Falling Backwards: A Memoir (23 page)

Mel and Isabel’s wild kids, Billy Ruth, Bobby June and Tyler (Tyler was the only boy), were skilled yet creepy horse whisperers.
They could make a horse do things that defied rational explanation. Their horses could sit and stay, shake a hoof and practically roll over. I swear they could almost talk! I heard it with my own ears. Those kids had been on the back of a horse before they could walk or talk, and they made sure they told us that every few minutes.

“We been ridin’ since we wasn’t walkin’ or crawlin’ …” (Yeah, you just told us that). Patrick once asked me if they were “normal” kids. I told him that they weren’t. I told him that I didn’t quite know what they were. I think Patrick was really asking if they were dangerous. Fearless is what they were. They were completely themselves, which I thought was spectacular. I envied them. I assumed that they were real country kids, complete with running noses and red necks, unlike us. Patrick also asked me if they went to school. I honest-to-God didn’t know. I never thought about it. Let’s assume they did.

I don’t think Mel was a big drinker; I think he and his wife split up because she just didn’t love him anymore. That was a fate worse than what my dad had suffered. Yes, he got kicked out, but my mom still loved him; he just had a drinking problem. Mel, on the other hand, had quite simply been set adrift.

I guess my dad started going to AA shortly after he moved in with Mel, because he called up my mom and told her that he was sober. Even though Mel was a good housekeeper, and a somewhat decent cook, my dad wanted to come home. My mom had laid down the law, though, and she had a list of things that he had to do in order for him to qualify for re-entry into our house. I’m not sure what was on that list, but
no drinking
was at the top of it. I was proud of my mom for sticking to her guns.

My mom was constantly worried about money so she balanced her chequebook a lot. I would see her hunched over my dad’s desk, shuffling through piles of papers and bills. “It never ends,” she’d lament. It couldn’t have been easy being there alone with us, paying bills and
fixing things and driving us all over hell’s half-acre and all that other stuff you have to do when you’re running a household. It must have been scary at night, thinking about people breaking in and murdering us all. (Maybe she didn’t think about that but I did.) We didn’t have an alarm system. We did have Aquarius, but he wasn’t much of a guard dog. He licked complete strangers like they were cheeseburgers.

We didn’t talk about my dad for weeks. We all tried to keep busy. The first time my dad came home for a visit sober, he came bearing a brand-new iron for my mother. It was a very weird gift to bring to a woman you wanted to woo back into your life. She said to him, “What’s this?” and he replied, “Well, I knew you needed a new iron.” My dad knew the way to my mother’s heart. You’d think he would have brought flowers or chocolates but no, he brought a new Sunbeam steam iron. I think my mom was happy to get it, though; it’s the thought that counts, and she did iron more than an entire legion of Chinese dry cleaners.

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.

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.

H
igh 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 same 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.