by Renee Rodin
SUBJECT TO CHANGE
Renee Rodin
Talonbooks • Vancouver
For Sandy, my sister and friend
Contents
Once I Got Married Twice
Stretch Marks
The Real Deal
PX
BC Rama
Predation
Terra-ism
A Naif’s Story
Glass
Ready for Freddy
Judgement
The Neighbourhood
Yew and Me
Time Top
Googling the Bardo
Walking
Wealth
Participants at R2B2
Acknowledgements
Once I Got Married Twice
From the time I’d hit puberty my mother would say, “I don’t care who the father is, I just want you to make me a grandmother.”
I’d barely turned seventeen when a friend I used to hang out with at a coffee house in Montreal said, “You’ve got to meet this cute boy from Brooklyn.” Murray was also seventeen and already living on his own in a room his parents had rented so he could go to university while they moved back to the States. That impressed me. Everyone else, including me, was still living with their parents and itching to get away from them.
Murray turned me on to marijuana and Marxism, and after he began serenading me with his blues harp under my bedroom window I couldn’t resist him. We rented a wonderful apartment, for sixty-five dollars a month, on Prince Arthur near McGill University. It was in a small, old, brick building taken care of by someone we referred to as “Dribble Puss.” We covered a sofa in black-and-white vinyl cowhide, painted our wooden furniture black and made curtains out of baby blue burlap.
Had I known then that my parents had lived together in the 1930s before they were married, I wouldn’t have pretended Murray lived upstairs with a guy from the Eastern Townships who taught me to make hamburgers. Confident I could cook anything, I invited my parents for dinner and baked veal scallopini for the first (and last) time. When I took it out of the oven, the tomato sauce had completely dried up so just prior to serving, I threw water on it to moisten it. The hot Pyrex dish instantly cracked into several pieces, but my mother inspected the food and said it was fine, so we ate it anyway.
We questioned authority and, in those days, partied hard. This was in spite of or maybe because of the carnage in Vietnam, a constant backdrop to our lives. When Murray received a deferment from the draft because he’d been born with a minor foot deformity that prevented him from being able to march well, we danced with relief.
After we both graduated from Sir George Williams with BAs, I worked with emotionally disturbed kids who lived in an old mansion that had been converted into a treatment centre. There were at least three staff people per child and the kids actually improved under our care. It was a job I liked so much I was surprised I got paid for it.
Murray landed a government job in Albany, the state capital of New York, about a four-hour drive from Montreal. On Labour Day weekend I donned my Jackie Kennedy look-alike coat (she was the reigning fashionista back then) and took the bus to visit him. The next day we joined Murray’s parents in Brooklyn to go to his cousin’s wedding in Paterson, New Jersey, which really excited me because it was Allen Ginsberg’s home town. Even though I was sure he didn’t know the couple, I still harboured the fantasy he might show up at their wedding.
At the reception the men were dressed in dark tuxes, the women in pastel gowns. I wore what I considered to be my finest garment, a wine-coloured silk sari trimmed in gold leaf. If there were any raised eyebrows about my appearance, I was as blissfully unaware of them as I was of the concept of cultural appropriation. I felt graceful and elegant.
I’d recently stopped taking the birth control pill, which had so blasted me with hormones I’d been depressed and bloated for the entire previous year. But every month since, if my period was even a day late, I’d cry about it to my friend, Trudy, because I was terrified I might be pregnant. Murray however used to blithely assure his mother that we’d get married as soon as I was.
On that Labour Day weekend in Albany I got pregnant. It had been exactly for the same reason people plan pregnancies that we hadn’t wanted to—it was too momentous a decision. We preferred to play reverse Russian roulette. We were twenty-one and we were in heaven.
Each of us held on to our job because we intended to go in a few months to England where Murray was to attend film school in London and I was to give birth. All I remember about Expo ’67 was standing in line for Laterna Magika at the Czech Pavilion. That’s where I blurted out to my sister that I was going to have a baby. She was floored.
We were right on the cusp of the great social changes of that decade, but still, in those days, if you got pregnant you got married. In Quebec, then, you couldn’t have a civil ceremony, so one bright mid-October afternoon, Murray and I went looking for a Greek Orthodox priest because I liked the dramatic way they looked with their long beards and long dark cassocks. Only later did I realize how much they resembled Chassidic rabbis around whom I always felt irrationally guilty and scared.
After two Greek priests brushed us off, thinking we were just pulling their legs, on our usual route home we passed St. James United Church, the landmark built in 1898, on Ste. Catherine Street. For the first time, we stopped in. The minister was puzzled about why two Jewish people would come to him, but he also seemed flattered by our request—or else simply concerned we’d continue to live in sin if he didn’t marry us. He bore a strong resemblance to Billy Graham whose picture sat prominently on his desk—they both had the same bushy eyebrows and good-natured Nordic looks.
He offered to use his office, but we insisted that we be married in the main part of the church, with its 2,000-person seating capacity, and hurriedly got hold of two friends, Alden and David, to be our witnesses-cum-bridesmaids. Sunlight streamed through the stained glass windows on that breezy fall day as the five of us stood at the front. The only other person there was the caretaker at the entrance to the church, far behind us, sweeping up the fallen leaves. Just as the minister was about to begin, Murray instructed him: “Don’t mention Jesus.”
