Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter

by Alison Wearing

  The day my dad tried to tell Dot he was gay and would be leaving his wife and children, Dot was upset, confused and, above all, horrified. How could he do such a thing to his family? A few weeks later, when my mother broke the news to my dad that Dot had decided “not to see him anymore,” he was so devastated he went into the living room and cried inconsolably. He told me later that he wasn’t sure he would ever be able to stop. While she had always had a stubborn streak, Dot and my dad had always been very close, so he hoped that with time she would come to understand and accept him.

  About a year after their last communication, I was in a school production of West Side Story, that Romeo and Juliet–inspired musical set amid gritty New York gangs. The set designer-choreographer was a brilliant artist who should have been working somewhere far loftier than a west end Peterborough high school (but thankfully, for our sake, was not), the director was visionary and daring, and the conductor was exacting. It was actually a pretty good show.

  I played Anybodys, a tomboy who joins the boys’ gang, and the part suited me perfectly, as most of that year I walked around wanting to kick the walls in, but smiling and being nice to everyone instead.

  While the rest of my school day was brain-bloating, a series of exercises that flexed my cerebral left hemisphere and asphyxiated the rest of me, the world of West Side Story was expansive and invigorating. I adored the community and camaraderie of our rehearsals, the challenges of rhythm and choreography, the natural elation born of the act of creation. There on the set of West Side Story I took my only deep breaths of that year.

  We put on about seven performances and somehow—by agonizing coincidence or fate—my parents happened to come on the same night. Just to increase the Agony Index, my dad brought Lance, and my mom and Mel brought Dot, who was visiting them for the weekend, my mom and Dot having made the decision to remain friends despite the divorce.

  The irony of the feuding families attending a performance about, of all things, feuding families, did not escape my dad, who apparently tried, during the intermission, to approach his sister and point this out to her. Perhaps to call it out, plead with her. Perhaps turn over a few chairs in pursuit of her as she walked away. I was back in the dressing rooms, so I didn’t witness what happened, but word travelled fast that there was a shocking scene playing itself out in the auditorium, and I’ve never wished myself dead more fervently than I did that night between Act One and Act Two.

  I’m never going to get over this, my mother thought to herself as the real-life drama played out before her. I don’t know what Dot said to herself, if anything. She never spoke of the incident to anyone. And in the thirty-plus years that have followed, she has never spoken to my father again.

  PITS AND BASEMENTS

  For most of the rest of high school, I would eat a light breakfast and, inasmuch as I could help it, nothing for the rest of the day except eight cans of Diet Coke. Then I would go jogging. I drew heavy black lines around my eyes with the idea, I believe, that no one would be able to see me underneath them. I managed to do well in most classes except Biology and English, both of which required me to pull apart a once-living creature limb by limb, labelling each piece as it was separated and pinned: heart, lungs, liver; plot, character, setting. The compulsory dissection brought me no closer to understanding frogs than it did books, and I ended up alienated from two previous sources of nourishment: nature and story. Both subjects: 51 percent.

  My moods, lies and need for privacy distanced me from most of my friends and set me up to fall for a boy five years my senior, who was not only a wildly talented jazz musician but also a hermit. He and I would drive out to a place called The Pit, an abandoned gravel quarry where he would skid around on his dirt bike while I sat in his truck pretending to be captivated by him. While he was off exploring some distant berm, I would pull out a sepia-paged book on Renaissance polyphony and try to sing through excerpts of choral works by Palestrina until the sneer of the dirt bike came close and I would slip the book back into my purse and once again admire him dutifully through the window.

  No one understood what I saw in him—me, least of all. We never went anywhere except The Pit and his basement—not to a single party, dance, park, movie or restaurant. We didn’t get together with friends (he had none and most of mine were estranged), and he refused to meet any member of my family. I never told him about my dad, choosing instead to make up a whopper about him “living with his twenty-year-old secretary in Toronto,” which my boyfriend found shocking enough. My mother kept trying to invite him over for dinner, but he categorically dismissed the invitations, telling me, “No offence, but I don’t really like parents.”

