I’ve been working like a hungry little puppy. They book everyone’s schedule for full-time, but a lot of the kids want to take days off for fun stuff and rather than switching shifts they usually just ask me to cover theirs. So it’s normal for me to work seven days a week, maybe even with a double-shift in there if they really beg hard. I take basically every shift I can get because I am not capable of turning down work, and because -since the job is outside- if it rains for a few days all our shifts get called off.
Things at the house are going really well. I’m surprised; given that it’s basically a random bunch of kids thrown together with absolutely no adult supervision. Janet’s little ‘romance’ with John McRae is floundering in a weird state of limbo, but she just can’t seem to stop talking about him regardless. I find it tiresome because I can see he’s just playing her, but she seems to think that SHE is the player and won’t give up. Oh well, something for her to do I guess. None of these other kids have jobs so maybe they need something to occupy their minds. I don’t know. I’m reaffirmed in my lack of romantic involvement with any of them; just as I found the boys in my classes at school childish and uninspired, I don’t find any of these boys attractive. I’m glad about that though because when it comes time to sleep I dont’ have to put up with someone’s clumsy fumblings in the dark.
I’m still completely enamoured of this boy at work yet he continues to elude me. I’m not forward at all so it’s hard for me to indicate that I’m interested romantically. It’s not that I’m particularly shy, I have no problem seeking him out for a chat and some mild flirtation; I’m just not one of those girls that can just come out and say they like someone, or that ask the guy out. I think I’d die of embarrassement if I tried that! So I just keep going on in my semi-subtle way, and hope there’s a time when I meet him in a non-work environment so I can make my feelings more plain. Probably when I’m older I’ll get better at this.
I worked the day shift today so I’m meeting Janet at her house. She plans to raid her parents’ fridge, from what I hear those guys have been living on peanut butter sandwiches. Luckily I get a staff meal for every shift; usually I try to order something big like a burger and fries or some seafood pasta. I’m in good with the kitchen staff so they load up my plate too. Last year we used to be able to order as much dessert as we wanted. A nice sugar fix after a hard day of running around in the hot sun. But there ended up being countless plates of half-eaten cheesecake with raspberry sauce or the famous chocolate decadence cake in the cash-out area every day so management nixed that. We do get a staff beer though. Well, those over 19 do. Sometimes someone sneaks me one, or a glass of wine, but not often because we could get busted for that.
We have to hang out at Janet’s house for a while until she can eat and to wait for Johnna. I’d kill for a beer, but I guess I can wait a few hours. Janet fills me in on the latest gossip and goings-on at the house.
"We’re trying to figure out how to get Chris to understand we don’t want him there.”
She’s putting on her makeup so we’re standing in the bathroom. I’m drinking a juice and have to force myself to stop thinking about getting some vodka in it.
“Why? He’s funny man. I had this total wacky conversation with him the other day. He was talking some crazy shit about aliens . . . as if they were real. I couldn’t understand almost a word of what he was trying to say, but it was hilarious. I was so drunk.” I suck on my orange juice as thoughts of rum waft through my head.
Janet is not amused. “Well, he’s pissing everyone off because he goes on these tirades right when we’re all starting to relax.”
“That’s why I like him, it’s entertaining!” Sometimes Janet has no sense of humour.
“And yesterday he was bugging us all day. Like he was a spoiled child and we were his parents or something,” she scowls while applying her mascara.
“What do you mean, what was he doing?” Sometimes these kids are too demanding, they don’t accept people for who they are.
“It’s like he needs attention all the time. We were talking with Rangae in the kitchen about something personal and the guys were just hanging out on the couch. Chris kept wandering back and forth like a lost puppy and wouldn’t let anyone talk. We told him to go away but he just got louder and more obnoxious.”
I still don’t see the problem, all of us have our obnoxious moments. I pissed off Trevor the other day because I was hassling him about the way he treats his younger brother.
“Then later in the night we were all talking in the kitchen and he had this kind of fit! It was like he was faking an epileptic seizure or something.”
