Anger Management
Chrissy felt warmth, like a fireplace, when her grade 3 teacher, Mrs. McKay, told the class about Hitler, anti-Semitism, Europe, and the Holocaust. Despite the message, Mrs. McKay’s manner said she was not angry. The combination of horrifying message and gentle delivery was new to Chrissy; more familiar were banal messages delivered tersely, like a scratchy towel.
But Chrissy had questions. She hurried home that day ablaze, her winter boots clomping on the sidewalk, just three steps per slab of concrete. She accosted each parent in turn. Did they know? How could they not have told her? How could systems so terrible exist and not follow her to bed at night?
Her parents appeared confounded. How to respond? What to say? “Why would we talk about that?” “It’s fine.” They each hurried away.
Chrissy called after them, “Was Portugal in it?”
Here, her father turned, answering with pride, “Portugal was neutral.”
Neutral? Like the car? Idling? Idle.
Chrissy went to bed feeling in her marrow that people could do worse, had done worse, than she could grasp. She hated herself for it though she didn’t know why.
She knows now though the crux of her horror. A horror that never quite left. She will never do anything to stop it, stop anything. She will only cower in her blankets. On bad nights, this certainty comes back to her while she curls up on the couch counting cobwebs.
***
Local History
Chrissy’s Grade 4 class had embarked on a field trip to Sandon by school bus. An abandoned mining town they were told. Silver. Just three hours one way by bus and ferry, but a field trip nonetheless. The kids’ spirits rose at the possibility of silver, deep dark tunnels, graveyards.
Chrissy wished for answers, though she didn’t know the questions.
The deer at the ferry terminal inspired tall tales. Tales of deer wagging tails. Tales of deer hit by trucks. Tales of deer shot by fathers and uncles.
Standing on the open ferry deck, some hardly able to see over the edge, they saw a fish jump in the Arrow Lakes—really the Columbia River swollen from damming. This fish inspired tales like those of the deer: fish caught, fish bonked, fish red and spawning, landlocked freshwater salmon. These were other children’s stories. Chrissy’s stories were of fathers staking beans and mothers at stoves, talking that sounded like yelling, foreignness.
Back on the bus there was staring out the window. When restlessness set in, they sang babyish songs, in tacit agreement that it was okay to sing because it was too long to be trapped on a bus. They sang John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt, Down by the Bay, 99 bottles of beer. These Chrissy knew, everyone knew.
The bus wound down a small road and out of the forest. “We’re here!” someone shouted.
A few buildings were left standing, now-faded paint applied right to the facades. GENERAL STORE. BLACKSMITH. TACK.
The bus trundled through town for ten minutes. Kids opened windows and hung their arms out, heckling ghosts. The teacher, Mr. Henderson, pointed to an abandoned cart, an explanatory sign, a set of two-by-fours in the distance nailed into a square and propped against the hillside. “A mine shaft,” he said. They saw no opening.
There was no silver, no tunnel, no graveyard, no ghosts. There were no answers.
The bus turned around and drove back out of Sandon never having opened its doors.
Charlie whispered, “We didn’t see Sandon.”
Chrissy nodded as if to herself. The rest of them shrugged, accustomed to lessons they didn’t understand.
“History is boring,” Lisa said.
Everyone agreed.
Fifteen minutes later the bus finally let the kids off at a rest stop overlooking the Columbia, surrounded by white pine, western hemlock, and douglas fir. But Chrissy didn’t know their names then either. She wished she did. Something, anything, that tethered her to this time and place.
***
Catechism
Chrissy went to church, catechism, pancake breakfasts. The pancakes were soft and buttery. Like freedom, like bare feet on the beach. Kids running around in the cinder block hall. Joy.
She learned to colour Jesus and say words like Macabee. There was a story of stone soup. A Samaritan. They came through as glimpses. As if she had stared at a fence for years, or a pew, seeing only birch wood. Wood, wood, wood, wood. Stone soup. Community. Pooling resources. Wood, wood, wood. The Good Samaritan. Kindness when it’s inconvenient. Wood, wood, wood. Wood, wood, wood. Jesus had a beard and peach coloured skin, sometimes a staff, some sheep.
But in all, Chrissy understood. God was good, there were three of Him, and only one, and in that lay the mystery and it was fine. Do your best to be kind and don’t do anything bad. Yelling at people was not necessarily bad. Talking about people, too. Judging, especially overweight people or that man who had stolen chickens, fine. Got it.
