by Rae Spoon
She didn’t know how much I needed to do something that made me seem like a girl.
“Yes. I do!” I said.
“Well, did you use soap? Next time use soap.” She patted my head and walked away.
In gym class the next day, no one noticed my attempts at becoming a woman. The teacher broke us into groups. “Come up with a routine to the song I give you,” she said. Our group was assigned the particularly sinful song “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now).” I had never heard the song before. We took our tiny stereo and went to a corner of the gymnasium.
“We should start in a line,” one girl said, trying to take control, “and then we can wave our arms up and down like this. It will look like water!”
Kill me now, I thought.
Slowly our routine unfolded. It involved a lot of loosely choreographed manoeuvres which we tried to do in unison. We made the routine longer by doing our moves close to each other at first, and then further apart. By the end of the class I was certain that we had created a routine that would not only confirm how deeply flawed I was at being a girl, but also send me straight to hell, forever.
The next day it was show time. Other groups went up and managed to perform through waves of their own giggles. Suddenly it was our turn. I stood up and joined my group on the blue gym matt. My heart was racing. The gym teacher pressed play on our song, and we stood motionless in a line, waiting for the right note to kick in before starting the routine. As the synthesizer washed over us, something happened to me. Something far back in my mind snapped. I can’t do this, I thought. A voice spoke to me. At that moment, I thought it was Jesus. It said one word: “Run!”
I bolted out of line and out of the room like someone had pulled a pin from a spiritual grenade. By the time the singer had started the chorus, I was halfway down the hallway. I had no idea where I was running.
After my near-dance routine experience, I gave up trying to understand my classmates. I had a new tactic: getting lost in outer space. I saw Star Trek: The Next Generation on television and became fascinated with both the series and the idea of space travel. The show provided an escape not only from junior high, but the entire world. After hearing Captain Picard reference quantum physics, I decided to look into them.
I started to spend my lunch hours in the library reading books about wormholes and antimatter. I would close my eyes and imagine the great darkness of outer space. Of course, life had been hard. I’d been looking at things that were too small. The things that were important weren’t of this world. They were big, like God.
I came up with my own theory of the universe. I read that black holes might actually be wormhole gateways to another universe. As matter was pulled into them, it moved faster—so fast that at some point, time actually stopped. This point was known as the event horizon. I had read a theory that this was the point where the polarities on atoms switch, so when the object emerged in the new universe, it was antimatter. Eventually, I theorized, everything from our universe would be pulled into the other, antimatter side. Of course, beyond that was the spiritual realm of heaven, where God presided over the laws of physics.
I made a diagram of my theory on a poster board. My science teacher happened to be in the library one lunch hour and asked me to explain it to him. He nodded as I told him what each part meant. “That’s great,” he said, “but shouldn’t you be doing other things on your lunch hour? I’m worried about you. This isn’t normal.”
I smiled and replied, “Don’t worry about me. I like being here.”
But when I found out that quantum physics involved math, I chucked away my whole theory and my preoccupation with it. I was never able to concentrate on numbers for long. My theory was not sound and would have been immediately disproven by anyone over the age of thirteen. Yet trying to come up with an explanation for where matter went through black holes was less daunting than getting along with the girls in my gym class. Those lunch hours that I spent imagining outer space allowed me some more time to grow up before I really had to interact with others. No one ever told me that being a nerd was okay, but I chose to embrace it like it was an appointment by God because it seemed like the only thing that I could do.
I Will Be a Wall
SIX MONTHS AFTER MY brother John was born, there was tension throughout our house. Everyone was uneasy with the fear that John would die like Jack had a few years earlier. It felt like we were waiting out his infant years more than we were enjoying them. One night during that time, my father stopped sleeping. He stayed up all night changing the combination-lock code on his briefcase and rustling around the house performing other mysterious rituals. I could hear his briefcase constantly clicking open and closed and the shuffle of his feet from one place to another. The next morning, with bags under his eyes, he took me aside and said, “Your mother is trying to kill us. She’s putting poison in our food.” But that night he ate his entire dinner while I stared at him from across the table, waiting for a cue.
For years he had been telling us that we were making him sick by kicking up dust in the house or that the world could end at any moment, but he would always do so in a cool, reasoned tone, and often out of the blue, like he was just recalling something he had forgotten that he wanted us to know. It never seemed like he thought it was an emergency, until he came up with the story of my mother’s poison plot.
That same week, things started to happen in clusters, like a rain outside that you can’t hear at first but which gets slowly louder until it’s impossible to ignore. It started with my father buying flowers for my mother at the local grocery store. When I saw him come into the house with them, he said, “I bought these because I love your mother so much.”
By the end of the week he was looking wild-eyed and shooting accusations at her. In the middle of it, I could hear the two of them fighting in their room right next to mine. My father opened my door and turned on the light. “Get up,” he said. “We’re going.” I walked out of my room rubbing my eyes and saw that he had rounded up all three of my siblings. My sister was holding John, who was a baby, in her arms, in that way children hold babies, his feet barely off of the ground. Craig, who was seven, stood dazed next to them. “Your mother is trying to kill us,” he said, and raced down the stairs to start the van.
