Doing Housework in High Heels

           

            On Wednesday morning I read the last section of Gabrielle Roy’s short story, “The Road Past Altamont”. It’s a weepy ending but it’s meant to be and she captures masterfully the sadness of parting through her description of the landscape of a beloved place in Manitoba visited one last time by a mother and daughter just before the young woman leaves for Europe.

            I started reading Nietzsche’s third essay in “A Genealogy of Morals”. It’s a critique of asceticism and the part that I read was a criticism of Richard Wagner’s “Parcifal” because of its glorification of sexual renunciation. Nietzsche says that it could only be considered a good opera if it was meant to be funny. Maybe it was. I’ve always thought that the ending of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” was meant to be funny. I think it’s hilarious. Juliet takes a potion to make her seem dead. Romeo thinks she’s dead so he poisons himself. Juliet wakes up to find Romeo dead so she stabs herself. It’s madcap! I could see it as an episode of I Love Lucy.

I went to the food bank at around 10:30 on Wednesday. As I walked my bike along the snowy driveway there was a conversation going on at a distance between two regulars: a thirty-something big, loud woman and an older, loud man. She said, “There’s quite a few guys over sixty that still do it!” He said, “When I get sixty-seven year old women comin’ after me I tell them, ‘Hey! I don’t want you havin’ a heart attack!’”

            I locked my bike and the line was already moving by the time I stepped into it. The big woman, who was standing away from the line-up, continued her conversation with the older man. She explained that she was standing back because she was smoking. That was nice.

            She asked him where his girlfriend was and he told her that she was home because she was recovering from a recent diabetic attack and so he was going to get a number for him and one for her. He said that she eats too much sugar. He added that one has to be careful with Sugar Twin as well. This made me curious, so I looked it up later. Apparently Sugar Twin is thirty to fifty times sweeter than sugar and in Canada it’s made with sodium cyclamate but it’s made with a different artificial sweetener in the United States where cyclamates are banned because of evidence that they cause bladder cancer in rats. Subsequent research has caused most other countries to lift any bans they had placed on cyclamates, but the US is still holding out. It’s also funny how cyclamates were discovered accidentally, as so many things have been, by a grad student trying to synthesize anti-fever medication in a lab at the University of Illinois. He’d placed his cigarette down on the bench but when he put it back in his mouth it tasted sweet. A cigarette? In the lab? Well, it was 1937. Just think of all the accidental discoveries scientists have missed out on since they can’t smoke around their chemicals anymore!

            The older man was two places ahead of me, but after he left with his two tickets the guy in front of me complained. The volunteer checking for my name in the database rolled her eyes at him and explained in an annoyed voice that it’s perfectly legitimate to get a ticket for someone else if they’re sick.

            I got number 19 and went home.

            While I was leaving for the food bank I saw Sundar, the superintendent, for the first time since before he went into the hospital a couple of weeks ago. I asked him what the problem had been and he said he’d been finding it hard to breathe. Thinking of his throat surgery last year I enquired if he was still smoking. “Sometimes” he answered guiltily. He told me though that this problem had nothing to do with his throat but it turned out that he’d gotten a small heart attack. I said that it’s good that he’s getting treatment for his heart. I told him about a friend of mine that died of a heart attack twenty years ago. He’d been having blackouts but even his doctor hadn’t realized that what he’d been experiencing were minor heart attacks. If they’d started treating the problem in time, Mike might have had a better chance of staying alive.

            As I turned my bike on Cowan, someone over by the library shouted “Corva!” which is Polish or Yiddish for slut. Immediately a voice with an accent from over by the Masaryk-Cowan Community Centre shouted back in a good-natured tone, “Corva!”

            There were quite a few people standing around waiting in the snow outside the food bank when I arrived. The driveway was in the shade but out on the sidewalk the sun was blinding as it reflected off the snow.

            A colourfully dressed regular was standing in the middle of the driveway and looking at his phone. From time to time he made comments: “Gonna eject you from my life, bitch!” and “Whadaya got to say about that, Black people?”

            Once I was inside and shopping, there wasn’t much I could take because I’ve limited my diet in preparation for my annual fast. Most of what I selected were things I couldn’t eat right now but I took a few canned items. The shelves were a lot emptier than usual. There were just four boxes of Kraft dinner on top of one shelf, My volunteer, the nervous one was trying to remove them to clear the shelf, but she couldn’t reach, so I helped her. In Sue’s section there was milk, which I had to turn down, but I took two cans of V8. She apologized that there was so little. She threw up her hands and frowned, saying, “We’re empty!” She opened the fridge and offered me some packaged salads, but they had tuna, so I turned it down. I skipped the bread, but it looked like they had some tasty cinnamon-raisin buns. From the vegetable lady I just took a few apples and some soggy broccoli.

            That night I watched two episodes of Dennis the Menace. It was interesting to see Gloria Henry doing housework in high heels and I wondered about that. Was that just a TV thing in the Fifties or did women actually do ordinary chores in heels. I can’t conjure an image in my memory of what my mother or my friend’s mothers wore while they did housework, but I think it would be burned there if they’d been wearing high heels.