Falling Backwards: A Memoir (18 page)

My mother had a beautiful voice, but I already knew that. She sang to me a lot when I was little. I was a terrible sleeper, so she’d rub my back and sing songs until I drifted off. She said her arm would just about fall off stroking my back—up and down and up and down—trying to get me to go to sleep. If she stopped for a second I’d wake up again. It’s like if you fall asleep with the television on and someone comes along and shuts it off, you immediately wake up. Her song selection was kind of crazy, or at least different. She used to sing songs from a movie called
Paint Your Wagon
with Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin. I loved those songs, “Wand’rin’ Star” and “I’m on My Way” in particular—I knew them by heart because she sang them so often to me. I thought my mom sang them at least as well as, if not better than, Clint Eastwood. And my mom was
way
better than Lee Marvin (that was a no-brainer, as I didn’t think he could sing at all). Songs from
Fiddler on the Roof
were popular around our house too, but they weren’t my favourites. “Sunrise, Sunset” is the only song that ever made any sense to me; the rest seemed to be about farm animals or unrequited love, neither of which appealed to my ears at the time. My mom also attempted to sing Harry Belafonte tunes, which I loved,
but she lacked the accent needed to really pull off “Come, mister tally man, tally me banana.” What the heck was that all about? Tally your own bananas.

Before too long, my mom was playing songs like “Country Roads” by John Denver, “Goodnight Irene,” originally recorded by Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter, and “Edelweiss” by … whoever the hell first sang that song. She was sounding so great, so professional! I was amazed, to say the least. I couldn’t believe that this was the mother that belonged to me.

I went to a lesson with her once. I sat in the corner of the church on a metal chair and listened to eight or ten people who were concentrating so intensely that they looked like they were trying to go to the bathroom. They all strummed away madly and sang songs for an hour at the top of their puffed-up, gleeful lungs; I was in heaven. I loved the tones that poured out of their big guitars. I loved that together they could make a sound that seemed to seep underneath my skin and crawl ever so slowly towards my heart and then just sit there, humming like a long laugh. Everybody looked so darn happy, and it was contagious! Any one of those people who had a trouble in the world when they walked into that lesson walked out an hour later not knowing what those troubles could possibly have been. My mom looked happy in that guitar class, and she didn’t look happy very often.

Her brow was usually furrowed, and for good reason. Because building the house had put such a strain on my parents financially, my mom felt she had no other choice but to go back to work. She didn’t want to, but she knew she had to. She was thirty-nine years old, and had to figure out some way to support us all in case something went—well, just in case … She honestly didn’t know if my dad would be able to keep his job at the concrete company or not. There was a lot of infighting where he worked and sometimes
there was real fighting. My dad worked with two crazy brothers who could both drink like the devil in a desert and who beat the hell out of each other on a weekly basis. Things were unsteady and unpredictable. The company was one truckload of concrete away from crashing onto the tarmac.

I know that at that point my dad was drinking so much he’d stopped eating, and managed to get himself down to about 130 pounds. I don’t remember him being thin. I didn’t see him around enough to even notice if he was thin. My mom told me that often when alcoholics drink they don’t want to eat. That was news to me. Drinking was nothing like smoking pot, then, because when Duray smoked pot he’d microwave a package of wieners and eat the entire thing with a loaf of white bread followed by four or five Wagon Wheels and a gallon of homo milk. Duray would eat car parts if he had the munchies and there was nothing else around. Sometimes I think my mom got a part-time job not just for the money but so she could get out of the house. Who could blame her?

She worked a crazy assortment of odd jobs to earn a bit of extra money for us. One of them was sorting eggs at a chicken farm about a mile down the road from where we lived. Mom said it was a horrible job because of the smell. She had to peel her clothes off at the back door and bleach them in hot water to get the stench out. Everybody who lived within a few miles of the egg farm knew what it could do to a perfectly good summer day. When the wind blew in the right direction, the smell of chicken shit was so bad it could almost peel the red paint off a barn. I can’t really describe it but I’ll try: if you put a loaded diaper in a pot of boiling sock juice with goat balls you’d be about halfway there.

