This All Happened(84)
Boyd: Grampa says if Dad dies, he’ll have to go cut his own wood this winter.
13 For thanksgiving I’m invited to Lydia’s parents’. While Lydia pours the gravy into a glass jar, her mother is plonking in three ice cubes, to help separate the fat. Her brother is sorting the coats and boots in the porch and saying, Let’s get this place spotless. Lydia carries a bag of garbage out to the garage, and then returns with her boots still on. Her sister is laying plates in the oven to warm. Mr Murphy says, You want a drink, Gabriel? And he pours a generous glass of rum with orange juice. I’m putting on the cabbage. There’s one two three, nine for supper. Tinker Bumbo is snoring on the loveseat.
Mr Murphy: It calls for salt.
Lydia: It do boy, it do.
Theyve invited me for supper but I’m brokenhearted. Too many fights with Lydia. And they love me and I love them. That’s what breaks my heart. Theyre a good family and I’m losing them.
14 I look outside and focus on the twenty-two black wires strung on the telephone pole in the yard. If youre looking down Long’s Hill at the burgundy and scarlet and mustard and rust of Signal Hill, then the twenty-two wires converge and disrupt the hill in a random graph of thin crescents of colour.
This pole is leaning a little, carrying the weight of electricity and communication. A thirty-foot timber cut from the Gander region. It stands just outside the rebuilt Chinese and fish-and-chips restaurants. Where they sell laminated placemats of the Great Fire of 1993. The Old Big R engulfed in Halloween nighttime flame. Fire licked in ladders up phone poles on Harvey Road, transformers exploded. In the grocery store fire burnt turkeys in freezers. And last night, on the rough parking lot that once was the grocery store, I had a fight with Lydia.We were sitting in Jethro, discussing breaking up. At one point, a point where we’ve all been, where you are exhausted with your predicament, willing to take any ship, I realized Jethro was sitting in the aisle for fresh fruit and frozen products.
15 We’ve had our last fight. It’s finished. I hate her. Let me explain why I hate Lydia Murphy. Because she says that I’m mean-spirited. That I’m a prick. That I dont admit the real motives for my actions. That I won’t apologize. If only I’d apologize.
Nothing I do seems to make Lydia laugh. She will laugh at Max in a glowing love. Maisie laughs. Wilf will take my questions in wonder. But Lydia shuts me down. No, she’ll say, that’s not right. No one wants to eat that gravy with fat in it. But the truth is, only she doesnt. I try using the turkey baster (we’re waiting on the gravy) and she tells me not to. I’ve asked her to take care of the gravy and she goes off with Wilf. Later, she yells at me, you didnt say it had to be done now.
We play 120s and she takes sixty points off my score when I went thirty for sixty. Instead of laughing at my bad luck in a good way, she’s mean and punishes. When I ask about the sixty points she isnt sure.You just like being mean to me, I say. Then take it back, she says. Take it, take it. She is stern in front of the others. When I ask if saying hearts is strategic the ace of hearts becomes the ace of trump, reducing trumps by one
Lydia says, automatically and impatiently, Doesnt matter. She wins, but do I care? It’s not with joy.
We call a taxi to go downtown, but the cab driver says he won’t take five. I’ll walk, I say. And Max and Maisie and Wilf say, we’ll walk too. It’s only Lydia in the cab. And I see her sitting there in fury.
What’s tiresome in all this is that I will explain why I was upset and it’s as though I havent said a word. Lydia returns to her original argument. And, always, it’s me who is wrong. I will apologize for hurting her she expresses hurt through anger.
We look at each other, bent on fury and exhausted. And resigned. There is even a touch of love, perhaps sadness, when we agree we should part ways. It’s too much anger. I’d rather be on my own.