Art is a staircase, Mom told me more than once. Learn where it maintains ground and where it rises or falls. I heard that phrase echoed dozens of times when I had carried Gran up and down the narrow staircase of her house, my feet feeling out the risers and treads I couldn’t see for the thin body in my arms. In the theatre, Gloria climbed a step in Lady Macbeth’s first scene as she read a letter from her travelling hubby. He describes his meeting with “these weird sisters,” the non-father Macbeth claiming the witches as family. Sisters, not witches, women, or girls. Gloria extended the stage convention of having an actor read a letter aloud by having a pre-recorded voice track by the Lady Macbeth actor double the recitation. At times the recorded version lagged behind the live, portent echoing portent. At other times, the two versions were layered in stereo, the recording thickening the live and vice versa. When Lady M. lowered the note after she read it, Mom hit us again with a recorded “This have I thought good to deliver thee.” At this echo, Lady M. crumpled the note in front of her hips. Macbeth’s words but Lady Macbeth’s voice. And body. Deliver thee was said directly in front of her hips. Pride, fear, and wonder bit into me.
As Lady M’s speech ended with that letter crumpled in front of her hips, I tried a little theatre Morse, pressing my leg against the side of Kate’s. She didn’t press back.
36. Mombeth II
Family, it’ll make you blind and it’ll make you see. Without Mom’s production, I’d have gone on misremembering Lady Macbeth’s famous line as “unsex me now.” How could I do that, living here in polluted Windsor? We’ve got one of the highest cancer rates in Canada. We tip the scales for Hodgkins lymphoma and babies born missing chunks of their brains. Our MS rate matches that of third-world toxic dumping grounds. Wind-sore Windsor. The nearby Aamjiwnaang Nation has one of the highest rates of female births in the world, two girls for every boy. And in the hooker capital of Canada, the line is definitely unsex me here.
Gloria refracted Lady M’s unsex me soliloquy by sending out the three child actors again, this time clean-faced and dressed not as witches but identically to Lady Macbeth. “Come you spirits,” the lady called, and out came these three little Lady M surrogates to mime behind a translucent scrim. “Come you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here.” Each of the three mini-Ms mimed the presence of breasts, breasts each child actor clearly did not have, then ripped them away. One minute the miniature trio moved together, three parts of the same whole, then suddenly they were independent. Two girls stood behind the third and moved their hands and arms across hers. This accompanying mime emphasized already memorable lines in a speech that needed no emphasis for Kate or me.
Did Mom know all of the arrows she was firing into us? Could she count the ways? Unsex me. The most obvious interpretation, Change my gender. Stop me from being a woman. Whether that means turn me into a man (sativus) or neuter me (sativum) is a director’s choice, and Mom made hers quite clearly. Anything but sativa. Unsex me here could also simply mean undo the sex I have had. Turn the clock back before that forgotten pill or the night of the vodka bareback. This undoing became more and more apparent each time Lady M uttered that double-agent of a word, “come.” Each child dancer had been cruising about in a slow and exaggerated shuffle, a low-to-the-ground labouring of flung feet, angled knees, and long transfers of weight. At the single word “come,” they simultaneously jolted upright as if shocked.
Their work together was taunting enough. Apart, they were murder. They scattered from their first shocking “come” into separate roles. The middle ex-witch/child/mini-M slid to the ground to recline on her back, knees raised and breath chuffing like a birthing mother. The second knelt behind her head to mop her brow and coach her breath. The third lay between the patient’s knees as their madam made her hard bargain: “unsex me here, / And fill me from the crown”—grunts from the birthing child/mother—“to the toe topful / Of direst cruelty!” At the butcher’s lines, “Make thick my blood, / Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse,” the child physician and her child patient suddenly had a very different gynaecological procedure on their hands.
For all my terror, helplessness, and rage, I was still impressed. Once again we watched a woman subordinate her life and career to her husband’s and/or her uterus. All that for an audience of mostly women who earned substantially less than men, were promoted less often, were rarely chief executives. Even more undiscussed were the abortions. In a crowd of two hundred adults, how many of the women had responded to pregnancy by saying not now?
