Dropped Threads 3 (19 page)

Already, my older son has moved out. Just after he turned eighteen a few months back, he went to live with his dad, having understandably grown tired of going back and forth between two houses. I see him once a week at Sunday supper; occasionally I persuade him to let me drive him someplace, and we grab a bite. He’s good about it, really, he is.

In return, I am trying hard to give him the distance he needs, to listen to him talk about his own choices, his own life, without insisting I be integral to it. I learned about letting go by watching my mother with her only surviving son, my younger brother. She has always wanted more from him than he was able, or eventually willing, to give. Through her, I have learned that what defines “enough” in a relationship is largely determined by the person on the receiving end. I may even have come to accept that if there is a hole, something missing, I will be the one to get out the shovel and look for a way to fill it.

So now, when it has been a while since I’ve seen or talked to my older son, and the younger one has entered a period of inscrutability, I take a deep breath. I think about what the boys have given me, and I count those blessings, one by one. They have always let me be myself, rarely criticizing me, though often poking not-so-gentle fun at my foibles. They have humoured me, and they’ve let me hug and kiss them on the neck, even in front of other people. The boys have given me much laughter, still do, and probably always will.

These days, when something nice happens, I virtually bronze the moment. Recently, Danny and I were driving in the car and one of his favourite tunes was blasting from the CD player.

He was singing along madly and at the end, I said to him “This song will always remind you of being a teenager, Danny. You’ll hear it when you’re thirty and forty and you’ll
think back to when you were in high school, playing football, hanging out with your friends.” I looked over at him and smiled.

He looked back at me, right in the eye, and replied, “And being in the car with my mom.”

You’d have to be the mother of boys to know this, but that was enough.

For me
, the pleasure of work and a cruel sense of imperative are mixed together, shaping a force that I wrestle with every day. Having been raised within a tolerantly Calvinist family, I am motivated by guilt, by desire, and by the ineffable satisfaction of completing a difficult task. This may be the main reason that I write. The challenge of building ideas and of communicating those ideas with the sharpest and clearest of words requires an ascent to a summit that most don’t want to undertake. There is immense satisfaction inherent in the journey, and of course, considerable pain. It is not at all easy to live as a writer, especially here in Canada.

And then there is the other work I cherish and toil at: teaching, talking, doing research, and chipping away at the quotidian tasks of a woman in academia. The plateau of writing breathes an air more exhilarating than academia’s grubbier potion. The hallways and offices and classrooms of a university demand an unrelenting attention, compounded by theoretical wars, identity politics, a thick glass ceiling and a burgeoning concern for technology and funding.

Teaching at every level offers definite rewards, tangible as the student who develops a love for literature expressed with so much grace and gift that one can only smile and approve. Or the chronically inarticulate student who, after years, achieves some measure of eloquence. Every year I receive
dozens of notes and e-mails from students who thank me for the energy that I give to my classes, and who tell me where they are in their own writing careers. Yes, my former students are themselves making a mark on this country’s literature. But the precise challenge of teaching—and teaching well—is far removed from the urgent trivialities of university life, the frustrations of trying to arrive at a sensible destination in an arena attentive to so much arcane minutiae that every memo and notice becomes a virtual ankle chain.

How did I get here? I often ask myself. The students are worth the energy, and they are the primary reason for my passionate attachment to teaching. But the politics and the picayune jealousies and the jockeying for position and the back-stabbing and the slow poison that leaks through the vents of decrepit buildings perform a version of cumulative discouragement. Where once there was a sunshine aura to post-secondary education’s physical and psychic space, it is now obsessed with results and advancement. Students want jobs when they graduate—and what they are learning is mere conduit to that land of tech-toys and six-figure salaries, enviable cars and downtown condos. The university itself reinforces that commercial mindset: the more research dollars professors bring in, the more respect they are given. And so, imagining itself a version of a corporation, academe has allowed its halls to become the site of cloak-and-dagger competition, obsessed with arguments over space and resources, with sadly petty results.

But wait, how did I get here? In my first year as a student at the University of Alberta, I was completely and unreservedly happy. I went to my classes, I studied, I wrote papers and knew in my bones that I had found my heart’s desire: to make my living reading and writing books, to make my living working with words. My notion of making
my living then had to do with making a life, not making money. Money was not much discussed at institutions of higher learning in the 1970s; more important was the reading and research and the satisfaction of learning itself. And this happy state of innocence I expected to continue. But I should have taken notes, paid more attention to the worms in the apples.

I entered Honours English after an exploratory first year (as was customary at the University of Alberta) and in that very small seminar had a puzzling encounter. A young man who had been in my freshman English class was one of the half-dozen of us admitted to Honours English—and in the first Honours seminar, I was pleased to see him again. “Hi, John,” I said, with friendly goodwill, and was surprised when he frowned at me.

“You’ve got my name wrong,” he said. “It’s James.”

I was young and stupid enough to be quite certain that in the freshman English class we had taken together he was definitely John. “Have you changed your name, then?”

“No,” he said haughtily, “I’ve always been James.”

“But, last year …”

He interrupted me roughly, and with a lowered voice. “Listen, I took the course for someone else, okay? Just shut up about it.”

