Читать книгу When Fenelon Falls - Dorothy Ellen Palmer - Страница 12

But a reproof is no poison. Like ordinary siblings, BS and I could be at war one second and united the next. Take the car radio, a case in point. That’s where we first heard it that Saturday – the song that sang summer, claimed summer, still is and always will be that summer. We loved it instantly; our parents despised it sooner. No small part of its attraction. At home, we’d negotiated a détente of door closing, but a three-hour ride renewed hostilities because the little yellow radio, Miracle or not, didn’t work in a moving car. So over the years, the car radio ritual – who got it, how and for how long – had become quite the song and dance.

We’d ask before Dad’s key turned in the ignition. Mom would say, ‘Sure,’ and turn it to CFRB, smiling into the back seat, ‘Oh, that isn’t what you meant?’ We’d specify CHUM and she’d say, ‘Hmmmm, you’ve got a friend on the radio? How nice. What’s her name?’ As if she’d been born a March, perfecting their tactics: deny, stall, blame. ‘What radio?’ ‘Wouldn’t it be nicer to sing? “Michael row the boat ashore … ”’ ‘Your father’s too tired.’ ‘Surely you don’t want to make him have an accident?’ She’d make us play stupid licence-plate games and I Spy. Then finally she’d say, ‘Okay, When Fenelon Falls. Win, and you can have that noise you call music.’

When Fenelon Falls was a family invention, a triumph of Marchspeak, a fact I didn’t appreciate until I discovered firstly, that not all families played car games, and secondly, that even avid mobile gamers had never heard of it. Legend has it that it evolved from a discussion of autograph books, that Mom was explaining that when she was a girl you wrote stuff in them like: ‘2Y’S U R, 2Y’s U B, I C U R, 2Y’S 4 Me,’ girlie stuff that ended with ‘Yours till Niagara Falls!!!’ when Jordan asked, ‘When Fenelon Falls, does he get hurt?’ And that’s all it took to get them falling all over themselves to show off their brains.

How do you play? Well, it sounds simple enough. Theoretically, we each had thirty seconds to add ‘when’ to any place in Canada so that it becomes personified. Swansea becomes ‘When Swans See.’ Port Hope becomes ‘When Port Hopes.’ Adding an ‘s’ is permitted. But play any game in March and it gets complicated. As keeper of the stopwatch, MC clicks, I swear, at twenty seconds for any turn that isn’t hers. ‘You’re out!’ Repeat a name and you’re likewise out. Foist a dubious construction in her direction and, well, you get it. Dad and I, we’re always out. I suspect Dad knew I often took myself out because I was sure he did. Cut to the chase: BS and MC ruled the airwaves and we all knew it. They’d memorized the classics; they had new names at the ready. They hid Canadian atlases under their beds for nights when they were too busy plotting strategy to sleep. A good one, but no joke.

Mom always starts: ‘Who names the new and learns the calls can stand alone when Fenelon Falls.’

We sound like this:

‘When Brace Bridges.’

‘When Saska Tunes.’

‘When Moose Jaws.’

‘When Green Would.’ There are lots and lots of ‘wood’s.

‘When Lind Says.’

‘When Cobo Conks.’ One of Mom’s favourites.

‘When Winnie Pegs.’ Jordan insists that Winnie the Pooh could play cribbage.

‘When Waska Peepees.’ My favourite and, yes, there really is a Waskapipi River in northern Ontario. I liked to use it in a double-play with ‘When Bummers Roost.’

‘When Dale Leaks.’ Dad loyally plays it after ‘Bummers Roost.’

Mom unfailingly rules him out, and never gets the joke. ‘It’s Leaskdale, Tommy, not Leaks-dale!’

‘So sorry, Caroline,’ Dad says, winking into the rearview mirror, ‘I just can’t seem to remember that.’

Once we’re out, Mom and MC only make triple plays. While Dad and I drive and get driven in silence, Ux Bridges, and Manito Baas, and Alber Taas. This favourite of Jordan’s is much disputed by Mom. Jordan always insists that it’s technically correct: a man named Albert, pronounced the French way, could say ‘Ta ta,’ the singular third person past tense being ‘taas.’ Mom scowls but relents. She wants to count her equally dubious inventions of ‘When Stove Ills and When Picka Rings and When Victoria Corners.’

‘When Peter Burrows and Sud Buries and New Found Land.’

‘When New Markets, Port Credits and Cale Dons,’ Mom counters.

Jordan smiles. ‘When Prince Edward’s Eye Lands. When Prince Edward, I Land. When Prints Edward Island?’ Enough said.

