by Shania Twain
Ten hours later, we reached Toronto. Mom got out of the car to use a pay phone while we sat and waited in the car, returning a few minutes later with a piece of paper on which she’d scribbled the address of a homeless shelter.
That night, the five of us slept in a crowded, sweltering place on cot-like beds spread out along the walls of a series of spacious, open rooms designed for large groups. Our room held several families. I could barely sleep, it was so hot. Obviously, you had no privacy; everyone shared the bathrooms, and in the morning we ate at long, bingo-style tables, cafeteria fashion. Being surrounded by so many strangers was uncomfortable for me; I felt small and lost and wondered if maybe we’d made a mistake coming here. But then, at least we had someplace to go. And on the plus side, my first breakfast at the shelter was Rice Krispies cereal. I could have as much as I wanted—and no limit on the milk. This was new. We were eating with the down-and-out, but there was food to spare. We were soon placed in a smaller facility, a multistory house that had been converted into a women’s shelter large enough for about five families and staff. The food was good, the staff members were attentive and helpful, and I felt safe and finally had a sense that things were going to get better.
There were strict security rules in the shelter. The front door locked automatically behind us whenever we went out, and we were told to never tell anyone our address or to speak to anyone about the other people in the house. Mothers were warned not to tell anyone on the outside, such as friends, family members, and especially husbands, where they were, under any circumstances. After all, one violent man showing up at the front door demanding to see his wife and kids could put everyone’s safety in jeopardy. With this concern in mind, the residents were not allowed to answer the door or the phone. Counselors advised the women to not even call their abusers on the phone until the staff was confident that the person in question posed no danger. I could see how easily this protection protocol could be compromised with so many kids in the house, as it’s hard for children to understand the necessity of so many bizarre rules, like not answering the door or the phone where you live.
Everything we needed was provided for—the women were even given an allowance for miscellaneous items, plus pocket money. If you had a birthday, the staff threw a party, and when the weather was nice, we’d have barbecues out back. What a blessing! The shelter provided a true refuge of safety, order, and security.
During the day, I used to go out for a walk by myself, just to get away from having so many people around me. Usually, I’d head up to a huge discount department store on Bloor Street West called Honest Ed’s, to browse around. It’s like a privately owned Dollar Store. Everything was so cheap! Now and then, I’d “splurge” on something for fifty cents or a dollar, like a new pair of flip-flops or a change purse.
I also liked to play basketball, and across from the shelter there was a basketball court. Although I was never much good at maneuvering, I was an accurate shot. I had wanted to play back in middle school, but my father couldn’t afford the gas money to drive me back and forth for practice and games, so I had to pass on trying out. I was able to walk to another school closer by, though, where I could practice my aim and play a game called twenty-one against other kids. It turned into a constant pastime for me, and I became good at it. After a lot of practice, I was able to win. I went up against boys exclusively, too, simply because there were never any other girls at the court. Needless to say, losing to the short, skinny girl was frustrating to athletic teenage boys.
Although 1979 was a year that brought relief by breaking the dysfunctional cycle in our daily home life, there was still much uncertainty as to what would come next. It felt fresh to me, this shift in the direction of our lives. I was grateful that my prayers to Father Time had been heard, that my faith in it was not in vain. It knew I’d had enough, and change was granted. “I knew I could count on you, time,” I sighed with relief. I bid farewell to the worst year of my life, coming from a deep sense of hopelessness only months before, to feeling hopeful. I was looking forward to better things.
Songs have a way of marking time, and “Sailing” by Christopher Cross does that for me. I first heard that song near the end of our stay at the shelter. The lyric “Just a dream and the wind to carry me, and soon I will be free” made me feel better about not knowing what the future had in store. The song inspired me to accept that as long as I have dreams, elements that are beyond my control can actually help me reach them.
