Falling Backwards: A Memoir Read online

  When I was seven or eight years old, I used to take my dad’s precious transistor radio off a shelf in his office and put it under my pillow at night. It was a big radio, probably the size of a shoebox, so my head would be eight inches off the bed. I’d feel his hand come sliding under my pillow a few hours later to gently pull it out. I used to look forward to him coming into my room to take it back. I don’t know why, I just did. I can remember vividly how he smelled. His scent would linger in my bedroom long after he’d gone.

  I found out later it was Old Spice aftershave lotion. I can’t smell it without thinking about my dad. There were commercials on TV back in the seventies for Old Spice in which all the men were on sailboats with the sea breeze blowing through their hair. They had giant moustaches and navy peacoats and they looked rugged and confident. My dad did not look like any of those men. My dad looked like a dad. He looked worried, for the most part. Maybe wearing Old Spice made him feel like a sailor. I hope it did. The guy deserved a damn break, that’s for sure.

  Still, I was always in trouble for running the batteries down in that radio of his because they were expensive, after all, or rather “goddamn expensive.” I would often hear my mother in the background somewhere saying, “Do you have to say ‘goddamn’ all the time?” My dad would mumble something back to her and so it would go. Were there any other kind of batteries other than goddamned ones? I didn’t think so. Everything was goddamned in my dad’s world. If he couldn’t open a jar, it became “this goddamn jar!” If the TV didn’t work right, it became “this goddamn TV.” He was pretty good about my absconding with the radio, for some reason. He was probably relieved that it wasn’t a box of Eddylite Easy Strike matches I had under there. (I wasn’t stupid. I kept those under the mattress.)

  He still has that radio. He listens to it all the time. Sometimes I go into his woodworking shop when he’s not there, walk over to it and turn it on. I’ll run my hands over the black-and-silver casing, remembering all the songs that seeped into my pillow and then into my brain at night. All of those songs stayed right there in my head and never came out. I summon them up and steal from them from time to time when I am writing. (I don’t tell anybody, though, as I don’t want to involve lawyers. Nobody is the wiser.)

  Music class with Judith was so exciting I felt sick to my stomach every morning before we went in through that big steel door. I had butterflies diving around in my chest and running up and down my legs. The music room had three huge tiers of carpeted stairs and looked like a mini-amphitheatre. There were no desks or chairs or tables, which I found to be unbelievable. It was a carpeted heaven in a space behind the school stage, which was attached to the gym. We could always hear balls bouncing around and kids yelling and laughing from the gym class. We’d all lie on the giant stairs, practically drooling, as we peered down at Judith and waited for her to play us songs from the albums she brought in from her very own collection.

  The record player looked like it was covered in canvas, a rectangular box about the size of an apple crate with a sticker on it that said, “Property of Elbow Valley Elementary School.” I always wondered why they needed to put a sticker on it. Like we all didn’t know where it was from? Did they actually think we’d try and steal a record player? We were three and a half feet tall, for God’s sake. How would you even begin to figure out how to get something that big out of the classroom, never mind onto the school bus? (Now that I think about it, maybe they were more worried about the teachers stealing it than the students.)

  Judith would flip though the big cardboard box full of her well-worn vinyl records, scanning the covers, looking for just the right song. She had so many wonderful artists in her collection. She had Anne Murray and Carly Simon and Simon and Garfunkel and Janis Ian and Judy Collins and James Taylor and the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Joan Baez and the Carpenters. I loved the Carpenters even more than I loved driving Leonard and Dale’s go-cart. It was like Judith had poured chocolate into my ears. She played a song called “Ticket to Ride” and it flooded out over the classroom and made me feel like I had been struck by lightning. Every hair on my body shot upwards, electrified by the sound of Karen Carpenter’s voice. I had heard plenty of songs in my life, but this song, this girl’s voice, made the world stop.

  We always sang at the top of our lungs to every song Judith played. She’d bring in photocopied pages of song lyrics and hand them out to each of us delicately, like they were little baby chicks. I would read them, careful not to bend any of the corners, and I would marvel at how the verses looked like long poems and made my tongue feel like it had salt and lemon on it as I read them to myself. Reading song lyrics was like solving a mystery. You had to figure out what they meant, and it seemed like each kid had a different idea of what that was.