What balance. Glore never ignored a scene’s journey for its destination. Witness her gall. Start to finish, the whole play was one big relationship scrap. She’s more impressive; no, he’s more impressive. He’s nasty; she’s nastier. The switching, swinging Macbeths. Notice that the one Shakespearean female with multiple memorable lines is the dominatrix. In Act II, Mom sent her Lady out in a leather corset, all kink and riding crop. You might know a line of Juliet’s and a phrase of Ophelia’s, but it’s Lady Leather we all remember. Unsex me here. Out damned spot. If you’ve got another of her lines, I’ll wager it’s take my milk for gall. “Come to my woman’s breasts,” Mom’s Lady called as her surrogates cupped air in front of their small chests to latch even smaller, invisible heads onto their imaginary breasts, heads which they suddenly flung aside as the line continued: “Come to my woman’s breasts, / And take my milk for gall.” The next few lines had the weird sisters up and dancing together again briefly before two resumed their work against one. Shifting gears on the third and final call to “Come,” two of the dancers slipped behind the third, one working low on her body and the other, well, high. As their lady called, “Come, thick night, / And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,” the upper-body dancer worked behind her standing sister to roll and pass her a mimed joint. Below her, the crouching third put something into one of her hands before reaching across to extract something from the other, the classic green handshake. Then for a second time, two of the sisters again attended to the north and south poles of the third, the upper patting a brow and smoothing back hair one second then seizing her arms while her lower co-worker kneeled to yield a shining scalpel. We knew where and how the blade struck as Lady M concluded, “That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, / Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark / To cry ‘Hold, hold!’”
An abortion production of Macbeth from my mother, beside the woman I didn’t want to see become a mother. When the house lights came up at halftime, the audience applauding already, I turned to Kate. “You told her.”
If you’ve heard this from Kate, you’ll have heard that I had been the one sitting closer to the aisle and that in waiting for an answer I had blocked not only her exit but also that of the dozen well-dressed people waiting down the row. All true, but listen to her reply.
“Will you let me by?” she asked instead of answering my question. And when that didn’t work. “Us?”
Maybe she meant everyone down the row. Maybe.
37. The Zug Exhale
Intermission. The play was suspended for fifteen minutes. Kate and I had been suspended for nearly as many weeks.
Will you let me by?…Us?
If you want by, go.
But the crowded theatre wouldn’t let either of us by. The half-shocked, half-impressed audience kept us shackled together with small steps in the busy aisle then down a crowded staircase. Strangers in dry clean-only clothes were never more than six inches away, often less. At the doorway, I let Kate pass in front of me. Was she already picking her steps a little more carefully? Walking to shield?
“Are you thirsty?” I asked the back of her head.
“A pee first.”
“There’ll be a lineup. If you’re thirsty, I should get in line now.”
“Okay.”
“Okay what? Water or Perrier?”
“Perrier. Thanks.”
One of the least heard words
in the language was flitting about the crowded lobby. Abortion—a bird flown in from the dark outdoors, beating its circuit of panic. Even more frequent, the bright, single syllable she. She, most of the actors. She, my mother. Lady She. The women who had, who hadn’t, who might have. Normally the A-word is the secret. Gloria once told me that women in book clubs often confess to their affairs and/or those of their husbands. Semi-strangers mention miscarriages while eating little sweets off little napkins. Nearly 30 percent of them will have had abortions, but none of them say so. Suddenly I was hearing it all over the lobby. Imagine what Kate was getting in the ladies’ room.
I stepped out of line quickly, one movement shy of leaping and ripping my hair out. She’d told Gloria, and I’d been standing in line to buy bottled water. She told her. She told her. She told her. For Kate to have said “I’m pregnant” to Gloria was a cowardly way to deliver her verdict on the pregnancy to me. What, she was going to tell Gloria and still get herself taken care of? Look what Mom had to say about that.
