My Turquoise Years Read online

  Elsie said, “That Nancy. This really takes the cake. She finally remembers your birthday and she sends something like this. Wait till I tell Maudie!”

  “No! Don’t tell!” I cried. Because I knew it wouldn’t only be Maudie, my other aunt. It would be Ernie, my uncle; Grandma; Elsie’s daughters, Doreen and Shirley; Rae-Ella, the hairdresser; Mrs. Holt next door; everyone else in the family; neighbors, strangers, even Len the butcher at Four Ways Market; and especially my father, Billy. Elsie couldn’t keep quiet about anything.

  “Can’t we forget about it?” I pleaded. “Can’t we throw it in the garbage?”

  She sat down at the kitchen table looking defeated. “Oh, Marion,” she sighed. “You shouldn’t be too hard on your mother. It’s just that… well… she doesn’t know what it’s like to raise a daughter. I’m sure she means well.”

  “Hah!” I snorted. We both knew this was a ridiculous thing to say. “How can sending a birthday present two months late be meaning well? And what about Dad? Was leaving him ‘meaning well’? Was it?”

  Elsie sighed again and looked bewildered. “I don’t know… It’s just when two people don’t…”

  The answer always ended like this—at a locked door. When two people don’t… The next words—love one another—were never spoken. The explanation always ended at “don’t.” That’s as far as I ever got: I had parents, all right, but they were Nancy and Billy. Two people who don’t.

  I gathered up the nightgown and the underpants and scrunched them into a ball. I didn’t know what I was going to do with them. Maybe use them as costumes for one of my plays. Maybe wear them on Halloween to scare babies.

  “Here, give me them,” Elsie said, extending a flour-covered arm. “I’ll put them away.” Then her eyes went wide. “Wait a minute! I know what we can do! We’ll give the nightgown to Grandma. Can’t you picture Grandma sitting at the kitchen table playing solitaire in a purple negligee?”

  I knew this was a lame attempt to humor me, knew she was treating me like a four-year-old. But I laughed anyway. Laughed, with relief and gratitude. In an instant my anger switched to amusement. It was as if I were a TV and my channels had been changed.

  Everyone laughed at Grandma these days. She was eighty-four and had, it was said, “gone funny.” She hummed nursery rhymes and spent her days playing solitaire or dominos at the kitchen table, and she could always be counted on to do or say something deliciously odd. She lived in Victoria with Maudie and Maudie’s only son, Kenny. Elsie called him “that useless Kenny Pepper.” I called him “that gorgeous Kenny Pepper” after the TV wrestler Gorgeous George. They were both blonds. And I knew that siding with Kenny annoyed Elsie.

  “You could wear the underpants,” I now said, to keep the joke going, enjoying the rare camaraderie between us. And because Elsie was short and plump and wore glasses and was fifty-four years old and it was hilarious to picture her with “Hi Sexy!” written on her bum. It would be like seeing the underpants on miserable old Mrs. Smith, who ran Smith’s store, or on Mrs. Black, my bossy Home Ec teacher.

  “Hah! Wouldn’t that give Ernie a thrill?” Elsie said.

  But I recoiled from laughing about that. I hadn’t thought about that. Picturing my pudgy, bald-headed uncle in his beige janitor’s clothes getting a thrill out of Elsie in the “Hi Sexy!” underpants was too strange a picture. And why would he love it if she wore the bikinis, I wondered? They didn’t sleep in the same bed; they didn’t even sleep in the same room. Ernie had been sleeping on the pullout downstairs since last Christmas. The reason for this was still a mystery to me, but ever since, things between them had been horrible. Elsie said Ernie slept downstairs because he snored. “Snore?” Ernie said. “You should listen to yourself!”

  The only things Ernie loved that I knew about—other than snore-free sleeps—were chocolate bars with nuts and hard candies; wrestling matches, Fun-O-Rama, and Gunsmoke on TV; building things in his workshop beside the carport; and all pets, especially my excitable dog, Rip, a large black Lab and collie cross. No, I decided, the underpants would probably make him cranky, because that’s what he was most of the time.

  “He’s a cranky old fart,” Elsie often said of him these days. “Don’t pay any attention to him.”

