Falling Backwards: A Memoir (8 page)

My mom has since become a much better cook, although she can still whip up some pretty interesting dishes. I happen to love her liquid version of cheesecake. So what if she forgot one little ingredient? It tasted like cheesecake and that was all that mattered. My Lord, did we laugh that Christmas we were all slurping cheesecake out of bowls.

Our new house was shaping up to be the biggest I had ever seen, and I couldn’t wait to move out of the white trailer and get into my own bedroom. In our old house in town I had shared a bedroom with my little brother, Patrick, which wasn’t terrible except for the fact that he had severe asthma and I thought he was going to die every night. Other than that it was fine. The poor kid was allergic to his own skin. His little shoulders were always hiked up to his ears just trying to take in a decent breath. In the spring, my parents would have to rush him to the hospital for a two- or three-week stay because he just couldn’t breathe. Every summer holiday we ever went on until he was about fifteen years old ended with us taking him to the emergency ward in some little British Columbia town. It must have been terrible for him and scary not knowing where he was, and for him to be away from his parents for who knows how long. Mom and dad couldn’t stay with him in the hospital because they had Duray and me to look after back at the summer cottage. So there Patrick would be at night, alone in a giant plastic tent, surrounded by strange nurses and doctors and feeling more homesick than it’s possible to imagine.

Living out in the country made his asthma symptoms worse.
All the trees and the pollen and the fields of wild grass and the animal hair were too much for his lungs to take. It was sad seeing him sitting on the sidelines while everybody else ran around playing. His whole body showed his disappointment. Thank God he eventually outgrew his asthma. It just went away one summer and never came back.

Watching someone trying to breathe is horrible. My friend Danielle, who has cystic fibrosis, says it’s like drowning on dry land. I always thought that was so profound. Danielle has also always told me that she’d rather be hit than dragged. I think about that when I am alone at night.

I remember the first time I became aware that I had something beating in my chest. I had never thought about my heart or what it did up until that point. My heart never crossed my mind.

One summer when I was nine or ten, my family stopped for the night at a motel on our way to Wood Lake, where my parents took us on vacation every year. To our delight, there was a heated outdoor pool. We were in heaven.

Children + water = happy

Duray and I went diving in the pool for my dad’s car keys. We’d been swimming for a few hours and my hands and feet were a wrinkled, waterlogged mess. I looked like an eighty-pound raisin. One more time down to the bottom of the pool, I thought, before we quit for dinner. On my way down to fetch the keys, I felt something go pop.

I thought it was because I had gone down too fast into the deep end of the pool. Maybe my ears had done something weird. I came up to the surface and felt like I was more out of breath than usual. I felt a heavy weight on my chest and my heart was fluttering when it should have been beating. I had no strength in my legs and I was
barely able to drag myself out of the water. I told my mom that I felt funny, but there wasn’t much she could do. I didn’t say that my heart felt funny, I just said that
I
felt funny. She told me that I’d overdone it, and I thought she was probably right. A good night’s sleep cured everything.

My heart felt fluttery for days after the pool incident, though, and I felt weak and breathless. The wild beating was all I could think about. I was a wreck and my mom was getting annoyed with me, I could tell. She thought I was being silly and I really, truly wanted to believe that I was just being silly. Maybe it was all in my head. Maybe I had pulled a muscle?

When my heart finally felt normal again, I was relieved, to say the least. I wouldn’t dive so far under the water next time, I thought to myself; that was what had done it. I figured that would be the end of it. But my heart was never the same after that. For years it did strange things. It would suddenly start to speed out of control for no reason at all. I would raise my arm up to get a glass out of the cupboard and my heart would start beating like crazy. It always scared me. I’d lie down and put my feet up and pinch my nose shut to try to get it to slow down. It usually worked, but that still didn’t explain why it was happening in the first place. I tried explaining what it felt like to my mother, but I couldn’t quite find the right words. I never felt any sort of pain; it was like I had a frightened bird caught underneath my rib cage. Whatever it was, it was stealing my confidence.

