If the Sun Has Legs

by Deborah Blenkhorn

“And whether pigs have wings.”
–Lewis Carroll, “The Walrus and the Carpenter”

“It does so—the sun does so have legs!”

“Does not!”

“Does too!”

This was the subject of debate between cousin Callie and me, ages two-and-a-half and three-and-a-half respectively.  My father and I spent a season with his sister Lila, her husband Mal, and their daughter on Prince Edward Island in the wake of my parents’ break-up back in Ontario.  My father had grown up in the Maritimes (as indeed had my mother—they had been high school sweethearts in the small university-town of Sackville, New Brunswick), so perhaps this was a homecoming of sorts for him, though hardly a joyful one.  I had spent each summer (and would continue to do so until way into my teens) with my grandparents on the New Brunswick side of the Northumberland Strait, so the Maritimes represented stability and comfort to me, too. 

My aunt was pregnant with her second daughter, Ella (girls are more better, as the family saying goes), and sick.  “Girls, bring me a towel,” she would say, as my cousin and I had arguments that would have made sense only to Lewis Carroll.  My greatest triumph was my discovery that “Cuz” would never be as old as I was, even if she were right about the sun.

Years later my Aunt told me she wished I had stayed on with them—indeed, that they had petitioned to formally adopt me, but my father and I trekked back to Ontario.  Even on PEI, I had started to feel—what?  Not frightened, not angry, not even anxious, but somehow aware of a growing desire to live not with my father but with my mother.  It seemed right to me, it seemed best for little girls to live with their mothers.  Had I been a boy, I would not have begrudged myself to my father.  And even if I had had a more adventurous spirit, perhaps, I would have relished and not disliked the odd moments I now remember as traumatic.

At three, I sat on my father’s lap in a moving car, trying frantically to steer as he assured me that the car was completely under my control, that we would go into the ditch unless I kept the wheel straight.  Thirty years later (and no doubt for other reasons as well), I still don’t drive.

My mother visited us at least once in Tea Hill on Prince Edward Island, for I have heard the tape she made of my pygmy voice:  “The tide has covered the shells,” I announce with slow and ominous intonation, narrating a series of pictures I have drawn for her.

When she plays this tape for me, decades and lifetimes afterwards, she tells me about other memorable things I said as a young child—memorable to her, perhaps replayed in her imagination in moments of loneliness.  “Good beer!” I declared, at less than two, to a group of nuns to whom my mother was giving a lecture on nutrition at the Hotel Dieu Hospital in Kingston (a cart of canned pop had just been wheeled into the room).  “My, what a succulent roast!” I imitated from the version of  “The Three Little Pigs” I knew by heart at three, just as my parents and a group of their friends sat down to a roast pork dinner.

Silly stories, fragments—anecdotes, really—and they’re all I have of my mother in my early life, apart from one bread-and-jam snack (“Don’t forget the corners,” I urged her).  Asking her every night when she got home from work, “What did you do yesterday?” (not thinking that the day that had just gone by could be called “today”).   And once when she was in the bath, bringing a red balloon to show her, with a pin.  “Look,” I explained, unaware that the universe was about to betray me, “if I put the pin right here where it’s tied it won’t burst.”

Why I felt so desperately the need to go and live with her I cannot tell.  I have some memory (surely false) that an adult asked me, at the time of the divorce, whom I wanted to live with.  In this vignette, I choose my mother and am placed with my father.  My mother tried to explain it all to me several years later when I came to live with her at last:  my father had been the primary caregiver, my mother was the “offending party” in the case who had “committed adultery”—there seemed plenty of good reasons for me to live with my father.  Just a couple of years ago, my father told me that before my mother left she “had constructed an emotional life of her own.”

I made up stories to tell my mother on the phone, about how my father wouldn’t allow me to eat certain kinds of cereal (I had never even actually requested them) or made me eat leftover macaroni and cheese cold (I requested it)—I never thought to tell the truth about what bothered me.  It was too weird.  Walking with my father along the shores of Lake Ontario, I would ask him questions to which he seemed incapable of giving a straight answer (not that I realized this at the time).

“What are those huge piles of white stuff on those docks?”

“Snow.  There’s not enough here so they fly it in from up north.”

“I have to go to the bathroom.  Does that sign say ‘LADIES’?”

“Maybe it says ‘LADDIES.’ You’d better be sure.”

OK, these were jokes, I guess.  But I was the only audience, and I didn’t get the jokes until years later when I thought back to them.

But I had my own secret agendas, ideas so strange I didn’t know where they came from.  Everywhere I went with my father from ages three to seven—hitchhiking, visiting people’s houses, wandering through unknown streets—I called him “Dad” in virtually every sentence.  My rationale was thus: if people heard me calling him “Dad,” they would know I wasn’t his girlfriend.

My father did have a girlfriend (I assume–or at least a female friend) with whom we lived for a while.  She was from some country like Sweden where they did things differently.  My memories of Florrie (now a diagnosed schizophrenic, bless her heart) are mixed, but unfortunately the most vivid one is of her trying to help me by manually extracting a bowel movement when I suffered from constipation.  Maybe that was the way they dealt with such problems in Sweden.