  Still, Ernie as a “cranky old fart” was something I was used to, as familiar and as ordinary in my life as the yellow bedspread on my bed, as the beach of Cordova Bay. Ernie as a lover of bikini underpants was too unbelievable even to consider.

  “I wonder what the ‘surprise’ means,” Elsie said, musing over the card in her hand. “Maybe Nancy’s finally struck it rich.”

  “ ‘A nice surprise,’ ” I said, sarcastically. Sarcasm was something I’d recently discovered and I used it constantly. “Sounds like ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’: ‘If you go down in the woods today, you’re sure of a big surprise.’ ” “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic” had been my favorite song when I was five years old; Billy had bought me the record. “And it’s not a real birthday card,” I added. “It’s some old thing she had lying around. Probably that nightgown was an old thing, too.”

  Elsie agreed, but she was less contemptuous, more thoughtful. “Nancy always did go in for ritzy clothes. This must have cost a pretty penny.” She was examining the marabou on the negligee. “It’s sewn right into the seam!” she now cried.

  I was disgusted. Some present. I searched for words to describe it. Cruddy. Putrid. Absurd. To my annoyance, though, these words kept colliding with “ritzy,” a word that sparkled with classiness and allure.

  Nancy and friends

  [

  four ]

  “ MY MOTHER,” I liked to joke to my friends, “she’s missing and in action.”

  By the time I was thirteen she was on her fourth or fifth marriage, maybe even her seventh or eighth, I’d wildly boast. In truth, we never knew for sure how many marriages Nancy had had. But we believed it was a lot, certainly more than the sturdy homemakers of Vancouver Island ever had. As many, I liked to believe, as the movie stars in Silver Screen or Photoplay magazines—Elizabeth Taylor, Debbie Reynolds, or Elsie’s favorite, Lana Turner. I imagined Nancy, like them, hopscotching from one man to another in a peculiar game of collecting broken hearts. Her quest, as I knew, was to become fabulously rich. “And she doesn’t care how she does it,” Elsie would usually add.

  Each time I told the story of my mother I would exaggerate her stature. My friends heard about a woman of mythological proportions, one who was traveling the world on luxury cruise ships, who dressed like a movie star in gowns and furs, who was dazzlingly beautiful, slim, and dark-haired, who was the life of every party, always laughing from the center of a ring of admirers, a cigarette holder poised between fingernails painted a vivid Chinese red. Not only that, I’d tell my audience, my mother played the piano so well she could have been a concert pianist if she’d wanted to. She was so extravagant, I’d say, using a newly discovered word, that she sent me madcap gifts like purple negligees and “Hi Sexy!” underpants, and once a pair of black velvet shoes three sizes too big. And when she wasn’t traveling the world, I’d add as final evidence of her grandeur, she lived in Australia, that bright exotic place at the other end of the world.

  I’d say, “I was born there, you know.”

  I’d say, “Australia’s like a beautiful desert island, only better.”

  I loved it when people’s mouths fell open. “Oh my, Australia! Lucky you!” And didn’t that make me exotic? Wasn’t I someone special? And different? And envied?

  In this way I paved over Nancy’s absence.

  There was a picture that summed her up for me then. She’s leaning casually on the railing of a cruise ship, a cigarette in a holder dangling from between her fingers. She’s young-looking, glamorous. Dressed to the hilt—a fox fur collar around her neck, a flower in her hair. But the thing that always grabbed me about this picture was the people beside her. A man and woman to her right, a woman to her left. One woman is wearing a sweater, the o
ther, a blouse, and they’re without makeup; the man wears an ordinary white shirt. And they’re so dowdy, so plain beside Nancy, like three weeds clustered around a rose.

  It’s not a picture that was given to me but one I found in Maudie’s, my other aunt’s, photo album. From the stamp on the back of the picture I knew that it had been taken in New Zealand. From Elsie I knew that the coat with the fox fur collar was light blue.

  “The Story of the Blue Coat” goes with “The Story of Nancy’s First Visit.” Elsie’s stories. Told many times during my childhood.

  I’ll never forget that coat of Nancy’s. She had it on the first time I ever saw her. A long blue coat with a silver fox fur around the neck. Very sophisticated. I thought: This can’t be my brother’s wife. Because she was too grand for him, too swish-looking. And Billy was such a mouse, such a quiet guy.

