It sounded absurd, two people on either end of a joint like that, their faces, their lips, almost touching, while one blew smoke into the other’s mouth.
“The trick is to keep the joint lit without burning the inside of your mouth. I guess I was good at it. At our parties, people would line up for one of my brain tokes, boys and girls, but mostly boys.” She sighed as if she was growing impatient with me. “And surely you can guess what brain toke is another name for? Rachel gives good brain tokes. Rachel gives good…You get it?”
I forced a laugh.
“Yeah, well…Look, there were a few guys at one party. I never even knew their names. I was so out of it I hardly knew what I was doing. Just a few, okay? That’s all it was. But Carmen told Fritz about it. When I met him at their wedding in Halifax, the first thing he said after hello was, ‘Could I get a brain toke, baby sister?’ No, actually, the first thing he said was, ‘Well, if it isn’t Rachellatio.’ He and Carmen thought it was hilarious. You have that look on your face again. You think that I’m as bad as Fritz and Carmen.”
“No,” I said, though I was reeling from the phrase a few guys. “I know how easy it is for a girl to get a reputation she doesn’t deserve.”
“Well, something’s wrong. I can see it in your face. What is it? Are you worried that people might laugh at you behind your back because you’re going out with me? Some people already are.” She was on the verge of tears.
“Rachel—”
“All right, all right, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I worry that my family will make you think I’m even crazier than I am.”
“I’ve known stranger families,” I said.
“I’m sure you think you have,” Rachel said, “but I very much doubt it. The drugs were just a phase for Bethany and me. But Carmen…” She shook her head as if to say, There are no words. “She used to be so sweet. She is sweet, once you get to know her.”
Still shaken by that knife, I couldn’t get Rachellatio out of my head. But at the same time I was wondering if I had yet to write a word of my book because I’d led such a small-town, parochial life. Fritz with his switchblade and his heroin-addicted wife, and all that Rachel had confided in me—I had only ever heard of such things.
Standing in front of the fireplace, we shared a glass of cognac. Rachel said, “Carmen was doing drugs long before they met, so I can’t blame him for that, not entirely. I’d only met him once before I went to their wedding. Carmen met him in 1975, when we went back to South Africa for Dad’s sabbatical. She came home with us but got herself a pad, as she called it, with some other, older kids in St. John’s. Not long after that, Fritz sent her the airfare to come back to South Africa to live with him. She ran off without telling anyone at home that she was leaving. Mom and Dad will never forget that. The first we heard that she was getting married was when we got the wedding invitations. I was the only one from the family who went. Mom and Dad kind of sent me. They’d written to her and told her she was too young, at nineteen, to get married to anyone. After Fritz did his national service in South Africa, he didn’t go to university. He had no career plans. Mom and Dad hoped that, if she knew they weren’t coming, Carmen might not go through with the wedding. Gloria was in South Africa—she’s a flight attendant who’s based there now—but she wouldn’t have gone to the wedding anyway because she and Carmen don’t get along. Bethany was in the hospital. I can’t believe that, when I saw the van, I was more worried about the impression Carmen would make on you than I was about Fritz. If I’d known, I would have never let you come inside. I wouldn’t have gone in, with you or without you. I don’t know what you must think of me having a sister and a brother-in-law like that. My family are all so weird. I hope you don’t think I am too. I mean, aside from the time I devote to Anne Frank, I’m not hopelessly weird, am I?”
I put my glass on the mantel and took her in my arms. “You know what I think of you,” I said.
She nodded, her head against my shoulder. “Well, the surprises just keep coming, don’t they? The van Hout hit parade. How many will be one too many for you?”
“Let’s stay at my place tonight in case they come back.”
“They won’t, but okay. We’ll feel better at least. But let’s walk. I don’t want them driving by and seeing that the Malibu is gone.”
Later, as we sat at my card table, looking out the window of the garret, her eyes welled up.
“She was my favourite sister, you know. I wish you’d known her back then. She said that I was part of her and that she was part of me. She was always saying things like that. I loved it when she smiled at me. I looked up to her, literally, when we held hands on the playground. I remember the feel of her hand. Those big eyes of hers—I loved the way they smiled at me. She used to have such rosy cheeks. I trusted her more than I trusted anyone. She loved me, and I loved her so much. She thought she had to protect me from everyone.
“Once, she took me to the bioscope, the movies, at Rondebosch, and we got stoned while watching Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. She was twelve and I was eight. I was so stoned I thought the seven brothers looked exactly alike. Carmen thought that was hilarious. She said the word septuplets and it sounded so strange we couldn’t stop laughing. We got caught, right there in the bioscope, by some narc who was not much older than Carmen and turned out to be our second cousin on my mother’s side. A real goody two-shoes. He called Mom, and she came to get us and talked him out of reporting us. On the way home she told us she was disappointed with us but never said another word about it.
