Mrs. Winchell at the new school we went to after the other one got shut down had black hair that was like a helmet on her head, and her black-framed glasses came out from the helmet like goggles on a Halloween mask of a race car driver, and her mouth had wrinkles around it, not the wrinkles you got from smoking like my mom said you get, going straight up and down over your upper lip like the folds in a curtain, but wrinkles at the side of your mouth that say you’re not smiling even if you are smiling, or the wrinkles that grow and get deeper when you’re frowning and show a mood of angry disapproval even deeper than that which you’re feeling.
She never laughed except without amusement, with a skeptical small suspiciousness. To her the only realities were the unanswerable laws of mathematics and science—all else was suspect, to be approached as if it were shameful and wrong, and potentially leading to the ultimate ruination of everything. I found this out early in the year when she was giving a talk on what to expect and I was listening while drawing an elaborate picture on the inside of my Hillier notebook. When she concluded her talk she marched straight down the aisle to my desk, leaned over, and using a ruler as a guide, tore the back cover neatly from my notebook. “There’ll be no drawing while I’m talking to the class,” she said as she marched off, though I didn’t know what was wrong since I’d listened to everything she’d said.
I had to tell Mom and Dad about it and Dad was mad, saying she had no right to ruin the notebook, and he’d be damned if he was going to buy another one, but Mom just got out some construction paper and scissors and made a new cover. Mrs. Winchell would become furious with my disinterest in math and science, and when I was confused I knew not to ask her, for her face said to me that she disliked me in a basic and powerful way that there was nothing I could do to change or alter, the same way I felt some other kids at school didn’t like me. When we did math I just got more confused, for when one bit goes by and you’re afraid to ask questions, and then another bit comes it makes it that much the worse, because it was built on the bit before, until you fear ever being able to understand the figures and symbols that are grasped so easily by others. Every minute your confusion deepens until the entirety of life seems hopeless and you are completely set apart from it as one who doesn’t understand, who can’t understand, and tears pour from your eyes as you stare down at the book on your desk, so that a classmate puts up her hand and says, “Mrs. Winchell—Tim’s crying because he doesn’t understand the math,” so that you’re exposed to the whole class as one who doesn’t understand, can’t understand, will never understand, even though your classmate calls out with real empathy and the desire to help—it then doesn’t make it any better when Mrs. Winchell says, “Tim shouldn’t be here if he doesn’t understand it. He should be going to a special school.”
My ability to draw didn’t help me as Mrs. Winchell had no time for art. Although she had to teach it as part of the curriculum, she did it only in the most grudging way. When I made my science fair project about the technology used to make animated films and how the persistence of vision was used to create the illusion of movement, using my drawings to show how scenes from Walt Disney films were animated, she let her gaze fall over my presentation and asked, “You like that sort of thing, do you?”
Something that was strange was that her husband was the head of the Gideon society that brought little bibles to us with red leather covers and a place at the front to write our names and addresses, and also there was a picture of a Canadian flag and also the words to the national anthem. As he stood before us, Mr. Winchell, who looked a lot older than Mrs. Winchell, told us about Gideon from the Bible, and why his society left bibles in hotel rooms and gave them to kids in schools, telling us that in these books was all the wisdom of the ages, and the answer to all our questions, and that in our times of need and sadness, all we had to do was consult these books and be strengthened by God’s word, so that these bibles could be our life’s greatest companions.
I looked over at Mrs. Winchell watching him as he made his long speech and she looked a bit nervous and shy but also proud in that she believed in all of what her husband was saying, though it was sometimes hard to tell because in addition to the wrinkles by her mouth which always made her seem frowning and disapproving, the flesh of her face seemed frozen, like a mask placed over her real face, and the muscles were supposed to match up to the expressions she wore under her mask, but they were never entirely synchronized. When we lined up at the door to go out for recess, for the benefit of my classmates I’d put my hand over the first four letters of her name on the nameplate on her door so that it read Mrs. Hell.
Dad was let out of the hospital after three months. We went down to pick him up, and Jason and I hugged him in the hospital lobby where there was a statue of an angel. He wasn’t supposed to work so he laid down on the couch for some time, and then he started going to a night class at the local college for interior decorating to learn how to decorate our house when we got finished renovating it. He also applied to be a member of the Masons and that required him to study a little black book that he said nobody else was allowed to look at, though I did look and couldn’t make any sense out of it or see anything that was so secret. A couple of men had to come to our house to inspect it and see if he was suitable to be a member of the Masons, and Mom and Jason and me all had to stay in the kitchen with the door closed all night and we couldn’t watch TV as he was entertaining the men in the living room, and we were only brought out to them one time to be introduced to the two men as they drank their beer, and then we had to go back in the kitchen and stay there until it was time to go to bed.
When my dad became a Mason he’d get regular newsletters in the mail which he said I also couldn’t read, and which I did anyway, and he started going to meetings every week. He also got an apron decorated with flashy jewels that he wore to the meetings, which he kept in a leather case that I wasn’t supposed to fool with, and when he started working again he’d take the case with the apron in it to work so he could leave for the meeting right after. One night we were at the barbershop after he’d turned the closed sign over and was getting ready to go, and Mom jokingly held up the apron to Howard, my dad’s partner in the barbershop, saying maybe he’d look nice in one of them. After Howard left, my dad got really mad at her, saying non-Masons were never to be allowed to wear those aprons, even in fun, and she had no business holding it up to Howard like that. I wondered whether they wore the aprons over their clothes at the meetings or whether they just wore the aprons and nothing else.
