Home from the Vinyl Cafe (20 page)

               
M
orley was telling her friend Nicky about her mother’s accident. They were both fixing supper as they talked on the telephone.

“Just a second,” Morley said. “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Shoot.”

There was a crash as the receiver snapped off Morley’s shoulder.

Nicky winced. “What’s the matter?” she asked. It sounded like the phone had fallen into the blender. “What’s happening?”

What was happening was that the receiver was snaking across the kitchen floor. The dog was chasing it.

“Morley?”

There was another clatter. Then Morley came back on the line. “Sorry,” she said.

“What happened?”

“The potatoes were boiling over. Where was I?”

“Your mother.”

“She rear-ended someone. It wasn’t her fault. Someone jumped out in front of the guy, and he slammed on his brakes.”

“Was she hurt?”

“No. No. She’s okay.”

“What about the other guy?”

“No. Everyone was okay. It was Friday night. She came here after it happened. Dave and I were supposed to be going out. She got here the same time as the babysitter.”

“How?”

“How what?”

“How’d she get there?”

“She drove.”

“Did you go out?”

“Yeah. It was her second accident since Christmas.”

“What did you do?”

“What do you mean what did we do?”

“Where did you go?”

“We went to a movie. I’m worried she’s going to kill someone.”

“I wish
my
mother could still drive. What did you see?”

“I don’t remember. Damn. What did we see? The one with the guy and the bomb. Where the father gets blown up. You know, that’s the problem. Everyone is so impressed because she’s eighty-two years old and she still has her mind. She also has cataracts. She can hardly see, Nicky. She’s going to kill someone.”

“Don’t they have to take the test when they’re over eighty?”

“She took the test. She’s waiting for cataract surgery, and you know what the guy said? He said, ‘I am going to retire in seven years, and if I can drive as well as you can when I’m sixty-five, I’ll be happy.’ ”

“He passed her?”

“Yeah, he passed her.”

“So don’t worry.”

“She’s had two accidents since Christmas.”

“You said it wasn’t her fault.”

“Still.”

“If you’re so worried, why don’t you call the police?”

Morley and Dave were lying in bed.

“She’s my own mother. How can I turn my mother in? I can’t rat on my own mother. What if I call and she finds out about it?”

“What if you don’t and she kills someone?”

“Thanks, Dave. That’s a big help. Thanks a lot. Why don’t
you
call the cops.”

“She’s not my mother.”

“Great. That’s great. That’s really great.”

Morley was picking up her pillows and heading out of the room.

“Well, she isn’t,” said Dave as she disappeared.

Dave said, “I’m sorry.”

Morley didn’t say “It’s okay.”

Dave said, “Listen. She hardly drives anymore. What does she do? She goes for groceries. How far is it to the grocery store? A quarter of a mile? Two turns? She goes to bridge. Those are the sort of trips you could do in your pajamas. Who’s going to see you? What’s going to happen?”

“I know what’s going to happen,” said Morley. “She’s going to kill someone, Dave. That’s what’s going to happen.”

“She’s not going to kill someone going to the grocery store.”

“You know what happened last month? She got lost. You know where she got lost? She got lost in Scarborough.”

“Scarborough?”

“She went to dinner at Norah’s house, and she got lost coming home. She said she didn’t know where she was. She said she couldn’t see the numbers on the houses or read the signs. She said she was so scared, she was shaking. And then
she got on the highway, don’t ask me how, somehow she found the highway, but she didn’t know where she was going. And you know what she told me? She said she must have been driving funny, because someone stopped and helped her. Someone stopped, Dave. She said they told her she was going the wrong way.”

“I thought she didn’t drive at night.”

“How else was she supposed to get there?”

“She could have taken the subway. The subway goes to Scarborough.”

“She hates the subway. The stairs are too hard.”

“But she figured it out. Anyone could get lost in Scarborough. She got home. Right? She’s fine.”

“You know what scares me, Dave? She said she was heading the wrong way. I don’t know whether she meant she was heading in the wrong direction or driving on the wrong side of the highway.”

“Did you ask her?”

“I was too scared to ask her. Somebody stopped. What do you think?”

