In My Fucking PrimeIt’s not that summer grew tired of her fragrant clothes, went off in a snit and returned rebelliously without color, head to toe, a winter nun. A serious stoic. I’m sure there were fazes in between—like that decadent one when she shed all her clothes, all, and became autumn. And later mourned; maybe she had gone too far taking those blunt scissors to her hair to compliment her nakedness, crying for her bareness including her hair. Like late autumn, when it rains and rains and the dank wetness penetrates your bones, she cried like that. And then she grew cold, after all those tears, yes, there are always clues, turning rain to snow the way it does every year and did with Garth and me. Except we still have those glorious winter days like the ones in St. Agathe when my grandfather in his shirt sleeves sat on those metal and royal blue striped canvas folding chairs on the veranda overlooking his vast snowed-in garden and the lake, the sun bathing his skin, transforming it to ruddy brown, that sweet shade I have grown to love.
I was going to write about not knowing when things started to go really wrong with Garth and me. I was going to slide in leaving the girls to shack up with him and how his young son with the curly auburn hair called me Mama. And now his young son is overweight and has his head shaved which Garth says is Talon’s mother’s doing since she thinks it looks both neat and black which I don’t understand with his glow-in-the-dark tight curls. “She’s gay,” Garth offers, and he and Talon grin at each other.
Garth works at Main Street Investment with other brokers whom he says are a waste of skin, yet still goes out with every Friday night, which has something to do office politics and playing the game. “Why don’t you take me anywhere anymore?” I say and then wince. “I’m a builder, damn it—in my fucking prime.” He says I look down on him, that I don’t like his TV shows, sneer at his comics and his playing Duke Nukem with Talon. “But I watch Spawn, and that other guy, you know on Saturday morning, the one with the gargoyles, and that other one with extraterrestrials and good graphics, what’s the one?”
“Goliath to the first one,” he says in his flat voice, “and Reboot to the second.”
Every morning Garth phones Diamond cab.
“Why don’t you take the bus like most people? Who takes a cab every morning?” I plant myself in front of him, my arms across my chest.
“You asking my son to wake up at 6:30 and stand in a packed subway?” he says, a dark cloud crossing his face. My heart aches to kiss him under the sheets; in my head, I’m slamming the door on his cocksure face. What if he leaves now? What’s stopping him from leaving now?
“No—it’s just that it’s so much money, so much money going out, don’t you think?”
“You’re asking me to wake my seven-year-old son up at six-thirty so he has the pleasure of experiencing rush hour.”
“No. I’m not saying that.”
“So what are you saying?”
“I’m not saying anything. Nothing at all.”
“No. You did say something. And I want to hear it.”
“Listen, I’m going to be late. They don’t like when I’m late and I always am. And Lynette’s waiting.”
“You wouldn’t want to keep Lynette waiting.”
“No, no I wouldn’t.”
“You shouldn’t leave and let this fester.”
“Can’t we talk about it later? I’ve got to go, really, these are my steadies.”
“You asked me to tell you. I’m telling you, it’s not a good idea what you’re doing.”
“Fuck you both, fuck you fuck you, someone’s got to pay the bills,” I say on the other side of the door as I sling my gym bag over my shoulder. Even though I’m mud-slinging pissed off, I’ve got this springy step. Different from my builder’s strut, this one is flexed and tightly coiled.
I wanted someone to take care of me, which I didn’t know the moment I saw him and my cunt shimmied across the floor and landed at his feet. I was a serious builder in those days. There were other big guys working out that night, some I knew from my days at hardcore gyms, others from The Workout, Gold’s on Yonge, Worlds, Fitness Connection on Don Mills. Every day he breaks my heart.
He says I’ve become mean. I come home, walk into the bedroom, and shut the door.
He says I don’t listen to him anymore. I interrupt him as soon as he starts talking.
He says we don’t talk anymore.
I say why doesn’t he get a job. I’m dying I say.
He just sits and doesn’t say anything.
Don’t you hear me? I say. I’m falling. Can’t you see I’m falling?
Yes, I see, he says.
You’re a young man. I can’t take care of you this way.
I looked, he says. Dishwasher, gas attendant. They say they don’t need anyone.
Why didn’t you tell me?
That I couldn’t get a job as a dishwasher?
I kiss him. What has happened to us? I say.
Come, I say, and taking his hand, lead him into the bedroom.
