Читать книгу Sunday Drive to Gun Club Road - Marion Quednau - Страница 8

At one time, when owning a car was still a big deal, and gas cheap, land even cheaper—you could buy acres of the stuff, with scrub trees and a gouged-out gravel pit, for a song—taking a drive was the classic pastime. Or so my father once told me. On Saturday, he said, it was the kids’ job to wash the car for the big outing, flinging soap bubbles at one another, earning their paltry allowances. Sunday you got behind the wheel after filing out of church, pressed by something you couldn’t name, as though you had to make a run for it, get somewhere and fast. If you took to the back roads all that blather about salvation that had hurt your ears while the smarmy priest droned on and on would just fly out the window, my father said. He liked to joke about things.

Long after churchgoing had fizzled—the white clapboard husk of St. Mary’s on our street mainly stood hollow and empty, only a few blue-hairs straggling in to pray for people like ourselves, spiritually lost—my family still had the habit of hitting the road. It was nearly the end of a century famous for gas guzzling and wasting time between wars, but we had pent-up energy on Sundays to get going, to be somewhere.

I thought of our aimless trips along the shimmering roads as one of those wavy pencil illusions when you waggle your fingers just to impress yourself because nobody else cares. Or like some head-hurting math problem: How long will it take this family to reach any sort of destination, given a few random detours, like us nearly hitting a bear cub once, my mother shrieking, “Oh for the love of Martha!” and the grim fact that the car burned oil, constantly needed topping up? Our being together in a moving vehicle was an act of faith, one my father believed would assign us a history, save us from being unremarkable as a family. We’d go zooming down some potholed country road, in any old direction in any blunted weather, and simply stare out the windows of our old clunker Oldsmobile as if we were watching our favourite TV show, The Passing Scenery.

After a few hours of looking for God knows what, we’d stop somewhere, maybe at an old diner called the Hilltop or the Rendezvous, one of those places still serving real pie or big milkshakes from a noisy retro blender on the counter. And for a while that became the gambit: finding just such a homey place, with pan-fried potatoes and my father’s old faves, creamed chicken on toast or fried liver with onions. Once we drove south of the line to some hole in the wall near Snohomish, Washington, but a cop pulled us over for rubbernecking, as he called it. Asked us what our business was, the state trooper not nearly as friendly as our Canadian Mountie sort. He didn’t laugh when my father asked, “What, do we look like potheads?” So we stayed north of the border, looking for sudden roadside rewards, what we seemingly deserved.

It couldn’t be fast food—my father had no patience for the overly sweet slop that all tasted the same. “You call this pathetic little morsel a burger?” he’d said once, the girl behind the takeout window sliding it shut on his fingers. It was part of my father’s shtick to be a food critic, an everything critic. I had this odd feeling he wasn’t just trying to entertain us, but to show us something that needed watching.

I noticed he never complained about my mother’s cooking; she always packed a few things with a chunk of dry ice in the cooler, sandwiches with fatty deli meats, her gloppy potato salad, a few pieces of nearly spoiled fruit. In good weather we’d find a picnic spot and chow down, kick a ball about for a bit. Listen to the birds or watch someone chasing a headlong dog, trying to call it back.

I don’t remember how the house thing started. More than once my father rolled down the window, took a deep breath, and spoke of getting a farm, growing our own food, that whole back-to-the-land thing where enterprising sorts could be smarter than the average joe, self-sufficient. He taunted my mother with leaving his job—but after the look of alarm on her face he left that topic alone. He’d worked for the railroad since forever, new technologies and old decrepit trains making his stints as signal man or conductor, yard master or bridge inspector ever more erratic; he’d been transferred more than promoted, that’s how my mother put it. Still, he stood to get a decent pension for all the runaround. So maybe they were both thinking of the future, how it could look different when we went toodling along some gravel road north of nowhere.

I know the first time we wandered into one of those public showings of houses that needed selling—and fast—we were hooked. By the risky notion, perhaps, of people’s hopes so exposed. As if someone might buy six rooms and a specialty koi pond or flagstoned breezeway on impulse. Or maybe with a vengeance, like a drive-by shooting. Something simmering in the back of their minds, a kind of reckoning.

We’d scoff and roll our eyes at the so-called staging of rooms, the frayed and faded objects that might describe a particular family tucked away in cupboards while flowers swayed in vases, kitschy plaques saying There’s No Place Like Home or Be Free as a Bird hung over a scorched fireplace that had stopped burning wood eons ago.

