After the Falls by Catherine Gildiner

Author:Catherine Gildiner [Gildiner, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-37302-1
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2009-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

We got out the map and looked at it while we ate lunch. On the way down we had followed the AAA TripTik, which showed only the road you were to take. We had not actually studied a map of Ohio, known as the Buckeye State, as it related to the rest of the states. It plunged below parts of West Virginia and bordered Kentucky, and took a major dip at the southeast corner. Athens was at the southern tip, far closer to Kentucky than Cleveland. My mother and I looked at each other in surprise. I was trapped in the Appalachian Mountains and surrounded by West Virginia coal mines.

Still studying the map, my mother said, “I hadn’t realized how far south Ohio goes. Isn’t it amazing that I know more about the geography of Africa than of the United States?”

The waitress, instead of saying hello or even hi, greeted us with “Haaaaa.” Neither my mother nor I could understand what she said after that. She had the same accent as Edwina’s mother.

We had barely finished our lunch when my mother announced that she had to get home. When we got to the car, she said, “Look, there are sixty thousand students here. Certainly not all of them or their mothers would refer to Negro students as jigaboos or we’d have heard the word.”

“If all else fails,” I said, “I can become a scout for Queen for a Day. I won’t even have to travel.”

“Good luck,” she said, then got into the car with the top down. As she drove away in the now slightly rusty 409, she lifted her hand in a wave.

Neither of us bothered mentioning that she had to leave so quickly because she was paying a nurse to stay with my father. She was about to “shuffle off to Buffalo” to a man who thought he was going to sell garbage potatoes that had never been planted, a man who’d lost his mind, body and money.

Compared to that, dealing with Edwina and her mother was nothing.

But as my mother drove away, I realized that I was losing my best friend. I’d had no sisters or brothers, and she had functioned as both. We both had the Irish penchant for black humour and for teasing the one funny thread from a tangle of tragedy. Although my father’s illness was catastrophic, we had found humour in certain situations — enough to keep us going. He’d forgotten words and now confabulated his own. He said “big skate” for car, “wheel bin” for garage, “Tontos” for Natives, “Rochesters” for black people, and he had hundreds more. My mother and I had adopted these word substitutions and begun our own idioglossia based on his linguistic lacunas. We would formulate sentences that only we understood; for example, I would say, “I got the big skate out of the wheel bin and drove down to hear music in the Rochester ghetto and sat with a few Tontos.”

I hoped she would be able to handle being at home alone with my father and not miss me as much as I would miss her.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.