First Spring Grass Fire

by Rae Spoon

  We are from different eras, but my grandmother and I have more similarities than our love of sports and music. When we were putting together a slide show for her seventy-fifth birthday, my sister found a tiny photo in a box and e-mailed it to me. It was of a woman in a wedding dress and a man in a suit. I was confused because I didn’t think the woman looked like my grandmother, but then I noticed that the man looked a lot like me. It was her, smiling with her arm through the other woman’s, dressed in drag sometime in the 1940s. When my sister asked her about it, she said, “Oh, that was silly. I don’t know why we did that.” I guess we are both keeping secrets from each other.

  Outsiders

  I MET RENA BECAUSE our last names were near each other in the alphabet. We were seated alphabetically in school, and no one in our Career and Life Management class had a last name starting with the letter between ours. I was sixteen and she had just turned seventeen. That first day I spent the entire class looking straight ahead. When I turned around, I noticed how beautiful she was. I wanted to talk to her, but didn’t know what to say. So I said, “Your purse looks like a dead rat.” To my surprise, she laughed. The next day I grabbed her eraser and sawed it in half with my pencil in a second awkward gesture of friendship. She didn’t seem to mind, and soon we became allies in making fun of our teacher, especially when he tried to instill in us the value of investing in mutual funds and real estate. We were teenagers, after all; I was more worried about if I’d get away with skipping a class or who was going to buy my cigarettes.

  We had to pair up to work on a project about current social issues, so Rena and I decided to work together. When the topics were pulled out of a hat, we got schizophrenia. At least I know a lot about it, I thought.

  The weekend we were supposed to put together our project, my father was hospitalized for threatening my family. I met up with Rena at the public library. Although we hadn’t been friends for long, she could tell something was off. “What’s going on with you today?” she asked. “You’re really quiet.”

  “I don’t feel well,” I mumbled.

  “Come on. You don’t seem sick. Did something happen?” she prodded.

  I had been hiding my father’s episodes since they began, but Rena’s eyes were kind, and gazing into them made me want to tell her the truth. “My dad is a schizophrenic,” I whispered. “I found out when I was eleven. Every once in a while, he flips out and ends up in the hospital. Yesterday, it happened again.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that before?” she asked. “We could have switched or something.”

  “I didn’t want to make a big deal about it,” I said. “But reading about schizophrenia is really making me feel bad.”

  “Listen, I’ll do the research and write the text,” she said. “How about you just draw and colour the pictures of the brains for our poster?”

  So we sat there together in the library all afternoon, Rena taking notes while I coloured in pictures beside her. Occasionally, I would steal a look at her leaning over the books with her hair hanging in her face.

  On Monday when we made our class presentation, I was so out of it I could barely speak. I had gotten a call from my mother that morning and found out that she had planned to let my father come home after he got out the hospital. Even though I didn’t live with them anymore, I was really tired of the same thing happening over and over. I just stood next to Rena as I held up the red poster board with little pictures and bits of text glued to it, staring at the floor. When we sat down, the teacher said, “This is a great project, Rena, but Rae doesn’t seem to know much about it.”

  I didn’t bother arguing. The weekend I had just been through wasn’t something I felt like explaining as part of the project. Besides, Rena was in the advanced program and I had basically given up on school altogether. I’d barely passed any of my courses—even music, where I had neglected theory to write songs.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Rena said after class, touching my shoulder before walking away. My eyes followed her down the hallway.

  Since Rena knew about my father, I stopped hiding things from her. We started passing notes to each other in class and then ones we had written between classes. Through these notes, we learned each other’s secrets. Rena loaned me her favourite book, The Outsider by Albert Camus. I devoured every page of it. She also introduced me to the Smiths. I would walk around the suburbs with them reverberating in the headphones of a yellow Walkman that she loaned me. Soon, all I thought about was Rena. I rehashed our conversations when we were apart and glowed when we were together.

  Then Rena wrote in a note that she wanted me to see her favourite movie, Heathers. I wrote back and invited her to stay over and watch the movie. That Friday we took the bus back to my grandma’s house. I talked nervously during the entire ride. I had a warm tickle in my stomach that wouldn’t go away. I hoped Rena couldn’t tell. A few months earlier I had come out as gay to a friend whom I’d had many sleepovers with and she had told me that she wanted to stop being friends. I didn’t want that to happen again.

  At dinner, my grandmother tried to feed Rena roast beef, even though she had announced she was a vegetarian. I don’t think I had ever met one before, so I was as confused as my grandma when Rena refused it. We fed her broccoli and mashed potatoes instead. Then we watched her videotape of Heathers in the living room, sitting close to each other on the couch. When it was time to go to bed, we said goodnight to my grandmother and headed to my room in the basement of the house. I went to the bathroom and changed into my pajamas and then Rena did the same. We stayed up talking quietly until the sky turned from black to dark blue and the birds started singing.

  We began sleeping at each other’s houses every weekend. Eventually, hiding my sexuality started to feel deceitful, considering I had told her all of my other secrets. One day, I decided to tell her.

