by Arden, Jann
It was a Sunday when he came out to see us so he stayed for supper. My dad seemed relieved to be sitting there around our white kitchen table eating a meal with us. He was a new version of himself; he didn’t holler or lose his temper once. I waited for him to throw around a few goddammits, but he never did. He just ate his supper quietly and then he left. I could hear my parents talking at the door before he got into his car, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Believe me, I tried.
He came back every weekend and worked on repairing his marriage and his reputation. My mom was cautious but hopeful, I think. She didn’t have any grand expectations of how things would turn out. Patience is indeed a virgin. Or something like that …
My mom needed to be sure that the soberness was going to stick. Who could blame her? Alcohol is like air: it’s everywhere you turn. Hard to avoid putting it into your mouth. We just hoped that the twelve steps of never were going to work for my dad. My mom would always say, “It’s up to him.” I am pretty sure she didn’t mean God. My mother was never terribly religious and I was happy about that. Her views on religion were always very practical, thank God.
The AA people had a poem that my dad had put onto a plaque. He would recite it at all his AA meetings.
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.
I always thought that it was a great poem. It made sense to me, unlike some poems that left me scratching my head and wondering what was wrong with artistic people.
I went to an AA meeting with my dad every now and again. I loved going because, as I found out, alcoholics love sugar, and so they had enough donuts and coffee and cola and candy at their gatherings to make a kid feel like she had died and gone to tooth-rotting heaven. All the recovering drunk people would eat a dozen donuts each as they guzzled pot after pot of thick black coffee with, you guessed it, five heaping tablespoons of white sugar. AA meetings were A-okay in my books. I was glad my dad was going to them and meeting other people who had trouble with rum from time to time.
When my dad eventually moved home a few months later, he stuck the AA poem plaque in their upstairs bathroom. I read that verse every day for the next ten years. It was like I couldn’t even begin to think about having a poo without reading that damn thing. It was very Pavlovian. I guess it was a better option than having to read the Lord’s Prayer every time you went to pay your respects to the septic tank. That would have been a surefire way to have eternal constipation, as it was an extremely long poem.
The only other thing we had in the bathroom to read was, of course, a copy of Reader’s Digest magazine. It was at least ten years old. It looked like the dog had eaten it and thrown it up again. I had each and every page committed to memory and I am not kidding.
There was one story I read at least a thousand times about a woman who had survived a bear attack only to crash-land in the plane that had flown in to rescue her. Now that’s bad luck, or good luck, it’s hard to know … The woman somehow survived the plane crash as well as the bear attack, and went on to become a life coach and professional speaker. I would have liked to attend one of her speeches. Perhaps they began with: “Don’t ever go into the woods or get into a plane, and then your life will work out just fine.” I’ll never forget that story. I will also never forget the word “reciprocity,” as it was in the “Expanding Your Word Power” section of that very same issue. I never managed to use it in a song, although I tried rhyming it once with “velocity” but it didn’t work out. It did, however, work quite well with “atrocity,” which was much more up my songwriting alley.
After he moved home, my dad went to AA meetings whenever he could. He drank a lot of coffee and said it gave him the runs. It’s no wonder the Reader’s Digest magazine looked so beaten up.
My mother forgave him in tiny little bits. Trust is a hard thing to get back.
chapter ten
BEING REBECCA
High school was a really wonderful time in my life. It was smooth sailing, except for the home perm my mother gave me in grade twelve. The story goes as follows:
I had stick-straight hair that I couldn’t do anything with except braid or put into ponytails. I wanted to change up my look slightly, more like the wavy look that a lot of movie stars seemed to be sporting. A few girls in my class had perms and I thought that they looked really great. My mom brought home a do-it-yourself box of “perm” from the Co-op, as per my request, and said that we’d put it in that weekend. I was so excited I couldn’t wait to show off my new do at school on Monday.
That Saturday my mom opened the box and spread its contents on the kitchen table. There were rubber gloves, perm solution, dozens of tiny plastic rollers, “taming” solution (whatever the hell that was) and, finally, the all-important instructions. I was in charge of reading out the instructions to her. It was painstaking work getting all the little rollers in, and it took at least ninety minutes. There seemed to be an awful lot of them. I only wanted a little wave but we were following the instructions, after all, so we carried on. Step two was the perm solution. My mom drizzled it onto my head, careful to keep it from dripping down the back of my neck. The smell was horrible. It was like someone had thrown a cat onto a fire. I could hardly keep my eyes open.
After fifteen minutes or so, it really started to burn. I told my mother that my head felt like it had Tabasco sauce on it, but she insisted that we follow the instructions to a T. I figured she knew what she was doing. She kept checking my scalp and saying that everything looked good and so I sat there watching the minutes on the oven timer tick painfully by. After ten more minutes I couldn’t stand it. I told my mom that something was definitely wrong and that she had to get it off of my scalp. She told me she would test a roller and unwound it to check the hairs to see if they had any curl. She thought the roller needed a little more time. I felt like I was going to have to submerge myself into an ice bath after it was all said and done. I couldn’t believe that my hair wasn’t melting right off my head. The instructions called for forty-five minutes with the perm solution on. I was then to give my hair a thorough rinse and, as the final step, apply the taming solution, followed by a double rinse. I couldn’t wait to get the damn plastic rollers out of my hair. It started to smell like someone had thrown up onto the cat that was on fire. Mom pulled the rollers off and stuck my head under the tap at the kitchen sink. The taming solution smelled not bad at all compared to the perm chemicals. Mom thought it looked great. I wanted to see it!
