Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter

by Alison Wearing

  I swear dinner always tasted better on those nights. And lying in bed that night would be like flying through stars, the song of my mom’s oboe downstairs threading constellations of light through the dark house, guiding us on our nightly migration into sleep.

  It was probably the sheer relief and satisfaction that came with producing a great reed that made Mom forget to snip the rest of the red thread from the back of the yellow kitchen chairs, and over the years those chairs became hairy with dangling threads. It became sort of comforting, in that my brothers and I took to throwing our arms over the backs of the chairs and running our fingers through the threads the way some people play with their hair.

  And that is what I was doing—coiling the thread around my finger, then letting it loosen and fall, over and over—the night she went out to orchestra practice the year after Dad moved out and I decided to snoop through her desk in the corner of the kitchen. Actually, I did that a lot. Sometimes the car wouldn’t even get halfway down the driveway before I popped open the metal doors (it wasn’t a typical wooden desk—more of a metal cabinet with a wooden flap she could pull up to do her filing and chiselling on) and started riffling through whatever papers I could find.

  It was there that I had found the divorce papers for Wearing vs. Wearing, those long typed pages, most of which I didn’t understand, but where a single typed word, Homosexuality, was listed as the grounds for divorce.

  I remember staring at that word for a long time, one hand running through my mother’s red threads, my tears blurring the letters together, as I tried to fit my dad into that word. I knew that he was gay, that was not news, but it was a deeply sad and lonely moment still. Something condemning and denouncing about it made me just cry and cry.

  Snooping was also how I learned, a few months later, that my mother was getting remarried. “Well, I assume you’ve heard all the bad news,” she wrote in a half-finished, clearly long-overdue letter to an old friend in England, “but the good news is that I am getting married …”

  I wound the thread so hard around my fingers that time that I nearly cut off the circulation.

  Several months after my dad moved out, my mother began playing tennis with a neighbour. Mel was a friendly man with an eager smile, the kind of person who did things like bound up the stairs two at a time. Mel had lived around the corner from us for as long as I could remember, but I never really knew him (other than as “that divorced guy who lives on Roper Drive”), and the idea of my mother “dating Mel” was one of the weirdest things I could have imagined.

  Mel loved sailing and adventures and pulling into our driveway in his long, fake-wood station wagon and asking my mother to “go out for cappuccino.” It was the first time in as long as I could remember that my mother had a social life outside the house.

  I was furious.

  Terrified, actually. Convinced she was going to disappear too. To restore order to the world, I began keeping tabs on her like a probation officer. She was required to file her whereabouts with me at all times. More than once, I had her paged at a restaurant for flouting her responsibilities and staying out ten minutes later than she had promised. She was often frustrated by the choke-chain I’d looped around her life, but when I burst into tears she would soothe me, saying, “You don’t have to worry” and “I’m not going to just run off.”

  My mother’s outings didn’t seem to bother either of my brothers—nothing seemed to—but I was constantly filled with anxiety. If my mother said she was going out to play tennis, I’d decide to take the dogs for a walk so that I could keep an eye on her from a neighbouring field. If she said she was going to Mel’s house for dinner, I would show up at his door when I felt they should be finished eating.

  Understandably it drove my mother bonkers, but she and Mel tried to be sympathetic and provide me with the assurance I needed. Until one evening about half a year into their courtship when my mother announced over dinner that she and Mel were going to Aruba.

  “What’s a Ruba?” Flip asked between mouthfuls of green beans.

  But I knew exactly what it was. It was running off with someone. Goddamn them.

  “When are you leaving?” I pried petulantly, as furious as I was upset.

  “Tomorrow,” my mother responded calmly. Her sister, Sally, would come to stay with us for the week.

  “For the rest of our lives, more like it!” I yelled, and stormed up to my room.

  That night, I crept into my mother’s room and begged her not to go, even launching a case for why it would be a good idea to stop seeing Mel altogether. He wasn’t her type. Didn’t even play an instrument. Wouldn’t know a concerto from a contact lens. She should stay home and play the piano more. She hardly ever did that anymore. Wasn’t that a bad sign? Besides, he was a sailor. And you just never know what kind of a thing a person like that is going to do.

  I didn’t win my case, but I wept dramatically and made her promise me that she would come back. Although I don’t know why I bothered because I didn’t believe her when she did.

  When she walked out the door the next day, I took a conscious snapshot of her face—her uniquely gorgeous, irreplaceable smile—convinced it would be the last time I would ever see her.

  (It wouldn’t have dawned on me to create such drama over one of my dad’s departures. He had come and gone for so long, I never imagined I had any control over his whereabouts. And he had always had a social life outside the house. But if the double standard drove my mother “round the bend,” she never pointed it out to me.)

  As promised, she returned from the Caribbean. They returned. And sometime after that, she went out to orchestra practice, handmade reeds in hand, and I went snooping and found the letter. So while I was surprised by the news of an actual wedding, it didn’t come wholly without warning. And considering my near-crazed reaction to her mating dance with Mel, I can understand her wanting to enjoy the exciting news with her friends for a bit before initiating what was sure to be a Heavy Conversation with me.

