I think it was the smell that finally gave us away. My mom kept asking me what the hell had I been up to that day while my dad was at work. There is something unmistakably foul about the smell of the inside of a tire, a cross between pond water and cat pee, I would venture, and my mom couldn't quite pin it down, but she got suspicious.
It was a bright August morning, the day it all ended, and we had a beauty of a big tire all loaded up and ready for take-off when we heard a noise inside our heads, a skull-piercing shriek that stopped our blood. We all froze in our tracks. My mom appeared from out of nowhere and it dawned on me that the noise was originating from her mouth, the words becomeing slowly recognizable as she beelined toward us, her face all veins bulging red, and the whites of her eyes all you could
see: “
What the fuck are you stop right now stop that stop it stop
⦔ and so forth.
There was really no explaining our way out of this one. What else could we possibly have had in mind? More damning, of course, was the pile of tires already situated at the bottom of the power line; we couldn't even argue that we were just thinking about climbing inside one and rolling it down the hill, but were just about to prudently change our minds and go help our fathers sort bolts and sweep up.
An ad-hoc committee of irate parents was called immediately, and our dads did what any fathers would have done when catching their child about to engage in activities which could only result in grievous bodily harm: they spanked us all senseless. Nothing like pain to remind you of how much you could have been hurt. It was, after all, the seventies. I was also given plenty of time to mull over my decisions for the next two weeks: I was grounded, and spent the rest of the summer inside at home, watching the Seventh Day Adventist kids safely ride their bikes on the road. What could you do? Like I said, it seemed like a fine idea at the time.
WHEN YOU'RE IRISH, AND CATHOLIC, and the oldest, you babysit a lot.
I have thirty-Six cousins, so I pretty much had to book my weekends off if I had plans of my own, plans that didn't involve the baths and bedtimes of any number of little ones in pajamas, most of them with blue eyes just like mine. We all vaguely resemble each other, me and my cousins. This made it easier to get mad at them, and harder to stay that way for very long.
There was a routine, which changed only slightly, according to which aunt and / or uncle I was sitting for, which house I was in, and how many kids I had being the variables.
I would ride my bike over, or get picked up if it was winter. My uncle â no matter which one â would pull his truck up into our driveway, and honk the horn, because invariably he was late. I would skid across the ice in my running shoes, because snow boots were so uncool, and climb up into the cab of his pickup, which was usually a four-by-four, and almost always blue.
This was how things were done in my family.
This night it was my Uncle Rob behind the wheel. He was a car salesman, and always smelled like aftershave, and sometimes like rum and coke.
“Whatcha got in the backpack?” he would say.
“Homework,” I would answer, usually lying.
“It's Friday night, for crying out loud,” he would reply looking at me sideways, his right arm draped over the seat between us as he backed up the truck. “You read too much.”
I would shrug, he would shift into first, and we'd be off.
There would be chips, and pop, and sometimes a video. There would be bathtimes, and bedtimes, and numerous glasses of water, and eventually, finally, all my cousins would be asleep.
Leaving me blissfully alone. To do whatever I liked.
This is how I discovered
Playboy
magazines, vibrators and dirty videos, condoms, feminine douches, hemorrhoid creams, and vaginal suppositories.
I have to admit that most of my earlier knowledge of the strange and smelly world of adult bodies came from snooping in the bathrooms and under the beds of my mother and father's brothers and sisters and their significant others.
Nobody had cable back then, and a girl can't keep herself occupied with
CBC
North all night. Boredom forced me to it, you see. My parents either had a remarkably unaccessorized sex life, or they hid things better.
Anyway, it was a Friday night that had passed like any other, and I was alone in my Uncle Rob and Aunt Cathy's bed-room. It had apparently been the scene of a rather frantic fashion crisis on his part earlier, because his clothes were strewn everywhere.
I took off my t-shirt and slipped on one of his car salesman suit jackets. It was scratchy wool on the outside, with suede sewn over the elbows. But it was lined with caramel-coloured satin inside, and felt cold and kind of nice up against my nakedness.
