Swing Low (15 page)

During this time, I was fairly optimistic. I had met my goal of becoming a schoolteacher and I was in love with a wonderful girl. Two years later we were married, and I have mentioned already the somewhat chaotic circumstances of our wedding ceremony re the candelabra, the burning veil, Wilma’s race to fetch another.

Several months before the wedding I had gone to Elvira’s brothers with a proposition. I knew that a woman of her background could expect to receive, usually from her parents, a wedding gift of fine silverware. But Elvira’s mother had died years before and her father in the meantime had become bedridden after a stroke. With all of my expenses at home and my meagre teacher’s salary I couldn’t even begin to dream of purchasing the silverware myself. I asked the brothers, who were generous but busy with their own lives, if the three of them could pay for fifty percent of the cost of the silverware; I would pay the other half. They agreed on the spot, and Elvira was thrilled and surprised when I told her how I had financed the gift, a beautiful red-velvet-lined mahogany box of sparkling silverware. She has taken excellent care of the silverware ever since, using it only on special occasions, avoiding the dishwasher and washing it by hand, and, before it became one of the cleaning lady’s pet projects, polishing it to the point of nearly blinding our dinner guests.

Have just received a visitor who tells me I’m looking good. Oh, I don’t think so, I said. Secretly was very happy to be
told that I look good. Daughters tell me I’m handsome every day in my new Tommy Hilfiger shirt. Wish I could remember his name, assume he’s a church elder because of the nature of our one-sided conversation. Offered him my dessert. Declined. Hope it wasn’t tube food. I sat in silence, nodding at various intervals and smiling. Hope I thanked him for the visit. Should consider investing in a guest book. Would have names written down, comments. Would give me a clue.

S
ometime before we were married I found the courage to tell Elvira that I had been diagnosed as a manic depressive and that I would likely be on medication for the rest of my life. She told me that she already knew this because she had found my pills in my pocket and had recognized what they were. She told me that she loved me and that everything would be fine. This statement proved to be half right: she loved me very much, though to this day I wonder how. My psychiatrist had, when I informed him that I was planning to get married, expressed no small amount of shock and dismay. He told me that those who suffer from manic depression have a lot of difficulty making marriages or any long-term relationship work, and when I told him that I was also planning on becoming a schoolteacher, he almost hit the roof. The responsibility, Mel, the consistency, the patience, the endurance … all these things are extremely
difficult to maintain with an illness like yours … won’t you reconsider? But of course I wouldn’t. If anything at all, it was those two things, my marriage and my career, that kept me tethered to the ground, that made my life bearable and kept me from becoming unhinged.

The other worry of mine in those days, the possibility that Elvira would become an airline stewardess, was doused the day we married. So too was the possibility of her continuing her job as a nurse in the local hospital. There was only one married woman working in the hospital at that time and only because her husband had been injured and couldn’t work.

In those days, in the early fifties, I was making $170 a month. We paid fifty dollars a month to rent the small motel room, next to my aunt Molly’s Laundromat, that we lived in for a portion of the time that our house was being built. Another fifty dollars a month went towards the payment of our house lot, and thirty dollars was our average monthly grocery bill. That left us with forty extra dollars a month. Had times been different, Elvira would have kept her job, which paid more than mine, and we would have enjoyed a much higher standard of living, not to mention the sense of fulfillment she would have had working in her chosen career. But in that respect, we were no different than any other couple of that era.

Those early years were good, bearable. No lengthy, inexplicable silences, no blackouts. We had two gardens, one each for flowers and vegetables, numerous flowerbeds all over the yard that got bigger every spring as I tilled the grass to plant more rows of red and white petunias. We had
chokecherry trees and saskatoonberry trees and crabapple trees and later two willow trees that I planted in honour of the births of our daughters. In the front of the house, running almost its entire length, was a brick planter full of red and white petunias, and at the foot of the narrow paving-stone path that led from our front door to the street stood a huge and ancient elm tree. When Marjorie was a little girl, she would stand under this elm and wait for me to come home for lunch. Right outside our bedroom window was a wonderful-smelling evergreen that grew to an enormous height and width. I have a photograph of Marjorie standing beside the tree. They are the same height and she is seven years old. Elvira and I would often stand on the front porch and watch the sun set behind its boughs. Our house was made of red brick and I had painted the wooden part of it a dusty rose, my favourite colour, though the girls maintained we lived in a pink house.

Later, because of the amount of time I spent in bed, I became good at identifying sounds, in particular the individual noises of each family member. Marjorie played the piano from sunup to sundown, and my youngest, Miriam, slammed the front door countless times a day as she ran in and out of the house with friends. And Elvira talked on the phone or in the yard to friends, neighbours, and anybody else that came along. I couldn’t decipher exactly what she was saying from my bed but I could hear a quiet steady rumbling punctuated with whoops of laughter and screams of No! or Not really! And
Oba yo!
(Oh, but yes!) and
Oba nay!
(Oh, but no!) Elvira could spend hours on the telephone and Miriam would sometimes, to get her attention,
tie Elvira to the kitchen chair with her pink skipping rope. Or she would write notes to her mother such as: “I’m having difficulty breathing. My vision is blurry. Please tell your friend you’ll call her back after you’ve performed CPR on me.”

