MOM POSED DAD and me for a photograph the night of my grade 12 graduation. I stood stiffly in my first long dress, a sleeveless, aqua peau de soie with small covered buttons spilling down the right side. For the first time in my life, I had a hairdo. Ginnie at the local shop had shaped my curls into a bundle of sausage rolls on top of my head. Later, I would groan every time I looked at my hair in this photo. Then I thought it was as sophisticated as anything I’d seen in a Movietone magazine.
Dad was wearing his only suit. It was the kind most prairie men of his background and generation saved for weddings and funerals, ignoring the shifts in fashion or their body shape. His arm was draped across my shoulders, and as he turned away from me towards the camera, his sloppy grin looked as if it was about to slide off his face. Before Mom snapped the picture, he said, “You’re my little girl.”
My satin high heels were dyed the same colour as my dress. Dad was in his good “oxfords,” as they were called. Mel Caswell’s wife had given them to him when Mel died. They were both small men with small feet, but every time Dad wore the shoes he complained they pinched. That night he’d forgotten to tie his shoelaces. After taking the picture, my mother, in a snit, sat him on the couch, yanked the laces into place and knotted a bow. He leaned on her as we walked to the door.
We were close to being late for the banquet in the school gym. We had to be on time; I was the valedictorian, and my family was supposed to sit with the principal at the head table, where I’d give my speech after everyone had consumed the ham, scalloped potatoes and jellied salads. Over coffee and apple pie, my fellow grads and their parents would listen to my optimistic, conservative lines about the values our elders had taught us and how these would guide us through the years to come. There was no hint of teenaged angst, no disrespect or rebellion in my speech, no true words about what I’d learned from my father. Though it was 1966, it was small-town Saskatchewan, and the sixties were happening somewhere else.
Dad hadn’t come home the night before. He didn’t stay away overnight all that often, but when he did we knew he’d fallen into a poker game or a heavy drinking party that didn’t know how to end. “It’s always when something important is happening that he acts like this,” my mother said.
The last big public event in the family had been my brother’s wedding two years before. The three of us had caught the night train to Winnipeg, where Barry was stationed in the air force, Dad with a bottle in his suit jacket, shouting and singing, keeping everyone awake until the porter threatened to throw him off. Shame was an everyday part of living with him, but that was the first time I willed myself to grow small, so small that no one could see me. Later, I was startled when I caught the reflection of my face in the window of the train. I thought I had made myself disappear.
The afternoon of my graduation, my mother had made me walk to the school to tell Mr. Whiteman, the teacher in charge, that my father wouldn’t be at the banquet. He’d been called out of town for work, I was to say. The story was implausible, because my father’s job was in the oil patch, just a few miles away. I prayed that Mr. Whiteman didn’t know what Dad did for a living, and I squirmed at the thought of lying to him. He was my English teacher, I’d just gotten 97 per cent on my Easter exam, and I wanted to keep his respect. My last year of high school, I’d given up on avoiding high marks in order to fit in. I wanted to go to university, and I’d need scholarships to pay my way.
Mr. Whiteman nodded his head and said nothing as I apologized for my father’s absence, but I saw something in his gaze that I’d never seen before. It wasn’t disappointment or anger. Would I have known then to call it pity? Whatever it was, it made me mad, not at my parents or myself, but at my teacher. Despite the shame he caused me, the love I felt for my father was fierce. It would have been easier if I could have simply hated him.
A few hours after my meeting with Mr. Whiteman, I walked ahead of my parents to the school to relay the good news that my father was able to make it after all. The head table would need to be rearranged, my father’s place card set beside mine. Trying to get to the gym before the other grads and their parents were seated, I walked as fast as I could, pounding my new thin heels so hard on the sidewalk that the rubber tip broke off my right shoe. Mr. Whiteman was standing by the stage I’d helped decorate the day before with crêpe-paper streamers, pink and aqua Kleenex roses and balloons. When I moved between the long tables across the floor towards him, one shoe made a clicking noise; the other landed without a sound. I wished anything would happen but what was about to. I wished I were any other place on Earth.
IN OUR CROWDED living room a few weeks before graduation, my father and I danced. He was good on his feet, gliding me through an old-time waltz, a two-step, a quicker foxtrot. My toes stubbed into his. No matter how many times he told me to relax, my body stiffened. At the Friday night Teen Town dances, I had no trouble with grace and daring. I twisted and jived with the best of them, and I mastered my generation’s kind of waltz: my partner and I would stand almost still, swaying, arms wrapped tightly around sweaty backs as if we were keeping each other afloat. Heads bobbing in the dark, we swooned to music we barely heard above the warm rush of blood and heartbeat. But my parents’ kind of dancing—the two slow, backwards steps followed by two fast ones forwards; the smooth slide through circles, the quick crossing of the floor, avoiding the couch, the chair, the big console radio–record player combination—required more coordination than I’d been born with.
My father was gentle with me; he was patient. When I could make myself relax, I followed him with a minimum of awkwardness. My feet only had to be smart enough to get us through one dance—the first of the evening, which all the grads had to endure with one of their parents. And it didn’t really matter what condition Dad might be in. Drunk or not, he could make it around a dance floor without stumbling. His feet never slurred.
MY MOTHER CURLED and bowled in the afternoon ladies’ leagues, and she met her neighbours for coffee once a week. But she never spoke about my father’s drunkenness to anyone but me, and she warned me repeatedly not to tell my friends. His drinking was our skeleton in the closet, our mad child hidden in the attic. The bones rattled, the feet banged on the floor above our heads, but if someone else was around, we pretended not to hear. “What goes on in the family stays in the family,” Mom said. “No one wants to hear your troubles.”
