Threads of Life

Chapter 3-2

weMy mother looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know,” my father said. “But it sounds like a good explanation.”

“It doesn’t explain anything to me. It sounds like you’ve lost your mind. You need to stop cross-examining Simon’s friends. You’re scaring them.”

My father wasn’t deterred. “They’re threatened by people without religion. They need us to be something, even if it’s something they hate. Or maybe it’s because they need something to hate.”

“You’re losing your mind.”

“A Rabbi could explain it better.”

* * *

Besides playing tennis, Simon was a perennial member of the Westbury track and field team, which I’ve already mentioned. Eventually, he became a good distance runner, completing a half-marathon in one hour and twenty-six minutes and finishing third in his age group. And if that wasn’t enough, on weeknights and weekends, he played hockey, first for the Thornhill Panthers and then the Vaughan Rangers. This meant that twice a year my family would drive to out-of-town tournaments, usually held in Buffalo or Detroit, where the Canadian teams, believe it or not, would often lose to the Americans, who looked too old for the age-group in which they were competing, and who smashed their opponents against the boards with such regularity and relish that Simon and his teammates were afraid to hold onto the puck for more than a few seconds.

And along with organized sports, his exercise regimen only intensified in high school, and our bedroom became his personal fitness club, where he would clear a space in the clutter on the carpet like he was ploughing snow and do sit ups and push ups. And then he would walk over to our closet, where there was a metal pull-up bar in the doorframe and hang from the backs of his knees and do impossible looking things, sometimes talking to me while he was upside-down.

“Don’t forget you have a geography project due on Tuesday.”

Or “Make sure you wear a sweater today.”

Or “You should eat more apples.”

* * *

And I haven’t begun to do justice to his frenetic schedule. There was also the whole academic part into which he poured his heart. Simon was unfailingly attentive and participatory in class, and always sat in the front row while I sat in the back row, trying and often failing, to stay awake. He did his homework in the car on the way to hockey practice and on the bus on the way to a basketball game and before he went to sleep at night and early in the morning before he ran five miles and during lunch-hour when the rest of the students hung out and smoked and did nothing. He achieved a near-perfect grade-point average and scholarship offers from every university to which he applied.

And then there were his friends, many of whom were a constant presence at Hampshire Court. There was Ronnie Spencer, nicknamed Spence, and Darren Porter, nicknamed DP, from hockey, where there was some sort of tradition about making sure every player had a nickname, and where Simon, depending on how he played, was referred to as either Killer or Thriller.

And there were tennis friends besides Paul Delaney, a sometimes fat and sometimes thin kid named Hayden Bishop who lived on Old English Lane and whose father gained some notoriety at Long Acre for smoking a cigar while playing tennis, and Todd and Ely Revin, brothers who were as tall and good-looking as Simon, and who looked like twins even though they were three years apart.

And there was a basketball friend, Scott Shelton, who I think I did mention earlier, and who loved playing chess as much as basketball, and always brought a chess set to our house. If Simon was in the mood, the two would play seemingly endless games of chess at the kitchen table or by the pool until Simon announced he was going stir-crazy and needed to run or swim. Scott would sometimes wait for hours, patiently guarding the board until Simon returned to the game.

And there was a running friend, Drew Cunningham, the most talented runner on the team, who ran everywhere—to school, to friends’ houses, to his part-time job at Canadian Tire, to the mall, to movies, and sometimes, under threat of expulsion by the coach, ten miles or more to track meets where, regardless of how many miles he had logged right before a race, he would usually win—before running home.

And there were a couple more friends, unaffiliated with any team, smart kids from school. Hank Hopkins, who had freckles and a red afro and liked to eat lemon and orange peels. And Andy Viteri, who looked like John Denver in grades nine and ten and Tom Petty in grades eleven, twelve and thirteen and had an unnerving amount of energy; he’d climb on our roof and bang on our bedroom window until we let him in. Andy never slept, and would lose track of time, and would telephone Simon at two in the morning and wake everyone in the house.

And there were girlfriends. I still remember their names: Bonnie Clemens, Marla Moodie, Rickie Kasner (my favourite), Sherry Marshall, Patricia McNight (my second favourite), Tracey Pollack (my least favourite), Teri Goldfarb, Christine Davidson. Each one insinuated themselves into Simon’s busy schedule of sports and studying, which he wasn’t willing to alter, at least until he started having s*x.

* * *

And he still found time to play nine different instruments. By the age of thirteen, Simon had taught himself to play acoustic, bass, and twelve-string guitars, violin, piano, saxophone, trumpet, drums and harmonica, abandoning each one for the next as soon as he was any good, but always returning to the acoustic guitar and a handful of Beatles’ songs, which he played over and over, especially when he realized what an aphrodisiac they were to high school girls.

