Keeping Things Whole Page 14

  Awe. Incredulity. Confusion (but the pill?). Then the internal debate about where, when, and how I could say abortion. We were twenty-fucking-five. She’d wanted to be a lawyer for half her life and here she was in pod before her final year of law school.

  Abortion. A lifeline. For her, for me, for we. Abortion. A red warning light flashing on our console. A button I needed to press. Abortion. The dog you’ve raised to now let off its chain. And, above all, mercy.

  I’m pregnant. Hear that and there’s already distance between the two of you. I’m pregnant. She was, and I was left behind, the salaried NASA scientist watching the ship and its expensive payload power off into inner space. The word was the thin edge of a swelling wedge tapped between us. Maybe if I just shifted to the side a little, that wedge would lose its purchase and clatter to the ground. Thing is, tai sabaki only works in advance, not retroactively.

  I hadn’t suspected for a second. You’re less observant than you once were had referred to my not noticing a missed period, the swellings and retreats, the red cave she backed into then emerged out of. Of course as soon as she said it, I recognized that our carnal routine had been a while without its change and that, yes, I’d been too busy slinging green to notice. I thought she’d stopped drinking because of the Windsor heat.

  Then wonder. Unfocussed, inarticulate, probably costly wonder. This is the strangest, most unique thing to ever happen to you. Simultaneously you think you have just won the weirdness lottery, and yet nothing is more natural. You even question fate: did that rogue pill malfunction, or allow? To some, genetic fate is a contradiction; to others, it’s redundant. At times, who doesn’t believe (want to believe?) that we’re also genetically drawn to our partners, not just rationally and emotionally compelled, that cells and genes are incomplete without the other? Love isn’t, can’t be, all policy and debate. Rude biology will have its rut. The scent of him or her, the sweat you make together then mingle. These genetic compulsions are easier to see once the words I’m pregnant eject you from the plane.

  Sitting with her under an enormous tree in the half-light of High Park (!), a four-minute father, I felt a little like rain. Not a single drop but one of many. We could still hear traffic and street noise. Passing headlights slopped light through the canopy of leaves above our heads. Car doors woofed shut. A streetcar clanged by. All those noises, each activity, the city itself—everything had originated in the grunts of sex. Like it or not, Kate and I were suddenly members of a club, a tribe. Or maybe not full members yet. Applicants. Reluctant applicants, I hoped. I got a little of my head back. All that noise and bustle didn’t simply begin in sex. However unfairly, it all began with male ejaculation. All these genetic contracts signed by male pleasure. Both the species and the world would be so different if human conception also required female orgasm. In training Voodoo, I’d learned one slogan more important than all the rest: You get what you reward.

  No, I didn’t immediately leap to hold Mother Kate. I hope that’s to my credit. I wanted to think, even a little, not cling. Either she wanted the same or disapproved of my initial few minutes hanging off. When I did finally lean in for a hug, her slack arms and firm spine made me feel farther away, not closer. An unreciprocated hug is failure mimed. I said the second-most honest thing I could. “Oh, Kate.” Writing now, I admit that doesn’t sound anything like abortion.

  Yes, my first question was rehearsed. My “Have you seen a doctor?” could have been caring, could have been responsible. It was also, of course, my way of saying, Are you sure?

  “I’ve seen one pee-stick plus sign after another is what I’ve seen. Five tests, three different brands. I’ve seen no period and darkening areolae. And my boobs hurt like hell.”

  Already her face had a new way of looking off. Get pregnant and the thousand-yard stare just comes.

  “Still though, you should—”

  “Still though what? Still a drug smuggler, though?” She turned away and even slid herself a little along the picnic table.

  “Not yet, okay, Kate? Not yet. Keep talking to me. Any idea what happened?”

  “Let’s see…Wasn’t there one time when you fell on top of me with your dick hard? We fucked is what happened.”

  “I mean with the pill.”

  “The pill doesn’t always work. Welcome to Club 3 Percent.”

  “But you took it like usual?”

  “Like always.”

  Even in the half-light I could see her glare.

  “What do you think? Last month I decided that having a baby with a criminal would jump-start my legal career? This isn’t my fucking fault.”