I moved between the bar lineup and the women’s room door. This second spat beside the Detroit River would be my call, not hers. When Kate emerged, I stepped forward and pointed to the exit. “Some air.”
Fittingly, we had to pass through smokers to get any privacy outside. The Zug winds were up, so we only stepped from one stink to another.
“You had no right to tell her when we still haven’t made our decision.”
“Our decision? Rights? I puke enough in the morning. Yes, Antony, I shouldn’t have told your mother. And I should have let you know as soon as I decided, but decide is a tricky word here. This isn’t like booking a trip or choosing a major. As for you, the second thing I know is that I wish I could have this baby with you. A version of you.”
Apart from her, I was incandescent with rage. In front of her, I felt less enraged than irrelevant, and that feeling had been growing for two months. Fatherhood, my feelings—big deal.
“You talk as if humiliating me in there means nothing. The pregnancy—”
“The baby, Antony. Our baby. Not a pregnancy, a baby.”
“The pregnancy is one thing. Shutting me out and telling Gloria is quite another. Look at what she’s doing to us in there.”
She reached for my arm. “I am sorry about that. I had to tell someone, a woman. Safaa’s too much of a witness. Melissa—not right either. I thought this would be better than telling my mom. You get pregnant and you need to tell another woman. You just do.”
I shook free of her arm.
“‘Need to tell.’ Aren’t you the lawyer? You mean want to tell.”
That lit her eyes up. “Don’t you get it? I’m no longer a law student with great prospects. This is bigger than that, all of that. Your rights. My rights. Neither of them make a fuck of a difference to the little tadpole heart inside me.”
I’d never before seen someone look stronger by crying. Her eyes welled with tears and threatened to unbalance her forehead, but she swung her jaw out to right her skull and stare back at me. “I know what my body wants.”
“So do pedophiles. So do rapists.”
She flashed me an asshole look. I flashed back: an asshole who’s right.
“Listen to me. I go to sleep pregnant. I wake up pregnant. My blood is pregnant. Remember Orwell writing about being unable to shoot a man while he takes a shit? That’s how I feel. It doesn’t matter anymore how the rifle got into my hands. It’s there, and some poor fucker’s got his pants down.”
“I’m not thinking how either. I’m thinking when. If we can’t be good parents, why be parents at all?”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“You tell me. You cannot work seventy hours a week and be a good parent. Period. Choose your moment, darling. Six or seven years from now you could be set and I could retire, get a hobby job. Teach taek. Finish school. Become a green builder. Remember Enron? Most of the pirates stayed on the sinking ship until it took them down with it. But a few got out as rich as princes.”
“Yeah, the stripper guy.”
“The smart guy. Just being a parent doesn’t make somebody a good parent. Most parents are shoppers and wipers. At best, they round that out with chauffeuring. But you have to want to drive to soccer practice. I don’t, and I don’t think you do either. Fear of blood on our hands is never going to make you more patient with shrill cartoons and plastic junk everywhere. Parenting may be affectionate or meaningful, but it isn’t intellectual. You’re the smartest woman I’ve ever met. This isn’t the right time, in your life or mine, for wiping and yelling.”
“That doesn’t make it the right time for killing, either. Do I wish I weren’t pregnant, that for me a big decision was still whether to buy or lease a car, a Windsor firm or Toronto? Yes. Am I going to kill to get it? No.”
The theatre lights flashed us back to our seats.
“I’m going,” she announced, then did, hailing a curbside taxi. After a few steps she turned back to say, “Tell her I had to pee too often to stay.” No mention of the expensive shoulder sweater she’d leave me to collect from her seat or simply abandon. But she needn’t have said anything. Her striding away alone was the highest compliment she could have paid Gloria’s Macbeth. Mother Kate was beginning to gel, a woman looking after her own or at least armed with the perfect excuse to do what she and she alone wanted to do. Why stick around for the second half of the play? She knew how it would end.
