Falling Backwards: A Memoir (24 page)

Most of the parties I went to as a teenager were harmless. A bunch of us—anywhere between six and ninety-seven, depending on the weather—would drive our crummy old cars to an empty field somewhere, and we’d start a giant, blazing bonfire and drink warm beer somebody had stolen from their parents’ secret stash in the basement. If we were lucky, somebody remembered to bring a few bags of potato chips. We’d stand around like a bunch of bowling pins, staring at the sparks flying through the black sky. Every so often somebody would say something funny and we’d all laugh. We were happy to be there, with the flames kissing our faces, pretending we were grown-up. One of us would usually have a car or truck door pried open so we could hear the radio blaring from the crappy little built-in speakers. We were all glad when Frank, who drove a T-roof Chevy Camaro, showed up at a party, because he had an eight-track stereo tape player and we’d have decent, loud music to listen to. Frank would always have a huge bottle of whisky with him as well. The guy could drink like a sailor and still drive as straight as a ruler. Between the giant fire and the booming music, it was easy to find the party on even the blackest of nights.

I thought Frank was like James Dean because he smoked cigarettes and wore his hair long and brushed back. He was one of the few guys who looked like he knew how to drink a beer. The rest of us just appeared awkward holding those brown stubby bottles in our hands. Not Frank—he was very manly. He would tip the beer bottle back towards his head and barely brush it with his lips, letting the malt beverage drain down the back of his throat. He didn’t seem to
even have to swallow. After each drink he’d take a long puff off his du Maurier cigarette and blow the smoke up over his head. I thought it was marvellous, I really did. I don’t remember him ever talking. He was such a quiet kid, kind of mysterious, if that’s possible at sixteen years old. He came to school about once a week, whether he needed to learn anything or not. I always wondered if he even had parents. I wondered where Frank lived and who bought his clothes. I am pretty sure he didn’t know I existed, which is funny considering how much I thought about him and his mysterious life.

We’d listen to his eight-track player until his car battery died. (In hindsight, it would have been a good idea to just leave the Camaro engine running, even if the exhaust did make us all sick.) Somebody would end up giving his car a boost, so it all worked out. If there was one thing everybody had in the trunk of their car, it was jumper cables. Nobody in Canada would be caught dead without a set of those. (One year I got jumper cables in my stocking for Christmas. It doesn’t get any more Canadian than that. They were red, and my mom said that that was the only colour she could find and if I didn’t like them she could take them back. I would have preferred plaid, but red would have to do.)

I remember listening to so much great music at those bonfire parties underneath the brightest, shiniest stars. Boston, Rod Stewart, Queen, Cat Stevens, Fleetwood Mac, Journey, Martha and the Muffins, the Beatles, Jethro Tull, Ozzy Osbourne, Black Sabbath, Nazareth, Simon and Garfunkel, Hank Williams, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Johnny Cash, the Eagles, even Barry Manilow. There’s something about being a bit drunk and singing “Mandy” at the top of your lungs that makes you feel like you’ll never die. We put on a great show for all the horses and cows that would surround us. None of us thought it was the least bit odd to have livestock five or six feet from us. It was like they were part of the gang. I am sure we were very interesting to observe.

As the parties wore on into the night, inevitably someone would drink too much and wind up throwing up in the bushes. We’d all laugh, secretly grateful it wasn’t us getting sick. The “thrower upper” would often rejoin the party after a quick trip into the trees and, unbelievably, drink some more, which I found astounding. And there would always be a few unsuitable couples who drifted off into the privacy of the trees to make out. (It was best to avoid the puddles of vomit). Of course the unsuitable couples wouldn’t speak at school that Monday because that wasn’t cool. You had to act like you’d never seen that person in your life. You had to act like you didn’t care one little bit if that person lived or died. You had to be aloof, tossing your head back (in slow motion if possible) and laughing madly if you thought they were looking at you. Even if it was true love, you had to sacrifice yourself for the greater good. Those were the rules.

