Show and Tell

june 11 … dear brad … work on the Pathètique is going well. i have finished the first and second movements: the first is very exciting to play, one cant help but get caught up in the emotion of it—god i wish i could write like that; the second is justso beautiful—i cringe because i dont do it justice, i dont have the smoothness and the subtlety it deserves. tomorrow i shall begin the third movement.

would you believe i have found someone up here who has a grand? a yamaha no less. he is letting me play on it once a week, just for a few hours—not enough—not nearly enough! but still its better than nothing. certainly better than the second-hand upright i have. oh well. one makes choices. if i taught full time, in a few years i could have a yamaha grand too. but i'd have a lot less time for my work. no, i like it how i have it.

i finished a fugue yesterday! yes, i actually wrote a fugue—theyre much more fun to compose than to play. it turned out to be in the key of c minor. cant get away from that old diatonicism no matter how consciously i ignore the harmonies. i could go back and, say, naturalize all the b flats, so it'd be in a different mode, but what the hell, i wrote it this way because thats the sound i wanted.

now that it is getting warmer, Chestnut and i go for our walk in the evening instead of in the afternoon. the beach is quite nice at dusk. very peaceful. and Nut still runs ahead then comes bounding back then runs ahead again—such a joy to see him so free and happy. did i tell you he's become friends with Sheba? a german shepherd who's here at the same time. it is really quite amusing considering that Nut comes up to about Sheba's knees, but they romp around quite delightfully. last time Nut didnt want to leave, and every ten yards or so he'd turn around, sit down, and look back toward the beach. all the way home.

i've started running again. its an anti-depressant and it gives me more energy to work—which is what i need now. i'm up to a nice five miles and wont go any further. i've given up the idea of a marathon, i shouldve done it three years ago when i was doing ten and fifteen mile distances. but now, well, i'm into other things, i guess.

love, amanda.

june 13… dear brad … well i have finally finished my analysis of Gagnons music. you know his stuff is ridiculously simple and he uses repetition all the time. and its incredible how conventional his harmonic structure is. and yet, for all that, i find his music very beautiful, very satisfying. thats curious. perhaps i'm using my head too much when i compose, trying to avoid all the cliche patterns. but when i dont consciously attend to its composition, it turns out quite mundane, 'pretty' at best. maybe its just that Gagnon creates such touching, haunting, lyrical themes, perhaps their beauty carries the whole piece.

its been only ten days since you've been gone and already this is my fourth letter. i expect it'll slow down. sometime, soon, maybe.

yesterday i acquired two more new students. so that brings me back up to my minimum of twenty. no more worries about rent! and theyve both been taking lessons for a few years already—a nice relief among all the beginners i seem to have.

by the way, my idea of incorporating composition into the lessons by starting with sound effects seems to be going over quite well. most of the kids just love the idea of figuring out how an elephant falling down the stairs would sound or angels singing out of tune. a few days ago one came and did 'someone eating corn chips and chewing bubble gum at the same time'. neat, eh. after the sound effects, we move into telling a story while playing the soundtrack for it. i can hardly wait for that last kids stories!

Canary developed a painful rattle this morning. its at the garage now. hope its nothing too costly. maybe i shouldve kept your car after all, instead of selling it.

… love, amanda.

june 16 … dear brad … The National Academy of Music called today offering a job. if they had called a week or so ago i wouldve accepted, but i have enough students now, i dont need any more money. and anyway when you teach at an academy, they skim off half the students fee for themselves, so on my own i make much more per hour.

have finished analyzing Supertramp. i have always been impressed with their music—and now i've found that it actually isas interesting and innovative as it sounds. Hodgson sure likes to use the bVII chord.

work on my Pieces, Opus 2, continues to go slowly.

Anna dropped by the other day, 'to see how i was getting along'. she brought her photo album of her trip, apparently i need seme 'cheering up and distraction'. she says its unnatural to be alone so much, especially at a time like this. i tried to remind her that ive lived alone all my adult life and i like it that way, but, well you know Anna—

we actually spent a whole hour looking at those—those awful snapshots. they werent photographs, i cant call them that. i almost brought out all your work to show her the difference, but no, i didnt.

'thats us in those caves up at Collingwood, you know, where they make that blue mountain pottery … and heres us at the Calgary stampede … here we are getting on the ferry to Vancouver Island … here we are getting off …'

my god. why do people keep photo albums. not for aesthetic pleasure, thats for sure. as a record of their experience, i suppose. no, its more than that, its a validation of their experience, their very existence. the album s something to show to other people: see, this is where have been, what i have done, here is proof, look, i exist.

funny how important, how necessary it is, to show and tell. how we need to verify our subjectiveexistence by exposing it to an objective existence. a reality of the self depends on an interaction with a reality of the other.

and its the giving in that interaction that matters, not the taking—the transmission, not the reception. Anna didnt even notice if i was interested or not, if i nodded at the right time or asked a question here and there. it mattered to her only to be able to show the snapshots to me and tell me about them.

its like that old riddle, does a tree falling in the middle of the forest make a sound if no one hears—well, the tree doesnt care, that blessed oak or pine just needs to be able to fall. its existence is validated by the mere falling—whether it is heard or not is irrelevant.

… love, amanda.

june 17 … dear brad … today when i looked at that picture of you i have one my billboard, you know, the one taken in your Vancouver apartment after we made love all morning—i suddenly realized that you are my snapshot, you are my way at validating my existence.

no, listen. when we talk about love, what do we mean? im not referring to that general love of humanity, that impersonal respect for individual life in all its manifestations—im talking about personal, specific, one to one love. what is it?

well, lets take away all the business that goes on between two people in a love relationship. take away the family business—the kids need new shoes, johnny went to the dentist. take away the household business—what do you think about new furniture for the den, dont forget to pick up the drycleaning. and take away the social business—the bowling league starts thursday. now what is left of this loving couple, what is left of their interaction, their relation? i had an awful day at the office, so and so called this morning, i did the basement rug: show and tell. thats what passes for love. just show and tell.

and we're no different. oh we dont have any family business—neither of us wanted to be the mother. we dont have any household business—we've lived apart, so each to their own, no need to interact on this dimension. and we dont have any social business—again, living apart leads to separate social circles, though neither of us is very social to begin with. yet we do have a relationship, we have had a very stable and satisfying love, for seven years.

this lack of 'business' in our relationship just makes it easier to see what that relationship, what that love is. and look—our telephone calls are like progress reports, our together times every two or three weeks are part piano recital, part photography exhibit: show and tell, affirming our subjective existences by showing and telling to an objective existence, the beloved. that is love. nothing else. nothing more.

… love, amanda.

june 18… dear brad … and in our relationship, in our love, its been the transmitting, not the receiving, that has mattered most—like the tree, it matters not whether i am heard. as long as i could say, hey listen, i finished that piece i was writing, or hey look, i tried this out and it worked. as long as i could talk to you, share my life with you, as long as i can show and tell to you, love you—then my life is valid, it is real.

so thats why im writing letters to you. weeks after your funeral.

… love, amanda.

1982

***

The English Teacher

How does it feel? To be on your own … I turn up Fieldstone, then onto East Street. Like a complete unknown … like a rolling stone … I pull into the high school's parking lot, and turn off the ignition. Dylan shuts up. So does his harmonica. (I once listened to that song for two hours straight, was I stoned. I musta been.) I sit in my car and prepare myself for the passing through. Each time I open the school doors and step onto the other side, a wave of culture shock hits me. I am a foreigner.

But pass through I will. I am The English Teacher. Shit, I'm on time for 'O Canada' again. First time I sat through it in a classroom, I was called down to the office. Naughty. "You aren't setting an example for the students." Damn right I'm not. I'll be no model of hypocrisy. 'The true north strong and free'? Come on. 'I'll stand on guard for thee'? I will not, I'm pacifist. 'With glowing hearts—' "You don't have to sing it, you just have to stand for it, it is our national anthem." Nationalism is an infantile disease, I footnoted Einstein. (It was Einstein who said that wasn't it?) I was dismissed. No detention.

And then 'The Lord's Prayer'. Oh god. I stand and look out the window at the garbage blowing in the wind. So they don't see the derision on my face. Quote for tomorrow's writing exercise: Religion is the opiate of the masses. (Marx?)

Then the announcements come on. I don't put in any announcements. I tried once, at the beginning of the year, but they censored it, can you believe it. It was to start a debating club, The Forum, and it read something like 'Does God exist? Should you burn your draft card? Is capitalism good? Is abortion murder? Should attendance be compulsory? If you're interested in issues like these, come out to Room 304 at 3:05 for the very first meeting of LCI's new club, The Forum.' They read, instead, 'A new club for debating will meet today after school in Room 304.' Too controversial, they said. What the fuck? What about the spirit of educ— freedom of— I don't understand.

Morning rituals over, it's time for class. I stare for a few moments at the rows of faces until a vague notion of habit moves me. I go towards the filing cabinet, but then stop. Suddenly conscious. I remember my self. The smartass sixteen-year-old in the fourth row sees my dawning incomprehension and says "What's wrong?" He'd love to see me stoned in class, but when I'm stoned, I call in healthy and don't come to class at all. (Actually that hasn't happened yet, but I can hardly wait, to hear the department head's response.) Shall I be honest and open with my students? Shall I say I don't know what the fuck I'm doing here? I tell him "Nothing" and open the drawer. The seizure has passed, Lethe rushes on.

I get the graded essays out of the cabinet. Ah yes, grading essays. Pick a number, any number, to represent the quality of this piece. I hand them back and allow a few minutes for insults and complaints. One guy comes up and says "Why did I only get a 64% and she got 66%?" Right. Account for that 2% difference on a ten-page essay read two nights ago after 25 and before 30 others. "You used a semi-colon incorrectly twice, and she used it incorrectly only once." He believed me. He went back to his desk. I laughed.

My god— I laughed.

I carry on with English class. Vivisection becomes dissection with the instruments of an a posteriori black bag. I mean what writer is conscious of the plot pattern of rising action, climax, and resolution, the four techniques of building suspense, and the three differences between direct and indirect characterization? Is that the essence of the study of literature? Class dismissed. No detentions.

What the fuck am I doing here? I who disdain and mock the public am now its servant. Ah and here comes one of the masters now. I'm not against parents. I even called each one, yes each one, in September to introduce myself and open the lines of communication. But when they come in and demand "Susie got 70s last year and she's failing your course this year why?"—I mean, what to say? Well she musta got really dumb over the summer? Or she had an asshole teacher last year who didn't know the difference between the Petrarchan sonnet and the Spenserian sonnet? (I don't know the difference either but.) Or having successfully maneuvered herself through puberty, she is no longer interested in dangling participles? Or well she's into drugs now, didn't you notice? I tell the mother I don't know and dismiss her. No detention.

Susie by the way isn't the only student who is failing. So are John, Shirley, Mick, Rob, Paul, Marie … The failure rate of my classes last term was 45%. I got called down to the office for that too. Apparently it's supposed to be no higher than 20%. "Justify your figures," the man says. Well, I replied, twenty-nine of the thirty-six students who failed did not hand in at least ten of the twenty required assignments and tests. As well, all failing students were absent at least fifteen days during the term, that's three weeks of missed school. "Well we can't have a failure of 45%, that's too high." Oh. "Perhaps you could raise all the marks by 15%. Would that bring the rate down?" Well, yes. It would. "Fine then." (What language are you using?) It would also give six students a mark of 105% or better. "Oh no, that's too high. We can't have that. The computers can only handle two digits." Oh. (What language did you say you were using?) I was sent back to my room. Number 304.

I teach wearing my jeans, a shirt, and my hiking boots. (I could tell you what kind of socks too but it might not matter. I'm not sure anymore. What matters.) My attire seems to pose a problem. I was called down to the office, this was in September, and I was told that I'm to "Set an example by dressing properly." What's improper about my clothes, I asked. "Well maybe inappropriate is the ward." What's inappropriate about my clothes, I asked. They don't seem to hinder my ability to teach, I don't suddenly forget the material when I put on my jeans, my evaluation standards don't decline if I have jeans on— "Well there is an accepted convention regarding dress for teachers." Is an Accepted Convention kinda like a Commandment? Or are you saying its mandatory for staff to wear uniforms? If the latter, why?

A teacher in this department, they still talk about it, confessed to me the other day that he was very grateful for his suitcoat and tie during his first years of teaching because they gave him the authority and respect he needed to control the class. So that's why. I thought so. I told him every day you wear your suitcoat and tie, you're teaching the students that it's what's outside that counts and you thereby discourage them from looking beyond the facades, from reasoning; you perpetuate the mentality of evaluation on the basis of appearance, of 'You are what you look like', of 'Judge a book by—' It's funny, my dog acts on much the same basis: response patterned by sensory stimuli. He didn't understand me. The other teacher.

I mean I could wear a suitcoat and tie too, but then they'd all wonder if I really was a lesbian, and then I'd have to shave my legs pierce my ears pluck my brows curl my hair paint my face and varnish my nails to prove that I'm normal.

On hall duty. Someone has spray painted "John sucks Arnie" on the ceiling by the door to the outside smoking area. Every student coming in either tsks or laughs. I don't understand. When I read it, I just thought so what? I mean, who the hell cares?

After my last class, I got called down to the office again. They sure do show an interest in me. I told than that and added an apology for my inability to return the compliment. They almost dismissed me then, but remembered I was there to account for my truancy during the last two days of the exam schedule. I told him (him, they, synonyms here, see I am too learning) that I was not scheduled for any supervision on either day and as all my exams were graded, marks calculated, and the first month of third term prepped, I couldn't justify driving half an hour each way to spend six hours in the smoky staff room picking my nose. He couldn't justify it either, but I had violated the Board's rule and that was a no-no. Oh dear.

One last check in my mailbox before I leave for the day. Item. The written report of an evaluation by one of my superiors who sat in during one of my classes last week. Could I please sign each copy and return all but one. Observations: The class began at 10:31 a.m. A few students came in late, one as late as 10:37 a.m. Many of the students were sitting towards the rear of the classroom, fourteen of nineteen. Attendance was taken by the teacher. A definite homework assignment was not given. The class was generally well behaved.

Wow. What observation skills! The implications of this man's priorities, his understanding of what education is all about— Content is irrelevant, I see. We may have been discussing the function of the cilia in a two-toed paramecium on rainy days in February. However, what we were discussing was a story's theme: the desperate extents to which being an alien can drive one. The character in the story, able to understand and be understood by no one, starts talking to dandelions, and then kills himself.

1982

***

Suspended

she sits in the third row

at the second desk

wearing one of those new shirts

with words on it—

her words are in black and blue:

all dressed up and nowhere to go.

the laws of her country won't allow her

ever to go back

and the laws of this country won't allow her

to go forward

until she looks like, speaks like, acts like,

thinks and feels like

us.

the first one is easy,

she has done it already.

the second two are more difficult

though she is learning in my class,

and she is trying hard.

but the last two are almost impossible—

and she cries with each cut across the grain:

she is made in Taiwan.

1983

***

The Apple

(to Eve, the first teacher)

thinking about the apple

left on my desk,

wondering about the origins

of the tradition,

i suddenly remember you

and think, why of course,

you picked it from that tree,

its our symbol of knowledge.

well if its that

and not a symbol of

disobedience or idle curiosity or evil

why, i wonder for the hundredth time,

do men still condemn us?

especially since you offered the apple to Adam

you shared your knowledge with him

and he turned around

and kept it

from us

in a thousand different ways.

yet here i am

still holding out my hand and smiling

sill sharing that gift, that power,

that knowledge

(but every time a male student

walks into my classroom

i shudder

and think

why should i?)

1986

***

(free downloads of the complete collection at chriswind.net)

War Heroes

Phan Ling completed the one remaining calculation, neatly printed ‘47.12’ onto the large sheet fixed on her drafting table, then carefully set down her pencil. She stretched, leaned back with her arms crossed behind her head, and looked out the window of her fifth floor office. The usual feeling of triumph—or at least satisfaction—was not forthcoming. She was puzzled: she had been working on this assignment for months.

Well, she realized, she hadn’t been too excited about it in the first place. It was the design of a fission trigger which would initiate the fusion reaction of a thermonuclear weapon. But, she knew she couldn’t pick and choose her assignments—no one in R and D could. No one in any department could. You can’t just accept parts of your job, the stuff you liked, and refuse the rest. A company can’t function if it can’t trust its employees to do what they were asked to do—she knew that. She understood that.

And it wasn’t as if all of her assignments had to do with nuclear weapons. In fact, this was the first. She knew the company itself wasn’t comfortable with this particular contract—but, well, it had saved them from bankruptcy.

No. generally speaking, she liked her job, she liked the challenge of her work. So she wasn’t about to get radical and become an activist over this one assignment. It wasn’t in her nature. It wasn’t in her background. When her parents’ parents became frustrated at the lack of opportunity at home for a university education for their children, they didn’t take to the streets shouting and waving banners, demanding more universities, and condemning the government’s complacency with the rampant under-the-table bribery that went on for the few spaces at the existing universities. They simply sold a family heirloom, withdrew their savings, and sent their youngest and brightest here, to Canada. They simply saw an alternative and quietly took it.

Then when her own parents discovered the persistent disadvantage of their poorly spoken English, they didn’t cry ‘discrimination!’ and call for meetings with the student unions, they just decided to switch majors, from anthropology and psychology to engineering and physics, fields in which the disadvantage would be minimalized. Like them, Phan believed that you could get what you more or less wanted withinthe confines of laws and regulations. with a little intelligence and a lot of hard work.

That’s why the news this morning—ah! There’s the reason! She had heard on the news this morning that the arms talk had failed. That was why she didn’t feel very good about her successfully completed assignment. By themselves, one or the other wouldn’t have upset her. But timing can create such a juxtaposition—

Of course it wasn’t the first arms talk. And it wasn’t the first arms talk that had failed. The U.S. had begun testing in 1945. The Soviet Union, in ’49, and the UK, in ’52, Six years later, thirteen years after the atomic bomb, negotiations began for a ban on testing. The three countries actually agreed then to stop it, for two years. But before those two years were over, the U.S. walked out on further negotiations. France began testing in 1960, the USSR and the U.S. resumed in 1961. By that time, the Intercontinental Bomber, the hydrogen bomb, the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, the man-made satellite in orbit for targeting and surveillance, and the submarine launched ballistic missile had been successfully developed.

Over the next fifteen or sixteen years, a mere four treaties were established. All were limited in scope, all were ‘partial’. Then in 1977, the three countries got together again and talked about a comprehensive test ban treaty; two years later, the U.S. and the USSR signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Agreement, the one known as Salt II, but the U.S. Senate didn’t ratify it, and in 1980 the U.S. refused to continue negotiations. In 1985, the USSR declared a unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing; they even extended it four times, until 1987. But no one else joined in; and they started testing again. In the meantime, the multiple warhead, the Antiballistic Missile, the Multiple Independent Targeted Warhead, and long range cruise missiles had been developed. And testing was taking place in China and India as well.

She began to lose track then as every talk became enmeshed in a complex web of ifs, ands, and buts. How many SS-20s equal how many Pershing IIs? Then denials and declarations began that put even ‘the facts’ in question. Maybe the U.S. didn’t discontinue negotiations, maybe the USSR didn’t maintain a moratorium. Were the warheads withdrawn as promised? Did the freeze occur at the level agreed to?

Who would ever know what had happened in the past—certainly the present state of affairs was muddy. And the future was—well, invisible. Were egos blocking the vision? Was it that too much was invested to turn back now? She didn’t know why the talks had failed.

She knew only that negotiations weren’t working. She thought for a moment, then she picked up her pencil, erased ‘47.12’, and printed ‘47.22’. Now the triggers wouldn’t work either. She stretched and leaned back in her chair again—smiling with pride at a job well done.

Karl Nyovsky worked in a place that looked like an old military base, except that it had shiny barn-like buildings. It was in fact an industrial facility, a metalworking factory. The metal used was plutonium. The plutonium was melted, then poured through a tantalm funnel in to a graphite mold. The resulting ingots came down the line to Karl, to be machined into the proper shape. He was a tool-and-die maker by trade. Here he made nuclear triggers.

Almost every factory worker knew someone who had lost a finger somehow somewhere, and Karl was no exception. Yes, he was very aware of accidents; in fact if he had another skill, he’d find another job. However, from behind a stainless steel enclosure, with lead glass windows, lead shielding, and lead oxide in the rubber gloves he wore, Karl wasn’t thinking of losing a finger.

He was thinking of accidents he’d read about. Three-Mile Island and Chernobyl. (In fact, if the money weren’t so good, he’d find another job.) But Karl didn’t read just the Sunor the Star or the Globe. He also read the other newspapers, the small alternative, almost underground, newsletters and pamphlets that came his way, sometimes by subscription, sometimes by random outreach. It was a habit he had brought with him from home.

So as he worked, Karl was also thinking of the B-52 carrying four nuclear bombs that crashed in Greenland in 1968, spreading 16 kg of plutonium over acres and acres of tundra. More than 230,000 cubic feet of ice and debris were scraped up and disposed. Where, Karl wondered, as he lined up the next ingot, where was it disposed to? He also thought of the Russian airplane carrying a nuclear weapon that crashed in the Sea of Japan. He thought of the U.S. subs carrying nuclear missiles that have collided with Russian ships, the George Washington that ran right into a Japanese ship back in ’81, and the Scorpion and the Thresher, two nuclear attack submarines that just sank into the ocean and no one knows why. He checked the setting readouts above the four knobs, ‘1.18’, ‘47.22’, ‘15.6’, and ‘7.64’, and thought of the nuclear weapon that fell out of a strategic bomber in the late ’70s and landed in Carolina in a swamp. He thought of the failure in 1979 of a 46¢ computer part that produced a false signal showing Russian missiles on the way to the U.S., and of the missile that was accidentally fired from Arkansas in ’81 because a mechanic dropped a wrench. Oh yes, he knew, accidents happen, people make mistakes.

The chance of a nuclear war starting by accident was, to his mind, phenomenal. He thought of the four plutonium bombs dropped on Spain by mistake—fortunately they didn’t explode. He thought of the crash in ’61 of a plane carrying a 24 megaton bomb over North Carolina—on impact, five of the six interlocking mechanisms on the bomb failed, so that only one switch prevented an explosion equivalent to 1,000 Nagasakis. One switch had made the difference. Chances are, he thought, adjusting the precision controls, this one will also be fired by mistake. He turned one of the knobs just a few more degrees. But chances are, he smiled, it won’t go off.

Claude Tremblay was lying awake in bed at 5:00 a.m. He was on his back, staring at the ceiling. He was trying to decide whether or not to call in sick.

He was scheduled for what the guys called a ‘nuke run’. Transporting something or other—they never knew just what—in those canisters marked with that radioactive symbol, always to or from some military base. The runs paid sometimes five times a regular run—which is why a lot of guys put in special requests for them. But for exactly the same reason they paid so much, a lot of guys didn’t like them—the personal risk. What happened if your rig got in an accident? Well, no one really knew for sure—they said it was safe enough and talked a lot about the construction of the canisters—but well, Claude didn’t always believe what he was told.

However, that wasn’t what was really bothering him. Every time he saw one of those symbols, he saw people running, on fire, their skin hanging in strips. He saw schools, hospitals, buildings of all kinds, blasted to bits, the steel, concrete, and glass shards flying into people’s bodies. He saw people lying everywhere injured, dying. He saw others walk by, unable to help, but with nowhere to go.

He saw people with radiation sickness, throwing up, their hair falling out, just waiting to die. He saw hundreds of dull and empty eyes, suffering acute stress, bereavement, and depression. He saw people living in a cold and barren wasteland, desperate with survival instinct, looting and killing for a bottle of water, a can of beans. He saw the survivors sprouting cancers, gradually malfunctioning.

When he told the guys once, they looked at him like he was some kind of wimp. It was okay to consider the risk to yourself, but it wasn’t cool to think about others. He didn’t understand. Then some new guy got on his high horse and refused all nuke runs, saying it was our duty to our children to resist, etc., etc. Claude tried to figure it—duty was okay but care wasn’t? It was okay to care about others only if the others were your kids? Well, if your kids are merely extensions of your self, he saw their logic in that—he noticed that a lot of people suddenly became concerned citizens when they became parents. The new guy was suspended—they were trying to decide if they could fire him.

Claude didn’t want to be suspended too—or fired. He liked—well, yeah, he liked his job: he liked being in the driver’s seat, he was his own boss more or less, he made his own decisions—didn’t have to ask no floor super if he could go to the can. The bed creaked as he shifted his position. Well then be your own boss, makeyour own decisions.

Still—what’s one trip? He stared at the ceiling. and saw that damn symbol. And then saw again all the people— what he saw made him sick. He picked up the phone.

Alabua Achebe was pacing outside the assembly building at the base, waiting anxiously for the truck. She looked again toward the gate. It was an hour and a half late. Where was the damn thing? She had to have the trigger installed by five o’clock today.

Tons of money poured into this whole business and still it’s a mess! (It was income tax time and money was uppermost in her mind.) Fifteen percent of my taxes go to the Department of Defence, she thought, fifteen percent! She had been thinking about withholding that fifteen percent. Redirecting it to the Peace Tax Fund. Well half of it anyway. She wasn’t one of the naive who were totallyanti-military. She wouldn’t be here if she were. No. Alabua admired much of what the military did. She had joined mainly for the educational opportunities and for the peace-keeping and rescue aspects of the job. But then she was transferred. And transferred again. As Junior personnel it was hard to say no because who knew then if you’d ever see a raise or a promotion again. But it was hard as senior personnel too because the expectations of loyalty were so great. And of course the transfers were always temporary. Yet with each transfer, she became a little more disillusioned. But what was she to do. Just say no? Quit? Walk away from a job that had given her a university degree, not to mention a great dental/medical plan, life and disability insurance, and a fantastic pension to boot? It had occurred to her. It had become harder and harder to defend against the ‘little boys with big toys’ accusation of her non-military friends. And the money, the expense, was certainly one part of it. She discovered that the old joke about $20 for a manually-operable torque device—a screwdriver—was true. She always wondered where the difference between $20 and $4.99 went. Not into herpocket. (Though she had no complaints.) In the States, the profits made by arms manufacturers exceed those made in civilian industry by twenty to thirty percent. It was something to think about. At the edge of the building she turned with impatience and walked the other way.

So was fifteen percent. And she realized that that didn’t include things like the $13 million subsidy the federal government had given to Litton to manufacture the guidance system for the cruise missile. That $13 million came out of the other 85% of my taxes, she figured. How many more such subsidies were there?

No one had been charged or sent to jail for redirecting taxes, as long as the test case, the one with Dr. Prior, was unsettled. But as soon as she lost, people were being hauled in left, right, and center, to pay for their conscientious objection. More and more every year.

It was no wonder, Alabua thought, as she turned and walked back again. The military industry produces fewer jobs per dollar than any other sector, everyone knew that by now. It created 75 jobs where construction created 100, health care 138, and education 187. And what had she read the other day? That the global arms race was costing the world $2 million a minute? (It was expensive to go nuclear—especially when you buy 25,000 warheads where 200 would do—she knew the requirements for deterrence.) And that to provide adequate food, clean water, education, health care, and housing for everyone on the planet would cost $17 billion a year—that’s, she turned again as she did the arithmetic, that’s a little over six days: less than one week, one week’s military spending out of fifty-two, would take care of the world’s basic needs. She stopped. It was incredible. What are we, she wondered, crazy? She turned slowly and started walking again, toward the gate. and through it.

Bill Lancaster set his pencil and management textbook onto the bare table in front of him—he was half-way through chapter nine. He looked at the clock—lots of time yet. He yawned and glanced around. This was why he liked this assignment, why he had volunteered for missile duty. Twenty-four hours in a capsule with virtually dick-all to do. At the rate he was going, he’d have his MBA by winter, fall maybe. He stood up to stretch and walked around checking the many indicator meters. A lot of guys brought correspondence coursework with them. Except Fisco—she moonlighted as an accountant and brought her clients’ books to work on. And Dubb—he didn’t bring anything—and usually fell asleep after eight or ten hours. He finished his check, everything was as it should be. He turned back to chapter nine, fiddling absently with the ‘combat’ pin on the lapel of his neatly pressed uniform.

After a few hours, he took another break before launching into the chapter’s questions. It was six o’clock, the controls would be switched to missile two now, the one with the newly installed trigger. He poured himself a cup of coffee, offered one to his partner in the adjoining capsule, then sat down to go through his mail—one could not live on coursework alone.

A few bills he tucked inside his wallet. A letter from his foster-child in Peru he read with some delight and put into his pocket—it would get taped to his fridge. Some junk mail—a record club offer he could refuse, a plea from the cancer society, and something from an anti-nuclear group. He flung that last one onto the table. He was sure they had a separate mailing list, some kind of hit list, of all DND employees.

Yes he knew that between the soot and dust from the explosion that would darken the planet and absorb the heat, causing the surface temperature to decrease, and the radioactive fallout that would contaminate soil and water wherever it drifted—yes one thing leads to another, the face of the earth would be changed: it would no longer sustain life as we know it. Yes he knew that. It was so well-publicized, you’d have to be an idiot not to know. Or a psychopath—was that the name for people who blocked out certain aspects of reality?

But that would never happen, didn’t they know that? This was all a charade, a scare tactic. That’s what this country’s military strategy was based on: threat, the potentialfor devastating attack or retaliation. And even though it was the mere threat that was important, it couldn’t be an empty threat, they had to actually have all the missiles they said they did. Granted, it wasn’t the best military strategy in the world, but a battlefield of nuclear weapons wasn’t your best military scenario either. You had to deal with the facts, and the fact was nuclear weapons existed, but it would never happen.

