THE YEAR I started grade 9, we moved out of our house on Fourth West because our landlady refused to fix the furnace. I wasn’t happy to go. Though derelict and cold, our old place had its charms: its two storeys, its worn hardwood floors, the leaded-glass panes above the big window at the front, the oak sliding door that separated my parents’ bedroom from the spacious front hall. Ever since my brother had left to play hockey—he’d been scouted by a coach for the Estevan Bruins—I’d had a bedroom of my own upstairs.
I didn’t mind sharing the second floor with renters. The Andrews were gone by then, and a middle-aged couple named Mr. and Mrs. MacDonald occupied the other three rooms. They’d set up a hot plate, fridge, and chrome table and chairs in one bedroom, their bed and dresser in another, and a TV and couch in the third. Sometimes I’d check to see what they were having for supper, and if it sounded better than what my mother was cooking, I’d stay if they asked me to. The only thing I didn’t like about my room was the mice I was sure I heard in the night, their paws pattering across the linoleum. Mom said there was no reason to worry: mice couldn’t climb stairs. The sounds I heard must be in my head.
Our new house, half of a duplex, squatted on the corner of Herbert Street and Second Avenue East. The landlords, the Crawfords, lived across the street in a gracious two-storey painted white with green trim and shutters. He was an accountant at W.W. Smith Insurance, and ours was one of a number of rundown houses he and his wife owned and rented out. Shortly after we moved in, Mrs. Crawford invited my mother and me over for tea. She treated me like a grown-up, telling me in her thick German accent to call her Berta. Only the youngest of her three daughters joined us. The other two were at a friend’s, Mrs. Crawford said, who lived on North Hill.
Everything in the room was so tidy and pretty. We each had a white napkin the size of a handkerchief, embroidered around the edge with a string of yellow daisies. While we sipped our tea and ate the ginger cookies Mrs. Crawford had made, her little girl climbed the oak frame of the living room archway with the skill and quickness of a monkey. I was impressed, but she and her sisters were too young for me to bother with.
I still had my own room, but in our new house it shared a wall with my parents’ bedroom. At night, I could hear them fighting. The bathroom was below, in a dank, earth-walled cellar with low ceilings and a hanging bulb you turned on by pulling a string. A sheet of plywood that didn’t reach the ceiling separated the toilet from the deep enamel tub. Alkali grew out of the cellar walls like a crystalline mould and broke through the cement on the floor that the scrap of linoleum didn’t cover. Mom promised me, a fourteen-year-old sulky with the ugliness of it all, that we’d move to something better as soon as we could. Until then, I’d just have to put up with it. I snapped that I’d never invite a friend over—I’d die if anyone saw where we lived. “Tough luck,” she said, and went about her tasks.
By now, my mother had a winter job too, selling tickets at the Junior A Bronco hockey games. The rink was on the outskirts of town, a couple of miles from our house. She didn’t have a driver’s licence and couldn’t rely on my dad to show up sober or on time, so she walked through the dark and cold to the evening games. Sometimes she’d get a ride home with a fellow worker; if not, she’d make the trek on foot back again. Her small bundled figure trudged through the snow, the icy wind whipping around her. Waiting for her to arrive, I imagined watching her from high above, the only moving thing in all that white.
She and I had set off on similar walks together when I was little. Once, after we’d waited an hour for Dad to pick us up from the Eagles’ Christmas party, a brown bag of hard, striped candy clutched in my hand, we plodded down the snowy streets alone. The temperature had fallen to thirty below. Halfway home, because I was shivering, she undid the big buttons on her old muskrat coat and pulled me inside, the back of my head pressing into the rise of her belly, the satin lining slipping across my forehead and nose. What strange tracks we must have printed in the snow as I blindly shuffled my feet between hers.
Besides the few bottles of beer my father kept in the garage or by the basement potato bin, there was no booze in the house. Dad did his drinking at the Legion, though he hadn’t been a soldier in any war; at the Eagles’ Lounge on Sunday afternoons, and at the three downtown hotels. He’d get home from work, wash his face and hands and change into a shirt and tie, then leave for a few drinks before the bars closed between five and seven. He’d return to the house to eat supper, then head out again until last call. Twice in three years he lost his driver’s licence, a penalty that meant one of his fellow workers had to pick him up in the morning and drop him off at the end of their shift. Both times the judge had allowed him dispensation to drive a backhoe in the oil fields. Otherwise, he would have lost his job.
