Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter (13 page)

I was as surprised as anyone that Paul's food was such a hit, as well as being greatly relieved. The first time he set out for the neighbours' house with all those dishes of food piled into a huge long box, I was afraid that after all that careful preparation, that endless chopping into little pieces, all that whisking and stirring of sauces, fiddly frying and drying, the neighbours might find the food as barfy as I did. But they raved and raved.

Like I said, there were so many things I did not fully understand.

Dad gutted his new (old) house bit by bit, refinishing wood floors and laying oriental carpets, replastering and painting the entire house Wedgwood blue with white trim, and filling the place with the furniture he had inherited from his parents; among other things, the twin beds my mother had said she didn't want. He hung an astonishing number of chandeliers and sconces, unpacked his collection of sketches, paintings and statues of naked men, and found places for every one of them.

My weekends in Toronto during that period were spent amid plaster dust, Chinese restaurants and Wagner operas, and gradually my brothers and I grew accustomed to the changes in our lives; not in our father, for he was largely the same (with a few added personality sequins), but in all that surrounded him. He had been coming out for about two years by the time he bought his house, so we were already used to seeing copies of
Body Politic: gay liberation journal
lying around. Many of his new friends had a way of speaking that identified them clearly as “gay” (not quite as pronounced as “Thammy” from the Gay Fathers of Toronto potluck, but thimilar). And they were suddenly not all academics but also
normal
people: postal workers, Bell Canada employees, architects, dessert chefs, lawyers, opera singers, and a journalist/prostitute who was the least pretentious well-read person I'd ever met.

While I found it strange that my dad was suddenly hanging around with postmen and prostitutes, I must have been young enough to not really care. (Incidentally, the journalist/prostitute
looked and dressed like a university professor, and a few years after I met him, he became one.) Or rather, I must have been young enough still to care more about what they were like than what they did for a living. I was also young enough to continue to take cues from my dad, who didn't seem to find any of it strange at all. And I was so used to his university friends speaking excessively syllabic nonsense about things that mattered only to them that it was a relief to spend time with people who spoke real English about things that also mattered to me.

Also, these guys were
fun
. They loved to make jokes. Make light of things. Double over giggling. Groan about good chocolate. The whole thing might have been considerably harder if Dad's new circle of colourful friends hadn't been so likeable. But they were engaging and interesting, mirthful and eager to chat. I truly enjoyed hanging out with them. By the time Dad introduced me to his “boyfriend”—the postman as it turned out—I was so taken by the man's playfulness that I came away hoping only that they wouldn't split up, so that he could continue to be my friend.

Which he has done. For more than thirty years.

It never occurred to me to hate Dad for being gay, nor did the notion ever seem to dawn on my brothers. There were plenty of times when I was angry about the whole thing—deeply sad, actually, though hiding it beneath a mask of cool teenage ire—but to wag my finger at Dad's willy and get all worked up about what he was choosing to do with it never crossed my mind. Somehow, my brothers and I understood that the “sex
part” had nothing to do with us. And that to be furious at him for being gay was as pointless as cursing a bat for hanging by its feet.

What I did hate was the Greyhound bus, that long sprint on the dog's back to and from Toronto, the grime and stink of it, the feel of the highway in my chest; to this day the reek of bus fumes throws me into a nauseated funk. I hated the shame my mother wore in her eyes, the way she would sit in the La-Z-Boy rocking chair in the backroom listening to old, scratchy recordings of Schubert
Lieder
and swimming in a pain for which the world had no place. I hated that it was the day of Flip's ninth birthday party that she had discovered a love letter from her husband to a man—
pin the tail on the donkey everyone!—
and that after the party she decided to go camping by herself. Two cans of tuna, a loaf of black bread, a husband in love with a man, and a life with three young children to figure out.

I hated that they fought over money. I hated it when my mother walked around looking like a top that was all bound up and busting to have her string pulled so she could spin. I hated that, especially by comparison, my dad seemed so damn happy. But more than anything else, I hated all the stories I needed to invent about my life, the dancing pink elephant in the room that I spent my adolescence trying to conceal.

I became an acutely talented liar. Could talk for hours about things that never happened, tire people with details of the illustrious job at the University of Toronto that had forced my dad to move (in truth, he still taught at Trent University
and lived, during the week, in a house with some other gay profs across town). I claimed great vexation at my mother's refusal to move the family to the city, throwing in enough histrionic gestures to make my frustration believable. As my friends chewed their bland sandwiches in the cafeteria, I would regale them with tales of the dazzling and mythical metropolis of Toronto—the restaurants, the films, the concerts, the
art
(a word I learned very young to use as a weapon of superiority)—all the while conveying my sympathies that both their parents lived in poky, dull, provincial little Peterborough. Probably even shared a bed. Lamentable things.

In addition to the piano, my mother also played the oboe, a notoriously difficult reed instrument that when played badly sounds like a Canada goose with croup, but when played well creates one of the most sublime sounds on this earth. My mother's playing was on the sublime end of the scale, although she never considered herself a master of the instrument.

The oboe bears a superficial resemblance to the clarinet, but the oboe is played with a double reed stuck into a hole at the top of the instrument, rather than a single reed on the side of the mouthpiece. Oboists being a rare breed (in Peterborough, there was, let's see … one: my mom), she had to make her own double reeds, which she did by cutting two pieces of cane with a very sharp knife, binding them together with red thread and sticking them into a tube of cork, which fit into the top of her instrument.

