Falling Backwards: A Memoir (11 page)

It felt like Duray was disappearing before our very eyes. To say he was becoming estranged from the entire family was an understatement. He was secretive and kept to himself when he was around. He smoked pot and drank my dad’s beer and listened to his music and the rest of his life was a mystery to me. (My mom told me later she suspected his pot smoking, but she wasn’t exactly sure what to do about it.)

I thought I’d keep the whole Leonard ordeal a secret. I thought that was the best option. I regret that now. I should have said something to someone. I was just very ashamed. Dale probably would have popped him one for me if I had told him. I would walk home from Leonard’s house after one of those encounters feeling like I was the worst person in the world, that it was my fault. I think that’s a pretty common feeling. We all have similar tales to tell. The shame somehow silences you. Growing up is hard. The person I am now would have taken Leonard by the throat and twisted his little balls off. But when I look back I feel nothing but compassion for both of us, Leonard and me. I often wonder what he recalls of it? Maybe his recollections are different from mine.

It was all so bizarre, and trust me, there was nothing even remotely sexual about any of it for me. I truly thought that Leonard had gone completely bonkers. I thought he had lost every single one of his marbles. I had no clue what was so exciting for Leonard. He wasn’t a bad guy at all. He probably thought, what the heck is happening to me and why do I feel like humping fence posts,
pumpkins and old cars? He never forced me to do anything. I was just too stupid and shocked to say “stop it!” I suppose that’s why they call it learning.

The hardest part was that I knew there would be no going back to who we had been. The wonderful, innocent days of running through the flower-filled meadows, skimming stones in Douglas’s Pond and flying kites and riding snowmobiles at midnight were behind us forever. I don’t think we fully realized that at the time. Maybe the boys thought we could do both: Leonard could dry hump me from time to time and try and steal a kiss in his parents’ basement
and
we could continue to shoot things and have bonfires every weekend and build tree forts. But it wasn’t meant to be. That was our last summer. We were headed back to school and I was already starting to spend more time with my other friends, so I didn’t speak to them much at school anymore. Leonard and Dale just started to fade like an old Polaroid. I don’t even know if they ever graduated. I think they may have gone to another school. All I know is that I’d never had friends like them before in my life and I doubted I would have friends like them again. To say we didn’t have a care in the world was the complete truth. Every morning I stepped outside my house and squinted into the Canadian sun, there they’d be, standing with their dogs, their hair blowing sideways, waiting for me to come and play.

M
y older brother, Duray, had become pretty much a shadow to me during my Leonard and Dale years. He was three years older than I was, so we didn’t play together and I didn’t see him much at school. When I was in elementary school, he was in junior high, and when I got to junior high, he had moved on into high school. I was busy running through the pines and riding horses and having fun. I didn’t notice him and it was like he didn’t want to be noticed. While I had been living like Huckleberry Finn with Leonard and Dale, Duray had been slipping deeper and deeper into incredible sadness. Something terrible had happened to him, and none of us could have imagined what. Later, my mother said that they’d lost him the summer of his ninth year. She said that we’d come back from our yearly summer holiday at Woods Lake in British Columbia, and he was just not the same. Part of him was gone. It wasn’t until years later that we pieced together our version of what may have happened. Duray to this day does not discuss that time in his young life, period, no matter how much we prod him. All I know is he became isolated and sullen. The always smiling and happy boy just
disappeared. He went from doing incredibly well in school, doing well in sports, being well-liked and achieving straight As, to becoming anti-social and failing at every subject.

It worried my parents no end. They couldn’t understand it. I know now that part of the reason they moved us out of the city was so that Duray could attend a smaller school and have the chance to make a new start. I guess they hoped that he might get back on the right path in Springbank. Sadly, nothing was going to get him onto the right path. He was constantly in trouble and my parents were completely helpless to do anything about it. Lord knows they tried everything to get him to understand that his actions would be met with bigger and bigger consequences. My mother always says that some people are determined to ruin their own lives, and he was one of them.

I remember his big brown eyes looking down at his shoes all the time. Duray always seemed to look at the ground. It’s hard to see a person’s head hang so low, especially a person you love. Even when I was young I knew that something was really wrong with him. He didn’t seem to have good friends. He hung around with these guys who thought the world owed them something, and nobody seemed to stick. Kids would just come and go, in and out of his life. You’d see them for a few weeks around the house, hanging out in the basement, and then they’d be gone. He went through people quickly. It’s like he didn’t want anybody to know him, like he didn’t feel worthy of being known. I think he wanted to be invisible.

