My Turquoise Years Page 3

  About his life in Vancouver, in his apartment, I think he was a hermit. He lived a lonely life, keeping to himself. All his life he wanted a home of his own, but he never got it.

  Once, though, Billy did write about having a home—with Nancy. When I was nine and visiting him with Elsie, Ernie, Grandma, and Maudie at his bachelor suite in Vancouver, I discovered his “book” in the walk-in closet. It was in a cardboard box of souvenirs from the South Pacific, shoved beneath a net sack filled with black rocks and shriveled vanilla beans. There was a pair of carved heads in the box, too, a Fijian man and woman made of shiny, brown wood. Billy and the rest of the family were busy getting tea; for the moment I wasn’t missed. I settled on the floor to read, but my heart was pounding, the way it did when I snooped in Elsie’s or Maudie’s dresser drawers—trespassing, looking for secrets.

  Billy’s story was set in Fiji. The “book” was actually a postcard pamphlet about the Islands, only seven pages long. He’d scratched out the title on the inside cover—The Fiji Islands—and printed above it, “Magnetic Island” and “Dear Nancy.” There were fourteen color pictures in the book, reproduced paintings of palm trees, beaches, sunsets, thatched native huts—and above and below each picture Billy had created a story about himself and Nancy. I read fast and hungrily.

  Page 1: A picture of a cove. Palm trees. A pink-and-blue sunset. This pearl that nestled so peacefully in the broad Pacific. Majestically superb in its natural simplicity. We knew then we had found our paradise. It was here we decided to make our home.

  Page 3: A picture of three native boys standing on a beach. Palm trees in the distance. The same pink-and-blue sky. Another tribute to the charm of a gracious lady. How fortunate I am! This was the beginning of a bond, children would later strengthen it.

  I found myself crying. Elsie called my name. Still I read.

  Page 5: Another lagoon seen through the trunks of palm trees. The sky, peach-colored. It was a peculiar day when you took this photo, for we were both sad and happy. Sad because on the morrow we were leaving our island, happy because yet another dream was about to be fulfilled. Soon there would be three of us. There were tears in our eyes… Elsie called my name again. Wiping my eyes, I hurriedly put everything away. Just in time.

  “What are you doing in here?”

  “Nothing.”

  But I’d found the evidence of my father’s broken heart.

  TV set and neighbor’s cat

  [

  six ]

  NOT LONG AFTER the purple negligee arrived, Elsie said, “You should write and thank your mother for the present.”

  It was before supper, and I was sprawled on the couch in the tiny room at the front of the house that Elsie and Ernie called “the den.” I was watching Fun-O-Rama with Ernie. The toothpaste commercial was on—“Brusha, brusha, brusha. With the new Ipana.” Which meant The Three Stooges would be next. I didn’t want to be bothered writing a letter.

  “Why?” I muttered under my breath.

  Ernie heard and looked up and smirked. I stared at him, trying to make my eyes burn into the top of his head. The gesture was supposed to mean “Shut up.” He’d have been told about the horrible negligee by now. But who knew what he was thinking? He hardly ever spoke. “Like his father,” Elsie often complained. “Just sits there with his mouth shut. Never says two words.”

  Elsie leaned against the doorway with a lighted cigarette in her hand. “Did you hear me?” she said, sounding irritated. “You should write a thank-you note to your mother. It’s the proper thing to do.”

  The Three Stooges theme song came on: “Hickory, Dickory, Dock.”

  “Not now,” I answered.

  Already Ernie was squirming in his chair, grinning in anticipation; he loved The Three Stooges. He had a cigarette burning in the ashtray on the side table, and he reached for it without taking his eyes off the TV. The Three Stooges was our favorite Fun-O-Rama show. Our next favorites were Popeye and Mighty Mouse cartoons.

  “Marion! Did you hear me?”

  “Yes. All right. Leave me alone. I’m watching TV.”

  The “Malice in the Palace” episode was on, the one where Curly, Larry, and Moe are waiters and keep dumping trays of food over everyone’s head. Ernie and I had watched it a ton of times. I always thought it was funny that people in the shows called the Stooges “boys.” They were at least as old as Ernie, and Curly even looked like him.

