Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter (5 page)

Early childhood drawings have me illustrating myself thus: two arms, two legs, a happy face surrounded by a full 360 degrees of curly hair. Just one great squiggly line going round
and round across the top of the head, all the way down under the chin and up the other side. (Note: thirty years later, my son's drawings depicted his mother identically.)

Throughout elementary school, I strove to model myself on Laura Ingalls from
Little House on the Prairie
: a brave and good soul with silken braids. I failed miserably, my thick, wiry hair giving me more of a Pippi Longstocking look (think horizontal braids). After being laughed out of the playground for arriving in a bonnet, I took to sleeping with a frilly white nightcap and reciting prayers on my knees like my blessed heroine. I would fall asleep feeling pious and satisfied, but was a thrasher of a sleeper, inevitably flinging the ruffled cap to the ground sometime during the night. In the morning, I would roll my wildly curly self out of bed and retrieve the cap from the floor ashamedly, even on occasion muttering under my breath, “Sorry, God.”

I do not recall at what age I convinced my mother to let me have my hair straightened, only that I must have been quite small. The hairdresser simply blew it dry, strand by strand, with healthy applications of hairspray, until I looked as though I had cozied up to a steamroller.

All the way home, I stroked my Saran Wrap hair. Dreamily, I rolled down the car window to feel it blow in straight lines across my face. I was elated and begged my mother to learn the technique herself, “Please, please buy hairspray!”—she smiled flatly; she never bought cosmetics of any kind—they were for stupid people, she told me rather bluntly. “But I want to keep
it this way forever!” I pleaded, running a hand over my straw-straight hair.

When we got home, I wandered to the end of the driveway so that the world could see me. I flipped my head from side to side, relishing the
straightness
, waiting for someone to walk by and comment, but no one did and eventually I sat down in the gravel. Briefly, I recalled bleaker times from my old life when my brothers had sneaked pebbles into my hair, me oblivious to the joke until I laid my head down on the pillow at night and felt the bumps.

No longer.

For the first time, I could draw my fingers from the top of my skull all the way down the length of my hair to the ends. It was heavenly. I did it over and over, decided I would stay up all night doing it, and then got the inspired idea of putting a small stone at the crown of my head to feel it slide, unimpeded, down the smooth strands.
N-n-n-n-plonk
. It was so delicious I did it again. Then with sand, which tickled the curve of my scalp as it slid down the slick slope. Like ice. For the rest of the afternoon, my head was the hill for handful after handful of pebble skiers. I believe I charged them admission when they rode the finger-lift up my arm.

No surprises as to how the fantasy ended, which was with my mom's exclamation, “What on earth did you do to your hair, we'll have to wash it!”
Trrrrrrrring!

Curls again.

From that day on, I assumed them as my life's curse.

That and school, whose purpose never came clear to me during all of the eighteen years that I attended. In kindergarten
it was discovered that I could read, so while the other children played, I was sent out into the hallway to do spelling flashcards with an “advanced” grade eight student who found the exercise so dull that no doubt she wished she had been labelled “retarded” instead. I greeted each day with a leaden dread, my stomach a tangle of glass-tipped threads that once pierced my bladder and released a morning's worth of urine during storytime. The sensation was one of blessed relief, like the exhalation after holding one's breath, a warm wash against the backs of my thighs that was comforting only until we all stood up and a dark circle revealed itself where I had been sitting. Naturally, I found reason to busy myself with something on the other side of the room, listening to the teacher's stern pronouncement—that someone had been very,
very
bad—and donning a look of surprise and disapproval comparable to those of my classmates. For the rest of the morning, my white tights sagged with the cold memory of that release, burning and scratching my legs as I walked, and freezing like a patch of yellow snow on my bum when we were let outside for recess.

When my mother complained about the flashcard drudgery—peeing one's pants is a sign of stress, I heard her confide to a neighbour—she was invited to a meeting with my teacher and the principal, both of whom thought it would be better if I were taken out of the class and moved into grade one. My mother said she preferred that I stay where I was, as all I really wanted or needed to do was play with my friends, but the teacher insisted that I be put among children of the same ability. “Otherwise,” she concluded with a rhetorical question
that spun my mother's eyeballs, “how is she ever going to learn how to conform?”

In the end, my mother won, but the truth is that my teacher was right. For in a few months I will turn forty-five and still I have not the slightest idea how to conform.

“Close your eyes—and try not to
feel
.” These were the instructions I gave to my father as he lay back in the reclining chair of the family room and prepared to count to ten, and I scampered off to find a hiding place. I was probably four or five years old. My plan—I could not imagine why I hadn't thought of it before—was to hide behind his back. He would never think to look there. The only technical difficulty I envisioned was that I would have to crawl
under
his reclined body. Thus the instructions.

Always the good sport, my father did as he was told. I burrowed into a spot beneath his shoulder blade, and when he reached “TEN!” he bounded up and wandered around the house looking for me in all the usual places, accenting his search with many a declaration about how challenging it was to find me.

Scarcely containing my laughter, I sat on the reclining chair, nestling into the warm imprint his body had left on the leather. As I heard his footsteps approaching, my entire body tensed with excitement, so full of glee that I had to stuff my hands between my legs to keep all the giggles inside. He clapped his hands and shrieked when he saw me.

“How did you get there?”

My laughter slapped every wall in the room. “I was hiding
underneath
you!”

That was the first time I realized how clever I was.

The second occasion came near the end of a long drive
to a cottage, where we were to spend a month of our summer holidays when I was four. It was late, and the gravel rumbled beneath our tires as our car wound along a maze of narrow, dark roads. Not a street or house light in sight. Black sculptures of trees on either side.