And if it did—well—he’d do as he’d been trained, he’d follow orders, he’d act— No, he’d react. He was like a rat: the light goes on, you do a little trick, and you get a pellet. He glanced at the envelope from the nuclear group. No, you get killed. It wasn’t the best military strategy in the world.

Suddenly the alarm in the capsule went off. Bill jumped to the control panel, seeing the red light flashing. He began to go through his routine: one—off, yes; two—on, yes; three—over ten, yes; four—switch up, yes; five—key turn five—key turn —no.

***

Going Shopping

Adelaide carried the pot of tea from the counter to the little kitchen table. The table was already set from the night before: a cup and saucer on either side, next to a bread plate and knife. The butter dish was in the center, beside the empty spot where she now put the teapot. It was good china, a wedding gift, forty years old. It had lasted longer than Albert.

Greta came out of the second bedroom and entered the kitchen of their small apartment.

“Good morning, Adelaide!” she said brightly, opening the fridge. She always got the little jars of jam out, and added the cream to the cream-and-sugar beside the teapot.

“Good morning. Sleep well?” Adelaide asked.

“Oh, you know for me it’s not the sleeping that’s a problem, it’s the getting up out of bed that bothers me.”

Adelaide did know that. And today was Saturday. Shopping day.

“Is it too bad to go shopping today? We can always—”

“Oh no! I can certainly go shopping! The day these old bones can’t go shopping Adelaide, why that’s the day I’ll just roll over and die.”

They both smiled. Greta got the loaf of bread out of the breadbox, and put two slices into the toaster. She then sat across from Adelaide.

“I wonder what Woolworth’s has on sale today,” Adelaide said with devilish glee in her eyes.

“Now, Adelaide, don’t you start. We’ll just have to wait and see.” Greta followed the script. She peeked into the teapot. “It’s fine for you, I think,” she said to Adelaide, who liked her tea a little less strong than Greta.

Adelaide peeked too and then poured herself a cup. The toast popped up and Greta started to get out of her chair.

“I’ll get it, dear, you stay put.” Adelaide flitted from her chair to the kitchen counter. She was the smaller of the two and had an air of fragility whereas Greta appeared solid. But Greta’s body seemed to have lost its shock absorbers, whereas Adelaide’s was still springy. And so, in fact, Greta was the one more liable to break. And she was heavier. But then again, she was also stronger— So it was hard to say, really.

Adelaide put a plate with two pieces of toast on it in the center of the table, then sat down. Each took a piece onto her bread plate then paused, deciding.

They looked at each other as if this was some sort of paper-rock-and-scissors game. Then Greta quickly reached out for the raspberry jam, and Adelaide snatched the apricot marmalade. They laughed at their own silliness. The grape jelly and the pear-pineapple stood unchosen.

“It looks like it’s going to be a sunny day,” Adelaide commented.

“Yes, though it’s still early morning. It’s got time to change its mind.”

“Do you think that new store—that new ice cream store—what’s its name? One of those silly hyphenated—Baskin-Rubens?”

“Baskin-Robbins,” Greta knew it.

“Yes that’s it, Baskin-Robbins. Do you think it will be open today?”

“I don’t know. Maybe—”

“Can you imagine?” Adelaide said. “Thirty-one flavours!”

They finished their toast and tea after a few moments, then Adelaide announced with excitement. “All right, time to get down to business. Shall I get the paper or will you?” Greta didn’t answer. She was staring out of the window, lost. “Greta?”

Greta looked at Adelaide then, “Why don’t we both go?”

“Both?” Adelaide was surprised. “Why?”

“Well, I’ve been thinking,” Greta looked out the window again. “You know that new young lady who’s just moved in two doors down?”

“Yes …”

“Well, she lives alone as far as I can tell,” she looked at Adelaide’s generous blue eyes, “and I don’t think anyone’s said so much as hello to her.” She stopped, cautiously. “Why don’t we invite her along with us today?” She wasn’t sure how Adelaide would take this. Going shopping had always been a ‘just the two of them’ thing.

“Why Greta, that’s a splendid idea!”

Greta smiled with relief.

Adelaide thought about it further, then said, “But we can’t go knocking on doors in our pyjamas!”

“I’m sure she’s seen women in housecoats before.”

She considered that, then asked, “Do you think she’s home?”

“It’s Saturday morning …”

“Well, I’m sure she’d love to go shopping,” Adelaide decided. “She probably hasn’t even been downtown yet, poor dear.” She was delighted with the idea of playing tour guide on shopping day.

They quickly cleared the table of the plates, knives, and jams, took the teabag out of the pot, and covered it with a cozy. Adelaide tied her baby blue brushed nylon robe around her a little tighter. She was wearing fancy slippers with puffs of white furry stuff on the toes. She joined Greta at the hall mirror.

“Do we look all right?” she worried, patting her hair and making sure she had no jam at the corners of her mouth.

“I think so,” Greta answered nervously. She wore a burgundy coloured terry cloth robe over her nightgown, and it made her gray hair look quite handsome. Suddenly she remembered her feet, and went into her bedroom to change from her worn slippers with the holes where her bunions were into a pair of Happy Hoppers.

“Does one of us have her glasses?” she asked Adelaide, coming back into the hallway.

Adelaide checked the pocket of her robe. “I have kleenex,” she stated.

“I’ll take mine,” Greta offered and went back into her bedroom. She returned patting the case in her pocket. “All set?”

“All set,” Adelaide responded. Greta opened the door, but on her way out she stopped suddenly. Adelaide bumped into her.

“Do you have the key?” Greta turned to whisper in the hush of the hallway.

“Oh— No! Good thinking, Greta!” Adelaide went back to the hall mirror. There was a door key lying on the little telephone table under the mirror. She put it into her pocket.

“Okay, got it,” she returned to the door. Greta smiled grimly, and they entered the hall then, making sure their door was locked behind them.

It was a long hallway, with four or five apartments on each side. But it was well lit and the carpet was even.

“Should we ask her on our way down or on the way back?” Adelaide almost pranced in her excitement.

“Well, if we do it on our way back, we’ll have the paper, so if she says no, it won’t look like we came by just to ask her,” Greta said.

“That way too, she might feel freer to say no if she really doesn’t want to come with us.”

Adelaide considered this for a minute or two. “Where did you learn to think like that?” she finally asked.

So they went down to the lobby first, at the end of the hall. Greta’s back was loosening up, and she tried not to dodder. They were lucky enough to have an apartment on the first floor. The laundry room however was in the basement. They approached the rows of boxes on the wall, while Greta fiddled in her robe to get out her glasses. She took them out of the case and put them on. She leaned close to the bottom right corner, carefully reading the names on the small typed labels. She found theirs, McCall and Luxley, and pulled out the rolled-up paper. She counted and knew again that their box was two rows up and three rows over, but every time she forgot her glasses, she also forgot if it was two over and three up or three over and two up. And Mr. Chase (three over and two up) was an angry young man in a wheelchair—a motorcycle accident, someone said—and when once they took his paper by mistake, he ranted and raved and hit the boxes with the fist so loudly the whole building heard him.

“Are you sure that’s ours?” Adelaide asked.

Greta peered at the name labels again, for good measure. “Yes,” she said, slowly straightening. “Let’s go.”

They walked back through the lobby and down the hall. They stopped at #105.

Suddenly Greta was shy. “You knock, Adelaide,” she said. “You’re much better at this than I am.”

So Adelaide stepped forward and knocked on the door.

A youngish woman, who looked like she should be a trail guide as well as the women’s center researcher that she was, answered the door. She had short brown hair, and was wearing a paint-spattered sweatshirt, jeans, and track shoes.

“Hello,” Adelaide began, “my name is Adelaide and this is Greta.” Greta smiled as she nodded a ‘Hello’. “We live just two doors down from you. And, well, we’d like to know if you’d like to go shopping with us today.” There, nicely put.

“Go shopping?” the woman asked doubtfully. This is awful, she thought. My mother and sister have come in disguise to haunt me.

“Well, yes. Today is Saturday,” Adelaide said, as if that explained it.

Greta came to the rescue, “Adelaide and I always go shopping on Saturday and we just wondered if you’d like to come with us. Consider it sort of a ‘Welcome Wagon’ gesture. You’re new here and maybe you don’t know anyone or don’t know downtown and we just thought— Well, we thought we’d ask you.” She began to feel ridiculous.

“But I don’t need to buy anything,” the woman answered simply. She looked at the two old ladies in their dusters or bathrobes or whatever you called those things—you could get them at every department store, she knew that—and their cute little slippers. This is priceless, she thought.

“Well,” Adelaide faltered, “neither do we.” She looked at the woman. She sure was a strange one.

“Then why— What are you going to buy at the stores?”

“Well, we don’t really know until we go,” Adelaide was getting confused. ‘Going shopping’ had always been a legitimate activity, something every woman intrinsically understood, like ‘doing the wash’ or even ‘watching tv’. Now suddenly it was suspect, bereft of substance.

“There must be somethingon your shopping list—” Greta tried.

“My what?”

It was like two cultures clashing. An awkward moment passed. Then suddenly the young woman accepted their invitation.

“I’m sorry,” she extended her hand. “My name is Sue. And I’d love to come. I guess I could pick up a few things.”

Puzzled by her change of heart, but also pleased by it, Adelaide and Greta shook her hand. “All right then, we’re just going back to look at who’s got sales on today,” Adelaide said and Greta held up the newspaper, “and to change.” She looked at her robe with a smile of embarrassment.

“Perhaps we’ll meet you back here in an hour?” Greta suggested.

“That’ll be fine,” Sue said, and closed her door as they left.

Adelaide and Greta didn’t say a word until they were back in their apartment.

“Isn’t she an odd one?” Adelaide laughed.

“Look who’s calling the kettle black!” Greta laughed too.

“Hm,” Adelaide agreed.

They spread the newspaper on the kitchen table and poured their second cups of tea. Adelaide turned to the section with the sales advertisements.

“Oh look at the Woolworth’s ad. Is stationery on our list?”

Greta checked the little pad she’d gotten from the telephone table drawer. “Yes it is, why?”

“Well, look—typing paper, envelopes, and that white-out stuff is two for one. And spring scarves, oh and lots of kitchen things—”

“Okay, I’ve got Woolworth’s written down. Where else?”

“Let me see … Sam’s. They’re a record store. And Zacks. Oh—even their sale prices are high. But put them down, they have gloves on.”

Adelaide turned the page. “The I.D.A. … lots there … shampoo, soap, toilet paper— But Kresge’s has those things on sale too. Let me see … 88¢ and 89¢, three for .99 and four for $1.39 … Kresge’s, I think, will be cheaper.”

“Okay. Where else?” Greta tried to look upside down as Adelaide turned the pages. “Anyone have sweaters on?”

“Goudies! They have all their cottons on sale and some polyester prints too!” She scanned the page. “Their whole notions department is featured! And a few things in other departments too, it looks like.” They continued to go through the sales section, page by page.

“Oh goodness, it’s a quarter to!” Greta had looked at her watch. “We’d better get dressed!” She finished her cup of tea, then rose from the table.

“Yes,” Adelaide agreed, and shuffled the paper back together.

It didn’t take them long to get ready. They each had two sets of ‘shopping clothes’ and it was just a matter of putting on the outfit they didn’t wear the Saturday before. Low-heeled shoes were important. And their big purses, with all sorts of emergency things—you never knew what would happen on a day’s trek downtown. And of course their shopping bags. Adelaide had two of the large blue and white paper shopping bags you could buy for a dime out of the boxes at Goudies. Greta liked the brightly coloured string bags that could accommodate all sorts of packages and never rip, never need reorganizing. In a few minutes, they were standing by their door, ready.

“Glasses?”

“Yes. Kleenex?”

“Yes. Shopping bags, shopping list?”

“Yes. Yes.”

“Bus fare!” They opened their purses. Each had a special little change purse into which they always put the correct change for two trips before they left. Better that than to rummage while standing unsteadily on a bus, people lined up behind you.

“Do you have a nickel? I’m short—only dimes, quarters, and pennies in my wallet this week.”

“Here you go.”

“Thank you!”

They snapped their wallets shut then, and closed their purses.

“Okay. All set?”

“All set.”

“Shall we go?”

When they knocked on Sue’s door, she answered immediately. She looked exactly as she had before, with the exception of a small green knapsack on her back.

“Ready!” she said cheerily and stepped into the hall to join Adelaide and Greta.

They didn’t say much on the ride down. The bus came almost as soon as they got to the stop, which was just one block away from their apartment. And it was crowded. Greta and Adelaide had to sit apart, and Sue had to stand, shuffling forward and backward as people got on and off.

After about ten minutes, Adelaide reached up to ring the bell as soon as they pulled away from the stop just before Kresge’s. They always got off at Kresge’s, then walked down the one side and back up the other. They caught the bus home in front of Kresge’s too.

She excused herself, stood up, then began the agonizing, always anxious, process of working her way to the exit door by the time it got to the stop. She tried to see Greta, but it was too crowded. She hoped she wouldn’t fall. They had told Sue ahead of time that they got off at Kresge’s, but she might not be able to see when they got there—or she might see it too late. Two more seats to go. She stood by the exit door, hanging on tightly to the pole, as the bus lumbered on, peering about. Then with relief she saw Greta approaching from the rear, Sue behind her. The bus stopped, they stepped off, and gathered themselves in front of Kresge’s.

“Well, Sue, welcome to downtown Kitchener,” Adelaide said expansively, gesturing at the length of King Street ahead of them. She beamed. Shopping always filled her with an exhilaration she couldn’t contain.

Sue did indeed look down the street. She resisted the impulse to also look down at her watch. “Shall we begin?” she said, aiming for cheer.

Adelaide’s eyes glittered at Greta as she led the way into Kresge’s.

She headed for the ‘health and beauty aids’. There they were, soap bars in a package, three for .99. She put three bundles into the shopping basket she’d picked up at the front door. It was a square thing made of red patterned vinyl, and it always reminded her of a picnic basket. And then shampoo, 900 ml for 88¢. She looked at the selection: herbal, wheat germ oil and honey, balsam and protein, egg and lemon, aloe vera, and beer. Beer?

She turned to Sue, hoping to involve her, “Which ones do you think I should buy?”

“I don’t know,” Sue replied. This was not fun. The store was crowded. She did not now nor ever would care about what kind of shampoo Adelaide used. “Take one of each,” she muttered as she turned away to look at something else. The door. When she turned back, she saw that Adelaide had indeed put one of each into her shopping basket. Her mouth dropped open.

They moved on, Adelaide in the lead, Greta second, and Sue tagging along behind. Things were tossed into the basket, seemingly at random—boxes of kleenex, packages of toilet paper, a cuticle scissors, a pair of nail clippers. They couldn’t possibly need all of this. She smirked at their consumer addiction. “Look,” she said with cruelty, “pony tail ties are on sale, six packages for 49¢!”

“What a wonderful idea!” Adelaide said and grabbed a handful. Sue thought about fabricating a forgotten appointment.

Eventually they got out of Kresge’s. They passed by the I.D.A., having gotten everything more cheaply at Kresge’s, then Greta stopped Adelaide in front of a hardware store.

“Look,” she said, pointing to the display sign in the window, “hammers—for only $4.99.”

Adelaide looked at Greta in wonder. “Magnificent!” she exclaimed.

“What do you need a hammer for?” Sue asked. “I have one you can borrow any time.”

“That’s kind of you,” Adelaide answered. “Thank you, dear.”

They entered the store and bought two. “I’m sure there’s lots of things a hammer is needed for,” Greta said with satisfaction, as she paid for them at the counter.

Sue thought about taking notes—surely this day could fit into the research project. It had to fit somewhere in reality.

A clothing store was next to the hardware store. Robinsons? Sue didn’t notice. She was trailing by now, so passers-by wouldn’t immediately know she was with them. She came upon them trying on sweaters out of a bin near the center of the store.

“What do you think about pink?” Adelaide asked, turning around to model.

“Pink’s a good choice. A bright cheerful choice,” Greta answered, rummaging through the piles. “And how about this yellow one too?”

“What size is it?”

Greta checked the tag, “Medium”.

“Okay—this one’s a Large. Shall we take a Small too?”

“Yes, let’s,” Greta concurred. They turned to Sue.

“You choose the third one.”

Sue found herself actually looking at the sweaters, deciding what colour to choose.

“I like this one,” she held up a blue and green striped sweater.

“Oh yes,” Adelaide approved, “that is nice.”

“And they feel good and warm, don’t they?” Greta bunched the sweaters in her hands.

More stores. More purchases. Shoes that didn’t fit, but Greta “liked” them. A couple dresses. Some socks. An extension cord. Books. Two records—Mel Torme and Michael Jackson. Both for 99¢. With that, and the multicoloured shoelaces, Sue began to wonder. When the three pairs of baby booties went into the string bag, she was sure they were both senile.

They came to Goudies. It was an old store, a classic. Grand gold lettering on the building’s front. The only store in Kitchener with revolving doors, the old kind made of heavy wood, a bit of glass, and lots of burnished brass trim. It had elevators too—with elevator attendants.

“Shall we have lunch before or after we do our shopping here?”

Sue knew it was a weekly decision.

“Oh, I could use the rest now, how about you Sue?”

“Now’s fine.”

They passed through the revolving doors then turned left to go downstairs to the dining room. Sue looked around in disbelief. It was straight out of the 40s or 50s. A real dining room, not a cafeteria, not a food emporium.

The hostess smiled at Adelaide and Greta—they were clearly regulars—and led them to a good table. Sue followed, noting the swivel stools at the counter, stuffed and covered with red leather. The tables and chairs were wood—good, worn, wood. The room was about three-quarters full now, with shoppers. Ladies with purses and shopping bags tucked under their table, some with coats thrown over extra chairs, many with hats still on. Probably with hat pins.

“There’s Magdalena,” Adelaide leaned forward to say to Sue and nodded to a sweating hefty woman standing in the kitchen behind the divider behind the counter. “Best short-order cook there ever was.” She waved at Magdalena who waved a floury hand back.

A waitress came and handed each a menu.

“You’re new here, aren’t you?” Greta asked.

“Yes, I am,” the waitress replied.

“I’m Greta, this is Adelaide, and this is Sue.” She introduced them all.

Sue measured the clearance under the table.

“And what’s your name?”

“Ginger,” the waitress replied, a little surprised.

“What a lovely name!” Adelaide said, as she opened her menu.

“Thank you,” Ginger replied. “I’ll give you a few minutes to decide,” she smiled and left the table.

“Their club sandwiches are very nice,” Adelaide offered to Sue.

“And their toasted westerns.”

“And their french toast—and waffles.”

“Oh—” Adelaide just remembered, “I wonder if their butterscotch rolls are ready!” She looked at Sue and put her hand on her arm, “They have the best butterscotch rolls here!”

“Served with real butter, of course.”

“And sometimes we time it just right and get them warm out of the oven!”

They ordered. While they waited, Greta got out their shopping list and began to stroke off items.

She peered into their bags. “Did we get the envelopes yet?”

“No. They’re wherever the stationery is on sale.”

Greta nodded and continued updating their list.

When their food arrived, Sue dutifully joined in the comparisons and then listened to how this week’s choices measured up against last week’s. After they had eaten, and finished their tea, they felt refreshed and ready to carry on. The next stop was the ladies’ room. It too was classic—large, with marble and mirrors. It used to have an attendant, she wasn’t surprised to be told. Then they passed through a short hall that served as a small art gallery—Robert Woods oil paintings in cinnamon, nutmeg, and tangerine tones. And then they took the elevator up one flight to the notions department.

They purchased a couple yards—not metres—of this and that, several bundles from the ‘ends’ box, tiny sewing kits, and an umbrella from the neighbouring department. A black and white one with zebras all over it. They thought of going to look in the other departments on the second and third floors, but it was getting late, and they had the other side of King Street to do yet.

“Next time,” Adelaide promised to Sue as they walked on to the exit.

Sue didn’t answer.

From Goudies, they headed straight for Woolworths. The ‘end’ of downtown.

Greta stopped at the candy counter at the front of the store.

“Some macaroons?” she asked Adelaide.

“You know they’re not very healthy.”

“If I buy vitamins too?” she bargained.

“Okay,” Adelaide agreed.

They waited while Greta purchased a pound of macaroons. Then they headed to the pharmacy section. Flintstones chewables were on sale. Then to the stationery section: envelopes, typing paper, white-out, and a box of pens. Oh and don’t forget the scarves on sale. They had to search a bit until they found the rack, marked down in price. They chose a silver and turquoise one, a loud paisley one, and a peach polka-dot one.

“And the kitchen gadgets—they’re downstairs,” Greta reminded. They headed to the back of the store to the staircase, bags bulging and wire shopping baskets bumping against each other.

“Let me put some of your stuff into my knapsack,” Sue offered.

She had offered earlier to carry a bag, but they refused, rightly pointing out that it was easier to carry two than one.

“That’s right, you haven’t bought a thing,” Greta noticed.

“Oh, but you must!” Adelaide encouraged.

They picked out some wooden spoons, bowls, and melmac mugs.

Sue picked up a can opener.

“That’s a good one,” Greta complimented.

They accidentally wandered from kitchen to hardware, so they added a few screwdrivers and some fuses to one of their baskets. They climbed the stairs and checked out at the front of the store.

“Oh my goodness,” Adelaide surveyed their bags once outside. “Look at all we have already!”

“Well remember though, this side doesn’t have quite as many good stores.”

“That’s true.”

They walked past a cigar store, another record store, and Somers’ men’s wear. Then the Walper Hotel. Or maybe it was the other way around. Sue wasn’t paying much attention. They stopped in front of Zacks.

“Let’s leave the gloves,” Greta suggested with some fatigue.

“All right,” Adelaide agreed. “Oh look,” she noticed the store next to it, “Here’s that Baskin-Rubens!”

“Baskin-Robbins,” Greta corrected.

“And it’s open!”

“Good,” Greta said, “I could use another sit down before we head home.”

“Why don’t you two go on ahead,” Sue said. “I’ll zip into Zacks and get a pair of gloves, if you like, and I’ll meet you in Baskin-Robbins.”

“That’s a splendid idea,” Adelaide responded. “Would you dear?”

So Adelaide and Greta went ahead to Baskin-Robbins while Sue went into Zacks. She found the gloves that were on sale and picked out a pair of light green ones. She also bought two pairs of men’s suspenders and a ladies’ belt. Because what the hell. When she entered Baskin-Robbins, she saw that Adelaide and Greta had set their belongings at a table by the door and were up at the counter, walking ever so slowly along the ice cream freezers. Greta had her glasses on and was reading the flavours out loud.

When they got to the end, Greta nudged Adelaide. “Thirty-one flavours and they haven’t got Neapolitan!” she whispered.

“Thirty-one flavours and you were going to pick Neapolitan?”

Sue saw the high school kid behind the counter laugh. Sue laughed too. Greta was right. So was Adelaide.

“I’ll have the Caramel Coconut Swirl,” Adelaide said then to the student.

Greta wandered along the counter again while Adelaide’s cone was being prepared. Sue stepped up to order, seeing that Greta hadn’t yet made up her mind.

“Chocolate and Cranberries, please.”

“And I’ll have the Blueberry Pecan Cheesecake—ice cream,” Greta added.

They sat down, licking their cones. Greta felt tired and happy. Adelaide felt happy and tired. Sue had alternated between distaste and disbelief all day; she didn’t know what she felt now.

Greta reached over with a napkin to wipe a dribble from Adelaide’s chin.

“Thank you, dear. How’s your Blueberry Pecan Cheesecake?”

“Very good. How’s yours?”

“Excellent. I think I’ll try the Strawberry Mint Sherbet next time.”

“And how’s yours?” they asked Sue together.

“Just fine, thanks.”

When they had finished, they gathered up their parcels and purses and left the store.

“What’s left?” Greta asked, trying to ignore the pain that had returned to her legs as soon as she had stood up.

“Want to cross and catch the bus here instead?” Adelaide suggested.

“Well …”

“Yes, let’s,” she decided.

So they crossed, waited for a few minutes at the bus stop, almost got on the wrong one—“Greta, no, that’s the Westmount—” and waited a few more minutes for the right one. It wasn’t quite four o’clock so all three of them got seats. They sat through the trip in silence, rang the bell for their stop, got off the bus, then walked the block to their apartment.

Sue reached in her pocket for her keys, and let them all in.

At her door she turned to them, “Well, thanks for asking me along—”

“Oh no, we’re not through yet!” Adelaide was horrified.

Sue groaned.

“You must come back to our apartment! We’ll have tea and sort through what we’ve bought!”

Sue hesitated. She couldn’t stand much more, really, but this was clearly very important to them. She could see it on their faces.

“Well, all right, but just for a bit.”

Once inside, they walked first into their living room and set the bags on the floor by the couch.

“You sit, Greta, I’ll put the tea on,” Adelaide offered.

Gratefully, Greta sat down. After a sigh of sheer relief, she started to unpack everything. Sue helped her put their purchases onto the couch beside her. Adelaide plugged the kettle in and prepared the tea service with a plate of shortbread cookies. She went to the telephone table and brought out some sort of list, several pages hand-written and stapled together. She got her glasses from her bedroom, then joined Greta and Sue in the living room.

“Oh,” she sank into an upholstered chair, “this does feel good.” She looked about at all their purchases. “My, my, just look at what we have!”

“Yes, it’s a lot, isn’t it!” Greta agreed.

So did Sue. She had added her can opener, and the gloves, belt, and suspenders to the pile. It had seemed the thing to do. Then she resigned herself to a chair in the corner, to the edge of a chair in the corner. Adelaide got up and was back in a minute with the tea service on a large, beautiful silver tray. She set the tray on an ivory doily in the middle of the coffee table.

“Shall we begin?”

Greta nodded.

Adelaide put on her glasses and scanned the list. “The transition house didn’t get their operating grant this year, the stationery stuff—the envelopes, white-out, paper, and pens—those things were for them?”

“That’s right.” Greta moved those items from the couch to the floor.

“We forgot stamps and a typewriter ribbon—”

“Let’s put it on next week’s list,” Greta reached into her purse for the little pad of paper that had this week’s list on it. She tore off the page and wrote down the items, starting a new list.

“All right, the hammers—they weren’t on our list, were they? Who shall we give them to?”

“How about that fellow in Nicaragua—remember?”

“Perfect! And the screwdrivers too.” Greta set the hammers and screwdrivers onto the floor.

“And the baby booties are for Selema, of course,” she added them to the pile on the floor.

“Selema just had a baby,” Adelaide explained to Sue.

“She’s on our Third World list,” Greta elaborated.

“The shoelaces—for Nikki?” Adelaide asked.

“She’s our foster child in Peru,” Greta explained this time. “And the macaroons and the vitamins.”

“You spoil that child!” Adelaide reprimanded. Then she added, with mischief in her eyes, “And the pony tail ties, of course, for her lovely long black hair.” Greta moved the named items to the floor as Adelaide made notes and checks on her list. Then Adelaide pointed to the candy and the vitamins, “Let’s tell her she must share them with all of her classmates.”

“Agreed. The umbrella?”

“The mission,” Sue suggested, to her surprise. “Most of those who show up for a bed don’t have an umbrella. When you live and sleep on the street, you need something to keep dry …” her voice trailed off, as Greta put the umbrella onto the floor without question.

“Those suspenders!” Adelaide just noticed them. “They’d be perfect for Mr. Worton! You remember that gentleman in the home, Greta? Did you buy them?” she asked Sue. Sue nodded.

“They’re perfect! His pants are always so loose and baggy, he’s losing so much weight now, and no one has bought him new trousers—Greta …” Greta was already adding trousers to next week’s list.

“He can have the brown ones. And the red ones?”

“There’s a guy I know,” Sue offered, “he’s also losing a lot of weight —AIDS—he was always a spiffy dresser—before …”

“A dandy, eh? That’s perfect then, they’re for him,” Greta put both pairs onto the floor.

The book went to a CUSO school they knew about. One of the boxes of kleenex went to a woman whose husband was a journalist; he’d been imprisoned and subjected to torture for a year now, they knew about it from Amnesty International.

“It means we cry with her,” Adelaide said.

The other boxes, the soap, the toilet paper, and all the multi-flavoured shampoo went to various families in various countries from their Third World list.

Greta pointed to the clothes and kitchen things. “What about that earthquake we sent stuff to last week—do they have enough now?”

“It was a hurricane,” Adelaide checked her list, “and I suppose they can always use more.”

“We should’ve gotten another blanket …” Greta added it to their list for next week.

They looked at what was left.

“I’m going to take that paisley scarf to that woman upstairs. The one with those screaming kids?” Greta clicked her tongue, “I don’t know how she does it!”

“That extension cord— Didn’t we just read about some electricity generating project—Was that an Oxfam thing? Interpares?”

“Interpares, I think,” Greta set it on the floor. “Good idea. The fuses too.”

Sue looked at what was left. “Michael Jackson. Children’s ward at the hospital?” she asked.

“Sounds good to me,” Adelaide wrote it on her list.

“Agreed,” Greta set it onto the floor.

“Mel Tormé, a belt, a pair of gloves, and two scarves,” Adelaide took inventory aloud. “Oh, and the fabric and sewing notions.”

“Let’s tuck them away for now. We’ll know soon who to give them to.”

“Okay. Done!” Adelaide put down her list and poured the tea.

“Tomorrow we can wrap them, and then on Monday the post office will be open,” Greta passed a cup of tea from Adelaide to Sue. “Have some cookies, too.”

“Yes, go ahead, dear.”

