There was a big world out there, but mainly I lived in a small one. The suburb, or our part of the suburb, was made up of a small T-shaped area consisting of our section of Far Creek Road with Connington Crescent running off it: Norman’s street, one block long, a level semi-circular sweep between a series of ranch-style houses.
Both streets had been ploughed through a dozen years before on land my father said was the traditional territory of the Squamish people. To me this meant hunting grounds, where people from the local band had stalked game and picked huckleberries the way I did. It meant forest, which was only cleared when people like my parents moved in. A family story had my mother carrying buckets of water downhill from a pipe at the top of the slope when it was cleared for our subdivision. There were stumps on every side, and deer leapt over them, and once when my mother came down the hill with her buckets, a cougar flitted across the road like a big golden cat. At the other side, it paused to look over its shoulder, and the way the cougar narrowed its eyes at her made the hairs on my mother’s arms stand up. Then a car came grinding up the hill, changing gears, and the big cat bounded away.
Our subdivision was made up of people whose ancestors came from the Old Country, which usually meant Scotland or England or Ireland, Parkers and Coles and O’Neills, along with some Milewskis and Krawchuks who had moved west from the prairies. There were even a few people with German names, although they were careful to mention family members who’d fought for the Allies during the war, even if they didn’t have any.
A bigger difference was with the people on the reserves down the hill, where my father had friends who were members of the band living at the mouth of the Capilano River. Up the hill, the main difference was between Anglican and United Church Protestants, leaving aside a few Catholics, a family of Holy Rollers and the Shribmans, who were Jewish, Judy Shribman being in my grade at school.
We didn’t worry about any of this, at least not in my family, although I was aware of a pecking order that put Anglicans on top. The Manners family next door was Anglican, and they were at the apex of local society. Like my father’s great-grandfather, the earliest Mr. Manners had owned lumber concessions and canneries, the difference being that his family had managed to hang onto them. “The Manners Had Money”: that’s what everybody said. You could almost hear the capitals when adults were talking. Had Money. The War.
Belonging to one of these categories permitted certain types of behaviour. If you had money, you could drive your sports car as fast as Mrs. Manners, and the police let you off with a warning. But look out if you drove an old rust bucket over the limit. Men who’d been overseas could have moods like my father, but moods were frowned on in housewives. All of this made the suburb a uniform place, and maybe kept it that way, but there was still low-level discord. My father explained it to me the time a boy in my class passed a mean comment about Donnie O’Reilly being a mackerel snapper.
“People will find differences, Tink. Even if they have to use a magnifying glass.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant. I knew that mackerel snapper meant Catholic, but wasn’t sure why, or what Holy Rollers meant, or talking in tongues. How else did you talk? How could anyone talk without a tongue? I wasn’t sure about a lot of things, despite having a happy family, my brother Bob aside.
Middle class, Bunny called us. It was a prosperous time, although the prosperity didn’t reach everywhere, including the reserves. I had also seen panhandlers over town and heard about unemployment. But there were jobs for white-collar men like my father, and working men like my Uncle Punk were in unions and they were well-paid. People talked about deserving this after the war. They’d earned their security. They were owed. This was a serious matter, what you’d earned and what you deserved. And while I wasn’t sure what I deserved, I enjoyed what we had and never felt the lack of anything, especially after Norman arrived.
Norman Horton was two weeks and three days younger than me, both of us born in the rainy season leading up to Christmas. He and his family had relocated to our suburb the year before the sirens began. They’d bought the old Milewski place, moving in just before Norman and I were due to start grade four. Mrs. Horton started teaching grade five at the same time, while Mr. Horton had already been teaching at the high school for three or four years, having driven across the bridge from their old place over town.
I first saw Norman a couple of hours after the moving van pulled away. It was a sunny August afternoon, and he stood in the yard behind his new rockery watching us play Red Rover. Norman kept his hands clasped behind his back, sticking out his stomach in a way that made him seem hefty from a distance.
When I looked closer, I saw that Norman wasn’t hefty; he was just solid. His brown hair stood up in a crewcut, and he looked as if he wore glasses, although that wasn’t true either. It was more the case that Norman looked like a small father, standing there with his stomach stuck out watching us play.
