Should I tell him? What if Uncle Bruno kills him? In school, the people came and said I should tell a grown-up if another grown-up hurt me. The people at school said not to be afraid, that if you tell, your parents will believe you and the police will protect you. Maybe what happened was bad and maybe it wasn’t my fault after all.
As I debate whether to tell my father about Uncle Bruno and I’s private time together, dad is putting the cigarette order away behind the counter. The Store is open 24 hours now and mommy is on the night shift. I have time with daddy, so now would be the time to tell him.
I gather up my courage, and I timidly approach my daddy and tug on the pocket of his jeans. Daddy turns to me and asks "what is it?" what do I need? I say that “at school they said I should tell the truth, when I lived with Aunt Anna, Uncle Bruno was always naked and he used to touch me.”
Now, I am the parent of two children, and I assure you if either of them said this to me, my reaction would have been much different than:
“Pfff why would you say something like that. Stop watching so much television.”
The end. It was never mentioned again.
Later, when I asked him why he never believed me when I told him I had been molested and sexually abused, he said, “you never told me.” When I pressed and repeated exactly what I remember saying to him, his response was “Oh, but you only said he was naked in front of you.”
Only said he was naked. OK, let’s run with that. As a grown-up, if a child told you another grown-up was naked in front of a child would you ask questions? Would you maybe speak to the person involved to see how they react? Approach your sister and maybe open a dialogue about what your daughter just said? Nope. None of that happened. In fact, we still had to go over there, I was still unsupervised, and every time we saw Uncle Bruno not one single person noticed that when he embraced me, his hands were in my crotch and his tongue inside my mouth. Gross. Daddy did not give two fucks about any of it. He got what he wanted: no child support payments; he moved his Concubine in so she could raise his children for him, and he lived the free life.
Around this time, I remember mommy freaking out about daddy having had an affair with their real estate lawyer – Sonia. I totally believe it. She had large breasts, which I remember clearly, because she often would lean into my dad so he would notice. My mother was equally gifted with a great rack, so I assume Jack is a breast-man. Maeve was also increasing her cup size (I think it was mostly the band size that was getting astronomically larger), but that is only because she gained about 100 pounds living on chocolate, Pepsi, and deep-fried anything and everything. Dad was rarely home, he was always busy and out of the house. We were always left alone with Maeve. Maeve the woman I had to call ‘mommy’ despite her screaming about how much she hated children, my mother, my grandparents, and me. The truth is, she is an idiot. She tried to learn French for years and was never able to. Ever. How do you live an immersive life and not learn a few words? I taught her ‘biscuit’ because I thought it was funny for a very obese woman to know the one word that got her to that weight. The North is mostly bilingual and many are multilingual. Maeve cannot even spell in the one language she claims to know.
At the end of June, Gary and Irene come get us for our 3 week summer vacation at the cottage on Lake Couchiching. I was over the moon with excitement! It had been so long since we last saw them. They drove up on a Friday, came over for supper where they met Maeve – would it surprise anyone if I said she hated them? The feeling was mutual; they did not like her at all. She is a crass, vulgar, uneducated woman. She disliked Gary and Irene for the simple fact that they treated us like their own children. They loved us, spoiled us, and wanted to take care of us. Maeve did not like anyone who took any interest in us. She worked behind the scenes to get Gary and Irene expelled from our lives.
This particular summer vacation we spent all our time exploring the outdoors, swimming in the lake, bird watching, and being kids. I never worried about being hit, yelled at, screamed at, belittled, cursed at, or made to feel humiliated. Gary had a boat and I remember he took us out for a ride and the boat sank. Hahahaha fortunately I was an excellent swimmer. The boat had hit something in the lake and caused a rather large hole, I say it sank, but it sank quite close to the boathouse for an easy tow-in. The lake was our bath water that summer since the cottage did not have running water and electricity was provided by a generator.
When Gary, Irene, and Isabel spent their time at the cottage, they brought all the fowl with them too, and Scotty. The cats could fend for themselves, apparently. I loved the chickens. I had a brown chicken named Matilda. Her eggs had the darkest yellow looking yolk, but at the end of three weeks, I never wanted to look, smell, or eat another egg. Granted, it was much better than the liver and onions daddy and mommy would force us to eat or just abandon us to sit at the table for hours trying to hide pieces of liver in the houseplants. I never wanted to leave. I just wanted to stay with them forever.
Gary and Irene indulged us. I wanted a swing, so Gary hung a large rubber tire on one of the large oak trees so I could sit there and watch the sun set. Across the lake was a Girl Guides camp, I think. There were cottagers all around us, but our little cottage was insulated by many trees and made it easy to forget we were not alone. At night, Gary would enthrall us with tales of fairies riding on the backs of dragonflies. He told us about princesses in fairyland that looked like us and were heroes of their people.
One time while I was swimming underwater with my eyes open, Gary jumped in and I happened to see his scrotum because it fell out of his swimsuit. At the end of our vacation when we returned home, daddy wanted to know all about our holiday so we told him about the hens, Rusty, the ducks, the quail, the lake, the boat sinking, and Gary’s scrotum. All of a sudden, we were no longer permitted to vacation with Gary and Irene. I saw his scrotum. I wonder why seeing a scrotum once was worse than when I told daddy about Uncle Bruno… I think daddy hoped my memories would just go away. The reaction he had to this incident was overblown, in my opinion.
Gary and Irene started coming to visit for weekends instead of taking us to their cottage until one day, when I was 12 or 13 they were told they could no longer see us or send gifts. Why? Because Maeve. It’s always because Maeve is jealous of children. One of her biggest fears, I have come to see, is that someone would find out how she treated us and perhaps someone would understand the terror I experienced every single day. The balancing act on her part was to not go so far as to anger my father. I don’t think it was possible to anger my father. He literally watched her treat us like garbage and call us all sorts of names… my sister recalls my father saying “Hey, break the cycle,” which only served to enrage her even more. Reminding Maeve about breaking the cycle of violence was equivalent to waving a red flag in front of an enraged bull.
At the end of summer in 1982, daddy sold The Store because one night, they were held up at gunpoint. Our next business adventure would be a whorehouse. The original whorehouse of the town was now a rooming house. It is a 7,000 square foot building in the centre of town with a 2-bedroom apartment on the main floor separating the living quarters from 31 rooms over 3 floors. An appropriate environment for young kids, no?
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