I used to ride a bull that didn’t move. He would stand in the middle of our cluttered yard with my father’s collection of rusted and dilapidated cars sitting behind him, the Canadian prairie sky with cotton clouds above him - like a backdrop from one of my Saturday morning cartoons. If my sister was up for it, we’d run outside into the un-mowed grass in our bare feet, approaching him like a freight-train. He didn’t move. My sister was tall enough to climb him on her own, and sometimes she would help me up too, but often I was relegated to the job of mover, trying to pull him along or whacking him with a stick so that he would take a step. I don’t know the emotional awareness of bulls, but if they are capable of laughing inside, he must have been roaring uncontrollably at the two of us – our pathetic little kid muscles trying to force him to do something he didn’t want to do. Every now and then he’d take a step. Maybe he felt sorry for us.
Not everyone believes this memory. I don’t blame them - it is pretty unbelievable. They remind me that bulls are dangerous. He could have killed you! Yes, he could have. But, miraculously, he didn’t.
I remember telling that story on a drive to Winnipeg when I was in high school. I don’t know exactly where we were going or why, but I remember getting a ride with my Phys Ed teacher and his family. I didn’t talk much to anyone back then, but perhaps the darkness of the car and the polite questioning about my life let me open up a little. The high school was in the neighboring town, and although they might have heard rumours, they didn’t know much about me or my family (or at least they pretended not to). So, I found myself telling the story of the stock-still bull and then about the hay elevator that we turned into a giant teeter-totter. I told them about the rooster that chased me as a toddler, the hissing goose and gander that patrolled our front step to trap me in the house, and the muskrat that found its way inside when I was home alone, those beady little eyes looking up at me from its place beside our living room chair. I told them about trying to fry an egg on the old abandoned combine in the heat of the summer, the whites slithering down the rusty, uneven metal and finding a home between my dusty toes; and how we baptized the poor, unsuspecting cats in the pond. Everyone was laughing like I was some kind of a comedian that had come up with a good bit. I laughed with them until tears fell out of my eyes. It felt good and bad and weird and scary and overwhelming all at the same time. Mostly scary.
Lately, I’ve noticed that my past keeps knocking on the back door of my brain, waiting patiently for me to open it. I have, over the years, pushed half-heartedly against its aging seal, but the door is so swollen and jammed that it prefers to stay shut. If I do open it a crack, it’s only enough to let the cold wind whistle in. Sometimes the memories of other people have slipped through some invisible window that I didn’t even know was open, making me pull out that shrinking plastic and heat it up with a hairdryer to keep the cold out. But these days that knocking is getting louder – sharp and irritating and brash – demanding that I step into the blizzard. It’s a good thing I have my parka.
Driving to Winnipeg in my Phys Ed teacher’s car, I knew which stories not to tell. I knew when the laughter would turn into that uneasy quiet, the air filling with an invisible density, like a giant balloon slowly inflating and pushing me into the vinyl seats. Even at sixteen, I understood the thin line between empathy and pity, and the even thinner line between pity and disgust. I knew not to tell them that our house was so cold that my father would use the oven for heat until the element burnt out time and again (another miracle escape from death), or that even though it was the eighties, we didn’t have a flush toilet until I was in junior high, and only then because my eldest brother was old enough to work and he paid for it. I didn’t tell them that my mother tied navy-blue cords onto my kindergarten waist with baler twine because they were the only pants in the box from the Union Gospel that kind of fit me. I didn’t tell them that even most of my underwear were hand-me-downs or picked out of one of those cardboard boxes. I didn’t tell them that my lunch had, for much of my elementary career, been two slices of white bread with jam that I greedily swallowed in four bites, and how much my stomach hurt smelling the soups or homemade chili in the Tupperware thermoses around me.
I didn’t tell them I was The Germ Child.
It seemed everyone else at school knew about my germs before I did. I didn’t know I was disgusting – but somehow, they all did. Maybe it was the poverty - the baler twine pants and the sparce lunches that made them look at me that way. Maybe it was the fact that our yard was covered in junk that my mechanic father believed he could fix someday. Maybe, as my mother believed, it was because we attended the wrong church. Maybe it was simply the fact that my five older siblings had already attended the little elementary school and they too, had been Germ Children. Maybe they knew just by looking at me.
