Читать книгу Incontinent on the Continent - Jane Christmas - Страница 10
ОглавлениеAlberobello, Martina Franca, Locorotondo
Rain was hammering the slate tiles of the trullo’s roof when my eyes opened the next morning.
I threw off the bedcovers, scrambled out of bed, pulled open the heavy wooden shuttered doors, and peeked through the glass. Fat drops were pinging, staccato-like, off the patio and the pool.
I unlocked then opened the door to embrace the warm Italian air, and a bitter blast of cold—colder than I had experienced over a lifetime of Canadian winters—shot into the room. I gasped and slammed the door shut.
I glanced at the floor, where the contents of my opened suitcase flopped over the edges, exposing their unsuitability: two bathing suits, capri pants, long gauzy skirts, sleeveless tops, strappy sandals. What was lacking were thick sweaters, wool socks, hip waders, mittens, and a hot water bottle.
I pulled on the only sweater I had packed—an oversized, sickly pale green garment with a deep V-neck, which I had thrown in at the last minute—and wandered down the hall to the living room. Peering out a small window past the rain and the dissipating fog, I was alarmed at how high up on a hill we actually were. The driveway wound frighteningly into an abyss and then rose up a sharply steep, rut-infested incline. It looked impossible to scale by foot, much less car. I could not believe I had driven that road in the dark without screaming in fear.
I padded off to Mom’s room.
“Well, it’s not the best day to start a holiday, is it?” said Mom as she peeked out from under a thick layer of bedcovers.
“Has the rain stopped?”
“I’m sure it’ll clear up soon,” I said with assurance. “This is southern Italy, after all. Let’s go into town.”
She did not seem pleased by this suggestion.
“Why?” she pouted.
“Because we just arrived in Italy,” I said impatiently. “Aren’t you curious to see the area? I’ll put on the kettle.”
She didn’t say another word and gamely struggled out of bed.
As we chowed down slices of a toasted baguette and tea in the kitchen, we could hear the low rumble of distant thunder.
“What time did you want to leave?” asked Mom.
“Now,” I answered. “Is that ok?”
“Well, no,” she replied primly. “It takes me a bit of time to get moving.”
“OK, how about five minutes?”
She winced.
“A bit longer than that. What I meant is that it takes me a while to get moving. ”
“Oh, right,” I said, catching the euphemism.
“I’ll let you know,” she said, and toddled unsteadily toward the bathroom.
I waited. And waited. Her morning ablutions took longer than my teenage daughter’s. I passed the time flipping through an English-Italian phrasebook.
My absolute favorite Italian word is “andiamo!” which translates into “let’s go!” It has such energy, enthusiasm, and optimism. When I am feeling full of vigor and anticipation I will say, “Andiamo!” I just love the sound of that word. I had the feeling that I would be using it a lot on this trip, but not in a good way.
An hour later Mom emerged from her bedroom, startling me out of a nap.
“OK, I think I’m ready,” she said. “Now, where did I put my glasses?”
Four more minutes.
She located her glasses and began rummaging through her purse.
“I was sure I had some Kleenex in my purse. Oh, where is it? Would you mind grabbing me some from the bathroom?”
One minute.
“I need my puffer. Let’s see. Maybe it’s in my purse.”
She conducted a forensic audit of the contents of her purse.
“Yes, I think it’s there. Yes. There it is. I really should clean out my purse.”
Two minutes.
“Now, do you think I should bring my cane or my walker?
Well, the walker is in the car anyway, isn’t it? I’ll bring both.
What else am I forgetting?”
“That I am impatient, perhaps?” I ventured.
She paused in the middle of the room, put a finger to her lips, and stared at the floor as her brain scanned the possibilities.
Two more minutes.
She suddenly straightened up and beamed, “Well, whatever it is, it can’t be that important.”
She shuffled to the front door and continued through it out onto the patio and toward the car. This all took another three minutes.
I followed her and paused at the door to find the right key to lock up. Three more minutes.
“What’s keeping you?!” Mom hollered from the car.
Once in the car, I turned the ignition. The seat belt signal promptly began to beep.
