Childhood Read online

  Then I was forced on her.

  She could have drowned me, poisoned me, left me in traffic, or fed me to wild dogs – all of which she threatened to do. Instead, in her own way, she sheltered me. (There is even, at the edge of memory, a memory of sleep in her arms; her sour smell, her dry white hair…)

  I didn’t understand how much each kindness to me cost her. To feed and clothe a child who, on top of everything else, resembled her reckless daughter. Imagine.

  And then there were her friends, the two or three old ladies who visited from time to time. They smelled of baby powder and dirty clothes. They held my chin in their hands and shook my face until I was dizzy, and then said things like

  – He looks just like Katarina…

  – It doesn’t look like you’re taking care of him, Eddy…

  – He’s a little animal…

  – I don’t think you’re raising him right…

  and shook my face some more.

  That must have rubbed salt in the wound.

  So, my survival was a fortuitous thing. As soon as I learned to, I steered clear of my grandmother. The less she saw of me, the more tolerable I was.

  * * *

  —

  Now, as I mentioned, I met Sandy Berwick while I was pulling weeds from the garden.

  His idea that my grandmother had to be converted was still a little beyond comprehension. Religious conversion wasn’t, until Mrs Schwartz began her studies, an issue for me. As far as I could tell, we – my grandmother and I – were not religious at all. It was she who told me God did not exist, and we rarely saw the inside of a church together.

  Obviously, Sandy’s upbringing was different from my own. His father was a minister of the United Church. His family was devout, but I don’t think that explains his fervour. His mind had latched on to an idea and it would not let go.

  Some time after our first meeting, I was in the backyard again. It was a hot day. The garden was parched. (We called it a garden, but there were no flowers to speak of, only a row of sunflowers that drooped in our direction, though they belonged to the Berwicks.) I had found a stick with which I could poke holes in the ground, and I had discovered an anthill.

  This time I saw Sandy coming before he spoke to me.

  – You want to be friends? he asked.

  – I don’t mind.

  – What’re you doing?

  – Digging holes.

  – What for?

  – I don’t know.

  – You want to see my house?

  – Sure.

  * * *

  —

  I was obsessed with other people’s houses. I remember the Berwicks’ house in its particulars. It smelled clean. It was ethereal in its cleanliness.

  The stairs to the second floor were carpeted. The kitchen was spotless: no Pablum stains, no greasy tiles, no signs of violence. The furniture, what little there was, was all straight lines. (Though other houses were more inviting, the Berwicks’ was where I would have chosen to live.)

  Mrs Berwick met us as soon as we entered.

  – Te voilà, Alexandre, she said, kissing Sandy’s ears. Tu as un ami? Tu me le présente?

  She held him close, smiling politely as we were introduced, pleased her son had found a friend.

  – Tu veux quelque chose à manger, chéri? Ça fait déjà deux heures depuis déjeuner. Tu n’as pas faim? Oui, tu as sûrement faim. Viens manger un peu.

  She led us to the kitchen table and put a basket of oranges before us. She cut two slices of cake (canary yellow, impossibly sweet) and put them on small plates. She brought us glasses of milk.

  Sandy wasn’t interested. He watched me eat, without touching his food. His mother tried everything to encourage him. She stood behind him and played with his hair. She whispered to him. She nibbled on the cake herself, until, at last, he broke a corner from the slice and put it on the tip of his tongue.

  – Tu vois? she said. Miam miam…

  I was confused. My grandmother never fussed over what I ate, and I ate whatever was before me.

  When we were finished, Mrs Berwick inspected Sandy’s plate. He had eaten enough to satisfy her (half the cake, a section of orange), so she let us go.

  * * *

  —

  Sandy’s room was much like the rest of the house. It was carpeted. It smelled of nothing in particular. The walls were white. There was a neatly made bed, above which hung a painting of Christ surrounded by young children.

  And there were short bookshelves, filled with books in French.2

  On top of one of the shelves, Sandy had a cage of white rats, two of them: Aline and Pierre.

  * * *

  —

  The clean house, the tidy room, the neat backyard. By and large, they were the borders of Sandy’s world.

  He would have preferred to play baseball, to swim in the water hazard at the golf course, to throw stones at passing cars, but with his asthma there wasn’t much chance of that. Whenever he ran for more than a few steps, he would collapse, breathless, and I would have to help him with his inhaler, or wait until he recovered.

  – Don’t guess. What is it?

  – It’s D.

  – That’s right. And this…?

  From the letters themselves we turned to their sounds. That was even more obscure. How was it that “A” could be

  “A” as in father

  “A” as in make

  “A” as in have

  What were the rules?

  Nor did my grandmother limit herself to short words when it came to pronunciation. For every “bake” there was a “prestidigitate,” a “necromancy,” or a “manoeuvre.” Difficult words indeed, but I learned to pronounce them, and she never broke any of my fingers.

  Then we began to read.