Sue was just sitting there, silent, stunned. She looked at Adelaide and Greta, at these two crazy ladies, these two magnificent women.

She smiled then and accepted their offering. “Thank you,” she said to both of them. Then lifted her cup in a sort of toast. “To next Saturday?”

***

(free downloads of complete collection at chriswind.net)

1

As soon as she opened the back door of the cabin—the cottage, she corrected herself—she looked right through it, through the wall-sized windows, to the lake. To the bright sun sparkling on the dark water, circled by a wilderness of trees. Yes. Yes. Her whole body, her whole mind, responded as if the most wonderful drug in the world were coursing through it. She stood there, letting it happen, welcoming it with every … with everything she had left.

She set her bags down then, and crossed the open-concept room. She opened the sliding glass door to the left of the windows, and stepped out onto the small deck. A slight breeze caressed her face, and she paused at the simple joy of it. Then she followed the short, steep path to the dock and— It was almost too much. Her eyes started to tear up as she gazed at the glittering cove, at the nothing-but-forest along the curving shoreline that ended in the pretty peninsula on the other side— Yes.

She stood there for a long while, a very long while, just staring out at the water, at the sparkles, as they were whispered by the breeze into a gleaming sheet, then as they separated again into discrete points of brilliance …

There must be a lounge chair in the shed—the garage, she corrected. She’d bring it down.

It was September, so it would be another couple hours before the sun disappeared below the tree tops. She had time.

First she’d unpack and get set up.

It took only two more trips out to her old Saturn, parked in the dirt driveway. She hadn’t brought much. She didn’t have much to bring.

The fireplace between the two large windows had an insert, she noticed, with a sort of bay window door. You could probably see the fire from the couch, she thought. Nice. She’d bring in some wood later.

The couch, a fold-away, was in front of the window on the right, but it was turned to face a large-screen television mounted on the wall dividing the main space from the rest of the cottage. She shook her head with disgust, and turned it to face the window instead, to face the lake. When she had it angled just so, she lowered herself into it. And sighed with contentment. It wasn’t quite right, but still. The view was quietly stunning.

There was a dining table with four chairs in front of the other window. She moved the entire ensemble away from the window, to the kitchen area.

The remaining corner had been walled off into what she presumed was the master bedroom.

God, how did people use that term without embarrassment?

She struggled to get the mattress off the bed and through the door, then dragged it to where the dining set had been. She opened the window. Now she would hear the loons at night. Unless they’d already left …

When she unpacked, she saw that they’d put up a wall in the adjoining room, to make two small bedrooms, and had managed to squeeze into each of them a set of bunk beds and a cot.

Right. That way they could say ‘Sleeps 10’.

She went back out then, not to her car, but to the shed. The garage, she corrected herself again. And there it was, at the back. A Pamlico 100. Not the fastest kayak around, but virtually untippable. While in it, you could give yourself over to the beauty. Completely.

She carefully extracted it from the clutter, the water toys and yard tools too numerous to mention, let alone need, then carried it out and gently lay it onto the grass. It hadn’t been used in a long while. She smiled. She gave it a thorough cleaning, then hoisted it onto her shoulder and carried it down to the water. Once on the dock, she eased it into the lake, then secured it. She went back up to get the paddle, a life jacket, and a seat cushion, cleaned them as well, then carried them down.

She glanced behind her at the sun. Soon it would be time.

She went back up, plugged in the kettle, then found the lounge chair. While her cup of tea steeped, she cleaned it, then took it down to the dock as well. She positioned it just so, facing the end of the little cove.

She followed with her a cup of tea and settled herself onto the chair. Perfect. She took a long sip of her very good tea. She’d splurged on half-and-half.

Then, exactly as anticipated, the sun, at just the right angle, started to light up the cove, bit by bit, as it slowly panned from left to right, filling it with the most incredible emerald luminescence— It was magical.

An hour later, during which she hardly moved, hardly breathed, she got into the kayak and paddled out. She wouldn’t be able to see the sunset from the dock.

She glided past the unoccupied cottages, past the other docks, many already pulled onto shore for the winter. Then she turned slightly and headed straight for the gleaming path of the setting sun, a dancing golden brick road. She glanced up every now and then, and as soon as it no longer blinded, she stopped paddling. And just sat there, in the middle of the lake, watching as the colours became visible, dusty rose, soft lavender … The sun edged the clouds with a bright jagged line of lightning … The colours crescendoed, slowly, imperceptibly, into fuchsia and purple … Then she watched them fade, dissipate, dissolve.

She should go back, she thought.

Or she could go on. Tomorrow would be soon enough to start.

So she continued, past the stream that flowed into the lake. The current would have been too strong in spring, but now, tomorrow perhaps … She passed the marshy part, where there would surely be duck nests, then paddled along the stretch of crown land that led to the next populated cove.

She looked for the slink of otters, listened for the slap of beavers. Around the next curve, the lake was no longer accessible by road, so there was just forest. Beautiful forest. She took her time, relishing every stroke. She made her way past the little island, all the way to the end. And then she settled back, rested her paddle across her lap, and just drifted. It all— It took her breath away. And then she didn’t need to breathe. The beauty was pure oxygen to her.

A loon called. And her heart— surged.

It called again. And received an answer.

Their haunting voices in the otherwise silence, the dark of the night wrapped around her, the moon glimmering shimmering silver on the water, her hand resting in cool of it— She felt such a complete peace.

She had a month. Just one month. But one whole month.

It was well past midnight when she got back, but she had no trouble finding her way. She retied the kayak to the dock, then carefully went back up the steep path to the cabin.

She set a fire and simply gazed at it, listening to one of the CDs she’d brought. It had taken a while to choose her top thirty, and on this first night, she played her favourite arrangement of Pachelbel’s Canon. Over and over.

2

Next morning, she carried another good cup of tea and the first journal down to the water. She’d given herself one month. One month to figure it out, to understand—

Eventually, she opened the journal. September 1972. The very first entry was a carefully reasoned argument about why school spirit assemblies were stupid. Surprised, delighted, she smiled. If ever there was someone born to be a philosopher—

So what happened? Why hadn’t she become a Peter Singer? A Catherine MacKinnon? Or even someone close to?

She intended to go back through her life, through her journals, thirty-five years’ worth. Not exactly one a year, but close. She’d read one a day. She needed to understand.

How did she get here—from there?

How is it that the girl who got the top marks in high school ends up, at fifty, scrubbing floors and cleaning toilets for minimum wage, living in a room above Vera’s Hairstyling, in a god-forsaken town called Powassan somewhere in mid-northern Ontario?

She was the one who did all her homework and then some. She was on the track team, the basketball team, the gymnastics team. She belonged to the writers’ club and the charity club. All of her teachers loved her. She was supposed to become something. God knows she tried.

What happened? Where did she go wrong?

And how did she end up so alone? There was no one she could call and say, “Hi, it’s me.” No one.

She read on. Two days later, she’d written a critique of her school’s attendance policies and procedures. She’d argued for autonomy and against deterrence, though not in those words; she questioned the value of giving course credit for, measuring achievement by, attendance; she even pointed out the environmental irresponsibility of all those blue slips so laboriously filled out every forty minutes going to the dump, to be burned into air pollution.

Three days after that, she’d written about the fact that those students with a tenth period class couldn’t attend the speech to be given by the newly elected premier.

She noticed, now, that it hadn’t occurred to her to go to the speech anyway.

She looked up and stared out at the gently rippling water. Maybe that’s why she’d become so very critical. If you have no intention of following the rules, you don’t get upset by their injustice. Alternatively, if the rules prescribe what you would have done anyway, well, no problem.

So if she’d just been able to just break the rules—

Or ignore injustice.

But she was raised Roman Catholic. St. Louis was an impressive church, its ancient stone steps worn with use leading to a set of magnificently heavy wooden doors. The vestibule held a large marble font of Holy Water, and the church proper was glorious, with its high ceiling, its tall and narrow stained glass windows, its polished wooden pews.

She couldn’t remember ever entering through those magnificent doors. They always used one of the side doors, as if they were the undeserving or uninvited second-cousins to the—no wait, she did enter through the centre doors once. When her sister got married.

Right. Of course. Because getting married was so fucking important. Made you so fucking important.

Not only did they always enter through the side, lesser, door, they’d always sit about halfway up. Never at the front, but never at the very back either.

She remembered putting on her Sunday outfit and walking to church for the eleven o’clock Mass. Every week. She remembered the Mass with all its rules about when to stand, when to sit, when to kneel—rules that were so very imperative and yet so very arbitrary.

So why didn’t that, that insight, that fact, give you permission to break them, she wondered now about her younger self.

Well, she probably didn’t see them as arbitrary. Then. She probably assumed she just didn’t know the reason for them.

There were rules too about when to say something and when to be quiet. She remembered that at some point she thought it odd that you couldn’t ask questions during the Sermon. So she went to the Rectory on a Saturday to ask her questions. The priest—Father Meilling, she still remembered his name—was amused. She’d been so disappointed.

Didn’t know yet to be insulted.

She remembered her First Communion, her mother fussing over the new and very white Communion dress, as if that were the most important part of the ceremony.

Her First Confession, she remembered that too, she remembered waiting in the pew for her turn in one of the dark Confession booths. ‘Bless me Father, for I have sinned, I argued with my sister twice last week.’ She never had more to confess than that—

Wait—argument, a sin? Of course, she thought now. It made perfect sense.

At her Confirmation, as she walked back from the Altar, brimming with the presence of the Holy Spirit, she couldn’t keep the beaming, beatific smile from her face, even though she felt that it was wrong, she was supposed to look pious instead.

Even so, she decided, then, to become a nun. The purity appealed to her.

She remembered the large bottle of Holy Water at home in the bathroom cupboard, from which they refilled the little vessels on the wall by the light switch in each of their bedrooms—actually, just her brother’s room and the room she shared with her sister, come to think of it—into which they were supposed to dip their finger and make the Sign of the Cross, blessing themselves every time they left their room.

They also had to say their prayers every night, on their knees by their beds. They were supposed to say the Rosary as well, especially if they had trouble going to sleep.

Oh, that’s rich. Religious belief as a sedative.

She went to St. Louis school, as did her brother and sister before her. So by the time she was eight, she learned that there were venial sins and mortal sins. There were sins of commission and sins of omission. There was heaven and hell, and purgatory, and even limbo, for those who died before they were baptized. Roman Catholicism was obsessed with sin. With right and wrong.

No wonder she went into Ethics.

No wonder ‘should’ had ruled her life.

(It would be decades before she realized that the ever-present ‘should’ was indistinguishable from what her parents wanted, which was, in turn, indistinguishable from habit and tradition.)

(Even so, it would take a lifetime to get out from under ‘should’.)

She recalled now that much was made of impure thoughts. It was wrong to even think some things.

When even thoughts can be sins, being a philosopher is the highest rebellion, a supremely subversive act. She understood this only now.

What she understood back then, though not until her teens, was that she was the only one in the family to take it all seriously. Yes, her brother became an altar boy, but he didn’t seem bothered by any of the dogma. In fact, he later became Baptist overnight. In order to marry his new girlfriend. And her sister probably didn’t understand any of it. And her parents—her parents stopped going to church as soon as the three of them were in high school. (Public high school, not St. Mary’s and St. Jerome’s. Because they couldn’t afford the tuition.) She never quite got that. Had they suddenly become non-Catholics? No, they said with irritation when she’d asked, they were just non-practising Catholics now. What did that mean? Did they still believe in the Catholic dogma then? The prohibition of contraception, for example? They shrugged off her questions. As if they were irrelevant.

But it had bothered her. Why did they suddenly think church attendance wasn’t important? And why had it been important up to that point?

Why. For philosophers, the prime question was always ‘Why?’ But, she came to understand, it was a question most people weren’t interested in. In fact, she realized now, accompanying her requests with reasons, with the ‘why’, made interactions worse, not better. People wanted to keep things simple, they’d rather not know— They’d just rather not know.

She supposed that going to church was her parents’ way of instilling a sense of right and wrong, something apparently achieved by the time one reached high school age. And yet, whenever she wanted to discuss matters of right and wrong, they just … weren’t interested. That was the best way to describe it.

Which meant her parents were either hypocrites or imbeciles.

Or both.

It was her acute sense of justice that in part led to her friendlessness. Groups by definition excluded people. And by the time she realized that such exclusion was at least sometimes justified, she’d refused to belong to so many groups …

Networks, she realized now. Far too late.

She looked out at the water, closed her eyes to the warmth of the sun for a few moments, then turned back to her journal.

She had written “awhile” and “alot” as single words and often ended with something trite, but all in all, she thought, with deep dismay, she hadn’t come a long way in thirty-five years.

Those pieces too had gone unread.

Why didn’t her teacher, the one who’d assigned the journal, suggest that she submit them to the school newspaper?

She turned a few more pages. Ah. Two weeks later, she’d written a critique of the school newspaper, describing what she would do if she were in charge: have a staff, regular meetings, regular issues, a standard cover, a table of contents, regular columns (sports report, student council report, library report), letters to the editor. She recalled then that the paper was haphazardly put out by a few of the cool kids. So even if she had submitted her pieces, they probably wouldn’t’ve been published.

She really hadn’t come any distance at all in thirty-five years.

So why hadn’t she started her own paper? Because she didn’t know anything about putting out a paper. But the cool kids probably didn’t know either. They asked.

She never asked. How was it, she wondered, that she had become such a passive person, never actively seeking what she wanted, accepting, consequently, a life of frustration since it was unlikely that what she wanted, what she so badly wanted, would ever be offered to her?

She remembered then, she must have been four or five at the time, her mother had prepared the bath for her, told her to get in, then went to answer the phone. The water was hot. Too hot. But she stood there, her feet and ankles turning red, as her mother talked on and on. She didn’t get out of the tub. It didn’t occur to her to do so. It certainly didn’t occur to her to turn on the cold water tap. Why not? She wasn’t stupid.

No. She was obedient. She did what her mother told her. That’s what good girls did. And she was a good girl.

She did exactly what her mother told her. Her mother had told her to get into the tub. She got into the tub. Her mother had not said, “If it’s too hot, get out.” She was doggedly literal-minded. Still.

Then again, maybe it wasn’t about obedience or literal-mindedness, but initiative. She’d since read the studies. Infant monkeys, for example, who’d been able to control aspects of their environment, even for simple things like food and water, later exhibited more exploratory behaviour than did monkeys who hadn’t had any control.

Her mother always made the supper. Then, at the table, she dished out the meat, potatoes, and vegetables. There was no need to ask.

Her parents looked after her. They knew best. They would provide. She trusted in that.

Which explains her immense anger when she realized they didn’t. Look after her. Know best. Provide.

They should have told her. Yes, she supposed the illusion was necessary for a safe and secure childhood, but at some point during adolescence they should’ve told her the truth. They didn’t know best.

As for asking for more, it just wasn’t done. She learned to simply accept what was given.

More importantly, the simple act of helping herself, choosing how much potatoes, which carrots, was denied. And so, she never developed initiative. Initiative presumes one is entitled to have, to therefore seek, what one wants. Not just what one needs.

So there she was, five, ten, twenty years later, still waiting for permission. And crying ‘No fair!’ when someone else just went ahead and did what they wanted, to get what they wanted.

And it wasn’t just that all was provided by her parents. All was decided by them. By her mother. What to do, when to do it, how to do it. She was never consulted.

Except on her birthday. Once a year, she got to choose what they’d have for dinner. But it was clear that she was supposed to choose from among two or three appropriate options. Roast beef. Roast pork. She couldn’t, for example, ask for hamburgers or hot dogs. That was what they had on Sundays. Even meatloaf, which she loved, was for some reason inappropriate for a birthday dinner.

It was her sister, her ‘slow’ sister, who asked for cherry cheesecake instead of the usual chocolate cake. How was it she developed the daring, the imagination—and not her?

She wasn’t bothered by ‘should’.

She looked up—she’d just remembered something else. Months spent making a set of coasters, as a Christmas gift for her parents. She cut out twelve squares of cardboard and dozens of teeny quarter-inch-wide strips of coloured paper. Then she wove the strips criss-cross, and when that was done, she got a needle and some yarn and sewed a line around the perimeter, to hold it all in place. It was an impossible task because every time she tried to weave one strip into the whole, the ones she’d already done would shift and come undone. Each coaster took days of frustration. She has no idea why it occurred to her to make them. (Paper and cardboard for coasters? They’d get wet from the sweating glasses.) The thing is, it hadn’t occurred to her to pin or tape the ends, to hold them in place, until she sewed them. Somehow that would’ve been cheating.

So, what—life was supposed to be hard?

And yet, she thought, it wasn’t like she had an unhappy childhood.

She tried to think back to her first memory. After a moment, she laughed out loud. Oh, this is priceless. Her first memory, her very first memory, was of walking beside her mother—harnessed.

She must have been quite young. Two? Three? Old enough to walk, but too young to be on her own. She imagined now that many people must have thought her mother cruel to put her child in a harness, like a dog, but her memory is one of joy. When she had to hang on to her mother’s purse strap, she had to focus on just that. Because what if she got jostled and let go? The very thought sent her into a panic. And it was awkward, uncomfortable, that reaching up and hanging on. But when she had the harness on, she could pay attention to everything, anything. More than that, she had the use of both of her hands and more range of movement. She felt free. And at the same time, safe.

She also remembered sitting on the porch, reading to her dolls. She remembered helping with the baking, kneeling on a chair at the table, stirring batter in the big bowl. She remembered getting to lick the frosting off the mixer beaters; she got one, her sister got the other. She remembered her blue princess costume for Hallowe’en—she wasn’t crazy about the colour, but it was the one year they were allowed to have a real costume, one bought from the store, instead of having to put something together from what they had at home.

So not unhappy, no.

But fearful. She realized now that she’d spent much of her life afraid of not doing the right thing, of not doing what she was supposed to do.

She was afraid of being late for school, for example. If she was late, the world wouldn’t end; she’d just have to go to the office to get a late slip. Still, it was unthinkable.

She even peed her pants once— She and her sister were doing the dishes. Her sister washed, she dried. “Hurry up!” her sister would scold with such irritation if she had to stop and wait before she could put more newly washed dishes into the still-full drainer. So if she’d stopped to go to the bathroom—what? It wasn’t like she’d be left behind if she couldn’t keep up—what was she so afraid of?

She was afraid she’d ‘get heck’.

Where did that come from, she wondered, staring out at the water. It was such an odd phrase. ‘You’ll get heck!’ What did that mean? She’d be yelled at? All that fear, just of being yelled at?

Well, yes. To be yelled at by her mother— Her mother was her whole world. If her mother got angry at her, if her mother didn’t love her—

And, she realized now, she was afraid she’d ‘get the strap’. The thick strip of leather was in the third drawer in the kitchen. She remembered getting a spanking, but she doesn’t remember ever getting the strap. Still, it was always there, an ever-present threat.

Like hell.

And then she realized— Our parents are our gods.

She remembered having to sit facing the corner once, as a punishment, for something she didn’t even do. She felt cast out.

So, yes, her mother’s reprimands were to be feared. They were punishment enough.

There was no mechanism in their family for apology, for forgiveness, for reconciliation. Her mother certainly never apologized. For anything.

And they would never ‘talk about it later’. Action, reaction. End of story. Any loss of love was permanent.

No wonder she was perpetually so afraid of doing something wrong, so afraid of her mother’s disapproval.

So she was a good girl. Such a good girl.

And still her mother disapproved, she thought bitterly.

She closed the journal. It was enough for one day.

• • •

Ten minutes later, she was paddling past all the cottages again, basking in yet another beautiful, sunny day. Maybe she’d paddle up the stream today. It was calm enough. Or maybe she’d just keep going, all the way to the end again. Or maybe she’d do both. She smiled at the thought.

Her attention was caught then by movement at the last cottage. Oh, right. It was Friday. People would be coming up for the weekend.

Surely it was too cold for jetskis, she thought. Fishing boats wouldn’t be quite so annoying, but their motors and fumes would certainly ruin her time out on the lake. Maybe even her time down on the dock. She hoped the forest wouldn’t be overrun by dirt bikes and ATVs. Perhaps she’d go for a long walk instead.

3

She settled onto the lounge chair on the dock again and just stared out at the water for a while, cup of tea in hand. It was black, really. Not muddy or silty, but still, you couldn’t see too far down. And that was what, she figured, made the sparkles so … sparkly.

There had been a lot of late night noise, most of it from across the lake, and dirt bikes had woken her up. It finally occurred to her that this was not just a weekend, but the long weekend. So she’d brought her earplugs, headphones, and portable CD player—all of which got good use when you lived beside the railway tracks—and loved music—down to the dock with her. Good thing. As soon as she sat down, a leaf blower started up.

Earplugs in, she pressed the play button, increased the volume, and Bach washed over her. Exquisite.

Eventually, she opened her journal to where she’d left off the day before, and saw a review she’d written of Jesus Christ Superstar. Although she hadn’t heard it in decades, she recalled every note, every anguished inflection, of Murray Head’s performance of Judas’ song— She’d actually recorded the middle bit, when he breaks out into the painfully impassioned “I don’t know how to love him,” over and over, filling the whole side of a cassette, so she could listen to it, just that part, over and over. It was so … tortured. It—

It spoke to her. It spoke for her.

In a way Donny Osmond never had.

She read the review, and was pleased. She’d attributed the rock opera’s success to its uniqueness; she’d called it a reaction to the religious brainwashing that had been going on for ages; she’d identified the humanity of Christ, and had said that the emotional quality was what was unusual, and attractive. It was pretty good, she thought. Well, except for the borderline appeal to ignorance in the middle—”At first we may scoff at the idea of Mary Magdalen as a prostitute, but there’s no reason to think she couldn’t’ve been”. Mentioning that there’s no evidence to the contrary was valuable, but not sufficient.

Despite her passion for ideas and argument, she didn’t join the debating team. She’d tried once. There had been an announcement one morning that said the debating club would meet that day in Room 231. And after working up the courage to just walk into the room— She’d wondered why no one else seemed to find that difficult. She didn’t realize that no one else walked into a room alone; they were always with their friends. People didn’t stop and stare in that case.

When she entered the room, she saw the two Rothblatt brothers on their feet arguing with each other. She was so thirsty, it felt so right— And it felt so wrong. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it. They were so loud, so cocksure. They glanced at her, then argued even more passionately. And she—she didn’t say anything. Eventually she left. And never returned.

She realizes now that they were performing. Ostensibly for her, but really for each other.

You were never expected to join in, she told her younger self. About life in general.

She remembered discovering philosophy. One of the suggested topics for her grade eleven history essay assignment was “The Continuity between Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.” She was vaguely aware that they were philosophers. Certainly she’d heard of Socrates. Deep thought. Wisdom.

So she went to the library, found the shelf for Philosophy, and signed out all the books that had to do with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. There were seven. She also signed out three on Greek history and culture. And another four that were on the philosophy shelf that just looked interesting.

That weekend—

Her parents had bought a cottage on Silver Lake, and they went there every weekend from Victoria Day until Thanksgiving. She loved it. Going out in the canoe, going for a run on the dirt roads …

One of the first new things she’d done at high school was try out for the cross-country team. She’d never heard of cross-country before, but it sounded like something she’d like, and indeed, she fell in love with it: the distance running, the forest, the solitude.

She hated the evenings at the cottage though. Her mother would insist she join them after dinner to play cards. Canasta. Euchre. Something pointless. She had no desire whatsoever to sit at a table with a few other people, repeatedly subjecting herself to chance, having a near total lack of agency, engaging in something that required little intelligence, little skill, and for what—’I won’? But it was made abundantly clear that if she didn’t play, she was being rude and selfish.

That memory triggered another. A few children’s decks of cards in the drawer in the den. She had a favourite … Crazy Eights? No … Old Maid. It had the most colourful pictures, and—the picture of the old maid herself was horrid, she recalled now. A grizzled witch of an old woman, whiskers sprouting from her chin, a maniacal grin on her face.

God, it started so young, went so deep. ‘See, that’s what happens if you don’t get married.’

She hadn’t even known yet what ‘an old maid’ referred to.

That weekend, she set up a table and chair down at the water in the boathouse (after her chores were done), organized her fourteen books into three piles on her left, and set a pile of blank paper in front of her. She had her favourite pen (a BIC fine point with black ink) and she’d brought down a large glass of milk. She’d opened the door slightly, just enough to see the lake. Not the dock or any other evidence of other people.

One by one, the books moved from the pile on her left to a pile on her right. The sheets of paper became filled with her writing, her thinking. The breeze, the view of weeds, the water, the sun sparkling on the lake. She was sohappy. In fact, she had never been happier. She knew then and there that that was what she wanted to do. For the rest of her life. Live alone in a cabin on a lake in a forest and just read, write, and think.

It was an epiphany.

When her mother called her up for lunch, she resented it immensely.

She’d never understood why eating at a certain time was considered sacred. So sacred that it took precedence to everything else. Was allowed to interrupt everything else.

Once she was on her own, she dispensed altogether with the concept.

“Why don’t you come into town with us this afternoon to do some shopping?” her mother asked as she and her sister did the dishes from lunch.

Because she didn’t want to. She wanted to go back down to the boathouse to continue reading, and writing, and thinking.

“You spend too much time alone with your books,” her mother chastised.

Chastised.

She remembered one time she had gone shopping with her mother, to Yorkdale or Square One, one of the huge shopping malls in Toronto. Her mother had insisted. Because, at the time, she didn’t have a coat; she just had jackets. Which was fine, as far as she was concerned, since she had stopped wearing dresses. But her mother was adamant. She needed a spring coat.

She’d said it like it was a rule. Like it was uncontroversial. And perhaps it was. For her. Perhaps all of life was uncontroversial for her.

That would explain a lot. Her anger whenever you wanted to discuss something.

She’d much rather have stayed at home. And had said as much. But her mother had persisted, so she had acquiesced. If it meant that much to her— She didn’t want to hurt her mother’s feelings.

When did her mother ever acquiesce to her desires? Took three decades to ask herself that.

Her mother picked out a pale blue one. She’d wanted the black one. But her mother disapproved. Apparently black was not an appropriate color for a spring coat. Or for a sixteen-year-old. Her mother purchased the pale blue one. It was her money. And she should have been grateful. But she never wore it.

Her mother was hurt.

And she felt bad about hurting her.

But her mother was hurt whenever she didn’t like the same things, didn’t want the same things. So it was inevitable that she would hurt her mother. Because she couldn’t change what she liked, what she wanted. Was she supposed to?

She looked up from her journal, hearing the fluttery whir of ducks coming in for a landing, and saw a pair of mallards, the head of the one gleaming like a hummingbird. She watched them for a while.

She also remembered discovering consciousness. That is, she remembered the moment she first became conscious of her life—as a life. She didn’t remember first gaining consciousness, which was odd, and a little sad, given how much she valued it. But she did remember her first moment of critical consciousness.

What was astounding to her now was the quality of her appraisal.

She was ten, it was a Sunday, and they’d all just come back from church. It was a bright, warm April day. They were milling about at the back door, by the patio where she often fed Chippy the squirrel, waiting for her father, already up the stairs and on the porch, recently painted green, to unlock the door. Just as she raised her foot to take the first step, to follow her brother and sister, she was … aware. Of her happiness, of her contentment. Simply put, life was good.

Well, you were ten.

She has since realized that not everyone develops such a self-consciousness. Not everyone reflects on their life. Not everyone is aware of their life, as a life. It’s a second order consciousness. A squirrel doesn’t have it.

Most of her neighbours haven’t had it.

She idly turned the pages. More of the same. A scathing critique of television. Another of football.

It was the beginning. Correction: it could have been the beginning. All her life, people had criticized her for being too critical. The irony. But no one had ever suggested she become a critic.

Just as her mother criticized her for always arguing, but never suggested she become a lawyer.

I could have been good, she thought sadly, staring out at the water.

Better than good. You could have been, should have been, a Globe and Mail critic by now.

But no one celebrated her propensity for criticism, for argument. Instead, she came to apologize for it.

Besides, girls didn’t grow up to become critics or lawyers. Not in the 70s.

And she didn’t even know one could become, one could be, a philosopher.

She wanted to be a writer. She knew people became writers. After all, she read books. And although she’d written a few poems as a child, her passion to become a writer didn’t solidify until high school. It was her Creative Writing teacher, Mr. Ledford, who had them start a journal: they were to write a page a day.

She would write several pages a day. For the rest of her life.

She joined the Writer’s Club at school, had her work published in its annual magazine, and won or placed in the local library’s literary competition every year. When her first poem was published in a ‘real’ magazine, she was thrilled. She thought she was well on her way to becoming a writer.

She actually thought she could become another Margaret Atwood.

She made the mistake of sharing her joy with her parents. Her mother asked how much she’d been paid for the poem. Not in a way that suggested that she thought women should be financially independent, but in a way that suggested that she measured value by price.

Her father asked “Where are they?” as if he knew, but had momentarily forgotten. And as if establishing the location of everything was absolutely critical.

Which it was, if you were a Neanderthal, foraging for your food and keeping away from predators.

Neither of them asked to read the poem.

She’d never make that mistake again.

And they never noticed.

later in the evening

long after the dinner and dishes were done

i came again to the kitchen

and this time

saw him.

our beloved budgie who delighted

in the flat chrome top of the fridge door

hadn’t turned quick enough this time

his tail caught between

and with the closing jolt

he lost his balance

flipped over the edge

to hang helpless

as he hung still now

his little bird feet clenched

into stiff fists

his eyes bulged wide and still.

i opened the door

cupped him in my hand

and wept.

how long, i wondered—

when last did someone—

what does it feel like—

no, i need not ask about the pain

of dying

with the people you love all around

oblivious.