  That day was the first time we saw you, too. A baby, six months old. There’d been a picture of you and Nancy in the Vancouver paper and a write-up saying how you were the first baby to ever fly across the equator, and how Nancy had never seen snow. We saw the article before we ever laid eyes on the pair of you; Billy had sent over a copy. “Mrs. Gibson, wife of Captain W.D. Gibson, and baby Marion arrive in Canada from Australia and see snow for the first time.” That’s what the article said. Something like that.

  But when Billy brought you both to the Island, Nancy took us by surprise. She was so loud, so forward. It was like some fancy bird had landed in my kitchen. She plunked herself down on a kitchen chair and right away said, “Well, where’s the cocktails?” Cocktails! In the middle of the afternoon! She made everybody shy. We were such a drab bunch compared to her.

  But the thing I noticed that day was the way Billy did all the looking after you. Feeding you, changing your diaper. Nancy couldn’t have cared less. She was more interested in getting Ernie to fix her cigarette lighter, which had broke. Or showing off her clothes to my girls. Her blue coat and her fox fur. And her shoes! She had plastic high heels with dice floating in some liquid in the heels. No one had ever seen anything like it. The girls couldn’t get over them. They thought Nancy was a movie star.

  But for me there was no fun in looking at Nancy’s clothes. She made me jealous. Beside her I felt so poor and ordinary. And when she started making up to Ernie, flirting with him, I didn’t know what to do. Later I learned what she was like. She’d make up to any man. Just for the fun of it. Just to see the other woman squirm.

  The story always made me squirm when I heard it. Nancy “lolling about,” as Elsie called it, with her cigarette lighter and her plastic high-heeled shoes, demanding cocktails while Billy changed my diaper. I liked hearing about Billy’s part in the story, though, that he was the one looking after me.

  Billy at sea

  [

  five ]

  IT WAS UNDERSTOOD that Nancy had broken Billy’s heart. It was also understood that we were never to mention her name within his hearing. That would be a cruel thing to do and might cause his heart to break again.

  Billy lived in a bachelor suite in Vancouver. When I was younger I thought he kept his broken heart at the back of his dresser drawer and only took it out on Friday afternoons to glue back together before his trip to the Island. I imagined then that his heart was like an egg that had cracked open when Nancy left us for the last time. I also believed that when your heart broke you cried your eyes out. There you were, alone with the pieces of your broken heart, and with no eyeballs either, utterly miserable on your tear-soaked bed. It was the worst thing that could happen to a person. And it had happened to Billy.

  Once when I was being difficult with him—I was eight or nine—Elsie pulled me aside and hissed, “You be nice to your daddy. You’re all he has.”

  Meaning: Don’t you break his heart as well. Don’t you be like your mother.

  Still, I wanted to know: How had Nancy done this terrible thing? How did she break Billy’s heart?

  “By being selfish and thinking of no one but herself,” Elsie would say. Then add, almost as an afterthought, “And that time in Vancouver. Running off for two weeks with an officer from Billy’s ship… ”

  “Yes, but his heart. Why did it break?” I pressed, not wanting to believe that such an important thing as a heart could be so easily damaged.

  “He didn’t have his head screwed on,” Elsie said. “He was head over heels.”

  BILLY WAS A SMALL MAN, slight in build, and balding, with a fringe of hair that was dark brown, flecked with gray. I thought his eyes were wonderful. They were a special shade of milky-blue, like the color of the sea and sky when they melt together on a hot summer’s afternoon.

  There was a cot covered with woolen blankets in the basement of Elsie and Ernie’s house for him to sleep on. He’d arrive on a Friday night swinging his leather suitcase—he called it his “grip”—the same bag he used when he went to sea. Inside it, sometimes, when I was small, there’d be a present for me—a coloring book, a kaleidoscope—though Elsie soon put a stop to that. “You’ll spoil her,” she told him. “She’ll only want to see you for the presents.”

  Then he’d spend the weekend just with me. He’d do anything I wanted. Go to the park. Movies. Out for chocolate ice creams. Play Snakes and Ladders. Help me with homework. And when I was younger, watch my plays—re-enactments of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Princess and the Pea,” and of “Cinderella” and “Snow White.” I was always the star and played every part, specializing in the wicked stepmothers and witches, the brave but slighted princesses. Billy was always the audience of one. The audience clapped and clapped, and found me delightful! What a delightful little girl!

