Queasy
Non-Fiction by Madeline Sonik. Illustrations by Andrea Bennett
My little brother sleeps and drools beside me, exhausted and reeking of vomit. He threw up when the plane landed, then passed out as soon as we got in the car. I know it’s a sacrifice for my uncle to drive us. It’s a six-hour journey from his house in Ilfracombe to Heathrow airport, and another six hours back again. He’d wanted my mother to take a coach or a train. He wanted not to be inconvenienced, but if he’s even mildly annoyed, there’s nothing in his demeanor that shows it.
From the back seat of my uncle’s mini Clubman, a car that seems half the size of those driven in Canada, I can’t always hear the front seat conversation, but I know that my uncle and mother are talking. I can see their lips, which are rarely still. My uncle is saying something about his journey and my mother, who is buzzing and effervescent, is saying something about herself. She’s lost weight, bought a new wardrobe, dyed her hair an auburn red. “I look good! I feel good!” she tells my uncle smiling with two plates of impeccably straight and whitened dentures, which she seems to be wearing all of the time. It’s a new beginning, a fresh start: she’s cast off the shackles of Canada, buried her dead husband, burned, sold, or given away every trace of that awful life. “I made a mistake!” I see her lips move, and know this is what she’s saying because I’ve heard her say it a hundred times. “I made a mistake, and I want to come home.”
My uncle has encouraged my mother’s return to England. As a young man, he lived in various cities in North America and for a short while in 1949 in Cape Town, South Africa. He’s a well-travelled man, having visited all the European capitals, gone to Egypt, Cyprus, and Bombay. He can tell my mother in his windy, weighty, public school way, without the slightest quaver of uncertainty in his voice, that England is a place second to none, that as far as beauty and atmosphere and pace of life go, it has no rivals. In short, England is and always has been the very best place on earth to live.
My mother is certain that my uncle is right, certain she was a fool to leave, though she reminds him that she and their mother did so at his bidding. It was after the war; he had a bar in Detroit, he was married to Peggy and in-between marriages to Lena. My mother was single, and the war had left England with a serious deficit of men.
She regurgitates stories of her young life, as if their substance was too rich, and even when the front-seat voices disintegrate beneath the engine’s thrum, I hear the stories dizzily repeat. She extracts a long white cigarette from a golden cardboard Benson & Hedges package; there’s a royal seal on the lid, and although both she and my uncle agree that the royal family consists of “a bunch of layabout hangers-on,” these are her cigarettes of choice and she smokes them like a queen. In times to come, the seal will be revoked, taking away the phrase “by royal appointment,” terminating a one hundred and twenty-two-year agreement that this cigarette manufacturer maintained with the royals. The Queen’s father, grandfather, and great-grandfather smoked. They all choked, and retched, and spat up phlegm; they all died from smoke- related illnesses, but my mother, who has no intention of dying in such an unattractive and tortuous way, has devised a sensible precaution. Instead of smoking the entire cigarette, she smokes only half, leaving the bulk of tar and carcinogenetic chemicals untouched in a waste storage area in front of the filter. My father’s life insurance money has made her extravagant, but even when my father controlled the purse strings, my mother still smoked her cigarettes in this lavish way.
I’m thankful for my mother’s lavishness because when I’m short on funds, which is often, I can scrounge her leavings and with neat, white rolling papers create my own cigarettes. Fortunately, today there’s no need for this. Travelling has made her generous and she leans from the front seat to the back, offering me her golden package and a flick of her plastic butane lighter.
As we motor along, the smell of vomit and smoke intermingle, and my uncle and mother discuss various plans. My uncle owns a twelve-room guest house, though no paying guests lodge there anymore. It’s just my aunt and uncle and their two Pekinese dogs, Chan and Chloe, who all live mostly on the first two floors. There’s a small shop attached to the house where my aunt and uncle once ran a café and later an antique store. Now they let it to a middle-aged widow who sells wool and knitting needles.
