Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter (9 page)

I wish I could say that I felt sad for my friend Julie, but I'm
not sure I had the capacity to feel sorry for anyone but myself at that moment. It was more likely that I got a small jolt of pleasure from Julie's misfortune, that seductive sting of glad-it's-not-me delight that drives gossip mills and tabloids. For I was definitely comforted to know that there were other parents going off and doing unimaginably awful things, and heartened to hear that my life could have been a whole lot worse. Until then, it had never occurred to me that mothers could leave home; as far as I was concerned, they
were
home. So at least it wasn't my
mother
who was running off to be gay; that would have been like the whole house collapsing. My dad running off to be gay just felt like a bomb had gone off in my stomach.

At the airport the next day, I clutched my ticket to Frankfurt so forcefully that by the time I checked in, the smudged lettering was almost illegible. My mother was there, as always, and my father arrived late, as always, just as I was about to walk through the customs gate, a series of doors and officials that felt menacing; I couldn't imagine how I would get past them all without bursting from the pressure of the tears and terror I held inside.

I don't remember the actual goodbye, only my father's quick step as he arrived (from his Toronto apartment) and his jolly manner, the way he grabbed my mother playfully around the waist, and how she flinched. Steeled herself and tried to be good-natured. Albeit stiffly.

No doubt my mother regretted the previous evening's disclosure. It hadn't been planned and the timing was, obviously, pretty dreadful. She had found out about my dad only a few
months earlier, so maybe her judgment was off. Whatever it was, I felt completely disoriented even before boarding the plane.

The memory crunches at this point, the way our old 8mm films used to at the end of a reel. Ours were among the first generation of home movies, and oh did we love them, my brothers and I. Nothing, but nothing, could compete with watching silent stilted scenes of ourselves at various stages of development. Our greatest shrieks of delight came on those evenings when my father would clap his hands together and suggest that we set up the projector.

There he is: Paul, at age three, trying his hand at conducting with my father's baton, a look of acute seriousness falling across his face as he waves the stick around him, flipping the pages of the music score with great concentration, but backwards, following various lines with his finger, his intensity and passion building (pure child mimicry here), tongue curled over his lip, until he is conducting so furiously that it looks as though the baton is about to take flight. Hilarious every time.

Or precious moments such as my potty training outside a crumbling stone house in southern France, Paul proudly marching around the bowl of urine in his Buckingham Palace–guard costume while I waddle towards the camera with a smile of self-satisfaction. I could have watched the scene a thousand times. Especially for a child, it is pleasing to see proof that one was once effortlessly adorable.

There are summers at cottages with untannable English friends, watermelon-seed spitting contests and unhappy babies
in playpens. Unintentional shots of my grandmother's shins as she sits on the sofa watching us on Christmas morning the year she gives us the Fisher-Price castle—could our mouths have stretched wider with joy? There is Judy, the skinny English nanny who lived with us for a year, tossing grapes up into the air with my mother, the two of them catching the fruits in their mouths with great comical self-congratulations each time a little green orb makes it through the drawbridge of their teeth. My brothers and me (aged seven, six and three) marching angrily the length of the kitchen with placards that read W
E WANT TO STAY UP FOR THE PARTY!
and E
RLY BEDTIME – NO WAY!
while my mother and her sister sit off to the side giggling into their hands. Aunt Sally, ever the sophisticate, posing seductively in a doorway exhibiting the uncommon talent of crossing her eyes and making circles with only the right one. Flip posing solemnly with Ida the black Lab, Flip in his best shirt and Ida in a headband of ribbons, just after his announcement that he intended, a bit later in life, to marry her. My father dancing around in the backyard, his hands flitting about like butterflies, urging us to join him. His enthusiasm is visibly contagious and in no time my brothers and I, Flip still a toddler, are delightedly following behind trying to imitate my father's style, wobbling our hips and swirling our hands behind him as he prances around the garden like a fairy.

Oh my.

While foraging for extra blankets at my mother's house one Christmas decades later, Flip and I came across the old projector
in her basement and set it up excitedly. We laughed at the same scenes all over again, rose up in our seats and filled in some of the sound effects or details about certain moments that we remembered.

And then came the
let's all dance like pixies!
scene: my father leaping about, actually
pointing
his toes as he lifted them off the ground.

“Uh, that would be Dad,” Flip acknowledged, raising his eyebrows and rubbing his beard. As my father's nimble body frolicked along the white basement wall, Flip's shoulders began to shake. Mine followed. And by the time the film spun to a finish and slapped its loose end round and around the projector, we were both leaning into each other, laughing uproariously.

Uh. That would be Dad.

“Did you ever have any idea?” people often ask. “Did you ever wonder if he was gay?”

Fair questions, I suppose. The crème brûlée and all. His preference for gambolling over gambling. Opera in the streets, yes yes.

But no.

As a Canadian child of the 1970s, no more did I suspect my father of being a closeted dandy than I harboured suspicions of my rice-enamoured mother being secretly Chinese. While it's all mainstream sitcom nowadays, at that time the kind of thing my father was up to simply
was not done
. Except a few hours away, in a place called Toronto, where although one still might have been hard-pressed to find a drink on Sundays,
if one knew where to go (and for a time the police did not) one could find a gay bathhouse.

Or a gay bar.

Though that was not, in fact, what my dad and I had visited during the notable father–daughter weekend that my mother would later refer to. What we had gone to was a restaurant, such a novelty to me then that it might as well have been a bar. It was a pleasant place, bright and fancy with an ample array of ornamental flowers. There was even, to my father's felicity, a chandelier. Sitting there on a puffy vinyl seat reading an embossed white menu with a red ribbon draped down the middle, I felt very much the princess, and happily-ever-after-ly so.

