From This Moment On (11 page)

Listening to her confess was painful for me. I didn’t cry, though; I had to be strong for her. Another member of the family might have been in the kitchen with us; I really don’t remember. All I know is that I felt alone with her, with her pain, and that she needed me to help make her feel better. I was relieved that the officer had let her go. Imagine if he’d arrested her: I would have considered the world officially cruel and callous if he had. That kind and sensible policeman did the right thing.

I thanked her in my heart for trying to do the right thing, even if she went about it the wrong way, and I honestly didn’t believe that she should feel ashamed over the incident. But I know she did, both for having done something dishonest as well as for, in her mind, having let down her children. I looked at my mother with her knees curled up to her chest, shins pressed against the edge of the table, and her feet resting on the seat of the chair. This is how she always sat at the table. My tiny, skinny, sad, ashamed mother, helpless in her despair. And I, in turn, felt so sad for her.

My mother sat in this position at the table even when she wasn’t in need of a role-reversal conversation with me. Sometimes she was laughing, scooping in her triple teaspoon of sugar and long pour of Carnation canned milk in her coffee, carrying on about what songs I should add to the song list of my performance repertoire, flicking her fingers up in the air, demanding a light for her cigarette. She needed anything to keep her happy and not focused on what there was for her to complain about. Anything to keep her from rightfully picking an argument with my dad about what was wrong.

The house on Proulx Court saw all extremes of the roller-coaster ride our family was on. Laughter, love, violence, fear, a family united, and a family divided. This house would be the last place in my youth where I would see such severe dynamics of dysfunction and violence in my childhood home life. The end of the days of watching my dad drag my mother along the slippery, linoleum floor by the hair and throw her down the stairs to the dirt basement, where the chickens ran around free, was drawing near.

Up the street lived a girl about a year older than me named Sue, who befriended us and had a heart of gold. Sue’s kindness made these few intensely difficult years somewhat bearable through her generosity. When we were out of the basics, she’d sneak us sugar, milk, and bread from her mother’s cupboard. Sue, a very athletic girl and a horse lover, enjoyed my mom’s company and liked hanging around with us. She took care of some horses on the other side of the court,
among them a pretty palomino mare named Angel. She had a golden coat, a platinum mane, and a striking white blaze down her face; to me, she looked like the kind of horse that Barbie would have ridden. I wanted to ride her, even though I’d never been on a horse before.

Sue taught me a few basics and let me give it a try. I had a hard time getting Angel to move any faster than a slow walk. About a half mile from the barn, I decided I’d better turn back, and as soon as we were heading home, the horse sped up and ran full tilt all the way back to her barn. I had no control at all, but I at least learned how to stay on and to enjoy the smell of horses. The horn on the Western-style saddle was a big help, as it gave me something to hold on to as she bolted for home. I grew to love being around horses even when I wasn’t riding. In the winter, the roads were icy, and often we’d just barely make the corners without Angel’s legs sliding out from under her. One time she took a shortcut and ran us straight into a deep ditch, sinking right up to her belly. She couldn’t move with her legs stuck in the snow like pegs in four holes, so Sue and I had to dig her out by hand. Angel wasn’t the easiest or kindest horse I got to know, but she taught me to like horses anyway. I took on the chore of feeding the horses in the morning before the bus arrived and would go to school with smelly mitts. I was embarrassed for anyone to smell them but didn’t mind it myself at all. I liked sniffing them, since it took me out of school and back to the barn, which was where I really wanted to be. Besides, I was more embarrassed about going to school with no lunch than I was of smelling like horse manure.

One night my parents got into a spat, and once again, it got violent. As usual, money woes precipitated the argument. This fight was different, however, in a big way.

They started pushing each other around, and when things snowballed to where it became clear that my mother was about to really get it, I ran up behind my dad with a chair in both hands and smashed it across his back. I knew I was really going to get it for that one. I’d jumped on him before during fights between him and my mother in an attempt to pull him away, but he never did more than
shake me off and warn me to stay back, which I did, as I was too afraid to do anything else. But I was getting a bit bolder around the age of eleven, and for the first time, I struck my dad. Before I could get away, he punched me in the jaw. Adrenaline pumping, I punched him back! It was purely a reflex action. He didn’t put much force behind his punch, as if it was more of a warning tap for me to back off.

