Lake Ontario
I would never survive if I kept wishing to see him again.
He built our little cinderblock house with his bare hands on a dusty lot among hundreds just like it in what would become one of the first working class suburbs of Hamilton, Ontario. In front, he planted a two-foot sapling, wired to stakes. The sidewalk cement wasn’t yet dry when the water pipes began to squeal. He scooped me up by the straps of my jumper and ran right through the screen door, then dove back in and out, catching up my sister playing dolls, and our mother doing chores. Our budding family stood a ways from the dirt patch that was our yard, waiting for our home to blow up. Nothing happened. After a while, he tiptoed inside and turned on the kitchen tap, letting the air escape.
Our mother told us kids routinely how full of hot air he was. Like he built it into the house. How he and his pals, before my sister and I were born, would pile on the beers, turn out all the lights, get ready, get set, and fire a match to their farts. The burst of blue gas she phrased with her hands was wide and always on her left, and, like her half-turned, uplifted head, appeared to me to be a clue. An outsider, she had watched more than a little envious from another room. A look of superiority would give way to disgust. It was subtle, but that was my job from the time before I could run, to watch very very carefully for the slightest shift in her eye. Or twitch in her mouth or the sharpening of my father’s pupils. Twenty years later, she was still telling that story, except this time, Daddy had moved on, my sister was gassy, and we three, giddy from booze, were about to try the stunt. Mom readied a cigarette lighter, sister set up, me roused from the floor. My sister announced one coming. Two seconds later, a clap of electricity. Smoke cleared. My sister’s bare butt showing through a big hole, like a hot iron had singed her nylon panties. We nearly died laughing. Three sisters as it always was and would be. The “Ivy League Gabors” is how a comedienne friend of my mother’s announced us to the beauty parlor when we came through the door.
The maple was four feet high when my parents separated. It had grown thin branches that sprouted waxy, five-fingered leaves smaller than my hand. In the fall, I turned the furled dead leaves to dust, invisible and sharp in my skin. Patches of crabgrass and dandelions thrived, though none of the grass seed ever took, which agitated my Scottish father, who most wanted to be known as a green thumb.
Dumpsters and mixing trucks spilled their contents around the developments constructed on flats above steep ravines dividing sections of the city. Teams of men paved and tarred the cul-de-sacs and adjoining streets. Along the main road, giant pyramids of raw salt from the Hamilton mines hardened under pewter skies. Miners, wearing protective clothing, shoveled away. Despite their gear, their faces and hands cracked and bled, making it look painful when they lifted a fork or guzzled a beer at the diner where my father sometimes took us.
Elegant. Bruiser. Immaculately groomed. He played goalie on a semi-professional lacrosse team. The Hamilton Tigers. Beside the medicine cabinet where he loved to preen and shave, he had hung a framed photo. In it, he is the tall man standing in the back row behind his squatting teammates. A quote from a newspaper was pasted on the glass. "Never take a breather in front of a tiger. He'll track you down and tear you to tatters. Most persistent of the trailers is the lacrosse Tiger of the Hamilton Stripe." They had won the Mann Cup that year.
My father's working class fans needed him to fight with all he had. When he took off his lacrosse uniform, emblazoned with a tiger, he wore slicked back hair, black knee-highs, knit sweaters, and hand-crafted shoes with spaghetti-thin laces and natural soles. Well-built, he was lean and strong, his square jaw and finely tuned dark brown eyes sending one and only one message. I am the best.
He could catch a fly in midair and, once, on foot, he chased down a car that left tire marks while making a U-turn on the front lawn of a house he bought after he split with our mother. How well he could hide his raw pride behind a false humility. My biological father. When he lost his daughters at such an early age, he said to me over a one-time phone call I made to him when I was in my late teens, he knew he had to be all the better father to his sons.
A goalie attacks like a bear. Bullet-eyed, lunging. Dirt kicks up and into his eyes. One beating was all anyone, including me, needed with his belt, fist, or hockey stick, dented from his time playing professionally on ice. He never lost a game or let anyone win. Not even Chinese Checkers that he had helped me learn for no other reason than to watch me lose. He took pride in the scars on his eyebrows and chin. After a rock-hard lacrosse ball, fast as a bullet, sheared his two front bottom teeth, he had them and all the rest on the bottom filed down to the same height, so that his bite mark left a distinct impression—like an animal that grinds, rather than tears, what it eats. The meat of a Brazil nut was most rewarding if his jaw cracked open the thick black shell. He’d break off pieces to share. Which reminds me of my first whipping. He was beating my mother, pinned against the icebox. Hysterical, my sister clung to our mother’s waist. I took a bite of his hairy calf, my baby teeth sharp as needles. He yelped. Let go of my mother, plucked me up, crossing to a chair while removing his belt. I will always remember the shock of the strap. That sense that the ice rink is smaller than it looks. That in this world referees are scarce. He was twenty-five-years-old, my mother twenty-three, my sister days away from turning five, and me still three.