I kissed a boy named Mark for half the night at an indoor party that took place at the Hungarian Cultural Society, of all places, and, yes, I too was ignored the next day at school. I tried to be the “ignorer,” but I wasn’t quite quick enough. I made eye contact with Mark purely by mistake, right next to my locker, and when he quickly looked away, I became the “ignoree.” High school was complicated.

Mark was such a nice guy—tall and slim with curly, light-brown hair. He was very athletic and smart and popular to boot. I guess you could say he was a triple threat. I always thought I was lucky to have kissed him at all and kept wondering how it was that he had picked me. There were so many other girls at that party. I certainly wasn’t tall and willowy or the least bit pretty. I thought I was cute given just the right lighting, but how often do you get just the right lighting? I didn’t even have boobs at this point. I felt like I had swallowed a canary all the rest of the week. Being the “ignoree” only bothered me for about fifteen minutes and then I was over it. I may have blushed ever so slightly as we passed each other in the hall later that day, but
that was the extent of my shame. I was relieved in a way that we didn’t have to rehash our very short romance. I didn’t think we were all that good a match anyway, because our teeth kept clinking together when we kissed. If my head went left, his head went right. We never had that good seal that was of paramount importance for a successful lip-lock. Neither of us knew what we were doing in the kissing department (and I was pretty sure we didn’t look anything like Kristy McNichol and Leif Garrett when they kissed on the TV series
Family
).

I remember the Hungarian Cultural Society had a jukebox. It looked more like a spaceship than something that played records. For twenty-five cents you could play four songs, which I thought was highway robbery, because my friend Patti had her very own jukebox in her parents’ basement and it was free. To this day I can’t hear a Juice Newton song without thinking about kissing Mark and how our teeth made sparks in the dark. (There is some kind of poem begging to be born right now …) I remember Leo Sayer singing “The Show Must Go On,” and thinking it was the worst song I had ever heard but I liked it anyway.

The funny thing about going to a small school is that you were either the type of girl who got pregnant between English and math class in the school parking lot, or you were like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, virtuous and more or less completely inexperienced. There didn’t seem to be anything in between. I was in the Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm category.

I was a late bloomer in many ways, well, in every way. I hadn’t really had many romantic encounters. Yes, I had kissed Mark and had let Leonard dry hump me in his mother’s basement, but that was pretty much it. Oh yeah, and in the fourth grade a little boy named Greg said he’d give me a big piece of bubble gum if I kissed him on the lips. It was only a one-one thousand, so it was totally manageable. I kept my mouth shut as tightly as a pickle jar.

Every year it seemed like we lost a couple of girls to “the sinful deed you should never do.” It was always the girls you’d never dream would be engaging in sex of any kind, certainly not the kind of sex that involved a real honest-to-God penis. I’d hear whispered rumours by the lockers at lunchtime about this girl and that boy and the next thing I knew the knocked-up girl in question would be whisked off to some school for pregnant teens in Edmonton. That very same girl, pregnant no more, would reappear in the classroom the next spring, and not a single word about the illegitimate baby would be breathed by anybody. Not even the bullies dared go there. Eventually the whole sordid affair was swept under the boards of the football bleachers, never to be spoken of again. Well, at least not in front of the sinners themselves …

I always wondered why the boys who impregnated these young girls got off so easy. They stayed in school and graduated with their classes and were more or less held up as heroes by their male friends, with a lot of wink, wink, nudge, nudge going on. I am not saying that the boys didn’t suffer some pain and anxiety, but they didn’t have to be pregnant. The boys seemingly glided through all the embarrassment and the shame while the girls ate and slept in it.

The girls always looked so changed, so defeated, when they came back to school. I don’t know how anyone could not be changed after giving birth to a real, live person. It must have been horribly hard giving the babies up. These girls were probably going to be spending the rest of their lives wondering how their babies were and who they were and where they were.

I knew one girl who gave up her baby her very first year of university. Just when she was starting her life, she got pregnant and had a very sudden change of plans. She was only seventeen or eighteen. She was in my grade but she’d skipped a year because she was so darn smart. I saw her a few times after her baby had been adopted and she
was different somehow. The whole baby thing made her cynical and mean. I guess if she was going to feel miserable, she was going to make damn sure everybody else was miserable too. I felt sorry for her. She was too young to be broken.

