Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter (14 page)

In the end, the conversation appears to have been so heavy it collapsed my memory, for I have no recollection of it at all. I probably cried so hard I washed all traces of the words away. Actually, I think I was angry. Yes, I vaguely remember storming off the back porch and slamming the sliding door shut, hoping its large glass would shatter. Oh, and I recall one of our sweet little Bichon Frisés nearly getting squashed in the slam.

In any case, they got married, and suddenly I had a stepfather named Melville.

I didn't like him. For one, he had stolen my mother. For another, I found him exceedingly heterosexual: he belonged to the Kiwanis Club, was an engineer, a
sailor
, and he viewed the kitchen as a woman's domain. And every night when he came home from work, he would put his briefcase on the kitchen table, reach up to the top cupboard and pour himself a scotch.

Sometimes another.

And another.

“I heard my mom telling Mrs. Smithey she's so relieved your mom got remarried,” Jessica told me as we sat on the floor of her room listening to her latest passion: the music of KISS. “Yeah,” Jessica said, putting on a nasal imitation of her mother's voice. “
Now those kids can finally get back to having a normal life
.”

Our first Christmas as a new family was kaleidoscopic. The wedding had taken place a few months earlier and all seven children—my brothers (ages twelve and sixteen), me (fifteen), and Mel's four kids (between seventeen and twenty-three)—were still adjusting to the new configuration of our lives. All of us, I believe, with some difficulty.

Mel's kids had flown in from Halifax (where their mother lived) for a week starting on Christmas Eve. The first afternoon was a series of awkward introductions and silences, the evening a painful attempt by the newlyweds to highlight how much we all had in common. Apart from choruses of throat-clearing, the dominant sound at the dinner table was the scraping of cutlery against plates. Once the dinner was adjourned, I slipped out the back door, punched through the thigh-deep snow of the neighbourhood's backyards and crawled into Jessica's basement. I found her listening to Pink Floyd and slurping hootched-up Coke, and we spent the next few hours trading ongoing tragedies.

The next morning came far too early, my hungover head feeling like a gravel driveway that someone had spent the night shovelling. I came downstairs to an intimate Christmas morning of total strangers and the CBC. Passing over the plate of store-bought croissants on the counter, I put a piece of bread in the toaster and accepted a cup of spiced tea that my stepbrothers had prepared. My new stepsister was quiet but pleasant, helping my mother get everyone accommodated.

They were friendly, my stepbrothers, funny and charming, and, it bears mentioning (because I was a teenage girl whose interest in erotica was steadily growing), they were also drop-dead cute. I hadn't noticed the previous night, so focused had I been on my new-family anxiety. But over the course of breakfast, despite my bedraggled, dry-mouthed state, I found myself warming up to them. The older one in particular. No, the middle one. The deep brown saucers of his eyes. As I crunched dry toast and glugged cup after cup of sweet spiced tea, I found myself beginning to enjoy the allure of my new family.

After everyone had eaten, we went into the living room for the traditional opening of presents. And that was where it all began to twist. Well, not twist exactly, more like undulate, with galloping shapes and colours. And presents, so many presents. So many presents that I felt they were filling the room, crawling along the carpet and gathering around my shoulders. I got up and went into the hallway. Scrunched my eyes. Stared at the ceiling, the floor. My stepbrother appeared, the middle one with the dreamy eyes, put a hand on my shoulder and asked if I was all right. Yeah, I said, blinking excessively. I moved to touch his face only to discover that my fingers were dancing green lights. Five glowing threads attached to my wrist. I played with them for a while, dangling and dancing them in front of my face, until he guided me back into the living room, where Mel was in the process of opening a small oblong box from his eldest son.

“Look at this tie! Oh, Anne!
Look
at this tie!” he repeated, shaking his head in amazement.

My mother paid no attention, focused as she was on hooking a pair of slippers over her ears and kicking her legs side to side like a showgirl. Mel stared at her bewildered (as did we all), but said nothing. Instead, he returned the lid to the gift box, stared around the room with an entranced expression, and then, returning his gaze to the box, opened it again. “Look at this tie!” he exclaimed, as though seeing it for the first time. “Oh, Anne, look at this tie!”