• • •

By afternoon, the long weekend was in full swing, so she did decide to head into the forest instead of out onto the lake. Halfway up the hill to the logging road that went into the bush, a pair of ATVs passed her and then turned in at the logging road. Covering her mouth so as not to end up with a headache for the rest of the day, she sighed and turned around. Part way down the hill, there was a newer trail, too overgrown to be used by ATVs. Not as easy a walk in, but clearly a better choice.

She’d also wanted to become a composer.

Her parents had started her with piano lessons at the age of eight, and she practiced every day like she was supposed to. One day, when she was about fifteen, she composed a piece. She called it, optimistically, Op1. No.1.

Her piano teacher, Mrs. Aldrich, had not assigned, or even suggested, let alone encouraged, any sort of original composition, but at the end of her next lesson, she mentioned, shyly, that she had composed such a piece. Could she play it for her? But, of course!

The piece was a little simplistic, but nicely done. It opened with a pretty bit in a major key, then moved to a dramatic bit in a minor key, then returned to the pretty bit in the major key. Mrs. Aldrich correctly identified Hagood Hardy as an influence. (Although she hardly ever went to a movie, she had recently seen A Second Wind, drawn by the running theme, and Hardy had written the score.)

Her parents were equally surprised, and even more impressed. They made such a to-do about hearing her play it for them, sitting together on the couch in the basement rec room, holding hands with such excitement, nodding to her to begin, then applauding wildly when she had finished.

Somehow they discovered that Hagood Hardy lived in Toronto, and was willing to take her on as a student of composition. Her father drove her, once a week, to Mr. Hardy’s house. She quickly became his protégé, and by the time she was eighteen, had written a piece he felt was good enough to include in one of his concerts. Her career as a composer was launched.

In her early twenties, he introduced her to the wildlife sound recordist Dan Gibson, and they formed a partnership almost immediately: her piano pieces and his recordings of birds, streams, and so on. She found herself in the company of George Winston, David Lanz, and Paul Winter, on the cutting edge of the new age genre.

It could’ve happened.

It didn’t.

She waited for a convenient moment, for when her mother was on her way up the stairs from the basement, having just put a load of laundry into the washer. “Do you want to hear the piece I composed?” she asked. Her mother wouldn’t have to make a special trip back down to hear it; she could play it right then.

“Not now,” there was irritation in her voice. “The supper’s on.”

Right. Supper was more important. And it couldn’t possibly wait. Food always had priority. It certainly came before her daughter’s first composition.

But the implied ‘later’ was never mentioned. By either of them.

It hurt.

Thus she learned early to hide her pleasures, her prides, her passions.

burn victim

i am always cutting flesh

taking from one part

to heal another—

survival of the self

sufficient.

She did play her piece, at her next lesson, for Mrs. Aldrich. Who said it was nice and then sent her on her way; the next student had arrived.

Her parents attended her piano recitals, but she felt that that was only because they had to drive her there. She realized now that they could have just dropped her off. Still, she didn’t get the feeling they wanted to be there; she didn’t get the feeling they wanted to hear her play.

After all, her piano had been put into the basement. And whenever she forgot to close the door when she went down to practice, someone slammed it shut.

She turned off the trail onto the logging road. After a short while, she got to the little brook and was delighted to hear its burbling. She’d expected it to have been almost dry by this time of year.

She realized, eventually, that yes, it was annoying to hear someone practice a musical instrument, to hear the scales up and down, and up and down, to hear the same phrase over and over, to hear the stumbles, the wrong notes—but the door was also slammed when she was playing a piece she’d mastered.

At first, she practiced the piano every day because she was supposed to, but she soon grew to like the simple accomplishment of learning a piece.

Then she grew to appreciate other, far more compelling, reasons for practising. Certainly for the beauty of the music, which was apparent to her even in some of the simpler pieces she was able to master—some Burgmüller, some simplified Chopin, and most of all, Bach’s Prelude I.

But when she graduated to Bach’s two-part inventions, the quality of her life changed. Literally. It was then that she became attracted to the attention to detail, and the precision—the precision of the composition as well as the precision required for its performance, not only in the reading, but also in the playing, in mastering the subtle response of the keys to perfection—

It’s a pity she had just an old Heintzman. The first time she played on a grand, which was at her grade eight exam, she nearly wept. And was so distracted by the difference, she nearly failed the exam.

Many years later, she read somewhere about a budding pianist that “… money was found to buy a grand piano ….” The simplicity of the statement stunned her. In so many ways.

She practiced Hanons for a solid half hour. Then a solid hour. Although her wrists would be on fire by the time she was done, she was swept away by the sheer physicality of it, the perpetual motion of the pattern up and down, the ever so slight change then up and down again, as she moved seamlessly from one pattern to the next.

One of her parents’ friends, while visiting, heard her. “You should play Philip Glass,” she said. “You were made for his music. I’ll introduce you. Take you to New York next week, how would you like that? He’d love your technique.”

As if.

Instead, one of her brother’s friends, during one of his parties down in the rec room, set his bottle of beer on her piano. She’d come down to get something from the root cellar, potatoes she was to peel for dinner probably, and when she saw it, she asked him politely to please not put any glasses or bottles on the piano, please. Her brother scoffed and made fun of her concern. Well, at least she could close the cover, protect the keys. When she heard them banging away on it later, she sat alone in her room upstairs and cried. She couldn’t say why exactly.

The word ‘rape’ had not yet entered your vocabulary.

She worked her way through the Conservatory piano exams, adding the theory component when it was required. She remembered writing her grade three harmony exam. She’d never written a three-hour exam before. When the proctor said “You may begin,” she opened the booklet. “Complete the following sixteen-measure passage with the given figured bass.” She was writing an exam in which you had to write music! It was an amazing thing to her. At one point, she happened to look out the window and saw for the first time gladioli, or what she figured out later must have been gladioli. Stalks of flowers. Flowers on a stick! she giggled. And the colours were so vivid! She’d never really looked at flowers before. But there, in the middle of writing that exam, her senses were heightened, her brain was so excited, neurons must have been flashing like crazy …

She also remembered the grade four counterpoint exam. It was a take-home: they had forty-eight hours to write a fugue. Unfortunately, it was a weekend and she had to do all of the dusting and her share of the ironing first. Then, later, she had to stop, right in the middle of the development section, to help get dinner ready, set the table, sit at the table, eat, then do the dishes.

Until she was around twenty, the only music she’d ever heard, apart from the pieces in her piano books, was the pop and rock played on the local AM radio station. The Partridge Family, the Carpenters, Barry Manilow, England Dan and John Ford Coley.

It never occurred to her to change the station. She hadn’t known about the FM band.

She knew that her parents had some records in the stereo cabinet in the living room, but … Even so, she worked up the nerve one day to look through them. Among the Teresa Brewer and Engelbert Humperdinck, Glenn Miller and Boots Randolph, there was a James Last album—James Last in Concert. She put it on the turntable, careful not to scratch it. And— The music was so beautiful!

How was she to know there was more? She knew the pieces in her piano books were unlike what she heard on the radio, but it didn’t occur to her that the people who had written those pieces would have written other pieces that were on records somewhere.

Kadwell’s, the store at which she bought her precious 45s, must have carried more than the Top Ten, but she could afford only 45s. So she didn’t even browse the LP sections. In any case, there were no listening booths.

Later, when she could afford LPs, she fell in love with the Beach Boys’ “Lady Lynda,” not realizing that it was based on Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring. And Eric Carmen’s “All by Myself” blew her away. Though it was really the second movement of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor that blew her away. Similarly Louise Tucker’s “Graveyard Angel”—Albinoni’s Adagio.

Once she showed interest in a Vanilla Fudge album her brother had bought, but he showed such contempt for her interest, she backed off. In any case, she wasn’t allowed to play it.

Of course not, she thought now, lowering herself onto a fallen tree to just sit—she had come to the stand of maple trees, and the sun streamed through the trees, brightening the leaves. Teenaged boys listened to music for the rock; teenaged girls listened for the romance. That’s why she’d listened to Donny Osmond instead of King Crimson. If she’d known about Stevie Nicks, Heart, Pat Benatar … No, she thought, even then … Girls are supposed to fall in love and get married. They’re not supposed to become rock stars. Either.

4

It continued to amaze her how two people could live in the same house, for almost twenty years, and never say a word to each other. She thought about her relationship with her brother a bit before she opened the next journal she’d taken down to the water with her. It was another warm, sunny day, but a few clouds were moving in.

They sat at the same table for dinner. But her brother was on one side; she and her sister were on the other.

Right. Must maintain the sexism.

She thinks her parents actually had an agreement whereby her father was responsible for raising her brother, and her mother was responsible for raising “the two girls”.

She’d hear him practicing in his room—the clarinet, and later, the saxophone—but despite the fact that she was also learning to play a musical instrument, they never talked about music.

Years later, when she saw someone her age talking and laughing with her own brother, she was astonished. She’d thought that that just happened on tv, brothers and sisters being close. Talking to each other.

She saw him occasionally sitting in his room at his desk. Their father had actually made a desk for him. The C student. While she, the A student, who brought home so many books every day and wanted to do nothing but study—she had to do her homework at the dining room table. Which meant she had to put everything away when she was done and get it back out the next evening.

They passed each other in the house as they went about their lives, but he never acknowledged her. She acknowledged him by getting out of his way.

And her parents didn’t even notice. Or didn’t care enough to do anything about it.

They certainly didn’t walk to school together. Once, they happened to pass each other in the hall. She broke into an eager smile—and he pretended he didn’t see her. She felt … shamed. But she … co-operated.

He got a chemistry set. She and her sister got dolls. She sat them in the old school desk in the basement and taught them something.

Like that would ever do any good.

He got Adidas. She and her sister got knock-off Cougars. Even though she was the one on the cross-country team and the track team.

He got an expensive Ingo sweater for Christmas. She and her sister got Warrens from the Sears catalogue.

He was entitled to so much.

They were entitled to so little.

Once he was sitting there, at his desk, on a Saturday morning when she had to do the dusting. That was Saturday’s chore. She did the dusting; her sister, three years older, did the vacuuming. She also had to “dust around” on Tuesdays and Thursdays. That took less time because she didn’t have to pick everything up, dust under it, then dust the thing itself before putting it back down; she just had to dust around the things. And on Mondays, she had to iron the easy things: the dishcloths, tea towels, and pillow cases. She and her sister also had to set the table before every meal, and then do the dishes after every meal. They took turns making the milk: they drank powdered skim milk, and whenever there were fewer than four quarts in the fridge, they had to make more in the big metal mixer bowl, bringing up the bag from the root cellar, filling the empty quart glass bottles with water to pour into the mixer one at a time, measuring out the powder, setting the mixer for a minute and a half, pouring the milk into the bottles through the funnel, waiting for the foam to dissolve, then capping the bottles and putting them in the fridge, and then taking the bag back down to the basement.

Her brother had to cut the grass once a week in the summer and shovel the driveway in the winter as needed.

She remembered clearly, that Saturday morning, his irritation when she’d had to disturb him so she could crawl under his desk, in and around his feet, to reach the baseboards.

She’d apologized.

Even so, she respected him. He was male.

And when he complimented her, she wrote about it in her journal. It was that noteworthy.

It happened twice.

It wasn’t until she was thirty that she started to understand what a totally unremarkable person he was.

And an asshole to boot.

She had said once, at the dinner table, quoting some famous Olympic coach, and merely wanting to share her delight at a truth she had not to that point realized, that you didn’t run with your legs, you ran “with your arms, on your legs.” Her brother had scoffed, his voice full of contempt and disdain. Told her she was crazy.

This from a person who had never run a mile in his life. To a person who had been running since she was thirteen and who was, at the time, running thirty miles a week.

But he was male. Therefore, he knew better.

He was a guy. He especially knew better about sports.

Never mind that you were quoting an Olympic coach.

She was horrified, now, to realize all the times she believed her brother, and her father, and Craig, her only ‘boyfriend’; whenever they said something, she accepted it as truth.

Years later, she realized they regularly presented their opinions as facts. Despite having no evidence whatsoever for those opinions.

She had been raised to think men were better than her. All men. They knew more. About everything. They were more competent. At everything. So she was intimidated by them, and impressed by them.

So every time she found out they didn’t know more, they weren’tbetter, she was not only disappointed, she was angry. Angry at them for lying, for pretending to know more, for pretending to be better. And angry at herself for her misplaced admiration.

She remembered her embarrassment when in grade nine science, as they took up their homework questions, she had proudly answered “How many gallons of water does it take to flush a toilet?” with “Twenty” because that’s what her father had said when she’d asked him the night before. The teacher had laughed. She was mortified. A teacher had never laughed at her before. And, but, she was right! Her father had said so!

When she told him that evening that he’d been wrong, he brushed it aside. She was puzzled. Didn’t he care that he’d gotten it wrong? Didn’t he want to know the right answer?

It took a few years for her to understand that her father (a) didn’t take her questions seriously, (b) didn’t take her seriously, (c) didn’t stop to think about things, or (d) didn’t know fuck all about anything.

Or, of course, all of the above.

Shortly after that, when her parents went to Barbados for a holiday, her mother left laundry soaking in the tub for her to finish. She was to scrub it with the yellow soap, wring it out, put it in the washer, then hang it up to dry. The tub had contained her father’s underwear.

Scrubbing the shit stains from your father’s underwear is a real paradigm changer.

• • •

She decided it would be a good day to paddle up the stream. Five minutes out, someone revved up a jetski. Damn it. She kept close to shore, paddling hard to get out of earshot as quickly as possible. He drove in circles, around and around— Trying to put in one last afternoon for the year? Trying to use up the gas in the tank?

At the stream, she carefully negotiating the whirlpooling current, paddled past the first switchback, then the second, then, having reached quiet, relaxed again into thought.

Because her older sister was ‘slow’ (she’d failed grade four), her parents spent a lot of time with her. Helping her succeed.

She herself didn’t need any such help (after all, she’d skipped a grade). And so didn’t get any of their time.

The message was that even though her sister wasn’t smart, she was just as important.

But the message received was that she was more important.

“I often said that of the three of you, you were the one I’d worry least about,” her mother would say years later. Explaining fifteen years of neglect.

So despite her straight As, she grew up thinking she wasn’t good enough. After all, she never got her parents’ attention, let alone their praise. To praise her for her accomplishments would make her sister feel bad.

And we can’t have that. Oh no.

It didn’t help her self-esteem—though of course they didn’t use that word back in the 70s—that according to the Roman Catholic doctrine, people were born in a state of sin. So even before you opened your eyes, you’d done something wrong.

Or were something wrong.

And even though she practically hid her straight-As report cards, lest they make her sister feel bad, ‘You think you’re too good for us’ remained an unspoken accusation.

She was supposed to do her homework. But she wasn’t supposed to acquire knowledge or competence.

Yeah, how does that work?

It was drilled into her: just because she herself was smart, she was not to think she was better than everyone else. Anyone else, actually.

So, since it was clear that effort was praiseworthy (they certainly praised every little effort made by her sister), she had to believe, then, that she was just born smart—that her being smart wasn’t due to any effort on her part, that when she got As, she was just lucky.

And, so, true to her acute sense of justice, she felt guilty for her good luck, guilty that she’d gotten extra IQ points, IQ points her sister should’ve gotten.

But years later, when she was helping her sister with the material in her Early Childhood Education program, as she went over, and over, the stages postulated by Piaget, she became convinced that her sister simply wasn’t concentrating, she wasn’t even trying to process the information, she wasn’t thinking.

She realized then that she had spent more time, far more time, doing her homework than either her sister or her brother ever had. Her sister gave up as soon as she had trouble. She herself persisted. On one occasion, with her high school physics homework, until tears of frustration welled in her eyes. Her brother went to Florida with his friends on spring break. She herself caught up on the assigned reading and her term papers.

Lucky, my ass.

And fuck the guilt.

Is it any wonder she actually chided herself every time she wasn’t interested in a man who had barely graduated from high school?

So startled by this new connection, she stopped paddling. Think you’re smarter than him? she remembered scolding herself. Think you’re too good for him?

But then her mother called her a slut. Because she’d have sex with anyone.

She stared at the water rushing by. She’d come back to that.

Proclaiming everyone to be equal was also a middle class thing, she supposed, as she resumed paddling. And it was hard to argue with democracy.

And yet she did. Years later. When she realized it simply ensured a tyranny of the masses—the average, the ordinary, the unthinking. People like her brother and sister, people like her parents.

Because deep down, she did think she was better than everyone else. She couldn’t ignore the evidence. She was the smartest kid she knew. And she didn’t know anyone else who was an accomplished pianist, who’d had poetry published in a magazine, and who could run five miles in thirty-five minutes.

The sound of rapids broke into her thoughts. She looked ahead and saw that there was no paddling around them. The water level was too low. And it would be a lot of work to walk her kayak through them. No telling how far she could go once she was on the other side before a fallen tree blocked her way. Maybe another day, she’d find out. For now, she nudged her kayak into a patch of weeds and just sat for a while, listening. Such a pretty sound, the water pouring over the rocks, bubbling into below.

How did she reconcile having such a low opinion of herself and, simultaneously, such a high opinion of herself? She’d never noticed the contradiction before.

Ah. She wasn’t better than everyone else. She was just better than all the girls she knew.

But then she would’ve had to have thought that the average man was, somehow, better than even the best woman. Which, she realized, was exactly what she had thought. It went without saying. All her life, growing up, it went without saying. Men were better than women; all men were better than all women. It was such a given, she didn’t even see all the overwhelming evidence to the contrary until she was in her thirties.

So how did she reconcile the fact that she was the smartest kid in the class, the one who always got As, with the belief that a full half of the class, the boys, were all better than her? She didn’t know. It didn’t create any cognitive dissonance. At the time.

Most likely she assumed she must be missing something. She must be too stupid to see their superiority. It must be evident in areas closed off to her.

Imagine her rage when she discovered the truth.

• • •

After she’d returned and had a slice of the large pizza she’d brought with her, she saw that there was a fishing boat parked about twenty feet away from the dock, so she settled into one of the chairs up on the deck. It had a different, but just as pleasing, view. Less water, more curtain of trees, and the eye was drawn down rather than across. She opened the journal and continued reading through her life.

She didn’t remember her mother, or her father, ever reading to her at bedtime. Which is probably just as well. It’s an appalling thing to do to a kid: condition them to associate reading a book with falling asleep.

She also couldn’t remember even one time she was comforted or soothed by her mother. Or her father. Not when she wasn’t allowed to play Red Rover with the grade fives, not when she didn’t make the basketball team in grade twelve, not when Scott dumped her, not when Craig didn’t write back.

Well, they probably didn’t even know about the last two. They took such little interest in her life.

They never hugged her.

The only touch she knew was sexual.

So no wonder—

She did remember that when they went to Church on Sunday, her brother led the way (of course), her sister followed next, and though sometimes she walked with her sister, other times she was just so happy—Sundays, going to Church, she felt the goodness of it all deep within her core—she insisted on walking between her parents, holding onto their hands and swinging between them, one giant step to their two steps. But she realized, even then, that she had to insist on doing that. They didn’t offer to swing her, and they didn’t seem to enjoy it. They tolerated her.

She learned she was someone who was tolerated.

Not someone whose company another person might actually enjoy.

Nor does she remember one serious conversation with her parents. Time to set the table, time for supper, what are you watching, time for bed … Nothing but daily trivia.

She turned the page.

four grown human beings

each half a lifetime used

sit around the table;

playing their new game of

Triple Yahtzee

because it’s Christmas;

triple strategy

triple excitement

triple fun;

it says so on the box.

they sit

passing the bright shaker of dice;

talking seriously

knowingly

of the best way to win;

it matters.

the properly-dressed woman of forty-five

yells “Yahtzee!” in glee

when the dice fall right;

she carefully counts and

records her score;

she’s happy now.

she turns to me and boasts

“I’ve had three Yahtzees this game!”

and i almost answer

i’m proud of you mom—

but i bite my tongue,

and my heart bleeds.

Whenever she approached her parents, about anything, they didn’t want to discuss it, they didn’t want to argue, they said.

To someone for whom discussion was lifeblood.

Or would be if she’d ever had someone to discuss things with.

And she wanted to discuss everything. But whenever they did discuss something, she’d end up hurting them.

How discussion could hurt someone, she never did figure out. Were they hurt by the mere fact of someone disagreeing with them?

Oh my.

No wonder she clung to the first person she met who was willing to discuss stuff. Her letters to Craig would eventually become forty pages long.

Later, her parents explained, “It’s impossible to win with you.”

She didn’t understand why her ability to deal with all of their objections, her ability to have a stronger counterargument, would upset them. Wouldn’t they be pleased? Maybe even proud?

It would be twenty years before she stopped accepting all of their admonitions: “You think too much,” “You’re overanalyzing it,” “You always have to go too deep,” “You’re too sensitive.”

No. You don’t think enough. You don’t analyze enough. You’re too superficial.

And you’re not, not nearly, sensitive enough.

Of course her parents never asked about her homework. The only time they showed any interest at all was when she’d mentioned the Plain Truth magazines of the Church of God that were appearing all over the city. She’d said she’d found the articles convincing. That is to say, she’d found their claims as convincing as those of the Roman Catholic church. Suddenly her father, pushed by her mother, set out to read the textbook for her grade twelve World Religions class.

But he never discussed it with her.

Years later, she realized he probably didn’t understand any of it.

Which is probably why they were such ardent Catholics.

nuns

habits of black and white

explaining their faith

After her careful but unremarkable line of reasoning led her from Catholicism to Christianity, it led her on to theism, and from there, to atheism.

Unremarkable, but still, such a weight lifted when she realized there was simply no evidence, or lamentably insufficient evidence, for everything she’d believed about god and religion. She wasn’t a sinner. She wasn’t going to hell. She didn’t have to believe “six impossible things before breakfast”.

That oppression, at least, lifted.

One of the pictures in the living room, that she had to dust every Saturday, was of the four of them: her brother in his cub scout uniform, her father in his cub scout leader uniform, her sister in her brownie uniform, and her mother in her brownie leader uniform. She understood, cognitively, why she wasn’t allowed to be in the picture. She wasn’t a brownie, so she didn’t have a uniform. And she understood, cognitively, why she wasn’t allowed to join brownies. She had music and dance lessons. So she already had an activity. Two, in fact. They were already paying for not just one, but two, for her. But emotionally—couldn’t they have let her be in the picture anyway?

You were only six, for godsake.

She remembered they’d said no.

She remembered having to stand off to the side all by herself.

She remembered crying herself to sleep that night.

Now, of course, she was glad, so very glad, not to be part of that family. She was an artist, an intellect, an athlete. A poet and a philosopher. A composer.

Not an office worker.

And yet, despite everything, she’d believed her parents did their duty as parents. They did what they were supposed to do. You couldn’t fault them there.

She doesn’t believe that now. She’s raised her standards for parenting. It is, after all, a completely voluntary endeavour. And such a very, very important one.

She closed the journal, then watched twilight become dusk become night.

5

It rained the next day, so she curled up on the couch with the next journal and her tea, opening the windows so she could hear patter on the leaves.

Part way through high school, her parents decided to stop renting out the rooms in the attic. They suggested that she could have one of them. But she’d have to clean it first.

Three hours later, she had a room of her own. She was thrilled.

It had a large oak table she’d cleaned, waxed, and polished, then moved into the corner. She put all of the chairs but one into the other room, then covered the walls around the table, the desk, with cork billboard.

She sat at the desk, her desk now, six neat piles on the scrubbed linoleum floor beside her, one for each of her courses. Pen, paper, typewriter on the desk. Turntable and records in the corner by the old chesterfield. It was all she needed.

Every day after school, she’d get an oversized glass of milk—she used the brown plastic milkshake shaker that had come with the Nestlé Quik one year—and go up to the attic, not coming down until she was called to set the table for dinner. Then, after she’d spent an hour with her piano in the basement, and half an hour with her dance lesson, also in the basement, she went back up to the attic to work until she went to bed.

She loved it.

She loved being so far away from them. From their chatter, which was like radio static, sound with no meaning. From their very presence, which was a constant reminder of—deep mutual disappointment.

But “Come watch tv with us,” her mother would plead from time to time.

She wasn’t interested in watching Mannix.

And she hated it when they watched All in the Family. Her father laughed with Archie at Meathead and Gloria.

Which is worse, she wondered, that he didn’t know or that he did? That she was Meathead. And Gloria.

And he was—he was Archie Bunker.

It would be one of the first times she was overwhelmed with inadequacy. Where to begin? To explain to him that he was—that everything Archie Bunker was—

She tried. And failed. And tried again. And failed again.

If she couldn’t change her own father, if she couldn’t make himsee, how could she ever hope to change the world?

Every time he laughed at something Meathead or Gloria said, something perfectly reasonable, something important, about capitalism or pollution or equal opportunity for women, she screamed inside.

Then cried.

No wonder she’d put up a wall.

Without it, she would’ve been crippled with pain.

And anger.

i wake.

the sky is like soiled snow at a spring sewer.

there are tears in the air.

every morning we leave the house

they go to work, i go to school.

we walk along streets

hearing the ebb and wash of the tide of traffic

as it sterilizes the pavement with carbon monoxide.

they go to buildings

that do not scrape the smog from the sky.

i go to a displeasing dome

by dubious decree.

and i remember

sitting in class

my gaze caught upon a cocoon

up where the ceiling is seamed

so pure and white

i felt its rough softness with my eyes

and when i saw it i dreamed

perhaps i will see

the butterfly burst out.

i listen to music

upstairs in an attic

that is my room of my own now

Beethoven boasts his beating heart and

Springsteen makes me move and

no one tells me turn it down.

last night, i listened to a song called “Sunrise”

the first few bars so wakened into glory—

in the morning, this morning

i rose

and bicycled six miles out of the city,

i saw gossamer glistening,

in the silver mist,

crystal veins dripping opal,

and as i sat in an open field,

i saw the sun rise!

and i thought,

i feel

therefore i am.

i remember hope and i remember despair

but i forget

which is the key for life—

Years later, reading This Magazine, Kick It Over, and off our backs, she discovered there were names for what she was. Social activist. Environmentalist. Feminist. Civil libertarian. Anarchist. Although it was sad, because she’d been trudging along, alone, in the soft, sucking sand, inventing the wheel when there were highways just a few miles away, it was also refreshing. To come upon a veritable oasis of kin.

But they were out of reach. They were theoretical kin. None of her friends—well, she didn’t often have friends. Not really.

When she was at St. Louis, it was decided that she could ‘accelerate’: she was told she could finish the grade five textbooks over the holidays and then, in January, join the grade six class.

The grade six teacher welcomed her and showed her to her new desk, but she knew she wasn’t really supposed to be there. She felt like she didn’t belong. Again.

It was a feeling that would accompany her throughout her life.

But that wasn’t all. Suddenly her best friends, Julie and Joanne, were no longer her best friends. She wasn’t even allowed to play with them anymore at recess. She still remembered that first day, in January, going out at recess to join the Red Rover as she had always done—and being told she couldn’t anymore, because the Red Rover was just for the grade fives.

And the grade sixes didn’t play Red Rover. Well, the boys did; the girls just watched.

She ended up making snow castles with some of the grade four kids.

And so she continued to feel different, to feel like an outsider. That was bad enough. She would never feel part of a group, part of a team.

But the grade six kids were as ordinary as the grade five kids. They were just doing different stuff. So, also, she continued to feel felt smarter than everyone else. And she was right. She was smarter than everyone else. Everyone else she knew.

If she’d had the chance to be in an enriched class (St. Louis had only a ‘special ed’ class), she would have found herself in a room full of kids as eager as her and as smart as her, kids with whom she could’ve been herself, without fear of reprimand for showing off or standing out. It would’ve changed everything. Her entire view. Her entire life.

Because as it was, she would never feel like she could ask anyone for help. And expect them to be able to give it.

Worse, when she finally met people who were smarter than her, it would always take too long for her to recognize that. To recognize that she could learn from them. Even if she didn’t ask for their help.

Asking for their friendship wouldn’t even occur to her.

In grade nine, she became part of a group of friends again, Lisa, Colleen, and Sandy. And that might have developed into something. Something normal. But then a new high school opened up and all three of them, because of where they lived, were transferred to it, so in grade ten, she was, once again, friendless.

She became friends with Heidi then, who was, like her, a ‘brain’ and an athlete.

Friends? She realized now that she really didn’t know how to ‘be friends’. Heidi was just the person she hung around with during the school day, if they were in the same class or had lunch during the same period, and after school, if they had basketball, gymnastics, or track practice.

They never did anything together outside of school. Partly, she was too busy: she spent several hours each night doing her homework; by grade ten, she was up to an hour a day piano practice, and by grade thirteen, an hour and a half; and she was taking not only jazz lessons by then, but also ballet and modern, intending to take her Associate’s exam; during the week she had cross-country and field hockey practice to go to or, later in the year, basketball, and then track; and on the weekends, and some after-schools, she had gymnastics, and a part-time job typing and filing at the insurance company her mother worked at.

In fact, she was so busy, so focused on her schedule, that one day—she remembered this with such guilt—while rushing to get to a class, or a lesson, or her job, on time, she saw a little girl who, while crossing a side street ahead of her, dropped a bag of pennies halfway across. The little girl wisely, or fearfully, didn’t stop to pick them up. But once safely on the other side of the road, she broke into a wail and just stood there, helpless. She knew she shouldn’t dare go back into the middle of the road and pick them up, but—

And she, the adult-enough who could have easily, safely, gone back and picked up the pennies for her, every last one of them, did not stop to do so. She just walked by. Left the little girl crying on the corner.

