Svea, of course, proved to be far too mature for the boys in high school. She already knew the complexities of caring for young children, of anticipating Uncle Peter’s benders, of skirting Margaret Strand’s propensity for finagling them all. By the time Britt Ekland was in the tabloids and I was off to university and other girls were going to nursing school or beauty school or agricultural college, Svea was holding the fort, waitressing at Max’s Café by day, helping the twins with homework or cruising with Randy Fuller in his Ford pickup truck at night. Randy lived west of town on his parents’ cattle farm, but he was often away working on the rigs for weeks at a time; it was part of his plan to finance his eventual takeover of the farm upon his parents’ retirement. We all assumed that Svea would end up on that farm as well.
It’s sad to say, but Svea was the victim of town gossip, and Randy was unable to ignore it all, perhaps with good reason. Working in Max’s Café exposed Svea to people in town and from miles around, and her easy sensuality did not go unnoticed. Though she had little known reason to hang out at Lens Menswear, the story goes that she had slipped in there right at the end of a day and that a last-minute customer had walked into that store, after closing time, to find Svea bent over the oak desk at the back, naked from the waist down. She had been seduced by a married man. After ordering his coffee, he would compliment her daily on her elegant posture and her sultry hip sway. She had been curious about his abilities. For Svea it would have been but a blip on the radar if it had gone undetected. Afterwards, she maintained her usual poise at work, which helped keep some suspicious minds in check, but at home Uncle Peter, in his inebriated and embarrassed state, upbraided her to the point of sending her fleeing back to our house. Randy Fuller was soon engaged to another woman. Too soon by most people’s reckoning. That was the year that Elizabeth Taylor married Richard Burton after she starred in Cleopatra and cheated on Eddie Fisher.
The shock for me wasn’t that Svea was having sex. I already knew about her and Randy. It was that image of Svea being exposed and, more to the point, being watched. There were too many details told for just a fleeting glimpse.
This brought Anna and Lilly full circle back to our house. The twins were used to following Svea, and by this time they were tired of the misdoings between their father and Margaret Strand. I became the weekend visitor, going from a shared room in university residence to a spot on the couch at home. My mother became their substitute mother, and Uncle Peter knew in his heart that it was for the best. The twins had just turned thirteen. You might think, given the times, that they would be a challenge to their father and to my parents, but family scandal can have a sobering effect and can even encourage conservative behaviour, at least for a time.
My mother determined that Svea was a born nurturer, as if she had a choice in the matter, and advised both Svea and Uncle Peter of the new nursing aide program in Edmonton, and that it would be a crime if Svea did not go. The next fall Svea and I found a basement apartment near Whyte Avenue. Sandra Dee was long gone in my head, and Julie Christie, with her wide sensual mouth, was her replacement. I wanted to be Lara to someone’s Doctor Zhivago. Now we were both identifying with “the other woman,” although a fraternity pin and some kind of commitment would not have been out of the question for me. That gadfly Britt Ekland was the “party girl” in Do Not Disturb at this point, then the kid sister, Gina, to Peter Sellers in After the Fox. It would be another nine years before she played the assistant to Roger Moore in The Man with the Golden Gun. That about measures the time it took for Svea to make her final transformation, going from bedpans during the week and party girl or devoted sister on weekends to full-time medical assistant and eventual clinic director.
I know. She surprised us all. Her qualities, that we all took for granted, of courage in the face of loss and judgement, sensitivity to the needs of others, quiet responsibility, and thicker skin than her fresh-faced aura implied set her up for managerial success. And she was determined to have a better life for herself. I, of course, had taken it all for granted.
Elizabeth Taylor had divorced and remarried Richard Burton, but I don’t think Svea cared too much anymore. While Elizabeth relied on serial marriages, we rode the wave of the sexual revolution with serial dating.
