years old. Honestly, I don’t know any more.”
“Jesus Flo,” says Murray. “You made me miss the scores. Happy now?”
The news has moved from hockey to a women’s rowing event in China. Murray takes a swallow of beer. The bottle’s empty. He puts it back on the TV table and pushes the table aside. He flips until he gets the FOX station from Seattle. Three women with big hairdos and tight clothes vie for dates with two muscular young men who have perfect teeth, long hair, and no necks. The men answer skill-testing questions about their love lives. Their lips move but nothing comes out. Murray keeps flipping. Flo gives him a disapproving look from the ironing board, his language again. She yanks at another large section of tablecloth, spreads it out over the board, and presses. Flo has a sense of rhythm and weight with an iron. She rarely goes over the same spot twice.
“His friend’s name is Ian,” Flo says through a cloud of steam. “Em says he’s artistic, so mind.”
Flo irons everything, always has, even underwear. It threw Murray for a loop when they were married. But he was happy about it when the bus company moved him into middle management after twenty-eight years in the garage. He showed up every day with the whitest, crispest looking shirts at branch office. Flo was glad to be rid of the coveralls headache. Nothing ate grease like it said it did. The switch from coveralls to office clothes didn’t come soon enough for her money. People commented. Flo didn’t like to take credit. She pointed out the good cut you could count on with an Arrow shirt. Collars like that don’t happen overnight, she’d say. All the same, she was pleased by the congratulations. Not a wrinkle gets by Flo.
“He’s from Newfoundland,” she adds.
“An artsy-fartsy Newfie who’s light in his loafers,” says Murray. “There’s gotta be some kind of grant for that.”
“Oh you.”
“Now it’s out of my system. You’re safe.”
“Em says he’s a hockey fan.”
“That’s no surprise,” says Murray. “Half the coaches are up-the-bum.”
“I give up.”
“Jeez, Flo, lighten up. Can’t you take a joke? Fags have got a sense of humour like anyone else.”
“I suppose you’ve been down at the local gay bar soaking up culture. And don’t say that word.”
“Now I give up.”
“Fine.” Flo starts to work on the tablecloth edges. It’s an old one from storage. Parts of it are worn so thin she can see through it when she holds it up to the light. She’d normally never dream of using it for company. But with a pad underneath, and her table setting, it’ll do fine. It’s worn out from being her favourite for years. When Trevor and Doreen were kids, they often stayed with Flo and Murray so Em and Jack could get away. Trevor liked to help set the table, especially the tablecloth. It’s got an embossed pattern of leaves and branches winding in and out. Flo would walk into the dining room and find Trevor with his knees up on a chair, tracing the outline of the leaves and branches with a finger as though he were following a path. It was a maze, but he never backtracked, he kept moving forward. Flo would put down whatever she had in hand and do the same thing on the other side of the table. It was a race.
“I’ll get there first,” Trevor would say excitedly, meaning the far end of the table. He always did. Flo let him.
“The way you talk you’d think I never saw a queer before,” Murray says. “They’re all over the TV for Christ’s sake.”
“That’s what I’m talking about. That kind of language,” says Flo.
She drapes the finished tablecloth over the back of Mum’s wingback. She unplugs the iron, puts it down on the floor, sets the ironing board upright, and starts to close the legs. “Queer. That’s a fine how-do-you-do, your own nephew dying of AIDS.” She snaps the board shut.
“That’s what they call themselves,” says Murray. “They call themselves queer.”
Murray readjusts the La-Z-Boy. He needs to for his back. Every half hour. The doctor told him. The chair doesn’t just go up and down and turn. He can change the pressure at the small of the back to follow the curve of his spine. A change in posture makes all the difference in the world.
Flo looks at him like he’s gone nuts. “Not all of them. Not the ones like Trevor. Just the active ones call themselves queer,” she says. “We saw it on Sixty Minutes, remember?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. You mean activist,” says Murray. “Not active.”
Despite following doctor’s orders, his back begins to act up. It does that whenever he gets into an argument with Flo. She has a way of painting herself into a corner and him with her.
“I do too know what I’m talking about. And I know what I mean,” Flo insists, picking up the iron and ironing board. “I mean to make sure you don’t spoil a perfectly good Easter supper with anti-homosexual words like queer. Just keep an eye on that mouth of yours.”
“All right,” Murray grumbles, “I’ll try to watch what I say. Now can I watch my program in peace?”
“Do what you like,” says Flo, going to put the ironing board away. “Lord knows I’m wasting my breath,” Murray hears her say, her voice faint as she disappears through the doorway to the linen cupboard.
