White Tuna on Marble Rye

WHITE TUNA ON MARBLE RYE

By Rod Carley

Our mom was dying.

 It was the Sunday night of the Labour Day weekend. She was ninety-years old, and she knew she was dying in the next twenty-four hours. Don’t ask me how she knew, but she did. She

complained of back pain during the summer. We all noticed she’d lost a few pounds at the August long weekend family barbecue. It didn’t cross our minds she was sick - Mom’s weight fluctuated depending on the season.

           She decided she wanted to die after Larry’s strange disappearance.                                                          

“I need to make sure Larry and Rose are okay,” she said, sipping her tea last week. Like our father, she could make a tea bag last a week.

“Isn’t that God’s job?” I said, pushing a scone around on my plate. It was harder than a World War I trench ration. On further inspection, I discovered the Metro plastic container expired weeks ago.

“God’s got enough on his hands,” she replied. Then winked at me.

My older brother, Larry, retired from the railroad a year ago. He rode the last ONR passenger train from Cochrane to North Bay. No fanfare. Like many things in Northern Ontario, here one day, gone the next. Most days he retreated to his basement to tend to his model railroad collection. He pretended he and his wife, Rose, were travelling to the Rockies in a sleeper car – a

holiday cancelled by cancer. Shortly after Rose’s death, Larry volunteered as the lift operator at his church, delivering disabled parishioners from the narthex to the sanctuary.

One of his passengers, Iolanthe was a grieving widow, the church matriarch for years, making Coronation chicken sandwiches for luncheons - until a child choked on a bit of

eggshell - and was generally tolerated by the congregation. Iolanthe was the embodiment of the colour orange. She wasn’t just a splash of orange, she was a tsunami.

           On a hot Sunday morning, on the Canada Day weekend, Larry wheeled Iolanthe into the lift. The door slipped shut and up it went.

VVVIZZZZSPPT!

The narthex light flickered. The lift engine cut out.

Then.

The engine purred back to life. The lift descended. The door slowly slid open. There sat an empty wheelchair. Larry and Iolanthe had vanished.

           “The mental order of the universe is a mystical system,” Evie, my older sister, said on the phone. “Expect the unexpected.” Evie is a Jungian analyst, “Jung at Heart,” her motto.

After Larry and Iolanthe vanished in the lift, their bizarre story spread rapidly across the internet - like the teenage girl who threw a chair off her balcony onto the Gardiner Expressway.

The following day, paranormal investigators, journalists, exorcists, the RCMP, and Randy Quaid invaded the town. Hotel and motel rooms were booked to capacity. The RCMP treated the

disappearance as a missing persons’ case, but ultimately came up empty-handed. The church’s notoriety grew like Martian red weed, clogging the airwaves, interrupting Sunday services, and

causing widespread theorizing. Attendance increased by the walker-full. Old sick seniors, lonely parishioners, and the dying, wanted to go up the miraculous lift to God. They, however, did not

vanish. Larry and Iolanthe remained a mystical one-hit wonder. Rumours amongst the elderly congregation bandied about in hushed tones behind closed minds – Larry was actually the Grim

Reaper, as evidenced by his poor singing voice.

All my siblings, all of my mother’s siblings, all of her grandchildren, and most of my cousins, were in Mom’s tiny cramped apartment she shared with her nineteen-year old tabby

cat, Franny. Tacky landscapes in cheap frames covered the walls. My mother rescued paintings from Value Village that she felt needed a home.

Mom has three younger brothers: Uncle Clarence, the eldest, who worked for the town of Birch Lake driving dump trucks in summer, graders and snowplows in winter, and purchasing a

new Buick each September. He sold his used car-me-downs to my father. One time, shortly before he retired, Uncle Clarence got caught stealing from his road-worker job.

  “When the police arrived at his door, all the signs were there,” joked my Uncle Charlie.

  Uncle Charlie was my mother’s favourite brother; a good-humoured punster who still runs the small general store in the village of Juniper, just down the road from the Juniper trailer park. Sitting in mom’s living room, I told him I saw a moose on the way to the college.

He replied, “How do you know the moose was on the way to the college?” Uncle Charlie is the Buddha of bad puns.

Uncle Clayton, the most romantic of the bunch, left home early with a thirst for adventure. He built hydro towers across the Canadian Shield until he settled in Hearst.

  “Always fight fire with fire,” he used to say to us when we were growing up, which explains why he was thrown out of the Hearst Volunteer Fire Department.

The three brothers raised large families, even larger bellies, and enjoyed long lives of relative blue-collar discontentment. 

We all knew Mom was dying because she said she was - her doctor couldn’t say.

I volunteered to run and grab dinner for everyone, so I asked Mom what she wanted. I figured she should get dibs on the menu since it was going to be her last meal. But I knew she’d be ambivalent because our mother never demands anything.