The small sitting room where my aunt and uncle take their meals and watch the news, where my uncle with his heavy magnifying glass scrutinizes bags of stamps for his collection and my aunt clips newspaper articles, connects to the shop through a serving hatch. It also connects, in the opposite direction, to a seventeenth-century cottage which in the early 1900s was converted into a kitchen, and has remained the only kitchen in the house.
I can’t hear what they say in the front seat, but I can see that my uncle is enthusiastic. “Would you like that?” my mother asks. She strains to turn. The words are meant for me. “Your uncle wants to show you the deeds of his house when we get there.”
I’m not sure why he wants to do this, but I’d rather appear agreeable than apprehensive. “Sure.” I nod. I take a long drag off my cigarette, feel the nicotine surge, and try to follow the front-seat conversation, just in case another question volleys my way.
The plan is that we’ll live in my uncle’s house while my mother is searching for one of her own. I know she wants something modern and pristine, with wall to wall carpeting and central heating. She’s told me that she detests old houses like my uncle’s; she hates their smells of kerosene and coal, the way they mildew and crumble, the way they never look clean and always feel cold. It’s 1977, and she doesn’t want to live in England’s past. She doesn’t want to endure the discomforts of a bygone time. What she wants is to move forward into her life with as much ease and modern luxury as her finances allow.
“I don’t think I could manage the upkeep of a character home,” her lips politely say, but my uncle isn’t listening, he doesn’t seem to care. By the same token, she doesn’t seem to care about Ilfracombe’s past — all the facts he’s collected, all the stories he longs to share, about the Celts and hill forts of the Iron Age, about pirates and smugglers and shipwrecks.
He raises his voice for my benefit. “I was out digging in my garden and damn me if the earth all around the blackberry bushes didn’t start caving in. I didn’t want to investigate too closely and disturb things, but I expect it’s an old smuggler’s passage we’ve got back there.”
I know my mother’s expressions, her frozen courteous veneer, the mask that conceals a solipsistic disregard, the same mask my uncle wears when she speaks about her resurrection. They look very much alike, even though they’re only half siblings, even though he’s sixteen years older than she. An invisible wall stands between them, in part because they’ve lived such very different lives.
My uncle was born a month before the flamboyant King Edward died, whose appetites of all kinds set a liberal precedent that defied the austere prudishness of his mother’s, Queen Victoria’s, reign. Known as the Prince of Pleasure, the Playboy Prince, and Edward the Caresser, his visits to brothels and gaming houses created scandal, yet kept him close to the common man. Though he came to the throne at age fifty-nine and his sovereignty was short, its stain, like full-bodied wine, bled into the fibers of my uncle’s life. The pleasure-seeking bon vivant would forever be my uncle’s calling; yet fused with this was a quiet practicality, a modest reserve, and a sense of conservation that often showed itself as miserly constraint.
Though he’d amassed a small fortune through a variety of business ventures, most having to do with buying items people believed useless and selling them at ten times what he paid, my uncle never bought a new article of clothing or a new piece of furniture or a new pot or pan. He never paid for a haircut or an envelope or a restaurant meal. When his second-hand socks grew worn, my aunt would retrieve an old skein of darning cotton. Instead of a daily shower, in order to save money, he washed himself with a face cloth in a sink and once a month took a bath in the same water my aunt had used. Although he wasn’t particularly handy when it came to home repairs, he often was ingenious, using tar for countless holes and cracks as mildew repellent and wood stain. Both he and my aunt kept a small garden which they moistened with dirty dish water. They made juice and wine from the rhubarb and berries they grew and once got very sick when they cooked up a vat of rhubarb with its lovely green leaves, because they didn’t know they were poisonous and it seemed such a shame to waste them.