  So, whenever my boyfriend came over to my house, he would come only as far as the driveway, where he would sit in his ultra-cool sports car until I noticed him. Then I would drop whatever I was doing (generally teaching myself to play the piano—my new pastime), and we would head to his basement. Aside from the standard necking and fooling around, we would lie in the dark listening to Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Wayne Shorter, Maynard Ferguson and Thelonius Monk. Non-stop, without saying a word to each other, for five to seven hours at a time.

  Oh, and we never ate. Anything. And all we ever drank was water. No matter how many mealtimes passed while we were in each other’s company. For some reason, he never got hungry and I wouldn’t admit that I was hungry, perhaps because the one time I did, my boyfriend responded with the admonishing words, “Then you’re going to get fat.” Which did follow a path of twisted logic, I suppose, because the opposite was certainly true: all this going hours and hours without eating was certainly making me skinny.

  While the relationship was odd and I spent much of it starving, those hours we spent together in uncharted, uninhibited musical exploration were ascensions into the wildness craved and required by every adolescent. In societies that have lost their connection to wilderness, teenagers are left to invent it, most often chemically, for themselves. Fortunately, I found it through jazz—not drugs—and those journeys into realms of wild creation fed me in their own way.

  The summer before I started grade twelve, my boyfriend moved to Texas to study percussion. After doing the obligatory weeping, I then looked up and smiled for the first time in more than a year. (No doubt my parents were thrilled by the geographical blessing, but neither said a word about it.) Suddenly, I was free to re-create my life: have friends again, eat food, get drunk, have a normal life. I began softening my makeup, plucking my eyebrows, hanging out at parties, eating potato chips, drinking rum and Coke, and dating a football player who loved Barry Manilow. I got round-faced and round-hipped, dizzy with ditsy socializing, and, in the words of my school guidance counsellor, I was “making improvements in adapting to my environment and personal circumstances.”

  This wouldn’t last long.

  DESPERATION AND ESCAPE

  Words have no sound in alcohol. They are spoken from the bottom of a deep weedy lake. Every time the mouth opens, it fills with water. And so it learns to stay closed. Learns quickly.

  I knew nothing in adolescence of the pain behind addiction, only of the lacquered exterior that covered it. I did not know about torrents of unreleased grief, the way they storm and rage in people, filling their bodies with cracks they spend their lives desperately trying to patch. Or that the glaze of alcohol is sorrow-soluble and must be reapplied nightly—and now and again in the afternoon.

  I did not see my stepfather as a vessel of saline waters, a body of unshed tears. I did not see his kindness, his effulgent smile, how hard he tried to love life, to love us. Nor did I see how much he wanted us to love him. Through the smug narcissism of adolescence, I saw only a man who had stolen my mother from me and drank too much. And I had no more compassion for my mother, who had taken on something of a shadowed form. Some days I remember seeing her in the house looking wilted and tired and I had no idea who she was.

  It wasn’t clear how much she had known of Mel�
�s drinking before they were married—it had always been in the context of a party, a vacation, a celebration of their time together. But it was clear that she loved his fun-loving spirit and that he loved hers in return. They travelled, sailed, hiked, played tennis, and I don’t know if the drinking got worse over the years or if I simply began to notice it more. But when I watched the two of them begin dinner as wonderful people and morph into inebriated fools by the end, I felt like reaching across the table and smashing their heads together.

  I tried to talk to my brothers about it a number of times, but Paul and I spoke very little in those days, and Flip had descended into an anti-social, Troglodytic existence since the relocation of the television to the basement.

