Bilingual Being (26 page)

Theirs was a passionate union lasting four decades. I, on the other hand, could barely get around to cooking for my three husbands, let alone serving them. I insisted that shoes be off inside the house, and I picked the first (my children's father) and third (my impractical desire) because they didn't drink alcohol – while I left the second (my next-door neighbour) because he did. I didn't dress up for them, nor did I read anything in search of becoming a better spouse. But when I review my married life – nearly twenty years, in three instalments – my mother makes a convincing argument for why I failed where she
succeeded. A French woman pleases her man. An English-Canadian wife is almost as bad as an American wife, someone who just doesn't look after herself. Someone who, «Mon Dieu!», goes to the mall in curlers – something my mother once witnessed and that marked her as much as a crime.

One can hardly blame a husband for his wandering lust in such cases, the logic goes. My French mind regrets that I couldn't have been a bit more compliant – but only for a moment, and only because my mother is so remarkably capable of making her case. Then my English mind takes over, won't give the French «bonne fille» [good girl] a chance. Thinks that, yes, in fact, one can blame a husband for that. And that if a man is so superficial as to enjoy such trivialities, he isn't worth having. My mother looks at me despairingly. For in addition to losing my language, I've clearly lost my good sense.

To her chagrin, as I got older, I gained the power to articulate my preferences even more strongly and developed a firm resolution to resist her lifelong efforts to feminize me in a manner appropriate to my social position and culture: short skirts, sexy tops, and «des beaux souliers féminins» aka sexy shoes that show a feminine calf. Instead, I was a perpetual hippy, invisible out West, but incongruously completely foreign-looking back home. And so it is that, even today, I often don't feel like a “real woman” in Quebec. I always wear the wrong shoes, shirts, or pants. Not feminine enough. Not French enough. The imprint has stuck.

I was only six, for instance, when my father placed a quarter between my thighs. Of course, the quarter dropped. (Truth be told, it still would.) He repeated the gesture with my mother, where it stuck, and stated triumphantly, “You see? Those are the legs of a real woman.” And he kissed her passionately. Starting at age twelve, when Marymount closed, I wore jeans, plain tops, and sandals as he bemoaned that I was “his second son, not his daughter,” predicting that I “would never meet a husband looking like that.” And everyone worried about my utter lack of cleavage: «Y a des exercices qu'tu peux faire pour ça, t'sais.» [There are exercises you can do for that, you know.]

It was that very year, on a sunny fall afternoon in 1969 or 1970, when I heard myself say “fuck!” out loud for the first time. A cathartic
word from the very start, it was a sharp mark on my record, a noticeable change in the life of «une bonne fille.» I screamed it at a French neighbour across her driveway, enjoying the sheer power of using my burgeoning English on our very French street. I remember the English friend I was with saying, “Wow, Kath!” Little did I know then that “fuck it” would end up becoming my mantra for the next twenty years, whenever I fell headlong into my own cobwebs. My love for the language grew and grew.

PATCHOULI

But even looking like a boy, according to my father, I managed to date, from the age of twelve. For the next five years I went from one young male to another in a continuous chain. I was careful not to overlap them, but just as attentive to line them up like small soldiers every few weeks or months, so that the next would take the relief as soon as one was summarily dumped. The sorry pattern of repetitions was beginning. And every one of my soldiers had to be English, never French.

Or, almost never. There was one once who came close to being part of my line-up. Réjean, we'll call him, and we were fourteen or fifteen. My parents had bought their fishing camp by then, a lodge in the woods where we went every weekend, rain or shine. It was without electricity, phones, toilets, or running water. To my teenage mind, it was hell on earth. I fought against going with every fibre of my being, and I was occasionally successful. Most of the time, though, I was sentenced to accompanying them, and rarely allowed to take along a friend because my parents liked so few of them – these English girls from schools, or “little sluts,” as my father referred to them in perfect diction. The adjective here, “little,” didn't seem intended as a softener in the least. Rather, it seemed to be a pejorative levelled at their low rank in the sexual kingdom of adults, their being mere amateurs.