  Beneath its snowy mantle cold and clean,

  The unborn grass lies waiting for its coat to turn to green.

  That was the first line from Anne Murray’s song “Snowbird.” I had no idea what it meant. I read it over and over again. I didn’t know what a snowy mantle was and I wasn’t sure that unborn grass could have a coat, but who cared anyway? Judith dropped the needle on the record player, and we’d all start singing like we didn’t need the money. I remember her taking me to the front of the class and having me sing all by myself. I had no idea why she’d do that, but I didn’t mind. I remember thinking how good it felt to have all that sound rumbling around in my chest. I felt weightless. (I remember my mom talking about Anne Murray. She’d say, “I don’t know why that girl won’t put shoes on her feet.” Then she’d shake her head and figure out what to make for supper. I hated being barefoot. To this day I wear shoes and socks whenever possible.)

  Judith also had us dance in music class. We waltzed and tangoed and discoed ourselves into a delightful frenzy. We had an odd number of students in our music class, so someone inevitably ended up dancing with Judith. You’d think that dancing with your teacher would have been the worst thing in the world, but it was actually the opposite. We fought over who would be the last man standing without a partner. I got to dance a polka once with Judith, and I’ve never forgotten it. She’d put on a record with some crazy guy yelling instructions at us: “Allemande left and allemande right! Do-si-do!” Whatever in God’s name that meant. For me it meant spinning around like one of those dervish people until I couldn’t keep standing. I’d fall exhausted on the carpeted floor and watch the ceiling whirl around my head.

  Judith taught us practical things as well as the fun stuff. She taught us the basics about notes and scales and keys and chords, but it was just her plain old passion for music that lit our spirits. Her music class was my favourite class in the world. That was followed closely by gym class and, of course, art class. I can’t remember those teachers’ names so they obviously didn’t leave a huge impression on me. I do remember my art teacher wearing a purple bra under a white sweater. It’s so funny that that image has stuck with me all these years.

  Math was impossible. I figured that math was for kids who had no hope of ever making friends. What in the world would anyone ever need math for in their entire lives? What was useful about a fraction or a square root? Math was nothing more than twelve years of blur for me. I never retained a single usable thing. I can’t even count the days between my periods. I am always in a public place when I get my period, and I always say “goddammit” under my breath when I do because I am my father’s daughter.

  When I reached junior high I did end up with one math teacher whose class I actually kind of liked. His name was Mr. Milton and he was at least 130 years old. He wore the same suit every day and he smelled like mothballs. He had white hair and glasses with thick, black frames that had a Cary Grant vibe to them. That was about the only thing remotely cool about the man. He didn’t really teach—he stood at the front of the room with his golf putter, and would continuously putt a golf ball into a paper cup. He’d tell us to open our math books to page such-and-such and then he’d start putting. He rarely l
ooked up to see what we were doing, he would just shuffle back and forth, collecting the ball from the cup again and again. The bell would ring and we’d all look at each other in disbelief. The first week or so, I couldn’t quite believe that this was going to be a common occurrence, but it was. Everybody in the entire school talked about Mr. Milton and his putting. I don’t know how the principal couldn’t have known what he was doing in that classroom. Maybe we were being taught subliminally?

  It wasn’t just the golfing thing that was strange with him—there were also skits. I have no idea why we did it, or what he was thinking, but off he’d send us into little groups in the far corners of the room to spend the class making up something stupid to perform. The only requirement would be that the skit needed to have something to do with numbers. After all, it was math class. I remember one we made up that was supposed to be about a long and bloody brain operation. We dressed up like doctors and nurses and doused our classmate, who was the patient, with ketchup. One of us called out made-up equations, which apparently had something to do with the brain procedure, while the rest of us laughed our heads off squirting ketchup around the room. Mr. Milton sat behind his desk with his arms folded and laughed too.

