Forgiveness (24 page)

As we stood up for roll call, “Sakamoto” caused a few snickers. I looked different, but not that different. I was, after all, half Japanese, half Scottish. Most kids could not quite put their finger on it.

Daniel and I were the youngest kids on our block and, not surprisingly, street hockey was the sport of choice. All the big kids would stake out their hero: “I’m Wayne!” “I’m Lanny!” I’d always be the last to yell: “I’m Matt!” Matt Kabayama never made it to the NHL, but he was one of the finest WHL players Medicine Hat ever produced. He was a slight Japanese kid living in a world of burly
white farm kids. I related.

The year I was in grade 1, my dad put me in hockey. At the beginning of the season, we went to Black’s Sports down on 2nd Street to get me suited up with size-six Braun skates, a helmet, and a wooden Koho stick that he cut down to size in the driveway as soon as we got home. He made sure that the helmet had a full mask. It was a white cage around my face. I was too excited to sit still long enough to bite the dashboard on the way home. Matt Kabayama, here I come!

At my first practice, Dad suited me up. He hunched over and did my laces up. It felt like he tied them too tightly, but I didn’t say anything. I walked slowly down the padded aisle, holding the cinderblock wall to keep my balance. I was shaky hitting the ice. I tried to remember the drills Dad had run me through on the open Riverside rink. But my knees kept on folding in on themselves. I was up and I was down. I’d see ice and then I’d see the rink’s roof. I was glad for the helmet.

At one point I was happy to be leaning my back against the boards by the penalty box. A boy skated in front of me and looked hard through my facemask. Even behind the white cage, I looked different from him. But like the kids at Webster Niblock, he couldn’t quite place me. He stared for a long moment, blinking, taking me in. Then, eureka!

“You’re a nigger.”

I’d never heard the word.

“I don’t think I am.” This was a statement of fact.

Then the whistle blew and we were off to do our drill. I felt as visible as the bright orange pylons I was unsuccessfully trying to navigate. I held my tears back as we drove the seven blocks home from the Crescent Heights rink. Dad did not press me.

Back home, I threw my face into my pillow and cried. Mom let me cry for a few minutes to get it out. She wanted to be sure I would hear what she had to say.

“Get up.”

I did.

“Look at me.” There was no softness. There was no pity.

She was standing in the doorway. Her hands were on her hips. Her eyes were on fire.

“It doesn’t matter what colour your skin is, so long as it’s thick.”

That was that. She closed the door to let me ponder that, cry some more, whatever. She knew I had got the message.

Mom did her best to instill in me a warm heart. Many mornings as I walked into the kitchen, she would beckon me over to her favourite spot at the table, the spot where the morning light shone through the window and warmed her morning tea. She’d tell me every morning that my heart was golden.

She believed in her boys. It was contagious. We felt we could,
we really could
, do whatever we wanted. Our reach was only limited by our imagination.

When Daniel turned three, Mom began working full time as a receptionist at City Hall. Her re-entry into the workforce called for a fashion makeover. She called in a heavy-hitter, her friend Donna Stetic; they had worked together at the Department of Community Services and Recreation.

Donna seemed distinguished to me. She had no children. She was like the ladies of means I’d see on mom’s soap operas. She was in her early forties and she acted her age. Her husband owned a large cattle ranch forty miles east of the city. Mom came home from the fanciest store in town—Friday’s Image—with a purple satin blouse with shoulder pads, purple pleated slacks, a green jumpsuit, three
pairs of high heels, one pearl necklace and a flower brooch. She was so excited she had worn the jumpsuit home.

Strangely for a Canadian, I remember summers far more than winters. Every weekend, we would hop into our dad’s brown Chevy truck and make our way to the farm. It was just a few minutes south of town. The farm was sixty-two acres of cukes, tomatoes, potatoes, and corn. The north side was lined with massive spruce trees, but to the south you could see until the end of time. Growing up under a wide-open sky profoundly affects your outlook. You feel boundless.

Daniel and I, too young to be enlisted into hard labour like our older cousins, spent most of our days playing in the cornfields. The tall husks were perfect for hiding and seeking, attacking and retreating. We made good use of our time, knowing full well that the very corn that was our disguise would soon become our chore. In a few months, we would be sitting on Grandma and Grandpa Sakamoto’s driveway husking truckloads of corn that never seemed to end. We didn’t dare complain. We knew how hard everyone else was working.

