My Grandmother's Pill

My Grandmother’s Pill

Lisa Pike

GUERNICA - FIRST FICTIONS SERIES 6

TORONTO • BUFFALO • LANCASTER (U.K.)

2014

Contents

I. Mean Drunks and Happy Drunks

Bay Street and Bloor

1 2 3 4 I declare a thumb war

Walt’s World

II. Inch by Inch

III. Slip

Acknowledgements

About The Author

Dedication

Copyright

I.    Mean Drunks and Happy Drunks

The women in my family always classified men as either mean drunks or happy drunks. With happy drunks, they smiled as they dried their dishes with cotton dishtowels or sat at the Formica top and chrome leg kitchen table with their cigarettes and tea. Uncle Art, for instance, was a happy drunk and they would recall fondly how he joked and played the violin. Too bad he had to die. With mean drunks, they talked less of what the men did and more of how they hoped they were getting theirs in hell. That’s just how it was, milling around the kitchen table, bored, till someone offered me a cookie, two arms pulling me in, a voice happy in my ear, "Come here Maudie, come sit on Gramma’s lap!"

Bay Street and Bloor

It has to be shit from the ‘70s, that’s the rule. You’re only allowed to translate shmaltzy cheese of the Tom Jones kind. God the old boy used to torture me with that shit in the car. And there’d be nothing you could do till the ride was over.

Seamus always called his dad the old boy. The old boy’s coming in for Christmas, the old boy’s having something done to his kidney, one of his sisters might be mad ‘cause the old boy’s bringing up the girlfriend for Easter dinner.

Well I don’t know any Tom Jones songs.

Good for you! he says, rolling over on the bed to kiss my belly. He caresses my legs, up my inner thigh — you’re so soft, his lips, mouth, murmur — kisses climbing up my chest.

You always say that.

"‘Cause it’s true!"

What about Beatles songs? Could they count?

Hmm, maybe.

We could do a whole series — just songs from the early 60s.

Well, that certainly counts as cheese!

Seamus begins to lick around my nipple and move his hand, fingers in between my legs. He doesn’t stop till he makes me come and then enters me slowly, gently building momentum till it’s his turn. We lie naked on my bed, sweating, exhausted, the busy intersection of Bay and Bloor twenty stories below us.

Maude! Do you realize we’ve been shagging for three days straight? I mean, I know you’re a sexpot divorcée and all, but I really don’t know how much more I have in me. He reaches up over to the dresser for his cigarettes, Players King Extra Light. He’s trying to quit. When are your kids are coming back?

Tomorrow. I lie on the bed, flat on my back while he smokes his cigarette sitting cross-legged, using one of the small coffee cup saucers from the wedding set my mother once bought me as an ashtray. I rest my hand on one of his knees, the smell of salt, sweat and semen, all mixed in now with the smoke that he blows in rings drifting and disintegrating overhead. Listening to the sound of his deep rich baritone voice finding its way through the lyrics of Detroit City in French.

When we weren’t shagging or playing the translating cheesy-songs-into-French game, Seamus and I loved to sit in the green room, a kind of uninsulated sunroom popular in the early 1970s when these apartments were built. It was someone’s idea of a solarium but that’s not why we called it the green room. Ruby and Geoff started calling it that because of the old green indoor/outdoor carpeting that was in it, all stained and frayed, on which they sometimes played. The room was freezing in the winter and sweltering hot in the summer. In short, a beautiful view but basically useless for anything practical. That was the reason why I took the apartment, walking through here with the cranky lady who still works the front desk saying yes, I’d like to rent it even though I knew I wouldn’t be able to afford it for long. I could see the water from here and there was a clear sense of where the city ended. The CN Tower, bank buildings, offices all rising up, rows and rows, masses of concrete all clumped together suddenly dropping off into nothing. Ending. And then, water.

This is what I loved about this place when I walked in, the sense that the city could be contained, controlled. That it couldn’t go beyond the limit of the shore.

Sometimes I would take the kids down there, to the edge, feel our shoes on the sand and see, hear where the water and land met. The act somehow proof of what I saw each day from my window. Yelling out to Geoff to stay clear of the garbage and to not go near any needles as he wound his way along up over rocks, logs, strewn branches looking for sand crabs, dead or alive. Ruby meandering alongside the edge of the beach and the boardwalk between me and Geoff, carrying the snacks we’d packed together: chips, cheese sandwiches, a washed apple wrapped in a paper towel for us each.

Sitting cross-legged, surrounded by windows from which you could see north, east, and south down Bay from the twentieth floor, Seamus and I would drink our coffee, the little ashtray-plate from the wedding set my mother bought on the green between us. Seamus intermittently getting up to refill our cups, make another pot for the conversations that started our day: interesting books we were reading, the time we’d each spent travelling in Europe when we were younger, my divorce, Geoff and Ruby, war in the Middle East. All this before 10 am when I’d head down to the library at the university and Seamus would be going down somewhere on Parliament Street to meet his boss Sue who had a contract for her Language Instruction Company to teach government employees French. There were a few who were pretty good, Seamus said, people who could speak reasonably well, but on average they were beyond hope. They would never speak French no matter how many classes they took on their lunch hour. And of course you can’t tell them that, that they may as well quit while they’re ahead, that if they ever went to France no one would understand a word they said. And Quebec? Forget it! There are a couple of guys who are really persistent too. They got all the little extra kits, workbooks and tapes and new dictionaries that they keep referring to, checking things during class. And then, of course, there’s always the one who tries to trick you. Asking you some particular word that is so obscure and useless that you’d never need it for anything practical, any conversation between real people. Probably thinking that shit up before bed. Fucking feds! Seamus had laughed, getting his black book bag ready.

∞

I try to find Seamus’ old set of keys on my ring. Sunday is approaching and I have to give them to my friend Lynn so she can water the plants. That’s the day my mother arrives and we go for the eight-day vacation of our lives to Disneyworld. Another one of my mother’s spoonfuls of medicinal elements, herbal remedies and self-help books, trying to make our pain go away, make everything alright. Like when she used to take me to the herbalogist on Wyandotte Street in Windsor where I grew up.

Climbing up onto the tall teetering wooden stool so the herbalogist could read my eyes. I never heard of any other kids who had their eyes read. But my mom insisted it was necessary, rationing out the paycheque money from her latest new job, calculating everything in her head as the assistant measured things out onto scales to put in the capsules that would be wrapped up with plain brown paper and popped into my mother’s faded bird-patterned purse with the round wooden handles. The heavy string of brass bells ringing in a low, solemn matter-of-fact way as we opened