  To my friends I said: “My father’s a captain. He has his Master’s ticket. He can navigate by the stars.” I said, “My father comes over from the mainland every other weekend just to see me.” I said, “My father’s rich; he bought Elsie a car so she can take me to dancing lessons. He can play the banjo, too.”

  If a grown-up wanted to know about Billy, Elsie had two stories at the ready. The shorter version was for strangers, people met in passing—a woman in a lineup at the wool store, a neighbor’s sister, and, once, as I stood mute by her side, in chatty conversation with my Grade 4 teacher, Mrs. Turvey, when it was discovered that in “real life” Mrs. Turvey was a housewife who knit and made her own clothes just as Elsie did. The shorter version about Billy was the exalted one, the one meant to impress and to lay flat any suspicion on the part of the hearer that Elsie’s family—she called us “Me and Mine”—were anything less than exemplary. (It was the same thing I did when I boasted to friends about my absent parents—derailed any criticisms of my unusual family life by declaring it spectacular.) Even while sensing this distortion, the falseness of this public presentation, I still shamelessly loved the warm glances people would give me after Elsie told the story, glances that said: “For goodness’ sake, a captain! And he still had time to father this lovely child!” Privately, I called this story “Sailing the Deep Blue Sea.” It was as brief and as soothing to my ears as a lullaby, and it began: My brother, Marion’s father. Now there’s a hard worker. He started out as a cabin boy, you know, and worked his way up the ladder, all the way to deep-sea captain. And look at him now! In charge of the Vancouver waterfront!

  Then there was the other story, the one hauled out for family and friends. This story, it was understood, was the real one, the plain, cold truth, the one without the varnish, as frank and everyday as a filet of sole set out on the counter for frying, as the ratty elastic bandages Grandma wore on her swollen legs, as Ernie’s old blue truck with the rusty back fender. I called it “Sad Billy” because of the way it made me feel, and because it seemed to go with my own story about his broken heart. The way Elsie told this story, you’d think Billy’s life was over.

  He was an unpredictable kid. Everything he did was in a rush. For example, the way he ate his supper. Ma made him count between mouthfuls. Otherwise he’d gulp it down and be finished before anyone else ha
d started. Everything Billy did was too fast. He didn’t know what “walk” meant. He ran everywhere and was always covered in cuts and bruises. He’d be running and not looking where he was going. The times he banged into furniture, walls, telephone poles. Because he wasn’t watching out.

  When he was sixteen he got on the boats. The merchant marines. And that slowed him down. Because he had to follow rules. Pretty soon he was a different person, everything neat and careful. When he’d come home on leave we were surprised at the new way he was eating, cutting up meat with a knife and fork and not shoving it in his mouth with his hand like before.

  Other things changed, too. He was a noisy kid, yelling out what he wanted to say, pulling pranks. One time he lit Ma’s tablecloth on fire. He was underneath it playing with matches. But after he went on the boats he got quiet. Maybe because he was working hard, studying in his spare time to get his tickets. He went from cabin boy at sixteen to captain by the time he was forty-one.

  Before Nancy he was in love with Ruth Parkinson. This was when he was in his late twenties. But Ruth was a very tall girl, and I think Billy felt stupid being with her because he was so short. So they broke it off. He felt inferior because of his height. I don’t think Ruth minded him being short but it bothered Billy. He couldn’t stand being made fun of. He must have felt awkward walking down the street with her.

  Ten years went by before he met Nancy. When that finally broke up he wouldn’t talk about it. We never discussed my raising Marion, either. He just left her with me. It was only after Nancy had been gone three years that I said to Billy, “Nancy’s not coming back, is she?” and he said, “No.” So then I knew I had Marion for good.

  Everyone was proud of Billy. For what he’d become. The only one of us to do something important. He was the captain of cargo ships, and when he came ashore, he supervised the docks in Vancouver. But this was a side of him we didn’t see very often. His working life. Once in a while I’d get a glimpse when he’d get a phone call at my house, something to do with the loading of ships. And I’d always be amazed at the way his voice changed when he talked to his men. Bossy, loud. He’d be telling some guy what to do. Sounding gruff and important.