Just before the start of school, the shelter arranged for us to move into a town house that we would share with just one other family: a mother and two gorgeous little blonde-haired girls. It was in Jamestown Etobicoke, a residential area northwest of the city, with blocks of attached housing and parks on either side. If you include the basement, the place had four bedrooms. Upon moving in, we were given weekly grocery coupons. My mother and Sherry, our town house roommate, went to a depot of some kind to collect our groceries each week. Each family received a box full of staples, such as bread, sugar, butter, and milk. It even contained one of my favorite cereals, Shreddies. Mom also received an allowance check based on the number of children she had. If we needed anything else, we might make the odd stop at the Salvation Army. It still didn’t seem like much or even enough at times, and my mother realized that she had to get a job.
She managed to find a night job cooking at an Irish supper club called the Conception Bay Club, which was more like a hall. Owned by an accordion-playing recording artist from Newfoundland named Harry “His Nibs” Hibbs, it featured home-cooked East Coast food and Irish music and dancing. Mom hadn’t given up on her little singer and quickly arranged for me to go with her there on weekends. She worked the kitchen standing over huge pots of boiling pigs’ feet and cabbage, and I sang country songs on and off throughout the night for extra cash. Then I’d wait around for my mother to clean up after the crowd was finally gone, and we’d go home together. I liked the atmosphere at the Conception Bay Club, and the food, too, although everything seemed to be boiled; salty and boiled was how I figured the Irish liked it.
This was another one of those nightlife atmospheres where, although I was now fourteen years old and no longer a child per se, I was still out of place in this adult world. I remember a regular talking my ear off between songs one night, complaining to me about his supposedly bitchy wife. He told me he was going to leave her, that she was too uptight and superficial for him, and he just didn’t love her anymore. “It’s like living with a stranger,” he grumbled. I told him I thought she was pretty and that I liked the way she did her makeup. She was very precise about it and quite glamorous. He hated her makeup, he said; in fact, he hadn’t seen her without it since they married several years before.
“Wow, you never see her without her makeup?” I asked. “How can you be married to a woman and never see her without makeup?” Surely at night when they went to bed, he’d see her natural face then? He carried on to say, “Nope, she sleeps with her full makeup on, lipstick and everything.”
Although I was just fourteen, my conclusion was that this man obviously drank too much and was flirting with me; meanwhile, his wife was unhappy and lonely and too insecure to ever take off her mask for fear that her husband would judge her without it and not love the real her. I also figured that she had to have been a very complicated person to allow a man to make her feel so insecure to the point of never being seen without her makeup, even by her own husband. The more pressing question on my mind was, Why is this man even telling me this stuff? Like I said, I was once again back in an adult world where I didn’t belong, asking myself, What the hell am I doing here?
I made only a few bucks from singing, and my mom wasn’t making much more than that slaving over the steaming pots. Therefore, she took on the extra job of selling club memberships, with me as her helper. By then, school had started, so I’d make my calls in the evenings and on weekend afternoons. About one out of every fifty people on my calling list even listened to my sales
pitch, and maybe one in every one hundred considered it. We only had a dial phone at the time, and it took so long to dial each seven-digit number. By then I had my first boyfriend, Daniel, who lived just a couple of town houses down on the same attached block. His family owned several push-button phones, the more expensive kind. He let me borrow one, and, wow, did that make a difference. Not in terms of sales, mind you, but at least I was able to rack up more rejections per hour. I’m sure his mother found it very odd that one of her phones was being borrowed by the teenage neighbor. Sure enough, the next day she demanded that it be returned, so it was back to doing phone soliciting the old-fashioned way. Boy, did my index finger ache.
I met Daniel in 1980, when I was still fourteen. He was a very generous, bighearted guy. Despite being my age, he was mature for a boy and understanding and sympathetic toward my family’s hardship. Being such close neighbors, we got to talking outside our gates when my family first moved in—just hanging out, without having to go anywhere, still within earshot of our mothers’ calls. All very innocent. For my fifteenth birthday, he took me to the Canadian National Exhibition to see Van Halen. The CNE, founded in 1879, is an annual tradition in Canada. The two-and-a-half-week late-summer event is like a country fair but on the scale of a world’s fair, with lots of rides, parades, sporting events, and entertainment. I happened to love Van Halen. Eddie Van Halen was such a heartthrob, and his guitar sound made me nuts. I thought he was a genius.