  My stepsiblings and I, comrades in psychedelic Christmases, remained close, laughing on the phone, launching into friendly jousting the moment we saw one another, but they lived so far away that our visits were rare. For a while, when I was sixteen, the stepbrother with the dreamy eyes came to live with us, and I remember him as a guiding star in my sky, greeting me every day when I would return home from school with a mug of hot chocolate, a fire roaring in the den, and a backgammon board open and ready for play.

  I’m not sure he had any idea of the medicinal value of those cups of chocolate and fireside games. We never talked about the atmosphere in the house, the nightly inebriation and the agony of continually pretending it wasn’t happening. In those months together, we shared a lot of weak smiles and knowing looks, the occasional tear-lined glance, and each moment of connection pulled me through to the next day.

  That spring, a subdivision of monster homes began to stomp their way across the fields and forests at the end of our road. I began to replace inspiring walks in nature with idle and depressing ones in the mall, wandering the shiny, fluorescent-lit avenues that led me to perfumed delights of every kind. I bought cheap jewellery, a flat iron to tame the wildness out of my mane, a pair of stitched cowboy boots that forced me to change entirely the way I walked, and bags of junk food to scarf on the drive home, where I would then saunter upstairs and bring the whole thing up in the bathroom.

  It had been building for a while. Years, I’d say. Hundreds of imperceptible nudges in that direction until one day I found myself there: over the toilet, vomiting food I had just eaten, and feeling so much better, lighter, thinner, emptier—free of knots, tension, lies, deceit, anger, shame, failure, the certainty that my life was Completely Fucked Up, and, last but not least, food.

  It was an easy release and an addictive relief, a way to eat and not get fat, get a sugar high and keep my weight low, fall apart but look great, dull my caustic emotions under layers of ice cream and then heave the whole toxic soup out of my body for a while. Generally, just until the next day. Bulimia was my drug, and like the addict who reaches compulsively for the next high, I reached for food, the nearest bathroom, that horrifying, disgusting, hate-filled release, and then—fleetingly—the feeling of being okay. Empty. Light.

  Free.

  And then it would start all over again.

  It was like being in a boat with an infuriating crack in its hull. Just when I had finished bailing, it seemed, sometimes only hours afterwards, I would feel the water level start to rise again, that sickening, gnawing anxiety that I knew only one way of calming. And so I would start again. Finish again. Swear it was going to be the last time. And then start again.

  I never got skeletal, just perfectly magazine-thin. In this way at least, I was society’s ideal.

  “You look great!” people said to me in greeting.

  And as happy as I was for the stamp of approval, the comment filled me with rage and contempt. I looked great? Was everyone so deluded? Could they not see?

  Actually, a few people could, but the moment they expressed concern—“How are you?” “Is everything okay?”—I would distance myself, because no one could find out what I was doing, what was really happening, what a disaster I was. The mortification would have killed me. Or so I felt.

  I had to get out, get away, start fresh, find my place. Wherever that was. I decided I needed to leave the country. Better still, the continent. To finish school as quickly as possible and move to Europe—to my mind, a mythical paradise.

  In the meantime, I tried to stay sane. Stop going to parties. Pass my classes. Save money. Spend time with people like Mary Smithey, my friend from sweeter, more innocent days. And play the piano, which nourished and moved me when little else could.

  When we were kids, my brothers and I used to joke that we were the victims of auricular torture: awoken on Saturday mornings to the sound of my mother’s students mutilating Mozart à la Suzuki Method. The upside of the torture was that after sixteen years of repetitive listening, I was able to work through the entire series of piano books in a matter of a few months, practising three to four hours a day; on weekends, as much as eight. The music was already there, deep in my cell tissue, so it was just a matter of strengthening my fingers and learning how to move them in the right way to get the music out.

  Soon, my mother felt that I was playing well enough to take on some of the students she couldn’t accommodate, so carloads of obligated children began to arrive on a weekly basis, music books in hand. I couldn’t bear to put even the advanced ones through the tedium of scales and sight-reading (besides, I didn’t know how to do either), so I focused instead on getting music into their skin, turning phrases into stories or dances. My students and I all enjoyed each other, we had some good laughs and the odd virtuosic moment, but after a year of lessons, they could no more have passed a conservatory exam than have ridden a camel. I hoped to be out of the country, cash in hand, before any of their parents really noticed.