“You guys want to kick him out just for that??” It’s not funny but it’s hardly a punishable offense.
“His face was in the dog food bowl.”
“Yuck! Still though . . .” “You don’t understand Keta.” Janet tends to get a bit short-tempered with me sometimes. I guess my special brand of cluelessness gets frustrating for her. I try to catch on more quickly.
“He was basically demanding attention. I mean, we have to be able to talk together about stuff without having someone acting like a five year old.”
“That’s true. What happened when you told him to stop?”
I’m really uncomfortable with the idea of turfing someone from the house for anything less than outright stealing or something equally important. We’re supposed to be sticking together. I know Chris wasn’t part of the original crowd but he is a friend of Johnny Bridal’s. It just sounds to me like they want to get rid of him because he’s not cool enough, or popular enough or something and I don’t like that one bit.
“He was laughing, it was obvious that there was nothing wrong with him. We started ignoring him, and he just lay there with his face beside the dog dish for a while then he got up and was normal again.” Janet’s really pouting so I can tell she’s very displeased.
Sometimes I can’t tell if she’s speaking her own mind or if she’s just going along with the crowd. I’m getting the feeling that it’s the guys that lost patience with Chris and Janet’s just going along because she wants to score points so that when she wants something to change at the house they will go along with her. Those are exactly the kinds of tactics that I suck at; I either don’t give a shit so ignore the manoeuvering or I have my total own trip that I’m on and no one can change my mind no matter what they say. I never like create alliances or trade favours. Which is exactly why I end up being the last to know when decisions are being made. Then, sometimes, I bring up the only salient point to an issue which -of course- no one else has thought of because they’re all madly working out ways to one-up each other. Sometimes it’s too late, other times it launches the whole discussion all over again.
“I don’t think that’s so bad, all of us get goofy sometimes! Look at Kelly.” We both laugh.
Kelly lives down in False Creek, he doesn’t stay up at the house with us often because his own dad is away alot so he can bascially do whatever he wants. He’s started some job that he needs to wake up at 6:00am for, so he asked us to stop by on our nighttime travels. About 13 of us ended up there at 5:30am or so, all drunken and rowdy having wandered the streets and hung out at the beach all night. But he wouldn’t wake up! I mean he woke up to let us in then slid right back into bed again. We were all wired and crazy, playing music loud on his stereo, bouncing off the walls, shouting and carrying on. And there he is just sleeping away. I started to think something was wrong with him when his alarm went off. He SHOT up, standing on his bed and started ranting away about ‘good morning’ or some such thing. It was weird to me; like he was putting on a show or something. He didn’t have a shirt on, just his shorts, and Kevin kept yelling from across the room, “Kelly! I can see your short and curlies” and bursting into laughter. That, to me, was way more freaky than how Janet was describing Chris. But because it was Kelly and he’s cool and everyone loves him it was OK.
“Well, it’s not the same and the others think so too so we’re going to talk about it later.” I roll my eyes. Yeah ok you guys, you just want to tell everyone how to be.
Janet is finally ready, Johnna already called that she’s on her way. I’ll be drinking beer in less than an hour, not a moment too soon!
. . . .
I’ve been home for about an hour in the last week and a half! Just to take a long soaker-shower, maybe eat something, and put another three days worth of clothes into my pack. I’m usually during the day time when my friends aren’t doing anything in particular, so my parents are never home. I know they are still not pleased about my arrangement but I’m really not concerned about it. With no car there’s nothing else I can do, and they’re certainly not going to drive me!
Now I’m headed up to Bill Ritchie’s house, he thinks he can arrange a ride back down to Johnny Bridal’s. It’s a nice sunny day and I’m feeling all jaunty. Probably it’s from lack of sleep -they were making fun of me at work the other day for being a little slow on the uptake- but I’ve really been enjoying this independence.
