Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir (7 page)

I told her I needed my glasses; I was blind. I couldn’t see the stairs we were taking to the parking garage, and I kept tripping.

“You won’t need them in the bottom of the river,” she said.

Maybe I was tripping because I was trying to stop. I could remember only the gray cement of the stairwell and the underground garage where all the tenants’ cars were parked. Gray cement, the same hard color of her eyes.

My mom pushed me into the front seat of the VW. I popped out, protesting. She pushed me in again. It was like playing jack-in-the-box. Of course she won, or I gave up too soon. Was she really stronger than me?

I yelled, “But where are we going?”

She replied with the kind of satisfaction you imagine only in perfect victory: “I’m driving us into the river.”

The Saskatchewan River in Edmonton is frozen in parts … most of year. Really, everything is frozen, from September to May. You wouldn’t even have to crack the ice to die in the river — it’s so cold — and I was wearing too-small pajamas.

I didn’t know what my mother’s drowning plan was, but she seemed to be soaring.

When I stopped pushing the door back open, I said, “I don’t want to die.”

“Too bad!” Elizabeth’s laugh echoed through the garage. She said it was too late.

The car started out slow, but then she hit the gas. She ran a string of lights on Eighty-second. I was afraid to grab the wheel or whatever it is that movie heroes do when someone evil needs to be pushed out of the driver’s seat. My own thoughts got very small, and slow. Was this the relief I’d imagined so many times? Was the aftermath beginning now?

It was glacial. I had all the time in the world to think. I had regrets, and complaints. I wished Mom had just taken pills this time, like before, or had used a razor in the tub, where it was warm. I felt so sorry for myself because I was going to die cold, but it was like feeling sorry for someone else — I couldn't sense my limbs anymore. No more tears. I didn’t have a private conversation with God, because we all know how those had gone before. He never showed up.

The windshield wipers were pushing the snowflakes this way and that, like little cards being shuffled from one part of a deck to another. The car screeched and spun — we plowed into a curb, and my head hit the dash. It wasn’t the river, but blood poured out of my nose. It was wonderfully warm.

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 ne
eded 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

A
fter 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 penis 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.