1973
CHILDREN IN COSTUMES and leotards were scattered inside and outside of the studio in a rundown area of Montreal. Dozens of shiny steel-toed shoes were reflected in the large mirrored wall. I learned to shuffle and triple-time step here in Miss Kristy’s class. I fell in love with both her and the ability to make music with my feet. I was excited about dance, movement, about being alive. Miss Kristy planted a tiny seed and music filled a space inside that I hadn’t really known existed until I met her and learned to tap. It was mixed up with love, drums, swing, jazz, blues, rock and roll, time steps, metronomes, and Miss Kristy hugs.
My mother also signed me up for drama lessons at a local children’s theatre. I loved that more than anything: the land of make-believe was a perfect universe for a child like me. And it was the same for my mother, who had a certain twinkle in her eye when I was on the stage or when music played or when leather shoes pointed, tapped, or drummed. Mother’s escape was the same as mine, only she experienced it vicariously through me and my sister Lou. If she could have worn the tap shoes she would have, but she could only be an observer. She knew the moves: pirouette, flap, Buffalo, and time steps. My mother knew the language of dance. This was our shared love, our point of connection. Everything else was chaos.
“Let’s hurry and get going, girls,” Mother said, swinging her arms at us to get us into the car. She wore one of the floral dresses that covered her rolls of fat, and smelled of Chanel perfume and talcum powder mixed with sweat. Her long, dark hair was made shorter by her accordion perm, but in the shuffle as we carried our belongings to the car, it became stringy and wet.
Sadie, my eldest sister, was fourteen, and like twelve-year-old Diego, she was at school. Lou was ten, and we were kept home to help pack the car.
Sadie had big green eyes and a cackle of a laugh. Diego had a Mick Jagger pout. Lou had chipped front teeth and freckles. I was skinny and quick, always watching over my shoulder, on the lookout for larger people, especially my father. He could make a child believe the devil was real.
We were escaping our father, dismantling our home while he was at work, taking only essentials and keepsakes. I was four years old the day we left him.
We raced around, carrying out our prized possessions and jamming the car with pots and pans, bedding, clothes, food, pharmaceuticals, photograph albums, tap and jazz shoes — anything we could cram into that one load.
My mother fumbled to get the key into the ignition. We held our breath until she managed to pull away from the curb. I looked through the back window to say goodbye to all I had ever known, but it was too late. We had already turned the corner. No time for goodbyes.
“He won’t be back. I promise,” my mother said with determination, sweat pouring down her face as she drove. Lou didn’t speak, just stared at my mother with a type of hopeful uncertainty: a girl who demanded the truth, a big-mouthed older sister who wasn’t keen on smiling, who had little to smile about.
What we all felt that morning was panic mixed with excitement over escape. In my four years of life, I had learned to survive despite a constant level of fear.
We left a street lined with yards and trees, where children played on the merry-go-round and baseball diamond in the park across from our house, and entered a block with no grass, just rows of townhouses and street lights, a working-class area. Houses were small, attached. Everything looked the same all the way up the block: rows and rows of tiny spaces filled with people living inside a grey world.
We didn’t say anything when Mother told us that our father wouldn’t be back. I remember counting in my own head — counting the stop lights, green lights, red lights — and holding on to Lou for dear life in the car, in a panic that we would be found, that somehow he could see and would know where we were, and if he found us there would be hell to pay.
We came to know our new neighbours and found places to play, found parks and abandoned houses to explore or get lost in that spring. I turned five years old in July, and our new friends gathered for the first birthday party I would remember.
“Happy birthday!” The room erupted after a vanilla-frosted cake was placed before me at the kitchen table.
“Make a wish, Joanne,” Mother said.
A little boy named Bobby stuck his finger out to scoop up some icing before his mother swatted his arm away. There were mothers and children from the grey buildings piled into our apartment, women wearing polyester paisley dresses with fake jewellery, beehives, and buns, and children with shorts, sneakers, and food-covered faces.