(Years later, she would atone, once stopping on a winter’s run to push a stuck wheelchair-bound man up a ramp, another time simply picking up a child frozen with fear at the top of a crowded escalator, his mother, encumbered with baby and stroller, anxiously beckoning him from the bottom, and riding down with him.)

But, she wondered now, was it because she was so focused on her schedule or was it because she’d never seen anyone ever do something like that? She had no role models for stopping to help someone. Certainly she’d never seen her parents do anything like that. They always minded their own business.

And already you were rejecting motherliness. Though you couldn’t articulate why, exactly.

The other reason she and Heidi never did anything outside of school was that she didn’t know how to initiate such a thing. It never occurred to her to ask for Heidi’s phone number. What would she do with it? Neither she nor Heidi were ever invited anywhere on Friday nights, so it’s not like they could go to parties together. Neither of them liked shopping; they didn’t want to hang out at the mall on Saturdays. Besides, she was saving her money for university. She didn’t need any help with her homework. Practicing the piano wasn’t something you needed a friend for. She supposed they could watch tv together, but what would be the point of that? And Heidi didn’t seem to be the type to want to discuss things; she was into maths and sciences.

What else did one do with one’s friends? She honestly didn’t know.

She still doesn’t, really.

But mostly, it just didn’t occur to her to initiate anything with Heidi outside of school. That would have required an act of imagination. Not just imitation.

Because she didn’t recall her parents ever going out with friends or having people over to the house. Or her sister. She didn’t know how her brother managed it. And she certainly couldn’t ask him.

All of which meant that she never had the opportunity to learn the norms of social interaction that would make such things easy.

Years later, when she moved, and some guys helped her unload, she didn’t realize that she should have said thank you not just with words, but with a case of beer. She didn’t drink beer. She’d never bought a case of beer in her life. She wouldn’t even know how. So it just didn’t occur to her. The men thought she was ungrateful.

And when, once, she was invited to someone’s house for dinner, she had no idea she should have taken a bottle of wine.

• • •

It was still raining, so she decided to go for a walk in the rain. In the forest. It would be lovely.

She took off her glasses off and put in her contacts. They were old, prescription-wise, but they’d do. Actually, she’d see better in the rain with them than with her glasses streaming wet.

Back in grade seven, when she’d first put on her brand new glasses, she was amazed. She could see all the individual leaves on the trees. Before that, trees were just clumps of green fuzz.

But what really stopped her was what happened when she went to the tuck shop after lunch. For the first time, she could see the individual chocolate bars on display behind the counter. That’s how everyone else always knew exactly what to ask for!

Years later, she realized that because of her myopia, she’d developed a habit of not looking very far around her. Why would she, since it was all out of focus? She’d developed a sort of tunnel vision, which would persist well into her forties.

In class, she saw the student sitting in front of her and the ones on either side of her, but that was it. She didn’t see anyone else. (She wasn’t supposed to turn around, so she didn’t.) So her friends were, or were not, those three girls. If they were boys, she was out of luck.

When she played the piano at recitals, she literally did not see beyond the edge of the piano. Surely that had exacerbated her performance anxiety.

When she entered a strange building, she never took in much beyond ten yards. No wonder she got lost so often. No wonder new places were intimidating.

The physical reality became a social habit. She simply didn’t consider what she couldn’t see.

And it became a hopeless circle. She remained intensely shy, unable to socialize, because she couldn’t ‘see’ others—and she couldn’t ‘see’ others because she remained intensely shy, unable to socialize.

And no wonder she never saw the big picture. She would never develop control over the big picture of her life.

• • •

When she got back—and it had indeed been lovely, walking along the logging road, forest on either side, inhaling the damp and stretching out her hands to the dripping—she brought in some kindling and chunks of wood from the adjoining lean-to, made a fire, then curled up on the couch again, which yes, provided a fine view of the fire. She stared at it for a while. The flames didn’t sparkle, but there was something similarly mesmerizing, similarly beautiful …

One day, out of the blue, Rick Bruendel, a boy who had been in the same grade at St. Louis, and then a grade behind her at St. David’s, called her for a blind date. For his brother Arnold. He was going to be honoured at some banquet and would she like to be his date? She was flattered. Pathetic as that was.

Such a neat trick, she thought, gazing into the fire. Make all women feel inferior to all men, and any woman will feel honoured to be chosen—by any man. For anything.

She was also excited. A boy had called her for a date! Her first date! She was sixteen. It didn’t matter that she had never talked to Rick. All she knew, really, was that he had several brothers. About six of them. Arnold was the oldest, she thought.

Her parents thought it would be okay. Her father vaguely knew of the Bruendel boys; they all worked at their father’s plumbing shop.

Several of them arrived in a car to pick her up, and they drove in silence to a rented hall somewhere.

After they checked their coats, Arnold took her arm and walked into the banquet room with her at his side. He pulled out a chair for her, she sat down, and—that was the end of it. No one talked to her. For most of the night, they were off talking among themselves. And she was too shy, too confused, to initiate a conversation. Besides, her mother had warned her not to let her intelligence show. As if it were some unwritten rule for dating.

If men are so superior, why are their egos so fragile?

And what about your fucking ego?

So she just sat there. Ignored. All night.

No, that’s not quite true, she remembered now. They did dance, once. Arnold took her hand, led her to the middle of the room, then turned her around and around while he pumped her arm up and down until the song ended. Then they sat back down.

She supposed she should smile. But she couldn’t figure out at what. So she didn’t.

She supposed she should be grateful. To have been asked to be his date. Sad thing was, she was.

You wouldn’t think it possible for someone so shy feel any more awkward. No wonder she didn’t ever again want to go to dinners, or dances, or parties, or any so-called social events. They just shone a spotlight on her social ineptitude.

Not once did he really acknowledge her. It was like he didn’t even consider her a person. He didn’t care what she thought. About anything. She was just this … thing. A body to fill the space beside him.

And despite her intelligence, it would take her several decades to realize—no, to accept—that that’s how it was. How it always had been. And how it always would be.

At the end of the night, the boys pulled up in front of her house again and sat in silence while she opened the car door and got out. And then they drove away.

Years later, she realized they must have chosen her in some way. Chosen the girl least likely to say no, the one most desperate. She was humiliated. Years later.

The upside to social cluelessness.

Why didn’t her parents say anything? Why didn’t they stop her? Tell her that he just wanted to use her. That he wasn’t interested in her at all. Were they as clueless?

Or did they think it was all very … appropriate?

That would be her only date during all of high school.

And yet of course she wanted a boyfriend. How could she not when every song every single song on the radio glorified having a boyfriend. Apparently, it was the best. And essential.

She never really understood why no one ever asked her out. She was attractive enough. And she was smart, she was artistic, she was athletic—

And all of that was why.

There were several boys she liked. At least, she liked the way they looked. She didn’t know anything about them. She didn’t know them. She never spoke to them. You just didn’t.

Or at least she didn’t. She couldn’t just go up to a boy and start a conversation. She couldn’t even do that to a girl. It’s a wonder she had any friends at all. If the teachers had never put them in groups for various projects, she probably wouldn’t’ve.

Boys were … out of bounds. Her brother never talked to her. Nor she to him. Her father never talked to her. Nor she to him. Boys hung out with other boys, girls hung out with other girls. In the cafeteria, boys sat on one side, girls sat on the other.

Who needs the Jewish mechitza? Or the Islamic rule about walking ten paces behind?

Unless of course you were married. Then that woman and that man could talk to each other. But the woman couldn’t really talk to another man, unless her husband was present, nor could the man talk to another woman, unless his wife was present. It had to be the one couple talking to the other couple. Even then, the man generally directed his comments to the other man. Ditto, the women. That’s how it was. How it is.

So she never spoke to the boys she longed for from afar.

And she didn’t know how to show her interest without coming right out and saying—what? I like you? I’d like to get to know you? I’d like to become friends with you?

She certainly didn’t flirt. Only bad girls flirted. That was teasing. In any case, flirting required talking to them. Or glances of a certain kind. Which she knew nothing about.

So instead she pined from a distance for boys who never even knew her name.

So why would any boy ask her out on a date?

Years later, she realized that most girls got asked out on a date after several group dates, occasions on which a bunch of girls and a bunch of boys hung out together. On these occasions, one particular boy might spend a bit more time with one particular girl, so after a few weeks, or months, it would be no big deal for that boy to call that girl. And ask her out on a just-the-two-of-them date. So she had been at a disadvantage, not being part of a group of girls that hung out with groups of boys.

Of course another way a boy and girl might end up dating is if they met at a party. Sort of the like the group date thing. But she was never invited to any parties. How would that have happened? She didn’t know.

Not every girl gets asked to the prom.

The fire had burned down to embers, so she put in another couple chunks of wood. And made a note to herself to see if the hardware store had those packets that, when you tossed them onto a fire, made the flames multi-coloured. She’d have to drive into town at some point anyway, for another pizza and more half-and-half.

The typing and filing job at the insurance office where her mom worked was her first job. She was sixteen, it was an after-school part-time job, and although it paid only minimum wage, because of it, she was able to pay for her piano lessons and music books (which her parents had stopped paying for once she had a job), her dance lessons, her school books (in grade thirteen, they had to buy their own books), her track shoes, a pair of jeans, and a few shirts; she put the rest aside for first year tuition, hoping she’d have enough in two years.

But she hated it. Specifically, she hated the people. With their small little lives, the women talking on and on in the cramped little lunch room about dieting, everyone all excited when it was Friday, then all subdued come Monday, and endlessly anxious every day in between about whether the renewal policies would get out in time …

The actual typing and filing, she didn’t mind. She was quick and efficient. And it was certainly better than being a waitress or working in a factory. The ability, let alone the desire, to wait on people with a smile was notan innate female characteristic, and the noise and fumes, not to mention the relentless repetition, of factory work would have made her ill.

She actually liked the attention to detail that her office duties required. Typing was a little like playing the piano. And filing was organization embodied.

But it was a mistake. Perhaps the first of a life full of You-can’t-get-there-from-heres. She should’ve been an intern at Ms. Not a file clerk. But of course that wasn’t an option in Waterloo. Or if it was, she certainly didn’t know about it.

At the very least, she should’ve been a file clerk at a law office, not an insurance office.

But she was so grateful for what she got, she never thought to ask for more. Or different.

That was the way of her life.

The winter her brother went to Daytona Beach with his friends—

It was her father’s “contribution” to his education, giving him the money for a little fun since he was working so hard.

He offered no similar contribution to her education.

Instead, once, during midterms, he helped her with the dishes.

She asked him, much later, why he didn’t give her money for a similar bit of fun, because she too was working hard, but he just shrugged.

So she offered an explanation, her take on the matter, an exposé of his unexamined sexism, perhaps inherited from his own father, and was shocked by the vehemence of his response. “Oh now you’re going to psychoanalyze me?!” he’d all but shouted at her.

Well someone had to.

Because you sure as hell didn’t.

It wouldn’t be her last encounter with the male refusal to develop any kind of self-knowledge.

The winter her brother went to Daytona, she took over his snow shovelling job. Without fail, everyone who saw her expressed surprise. By that time, she was doing one or two gruelling track work-outs a day, weight-lifting three times a week, and coaching gymnastics on Saturday mornings. But she couldn’t lift a shovel full of snow? How insulting.

But what really made her angry was the discovery that he made twice as much shovelling snow as she did typing and filing.

“Well, it’s outdoors. It’s cold.”

“So?”

She wanted to point out that at the office, the windows didn’t open, so there was no fresh air. In the filing room, there weren’t even windows. So you couldn’t even see the outside.

But there was no point. She understood, on some unconscious level, that being outdoors in the cold wasn’t the real reason for the higher pay.

And yet, her parents provided interest-free loans to him for his tuition year after year.

No such provisions were made to her.

To whom much is given, more is given.

There were so many more women than men in the office: Carolyn was on switchboard; Irene and another half dozen were the typing pool; Deb and Jennifer were in Accounts; Ruth was in Claims; her mother and Arlene were secretaries for Mr. Riley, the vice-president; Eileen and Georgette were secretaries for Mr. Peterson, the president. And yet the men ruled the place. Mr. Peterson, Mr. Riley, Mr. Eddy, who was Head of Claims, and all of the agents, who were all men, worked on the second floor. The women, all on the first floor, lived to please them.

Her father also worked at an insurance company. He was an accountant—

No, she realized just now, that can’t have been right. That was probably just more of his ‘loose talk’, his lies. An accountant? With just a grade twelve education? And the stress he’d experience every year when he did the family income tax? She’d see the damp stains spreading under his arms … He was probably just one of the company’s adding machine operators.

But her aunt—the summer she worked with her aunt, a whole new world opened up for her. It was the summer just before she started university. Her aunt was a manager at a small television station, and would she like a job as her personal assistant that summer? Would she?!

Over the course of the summer, she got to see how things were run. She went with her aunt to meetings with the City Council, the Chamber of Commerce, the Rotary Club, and the Lions Club. She sat in on production meetings and helped schedule the various work streams so everything was coordinated. And saw, in the process, a number of jobs that were far more attractive than typing and filing. She was even allowed in the booth during a taping to watch the director direct the show.

Most important, she saw that anyone could get a tv show. People could come in with just an idea. No experience or anything. She listened to them pitch their idea, often badly, she thought, but then her aunt and various other people on the staff would work with them to develop the show, provide the graphics, and make it happen.

Which meant that later, once she’d graduated, she would pitch a show and—

Her aunt worked at the meat factory. On an assembly line. Stuffing wieners.

6

Next day, Tuesday, it was quiet again. All the people who had been up for the long weekend had gone home. It was also sunny again, so she took the next journal, and another excellent cup of tea, down to the water again. Before opening it, she just sat for a while looking out at the twinkling water, sipping her tea, contentment suffusing through her.

Eventually, she turned to the first page.

She’d agonized over what to take at university. Philosophy, certainly, and since she wanted to be a writer, English. That would also enable her to become a high school English teacher, part-time, so she could write. Teaching was the only job she knew that would pay enough part-time.

But she also wanted to change the world and had this idea not only that teachers were agents of social change, but that philosophy should be a high school course. (She had no idea that it already was in some countries.) She wanted to make that happen, somehow. If only people would think, she thought, the world would be a better place. Her writing too was intended to make a difference.

An A+ male student probably would have been told he was throwing his life away if he decided to become a high school teacher. But in her case, everyone seemed to approve.

She was also interested in Psychology. And of course Music. She’d also considered Social Work, Dance, and Kinesiology. Eventually she decided on a double major in Honours Philosophy and English Lit, with a minor in Psychology. She could continue her music and dance studies privately. Teaching would be her social work. And she’d keep running in any case. That way she could have it all.

She couldn’t wait.

Of course her mother disapproved. Philosophy wasn’t practical.

She loved books so much, she should become a librarian, her mother had said. But the very idea appalled her. Librarians were so prim and proper. That wasn’t her at all! Didn’t her mother see that? No. Like so many parents, she wanted to make her daughter in her own image.

The hubris.

Fortunately her high school guidance counsellor had a different opinion. “The University of Toronto has a good philosophy program,” she said, “and with marks in the 90s, you’re sure to get a scholarship. Actually …,” she looked at her file, “with an average of 93% … and your sports activities … and oh my, you’re president of Charitas, member of the Writer’s Club—” She looked up at her, smiling. “Let me make some inquiries. You’ll have to take the SAT,” she continued, thinking out loud, “but that shouldn’t be a problem … How would you like to go to Harvard? They’ll love you.”

She practically bounced down the hall, repeating to herself what the counsellor had said. “They’ll love you.” Harvard would love her! Harvard!

Everything changed when she went to Harvard. She met people as excited by the intellectual as she was. And as creative. It seemed everyone in her class at Harvard was a musician or an athlete. Or a chess champion or—

They got it. They got her.

She could learn from them. She could learn so much from them.

Everything could’ve changed.

Because what the counsellor actually said was “Philosophy is very difficult. “ To the girl who’d gotten the highest marks in the school. Student body of 1,500.

She wondered, of course, if Mrs. Ellison would’ve said that if she’d been the boy with the highest marks.

Yes, they had separate categories.

She supposed that answered her question.

It also explained why fraternities at Harvard might, like those at Yale, chant “No means yes! Yes means anal!”

So, she realized, with a deep sigh, staring out at the water, nothing would’ve changed if she’d gone to Harvard.

Quite apart from the fact that Harvard makes politicians. Oxford makes philosophers.

And the fact that Harvard didn’t become officially integrated until 1977, two years later.

She went to Wilfrid Laurier University. It was in her home town, which meant she wouldn’t have to work another twenty hours a week to pay for rent and food; she could continue to live at home—her parents had said that she didn’t have to pay room and board as long as she was going to school. She was grateful.

She didn’t realize, of course, that many parents paid for their kid’s room and board, for a dorm room, at a university away. As well as for their tuition and books.

She also chose WLU because her brother went there. And that was comforting.

God knows why. Given his total lack of acknowledgement of your existence.

And she chose WLU because UW, the other university in town, was much larger and therefore more intimidating. She had barely made it through her first day at the high school, she was so spatially-challenged, so easily disoriented. Years later, she realized that this was not only because of her tunnel vision, but also, perhaps even mostly, because she had never seen, had never been shown, a map of the school’s layout. She’d never seen, had never been shown, a map of the city either. In fact, she didn’t even know they existed. She’d seen only a highway map. It was in the glove compartment of the car. And only her father and brother were allowed to consult it.

Surely a metaphor.

Even so. She was thrilled to be going. To university! The ultimate intellectual institution! The place where people with fine minds hung out! People who were interested in ideas! There would be late night discussions about meaningful things—

Or not. No one in her classes seemed on fire for philosophy the way she was. Perhaps they were mostly General students. She didn’t know. (The university was too small to have separate classes for its three-year General and four-year Honours programs.) She did know that once again she was not in the company of her peers.

She also knew that she was the only woman in the Philosophy program, Honours and General. Not only in her own year, but in the years immediately before and after her. For the entire four years, in all of her Philosophy classes, she saw only one other woman, Maureen, a general arts student who took Existentialism as an elective one year.

Certainly none of her Philosophy professors were women.

And, actually, now that she thought back, only one of her English professors was a woman.

Even so, her reading list was fascinating.

Though even there, she eventually realized—so few, so very few, of the authors were women.

But the library was huge! Three whole floors! She could spend days in it, wandering up and down the stacks. On several occasions, she did just that, simply pulling books out at random, amazed at what there was in the world.

There were bulletin boards full of notices about guest speakers, events, all sorts of things. She went to as many as she could.

The university had a well-developed music program, so there were weekly concerts, which she also went to. She’d never gone to a concert before. She’d never heard a live violin before. Or a cello …

She also went to her first dance performance. Her first theatre performance.

It was all so exciting! Her cup runneth over.

Shortly after the year began, the Philosophy Department had an informal gathering to welcome the new students. When she walked through the door of the two-storey brick house on a side street near the university, in which the Philosophy Department had its offices, she was bubbling with anticipation. People stood in small clusters talking, surely about intriguing philosophical problems. She approached one group, and the conversation stopped.

“Hi,” she said to the group. “I’m Kris. First year.”

A few of the men in the group mumbled their names. After a long awkward moment, she moved away from the group. And then heard the conversation resume.

She approached another group, this one containing one of her professors.

“You’re forgetting that the correspondence theory isn’t the only approach,” someone said. “And given our inability to apprehend the nature of reality, my vote goes to the coherence theory.”

They were talking about theories of truth. It was what Professor Mauritz had talked about that day in class.

“But the coherence theory is like a house of cards,” she offered to the group. “Something might fit with all the rest, but what if all the rest is false?”

There was a silence. Surely they understood what she’d said. She looked from one to the other. Their faces were blank. What social gaffe had she committed, she wondered.

Dr. Mauritz spoke then. “Welcome, to our group. Kris, isn’t it?” He leaned in to look at her name tag. “Would you like a glass of wine?”

“Yes, thank you,” she said politely, as he reached around to the table and handed her one of several waiting glasses.

“I mean, if the rest is false—” she tried to resume the conversation.

“So, Kris, tell us a little about yourself,” Dr. Mauritz smiled.

She received As on her papers, of course, but her brother mocked her achievement. Philosophy was useless, a bird course. Anyone could get As in Philosophy.

But she knew that wasn’t true. Philosophy wasn’t easier than Business; it was harder. Much harder. But what could she say in her defence? She didn’t have the stats to support her belief.

Not that that would have mattered.

Years later, she would read that Philosophy students obtained the highest GRE scores. They were most able to handle abstract reasoning, most competent at the higher cognitive levels.

The Honours English program required that she take a foreign language, and since she’d taken French in high school, every year, she thought she’d take Latin instead (the only other option). Unfortunately it was offered at the same time as the first year Honours English course, ENG190. But the Dean, who was her advisor, said that that was no problem; she could take the General English course, ENG220, in her first year, then just continue on in the Honours stream in her second year.

When Dr. O’Reilly, the ENG220 prof, kindly took her aside near the end of the year to tell her that he thought she could handle Honours English, she should be going for an Honours degree, she was surprised. She told him she was. She was in Honours English. Of course she was an Honours student!

It was a small university. She had assumed the Dean would have sent some sort of letter informing her professors that even though she was in ENG220, she was an Honours student. Or that there would be some sort of list of incoming Honours English students, and she would be on it.

Apparently he didn’t. And there wasn’t.

So for four years, she was regarded by all of her professors as a General student who had stepped up into the Honours program. So of course they didn’t expect her to get any A+s. A-s maybe. Perhaps the occasional, startling, A.

And we all know what Rosenthal and Jacobson demonstrated about teachers’ expectations.

Also consequently, by the time she got into the Honours class, in her second year, she was an outsider. All of the students knew each other from having been together the year before.

So no wonder she sat at the back of the class. Unfortunately, it became a habit.

On top of which, she never felt confident enough to sit in the middle. And she certainly didn’t feel like she deserved to sit at the front of the class.

In her fourth year, someone remarked about it, remembering one of the third year classes they’d both been in. “You always looked like you were just visiting, like you didn’t really belong.”

That’s it exactly. She hadn’t really belonged since grade five.

And so why would any of them engage with her? If she was just visiting …

But she made friends with Jen, one of the students in ENG220. She and Jen probably didn’t have a lot in common, but their personalities meshed, and they got along well enough to go dancing at Jokers on an occasional Saturday night, and once a week they’d go up to the Student Union to shoot pool. Where the guys didn’t know whether to hit on them or resent their presence. Mostly they did the latter, it turned out.

Hit on them. What a telling phrase.

They also played squash once a week. She liked playing squash with Jen. There was lots of hitting the ball, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, sometimes running for it, sometimes not. It was fun. So years later, when Craig asked her if she wanted to play, she said yes. But he constantly hit the ball into the most awkward, impossible places for her to get to. Whenever she hit the ball, she carefully made sure he could hit it back. When she finally realized that he was doing what he was doing on purpose, her appraisal of him went from incompetent to inconsiderate. And she was angry. She’d thought that if you lose, you should lose because you’re not as good, because your hand-eye coordination isn’t as precise, because you’re not as strong, because you’re not as fast. Not because the other person intentionally made it difficult for you to be good. Competition for her was simple comparison. Not strategic sabotage.

Was this another gender difference?

Duh.

So even when women do compete, they don’t stand a chance. Not against men who’d been doing it, and doing it that way, since birth.

Some time later, when Jen tried to set her up with Carl, one of her boyfriend’s friends, both of whom were in Business, she suddenly realized—well no, she’d realized it before, but she hadn’t fully understood the implications: WLU specialized in Business. Which meant it couldn’t’ve been a worse choice for her.

But UW was her only other option, and it specialized in Engineering.

She should have gone to the University of Toronto. Why didn’t anyone, especially one of her English teachers, insist she at least apply to the University of Toronto? She might have gotten a scholarship, one that might have covered the additional expenses.

But no, if going to UW would have been intimidating, going to UT would have been out of the question. She’d been to Toronto only twice, when her family went to Square One for a day of shopping. They’d acted like it was a trip to the moon, instead of just an hour and a half’s drive.

And she must have thought—yes, she knew she did—that it didn’t really matter. Wouldn’t she get a good education regardless? Didn’t that depend on the course material and the professors? And wouldn’t the course material be pretty standard and couldn’t excellent professors be anywhere?

She didn’t even consider status. She didn’t consider whether going to WLU would put her one up or one down. She didn’t know that which university you went to could do that.

After marking her spot in the journal, she closed it. Then carried it and her empty cup back up to the cottage. She filled an empty water bottle with juice, poured some trail mix into a little plastic bag, and went out onto the lake. And thought about nothing for two hours, lulled by the rhythmic sound of her paddle in the water, the sparkles on the water, the breeze rustling through the stiff weeds …

• • •

She returned in time to watch the light sweep slowly across the cove, then had a bite to eat, then decided to finish the journal before heading out again for the sunset.

Part way through her first year, still searching for, still hoping to find, kin among the slush of Business students, she’d thought that maybe all those exciting all-night discussions happened in the dorms. Which she couldn’t afford.

Or maybe they happened in the cafeteria. But since she couldn’t afford lunch in a cafeteria, she never went there. She didn’t even actually know how to get food, or a drink, in the cafeteria. All through high school, she’d brought her lunch to school. She didn’t know that you went to one end, got a tray, and cutlery, then walked along and either asked for what you wanted, or helped yourself, and then paid at the other end. She’d never actually watched how people did it. They were always too far away to be in her myopic field of vision.

‘Going to the pub for a beer’ was similarly unknown to her. Since she couldn’t afford beer, and in any case didn’t like it, she’d never gone. And she did know it would be weird if she just walked in and sat down at a table by herself.

Besides which, she didn’t have time to go to the cafeteria or the pub after class. As soon as she’d obtained her grade eight piano, at sixteen, she’d started giving piano lessons. She liked it. At least she thought she did. By the time she started university, she had a roster of about fifteen music students, in addition to her three hours of practice a day. She also taught some dance classes at the studio where she was herself taking lessons, and she coached gymnastics Saturday mornings. And the local Parks and Rec ran several youth drop-in centers during the summer, full-time, and again during the year, on Friday nights and Sunday afternoons. She’d been hired as a leader for the summer, then, much to her pleasure, been kept on during the school year.

So her daily schedule was something more or less like this:

7:00 get up

7:30 bike to … (or, in winter, run to …)

8:00 piano lesson

8:30 bike/run to the university, shower, and change

9:00 History of the Novel class

10:00 Milton class

11:00 library to work on term papers

1:00 Ethics class

2:00 bike/run to…

2:30 dance lesson

3:15 Jazz I class

4:00 Jazz II class

4:45 bike/run home

5:00 piano lesson – Andrew

5:30 piano lesson – Laura

6:00 practice (piano)

6:30 bike/run to …

7:00 drop-in

9:00 bike/run home

9:30 practice (piano)

11:00 course reading, term papers, etc

3:00 sleep

There were never enough hours in a day. Then.

Now, well, now there were too many. Not right now, not here, she smiled, watching the fluorescent green make its way across the cove, but back—no, it wasn’t home—her room above the hairdresser’s beside the railway tracks wasn’t home, wasn’t—

It was hard, those years at university, with that schedule, every day—but she loved it. All of it.

Perhaps the drop-in job most of all. The program had access to a large room and the gym at the rec center, so she spent the time playing ping pong with the guys, or basketball, or just sitting around, talking, just hanging out.

She’d never ‘hung out’ before.

Her mother didn’t approve, of course. She didn’t like her associating with ‘kids like that’. She especially didn’t approve when, a couple years later, she became a volunteer probation officer.

And yet when her brother became a Big Brother, he was commended.

Of course he was.

But, she realized, just as the cove lost the last of its light, if she’d had a family, or a friend, who did listen, understand, support, encourage what she did, what she was, she never would’ve become a writer. The need to express, to let it out, to get it out, to work through it all—that would have been satisfied with conversation.

Part way through that first year, she had discovered that there was a Philosophy Club—there’s where she could have late night discussions about meaningful things! But she had been disappointed to find, once again, just a few guys in the room. They became silent when she entered. And remained silent until she left.

So she had discussions with herself, inside her head, non-stop, developing a sort of alterego. Alongside the notes she took in class, she scribbled reactions, responses, to Plato, Bentham, Kant, beginnings, middles, and ends of poems and stories, what would Milton’s daughters think of that arrangement, ideas for essays, what did it really mean to have ‘power over’, ideas for books even, was free will a matter of degree, lines of melody to be developed at some later time, ideas for new pieces, a setting of Keats’ Ode to Psyche—all of it was crammed into the margins in writing so small it was barely legible, but one idea led to another and another and the available space kept getting smaller and smaller—

Confined to the margins. Marginalized.

And every night she would transfer the bits and pieces into her journal every night. The very one she had in her hands.

She turned the page and saw another finished, neatly typed poem from that time.

(for my brother)

I

with a grunt of irritation

you condescend to be interrupted

and move your chair back a bit

so i can crawl

under your desk

(the one dad built special for you

now that you’re at university)

so i can dust the baseboards

as is my job

(i’ve already done the rest of your room)

i’m quiet

careful not to disturb

because it’s hard stuff, important stuff

you’re doing

(i’m still only in high school

but you’re at university now

it must be harder

you’re getting only 60s)

i turn around in the cramped space

on my hands and knees

and see your feet

i think about washing them

i think about binding them

II

the guidance counsellor pauses

then discourages

“philosophy’s a very difficult field”

and i thought

(no, not then, later)

i thought, she’s telling the kid

who has the top marks in the school

it’s too difficult?