  Sitting cross-legged facing one another on her bed on a Friday afternoon, I told her I had something to tell her, but then I stumbled on my words. “Write it down,” she said, and passed a piece of paper to me.

  I picked up an orange marker and wrote “I am gay,” then folded up the note and passed it back to her. She unfolded it and read it. The back of my neck grew hot with the looming possibility of being abandoned again. But then she raised her head and said, “I’m not homophobic.” A wave of relief washed over me. I wasn’t going to lose her. We then decided to rip up the note and burn it in the backyard. We knew how dangerous those words were if left lying around. Life went back to normal; we kept passing notes and sleeping at each other’s houses. A few months later, I knew I couldn’t hide my other secret either. I liked her. I’d always liked her.

  On one of the last days of school that June, I shakily wrote out another note. Actually, it was more like a survey. In it, I put two questions.

  The first was: “Do you think you could date a girl?”

  The second read: “Do you think you could like me?”

  Next to each question, I put two boxes for her to check: one said “Yes” and the other said “No.” At the end of lunchtime, I handed the note to her, then went to my afternoon classes. I knew I was gambling with our friendship and all of my happiness. When she handed it back after school, I opened it cautiously. Inside she had checked the “Yes” box for both questions. I felt like the prairie wind was lifting me right off of the ground.

  That night, she came to sleep over at my grandmother’s house again. We lay across from each other on top of the blankets. Neither of us had ever kissed anyone before. It occurred to me that I didn’t know how. We spent a lot of time listening to a Simon and Garfunkel record and awkwardly figuring out how to match the feelings we had with our bodies. It was somehow perfect because it was much safer than I had ever felt having anyone so close to me.

  Then it came an abrupt halt. Rena went to England to visit her family for seven weeks. The day after she left, I had my first panic attack. I was alone in my room when it occurred to me that she could die before I ever saw he
r again. I couldn’t talk to anyone about it, and in my paranoid state it grew into the thought that she probably would die before I ever saw her again. I had someone I wanted more than anything. Given my history, it seemed logical that she would be taken away. My love turned into a quiet desperation. I did everything I could to distract myself. There were no letters and no phone calls, no proof that she was alive beside the fact that no one had called me to tell me otherwise. But then, maybe her family wouldn’t call me even if something did happen.

  When Rena finally came home, I didn’t recognize her at first. I felt like I was looking up out of the bottom of a well. She had been in London and Amsterdam, where she shopped and even went to a Michael Jackson concert. She was wearing makeup and different earrings. She said she had written, but her letters would take six weeks to arrive. She felt like she couldn’t call because her family was nosy and she wasn’t sure if they would have eavesdropped. I couldn’t put into words the terror of my daily panic attacks. It took a week for things to start to feel the same as they did before she left.

  The first day of grade twelve, I found out what it was like to try to hide something that I was very excited about. I would see Rena between classes and want to grab her hand or kiss her. By lunch hour it became unbearable, and we stole away to an alley near the school, so we could be close for a minute.

  “This is really hard,” I said. “Whenever I see you, I want to kiss you.”

  “I know,” she replied. “It’s really messed up that we have to hide something I feel so good about.”

  That was also the year that Ellen came out on national TV. We watched the show together with the volume on low in my basement room. Now we knew that there were places we could run to where being queer was okay, like San Francisco or Los Angeles. Rena and I became bolder. We started to tell our friends that we were together. After it became clear that most people at high school already knew, we gave up and started to do whatever we wanted even though we had to endure people hurling insults at us constantly.

  One day a friend at school said to me, “Hey Rae, I hear you’ve got rights.” I didn’t know what she was talking about, but she explained that a teacher had won a discrimination case filed with the Alberta Human Rights Commission after he was fired from a Christian school for being gay, which led to sexual orientation being protected under provincial human rights legislation. All day I walked around the school chanting, “You can’t hurt me, I have rights,” at all the other students. One girl came up to me and said, “I don’t believe in you.”

  “I don’t care if you believe in me,” I said. “Just don’t beat me up.”

  I thought that Rena and I were going to get married. That’s what people who were in love were supposed to do. We just had to make it through the last year of high school. We talked about having children together and what we might name them. We were totally absorbed in the way that people can be when they’ve never broken up before. It was supposed to last forever.

  But we were both extremely jealous and would sometimes fight terribly. There was so much outside pressure that when we finally did graduate from high school, our relationship fell apart. Rena went to university and I got a job at a gas station. Graduation was not the finish line, but it was the beginning of our separate lives.

  Our affair is over now, but it still exists in the memories of all of the nights we spent together talking and listening to old records in my basement as teenagers. I can go back to those moments and remember how complete I felt. She was the first person that I ever felt safe to be myself around. It gave me hope that I could construct something secure and new for myself. It gave me a reason to work out the ugliness inside me. I spent the next ten years wrestling with my past, but Rena was always somewhere nearby to remind me why it was worth the fight.

