Dropped Threads 2 (19 page)

Bettina’s
               Hat

Linda Rogers

A few years ago my friend the fabric artist Bettina Matzkuhn was putting together a show of reversible hats painted with personal totems; she’d asked a number of her friends to provide primal images for her to work with. Her question to me was whether I had a “comfort fetish,” something like an old blanket I depended on at those times when children suck their thumbs and twirl their hair. “Don’t be silly,” I said. “I’m a grown-up.” Then I remembered—the mantra I always resort to in times of stress or illness: “I want my mother.”

When the catalogue of Bettina’s hats arrived, I saw that my mantra had been translated into a breast with legs painted on the crown of a hat. It took a hat with a nipple to make me realize I’d come a long way from wanting to be an honorary boy—girls were too passive and weak—to understanding how much I loved and needed my tribe.

Initiation into the tribe of women wasn’t easy for me, growing up in the fifties. “Mother tongue” was an oxymoron then; our mothers’ tongues were tied as surely as their breasts and hips were shackled in products by Maidenform. My mother, using her “man’s” mind in the woman’s world of advocacy for social causes, managed almost every arts and humanitarian organization in Vancouver, but even intelligent, socially aware mothers like her were complicit in the conspiracy to separate girls from their bodies and from each other. Because our mothers wanted to protect us, they taught us to dissemble, to squeeze into moulds as constricting as girdles.

Part of the moulding involved constraints on language. There were words we did not utter in my family, and for me, the only daughter, the list was long. My parents never used what they termed “vulgar” language, which included the correct names of body parts that were considered private. I never heard any word at all for “vagina.” In fact, I didn’t know I had one until I menstruated!

In sharp contrast to the blank space in language for female genitals, there was a plethora of ridiculous, “underground” terms for the penis, like “peeper,” “dingus,” and “dewey.” The subversive language indicated that this body part was dirty, for peeing, never the instrument of desire and ultimately pleasure. On the way home from school one day when I was about nine years old, my friend and I were stopped by a man in a car, who wanted to show us “something.” We knew what the something was but didn’t have a word we were allowed to use. I took his licence number and reported him to my mother, who called the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. When the constable came to our house, I was reading. I don’t think I looked up past his boots once.

“Do you know what a penis is?” the policeman asked. I said no. Young ladies, nice girls, did not know words like that, and if they did, they certainly wouldn’t admit it to a cop. He informed my mother I wouldn’t be asked to testify because of the limitations of my vocabulary. My mother accepted this as a testament to her effective daughter-rearing. But surely it must have struck both of us as ironic that someone who had already wormed her way through a large chunk of English literature should be described as word challenged.

And yet, my father, who was a lawyer, taught me that language was the key that would unlock every mystery, whether it was legal, philosophical, theological or anthropological. Why was it, then, that I kept bumping into words and concepts that might as well have had a big red line through them, indicating DO NOT GO THERE? I was given free rein in my parents’ magnificent library, where I devoured my father’s grown-up books, even though I certainly didn’t understand everything I read. I knew better than to ask them about words I’d never heard mentioned in the house and did not appear in my dictionary; instead, I drew my own conclusions or interrogated one of the worldly boys at school. In
Tender Is the Night
, Dick Diver comments on bad sex with his wife, Nicole, saying he never made love to dry loins. What did that mean? Certainly he wasn’t kissing overcooked lamb chops. I assumed it was a typo and transposed two letters so it read “lions.” Henry Miller uses the word “cunt” in the first sentence of
The Tropic of Cancer
. I got a detention in French class for whispering a query to a classmate who might have known what that word meant.

Much of the terminology we did have access to reinforced rigid division between good and evil. This was a time when humans were separated along gender lines—beer parlours were divided into “Men’s” and “Ladies and Escorts”—and our sex seemed to be further split into “good girls” and “bad girls.” Bad girls were easy. They wore feather earrings and tight skirts and rode sidesaddle on their boyfriends’ motorcycles. Bad girls advertised: they looked cheap. Good girls didn’t. They were to be “young ladies” who wore gloves, went to Sunday school, crossed their legs at the ankles (never the knees) and ignored the prospect of intercourse, that most secret of all activities. I knew I was supposed to be a “good girl.” What I didn’t know was the real meaning of the changes in my body and that it wasn’t
bad to
grow into my sexuality; in fact, that it was essential to my becoming a woman.

