When I was a boy, my father showed me a photo from his army days when he was eighteen. He and another soldier were studying a map and I imagined Dad having to locate his food cache using the map. I saw the photo again much later when I was an adult and noticed that it wasn’t a map they were looking at, but a Playboy centrefold.
After the divorce, Dad dated a woman who was not much older than I was. She told me I could call her mom and I said I don’t think so. The woman would sit on a chair in the kitchen when I went to school and would still be there when I came home. She would pick at her fingertips until they bled. I asked Dad why she did this and he said he didn’t know. She left Dad three times before Dad decided not to take her back. Each time he felt relieved when she left and relieved when she returned. I had never seen Dad cry before he met her.
On a family trip to eastern Canada, I was pestering my brother in the back seat, poking him with a finger. He told me to stop, but I persisted. He leaned forward, turned, and punched me in the face. It’s the only time he ever did it. I stopped pestering him for quite some time afterward, but then, you know…brothers.
On that same trip, I was standing at the top of a waterfall when my brother yelled. He had lost a shoe, which was floating downstream towards me. I told him I would save his shoe from going over the falls if he gave me twenty-five cents. My parents said I would be grounded when we got home and made me give the money back.
When my parents were out of town for several months opening up a business and preparing to move the family at the end of the school year, we were stuck with a babysitter. She grounded me for drinking some of her Coke from the fridge. I locked my room with the chain lock, snuck out my window onto the balcony, jumped to the lawn, and went to visit my friends. While I was gone, she came to my room to check on me, saw the door secured by a chain, saw that the window was open, and kicked in the door. When I climbed the fence onto the balcony to sneak back in through the window, she was sitting on my bed with the broken lock in her hand. She was steaming. I told her that she can’t have Coke in the fridge and expect that we thirsty kids wouldn’t be tempted by it. She said she would tell my parents about my behaviour and I said go ahead, maybe they’ll fire you.
But my parents didn’t fire her. By that time, she was dating my uncle who used her open legs for putting practice and who was always trying to coax her into the bedroom.
My mother lost her virginity with my father when she was fifteen. Dad asked her to marry him when he found out she was pregnant. Mom needed her parents’ consent to get married. Mom had three children by the time she was twenty. When people ask me to tell them something about myself, I say that I was conceived in the back seat of a ’57 Chev at the drive-in theatre on the night that my teenaged mother became a woman. This more closely resembles my sister’s story, but it sounds better than saying I was a love child.
When sex education started in school, my father decided to teach me how to identify the female body parts by pointing them out on a Playboy centrefold. (Clitoris, Dad? No son, that’s the navel.)
