It seems odd to write about my parents as a couple, for even my early memories of them are as separate entities. Their bedroom contained twin beds, something I thought nothing of, assuming Mary Smithey’s parents shared a bed only because they must have been too poor to buy two. My mother and father always got along pleasantly, but I do not have a memory of them actually touching. In an innocent and unalarmed way, I always assumed that they lived together for the simple reason that they both happened to be related to my brothers and me.
Their love was music, in that it was the sacred hearth of their lives. Though as a child I never put it in such terms, I believe I saw them as both being wedded to music and, through that, to each other. (Once, my father mentioned that one of the things that had drawn him to my mother was that she had been more interested in music than necking. When I queried her on the subject, her response was “Ditto.”) They were both accomplished pianists and sometimes played duets or music-for-four-hands piano. Most of their friends were musicians of one kind or another, and typical social get-togethers involved my father conducting people in the choral rounds of a spoof composer known as P.D.Q. Bach, while my mother accompanied them on the piano. There were great eruptions of laughter as people muffed a line or got lost, and although my brothers and I would feign annoyance—we’re trying to sleep!—we secretly loved it.
When people came over to our house, they always brought their French horn. Or their bassoon—a word I learned before the word gun—or their double bass or clarinet or the latest recording of so-and-so playing such-and-such. Many a night we kids would lie in bed listening to the sounds of my parents and their friends playing chamber music, and I would lift into a transcendence I have never tried to name.
Music was my mother tongue; it was the language of home.
RIOTS, BROTHERS AND GOATS
Three international events of 1969 made it a pivotal year for my family: the Stonewall Riots in New York City; the Criminal Law Amendment Act in Canada; and our family holiday in the south of France, where, to my mother’s great relief, I was toilet-trained.
The first event was so distant and irrelevant to our family that it went unnoticed at the time. The Stonewall Inn was a popular gay bar in Manhattan’s West Village. While police raids on such establishments were not uncommon, by 1969, lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transsexuals and queers (now known as the LGBTQ community) were fed up with the routine harassment. Every intolerable situation has its boiling point and this one was reached on June 28, when instead of submitting to police arrest, the employees and patrons of the Stonewall Inn resisted and fought back. There followed the massive demonstrations and riots now known to history as “Stonewall,” the watershed incident that led to vocal, widespread and organized demands for LGBTQ rights, and the moment, it is said, that the gay revolution was born.
Who knew that raid/riot/demand-for-rights would have any effect on our young Canadian family? But it would, in an indirect way. Although not for another decade.
Closer to home, the second momentous event of 1969 involved a hip, progressive Canadian politician by the name of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, whose landmark Criminal Law Amendment Act decriminalized, among other things, abortion, contraception and homosexuality between consenting adults. “There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation,” Trudeau famously told reporters. “What’s done in private between adults doesn’t concern the Criminal Code.”
My father would have been paying close attention to those words, not because he felt they had any personal relevance—they didn’t; not then—but because he was a devoted Liberal and a recently tenured professor of political studies. And, like millions of other Canadians, he was a supporter of the “just society” and a big fan of Pierre Trudeau.
To those two grand events of 1969, I contributed a third, namely the planting of my sweet petunia onto a white plastic potty and the happy sound of urine sprinkling down. The rite of passage took place in the village of Bardigues, where my family was spending the summer, and the setting made such an impression that for many years I continued to free-associate France with urine.
In 1970, my mother gave birth to a third child and less than a year later, in an act of intrepid insanity, my parents decided to take all three of us on another European escapade. Stoically, we trundled across Madeira, the Canary Islands, Spain and France, dragging, as my mother recalls, bags of dirty diapers (not mine!) through endless museums, cathedrals and labyrinthine cobblestone streets. My parents lost only one of us, somewhere in rural Spain.
Our train from Granada to Madrid had stopped in a small Andalusian station. My father, I am told, headed off the train in search of something for us all to eat and a few seconds later, my older brother, Paul, asked if he could go with him. Sure sure, said my mother with characteristic insouciance, propping up my sleeping head with one hand and my baby brother with the other. Five-year-old Paul puffed out his chest proudly, heaved open the compartment door and went slapping down the train corridor into the world of adults.
After a time, the train’s whistle blew, my mother glanced briefly out the window and we hissed forward. The small town’s few houses disappeared and were quickly replaced by goats on hilltops doing their horizontal chew. As the train careered along, my father appeared in the aisle juggling bread, cheese, fruit and a bottle of wine. It was then, seeing Dad without child in tow, that my mother panicked and told him that Paul had followed him off the train. Who knows how they managed it (my father possesses a useful talent for the hysterical), but as I recall, my parents got that train to whinny itself to a halt and wobble backwards through the rough Spanish countryside until we pulled into the station in reverse, only to find Paul, blond and bony-kneed, standing alone on the platform. He was stolid until he saw our faces. Then, a thousand tears shot from his body all at once.
My parents expressed such gratitude to the train conductor that, following a path of childhood logic, I entertained fantasies of having once been part of a much larger family with various siblings who had been forgotten at train stations all over Europe, the other conductors not having been so kind as to go back and pick them up.