She saw too that the Catholics she knew thought Catholicism was better. Protestants were Christians that had lost their way, but better than other believers (never named). One true faith, etc.
She gave church, catechism and God a five out of ten.
By grade eight, still almost none of what happened in church could be understood by staring at the wood waiting for time to pass, but a few more things worked their way through. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Matthew had more to say. Women could be harlots, or the mother of God.
The kids still in catechism at that point, like Chrissy, were in for the long haul: confirmation, becoming official church adults in grade nine to prevent falling into sin and degradation. Catechism became a little less abstract, with the ten commandments, thou shalt not and all that. Taught by Sister Teresa, nobody’s favourite. Stern, like she carried the weight of everyone’s damnation on her modest shoulders. She held her lips primly whenever the priest spoke. She thought she could do it better, it was clear, and perhaps she could have. Her sermons were sterner, certainly. More Old Testament.
Chrissy was fairly sure she’d found a loophole to the ten commandments. She knew sex before marriage was out according to Catholic doctrine, but she couldn’t find the commandment. Was it murder? No. Covetousness? She didn’t see it that way. Stealing your neighbour’s cattle or wife? Nope. So when Sister Teresa finished her expounding on the ten commandments, Chrissy asked, “But there’s no commandment against sex before marriage?”
The class froze. Even the badass kid’s eyes widened. Sister Teresa’s face pinked up before she said, “No. The commandment is ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’” Chrissy nodded. Yes, and? Sister Teresa sighed, seeing Chrissy was not satisfied. “Sex outside of marriage is adultery.” She looked tempted to list the other things that adultery captured but she refrained.
There were no loopholes. The rules were what they were, at least for her.
***
Self-Defence
The girls took turns sitting at an improvised bus stop in the high school cafeteria. “It’s a learning opportunity,” one guest instructor said. She started off chatty. “Hey, honey. What are you doing out tonight?”
The boys were in a different room; they needed a different sort of training. Courtney whispered to Chrissy, “I heard they’re teaching the boys to cry.” Chrissy’s eyes widened and goosebumps rose on her arms. The possibility warmed her belly though she couldn’t say why.
The girl’s topic was how to avoid rape. Nothing they needed to discuss with boys.
***
When it was her turn, Bethany responded to the instructor-predator with “Fuck off.”
The instructor said, “Pause,” and made a “T” with their hands. “Remember, Bethany, this is no place for your inner bitch. Put your bitch back.” Bitches make them angry, they were told. And you don’t want them angry. The instructors said “bitch” a lot.
Later, the instructor-creep walked up to Michelle and said, “You are coming home with me.”
Michelle whispered no and slid away on the bench.
“No, Michelle,” the other instructor stepped in. “Put your inner baby to bed. Baby doesn’t belong here. You will take care of this.”
Michelle nodded. “Sorry.”
“What do we say about ‘sorry’?” the first instructor asked.
A chorus of girls parroting “snip, snip” filled the room. There was a second topic: apologies. They were told to “Snip those sorries.” Snip, snip. “Don’t apologize unless you have something to apologize for. Don’t apologize for breathing.”
“Okay, Michelle. Let’s try this again. Put baby to bed and keep your bitch back.
Chrissy heard the facilitators weren’t invited back the next year.
***
They stopped after the twelfth girl, Kelly. Thank God. Kelly followed the expected formula: say “no” three times. Assertively. Do not shrink back. Do not let your inner baby out. Do not get angry. Do not show him your bitch. Supposedly after the third “no” the predator would walk away with a shrug, not feeling enraged, emboldened, or emasculated.
Chrissy was more likely to run like hell.
***
Charm School
The locker-lined hallway was desperately orange, a tinge Chrissy hated all five years she spent in high school. A classroom door was ajar, but she stayed focused on the bathroom door at the end of the empty hall. Her footsteps echoed as she walked. Alone. Chrissy knew he was watching, a boy who survived by acting cocky. Or so she thought. Maybe it was genuine.
He craned his neck to appraise her. What big insight would he share?
Only a stage-whispered “nice tits,” it turned out.
Chrissy quickened her pace as her stomach turned over.
She knew she was lucky. Some girls her age had pennies thrown at them in the main foyer. A girl was once forced to wear a hand-painted sign: “I suck the big one, ask me I’ll show you.” Chrissy considered correcting the punctuation, but not removing the sign.
In the bathroom stall, the words reverberated in Chrissy’s head. nice tits. nice tits. nice tits.
She closed her eyes and crowded them out by reciting from memory the messages etched into the bathroom stall. Dylan and Becka 4ever. 4 a good time call 5309. Peace. Joanna’s got fat tits. Tara Tiny Tits. Tits ‘r Us.
