From This Moment On (26 page)

I took pride in doing a good job there, especially when it came to serving up McDonald’s famous fries. (Historical note: this was when they were still fried in artery-clogging beef tallow, not today’s vegetable oil.) Now, promise you won’t laugh, but I was a stickler about how the fries were arranged in your scoop-shaped cardboard container. To
the eighteen-year-old me, it was critical that they be presented exactly as they appeared in any McDonald’s advertisement: standing as tall and straight as a platoon of soldiers, of a uniform height, and, for God’s sake, no broken or squished ones! I learned how to position the scoop and angle my wrist in such a way while cupping the fries that they slid into position precisely, thereby achieving a photo-perfect serving every time. Obsessive? Maybe. But I was just trying to live up to the photo ad. I do tend to be like that with most things, just wanting to do my absolute best at whatever I do.

So went my life for the next three years: winters spent in Toronto, writing songs, working odd jobs, and taking sporadic bar gigs, followed by five-month stretches supervising tree-planting crews back in Northern Ontario with my family.

I still needed to share accommodations during the months in Toronto, as money was tight. Laura had just moved into a new place when our paths crossed again a year later. She was in a basement apartment of a large, old house where there was a small six-by-ten room filled with stored junk covered in webs and dust. The stuff piled in this space couldn’t be very valuable, as it looked obviously forgotten. Laura said the owner never came down to the basement, so I asked her if she thought I’d be able to move this abandoned junk to another spot farther down the hall. My idea was to be her new roommate, pay her on the side, and we’d both be safer living together, as there had been a recent warning about a rapist in the immediate area.

I would move everything myself, clean the large “closet” of its layered insect habitat and grunge, cleaning nonstop almost the whole day. Then I bought a cheap can of white paint and painted the bricked walls to brighten it up because when it was empty, it looked like a prison cell. I found an end-cut carpet somewhere to cover up the cracked cement floor and was ready to move in. There was still the odd giant centipede zipping by and grossing me out, and there were lost spiders wondering where the hell their pad went. But this was my place now, and I wanted them to get lost after all the
hours and sweat I’d put into making myself a home in this hole in the basement.

But somewhere between my brilliant plan and my move, Laura told me that her landlord came downstairs for some fluke reason and discovered our secret. She was furious and warned Laura that everything had to be moved back where it was, or else! I was not happy about this, as my paint went on those walls, my sweat cleaned and moved everything, and I felt like it was mine to use now. If anything, I figured she should be happy that the place had at least been cleaned and the junk stored safely, after all. I’m not sure why I felt this sense of entitlement to live somewhere secretly, without permission. It wasn’t like me to help myself to something that didn’t belong to me. Looking back, it’s strange observing this about myself now, but I believe my immaturity allowed me to abandon logic. Not to excuse my behavior with youth, but my thinking was I needed to solve the problem of where to live, and my solution was to take it upon myself to create something out of nothing; and when I was criticized for it, I felt put out.

That spring of 1987, I took my annual sabbatical to help oversee my parents’ tree-planting business. Based on what I observed of the state of their marriage, the tension between them seemed apparent.

We had a young, pretty girl with long, strawberry blonde hair who came around the camp regularly that summer, an employee of the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, whose job was to monitor the tree-planting operation on the ministry’s behalf. My father made it pretty obvious that he noticed her. She was a university graduate, a nature lover, single, and way too friendly with him. I have no idea whether or not the two of them had an affair, but just the presence of this flirty bush flower was upsetting to my mother. Further complicating matters, my father insinuated to me one time that my mother had engaged in an inappropriate liaison with one of the crewmen. He didn’t provide any details, and I didn’t ask any questions. The way I
figured it, he probably deserved it after having sent my mother into a jealous frenzy all summer over his flashy-haired hottie.

Shortly after the plant ended that season, I went back to Toronto to sing at a few corporate gigs that Mary Bailey organized for me. Mary Bailey was the professional name of Eveline Kasner, a dear family friend. We met a man by the name of John Kim Bell, an American, part Mohawk Indian, who’d recently relocated to Toronto from New York City. Not long after we met, Kim and I started dating and quite hastily moved in together to a house on Indian Grove, located right near beautiful High Park, the largest park in Toronto.

Kim was a talented orchestra conductor and serious classical pianist. He was several years my senior, so it was awkward taking him home to Timmins to meet my parents, who were only a few years older. My mom and my dad tried to talk me out of the relationship. “He’s not for you,” they insisted. When my father scornfully referred to Kim as an “apple,” I didn’t know what to say. That’s a derogatory term used to describe someone who seems like an Indian on the outside but whose core is “white.” It’s the equivalent of calling an African American person an Oreo.

I argued with both my parents that night, defending Kim and my right to choose my own personal relationships without their criticism. Later, I would regret that this upset my parents, as it would not be long into the future that I would never see them again.

I woke up one morning in the Indian Grove house from a terrible dream, dazed and covered in sweat. It took me a few minutes to realize that it was just a dream, but nonetheless it shook me up enough that I had to step outside for some air. As much as I wanted the dream out of my head, I sat down on the front step and reviewed it, like rewinding a video.

In my dream, my mother had taken a taxi home from the grocery store with the car full of bags. There was a crash, and she was cut from head to toe, bleeding everywhere. She was dead when I saw her, yet she was alive in a strange and different dimension and still
able to speak to me. She told me cryptically, “You have to take care of things.” Then she was gone. Just dead and gone. For a few moments, I felt as if I was in shock and had a hard time accepting that it was just a dream. The images and conversation were so vivid and felt so real that I truly had that hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach that you get when grieving for something or someone. It was very upsetting and left me ill at ease for the rest of the day.