In those days when the dumbing of young people was a wide social practice, firmly ensconced in homes, schools and churches, we were also dished out misinformation. As a child, I had a nanny who tied my left hand behind my back to force me to use my right one. She also warned me not to cross my eyes or they’d stay that way. I suppose that being left-handed and female was bad enough without adding crossed eyes to the sinister mix. “Children who indulge in self-abuse go blind,” the nuns at Our Lady of Perpetual Help School told my Catholic friend. My friends and I weren’t sure exactly what self-abuse was, other than it happened below the waist—a place that some people called “down there”—but we knew it was a sin. These were the days before the excesses of some of the Catholic clergy were reported, and we all bought the story that the holy Catholic Church was the chief arbiter on what constituted a sin, which included any form of sexual pleasure before marriage, let alone a self-induced one.

Later I accompanied my mother to Jericho Hill School for the Deaf and Blind, where she read to blind children. By then, schoolyard talk had filled me in a bit, so I assumed all these kids were suffering the consequences of sexual self-abuse. Even at that time, it was hard for me to believe all these perfectly nice children deserved such a terrible punishment. And then I began to worry about my paternal grandmother, pillar of the Church of England, who reportedly went blind from diabetes. Was she also guilty of indulging in the solitary pleasures of the flesh?

There were also stories about pregnant, unmarried girls being sent “to visit their aunts” because they had been “led down the garden path.” Putting together my own observations and the story of Eve’s expulsion from Eden, I began to associate gardens with trouble, their earthly delights an invitation to transgress any one of a number of social laws.

In the well-groomed gardens of my neighbourhood, no one ever talked about the pleasure of being a woman. The cautionary tales, the horror stories we were told were the electric prods used to control young females, to keep us in line. I am astonished by what I didn’t know, given that I was insatiably curious. It’s so much easier these days to call yourself “sexually liberated.” That means your sexuality—heterosexual, homosexual, autoerotic—is your own damn business.

The one thing I did know was that if I wanted to marry within the Lucky Sperm Club, people “entitled” by birth into upper-class families, I had to be cautious and play the game. I had an appetite, but nice girls hid their hunger. “Greed” and “ambition” were words appropriate to men. My father told me a girl shouldn’t compete in sports or in school and should never be “hungry.” A hungry woman was by definition hungry for men. That would have made me an insatiable nymphomaniac—a word that hung over my neck like a sharpened guillotine—and would have resulted in social death.

Rejecting the tightrope civilities of the good girl and the civilized gardens we were to be confined in, I decided it was safer to be a tomboy. The beginning of my adolescent rebellion against female stereotypes was contempt for those I perceived to be “girly” girls with flabby pastel minds the colour of their cashmere twin sets. When hormones transformed us into devious dissemblers, a half-dozen female friends and I—warriors, we liked to call ourselves—were determined to explore and name the forbidden territory “down there,” but not within the parameters patrolled by our careful parents. Since the civilized world of house, garden, school, church and the language that defined them were all mined with potential sin and judgment, my gang took over the wilderness beyond. That was our Promised Land, uncharted, unclaimed territory where we could explore our inner savages.

In the ravines and bushes of the university woods, we devious dissemblers ate as many berries as we liked. We cursed and wanked and pissed on leaves, out-boyed the boys. One of the girls brought Vaseline. Her mother had been a nurse in England during the war. She told us they put Vaseline on burn victims to encourage the growth of body hair. We covered our “private parts” and waited to evolve from young ladies to hairy wild women. In the wild, we did all the things boys got to do, especially bonding with one another in a physical way.

One summer afternoon, bored with stealing apples and smoking smuggled cigarettes, we kidnapped a boy, took him to the woods and undressed him. Because I drew the longest blade of grass, I was blindfolded and allowed to touch him between the legs, where his member responded. None of us had been informed about that. Aha! Perhaps boys scorned girls because of this transformative power we didn’t know we had.

