Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter

by Alison Wearing

  But my attempts-to-emulate-Nadia phase was as doomed as my wannabe-Laura-Ingalls phase of several years earlier. For one, I smiled too much; couldn’t help it. No steely look of determination for me. My curls made the gymnast-ponytail look comical (again, think horizontal). But most crucially, I was too old. By the time I joined the Peterborough Gymnastics Club, I was (the near-decrepit age of) ten; Nadia had started at five. While she had trained eight hours a day, the most I could register for was eight per week. Still, I tried. Ten points for effort. Too much effort, as it turned out, for I trained so hard and incessantly that by the time I was twelve I had developed debilitating lower back pain.

  After a few inconclusive appointments with our family doctor, my mother took me to a sports doctor in Toronto. Initially I felt quite proud to have an appointment with a sports doctor—it was the kind of thing, I felt, that Nadia would have done—but a bone scan revealed a stress fracture in one of my lower vertebrae. In addition to a period of two to three months of rest, the specialist prescribed a daily diet of twelve—count ’em: twelve—aspirins per day. I was a wisp of a thing, well under a hundred pounds, so the regimen was almost guaranteed to blot out my back pain, in addition, no doubt, to most other sensations.

  Directly after my appointment, my mother and I went to have dinner with my dad at his city apartment. I told him all about my stress fracture, and then he and my mom discussed it a bit while I chatted and laughed with my dad’s roommate, Tom, who was friendly and lots of fun. I don’t remember what dinner was like, but afterwards, Tom and my mom joked about how messy my dad was in the kitchen, and then she said, “Well, we don’t want to keep you from the pleasure of doing the dishes!” and we got going. At the door, Dad thanked us for coming, Mom thanked him for dinner, we all hugged, and then my mom and I drove back to Peterborough.

  My Acetylsalicylic Acid Period was not my happiest. I missed gymnastics. I missed the natural joy that comes with being so active and passionately engaged. After a few months of rest, my back was no better (I was still in chronic pain, despite the aspirin-buzz), and I agreed, reluctantly but resignedly, to give up gymnastics for good.

  Briefly, as consolation, I took up ballet, but just as I was beginning to enjoy the classes, I developed the first hint of flesh on my thighs and stomach and felt too fat and old to continue. The back pain would dog me for the rest of my adolescence, but like so many other things, its intensity faded as I grew used to it.

  My father had been spending a lot of time away, having taken part of his half-year’s sabbatical in Germany. One night, while I was lying on the floor playing with the latest litter of puppies, the telephone rang.

  “Hello?” I answered.

  “Hi, it’s Dad!” he said excitedly, transatlantic telephone calls still an echoey and miraculous venture in those days.

  “Oh, hi, I’ll get Mom,” I said immediately, putting down the phone, calling up the stairs, and lying back down amid the warm kibble-breath of the puppies.

  I discovered later that my father was shocked and hurt by my indifference, but I was so accustomed to his extended absences I hadn’t even realized that that transatlantic call was the first time we had spoken in three months.

  My parents never fought, which isn’t to say they didn’t disagree or that my father didn’t drive my mother “ ’round the bend,” as she used to say, by arriving late to virtually everything (especially concerts, train stations, airports and diaper changes), or by following her down the driveway as she left on a very rare two-week holiday with her mother and sister to say, “I just want to tell you, this comes at a very inconvenient time.” Or by leaving his nightly cereal bowl and spoon on the counter in such a way that it left a little milk puddle for her to wipe up every morning. Et cetera.

  The only thing I ever heard about my mother that may have driven my father bonkers was the way she clammed up when she was upset and retreated to the family room, where she would close the door, curl up in a rocking chair and listen to Schubert Lieder. For hours. If my father pursued her and asked what was wrong, the answer was always “Nothing.” So, they did not yell at each other or even raise their voices, and with what felt like logic, I thought that meant that Everything Was Fine.

