“No, no.” My father laughed, peeling his dough off the counter and explaining the phenomenon of high frequencies.
My mother sighed and cut in. “It’s not really about hearing anyway. When those guys are tuning the piano, they’re not really hearing so much as feeling the sound.”
“Yes, that’s true,” said my father, sprinkling more flour onto the counter.
Now, hearing my father say (or sing) silly things was certainly not a novelty to me, but normally my mother was more sensible. Tuning the piano by feeling the sound? I couldn’t find a way to understand that.
So I decided to investigate.
Months passed. I was skipping on the front porch when the strange car arrived. A woman with a flowery orange dress that looked like our kitchen wallpaper led the blind man to the front door. I said “Hi” in that robotic way kids do when they know they’re expected to speak, and then I called my mother. Ducked behind the dining room door and peeked through the crack.
The blind man was tall with waxy grey hair that glistened. It was all brushed back so that it looked like those rippling marks that waves leave on sand. (After his last visit my mother had told me that his hair was probably as curly as mine but that he used something called Brylcreem to “tame it down.” Excited by the phrase tame it down, I had gone straight to the bathroom and applied some of my dad’s shaving cream—Brylcreem, shaving cream, what’s the difference?—but to my distress, I created more of a frothy-wave-crashing-on-rocks look than the wave-textured-sand look I was after.)
My mother settled the ripply-haired blind man at the grand piano and offered him tea, which he softly declined. He sounded the first note. Slowly, I stepped out from behind the dining room door and began to creep into the living room, freezing several times mid-step when it seemed he had heard me. “Hello?” he called once, his lopsided marbles pointing in my direction, a smile on his face. I held my breath. “Hello there,” he said playfully, as though he knew it was me, a child at any rate, not my mother. And for a moment, I wondered if he really was blind; I felt sure he could see me. Maybe he was just pretending to be blind so that he could tune pianos.
But eventually he turned back to the piano. I exhaled. A bit louder than I’d hoped. (I’d developed asthma, so often wheezed when I breathed.) And he returned to his tools, playing octaves over and over again, drawing up the sound from below, adjusting, re-sounding, adjusting. Until he was satisfied. Then he moved on. I watched him carefully but couldn’t find any evidence that he was “feeling the sound.” He just seemed to be listening.
I decided to get closer. With what I felt to be the stealth of a professional spy, I lowered myself to the ground, crawling along the soft fringe of the oriental carpet until I was directly beneath the soundboard of the piano. I did not have a plan as such (many professional spies do not), but as I crouched there I became aware of a tingling in my back as the blind man played.
I closed my eyes. And there they were: all those notes, underneath my skin all this time. Resonating in my body as though I were the piano and my ribs the strings. I folded myself down over my thighs and plugged my ears with my fingers. The notes were still there, even stronger than before. Like a thousand purring cats all over me.
I stayed so long I fell asleep, my cheek hot against the carpet when I awoke. From the open window, I could hear a game of kick-the-can starting up in the backyard with some neighbours, so I got to my hands and knees and crawled out of the living room, down the back hallway and out through the flap of Ida’s doggie door, until I was safely outside.
I never spoke to anyone about “feeling the sound.” It was a discovery that I kept to myself, perhaps my first exploration into the sanctuary of solitude. Whatever it was, music danced into me in a new way that day. I never listened to it the same way again.
The forests and fields at the end of the road soon became my roaming ground and I delighted in walking through them alone, and for hours. Those moments are castings of light across my memory, sparkles of ever-dancing details, impossible to grab at or isolate. What I remember most is that I would hum. And that I felt as much a part of the place as a note to a song.
When I snapped a stalk of tall dry grass between my fingers, the reedy crack would register in my knuckle. Lying on my back, my skull like a mossy cobble in the mud, I would feel whorls of clouds drift through my chest, swelling and shape-shifting across my heart. Crickets rang in my cheekbones, and the calls of cardinals plucked the tips of my ribs. My chapped lips were the peeling bark of the birch tree, its branches tall limbs I would grow into. And the garter snake that once slithered into the cove of my neck as I lay in a spray of ferns became, in that moment, a ringlet of my own hair.
