Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter (16 page)

“I'd like to work on getting a man,” Dad answered. “But I don't suppose you can help me with that.”

The psychiatrist agreed that he could not.

From that point on, Dick chose not to have any further contact with his brother.

It was not an uncommon reaction, particularly in those days, and I believe my dad expected that after some time Dick might change his mind. He did. But only on his deathbed, twenty years later, when he requested that my dad visit him in the hospital. Dick gave Dad some of their father's papers, the two brothers had a few bedside conversations, and then Dick died.

Millie and her children invited my dad to speak at the funeral, which he did, talking about Dick in glowing terms and saying only that at one point the two of them had had different views about life and how it should be lived, but that in the end they had managed to put differences aside. “Our parents would have been proud.”

Dick's children had never broken contact with my dad in the first place and they continue to be in touch. Millie kept up with my dad until she died.

While my dad had never been close to Dick, he and his sister Dot were two peas in a pod. Or no, that's too sedate. They were more like two balls in a racketball court. My dad's shoulders don't shake up and down when he laughs, but his laughter is equally expressive in its own way (and extremely embarrassing, when you are a teenager and are taken to see a comic play, and people in the rows ahead of you turn around to see who is going
whoo-hoo-hoo!
). So when Dad and Dot were laughing together, the hullabaloo was enough to drive away birds perched in nearby trees. Before Dad came out, we would spend time with Dot and her family every summer in the beautiful lakeside town of Goderich, Ontario, and she and Dad always made merry, whether it was at the beach or around the dinner table, in the kitchen or on the front porch. The two of them told stories and laughed until it was late and they were exhausted and there was nothing else to do but go to bed.

The day my dad tried to tell Dot he was gay and would be leaving his wife and children, Dot was upset, confused and, above all, horrified.
How could he do such a thing to his family?
A few weeks later, when my mother broke the news to my dad that Dot had decided “not to see him anymore,” he was so devastated he went into the living room and cried inconsolably. He told me later that he wasn't sure he would ever be able to stop. While she had always had a stubborn streak, Dot and
my dad had always been very close, so he hoped that with time she would come to understand and accept him.

About a year after their last communication, I was in a school production of
West Side Story
, that
Romeo and Juliet–inspired
musical set amid gritty New York gangs. The set designer-choreographer was a brilliant artist who should have been working somewhere far loftier than a west end Peterborough high school (but thankfully, for our sake, was not), the director was visionary and daring, and the conductor was exacting. It was actually a pretty good show.

I played Anybodys, a tomboy who joins the boys' gang, and the part suited me perfectly, as most of that year I walked around wanting to kick the walls in, but smiling and being nice to everyone instead.

While the rest of my school day was brain-bloating, a series of exercises that flexed my cerebral left hemisphere and asphyxiated the rest of me, the world of
West Side Story
was expansive and invigorating. I adored the community and camaraderie of our rehearsals, the challenges of rhythm and choreography, the natural elation born of the act of creation. There on the set of
West Side Story
I took my only deep breaths of that year.

We put on about seven performances and somehow—by agonizing coincidence or fate—my parents happened to come on the same night. Just to increase the Agony Index, my dad brought Lance, and my mom and Mel brought Dot, who was
visiting them for the weekend, my mom and Dot having made the decision to remain friends despite the divorce.

The irony of the feuding families attending a performance about, of all things, feuding families, did not escape my dad, who apparently tried, during the intermission, to approach his sister and point this out to her. Perhaps to call it out, plead with her. Perhaps turn over a few chairs in pursuit of her as she walked away. I was back in the dressing rooms, so I didn't witness what happened, but word travelled fast that there was a shocking scene playing itself out in the auditorium, and I've never wished myself dead more fervently than I did that night between Act One and Act Two.

I'm never going to get over this
, my mother thought to herself as the real-life drama played out before her. I don't know what Dot said to herself, if anything. She never spoke of the incident to anyone. And in the thirty-plus years that have followed, she has never spoken to my father again.

For most of the rest of high school, I would eat a light breakfast and, inasmuch as I could help it, nothing for the rest of the day except eight cans of Diet Coke. Then I would go jogging. I drew heavy black lines around my eyes with the idea, I believe, that no one would be able to see me underneath them. I managed to do well in most classes except Biology and English, both of which required me to pull apart a once-living creature limb by limb, labelling each piece as it was separated and pinned: heart, lungs, liver; plot, character, setting. The compulsory dissection brought me no closer to understanding frogs than it did books, and I ended up alienated from two previous sources of nourishment: nature and story. Both subjects: 51 percent.

My moods, lies and need for privacy distanced me from most of my friends and set me up to fall for a boy five years my senior, who was not only a wildly talented jazz musician but also a hermit. He and I would drive out to a place called The Pit, an abandoned gravel quarry where he would skid around on his dirt bike while I sat in his truck pretending to be captivated by him. While he was off exploring some distant berm, I would pull out a sepia-paged book on Renaissance polyphony and try to sing through excerpts of choral works by Palestrina until the sneer of the dirt bike came close and I would slip the book back into my purse and once again admire him dutifully through the window.

No one understood what I saw in him—me, least of all. We never went anywhere except The Pit and his basement—not to
a single party, dance, park, movie or restaurant. We didn't get together with friends (he had none and most of mine were estranged), and he refused to meet any member of my family. I never told him about my dad, choosing instead to make up a whopper about him “living with his twenty-year-old secretary in Toronto,” which my boyfriend found shocking enough. My mother kept trying to invite him over for dinner, but he categorically dismissed the invitations, telling me, “No offence, but I don't really like parents.”

