Falling Backwards: A Memoir (17 page)

Sue’s folks used to let us sleep outside in a tent near the side of their house. Even in the summer the temperatures would drop enough to leave you shivering half the night. It was always so exciting to be out there in a tent, but frightening too. I was always scared of that bear showing up or, God forbid, one of the Fullerton boys coming to harass us. We’d lie there with flashlights and bags of chips and just chatter the hours away until the sun started coming up, and then we’d finally nod off for an hour. When I could hear the birds chirping and we finally did get up, I could hardly think, I was so exhausted. We’d go rushing into Sue’s log house, where her dad would be sitting and smoking his pipe, and brush our teeth, make our lunches, change our clothes and head for the yellow school bus, our own private taxi.

I loved going out to Bragg Creek—and it was probably nice for my mom not to have to drive me around those weekends—but I was always so glad to come through our back door and be home. I was happy to be the only daughter again after a weekend with Sue and all those sisters!

One year Sue didn’t return to school in Springbank. She just seemed to disappear into thin air. I don’t know where she went. So many things could change in a single summer. She was a dear part of my childhood, and I missed her a lot as the years went by. People
come and go, I was learning that more and more. Maybe Sue thought I was the one that went somewhere.

I was by now a seasoned country girl. I had earned my stripes, as it were. I had the world’s best dog, Aquarius. I had peed outside, slept outside, shot and killed small animals, built tree forts and rafts and ridden the school bus long enough to be considered a “Springbanker.” I could hardly remember ever having lived in the city. My parents had slowly but surely finished our house, and we had all settled in to our new lives. Well, we thought we were settled. It’s easy to mistake a sandbar for solid land if you’re not paying close attention.

Complex undercurrents kept trying to pull us apart. Mom and dad were the ones mainly feeling the strain. It wasn’t anything you could put your finger on, but the atmosphere was getting thicker as the days were getting longer. I felt the undercurrents at night under the bed, reaching up to grab an arm or a leg. I hated having my arms or my feet hanging out of the covers at night. I felt I was inviting big, creepy trouble by having them stark naked right out there in the open. I often tried convincing myself that I was not afraid of the dark and that there was no such thing as demons. It rarely worked. (As I got older I always kept a night light on for protection. Demons are deathly afraid of night lights.) Then I’d fall asleep due to a lack of oxygen, since I’d be underneath my blankets hyperventilating most nights.

My dad came and went and came and went, and my mom kept shuttling us around to all our activities, trying to keep us as busy as possible. We seemed to keep just busy enough to ignore what was actually going on. My parents were definitely not getting along. I would often hear raised voices after I had gone to bed at night. I’d lie there and try to make out what was being said, but I never could. It was muffled and fragmented. The one thing I could make out was my mother saying “Keep your voice down!” which seemed somewhat
ironic. It must have been hard for her to deal with him coming home late after he’d been drinking.

Looking back, I wish I could have carried some of that weight. I knew there were things going on that weren’t good, but I kept so busy that I didn’t give myself a chance to worry. I talked myself out of a lot of what I witnessed going on between my mom and dad. I suppose part of me was scared to death of the possible outcome of their discontent. I could tell that his behaviour was wearing her out. She’d pack us up and take us to gram’s house once in awhile for sleepovers. Mom probably needed a break from the constant arguing.

My gram was one of seventeen children. She was born on a small farm that one of her nephews runs in southern Alberta. It’s hard to fathom that my gram’s mother had
so
many kids, especially knowing that they were all born into such hard times. You’d think it would have been in everybody’s best interest to stop at two, but my mom told me that people back then had to give birth to their own labourers. Every kid worked on the farm; that’s the way it was.

Apparently my great-grandfather was nothing short of a bastard who never let up on my great-grandmother, and that in and of itself was the main reason they brought seventeen beings into the world. My great-grandmother was never not pregnant. My mom tells me her grandfather was a drunken, dirty old man. He exposed himself in front of his own children and grandchildren many times. My gram’s sister, Ern, told him on one of those occasions that if she ever saw him pull out his penis again she’d cut it off. I guess that scared him enough to stop whipping it out all the time. It’s hard to think that man is part of me and I am part of him. Genetics are bizarre.