My parents were muttering in the front seat, consulting handwritten directions under the thin beam of the car's interior light and pushing frustration and question marks back and forth at each other across a small map. Then, a solemn declaration sounded from the back seat.

“I know where we are,” Paul announced gloomily. “We're
lost
.”

“No we're not,” I insisted, pointing towards the front of the car. “Look, Daddy has his headlights on!”

For a few happy moments, my parents' voices lifted into laughter, the mood in the car lightening so palpably that I was convinced I had struck brilliance again. “We can't be lost if we can see where we're going, silly Paul!”

Eventually we arrived at the cottage, as I had known we would, and had a beautiful holiday full of creaky screen doors, weedy swimming, my dad reading
Gourmet
magazine while tanning himself on the dock, and evenings that sparkled with loon calls. Some mornings I awoke before dawn, pushed my arms into the sleeves of a pale yellow sweater my grandmother had knitted me, and sat with my cat on a steep granite cliff overlooking the lake. Chin on my knees. The cardigan's top button a hard candy between my teeth. And the day's first light like soft warm ribbons in my hair.

Mine was a carefree childhood. When I went missing, someone looked for me; when we got lost, we found our way. We laughed, played, ate well, loved each other.

All the essentials.

One way to encourage two children out of the bathtub:
Okay, kids, it's time to get out of the bathtub
.

Another way:
Okay, kids, I have a tube of toothpaste behind my back. Whoever chooses the hand with the toothpaste in it gets to stay in a little longer
.

A third way, and the option preferred by professors of political science who are keen to see their children grow up with a modicum of vital political knowledge: “Okay, kids, I'm going to teach you the names of all the prime ministers of Canada. Whichever one of you can recite them back to me the fastest gets to stay in the bath the longest.”

When one is born the child of a professor of political science, one assumes as normal the following: spending the chilly evenings of several weeks going door-to-door—not unlike Jehovah's Witnesses, come to think of it—canvassing for the Liberal candidate of your riding; being allowed to stay up late
only
on the nights of leadership conventions and having to feign enthusiasm when what's-his-name wins; living with a large poster of Prime Minister Trudeau's silhouette in the garage and his annual family-portrait Christmas card hanging prominently in the front hall, all year long; and being asked to learn the names of prime ministers as part of a bedtime ritual.

Thus, a typical scene from the Wearing household
circa
1972: A corduroy-clad man with black horn-rimmed glasses and short, curly hair climbs the stairs, adjusts his glasses as he notices himself in the hallway mirror, walks four steps down the hallway
and opens the bathroom door. His two eldest children, aged five and six, instantly drop their bath toys and shout in unison:
“Mac​don​ald​Mac​ken​zie​Mac​don​ald​Abb​ott​Tho​mps​onB​owe​llT​upp​erL​aur​ier​Bor​den​Mei​ghe​nKi​ngM​eig​hen​Kin​gBe​nne​ttK​in​gS​t​.​Lau​ren​tDi​efe​nba​ker​Pea​rso​nTr​ude​au!​”

To be accurate, it wasn't quite in unison. While the litany was recited perfectly by Paul without so much as a fumble, I, being more of a musical learner by nature and therefore inclined to focus on the lyricism of words rather than the accuracy, rattled off something along the lines of
“McDonald'sCandyMcDonald's … Tom'sson'sBowels … Uproar … B-b-boredMeKingKingMeKingBenNetKingSayLeron … D-EasyBakeOvenTrudeau!”

Paul always won.

Until one night I burst into tears in the middle of my stumbling recitation and my father suggested we return to the earlier ritual of choosing the hand that held the toothpaste. At this, I was impressively adept.

Once we were prime-ministered, brushed and into our pyjamas, my father would read to us, not from
Winnie-the-Pooh
, as most of my other five-year-old friends' parents were doing at the time, but
Great Expectations
. Being a Dickens fan, my father felt it important that we be exposed at a young age. I do not remember much of the story itself, although the mere mention of the title brings up a vivid image of young Pip helping the convict file the shackle from his leg, as well as a memory of being very glad I didn't live in England, where such things went on.

I'm not sure how much of the story Paul and I understood, but I do remember that my father encouraged us to ask
him to explain unfamiliar words, and we certainly had plenty to choose from.

Generally Paul and I would choose only one or two words per paragraph to ask about; otherwise, the story never seemed to get going.

“What's
dis-earn-a-bull
?”

My father would stop, look pensive. “Something that's perceptible. You can see it or perhaps sense it.
There is a discernible smell coming from Paul's side of the bed just now
, for example.”

For me, the memorable thing about
Great Expectations
was not so much the story as the cello song of my father's voice, the way we lay on the bed all together, limbs relaxed against limbs. Often I would drift from the storyline and simply enjoy my father's pleasure, the animated way that he read, the way
different voices felt when I closed my eyes, the funny way the English had of saying
ought
or
I know not what
, and how much my father seemed to love Dickens's wit, laughing out loud when something amused him. We did not learn typical stories from my father; what we learned was the joy that can be found in the telling. Such an invaluable lesson.

How it has fed me throughout my life.

My early musical career was a sweet scene, beginning as it did on the “cello” at age four. Born tiny as a crab, I was only slightly larger than a lobster by this point, and I found it too difficult to hold and manoeuvre even a child's-size cello. I was therefore given a viola (an instrument moderately larger and lower in pitch than its cousin the violin) to turn upside down and hold between my thighs as a makeshift cello. This was, I was later told, awfully cute.