There was a walk-in closet, a big one, with a sliding door. Everybody had them, you know the ones, covered in mirrored tiles with gold veins running through them.
My pants didn't match, so I took them off. There was a tie, tied and then abandoned on a chairback. I slipped it over my head and slid the knot to the base of my throat. I looked left, and then right at myself, sucked my cheeks in, flexed my biceps. I tried on his cologne, slicked my hair back, and danced with myself in the mirror, singing “Jessie's Girl” by Rick Springfield.
I was a twelve-year-old dork, and I didn't care.
Except my legs looked too skinny protruding naked from his suit jacket, so I dug a pair of his clean underwear out from an open drawer and put them on. I grabbed a pair of dress socks, too, the ones made of all man-made fabrics. I believe I had every intention of putting them on my feet when I originally
removed them from the drawer, but somehow they ended up down the front of the underwear. I was on my way to finding a pair of his dress pants when I was again distracted by the mirror.
I believe it was the Rolling Stones I was singing when he walked into the bedroom.
I froze, covering the bulge in my â I mean his â under-wear, and just tried to act ⦠natural.
“Forgot the tickets,” he said, perfectly calm, reaching for an envelope on the dresser. He stuffed the tickets into his inside pocket, turned without even cracking a smile, and was gone.
I stripped in a panic, I don't know why, having already been caught quite in the act. I couldn't believe he hadn't said anything. In my family we rarely turn down an opportunity to torture and harass each other, and he had just been handed the opportunity of a lifetime. Maybe he couldn't think of any-thing good right away that was it, I would be in for it later, I'd never hear the end of this one, I knew it.
But he never did say a word to me about that night, not the next day, nor the next. Not even years later, both of us drunk in his boat, talking about why we both like girls, did he even ask me about it. Maybe he didn't know what to say. What do you say to your half-naked niece when you catch her in your bedroom with a pair of your dress socks stuffed down the front of a pair of your underwear, singing “Can't Get No
Satisfaction” and licking your gold-Veined, mirror-tiled closet door? Maybe the shock was too much, maybe he blanked it out.
Or, maybe the black panties and fishnets I found under his and Cathy's bed weren't Cathy's, who knows?
He always was my favourite uncle.
There are strange things done, under the midnight sun,
by the kids of the guys who work for the men who moil for gold
,
The northern lights have seen queer sights,
and one of the queerest I happened to see
,
took place on a night,
bathed in midnight sunlight
,
A scene created and witnessed only by me
.
BUT, LET ME BEGIN NEARER TO THE beginning.
I met her working the breakfast shift at the Travelodge, which was later sold and renamed the Sheffield Hotel, and then the American guy bought it and named it the Westmark, just like his hotels in Skagway, and Dawson City, and Juneau, Alaska, but, ask any of the old folks, and they still have coffee at the Travelodge, regardless of what whoever owns it now may call it.
Our shifts started at 4:30
AM
to set the tables and warm up the industrial toaster, and opened for buffet and breakfast à la carte at 5:30. Busloads of retired American tourists on a last chance economical pilgrimage north to Alaska, and we were the last stop for excuse me miss, can i have some more coffee?
Now, waitressing with someone can result in a very particular kind of bond, or betrayal, and only a fellow waitress can truly understand the depths of gallantry involved in pouring coffee outside of one's section, the security of a good busboy and the treachery of toast thieves, and those who don't polish their own silverware and never make coffee, and leave full buspans for the next guy.
Her name was Sylvia Wadsworth, and she was then and probably still is one of the worst waitresses I have ever apologized to hungry Texans for.
We had both just finished our first year of college. She was at Concordia, I was at Capilano College; she was going to grow up and be a psychologist, and did, and I was going to be a saxophone player with a degree, just in case my waitressing dreams fell through.
Now, a devious toast thief or lazy buspan leaver is a thing to be scorned, a thing never to pour coffee for, but a waitress who doesn't polish silverware because she is too busy cleaning blue cheese dressing out of her hair because someone left it on the top shelf of the cooler with the lid on loose is a waitress to
be rescued, in that calm, resigned yet noble way that waitresses cover for one another:
“I got the two truckers at table eight for you. They're coffeed and watered and their toast is on.”