Gram’s mom died during childbirth at forty-six from a massive hemorrhage. I think about that all the time. I have seen one picture of my great-grandmother, from when she was about thirty-six years old. She looked so much older than that. Her lips were pursed and
her eyes looked like the light had left them. They were sunken into her head. People didn’t smile for pictures much in those days but even still, she looked worn out and defeated.

Even though my gram had a terrible childhood, she was a delight to be around. She was altruistic, kind and funny, helpful and full of goodness. She was little when her mom died, maybe seven or eight. She could have turned out to be a bitter, cranky woman, as a few of her sisters did, but she was an angelic human being. We all adored her. She loved to have a cold beer and a laugh. I wouldn’t say she was a smoker by any stretch of the imagination, but she enjoyed a few puffs here and there on a weekend. I remember her letting me roll her cigarettes in one of those weird little tobacco machines. It was so much fun. I made a huge mess and ruined hundreds of the filter tubes, but she never got mad at me. She was so patient and tender. I never heard her say a discouraging word about anyone or anything. She liked everybody and everybody liked her.

When mom drove us to gram’s house to stay for a few nights, I was relieved somehow. I knew it would be a welcome break for my mother—a chance to think and breathe and regroup. I didn’t know exactly why we had to stay there, but it didn’t matter, I was happy just the same. It felt like a holiday. My gram always had ice-cold milk in the fridge and a jar full of peppermints by her couch. She was so good to us. She and my mom were so close, they were like the same person. They talked effortlessly. They were bound by some wonderful bit of heavenly, golden thread. I think my gram saved us many times.

Most days my dad would be gone before I got up in the morning. He was working long hours, and mom was so frustrated with him. There were countless ultimatums that were never acted upon. She couldn’t seem to follow through on any of her threats and I don’t blame her for that. Nobody wanted to break up our family, least of
all her. I didn’t know how close she was coming to running out of options. You can only take your kids to sleep over at your mother’s house so many times and then something has to give.

I don’t think we were unlike most families. Most families are complicated and hard to understand. My mom would always tell me that we weren’t the only weird family out there, as if she was trying to convince herself. I was happy to hear it coming from her mouth, anyway. I knew families who ran over bunnies and had them for their dinner. I knew families who hung pigs in trees. By all accounts, we were as normal as normal could be.

I was glad to have my weird little family. I wouldn’t have changed a single thing about them even if God had given me the option to. (There were worse things out there than brothers—those things were called sisters.) But I felt that because I had a brother who was always in trouble, it put extra pressure on me to be good. And it wasn’t always easy. I felt like I couldn’t do anything to rock the boat because my parents wouldn’t be able to stand another thing going sideways. Not that I wanted to do anything bad and not that I was bad, it just made me very aware of what I was doing at all times. My dad’s temper helped keep me on a fairly straight and narrow road too. When he yelled my heart just about stopped. It was that loud and that ferocious. Half the time I wondered if he knew what he was so bloody mad about. My mom would tell us that he was just like his mother. That made him yell too.

Patrick seemed to get along with everybody. He had such an easygoing nature. He was so smart and empathic—a sensitive boy with a really great head of hair! He would feather it to near perfection every morning using a blow-dryer that could have started a forest fire. It had one setting: atomic. If you weren’t careful with that crazy thing, you’d burn an ear off. He spent more time in the bathroom than any of us. He was the only one who seemed to really care
about how he looked for school every morning. It took him hours to decide on an outfit. He worried about having everything perfect. He put a lot of pressure on himself, which I didn’t realize until many years later. He’d be so nervous about getting on the bus every morning he’d almost make himself physically sick. All his worries and troubles paid off academically. Thank heavens my parents had one child who would bring home a really great report card twice a year without fail.

Patrick had not yet outgrown his asthma and was riddled with symptoms every spring, but he was game to play all the sports right along with the other kids. It was hard on his lungs to keep up with all the cardio required for football and track and field. He spent most of his time just trying to breathe. I remember seeing him in his oversized football uniform. His legs were so skinny and his shoulders were so hiked up around his jaw line he looked like a grasshopper. It didn’t help that the school uniforms were green. He looked so proud to be in that uniform. He never stopped trying to be just one of the gang. Everybody deals with shadows in their own particular way. Patrick’s way was to be as close to perfect as he could be.

