Thea Bowering is the author of Jeanne's Monologue, parts of which appeared recently in Matrix magazine.
"Fortress Kerrisdale" Copyright © 2002 Thea Bowering
Fortress Kerrisdale
I was a kid who grew up alone in a house full of furniture— like the other kids in my neighbourhood. The show I watched on TV had a chicken named Rusty who lived in a greasy cow-skin bag hung on the wall. He played the piccolo. His friend, the Giraffe, with an enormously ranging Adam’s apple, you can imagine, swung his long neck cool-like into the frame of a pointy window when whistled at; he played the saxophone. And the Friendly Giant's hand came down at the beginning and end of every show and rearranged an empty room full of furniture; moved things closer together and then further apart. Like red curtains in a play. It was particularly concerned with a chair for two to cuddle up in by the fire. This cuddling seemed like something only the children in England, in Nursery Rhymes, had time to do. Limbs pulled up with white socks turned once, and autumnal hair red or blonde, sketched and windblown. Our back lanes were a bit like that, rambly, you could collect flowers in them, reach into backyards through white picket fences.
There was only one of me. And my friends also had empty homes with empty rooms and empty floors and empty furniture that rested squarely, in rectangles in the seventies, and in harmony with the carpet and walls. Sometimes the carpet continued in pictures on the walls, or was woven into plant hangers. And much about being in Kerrisdale seemed like the empty parlour of the Friendly Giant where lucky invisible children were about to arrive. We could play whatever we wanted in our homes; our parents never seemed to be there. Sometimes we played "The Fonz"; a girl would sit on another girl's lap and kiss her, and the first girl would say "A-a-a-a-a-e". Then she would hit some furniture, and another girl would press play on the tape deck; and it was like the music, "Happy Days", came on by magic like it did with Fonzie. We thought of our homes as ours. We didn't know about money; we knew about using space, which we did, much more than our parents did, with all the spaces in out homes, including the laundry shoots and the closets.
Yes, our neighbourhood was inside like inside the friendly hole when the drawbridge of the Friendly Giant's castle came down and went up again. The school was ours like our homes were; all the adults left at 3. We had a small court of boys and girls who played on the grounds of a small school on a Hill. There were our tasks, lessons, and the theatre we put on for each other in the empty auditorium. Magazines to teach us about men and women were found wet from rain under the bushes. In one game, we identified each other in the dark by groping through a maze, petticoats, the folded curtains of the stage. Young Aaron did stand-up with stray props that hadn't been locked up in the ball room. Us two girls huddled in the middle of the floor, gasping and clapping. He was a genius of 'theatre of the absurd'.
There were many trees on the grounds to the West. We expected trees. Did not know that trees belonged to this neighbourhood and that some schoolyards had no trees at all. We expected trees around us, thought of them as part of the world, as natural to it, that one lived at least part of the time in the forest. We thought they had always been there, cleared ( and not planted, as they were) with a plan. There was a line of five birches; you could crouch in one of them with a girlfriend and put letters into a hollow knot at the crutch of the branches. There was a grove of cedars. Half a dozen girls swept together under them with long cedar branches, clearing a dry and perfect floor. Why did we do this. The cedar smelt good and was perfect for the work. We knew what we were doing, that we lived at least part of the time in the forest and had a strong desire to clear a space in it.
It did not make much sense that the Giant's parlour looked British while the rest of his castle was clearly medieval. This is what we thought when we rushed from our Parents' living-rooms to the schoolyard where there was a castle wall: a roundabout for cars, but really a curved and crude balcony, complete with a tower and a winding stairwell down. This is where we hid what we had plundered from the cake walk. Over the edge was a slope of brambles that the boys would leap into on their way to War. It went down to the sea, which you could not see was the high-school-next-door's loading dock—until the year before you left. The High school you would go to next, for now, another country where you supposed a different race of people lived. On the west side of the hill, at the bottom, was a cement wall you always stopped just short of when you went down on a plastic bag, head first, over the driveway and into the snow.
To the East was an apocalyptic war zone. A Battlefield made up of three gravel playing fields: The Big Adventure, the Little Adventure, and the third was nameless. These lay beyond a deep but empty concrete dam. You could walk down the stairs cut into the concrete and barely make out the ascending stairs far at the other end. No one quite knew what to do with this space. This was the main place the boys played. They zigzagged across the brutal basin; dropped into it from above, bringing toy guns, and small hard balls that smashed off the walls. The girls would play jumping rope games, with yards of sewing elastic, close to the wall.
