Dropped Threads 3

by Marjorie Anderson

  I study their faces. “Promise me that you won’t experiment with sex.”

  They nod, their smiles fading, their mood suspended by my unexpectedly adamant plea. The fire crackles, and somewhere a loon calls.

  • • •

  Make Love, Not War

  I grew up with that mantra. It permeated the air as a gleeful command—one that echoed through the years and across the miles, until its connection to Vietnam and the Sexual Revolution grew faint and it reached my late ’70s high school in St. John, New Brunswick, as a vague cultural prerogative to have tons of sex.

  War, certainly, no longer had anything to do with it. When I came of age Make love, not war simply meant that guys in wide-leg Wranglers with peach-fuzz moustaches could plunge their hands into my bra as we lounged in a basement rec room listening to the Cars, and feel no sense of obligation to date me.

  It meant going all the way as soon as I was “legal,” and accumulating more than a dozen lovers by the time I was twenty-one.

  There was the Summer of Love, 1967, when sexual freedom fairly vibrated with political and cultural purpose. And then there was the Summer of Graduate School, 1987, by which time Make love, not war meant spending a given Sunday sipping coffee whilst idly jotting down a list of “Men I’ve Slept With,” as if engaged in an obscure sort of moral or emotional math.

  I only ever wrote their first names: Rod, Jonathan, Oliver, Glen. As if the addition of last names rendered the list too impersonal. A list of invitees to a ball, a list of grant applicants. A list of airplane passengers, or war dead. There was one fellow whose name I could never remember at all. I vividly recalled being with him, for his presence in my bed felt particularly strange. We hadn’t sparked through flirtation, or laughter. There hadn’t been any preamble to our intimacy, which came about after meeting in a bar. He was solemn, largely silent, pursuing something private for himself that nevertheless involved my body. I registered his emotional absence as an alien scent, a hard mouth, an unknowable face in the half-light. On my list, in referencing him, I usually just wrote: “Guy from Windsor.”

  Why “Guy from Windsor” was more important in my mathematical exercise than the friendly men I merely kissed, or rolled around with on the moonlit grass confounds me a little now. In my emotional innocence, sex meant intercourse. Other encounters, including oral sex, didn’t count. They were something else, matters of hazier significance.

  I can’t imagine now, what I was trying to calculate. There was nothing to conclude from my tallied account. What about the men who loved me, truly, whose sexual touch was confined to a gaze. I had no list for them. And my husband is the last name jotted down, which means what—about our relationship, our friendship, our shared parenting and entwined life history—beyond nothing at all.

  Incredibly, my nieces are practising this aimless old math of mine in the corridors of their high school. Sex = intercourse, or so they hear. Hook-ups don’t count, nor do kisses. Nor does love.

  How do I explain the folly? How do I show them, in advance of their own scarring experience, how they need to guard a different, less tangible door to themselves than the singular orifice that lies between the legs?

  Alas, for all I’ve been through, with more than thirty lovers on the list, I fear I’m just another grown-up now, going “wah, wah, wah” like the adults in the Peanuts comic strips. The generations reinvent themselves. They clap their hands to their ears.

  I remember sneaking home with a friend from high school at some impermissible hour, and being duly confronted by her mother. “In my day,” she would say, and then expound upon the rules for young ladies and their suitors, while we rolled our eyes in a magnificent display of indifference.

  “In my day,” she would persist, “young men would escort young ladies home at this hour.”

  How would the phrase sound now, to my nieces? “In my day,” I can hear myself saying at the next intimate sharing around a campfire, “we screwed everything that moved.”

  “Well, girls,” I want to say to them, assuming I have their attention. “Let me tell you about my twenties. I was healthy, young, attractive, energetic and enthused. And I cried all the time. Have another marshmallow.”

  I want to imagine them listening earnestly, all ears, like Luke Skywalker to Yoda: “Understand, my daughters,” I might say in a grave and wise voice, “I cried when I found myself pregnant, and plodded off to Women’s College Hospital in Toronto for an abortion, because this was a transgression that I was expected to attend to, pro forma, after my boyfriend had dumped me. I cried when men said ‘Oh, actually, this is just sex,’ and I wept when they said ‘It might have been more than sex, but I’ve changed my mind, you don’t object, do you?’”

