Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir

by Susie Bright

  I heard a door slam. The car was stuck half cocked in a snowbank. She was walking away — my mother was walking fast on a dark street that fronted the river. I saw her step right up to one of the first doorways with a porch light. Then she disappeared. I couldn't see much without my glasses, but I was glad they hadn’t been broken in the crash.

  I don’t know how long I sat there by myself. No one walked by — it can be very lonely in Windsor Park. It was that January where it was forty below zero for forty days, and afterward everyone wore a button to brag about it. Coming so recently from California, I was still fascinated by snowflakes, the way I’d once been thrilled with four-leaf clovers. I liked to watch the way each one pasted itself to a windowpane before it was subsumed by another, and then another.

  Was it hours or minutes that went by? I became curious and impatient again, two signs of life. I got out, walked to the door I guessed she had gone to, and rang the bell. It was a dark wood house. I remember the Beatles lyric passing through my mind as I pushed the button: “Isn’t it good … ?” A middle-aged Japanese woman came to door, reminding me of our old landlady, Mrs. Koyamatsu, in Pasadena.

  “I’m looking for my mother,” I said, and Mom appeared at the door, on cue, as if she’d summoned a taxi and it had just arrived.

  “Oh yes, Susie, there you are. What are you doing in your pajamas?” My mom laughed as if I needed a fashion remedial.

  I have never seen anyone carry on as if nothing had happened, but then, I’ll never be fourteen again in Edmonton with blood on my flannel PJ’s, a black eye, a busted lip, and my mouth hanging open.

  Bleeding

  After the Saskatchewan River incident, I wasn’t Mommy’s little girl anymore. I watched her at a distance — and I didn’t tell her things. It was like being in a lion’s cage with a chair between the two of us.

  She didn’t know that I came home from Garneau Junior High at lunchtime to read and watch Petticoat Junction on TV. I made grilled-cheese sandwiches using the iron and ironing board like a sandwich press.

  My mother didn’t get home until six. She might walk in and crack me across the cheek; she might announce she wanted to curl my hair in cloth rags like Shirley Temple; she might walk into her room and close the door. But the daytimes were my time at home, and they were quiet. I loved how warm it was inside closed doors in Edmonton. They had figured out the heating thing in Alberta, unlike in the apartments we’d had in California. I could stand in our apartment at the ironing board, warm as a bug, and the sun would pour through the windows, reflecting the snow.

  Petticoat Junction was a half-hour sitcom about three silly sisters with sexy pigtails: Billy Jo, Bobby Jo, and Betty Jo. They’d have cute problems with their laundry and with boys.

  My mother had left a paperback copy of The Female Eunuch on the cardboard boxes she used as a dresser. I was old enough to take an interest in her books. This one had a female nude on the cover, and that caught my attention.

  I opened Eunuch, and it fell to a page where Ms. Greer dared you to taste your menstrual blood. She was witty. “Freud is the father of psychoanalysis,” she wrote. “It has no mother.” I could feel myself imitating her voice.

  She asked women what they were afraid of. I didn’t want Germaine Greer to know that that my answer was, “Just about everything.” But if I could act like her, talk like her, all my trepidations would fizzle away. I had always been a bookworm mimic; everything I read came out of my mouth, as if I was a living continuation of the script.

  Tasting my menstrual blood would surely be a walk in the park. I had been raised to be sensible about bodily functions. I decided I would taste mine as soon as my period appeared.

  Voilà — my fourteenth year, before I finished the last chapter of Eunuch, my first menstruation began. Conveniently, it was during my private lunchtime.

  I found some Kotex in the broom closet and started to arrange a pad in my bell-bottoms. It felt like a loaf of bread in my pants. I couldn’t believe my mother would put up something this uncomfortable. She didn’t even wear girdles, and she threatened to throw her bras out daily.

  Backward, forward; it felt like a wadded-up diaper, and I could only imagine it looked the same. It was time to clean up the ironing board — I had to get back to fifth period. I thought for a half second of calling my mom and asking her, “Is there a trick?”