One night, in our room, lying in our beds, he was talking about what a great song “Two of Us” was, and he said, “It makes them horny.”

“You mean the song?” I asked.

“I was playing it and Marla started rubbing herself on the beanbag chair.”

There was a brown corduroy beanbag chair in our basement that, from that moment on, gave me a boner.

“Really?”

“She was so turned on, she started doing it right in front of me. When I finished the song, she grabbed my hand and shoved it down her pants. She was soaking wet. Then she told me that I should watch her finish. She took off all her clothes and touched herself until she came.”

“You just stood there watching her?”

“Not really. She was using her other hand on me.”

* * *

And somehow, he found time for volunteer work. In grade nine, Simon’s basketball coach, who believed in moulding young minds as well as young bodies, took the team to the St. John’s Rehabilitation Centre on Cummer Street, and had them volunteer for the day, reading to stroke victims and mangled survivors of horrible car accidents. And while the majority of the team viewed this exercise in civic responsibility as a one-day jail sentence, Simon returned the next Saturday morning and almost every Saturday after that, and became a fixture on the first floor, doing what he did best: making people feel good about themselves by sharing an interest in their miserable lives.

* * *

And what did I do while this perpetual full-court press, known as my brother, was going to the same high school as me? The answer, sadly, was as little as possible. I remember reading a few dozen novels, watching lots of television, eating lots of chips, and struggling to complete homework, which I usually avoided until the last minute. My grades were solidly average. I had no close friends. And regardless of how little I did, I always felt like I had no time for myself and that every one of Simon’s invitations to join him in an activity was an imposition bordering on offensive.

What I was, was an expert in Simon’s life. And it was mostly his doing. He must have thought of me as a plant that would dry up and die unless watered with constant attention.

And the nights were the worst, when I was trapped in the same room as him, and all I wanted to do was go to sleep, and all he wanted to do was keep me awake.

“For God’s sake, Simon, do you have to throw your s**t on my bed?” I was pushing an elbow pad, a glove and a garter belt attached to a hockey sock off my bed and onto the floor.

“Sorry about being such a slob, Aud. I was looking for my social sciences book. I thought I’d left it in my hockey bag.” He was walking around the room, collecting pieces of equipment, including a hockey jersey that hung from the light fixture and a neck guard that he had flung and lodged in the slats of the blind, shoving everything back in the bag.

When I pulled my blanket down to get into bed, I found his mouth guard in a small grey plastic container on my pillow. I picked it up and threw it at him. “Damn it, Simon.”

He caught the mouth guard and, in one motion, flipped it over his head and into the small opening in the hockey bag. “Two points!”

I told him again I was tired of finding his things everywhere.

“I’ll try to be neater. It’s not worth freaking out over.”

He picked up one of the guitars from the floor and started plucking the strings. His fingers moved quickly along the fretboard, and he played a series of notes that sounded familiar.

“We should write a song together.”

“Sounds like a lot of work.”

“Don’t be silly. You write the first verse, I’ll write the second, you write the third, and I’ll write the fourth. We can write the chorus together. I’ll put it to music, and we’ll sing it together at the talent show in December, and we’ll be discovered by Colonel Tom Parker and become rich and famous.”

“Who’s that?”

“Colonel Tom discovered Elvis.”

“Oh.”

“You have a great singing voice. It’s nasally and high-pitched in a psychedelic way, like Neil Young’s.”

Simon had never heard me sing.

He got up from his bed, walked across the room, stepping on an empty album cover and a pair of jeans, and sat beside me on my bed, bouncing up and down.

“I want to go to sleep.”

“Listen to this.” He started playing the same song he was playing before.

“What’s that?”

“Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.”

“You can play that without an orchestra?”

“Weird, eh? I’m trying to learn all nine of them. The amazing part is you can take the most complicated piece of music in the world, one that’s written for dozens of different instruments, and play it on guitar using five or six chords.”

“Weird. Now, get off my bed.”

Simon was still bouncing up and down. “Come on, Aud. Let’s spend some quality brother-time together.”

“Tomorrow.”

“You always say tomorrow. Tomorrow you’re going to say tomorrow again.”

“Maybe tomorrow I’ll say the day after tomorrow.”

after“Funny. Tell me something about your day. Something I don’t know. And I’ll tell you something about mine.”

That day Simon had volunteered at St. John’s, got to third base with Rickie Kasner, played two hours of tennis with Paul Delaney, finished reading a biography of John Kennedy he had found on my parents’ bookshelf, and was apparently more than halfway through learning to play Beethoven’s nine symphonies on the guitar.