  It would have been nice to have simpler things, like Mother Goose Rhymes or Struwwelpeter. Instead, we read English poetry and Dickens, boatloads of Dickens.

  To be fair, it was something of a pleasure meeting English this way, but once I’d gained confidence, she started in on French. I learned that language the same way, though I speak it with a Trinidadian accent.

  We didn’t do much together. We read our comics, occasionally explored the woods behind the tile factory, or disposed of the rats born to Aline and Pierre. Somehow, that was enough to kill the hours between breakfast and supper (in summer) or afternoon and evening (during the school year).

  It wasn’t an enduring friendship. The Berwicks moved to Wyoming when I was eight, and there was no goodbye.

  The things I most remember about Sandy are his desire to convert my grandmother, his trouble breathing, his clean home, and his mother’s body.

  * * *

  —

  When we’d been friends for two years, Sandy went through a phase.

  It began when we discovered a stack of rude magazines in the woods behind the tile factory.

  The tile factory was abandoned and decrepit. It was just past the golf course on the edge of town, within walking distance of our homes. (That is, Sandy could walk to it without suffering.) Behind the factory was a tract of bush, thistles, and thin trees. A shallow stream ran through it, and it was a perfect place for catching grasshoppers, field mice, shrews, and frogs.

  In the middle of all this scrub, there was a shack, a lean-to really, only big enough to accommodate half a dozen children at a time. It was a foul-smelling place on the inside, and it was, in its way, dangerous. We felt courageous exploring it.

  The magazines were inside the shack.

  They were, most of them, “gentlemen’s” magazines, full of colour photographs of naked women. Two of them, however, were mystifying.

  The first, My Darling Horse, had photographs of a woman with her hand on a horse’s penis or with her mouth around it. (In one instance
, she was hanging on to the horse’s body with its penis inside her.)

  The second had no cover at all. It was full of pictures of men and women burning each other. They were naked, but they weren’t otherwise engaged. They simply burned each other with cigarettes and butane lighters, candles and cigars. That was it.

  These two we thought too awful to keep, so we left them where they were. The others we took with us to a new hiding place. We buried them at the foot of a birch tree beside the factory. And we returned to the magazines every so often until they disintegrated.3

  Their effect on Sandy was immediate. Whereas before we had wandered around the woods and fields talking about nothing in particular, we now talked of nothing but women. Were they all like those in the magazines? Did they all have vaginas? What would it be like if they didn’t? How would you know? Could you ask?

  And then, one day, Sandy wondered aloud if his mother was “vaginaed” or not. I hadn’t thought of Mrs Berwick that way, but, to my mind, it was certain she was.

  – Of course she has a vagina, I said.

  – How do you know?

  After a long and thoughtful discussion, I had to admit I didn’t. How could I? But why wouldn’t Mrs Berwick have one? We all had penises, didn’t we? (Though, there too, the question was moot.)

  I would have preferred to let the matter drop, but for Sandy it was a pretext. He began to plan the best way for the two of us to discover his mother’s private province.

  We spent more time at his house.

  We hid in the bathroom for hours, waiting for his mother to come in.

  – Mais qu’est-ce que vous faites dans la salle de bain?

  He repeatedly asked if we could hide under her skirt.

  – Mais pourquoi?

  Whenever her hands were full, he would pull her dress up as high as he could.

  – Alexandre! Laisse Maman tranquille!

  We would hide in the bedroom closet with the door open just wide enough for us to see what was going on. (Once, this almost worked, but as Mrs Berwick began to undress, Sandy giggled in anticipation and she found us out.)

  The remarkable thing in all this was Mrs Berwick’s patience. It must have been obvious what we were after, but she was indulgent.

  And, in fact, we finally did see her naked, but it wasn’t as Sandy had planned.

  One summer afternoon when we were being typically bothersome, Mrs Berwick threw up her hands and said

  – Bon. Aujourd’hui nous allons à la plage.

  – That’s a wonderful idea, said Reverend Berwick.

  It didn’t seem like a wonderful idea to us, but we helped her make ham sandwiches and lemonade, and we climbed into the car.

  The ride was interminable.

  We drove out of town, past Sarnia, past farm fields and farm animals and farmhouses, taking gravel roads and dirt roads. Then, when Reverend Berwick stopped the car, we walked along a pebbled path until we came to a small lake.

  There were clouds in the sky, but the sun was shining. The water was clear and cold. The narrow beach smelled of the pine trees along the shore. The ground was a little stony, so we had to watch where we stepped. Reverend Berwick put two baby-blue beach towels down, and then he and Mrs Berwick undressed. Just like that, neither casually nor self-consciously. Mrs Berwick let down her hair and put her glasses in her husband’s jacket.

  – Vous vous déshabillez pas? she asked us.

  Her body was pink and white. She had heavy breasts, their light-blue veins reticulated. Her nipples were dark and, yes, she had a vagina, or at least the pubic hair that suggested it. Reverend Berwick was thin. His body was white and soft-looking. Naturally, he had a penis.

