Sparing a thought for the girl who lived up the lane

She was kind of a skinny kid with catseye glasses and a serious demeanor. She was very smart and, if it was possible for a little girl in 4th grade to be a full-blown cynic, Gail (for that was her real name) was one.

She lived up at the top of our street, which wasn’t much more than a little gravel country lane in those days, and was the same age as me. She had three sisters, but she was the oldest. And the most awkward. The other girls were very pretty. Gail too was pretty enough, but she didn’t let it show. She wore unflattering clothes, rarely smiled and fought like a hellion with her younger siblings.

Gail had a father who was a kind of glamorous man, did something for an airline and wore a dashing uniform. Her mother was extremely beautiful, with long raven hair and a propensity to exhibit herself in a manner that set the other women in the neighborhood to tut-tutting. The mother always wore skin-tight sweaters in the winter, and low-cut tops in the summer. She was very large-breasted and seemed to want to have others appreciate the fact by showing as much of herself as legality would permit. As a little boy I found this confusing. Not displeasing, to be sure, but definitely confusing.

Throughout her younger school days Gail was quiet and thoroughly studious. She read voluminously. She read adult books when other kids were perusing the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, or nothing more challenging than comic books. Gail didn’t look at comics. She read real books. And if you weren’t up to talking about real books, then she had no time for you, and let you know with a glowering expression.

When we were in 7th grade they had a school dance. I invited Gail. My mother said that would be a “nice thing” to do. I didn’t mind. I liked Gail and actually got along quite well with her. I was able to make her laugh. Few had that ‘gift.’ In fact, we would get into hysterics over stupid stuff, dirty stuff, word games and the like.

When we started high school, Gail once had a party. Mom was there in a low-cut cocktail dress, sporting cigarette holder and charming the bejesus out of the horny young guys there for ‘Gail’s’ party. Mom got all the attention and obviously adored it. Mom wasn’t actually a slut in a slovenly sense, actually she was very intelligent and creative, wrote devastatingly funny stories for a local newspaper, and, for a reason known best to her, decided she ‘must’ compete with her ugly-duckling older daughter. I’m not Freud and shall go no farther with that.

By the time Gail got into high school, something happened. She changed. She hung around with what was known in those days as a “rough crowd.” She drank, she screwed all and sundry, and ended up getting pregnant at least twice that I know of. After that, I lost touch. I went off to university and moved away and I thought little more of Gail.

A few years later a friend who was a navigator on an Air Force fighter left the military and got a job as an air-traffic controller at Vancouver International.

“I met another controller who knows you,” he told me one day. He also told me her name was Gail, and divulged her last name as well. I inquired after her.

“She is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met,” he recounted. “Also one of the most fucked-up.”

Yes, that would be her.

About two years ago I asked after Gail again. I asked of a former mutual acquaintance that I knew had been a good friend of Gail’s. She told me.

The tale went like this. Gail had left a number of years before, and sometime in the late 1980s, living somewhere in Europe, Gail had died. I was shocked. I asked how she had died.

“She died of everything,” said our mutual friend. “Anything she could drink, snort, shoot up or smoke, she did – all the time. I got pretty messed up too, when we were younger, but I pulled away and into a normal life. The worst mistake I ever made was hooking up with Gail when we were kids. It cost me a few wasted years.”

I have no idea why I thought of Gail today. But, I decided she warranted a thought; that little girl up the lane. The serious and sad little girl with the catseye glasses.