Believe Me Read online

Lately, Bernice had been more adamant than ever that she wasn’t too good, but that we could not, under any circumstances, come to see her. She didn’t want us to witness her all swollen up and wheezing, with her white hair tufted and askew. She knew we would let her carry on this way indefinitely, shooing us off with remarks about airfare, hell-bent on recovering her health and dignity and returning home to make meat pies. But Dana’s phone call was unprecedented—who knows how she even got our number? After hanging up, Calvin and I sat at our kitchen table, he with a can of Double Diamond and me with some merlot in a juice glass. We eyed each other and allowed: here’s the shit, and here’s the fan.

  A prolonged silence followed. Easily five minutes. I listened to our neighbor’s Great Dane barking. The couple next door began shouting, which came through the wall in muffled sing-song tones. They’re a pair of Italians who argue easily and almost impersonally, whereas Calvin and I, being equal parts repressed Catholic and reticent WASP, do not clash with angry voices. Instead, we ineffectually stab at one other with pointed looks. An escalation in conflict between us entails moving from sighs and dueling eyes to unheralded refusals to do things around the house, like washing the dishes or serving a more appetizing meal than Tuna Helper.

  I wouldn’t recommend this to other couples as a strategy for marital combat, if only because it depends upon the other person actually noticing. Once, when Calvin was mad at me for staying out until dawn with some friends, an entire fortnight went by before I realized that he had ever been mad at me, and this anger was the reason he no longer took out the garbage.

  On the subject of his ailing mother, we engaged in a knock-down, drag-out exchange of looks rendered absolutely electric by our shared guilt.

  “You, you, you,” I jabbed at him with piercing eyes. “It’s your mother. If my parents were sick, I would be with them in a flash.” Of course, that was easy to say since they lived about ten blocks away in robust health.

  “No, you,” he retorted by way of a glare.

  “Why me?” My eyes flashed. The new mommy had been elected to care for the old one? Is that what he was saying? The dog carried on outside, barking pompously at nothing. I poured another cup of wine. Glanced at my watch. Sighed loudly, and finally broke the silence: “Come on, Calvin, there is no one else to see her through this, and it’s almost Christmas.”

  Bernice’s sister Shirley had gone down to Florida for the winter, where she was deeply involved in the Jacksonville Golden Years Bingo tournament. President of the organizing committee. A sudden revelation of purpose, after life-long drift. As much as she loved her sister, she knew Bernice’s history of hypochondria and would need to see a death certificate before she’d abandon the action.

  “Don’t you think your mother needs family?” I asked. “If not hanging around keeping her company, then at least to find out what’s actually wrong with her?”

  Calvin laid his head down flat on the table, so that the cowlick in his nut-brown hair popped up and danced to and fro. When he gazed up at me again, his eyes were misted over, the closest he’d ever come to tears. “I can’t deal with my mother,” he muttered, “not this soon after Dad.” Stan died—boom—from a heart attack right in the middle of the Stanley Cup playoffs just this past May. Still spry and self-sufficient up to that point, and then off he went, without preamble. Living, reachable by phone, chuckling at Bernice, and then gone. Calvin had to organize the funeral, which Bernice refused to attend, bawling that she couldn’t bear it. Calvin never talks about it now, although at the time, he told me how strange it was, to walk home from the hospital with his dad’s spectacles in his pocket, thinking, what should he do with them, should he donate them, and then realizing, stopped rigid on King Street, that they were now the most useless things in the world.

  The way I have come to understand these things, a scant five years into my relationship with Calvin, is that lovers take turns getting haunted and freaked out by the challenges that life scares up. It’s only fair.

  The following morning, I booked Lester and me a flight.

  3

  I have only ever been in hospital twice. Once, to come into the world all soggy and squalling, and the next time to usher in my son. In neither case was my stay long, so I was intrigued by the idea of Bernice sharing a room with several incapacitated roommates, all of whom took great interest in one another, as if they were girls at boarding school.