We were fairly safe. One afternoon, a man wandered onto the grounds with his penis hanging in a bottle and a polaroid of a woman tied up and he asked Liza and Karen and Elizabeth if they had seen his wife. How strange, they told us later, with their hands to their mouths in pretend. It was strange we agreed. Sometimes we would hang from the monkey bars and do cartwheels and let our shirts come up a bit, but this was for the boys. There was also Joy's dog, the neighbourhood dog we called "the humping dog" because if it got near you it would try to hump you. Now this was scary, as it chased you around on the gravel, nowhere to go.
The boys saw us as things to hump too. They would draw pictures with a long stick in the gravel. Pointed out the plays, like football. We took note, in a huddle, studied the strategies over their shoulders. One time everything broke loose. The boys were on us all at once in the Big Adventure and we were down in the gravel, our tight grade seven jeans yanked open. Our underwear and flat pelvises suddenly looked different to us. Mr. Worth came out and whacked them off us with the walking stick he used to take us on long strolls about the neighbourhood. Who knows where this idea came from, that Romantic English walking thing; but the mighty lawns of Kerrisdale were very green and pastoral. The boys lined up behind as Mr. Worth strolled, animated with his cane moving out in front as though he could beat the rhythm of a sonnet into us. And as they too strolled, the boys would casually moon us; we loved the word moon—they taught us others: like frigid and wang, but this was the one we loved. And we were in awe of their pale and luminous bums walking along. Every time we giggled, Mr. Worth would turn around, enraged and humiliated. We felt sorry for him, not being one of us.
We played another not-knowing game, looking into the girls' bathroom mirror. One person stood in the foreground and (with exaggerated gestures) went on about how nothing-ever-happens in her neighbourhood. Meanwhile, in the background other girls would be: 1. pretending to be murdered or having sex 2. pretending to be celebrities or 3. falling from the sky. But we were not exclusive; we loved the boys and played not-knowing games with them too. Made them stand in a row on the hill with their eyes closed and their lips soft as we went along and kissed them, or not.
Sometimes one would hit one of us in the stomach, or on the head with his lunchkit; but that was because you'd said something mean or had punched him first. And a blow to the stomach was interesting to a young girl who wondered how boys felt when they fought each other.
The only real betrayal was when they spray-painted the girls' fort in the Old Man's hedge in Shaughnessy. Even the toilet paper— a florescent green to mock the dark green hollow we'd found and built in. After that, we were forced to dig shallow holes and lay sticks and leaves across. We thought this would work. But they got stomped over with boys' big angry sneakers and had no effect at all: not one twisted-ankled boy caught wounded or afraid to return. We gave up the fort. And they didn't take it over.
Mr. Stark, the new principle with white hair and lips that snarled and gleamed when he conducted, tried to use music to tame us, bring us together, and make our school more presentable for parent/teacher nights. "Rest Position" he would hiss, and all our recorders would stand upright in our laps and close to our chests. He was determined to reach grandeur in the Vancouver school system through the musical. Elizabeth hung from a hook for him. From one high corner of the auditorium, in a crinoline dress, she lurched down diagonally over the parents' upturned heads and onto the stage. Then she was unhooked, and had to be a hunchback Mary Poppins for the first few numbers.
The musical that really put Mr. Stark on the map was one he wrote called "EarthSong". It was only fair that every child came onto the stage at the end to sing: Sing this Earth song sing this space song/ this world can be filled with joy! to the tune of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy"; no one told us this was Beethoven's song, though the tune did sound familiar. Fill the earth with sounds of music/ let this world know you belong. Every heart will fill with gladness/this world will be filled with joy. On the walls around the auditorium, in rainbow colours, were the traced outlines of every kid's body in various, caught-by-surprise shapes. Some of us had already learned somewhere about post apocalyptic shadows— what would remain of people caught in their last gesture.
The best performances, however, were always more spontaneous-like and often behind the ice rink in back of McDonald's. It was always snowing, a dream, because there were always mounds of snow from the Zamboni. The boys would make their ice balls; and they would be more or less compact when they hurled them at us— depending on the boy. We threw back, but our aims were unpracticed and usually hap-hazard. They looked nonchalantly the other way, reached out, and exploded our snowballs to fine dust over their heads with their mitts. This made us even more desperate and desirous, for precision.
It was in back of this arena that Michael found a frozen cat in the dumpster. We didn't know where Michael came from. Way on the other side of town, or perhaps the States. He stayed a number of months and then was gone. He was tall like an adult and really thin. He had dark, dirty blue jeans that hung from his hips, and a jean jacket, short in the cuffs. Never had anyone dressed in both dark blue jeans and a jean jacket before. It meant something; something had happened wherever he was before.
