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

by Carol Shields

  Caught between the forest and the garden, I was paralyzed by the transfixing adult phallus nuzzling against my thighs. But the gang, emerging from the woods behind the school, saw him poised over me and ran toward us, shouting “Penis!” in unison. “Penis!” I yelled with them, all of us once again bringing the word out of the forest, scaring away the naked emperor, who was never seen at the school again, having been exiled to the theatre but not to jail, where he should have been sent.

  I was saved by the lost language of women. In rebellion I gained something essential that had been denied to me as a “good girl.” Rediscovering the deeper roots of woman-speak in the woods, where we were empowered to explore and understand our own bodies, my tribe retrieved a legacy for our daughters and granddaughters. Nowadays they can say “penis” and “vagina.” They have the language of pleasure and know how to protect and enjoy themselves, privileges denied to us because the whole social order rested on our ignorance. What we didn’t know and couldn’t talk about separated mother from daughter and daughter from herself.

  Now I wear my mother, my friends, my daughters-in-law and my granddaughter on my head. Bettina’s astonishing hat has brought me fully into a club that is beautiful and various and has ownership of the language that makes us unique. “Breast” is the chakra of pride and reconciliation. After so many years of rooting around in the dark with other girls from the bottle-fed generation, I found what I already had, the mother word for pleasure and belonging.

  Don’t Say

  Anything

  Michele Landsberg

  My mother believed in white, and only white, cotton underwear; in one green and one yellow vegetable with each meal, lightly cooked; in wiping from front to back; in washing hands scrupulously after the toilet and before eating; in never sharing a drinking glass; in not sitting on the cold cement of the front stoop (bad for the kidneys) to read your library books; in “little ladies” not whistling or chewing gum. Beyond the physical rules of the perpetual struggle for survival and against germs, in those days before antibiotics, there were also strict codes of conduct for each gender. The bedrock principles boiled down to “Boys will be boys” (for my brothers), and for me, the youngest and only girl, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything.”

  Not saying anything at all was my mother’s only way of coping with all the not-nice parts of life.

  In this, I later came to see, she perfectly mirrored the genteel Toronto way of being in the 1940s, the years of my childhood. Above all, we did not talk about sex or race. They were not Nice. This was more than dropped threads; this was an entire fabric of experience that could not be spoken of.

  When I was eleven, and was nabbed by the teacher with a hot copy of my hand-printed TinyTown Newspaper—complete with headlines, ruled columns and letters painstakingly embellished with serifs—I was sent home in disgrace to find my mother lying down in a darkened room in a state of speechless horror. How could I have written such … such … filth? It’s true, there were doltishly lame little jokes referring to menstruation and underpants. But because I had to stand beside my mother’s bed in an agony of shame while my choked self-justifications were waved into silence, I could never explain that the newspaper had started out as an innocent pastime. It was only when my classmates showed utter indifference to my straitlaced items of classroom news (aah, the downward path to pornography) that I began to spice up the classified section with prepubescent smut.

  This incident precipitated my mother’s boldest step in sex education. Some months later, she managed to find a discreet pamphlet. Blushingly, she mentioned to my brother and me that we would find something interesting to read on a side table in the living room. But I already knew I must not ask about such things. That had been made quite clear several years before when the older kids on the street repeatedly taunted the younger ones—out there under the street lamps in the wild moments of daring at dusk—that our fathers had had to fuck our mothers to create us. I had no idea what “fuck” meant, but clearly it was loathsome, a deed so repugnant that it cast all our origins into a muck of disgrace. I absolutely could not believe that our parents had done something dirty. But the big kids had seemed so sneeringly sure…. After weeks of bothered perplexity, I chose a moment when I was setting the table for dinner. “Fork” reminded me of that mysterious word. “Daddy,” I asked in my best seven-year-old tone of polite inquiry, “Did you really have to fuck Mummy to get us?”

  The impact was stunning. My father thundered into the kitchen, roaring at the top of his lungs, “Lee! Lee! Did you hear what your daughter said?”

  “My daughter! She’s no daughter of mine!” exclaimed my mother, near tears as she frantically stirred the soup.

  The counterpoint disownings continued for some time, followed by a profound silence, and I didn’t find out the answer to my question for several years.

  When urgently pressed to express something, my mother would resort to clichés. At thirteen, I sullenly donned the almost-compulsory 1950s outfit: long-line bra, rubber panty girdle, saddle shoes, bobby socks, pleated skirt and Peter Pan blouse. But I drew the line at lipstick. Beside herself with anxiety that I would go on and on like this, and ultimately fail to “marry well,” my mother memorably exclaimed, “But Michele! Even Nature adorns herself!” Later, when I teased her about this ornate utterance, she blushed and explained that she thought she was appealing to my love of Beauty.

  Despite this overlay of reticence, reluctance, shyness and propriety, my mother and I had an almost electric current of understanding that flashed between us at critical moments.

  The medium was not words but our hands touching.