“Cake! Cake! Cake!” the other children chanted. Lou put Glenn Miller on the record player and the mothers erupted when they heard “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” singing along to it and pouring wine into plastic cups while we ate seconds of cake. I wondered if we had become like the Partridge Family, all giddy and sweet like their theme song, “Come On Get Happy.”
We played openly and made noise at the dinner table and ran around if we felt like it. Diego was usually out getting into no good with other boys on the block. He always seemed absent. Even though he lived with us, he felt separate. Perhaps it was that he was so much older than I was, but in truth I think it was because he was a boy, and a boy in a Catholic Italian family had a much longer leash.
We girls spent a lot of time together. We constantly dared our mother to see if she would punish us for being naughty. My Crayolas found their way onto the white mat of a painting on the wall. Sweets were brought to the dining table before we finished the food on our plates. Sadie cursed outright and smelled like tobacco. I screamed at the top of my lungs as a new exercise, goaded and pushed to see if Mother would crack or smack me. She tried once, but I ran around and jumped over furniture and she gave up. Mostly she didn’t do much, just stared with a strange numbness when she couldn’t make us stop and no amount of yelling would do.
Without our father, our muscles relaxed and we were not on constant alert anymore, no longer hard-wired to scan for danger. It had taken weeks for my body to learn this new feeling, and I wasn’t sure if I should trust it.
“Joanne. Come on, it’s your move,” Lou called out from upstairs.
The skim-milk-powder man had arrived to show our mother how to make milk from a package. He stood in our kitchen mixing water and powdered milk in a bowl, trying to get her to buy it.
“Cheaper than milk and will last a whole lot longer. Just pennies a packet,” he explained as he pushed his crinkled shirt into his pants over and over again. He shifted back and forth from one foot to the other while Mother leaned against the counter and nodded her head up and down delicately — though she was hardly delicate — trying to seem interested while he droned on and on about powdered food. She had been struggling to feed us. When we first moved in it was chaotic and messy, almost daring, like the universe was testing us all to see if we could survive in this unkempt and sparsely furnished house without a father, without money. I liked it.
I ran upstairs to Lou and Sadie in the bedroom we shared. There were only three rooms: one for Diego, one for our mother, and one for us. Sadie was reading a magazine with David Cassidy’s face on the front. She flipped through the pages, ignoring Lou and me. Lou sat on the floor in front of one of my birthday gifts, the game Operation, with her bag of barbecue chips ripped open and the radio playing. The window was covered with half a sheet tacked up, and our unmade mattresses were on the floor. I dropped down on my bed, grabbed the tweezers attached to the red wire, and tried to get the Toe Jam piece out of the foot.
“Lou, can milk be the same as when it comes out of a cow if it comes from a packet?”
The game’s buzzer went off. Lou and I jumped while Sadie muttered “Jesus Christ” and then went back to reading.
Lou snatched the tweezers from me. “I don’t know. I suppose if it tastes okay then it might be the same as real milk.”
“So how come we didn’t have powder before?” I asked.
“Who cares? We had Ding Dong before,” Lou said.
&
nbsp; “What’s Ding Dong?”
“Dad.”
All three of us burst into fits of laughter and chips fell to the floor. Lou got up to turn up the volume on the radio, where Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” was playing. We both stood up and waved our arms around in the air like branches to the melancholic sounds. I did my best to imitate her. I could still hear the whir of the machine downstairs where the grown-ups were making milk.
“Are we going to have to eat food from a packet?” I asked Lou, tugging at her shirt as she sang along. “Lou. Lou!”
“What? Why you always gotta ask stupid questions?” Lou closed her eyes, trying to catch up with the lyrics. I sat down and stared at her waving around like a squid, then laughed.
“Whatcha laughing about?” Lou asked.
“Ding Dong,” I said, and all three of us fell into hysterics.
“Girls,” Mother called from downstairs, but we ignored her. “Turn down the music and come downstairs.… Do you hear me?” Mother shouted. “I want you to try the milk.”
