Falling Backwards: A Memoir (25 page)

For two or three years I felt completely overwhelmed by everything. My hormones were running around my body like hungry truckers at a buffet. Hairs popped up in places I never even knew I had. I was plucking them out as fast as my tweezers could tweeze. I finally had to give up on the hair removal because I was starting to look like a rotisserie chicken. And the mental and emotional part of growing up wasn’t any easier than the physical part. When I dragged religion into the whole equation, I started feeling like I was certifiably nuts.

I wondered more and more about who in heaven’s name God was.

Was God:

I had a Buddhist friend who told me that I was God. That God was
in
me. No wonder I was feeling like I was putting on weight.

I prayed every night that I would wake up with all my spiritual queries answered. I was prepared for whatever answer God wanted to give me. I just wanted to know one way or the other what the hell was going on. I prayed constantly and read the Bible religiously (how else can you read a Bible?). I enjoyed parts of it, where there was an actual story, but for the most part I was completely and utterly lost. The “begats” made my brain hurt. Did we really need to know who begat whom and for that many pages? To tell you the truth I skipped through most of the begats and ahead to the parts where everybody was killing each other. (Nothing has changed, it seems, we’re still doing that today …)

The Bible had a lot of rules that I knew full well I was not going to be able to abide by. Two thousand years ago, my menstrual cycle would have really caused me some problems. For instance, I would have had to either live in a tent with some other broads for the entire week or leave town altogether. If Biblical men were the ones having the periods, it would have been a time to drink and feast and have full body massages. Eating pork would have also posed a big problem for me back then since that’s what my mother had bubbling away in her Crock-Pot at least once a week. I would have been stoned on the spot. They revise a dictionary every year,
for crying out loud! High time to revise the Good Book, I would think.

I didn’t like the fact that according to my dad’s very Mormon mother—my grandmother Richards—God knew what I was thinking and could see everything I did, including when I was having my period. It was hard going to the bathroom after that without wanting to completely cover myself with a towel, and sometimes I did cover myself with a towel and I am not kidding.

I wondered how God could see every single person on the planet and know what they were doing, never mind what they were thinking. It seemed impossible that God could keep track of us all. My head felt like it was going to cave in on itself. My mom told me I was too young to be worrying so much about God, and that it was actually God’s job to be worrying about me. She was probably right. My mother always knew what to say to make me feel better.

My grandmother Richards told me that all people were sinners, and that I was a sinner too and that I needed to repent and work harder in school. She told me that I needed to remain steadfast, whatever that meant. I always thought she smelled a little bit like a Kleenex box, if that’s possible. Maybe because she had so many Kleenexes stuffed into one of her bra cups. (She’d had a breast removed due to a cancer scare in the fifties.) Whenever she wiped my face, I knew exactly where she got the tissue from. It was a bit creepy, but handy just the same. I think she kept a deck of cards in there, too, and a Yahtzee game. My grandma loved to play Yahtzee. Growing up, I must have played two million games of Yahtzee with her. I would be in her good graces, and God’s, if I let her win. I threw the games on purpose almost every time.

I think my grandmother Richards would have been a lot nicer and happier had her husband, my dad’s dad, not passed away so young. She was left with a young family to raise, and it must have been hard being alone. She didn’t have a lot of friends, according to
my mother. She had church friends and that was it. She wasn’t the type of person to invite the neighbours over for coffee because A) she didn’t like the neighbours and B) she didn’t drink coffee. My grandmother had Jesus and she made sure we knew that practically every time she spoke. I wanted God to be anything but what she believed him to be. Her version of him seemed really scary.

Her God was mad at everybody, handing out punishment and fear, stomping his feet on the ground when he didn’t get his way. Her God had more rules for getting into heaven than I knew what to do with. I wasn’t going to be able to abide by them all. She told me that families were forever and that she hoped I was going to be able to come with her into eternal life. Not at the rate I was going, I thought. If drinking coffee or beer or wine was going to keep me locked out of Eden, well, I guess I was a lost cause. (Maybe decaf would have been okay, but I’m not sure. I’ll have to go back and check
Mormonism for Dummies
.)

