Chapter 18
Tulah at 17
Tulah’s Snow Journal
Wednesday, December 2, 1992 #34
This is a dusty snow. As if the snow has been cranked through a flour sifter. Looking across the city, it’s as if there’s smoke in the air. The snow on the ground is powdery as it accumulates. Grandma Frannie told me once that the Inuit had hundreds of names for snow, a hundred ways of looking at snow. I looked it up. Most credible sources say it’s no more than a dozen or so, but one of the articles I found said the Inuit word for a fine snow is “kanevvluk” and that the Inuit dialect has at least fifty-three, including “matsaaruti,” for wet snow that can be used to ice a sleigh’s runners, and “pukak,” for the crystalline powder snow that looks like salt. I like the lie better than the reality. I love the lie that there are hundreds of Inuit terms for snow. Why not? Why wouldn’t there be hundreds of ways to look at snow? Hundreds of ways to name it? They lived with snow and their lives depended on defining it. It’s logical. Maybe this is why the rumours exist.
Tulah and her sister are staying with their dad, at his condo, which is downtown. Alesha has gone to a movie and Tulah has been listening to Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You, over and over. It’s a boy named Colten, at school and she believes he doesn’t know she exists. She knows about him though. She talked with him once in grade 9, and she has written his name down on numerous sheets of paper, on the inside covers of binders, and once, on her arm.
Her dad knocks, softly, and comes into her room. His hair is sticking up at an odd angle at the back and his shirt is only half-tucked in. His hair never sticks up. It’s always just so. She wonders what he’s been doing. “I’ve got some bad news,” he says. “Grandma Frannie died. I just got off the phone.” His voice is cracked and uncontained, and at the same time, it’s soft, as if this softness will make the message less awful.
“What? She died?”
“She was sick for the past few years, and tonight she passed away.”
“But I just talked with her on Saturday. I talked with her two days ago… she was fine. She was fine.”
“I’m sorry, Tulah. She had a massive heart attack and they couldn’t...” He sits on the bed with her and she slips her hand into his.
Save her, Tulah thinks. They couldn’t save her.
Tulah does not think about the fact her father has lost his mother. She is trying to reconcile her grandma’s voice just days ago with the idea that today this voice is gone forever. She leans into her father’s chest and wraps her arms around him. They sit for a long time and let the silence fill the room without questioning it.
“I feel sad,” Tulah says. “But I don’t know what else to feel. I don’t understand how she can be gone now, when I just talked to her.”
“You can feel whatever you want,” her dad says. “You can take all the time you want to sort this out. No school for you tomorrow, unless you really want to go.”
Tulah can see the snow falling past her bedroom window and she wants to go out in it. She wants to say goodbye to her grandmother in the snow.
The funeral is delayed because there are people coming from Zurich, and a sister from London. Sorrow lurks in them and around them. It becomes a liquid they have to push through in order to do anything and it slows them down. Tulah’s mom is coming to the funeral. The designations of divorce are placed aside for death. Tulah and her sister like it that they will be a whole family for the funeral.
She does not go to school for the remainder of the week and because of her absence, Colten calls. He wonders if she’s okay and she tells him the truth – she is not okay about her grandmother – but she is happy he called. Colten tries to cheer her up by telling her about one of their classmates, Brendan, who lost his trunks in the pool at a swim meet. They came off when he made a turn-around, but he kept swimming. He won the race and had to stay in the water until his coach brought him a towel. Colten thought it was hilarious. Tulah thought it was courageous.
When Tulah was ten, she used to spend weekends with her grandmother, in her house near the river. Everyone in the family called her Grandma Frannie. On one of these weekends, they made a fire in the downstairs fireplace, steeped some tea and watched the snow. “People are always complaining about the snow,” her grandmother said. “And with good reason – it makes it difficult to drive, slower for sure, and people have to shovel it, and it’s usually cold when it snows. But snow can always make you feel better. Snow has a magic but you have to invite it. You have to make room for snow inside of you.”
“How do you do that?” Tulah said, thinking Grandma Frannie had made up a new game and they were about to play it.
“You touch it as it’s falling. Or you let it touch you. You open yourself to it and only then can you understand the magic.”
Then it is a Saturday afternoon in February and they are standing in the back yard of her Grandma Frannie’s house with the snow falling like feathers. They see the deer – three hazy ghosts, standing at the edge of her property, toward the river. Tulah and Frannie have made a deal with each other to be silent until they are back in the house and tea has been made. They are just going to look at things and not say anything. Frannie has been watching the deer for a while, but she lets Tulah nudge her and point at them – so the deer become her granddaughter’s discovery.
At the river’s edge they find the path and after twenty minutes, Tulah is cold. They are not moving fast enough to generate their own warmth. They stop at a place where a dog, or coyote, has crossed the trail and its tracks cut into the new snow. Chickadees are chirping in the pines and far back in the woods a raven is scratching the air with its caw. Tulah looks up at her grandmother, who nods and beckons with her head to go home.
Tulah breathes her tea – a spicy chai with milk and honey. She takes a sip. “Do you think the deer thought we were ghosts?”
The grandmother recognizes the question as a penetrating one. Her granddaughter did not have to say the deer looked like ghosts through the snow. She was already down a layer, wondering what they may have looked like to the deer. This makes her happy.
The last time Tulah saw her grandmother there was the persistent cough. She coughed, a lot. She said it was a cold, and Tulah had believed her. They’d gone to see the movie Unforgiven, and the elevators in the theatre were being repaired. Her grandmother had struggled with the climb – she’d stopped twice to catch her breath.
“It’s this damned cold,” she said. “I’ll be fine in a minute.”
Tulah puts this together after midnight, after talking with her sister about it. Grandma Frannie kept her illness to herself.
A few months after the funeral, Tulah’s dad tells her he’s dating someone in his building.
“The woman in 31-A,” he says. “She’s a doctor.” Her father acts like it’s a big deal, as if two years after the divorce, he’s not allowed to have a normal life and so he treads carefully.
“Good,” Tulah says. “Is she coming for dinner tomorrow?”
Her father steps back, astonished. He’s holding a head of lettuce. “I, I hadn’t thought about inviting her. You’re okay with that?”
“Dad. You deserve to be happy. Mom’s dated like ten guys since you divorced.”
Two years later, the doctor from 31-A and Tulah’s father are in France on vacation and decide to get married. With a week’s warning, they want Tulah and Alesha to come but Alesha is at a yoga retreat on Vancouver Island, so it’s just Tulah. She does not hesitate and her dad arranges a first-class ticket to Paris. There are a dozen people from all parts of the planet gathered in a cathedral in Mâcon, near the river. The ceremony includes the mass, and the dinner afterwards is rustic but delightful. They are in a café somewhere near the river and it is stifling hot, even at 10 p.m., it is hot. Tulah is moved by the ceremony, and by the simplicity of the reception. Her father and the doctor dance to The Way You Look Tonight and there is a joyful lightness to the evening that makes Tulah smile pretty much all night. Two days later, she is back at school and it all feels like a dream. Her dad and his new wife decide to split their time between Mâcon and a modest place in Phoenix, Arizona.