was no end to my mother’s slaving. She was in constant motion—cooking, scrubbing, washing clothes by hand (and later in an old wringer washing machine), hanging them on the clothesline, preparing lunches, planting flowers. Our house and our clothes always smelled of flowers, cinnamon, and cloves. I don’t know if that scent of flowers lingered on my mother’s hands or if she carried the pollen in the pores of her skin, but I can’t think of my mother without picturing perfect rows of peach-coloured gladioli and deep red dahlias surrounded by the sky-blue of morning glories.
Neither my mother nor my father had time for imperfection or frivolity, and I was given to both. So I tried to stay out of their way. I hid in the woods for hours and talked to the trees, the flowers, the brook, and later, to my little stray cocker spaniel, Pal.
I’d tell my surroundings about my dreams, about how I was going to be a famous writer and have tons of money when I grew older. About how I would wear bright satin dresses and pearls braided in my long hair as I entertained my friends in a grand house and my babies slept in their separate beds upstairs.
I would have four healthy, happy children and I would be a good mother.
Sometimes I’d cry as I held Pal and asked him to love me and never go away I talked about everything, except the visitors who came to touch me during the late hours. I was a child and had no way of properly facing those feelings or aligning them into words.
Sometimes I collected ants and spiders and made farms for them. My mother wasn’t too thrilled with this pastime, but she allowed it as long as I stayed outside or in the shed, out of her way. It wasn’t until I smuggled a garter snake into the house in a shoe box that she put an end to it all.
Cut off from my bug and snake interests, I took up reading and writing in earnest. I read comics, dictionaries, encyclopedias, True Stories, anything, as long as it offered a world to which I could escape. Jane Eyre, with another seething male protagonist, and Wuthering Heights became my literary Bibles, but I loved my Wonder Woman comic books just as much.
I never really minded being poor. Economically challenged—what an expression! It sounded like some sort of competition. Back then all we worried about was surviving. I know today what hardships my parents fought. They did the best they could. But, as a kid, I assumed I was the problem. My world was so small and introspective that I was sure I had to be the reason for their ill tempers, especially when my father raged about how unfair life was, or how he wished he’d never been born. Like most children, I took it personally.
GRANDMOTHERS
When I was quite young, my father’s mother, Grammie Mills, visited us often. My paternal grandfather had died long before I’d been born, so Grammie Mills had been widowed quite a while. Emma was her name—a sweet little woman from Birmingham, England, who stood only five feet tall. She smelled like lilacs. I don’t remember her hair being any other colour than grey It was long, but she never wore it down. She kept it pinned up in a circle around her head that made her look to me like an angel with a silver halo. I’d stare up at her from her lap while she rocked me in her rocking chair and sang hymns that I embraced for their soothing melodies: “Rock of Ages cleft for me. Let me hide myself in thee.”
I wasn’t sure what kind of rock she was singing about, but I thought I understood. I’d once found a cave carved into the rock in the woods and figured it might be a good place to hide. I would go there and sit on the moss and pretend I was safe from my enemies. I used to think Grammie would have liked it, too.
Most often the songs she sang were about the home and mother she’d left behind when she immigrated to Canada at the age of seven. I believe she made up the words to most of the songs, because they didn’t rhyme and they rambled aimlessly without reaching any destination, but I couldn’t have cared less. She was singing them for me. Not only that, she would also read me stories and recite precious poetry.
“Two little girls in blue, two little girls in blue,” she’d mumble over and over as she stroked my cheek. Gazing toward the sky outside our kitchen window, she always seemed to be off in another world.
“What are you thinking about, Grammie?” I’d often ask.
“You, little one, you,” she’d say. And she would laugh throatily and gaze into my eyes with such love that I would feel my chest swell with pride. Sometime I thought I could detect a trace of fear in those soft eyes when she looked at me, but she spoke so few words that I could never be certain.
“Be a good girl, Eva, be a good girl” was all she’d say before once again retreating into her far-off world of daydream.
When Grammie Mills moved to Saint John to live with my Aunt Edna, I felt as if I’d lost a big piece of my newly special self. After a few months, the memory of her tranquillizing songs wore too thin to buffer my loneliness. We didn’t visit Grammie Mills often because the one-hour drive was a costly venture for a family struggling to clothe and feed five people. I wrote to Grammie frequently and she would always reply. She kept all of my letters and read them repeatedly, my aunt later told me. I did the same with hers, even sniffing the letters. Her lingering scent and the delicate curl of her handwriting gave me solace.
I saw my maternal grandmother, Grammie Brewer, more regularly She’d left my grandfather, George, the father my mother had brought lunches to in jail, before I was born and remarried a man with eight children after raising eight of her own. In later years she also raised her granddaughter, Nancy.
According to her birth certificate, Grammie Brewer had been born Effi Scoupi on December 24, 1903, in Germany. My mother said she’d come into the world with a veil of flesh over her eyes that had to be removed. This caul gave her “second sight” and established her reputation as a fortuneteller who often saw forerunners of people’s imminent deaths. Her father, Franz, was also a noted fortuneteller. He hailed from Bohemia, and her mother, Franchiska, was from Austria. Other relatives lived in Romania.
As a child, Effi travelled with her family from village to village, searching for work, learning the art of tea-leaf fortunetelling and palm reading from her father, who repaired timepieces along the journey. They did this until they immigrated to Canada to escape persecution from an Austrian leader.
Once in Canada, her name was changed to Eva Skopie. At fourteen she met and married my grandfather. My mother was the eldest of the two girls in a predominantly male family. It wasn’t until Grammie was in her mid-forties that she became Grammie Brewer after she married a farmer who lived in a small country village about forty minutes north of Oromocto.
Grammie Brewer, like Grammie Mills, was small in stature, measuring only four foot ten, but she was a force to be reckoned with when she was riled. One day I watched her chase a stray dog across the yard with a wooden spoon in her hand. The dog was almost as big as she, yet Grammie showed no sign of fear as she drove the mangy cur away from one of her prized white angora kittens.
Like my mother, Grammie Brewer wasn’t openly affectionate, but I always knew she had a soft spot for me. Every Valentine’s Day I received a carefully wrapped gift from her in the mail—a small tin of heart-shaped sugar cookies with pink frosting.
When I was about eight, I coaxed her to tell my fortune, even though she seldom engaged in the practice around any of us kids.I’d gulped down my cup of tea, with only a little sugar, no milk, and spit bits of tea leaves into a dish towel as I paused for breath. I couldn’t wait to hear what adventures lay in store for me.
“You needn’t have drunk the tea,” Grammie said a little too late.
I watched in fascination as she squinted into my cup, studying the patterns made by the leaves. When Grammie instructed me to make a wish, I was torn between choosing a new car for my father or happiness for myself. In the end I selected the car because I enjoyed our Sunday drives.
“What do you see, Grammie? What do you see?”