The Girl in Saskatoon

by Sharon Butala

  We are both in the grade eleven Drama Club picture too, where, once again, Alex was chosen as Best Actress of the evening’s three plays. I remember sitting in the audience as the adjudicator spoke, and being startled by the choice. It was in the nature of a revelation for me; I thought, Oh, so that is what acting is, because I had not even noticed her when she said her lines. They simply registered and then I turned my attention to the next actor speaking, whom I’d recognized as acting. It was then that I realized that all overt sense of performing had to be buried. And the class notes for Alex’s grade eleven year: “You’re nothing but a hound dog so don’t be cruel; use ‘Love Me Tender’ as your rule. Listen to Elvis and don’t be a fool.” I suspected that this probably was something the writers had collected from somewhere, and although it was devoid of any meaning, they liked the hipster feel of it and chose to use it on Alex because nothing more personally significant had come to mind. Remembering what high school was like, I am sure they were very pleased with themselves over that note. (It occurs to me to wonder how Alex would have explained it to her mother and father.)

  In the grade twelve pictures Alex appears again with the Drama Club (where she is listed as club secretary) but she does not even place in the Best Actress listing. What a disappointment that must have been for her, her third year in Drama Club, and declared Best Actress twice, only to be ignored this time, when she might have expected it, when it might have mattered most to her. Her grade twelve class was 4C:“Great in endeavour, small in size. Shows enthusiasm in each enterprize.[sic] Ambition: Stewardess.” (The joke here was the reference to the town she’d come from.)

  Rock and roll was our music, and every Friday noon our gymnasium reverberated to its sounds while a couple of hundred teenagers twisted, stomped, and did that peculiar little hop-skip with the hip thrown out for a beat, arms extended, hands clasping the partner’s hands, and then the spin, sometimes only the girl, sometimes both the girl and the boy. To be able to jive, to be good at it, to have your own style, that was what we aimed for. Every Friday noon hour for the four years Alex and I were students at Tech we went down to the gym and joined in the dancing to Elvis’s “Blue Suede Shoes,” or to Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock.” Or rather, as things were in those days, if we were in grade nine we sat on the folding chairs that lined the walls, and at that, mostly at the back of the gym, the farthest from the stage, or else we stood in tightly packed clusters and unruly rows and giggled with our friends, moved our hips and feet to the music, and enviously—trying not to show our envy—watched the seniors dance.

  By grade ten we’d moved up toward the centre of the gym—the grade nine and ten boys must have been leaning against the walls or standing in groups in the doorways, or maybe hadn’t come at all—and sometimes danced with other girls, and once in a long while, an exceptionally pretty girl, or maybe one who had a steady boyfriend, would actually move front and centre and dance with a boy.

  By grade eleven we were bolder, more sure of ourselves, knew most of our peers, and understood our own social system better, so we moved to the stage end of the gym, sat boldly on the chairs near to it, or stood, swaying and tapping our feet invitingly to the music so that boys might ask us to dance. The goal was to dance enough times not to be seen to be a wallflower, a fate worse than death by torture; it was death by torture. If we couldn’t pull that off, we were better not coming to dance practice at all, and some people never did. But not me, and not Alex. We were in there, scared but eager, and by grade twelve, both of us without steady boyfriends, we still danced enough times not to be seen as unwanted and unlovely, as embarrassing pills.

  We did not understand that this system was also torture for many of the boys. I can imagine how many girls spent that noon hour walking the riverbank with their girlfriends, their hearts and souls back in the gym with the rest of the school, but their minds steadfastly on something else—anything else—knowing that dance practice, for them, was only humiliation. Or how many boys got in their cars and drove elsewhere that noon hour, also wishing to be in the gym, a pretty girl spinning at their fingertips, but not daring to risk failure—expecting, as did so many girls, that absolute failure was likely to be their humiliating lot. It wasn’t just the lot of those who were fat, or smelly, or whose nose always ran, or whose hair stuck out like a dust mop, or who appeared in clothes that were tattered and filthy, or worse, unfashionable, it was the lot of the ordinary in appearance, of the shy, of anyone who was perceived to be in any way different from the accepted standard. If we occasionally, privately, dreamt of a world where you were chosen to dance based on your inner loveliness and your interesting mind, we were a whole lot more likely to dream of a world in which we were pretty and with it, and had boys lining up just to talk to us. For many of us, it was our first experience of the real injustice of the world. The only escape from it, we thought, was growing up.

