“That!” Whack! “Was!” Whack! “The!” Whack! “Most!” Whack! “Unladylike!” Whack! “Display!” Whack! “I!” Whack! “Have!” Whack! “Ever!” Whack! “Seen!” Whack! “In!” Whack! “All!” Whack! “My!” Whack! “Years!” Whack! “Of!” I braced for the next strike, but she paused. I waited for a Whack! “Teaching!” or Whack! “Beating Children!” The tension mounted.
“What are you doing?!” she finally screamed. I assumed she was talking to me and I dared not move or talk. The answer seemed obvious. I’m letting you beat the poop out of me, Mrs. Gruber. But then, a small voice spoke up. I recognized it as Ramona’s.
“Nothing, Mrs. Gruber.” I peeked up and saw Ramona standing at the door.
“Where do you think you’re going?! You get back in your seat! NOW!” As Mrs. Gruber banged the yardstick down hard on the desk beside me and I jumped, I saw Ramona disappear out the door. Splinters of wood flew around us, which only angered her more. She yanked me up by my collar and addressed me. “You! Get back in your seat! If you ever do anything like that again, you will see much worse than this! I don’t know how they do things in Canada, but your behavior is unacceptable!” I bit my lip and limped to my desk, tears leaking from the corners of my eyes. Jolts of electricity shot down my legs and up my back as I sat down on my bruised rear end and upper legs.
At home that night, I told my parents that Mrs. Gruber had hit me with a yardstick, but I didn’t mention how hard or how many times, or show my welts and bruises.
“What did you do?” Dad asked.
“I jumped over my desk.”
“Had she told you not to do that?”
“I guess so,” I said, uncertain.
“Well, then, I guess you had it coming, didn’t you?”
Dad hated the corporal punishment required by his job as a school principal, but in an era where hitting was condoned as necessary for proper discipline, he was expected to mete it out to students who disobeyed. His school board used a heavy rubber strap, about twice as wide as a typical ruler. At home, my siblings and I were spanked with a bare hand occasionally, and my parents trusted our teachers to dole out whatever punishment they deemed appropriate.
We never saw Ramona at school again after that day. We were all too terrified to ask why.
BACK IN CALGARY the following summer, our neighbors and friends eagerly waited for us as we pulled up in front of our house after our American adventure. Barbecues lit and beer cases in hand, they greeted us with a block party, welcoming us back home. We settled back into our relationships with friends; we were a year older, but little else had changed.
“You have to be Mary!” Corrine insisted to me. “Katherine’s Laura, I’m Ma, and Melanie’s always Nellie.” The other girls stood around her, nodding in reluctant agreement to her casting for our version of Little House on the Prairie. Corrine was bossy and always organized our basement play. Disagreeing with her never went well for anyone. I felt she miscast herself as Ma. She was definitely a busybody Nellie Oleson.
“I’m Almanzo or I’m not playing,” I demanded, arms folded, determined to play Laura’s husband.
“Fine.” Corrine threw up her hands. “We do need an Almanzo, but it’d be better with a real boy.”
Melanie spoke up. “Lori’s a good boy—she’s good at it,” she offered.
“Fine.” Corrine moved to the blackboard and handed “Laura” some chalk. “Let’s start with a lesson. Laura can be teaching us.”
“This is dumb,” I said. “Laura doesn’t teach us, she teaches younger kids.” I took off the brown vest and Dad’s oversized work boots. “I’m going outside.” I escaped up the stairs to find Jake—I felt more like I belonged when I played with him and our boy friends.
Since our return from South Bend, I’d begun to notice the group dynamics between the girls and the boys on our block. My neighbors Corrine and Melanie formed a tight group along with Katherine, each of them being no more than two years apart. Melanie was my age and we sometimes played together one-on-one, but if Corrine, Melanie, and I played together it seemed to spark conflict. I suspected Corrine was the cause, because when Jake and I got together with Corrine’s older brother Jason, who was Jake’s age, we spent hours together and no one ever fought, argued, or ran home crying.
I didn’t understand it. I wished the girls would play sports recreationally, outside of the organized girls’ leagues that existed for soccer, softball, and hockey. I didn’t think deeply on the reasons behind it in those days; it simply seemed like the girls wanted something else, and I didn’t know what it was or grasp that anyone could find play centered around sports lacking in any way.
Sports beckoned to me, and Jake was my willing partner. I was the Bernie Parent to his Bobby Clarke, the Jerry Rice to his Joe Montana, the pilot to his brakeman on our tobogganing adventures. We built our own skateboard decks, experimenting with different designs for a skiing-inspired course of skateboard slalom, an alternative to the half-pipe and freestyle events most skaters were doing. We took the bus across the city weekly with the boys from our street to ride the new skate park in an industrial warehouse run by a bunch of Dogtown wannabes.
As teens, we skied the notorious vertical drop of Mount Norquay’s North American run until our legs turned to rubber and our woolens hung on us, soaked in sweat. We took over Dad’s basement workshop each winter to tape our hockey sticks, sharpen our ski edges, drip PTEX into the gouges in their bases, and read Ski Magazine together as we glanced at the sky for any signs of snow. Ours was an easy partnership, free of the bickering and fights common among siblings. Jake was a gentle kid, much like our father; I was the feisty one, prone to more outward expressions of anger and frustration from which he would often talk me down. He never laid a hand on me aggressively or angrily.
The only physical confrontation I can remember between us as kids was when I punched him in the stomach, for reasons I can’t recall. What I do remember was the ease with which his thin belly absorbed my fist and the mixture of shock, disappointment, and sadness on his face. I recall wondering at how he conveyed all those emotions to me in that briefest of instants. The idea that I could cause another person pain or hurt seemed unfathomable to me, yet here was my best friend—my brother—and I had hurt him. Years later, when I was twenty-five and trying to convey my gender struggle to my parents and siblings, he would tell me, “You’re ruining our family.” Only then would I understand how he must have felt that day years before when I punched him for no good reason.
We lived across the street from Clem Gardner Elementary School but attended St. Leo’s, a Catholic school a few blocks away. Occasionally, we had days off that the Clem Gardner kids didn’t share. On one such sunny, winter afternoon, Jake and I—no older than eight and seven—took to the front yard for a little tobogganing. We raced up and down the twenty-five-foot slope leading down to the sidewalk. To call it a hill was way beyond generous, but we piloted our thirty-inch-round red Super Saucers—disc-shaped plastic sleds—down the slight grade like it was the Matterhorn. Mom was inside with Katherine, now four.
On one successful ride, Jake slid onto the sidewalk just as a boy about his age was walking past on his way home from school, forcing him off the sidewalk to avoid getting hit. Jake stood up beside his saucer.
“Sorry,” he said as he made his way back to our yard.
“Don’t be such an egghead, stupid!” the boy shouted, spitting on the snow near Jake’s boot. “Ya stupidhead!” Jake considered him briefly before passively continuing back to the top of the slope. I had watched the scene unfold from a few yards away, outrage growing in me like a tidal wave. Without any thought, I flipped