“Those signs are majorly annoying,” my sister Amy piped up after we’d had our fill of crescent-shaped moons in bedrooms promising Sweet Dreams or paddle-shaped folksy art saying Beach when we were nowhere near water, or even worse, when we were—the house on a jutting cliff with no way down to the Pacific rolling in below. “Sweatshop-made by kids barely old enough to go to school in some burb in Bangkok or Shanghai. And they don’t—go to school, I mean. They just make shit like that for rich people to close deals on houses. It makes me sick.”

She was going through her idealistic, clean-up-her-act phase. But my mother told her she shouldn’t swear in front of my younger brother, a gnarly eleven-year-old stuck between his sisters in the back seat, reading crime comics and laughing giddily at some murder gone wrong.

To my mind, the near-empty, freshly scented rooms with lavender-painted walls without scuff marks or cobwebs in the corners looked hokey, sure, and you’d hit your shins on the glass coffee tables if you actually lived there. But the fake-fancy stuff wasn’t nearly as depressing as the cluttered houses: tons of grandchildren’s photos and knitted dealies over every chair, obviously the hangout of old folks about to move into rest homes. Or maybe even keeled over, suddenly dead and gone. It made me sad to think the knick-knacks might be all that remained of their lives, ceramic cock-a-doodle doodads for holding spoons, amber glass ashtrays from when it was still cool to smoke indoors and give your newborn a stroke from all the fumes.

My sister Amy was good to have along on these outings, because she was more and more obviously expecting. Her soccer-ball tummy with its pierced belly button poking out of her shortie T-shirts made people think we were serious, maybe even desperate, about this house-buying business. Not just kicking tires.

My dad laughingly called her condition “knocked up,” despite my mother frowning and saying it wasn’t polite—or even respectful—to Amy. She said it as though good manners and leaving someone to make their own mistakes were two different notions.

“It used to mean woken up, someone banging on the shutters to get you out of bed, back in Shakespeare’s day,” my father replied. “And in that sense I would say Amy is well and truly knocked up.”

He chortled again, because he always found himself amusing. And expected us to be onside, or else he got hurt feelings like a big kid. So my mother’s tight laugh, just to keep him company, often started ahead of the punchline. She was an appeaser, if not an outright enabler. Hitler might have been worse if she’d been his mother.

“Who’d live on Gun Club Road?” my father protested after we’d traipsed around a living room with lumpy wall-to-wall carpet browning at the edges, and bedrooms with no sheets on the beds. Just bare mattresses. As if the name of the road had made someone move out in a big hurry. Monster truck repossessed, and the deadbeat renters walking a fine line between petty theft and real crime.

“Yes, that one’s definitely out,” my mother agreed, as if they were actually discussing the pros and cons of the neighbourhood.

There was another open house just one street over, on Marble Road.

“I have a hunch that old crook of a realtor is a hard-core closer on deals with leaking basements and parasites under the laminate flooring,” my dad said when we left the place with complacent smiles on our faces and headed to our ages-old dinosaur of a car. I mean, the car alone should have given us away.

“Too Italian,” my mother said of the kitchen, “and I don’t get the big shift toward granite counters. They stain like crazy, red wine, fruit juices, you name it. Besides, I don’t like my kitchen to be too show-offy.”

“Yeah, the place was a little over-the-top,” I agreed. “As if a cheap rancher can look like a villa near Rome. More like the fall of Rome. Ha ha!” I was starting to sound like my joke-a-minute father. Trying too hard.

There was a front-seat discussion then about where the best granite came from, whether from eastern Canada, Quebec, my mother thought, or some quarry in India or Brazil, my father countered, where they don’t have to deal with the environmental rigmarole. “The poor souls mining the stuff die of lung diseases from all the dust,” my father added, as if he were suddenly the greenest guy on earth.

“Who was it that said luxury should feel like comfort?” my mother asked, waggling her head around in small circles, as though her neck might be kinked by all of our far-fetched travels.

“Coco Chanel,” my sister offered. “And it must have been an afterthought, ’cause she had a shitty life, despite all the parties on the Riviera and the glitzy jewels. Never found her happy place.”

It was something Amy had read in her fashion mags, no doubt.