The next time I don’t kiss him or lead him into the bedroom. Sometimes I sleep on the sofa. I used to sleep on the couch to get away from Abie.
One night I lie face down on the gray carpet. I stay there for a long time and weep on and off. Like a ghost through a wall, white arms and hands reach into my back.
“Garth!” I say, standing up now. “Garth!”
He is beside me in an instant.
“An angel came to help me. I felt an angel dipping into my back, so I could stand up. And when I did, it had passed, all that made me so sad—I was in a Greek tragedy, like Odysseus’s wife wailing with piercing cries. Did I tell you I played the Chorus in Antigone?”
“Yes,” he says, “you told me.”
“I love you Garth.” I say, leaning my head on his warm chest.
“Oh Janice, you just don’t get it, do you? I never stopped loving you.”
On Nina Street I asked Garth how many years he gave us. Five years, he said. It’s four now and already he’s talking of leaving. “Five months,” he says. Until he saves some money. And then five months pass and he says, “Five months, until I save some money.”
I learned about money on Bluffwood Drive when the chair I was sitting on, a sturdy ladder-back chair relocated from the St. Agathe country house, was yanked out from under me. Still more lessons rained down on me until I had nothing sparkling left to lure men with. It was on a slushy sidewalk outside the Deloraine house that I remembered my soul. I hadn’t realized cash had sweet-talked its way into the cartilage between my vertebrae.
All those years I’d spent nourishing that soul of mine, art, music, words, the works, until I didn’t have to feed it anymore. I could go anywhere and that soul would seek out and suck in. The ladies at gym set aside empathetic moments—“How are you? How’s your daughter?” one would say. “What a fine soul you are. This has got to be the most caring place.”I’d say while searching my pockets for a hug, like used gum with the flavor still intact. And they’d smile, I was their mitzvah. I never knew those words before Abie and his family and then the ladies entered my life. “And yet, you stay smiling, you’re always smiling.” “I have a rich soul,” I’d say.
Given the choice of money or soul, Garth would say money, every time. He says he’d rather his impoverished soul hang out in decent surroundings than on some street corner. I tell him I’m going for both. “Sure,” he says. “Why not?”
I know how to work the floor. My end-of-the-month write-up of accounts consumes a night. The accounts confuse me. Sometimes I make mistakes and my cheque rings in at one or two or even three hundred dollars less. And other times I invoice again since I have a stash of copies to back me up. All month I add up training fees. I need to know where I stand. The gym has two or three master trainers and I’m one, having the look as I do. Also I’ve been a trainer on and off since I was thirty-eight at the Inn on the Park gym where I also looked the part though not the way I do now. Abie talked me into rowing so I took those learn-to-row classes at the Argonaut club until I heard about Hanlon. I was bow seat on an eight, although I also rowed fours, pairs, and doubles. My second year, I got it into my head that I’d like to single so Michelle, our coach who by the way had the hots for her coach and married him, much as I fell in love with all my coaches and some of them with me, taught me first on a Paluski touring single scull and then on a traditional single Hudson. Rowing is something else. I loved rowing though not as much as building, I guess having started out with building, strayed into rowing, and came back to my first love with as much longing and lust as I’d had in our beginning.
The head nurse with the oily streaked hair and soothing smile tells me Caroline is going on a medication holiday. “A holiday—I can’t imagine,” I say. “The last time we went on a holiday was fifteen years ago, in Hawaii. It’s not that sort is it?”
In the early months, I’d phone in. “I’m thinking of coming in today,” I’d say and the nurse would answer, “I’ll go and ask her.” Sometimes she’d say, “Yes, she will see you,” and other times, less often now than at the beginning, I’d wait until she returned with “maybe today is not such a good idea.” There was a Sawtooth Oak in my Gossamer garden, its limbs so high and wide and open; could I not lie on the earth and open myself to something sweet and metaphysical?
Inside, dogs guard me. I cannot remember when I last walked about without them in the shadows. I’m like that Billy Holiday song, “You’ve Changed.” I’ve become a ghost town, my eyelids like roller shades pulled down low.
Caroline is walking with me. It’s spring now. She stops and says something causing me to turn to her and wrap my arms full around her.
I’m in her tiny hospital room, emptying the contents of drawers and one metal locker onto her cot.
She sits in the passenger side of the front seat, her head against the glass as she watches the passing of shapes and colors, some of which she recognizes. I am inside her eyes.