  When it wasn’t dance practice day, those of us who brought brown bag lunches—and if there wasn’t choir practice or Drama Club or a Students’ Representative Council meeting to attend, or if we weren’t athletes—would go downtown. Our school was sandwiched between the South Saskatchewan River and a large parking lot, with the Canadian Legion building directly behind the school (it would be torn down in 2007), and at the other side of the lot, the Saskatoon Civic Arena, now torn down in favour of a high-rise residence for seniors. We crossed between the buildings and walked a block north on 2nd Avenue, and we were downtown. We would go in groups, mostly of girls, and we would walk for half an hour or so through the various downtown stores that sold women’s clothing, Eaton’s being the first, best, and largest. We rarely bought anything. We just wandered around, bored out of our minds, and looked at the clothes. Or else one of us would be buying a pair of shoes with six of us lined up behind her, watching and giving advice.

  We were teenage girls, a fairly newly minted class of humanity, at the outer edge of the western pioneering society. We were among the first of the generations to be defined by our consumer interests, to have an industry of consumption aimed at us, to have our natural interests and desires, our psyches, plumbed by adults in order to sell to us. Together, we created the modern teenager as a separate category. Other factors were at work, of course: the move to the suburbs, the creation of the nuclear family, the need for people in suburbs to have cars, the post-war prosperity, and so on. What seemed to us fated, ordained, the way the world was, was actually a creation of larger forces.

  All through our high school years, Friday night was movie night. Mostly, we went in gangs, depending on what the movie was, all girls, or, if it was a rock-and-roll movie, boys too. Movie theatres were packed in the fifties; if you were late you couldn’t even get a seat. And everybody you knew was there, enthralled by the big screen, and by the big stars, chosen not for their ability as actors, no matter how gifted they might happen to be, but for their charisma, for the way the camera loved them. (It would appear now, also for their docility, as they were not so much human beings as well-paid commodities whose lives were controlled by their employers.)

  Mostly, we went to the Capitol Theatre on 2nd Avenue, the city’s main street, just a few blocks straight north of Tech. The Capitol was opened in optimistic and prosperous 1929, and was by far the fanciest of the six movie theatres then extant, with its decor identified variously as Spanish, Italianate, or Turkish, and with medieval-flavoured decorations, and a fake star-studded ceiling. High on its interior walls were false balconies with pillars and windows behind them, and a painted backdrop of trees and church towers. Regrettably, and despite loud protests by many citizens, in the eighties the Capitol was torn down. But its decor had signalled pretty clearly to all of us who entered it that we could leave behind our humdrum lives, that we were entering the world of dreams.

  It is hard to conjure for the younger reader raised on television just how big an influence those movies were on our lives, just how deeply the things we saw there were imprinted on our teenage minds. I s
till remember the tight, wine-coloured satin dress Marilyn Monroe wore in How to Marry a Millionaire, and how adorable she was even to a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old girl—with that famed vulnerability of which she could neither rid herself nor hide, even as she embarrassed us half to death, and even as we were baffled and deeply dismayed by her. And yet, the temptation was there, the possibility of her as a way to be a woman was opened to us. We held it in abeyance—who knew what adulthood might bring?