  Paul was reading books about Churchill, little white dogs were running around in bloodied training pants, my mother was running around good-naturedly from marathon races to piano to dishwasher, and though Flip briefly replaced hat bacon with finger bacon (hot dogs) and tried cheese, he quickly reverted to his signature diet, we all exhaled, and life returned to normal again.

  When my father returned from his sabbatical in Germany, he busied himself in the garden, as he did every summer, his bare back browning in the sun as he meandered and crouched along the edges of his elaborate, curving flowerbeds, his shirt flung over his head like a floppy bonnet. (“Why is your dad wearing a bonnet?” my friend Mary once asked. “Oh,” I said, casting a glance at his strange getup, and answering, rather portentously it seems now, “my dad’s different; he does things like that.”)

  My father was forever trying to engage me in examining a flower—“Look at the way this one blooms so audaciously!”—and I was forever bored with all the blooming. When he wasn’t gardening, listening to music or fussing over a recipe from Gourmet magazine, he was involved with life at the university or life in Toronto; I never really distinguished between the two.

  On rare and special occasions, my brothers and I went with him to Toronto, although normally we went one at a time as that made for unique, individually tailored adventures. My own father–daughter weekends included things like The Nutcracker ballet or eating fancy cakes in restaurants with embossed menus and handsome waiters who asked, “And for the young lady?”—meaning me!

  But most of the time, I stayed in Peterborough and led an ordinary, contented, little life: I had good friends, enjoyed school, read books, took up the flute. And whenever I had the urge, I would walk in long afternoon light through the fields at the end of our road to a hilltop with a view of spiral hay bales and a barn.

  Life was comfortable, simple and mostly predictable. I had no reason to believe it would ever be otherwise.

  TRUTH

  I remember the night my mother told me.

  I was twelve, though I cannot place the feeling of that age. Thinking back to the moment the floor cracked, I was like a fledgling bird: transparent skin clinging to bone and an exposed throat, wide and voiceless, wings folded tight to my body.

  The following day I would step onto an airplane alone and fly to Frankfurt to spend a month with the family of a German girl I had met through a gymnastics exchange. I had stopped doing gymnastics by then, but I was excited at the prospect of adventure. I was also nervous, I imagine, although that emotion is something I have stapled to the memory rather than something that calls itself up on its own. All that I truly remember is sitting in the kitchen perched on a stool with two fold-down steps that I gripped with my toes and kept lifting and dropping to the floor. Creak creak creak—crash. My mother was unloading the dishwasher, her eyes pulled tight with annoyance at both the continual slamming of the steps and my persistent questions:

  “Will Dad be at the airport tomorrow to see me off?”

  Creak creak creak—crash.

  “Why doesn’t he come home very much anymore?”

  Creak creak creak—crash.

  “I don’t see why he has to have an apartment in Toronto …”

  Creak creak creak—crash.

  “Well,” my mother began, clicking three brown and white cereal bowls together and stacking them in the cupboard, then standing for an extra few moments and running her hand along the counter. “There are a lot of things about Dad that you don’t know.”

  “Like what?” I asked in the tone of a challenge, a schoolyard taunt, with saucy shoulders and a raised chin, the way I would speak to a girl who claimed to know something embarrassing about me that she was threatening to broadcast to the class.

  Or, no.
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  That wasn’t it at all. It was more of a mealy-mouthed squeak, the way someone might talk if they felt that the flight of their voice into the air might collapse the roof.

  “Like what?”

  For a long time she said nothing, just walked back to the dishwasher, pulled up the cutlery basket and set it on the counter with her back to me. I watched her gather all the knives together and place them—clink clink clink—into the drawer. Then the forks, her strong pianist’s fingers folding around the tines and pulling the utensils up, one by one.

