Sister Crazy

Do not cry, Jem, I say to myself. Come on now, do not be a baby. Do not be a girl.

Besides looking back on good times and trying to fathom them, I write my book in my head. It is a survival book, a book of rules. It won’t be long but it will be very useful. Here is rule number one.

1. NEVER LEAVE YOUR GLASSES ON THE FLOOR.

I have discovered there is no loophole to this rule. Even if you say to yourself, okay, I have just set my specs on the floor. I see myself do it, I etch it on my memory. No way I’ll step on them or kick them across the floor. Then it happens. The phone rings and you jump right on top of them or you nap for a minute and shake awake suddenly and swivel your body off the sofa, landing your feet back on the floor. Right onto the specs, goddamnit. So that’s rule number one. Never leave your glasses on the floor. Thank you.

2. NEVER LEAVE YOUR WINEGLASS ON THE FLOOR.

Same potential disasters as above.

When we left the bar that day with our shopping bags, my dad said, ‘Let’s call home. Just in case. We don’t want to have to go out again.’

My dad has seen enough of the world and he has one vision in his mind. It is of a big sofa with a tomato snack by his side and a mess of newspapers all around him. Soon Mum will call out to him, Darling! Supper. Ah, the best moment of the day.

Right now, though, what my dad really wants to do is to chuckle over the fact we could not find truffle butter. When Mum wrote this down on our list he was gleeful. He thought this was hilarious and he was pretty determined to be right about this item not existing out there in the western world as he knows it. In the two places we tried, he made me ask for it, truffle butter being two words too girly for him to utter. At the first shop, he even waited outside, only coming in after it was clear my request had not been met. We laughed.

Before we get to lord it over Mum, my dad has to tackle the public-telephone situation.

‘Jem,’ he says, serious now, ‘we’ll try this one.’

I sigh with anticipation. This will be fun.

He pushes on the door of the nearest booth, meeting resistance.

‘Hey!’ he says. There is a lot of resistance to my dad out there in the physical world. He figures the door business out and drops a coin in after scanning all the instructions wildly and deciding to ignore them. The phone machine swallows the coin and that’s it, no joy. He thumps the machine about three times.

‘Goddamnit!’

I reach in and press coin return and check the slot. ‘Let’s try another one, Dad.’

In the next booth, I can see through the window that he is doing a lot of crazy thumping and is prepared to jump ship. I open the door and reach through the mayhem to press the button under the coin slot, right near the instruction that reads, Press after each coin entered.

‘Oh,’ he says and dials home. He looks back at me in exhilaration. He is about to reveal to Mum the sheer folly of her shopping mission. He can’t wait.

3. GIVE INSTRUCTIONS A CHANCE.

Instructions are sometimes written for those with below expected mental capacity. For instance, on a package of plasters, I read in step two, ‘Apply plaster.’ On a tube of skin salve, ‘Apply a little cream.’ Well, why not? But some instructions are useful. On page one of my video-machine booklet, it says, ‘To reduce the risk of fire or shock hazard, do not expose this equipment to rain.’ I do not know who would watch their TV and video out in a field when it is raining but never mind, this is important information for those people who are tempted. ‘Do not exceed the stated dose.’ This, I find, is important news. I remember a time, in dark days, when I was not Joey or the Doc and I was riding in cars on the way to health shops in search of herbal remedies for depression, yes, I remember a time when this was a vital instruction that I intended to ignore. I wanted very much to largely exceed the stated dose. This was exactly my plan before I decided that I did not want anyone else to wear my agnès b. clothes and that I wanted to finish the novel I was reading but mostly the look I imagined on Mum’s face at the sight of my grim and excessively dosed self on the carpet was too unbearable to contemplate. So I put off my date with death. It was a postponement I had in mind, that is all.

Strange though, I thought, my dad will be okay. He’ll get over it. When you are a cowboy, you see all kinds of things, sudden death and gruesome moments of all varieties, and you just have to endure it all. People depend on you to do this.

‘I’ll be darned,’ a cowboy might say over some gory reality, pulling a fresh cheroot from a shirt pocket, maybe tipping his hat back for a second, swiping the heat from his brow. ‘I’ll be darned. Lookee here.’

When my dad finished his gleeful phone call that day, we chuckled for some time. He bought flowers, white ones which Mum especially likes, on the way home.

