Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter (28 page)

A few months after that, in the deserts of northwestern China, I sat on the back of a cart in a bustling camel market and composed a long, image-rich letter on thin rice paper. The next time I was near a post office, I mailed it off to a law office in Montreal.

Months later, a typed letter found me, almost miraculously, on a small island in Thailand, where I had gone to write up my Chinese adventures. The letter contained excerpts from Tennyson, a telephone number and three initials:
P.E.T
.

In Canada, a few weeks after that, I drew the letter from my backpack, dialed the number and announced that I was bursting with stories about China. There was jovial, strangely familiar laughter on the other end and an invitation to lunch. It was the beginning of a long-lunch-and-travel-yarn (and the occasional movie) friendship that lasted until Trudeau died ten years later.

Thanks to my dad, I suppose. Or inspired by him, at any rate.

It was about two years before I mentioned to Trudeau, while at an Indian restaurant in downtown Montreal, that I used to say his name every night in the bathtub. He raised his eyebrows, intrigued. Passed me the onion
pakoras
. I put a few on my plate and explained my father's last-one-to-stay-in-the-bath ritual when I was five. Trudeau looked puzzled, somewhat deflated. “So every night you had to recite the names of the Canadian prime ministers so that you could stay in the bath,” he confirmed. I nodded. “But most of the time I just spouted a series of nonsensical syllables,” I confessed. “I believe your name was the only one I ever got right.”

Trudeau took a sip of beer. Gave his signature shrug. “Well, it's a dubious honour,” he began seriously, smoothing out a corner of the tablecloth. Then he looked up and smirked. “But I'll take it.”

While I never try to hide my family's story, when I am in places such as the Islamic Republic of Iran or the fundamentalist Christian parts of the United States, I tend not to parade around wearing a “Queerspawn” T-shirt (or cloak, as the case may be). If people ask, I tell them. I talk about “my dad and Lance” the way people say “my mom and dad,” and most of the time the issue is a great big non-issue for me, just as it has been, virtually always, for both of my brothers.

When I was still in my mid-twenties, however, and the shell of my invented self had only recently cracked and fallen away after so many years of fictional living, my relief at being able to be honest about my life was so intense that I found myself with my legs wrapped around a pendulum and swinging gleefully to the opposite extreme. There followed a (blessedly) brief phase in which I openly
pitied
people for having straight fathers—they all seemed so
dull
, so decidedly unoriginal and unflamboyant.

Over time, however, I learned not to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, and to accept that we all give to our children in different ways. Our only failures are our judgments of others.

I cannot say at what point having a gay father became as normal to me as having tea in the morning instead of coffee, only that it did. And just as I cannot imagine starting the day with anything other than tea, it is quite impossible for me to imagine my father any other way than gay.

Because he has always been gay; in the past, he only pretended to be otherwise.

Yet never, in my most extreme imaginings, did I envision a day when having a gay father would be something a friend would call “fascinating.” Or that a future boyfriend, in something of a backhanded compliment, would tell me that my dad's being gay was one of the most interesting things about me. Or that my brothers and I would end up teaching choruses of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas to one another's kids, pumping our arms out to the sides and snapping our fingers like castanets while skipping down the sidewalks of Vancouver. Or that shortly after my dad and Lance's twenty-fifth anniversary, I would follow the sound of celebratory cheers to Lance's bedroom and find the two of them snuggled together on the sofa watching a television series called
My Big Fat Gay Wedding
.

Or that my six-year-old son, in trying to describe how much two people loved each other, would use the casual explanation “as much as Granddad and Lance.”

Shortly after my first book was published, I was invited to do a reading at a literary festival not far from my aunt Dot's home. I had kept my distance from Dot for years, but my cousin encouraged me to stay with her. “Mom would love to see you,” she assured me.

It had been more than twenty years since Dot had had any contact with my dad, although he continued to send her invitations to family get-togethers, articles he would find about their father (who was a Senior County Court judge in London, Ontario, until he died in 1947), and other genealogical discoveries. He never received an answer, but neither did he expect one.