Murray turns up the volume on the TV, so he won’t miss the sports recap. Flo’s back in the room just as it’s about to begin. She takes the tablecloth off Mum’s wingback and folds it over her arms. She thoughtfully sinks into her left hip, the one she’s favoured since they put a metal plate in her right hip to compensate for bone erosion. Flo stares at Murray. He pretends not to notice, hoping she’ll give up and go away. It’s useless. Flo settles into her long-term stare, the one that won’t let up until he lets her have her say.
“What?” says Murray.
“You know, they might vote different,” remarks Flo. “Don’t get on your Reform Party bandwagon. You know what they say about company. Don’t talk about sex, politics, or religion. Years ago, Em and Dad used to go at it tooth and nail when she was at the university and visiting home for the holidays. It ruined it for Mum and me. You and Em aren’t any better when you get a couple of drinks in you, fighting about how to solve the world’s problems. So put a zipper on it. Sex, politics, and religion don’t have a thing to do with Easter.”
“Okay,” Murray agrees.
“Promise?”
Murray has missed the entire sports recap. He turns off the set and gets up from the La-Z-Boy.
“Promise,” he answers wearily.
He follows Flo into the hall as she goes to the dining room to set the cloth, to save time in the morning. He heads into the bathroom. He doesn’t bother to close the door while he pees. Flo sticks her head out of the dining room.
“Em says they’ve got earrings,” she yells.
“All the earrings in the world and they won’t ever be as pretty as you,” he yells back.
“Snake charmer,” Flo says under her breath and goes back to laying out the tablecloth, pleased.
Flo, as usual, doesn’t go to bed with Murray. After spreading the tablecloth and folding the serviettes origami-like into swans the way Denise did during one of the Famous Food Floor’s Friday lunch-hour home hospitality demos, Flo takes her sleeping pill. The doctor tried to make her take pills for depression, but Flo wouldn’t have any of it. In the end she agreed to the sleeping pills.
Not working makes her sleepless. Flo couldn’t get a job after the Famous Food Floor. She tried, even at the new Walmart across from the Heights. No one said so but they really didn’t want to hire a woman over sixty to do cash.
Flo doesn’t really need a job. They’re set. As well as her antiques, Mum left them some money when she died. There’s Flo’s severance, Murray’s earnings until he retires in a couple of years, plus their pensions. She eventually passes out in the La-Z-Boy with the TV on.
She wakes up to an infomercial for a ball of wax that can remove unwanted body hair. The room is milky with dawn. She opens the curtains and blinds and turns off the TV. Flo gets dressed in an old pair of Murray’s pajamas, a dressing gown, and slippers, then goes into the kitchen where she puts out milk and cat food for Whiskers. The old tabby slinks out of his lair beneath the dining room sideboard and pads into the kitchen. He slurps his meal, arching his back like a drawbridge. Once everything is gobbled up, he slips back beneath the sideboard.
Flo checks on the Butterball she put out last night. She generally prefers a ham at Easter, but she has a freezer full of turkeys she’s looking for ways to get rid of. The wives at Our Lady had a raffle for Save the Children, and Flo, who bought two books of tickets because she couldn’t sell them all, won the second prize of ten Butterballs. She has half a mind to give the rest away to the food bank people.
“I’ve got enough to think about without too many turkeys getting in the way,” she’d told Murray.
The bird is nicely thawed. She fills it with bread and raisin stuffing, massages sage and garlic into the skin, and sticks in bacon strips with toothpicks. She places the turkey into a well-greased roasting pan and slides it into the oven. Flo is one for slow cooking, breast up. The Butterball taken care of, she puts a sweater on over her bathrobe and steps through the sliding doors onto the back porch. It’s going to be a fine day. Not a cloud in the sky. Dew sparkles on the grass. Their place has a view of the bridge into New Westminster and the Sky Train monorail crossing the Fraser River. The mountaintops a few miles north are amber, the soft morning sunshine reflecting in what little snow is left.
Their large yard slopes down a gentle hill to a chain-link fence. Beyond it, a new subdivision of pink and beige monster homes dwarfs the strip of postwar bungalows like Flo and Murray’s. The massive houses are built to the very edge of their properties, with three-car garages and giant staircases rising to second-floor double front doors of elegant wood.