Eventually, I came to accept that two brothers were all I had ever had. In my early years, they were both my dearest life companions and creatures as strange to me as the plantar warts on my left foot: fascinating to pick at, those strange tentacles that had embedded themselves deep into my being, but mysterious in their purpose, other than as a vague annoyance, something crudely intriguing. I could not have imagined that I would grow up to adore my brothers; when I was young, that notion would have been as inconceivable to me as falling in love with my warts.
From the time he was able to admire them, Paul was fascinated by the productions of his own body, famously spreading the contents of his diaper the full circumference of his crib and head, while my mother hosted her first University Women’s Club tea downstairs. The last time he and I ever took a bath together was the night he invented a game called Lumberyard, in which he stood up, bent over and produced three brown logs, encouraging me to catch them as they came out of the mill. Instead of growing out of the “bowel narcissism,” as my mother came to term it, his captivation only grew in sophistication over the years, and when we get together for visits we are still, to the present day, treated to commentary on his morning eliminations.
Paul could be terrific fun, even in non-anally-fixated ways. He was (and remains) a great creator of games and a natural leader, once inspiring hordes of neighbourhood children to host our own version of the summer Olympics complete with elaborate opening ceremonies (I can’t remember which of us was chosen to run around the block holding the flashlight aloft like a torch), and hyper-precise timing, scorekeeping and statistics. Most of the time, however, Paul was an intimidating mystery to me, prone as he was at age ten to willingly spend an afternoon reading a biography of Winston Churchill and then positing theories on war strategies and little-known undercurrents in British society of the time. In truth, I foun
d it easier to relate to his bowels.
I’m sure my younger brother was born with a proper name, but from the moment we began calling him Flip (for no particular reason), we never used his given name again. Flip could only get to sleep by lying down and bobbling his head rhythmically against the pillow, something that looked demented but was apparently normal. His best friend, Little Boy Cowboy, shot him in the stomach one day in a back field—there was, indeed, a small scar—and had a sister named Beaushamblah. We never met either of them, but Flip spent many a day making Lego sandwiches for them in the backyard.
At three, he refused to eat anything but “hat bacon” (a piece of bologna fried until it puffed up into a hat shape), peanut butter sandwiches (butter on the waymost bottom, then honey, then peanut butter on the waymost top, crusts off, sliced diagonally), bananas, strawberry yogourt, a pastry my father used to make called “cheese puffs,” and green beans. The diet (slightly modified a few years later: pancakes in place of hat bacon) nourished him to the age of nineteen, the year he finally agreed to wear shorts. To protest a much-despised teacher (who taught him to read, horrid thing), Flip walked backwards to school for the entire first term of grade two. Years later the neighbours confided to us how much they had enjoyed the daily reverse parade. “Yes, he’s quite idiosyncratic,” my father replied. To which I clapped my hand to my mouth and tee-hee-hee’d up the stairs. I assumed that “idiosyncratic” was a grown-up, professorial way of saying “idiotic.”
Paul, Flip and I had our sibling laughs, and plenty of them, our games and silly voices, but we also fought, fiercely and dramatically, over all the standard things—cheating at a game, being “gross” or generally annoying, hogging the bathroom—inevitably proclaiming our revulsion for one another with loud and careless pride. The sibling battles upset my father terribly, but he was the furthest thing from helpful when it came to resolving spats, a fact made clear by his default response (spoken with hands flapping around helplessly): “Kids, kids! Now, now, now … stop trying to get each other’s goats!”
My father was not a natural disciplinarian. (Why have discipline when you can have fun? I imagine him saying.) The task of imparting discipline fell to my mother; although, being a lover of fun herself, she was reluctant to play the heavy and was often frustrated by having to assume the role. While my father busied himself or just looked the other way, it was she who laid down the law (when necessary), she who had us cleaning up the milk we spilled, she who enforced bedtimes, et cetera.
There was never any question as to who wore the pants in the family, but never did that prompt us to wonder if that meant my dad wore the skirt. So to speak. I knew lots of kids with strong-willed mothers and namby-pamby dads. Nothing out of the ordinary there.
Something a bit less common was that my mother sometimes wore my brother’s clothing. I don’t remember when it started, only that one day I noticed that the green jeans I used to see on Paul’s body were now on hers. As well as his sweatshirt. He was probably about fifteen and rapidly outgrowing “perfectly good clothes,” as my mother called them. So, being what’s known as “petite,” she began to wear them.
Or, being what’s known as “tomboyish,” she began to wear them.
Actually, she wasn’t a tomboy; she was just beautiful in a natural, short-haired, no-makeup, independent, athletic and intelligent sort of way. My mother never used the term feminist, but that is what she was. And while she may not have put it in exactly these words, she felt that fashion was for airheads and shopping was a tedious waste of time. So she wore my brother’s hand-me-downs—or hand-me-ups, I guess they would be—and got on with her day.