After almost two years, I am driving her away from this place she has renamed Camp Fazeka. She says it had a gun room. “It was a frightening place,” I say because I know not to argue the finer points. I have a book. But she says, “It’s true, there’s a gun room in there. I saw it.” I tell her Passover is around the bend, what a celebration we shall have. “I’m not Jewish. My mother and father were Christian atheists. Hail Hitler!” she spit out, her voice scaling the window. I pull into the emergency lane. A police car pulls up behind me and a cop with a buzz cut walks up to my car.
“Anything wrong?” she says.
“No officer, I’m just taking my daughter home. From Whitby Mental—”
“They burned it down. It’s burned down,” Caroline says in her new shrill voice.
“Hail Hitler!”
“You sure you’re OK?” the officer says.
“I’ll manage,” I say. “It’s just the first day.”
“How old is she?”
I hate talking about Caroline in front of her back.
“The officer wants to know how old you are honey.”
I have to repeat this with a touch on Caroline’s forearm which I figure might ground her.
“I’m one week old, zero pounds, zero feet.”
“She’s twenty-three, officer.”
“They’re lying!” Caroline casts out, her voice zinging out the car into the middle of the 01.
“Well, good luck. I could accompany you back if that’s what you need.”
“We’re be alright, won’t we Caroline?” I say, placing my arm on her forearm which she shakes off.
“We’ll be alright. It’s just a matter of time.”
“Good luck, then.”
“Thank you, officer,” I say and pull out, carefully merging traffic already on its way and going fast.
I am making a single bed in a room with two single beds and a bureau—where is the bureau? Not between the twin beds or under the tilted Venetians missing every third slot—the room is in her father’s third floor walk-up apartment on Weston Road. Cayne’s Appliance Warehouse lures men and women who park gingerly on the street, checking once, twice their foreign cars are indeed locked. Beside Cayne’s, a sandwich shop with bars on its windows and doors sits empty. A used-car lot stakes its land claim beside Abie’s building and after that a street-corner Pentecostal Church with a sign “Non-Worshipers Welcome.” When we drive up, I point to the library, a brown brick building across from the used-car lot.
Abie has set up his office near the TV in half of the living room. The other half holds a chrome and arborite kitchen table and four beige leatherette chairs. In the kitchen, grime has invaded all available crevices. The freezer is half full with frozen dinners and there’s a tin of Campbell’s beef stew on the counter. Whenever he answers the phone in the living room, he waves us away with his hands like a wild Baba, gai avek, gai avek. I talk to Caroline in a low voice. “Quiet! I’m talking to Germany!” he hisses. “All of Germany, you say?” I say, and Caroline smiles which gives me hope. “He sure puts a lot of energy into waving that arm of his at us,” I say to Caroline. “Let’s go in your room.”
We sit on her bed. “Oh my darling,” I say, patting her hair. “Come put your head on my lap,” it’s been so long, honey. Rest now.” And she does. At first a bit stiffly, but soon her fear, that thick fog inside her, lifts and for now, we have peace. My grandmother, my Bobi on my mother’s side, used to rub my scalp. I sit with my lost daughter on her cot that reminds me of another mattress in a glass room as I massage her head and forehead until the right arm, wrist and hand ache, but I don’t stop until her thin lids close. And still I continue.
GuiltStanding in front of the picture window, I wrap my arm around my daughter’s shoulder. A full moon graces the sky above the plain brick Salvation Army building next door.
“It was like a concentration camp.”
“What, honey?”
“Camp Fazeka. It was like a concentration camp.”
“I know, my honey. I’m so sorry.” I say and put my head on her shoulder which amazes me, that she’s so tall and that I’m so short. And that we are in the world, side by side, with a movie moon overhead.
Now that she’s free, she’s in another hell, here on Weston Road in a third floor walk-up with a pot-bellied middle-aged man who sits and works on an eight-year-old computer as he rubs shoulders with deal makers across the ocean. What must she think of me? And who would have thought Abie would be the one to free her?
The social worker, a skinny nervous guy, his face and neck pockmarked with acne scars, sat me down in his office one spring afternoon. They’d done all they could for her, he said, advising that she be placed in a group home, there was one with an opening, three women, one in her forties, the other in her seventies, the other—well, the other had just died the week before which was the reason for the spare bed. I phoned Abie who said no way was he going to have his daughter sleep in a bed someone had just croaked in. “We’re taking her home,” he said. I think she was happy because she held my hand for the whole ride to Abie’s place, sometimes squeezing my hand, other times resting her partly open hand like the wing of a wounded bird on top of mine.