I didn’t know I was absorbing the language of place, just as an infant does not consciously train in the dialect of his parents. He simply listens, babbles back, and becomes part of the verbal geography. Similarly when apprenticing in the particular pitch of spruce, the tone of grackle and granite, weasel, aster and snow, we effortlessly tune into the surrounding chorus and grow up with the anthem of the land.
Only when I grew up and began to look for a home beyond my own did I notice that while I resonated with other places, I did not seem to contain their resonance. I could learn the language of a country, yes, eat its foods, partake of its ways, wear the fabric of its clothes, but I would live in these new places with a hollowness I found difficult to name. Its leaves were not connected to my skin, I would say; or, its winds did not contain the flavour of my sleep.
For comfort, I would lower myself down the well of memory into the body of that child, the one lying on her back in an August meadow with a black-eyed Susan blossoming between her toes, one arm crooked under a mop of muddy curls, and the elegy of a mourning dove blowing sound rings across an infinite sky.
DOGS AND SEX
One day I came home from school to learn that Ida (diarrhea dog who had, by then, increased her repertoire of pleasing habits to include: drooling into my grandmother’s shoes after she’d slipped them off to play cards, and snapping at neighbourhood children) had been taken off to that mythical place known as A Farm. She would be happier there, my mother said. Besides, my asthma was triggered partly by dogs. Then, adding insult to injury, she added that we should be happy she went to such a nice place. I wept bitterly.
The following day, a small white Bichon Frisé arrived. His face was a 360-degree fan of frizzy, hypoallergenic hair. Instantly, I fell in love with him—Sebastian, my comrade in curls—and decided to believe that Ida was romping happily on her Farm and that we were all better off for the new arrangement.
Sebastian was such a hit that soon we acquired another Bichon, Cinnamon, and the springy pair took it upon themselves to become sex education instructors for my brothers and me. First Cinnamon went into heat, prompting my mother to rush out to Sears and purchase padded underwear called training pants, normally used for toddlers, that she styled for a dog by cutting a hole in the back for Cinnamon’s tail and a little one in the crotch for the pee. Cinnamon pranced around in variations of that getup for weeks, while Sebastian lost all interest in me—we had been inseparable until then—panting and throwing himself at doors to be with her. I sobbed, feeling a combination of rejection and disgust at his loss of dignity—emotions I would find myself revisiting with a number of other males later in life.
About six months later, Cinnamon heated up again, but this time we were told that Sebastian would mate her. (Eight-year-old Flip’s puzzling comment when he saw the bright red extension of Sebastian’s penis was “That’s what I need!”) The dogs’ backyard copulation was the most exciting thing that had happened around our house for a while and my mother didn’t discourage us from watching nature in action. My brothers and I giggled and pointed at the humping for the first few minutes, but the post-coital panting and bum-to-bum attachment was so horrendous that it turned me off sex for much of the ensuing decade.
A few weeks after the unromantic union, Cinnamon’s body beg
an to fill, her teats swelling underneath her until one evening she moved into an almost hypnotic state, growing purposeful and uncannily focused. My mother helped her into the bed she had prepared and we all gathered around, staying up well into the night, thrilled by the exciting vigil. Cinnamon yelped as the first translucent ball emerged from her body and it was by far the best magic trick I had ever seen. My mother reached over and pinched open the thin sac that encased the puppy’s body, peeling the membrane from its face.
From the tiniest mouth I could ever have imagined, I was taught that breath is life.
FICTION
The summer I turned ten, my father decided that we should celebrate the event with a reading of Anne of Green Gables. I was an avid reader by then, devouring books as fast as my parents could put them in front of me, but my father’s gift was a reading of the book, aloud and together.
He began the ritual by baking Gratin Dauphinoise, a Julia Child recipe that normally calls for white potatoes, but for which my father substituted the red potatoes my mother had brought back from a trip she had taken with her mother and sister to Prince Edward Island that summer. It was the rich, red sandstone and soil of Prince Edward Island that was responsible for the colour of the potatoes, my father explained excitedly as he served up plates of light pink Gratin.