Meanwhile at school, if Mrs. Winchell wasn’t impressed with my drawings the other kids were, as each day I made drawings of jokes and gags on the backs of exercise sheets that would get passed around the class. Carl Plympton, who came with me from the other school, drew too, and he liked the Disney characters as I did but was unable to draw them unless they were smiling. This didn’t really work for most of the gags he depicted, especially when the gags themselves were so lame—he would draw Goofy pulling the trigger of a gun aimed at his own face, smiling all the while, and often the gags he used were stolen from my own drawings to such a degree that I referred to him behind his back as Xerox. I was glad, though, that for the most part the kids in the class could figure out that my drawings of the Disney characters were better, not to mention had more expressions, while I always couldn’t help but regret that some others couldn’t tell the difference between Carl’s drawings and my own and happily enjoyed both as if they were equal.
A boy named Garry Lewis began championing me and my drawings and would get mad on my behalf at anyone who claimed Carl Plympton was my equal. With his encouragement I started a weekly newspaper called The Homely Gazette, which featured such stories as a soccer player missing the ball when going for a big kick and getting his foot wedged in his own mouth, and a man falling out of a window into a pile of rotten Kentucky Fried Chicken. I put the paper together at home, giving my brother Jason the credit for being “chief pencil sharpener,” for he did race back and forth to my room, providing me with freshly sharpened pencils, and I gave it to my mom to Xerox some copies at her secretary job. I took the copies to school and sold them for fifteen cents apiece and Garry Lewis promoted them and strong-armed kids into buying copies.
At the same time it was Garry Lewis who, without meaning to, was the cause of the end of The Homely Gazette. In his class down the hall he was reading the paper as his teacher was trying to teach a lesson, so she grabbed it from him and marched off with it, as Garry told me one recess. “She didn’t seem too happy looking at it,” Garry said. “Sorry—I hope you don’t get in trouble.” That afternoon our principal Mr. Gosland arrived at the door of our class and asked, “May I borrow Tim for a moment please?” Anyone’s first impression of Mr. Gosland would have been overwhelmed entirely by the sight of his large bald head which was ringed by a fringe of red curly hair, earning him the nickname of “Miner, miner, forty-niner” because the light that bounced off his shiny dome was so bright it made it seem as though he was wearing a miner’s hat with a light on the front of it.
He took great joy in his job, and when teaching about the moon he would enter the classroom in a space suit that he made himself, and in teaching about Vikings, he would gather the kids in the gym and sit them on benches as if on a Viking ship while he stood before them dressed as a Viking captain and serving them cut-up hot dog as the meat of the dragon they’d killed, and in teaching about First Nations he would enter the classroom in a headdress. He also kept a chipmunk in his office in a glass box. He now stood in the hall waiting for me with The Homely Gazette in his hand.
I looked up at his serious features, usually so mild and amiable but now stern and disapproving, his eyes seeming insect-like the way people’s eyes always do behind glasses. I could see the pores in his nose, and a slight white rash around the strands of his red moustache. “One thing I really respect is talent,” he was saying, his tenor voice sounding as earnest and reasonable as ever, broadcasting, it seemed, from his sober, industrious heart that desired nothing more than to meet another like itself, whose tone rang with unanswerable logic, making it even more unsettling that this same voice was expressing disappointed dismay, though I could not figure out why, for to my mind there was nothing bad about my paper. “But one thing I hate to see is a misuse of talent,” he said, indicating The Homely Gazette. “And this is a misuse of talent,” he said.
I didn’t see why, since Garry Lewis and all the other kids liked it. Was it because Garry Lewis was reading it when the teacher was talking? Did that make it a misuse of talent, and if that was so, didn’t that apply to anything anyone was reading during class?
“So I’m going to ask you to stop doing this. Instead, we’d like you to do the drawings for the school newsletter each month it comes out,” he said, finishing with a slight smile. I knew he wanted me to be pleased, so I acted pleased, and I was, but at the same time I’d liked making The Homely Gazette and would miss making it.
Garry Lewis was mad when he found out. “Miner Forty-niner don’t have any right to tell you to stop making it!” he said, and at recess he saw Mr. Gosland outside doing recess duty and went up to him and asked him, “Why’d you tell Tim to stop making his paper?” Mr. Gosland’s eyes narrowed and he asked, “Whose boy scout are you?”
“Ha-ha! Tim got in trouble for his paper!” my brother Jason said at supper that night.
“What’re you laughin’ about?” my dad said. “You’re in trouble, too. You’re in there as Chief Pencil Sharpener!”
“Yeah, that’s right!” I said.
“Oh, you think it’s okay if you go down, just so long as you take the other guy with ya, huh?” Dad said, turning on me.
The problem with doing the drawing for the school newsletter, though, was that I would submit the drawings suggested by Mr. Gosland relating to the subject matter of the newsletter, which he would advise me of when he took me into his office each month, and the drawing would be taken by the school’s secretary and traced onto carbon by which the newsletter was reproduced. Her tracings, I found to my anger when the first newsletter was printed, often left out lines that I considered essential, making some parts of the drawings appear as blobs, or leaving out mouths or eyes on some of the figures. It didn’t seem to make any difference to anyone else, but to me they didn’t have any of the feel or spirit I’d drawn them with, and I asked Mr. Gosland if I could trace them onto the carbon myself, and he said that wasn’t necessary because Mrs. Brennan did that job “very handily.” I would try to say that my drawings didn’t look as good when she traced them, but he chuckled and asked me if I wanted to see his chipmunk in the terrarium.
“Now for this month I had the idea that you could draw something relating to the maple sugar trip the grade ones went on when the class was told that to get sap they had to ‘tap’ the trees, and one of the children…” here Mr. Gosland paused to chuckle, “one of the children spoke up and asked if ‘tapping the trees’ meant putting water taps on them like they had at home. So I thought you could draw the trees with water taps on them.”