I could see my mother wanted to curb Amy’s blunt language again, but she changed the shape of her mouth and her mind along with it, suddenly admitted she was uncomfortable with this whole thing.

“What whole thing?” my father asked.

“Taking our shoes off and tiptoeing around people’s private spaces. As if we were looking in on their lives and finding them lacking. Judging books by their covers, so to speak.”

My mother was master of the blurt, saying something offhand that was really a warning in disguise. It was the only way she could get anyone’s attention. As if she’d said something impor­tant by accident, and never mind her.

“What—you think we should leave our shoes on?” my father said, trying for a laugh.

“No,” my mother said. That was all. But there was a sparking in the air, like when you forget to rip off the foil before putting an instant dinner in the microwave.

“Well, the notion of an open house,” my father continued, “is clearly an invitation.” He could feel the sting of her reproach, no matter how slight. “These wiseass realtors are daring folks to be enthralled about the rotten wiring in the basement or the deck that needed replacing years ago. I can’t believe some of these places and the prices they want. The realtor always saying he’ll have to check on the actual bona fide lot line, or that we can add on in the future, when he’s just BS’ing us. It takes a certain nerve—so we shouldn’t feel bad. Far from it,” he added, just so we all got the point.

But my mother didn’t quit. I had to admire her sudden show of spunk.

“The last realtor was a woman,” she said quietly, “who answered your questions quite handily, I thought.” My mother was clearly doing some daring of her own.

My father said nothing more, just firmed up something in his jaw and kept his eyes on the road.

I wanted to fix it between them, agree with my mother’s old-fashioned common sense and still run with my father’s bluster. I have to admit I liked looking at other people’s updated bathrooms, with their little baskets of different coloured soaps, or their so-called great rooms, with faux-leather couches and rugs sporting the bright colours of a cheap trip to Mexico. The gas fireplaces with fake logs lighting up at the press of a button, the spacious sofas with oodles of throw cushions at just the right angles, not too heaped in a pile and not too scattered. I felt relieved to see houses that shiny and polished, like a neat ending to a story, not like our house, always under construction with one of my father’s notions to expand the front porch to something bigger than a welcome mat, or to make the extra room in the basement into a separate suite for Amy’s incoming squawker. As far as I knew my father liked tearing things down, not so much building them up again.

Every now and then we would find a few upscale places in our searches, in recently tree-shorn neighbourhoods called Eagle’s Watch or Bonnybrook Place, the homes bigger and newer, more costly and out of reach. My father was getting ideas on the road, he would say to us. “Of what not to do, hardy har har. Like those fake mullioned windows, with their chintzy little plastic inserts? Give me a break.”

“That’s good,” my mother said, humouring him again, as though what had briefly reared up between them was settled. It felt endless, relentless, as if we would always pile into the old Cutlass on Sundays and look for a promising aspect to the landscape, a house perched on a knoll as though it belonged, something that would make us stop, take our shoes off, tread lightly in the sacred spaces of other lives. Then turn around and go home to our so-called character house of cracked stucco with fake Georgian mansion pillars, the furniture all mismatched hand-me-downs, every room crammed with failed intention to sort or paint, to feel less dissatisfied.

On one of our Sunday jaunts an elderly couple took a particular shine to our whimsical family, in which we all played our parts. My brother, when he got tired or hungry, started acting half his age. Six at best, all whiny and crumpled. So at the umpteenth house of that day’s touring—“it is a gracious house, with good bones,” the realtor insisted—my brother said aloud, in a hectic voice, “Why aren’t there ever more people at these things? I don’t get it. Why are we the only ones?”

My father took him aside and said just as loudly, in his typical swashbuckling style, “You know, son, at an open house down near Dallas, Texas, way back in 1952, they offered free Dr. Pepper soft drinks to all comers, and a Cadillac to the lucky buyer of any brand-spanking-new house in the suburbs they were building. And you know how many people showed up? Thirty thousand. Thirty thousand. Now that was hoopla!”

My brother was looking blank and his stomach was gurgling. The owners of the house—they hadn’t vamoosed, like you’re supposed to—brought out a plate of tired Oreos. I swear there was dust on the cookies. But my brother dove in.

They were a sad-faced look-alike pair, like John and Yoko, as if people found a certain sameness in a face made them feel more at home with a stranger. Or how people come to look like their droopy-jowled dogs, so maybe this pair had once had a hound or something. All I know is that they hovered, that was the only word for it. Seemed to be assessing the possibilities as we moved from room to room in our stockinged feet and poked at window ledges, flipped light switches on and off.

