Before We Begin
B
efore we begin, the first thing you should know is that my father is a ghost. His existence is like a mist. Some kind of faceless, phantom form tumbling through sky and space. When others ask about him, I want to say that he’s the feeling of someone who was just here—someone who’s left the room only moments before your entry. I don’t say this out loud because it’s untidy and strange. You can’t say that your father is the scent of bacon after it’s been crisped in the pan and eaten greedily over the kitchen sink—salt heavy in the air, clinging to the dim corners of the kitchen. No. You can’t say any of that. So I usually just say that he is dead.
When we’re six, my twin brother and me, my mother sits us down to deliver the facts:
“Your biological father’s name is Patric Kluth.”
“Kluth” she repeats. “With a ‘K’.”
“Kluth,” I whisper.
“It’s a German name,” she says. “His parents—your grandparents, I guess—are from Germany. Your grandfather’s name is Oswald, your grandmother’s name is Rose.”
“Or Rose-marie,” she says. “Or—shit, it might be Rosie?” She shifts in her seat on the couch.
“It was what the grown-ups call a one-night stand.”
I hold his name on my tongue, allowing it to move around inside of my mouth. Kluth. With a “K.” To me, it sounds like the word clue.
When we go out shopping, me and my mother, I begin to look for my father everywhere. I concentrate on the faces of men passing us outside of Harwood Plaza or in line at the No Frills. I scrutinize the arch of a brow, the slope of a nose. I consider each man until I feel a special feeling. I believe that I’ll know my father’s face when I see it. There will be an understanding, some spiritual stirring in the concaves of my chest. If a man looks at me, he could be my father. And if I regard him back, then maybe we’ll both know.
He might walk to me slowly, a blinking realization settling on his face. He’ll have discovered that his daughter and his son have been born and growing and starting school in the city of Ajax. Right here, where he’s walked around every day, wondering about them. He might hook his hands between my arms and lift me up at the waist, bringing me to his chest for a hug. We might spin. I imagine that the people around us in the No Frills line would probably clap and cheer. Perhaps we would make it onto the TV news. Maybe even Oprah.
My mother gave me my father’s name, and I remember it. The Clue remains tucked away for many years. It’s the receipt for an expensive item, the one you keep safely inside of a desk drawer, just in case. Each year, I unfold The Clue, assess it, then tuck it away again. Life lurches forward, the sun setting and rising. The seasons swell up in another wet birthing, then gold and brown, retreating back to that same little death. It’s important to know that life keeps happening, over and over, whether you are a fatherless daughter or not.
My mother stops trying to find him. She called his parents from her mother’s landline to inform them of her pregnancy. Then again later, to announce the birth of their son’s fathered twins. She gives them her phone number to pass along to Patric. The landline doesn’t ring. My father never calls back.
My mother is generous surrounding my father’s name, its correct spelling and his parentage. She is not as forthcoming when it comes to her recollection of him. I ask if she remembers the night they shared together. The texture of the evening, the music, anything at all. She doesn’t. I ask about his face, the way he spoke. Was he kind to her? Was he funny? What kind of beer did he drink? How did he dance?
“I don’t remember much,” my mother breathes out, DuMaurier smoke puffing out from her lips. She thumbs her cigarette over the ashtray. She launches into all of the old stories she’s told me before. The one about being pulled up on stage at a David Bowie concert. Getting kicked out of the bar with a friend, fighting off the two bouncers for the both of them. The years she spent working for Mini Maid. Her days of cleaning the large homes of others, walking around those big rooms and thinking, God, if only I had a house like this.
I admire my mother’s complacency. Her willingness to yield, to kneel down even when the salt is stinging the skin of your knees. I picture her pregnant, a young woman in her 20s. In and out of Scarborough General, for hearing voices or schizophrenic behaviour or manic depression or bipolar disorder or high periods of paranoia followed by depressive lows. Two babies kick inside of her. She knows she can do this, but no one believes her. She bows her head in a humble surrender. If you are a single mother living in a subsidized apartment on ODSP who never got her driver’s license, what hands do you have left to play, and would you believe you could win them?
I begin to think that she might just prefer our life without a man. Her reticence seems to say, Sure hon, a full fridge would have been nice. Someone to hang a picture frame on a wall or take the garbage bags to the trash chute. But is a man really worth all the trouble?