The very notion was so puzzling to me (at the age of nineteen) that I couldn’t quite figure out what he meant. He took the course for someone else? Why would one do that? At that moment the professor entered and my question was put on hold. Seeing my face, James probably thought that I was naive enough (and he was right) not to understand the ramifications of his identity switch, and when the class was over, he pulled me aside again. “I traded,” he said. “He did biology for me, and I did English for him.”

“But why would you do that?” I asked, incredulous.

“To get an A, stupid,” he said. “He’s a science student. I’m an English student. He got me an A in biology; I got him an A in English.”

“But that’s lying,” I said.

“It’s an A.” He turned his back and walked away, but I had made, by the sheer accident of having been in his doppelgänger class, an enemy. And since we were Honours students together, we took many of the same courses. Where, every time I had to do a presentation or made comments in class, Mr. James (I truly cannot remember his last name), did all he could to punish me, making snide comments and challenging my critical position.

Academic misconduct of this kind was far removed from my sphere of recognition, immersed as I was in my studies, and it was less well policed than it is today. While I thought James’s actions wrong, it would not have occurred to me then to report him, or even to censure him. His drive for success was so intense that he had carefully planned and orchestrated getting a good grade in an area that was not his strongest, in exchange for helping a friend in the opposite field of study. I thought he was excessively pragmatic, and that was the sum of my youthful judgment. And I did not, until years later, connect the source of his antagonism to the information that I had inadvertently acquired. Oddly, it was his early scholarly taunting that toughened me up, probably helped to sharpen my already strong feminist sense, and made me question the motivations of those who insist on humiliating others in the classroom. So perhaps I ought to be grateful.

My second shock was less accidental and more personal: deliberate harassment. Graduate students at the University of Alberta who held teaching assistantships in English were
given their own freshman classes to teach. This entailed long hours of marking and preparation. As an apprenticeship in pedagogy, it was definitely a trial by fire, but I took to it with a passion and zeal predicated on my genuine love of literature and desire to persuade others to share this love. At the time, I was also writing my first novel, and my energy was happily divided between teaching and writing, all in preparation for defending my MA thesis. Because I was living in a tiny apartment, I spent long hours in my airless, windowless office. I didn’t care; I was doing what I loved. I worked sometimes from nine in the morning until ten at night, eager and engaged, completely focused on literature and writing.

And then I started to get phone calls. Very strange phone calls, making utterly outrageous sexual comments. I could not understand their source at all and at first assumed that some sex phone line had a number remarkably similar to that office number. But they persisted, and a few of the male callers (they were all male) actually used my name. Finally, it was the students in my class who told me that they had seen an ad (the usual three free lines) in the campus newspaper citing my name and my number in a sexually explicit way. Only my colleagues and students knew that university phone number, but although campus security investigated, they were never able to discover who had placed the harassing advertisement—it had been done anonymously. They concluded it was students playing a bad joke, but from the perspective of time, and given my awareness that I was working far harder than most of my colleagues (and frankly, achieving greater success), I now suspect those calls may have had more to do with academic jealousy than student prankishness. Of course, the calls were so disturbing that I could no longer work in that office and had to set up a rickety desk at home. I had enjoyed having an office; I had worked well
there. Now, it had been made a zone of discomfort, impossible to occupy.

These moments of shock may seem inconsequential with the passage of time, may seem to be merely about space or self-confidence, but they have a long echo, a discernibly discomfiting effect, creating stumbling blocks of doubt, distress and even, of course, danger. Older and fiercer now, I would seek to bring about some serious retribution on those responsible, but I am not sure I wouldn’t encounter similar laissez-faire attitudes from administrations, student governments and even security officers. For the dominant presences within academic institutions are genuinely puzzled about women’s discomfort with their scales and balances. Men like Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard University, whose remarks about women’s abilities in the areas of science and engineering have brought him considerable censure, seem always surprised by the reaction they incite, despite years of information and discussion. Perhaps part of the source of unease between women and men in academe is this conflict of outcomes, the differing measurements that are imposed on goals. On the other hand, the largely male administrations of universities tend to be thuddingly and resoundingly blind to their own participation in systemic difficulty if not discrimination, so much so that they cannot imagine the changes begging to be made.

Compounding these subtle toxicities are overt collisions that can only be defined as downright thuggery, of both the silent and the spoken variety. Intellectuals are not necessarily the kindest of folks and despite the low stakes (university professors earn commensurately far less than people who work in the corporate world; writers earn virtually nothing), frustrations surface in the strangest places. I have watched men appoint themselves gatekeepers and authorities, and
then bully those who are least powerful. I have seen men draft women to serve as their lackeys, their puppets in hounding other women, and I have watched those women acquiesce. The imperatives of power or friendship or debt are difficult to escape, even in a world where the higher imperative is supposed to be the transmission of knowledge.

As my experience as a student should have taught me, there is always a worm in the apple of knowledge. I have encountered, with frustrating predictability, actions intended to discredit and discount the work of women, as if it were inherently of questionable worth, or as if some alternative, harsher measurement were required for what women do. And yet, cowed by our own abjection or even our lack of confidence in our own value, we permit these disparagements, perhaps because there are only so many battles that can fruitfully be fought. For while universities proclaim an intellectual recognition of equality, putting that ethic into practice is another matter. The contingencies of excellence, qualification, seniority and connectedness will always trump egalitarian ideals.