Dropped Threads 2: More of What We Aren't Told

by Carol Shields

  I collected animal bones. I sat for hours in summer watching the sun dance crimson and orange across the lichen. I was a city girl, for God’s sake. I’d never seen a walrus before. Or giant ravens and herds of caribou.

  Walking on the land became my favourite pastime. No trees. No people. No power lines. Just crunchy snow and the green shimmy of the northern lights like silent, magic wind.

  David chased me from the Legion once, the Legion with the fourth-highest liquor sales in the country. I had decided to leave without him. Booze often stole his beautiful smile, leaving behind hard stares and silent suspicion. Friends knew he was changing his skin and held him back when he tried to follow me. It was part of the usual late-night drama in the North, and they were probably pleased it was me this time and not them.

  I started running. He wriggled from his shirt and chased me, bare-chested in the—30° C night. I hid like a rabbit beneath a house propped up on stilts above the permafrost. I halted my panting breath and he ran past seconds later. I heard his footfalls approach and recede. It was the first time I truly feared him. My heart was pumping so fast my ears were ringing. What a rush.

  A couple of days later, he wrote an apology of misspelled words on loose-leaf paper and dropped it by my office. He was so sorry. He didn’t mean it. He really loved me.

  We met for coffee, shoulders stooped and staring at the tabletop. He gave me a pendant, gold letters fused together into “Little Princess.” Before he said a word I had already forgiven him. I had seen his family in action before: laughing, crushing hugs of love and seal stew one minute; booze-soaked insults and late-night brawls the next. Like a see-saw between heaven and hell. We hugged with relief and the dizzying ride continued. In us.

  Forgiving had a way of returning power and control to me. I was hooked. So this was what it was all about, I thought. This was the story I’d written so many times. Man beats woman. Woman returns to man. Public scorn and confusion ensue. Only now it was me.

  I travelled throughout Nunavut as a reporter for the Iqaluit weekly, but few communities were as stunning as Pond Inlet, David’s hometown. I covered a conference there in the midst of my madness with him. I had come to know many of Nunavut’s leaders. Some were losing the battle with drugs and alcohol; others were worn and wise. They liked to tease the white reporter, and I accepted it as part of my initiation. I was a stranger, and like other transients before me, I would eventually leave. They knew that.

  It was a large conference to discuss how the Nunavut land claim would be settled. Drum dancers and throat singers performed as they would have centuries ago. Men and women cut raw seal and caribou on cardboard on the hall floor and shared news with bloodied lips and hands.

  I tried to join in their feast. The caribou and whale blubber were palatable, but I couldn’t get near the walrus. In traditional fashion, it had been wrapped in skins and stored for weeks under rocks. The rotting flesh was grey-green and glistening. I retreated to the back of the room to eat vending machine chips with Inuit teenagers.

  I tried suicide that year, if you can call it that. Was I trying to fit in? Centuries’ worth of Inuit fortitude was fraying among the young, who were killing themselves in alarming numbers. Lost somewhere between raw meat on the land and microwaveable Big Macs at the corner store, they struggled in my world and I in theirs.

  It happened a few nights after my neighbours called the RCMP. David was throwing bottles and shouting death threats through thin apartment walls. I spent hours at the cop shop that night in my ripped flowered dress with my shins and forearms raw from his blows. Was this the first time he had attacked me? asked the officer. No. He found me a pack of cigarettes and I wrote out my statements, thinking maybe I should have hidden beneath a house instead.

  Days later, I caught a glimpse in the bathroom mirror and did not recognize myself. Someone else’s empty eyes. Some poor sucker’s flat, grey face. I stared for a long time, wondering how my own flesh could abandon me. My phone calls to old friends and family back home that night left me quietly weeping into the shrill ringing. This final betrayal by my own body felt like an omen.

  Then the tears stopped and everything turned slow motion. Calm.