Just before Lou and I reached the bottom step, we heard the banging at the front door.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
“Open the door!” shouted the voice on the other side. I knew who it was. We all did. We froze. I stood beside Lou. The skim-milk-powder man stayed in the kitchen, and Mother walked over to open the door. She didn’t look at us, but hesitated for a moment, her hand hovering above the doorknob. Lou squeezed my hand. My breath stuck in my chest. I heard the click of the unlocking door.
He stood in the rain with the thunder crashing around him, wearing his dirty work clothes, hard hat, and Kodiak boots after a day of constructing new houses for people to live in. Ours instantly fell apart.
Lou ran upstairs and I followed as Dad screamed at the skim-milk-powder man to get out of the house. Sadie wasn’t reading anymore; she was facing the wall under a blanket with her back toward us, as if she were asleep. Lou and I instinctively cleaned, putting the game pieces away, the chips. There was yelling and smashing. Dad was throwing things and calling Mother a bitch. Mother shouted, “Stop! Stop it! Stop …” until all that was left was the sound of the rain on the roof, the drums of thunder, and the wild flashes of light across the windows.
I stood in front of our closed door and listened. Sadie kept her face to the wall. Lou took my hand and gently guided me toward my bed while humming a tune.
I wiped my nose and eyes on my sleeve and took a deep breath. The trembling returned in my chest. Lou grabbed a bag of elastics from the dresser drawer and started to braid my hair, not one or two, but as many tiny little braids as she could twist on my head. We sat for hours like monkeys in a tree, grooming hair, comforting, and resting in each other’s arms while the moon rose and the room went dark.
The thunder seemed to be permanently present inside that apartment after our father came back, after our failed escape. The very walls seemed to inspire a type of doom; even our new rescue animals were not immune, our cat, Candy, and our dog, Velvet.
Poor creatures. That they had landed in our home was a tragedy. Our cat had a litter of kittens, and my favourite kitten was smothered by her mother and lay dead beneath her. I couldn’t stop wailing. Sick of my screaming, my father went upstairs with a shovel and killed the remaining kittens.
I don’t remember the feeling, but it was something like white noise — like something had taken over my body and had frozen it in time, like a piece of me broke. Up until that point, I didn’t know death, didn’t know a mother cat could smother her baby, that my father could kill the rest out of rage, that life could be permanently erased. And it happened because I cried.
In my thirties, I was asked, “But you must have had good times, good memories?”
There were, only the bad ones were so bad I couldn’t quite hang on to the good.
CHAPTER THREE
ENGLISH-SPEAKING FAMILIES were packing their cars and leaving Montreal in droves during the language conflicts between French and English Quebecers in the 1970s. Children had to prove what language they spoke and businesses had to adopt French as their official language. Eventually that would change, too, but not before many people left.
We, however, stayed. All we left were the row houses when I was five for a house on the West Island, in Pierrefonds, with two storeys and a yard out back and a large wooden deck with old appliances sitting under it — stoves and a freezer that could be used for great games of make-believe. Fragrant lilac trees filled our senses and the big beautiful pine, birch, and maple trees had high branches that seemed as if they could touch the sky. The walls in the house were painted bright, light colours: oranges and yellows.
We were on a cul-de-sac with a mound of grass in the centre and evenly mowed lawns around us. Every house had a garage, even ours, and that was where our father stored his tools, converting it into a workshop.
It was as if we had never escaped him. We all pretended and acted like it had never happened and tried to blend in with the other families on the block, where life seemed so normal, where children played red light/green light, hide-and-seek, and tag until dark. Flowers bloomed, and neighbours had above-ground pools, basketball nets, and pets and doghouses. We rode bicycles with banana seats and bells.
I found a hiding place under the front porch and would slide under the concrete deck through a small crevice. I brought my favourite toys under the porch, my red plastic Close ’n Play phonograph-record player, and my favourite 45s. Music was my salvation.
Sadie, Lou, and I listened to music together regularly when our parents were out — the Beatles, Elvis, Rod Stewart. On one occasion, Sadie and Lou sang and jiggled on the couch side by side to a Janis Joplin LP, snapping their fingers and swinging their heads in unison. I was lying on the carpeted floor with my eyes closed, communicating with Joplin’s spirit. I did this with all the dead singers we listened to, certain I could communicate with “famous ghosts.”