Maybe that’s where the drugs and alcohol came in. They could make him invisible. I was too young to know how to help him or, for that matter, that he even needed help. He always seemed so mad, arguing with our mom and dad. He has said many times over the years that he never felt like he fit in. He was always on the outside looking at all of us, like we were speaking a foreign language. I don’t
think he knew how to tell us what was bothering him or what had happened to him. Of course, we didn’t find out any of this out until it was far too late. He buried all of it away and hoped that it would just stay there, out of sight and out of mind. I don’t think that ever works for anybody. It certainly never worked for me.

My brother and I could not have been more different. It’s always weird to think that we came from the same two parents. I wanted people to know me. I wanted to nurture new friendships, and I wanted to fit in no matter what I had to do. I enjoyed every minute of my life. Everything was fun. Even when I was alone, which I liked to be as well, I was serene and content. Not Duray. Duray had shadows following him around all the time. He was cloaked in darkness.

Like most siblings, we always fought over some stupid thing or the other, like who ate all the potato chips or where the chocolate bars were hidden or whether I had been in his room and touched his stuff. Touching his stuff was the worst possible thing you could do to an older brother. Stuff was very important and touching somebody else’s stuff could and would be severely punished. We’d chase each other through the house and punch each other’s arms until faint red marks would appear. It was all pretty harmless and average. I don’t know of any kids who didn’t fight with their siblings. Duray was much bigger than I was, but I could be mean and wild. I would kick him and scratch him and punch him and throw the odd piece of furniture his way. He never used more force than he needed to. Though I hated it when he sat on my chest and farted on my face. That was never pleasant. He, much like Snoopy, could fart at will. He could also burp the entire alphabet and whistle better than anybody. He stuck his thumb and his middle finger into his mouth and made the highest, loudest whistle you had ever heard in your life. My ears used to ring. Duray taught me how to whistle. It took him about
three days, but he managed to teach me how to stick my two fingers in my mouth and blow out a perfect long, shrill note. I am still a great whistler. I can hail a cab from a block away thanks to Duray.

He never knew how much I admired him. He could do anything under the sun; he took after my dad in that way. He could fix absolutely anything that was broken. There was nothing he couldn’t take apart and put back together. He was very mechanically minded, but he was an excellent artist as well. He could look at a picture of a truck or a helicopter or a beautiful building and draw it freehand. He was wonderful at woodworking or anything to do with metal or leather or plastics. He could do it all. That always made me jealous. He was also very musical. He loved to play guitar and sing. He made me want to do the same because he made it look effortless. He seemed to be able to listen to a song and then play it back as though he’d always known it.

He was very nonchalant about his talents and abilities, maybe because he didn’t think that what he was doing had any worth. My brother was and is incredibly smart but I don’t know if he really understood just how intelligent he was. That always seemed sad to me. His self-esteem was so incredibly low. I don’t think people even knew what self-esteem was in the seventies, or at least they didn’t really give it much attention. A lot of young people slipped between the cracks, and he was one of them. I saw him doing all these incredible things but I didn’t really know him. He didn’t let you get to know him. I think he thought I was a pest: an annoying little sister who got into his things and got away with everything.

I did tattle on him a lot. He was doing some pretty bad stuff, and I thought that somebody should know. Probably not the best idea in hindsight, because it just made things worse for him at home. I am sorry for telling on him. He needed me to support him, not tell on him every chance I got. Our parents, especially my dad, scrutinized
and questioned every little thing he did because he lied about everything: where he’d been, who he’d been with, what he’d been doing.

I took no pleasure in seeing him in trouble, I just didn’t think about what my actions would do to his life. I didn’t look ten minutes ahead of where I was. By the time Duray was a teenager, he’d been stealing from my dad’s liquor cabinet and smoking his cigarettes for years. He would stay out as late as he pleased, never telling anyone where he’d been. Sometimes he’d stay out all night without so much as a phone call. He was always in trouble at school, always being suspended. He was vandalizing houses and crashing motorcycles and taking off with my mother’s car. I don’t know if he was crying out for help or just trying to be the biggest loser in the world on purpose. It’s a fine line. He was starting to scare all of us.

