“Yes, thank you very much,” he replied with a smile as he swallowed a large bite from one of my mother’s cinnamon rolls.
That was enough for me.
I was stimulated by thoughts of a culture so different from mine, a culture where dragons were magical creatures and children like Dickie were greeted with proud smiles by their fathers. As far as I could tell, Dickie’s parents were never angry with him. I used to watch their faces glow every time they picked him up at school. It was as if he were someone special, and when Dickie paid attention to me I felt special, too.
I tried to imagine what it would be like to live on a foreign Asian shore where all the boys had black hair and brown skin. When Dickie moved away, only three months after we met, I was already hooked. My attraction to Dickie Lee was the beginning of an unusual addiction.
THE CURSE OF A POOR FAMILY
My mother, Isabel, a petite woman with shoulder-length light brown hair and plain good looks, was the best cook I’ve ever known. Even back when I was just a kid she was able to create a culinary masterpiece out of something as simple as a can of sockeye salmon, onions, and a few potatoes. My mouth still waters when I imagine her plump brown loaves of bread or deep dishes of apple crumble cooling on the windowsill of our small brown-shingled home.
Mom didn’t like to hug. When I tried to get close, she’d pat me on the head or back off awkwardly. I’d keep trying, but she would usually brush me away, saying, “Go on now. I’ve got to get this cooking done.” Or sewing or ironing…
When she did hug me, her arms felt stiff, as though they were working against their will. A vacant look would overtake her small brown eyes when I tried to strike up a conversation, as if she were creating a wall between us so she wouldn’t have to get to know me. She never seemed to act that way toward my brothers. Regardless, she always took extra care in baking special treats for us. And I came to understand I love you in the language of apple pies.
For many years I possessed the empty feeling that my mother didn’t love me. I often felt as if I were nothing more than a bother to her.
Being born female had been the root of many of my mother’s problems. From an early age she discovered it was a male’s world as she waited on her drunken father and helped her mother care for six brothers. She spent her teen years in Barker’s Point on the north side of Fredericton, and often she’d walk the two miles across the train bridge to deliver lunch or some necessity to her father while he dried out in the Brunswick Street jail. Her mother was too busy caring for her large brood single-handedly to spend any time playing with them, and my mom—being the eldest—was expected to assume a great deal of the responsibility.
In those days discipline meant beatings with a large leather strap or an alder switch. Often there was little to eat. There wasn’t much to prompt the words I love you from a mother who matter-of-factly proclaimed, “Daughters are the curse of a poor family.” I think those words lay dormant in my mother’s mind, only to find new light when I crossed into adolescence.
My mom became pregnant before she and my father met. She was only seventeen when she gave birth to a girl with curly blond hair. She named the infant Eunice and tried to care for her while still helping at home, but it was impossible. The workload was too much to handle and a choice had to be made—the obvious one at the time. When Eunice was fifteen months old, my mother was forced to give her up for private adoption. No doubt that baby girl gouged a big chunk out of my mother’s heart when she was handed over to strangers.
I couldn’t understand my mother’s growing coldness when I began developing into a young woman. Perhaps she was troubled by reminders of her past mistakes and was determined to make certain I wouldn’t follow in her footsteps.
Our house was extremely small—a mere three rooms. No bathroom. No running water. Just two bedrooms and a combined kitchen and sitting room that contained another pullout bed for two of my brothers—Nelson and Carman. I occupied the top bunk in one of the bedrooms. Another brother, Allison, claimed the bottom bunk. Mom and Dad—who worked as a janitor for an apartment complex in Oromocto—had the remaining bedroom to themselves, except when there was a new baby or if someone was especially sick. Otherwise there was no way of getting close to my parents, of enjoying their comforting heat. Being especially sick was almost something worth looking forward to. I cherished the cold nights when my father would come and check to make certain we were all tucked in. Sometimes I’d throw my blankets off so he’d cover me up again and give my forehead a reassuring little pat.
The old house wasn’t much to look at, just a brown-shingled shack. But it had plenty of character standing proudly in the middle of a large field about fifty feet from the woods. Our yard was as spotless as the inside of the house. My mother despised clutter, so even the garbage was hidden before it was taken to the dump five miles away to be burned. The grass was always clipped and manicured.
Everything on our property was neatly arranged and had been given its own space an exact measure of feet away from the nearest object. The outhouse was at least a hundred feet from the house and was surrounded by pine trees. About fifty feet in front of it, between the outhouse and the house, stood a small shack used for Dad’s meagre collection of tools, shovels, picks, and the scythe I greatly feared.
On the north side of the house there was another outbuilding used for storage, and twenty feet behind that, off to the right, stood a woodshed. On the south side there was a picnic table next to a single swing that hung by rope from the thick branch of an ancient oak. Once in a while a multicoloured beach ball or a small red wagon might get left behind beside the picnic table, but usually any sign that play had taken place in the afternoon was quickly erased by suppertime.
In the front of the house, spaced exactly two feet apart, were three tires, each filled with flowers. Pansies grew in a circle on the outside, ringing the marigolds inside. Everything was so perfect; even the flowers had their own little yards. It must have been my parents’ way of compensating for the lack of space inside the house. They created a vast, ordered kingdom outdoors to help escape the claustrophobia of their inner lives.
A young cedar grew outside my bedroom window. Sometimes, on summer nights, the pungent perfume stole its way inside on a warm carpet of west wind. The lacy fingers of the tree would scratch on my window to signal the visit and I’d pretend the cedar was a special friend come to call, I’d think of Catherine in Wuthering Heights, one of my favourite novels. I’d picture Catherine visiting Heathcliff, tapping on the glass. I’d fantasize about the darkness that was Heathcliff, so much like my father, a handsome man with thick dark hair, brooding eyes, and high cheekbones that hinted at remote Native ancestry. I used to imagine my dad as a movie star. With his sober good looks and unpredictable mood changes, he exuded an air of mystery like some of the men I read about in my books.
I read incessantly anything I could get my hands on. Mom told me I had inherited my love of reading from my father. Growing up as a child in a poor family, he found that dictionaries were often the only books available to him, so he read them cover to cover many times. As for me, stories that portrayed gloomy, untamed men heightened my affinity with tragedy.
When I was twelve, Mom added wild rosebushes to the front yard, then a lilac tree and wild day lilies to her flower collection. Soon the front of our house was completely fenced in by aromatic flowers. Mixed with the scents of Mom’s blueberry pies and lemon breads, the resulting blend rivalled the intoxicating fragrance from any perfume company.
I can’t recall ever being cold or hungry. But I do remember the exhaustion in my father’s eyes when he walked the more than three miles home after work before we had a car, frequently carrying a large burlap sack of potatoes or some other groceries on his back. Stepping in the door, he’d be faced with the news that there was another leak in the roof or the shed door needed