  They both went slowly into the water, and then Reverend Berwick plunged in.

  Sandy and I reluctantly undressed and joined them. Sandy stayed in the shallow water by himself, but, once I got used to it, I went out as far as I could.

  Now, of course, I understand what was memorable about all this. It wasn’t the Berwicks’ nakedness as such. They were as tidy with their clothes off as on. It was my awareness that they must always have been at ease with their bodies.

  There was no doubt Sandy had seen his mother’s body. He had plotted so that I should see it, and not like this, either. Our day at the beach was a disappointment to him. Why? Because I’m convinced he had his own reason for having me see his mother’s body.

  Perhaps he wished to embarrass her, or, again, perhaps he was proud to show me what he had already seen.

  Whatever the case, his motive eludes me. To this day, I can’t get it straight.

  2 I don’t know how it had been for him, but I had been reading since the age of four. And learning to read, as with most of what my grandmother taught me, had been traumatic.

  She’d started me in on the alphabet from the time I could say “gramaw.” There had been hours at the kitchen table: I, small and nervous, on one side, my grandmother, armed with cards and a yardstick, on the other. You can believe I learned the letters quickly.

  – Put your hand on the table. Now, what’s this?

  – A?

  – That’s right. And this?

  –D?

  Smack! A rap across the knuckles.

  – Are you guessing?

  – O?

  Smack! Another rap across the knuckles.

  3 These magazines were my first proof that the adults around us were engaged in something obscure. It was also the first time I was aware of being sexually aroused, without knowing that that’s what it was. I couldn’t understand the horse or the burns, but most of the other images did something to me that translated, physically, as a racing heartbeat, a feeling of anxiety, and an unwanted, though not entirely disagreeable, forgive me for mentioning it, tumescence.

  If I could choose, this would not have been my first sexual experience. It’s annoying to be taken back to those woods, to the sound of birds, the smell of earth and trees, the stink of the cabin.

  III

  Two words forward, one word back. I’m surprised at how arduous it is to write. How arduous it is to arrange my own life.

  I get up at seven as usual, but most of the day is filled with scribbling.

  My timetables aren’t all that helpful, but I’m wary of keeping too strictly to schedule. I mean, I’m comforted by things in place, but I’ve learned to temper my inclination.

  My first timetable was an act of desperation. It was made in 1978. I was suffering through an episode. I was confused and tired. I’d spent three days staring at a dirty basement window.

  And then a car horn sounded in the distance, somewhere along Gilmour Street. I heard it and, for no reason I can understand, I suddenly saw the moments in a day as if they were the beads on a chaplet.

  It was transcendent.

  I wrote my first entry that very day, and from the first words

  7 O’clock: Wake up.

  I felt a wave of relief.

  Of course, things didn’t fall into place right away. After

  7 O’clock: Wake up.

  I wrote

  7:01: Feet on floor. Out of bed.

  7:02: To the bathroom. Urinate.

  7:03: Brush teeth.

  7:04: Floss teeth, rinse.

  7:05: Walk leisurely from bathroom to kitchen.

  7:06: Pause to remember a voice.

  7:07: Emotional interlude: longing.

  7:08: Think about breakfast on way to kitchen.

  7:09: Reject preceding thought. Leave kitchen.

  And so on…

  There was more solace in the elaboration of a timetable than there was in
its execution. I fastidiously set down the minutes in a day, all of them. There were 1,440 entries on 43 pages, but I’d forgotten to leave time to read them.

  You understand, I knew how strange it was to wander about the house, pacing myself, reading from my pages, and once the comfort of precision faded, I was not confident of my state of mind.

  And yet, I’d done some things right. The minutes of sleep were easily accomplished, and I had wisely left myself “emotional interludes,” though I’d forgotten how unpredictable they are. (I remember staring at a cup for three hours one day, wondering why it was yellow. It’s difficult to schedule an episode like that.)

  The trick, which I have almost mastered, is latitude.

  * * *

  —

  Looking over the pages I’ve written so far, I have the distinct feeling my childhood was unpleasant.

  It wasn’t, not entirely.

  My grandmother was a frightening woman, but even she occasionally lost herself in good humour. There was pumpkin pie for Halloween, Christmas cake for Christmas, plum pudding and ice cream whenever the mood struck her.

  Petrolia was unexciting, but it was also a stillness: an impossibly delicate tree frog in the palm of my hand, milkweeds and thistles, acres and acres of green and ochre, the dark stubble that sticks up from under snow-flattened fields…

  I might even have said my early childhood was good, if I hadn’t decided to write it, to write about the others who populated it.

  There’s nothing to be done, though. The way to Katarina and Henry is through me.

  * * *

  —

  Our neighbours to the east, the Schwartzes, were a little ominous.

  They moved into their ivy-covered house when I was six.

  I’d been admiring centipedes when I heard the sound of a hard rubber ball, tocking, and then the voice of a girl, singing.