“Does she have to go?” Caroline says.
I look up at Abie.
“She has to work, honey,” he says.
“I’ll be quiet,” she says, getting up and going to the closet. “I’ll stay with you and I’ll be quiet.”
“You’d be home alone,” he says and tells her to give me a hug good-bye, I’d be back the next day. “I will, tomorrow, same time, and we’ll go out,” I say but her eyes are already vacant.
I hold onto life’s ledge as people walk by and step on my fingers. It’s not they mean to, I know that, but I’m losing my grip. And here I am complaining like an old hooker, which I know is tedious, with my oh-so-sad tits and worn-out ass. Abie’s been evicted two times since he left Indian Road, first from Teddington and then his apartment hotel in Forest Hill. He asks me for cash which I give him even though I received only a leased red Neon when he hit the jackpot with his two-and-a-half million bank-trading deal. I pay for the deposit and first month for his cracked white brick apartment hotel, also his cell phone. He’s going to take care of all of us, he says, and I’m sabotaging the girls’ future if I hold back. He says he has no money for food so I give him that too. His deal is closing Monday or Tuesday. On Wednesday he says there’s been a glitch and looks forward to Thursday or Friday. On Friday he says everyone’s left early for the weekend, which is what they do, with their chateaux in the mountains and island retreats.
“You can afford it,” he says, knowing I’m taking home six thousand a month which I told him in a moment of weakness after one of Garth’s hammering sessions.
“I have to pay for the rent, food, Internet, cable, my car—”
“Yeah, yeah, so what about Garth?”
“So what about you?” I say, picturing the old ringer machine in the screened-in summer porch in the Lake Alverna house and the hands of two men, one familiar, giant and golden brown, and the other pasty white with sparse hairs impotently playing around its knuckles, feeding into the rotating rubber rollers.
My heart is like black Pluto’s, our round-headed lab from the Old Forest Road house. Every time the doorbell rang he was there, inching his way in and out. He needed to run free. So I’d hold my Caroline on my ready left hip and grab Pluto’s collar as I opened the screen door. Garth advices me not to say anything about the twenty-thousand in my Bank of Montreal savings account. I was raised in a fifties’ household by a university graduate stay-at-home housewife who taught me about the spiritual side of fucking but didn’t prepare me for the workforce and now like a proud parent, I’m watching my sweet cash stash grow. But I’m wearing out, holding up four people, sometimes five. Muscles need time to recuperate, and I’m over-training and hitting the wall.
“You’re living with your mother,” I say to Garth who is playing solitaire on his computer.
“My mother never gave a damn about me.”
“So you’ve recreated your childhood through me. You’re fucking your mother.”
“I didn’t choose you because of your age.”
“Hey, you’re the one who told me you like older women. Remember when you were eighteen and had an affair with a thirty-eight-year-old?”
He lines up the solitaire cards on the computer screen and I stare at the fatty mass of his trap below his neck. I once asked him about it. “How come you have this?” I said, poking at the lump. He says he has over-developed traps, always did, even when he leaned right out that year he walked everywhere in Guelph. I wanted to tell him he was fat, that old trap just fat like the layer of gelled chicken soup.
Mark says I’m one of the highest paid trainers in Toronto which is a fucking joke because I’m a builder pure and simple. Last month I screeched out of my parking space behind the Promenade and bashed into a taxi which didn’t bother me much since I was driving a rental, my car being repaired at a Maaco’s collision shop on Finch Avenue West. And yesterday as I flung open my driver’s side door, I nicked the shiny exterior of a red convertible belonging to the Greek hairdresser who works at the Hair Connection across from the Women’s Gym. That same morning I was summoned on the loud speaker to reception where an official mall security officer was waiting for me. I had damaged the rear of the hairdresser’s car, there were witnesses, he said. Impossible, I said straightening myself up, both cars having been parked facing due north. I could see he was juiced up. John used to shake his head just to make his water-retaining cheeks wobble for me. I phoned Garth from the back room.
“Garth,” I said, my voice quavering, “they’re going to issue a restraining order to prevent me from coming into the mall. Where I conduct my business.”
“Phone the cops,” he said which pissed me off even more, because what’s the use of living with an ex-bouncer when he won’t get off his ass to protect you?
I wish he would massage my ankles. These ten-hour days make me feel like I’m walking on stumps. Phantom limbs aren’t even an issue.
