Drink: The Deadly Relationship Between Women and Alcohol. Ann Johnston Dowsett

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СКАЧАТЬ the hinge experience. Once we had been there, it seemed there was no turning back.

      Before we moved, there were many memories, but none so dominant as my mother’s devotion to her parents. Night after night, I fell asleep to the sound of her typewriter keys as she wrote her long letters home. Handel or Beethoven on the record player, clackety-clack. Telling them of her life in a small northern mining town, with three small children, where the whistle blew every evening to signal that the miners’ day had ended. Clackety-clack. Writing of life alone with those small children. My father in Africa or Australia, a geophysicist overseeing exploration in the outback. Clackety-clack. Once in a while she would go to her bridge club. Kissing me when she returned, she smelled of cold air and clean hair and Guerlain’s l’Heure Bleue. But those evenings were rare. Most evenings, I fell asleep to the comforting sound of her keys.

      And then glorious silence: come June, the typing would stop and we’d hit the road.

      Year after sunburned year—long before people worried about global warming or SPF—we would escape for the entire season. As soon as school was out, my mother would load up the car and head off down the highway. In the trunk would be our tartan cooler, the car rug for picnics, plus an entire suitcase of library books. In the backseat: the dog, my sister, my brother, and I, unencumbered by care—or seat belts, for that matter.

      On paper, my mother would say we were Protestants. But in reality, heading to the cottage was our religion: we were the true believers. Not that we worshipped in just one spot. As newlyweds, my parents had honeymooned at my father’s family place, a log cabin on a sheltered teacup of a lake near Algonquin Park, the same lake where iconic Canadian painter Tom Thomson planned to honeymoon before he mysteriously drowned. But after that initial trip, they split their vacation time between their families’ summer homes. And since my father’s holiday time was limited, more often than not we would find ourselves nestled in the bunk beds of my mother’s childhood cottage on a stretch of Georgian Bay, a place where August storms swaggered in at night, tossing sailboats at their moorings, working their bonsai magic on the pines.

      Thanks to my two grandfathers—both of whom had fought in the First World War, one as a fighter pilot, the other having his leg shattered at Passchendaele—there were two log cabins we called home. During the 1930s, they and their spunky wives had searched the north country for land, tenting with their children before the cottages were built. In my maternal grandparents’ case, they bought a local farmer’s log home for five hundred dollars in 1930 and had the thick hemlock timbers numbered and transported by horse and wagon to be reassembled by the shores of Georgian Bay. My paternal grandparents, on the other hand, built a tidy one-room log place from scratch, adding little pine bunkhouses along the shoreline as their family grew.

      As a result, we gorged on summer in two distinctly different places. At the little lake cabin, we would fall asleep to the mournful call of loons, snug under heavy red Hudson Bay blankets, in flannel pajamas my mother had warmed by the fire, our hair smelling of wood smoke. My sister Cate and I would whisper by the dying light of the woodstove. What was that noise? Was it a bear? Or a ghost? I was sure there were ghosts. Poor Tom Thomson, vengeful in his soggy plaid shirt, rising from his watery grave to return to his never-to-be honeymoon spot, wielding an axe. Always an axe, to give us forty whacks.

      Before I knew it, morning would break with a slam, my grandmother’s screen door announcing she was up, coffee on, porridge started. Time for the morning paddle to the lodge to see if the paper had arrived. Within minutes we would be off, her voice ringing clear across the mirrored water: “By the li-i-ight of the sil-ver-eee moo-oo-oon …” Another day had begun, a day of snooping in the woods, racing to the raft, horsing around with the Patterson boys.

      At the other cottage, days and nights were different. There I would fall asleep to the sulky rhythm of Georgian Bay and the tinkling sounds of masts, the sweet taste of marshmallow in my mouth and even sweeter comfort of my cousins. By day I’d wake to thick wedges of sunlight on the painted floorboards and the whirrrr-dee-dee-dee of the birds. In a flash, I’d be downstairs, joining Dougie as he cracked open a new variety pack of little boxed cereals, dousing his bowl of Frosted Flakes in chocolate milk because shhh, the mothers were still sleeping. Off we would tramp in our still-damp bathing suits to our secret fort at the Point. Back to the cottage to head out in the Swallow, our bathtub of a homemade rowboat. Adventure after adventure, punctuated only by meals, served by my mother and aunts and grandmother on little birch-bark place mats, ones sold by the “Indians,” said my mother, “when they used to tent on the Point.”

      All week long the cottage was a women-and-children affair. But on Friday afternoons the air would begin to crackle. For hours we would line ourselves along the top of the split-rail fence, chirpy faces trained toward the curve, looking for the first sign of a Buick. My mother would head into the bedroom to brush her freshly washed hair, put on lipstick, and emerge transformed: burnished and blond for my dad. I thought she looked like a movie star.

      For the next two days there would be laughter: games of charades, rounds of bridge, impromptu skits. Tall shoulders to be tossed from, into the water; strong arms to help us build boats and forts. Handsome men drinking “Hey Mabel, Black Label” beer after splitting logs and stacking the woodpile. Was there too much drinking? I have no idea. All I remember is that most of the adults smoked cigarettes or pipes—and we did, too, sneaking them into our homemade tepee. It was a poor plan. The smoke billowed out the top and we were caught, red-handed, forced to chain-smoke until we turned green.

      At night, lying under white sheets, little needles of sunburn prickling our shoulders, our noses peeling for the umpteenth time, my cousin and I would decide that no, we weren’t going to sleep, not when the adults were telling dirty jokes downstairs. And so we would eavesdrop, and then whisper very quietly, because “for the last time, kids,” my uncle had warned, “it’s time to go to sleep!”

      Then it would be Sunday night, and we would all wave as the cars, honking, disappeared around the curve, and the cycle would begin again.

      Often there was a visitor I loved: the painter A. Y. Jackson, a close friend of my grandparents. A bachelor with an infamous appetite for my grandmother’s jam—jam that would dribble down his sweater vests along with his cigarette ashes when he chuckled at my grandfather’s jokes. Looking at his belly, I knew why Aunt Esther had never married him. “I’ll be away many weeks of the year,” he had warned when he proposed. “Make it fifty-two, and I might agree,” was her response.

      Or that’s how the story went. Maybe he never really wanted to get married. Maybe he was afraid of marriage the same way he was afraid of fire. In one of the cottage bedrooms, he had had my grandfather install a thick rope, attached at the windowsill so he could shimmy down it in the event of a blaze. (He never used it, but Dougie did, when we played hide-and-seek.)

      Clearly, this was a man who liked to escape, just like my father. He stole my heart because he taught me how to steer a paintbrush with my thumb, and because he painted a naughty little sketch of a Shell station with the S missing. He was just about the only bachelor I had ever met, a rambling guy whose snowshoes hung on the wall beside the fireplace. But I used to think that maybe he’d outfoxed himself, taking all those painting trips and somehow forgetting to get married and have his own little family to go home to.

      Year after sunburned year, this was how we lived. If my father was away more than most—and he always was—summers buffered my mother from her pervasive loneliness. She flourished near family, and so did we.

      When this chapter ended—when her parents died too young, and her drinking started—I used to think that those summers at the cottage were like money in the bank or gas in the tank: she had accumulated so many good memories for us that it took a long time to get to zero.

      Of course, we did get to zero, СКАЧАТЬ