My poor mother stood in front of a conveyor belt, holding up egg after egg to a 40-watt light bulb. Her job was to see if the eggs were fertilized, which I thought was disgusting. She worked there
just long enough to afford a third-hand clunker of a car called an Epic. It had a top speed of forty miles per hour and could fit two people comfortably and four people really uncomfortably. She quit her job at the egg farm the day she got the last cheque she needed to buy that car. She drove us everywhere after that. It was nice for her to be able to get around without having to depend on my dad.

I don’t know how she did it. My mom worked a full-time job for several years as well. She somehow managed to get a job as a dental assistant, of all things, though she had no experience. She saw an ad in the paper and went and filled out an application, did the interview and Dr. dePledge hired her right there on the spot. She went out and bought dental technician outfits and everything. I was very proud of her and I think she was proud herself too. My mom sold Avon for awhile in the seventies, but she didn’t really like the door-to-door part of it so she gave it up. I don’t blame her. The dental technician job was a lot more serious than the Avon gig, although I did miss the flavoured lip glosses that came in the giant flower rings. I would have to settle for the plastic diamond rings I got from the dentist.

There she was, with the suction thingy and the teeth-picking tools and the cotton swabs and the paper-spitting cup—just like she knew what she was doing. Of course she made us all go to Dr. dePledge because he gave her a good deal. I don’t know what the good deal was, but she may have had our fillings and our cleanings done in trade for ironing all his shirts. My mom said she had a hard time getting Dr. dePledge to even give us a bill for our dental work. He was a very nice man, and I know my mom was very grateful for his generosity. He also gave a good needle. I never felt a darn thing. I would anticipate pain, and it never arrived. Before I knew what hit me, my nostrils were frozen and one of my eyelids was hanging down over my lip. Sometimes it felt like he froze one of my ears. Better safe than
sorry, I guess. It took days to be able to drink anything without pouring it down the front of my shirt. His hands always smelled like Jergens lotion—very almondy. It’s funny the things you remember. He would ask you a question and then cram his fingers down your throat. Why do dentists do that? They ask you something that you can’t answer without sounding like you’ve had a stroke.

It was a bit embarrassing having my own mother as my dental hygienist. It was really weird to have her sitting there beside me, staring down my throat, picking away at my teeth and telling me that I needed to be flossing more. She was big on flossing.

“Just floss between the ones you want to keep,” she’d say. Someone once told me that flossing your teeth on a regular basis can add seven years to your life, but that the flossing itself will literally take up the seven years, so it’s kind of a moot point. (And by the way, don’t floss and drive; I’ve tried it and it makes it really hard to text and drink.)

My mom came home one day and told us that that afternoon a patient had died in the dental chair. Yes, died. A patient had
died
in the chair? I wondered what she had done to him. My mom told us that the patient was a very old man and had to have one of his teeth extracted. Apparently he didn’t make it. I wondered how badly you’d have to screw up a tooth extraction to actually kill somebody. She went on and on about how much blood there was spewing out of his elderly mouth. She said they just couldn’t stop it and so he basically bled to death. I felt queasy just listening to her go on about that old man and all the blood pumping out of the empty socket in his head. Of all the ways you can leave this planet, death by tooth extraction is not all that bad, I guess. It’s pretty weird, but not bad as far as deaths go.

My mom never minded blood. She told us that, growing up, her dream was to be an operating-room nurse. What kind of a dream is that? What happened to flight attendant or actress or, God forbid, a famous singer? I can’t even stand the sight of a needle
going into my arm, never mind the gore I would encounter in an operating room. I realized there was a lot I didn’t know about my mother. She wasn’t even that upset that the old guy had bought the farm. I guess an ambulance came and hauled him away to a morgue somewhere. I do not want to die in a dental chair unless I have the laughing gas on full blast and my Latin lover Philippe straddling my body with the suction thing going. (That could mean anything, couldn’t it?) Then, and only then, would I be prepared to die in a dental chair. Oh yeah, and I would like to be a 107 years old with a glass of champagne in one hand and a cheese and onion sandwich in the other.

