Dropped Threads 2 (17 page)

A Place on
                                the Pavement

Debbie Culbertson

My father holds my new second-hand bike steady on the cracked sidewalk in front of our grey stucco house. He has just come home from work at the sewing machine store. His bow tie is gone, and his white pressed shirt is open at the neck. I can smell du Maurier cigarettes and Old Spice as I climb onto the bike’s smooth black seat and reach for the handlebars. My father smiles as my feet find the pedals. Then I’m gliding along while he runs beside me, one hand resting on the back fender. I’m laughing and my hair is flying in the air while his stays Brylcreemed to his scalp. Suddenly he lets go of the bike, and I glide, wobble and bump over broken sidewalks, whirring past wide front porches, grape-vined gardens and rusty Chevys. When I stop, my feet dragging on the broken concrete, I turn and look back. He is gone.

That fall, my father leaves my mother and disappears from our lives. My stay-at-home mother finds work in a canning factory, goes back to school and cries at night. There are no new school clothes, and the fridge is often empty. I make a promise to myself that if I ever have children, I will never leave them and will always be there to catch their backward glances.

In my teens I pursue a kind of working-class normalcy. I am going to be a secretary, marry a nice boy and have a houseful of children. I take typing and shorthand, date boys who drive fast cars on back roads, cut classes to walk along the railroad tracks. Panic sets in as my eighteenth birthday draws closer. I want to be in control of my life but have created a situation where I will be as economically dependent on men as my mother has been.

I become a model student. I study hard, cram four wasted years in high school into a few months. Although I am accepted into university, I cannot entirely escape, cannot reach for the ring without wearing one. At eighteen, uncertain about survival on my own, I marry my best friend. We become one of the thousands of young Canadian couples who survive on married-student loans in the late 1970s.

When Jonathan is born, I’m in the second semester of my master’s degree. It’s a time when women play tapes of Beethoven next to their pregnant bellies and prepare flash cards for their infant children. I read
Free to Be You and Me
, tape
National Geographic
maps on the wall beside Jon’s crib and lay him on sheets printed with primary colours.

It is the height of the second wave of feminism. I nurse Jonathan while writing papers on women’s history, rock him to sleep while reading Adrienne Rich’s
Of Woman Born
. Sometimes he attends classes with me, zippered into a front carrier next to my heart. Later, we walk hand in hand to the co-op daycare where the faded names of 1960s children are still crayoned on some walls. As my son plays in the sandbox, I wonder whatever happened to the children named Moonbeam and Summer Skye.

On a warm spring night, I leave Jon with his dad and walk with a thin corridor of women along Toronto’s back streets to protest violence against women. We wear black T-shirts emblazoned with “Women Unite, Take Back the Night.” I feel a kinship with the women who march beside me, as if we had cut our thumbs and mixed our blood, pledging a lifetime of protests together.

In the summer, Jonathan sleeps in his stroller as I push it along in a massive Toronto peace rally. I walk next to an elderly woman who has been marching for peace since the 1950s, when there were only handfuls of protesters. “We were called names then,” she says. “Some of us got beaten up.” As we talk, a plastic bag filled with water explodes in front of Jon’s stroller. It has been aimed at us from an apartment high above our route.

Some friends and I crowd into a packed lecture hall at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Mary Daly is the featured speaker. The lesbian feminist author of the new book
Gyn/Ecology
delivers a searing condemnation of those institutions she terms patriarchal—the church, the nuclear family and heterosexuality. Her solution is a radical kind of separatism—a women’s-only community, a kind of sanctuary and fortress against the dominant society. At the end of the lecture, she invites questions. I raise my hand. “What about women with sons?” I ask. A ripple of laughter runs through the crowd. “I’m afraid I can’t help you with that one,” she says with a broad smile.

At university I encounter other lesbians. At first, I intellectualize my interest in them, treat my curiosity like a graduate school assignment. I stumble into a conference on lesbian sexuality fresh from my part-time job, wearing a blouse and skirt, high heels and panty hose. Among the sparkling scarves, blue jeans and flannel shirts, I am the odd one out.