  I wanted to tell her I was glad things had changed since she was a girl and I knew I wasn’t dying. But I just didn’t want to tell her anything anymore. I sat on the toilet and stared at the floor. I tasted my blood. Okay, done. Unremarkable.

  I saw a blue box on the laundry hamper I hadn’t paid attention to before. Tampax. Yes! A new box. It had a paper diagram. Annette Laurence, who sat behind me in algebra, had said tampons would ruin your virginity. But I felt like ruining something. I slid the tampon into my vagina, and it was like folding a perfect paper crane. I felt nothing — in a good way — and the blood was no longer running down my leg. Now I just had to clean everything up. I was really late for class.

  I was never behind in school. Never late, never missed a test, never started a problem in the cloakroom — I found following all those millions of rules at school effortless. The only rule I routinely violated was passing notes, and you couldn't really call them “notes” because we were passing twenty-page scripts back and forth — it was our art.

  I walked into debate class five minutes after the hour and slipped a quick missive to my best friend Jane, to tell her my glorious bloody day had arrived. She gave me a thumbs-up sign.

  “Susannah,” said Miss MacKenzie — who addressed every pupil by the name on his or her birth certificate, even if it included “Esquire” — “you will report to Dr. Shalka’s office for detention. You will not disrupt our classroom with your tardiness.”

  The blood rushed to my cheeks now. No Tampax for that.

  Mrs. MacKenzie was such a piece of work. “Who has triumphed, class?” she would ask. “Democracy in India … or communism in China?” Yeah, the suspense was killing us. This same martinet taught art class, where you were graded on how well you stayed within the lines of a picket fence we drew over and over and over, as endless as Alberta’s prairies.

  I walked into Dr. Shalka’s office like a mad bear. A mad menstruating bear with Germaine Greer on my tongue.

  “This is not right,” I said, before he could motion me to sit down. “My period just started at noon, and I had to figure out the Tampax all by myself and I am never late and you can’t discriminate against me just because I am menstruating —”

  I probably didn’t get that far, actually. I remember the look on his face when I said the “female” word. Was it period or the one that started with an m? You would’ve thought I had just sat on his face with my “vagina.” He flushed, his giant hands fluttered at his desk, and he coughed repeatedly into his cloth hankie.

  “That will be enough!” he gasped, coming up for air. “You will not be kept for detention.” He looked at me as if he were begging. “Please go!”

  “Okay,” I said, “I’m sorry.” And I walked out of his office, closing the door quietly, as if I were leaving a patient’s room. What was this? A grown man had turned to mush because I had my period? But he had a whole junior high school of girls doing this! On any given day, one of us was probably starting to bleed for the very first time.

  Sue, Barbara, Joan, Jane, Molly, Agnes, Corinne, and the French Canadian girls passed notes to me through the next two periods. Mischi invited me outside for a smoke. I was in the club. Susan Johnson, the only other person in school who wore glasses, slipped me a copy of The Godfather like she was passing contraband.

  “Page twenty-seven,” she whispered. “Page twenty-seven!”

  I went to the cloakroom before gym and tented my down jacket over my head, to cover whatever Susan had in store for me. The magenta paperback was dog-eared. On page twenty-seven, this guy Sonny is seduced by a woman whose vagina is so big that only a gargantuan peni
s can satisfy her. You imagine her vagina in Olympian dimensions. Did vaginas come in sizes? Did penises come in such different sizes? I had never even considered this whole size thing! The tampon I had just used said “regular” … and it was tiny. Was the super tampon as big as your arm? That’s what the book said Sonny’s penis was supposed to be like. One of the characters said it would “kill” a normal woman.

  The Godfather’s prose was purple. I felt secretive and hot; this was the sort of thing you read under blankets. But then the story went on. I was up to page thirty-five when I heard Susan calling my name. … I stuffed the book into my satchel and came back out in my navy gym bloomers.

  “I’m here!” I said. “Can I borrow the whole thing? I want to read it to the end.”