Réjean and I had been good friends for two or three summers because his family had a camp on the same property, along with a dozen other families. He was one of the few people I knew with more parental problems than me, and that in itself was reason enough for me to love him. He was handsome, too, in a rugged way, with a savage kind
of look. And he could make it in the woods on his own, my automatic hero. Of that, there was ample proof because his parents, who got along poorly even with each other, left him alone there for weeks at a time with no food, sometimes returning when they promised and sometimes not.

That's how he took to drinking a lot, ingesting a few too many barbiturates, and staying up there into September, even once school had started, barely caring about what he was missing. He was bright and funny in the sarcastic way I love, but his lack of educational ambition was a worry. After all, that's what I lived for. Yet it was his addictions that I found unforgiveable. They were so dangerous in my world, for such complicated reasons.

One weekend I arrived with my parents and brother and found him delirious, his left hand swollen with pus. Diving off a low dock, he had cut it badly on a broken 7-Up bottle. For the better part of the week, in the absence of a first aid kit, he'd been pouring beer on it. It was a smelly, disgusting sight, the wound running from the top of his index finger almost to his wrist, the skin turning colours I'd never seen skin be before. He was crying slightly, one drop slipping out of the corners of his eyes at a time. And he was almost immobile and spoke slowly, drifting away. I quickly fetched supplies from our camp while my family fished in the middle of the lake, and I stayed with him for hours, doing indescribable things to his hand that took me to my nausea threshold and back several times.

There's no other grown male I've ever done this for: mended a real wound. For Réjean, I played doctor willingly, though that game was scarier for me than his drinking. He did get better, thankfully, but the relationship was never the same. When I tried to kiss him, it felt all wrong, as if we were violating an incest taboo. Had it been the doctoring, the re-enactment of a game infected with problematic triggers? Or had it been seeing him so exposed – the pus, the tears, the weakness? I'm not sure, but it was over from then on. My almost-something relationship with the only French male I ever loved was reduced to casual conversations. He did leave me with a treasured memory, though – patchouli. I don't know how he managed it, but his skin exuded it from every pore, and his hair, even dirty, did too. To my female heart, it was the smell of heaven, and still is.

UN CAS PERDU

In one of the summers that followed, I decided to listen to my parents' ideas about love and men and set out quite deliberately to engage in a three-month trial of being a proper French girl. Honestly, I think it was just out of boredom. Then again, maybe I was trying to bring home some of what I'd been learning at McGill, the scientific procedure that was the hallmark of modernism, a minor experiment on cultural and personal boundaries. In hindsight, some thirty years later, I also admit a growing urge to explore the edges of my trauma, a curiosity about dreams and inner convictions for which the evidence in the here and now was entirely lacking. So just how easy was it to be sexual bait?

I was working selling tours in a downtown location. I wore sexy skirts, tight pant suits, high heels every day, makeup, and hair down my back instead of my usual, tied back or up. In stilettos, I navigated a tricky path to work at the corner of Rue du Trésor from where I parked near Les Ursulines, as my heels threatened to catch in the cobblestones. But my mother was happier that summer than years later, when I announced my pregnancies, or when I graduated, multiple times. And my father looked genuinely proud and relieved as though, finally, I'd stop embarrassing him.

I received two marriage proposals in the course of the experiment, quite serious ones. One was from an American marine and another from a Montreal businessman. And I grabbed the sudden interest of two older males I'd known since high school who'd virtually ignored me until then. I apparently even made the cover of a Japanese tourism magazine. Easy game, being chicken on a bone – a French girl smiling in her pink jumpsuit with the deep-cut back and slender sandals, in the heart of the Old City.

But the English girl inside was thinking,
Stupid men. Is this all there is to it? A dog is harder to trick than this
. And I married no one, dumped them all, four men on a puppet string cut down all at once. The experiment ended. I donated the clothes and the shoes and went back to being me. The usual funk returned to my parents' household. «C't'un cas perdu» [It's/she's a lost case], they declared unanimously.