  But I do remember one girl who went to high school with Alex and me—another Ukrainian girl, as it happens—doing a young girl’s version of Monroe at a party, solely to attract boys, and how well it worked. It wasn’t a direct imitation, but a kind of putting-on of Monroe’s innocent sexiness. I think I felt more sorry for the girl than anything, probably because at a more mature level (which I was able to find in myself when I wasn’t so blinded by the movies), I knew that the performance came out of some real wounding, as it did with Monroe, as well as that the girl couldn’t possibly still be a virgin like the rest of us, that the boys saw this too, and that that was why it worked for her so well. I suppose we were taken aback partly because we knew instinctively that this wasn’t a healthy sexuality; it was not about husbands-and-babies, it was about daddy-and-his-little-girl, it was about desperation and an unfillable hollow of need.

  Although occasionally some girl might imitate Monroe’s walk, or her facial expressions, to make the rest of us laugh, I do not remember us even talking about Monroe other than in shocked phrases or half-sentences, without finding adverbs or adjectives, and sometimes without even nouns, to express our confused responses to her. It was that fifties virgin—whore dichotomy again and the reason Marilyn Monroe so confounded us all was the innocent, wide-eyed way in which she managed to be both at once. (Her tragedy, and it was a tragedy, should have been enough in itself to cause the second wave of feminism. She was so used by men.)

  I remember being torn: on the one hand, I wanted a happy marriage and I wanted to behave in the way I was told I was supposed to, but on the other, I wanted glamour, I wanted an independent life. And when I mentally juxtaposed the two, aware of the impossibility of having both, instead of recognizing that it was wrong to expect women to be submissive in marriage and to give up any hint of independence or autonomy in favour of husband and children, and being shown no alternatives, I just thought—we all thought—that somehow it would all work out. Instead of concerning ourselves with the falseness of those movies, and the real message behind them, we concentrated on the gorgeous dresses, the glamorous sets, the shots of famous places we’d never seen but dreamt that one day we would.

  From these films we took away several messages: that to marry wealth was a reasonable goal (although wealth plus love was the highest goal of all); that näiveté, genuine innocence, was endearing and proper in a woman (as was being a blonde), especially if one could manage to be sexy at the same time—this was the period when the term sexy came into popular use to describe a trait to be at once desired and deplored—or perhaps it was that näiveté in a woman was itself sexy. And also, that we should want to be married to a nice, high-performing man (if we couldn’t find a rich one), that we should have children, and that we should aspire to a life of peace and domesticity in the suburbs—but that none of this would be easy to achieve, as men, generally speaking, did not know what was good for them, and had to be cajoled and drawn toward the right and best thing. This, usually, in the face of a glamorous, enthralling, “bad” woman. It was always clear which of these two we were supposed to want to be. In many of our favourite films, the story was about not much else but negotiations for the prize of the star’s virginity.

  That the world would soon break wide open, destroying these stereotypes virtually forever, freeing us, a small handful of North American women, wasn’t something we could have imagined, so submerged were we in that world of fifties movies, and fifties television: Leave It to Beaver, Life with Father, I Love Lucy. In the meantime, most of us were conflicted about what we should want: caught between the natural desire to have lives of our own, and the equally natural desire to marry and have children.

  That was how we spent our Friday nights—dreaming at the movies. Saturday nights were, in my memory, reserved for parties and dances, or better, for dancing. I didn’t have a steady boyfriend and I wasn’t very pretty so I did not go to dances, not even school dances, because to do so would have meant an evening of leaning embarrassingly against the wall. Mostly, those dances were attended by steady couples, or those—both boys and girls—who had at least a hope of dancing. Whether Alex and her friends ever went, I don’t know, but when I asked them if Alex had dated in high school, they all said yes, but hesitantly, and not one of them could remember the name of one boy she’d gone out with. I suspect that her dating was kept to a minimum, this because, in return for her room and board, her job was to help her older sister with the housework and to babysit for her nieces and nephews. Besides that, every Ukrainian person I spoke to told me that Ukrainian parents were stern disciplinarians; it is—or was—part of the culture, and what children did and said, where they went and with whom, and at what time they returned, was closely monitored. Marie, Alex’s older sister, had parental responsibility for Alex as long as Alex lived in her house, and she told me herself that she kept a close eye on Alex. This did not mean that Alex couldn’t go out, but most likely that she could go out only on weekends, and had a strict curfew.