  Elsie was still standing there. “Well?” she demanded.

  “Well what?”

  “The letter.”

  “After supper.”

  “Shush!” Ernie said loudly. He was mad because of the interruption. His face was red. He had large lips, fish-lips I secretly called them, and he had a habit of licking them, so that his lips were always shiny, purply-red.

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake,” Elsie said. “A grown man watching that junk. Sometimes I wonder what I’ve married.”

  Ernie ignored her. Moe had just stuck two fingers into Larry’s eyes.

  AFTER SUPPER I spent ten minutes with a piece of paper torn from my English notebook and wrote:

  Dear Wother,

  Thank you for the present. It’s nice. Purple is an interesting color. I’w fine. Hom are you? I just had wy thirteenth birthday. Suwwer holidays start in tmo meeks.

  Frow Warion

  This was my first piece of written satire. I was thrilled with it. I’d never experienced such pleasure writing anything for school. I continued with the return address:

  WISS WARION GIBSON

  4921 Cordova Bay Rd.

  Saanich Peninsula

  Vancouver Island

  Victoria, B.C.

  Canada

  The Morld

  Writing this put Nancy in her place—far away—and made her seem hilariously incompetent, someone who couldn’t even form her m’s and w’s properly. Writing this put me securely in my place.

  At thirteen, everyone said I was a smarty-pants. A smart aleck. A wiseacre. A pain in the ass.

  I thought I was a barrel of laughs.

  Ernie, Elsie, Grandma

  [

  seven ]

  CORDOVA BAY WAS a semi-rural area of farms and seaside houses five miles outside of Victoria. Billy’s family claimed lineage to Cordova Bay dating back to the 1920s, when for a few brief but extravagant years his parents had owned a summer place there. My grandfather was a barber, but also a drinker and a gambler, and he’d won the tiny plot of land in a card game. It was flat and treeless, about the size of a baseball diamond, not waterfront, but a short walk from the northern end of the beach. For several summers his family and assorted relatives tented on the property. But in another card game my grandfather lost the property, and summers at Cordova Bay came to a humiliating end.

  Then, in the early 1950s, Elsie and Ernie bought a narrow waterfront lot at the south end of Cordova Bay from Old Man Head, a frail neighbor of theirs in Victoria, and it was as if the family had been restored to its rightful place in the world. There was a sense of prestige regained, of wrongs made right; the family was “back out the Bay.”

  In an attempt to make the new house fit the lot, Ernie had built it like a train, in a series of small stuccoed boxes, with each box—den, bedrooms, bathroom, kitchen, living room—attaching itself to the next one until they reached the rocky bit of land overlooking the beach. The house had turquoise trim and a long gravel driveway.

  This was the house where I’d lived with Elsie and Ernie since I was five years old, and the house where Billy visited. Now that I was set down in a place I trusted as permanent, I held fast. Like a barnacle, I told myself, relishing the image of immovability.

  “The Bay,” as we called it, stretched beyond the shore for miles across to D’Arcy Island, an island that had once housed lepers. Closer in, there was Seal Rock, which you could wade to on the lowest tides, when the double sandbar reached it like a shimmering bridge. There was the gentle curve of the mile-long beach with its fine sand and pebbles and scat
tered driftwood logs bleached by the sun. Pampas grass grew like a boundary between the beach and the places where the summer cottages began. On hot summer afternoons, agitated sand flies skimmed the sand’s surface. I’d watch hundreds of them feeding on the rotting seaweed that was strewn, half-hidden, like beige rags in the sand; you could kick at patches of it and watch the flies swoop off together like a flock of startled birds. The sharp, iodine smell of seaweed was a marvelous thing, pungent and rank; thick beds of seaweed floated near the shore at high tide, looking like the long green hair of mermaids. And always there were seagulls cruising over the water’s surface, and farther out, sailboats silently drifting.

  The Point at the southern end of Cordova Bay was a special place for my friends and me. We gathered there between swims in summer, or met there during winter when the water was swollen-looking from the rain or cold blue and choppy during a storm. The Point marked the place where the sandbar ended and the beach turned into cliffs. We claimed it as our own.