  “But there’s nothing after page twenty-seven!” she said. Her bloomers were even saggier than mine. Mischi said the school made us wear these in gym so the boys would lose their boners. I suddenly understood what she meant.

  “I know; I just want to see what happens,” I said.

  I got home at four o’clock and started to make supper. I was a big fan of Hamburger Helper. It came in all these flavors, and you could pretend you were eating around the world. The radio was playing Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot — and then back to Neil Young.

  I liked them all, but the DJ was sarcastic. He said the new law was they had to play 70 percent Canadian artists, but they’d all gotten rich on American dollars.

  I picked up the mail. There was a letter from my dad to me — and a letter from my dad to my mother. My chest turned to lead; I wanted to crumple all of the letters in my hand. What were they doing? He never wrote her.

  I opened his letter to me. It contained a few elephant jokes, something we’d been trading over the past year.

  Q: What's gray and white on the inside and red on the outside?

  A: An inside-out elephant.

  Every month he would mail me an elephant joke book, or write down extra ones he’d collected, or send me a comic book with Charlie Brown and Snoopy. Happiness Is… — I liked that one. I liked the packages that came with letters he wrote himself, so I could see his handwriting. He always wrote on recycled paper from the manuscripts he was editing. I would look on the back of his elephant joke note and there’d be some thesis, or an article he was editing for his linguistics journal, Language. I never understood the subject, but I always recognized the proofreading codes he’d taught me. “A slash means lowercase, three lines means uppercase … Transpose this, it’s like a little snake.” It was an international code, so even if someone wrote you in Russian, you could still follow the proofreading marks.

  This time his letter to me had a second page, unusual. It said:

  Dear Susie,

  “My wife Marcia has died after a long battle with breast cancer. I am very sad. I have sold our house in Topanga Canyon and moved to an apartment in Malibu — you will find my address below. I hope I will see you this summer.”

  Daddy

  I didn’t know Marcia had cancer. Or that she was sick. Or for how long. I hadn’t seen either of them since 1969. How long? I put some water in the teakettle on the stove and steamed open Bill’s letter to my mother.

  It said the same thing, except nothing about his emotion. Marcia was dead, and he wanted to see me.

  Marcia had a daughter, I thought. Karen — she was a year older than I. What about her? I remembered Karen from when we had a couple of both-kids-at-the-same-time custody visits. Marcia saw her little girl, and Bill saw me. We shared a bed in the guest room. I liked her — of course, she was older than I was and knew everything. Daddy said that Marcia had given birth to Karen when she was seventeen, with an older guy, and that the guy had taken the kid because Marcia wanted to go to college and he said she couldn’t do both.

  “But wasn’t she upset?” I asked. I was eight. “Doesn't she want her daughter?”

  Bill told me that it was better this way for Marcia, and that she loved her daughter anyway, even if they didn’t live together. Then he told me he loved me very, very much.

  When my father died, in 2005, he told me Marcia’s story more completely. My childhood intuition was right. Marcia was not “fine” about her daughter’s absence in her life.

  Bill explained, “Her parents were Swedes. They didn’t speak to her when she got pregnant. It was never mentioned. The baby was supposed to be put up for adoption, but the birth father, an older fellow, said he’d raise it, with his then-new wife, and Marcia would have to accept her punishment. It was like she had done something wrong, and he was the savior instead of her impregnator.”

  When Marcia was diagnosed with cancer, she went to her bed, like Barbry Allen, and looked up at Bill one last time. “Karen …” she said. “Karen. I have failed her completely now.”

  I was finally old enough for that to sink in.

  I had never thought about my dad losing people. He must’ve been sad — more than that — to lose my mother, or me. Yes, that must be true. And then his second wife, Janie — they had barely been married eighteen months when she was killed by a drunk driver who slid over a highway median strip. What did he do after that? I hadn’t seen him for a long time after Janie died. He married Marcia a year later, and now she was dead, too.

  I’d never heard of someone who lost two wives in a row to untimely deaths. Was he going to kill himself? That’s where my mind went. What was my mom going to say when she found out? She wasn’t good with letters like this.