The past year has been a TOTAL drag because my parents are on this home-rebuilding kick. They buy a property, we move in, then WHILE WE LIVE THERE they gut and upgrade it. Once it’s all pretty and nice they sell it and we have to move again. In the four years that we’ve lived in Vancouver we’ve lived at four different addresses and I HATE it. I HATE moving. Last time I started to really wonder why I always get so upset at moving time and I came to the conclusion that it’s because the first time that we moved (that I can remember) was when I was five years old after my parents got divorced. I think a lot of harsh, unresolved feelings get dredged up in the process of preparing to move.
It was a brutal time not only because they got divorced and my dad, infrequently present before that, became suddenly completely absent. He was shacked up with his long-time girlfriend (now wife and mother of his two other children, his “real family” as he considers it) another thorny issue. The move was completely harsh because my mum was in denial. We lived in a townhome type-thing (a kind of condo I guess) and I remember the day the landlord came by. He became rather displeased to find us not only not packed but totally without arrangements for a place to live. He gave my mum a stern talking-to then allowed her an extra month.
After he left she had a total meltdown, crying that she didn’t even know how to go about finding a place to live. I was about two seconds away from a complete freak-out; “We’re not going to have a place to live!?!?!?” when my brother responded in a rare moment of usefulness. He walked my mum through the steps logically;
“There must be a way people find apartments. What do they do?”
“I guess they look in the newspaper and pick a place.” My mum was sobbing hard, I tried to grab onto her as I was still very close to panic. My brother pushed me away roughly, he could only handle one of us freaking out at a time. This is not a good position for a five year old and a six and a half year old to be in.
So she found a place, not far away (luckily; same friends, same school) and got us packed and moved in. She could only afford a two-bedroom so she would sleep in the living room. She promptly had a nervous breakdown and had to go to the hospital for a week or so. We stayed with our ‘surrogate’ grandparents, a very lovely German couple (Wolfgang & Brita) who we knew very well and took great care of us for that time.
I remember the day they took us to our new home; we were so excited because we hadn’t seen our mum in over a week. It’s pretty tough when you think about it, at that age, to lose your father, your home and not get to see your mum for such a long time. All while you know that when you do everything is going to be different, and it will never be the same again. I was excited but also anxious. Anxious. A state of mind that was going to become very, very familiar for the rest of my youth.
He brought us to the apartment but couldn’t stay, he had to leave right away. At first I didn’t see my mum, she was lying on her back in bed in the living room with her arm over her face. I shouted and ran towards her but was stopped. I think she may have gotten up to hug us but I don’t remember. I do, however, remember Wolfgang leaving. A friend of my aunt’s (who lives in England) that we knew a little bit -he was chef/owner of a Czech restaurant we had been to a few times- showed up. He was also pressed for time. By now my brother was starting to get unruly; he could see there was no real adult supervision, and with a whole new living place to explore he quickly got out of hand. I was standing, kind of frozen, in the kitchen where Wolfgang had left me trying desperately to compute this new living arrangement. And why was my mum lying prone in bed in the middle of the day? They told us she was sick.
The Czech cook fellow spoke rather abruptly with us. I was starting to intensely dislike the way we were being rushed through everything. He asked who was older and I pointed to my brother. He started to tell my brother what to do but couldn’t get anywhere between the singing and jumping around. I stared at them both with about a million questions burning to get out of my soul. When he turned to me to explain things I started blubbering a little bit, with my brother still goofing around in the background.
He grabbed my arm, tugging at it firmly, “Listen. You have to TAKE CARE OF everything here.”
That phrase stayed with me throughout my life; I learned then -and have yet to fully unlearn- how to take care of everyone else. Generally at the expense of myself.
“Here is the food and this is how you cook it.” He had brought all kinds of dishes from his restaurant. He showed me how to turn an oven on, how to put the food in a pan, and how to slowly heat it. My brother popped in and out to watch, but he wasn’t paying enough attention to absorb anything. I was completey engrossed in his instruction, being monumentally aware that the well-being of my family -at least in the short term- rested on my shoulders.
Five years old. Fuck.