My mom took me to our family doctor and he said that, in his professional opinion, it was all in my mind, which was maddening. He told my mom that it was quite normal for adolescents to experience odd cardiovascular behaviour, and that it was part of puberty as far as he was concerned. He told us that it would get better as I got older. As he butted his cigarette out in the ashtray on his desk, he told me not to think about it so much. I thought he was completely
nuts, and so did my mother. I badly wanted to believe that it would go away eventually and that nothing was wrong with me, but somewhere deep down I knew something wasn’t right.

My cardiovascular problems didn’t go away; in fact, they started getting worse. My heart took off like a rocket on a much more regular basis. The weird part was that at night, when I lay down to go to sleep, it was just the opposite. My heart felt like it was going to stop. It would beat so slowly that I found myself taking giant gasps of air to try and keep it going. Sometimes I thought that if I went to sleep I’d never wake up, so I had to stay up to keep my heart pumping. I was too young to be an insomniac, but that’s what I was becoming.

If I had thought I could drink coffee and not end up with the runs like my dad, I would have started drinking three pots of the stuff a day. People were always saying that coffee kept them up at night; I needed some of that. I would wake up in the middle of the night to make sure I was alive. I usually was. Good thing I woke myself up, I’d think to myself. It was all a bit crazy, but I really felt like I had to will my heart to beat at night, that I had to think about it every second or else it would stop. I was exhausted most mornings. I sat on the heat vent while my mom braided my hair and worried about having to go to sleep again that night.

My mom dragged me around to all kinds of cardiologists, none of whom could tell me what was going on with me. My mom was so good about all the doctors’ appointments. She never doubted that I had a problem, and that kept me sane most days. She never once told me I was making my heart problems up. She knew me better than that.

One cardiologist told me that I had something called tachycardia, and that it was a condition caused by the sports I was doing. He told me that perhaps it would be best if I were to forgo any athletic endeavours. I wasn’t about to do that. I remember my mother
telling him that she thought it important that I get as much exercise as possible, all things considered. She thought I should be keeping my heart as strong as possible. He looked at her like she was a filing cabinet.

This whole doctor thing went on for six or seven years. I had basically resigned myself to the fact that I had a weird heart and nobody knew what to do about it. My friends were getting used to me lying down in the middle of the gym floor at a basketball game or on the popcorn-strewn aisle of a movie theatre or on the bathroom tile at a party. I’d lie down and put my feet up against a wall, plug my nose and blow to slow my heart down. It was par for the course now. I wished somebody knew what it was that I had.

I had a funny heart, but my funny heart has always served me well.

I
t’s hard to write about Leonard and Dale. They were such a big part of my life growing up. The impression the two of them left on my heart is indelible. They were simple, down-to-earth farm boys but they were as crazy as the day is long. There was nothing they couldn’t get me to try. They didn’t care much about school or anything academic. They just wanted to be outside, running around like tribal nomad people, shooting at anything that moved (and they shot a lot of things). One day they just appeared out of a clearing in the trees. That’s what it seemed like, anyway. There they were, standing by our trailer with their dogs in tow, ready to drag me off right then and there. I don’t think they even asked me what my name was, they just asked me if I wanted to play and off we went. I think I fell in love with both of them the very first second we met.

Leonard and Dale were cousins. That was one of the first things they told me, like it was a big announcement.

“We’re cousins, you know,” Leonard said, with his hands on his hips. Leonard could fold his ears in half and make them stick with the help of a little spit, and Dale could turn his eyelids inside out,
which he did for hours at a time. I was mesmerized by everything they did, no matter how strange it was. I had never seen anybody turn their own eyelids inside out. Gary would have sooner died than to stick his ears together with spit. I thought boys like these only existed in the movies. I had seen a matinee of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and these two were as close to that in real life as I was ever going to meet.

Dale constantly had a bleeding nose, but he seemed completely unfazed by the blood bubbling out of his nostrils. He’d just wipe his face on his sleeve or snort the blood up into his mouth and spit it out onto the ground in a grotesque pile. I thought that his spitting was wonderful. He could lob a giant glob of spit and blood twenty feet through the air. Leonard spit a lot too. I don’t know what it was about spitting, but it was certainly all the rage with those two.

