Excerpt from After the Falls
Chapter 1, Expulsion
As we crept up the narrow winding road that rimmed the Niagara Escarpment in our 1960 two-toned grey Plymouth Fury with its huge fins and new car smell, my father pressed the push-button gear, forcing the car to leap up the steep incline and out of our old life. The radio was playing the Ventures' hit "Walk Don't Run." I sat in the front seat with my father while my mother sat in the back with Willie, the world's most stupid dog. We were following the orange Allied moving van, and I kept rereading the motto on the back door: leave the worrying to us. Two tall steel exhaust pipes rose in the air like minarets from both sides of the truck's cabin. Each had a flap that continually flipped open, belching black smoke and then snapping shut, like the mouth of Ollie, the dragon handpuppet on the Kukla, Fran and Ollie television show. The smoke mouths kept repeating the same phrase in unison: It's all your fault . . . it's all your fault.

I pressed my face to the window as the car crawled up the hill in first gear. Lewiston, where I'd grown up, was slowly receding. The town was nestled against the rock cliff of the huge escarpment on one side and bordered by the Niagara River on the other. St. Peter's Catholic church spire, which cast such a huge shadow when you were in the town, was barely visible from up here.

The sun was resting on the limestone cliff, setting it ablaze. I squinted at the orange embers on the rock wall, but the reflection was so glaring, I had to look away. My childhood too had gone up in flames.

~~

Yesterday I'd stood for the last time in my large bedroom with its wide-plank floor and blue toile wallpaper. My bed, which had been in my family for over 150 years, was now stripped naked, dismantled and propped against the wall. It was going to be left behind in our heritage home, no longer part of my heritage. My father said that the ceilings in our new house would not be high enough for the canopy. Where were we moving, a chicken coop?

I looked out my window at our sprawling yard and counted for the last time the thirteen old oak trees my ancestors had planted to celebrate the thirteen states in the union. The dozens of peony bushes near the wraparound porch had just opened. For generations now the church had taken flowers from our expansive gardens for the altar. I loved the part of the Mass when Father Flanagan would say, "Today's altar flowers are given to the glory of God by the McClures."

As I loaded my new popcorn bobby socks into a box with my Lollipop underpants and turtleneck dickeys, I caught an unwelcome glimpse of myself in the mirror behind my door. I was twelve and very tall for my age, with white-blonde hair. I had no curves, not even in my calves. I resembled a Q-tip. When I'd told my mother I was hideous, she insisted that early teenage years were an "awkward stage" and that soon I would "grow into myself"–whatever that meant.

I took the gilt-framed picture of my parents off my marble-topped dresser. It was an old photo of my father in his wool three-piece suit with his broad letterman grin, his arm casually draped around my lovely tall mother with her shy smile. It was taken years before I was born. Suddenly the words I'd overheard Delores, the cleaning lady, say to someone yesterday over the phone came back to me. She claimed it was a good thing that my mother only had one child, because two like me would have put her "in an early grave." As I glanced at the picture one more time before wrapping it in my eyelet slip, I noticed how much my parents, who were in their forties when they had me, had aged. They now looked more like grandparents than parents.

~~

As the car chugged toward the top of the escarpment, I, like Lot's wife, looked back at the town below me. I had no idea then that I was leaving behind the least-troubled years of my life. Strange, since I felt there was no way I could cause more trouble than I'd caused in Lewiston.

It was 1960. The era of the small town with historical homes was becoming itself–merely history. We were doing what millions of other people had done: we were migrating. The Okies had left the Dust Bowl for water and we were leaving Lewiston for what my mother had mysteriously described as "opportunities." Whatever the reason, we were leaving behind the chunk of rock that was a part of us. What would I do in Buffalo in the summer heat? When I was working at my dad's store in Niagara Falls, I would wander over to the falls and get cooled off by the spray. I couldn't imagine not being near the rising clouds of mist that parted to reveal the perpetually optimistic rainbow.

What would my life be without the falls to ground me? Losing the falls was bad enough, but how could I leave the small, idyllic town of Lewiston, where history was around every corner? General Brock had been billeted in our house during the war of 1812. Our basement had been part of the Underground Railroad that smuggled black slaves to Canada. And would I ever again live somewhere where everyone knew me- where I knew who I was? I would no longer be the little girl who worked in her dad's drugstore. Roy, the delivery driver with whom I distributed drugs all over the Niagara Frontier, used to say if someone in Lewiston didn't know us, then they were "drifters."

~~

Soon the escarpment was only a line in the distance, and Lewiston had disappeared. I would always remember it frozen in time: the uneven bricks of Center Street under my feet; the old train track up the middle, worn down after not being used for almost a century; The Frontier House, the hotel where Dickens, James Fenimore Cooper and Lafayette stayed and the word cocktail was invented; the maple and elm trees that arched over the roads, and the Niagara River, with its swirling blue waters that snaked along the edge of town. As we began to head south, I thought about the tightrope walker my mother and I had seen, years ago, inching across Niagara Falls carrying a long balance pole. We stood below on the lip of the escarpment, holding our breath. My mother kept her eyes shut and made me tell her what was happening.

I felt as though now, as I headed into my teenage years, it would take all I had to maintain my balance. I knew the secret was to never look down at the whirlpools below, to focus on a fixed point at eye level and keep moving. I had no idea then how much I would teeter when the winds of change in the 1960s got blowing.