My uncle survived two world wars and was an adult during the Great Depression. The gilded edge of his otherwise Edwardian self has long lost its lustre. He still enjoys high living and consumption on the largest scale, but all of this is tempered by expenditure — expenditure of time and money and energy, expenditure of stress. Instead of going out in the world, he finds it so much more pleasant to lounge in his faded armchair watching John Wayne movies and Coronation Street. It’s so much nicer drinking port in the leisure and comfort of his home than in some smoky little pub, and so much more serene feasting on the roly-poly pudding and Battenberg cake my aunt serves, just the way he likes.
At home he can eat and drink as much as he wishes. He can play his organ or invite some neighbours over for a game of bridge. At night, before he falls asleep, he says he relives all his romantic adventures: younger women, older women, women he seduced, married women who hid him from their husbands in their wardrobes where the smell of mothballs burned his nose, women he propositioned, women who propositioned him, one-night stands, two-night stands, dirty weekends, women he lived with, women he knocked up. He plays with these memories, embellishes them, turns them into defining tales: “I really was a bit of a lad.” He can relive all of it knowing its outcome, extracting all its misery, molding what is left to farce. This kind of adventuring is so much more delightful than living everything fresh with danger and un- certainty, with responsibility and consequence.
My mother stops even pretending to listen when my uncle alludes to his playboy past. It’s not that she disapproves; in fact, it seems she takes pride in it. Her brother was once handsome and seemingly irresistible to women, a real man with manly appetites and inclinations, she’s said. But it seems this long journey has off-balanced her and what she really needs is to talk about her- self — her hopes and dreams and life to be, about everything she’s chucked away in Canada — how she misses none of it, and how if a man were to come “crawling to her door, his hands dripping in diamonds,” begging her to marry, she’d slam the door right in his face. “There’ll be no more marriages for me!” she says. I see her expression in the rear-view mirror, see the familiar shake of her head, and although I can’t hear what she’s saying, I know this is what she’s said.
She was born in 1926, the same year as the present queen. Some have dubbed her generation “silent,” but if you were to ask her opinion, she’d vociferously disagree. Some have suggested that the Weltanschauung of her era (closing at the end of World War II) is characterized by compliance and convention, that women of her generation felt duty bound in whatever role or occupation they pursued. Marriage and motherhood were important, and although during this era over three million marriages were legally terminated in the United States alone, divorce was still frowned upon. Some writers have proclaimed that morals are conflicted for women of this era, that as a generation they seem to have lost their faith; they are solemn and pessimistic with few expectations, for they perceive life, by and large, as a rather disappointing affair.
“My problem is I expect too much from people,” my mother says, and her confession wafts above the front seat with an exhalation of smoke. “I expect too much, and people are always letting me down.” She stabs her partially cremated cigarette into the car’s tiny ash receptacle and continues a diatribe of which I can only catch the occasional word. It is of course an outburst against my father, a dead man whom she now bitterly resents: his alcoholism, his disrespect of her, his stupid arrogance. Her face is hard, and she spits out invectives, creamy memories that have all turned to curd.
In 1955 when my uncle owned his Detroit bar, he told my mother not to worry; he told her she could make a choice. She didn’t have to marry. She wasn’t the first woman with a belly full of trouble and she certainly wouldn’t be the last. He had the name of a reputable doctor if she wanted to go that route and abortions weren’t half as dangerous as they used to be. For one hundred and twenty-five dollars she could be rid of it; or if she’d rather, she could have the child, put it up for adoption or even keep it if she liked. He suggested that she and their mother could live with him, that their mother could look after the child while she worked. Things weren’t like they used to be — nothing like before the war, when abortion and childbirth posed serious risks to women. Antibiotics and blood transfusions weren’t readily available and death by puerperal sepsis, an infection of the genital tract, was responsible for five maternal deaths in every thousand births. Before the war, poverty was rampant, birth control for most young women was a mystery, and attempts at home abortion by the unwed were not at all uncommon. Knitting needles and hatpins were the implements of choice, or syringes full of soapy water. There were purgatives and pills, herbal concoctions made from juniper berries, hot salt baths and gin. Before the war, pregnant women who didn’t marry quickly would most likely lose their jobs if they were employed and get thrown out of their familial homes. They would most likely be spurned by their community and forced to seek shelter in places where the blot on their moral character was unknown. They would have no help, no familial support, in bringing an illegitimate child into the world. They would not have the means to care for it, and unless they were willing to lie about their past, there were no chances of them ever securing a respectable marriage in the future.