When I turn 17, I decide to look for my father. This time, there is the internet. Now, I can do the searching myself.
People say that timing is cruel. I think that timing just possesses trickster energy.
Ha-ha, Timing says, you thought that you could cheat the turning wheel of the year or delay the leaves from wilting on the branch. Timing cannot be cruel, it’s just mischievous. I type the name Kluth into the search bar on yellowpages.com. At the top of the page, just two listings appear.
My paternal grandmother picks up on the first ring. It’s as if she expected it. Her acknowledgement startles me, and I almost forget the reason for my calling. I ask her about her son, my words building up to it. If I don’t draw it out, explaining it as slowly as I can, I worry that she might just hang up.
I learn about my father by reading the obituary, the one hosted on the website for a funeral home in Thunder Bay. His passing creates what I’ve always wanted to uncover: a record. A bit of marrow left inside the bone.
She cuts me off. Perfunctory and detached, she tells me that yes, Patric is her son. But Patric is dead. Three weeks ago, it turns out. A tumour. It turns out that her name is Annerose.
“Oh,” I say. “Well,”
“Well,” she echoes back. “Bye, then.”
“Um,” I whisper. “Bye.”
After I hang up the phone, a thought emerges, ridiculous in its practicality: The next time my family doctor asks me those pre-screening questions, like, is there any history of cancer in your family? I can now say yes.
The phone call does a peculiar thing. I am now keenly aware of my father’s absence. Before, he was an imagined memory, a man moving around rooms in full human form. Wearing blue jeans and a t-shirt. Other times, maybe, a thick flannel button-up. Now, he is a ghost made sacred. I can’t picture him as a man any longer. He has transformed into a muted spectre, one that floats through long halls with tall, ornate ceilings. He is cloaked in a holy white cotton sheet, two jagged holes cut out for eyes.
Google tells me that the five stages of grief are Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. There is no stage called Questioning. But perhaps this is the same as Bargaining? My first question: am I supposed to grieve? If so, in which way? I deliver the news with a dramatic flair. My brother is a shrug. My mother is a frown. I decide that I will grieve quietly. In secret.
I do feel Anger, though. He missed out on years of child support. We could have used it. Hey asshole, I want to say to him. Thanks for all the daddy issues. Didn’t you ever want to redeem yourself? I would have accepted him. At the very least, he could have sent something for our birthdays. Like a Barbie, or a cool scooter. I’d always wanted a scooter.
I learn about my father by reading the obituary, the one hosted on the website for a funeral home in Thunder Bay. His passing creates what I’ve always wanted to uncover: a record. A bit of marrow left inside the bone.
I realize that only death makes my father become Google-able. Timing-the-Trickster laughs.
A photo of him is on the obituary page. I squint at an image of a man with greying hair peeking out from under a brown fedora. He’s got tinted eyeglasses perched on his wide nose. Mine and my brother’s nose. He is smiling. Beside the photo, a paragraph: Patric Kluth was a rocker at heart, and loved to fish. His death follows his father’s, who died in 1998.
Then, the obituary talks about his beloved son. Their father-son camping trips. A brother? I think. The obituary says that his son is 16 years old. I am one year older.
On a September day in the 1990s, my mother lays on her back in a Scarborough hospital bed. A nurse pushes back her sweat-dampened hair with a washcloth, while my mother screams through the birth of the twins that Patric fathered. I came first. My twin brother, second. Around this time, it is entirely possible that somewhere else, my father’s long-term girlfriend has just found out that she was newly pregnant with my other brother.
When I find my half-sibling on Facebook, I want to ask him about our father. But I’m not sure how to begin. Hey bro? No. The photos of my brother show icy-blue eyes. They are not warm brown, like mine. He has a slim face and a flash of straight dark hair. I compare him to photos of myself and my twin brother. As I examine my half-brother’s face, I see that his smile curves just the way mine does. His jawline cuts in a familiar way, ending in a weak chin, like mine. I send him a message.
To my surprise, my half-brother is elated. He wants to talk.
“Dad used to say he might have some twins out there somewhere,”
I pause. I let him type.
