Dropped Threads 3 (6 page)

If it is love that you need, then understand you will not win it through your body. The intimacy is false, and it is dangerous. And it doesn’t matter, my beloved, bright and vibrant girls, if you break it down by orifice. The math is misleading. Cross it out, I plead with you. Let’s start again.

There’s a cartoon
that I’ve come to love in recent years. It’s by the American cartoonist Robert Crumb, and is nothing more than a large bowl of bean soup, drawn cartoonishly, of course. The beans near the surface of the soup are distinctly drawn—bean after bean nuzzling one another like … well, like so many beans in a soup. Only one of the beans has a face, though, and this face bears an astonished look. A big white arrow points down at this single bean, and there’s a caption alongside it that reads:
He thinks he’s the only bean in the soup!

•    •    •

Long before I realized that I was not the only bean in the soup, I was a teenager. This was in the early sixties. My world and the worlds of my family and girlfriends were the only worlds that mattered. The fact that I was growing up in an oddly configured household didn’t trouble me, either. I was being raised by my aunt Elsie, her husband, Ernie, and my father, Billy, who was Elsie’s younger brother. Billy visited us every other weekend from his job in Vancouver where he worked on the docks. My mother, Nancy, had flown the coop when I was five; packed her bags for greener pastures, as the saying went, and caught the last ocean liner
out of Vancouver for Australia in 1952. She had done all of these things, Elsie claimed, because she was a gold digger.

“Women like Nancy give the rest of us a bad name,” Elsie frequently sniffed. By the “rest of us” she meant herself and the other stolid housewives of Vancouver Island.

By all accounts Nancy’s gold-digging exploits were successful. By the time I was fifteen she was on her fifth marriage, having hopscotched from man to man, getting wealthier along the way.

Not that her success was of any use to me

Nancy seldom wrote or sent gifts. By the time I started dating, I hardly thought about her any more, other than as an exotic character I could use for spinning tales—My mother is fabulously rich, has beautiful clothes, can play the piano like a concert pianist, travels the world on cruise ships like a pirate in search of wealthy men.

It was Elsie who provided me with steady information about the world of men: the Gospel According to Elsie, as I came to call it. We never sat down and discussed these things. Rather, it was me watching and listening. Elsie wore her opinions about men like a battle shield, and her opinions were so clear and definite that I didn’t doubt them.

I had a boyfriend by then. Martin Defolio, a guy from Victoria who had a car. I didn’t particularly like him, but he was the first one who seemed interested enough to ask me out. And at fifteen it was crucial to be asked out. All my friends had boyfriends and if I didn’t have one, too, I could kiss popularity goodbye. I’d be lumped with the wall-flowers—a certified cretin.

It wasn’t enough to
get
a boyfriend, though. Somehow you had to
keep
him. Keep him without getting knocked up and ruining your reputation, or losing him to a rival. It was difficult work. My friends and I talked of nothing else.

So I was Elsie’s gung-ho apprentice. When she’d spit out things like “Men! There’s no pleasing them!” or “Men! Who do they think they are?” I’d lap it up. My friends and I would feast on these tidbits. Apparently there was a war going on in the murky world of romance that we hadn’t known about. The war was called the Battle of the Sexes, and if you played your cards right, it was a war you could win.

I cut my teeth about men via the living proof that was Elsie and Ernie’s marriage. Theirs was the only marriage in the soup. And Ernie became the singular bean, the stand-in for every man in the Universe. Poor old Ernie.

•    •    •

Back then, I bought into what Elsie had to say about men, bought into it heart and soul. In 1962 I wanted guidebooks, diagrams, maps, and Elsie provided them. I became convinced by what she had to say. Being in charge sounded good to me. Better than good. A huge and wonderful relief. I liked the idea of power, of being dominant, of pushing puny Martin Defolio around when he whined that no sex made a guy go blind. Up on Mount Tolmie on a Friday night, I could roar with confidence, “So go blind, ya big ape!”

With men, the main thing, apparently, was to never give in—to anything.

Elsie never gave in, particularly to Ernie. With him, she acted like he was another household chore, someone she had to clean up after. It didn’t help that he was fat and bald and worked as a janitor at the public library and watched
Fun-O-Rama
cartoons after work every weekday at four. She’d be standing beside the TV set with a lighted cigarette in her hand and snarling, “Why do you watch that junk? Sometimes I wonder what I’ve married.”

Ernie would pretend he was deaf, especially if he was watching the
Popeye
cartoon where Brutus was being whacked all the way to the moon.

Elsie used her unalterable opinion about the opposite sex to achieve a different kind of whacking: all men, according to her gospel, were a necessary evil. Necessary because you needed a husband in order to have a house and a family, and they were okay—meaning a woman could stand them—as long as they were kept busy with a hobby or fixing things around the house or digging in the garden. The evil part was that they were prone to laziness and sex. If they started lying around the house doing nothing then one of their eyes would go funny. They’d get that look—“a bedroom look,” Elsie called it—and start slobbering and leering. Then it was, watch out! A perfectly good afternoon could be flushed down the toilet.

“Because, after all,” Elsie would snort, “the only thing a man’s interested in is sex and his supper.” Her statement was irrefutable. On some days, “What’s for supper?” was the longest sentence Ernie delivered to his wife.

•    •    •

Around this time we were learning about the Greek myths in English class, and in particular, the Amazons. Miss Hewitt, our young, brown-suited teacher, told us that the Amazons were a tribe of giant women warriors, so fierce that they had a law decreeing that only girl children could live. “They drowned the boys like rats,” Miss Hewitt said.