One day I remember being out in the yard with Leonard and Dale. By this time, we’d been hanging out less and less but on this day we were riding bikes around the driveway, hanging out, happily wasting the day away. Duray was by the garage, kind of keeping his eye on what we were up to. He had been drinking most of the afternoon and seemed agitated, taunting us and calling us names just for the sake of having something to do. I remember thinking how alone he seemed. Drinking turned him into a completely different person. I tried to steer clear of him if he’d been drinking, but that wasn’t always possible. I honestly didn’t understand his behaviour. He would usually threaten to break our arms or rip our legs off if we were to tell on him for stealing alcohol. He was a foot taller than any of us so we believed him, even though we knew he’d never actually break our arms. We sort of laughed it off and tried to look like we didn’t care when we really did. Leonard and Dale always tried to be brave for me, but this wasn’t someone they wanted to tangle with.

Duray could be really intimidating and unpredictable. On this particular day, I watched him down three or four beers and then
saunter over to our little beige car and unscrew the gas cap. He put his mouth over the hole and began to huff in and out. He kept breathing in the gas fumes and coughing between huffs. This went on for about five minutes until he flung himself back from the car and started staggering around the yard speaking nonsense. His eyes were big and wild, and he was spitting and hacking and twirling about like, well, a drunk person who’d been huffing gasoline. He laughed like he was possessed and kept yelling things that made no sense at all. After awhile he grabbed his head and moaned in incredible pain. Whatever high he’d climbed up to, he was now rapidly coming down from it.

He repeated the process over and over again until he was exhausted and throwing up. It was hard to watch and even harder to understand. I had never seen anybody huff anything in my life. The only thing I had ever sniffed was a black Jiffy marker. I loved that smell—I still do. But gasoline? Leonard and Dale and I thought Duray was off his ever-loving rocker. For some reason, I didn’t tell my mom about those episodes. That was something I should have tattled about, but I was too scared. The huffing episodes became more and more frequent as he disappeared further and further down the rabbit hole.

Duray didn’t seem to be all that good at staying out of my dad’s way. My dad was especially hard on him. Perhaps because he was the oldest and he was a boy and that’s what dads do. They try to groom their sons to be better men than they are. Duray knew how to push his buttons, though. It was a case of my dad saying “black” and my brother saying “white.” They were like oil and fire—one spurred on the other. They fed off each other’s discontent.

They would argue about everything and nothing. It didn’t matter what it was, they just butted heads about it. Their yelling sounded like planes crashing right there in our kitchen and made my
stomach fold in on itself. It would very often end in a shoving match or misplaced, angry punches thrown or someone crashing out the back door yelling profanities. Usually when two people yell at each other, not much is accomplished. I didn’t want to be around it and, though I’m sure Duray didn’t want to be around it either, I doubt very much he knew how to avoid it. It was almost a given that there would be confrontation if drinking was involved: you cannot reason with rum. There was no way in hell I was going to get between my dad and my brother.

My mom spent a lot of time in her ironing room. It was not at all private, since it had two doors and was in the middle of the house, but it was her room. It was going to be a bedroom at one point, but that didn’t come to pass. It was small with a pretty decent window that looked right into the side of the garage. Not exactly a million-dollar view. She’d go in there and iron piles of clothes. She never seemed to get through that pile. I am serious when I tell you that it was five feet high at times. I had to iron a few days a week as one of my chores. (I didn’t have many.) I’d sit there and watch
Star Trek
and iron T-shirts and slacks and tablecloths and my dad’s hankies until I could do it with one foot tied behind my back and blindfolded. I was an excellent ironer. I’d drink Pop Shoppe pop and eat Old Dutch salt and vinegar chips. I could see why my mom liked to be in her ironing room. You could be alone and have a television all to yourself and watch whatever you wanted, and it was quiet. The quiet is what I remember the most about the ironing room. Once in awhile you’d hear the steam pour out of the top of the iron. It was such a pleasant sound, and the warmth of it felt so good. We had three channels we received clearly: channels 2, 4 and, of course, the good old CBC on channel 6. It was a huge deal when we got a fourth channel, even though it didn’t have the best programming in the world. Channel 9 was mostly news, and who in their right mind wanted to watch the news?