Driving Home

What was it that Maud’s mother always said, in the most excellent of moments that served Maud little but gave her mother the opportunity to repeat herself: “You’re always late! Can you not be more organized?”

Hearing it again and again, it had been carved in. Permission to repeat.

Maud Verhaal was in the moment now. She was driving to see her girlfriends for the once-monthly catch-up. Moving east along a busy highway, her radio station tuned to the Blues Hour. The sky grey-white, overcast. Her odometer displayed a reasonable speed. Her back well-supported by lumbar controls. Her fingers bare of jewellery, her wrist without a watch. Shoes without socks. Maud was trying to think of what to say to her old pals, what conversations she could start. Her white SUV drove under one of the many overpasses. The absence of direct light meant there weren’t pronounced shadows. Of course she couldn’t see the delivery truck above her lose its load.

Lynn was well on her way down highway A10 into Magog. She was en route to visit her parents. The parents who still lived in the same clapboard house, the parents who kept multiple jars of pecans from Florida in the freezer, pounds of flour in the fridge, stacks of maple syrup cans beside the salted butter in the cupboards. The parents who geographically weren’t that far away. Her daughter Lydia was sitting in the back seat.

Lynn was thinking about how much her mother hated handiwork, knitting in particular, her disdain of craft to which Lynn felt a pronounced connection. Her homemade jams sitting in a box on the backseat beside Lydia, Lydia who was wearing a purple and pink checkerboard scarf made by her mother. Lydia was curled into the car door, head resting on a fuchsia cloth bag stuffed with a random assortment of yarns. Lynn Trestle was a stubborn, determined, single mother.

Around 9:44 AM, something fell from above to greet the hood of Maud’s car. She bellowed and braked instantly, causing a string of red lights to chime in unison behind her. She swerved to the left and right, squealing tires, momentum completely pulling her off of her seat, out of her reverie. She was blinded by the flap of burlap on the windshield. She made a full stop, punched on the emergency lights, and got out of the car.

“Oh!”  to the jute strip of material.

Stuck for words, not quite knowing what to utter, she shook the fabric briefly and held it like a specimen – barely pinched between two fingers. Although her first instinct was to throw it onto the asphalt, she tossed into the car instead. Then glanced up at the overpass, as if she could mentally track down the offending vehicle. Then looked at the drivers behind her. She lifted her hands in dramatic astonishment at the accident averted, and stepped back in to her SUV, as no-one got out of their cars. People were eager for her to get moving, she felt. Maud started on her way, hands gripping the wheel, radio turned off, heat turned on. Warmth fanned out through the vents, blowing the scent of jute throughout the car. As she worked through the incident, the vents fanned out memories of near misses. Protection versus disaster. Blew out memories of being on the highway in Quebec one winter, ice slick to the black road, her car spinning into a full 360, landing her on the opposite side of the highway. Feeling that same protection then, the warmth flooding through her body, feeling her mother there with her. Her great aunt, the protective saint of her travels.

Lynn thinks about food. Croissants. Baguettes with brie, butter and arugula. The box from Ma Maison is sitting on the seat beside her. She’s splurged. Lynn isn’t really dealing with matters, but she is getting from A to B. Things feel a bit shaky around the edges, as if she can’t go on like this much longer. Her daughter is a talented dancer. A dervish and an energetic near-tween. Nine … she’s only nine, and she seems like she’s ready to leave home. Who can she talk to about raising this child? John, her ex, is out of the picture for all emotional needs.

She and John separated over five years ago. Lynn left Quebec to come to Toronto, where she could erase some of the familiar and test the possibility that she was good with numbers. Head offices confirmed it. She was an inventory whiz. She had wanted to be a hair stylist when she was Lydia’s age. A stylist, or a dentist. Now she feared both professions – detested people touching her hair, couldn’t stand the thought of admitting her failure in flossing.

Maud is originally from Winnipeg. Parking her car near the café in Toronto, she’s thinking about her women. Her mother. Her two sisters, Aline and Wilma. Two girl friends. Maud is a well-rounded person, a mother of two, married for fourteen years. She’s a professional. A teacher at a private school for seventeen years. And this strange near-defeat by burlap sack has her wondering about being more open to randomness. She wants to be uneven, not so balanced, maybe she needs to be the way she used to be.

She open the car door, lets her practical flats hit the parking lot pavement. The feel of the asphalt this time is reassuring, and her thoughts shift instantly to food, as if the drama of the previous thirty minutes was willingly shifted into the background scene. Black coffee. Madeleines. She walked quickly now to the brick building that housed the quaint French coffee shop, quickly to lessen the time between now and “in a second”. Wanting the comfort of the familiar immediately. Ma Maison, it always felt like she was coming back the original home kitchen.