III

it’s true

i just find it easier

besides, compared to business

philosophy is such a bird course

no, that’s a lie:

i’m smarter

and i work harder—

while you’re out with your friends

friday nights

i’m at work

because my summer job didn’t pay enough

to cover the whole year

and while you’re watching tv

i’m at work

(at ten o’clock

after six hours of lectures

and just as many of typing and filing)

i move the set

so i can crawl

into the corner

to dust the baseboards

you lean and yell in irritation

because i’m in your way

because i’m in your way

7

It was another beautiful, beautiful day. The sun sparkling on the water, the gentle breeze, the quiet—she simply did not tire of it …

Just before her second year began, and quite unexpectedly, Craig contacted her. They’d been in a few classes together, and he’d also been on the Reach for the Top team, so they’d seen each other at a few practices and when they had competitions. She sort of liked the way he looked. His perpetually raised eyebrow indicated a certain inquisitiveness, an intelligence …

Jen saw a picture of Craig today. “His eyes” was all she said. Yes.

Her mother had said, seeing only his acne, “I wouldn’t want to kiss a face like that.”

He told her that he was going out west to attend UBC, in order to avoid having to take grade thirteen, which he thought would be a complete waste of time for him, and did she want to keep in touch? He said she inspired him to be better. To not be a screw up.

That should have been your first clue, she told herself.

Your second. The arrogance of assuming grade thirteen would have been a complete waste of time should have been your first.

She was flattered. And delighted. He was going to get a degree in Psychology, he’d told her, intending eventually a Ph.D. And he was a photographer. An intellect and an artist! Just like her!

She agreed to write. He wasn’t exactly her boyfriend, they’d never actually gone out, but … Within just a few months, their two-page letters became five-page letters.

Although she continued to make a point of going to all the university-sponsored parties—they were the only ones she was invited to—if you can call a notice in the student paper an invitation—she continued to find it difficult to just walk up to a group of people and join in their conversation. The few times she mustered the courage to do so, they nodded politely, then ignored her. She didn’t know what she was doing wrong. She didn’t know how you were supposed to act in such situations.

Well, first of all, you weren’t supposed to be by yourself, remember?

She’d never been invited to a ‘real’ party. The only such party she’d ever gone to was her own birthday party, that her mom had for her when she was eight. They played musical chairs and pin the tail on the donkey. Then they had cake, all of them sitting at a table in the rec room in the basement. Danny Snoeder was there. And Davey Krebel. And Susie Dewinge. Her mother had invited everyone in her grade three class.

Otherwise, the only parties she’d ever gone to were the family Christmas parties, which were always fake with relatives she hadn’t seen since the previous Christmas, didn’t know, and, given what she saw at the annual get-together, had no interest in knowing. She hated going to these parties. But her mother insisted. She would’ve been so hurt her if she’d refused.

Every year, she felt nothing but uncomfortable. She didn’t know how she was supposed to act, what she was supposed to do. The one time she actually enjoyed herself, she was dancing like crazy in the corner to a song that had come on that she really really liked, and her mother had told her to stop because she was showing off. She was deeply embarrassed and felt like she should go around and apologize to everyone.

For what, having fun?

She stared out at the water. How her mother had crippled her!

we move

with

wooden

spasms

marionettes

with

umbilical

strings

She came to believe that the parties she saw in beer commercials weren’t real. People at parties, having fun, talking and laughing, that was a lie. A fantasy. Life wasn’t ever like that.

And then she discovered that it was. There were parties like that. She just never got invited to them. A single girl, a girl alone, just somehow wasn’t invited. Unless someone was specifically interested in her. A couple girls, or a small group, yes, but not just the one.

And then Dennis invited her to a party. Dennis! She’d met him at the small ceremony welcoming all the first year students who had received scholarships. So that meant he was smart. And he was friendly. To her.

That’s all it took to sweep her off her feet.

She didn’t realize he was friendly to everyone.

Whenever she happened to see him in the halls of the main lecture building, she tried to convey her eagerness to stop and chat. But he just smiled at her in recognition and kept on walking.

Then one day, he said “Hi.” She made note of it in her journal.

She wrote down every little thing any guy said to her. Any attention whatsoever.

Jack said “looking good” as I lapped the track today.

Eric Preston asked me to sit beside him today in class.

She looked up across the water, appalled to remember how important they were to her. Men.

Then another time when Dennis saw her in the hall, he again said “Hi” and did stop to chat. He casually mentioned that a bunch of guys were having a party the next night, she should come by. He gave her the address.

Yes! Her first party! Her first party at university! See, it washappening!

She spent the next day in joyful anticipation. She washed her hair that afternoon, then put on her best jeans, a nice shirt, even a bracelet.

When she got to the house, it was dark. There was no party going on.

Puzzled, she walked around the entire house, trying to find a back door or something. But no. Had she gotten the night wrong? Impossible. He’d said “tomorrow night”. Had she gotten the address wrong? No. She’d written it down.

She felt stood up. By an entire party.

Two days later, when she saw him in the hall, there was no indication that something had gone amiss. When she said, as casually as possible, “So I came by the house Saturday night, you’d said there was a party—” he sort of stared at her then said, just as casually, “Oh yeah, we had to change the location.”

He’d forgotten he’d asked her.

So she decided to have her own party. If you want to meet people and have fun at parties, she thought, then just do it. Make it happen. She announced in her philosophy class that she was having a party at her place, and everyone was invited.

Why in the world did she think anyone would come? No one ever even talked to her. But it wasn’t that they didn’t like her, she thought, it was just that they didn’t know her. And how do people get to know each other? You meet at a party, you talk to each other.

Maureen came to her party. And the professor came, but he left after an embarrassing five minutes of sitting with the two of them in her parent’s basement, painfully hopeful music playing, a bowl of chips on the table, and a neat arrangement of empty glasses beside two large bottles of pop.

No one else came.

Her letters to Craig became ten pages.

“I need a harbour for my soul.” Yes, that’s it exactly.

At some point, unbeknownst to her, the word ‘party’ changed meaning. In her late twenties, she’d gone to a bar to pick up a man. Did she do this a lot? Not a lot, no. Just whenever she was really distracted—a few days once a month. She’d tried do-it-yourself, but it didn’t satisfy. Having sex with men she just met didn’t satisfy either (but then, she’d never had an orgasm with Craig either) (who made her feel like that was her fault) (and she accepted that because she had been unable to make herself come—how could she expect him to do it when she couldn’t even do it herself?), but she kept telling herself the next one would be better. (Turns out most men aren’t very good at it.)

Surprise.

Her sex education had consisted of a little turquoise booklet called Mother’s Little Helper published by the Catholic Church. Each chapter wasn’t to be read until you hit a certain age. She actually adhered to that until, at sixteen, she carried on and read the chapter for eighteen-year-olds. It wasn’t educational in the least. It just told her that soon she’d be embarking on a wonderful journey, getting married and becoming a loving wife and mother …

And the only thing her mother ever told her was “It hurt.”

She’d gone to a bar and and a few guys asked if she wanted to go party. Of course she said yes. Here was her chance! Her second chance! Maybe she’d meet some interesting people. Women, men, whatever!

So they all got into the one guy’s car, and half an hour later it was parked in the middle of a scrubby patch of bush. The three of them looked at her expectantly. Oh. This was their party.

Or maybe ‘party’ had always meant ‘sex’—to men.

You’d think she would’ve stopped picking up men at bars after that. (Apparently they talked about it the next day; they couldn’t figure out why she hadn’t freaked out.) (It was simple really. None of them had a weapon, and she knew that she could open the car door and just take off. She was absolutely certain she could outrun them. None of them was in the least an athlete, and she was, at that time, still running five miles a day. So she’d just told them no, repeatedly, while they kept up their bravado, their insults, their mockery, their threats, then finally she said something like ‘Look, this is boring. If you’re going to rape me, go ahead and try, but know it will be rape, I’m not consenting, and I’ll press charges. Otherwise, drive me back to my car.’)

But no, she didn’t stop until something else happened. One night she picked up a guy—they danced a bit, chatted a bit, then went to her place. Later, when she offered to drive him home, she discovered that he lived in a group home. For the developmentally delayed.

She hadn’t realized. Because he was no worse, emotionally speaking, cognitively speaking, than all the other guys she’d ever picked up.

So, men in general— Instances of arrested development, every one of them.

She often saw Dennis at the pub that year—part way through the year, she’d started tagging along with Jen and her boyfriend—and one night she finally got up the nerve to ask him to dance. He smiled and led her to the floor. It was the last song of the night. Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”. Perfect. All those months, waiting. And now. It was happening. She was dancing, to “Stairway to Heaven,” with Dennis! The song ended, he went back to his buddies at his table, and—

It suddenly felt like a pity dance.

Two whole years, she’d waited and hoped.

What a waste.

She finds it hard to believe, now, that she was so infatuated, so obsessed, with meeting someone, finding someone—but she knows that she was. Wasn’t everyone?

She put the journal down, went back up to the cottage to make another cup of tea, then returned to her reading.

All through first year, she’d wanted to join the track team, but there was no women’s track team. At the beginning of second year, it occurred to her that maybe she could join the men’s team. So she went to the coach and asked him—would he be her coach? He told her to come out that afternoon, watched her run, and said yes.

Ten years after Switzer had had to do the same thing.

So in addition to the work-outs with the team four times a week, she started going to the weight room twice a week, just as she had with Heidi back at high school. (The high school weight room was a converted classroom and clearly intended for the boys, but they went anyway.)

Her mother disapproved. Girls weren’t supposed to develop muscles. They weren’t supposed to sweat.

She was always the only woman there. Some of the guys nodded a ‘Hi’, but they never included her in their banter.

Imagine everything you do, everywhere you go, you’re not supposed to.

Or at least not expected to.

She continued to work at her various jobs, despite her mother’s criticism that she should make up her mind about what she wanted to do. But it wasn’t that she didn’t know what she wanted to do. It was that she wanted to do it all. She loved it all.

She charged two dollars per piano lesson and was paid about five dollars per dance class, ten dollars for Saturday morning’s gymnastics coaching, and minimum wage for drop-in. It worked out to around seventy-five dollars a week, for around twenty hours. During the summer, when drop-in went full-time, it worked out to about two thousand.

Her brother made four thousand. Working for a landscaping firm. Cutting grass.

Which meant that people (boys) got paid more to look after lawns than people (girls) got paid to look after kids.

So her brother’s summer jobs always paid enough for the following year’s university tuition and books, whereas hers never did. Which is why she had to work during the school year as well.

It also meant that although she could pay the cover charge to get into the clubs—often after a meet, the team would go somewhere—she couldn’t afford the drinks. So she drank water. And when everyone went out for pizza after, she said she had to get home to work on something or other.

She certainly couldn’t afford to go to Daytona Beach for Spring Break.

And she couldn’t afford to buy a car. But she managed, over the course of two summers and the year in between, to save enough for a motorcycle. A second-hand Honda 350. Red.

Of course, her mother disapproved.

And, apparently, many people were surprised. Kris? A motorcycle?

But it felt so natural, so normal to her. She didn’t feel at all as if she’d changed. Despite her social ineptitude, she’d always felt strong and capable. And despite her … demeanour, a bit radical. The bike fit that.

She liked the speed, the wind blowing past her. It was like running.

She liked the handling, taking the curves like a slalom skier. (That was another thing about weekends at the cottage that she loved: they could go waterskiing. They were allowed only two circuits of the lake, and they had to contribute for the gas, but she loved the motion of the slalom—the skidding across the wake, cutting hard on the edge, the lean, then the changing over, the letting go of one hand, to reach out, to extend, with her whole body, then the bicep curl, straining, pulling her body back in, to shoot across to the other side …)

And yes, she liked the cool. She felt oh so cool in her jeans, denim jacket, and boots (construction boots, purchased for the spring she worked on maintenance before drop-in opened).

She looked up from the journal and stared across the water. She missed her bike. Had missed it since she’d sold it.

She’d asked her brother to teach her how to do basic maintenance and repair. (In addition to a little MGB, that he never let her drive, he’d owned a Norton for years.) She’d wanted to be able to do what the guy in The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance could do. Going on a cross-country trip like he did wasn’t out of the question either.

But her brother never managed to have the time.

She looked up again to see a squirrel scurry through the trees across the cove: it had a neat little route from one to the other, like it was playing Snakes and Ladders.

Of all her jobs, she especially loved drop-in. When she walked in, the guys (they were mostly guys) smiled and called out to her. Nowhere else was she welcomed with a smile. Her music students did that, and some of her dance students. But they were kids.

Technically, so were the drop-ins, but she didn’t see them that way. They were high school kids. They were fourteen to seventeen; she was nineteen. So there was only two years’ difference in some cases.

If she sat down at their table, one of them would easily offer her some of his chips. If she went into the gym to watch a game of basketball, those on the bench made room for her to sit beside them. It almost made her cry, the way they so easily included her.

It was her Cheers. The place where everybody knew her name.

It was a little like that with the track team—

The meets are cool, the guys cheering me as I run, Ed saying “Run this one for Grigsby,” Tim telling me he expects me to break sixty on the 400, Len calling out to me “Just do it!” …

—but she couldn’t roughhouse with her trackmates like she could with the guys at drop-in. When she played basketball or floor hockey at drop-in—more often than not, they asked, or expected, her to play—she went all out.

They even went on a couple camping trips during the summer. She’d never gone camping before with a bunch of people. The hiking, the canoe-racing, the horsing around— It was all a lot of fun.

She’d never really had fun before.

And she was never to have that kind of fun again.

The guys on the team were supportive and encouraging. Yes, they cheered her on as she ran, they were okay with her tagging along after the meets, they even invited her to the dinner they gave the coach when he retired, and they’d had a plaque prepared, without her knowledge, that said “From the boys—and girl.” But it was never quite the same. Something was in the way. The possibility of a romantic/sexual relationship. It’s a pity, she thought, that the only physical touch ‘allowed’ between men and women is sexual.

But the guys, and the girls, at drop-in, they just … liked her. They thought she was cool, cruising into the parking lot on her bike, messing around with them in the gym, and generally hanging out.

It was the peer group she never had.

How pathetic is that, she thought. That she’d had to get her social needs fulfilled by fourteen-to-seventeen year olds at a drop-in.

But then again, it was completely understandable. Women her age seemed exclusively interested in being for, and with, men. Even Jen had had less time for her once she had a boyfriend.

And men her own age always had to assert their superiority, which she then had to challenge, resist.

That time Dan came to drop-in—he was a motorcycle cop that she’d met at the training course she’d taken—all the guys thought he was cool, they thought Kris with a motorcycle cop was perfect. But when he playfully, supposedly, put her over his shoulder and carried her into the gym, she was enraged.

To be treated like a child. A naughty child. He may as well have turned her over on his lap and spanked her.

She didn’t see him again.

Furthermore, she thought, men her age had the power over her granted by society, such as it was; with men younger than her, there was a balance, their patriarchy-imbued power countered by the power of her greater age.

No wonder she would later prefer relationships with younger men.

Besides, she thought bitterly, it’s not like guys her own age ever beat a path to her door.

Even though, and yet, she also had fun with the other leaders at drop-in, who were her own age.

She remembered Fox especially. One night, she was telling him about the latest frustration with her parents, and he offered to call them up and talk to them.

“Yeah?” she’d grinned at him. “And what would you say?”

“I’d say ‘Mr. and Mrs. Muller, first of all, she wants to be able to cross the street by herself.’”

And she burst out laughing.

And the time he needed a ride to drop-in, she picked him up on her bike. He thought that was so cool. As did all the kids who saw them pull in.

I don’t come across as an authority figure, do I, I asked Fox tonight.

No, you come across more like a degenerate. He laughed.

But I’m responsible, right? I’m a responsible degenerate.

Yeah. You’re amazing, just incredible.

What do you mean?

I don’t know, you as a person, I’ve never met anyone like you.

She tried to track him down years later. Remembering his warmth, his smile, the fun she’d had with him, she realized that she should’ve—that they should’ve— She’d thought, hoped, maybe they could have a do-over. But she couldn’t remember his last name, and although she had the university check every Barry known as “Fox” in Kinesiology and Environmental Studies … nothing.

She closed the journal, stood up, and stretched.

• • •

Half an hour later, part way up the little river, she saw a deer come out of the forest. It hesitated on the bank, seeing her. She kept the kayak as still as she could, and then was rewarded to see it leap across, covering the distance with five splashing strides. How it kept its feet on the rocky bottom, she had no idea. It fled up the other bank and disappeared out of sight.

As in first year, she went back to her high school from time to time during her second year, walking down the familiar halls to visit her favourite teachers. Mr. Shepherd, Mr. Farnsworth, Mr. Ledford—they all welcomed her and, as during the five years she was a student there, made her feel like she was some kind of wonderful.

She must have known at some level that she would never have that again.

They weren’t surprised at her apparent make-over. The jeans, the boots, the motorcycle. While the other students had always seen her as a shy good-girl brainer, they must have seen the independent and creative mind that would surely, eventually, assert itself …

When she discovered that Linda, whom she remembered as a quirky, radical classmate, and whom, years later, she recognized as a fellow feminist (it was not a word she knew in high school), had become affiliated with a local theatre group, she contacted her. Partly because she realized then that they had had so much in common and should have been closer friends, so maybe they could become friends now, and partly because she was hoping for some advice about how to get some of her material produced—she had just finished her collection of angry-young-woman soliloquies ‘written’ by Shakespeare’s women protesting the role he had given them (Portia—you don’t think someone that intelligent would be a little pissed at being bait and trophy? And Juliet, well, Juliet just wants to have—sex). But she was completely uninterested in reading her script, seeing only the person she’d seemed to be in high school and imagining no doubt some goody-two-shoes play.

When she’d told her, over the course of a brief catch-up conversation, about her experiences as a supply teacher, in particular, about a recent incident in which she’d been reprimanded by the principal for refusing to stand for the anthem, Linda had simply said, “I can’t imagine you being called into a principal’s office for anything but praise.”

But her old high school teachers weren’t surprised at all. They had paid attention to her questions in class. They knew she had a strong personality and a critical mind, and were not, therefore, surprised, to hear about such incidents. Nor to see her striding down the hall, helmet in hand.

Then one day, someone stopped her and told her that all visitors had to check in at the main office.

She stayed out on the water for the sunset, then leisurely paddled back in the starlight.

• • •

After a hot shower and a slice of cold pizza, she picked up the journal again. She’d finish the year, then call it a day.

She managed to continue to do it all—her courses, her jobs, track, piano, dance.

She also continued, during her lectures, to generate ideas, and more ideas, so many ideas, and insights, and poem buds, and melody bits, and every evening she’d continue to transfer the fragments from the margins of her notebooks into her journal.

And late into the night, when she did the assigned reading, she continued to talk to Descartes, and Berkeley, and Rousseau—well, mostly she fumed at Rousseau—and Mill, and Sartre—though mostly what she said to him was YES!

“But whether or not one can live with one’s passion, whether or not one can accept their law, which is to burn the heart they simultaneously exalt—that is the whole question.” Albert Camus

She turned the page and saw another poem.

crease, flip, crease, flip, crease, flip,

i fold the kleenex into an accordion

then tie it with a tiny piece of string

(it’s important to tie it right in the middle—

i have the strings all ready—)

then i separate the tissue

(don’t pull it)

ply by ply

(it must be done carefully—

the layers are so thin—

they tear easily—)

IT’S BORING

AND TEDIOUS

AND STUPID

i pretend to fluff it up

as if it’s something important, something artistic

then i toss it into the large flat box

WE HAVE BEEN AT THIS FOR THREE NIGHTS

my mother and i

my sister’s getting married

and my brother’s upstairs

allowed to do his homework

instead

i feel again those tears

of frustration and injustice

and reach for another kleenex

It was right in the middle of mid-terms. And her mother expected her to do all sorts of stupid shit. Cheerfully. Which reinforced her view that her mother didn’t know her. At all.

Nor did her mother want to know her. She didn’t want to hear her views on marriage.

When you get married, you’re entering into a legal contract. You might be doing a few other things (promising your love to someone, making a deal with a god), but you’re most certainly entering into a legally binding contract with another person. There are rights due to and responsibilities incumbent upon people who enter into a marriage contract. Some of these have to do with money, some have to do with children, some have to do with sexual services, and some have to do with other things.

What I find so extremely odd is that even though well over 90% of all people get married, almost none of them read the terms of the contract before they sign. (Most people find out about these only when they want to break the contract.) Probably because the contract isn’t presented when their signatures are required.

Although this begs the question ‘Is the contract, therefore, still binding?’, the more interesting question is ‘Why isn’t it presented?’

Her mother kept insisting that she too would get married some day.

Clueless. Wilfullyclueless.

when her mother explained

what a hope chest was

she didn’t know

whether to laugh or cry

She remembered having to go shopping for this and that—the wedding preparations seemed endless—and at one point, she waited in the car with her father while her mother and sister went inside for something or other. Earlier, during some disagreement with her mother, about what, she can’t remember, her father was noticeably silent. So she confronted him about it. What did he think?

It irritated him to be put on the spot, but he finally confessed that he’d agreed with her, that, in fact, he often agreed with her, but couldn’t say so. Her mother, his wife, would be here for the rest of his life, he explained. She, his daughter, would leave.

Which was why he didn’t care what she thought.

He actually said that.

She was not impressed with their marriage. She pictured them leaning toward each other, each propped up against/by the other. So they stand together, yes, but if either one is taken away, the other falls.

She was surprised it lasted a lifetime.

You can live with anything if you don’t think very hard.

But then she always did underestimate people’s capacity for denial, their capacity to wilfully delude themselves. Their lack of courage.

I wonder how many marriages are kept together by pride. How many people simply refuse to admit it was a mistake, to commit for life, to that person (or any person). It is, by definition, such a huge mistake.

Angry at her for bringing it up, for expecting anything different, he also said that he had to support her brother over her because he was the oldest and his son.

Of course, she had to ask.

And yes, he would have been disappointed if he hadn’t had a son. Because then there would be no one to carry on the family name.

What?

She didn’t know where to begin.

Perhaps not with pointing out that she, despite being a lowly female, could carry on the family name.

Because at that moment, at that very moment, she decided not to. She’d use a pseudonym.

She set the journal aside, got off the couch, and made a fire. It took a while, since there was a backdraft—she had to heat up the chimney first by holding a torch of rolled up newspaper as far to the back of the insert as she could. Then slowly, she built the fire first with kindling, then added one or two small chunks, knowing that if she put a large chunk on too soon, the room would fill with smoke. Eventually, satisfied that all was well with the blazing fire, she returned to the couch.

Near the end of the year, she was sort of invited to a prom. Scott, one of Jen’s friends from, and just finishing, high school, needed a date for the prom. She asked her on his behalf. “But he’s just using you,” Jen cautioned her. “He’s gone through all the girls in his class.”

She didn’t care. She was finally going to the high school prom. Not her prom, and not while she was in high school, but still.

Or she didn’t believe what Jen had said. After all, Scott was a musician. He wanted to be a composer, like her. She’d finally meet her soulmate. So what if he started out using her. Once he realized she was a fellow composer, and just as smart, once he realized she was someone with whom he could talk about Beethoven …

She couldn’t afford to buy a dress to wear just once. Not again. She’d already had to do that for her sister’s wedding. So she thought she’d just wear that dress. She actually liked the color. It was a bright, vibrant fuchsia. Her mother took off the puffy short sleeves and made a dark, short jacket to wear with it.

Still, she looked ridiculous.

But she had no idea. She was uncomfortable wearing dresses of any kind. So it didn’t occur to her to get, and wear, something … sexier. In any case, sexy for her would have been black leather pants and a 19th-century men’s shirt with a laced neck and ruffled cuffs. But this was the 70s. Young women wore dresses to the prom.

The first thing she said about music, on the way, in the car, he scoffed. Made her feel like she didn’t know what she was talking about, like she was way off in her opinion.

Ditto for the second thing she said about music.

And then, she hadn’t heard of Yes? But they were the best band ever! How stupid could she be?!

He refused to dance with her. All night. Because she looked like an idiot bridesmaid, he said.

The next day, he told Jen she didn’t know how to kiss.

Even so, she pinned the corsage to her billboard over her desk and waited, hoped, for his phone call. Of course it never came.

Years later, she realized he didn’t want his date to be someone who knew about Beethoven. He wanted to be the expert, the authority. He went on to get his B.Mus., then his Ph.D. Last she heard, he was a professor at some big music school, doing musicological analyses of rock bands. Like Yes.

Shortly after, her brother moved out—as soon as he’d graduated, he’d gotten a job in an insurance company in Edmonton—and they took in a roomer. It was odd to have a stranger living in their house. To see the man come out of her brother’s room and go into the washroom. Once he stopped her in the hall to ask if she could sew, if she could repair his trousers. The question startled her. Her brother had never initiated conversation with her.

At the end of the summer, since drop-in finished two weeks before school started, she drove up to the family cottage. Just her. For two whole weeks.

It was amazing. To be able to eat what and when she wanted, not to be interrupted when she was reading, writing, or thinking, because it was ‘Time To Set The Table’. She canoed or just sat outside at night, in the dark, without a light. Basking in the moon and the stars and the quiet. No one to tell her she should come in. Why, for godsake? No one to say, ‘At least turn on a light.’ No, damn it, I don’t want a light! I want to sit in the dark! What the hell is wrong with that? She went for five mile runs. Then six. Then seven. No one to tsk tsk. She played the same piece on the record player, over and over, merging with it. No one to yell at her ‘Enough!’ And no one to tell her it was ‘Time For Bed’. At eleven. Simply because that’s when the prime time tv shows were over. So she stayed up until two or three. Then slept until ten or eleven. She worked better that way, well into the night.

She knew then that she wanted to live alone. Having to live with someone meant having always to give in to what they wanted, to go around what they wanted. Living with someone meant you could never do what you really wanted.

It also meant being constantly subject to criticism.

“The greatest heights of self-expression—in poetry, music, painting—are achieved by men who are supremely alone.” Colin Wilson

She closed the journal, selected a CD, put it on the stereo, turned out the light, and just listened. Malmquist. Such a delicate beauty …

8

Another sunny day. Another cup of really, really good tea. Another morning down on the dock, with the shimmering water, the gleaming water …

Her strongest memory of third year was that of impatience. She couldn’t wait to work on all the bits and pieces she was accumulating, all the books she was planning to write, all the pieces she was planning to compose. She enjoyed all her courses immensely, did all the work, never skipped class, and she loved the track workouts, the running, and she loved her hours at the piano, her music students, and her dance studies, her dance students, and she really enjoyed drop-in—but she couldn’t wait to have more time. To do her own reading (her list of books to read was now ten pages long), to do her own writing, to work on her own compositions …

She spent so much time on her studies. Struggling with the language in her Chaucer course, for example. She didn’t know everyone else just went to the library and got a translation. She didn’t know there were translations. And her History of the Novel course. She thought the reading list was compulsory, not recommended. She read every single novel on the long list, cover to cover.

And if I’d known then what I know now, she thought. Richardson, Fielding, Meredith—they were all such pompous pretentious twits thinking they were god’s gift to the world, so full of wisdom, going on and on and on about the most trivial of things, so full of shit.

Susan Juby’s Alice, I Thinkis better than Pamela and Tom Jones any day.

One warm, sunny day Dr. Spivey stopped her outside the library.

“Kris, hi, how are you?”

“Good, thanks,” she said. Then added belatedly, “How are you?”

“I’m good too, thanks. Listen, I wanted to talk to you. I see you’ve taken a course overload again next semester. I hope you’re planning on applying to graduate schools.”

“Well, actually, I—”

“But you must! You of all of this year’s students! Your work is excellent, and you’ve got the fire, everyone can see that! No one questions that you’re Ph.D. material!”

Well, she did. Yes, she had the fire, but a Ph.D.? Her?

Besides, she had no desire to spend even one year, let alone three or four, studying some esoteric point of epistemology, metaphysics, or logic.

Nor the use of the semi-colon in T. S. Eliot’s poetry or some such. Which is why graduate studies in English didn’t appeal to her either.

He insisted she make an appointment with the Head of the Philosophy Department to get information and advice about where she might go.

“But I don’t think I can afford it. I’m barely breaking even as it is,” she said, looking at her watch. She was scheduled to teach a dance class at the studio in twenty minutes.

And she didn’t really want to postpone her own projects for that length of time.

“But you’ll probably get a TAship,” he said.

She didn’t understand.

“Most graduate students get a teaching assistantship. It’s a guaranteed job.”

Oh. She hadn’t known that. That would change every—

“And there are probably a dozen scholarships you could apply for.”

A dozen? Her high school counsellor had just told her about the entrance scholarships to the two local universities.

A week later, she was in Dr. Whittle’s office, nervously telling him about her mother’s comment that she’d make a great lawyer, because she was always arguing. On some level, in some way, she was trying to wrap her head around being in his office talking about doctoral programs. “But,” she added, “lawyers are just intellectual cops. And I don’t think I can put in all the years required before you get to be a judge. And even if I could, even if I became a judge, they’re bound by precedents and rules too. So I stillwouldn’t be able to question the precedents and rules—”

“So you want to become a legal philosopher?” Dr. Whittle asked.

A legal philosopher? She’d never heard of such a thing. But yes!

“I would have thought you’d fancy feminist philosophy.”

She hadn’t heard of that either. She could spend three or four years studying the effects of gender on one’s life? Hell, she could spend her lifedoing that! She wondered then if he’d heard about her Milton paper. She didn’t have the tools, the language, to write a feminist critique of Paradise Lost, but she sure as hell knew what she’d say to Milton if she were Eve. So that’s what she wrote. Filled ten pages. Apparently it had caused quite a stir in the English department.