Excerpt from Too Close to the Falls
Chapter One, Page 1

"Over half a century ago I grew up in Lewiston, a small town in western New York, a few miles south of Niagara Falls on the Canadian border. As the Falls can be seen from the Canadian and American side from different perspectives, so can Lewiston. It is a sleepy town, protected from the rest of the world geographically, nestled at the bottom of the steep shale Niagara Escarpment on one side and the Niagara River on the other. The river's apprearance, however, is deceptive. While it seems calm, rarely making waves, it has deadly whirlpools swirling on its surface which can suck anything into their vortices in seconds.

My father, a pharmacist, owned a drug store in the nearby honeymoon capital of Niagara Falls. My mother, a math teacher by training rather than inclination, was the an active participant in the historical society. Lewiston actually had a few historical claims to fame, which my mother eagerly hyped. The word cocktail was invented there, Charles Dickens stayed overnight at The Frontier House, the local inn, and Lafayette gave a speech from a balcony on the main street. Our home, which had thirteen trees in the yard that were planted when there were thirteen states, was used to billet soldiers in the war of 1812. It was called into action by history yet again for the underground railroad to smuggle slaves across the Niagara River to freedom in Canada.

My parents longed for a child for many years; however, when they were not blessed, they gracefully settled into an orderly life of community service. Then I unexpectedly arrived, the only child of suddenly bewildered older, conservative, devoutly Catholic parents.

I seem to have been "born eccentric"– a phrase my mother uttered frequently as a way of absolving herself of responsibility. By today's standards I would have been labeled with attention deficit disorder, a hyperactive child born with some adrenal problem that made her more prone to rough-and-tumble play than was normal for a girl. Fortunately I was born fifty years ago and simply called "busy" and "bossy", and the possessor of an Irish temper.

I was at the hub of the town because I worked in my father's drug store from the age of four. This was not exploitive child labour but rather what the town pediatrician prescribed. When my mother explained to him that I had gone over the top of the playground swings making a 360-degree loop and had been knocked unconscious twice, had to be removed from a cherry tree the previous summer by the fire department, done Ed Sullivan imitations for money at Helm's Dry Goods Store, all before I'd hit kindergarten, Dr. Laughton dutifully wrote down all this information and, laid down his clipboard with certainty, said that I had worms and needed Fletcher's Castoria. His fall back position (in case when I was dewormed no hyperactive worms crept away from any orifice) was for me to burn off my energy by working at manual labour in my father's store. He explained that we all had metronomes inside our bodies and mine was simply ticking faster than most; I had to do more work than others to burn it off."



Excerpt from Seduction
Chapter One, Page 1

"It’s really embarrassing to admit, but I forget why  I killed my husband.

The vast majority of people do not kill their spouses. I’ve faced that I’m in an extreme minority. Since I’m locked in here anyway, I decided to try and figure out what I missed that everyone else seems to understand.  In a former life I studied Darwin and examined how drives become instincts.  It was great for watching birds make their nests and fly south, but it didn’t give me any clues as to why I killed my husband, or help me figure out how to conduct myself when, and if, I ever get out of this cinder block cell.  I tried reading religion, but it didn’t grab me.  Philosophy was interesting, but it only made me wonder if I was here at all. 

However, about eight years ago – I’ve been in this cooler surrounded by frozen tundra for nine years now-   I ran across Freud.  I started with volume one of his collected works, because I’m that kind of person, and read all twenty three. (I’m that kind of person too.) Freud’s theory is a turnkey operation. You only have to buy into the unconscious and the rest falls into place. It’s like buying the model suite. You may have quibbles with the furnishings, but you have somewhere decent to live."

Excerpt from The Loafers
From The First Man in My Life, edited by Sandra Martin

All four of us were partaking in Rhonda’s first walk on the wild side. We laughed so hard we were crying when Studly made the car jerk to the beat of “Help Me Rhonda,” which blasted on the radio.

When we walked into the Idle Hour, she didn’t see the drunks slumped over the bar in a smelly old beach tavern that was full of townies drinking cheap beer off-season. Having just finished The Old Man and the Sea in our English class, Rhonda saw the Idle Hour as a haunt of the Hemingway Lost Generation. All I saw was the bullshit.

I had been around bars long enough to know full-blown losers when I saw them, so I just went out to the patio by myself to get away from the stale beer smell. I hung out at an old, cigarette-burned picnic table listening to the waves hit the rocks and watching the ugly plastic coloured lights strung up around the periphery pick up the moonlight off the waves. Amazingly enough, nature could even dress up the Idle Hour.

By the time I went back inside, all three of them were hammered. They had ordered french fries, which they hadn’t even eaten. I told Studly I had to get home.

He told me to “cool my jets” as he barely crept around the empty dance floor to “You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling,” by the Righteous Brothers, with both arms clenched around the tiny Rhonda. Shaky and I sat morosely looking at each other. Shaky chewed on his coaster that said Schlitz, the beer that made Milwaukee famous and, between bites, said, “We were lining up shots with beer chasers. We challenged those guys over there from Bethlehem Steel, to see who could drink the most in a five-minute span. We drank them under the table.”

Christ. Shaky was slurring and Studly was weaving around the dance floor, staggering and laughing with Rhonda who was tipsy but not nearly as drunk.

“Guys we have to get going. It’s amazingly late and we have a forty-five-minute drive ahead. Studly, I’m driving your car and you’re sitting up on the back boot.”

"No way, you can’t drive stick shift. Don’t worry, my car knows the way home."

I knew we were in trouble.