Mom left her family farm in her early twenties and got a job as a receptionist in a small business office in town. She enjoyed her little life of freedom and independence. She had a gathering of girlfriends, drawn from her secretarial pool at work, and they would often go to a barn dance on a Friday night. Patio lanterns hung from the rafters amid the sweet smell of 1950s innocence that longed for a hotter smoke. The dances packed with community revelers from the ages of twenty to sixty, all there to let off some steam after a grueling work week, and get lost in

the glow and promise of the summer lanterns and music. The barn dances were a dry affair. The men discreetly hid mickeys of rye in their blazer pockets. My mother and her girlfriends sat at a

table near the back, sipping lemonade, some smoking, checking out the young men, while waiting for a daring, country Romeo to find the nerve to approach and ask for a dance. The men,

meanwhile, leaned against the walls in groups of fortified bravado, invariably sneaking out for swigs of liquid courage before beginning the long walk to the girls’ tables. This was the simple

mating ritual of my mother’s generation.

 One Friday evening in May of 1952, a tall, devilishly handsome man in his mid-twenties approached my mother’s table and politely asked her to “cut the rug” with him. He had warm

blue eyes that sparkled with mischief, sporting long sideburns and the greased pompadour fashionable at the time, the scent of scotch and nicotine fresh on his breath. He looked and smelled like trouble. His gentle manner proved otherwise. He danced our mother around the barn floor for hours, making her laugh at his silly jokes and relentless energy. Their dating had begun.       

Marty “Mo” Black grew up on a farm only a few miles down the road from my mother’s homestead - although their paths never crossed until that fateful barn dance Friday. During his

teenage years, my father worked as a movie theatre usher, stock boy in the hardware store, and by the time he met my mother, was dreaming of running his own ad agency. Two summers later,

they were married. Black Media & Marketing and my brother Larry followed soon after. Mom quit her job and set about raising six kids while our father hit the road and sold display advertising for bus shelters and billboards across the North.

From the beginning of their marriage, our mother put everyone else’s wants and desires before her own.

“What would you like, Mom?” I asked, expecting an “anything is fine” response.

“A toasted tuna sandwich from The Cozy Kettle” she whispered. “Lettuce and tomato.”

“Okay, sure,” I said.

“With light mayonnaise, white tuna not dark, on toasted marble rye, not light rye, not dark rye, and no pumpernickel.”

“Um, that’s pretty specific. It’s Sunday. They might not be open.”

“So, you’ll call”.            

We did call, but there was no answer at The Cozy Kettle, a restaurant I hadn’t heard my mother ever mention before. I told her they weren’t answering the phone.

“Call again in ten minutes”

Okaaaay.

I stopped myself from saying it aloud. Some things are better left unsaid, which I generally realize right after I’ve said them. Bartering over tuna was not how I envisioned my mother’s final breaths. I looked to Evie who nodded with deference to Mom. She had her concerned analyst’s face on, the one there was no point arguing with.

When we were finally satisfied that The Cozy Kettle was not doing any business that night, we decided on The White Pine Diner, because allegedly they also made a nice tuna fish

sandwich. I took everyone’s orders (most of which were grilled cheese sandwiches). I leaned down to be face-to-face with Mom. The muscles in her neck had stopped functioning months ago

so she was permanently hunched in a downward-looking position. I had to get down on my knees to see her face.

“I’m going to go get your tuna sandwich now, Mom, okay?”

“Is it on rye?”

“Yes, marble from White Pine.”

“I don’t think I want a tuna sandwich from there. Did you try The Cozy Kettle again?”

“We tried, there’s no answer,” said Evie, taking Mom’s other hand.

Meanwhile, JoJo went to the kitchen to look for a can of tuna and maybe a petrified loaf of marble rye. Neil followed her in to scour the fridge for light mayonnaise. She found two slices of hard and stale marble rye in the bread basket, and popped them in the toaster.  She checked the cupboards. Nothing. She heard a mew and looked down. The last can of tuna was in Franny’s bowl, half-eaten, mixed in with her kibble. JoJo considered her options.

 “You can’t be serious,” said Neil, shutting the fridge door, mayonnaise in hand.

“I am never frivolous,” responded a female voice.

“What?” said JoJo.

Neil searched for a second. He looked down at his iPhone.

“It’s Siri talking back.”

“That’s creepy. Turn off your phone.”

Back in Mom’s bedroom, Evie repeated, “There’s no answer at The Cozy Kettle.”

“Can you get me a tomato, bacon and cheese sandwich then?”

“Um, okay, uh, that’s a different thing,” I said. “The White Pine might not have that.”

“Okay, just a BLT then.”

“Yeah, that’s just a different different thing, Mom. Listen, I’ll do my best. I’ll find you something, alright?”

“Okay, whatever, I’ll try their tuna sandwich, as long as it’s not on light rye.”

“Okay, I’m on it”.