All the large trees have been chopped down. A couple of the gardens are planted with a hardy kind of palm tree. Flo misses the Douglas firs and cedars that used to tower over the landscape wherever she looked. The palm trees are exotic but don’t belong. They remind her of the time she and Murray RVed down south. With the exception of some bamboo, Flo’s made a hobby of nurturing local flora, and her green thumb has left its print throughout their yard. She looks over her garden bursting with spring and feels proud. Flowers bloom everywhere and most of the shrubs and trees are more than halfway to full leaf. She must remember to give Em some clippings. And advice. Clippings without advice would quickly become compost in Em’s incapable hands. Flo got the green thumb in the family. Em got the kids. Murray and Flo tried their best for several years. Sluggish ovulation was the verdict.
There’s no shortage of family next door. Mr. Hsiang’s father is in the middle of the yard pretending to be a stork or heron or crane, or some other kind of long-legged bird. He stands on one leg with the other extended behind, arching his arms like graceful wings. Mr. and Mrs. Hsiang have six children. The three remaining grandparents live with them. Denise calls it “Hongcouver.” Flo’s heard other people at church call it that too, and they don’t have a friendly tone.
The old man sees Flo and stands up properly. He smiles and nods his head, spreading an arm over the landscape to indicate the grandeur of the morning.
“Lovely day,” says Flo.
“Yes, very lovely,” says the old man. “Tai chi,” he explains, smiling as he folds himself back into the shape of a bird. There is something comforting about the old man’s movements.
Flo makes a mental note to ask Em what clippings she’d like and goes inside.
Her hip feeling up to the three-block walk to Our Lady, Flo decides on eight thirty Mass. Murray likes to sleep in, so she’s quiet as she pulls underclothes out of drawers and one of her church suit dresses from the closet. She remembers earrings from her jewellery box, and the Chanel No. 5 Trevor and his friend sent her last Christmas. She washes up, then changes in the living room where her things are spread out.
Flo looks up from buttoning her blouse at the framed portrait of Jesus exposing his sacred heart above the La-Z-Boy. She crosses herself. Jesus smiles, winks at her, and gives her thumbs-up. In the time it takes to blink, he’s regained his composure of distant compassion. Flo puts it down to the sleeping pill. The pills often leave her feeling not quite right. She slips on her jacket and shoes. On Tuesday she’ll call the doctor and have him prescribe something different.
Flo walks to church as briskly as her hip will allow.
Denise is two pews up. Her hyperactive six-year-old wriggles in his suit. Denise swats the side of his head.
“Ow!”
“Jason, haven’t I told before why God forgives our sins?”
“I don’t care.”
“Because Jesus didn’t squirm.”
“Jesus is a toilet face.”
“Shhh!”
“Toilet face, toilet face, toilet face, toilet face — Ow! Let go!”
“You behave. Now take this and put it in the basket when it comes by. Not in your pocket like last time.”
“Toilet face.”
Flo knows what a lucky boy he is. Two years ago, a lump in his back was diagnosed as cancer. Denise was scared because her husband had passed away with stomach cancer. (There was talk of toxic waste in the ground where he grew up in Ontario.) Fortunately, the boy’s lump was benign and operable. Her son had begged and begged Denise to keep the lump and she finally relented. After the operation, they put it in a jar of formaldehyde for him to take home. He made his mother print a label on masking tape. MY CANCER, the jar said. He brought it to his kindergarten Show & Tell and it was such a success that he received invitations to birthday parties for the rest of the year.
Flo catches Denise’s eye and waves. Denise waves back. She’s back at community college studying computers. A much younger woman than Flo could do that. Flo envies her. The mass begins. Flo makes a point to tell Denise about the serviette swans.
After, outside in the warm sunshine on the steps of Our Lady of Immaculate Conception, Flo thanks the priest and goes to the bottom of the stairs to wait for Denise and her boy.
“Hi there, Flo. Happy Easter.”
“Happy Easter, Denise.” Flo bends down to tousle the boy’s hair. “And what did the Easter Bunny leave you?”
The boy pulls his head away. “There’s no such thing as the Easter Bunny.” He races off into the parking lot, spinning and kicking and humming the Power Rangers theme song.
“They grow up fast these days, don’t they,” Flo comments. She watches him playfight invisible monsters.
Denise lights up a cigarette. “Yeah, they sure pick things up quick,” she says. “He’d only be disappointed sooner or later, so I set him straight about stuff like the Easter Bunny.”
Flo smiles and reaches out to touch the woman’s arm.
“I just wanted to tell you that I folded my lumps into swans for supper tonight like you demonstrated that time,” says Flo.
Denise isn’t listening. She’s staring off at her son. She throws her cigarette on the pavement and grinds it in with her shoe.
“Jason,” she shouts, “you stop that!”
The boy stands in the parking lot exit, pounding his fists on the hood of a car trying to get through.
