After River (8 page)

M
Y FATHER WAS
not a complex man. Everything he was could be read on his face. The essence of his personality was etched into those permanent laugh lines at the sides of his mouth, into the V furrow between his eyes.

When my father smiled, his right brow lifted higher than the left. That along with the widow's peak on his forehead gave him a devilish or rakish look, depending on whom he was looking at.

Whenever I try to visualize my father I have difficulty seeing him as the still, sometimes serious-looking man in the posed images of old photographs. I have to imagine him doing something. My father was always moving.

I can picture him, wearing coveralls and gumboots, walking to the barn in the evening twilight, or waving from the cab of his milk truck, his handsome face a flash of teeth and tan beneath his snap-brim hat. I can see him steering the tractor through a field of freshly mown hay, or tinkering on equipment in the machine shed. He seemed to spend half his waking hours with his feet protruding from beneath a tractor or mower.

Mostly, I can visualize him at our kitchen table. Even there he was animate. His arms and hands waved and poked at the air while he ate, or directed the constant table talk. And I see him smoking.

My father always seemed to have a roll-up in his mouth, the thin cigarette moving across his lips as if on its own. The ashtray in the milk truck was always full-to-spilling with butts. Every afternoon he sat in the kitchen with a tin of Export tobacco and Zig Zag papers, his ‘fixens', on the table before him. He picked up a piece of the thin translucent paper with a licked finger. Then holding it between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, he sprinkled on the dry, wormy-looking tobacco. He loaded the paper without even looking, and deftly squeezed and rolled the paper back and forth, back and forth, until, as if by magic, a thin, neat, tube appeared beneath his thick fingers. He ran his tongue across the top of the paper above his thumb–an almost feminine gesture–then laid the finished product on the table. He lined the rolls up, twenty, thirty, at a time and let the spittle dry before he placed them neatly in a small flat silver case.

The cigarette case was a wedding gift from my mother. It was tarnished and worn, but always in my father's left-hand breast pocket. Even while he was rolling, my father had a cigarette in his mouth. When he inhaled, his dark eyes squinted and tightened as grey-yellow smoke drifted into them. I still remember his expression as he sucked in what I thought must be delicious smoke. Except now I know that while this smoke was swirling around it was searching out places to invade, to blacken, and to infest with the cancer that would eventually eat its way from the inside out. But when I was young I saw only that my father looked even more handsome when he smoked.

As I grew older, I noticed that his female customers found him handsome as well. I could tell by the way they looked at him.

On weekends and holidays Morgan, Carl, and I took turns delivering milk with Dad. At many of the houses, women suddenly appeared on their front porches when he arrived, as if they had been
waiting behind their doors. They leaned over and picked up the milk bottles, their nightgown or dress fronts often falling open. Or they held a quart bottle in one hand and waved with the other, while the tops of their dressing gowns hung loose against bare flesh. My father would wave back, flashing his famous smile, calling out, ‘Good morning darlin'.' Then he would wink at me as he climbed back into the truck and lit another cigarette.

I once heard Morgan and Carl laughing over this willingness of Dad's female customers to expose their breasts. ‘Guess they figure with all these cows he's an expert on tits,' they howled.

Everyone knew my father. And they knew I was his daughter. ‘Nat, Nat, milkman's brat, butter and cream make her fat, fat, fat.' The silly singsong, skipping rhyme followed me through the playgrounds of elementary school.

There are worse things than being teased. There are worse things than wearing heavy black gumboots in the winter while your classmates wear shiny, fur-lined ankle boots. Worse things than homemade dresses instead of reversible pleated skirts and pastel sweater sets. There are worse things than being called ‘heifer', and ‘fatty, fatty two by four'. But when you are a young girl it's hard to imagine what that would be.

The only thing that got me through those early primary school days was knowing that when the final bell rang I would spend the rest of my day with my father, my mother, Morgan, Carl, and Boyer. Especially Boyer.

Still, I wasn't above revenge. When I was in grade school I took my revenge in the only way I knew how. I took everything I learned from Boyer and used it to compete with them. And I beat them. I beat them at every spelling bee, pop-quiz, or book report. And I beat them on the playground.