But even though World War II was over and things had changed, in 1955, my mother did agree to marry, though she also tried salt baths and gin, stumbling down the stairs, lifting the heaviest pieces of furniture in the apartment that she and her mother shared. She’d always feared doctors and medical procedures, and wanted to take care of things herself, but there was no taking care of things; the child in her womb would not comply.
Often, when she reminisced, she would say how sick she’d felt every day of her pregnancy, how she would vomit at the drop of a hat. She couldn’t eat anything but the blandest foods, plain saltine crackers, cantaloupe melon, cottage cheese. Even the thought of pungent smelling spices would have her rushing to the nearest toilet.
My father’s parents kept finding excuses for why the wedding should be postponed, and all the while, she recalled growing bigger and bigger, having to let out the waist of her ivory wedding dress, cursing my father and his family for humiliating her.
At least a decade after this journey to Ilfracombe, when my mother and I are both, again, living in Canada, a photograph of her will surface, young and sexy, leaning against a wall at Niagara Falls. She will explain, teary eyed, that it was taken by her lover, not my father, shortly before she married, though the implications of this confession, like the name of her lover, will never be stated. In 1977, as we journey down the motorway, I am fortunate not to have to consider this. I steal the last hit off my cigarette, careful not to drag too hard and ignite the acrid filter. My little brother stirs, but nods off to sleep again. The road extends for miles and miles with nothing to look at but scrub and signs and other cars, which appear all remarkably alike.
Five years before my parents wed, Britain dominated the world automotive market; five years later, things had drastically changed. I’m only sixteen, so no one would expect me to know this, and because I come from Canada, no one would expect me to have any familiarity with the name British Leyland, and the current problems this car manufacturer is suffering. I can’t speculate about its poor management, how competition was underestimated, how forceful trade unions played a role. I’ve never heard the word “nationalization.” I didn’t know it was possible for a government to bail a company out, or how such an act of charity must ultimately be paid for. Because I’m young, I’ve not yet personally experienced the way problems left unsolved creep into the future, although I know this to be the case. I’ve watched it happen often enough.
My mother’s voice hits an emotional pitch, which my ears have been trained to perceive. “I should have left him, Geoff. I should have done it when I had the chance.” She is still denigrating my father, and although my uncle’s reply is muffled, I can tell by his bewildered movement that he can’t fathom why she’s carrying on. I imagine all the things he probably wants to say: “He’s dead, for God’s sake!” and “Don’t you see, your chance is now?” He’s probably thinking that she talks as if she’s still stuck with him. He doesn’t realize yet that she is, that she somehow has ingested him and that this harping and moaning is really just a reflexive gag. She needs to purge herself of the man she married and every memory of their toxic life. It’s impossible for her to stop this nauseating droning, until she throws him up completely, until she discerns the borders of her own life. Everything she’s done since his death, including moving here, has been an on- going effort to separate, to rid him from her core. If only some- one would invent a stomach pump for the psyche, or locate its throat so she could shove her finger down. If only there was a pill, or draft, or rhubarb leaf to force him out of her, to set her free.
It doesn’t matter that this nausea has only been prevalent since his death, that previously, my mother’s faith and expectations kept all the sick-making toxins at bay. My father wasn’t the total monster she describes; their life wasn’t a total hell. It will take me years to understand that he was part of her and that she hates him because he died. My uncle, who has left many women, will probably never understand this. What he might understand, however, if only my mother could articulate it, is the way we blame the dead for their departures as if they themselves have had some hand in their demise.