I could hear her sobbing on the phone in the kitchen. I made it down to the landing just as he walked back into the house. His coat smelled like exhaust, the same way it always smelled when he got back from work in the winter or was puttering with the van in the garage. “Come on. Let’s go.”
I was between him and my siblings. I could hear my mother talking to my uncles, telling them to come and help us. I moved toward leaving with him and then stopped. My mother shouted at me across the house, “Don’t leave with him. He’s sick. He has schizophrenia.”
I didn’t really know what the last part meant, but there was something in the tone of my mother’s voice that told me I should believe her. She didn’t sound like she wanted to kill all of us. She was terrified of my father. We couldn’t leave with him. I drew myself up and said, “We’re not going with you.”
At that moment I lost awareness of where or who I was. I was a wall with one job: to keep him away from them. I made myself look as big as I could for an eleven-year-old, and somehow he didn’t push me out of the way. He just looked at me with hurt in his eyes and then left.
Fifteen minutes later, my uncles arrived at our house. We threw our backpacks into their trucks and piled into them. As we started to pull away, a police car turned up and my mother got out to talk to them. We then drove in silence to the east side of the city where my aunt lived. I looked out at the yellow dawn and tried to wrap my head around what had just happened. My father is a schizophrenic? What’s that?
We camped out in our aunt’s basement, and in the morning I picked at a fast food breakfast in front of a television that was way bigger than what I was used to. Later, I sat on the stairs out of sight and overheard everything my mother told my aunt. My father
had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia when he was sixteen. His family never told my mother and she only found out during their first year of marriage. Why hadn’t she told me?
My mother got a restraining order against my father, but that Monday he accidentally turned himself in by going to the police station to report my mother’s homicidal plans. The police saw the restraining order filed under his name and talked him into going to the hospital. They called us and we went outside for the first time since that Saturday night.
My father had returned to the house, where he had been alone for the last two days. I found a list of all the odd things he had done that my mother had typed for his psychologist. He had nailed the windows shut on the ground floor, blown off the top of the barbecue, and hidden glass shards under the door near the entrance as a crude trap. He had anointed a clay dinner bell, a present from his sister’s missionary trip to Mexico, in olive oil and left his copy of the Bible open with two gloves facing up like praying hands on either side.
While my father was in the hospital, my mother went to visit him there every night, so we were left home alone a lot. After dinner my sister and I would put John and Craig to bed. In the living room, Karen and I were often convinced that someone was breaking into the house. We would huddle on the couch breathing nervously and listening for the sound of footsteps outside. Sometimes John would wake up screaming and I would have to try to calm him down. It was hard because I knew I wasn’t the one he wanted.
My mother asked me told not to tell anyone about my father’s illness or what had happened that awful weekend. He had just been elected deacon at our church and she didn’t want him to have to resign. I couldn’t concentrate at school and spent most of my time wondering if there was any truth in the things my father had said to me over the years.
The first time I visited my father in the hospital, we took an elevator up to the top floor. It was my sister’s birthday. My mother told us a story about how she had come there the day before with the pastor from the church and he had cast some demons out of a female patient by putting his hand on her head. I believed her. When we walked into my father’s room, he was sitting at a table with a pencil and a piece of paper checking off what he wanted to eat for dinner. He looked different; the wildness was gone from his eyes, but there was nothing there to replace it. He looked empty and docile. “The food’s actually pretty good here,” he said, marking off the boxes for toast, soup, and jello.
After he came home, he would sleep on the couch all day and struggle to pay attention for more than short periods of time. We all fell into a lull. My mother said he had been sick, but that he was getting better. I waited for the parts of him that I had liked before to come back.
Six months later he started going to meetings that were run by a fundamentalist Christian men’s movement. He came home after one of their gatherings and called a family meeting. Looking at each one of us, he said, “Men need to take back their rightful place as spiritual leaders in their homes. That’s why this country is falling apart. I am the man of this house and I need to take back my place as head of it.”
That night I woke up to the sound of him shuffling around the house again; soon the accusations returned, and the wildness came back into his eyes. He had gone off his pills so he could be a stronger leader. I became a wall again. This time I watched him and when he started to slide, I situated myself between him and my siblings until he ended up back at the hospital and on his pills.
When I was thirteen, my mother claimed to be divorcing him after a particularly violent incident, but then let him move back into the house when he got out of the hospital. She always tried to tell me he was just sick, but I knew there was more to it than that. He was cruel to all of us, even when he was on his pills. She would waffle between agreeing with me when I brought it up and being loyal to him. He saw me as a traitor who had turned on him. Meanwhile, he again tried to reassert his authority over our family. Each night after dinner, he would make us stay at the table while he read long passages from the Bible and then made us all name a thing that we were thankful for.