I had a hard time giving an old pair of jeans away, so I couldn’t imagine giving away a person. I think it was very brave of those girls to do what they did. They gave their babies a real chance to have wonderful lives. We had adopted Patrick when he was ten days old, so I knew full well what a gift it was to have a new soul come into your family. I knew that some young girl had given him up in order for him to be with us. We were all very grateful to his biological mother for putting him on the planet. Apparently she was only sixteen years old when she gave birth to him. It was hard for me to get my head around that. Pat was such an amazing addition to our family. We were all thrilled when he arrived with his little, blue blanket and his tiny hairbrush. He had the cutest face and the biggest ears. He was completely adorable, and we loved him the minute he came through the door.

I read an unbelievably crazy statistic once that said that four out of four girls have had sexual contact they did not want. I read it about six times to make sure I was reading it correctly. It’s a tongue-in-cheek comment, but I can sort of guess where the author was coming from. It’s more of a comment about our society than a statistic. It means that every girl has a bit of shame following her to bed at night. I knew I did.

When I was about ten years old one of my relatives at a family event got me alone in a basement and lay on top of me. He was older than I was so he certainly knew better, but he did it anyway. “Don’t tell anybody, ’k?” he quietly insisted. “We didn’t do anything, right?”
Who’s we? I didn’t do anything but you, on the other hand …

He somehow lured me downstairs and got me onto the crappy couch with the springs sticking out of it, and eventually managed to get his fat, sweaty body on top of me. He writhed around, making these low moaning noises, his sweat dripping onto my face. I had no idea what he was doing but somehow I also did. Does that make any sense? I knew it was bad. I knew it was dirty, and I knew beyond anything else that it made me feel terrible.

He had all his clothes on but that didn’t make it any easier to stomach. He went back and forth on top of me, rubbing over my body for what seemed like three weeks, and then he came to an exhausted sudden halt, huffing and puffing away like his big, fat body had been running after an ice cream truck. His breath was hot against my neck, and I struggled to avoid it blowing into my face. He lay there, still, not really knowing how to let me up. Maybe he thought I was going to do something like run and tell somebody? I felt like a rabbit in the jaws of a wolf.

I am sure I was only about eighty pounds when I was ten. He must have been at least twice my size. I certainly couldn’t move out from underneath him. I was pinned there like a rag doll. I should have screamed, but I didn’t. I should’ve hit him or kicked him, but I didn’t. I didn’t do anything at all. I cried a lot afterwards and locked myself into the bathroom down there in the basement, hoping he’d be gone when I finally had the courage to come out. Like so many girls, I thought I had done something wrong. I thought that I had done something to make him do that to me.

My ten-year-old self couldn’t process any of it. I tried not to think about him and “it,” but as I got older I’d occasionally see him at a family get-together and I’d do my best to act normal, whatever that was. I felt like everybody around me could see my memory floating through the air like a black balloon. It still creeps into my head on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

I want other girls to know, yeah, it happened to me too. You’re not alone. I wasn’t raped, but I was violated. The brutality against so many women on this planet defies goodness on every level. Sexual assaults have lasting, lifelong effects on the human soul.

I should have told my mom sooner than I did, but eventually it all came out. She was very understanding and empathetic. I realized, years later, that my cousin was going to be the one who had to live with the shame, not me. That was a good realization. I don’t let the memory hurt me anymore.

Becoming a person can be difficult, to say the least. You are inundated with so many experiences and so much information. There are trillions of tiny bits and pieces of universal information that sift through your head at any given moment, like how does my brain make my fingers move, what kind of sandwich should I make, should I pull off this hangnail really quickly or clip most of it off to avoid the pain I know it’s going to cause if I just yank it off? I found myself lying in bed, wondering how I was going to make sense of it all. If getting my period was the only thing I had to worry about I would have been laughing, but, oh no, there were myriad things far worse than a menstrual cycle.