When our parents were gone, it was like the black and white of life switched to colour, and we made as much noise as we could, listened to music, and ran about unreserved.
One day, Sadie suggested we make hot chocolate and sandwiches. Lou and I shouted our approval and scrambled to the kitchen. Lou grabbed the food out of the fridge and I passed it to Sadie. The smell of cheese, bread, and chocolate drifted through the air. I mixed the powdered chocolate with milk on the stove, standing on a chair. When everything was ready, we sat down at the kitchen table to eat and devoured our food as quickly as we’d made it. Our pace was always frantic, getting in as much unadulterated sister time as possible, cramming in pleasure, then wiping it away. We carried our plates to the sink, knowing not to leave any visible crumbs. We placed our mugs on the counter, washed the table, and left our little yellow kitchen, content that we had covered up our mess.
“We’re home!” yelled our mother that evening after the front door opened. Our parents thumped up the stairs above us.
We were in the basement watching The Bionic Woman on our black-and-white television with the rabbit ears on top. We turned down the volume.
“Sadie, Lou, Joanne, Diego, did you hear me? Get up here now!” Mother said in a tone of voice not to be ignored. We knew the drill. My body felt like it had just doubled in size, so heavy, and every step up from the basement to our parents was like going against the current. If there was a sixth sense in our house, it was fear.
“Where’s your brother?”
“He’s been out all day,” Sadie said as we filed into the kitchen.
“Sit down. We want to talk to you,” Mother said, her face calm, quiet. “Who left the mess?” Mother had her “going out” makeup on: thick blush, blue eyeshadow above her green eyes, and bright red lipstick. She was wearing one of her handmade dresses. She made some of our clothes, too, because it cost less than buying new from the local Zellers, especially dress-up clothes for weddings or church services. She was jiggly and soft, with arms as round as loaves of bread.
“Who lef
t the mess?” she asked again, arms up, staring at us calmly while our father towered above us, with tight lips, tornado eyes, large fists clenched, and popped blue veins under his skin as he paced. His face was balled up with rage, like a trapped wild animal. I looked around. The place was spotless. But then I saw them — the three mugs on the kitchen counter.
It was quiet. None of us looked at each other; we were still, half breathing, the smell of Mother’s powder mixed with our fear and the sound of my father’s feet pacing behind us, boom, boom, boom.
“I did it,” Sadie finally said after an agonizing silence.
Dad grabbed Sadie. Lou ran out of the kitchen to get away and I stood up. Dad punched Sadie, then dragged her to the floor, hitting her and hitting her. She screamed while I looked at my mother, hoping she would make it stop. Mother just watched, in a trance with no expression. She pulled me into her, holding me tight. Sadie was on the floor taking it for all of us, and I couldn’t tell anymore if it was her or me that was screaming. I floated, looked out at a sea of red. It was Sadie’s blood, flowing from her nose. She cradled her arm and tried to shelter her face from the blows that never seemed to end.
This was when I learned the next horrible lesson of our home — maybe the worst. That our mother was not interested in saving us. She had called us up to “talk,” wanted to know who had left the “mess,” and waited patiently until he blew. She wound him up like a music box and would not let me run, forcing me to witness the brutality while she squeezed and gripped my small frame.
Sadie was forbidden to leave her room the following day. She wasn’t allowed to eat, talk on the phone, or go to school. I snuck down to her room, brought her some dry cereal and my plastic fur-covered black panther for company. Her room smelled of musty urine. She was curled up, soft and exposed like a crustacean without a shell. I kissed her wet cheek and then went to school.
It was impossible to concentrate at school. I was guilty for being silent while Sadie took the beating. It took everything in me to act like the other children, who played tag or hopscotch, answered questions in class, or raised their hands to read out loud from picture books before the end of the day. I could only stare, physically there but nowhere near present.
All We Knew But Couldn't Say Page 2
