Falling Backwards: A Memoir (13 page)

Usually their fights ended with my parents not talking to each other. The silent treatment was a much-used weapon in our house. Silence is creepy and eerie when done on purpose and executed properly. You cannot talk to the other person, ever. You must hold out as long as you can. To win at the silent treatment game you may have to stop speaking for at least a year, sometimes longer. That’s what it seemed like, anyway.

I could walk around our house and be able to hear hearts beating, clocks ticking, floors creaking, wind throwing leaves around outside, mice walking on the snow … Everything was amplified. Silence is never all that silent, when you really think about it.

Mom did her best to protect us from all the mood swings that
the drinking was causing in my dad and from all his irrational behaviour, but the rug wasn’t big enough to sweep everything under. You can’t just go out and buy a bigger rug, although we all would have liked to have done that for my mother’s sake. Maybe a bigger rug would have made things easier for her. It would have bought her some precious time.

I don’t know how it happened, because it was so gradual, but eventually my dad just kind of disappeared. He was working around the clock and by the time he got home, I was in bed, and by the time I was getting up, he was already gone again. That’s just the way it was. Ever since he’d gotten his new job at a concrete and construction company, he wasn’t home very much. It seemed perfectly normal to me. It’s probably because my mom picked up so much of the slack. She drove us kids everywhere: to swimming lessons and hockey practice and volleyball games and track and field and badminton and you name it. I don’t know where she got the time to magically show up to pick me up and drop me off, but she did. She drove my friends everywhere too. She never said no to any of them.

Because school was so far from home, we didn’t get to go home at lunchtime; we were there pretty much all day and had to bring our lunches with us on the bus. Eventually they converted a classroom into a kind of cafeteria, but until that happened, Patrick, Duray and I brought our lunches from home. My mom tried to switch it up to keep things fresh and exciting. It couldn’t have been easy to please our complicated palates. We were, after all, used to complex gourmet food made in a Crock-Pot, so she had a very high bar to leap over.

She made all kinds of different sandwiches—bologna or tomato or Cheez Whiz. (We went through nine gallons of Cheez Whiz every week, I’m sure. I can’t wait to see what the long-term health effects of that will be.) There were certain items we’d always have in
our lunch boxes. Rock-hard Dad’s oatmeal and chocolate-chip cookies that took the skin off the roof of your mouth and, yes, those dreaded Wagon Wheels. We’d also take a Thermos of something to drink, either juice or milk. Pop was not a good idea because of the explosion factor. I had a baby-blue plastic lunch box with a matching Thermos that my mom bought me at the Co-op. It lasted me all through elementary and junior high school, but I went through about four hundred glass Thermos inserts. I was forever breaking them. If you dropped those old Thermoses from four inches off the floor, they’d shatter into a million pieces. If you bumped them on the side of a chair, or into the back of someone’s head, they’d break. I am just saying that it didn’t take much to break a Thermos insert. But my mom was always mad when she had to buy me yet another one.

My mom tried to get more creative with our lunches as the years went by. Sandwiches had become a thing of the past; it was high time to move on to bigger and better things. One morning she boiled the kettle, filled my Thermos with hot water and sank a hot dog wiener into it. She wrapped the bun in plastic wrap, already loaded with ketchup and mustard and onions. She even had a dill pickle sliced up and wrapped in tinfoil. She figured the wiener would be perfectly heated and ready to put into my bun by lunchtime. When I sat down and opened my blue lunch box, I knew something was different. Where was my sandwich? What was this bun for? I unscrewed the top of my Thermos and couldn’t figure out what I was looking at. I could see a beige bubble looking out at me. I poked at it with my finger and it hardly moved. What was it? I got out my pencil and stabbed at the thing, still not knowing what to make of what was in there. It turned out the wiener had absorbed all the water and had expanded into every possible bit of space in the Thermos. I had to pull out the wiener piece by piece with my pencil
and put the pieces into my bun. My mom swears to this day she never put a wiener into my Thermos. Well, she did, and, although it didn’t look like a hot dog when I finally got it out, it did taste like one. I have to give her credit for trying.

