cadaver in the fucking freezer."
"Oh." Holly looked at the television.
"What fresh hell is this weâre watching?"
*
By mid-afternoon, Holly had disappeared again, so it was just Mom and me visiting Grammy at Central Park Lodgeâa retirement home in Thorncliffe Park, an offshoot neighbourhood in East York, a ten-minute drive north of our house.
The area was a ghettoized suburb comprised largely of stuffy high-rise apartments, a dilapidated mall (Zellers, a bowling alley, shoe repair, custom T-shirt print shop, food court, BiWay, womenâs and menâs fashion, designer footwear, Radio Shack, Pizza Pizza, a large grocery store, beer store, electronics, lotto-and-cigar shop, dentist, optometrist) a feeble library, and a high school recently renamed after a Canadian astronaut, Marc Garneau.
For nearly two years now, Grammy had slept each night in a tiny metal-rimmed bed and puttered around the miserable confines of her walk-in closet-sized room, which was furnished with a crummy desk and dresser, a one-seater chair, and a terrible view of the gaping parking lot seven floors below. Her room was barren, devoid of the rat-packing bounty for which she was known. Even her trademark geraniums, which in her former apartment, could always be seen spread out on display, were never replaced. Instead, two greeting cards and some photographs lay warped on her dresser. She would, on occasion, ask me about the whereabouts of her cassette tapes, which featured recordings of random evenings in her Etobicoke life with my Grampy: playing the piano, having friends over, indiscernible merriment. I told her they were safe, stashed neatly next to my own cassette inventory. I found it depressing that Grammy had been reduced to this miniscule quadrant. Our visits were short-lived, overheated, with nowhere to even hang our big dumb winter coats.
When we got to her room, Uncle Carl was already there, standing by the window.
"Hi Unc," Mom chirped.
Uncle Carl wore a dull grey suit with old and new dandruff caked on his shoulders. A tattered red sweater-vest was worn underneath, while his dress shirt was light blue and accompanied by a crusty clip-on tie. He looked like a vacuum-cleaner salesman from a 1961 episode of The Twilight Zone . His hair was slicked back (grey/black), cut extremely short on the sides. Sparse white hairs could still be seen from within his dark, neat coif.
Mom said he dyed his hair with a tonic. "Itâs what a lot of elderly men do," Mom once told us. "It sometimes doesnât looks very good, but we shouldnât say anything."
"So itâs womenâs hair dye?"
"No, itâs a special tonic cream," Mom had told us without getting into any clairvoyant detail. I just filed it under Momâs War Room Mystery Facts .
"Youâre looking fine," Uncle Carl said to Grammy, who lay cork-screwed and twisted in starchy sheets, his dwindling sister-in-law, both aged seventy-four years, who had known each other since the late 1930s. Uncle Carl was my godfather, my "Great" Uncle Carl, the arbiter of my on-call super-VHS glory reel, the controversial camcorder that cost $1,276.56, the one who slipped me twenties, developed my rolls of film from my insatiable documentation of driveway hockey or Han Solo poses, or prop Star Wars models or any other evidence of my inability to socialize in normative levels. Through Uncle Carl, I had become a mental tourist, photographing and videotaping the nothing around me.
"Just fine," he said, nodding to her and glancing at me for an endorsement. "Itâs warming up. Soon youâll be able to go outside for a nice walk," Uncle Carl said, with a denture click, giving Grammy a big diplomatic smile, talking in an elevation of tone, bordering on condescending baby talk.
"Gotta get some fresh air in here," Mom said, beginning her usual tirade of blunt commentary.
"Yes, dear," Grammy said, on her back, head tilted on a slant, as if sunk deep in her thick mattress,
"Yes,
"Oh." Holly looked at the television.
"What fresh hell is this weâre watching?"
*
By mid-afternoon, Holly had disappeared again, so it was just Mom and me visiting Grammy at Central Park Lodgeâa retirement home in Thorncliffe Park, an offshoot neighbourhood in East York, a ten-minute drive north of our house.
The area was a ghettoized suburb comprised largely of stuffy high-rise apartments, a dilapidated mall (Zellers, a bowling alley, shoe repair, custom T-shirt print shop, food court, BiWay, womenâs and menâs fashion, designer footwear, Radio Shack, Pizza Pizza, a large grocery store, beer store, electronics, lotto-and-cigar shop, dentist, optometrist) a feeble library, and a high school recently renamed after a Canadian astronaut, Marc Garneau.
For nearly two years now, Grammy had slept each night in a tiny metal-rimmed bed and puttered around the miserable confines of her walk-in closet-sized room, which was furnished with a crummy desk and dresser, a one-seater chair, and a terrible view of the gaping parking lot seven floors below. Her room was barren, devoid of the rat-packing bounty for which she was known. Even her trademark geraniums, which in her former apartment, could always be seen spread out on display, were never replaced. Instead, two greeting cards and some photographs lay warped on her dresser. She would, on occasion, ask me about the whereabouts of her cassette tapes, which featured recordings of random evenings in her Etobicoke life with my Grampy: playing the piano, having friends over, indiscernible merriment. I told her they were safe, stashed neatly next to my own cassette inventory. I found it depressing that Grammy had been reduced to this miniscule quadrant. Our visits were short-lived, overheated, with nowhere to even hang our big dumb winter coats.
When we got to her room, Uncle Carl was already there, standing by the window.
"Hi Unc," Mom chirped.
Uncle Carl wore a dull grey suit with old and new dandruff caked on his shoulders. A tattered red sweater-vest was worn underneath, while his dress shirt was light blue and accompanied by a crusty clip-on tie. He looked like a vacuum-cleaner salesman from a 1961 episode of The Twilight Zone . His hair was slicked back (grey/black), cut extremely short on the sides. Sparse white hairs could still be seen from within his dark, neat coif.
Mom said he dyed his hair with a tonic. "Itâs what a lot of elderly men do," Mom once told us. "It sometimes doesnât looks very good, but we shouldnât say anything."
"So itâs womenâs hair dye?"
"No, itâs a special tonic cream," Mom had told us without getting into any clairvoyant detail. I just filed it under Momâs War Room Mystery Facts .
"Youâre looking fine," Uncle Carl said to Grammy, who lay cork-screwed and twisted in starchy sheets, his dwindling sister-in-law, both aged seventy-four years, who had known each other since the late 1930s. Uncle Carl was my godfather, my "Great" Uncle Carl, the arbiter of my on-call super-VHS glory reel, the controversial camcorder that cost $1,276.56, the one who slipped me twenties, developed my rolls of film from my insatiable documentation of driveway hockey or Han Solo poses, or prop Star Wars models or any other evidence of my inability to socialize in normative levels. Through Uncle Carl, I had become a mental tourist, photographing and videotaping the nothing around me.
"Just fine," he said, nodding to her and glancing at me for an endorsement. "Itâs warming up. Soon youâll be able to go outside for a nice walk," Uncle Carl said, with a denture click, giving Grammy a big diplomatic smile, talking in an elevation of tone, bordering on condescending baby talk.
"Gotta get some fresh air in here," Mom said, beginning her usual tirade of blunt commentary.
"Yes, dear," Grammy said, on her back, head tilted on a slant, as if sunk deep in her thick mattress,
"Yes,
Similar Books