If my father was shocked, he wasn’t half as stunned as I was at the fact that I’d punched him back. I didn’t know where I hit him because I had closed my eyes, punched, and ran. Too afraid to face him after I hit back, I bolted to my room, hopped out the window, and raced down the street to the barn. I stayed with Angel and the other horses that night. No one came looking for me, but I worried about how things ended up at the house. Did the fighting stop after I left? Was my mother okay? And what about the other kids? I was too afraid to go back until the next morning to find out, and by then, things were calm. No one brought up the events of the night before, and we all carried on with just another day in the Twain house.

Part of growing up in Canada involves putting up with Old Man Winter year after year. The conditions can be extreme. At the end of our driveway on Proulx Court, the snowplow would leave us fifteen-foot-high piles of chunked ice and snow scraped from the street surface. Every night after the plow finished, my two sisters and I would head outside for about an hour to shovel the snow from our driveway so our dad could pull his car in when he got home from work.

Winter walks are beautiful, but when you’re ten years old and walking miles in treacherous subzero temperatures just to get home from a late afternoon at school, it’s not so fun. The town bus ran only on the main road, so the nearest bus stop was forty minutes away by foot. One cold evening, I was walking home wearing a cheap waist-length bomber jacket, running shoes, no mitts or hat, and only jeans on my legs. I would have pulled my hood up over my head for some protection from the biting cold, but it was too open and lightweight
to give any warmth. As a preteen up North, it was cool to walk around underdressed in winter, despite the freezing temperatures, and it was common to see teens wearing running shoes to school even through the coldest months, as a fashion statement. They wouldn’t play outside without proper clothing, but going from home to the bus, to school and back, it was better to look good than to feel comfortable.

The temperature can drop quite low once the sun goes down, and in my case this particular night, I was getting home later than expected, and the temperature had dropped lower than what I was dressed for. When the temperature gets down to where even five minutes of exposure begins to literally freeze your skin, fashion becomes the last thing on your mind. About fifteen minutes from my house, I just couldn’t go on; the pain from freezing was unbearable. The joints in my knees and hands cramped and ached. My hands and feet were totally numb, and I started to cry, which is not wise when you’re freezing, as your tears can literally freeze on your face. I hesitated for a long time, questioning whether to knock on a stranger’s door for help. I wanted to make it all the way home and was so close, but I was too cold to carry on. Very few houses still had lights on, as it was getting pretty late in the evening. But I finally saw a house where it seemed someone was still up. I asked if I could come inside to warm up for a while, and the family was very understanding and let me sit long enough to thaw out before I set off again.

I finally made it home, but I can tell you, there were many close calls like that growing up in such extreme weather conditions. My youngest brother, Darryl, once came home from a night of playing hockey with both his earlobes severely frostbitten. He’d been wearing just a tuque on his head, which angles down over the ear but leaves the lobes exposed. Over the next few days, his earlobes turned red to blue, then a purple-black, and they drooped unnaturally low. The skin peeled away in layers until the dead, frozen lobe fell away. I worried that Darryl might end up like our grandpa Twain, who had only a jagged edge left to his lobes, as if they’d been chewed off by
Jack Frost himself. My grandpa’s earlobes had frozen and fallen off so many times that eventually they never came back. Fortunately for Darryl, his lobes did.

My two sisters and I loved going public skating during the winter months, and the rink was about a forty-five-minute walk from our house on Proulx Court. We were fine on the way there, but on the way back, the temperature had dropped quite a bit. Yet in true Canadian spirit, we stepped outside the arena, took a deep breath, probably muttered something like “It’s cold!,” and carried on toward home.