He repeated the whole exercise so many times, it seemed the room had fallen into some kind of time-warped loop.

“Oh, Anne,
look
at this tie!” he gasped for the nth time, one hand pressed to his forehead.

But she did not, of course, because of all the Folies Bergère ear-slipper dancing.

It was the greatest lunacy I had ever beheld.

My stepbrothers, all three of them, were a heap of entangled limbs in one corner of the room, laughing so hard their eyes streamed with tears. My own brothers sat side by side on the green-striped loveseat, their heads volleying back and forth as though watching a tennis match, their bottom lips flaccid, cheeks long.

Eventually, although it was the middle of the day, people started going to bed. Or rather, our parents went to bed while some of the kids napped on the sofa and others stayed up drinking Irish coffee at the suggestion of the good-looking middle stepbrother. I took a catnap in an armchair and woke up ravenous. It was two in the afternoon but I felt like I hadn't eaten in days. My brothers and stepsiblings were all in the kitchen,
scavenging through the fridge and cupboards like army ants, gnawing croissant ends, eating jam by the spoonful, and slathering (still-frozen) french fries with peanut butter. There was a raw hot dog stuck in the top of the ketchup bottle. “I tried to dip it,” my eldest stepbrother explained, and we all found this so monstrously funny that I thought I was going to pee my pants.

Then we began to play poker, heaps of white-red-blue plastic chips being piled on flushes, bluffs and avalanches of laughter, until my mother stumbled in mid-afternoon, her hair all pushed up on one side as though she'd been trying to curl it with a frying pan, asking what we should do about the turkey.

As I recall, Christmas dinner didn't happen that year until about midnight, by which time my new siblings and I had all dyed our hair pink. There were none of the tedious
scrape-scrape
silences of the previous evening, and moments after the last of the pumpkin pie had been shovelled into our eager mouths, we were outside collecting boulder-sized snowballs from the ends of people's driveways, heaving them at one another and roaring like lions up and down the length of our quiet, plowed, festively lit street.

Eventually, we learned that the spiced tea my stepbrothers made for us that memorable Christmas morning had been mulled not just with cloves, cinnamon, star anise, but also with magic mushrooms, that festive hallucinogen guaranteed to liven up any staid affair.

A few days after the mushroom Christmas, Paul, Flip and I travelled to Toronto to celebrate the holidays with our dad and
his (now serious) boyfriend, Lance. There were a few wrapped gifts for each of the kids under the tree (Dad and Lance having exchanged gifts on Christmas morning), and a few from us to them. Dad gave me a deep-burgundy angora turtleneck sweater, and he and I took turns rubbing our cheeks against the wool and groaning at its softness. Lance gave me a book on the Kirov Ballet, which I found quite wonderful, and I don't remember what Paul and Flip got and probably didn't notice even then.

With choral music playing in the background, we ate dinner: turkey, roasted parsnips, mashed potatoes, Brussels sprouts, and homemade cranberry sauce. And after dinner Dad set up the slide projector and we all guided Lance through our early family adventures, an experience that must have been about as pleasant as having children decide to give you a root canal, but Lance was a good sport about it. And then we all wished each other a merry late Christmas and went to bed.

It was pretty, um,
normal
. One might even say “traditional.”

Except for the thing about my dad and Lance having the same anatomy.

“So, what have you been up to tonight?”

(The pickup line that changed my father's life.)

“Well, I just went to see a performance of
Oklahoma!
at the Royal Alex.”

(The sing-songy reply that would come to change our lives as well.)

The setting: Buddy's. One of Toronto's gay bars.

The date: April 3, 1981.

The protagonists: my dad (Mr. Pickup) and Lance.