All year through, my mother did three hours a week of day work for a lawyer who lived at the top of North Hill. Taking on that job was the smartest thing she’d ever done, she said, because it showed her how the other half lived. “Let me tell you, they’re no better than we are.” Though she relied on her dollar-an-hour wages to buy our groceries, sometimes the lawyer’s wife forgot to get money from her husband, and Mom would have to wait a week or two for her to settle up. As if to make up for this, the woman would send home clothes for me, things she’d grown tired of. Some of them were nice, more expensive than anything I owned, but they didn’t suit me. I wore one of her dresses anyway, a mustard jersey shirtwaist with flat gold buttons down the front, paired with a short jacket with three-quarter-length sleeves. Though the colour wasn’t flattering, I thought the outfit made me look classy.
There was one good feature of our new house—my high school was only two blocks away. That meant I could come home for lunch and wouldn’t have to eat with the kids who lived south of the railroad tracks or came in from the country on buses. The school’s lunchroom was nowhere you’d want to hang out, just a few rows of metal chairs in the cold, too brightly lit gymnasium.
On Friday nights, my girlfriends and boys our own age gathered at the new Country Club Café near the Lyric Theatre, where we’d order Cokes and chips with gravy. Some nights a boy would walk me home, and we’d kiss on the top step at my front door. I was too anxious to enjoy it, afraid my dad would drive up before I got inside. For a few months in grade 10, I went out with the son of a doctor. He’d already graduated from the other high school, Irwin, and was in university. His mother ran a clothing store, and he gave me a beautiful pink angora sweater for my birthday in May. It wasn’t right for the season—it must have been at the bottom of the sale bin—but I couldn’t wait to wear it to school in the fall. When I told Mom he’d invited me to his house for dinner, she was nervous for me. “Imagine,” she said, “my daughter going to a doctor’s house. Remember, you’re just as good as they are.” I was so uneasy at their table, trying to figure out the cutlery, that I dropped a boiled potato I was lifting from the bowl with a fork and it fell on the carpet and rolled. All of us ignored it.
High school wasn’t about learning geo-trig or chemistry or Shakespeare’s plays. It was about learning how to belong, how to fit in, a desperate and hopeless task. The most popular kids at Beatty weren’t the smart ones but the athletes. Like my brother before me, I didn’t want to be called a brain. I’d do enough cramming before tests to get good marks, but not stellar ones like Bonita Stark and Barbara Ashford, who never got asked out on a date.
Unlike my brother, I wasn’t good at sports. Even if girls had played hockey, I wouldn’t have been among the graceful, bladed furies streaking across the ice. I wasn’t good enough for the basketball, volleyball, baseball or track teams, either. Yet I wanted to be part of something bound for glory. I wanted to go to practice and get drenched with sweat and pour water over my head to cool off. The only thing left was the cheerleading squad. Though I couldn’t turn a cartwheel, I got chosen at the tryouts, maybe because the teacher advisor, Miss Bly, was also my science teacher. A few nights a week, I’d stay after school to feed the three caged gerbils and two rabbits in her classroom. Once I’d helped her lay out frogs and scalpels on the front counter for the grade 11 biology class. I couldn’t wait to take that class myself and cut a frog open. Gutting the chickens on my grandparents’ farm had made me hugely curious about the wonders you could find inside a body.
Dressed in a short top and flippy little skirt, I shook my pompoms with the other cheerleaders in the gym that smelled of green sawdust and sweat. We dyed our running shoes in my mother’s canner to match our uniform’s royal blue; she was the only mother who’d let us do that in her kitchen. Three Beach Party movies had recently played at the Lyric Theatre, with Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon crooning and rocking in the California sun. Our skin shone fish-belly pale by the time the basketball season began in the fall, but we wanted to be as brown as Annette. Our knees and elbows flashed orange from the Quick Tan we smeared on our skin.
I mastered the footwork of the cheerleading routines and the five jumps that concluded the yells, but I hung back when the rest of the squad cartwheeled or backflipped in front of the players’ bench. It didn’t take long, though, for me to find a way to make up for my lack of gymnastic skills: I became the writer of cheers. I lay in bed at night and composed words to tunes like “Long, Tall Texan,” “Walk the Dog,” “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” and “He’s So Fine.” For the “doo-lang, doo-lang, doo-lang” I substituted the name of the Beatty boys’ team, accenting the last syllable: “Bar-óns, Bar-óns, Bar-óns.” When I sang the cheers to myself, I was transformed into a Chiffon, a Shangri-La, a Marvellette.