When my hair was wet it looked pretty good. I could see curly waves, even little ringlets. My mom said that we needed to blow it dry to see the full effect. I sat on the white swivelling kitchen chair and waited as my mom brushed and dried my newly permed hair. My mom was brushing and blowing for a really long time. She seemed somewhat perplexed about the whole thing.
“That’s odd,” she mumbled under her breath. “Hmph …”
I was getting nervous at this point. “What’s the matter, mom?”
“Well, it seems to have really worked,” she said anxiously. “It’s got really good curl, that’s for sure.” I wanted to see it immediately.
“I hope that’s what you wanted,” she called out as I raced to the bathroom mirror to see for myself.
What I saw was nothing short of a major disaster. I would never be able to show my face at school ever again. My mom had given me an Afro! I had the smallest, tightest curls on my head that I’d ever laid eyes on. It took force to pull them straight and when you let them go again they’d spring back into a compact coil. I was so shocked I didn’t know what to say. My mom came into the bathroom behind me and said that it didn’t look that bad. I strongly disagreed.
“We followed the instructions on the box,” she insisted.
I know there are a lot of people who have nightmare stories of how hard high school was for them, but that wasn’t the case for me. I had been with the sam
e kids since grade four, so we all knew each other and we pretty much got along. School was like a big party as far as I was concerned. I loved all the team sports, and I played everything: basketball, volleyball, flag football, badminton, track and field and, of course, hockey. It was easy making it onto the teams because there were so few kids who tried out. All I had to do was show up for practice and I was a shoo-in! I guess that’s what happens when you have forty-two kids in your entire grade.
We’d be lucky to find nine people to play baseball. God forbid we should have one extra kid who could sit on the bench. If one player got hit in the head with a bat and was bleeding to death he’d have to keep playing because there wasn’t anybody who could take his place. Our gym teacher, Mrs. Neilson, quite often had to be the back-catcher as well as the umpire. In addition to being the gym teacher, she was our English teacher, our social studies teacher, our math teacher and the coach of all my sports teams.
She was always in her gym clothes and wore her whistle and her stopwatch to English and math class and actually used the whistle on occasion. It’s weird having a whistle blown when you are in the middle of writing a math test. For whatever reason, I don’t think Mrs. Neilson liked me. I certainly didn’t care for her much, so that was probably half our problem. For some reason she gave me the creeps. Maybe it was because she blinked way too much—I’d heard that people who blink a lot seem nervous. She certainly made me nervous roaming the halls with that whistle around her neck.
I had some very interesting teachers while at Springbank High School, some of whom seemed like they’d been fired from Hogwarts and some of whom seemed no older than we were. My art teacher looked like she was sixteen. All the boys thought they had died and gone to heaven because she had a body like a Russian gymnast. (All the girls were secretly jealous, I’m sure, that she had stolen the boys’ attention.) But however young, Mrs. Denyse was an amazing art teacher. She was fresh out of university and ready to take on the world, only she ended up with us instead of the world. Must have been slightly disappointing.
I had no idea what I was going to do when I got out of high school. Everyone seemed to be talking about which universities they had enrolled at and what they were going to be.
I had no idea what I was going to be. I was still trying to figure out who I was, never mind who I would be. I felt like I had lots of time to sort that out. I still had a whole year before I had to start thinking about any of that career crap. I had things to go do before I had to go be. Didn’t that stuff just sort itself out? I hoped it did. It did in the movies anyway. There was always the scene with some sappy music and the heroine running in slow motion through a field of golden daffodils towards her dazzling future. That’s the way I pictured my life unfolding. Alas, I had a ways to go.
Most of the parties I went to as a teenager were harmless. A bunch of us—anywhere between six and ninety-seven, depending on the weather—would drive our crummy old cars to an empty field somewhere, and we’d start a giant, blazing bonfire and drink warm beer somebody had stolen from their parents’ secret stash in the basement. If we were lucky, somebody remembered to bring a few bags of potato chips. We’d stand around like a bunch of bowling pins, staring at the sparks flying through the black sky. Every so often somebody would say something funny and we’d all laugh. We were happy to be there, with the flames kissing our faces, pretending we were grown-up. One of us would usually have a car or truck door pried open so we could hear the radio blaring from the crappy little built-in speakers. We were all glad when Frank, who drove a T-roof Chevy Camaro, showed up at a party, because he had an eight-track stereo tape player and we’d have decent, loud music to listen to. Frank would always have a huge bottle of whisky with him as well. The guy could drink like a sailor and still drive as straight as a ruler. Between the giant fire and the booming music, it was easy to find the party on even the blackest of nights.