  Standing at the top of the bank behind our house, eager to be running free with Rip on the sandbar below, I’d often feel exhilarated. By the light, and the brightness, and by the sense of endless space. The sea and sky on a still summer’s day looked like a watercolor created with two or three strokes of the brush.

  I’d be standing there, my breath catching in my throat.

  Doreen and Billy

  [

  eight ]

  WITHIN DAYS, BOTH family and neighbors knew about my mother’s present. It had become “The Story of the Purple Negligee.” It was mainly Elsie’s story, because she did most of the telling. “Laugh? I thought I’d die!” she said repeatedly about the moment the negligee was revealed. To Mrs. Holt next door. On the phone to Ernie’s sister Mildred. To her daughter Doreen, my married cousin. Long-distance to Shirley, her other married daughter, in California. More than once to Maudie.

  The purple negligee and the “Hi Sexy!” underpants had become another family event, as was anything concerning Nancy. I should have known it was useless to plead for privacy. Yet I no longer felt bothered by the gift. Surprisingly, transforming it into a story drained it of any power it had to upset me. And I liked the notoriety the story gave me, liked that it centered on me, that because of me there was a story. Elsie could tell it as much as she wanted. I was content to hang around the edges like a movie director, smugly observing how everyone played their part, delighting in their mock outrage on my behalf, the easy laughs. I liked hearing about myself in the third person; it was like watching yourself on TV.

  “Laugh? I thought I’d die!” I now told my friends. “I’ve sure got one crazy mother.”

  DOREEN, ALONG with her husband, Bob, and her year-old baby, Lyn, drove out to the Bay with Maudie and Grandma to have a look at my birthday gift. The family did everything together, always. They moved through life in a posse—Sunday dinners, summer vacations, daily visits or telephone calls. No one seemed to have a life of their own, a private life; it was all family. Solitude was suspect, something to be pitied and avoided. Wanting to be by yourself was considered anti-social, even morbid. At thirteen I’d often refuse to go along on Sunday drives, dreading another dull afternoon wedged between Grandma and Maudie in the back seat of Billy’s Zephyr. I wanted to read, do anything rather than be imprisoned with my family.

  “What?” Elsie would snap. “We’re not good enough for you? A book’s more interesting than us?”

  “Yes,” I’d counter, effectively silencing her for at most thirty seconds.

  “That’s the trouble with you,” she’d fluster. “You’ve got a mind of your own.”

  There were no books in the house, not proper ones. Only TV Guide, magazines filled with knitting patterns, the medical encyclopedia hidden away in the basement pantry. The only real books were my own few: schoolbooks, library books about girl ballerinas, collections of fairy tales—Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm—and the two Mark Twain titles that Billy had given me for my thirteenth birthday.

  “Why don’t you ever read a book?” I’d challenge while Elsie and Ernie watched Gunsmoke or The Ed Sullivan Show, thinking: They’re as stupid as slugs. If I had a mind of my own, they shared theirs with half a dozen people.

  Elsie: “We’re not bookish people.”

  Ernie: “I work at the library. I spend all day surrounded by books. You think I want to look at books on my time off?”

  The gifts from Nancy were placed on the empty kitchen table like exhibits at a criminal trial. Laughing, “Oh, Marion!” Doreen was the first to snatch up the negligee. At twenty-seven, she was the elder of Elsie’s daughters, and I thought of her as my sister. She had short white-blonde hair done in kiss-curls around her face, and long dancer’s legs, and she had been one of the stars in Miss Blythe’s dance troupe. I’d cut out and kept the picture of her that was in the Victoria Daily Times when she married. The headline said: “Well-known dancer weds.” My friend Doris and I would have long discussions about Doreen. How beautiful was she? More beautiful than cute? Definitely. More beautiful than pretty? For sure. Ravishing? Not ravishing, that was too sexy. Famously beautiful, then? Sort of. She’d had her picture in the paper, hadn’t she?

  Doreen held the negligee in front of her, testing it for size, then waltzed with it around the kitchen, singing, “Heaven, I’m in heaven… ” She twirled and she leapt; she stood on her toes and then did the splits. Finally she made a deep bow and flung the negligee at Bob, where it landed on his head. Everyone was laughing. She was lovely to watch, and funny; she’d turned the negligee into a parody and Nancy into a parody as well. I loved her for it.

