It had been painful enough to watch my father’s shame when he couldn’t remember my name. Worse still when he didn’t know me, even after I told him I was his son, Jamie. By the time my father was actively afraid of the bulky, forty-year-old man he didn’t recognize as his son—the one who spoke softly to him with filial familiarity, caressed his hand, tried to hug him, called him Dad—I realized I’d had an authentic glimpse of hell. The insidious devils that ran the place bore no resemblance to anything Biblical. Their sadism was far too subtle for mere religious mythology. They’d damned my father by siphoning away the memory of his life, taking care that he’d been aware enough to know it, and they’d damned me by forcing me to watch it happen.
The best years of my childhood had been after he and my mother divorced.
I had been ten. Everyone tiptoed around me as though my mother leaving us was supposed to be the most devastating thing imaginable, but after three solid years of increasingly escalated arguments, it was really more of a blessing. Her indifference to me had hurt less than her anger at him, which seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. On the rare occasions that my mother made me part of their marital psychodrama, it was as part of a rebuke to her husband.
“You always take his side,” she seethed. “Like when he brought that stupid turtle home. But you didn’t listen, and we know how that turned out. It’s like you’re married to him instead of me. Sometimes I think I should just go off and live by myself and let you two live your own lives together.”
My father always protested, of course, but after a while it must have seemed like an excellent idea, likely to both of them. In 1972, she did just that, and left.
I said I wanted to live with my father. Since my mother didn’t want me, for the sake of form or even spite, there was no fuss over custody. I simply stayed in our house with him and grew up there. At first, we were hesitant with each other, like two survivors of an explosion that had just levelled a city block; but in time, we both realized that our house was calm and quiet all of a sudden, the atmosphere detoxified and clear of the constant anticipation of hostility. Our spines relaxed, our jaws lost the tense set we hadn’t realized they’d adopted. We kept waiting for all of that to change for the worse, even for mourning to set in, but it never did. Since my mother was the one who initiated the separation, I could only gauge its effect on my father as the one who had been “abandoned” (a word I picked up from listening to my mother and her friends talking about women who had been left by their husbands—a word I assumed must be similarly applicable to men who had been left by their wives).
When my mother announced that she was moving to Vancouver to stay with her family “for a little while, till I get things sorted out,” I breathed a sigh of relief that it would likely be the end of the tense lunches and dinners in restaurants that had become our sole interaction on “her” day. I have no idea what she told her friends, but when neighbours and close friends of both my parents came over to check up on us (or, more accurately, me, the “abandoned” child), they were surprised to see me smiling and calm and happy in my father’s company, and under his care.
I overheard an exchange between my father and Mrs. Alban one evening when she’d come over to drop off a cake she’d baked for us. It hadn’t been my intention to eavesdrop, but when I heard my name, I paused on the stairs and crouched there, listening to what the adults were saying.
“Alice is a gadder, Peter. Some women are just like that,” Mrs. Alban said. I heard her sigh. “You’ll forgive me for speaking my mind. I don’t mean to impugn Alice, and I’ve always been fond of you both, but some women aren’t always made to be wives and mothers. I’m sure she gave it her best shot. How is Jamie doing?”
“I think he’s doing fine, Mrs. Alban. I think he misses his mother, but the two of us are doing well. Alice loves him, and I think Jamie knows that. Divorce is never easy on anyone,” he added diplomatically. “But we’re going to be okay. Alice, too, I suspect.”
“I don’t mean to intrude in a way that’s too personal,” Mrs. Alban said, “but while it’s unusual for the child to stay with the father rather than the mother, I think it’s probably a very good idea in this case.”
My father’s voice sounded stiff and formal all of a sudden. I could tell that Mrs. Alban had crossed a line without being aware of it. “Thank you, Mrs. Alban,” he said. “We think so, too.”
And that was that.
For his part, my father felt it was his duty to present both sides of the story to me, lest I harbour any ill will toward my mother later in life. He had never spoken ill of her in my presence, even when it had become obvious that divorce was inevitable. That was the point at which he stopped making excuses for her and simply let her words and actions speak for themselves. That was as judgemental of my mother as he ever got in front of me.
“Jamie,” he asked me one evening after she left, “are you angry at your mother?”
“No, Dad.”
“Are you angry at me? It’s okay if you are, you know. We can talk about it.”
“No, Dad.”
“You’re probably too young to understand what happened between your mother and I, but even if we don’t love each other the way we used to, we still love you. And that’s the important thing. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“I know, Dad. It’s okay.”
“Jamie, do you . . . do you, you know, want to see anybody about this?”
“Like who?”
“You know. Another grownup, maybe? Like a doctor?”
“No,” I repeated. “I’m not sick. I’m really okay.” And I really was okay, too. It was the last time my father suggested a psychiatrist.
Privately I did wonder if there was something wrong with me with regard to why I didn’t miss my mother more. I asked Hank about it once right after my mother left. Hank’s view was a pragmatic one, a pragmatism that belied the fact that she was only ten.
