by Bif Naked
I said it to myself, “A woman who loves other women.” I was astounded.
“Why? Do you think you’re a lesbian?” My father stopped shaving and looked at me.
My mother’s voice carried through the house, “Beth? Beth! Are you dressed?”
Grateful for the timely interruption, I broke into a little self-conscious smile. “Thanks, Dad.” I turned on my toes and ran down the stairs two at a time, pulling on the thin iron railing, my clammy hands squeaking all the way down. Although I don’t think I ever did answer him, his honest and matter-of-fact response made it one of the most impactful and integral conversations I ever had with my father.
So impressionable was I, so prone to even the slightest indication of negativity, that when my dad imprinted this concept onto my growing mind, it was as if any shame or self-doubt I would ever have regarding whom I chose to love washed down the sink along with the scalding-hot whisker water that morning, never to threaten to burn me again.
I have loved languages my whole life, starting with the sweet sound of spoken Hindi, which I heard especially at the kitchen table. We were far from a formal family, and there was a certain casualness surrounding our mealtimes. As I’ve said, this was the seventies, with its “TV table” culture, and we often ate gathered around a small television set, grateful to not have to make conversation. And on many occasions when we did eat at the table as a family, my parents spoke in Hindi, knowing full well we girls understood little, if anything, that they said. “Ap ki marzi” often escaped from my mother’s lips. I remember this specifically, as it was an expression I knew well. It meant “Whatever you like.” There was a surrender about it—or was it just my mother’s courtesy? In later years, I regularly fell back on this same style of martyrdom in my own adult relationships. Like mother like daughter.
Also burned into my ears was the expression “chup,” meaning “quiet,” or, more likely in my sisters’ and my context, “Be quiet!” Dad was rarely home, and when he was he resumed his dictatorship, imparting totalitarian rule. Being an absentee parent must have been difficult for my father, but it was much harder on my mother. I was a nightmare, Shireen was also, and Heather barely even spoke. It’s hard to comprehend the true dynamic between my parents. I can’t say either of them would do things the same way today if put in the same situations. Like many couples of their generation, they simply stayed together—long after today’s partners would have separated. That is either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how you look at it. What I failed to understand was that my dad was basically an absentee husband also, and that that was normal for the times. My parents were never malicious toward each other. They never spoke ill of each other or put each other down, not once, that I know of.
My dad was simply working; he was his work. My mom was often also working outside the home, as well as volunteering with many organizations, but most of her work was raising us ingrates. She was and still is endlessly forgiving, a woman with an unselfish heart. I don’t know how she did it—I think I would have blown my brains out.
Eventually, my parents did split (in 1991). My father had taken yet another teaching job, this time in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. My mom was done: she simply didn’t want to move again. After their divorce, my mother thrived in her new job with Winnipeg’s Handi-Transit, and my father soon met Anita, who would become his second wife.
I know that as an adult my relationships replicate that of my parents and their dynamic with each other. I’m not blaming them for anything in my life. But they did provide me with my basic model for adult romantic relationships: I become the breadwinner, the head of the family, as well as the martyr. This behaviour is exhausting and counterproductive. I think one of the worst manifestations of it is that I am too easily seduced into believing that “this one” is my “someone,” my soulmate. As a matter of fact, I’ve probably met about a hundred versions of my soulmate, each with the missing perfect facet of the last one. If only I could put them all together, like puzzle pieces.
I am an avoider, chronically avoiding conflict—except on stage, where I blossom into a very candid individual. Suddenly I can take control, actually say no, express my disappointment, my sadness, my fears and anger. My lyrics say the things I can’t in everyday life. I can say them through my show the way that I want to because it is the well-thought-out, one-sided conversation of the lyric writer. And I could fist fight, or simply just scream.
I built my stage show on that emotional explosion completely unintentionally. I was used to internalizing, and to its simmering anger and angst, to regrets for not speaking out. I’d put every disappointment or wish in writing, then bring the list to rehearsals in my bag filled with Hilroy scribblers, pens, bus transfers, soda pop receipts, chewing gum, smokes—and hopes, stashed there just waiting, just like I was.