  On weekends, I moonlighted at a country club. As balls went pinging across the rolling, poison-soaked lawns, I served food, some of which was spat upon by the cook or dropped deliberately on the floor before being placed on a plate for the customer who had had the gall to make a special order. We catered an exorbitant number of weddings, all of them so similar I sometimes wondered if the same people were back again. My private goal was to have every plate of dessert hurled onto the tables before the hardy-har-har speech about the groom’s embarrassing past and the inevitable gush about love and the glories of marriage.

  Real love, real life, lay elsewhere. In Europe somewhere. I was convinced of it.

  A friend of my mother’s knew of a university in France that offered a language program for foreign students, and my mother helped me to apply. My dad thought it was a wonderful idea—sure to be very stimulating—and he pored over maps of France with me, plotting possible weekend getaways, while Lance sat beside us excitedly reading excerpts aloud from the Michelin Guide: France.

  The day my letter of acceptance came in the mail—that strange cursive writing and all of those foreign stamps!—I felt a surge of true excitement for the first time in years. I remember my mother sitting at the piano, lifting her hands from the middle of a Rachmaninoff prelude, smiling as I read the letter aloud.

  A few months later, at seventeen, having crammed two semesters of high school into one—two dead frogs in one jar, as it were—I packed two suitcases, climbed onto a taut emotional slingshot, and pinged myself to France.

  FRENCH FANTASIES

  The Plan: I would learn French, find the meaning of life, never go back!

  Specifically: I would do the language course. Speak fluently in no time. Then, wander the French countryside until I came to a cobblestone village with terra-cotta tiled roofs, herbs growing wild out of stone walls and a village of people sitting around a long wooden table sharing a baguette. They would look up in the middle of a discussion about Flaubert and smile when I approached, tell me I look terrible—say, here, darling, have some chocolate; and ah, mon Dieu, what a very cultured thing to have a gay father. And a Simone de Beauvoir–type mother, how absolutely marvellous. Here, chérie, ‘ave a glass of Bordeaux.

  Shortly thereafter, a man without a word of English would
fall dramatically in love with me, serenading me with baritone arias while scooping me into his arms and carrying me through fields of lavender to a cottage on a hillside. When not being massaged or made love to, I would read beautifully undissected novels under an arched window, sleep under frescoes, and picnic in the shadows of cypress trees. And I would live in that perfect place forever.

  None of which happened.

  But I did fall in love with France. With walking. With admiring buildings and cobblestones, courtyards and fountains, vistas that made me laugh with sheer pleasure. I loved speaking French. Eating baguettes. Getting quietly chubby and having no one notice or care. When my language course finished, I got a train pass and clackety-clacked around Europe for three months, sleeping in hostels, jumping on and off trains whenever I felt inspired, and filling myself with beauty as I wandered, drawing nourishment from landscapes and languages, free concerts and museums, passing friendships, movable feasts and shared food.

  Just before my eighteenth birthday, after six months of living and travelling on my own, I met up with my dad and Lance in Amsterdam. The three of us spent several days wandering arm in arm along the canals, eating rijsttafel feasts, and looking at Van Gogh from every angle. I particularly remember the way the artist drew hands. From there, Lance cycled off to Belgium, while my dad and I took the train to Paris and checked ourselves into a lovely tumbledown pension with patchy carpeted hallways and thick floral drapery.

  There was a lot of museum-visiting. The odd concert. One ballet. But the thing I remember most was that the hotelier brought us breakfast, setting the tray down on the weathered carpet, knocking on our door and then creaking away. We would roll out of bed and open the door to be greeted by the miracle of a hot breakfast under linen, and balance it over to the table by the window.