Weirdos are Living in My House

Chapter 21 Bugs

We moved to the new house in February of Grade Nine, 1973. There were three bedrooms on the main floor. I had one, Hatty had one, and Mom and Dad had one. There were two bathrooms too, one for Mom and Dad and one that was mainly for Hatty and me. I liked having my own room again. Mom and Dad painted and wallpapered it for me, and were all cooperative about it, so and I thought that maybe things were going to be okay, after all. I think Hatty liked having her own room too, once she got used to it. She wasn't too thrilled about moving because she liked our old house and she liked her old kindergarten class. Dan and I had to keep going to Killarney, because it was on a term system where the courses started in September and ended in June, and the Burnaby school was on a semester system where half the courses started in September and ended in February, and half started in February and ended in June. We took the city bus to school, which was a long, boring ride in both directions.

Dan had his room in the basement again, but it wasn't a dungeon like his old room. More of it was above ground and he had a real window, not just a window in a well. It was papered with Playboy Bunny centrefolds. It was like that when we moved in, and Mom didn't make him take them down. I would have, and I wasn't the one who was always going on about the objectification of women and the moral dangers of the pornography industry. I didn't look very closely at the Playboy Centrefolds. I kind of wondered if one of them was my Grade Eight English teacher, but I didn't want to know what she looked like when she was young and naked. I didn't like her middle aged and inappropriately dressed. No other teachers wore black lace cocktail dresses to school.

Al and his girlfriend were in another bedroom, and Ralph and a steady parade of young women who came upstairs to the kitchen in their underwear and his shirts were in a third bedroom. In our old house, I'd been nervous about going into the living room and finding a sleeping hippy. In this house, I was nervous about going into the kitchen in the morning and finding one of Ralph's half naked girlfriends and Ralph making her breakfast in the short bathrobe he always forgot to close. No one needed to see that first thing in the morning, let alone a fourteen year old girl who needed to eat breakfast, make her lunch, and get out the door in time to catch the bus, or miss it, and have to wait half an hour for the next one, which would make her late for class.

The other rooms in the basement were one bathroom for all of them to share, a couple of smaller rooms and a huge rec room. Dan knew how to keep old friends and make new ones, and the rec room soon became party central for all of them. They'd play stacks of records and dance and drink and horse around. They didn't care if I was down there too, but the parties were Dan's, not mine. The parties were raucous and rowdy and much, much more dangerous than anything the boys in the park got up to. Dad always stayed upstairs in case things got out of hand and an adult needed to take charge, so he was there for the boy who drank too much Southern Comfort and knocked himself out trying to prove he was sober enough to lift weights, and also to talk another boy out of breaking one of his own fingers so he'd have an excuse to explain why he broke curfew to his probation officer. And Mom thought Kelly was a bad influence! None of the park boys had probation officers, and neither did Kelly. Sometimes a couple of Grade Eight girls would be at the party, looking lost and too young, and I'd be reminded of Kelly and I at the house party that I got into so much trouble for going to. Mom wouldn't even notice, let alone send them home. I wondered what their parents would have thought?

The rules for Dan were much, much different from the rules for me.

Mom had just about finished university, so her annoying friends stopped coming around constantly. I was happy about that, but she wasn't. Dad said maybe she wasn't as important to her friends as they were to her, and that was what he had tried to tell her when she had said that friends were family you chose, and he had said that was horseshit. She said, but they'd been good friends to her, and then he said they'd come to our old house all the time because it was convenient and he bought most of the beer and the food. She said he didn't know what he was talking about, and what about Nicola? Dad said, what about Nicola? It was nice that they were still friends but now they weren't in school anymore, they'd probably drift apart. Mom didn't believe him, but he was right. Nicola moved away and took her daughter with her to Quebec. Mom wanted to go visit, but Dad said he had enough on his plate, and she could go if she wanted to, but she'd have to make her own arrangements. I think that meant she'd have to pay her own way. A little while after that, Mom moved into one of the small extra rooms in the basement and she and Dad stopped talking to one another. We were in a new house, but we were still the same old people.