“He wasn’t really a great dad,” my brother types to me. “Just so you know.”
“Do you have any more photos of him?” I ask.
“My aunt might,” he replies.
“I walked through my whole life thinking I was an only child,” my new brother types to me. “I just can’t believe that I have siblings.”
I feel a newfound belonging. The feeling I’ve been after is named: kinship. In a swelling of emotion, I wonder if I should invite him to my upcoming wedding. Is a wedding a good time to meet your unknown half-brother?
My half-brother shows me that while I was looking for my father, he just walked around knowing I existed. Did he ever dream of me? One night in bed, I toss and turn beside my sleeping fiancé, limbs leaden and hot under damp sheets. A thought crystallizes: perhaps my father thought of me and my twin as ghosts, too. Haunting him, threatening to wreak havoc on his real family.
I wouldn’t have, I say to him. Around this time is when I start talking to my dead father.
I can carry on quite well, composting almost any hurt into a joke. I’m doing fine, thanks! Just fine, really. Someone who I didn’t know died, and that someone was my biological father? I don’t know what to do with that. It’s confusing, right? So weird. Like, how does one grieve that sort of loss? Do you even feel you have the right to grieve at all? What was that? Oh, the yogurt? Yep yep yep. I’m standing in front of the cooler. Yes, my shopping cart is in your way, I see this now. Here. Let me just. There you go. Oof, watch the sugar on that one. 13 grams! Insane. Glycemic index alert! Haha. Anyway. Yes. Yeah–I’ll see you at book club. Bye.
But there are moments. The way my husband’s hands cradle our newborn daughter’s impossibly tiny head makes me sob loudly in the kitchen. It’s how he fathers so well, making our son’s bottle in the morning, droplets of warm milk measured against the skin on his wrist. My husband lifts our daughter by her waist at age six, the same year I learned of my father’s name. He brings her high, legs kicking over the glowing lights of our Christmas tree. Her small fist clutches the tree star, and something wraps itself around my top left rib, squeezing.
It’s healing to see a new version of fatherhood modelled in our family. But I know that my sentimentality is still tinted—everything is looked at through the lens of lack. The joy is punctured. It has two jagged holes for eyes.
When my daughter turns ten, she favours my husband. They create their own inside jokes, disappearing into worlds where I do not exist. When I walk into a room and say something, like, there’s a wet towel left on the bathroom floor again. Or, please remember to turn off a light when you leave a room, they both collapse together, laughing. Like two galaxies colliding, shining and breathless.
I resent that their closeness bothers me. A new feeling emerges: one of being left out. How ridiculous, I think, for a grown woman to feel these things. I atone with my therapist, labelling the self-consciousness that surrounds the feeling. It's infantile and silly. My therapist is quiet for a while.
“You missed out on all of this,” she tells me.
No shit, I think.
“Sometimes,” she says, “a trauma in early childhood can stick you to a time and place, preventing yourself from moving on, from the feelings you felt back then. In a way, you are rooted in place.”
I like the word she chooses: rooted. It is a word I circle in on. Green things spring to mind: sprouts unfurling from the dark soil of our family garden beds. Springy moss, humid air. Green things I can do. Growing, I have patience for. Plants cannot be bad, cannot be evil.
Each story is hued by the shifting language of the person speaking. Told in the open air, the memories become alive like the person speaking them. They start, they stop, branching into different directions. I notice that stories shared from the mouth are made animate.
“How’s work been going?” my therapist asks. I tell her about the new oral history project at the library that I’ve been working on.
“Interesting stuff!” she says. She scribbles on her yellow legal pad.
When told in the oral tradition, stories can move and bend. I sit with seniors inside the library, listening. How their grandmother used to bend down in a clearing by the water of the Kichi Sibi, coaxing the milk from a cow in the place where a tennis court now stands. Each story is hued by the shifting language of the person speaking. Told in the open air, the memories become alive like the person speaking them. They start, they stop, branching into different directions. I notice that stories shared from the mouth are made animate.
And then there are the storytelling circles. For these interviews, several family members sit close, knees bumping together. They form a ring of bodies around the recording device in the centre of the table.
