Читать книгу When Fenelon Falls - Dorothy Ellen Palmer - Страница 11

The drive that got us to the cottage that summer of ’69 was, much like the family in the Ford, a day late and tender short. It occurred uncharacteristically in broad daylight, on Saturday morning, the 28th of June. Had we followed the Departure Protocol, our car Tessie would have joined the Friday night diaspora of the last day of school. Ordinarily, MC rocketed around the house all afternoon, ordering Jordan about in a frenzy of cleaning and packing, both of them tripping over our springer spaniel, Balsam, who knew that barking makes women pack faster. We couldn’t waste a nanosecond. MC’s self-imposed countdown had us blasting off the second Dad engaged the screen door. But that night broke the routine. Jordan walked no farther than the triangle between couch, radio and TV, surfing our three U.S. stations. Mom’d start pouring cereal or powdered skim milk into mouse-proof jars, then find an excuse to join her.

‘What earth-shaking event had transpired?’ you ask. Not transpired, expired. Judy Garland – she died. A week of footage already: Judy dancing with Mickey, clanging trolleys and ringing bells. Judy singing ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ after JFK’s assassination. Judy, Judy, Judy. Just get over the bloody rainbow and be done with it.

Apparently not. Friday was her funeral, so of course they played The Gizzard of Boz yet again. I had to listen to BS redeclare it ‘the number-one-all-time-best-possible-movie-ever-in-the-history-of-the-possible-world!’ I had to watch Little Miss Chubby Pigtails outwit a twister and a witch, lions and tigers and bears, only to discover what most of us already know. When a network bulletin interrupted to announce a riot after a police raid on Stonewall, a men’s bathhouse in Greenwich Village, and Jordan asked why didn’t they have tubs, Mom snapped the Gizzard off and told her to go pack something. But when Dad got home, he found the TV on and them side by side on the couch blubbering at some clicking ruby slippers, snotty Kleenex snowballs piled between them. When he got out the camera, MC put the kibosh on that blockbuster with one slam of a bedroom door.

Next morning, Jordan held three things safe in hand, refusing to consign any of them to Tessie’s trunk, especially not her Little Yellow Miracle. Last summer, on her thirteenth birthday, she got the usual, a little party and a little present: a bowling party for two, her standing request since nine, and her very own transistor radio. A Lloyd’s, sun yellow, the size of a deck of smokes but thicker. It had two gold knobs, tuning and volume, and a plastic wristband, also yellow. I’d be surprised if the parents laid out more than five bucks, but when she opened it you’d have thought it was a brand-new Pontiac Firebird. She squealed. She actually hugged them and they even let her. ‘It’s perfect!’ Queen for a day, she all but danced.

Later she told me it was the only time they got it right – that usually, after hours of deliberating (the kind of hours you have to spend when you’re only getting one thing), she’d give them a page from the Eaton’s catalogue with her wish circled or stand in the bargain aisle of Savette’s and point. Come the 23rd of June, however, deliberation counted squat. She’d inevitably unwrap a close second, something almost but not quite the real thing: a cheaper version, the wrong colour or size. ‘That’s me,’ she shrugged, ‘always silver, never gold,’

The sight of her clutching her Miracle that day elicited my first act of similar kindness that summer. I won’t say what kind. I leaned over Balsam, always plopped down on my half of the back seat as if he didn’t need to share it, flicked the side of Jordan’s head with my finger and whispered, ‘You love a stupid little yellow box more than anyone will ever love you.’

A dead moment. A shrug. She asked MC for the car thermos, full as always of watered-down grape High-C, and with no help from me, poured it straight down the front of her yellow pop-top into a puddle on her new white shorts. I laughed. I said she looked like a walking exclamation mark, like one of the Riddler’s henchmen. When we stopped in Manilla for ice cream, Dad moved to let her out, but MC reached back and locked the door. As we stepped away, we heard, ‘Hey, all you CHUM Bugs out there! Here’s your brand-new CHUM Chart, #648, Saturday, June 28, 1969!’ And when we got back, she was still singing. Dad filmed her through the window, glasses on her head, holding the tiny print of it under her nose:

THIS WEEK >> LAST WEEK >> ARTIST >> TRACK

1 >> 1 >> Desmond & the Aces >> Israelites

2 >> 6 >> Three Dog Night >> One

3 >> 1 >> Blood, Sweat & Tears >> Spinning Wheel

4 >> 12 >> Oliver >> Good Morning Starshine

5 >> 9 >> Paul Revere & the Raiders >> Let Me

6 >> 15 >> Joe Jeffrey Group >> My Pledge of Love

7 >> 5 >> Friends of Distinction >> Grazing in the Grass

8 >> 26 >> Jr. Walker & the All Stars >> What Does It Take

9 >> 20 >> Andy Kim >> Baby I Love You

10 >> 10 >> The Buchanan Brothers >> Medicine Man

11 >> 27 >> The Winstons >> Color Him Father

12 >> 3 >> Henry Mancini >> The Love Theme from Romeo & Juliet

13 >> 2 >> The Beatles >> Get Back

14 >> 8 >> The Classics IV >> Every Day With You Girl

15 >> 24 >> Tommy James & the Shondells >> Crystal Blue Persuasion

16 >> 18 >> The Young Rascals >> See

17 >> 25 >> Motherlode >> When I Die

18 >> 4 >> Elvis Presley >> In the Ghetto

19 >> 21 >> Tom Jones >> Love Me Tonight

20 >> 30 >> Kenny Rogers >> Ruby Don’t Take Your Love to Town

21 >> 29 >> Jerry Butler >> Moody Woman

22 >> 17 >> Bill Deal & the Rhondels >> I’ve Been Hurt

23 >> 0 >> Brian Hyland >> Stay and Love Me All Summer

24 >> 13 >> Marvin Gaye >> Too Busy Thinking About My Baby

25 >> 0 >> Booker T. & the MGs >> Mrs. Robinson

26 >> 0 >> Roy Clark >> Yesterday, When I Was Young

27 >> 0 >> Life >> Hands of the Clock

28 >> 0 >> Neil Diamond >> Sweet Caroline

29 >> 14 >> Sonny Charles & the Checkmates >> Black Pearl

30 >> 0 >> Cat Mother/The All Night News Boys >> Good Old Rock ’N’ Roll

If my Tin Roof was too good to share that day, if we all turned on her that summer, music was the only thing that didn’t. And, man, how she loved it. The Miracle never left her side until she went in the lake. It lived on her left wrist where normal people wear a watch, attached by a disintegrating loop, now more duct tape than wristband, more dirty silver than yellow. In true sixties style, it rocked round the clock: on the dock when she went swimming, on the deck at supper, on the butt wad in the kybo, under her pillow long past sleep. Up at Mrs. Miller’s General Store, Mrs. Miller set aside Miracle batteries at least once a week.

What was playing? For teens in the Toronto of 1969 there was only CHUM. (That’s a.m. – f.m. was for old people.) If her radio played other stations I never heard it do so. It’s no exaggeration to say that Jordan knew every word of every CHUM Chart hit that summer. She had a disgustingly eidetic memory, memorized whole songs at one hearing. She sang like a chainsmoker smokes, igniting the next with the previous. She kept her CHUM Bug card in her wallet where the rest of us keep our names. Come December, she pooled her babysitting money and took a toy down to the CHUM Christmas Wish. On New Year’s Day, when CHUM played the Top 100, she sang every word. She sang the jingle: ‘C-H-U-M, Ten-Fifty, Toronto.’ She sang the ads. She knew all the DJs and all their time slots: Bob Laine from eleven to three weekdays, Jungle Jay Nelson, mornings from five till nine, and the all-important Top 30 countdown with Chuck McCoy on Tuesday nights. She’d sneak up to the pay phone at Mr. Miller’s and part with a whole dime – she collected them – to call the ‘Twenty-four hours a day, you say it and we play it’ CHUM hotline. On the way she’d sing the phone number, ‘Nine two nine, fourteen eleven.’

Between visiting Yogi, calling her CHUM and cashing in pop bottles, we hit the paved – read public – road several times a day, and whenever we did, she’d ambush me: ‘Lyric Speak!’ Another BS game. We had to converse in song lyrics and, in a rule I’m sure she devised to make me look like a total spastic retard, we could walk only when speaking. She’d get most of the way to the store reciting ‘Love Child’ by Diana Ross and the Supremes as if it passed for conversation. The day it knocked ‘Hey Jude’ out of Number 1 was the only hearts- and-stars day of last winter’s calendar. That summer I came prepared – she called it cheating – by repeating the chorus of the new Ray Stevens hit. This cowboy hero kept rescuing Sweet Sue from every conceivable danger, kept being tall, thin, long, lean, lanky and potentially heroic, until she added a no-repeats rule. She’d be yards ahead, ‘Love Child’ing away and I’d be shuffing my feet like a midget-idget. I’d cave and walk normally. Of course, she never would. When I did, I had to spring for a Dubble Bubble. Jordan got a lot of gum that summer. She could have papered her room with Bazooka Joe.