FOUR
Kentucky
MY DAD ACCEPTED A POSITION SETTING UP A DENTAL program at the University of Kentucky, and as a result our family made the move, the huge transition, from The Pas, Manitoba, to the big city of Lexington, Kentucky. I was halfway through grade two. We moved two days after Christmas 1977, on the front end of a freak ice storm, the worst Kentucky had ever seen—an appropriate greeting for the Torberts from the Canadian tundra.
My parents had decided that we needed a change as a family, a fresh scene for the sake of us kids. Shireen and I were both getting into a lot of trouble in The Pas, but particularly me. I loved moving, even though it held its challenges, but my sisters were not pleased about it.
We found that, much to our naive surprise, many people in Kentucky were racist. And my sister Shireen was brown. In the move from Manitoba, we had to change schools, we had to change churches, and we had to change cultures. The racism thing seemed weird to us, and because it was surprising for all of us kids, we became a bit aggressive and defensively shouted back or flipped off any kids who said something to us. Except for Heather. My little sister became even more introverted and isolated at first, withdrawing even further.
Apart from our new-found extracurricular-activity schoolyard fist fights, I enjoyed the change: I am quick to adapt and up for just about any adventure. I loved having new opportunities to horse around and to meet new people and to reinvent myself, really. I loved escaping my past, escaping the neighbour’s humping dog.
For the first week of school at Stonewall Elementary, I pretended to speak fluent French. I didn’t actually speak any French, but the Kentucky kids thought I was an “Eskimo,” for God’s sake! So what did they know? Since they believed me, I kept it up. In the school cafeteria, I told them that “sissy” was the French word for “napkin,” and they believed me. And I kept on making up words. They didn’t know anything about Canada except that Canadians speak French.
There were so many kids at this new school compared with our sweet little elementary school in The Pas—it was a school so huge that it had a cafeteria, which served corndogs for lunch every single Friday.
Kentucky cuisine was a miraculous thing, in my world. A real mixed bag of Mason-Dixon line–crossing unhealthiness, but delicious. It was like my entire menu-item count suddenly quadrupled overnight. And it was a far cry from my mother’s Hindustani khana, Ayurvedically balanced food that was good for the soul. My mother infused love into her food; it was nurturing and healthy, like her intentions. But we were a busy family, and three school-aged girls who wanted McDonald’s was a new thing for my mother, who was now working full time out of the house. She couldn’t win. Gone were the quiet northern lights to dance our little eyes to sleep, the sound of the wind on the ice lakes, the music of the trappers’ festivals, and the powwows, with their scent of fresh-cooked bannock and burning sage.
My sisters and I took the school bus to school. We learned a lot on those bus rides: lots of derogatory words, and lots of songs. The rides home were noisy, riotous. None of us kids had seatbelts, and we ran up and down the aisles without supervision or intervention.
My sisters and I were th
rust into this society, one that had Sambo dolls for sale and Aunt Jemima pictures as decorative kitsch in every grocery store. This was also a culture in which my sister was called a “nigger” and I, a “white nigger.” Shireen was the only South Asian, the only Indian kid, at the school, and to all the others, she was basically one of the black kids. We fought at school constantly. I wanted to kick every racist kid in the balls, and so I did just that.
Defending Shireen during recess bullying sessions made me hated, and as a result, a line was drawn in the sand. And, of course, children can be the most cruel of all in the consistency of their teasing and psychological torture. It was devastating to us, and Shireen took this ostracization extremely hard. It wouldn’t be the last time we were exposed to bigots. My parents despised bigotry, and so did Shireen and I. And so did God, even if Jesus forgave them—and I believed, Jesus would forgive me too.