After my mother found some of my writing in which I talked about suicide, there was an ongoing debate between my parents and me about which one of us was crazy. I was sent to a Christian therapist. My father often threatened to send me to the hospital when I disobeyed him, going so far as trying to pick me up and carry me there once when I refused to go to therapy. One time when we were alone in the van and he was driving me back from a session, he drove past the turn-off where we lived and onto the highway out of town until there were no longer any streetlights. The dark fields west of the city never looked so remote. He didn’t say a word, but I got scared. I felt like he was capable of anything, especially if he’d gone off of his pills. I started to scream at him. I told him to take me home. He turned the van around. I never told my mother.
I knew I would die by my own hand, or maybe my father’s, if I stayed there. The next week I told my mother that if she didn’t help me move out, I would jump off the overpass by our house. So she did. I moved into my grandmother’s house, where eventually I started eating and sleeping again. But this was the start of a terrible time for Karen, because now all of our father’s rage was directed at her.
Five months later, though, my mother and siblings joined me. My father had threatened them again and there had been a huge scene when my mother had tried to lock him out of the house, but he had rolled in under the garage door. The police came but they couldn’t legally remove him. Karen told me that she was sitting on the roof of the house in the spot where we used to crawl out of the window to hide and that our neighbours were sitting in lawn chairs watching the commotion. Soon after, my parents finally divorced and we got another restraining order against my father. We then moved from my grandmother’s house into a duplex one neighbourhood away.
There is still always a chance my father will show up somewhere, but I see him most frequently in my dreams. I have a recurring nightmare that I am still a teenager and that my mother has decided to let my father move back in. When I was younger and had the dream, I would not fight back, but now I will do anything it takes to get rid of him and sometimes I succeed.
Cowboy
MY EARLIEST MEMORY OF the Calgary Stampede involves my parents dressing us up for the parade. I had a whistle and a blue straw cowboy hat with a sheriff’s star on the front. My sister had a red one. We were both wearing checkered shirts and Levi’s jeans with elastic waistbands. Our brother Craig, a baby at the time, had a bib with a star on it and a brown straw hat that he kept throwing off. Our father was teaching us how to yell “Yee haw!” The rule of the game seemed to be the louder, the better, but every time one of us yelled, it would scare Craig. He would crinkle up his face at first and eventually start to cry. But then that became part of the game. We all took turns yelling “Yee haw” while Craig wailed along.
Every Calgary Stampede, the city becomes a sea of new white cowboy hats and denim worn by office workers who have probably never even been on a farm. You can see them in the evening sauntering around town drunk with little bits of straw stuck on their outfits from the bales of hay that are trucked in for the occasion. I grew up in the suburbs. My father was one of those office workers. I never lived in the country as a child, but my mother’s family is different.
I could always tell when my uncle Carl was at my grandma’s house when I saw his worn brown cowboy boots at the door. They stood up straight as if his legs were still in them. Uncle Carl lived with his wife and two sons in a mobile home out in the country. Every once in a while they would decide to move and bring their mobile home with them. I remember being amazed pulling up to the same house in a completely new location. When we walked in everything inside was just the same. It was like a spaceship that could take off and then land somewhere else.
Uncle Carl loved horses. He rode them until he was bow-legged. I would watch him amble around and think about how the horses had changed the shape of his
legs to fit their bodies. Sometimes he would take his own horse out for us to ride. He would lift my sister and me up onto it and then lead us around slowly. I felt so tall on top and safe with my uncle holding the reins.
Uncle Carl has worked the oil rigs for as long as I can remember. We would never know if he was going to show up at Christmas or Thanksgiving until that day. It all depended on whether his boss gave the crew the time off or not, and that depended on the price of crude oil. Sometimes he would drive twelve hours straight back from Saskatchewan to be with us. Other times he would be unreachable, working somewhere out on the frozen, flat land. One Christmas when he came home, he hadn’t told anyone that he had lost part of a finger a few months earlier, and he made a practical joke out of it. He came up to me and did the trick where he pretended to pull part of his finger off, which is usually done by tucking the finger back and making part of the thumb on the other hand look like it was the detached part of the finger. This time there was no “just kidding” part at the end, and he laughed for half an hour after I screamed when I discovered that there was indeed a part of his finger missing. But I loved it when he paid attention to me even if he sometimes shocked me. I didn’t even have any bad feelings for him after he accidentally dislocated my arm when he was trying to put me on his shoulders; I just cried until my relatives gave me candy and then we found out that my arm had popped itself back into its socket on the trip to the emergency room.
My uncles who work the oil rigs are often away from home for months at a time. They work fourteen-hour days or more through every season that the prairies throw at them. All three of them dropped out of high school as soon as they could, but now they earn more money than a lot of people who went to university. Life on the oil rigs is lonely. When I was a child, it was not unusual to get a drunken call from one of my uncles in the middle of the night, wanting to want to talk to all four of us kids to tell us that he loved us. We would make jokes about it and warn each other as we passed the receiver, but I felt my uncles’ isolation and identified with it.