Spilled Milk

by Charmaine Arjoonlal

My mother found out my father had cancer when she answered the phone to a cancer society volunteer offering to drive him to his next doctor’s appointment. By then they had stopped talking with each other entirely, and their dog Molly had become their conduit to essential communication.

When my sister Susan and I were visiting our parents, we’d hear our mother yell to Molly, “I’d like pork chops for dinner!” in the hope that my father would overhear. He didn’t like to wear his hearing aids, saying that they made him look like an old man. We’d then hear the drag of his footsteps as he went down the stairs to the basement freezer.

Molly was a scruffy terrier whom my mother rescued from a neighbour with dementia, who thought Molly was a cat and had only fed her milk. Molly didn’t seem to take the yelling personally, but perhaps she too was deaf. My mother sat on the couch in a button-up housecoat to watch TV and knit hats and booties “for the babies at the hospital.” Molly was getting dog food now, as well as milk, and cuddled beside her, the dog’s milk-filled tummy round and plump.    

“He never even told me he had cancer! And what will the neighbours think when they see him get into a strange woman’s car?” my mother complained to Susan on the phone.

I lived in the Yukon wilderness without electricity and used a radio as a phone. Like the ‘party lines’ of old, everyone up and down the highway could overhear my conversations. My mother found this situation abhorrent, so we didn’t talk often. Susan didn’t mind, however, and we’d talk about our parents for hours. Not related by blood, we had been transracially adopted by the Gilmour’s when they were in their mid-forties. Perhaps this bonded us more with each other, than to them.

By the time we found out that our father had cancer, it was too late for treatment. The cancer had been festering for years. When Susan told me of his diagnosis, I flew the 4000 km to Ontario to visit. I took the airport shuttle to Peterborough.

“Why are you here?” my mother challenged. I hadn’t told them I was coming.

I was born with a speech impediment and, when tired or stressed, my words often come out jumbled or mispronounced. Because it’s somewhat unpredictable, in certain situations I only share what’s needed. Unfortunately, while this works well for me, it doesn’t always work well for people around me.

“I knew you weren’t telling me everything on the radio phone,” I replied, concentrating on pronouncing my words while staying even, unemotional.  My mother said nothing. Her eyes seemed to be looking at a spot above my head. In the silence, I stared at Molly and imagined she could purr.

I went downstairs to the basement where my father paced wild-eyed, hair askew in the semidarkness, frantic with pain. I took a deep breath, and the mildew wrapped around my throat causing a moment of panic.

“My body feels like an oven,” he said. As I leaned in close to hear his words, I felt the familiar lurch in my stomach. His breath smelled curdled. 

“I think we should find someone to come in and help,” I said, my voice hoarse. My mother, never much of a housekeeper, had now given up all pretense; floors and counters were sticky, ashtrays overflowing, and crumbs covered most surfaces. “Maybe you should take more pain medication. Someone could help with that.”

“We can’t have strangers in the house,” he replied, stopping to look at me. His pupils were dilated, the black filling most of the brown. I had a fleeting memory of us laughing while we played checkers in that very same basement. My parents had become less social and progressively more isolated, their few friends and family also aging. Now, they just wanted to be left alone.

“That would cost money,” he said and moaned, sitting down to rest. I took a deep breath and went back upstairs to look for ways to help. My stomach churned.

I shuffled around the kitchen noting the unwashed dishes and opened the fridge. An unpleasant odour wafted in. It smelt like the dirt-rimmed dairy fridge at our local convenience store.

 “You didn’t come home to clean,” my mother complained, coming upon me as I attempted to scrub the spilled milk that had crusted on the bottom, the yellow-hued gunk left to accumulate on the drawer handles. I half expected it to pulsate.

I remembered as kids our parents thought it was the right thing, the healthy thing, for my sister and I to drink a glass of milk before we could eat our supper. They never cared if we ate everything on our plates, as long as we drank a glass of milk. I hated the taste and occasionally tipped it over, pretending it was an accident. This caused my parents to react like a bomb went off in the kitchen. But one day when my father seemed more tired than usual, he looked at my mother and said, “It’s just spilled milk.”