  Drunk in the Spirit

  IN MY EARLY TEENAGE years, I went to church events five times a week, and our parents hosted a Bible study at our house every Wednesday. My father wanted to boost his reputation around town in case people found out about him being hospitalized for a paranoid breakdown. It seemed important to him that church members saw him sitting there at home, in a circle of chairs with a Bible in his lap, while my mother served coffee and we, his children, sat silently nearby. We mostly obeyed except for an early incident when we carefully lowered a purple slinky from the stairs above onto the pastor’s head. It was a rare moment of slapstick in the midst of our family’s display of “normality,” and fortunately comedic enough that we weren’t punished. Wednesday nights were boring, but at least we were allowed to drink coffee.

  On Friday nights my sister and I were sent off to the church youth group, where hot pizzas, fake graffiti, and loud Christian rap were used to show us the cool side of Jesus: Jesus the skateboarder. Jesus our buddy. Jesus with a flying V guitar. Our youth group had a pool table and its own yellow school bus that would whisk us off to bowling alleys or even larger gatherings of faithful teens. The church also organized youth-oriented sermons designed to keep us from turning into sinners as adults. One Friday an expert on homosexuality preached to us about the perils of “Adam and Steve.” He never mentioned how he became such an expert on gayness, but his talk affected me a lot. I left feeling like a solid sheet of ice had formed over my sexuality. Not only was I certain that I wasn’t gay, I was also certain that I wasn’t straight. I believed I was above sex altogether. It was convenient for me that the next guest speaker was from an abstinence organization. After illustrating the vulnerability of the unmarried to all STIs, the horrors of teen pregnancy, and the consequences of eternal damnation, he handed out pink cards for us to sign that read: “Father God, in the Name of Jesus, this day I commit to glorifying you with my body, soul, and spirit. I offer my body as a living sacrifice, and I pledge to commit to abstinence until marriage, which is my reasonable service. I recognize that at times I may feel tempted or weak, but it’s in these times that I will seek strength and guidance from You and Your Word. I can do nothing in and of myself, however I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me, including henceforth abstaining from sex until marriage. In Jesus’s Name, Amen.”

  That speaker was careful to tell us that those who agreed to sign would be brought up to the front of the church on Sunday morning to celebrate their commitment to abstinence with the entire congregation. Of course, this meant that anyone who didn’t sign would be left to sit in their seats under the disapproving eye of other churchgoers. The open refusal of abstinence would be social suicide; it would mean being banned from activities outside of church and shamed from within it. Every single person at youth group signed their card that night, and on the following Sunday, we all marched proudly up to the front of the church. I don’t know how many of the others were actually virgins, but we were all given a fresh start to save ourselves until marriage and, of course, to be straight.

  This made it a lot easier to explain to my church boyfriend Chad that I just didn’t feel like making out with him. (I’d grown up with him, but only recently started talking to him at youth group; he had asked me to be his girlfriend on the night of the homosexuality sermon.) We had our entire lives to live, and the abstainers’ belief that “true love waits” meant that I could spend less time with him evading his embraces and more time skateboarding, making wallet chains, and jamming on our guitars. These shared activities were my motivation for wanting a boyfriend in the first place. I could wear his big clothes and do boy stuff. I never kissed him the entire time we dated. Our intimacy consisted of holding each other’s sweaty hands at youth group and church. For me, this only helped confirm my lack of sexuality and made celibacy feel natural and easy.

  Meanwhile, I was in love with one of the leaders in youth group. Her name was Carla. She was eighteen and a foot taller than me. She played basketball with the boys and knew how to drive. Every Tuesday night she called to encourage me to come to youth group. At first I thought she was only calling me because each youth leader had a list of outreach calls to make in
order to keep up attendance, but I was talented at keeping her on the phone. We sometimes talked for four hours or more, about Jesus and teenage life. Her father had died when she was a child, and she tried to help me see that the bad things that had happened to my family were all part of God’s plan. She may have had more than a spiritual interest in me. I will never know, though, because I assume she followed the pledge on her pink card right into holy matrimony with a good Christian man.

  On Saturday nights my church had a more casual sermon in the main room. The band would break out the electric pianos, synthesizers, and electric guitars for praise and worship. We would wear dress pants and sweater vests. The more casual the dress code, the more Pentecostal the expressions of the church members would be. It was almost like a youth service for all ages, with everyone from children to people in their eighties praising fervently. Between songs, the band would keep quietly repeating chords while the pastor made rambling, improvised speeches beseeching us to come to God. By attending the service, I thought we had technically done our bit to go to Him, but there were other ways to get even closer to the Lord, including speaking in tongues and being slain in the spirit. The most confusing of the possibilities to me was what my mother called being drunk in the spirit, a kind of all-of-the-above option which involved both falling over and speaking in tongues. It was odd to me that it had that name because no one in the congregation was allowed to drink—alcohol was far too destructive to our bodies, which were temples for the Lord. It was the only way we were allowed to “get drunk.” Mostly it was a way for churchgoers to blow off steam on the weekend after working office jobs for oil companies all week, a generous concession from God because he seemed to understand how stressful life in Calgary could be for sober people.