The rest of the afternoon passed playing with my brother. The entire apartment was set up completely; our bedrooms were done, beds made, clothes put away . .. everything. I couldn’t really enjoy our game, the transition had been so jarring I couldn’t quite get to feeling that I lived here now. Eventually my mum managed to get out of bed to check on us, she looked like shit I can tell you. I guess that’s what happens when a person cries for two solid weeks.
I mean, how would you feel? She was barely 24 years old with two children, alone, in a country where she was still learning the language. We came to Canada as refugees after the Soviet invasion of Czech. On THE DAY the tanks came in my dad came driving up the country road to the cottage where we were, with the woman that was the girlfriend to eventually steal him away from my mum. I’m sure the sense of betrayal must have been too enormous to bear, even if the breakup was at least partly her fault. I didn’t understand -or even know about- all of this then of course. All I knew was that my dad was gone, our lives had changed, and my mum was seriously fucked up.
She came into my brother’s room where we were playing, completely drained. No energy at all. She looked at us without the slightest love or enthusiasm and said it was probably time for her to make dinner. She looked like she was going to start crying again at the thought of the monumental task. Wanting to be helpful, and perhaps ease her from a little bit of her pain so she would love me and maybe hug me I jumped up, “I know how to make dinner!”
“You do??”
“Yes, the man showed me.” I went into the kitchen and started carefully taking pots out of the cupboard and getting the food in. She was amazed, but satisfied that I was doing it properly. Then everything changed, though I didn’t know it yet. She saw in me someone so hungry for approval, so desiring a ‘happy family’, so wanting things to be settled and normal that she knew she would be able to exploit me for housework. Which is exactly what she ended up doing.
“Set the table,” she told my brother, still eyeing me and assesing my abilities. I was happy to do it, it was more like a game where a little girls plays with a toy stove except it was real. I didn’t know that it was going to lead me to a life of doing all the family laundry and basically all of the housework by the time I was ten years old.
My brother rudely refused to set the table, or to do anything useful at all. My mum didn’t have the strength to argue with him which set the tone for the next 15 years of HIS life, where he did basically nothing in the house except eat and take up space.
I don’t know why I just told you all that, it has nothing to do with anything except to maybe explain why I hate moving and always find myself very upset all through the process. This house we’re in right now is finished and looks very nice, it’s already on the market and they tell me we’ll have to move again before I start university. I actually laid it on the line with them, telling them that I just can’t do this. I can’t live in a house that’s being remodelled then move year after year after year. My mum’s stupid husband looked at me with that barely concealed dislike in his eyes and said something like what I think doesn’t matter. I glared back at him and said -as calmly as I could- that the next time we move I’m moving out. I’ve been planning to move out since grade ten anyways. It’s just this side of hell living with those two; they packed my brother off to boarding school a couple of years ago. That’s another horror story I’ll tell you about later.
It was very disruptive and difficult for me in my last year of high school, with the advent of the 50% government exams for the first time that year and all the class time we wasted doing ‘mock’ exams so they could work out a system of standardized testing. Then we had a teacher’s strike in December. All the while the entire house except my bedroom was completely gutted, all the furniture was under a tarp in the living room where my parents slept and a second floor was being added to the house. It’s a miracle I passed at all, not to mention with the grades that I did.
I can’t think about that right now, the house isn’t sold yet and they tell me that when it does we have at least a month to pack and move. I can’t pay for an apartment myself, but I can’t live like this anymore. I don’t understand how my parents can do it so willingly in fact, sometimes they seem to me to be entirely lacking in feeling.
Anyways, I don’t have to worry about it this summer because I’m barely going to see them. But thinking about all of this has pissed me off so much I take a bottle of rum from their liquor cupboard. My mum doesn’t mind, she buys me booze from the liqour store. Being European they dont’ agree with the government telling you when your kids are old enough to drink. Besides, as she says, this way she knows how much I’m drinking. Little does she know that aside from what she buys me I get double that myself at the liqour store!
Bill will be pleased, we’ll have a couple of drinks before our ride shows up. He gets the whole basement to himself and his parents basically never go down there so we can do whatever we want.