“It sucks that your mom left, Jamie,” she said kindly. “But you know, your dad is nicer than your mom. And he loves you a lot. At least you get to stay with him. You’ll get to do all kinds of cool stuff now, and never have to worry about your mom being mad at you for doing it. Also, I don’t think she really liked me that much, so I’m not sad she’s gone, either.”
Still, I worried. “Do you think it’s weird that I’m not really sad?”
She shrugged. “Nope. I think it’s weirder that your mom wanted to leave you guys. You have a nice house, and your dad is a nice person. As for me, my mom is a pain in the you-know-what. I wish she’d leave, too. I wouldn’t be sad if she did. Well, not that sad,” she qualified. “At least I’d be able to keep my hair short and let the stupid holes in my stupid ears grow over and never have to wear these stupid earrings ever again. And nobody would ever call me ‘Lucinda Jane’ again. I hate being a girl.”
“You’re not a girl to me,” I said loyally. “You’re just Hank.”
“Thanks, Jamie. You’re not a boy to me, either. You’re just . . .” She paused, thinking it over. “Well, just you.”
“Thanks, Hank.”
When I was thirteen, we left the Ottawa and moved to Toronto because my father got a better job. I missed Hank terribly. We wrote to each other every week and spoke on the phone sometimes late at night when the rates were low. Hank wasn’t allowed to rack up long-distance charges so I always called her. My father understood the importance of our bond and encouraged it.
At fourteen, I experienced a growth spurt. My body filled out with new muscle, yielding unfamiliar strength. All traces of the willowy androgyny of my childhood vanished behind a wall of sinew in the space of a year, and I grew five inches, topping out at a solid six-one.
For the first time in my fourteen years, I was the physical superior of all the boys I knew. There was no more bullying from anyone, and there was something in its place: complete equanimity.
My new height and weigh
t caught the attention of the various coaches at my high school. I was encouraged to try out for sports—hockey, football, even wrestling. I resisted at first, of course. None of the experiences I’d had with boys my own age up to then had inclined me toward trust, let alone affection.
But at the coaches’ insistence, I tried out for all three. While I had no natural dexterity or ability in either hockey or football, neither the other boys on the team, nor the ones trying out seemed to find anything particularly unusual, let alone abuse-worthy, in my competing on their level. My new physicality seemed to be currency enough; they didn’t seem to sense anything different about me the way the boys back home in Ottawa had when I was younger and frailer. If my new physical imposition was my camouflage, it was a perfect illusion. It had erased any traces of who or what I had been. This new Jamie Browning could go anywhere, and did. I finally settled on wrestling. The sport suited my new strength and I responded to the rigours of the training regimen. Best of all, the sport was the perfect conduit for any pent-up aggression I had accumulated over the years. Even if no one I wrestled had any idea who Jamie Browning had been prior to this transformation, they felt the full force of it when I had them pinned under me on the mat.
After graduating from university I became an English teacher at a private school outside of Toronto. I loved teaching and took to it with a naturalness that surprised everyone who knew me, except my father who told me that he’d always envisioned me as a teacher of some kind.
I married a young woman named Ame Millbrook, with whom I’d fallen in love my final year at the University of Toronto. She had beautiful shoulder-length red hair and skin like the inside of a peony petal.
Ame had moved into the Knox College residence after three years of living with two roommates in an apartment on Palmerston Avenue, not far from the university, in the Annex. She had broken up with her boyfriend that summer and had wanted to make a complete break from her previous life while she finished up her history studies. After she received her B.A., she planned to take a year off, she said, to travel.
I swam laps at Hart House every morning before breakfast, and Ame was an early riser so she could study, so we were both usually the first people at breakfast in the dining hall. Early morning small talk at breakfast eventually led to longer talks at lunch and dinner, which eventually led to me working up the courage to ask Ame Millbrook out on a date.
Over Chianti and pasta puttanesca at a cheap Italian restaurant near the campus, we each discovered that neither of us was very ready to trust when it came to relationships. Ame had been badly hurt after discovering that her boyfriend had been cheating on her for six months before they broke up. For my part, it appeared that my parents’ divorce and my mother’s departure had affected me more than I’d thought.
It struck me later as ironic that our very fragility on the topic was the common bond we shared, and that it proved to be the source of our courage to yield to the feelings we were each clearly developing for each other; love in the form of emotional détente.
The first night she was nude in my arms, I marvelled at the contrast of her slender whiteness against my own darker skin. Her delicacy against my bulk was shockingly erotic for both of us. In the darkness of the bedroom, I would wrap my arms around her back, cradling it, my back bowed, my weight on my elbows, my hands cupped her shoulder blades as I thrust, both of us slick with sweat. Making love to Ame was a sublime, sensual ritual pas-de-deux. I hadn’t been a virgin when I met Ame, not by any stretch of the imagination, but somehow, with her, I felt more myself than I ever had.
When I was on top of her, feeling her body react to every movement, I felt somehow as though the act was more than just sex. If I’d believed in souls, I would have said I felt—in my soul—that I was securing the final lock on the door between my childhood and my manhood.