  “I’m not saying it’s your fault.” There, we had said fault. Time to start talking solutions. Pregnancy not baby. Never say baby. “Kate, I love you. I want you to be healthy and happy. I—”

  Shit, we were kissing. She was all python, pulling me in, wrapping me up. Our tongues alone were suddenly more intimate and more daring than we had been in days. Wet, Greco-Roman wrestling one minute, slow pink signatures the next.

  “Come on, in here,” she said, guiding us toward a darker path into the woods. Once you break the in-case-of-emergency glass, you might as well reach on through.

  28. Medea, Medea

  My mother introduced me to infanticide. Even without her Chicago Medea, I learned that we single children of single mothers often barely survive. I wanted Kate to endure the sound of a vacuum Gloria had chosen not to hear. She must have been tempted, even before Trevor lit out. They were vagabond actors, unstable financially if not emotionally. Legally, he was an exile. By the time he packed his bags again, did she want me or was it simply too late to hit undo? Before Kate was up the pole, she told me that 95 percent of Canadian abortions are performed by week twelve, the sticking week. (Another little gem she picked up in that knowledge sandwich between law school and Safe Sisters.) Trevor left his note of uns, and nothing else save some genes, shortly after three months.

  Gloria: tough love and tasteful earrings. The week she signed a permanent contract at her school, she hung up a copy of the title page of Thomas Bowdler’s nineteenth-century Family Shakespeare on her classroom wall. This expurgated edition of Shakespeare’s plays “endeavoured to remove every thing that could give just offence to the religious and virtuous mind.” This single sheet of framed paper was another of Gloria’s tests, a little gateway to separate the B students from the A’s, those who thought she approved and those who learned she didn’t.

  The Family Shakespeare. As if families shouldn’t know how they begin, where and how their lifeblood first ran. Billy S. knew how we keep things whole. There was no innuendo he wouldn’t reach for. Or stoop to. Bearded this and staff that. Rings and hoops and coins. Purses, gloves, flowers, and everything pink—all played for smutty laughs. Locks get picked in the night. Warm winds part velvet curtains. In Shakespeare’s garden, some nights the plum tree is easier to climb than others. This was Gloria’s specialty. She too smuggled contraband past her enemy. To her, Bowdler “drove a Cadillac.”

  You’ve seen the (trademarked) hood ornament of Detroit’s pride, the Cadillac car. Has anyone else told you it was stolen and is another local counterfeit? Around 1604, Antoine Laumet Cadillac started his lying in Nova Scotia and Quebec before he went professional and founded Detroit. Another entertainer honing his skills in Canada before chasing the bigger American audience. He was barely off the ship in Port Royal, Nova Scotia, before he started calling himself Antoine de La Mothe, appropriating the name Lamothe from a nobleman back home. He also stole Lamothe’s coat of arms, a symbol that would eventually grace the hood of every Cadillac car and serve as the company logo. He was Gatsby before Gatsby. As soon as he was put in charge of Fort Detroit he quintupled the price of a jug of brandy. Another local fortune founded on a buzz.

  Mom showed me what she thought of liars and cheats long before I started selling my pre-rolleds. At seventeen, I assured my
self she couldn’t have known about my street slinging. She was away in Chicago most of that year. But look what she showed me as co-author and star of a rewrite of Euripides’s tragedy Medea.

  An actor for a parent. Strange and not so strange. The actor is a soul in a situation, a body, voice, and mind throwing or catching someone else’s ball. So too the parent, always aiming for a moving target. Perpetual jazz. You only get to teach the lessons you have occasion to teach, not those you want to teach. Once when we drove past a playground, Mom announced, “Every child is a mimic.” Little did I know.

  When I was in the monkey years myself, three, four, five years old, she used to terrify me, to indulge me by terrifying me. Our cat and mouse game might start with some reading on the couch, though crucially this would be hours before bed. Daytime couch reading became horror reading. No book in the world will ever hold me like Treasure Island once did. We must have read some scenes two dozen times, and still I froze every time Israel Hands began climbing the mast after young Hawkins. Mom’s voice was pure menace, her tone as steely as any dagger she was describing. Watch out for her lips. Snarls of derision. Mercilessness in a slit. Pouts of entreaty. And then the chase would be on. When a character she was reading about leapt for someone else, she would toss the book aside and leap for me. It wasn’t until I watched her Medea more than a decade later that I realized she had lunged with an actor’s timing, not a predator’s. The arms she reached out for me were intended to cue my sprint from the couch, not to catch me. One action created a space for the next.