How Chrissy hated that word.
That was the day she perfected her slouch.
***
Family Planning
One gym teacher, Mr. Thomas, couldn’t hear “Sex-ed” without blushing. The other, Mr. Wale, doled out birth control advice to boys in preparation for the public health nurse presentation. He said, “After kids, get a vasectomy so you can do it like bunnies.”
At fourteen, Chrissy vowed she would only have sex with a condom and birth control. On guard. Chrissy never wanted to be a mother. Not that she was likely to have sex in the next decade. The only guy who sought her gaze was Jason, chin held high like an over-confident goat (because at fourteen, he had more facial hair than most of the guys in grade twelve).
But the summer after grade ten, Chrissy did manage to have sex. More than once, with her boyfriend. He actually seemed to like her. He looked at her with delight in his eyes. She pinched herself from time to time.
Terrified of gonorrhea, chlamydia, hepatitis, and herpes, Chrissy faithfully used condoms, but her terror of pregnancy—the look on her parents’ face—hadn’t been enough to face the complicated embarrassment of making a doctor’s appointment. Her family doc was a known gabber. And doctors were never around at midnight in her boyfriend’s car.
After three months, her body sent up a flare. She felt off. Different. And finally, panicked.
Sure that her fate was already sealed, she tried the few inadvisable things she could think of: pressing her abdomen against her desk and hinging at the waist; pushing a rolling pin around the soft diamond of flesh between ribs, hip and pubic bones; and sitting in the hot tub at the pool for an hour, dodging the lifeguards’ looks.
A couple days later her period came. More painful than usual. Extreme. She made an appointment with a brand-new doctor.
***
Anger Management 2
Chrissy thought Jolene, a girl in her grade 2 class, was rich. Her eyes widened at the riches. And fun.
Jolene’s mom picked her up from school once, in a shiny black coupe with tinted windows. That’s what did it for Chrissy: rich. The Cher blasted from the door when it opened to let Jolene and her sister Becky in. Chrissy caught only a glimpse of the mother’s youth and flowing locks before the door closed behind Jolene. Money, youth, fun. The charmed life Jolene must have led.
Another time, it was Fine Young Cannibals. “She Drives me Crazy” sounded incredible trumpeting from the open windows as they pulled out of the parking lot. Chrissy watched until she couldn’t see the car anymore, the sound fading.
The first time Jolene went to Chrissy’s house, they listened to a Concrete Blonde tape Jolene had brought, invented dance moves. As they sat in their grand finale pose, feet in the air, Chrissy was struck by Jolene’s mangy socks, hardly white at all. They were much like any kids’ socks, kids whose parents weren’t convinced that bleach was the nectar of God. But the contrast for Jolene was stark, between those socks and that gleaming coupe.
When they were too tired to dance, they memorized lyrics, testing each other. Their fate as friends was sealed.
Jolene’s mother worked for a landscaper it turned out. She was indeed young, under 30. She did push ups for fun and sang to the Red Hot Chili Peppers when she cleaned. Chrissy loved being at their house, full of puppies, plants, dirt and childhood. Their toaster even cooked the perfect slice, every single time. Her parents’ requirement that she wear dark socks to Jolene’s house hardly dampened Chrissy’s mood.
Chrissy understood over time, the same old clothes, worn carpets, drafty windows. And the car was just a car. It gleamed two days a year, like every other car in town.
In grade 4, after a solid hour of dancing to New Kids on the Block, they lay on the floor of Chrissy’s room. Damp, smiling. Chrissy asked, “Want to play tomorrow?”
Jolene shook her head from side to side. “I can’t.” But she gave no reason.
Chrissy propped herself up on one elbow. “Why?”
Jolene stilled and stared at the ceiling. “I have to see my father.”
Her father? Here? She had a dad? A father?
“Every June when school’s done. He likes to check in,” she said. “He lives by the river.”
Chrissy was baffled for days. Kids could have dogs and music and joyful moms and still not be safe, still have a dad who treated them like bad workers on report card day.
Chrissy hated that man she’d never met. A dad who waited until his new family was away to bestow this yearly blessing, of his time and his judgment, on his first children.
Every year Jolene’s anger grew, until as a teenager she was expelled from school after spray painting “fucking die” across the floor to ceiling windows of the school entryway. Chrissy did nothing. Said nothing. Chrissy hardly recognized Jolene with her life in shards, like someone had taken keys to the CDs that played the soundtrack of her happiness, and they just skipped, skipped, skipped, over the same two bars of a Nine Inch Nails song.