At home my dad started going into work again. One night at my aunt’s house on my mother’s side of the family, I heard him telling Aunt Maxine and Uncle Elmer the story: “They said to me, you’ve had a heart attack and I said, ‘Bull—shit! I didn’t have no heart attack!’ I didn’t have any pain in my heart, it was my arm that hurt like a bitch! And they said that’s where it hits ya, and then by Jesus, I started feelin’ terrible again and they told me I had another heart attack! And I wake up and this one over here…” I pictured him pointing at my mom, since I was in the next room playing with my brother and my cousins, “this one over here is sittin’ there cryin’ her eyes out! Jesus Christ! So I said, ‘What’s the matter with you? I’m the one that had the heart attack!’ and she says she’s worried about me. ‘Well, Jesus, how is your sittin’ there cryin’ gonna help me?’ I says to her.”
Meanwhile, my cousin and my brother and I had found some old boxing gloves that we brought into the room where the adults were talking and when Dad saw them he started talking about how he’d boxed in the Navy. My cousin was Uncle Elmer’s grandson, and his dad was there too. Since my cousin was the same age and size as Jason, they decided the two boys would put on the gloves and spar a bit so we moved out to Uncle Elmer’s front room, and the men who’d been drinking some beers showed the boys the right way to lace up the gloves, and Dad prodded Jason while Uncle Elmer and his son-in-law coached our cousin, and as they faced off against each other, at first the two boys were smiling but something in the men’s faces became tense and impatient as they stood behind the boys with their beers, my dad drawing fitfully on his cigarette.
“Hey, that ain’t the way ya do it—ya gotta get in and under,” he said to Jason, bending to show him how it was done, while Uncle Elmer and his son-in-law fussed with our cousin, getting him to hold his gloves up in the right way, and they all surrounded the two boys, the fight all of a sudden becoming serious:
“Hey—don’t let him get ya like that!”
“Block him!”
“Uppercut!”
Something terrible came into the eyes of my father, his right eye squinting up, and on the other side, Uncle Elmer and his son-in-law becoming more hungrily brutish in a way I’d never seen before—until I remembered when I’d heard about my uncle going to secret cockfights in drive sheds in the country where they made roosters fight each other to the death, and the dark eyes of the men fed on the two boys fighting, pushing them together, seeming almost angry like there was a poison they needed to ooze out of themselves and the only way they could get at it was to have the two boys fight, and my brother and my cousin starting out laughing, now serious, now doing their best to stand up before the prodding of the men whose voices were getting more guttural and careless, and the boys finally began crying, tears spilling from their eyes and down over their contorted mouths and onto their gloves, and the men going, “Aw come on now, what’s th’ matter with ya?” and the little boys bawling, their faces red and hot with shame, and the women coming in from the kitchen, my mother, Aunt Maxine, her daughter-in-law: “Now what’s going on here? What the hell are you doing to them?”
“Jus’ a little boxin’ lesson…” Dad said and shrugged, smirking at the other men, turning back to the women with amused and diminishing contempt.
For a while it seemed like Dad had not been drinking and then he was. Certainly I had heard him tell the stories of when his pals sneaked him beers into the hospital and he even bragged that the doctor told him one beer a day was good for him. “Just down a couple beds from me was Rob, you know, the guy who owns the funeral home in town, and he says, ‘By God, I’ll get you yet, Dirk!’”
He still had to go to a lot of doctor’s appointments and after one of them as me and my brother sat in the back seat of the car I heard my parents talking in hushed voices about something I couldn’t hear, though I thought it had something to do with what they sometimes did on Sunday afternoons when they asked us to go out and play, and they went into their room which they usually never did in the afternoon, and so we tried the bedroom door and found it locked, so we went outside and looked in through the window and in the dim shadows of the bedroom we would only see the shape of Dad on Mom, and could specifically make out only the sight of Mom’s feet dangling over the edge of the bed with her panties draping from her toes, and later when she asked us what we saw, that’s what we said, and now as they talked in the front of the car, their voices implying more than they said, with spaces in their sentences to be filled in by what was in their minds, all the words circling around the question of When? I knew somehow they talked of what made the panties drape from Mom’s toes.
As he returned to work and to the Point Edward Ex-Servicemen’s Club, my dad would call my mom to pick him up after an afternoon when he didn’t come home, and I’d say to Mom, “Well, at least he calls now,” and me and her and Jason would drive down to the club and get him, and he’d come sauntering out and get into the car, and once as he sat there numb and dumb, looking around with bewildered squint-eyed sadness, I asked him, “Why do you drink, Dad?” and he scowled and shrugged as my brother at my side shushed me and shook his head disapprovingly at me for asking the question but Dad just sat there looking down for a while as Mom drove, and then he said, “Well, drinking’s a drug just like any other,” and lifted his cigarette and stared at it. “This is a drug, too… a very, very, mild drug. But it’s a drug, too.” He took a drag and let the smoke curl out of his mouth as he looked out the window to the landscape passing by.
Dad began returning to his habit of not coming home after work, or sometimes not coming home at all, so I would check his bed when I got up in the morning to see if he was there, and sometimes at night I’d hear him come in, get into a fight with Mom, and then say he was going out again, and my mom would say, “Oh, you’re going to walk out again? Do you think the kids respect you when you do that?” and I heard her go into another room, maybe the kitchen, and after that I pictured my dad sitting on the couch in the living room, and then I heard his quick footsteps and then the screen door opening and swinging then slowly coming shut.
Another night I was awakened by their fighting, a sound even more horrifying than the war-like national anthem surrendering to crackling static chaos, and my mother crying, “What the hell’s the matter with you, do you want to have another heart attack?” and then my dad in frenzied mockery calling out, “I’m havin’ one now! I’m havin’ one now!” as he put his hand over his heart then fell to the ground. I heard the clatter and thud against the floor and my mother’s voice sounding like shattered glass in hysterical fury as she picked up the phone yelling, “I’m calling the hospital! I’m calling the ambulance! Get up or I’m calling the ambulance!”
