“Crusoe Complex” was one of my favourites. The words helped explain the pained expression I so often witnessed in my father’s eyes:
Heart is a lonely island ringed by reefs
And washed by endless tide
Love is a bridge to other islands
A brotherhood to lesser loneliness.
My island has no bridges,
The bitter tides are flotsam-filled
And reefs around my island are a cage.
Jim Coulter often read my father’s poems on CFNB Radio, but Dad knew he’d never make any real money writing poetry no matter how much he dreamed about it, so I guess he was determined to save me from the same unrequited dreams. He was quick to say, “Put that foolishness out of your head.” I was a female. Females were supposed to learn all the devotions required to be a good wife. “Never mind that career nonsense,” he insisted with a fierceness that seemed much too severe to suit the situation.
He discouraged me from viewing writing as a career, but his objections came too late. I had already fallen in love with the recognition I’d received at school for my writing abilities. It was the only area of my life where I felt some measure of confidence. When I won a provincial essay contest at the age of twelve, my mind was made up. I would be a writer and I would make money at it.
My father discouraged me from learning about things usually considered the sole preoccupation of men—like cars. I asked him one day to show me, as he had my brothers, how to fix the fan belt in our car. He had no time for it. I cursed him twenty years later when I sat on the side of a deserted highway on my way home from St. Stephen trying to picture what little information I had been able to glean of the fan-belt installation before I was instructed to go help my mother and leave the fan belts to the men.
I was always at the top of my class in school. My marks hovered in the nineties. Sometimes I would even bring home papers with a proud 100 circled in red marker. But no one was particularly impressed except Grammie Mills. Whenever I wrote and told her about my marks, she’d always write back to let me know how proud she was of me.
Only if my grades slipped a point or two did I receive any feedback. Then it would be something like: What happened there? Didn’t you study? Had your mind on those boys again, didn’t you?
I had a hard time pretending my life was normal. Sexual abuse had forced me to be a fragmented woman long before I was even an adolescent, and the secret was making me sicker every day My strict parents would never have believed I was innocent. If I confessed, it would be my fault. If I opened my mouth, it would all be my fault, my creation, my doing. My father was always suspicious of my dealings with the opposite sex. He’d often accuse me of sneaking away to meet a boy when I’d only been sitting in the woods by myself, wondering about my solitude and admiring the stillness.
Eventually the accusations got to me. The craziness in my head got to me. The life of misunderstanding and loneliness got to me. The part of me that was labouring to come to life just gave up. I didn’t want to be there anymore. I thought maybe I could drown myself, but we didn’t live handy to any suitably deep river or lake and I was terrified of water, anyway. I had heard that my greatgrandfather had shot himself, but I didn’t know how to use a gun. So I just started praying for an end when I went to bed at night.
“Please, God, don’t let me wake up in the morning. I don’t want to wake up anymore.” I begged for God to take me so that my eyes would never witness daylight again. I would eventually drift off into the semblance of my hoped-for disappearance, but in the morning my eyes would open to the reality of yet another day.
Having grown up in a predominately morbid household, it was an easy transition to become preoccupied with fantasizing about death. How wonderful and peaceful it would be. How empty and weightless. How innocent and graceful.
But I continued living. After a while, I just stopped praying altogether
If it wasn’t for school, I might have found a definite way to do away with myself. I loved school. I loved books. I grew stronger under the steady regimen of classrooms and corridors. I delighted in cleaning dusty chalk boards and helping the teachers any way I could. I found the consistent presence of the teachers reassuring. I hated weekends. I hated the turbulent days when we were forced to stay at home because of storms.
And I hated summer vacations.
I had few friends at school, only a skinny girl a year younger than I named Beryl. She had light brown hair and sang country songs like my mother. Beryl was easygoing except for being troubled by constant nosebleeds. She lived about four miles away on Waterville Road. Some of my teachers were the kindest people I had ever come upon. Miss Murray, a slim young woman with curly brown hair and a generous smile, was my favourite of all the teachers. Whenever she spoke to me, she always put her hand affectionately on my shoulder. She seemed to care about me genuinely, even going as far as to tell me she was worried I was spending too much time with the boys at school.
“You have to be careful,” she said, “especially around the older boys—like Norman.”
A part of me wanted to ask why, but another part didn’t want to hear anything more. My need for Norman far outweighed any advice from an adult who knew nothing of my brash and pure-hearted desires.
One of my principals, Mr. Davidson, loaned me extra books to read and always encouraged me to follow my dreams. He never seemed too busy to talk and he was quite excited when I showed him those 100s circled in red. It was as if he had journeyed from my imaginary country, that green fertile land with winding brooks, furry puppies, and gentle-handed grandmothers who served apple pie and cookies as they smiled and patted your cheek, a country where the sole male inhabitants lived on the other side of the brook and could visit only in the daytime under the plainness of sunlight. It was a world I still conjured up, even in high school.
Mr. Davidson wasn’t concerned about training anybody to be a proper wife, and he certainly wasn’t interested in my body His generosity and kindness accented my parents’ rigid fanaticism. It was through this comparison that I began to suspect my mother and father truly hated me.
In school I adored listening to lectures about far-off countries or distant planets. This information held my attention a lot longer than the seemingly frivolous games played during recess breaks. I was particularly fond of history, language arts, and social studies, but totally frustrated by mathematics after grade six. For the most part, I loved all my teachers, and I often fantasized what it would be like to stand in front of a classroom and lecture about Charles Dickens laboriously penning his stories of life in old England.
School became my entire world. I couldn’t fail. That was who I was—a top student, willing and able to take on any project to please an adult. I wrote for the school newspaper and worked as the editor gathering articles from the reps in each of the classes. I often won writing competitions. These interests were particularly important because I needed my poet father to be proud of me. Outside school I possessed zero identity. To fail would have meant I ceased to exist as a human being.
In spite of my efforts, not all of my teachers admired my devotion. In particular, one of my math teachers, Mr. C., made it obvious he thought I wasn’t worth any extra effort when it came to getting supplementary help to master difficult concepts in subjects like algebra. I approached him one day to seek assistance.
“Why would a top student like you need extra help?” he replied sarcastically, walking away. I knew better than to ask again.
Grade seven was a tough year for me. My lack of popularity among my peers became excruciatingly obvious. I