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Sparkle (1)
Four arched Victorian windows overlook the park, the view from my second floor bedroom a three dimensional still life hung outside for all of my eighteen years. Now, now, the imagery beyond the decorative windows feels sterile, bereft of the childhood illusion of across the street park as backyard and personal playground.
The old leaded window glass distorts light, and on late winter days like today, when angular beams of sunlight pour through onto the restored hardwood floor, hints of prismatic rainbow crawl in quadruplicate tandem left to right. Once, it enthralled. This afternoon, my compulsion falls not with sunlight but to window, a need to open one of the squeaky weight-balanced sashes and hurl my just consumed lunch out onto the icy sidewalk.
Even three months ago I still loved the windows, the rainbow floor shapes, and the park beyond, holy gathering spot for the Patterson Street children in between the synchronised ritual meals of day. In summer we splashed in the park pond, an annual rite of disregard for city rules, and crawled up under the left stanchion supporting the pedestrian bridge, claimed as our clubhouse. In winter we skated and made snow forts from which we launched snowballs at the rival Moncton Boulevard kids. Or we did, back in our oblivious days of innocence.
What fools we were to buy the vision of life adults painted, to believe we hoodwinked them as we went our own way, asserted our independence, and designed our play parameters. It was controlled freedom, the manipulations beyond our perception. In high school, our use of the park and interests evolved and grew in complexity, centred on amorousness and clandestine nighttime rendezvous away from the conical sprays of streetlamp illumination. We relished our unsanctioned behaviour, giggled over our sly snookery, and believed we controlled our own destiny. Maybe we did; behind the 1930s era Civilian Conservation Corps planted thatch of rowed spruces, I lost my virginity to Brad Thornton. While I retain fond memories of our lovemaking – a first for both of us – things just didn’t jell and we moved on.
Now this townhouse changes hands, my only known home sold from out under me by parents imposing change, a need to get away, a need to…live elsewhere, hidden away from the civilised world, in the process splitting our family like the division of decaying Ancient Rome into East and West, Roman and Byzantine. I’m not sure who wrote the fucking rules they try to follow, but it sure as hell wasn’t me, or anyone with my subset of life experience. They act like my protectors and cheerleaders, glossing over fact in favour of their desire for the impossible ideal and image, as if they can strip away their embarrassment and make themselves feel better by hiding me away, pretending what works for them helps me feel good about myself.
In 1971, we damn well know better than to buy into the 50s or early 60s bullshit. Television, save for reruns, no longer portray married couples like Rob and Laura on the Dick Van Dyke show, where husband and wife slept in twin beds, lest any kid watching think parents actually… you know… copulated. We watched all the idealistic trash, the purported innocence, the packaged two dimensional world absent any hint of sex, while all around us people screwed like rabbits overdosing on rabbit aphrodisiacs, and sometimes it wasn’t husbands screwing wives, it was men and women cheating, men screwing other wives, single women, and women against their will, even daughters and nieces and granddaughters. On the street we learned about the downside of up mine, of the consequences and options.
The Supreme Court has a case before it but delayed ruling, one they call Roe v Wade in the paper, the court wimping out on ruling for a year now allegedly because of another case the justices first wish to decide, not that it matters to me. My parents, those pillars of morality, don’t want me to do…that, legal or otherwise. No, lucky me gets to blow up like someone shoved an air hose up my vagina, my body moulding some new creature for this world I’ll fucking have to kick out against my will, even though I don’t want it in me, either.
Maggie – my therapist – tells me I’m holding in how I feel, a ridiculous thing to claim when I’m being hauled out of my home precisely because I make no effort to hide anything or engage in expected pretence, as if I should