Soon after my father quit playing lacrosse and left us, he landed a salesman’s job with the natural gas company and started making his way up the ladder. The company’s logo was a glowing, bright blue flame, circled with a thin black line. It is never too late for irony. Eventually, he remarried a pretty, long-faced, small-waisted woman with cropped red hair. He bought a ranch house with a big sloping lawn in nearby middle-class Burlington. Along one side, he built my sister and me a screened porch in which we slept outside behind the back door in sleeping bags on canvas cots. The dog on the other side of the door had heat. In back, a field of wild thistle and bulrushes led to the woods. Lake Ontario was never far away. In the winter, I could forecast snow by the metallic smell in the air. And sniff deer and rabbit droppings before they froze on the crust. He handcrafted a toboggan that raced and turned like a cheetah after an antelope. The summer sand on the beach stank of small fish that washed ashore, countless dead eyes mirroring the sky, that was more often than not cloudy. Every Thursday, a crew raked and shoveled tons of fish into disposal trucks that the fat gulls followed to the garbage dump, leaving little pipers and plovers to scavenge the beach. After a long day playing in the sand and water, my sister and I would stand behind the open door of the car, and our father would towel-whip the oil-saturated sand from our calves and feet. Then we’d shimmy out of our suits, and he’d roughly dry our hair and torsos with the same damp towel. Driving home, I inevitably said I was hungry. “Hi Hungry,” he would say, smiling white corn-sized teeth, his dark eyes glinting, ownership and maybe some love. “My name is Gord.”
As in Gordon and Gordie and Uncle Gord to some, and eventually (in my imagination) as a bad small town sheriff who lingers too long on his manicure, his shield, and gold-plated watch.
At night, when it grew cold on the porch, and the mosquitoes and gnats disappeared, the air became fresh and full of sounds and scents. Rustling animals and hooting owls in the woods kept me awake. I woke in time to see the dawn. The frost. Rabbits. Blue jays. Orioles. And in early spring even grazing deer and fawns, camouflaged, in the overgrown field. My stepmother was pregnant. And like various females of other species, she developed a sensitivity to mess and noise, was easily scared and cried. Her husband, he was mostly gentle with her. Other times he shouted and once, when she screamed back at him, he raised the back of his hand to her. When he got angry, my sister and I shrank, praying his old grasp of some kind of athletic restraint would spring to life and redirect his shot. Truth was, whether the fault was ours or not, we knew it would not be his wife that got thrown over his knees with her pants pulled down.
As soon as he left for work, our stepmother, neck tense and torso thick, sulked about, dusting furniture, lamps, and the frames of her husband’s prized wall hangings. All six of the sand textured collages had the theme of jewel-studded matadors, tossing red capes toward flat black cutouts of angry bulls. Probably worth a fortune today on Antique’s Roadshow, or maybe five bucks? The value being in the provenance.
When our stepmother grew lonely, she’d retire to the bedroom with her magazines and catalogues. While chewing and spitting out sticks of gum, she kept the level of rye above the ice in her glass. Not a bad egg, she didn’t mean us harm so much as she wished time itself would develop compassion. She kept her distance, to say the least, afraid at once of being and not being, of touching or being touched. Who doesn’t learn to hesitate?
I visited that house only once after my half-brother Shawn was born. He was a toddler in diapers with clamps for fists. He pulled at my face and hair so hard that I pushed him away. He fell on his diapered bum and started screaming. Hindsight, more often than advancing one’s perspective, excuses culpability. My stepmother had been waiting to let someone have it, and this time it was me. I ran away a few miles to my uncle’s house (on my mother’s side of the family.) I don’t remember my sister being there that visit. Not even in the car when my father picked me up. She might easily have been there, but I blocked her out. We did that to each other for contradictory reasons, I think now. To diminish the intensity of our environment and to protect or defend against the most difficult occurrences. It was like playing to win. You have to take sides, and once that’s done the world is built, bottom to top with a fence so high and dry, nothing that flows can touch it. It doesn’t need defending.
Once, when our family was in the big boat-like car with the cigarette smoke cloud inside driving along the main road, I felt like I was choking. Daddy was at the wheel. Mom in the passenger seat. Each was halfway through their cigarette pack. But for the heat of bodies, I could freeze my tongue on the window. A bump rose in the floor behind the front seat. I stood on it, combing the tail and mane of a toy horse. My sister cleared a fog-patch on her side window. She didn’t have her mind on me for a change. I don’t know why it was that I said what I said just then. Never will. The words came out. “Roy made milk in my mouth,” I said, still focused on the fake horse mane. My father and mother shot each other a look. He hit the gas, throwing me off. I felt my sister’s fist slam into my side. “You weren’t supposed to tell,” she growled. My mother sank below her trail of cigarette smoke, out of sight. The whole point of cigarette smoking is in the hiding. One’s smell, one’s hope, one’s more obvious inclinations, to tease something out of nothing. Love running out.