Just recently, my sister emailed me a slightly rawer version of that same sentiment that made me laugh hard. It’s quite a typical thing Canadians would share between friends to help get one another through the long, cold winter with a good sense of humor. I get this poem every winter, and every winter I love rereading it. It’s beautiful—
very
well written—and I thought it might be a comfort to you on a cold day, as it was to me:

“Winter in Canada”

So appropriate and heartwarming!!

Fuck!

It’s cold!

The end.

The trail between the arena and the house block where we lived was a thirty-minute stretch of walk, wasn’t lit, and there were no houses along the way. Just bush and field. Two brothers of about twelve and thirteen years old who lived in our same direction were making the walk home with us. Jill would have been eleven, me nine, and Carrie seven. Halfway down the trail, Carrie started to cry that she was too cold to go on. One of the boys generously offered to carry her on his shoulders. I looked her in the eyes and told her she had to be brave and that we were going to make it. As I spoke to her, I could see the tears in her eyes were actually crusting into ice. She was literally crying ice flakes. I know it’s hard to picture, but believe me, her
eyes were glazing over with ice, and I yelled at her to stop crying. I was panicking and felt that we were really in trouble.

Winter wasn’t all a near-death experience, though; it was fun, too. Sometimes the snow would pile up so high that we could climb up it onto the roof of the house and jump off into a sea of clean, white snow. We used to knock off icicles from the roof to see who could get the longest one intact. Icicle harvesting tip: the poorer the insulation of the roof, the longer the icicles you get. Ours, it goes without saying, had plenty of great icicles.

One rite of passage for anyone from Northern Ontario is getting your tongue stuck to frozen metal. Any Canadian who insists “Never happened to me!” is just too embarrassed to admit that as a child he tempted fate by touching his tongue to the zipper on his ski jacket and then couldn’t pry it loose. It’s a strange and panicky feeling, but if you don’t jerk your head back and have the presence of mind to exhale hot air out your mouth, the metal will thaw just long enough to release you. With a lot of skill and a little bit of luck, you can escape without leaving any flesh behind. Another winter hazard was going outdoors with wet hair on a frigid day; I once heard of someone’s frozen ponytail snapping right off. Unfortunately, around our house, a hair dryer fell into the “luxury item” category, and so my sisters and I had to improvise. We figured out that if we took the vacuum cleaner and attached the hose to the end where the warm air blew
out,
we’d be able to dry our hair. The only hitch was that the jet of air stank from dog hair, dried bits from indoor accidents, stale food crumbs, and whatever else got sucked up the Electrolux that week. Consequently, our hair smelled accordingly—mostly like old dog poop, though. One alternative was to hang our heads over the heating vents in the floor, but this took much longer. On most mornings, when we were running late for the school bus, the smellier but speedier Electrolux was the better choice.

Sometimes, though, even that option wasn’t available because either the hydro (electricity) had been turned off or the furnace was out of oil. It seemed as if there was always some utility threatening
to cut off service if we didn’t pay the overdue bill. My parents tried to make sure that at least one of the two would be functioning at all times, because in the heart of a Canadian winter, you couldn’t manage without electricity
and
heat.

So, for instance, if my dad knew that we couldn’t afford to get our oil tank refilled, he’d bleed the water pipes so they wouldn’t burst from the cold. This called for us sleeping with our winter clothes on and cocooning ourselves in heavy sleeping bags. In the morning, we’d get up and huddle around the electric stove. It warmed us, cooked breakfast, and heated our socks and boot liners. Warm feet, hot porridge, and dry mitts were good enough for us to get by. Conversely, we’d have to do this when the hydro company turned off the power. Once it got dark, we used flashlights to see around the house. This type of situation typically lasted a day or two and, thankfully, occurred only about once a winter.

If the washing machine broke and we couldn’t afford to have it fixed, doing the laundry became a very labor-intensive chore for a family of seven. As it was, we didn’t have a dryer, and if it was still winter, we had to go to the Laundromat for hours to dry and fold everything. Our mom had relinquished this task—and most everything else involved in running the household, including cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the kids—so consumed was she by her depression.