***
Charm School 2
Chrissy had dodged all sorts of heartache in life, having been desired almost exclusively by social pariahs. And it was twisted to feel overlooked when her friends attracted wolf whistles, phone numbers, and pick up lines that made her squeamish. It wasn’t much to miss out on.
But it meant something. The silence. Something bad. About her weight, or her skin or her ass. And that stung anyway. And it stung that it stung.
Chrissy’s friends and her were giddy in each other’s company, like teenagers, bouncing down the sidewalk from the restaurant to the ice cream shop, before heading to Kirsten’s living room, where the dance floor would be spacious and the tunes handpicked.
They didn’t hear the jeep crawling alongside them, laughing as they were. “Hey!” he called, impatience in his voice. They all turned. He was hanging out the passenger window with a goofy smile and brown hair flopped over one eye, a beer can in his hand, college aged.
“Hey, Red!” This meant it was Heather’s turn to be charmed. “Does the carpet match the drapes?”
Being old pros, most of her friends flapped their hands at him in dismissal and kept walking. Kirsten flipped him the bird. Heather’s neck likely reddened, but she had heard worse, and they were all riding so high, visions of waffle cones drawing them along.
Yet Chrissy wasn’t ready to move on.
Every instance of pathetic catcalling, every bad line delivered to her friends, and all the anger she held for being less worthy of men’s gaze, boiled in her like a vat of cheap molten cheese, until it spilled over, messy and burning.
If her friends had noticed, they would have stopped Chrissy, told her to save her breath for someone creative. The guy was still yelling “Hey!” and slapping the door panel at his wit, as cars bypassed the jeep, honking.
“Hey, you!” she said. “Pathetic donkey fart.” Against her will, her arms punctuated every phrase. “Have a thing for red heads, do you? Ya? And their pubic hair? Real swift.” Chrissy’s friends were rushing toward her. She had only seconds before they would dutifully pull her away. “Be original!”
His mouth twisted, apparently about to retort, but she spoke over him. “Your witless tongue can’t make up for your shrivelled—”
And just like that, Kristen’s hand was clapped over her mouth. She put Chrissy in a quasi-headlock and whispered, “Most obvious insult on the planet, Chris. As bad as him.” Two of them clutched her wrists and another urged her along from behind.
Jen flashed her steel blue eyes at the jeep and ended the exchange, like a no-nonsense mom, “You sound like an idiot.”
The guy retreated into the jeep, whipped the empty beer can at the sidewalk, and yelled to his friend, “Let’s go, already!”
***
That night on Kirsten’s living room dance floor, Chrissy and her friends invented new moves inspired by the man they christened the Interior Decorator. Their favourite moves were “the beer can,” a sideways whip of the hand, and “the donkey fart,” executed by rubbing your butt against someone else’s. They trotted those moves out all the time. But the sting remained, rubbing elbows with Chrissy’s self-loathing.
Family Planning 2
How little Chrissy knew about her own body, even in her thirties. About what it could do, how it worked. How her nipples could in fact release milk, though no openings were apparent. How her body could expel an enormous child without intervention, even though her mother’s body could not. How labour did not end with delivery of the child, but of the placenta, which could be eaten or incinerated as per the mother’s whim. How refreshing.
How little she knew about the body’s gestational glitches: false labour, pregnancy nose, diabetes, skin discolouration, mood disorders, poor placental placement, astronomical sex drive, and the accidental cleaving of the pubic bone, making it near impossible to walk or turn in bed.
How little she knew when they let her leave the birthing centre the next day with a new human being under her charge. Not so much as a receipt to prove she was authorized. How fortunate she was. How much it felt like theft. Heresy. Like she was taking a mythical creature from its sacred lands to be hers forever.
Which, she supposed, is exactly what it was.
***
Self-Defence 2
Chrissy has always feared known men more than unknown ones. Maybe because of the cousin who had pushed her to say forbidden things when she was eight. Maybe it was the friend’s brother who had fought to yank her shirt off when she was eleven, only stopping when an adult called them. Maybe it was the way a guy could sit beside her at a bush party, chatting, drunk. Like a friend. Above board. Before staring at her, gazing down at the zipper of his jeans, and staring at her again, raising his eyebrows.
Chrissy wishes she could be more like Kate, who would shrug and move on. Or like Scarlet. Even as a kid, Scarlet would have just screamed and punched a guy in the face. Told the world. Not given a shit who heard her.