“I’m telling you! I’m going to swat you into the middle of next week,” Denise yells as she runs after him. “Bye Flo!” she tosses back.
“Goodbye,” says Flo, concerned.
She watches the small boy in front of the car, his eyes closed and hands clenched as he collects all his superpowers together to cover himself in the protection of a mechanical dinosaur and crush his enemy to death.
On her way home, Flo realizes that she told Denise lumps instead of serviettes. She doesn’t have time to ponder why. Not with what she sees when she turns onto their street. Although it’s only ten and they aren’t supposed to arrive until noon, Jack and Em’s minivan is parked in front of the garage. Jack and Em are on the porch with Doreen. Murray stands with the screen door halfway open, blurry eyed in his bathrobe. Running on the lawn toward Flo is an old man she’s never seen before. He’s frail and thin, dressed in loose-fitting clothes and bedroom slippers. His wispy, longish hair strays from his head. He carries a bunch of tulips in his hand. Flo figures out they must have been torn from her garden. They trail soil. A good-looking young man wearing a black leather jacket chases after him. The old man approaches Flo, raising the tulips above his head.
“A diadem of flowers to anoint the Queen of Heaven!” he cries rapturously. He places the tulips at Flo’s feet. Flo stands there, not quite sure what to do as the old man sinks down on his knees and clasps her legs.
“You must be Florence,” says the young man in the leather jacket as he catches up to them, holding out his hand to Flo. He’s a little out of breath.
“Ian,” he says, smiling.
Flo takes his hand and shakes it. He’s got a pansy voice, but his grip is firm. A fairy nice fella, Murray would say, like he did that time about the waiter at the Old Spaghetti Factory.
“He wanted to come early,” Ian explains. “He gets impatient. Sometimes you’ve got to humour him.”
Flo looks at him, then down at the old man at her feet.
“Trevor?” she asks.
“We are saved!” her nephew shouts with elation. He starts to cry. “At last, we are all of us saved!”
The kitchen is filled with the harmonious twang of cheated lives. The radio on top of the fridge is tuned to Flo’s country station. Flo bends over the oven to baste her Butterball, tapping a foot to Achy Breaky Heart.
“He’s still normal most of the time but he has moments,” Emily says to Flo’s backside. She takes a sip of Chardonnay.
Flo stands up, closes the oven door, and puts the turkey baster on a folded tea towel on the counter. She presses her hands into the small of her back, kneading the muscles with her thumbs.
“I’m going to have a moment if this bird doesn’t step to it and brown,” she says.
Different people throw themselves with abandon into different things: drinking, the track, sometimes love. But Flo’s Achilles heel is a possible breakdown in the timing and composure of a well-laid spread. When Murray chides her, Flo snaps that good food never put anyone in the drunk tank or the poorhouse. She’s mute on the consequences of overindulged love.
A twin set of porcelain roosters bookend Fanny Farmer, Joy of Cooking, and the entire Company’s Coming series on a special section of counter space. There are also several photo albums containing years of clippings from Canadian Living, The Vancouver Sun, and the local community newspaper. Her crab and Tabasco/mayonnaise puffs, cheese curls, Nanaimo bars, lemon squares, and all-time favourite The Devil Made Me Do It Double Fudge Brownies are among the many prized baked goods she serves up at church functions, prompting more than one person to approach her with catering offers. Flo always declined, thinking it unchristian to take money for something that gave her enjoyment.
“Women like that Martha Stewart ought to be ashamed,” she’d said to Murray. They’d been watching the “It’s a good thing” woman on TV one recent winter evening. “I read in Cosmo that women are having Martha Stewart breakdowns trying to keep up. Imagine.”
“I think she’s a super babe,” Murray had remarked.
“Oh, talk your age. She eats men like you for breakfast, in a hollandaise sauce she won’t shut up about for half an hour.”
Flo takes off an oven mitt and picks up her wineglass.
“Ian and Doreen have adjusted to it,” Emily continues. “Jack and I are learning to. Books and counselling don’t really prepare you. But being around Mum in her last years has.”
Flo swallows an urge to mention prayer and washes it down with wine. She gives her younger, thinner, smarter sister a thoughtful glance.
“It’s just like Mum in a way,” says Flo. “Though she called you and me a lot worse than the Queen of Heaven. Once she lost the last of her marbles no amount of soap could clean out that mouth. I swear it got hard to believe Mum housekept a rectory all those years after Dad died.”
Emily smiles and drains her wineglass. “Dad was the reason Mom went off like that, Flo, we both know that and there’s no pretending we don’t. All his carrying on. She just let go of all the stuff she’d bottled up about Dad all those years and took it out on whoever came close: you, me, the nurses, whoever. It doesn’t take illness to drive a person mad. So long as you’ve got families, you’ve got madness. They fuck you up.”