It was late in the day and only two of us were left, sitting where the Zamboni had just dumped some snow; and Michael said look what I found and called us over to the dumpster and we saw a frozen black and white cat. We wondered, innocently enough, how it had gotten stuck there; or had it been a kitten there and grown up eating McDonald's trash. We went to sit back down. Michael kept teasing and we shook our heads, but he took the cat out of the dumpster and began swinging it over his head by the tail, telling long narrative jokes while the frozen cat grimaced in its last hunting position. We sat on the curb and laughed and laughed; it was the most horrible and hilarious thing. Michael's pale face was shiny and he looked handsome and cavalier when he saw us laughing.
There was another story that became lore at our school. Lilly had a birthday party, though no one ever played with her seriously. (because she wore private school clothes even though we weren't a private school, only spoke inaudibly, laughed uncontrollably with her big round shoulders shrugging, and blew her hands off delicately if you touched her) The kids who went were ushered by her dad into a dinning-room with a big round oak table. In the centre was one Big Mac; and everyone just stood around not knowing what to do.
It's because her dad's Chinese, Liza said.
Soon after, we took Lilly to Elizabeth's, across the street from the school, and put Elizabeth's stepmother's blue eye shadow on her. We kept smoothing her arms down to her sides as we tried to curl her hair. We were surprised how it slipped right out of the iron. We made her pretty, and took her out to the boys who were all there, playing a game with a small hard ball. We walked her back and forth and said: "don't you think Lilly's pretty, don't you think she's pretty now, don't you?" Nobody in our class compared boob sizes or noticed who was first to get a bra or period. Adrian and Tom stopped with their hands back (frowning and ready to throw) and wondered what we wanted.
No one in our class became a scientist. Rather, we knew how to play the ukulele and square dance and wondered who the people were that we imitated by doing this. Way in the middle of the country, Way down South? In our science classes we drew inventions of the future. Lilly made an egg-shaped house that floated in space. We all made fun of her because the only thing special about it was that it floated in space. A lot of us have since said: "what ever happened to Lilly?" and someone saw her a couple years ago leaping off a bus in red plastic cowboy boots.
Now I have my chin on a table, like when I was waiting and watching for all the yellow chicks to hatch in a fuzzy lonely bundle under the warm bulb of the incubator. This was a privilege that came after having many gold stars on your compositions; and Charlotte, who looked like snow white, was also there. She played piano and was always already in the room they brought you to when you had excelled and could be separated from the rest. Carla was never anywhere we saw, had her own room; the tall blind black girl who was "it", circled round and round a beam, hugging it with one arm and lunging out, crying, to catch you with her big hand. We stopped just short of her, and noticed this and were also surprised that she won medals somewhere for skiing and jumping horses.
I went often to the corner cafe in the neighbourhood where I lived. That's as far as I went by myself. I used to order tiger ice-cream milkshakes and imagine it was a tiger blended. A tiger milkshake is grey, and I hoped to be noted as a little blonde girl drinking a grey milkshake. Young women, who went to my school as little girls, are on the boulevard. They are dressed like their mothers, have kids hanging on them, and are picking through the expensive dresses of a sidewalk sale. Hatred and dreaminess are in the air. Now the corner cafe is a Tuscan Italian coffee place that we all love; there are paintings of enormous tulips, coming out like gore from the walls, and you can buy them. A woman to the right is talking to her child in a gigantic stroller like he is a puppy. On the other side is a man's healthy and tanned hand, serene; A pale blue cuff, a white gold cuff-link, the kinds that do not allow you to turn to see a face. There is golden hair like a boy's on the fingers, and it's suspended above the table, not quite touching anything; it captivates the whole scene and is infinitely patient.
Everything is moving slowly along 41st Ave.— in the shape of pills, and spacecraft— set against the empire of widows. Black walking canes with gold handles. They know all about it, and go like bent fierce knights to get their British paperbacks that are in at the longstanding local bookstore. There is only one bum in Kerrisdale which makes him famous. He stands in old clothes and a rope around his waist at the door of the coffee place, welcoming the youths returning to their imports with: "Hi, did you miss me?" The young mother next to me says to another mother that he should get a suit. Her kid's name is Morely. They turn their infants in their monster strollers toward each other, so that they can stare at each other.
Oh it's not as upsetting as this. Really, it's nice— you recognize the same collie by its reds leash, tied and waiting outside the coffee shop, the drugstore, the bank— which is comforting. And there is a miniature Ferris wheel, a calypso band; banners that say "Kerrisdale Days" and flower baskets dripping gardens from every light post.
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Author's Note: In "Fortress Kerrisdale," I wanted to pay attention to the initial impressions children have that draw them into 'fortressed' racist, sexist and elitist ideologies. I know language isn't neutral, but I wanted to present these impressions through language that is void of emotion or an obvious political stance because I wanted to mimic the very first encounters kids have with these governing ideologies -- they are intense but kids have no language to confront them with. Barely know how to feel them. Also I wanted to show how these childhood impressions trail into adulthood.