“So was Anne’s food always pink?” I asked, picking through the sludge of milky, cheesy potato slices and trying to get inspired to taste it.
Dad laughed. “She probably ate her fair share of potatoes,” he replied, scraping away at the sides of the baking dish where a buttery crust of potato was stuck. “But there wouldn’t have been any such thing as ‘French cooking’ in Prince Edward Island back in those days.”
I smiled and nodded, silently wishing that there wasn’t any such thing as French cooking in Peterborough, Ontario, in these days either. But I brought a forkful of gooey pink potatoes to my mouth, chewed cautiously, and was pleasantly surprised by the flavour. Anne of Green Gables was getting off to a good start after all.
Once I was all ready for bed—washed, brushed, in my nightgown and under the covers—I was to call out, “Daddy, I’m ready to start reading!” And just as he had done a few months earlier with Paul (with the dreadful-sounding book Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson), my dad would lie down on my bed and begin reading, just to me. I coveted it as the privilege it was.
From the beginning, I loved everything about Green Gables: the gossipy neighbour Mrs. Rachel Lynde, sweet Matthew Cuthbert, the feistiness of Anne herself, her spunk and audacity, her untameable nature and godforsaken hair. My father loved it all too, particularly the descriptions of landscapes and sunsets, which sometimes prompted him to stop reading, sigh, and say, “Oh, wasn’t that wonderful,” before carrying on to the next sentence. But our favourite chapter of all was “Matthew Insists on Puffed Sleeves,” in which Anne’s adoptive father Matthew defies his more practical sister Marilla and sneaks into town to buy Anne the dress she had always dreamed of: one with extravagant puffed sleeves.
Anne took the dress and looked at it in reverent silence. Oh, how pretty it was—a lovely soft brown gloria with all the gloss of silk; a skirt with dainty frills and shirrings; a waist elaborately pintucked in the most fashionable way, with a little ruffle of filmy lace at the neck. But the sleeves—they were the crowning glory! Long elbow cuffs, and above them two beautiful puffs divided by rows of shirring and bows of brown-silk ribbon.
My father and I swooned about that dress for weeks afterwards, imagining the dreaminess of the long elbow cuffs and the dainty frills, the great big puffs at the shoulders and how magnificent they would feel.
“Maybe I should buy you a dress with puffed sleeves for Christmas!” he suggested one night, and I fell asleep with my hands clasped under my chin, asking God (in true Anne of Green Gables fashion) for exactly that. In any colour but brown.
My dad and I continued reading right up to the penultimate chapter, “The Reaper Whose Name Is Death.” I was lying on my back with my eyes closed, imagining the story, as I always did, when dear, sweet Matthew, who had been so kind to Anne every day of her life, suddenly dropped like a sack of PEI potatoes in the doorway, right before Anne’s very eyes. My stomach went hot. I squeezed my eyes tightly, hoping that he had just fainted. “Please let the name of death not be Matthew,” I whispered to myself.
Alas.
“ ‘Anne looked at the still face and there beheld the seal of the Great Presence,’ ” Dad read solemnly.
I felt tears gathering under my closed eyes. My dad continued, clearing his throat as he read, faltering uncharacteristically over words and lines, having to go back and repeat certain passages.
“ ‘When the calm night came softly down over Green Gables the old house was hushed and tranquil. In the parlour lay Matthew Cuthbert in his coffin … ahhhem … his long grey hair framing his pleasant … sorry … his placid face on which there was a little kindly smile as if he but slept, dreaming pleasant dreams. There were … ahhhem … there were flowers about him, sweet old-fashioned flowers which his mother had planted in the bridal homestead … sorry … in the homestead garden in her bridal days and for which Matthew had always had a secret, wordless love. Anne had gathered them and brought them to him, her anguished, tearless eyes burning … in her white face. It was the last … the last … thing she could do for him …’ ”
Then his voice went all gurgly. I opened my eyes and turned towards him. His face was wet, the open manila pages of the book speckled with tears.