If my mother could give voice to this instead of an endless litany of gripes, my uncle would most probably think of his father, a man who died when he was very young. In pictures I’ve seen, his father is gangly bodied and smooth faced, appearing far too young for puberty let alone the possibility of fatherhood. I imagine my uncle recalling his father’s flat white cap, the anchor on the sleeve of his jacket, the way he lifted and twirled him in the air until the world was spinning and the breakfast porridge in my uncle’s stomach threatened to return. I imagine how my uncle would see him, chuckling, as he set him down. “It’ll take a while to get your sea legs, ol mate,” he’d say, and be surprised my uncle didn’t find this as amusing as he did.
“Who’s that man?” my uncle is reputed to have asked his mother, being too young to remember her patient explanations of a father duty bound to the sea and then, when he finally grasped the concept, couldn’t stop calling every man he saw in a sailor’s uniform “father,” much to his mother’s dismay.
If my uncle were inclined to think of his father, he would probably also recall his mother’s giddy pleasure when his father returned home on leave, the way she dressed with extra care in clothes she kept especially for these occasions. She too was young then, but she went on aging long, long after his father died.
My uncle was only eight when the Q-ship Willow Branch, the ship on which his father was a petty officer, was demolished by two German submarines. Most of the crew abandoned the ship for lifeboats. The third officer was taken prisoner and a few men drowned. My uncle was told that his father had drifted for days under the blistering sun with no fresh water to drink. He was told that eleven of the men were so desperate that even though they knew they shouldn’t, they swallowed sea water, and went mad.
My uncle once confessed that often in his childhood he’d consider thirst and sometimes go an entire day without a drink of any kind. He’d wanted to know what his father experienced, wanted to share this suffering, and usually by nightfall could bear it no longer.
Once when he and his mother went on a widows’ and orphans’ seaside picnic excursion, after he’d eaten more than his share of the ham sandwiches and little jam tarts, he drank an entire tumbler of brine just to see what would happen. Within minutes he’d expelled the contents of his stomach with such violence that he was certain he’d die. His mother, who coddled him and had become even more solicitous since his father’s passing, feared he’d had too much sun. All that night he waited for madness and was a little sorry when it didn’t come.
Later, as a young man, he met a seaman acquainted with the Willow Branch sinking who told him that his father didn’t drink the ocean’s water, nor did he go mad. Poseidon did not whip the ocean into a frenzy of deadly waves, and the sweltering sun, though it might have been fatal, didn’t have time to do its damndest. His father had been sacrificed, according to the stranger. His flesh had been devoured and his blood imbibed. What else could explain two survivors after nine days on the open sea?
This report came so long after his father’s death that my uncle said he felt guilty he wasn’t enraged, guilty that his first thoughts were selfish and macabre — it was a story to dine out on, as the saying goes.
My mother drums her manicured fingers on her lap as we reach a stretch of undulating road. Although she’s trying to maintain her cordial veneer, I can see, when she turns, that her eyes are glinting. She will never acquire the taste or aptitude for the kind of tailored history my uncle savours. She will never be able to recall a place, time, or person who has touched her, without some emotional keel. My uncle’s reminiscences seem to be a tedious collection of reruns to her. I watch the back of her head as she fights to get a word in edgewise, as she struggles, busting, to talk about herself.
“I don’t care how handsome, how gracious, how well off,” she blasts. Al- though I attempt to create an imaginative barrier between us, a line where her fulmination can’t pass, her words swell as they reach my ears, and glut them. “You can torture me, starve me, lock me up.” My little brother stirs with a fresh waft of stale vomit, my stomach lurches, the road twists. “I’ll never marry again! Never!” she continues.
Before I heave, I try to signal my uncle, try to get him to pull over to the side of the road. His mouth is moving, just like my mother’s, words avalanching over words avalanching over words.»