Falling Backwards: A Memoir

by Arden, Jann

  In junior high school I kind of became popular. Well, I don’t know that for sure. I just decided that I would try to be. My goal was to not be one of the kids that got picked on. I wanted to become like Switzerland: so neutral that my classmates would have no idea what clique I belonged to. I would have to belong to all the cliques and be convincing. First I had to figure out if we even had any cliques, and then what the cliques were.

  Thankfully none of the forty or so kids in my grade exerted any pressure to be dressed well, so there was no fashion clique. Half the kids who got on the bus in the morning smelled like chicken poop, so the bar wasn’t exactly set all that high. In fact, if you came to school and didn’t smell like some kind of farm animal, you were considered weird. Being “in fashion” was foreign to everybody apart from a few silly souls who had just moved to Springbank from the city. For some reason, they still clung to the idea that they were supposed to look coordinated. If anything I was wearing matched, it was simply by chance. The new kids hadn’t been conditioned yet. Soon they would be in generic running shoes and used Levi’s from the Salvation Army, skipping Mr. Milton’s math class/putting lesson to drink Lonesome Charlie by the river. (Lonesome Charlie was a very cheap, incredibly crappy pink wine that was basically a headache in a bottle but was also sweet and bubbly and therefore very popular.)

  There were a couple of sisters who had moved to the area from California, of all places. Their names were Kim and Debbie Dunning. Our whole school turned upside down when they arrived one fall day in September. They were both so pretty! When they laid eyes on all of us farm-looking people, they looked as though they would cry. We probably all looked like extras from the movie Children of the Corn. I don’t blame them for feeling upset. They were stared at for at least a year. I am sure it was their worst nightmare to be sitting in their graffiti-covered desks, having poorly dressed pubescent boys that smelled like chicken poop staring at them. These two lovely girls had gone from sand-covered beaches and sunshine to cow patties and haystacks. Theresa and I felt sorry for them, although we were jealous. They were the most beautiful girls any of us had ever laid eyes on. They looked like the girls on TV—all tanned and glowing with long, straight, shiny hair. They always seemed to be moving in slow motion. You didn’t know whether to kiss them or punch them. (As it turned out, they were both very nice, and it didn’t take long for them to learn how to smoke cigarettes and drink Lonesome Charlie and date very, very far beneath them. Sometimes you can’t fight fate.)

  Some of my friends had started developing breasts, and I’d seen them before gym class trying to cover themselves up by changing in the bathroom stalls. All the girls seemed mortified about having to wear a training bra, and I was too. Well, there were one or two girls who started wearing bras two years before they had to. God knows why. They even went so far as to stuff them with tissue to fill them out. We all knew. Some girls were completely out of their minds when it came to things like that. Who would want breasts any sooner than they had to get them? I wanted to keep mine at bay for as long as I could and I kept wearing looser shirts so no one could see what was going on. Eventually, my mom took me into Woodward’s and bought me a training bra. I did not want to have to wear one, but I wasn’t given much of a choice. For whatever reason, even trying it on was humiliating to me. I felt like I was losing control over my own body, and it felt terrible. My mother said that I would get used to it and that there would be no discussion. It was already completely embarrassing, so why would I want to discuss it anyway?

  Things got even worse when my mom wanted to discuss my impending period. I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing. My period? Please, dear God, Lord Jesus above, do not make me discuss my period with my mother. I didn’t plan on ever getting my period, for one thing, and for another thing, I already knew about my period because there was a girl who blabbed all about hers in biology class. Fitting really, biology class.