Slowly the work on the house continued somehow, with my dad’s knowledge of interior decorating from his college course informing his choices as to paint and wallpaper for the walls. Sometimes he’d use his new expertise garnered from the course to tell other people how their colours clashed and were incorrect according to the experts.
But unfortunately the worst thing we found that year was that a developer had bought all the land around our house and was going to build a subdivision, and when they asked Dad if he wanted to sell he of course said no since we’d just moved in, but it wasn’t long before the surveyors wearing the orange bands came around again, and the orchard on one side of us and the cornfield on the other, and even the old barn behind us where when we first moved in, two old men named Morris and Arthur sat every day, the dust at their feet littered with the many matches they used to light their pipes. All was uprooted, upended, and mowed down, the bulldozers and the backhoes came in, and the barn was demolished, collapsed into an isle of shattered wood and stale straw around which a moat of liquefied manure shone in the sun, sending packs of rats scurrying toward our home, and my brother and I watched the workmen perched on their bulldozers, nosing their way through the orchards of apple and pear trees and flattening them, and we knew them to be our mortal enemies, and one day one of the men with a large bush of red hair whom my brother and I derisively called, “Orange Root Beer Head,” came sweating to our door and asked us for a glass of water, and we fixed him a cup of water with dishwashing soap in it to punish him for knocking down the orchard. We told Dad what we were doing and he leapt off the couch, “Christ, don’t do that! If I asked for a glass of water and you gave me that I’d punch you right in the mouth! Go get the guy a nice glass of water!”
Mom and Dad had started bowling with a league once a week and one night they had a rare party after bowling, when a bunch of adults came to our house and stood around and drank alcohol. Dad was standing in the kitchen near a woman who leaned on the counter where the coffee maker was. “Hey Tim! Go get your brother!” he called to me, so I sprinted down the hall and told Jason that Dad wanted him. “Hey buddy, take a look at these!” Dad said to Jason as we approached, and Dad pointed, smiling, to the breasts of the woman beside him. She smiled indulgently at us. “You’re always lookin’ at Howard’s magazines—check out the size of these,” he said, and it was true, when we were in the barbershop and Dad’s partner wasn’t there, we would go look in the bottom drawer of Howard’s barber counter and see the Hustler and Penthouse magazines, and my brother in particular would pore over the forbidden pictures of flesh before our dad would say, “Hey, come on, that’s Howard’s stuff! Leave it alone!”
Although the appeal of the pictures partly baffled me, it was true my brother looked long and hard over the women’s chests portrayed in the magazines, and now he stood in shock as his father indicated the woman beside him and said, “Now these are what you call boobs! No doubt about that! She’s sure got ’em, don’t ya think, Jason?” The woman smiled benignly down at the boy, who recovered from his shock, turned on his heel, and sped down the hallway. “Jason? Jason!” Dad called after him in increasingly angry puzzlement. A storm crossed his face and he trudged down the hall after his son. Jason was under his bed in his darkened room. “What the hell’s the matter with you?” Dad was asking, standing at the door. “Come out of there! Get out of there right now!”
Jason wouldn’t come out or speak. I tried to tell Dad I thought he was embarrassed. “Embarrassed about what? I was just showin’ him a woman that was really built!” Dad argued. “Get outta there!” he called under the bed. “Come on!” He finally gave up and left the room disgusted. Since Jason seemed to have turned in for the night, I put on my pajamas and got into my bed, listening to the voices of the adults talking down the hall. The voices grew fewer as the front door on the other side of the wall from my room opened and shut.
I heard a body trudge down the hallway that I could tell from its footfall was my dad. I heard the trickle of him in the bathroom and shortly after, his shadow appeared in my door, framed by the hallway light. “What’s the matter with Jason?” he demanded. “Why won’t he talk to me?”
“He’s embarrassed,” I said.
“About what? You know as well as I do that he can’t get enough of the pictures in those magazines of Howard’s!”
“Yeah, but it’s different when it’s a picture and when it’s a real person.”
“Well, Jesus,” he grunted as he came into the room and sat on my bed. “I wasn’t tryin’ to piss him off, for Chrissake!”
“He just got scared,” I said, realizing he never would understand. He lay down beside me on the bed.
“You and Jason got the best beds in the house—they’re the best kind for your back,” he sighed after a moment. “Well, I don’t wanna upset you guys, or embarrass ya,” Dad continued, draping his arm over me. “You guys are my right and left wingers, right?” he said in the darkness, echoing his long-time names for me and Jason since Jason was left-handed and me right-handed, so those became the positions we played on Dad’s imaginary hockey team, which I always felt a little uneasy about because I failed to take an interest in hockey just as I’d failed to take an interest in Fred Scott’s ball mitt, or in any sport, and I felt bad about disappointing him, but still he called us his wingers when he was in a good mood, and as we lay in the darkness his arm hugged me closer to him.
“You guys are my wingers, and you know I love ya—right? You know I’d never let anything bad happen to ya—right? I wish you guys could stay at the age you are now forever,” his voice said quietly in the darkness, with a different note in it. “You’re my little winger and I’m proud of ya,” and he lay there holding me for a while, then got up and sauntered back out to the party.
“What were you doin’?” I heard Mom ask him out there with the other adults.
“I was havin’ what you call a father-and-son, man-to-man talk,” Dad pronounced with significance.
“Oh, bullshit!” Mom said, laughing.
In the coming week Jason and I had a school holiday on a Monday, the day our dad had off work, and he was going to take us to the secret spot along the lake where he used to swim as a kid, an inlet near the mouth of the river, and he drove us to the beach that was secluded and watched as me and Jason played in the sand and waded into the water. “Nice and sandy along here, eh? No rocks or nothin’!” he said as he watched us. “This is the best part of the beach.” He sat on the sand and watched for a while as we played and swam. Then it seemed to get like he was thinking about something else and said to us he was going to go talk to a guy just for a bit at the Ex-Servicemen’s Club that was nearby, but he’d be back soon, and don’t get into trouble.