Svea’s new venture began with The Pill, which was first prescribed by Dr. Jensson, who she deemed less judgemental than Canadian-born doctors. Before long Dr. Jensson had a parade of Svea’s friends and acquaintances, including myself, going through his office. Then Dr. Jensson, who obviously recognized Svea’s strengths, hired her as his aide. This may seem inappropriate in this day and age, but it all made sense to us at the time, and it was on the up and up between the two. This was how Svea began to “associate,” that is go out with, medical sales and marketing associates who came to the office to promote their wares. This was how she learned about balloon-catheter-inspired IUDs, and how she determined that women could be free of The Pill’s high-dosage side effects such as weight gain and nausea and blood clotting, weight gain being her major issue. She was fitted with the Dalkon Shield (a source of sadness and irony for the rest of her life) but kept abreast of the latest pill packaging. Ads promoted the “perfect pack” and the “dial pack,” and there was the addition of placebos to round out all the days of the month and maintain a regular intake by forgetful women. Options and forms of birth control marketing interested her.
The tipping point came when Uncle Peter, with his ever-increasing alcoholic flush, cut ties with Margaret Strand and her ever-increasing jaundice eyes and moved with the twins to a two-bedroom bungalow with a fenced-in backyard of his own. He was free of the Strand on weekends, but the girls were left too much on their own. Soon Anna was pregnant and came to live in our basement suite in Edmonton while Lilly stayed in school with Svea’s advice and Dr. Jensson’s prescriptions to protect her. Svea took on as much of the guilt as anyone. She had failed to pass on her knowledge to the twins. It dawned on her that there were countless young women, and young men too, who needed information and care. Dr. Jensson, who had promoted the idea many a time, obtained a new government grant and, along with Svea, established a birth control clinic on the edge of the university campus. It was not without controversy, but there were plenty of subscribers. Free prophylactics were a steady draw, and medical marketing firms recognized that supplying the clinic with a multitude of samples was a great way to drum up business later on. Eventually students would find jobs and pay for these familiar products.
In 1984 Elizabeth Taylor organized and hosted the first AIDS fundraiser, Britt Ekland published a fitness book called Sensual Beauty, and Svea began a low-key campaign against the Dalkon Shield, calling into radio talk shows whenever the topic touched on birth control, pregnancy, infertility, or false and dangerous pharmaceutical advertising to women. She not only had the depth of experience from the defunct birth control clinic (grants had been phased out), she was also devastated by the device’s effects on her own body. Svea, earth mother to her sisters and the sisters of others, and Aphrodite to countless men, was infertile due to the Dalkon Shield’s faulty design and shady promotion. A multitude of lawsuits supported her stance in the following years.
I was never comfortable with controversy. Julie Christie (dubbed the anti-goddess) with her simmering energy and ongoing affair with Warren Beatty, haunted me from time to time, but even so I cozied into the life of a teacher, a wife, and a mother of two spirited boys. Anna, single mother of sweet Emmy, who was curly-haired like her mother, went back to school; she earned scholarships and a degree in dental hygiene, ensuring her own marketability. Lilly became a lawyer advocating for women’s rights, inspired by Svea’s slow but sure awakening to the roles of sex and fertility in women’s lives.
And remember that farm boy, Randy Fuller, who dropped Svea over her menswear scandal? He had an awakening of sorts as well. His hurt pride had not held a candle to the pain of being married to a woman he truly disliked, the one he had
hastily married after Svea’s notorious fuck (as women now freely call it), bent over that desk in Len’s store. Svea met up with Randy at our school reunion. Along with others he was again entranced by her goddess persona. As a woman she more fully resembled the statue of her namesake Moder Svea (Mother of Swedes). She was no longer the young girl in the photo who was destined to fly to Canada, clueless about her future. With his wife gone and his children grown, Randy met with Svea as two adults can do, knowing they each have interesting flaws and a lot of history to talk about. They took a chance on marriage, Randy for a second time. Svea was soon enthralled with the breeding of purebred cattle, with identifying the udder quality of cow, and the efficacy of the semen of champion bulls. She learned to perform artificial insemination and to market embryo transplants, but mostly she remained on guard for the well-being of us all.