  So what if I did? Object. The next thing I’d know I would be the spooky witch in Fatal Attraction, wielding knives and boiling bunnies.

  It is one thing to be a mother, as I am now, anchored in family and strengthened by accomplishment, desirous of erotic adventure. Another thing entirely to be young, wishing, without faith or discernible rules, for life to take hold and begin.

  “Ah, nieces, you will find your hopes crushed throughout your most fertile years, as you find love and then watch in astonishment as it passes through your hands as swiftly and ephemerally as sand. Sometimes, you’ll think you’re about to go stark raving mad as men with whom you have everything in common—laughs, sparks, intellect, attraction—nonetheless find themselves intoxicated by the infinite prospects unleashed by the mantra Make love, not war. ”

  Or, at least that was the case in my day.

  One lover dumped me during his lunch hour, even though we were living together. He invited me to join him for Chinese food during his one-hour break and then assured me that I would “make somebody a wonderful wife and mother one day.” Just … not him. Another future life partner dropped me scant months after I had miscarried his unborn child—when I was still reeling around in the echoing hell of that ill-defined experience. His reasoning—and theirs, the other men—was preposterous, if judged against the ages of human experience. There might be other women out there! They might be better! More perfect! There could be a woman somewhere who was perfection incarnate! Who knows, there might be a goddess awaiting him.

  A goddess, good lord. And who did these men, who were so fired up by romantic possibility that they left me, sobbing and effectively widowed without access to a dignified black wardrobe, wind up marrying? Ordinary women like me, with tempers and big noses and garden-variety insecurities, that’s who. Regular Janes, who merely happened to happen along, to turn that corner of the street or show up at that party, exactly when the men I loved had tired of conquering the High Seas and were more amenable to settling down.

  “Of course,” one ex-lover told me a couple of years ago, as we spent an afternoon together drinking beer on the patio of my hotel in the shadow of a Mexican volcano, an hour’s drive from where he now lives with his wife and two daughters. “It was all in the timing,” he said. We took a walk, then, along the steep, cobblestoned streets of the village, and I found myself falling behind him, pulling away in a state of melancholic revelation so profound that it physically slowed me, as I recalled our unborn baby. Our son, or daughter, our thrown-away child.

  Please, I want to say to my nieces, please, understand! The hours and hours I spent examining my own personality for the critical flaw that made me lose this man in Mexico, and that child. The scrutiny of my body in the mirror. The raging at my lack of perfection, the unsent letters. And all it turned out to be was timing? Only that. The impersonal calculus of a convenient time.

  Now and then, I read Jane Austen, or catch one of the many films and TV shows based on her work—for we are captivated by her world of romantic restraint now, are we not? And I note that twenty-something men are no different, now, than they were in the nineteenth century. Why should they be? A man of “five and twenty” is a creature fuelled by ego and testosterone. In Austen’s era, such men felt compelled to j
oin Wellington’s campaign in the Peninsular War, or do a stint with the East India Company. Their spirit of adventure didn’t include turning all of the women of their acquaintance into unpaid strumpets. But it might have. They were simply not allowed.

  Looking back, it seems to me that the social restraints placed upon women needed to be loosened, but perhaps … perhaps … less so the overthrow of honourable behaviour in men. Adultery without stoning, yes, and freedom from Scarlet Letters. Rape without social ruin. Premarital passion without banishment from the realm of the marriageable female. Enlightenment on the subject of feminine sexuality. All yes. The overthrow of powerlessness, with its gendered double standards, and the condemnation of sex as a means of control, yes, yes.

  But what did we do wrong, here? When did we send out the invitations that made us forget ourselves? From Regency culture to the rec room: a revolution gone a wee bit far? That sounds good and academic. I could present that as a paper somewhere. But how do I translate my meaning to my nieces?

