Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter (2 page)

The Box was a time capsule, a cardboard safe where, during the two years when he was actively “coming out of the closet,” my father stuffed and stored everything that related to his private search for the truth about himself. As I read and transcribed the diaries, articles and letters, I found myself with an ever-deepening understanding of the man behind those words, the complexities and agonies he had lived as he struggled to admit to himself, to his family and to an unsympathetic world that he was gay. If there was value in the material, I realized, it lay in the possibility that reading such a story “from the inside” might help those on the outside to find a similar compassion. For these were not my father's reflections as he is now, a person so comfortable in his life as a gay man that it is difficult to imagine him any other way. These were his words and
emotions at the time, when even he had trouble understanding what was happening to him and why.

Although the events (and escapades) recounted in The Box all took place while my parents were still married, at no point during the reading did I feel angry. In fact, it was only after someone asked if it was “infuriating” to read about my father's “infidelity” that I realized it had the potential to be upsetting. But it wasn't, not at all. I was simply fascinated, and curious, and while at times I felt freshly heartbroken for both my parents, it was a beautiful sensation: the kind of heart-opening that leads us to love and understand people more deeply.

It might have been different had The Box disclosed a secret life, an unresolved past, a trail of lies, brutalities or shame. But when my father came out, his secrets were all set free. Through the alchemy of honesty, they had transmuted into truth. And ultimately, truth is a gift of liberation, however painful it might be at the time.

This story would have been incomplete without an honouring of my mother's place in it all, but I chose to treat it with something I knew she would appreciate: brevity. In deference to her private nature, I have kept the details of her life to a minimum. In honour of her musicianship, the structure of her section, Part Three: The Way She Saw It, was inspired by that of a choral requiem.

Names have been changed in most cases for the simple reason that I felt people might appreciate the slight remove, not necessarily from this story but from my take on it. I will
never pretend to re-create people as they see themselves and no doubt every person's version of the same events is as different as it is valid. In cases where names were relevant to a larger picture, I have kept them intact. To everyone else, I offer a pseudonymous masque and do hope you all enjoy the ball.

Finally, a few words need to be said on the subject of stereotypes, for they are, in this case as in every other, unfair caricatures of unique individuals, often highly inappropriate and/or inapplicable, and a subtle, maddeningly acceptable form of bigotry.

Gay men do not, of course, all prance, sing show tunes, bake puff pastry or perform mock ballet moves on patios. Of course they do not. It might be fair, however, to say that if one were to walk into a party where men were engaged in the aforementioned activities, one might be
less
inclined to assume those men to be heterosexual. Although they might well be. Just last Christmas, my (male) partner and my brother—both staunch heterosexuals—celebrated their gifts of long underwear by donning them immediately and performing a leaping and twirling version of
The Nutcracker Suite
—“The Nutscratcher Sweets,” I believe they called it—for the rest of the family. So anything's possible.

To state the grossly obvious, gay men, like all men, come in every possible shape, size and style; ditto for lesbians and, for that matter, everyone else. Gay men do not talk, move or dance in a particular way, nor do they all share the same tastes or habits. Of course there are millions of examples, but the gay-stereotype-smasher that comes to mind at this instant is
the friend of my father's who once devoted several years of his life not to becoming a fashion designer, but to building an airplane—from
scratch
. So let us be clear: an individual is an individual, be they straight, gay, bi, transgender, queer, black, white, dwarf, tall or in all ways absolutely average.

I do not believe in the propagation of stereotypes, although my father may be, at times, a prancing, show-tune-spouting, pastry-baking, ballet-loving example of the stereotypical fairy. (Some people have problems with that word,
fairy
, but I've never felt or used it in anything but the most endearing terms, so have only affectionate associations, as does my father. My apologies to those who equate the word with anything but playful acceptance.)

“I thought gay men were supposed to be tidy,” a former boyfriend once remarked upon walking into my father's house, a roving memorial to every paper, book, letter, present, Christmas card, kitchen appliance and rock that has ever come into his possession.

“
Some
gay men are tidy,” I replied, a bit peeved by the comment. “But they don't
all
fit the stereotype, you know.”

My boyfriend leapt to apologize, the operatic warble of Maria Callas blaring around us. “I don't know why I said that. I can't stand stereotypes,” he continued. We put our bags down on the counter next to Nigella Lawson's cookbook
How to Be a Domestic Goddess
. My boyfriend chuckled. “I mean, my dad's probably reading that too.”

I swatted him playfully and we looked outside, where my father was hunched over bare-backed in the garden, his T-shirt
flung over his head so that the effect was that of a bonnet. My father smiled and stood up when he saw us, his hands flittering around in the air like manic butterflies as he cried, “
Ooooh, helloooo! I've got some bubbly chilling in the fridge!
”

“That's not a stereotype,” I said, smiling proudly. “That's my dad.”

Throughout the life of this project, I have been newly moved by my father's quest for his most authentic self and for the fullest, most joyful expression of his love.

The story that follows is my attempt at the same.

