Dropped Threads 2 (22 page)

In the porch light, the letter is from her. What I wanted it to be but wasn’t asking all that slow, dark walk from the mailbox, just being with the simple, good fact of a letter, carrying whatever it was inside, letting the momentary stillness and the unknowing be a strength. Just as, on the long arc of two lives, we carry each other.

Ten Beauty Tips You
                    Never Asked For

Elizabeth Hay

When I was small and in love with Perry Como, I would sit on my mother’s bed and watch her put on her clothes exactly as she took them off: in one fell swoop. Overnight those multiple layers of undershirt inside blouse inside sweater upon sweater cooled off and in the morning, when she slid them over her head, they were icy. What kind of mother was this? Where was the makeup? The high heels? The romance? It pretty much broke my heart that I didn’t have a beautiful mother.

Sometimes I would suggest that she wear one of her suits, and she would, but not until late in the day—she had the habit of wearing the same old clothes all day long and then changing into something better before my father came home. There was the butterscotch-coloured suit with a matching frilly blouse, and the soft greeny-blue suit with the cream-coloured blouse. Both jackets came in at the waist, both suits were a joy to behold. But two suits was not a lot of suits.

In those days I had a friend with a glamorous, vividly high-strung mother who lived for playing the piano and going to Toronto, which she called
the city
, where she shopped on Bloor Street at the Colonnade. I will never forget the way she looked down at her new suede shoes, and, spotting a scuff on the side, said, “Look at that scuff! I’m going to have to get a new pair!” Nor will I forget the sight of her playing piano with such concentration that her beautiful face screwed up into a monkey’s.

Beauty Tip #1: Don’t grimace when you play piano.

At eighty, my mother—your grandmother—had become so beautiful that I couldn’t stop looking at her. Her thick hair—her crowning glory, as she called it with amused derision—was the colour of fine silver. Her old satiny skin was walnut brown. Her hands with the Henry Moore thumbs—curving into backward C’s as befits a sculptor, or, in her case, a painter—were gnarled but arthritis-free. She became beautiful after her four kids left home and she no longer had to pretend she was so damned happy about being a mother. She would dispute this, she always has disputed it, but I am the one writing this piece. Her cross face relaxed, her 1950s glasses came off in favour of gold-rimmed specs and she stopped putting her naturally curly hair into tight curlers.

Beauty Tip #2: It is never too late, as Churchill kept telling Garbo.

In the meantime, you came along. At the age of six you sat on my bed and said to me, “You always wear pants, and you always wear the same pants.”

Beauty Tip #3: Listen to your daughter.

If anything, my interest in beauty has only increased with the years. I notice skin more avidly than ever. The way many women work their skin with their fingertips, especially during the cold winter months, rubbing and tugging at it as if it were cheap dry goods. The overripe watermelon gleam that swollen old female knees acquire. The fine cross-hatching that afflicts blondes who swim in chlorinated pools, the furrowed upper lip that plagues auburns above all. In the name of research, I ask perfect strangers what they use on their skin, and they tell me. The ruddy newspaperwoman who pulled a wagon of
Ottawa Citizens
behind her bicycle, no matter the weather, said, “That vitamin E cream you get in the pharmacy.”

“Vitamin E?”

“Yeah. Or C.”

The cleaning ladies who were tromping up somebody else’s steps, laden with buckets and mops, said, “Neutrogena when we can afford it, but usually Lubriderm.” The Cambodian wagon vendor who was selling French fries during the ice storm said, “Vaseline. In Cambodia too.” There’s Vaseline in Cambodia? “Everywhere. All over the world.” And you needed it over there? “There it’s worse, so cold and dry that even our cheeks would split.” The thin, elderly woman working in a health food store on a hot summer’s day said, “For years I couldn’t have a bath. I’m going to get that fly”—she was holding a swatter up in the air. “I’d have a bath and in the middle of the night I’d be scratching here”—across her belly—“so hard I’d bleed. Then we moved into the country and I realized I was allergic to the chlorine in city water. But I still couldn’t be in the sun. I’d be in the sun, and it was like boiling water thrown over me, I burned so bad. Then I started reading in these books we have”—she pointed around the store—“and began to take flaxseed oil capsules, three of them three times a day, and in two and a half months I could feel oil on my skin. And this summer I could be in the sun without burning. This may not look like much of a tan to you”—stretching out her arm—“but if I held it up against my breasts you’d see how white the rest of me is. Now I’m down to one capsule twice a day. My hair looks 100 percent better. And my bowels! I just go into the bathroom and I’m out again before you know it.”

