Because of Canada - A memoir (with a bit of creative nonfiction)

 

Because of Canada1

 

My grandparents built a two-story, three-season, Cape Cod-style lakefront vacation cottage in Kingsville, Ontario. In Canada, I learned to swim, fish, row, drive a speedboat, and water ski. I also learned that opportunity is a brief visitor.

In 1963, when I was thirteen, my best friend, Doug, stayed a month with us at our cottage. Doug and I spent our days hanging out with a group of summer kids. Some days we’d walk into town for ice cream. One day we earned thirty-five cents a basket picking yellow wax beans. Doug and I talked about girls when we were alone. We knew next to nothing about sex, but we were ready to learn. My older brother Dave, who girls considered cool, knew quite a lot but offered little advice.

That summer, my father and older brother lived at home during the workweek and stayed at the cottage on the weekend. Most Saturdays, my dad would play cards and drink old-fashioned with a neighbor. My older brother Dave divided his time between sleeping, swimming, and borrowing my mom’s convertible. When friends of my parents visited the cottage, they came for lunch and cocktails on Saturday. One Sunday, my mom announced the Nelsons would be visiting on the next Saturday with their twin daughters.

Doug and I had gone through grade school with the Nelson twins, Barbara and Kathy. The girls were not identical twins. Most considered Barbara the prettier of the two. She had a beautiful oval face with pink apple cheeks. More of a tomboy, Kathy was cute, athletic, and funny. She was the one who always laughed at my jokes.

In fifth grade, Barbara and I became friends while learning to dance the waltz in gym class. No one had to teach us to twist. Barbara was easy to talk with and tolerant of my clumsy dancing. The next year, our entire sixth grade went on the train for a three-day trip to Washington, DC. My mother and Mister Nelson were parent chaperones. Doug and I and a dozen other boys did everything we could to be near Barbara and Kathy during the tour. Over the summer, the two sisters had matured. Kathy developed curves and Barbara became slim and shapely. They had turned into the type of teenage girls that cool guys, like my older brother, wanted to date. They became unobtainable to guys like Doug and me.

Doug and I spent the next week talking about what we should do when the twins arrived. Getting free of parents, sunbathing, and swimming were high on our list. In my imagination, I pictured Barbara and me alone on our beach. The sun beating down; the waves lapping the shore, a transistor radio playing music for young love. Did I mention I was applying Coppertone to Barbara’s back, and she was wearing a bikini?

The atmosphere Saturday morning was chaotic. Neighbor boys kept stopping by to glimpse the fabled twins. My brother Dave and my dad went into town to buy perch. My mother assigned me to straighten and clean the cottage. Doug, who had taken a dose of his allergy medication after breakfast, laid down on a daybed in the dining room and fell into a deep, unconscious sleep.

I was shucking corn in the kitchen when the Nelsons arrived. Dad and Dave had yet to return. My mom made a fuss over the girls and how they had grown since she last saw them. The girls had on identical white blouses, shorts, and tennis shoes. Only their hairstyles were different. Barbara had long blonde hair below her shoulders, similar to Joni Mitchell. Kathy had cut her blonde hair in a short style made popular at the time by Jane Fonda.

“Aren’t they cute, Roger?” my mother asked.

I said nothing. The awkward silence was broken by Doug’s snoring in the next room.

“Roger, go wake Doug,” my mother said.

“I tried. It’s his allergy pills. I can’t wake him.”

“I bet the girls can get a rise out of him,” my mother laughed.

Giggling, Barbara said she would try.

Barbara sat beside Doug on the daybed, stroking his face and whispering, “Doug, wake up, wake up.”

Arising from a medicated stupor and seeing the girl of his dreams sitting beside him, Doug did the only sensible thing he could do. He grabbed one of the daybed’s mildewed pillows and placed it over his lap as he sat up. It is a biological fact that most teenage boys wake up with an erection. Doug’s plight was obvious to me. His salvation came when my mother suggested I show the girls where they could change into their swimsuits.

Kathy said, “That would be great. I swim every day in our pool.”

“I’ll show you,” I said, now worried about where we would swim. Swimming off our dock was possible, provided one didn’t mind seeing the occasional dead fish float by or stepping down into the mucky lake bottom.

Changing into our bathing suits, Doug and I argued over who would sit with Barbara. What we failed to consider was the girls were on the verge of being women and any decision would be made by Barbara and Kathy.