  In 1944, in a moment of profound silence, I learned that it was dangerous to be a Jew. I was oblivious to the war, having been born the year it began, and my parents didn’t speak much about our Jewishness. But when my mother took me to Allenby Public School to register me for kindergarten, she held my hand as we stood before the secretary in the principal’s outer office. Perkily, the secretary recorded our names, address and phone number, filling in the spaces on a form.

  “Religion?” she asked, looking up brightly, pencil poised.

  My mother, the soul of social politeness, didn’t answer. The silence hung there. At last: “Hebrew,” she said, and her hand tightened painfully on mine.

  Hebrew? This was a word I had never heard before. I knew it was wrong and that my mother certainly knew better. In the long moment before the secretary nodded and bent to complete the form, and as my mother squeezed my hand tighter and tighter, I absorbed the knowledge that just to say the word “Jew” aloud was dangerous, even for a grown-up like my mother.

  My experiences at Allenby confirmed that first signal. There were few Jewish children in the school, and the principal was an open anti-Semite. In kindergarten, while the others sang lustily, “Jesus loves me!” I mouthed the terrifying words to myself—I knew already that it was in the name of Jesus that the other children would taunt and hit—until my father taught me to sing subversively.

  “Jesus loves me, Yes he does—ve-e-e-ry kind of Jesus!” No one ever caught me whispering the sarcasm. It was a kind of private consolation.

  It seems odd now to speak of anti-Semitism as an unspoken menace in Toronto of the 1940s and 1950s, when the dominant culture hardly tried to conceal its bigotry. The sting in the scorpion’s tail was that we, the Jews, were not allowed to speak of anti-Semitism. If we named it, rejected it, spoke out against it, we were doubly reviled as despicable slanderers and outrageous liars.

  For this reason, it was impossible to tell my parents about the daily humiliations and perils of being a Jewish child in a mostly gentile public school. How difficult it was to sing those Christmas carols and Easter hymns, praising the foreign God in whose name I was attacked in the schoolyard. Forced to sing them, I nearly choked on fear and shame, convinced that I was betraying my parents. How frightening was principal Kerush, who marched me furiously to his office and
threatened me with the strap when I was nine. I had finally summoned the courage not to raise my hand to vow to pray to Jesus every day, in the annual assembly convened by the Gideon Bible Society in the stuffy basement audiovisual Room.

  How silencing, above all, was the weekly music class. Mr. Housen, the music teacher, explained to us in Grade I that Jews were not musical and that it was well known that Jews could not carry a tune. Therefore, any Jews in the class—except for Marilyn Goldstein, who had perfect pitch and was often asked to sing the opening note—were to mouth the words to all the songs in complete silence, especially when the music inspector came. Seven years of this, and I was made incapable of singing in public for the rest of my life.

  Eventually—after the war—some of the other parents finally learned of the open anti-Semitism in the school and complained to the school board. Mr. Kerush was quietly removed to Rose Avenue School in Cabbagetown, then a slum.

  A few years back, I took the trouble to do some research in the Toronto Public School Archives. Evidently, silence still muffled the vices of earlier times: the school board minutes of that historic meeting were somehow missing, and the Allenby School bulletin, fondly bidding farewell to Mr. Kerush, who would always think of Allenby as “his” school, made no mention of the reason for the transfer. How tidily the record was swept clean.

  But then, the anti-Jewish sentiment of the day was supposed to be our own fault, not theirs. I remember another, perhaps the last, of those wordless hand-to-hand communications between my mother and me. I was thirteen and frustrated by the boredom of my high school curriculum. I nagged my mother to let me go to a private school where, I imagined, the classrooms seethed with intellectual intensity. My brother had been admitted to the University of Toronto Schools, a public but exclusive boys’ school for the sons of the upper crust, plus a handful of bright strivers. The principal there had made it clear that although the Jewish quota was filled, my brother—with his blond hair, blue eyes, snub nose and athletic abilities—could just be fitted in. I was passionately envious of his chance at academic challenge.

  Reluctantly, at last, my mother made an appointment with the principal of Havergal College, a private girls’ school on Avenue Road in Toronto. It was the early 1950s. We were barely clinging to the lower rungs of the lower middle classes, and in fact, there was no possibility of our paying school fees. Nevertheless, she must have decided to make the attempt in the frail hope of a scholarship.

  From the first moment of our stiff little interview, the lady principal held her head back with a pained expression, as though we had brought a distasteful odour into the office with us. My mother made her hesitant explanation of my good marks, my poetry writing, my professional work as a radio and stage actress. The principal gave a small surprised laugh, astonished at our temerity. “No, no, it’s quite impossible,” she said. “We already have two Jewish girls this year, and that is absolutely our quota.”

  My mother’s hand was tight on mine as we crossed what seemed a mile of polished lobby floor to the exit.

  Anti-Semitism was the shard of glass in the pale custard of Toronto society. It became subtler after the war, unacknowledged and, to the untutored, invisible. If you were unwary, you forgot it was there or even learned to deny that it existed. You could be (as I was) turned away from graduate school at the University of Toronto, shunned by a new neighbour or mysteriously disliked by a colleague and never fathom the reason until much, much later, when some friendly snitch told you the truth.