And they told us things, private things not generally admitted to prospective buyers. How a baby had died in the house in the early years. And how the house itself, with its grand old front porch and radiators hissing in every room, had seemed to shore them up, give them the constitution required to carry on. They’d never had another child—had lost their nerve, so to speak. But the creaking staircases and Victorian gables housing the memories of the child had seemed enough to care for, to inhabit.

“That’s why it’s never been on the market, up for grabs. But since my husband’s stroke, well, he needs so many visits to the hospital, we’ve decided to move close by, have an apartment for the time being. I mean, enough time has passed, it feels as though someone else could care for… our Jimmy,” the woman said, her sparse hair permed to a frizz that made her seem fraught, still.

The realtor, who’d been pacing in another room, clearly chagrined with the off-the-rails sellers, had finally broken things off with a spiel about new soffits and a dandy energy-saving gas furnace about to be installed.

“Whoa,” my dad said, when we hit the car. “That was some sales pitch. And it never seemed to occur to them that Amy is—in the family way,” he said, gloating at my mother with his eloquent language, “and might not want to hear that sort of thing.”

“People in their grief,” my mother muttered.

“I would like to know how the dead baby got that way. I mean, dead,” my brother the private detective said, now that his blood sugar was restored.

“What, you think arsenic in his mashed peas? Or maybe they locked him in a toy box for using bad words until he turned blue in the face?” I asked, trying to pique my brother into acting normal for once.

“They didn’t say his age,” my mother broke in, tartly. As if we were finally, after all these years, getting on her nerves. “But he was a baby, they said, so too young to speak much at all.”

Our surmising of rusted swing sets and choking on food grew disinterested by the time we reached the next open house with blue balloons swinging merrily from a tree branch, a windswept sign promising Free Coffee!

“That’s made up my mind already,” my father said, giving way to his usual mirth. “Yum, yum. Something on the hot plate since early Jurassic times.”

The winding pathway to the house had the sweet smell of rotting pine needles and twisted tree roots all set to trip you up.

“This entrance doesn’t lend itself to bringing in the groceries,” my sister said. She was starting to sound eerily like a mother, all warning and worry.

And then she suddenly doubled up, made an argh groaning sound, as though someone had just stabbed her in the stomach. She straightened up again, her eyes tearing.

“Wow, that was a doozer,” she stammered. “A burning flash in baby town—as if I just swallowed a shot of brandy on the tip of a knife.”

She had some potential as a writer, I thought just then. It would be something to kill time while she breastfed. And breastfed.

My father took her by the elbow. As though he would gladly walk her down the aisle if only he could find any reputable young man my sister had never yet met.

I had to wonder how many shots of brandy my sister, at sweet seventeen, had swallowed. And with whom? The mystery father? She’d never said who it was, had just burst into tears of rage—it looked like to me—every time the subject came up. Boys of high school–dropout age didn’t usually tipple brandy in snifters. So someone of my father’s ripe old vintage? The thought gave me a coy twisting of innards. As though I could feel the kid inside my sister wiggling, insisting the truth come out in a big sloppy plop.

The house didn’t have an easy flow, my father said, pointing to a long dark corridor branching off to a series of small, shadowy rooms.

The realtor was young, full of ideas. “Yeah, I agree. You could knock down a few walls and really open up the space.” He smelled of nervous sweat and sprucing up with cologne and my sister started to look a little green in the face.

“We’re going outside for a spell,” my mother said. “Fresh air.”

I could see them through what the realtor called the retro picture window in the low-ceilinged living room. And the picture wasn’t pretty. My sister was throwing up in the rock garden, splashing the plants with her plumes of roadside picnic lunch. Always too much salt and mayo, you could count on it with my mother, no matter what the menu.

As distraction, my father led the young fellow toward the kitchen, which smelled of mould and fake-lemon cleaning agents. “So what about drainage?” he asked, looking up the sloping backyard to the neighbours’ back fence looming above, as though the house being pitched as a mid-century, cute-as-a-bug rancher might lie in a gulch or river bottom.

I gave my dad the high sign when my sister had disappeared back toward the car, holding tight to my mother’s arm.

