Playing Dominoes

By Michelle Berry (page 2 of 5)

In the middle of June in 1975 my family packed up a U-Haul moving van. We also packed up our little car. We put everything we had into these two vehicles and left our small house in Virginia for a two week adventure. My brother was nine. I was seven. I had just played the role of Betsy Ross in my grade one, end-of-year school play. I remember some complicated manoeuvre the grade one teacher taught me where, as I pretended to sew a blank piece of white cloth, I would turn my hand slightly and push the American flag up through the white cloth. From plain white, to red, white and blue.

My father had taken a job at the University of Victoria in British Columbia as an English Professor. On our glass coffee table before we left he laid out a map of the United States and Canada and my brother and I kneeled down to trace the route we would take. Through Pennsylvania, through the mid-west to Chicago, through Iowa and the Badlands and Wyoming or Montana (nobody's sure anymore), through Idaho to Washington State where we would take the Anacortes Ferry to Victoria and touch down on Canadian soil. My father told us about living on an island. He showed us how big Canada was. I distinctly remember him mentioning something about a Queen. When he told us about the vastness of Canada we saw the huge colours on the map, hardly any of it covered in writing. Somehow I understood that the journey would be a big one, and that the line my father traced across the country was not really an arm-span long but stretched for miles and miles. We were leaving grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins in New Jersey. We were leaving friends, my career as Betsy Ross, my ballet class, the fields and woods around our house.

The Vietnam War was over, Watergate was winding down. My parents had friends who trained their one year old to stick out his tongue and blow at Nixon whenever he was on TV.

My parents had done this kind of mass moving before. My father's PhD is from Berkeley, California. He then received a Fulbright Scholarship and we shipped off to the UK to study in London. Before they had children my parents taught in Sierra Leone for the Peace Corps. They'd packed up their houses and apartments many times to live in other countries. They knew to come prepared. Bags of games and toys we could open for each day in the moving van or car. Start driving at 8am, end at 4pm and always find a motel with a pool. My father taped all our records and so we listened to "Jelly on Your Belly" and "The Lone Ranger" over and over.

In Chicago we stayed with my parents' friends who were enormously wealthy. My mother regales me with tales of their house near a lake and these stories combine with my memory, place me inside the past. We had a maid serve us breakfast, she tells me. The dining room table sat thirteen people. They had furniture from a Venetian movie set. One entire room for a ping-pong table, another room with nothing in it but seashells. And the huge library with books from floor to ceiling covering all the walls. "Surely you remember that?" she says.

The van was expansive. My feet didn't touch the floor. My father was omnipotent. There he was controlling this huge beast. I stuck my hand out the window and shot things - a tree, a bird, the landscape of cars below us. I waved my hand in the wind, an early version of break-dancing. I sang "Leaving on a jet plane, don't know when I'll be back again," because my teenage cousin had taught me it as she strummed her guitar.

I remember the Badlands, at least the photograph of me standing there. I can see the beige short-set I was wearing, the scabs on my knees, the dust blowing. I remember the prairie dogs poking out of their holes, arms poised, begging. They do look like that squirrel. Both have little arms clutched in front as if they are praying.

The scenery changed as we moved towards Canada. Things became lush (although anything is lush after the dust bowls of the prairies). The hotels were nicer, the pools clean. There was something coming, bright, just around the corner. Anticipation was thick in the air. We were approaching Canada.