“Penis!” we yelled at the top of our lungs as the kidnapped boy ran away, out of the woods back to the civilized gardens. “Penis! Penis!” Our mothers couldn’t hear us. Our Sunday school teachers couldn’t hear us. The police couldn’t hear us. We were free in the forest, armed with the understanding that sexual power is the real reason men fear women.

Not long after we witnessed our first glorious erection, I was in a Holiday Theatre production of
The Emperor’s New Clothes
. The emperor had a day job as a substitute teacher. He came to my school and taught English literature and drama, and even though he was smart enough to remember his lines and his blocking, which included expressing surprise that he was doing stark-naked walkabouts, he didn’t seem to have assimilated the information that girls under the age of sixteen were jailbait. During lunch hour, he invited me to a picnic in the woods. Having been there with my warrior friends, I saw no problem and went with him to the edge of the forest, where he began peeling off his transparent schoolteacher’s disguise. Eureka! There it was, another fully erect penis.

Caught between the forest and the garden, I was paralyzed by the transfixing adult phallus nuzzling against my thighs. But the gang, emerging from the woods behind the school, saw him poised over me and ran toward us, shouting “Penis!” in unison. “Penis!” I yelled with them, all of us once again bringing the word out of the forest, scaring away the naked emperor, who was never seen at the school again, having been exiled to the theatre but not to jail, where he should have been sent.

I was saved by the lost language of women. In rebellion I gained something essential that had been denied to me as a “good girl.” Rediscovering the deeper roots of woman-speak in the woods, where we were empowered to explore and understand our own bodies, my tribe retrieved a legacy for our daughters and granddaughters. Nowadays they can say “penis” and “vagina.” They have the language of pleasure and know how to protect and enjoy themselves, privileges denied to us because the whole social order rested on our ignorance. What we didn’t know and couldn’t talk about separated mother from daughter and daughter from herself.

Now I wear my mother, my friends, my daughters-in-law and my granddaughter on my head. Bettina’s astonishing hat has brought me fully into a club that is beautiful and various and has ownership of the language that makes us unique. “Breast” is the chakra of pride and reconciliation. After so many years of rooting around in the dark with other girls from the bottle-fed generation, I found what I already had, the mother word for pleasure and belonging.

Don’t Say
                        Anything

Michele Landsberg

My mother believed in white, and only white, cotton underwear; in one green and one yellow vegetable with each meal, lightly cooked; in wiping from front to back; in washing hands scrupulously after the toilet and before eating; in never sharing a drinking glass; in not sitting on the cold cement of the front stoop (bad for the kidneys) to read your library books; in “little ladies” not whistling or chewing gum. Beyond the physical rules of the perpetual struggle for survival and against germs, in those days before antibiotics, there were also strict codes of conduct for each gender. The bedrock principles boiled down to “Boys will be boys” (for my brothers), and for me, the youngest and only girl, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything.”

Not saying anything at all was my mother’s only way of coping with all the not-nice parts of life.

In this, I later came to see, she perfectly mirrored the genteel Toronto way of being in the 1940s, the years of my childhood. Above all, we did not talk about sex or race. They were not Nice. This was more than dropped threads; this was an entire fabric of experience that could not be spoken of.

When I was eleven, and was nabbed by the teacher with a hot copy of my hand-printed TinyTown Newspaper—complete with headlines, ruled columns and letters painstakingly embellished with serifs—I was sent home in disgrace to find my mother lying down in a darkened room in a state of speechless horror. How could I have written such … such … filth? It’s true, there were doltishly lame little jokes referring to menstruation and underpants. But because I had to stand beside my mother’s bed in an agony of shame while my choked self-justifications were waved into silence, I could never explain that the newspaper had started out as an innocent pastime. It was only when my classmates showed utter indifference to my straitlaced items of classroom news (aah, the downward path to pornography) that I began to spice up the classified section with prepubescent smut.