  I got a bedsheet from the closet and tied it to the shower-curtain rod for a noose. But when I tested my weight with my arms, the rod gave way and I fell tumbling into the tub. As I sat there with a sore ass and the metal rod on my lap, I started to laugh. My plan was absurd and the result slapstick. I laughed myself straight. Then I went to bed.

  I played a lot of hockey that year. It was a welcome distraction and one of the few healthy hobbies I had. Most of my teammates were Inuit, and I made fast friends. For several, it was the only escape from brutal spouses who broke their jaws and hearts. Beneath elbow pads and helmets, they were invincible. They carved deep lines in the ice and barrelled to the net with ferocious intent.

  I gathered the courage one night with my female drinking buddies to tell my secret. They nodded and poured more vodka from a bootlegger’s bottle. Then they rolled up sleeves and pant legs and we compared scars like old soldiers in a perverted contest to see who was the bravest of the broken. I was unrecognizable even to myself, but here I was normal. It’s frightening how fast you fall when the people who love you aren’t there to see you slip.

  In the end, I dug a firewall to stop the flame from spreading. I told my dad. Oh, not every detail, but enough. “I’ve pressed charges,” I said into the phone. “There will probably be a trial. And then I will come home.” I could feel his alarm building by the way he cleared his throat and reached clumsily for something other than “I see,” and “Um-hmm.” Eventually he found the words. Was I okay? He was sending me a plane ticket. There was no shame in leaving. He wanted me gone. Soon, I told him. Promise.

  Mom told me later that he’d spent days alone in the garage after that call, occupying restless hands and quelling the urge to rescue me. I had no choice. My heart was long broken, but telling him meant I was now responsible for his. The rabbit couldn’t hide this time. I had set a trap.

  David pleaded guilty. Denied nothing. It saved me the publicity of the stand, and I was grateful but not surprised. He never had trouble admitting what was happening. He just had trouble making it stop. Sort of like me.

  I didn’t have any real therapy afterwards. I tried peer counselling once, but the other woman’s story was so horrific that I spent most of my time interviewing her and then left feeling fortunate. She had real problems, I thought. Everything was going to be fine.

  Now I stare at these words and wonder how I managed to pull them out without breaking apart. Recalled one by one, the scattered memories had always been manageable. Combined, they felt heavier and more lethal. If nothing else, completing this puzzle has forced me to reveal all the dirty little pieces to my husband, my family and my friends. And there is relief in the telling.

  Variations

  Like Mother,

  Like Daughter

  Maggie Dwyer

  Our mother leans down to kiss her daughters good-night. Her cheeks are sweet with the scents of powder and rouge. Where are you going? we cry. In our cries she hears a slightly indignant tone. Where is she going without us? It must be a weekend when her father is visiting and watching over the household. She has a date with Dad.

  She cherishes the first valentine he gave her. Their courtship was a simple one. He was a close friend of her brother’s, and they met at one of the dances that were held in local homes in the final years of the Great Depression. Both families were members of St. Patrick’s Church at Kinkora, P.E.I. Their grandparents and great-grandparents, early settlers from Cork and Kerry, were buried side by side in the cemetery and memorialized in stained-glass windows given to the church in their honour. Their marriage banns were read out here, but they didn’t hear them. Following the local custom, they had slipped away to attend Mass in a neighbouring parish, avoiding the initial reaction from the crush of well-wishers. It was as if they had eloped. Their f
riends and neighbours held a wedding shower for them at the church hall and wrote a loving letter of good wishes. They married in September 1940, after the harvest was in and my mother was free to leave her widowed father and brothers.

  Their deep and enduring love was the inspiration and foundation for their partnership in marriage and family life. We didn’t always have much, she says, but we always shared. Their early married years were spent in northern Ontario at Kirkland Lake, where my father sold magazine subscriptions. Mom contracted a serious illness there and lost her first pregnancy. It would be five years before my older sister was born. Long awaited and happily welcomed.