  It was many years before I stopped to wonder how she might have felt as she drew those forks out of that blue plastic mesh basket—one … at … a … time—and decided what to say. That moment has come to me many times along with memories of that dishwasher, the one that seemed to vomit grit all over the dishes as it washed them, bits of black sand we would pry loose with our fingernails from cups and spoons before we used them. If she was around, my brothers and I would always blame my mother for the silt—Maawwm, there’s crud on this bowl!—as though she’d deliberately sprinkled sand on the clean dishes before putting them away. How she kept herself from curling her arm and Frisbee-ing the half-clean plates at our heads is still beyond me.

  So I have thought of the dishwasher and that stool, its orange flower-patterned seat and the two rubber-matted steps we would flip down to climb up and reach the cereal shelf. And I have thought of that twelve-year-old girl in her nightie, the feeling of being perched, and of anticipating her first flight alone the next day.

  But only now, more than thirty years later, do I find myself staring out at overgrown grass and the whiteness of a tired sky, recalling the moment and wondering, for the first time, what my mother may have felt as she decided what to say.

  “Do you remember the time you came back from Toronto and told me that Dad had taken you to a gay bar?” she asked, pulling out a bundle of spoons and placing them, with excruciating gentleness, in the drawer.

  Our kitchen floor. That spongy beige linoleum with the brown swiggly patterns designed for some purpose utterly unrelated to aesthetics. I burrowed into it, the brute ugliness of it, my eyes digging frantically for a way out of the conversation, the room, the fire that began to fill my body. I recall pulling myself into a ball, drawing my knees up under my sheer white nightgown until it threatened to split down the middle. That terrifying and exhilarating sensation of near evisceration. And how, underneath the threat of explosion, my stomach tightened into such a small knot that it virtually disappeared.

  For years.

  Sitting there with my toes curled over the stool’s edge, I rewound my mind to the phrase and replayed it: Dad took me to a gay bar.

  Why had I said that? Anyway, I hadn’t meant it like that. But why did I say “a gay bar”? It was just a fancy restaurant we had gone to, with a handsome waiter and a chandelier. Had Dad called it a gay bar? If he had, he was probably joking. Maybe he meant “gay” as in “happy,” because it was actually quite a happy restaurant. Happy restaurant, gay bar. Same thing! What a mistake!

  That entire string of denial spun through my mind in a few seconds and then snapped, because the moment I looked up, my mother’s expression said it all.

  There was no mistake. And there was nothing happy about this.

  I don’t remember what was said in what order, but I do remember my mother concluding that it wasn’t going to be easy for my father. That being gay meant “a lonely life.” Which made the whole thing even more impossible to understand. Why would he want that? Why would he want to have a lonely life in Toronto when he could just be here with us?

  I didn’t understand what being gay meant, aside from knowing that it was Very Bad News and had to do with boys kissing boys. Which was gross. There were no gay references in my world in those days, and I had no context for that word at all. No one said He’s gay other than as an insult, and I knew very well that there was nothing at school or in the neighbourhood—nothing—worse than that.

  How could my dad suddenly be the worst thing there was? How could that possibly, possibly be?

  I remember crying a lot and feeling freezing cold, even though it was the middle of summer. Neither of my brothers was home—were they at summer camp?—so the house had a huge emptiness about it that night; just my mother and me under a bell jar. I don’t remember any of the questions I asked or what else my mother said. Except that towards the end of the evening, just before we made our dazed way to bed, she took a deep breath and said, “And do you know what else?”

  What else? Oh God. How could there possibly be an else?

  Then she told me: Virginia, my former gymnastics coach, was also gay (the word lesbian hadn’t arrived yet in Peterborough). And, as if that wasn’t enough, she and Mrs. Harper, the mother of my fellow gymnast and friend Julie, had “just run off together.”

  I was greatly relieved by this news, even though I had no idea (again) what any of it meant. For some reason, I had been instantly terrified that the else was that my mother was gay too. Why not? At that point, anything seemed possible. But no, thank God thank God thank God, it was only Virginia. And Mrs. Harper. The two of them clad in blue jeans with the cuffs rolled up (I imagined), skipping hurriedly through fields of tall grasses, hand in hand, “running off together.” Why, or to where, I could not imagine.