  Life in Room 12 was a multi-generational affair. In addition to Julia and Bernice, there was jolly Aileen—who went on a package tour to the Yucatán and managed to fall off a Mayan pyramid, which apparently happens to several tourists each year. She had smashed her knee in her tumble down the side of the ruin, and after immediate care by Mexican doctors, wound up here to recuperate.

  Aileen was sixty or so, and shared her side of the room with Celia, who was only twenty-five. Celia had gotten married the previous summer, and her young husband, Joe, came to see her twice a day, bringing Chinese food and DoodleArt posters, with a fresh box of markers each weekend. She always looked up at him and smiled with grateful love, as if she could not believe that a man would take such a leap of faith as to entwine himself with an invalid. Celia was in chronic pain from an unsuccessful scoliosis operation, a procedure she was preparing, once again, to endure.

  Lester had taken to sitting cross-legged on her bed, coloring his socks with her markers. I sat on a little fold-out chair beside Bernice, who alternately dozed, stared about dully, wept, and gossiped about everybody else in the room. When a nurse wheeled Julia outside and downstairs for a smoke, Bernice whispered to me loudly that Julia was the richest pensioner on Cape Breton Island.

  “That bed cost her twenty-five thousand dollars!” she exclaimed, hauling herself up to a sitting position with the zest of her conviction.

  I wondered whether to point out that the richest pensioner on Cape Breton Island could probably buy themselves a private hospital room. But I was just there to listen, I felt. Being a coal miner’s widow, Bernice was not familiar with what wealth could afford, and drew her own conclusions. The yardstick she tended to use was the purchase of appliances. If you had a pressure cooker, but you also bought a microwave oven on sale at the Mayflower Mall, then you could walk with your head held high. Dana had just acquired a deep-fryer, which raised her considerably in Bernice’s estimation. Carol, her next-door neighbor, had a portable paper shredder, which put her on a par with the queen of England.

  “Does she have a lot of papers to shred, do you find?” I asked in puzzlement.

  “It’s all them forms from the government,” Bernice explained.

  I nodded. Julia with her inflatable hospital bed was the ne plus ultra.

  In a way, this subject of appliances was a difficult one for me and Bernice, because I didn’t have any. Calvin and I were paupers, without a waffle-maker to show for our strivings, and she knew that. So she stepped lightly around the subject, trying her best not to upset me by prying. Since she couldn’t think of what else to ask me, there tended to be gaps in her sense of who I was. She still called me Nancy, for instance, which isn’t my name.

  “It’s Frannie, Mum,” Calvin had told her repeatedly. “Nancy’s your cousin in Montreal.”

  “Oh, Lord in Heaven, I’m sorry,” Bernice would say. And then do it again the very next time we talked.

  Celia had produced some cerise nail polish, and was carefully painting her nails. She had agreeably dabbed bite wounds on the ribs of Lester’s plastic triceratops first, and he was playing with it now, plunging it into death throes in the tangle of her sheet.

  “You got a date today, hon?” asked Aileen, gazing up from her paperback novel.

  “Joe’s pickin’ me up in an hour. He’s takin’ me to the Cranberry Nook for lunch.” Celia looked pleased, but she had deep shadows under her eyes, and a sheen of perspiration on her forehead.

  “You need any help?” I asked.

  “Naw, I’m okay,” she demurred. Then she thought about it, waving her
nails dry. “Actually, maybe you could help wheel me to the bathroom to do up my hair?”

  The harsh bathroom light was unflattering to both of us. Celia looked twice as ill, and I looked fat. The smell of disinfectant was nauseating. I ran a brush carefully through her lank brown hair.

  “You know,” she said, somewhat tentatively, “I had asthma real bad as a kid, and it never swelled up my legs.”

  I nodded. Bernice’s explanation for being in hospital was somewhat akin to my claiming that the reason I had put on weight was because I had rickets.

  Celia peered up at me in the toothpaste-spattered mirror, her head gently bobbing backwards as I brushed. “What does Dr. Richardson say about her taking sick like that, with asthma?”

  “I still haven’t seen him,” I said, smiling, and Celia rolled her eyes and murmured, “My God, that man should not earn a paycheck.”