This incident precipitated my mother’s boldest step in sex education. Some months later, she managed to find a discreet pamphlet. Blushingly, she mentioned to my brother and me that we would find something interesting to read on a side table in the living room. But I already knew I must not ask about such things. That had been made quite clear several years before when the older kids on the street repeatedly taunted the younger ones—out there under the street lamps in the wild moments of daring at dusk—that our fathers had had to fuck our mothers to create us. I had no idea what “fuck” meant, but clearly it was loathsome, a deed so repugnant that it cast all our origins into a muck of disgrace. I absolutely could not believe that our parents had done something dirty. But the big kids had seemed so sneeringly sure…. After weeks of bothered perplexity, I chose a moment when I was setting the table for dinner. “Fork” reminded me of that mysterious word. “Daddy,” I asked in my best seven-year-old tone of polite inquiry, “Did you really have to fuck Mummy to get us?”

The impact was stunning. My father thundered into the kitchen, roaring at the top of his lungs, “Lee! Lee! Did you hear what your daughter said?”

“My
daughter! She’s no daughter of mine!” exclaimed my mother, near tears as she frantically stirred the soup.

The counterpoint disownings continued for some time, followed by a profound silence, and I didn’t find out the answer to my question for several years.

When urgently pressed to express something, my mother would resort to clichés. At thirteen, I sullenly donned the almost-compulsory 1950s outfit: long-line bra, rubber panty girdle, saddle shoes, bobby socks, pleated skirt and Peter Pan blouse. But I drew the line at lipstick. Beside herself with anxiety that I would go on and on like this, and ultimately fail to “marry well,” my mother memorably exclaimed, “But Michele! Even Nature adorns herself!” Later, when I teased her about this ornate utterance, she blushed and explained that she thought she was appealing to my love of Beauty.

Despite this overlay of reticence, reluctance, shyness and propriety, my mother and I had an almost electric current of understanding that flashed between us at critical moments.

The medium was not words but our hands touching.

In 1944, in a moment of profound silence, I learned that it was dangerous to be a Jew. I was oblivious to the war, having been born the year it began, and my parents didn’t speak much about our Jewishness. But when my mother took me to Allenby Public School to register me for kindergarten, she held my hand as we stood before the secretary in the principal’s outer office. Perkily, the secretary recorded our names, address and phone number, filling in the spaces on a form.

“Religion?” she asked, looking up brightly, pencil poised.

My mother, the soul of social politeness, didn’t answer. The silence hung there. At last: “Hebrew,” she said, and her hand tightened painfully on mine.

Hebrew? This was a word I had never heard before. I knew it was wrong and that my mother certainly knew better. In the long moment before the secretary nodded and bent to complete the form, and as my mother squeezed my hand tighter and tighter, I absorbed the knowledge that just to say the word “Jew” aloud was dangerous, even for a grown-up like my mother.

My experiences at Allenby confirmed that first signal. There were few Jewish children in the school, and the principal was an open anti-Semite. In kindergarten, while the others sang lustily, “Jesus loves me!” I mouthed the terrifying words to myself—I knew already that it was in the name of Jesus that the other children would taunt and hit—until my father taught me to sing subversively.

“Jesus loves me, Yes he does—ve-e-e-ry kind of Jesus!” No one ever caught me whispering the sarcasm. It was a kind of private consolation.

It seems odd now to speak of anti-Semitism as an unspoken menace in Toronto of the 1940s and 1950s, when the dominant culture hardly tried to conceal its bigotry. The sting in the scorpion’s tail was that we, the Jews, were not allowed to speak of anti-Semitism. If we named it, rejected it, spoke out against it, we were doubly reviled as despicable slanderers and outrageous liars.

For this reason, it was impossible to tell my parents about the daily humiliations and perils of being a Jewish child in a mostly gentile public school. How difficult it was to sing those Christmas carols and Easter hymns, praising the foreign God in whose name I was attacked in the schoolyard. Forced to sing them, I nearly choked on fear and shame, convinced that I was betraying my parents. How frightening was principal Kerush, who marched me furiously to his office and threatened me with the strap when I was nine. I had finally summoned the courage not to raise my hand to vow to pray to Jesus every day, in the annual assembly convened by the Gideon Bible Society in the stuffy basement audiovisual Room.