The brains in the front rows—the science club guys—cringed when they heard this.

She also said, with evident zeal, “The Amazon women were in charge! Think about that!”

I passed a note to my friend Dana: “My aunt is an Amazon.”

There was no disputing the fact that Elsie was in charge—of Ernie, me, the entire known world.

Dana passed the note back: “Ha, ha. What are you wearing Friday night?”

But the Amazon idea stuck.

•    •    •

I thought I would write an essay about the Amazons for Miss Hewitt. We had to pick one of the myths. I chased the idea further. I would describe Elsie as an Amazon queen. The women in my family were Elsie; Maudie, her sister, a widow; my crinkly old grandma, who sang nursery rhymes and lived with Maudie; and Elsie’s married daughters, Doreen and Shirley. Even though they were all short, I didn’t consider this a hindrance. They could be Amazons in disguise. Being a housewife, I decided, could be a clever ploy that had allowed the Amazons to survive to present-day times.

The idea delighted me. Home life might not be a prison sentence after all. Seen in this light, Elsie and the others were confident women, possessed of a sure clarity about the purpose of our lives. Within their homes, they miraculously enlarged, like Alice with the pill, and became giants, enormous in influence, compelling in control, the huge hearts at the centre of the family fortress.

I didn’t know the word
anthropologist
at the time, but all this was about discovering a tribe, one whose existence I had been blind to. Housewives! Not to be found, shockingly, within the pages of
National Geographic
like those bare-breasted native women whose lips were made monstrous by inserted plates. But no-nonsense, rolling-pin-wielding
women existing right under my nose. I started looking at Elsie with new-found interest.

I called the tribe the Amazon Housewives.

When Miss Hewitt told us that Amazons had fought in the Battle of Troy with the help of the goddess Artemis, I decided the Amazon Housewives needed a patron saint. I chose Blondie, from the comic strip of the same name. Blondie was the boss of her family, like Elsie was of ours, though Elsie was dumpy and wore glasses, while Blondie was something of a glamourpuss.

Ernie played out as Dagwood, Blondie’s husband, a subservient, henpecked weakling.

Once again, poor old Ernie.

All men, according to the housewife followers of Blondie, were Dagwoods: mid-day couch sleepers, sneaky avoiders of chores, destroyers of housework, and foulers of clean sinks and towels. They left grimy fingerprints everywhere, slopped mud onto shining kitchen floors, and snored and farted with abandon.

No wonder women had to be like Blondie. They were forced to it. Forced to use “every trick in the book” to keep their husbands in line. Blondie used rolling pins and frying pans to keep Dagwood in line. The Amazon Housewives used sharp tongues, guilt, sarcasm, and withheld sex. Only a woman’s steady vigilance kept a man civilized. Otherwise the man she had married would gain the upper hand and she’d wake up to find she’d married a slob.

This was the Gospel According to Elsie and the Amazon Housewives

Whew!

I never wrote that essay for Miss Hewitt. I wasn’t up to it. I couldn’t reconcile the man-hating meanness of the Amazons with my own dimly realized yearnings for love and
romance. And where was tenderness? And the rumoured gallantry of men? Where was their care and kindness, qualities I had often seen in Ernie, and in my father, Billy? So instead, I handed in a dry little book report: “The Amazons were an ancient tribe …”

•    •    •

Now and then Elsie and I would watch a late-night movie together. A musical, or a romantic comedy. She would be on one side of the den, in Ernie’s recliner (he’d have gone to bed), and I’d be on the couch wrapped in a blanket. The Fred and Ginger movies. And
Mrs. Miniver, How Green Was My Valley
. We smiled at the spunky portrayals of women with spirit who stood up to a man, who were independent and cutely petulant. No man could ever “get to first base” with them, not until they were “churched,” as Elsie called it. Enchanted, we watched the men in these movies. They were so remote from us, so clean and handsome in their tuxedos. They could dance and sing and had “hearts of gold” and went gallantly about the intricate business of winning a woman’s heart. Entire films were given over to the tug and pull, the sexless sophistication that was the fantasy of romantic comedy. There was not a man in our known world who could reach the elevated level of Cary Grant or Fred Astaire, though in my heart—and I believe in Elsie’s, too—we knew we were equal to them, knew we could turn into Ginger Rogers at the drop of a top hat.

Elsie never had much to say about these movies, other than to sigh, “Too bad life’s not like
that!”

Once, during a musical, Ernie shuffled out in his flannel pyjamas; the fringe around his bald head was ruffled like Einstein’s. He told us to turn down the TV. All that tap-dancing was giving him a headache.

Watching him return to their bedroom, Elsie snorted. “There goes the man of my dreams.”

Poor old Ernie, I thought, feeling hopeless for him yet again. There seemed no escape from the Amazon Housewives. He’d lost the Battle of the Sexes.

I wished Ernie could be on a TV show where he’d be given his most-wished-for things. Like
Queen for a Day
, the show for hard-up women. Ernie could be
King for a Day
. He’d turn into Cary Grant, be tall and handsome, have thick black hair. He’d be given a year’s supply of chocolate bars. A new truck. He’d drive off in the new truck, with a new wife, a dish he’d call “baby”….

•    •    •

If “The Gospel According to Elsie” didn’t stick with me, and I went searching for other bowls of soup, it was because of Ernie.