I’ve often experienced real emotions through the events in my dreams, as I’m sure many people do. It’s such a relief when you discover that you were only dreaming, but it is wrenching to be forced to feel such deep and disturbing emotions through the events intense dreams can drag you through. You may not have
lived
the events in the dream, but the feelings are real, as this dream was for me.

Strangely enough, that same summer, my mother called me from a pay phone. “I need to see you,” she said in a pinched voice. It turned out that she was calling from Toronto—just down the block, in fact. Once again she’d left my father. “Can I stay with you?” she asked, explaining that she had no clothes, no money, and no shelter. I was stunned and a bit surprised that she hadn’t called before to tell me of her plans. I felt Kim’s resentment toward my parents, that they did not accept him as a man with the heart of an Indian. This was my parents’ perception of him, and I doubted very much he would take in my mother with open arms, considering her opinion that he was bad for me.

I felt terrible not being able to help her when she needed me. I suppose that was as good an indicator as any that this man couldn’t be very good for me if I didn’t even feel comfortable welcoming my own mother. But after all, it was his house, and under the current circumstances, the best I could do was to help her find a room in a boardinghouse up the street. It was dirt cheap and extremely spartan, but at least she was a stone’s throw away and not in a shelter, for heaven’s sake.

I pulled together some clothing from my closet for my mother, and then got on the phone to my father. “You need to send Mom her
clothes,” I told him. “And I think you owe it to her to send her some money, too. She’s supported you all these years and has been a big part of the success of your tree-planting business.” On and on I went, feeling like a mediator negotiating for my mother’s rights.

He responded, “Whatever she left behind stays here. If she wants anything, she’ll have to come and get it herself. Her home is here, and this is where she belongs.” This possessive behavior was his way of saying that she was his: his wife, his life partner. That’s what I sensed in his voice. A sad longing for her to come back home, back to him. He was dramatic about it, and I could detect an underlying, sincere pain in his voice.

The fact that I was supporting my mother by trying to at least get her some of her things until they worked something out between them made him feel as if I was taking sides, and this angered my father, only making him more stubborn and defensive. Then he blurted out something that almost made me drop the phone: according to him, she’d left him
for another man,
one of his own employees. “She can pay the price and suffer,” he said, clearly hurt by the betrayal. As far as he was concerned, she was on her own.

After hanging up with him, I confronted my mother. “What the hell happened?” I asked. Although my father had exhibited some jealousy over the years, there had never been any evidence to support it. I was in shock. My mom told me that she and my dad had grown distant, and that she’d fallen in love with one of the guys from the tree plant. Through sobs, she explained how this man had planned to join her in Toronto. But he never called, and never would. She was humiliated and heartbroken, too, as I really think she fell for this guy. He obviously got cold feet. My guess was that my father had likely put a scare into him—the Native tree-planting world was small—causing the man to reconsider hooking up with the boss’s wife.

I felt sorry for my mother—my father, too, for that matter—but at the same time, I didn’t like being caught in the middle of this awkward dance. For once, I wanted the two of them to grow up and just get it over with, one way or another. I was tired of playing referee to
the people who were supposed to be my caretakers in life, not the other way around. As much as I loved them and felt selfish for feeling impatient with their behavior, I had resolved that I would not be pulled back into their dysfunction.

In a familiar pattern, after several weeks of separation, my mom went back to my father. It became increasingly evident to me that her courage to start life over again on her own was weakening. Her lover-slash-boyfriend had abandoned her, my father refused to help her unless she came home, and there was also the matter of two adolescent boys still at home. When she left for Timmins in the fall, I hurt for her, but at the same time, I was relieved to be free of the relationship complications between my parents.

As I said before, I’d been on the periphery of the music business long enough to understand I was in for an uphill climb. I was now twenty-two years old. While other people my age were graduating from college and moving closer to their professional goals in life, music was the only thing I knew how to do. It was time to figure out my plan B. I decided to take an introductory course in data entry at a community college five mornings a week. This was back when computer monitor screens were still black with green characters. Imagine! Several of the other students were immigrants whose English was so poor that the instructor asked me if I’d help a couple of the other girls along. One was from Ghana, the other from Ethiopia. Communicating with one another wasn’t easy, but we managed, and besides, I was intrigued hearing about what it was like to live in another part of the world. I enjoyed exchanges with people from faraway places, and it was far more interesting to chat with them than learning how to use F6, highlight, underline, and cut and paste text.

Much as I felt the necessity to have a backup plan by learning functional skills such as computer keyboarding or data entry in case my singing career didn’t pan out, my attention to practicality did not mean that I was giving up my dream at all. I wanted to be able to pay my own way and not depend on anyone to take care of me. I didn’t
want kids early in life, I had no intention of being supported by a man or living on welfare, nor did I have any desire to work menial jobs and live hand to mouth for the rest of my life. Not only did I want to be monetarily comfortable, I was driven to earn it myself. I’m not sure if this fierce desire to be independent came from believing that there was no such thing as being able to rely on anyone else. I suppose that was part of what I’d learned to accept as reality, and the other part was based on my father Jerry’s consistent example to not look for the handout, the sheer principle that unless you earn what you have, having it doesn’t hold the same pleasure of reward or accomplishment. For me, this was where the motivation to strive to better myself came from.

I try to interrupt him a couple of times, asking, “Who is it? What’s going on?” but he’s concentrating hard on what’s being said, as if straining to comprehend what the person is saying. I’m getting upset and can’t sit still, anxious to know what’s happening, as I can feel something’s wrong. I’m restless and beginning to pace as I wait for him to respond to my anxious string of questions.