The Sweetness in the Lime Read online

  “Back at ya,” I called to Liv. She smiled, gave me her I-knew-you-could thumbs up, and turned her attention back to her screen.

  I leaned back then, scanned the emptied newsroom. The glassed-in managers’ offices at the far end of the newsroom had been lights out and empty since six o’clock. Most of our diminishing pool of local reporters had filed their stories hours before and headed off to wherever they went. Even the chairs at the workstations around the editing rim—so recently occupied by the entertainment editor, life editor, business editor, early news editor—were empty. Only Liv, the sports guy still sneaking in results from west coast games, and I remained at our posts.

  Oh, and Peggy Aylward. She sat alone at her desk in the reporters’ section. Peggy was our marquee reporter, justly famous for a decade-old exposé that had driven the mayor from the city. The awards she’d won for the paper used to earn her slack from the bosses. No longer. After the fresh crop of new owners arrived last year, one Toronto Suit began charting “content output,” establishing specific weekly word quotas each “content provider” must fill. Peggy’s output, Toronto Suit recently reported gravely to Gibson, who confided to Peggy, who blabbed in righteous indignation to the entire newsroom, was “well below average.” She was given one month to get her numbers up to the publishing chain’s metrics of 7.4 stories per week, averaging 360 words per content unit. Otherwise, Toronto Suit said, “There are plenty of other content providers in the ether.” Or words to that effect.

  So Peggy was still at her desk, probably polishing her résumé for the next government flacking job ahead of what everyone knew would be another round of newsroom cuts. Perhaps I should do that too. I’d heard talk the chain was considering outsourcing all its page preparation functions to a private contractor in Shanghai, or Singapore, or someplace not here. Or maybe to an algorithm.

  I glanced back at Peggy, who was now engaged in an animated conversation with Wendy Wagner. They were discussing a printout Peggy held in her hands. My edit of Wendy’s copy? Was Peggy mentoring Wendy? Why wasn’t I? Wendy, dressed, as was her wont, in black—black turtleneck top, short, form-fitting black pencil skirt, black tights with requisite run above the knee, black mid-calf boots—had draped herself across the end of Peggy’s workstation, her head resting on her folded hands, looking up in seeming supplication at the older, wiser woman. My Wendy rant, which I luckily hadn’t ranted aloud, had been unfair. I was simply channelling my collective curmudgeon Ghost of Editor Past, the one who lamented that kids these days don’t already know what we probably didn’t know either at their age (but have now conveniently forgotten we didn’t know). I once told myself I would quit when I began sounding like the ghost of Editor Past. I should quit. But what else would I do?

  “I’m sorry. I really am.” I looked up, startled. How had Wendy ended up in front of me when she was?… I stole a glance at Peggy’s cubicle. Peggy was putting on her coat. Wendy stared at me, apologetic. “I just can’t help myself,” she explained. “I want to write the best story I can, so I just keep playing with the words, like, trying to make it as perfect as I can. Anyway, sorry I was so late. And thanks for making it read so much better.”

  “No worries,” I mumbled. I had never been good at actual conversation.

  “Maybe tomorrow, we can go over my story and you can tell me how I could have made it better.”

  “Sure.”

  She brightened. “Peggy and I are going over to the Shoe. Wanna come?” The Shoe was the Shoe Shop, a trendy downtown bar I rarely frequented. I don’t like crowds.

  “Uh, thanks, really, but I—”

  “Our Eli has more important things to do.” It was Liv to my rescue, calling out from behind her desk as she wiped the evening’s electronic detritus from her terminal. “While you girls party the night away, Eli will be home hunched over his computer, writing his great Canadian novel, won’t you, Eli?”

  Thank you, Liv.

  Wendy flashed me a look. Admiration? Respect?

  I shrugged helplessly. There was no novel. Perhaps there had been once. Was it the novel based—not loosely enough—on my own life, the one that, like my actual life, had depressed, then bored me into submission? Or maybe it was my stillborn memoir? I was going to call it Father Knows Nothing: And I Know Nothing About My Father. I never got past the title.

