1. Pieces of an Immigrant Girl

My father was already at the steering wheel of our old aqua-blue Pontiac Streamliner, its smelly exhaust spewing into the cold December air. He turned, craning his head around, as my mother deposited us one by one onto the hard, cold back seat of the car. The look of impatience on his face was something I had never seen before. There we were, three sisters sitting ramrod straight, our six little feet in ankle socks and scuffed black Mary Janes pointing straight ahead. These are the remnants that linger in my memory of those few seconds from more than sixty years ago.

What remains as clear as an old photo is my sense of anxiety about being separated from my mother.

It had to be an auspicious day because there was a package of store-bought, chocolate-covered ladyfingers in a little bag I had with me. Plus, my mother was sending us to stay with friends for the day, something she had never done. As far as I was concerned, the store-bought cookies—far superior to the homemade ones we always had—took some of the sting out of my separation from her.

It was 1958, seven years after my parents had arrived in Canada from war-scarred Europe, and our family was moving into a newly built house in Sarnia, Ontario, where I was born. I called it Smalltown, Ontario, population 34,000, nestled on the shore of Lake Huron at its extreme southern point where it flows into the St. Clair River. But I only learned that we had moved at the end of the day when my father picked us up and brought us to our new home.

My mother wanted to complete the move without three small children underfoot. As my father pulled the car into the still-unfinished, muddy driveway, she stood waiting on the narrow stoop at the front door, waving. Relief washed over me as our separation came to an end, and the three sisters dashed along the wobbly planks of wood serving as a makeshift sidewalk. We crossed a yard that still resembled a construction zone and rushed into her outstretched arms.

She was a pretty woman with dark hair and eyes, her figure slightly softened and rounded by the births of three children in four years. I didn't notice it then, but there was an invisible burden that rested on her shoulders. As she leaned down and gathered us up, she may have been thinking about the monumental achievements in their new country: my father's job, three daughters, Canadian citizenship, a used car, and a brand-new house. I know now if she was thinking about those accomplishments, she was also guarding her emotions around them, unsure she could permit herself to be too happy.

The new house was a small bungalow, the first one my parents owned. It was an upwardly mobile move to a new development in the north end, away from the acrid smell of the chemical plants in the other part of town. My mother had chosen the finishings: the peach bathroom fixtures, the avocado-green Formica kitchen counter, an aluminum front door with the letter S, and the narrow orange-coloured bricks on the bungalow's exterior. The brick choice made the outside of our house look different, prompting me to wonder why we didn’t have red or gray bricks like everybody else. It stood on a sandy, barren lot, which my parents covered with grass, cedars, and a hedge of raspberry bushes in the backyard that became a bird feeding station. Soon, more houses were built, standing a few feet apart, one bungalow after the other.

The move was made possible by my dad's promotion at work. The company he worked for, a synthetic rubber manufacturer, had just set up a new lab. His job was creating special products requested by customers—like a rubber seal for their gasket or a component for automobile tires in the burgeoning post-war auto industry. Working in the lab, my father developed several variations of synthetic rubber that the company patented. The company purchased the rights to each patent from him for five hundred dollars. The extra money, along with a small loan from a Polish friend in the community, allowed my parents to save up for the down payment of four thousand dollars and secure a mortgage for our little three-bedroom bungalow.

The new neighbourhood had a recently constructed public school just down the street from our home. I would start there in January, leaving behind my old school and kindergarten class. It was a standard edition 1950s Ontario school building—a squat one-storey structure with six classrooms and a small gym. It stood in a dusty field surrounded by a tall chain-link fence. The kids played on a small asphalt playground where the girls skipped rope and hula-hooped, and the boys jostled at tag or rough games that involved jumping on each other.

I was self-conscious about being different, the only child in my elementary school class with immigrant parents, thanks to a restrictive immigration policy at the time that wanted to keep people like my parents out. I didn't speak English when I entered kindergarten. We lived in a Polish bubble. My parents spoke Polish at home, most of their friends were recent Polish immigrants, and the church we attended every Sunday had a Polish Mass. Language wasn't the problem. By the time I started at the new school, my English had improved. The problem? My family was just different.

My parents named me Alice, a deliberate attempt to give me a Canadian name. At home, I was Alinka, a diminutive of my Polish name Alicja. My parents—Edward Switocz and Maria Wałęsa—became Ed and Mary. But our last name—Switocz—not very Canadian-sounding—was always mispronounced.