I thought Frank was like James Dean because he smoked cigarettes and wore his hair long and brushed back. He was one of the few guys who looked like he knew how to drink a beer. The rest of us just appeared awkward holding those brown stubby bottles in our hands. Not Frank—he was very manly. He would tip the beer bottle back towards his head and barely brush it with his lips, letting the malt beverage drain down the back of his throat. He didn’t seem to even have to swallow. After each drink he’d take a long puff off his du Maurier cigarette and blow the smoke up over his head. I thought it was marvellous, I really did. I don’t remember him ever talking. He was such a quiet kid, kind of mysterious, if that’s possible at sixteen years old. He came to school about once a week, whether he needed to learn anything or not. I always wondered if he even had parents. I wondered where Frank lived and who bought his clothes. I am pretty sure he didn’t know I existed, which is funny considering how much I thought about him and his mysterious life.
We’d listen to his eight-track player until his car battery died. (In hindsight, it would have been a good idea to just leave the Camaro engine running, even if the exhaust did make us all sick.) Somebody would end up giving his car a boost, so it all worked out. If there was one thing everybody had in the trunk of their car, it was jumper cables. Nobody in Canada would be caught dead without a set of those. (One year I got jumper cables in my stocking for Christmas. It doesn’t get any more Canadian than that. They were red, and my mom said that that was the only colour she could find and if I didn’t like them she could take them back. I would have preferred plaid, but red would have to do.)
I remember listening to so much great music at those bonfire parties underneath the brightest, shiniest stars. Boston, Rod Stewart, Queen, Cat Stevens, Fleetwood Mac, Journey, Martha and the Muffins, the Beatles, Jethro Tull, Ozzy Osbourne, Black Sabbath, Nazareth, Simon and Garfunkel, Hank Williams, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Johnny Cash, the Eagles, even Barry Manilow. There’s something about being a bit drunk and singing “Mandy” at the top of your lungs that makes you feel like you’ll never die. We put on a great show for all the horses and cows that would surround us. None of us thought it was the least bit odd to have livestock five or six feet from us. It was like they were part of the gang. I am sure we were very interesting to observe.
As the parties wore on into the night, inevitably someone would drink too much and wind up throwing up in the bushes. We’d all laugh, secretly grateful it wasn’t us getting sick. The “thrower upper” would often rejoin the party after a quick trip into the trees and, unbelievably, drink some more, which I found astounding. And there would always be a few unsuitable couples who drifted off into the privacy of the trees to make out. (It was best to avoid the puddles of vomit). Of course the unsuitable couples wouldn’t speak at school that Monday because that wasn’t cool. You had to act like you’d never seen that person in your life. You had to act like you didn’t care one little bit if that person lived or died. You had to be aloof, tossing your head back (in slow motion if possible) and laughing madly if you thought they were looking at you. Even if it was true love, you had to sacrifice yourself for the greater good. Those were the rules.
I kissed a boy named Mark for half the night at an indoor party that took place at the Hungarian Cultural Society, of all places, and, yes, I too was ignored the next day at school. I tried to be the “ignorer,” but I wasn’t quite quick enough. I made eye contact with Mark purely by mistake, right next to my locker, and when he quickly looked away, I became the “ignoree.” High school was complicated.
Mark was such a nice guy—tall and slim with curly, light-brown hair. He was very athletic and smart and popular to boot. I guess you could say he was a triple threat. I always thought I was lucky to have kissed him at all and kept wondering how it was that he had picked me. There were so many other girls at that party. I certainly wasn’t tall and willowy or the least bit pretty. I thought I was cute given just the right lighting, but how often do you get just the right lighting? I didn’t even have boobs at this point. I felt like I had swallowed a canary all the rest of the week. Being th
e “ignoree” only bothered me for about fifteen minutes and then I was over it. I may have blushed ever so slightly as we passed each other in the hall later that day, but that was the extent of my shame. I was relieved in a way that we didn’t have to rehash our very short romance. I didn’t think we were all that good a match anyway, because our teeth kept clinking together when we kissed. If my head went left, his head went right. We never had that good seal that was of paramount importance for a successful lip-lock. Neither of us knew what we were doing in the kissing department (and I was pretty sure we didn’t look anything like Kristy McNichol and Leif Garrett when they kissed on the TV series Family).
I remember the Hungarian Cultural Society had a jukebox. It looked more like a spaceship than something that played records. For twenty-five cents you could play four songs, which I thought was highway robbery, because my friend Patti had her very own jukebox in her parents’ basement and it was free. To this day I can’t hear a Juice Newton song without thinking about kissing Mark and how our teeth made sparks in the dark. (There is some kind of poem begging to be born right now …) I remember Leo Sayer singing “The Show Must Go On,” and thinking it was the worst song I had ever heard but I liked it anyway.
The funny thing about going to a small school is that you were either the type of girl who got pregnant between English and math class in the school parking lot, or you were like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, virtuous and more or less completely inexperienced. There didn’t seem to be anything in between. I was in the Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm category.