We usually played Red Rover at school, but there was a crowd of people around that day, and someone had proposed it for the street. We faced each other in two long lines, waiting for a captain to yell, “Red Rover, Red Rover, we call Somebody over.” If they called your name, you had to take off, building up speed so you could break through the opposing line of linked hands. That day, I was too busy staring at Norman behind his rockery to hear the captain call my name. This was one of the Manners kids, who were always captains.
“We call Tink over,” Harry Manners called more loudly. I came to myself and looked over at their line, deciding to break apart Jeannie Stevens and Cathy Cole, who were girly. Clenching my fists, I ran as hard as I could. But hitting their clasped hands was like hitting a wall, and I bounced back, landing on my rear so everybody laughed. Not meanly, since I was a pet. All the adults said that, not just Bunny.
I hated being a pet. I felt humiliated sitting on the road, hating the way I’d lost, taking a long deliberate time to push myself up and brush off my shorts. I didn’t want to join the other side. I wanted to take a hostage back to my own. But I hadn’t earned it, and when I finished brushing myself off, I made one of those decisions you never exactly make, swivelling and stalking across the road toward Norman’s house, calling over at him, “How come you’re just standing there snooping?”
Norman regarded me mildly. “I’m not snooping when I’m not hiding.”
“So why’re you just standing there?”
“Because I had polio, and I can’t run.”
Norman looked down at his pants—the rest of us were wearing shorts—and as I followed his eyes, I could see metal outlines on his left leg.
“I can walk fine now, but I still can’t run.”
I thought about this for a minute, before yelling to the others, “He had polio.” Turning back, I asked, “So what do you like to do?”
Norman seemed to find this a reasonable question.
“I’ve got a bike, but it isn’t unpacked yet.”
“We’ve all got bikes,” I said. “Didn’t everyone have bikes where you used to live?”
He shrugged. Sure. Another shrug. Pretty much.
“I found my comic books, though,” he said.
I went down the driveway and around the rockery to join him.
“I’m Tink,” I said, putting out my hand for him to shake. He shook it gingerly, although there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with his arm.
“Tink?”
“What’s your name?”
“Norman.”
“What do they call you?”
“Norman?”
At that moment, Norman and I became friends. Not that I actively needed friends. It was true that Jennifer Doherty had been my best friend and her family had moved to California in June when her father had been transferred by IBM. But even though I liked other people well enough, I mostly preferred being on my own. I liked to have projects, many of them down the creek. I was usually busy picking buckets of huckleberries for Bunny to make pies, building dams in summer, collecting leaves in the fall to iron between pieces of wax paper, a raggedy old dish towel on top to save the iron. You didn’t need to talk when you did these things. You didn’t want to have to keep telling people to be quiet, either.
Norman didn’t care about talking. He cared for it even less than Jennifer Doherty, not that Norman was a follower. It was more that Norman was a thinker, and very polite. He didn’t like to intrude, and he said he was used to being on his own, having spent a year inside an iron lung. Not that he could really remember it, he told me. After we went inside to look at his comic books, I got the story out of him, since sometimes I talked quite a lot.
We went through the basement door into what would become the Hortons’ rec room. The house was on the south side of the street, meaning the front looked like one storey but the lot sloped down the mountain, and the back showed it was really two storeys, with the rec room looking out through big windows into the backyard. Mostly the windows were blocked with high brown boxes, but there was space open in the centre of the room. We decided to build a fortress there to keep from getting underfoot, the way Norman’s father had told him. It didn’t take long to pull five empty boxes into a circle, and after we went inside, I asked Norman why he’d got polio.
He hadn’t got his shot? How come? Why didn’t they have shots when he lived up north? Wait. You could get them now? So he’d lived in Prince George? How come his parents went to Prince George? What did he mean, he guessed they’d been sent? By who? Why wasn’t he supposed to talk about it? Okay, but they must have had hospitals where he got sick. How small was small? Like a Dinky Toy? Ha, ha. What did airlifted mean? Wait a minute: I was born in Vancouver General Hospital. How old was he when he got here?
Four and a half. Norman couldn’t remember much about it, but he could do a good job mimicking the unh-uh, unh-uh, unh-uh sound of the iron lung. Inside our fortress, the light was dimmed by the boxes at the windows. Unh-uh, unh-uh, unh-uh, unh-uh. Norman went on for so long that things started to feel weird, so I picked up a recent Superman.
“Who do you like better?” I interrupted. “Superman or Batman?”
Norman came to himself quickly. “Batman,” he said.