  Out of the blue one day, my mother marched me up to her bedroom and opened the drawer second from the top of her dresser and pointed to the biggest menstrual pad I had ever seen in my life, and I’d seen a few in my day. These things were like mattresses and they had to be attached to giant belts that looked like they should be holding up hockey socks. My mother gave me a tutorial on how to use the pads and how to connect the belts and, quite frankly, after that, it all started to feel and sound like I’d been huffing helium at a clown’s birthday party. I never again ventured into the “period drawer.” What I ended up doing, when I did finally start my period, was roll up wads of toilet paper and then stuff them into my underpants. I kind of clamped my legs together to keep everything in place. It was an art form for sure. I felt weird about the whole period thing and kept it to myself until I was about eighteen. My mom must have thought that I was really late to come to the menstrual party, but she didn’t say anything to me, thank God. Most of the girls I knew from school got their periods when they were fourteen or fifteen. I was sixteen when I started, and really didn’t want to tell my mom.

  But the problem with the homemade toilet paper maxi-pads was that they crawled up your bum crack and right out of your jeans whenever you walked or moved, which was fairly often. I was always trying to figure out how to cram the pad down past my waistband and back into position. I would only have to take a few jaunty steps before all of a sudden my toilet paper wad was making its way towards my training bra. I really wanted to learn how to use tampons—anything seemed better than going into my mother’s period drawer—but my friend Elise’s mom told us that they were for married people. We never quite figured that one out. (If you’re ever considering making your own pads, know that you can get serious chafing down there from wads of toilet paper.)

  I went through hundreds of rolls of toilet paper during that time, and eventually my dad started to notice. I heard him upstairs one morning yelling, “Where is all the goddamn toilet paper disappearing to in this goddamn house?” He went on to spew out about twenty-seven Jesus Christs and at least one F-bomb. We very seldom heard the F- bomb, but on the occasion it did slip out of his head we all ran for cover. I wondered how you said the F-bomb in Dutch. I would have to remind myself to ask Theresa’s dad about that.

  chapter seven

  GROWING PAINS AND

  FISHING RODS

  I didn’t like growing up at all. It felt, well, quite simply, odd. It’s not easy becoming a person. Even my thinking had begun to change. I started thinking about God again. God was always poking around somewhere in the back of my mind, but I was beginning to seriously consider who and what he was. Was he even a he? Where did he live? Did he wear clothes? Did he have a penis? That one really bothered me to think about. I knew even picturing that was a terrible sin punishable by a trip to hell.

  I had so many questions about the universe. I didn’t know where to start. I began to pray a lot. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I would lie in my bed at night and talk endlessly to whatever it was that was out there. I would whisper all my secrets into the ears of the abyss and fall asleep right in the middle of some important wish. I couldn’t quite get my head around the concept of death. To think that I would die seemed laughable. Where does someone go when they die? Would I get another body? Do you get to eat up there? Surely they give you clothes to wear. Would I know anybody in the afterlife? I hadn’t even begun figuring out the “before” life yet. I had certainly killed enough things in my youth to understand that death was a very serious thing. You’re here and then you’re not, that’s what my dad always said. One day I woke up startled because the thought of perishing had never crossed my mind, and then there it was. I am going to die! Just like that, jumping up and down right in front of me, taunting me before I even had time to eat my morning Pop-Tart.

  It’s an innocent time in your life when you can actually say you don’t know of a single person that has passed away. My dad’s father had died before I was born, so that didn’t really count. So technically I didn’t know personally anybody wh
o had died. I do feel, however, that I came very close to being killed several times in my young life, thanks to my dear friend Sue McLennen. Sue was the female version of Leonard and Dale. We were always on some sort of outdoors adventure, but Sue didn’t have the desire to kill anything. She didn’t even own a gun, which was good. Sue lived in a little town called Bragg Creek that was much closer to the wilderness than we were in Springbank. We loved playing down by the river, throwing rocks and wading in the water looking for treasures that people may have lost hundreds of years ago. Once I found a hubcap and pretended it was part of a spaceship that had crashed. We used that hubcap to pan for gold all summer long. (We must not have been panning correctly, because we never managed to unearth a single nugget of the glimmering stuff. We would have been happy finding cold, hard cash if it were underneath that water somewhere as well.)