  “Next time,” Wendy offered, her face betraying neither disappointment nor relief. My presence, or absence, didn’t really matter.

  And then Wendy and Peggy were gone.

  “Want a drive?” Liv asked. I was never sure with Liv. Sometimes, a drive meant a drive home, sometimes it meant a quick fuck in the back of her car outside my father’s house. Don’t give me that look. She would have described it that way too. We were work friends. We talked about the news, and the news behind the news. We bitched about the bosses and gossiped about our co-workers. Occasionally we had wild, utilitarian sex that signified nothing more than the obvious. I liked Liv, and she liked me too, I think. “You’re a good-looking guy,” she would tell me whenever she thought I needed a talking-to. “No, really, my friend. You are. You’re just too hard on yourself. You have to get out there and meet someone.”

  Sometime. Someone. But I wasn’t in the mood tonight.

  “No thanks. I think I’ll walk.”

  “OK.” Like Wendy, Liv’s face betrayed neither disappointment nor relief. My presence, or absence, didn’t really matter.

  ****

  My father waltzed around the kitchen table, deftly navigating obstacles like the couple-resembling chair, smiling at some secret memory, eyes squeezed shut, leaning in now, savouring, perhaps, an imagined whiff of perfume, hugging the broom closer, cheek to broom bristle, humming along while Vera Lynn sang “We’ll Meet Again” yet again.

  Standing in the kitchen doorway, a tumbler of Bacardi Black in my hand, I considered the father I’d never really known, not growing up, and certainly not now that his mind had faded like one of those old photographs, the image never properly fixed in the darkroom. Who knew Dad would be obsessed with Vera Lynn? No, not Vera Lynn. Vera Lynn singing “We’ll Meet Again.” Just that.

  It had started one night after I’d returned from work and neither of us could sleep. I flipped on the TV and found a channel showing Dr. Strangelove, the sixties satire about a nuclear holocaust, which ended with Peter Sellers, as a wheelchair-bound former Nazi scientist named Dr. Strangelove, rising from his chair and shouting, “Mein Führer, I can walk!” The scene then dissolved into a montage of nuclear explosions, accompanied by Vera Lynn singing ironically how they’d all meet again some sunny day.

  “Again,” my father said as the credits rolled. “Again.” For days after, he would point to the TV and simply say, “Again,” again and again. I finally rented a VHS copy. My father stared blankly at the screen until the end when Lynn began to sing. Then he turned to me, smiled, and nodded enthusiastically. Rewind. Play. Rewind. Play.

  It had seemed as good a time as any to ask him about his war, to segue into the black hole of his life before mine. “What do you remember about that time?” I asked, all innocence and curiosity.

  “Nothing!” he barked. “I didn’t do nothing in the war! Stop asking me that!” So I did.

  Eventually, I downloaded a copy of Lynn’s best-of album to my iPod. But my father wasn’t interested in Lynn’s other World War II songs. He’d shake his head, stomp his feet until “We’ll Meet Again,” the last song on the album, came on. After a few days, I put it on continuous repeat, which made my father happy. Except—

  “Fucking cunt!” My father would suddenly scream at the broom for no apparent reason, throw it to the floor, and put his hands over his ears to block out the music. He did this randomly, yet more and more often. His nightmares were becoming more frequent, less random too. He’d wake me from a deep sleep, babbling incoherently. “Ping…Ping… Got you!…Not this time, you bastard…No cl
ean sweep for you.” And then there’d be a pause, followed by a plaintive howl and an almost eerie declaration. “I killed them! I killed them all! It was me!”

  “It’s not unusual,” my father’s doctor explained when I expressed concern. “People with dementia often lose their traditional inhibitions, begin acting in ways opposite to what we have been conditioned to expect from them.” The doctor prescribed an antidepressant he said was popular among seniors. “It’ll take a few weeks, but, after that, he’ll settle down….” The doctor stopped, switched gears, launched into the spiel I now knew as well as the lyrics to “We’ll Meet Again.”