How did she get weekly CHUM Charts up in the Kawartha Lakes boonies? There were none to be found in Fenelon, let alone Rosedale. Enter BS’s small army of nerdy little browner girlfriends. Must have been a dozen girls mailing her charts. What’d she do with the extras? No such thing in March. She’d lay them out in chronological order on her bed, then in thematic order, by longevity, by unknowable Jordanian orders, until she’d made a CHUM Chart quilt. It’s insufficient to say she memorized them; she scrutinized, cross-referenced and made projections from them. She could quote hits and stats with the same obnoxious accuracy that Derwood did from his extensive collection of baseball cards. I hesitate to think it, but it’s true: they had something in common. Obsession knows no gender.

On weekday mornings, I followed Jordan up to our battered tin mailbox, the one connection to the city and our other life. It leaned precariously sideways on a splintering post across from Yogi’s cage. We’d gather dandelions for her breakfast and then Jordan would lean against the cage and wait, sunshine-yellow thank-you notes to the Chart Brigade in hand, for Not Overall Boy, Hezzy’s postal son, permanently rechristened in March as NOB. You raised the flag if you had mail for him and she always did. He’d drive up, open his window and exchange letters, but never a word. There was much discussion in March about whether or not NOB could talk. (He was a mouth-breather.) Derwood’s father, Uncle G, said every village has its idiot. Grandma said whether or not the youngest Mr. Gale could speak, he could read demonstratively better than Uncle Gavin. Ouch. When she wanted to, Grandma could truly cut to the wood.

I remember the CHUM Charts so eagerly pulled from the mailbox at the start of that summer. All variations on a theme: a black-and-white photo of a DJ with coloured sound waves radiating from his head. Gary Duke, ‘Boss of the million-dollar weekend,’ emanated green sainthood. You could ‘get Weaverized’ with Hal Weaver in Easter purple, and a psychedelic orange Jay Nelson invited you to ‘Bet your sweet bippy.’ Jordan read them aloud on the walk home, made her quilt and eventually put them to bed in her improvised record case, an ancient round red suitcase that sported a red and white relief drawing of two red-slippered feet poised in pointe. Obviously born to hold ballet shoes, something Jordan would never own, it had been kicking around as a Barbie case, and then as a record case, for as long as I could remember.

For Saturday’s drive north, it got stashed under protest in the trunk, nestled between Jordan’s equally precious homemade diaries – two industrial-size binders, reclaimed from Dad’s work at the order desk of BA Oil. Jordan worried the heat would warp her precious 45s. Her singles. In 1969 a single cost sixty-nine cents, that’s sixty-six cents plus three cents tax, and I hoped the trunk would liquefy every cent. Let’s cut to the chase. For a smart girl my sister had the musical taste of a puke Twinkie. Donovan, Simon and Garfunkel and Mr. Lightfoot had my grudging respect. But Neil Diamond, Tom Jones, the Cowsills and the bloody Bee Gees could improve the music scene only by contracting the Black Plague and popping their buboes in the face of every known fan and genetic relation. When I said her collection lacked seriousness, she played the Monkees, ‘Daydream Believer,’ her first single. She was twelve, but that’s no excuse. The schlock remains the same. What the cluck did girls ever see in that scurvy midget Davy Jones? When I said no sane person could dig both Iron Butterfly and Bobby Sherman, Steppenwolf and Andy Kim, she sniffed, ‘I can.’

Error. Teens live and die by their music. It’s who we are and who we aren’t. You know exactly who someone is when they say, ‘I listen to blank.’ If you like blank, you like them. Solid. If not, walk away. It’s a matter of pride to be consistent. I tolerated folk, loathed pop and loved rock. I liked bands that weren’t Canadian, the Stones and Procol Harum, but thanks to Canadian-content legislation and arts spending on Ca-na-da after our 1967 Centennial, I was also the first generation able to claim that most of my favourites were homegrown: Three Dog Night, Motherlode and Blood, Sweat and Tears. It’s just plain dumb luck that I got to be a teen in the late sixties, when for a few short years they played the best music ever written. Consider it: I still played my Christmas present every day, a little LP called The White Album. By June, Rocky Raccoon, Bungalow Bill, Sexy Sadie, Molly and Desmond and their barrow were all close personal friends.

