From friendship token to stray artifact to craft souvenir to raggedy castaway to personal effect of the deceased to repatriated relic to cherished heirloom. The transmutation of matter.
The quilt arrived at the Undeliverable Mail Office toward the end of 1988. As I recall, I was poring over an elastic-bound set of Enid Blyton books, looking for a card or a dedication, remembering my childhood, when I was called over by one of the storage-room sorters. His name was Finn, short for Finnegan—though Andrei used to tease him by calling him “Fin, the End,” because it was his job to declare the worth of items that were left unclaimed after six months. He was the gravekeeper; the storage room, his necropolis. For days at a time, its phantoms were his only company. Covered in dust, in actual danger of being crushed, Finn burrowed his way through bulging walls of packages and documents, his great mop of reddish brown hair floating through this contemporary catacomb along an increasingly narrow trench. Valuables were sent to auction. Non-valuables were destroyed. It was like sorting wheat from chaff: tedious but straightforward. Only on occasion did he call on anyone else for input. And when he did he spoke concisely.
“I’ve found something.”
On a table lay the badly preserved quilt, star-shaped patches of red floral fabric hanging in flaps against an uneven blue background. Along one edge in pale pink thread was the embroidered inscription. He underlined the names John and Margaret Kimura with his index finger.
Did I know of them? Well. No. Not them. But I could make a few calls.
It turned out that the quilt, which had been on its way to the incinerator, had been made for Gloria’s aunt and uncle, who, when given the choice of going to an internment camp or “repatriating” to Japan, a country as foreign to them as Norway, had chosen the latter. The quilt had been in the hands of strangers for four decades. After a bit of inquiring, it was given to Gloria as John and Margaret’s closest traceable relative.
It was a “reunion” I regarded as a landmark in my mail recovery carreer. Gloria was an odd but good-hearted woman who tended to place everyone else’s needs before her own. I’d long admired her cheerful disposition, the genuine, sometimes heroic smile that spared whoever she was with any sense of the distress she might be feeling at that moment. It gratified me to be able to give her something.
For Gloria, the quilt became a source of pride and purpose—like Penelope’s robe, a perpetual doing. She worked on it every day, mending the broken stitches, repairing the stars. In retrospect, the labour probably staved off a depression that would have consumed her sooner. It was impossible to imagine Gloria without the quilt.
And when it was completed, a few days after I visited her, she got out of bed and wrapped herself in it, and then a woman whose days and nights had no centre walked down the hall and set fire to a wastepaper bin in the women’s washroom.
T
he morning after the sprinklers went off at Sakura, I woke up early with razors in the back of my throat. I went to the kitchen to fetch a glass of orange juice but it hurt too much to swallow. My ears were clogged and when I spoke my voice sounded faraway. I padded off to the bathroom and inspected my tonsils, gargled and padded back to bed, groaning as I lay down. A shaft of light passed through the window. It had snowed lightly during the night.
“It’s probably the flu,” said Paolo when I called him. “Stay in bed.”
After I telephoned the UMO, I slept and slept, waking occasionally to take teaspoons of liquid, including chicken broth that Paolo brought over later in a big pot. After the virus travelled from my throat to my chest, a cough racked my entire body. During the three days it took me to recover, I hardly thought of Gloria or Andrei or my mother at all. I rested and watched television with filmy eyes, buried in a
beige duvet that I had had since I was seven years old and surrounded by ribbons of toilet tissue to blow my nose. Paolo nursed me between his shifts at the flower shop, but for the most part I was alone, blinds drawn against the daylight, lozenge wrappers hidden in the damp folds of my overslept bed.
Day mixed with night, snacks replaced meals. A feeling of slackness gradually overcame me, as if my body had been filleted of its bones and was now melting into the mattress. The television was on but I looked through it. After some patting around, I found the converter and turned it off. There was a bulk at my feet where I had left the morning newspaper. I reached down and pulled it toward me, unfolded it on the bed as best I could, barely able to take in the day’s reporting.
USA THREATENS TO INVADE PANAMA. OPERATION JUST CAUSE
90 HOMELESS EARTHQUAKE VICTIMS IN SAN FRANCISCO SLEEPING IN AN AUTOMOBILE SHOWROOM
ELEVEN PEOPLE KILLED IN A CAR PILE-UP ON THE 401
MASS PROTESTS IN TIMISOARA, ROMANIA, TURN VIOLENT
I refolded the paper and my mind started to roam, picking up thoughts then discarding them. The telephone rang. After four rings, I managed to reach it. My mother was calling with news that Gloria had been tracked down through her sister in Port Hope. Her breathing quickened with excitement as she spoke. Apparently, Gloria’s sister had received a call earlier that morning from a nurse at a Toronto hospital. Some good Samaritan out walking his dog had witnessed Gloria fall on a pathway overlooking the Scarborough Bluffs and had brought her to emergency the night before with a hip fracture. They had set the fracture, but she would be in hospital for several more
days. As she told me this, I could hear the note of disappointment in my mother’s voice, the pout of a child who couldn’t wait. I swallowed in an effort to unblock my stuffed ears and mustered a few words of encouragement. Something about time passing quickly enough, no need to be impatient.