The hairdresser phoned Mark who called me into his office. He couldn’t have the hairdresser bad-mouthing his gym, he said, but he’d cover my back and would I make just a token payment, possibly two hundred dollars.
Two days later a new client lay on a flat bench in the free weight room and sat up. Going from flat to sitting caused her to wrench her back necessitating the mall’s male emergency crew to enter the women’s gym, which was announced over the loudspeaker system so the orthodox women could scurry out of view into the changing room, leaving only the modern orthodox, conservative, and reform women to stand by and watch. “None of my legs behind-the-head fucking for their puny boxes,” I told Garth. The woman was so incapacitated she needed a bedpan and couldn’t take care of her seventh child, a two-and-a-half year old she was still breastfeeding as she told Mark who then relayed the story to me. The thing was I had interviewed Rivke the way I did all the women I trained, sitting them down and getting them to take me all the way back to their early childhood—I’d go over the whole body top to bottom, a total life inventory.
Mark offered her a year free. She refused. Five hundred. Same. One thousand. She waited a full minutes before accepting although it wasn’t about the money, she said. The money was just a token. It was about her quality of life and being robbed of her maternal abilities. I stood in front of his heavy desk, zipping and unzipping my red fleecy vest that I truly despise although I have five hanging in my condo entrance way closet. The rule is no trainer is allowed on the floor without her red fleecy with Women’s Clubs of Canada embossed across the back. Living my life as I do in the fast lane, I’m always forgetting mine, so I pinch them. Trainers dash about making frenzied inquiries and I always help out. When the time comes for me to leave the gym, which Mark says I never will, “accept it, you’re a personal trainer,” he says, “and one of the best in the business although it was a hell of a job polishing you,” I’m going to burn these hateful vests in the kitchen sink since we don’t have an incinerator like we had in the Montreal apartments. I liked the incinerators, except when Abie threw the green garbage bag with dead baby rabbits down one.
I don’t give a damn about the ladies. I don’t give a fuck if they get sick or injured or if they’re not getting results because they’re gorging in their walk-in closets. And yet every week I give Jeanette who weighs over three hundred pounds a fourth free session even though she despises training. She’s had a tough time—one morning she went to bathroom to take a piss and found her husband dead and hanging. I tried to explain this to Garth, but couldn’t get past the dead and hanging part. “Hanging from what?” he said. “The shower rod?” Every time I see Jeanette I want to ask her so I can go home and tell Garth.
I can’t say I want my old life back. I’m filled with yearning for a refrain I once heard, but when I revisit it, the song turns ugly or mean, and I wander around until I come upon another freshly spun song. It’s not that I mind minor keys, and discords thrill me. “What was I like before Whitby?” I ask Garth who has an eye for detail. “You’re more removed,” he says, “you forget things—summing it all up, you’ve become a zombie.” I tell him his comics have gone to his head, but he’s right. I remember sucking him off in the country—I had a van, I think, something with room to put his seat back and for me to crouch under the glove compartment. I was so glad for his cock in my mouth that I couldn’t breathe, I’d gasp and catch my breath. And once, in one of those gathering moments, I looked out the window. “Look at all those stars!” I said. These days I can’t find the stars when I suck on Garth’s cock. I don’t even look for them.
There are certain things I want in my life again: I want a clothes line; I want to play Sonny Rollins, Edith Piaf, Oscar Brown, Al Jarreau, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, Nina Simone, Leonard Cohen, Pete Seeger, Mississippi John Hurt, Elizabeth Cotton, Ravi Shankar, Marvin Gaye, Keith Jarrett, Paul Robeson, Billie Holiday, Fela Kuti, Bach, Mahler, Rachmaninoff, my sweet Chopin nocturnes, Albinoni, Al Green, Seu George, Philip Glass, Mose Allison, Toots and the Maytals, Rev. Gary Davis, Roland Kirk, and Omar Sosa full blast like the biggest brightest come in the world. (In another house, years later, Lisa and I talk about her dancing and my music. “The truth is,” she says, “given the choice of dancing or sex, I’d have to choose dancing.” “You would?” I say, “Because that how I feel about music.” And Lisa adores sex, yelling “yes!” every time she comes, which I know because of that certain house, the one like a husband to me.) And in case God is listening to this anxious atheist, if you could add a house by the water, nothing big or fancy, just something I could settle in and call my own, and a garden. And my girls.
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