We ate a lot of meals out of a Crock-Pot when my mom was working at the dental office, and I know that doesn’t have anything to do with the guy dying in the dental chair. Before she headed off to work, my mother would stick a chicken or a roast or a ham in that yellow-and-brown Crock-Pot with a few carrots and onions, and, nine hours later, voilà! It would turn into dinner. It was always good, though. No matter what kind of meat you put in that thing, it would turn it into a stew that was always dark brown in colour and would taste exactly the same. Even the carrots gave up their orange eventually. No vegetable could withstand the colour-sucking power of my mother’s Crock-Pot.

As I got older, I cooked dinner a few times a week just to help out while she was at work. We needed a break from the unmerciful stews on occasion. My so-called cooking consisted of opening a lot of cans and putting them all together into a casserole dish with tuna and Cheez Whiz and baking it.
Surprise! It’s dinner! I don’t know what it’s going to taste like and that’s why it’s a surprise!
No one was thrilled when I was in charge of feeding the family, least of all me. There was generally a lot of mumbling going on around the table. I swear there were times when my dad tried to bury his uneaten casserole under
his mashed potatoes. I’m no dummy. I have to say, I am pretty sure that I came by my cooking skills honestly—I say that with a lot of love in my heart.

Mom really enjoyed going to her guitar lessons, and I enjoyed her going to those lessons too. It was something that she was doing for herself and nobody else, and I paid close attention to that. I know she was relieved to be working at the dental office too. It was a fairly big office, as there were three full-time dentists and they all had assistants and receptionists, so it was a very social place and she was making new friends for the first time in a long time. It was important for her to have other women to talk to and now she had a whole gaggle of co-workers. I’m sure it was nice for them to get together in the lunchroom and discuss how rotten their boyfriends and husbands were. I don’t think my mom found herself quite so alone after she started working for Dr. dePledge. She had found herself some girl power!

My dad was still very seldom at home and when he was it was tense. Whenever my dad took the time to speak to me I was always shocked. I’d look around and think to myself, are you talking to me? I mean, I was thrilled that he was talking to me and not yelling, but I felt awkward. He would say things to me like “What are you doing with yourself?” or “Where do you think you’re going?” It was always kind of random. I was very intrigued by my dad. I wondered what was going on in his head most days. He was a puzzle to me.

One summer day I got to go into town with my dad to run some errands. Most of the time I felt I was a nuisance to him so this was indeed a rare occasion. It wasn’t very often that I got the chance to do things with just him. My mother looked at my dad out of the corner of her eye, somewhat suspicious. Maybe she knew something that we didn’t. Whatever it was, she seemed uneasy.

Sue was staying over at our place for the weekend, so of course she came along and then Patrick wanted to come too. Dad told us he’d take us to an arcade to play a few games once he was done his running around, so we were all beside ourselves with excitement. I was thrilled to have Sue for a sleepover as I didn’t get to have them very often. My mom always cautioned me not to bring kids home after school as she never knew what kind of mood my dad would be in and whether he would embarrass us. But Sue’s dad was a drinker too and she knew all too well what it was like to have to cover up a situation. She was a kindred spirit and one of the few friends I knew I could have stay over without feeling at all weird. My dad liked Sue a lot: he even went so far as to remember her name.

We piled into my dad’s company car, rolled down the windows and headed into town with giant grins on our faces. I remember it being a particularly hot day so we were dressed in T-shirts and jeans. We didn’t have jackets with us, just the clothes on our backs. Dad drove around to a few stores, stopping here and there for whatever it was he needed. We went in with him when he picked up things for the house at the hardware store. We went in with him when he returned the bottles to the Pop Shoppe. We went in with him everywhere until we rolled into the parking lot at the Tradewinds Hotel and Bar. When we got there he told us to wait in the car and that he’d be back in a few minutes. Something told me it wasn’t going to be a few minutes but I just shoved that thought to the back of my mind.