“I like Superman. My father has glasses like Clark Kent.”
“Everybody’s father has glasses like Clark Kent. If they’ve got glasses.”
I would have taken umbrage if someone else had said that. But you could tell right away that Norman just liked saying what was true.
“How come you like Batman?”
“He doesn’t have superpowers,” Norman answered. “So he has to be smart.”
“I’d like to have X-ray vision,” I said. “But I really like Lois Lane better than Superman, and she’s pretty smart. So I guess I like Batman, too.”
Norman smiled shyly and taught me to unh-uh, unh-uh, unh-uh. After I got it, we did it together while marching around the boxes, and I did it again as I walked home, then did it louder when I threw open the kitchen door.
“Lord lovely Jesus!” Bunny cried, dropping her wooden spoon. She was making pie crust, my father being fond of any kind of pie.
“That’s from the new boy,” I said, and explained about Norman.
“Too bad they don’t have a girl,” Bunny told me and dumped the pie dough out of her bowl onto some waxed paper to roll it out.
“What difference does that make?” I asked.
Bunny just kept rolling out her pie dough, being consistent in never answering anything important. My mother was one of the shortest of the local mothers, and she was usually on a diet, although most of the mothers went on diets at some point. As of today, she was almost back to her ideal weight, but only almost, which meant she wouldn’t eat the pie she was making. In fact, I could tell she would ostentatiously not eat it for dessert tonight: a word I couldn’t pronounce but understood very well, given Bunny’s dramatic displays of not eating something she’d put on the table for my father, who could have eaten an elephant without gaining an ounce.
“Unh-uh. Unh-uh,” I said, breathing right up in her face.
Bunny used her hip to shove me away. If it had been cookie dough, I would have snuck in a finger and stolen a bite. But cherry pie for dessert was just fine.
Four weeks later, Norman put on another display of mimicry. Almost exactly four weeks, since we were on our way home from our first day in grade four, when he got Miss Atkinson down pat the first time we saw her.
I hadn’t wanted to go to school that morning. I’d hated my grade three teacher Mrs. Persson so much that I’d pretended to get stomach aches all the previous year. I’d pretended so hard that sometimes I threw up, even though I had a strong stomach. My mother had promised me that I would never get Mrs. Persson again—my father had got rid of her—but I’m not sure I would have been able to make it out of the house if Norman hadn’t unexpectedly knocked on the door. Maybe he knew how scared I felt, or maybe he just wanted to go with somebody himself.
In the schoolyard, when the bell rang to go inside, I followed the other girls through the Girls door and waited for Norman to come in from the Boys so we could go to our classroom together. I barely made it inside, slumping into a desk in the last row. After a moment’s thought, Norman sat down next to me. There was an agonizing pause, then the front door of the classroom opened and Miss Atkinson strode in, clapping out a cheerful, “Well! People! Here we are!”
Miss Atkinson was slim and pretty, and she kept her hair in a ponytail with a barrette she changed every day, which became a matter for discussion. I loved Miss Atkinson from the first moment I saw her, when she smiled her perfect smile and carolled out, “Well! People!”
Not “Children!” But “People!” I watched mesmerized as she wrote her name on the blackboard. After “God Save the Queen” and the Lord’s Prayer, she strode back and forth across the front of the classroom, her ponytail bouncing, burbling with laughter as she told us about her last Christmas vacation when she’d gone to Hawaii and eaten an octopus—that might have been the single most impressive thing I’d ever heard—and after lunch rewarded us for our excellent behaviour by taking us outside to the playground.
“Well! People! Who wants to burn off some energy!”
As we walked home after school, Norman got that, “Well! People!” down perfectly. I laughed, although it made me feel disloyal. I was also puzzled that Norman didn’t seem to take school very seriously, even though his parents were teachers.
“You try it,” he said.
I kicked the road with my new black patent-leather shoes, which were a bad call on Bunny’s part. I didn’t want to make fun of Miss Atkinson.
“Dare you,” Norman said.
“Well. People,” I said grudgingly.
“You’ve got to say it like her.”
“Well! People!” I said more loudly, which was enjoyable.
“People!” he yelled.
“People! People! People!” I cried.
“Shorty people!”
“Booger-nose people!”
“Stinky-feet people!”
“Wet-Your-Pants People!” I cried, making fun of Nancy Workman. I knew that was mean, but Norman bent over laughing his silent laugh, which was sort of like gasping.