For some reason I never figured out, my parents believed we were at fault for even entertaining the notion that fighting to defend ourselves against bullying, racist kids was okay. They could not understand why we weren’t able to use reason to avoid fights. When I proclaimed “They are racist assholes,” this heated outburst earned me a spanking so hard that the wooden spoon broke across my behind. My parents simply believed we should be better mediators. That looked good on paper but didn’t work in real life.
We were finding it difficult to navigate the classrooms, schoolyards, bus rides, and even church services without feeling the pressure and feeling on edge. Bigots were everywhere, trained by their bigot parents. They couldn’t be reasoned with, just forgiven, just like Jesus would forgive. That’s what they told us at church. The church where Jesus worked. And what a church!
The churches in the South are architectural landmarks, holding congregations of up to a thousand faithful—and singing—worshippers every Sunday. They were the biggest buildings for miles around, and always full. My parents drove out to Trinity Hill United Methodist Church, which was a distance from our house. They were quite immersed in church culture and by default so were we kids—choir, Sunday school, service, after-service tea and coffee. Our church was chock full of white people.
We lived in a pretty homogenous place. My dad had accepted a professorship at the University of Kentucky, and while we lived in Kentucky, the Wildcats were NCAA champs more than once. This was of the utmost importance to me—I was a big fan. My parents believed that I was actually a fan of the athletes themselves. I certainly was developing a thing for boys—lots of them.
Although at first I was struggling with a new school, new city, new environment, I soon gained a fresh prepubescent perspective along with the fresh audience. I was delighted with the change of scenery. I morphed my personality to suit whoever was in the room, and this coping mechanism, this survival skill, was developing quickly—I was becoming the consummate actress.
In grade four I learned a thing or two about training bras: the straps really snap when you yank on them from the back and then let go. This type of attention was high comedy for some, and enduring it, a great pathway to acceptance for me. It seemed all in fun, but really, my acceptance of it was acknowledgement of my objectification and sexualization, and both of these, as I now understand, suited me just fine. This was the game of choice in my class that year, and I was not about to complain or protest.
I managed to make some friends at Stonewall Elementary despite my constant scoldings and having to write lines as punishment for talking too much or clowning around by deliberately making fun of myself while singing “My Old Kentucky Home,” which played every day on the PA system for students to sing along to. “Self-discipline requires doing what is necessary, when it should be done, whether it is a pleasant task nor not.” I wrote this sentence, assigned in my first few days of grade six, five hundred times a week for the entire school year, using a ruler to give the exact angle to the words that Mrs. Spifey, my homeroom teacher, wanted.
I was obsessed with the Farrah Fawcett look-alikes at school. Some of the girls hit puberty early, I guess. They had long blond feathered hair and wore Bonne Bell lip gloss. Donna was the tallest girl in my class, and her clothes were always perfect, as was her hair. And if that wasn’t torture enough, making the rest of us feel inadequate and shamefully aroused every time she flung her long hair, there was her mom: a sexier, more glamorous version of Donna. Donna’s mother was the most ravishing creature I had ever seen. I may have been just a kid, but I was in love with her.
One fateful day in grade six, Donna’s mom floated into the classroom. Time stood still, my heart stopped, my breathing ceased. She was wearing skin-tight white pants, a blue-and-white-striped fitted T-shirt, and a blood-red silk scarf, which was tied around her neck and billowed behind her as she walked. Her blinding white, toothy smile highlighted pouty crimson-red lips, and she had the same perfect long blonde feathered hair as her daughter. She looked like Christie Brinkley, only better.
But the best part was her smell, the beautiful, lingering scent of much too much sickly sweet perfume. I closed my eyes and just sniffed, trying to inhale the entire roomful of scent into my lungs. Her smell permeated my nostrils and grabbed hold of my insides. As with many of my richest memories, I can still smell the moment—in this case, the moment I first laid eyes on Donna’s mom.