My childhood was dimly normal: an ordinary red-brick house on an unremarkable street in small-town Ontario. Mother, father, two brothers, a black Labrador named Ida who used to hump the legs of visitors so furiously that she'd leak diarrhea onto the oriental carpet, and a deaf “cleaning lady” (as she was known), who came once a week and ate ketchup sandwiches for lunch. Mrs. Preston had a distended vein that bubbled out from under her eye and loved to sing loud tuneless love songs while dusting with long
pffft
s of Lemon Pledge, so on Tuesdays our house took on an other-planetary feel that I preferred to avoid by going over to Mary Smithey's house to play.

I spent no more time contemplating the concept of home than I thought of ripping up the flooring to see what lay underneath. Home was simply the sound of the front door's creak; the taste of a breeze as it funnelled through my bedroom window and across my cheek; the comforting clang of kitchen pots against classical music and the magic of groceries being transformed into meals; my mother's being there virtually always—
Maaaawm? … Yes, in here
; the predictable to-ing and fro-ing of the neighbourhood; the sound of the stones flipping up from the driveway when my father's car pulled in; the fields of tall grasses at the end of the road and their sketch of soft dry gold on my eyes; and the sensation of my teeth as enamelled ice cubes when I played under an evening's snowfall, the crystals falling out of the darkness onto the camber of my tongue.

As most people do, I thought my own family fairly typical. My mother was perfect, except that she ran marathons, was a concert pianist and did not have her ears pierced. Fortunately, none of these quirks was considered strange enough to inspire ridicule from my friends, so they were easily forgiven. As far as I could gather, she was ideal in every other respect. And she eventually even pierced those formerly austere ears, to my great and very vocal delight.

I had grown up believing that my father also floated within the boundaries of normality, he being a professor at the university and, therefore, prone to excusable eccentricities resulting from excessive intelligence or degrees that allegedly proved the equivalent. He took pleasure, for example, in wearing raw silk pyjamas of French design, and while I suspected this was not standard practice for the neighbourhood, I understood that an appreciation for things European was an essential part of being intellectual, so did not mind, as long as he changed into regular clothes before anyone came over to play.

Slightly more distressingly, he also enjoyed skipping down the city sidewalks singing choruses from Gilbert and Sullivan operettas while pumping his elbows out to the sides and snapping his fingers like castanets. I'm sure I loved it as a three-year-old, but by age ten, I had learned to fall out of step and begin idly window-shopping if terse and alarmed pleas for him to stop did not immediately suppress him.

On my seventh birthday, the only one my mother ever missed (she had to visit her sick father in hospital), I had
requested hot dogs, coleslaw and chocolate cake iced with Cool Whip. My father, delighted to have been put in charge of my party, listened to my request and then, without consultation, changed the menu to Gruyère soufflé, waxed beans in tarragon butter, and crème brûlée. “It's more
festive
,” he explained to my shame-inflamed face, as my friends sat around the table wrinkling their noses and exchanging bulgy-eyed stares. In place of loot bags, each child received a home-copied tape of the Mozart Wind Quintet, and in place of a father, I wished I had a hamster. Or that, at least, is what I shrieked once the last mopey-faced friend had left and I'd burst into tears, running at my father's thighs with my fists. After being sent to my room for being wretched, I filled the stairs with signs saying I H
ATE
S
OOFLAY
and, in the most powerful protest I could come up with, refused to turn seven.

The day I turned eight, however, I pulled myself up out of the water after a swim in the Trent Canal, arms folded up over my chest, fists rolled under my chin, shivering. I wandered through the Families of Faculties picnic, dripping across a few professors' legs until I reached my father, whose arm was already outstretched. My bum fell into the wedge of his lap as I nestled into him, laying my head against his chest and staring at the dark red nose of his nipple. Above me buzzed numbing talk of political leadership conventions and voting behaviour, as effective a soporific as any I know, and I drooped into a groggy peace. The two things I took note of that afternoon were how the bottom of my thighs felt crazy-glued to the top of his—would I dangle from him when he stood up? I
wondered—and how lucky I felt to be entitled to fall asleep on that lap, breathing in the sherry-bread scent of him.

On Sundays, my father liked to bake croissants from scratch, placing the doughy bundles to rise on a ribbed glass hotplate that was as magical to me as a witch's cauldron. When the little crescents had puffed up dutifully, my father would lift the damp dishtowel and call us over to witness the miracle known as “doubling” before transferring the croissants to the hot stove and clicking on the oven light. There we would sit, my brothers and I, forever pushing each other out of the way—you're hogging the whole window, move o-ver—watching the anemic goop transform into crisp, gorgeous pastry. Never did we manage to wait the suggested ten minutes before plucking—ow!—a fresh wrap of buttery gold and juggling it onto a plate. While my father put on choral music and began conducting dreamily to an invisible choir, my brothers and I would snap off the pastry's pointed end and watch the steam coil out like a genie. The next task was to extract the stretchy white interior and fill the hollow with globs of rapidly melting butter and raspberry jam. As the Verdi Requiem blared chromatic drama across the kitchen, my father would sit with his eyes closed, alternately biting into his croissant and directing the music with a poised conductor's hand, groaning with a combination of culinary and musical pleasure. With crumbles of greasy, golden flakes collecting on our lips and fingers, and the kitchen assuming the auditory grandeur of a cathedral, it was easy to love my father and his peculiarities.