“Seat belt,” I said to Mom.
“Oh come on,” she tutted. “We don’t need seat belts here.”
“Yes, we do.”
“But it’s so uncomfortable.”
Her body stiffened as I leaned over her, wrenched the buckle and sash from the passenger side, and drew it across her chest, theatrically snapping the buckle into its mate and adjusting it for comfort, though, according to my mother, a seat belt can never be adjusted for comfort. Years ago, she once seriously considered cutting the seat belts completely out of her car because, in addition to being a nuisance—they kept getting caught in the door, she claimed—they were not esthetically pleasing.
My mind drifted back some twenty years to when I routinely strapped my toddlers into their car seats. Their bodies never stiffened; gosh, they were such compliant and agreeable little tykes, accepting without question the necessity of seat belt use.
I loved hovering over my kids in those days, inhaling the sweet smell of their fresh-washed hair and clothing or catching the twinkle in their eyes. Occasionally they would grab my hair with their chubby, clumsy hands and pull my face close for a kiss, then erupt into shy but victorious giggles.
But this was my mother, not my children. I smelled the familiar scent of her makeup, but it was not a moment that inspired playfulness.
I can’t say I felt entirely comfortable mothering my mother. What comes naturally to me as a mother does not come naturally to me as a daughter. The emotional distance that had been allowed to grow between us over the years had seen to that.
“You don’t have to baby me, you know,” said Mom sternly.
“I’m quite capable of putting on my own seat belt, thank you very much.”
She let out a sniff of disapproval as I double-checked that the buckle was secured. Like a practiced parent, I ignored the pout.
We drove in silence toward Alberobello along rain-soaked, narrow, winding country roads and rolling landscape for about five miles. We could barely see anything through the rain-splattered windshield.
I made a left turn at what appeared to be a main thoroughfare, and within seconds the sorts of buildings that signal the approach of civilization began to appear: a garden center, a few restaurants, a store selling ceramic tiles and flooring.
Nothing looked remotely open.
We pulled into a gas station, but no one approached us at the pumps. I got out of the car and wandered into the gas station’s café.
“Chiusa oggi. Tutto,” a young man behind the counter said brusquely, with a wave of his hand. Closed today. Everything. No reason was given. Italians take their closings very seriously.
“The town’s closed today,” I said to Mom when I returned to the car.
“Why?”
“Beats me,” I shrugged.
“But it’s Thursday!”
We drove up and down the empty streets of Alberobello.
There’s something unsettling about a town without any activity. Eventually, with a sigh of surrender, we returned to our trullo.
We retreated to our individual rooms and the warmth of our beds. I put my pajamas back on and added socks and the snot-green sweater. I scoured the cupboards and drawers for more blankets but came up empty-handed. How was it possible for Italy—my beloved, hot Italy!—to feel colder than Canada?
“Are you warm enough?” I asked Mom when I peeked into her room.
But her eyes were already shut.
THE NEXT day we took another stab at checking out the area.
Culture shock was no match for how utterly blindsided I was by a lack of all sense of direction. A road map was of no help because it did not show the numerous small country lanes that shot off in various directions from the main road. At least I assumed it was a main road.
We dutifully followed the road signs to the nearby town of Locorotondo but, despite our efforts, ended up in another town, Martina Franca. Dumbfounded, I glanced down at the map in my lap. I had no idea how we ended up there, much less how we would find our way back.
At least there was some action in Martina Franca. We inched through the busy streets filled with small cars. Elderly men and women wandered in and out of traffic.
“Oh look!” cried Mom. “A church! Stop! I want to go in!”
“It’s hard to stop here, Mom,” I stammered, checking my rearview mirror and swerving to avoid an oncoming car.
“There’s traffic piling up behind me. You get out and go in. I’ll try to find a parking spot.”
“You just passed a parking spot,” she said. “Why didn’t you park there?”
“What spot?” I said, turning my head just as a small car deftly slipped into the vacant space. “How am I supposed to look for parking spaces and concentrate on driving in a foreign country?”