So, whenever my boyfriend came over to my house, he would come only as far as the driveway, where he would sit in his ultra-cool sports car until I noticed him. Then I would drop whatever I was doing (generally teaching myself to play the piano—my new pastime), and we would head to his basement. Aside from the standard necking and fooling around, we would lie in the dark listening to Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Wayne Shorter, Maynard Ferguson and Thelonius Monk. Non-stop, without saying a word to each other, for five to seven hours at a time.

Oh, and we never ate. Anything. And all we ever drank was water. No matter how many mealtimes passed while we were in each other's company. For some reason, he never got hungry and I wouldn't
admit
that I was hungry, perhaps because the one time I did, my boyfriend responded with the admonishing words, “Then you're going to get fat.” Which did follow a path of twisted logic, I suppose, because the opposite was certainly true: all this going hours and hours without eating was certainly making me skinny.

While the relationship was odd and I spent much of it starving, those hours we spent together in uncharted, uninhibited musical exploration were ascensions into the wildness craved and required by every adolescent. In societies that have lost their connection to wilderness, teenagers are left to invent it, most often chemically, for themselves. Fortunately, I found it through jazz—not drugs—and those journeys into realms of wild creation fed me in their own way.

The summer before I started grade twelve, my boyfriend moved to Texas to study percussion. After doing the obligatory weeping, I then looked up and smiled for the first time in more than a year. (No doubt my parents were thrilled by the geographical blessing, but neither said a word about it.) Suddenly, I was free to re-create my life: have friends again, eat food, get drunk, have a normal life. I began softening my makeup, plucking my eyebrows, hanging out at parties, eating potato chips, drinking rum and Coke, and dating a football player who loved Barry Manilow. I got round-faced and round-hipped, dizzy with ditsy socializing, and, in the words of my school guidance counsellor, I was “making improvements in adapting to my environment and personal circumstances.”

This wouldn't last long.

Words have no sound in alcohol. They are spoken from the bottom of a deep weedy lake. Every time the mouth opens, it fills with water. And so it learns to stay closed. Learns quickly.

I knew nothing in adolescence of the pain behind addiction, only of the lacquered exterior that covered it. I did not know about torrents of unreleased grief, the way they storm and rage in people, filling their bodies with cracks they spend their lives desperately trying to patch. Or that the glaze of alcohol is sorrow-soluble and must be reapplied nightly—and now and again in the afternoon.

I did not see my stepfather as a vessel of saline waters, a body of unshed tears. I did not see his kindness, his effulgent smile, how hard he tried to love life, to love us. Nor did I see how much he wanted us to love him. Through the smug narcissism of adolescence, I saw only a man who had stolen my mother from me and drank too much. And I had no more compassion for my mother, who had taken on something of a shadowed form. Some days I remember seeing her in the house looking wilted and tired and I had no idea who she was.

It wasn't clear how much she had known of Mel's drinking before they were married—it had always been in the context of a party, a vacation, a celebration of their time together. But it was clear that she loved his fun-loving spirit and that he loved hers in return. They travelled, sailed, hiked, played tennis, and I don't know if the drinking got worse over the years or if I simply began to notice it more. But when I watched the two
of them begin dinner as wonderful people and morph into inebriated fools by the end, I felt like reaching across the table and smashing their heads together.

I tried to talk to my brothers about it a number of times, but Paul and I spoke very little in those days, and Flip had descended into an anti-social, Troglodytic existence since the relocation of the television to the basement.

My stepsiblings and I, comrades in psychedelic Christmases, remained close, laughing on the phone, launching into friendly jousting the moment we saw one another, but they lived so far away that our visits were rare. For a while, when I was sixteen, the stepbrother with the dreamy eyes came to live with us, and I remember him as a guiding star in my sky, greeting me every day when I would return home from school with a mug of hot chocolate, a fire roaring in the den, and a backgammon board open and ready for play.

I'm not sure he had any idea of the medicinal value of those cups of chocolate and fireside games. We never talked about the atmosphere in the house, the nightly inebriation and the agony of continually pretending it wasn't happening. In those months together, we shared a lot of weak smiles and knowing looks, the occasional tear-lined glance, and each moment of connection pulled me through to the next day.

That spring, a subdivision of monster homes began to stomp their way across the fields and forests at the end of our road. I began to replace inspiring walks in nature with idle and depressing ones in the mall, wandering the shiny, fluorescent-lit
avenues that led me to perfumed delights of every kind. I bought cheap jewellery, a flat iron to tame the wildness out of my mane, a pair of stitched cowboy boots that forced me to change entirely the way I walked, and bags of junk food to scarf on the drive home, where I would then saunter upstairs and bring the whole thing up in the bathroom.

It had been building for a while. Years, I'd say. Hundreds of imperceptible nudges in that direction until one day I found myself there: over the toilet, vomiting food I had just eaten, and feeling so much better, lighter, thinner, emptier—free of knots, tension, lies, deceit, anger, shame, failure, the certainty that my life was Completely Fucked Up, and, last but not least, food.

It was an easy release and an addictive relief, a way to eat and not get fat, get a sugar high and keep my weight low, fall apart but look great, dull my caustic emotions under layers of ice cream and then heave the whole toxic soup out of my body for a while. Generally, just until the next day. Bulimia was my drug, and like the addict who reaches compulsively for the next high, I reached for food, the nearest bathroom, that horrifying, disgusting, hate-filled release, and then—fleetingly—the feeling of being okay. Empty. Light.

Free.

And then it would start all over again.

It was like being in a boat with an infuriating crack in its hull. Just when I had finished bailing, it seemed, sometimes only hours afterwards, I would feel the water level start to rise again, that sickening, gnawing anxiety that I knew only
one way of calming. And so I would start again. Finish again. Swear it was going to be the last time. And then start again.

I never got skeletal, just perfectly magazine-thin. In this way at least, I was society's ideal.