The Grey Ticket

Do you have the grey ticket, my seven-year-old grandson asks. He looks up into my eyes. Expectant. Earnest. I look down into his. The ceiling of the atrium in which we stand sits miles above us, cathedral-like. Space engulfs us. We form a tiny dot at the nexus of pool, rink, and library, me laden with bags of towels, swimsuits, and goggles, our eyes locked on one another’s. He waits for me to understand. It’s Sunday morning at the leisure centre, his swim lesson just finished, and now he and his sister and I will busy ourselves until it’s time for her swim lesson. The grey ticket, I repeat his words. Brow knit. Stumped. I think of things with tickets. Movies? Shoe repair? Parking? It matters not. I can see from his eyes that my answer has to be yes, I have to have a ticket, I can’t let those eyes down. You remember, he says knowingly, taking my hand and pulling me forward. The vending machines come into view. The grey ticket!, I blurt, The credit card. I understand. Yes, I say, I have the grey ticket, and I pull it out in a flourish and we set to work pushing buttons and releasing captive treats. 

We see relatively little of one another and it occurs to me one Sunday that when we do we need to make maximum use of the time. Give it our own stamp. What will it be? The lessons and facility are great and wonderful starting points, gifts, really, but they’re also the stuff of routine. The kids can do these things with anyone. What will they do with me? What will make it uniquely ours? 

For a few weeks I’d guessed and asked my way toward desirable food offerings, things I could bring from town to country. I travel an hour to see them. I consulted their mother, my daughter. Croissants? Oatcakes? Fruit? What was their desire? What do they like? She helped with the selections but nothing quite hit the spot, the kids largely indifferent, the food ignored. She provides a sensible snack, something to address actual hunger and health, so my job is really to come up with a treat. It needn’t be virtuous.

The swim lessons for each child are spaced such that there are gaps to fill. That’s the visit, the visit is in the gaps, each of them waiting for the other while their respective lessons proceed. Then there’s another wait at the end of swimming for the library to open. In the meantime, there’s usually a hockey game or practice to check out in the arena and a picnic table out back at which to sit and eat and draw and trees to climb and a creek with a bridge and fallen logs and a bit of forest and a skatepark of epic proportions to run around. But these things are not ours particularly, they’re pre-formed. Or they’re ours but they need customizing. Bedazzling. Like naked canvas runners. They need our stamp. If we were at one of the many beaches on the nearby ocean we’d dig the deepest hole ever and build the biggest castle and adorn it with shells and seaweed and stones. If at home, we’d make blueberry pancakes and blanket forts. But we’re at the leisure centre, a place of good but tightly proscribed activity. What’s our secret sauce?

Initially, I think lesson time will be hell for the child whose turn it is not. We have to stay together, they can’t go off on their own. The wait will be boring for them, I think. And maybe it is but if so it turns out to be a cool boredom, relaxed as opposed to hot and fidget-filled, each of them very accepting of the wait. Patient.

We sit with other families on a white tile bench that runs the length of the pool, floor to ceiling windows revealing the grounds and forest behind us, first one and then the other grandchild sitting next to me or on my lap or stretched out with their head in my lap and as they sit or lie I lightly trail my fingers up and down their arms and spine and over their back and shoulders like they’re a game of snakes and ladders. They are as if hypnotized, lulled into an open-eyed trance. I ease my fingers through their hair, smooth it, smooth their foreheads. I am them when I was a young child with my head in my mother’s lap. I am my mother with her grandchildren when she was my age. I am me as a mother when my kids were this age. We are the finger-whispered lineage of the back tickle. I do it without thought, fall into an effortless rhythm. This is what you do when a child is quiet and near. Second nature. This is the advantage of stillness, of cool boredom.  

Arm and back “tickles,” as they were known, caresses, in fact, were a highlight of Littlefair childhood. They could happen anywhere, like at a pool, but I remember in particular lying prostrate on the nubbly brown couch in the living room while my mother tickle-caressed my back and neck and arms so lightly my breathing all but ceased in deference to the ecstasy produced by the barely perceptible touches. I don’t know how she came up with it, so genius, so perfect. Her mother was a cold and distant presence in her own life. Tickleless. That made the arm and back tickle a veritable immaculate conception, a miracle, my mother having no firsthand knowledge, no memory, of what paroxysms of joy such a thing produced. 

So too my memory of coin-operated machines although in this she defined herself in opposition. They were a longing she did not indulge, a joy forever denied. I was besotted with gumball dispensers and the mechanical horses and elephants that lurched about on poles on square metal pedestals at grocery store entrances. They remained stationary and unyielding in my presence, indifferent, my mother refusing to part with the nickel I begged that would encourage them to act. A waste of money, she said. But I sat on them and pretend-galloped and said Giddyup anyway and twisted the knobs on the candy dispensers and checked their flapped chutes, ever hopeful that something would fall out. It did not. But I’m a grandmother now and I have a grey ticket. Things will be different with me in charge. I can make machines do my grandchildren’s bidding.

Back tickles and the treat-belching vending machines are what I want my grandchildren to remember of these visits. My mother slow-tickled my back and I slow-tickled my kids’ backs and now I slow-tickle my grandchildrens’. The tickle lineage is well and fully established. With the vending machines we honor an existing unwritten code: grandparent as co-conspirator and magician. My mother didn’t do it with me, I didn’t do it with my kids, but my grandkids and I are united in our feeling that the machine’s dispensables are indispensable. 

Magnetized by the package colour, orange, they settle on corn chips. They need a bag each, of course, the younger wanting whatever the older gets. And drinks, one purple and one red. The chips are such a success they realize they should celebrate with two more bags. And do. On reflection, however, those chips now consumed, they think that maybe they’d been too hasty. What about the potato chips? We’d better try those as well. But no, as it turns out they were right. Good though the potato chips are the corn chips, still orange, are even better and so we get another bag to share as well as another drink, the two of them having got quite thirsty. This time the drink is fluorescent yellow. Before we know it they’ve had seven bags of chips and three drinks and their shirts, the chests, are covered in fine orange dust where they wipe their cheesy fingers. I don’t notice it. Their father arrives to pick them up. Doritos?, he asks. Maybe?, I say, busted. Subversion is not my strong suit. But for now, in this moment, the kids are and will remain awash in the evidence of a grandmother’s excess, the three of us drunk from head to toe with all forms of secret sauce, back tickles and chips enough to see us through to our next adventure.