“Once, Carmen and I accidentally got on board a train reserved for non-whites. The passengers urged us to go to the white train. ‘Please, miss and miss, go to the other train or we will get in trouble.’ Carmen was stoned, so she thought it was hilarious. I thought it was strange that the coloureds would be the ones who would get into trouble for our mistake. At the time, I didn’t think that much about coloured people, but Carmen did. She pestered Mom and Dad about how unfairly they were treated. Mom would tell her that coloured people couldn’t be given responsibilities until they were educated. Until then, we had to protect ourselves from them and protect them from themselves. Even after they were educated, there would still be apartheid, she said, because, if you mixed the races, God would be displeased and send forth a plague of birth defects upon his people, as he did when children were born of incest. ‘Where in the Bible does it say that?’ Carmen was always asking.
“We were close until she met Fritz. ‘You don’t get him like I do,’ she told me. ‘You have to see beneath the surface. Most people think that what they see is real. I don’t. You know that Mom and Dad are not what they let on to be. Fritz says that the whole world has to be torn down and built back up the right way. It might be a long time before the revolution starts, but when it does, there’ll be no need for people like our parents.’
“But she knew her way around Mom and Dad. She told me that if we acted as if we were doing nothing wrong, they would act as if we were doing nothing wrong. After we came back to St. John’s from Cape Town in 1976, Carmen and I used to have these huge parties in the basement. Most of our friends slept over because, by midnight, they couldn’t make it up the stairs. We had beer and grass and acid, and there was always someone who could afford cocaine. Mom and Dad must have smelled the grass and heard the noise, but they never came down to complain or check on us. And in the morning they cleaned up after us. They saw the punctured beer cans, the butt ends of joints, the matchboxes stuffed with hash or grass, the scorched tinfoil, the hash pipes. If some of our friends were still there passed out on the floor, they just stepped over them. By the time they were done, the basement looked as if the party never happened. In our house, if you acted like something wasn’t there, it wasn’t. If you acted like something hadn’t happened, it hadn’t.
“Mom used to go around singing this song:
Now Cocaine Bill and Morphine Sue were walking d
own the avenue
Honey have a sniff, have a sniff on me
Honey have a sniff on me.
They walked from Broadway down to Main
looking for a store that sold cocaine.
Now in the graveyard on the hill
lies the body of Morphine Bill
and in the graveyard by his side
lies the body of his cocaine bride.
“That’s the closest she ever came to telling us she knew what was going on.”
“That’s not how I grew up” was all that I could think to say.
From The Ballad of the Clan van Hout
CARMEN (1979)
(A piece not read to anyone,
a piece I wrote when she was gone,
a piece withheld from the Salon.)
My second one, a quiet child,
was never one for running wild.
For days you never said a word—
I wasn’t certain that you knew
a word of what was said to you.
You had to see a specialist—
he said you lagged behind the rest
and you might never be the best
at anything you tried to do.
“But that of course depends on you.
There’s nothing wrong with Carmen’s ears.
It’s that expression that she wears
that gives me reason for concern.
It might be someone else’s turn,
another kind of specialist,
perhaps a child psychiatrist:
I know a good man down the street.
I think he’s someone you should meet.”
I never saw that quack again—
I’d had it up to here with men
who conferred with one another
about my failings as a father.
You had such lovely long black hair—
you would twist it round your finger
as you stared into the fire,
a schoolgirl trying to think through
a problem she was told to do.
You were slow to learn The Ballad—
you were ten before you had it
half as well as Baby Sister;
you recited in a whisper,
beneath your breath, like a prayer
that no one else was meant to hear.
The girl that I think of as you
no longer shy, no longer blue,
burst from her room at age thirteen
as spiteful as she was bone mean.
You mocked my every word and move
as if you thought I had to prove
that I was worth the air I breathed,
as if my little girl had seethed
with hate for me since she was born,
her every word adrip with scorn.
You came home with all kinds of boys—
hippies who would proselytize
as if they had rehearsed at school
how best to prove me but a fool,
oblivious to politics,
an easy mark for all the tricks
of men who needed votes from me.
Your Mom and what you called her kind
you mocked as if they’d lost their minds,
the blinking owls, the abject wives
of men like me who toed the line,
and spent their bland, complacent lives
enslaved by the Establishment—
and there could be no argument
that She, like all the other wives,
in thrall to men like Hans van Hout
who, once a month, might take them out,
who bought them their appliances
and doled out their allowances,
was just another doormat hen,
a racist mom who liked to sew,
upholder of the status quo
who stayed at home and raised her kids
and voted as her husband did.
