ROUGHHOUSING
When the Mont-Blanc detonated, a gas fireball of coal, oil, cargo, ship parts, and humans catapulted two miles into the sky. Topping a thousand pounds, a piece of the Mont-Blanc’s anchor was found nearly two and a half miles away. The anchor site is on the cusp of the Regatta Point Walkway at the corner of Anchor Drive and Spinnaker Drive, a two-minute walk from where I grew up with my father.
I was under two when my parents divorced. They had been together for ten years, married for about eight of those, when my father first moved out into an apartment in downtown Halifax, where he lived until we moved to Spinnaker Drive when I was six. Mostly with my mother after the separation, I visited my father every other weekend or so. A thrilling vacation, the apartment building, directly across the street from the Halifax Harbour, had a pool … A POOL! You technically were not allowed to jump or dive, but we would in secret. One of us on the lookout for “cranky Cram,” as my dad referred to the building supervisor.
The view of what the Mi’kmaq named K’jipuktuk, or “Great Harbour,” is now blocked by condos. But at five years old I could look out and study the boats and ships, my tiny brain struggling to deduce how objects that massive were smoothly gliding along the surface, how the masses of steel weren’t just swallowed up. I’d watch them slowly make their way toward the Atlantic, floating beyond Georges Island. Named after a British king and smack-dab in the middle of the harbor, it was occupied by the British military in 1750. The island’s fort became one of the most important naval bases for the British Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The intricate underground tunnel system sounded like something out of The Goonies. People spoke of ghosts, apparitions loitering, a result of executions, deaths in the prison camp and in the quarantine station on the island. Going to sleep, I selfishly prayed the ghosts couldn’t swim.
My dad had recently started a graphic design business with a friend, Eric Wood. The Page & Wood office was inside the Brewery Market, a sprawling heritage building constructed in the 1800s out of granite and ironstone. Just a short walk from the apartment down Lower Water Street, it was mostly known for the farmers market every Saturday. In existence since 1983, the farmers market is where I’ve spent countless Saturday mornings weaving through the crowds, collecting produce, eating fresh cinnamon buns, listening to the fiddle echo through the main hall.
At the beginning, the office was quite small. My dad had a large, slanted white desk where he would brainstorm and sketch. At one point he got one of those golf-putting practice machines that shoots the ball back to you. Putting next to his desk, I’d make up stories—me, a cool professional golfer in one of those crisp collared shirts. Eighteenth hole, a putt for an eagle to win. I liked how men held the club with their hands, the way they adjusted their fingers, wiggled their feet, how they craned their wide necks to face the hole and looked back to the ball focused, then a steady, slight swing. I was flexible with the mulligans.
My dad, Dennis, was spending time with a woman named Linda, who would eventually become my stepmother. Linda and Dennis met when they worked in the same office. I think of my mother now, her husband leaving her for someone else. She was alone, taking care of the child and working full-time as a teacher. Then, I’d return all giddy and insensitive with stories about swimming, blabbering away about the new lady and her waterbed, no grasp of the hurt, the resentment. How that must have pierced her heart.
“It takes two,” my mother says. “I had a role, too.”
I’ve always found it strange that my mother and father had a baby. Me. Their relationship was already in trouble by the time I came along. I suppose gratitude is the course of action, but if I was not born, I’d have no perception of what I’d be missing, nor would anyone else miss me. This would suit me just fine. We are all micro specks, almost nothing in the grand scheme.
Linda lived in Clayton Park, an area in Halifax approximately a fifteen-minute drive from my father’s. She had a condo in an apartment complex. Two stories, the kitchen, dining area, and living room on one floor and the pair of bedrooms and bathroom upstairs. Linda already had children from her previous marriage: Scott and Ashley. Scott was three and a half years older than me, Ashley another three years older than him. Their father was a teacher like my mom.
Scott and Ashley’s room was rad. A wooden white bunk bed, Scott on the top, Ashley on the bottom. When I slept over, a small futon was rolled out on the floor. I was jealous of the top bunk, but my time would come. They had a TV in their room with a Nintendo, the original one that launched in 1985. Scott and I would play Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt for hours, staining the controllers with our ketchup chip–laced fingers.
Linda’s room contained the aforementioned waterbed, still the only one I have ever witnessed in the flesh. My father and I would visit, Linda would make supper, typically I was off with Scott. My stepmom’s “thing,” shall we say, is cooking. She worked as a food stylist part-time, primping and prodding produce and meat, preparing the perfect turkey for a TV commercial or photo shoot. For one job, she had to make an exorbitant amount of ice cream, but it had to be fake so it would not melt. The breakfast table, island, and dining table were covered with a multitude of experiments and concoctions. What a cruel joke, fake ice cream.
The 1996 movie Two If by Sea, starring Sandra Bullock and Denis Leary, was set in New England but filmed in the towns Chester and Lunenburg, along the south shore of Nova Scotia. Linda styled a decadent dinner for a scene. Her work appearing in a Hollywood film had me buzzing, my heart aflutter for Sandra Bullock, my eight-year-old self not comprehending that I once again had a crush. Twenty years later I would have dinner with my friend Catherine Keener and Sandra at the famous Craig’s in Beverly Hills. Sandra looked so cool, in jeans and a hip rocker T. She was nice, funny, and grounded, just as my eight-year-old self had imagined. Oh, these strange roads we travel.
Despite her supposed knack for cooking, I could not handle Linda’s meals, incapable of digesting them. My father, stepbrother, and stepsister seemed to have no problem, enthusiastically moaning and complimenting. It felt as fake as the ice cream.
I hated food that wasn’t simple. My mom’s free time was minimal, she didn’t have space in the day to put together lavish meals, with new tastes and smells. She was then teaching French at two or three schools on the outskirts of the city. Harrietsfield Elementary, William King Elementary, and Sambro Elementary, my favorite one. A small school, it is not far from Sambro Island’s looming lighthouse, which is supposedly haunted. Legend has it that a Scot named Alexander Alexander (often referred to as Double Alexander) was stationed there, and when he left the island to buy supplies, he not only didn’t retrieve the goods but also began a two-week drinking binge and then took his own life. People say Double Alex’s ghost can be heard walking, screwing with the lights, and flushing toilets.
I wanted what my mother made, meat and potatoes, noodles with butter and steamed veggies. Linda’s stir-fries hit my gag reflex, a sweetness I wasn’t used to. Drinking copious amounts of milk, I’d be reprimanded for not eating. I’d chew and chew and chew and chew, as if I’d lost my ability to swallow, the muscle memory abruptly vanishing. As a toddler, I’d be left alone at the table when the others were done with a timer counting down. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. I had to eat it all before that screeching bell. This elongated chomping persisted as I aged, even her homemade pizza, a revelation that it wasn’t just about flavor and aroma.
When I was six, we all moved in together. Dennis, Linda, Scott, Ashley, and I stood in the concrete foundation of the new development on Spinnaker Drive, surrounded by high, foreboding gray walls. Looking up, just sky, the treetops lining what would become the rear of the house, a small forest tucked up the hill from the back patio.