We went out the back way, so the realtor my father later called a shifty-eyed young grifter wouldn’t see my sister’s display over the hydrangeas. Or smell it.

“Ah, a carport,” my father said. “A notion from gentler times.”

I knew what he meant, though the realtor looked stymied. I’d once asked my father why garages were the first thing you saw with so many newer houses. And he’d scoffed, as if he couldn’t believe the way the world was heading, and said “security,” so people could go straight from their locked cars into their locked houses, no fuss, no muss with someone skulking around. I realized I’d been at risk my whole life, getting off my bike in plain view and entering the house by the side door.

“Well, thanks so much,” my father said, shaking the realtor’s sweaty hand. “Sorry we don’t have time for the coffee. We’re late for a showing.”

“Oh, oh… here’s my card,” the jumpy guy offered. “Barry—if you have any questions.”

My father put the car into high gear, spurting gravel as we departed.

“Feeling any better?” he asked into the rear-view mirror.

“Not much,” my sister murmured. Her face was a ghastly grey, with none of that peachy motherly glow.

“I think it’s a sign,” my mother said, looking directly at my father’s right ear.

“That we should skedaddle home? Call it a day?”

“That we should stop doing this—dropping in on a whim. When we have no intention of ever buying any of these… places.”

She seemed to be blaming him for something, but I couldn’t tell exactly what. A lurid affair came to mind, the kind of secret dalliance that would rear up in the movies and bust a family wide open. But it would have to be a woman as generous as my mother in laughing at bad jokes. And doing it naked, which was highly unlikely.

Everyone in the car went silent, felt strangely alone in a crowded Oldsmobile smelling ever so faintly of throw-up. My sister was slumping toward the window, pressing her cheek against the glass, the passing scene suddenly struck with bleary spatters of rain.

My brother was cracking his knuckles loudly and making that growly sound in his throat he does when he’s trying to stem one of his stupid questions.

“But what would we do—I mean, on Sundays?” He couldn’t help himself.

My father sighed a long flubber of an out-breath, sounding like a snorting horse. He seemed to be at a loss for words, which surprised me. He couldn’t exactly spell it out, he finally said, how the trips we’d taken were an investment of sorts, in a common vision. But he seemed to be hinting at the fact that we might otherwise be in trouble as a family, might all go our separate ways if not for our playful considerations of this mud room or that in-law suite. He seemed to be saying that our sightseeing ritual was our church without the church, our roadside redemption.

That was when I noticed the bright stain seeping out from beneath my sister.

“Shit,” I croaked out. “Amy’s bleeding all over the seat!” Her head was bumping against the glass by now and she didn’t seem to care.

My father did an about-turn and drove like a crazy man toward the hospital only a few minutes to the south. He blared his horn at red lights, green lights and intersections with no lights at all, and gestured with his hands off the wheel at dithering pedestrians, my mother with her head out the window, screaming, “We’ve got to get to the hospital! Get out of the damn way!”

I’d never heard her swear before so I knew this was serious.

They took Amy on a stretcher straight from the car, while my clueless brother thought to note aloud that it was just like an ER drama on TV, except in real life. My mother gave him a horrified look, as if to say, “Whose child are you?” So he clammed up while my father paced in the waiting room. My mother tried to look at magazines, but I could see her eyes lifting and peering into the middle distance, measuring something.

Amy pulled through, of course she did. She’s a tough cookie, as my father would say, which doesn’t always sound like a compliment. But the poor little jelly mold of a baby didn’t make it. It pissed me off, because I’d already spent nights and nights, while falling asleep, trying to name the kid I would probably be babysitting.

And I kept revisiting those houses we’d looked at and talked about. They came back to me, one by one, in that near-dream state when your mind whirls with possibilities. The family room in a big so-called cottage, with a stone fireplace, the wood stacked neatly beside, ready for flaming. The kitchen nook in another, with its bench seating, like a picnic mood dragged inside. The teensy view of the ocean beyond, its glimmer of light through a dark fringing of woods.

We no longer take Sunday drives, it’s true. But we bought a house, a real beaut of an old-timer with hardwood floors and fancy coved ceilings. The one with the dead baby. It has a great backyard with stately old trees where I hang suspended in the saggy old hammock my father strung up. And now, as a family joke, we call Amy’s sad day her Jimmy. Use that day as a marker, to hold our places. Although it’s not a name I would have chosen.