After I replaced the receiver, I flopped back against the pillows with a mixed sense of relief (that the mystery of Gloria’s whereabouts had been cleared up) and irritation (that my mother hadn’t asked a single question about me, not a word about how I was feeling). My spine hurt. Sitting upright, I sipped my tea and shifted against the headboard, feeling sulky. The small of my back needed a good stretch. I flexed my feet, crossed my legs, tucked them under, straightened them, unable to get comfortable. At what point had she stopped asking?
Was it possible for a mother to forget to be a mother?
Don’t
, I thought.
But it was too late.
When they come, childhood memories are much like a wind in the trees, everything stirring at once.
O
NE SPRING
,
WHEN
I was ten and Kana was thirteen, my father and mother made the announcement that they were separating, a mutual and amicable decision.
“We’ve grown apart,” they said.
To which we responded: “Can’t you work it out? Can’t you grow back together?”
But they insisted: “Don’t make this harder. Someday you’ll understand. And we’ll still be friends, still be here for you.”
We pleaded and bargained but it didn’t get us anywhere. There
were no miracles. We felt cheated. The way they had padded their announcement with niceties had broken our hearts.
It was almost summer but the world was grey, the shadows in our house multiplied. I became a faucet of sorrow, flooding the house with my tears. Kana cried in private, often in the shower under camouflage of cascading water, but her eyes bulged publicly with grief.
Everything happened so quickly. Within a few days, my father had rented an apartment near the college where he taught applied geography, and on my mother’s insistence they began dividing the contents of the house bit by bit. Books, records, scissors, linen, unmatched chairs, mugs, photos, even condiments. I walked around the depleted house in a state of shock, while Kana spent hours in her room working on a jigsaw puzzle of Antarctica she could never complete.
When the first heartbreak passed, we imagined we were luckier than many kids in similar situations. We practised handstands and back walkovers in a space once occupied by two worn leather armchairs, and imagined our father’s empty study as a time-travel machine, a device that could transform stillness into velocity, the present into the past.
Of course, in the end, the separation wasn’t as tidy as they had led us to believe it would be. Old grudges began to reveal themselves. My parents became more aloof with each other, and stopped talking like old friends when they were on the telephone. Shared meals became less common. As the drifting apart gained momentum, we felt it acutely: the loss of their once combined energy and ideas. My father, an introvert by nature, sank further into his books, and into a monastic solitude that became harder and harder to interrupt.
But the most significant change was in my mother.
Through the initial stages of their separation, my mother fluctuated between matter-of-factness and giddiness. Strangely, her approach to
keeping her composure was to keep moving. A figure of perpetual motion, she restained furniture, discovered the art of stencilling borders and reorganized the house from top to bottom.
Then one day, out of nowhere, following a conversation with my father during which he told her he had made the decision to spend half his sabbatical in England the following year, she came to an abrupt halt. When she got off the phone, the look on her face was that of someone who had lost her way. For a few minutes she moved about the room, repositioning chairs, picking things up and putting them down someplace else. She swept the vitamin bottles to the back of the kitchen counter, then sat on a stool. It seemed she didn’t know what to do next.
As I finished eating the
onigiri
she had prepared for lunch, she stumbled past us to her bedroom, quietly but firmly closing the door. I followed her, with bits of rice sticking to my fingers, and rapped lightly on her door with the heel of my hand. There was no response. I licked the rice off my fingers, placed my hand on the knob and put my ear to the wood. Inside I could hear the rustle of bedsheets growing more insistent, like a mole was burrowing. I tried again. Still no response.
From early September to late November, she barely left her bedroom, sleeping through the day while Kana and I were away at school.
One childhood fear, still with me, comes from the mystery of my mother’s collapse, the lack of any advance signal. At times, I have wondered, as children do, what genetic surprise awaits me. How would I know? What was her snapping point? What did it feel like to crack? A sudden pop, a jagged rupture, a slow seep?
My father ended up moving to England. A few years ago, when he came through town for a geography conference, I asked him, during
a rare heart-to-heart, what he might have said to her during that ill-fated phone conversation.
He replied, “I can’t think of anything in particular. I merely told her to take care of herself.”
Perhaps he said it in such a way that she felt the entire wall of her ego cave in. Or maybe he didn’t say it any particular way at all; maybe at that moment he was genuinely full of sympathy and concern. The words shattered her nonetheless. They were divorcing words.
Well then, my dear
, he might have said as he held her over a canyon, legs dangling in mid-air,
take care of yourself.
The truth is that my father has always been a bit curt. The thing he most dreaded being was tedious. It was a quality he despised in others. He believed that most people talked far too much, that fewer words denoted thought. But to my mind he simply feared the emotion of words. He should have had the courage to say more. The week before he went off to England, where he planned to investigate some breakthrough in electronic cartography, he took me out for ice cream. His parting speech lasted a confusing thirty seconds.