How silencing, above all, was the weekly music class. Mr. Housen, the music teacher, explained to us in Grade
I
that Jews were not musical and that it was well known that Jews could not carry a tune. Therefore, any Jews in the class—except for Marilyn Goldstein, who had perfect pitch and was often asked to sing the opening note—were to mouth the words to all the songs in complete silence, especially when the music inspector came. Seven years of this, and I was made incapable of singing in public for the rest of my life.

Eventually—after the war—some of the other parents finally learned of the open anti-Semitism in the school and complained to the school board. Mr. Kerush was quietly removed to Rose Avenue School in Cabbagetown, then a slum.

A few years back, I took the trouble to do some research in the Toronto Public School Archives. Evidently, silence still muffled the vices of earlier times: the school board minutes of that historic meeting were somehow missing, and the Allenby School bulletin, fondly bidding farewell to Mr. Kerush, who would always think of Allenby as “his” school, made no mention of the reason for the transfer. How tidily the record was swept clean.

But then, the anti-Jewish sentiment of the day was supposed to be our own fault, not theirs. I remember another, perhaps the last, of those wordless hand-to-hand communications between my mother and me. I was thirteen and frustrated by the boredom of my high school curriculum. I nagged my mother to let me go to a private school where, I imagined, the classrooms seethed with intellectual intensity. My brother had been admitted to the University of Toronto Schools, a public but exclusive boys’ school for the sons of the upper crust, plus a handful of bright strivers. The principal there had made it clear that although the Jewish quota was filled, my brother—with his blond hair, blue eyes, snub nose and athletic abilities—could just be fitted in. I was passionately envious of his chance at academic challenge.

Reluctantly, at last, my mother made an appointment with the principal of Havergal College, a private girls’ school on Avenue Road in Toronto. It was the early 1950s. We were barely clinging to the lower rungs of the lower middle classes, and in fact, there was no possibility of our paying school fees. Nevertheless, she must have decided to make the attempt in the frail hope of a scholarship.

From the first moment of our stiff little interview, the lady principal held her head back with a pained expression, as though we had brought a distasteful odour into the office with us. My mother made her hesitant explanation of my good marks, my poetry writing, my professional work as a radio and stage actress. The principal gave a small surprised laugh, astonished at our temerity. “No, no, it’s quite impossible,” she said. “We already have two Jewish girls this year, and that is absolutely our quota.”

My mother’s hand was tight on mine as we crossed what seemed a mile of polished lobby floor to the exit.

Anti-Semitism was the shard of glass in the pale custard of Toronto society. It became subtler after the war, unacknowledged and, to the untutored, invisible. If you were unwary, you forgot it was there or even learned to deny that it existed. You could be (as I was) turned away from graduate school at the University of Toronto, shunned by a new neighbour or mysteriously disliked by a colleague and never fathom the reason until much, much later, when some friendly snitch told you the truth.

But no Jew could ever mention the existence of anti-Semitism. That was the rule. I forgot the rule a few years back when a female “master” of Massey College at the University of Toronto invited me to sit at what they called “High Table” for dinner one night. Massey, an elite graduate college, still trails clouds of the old Toronto. At first, in the 1960s, it was for male students only. Even in the 1990s, when I had dinner there, Christian prayers were said in Latin before dinner, while students of every colour and creed sat docilely below at long refectory tables.

Prayers done, I engaged in conversation with my table-mates. One, then head of the University of Toronto law school, asked me where I had attended primary school. He was surprised to learn that we had both attended Allenby. Rashly, I then committed the social faux pas of mentioning my overriding memories of anti-Semitism there. As I spoke, I saw the tight expression on the face of another professor, a prolific and conservative Canadian historian, sitting beside the law dean. I realized that I had once more spoken the unspeakable in the presence of a gentile Torontonian.

The dean of law, a Jew, then promptly reminded me of the rules.

“Anti-Semitism? You are certainly mistaken! I remember nothing of the sort—even though it’s true I did move away from there after Grade 2.”

The conservative historian smiled a repressed, malicious smile. It was uncannily like the smile on the face of the Havergal principal.

I coped with this embarrassment in the only way I had been trained. I fell silent. I had nothing Nice to say.