  Sue and I were chased by a bear one day when we were panning for gold down at the river. I remember being taught survival skills in Brownies. You were to lie down and play dead when encountering a bear, but lying down in the bushes seemed beyond crazy to me at that moment and Sue and I made a run for it. I decided then and there that Brownies was as dumb as a bear turd and I vowed never to go again unless it was Cupcake Day, in which case I would make a one-time exception.

  I have never run so fast in my life. We could hear the bear crashing behind us as we tore through the brush to get back to the road. Now that I think about it, that bear could have been running away from us, but that makes the story less interesting. It was a little brown bear that was probably three hundred pounds at best. It certainly wasn’t a grizzly or anything like that. All I know is that the brown bear was after us and if we were to be eaten by him it would be the most sensational story ever told at my junior high school. For a split second I thought of letting it catch up to us, but then my common sense took over, thank God.

  Another time, Sue and I were playing with a very long fly-fishing rod, casting a lead weight into the trees, when by accident I whacked her across the thigh, leaving a really long, red welt. She, of course, had to retaliate, and started running after me, intending to whack me back. It’s hard to run when you’re laughing as hard as we were. I remember trying to hide behind a telephone pole. Sue was flicking the fishing rod at my legs trying to hit me when all of a sudden a car veered off the road and smashed into the pole. We must have been really carrying on and not heard it coming, because it seemed to roar out of nowhere. The crash itself was deafening. The ground beneath my feet shook so hard it knocked me over.

  Sue and I stood there looking at each other in disbelief. I was inches away from being squashed between a wooden pole and a large four-door vehicle moving at fifty miles an hour. People came running from the house next door trying to figure out what had happened. The poor guy had had a heart attack behind the wheel and lost control of his car. He was clutching his chest and muttering, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry …” While everyone waited for the ambulance, I wondered if he was going to die. His wife, who had been in the passenger seat, had a bloody nose that looked a lot worse than it probably was. She was staggering around with her purse dangling off her arm. God forbid she should lose that purse! After the ambulance drove them to the hospital, Sue and I wandered home with our fishing rod, still in shock. It was one of the most exciting and frightening things that had ever happened in Bragg Creek. We never did find out if that guy died. He was still moaning when they hauled him off, and we assumed that was a good sign.

  In bed later that night, I cried for an hour, replaying everything in my mind. I don’t think I realized how close I had come to dying. It was nothing more than a split second that could have changed everything about my existence. Sue never did whack me back with that fishing pole. I guess she figured being almost hit by a car was payback enough.

  Sue was so much fun to be around. Her parents lived in a real log cabin that her dad had built, and I thought that that was completely fantastic. It looked like a quaint little pioneer home that Hutterites would have lived in, only edgier. The people in this log house smoked and drank.

  Sue’s folks sold antiques and ran the local postal outlet, among other things. Sue’s mom was a landscape painter. She’d sit in the post office part of their house and paint these amazing mountain scenes. The oil paint looked edible and, believe me, I was tempted. I had never seen anybody paint a real honest-to-God painting before, and I was completely entranced. Someday I wanted to do that too.

  Sue’s dad always had a pipe hanging out of his mouth, and he liked to drink whisky. (I think he may have been drunk all the time, but I never knew what he looked like sober so I never actually figured that out.) He hardly ever spoke a word to any of us. He grunted and waved his hands a lot. I was kind of afraid of him. Sue told me that her dad was Scottish and that’s why he was the way he was, whatever that meant. His hands were as big as baseball mitts, and they were riddled with scars and cuts and gouges. Not only had he built their log house, but he built log houses for a living, and his hands reflected every single hour he put into building them. Sue’s parents seemed like hippies but I knew they weren’t. They marched to their own band, that’s for sure.