During the winter when I was ten, Boyer and I practiced shooting marbles on the floor of his room. In the spring I carried my purple velvet Seagram's bag with a few pieces of choice ammunition to school. I returned home with the same bag bulging each afternoon. The girls soon stopped playing, but the boys were more determined. They kept moving the shooting lines further back, which only made it more difficult for them. Each night I emptied my winnings out into boxes and hoarded them under my bed. Of course, my abilities did nothing to improve my popularity.

I had a brief respite from my status as the class ‘square' in grade five. Thanks to my mother. When I was eleven years old, she came to the school to play the piano for parents' day. She made her way across the stage as if she was called for a command performance. She wore her Sunday go-to-church outfit, a blue duster over her best dress and a little blue boxlike hat on her head. She sat down at the piano and beamed out at the audience. Everyone clapped when she was introduced. Before she started to play she nodded at me and silently mouthed, ‘Hello Sweetheart'. I sat up a little straighter. Everyone would know this beautiful lady was
my
mother ‘Wow,' I heard over and over that day, ‘your mom's really pretty.' For a brief while I was no longer ‘Nat the Fat', but Natalie Ward, the daughter of the beautiful piano player. I basked in the glow of the second-hand compliments all the next day.

Even Elizabeth-Ann Ryan couldn't help but comment on my mother's beauty. ‘Your mom looks just like a blonde Jacqueline Kennedy,' she said to me as I drank from the water fountain a few days later. I straightened up and wiped the water from my mouth, but before I could respond she added, ‘You must be adopted.'

It took a moment for the implication of her words to sink in. I forced the smile to remain on my face. ‘Must be,' I said and turned
away. Who needed friends? I told myself it didn't matter. But looking back, I realize that my alienation in elementary school was, in large part, my own doing. I did nothing to encourage friendships. I either competed with the other girls or I ignored them. The games that drew them together, the skipping, hopscotch, and Barbie doll fantasies, held no interest for me. I told myself they weren't important. I had Boyer, our word games in his room up in the attic, and books. And when Boyer was eighteen and became the school bus driver, I got to sit right behind him while the other girls watched with envy as my handsome brother, his eyes smiling in the rear-view mirror, talked to me about my day.

Because of Boyer, school for me was only about learning, about soaking up knowledge so I could go home and impress him. By the time I reached grade six I was a serious ‘teacher's pet', shunned by the rest of the class. I had no friends, did not know how to make friends, and I didn't care. At least I'd pretended I didn't care for so long that I believed it.

So when Elizabeth-Ann–who was easily the prettiest and most popular girl in school–came to me a few weeks after we entered high school and said, ‘Want to come to a sleep-over at my house on Saturday night?' I had no idea how to respond.

Something had shifted over that summer. My long hair was still pulled back and plaited. I still wore the same clothes as last year, yet the teasing had stopped. It was as if the world left behind last June belonged in another dimension and the slate was wiped as clean as the brand new blackboards of our junior high classrooms. The girls who entered grade seven that September looked and behaved far different from the girls who had left elementary school a few months before. Barbie dolls and skipping ropes were forgotten. Poofy hair and nylon stockings had replaced bobby socks and braids.

They had discovered boys. More exactly, they had discovered my brothers. Morgan and Carl were both in grade eight now and as inseparable as ever. Mom swore that Morgan failed grade six on purpose so that he wouldn't have to move on to high school two years before Carl. It wasn't hard to figure out that they were the reason for my sudden popularity.

‘Everyone's coming at eight,' Elizabeth-Ann said, smiling at me with a look that said how grateful I should be for this invitation.

‘Why?' I asked not sure what kind of joke this was going to turn into.

‘Why what?'

‘Why would I want to sleep at your house?'

‘It's a pyjama party,' she said sweetly, as if she had included me all along and couldn't understand my reluctance. She named some other girls who would be there. ‘Come on, it'll be fun.'

‘I'll think about it,' I told her before I made my way over to the school bus.