From my perspective, these comments were experienced as another invasion of the sexuality I was trying so desperately to mute, for reasons
that weren't clear to me. I was protecting myself from what I-didn'tknow-and-couldn't-quite-remember, as I looked for young men whose mothers thought that I was a nice girl sensibly dressed, and thought that it was my mother who was far too flamboyant for her own good. It was, and is, a clash of cultures, a painful one, this battle over what makes a proper woman.

I was instinctively determined not to be «une belle poupée» [a pretty doll] on display for all to see – to be more sexually conservative, to try not to tempt men. So I resisted the French-Canadian vision of the feminine without understanding why, except for the vaguest notion that in dressing me up and promoting my sexuality, my mother was setting me up. And my father, for reasons I attribute to a combination of parental apathy and physical self-interest, was evidently willing to buy into French sexuality for the mere joy of living in a city where women make themselves look sexy to run out for milk at the corner store.

Yet in each of my languages, I'm embodied in a particular view of the feminine. And these different perceptions of my gendered self – my variant possibilities as a woman in each culture – have distinctively affected my linguistic undertaking. In choosing a language and its world, I effectively select a particular version of myself as a woman. This is a huge idea for anyone to consider. But for a victim of sexual trauma in one particular language, the potential for rebranding in another language is dramatic – an invitation that can't be refused.

__________

*
There's a bonanza of information about this subject online. For example, see “Admixed Ancestry and Stratification of Quebec Regional Populations,”
American Journal of Physical Anthropology
(2011); “The Genetic Heritage of French Canadians,”
Discover Magazine
(2011); and multiple scientific projects by the (recently closed) Quebec genomics firm Genizon Biosciences.

†
At the time of writing, a number of Internet sites offer this information. The most user-friendly is
http://naviresnouvellefrance.com
.

*
The former commander of Fort Champlain, also known as Fort de la Touche (a critical defense post in the seventeenth century), who was entrusted this huge seigneurie by Samuel de Champlain himself.

*
Maurice Duplessis (1890–1959) was a powerful conservative premier in Quebec from 1936 to 1939 and 1944 to 1959.

Angry Bird

There's a part inside of me that used to be an angry bird.

Diving at things with its beak: gouging, clawing at their eyes,

grabbing bodies in its talons and dropping them into quick rivers,

flying recklessly from one sky to the other, feeding off dark winds.

Well, at least that's how it felt and seemed within my own head.

In my face, I really don't know what it looked like. I didn't see it.

But I understand from all the reports of my childhood that I was

extremely docile and compliant, never angry or impatient,

a calm child you could take anywhere: flexible, malleable.

I only know that the angry bird existed because its beak kept

tapping inside my skull like a raging woodpecker from time to time,

and once I let its reckless wings fly into a plaster wall. I know that's true

because I saw the knuckles of my sixteen-year-old body scraped and bleeding.

That's the last time that I felt the angry bird, the last time it appeared.

And uncoincidentally, I think, this was first time I got mononucleosis.

After that, whenever I felt oppressed, engulfed, caged – by now,

eleven times in all – out came a much more pleasant sleeping bird,

a calm adult you could take anywhere: flexible, malleable.

14

THE DOUBLE FRAME

FACES AND FEATURES

I often find myself staring at the double wood frame that sits on the shelf facing my bed. On the left-hand side of the frame, there's Joseph John Leo St-Onge and Gladys Louise Garland on their wedding day. My paternal grandfather is dressed in his full military uniform, half-sitting on the right arm of an expensive-looking wooden upholstered armchair. My paternal grandmother wears a modest string of pearls, a white hat with a medium-sized brim, and a luxurious stole – fox, I think. Her satin shoes with fancy bows rest on a bear skin, and her arms are crossed neatly in her lap. They each have a confident smile, as though their success is assured.