Lynn’s mother was still in the same house that Lynn grew up in. This was Justine – a loopy maman, a feisty grandmother. Lynn could remember how the grandmothers on both sides had taught her how to knit. Lynn had typed this information down on an online post that she had recently started in an effort to reach out to other single mums. “Looking for someone old-school to knit with; let’s be old-fashioned together.” She appended an image in her post – a drawing of her sitting at a table, with a row of 8 beer glasses in front of her, yarns filling and spilling out of the glasses, various shades of purple and yellow. The message was there, she thought, knitting is social work. Escapist. Creative. Pointe finale.

Maud had always wanted to learn how to knit. This is what she was confessing to her friends Leda and Helen. Her face was contorted with the attempt at description:

“That’s what I was thinking about you know… all this remembrance. I was thinking about the UP and OVER, and dip the needle down through, slide the yarn down, pull it over to the other side, bring the needle back. You know, that knitting motion that I had watched as a kid, and I was kind of caught up in the imagery when the curtain literally comes down on my car. I felt like someone was actually drawing the close to my act, saying ‘CUT!’ Scene over.”

Leda had her hand to her chest. “Maudette, that’s terrifying! Exit, stage right”

Helen is holding her cup close to her lips, blowing at warm surface. “Unbelievable. Who knew you had such good driving instincts!”

Leda added “What are you going to do with the burlap?”

Helen shrugged her shoulders, “Why should that be an issue?”

Maud didn’t touch her coffee for the moment, as she was fingering the last of her sweet almond madeleine, silky lemony sweetness barely crusted on the surface of that shell form. What was working at her was the of her grandmother’s knitting, the way her movements felt like magic code, something inimitable. Thinking about her grandmother made her want to go back, go in reverse. Why did it always seem like there were missed opportunities? She felt that those wasted spaces of time were wasted because she didn’t give back what was given to her.

Lynn’s mother had just come back from the hair dresser, and was touching the ends of her hair, stopping short when the hair stopped, playing with the ends. The chin-length bob made her hair look healthy again. Propped her glasses on her nose, and pulled out her brown leather sac and pulled at some papers and lists. Maybe she might call Lynn on her cell, just to check on how far they were from home.

Lynn perked up with the train whistle, a choo-choo whistle coming from the passenger seat.

“Grand Mere’s calling!” Lydia said sleepily.

Lynn thought about the pillows she had embroidered for her parents. What do you bring for a quiet dad and a practical mother? She thought over-the-top pillow cases were totally out of left-field and perfect: “Good Morning, Beautiful”, embroidered on one.

Lynn was trying to gauge time, trying to engage with time and where she fit and how she could make peace with the feeling of absence. This seemed to be her shadow. She pressed the bluetooth’s “answer call” button. “Good morning, Beautiful!”

“Lynn! It’s 9:45! It’s your mother! I got a letter from your cousin today. They want Lydia to come to see them in Rennes. I’m making squash and lentil soup for tonight. Will you pick up some pork? How is Lydia? Is she happy to be coming to see me?”

“Mais oui!”  she gasped, in a broad way trying to answer all of her mother’s questions.  “I’m about one hour from the house. I’ll get pork. Do you have beer?”

Maud still hears her mother admonish her scheduling abilities, years later. Since her mother had passed, Maud had been committed to the practice of order. Her mother Agnès died at the age of 53. A heart attack. Maud had just married when her mother ceased. Things changed so suddenly that now, fourteen years later, she is still gripped with the same shock that met her on the day that it happened. She relives that moment that defined her as helpless, detached, unavailable, suspended. Maud remembers standing at the door to their Toronto bathroom, a late evening call, taking the phone from Derek, hearing her father’s voice. The light in the hall. The smell of the bathroom. Lightness in her limbs. Waiting for the sirens to wail.

Lynn is holding on to the phone, even though she knows she shouldn’t. It’s slippery in her palm, and it slides out of her hand down into the crevasse between her seat and the gear shift.

Maud will keep the jute material, the burlap flap of fabric. There something there that she needs to transform. What was that quote from Isadora Duncan, the Canadian dancer… something like “Source is my favourite word.” She picked at that idea, wanting to thread her way into understanding of what her source was.

Lynn swears into the quiet of her car. A sheet of rain suddenly slaps into the windshield, wind comes from the northeast, and she’s on guard, battling the elements.

“Jeezus, why is it always a test, always me being checked? It’s all so much work!” Her glasses slipped down her sweaty nose, and she glanced back with raised eyebrows and a furrowed brow, looking to Lydia for an apology for her outburst. There was a little version of her mother, a chilled-out dancer girl, a girl who likely already knew where her source of life came from, but wouldn’t admit for years to come.