Hailing from Alberta farming stock, Lance spent much of his childhood in the town of Kelowna in the interior of British Columbia. He was one of four children, and his three sisters love to claim that Lance once pushed his younger sister out of the family car as they were driving down the highway. According to Lance, they were driving along with the windows down, happily admiring the summer day around them, when little Marjory began fiddling with the car door. The next quick, silent, pre-seat-belt-era moments included the back door opening, Marjory toppling out, the back door closing.

Just as he took a breath and leaned forward to report the tumble to his parents, Lance's mother turned around. “Where's Marjory?” she cried. “Lance! Did you push your sister out of the car?” Then, to her husband: “Lance pushed Marjory out of the car!”

Lance remembers only sputtering.

“So what happened to Marjory?” I asked, wide-eyed.

“Well, nothing!” Lance said, his voice as tuneful as a slide whistle. “She must have just kind of … 
rolled
!”

How to describe Lance …

Well, assuming for a moment that there is such a thing as a spectrum of sexuality upon which most of us find ourselves weighing in at the heterosexual side of things, lesbians and gay men would be comfortable on the homosexual end, and still others would place themselves somewhere in the middle or on another spectrum altogether. Lance, were he to climb upon such a scale, would rush posthaste to the homosexual end, curl his toes over the spectrum's very edge, and lean out. Then he would turn back to the rest of the homos gathered at his end and ask which one of them was planning to serve hors d'oeuvres.

Although I don't believe he ever came out to either of his parents, Lance knew from an early age what his leanings were and they were never once, not for an instant, in the direction of a girl. After studying at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, he was relieved to meet up at last with other gay men. Playful to the nines, the friends liked to refer to each other using campy drag names, so in due course Lance became Mona del Kelowna.

Although he was a truck driver for the post office when I met him, Lance eventually went back to school and completed a degree in one of his many abiding passions, urban planning. Name any city in the industrialized world and Lance can give you a historical architectural tour so comprehensive you will
feel almost obliged to give him a tip. And that's just architecture. Ask about music, literature, politics, theatre. I know of no one more well read and well versed on as many subjects as Lance, nor as gut-splittingly funny or astutely entertaining.

Nor as bossy or opinionated—and he will take that statement as a compliment.

“I hope you're going to a lot of trouble,” he has been known to warble feebly from the living room when my father is preparing dinner in the kitchen. And his terse response to learning of my plans to travel to Ecuador after university was delivered with a roll of the eyes: “Why would you want to go
there
? They don't even have an opera house!”

That said, during all the years that I travelled from one country-without-opera-house to another, whenever I found myself resurfacing from a remote adventure and stumbling to the
poste restante
address I had sent to people as my next destination, I could always count on at least one (and often several) long, newsy and hilarious letters from Lance.

While he has never felt like a parent to me, Lance does feel like family, and is. His relationship with my father has always been loyal, lively and loving (if bossy), fascinating (if fastidious), endlessly social, and laced with travel, food, (too much) opera, inspiration, stories and laughter.

I cannot think of anything objectionable about their relationship. It was always difficult to understand why anyone would.

While my dad had managed to come out of the closet completely, in my own life I kept him firmly inside it, still hiding his life from everyone except Jessica Bell. Which meant that I began leading a version of the double life from which my dad had finally liberated himself.

In Toronto, I would dress up and play the princess, attending ballets and dinner parties with Dad and Lance's friends, whom I adored. It was all still a bit
strange
, I suppose, but once my internal compass settled around Dad's new orientation, my Toronto weekends took on a relaxed quality: pleasantly predictable and predictably pleasant. I even began to like “real” Chinese food.

At the end of the weekend, I would hang that life in a closet on Walmsley Boulevard and take the Greyhound bus back to Peterborough, already scripting what I would say to my friends when we compared
whad'ya do this weekend
? stories.

What actually happened:

Friday night: Lance and I went to the ballet with free tickets that he got because
his
ex-boyfriend is in the company. Saturday: went silk-shirt shopping with my dad, then to the new gay cult film,
My Beautiful Laundrette
, after which I adjusted to an odd father–daughter moment that found us agreeing on who was cuter. Sunday: enjoyed a picnic with some friends from Gay Fathers.