Falling Backwards: A Memoir (15 page)

They had a huge, black cast-iron frying pan always sitting on the stove with an inch of grease in the bottom of it. Mrs. deCrom fried up everything imaginable in that big, black iron skillet. She used to scorch large pieces of thick, homemade bread in the hot grease, and then sprinkle sugar on them. It didn’t look very tasty, but it really was. Theresa told me that it was because of the war. What war? I thought to myself. I knew that a big war had taken place, but I thought that it had ended at least a hundred years ago. I was alarmed to be reminded that it was only 1945 when that war ended for the Dutch people and that it was still a touchy subject. I guess in Europe during the war grease of any kind was like liquid gold. Forty years later, the whole family was still deeply programmed by World War II rationing. I didn’t know you could use grease more than one time—boy, was I wrong.

In our house, the frying pan was nearly sandblasted clean after every use. My mother would stand over the sink while all the windows fogged up with steam, scrubbing the living hell out of our pots and pans. Her hands would be bright red from the combination of hot water and S.O.S pads. To this day I can’t touch an S.O.S pad. They make me feel like grinding all my teeth off to the root.

My dad used to put four or five strips of bacon into a pan and fry them up, but Mrs. deCrom would put an entire pound in and move it around like a brick until it was done. Miraculously, it all came out perfectly cooked. Then she’d drop the eggs into two inches of pure pig fat and boil them in oil. After the feeding frenzy came to an end and the
breakfast plates were cleared away, the pan would be put right back on the stove filled with all that grease, awaiting the big fry-up that would undoubtedly happen the very next morning. The deCroms were a very frugal family. Nothing was wasted, nothing was thrown away—and I mean nothing.

Theresa told me that the family was driving back from church one Sunday when suddenly the car swerved and there was a subtle but audible thumpity thump. They came to a rolling stop and everybody waited to see what they had hit, if anything, and what damage had been done. Mr. deCrom stepped out of the vehicle, and to his delight discovered that he had hit a rabbit. He grabbed it by the ears and tossed it into the back of the car with his terrified children. Theresa told me that the bunny was not quite dead, which only added to the chaos. Theresa swears they took that poor little bunny home and had it for dinner. I remember my dad hitting the odd gopher or squirrel as we drove around those back country roads, but I am pretty sure we never ate anything he ran over. Mind you, who knows what went into my mom’s brown-and-gold Crock-Pot.

I can’t say that I loved junior high school. I felt awkward, to say the least. My body felt like it belonged to someone else entirely. It was changing on a daily basis—they were subtle changes, but changes nonetheless, and they scared me. I had always been stick-thin and wiry, but I was starting to put weight on my hips and my legs and my stomach. I was still tiny, but I could see the differences from month to month. My clothes were becoming a bit harder to squeeze into, and I hated it, because I would have to go out and buy new ones. Shopping wasn’t all that high on the list of things I liked to do. Mom would take us once a year for new school clothes, and that was about the extent of my shopping. I’d pick things out in about two minutes and be done with it. A lot of my clothes were hand-me-downs from Duray. I liked
his worn-out jeans and his plaid shirts. People pay big bucks for clothes that look like they’ve been worn for years—apparently they call it “distressed” and charge a bloody fortune for it. I was ahead of my time.

In junior high school I kind of became popular. Well, I don’t know that for sure. I just decided that I would try to be. My goal was to not be one of the kids that got picked on. I wanted to become like Switzerland: so neutral that my classmates would have no idea what clique I belonged to. I would have to belong to all the cliques and be convincing. First I had to figure out if we even had any cliques, and then what the cliques were.

Thankfully none of the forty or so kids in my grade exerted any pressure to be dressed well, so there was no fashion clique. Half the kids who got on the bus in the morning smelled like chicken poop, so the bar wasn’t exactly set all that high. In fact, if you came to school and didn’t smell like some kind of farm animal, you were considered weird. Being “in fashion” was foreign to everybody apart from a few silly souls who had just moved to Springbank from the city. For some reason, they still clung to the idea that they were supposed to look coordinated. If anything I was wearing matched, it was simply by chance. The new kids hadn’t been conditioned yet. Soon they would be in generic running shoes and used Levi’s from the Salvation Army, skipping Mr. Milton’s math class/putting lesson to drink Lonesome Charlie by the river. (Lonesome Charlie was a very cheap, incredibly crappy pink wine that was basically a headache in a bottle but was also sweet and bubbly and therefore very popular.)