As I came to find out, my germs were so infectious that merely brushing my shoulder (or touching a desk or a book or a pencil) was enough to contaminate another child immediately. Some of the kids would intentionally touch something of mine so that they could chase the other kids around the school yard, threatening them with my repugnance. Those were the kids who looked for ways to taunt me – holding their noses and telling me how much I stank – or mocking me when I walked by. They would laugh and nudge each other and play their popularity games at my expense. Some of the kids would contort themselves like a circus performer just to avoid touching my desk as they maneuvered their way through narrow aisles. If a teacher had us pass our work back to do corrections, there were audible groans of disgust from the person behind me, and I would carefully slide my paper onto the corner of their desk so it would touch the least amount of surface possible.
Some kids just let it all happen - not really starting anything, but avoiding me nonetheless, for fear of complete alienation by everyone else. But there were some who actually believed it – who really thought they could become contaminated with the virus that my presence carried. They had a particular look in their eyes, a curl of the lip that wasn’t about making others laugh or keeping up with the crowd. Their feelings of abhorrence were real. Those were the kids who taught me to stare at the floor and never meet another person’s eyes. I learned that early, and I didn’t look up until I was about to enter high school. Even then, it made my eyes burn.
Four of my siblings moved out of the house while my sister and I were facing our personal war zones at school. She was five years ahead of me, so it didn’t take long before I was the last one left – silently sinking into the seat on the bus that no one else would touch, clutching my backpack to my chest and listening to the kids behind me. Sometimes they would ignore me, sometimes they would target me. Not knowing was the hard part. I got very good at building a cage around myself – an armour that blocked the sounds of their voices, making them distant and murky, like my sister sounded when my ears were submerged in the bathtub. The armour could activate my skin, causing it to prickle in warning when someone came near. I’d arch away from them before they could pull away from me, my arms folded and tucked, my feet crossed and bent, anything not to let myself touch them. Every day was a marathon until I could walk back down our driveway as the bus roared away - into the house with little heat and ratty furniture and a cash-and-carry toilet. Then I'd greet the dog and make myself six pieces of peanut butter toast and watch the Flintstones. There was almost always bread. And I was hungry.
It's hard to tell the truth. It's sticky and messy and full of dangerous thorns that can slice into skin until it bleeds. The stories I told in my Phys Ed teacher's car on that drive to the city were true (at least how I remembered them). There really were geese and hay elevators and leaky eggs on rusty combines. And when I threw in nonchalant references to friends, they weren't entirely fabricated. There really were a few fleeting people over the years - bonds of convenient joint exclusion; even one or two others who gave me a chance until they couldn't anymore. But those years were tangled and matted with ridicule and ostracization and staring at the floor. Those years were a maze of landmines that I was stepping through as I answered their questions - choosing who I would be, and where I would come from.
In that conversation, and a million more - I was closing the door to my past and sealing it. I was learning how to pick the right things to say, and to be quiet the rest of the time. I was learning to listen only to the whispers of the past that were safe, and only when it suited me.
I was learning to survive.
I live in the city now. I have people to love and people who love me. I've learned to play my role of middle-class woman in her forties with no formal training. I smile and nod through casual conversations with other people my age - throwing in words of truth about my past that I know will fool them all. Sometimes, I'm so good at playing this role that I almost believe myself. Almost.
But then those other moments come. The moments when I stop like a deer in the headlights, sure that everyone can see right through me. I look at the floor or the ceiling or I pet the dog, trying to find a place that isn't the person's eyes. Or there are times when someone sits or stands close, and I instinctively turn or move away - my unconscious brain believing that my touch will burn. When those moments come, I feel resentment clogging my veins like sour milk. I could have been someone else, someone stronger and braver and better. I could have been like everyone else.
This middle-class imposter and the damaged child battle often. They argue when the truth of the past rises and falls like a wave in the ocean, and I have to wait it out. When it settles (and it does), someone else walks forward and I recognize her. She's the one that returns after the fear and anger and questions slow. She's the one that is strong enough to forgive children for their cruelty. She's the one strong enough to forgive herself when she stumbles. She's the one I grip onto, trying hard not to let go.
I didn't tell my teacher and his family about the cow that really did trample me, knocking me to the ground while my mother watched and screamed my name from the kitchen window. The cow skimmed the left side of my chest with her hooves as she ran toward the pond with me in the way, but somehow, she didn't land. Somehow, she didn't crush me. I remember my mother's hand as she cleaned the wound under my shoulder with a warm, wet washcloth. I remember just how it felt as she rested her warmth on the other side of the terry cloth and let my heart beat beneath her fingers.
It could have killed me. But it didn't.
© 2022 Shirley Hay