He was taken aback for a second, but then graciously asked, “Is God okay?” and chuckled when we gave him the go-ahead.
The ceremony took about three minutes after which we walked over to David’s place on de Boullion (or was it St. Cuthbert?) where we partied and everyone but me dropped acid. A couple of days later we went to my parents’ house to begin to tell our families the news. We anticipated Murray’s parents would be thrilled since they’d been bugging us to tie the knot, but when we phoned they were horrified we’d eloped and had done it in a church yet!
We thought my mother, who rarely expressed surprise because that would have meant someone had caught her off-guard, would be ecstatic since she was finally going to be a grandmother. Instead, in a complete deadpan, all she said was, “Well I knew you two weren’t just playing Monopoly,” a favourite game of ours when we were stoned.
My family wasn’t the slightest bit religious but the day after we’d broken our news, my mother called to say she’d found a rabbi in the Yellow Pages who told her our baby would still be a mumzer (bastard) if we didn’t get married in a Jewish ceremony.
A month later, on Remembrance Day, Murray’s and my immediate family assembled in the rabbi’s study to get married again. I wore a cream-coloured dress and a veil, made for me by my friend Rhonda’s sister, whose shade of pink matched the sash around my waist and the spots of blood that had begun to appear on my underwear.
Worried that I was on the verge of a miscarriage, my mother said to the rabbi, “Make it snappy, I don’t want her on her feet too long
.” He sped through the service, interrupting himself only to yell at those of our relatives who kept hopping on his upholstered armchairs to get better vantages from which to take their photographs.
Then everyone, except for the rabbi, went to a French-Canadian restaurant, chosen by my mother, in Old Montreal. The main attraction at Au Lutin qui Bouffe was a piglet that got wheeled around in a cage for patrons to feed with a baby bottle. Jews are strictly forbidden to eat pork. Unlike in India, where Hindus can’t eat beef but treat cows with respect and festoon them with garlands, Jews and pigs have never quite hit it off. That evening though, everyone seemed to enjoy the diversion.
Stretch Marks
In the spring of 1979, my father left my housebound mother in Montreal and came to Vancouver to join my sister and me on a holiday. My mother had planned this trip for us, probably feeling guilty and thinking that my father had become weary of looking after her.
I was tired too. My marriage to a filmmaker had ended years earlier. We’d been together since we were teenagers and had three kids in three and a half years, each one very much wanted by both of us. But we were just kids ourselves.
Though Murray took the children when he could, which meant mainly on the weekends, I was ready for a longer break. Neither my sister nor I was especially close to Abe, but saying “no” would have caused a big commotion in the family. Sandy was also due for time off from her job, and since our parents were treating us, we decided to go for it.
Joey was now eleven years old, Noah nine, Daniel almost eight, and it was a perfect time to be away because they were so focused on my daughter’s cat, Bushka, who’d just had her first litter, all female. Joey named them Pierre, Elliott and Trudeau.
Fortunately, Sandy’s partner offered to stay with the kids, otherwise it would have been impossible. Finding a reliable babysitter, even for an evening, was difficult and expensive. I didn’t want to impose on my childless friends nor on those who had only one child. It didn’t seem right for them to take three of mine, and I didn’t want to take their one child three times in order to make it even. I was determined that the few things I could control would be fair. My kids were very good at keeping me on my toes in that area.
We chose San Francisco because our father, a Montreal taxi driver and tourist guide, had heard the only other place in North America that came even close to Montreal’s beauty was San Francisco and he was curious to compare. Another plus was that city was just a three-hour flight from Vancouver, but American and therefore “foreign.”
Downtown, where our cheap hotel was located, the streets were filled with amputees in wheelchairs or on crutches. Most were disaffected. These vets were the embodiment of war, their young lives had barely begun before they had been so brutally disrupted. Vietnam had never seemed so real to me.
Long before we’d left Vancouver, Sandy and I had made our own plans. Minutes after we dropped our bags I muttered to Abe, “We’re going to an art show. You won’t be interested in it. We’ll meet you later for supper.” We couldn’t wait to see The Dinner Party at the Museum of Modern Art, an exhibition causing a sensation. As it turned out this would be the only time, for decades, that it would be shown in its entirety.
Headed by Judy Chicago, the collective project took four years and four hundred volunteers to complete. At its centre was a series of thirty-nine ceramic plates using floral imagery to depict female genitalia. Each setting was dedicated to a “guest of honour” who had contributed significantly to Western civilization. The work was highly controversial; some thought Chicago was ridiculous to reduce the representation of a woman to a body part, others that she was heroic.
Eager as we were to leave, it didn’t occur to us to ask Abe what he’d be doing while we were away. But as we were racing off he told us anyhow. With a sheepish look he said, “Well, while you’re doing that, I’ll be going to my first porn movie. I’m going to see Deep Throat.”
