The Telephone Table

“My daddy’s dead! My daddy’s dead!”

It’s 1962? 1963? I can never remember which and I don’t know the day or month, either, because for some reason it won’t stick in my head and I don’t have it written down anywhere. The date I’d get from my mother was different every time I asked, and my siblings are no better. It’s on his gravestone, of course, but this is what I mean about it not sticking in my head. When my mother died a couple of years ago (physician assisted and I can’t tell you what a pleasant experience that was – five stars, two thumbs up, and highly recommend) we all went out to visit it. I made a mental note to remember the date of death, maybe even did briefly, but then forgot it again.

So I have no idea when my father died, or where, for that matter, but I look at it like this, the universe doesn’t want me to know. Why? Because the universe is saying I’ve only ever needed to know it on government security clearance forms, and since I’ve filled out at least a dozen of them with a different date of my father’s death on each one, clearly the government doesn’t need to know, either.

By the way, my mother wanted her ashes buried in the plot beside my father, but alas, my uncle put himself there before she could. She didn’t really care and even thought it was kind of funny, because my uncle was a special case, and maybe loved my father most – he certainly looked up to him. But my mother also told me whenever uncle G came to visit my father would spend most of it hiding in the den, pretending to work, and so uncle G would end up talking to my mother. Personally, I think my mother was who he loved most but in a jealous of us kids and wanting her attention all to himself kind of way. But to be fair about the whole being buried beside my father thing, he did, after all, know my father longer. My mother only knew him after the war was over and until he died, whenever that was. Then she lived a whole lifetime without him, teaching, staff parties, traveling, staff parties, playing golf, staff parties, under 40 when he died, over 90 when she did.

(Just an aside: My uncle wouldn’t be appropriate for kids today. Once, when I was about ten? eleven? twelve? I agreed to accompany him to a service at the church beside the farmhouse in Cloudslee where my grandmother was born. After the service he showed me around the little cemetery, pointing out who was who. Then he told me that my grandmother and grandfather were cousins and that’s why he was a genius and I was retarded.)

But back to my memory. It’s the date of my father’s death, whenever it was, and I’m skipping up and down the back lane chanting “My daddy’s dead! My daddy’s dead!” a four-year-old town crier.

Now, I should clarify, I don’t know if I actually did this, skipped up and down the back lane chanting “My daddy’s dead! My daddy’s dead!” – or – if my older sister S just told me I did. I don’t know. She didn’t like me. She didn’t like any of us. But regardless of whether it’s a made up memory or not, it’s a memory, and my first in colour. The sky is blue, the sun yellow, the grass green. I’m wearing my pink peddle pushers with the bicycle ladies print, a too tight mock turtleneck in a scratchy knit fabric (pastel striped). My hair’s in braids and I’m wearing a red hairband.

There’s a light breeze. Nobody’s in their backyard, but people in black are coming and going from our front door while I skip up and down the back lane.

But it’s a cartoon me, too, the people in black are silhouettes, and for pete’s sake – it completely defies physics. I shouldn’t be seeing myself, first of all, but also, how could I see people at the front of the house when I’m in the back lane?

If my father died in winter then obviously this memory is made up. But I don’t think he died in winter because I remember a scene, and I know it’s real because I’m not in it, my mother’s beside me, we’re in the doorway to my parents’ bedroom, and she’s showing my father, who’s sitting up in bed, my new snowsuit that she got on sale. So even if it was winter it would have been the end of winter, and while my father didn’t live long after his diagnosis, he lived a while.

Look, the thing is, made up or not, I know I was like my baby sister, A, who was 18 months, not S, who was nine, or my brother M, who was seven. They were sad. I wasn’t sad. I was too young. I didn’t understand what was happening, what had happened. Maybe I’d even forgotten about my father by the time he died. And children weren’t involved in adult affairs back in the day. We didn’t even go to his funeral. It wasn’t considered appropriate. Or something. I don’t know. All I know is that I have no memory of being sad that my father had died.

Say, you know that famous picture from Life magazine of JFK Jr. saluting his father’s coffin? Well he was younger than I was when my father died and I can tell you, he had no idea his father was in that coffin. Cripes, he’d probably interacted with his father a dozen times before he was assassinated.