We played in our own private bay and could see the big boats and tankers moving to the river beyond. The boats moved through the afternoon and the changes of the sky were mirrored in the lake, and we ran between the excitement of the waves and the pleasures the sand offered, the digging of tunnels and forts through the afternoon to its latter part, when the silence of the shore beyond its murmuring tide and the seagull’s cry became more ominous, and the shadows lengthened on the sand dunes, and the air turned cool so we didn’t feel much like swimming anymore. My brother and I ended up lying beside each other on the sand as the sky darkened, wondering where Dad was and if he’d forgotten us, shivering in the cooling wind, my arm around my little brother for protection and warmth.
“Have a good swim?” Dad asked as he finally drove back up. “Great beach, huh?” I could see his right eye was squinted up that way and he was talking again as if he held something hot in his mouth. He drove us home as Mom was just getting in from work.
“You guys have a good time swimmin’?” she asked us. “You were out a long time.”
Yeah, we did, we said, and Jason added that it started to get a bit too cold to swim near the end and Mom said, “Why didn’t you come home, then?” and Jason said we were waiting for Dad to come pick us up, and Mom said, “You mean he wasn’t there?” Then turning to Dad she said, “I can’t even trust you to take the kids for a day! You can’t leave kids like that all day at the beach by themselves!”
“Shit,” he said, now laying on the couch in his usual place. “I spent the whole summer in the water when I was a kid—never took my suit off from June to August.”
“You don’t leave kids that age at the beach by themselves!” Mom screamed. “They could have drowned!” It was clear to me he didn’t understand just as he didn’t understand why Jason had been embarrassed. It was more often that these misunderstandings happened when his right eye was squinted up, which seemed to happen more often as the subdivision was built around us and landscaping around the new houses caused the ground level to be raised at each side, so that when it rained, our yard was flooded till it was like it was a lake.
At least one time, though, his acting this way was more to do with physical pain than with the townhouses and identical split-level homes being constructed all around us. He came down with an abscessed tooth and had to go to the dentist and get it drained of pus. Off work for the day, he stopped at the club after the dentist with his friend Frank Ostachuk, and they came clattering in the door just after me and my brother came home from school. They sat at the kitchen table drinking and smoking, and I came in marvelling at the strange sight of the men there in the late afternoon and asked my dad how his tooth was.
“How do you think?” he asked as he displayed his swollen cheek for me to see.
Mom came home and said, “I see you guys have been helpin’ Dirk forget his tooth,” and she started to get dinner and asked Dad if he should be drinking while taking the pills the dentist had given him for his tooth. They started arguing, and Frank Ostachuk came out to the living room where we were watching The Brady Bunch and silently smoked his pipe, and I went back to the kitchen because I remembered that tonight was Parents Night at our school, and Mom said, “Oh, that’s right,” and looked over at Dad and said, “How are you gonna go in the state you’re in?”
By this time Dad was holding his head and moaning with real pain, but somehow it seemed warped and deformed by the amount he’d drunk, as if his feelings were passing through a filter that made them bigger but at the same time blurred them, made them crude and block-like and fuzzy, and we had supper, Mom making friendly talk with Frank Ostachuk, and we all ate except Dad, who sat drinking, and after when Frank Ostachuk rejoined my brother and me in the living room while Mom got ready for Parents Night, I crept back to the kitchen to see how Dad was doing just in time to see him standing by the counter and slamming his hand down on it. To my horror he burst into tears, grimacing as he sobbed with a strange, high-pitched sound.
I ran back to Frank Ostachuk who sat smoking his pipe, and hardly able to form the words with my mouth, I said, “Mr. Ostachuk, something’s wrong with my dad—he’s crying.” Not nearly as fast as I wanted, Frank Ostachuk stirred himself and slowly padded out to the kitchen and put his hand on Dad’s arm.
“I’m alright, Frank,” Dad sobbed. “I’m alright.”
Mom came out and said he was in no condition to go to Parents Night, and he said no, no, no, he’ll go, he didn’t want to let the kids down, and so Frank Ostachuk left and Dad drank more of the drink that wasn’t his usual beer, and we went out and got into the car, rumbling through the countryside till we got to the school, unusually alive with golden lights in all the nighttime windows, people visible in the classrooms even from the road, parents standing in the aisles, the cars parked all around the building over the hopscotch and four-square marks on the asphalt.
My brother and I watched Dad not just for the way he was acting but also for the pain the tooth was giving him, the side of his face swollen up as he walked slowly into the school with a sense of being duty bound and grimly living up to his responsibilities, and down the hallway as the parents of various children that he knew from the community or from the barbershop passing by, and him pausing to greet them with an over-friendliness that had his hand leaping up into the air to greet them and his laugh not coming from a real place but from an idea of what he now believed approximated good humour, and I looked from his lopsided grin to their faces to see if they knew, and mostly they bid hello to him in a regular way, and chuckled as he hazarded an irreverent joke as we walked down the hallway of the school, and he now seemed to waver as we walked into Jason’s classroom and we spoke to his teacher, her face taking on a solemn cast as Dad greeted her and they talked of Jason’s math, and he expounded on the difference between math when he was a kid and math now, and she nodded, and he talked about his tooth and how it was infected and they had to drain the pus, and he swayed on his feet and it struck me that Jason’s teacher thought that this was how my dad actually was, that he was mentally slow and had to be patronized and listened to as a courtesy you extend to someone because you are a good person, and it was her job to listen to the concerns of the parents of her students no matter what handicaps they may have, and Dad was telling her about when he was a student and in the midst of one of his most florid pronouncements a little drop of spit came out and landed on the edge of her desk, and though he was unaware of it, I wondered if the teacher saw it, and I looked up to her face and saw it trained upon the tiny bead on the corner of her desk, which she looked at for a moment with no expression, or rather the same expression she had when looking at Dad’s face, so that it didn’t change as she took her attention from the bead and moved it back up to him as he finished with a joke and she smiled and chuckled briefly to show that she knew it was a joke and then we walked from the classroom down the hall, Dad saying, “She’s nice, huh, Jason? Not bad lookin’, either!”