  What a nutty old bugger he was. Likeable, but a dead-on nutter. I don’t remember him ever saying anybody’s name. I am positive he had no idea what our names were. He’d say “You there” or “Look where my finger is pointing, I mean you!” It was scary if his finger was pointing at you but I guess I survived it all right. Nowadays there would be some kind of parent or school board intervention and Mr. Milton would most certainly end up pushing mops and brooms somewhere. He certainly wouldn’t be able to continue being a math teacher. I’m glad I went to school in the seventies.

  My friend Theresa lived up the road from us, in the opposite direction from Leonard and Dale’s place. She was one of seven kids, and had Dutch immigrant parents. We met in a lineup outside of Elbow Valley Elementary School. I don’t know what we were lined up for, but there we stood with our lunch boxes in hand. She was about a foot taller than I was, and as shy as a person could possibly be. We somehow became fast friends. I was very grateful for Theresa, who became my link to civility. I actually had a fighting chance of remaining a girl around Theresa. She had a bunch of sisters, too, so that was an extra-special bonus.

  I would pedal my bike the few miles up the road to her house whenever I had the chance. I was always dodging swarms of mosquitoes that hung in the air like buzzing black clouds. Getting a few bugs in your mouth was completely unavoidable. I crashed a dozen times trying to swerve around them so sometimes swallowing them just seemed like the better, safer option. Mosquitoes, I have found, can live in your hair for a few days if you don’t take the time to pick them out. I was not good when it came to brushing my hair. For whatever reason, I hated doing it. If I could have a braid down the back of my head that lasted a week, I was happy.

  Theresa’s house was like a weird fantasy playground. Her dad had a garage full of the craziest things, which he and his wife had bought at auctions. Most people would have thought that the garage was full of piles of junk, but I thought it was like a mountain of free candy. I didn’t know which lovely heap to climb first. Their yard looked as though Alice from Alice in Wonderland and Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz had hosted an after-grad party that involved a lot of cheap liquor and drag queens.

  Mr. and Mrs. deCrom loved a good auction. If Theresa’s dad thought it was a bargain, it ended up in the back of his truck. I remember him having six or eight of those professional hair dryer chairs lined up next to his pickup truck in the garage. I guess he figured that with all the kids he had he could save a bundle on hairdressing. I don’t think they ever used those chairs, although we’d sit in them from time to time and pretend to get our hair done. They came in very handy when we were playing “pageant.”

  “Pageant” was a way better game than “put Dicky in the dryer.” I had never heard of a single soul going to hell for playing “pageant.” I was always, always the host of the pageant and Theresa, her sister Audrey and their next-door neighbour Sherry were the contestants. Theresa’s dad had bought a whole whack of assorted bridesmaids’ gowns at one of his auctions. They certainly did come in handy when we had the evening gown segment of the game. I was always a bit jealous that I couldn’t be the one dressing up in the gowns and the shoes. Instead, I was the one who had to make up the theme songs and ask all the skill-testing questions. It was hard work. World peace was a very popular thing to want, even back then. World peace and, of course, feeding all the starving children in Africa, which Theresa would always include in her speeches. I think that’s what clinched her many wins. (It’s tragic that we are still struggling to feed the starving children of the planet. Mothers everywhere still say to their kids, just like my mother did to us, “Finish your dinner because there are children starving in Africa who would love to eat those Brussels sprouts.” I have this sinking feeling that it could be another four hundred years before we feed the children of the world.) The talent part of our pageants was a bit sketchy but always entertaining. Baton twirling and interpretive dance seemed to top the list of things the girls wanted to do. I think there were even a few cooking demonstrations.

  There were times that I wished Theresa and I had a go-cart to drive back and forth in between costume changes, and there were certainly times when I missed dangling from the trees and shooting at things. But Leonard and Dale and the killing fields were starting to fade behind me and the deCroms were engulfing me with their giant family. I didn’t mind one single bit. I decided that I was going to like Dutch people. They were outdoorsy but they didn’t kill everything within rifle sight.