  The year I turned sixteen was the happiest year of my teenager-hood. A half-dozen or more of us, both boys and girls, and mostly from our same class, but one or two from other classes, used to hold a dance party every Saturday night. The boys would go round in somebody’s car and pick us girls up one by one and we would all go to somebody’s house—we rotated from home to home—and we would dance until midnight. We weren’t dating each other and never did, and the boys seemed to feel responsible for us. They drank a moderate amount of beer, we drank Coke or water, and sometimes they would allow us a sip or two from their beer. I remember one girl getting too enthusiastic and the boy pulling the bottle away from her, and saying, sternly, “That’s enough!”

  We jived until we could barely stand up; every Saturday night I would lose five pounds (which, of course, I’d regain during the week). This went on even after I had a weekend job in Food Services at the university. I cannot believe now that I could be on my feet all day in the cafeteria cleaning tables, sweeping, making milkshakes, and then dance all night. As for drugs, marijuana was the only drug we had heard of then. Most of us didn’t know what it was, much less how to get it, and if it had been available, we wouldn’t have bothered, because what did you need drugs for when there was alcohol, and there was dancing?

  But one night when the boys had picked us up, I remember that as we drove, they had a short, careful conversation, saying something like How do you feel? And a reply indicated nothing much was happening, and when we girls asked what they were talking about, they wouldn’t tell us, and we didn’t pursue it. You were careful with boys then, you didn’t push them, you didn’t demand. I remember thinking that some bad thing was entering our happiness, but I didn’t quite know what it was, although I thought maybe it was that thing we’d heard about, but as I never asked in those years, and barely remember who those boys were, I can only guess that they had just had their first taste of marijuana. That is the only memory I have of drugs from the years 1954 to 1958.

  As for Alex, a properly brought up and closely watched Ukrainian teenager, I think she must have yearned for freedom. Maybe that was what was behind that glance I saw her give that day nearly fifty years ago, in our last year of high school, and which, although I could not then understand it, I have never forgotten. A kind of weary patience, waiting for the time when she would be free.

  Chapter Five

  Wisdom

  In June of 1958 we had reached the end of our childhoods. For many if not most of us at Tech, it was also the end of formal education. Our
small gang of friends broke up, and while I still occasionally see a few of them, some I have never seen since, nor do I know what became of them. I stopped crossing the river every day, and began my five years of daily walking north along the river, but now on its east side, to what in those days seemed to be a kind of feudal estate high on the riverbank above and overlooking the river and downtown, and the old west side, to those beautiful warm pink-and-beige stone buildings, imitation Gothic, with their occasional crenellated tower and gargoyle under the eaves. I thought I had entered the kingdom of heaven. I thought that in one daring leap I had become one of the anointed.

  I have always wanted to know; my desire to know began long ago, when I was a small child and the world seemed so incomprehensible and chaotic to me. This, because of our situation as a family, the mystery in the form of wilderness and wild animals, sky and winter hovering around us all the time, the precariousness of our existence there, the never knowing what the next year might bring, or where it might find us, and because of the struggle life was, and my parents not noticing their children needed explanations. And so, wanting nothing so much all my life (although I did not know that is what I wanted until I was old) as to learn what everything meant, at some level beyond conscious thought, I thought that there, at last, at university, I would learn the secrets of the universe. But my presence there was at best tenuous, I knew. I didn’t want anybody to know that I didn’t really belong there; I walked in fear all my first year, sure that I would be found out and expelled from the paradise of which I felt myself barely worthy. (And not knowing that half the student population, in from distant, hardscrabble farms and ranches and tiny villages, felt the same way, and was as determined as I to succeed.) And I gave barely a thought to high school and my friends there; I am sure that all that first year Alex’s name and face never once crossed my mind. I had no idea what had become of her after graduation, and I don’t remember wondering.