In fact, one of the books she was eager to start writing was a collection of short pieces from the perspective of more women from the Bible, and from Shakespeare, fairy tales, and mythology—as if they, those women, weren’t the creations of men. She thought that might count as feminist philosophy.

She also hadn’t heard of philosophy of mind. And yes, the relationship between the mind and the brain intrigued her, the nature of consciousness …

That’s when she realized just how poor her choice to attend WLU had been. Neither legal philosophy nor feminist philosophy was offered in the undergraduate program at WLU. Nor philosophy of mind. Nor social philosophy. Nor any applied ethics courses. Because yes, of course, she was also interested in questions about the morality of using animals for experimentation, of selling one’s organs, of euthanasia … Apparently, any one of those could become her Ph.D. thesis.

“You need to put together a research proposal—”

“A research proposal?”

“And we need to get you a good set of recommendation letters …”

But instead, what Dr. Spivey actually said when he stopped her outside the library was “I see you’ve taken a course overload again next semester. Have you considered taking less than a full load instead? Spread out your degree over six years instead of four. It would enable you to focus on each course as much as you seem to want to do.”

It was Kevin who received the grad school advice. And James and Robert.

To My Philosophy Professors

Why didn’t you tell me?

When I was all set to achieve Eudamonia

through the exercise of Right Reason,

When I was eager to fulfil my part

of the Social Contract,

When I was willing, as my moral duty,

to abide by the Categorical Imperative

When I was focussed on Becoming,

through Thesis and Antithesis to Synthesis—

Why didn’t you correct me?

Tell me that Aristotle didn’t think I had any reason,

That according to Rousseau,

I couldn’t be party to the contract,

That Kierkegaard believes I have no sense of duty

because I live by feeling alone,

That Hegel says I should spend my life

in self-sacrifice, not self-development,

That Nietzsche thinks I’m good for pregnancy

and that’s about it—

Why didn’t you tell me I wasn’t included?

(Perhaps because you too had excluded me

from serious consideration;

Or did you think I wouldn’t understand?)

(I do. I do understand.)

If you don’t know something exists, why would you go looking for it? So she didn’t go to the Student Services office and ask, ‘Hey, is there a university somewhere where I can get a graduate degree in gender studies? Environmental ethics? Biomedical ethics?’

Is there a grocery store where I can buy coconut mango juice?

All she knew was orange juice and apple juice.

Though, actually, she thought now, leaning back in the chair, soaking up the September sun, it’s possible the fields of feminist philosophy, environmental ethics, and biomedical ethics didn’t exist anywhere in the 70s. The word ‘feminist’ didn’t even become common until the 80s; she remembers ‘women’s lib’ from her youth, not ‘feminist’.

Which just means she could’ve been, should’ve been, one of the pioneers.

In any case, she didn’t want to be a university professor. She wanted time to write! That’s why she’d already made up her mind to get a B.Ed.—so she could be a high school teacher, a part-time teacher, in order to have time to write!

She didn’t know that full-time professors were required to teach only two courses. And would be paid about $40,000 to do so. And would be expected—expected—to write. In the remaining time.

In short, she didn’t know that being a full-time university professor wasbeing a part-time teacher.

And no one corrected her. Because she didn’t talk to anyone about what she wanted, what she’d intended to do, what her life plan was.

She needed a mentor. It also wasn’t a word used in the 70s, but she realized now that that was what she’d lacked.

And yet … maybe people had stepped forward to mentor her, and she just didn’t recognize it. In grade eleven Math, Mr. Newcomb gave her a copy of Flatland. At the time, she assumed he just happened to have the book with him, saw that she had finished her work, and so gave it to her to read, to fill the time. But now, she wondered if he’d brought it especially to give to her, thinking she might find it interesting.

She did. She found it fascinating. But she never asked, after, to talk to him about it. It didn’t occur to her that she could do that. So, again, it was her own— No wait a minute, he was the teacher, she was just a grade eleven student, surely the responsibility was on him to follow up.

She also remembered also being fascinated by the question posed in a Moody Blues song that Mr. Pendergrass mentioned in grade twelve Physics, equivalent to ‘Is paint in a can a color before you open the lid and expose it to the light?’ Truly fascinated. And he saw that. But again, no follow up. She didn’t know what she expected—well, she didn’t expect anything at the time, but now—surely high school teachers have a responsibility, a duty, to notice unusual interest and foster it somehow.

And yet, and yet. Twenty years later, when she went back and got her M.A., her thesis advisor asked if she wanted to go for coffee, she said no thanks. She didn’t like coffee. She didn’t see it as an offer of something else, a discussion of future possibilities, mentorship.

It might have helped if she’d gotten to know her profs. But she never went to see them outside of class; she never showed up at their office. That was for C students who needed help, not A students.

Who needed help.

How was it that had happened in high school though?

High school teachers didn’t have offices. You just popped in if you saw them in their classroom during a spare.

Going to an office was far more intimidating. And she didn’t want to bother her professors, she didn’t want to impose.

She turned the page.

She’d entered one of her poems in the university’s writing competition and placed second.

She didn’t tell anyone. Lest someone see that glistening, iridescent bubble hanging so perfectly in the air in front of her, and then pop it with mockery or dismissal. She’d come to assume one or the other.

Except Craig. Who responded with a poem of his own. And she couldn’t quite—wasn’t that what she’d wanted? A fellow poet? She couldn’t quite put her finger on why she was … upset?

She turned another page.

Jen went to Paris on an exchange program in her third year.

How did one find out about such things? She would’ve loved to have gone with her. She wanted to travel around Europe some day. When she could afford it.

Late that fall, she decided to drive up to the cottage again for the weekend. The trees would be amazing. Neither her parents nor her brother were going that weekend, and her sister never went by herself.

Her bike broke down halfway there, just as she was passing through one of the small towns on the way. So she called home, with the dime she always made sure to have on her for just such an emergency. But her brother was working that evening at the curling club and couldn’t come. Her father was similarly occupied or didn’t know anything about bikes, she can’t remember. Nor can she remember why assistance by her mother or sister wasn’t even considered. By her or them.

This was before credit cards were given to university students and in any case, she had no idea how to go about getting a room in a hotel.

So she went into a bar, which was the only place that was open, and watched people play pool until it closed at one o’clock. Then she rolled her bike to the nearest park bench and simply sat down to wait until morning.

Years later, when she regularly drove an hour to and from work almost every day, she was horrified to realize that she’d been only a forty-five minute drive away. And yet, not one of them—not her brother, her sister, her father, her mother—all of them could drive—not one of them offered to come get her, at midnight, if necessary, and then return in the morning to deal with the bike.

At the time, she didn’t think that what they had done—what they had not done—was unusual.

No wonder she learned that if you needed help, you had to hire it.

But for most of her life, she couldn’t afford to hire help. As a result, she became remarkably self-sufficient. And, so, remarkably limited.

More than that, though, her self-sufficiency became an invisible force field. Inadvertently, she gave the impression that she didn’t need any help. So people never offered their help. And so her isolation, and by necessity, her self-sufficiency, increased. Around and around.

Also, because no one ever offered her any help, she never thought to offer anyone else help. Which only exacerbated her isolation.

Around and around.

Such a simple pleasure, she thought as she paddled. And such an intense pleasure. For her. She glanced at the cottages—the summer homes, she corrected herself—as she passed by. She hated them. They’d made life here impossible for people like her. And the people who owned them didn’t even live here! They didn’t want to live here. Not like she did.

• • •

Once back at the cottage, she had a bite to eat, then continued through her third year.

She met Matthew through Susan, who had also been on the cross-country team, in high school, though she couldn’t remember now how they got in touch again while she was at university. Matthew was an Engineering student at UW who was renting rooms with two other ‘gears’ in a basement suite in Susan’s neighbourhood.

She often stopped by on her way home. They’d invite her to stay for spaghetti. Then she and Matthew would sit on the floor between the two beds in his double room and talk.

They didn’t have much in common, but he was open to her. He was interested in her. That was enough. Given.

That could’ve been, maybe should’ve been, everything. But he didn’t—she had this list—and he—yes, he was clearly intelligent, but— He was an engineer.

She turned the page.

Part way through her third year, she discovered Jonathan Livingston Seagull. The book. And the soundtrack. The first time she heard it, she felt … buoyed by the wind of its exuberance. And realized then and there that she needed to learn how to orchestrate.

She also discovered Pink Floyd. And realized she needed to learn about … synthesizers?

One evening she was in the den watching a special program that she had begged her parents to let her watch—it was on at the same time as their beloved Mannix. Her mother was in the corner chair making out the grocery list, and her father was sprawled on the couch opposite her. When the commentator spoke of “a passion for music,” her father asked scornfully, “How can you have a passion for music?” She stared over at him. At the derision on his face. Then tried to explain, saying something about an all-consuming desire. “I guess I’ve never felt a passion for anything,” he said then, laughing.

Yes, she’d thought. That says it all.

“How can you stand it, not to know [what you want]?” Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

They are flatlanders. Two dimensional.

They will never be able to comprehend anything I do.

It was then that she had asked, hopefully, “When your kids, when I, was born—didn’t you cry—out of joy?” Not exactly passion, but it would at least point him in the direction of overwhelming emotion.

No. He hadn’t.

i hurl my screams!

they just strike the walls

and ricochet in hap

hazard madness

within the space of my room …

they collide, explode,

or clatter empty upon the floor

on and on

within the time of my room …

it’s deafening.

no,

i know the sound of my own screams.

this room is far too quiet.

She also discovered Janis Ian and Dan Hill that year. In a way, they saved her life. To know there were others that sensitive.

And still alive.

One day, she heard a piece of music on the radio, perhaps Alain Morisod, that had birds chirping in the background. She liked it.

So she asked to borrow a record of birdsong that her biology teacher had used in class one day, recorded it on her cassette recorder, rewound, then recorded the solo piano piece she’d composed, her Op. 1, No. 1, but of course in the process, erased the birds. She didn’t know what overdubbing was. She figured she needed two more cassette players. One to record the birdsong, one to record the piano, then she’d play them both back at the same time, recording on third. But she couldn’t afford two more cassette players. Yet. In the meantime, she started making notes for six more pieces in the set, that would feature wolf howls, rain, and ocean surf. She’d started composing in the new age genre. Before it had a name.

Much later, she wrote to Gibson, finding an address on the back of a record of nature sounds, suggesting a partnership: his nature sounds, her music. He said he already had someone. Fair enough.

Except that over the course of the following twenty years he’d add a dozen new composers to his roster. None of them you.

She turned a few more pages.

During the summer, when she was taking an extra course, Philosophy of Education, and had missed class two weeks in a row (first, because of an overnight camping trip with drop-in, and then, because her grade ten piano exam had been scheduled for the same time), Dr. Mauritz had asked her why she was taking the course if she couldn’t get to all the classes.

“I want to be sure I get into teacher’s college,” she explained. Please don’t kick me out, she worried.

“But you’ll just have to take the course again. Philosophy of Education is probably a required course in every B.Ed. program.”

Oh. She didn’t know that. She hadn’t thought of that. Maybe she could get an exemption and then take something else. She always wanted to take more courses than would fit in her schedule.

More to the point, the point he didn’t make, there would be no question she’d be accepted at teacher’s college. Given her grades, in the Honours program, and her extracurricular teaching experience? She was too good for teacher’s college! Why didn’t someone tell her that?! Why didn’t someone tell her that teacher’s college was for ‘B’ students, and conservative, unimaginative ‘B’ students, at that?

She was forever a victim of her low self-esteem, working so hard, so much harder than was necessary.

And yet it was never enough.

And she always seemed so sure of what she wanted. That’s why no one tried to dissuade her, to tell her she should go for a Ph.D. or even an M.A. instead of a B.Ed.

She was so self-sufficient, no one thought she needed anything. Advice.

Friendship.

Love.

“To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain … And then to want and not to have—to want and want—how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again.” Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

When loves comes, I will be too weary with waiting.

She closed the journal while she watched the sun light up the cove. Inch by inch, the conifer green became neon. It was amazing.

• • •

Once she had a good fire going, she returned to the journal to finish out the year.

OH HOW I HATE YOU! You, who are the measure of all things. You who would crucify me with your eyes—not for their power (alas, you have none), but for their pain—as I refuse to cross myself and pronounce the compulsory chant at the dinner table.

You, so secure in your religion. Never asking a question unless you knew its answer. Roman Catholic you still insist. You have yet to explain how one can be born RC, born believing in some specific system—oh, but you were. And you sit snug, smug, in stability, the measure of maturity—while I, still the struggling Adolescent, friend of Fyodor, run.

Her mother’s pain was her power. She realized this now.

And “Your intelligence is showing,” she would say. Like “Your slip is showing,” but much, much worse. It wasn’t just a reprimand. It was a warning.

And her father would get such an amused expression on his face whenever she expressed an opinion he didn’t agree with.

It was so fucking patronizing. Especially coming from some schmuck who’d spent his entire life working at an insurance company.

There is so much undoing to be done when people realize their parents are just ordinary people, just a couple of idiots who had sex and got married. Or got married and had sex. Just because that’s what people were supposed to do.

Parents are the most powerful people in the world. And anyone, anyone, can become a parent.

“You take yourself too seriously,” they would say.

Yeah, well, you don’t take yourself seriously enough.

Quite simply, she didn’t like her parents anymore.

In fact, yes, she had come to hate them.

They were always criticizing her for nitpicking, for her attention to detail, to fine distinctions. It was like yelling at a kid for differentiating between fuchsia and magenta. Instead of nurturing the developing painter.

It’s like everything I am is in conflict here. Intellect, artist, athlete—

Everything I am is stifled here. I’m suffocating. Here.

Her very existence imposed, interfered. No wonder she wanted not just to move out, but to live alone. So as not to impose on anyone. So as not to have to apologize to anyone—for playing the piano, for listening to music, for reading, for writing. For thinking.

That would be enough. Not to have to apologize for it. She didn’t even consider the possibility of being appreciated for it. Let alone respected, or even praised.

Why do I go on so, defending my hate?

Indeed.

She’d tried. She’d tried so hard. She suggested once that her father read one of her papers, so they could have a discussion. No, he said, he couldn’t make out her handwriting. She offered to type it. No, don’t bother.

Don’t bother.

Of course she went back inside herself. Even further.

And yet he wanted bragging rights. Even as he mocked her. “My daughter, Einstein,” he introduced her once to his boss.

Why do you do it? Why do you mock me so? Are you jealous? Insecure? Threatened? I never thought I rubbed it under your nose. In fact I often tried to hide it, in between cursing it—what good was my intelligence if it separated me from the people I loved?

Thought you loved.

And I must’ve done a pretty good job too: he actually thought Larry had ‘more university’ than me. Probably thought he had higher grades too.

Everything about living with them hurt. Their failure to understand, let alone support (encouragement was simply too much to ask for), her passions. Their failure to agree with anything she said. No matter how well argued.

Her life had become so oppressive, their constant disapproving presence so overwhelming, she was afraid that if she suppressed, repressed, her self, her interests, her desires, any more, she’d lose herself altogether.

And she was realizing just how much energy it took to do that, to keep everything in, to keep everything hidden—energy she didn’t have, given everything else she was trying to do.

So she decided to move out.

She’d had enough. She was twenty-one. Twenty-one!

Even the trivial things— Everything I do must be done the way you want it to be done. My god, you even get upset when I untuck the sheet and blankets at the foot of my bed. So, dancing in the rain? Out of the question.

In fact, she’d wanted to move out since part way through first year. She’d been becoming her own person since midway through high school. University, of course, intensified their differences, their distances.

It was only her reluctance to hurt her parents that kept her hanging on— If she could make it to the end of her fourth year— Her brother had moved out when, because, he got a job in a different city. Her sister had moved out when, because, she got married. What was her excuse, her reason? She wanted to. She didn’t need to. She just wanted to. To move out when she didn’t have to—she knew that would hurt them—

And why the hell did that matter so much? They clearly had no problem hurting you!

But she had come to hate their superficial and closed minds. The house with its mundane interiors, the ever-audible AM radio station, the tv always tuned to Mannix, Archie Bunker, and the like— All the assaults to her senses, all the assaults to her intellect—

No wonder I closed in on myself, no wonder I became so overly focused on myself.

Overly focused? You weren’t any more focused on yourself than most men with ambition.

And no wonder she wanted to move out.

Surely she’d waited long enough, tried long enough.

But no, apparently not.

“If you leave now, you don’t come back!” her mother said.

She was stunned. To the core.

She had been such a good girl. Obnoxious, really. She’d always done her chores, without being told. She’d always done her homework, without being told. She’d practiced the piano every day. Like she was supposed to.

Except for that one time, having to sit in the corner, she couldn’t ever remember being punished. Reprimanded, yes. Like that time she went with her brother and Danny through the cemetery, she must’ve been around eight, and they climbed the chain link fence, and on the way down, she caught her jeans on one of the pointy tips at the top and tore an eight-inch gash from the crotch to the knee. Her mother was so upset about having to sew up the tear. They were new! She had just bought them! And serves her right for climbing fences with the boys.

Only now does it occur to her that her mother was more concerned that she had torn the new jeans than that she might have torn her thigh.

I didn’t drink, I didn’t smoke, I didn’t ‘run around with boys’ or ‘the wrong crowd’. When I went out, which was maybe once or twice a year, I told you where I was going and what time I’d be back. So I didn’t even need a curfew.

I never talked back. I never slammed my bedroom door. I never disobeyed you. I never lied to you.

I was a straight-A student.

And yet—

And so—

So even though it was her choice to leave, she felt kicked out.

[contd]

(free downloads of complete novel at chriswind.net)

The Portrait

My dearest Nannerl,

Of course you have a right to be upset about the portrait. After all, you performed right alongside your brother; in fact, your father had the bills printed to read “Two World Wonders.” Two, not one. You were with Wolfgang on the 1762 tour through Passau and Linz to Munich and Vienna; I remember Count Zinzendort called you (not Wolfgang) “a little master”. And you went again through Germany, in 1763, this time to Augsburg and Ludwigsburg as well as Munich, on to Paris, and then to London where the two of you performed that sonata for the Queen of England. And in 1765 you performed in Holland. No, do not doubt yourself, Nannerl: you were quite correct in calling Carmontelle’s portrait inaccurate because it shows Wolfgang at the keyboard, your father at the violin, and you merely holding the music for them. And he said you insulted him! I do know how you feel about the matter and I am completely on your side. Nevertheless, I must ask you to apologize.

And I know that your father’s recent decision to leave you at home and take only Wolfgang on this next tour doesn’t make it any easier. Though I admit to being glad not to be left at home by myself for once, I know it is terribly unfair. And I am writing this letter not to excuse or justify your father, but to explain. Nannerl, you are not to take his decision personally. It is not, as you first thought, that you are not good enough. Recall the Elector of Munich insisted on hearing you play the clavier, not Wolfgang; and there are many who share his high regard for your abilities. Nannerl, you are an excellent musician, a great performer. Nor is it that you have fallen out of favour with your father; he loves you as much as he ever did. (Which is, unfortunately, not as much as he loves Wolfgang. He is a man of his times. Didn’t you ever wonder why he started Wolfgang on lessons at a younger age than he started you? Surely you noticed he spent more time with Wolfgang? And it wasn’t until Wolfgang was ready to appear in public that he let you perform. You were young then, and perhaps did not notice... All the better. But I know Wolfgang had a head start right from birth and—but enough, I am getting ahead of myself.) Nor is the reason for your father’s decision, as you also suggested, that he considers you too frail to withstand life on the road. Wolfgang too came down with typhus in Holland.

Then why, you must be crying out! Let me try to explain. There is a time in every girl’s life when, suddenly, people stop treating her as a person—and start treating her, instead, as a mere woman. All of the doors that until that time were open are suddenly shut. All except one. It happens to every one of us, some time between twelve and twenty. It is happening now to you. (And later, when that door has been passed through, it too will close, and there will be nothing left: nothing left open to go back to, and nothing open yet to go forward to. As soon as I gave birth to a boy, your father’s attention rapidly shifted: I was of no more importance and Wolfgang was everything—but again I digress.)

This time of life is particularly difficult for someone like you, someone for whom the open doors promised such glory and richness. Why, when still a youth you were performing in all the great centers of Europe, you received excellent reviews and return engagements, you were meeting with all the important musicians of the day, you had a knowledge and experience of the outside world forbidden to others of your sex and age. And you were beautiful too, I know enough of the world to know this is an asset. Oh Nannerl, you had it all! Not even your brother had your beauty! But he had something more important: the right sex.

It’s a betrayal, I know it. It dashes to the ground all of the things you thought mattered: ability, dedication, desire. I had a talent for singing. I found it hard too, when I realized that I was not destined to become a famous singer. But, alas, I loved your father and wanted a family, so I accepted that loss for another gain. But you, Nannerl, I suspect it will be a long time before you marry, if at all, and perhaps you will not have any children. So it must be particularly frustrating and painful to have the only door you ever wanted open, suddenly closed.

I know this is little consolation, and indeed in a less generous heart, it would be salt to the wound, but remember, without you, Wolfgang would not be where he is today. You helped him become what he is. Much as your father likes to take all the credit for Wolfgang, it is simply not true. He had a family to support, a job to do, and while he was away playing in the consort, and directing the choir, it was you Wolfgang learned from. Remember in London, when Wolfgang was introduced to Johann Christoph Bach and the two of them, taking turns, with Wolfgang seated between Bach’s legs, the two of them played a sonata together and afterwards improvised. What a delight that was to everyone! Of course I knew it was with you he learned how to do that. I remember you, as a mere girl of ten, taking your little brother, then six, and ‘babysitting’ him just like that. And there was so much more. All the musical games you made up, and the time you spent helping his little hand form the notes on the staff when he could not yet write the letters of the alphabet. When I saw how much more valuable it was to have you spend time with your music and with your brother, well, I did not force upon you all the domestic duties it is common for daughters to bear. Besides, how many women get to do the washing and cooking to the music of such artistic genius!

And all of that makes this last bit even harder to tell you. You suggested that I ask Carmontelle to re-do the portrait. That is an excellent idea, but it cannot be done. You see, the one you saw was already a second version, done at my insistence. Nannerl, in the first one, you were not there at all. The man had excluded you completely, left you out altogether. (And the portrait you see now is his idea of atonement.)

Love,

Mother

***

The Stone

February, 1510

Benetta—

So you really did it! I saw your marble come from the quarry today. It is a very big piece! Where will you put it? It won’t fit in your apron pocket like your peach stones— But I guess you’re no longer going to hide your work. I envy you that. People will know now, they will be saying ‘Benetta, the sculptor’!

And ‘Properzia, the notary’s daughter’. If I am lucky, ‘Properzia, Raphael’s friend’. No—if I am lucky, ‘Properzia, Benetta’s friend’!

No, if you’re lucky. Benetta, do you really think that by doing something big you will become famous? You know quantity has nothing to do with quality! The size is irrelevant. Not to mention impractical. You won’t be able to hide it—and I don’t mean from your husband now—well, you hear the talk of invasion as much as I do. And you won’t be able to carry your work with you wherever you go—around the house, around town, around the country. What if your husband gets posted somewhere else, again? You will even have to build a separate room to work in (I do wonder where the money is coming from), and then you will be able to work only there—what of the summer days we spent in the meadows with our tiny stones?

Benetta, it seems like such a risk. To do something so big. I mean, well it had better be good, because it may be the last piece you do—it will take you so long! Yesterday you had ideas for ten different pieces. You won’t have time for them all now—are you sure you really want to spend five years on one piece? (And that is with assistants—who will want to be paid. Tell me, do you honestly look forward to collaboration or do you now, like Michelangelo, just want to give orders to other people?)

But all right, you have made your choice. Big it is. But why marble? Why not wood? (I’ll use the peach pits and you can use the peach trees!) There’s lots of it and it’s far cheaper. Is that it? Do you believe that the rarer it is, the more valuable it is? But that’s silly! I need only go to the orchard and the ceramic artists simply go down to the river—but so what! How will having to order your material from far away make your piece any better? And why should something expensive be more valuable? Air is free, but I consider it valuable indeed. Just because you have to pay dearly for your marble— And again, consider the risk—I mean, suppose it isn’t great—all that money—

And listen, there’s more to it than all of that: don’t you see, by using marble, by using material that’s rare and expensive, you’re helping to make art rare and expensive—its production andits acquisition.

And in our society, who is it who has the money? Not us! Our husbands, our fathers, our men! So it’s not only elitist, it’s also sexist! Benetta, as it is, only men are ‘allowed’ the desire to be an artist (of all Marcantonio’s students, we two are the only women—and if it weren’t for the fact that we also had to audition, we’d never be able to withstand the comments, you know that). Don’t give them a monopoly to the meansas well!

Either way, size, or rarity, or expense, it’s formyou’re focussing on. Pretence, not substance—not essence! Tell me, which is of greater value: an inconsequential, meaningless figure done of an eighteen cube feet of solid gold, or a piece so strong in emotion you weep or so disturbing to the mind it shakes some fundamental belief—made out of a handful of clay?

Benetta, you’re breaking with tradition—women have a long line of work in miniatures: Anastasie with her paintings, continuing what Laya did as far back as 100 B.C., and the jewelry artisans, the petite-pointistes— And yes, sometimes it’s good to break out of the mold, but you’re merely taking up a fad! This obsession with bigness, it’s only the result of the current fusion of sculpture with architecture—and certain male egos. Are you trying to outdo Michelangelo’s David? Is yourmarble nineteen feet high? I’m not saying I don’t admire his work. It is good. Just not necessarily better.

Yet if we must compare, I do think ‘ladies’ art’ wins out. It requires a far greater sensitivity of touch, such fine motor control, exacting precision skills— Could your Michelangelo do a crucifix on an apricot stone? On a cherry stone? Could he have done the set I just finished—eleven stones with Apostles on one side, saints on the other? We don’t need science to tell us that women’s fingertips are more sensitive: we knowmen’s touch is coarse, and clumsy—fit only to handle rock.

with great affection,

Properzia

***

(free downloads of the complete collection at chriswind.net)

Greystrands

Once upon a time I had pretty little golden locks. Now all I have are grey strands. And as I was walking along one day with my cart full of all of my things—if you didn’t take it with you, somebody would steal it—and I had a lot of things people would—well, they’d kill for my plastic bags, great big green ones with no tears at all, just a little one in the corner, still keeps you dry though don’t you worry, and I’ve got a big long stick with a nail stuck in the end, one of the city workers fell asleep on the bench next to me one afternoon, you know those old geezers ready to retire that they put on the Parks Sanitation Crew, well that stick sure is good at sticking things, I can’t reach down anymore, my back is falling apart, and you miss a lot of good stuff at the bottom of the bins if you can’t just reach down and grab it, well, see, now I just poke in my stick, a few times, ’cause my eyes aren’t so good these days, and there, I’ve got it. But do you know what people most want to grab off me? My little black book. That’s why I keep it on my person, it’s too precious. I have a list, all written down of all the places that give away their leftovers—good leftovers—and I’ve got a star beside the ones that do it without making you feel like a beggar.

What was I saying? Oh yes, I was walking along, feeling right smart in my new rubber boots—yesterday’s find—a bit big but if I wear all my socks—and suddenly I smelled this delicious porridge. Now you have to understand that hot food is a real treat for most of us. How are we ever going to make ourselves a hot meal on the streets in our corners—plug in a hot plate to the nearest parking meter?

So I checked my list quick to see if this address was on it. (I forget easy, that’s why I’ve got them written down—it does no good to go the same place three times to ask when they said no the first time, they’ll think you’re being a pest. They don’t realize how easy it is to just forget day to day where you’ve been. Why I hardly remember where I am sometimes). But no, these people weren’t on the list, under the yes’s or the no’s. So I knocked on the door, politely, to ask if they could spare some of their nice hot porridge. No answer. Well, the door was open a bit, so I peeked in. No one there. But I saw the porridge steaming in bowls on the table. Brown sugar in a little dish even. Well I was hungry and so I confess I went straight to it. Serves me right, I burnt the whole roof of my mouth! Ooh, I yelled! Then I laughed! I haven’t burnt my mouth since, well since I was a lot younger, but—eating pizza! Yes, that’s it, the first slice from a box when it was just delivered… I tried the next bowl—too hot too, darn! But the smallest bowl was cool enough, so I ate it all without another thought. Then I felt awfully sleepy. Again when was the last time I ate so much I got tired? Well I headed for a comfy chair, but then I saw a bedroom—sure enough, there were beds! I mean—oh, this one is too hard—I knew they’d have beds, it’s just I haven’t slept—this one’s too soft—in a bed—but this one is just right—since…

Delivered pizza! Can you believe I was once rich enough—can you believe I once had an address they could deliver it too? So what happened? How did I get from a little apartment on King and Third with flower pots on the balcony and a cat that knew its name and a cup of tea in the afternoons with “Cheers” reruns and Gus snoring in the lazyboy, his pipe fallen into his lap—Gus died. Gus who loved my golden locks, my prince charming for fifty-five years—died. So his pension stopped. And of course, as a homemaker for most of my life, and a part-time this and that, here and there, I had no pension of my own. The government—well, the government pension is based on how much you earned and how long you worked, so in my case it didn’t come to much. The OAS and the GIS together came to about $450 a month. Well, what do you think my rent was? $400. That leaves $50 a month for food and—and some of the pills I was on weren’t covered, and there’s extra billing every time I—Sure, we had savings, but that was running out. Of course I looked for a cheaper place to live, the shared accommodation column had some pretty good possibilities, but no one wants to live with—There were a couple months I couldn’t make rent—Boots got sick once and that cost, and I dropped my glasses and they broke and I had to buy another pair—I can’t see at all without them—and I splurged, God knows why, and went to the dentist after all about that pain in my tooth, and, well I was evicted: I found myself out on the street with all of my things (what I had left—by this time it wasn’t much, I had sold the radio, the tv of course, and my good set of dishes, things I didn’t really need). And then I soon found out that if you have no fixed address, you get no fixed income. The OAS and GIS stopped. I woke up.