‘This’ll keep her busy,’ he cracks, in that Wild West fashion. The fact is, he is crazy about her.

He walks with me. I call it a saunter. My dad has a steadfast, ruminative walk. He takes command of his space. I only ever saw him hurry once, when Mum broke her wrist badly, gardening on a slope, when she was in a state of turmoil over his moodiness. It was a terrible break and he had to drive a long way to a good hospital and I was there too, sitting in the back of the car with my broken-up mother who was making cheery comments to keep us calm, despite a lower arm that looked like bits of snapped kindling. My dad’s back, I could see, was dark with sweat and he was leaning into the steering wheel as if he could impel the vehicle onward this way, or maybe speed us into a happier time zone, a place without injury.

4. NEVER GARDEN ON A SLOPE WHEN IN A STATE OF TURMOIL.

My dad walks with me. He is gripping my neck, loosely he thinks, in a manner suggesting fellowship and affection. It feels good although his grip is a little like those sinks in the hair salon, designed to hold your head in place but actually inviting disaster, such as permanent spinal injury and wholesale numbing of the nervous system. But I like walking with my dad this way. The world is ours. No one would dare pull a gun on us, nor even call out a careless remark. Everyone wants to be us, I can tell.

But who is this man, I cannot help asking myself, who believes that a thump will make a thing function? My dad is a pummeller of dashboards, a boxer of boilers, a rattler of fax machines, telephones, turnstiles and parking meters, a walloper of drinks dispensers, a slapper of remote controls. He is the man you see stabbing a lift button eight or nine times. He is also the one kicking the lawn mower, and pulling and pushing on locked doors, wildly enough to loosen the foundations of a house. It is possible this man had children in order to operate machinery for him. Yes, I think so.

My dad is a sportswriter. He also writes children’s fiction under a pseudonym. In these books, he writes about small children organizing the world around them despite themselves, a world full of human failures, cranks and despots, some with endearing and poignant flaws, others with thunderous bad taste and hilariously inflated egos. He finds these types, these faltering embarrassing types, really funny. These are his people.

To relax, my sportswriting dad watches sports on TV. He would like to be watching TV right now and he hears my little sister’s dancing step close by.

‘Harriet!’

My sister dances in. She is five years old and taking ballet classes. She has the right build but lacks discipline. She is a little too exuberant and has no time for the formality of steps.

‘Yeee-ess?’

‘Will you pass the remote.’

‘Oh Daddy, no! There are bad gamma rays, Jem told me. And soon you will fall asleep, snore-snore-noisy! Just like at the zoo, Ben said. No, Daddy, no, no! Hello! Goodbye!’

My sister is merry and exits with pirouettes and fouettés.

‘Goddamnit!’

Ben races past, a flurry of long limbs. He is usually in a hurry and my dad is not quick enough to catch him. Nor does he always know what to say, how to get his attention. Ben is complicated. I am crazy about him and this is not a problem for me. You have to know how to get through, that’s all.

‘Hey, Jude,’ my dad calls from his prone sofa position.

Jude, who was only passing, backtracks and stands in the doorway of the living room. My brother Jude is a man of few words. He doesn’t see much point in talking a lot. He has a bagel in one hand and a book in the other.

‘Pass me the remote. Did you mow the lawn yet?’

‘Not yet,’ Jude says, unruffled, moving very slowly in the vague direction of the remote control. He picks up a magazine on the way and bites his bagel. He is easily distracted and never in a hurry.

‘JUDE!’

I am looking for Jude. There he is.

‘Ahh! Jem! Who’s my favourite child?’

‘What do you want, Dad?’

I wish I had not come in, but I want Jude. Being bossed around and doing silly tasks for your dad when wearing a holster and cowboy hat is seriously disrupting.

‘Stick ’em up!’ he says, laughing.

I would quite like to shoot him now but I can’t. Never shoot an unarmed man.

This is how it was when we were small kids. It is still a bit like this when we come home to visit, even today. We all have our own machines now and we know how to use them. We don’t ask anyone else. We laugh now mostly about my dad when he is thumping machinery with the full expectation that this will be effective. We smile and try to help out. I think he likes that. Once, though, I saw him try to light a faulty boiler with a match. I wanted to yell at him but could not. I took over the situation but I could not yell at him. He is not a kid, he is my dad.