There were a couple of sisters who had moved to the area from California, of all places. Their names were Kim and Debbie Dunning. Our whole school turned upside down when they arrived one fall day in September. They were both so pretty! When they laid eyes on all of us farm-looking people, they looked as though they would cry.
We probably all looked like extras from the movie
Children of the Corn
. I don’t blame them for feeling upset. They were stared at for at least a year. I am sure it was their worst nightmare to be sitting in their graffiti-covered desks, having poorly dressed pubescent boys that smelled like chicken poop staring at them. These two lovely girls had gone from sand-covered beaches and sunshine to cow patties and haystacks. Theresa and I felt sorry for them, although we were jealous. They were the most beautiful girls any of us had ever laid eyes on. They looked like the girls on TV—all tanned and glowing with long, straight, shiny hair. They always seemed to be moving in slow motion. You didn’t know whether to kiss them or punch them. (As it turned out, they were both very nice, and it didn’t take long for them to learn how to smoke cigarettes and drink Lonesome Charlie and date very, very far beneath them. Sometimes you can’t fight fate.)

Some of my friends had started developing breasts, and I’d seen them before gym class trying to cover themselves up by changing in the bathroom stalls. All the girls seemed mortified about having to wear a training bra, and I was too. Well, there were one or two girls who started wearing bras two years before they had to. God knows why. They even went so far as to stuff them with tissue to fill them out. We all knew. Some girls were completely out of their minds when it came to things like that. Who would want breasts any sooner than they had to get them? I wanted to keep mine at bay for as long as I could and I kept wearing looser shirts so no one could see what was going on. Eventually, my mom took me into Woodward’s and bought me a training bra. I did not want to have to wear one, but I wasn’t given much of a choice. For whatever reason, even trying it on was humiliating to me. I felt like I was losing control over my own body, and it felt terrible. My mother said that I would get used to it and that there would be no discussion. It was already completely embarrassing, so why would I want to discuss it anyway?

Things got even worse when my mom wanted to discuss my impending period. I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing. My period? Please, dear God, Lord Jesus above, do
not
make me discuss my period with my mother. I didn’t plan on ever getting my period, for one thing, and for another thing, I already knew about my period because there was a girl who blabbed all about hers in biology class. Fitting really, biology class.

Out of the blue one day, my mother marched me up to her bedroom and opened the drawer second from the top of her dresser and pointed to the biggest menstrual pad I had ever seen in my life, and I’d seen a few in my day. These things were like mattresses and they had to be attached to giant belts that looked like they should be holding up hockey socks. My mother gave me a tutorial on how to use the pads and how to connect the belts and, quite frankly, after that, it all started to feel and sound like I’d been huffing helium at a clown’s birthday party. I never again ventured into the “period drawer.” What I ended up doing, when I did finally start my period, was roll up wads of toilet paper and then stuff them into my underpants. I kind of clamped my legs together to keep everything in place. It was an art form for sure. I felt weird about the whole period thing and kept it to myself until I was about eighteen. My mom must have thought that I was really late to come to the menstrual party, but she didn’t say anything to me, thank God. Most of the girls I knew from school got their periods when they were fourteen or fifteen. I was sixteen when I started, and really didn’t want to tell my mom.

But the problem with the homemade toilet paper maxi-pads was that they crawled up your bum crack and right out of your jeans whenever you walked or moved, which was fairly often. I was always trying to figure out how to cram the pad down past my waistband and back into position. I would only have to take a few jaunty steps before all of a sudden my toilet paper wad was making its way towards
my training bra. I really wanted to learn how to use tampons—anything seemed better than going into my mother’s period drawer—but my friend Elise’s mom told us that they were for married people. We never quite figured that one out. (If you’re ever considering making your own pads, know that you can get serious chafing down there from wads of toilet paper.)