Florrie’s rambling stone house, over a hundred years old, was a startling contrast to the third-floor walk-up where my father and I had lived before we moved in with her—and where we later moved back to.  I sleep-walked in that house (I’ve never done so since), and I was convinced (perhaps aided by a story that depicted precisely this phenomenon) that the shadows on my bedroom wall were wild, toothy animals come to life.  I was not sorry to leave Florrie’s house.

Other caregivers were astounded by the rules I imposed on myself.  I fraudulently proclaimed, when being babysat by one of my father’ s highschool students:  “I’m not allowed to have more potatoes until I finish my peas.”  The babysitter’s family indulged me—or perhaps believed me.  I think I may have been as inscrutable to them as they were to me.  The eldest daughter of the family, Mary, was responsible for my care.  However, I seemed to spend most of my time with her mother (a woman of preternaturally advanced age and beautiful handwriting) and Mary’s younger sister, Holly, the weasel-faced tyrant who would make my time in her family’s home a misery for the two years I spent after-schools with them.

Holly, who was my age although thinner and shorter, must have been a natural bully who found in me the perfect victim.  “Rub my feet!” “Let me jump on your stomach!” she would command.  I heard and obeyed.  At least she wasn’t one of those terrifying creatures from Planet of the Apes.  Or was she?

Her father, for some reason, would pick me up in the morning from the small apartment my father shared with me.  He was somehow involved in creating the music used in Walt Disney shows—or was this another story told to me by my father?  In retrospect, it seems likely to have been the latter.

Even now, I cannot separate reality from whatever else is there.  And my father is not the only teller of strange tales.  My mother has told me how her life with him had become unbearable, that she had sought counseling for him and with him, that friends would complain to her about his weirdness, that she would be told, “Keep your husband away from my wife and children,” that my father had been fired from his high school teaching job for making inappropriate advances to his female students.  But if you knew and/or believed all this (my silent question to her), why did you send me away to live with him for four formative years of my childhood?

Two awful nights stand out in memory.

Waking up in the night repeatedly, each time from the same nightmare (what was it?), lonely and afraid.  Going to get my father.  Him spanking me and telling me to go back to bed.  Going back to bed.  Waking up…How many times did this happen that night?  I have had nights since then, long dark nights of the soul,  ones that have seemed they would never end, and they always evoke in me this comfortless night of isolation and fear, punishable by hand.

And my bath memory.  Slamming the bathroom door against my father before getting into the bathtub.  (What was I angry about?)  Being yanked out of the bath to be spanked.  Backtracking, saying I slammed the door by mistake.

Why remember these?  These are my only memories of being spanked (or indeed touched) as a child.  Perhaps it was not an era of spanking.  My mother told me years later that my father had spanked her once when she had attempted to spank me for breaking a china figurine.  Once, shortly after my parents had separated, when she had come to visit us in the small town of Tamworth where we lived for a time, my father snapped the aerial off her car as she drove out of the driveway.

Who knows what either of them felt, what either of them suffered?

I know that the fulfillment of my dream to go and live with my mother caught me completely unawares.  It happened the September I was seven, in the early seventies when every day was a winding road.  Indeed, my father and I had made detailed (and I now realize suspiciously unrealistic) plans for the fall.  I would switch schools, and attend the one across the road from where we lived; I would have my own key to the apartment (I loved the idea of being a “latchkey child”) and there would be no further need for “babysitting.”  We would go to a Tommy Hunter concert in Toronto.  It seemed that everything I asked my father for he acquiesced to—and no wonder.  He must have known, as I think I did, deep down, that none of it would ever happen.

Meanwhile, though, we dreamed our dreams and made our plans.  He read to me for hours every night, stories of other lands real and imaginary, of Seven Chinese Brothers with remarkable powers, of the Secret World of Og.  He willingly prepared food to my taste, including Grammy’s rice pudding, which I insisted was supposed to have orange peels in it (I was mistaken) and which, magically, turned out delicious anyway.

My parents never reconciled, of course, though I wasted countless nickels and dimes in fountains,  and I never felt at home with either one of them.  My respite was summer with my grandparents and cousins.

We had free run of all the cottages, of all the beach and the sandbars at low tide; we had each other.  The three “girl cousins” were Callie, Ella, and I; three “boy cousins,” of corresponding ages, were sometimes there as well.  These boys—John, Joe, and Jack—were actually second cousins, and we delighted in figuring out exactly how who was related to whom among the various generations represented at the shore.  Occasionally our numbers were augmented by my Irish cousins, Lola and Tamara, and by the daughters of Lila’s friend Sue, Sorchia and Oceana.  A local girl at the shore, Shirley, was always available for hijinks, as was a lobster fisherman’s son, Mort.  We were all of an age, radiating out from the centre of the cottage community like the many legs of a spider–or of the sun.

For it turned out that Cousin Callie and I were both right: the sun did not have “legs” as such, but it did have rays, in/visible lines of light and and warmth in which we basked all the long days of those eternal summers.

 

 

Deborah Blenkhorn is a poet, essayist, and storyteller living in the Pacific Northwest. Her work fuses memoir and imagination, and has been featured in over three dozen literary magazines and anthologies in Canada, the United States, Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, Australia, Brazil, India, and Indonesia.