In a few weeks, she would be eighty, my dad told me when he heard I was going to see her. He left it at that. No
tell her I say hello
or
give her my best
. Just, “She's going to be eighty” and silence.

It was awkward at first. The pink elephant galumphed into Dot's house right after me, and she and I spent the first few hours pretending it wasn't there. It had been so long since I had lived that way, I hardly knew what to say, but fortunately, my son was a toddler at the time and going through an eye-crossingly exhausting stage of talking every moment of every waking hour, so there were no painful silences—just a lot of repetitive conversations about trains and backhoes.

After a few days, and I no longer remember the logistics or reasons, my partner and loquacious son drove back to the cabin where we were living for the summer, and I was to follow
them in the other car, which was being tuned up at the service centre down the road. Aunt Dot and I waved the boys away and I called the service station, only to be told that they were missing a part and it wouldn't be ready until Monday. This was Friday afternoon.

Dot laughed and slapped me on the back. “Looks like you just got yourself a weekend of peace and quiet! Why don't you grab yourself a beer and sit on the front porch?”

So I did. And after that, Dot and I drove down to the beach for fish and chips.

“Does this look familiar?” she asked, laughing as she pulled into the parking lot of the beach where I had spent so many of my childhood summers. Where my brothers and cousins and I had raced around the sand while our parents lay on blankets along the shore. Where we had ridden the waves of Lake Huron, jumped off the pier, fed french fries to waiting gulls.

Dot's knees were bad and she could no longer navigate the sand, so we carried our fish and chips over to a bench on the new boardwalk. With our dinners on our laps we looked out over a beach full of young families, kids running around on the sand, their parents sunk into collapsible chairs reading magazines, waves hissing against the shore.

We said nothing. Just looked back in time. Licked our fingers. Watched the clouds swell with the day's last light. And suddenly it came to me: that just as I would not force Dot to walk on the sand—it was painful, made her unsteady, afraid she might fall—I could not force her to understand my dad. It was painful, made her unsteady, afraid she might—

I might never know the end of that sentence, but it was not mine to finish. I just had to stop writing my own version of how she should be and simply accept her as she was, frailties, disabilities and all. It didn't mean that I agreed with her choices or decisions, only that I could choose to love her in spite of them.

Which was the least I could do, I realized, considering that that was exactly what I wished she would do for my dad.

“You kids never wanted to go home at the end of the day,” Dot said, laughing at the sight of some parents trying to coax their kids into gathering up their beach toys. “Your dad and I would sit there for hours while you kids played. My back would get so tanned …”

It was the first time she had mentioned him, and it was so casual, a sentence in passing. I turned to look at her, but she kept her eyes on the lake. Her profile was very similar to my dad's. Their mannerisms, too, were eerily identical: the way they gestured when they spoke, raised their eyebrows to punctuate a sentence, quivered their hands when they got excited.

A few french fries fell from my hands and in seconds I was surrounded by gulls rushing to gobble up the offerings and squawking their thanks. A young girl came running towards the gulls, her bare feet slapping along the wooden boardwalk until the birds lifted off into a resting sky.

The next time I looked at Dot, I could only smile at how much I loved her.

Dad just turned seventy-five. To celebrate, he has chosen to organize a week with the whole family in Oxford, a place pivotal and nourishing to him as a young man and one that retains tremendous meaning for him now. He has rented a large and lovely house that sleeps fourteen: he and Lance, my brothers and their wives and children. My partner and son and I will be going, of course. And so will my mother and her sister.

We leave in just over a month. The e-mails travelling back and forth at the moment are all about which one of us will bring the Scrabble board and which one the Boggle game. We're loading Gilbert and Sullivan into our iPods, checking the walking distance to the nearest pub, and the women among us are trying to figure out how to swing it so that the men do all of the cooking.

Whatever happens, we know that we can all accept and forgive one another, that the only thing of any importance now is to enjoy life together, and that the truth really does free all of us in the end.