“The way I remember it—” someone cuts in, before another interrupts with, “—no, that wasn’t the way it went. It was more like—”
My favourite thing is the way the recordings start. I ask the interviewees if they’re ready. I prepare them with the question I will ask first, so that they can gather the right words. But as soon as I press record, someone in the circle will lean forward, or hold up a palm, suggesting a pause. They have something they need to say first.
“Before we begin,” they’ll tell me, “I just want to say … ”
And then they share the most important part of their family history, the formative memory that illuminates how everything else was shaped after it.
My great grandfather was actually a widower who remarried. Here’s who really started the fire on the farm.
Each time, the dates or the facts that come after do not matter. The Before We Begin story paints in everything.
My therapist tells me that I could try looking into my own ancestry to move forward. I could connect my lost heritage from my father’s side to the identity I hold of myself now, and rewrite a new story for my family, our children. I try to learn German. I’m quite bad at it. I learn that the word reason in the German language is grund: i.e., "ground."
Some mornings after a hot shower, that liminal place where the mind can freely wander, I consider the blurry, anonymous shape of me in the foggy bathroom mirror. I remember the way a younger me wondered about my father’s face, unknowable and hazy. I swipe away the moisture clinging to the glass. I see my reflection emerge: my wide nose, my weak chin.
I chant this affirmation over and over: I am a plant I am a plant I am a plant.
I look up my father’s last name first: Kluth, North German: from Middle Low German klūt(e), definition: "lump of earth, sod, clod."
A lump of earth. My therapist would love that. I can only smile.
I spit my saliva into a tube and send it away in the mail. The DNA results are as expected: I am an Eastern European-Scottish-German mutt. I research diasporas and migration patterns, hitting numerous dead ends when building out my digital family tree. My mother can’t remember her great-grandfather’s last name. I invite my grandmother over for tea. I ask her what her mother’s maiden name was. She can’t remember either. She takes a sip from her cup, looks at me, and asks me if I think Elvis is handsome.
“Sex and love can be two very different things, you know,” she says, gazing past me, at the open living room window behind my chair.
I discover Annerose’s passing in my genealogy research. She had died in 2012 and I’d missed it. Just like my father, my paternal grandmother becomes traceable only after her death.
Annerose was born in Kretzschau, Germany in 1932. She came to Canada by ship voyage in 1955 to meet her fiancé, Oswald, who’d travelled ahead of her. She learned English quickly by working in an Ontario hospital kitchen. She loved to bowl. In her later years, she managed an art gallery. Her obituary tells me she loved growing roses, that she had a beautiful oak tree.
The thing is, everything sentimental and warm that I read in the obituary disagrees with the cold voice of the woman I spoke to on the phone.
Her coworkers, the obituary reads, would lovingly call her their "little china rose."
My first thought: isn’t that nickname kind of problematic?
My second thought: I guess she liked to garden, too.
My husband books me a reiki session for my 31st birthday. I close my eyes and try to relax. When the practitioner's hands float over my hips, I feel warmth. Then, a frenetic energy buzzes, like a swarm of bees under my tailbone. I am suddenly very uncomfortable.
When the session is over, all I can say is wow. The practitioner laughs.
“I want to share a vision that I saw while working on you,” she tells me.
“It was when my hands went near your sacral,” both of her eyebrows lift, conveying that this is a very important chakric location.
When the practitioner's hands float over my hips, I feel warmth. Then, a frenetic energy buzzes, like a swarm of bees under my tailbone.
“This vision could be your spiritual guide, or an angel. I’m not really sure.”
I hope that she is going to tell me about my father. A message, perhaps, or an apology.
“I saw an older woman, “ she says. “With grey hair.”
I try to hide the disappointment on my face.
“She was wearing this knitted cardigan and she’s sort of grumpy?”
“She paced around muttering words angrily to herself, which I couldn’t make out. In a way, it was funny.”
She pauses, shaking her head as to rid herself of the vision.
“She seemed like the type of woman that was just, well—like, humorously in a bad mood.”
“Huh,” I say. I smile. I think.
When I get home and my husband asks how the reiki session went, I say,
“It was good. Kind of weird. You should try it sometime.”
I don’t add how I am now feeling pretty certain that the old woman is my dead grandmother.