Now, if Jackie had died, or my mother in my case, I’m sure it would have been different. But my mother was at home with me. My father was a lawyer who went to an office every day. His office. And he probably hadn’t felt well for a while and was tired a lot and not around because he was sleeping.

Madonna’s mother died when she was five and she just remembers being mad at her all the time for being too tired to play.

JFK was President and on drugs for a bad back and staying in hotel rooms with Marilyn Monroe.

So, my father probably hadn’t felt well for a while, and was tired when he wasn’t at the office, then – poof – he’s gone away to the hospital. After that my only contact with my father would have been his Sunday night phone calls, only one of which I remember, and only because of what happened.

So yeah, Sunday night we would all line up to the telephone table in the hall because that’s when my father would phone so that each of us would have a chance to talk to him. I don’t remember those calls, just the one when I was finally trusted to hold the phone myself, talk to my father, then put the phone down on the telephone table – don’t hang up!!! – for the next person in line to pick up. 

I remember he said, “Bye now, be good”.

So I said, “Okay, bye” and hung up the phone. And I’m pretty sure I felt proud of myself because in the memory I look around excitedly at everyone (only my grandmother is still in the line, behind me) but S is screaming at me and then my grandmother is patting my arm and saying “It’s okay, it’s okay, I’ll talk to him next week.” And I realize what I’ve done and it’s just one of those awful things that’s so big at the time and you just wish you could go back and do it right because now you know what you did wrong and you just really really really want a re-do. See, I know that memory’s real because I can still feel it. Bad. It felt bad. It still feels bad. It was a shitty shitty feeling that I’ve had many times since – dropping a candy bar in a municipal bin instead of the wrapper, asking someone I mistakenly assumed was pregnant when the baby is due, marking an X in the wrong circle of a ballot.

Coming home drunk with Karen and eating the giant cookie that Leigh bought for her boyfriend’s birthday that they both just walked into the dorm kitchen to celebrate.

Oh and of course S told me later that our father died right after I hung up the phone and so our grandmother never got to talk to him again and that’s why she didn’t know who anybody was anymore and had to go into a nursing home where she died two days later.

I don’t think I ever believed that, though. And maybe that’s a made up memory.

Anyway, all of that to say that when M was clearing out my mother’s house, the one we’d grown up in, built by my grandfather, after she had to go into a nursing home, he asked if I wanted anything. Now, my mother had been trying to get rid of stuff forever, and sometimes I’d let her send it to me and then I’d donate it to the thrift shop, so I was all set to say no when I remembered the telephone table. I’d always liked it because my mother would keep her gloves and so on in the drawers, and they smelled like the Estee Lauder perfume she always wore with a hint of Du Mauriers. And all through the 60s and 70s when we were growing up and Gram was living with us, too, it was where the phone was, the phone being a central feature of our house.

So My Blond Companion and I rented a car and drove from Ottawa to Cloudslee, where my mother’s stuff was being stored in the farmhouse where my grandmother had been born, just a piece of property now owned by M, because primogeniture, to pick up the telephone table. By this time, it had become really important to me, having it, and I was relieved that none of my siblings were interested, and could hardly wait to get it safely back to Ottawa.

(We didn’t hear from S for any of this. She’d long since let our family go, as sometimes happens, but she’d never been interested in stuff, anyway. She did phone our mother the day before her physician assisted dying, and people can think that’s awful if they want, but we all appreciated it. It would have been awkward for the rest of us if she’d been there in person, not liking any of us, especially our mother.)

My point is, the telephone table may as well be from Walmart for all it evokes of the house I grew up in at our place in Ottawa. It’s not a particularly nice piece of furniture, either, and the drawers have tacky crap stuck to them that won’t come off. And the perfume and Du Maurier smell is long gone. The drawers don’t even smell like old wood when you open them.

And yet for sure the universe had said I needed to get that telephone table.

Then one day it hit me and I don’t know why it took so long but I knew why I had that telephone table, it was because my father would have touched it, he would have used the phone that used to be on it, he would have put his gloves in the drawers, his hat in the alcove.

And just then, and I know this is a real memory and not made up, I felt a pat on my arm, and a voice saying “It’s okay”.