Except for Widow Beckett's niece from Vancouver, Judy Beckett, who visited her each summer, I had no one I could really call a girlfriend. And even Judy only came out to the farm during the day. I had never been away from home overnight, never slept anywhere but in my own bed. It was hard to imagine sleeping in the same room as a group of girls.

‘Why, Natalie, that's nice,' Mom said when I told her about the invitation as we set the table for dinner that night. ‘Pyjama parties can be fun.'

‘What do they do?' I asked trying to sound uninterested. ‘Play silly games?'

‘Maybe,' Mom smiled. ‘Though they probably spend more time talking about boys if sleep-overs are anything like the ones I went to when I was a teenager.'

‘You went to pyjama parties?'

‘Sure, I was young once too, you know.'

‘You still are,' Dad called in from the porch where he was hanging up his barn coat.

So I went. If it was good enough for my mother, it was good enough for me. I was nervous, but secretly I was curious.

Boyer drove me in on Saturday evening. He parked in front of the Ryans' house on Colbur Street. ‘Smile,' he said as I opened the truck door. ‘You look like you're going to a wake instead of a party.'

I shrugged. ‘It'll probably be just as boring.' I grabbed my pillow and a cloth bag that held my flannel nightgown and toothbrush.

‘Then I hope you have a book in your sack.'

I groaned. Boyer had long ago taught me always to carry a book with me wherever I went. In the nervous preparations for my first night away from home I had forgotten to pack one. Boyer reached inside his jacket and pulled out a small dog-eared paperback. ‘Here, take this one,' he said. ‘I think you're ready for it now.' He winked as he handed me
The Catcher in the Rye
.

I tucked the book into my bag and leaned over and kissed Boyer goodbye.

Mrs Ryan answered my knock. Every time I saw her, Elizabeth-Ann's mother looked as if she were on her way to a party. Her angora sweater, tweed skirt, and high heels were in such contrast to my mother's bibbed apron tied over a printed cotton dress.

‘Hello,' she said. ‘Natalie, isn't it?' she asked as she waved me into a foyer as large as our kitchen.

I nodded.

‘The girls are upstairs,' she smiled and gestured to the stairway. She smelled like a cloud of perfume and hair spray.

‘Thank you Mrs Ryan,' I said and headed towards the stairs.

As I crossed the foyer I heard the clinking of ice against glass. ‘Well, if it isn't the pretty little milkmaid,' Elizabeth-Ann's father called out from the living room.

Gerald Ryan, the owner of Handy Hardware, was the mayor of Atwood. Somehow being called the milkmaid by him did not sound the same as when my father said it.

Unbidden, a forgotten image welled up. An image from when I started helping Dad deliver milk years ago. As I placed milk bottles on his porch early one morning I glanced down and saw Mr Ryan standing at the basement window. At first I felt embarrassed that I'd caught him scratching himself and I hurried away. The following weekend he stood in the basement again, his hand rubbing the front of his pants as he stared out the window. I plunked the full milk bottles down, almost dropping them in my haste. I spun away, but not before his narrow red-rimmed eyes met mine. His lips opened in a leering smile. I didn't tell my father. I still can't say why. Perhaps it was because I didn't understand why it frightened me. But I did ask Dad to change sides of the street with me when we delivered to houses on Colbur Street. Without hesitating, or questioning, he said, ‘Okay, Sunshine,' and that was as close as I came to telling anyone. After a while I began to question what I had really seen behind that window. But as Mr Ryan winked at me over his raised glass, I felt the same repulsion I had back then.

‘Hello, Mr Ryan,' I mumbled. I kept my head down, but I felt those red, rodent eyes follow me as I hurried up the stairs.

It looked like half of the grade seven girls' class was in Elizabeth-Ann's bedroom. They were sprawled about, lying or sitting on the twin beds, and on the jumble of sleeping bags covering the floor.
Movie Star, True Story
and
Mad
magazines were scattered everywhere. Even Bonnie King was there. As she flipped through the
pages of a glossy magazine I wondered if she still had problems reading.

I noticed eyebrows rise as I walked in.
Who invited you? What's she doing here
? Elizabeth-Ann called from her bed. ‘Hi, Nat, come on in.'