Kneeling on the floor in front of the fridge, everything felt hopeless. Why did I come? I hadn’t yet worked up the courage to open the crisper drawers.

I didn’t know how to be their daughter. I’ve always felt like an impostor. The towns we lived in were small and predominately white. I had become accustomed to people asking me where I was really from and why I lived with the Gilmour’s. I had become used to cruel comments about my brown skin. When I didn’t get comments or questions I was surprised and strangely disorientated. The questions and comments had become expected. They became my shadow.

I was in my twenties. I wanted to do what adult children were supposed to do when the tide turned and parents needed support from their children. But where to start? I wished everything would settle itself, resolve, without me having to do anything at all.

I went back downstairs to try again. He was still my father.  

“Pa, what about home care? They could help mom with the house.” I shivered in the damp and rubbed my arms as I inhaled the overall stink--his stink? Did I stink?  My parents never liked to bathe. As a child, my father washed his hair every couple of months, but he only stepped into the shower every six months or so. Strangely, his ash-white hair was always lustrous, and if he smelled, it was more like the smell of a musty sweater. 

In the basement, I felt the usual irritation when my father replied, “We don’t need any help. She can manage.'' At least he had started to help with the dishes when my mother’s hands became too rheumatic, after saying for years, even after Susan and I had left home, “Why do we need a dishwasher when we have three?” 

As he stood up, his hand brushed my breast. My stomach clenched, and I stepped back to focus on my breath. In out, in out, and I thought about udders. Pa had taken Susan and me to visit a local farm when we were young, and we were allowed to milk Daisy, pulling and tugging on her udder, as she placidly chewed her cud. It felt rough and soft, all at the same time, but when no milk came I hesitated to squeeze tighter—I didn’t want to hurt her.

“Pull harder,” the farmer had said. She’s made for milking—she can take it.”

“Sorry,” my father said, his eyes unfathomable. “I didn’t mean anything.” 

I never knew how to react when such things happened. I should have become angry, yelled, did something, but for some reason, I always froze. I don’t know why I felt bad for him, but I did. My mother had always implied that our father had never been the same after his honourable discharge from the Royal Canadian Air Force at age 20. He had been a Sergeant Air Gunner in WWII and, while flying over Germany, had witnessed the bombing of a school. He returned home to marry his high school sweetheart—my adoptive mother—and took a job delivering milk by horse and buggy. 

As a child, I remember him talking about his horse, Bob, whose bells tinkled as he danced up and down the streets. I had pictured them singing “Jingle Bells” together as Bob’s breath steamed and the milk bottles clinked down on people’s doorsteps. But, their friendship couldn’t survive the poor pay, and my father felt obliged to accept a job as a livestock meat inspector in a slaughterhouse.    

For some unknown reason, my grade two teacher took our class on a field trip to my father’s plant. Everything was concrete or steel and very cold, like being inside a freezer. Blood pooled in the depressions on the concrete floor. Mixed with dirt and excrement, it was then encased in the men’s boot reads and tramped across every surface. The putrid smell of blood and fear and death clung to my nostrils, bringing bile to my throat. I tried to block out the man’s voice, who was intent on explaining how the process of killing differed between animals and that killing a horse was the hardest. I put my hands over my ears to block out their imagined screams.

I wonder now if the screams of the animals triggered the trauma my father experienced from the tail end of a Lancaster bomber and, if so, how he managed to get through his day—every day.

I went upstairs and lay down on my teenage bed. My mind flooded with images of my past as I tried to piece together the woman I wanted to become. I knew that it would mean finding a way to communicate better, without a Molly. I knew that it would mean facing my shadow.

I wanted my adoptive parents’ life journey to mean something.

Or was it all just spilled milk?

BIO: Charmaine Arjoonlal is a writer and social worker who lives with her husband and two spoiled dogs in Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada. When she’s not squeezing in writing, she enjoys hanging out in coffee shops, biking and swimming in cold lakes. Her writing has appeared in The Reckon Review, The Rumpus, Last Stanza Poetry Journal, MUTHA and elsewhere. You can find Charmaine on x/twitter @arjoonlal on Instagram @charmainearjoonlal or visit her website charmainearjoonlal.wordpress.com.