But her best defence is avoidance. Tried, tested, and true. If someone sticks around long enough to gain her trust, and not her fear, someone kind and patient, they have fun for a while.
And if things get serious, avoidance is her best defence for that, too. She shows them the good, but once it gets to the bad and the ugly, it is time to move on. Say no three times, firmly. Nobody needs to see the baby or the bitch. A girl can’t be too careful.
***
Local History 2
First, she felt outrage. Twenty years old. Far too late to learn in casual conversation that Japanese Canadians had been forced into camps during World War II. Even though one internment camp, now a National Historic Site, was only a stone’s throw from her hometown. It was on the way to Sandon. The Silver City that had been so important to her teachers. Not a mention of the camp. She felt stupid.
But the learning didn’t sink in. There was too much of it then, with school and friends and tv. It didn’t last. It may as well have happened a thousand years ago. On Pluto.
Until years later she read “Obasan” by Joy Kagawa. The book taught her of children, what they bear of their parents. And it taught her, too, of the internment. Then it made her see. That old pillar of Catholicism, shame, reared up.
Canadians stripped of their homes, communities, businesses and assets. Held captive. Not that different from Germany in the mid-thirties. Not that different.
A week later, she remembered the old general store. The clerk who had handed out five-cent candies like they were treasures. All those Japanese families in the isolated region. Far longer than her own family had been. She had never wondered why. Her arm shook as she filled the kettle for tea.
Now, Chrissy felt stunned. Her first friend’s smile flooded her memory. A Japanese Canadian neighbour. Mary with the blue shoes. They had lived in each other’s yards, slipping through the fence. Mary’s grandparents had gardened and tended the home while her parents worked. Mary and Chrissy would eavesdrop on their Japanese and imagine the conversations. “I love you, my dear.” “Psh. Your farts stink like cheese.” Until they would laugh and get caught, then ask for fried tofu and chocolate chip cookies.
Chrissy’s shame flooded anew, counting every year she hadn’t thought of Mary.
***
Catechism 2
Grade 9 was probably when Chrissy started scoring church-catechism-God score to a one or two out of ten. She tallied the sins of the church, like St. Peter for the dead hoping to reach heaven.
Sin number one: Sister Teresa said Marie didn’t go to church enough. Marie’s face had fallen.
Sin number two: the bishop in Kamloops who went on about all those confused Christians following the wrong God.
Sin number three was rather big, long-lasting and admittedly ancient: the Crusades. Murder, plunder, empire building. Dink measuring contests, Chrissy assumed, though that’s not what the social studies textbook called it. This was no missionary excursion. Again, Chrissy went home mortified.
“Mom, do you know what they did in the name of God?”
Her mom set her shoulders and raised an eyebrow, ready to douse the flames.
“Why does nobody talk about the Crusades?”
Her mom gave a nod, appearing confident that she knew her enemy and could dispatch it. “It was a long time ago. Different from today.”
“But no God would want that.”
“The church isn’t its sinners. Don’t blame God for the sins of his people.”
But the church was God on earth, Chrissy had been told.
***
At some point, Chrissy stopped counting sins. She slept in on Sundays, avoiding her parents’ knocks.
Only later Chrissy saw she’d taken a rather black and white approach to these matters. And perhaps, perhaps, the church just hadn’t resonated. Perhaps its sins were a self-righteous excuse for her wayward soul.
But at 30, she sat at a Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearing, to bear witness, or to relieve her own Catholic guilt, listening as Christian leaders acknowledged wrongs against Indigenous children. The room was heavy with collective catharsis, direct and vicarious.
The Catholic official was last to speak. Hundreds of people sat, not breathing, both on stage and in the crowd. It was a decade before the Pope’s tepid apology. She felt five again, nauseated like when her parents discovered her stolen pack of gum. Her face flushed.
From the first sentence, the official minced words, twisted his tongue to speak of the mixed blessing residential schools had been, of literacy and opportunity.
They’d learned nothing. Catholics, colonizers had learned nothing.
Her inaction had caused harm. Her avoidance. Her silence.
Theirs had caused worse.
She listened as Indigenous voices called out their truths, the truth, and drowned out the official.
This, finally, was an education.
***
Self-Help
Chrissy has never called out a truth. Never stated what she needs. Doesn’t even know what she fears. Still. And this too, this, is an education.
No more counting cobwebs. She is past denial. Aware of her ignorance. Tired of her inaction.
Chrissy writes letters, reads books, accepts truths. Those things she can do.