  “But Mr. Cooper, you really should consider—”

  The doctor said so. Sarah said so too. Our father needed to be in a home where professionals could care for him twenty-four hours a day. “And you,” my sister said, “you need the freedom to live your own life again. It’ll be better for everyone.”

  So why did I resist? Perhaps because I knew Sarah wanted me to do what she knew—she always knew—would be better for everyone. Smart Sarah, the older, wiser sister who’d long since escaped the stultifying confines of our upbringing. “What’s wrong with you?” she’d chided me before our mother died, when leaving still seemed possible. “You’re smart.” But Sarah won the scholarship to the law school on the other coast. Sarah hooked up with the smartest guy in her first-year law class, married, settled in Calgary, gave birth to the requisite one boy and one girl, and then made partner in some downtown law firm specializing in something well-paying to do with oil and gas. So it had been Sarah who’d lived happily ever after somewhere other than here. And I had become the child left behind to care for my demented dad.

  Each summer, Sarah would fly home with the children (sans husband since “Saul’s too busy at the firm”) for her dutiful-daughter visit. She would stay in a downtown hotel, stopping by the house once or twice to see our father who—surprise—no longer recognized her. While he sat on the couch, puzzling out who she might be and what she was doing in his living room, Sarah pretended he wasn’t sitting across from her, puzzling out who she might be and what she was doing in his living room. Instead, she would re-board the endless train of her complaints. At some point, she would criticize me—again—for not having renovated our parents’ kitchen as she’d suggested. “How do you expect to get a decent price if you don’t fix it up. I told you I’d contribute.” That was her signal to segue—again—to what to do with our father other than the nothing I was already doing so well.

  “It’s not fair to you,” she’d insisted. “You’re what? Fifty-five?”

  “Fifty-four. I’m fifty-four.”

  “You could be travelling—”

  “There’s nowhere I want to go.”

  “You know what I mean.” I did. Sarah wanted me to be normal, to be like her, with a husband and kids and a mortgage. That ship had sunk long ago.

  “And it’s not right for him either. The locks….” She’d noticed—couldn’t help but notice—the new locks I’d had installed on the basement door to keep our father from falling down the stairs, and on all the kitchen doors to keep him from forgetting to turn off a burner and setting the house on fire while I was at work.

  “What about when you’re at work?” she asked. “What then?”

  Doris, I could have answered, but Sarah already knew that answer and it didn’t satisfy her. Doris, a neighbour, was my father’s part-time caregiver and companion, not to forget our very occasional house cleaner. I suspected Doris and my father spent most of their time together watching TV, companionably filling in the hours until I returned from work. It was not an ideal living situation, but—

  “I called the woman at Sunset.” Sarah was relentless. “She says they have an opening, a sunny, south-facing room in the dementia unit. I’ll pay.”

  “It’s OK. We’re fine.”

  Why hadn’t I just said yes, thank you very much? My own guilt at having nothing else to do with my life that made more sense than what I was doing? Inertia? My father picked up the broom again, resumed dancing as if nothing had happened. Vera had never stopped singing.

  “Hungry?” I asked. “Want me to make you some more of those squished peas with maple syrup? You like those.”

  My father smiled his goofy, whatever-you-say, whoever-you-are smile. Why would I even consider putting my father in a home?

  2

  I knew the phone was ringing, knew the telephone was on the telephone table in the hallway, knew I would have to get out of bed to answer it, knew the linoleum floor would be ice cold, knew no one ever called. It must be a telemarketer. I vowed to wait out my caller—we had no answering machine—hoped the ringing would stop. It didn’t. Finally, I opened my eyes.

  My father was hovering beside the bed, naked, wisps of white pubic hair staring me in the face at my eye level. He was holding two pairs of identical black jogging pants, one in each hand. How long had he been standing there? Seeing I was awake, my father held out one pair, and then the other, as if to ask, which one should I wear?