I had no idea why this should be so important to me, nor did I question it any more than I had questioned how this sense of closure was connected to the recurring dreams I’d had off and on since I was nine years old—dreams of a girl in an old-fashioned dress who seemed to grow alongside me into womanhood as I grew into young manhood. The girl appeared in different incarnations in different years, always roughly matching my own chronological age, always the same girl in a sequence of old-fashioned dresses and hairstyles, but always the same girl.
The night Ame and I got engaged was the last night I dreamed of this girl, now in every sense of the word a mysterious and beguiling young woman, even just in dreams.
In that last dream, she stood on some sort of rocky beach staring out across the water at a point in the distance. When the woman slowly turned her head away from whatever it was she was observing and met my eyes, I knew she recognized me. In the dream, she knew me. She smiled at me with a knowing that was somehow terrible.
I woke with a jolt, feeling as though I had fallen out of the sky onto the bed. The abrupt movement woke Ame. She murmured comforting words, then took me in her arms and held me until my heartbeat returned to a normal cadence and we both slept, with me dreamless at last.
Naturally, I’d asked Hank to be my best man. It was the right thing to do, and besides, I’d promised.
She’d come out as a very butch lesbian in her second year at Carleton University to no one’s surprise, least of all mine.
Hank had called me in Toronto that year and asked if she could take the train up from Ottawa and stay over, because she had something important to tell me. In my dorm room at East House in Knox College, she’d told me that she was gay, and in love with a woman named Cosima, a journalism major. She told me that her life of trying to be what everyone had wanted her to be—a girl named Lucinda Jane—had almost killed her, literally as well as figuratively: she had seriously contemplated suicide when she was sixteen.
“I had the razor blades in the bottom of my sweater drawer. I kept them there, secret. No one knew. Men’s razors,” she said with a hint of something like pride, or contempt. It was hard to tell which. “Not those fucking pink lady razors.”
I was horrified. “Why didn’t you tell me, Hank? Jesus. All those times we spoke on the phone long-distance. You could have told me. I would have been on the next bus . . .” I trailed off, unable to contemplate what her suicide would have meant. A world without Hank in it was literally incomprehensible to me. “Why? How could you keep something like that to yourself?”
She sighed. “I couldn’t, Jamie. I couldn’t admit what I was feeling, not even to myself. Telling you would have just made it real, and I wasn’t ready for any of it to be real.”
Hank confessed that she had finally come to terms with the fact that, in an effort to please everyone else, she hadn’t succeeded in pleasing anyone, least of all herself. Her earnestness had moved me, but the news couldn’t have been less of a surprise, or less relevant to our friendship, and I told her just that as I held her tight.
Later, as we lay on the floor head to head, very drunk on Jägermeister, staring up at the swirling ceiling of my dorm room, she said she had something to tell me.
“What, Hank?”
“I fucking love you, Jamie.” I fuggen lovezu
“Me, too, Hank. I love you, too.”
“I wish you were my brother.”
“I wish you were my brother.” I started to giggle. “No, I mean, I wish you were my sister.”
“Not me,” she said with drunken solemnity. “I don’t want to be anyone’s sister. I wish I was your brother, too.”
“You are, Hank.” Buffeted on the waves of Jäger, it made sense. “You are my brother. Tell you what—if I ever get married, you can be my best man, okay?”
“You getting married? To who? Why didn’t you tell me?”
Now we were both giggling. “No,” I said, nearly choking. “I’m not getting married. But . . . when.”
“And you want me to be your best man? Wow.”
The ceiling continued to spin. “Yup. I do.”
Hank paused, then reached for my hand, squeezing it tightly. “Bro,” she said.
The next morning, we weren’t sure which of us had passed out first, but we realized two things through the haze of agony: We each had the worst hangovers of our lives. And neither of us could remember having been happier.
In the years since graduation, Hank, having eschewed law school, had become a very successful landscape gardener.
During her undergrad, she had spent her summers planting trees up north and working on outdoor landscaping crews in the city. In the process, she had discovered that she loved the work and, more importantly, that she had a natural affinity for the soil.
Before opening her own small firm in Ottawa, she had worked on various crews for other landscaping companies, first on summer vacations, then full-time upon graduation. She found that her communion with soil and seed was instinctive and unfailingly accurate. Her various employers noticed that she was a hard worker who put in long hours in the sun without complaining. They also noticed that she took an effortless leadership role with the crews, which were usually comprised of men, and that those men accepted her leadership just as effortlessly. Her supervisor, Sid, regularly slapped her on the back and joked that she was “just one of the guys” and “practically a man—and I mean that in a good way, so don’t go gettin’ all militant dykey on me now, eh?”
Hank always assured him she understood exactly what he meant, and laughed right along with him. Sid was still laughing right up until the moment Hank handed in her notice and quit to start her own competing landscaping business. She took two of the company’s best workers on the crew with her and, in the process, snapped up a plum condominium maintenance contract her former employers had been too lazy to bother formally renewing with the condo board. Sid had been furious. He’d called her a thieving dyke and promised her he’d blackball her so she’d never get another landscaping job in the city as long as he had breath in his body.
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