  In the end, the conversation appears to have been so heavy it collapsed my memory, for I have no recollection of it at all. I probably cried so hard I washed all traces of the words away. Actually, I think I was angry. Yes, I vaguely remember storming off the back porch and slamming the sliding door shut, hoping its large glass would shatter. Oh, and I recall one of our sweet little Bichon Frisés nearly getting squashed in the slam.

  In any case, they got married, and suddenly I had a stepfather named Melville.

  I didn’t like him. For one, he had stolen my mother. For another, I found him exceedingly heterosexual: he belonged to the Kiwanis Club, was an engineer, a sailor, and he viewed the kitchen as a woman’s domain. And every night when he came home from work, he would put his briefcase on the kitchen table, reach up to the top cupboard and pour himself a scotch.

  Sometimes another.

  And another.

  “I heard my mom telling Mrs. Smithey she’s so relieved your mom got remarried,” Jessica told me as we sat on the floor of her room listening to her latest passion: the music of KISS. “Yeah,” Jessica said, putting on a nasal imitation of her mother’s voice. “Now those kids can finally get back to having a normal life.”

  MARRIAGE AND MUSHROOMS

  Our first Christmas as a new family was kaleidoscopic. The wedding had taken place a few months earlier and all seven children—my brothers (ages twelve and sixteen), me (fifteen), and Mel’s four kids (between seventeen and twenty-three)—were still adjusting to the new configuration of our lives. All of us, I believe, with some difficulty.

  Mel’s kids had flown in from Halifax (where their mother lived) for a week starting on Christmas Eve. The first afternoon was a series of awkward introductions and silences, the evening a painful attempt by the newlyweds to highlight how much we all had in common. Apart from choruses of throat-clearing, the dominant sound at the dinner table was the scraping of cutlery against plates. Once the dinner was adjourned, I slipped out the back door, punched th
rough the thigh-deep snow of the neighbourhood’s backyards and crawled into Jessica’s basement. I found her listening to Pink Floyd and slurping hootched-up Coke, and we spent the next few hours trading ongoing tragedies.

  The next morning came far too early, my hungover head feeling like a gravel driveway that someone had spent the night shovelling. I came downstairs to an intimate Christmas morning of total strangers and the CBC. Passing over the plate of store-bought croissants on the counter, I put a piece of bread in the toaster and accepted a cup of spiced tea that my stepbrothers had prepared. My new stepsister was quiet but pleasant, helping my mother get everyone accommodated.

  They were friendly, my stepbrothers, funny and charming, and, it bears mentioning (because I was a teenage girl whose interest in erotica was steadily growing), they were also drop-dead cute. I hadn’t noticed the previous night, so focused had I been on my new-family anxiety. But over the course of breakfast, despite my bedraggled, dry-mouthed state, I found myself warming up to them. The older one in particular. No, the middle one. The deep brown saucers of his eyes. As I crunched dry toast and glugged cup after cup of sweet spiced tea, I found myself beginning to enjoy the allure of my new family.

  After everyone had eaten, we went into the living room for the traditional opening of presents. And that was where it all began to twist. Well, not twist exactly, more like undulate, with galloping shapes and colours. And presents, so many presents. So many presents that I felt they were filling the room, crawling along the carpet and gathering around my shoulders. I got up and went into the hallway. Scrunched my eyes. Stared at the ceiling, the floor. My stepbrother appeared, the middle one with the dreamy eyes, put a hand on my shoulder and asked if I was all right. Yeah, I said, blinking excessively. I moved to touch his face only to discover that my fingers were dancing green lights. Five glowing threads attached to my wrist. I played with them for a while, dangling and dancing them in front of my face, until he guided me back into the living room, where Mel was in the process of opening a small oblong box from his eldest son.

  “Look at this tie! Oh, Anne! Look at this tie!” he repeated, shaking his head in amazement.

  My mother paid no attention, focused as she was on hooking a pair of slippers over her ears and kicking her legs side to side like a showgirl. Mel stared at her bewildered (as did we all), but said nothing. Instead, he returned the lid to the gift box, stared around the room with an entranced expression, and then, returning his gaze to the box, opened it again. “Look at this tie!” he exclaimed, as though seeing it for the first time. “Oh, Anne, look at this tie!”

  He repeated the whole exercise so many times, it seemed the room had fallen into some kind of time-warped loop.

  “Oh, Anne, look at this tie!” he gasped for the nth time, one hand pressed to his forehead.

  But she did not, of course, because of all the Folies Bergère ear-slipper dancing.

  It was the greatest lunacy I had ever beheld.

  My stepbrothers, all three of them, were a heap of entangled limbs in one corner of the room, laughing so hard their eyes streamed with tears. My own brothers sat side by side on the green-striped loveseat, their heads volleying back and forth as though watching a tennis match, their bottom lips flaccid, cheeks long.