There was also the case of the exploding chili, but I guess I don’t have to expand on that. It speaks for itself. I became more and more cautious about unscrewing my Thermos lid all through elementary school. I would have been happy to have soup or hot chocolate in there, like the rest of the kids, but I was always getting sloppy joes or spaghetti or beef stew. I remember eating my spaghetti with a spoon. It kind of disintegrated after a few hours in my baby-blue Thermos, but it was still good.

I guess I should have been grateful that I was getting lunch at all. I knew kids who came to school with a few oatmeal cookies in a brown paper bag and a bologna sandwich on white generic bread every single day. The contents of their lunches never changed. And a few kids sat there with nothing at all. I remember this one girl who just sat and read her Nancy Drew books all through the lunch hour because she didn’t have anything to eat. I sometimes wonder what happened to her. I don’t even remember her name, which makes it even more sad. I could kick myself for not just marching over to her and offering up some of what I had. Surely she would have appreciated chunks of my beige hot dog wiener? Surely she would have enjoyed a spoonful of my atomic chili? I can’t go back and change that but I would in a heartbeat if the universe would let me. I had years of school lunches ahead of me, and I will say this, they were always interesting. Thank God we finally got a cafeteria in junior high, though it was total crap for the most part. Everything they had came from a frozen box. There wasn’t a vegetable within a hundred miles of our school. For a buck I could buy a mini cardboard-like pizza with mystery meat on top of it, a
generic root beer and a greasy paper bag full of french fries. My nutritional needs were not even close to being met, but I didn’t have to risk having my own head blown off by my baby-blue Thermos anymore.

I
think my fourth grade teacher had the most lasting influence on my somewhat crazy career choice. (I didn’t really choose it—it chose me—but we’ll get to that.) Music was the last thing on the planet my parents could ever have fathomed my being involved with, I am sure. They thought I would just end up lighting things on fire and watching them burn, or that I would somehow become involved in the circus. They may well have prayed that I might consider entering a convent at some point, but a circus was pretty much the only place that would welcome a fire-wielding girl like me anyway. Nuns, of course, don’t really like anything burning—too much like hell. (There was a singing nun I really loved growing up. She sang a version of the Lord’s Prayer that became kind of a pop hit back in the day.)

My mother will often say to me that she had no idea I liked singing or, for that matter, that I
could
sing. My grade four teacher discovered that I, Jann Richards from Alberta, had a singing voice inside of me that was just screaming to get out. (It actually
was
rather like a scream and a bit like rubber boots walking on wet Styrofoam, but it was a singing voice nonetheless!)

My teacher’s name was Judith Humphreys and she was probably just barely into her twenties. I couldn’t have taught a single soul how to spit when I was in my twenties. I was an idiot, but at least I knew I was an idiot. When you’re an idiot and you don’t realize it, well, that’s where the danger lies. When you know you’re an idiot, you’re halfway to salvation. (I used to think salvation was when your mouth got all watery. Boy, was I wrong.)

She had long red hair that was always swept to the side with a barrette of some kind. (Ms. Humphreys had the good kind of red hair, not the wiry kind that Mrs. May had.) She had a permanent smile on her face, complete with dimples! For some reason I always think about her nice, straight teeth and her big, rosy cheeks. Some things just stick in your memory like flies on apple pie. I think she must have showered right before she came to school every morning, because she was always shiny. She made me want to start brushing my hair on a far more regular basis. Leonard and Dale had somehow changed me into a tomboy with no sense of personal grooming whatsoever. I had to try and correct that.

Ms. Humphreys got married about halfway through the year and shortly thereafter became Mrs. Snyder, but that never really seemed to stick. I don’t think she minded what you called her, Ms. Humphreys or Mrs. Snyder, she was just happy to be called “teacher.” It’s so nice when teachers actually like their jobs—it makes a kid’s life a lot easier for about twelve years. Ms. Humphreys loved her job, and we all felt it when she swept into the classroom every morning. She seemed to glide past our desks in slow motion, brandishing a fairy wand. I always felt like I was being covered in glitter.