A few weeks into the new kindergarten, my teacher, Mrs. Fleet, a plump woman who wore fire-engine red lipstick to match her long red nails, pulled me aside and gave me a note to take home to my mother.

"Can your mother read English?" she asked, stooping down so her red lips were close to my face.

I wasn't sure, but I nodded yes.

"The school nurse wants to visit your mother. We want to be sure she is feeding you enough."

I was a small, thin, and pale child with straight blond hair cut in a bob similar to Mrs. Fleet's own dark bob. Even at five, I knew my mother, who spent all her time in the kitchen, would be upset that a nurse was concerned.

On the day of the visit, a tall woman wearing a white uniform arrived and unfolded herself out of a small automobile. She adjusted the cap perched on top of her high, upswept hairdo and smoothed down the front of her dress.

"Nice to meet you," the nurse said at the door.

"Thank you," my mother replied, motioning for her to follow.

I hung back, peering around the edge of the kitchen door, ready to jump in and, I guess, translate in case my mother needed my help. She showed the nurse the pot of soup simmering on the stove. She lifted the lid so the fragrant steam wafted out. She pointed to the vitamins lined up in little bottles on the kitchen counter and confirmed that I was not a big eater and that she, too, wished I ate more. The nurse left satisfied that the young immigrant mother was doing her best. I watched as the back of her nurse's cap—held in place by four large black bobby pins, crossed to form two X's—receded out the front door and down the walkway.

Food was plentiful in our house and always homemade. Still, I envied my friends, who had chicken à la king or something from a can for dinner and butter tarts for dessert. Every day I hoped there would be a miniature red box of raisins in my school bag for recess snack instead of a slice of leftover babka or Polish apple cake wrapped in wax paper. Most days, I never took the snack out of my bag.

I wished my mother spoke better English and could write notes to my teacher without my help, a task I have come to realize is assigned to the firstborn in most immigrant families, past and present. "Alice did not feel well yesterday," my mother would recopy from the sentence I had written out on scrap paper. Then she would sign her name, Mrs. E. Switocz. The E. was for my father's first name, Edward. Sometimes I balked and told her to get my father to write the note.

Starting in the third grade, we had to prepare and present a speech. The best in each grade was selected to be given in front of the entire school at an assembly in our little gym. My dad sat with me at the kitchen table, reviewed the sentences I had written out on index cards about Marie Curie, and made me rehearse until I had memorized the words. I wanted my classmates to know that the first woman ever to be awarded the Nobel Prize, not once but twice, was from Warsaw, Poland, and that her name had been Marie Skłodowska when she was born. She was Polish like I was.

I hoped the teacher would choose my speech to represent Grade 3. The honour went to a boy who bounced up and down with excitement as he told the class about the raccoon he had befriended in his backyard. I was happy for him. He was the class clown who sat in the back row and always struggled with his schoolwork. Nobody seemed to care Marie Curie was Polish, so that was the first and last time I spoke about being Polish in school.

Instead of being selected to speak about Marie Skłodowska Curie, I was chosen to attend a special class for the type of kids who gave speeches on Nobel prize winners in physics and chemistry. It took place on Thursday afternoons at another school. The first afternoon there, the teacher announced to the assembled group that we would be doing an individual research project. I couldn't think of a subject of particular fascination, so I looked at a book on glass-making and pretended to be absorbed. I lasted for only a year. I felt like an impostor among the kids who were beavering away on their projects. And I was sure it was the reason I was taunted and pushed around by three mean girls who often followed me home from school.

At the age of twelve, at that delicate time on the cusp of being a teenager, I found a photograph of my younger self standing in that dusty schoolyard looking forlorn in a floral dress over loose-fitting plaid flannel pants. A conviction took root that everything wrong with my life was because of the way my Polish mother dressed me.

That young girl who longed to be like everybody else, anybody but the girl in the plaid pants, was decades ago. The pieces that make up the puzzle of my life have come together. And the piece of the puzzle I didn’t even know was missing—the little-known dark, tragic, heroic stories of my Polish parents and millions of people like them—has fallen into place.

My parents made their way to Canada from the wreckage of post-war Europe, and they rebuilt their lives and succeeded in their new country. This narrative has been repeated countless times by others leaving their war-torn countries of origin and arriving in this place of peace. But as a child, none of this mattered to me.

But it does now.