We were making our way to my classroom, me dreading Mrs. Winchell for what she might say since she hated me, her doorway appearing with its nameplate where I used to cover some of the letters so it read Mrs. Hell, my dad lurching beside me and groaning as he pressed his fingers to his swollen jaw, and me seeing some of my classmates emerging from the room with their parents as we approached, some of the kids smiling at me, and some of the meaner ones who ignored me, and the other ones who smirked derisively at me, but we were all checking out each other’s parents, and some of the kids simply stared with wonder at my dad, who moaned a bit from the pain in his tooth as he came into the room, his eye squinted up belligerently as he looked around at the kids’ paintings on the walls, and there was Mrs. Winchell with her black helmet-like hair, her tiny eyes behind her glasses and her mask-like face, its muscles frozen, only roused to action by an apparently intermittent electric zap running coldly through it, the wrinkles at the sides of her mouth downturned in blunt disapproval even when she smiled, as she did now, extending her hand to Mom and Dad, smiling a smile that wasn’t a smile but only a token signifying she knew that she was supposed to smile.
“Now I know Tim don’t have a problem with drawing and art,” Dad was saying. “It’s those other subjects like math we got to watch him on!” I looked from Dad’s careful movements of his mouth which showed that talking for him now was a treacherous exercise akin to maintaining one’s balance on an uneven and shifting terrain, and I looked over to Mrs. Winchell watching him, her tiny eyes taking him in behind her glasses like a scientist through a microscope, and as Dad went on, encouraged by the sound of his voice and her interest, his words fell into the rhythm they sometimes did where he pronounced his words as if they were much bigger and more impressive than they actually were, and his hand gestures, similarly encouraged, shot out and presented the propositions he was speaking of with unnecessary and exaggerated drama.
“Now when I was in school they taught long division in a certain way, but now I guess they figured out this different way to do it, they must’ve figured it out better,” and he cocked his head to one side and listened with some severity to her response, the elbow of one arm cradled into his hand as his other hand came up to touch his cheek in a thoughtful manner but also to rest upon the swollenness.
I watched Mrs. Winchell as she tendered her response, answering with what for her was a rising and diligent passion for the subject she excelled in, her voice like a key fitting into a lock, its unmusical stubbornness coming out with a metallic complacency for the fact the rules would never change, and in this inhuman security she staked her claim, and was only too happy to engage in all the conversations in which the only subject was that the rules never changed, and whose conclusions could only be that the rules never changed, and all the while I was glad because she wasn’t talking about how I cried because I couldn’t understand the math, or how I drew stupid pictures on my notebooks, or how I shouldn’t even be in her class and should be in a special school. No, she was happy to talk of how the methods of teaching long division had changed, and as she was doing so she seemed not to notice my dad’s screwed-up eye or how his expression was bleared and blurry and out of sync with what they were saying, and she didn’t notice how cautiously he was pronouncing his words even as his voice grew louder, and that even with that cautiousness the words came out wrong, or his sentences seemed to be missing words, or his words were missing syllables, like those neon signs where some of the letters are burnt out.
Now he was somehow talking of his abscessed tooth again, and she was nodding and something in her fed on this subject too, the subject of pain and suffering which caused her to narrow her eyes in interest and hasten to his words. “Yes, they can be quite painful, my husband had one of those,” she observed with what seemed to be wry satisfaction, and as Dad explained with glazed vividness the procedure of draining the pus, her frozen face was trained on his like an animal on food, and as his acting out the way various dental problems were dealt with attained an energetic theatricality, I realized that his simulations of conversational good cheer that rang so painfully false to me were entirely captivating to Mrs. Winchell as she nodded and waited to share her story of dental woe. She was utterly engaged and looked on my father and his over-the-top gestures with rapt interest and even admiration—in some essential way she connected with my dad in this mood as she connected with little else. She was alive with a respect that even overflowed a bit onto me as we parted and she allowed, with a new tolerance toward me: “Well, Tim’s coming along.”
We left the classroom and continued down the hall, and my dad’s hand went to his swollenness again as he grunted, “Jee-sus Christ,” and Mom went, “Shhh!” There in front of his office as we filed up the hall was Mr. Gosland, his bald dome under the nighttime fluorescent lights entirely living up to his moniker of Shiner, Shiner, Forty-niner. He spotted us and identified me as his “in-house cartoonist” with a chuckle, and he knew my dad from the old barbershop in Point Edward, and so he invited us all into his office to look at some arrowheads and other archeological artifacts that had been unearthed on his property, proudly displaying the arrowheads and watching my father as he went into a lengthy and slurring explanation of the arrowheads he’d found as a boy.
As I had with the other teachers, I watched Mr. Gosland to see if he knew and it seemed to me he did not, his rust-coloured eyebrows dipping up and down behind the upper frame of his spectacles as he followed Dad’s emphatic story, the muscles around his mouth, the movement of his lips beneath the bristles of his red moustache forming a friendly and welcoming expression as he reacted to the twists and turns of Dad’s tale, and I thought of how a week before I’d gotten into trouble for pulling Mary Hiemstra’s ponytail on the bus to school, how the truth of it was that we were both fighting back and forth, but the grade eights who were assigned to bus patrol, wearing their yellow bands, had decided to take Mary and me to the principal’s office, not because what I did was so bad, but because, as I heard the grade eights say as we walked into the school, by taking kids to the principal’s office they could get out of French, which they hated, and when we were all in Mr. Gosland’s office they stood accusing me, and Mr. Gosland stared sternly at me, and though it was true that I did pull Mary Hiemstra’s ponytail, it wasn’t the same as the way it was being said, and I knew the real reason we were there was because the grade eights wanted to miss French, but I couldn’t say that.