The bigger impact was that I fell in love with everything she represented to me. To me, she was pure sex, and by “sex” I mean the embodiment of my childlike idea of femininity and beauty. How ravishing she was, and she needed no words to say so much to the world. She seemed intimidating to everyone, even other adults, commanding respect and adoration even if she did breathe the same air as us mortals. To me, Donna’s mom was, and still remains, the ultimate ideal of female perfection. My love of makeup, perfume, and all things that she embodied has been injected into my psyche, both on stage and off. For this, I am grateful.
Donna’s mom and Sophia Loren were my first girl-on-girl crushes. I don’t think I sexualized my feelings as much as I idolized what those women represented to me: power. They held such commanding power over me, over any room they found themselves in, even over society, it seemed. I used to claim to my poor parents that Sophia Loren was my birth mother. “She just has to be, Mom!” I pleaded with my mother, begging her to tell me it was the truth.
I identified with these two powerful women. They were the answer to everything. They both created a brand-new and visually arresting image for me, one of a happy and attractive and confident powerful woman. My mother was such a modest woman, the embodiment of sweet. She was graceful and shy, polite to a fault, thoughtful and humble, deeply sincere. She didn’t wear much makeup or draw a lot of attention to herself. She lived for other people.
My mother would sit up at night in a plush chair in the living room, with all the lights off, only the light from the street lamp at the front corner of our lawn illuminating her dainty frame. And there she’d sit, in her housecoat, waiting for me for hours into the quiet night. Curfews came and went, cars passed by the house and kept going. She just waited. Half the time I was just sitting in the park near our house with all my little naughty girlfriends, talking about boys or making out with each other, practising our kissing techniques—it never occurred to us that this behaviour actually attracted boys.
I always laughed in the mouths of the other girls, blowing hot air down their throats. Sometimes boys would drop by the park. I kissed Bobby Frew for thirty-eight whole seconds, and then laughed so hard that he never spoke to me again. I also sometimes made out with my pillow, pretending it was the boy from my homeroom, the science teacher, or the lecherous guy at my parents’ church, or, of course, Donna’s mom. Oh, I was no stranger to the aching desire of youth. I wanted a boyfriend, like all the other girls. I just could never understand why we had to practise on each other when we really should have been recruiting nice boys to practise on. In my mind, that was the perfect solution.
FIVE
Hognose Snakes, Julie Lennox, and the
Poole Family
IN LEXINGTON, KENTUCKY, THE WILLOW TREES HUNG low over the abandoned sewer drains, where the neighbourhood kids could most often be found. It was here that we gathered and played. Well, mostly it was the neighbourhood boys plus my sisters and me, or, most frequently, just me and the boys.
Most of the time, we were in the drain sloshing in our wet tennis shoes through the water, trying to catch crawdads and little snakes. I myself had no desire to touch snakes, especially the hognose snakes, which were everywhere. They had big teeth and horns, like the devil, and when touched, flipped upside down on their backs and went completely limp, as if they’d died. This never really sat right with me. The first time I saw this happen, I cried, and went straight to my room when I got home for supper, praying on my knees by my bed. I thought I’d hurt or maybe even killed the snake, and I couldn’t bear the thought.
Two years before, I had whacked a mosquito while practising piano and the poor mangled thing tried and tried to pick itself up, only to struggle and fall. I raced to the fridge, my lips trembling and eyes welling up with tears, and grabbed anything I could find—a just-washed lettuce leaf, as it turned out—to try to nurse the squished mosquito back to health. I slid the lettuce underneath it but just ended up drowning it in the water pooled in the groove of the leaf. The experience changed me, and since then I have been extremely sensitive to harming anything.
At eleven years old, I had successfully got myself into a lot of trouble sending dirty notes to a kid named Dan, one of the boys I played with in the drains, who lived up the hill from me. Dan was a year younger than me, and had dishwater-blond hair and blue, blue eyes. He was beautiful, and contemplative and introverted, but he was intrigued by me and my loud mouth and attitude. In reality, my notes to Dan were not dirty. They were my art, my attempts at erotic poetry, and I enjoyed describing our interactions. I wrote him pages and pages of the stuff every day in class.