“Em!” Flo tries to conceal a half smile as she blushes.
“That’s from a poem I teach my first-year students. Come on, Flo, if anyone knows about family fucking you up it’s you.”
“I think you’d better check the speedometer on that wineglass,” Flo says sharply.
“Sorry.”
“The past is the past. It was the Irish in Dad. They can’t settle.”
“That’s what religion does to people.”
“That’s it, Em, get on your high horse. Take advantage of the Irish to find fault with religion.”
There’s a moment of silence for Ireland as Emily goes to the fridge, takes out more wine, unscrews the cap, and pours them both a full glass.
“Truce,” she says, passing Flo’s glass.
“Truce.”
They clink and sip.
The potatoes and yams begin to boil over. Both women put down their glasses. Flo hightails it past Emily to the stove and turns the elements down. Then she goes to the fridge, removes the thawed peas she’d brought in from the freezer in the garage, handpicked from her own garden last season. She gives the turkey another quick baste. Emily has found her way to the sink where she starts draining iceberg lettuce, which she rips into boat-sized pieces. Flo bites her lip watching her sister deposit the hopelessly large lettuce into a salad spinner.
“Use Mum’s crystal bowl. It’s on the sideboard,” she says.
Emily retrieves the heavy cut glass bowl. She almost drops it. It lands with a thud on the countertop. She fills the bowl with spun lettuce, then rummages in the fridge’s crisper, producing tomatoes and green onions.
“Where are the carrots?”
“I used up the last in my Jell-O mold,” answers Flo.
Emily sees it wiggling on a tray on the shelf in the fridge — red, translucent, and fish shaped, with raisins, shaved carrots, and miniature marshmallows.
“Score!” shouts one of the men downstairs. Jack, Murray, and Ian are in the basement watching the rec room black and white.
“Religion is helpless, Em. Even at Easter it can’t stop the playoffs,” says Flo, sighing at the stove as her peas rattle in a Silex pot.
Ian appears at the top of the basement steps. “It smells fabulous up here.”
“I hope you’re hungry,” says Flo.
“Famished beyond belief. I need to get us men some more barley pops.”
Flo furrows her brow.
“Um, beer.”
Flo points at the fridge. “Help yourself.”
“Thanks, Florence.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Who’s winning?” asks Emily.
“Can you believe it, Toronto. For a change. Isn’t that fabulous?” He pulls three beers out of the fridge and dashes back down the stairs.
“He’s not very shy, is he?” says Flo after Ian’s left the room.
Emily laughs. “No. But he’s fabulous.”
“According to the ghost of Liberace, who appeared before an eighteen-year-old waitress in an all-night donut store in South Dakota, Rock Hudson has turned straight in the afterlife.” Trevor shows Doreen Flo’s National Enquirer. There’s a picture of Rock Hudson looking emaciated, the same image that was all over the media when he died of AIDS, as well as one of the flamboyant piano player in an outrageous stage costume featuring rhinestones, ostrich feathers, and fur trim.
“Can you imagine?” says Trevor. “If there was ever proof of extraterrestrials amongst us, this is it.”
Doreen sits in front of the La-Z-Boy massaging Trevor’s feet. She inspects the picture. “Someone I know used to wear platform shoes with seven-inch heels, red satin pants, and a skin-tight T-shirt that said Surrender Dorothy in sequins.”
“That’s different.”
“Exactly what everyone else I knew said.”
“Hah-hah.”
Outside the living room window, nature resurrects itself, waking up and stretching with greenery. The slanted light of early evening provokes a scandal of leaves. A slight breeze stirs. The leaves flap in and out, a coy toss-up of new life. In and out. It seems to Trevor that his life has become little more than a series of ins and outs. In and out of the hospital. In and out of bed. In and out of doorways he’s too feeble to open by himself. Needles and tubes shoved in and pulled out of his body.
“Get this. It’s a quote from the waitress,” says Trevor. “‘I’m putting out some fresh dutchies when I look up and there’s Liberace staring at me. He tells me about Rock. Then he disappears, just like on Star Trek.’ Ow!”
“Sorry. Too hard?”
“Just a bit. I’d turn straight too, given a choice between that and a dead Liberace.”
Trevor folds the paper and puts it on the floor.
“Your uncle and I saw Liberace crossing the street in Palm Springs that winter we went to Southern California,” says Flo from the doorway. She steps into the room and rests a haunch on an arm of Mum’s wingback. “Diamonds on every finger. Flashy clothes. In broad daylight too. He did it long before your Elton Johns.”