While my world was expanding, my parents’ marriage was diminishing. They were speaking less. Their conversations became mechanical, bureaucratic. Who is taking what, where? My dad had never been chatty, preferring to let his actions speak for him. He wrote his thoughts down in a three-ring binder that he stashed on the top shelf of our foyer. I knew this because I’d see my mom drag a kitchen chair into the front lobby and pull the binder down to read his thoughts. I would sneak peeks myself. Most of his entries were about his failing business: he was losing Maxwell’s.

That September, when I was seven years old, I bought Dad a pen for his birthday, hoping to make him feel better.

Two weeks later, Mom began crying almost hysterically.

“Just looook at this kitchen!” she screeched as she ran her hands through her frosted hair.

The portable dishwasher, full of dirty dishes, was hooked up to the kitchen tap. She hadn’t found the time to turn it on. The sink was full of three days’ worth of soaking pots and pans. Burnt crusts clung to the parts sticking out of the oil-tinged brown water. A few remaining soap bubbles hung in each rounded corner of the stainless steel sink. A mountain range of soccer jerseys, jeans, T-shirts, underwear, and socks sat beside the fridge waiting to be carried downstairs to the washing machine. Each day the pile grew. The fridge was near empty. Four utility bills and one mortgage statement were posted on the fridge—a constant reminder of our arrears.

Daniel and I sat at the kitchen table, watching, waiting for supper, unsure what to do. Dad was working—he was always working. Mom was alone. She paced the kitchen like a caged animal.

She went to the bathroom to get some toilet paper to blow her nose. Nose still runny, she marched back into the kitchen, grabbed an empty Kleenex box, and threw it to the ground. We were out of paper products.

“My mother NEVER ran out of toilet paper!” Mom burst into tears again and slumped onto the kitchen floor, her back against the dishwasher, defeated. Daniel ran to the stove, grabbed the small kitchen towel, and handed it to her. “Don’t cry, Mom. It’s okay.”

It was not okay. Mom decided, at that very moment, I think, that life could not go on like this. It had to get better. We needed a cleaner house. We needed more food in the fridge. We needed toilet paper. I remember the look in her eyes. She was determined to go it alone.

The next night, I lashed out at my father. We were at grandma Sakamoto’s for dinner. Mom was not there. I was sitting on the kitchen counter, between the telephone and the sink. I was mad because he was not home when Mom was in need. I was mad that we had an empty fridge, a messy house, and past-due bills. I was mad that we didn’t have toilet paper. I lay in wait for an opening.

He asked me a simple, fatherly question. Something like “How was your day?”

“What do you care, you’re never around,” I said sulkily.

I may have as well have taken out one of Grandma’s
santoku
knives and stabbed him.

“Don’t you ever say that to me again,” he replied, his firmness masking his pain.

I jumped off the counter and ran to the guest room, leaped onto the bed, and plunged my face into the pillow. Dad probably felt like doing the same.

I think I have relived this moment more than any other. If I could take back but one sentence in my life, corral the words, and choke them back into my mouth, that would be the one.

That week, during one of her 10:45 a.m. coffee breaks, Mom decided to end her marriage. She informed grandma Sakamoto that very afternoon at 4:15 p.m., when she arrived to pick us up. Grandma broke down and wept. She begged her to reconsider, but Mom would not be moved. It was decided. She loaded us into the car and we were off.

Mom and Dad sat my brother and me down in our living room to tell us. The sun shone through the blinds against the bay window. Mom did the talking, Dad sat ashen-faced. He looked like he just wanted to wake up from a bad dream.

Afterwards I fled to the park across the street, climbed a tree, and stared at my house. At eight, I was old enough to know life was about to alter dramatically. I felt fear for the first time.

As far as divorces go, theirs was quite amicable, although we must have been shielded from some of the ugly moments that are bound to occur as two people unwind their life together. I recall only one screaming match, an early morning fight in the bathroom that woke me up. As I came out of my bedroom, I saw my dad standing in the hall, staring into the bathroom. “You go to hell,” he said with tears in his eyes. I had never heard my dad curse. I had never seen him cry.

