Backstory
Scattered fragments of my childhood home with an open ending
The following amorphous piece recounts memories of my childhood home in stops and starts. I’ve written the way I scatter puzzle pieces on a table, and then turn them over one by one, hoping to see a pattern.
The first thing to change when we moved in was the wallpaper. It was flocked - orange velvet paisleys spread with virulence over a gold background - and gave the house the feel of a funeral parlour. The walls were stripped and painted as white as chalk, and the mood was lifted right up to 1986.
Carpet the color of rust covered the entire first floor and spilled over onto the staircases. One staircase carried you from the front door to a set of mirrored panels where you could appraise yourself, from head to foot, inquisitively. Another smaller set brought you to the dining room, in the center of which cascaded a large chandelier that dripped with the chiseled, scintillating tears of a dowager’s neckpiece. The carpet here turned from rust to muted gold and ran right up to the baseboards. A piano stood, ageing but upright, at one end of the room. An old map, blown up to a size where the pixels could be counted, was laminated as a triptych and covered the entire far wall. Letters, photographs, secret things and electrical bills were safekept under the rolled-top of a mahogany desk, and guarded by a tufted leather chair on castors. Glassine curtains let you watch people go by, unseen.
My mother was glamorous, and had the kind of taste and temperament that made it difficult to imagine her very young. The objects that populated the living area weren’t sentimental or whimsical. They were laminated posters of past exhibitions, featuring works by Chagall or Bonnard, gargoyles brought back from France, tapestries. Objects were fraught with vécu and were furiously adult. The exception was a saturated oil pastel picture I drew in the fourth grade of a dark horse against a night sky perched awkwardly on its disproportionate legs beside a print of Matisse’s Blue Nude, smoothing the sharp angles of the sophisticated with just the right amount of naiveté.
When I came home from school, I would curl up on a huge round tufted gold velvet number that looked like a space orb designed by the Victorians. Around 6 pm, I would ritualistically “rest my eyes.”
One time, I remember my mother telling me she had bought a couch with peacocks on it. I excitedly waited for the jewel-toned piece to arrive and was disappointed when it turned up in muted shades of cream and brown, with smatterings of pale pinks and blues. I had had Jeannie’s bottle in mind.
The water always froze in the pipes in the winter if we forgot to keep it running. The water would therefore trickle continuously from our taps on the coldest days to avoid the pipes bursting. To think that I now turn the tap off between the initial brush and the “rinse brush” during my toothbrushing routine. How far we’ve come. The mind reels.
A few weeks after we had moved in, we discovered there were rats in the house. My mother would find them in the laundry room, and for years afterwards I entered that room doing the opposite of an army crawl - I would have gone in on stilts holding a ten-foot pole if I had had them handy. I’m assuming an exterminator came by, but I only remember my mother sprinkling traps around the house, and sleeping with a baseball bat under her bed.
Rats terrified me. Burglars terrified me. The idea of being reduced to sleeping in a bus shelter haunted me. Some childhood fears are explicable, some are entirely irrational, many insist on footslogging into adulthood. My current home is outfitted like Fort Knox, but I almost made friends, in Cinderella fashion, with the mice before an exterminator poisoned them all. As yet, I haven’t had to sleep in a bus shelter.
The basement back then was dark and low-ceilinged. It held a second, semi-functional kitchen, and a bathroom where spiders of the juicy black kind lurked in the folds of a shower curtain or under the toilet seat. A bar had been built between the kitchen and the TV area, in what I believe was brown laminate. We rarely used it, but I liked to look at myself in its mottled mirror as I walked by, and occasionally fondle the shot glasses that sat overturned on its dusty glass shelves. A small storage locker was wedged under the stairs, and near it, forgotten, sat a peacock wicker chair, straight-spined and proud, like the throne of an absent disco queen. Its seat was occupied, instead, by the one souvenir my mother had salvaged of her childhood, a doll brought back from Italy named Mafalda. Even in relatively pristine condition, Mafalda had the same uncanny quality, the same not-quite-inanimacy that so many old, porcelain dolls appear to have and which has led fertile-minded screenwriters to pencil them in as the protagonists of their horror stories. Nobody can bear to part with Mafalda even today, and so she sits in my garage, her face cracking, her limbs flaking, her dress shredded and dirty, looking like she’s going to rev up the chainsaw at any moment.
The lightest room in the house was my mother’s bedroom. It was a composition of creams and golds and brass and warmth. She had an odd, narrow but deep walk-in closet made out of something resembling sheets of plywood. It was like entering a costume shop. I loved to run my hands over and bury my face in the crêpes, the satins, the tweeds, the sequins, the furs. On a top shelf were columns of hats, and wigs neatly styled on their featureless foam heads. When my mother wasn’t home, my older sister and I would pile outfits onto her bed and put on a fashion show. My daughter and my sons haven’t shown much interest in my clothes, but my shoes are another matter altogether. Both my daughter and her twin brother love to model my shoes, their favourite being my pink satin marabou heels, which are meant to evoke the glamour of a vintage Hollywood starlet, the effect of which is ruined by the absolute racket they make on wooden flooring. It’s like sitting in the front row at the ballet, where the graceful pas de chat are inevitably accompanied by the somewhat less dignified clomping of the pointes on the stage.
At some point during the week, my mother would host literature night for my sister and me. She would read us various towering classics, and we were fairly receptive auditors. Literature night came to an abrupt end when she subjected us to Beowulf in Old English. I don’t remember much except that she sounded like the Swedish Chef from the Muppet Show. Tootin froodin shnoodin funk.
Lightning storms are a common occurrence during the humid summer months in Montreal. One evening, we were thunderstruck when we realized that a bolt had hit our patio, leaving a charred cartoonish zigzag a meter long in the wooden planks. I looked through the hole onto the grass, and then got the hell out of there in case lightning struck twice.
This is really funny, Lianne! I’m sure that Dickens is rolling in his grave at your detailed description of your childhood home… Meanwhile, Mafalda is revving up the chainsaw at the mere mention of another literature night devoted to Beowulf. 😂
Hahahaa...thank you, I needed a good laugh today. Who knew the Sweedish chef was so educated! Maybe he'd been reciting Beowulf this whole time...and then there was the time, many years later we went to see Beowulf the interminable film...we must not have hated it that much :) I love these posts of yours, remind me of things I havent thought of in years!