Trevor and Doreen give each other a look.
“Sorry about earlier, Aunt Florence,” says Trevor.
“I don’t know. Queen of Heaven sounds pretty good to me,” says Flo. “It’ll give me some poker chips when I get there. If I get there.”
Trevor doesn’t say anything. He only believes in God or heaven when he’s having one of his dementia episodes or when the morphine peaks.
“Holy Jehoshaphat, it’s hot in here,” says Flo. She stands up and goes to turn down the wall thermostat.
“I turned it up for Trevor,” Doreen mentions quietly.
“Oh.” Flo stops awkwardly mid-stride, unsure of where to put her hands, unsure of what to say next. “Well. I just came in here to tell you kids dinner’ll be ready in ten. I guess I should have asked you, Trevor, if there’s anything you can’t eat.”
“Just food.”
Flo returns to the kitchen and Trevor adjusts the La-Z-Boy to organize his pills. Doreen passes him his cup of juice from the TV table. One by one, he pops a pill into his mouth and swallows a sip of juice until all eight pills are gone. Then he sits back and closes his eyes, relaxing into Doreen’s massage. Between the worlds of pain and peace is the purgatory of being alone. Sometimes Trevor finds himself standing at the brink of an inevitable horror like The Incredible Shrinking Man, who faces an expanding cosmos until he becomes so small, he is beyond the range of the most powerful microscope.
Trevor sits at the head of the table where he can see through the door into the kitchen. Doreen sits beside him. He absent-mindedly circles the outline of a leaf on the tablecloth pattern with his finger, round and round and round. Flo, humming a country song, bustles back and forth ferrying plates, bowls, and sauce boats, some to the sideboard, some to the table. Smiling absently, Emily drifts in with a pair of salad forks, bumps into Flo, and deposits them by the salad bowl. When they’re both out of the dining room, Doreen turns to Trevor.
“What’s with them?”
Trevor nods his head in the direction of the kitchen and Doreen leans over so she can see. Two empty wine bottles sit on the counter.
“They’re half cut,” Trevor says.
Flo re-enters with a condiment tray, moving her shoulders in time with the kitchen radio. She puts it down and leaves. Trevor watches her go to the top of the basement steps.
“Turn off that hockey. Supper’s on!” she shouts.
Murray, Ian, and Jack shuffle upstairs. They bring their hangdog expressions into the dining room and sit down where Flo tells them to: Murray opposite Trevor, Ian between Trevor and Doreen, and Jack beside Emily’s empty chair. Flo and Emily bring in a few more things and sit down. Flo, mindful of her hip, takes a seat close to the kitchen door, where it will be easier for her to be up and down.
“What am I thinking?” Flo exclaims. “I’ve left the Jell-O mold sitting on the counter, along with my head.”
Flo returns with the wobbly fish and sets it down in front of Trevor.
“Aunt Florence, you haven’t lost your touch,” he says, avoiding eye contact with Doreen. “It’s, well, lovely.”
As usual, Flo has made too much food. Vegetables vie for space alongside the turkey and dishes containing an assortment of Flo’s homemade bread, pickles, and preserves. An enormous butter pat skis down a mountainside of whipped potatoes. Green peas. Orange yams. Ochre mushrooms. Scarlet tomato chutney. Ruby-red cranberry sauce. Thousand Island dressing basks pinkly in a crystal bowl.
Doreen pours everyone wine.
“Who’s going to carve?” Flo asks with a self-satisfied glow from the spread she’s delivered, and a touch of vine leaf. “Since grace is out of the question,” she adds with a stern look round at the heathens.
Murray and Jack argue about who’ll perform the honours.
“We’ll flip,” says Emily, holding up a penny. “Heads or tails?”
She’s always been a settler of things, ready to dispense justice from her change purse. When Trevor and Doreen were kids, disputes were settled this way. Who would rake the leaves? Who would take out the garbage? Emily was a shrewd diplomat. She let the loser keep the coin. Trevor’s father chooses tails and loses.
“I don’t want it,” he says grumpily when Emily offers him the shiny, new penny.
“Oh Jack, really,” Emily says. She exchanges an aren’t-men-something look with Flo. “Take the damn penny.”
The buzz of an electric knife cuts through the room as Murray slices the turkey’s plump breast. Trevor watches him carve. He has always found his uncle sexy: the short brush cut that shows his scalp, the tattoo on his sinewy forearm, the way he lights his Export As with a lighter that looks like a beer bottle.