Duray was smart, but he didn’t care about being perfect. He didn’t care about how he looked. He was one of those guys who could get up in the morning and splash water on his face and be ready for the day. He didn’t agonize over little things like his clothes or his hair. He made everything look so easy and so hard all at the same time. He could have slept through math class and still received a good grade if he’d shown up to take the tests. He was strong and athletic despite his pot smoking and his gas huffing. He would outrun everybody at school track meets, with no training or practising or anything. He was always good at running away from life.

My dad showed up to watch him run one year. Out of the blue he came and sat with the rest of the crowd and watched Duray compete at the track meet. Duray always talked about that. He was
so proud that dad had taken time from work to sit in the bleachers and watch him race. Dad talked about it too. He’d often tell the story of Duray being half a mile ahead of everybody else in the race, that he couldn’t believe his eyes. Dad told us that nobody else stood a chance, running against Duray. Knowing he had made dad proud of him, Duray’s face would beam with pure happiness.

W
hen I was twelve or thirteen, my mom began taking guitar lessons. The only reason she took up guitar was because she wanted to have something to do while she waited outside the school arena for me while I was at hockey practice. It would have been pointless for her to drive home and come back to pick me up and she said she was going to get hemorrhoids sitting on those cold bleachers. “It’s like sitting on a block of ice,” she’d say.

As the story goes, the preacher of the local church was offering beginner guitar lessons to all ages, which meant, please dear Jesus, let somebody show up and take lessons from me. The church was close to the arena and he was offering the lessons around the same time we practised on Saturday mornings. My mom had always wanted to learn an instrument and this seemed like just the right opportunity.

I liked sports of any kind, so when they put the sign-up sheet for the Springbank Sweethearts girls’ hockey team, I was first in line. I hadn’t really skated much at that point, but I thought, what the heck, it looks easy on TV. My favourite team was the Montreal Canadiens. I thought Frank and Pete Mahovlich were quite handsome. If they
could play hockey, so could I. I couldn’t have been more wrong—I was a terrible hockey player—but what I lacked in talent I made up for with enthusiasm.

My parents bought all my hockey equipment from a second-hand store called Sport Swap. Some people were weird about second-hand stuff, but I couldn’t have cared less. I had a friend who didn’t want to admit that her skis were used. I knew they were used because they had somebody else’s initials on them, but I never said a word. I knew it would’ve hurt her feelings. You could hardly see me when I put on my helmet. It must have belonged to a giant Russian defenceman at some point, because it swallowed my whole head. I had to tip my neck back to keep the darn thing on. It’s pretty hard to score a goal when you can’t even see your feet.

I think mom would have preferred to learn to play the piano, but we didn’t have one of those. I did, however, own a plastic air-powered organ with an impressive one-octave range, but I doubt that would have been useful for lessons of any kind. It only had twelve notes in total and the sound of the air whistling through was louder than any note you played. I likened it to a bagpipe with keys.

For eighty bucks my mom got not only a gorgeous binder filled with the popular sheet music of the day, but a guitar tuner, a professional finger chart, a faux leather strap and, lo and behold, a brand-new guitar! It was bigger than my mother. It came in its own case, made of fabric that looked like worn-out blue jeans. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever laid eyes on.

It was the first time I thought my mother was really cool. I was jealous of her new-found interest and, deep down inside, I would much rather have been taking lessons with her than pushing a puck around a freezing cold patch of ice while a bunch of crazy parents screamed insults at the referees from the stands. I was enamoured of my mother’s guitar—I wanted to hold it and touch it and strum it. I could
hear her practising at night in the living room. The sound of her patiently strumming away would drift up and around my head like smoke. I’d sit at the top of the stairs and listen to her trying to make the chords and sing along. It really hurt her fingers, to the point where they became so sore from pushing the various strings down that they almost bled, but she kept on trying to get it right. If you’ve ever learned how to play guitar, you know how difficult it is. The ends of your fingertips become blistered and crack open. My mom had such delicate hands to begin with, so I am not sure how she did it. The preacher told his class that if it hurt, chances were they were doing it right! My mom kept right on learning, despite the pain it caused her. I guess it was kind of like being married …