Shortly before Larry’s thirtieth birthday he managed to get enough money together for a down payment on a small house over on Lipton Street, a handyman special, just five rooms and a glassed-in front porch, and now he spends most evenings and weekends working on it. He and his wife, Dorrie, moved in two months ago, and ever since then she’s been after him to lay new tiles in the kitchen, and after that there’s the bathroom fixtures to replace, and maybe some ceiling insulation before winter comes along. A list as long as your arm. But this summer Larry’s been using every spare minute to work on the yard, sometimes with the help of his friend Bill Herschel, but more often alone. Might as well do it while the weather’s still good, Larry says. And he wants the whole yard closed in so Ryan can play out there next spring, unsupervised.
He’d be working at it today, only his folks have invited him and Dorrie and the baby over for the birthday festivities. Sunday dinner, opening his presents from the family, blowing out the candles, the usual. It’s 1980; he’s about to enter the decade of decadence, only he doesn’t know that yet, no one does; he only knows he feels the good hum of almost continuous anticipation in his chest, even though Dorrie griped all the way over to his folks’ place about how they were probably going to have a hot dinner, gravy and everything, when here it was, the bitch end of a sizzling day. Her own idea of hot weather fare is a big bowl of ice-cream and a glass of iced tea.
A brutal bored silence had fallen between them these last weeks.
A mere three years ago he was a young buck walking down a Winnipeg street in his shirt-sleeves. He remembers how that felt, no wife, no kid, no house, no yard. Now the whole picture’s changed, but that’s okay, especially his kid, Ryan. Another thing: he’s supposed to be sunk in gloom at the thought of turning thirty, but he isn’t. He’s unique and mortal, he knows that, and he’s got this sweet little babe of a house, and a yard that’s slowly taking shape, all its corners filling up with transplanted shrubs from the wholesaler down in Carmen. There’re some flowers too, and a few sweet peppers, but it’s mainly the shrubs he loves. Dorrie keeps calling them bushes, and he keeps having to correct her. “You’ve got shrub mania,” she says, but her lips smile when she’s saying it. “You want to be the shrub king of the universe.”
Maybe it’s true. Maybe he wants to make his yard a real shrub showplace. Somewhere Larry’s heard that almost everyone in the world is allowed one minute of fame in their lives, or maybe that’s one hour.
Stu Weller, Larry’s dad, got written up once in the weekend section of the Winnipeg Tribune on the subject of his corkscrew and bottle-opener collection, which included 600 items at the time of the interview, and has almost doubled since. Larry’s older sister, Midge, won a thousand dollars last year in the art gallery raffle – enough for a trip to Hawaii with a girlfriend – and she actually appeared on Channel 13 talking about how surprised she was, and how she didn’t usually waste money on raffle tickets unless it was for a good cause like expanding the gallery’s exhibition space or something.
Larry’s own moment of fame is still some years in the future, and that’s fine with him. He’s got enough on his mind these days, his young family – Dorrie, little Ryan – and his job at Flowerfolks, and his current preoccupation with transforming his yard. As for his mother, Dot, she’s had enough celebrity for a lifetime. Don’t even talk to her about being famous, especially not the kind of fame that comes boiling out of ignorance, and haunts you for the rest of your life. Dumb Dot. Careless Dot. Dot the murderer. Of course, that was a long time ago.
When Larry was a little kid his mother warned him about the dangers of public drinking fountains. “No one ever, ever puts their mouth right on the spout,” she said, “because they can pick up other people’s germs, and who knows what kind of disease you’ll get.”
This was bad news for Larry. At that age he liked to stand on tiptoe and press his lips directly on the cool silvery water spout, rather than trying to catch the spray in his mouth as it looped unpredictably upward. Besides, his mother’s caution didn’t make sense, since if no one ever touched the spout, how could there be any germs? He recalls – he must have been six or seven at the time – that he presented this piece of logic to his mother, but she only shook her headful of squashed curls and said sadly, wisely, “There will always be people in this world who don’t know any better.”
He pictured these people – the people who didn’t know any better – as a race of clumsy unfortunates, and according to his mother there were plenty of them living right here on Ella Street in Winnipeg’s West End: those people who mowed their lawns but failed to rake up the clippings, for instance. People who didn’t know any better stored cake flour and other staples in their original paper bags so that their cupboards swarmed with ants and beetles. They never got around to replacing the crumbling rubber-backed placemats from the Lake of the Woods with “The Story of Wood Pulp” stamped in the middle. That was the problem with people who didn’t know any better: they never threw things away, not even their stained tea-towels, not even their oven mitts with holes burnt right through the fingers.
People who didn’t know any better actually ate the coleslaw that came with their hamburgers, poking it out of those miniature pleated paper cups with their stabbing forks. Someone, their well-meaning mothers probably, told them they should eat any and all green vegetables that were put in front of them, not that there’s anything very green about coleslaw, especially when it’s been sitting in a puddle of wet salad dressing and improperly refrigerated for heaven only knows how many days. These people have never heard of the word salmonella, or if they have, they probably can’t pronounce it.
Whereas Dot (Dorothy) Woolsey Weller, wife of Stu Weller, mother of Larry and Midge, grandmother of Ryan, knows about food poisoning intimately, tragically. She was, early in her life, an ignorant and careless person, one of those very people who didn’t know any better and who will never be allowed, now, to forget her lack of knowledge. She’s obliged to remember every day, either for a fleeting moment – her good days – or for long suffering afternoons of gloom. “Your mother’s got a nip of the blues today,” Stu Weller used to tell his kids while they were growing up in the Ella Street house, and they knew what that meant. There sat their mother at the kitchen table, again, still in her chenille robe, again, when they got home from school, her hands rubbing back and forth across her face, and her eyes blank and glassy, reliving her single terrifying act of infamy.
Even today, August 17th, her son’s thirtieth birthday, she’s remembering. Larry knows the signs. It’s five-thirty on a Sunday afternoon, and there she is, high-rumped and perspiring in her creased cotton sundress, busying herself in the kitchen, setting the dinner plates on top of the stove to warm, as if they weren’t already hot from being in a hot kitchen. She’s peering into the oven at the bubbling casserole, and she’s floating back and forth, fridge to counter, counter to sink. Her large airy gestures seem to have sprung not from her life as wife and mother, but from a sunny, creamy, abundant girlhood, which Larry doubts she ever had. She smiles and she chats and she even flirts a little with her thirty-year-old son, who looks on, a bottle of cold beer in his hand, but he knows the old warnings. Her jittery detachment gives her away. She picks up a jar of pickles and bangs it hard on the breadboard to loosen the lid. She’s thinking and fretting and knowing and feeling sick with the poison of memory.
This my mother, Larry thinks, my sad soft mother. Most of her life has involved the absorbing of her grievous history, of trying to go forward when all this heaviness lies inside. One ancient mistake, one hour gone wrong, and now she pays and pays.
She’s a housewife, Larry’s mother, a maker of custard sauce, a knitter of scarves, a fervent keeper of baby pictures and family scrapbooks, but this is her real work: sorrowing, remembering. The loose shuttle of her pain flies back and forth so that sometimes she seems just fine, just like anyone else’s mother. Today she’s made Larry a lemon meringue pie for his birthday instead of a cake; she could have made it yesterday and kept it on the top shelf of the fridge just under the freezer section, but with her history she wouldn’t dream of taking a chance like that, and who could blame her? Her anxieties about