“You’d notice them if you stopped being so grumpy,” she replied flatly. “Now stop the car.”
In the middle of the street I jammed the car’s gear into neutral and pulled on the emergency brake.
Mom flung open the passenger door (without looking first to see if another car or someone on a bicycle was approaching; luckily, neither was) and laboriously maneuvered herself out of the car. Meanwhile I sprinted to the rear of the car, lifted the hatch, and unloaded her walker. I could feel the impatience of Italy boring into my back as horns tooted their irritation at this nervy pit stop.
Normally when this happens, and I am possessed by the moral superiority of knowing that there is a very good reason why I have stopped the car, I launch into a small rage that involves certain fingers and unladylike language. But something prevented me this time. Perhaps it was the old man behind the wheel of the car that was nosing my rear bumper. I did not have the words to fire at him—well, not Italian words.
Instead, I watched Mom persevere to the sidewalk, slowly raise her walker over the curb, and set off with great effort for the church.
“Dear God,” I muttered. “Please shoot me before I reach that stage of life.”
I got back into the car and began searching for a parking space, creeping along a dense labyrinth of streets. Upon circling the block I spotted—aha!—an empty spot close to the church where I had dropped off Mom. I pulled in—and it took all my skills to shoehorn the car into the space without scraping off the paint on my car or the cars on either side, I might add. After congratulating myself I squeezed out of the driver’s side, locked the car, double-checked that the car doors were indeed locked, and then turned toward the church, just in time to see Mom walking toward me.
“I thought you wanted to see the church,” I said.
“I saw it, said a prayer; it’s a lovely church,” she said. “Let’s go.”
Gee, when I pray I feel obliged to tell God that He might want to pour Himself a large coffee and settle into a comfortable chair. My prayers are rarely brief.
Low stone walls lined both sides of the two-lane highway back to Alberobello. Ahead, a hilltop town came into view. An impressively ancient white stone church dome and bell tower hovered behind a whitewashed stone wall bordering terraced fields. The town was Locorotondo.
We followed the signs to the centro storico and by some fluke wound up in front of the same town hall where we had first rendezvoused with Chris a few nights earlier. Across the street, people were milling around tables and stalls arrayed with brightly colored goods.
“I’ll bet that’s the market,” I said to Mom. “I’ll let you out here, and once I find a parking spot I’ll catch up with you.”
I stopped the car to let her out, then jumped out myself to unpack her walker from the back of the station wagon, set it up, and help her and the walker mount the curb. Then I got back into the car and drove off in search of a parking spot.
We had only been in Italy a couple of days, and already I was resenting the responsibility of driving and parking. Usually when I travel, I am free as a butterfly. I am more likely to be on foot and can stop and start, linger or jet off when the mood strikes. Not on this trip. I was responsible not only for my mother and her walker but also for our rental car, for finding our way around, for negotiating things in Italian, for deciding the itinerary, for, hell, even when and where to eat. I have on occasion been characterized as a control freak (usually by an ex-husband), and my reasonable response was always, “Well, someone has to be!” But truthfully, the accusation was patently unfair. I would kill—kill—to be led around by the nose for at least a week or so and have someone else take control of the day-to-day responsibilities.
By the time I caught up to Mom, she had already scuttled halfway through the market. She and that red walker of hers can really fly.
The market was crammed with vendors selling every conceivable item: clothing of questionable style and vintage, plastic bins, small appliances, leather or leather-looking purses (I was not tempted to take a closer look), duvets and comforters sporting large, unattractive floral patterns in faded pastels, and various household gadgets that, while likely useful, lacked esthetic charm.
Mom and I stood out like greenhorns among the legion of local women, some who were weathered of face, with kerchiefs tied under their chins and dressed in Italy’s national color— black, others who were younger and wore smart-looking jeans but who, if such facial expressions as narrowed eyes and furrowed brows offer a window on a person’s lifestyle, endured hardworking lives and scant resources. They wandered by the stalls, casting looks of profound indifference at the wares displayed, occasionally poking and prodding an item as if taunting the vendors, who would then leap to their feet and launch into their sales pitch, which most certainly included the phrase, “Today, everything is 30 percent off.”