“You don’t have asthma, too, do you?”
Norman shrugged, which meant yes.
We didn’t go down the creek that day. I was under orders to go straight home and tell Bunny how school had gone, and for once I wanted to. After dropping Norman off, I burst into the kitchen yelling, “Well!”
I stopped right there. My sister Debbie was sitting at the kitchen table with Bunny.
“Hey there, little Tinker,” she said, signalling me over for a kiss. “So it went okay? I needed to come see.”
Debbie was beautiful, wearing eyeliner over her big blue eyes and putting her fair hair into a bouffant. One time I’d seen a man walk into a telephone pole, he was staring at Debbie so hard. And she wasn’t just beautiful. My sister was also such a nice person that she’d driven over from West Vancouver for no other reason than to ask about grade four.
“Our new teacher is called Miss Atkinson,” I said. “And she’s really, really nice.”
“Is she?”
“Miss Atkinson took us outside to burn off our energy. We did jumping jacks and then we had a race—a dash—and she took off her scarf and waved it like a flag.”
“That’s smart. Burning off energy,” Debbie said, and regarded me mock-seriously. “Now you need to build it back up.”
My sister got up to make me a treat, heating milk on the stove and stirring in half a teaspoonful of instant coffee.
“Since you’re so grown up,” she said, bringing it over. “Grade four!”
Debbie put the cup down in front of me and leaned her arms flat on the table, cupping her chin in her clasped hands so she could watch me at eye level, being comical. When I sipped the coffee and grimaced at the bitterness, she didn’t say anything but sat up and took the cup, stirring in a heaping spoonful of sugar, then another, using her own spoon before handing it back.
Another cautious sip, and it proved to be almost as good as hot chocolate. I nodded slowly, thinking I might be able to get used to coffee. Debbie nodded just as slowly back, then sat up in her chair and knuckled a tear out of the corner of her eye, laughing in such a strangled way that Bunny clucked her tongue. I didn’t know why, although I’d heard the words disappointed and disappointment attached to Debbie. I knew this somehow involved children and was afraid I’d disappointed her by not liking coffee without sugar.
“It’s really good coffee,” I told her sincerely, so she laughed again, and dried her eyes.
Debbie was married to Ed, who was blond too, and looked like the movie star Tab Hunter. Ed’s father was a Dutch immigrant who owned a nationwide appliance chain. Ed worked as an executive for his father and was being groomed to inherit. That was why Debbie lived in West Vancouver, where an architect had designed their house. My sister’s name was Debbie Brouwer now. She’d met Ed at the country club five years ago when she was twenty and playing tennis with a friend who was a member. My father had decided we couldn’t afford to join a country club but it turned out not to matter. Deb had Married Up anyhow.
Married Up. Another Disappointment. I heard all those verbal capitals because I knew the words meant more than I could understand, they had nuances, and I was bookmarking them to understand later.
“You want to go outside and kick a ball around?” Debbie asked.
I was already on my feet when my mother said, “Are you sure?” To Debbie, not to me.
“Yeah. Too bad,” Debbie said. “Regular as clockwork.”
We had a big backyard, although it was shady. Bunny did her gardening in the front yard, where she’d planted azaleas, rhododendrons, and hydrangeas in the rockery. Closer to the house, she’d dug in a rectangular bed of roses like the rose garden in Stanley Park. My favourite was a Peace rose that was both pink and yellow. Bunny always said she didn’t love gardening but liked having a garden. The backyard was my father’s job, and he seeded the grass frequently enough that it was a uniform green, with none of the brown spots other people ignored.
I picked up a soccer ball in the basement and we kicked it around the yard, making Ha! noises as we booted it back and forth. Miss Atkinson looked quite a bit like Debbie, although I hadn’t noticed that yet. Norman would be the one to point it out after meeting my sister, and I would overhear Mr. Horton say something about the trend for little bottle-blond Barbies. This puzzled me, since my sister didn’t need to dye her hair, and she was tall. When I asked my father about this, he told me that Mr. Horton was sardonic, and for once explained what that meant.
But this was pure innocence, two sisters booting a soccer ball back and forth, no matter what our ages. When Debbie got off a particularly hard shot, it made such a big wow in the chain-link fence she said, “Daddy better budget for a new fence,” and I burped coffee.