  But no Jew could ever mention the existence of anti-Semitism. That was the rule. I forgot the rule a few years back when a female “master” of Massey College at the University of Toronto invited me to sit at what they called “High Table” for dinner one night. Massey, an elite graduate college, still trails clouds of the old Toronto. At first, in the 1960s, it was for male students only. Even in the 1990s, when I had dinner there, Christian prayers were said in Latin before dinner, while students of every colour and creed sat docilely below at long refectory tables.

  Prayers done, I engaged in conversation with my table-mates. One, then head of the University of Toronto law school, asked me where I had attended primary school. He was surprised to learn that we had both attended Allenby. Rashly, I then committed the social faux pas of mentioning my overriding memories of anti-Semitism there. As I spoke, I saw the tight expression on the face of another professor, a prolific and conservative Canadian historian, sitting beside the law dean. I realized that I had once more spoken the unspeakable in the presence of a gentile Torontonian.

  The dean of law, a Jew, then promptly reminded me of the rules.

  “Anti-Semitism? You are certainly mistaken! I remember nothing of the sort—even though it’s true I did move away from there after Grade 2.”

  The conservative historian smiled a repressed, malicious smile. It was uncannily like the smile on the face of the Havergal principal.

  I coped with this embarrassment in the only way I had been trained. I fell silent. I had nothing Nice to say.

  My Secret Life

  as a Mother

  Susan Swan

  “You’ll never write again,” my grandmother told me when I described the difficulties of combining mothering with writing. I remember the satisfaction in her voice when she said this. It was as if she were admitting me to a private club of non-doing.

  In those days, I didn’t see raising children as an achievement. I gave birth to my daughter in 1974, at a time when some feminists were encouraging young women like me to avoid family life, declaring that marriage and heterosexual relationships had limited female potential historically, in virtually all areas of public life. So confusion abounded over the value of motherhood. Some of that confusion was coming from voices in the women’s movement, and I believed them. That is, I claimed I did. My grandmother’s warning came after she had given me a statue of a mother holding a small child against her breast. Vowing that she’d eat her words, I hid the statue away. I was rebelling against the notion that mothers should give up professional work for their children. But I felt too superstitious to throw out the statue; I worried that my grandmother was probably right, that I wouldn’t be able to write after my daughter was born, and although I vowed I’d do both, this warning hovered for years in the psychic air around my mothering.

  My mother’s warning was more sophisticated and chilling. “Doctors shouldn’t have wives,” she liked to say, a phrase that evoked my country-doctor father who gave most of his life to his practice. As a child, I’d encountered first-hand what his dedication to his community meant: no time for me. In my mother’s view, it was better if dedicated professionals went it alone, without dragging in unsuspecting family members who didn’t sign on for the sacrifice of time that intense personal ambition demands. My mother’s generation came to adulthood around the time of The Red Shoes, a film about a dancer who threw herself under a train because she couldn’t square off the demands between art and love. Still, my mother’s perspective as a doctor’s wife was uniquely hers, and mine.

  Seeing into my own nature, I knew I shared my father’s temperament and drive. Did this mean I shouldn’t have a child? Or personal relationships? These questions made me uneasy. As a woman, I wanted both, but in those days there were no voices, male or female, that said it was wise, or even possible, to be a mother and a writer. God knows, Virginia Woolf hadn’t raised children. And Elizabeth Smart, author of By Grand Central Station, I Sat Down and Wept, had issued a warning—very like my grandmother’s—in her poem “The Muse: His & Hers.”

  Guilt drove him on.

  Guilt held her down.

  She hadn’t a wife

  To lean upon

  In the late seventies, I met Smart in her cottage in the dell near Flixton, Suffolk, and she told me that seeking “honourable discharge,” she had put off her writing until her children were raised. She said as long as she could keep her grammar and syntax, she felt she’d be all right. But she wasn’t. I saw an older woma
n suffering from a horrendous case of writer’s block, partly brought on by the forty-year separation from the publication of her first novel to her next book. During this time, Rose, the youngest of Smart’s children (she raised all four on her own by working in magazine publishing), came back to live with Elizabeth, bringing along a grandchild. When Rose died, Elizabeth blamed herself for failing as a mother.

  Reconsidering my life as a single mother, I see that I was continuously trying to fit into one dogma or the other (and sometimes both at the same time) and never succeeding. The feminist dogma that personal relationships weren’t as important as a career didn’t accurately suit my life. Although I paid lip service to the notion that such things hampered my literary work, I was privately profligate with the hours spent on my child, my lover, and my friends. I was also doing my best to behave like a man publicly—at least the way I thought WASP men behaved, which was to be stoical, to deny my feelings, to get on with making a livelihood, to do well in my work and, God forbid, to never get caught short by my own femininity.

  My journals reflect anxious days of writing fiction, working to meet deadlines as a professional journalist and struggling to be domestic and nurturing. When I picked up my daughter from daycare at the end of the day, I understood why my father wanted to hide behind his newspaper before supper, and I felt fresh respect for my mother’s patience.