“White meat or dark?” Murray asks Trevor first.
“White meat, please.”
Everyone turns to him and smiles.
“White meat for Trevor,” announces Murray.
“He always did like white meat,” murmurs Flo.
“He’s never been fussy about dark meat,” Emily chimes in.
Doreen catches Trevor’s eye.
“I’ll have a drumstick,” Doreen says.
“Doreen always did like drumsticks,” says Trevor.
Doreen dollops potatoes onto Trevor’s plate. He shakes his head at peas and points at the mushrooms. The clatter of people passing plates and bowls seems to be taking place outside somewhere. Satellites of chewing noises and small talk circulate the table like the hum of tiny flies. Trevor sits in silence, staring at his plate, not touching a thing.
“You all right, son?” asks Jack.
“Trevor, honey?” Ian is looking at him.
“Yeah. I’m fine,” says Trevor. “Fine.”
Emily looks at Jack. Murray looks at Flo. Doreen looks at Ian. Trevor looks at Whiskers. The cat is at his feet, on the prowl for turkey.
“Can I?” he asks Flo.
“We don’t usually feed him from the table,” says Flo. “But what good’s a rule without an exception.”
Trevor gives Whiskers a piece of turkey from his plate, then another, then another. The cat leaps into his lap and curls up, purring.
Ian leans over and gives Trevor a peck on the cheek. “Love you.”
Doreen looks at Trevor. Emily looks at Flo. Jack looks at Murray. Whiskers looks at the turkey.
“Ian was quite the hockey player in university, he tells me,” Murray announces to Flo, to break the ice.
“When I was at Memorial,” Ian remarks through a mouthful of potatoes.
“His wrists might be limp, but his ankles are firm,” Trevor mentions.
“Trevor!” His mother chastises him with a glance.
“I was into figure skating when I was a kid,” Ian says. “That couldn’t be said about too many boys in Corner Brook at that time. The only guys who got away with being sissies were the priests.”
Ian chuckles and takes a sip of wine. Murray showers Flo with an I-told-you-so stare. She glowers.
“My older sisters took figure skating, so I wanted to, too. My folks hoped it’d be, y’know, a phase or something. When it wasn’t, they put me into hockey, thought it’d be an antidote. I spun circles around those guys. They didn’t know what to make of me. And let me tell you, them changing rooms. Enough to make a good Catholic girl like me blush right through her knickers.”
He winks at Trevor. “But Corner Brook was Corner Brook. It wasn’t very fabulous. They say still waters run deep but let me tell you, backwaters run deeper. I left, went to school, kept on with the hockey, the skating.”
“He was on the Olympic figure skating team,” Doreen pipes in.
“My folks changed their tune when I came to Halifax with the Disney on Ice tour. The whole fam damily showed up from Corner Brook and regions farther afoot.”
“Do you still skate?” asks Flo.
“I just teach now. The last skating gig I had was Legends of Hollywood on Ice at Canada’s Wonderland. That’s where I met Trevor, on a free day for PWAs. I guess it was, what, five years ago now. About that.”
Everyone turns to look at Trevor as though a curtain has parted. Suddenly Trevor feels the spiny fish attacking. He throws Whiskers from his lap. The cat scrambles beneath the sideboard. The spiny fish lives in his stomach. Trevor had hoped it wouldn’t show up tonight. He has to stop it from getting bigger. He breathes deeply and slowly. There is a brief jab of pain, then the spiny fish disappears into the shallows. Trevor excuses himself and goes to the bathroom.
It’s nice to be locked in. The white tile floors and yellow walls are spotless. Each tile reflects a shadowy Trevor. TV-commercial-fluffy towels wrap themselves around chrome racks. There’s something safe about bathrooms. It’s the one room that doesn’t judge you. He kneels before the toilet, a posture of habit. To his right is a wicker basket piled with copies of Chatelaine, Good Housekeeping, and Canadian Living. And an Atlantic Monthly. His mother must have left it behind. On top of the toilet tank sits a box of tissue covered with a poodle cozy knitted from synthetic yarn, with a pom-pom tail and googly eyes.
The spiny fish expands. It punctures him with reckless, hysterical fins. He bends over and throws up. He flushes. Trevor flips down the toilet seat and sits, placing his head between his legs to regain his equilibrium. The tile seems to echo his heartbeat. He slowly raises his head. He gets up with difficulty. Supporting his weight on the sink, he leans closely into the mirror. The Kaposi’s sarcoma is beginning to take hold outside as well as inside him. A fine purple web of cancerous skin is starting to show on the bridge of his nose. The spiny fish reaches the shoal of Trevor’s endurance again. He vomits in the sink.