5. ALWAYS GO TO THE LOO IF YOU THINK YOU MAY NEED TO PEE.

Here are the times when passing up on rule number five is a bad idea. (1) Settling into a cinema or theatre seat and the show is about to begin. Too late. (2) Sitting at your table in a posh restaurant and ordering wine and food. The entrée arrives. Too late. (3) Turning off the lights at night when in bed in foetal position and already half-asleep. Too late. Now you will have tortured dreams featuring gruesome toilet-bowl situations. (4) Car rides with grumpy drivers.

I want to blame my dad for this but that is not the way things work just now. In the world today, all things dark and tumultuous are down to me. My dad’s mood is definitely my fault and I cannot bear to hold up the terrible car journey, the fifteen-minute ride which my dad conveys to me with a look will be as gruelling as a forced march across all the central provinces of Canada. No, I cannot hold up the journey by asking to dash to the loo first. My dad says we are going NOW. Some people rub their hands in glee and say, Now! Others, like my dad, mean only one thing by ‘now’. Now is full of terror.

O-KAAAY … co-RAAAALL! O-KAAAAY … co-RAAALLL! I think of this, too, that my dad must believe if he thumps me, if he takes me by the shoulders and rattles my little bones, gives me a shake momentous enough to reorganize all my vital organs and charge up my circulation and spark up all the neurons and synaptic impulses in my cerebellum, that I, too, will function again. It’s a simple operation. Come back, Jem. Howdy, partner. Long time no see.

We’re there now. Parking, my dad nearly mows down two dumpy ladies wearing stretchy trousers in appalling colours, but it doesn’t even raise a chuckle in our wagon. In good times this would be a great game, using our car like a cowcatcher. Not today, though.

‘Okay. I’m waiting here. Five minutes,’ he announces, not even looking at us, reaching behind the seat for a newspaper and snapping it open at the sports pages.

Mum and I see right away that the chemist/health shop is closed. Oh-oh. Clearly they knew I was coming.

‘Let’s get ice cream,’ my mother says recklessly, not glancing back at the car.

This feels pretty dangerous. I am prickly all over.

I get a tub of coffee ice cream and my mother, almost uniquely refined in her tastes and a really great cook, opts for something truly disgusting with caramel and scary little bits all over the top. For her, this is a throwback to a happy childhood she never actually had. She looks rebellious and gleeful which is cool to behold.

Walking back to the car, I note two things. I don’t need to pee anymore. And my dad is storming toward us, his hands flapping angrily like someone has stolen the car from right under him or maybe a war has begun and we are behind enemy lines. Spotting the tubs of ice cream takes him to a point beyond fury, a place Mum and I do not want to be. I look at her. I am scared now but she smiles beautifully and makes for the car, getting in the back with me. My dad returns to the driver’s seat and tugs the door closed, but he can’t slam it because his car is posh and new and he has to be a bit careful.

‘Aren’t you sitting in front?’ he asks crossly.

‘No,’ she says, and then, more quietly, ‘Home, James.’

I feel a great whirl of hilarity in my stomach now and I look at my mother with shock and delight. I whisper, ‘Home, James’ too. I keep saying it in my head and glancing at her. We eat our ice creams all the way home. I did not get my remedy for depression, but then of course, maybe I did, for a minute or two at least, which is perhaps all a person should rightly expect, I don’t know.

6. HAVE A CATALOGUE OF JOKES OR JOKEY SITUATIONS YOU CAN HAUL UP FROM MEMORY IN DARK TIMES.

You have to work pretty hard at rule number six. Sometimes, not very grown-up jokes are the best. For instance, my brother Gus and I often look at each other across a room and thrust out our lower mandibles, curling the mouth up at the corners, adopting a crazed, wide-eyed expression. Pretty soon we are spluttering into our drinks. It only takes a second. It is not grown-up but it is very reliable for a laugh, whereas jokes about German philosophers are not.

My dad tells one or two jokes I have never understood. One of them involves fishing and gefilte fish. It goes something like this. What happened to all the herring fished out of the X sea? Well! Ha ha ha! It ends up as gefilte fish in Chicago! My dad chokes up and all the sophisticates around him quake with mirth, shoulders akimbo and so on. The second joke is about an Eskimo. My dad went up to the Arctic once to cover some sledging championships or something for Sports Illustrated and he came back with some bizarre souvenirs, such as a sealskin doll for Harriet which smelled so bad she wouldn’t touch it and I buried it in the garden for her, plus some pretty bad jokes. It seems that when Eskimos had to choose English names for themselves for legal reasons or something, they picked whatever favourite activity they had or whatever object they were close to at the time. One lady was a fan of American football and so she called herself Sophie Football. Absolutely hilarious.