You do these things for one another. Especially if she's from out of town, with a fancy name, and you're about to turn queer that very next fall but you don't quite know it yet, all you know is that the way the back of her neck blushes under her tan when she accidentally pours water or coffee on American tourists makes you want to calmly, nobly, polish her silverware.
She was bilingual, and didn't have an accent when she spoke either language, but would slip French words into her softly-spoken English sentences in a way that made me not care that she stole my toast:
“Je m'excuse, ma cherie, but I took your deux brun toasts. I put more on. C'est okay, non?”
We would make fun of our customers' American accents, and the way that wiry grey hairs grew from their noses and ears, counting their tips and smoking and laughing conspiratorially, as waitresses do, in the end booth, when things slowed down.
One morning, when an unfed New Yorker was screaming at Sylvia, she backed through the double swing doors into the kitchen, explaining in French that she actually spoke no English at all, and so the floor manager, a five-foot
tall German closet case, approaches me:
“I'm sorry. It's about your friend. She's a sweet girl. Terrible waitress, though. One more complaint and I'm going to have to let her go. Would you talk to her for me, please?”
The way I figured it, no matter how much of her work I did for her, she only had a couple of days left to find another job.
I myself had two jobs; the other was cutting lawns for the City of Whitehorse. She asked me to see if I could get her on there, and so I did.
What she neglected to mention at the time was that she didn't know how to drive a tractor, and that she was violently allergic to grass clippings, but I helped her out a lot, and our summer not-quite-a-romance proceeded along famously.
One morning, while greasing the nipples on her tractor and talking, we discovered, small town that it was, that my mother had fired her father just a couple of months ago.
“Ta mère et mon père,” she shrugged as I cleaned her air filter for her.
I got the details from my mother that night at supper.
“Jack Wadsworth? He's Sylvia's father? The man's a lunatic. Of course we had to let him go. He's a complete incompetent. Delusional. He didn't even tell his wife for two months, just kept getting up and going out like he still had a job. Sad, really. Pretended he was going to work but instead he went down to the courthouse and huns: about watching: the
proceedings every day. Drove the bailiffs crazy. Poor Sylvia, she seems like a nice enough girl. He used to be a lawyer, they say. Sad, really, but what can you do? He's suing us, of course, representing himself. The man is a paranoid.”
Sylvia's parents lived on the top floor of an old three-storey apartment building with her sister, Claudia, a mousy twenty-Seven-year-old virgin in her last year of medical school, also home for the summer, working at the hospital.
One day when no one was home, Sylvia and I were out on her balcony, which was really the corner of the roof, nude sunbathing and drinking iced lattés, which I thought at the time were a French delicacy (very cosmopolitan), reading
Sassy
magazine.
My hand was touching her hand, ever so casually and accidental-like, and I think maybe I wanted to touch her but I didn't really know it yet, so luckily she interrupted my latent tendencies to read part of an article aloud to me:
“Says here that one of women's top sexual fantasies is to make love with une autre femme. Uughh. Speak for yourself, huh?”
I immediately moved my hand away from hers to sip my French latté and changed the subject.
“So ⦠you wanna go swimming tomorrow?”
“I can't. I'm going white-water rafting with Greg and Jeff and all them, remember? We should put our clothes on. Mon père is going to be home from âwork' soon.”
We laughed like only daughters can at their father's short-comings, and got dressed.
I heard the gory details the very next night from my best friend, Joanne.
There had been a terrible accident on the highway. Twelve teenage white-water rafters had rolled their van, Joanne's brother's girlfriend from Vancouver had been killed, cut in half in fact, going through the windshield. Sylvia had been trapped in between seats, Jaws of Life and the whole nine yards, and Sylvia's sister, the twenty-seven-year-old virgin / almost doctor, was driving the van because the guys were all too drunk.