She was unbelievably friendly and straightforward. She didn’t have any airs about her. I heard one of the other teachers call her “Judith” one day, kind of by mistake, I guess. I don’t think I had ever known a teacher’s first name before. I didn’t know teachers even had
first names. I thought they just had last names, and that they lived in the school after we all went home on the bus. I figured they had little cots in the teachers’ lounge where they slept at night. I wanted so badly to call her Judith, too, but I never did. I thought about it in my head, though. I imagined saying things like “Um, Judith, what time do you think we’ll be breaking for lunch today?” or “Judith, did you happen to see the news last night? It was very interesting.”

I had many imaginary conversations with Judith, in which I was very smart and grown-up. We’d go for coffee together in my head. It was always fun. We’d shop for skirts and watches and new cars. And then Judith would ask me a real question and I’d just sit there at my desk with a blank look on my face.

“Where were you just now, Jann Richards?” she’d say. I couldn’t very well tell her that I had been with her the whole time, shopping for new skirts and Chevrolets.

“Um …” was all I could ever reply. She never got mad at me, though; she always had a slight smile that meant, “Well, just pay more attention from now on, time for daydreaming later.” I did try to pay attention. I tried with all my might. I beat back my imagination with threats of never talking to it again. But you can’t reason with imagination, it’s just too powerful. You give in to it eventually and end up riding a silver unicorn to Saturn during math class. Reality is big, but imagination is even bigger.

I was an extremely imaginative kid, and it didn’t help that Elbow Valley Elementary was a lot different than my old school in Calgary, and not just because it was out in the sticks. My new school was considered very progressive in its day: its design was called “open area,” so you could always see every class and what all the other kids were doing. It was a sprawling free space with a lot going on at any given time, which made it hard for me to concentrate on anything, especially with Ms. Humphreys just floating around like she did. I was
forever looking about and eavesdropping on conversations other kids were having or lessons from other teachers in entirely different grades. Maybe I was just being nosy; that’s probably a good description, now that I think about it. I had, after all, become a pretty decent lip reader from trying to figure out the movies we’d been stealing from American satellite.

All the activity was like a drug for me. I felt like I was a bee in a hive and all the words were one big, crazy buzz. Leonard’s mom used to tell me that I was like a bear with a bee up its ass. Not quite the same thing as a bee in a hive. To think that I was one of the few people that she even liked says a lot about her. Leonard’s mom also told me that if I wasn’t careful my face would stay like that.
Stay like what?
Leonard’s mom drank a lot of beer so she said some funny things.

The school was kind of shaped like a wheel and all the classes were spokes coming off the library, which was at the centre. It was completely open and airy. No matter what classroom area you were in, you could look right into all the rows of books. I would gaze over at all the bookshelves lined up with book after beautiful book, filled with who knew what adventures. I would spend every spare moment wandering around those books, opening them up and looking at the illustrations, smelling the paper and reading countless random paragraphs, not knowing which book to devour first. It was literary overload. Reading was a real experience for me. I could be absorbed into a book within moments. I loved that my mind could shut everything off, and just be there in a book looking around at everything. Reading became an important aid in times of disaster and discomfort and heartbreak. It still is. My favourite author in grade four was an English writer named Enid Blyton, who wrote amazing stories about children solving mysteries and getting themselves into all kinds of trouble. I would read her books over and over again under the covers at night with my dad’s flashlight. He might
have been mad about my wearing down his flashlight batteries all the time, but he never said anything. I loved the library and I loved reading, but it turned out I loved music even more. Ironically, music made me feel still. I needed to feel stillness—being static was extremely difficult for me. Maybe I did have a bee up my ass.

When I was seven or eight years old, I used to take my dad’s precious transistor radio off a shelf in his office and put it under my pillow at night. It was a big radio, probably the size of a shoebox, so my head would be eight inches off the bed. I’d feel his hand come sliding under my pillow a few hours later to gently pull it out. I used to look forward to him coming into my room to take it back. I don’t know why, I just did. I can remember vividly how he smelled. His scent would linger in my bedroom long after he’d gone.