The grade eights looked at me threateningly, and in stifled rage I cried, unable to explain, and Mr. Gosland took my tears as remorse and pulled me to him, his arm around me holding me to his chest, the buttons of his jacket against my face, comforting me in what he thought was my being sorry but he did not understand that my tears were of fury at the injustice of not being heard, just like he didn’t understand now: a grinning, willing audience of my dad’s warped performance, putting in his own comments about the tribes of Shankton County and reacting to my dad’s grandiose speechifying with amiable enthusiasm.
The conversation turned to Mr. Gosland’s chipmunk in his terrarium, and Dad looked at the rodent and proclaimed that it reminded him of the rats he and his friends used to go hunting for down by the riverfront. “We’d throw somethin’ in there to get ’em movin’ around, and we’d go shittin’ around…” He paused to lick some excess saliva from his lips and in that strange and awful moment I looked from my father’s lips which had just said “shittin’” over to Mr. Gosland’s face, which at the pronunciation of that word dropped from its receptive friendly interest into a dismayed frown, his mouth sagging and pulling down the bristles of his moustache, and as I watched, in that brief interval that seemed to last an eternity in which my father had sworn at my public school principal in my public school principal’s office, in that disapproving eon in which Mr. Gosland looked with a sad, almost hurt disappointment which almost can’t comprehend that such words exist, much less are spoken, I felt an apocalyptic dread flowing across my stomach, until my father continued, correcting himself, saying, “shootin’ around,” at which point Mr. Gosland’s features perked up again into happy receptiveness, his face relaxing into its former smiles, having been reassured that all was right with the world.
Out into the car I thought of how Mr. Gosland couldn’t tell, and Mrs. Smitchell too, and how they didn’t know and would never know, and riding home with Dad holding his swollen jaw in the front seat as Mom drove, groaning a bit since we’d left his painkillers at home, and somehow I thought of this again weeks later when we were supposed to go to the Birdtown Fair. It was the biggest fair for miles around, forty miles away, and we only went to it every so often over the years because of the distance, and my brother and I were excited when our parents said we were going because of that, and looked forward to the Sunday that had been set aside for it coming up, and our excitement only faltered when we woke up that Sunday morning and I padded to our parents’ bedroom and saw that my dad hadn’t come home the night before.
Now the Sunday was an unhappy one, as we knew better than to ask Mom if we would still be going, and in the bright Sunday morning which seemed to be mocking me with its empty sunniness I sat in a chair by our big front picture window and I looked at the cars passing back and forth on the road before the field of weeds behind which the train tracks with their tower sat, and beyond which the stacks of the refineries soared in their midst, and I wondered if in the cars there were people going to the fair, or to church, and if they were trouble-free and unconcerned, or if, like me, the minutes and hours trudged with leaden weight, and no part of their bodies and thoughts could rest in easeful happiness, and I watched for my dad’s car at the furthest periphery of my vision, where the road disappeared behind the newly raised walls of the subdivision’s construction, my heart racing when I saw a car that looked like it could be his, with a bad comedown when it turned out that it wasn’t, and as the morning passed the promise of the Birdtown Fair moved further and further away, until amazingly, a car that looked like his did come down the road, and unbelievably, the front turning light blinked as it slowly turned into our driveway, slowly, as he always drove slowly when sidling into the driveway to show that however much he drank he was being cautious and careful, or maybe in his state he thought this was how sober people drove, but I found that the slower he drove down the driveway the more trouble he turned out to be, and I sprang from my chair to tell Mom that Dad was home, but she only grunted, and he came in through the kitchen, and yet he seemed to my eye not to be in a bad state, but more tired and rough-voiced, and he sat in a chair he usually didn’t sit in in the living room, and he lit a cigarette of the strange brand he never smoked at any other time, and he said, “Geez, that Bill Hornblower,” and my mom looking at a copy of Chatelaine didn’t even look up at him, but he went on, saying, “That goddamn Bill Hornblower—we had a game of poker goin’ and he just wouldn’t stop! I told him, I says to ’im, ‘You can’t keep the game goin’ just because you’re down some money,’ and he says, ‘No, goddamnit, let’s keep playin’, I got to at least get some of it back,’ and I says, ‘Come on, your wife Marlene’s gonna be waitin’ up for ya, you can’t keep her up all night,’ and he says, ‘No, goddamnit, I got to keep playin’.”
By this time my brother came out and was lying on the floor at my dad’s feet looking up at him, and we both listened to his story as Mom sat reading her magazine. “So I says to him after a while, ‘You can’t keep Marlene up all night waitin’ for ya, forget the money and go home,’ and he don’t answer me at all, so I go across the street to where him and Marlene live, and I says to her, ‘I can’t get him to go home!’ and she’s sittin’ there just about cryin’. And they got a nice little apartment there overlookin’ the lake, and the sun’s comin’ up—just beautiful—and she says, ‘Dirk, he’s been this way for thirty years—he goes on a tear and he can’t control it—he goes off and it might be for a week, or it might be for a month—never less than a week—and I don’t see him, he don’t call, nothin’. I can’t depend on him for nothin’, I can’t count on him, nothin’ means anything to him except the drinkin’ and gamblin’—and there’s nothin’ I can do about it—and don’t you feel bad, Dirk,’ she says to me. ‘Don’t you feel bad that you can’t bring him home. What he’s got is a sickness—a week, a month, every couple of months, he goes haywire and that’s it, and no one can find him, or talk sense to him even if they can find him—so don’t you feel bad, Dirk, that you can’t bring him home, though I appreciate it that you tried.’