  Sue was one of six girls. Her mother had two sets of twins. I often thought that her dad must have shaken his Scottish head back and forth every time another girl popped out of his wife. You’d think a Scottish man would have pined for a son. If he did, we never heard him say anything about it. He’d just sit at his wooden kitchen table (which he’d made himself) with billows of smoke gathering over his head. He’d flick the newspaper, peer over its pages, and ask us if we had anything better to do. I guess that meant, get your asses out of my house and go play. He did it with a glint in his eye; even though he was kind of scary, he smiled with his eyes all the time. He tugged on the braid down the back of my head once, and I took that as a sign that he actually liked me.

  One day Sue and I puffed away on his old pipe until we both turned green. It was like eating a half-burned log dipped in kerosene. I tried to throw up but nothing would come out. My eyes just watered madly and I stood hunched over in the trees, feeling foolish for having tried smoking at all. Sue was so afraid that we’d get caught that we made sure to put everything back just so. We wiped the pipe down for prints, and we fluffed up the tobacco in the pouch so it looked full. Her dad had a temper that we didn’t want to trigger under any circumstances. We both hoped our cover-up job was professional. I vowed to not smoke again until college.

  Bragg Creek was like the Canadian version of the Ozark Mountains, complete with the distant strains of banjos. I think there were a few folks out there whose parents may have been cousins. I won’t name any names, but there were some interesting sets of teeth for sure. Bragg Creek had one decrepit little gas station that had a single, old, rusted gas pump and an ancient pop machine that froze solid in the winter. There was one kind of gas—very leaded—and two kinds of pop, if you were lucky. The machines had glass bottles that pulled up through metal sleeves. I remember drinking Orange Crush or Dad’s Root Beer. A bottle of Crush cost twenty-five cents and made my entire mouth orange for several hours. The store also sold a small selection of penny candy so it was the place to hang out for sure.

  Gene Fullerton and his wife, Eva, owned and operated the gas station and also bootlegged beer and an odd assortment of hard liquor out the back door. Everybody knew what was going on. It didn’t matter if you were fourteen or ninety-seven, you could buy alcohol from Gene and Eva.

  Gene was a big man with a red face and his wife was like a barrel with legs. They both looked like you could roll them down a hill and they’d be none the worse for wear. Gene combed his hair from one side of his head right over to the other, like those thirty-five strands of hair would disguise what was actually going on up there. He had beady little eyes, the whites suffused with red veins screaming out for oxygen. He also had what they called a gin blossom growing off the end of his nose. It looked like a mangled lump of purple cauliflower. My mom
told me people got them from drinking too much. I would find myself staring at his nose whenever I saw him. He always smelled like whisky and his wife, well, she did too. Eva wore the same muumuu-type dress for years. She swayed from side to side when she walked, but never spilled a drop of whatever she was drinking. I remember her having one big tooth in her head that stuck out under her top lip, and I mean one tooth. I don’t know why she decided to keep just that one. I’d see her out in her yard with that dress on, holding her red plastic cup. Sue said she drank rye and Seven. I had never heard of rye and Seven. It sounded weird.

  There was something so melancholy about that pair. They certainly weren’t unkind people—in fact, they were endlessly jovial; just drunk, that’s all. They had all these wild kids who drank like crazy too. All you had to do was mention the name Fullerton and people knew it meant trouble. All their boys dropped out of school very early on and just drank themselves half to death. They were so young and good-hearted, but alcohol ruined their lives. They were simply born with an addiction. Sometimes people come through the veil already saddled with problems. It’s just a theory, mind you, but that’s the way it seems. My mom would often say that the Fullerton kids didn’t have a chance from the word go.

  Gene and Eva sat there and watched their entire family just drown in booze. First the man he takes the drink, and then the drink he takes the man—my dad always said that. My dad was a drinker, but he didn’t look like Gene Fullerton. My mom told me that people didn’t always look like drunks even when they were. Some can blend in and seem normal for the most part. I think my dad was one of those people. He blended in, he seemed normal, his drinking seemed invisible—except that my mom could see him and Duray could see him and I could see him. I hoped my dad would never end up with a gnarled purple chunk of cauliflower on the end of his nose.