During basketball season, I’d rush to practice with my verses in hand. We’d try them out, delighted to be original and risqué. We’d already lowered our voices so that we didn’t squeak and shriek like the cheerleaders from Irwin. All the boys on our team had a crush on them, but we thought they sounded silly. We bought full-support bras from Woolworth’s and panty girdles that stopped our flesh from jiggling when we jogged onto the court. We didn’t want to be sex objects. We wanted to be taken seriously when we jumped and kicked and launched into our new repertoire in voices deep enough for a singer of the blues.
It was all going well until the captain of our team walked over after our halftime show at a tournament and told us he’d kill us if we did that shit again. “What is your point?” he asked. “Why can’t you sound normal?”
LIKE MY elementary school friends, the girls I hung around with in high school took lessons my parents couldn’t afford to give me. Every Sunday, one after another, they spent an hour with Mrs. Town, who taught them how to sing. After, they rehearsed in the choir she conducted, getting ready for performances at the Ladies of the Nile’s strawberry tea or the United Church fall supper. My family didn’t go out to the farm anymore for Sunday dinner, so my friends’ lessons made the day long and lonely. Boredom seeped from every corner of the house. It settled in the yard and in the empty streets downtown. The sky was one big yawn that lasted until school began on Monday morning.
Despite my lack of training, I summoned up the courage to audition for the school operetta. Maybe it was my ululations as a cheerleader that gave me confidence in my voice. Maybe it was my mother’s encouragement and her naïve, unconditional faith that my brother and I could do anything we wanted. When I failed my first swimming test and came home crying, she marched me back to the pool and signed me up for the next set of beginners’ classes. When I swore I’d never learn to ride a two-wheeler, she wiped her hands on her apron, took me out to the back alley with my bike and ran alongside, holding on to the back of the seat until she finally let me go. I rolled down the gravel, the feel of her behind me, and I didn’t fall off. Even if I’d taken a spill and skinned my knees, she’d have made me get up and go at it again.
Carol Baba, the school’s best singer, got the lead in the operetta every year. To my surprise, the teachers holding the auditions announced I’d won the role of supporting actress; my friends were assigned to the chorus. It was my energy that impressed them, I guess, and my ability to throw myself into another character. I hadn’t seen that as a strength but as a weakness; it came from pretending to the world that everything was okay in my family, that my father’s drinking wasn’t a secret source of shame. Now I realized I’d spent years acting. As for the singing, Mr. Brown, the teacher in charge of the musicals, said he’d show me how to talk the songs. Although he was a small, quiet man, he was known to lose his temper if a singer didn’t catch on. During our practices alone in the music room, I could see he sometimes despaired, but he never banged his hands on the piano keys or bawled me out. The night of our first performance, the gym was packed. The members of the cast peeked through the curtains, trying to spot parents or schoolmates they had crushes on. I talked the songs as Mr. Brown had taught me, but whenever the choir broke in with the chorus, I’d sing with gusto, my slips in and out of key muffled by their trained, melodious voices.
The operetta was such a big event in town that the Swift Current Sun sent a reporter to cover the show. He wrote an article and took photographs for the next edition. My mother couldn’t get over her daughter on the stage. She clipped each article in the paper—I was in the school musicals for three years running after that—and pasted them into a scrapbook she’d bought at the Co-op. On the cover was a blonde girl in a sombrero-like hat, her arms around the neck of a golden collie that looked like Lassie. Every time I saw the picture I thought of my brother being forced to take me to Lassie Come Home at the Lyric Theatre when I was four. I had embarrassed him in front of his friends by grabbing his hand and sobbing loudly when Lassie was lost in the pouring rain. “Shut up,” he whispered, though his voice wasn’t harsh. “Lassie always comes home.”
My father never made it to my plays. Mom said he couldn’t sit still for two hours on those metal folding chairs in the gym. What an excuse, I thought. He just didn’t want to leave the shuffleboard or pool tables or give up on the Friday night meat draw at the Legion. When my mother saw the sour look on my face, she added, “There’s no better man than your father when he’s sober.” Her tone warned me not to argue, but every time she defended him like that, I wanted to yell, “When is he sober? Why do you put up with it?” Though reporters took my picture, though I won awards at school, I was not as good as anyone. I was Emerson Crozier’s daughter. That was the circle of light I stood inside no matter what I did or who I tried to be.