Daniel and I had fun before the concert going on rides and eating cotton candy. When we got back to our housing block, he kissed me politely and said good night. We soon fell in love and stayed together for the better part of two years. He was a fantastic person and will always have a special place in my heart as my first love.
Daniel attended a private Catholic school, while I went to the larger public high school. Every day after dismissal, we ran straight to each other and were together every chance we got. We were inseparable. My mother was pretty open when it came to discussing sex and had no problem explaining the hazards. With the overall awareness about AIDS still a year or two away, the foremost concern back then was to avoid becoming pregnant. I was pretty mature for my age, having grown up too fast too soon, and I decided to go on the birth control pill to protect myself against an unwanted pregnancy. I felt safe and confident in my relationship with Daniel, so experimenting with sex didn’t scare me, but I also didn’t want to be caught off guard the way my mother told me happens with so many girls. She explained that in the heat of the moment, things can get out of control and just “happen,” and before you know it, you have a baby on the way. The thought of that scared me. On my own, I made an appointment with a doctor, and Daniel and I went together to his office. Although my mother was open to talking about such matters, I wasn’t comfortable sharing this with her, so it remained between me and Daniel. The doctor gave me my first vaginal exam, after which I explained that I wanted to go on the pill. He agreed that would be the best choice of contraception for me, and off I went with my prescription in one hand and Daniel holding the other.
I knew only a little bit about intercourse itself, such as the fact that the first time would probably hurt. I approached the whole experience fairly levelheaded, as Daniel was kind and patient, so I felt no pressure or stress from him, and my hormones weren’t driving my decision to have sex, curiosity was. Without the heat of the moment fogging my brain, there was time to plan and think everything through. I have to chuckle at my methodical thoroughness in planning this, as there was nothing spontaneous about it and I really can’t say that it was a physically satisfying first experience. But more important, from an emotional standpoint, I felt reassured knowing that I was learning with someone who cared about me as much as I cared about him. Looking back, I think that I was very lucky to have had a loving first sexual experience that initiated a positive association for me between physical and emotional partnership. I know that’s not always the case for teenage girls. From then on, it remained an important personal value of mine that no sex was worth it unless the person was someone with whom I shared a mutual respect and consideration.
All in all, our life in the town house on John Garland Boulevard was tranquil, with no concerns about having empty cupboards. Still, having grown up with domestic violence, I sometimes worried that this comparatively normal way of living would prove to be just an interlude. What if my father eventually found us and came to bring us back home? Would we return to our old life, marked by periods of happiness shattered by horrendous arguments and physical brutality? I had no reason to believe we wouldn’t, since that had been the pattern for as long as I could remember.
I had good reason to be concerned, since I was the one who had inadvertently given my father a clue as to our whereabouts. The counselors at the first shelter we’d stayed at really instilled in us the idea that you couldn’t be too careful and should never divulge too much information to the physically abusive person. This made me feel paranoid and brought on a sudden, new anxiety. For quite a while after we moved to Jamestown Etobicoke, we never called my dad from our home phone; instead we’d walk to a pay phone a few blocks away, as he couldn’t trace the pay phone in those days. The only thing my father knew was that we were somewhere in Toronto. One day I was talking to him on the phone, and without thinking, I mentioned that we lived near a street called Kipling Avenue.
The moment I hung up, I was scared. Now he’ll find us! I thought. Intellectually, I realized that Toronto was a huge city, and for him to try tracking us down would truly have been like searching for a needle in a haystack. But logic is no match for a frightened young girl’s emotions, and I ran right into the arms of absolute fear.
