Why Here?

Bex O’Brian

Word Count 790

When I was about seven years old, I had that moment where you look around and say to yourself, “I live here!” That simple sentence carries extraordinary emotion and weight, not to mention confusion. I live here, on this street, in this city?

That night I said to my mother, “Isn’t it amazing that we live here, in this flat, in Montreal?” I wanted her to share in my wonder that there was this world, and I had just discovered I had a place in it.

“Don’t remind me,” she said. 

There was no getting away from the fact that my mother hated living in Montreal. It was the wrong side of the border. The only reason she ended up in Canada was after the war, when life in London showed no signs of becoming easier, dirt cheap flights were offered to those willing to stock that vast empty colony. So along with her mother and brother, they hopped over the pond.

My mother knew instantly what a mistake had been made when they were dropped off in the very heart of downtown Montreal, and my grandmother looked around and said, “Don’t worry, Love, tomorrow we’ll find a bus to take us into the city.”

Montreal, to my mother, was never anything but a provincial backwater. And she made damn sure we knew it. She sneered at Canadian authors, “Hugh McLennan, can a man be more boring?” The Canadian Flag? “What five-year-old came up with that?” And, when Canada passed a rule that something like 30% of all radio and television had to be Canadian content, she moaned, “Oh, that’s the bitter end. We are going to be Anne Murray-ed to death.” 

Her rage created something of an emotional disconnect. I was a kid, Montreal was all I had ever known and it did wonderful things, like churning up wild snowstorms and setting trees ablaze with colour in the fall. I loved our flat as well, or at least parts of it. True, there were many deep closets that had peeling plaster and smelled of mold and spiders, and rooms that no one went into for months on end so they, too, took on that stale smell of neglect and unease. We were renters, so any home improvements (which stopped when my parents divorced) were made on the cheap, jerry-rigged. The coffee table was a door. The kitchen table a plywood board. The bookshelves, groaning with books, listed and threatened to bury us all. But I accepted all its faults and funky smells.

When I was a teenager, I made the mistake of dropping acid at home. I was smart enough to avoid any mirrors. Although considering what happened, I might have been better off staring at my kaleidoscope visage. What was supposed to heighten and enlighten my every sense soon became a nosedive into terror. Everything in the house freaked me out as if my mother’s rage, unhappiness, and disquiet had sunk into every pore of the shabby trappings of my life, pores which now opened and threatened to subsume me. Before my trip was even remotely over, I was huddled in a corner gripping my knees and mumbling nonsensically. After that, Montreal seemed the other to me, not home. Mother had won.

Naturally, I left as soon as I could and moved to New York. Home? Not quite. America, the idea, now was America, the reality. And it was shocking. Table manners aside, there was this bullying rightness, this grand poobah-nish that this was the greatest spot on earth. I was so intimidated and still influenced by my mother that I feared I lived in a country rife with the profoundly delusional.

But why not take a cue from all those people who felt they were right where they belonged? I tried. But everywhere I lived, I was just a little bit out of step, not quite in the groove. At my first sublet in The Village, I was a young girl looking for love, surrounded by a sea of gay men. When my husband and I moved out to Brooklyn, I was a white woman who was not nearly hip enough for our rocking African-Caribbean neighbourhood. When the crack epidemic tore through the community, I was a target. And now, with the demographics changing again, I represent all that’s wrong with New York. 

I have lived in our apartment for more than thirty years. Surely, that feels like home. There are moments, usually late at night, when I am turning out all the lamps that I feel like the mistress of the house and yet, like those maps with the arrows pointing, YOU ARE HERE, I have never been able to dispel the question, Why?

Bex is the author of the novels (Under Bex Brian) Promiscuous Unbound and Radius, also available here. At present she’s working on a new novel entitled, My Memoir Of An Impossible Mother. Read an excerpt from Radius on our DPA+ page, here.