But in the summer of ’69, while Cat Mother and the All Night Newsboys sang ‘Good Old Rock ’n’ Roll’ and David Clayton-Thomas belted out ‘Spinning Wheel’ and the Stones rocked down with ‘Honky Tonk Woman,’ I am embarrassed to this day to admit that the most-played record in the case, the song my supposedly intelligent sister walked around all summer humming and, yes, unabashedly singing, the one she subjected us to as Ford and family pulled out of Manilla, was ‘Sugar Sugar’ by the Archies. When I yelled, ‘They aren’t real! They’re cartoons!’ she accompanied her vocals with hand to armpit and rhythmic farting percussion. At that moment, I truly wished I’d come equipped with a gun to shoot off the hands of my rival. When she sang the ‘do do do do – do do’s,’ I sang louder, ‘I’ll kill, kill, kill, kill – kill you.’ Good one.

In her defence, BS could call a hit from one hearing. It wasn’t just Burton Cummings’s mojo that moved her to become one of the first card-carrying fans of some dark-haired boys from Winnipeg who’d seen their first and so far only hit last fall: ‘These Eyes.’ When their new song hit the CHUM Chart July 12, a week before the moonwalk, she predicted, ‘It’ll be a monster hit. Like the Canadian Beatles!’ I figured she’d lost it. With that candy-assed little ballad? ‘Laughing’? Who calls a song that? Well, Guess Who had the last laugh. It sat on the charts longer than a pregnant elephant. Her life-size poster of Burton the Beloved, bought in a special promotion from Sam the Record Man, right downtown on Yonge Street, that was her second hand-held treasure, wrapped in Saran Wrap, sealed against even her fingerprints.

Her final hand-held gem was a handmade Countdown Calendar. Hearts and stars encircled two days: the 17th of August, our Annual Balsam Lake Regatta, and 29th of August, when Burt and boys would play Galaxie, the revolving Coca-Cola stage at the Canadian National Exhibition. Another miracle was stapled to August 29: one GENERAL ADMISSION ticket.

After extended grovelling and a Cinderella’s list of chores to earn the exorbitant ticket price of $7.50, after lectures about a fool and her money, after BS reminding Mom that when she was a girl she’d once gone all the way to Buffalo to see Glenn Miller, MC caved. She even drove Jordan down to CHUM at the crack of dawn to be one of ‘the first fifty at 10-50’ to get a special early-release ticket. In the margin of her calendar, in Jordan’s usual immature open scrawl, was a proverb in tribute: ‘A day to come seems longer than a year that’s gone.’

But I don’t think I ever believed they were really going to let her go. It was the principle of the thing. We always went to the CNE together. Well, more or less. Mom took us down. We’d do the buildings in the morning and for lunch she’d let us loose in the Food Building. We could have anything we wanted – anything that was free. In those days that was everything; we pigged out on Pogos and beaver tails and Tiny Tom doughnuts that left you smelling cinnamon the rest of the day. We saw the afternoon grandstand show with her, and then she handed us off to Dad, who met us after work at the Princes’ Gate and took us to the Midway. And we did all of that in that order, every year, on the last day of the CNE, Labour Day, because no real March ever left the cottage until compelled to do so. What March would drive Jordan all the way down to the city for August 29th? Good question.

I’ll admit to a certain shade of green. I was the one with good taste and she was the one with the meal ticket. How was that even remotely fair? The CNE would host every major Canadian band that summer – Lighthouse, the Five Man Electrical Band and Motherlode – but like the song says, Jordan only had eyes for Burton. Even rolled up, he smirked at me. With all that black hair he could have been a cousin or any paisano from Alderwood, except neither would be caught dead in his pansy outfit: purple bell-bottoms and a hippie-dippy shirt, paisley maroon with – get this – lace, hot pink lace on the sleeves. He lay in the back seat of the car, leering unbuttoned, sprouting chest hair down to his navel. Okay, so maybe I gave her elbow a little push. Maybe I was aiming for his face. Unfortunately, the High-C landed elsewhere.