  “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this,” she added, “but Barbara told me that Bernice had arm cancer.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  Actually, for years, Bernice had told everybody she had arm cancer, which—I explained to Celia—doesn’t exist, technically, as a medical condition. She had struggled with breast cancer about a decade ago, and had had a radical mastectomy to wrench herself free of the disease. Ever since, she had chosen to interpret everything from stomach acid to the knotty cysts of old age as cancer’s return. This had made chatting with her by telephone every Sunday from Toronto a somewhat surreal experience. In most families, I am assuming, news of terminal cancer gets broken only once.

  The time she reported an inoperable liver tumor we canceled our plans to attend a friend’s wedding in New York in order to go out to see her. The liver cancer, however, either never progressed or was entirely invented, for it ebbed out of her monologues some months later, supplanted by the announcement that she had cancer in her neck.

  I got so used to Bernice’s baffling declarations, interspersed as they were with increasingly wild suspicions about Dana thieving her lawn ornaments and Archie the yard man conspiring to steal her new Garden Weasel, that it all became a blur. It was impossible to suss her out. After Stan died, Bernice rarely left her house, only venturing into Sydney to shop at sales, as enervated yet compelled as a starving hunter heading into the jungle. She blamed her inertia on coughs and colds and headaches and dizzy spells. In the grip of her aging and her fear, she could not be persuaded to come to see us in Toronto.

  “Oh no, dear,” she said to Calvin, turning his invitation down once again this summer. “The only places I’m headed now are Mayflower Mall and the grave.”

  Calvin and I are not take-charge people. We tend to be more the run-away-in-bewilderment type. It’s nice to share traits with your life partner, but in this case something more complementary probably would have come in handy. Calvin’s disinclination to deal with his mother had to do with having grown up with her. But I rode with it—“What? You aren’t going to insist that we spend the holidays in New Waterford with your mother talking about arm cancer?”—and I never pushed Calvin to go.

  I couldn’t explain all of this to Celia. It was my own problem, I figured, the bad-daughter-in-law guilt I was feeling now like a whup upside the head.

  “You look pretty as a June rose today, hon,” Aileen exclaimed when I wheeled Celia back out of the bathroom sporting a lopsided french twist. She lit up and said: “Oh go on, I’m young, that’s all you’re jealous of.”

  “You got a be-oootiful bun,” Bernice piped in.

  “Don’t know what good it’ll do me,” Celia complained, “with this pain I’m feelin.’”

  “Least you had a honeymoon before you come in here,” Julia muttered. “Charlie was the first Cape Breton Highlander to go over to It’ly and the first to come back in a chair. I never got to have the you-know-what, not all my life, I never had a spasm.”

  There was a moment of shocked silence in the room, then Celia and I brayed with laughter. When you’re ninety-three, what the hell do you care? Is that not so? Maybe you’re thinking that you’ve been good all your life, and you’ve gained entry to the Kingdom of Heaven. Now you can safely rue what you’ve missed.

  4

  On Wednesday afternoon I spotted Bernice’s doctor leaning against the counter of the nurses’ station, not thirty feet away. “Oh! Dr. Richardson!” I shouted, like a winning contestant on The Price Is Right. He didn’t hear me. I began to trot forward. Richardson was eighty-four years old, and he creaked about in buffed black shoes, stoop-shouldered and shaky. He had a hearing aid, which drove Bernice up the wall because, in her view, it lent him a false sense of confidence. She couldn’t project her voice any more, and between her ailment and his deafness, they tended to have exceedingly peculiar conversations. The last time I was out here visiting, I observed an exchange between them that went something like this:

  “My arm cancer’s spread, hasn’t it?”

  “Alarm? No, no, no need for alarm, Bernice.”

  “Am I done for then, or not?”

  “Oh no, oh no, I haven’t used camphor as a medicine in years. We’ll give you something much more up to date, Bernice, don’t you worry a’tall.”