  Their next move was south to Waterloo, where he worked as a machinist during wartime and she as a clerk in a jewellery store. After a few months she gave up this job, which she enjoyed, at Dad’s request—women did not work outside the home unless economics required it. She stayed at home from then on.

  Several pairs of white high-top leather shoes are lined up in a precise row. It is late in the evening, and Mom has finished polishing them. The thin, chalky smell of the polish hangs in the kitchen air. This is the last on her long list of daily duties. It is after eight in the evening, and her little girls are upstairs in bed. The house is quiet, and she will sit down with her husband now, to read the newspaper and listen to the radio. My mother says she had all of us in these shoes to the age of six, in keeping with the wisdom of her day concerning what was best for young feet.

  In those years, homemaking and caring for children were labour-intensive—think of the meals, the laundry and ironing, the cleaning. Six daughters born within ten years and the birth of the youngest celebrated with the gift of a fur coat for their mother. My sisters and I grew up in a house where the linen was fresh, the meals made from scratch, the furniture gleaming, our hair curled in ringlets and our little white shoes polished. There was laughter, music and kindness. We accepted it all in the selfish way of children. She knew the true value of her work. If we forgot to compliment her on yet another delicious meal, we were reminded. She would quietly say, “Well, I guess that tomorrow night, I’ll put a bale of hay in the middle of the table….” We’d hurry to make amends and pour her tea.

  On a warm afternoon in a long summer season of canning, Mom is efficiently quartering pears. I am breaking a clove into quarters and inhaling its pungent scent while I listen to a story about how she and her mother and sister managed the cooking for a threshing crew of twenty men.

  A woman’s work on the family farm was essential, respected within the family. The work and roles of men and women were distinct and separate but complementary and accorded equal value. Women looked after the house but were not permitted inside the barn. Mom recalls that her father allowed women to come to the door but no farther. She tells us with pleasure that on days when her mother had to go to town, which meant Stratford, “She wouldn’t have the buggy out of the drive before I started to bake.” She was ten when she began, and her pastry has always been light. She excelled in the domestic arts, and this excellence was the reason Dad gained forty pounds in their first year together.

  Mom has many stories and sayings about women and kitchens, recipes and providing hospitality. One of my favourites, on the occasion of unexpected dinner guests: if you haven’t got much to put out, use your best tablecloth. In our house the cloth was white damask and the dishes were her mother’s.

  On another occasion one of us invited a boyfriend at the last minute. Before grace was said, a whisper went around the kitchen. We took such modest portions that there were unexpected leftovers. “Go easy on the duck” is a remark that still brings a laugh when we are setting an extra plate.

  A fifty-seven-year-old woman in her first pantsuit. It is 1970 and my father has been dead for two years. Now, after the early intense mourning has passed, Mom has found a job. The women’s revolution is gearing up. She begins working as a clerk at an insurance firm.

  Recently, when we were speaking of my elder sister’s coming birthday, she commented, “Fifty-seven, that’s when my life began again.” She got a new look—a work wardrobe—found new friends, travelled and enjoyed her status and her own paycheque.

  She has infected us with her love of fashion and good grooming. Her weekly trip to the hairdresser is a must. She delights in having good-looking clothes in her closet: a fashionable black suit, pretty dresses and scarves, sports clothes and “something lovely in the back of my closet so I am ready to accept any invitation.” A pretty pair of shoes is a favourite item—she very reluctantly gave up wearing high heels in the middle of her ninth decade. She was delighted to find a stylish coat for this, her eighty-ninth winter and beamed when I told her she looked pretty with the soft fur collar at her neck.

  Often when I visit my mother, we take a drive “up home.” She points out the handsome red-brick two-storey house and the window of the bedroom where she was born. It pleases us to see that the family name remains on the deed. She is the one who knows the histories of its generations and much about the forty families that made up the membership of the local parish. Each person, the life and the accomplishments, has value as comedy, tragedy or drama. She is the one who remembers. Especially the details of the women’s stories. She is the matriarch now, the eldest surviving on both sides of the family tree, and her status is important to her.