  Learn even a bit about the Greek myths and you see that character=action. Oedipus stabbing out his eyes. Penelope undoing her daily weaving. Medea and her spiteful infanticide. She kills her sons to spite her husband Jason, her cheating, scheming husband. Medea=infanticidal spite, not just infanticide. Mom, not Kate, introduced me to this scorched gene policy.

  When Gran and I flew to Chicago to see Mom as Medea, that famous mother and anti-mother, I’d never been more proud. All love involves pride. The heart wants to own, not rent. That was my mother on stage getting ready to off her children, and I was respect from head to toe. But of course Gran, not I, had actually lost a homeland and a child to war, male vanity and nationalism. She was closer to Medea than I’d ever be.

  Obviously the play was for strangers, strangers in another country even, not me or Gran. I didn’t take it personally, but given Mom’s spin on the funky cold Medea, I couldn’t help but take it professionally. Whereas Euripides’s Medea is set in ancient Corinth, a coastal Greek kingdom, Mom’s was set in Canada’s Cornwall in the late 1960s. Corinth was a narrow isthmus connecting the Peloponnesus to mainland Greece and frequently had ships hauled over it on sledges. Cornwall straddles the Canada/US border, is near the national rail line that ferried cargo from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and sits equidistant to Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa, a busy hub in the draft-dodging wheel. More important, more lasting yet more timely, was the story of young, love-sick criminals on the run. Euripides had Medea running from country to country with Jason to get away with the golden fleece, a kind of super wool/magic cloak they stole from Medea’s dad. Bonny and Clyde in a trim, fast ship. In the rewrite Mom did with her director, Medea and Jason were American hippies trying to smuggle a strain of pot, the golden fleece, into Canada so they could profitably turn on, tune in, and drop out. Quite specifically, they needed to drop out of the Vietnam War, Jason having burnt his draft card in the US before he would burn Medea’s hopes and heart in Canada.

  The whole year she’d been away, I’d thought my handshake of nations work with street weed flew below the Mom radar. How could she have known I sold? She might’ve suspected I smoked pot—what teen doesn’t?—but selling it? She went off to Chicago with my first trebuchets collecting dust in her crawl space. How could she have known they’d been put to fresh use while she was away? Watching her play unfold, I lost confidence that my green lantern had been visible to only a select few. Inseparable from her skill, a calibre of acting I’d never seen from her before, was her accusation, a retracing of the homeland borders.

  You don’t need me to convince you that a family member is the worst enemy you could ever possibly have. Similar brains similarly clicking away. Even worse, when we fight family we’re likely to half-hesitate on the killing blow (but only half-hesitate). Her Medea hit me with one thought more insistent than the others: Trevor Reynolds, Trevor Reynolds, Trevor Reynolds. She was using him to get at my green.

  In life and love, why don’t we pay attention? Again and again we confuse optimism with amnesia. Jason, you found yourself quite an ally in Medea, a woman willing to betray and rob her father to aid you, the accomplice without whom you couldn’t get the fleece, let alone escape with it. As you fled her father, the stern of your boat just metres from the bow of his, she murdered her brother, hacking him to pieces and scattering his body so Papa would slow down to collect the remains. Was Medea a determined and resourceful ally? Absolutely. A loyal lover? Unquestionably. Anyone you should dare to cross? Noooooooo!!!!!!!!!!

  In Mom’s version, the murders became political. With Jason a Vietnam draft dodger, Medea’s brother would also be subject to the draft, conscripted by yesterday’s veterans for today’s very different war. In the original, Medea laboriously dismembers her brother and tosses him to the winds. Mom’s Medea gave up her absconding brother’s location to the local draft board to similarly distract and delay her vengeful father while she and Jason made off with the seeds and clones of his pot strain.