Looking like goddesses in their one-piece suits, the sisters walked together and ahead of us, to the lake. Perhaps they were embarrassed to be seen with Doug, a beanpole in a speedo, and me, a sun-burned white whale who needed a mask and snorkel to swim underwater.

The cottage stood back from a gravel road overlooking Lake Erie. Our strip of the lake had a sandbar an eighth of a mile from the rock-covered shore. The sandbar offered one hundred feet of fine yellow sand at its widest part. The water in between cycled slowly and never got over five feet deep. Perfect for water skiing, if it weren’t for the lake weeds that grew in abundance in the silt and muck-filled bottom. Beyond the sandbar was an ideal stretch of clear blue water with a white sand bottom and no weeds. The only problem was getting there.

The smell of seaweed and dead fish on our rocky narrow section of sand forced us to move the beach towels to the end of our dock. The girls sat on one towel with their feet in the water. Doug and I sat on another. Why I thought I’d spend the afternoon applying Coppertone to Barbara’s golden shoulders is beyond me.

After a few minutes in the sun, Kathy stood up and suggested we go for a swim. Until that moment, I had not perceived how attractive Kathy had become. She had a brilliant smile, a face full of freckles, and an energy that outshone her sister.

Doug, who was on the junior high swim team, said, “Let’s swim to the sand bar.”

“Don’t you have a boat?” Barbara asked.

“We used to have an army surplus life raft,” I said. “But it sank.”

“What happened?” Kathy asked, laughed.

“It’s dumb,” I said.

“Come on,” Kathy teased.

“A couple of weeks ago, we thought it would be funny to fill a neighbor kid’s rowboat with water.”

“We sank it, along with the outboard,” said Doug, “and his dad didn’t think it was funny.”

“Anyhow, the next week, Doug and I were paddling out to the sand bar, when the life raft sprang a leak in three places.”

“What did you do?” asked Barbara.

“We made it halfway back before it deflated and sank. We don’t know how he did it, but we’re sure it was the local kid getting back at us. Anyway, the raft needs a rubber patch.”

“Besides, it would have been crowded with the four of us,” said Doug.

Barbara and Kathy gave us a look.

“It seems like a long swim,” said Barbara, looking out to the sand bar. “Could you borrow a boat?”

“We can walk,” I said.

“Walk.” They both exclaimed.

“We walk half the way to the sand bar in tennis shoes and float the rest of the way on these green and yellow pool rafts,” I said, not mentioning I’d need a snorkel and dive mask to swim.        

“Tennis shoes,” Barbara said, looking uncertain.

Any further discussion of walking to the sand bar in their clean white tennis shoes was averted by my brother. Wearing a summer hat and dressed in Madras shorts and a white Izod polo shirt, Dave looked like a young Elvis.

After awkward introductions, Dave asked, “Girls, would you like to take a ride later to see the lake and get ice cream in Kingsville?”

“Why not now?” Barbara asked.

“We can all go,” said Kathy, looking at me.

“No, the car only seats four,” Dave said, knowing we took five and six kids in the car. “You girls can go with me, and we’ll bring the ice cream back for dinner.”

Doug looked at me and I shrugged my shoulders.

“You don’t mind, do you, Roger?” Dave asked.

“No …”

“Great,” he said, taking Barbara’s hand, with Kathy following.

The girls spent the rest of the day driving around with Dave in our English-built Sunbeam convertible. When they got back, we had an early perch dinner, with ice cream and fresh strawberries for dessert. All Barbara and Kathy talked about at dinner were Kingsville and the fun they had with Dave. Doug and I never had a chance.

Fifty years later, I am still a cottage person, Doug and I are Facebook friends, and my brother has no memory of his day chauffeuring the twins. In Canada, I learned there is a difference between real and imagined relationships. I also learned never to trust another man around any woman I liked, even when that man is my brother.

1.  This memoir is an updated version with correct names of the people in the story. A version of this story was published in Remember When: Fiction & Memoir Tales of Memories and Times Past. Redwood Writers Press. 2020.

Roger C. Lubeck: “Because of Canada.” Remember When: Fiction & Memoir Tales of Memories and Times Past. Shawn Langwell (Co-Editor) Crissi Langwell (Co-Editor). Redwood Writers Press. 2020.