In this crowd my mother was easy to spot. She wore beige slacks with a matching zip-front jacket. She was the only blonde in the crowd—Italian women dye their hair dark until their dying day—and she was pushing a metallic-red walker, a rare and novel contraption in these parts judging by the number of turned heads.
Picking up the scent of fresh ignorant tourists, the vendors upped their volume and come-ons. Some made endearing attempts to speak English in the hope of coaxing Mom and me closer. I was tempted to try out what small amount of Italian I knew, but any skills I possessed (or even thought I possessed) now seemed patently inadequate.
We were making our way along the narrow concourse of stalls when we came upon a small medieval church in the middle of a small piazza. We were about to enter it when my ears pricked up at the sound of two women speaking English. I sidled closer to them to be certain my ears hadn’t deceived me and then dove onto them as if they were long-lost relatives.
“You speak English!” I said, with perhaps a tad too much enthusiasm. A raft of questions tumbled from my mouth. “Can you explain this place to us? Why do entire towns shut down midweek? How do we find our way around?”
The women were from Scotland but had been holidaying in these parts for many years, the jolly one with dark hair, protruding teeth, and a chubby smile told me. The other, of slight build with spiky, gray hair and a severe expression, never spoke.
“We’ve just purchased a trullo,” the chubby one gushed in a thick brogue. “We’re getting ready to renovate. We saw the plans yesterday.”
I congratulated them. Buying and renovating property in a foreign country requires a definite leap of faith.
“You must be very good with the language,” I said, privately entertaining fantasies of their taking Mom and me under their wing for the duration of our stay in Alberobello.
“Oh, we’ve been coming here for fifteen years and we still can’t speak Italian,” the chubby one giggled. “Just say to them, ‘Il mio italiano è poco e male.’ It means, literally, ‘My Italian is small and bad.’ ”
She sounded the phrase out slowly and deliberately and prompted me to repeat it. She must have been a schoolteacher.
“What’s with the weather?” I asked. “I thought southern Italy was warmer than this.”
“It is chilly today, isn’t it?” she said, pulling her sweater tightly around her big bosom. “You should have been here last week. It was seventy-five degrees and beautiful.”
That sentence would be repeated many times during our trip. I wished the women well and headed off to find Mom, who had wandered away at some point during the conversation.
When I located her, she was poking around a stall that sold kitchenware, and was holding a plastic spatula as if considering its purchase. I gently pried it out of her hand and placed it back on the table.
“How on earth were you able to converse with those women?” Mom asked.
“They spoke English, so it wasn’t too difficult for me,” I answered.
“That didn’t sound like English to me.”
We walked a little more, but Mom was now tiring.
“Had enough?”
She nodded.
“Then let’s go home.”
I steered her toward a rendezvous point and accompanied her across the street. Then I took off to get the car. In my absence, the parking lot had devolved into a hodgepodge of vehicles parked at random angles. There was nothing remotely organized about the arrangement. It looked like someone had given Stevie Wonder the authority to park cars.
I located my car, boxed in by an old, faded-red Fiat, and before I had time to react, an elderly man came hobbling quickly toward me, got into the Fiat, and moved it out of the way. I gave him a wave of thanks, but he had already scooted off to find another car to block.
I eased out of the lot—how I managed not to scrape every vehicle in the vicinity remains a mystery—and drove to the prearranged corner of the market area to pick up Mom. I threw the car into park, pushed a button to pop the trunk, jumped out, opened the passenger-side door for Mom, grabbed her walker, and folded it up and wedged it carefully into the trunk, then returned to the driver’s seat, did up my seat belt, and prepared to drive off. In the amount of time it took me to accomplish all those small tasks, Mom had managed to lift one leg into the car.
Adjusting to the pace of someone at least ten times slower than normal speed made me feel as if I were in a perpetual state of slow motion. It drove me mad. I held back the urge to snap, “Andiamo!”