38. Cronus Productions Ltd.
You can guess what Gloria made of Lady M’s “Out damned spot” line. The blood of careerist murder on manicured hands. Convenience blood. Sure, Mom, point taken. But remember that her career was possible after five years of university, not eight, and that she hails from the last generation of lifetime careers and constant employment. Eat the boomers.
I bristled through the second half. She did Banquo’s ghost as an aborted child come to life. Once again one of the child actors was dressed to mirror, in flagrant miniature, another character. For Glore, Banquo’s ghost was unborn. Later, towards the bloody climax, Macduff saying he “was from his mother’s womb untimely ripp’d” somehow made him both aborted but also born of a caesarean, a fetus-man with a score to settle. Watching indictment after indictment, piecing together this variation on tragedy’s grand message—you reap what you sow—I was forced to admit I was doing more than awaiting my word with Glore. Surely part of me was also sitting there, in public, passive and quiet, to staunch Kate’s wound. Cold comfort, though, hearing Macbeth’s “I am in blood / Stepp’d in so far” speech as his vote for abortion when the Kate parliament had just voted otherwise.
Wherever Mom was in the theatre, biting her lip in the wings or watching like a hawk from the control booth, she wouldn’t have liked the mathematical image I saw so clearly amidst all the hot oranges and cool blues of the stage lights. Alongside the estranged Macbeths I could also see back to an old textbook and its photograph of a Venn diagram set into a commemorative stained-glass window. Watching Mom’s play through the stained glass of rage, I saw every relationship as a Venn diagram of bodies and minds moving together or apart, hugging or slugging, admiring then exiting. Two lovers start out with the hope of aligning their planets, shifting their borders, sliding me into you and vice versa. Then, for some, a child, a third circle, a waxing and waning solar system of infants fixated on and imitative of parents they’ll eventually hold in contempt before maybe, maybe consenting to the pity visits and guilt calls. Across the water from the theatre, nearly one-third of American children were being raised by single mothers. For everyone in this story born after Peg and Bill, our Venn diagrams with our fathers had the briefest of intersections, a mere genetic download. That single touch then so much work to keep things whole.
Staunching my wound, seething, collecting my thoughts—whatever I was doing in that theatre had a predictable curtain call. By slipping out of my seat as soon as the final (roaring) ap
plause started I was able to avoid the crush of bodies which had slowed us at intermission. Here, finally, spiky rage shot through me. Everyone rising around me seemed so politely refreshed for having watched a fake tragedy with good lighting, to have been momentarily shaken in their nice clothes.
My asking for backstage admission and going down to the green room was a descent into Gloria’s lair, but what else to do? If you call the duel, your opponent gets to set the location. Laughter and a whirlwind of smells thickened as I descended worn stairs. The fatty smells of cosmetics, an acrid wave of hairspray, the crowbar of sweat. Rounding a corner, I saw the green room full of the half-undressed cast and the black-garbed crew. They hugged so frequently they created a communal, rotational dance, hug to the left, spin, now hug to the right. As someone in a dressing gown hinged one way then back I saw two seated queens, Gloria and her Lady M, drinking bubbly out of coffee mugs. Just before I reached them, I nearly collided with the child actor who had played Banquo’s ghost.
“Arlene,” Gloria said, “this is my son, Antony.”
“An excellent performance,” I told her. “Congratulations.”
“Thank you. I’m sure you’ve developed an eye.” Turning to Mom, Arlene said, “Well, darling, I really should get this shit off.” She rolled her eyes around to indicate the thick mask of makeup on her face. “Nice to meet you, Antony.”
Gloria glanced behind me. “You’re alone down here?”
“Alone now period, looks like. You can imagine how I might like a word.”
“This way.”
Shortly after a play, the stage is one of the few empty spaces available in a theatre. Gloria led me up a series of tiny backstage staircases. Watch your head here, and again here. Props sat ready on a side table in the wings: envelopes, swords, a leather-bound book. Once we hit centre-stage, I could see and sense her rooting her feet to the deck boards and squaring her shoulders. As of opening night, a director’s job is finished, and she walked the boards with palpable envy for her actors.
Keeping Things Whole Page 20