  You make the rules, I must say to them, as I reconsider the achievement of Gloria Steinem and her peers. You have the power, now, to decide which boy or man has honoured you enough to gain the privilege of seeing you vulnerable. Because you will be vulnerable, when you are naked and shy and uncertain in someone’s bed. You decide what you need from the encounter. And I will help you to learn how to get it. This is how you drink beer, this is how you smoke pot, and this is how you explore romance. Not sex. But romance: in tentative, curious steps.

  If it is love that you need, then understand you will not win it through your body. The intimacy is false, and it is dangerous. And it doesn’t matter, my beloved, bright and vibrant girls, if you break it down by orifice. The math is misleading. Cross it out, I plead with you. Let’s start again.

  There’s a cartoon that I’ve come to love in recent years. It’s by the American cartoonist Robert Crumb, and is nothing more than a large bowl of bean soup, drawn cartoonishly, of course. The beans near the surface of the soup are distinctly drawn—bean after bean nuzzling one another like … well, like so many beans in a soup. Only one of the beans has a face, though, and this face bears an astonished look. A big white arrow points down at this single bean, and there’s a caption alongside it that reads: He thinks he’s the only bean in the soup!

  • • •

  Long before I realized that I was not the only bean in the soup, I was a teenager. This was in the early sixties. My world and the worlds of my family and girlfriends were the only worlds that mattered. The fact that I was growing up in an oddly configured household didn’t trouble me, either. I was being raised by my aunt Elsie, her husband, Ernie, and my father, Billy, who was Elsie’s younger brother. Billy visited us every other weekend from his job in Vancouver where he worked on the docks. My mother, Nancy, had flown the coop when I was five; packed her bags for greener pastures, as the saying went, and caught the last ocean liner out of Vancouver for Australia in 1952. She had done all of these things, Elsie claimed, because she was a gold digger.

  “Women like Nancy give the rest of us a bad name,” Elsie frequently sniffed. By the “rest of us” she meant herself and the other stolid housewives of Vancouver Island.

  By all accounts Nancy’s gold-digging exploits were successful. By the time I was fifteen she was on her fifth marriage, having hopscotched from man to man, getting wealthier along the way.

  Not that her success was of any use to me

  Nancy seldom wrote or sent gifts. By the time I started dating, I hardly thought about her any more, other than as an exotic character I could use for spinning tales—My mother is fabulously rich, has beautiful clothes, can play the piano like a concert pianist, travels the world on cruise ships like a pirate in search of wealthy men.

  It was Elsie who provided me with steady information about the world of men: the Gospel According to Elsie, as I came to call it. We never sat down and discussed these things. Rather, it was me watching and listening. Elsie wore her opinions about men like a battle shield, and her opinions were so clear and definite that I didn’t doubt them.

  I had a boyfriend by then. Martin Defolio, a guy from Victoria who had a car. I didn’t particularly like him, but he was the first one who seemed interested enough to ask me out. And at fifteen it was crucial to be asked out. All my friends had boyfriends and if I didn’t have one, too, I could kiss popularity goodbye. I’d be lumped with the wall-flowers—a certified cretin.

  It wasn’t enough to get a boyfriend, though. Somehow you had to keep him. Keep him without getting knocked up and ruining your reputation, or losing him to a rival. It was difficult work. My friends and I talked of nothing else.

  So I was Elsie’s gung-ho apprentice. When she’d spit out things like “Men! There’s no pleasing them!” or “Men! Who do they think they are?” I’d lap it up. My friends and I would feast on these tidbits. Apparently there was a war going on in the murky world of romance that we hadn’t known about. The war was called the Battle of the Sexes, and if you played your cards right, it was a war you could win.

  I cut my teeth about men via the living proof that was Elsie and Ernie’s marriage. Theirs was the only marriage in the soup. And Ernie became the singular bean, the stand-in for every man in the Universe. Poor old Ernie.