They seemed to have the ability to pee at will. They’d whip out their little wieners (which I had never seen before in my life) and pee on anything and everything. They’d even try to pee their names into the snow. I couldn’t quite get over that one. After a few short months in their company, I just peed anywhere I wanted to, too. I never thought twice about pulling my cords down and peeing over the side of a fallen tree. I knew I would never be able to pee my name into the snow, but that didn’t matter. It was fun to pee outside. Liberating, actually. It beat having to go all the way back home. I couldn’t imagine peeing right in the middle of the yard at our old house in the city. I would have been hauled off by the cops. Gary would have had a heart attack if he’d had to pee outside. He was very proper. Leonard and Dale definitely did not like colouring or playing with dolls of any kind. I think they would have eaten poor Gary alive.

The cousins lived next door to each other, just up the road from us. It was a five-minute run or a thirty-second bike ride. Their grandparents lived behind them at the end of a winding dirt road
that looked like it had been ripped right out of the pages of
The Grapes of Wrath
. My gram and Charlie had a little garden in town, but Leonard and Dale’s grandparents had a real honest-to-God pig farm right there down the road from where my parents were building our new house. (Pigs, if you don’t know, are really mean when provoked. Never throw rotting, baseball-sized onions at a pig in a pen. They will chase you to your yellow school bus if they ever get the chance.)

Leonard and Dale’s mothers were sisters and had been given land by their parents when they were married in the fifties, so the whole lot of them had been living in Springbank for a long time. Looking back, I realize how much like hillbillies they were. And I mean that in the best possible charming, down-home, banjo-picking, country way. But Dale’s dad would pull out his own rotten teeth with pliers! They didn’t believe in going to the dentist, I guess. And I thought the string attached to the door routine was hard-core.

They referred to people like us as “city slickers.” I didn’t mind being called that—it sounded kind of like an endearment. After we’d lived in Springbank for a few years, I was the one calling anybody who didn’t live in the country a city slicker. It always felt good to say it and feel like I owned it.

It didn’t matter if it was pouring rain or smack dab in the middle of a winter blizzard, we would be outside running around. We knew every single hill for miles. We climbed every single tree. Snared every single gopher. Shot every single magpie. I became a new version of myself, and it felt like that was who I was meant to be. I was a tomboy and a vagabond and a gypsy and a girl who would never have to have a proper bath again.

After about two weeks, I’d forgotten we’d ever lived in town. I didn’t miss Calgary for one second. I think I wore the same pair of
Levi’s jeans for two years, until I finally outgrew them. I had a braid down the back of my head that I swear held my eyeballs in place when I rode my bike up and down those pothole-marked country roads. Every morning, my mom braided my hair as tightly as she could, and when she was done my eyebrows had a hard time moving in any direction. She knew my hair would be undone by the time I came home eight hours later; I think that’s why she braided it so tight.

In the winter I’d sit on the heat vent when she did my hair and watch
Romper Room
. I loved that show. There was a segment at the end of every episode where the lady host would look through a magic mirror (a tennis racket with no strings) and call out children’s names. I always prayed that she’d say mine but she never did. I don’t think Jann was a very common name. She’d always say Janice or Janet or Janine, but never Jann. I was always disappointed. I liked watching
The Friendly Giant
too, but I found Rusty, the little rooster who lived in the canvas bag, kind of creepy. He hung on the wall and I always felt bad that he had to live in that bag. Knowing he was a puppet didn’t seem to ease my mind.

I have to say that I am haunted by the number of living things Leonard and Dale and I shot or snared. Actually, I am mortified. When you’re young you have no reverence for life. You don’t realize, or I didn’t at least, the value of every living thing. I was just kind of hypnotized by Leonard and Dale and I did whatever they told me to do. The first time I ever saw them kill a gopher, I felt sick. I cried and they both looked at me like I was from another planet. I learned quickly not to cry about anything. If I was going to be part of the gang, I had to acquire a much thicker skin.