Rosemary
WHEN ANDREW ENCOUNTERED Rosemary it was mostly déjà vu. He could not reason why. It was the morning of the spring equinox, in the east campus parking lot. Piles of grimy snow leaked onto the pavement and students wended their way around slippery ice patches and stagnant puddles.
Andrew strode, oblivious to the grime and to the notion that the sun’s illumination was equal to southern climes. He carried, in his brown leather case, a copy of Civilization and Its Discontents, a tattered article entitled “Thomas Aquinas Revisited,” and an Egg McMuffin wrapped in moisture-proof paper.
Brown hair, soft curls. That’s what he noticed.
“Today is my day for gratitude,” she said, “so I have a gift for you.”
“Uh, I think I need my coffee. Your name has slipped my mind.”
“Rosemary,” she said. “And I can’t tell you how much I love your class. I’m just auditing, in case you don’t know.”
“Ah. That explains it. So what is this?” He dangled the gift, sprigs tied together with a yellow ribbon, in the air.
“Herbs,” she said. “With meaning.”
“Uh huh?”
“Parsley, sage, rosemary, and marjoram.”
“Not parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme?”
“Oh, and basil too. Ha ha, thyme. I get you. Well, thyme can give you courage, that’s for sure, but that’s not what I wanted to convey.”
“Uh huh?”
“Marjoram is a symbol of joy and happiness. It is one thing I wish for you.”
Andrew considered himself lucky, even if not joyful. Lucky because his mother Grace died when he was only four and his brother Eddie had convinced him that they had been spared the tyranny of careless mothering. As a result they had learned the value of independent thinking and logic, a perspective that was particularly suited to the dialectical methods of Plato. They both, as professors, employed dialogue successfully in their classes.
He had just one photo. The black-and-white picture revealed nothing about Grace’s health. Light and shadow evoked a vulnerable woman with a generous mouth and smiling eyes. Her hair fell down in soft waves. He couldn’t remember its colour. Their father gave no explanation; he was a muted witness, or so it seemed.
Grace held Andrew in her arms and out toward the camera so you could see his eyelids shut in baby bliss. Eddie stood right at Grace’s extended elbow, looking straight into the camera, and their sister Margie was on the other side, leaning on their mother’s leg and looking off to the side. The brothers always wondered at the wayward paths that Margie had taken back in Buffalo, before her own demise.
It was therefore inexplicable that a man who prided himself on academic thought, who was perhaps stoical about his early life, a man with tenure and a wife and three kids, after four days of resistance, lifted the limp aromatic posy from his middle desk drawer and began to google the meaning of each sprig. He remembered to search for parsley, apparently a symbol of useful knowledge, for sage, obviously a symbol of wisdom, and for rosemary, meaning remembrance. Oh, and basil: something about love spells.
The sun is three quarters up, and a jet stream curves up and over to the west, encapsulating sky and earth together, before disappearing into nothingness. Andrew studies the narrow gravel road more intensely than he would city pavement. There are ruts to negotiate that are sometimes obscured by the grassy shadows of east-side ditches. Yes, there are open fields of grain—green tinged with brown, alternating with sections of yellow canola—but bushes along the wooden and barbed-wire fences probably harbour mice and snakes. He’s not sure what to expect over each rise of a hill as vehicles tend to favour the middle of the road.
There is the dead-end sign that she described. He stops on the hilltop to solidify his view. There is the red barn with green shingles and a cluster of smaller sheds to match. One shed defies convention. It is painted white with a turquoise door, window frames, and shutters. The house is fifties style, two-tone, with brown on the lower half and cream above. There is no movement: no cattle grazing, no animal of any kind wandering in this yard, yet it must be the right place.