When good news comes my way, here is who I tell, in order: my husband, my mother, my son, my daughter, my grandmother, my best friend, my writing partner, the librarians at work, and the nice lady who works at the post office. She’s a very supportive postal employee. Last, I tell my father’s ghost.
Look, I say. I am having some success. I am making others proud. I have made something of my life. Your absence did not impact me. Don’t you dare think it impacted me. Don’t you see how well I’m doing? You missed out. You should feel sorry. You should feel so bad, really. You should wish you were dead!
And then I remember that he already is.
I need to stop talking to his ghost.
On a wet January afternoon, I cross slush-packed streets in the neighbourhood where my husband and I made our first family home together.
“And at the end of the street,” I remember the realtor telling us on closing day, her hand waving in the air, “is the best German bakery in the city!”
I open the bakery door to a bell tinkling. It’s warm inside and the smell of yeast, butter, and salt is in the air. The women behind the counter slip crackled boules of sourdough into kraft-brown paper bags, ushering them into customers’ open hands like they are handing over a sleeping baby. Inside a lit glass display cabinet, cakes are lined in neat rows. A jammy raspberry cheesecake, a chocolate ganache, one that might be lemon, powdered sugar dusted across a yellow-glazed top. I am standing still at the threshold, realizing that my mouth has formed itself into a small, silent “O."
One of the women greets me from behind the counter. Her cheeks are round and pink, flushed with her effort. She smells like sweat, maple syrup, and flour. I order a coffee and a Strammer Max. The board on the wall tells me that it’s an open-faced sandwich with ham and a fried egg. She tells me to wait. I notice her accent, a familiar melody singing in the apex of syllables. As she pushes the swinging doors to the kitchen, more voices float out. They all speak quickly to one another. One hums, another laughs.
“Na?” someone asks.
Their language is born from both the sounds of a cat’s hiss and the phlegm stuck in the back of your throat. They are speaking German. It’s beautiful.
I want to arch the top half of my body forward, over the counter. I want to lean in, to be able to listen better. The woman comes back with my coffee and the sandwich.
“This is weird,” I say, “but I love listening to you all talk to each other.”
“We speak German in the back.” She points to the kitchen doors behind her. “My sisters.” Her face holds the expression of an apology.
“Oh, it’s fine!” I say, a little too loudly. “I mean, I know. I recognized it. I’m German,” I tell her. “Well, sort of.”
She smiles and begins ringing up my order.
“I always wanted to learn it,” I say, as she punches buttons on the cash register.
“Your family doesn’t speak it?” she asks.
“It’s complicated,” I say. “I didn’t actually know them.”
She looks up at me with a solemn expression. Perhaps, I think, one of understanding. I think that she might be about to say something profound.
Instead, she backs away from the counter, and I worry that I might have come off as very weird.
She walks to the display cabinet and bends down, reaching inside.
“If you are German—” she straightens, sliding a styrofoam container across the counter, “—then you must try our Black Forest cake. It’s our specialty.”
Then her hand lands over mine. It is warm, and she squeezes gently.
Outside, I bite into the Strammer Max one-handed, eating in motion as I clod through the slush and snow. I wipe egg yolk from my chin with the heel of my hand. I realize that I feel very light, buoyant. An idea has come, one that feels emergent. The container of cake swings in a plastic bag looped around my wrist.
Reiki touch therapy is said to be an energetic therapy that involves the use of hands to help strengthen the body's ability to heal. It sounds absurd, but at the time, I believed that the bakery woman might have given me a gift. I begin to think that when she touched my hand, she transferred to me an idea.
At home, I rest the styrofoam takeout container on the edge of my writing desk, propping open the lid. She was right. The Black Forest cake looks perfect. It’s time to lay out my own family story. To sift through the dirt, pick out the bones. I open my laptop and press into the cake with a fork, bringing a bite to my lips. I chew.
I don’t have much. There are genealogical threads that end abruptly. I do not have records. I only have ghosts to talk to.
As I’m swallowing sugared cream and boozy cherry, chocolate crumb settling in the pockets of my cheeks, I think of the storytelling circles. I think of telling it by mouth. The nature of a familial story that is told through the teeth. How it lilts, stops, and stutters before going on again. Perhaps I can try to write it that way. Maybe I can make it animate.