  “This is way nicer than the one I had for my honeymoon,” she said, panting from the performance. “Now I’ve only got old flannelette nightgowns.”

  I wanted to give her the negligee. Then she gushed, “Oh, Auntie Nancy was always such fun. Everything’s so dull without her,” and I changed my mind. “I miss her,” Doreen continued. “Remember how she’d play Auntie Maudie’s piano and get everyone singing?”

  “That was eight years ago,” Elsie said.

  “I know. But wasn’t she fun?”

  “Hah! Fun!” Elsie said. “You don’t know the half of it!”

  Bob liked the underpants. He was twenty-eight years old and worked in a bank, a tall, skinny, dark-haired guy who liked playing baseball and drinking beer on weekends and who’d been raised on a farm up island. He and Doreen had been married for five years by now. Apparently, he’d never seen anything like those underpants. He kept staring at them and grinning. “Well, whad’ya know?” he said over and over. They made such an impression on him that, from then on, “Hi Sexy!” became his standard greeting to me.

  When it was Maudie’s turn to hold the negligee she said wonderingly, “Isn’t it fancy! So sheer. Imagine wearing such a thing.”

  Doreen and Elsie exchanged looks. Maudie had been a widow for eleven years and was reputed to hate sex. It was not possible to imagine her wearing such a thing. “She did it once and that made Kenny.” This was common knowledge via Elsie. “After that—forget it!”

  “Imagine washing it,” Elsie now said, changing the subject. “That marabou would take forever to dry.”

  “You wouldn’t catch the Queen wearing something like that,” Grandma snorted. “It wouldn’t be allowed.”

  We looked at her. Lately, the Queen was all she talked about.

  “Hey, Grandma,” Bob hollered, because Grandma was deaf. He pointed to the underpants. “What about these? Would the Queen wear these?”

  “I’m not deaf,” Grandma said, snatching the underpants and shoving them into her purse. It was the last anyone saw of them.

  “Laugh? I thought I’d die!” Elsie said again. “When Marion opened up that parcel and… ”

  “Pipe down in there!” This from Ernie in the den. Saturday afternoon wrestling was on. “I can’t hear a bloody thing!”

  He was watching another grudge match between Gorgeous George and his favor
ite wrestler, Whipper Billy Watson. Stomping around the ring—the slow-motion moves, the fake agony—I thought wrestlers looked like apes wearing diapers. Snidely, I’d mention this to Ernie, who’d be on the edge of his chair, moving his shoulders and groaning along with the TV figures. He always ignored me. Elsie and Doreen, however, loved the image.

  Now Elsie yelled, “What’s to hear? It’s just a bunch of grunting men,” and Doreen screamed with laughter.

  “Gorgeous George would look good in the negligee, Pop!” she shouted. “It’d match his gorgeous blond hair.”

  Everyone laughed.

  “Pipe down, for the love of God!” Ernie hollered and turned up the TV. “Is it too much to ask for a little peace and quiet?”

  Elsie and Doreen looked at each other with pretend fear, and giggled some more.

  “Men!” Elsie said dismissively. Until then, Bob had been laughing along with the women. Now he didn’t know what to do. So he turned to me and punched me on the shoulder. “Whad’ya say, Hi Sexy? Want to throw the ball around?”

  We headed outside. But we heard Doreen laughing as we went. “Poor Bob! He didn’t know whether to shit or wind his watch.”

  “None of them ever do,” Elsie said.

  Elsie

  [

  nine ]

  IF 1960 WERE assigned a color, it would be turquoise, not the black-and-white of our TV screens. Nineteen-sixty was at the apex of the turquoise years. The color dominated our lives like a vast vinyl cushion; everyone was crazy about it. Turquoise was the only color that mattered, a particular shade of blue-green that was bright, optimistic, and, above all, modern. It transformed everything: houses, clothes, cars, and, at Easter, even the fur of live rabbits. I’d wanted a turquoise rabbit in the worst way but Elsie had said, “Over my dead body. You wouldn’t look after it. I’d have to. And that’s all I need. A bloody rabbit.”