Leaving Locorotondo, we slipped out onto the rural roads and headed toward our trullo, relying solely on instinct and vaguely familiar landmarks as we sailed through a sweep of empty pastures, ancient olive groves, vineyards, and farmland. In a distant field a lone, bent figure with a scythe methodically thwacked around the edges of his property while a small brush fire burned. Smoke curled from the chimney of a modest home. Those were the only signs that anyone was about. It was an eerily empty countryside.
Then a movement indicating life materialized on the road ahead. Coming toward us was a man on horseback. I eased up on the gas pedal.
He was a handsome fellow—I’m referring to the man, not the horse—well into middle age and elegantly attired in the chaps and fitted tweed jacket favored by lords of the manor. He looked not to have a care in the world as he swayed confidently and languorously on his steed. One of his brown-leather- gloved hands clutched the reins, and the other was raised to his ear: He was chatting merrily on his cell phone.
As we passed he gave us a smile and a wink.
“See?” harrumphed Mom. “Even he has a cell phone.”
THE RAIN and cold persisted, and within days Mom had developed a worrisome bronchial cough. It was so bad that I wasn’t sure whether to be concerned that she would develop pneumonia or that she would have a stroke brought on by her constant hacking. The worry and the hacking kept me awake at night.
Early one morning, shivering from cold and heavy with sleep deprivation, I peeled off one of the blankets on my bed and took it to Mom.
Knock, knock. No answer. I rapped again a bit louder. Still no answer. Finally I opened the door a crack. Mom was lying on her back, staring happily at the ceiling, occasionally coughing. She had obviously not heard me enter. I gave a little cough, but again she didn’t hear.
“For God’s sake, get a hearing aid, woman,” I said. Still she didn’t hear me.
So I shut the door quietly, then knocked quite loudly and opened it noisily.
“Hi there!” she said, turning her head toward me.
“I couldn’t sleep,” I said. “I brought you another blanket.
Your coughing kept me awake.”
“How did you sleep? I bet my coughing kept you awake.”
“Yes,” I replied wearily.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I didn’t sleep well either.”
“Can I get you anything?”
“Well, I need to take my blood-sugar reading. The diabetes, you know.”
I fetched her kit from the bathroom.
“Can you help me up?” she asked, extending an arm.
I pulled her five-foot-two-inch frame up and helped her swing her legs around to the edge of the bed. When she was seated, her feet just grazed the floor and swung slightly, like a child’s. A surge of protectiveness welled up in me.
“Let me show you how I do it,” she said, eagerly opening her diabetes kit.
It has come to this, I thought, as I took a seat beside her on the bed. Watching my mother prick her finger to extract blood for a diabetes reading was now passing for entertainment on my Italian holiday.
She pricked her finger with a tiny needle, which automatically drew a small amount of blood and registered the reading on the kit’s lcd display.
“Five point four?” she gasped, taking a closer look at the results.
“Is that bad?” I asked with concern.
“It’s incredible!” she said. “It’s never been that low. I wonder what I’m doing right!”
“You should get back into bed,” I said. “So you don’t get cold. We won’t go out today. I’ll bring you some tea.”
I sauntered into the kitchen and put on the kettle. As I waited for it to boil, I spied Chris, the property manager, by the pool. It didn’t matter that it was freezing outside or raining; Chris kept the pool in pristine condition. I was aching to use it.
“The weather’s an aberration,” he said, anticipating my question when I joined him on the patio later. His brown, short-spiked hair was damp. “You should have been here a week ago.”
“So I’ve heard,” I said.
“How’s your mum doing?”
“Not so well,” I said. “She has a really bad cough. The trullo is freezing.”
“Did you crank up the heat?” he asked.
“I wasn’t sure whether that was something I should tinker with,” I said. “Are there any more blankets?”
“Loads more,” he said. “I’ll show you where they are. And let’s get the heat going.”
I received an unnecessary primer on the workings of the thermostat—honestly, I know how they operate—and was shown the stash of blankets piled in the cupboard that was under lock and key—a key that was, incidentally, not among the half-dozen or so Chris had given me.
The sound of Mom’s coughing came from behind the bedroom door.
Chris looked at me with alarm.
