When I Was Seven

When I was seven, I stood before him in our melody yellow kitchen, in front of the faux wood cupboards. My hands were warm like baked loaves and I recited the book of Leviticus in its entirety, just to get my ears pierced. Afterwards, seated in his lap, corduroyed legs dangling, sneakers swinging, I felt dead sure. I’d correct my mother when she’d say things like, Shit, and, Damn, or tell him to go to hell.

The day that she said she was leaving was the day that he and I broke all the records. Earlier, we three had been seated all day long amongst the rest of the flock at the Maple Leaf Gardens. Zealous and long-suffering – it was an all-day affair. While elder after elder took to the podium to discuss the dangers of worldliness and the impending inevitability of Arma-geddon, I drew pictures of the promised Paradise on Earth, lamented the fact that my worldly friends wouldn’t live through Revelations, and ate Tic Tacs.

They fought the whole car ride home and when we got in, he dumped all the records out onto the floor, handed me one and told me to break it over my knee. Apocalyptic moments housed in vinyl. My curls kept falling over my eyes, but I caught glimpses. Abba. Cream. Led Zeppelin. Lyrics feigning a stairway to heaven, cracking in half.

While she stormed through the upper floors shoving clothing, candlesticks, her wedding china, heels, into A&P bags, he reminded me that in the Paradise on Earth, all wild animals would be domesticated, and that if I really wanted a pet tiger, lion, wolf, of my very own, my Wham record would have to go, too. I weighed the value of George Michael versus the promise of a pet tiger and watched Make It Big splinter between my fingertips.

And I understood the value of all the right answers. And she didn’t leave. Instead, her art, intricately inked line drawings of places she’d never been and people she’d never met, grew stained with the watermarks left behind from routine basement floodings. But our floors were always clean. She scrubbed on her hands and knees, looking for yields in the linoleum. There were none.

I turned eight and started fucking my best friend. It was mostly accidental until it stopped being an accident, but even so, I played dumb anyway. Locked in the hollow space of my dusty rose bedroom at the end of the hall, my Smurfette nightie pushed up and over my head, I’d silently beg that her hands wouldn’t stop until after I was done shaking. Afterwards, she’d make me swear to Jehovah that I wouldn’t tell anyone, and I’d feign doe-eyed surprise and confusion. This is the nature of mastery, all the right answers. Admission of knowledge precludes absolution.

And the day my mother walked in on us, she walked back out.

And even though she knew about him – the secretary with the pale blue pumps, the waitress with the Farrah Fawcett hair, the woman with the lavender mints tucked in her purse – she did not leave my father. Instead she took pills, red ones for starving and blue ones for crying. All the right answers. Read spy novels and Good Housekeeping, Hints from Heloise. Spelled out her name with the telephone cord wrapped around her wrist. Covered her stomach with a pillow when she sat. And told me to eat smaller portions.

While he nursed paper cuts from the New Testament, and my mother ate Big Turks and Maltese while locked in the bathroom, I turned twelve and started sliding my hands down the pants of boys with greasy hair and long fingers, stealing lighters and lipstick, failing things like math and science. I think I wore trouble well, considering. I knew that liars would not inherit God’s kingdom.

The first time I got caught, it was for drinking stolen cans of warm Budweiser while my other best friend gave the neighbour’s son a blowjob. Confessional was held in our living room and afterwards, the elders made me apologize to Jehovah and branded me Bad Association, and my mother and father, humiliated and red-faced, put me under six-month house arrest.

He left three days later with his bible and the worldly waitress with the Farrah Fawcett hair. While my mother cried in her bedroom, curtains drawn, Janis Joplin singing, I tugged at the waist-length hair he wouldn’t let me cut and watched from my bedroom window as he drove away. I knew then that I should’ve chosen Wham. Eventually, hunger will always give you away.