  My mother provided a model for the role of a wife and mother that was time-honoured, the norm in our Ontario city where few married women worked outside the home. This was the world I knew, and in my youthful ignorance, I imagined that life went on virtually the same way in homes everywhere in Canada. After I left home to attend nursing school, I was shocked to hear other girls trashing their mothers by belittling their lives or claiming to hate them.

  And yet in my young adult years, all aspects of a woman’s domestic life bored me. I did not really appreciate the worth of my mother’s work—until I became a mother myself. This was in the early days of the women’s movement, and although woman was being transformed into goddess, it would not do, politically, to be like the most familiar of women, our mothers. The role of wife and mother was last on the list of choices for my generation.

  Although I admired my mother and the way she lived her life, I knew I had choices. I wanted something more. As a teenager and young woman, I did not worry about “turning into my mother.” I was determined I would not. I sharply dismissed her life as sweet but dull. I saw her as a lovely, intelligent woman who was lucky to marry the man she loved, someone who appreciated her good fortune in having her own home and in not being relegated to the role of spinster sister who kept house for her father and brothers.

  I opted for a conventional career, certain that being a nurse would be a ticket to adventure. Through the sixties and into the seventies, I was studying, then living, really living, playing, loving and working as a single woman far away from the dull fog of domesticity that seemed to enshroud my mother.

  Until my mid-twenties, I resisted the idea of marriage and motherhood. The idea of a conventional marriage and family life filled me with dread. I imagined it to be the narrowest of existences. I was not so much a feminist as a dedicated contrarian—until I fell in love and married at age twenty-seven. The adjustment to becoming a stay-at-home mother was shocking. I was constantly fighting fatigue and worrying that, yes, I was slipping into the dreaded domestic fog. I hadn’t been paying attention; I didn’t know how to mother. It did not come naturally, unlike the birth process with its inexorable rhythms. I struggled to keep pace with the world, reading the New Yorker while I nursed my daughter. I imagined that my life was taking place off to the side of real life.

  It was the shock of the now. The needs of my newborn baby demanded precedence over all else. And from then on, the persistent call of my first duty to my daughters. In this transition from self-indulgent career woman to mother, I looked to my mother and others, sisters and friends, who were there before me. We talked and talked and laughed and cried—and I learned. I saw that
there were many ways, many styles and strategies I could adopt.

  I found that humour is a mother’s very good if not best friend. At parties, when asked that dreaded question, What are you doing these days?, I used to answer that I was working on my doctorate in chemistry—the chemistry of laundry stains—and that my thesis was on the differential extrusion of the banana molecule. I claimed to be attending U. of M. By this, I meant I was keeping sane and current by listening to CBC’s Morningside program during the LaMarsh, Harron and Gzowski years.

  Gradually I came to understand the powerful role of mother and to know that there is pleasure in duty. That the years I spent at home were full of wonder and opportunity. That there was time for me and my interests. That in my mother’s life, never so sweet, never so dull for her, there were challenges, many and varied, and I learned to appreciate and respect how she managed them.

  Over the years, Mom has also revised her views and opinions, especially on topics such as women’s rights and marriage. If women’s lib had been around in my time, she says, things would have been different. She would not have listened to the doctors who insisted on the science of bottle feedings and gave her a new and improved formula for each of her six daughters. She would not have given up her job at the jewellery store. Now she understands how hard it is for young women who have been living and working on their own to stay at home with small children, even if that is what they want. “My job at the insurance company was good,” she says. “I got more out of it than the work.” She got a new life. She knew her work for pay was important then. Now we know the value of all her work.

  To her daughters and their families, Mom is always encouraging, the giver of sound advice for problems of the heart or head. She delights in all our successes and commiserates in our disappointments. Now at eighty-nine, she is so agreeable a model of how to live as a woman and mother that I try not to avoid turning into her but to keep up as gracefully as she has. Like mother, like daughter. It is a high compliment.