AROUND
THE KITCHEN TABLE
By
Lloyd Ratzlaff
(Excerpt from a memoir
in progress)
Last night as Larraine and I were getting ready to make dinner, I mentioned that I wished everyone could have had as satisfying a day as mine. She was holding a cast iron frying pan, and pointed at some rust on the bottom. Since I’m usually the one who does the dishes (it’s the least a freelancer can do for a partner in a stressful job), I assumed she was showing me that I had been too sloppy, as I often am.
Meanwhile, for the past three days a broom had stood in one corner of
the kitchen beside a dust pile she had left there (it’s one of
her few, to me, arcane tendencies), and all I could see was the similarity
between my half-assed cleaning and her unfinished sweeping, and said,
“Please don’t hear this as a criticism, because for once
I find it funny” (how often she’s urged me to make a joke
of small irritations, and this time I thought I’d done it), “but
that frying pan seems a bit like your pile of dust in the corner.”
I could see she was stung. After a long silence, I asked if she was
upset. She said no, but went to the living room and lay on the couch
while I began cooking. Already I was fretting at how my good intentions
had backfired, and it kept nagging until I went to explain.
It turned out that she herself had washed the pan earlier, and failed
to clean it to her own standards. She’d had no idea what my remark
meant. I stood shame-faced at the couch, since she hadn’t faulted
me or complained about anything at all. I had wanted to remove a speck
of sawdust from her eye, and lo there was a two-by-ten in my own.
We were just finishing dinner when the telephone rang. The wife of a
close friend was calling at the last minute looking for someone to sit
with her husband while she took their 10-year-old son to a track meet.
This friend is midway through a second regimen of chemotherapy for brain
tumours, “therapy” to which he’s consented only reluctantly
at the urging of others, while himself feeling as he’s said that
“it might be time to fold the tent.” He and I share a common
bond in our ethnic fundamentalist origins, we’ve rebelled in our
own ways, and we still struggle coming to terms with our families’
reactions.
I drove to his house. He was lying on a sofa in the basement den, seemingly
angry that he was forbidden both to accompany his family and to stay
home alone, resentful at being “babysat.” The young lad
was nervous about the upcoming race, yet when they left his dad didn’t
say so much as Good luck; and the minute the door had closed
he asked, “Would you like to watch a gospel music video?”
“Sure,” I said, “I’d like to do whatever you
want.” Inwardly I was hoping for another conversation around the
fire like we’d often had before; but this time he wanted only
to stay under his blanket and watch some aging southern gospel singers
raising hands in pentecostal fervour, weeping, praying down the spirit,
pleading to be healed. “That’s the bass singer from the
Cathedrals,” he’d say, “that’s Vestal Goodman,
that’s Jake Hess — he’s survived every disease known
to man” (Jake’s still here, despite a frail heart, cancer,
and other ailments which my friend recited by name). Three hours of
this, and hardly anything else was said. The few times he did speak,
it was mostly about these singers being close to death themselves.
I wanted to follow his lead, but didn’t care for this preoccupation
with fading Bible-belt performers, many of whom I recognized myself
from our youth. Not that I suppose shouting Hallelujah can
harm anyone, but I wanted to believe that both of us had left fundamentalism
behind years ago. Sometimes I’d make a comment too; then he’d
start from his pillow, and I knew I had interrupted his sleep.
When the others finally returned, I asked how the track meet had gone.
The boy looked dejected. “We came in second-last,” he said.
From the couch his father mumbled, “Well, somebody has to be last.”
The kid protested, “We weren’t last!” And
my friend went back to his video.
For months he’s said this son is the only reason he has to go
on living.
His wife stayed at the foot of the stairs in her coat. “It’s
late, the race didn’t start till 9:30. Maybe you should stop this
now, I have to take you to your chemo tomorrow.”
And I thought I hardly recognized the man who muttered again, sat up,
and kept watching the TV screen until I left.
When I got home around 11, I made love to Larraine. There was no sex,
but I hoped I was seeing her with eyes from which a few scales had fallen.
Ratzlaff is the author of two books of literary non-fiction, The
Crow Who Tampered With Time and Backwater Mystic Blues. Formerly a minister,
counsellor and university instructor, he now makes his living as a writer
in Saskatoon.
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