On the second-last day of our sojourn in Oxford (the Cotswolds, actually, the glorious countryside to the north of the city), I received word that Alfred A. Knopf Canada wanted to publish this book. With my entire family around the dinner table I announced the news, and because my father is someone who virtually always has sparkling wine chilling in the refrigerator, a few minutes later we were all toasting the book's birth together.

With a glass of bubbly raised again, I would like to thank my agent, Martha Magor Webb, for her perceptive eye and her patient, genuine championing. My ebullient editor, Deirdre Molina, has believed in this book since it fell into her hands and it has been an unmitigated pleasure to work with her on finding this story's highest expression. Thank you for such delight and diligence. Profound thanks also to Louise Dennys at Knopf Canada and Marion Garner at Vintage Canada; I am honoured to be part of their library. And I am terrifically
grateful to Scott Sellers for taking this book under his wing and helping it soar.

For the wildly beautiful workspaces in which I wrote sections of this book, I offer my sincerest gratitude to Nancy Rocha, Heather Morgan, Anneke & Adriaan de Monchy, Deb Gibson and Don Shipley. Each provided a version of paradise—quiet, gorgeous, sacredly private space—just when I needed it. I am also very appreciative of an Ontario Arts Council grant, as passersby who happened to witness my dance by the mailbox could attest.

Stefan Lynch and Pink Triangle Press generously gave permission for the use of Michael Lynch's writing. The excerpts from
The Globe and Mail
have been used with permission as well.

This story first came into form as a one-woman play thanks to the insufficiently heralded genius of Stuart Cox, who once saw me do an animated reading at a bookshop and was kind enough to break the news that what I was trying to do was actually called
theatre
. For his vision, direction and collaboration, I will probably never be able to thank him enough.
Gracias a
Janet Dawson and Doug Clark, who are the kind of tireless trumpeters that every artist dreams of having in their life.

Can-do-it-all Catherine Hume picked up my theatrical threads and helped me to sew them together, while continually bringing me back to the heart of the little girl in this story. I thank her for so much laughter-laced help and for sharing her dazzling creativity for a pittance. (Once, after I'd thanked
her for an insight, she commented: “Hey, you're not
not
paying me for nothing, you know.”)

Several friends helped write this book in that they kept me true to myself and to what was true for me. For such essential soul nourishment during this project I am particularly grateful to Trish Cannon, Citlalli Peña, Ekiwah Adler-Beléndez, Rosa Beléndez, Lourdes Álvarez and the radiant Wendy Roman. Samantha Albert was the first reader of the manuscript (with a ruler!) and her astute observations and kind suggestions were immensely helpful. And Stuart Cox and Michael Johnson were gracious enough to pass the final copy edit under their erudite and meticulous eyes.

My mother walked with me during this process with more grace than I knew a person could embody. I bow to her with the very deepest respect and gratitude. My ever-chuckling brothers were both brave and selfless in letting our lives spill open across these pages. They may always regret giving me that
Careful or you'll end up in my novel
sweatshirt for Christmas, but I hope not. My step-family has been in every way a stairway-family, in that they have brought my life to greater heights by being in it, and I am so glad history played out in such a way that we all came together. I am one of the few people in the world to have a “real” fairy stepmother and his presence in my life these last 30+ years has been a magical and hilarity-filled privilege.

Jarmo and Noah Jalava have watched me dance around in every other art form but words this last decade and they had every reason to give up hope that I would ever write another book, but somehow they did not. I thank them for such deep
love and faith. And for everything else that goes into our colourful, musical, crazily gorgeous life.

It was lovely, by the way. That week in the Cotwolds with my family. I am quite certain that I have never laughed so much or so hard as I did during those seven days, nor have I ever adored my family more. Every evening, the long dining room table shook with riotous laughter, songs and general silliness, and seeing my parents so genuinely enjoying each other's company meant more to me than I ever had imagined it would. One afternoon, I watched my mother, her sister, my fairy stepmother and my father wander happily down the driveway to go sightseeing together, and the quartet of cackles that drifted back to the house felt like both the tiniest of miracles and the hugest of gifts.