  • • •

  Back then, I bought into what Elsie had to say about men, bought into it heart and soul. In 1962 I wanted guidebooks, diagrams, maps, and Elsie provided them. I became convinced by what she had to say. Being in charge sounded good to me. Better than good. A huge and wonderful relief. I liked the idea of power, of being dominant, of pushing puny Martin Defolio around when he whined that no sex made a guy go blind. Up on Mount Tolmie on a Friday night, I could roar with confidence, “So go blind, ya big ape!”

  With men, the main thing, apparently, was to never give in—to anything.

  Elsie never gave in, particularly to Ernie. With him, she acted like he was another household chore, someone she had to clean up after. It didn’t help that he was fat and bald and worked as a janitor at the public library and watched Fun-O-Rama cartoons after work every weekday at four. She’d be standing beside the TV set with a lighted cigarette in her hand and snarling, “Why do you watch that junk? Sometimes I wonder what I’ve married.”

  Ernie would pretend he was deaf, especially if he was watching the Popeye cartoon where Brutus was being whacked all the way to the moon.

  Elsie used her unalterable opinion about the opposite sex to achieve a different kind of whacking: all men, according to her gospel, were a necessary evil. Necessary because you needed a husband in order to have a house and a family, and they were okay—meaning a woman could stand them—as long as they were kept busy with a hobby or fixing things around the house or digging in the garden. The evil part was that they were prone to laziness and sex. If they started lying around the house doing nothing then one of their eyes would go funny. They’d get that look—“a bedroom look,” Elsie called it—and start slobbering and leering. Then it was, watch out! A perfectly good afternoon could be flushed down the toilet.

  “Because, after all,” Elsie would snort, “the only thing a man’s interested in is sex and his supper.” Her statement was irrefutable. On some days, “What’s for supper?” was the longest sentence Ernie delivered to his wife.

  • • •

  Around this time we were learning about the Greek myths in English class, and in particular, the Amazons. Miss Hewitt, our young, brown-suited teacher, told us that the Amazons were a tribe of giant women warriors, so fierce that they had a law decreeing that only girl children could live. “They drowned the boys like rats,” Miss Hewitt said.

  The brains in the front rows—the science club guys—cringed when they heard this.

  She also said, with evident zeal, “The Amazon women were in charge! Think about that!”

  I passed a note to my friend Dana: “My aunt is an Amazon.”

  There was no disputing the fact that Elsie was i
n charge—of Ernie, me, the entire known world.

  Dana passed the note back: “Ha, ha. What are you wearing Friday night?”

  But the Amazon idea stuck.

  • • •

  I thought I would write an essay about the Amazons for Miss Hewitt. We had to pick one of the myths. I chased the idea further. I would describe Elsie as an Amazon queen. The women in my family were Elsie; Maudie, her sister, a widow; my crinkly old grandma, who sang nursery rhymes and lived with Maudie; and Elsie’s married daughters, Doreen and Shirley. Even though they were all short, I didn’t consider this a hindrance. They could be Amazons in disguise. Being a housewife, I decided, could be a clever ploy that had allowed the Amazons to survive to present-day times.

  The idea delighted me. Home life might not be a prison sentence after all. Seen in this light, Elsie and the others were confident women, possessed of a sure clarity about the purpose of our lives. Within their homes, they miraculously enlarged, like Alice with the pill, and became giants, enormous in influence, compelling in control, the huge hearts at the centre of the family fortress.

  I didn’t know the word anthropologist at the time, but all this was about discovering a tribe, one whose existence I had been blind to. Housewives! Not to be found, shockingly, within the pages of National Geographic like those bare-breasted native women whose lips were made monstrous by inserted plates. But no-nonsense, rolling-pin-wielding women existing right under my nose. I started looking at Elsie with new-found interest.

  I called the tribe the Amazon Housewives.

  When Miss Hewitt told us that Amazons had fought in the Battle of Troy with the help of the goddess Artemis, I decided the Amazon Housewives needed a patron saint. I chose Blondie, from the comic strip of the same name. Blondie was the boss of her family, like Elsie was of ours, though Elsie was dumpy and wore glasses, while Blondie was something of a glamourpuss.