The tables were long and set quite close together, so in my recollection we were soon chatting with two men seated along the wall, as well as an older gentleman at the end of our table. It might well have been a pickup joint, a safe place for queers to get quietly acquainted, but if anything like that was going on, I was unaware of it. I only remember everyone being exceptionally friendly, sweet and attentive to me, and witty, full of jokes and giggles. When we stepped onto the sidewalk of a grey, early winter day, I recall turning to my father and exclaiming, “I liked going there!” As well as the dewy-eyed delight on his face as he said, “Well, maybe I could take you there again sometime!” Then he threaded his arm through mine and skipped me all the way to the subway.

Could one of the men have ribbed him at some point, some innocuous joke about bringing his daughter to a gay bar? I no
longer remember. It is said that children know everything, every unspoken subtlety that passes through the lives of their parents, and I suspect that may be so. But the only thing I know for certain is that I took the Greyhound bus back to Peterborough, walked to our house on Merino Road and flopped into the kitchen, where I found my mother sweeping. And to her then-standard question, So what did you and Dad do in Toronto? I leaned my elbow over the back of a chair and responded, “Oh, he took me to a gay bar.”

Creak creak creak—crash
.

Germany was a well-ordered blur. Poppyseed-speckled
Brötchen
for breakfast, hairy-armpitted women, criss-cross fairy-tale houses, tours of cathedrals that all but drained the blood from my body, hundreds of games of backgammon with my host family's fun-loving father, an intestineful of Wiener schnitzel, beds that needed to be unrolled every night in my “host sister” Jutta's terminally tidy room, and a feverish insomnia that would have me huddled on the windowsill looking down on dark, empty cobblestone streets scribbling into the diary my dad had given me at the airport as an early birthday present.

I had never really kept a journal before, certainly nothing of any substance, but I began to write in that little blue diary because I thought I would burst if I didn't. So many questions churned within me that at any given moment I could have leaned over and vomited: hundreds of words spattering out of my mouth onto those immaculate German sidewalks.

No doubt they found me strange, Jutta's kind and welcoming family. Sleeping half the day, picking at my breaded lamb with sullen ingratitude, incapable of appreciating their
hospitality or enjoying myself for more than a few minutes at a time. I remember weeping on the telephone to my mother the day I woke up convinced I had cancer in my knees. Or wishing I did, not sure which. I seemed unable to decide whether I hoped I was dying or was petrified that I was. In either case, I was desperate for some kind of reassurance from my mother.

On the last night of my six-week stay, the Thiemanns threw me a beautiful if undeserved thirteenth birthday party with all the local girls and their families. A few days after that, I packed my navy blue fake leather suitcase full of souvenir coins, pins, leotards and postcards, along with a head full of the German words for things like potato salad—
Kartoffelsalat—
and butterfly—
Schmetterling!
—and flew home.

At the airport, I was thrilled to see both my parents waiting for me. All the way to the parking lot, I bubbled over with stories and proudly recited a joke I had memorized in German, a language they both spoke a bit. My father was overjoyed by my state, exclaiming that clearly Germany had been very
stimulating
for me and wasn't that wonderful! My dad often used that word,
stimulating
—Travel was so
stimulating
! Wasn't that concert
stimulating
!—but all of a sudden the word made me squirm. I saw my mom roll her eyes, but we all said goodbye civilly, my dad getting into his car and explaining that he was staying in Toronto (clearly a more
stimulating
city than Peterborough) and he'd see me soon. My mom and I got into her car and drove back to Merino Road.

A few days later, I came downstairs to find Dad in his
French silk pyjamas reading the newspaper in the kitchen. We chatted briefly, even phlegmed our way through a few words of German, until he began fidgeting with the paper and said sternly, nervously, but with impeccable grammar, “Mom told me that before you left for Germany, you and she had an important chat.”

Quickly, I reached for the Harvest Crunch.
Plink plink plink
. A tumble of glazed oats falling into my bowl. Lungs like limp socks on a clothesline. No breath, no breath.

“Yeah,” I said with a stab at teenage aloofness. “She told me, but I don't care.”

Lie number one.

Of thousands.

Paul already knew.

Dad had told him a few months earlier when they were having one of their father–son weekends at my dad's apartment in Toronto, his time at home having become increasingly rare since his sabbatical the previous year. Paul was quiet for a bit, but shortly after that he brightened up and asked if they were still going out for Chinese food. Which they did and had a wonderful time. That's what Dad told me.

Chinese food?

Quiet for a bit and then Chinese food?

I looked down at my bowl of Harvest Crunch, the oat-balls swelling out into the splosh of now-syrupy, off-colour milk, the lumpy mass looking like something I'd already eaten and brought up. I could barely lift the spoon to my mouth. How on earth did Paul manage Chinese food?

I have no memory of what we said next, but it was no doubt the verbal equivalent of covering up an unsightly stain on the carpet by looking towards the ceiling. I believe he offered to answer any questions I might have. And all I could think of was sitting in that windowsill in Jutta's room, and how I had been so frightened that someone would see the words I had spent the night scribbling into my journal that the moment I finished writing I shredded every page into pieces and ate them.

Nope, no questions.

Although there were a few. Like, how can you choose to live in that sleazy, graffiti-covered apartment building in concreteville Toronto when you could just stay here in our perfectly nice Peterborough house with all those gardens you spent years fluffing up?

Or, why can't you keep being normal during the week and just go to Toronto to be gay on the weekends? (I couldn't have known that they had been trying that, he and my mother, but the obvious snag to the arrangement—namely, Married Life As Ludicrous Hoax—was making it impossible to continue.)

Or, can't you at least come back and cook once in a while? We could have one day a week when we all eat soufflé.

Or, what's so wrong with everything the way it is? I thought we were all having a pretty good time.