No matter how much my father drank or how angry he became, he never hit her or me. He never abused us. She was simply covering up embarrassing behaviour, like the time he woke up in the middle of the night and peed in his shoe. Why tell anyone about that? Or the time he tripped on an imaginary branch on the sidewalk and came home with his nose scraped and bleeding and his glasses broken. Or the nights he spent in jail. She was honest and hardworking, and she wanted, in spite of our family’s poverty, to hold her head up high.
In practical terms, our secret meant that I couldn’t invite my friends home after school or ask them to stay for supper. I couldn’t take my turn at hosting the sleepovers where my high school buddies and I danced to records in our baby-doll pyjamas, sucked back bowls of chips and cheezies, and stayed up all night talking about boys. I couldn’t tell anyone the real reason Mom and I walked everywhere: Dad was too inebriated to drive, or he’d lost his licence. I couldn’t tell my boyfriend why I didn’t ask him to spend Christmas with my family when he was left alone, his parents responding to a relative’s death a thousand miles away. What did I tell him? Another lie.
Having to lie was a burden, but the worst effect of our secret was that it forced me to hide my sadness. On the surface, I was well-adjusted, popular, optimistic. Inside I burned with shame. My father’s drinking was so disgraceful that it couldn’t be talked about. It had to be carried invisibly, like a terrible disease that had no name.
My father never lied about his drinking. What would be the point? But I never heard either of my parents use the word alcoholic. He drank, but he claimed he could hold his liquor. That ability was part of being a man, as was his right to spend his paycheque on anything he wanted. As was his prowess at arm wrestling, shuffleboard and pool. The windowsills in our living room shone with trophies he’d brought home from the bars. They competed for space with the curling trophies he and Mom had won as skips of their own teams, though that game’s prizes were often more practical—matching table lamps, a big wine-coloured ottoman made out of Naugahyde, a set of cutlery, a side of beef.
For Mom, his excess stemmed from selfishness and a lack of affection for us. “He cares more about the Legion,” she’d say. “He’d rather be with a bunch of drunks than with his family.” But if he wasn’t an alcoholic, if he could stop whenever he wanted to, the deficiencies were ours, not his. I wasn’t good enough or pretty enough or smart enough to keep him home. Nor was she. He seemed to be having a good time, at least until he had to face her anger every morning before he left for work. She and I were the ones full of anxiety and despair. We were the ones sitting at home each night, dreading his arrival, hoping we’d be in bed and could pretend to be asleep when he stumbled through the door.
My father’s drinking and the taboos surrounding it drew my mother and me closer together. She told me her troubles because she couldn’t tell anyone else, and she became more and more independent. Sometimes she didn’t keep his supper warm when he was late; sometimes she didn’t tell him we’d be at a movie or a concert at the church. Once my brother had left home, it became easy to believe that she and I were the only ones who lived in the house. My father was an unwelcome, bothersome relative who dropped in from far away, demanding and unannounced. In some ways, I envied the kid I’d been when I’d wanted my father around. Now I was the one who wasn’t there, flying out the front door at the honk of horn, driving around with whoever had a car, meeting the rest of my friends at the A&W and horsing around.
I HADN’T touched my father since our dancing lessons. Part of my clumsiness, my slowness to learn, had come from his sudden, unavoidable closeness. I could smell the beer on his breath, feel the occasional brush of whiskers on my cheek, the heat of his hand holding mine and the weight of his other hand in the small of my back. There had also been a surprising pleasure in being inside the circle of his arms.
During the grad banquet and my speech, my father’s head nodded, and his mouth drooped open. My mother elbowed him now and then so he wouldn’t pass out completely and start to snore. After the plates were cleared away, the tables folded and pushed to the sides of the gym, the band leader in his red jacket and black pants announced “the grad-parents’ waltz,” and my father and I walked to the centre of the floor. It was one of the valedictorian’s duties to lead this dance. For a few minutes we were the only two people in the world. We were standing on an ice floe, cold and drifting, observed by hundreds of eyes. I was so afraid that something awful was about to happen, that my father would fall, that he’d say something loud about how pretty I looked and everyone would hear, that the principal would have to walk across the floor and lead us off. Everything was still. I could see my mother watching from the sidelines. Then the music started; I slid my feet to the practised steps my father had taught me. The other grads and their parents rose from their chairs and swirled around us. For a moment, I lost sight of my mother’s nervous smile. I let myself go limp and moved automatically at the slightest pressure of his hands. We never spoke or stumbled. The song ended, and we had made it through as if we were normal, as if this were an easy, ordinary task. I thanked my father, walked him to my mother at the edge of the onlookers and found my date. We watched my parents dance one waltz; then, her arm in his, my mother led my father to the door to take him home.
Most of the other adults stayed for the first half of the dance, waltzing together or watching their kids’ gyrations from the sidelines. I was ecstatic to be alone with my date for this special night. He was a friend, not a boyfriend, though we danced close, and later, at the wiener roast ten miles south of town, we necked in the front seat of his older brother’s car. Not once in the evening did we mention my father. Not once did we say the word “drunk.” I had started to believe that a glass cocoon lowered around my father after his first few beers. His loudness, his weave and stumble, the sloppiness of his smile were hidden behind the glass as long as my mother and I didn’t talk about him. When we kept quiet, only we could see or hear him. To everyone else, he was invisible.
Except, perhaps, when he and I were dancing. When we glided in our best shoes across the polished gym floor, past my classmates and their parents, all of them watching, all of them thinking for the length of a song that we looked good together, this father, this daughter, moving in slow, perfect time in each other’s arms.