“You’re crying!” I laughed, pulled suddenly out of the story by the shock of it. It might have been the first time I had seen my father cry. “Hey, everyone, Daddy’s crying!” I called out teasingly. “Daddy’s crying because Matthew Cuthbert just died!” I heard Flip jump out of his bed, but by the time he came running into my room, Dad had shut the book and stood up. “It’s just a book!” I called out, laughing and teasing him again.
Dad wiped his face and laid the book on my dresser, not laughing at all. Which made me feel suddenly sick.
“I was just kidding!” I said. “Let’s finish reading!”
Flip raced out of the room and down the hall to Paul’s room. “Daddy started crying from reading Anne of Green Gables!” he called out, proud to be the first boy to get the funny news.
I didn’t hear Paul’s response. I only saw my dad leave the room.
We never finished Anne of Green Gables. Over the next few evenings, I tried to convince Dad to read me the final chapter, but he apologized and said he just couldn’t.
“It’s too sad,” he would say, giving me a little hug. “And then you’ll tease me for crying.”
So I put the book on my shelf and went on with other things. Other books. All of which I read silently to myself. And one day I was doing just that, reading a book at the kitchen table, when something became clear to me.
My dad was standing at the counter, alternately flouring his rolling pin and rolling out pastry dough, and I was watching him fondly, knowing that some delicious tart would await us at the end of his labour-intensive preparations. I had looked up from my book—The Secret Garden, my mother’s favourite—and it dawned on me for the first time that my dad was an orphan (albeit an adult one). Both of his parents had died before I was born. And his father would have died, I calculated, when he was about the same age Anne was when Matthew Cuthbert died. There might have been flowers at my dad’s father’s funeral, maybe even sweet old-fashioned flowers which his mother had planted in the homestead garden in her bridal days and for which his father had always had a secret, wordless love.
My dad’s tears hadn’t been only for Matthew Cuthbert, I realized, my mouth sour with regret, but for his own father, who had died when he was just a boy.
Dad lifted the pastry from the counter, laid it into his French ceramic scalloped-edge tart dish and cut away the dough that hung over the edge. I sat watching him, feeling terribly, sickeningly sorry, but I couldn’t bring myself to say a wo
rd. I could only watch how focused he was as he primped the tart’s edge. In that moment, with his apron covered in flour, his shirt sleeves rolled up, his hands mottled with dough, he was suddenly not just my father, but a person. Someone fragile and full of feelings, someone I had never entirely known, whose life extended far beyond my own.
GYMNASTICS AND STRESS FRACTURES
My father began to spend increasing amounts of time away, even sharing an apartment with some friends in the city of Toronto, where he went to do research for the book he was writing on the Liberal Party of Canada. I thought little of this arrangement, assuming it to be just another way in which humans were similar to dogs: the females tending to the pups while the males sniffed around at the world, lingering and peeing in the places they found most interesting.
I was also unfazed by my father’s absences because I had fallen in love. With gymnastics.
For as many hours as I could manage at home and three to four times per week at the local gymnasium, I dedicated myself to the sport: balancing on beams, swinging from bars, creating “floor” routines on the back lawn, doing back-walkovers across the living room, the splits while watching television, twirls while waiting for my toast to pop, vaults over picnic tables. Nadia Comăneci, the great Romanian gymnast and sweetheart of the 1976 Montreal Olympics, had inspired me to turn myself into a leaping, twisting, tumbling sprite.
I covered the walls of my bedroom in collages created from hundreds of photographs I’d snipped from newspapers and sports magazines of Nadia in various poses and contortions. Her fourteen-year-old body was strong, limber, infallible; her face spoke of resolve and guts. She was the first thing I looked at in the morning, the point of reference I used throughout the day, and the person I was determined to become.
Nadia had scored the first “perfect 10” in gymnastics history and after poring over her routines and photographs with a hypercritical eye, I subjected myself to the same scrutiny. Good was not good enough; excellent wasn’t either. Lots of gymnasts were excellent—Teodora Ungureanu was second only to Nadia, but who’s ever heard of Teodora Ungureanu? No, in order to stand out, in order to win, to be rewarded, admired and celebrated, I would have to be perfect.
Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter Page 5