In the evening, if Elvira and the girls were out or watching TV together in the den, I would wander around the house picking up scraps of paper that had writing on them. Silly notes written by my daughters, grocery lists, receipts, and odd things doodled on the edges of newspapers and flyers, phone messages to the girls, pages ripped out of school notebooks that had been used to work out answers to math questions and discarded. I put all these papers into my filing cabinet in a folder marked “Family.”

Our friends and neighbours on the block included the Steingarts, the Shilstras, the Schellenbergs, and the Schroeders, as well as the Bergers, the Barkmans, the Bubberts, and the Broeskys.

Mrs. Steingart, a well-meaning widow, lived directly across the street and knew as much as she needed to know about every aspect of life on our block. Often she would come into our house — our doors were never locked — and wash the dishes and tidy up. She never quite understood, but always accepted, Elvira’s intense hatred of housework, and she was always happy to pitch in.

Miss Shilstra was a hermit who lived in a haunted house, according to the children on the block. In truth, she was a kind, eccentric, independent woman, the unmarried daughter of two medical doctors, who lived alone in an ancient weather-beaten house amidst piles and piles of yellowing
newspapers. At Christmas and Easter, Elvira would insist that one of the girls take Miss Shilstra a plate of baked goods that she’d prepared for the holiday. On these occasions Miss Shilstra would invite whoever had been given the task in for a cup of tea. The girls, I noticed, seemed oddly exhilarated each time they’d had a visit with old Miss Shilstra, perhaps because they felt they had narrowly survived the situation.

Between Miss Shilstra and Mrs. Steingart lived the Schroeders, a friendly family and home to the ever-adventurous Debbie, Miriam’s best friend throughout elementary school. As a child Debbie stayed up until one every morning to watch Merv Griffin on TV and every morning was raring to go before any other kid on the block. Every day, after school, she headed off to the Five to a Dollar store on Main Street, where her mother worked, and ate a bag of chips, a chocolate bar, and a soft drink, remaining as skinny as a garden hose. Once, her brother shot her out of a tree with a slingshot and she tried to strangle him with a garter snake. We were all in awe of Debbie.

On one end of our block lived the Harrisons with seven spunky daughters and no sons, and across from them the Bubberts, who kept to themselves; and at the other end of the block lived the Barkmans, he a Court of Queen’s Bench judge, and across from them lived John Henry and his family. John Henry had a sign-painting business and in the summer he would work in his driveway, creating beautiful signs of all types while the neighbourhood children stood around him in a circle and watched, fascinated. The entire block was used by the children to play games like kick the can, cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, and arrows, for which I
provided the fresh chalk. At six o’clock the siren would go off at the firehall, reminding children all over town to go home for supper, and at nine o’clock it was set off again, reminding them to go home to bed. Saturday nights, the girls had their baths and the next morning we’d all put on our Sunday best and go to church. Sunday dinner was always a beef roast, potatoes, and carrots.

Those were good years. I remember long summer evenings when I would bring ice cream cones to “my girls,” as I liked to call them, and thunderstorms when we’d all stand in the front porch, feeling brave and excited and happy.

Have lost my temper with good friend and colleague Miss Hill. Why her, of all people? How long, I said repeatedly, has John Q. Public known about this situation? What situation, Mel? asked Miss Hill. I’d repeat my question. How long has John Q. Public known about this situation? Miss Hill tried to calm me down. Nobody knows, Mel, it doesn’t matter anyway what people think … I explode: Oh yes it does!
Oh yes it does!
And I repeat the question again and again and again with increasing volume until Miss Hill whispers that she’ll be back soon, that I’ll be fine, that things will work out, that everybody wants me to be well again, that nobody blames me! Pointless to mention that I blame myself.

Those first five or six years of our marriage were relatively blissful, but there were some chinks in the armour, signs perhaps of another impending breakdown. On Saturdays I would sleep until noon, while Elvira baked the weekly supply of buns and did the banking, racing off to the credit union at ten to twelve before it closed for the day. The odd time she would mention how helpful it would be if I were to take on the banking responsibilities. On Sundays I spent most of the afternoon in bed on an extended
meddachshlope
(Sunday-afternoon nap; some people get an early start on their nap while still in church). Come Monday morning, however, I was raring to go, ready to meet my students and lead them forward through their lessons. My mind spun with ideas for group projects and written assignments, and every morning I eagerly awaited the arrival of my students. I was sowing the seeds of a pattern that would stay with me for life. My reputation as a teacher was growing in the community and so was the number of hours I spent in bed on the weekends. Elvira, in the meantime, was kept busy doing the housework and taking care of Marjorie, born a year and a half into our marriage.