“I really should get her some cough medicine,” I said. “Is there a pharmacy nearby?”
“Let me drive you,” he said. “I’ll show you a shortcut.”
I was grateful to be a passenger for once and let someone else do the thinking.
As for shortcuts, well, call me a pessimist, but they do not exist in Italy. Chris’s “shortcut” turned out to be a more circuitous and convoluted route than I could imagine. By the time we reached the pharmacy—and I could not tell whether we were in Martina Franca or Locorotondo or even Italy for that matter—I was thoroughly confused and disoriented. Had Chris asked me to find my own way home, I might still be driving.
The farmacia was a snug, rather precious shop with a white marble counter that spanned the width of the premises. Behind it small glass bottles and boxes and jars of every size and shape were neatly arranged on a wall of white shelving. A brass scale and a white marble mortar and pestle sat on the counter. I wasn’t sure whether those items were there for show or for actual use, but it was all charming nonetheless.
In front of the counter there was just enough space to accommodate a handful of people, and several were there when we walked in, waiting impatiently for their prescriptions to be filled. They hurriedly shuffled closer to close the gaps in the queue. Judging by the looks on their faces I would say they all had something terminal.
When our turn came, Chris spoke softly in Italian to the pharmacist, asking for cough syrup. I nudged Chris and asked him to add some Vicks VapoRub to the bill, but the pharmacist appeared to understand, because he produced a jar immediately. I paid the bill and we left.
“I’ve got to stop off and get some nappies for our baby,” said Chris as we exited the farmacia. “Do you mind?”
“Absolutely not,” I said. It would give me a chance to pick up some groceries. I hastily assembled a list in my head, beginning with wine.
Once the errand was accomplished, we left the town and drove back to the trullo, passing dozens of these adorable abodes along the country road. There were stucco-clad trulli and tufo stone trulli; some domes sported finials in the shape of a ball, while others had a more fluted shape. Some trulli were close to the road; others were situated in distant fields.
Thousands of these adorable buildings dot the countryside of Apulia (it’s actually called Puglia now, but I prefer the more historic appellation), and they have been under unesco’s protection since 1996. Recently, some of the restrictions governing trullo restoration and renovation have been lifted. I thought back to the Scottish women we had met in Locorotondo, and wondered how they would fare with their Italian trullo.
I asked Chris about the hobbitlike homes.
“Oh, they’re popular with the Italians, too,” Chris said. “They’re just waking up to the fact that trulli are a part of their heritage. Nobody ever takes their history seriously until people from another country come and snap up the real estate.
“In fact,” he continued, “people in this area tend to use the trulli as holiday homes. Believe it or not, some people have a holiday home only a few miles from their regular home. If you see a lot of trulli boarded up, it’s only because it’s early in the season. Even the locals find them damp and cold at this time of year. But by summer—and believe me, the heat is hellish around here—a trullo is the coolest place to be.”
Chris returned me to our frigid trullo, which was looking more like an igloo to me than a Mediterranean home.
“I brought you a treat,” I said to Mom when I returned to her bedside.
“Oh goody! What?”
I placed the Vicks and the cough syrup on her pine bedside table. With a jazz-hand flourish I gave a little “ta-da!”
She looked profoundly disappointed.
“Did you have fun?” she asked.
“Well, as much fun as you can have buying cough syrup and Vicks VapoRub in an Italian pharmacy,” I said.
She sat up in bed, and I plumped the cushions for her.
“I’m amazed how you go out and just get things,” she said.
“Well, I didn’t this time,” I said. “Chris drove me. And he spoke Italian in the pharmacy on my behalf.”
“Tell me about the pharmacy. What was it like?” she gushed excitedly, as if I had just returned from an expedition to Katmandu.
“It was what you’d expect. It was small and had lots of bottles and potions. It wasn’t like our drugstores in Canada.”
“Oh,” she said blankly. I got the impression that she was hoping it might have provided a potential shopping excursion for her later in the week.
“Did you have a sleep while I was gone?”
“Not really; I was lying here thinking about when I was a little girl, about when I was a rebel.”
“A rebel? You?”