That Saturday, all the classics had been played. Mom thought she’d won with ‘When Court Ices,’ which I’m sure she expected Jordan to contest. Instead BS coolly offered, ‘When Vank hoovers and Sku Gogs and Skoota Mattas.’ Boss, a new triple play. Mom had plenty-twenty time to match it but, as I bet Jordan expected, Mom began contesting ‘Skoota Mattas.’

‘Of course it counts,’ Jordan leisurely explained. ‘It’s the Scootamatta River. ‘Skoota mattas’ is ‘Skooter matters’ if you’re from the Bronx. Skooter’s a real name; she’s Barbie’s little sister, and ‘matta’ is like ‘Wossamotta U,’ the college on Rocky and Bullwinkle.’ Good BS, BS. The ensuing debate exceeded thirty seconds. So Jordan proclaimed, ‘I’ve named the new and learned the calls, I stand alone’ – we all joined in – ‘when Fenelon Falls!’

Mother nods. Dad flips to CHUM. A temporary victory, lasting only till in range of Lindsay’s CKLY, when we’d have to suffer through the every-three-minute singsong ad for ‘Lynnn-say Cleeeaners and Dyyyyyers,’ and hear Dad wonder yet again how a little town like Lindsay could employ so many people who dropped dead for a living. Mom would shhh us for the incessant updates on the floating whereabouts of the CKLY Courtesy Cruiser. That always pissed me off. Why did anybody need to babysit a thirty-foot yacht? But we were beggars, not choosers. The choosers contentedly sang along with Mitch Miller, Steve and Eydie or Bob Goulet. ‘Just walk on by, wait on the corner. I love you but we’re strangers when we meet.’ Mom’s favourite. That’s what you hear when you’re fifteen and haven’t got a gun.

I remember the moment exactly. We’d just earned CHUM. We were sliding down Leaskdale Hill, passing the gold brick house with the blue plaque, the historical home of Lucy Maud Montgomery, author of Anne of Green Gables. On cue, Jordan was muttering ‘That goodie-two-shoes, Anne with-a-stupid-E Shirley,’ when Tony Joe White’s grinding drawl invaded the car, thrusting ‘Polk Salad Annie’ like a giant tongue into my parents’ primly closed mouths: ‘Down in Louisiana, where the alligators grow so mean, there lived a girl that I swear to the world, made the alligators look tame.’ Jordan smiled. Tony Joe grunted. He moaned. They who spawned me but wanted all to believe it happened like salmon, achieved without touching, shot do something looks at each other in the overhead mirror.

‘Filthy,’ MC announced, reinstating CFRB, ‘like he’s mating with a bullfrog.’

‘Unsuccessfully, it would appear,’ my father added.

‘Thomas Cranston March, when you get to your church tomorrow, you’d better kneel down and pray for a cure for that nasty hoof-in-mouth disease!’ Dad tried to make a joke of a proverb, to say, ‘Every man to his taste, said the man when he kissed his cow,’ but proverbs were no joke to MC and she talked right over him. ‘Please attempt to remember that any little pitchers attached to the big ears in the back seat are yours.’

That crack about his church? Attending summer service in Rosedale, in the tiny green-and-white church where Grandpa had been minister, was both the prime directive of March and an order MC refused to follow. Annoyed now at the children in both the back and the front seats, she turned the radio off and a frown out the window. Silence: the sound most likely to be perfected by a March. Insert it here.

As we crossed into Cannington, passed Woodbridge, and the Argyle General Store, to swing down Glenarm Road from shoulder to wrist, the only one making any noise was Tessie. At the turnoff, Mom didn’t join in for the requisite refrain: ‘This is Fenelon Falls all right, so pitch your tent where the fishes bite!’

One hill past Cameron – as always, just past the spot where legend had it a suicidal cow jumped right through the barn wall – Jordan peered through the trees and called it: ‘I see Balsam Layyy-ake!’ As we sighted the canal bridge and neared the green highway sign, she threw herself over the front seat to plaster her hand against the windshield and claim her victory in sing-song: ‘I’m the first one in Rowws-dale!’

March litany dictated that Dad should immediately turn to her and intone what I’ve always considered the most nonsensical of family sayings: ‘Don’t get excited. Don’t turn pale. We didn’t go to Harvard, we went to Rosedale!’ But before he could speak his lines, MC upstaged him. Insert MC’s moment of kindness here: ‘Excuse me, Little Miss Hooligannie!’ She shoved the interloper into the back seat. ‘Are you my daughter or a changeling abandoned by gypsies?’

Jordan slouched down and into her hair. ‘Both,’ she whispered in my direction. ‘And don’t we all know it.’