“I was playing on the beach just like you, and some bad boys came along and started throwing stones at me. My nose got broken. Did it ever hurt.” Whenever she told that story, we could almost feel the bones breaking in our noses.
And so the cycles of the seasons went. After the long winter when spring arrived, I’d return to the routine of sunning myself on the top veranda. One Saturday morning in June, while looking out over the calm pale water, I detected from the corner of my eye a faint motion beneath the surface close to shore.
Then, a second time I saw the water ripple and the outline of an enormous fish — probably a whitefish. It flopped back and forth, as if in some distress. I’d never seen a fish this large in Lake Ontario, only silver minnows stranded on shore and promptly scooped up by sharp-sighted sea gulls.
I watched, mesmerized. Then, snapping out of it, I rushed into the house. “Daddy, Daddy, come quick. There’s a huge fish in the lake!”
My father, the inveterate fisherman, came bounding up the stairs to the second-storey veranda. He stared with the same fascination as I had. Then his body sprang into action. “Keep your eye on it, while I get my fishing rod,” he instructed. In the space of less than ten minutes, he retrieved his casting rod from the garage, put a lure on it, and rushed down to the shoreline. It was no use, however. Although his aim was accurate, the fish didn’t even glance in the direction of the lure. He said afterwards it was just as well. The fish was probably sick!
I felt disappointment for my father, but privately I was relieved. My lake must not spin off new activities such as recreational fishing from the shore. It would have been an intrusion for the Beach district to become a fisherman’s playground. I’d worked out an intimate relationship with this lake, and I wasn’t willing to have new dimensions introduced.
“It was not enough for his story to be truthful, ‘it must be detailed as well.’”
— Nancy Miller, quoting Jean-Jacques Rousseau in The Ethics of Betrayal: Diary of a Memoirist
Diane is lying in her bed, surrounded by books, music boxes, and exquisite bed linens. She has taken off her oxygen mask for a while so we can talk without obstruction. Her cigarette habit has finally caught up with her and her faithful husband Bob is taking care of her so she can die at home. I feel in perfect communion with her. I ask her that when she’s in heaven, to save a place at the bridge table for me with her mother and mine. I remind her she has a brother there she never met, because he died shortly before birth. Now she’ll be able to get to know him. She smiles. “You know, I had forgotten all about him. Yes, that will be nice.”
She asks me for the third time what I want of hers. I finally give her an answer. “How about your handsome husband, Bob?” And we both laugh, she as much as her wasted lungs will allow. Seriously then, I choose a wooden music box with a laminated garden scene by Monet on the lid. When I open it, this delicate box plays an incongruous tune — “Tie a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree.” Again we both laugh, though hers turns into a cough this time, and I see her distress. I sit for a while in silence, a companion to my dearest companion through our last times together on earth.
I can’t imagine what my childhood would have been like without Diane. We were both seven years old when we connected. The Hillier family had just been transferred from Belleville. She lived at number 1 Hubbard in a lower fourplex and we were separated only by two similar fourplexes and the intangible differences that arise from living in an apartment or a house. We were soulmates from the beginning.
Until Di came on the scene, the only other girl in our block was Ruth Lawrence, the only and, ergo, spoilt (according to my mother’s theories) child of a young mother and older father. She was the apple of their eye. Ruth was younger than I. Nonetheless, the sight of her overflowing toy shelves aroused in me a burning envy, which she fuelled by exercising a supreme power over me. She decided, according to her daily whims, which toys I could or could not play with. Sometimes my fevered mind would scheme. “I’ll ask for one toy I don’t really want to play with. Maybe she’ll say no and point to another that I do want.” But I never got up the courage to go through with that in case she gave me the one I said I wanted and that I really didn’t want, and then I wouldn’t get the one I wanted … and oh, life got so complicated I would end up allowing her to play her despotic game.
This is how Diane looked when I first met her — a little bit chubby and totally confident.
Diane and I treated one another so differently. We didn’t worry about toys — especially in the summer. The combination of boardwalk, beach, and lake was to us like a lover spreading out beautiful gifts for his beloved. We were water babies from our first breath. Cold water didn’t daunt us. We’d start swimming when the water reached 55 or 60 degrees Fahrenheit. The warmest Lake Ontario ever reached was about 75 degrees. We’d go in on the stony pebbles and rocks at the water’s edge, fighting to keep our balance. Then when we got to the top of our thighs, we could feel our legs going numb. That was the signal to dive under. Oh, the shock of that first plunge! Then, as we moved furiously around to distract ourselves from the frigid temperatures, the rest of our bodies gradually numbed, and we glided around in perfect happiness in our water kingdom.
In any spare time we had, we improvised to make up for our meagre stash of manufactured toys. Most of our playthings were made by human hands — ours! We’d get old cardboard boxes, cut windows and doors out, colour tied-back curtains on the cardboard beside the gaping window holes, then find old wallpaper or wrapping paper and glue it on the inside. We’d vary the pattern for each room as much as our supplies would allow. As we became more adept at cutting and pasting, instead of cutting out rectangular pieces for windows, we’d pencil them in on the cardboard, drawing a line down the middle. Then, we’d take a sharp knife, slice along the top and bottom lines, then down the centre. Voila! Shutters. We’d fold them back, creasing those fold lines so they’d stay open and not flop back to their natural resting place.
We’d divide the only floor into kitchen, bedroom, living room, and bathroom, each featuring a high ceiling. Next came the drawing and cutting out of mirrors and paintings from white paper and pasting them on the walls. The bedroom was the easiest to furnish. We’d use an empty wooden matchbox for a bed. We’d root around Mom and Auntie Flo’s sewing scraps for suitable materials, then hand-sew oval rugs (wall-to-wall was unheard of then), one bedspread, a pillow stuffed with cotton batting, and a cushion for a tiny chair precariously built of matchsticks. Sometimes an acorn turned into a baby and was laid in its crib, snuggled under a crudely cut piece of flannelette. Dishes and cutlery were a problem. The ones we owned were large tin sets from Japan, which were perfect for doll tea parties, but too large for our cardboard dollhouse. Then what would our pipe cleaner mother and father eat off of or with? We’d pretend that dinner was over and mother and father were sitting around the table (a cardboard circle top glued to an empty thread spool) talking. Devising solutions occupied as much of our time as the actual dollhouse play.
This early introduction into design blossomed as our play life went on. Over those early school years, we graduated from cardboard boxes to two-storey orange crates. But that demanded more decision-making. The orange crates could also be used for bookshelves or to form two ends of dresser drawers topped with a wooden board, covered with a piece of cherry-patterned oilcloth. I claimed one crate which I stood upended in my bedroom, becoming an altar with my tiny