  Dr. Richardson would go down with the Regional, that was the consensus. No use hiring someone new when the place had been slated for closure by the provincial government. He had acted as New Waterford’s GP for sixty years, and now presided over the emergency room, which would be highly alarming in Chicago or Toronto, but less so here, since everyone knew that Dr. Richardson presided over the ER, and paramedics took real emergencies to the hospital in nearby Sydney.

  I tapped him on his bony shoulder, so that he turned away from Barbara and regarded me uncertainly through his glasses.

  “Dr. Richardson, I’m Frannie Mackenzie, Bernice Puddie’s daughter-in-law?”

  “Ah yes, ah yes, nice to meet you.” He replaced his pen in the pocket of his white coat and offered me his trembling hand.

  “I’ve come out to see her from Toronto and … but I’m not actually sure what her diagnosis is. So—” I smiled apologetically.

  He interlocked his fingers and held them at chest level.

  “I beg your pardon, dear?”

  We were two doors down from Bernice’s room. I was extremely disinclined to speak up.

  “What is wrong with my mother-in-law?” I asked, raising my voice one tense notch.

  He smiled vaguely, and I wasn’t sure whether he had heard me, but then he opined: “She’s not too good. Not too good. I’m afraid the chickens are coming home to roost.”

  “Are you saying that her cancer has spread?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  I shut my eyes, crossed my fingers, and achieved something slightly less conspicuous than a bellow: “Has her cancer spread?”

  Celia reappeared from the patient snack room with Lester, who was sipping from a cup of Coke the size of his head. They started toward us.

  “Bernice’s best days are behind her. It’s safe to say that the crows are gathering on the wire, it is certainly safe to say that.”

  “Mommy, there’s a bee in the snack room, I saw it!” Lester bolted toward me and, in his excitement, slipped and did a face-plant, spilling his Coke, which spread out in yard-long rivulets. By the time I had rescued him, toweled off his pants, dried his tears and replaced his drink, it was safe to say that Richardson had flown the coop.

  5

  “Can we have Kentucky chicken?” Lester asked as we passed by the franchise on the way home from the Regional.

  “You know what? You’ve had that for the last two nights. What you have to do, small boy, is vary your diet. If you don’t eat fruit or vegetables you won’t grow.”

  “Why?” He kicked the back of my seat with his Blue’s Clues boots, fidgety.

  “Because you can’t grow tall and strong on french fries. You need other things too.”

  “Like pie?”

  I pulled the car into Bernice’s driveway and turned off the ignit
ion. I didn’t want to go into the little aluminum-sided house, empty as a motel suite. “I’ll take you out for supper, but we’re not going to Kentucky Fried Chicken. We’ll go to the tavern part of Room with a Cue.”

  In the cavernous, half-filled pool hall, Lester ate a grilled cheese sandwich and finger-painted with his ketchup, while I drank beer and gnawed on my predicament. The unexpected confusion was making me tense. What was I bracing Lester for? What was I going to tell Calvin, who was recording an album at the CBC studios in Toronto with his new jazz trio consisting of marimba, violin and kazoo? What if I had to stay here indefinitely? How could I deal with all the contingencies with no real information? I was very close to blurting out to Bernice, “So, are you dying, or what?” Which would have obliged me to flee New Waterford at once.

  Could we airlift her to Toronto like sedated livestock on a sling? That seemed shockingly cruel—import her to a more convenient milieu, and set up a death watch for her on the futon. But the alternative was to move here. To pull up Lester’s tender roots and mine, quit my job and hunker down against a cold Atlantic wind that reeked of coal. There are things you can do for the people you love that are harder to contemplate for people who call you Nancy.

  I signaled the waitress for another Moosehead lager. Of course, I could pull it off if I had to. Motherhood had taught me nothing less. I could have my work sent to me, and edit at Bernice’s kitchen table. The question of home-editing the Dandelion Review—Canada’s only bookreview monthly—from out here was only an issue when it came to thinking about what to do with my son.

  I had tried working at home when Lester was smaller, and really, I did not understand the meaning of the word “hampered” until I began taking business calls with a fifteen-month-old underfoot.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, Ms. Mackenzie, this is—”

  “Will you excuse me for a moment? Lester! Take that out of your mouth right now. Spit it out.”