I went through hundreds of rolls of toilet paper during that time, and eventually my dad started to notice. I heard him upstairs one morning yelling, “Where is all the goddamn toilet paper disappearing to in this goddamn house?” He went on to spew out about twenty-seven Jesus Christs and at least one F-bomb. We very seldom heard the F- bomb, but on the occasion it did slip out of his head we all ran for cover. I wondered how you said the F-bomb in Dutch. I would have to remind myself to ask Theresa’s dad about that.

I
didn’t like growing up at all. It felt, well, quite simply, odd. It’s not easy becoming a person. Even my thinking had begun to change. I started thinking about God again. God was always poking around somewhere in the back of my mind, but I was beginning to seriously consider who and what he was. Was he even a he? Where did he live? Did he wear clothes? Did he have a penis? That one really bothered me to think about. I knew even picturing that was a terrible sin punishable by a trip to hell.

I had so many questions about the universe. I didn’t know where to start. I began to pray a lot. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I would lie in my bed at night and talk endlessly to whatever it was that was out there. I would whisper all my secrets into the ears of the abyss and fall asleep right in the middle of some important wish. I couldn’t quite get my head around the concept of death. To think that I would die seemed laughable. Where does someone go when they die? Would I get another body? Do you get to eat up there? Surely they give you clothes to wear. Would I know anybody in the afterlife? I hadn’t even begun figuring out the
“before” life yet. I had certainly killed enough things in my youth to understand that death was a very serious thing. You’re here and then you’re not, that’s what my dad always said. One day I woke up startled because the thought of perishing had never crossed my mind, and then there it was.
I am going to die!
Just like that, jumping up and down right in front of me, taunting me before I even had time to eat my morning Pop-Tart.

It’s an innocent time in your life when you can actually say you don’t know of a single person that has passed away. My dad’s father had died before I was born, so that didn’t really count. So technically I didn’t know personally anybody who had died. I do feel, however, that I came very close to being killed several times in my young life, thanks to my dear friend Sue McLennen. Sue was the female version of Leonard and Dale. We were always on some sort of outdoors adventure, but Sue didn’t have the desire to kill anything. She didn’t even own a gun, which was good. Sue lived in a little town called Bragg Creek that was much closer to the wilderness than we were in Springbank. We loved playing down by the river, throwing rocks and wading in the water looking for treasures that people may have lost hundreds of years ago. Once I found a hubcap and pretended it was part of a spaceship that had crashed. We used that hubcap to pan for gold all summer long. (We must not have been panning correctly, because we never managed to unearth a single nugget of the glimmering stuff. We would have been happy finding cold, hard cash if it were underneath that water somewhere as well.)

Sue and I were chased by a bear one day when we were panning for gold down at the river. I remember being taught survival skills in Brownies. You were to lie down and play dead when encountering a bear, but lying down in the bushes seemed beyond crazy to me at that moment and Sue and I made a run for it. I decided then and there that Brownies was as dumb as a bear turd and I vowed never to
go again unless it was Cupcake Day, in which case I would make a one-time exception.

I have never run so fast in my life. We could hear the bear crashing behind us as we tore through the brush to get back to the road. Now that I think about it, that bear could have been running away from us, but that makes the story less interesting. It was a little brown bear that was probably three hundred pounds at best. It certainly wasn’t a grizzly or anything like that. All I know is that the brown bear was after us and if we were to be eaten by him it would be the most sensational story ever told at my junior high school. For a split second I thought of letting it catch up to us, but then my common sense took over, thank God.

Another time, Sue and I were playing with a very long fly-fishing rod, casting a lead weight into the trees, when
by accident
I whacked her across the thigh, leaving a really long, red welt. She, of course, had to retaliate, and started running after me, intending to whack me back. It’s hard to run when you’re laughing as hard as we were. I remember trying to hide behind a telephone pole. Sue was flicking the fishing rod at my legs trying to hit me when all of a sudden a car veered off the road and smashed into the pole. We must have been really carrying on and not heard it coming, because it seemed to roar out of nowhere. The crash itself was deafening. The ground beneath my feet shook so hard it knocked me over.