  Theresa’s dad swore a lot like my dad, too, so I felt like we had an understanding, only Mr. deCrom swore in Dutch. I learned how to say “goddammit” in an entirely different language. I also learned how to say “thick socks” and “pinch it off,” which were apparently things you’d yell at a family member if they’d been in the bathroom too long. I liked those expressions.

  Theresa’s mom always had a big pot of soup on the stove, with noodles, carrots, onions and mini-meatballs in it. It seemed like a bottomless pot, and it made the house smell like Sunday afternoons in a church basement. The only thing missing was the bake sale, though Mrs. deCrom made her own bread. You had to slice it yourself. My dad would have killed me on the spot if he’d ever seen how thick and crooked I cut that bread. I got in trouble with Theresa a few times over how I sliced into their hunks of ham and blocks of Dutch Gouda cheese. It was hard cutting free-form. Maybe it was because I was too short to see where the giant knife was headed. It wasn’t like I was trying to cut it crooked.

  They had a huge, black cast-iron frying pan always sitting on the stove with an inch of grease in the bottom of it. Mrs. deCrom fried up everything imaginable in that big, black iron skillet. She used to scorch large pieces of thick, homemade bread in the hot grease, and then sprinkle sugar on them. It didn’t look very tasty, but it really was. Theresa told me that it was because of the war. What war? I thought to myself. I knew that a big war had taken place, but I thought that it had ended at least a hundred years ago. I was alarmed to be reminded that it was only 1945 when that war ended for the Dutch people and that it was still a touchy subject. I guess in Europe during the war grease of any kind was like liquid gold. Forty years later, the whole family was still deeply programmed by World War II rationing. I didn’t know you could use grease more than one time—boy, was I wrong.

  In our house, the frying pan was nearly sandblasted clean after every use. My mother would stand over the sink while all the windows fogged up with steam, scrubbing the living hell out of our pots and pans. Her hands would be bright red from the combination of hot water and S.O.S pads. To this day I can’t touch an S.O.S pad. They make me feel like grinding all my teeth off to the root.

  My dad used to put four or five strips of bacon into a pan and fry them up, but Mrs. deCrom would put a
n entire pound in and move it around like a brick until it was done. Miraculously, it all came out perfectly cooked. Then she’d drop the eggs into two inches of pure pig fat and boil them in oil. After the feeding frenzy came to an end and the breakfast plates were cleared away, the pan would be put right back on the stove filled with all that grease, awaiting the big fry-up that would undoubtedly happen the very next morning. The deCroms were a very frugal family. Nothing was wasted, nothing was thrown away—and I mean nothing.

  Theresa told me that the family was driving back from church one Sunday when suddenly the car swerved and there was a subtle but audible thumpity thump. They came to a rolling stop and everybody waited to see what they had hit, if anything, and what damage had been done. Mr. deCrom stepped out of the vehicle, and to his delight discovered that he had hit a rabbit. He grabbed it by the ears and tossed it into the back of the car with his terrified children. Theresa told me that the bunny was not quite dead, which only added to the chaos. Theresa swears they took that poor little bunny home and had it for dinner. I remember my dad hitting the odd gopher or squirrel as we drove around those back country roads, but I am pretty sure we never ate anything he ran over. Mind you, who knows what went into my mom’s brown-and-gold Crock-Pot.

  I can’t say that I loved junior high school. I felt awkward, to say the least. My body felt like it belonged to someone else entirely. It was changing on a daily basis—they were subtle changes, but changes nonetheless, and they scared me. I had always been stick-thin and wiry, but I was starting to put weight on my hips and my legs and my stomach. I was still tiny, but I could see the differences from month to month. My clothes were becoming a bit harder to squeeze into, and I hated it, because I would have to go out and buy new ones. Shopping wasn’t all that high on the list of things I liked to do. Mom would take us once a year for new school clothes, and that was about the extent of my shopping. I’d pick things out in about two minutes and be done with it. A lot of my clothes were hand-me-downs from Duray. I liked his worn-out jeans and his plaid shirts. People pay big bucks for clothes that look like they’ve been worn for years—apparently they call it “distressed” and charge a bloody fortune for it. I was ahead of my time.