I meet a woman who has left her husband to be with another woman. In the process, she has given up custody of her young son. This shocks me more than the fact of her orientation. I am again seeing the empty place on the pavement where my father once stood. How could she give up her child?

Then, I begin to understand part of the reason she may have made that sacrifice. I feel an overwhelming, unexplained need to separate myself from my husband and, sometimes, even my child; I want to see myself more clearly outside of the brass-framed photograph of the three of us that sits on top of my bookcase. That picture reveals a wife and mother. I need to know if there are other relationships that might define who I am. My husband and I separate, and Jon is sent back and forth between us like a laughing and trusting yo-yo.

I date women for the first time. Susan, a tiny brown-eyed young woman I met at the sexuality conference, takes me to my first lesbian bar on Toronto’s Church Street. Until this moment, I have seen women dance together only at weddings, when elderly widows enjoyed a waltz or two together. But here, on a smoky, blue-lit dance floor, women of many ages are dancing as if their lives depend on it. Some are fresh from the overflowing typing pools on Bay Street, wearing short skirts and silk blouses, their thick hair teased into lions’ manes. Others stand with feet apart, cigarettes smoking between strong fingers, hair cropped short, wearing crisp cotton shirts and Levi’s. I don’t want to stare, but I can’t help myself. I watch the women dance and touch, my heart pounding and mouth going dry from longing, my beer getting warm while I hold on to it with both hands.

A creamy white envelope comes in the mail. “Congratulations. You have been accepted into the doctoral program….” I am offered fellowships to study at a university in Evanston, just outside of Chicago. I leave Jonathan with his father and travel to the United States. At first it feels like a vacation, a release from responsibilities and a new freedom. The euphoria wears off quickly as I settle into the daily routine of seminars, papers and endless studying. Soon I am longing for my son. I remember the lesbian who gave up her child, and Mary Daly’s dismissal of any woman whose bond with her child is greater than her own desire. I stop dating the new women I have met, afraid of what it might mean for my son and me.

The cost is higher than I expect. No more salty chicken dinners with Emilie in her Chicago apartment, while a block away the last train leaves for Evanston and Tracy Chapman spins out her love songs on the turntable. No more intimate intellectual conversations about “queer” politics with Kitty while she pushes at her glasses and uses the other hand to juggle the tilting tower of books she carries into our feminist theory class. Instead, I spend long nights in libraries, take solitary jogs along quiet back streets and make long-distance phone calls to a child who asks me when I’ll be coming home.

At a local laundromat, a young actor starts a conversation with me as I dump my wet clothes into the dryer. He invites me to his opening night, and we begin a relationship that will last for the next five years. I become pregnant and we move in together. I put my feelings for women firmly into the back of our bedroom closet and take the eight-hour train ride back to Canada to reclaim my son. Now that I have a male partner, it will be difficult for anyone to claim that I should be barred from parenting by virtue of whom I choose to love. My new partner and I marry; I am once more tightly framed within an “acceptable” family pattern.

By the time our daughter is born, my relationship with my husband is cold and strained. We move to Ontario, and our marriage slowly begins to fall apart. We often fight; he swears at me, throws chairs down the stairs, breaks the glass of a childhood picture. A short time later, Jon tells me that my husband has hit him; a hard slap that has frightened him and broken his trust. A friend asks, “Are you afraid of your husband?” When I realize that the answer is yes, I know it is time for me to leave.

I begin to date women again. It is like returning home after being a refugee in a land where I was not welcome and would never feel at ease. With women I can again speak my own language, feel that stir of recognition and celebrate that, yes, I survived and isn’t it good to be among
my people
again.

I meet Heather, a hazel-eyed strong-shouldered woman from Alberta. While we bathe together in the hot springs in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains, her sweet voice reaches into me and calls out my spirit to meet her own. This time I do not turn away, do not deny the passion that draws me to her.

In the summer of 1996, I move from Ontario to Alberta with fourteen-year-old Jonathan and nine-year-old Rachel. We begin a new life with Heather in a rural town a stone’s throw from the North Saskatchewan River. Together we buy a cedar house on five acres of aspen trees and pasture. A slough (Easterners call it a marsh) cuts through our land.