I mean these people came back into their house and found this smelly old lady asleep in one of their beds and they woke me up. As soon as I remembered where I was, I got all embarrassed. And then I felt the bed, oh my God, I didn’t—I stumbled up, hoping they wouldn’t notice, but they’d seen my cart and of course they’d called the hospital already. They apologized, I apologized, I tried just to be on my way, bundling up my big coat trying to hide the holes under the arms, thank you, I’m sorry, I—I couldn’t get away, the attendants were there already—Is this a happy ending?

***

Catherine

That you don’t recognize me by name is but the first of my complaints about my tale. Oh you know me alright. I’m the main character—in a tale titled with the name of one of the men in the story. But what’s in a name? A lot. Especially if it’s a man’s name. This man’s name is the answer to the question upon which rests the fate of myself and my newborn child. So his name is very powerful, it is very important. My name apparently is not.

Nor is my life. For whether it is to be filled with joy and delight from being with my newborn, or empty with grief and loss from separation is to be decided by a mere guessing game.

Nor are my words important. I denied my father’s boast. I told the King I most definitely could not spin gold out of straw. But he didn’t believe me. Of course not. He chose instead to believe the words of an immature, egotistic, vain man. And I suffer the consequences.

The consequences. To pay for my father’s ridiculous lie, I lose my sanity, my freedom, and my dignity for three nights—and almost my child, forever. (And one sentence—one sentence in the whole tale is devoted to that ‘choice’, that decision to give up my child in return for my life.)

Because I ‘succeeded’ on the third night, I was ‘rewarded’ with marriage to the King. Thus, for all intents and purposes, I also lost my life. Can you imagine what it is like to be married—legally bound to honour and obey until death, and socioeconomically bound with little option but to stay and make the best of it—to a man who didn’t believe me, a man who locked me in a room for three nights, a man so greedy that he said three nights in a row he’d kill me unless I did as he wanted? And that was before he owned me.

But as the tale says, I am shrewd and clever. And I have learned the force of threat, and the importance of a name—especially if it is male. Proud fathers want very much to pass it on. But royalfathers—dear husband, aging Highness, what would happen to your precious lineage if my, your, only son were to suddenly—

Since I am not dead, and am living still...

***

(free downloads of the complete collection at chriswind.net)

I am Eve

the bad girl, the evil woman.

I stand accused, and sentenced. Without a trial. For life.

Because of my single action, millions of individuals have been born with ‘original sin’, have been guilty even before they acted, doomed before they started. I alone have been held responsible[1] for this sad and pathetic fallen race. Therefore, let me begin by correcting this: if I were free not to fall in the first place, they were free not to fall after me; and if I were not free, then I can’t be held responsible—for my fall or theirs.

Now, let us further examine the charges, let us correctly define that action.

I have been condemned for choosing knowledge over ignorance: the fruit I ate came from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In a society that praises pursuit of knowledge and honours men of wisdom, why have I been viewed with disfavour? Had Adam reached out first, would he have been so rebuked? Or is the state of ignorance requisite for women only? (Histories pass on Socrates, they pass overAspasia.)

In the same vein, I chose experience over innocence. In a context of attitudes that value experience, the disapproval of my action can only imply the desire that women, like children, live in a state of innocence.

I have also been condemned for disobedience. If that were the issue, then why wasn’t the tree so named—‘the tree of obedience and disobedience’ or ‘the tree of temptation’. By naming it what it was not, God either deliberately tempted me or deliberately deceived me. And he should be judged, not I.

Perhaps though, the tree really was a tree of knowledge. In that case, one should wonder what insecurities led God to prefer obedience over knowledge. Indeed, one should wonder why he went so far as to forbid knowledge. The reason is evident in Genesis (3:22-23): he didn’t want us to equal him. He sent us out of Eden to prevent our eating from the tree of life, because already we were as wise for having eaten from the tree of knowledge, and if we had made it to the tree of life before he found us, we would’ve been immortal as well—we would’ve been as godly.

And that takes me onward, for counted among my sins is that of pride. Considering that later, through his son, God commands us to ‘follow in his footsteps’, I find the label of pride odd for the action that would do just that—make me like God. Furthermore, I find it odd to be condemned for being like God when, after all, he created us in his image (Gen 1:26-27). And God certainly is proud: to create us in his image can be called narcissistic, and to prefer us to spend our time admiring him rather than learning about him is equally evidence of pride. (As an aside, I would think that my knowledge would increase my admiration; that wasn’t why I ate the fruit, but if it was, would it have mattered? Did God ever ask my intent?)

I have also been charged with a lack of faith. Yet I took it on faith in the first place that God told us not to eat from the tree: remember, he gave the command to Adam before I even existed (Gen 2:16-17).[2] Further, I had faith in the serpent, I trusted the serpent to be telling the truth. Is it dishonourable to trust?

And is it reprehensible to act on that trust, as I did then in offering the fruit to another, to Adam? God commanded innocence, then held me responsible for an act of innocent intent. For how could I know my faith was misplaced? How could I know the serpent was evil until I had knowledge of good and evil? By telling us not to eat of the tree, he insisted on ignorance—but then held us responsible, for an act of ignorance.

Lastly, I have been condemned for using my reason, for it is through the exercise of reason that I decided to eat the fruit. The serpent’s explanation of God’s motives, that the knowledge of good and evil would make us godly and he didn’t want us to equal him (Gen 3:5), seemed very reasonable to me. God’s command on the other hand, not even to touch the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil because then I’d die, seemed so very unreasonable. Where is the fault in using that faculty given to me by God? The fault is not mine, but God’s: he made reason guide our will and left our reason prey to deceit.

Or did he? History has it that the serpent’s words were false, that I was deceived. But God’s words after the fact (Gen 3:22 “Behold, the man is become as one of us”) verify the serpent’s prediction (Gen 3:5 “Ye shall be as gods”): the serpent was telling the truth.[3]And so I stand condemned, for listening to truth. And for offering that truth to others.

[1] Even though Adam was beside me through it all (Gen 3:6) and made not one objection. And, of course, also ate the fruit.

[2] I don’t rule out the possibility that the command therefore was meant only for Adam—God knew that knowledge in the hands of men is a dangerous thing.

[3] And in fact God lied: he said we would die (Gen 3:3) if we touched the fruit of that tree, and we didn’t—at least not for several hundred years.

***

I am Mary

mother of God. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now—it’s immortalized. I am indelibly identified by my relationship to a male: all of me has been denied, except that one part. And yet even that part has not been accorded full status: I am the mother of God! It’s a relation whose ramifications no one seems to recognize, to credit.

My existence became important, became worthy of mention, only after (only because) Christ became important and worth mention. My childhood, my girlhood, is never looked at, and yet it was my life before Christ that was responsible for my being the mother of God in the first place: I was favoured (Luke 1:28, 30), I was chosen because of the goodness and purity of my life[1]—and yet none of that purity, none of that goodness was documented.[2] From what was considered important enough to document, one gets the impression that Christ and his apostles were the only ones capable of good works.

The issue of good works leads us to another unrecognized ramification of my role. Christ, my son, is known internationally for his compassion, his love, his generosity, his forgiveness—he’s famous for his ethics: well who do you think taught him right from wrong? His mother, of course! Who is it who always teaches a child the first and formative values?

It was no easy feat raising the son of God! Think about it: here we have a little boy who has the gift of miracle-working—do you think for one minute he always used his powers to serve God? Of course not! For a while he went around creating fantastic toys (as a carpenter’s family, we couldn’t always afford the best), and there was no end of trouble because all of the other children wanted ones just like them (I had to laugh at some of them, the rascal had imagination!). And I had to explain—somehow. He also played some very nasty tricks on people who angered or upset him (once he changed some children into goats).[3] It took some doing to get him through that phase quickly! So even though he was the son of God, he had to be taught that there is a good way and a bad way to use his powers. And, as his mother, I taught him.

In fact, I suspect at times that the only reason I wasn’t chosen to spread Christian morality was because God knew no one would listen to a woman. It’s sad, but it’s true. So the next best thing he could do was choose me to be his mother. He didn’t have to. Did you ever wonder why he even bothered? I mean, the virgin birth proves he—[4]

Let’s consider next this issue of virgin birth. I am not going to debate its truth. I have realized for a long time that what is believed to be true matters more than what is true. And the story of the virgin birth is believed to be true.[5] But the belief is at my expense! Because of it, I was suspect of infidelity—a very serious accusation then, I could’ve lost my life (Matthew 1:19)! Fortunately the suspicion was disconfirmed.[6]

Furthermore, to believe in the virgin birth denies me the joy of sexual intercourse—I am not even allowed the biological prerequisite to motherhood. (That is, I am not allowed the pleasing one. The painful one, childbirth, I am allowed: contrary to popular belief,[7] Christ was the son of woman, and he was born of flesh and blood, not of the spirit—I have the scars and stretch marks to show it.)

Further still, the ramifications of this belief go beyond the personal. I have become a universal symbol: the virgin birth implies that intercourse is undesirable, that natural conception is inferior, that the state of virginity is more blessed than the state of non-virginity.[8] I resent symbolizing such a concept: one state is neither more nor less blessed. And I resent being in the awkward position of putting women into an even more awkward, indeed impossible, position: motherhood is pure, but the prerequisite, sexual intercourse, is impure. Well what is one to do then?[9]

Let me go on to yet other unrecognized ramifications to my role as mother of God. For instance, a little publicized fact is that I had some powers of my own. In fact, many people at the time had psychic powers—clairvoyance, psychokinesis, telepathy—it was a time before those skills evolved out of use.[10] I could tell you of several proofs, but I’ll choose one which is documented (but again, unacknowledged): near the end of my life, I went with St. John to Ephesus, then ‘appeared’ in Jerusalem. (However, I fell asleep when I got there; a feat like that at my old age took a lot out of me.) Such an event should not surprise you—I am, after all, venerated as healer, said to have the powers of ‘miraculous intervention’; and the power of relics of mine was reaffirmed as legitimate by the Council of Trent (1545-64); and don’t forget the Shrine at Lourdes, established in 1858, to commemorate my appearance to Bernadette, and the Shrine at Fatima, 1917, for when I came to those three shepherd children.

Another example, the one last point of ‘credit not given when credit is due’ that I want to make, is best illustrated by examining the image, by examining how I am portrayed. Think of the Madonna. Any madonna will do, they’re all the same. Or think of the pietà. Any pietà. Always the young girl with the blank face, like she’s never had a real thought or a strong feeling in her life. Real thoughts and strong feelings! One of my children went through life as the son of God—wouldn’t that make you think? Then he—my son—had nails driven through his body—wouldn’t that make you feel? Can you understand the struggle to understand, or at least accept, such an injustice without anger, without hatred? Your (male) image-makers call me mother of God, but they don’t take into account what that means, they haven’t understood what that really means! I lived, through days, months, years, I became a middle-aged woman, an old woman.[11] In the pietà, my son is thirty-three—that should make me forty-eight, but do I look it? No, I have been denied my life, my experience, my self. And if you do not recognize my reality, you do not recognize me.

Yes, I am the mother of God. But it appears to be in name only. For all intents, purposes, and effects, Christ (like almost every other male in The Bible) may as well have begotten himself.

[1] Later this was not enough: in 1854, Pope Pius IX instituted the concept of the Immaculate Conception which insisted that my purity extend back all the way to a conception unsullied by original sin in order to provide a satisfactorily chaste womb for the birth of Christ.

[2] Actually there are several accounts of my life before and after Christ, but they have not been admitted to The Bible because they are not considered ‘authentic’ enough. The Protoevangelium of James for instance, written around 150-180 A.D., tells that my parents were Anna and Joachim, and that I lived in the temple of the Lord from the age of three.

[3] See the Arabic Gospel, Chapter 40.

[4] God didn’t really need a biological mother for Christ. He obviously didn’t really need a biological father. In fact, God has Christ born without a human father, because that would’ve detracted from his divinity. But it seems having a human mother didn’t detract as much—hasn’t anyone ever considered the implications of that one?

[5] And yet there are innumerable such stories in pagan mythology, but no one dreams of taking them seriously. This one, they took seriously.

[6] But not on my word, no, my word was not good enough: only after an angel appeared and explained to Joseph, did he believe it.

[7] Which is amazing, in view of the many confusions: (1) Was it a virgin birth or not? If it was, if Joseph wasn’t the biological father, then doesn’t the genealogy tracing Jesus through back through Joseph to David and Abraham (Matthew 1:1-17) break down? (2) Was it a virgin birth or not? The doctrine of virgin in partu claims I did not experience the ‘pangs’ of childbirth, but Salome, my midwife, will vouch for the pain; and that eyewitness account of her arm withering because she reached out and touched me, not believing the hymen could still be intact but discovering it was, has been relegated to the Protoevangelium (I wonder which part of the story was decided to be invalid. If it was the intactness of the hymen that was in doubt, they had to be considering then either sexual intercourse or natural birth as a possibility.)

[8] This view continues to be manifested by the vow of celibacy taken by nuns and priests; by the popular male habit of according extra status to ‘deflowering’ a virgin; by popular porn (by men for men) which exhibits women in childish, innocent, virginal costume and character; and by popular ‘kiddie’ porn (also by men for men) which exhibits children as sexually desirable—all of which implies that the state of virginity is something special, an added bonus.

[9] Furthermore, the state of motherhood may be pure, but the physical experience of it, childbirth, is not: consider the ‘purification rites’ I had to undergo (Luke 2:22) even though I had just given birth to the son of God!

[10] Peter, for instance, made some dogs talk; he also raised the dead, and flew (The Acts of Peter, Chapter 9). John, another example, controlled the bedbugs that were bothering him one night (The Acts of John, Chapter 61).

[11] Like my existence before Christ’s birth, my existence after his youth also becomes unimportant—it’s as if I was his mother only for the first ten or fifteen years. Even he seems to have thought that: at first he simply wouldn’t acknowledge me as his mother—I was the same to him as anyone else who followed God (Mark 3:31-35); later, he had the hurtful ingratitude to call me ‘woman’ (John 2:4)—not ‘Mom’, not ‘Mother’, not even ‘Mary’.

***

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Clytie

I can see you sitting there

looking up to your love

watching his every move

through the sky

like the girl who waited

every day at the corner

so to follow him to school

I knew his timetable

where he sat for lunch

and which afterschools he had practice

gradually your life changes

from human to plant

till you are finally immobilized

by your adulation

and unrequited love

if only you’d known

he wasn’t a god at all

but just some bunch of hot air

•

Clytie was a young woman in love with the Sun god. She would sit outside all day and watch him. Eventually she turned into a sunflower.

***

Amphion

perhaps you’re right about my beard—

it’s funny, I guess facial hair

well, hair of almost any kind

is a measure of masculinity

and academics and artists

have always felt a little like eunuchs

(real men use their bodies)

it’s an interesting insight

(and surprising from you)

but it falls a little short—

what I wonder is this:

do I have a beard

to look more like a man

or less like a woman?

•

Amphion was scorned by his brother, Zethus (a man who had great physical prowess), because he dedicated his life to art rather than to athletics.

***

Galatea

you don’t know me by name,

though you’ve heard of my husband, of course—Pygmalion.

the myth ends with our marriage.

then the real story begins.

(no, the real story begins a year later,

with our divorce.)

it shouldn’t surprise you—

I mean, look at the courtship:

it really didn’t involve me:

he spent months romancing his own private image

of the perfect woman,

not me.

(that happens a lot.)

then, as you know, he visited Venus,

she was impressed with his passion,

and made his sculpture

(his archetype of the life-sized inflatable doll)

come alive:

he proposed immediately,

and, I accepted.

(why, you might wonder.

well, it’s not uncommon for a disproportionate attachment

to develop toward the agent of,

no, the first encounter after,

one’s sexual awakening.

in my case, since the awakening included

my entire physicality,

I think my initial infatuation, and hence, consent

is understandable.)

however, over the next little while,

I found out what everyone knew:

that he had spent years creating

this beautiful statue,

that when it was done he started dressing it,

talking to it, bringing it gifts.

that he caressed it, kissed it—

(I also found out what few people knew:

that he had left a hollow space in the right spot,

and lined it with moss

—he was fucking it too.)

so let’s face it, the man has problems:

womb envy

delusions of grandeur

displaced narcissism

misogyny

stone fetishism

inability to cope with reality

so when he brought home this huge block of marble one day

I left.

•

Pygmalion was a sculptor who detested ‘the faults beyond measure which nature had given to women’ and therefore resolved never to marry. In spite of, or because of, his attitude, he sculpted a statue of ‘the perfect woman’. He grew to love it and began to kiss and caress it, dress it, bring it gifts, and put it to bed at night. Impressed with the strength of his love, Venus made the beautiful statue come alive; he named it Galatea.

***

Dido

Founder and Ruler of Carthage,

First at the bar, and Chair of the Law Association

President of the Business Alliance

Premier of the Year eight years running

Seventeen times on the cover of Newsweek

Lifetime member of Rotary and Big Sisters

(too bad what’s-his-name came into your life)

•

Dido was the founder and ruler of Carthage. Aeneas got shipwrecked on her land, and they became lovers. Eventually Aeneas left to found his own city. Dido then committed suicide.

***

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Kate

With great disturbance, I hear it said

My story doth much to entertain,

’Tis light and with a happy end,

In short, ’tis thought a comedy!

Dost thou laugh to see a shrew?

Indeed, I pray thee, what is a shrew?

What am I that I be so named?

’Tis said I am froward and I vow ’tis true—

But for a man to be so bold is not a fault.

And some doth complain o’ my scolding tongue—

Then I am wisely critical, not content

With any and all. Others bewail

I am wilful, with strong spirits—

But I see a woman may be made a fool

If she hath not a spirit to resist,

And surely in a man this is much applauded.

Further, ’tis said, I am bitter and bad-tempered—

I pray thee, what is the standard of measure?

’Tis true I am not mild, but neither is my father

Yet none doth therefore curse his name.

I am more strained than pleasant, I confess

But methinks perchance you would be too:

To be auctioned off as a piece of chattel,

To know the suitors who come

Court your father’s wealth—

’Tis not my mind to smile at greed;

And to know that my father will give his money

To a man who is a stranger

’Fore he will give it to his own daughter—

How shall I be sweet under that offense?

I ask again, then, what is a shrew?

Observe and see that any man

Not favoured by a certain woman

Will fall to insult and slander anon.

Witness Hortensio, who once called her jewel,

Doth declare Bianca a disdainful haggard

As soon as she prefers another.

Thus, all I have done to gain this name

Is fail to praise and stroke men’s pride.

Perhaps thou dost laugh to see me tamed?

I think it sad to make all alike,

To force the spirited to be subdued.

Do you find it amusing to see me starved

Of food and sleep ’till I am giddy,

Weak of mind and body? To see me subject

To Petruchio’s emotional whips and whims:

He presents a feast then throws it out

Or allows instead another to eat.

He gives me a beautiful cap and gown

Then rips it to shreds before my eyes.

He offers me everything then takes it away.

Back and forth, up and down—to be sure it overcomes,

This confusion, fear, and exhaustion.

To see me tamed.

Only a man blinded by some grand fantasy

Would call me tamed. Any woman is suspect.

My final speech is odd, unexpected.

One can see neither reason nor cause

For this absolute and sudden change.

’Tis true. One sees it not.

For it lies in an unwritten scene.

Heed not that speech of obedience and submission—

’Twas made with Petruchio near

And therefore under unspoken threat.

Did ye not notice Act Four?

In scene one, my arrival, he begins his plan,

Depriving me of food and sleep.

By scene three, my body is weak and begging,

Though my spirit still resists.

He toys with me, dismisses the tailor,

And announces anon we are to travel

To my father’s house. On the road

In scene five, it is a mere eleven lines

’Till I submit and agree with his every word.

Did you not wonder what happened between,

While the men bought and sold my sister?

I was beaten.

And I mean not to speak in metaphor.

You know well that Petruchio strikes

His other servants, doth it surprise thee then

That he struck me? Over and again—

He locked the room, ’trusted Grumio as guard—

And therefore, on the road, to my father’s house,

You see, that was my escape:

I could not have left alone,

His servants in league, under similar fear,

And even if I got away, perchance along the—

—At least Petruchio was only one.

But what then to do? Whither should I go?

If I confess to father, would he believe me?

He cannot, for he has given the dowry—

It and I belong to Petruchio,

And he has not the money to sell me to another

(Even if that be possible).

I cannot live at home forever

(Would that he take me back),

He’d be the laughing stock of the town,

A married then unmarried shrew.

I cannot go out on my own—

I have no money, and it is only to be made

As strumpet.

No, that marriage had to be, whatever the price.

And, I’d already enough humiliation:

To go and then come back would be worse

Far worse than it was not going,

No one else would have me,

And I shall not dance barefoot,

Nor shall Bianca be made to wait again.

Is’t not then the answer

To submit while he is near and pretend to be his

So at all other times, I can truly be mine own?

Having house and food is much—

And anon, I trust, he will travel oft away—

’Twas a bargain: prisoner to him

For freedom from the rest.

Lip service was all—usually—

And if a word spoken against my will

Can stop a blow against my body—

Well, you heard the speech.

Yet soft, ’twas not all false:

Carefully I say women are simple

To offer war when they are bound to serve,

Love and obey. And they arebound.

But not by God or nature, no—

By commerce and social custom alone

Is thy husband thy lord, thy life, thy keeper.

Remember that, I pray thee.

Is’t not then tragedy, to name me shrew?

And worse, to seek to tame such a one?

Worse still is’t to call the end gay;

But the worst tragedy is to be entertained by it,

To take it not seriously,

Indeed to call it, my story, comedy.

(But fast, I’ll tell thee the comedy:

Hast thou forgotten ’twas a play within a play?

Remember ye not Sly, the drunkard, and the noble man?

The old version ends not with me

But with Sly, just as it began:

The story was part of a dream.

To be sure, a sick dream, and a dangerous one too,

Nevertheless, ’twas a male fantasy:

To be honourable, to be wealthy, to be powerful.

But recall, alas, ’twas also a joke,

Played on the drunkard by the other:

And to be sure, that women should be

So obedient and submissive to men—

Aye, that ’tis a laugh!)

***

Juliet

Romeo, Romeo,

Where the hell art thou?

Have you stopped along the way

To play at your stupid battle games?

Or have you changed your mind,

And decided not to come

Thinking me too ‘easy’ and thus insincere:

What perversion of thought is this?

Because I say what it is I want,

Direct and forthright,

You judge my desire false?

While the one who dallies,

Says no to mean yes,

You deem true and take her

Seriously?

Or perhaps you think to be ‘easy’ is to be unchaste:

If so, you misjudge

Yourself!

Because I want you (I want you)

Does in no way mean

I am a woman who wants every man.

Do you think of yourself so poorly?

Can you not accept that it is you who—

That one look of yours makes me wet

One touch sends a fire through every nerve

That it is you, standing there

In your tights so tight

And your shirt

Carelessly open,

Your chest—

Oh Romeo, Romeo,

Wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?

’Tis true you asked the same last night

When you came

And I bid you go

—For you had come so ill-prepared!

I bid you go to the Friar—

Not for a marriage,

’Tis but a farce:

We say there will be no sex

Until there is marriage

Meaning until there is love;

But if we marry at first sight,

Then ’tis surely not a token of love

But a license for sex.

(Indeed, my mother’s talk to me

Of marriage

’Twas awkward, as talk

Of sex)

And what need have we of a license—

Better use can we make of a sheath!

(The Friar, do you forget, is also a pharmacist!)

Yes, I bid you go

But only to return—

Return, Romeo, come—

Part thy close curtain, love-perfuming night,

As I will soon mine own unclasp,

let fall,

To offer sweetest heavens

To my love, my Romeo, come—

Steal upon catpaws silent in the night

Follow my purr, come,

Leap into my arms!

Let us kiss once for every star in the sky

A thousand times our lips shall meet!

Let me feel your body

Move sleek along mine

Let me touch you, Romeo, here and here

(’Tis true, as spoken, strangers’ love is boldest!)

Flutter your fingers upon my breast,

Play with me love, at tug and nip

’Till my body stiffens in arched pleasure!

Come, let me surround you

Let me suck at the moon’s liquid

’Till you clench and howl!

Then lick me love,

Seek my treasure with your teasing tongue

Nibble the pearl in folds of oyster,

My hands tearing at your head,

’Till I am gasping in wild heat,

Come, now, thrust your hard desire

Reach deep in to me love—

Let me feel your panting breath—

Come night, loving black-silked night,

Come take me, wake me,

Make me cry out

For more!

Come, Romeo, come

Come,

Oh,

Come!

Nurse laughs to see me so—

(Though mother would faint,

Still confusing innocence with ignorance)

Young love, she mutters, fanning my face;

But I protest, ’tis not love,

Not of ones so young,

Nor of ones just met—

Let us be clear:

Yours was an artful come-on

(‘Let lips do what hands do’)

For a classic pick-up—

’Tis young lust, I tell her true:

I want sex

With a desire pure as the lace on my bodice;

She clucks to hear me talk so,

And I would persist—

But what’s in a name?

That which we call making love

By any other name

Feels as good.

***

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The Last Supper

this is more like it

a bunch of men are watching the game

there are twelve of them, cheering, yelling,

sprawled on the couch, the chairs, the floor

and one, front row center, in the lazyboy

(must be his house this rec room is in)

they all have a bottle of beer in one hand

and a chunk of pizza in the other

there's some serious emotion going on here

passionate talk

about what happened and why

what should be happening

and what's gonna happen

all accompanied with nudges and backslapping

(at the end they'll be hugging)

there are differences of opinion

heated exchanges

but their devotion to the game

is never in question

(except for the guy in the corner

the one with the glasses

who brought a book)

(he was going to bring a woman

for god's sake!)

***

Mona

she isn't smiling

she didn't feel like smiling

come on, he coaxed

just a little smile, for me?

he pleaded

a young woman should never be without

a smile,

he chided

a face as beautiful as yours—

he flattered

she gave up, she gave in

she smiled

it felt fake, it felt stupid

but i'm smiling, okay

are you happy now?

he scheduled another sitting

she still wasn't smiling

she didn't feel like smiling

come on, he coaxed again

just a little smile—

to thine own self be true

she refused

he felt threatened

it was a sacrilege

so he righted the wrong

tried to project the curve of her lips

didn't do so well

he scheduled another sitting

what's the big deal

she grinned

this smile could be the face

of any number of thoughts

it's a mystery only to minds

not expecting, unable to consider

anything on a woman but that

vapid shallow simple girlish

smile

he went back to the original

unsmiling

***

Rape of the Sabine Woman

trained to be fast,

he has easily outrun her—

taller, heavier,

he lifts her off the ground—

using the strength of his work-muscled arm

he pins her pelvis against his chest—

his other arm reaches across her shoulders

and stops her from arching away—

her right arm flails for leverage

while her left pulls back, ready,

her fingers gripping tightly

the knife

that will even out the odds

***

Trans-Canada Tailings

in the next room

someone has sculpted Canada

into a huge relief map:

as i walk the length of the room

i notice the teeny-weeny lobster traps,

the CN Tower of course, and the Skydome,

the patchwork prairies, Lake Louise,

the chairlifts at Whistler;

it's large, no doubt about it,

with lots of detail,

and it'd be of no consequence

except that

all along the highway

from coast to coast

winding its way

throughout

the land

this stuff is piled—

higher than the dinky cars

placed at the intersections—

garbage, i guess

but it's glowing

(from one tiny

maple-leaf signpost

to the next)

***

(free downloads of the complete collection at chriswind.net)

canary in a cave

i see shadows on the wall

of things happening beyond me.

petrified into paralysis

by too much and too little,

i sit in the dark

and chirp.

***

nuns

nuns

habits of black and white

explaining their faith

***

in the night

in the night, your mouth at my neck

a long passionate kiss arches my back

then stronger, hungrier, more purposeful–

i wonder how close you are to my jugular

do you mean to suck at my core?

but you stop

and i am still alive

so i think of leeches instead of vampires.

the next morning, i stand at the mirror

from behind you wrap your arms around me

i am looking at my neck

and seeing the truth of your intent:

a territorial claim to ownership.

then i look at your face and see more

the arrogant leap from brand to birthmark.

during the day, someone asks about it

and realizing the truth of accomplishment

i turn and say to you

it is merely a bruise,

and therefore, nothing permanent.

***

crease, flip, crease, flip

crease, flip, crease, flip, crease, flip,

i fold the kleenex into an accordion

then tie it with a tiny piece of string

(it’s important to tie it right in the middle–

i have the strings all ready–)

then i separate

(don’t pull it)

ply by ply

(it must be done carefully–

the layers are so thin–

they tear easily–)

IT’S BORING

AND TEDIOUS

AND STUPID

i pretend to fluff it up

as if it’s something important, something artistic

then i toss it into the large flat box

WE HAVE BEEN AT THIS FOR THREE NIGHTS

my mother and i

my sister’s getting married

and my brother’s upstairs

allowed to do his homework

instead

i feel again those tears

of frustration and injustice

and reach for another kleenex

***

(free downloads of the complete collection at chriswind.net)