CURLS, GOD AND CONFORMITY
If my father had had his way, my name today would be Amaryllis, and while I am grateful to my mother for the many things she has done for me over my lifetime, her opposition to that floral moniker rates among the primary ones. My father’s second choice of given name was Filomena, as there is a lovely sixteenth-century madrigal about a girl named Filomena and wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a child so named, but my mother categorically nixed that one too. Bless her heart.
I almost died at birth, six weeks early and tiny as a crab. The doctors wrung me out and pumped me up with new blood, which somehow helped, though it required them to shave my head so drastically that I waddled through my first years of life bald as a potato.
When my hair did grow in, it did so with an eye for reprisal, its fists raised in wiry curls that made the more racist elders in the family worry about my origins. These were not luscious curls; they were thick knuckly masses, something a (brief) boyfriend was once generous enough to inform me was the stuff that makes up a rhinoceros’s horn. As a child, I moaned about my not-at-all-silky hair, brushed the mass a hundred times a night (an exercise that only exploded the situation, like yeast given sugar) and, at my mother’s insistence, kept it as short as possible.
Early childhood drawings have me illustrating myself thus: two arms, two legs, a happy face surrounded by a full 360 degrees of curly hair. Just one great squiggly line going round and round across the top of the head, all the way down under the chin and up the other side. (Note: thirty years later, my son’s drawings depicted his mother identically.)
Throughout elementary school, I strove to model myself on Laura Ingalls from Little House on the Prairie: a brave and good soul with silken braids. I failed miserably, my thick, wiry hair giving me more of a Pippi Longstocking look (think horizontal braids). After being laughed out of the playground for arriving in a bonnet, I took to sleeping with a frilly white nightcap and reciting prayers on my knees like my blessed heroine. I would fall asleep feeling pious and satisfied, but was a thrasher of a sleeper, inevitably flinging the ruffled cap to the ground sometime during the night. In the morning, I would roll my wildly curly self out of bed and retrieve the cap from the floor ashamedly, even on occasion muttering under my breath, “Sorry, God.”
I do not recall at what age I convinced my mother to let me have my hair straightened, only that I must have been quite small. The hairdresser simply blew it dry, strand by strand, with healthy applications of hairspray, until I looked as though I had cozied up to a steamroller.
All the way home, I stroked my Saran Wrap hair. Dreamily, I rolled down the car window to feel it blow in straight lines across my face. I was elated and begged my mother to learn the technique herself, “Please, please buy hairspray!”—she smiled flatly; she never bought cosmetics of any kind—they were for stupid people, she told me rather bluntly. “But I want to keep it this way forever!” I pleaded, running a hand over my straw-straight hair.
When we got home, I wandered to the end of the driveway so that the world could see me. I flipped my head from side to side, relishing the straightness, waiting for someone to walk by and comment, but no one did and eventually I sat down in the gravel. Briefly, I recalled bleaker times from my old life when my brothers had sneaked pebbles into my hair, me oblivious to the joke until I laid my head down on the pillow at night and felt the bumps.
No longer.
For the first time, I could draw my fingers from the top of my skull all the way down the length of my hair to the ends. It was heavenly. I did it over and over, decided I would stay up all night doing it, and then got the inspired idea of putting a small stone at the crown of my head to feel it slide, unimpeded, down the smooth strands. N-n-n-n-plonk. It was so delicious I did it again. Then with sand, which tickled the curve of my scalp as it slid down the slick slope. Like ice. For the rest of the afternoon, my head was the hill for handful after handful of pebble skiers. I believe I charged them admission when they rode the finger-lift up my arm.
No surprises as to how the fantasy ended, which was with my mom’s exclamation, “What on earth did you do to your hair, we’ll have to wash it!” Trrrrrrrring!
Curls again.
From that day on, I assumed them as my life’s curse.
That and school, whose purpose never came clear to me during all of the
eighteen years that I attended. In kindergarten it was discovered that I could read, so while the other children played, I was sent out into the hallway to do spelling flashcards with an “advanced” grade eight student who found the exercise so dull that no doubt she wished she had been labelled “retarded” instead. I greeted each day with a leaden dread, my stomach a tangle of glass-tipped threads that once pierced my bladder and released a morning’s worth of urine during storytime. The sensation was one of blessed relief, like the exhalation after holding one’s breath, a warm wash against the backs of my thighs that was comforting only until we all stood up and a dark circle revealed itself where I had been sitting. Naturally, I found reason to busy myself with something on the other side of the room, listening to the teacher’s stern pronouncement—that someone had been very, very bad—and donning a look of surprise and disapproval comparable to those of my classmates. For the rest of the morning, my white tights sagged with the cold memory of that release, burning and scratching my legs as I walked, and freezing like a patch of yellow snow on my bum when we were let outside for recess.
When my mother complained about the flashcard drudgery—peeing one’s pants is a sign of stress, I heard her confide to a neighbour—she was invited to a meeting with my teacher and the principal, both of whom thought it would be better if I were taken out of the class and moved into grade one. My mother said she preferred that I stay where I was, as all I really wanted or needed to do was play with my friends, but the teacher insisted that I be put among children of the same ability. “Otherwise,” she concluded with a rhetorical question that spun my mother’s eyeballs, “how is she ever going to learn how to conform?”
Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter Page 3