Sounds simple enough, and it is relatively easy to make a reed that goes
squawk
, but making a good reed is an art in itself and for years my mother devoted herself to it. Our yellow kitchen chairs, strands of red thread forever dangling from them, were testaments to this devotion, as my mother's technique involved using the chairs as ballast while she wound the red thread around and around the cane, stacking each layer of coiled thread neatly upon the last, the chair back holding the thread tight. When she was finished, she would snip the red thread, make a firm knot and stick the reed in her mouth—
peepeepeepeeeeeep
—to test it out. There would always be adjustments
to make: chiselling with the sharp knife, shaving a bit off here or there. Sometimes, she would have to make so many cuts and shavings that the reed would be ruined. But other times, she would hover over her small grindstone, chiselling and shaving, playing a few
peeps
, chiselling again, until the
peeep
was just right. Then she would plug the reed into her oboe, play a few velvet passages, and pull the reed out with a smile of triumph. “I just made a great reed!” she would proclaim.

I swear dinner always tasted better on those nights. And lying in bed that night would be like flying through stars, the song of my mom's oboe downstairs threading constellations of light through the dark house, guiding us on our nightly migration into sleep.

It was probably the sheer relief and satisfaction that came with producing a great reed that made Mom forget to snip the rest of the red thread from the back of the yellow kitchen chairs, and over the years those chairs became hairy with dangling threads. It became sort of comforting, in that my brothers and I took to throwing our arms over the backs of the chairs and running our fingers through the threads the way some people play with their hair.

And that is what I was doing—coiling the thread around my finger, then letting it loosen and fall, over and over—the night she went out to orchestra practice the year after Dad moved out and I decided to snoop through her desk in the corner of the kitchen. Actually, I did that a lot. Sometimes the car wouldn't even get halfway down the driveway before
I popped open the metal doors (it wasn't a typical wooden desk—more of a metal cabinet with a wooden flap she could pull up to do her filing and chiselling on) and started riffling through whatever papers I could find.

It was there that I had found the divorce papers for
Wearing vs. Wearing
, those long typed pages, most of which I didn't understand, but where a single typed word,
Homosexuality
, was listed as the grounds for divorce.

I remember staring at that word for a long time, one hand running through my mother's red threads, my tears blurring the letters together, as I tried to fit my dad into that word. I knew that he was gay, that was not news, but it was a deeply sad and lonely moment still. Something condemning and denouncing about it made me just cry and cry.

Snooping was also how I learned, a few months later, that my mother was getting remarried. “Well, I assume you've heard all the bad news,” she wrote in a half-finished, clearly long-overdue letter to an old friend in England, “but the good news is that I am getting married …”

I wound the thread so hard around my fingers that time that I nearly cut off the circulation.

Several months after my dad moved out, my mother began playing tennis with a neighbour. Mel was a friendly man with an eager smile, the kind of person who did things like bound up the stairs two at a time. Mel had lived around the corner from us for as long as I could remember, but I never really knew him
(other than as “that divorced guy who lives on Roper Drive”), and the idea of my mother “dating Mel” was one of the weirdest things I could have imagined.

Mel loved sailing and adventures and pulling into our driveway in his long, fake-wood station wagon and asking my mother to “go out for cappuccino.” It was the first time in as long as I could remember that my mother had a social life outside the house.

I was furious.

Terrified, actually. Convinced she was going to disappear too. To restore order to the world, I began keeping tabs on her like a probation officer. She was required to file her whereabouts with me at all times. More than once, I had her paged at a restaurant for flouting her responsibilities and staying out ten minutes later than she had promised. She was often frustrated by the choke-chain I'd looped around her life, but when I burst into tears she would soothe me, saying, “You don't have to worry” and “I'm not going to just run off.”

My mother's outings didn't seem to bother either of my brothers—nothing seemed to—but I was constantly filled with anxiety. If my mother said she was going out to play tennis, I'd decide to take the dogs for a walk so that I could keep an eye on her from a neighbouring field. If she said she was going to Mel's house for dinner, I would show up at his door when I felt they should be finished eating.

Understandably it drove my mother bonkers, but she and Mel tried to be sympathetic and provide me with the assurance I needed. Until one evening about half a year into their
courtship when my mother announced over dinner that she and Mel were going to Aruba.

“What's a Ruba?” Flip asked between mouthfuls of green beans.

But I knew exactly what it was. It was
running off with someone
. Goddamn them.

“When are you leaving?” I pried petulantly, as furious as I was upset.

“Tomorrow,” my mother responded calmly. Her sister, Sally, would come to stay with us for the week.

“For the rest of our lives, more like it!” I yelled, and stormed up to my room.

That night, I crept into my mother's room and begged her not to go, even launching a case for why it would be a good idea to stop seeing Mel altogether. He wasn't her type. Didn't even play an instrument. Wouldn't know a concerto from a contact lens. She should stay home and play the piano more. She hardly ever did that anymore. Wasn't that a bad sign? Besides, he was a
sailor
. And you just never know what kind of a thing a person like
that
is going to do.

I didn't win my case, but I wept dramatically and made her promise me that she would come back. Although I don't know why I bothered because I didn't believe her when she did.

When she walked out the door the next day, I took a conscious snapshot of her face—her uniquely gorgeous, irreplaceable smile—convinced it would be the last time I would ever see her.

(It wouldn't have dawned on me to create such drama over one of my dad's departures. He had come and gone for so
long, I never imagined I had any control over his whereabouts. And he had
always
had a social life outside the house. But if the double standard drove my mother “round the bend,” she never pointed it out to me.)

As promised, she returned from the Caribbean.
They
returned. And sometime after that, she went out to orchestra practice, handmade reeds in hand, and I went snooping and found the letter. So while I was surprised by the news of an actual wedding, it didn't come wholly without warning. And considering my near-crazed reaction to her mating dance with Mel, I can understand her wanting to enjoy the exciting news with her friends for a bit before initiating what was sure to be a Heavy Conversation with me.