  I rubbed my cheek. She would probably have a fit. She would be jealous and say that Bill loved Marcia more. Loved all of them more. She might start hitting. And then cry really hard and want me to comfort her.

  I could endure Elizabeth’s blows, but I could not stand to comfort her. I took Bill’s letter and folded it back in the envelope, fastened the seal with a little bit of school-supply paste, and pressed it all back together so it would look like it hadn’t been opened. Then I put it with the bills that sat on the table.

  I wrote a note on a yellow foolscap pad Momma kept at her desk:

  “I am practicing my PE-class routine with Christine Haffke at her house. I will eat there. There is Italian Hamburger Helper and potatoes in the oven.” I took my letter from my dad with me.

  I bundled up for the snow. I would ask Christine if I could stay the night. Then I wouldn't have to see Elizabeth until the next evening, and by then, she’d either have calmed down — or she would have killed herself. I could walk into the apartment and find her body, and it would be calm and I would call the emergency operator and they would be nice to me. I could do that.

  Christine’s family were Estonian. Her dad was talented at making ice sculptures. He had carved a Santa and eight tiny reindeer on their front lawn. His wife and he slept in narrow twin beds with pink crocheted coverlets, like Ozzie and Harriet. Christine was an only child, just like me.

  “What do you want to practice?” Christine asked when I arrived.

  We had a modern dance final coming up. I pulled a Simon and Garfunkel forty-five out of my satchel. “Have you heard this song?” I asked. “It’s really good.”

  She looked at the label. “‘The Sound of Silence,’” she read. “That sounds a lot better than ‘Puppy Love’ — that’s what Betty Buggers is doing!”

  The most unpopular girl in our school was nicknamed “Buggers” and nothing made me happier than laughing at her snotty nose. In Canada, I was no longer the pariah. I was bleeding, and I was part of the elite.

  Christine had me in stitches, crooning, “And they CALL IT (pause, huge breath) PUPPY LUH-UH-UH-UVE. …”

  “My tampon is going to come out,” I begged her. “Stop it!”

  Christine looked impressed. I could tell she had never used one. “My Oma won’t allow it,” she said. “It will ruin you for marriage.”

  “We are never going to get married, Christine,” I said, putting the needle on Simon and Garfunkel. “Married people just die and get sad, and that is nev
er going to happen to us.”

  We reached up with our hands in a ballet flourish and then caught each other, leaning back until we could spin, faster and faster, pivoting on our toes, until we fell into a heap on the floor.

  The Time Has Come, the Walrus Said

  Elizabeth didn’t say anything for a few weeks after my father’s letter. Then she made an announcement: “I’m going to send you to your father’s this summer; it’s time he did something for a change.”

  I was careful not to show any expression. If I was happy, she might take it back. I just said, “Okay.”

  So in June, I took a plane by myself to Vancouver to meet my dad. That way I didn’t have to cross the border by myself. I hadn’t seen him in two and a half years.

  I didn’t know what to call my father when I saw him … was I too old to say “Daddy”? But nothing else seemed to fit. When he picked up my suitcase, I asked, “When we’re in a big place, and I have to call you across a room, could I call you Bill?”

  He held me very tight. We went to Denny’s Coffeeshop for pancakes, which I thought was the height of luxury. Bill said I could order whatever I wanted. There was a customer feedback form on the bill, and they asked what you thought of their eggs. He wrote “execrable,” and that made me laugh so hard tears rolled down my face.

  Bill didn’t get mad at me about anything. His eyes crinkled when I apologized, as I did about everything, every five minutes. But I wasn’t feeling sorry most of the time, I was … happy. If you were to ask me what the happiest days of my life were, I would say the day that my daughter was born … and the first week I spent reunited with my dad. We went to the Empress Hotel for high tea. We went to smell the roses in Butchart Gardens. We took a ferry, and then a small boat, to a little island where we picked clams and blueberries and made a huge fire at night. We stayed with Marcia’s brother, who looked just like my dad, with his long hair and beard. Everyone talked to me like I was the most interesting person, and pretty soon I couldn’t stop talking myself.