Here is another joke my dad finds very funny indeed. One afternoon in late August when I was fourteen or so, I cross the kitchen of our summer cottage on my way outside and see my dad finishing a snack involving bread and tomatoes and spring onions.

‘Hey, Jem.’

I stop. Oh-oh. ‘Yup?’ Will this take long? What does he want? I am aiming to go swimming.

‘Come here.’ He crooks his finger at me. This drives me wild. Having to get closer and closer just to be sent far off to get something for him.

‘I’m here.’ I take one step closer, that’s it.

‘How much pocket money do I owe you?’

‘June July-August.’

‘I’ll flip you double or nothing.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Come on, Jem.’ Be a man.

‘Okay then.’

I lose. My dad is so happy, he is just delirious with mirth. He goes looking for some more of his kids right away. He tries it out on Harriet and Gus and wins both times. This is one of the funniest things that has happened in the whole of my dad’s life, it seems. He tells the story for years and years. This is the kind of thing that keeps him going.

It is possible, when my dad is stuck in a queue at the supermarket or in a traffic jam, he calls up these jokes, and things improve for him right then, he feels better. You have to find your own thing. My mother saying ‘Home, James’ in a very quiet blithe voice the day we came back from our abortive trip to the chemist that summer, on a quest for some stupid herbal remedy for depression, that makes me smile, it really does, anytime I think of it.

Here is a joke. Can you be a cowboy if you are Jewish? I do not know the punchline. One day I’ll ask my dad, who is Jewish and a cowboy, maybe the only one that ever lived.

7. ALWAYS CARRY A BOOK WITH YOU.

This is a very important rule and easy to slip up on. Here is how. You say to yourself, I have carried that book with me every single day this week and never once have I had time to pull it out and read it. It is making a big fat unseemly bulge in my pocket, it is bumping up against my hip when I walk, it is weighing me down. Today I am not taking it, goddamnit. That is the day your friend is forty minutes late and you are left at the restaurant with the foot of your crossed leg swinging loose and you have studied every face and every painting in the place. That is the day your bus gets caught in a traffic jam or you end up having to take someone to the emergency room and wait four hours for the person to emerge. Always carry a book with you.

Here, though, are two times I had a book with me and it was of no use.

This was the first time. It is my turn for the emergency room. I am there because I cut my hand pretty badly and sometime between diving onto the floor of my flat in a petrified faint and getting into a cab to the hospital, I grab a novel and slip it into my coat pocket. I have paid attention to rule number seven, yes I have. I choose Le Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac, which I am reading for the second time. But when I am in Casualty, I am too sick to read. I am too sick and too scared. The nurse tries to speed me through. He asks, ‘Why are you so cold? How did this happen?’

I don’t know, I answer. I don’t feel well. I was cutting a bagel. I say this about the bagel because I have just read in a leaflet from a bagel shop that bagel-cutting injuries are a really common occurrence. I remember the bagel legend, too. How a Jewish baker invented the bagel in 1683 to commemorate the good deed performed by King Jan III of Poland. His good deed was this: he saved Vienna from a Turkish invasion. The bread was in the shape of a stirrup due to Jan’s love of equestrianism. In Austria the word for stirrup is Buegel. The name of the shop where I found the leaflet is Angel Bagel. Where was my angel tonight? Drunk somewhere, high on single malt. Nowhere for me. The thing is, I am lying about the bagel-cutting injury.

‘What are all those other cuts?’ the nurse asks.

‘I was reaching into a cupboard and I grazed my wrist on a cheese grater, how stupid can you get?’ I say in a rush.

If my dad saw me now with my cut-up wrists, he would be really really mad at me, although he would not say a thing. He would unstrap my holster and take away my gun. He would unpin my tin star. You are not fit to ride with me, that is what he would mean to tell me. You are no longer my right-hand man.

This brings me to rule number eight.