  Eventually, although it was the middle of the day, people started going to bed. Or rather, our parents went to bed while some of the kids napped on the sofa and others stayed up drinking Irish coffee at the suggestion of the good-looking middle stepbrother. I took a catnap in an armchair and woke up ravenous. It was two in the afternoon but I felt like I hadn’t eaten in days. My brothers and stepsiblings were all in the kitchen, scavenging through the fridge and cupboards like army ants, gnawing croissant ends, eating jam by the spoonful, and slathering (still-frozen) french fries with peanut butter. There was a raw hot dog stuck in the top of the ketchup bottle. “I tried to dip it,” my eldest stepbrother explained, and we all found this so monstrously funny that I thought I was going to pee my pants.

  Then we began to play poker, heaps of white-red-blue plastic chips being piled on flushes, bluffs and avalanches of laughter, until my mother stumbled in mid-afternoon, her hair all pushed up on one side as though she’d been trying to curl it with a frying pan, asking what we should do about the turkey.

  As I recall, Christmas dinner didn’t happen that year until about midnight, by which time my new siblings and I had all dyed our hair pink. There were none of the tedious scrape-scrape silences of the previous evening, and moments after the last of the pumpkin pie had been shovelled into our eager mouths, we were outside collecting boulder-sized snowballs from the ends of people’s driveways, heaving them at one another and roaring like lions up and down the length of our quiet, plowed, festively lit street.

  Eventually, we learned that the spiced tea my stepbrothers made for us that memorable Christmas morning had been mulled not just with cloves, cinnamon, star anise, but also with magic mushrooms, that festive hallucinogen guaranteed to liven up any staid affair.

  A few days after the mushroom Christmas, Paul, Flip and I travelled to Toronto to celebrate the holidays with our dad and his (now serious) boyfriend, Lance. There were a few wrapped gifts for each of the kids under the tree (Dad and Lance having exchanged gifts on Christmas morning), and a few from us to them. Dad gave me a deep-burgundy angora turtleneck sweater, and he and I took turns rubbing our cheeks against the wool and groaning at its softness. Lance gave me a book on the Kirov Ballet, which I found quite wonderful, and I don’t remember what Paul and Flip got and probably didn’t notice even then.

  With choral music playing in the background, we ate dinner: turkey, roasted parsnips, mashed potatoes, Brussels sprouts, and homemade cranberry sauce. And after dinner Dad set up the slide projector and we all guided Lance through our early family adventures, an experience that must have been about as pleasant as having children decide to give you a root canal, but Lance was a good sport about it. And then we all wished each other a merry late Christmas and went to bed.

  It was pretty, um, normal. One might even say “traditional.”

  Except for the thing about my dad and Lance having the same anatomy.

  OKLAHOMA AND KELOWNA

  “So, what have you been up to tonight?”

  (The pickup line that changed my father’s life.)

  “Well, I just went to see a performance of Oklahoma! at the Royal Alex.”

  (The sing-songy reply that would come to change our lives as well.)

  The setting: Buddy’s. One of Toronto’s gay bars.

  The date: April 3, 1981.

  The protagonists: my dad (Mr. Pickup) and Lance.

  Hailing from Alberta farming stock, Lance spent much of his childhood in the town of Kelowna in the interior of British Columbia. He was one of four children, and his three sisters love to claim that Lance once pushed his younger sister out of the family car as they were driving down the highway. According to Lance, they were driving along with the windows down, happily admiring the summer day around them, when little Marjory began fiddling with the car door. The next quick, silent, pre-seat-belt-era moments included the back door opening, Marjory toppling out, the back door closing.

  Just as he took a breath and leaned forward to report the tumble to his parents, Lance’s mother turned around. “Where’s Marjory?” she cried. “Lance! Did you push your sister out of the car?” Then, to her husband: “Lance pushed Marjory out of the car!”

  Lance remembers only sputtering.

  “So what happened to Marjory?” I asked, wide-eyed.

  “Well, nothing!” Lance said, his voice as tuneful as a slide whistle. “She must have just kind of … rolled!”

  How to describe Lance …

  Well, assuming for a moment that there is such a thing as a spectrum of sexuality upon which most of us find ourselves weighing in at the heterosexual side of things, lesbians and gay men would be comfortable on the homosexual end, and still others would place themselves somewhere
in the middle or on another spectrum altogether. Lance, were he to climb upon such a scale, would rush posthaste to the homosexual end, curl his toes over the spectrum’s very edge, and lean out. Then he would turn back to the rest of the homos gathered at his end and ask which one of them was planning to serve hors d’oeuvres.

  Although I don’t believe he ever came out to either of his parents, Lance knew from an early age what his leanings were and they were never once, not for an instant, in the direction of a girl. After studying at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, he was relieved to meet up at last with other gay men. Playful to the nines, the friends liked to refer to each other using campy drag names, so in due course Lance became Mona del Kelowna.

  Although he was a truck driver for the post office when I met him, Lance eventually went back to school and completed a degree in one of his many abiding passions, urban planning. Name any city in the industrialized world and Lance can give you a historical architectural tour so comprehensive you will feel almost obliged to give him a tip. And that’s just architecture. Ask about music, literature, politics, theatre. I know of no one more well read and well versed on as many subjects as Lance, nor as gut-splittingly funny or astutely entertaining.