My father’s sharp turn and acceleration threw my sister and me into far corners. Next thing, the brakes screeched, the door flew open, displacing the thick cloud. My father charged his sister’s little house like it was bunker full of enemy soldiers, or Yankees, or what he would call some group of people he loathed for the sake of it. The entryway was claustrophobic. He caught Roy on the stairs. He never babysat us again, nor did we ever see him. But, I remember. His sailor pants had wide legs. His hair was like a blond brush. He was eighteen, my father was twenty-six, my mother twenty-four, my sister just six, and I was four.
The day I ran away, when Shawn cried, my father drove me home from my uncle’s to Toronto, to the little apartment my mother rented in a building that allowed single women and female divorcees with children. My mother was not happy. My sister, now I remember, was not happy that I had been returned before I was supposed to. I was happy to see our rabbit. Peter either sat on top of the big box TV next to the antennae or in his cage on the little second-floor balcony. He grew quickly to be a very large bunny, white with long ears and bulging eyes, tainted by blood-red veins. Peter the Rabbit was domesticated, huggable. I secretly overfed him. There were trees and sloping yards in different neighborhoods, but ours was mostly made up of concrete buildings, and two-story houses that lacked porches and space between them, and narrow streets, lined with parked cars. The rabbit got stomach cancer and died shortly afterward, making our downstairs neighbors not unhappy. They had objected to our sweeping his droppings onto the grass outside their back door. Poop rained on them.
I never forgot my father’s post-shower smell. Or his soft, lime-scented cheeks when he shaved. After breakfast, he took his coffee, cigarettes, and newspaper into the bathroom where he remained uninterrupted and unchallenged for over an hour, the rest of us willing our bladders and bowels to hold.
Midday, if he came home for lunch, my father smelled of pencil shavings, tobacco and beer, and could, if he wanted to, burn your bare belly with his beard. He taught me to ride a bike and roller skate and how to cut my meat and how to look at things, like trees, and mounds of dirt in the grass, and how to spell his name and say hello when he introduced me to someone. He picked us up every other Saturday morning and brought us home Sunday night. When I was still small, before he built the screened porch, and we slept inside more often in the little room that would become his two sons’ bedroom, he’d ask me to collect all my things. And he’d pack my bag and my sister’s, too, except she’d always refold her clothes, for which she would get a wink. On the way to Toronto, he might stop the car by the side of the road so I could throw up. Nice and neat, the way he taught me. I think it took my having a baby, a divorce, and a second marriage before I realized I was retentive to the extreme, as in life-threateningly stopped up. I was brave.
Around the time my parents finalized their divorce—he gave up custody, was relieved of child support, and we moved to New York—he fed us lunch, heavily garnished with patriotic lines and walking-orders. “Never forget your fatherland; your country; the place you came from.” “Treat your body as your temple.” And “Always salute the flag with the Maple Leaf, and honor your ancestors.” (In his case, anyone with Scottish blood.) Probably because my sister was afraid of murky water, and I wasn’t, he proclaimed to me in particular, “If you want to take the record from Marilyn Bell, pal, you better stay fit and keep your hair short. The next time I see you, I want you to be ready and in shipshape.”
His dream was to have me beat Marilyn Bell’s September 9th, 1954, long-distance record; Bell being the sixteen-year-old who first swam across Lake Ontario. When I was old enough to read clippings of the event, I discovered that Bell had accustomed herself to the water’s temperature by spending her after-school hours in a tub full of ice, provided her by her father. She thanked him for helping her achieve her goal of swimming the twenty miles, despite the freezing water, awash in riptides and oil spills, some of which she swallowed. Because of high winds, the paper reported, there were 15-foot waves that made her severely nauseous, and caused her to vomit. She became semi-conscious, fighting them for 21 hours.
The press reprimanded her coach for not pulling her from the water, which, on top of everything else, was chock-full of jellyfish and lamprey-eels that stung her so many times, her arms and legs ballooned to twice their normal size, and her eyes swelled shut. Afterward, all her skin grew taut, cracked, and peeled in layers, leaving her with open sores.1
The day came and went when I realized that I would never survive if I kept wishing to see him again. When I did, at his cabin on the lake before he died at a ripe old age, he and I were the same height. He used a walker when we went to the shore close by. Back in New York, I had a hat made of the same plaid as the one shading his eyes. I told him. My half-brother Shawn, who had phoned to tell me the news that time was running out, got a good laugh at that. To think, I never once laid eyes on my younger half-brother.
The following year, Bell became the youngest woman to swim the English Channel, retiring from competition at the age of eighteen after crossing the Juan de Fuca Strait in British Columbia.
Constance Christopher’s work has been in Fence, Bomb, Northwest Review, & Ginosko. A novel Dead Man's Flower was published in the Bogie's Mystery series. She has published reviews for Publisher’s Weekly and worked in film & television. She is painting a large oil based on Robert Graves’ White Goddess.
wow! I wish I could be so brave a writer. powerful stuff here. thank you.
I love this piece so much, Connie. I love that we get to open these windows onto ourselves for others to look through. It's difficult to read, as well, but transformative. xoxox