Dropped Threads 3 (5 page)

Pat’s another example. We wore Cowichan sweaters in high school, became stage rats at Aden Bowman Collegiate. We loved poetry. Three years ago doctors removed everything cancerous they could find, and then some. Bald and gut-empty, Pat began to write poetry, to rethink those hundred-hour workweeks. She saw a shaman, Buddhist monks, inhaled poetry books. And wrote. Full, she says, I’ve never felt so full and whole.

Finally, candles—celebration, faith, ritual, all rolled in
one. I wrote a novel, someone will say, but it wasn’t nominated for the Giller. Yes, I wrote a song, but I’m not Connie Kaldor. Forget the yes-buts. Get out a journal—write down all you’ve done; turn around, see how far you travelled. Kick up the heels of those bright red shoes.

And never forget that little girl writing chalk lines along the sidewalk to jump into and over, an arc at the turn-around end. Pedestrians scuffed it. Rain came. Every night the girl slept hard, dreamed. And every morning she went out again with her chalk, writing herself into the landscape.

Now, she says, rising, reaching out her arm. That’s enough from me. Let’s put some soup on. I want to hear all about you.

“Promise me this,”
I urge my nieces, as we sit around a bonfire on the edge of the lake we all love. My family has traded secrets and elicited promises here in the late-summer twilight for five generations.

“In the next few years,” I venture, from my vantage point on an upended stump of wood beside the flames, “you’re going to try some grown-up stuff.” I glance toward the cottage a few hundred feet away. Their mother, my elder sister, has retired there to read after dinner. Her two girls, their lips smeared pink and their shorts too short, wave marshmallow sticks at the fire and giggle.

“No. I know you are,” I say. “We all do. I got loaded on Kahlúa at your age, thirteen or fourteen, and did a face-plant in the snow in my friend’s backyard.” They whoop with laughter. Their hilarity seems fuelled less by the fact that I’ve ever been drunk than by the exuberant notion that I, their aunt, should be telling them so.

“It’s true,” I go on, smiling. “It’s crap, Kahlúa. Haven’t touched it ever since.” I lean in too close to the fire, wincing at the heat as I wedge in another pine log. “I’m just saying that this goes with the territory of being teenaged. You’re going to try booze. You’re going to find pot. And I fully expect that you’ll be asked by some good-looking guy in your high school to …” I try to think of the current
slang for casual sex, “to hook up.” I gesture vaguely. “Or whatever.”

They stare at me, their firelit faces bright with expectation, awaiting a punch line. I am the irreverent Elder in their lives, I suppose. The one who quips, and blithely smokes and wears fashionable shoes from Berlin. My adolescent nieces and nephews have read passages in my books about one-night stands and characters who drop LSD. Of course, it pleases and surprises me that they go to the trouble to read my books, but sometimes I worry that my writing is like the in-house, familial version of the purloined
Playboy
. A treasure trove of outré adult behaviour just for them.

“Listen to me, girls,” I say, hoping like hell that my sister wouldn’t strangle me for this, “experiment with alcohol! I’ll give you some tips. And go for the pot, it can be incredibly fun, as long as you only take one puff of a joint. One puff. No more.” The girls trade looks of wide-eyed glee. “Just confine your experiments to those things,” I say, “and only with your girlfriends. Okay? Promise me that you won’t hook up.”

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 join 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.