Grandma Richards and I didn’t quite see eye to eye about God, that’s for certain. I guess she would be travelling to wherever it was in the ether of the afterlife without me. I didn’t have any plans on dying, anyway, so I could wipe that off of my worry plate for the time being. I was planning on living a long, long time.

I
managed to graduate from high school, but just barely. I never studied for a single test, I never listened to instructions and I didn’t care about anything even remotely academic. Other than that I was a great student.

I was short only three measly credits going into my last semester of high school, but I had to somehow make them up in order to pass. I was sent to my school guidance counsellor to figure out what I could do. He informed me that my choice was to take an extra class or take an extra class—so, well, I took the extra class. It involved me staying after school to work with and learn from a local farmer. I was the only student who was going to be taking that extra class, which had something to do with fertilizer. I didn’t think that that sounded all that bad, but I ended up standing on the back of a manure spreader pulling a lever that shot cow poo a hundred feet into the air. Nobody told me that fertilizer was
poo
. I thought fertilizer was fertilizer. For that simple act, which perhaps took me three or four hours at a time, I earned the three lousy credits that enabled me to graduate with my class. The lowest possible number of credits needed to graduate from
an Alberta high school is one hundred. I graduated with 101. I had never been so proud. My parents were beyond relieved, as you can imagine.

I wasn’t even on the ballot but my classmates elected me grad chairman. I was in charge of organizing our party, hiring the band, finding a venue, selling the tickets, planning the meal: the whole nine yards. I had never done anything of the sort but I was excited. Thank God the rest of the grad committee were smart and talented and organized because I was useless. I couldn’t organize my own sock drawer.

Because there were only forty-two of us, our grad wouldn’t require as much planning as grads for Calgary High School, which usually had about fifteen hundred students. Going to a small school had its advantages. We could have had our grad at a KFC but we didn’t, thank God.

The hardest part of planning the entire thing would be finding someone to go with me. I hadn’t thought about that a lot; I was too busy worrying about God watching me when I was in the bathroom. The scramble to find a date started in March for most people and most of my friends were all set. I was one of the only girls who didn’t have a date.

There wasn’t really anybody that I liked all that much. Mark was out of the question, and the boy I sort of liked was already spoken for as well as most of the boys my age and older. I had known most of these boys since the fourth grade so they were all kind of like my brothers and not grad-date material. But I don’t think that was the point—the point was I needed to not be going alone. It would have been really easy to go with Theresa but I don’t think her boyfriend would have been too keen on that. I was going to have to do the unthinkable and ask someone a grade below me,
oh the horror
! I would almost certainly be ridiculed but it was a chance I’d have to take. Asking someone a year older would have been no problem
whatsoever—I would have been considered incredibly cool—but asking someone a year younger meant I was a desperate loser.

I don’t know where I found the courage but I finally managed to go up to an eleventh grader named Stuart Richardson and ask him if he wanted to go to grad with me. He actually accepted, which I was totally unprepared for. In my mind I had already heard him say, “No, thank you, I have to bathe my ailing South African grandmother that night.” Stuart probably had no idea how important it was for me to have him accept. I am pretty sure that he didn’t want to hurt my feelings and that’s why he agreed to go with me. It was not a perfect scenario: my parents drove Stuart and me in their car and my mother made the dress I wore and there were still a few pins left in the hem, but the night turned out to be a great success. As grad chairman I could be proud. All I had to survive now was making it through my debut performance.

