Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter by Alison Wearing Page B

arrangement.
    Sebastian was such a hit that soon we acquired another Bichon, Cinnamon, and the springy pair took it upon themselves to become sex education instructors for my brothers and me. First Cinnamon went into heat, prompting my mother to rush out to Sears and purchase padded underwear called training pants, normally used for toddlers, that she styled for a dog by cutting a hole in the back for Cinnamon’s tail and a little one in the crotch for the pee. Cinnamon pranced around in variations of that getup for weeks, while Sebastian lost all interest in me—we had been inseparable until then—panting and throwing himself at doors to be with her. I sobbed, feeling a combination of rejection and disgust at his loss of dignity—emotionsI would find myself revisiting with a number of other males later in life.
    About six months later, Cinnamon heated up again, but this time we were told that Sebastian would mate her. (Eight-year-old Flip’s puzzling comment when he saw the bright red extension of Sebastian’s penis was “That’s what I need!”) The dogs’ backyard copulation was the most exciting thing that had happened around our house for a while and my mother didn’t discourage us from watching nature in action. My brothers and I giggled and pointed at the humping for the first few minutes, but the post-coital panting and bum-to-bum attachment was so horrendous that it turned me off sex for much of the ensuing decade.
    A few weeks after the unromantic union, Cinnamon’s body began to fill, her teats swelling underneath her until one evening she moved into an almost hypnotic state, growing purposeful and uncannily focused. My mother helped her into the bed she had prepared and we all gathered around, staying up well into the night, thrilled by the exciting vigil. Cinnamon yelped as the first translucent ball emerged from her body and it was by far the best magic trick I had ever seen. My mother reached over and pinched open the thin sac that encased the puppy’s body, peeling the membrane from its face.
    From the tiniest mouth I could ever have imagined, I was taught that breath is life.

FICTION
    The summer I turned ten, my father decided that we should celebrate the event with a reading of
Anne of Green Gables
. I was an avid reader by then, devouring books as fast as my parents could put them in front of me, but my father’s gift was a
reading
of the book, aloud and together.
    He began the ritual by baking Gratin Dauphinoise, a Julia Child recipe that normally calls for white potatoes, but for which my father substituted the red potatoes my mother had brought back from a trip she had taken with her mother and sister to Prince Edward Island that summer. It was the rich, red sandstone and soil of Prince Edward Island that was responsible for the colour of the potatoes, my father explained excitedly as he served up plates of light pink Gratin.
    â€œSo was Anne’s food always pink?” I asked, picking through the sludge of milky, cheesy potato slices and trying to get inspired to taste it.
    Dad laughed. “She probably ate her fair share of potatoes,” he replied, scraping away at the sides of the baking dish where a buttery crust of potato was stuck. “But there wouldn’t have been any such thing as ‘French cooking’ in Prince Edward Island back in those days.”
    I smiled and nodded, silently wishing that there wasn’t any such thing as French cooking in Peterborough, Ontario, in
these
days either. But I brought a forkful of gooey pink potatoes to my mouth, chewed cautiously, and was pleasantly surprisedby the flavour.
Anne of Green Gables
was getting off to a good start after all.
    Once I was all ready for bed—washed, brushed, in my nightgown and under the covers—I was to call out, “Daddy, I’m ready to start reading!” And just as he had done a few months earlier with Paul (with the dreadful-sounding