My mother’s idea of rebellion is wearing white before May 24 or having a shot of sherry before noon.
“Once upon a time I was,” she said. “As a teenager. Oh, I was a bad girl.”
This should be interesting, I thought.
“Being a rebel doesn’t make you bad,” I offered as I sat on the edge of her bed. “What made you a rebel?”
“Well, I rebelled about joining Hungarian social activities and about dating Hungarian men,” she said. “I refused to date a Hungarian, and my parents got so upset with me.”
Mom had immigrated to Canada from Hungary with her parents when she was a youngster. By the time she hit her teens, her mind was made up that she was going to be part of wasp society, and that meant marrying a wasp. All her friends were Anglo-Saxons; she had no time for the marriageable sons of her parents’ friends.
“One day, a Hungarian couple dropped by—they were friends of my parents—and they demanded that my parents force me to date or at least talk to their son, who was about my age. I was so angry and I refused to go out with him.”
“What did Granny and Grandpa do?” I asked.
“My dad, luckily, forgave me, but my mother wasn’t so easy,” said Mom. “But I didn’t care—that was her problem. I was set on marrying a Canadian.”
At age eighteen, she had moved to Toronto and begun working as a reporter for the Canadian Press, quickly catching the eye of a blond, blue-eyed fellow reporter.
In 1952 the union of a Canadian-born Anglican and a Hungarian-born Roman Catholic was considered a mixed marriage. My parents were not allowed to marry in a church, and instead were wed in the modest clergy office of Saint Gregory’s Roman Catholic Church in Oshawa. I was born a few years later, and my brother eighteen months after that.
I was fascinated by my mother’s Hungarian Catholic heritage, but it was a subject that was not discussed outside our home. My young and fertile imagination determined that this was because my mother was a spy, a thought that was amplified whenever I heard her and her kin speaking Hungarian.
I was amazed, proud in fact, at how my mother could toggle effortlessly between English and Hungarian. To the average North American in those days, Hungary was a vaguely gray, heavily shelled Eastern Bloc country of people who used paprika when they cooked. To me, it was exotic, mysterious, and dangerous. At family gatherings, one of my mother’s cousins would roll up his pant leg to show off the bullet wounds he received from the Russian soldiers in 1956 when he and his young bride were escaping on their bellies through a farmer’s field during the Hungarian Revolution. A little thrill would rise up in me whenever he recounted that story, and I would sit on the floor, my arms clasped around my knees, and beg for more details.
On rare occasions my mother would allude to her heritage proudly. “Don’t forget the definition of a Hungarian,” she would remind me. “A Hungarian is someone who goes into a revolving door behind you and comes out ahead.”
My mother rarely talked about her past, either because there had never been time to do so or because she didn’t think it was interesting enough to share with me. But her anecdote about refusing to date the Hungarian couple’s son was an eye-opener for me. When I was growing up, she would despair at my single-mindedness, and yet here she was relating an episode that illustrated a much stronger will than mine. Why don’t parents ever notice themselves in their children, and why do they have such a hard time cutting their kids some slack? Perhaps for the same reasons we have such a hard time cutting our parents some slack.
I was about to voice this observation, but she interrupted.
“Now you, you are too permissive a parent,” she said, pointing a crooked finger at me. “You need to drill into your children about not getting involved [that’s Mom code for “not having sex”] with nonwhites. I can be flexible now—they can marry Europeans, but they have to be white Europeans.”
I imagined sharing this news flash with my children. When they were much younger—long before they were near dating age—they would return home from a visit to their grandparents and inform me of their Nana’s strict rule about dating nonwhites.
“She said she would cut us out of her will if we did,” they would say in earnest little voices.
Still, my mother is entitled to her opinions and prejudices like everyone else. Not wanting to get into a heated argument about it, I replied, “My children’s preference for a mate is really none of my business. I know you think it should be but it isn’t, nor will it ever be. I do not control their sex lives.”
“I DON’T WANT TO IMAGINE ANYONE HAVING SEX!” Mom shouted. Then, in a softer voice, “Has it stopped raining?”