Suddenly, she grabbed my elbow. Her grip still worked, all things considered. She looked me in the eye.

“Do they have a turkey sandwich?”

“I don’t know, Mom. I didn’t memorize the menu. Do you want a turkey sandwich? Because I can find you one, it’s no problem.”

“No, I don’t want to put you to any trouble. A tuna sandwich is fine.”

“Fine.”

JoJo and I arrived at The White Pine Diner and, after scraping the front of my Forerunner on their parking barrier, the first thing we noticed was NO TUNA SANDWICHES scrawled on the chalkboard above the counter. It was a diner for Chrissakes - what kind of diner didn’t serve tuna fish sandwiches?

           “No tuna?” said JoJo, her voice cracking.

           “Owner is allergic,” replied the cashier, matter-of-factly.

But they did serve an all-day breakfast sandwich with egg, tomato and cheese.

“Why not go with her second choice, right?” said JoJo, muttering please under her breath.

So, we got Mom that.

Half an hour later, we were chomping away on our sandwiches, an apartment full of happy people, gastronomically at any rate. Everyone that is except Mom.

“This is not a good tuna sandwich,” she croaked. Poor choice of words, I admit.

Somebody (me, I guess) forgot to tell her that it was a breakfast sandwich she was eating.  Of course, she had eaten almost all of it by then. I leaned in and explained what happened. How I got her, what I thought was her second choice.

“Well, it doesn’t taste like any tuna I ever had.”

“Because it’s not tuna, Mom.”

Our mother did not die that night.

The next day the same crew and a few close friends assembled in her apartment again.

           “Is something burning?” she asked, scrunching up her nose.

“No, Mom, nothing’s burning,” I said.  My mother has smelled something burning since 1958.

It was lunchtime, so once again I offered to organize some food. I asked my mother what she wanted. After all, it might actually be her last meal this time.

“A toasted tuna sandwich from The Cozy Kettle.”

All of a sudden, this Cozy Kettle thing had become an obsession.

Unanswered calls went out to The Cozy Kettle, several of them. I commissioned Neil to physically go there and knock on the door. He came back with the dreaded news. They were

closed for renovations. And unless “renovations” was re-hanging a picture frame, my mother wasn’t going to live long enough to see how they spruced the place up.

A congressional subcommittee was quickly formed to find a replacement restaurant and, after much deliberation, Nick’s, a Greek restaurant across town became the chosen lunch-land

(even though none of us was Greek). I sent a query regarding our family tree to one of those ancestry websites. They sent back a packet of seeds and told me to start over.

Nick’s served tuna fish sandwiches, so, what wasn’t to like. I got the orders straightened away amongst my extended family, except for one.

“Mom, no marble rye, do you want it in a pita or on flatbread?” I was still on the phone with the vituperative owner.

“A bun” she said.

“You have buns?” I asked into the phone.

“Pita or flatbread.” He barked at me as only an Old World Greek restaurant owner can.

“Mom, they don’t have buns. Pita or flatbread?”

“Get it from somewhere else then.”

“Mom, everyone’s already given their order. We’ve got twenty-three sandwiches coming. I’ve been on the phone with this guy for half an hour. If I cancel now, he’s going to send over a wooden horse.”

I sent Neil to Metro to buy a loaf of bread with the intention of transferring Mom’s sandwich from Nick’s pita to marble rye. When the sandwiches arrived, Evie performed the surgery. She gave it a valiant effort, but we lost some tomato and lettuce in the transference, and the pickles never stood a chance.

Everyone loved the sandwiches - except one. Yet again, she ate the whole thing.

I leaned in.

“You hated it, didn’t you?”

“Let me ask you, who paid for this disaster? Can I at least pay for this disaster?”

A few hours later, I was holding her trembling hand as she asked me what time it was. I checked the Florida-shaped clock on her bedroom wall. “Two-twenty,” I said. I was practically prone on the floor looking up into her hunched frame.

She raised a cocky eyebrow and with a sly smile said, “Almost D-Day.”

I smiled back. “Yeah, almost D-day.” Then, “Is there anything I can do for you, Mom?”

“You could’ve brought me a better tuna sandwich.”

I swear on my life.

Everyone within earshot cracked up.

A few hours later, she was dead.

       Uncle Charlie put a hand on my shoulder.

“Two tuna fish pass by a submarine,” he said quietly. “Big Tuna Mommy says, ‘Don’t be scared little Tuna, these are canned humans.’”

  My mother provided me with love as never-ending as her voicemails. I saved her last message, three days prior to her death, five-minutes long, pleading with me to pay my overdue parking fines before I wound up in prison, and offering me her loose change to do so. I kept the message and listen to it whenever I miss her. I still haven’t paid my parking fines - I need to give her something to worry about - to keep her around. I find dimes all over the house.

         One day, she will stop leaving me change. Then what?