The Dinner Party was good and gutsy, though my expectations had been unreasonably high because of the hype. And I was distracted. The room was jammed with onlookers and as we inched alongside the long tables to peer at the plates and read the information on each woman, my mind kept returning to my father, wondering what he was seeing.
Later Sandy and I talked far less about the show than we did about Abe. Because he was a voracious newspaper reader, and The Dinner Party was receiving a lot of press, we were sure he knew about it. We were afraid that he was equating what we were seeing with pornography.
And we felt guilty, as if we were complicit, because we knew he knew we’d never squeal on him. Our parents had enough on their own plates to fight about. If Florence found out he’d been to a porn movie, it would either have set her off laughing or thrown her off her rocker. We could never predict with her and we didn’t want to risk finding out.
Going to the film wasn’t the worst of our father’s sins. We begrudgingly accepted that a middle-aged man out on the town for the first time without his wife might want to go to such a “cultural” phenomenon. Rather his great crime was in telling us, his daughters that he was going to see it. Why hadn’t he kept his mouth shut or else lied about it? Sandy and I registered our disapproval but only with each other.
The rest of our trip was spent all together doing the tourist things: Chinatown, Fisherman’s Wharf, the cable cars and the rhododendron gardens. It was a long five days. Abe conceded that San Francisco had its splendid sights and was therefore worthy of comparison, but he was keen to return to his beloved Montreal and get away from his sour daughters.
A while later Judy Chicago came to give a lecture at a packed hall in Vancouver. I was knock-kneed with excitement to be able to see this hot feminist art star. After she gave her spiel about the making of The Dinner Party she fielded questions. Someone asked, “Can a woman be an artist and a mother too?” A deep hush fell over the audience. You could hear hair grow as we waited for her to answer. “No,” Chicago said, “that’s simply impossible.”
There were several loud groans. That was the last thing I heard before my ears went on strike. Then my vision became blurry, and it hurt to breathe. An oddly familiar odour permeated the air: it was the smell of defeat. I fled home to huddle in bed, small and miserable, until anger brought me back to my own size.
Here was a woman who had so much support from so many women to do her art. Why couldn’t she have parlayed that support into helping other women artists? Namely me. She was saying my life as I wanted to lead it was impossible. Since I wasn’t going to give up being a mother, I should give up being a writer.
For months after that I bore a grudge against Chicago, whom I doubt I will ever meet personally. And even if I ever did get a chance to tell her how I felt betrayed by her, would she remember, recant or just tell me to “get a life”? I shouldn’t have placed that much importance on her answer, given her all that power, let myself be reduced by her. But I was very vulnerable to opinion then, hungry for support from other women.
It was in the heady days of the Women’s Movement, the Second Wave of Feminism, which had followed on the heels of the Civil Rights Movement sparked by the courageous actions of Rosa Parks. Great strides towards equality were made in society but not without internal strife over issues of class and race. As well, many mothers felt the movement was only for women without children.
Since for centuries most women had no choice about having children, the current thinking was that motherhood was too traditional. The pill was widely available and abortion was decriminalized. Instead of opting for liberation, women who had become mothers had made the “wrong” choice. We felt marginalized.
Even in the best of circumstances and with a lot of support, parenthood is daunting. Along with the realization that you are the pivot upon which so much depends, comes considerable self-doubt. You have to learn to trust your instincts, discover the authority you never knew you had. Keep yourself solid and fluid for your ever-changing children. Being a low-income single parent held additional challen
ges for me. Still, by and large, as a mother when I wasn’t terrified, anxious or guilt-ridden, I felt strong, capable and content.
But, if someone asked me what I did, though parenting was my full-time occupation, I never answered right away, “I’m a mother.” Nor did I admit, “I’m a writer,” because if I did and people found out I was also a stay-at-home mother, my writing would be relegated to a “hobby,” and I to “amateur” status.
Like most writers, I couldn’t and still can’t support myself solely by my writing. But no committed writer (or committed anything else) is an “amateur.” All my love relationships were with writers until I realized I didn’t need to live vicariously through them—I was a writer myself although I felt like a fraud to even think that way. To the dreaded question, “What do you do?” I’d hem and haw or say, “I’m a tennis pro.” I’d never played a game, nor wanted to, but it was the most outlandish response I could imagine in light of my life. (I was to play my first game of tennis on my sixtieth birthday).
“Are you a daycare centre?” strangers would ask when they saw me herding my close-in-size kids down the street. Real day-care gave me a badly needed breather from my children and just as importantly, them from me. But I seldom wrote, even after they entered elementary school.
I had part-time jobs and if one child or another wasn’t home with the sniffles, or if I wasn’t getting groceries, cleaning or doing something else to make the house more liveable, I’d relish being alone to replenish myself: to prepare for the scramble of noisy demands that was sure to resume after school.
What I needed in order to write was a blank state of mind, a sense of unlimited time and freedom, and I couldn’t decompress in what little free time I had to achieve that blankness, to focus. Like many new mothers I could barely read a book for a long while after I’d had a baby. Most of my body resumed its former shape eventually and I began to like, be proud of, my stretch marks, but my ability to concentrate was radically different.