Three weeks later, we were all packing up: Dad to move to a rented house not far from our first place on Division Avenue, Mom,
Daniel, and I to a duplex just around the corner and across the street from a subsidized housing complex. Mom had borrowed the down payment from grandpa MacLean. She hated to do so. She would rather owe the bank than her dad, but a single mother with a receptionist’s salary didn’t make for an ideal loan candidate.

The fear that had introduced itself to me in the tree became a constant companion. The ground under our feet had shifted. Like an earthquake survivor, I spent my days on edge, waiting for the next tremor.

Mom never really did articulate her reason for divorcing Dad. I think she needed release. She needed to feel truly free. But she was walking a tightrope without a safety net. Her first steps out onto the wire were unsteady.

On the surface, many things remained the same. Our morning routine was unchanged: waking up to a hug, breakfast cereal at the kitchen table, Mom watching us as she sipped Earl Grey tea. Off to school, home for lunch—Ichiban soup—babysitting Daniel from 3:10 until 4:45 p.m., when Mom returned. She watched
Oprah
in the living room from 5 to 6 p.m. while Daniel and I played with the neighbourhood kids. Then dinner, clean-up, homework at the kitchen table,
The National
newscast, and off to bed. Pretty routine stuff.

But cracks began to appear. I kept my eye on them like a home inspector, hoping they wouldn’t impact the foundation. As I watched the small cracks grow, I wondered if anyone else saw them.

In the new place, although my bedroom was downstairs and Daniel’s upstairs, we continued to sleep together. Old habits die hard. In bed at night, we would tap each other on the leg with our feet. One tap meant you weren’t tired; five meant you were close to sleep. It should have been the other way around, but that’s how we did it. We only started to do that after the divorce. We were scared; we had reason to be. In the half-light, we knew things were changing. We knew our mom was changing.

At first, the tiny duplex took on the feel of a chaperoned teenage party. A new cast of friends came into my mom’s life. For the most
part, they were a fun-loving, motley crew. Most were divorcees or folks in transitory stages of life.

A woman named Terry moved into the duplex next door. She was also a recent divorcee and she lived with her son, Wade. A pretty woman with a vibrant laugh, she had that late-80s sex appeal down pat. She drank fruit wine coolers and blared “Walk Like an Egyptian” in the afternoon.

Jerry was a neighbour who lived up the street. He liked to push the limits. He drove a fast car too fast. His favourite pastime was stabbing his hunting knife between his (or someone else’s) outstretched fingers. He was a dead ringer for Sting. At least once a month, he’d receive a free lunch somewhere in town because the server thought he was the rock legend. Jerry would never dispel their misconception. He would tell the waitress he was on a meditation retreat.

There was a good-looking man who wore a very old and very cool jean jacket. He rode a motorcycle and had the confident ease of a guy who has been cool all his life. He didn’t flaunt it, but you knew it, and he knew you knew it. But as a father with two young girls and a wife at home, he was finding life was quickly becoming less cool. With him, you knew something was going to give.

Rounding out the group was a fun-loving, carefree guy named Mike who rented a basement bedroom from Terry. Born on an aboriginal reserve in northern Alberta, Mike had spent his early adulthood trying to cram as much joy into his life as he could, trying to make up for lost time. In college, he started a Hug Society, where volunteers manned a booth and gave a hug to anyone who would take one. Like a man back from the desert with an insatiable thirst, Mike could not get enough affection.

They danced, they laughed, they drank. They were merry.

I was nine years old. The antics of my mom’s new friends excited me. We would have water fights in the backyard. We would all hop into a caravan and head to Echo Dale park, a man-made beach. The women would sunbathe while the guys played Frisbee. On one occasion, Mike gingerly untied Terry’s bikini top as she slept
face down on her outstretched beach towel. He then called her to ask if she wanted to go swimming. She got up and bounced halfway to the water before realizing she was the star of a burlesque show. Her scream only drew more attention as she dashed back to the safety of her towel. I sat, mesmerized, as her large milk-white breasts bounded in front of me. I had never seen real live breasts before. After the commotion died down, the gang decided to go for ice cream at the concession. I opted to stay lying on my towel.