“And I’m lookin’ at her there in her bathrobe sittin’ on her couch, and she looks so frail and sickly, Jesus!” Dad said, taking out another cigarette and lighting it. “You know she had that problem there a year ago, and she says, ‘I just give up waiting for him now, he’s gonna do what he’s gonna do and there ain’t nothing I can do about it,’ and I say, ‘Marlene, Christ, I wish there was something I could do to help ya,’ and she says, ‘There ain’t nothin’ anyone can do,’ and she just sits there by the window with the sun comin’ up over the lake, with her skinny body like there ain’t nothin’ to her—Jesus!” He grimaced and shook his head as if to drive the image from his memory.
“So,” he said with the air of one determined to turn the page to happier themes, “we goin’ to the fair?” He looked down at us kids and then over to Mom who was still looking at her magazine, and me and my brother looked over to her too, hoping against hope there was a possibility, since Dad’s story held in it his excuse for being out all night, and maybe that would cool the fire of her anger, make it alright for all of us to go to the fair together as a family, and after a moment she put down her magazine and getting up, she said, “The kids and I are going. You can come if you want,” and she walked off to the bathroom to get ready.
My brother and I were happy and excited, smiling at each other but we knew not to act too excited in the sombre mood Mom was laying down, and we all went out to the car, and we were surprised when Dad got into the back seat with us instead of sitting in the front passenger seat beside Mom, for though Mom usually did drive as Dad didn’t like to drive, he usually sat up beside her, but I figured this was his way to acknowledge that they weren’t okay with each other and maybe even too, a way to be contrite and shamefaced, though my brother asked him, “Why aren’t ya sittin’ in the front, Dad?” and he said, “Well a guy likes to have a change every so often, right, partner?” and then he said to Jason, “Why don’t you sit up front today?” and we pulled out into the early Sunday afternoon, motoring out into the countryside to the fair, and nobody talked much, and my dad smoked a cigarette looking out the window at the farms and fields passing by, and since my mom and dad weren’t talking to each other my brother and I didn’t talk much either, as much not to jinx the outing as anything else, and finally we were at Birdtown, and our car crawled over the soft earth of a field serving as the parking lot for the fair, and we walked in past the livestock all waiting to be judged, and through the buildings with the produce, the plump grapes around which the bees and wasps jiggled, the pumpkins and the watermelon and the honeycomb, the small midway with its gambling and games and Conklin Entertainment rides, the families and the kids so easy to bump into and smear their ice cream, and as my brother and I were treated to some rides and games we still looked over to our mom and dad to see if they were talking all the while, and were heartened when, at a display of aluminum siding, they exchanged some words on the practicality of the product.
But mostly my dad stayed back with me and my brother, even as we got into the car, my dad again climbing into the back seat with me, and we pulled out of the field and headed on the road home, except for one turnoff which would’ve led us to our house, my mom without explanation took the other way, and my brother and I looked at each other questioningly, and it soon became apparent we were on our way to our grandfather’s house, my mom’s father, a visit to whom was usually met with complaining and resistance by my dad, but now, since he was in trouble, could only be meekly assented to by him as he rode in the back seat, and we turned down the old gravel road to where my grandfather’s farm was, the stones biting and clicking against the car’s undercarriage, and we crept down his laneway, and entering by his back door where my grandfather’s wife greeted us with, “Well, isn’t this a pleasant surprise!” and my grandfather said, “Come in! Come in!” and we were offered food as we were every time we visited, and suddenly, somehow there was supper, and all was well except for the moment my grandfather asked Dad if he’d been out playing golf that weekend and my brother piped up, “No—he was out all night playin’ poker!” and my grandfather who’d never wanted Mom to marry Dad in the first place simply stared at Dad and slowly shook his head from side to side.
Getting into the car and heading home, my dad now sat beside my mom in the passenger seat and after a while we could hear their soft talking in the twilight as we motored through the darkened countryside and I noticed my dad stretching his arm along the back of the seat and tentatively touching Mom’s shoulder as she drove, and looking around I saw my brother now sleeping beside me in the back seat, and we got home and went in the house. Going to the washroom before I went to bed, I looked through the window beside the toilet into the backyard and saw the reflection of the moon in the water that flooded there from the subdivision being built at a higher level than our yard, and I realized that tomorrow I would have to go to school again and my parents would have to go to work, and though now they had started talking to each other and it would still be a day or so before Mom could laugh at Dad’s jokes so that things would be normal again between them, and after that it would only be a matter of time before things—meaning Dad—would go off the rails again, until it exhausted itself and Mom forgave him again, and so on, and in between there was us going to school and them going to work so that we never got to the bottom of anything, so that there was never a real moment, or a place you could sit and know and see and feel why or how you were doing anything.
It was like a week earlier when I got up and said to my mom and dad that I didn’t want to go to school anymore because it was boring and we just did the same thing every day and Dad said, “Well geez, don’t you think work is boring? Do you think I like to get up and go to work every day? Don’t you think it’s the same old thing for me every day?”
“Yeah,” I said, “but at least you have different customers coming in every day.”
“Yeah, but it’s the same old thing!” and Mom said, “What do you think you’re gonna do when you grow up and have to get a job? Do you think that’s not boring? That’s the way it is!” and I wondered why we all had to do that, go to school and go to work; it wasn’t like we’d all sat down and agreed this was the best way to live life, or some wise person had come up with this great master plan, it was just something that happened, something that came about that nobody had anything to do with, that just gathered and collected and came together, and Dad said, “Geez, well, what’re you gonna do, you can’t change the world, that’s just the way it is—you need money to live, so you gotta work,” and looking out the window at the moon on the water, feeling the movement of Monday coming and my mom and dad going to bed with the sense they’d have to get up for work in the morning, I saw that we’d never get it, the cycle would just keep going, there would never be the time to say an honest word, and there would never be a restaurant we opened in the living room of our house, and things would keep on in the direction they were going.