He eases downhill to where large tractor tracks have dug up the grass and soil, and where a steel gate is secured with a padlocked heavy chain. The trees are thicker here and the farmyard is out of sight. There is a second wooden gate inside that joins a second barbed-wire fence and leads to a dirt road with grasses and clover in the middle of the tracks. He gets out of his car. What the hell is he doing here anyway?
Suddenly dogs are barking and coming down the lane. With them is Rosemary on a bike. He can hear her voice but can’t make out what she is saying. He feels a rush of excitement. There is no turning back.
“Hello!” she calls, slightly out of breath.
“How are you?”
“Country style security,” she explains as she opens the wooden gate and proceeds to unlock the metal one.
“What are you keeping out? Wild animals?” he jokes.
“Just unwanted traffic. It’s not my arrangement. Just following through for Jill and Otto.”
He nods. “The owners I presume.”
“Yes. Go ahead and bring your car through.”
He drives through the gates and waits for her to lock up again.
“Meet you at the house,” she says as she leans into the car window, and then she pedals down the lane. The black lab bounds parallel to her, and the border collie circles ahead and back as though Rosemary is the centre of the universe. Andrew idles slowly behind. Her buttocks move rhythmically against khaki shorts. He is oblivious to everything else along the way.
She stands at the top of the wooden steps and motions with a hand.
The dogs bounce around him, scrutinizing him willynilly.
“Thelma, Louise, stop that,” she orders and the dogs settle down.
“Very funny,” he says. “Thelma and Louise?”
“Oh, you have to know Jill and Otto,” she says, laughing. “It’s their sense of humour.”
“Am I safe here?” he jokes.
“Safe as anywhere. Come on in. I’m just making us lunch. We can take it on our hike.”
She resumes preparations at the kitchen counter, assembling and wrapping up egg salad sandwiches, oatmeal cookies, green apples, and bottled ice tea. “Hope you like all this.”
“Sure, fine. Anything’s fine,” he says as his eyes follow the V-neck of her T-shirt downward to hidden cleavage.
She moves quickly from counter to sink and back again and looks over at him periodically to confirm their conversation. They talk about the fact that Jill and Otto are not really farmers; they are artists who maintain the farmyard and lease the fields out to neighbours.
The city, more specifically the university, recedes in a flash, as does Lois, his wife. This kitchen, with its oak table and pink cupboards and smooth black counters, possesses him. There is room for a large family and extras at harvest time, but now it is just the two of them. He needs to make a move, but something holds him back.
Birds si
ng a cantata through the window, punctuated by the sound of flies jotting on the screen. Time ticks away with the clock on the stove and floats out the door, swirls around the sheds, and sails over the open fields and down to the creek that apparently runs at the property’s bottom edge. Life as he knows it—his immersion in books and constant family dilemmas, the strain of appeasing Lois, all float away.
“Are you ready?” she asks.
“I am!”
“I’ve got a couple of backpacks. Here, you take the lunch in this one. I need mine for flowers.” She drops a pair of blunt-end scissors into the bottom of her pack.
“That’s all you’re taking?” he says.
“I’ll have plenty to bring back.”
They head down a mowed path toward the tree line where the creek is hidden from view. They reach an open meadow. Butterflies, radiated by sunlight, flit from a stack of logs to the grass and back again. They walk past dry anthills and listen to grasshoppers. Soon they hear water trickling further down. They look down a steep bank to the muddy creek and negotiate their way through low-lying scrub and young poplars. Wild raspberries and strawberries and mushrooms abound.
“Have a raspberry.” It sits like a gemstone in her hand.
He drops another in his mouth. “Barely a taste. A teaser!”
“Oh here, forget-me-nots!” She pulls out her scissors and snips a stem. The flower is composed of sky blue petals and a yellow eye. “There’s a legend about them,” she says.
“And what is that?”
“Well, a woman and her lover were walking along a river when she spied a beautiful blue flower. She asked if he would get it for her, and of course he wanted to please her. However, he lost his footing and fell in, crying out with his dying words—‘forget me not, forget me not.’”
Dear Hearts Page 3