As I sat through the dinner, I worried about singing my song. It took up all the space in my brain. I hadn’t ever sung in front of anybody before, so I wasn’t sure if I would faint or not. I couldn’t imagine what it was going to feel like. In fact, I didn’t know if I could go through with it, period. My thousands of hours of secret singing in my parents’ basement had in no way prepared me to play in front of a live audience. I had spent a number of months trying to figure out how I was going to sing a song I had written for my classmates. No one in my family—never mind my school—knew that I played the guitar and wrote songs, so it was going to be a bit complicated. I didn’t want to be made fun of. I was known as the class clown, not the girl who sings a serious ballad about having to say goodbye to life as we knew it.

I had practised the song a thousand times in the basement and had tried to visualize my classmates sitting there at the grad ceremony in their underpants. (I had read somewhere that that’s how
Karen Carpenter got over her stage fright.) I told myself I didn’t really care what the kids thought since I was going to be getting out of Dodge anyway, but I was worried about what my mom and dad would think. More than anything else, I did not want my parents to think I was crazy. I was sure they’d be shocked, considering they didn’t know I was the least bit musical. Trust me, I was shocked myself.

I finally walked up to the band leader and explained that I had written a song for my classmates and wanted to sing it to them. I am not sure he trusted me entirely, but he lent me his guitar and set me up behind a microphone. (I had forgotten I would need a guitar!) I don’t think I have ever been so afraid in my entire life. My lips went completely numb, and I felt like I was going to fold in on myself. One of my eyelids kept twitching—I would have glued it shut if I could have. My mouth was as dry as dirt, and I found it incredibly hard to swallow. I don’t remember singing at all, only the fear and the panic and anxiety. I stood there in the dress my mother had made me, with this huge electric guitar flung over my shoulder, and looked out at a sea of dropped jaws. My classmates were looking up at me on that stage in total disbelief and I watched their faces change from surprise to confusion. I felt like flying around the ballroom and like throwing up. I wondered if a person could throw up and fly around at the same time.

My mom and dad looked like they were going to bawl, and maybe they did cry a little bit—I couldn’t see that far away and besides, my eyes were watering profusely. I finished the song and to my great relief I was not booed off the stage. I don’t remember anybody clapping, although I think they must have, even if it was just because they felt sorry for me. The rest of the night was a blur. Everybody danced and drank and laughed and made promises to keep in touch. We all felt like we’d completed the most important chapter of our lives. None of
us had the slightest inkling of what lay ahead. The band played until about one in the morning and then, as quickly as it had all begun, our big night wound itself into a tight little ball and rolled itself to bed. (There was a fairly wild after-party, which of course entailed a bonfire, beer, potato chips and someone throwing up in the trees.)

My mom and dad didn’t say much about my song. My mom said, “I didn’t know you liked music.” I shrugged and said, “Yeah, I guess I do.” A decade later my mom told me that she and dad thought that I was as good as Anne Murray. I thought that was adorable.

The day after the grad party, I went to Hawaii with Theresa and two other girls for a week. For some reason still unknown to me, my parents actually let me go. I guess Theresa told her folks that my parents said it was okay and I told my parents that her parents said it was okay. I was eighteen years old and on a small island twelve hundred miles from home. I felt like I had won the lottery! For $400 each we flew to Oahu and stayed in a two-bedroom hotel suite twenty-seven floors above the beach. We were all thrilled to be there. I had $200 of spending money with me, which I blew through in a few days by tipping every person that looked at me and smiled. Theresa, God love her, paid for me for the rest of the holiday. We still laugh about that trip and about how young we were. We were so incredibly naive. None of us had ever been anywhere before.

Theresa saw her first penis on that trip. She went on a joyride with a local boy she’d met at the bar, who thought it would be incredibly romantic if he “pulled his goalie,” so to speak, right there in front of her. Theresa didn’t even touch him but she thought that some of “it” might have gotten onto her pant leg. She was so upset she cried. Believe it or not, not a single one of us knew for sure how sperm worked. We had an idea but we didn’t trust our biology class completely. You can never be too careful when it comes to sperm, so we bought a pregnancy test at the pharmacy just to be on the safe side.