  I wish I could say that I felt sad for my friend Julie, but I’m not sure I had the capacity to feel sorry for anyone but myself at that moment. It was more likely that I got a small jolt of pleasure from Julie’s misfortune, that seductive sting of glad-it’s-not-me delight that drives gossip mills and tabloids. For I was definitely comforted to know that there were other parents going off and doing unimaginably awful things, and heartened to hear that my life could have been a whole lot worse. Until then, it had never occurred to me that mothers could leave home; as far as I was concerned, they were home. So at least it wasn’t my mother who was running off to be gay; that would have been like the whole house collapsing. My dad running off to be gay just felt like a bomb had gone off in my stomach.

  At the airport the next day, I clutched my ticket to Frankfurt so forcefully that by the time I checked in, the smudged lettering was almost illegible. My mother was there, as always, and my father arrived late, as always, just as I was about to walk through the customs gate, a series of doors and officials that felt menacing; I couldn’t imagine how I would get past them all without bursting from the pressure of the tears and terror I held inside.

  I don’t remember the actual goodbye, only my father’s quick step as he arrived (from his Toronto apartment) and his jolly manner, the way he grabbed my mother playfully around the waist, and how she flinched. Steeled herself and tried to be good-natured. Albeit stiffly.

  No doubt my mother regretted the previous evening’s disclosure. It hadn’t been planned and the timing was, obviously, pretty dreadful. She had found out about my dad only a few months earlier, so maybe her judgment was off. Whatever it was, I felt completely disoriented even before boarding the plane.

  The memory crunches at this point, the way our old 8mm films used to at the end of a reel. Ours were among the first generation of home movies, and oh did we love them, my brothers and I. Nothing, but nothing, could compete with watching silent stilted scenes of ourselves at various stages of development. Our greatest shrieks of delight came on those evenings when my father would clap his hands together and suggest that we set up the projector.

  There he is: Paul, at age three, trying his hand at conducting with my father’s baton, a look of acute seriousness falling across his face as he waves the stick around him, flipping the pages of the music score with great concentration, but backwards, following various lines with his finger, his intensity and passion building (pure child mimicry here), tongue curled over his lip, until he is conducting so furiously that it looks as though the baton is about to take flight. Hilarious every time.

  Or precious moments such as my potty training outside a crumbling s
tone house in southern France, Paul proudly marching around the bowl of urine in his Buckingham Palace–guard costume while I waddle towards the camera with a smile of self-satisfaction. I could have watched the scene a thousand times. Especially for a child, it is pleasing to see proof that one was once effortlessly adorable.

  There are summers at cottages with untannable English friends, watermelon-seed spitting contests and unhappy babies in playpens. Unintentional shots of my grandmother’s shins as she sits on the sofa watching us on Christmas morning the year she gives us the Fisher-Price castle—could our mouths have stretched wider with joy? There is Judy, the skinny English nanny who lived with us for a year, tossing grapes up into the air with my mother, the two of them catching the fruits in their mouths with great comical self-congratulations each time a little green orb makes it through the drawbridge of their teeth. My brothers and me (aged seven, six and three) marching angrily the length of the kitchen with placards that read WE WANT TO STAY UP FOR THE PARTY! and ERLY BEDTIME – NO WAY! while my mother and her sister sit off to the side giggling into their hands. Aunt Sally, ever the sophisticate, posing seductively in a doorway exhibiting the uncommon talent of crossing her eyes and making circles with only the right one. Flip posing solemnly with Ida the black Lab, Flip in his best shirt and Ida in a headband of ribbons, just after his announcement that he intended, a bit later in life, to marry her. My father dancing around in the backyard, his hands flitting about like butterflies, urging us to join him. His enthusiasm is visibly contagious and in no time my brothers and I, Flip still a toddler, are delightedly following behind trying to imitate my father’s style, wobbling our hips and swirling our hands behind him as he prances around the garden like a fairy.