8. WHEN YOU ARE GOING THROUGH DARK TIMES, PACK UP YOUR KNIVES AND GIVE THEM TO A FRIEND.

I mean all of them, all your knives. If you are at all inclined to slice yourself up in dark times, to pretend you are a tomato, which is an ideal fruit for testing the sharpness of filleting knives, carpet cutters, cleavers, X-acto blades, Stanley knives and safety razor blades, to watch with fascination as the blood rises to the surface in particularly sensitive zones of your body such as wrists and ankles, then rule number eight is one for you. It will mean an expensive period of shopping at Marks & Spencer for ready meals, ones with bite-sized pieces of prawn or chicken in chilli tomato sauce, for instance. Or you can buy pricey pots of tomato sauce or roasted aubergines to put on pasta. Italian clam sauces are available in small jars from the best Italian delis. Or you can just eat a lot of yogurt and nuts and mashed banana. Buy bread in small shapes, i.e., bagels, or baguette de tradition you can break off bits from. It will be all right. If you feel like eating during dark times, you will not go hungry in a house empty of knives.

The second time I paid attention to rule number seven (ALWAYS CARRY A BOOK WITH YOU) and it was of no use to me was when my dad said goodbye to me before I took a coach to the airport on my way back home after my summer holiday, the one which featured the car ride and the quest for a herbal remedy for depression.

I have already waved to my mother. I asked her not to come with me because parting between us is a wrenching business, even for five minutes or so, even if we separate on a shopping expedition or something. I know I cannot go through the airport thing with her, no.

My dad lays his big hands on my little shoulders at the coach station, my two small cases at my feet. I am pretty sure my mother will have slipped some treat into my carry-on bag and I am looking forward to finding it as soon as my dad goes. Something about his two big hands on my shoulders just now has me worried. It feels ominous, like just before Joey warns Shane in the final shoot-out about the man aiming at him from the balcony. You know Shane cannot die, but he could. He could. He comes so close.

‘Jem,’ says my dad in a lower voice than usual.

I glance at his face and then stare at his chest. ‘We have done everything we can. We love you. We don’t know what else to do anymore. You have to look after yourself now. Got your ticket, passport, enough cash?’

‘Yuh.’

‘We’ll see you in a few months. We love you.’

As I watch him walk away from me, a slightly lurching walk, heels making their mark on the ground, arms swinging a little and the hands hovering loose but ready at holster height, I think, One shot. One shot is all it would take.

No, Jem, no. Never shoot a man in the back. Don’t you remember anything?

I want to scream after him, too. I want to scream, ‘Do you love me right now, though? Do you even like me now? Do you?’ But I just get on the coach and stare out of the window into the evening through a veil of tears, and at the airport I cannot read or eat the nice treats my mother stashed for me, I am good for nothing. My dad does not love me and I am on my own, I have to look out for myself, okay. These are my first steps in that direction and all I can do is pace up and down the airport lounge and cry quietly. There are no prizes for behaviour like mine and even rule number seven is of no use to me, goddamnit. I am thinking of making a pyre of my rule book or ripping it up in tight angry irretrievable pieces to flutter over the ocean. Tomorrow maybe. And I will never watch a western again. I hate westerns now.

9. ALWAYS HAVE SOME SPORTS NEWS AT HAND FOR WHEN YOUR DAD IS IN HOSPITAL AFTER A SCARY OPERATION TO DO WITH A FATAL DISEASE.

I’ve got my sports news ready in case my dad can talk to me, even for a few seconds. There was a tumour in him, they cut it out. My dad could have done this himself. Take a shot of cognac, stuff a hanky in your mouth, polish the knife on a rock, cut it out. Like snakebite, no problem. Today I might get to speak to him. Everyone is there with my mother – Ben, Jude, Harriet and Gus, even Ben’s wife and Gus’s girlfriend, who is pregnant. They have all flocked to him from wherever they live and are running and fetching and worrying and trying to joke with Mum and making calls to the outside world. I am the only one not there. Does he know it? Does he know I am not there? I am in the outside world. I just can’t go. I cannot be there. I am on the outside, waiting for calls. Sometimes the boys explain things to me about the operation, but I do not take it in. I have the same feeling when someone is explaining an abstruse political news item to me. It is a nightmare of information. I listen and nod and hope the person will shut up soon. I do not take it in. I tell myself, I’ll work it out later, I’ll find out for myself what this all means.