“I know it’s hard but during this difficult interval, it might be beneficial to concentrate on your studies. Try to be generous with your mother and sister. Before you know it, everything will come back together. Dissolution and renewal are a part of life. What makes us human are our failings and flaws.”
When I finally figured out what he was saying, I felt hoodwinked. He didn’t really believe that dissolution was a part of life. Or if he believed it, he certainly didn’t like it. As for our failings and flaws—my father loathed imperfection. He couldn’t stand the asymmetry of his face, for example, the way his nose curved to the left, how one eyebrow was noticeably higher than the other. He abhorred the freckles covering his body. He judged himself relentlessly. He shuddered at
people’s image of him as a pure-blooded Scot, not out of ethnic dislike but because he despised clannishness—especially its rituals of kilts and pipes.
What he did like were straight lines and straight A’s. He had a fondness for triangles. The equilateral was his favourite (three equal sides), next he liked the isosceles (two equal sides) and last of all the scalene (no equal sides). As a geographer, he looked for near-perfect formations: mountain chains, waterfalls, coral reefs. Best of all were near-perfect triangular formations: deltas, ice caps, the province of Madrid. He wasn’t without a sense of humour. He liked making geography jokes such as, “No man is an isthmus.” (An isthmus, I later learned, is a narrow piece of land connecting two larger bodies of land. When my parents separated, I became an isthmus.)
My father looked at his wife and saw someone too opposite. He was a minimalist. She was a maximalist. He was regular in everything, from his choice in coffee to his bowel movements. She was irregular—tea one morning, hot chocolate the next. He was a pessimist. She was an optimist. He liked the refined pleasure of listening to opera alone in his office. She preferred to pile up with us on the couch and watch television. Deep down I think he wanted to do the right thing for his family, but in the end he suffered from a failure of hope.
Yet at one time hadn’t he thought she was the very incarnation of perfection?
In my memories of my mother’s period of collapse, she is always lying under her comforter, the same floral
mofu
she’d had for years, originally shipped from Japan in an enormous piped-plastic package with a matching towel set that, once faded, was used as bedding for the cat’s basket. A dark slab of television rises tomb-like at the foot of the bed.
Bouquets of elastic-bound junk mail are scattered across the floor. The warm autumn sun, then the white winter sun, slants through a gap in the curtains, casting a coffin of light on the bed. It is surely the dictionary definition of
wretchedness.
Her hands are folded on her chest. She looks like the dearly departed. And this is when I start to mourn her.
No matter how much she slept, there were dark stains under her eyes. Not a normal tiredness but undiminishing exhaustion. As the weeks passed, Kana and I did our best to hold the house together. Kana was the mother now. She did the laundry and laid out our pyjamas in the evening, our clothes in the morning. For dinner, she beat four eggs, added some slices of pepperoni, diced tomato, a large toss of salt and pepper, put some butter in a pan and prepared her one specialty: pizza scramble. On other nights, our meals came from boxes and cans. The papery corpses of dead bugs gathered on the kitchen floor by the fridge. I used plastic cutlery and pretended we were on a long camping trip.
When I tired of eating Kana’s scramble, I thought briefly of asking the lady next door to help out on meals, but then she might have called Children’s Aid—and such intrusion wasn’t worth the risk. Looking back, we held up pretty well considering the strangeness of a mother who kept nocturnal hours and even then rarely left her bed.
At least I could count on knowing where she was. I experienced a rush of pleasure whenever I entered her bedroom after school. I knew that she’d be just waking up, that her body would emanate warmth. One day, while Kana stayed late at school for gymnastics practice, I joined my mother in her pillow fortress, crouching in the soft king-size bed, inhaling her faint sweat smell and glancing at her profile as we watched television together. By now, my mother had spent three weeks in bed, and I had a sudden irrational desire to be
shut up with her, the security of her and me in an otherwise hazardous world.
Our stomachs were growling for food, but I paid no attention until I was starving and then ran downstairs to prepare a selection of snacks. I remember enjoying the hickory salt left on my fingertips from the potato chips and the thick texture of Nutella pressed off a spoon with my tongue. We passed hours into the evening, lying side by side. At one point, I went downstairs and prepared a tray with chocolate milk, a sludge of brown syrup at the bottom of each glass, a tin of Del Monte mixed fruit for my mother and a bag of trail mix for myself. When I entered the bedroom the cats were scratching up the woven silk wallpaper, shredding the brown fibre with their unclipped claws. There was a nest growing on the carpet.
My mother rested the glass of chocolate milk on her collarbone, taking baby sips as she watched a rerun of
The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
Mary had just knocked on Mr. Grant’s office door. Suddenly there was a dull
thud
—in the room this time, not on the television. The unopened fruit salad tin had rolled along the downy slope of my mother’s blanketed legs and onto the floor. I waited but my mother didn’t stir. I let a minute or so pass, but it bothered me knowing that the tin was on the floor, so I went to her side, picked it up and placed it on the bedside table.