There’s a knock at the door. “Are you all right?”
“I’ll be out in a second, Aunt Florence.”
“That’s okay, you just take your time,” she says. “There’s pie.”
Trevor leans against Flo, looking out through the Emergency Room window at the dark street. He rests his head on her shoulder. She strokes his hair. Suddenly the street lamps switch on. When he was little, he used to squint to make rays of light come to him. He thought that if he collected all the light he could, one day he’d turn into the most powerful person in the world. He starts to do that now, squinting to capture the light. And hold on to it. He takes his aunt’s hand. Flo caresses his forehead the way Ian usually does. He closes his eyes.
After dinner, everyone had herded downstairs for coffee. The 1950s Wurlitzer jukebox Murray got at the bus company’s annual charity auction was lit up. It revolved in a sequence of red, orange, blue, and green. The windowless room was like a rainbow. The jukebox was stacked with old 45s, which they played for a while until Murray persuaded Flo to sing for them.
She sat down at the 1-800 electric keyboard and started to sing “Goodnight Irene.” Her voice was not unpleasant. She was about halfway through when Whiskers came padding down the stairs.
The cat headed straight for the centre of the room, made a terrible noise, arched its back, and then threw up all over the rec room carpet. Flo had to stop singing to clean up the mess. The cat continued being sick until there was nothing left to be sick with. Shivering, it huddled under the hutch where Flo kept her good crystal, fine china, and a miniature Versailles of porcelain figurines resplendent in Rococo regalia: women wearing beribboned hoop skirts and floral bodices, holding flirtatious fans; men in frock coats and breeches, turning a leg to show off stockinged calves; and oh, the wigs and hats! Whiskers rallied for another surge, this time with an anterior trajectory.
Not too long after, Doreen started to complain about cramps, followed soon after by Emily, Ian, and Jack. They excused themselves, Doreen to the upstairs bathroom, Emily to the one in the basement. Jack and Ian dashed out the back door. Flo, Murray, and Trevor could hear them being violently ill. About half an hour lapsed. Everyone was still sick. Flo said she thought they should all go to the hospital, which wasn’t too far away. She wanted to drive but Trevor pointed out that she’d had too much to drink. Feeling a little better now, he was the only one sober and not sick. So, with Trevor at the helm of the minivan driving, Flo beside him praying, and the rest in the back clutching their guts, they headed to Surrey Memorial.
Trevor opens his eyes again and sits up. “When did you learn to play the piano, Aunt Florence?”
“The truth?”
“Why not the truth?”
“I’ve never told this to anyone. Not even your Uncle Murray. Only your mother knows.”
“Only my mother knows what?”
She tells him. When Flo was sixteen, she was pregnant. Her mother sent her to a special place for girls in her condition, far away. Delivery complications left her barren, but the baby survived. It was a boy, but she never got to see it. It was given up for adoption.
“They had a piano there. At the house,” says Flo. “The woman who ran it taught me how to play. Piano lessons took my mind off things.”
“Who was the father?”
Flo doesn’t say anything. She stares out the window.
“Jesus,” Trevor says under his breath. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Flo smiles and sighs, taking a tissue from her purse to dab her eyes. “You’re sorry. That’s a fine thing. With everything you’ve got to deal with.”
“Something I’ve learned, Aunt Florence, is that one person’s tragedy does not cancel out another’s.”
The night nurse comes up to them.
“It’s not life-threatening,” she says, smiling. “Just a bad bout of staphylococcus. It should pass by tomorrow. Was there something they all ate in common?”
“Oh, my Lord, the Butterball,” Flo exclaims. “I’m going to phone those people tomorrow and give them a piece of my mind.”
The nurse shakes her head. “It’s not from the turkey itself. It’s from the person or people handling the food. It’s a common bacterium. Most of us carry it.”
“Oh,” says Aunt Flo.
“The best advice I can give you is to give them lots of water and try to get them to rest.”
The whole family camps out at Flo and Murray’s. After everyone’s been settled in makeshift beds, Flo and Trevor go down to the den where Flo has laid out bedding on the sofa for Trevor.
“Aunt Florence?”
“Yes.”
“Will you play something for me?”
“Are you sure? You look exhausted. Don’t you want to get to sleep?”
Trevor gets beneath the covers and puts his head on the pillow.
“It’ll help me sleep,” he says. “It’ll take my mind off things.”
Flo starts to play Moonlight Sonata.
“That’s beautiful,” Trevor says drowsily.
“Oh, I don’t know,” says Flo. “I’m no Liberace.”