I heard it all from noon to night
and never once put up a fight.
In fact, I never said a word—
I’d act as if I hadn’t heard
you when you barged in through the door.
She tidied up the kitchen floor
as you remarked on what She wore,
her “mousy doormat pinafore.”
My silence made you that much worse—
you’d stamp and storm about and curse.
You took some drug in front of me;
I still pretended not to see.
The days and years went by this way:
I held my tongue, you had your say.
Each month it was another boy,
another drug, another toy.
“There never was a Land of Hout,”
you said, “just a garden, a house,
a bunch of rooms with furniture—
now someone else is living there.
It isn’t ours anymore.
Why don’t you knock on their front door,
say ‘Land of Hout, proprietors’
and see how fast you land up in
the lockup or the loony bin?”
Irreverence and sacrilege
are born of too much privilege.
What I think sacred is profane,
especially the family name.
You spit it out, the name van Hout,
like something vile shoved in your mouth.
Things haven’t changed, though years have passed,
each day a copy of the last—
I ask what you are mad about;
you roll your eyes, throw up your hands
as if I wouldn’t understand
the grudge you hold against the Land.
It’s one thing for you to blame it,
another thing for you to name it.
I am the very soul of sin—
and They who let the Rumours in?
You never say a word of Them.
I did the best I could for you.
How could anyone stay true
to such a child, a dissident
with nothing to protest against?
You left before you went away,
you found yourself a place to stay,
a “pad” for which I had to pay.
You called Her My, still called me Dad.
I went to visit, not with My—
I knew She couldn’t stand that I
would let you gloat as if you’d won.
You knew I’d let you have your fun;
your tantrums passed and you calmed down.
Till after dark, we made small talk,
the two of us, we took those walks
before we drove out to the Cape.
I dropped you off and got home late.
Your mother did not make a fuss,
a woman scorned by both of us.
I still recall you sitting there
as Rachel brushed your long black hair,
enchanted by the roaring blaze,
a child lost in a fog, a daze,
a child remembering the days
before she came into the world,
before she was a little girl,
a child still in the Land of Hout
before They let the Rumours out,
before the Rumours spoiled Within—
van Hout was cast Without again.
WADE
“So when do I get to meet your family?” Rachel said, a week after the encounter with Carmen and Fri
tz, as we hiked along the base of Signal Hill, the waves echoing in the caves beneath the ground we walked on.
“They’re very short,” I said.
“Well, I wish you’d told me that before, because I don’t date guys who have short parents.”
“It’s a defining feature of the Jacksons, except for me. My mom is four ten. Dad’s about five two; my brothers and sisters range between five three and five six.”
“You’re what, six four? How did that happen?”
I shrugged. “I don’t eat vegetables, as you know. They do.”
She laughed. “And you think that’s why you’re taller than them?”
“That’s what they think. I eat a lot of protein because I like fish. I had to cook it myself because no one else in the family but Dad liked it. I mean, it’s all just a joke. Sort of. You’re taller than all of them and you’re a vegetarian.”
“You make them sound like gnomes.”
“I’ve given you accurate numbers. Anyway, consider yourself invited. I’ll check with Mom about how much time she’ll need to lecture the others on how to behave. Not that it will have any effect.”
“Thanks for not making me nervous. Don’t say anything about Fritz and Carmen, okay?”
I smiled at her. “Believe me,” I said, “I wasn’t planning to.”
“Well, don’t say anything about my diary or Anne Frank, either. Not yet.”
“Relax,” I said. “I’ll think up a pseudonym for you.”
“And don’t tell your mother that I’m a vegetarian. She’ll get all flustered if you do.”
“But if I don’t tell her, there might not be much for you to eat, and then she’ll get even more flustered and so will everyone else, and you’ll be hungry. You don’t know my mom.”
“Well, I know that she’ll ask you to ask me what I want for dinner, and it wouldn’t be polite for me to tell her what I want. Don’t worry, I’ll be fine.” She sounded as if she’d faced exactly this situation a thousand times before.
* * *
—
A few days later, as we drove to my parents’ house, I asked Rachel if she’d ever been to Petty Harbour, my hometown.
“I’ve driven through there,” she said. “And it’s on a lot of postcards.”
“That’s because it’s the closest outport to St. John’s. Tourists can drive five miles and say they’ve been to an outport.”
The Mystery of Right and Wrong Page 9