  “In a minute,” I said, pushing back the covers, hauling myself into a sitting position. I looked at the alarm clock on my bedside table. Seven in the morning! I navigated past my father, who turned and followed me through the bedroom door. The telephone table was at the far end of the second-floor hallway, outside what had been my parents’ bedroom, where it had been since I was a kid. It was a big black rotary handset. No colour, no punch digits, no caller ID. It must be the oldest telephone on the planet. Not that it mattered. No one ever called.

  “Hello?” It was more question than answer.

  “Good morning, sunshine!” Liv. Chipper, chirpy, like a bird. I said nothing. “Did I wake you?… I woke you. That’s all right. Gibson woke me. All hands on deck.” My father was standing close now, still holding out one pair of pants and then the other, waiting for an answer. “It’s something big. I don’t know what, and neither does Gibson, or he isn’t telling me. Just that he got the word from above. High above. An all-staff meeting in the newsroom at eight o’clock. Be there or be square.”

  “What—” I paused, tried to process, couldn’t. “What’s going on?”

  “Who knows? But I do know you could use a coffee. I’ll have one waiting.”

  “Is it bad?”

  She laughed. “Maybe they’re going to give us the Christmas bonus they forgot this year.” She paused, but I didn’t respond. “Oh, and Eli? No walking to work this morning. Take a cab. You won’t have time. There’s going to be a mother of a storm this afternoon. And it’s fucking freezing already.”

  She hung up. I put down the receiver, looked at my father. “Those,” I said, pointing to the pair of pants in his right hand. “Wear those.”

  ****

  “I’ll need to see some ID, sir.” The guy was security. It said so on the gold plastic pin on his lapel, but I would have known. He was one of those shaved-headed twentysomethings who popped steroids and pressed benches. All that exercising and power-shaking had puffed up his body until he was too bulky for his clothes. His blue sports jacket bunched uncomfortably at his armpits. His grey slacks bunched even more uncomfortably at his crotch. That must hurt, I thought. Why, I wondered in the middle of thinking that, did I bother to note such irrelevancies?

  “Your ID, sir,” Security Guy said again, still polite if unsmiling, but with a sharpening edge to his voice. He was not used to being ignored. “I can’t let you in until I examine your photo identification.” Long silence. “If you’ll step aside, sir, there are people waiting.”

  While I stood in front of Security Guy, catatonic, Peggy Aylward waited behind me, holding her press card, the one with the photo that identified her as a reporter for the Tribune. I stepped aside. She handed the card to Security Guy. He handed it back. “Sorry, ma’am,” he said. “It needs to be government-issued with your photo on it. Like your driver’s licence.”
I was surprised Peggy did not say I’m a fucking reporter for this fucking newspaper. That’s my picture on the goddamned press card, so let me fucking pass now, asshole. Instead, she meekly took the card back, handed him her driver’s licence. She must be in shock. Security Guy let her through. As the door opened, I could hear the thrum of confused conversation in what should be—at this early hour—a somnolent newsroom.

  “Thank you, sir,” Security Guy said, still sir-ing, still unsmiling, handing me back my own government-issued identity card, the one that wasn’t a driver’s licence because I had never learned to drive, the one I apparently had handed over without realizing it. “You may enter now, sir.”

  Too many strangers crowded into my newsroom. There were reporters and editors from dayside I rarely encountered, columnists whose faces I recognized from their headshots but who filed their screeds electronically and never actually appeared in the newsroom, and wary guys from the state of sales who understood they were unwelcome in the church of the newsroom. There were managers, even editor Gibson, who now stood alone, adrift, without anyone to manage, not to forget all the civilian non-combatants, the secretaries, clerks, and accountants who toiled in the business office and were essential to the running of the newspaper but whose names and life stories I had never learned.

  “We’re fucked,” Liv declared, sidling up beside me, handing me a Starbucks. “It’s over.”

  I was about to ask what she meant when a flying wedge swept past us. Half-a-dozen lookalike Security Guys surrounding one small, grey-faced, grey-haired man in a grey suit who ran to keep pace. They came to a sudden halt in front of the editing rim. Two Security Guys lifted Nervous Man up on to the tabletop.