Dave was reading the paper. Morley was knitting.

Dave said, “Did you know some guy in Kansas, some eighty-year-old guy in Lawrence, Kansas, has Albert Einstein’s brain in a pickle jar in his apartment?”

Morley said, “No. Mom phoned today.”

Dave said, “The guy was a pathologist. And he was on duty when Einstein died, so he did the autopsy and kept the brain to study it. What did she want?”

Morley said, “Nothing. Every time she leaves a message on the machine, I feel guilty erasing it.”

Dave said, “Listen. ‘The most celebrated brain of the twentieth century resides in Apartment Thirteen on the second
floor of a nondescript brick apartment building here.’ Here is Lawrence. Kansas. The guy has it all cut up. He says he’s two thirds of the way through studying it.”

Morley said, “I keep thinking it’ll turn out to be the last thing she ever says to me, and I will have erased it.”

Dave said, “He keeps it in his hall closet.”

Morley said, “I invited her for dinner on Friday. It’s Dad’s birthday.”

Dave said, “Friday?”

Morley said, “When did Einstein die, anyway?”

Dave said, “Nineteen fifty-five.”

Morley said, “How?”

Dave said, “Automobile accident. He was hit by an old lady.”

Morley said, “What?”

Dave said, “Just kidding. It doesn’t say. It just says he was seventy-five.”

There is a picture of Morley’s father on her bureau. It is in a gold frame. It was taken in Florida ten years ago. Roy was seventy-six years old. He looks impossibly young and vigorous. The sun in his face, the wind tugging at his hair. He is squinting.

“Thirty years as a copper,” he used to say, “and the payoff is I get to go to Florida and squint for three months.”

Ten years ago Helen and Roy used to drive to Florida and back and didn’t even think about it. Nobody thought about it.

They brought back pictures of their friends, all of them holding drinks, standing around someone’s mobile home—“It’s not a trailer park,” Helen used to say, “mobile homes, mobile homes.”

Six years ago, in January, he collapsed. Helen phoned Morley and said, “You better get down here.” She said it was
like someone had unplugged him. Dave said, “What do the doctors say?”

Morley had phoned the hospital in Clearwater and spoken to a doctor. He said, “You have to be philosophical about this; he’s had a good life.” Morley and Dave rushed down and put the trailer up for sale and sold some stuff and left the rest for whoever bought it, for whatever they wanted to pay.

After two weeks the doctors said Roy could travel. Dave had already left with the car. Morley flew back with her parents. She couldn’t believe how old Roy looked. He could walk, but he was walking old. He didn’t seem to be paying attention to anything. He didn’t want to eat.

Roy had always been so strong.

When he was a young man, he played hockey. In 1927 he played center for the Toronto Granites. It was three years after the Granites won the gold medal at the Winter Olympics.

He was a born athlete. He used to go and watch the Maple Leafs play baseball at Hanlan’s Point Stadium. He took his glove. If he got there early enough, they would let him shag flies during batting practice.

He quit school when he was sixteen and worked on an ice truck. Two years later, the hockey team got him a job at the Inglis factory on Strachan Avenue. He stayed there, working in shipping and then on the line, for almost fifteen years.

When he and Helen got married, they got a place in the suburbs. He used to run a mile every morning to the end of the streetcar line so he wouldn’t have to pay two fares. In those days, when you changed cars, you had to pay a second fare.

He got a weekend job with the Mounties, and when the war came, they hired him full-time. They gave him a rifle and one bullet and sent him to Port Colborne to guard the
Welland Canal. He wasn’t allowed to put the bullet in the rifle in case he might hurt someone. He used to say it was the most boring job he’d ever had.

Dave tried to tease him about it once. He said, “But you must have been good at it, Roy, you must have done a great job. At no point in the war did the Nazis make it anywhere near the canal.” Roy looked at him like he was nuts. He wasn’t going to let anyone say the job was unnecessary.

After the war, Roy left Inglis and got a job with the North York police force. It paid less than the factory, but it was with the township, and that meant job security. There were only fifteen other men on the force when he joined. When he retired, there were three hundred, and he was an inspector.