That night I started having nightmares, as I was so frightened he would find us and that it was all my fault for saying too much about our location. However, to my surprise, my mother told me not to worry so much about it, that she was going to give him our home phone number soon anyway, though not our address, yet. She was becoming more relaxed and comfortable about reconnecting with him, but I wasn’t ready to accept that we were safe. Didn’t she take the counselor at the shelter seriously? Wasn’t she worried that he was just acting nice so she’d let her guard down and give away our whereabouts? My mother’s newly lax attitude made me feel anxious and my fear launched me into a nightmare that even today remains vivid in my memory.
The town house we lived in had three floors. At first I’d slept in the basement, but after a year, Sherry and her two daughters moved out, allowing me to share a room with Carrie on the top floor. Like old times, we slept in bunk beds, only with Carrie on the bottom bunk and me on top. In my nightmare, my dad was standing at the foot of my bed, throwing dishes at me. I sat up and began waving my arms, crying, “No, no, stop! No!”
The plates shattered against my body, cutting my skin in clean, long slices. I had cuts everywhere, even on the soles of my feet, and it hurt like hell, although, strangely, I wasn’t bleeding much. After a time, the throwing stopped. That’s when I woke up.
I sit up in my bed, breathing heavily with my eyes open, keenly aware of where I am. The nightmare is still rolling, though I’m no longer sleeping. I have to get out of bed to check on the others! Although I’m awake, I’m still in the clutches of the dream. As far as I’m concerned, my father is coming for us. I have to warn everybody. What if he’s hiding in the house? I’m expecting him to be.
I attempt to get down from my bunk, but my whole body aches. When I try to brace myself with the palms of my hands, they hurt, from the cuts—yet I don’t see any cuts. It feels as if I have razor-thin slices all over me. When my feet touch the carpet, I can barely stand the sensation of the cut skin grabbing the knit of the carpet. I have to walk on my tiptoes, but I pad around to each bed in the house and check on my mother, my sister, and my brothers, certain that I will find them dead. Much to my relief, all four are still breathing and fast asleep.
I gingerly make my way down to the main floor, to check that the f
ront door is locked. Yes. Good. But what if he is waiting for me in the basement? If I turn on the light, he might see me, so I creep downstairs and feel my way around in the pitch dark. Another surprise: no one there. I am sure, however, that my father will certainly be coming to get me. After all, it was my idea for us to leave him. It was me who convinced my mother, mired in depression, to climb out of bed, get in the car, and drive all of us far away. It was my doing that he came home from work that night to an empty house, to be greeted only by a pathetic one-sentence note of apology dashed off in a minute: “I’m sorry things didn’t work out.” I was responsible for his abandonment, and I was going to get it.
I am shivering from the pain as I crawl back upstairs and hide underneath the kitchen table. From here I can see every window and door on the ground floor. The cold touch of the metal chairs hurts so much against my cuts, and my feet are in agony. It’s three in the morning, and this is where I will stay, frozen and wide eyed, until dawn. I’ve been scoping the house for an hour. I know this because it was two o’clock on the digital clock beside my bed when I woke up from my “dream.”
I huddle beneath the table for hours, knowing that any second my dad is going to bust through the door with a shotgun. I’ve seen him in action, I’ve heard his roar, my mother’s screams, our cries, the banging, the punching, and the yelling of two people entangled in violence. I am ready for the worst. I’m worked up and ready to take him on if he comes through that door trying to hurt my family. But he never comes. Around six in the morning, the sun streams through the window. My father never came. A warm sensation washes over me; I am all of a sudden no longer stiff and in pain. I’m back to normal. I shake my head and ask myself aloud, “What the hell are you doing here under the kitchen table?” I know the reason, but I can’t believe it. It’s as if someone had walked me there in my sleep, and now I’ve woken up, only I was awake the whole time. I crawl out from under the table with no pain, trudge up the stairs, and flop into bed like nothing ever happened.