  With all that on stage, Mom had me doing the cost-benefit analysis of feminization long before Kate ever did. Medea robs her father, flees her home, and murders her brother while Jason watches. When Jason and Medea arrive to Corinth/Cornwall with the golden fleece, Jason barely pulls their boat ashore before he begins his bid for Glauce, the local king’s daughter. Worldly ambition, that Macbeth drug often shared by couples, is his rationalization to the spurned Medea. “What need have you of more children?” he asks her. “But it makes sense / For me to gain advantages for those we already have / By means of those to come.” Darling, bigamy with a princess isn’t really bigamy. Careerist bigamy. Estate-planning bigamy. C’mon, think of the children.

  Who was royalty to a draft-dodging, counter-cultural American hippy? A farmer near a border. In the exodus of Vietnam War resisters, many decided to keep resisting once they got here, and that meant growing their own food, not supporting Big Agri. While urban Toronto had its American ghetto, where Trevor Reynolds sometimes skulked around Baldwin Street with Kansans, Texans, and Georgians his Yankee ass never would have met in Michigan or New York, others felt that if they were already checking out of family and the military-industrial complex, dodging both consumerism and careerism, then they would truly check out. Back to the land they went. In the late 60s, just as Canada shifted irrevocably from growing food to importing it, up boiled the hippies. Most of the history you can find on this exodus fails to note that more American women came to Canada than men, and more stayed. These resisting, nomadic women knew where to take the seeds.

  In Gloria’s Medea, King Creon had a Cornwall farm with a few isolated, neglected acres none of his own children wanted. Up came Jason with a pocketful of seeds. He could dodge the draft and have a nice little grow-op. The easiest way for him to overgrow Government A was to marry into Government B.

  Creon was nervous to see Medea walking around after Jason had cast her off for Glauce. (Weed does have its paranoid side.) He prepared to send Medea into exile, permitting her just one last day to bid farewell to her sons. Secretly, he planned to expose her to Canadian immigration in hopes they’d deport her. Enter Aegeus, King of Athens/a border-crossing New York congressman. Hearing Medea’s plight but not yet knowing her plan, Aegeus agreed to shelter her provided she could make it to New York and use her herbal powers to help his wife conceive the child they hadn’t yet been able to have. (There we grow again: add pregnancy, have story.) />
  Of course Medea never intended to slip off quietly. Jason dared to rob her so thoroughly then abandoned her publicly. Ultimate humiliation. What could Medea/Mom strike that would hurt him in his new life? The piece of the old he was still trying to cling to: their sons. Infanticidal news stories surface every year. A single mother caught in the avalanche of post-partum depression or a berserk, woman-eating sire, some self-proclaimed victim turning victimizer on his genetic audience. At least in art, only ideas and feelings get hurt.

  Gloria knew we had to understand Medea emotionally, had to say maybe if not yes. In Euripides’s day the violence was offstage. He had his chorus tell the audience that Medea takes a cleaver to her brother and poisons her children. In the original, the poisoned robe she has her sons take as a gift to their new stepmother is carted off, and its consequences come back as overheard screams and reactions. Today we’re eyeball deep in sex and violence. We demand a show, and show Mom did. We sat in an American theatre during its first war with Iraq watching a play set during its war with Vietnam. Rather than killing child actors on stage, Mom took the old device of poisoned clothing and turned it into a contemporary symbol of child-killing: the military uniform. How could Mom’s war-resisting, regime-renouncing, pot-growing Medea kill her sons with poisoned clothing? By sending them back home to the US and its brain-dissolving, class-gobbling, profit-churning military. Stranded in Canada and spurned by a draft dodger, Mom’s Medea didn’t immediately kill her children. Instead, she took them home vowing to raise them as war-loving, father-hating patriots keen to enlist. In the closing scenes, the American audience watched images from Gulf War I projected onto Medea and her sons. Burning oil fields, sweeping helicopters, camouflaged khaki, and convoys bisecting deserts—all made liquid by a digital projection poured over the entire stage while Medea’s uniformed sons looked back at us through military-issue night-vision goggles, half mask and half eye of the technological tiger. In her closing tirade to her husband, Mom/Medea stood so firmly I could feel her quads burning, her heels bolted to the stage. Eyebrows, cheekbones, and jaw—all raised with searing contempt for anything foreign, anything not her own, poison from her mother’s breast. Medea, Medea, a mother to the last drop.