I have tried her method in scaled-down fashion, a variation of my old childhood practice of dipping my finger in the butter dish every time I passed the dining room table. As someone who butters her baguette on both sides, you will be sympathetic. I have even framed Beauty Tip #4: Don’t bother with skin cream, just eat oil. And added Beauty Tip #5, my favourite, as a corollary: Don’t bathe so often. All a daily shower accomplishes is to remove a body’s natural oils that then have to be replenished with expensive lotions, and what this furthers beyond lining the pockets of the beauty industry I don’t know. But, in honesty, I have to add something else. As someone with a cupboard full of skin creams from as far away as Cuba and Germany, as someone who took a workshop on how to make my own herbal lotions and has a drawer full of ingredients and a willingness to try anything—motivated as I am by the highest scientific interest—take it from me, this is a shortcut: Beauty Tip
# 6:
Nothing works.

Now on to hair. I have it on good authority that before the war women used to wash their hair no more than twice a month, and it was “a job” conducted not in the bathroom but in the kitchen. With shampoo? I asked your grandmother. “Oh, my dear, no. Hand soap.” But didn’t your heads get itchy? “We scratched.”

She remembers clearly the furor when Mary Martin, starring in
South Pacific
, washed that man right out of her hair every night on stage. “People were concerned that her hair would turn to straw.” She remembers, too, the Canadian-Scottish sneering that occurred when the first beauty parlour came to town. This was in the Ottawa Valley in the 1930s. “Such nonsense,” everyone said, to go to a beauty parlour to get your hair washed.

When I was a teenager like you, I had tragically oily hair and my own technique for dealing with it, something I was reminded of a year ago when I ran into an old school friend I hadn’t seen in thirty years. She wanted to know if I still washed my hair with dish detergent. “No,” I answered, “not any more. But I have observed that washing my hair every day is a mistake. It looks better on day two or three.” Beauty Tip #7: Hair, like homemade bread, is always better on the second day.

Body hair is something else, and finally I have reached the unspeakable heart of the matter. I could have built a pyramid in the time I’ve spent regretting my own body hair and forecasting your hairy fate. Oh, the sorrows that await. But this is where the torch I’m ready to pass on gets so wisely refused. You dumbfound me by taking a different approach. At fifteen, when you have to give a speech in French class, you take the point of view of the despised and embattled leg hair: the hair on a woman’s leg speaks to the hair on a man’s leg, asking why its existence is so much more threatened. You practice your speech in front of our French-speaking neighbour, who actually comes from Greece, and what follows on a beautiful June evening is an outpouring of body-hair confessions as informative as they are heartwarming, a United Nations of body hair enlightenment.

“I am hairy too,” announces our Greek neighbour, a pretty thirty-year-old who dresses in revealing tops, petite and slender, though with a hearty appetite (she comes for a drink and stays for supper). “I am a very hairy woman,” she says. “It is a curse. The Mediterranean curse of hairiness.” She describes her trauma at sixteen when a man made a pointed remark about the hair under her arms. And she gives you the following advice about leg hair. Beauty Tip #8: Don’t shave. Never shave. First: wax. Then, when the hair starts to come in again, use a depilatory instrument; they cost $100 at a department store.

She tells you, “Don’t be jealous of other women. Well, I am jealous. But don’t be.”

Then, having accepted another glass of wine, she offers to wax your legs. Stepping back with a smile, she says, “This is not a conspiracy. But if you want …” She explains that she has a Greek product no longer available under the new EU restrictions. “Now you can only buy expensive waxes. But this product used to be cheap. It is sugar, lemon and water. You paint it on and pull it off in strips.”

“Will it hurt?” you ask.

“If it does, we stop.”

You graciously decline. But when Irene moves to Europe to teach advanced linguistics at a famous university, I inherit her instrument, the famous hair plucker, since it operates on a North American current and will be useless to her over there. As a result, I can testify to the stoical thread that unites hairy women, whether they be of Mediterranean or of grim northern stock. Never do I use it without thinking of her and of her gentle, forthright urgings that you not make your life harder for yourself than necessary.

In the end, the delivery of your speech was anticlimactic. Your classmates laughed, but much more moderately than you had hoped, and you came home depressed. Beauty Tip #9: Square your shoulders and remember Irene.

A few other things I’ll pass on: Noses grow. They keep growing long after everything else has stopped. This is not an illusion. Moles proliferate. They increase in number as you age and there will be no end to them. Brown ones, beige ones, red ones like flicks from a red paintbrush. They prefer your chest to any other place. Eyebrows flourish. Pubic hair thins. Wens removed from your scalp grow back.

Lately, you have taken to wearing your father’s old pants, and I find myself thinking as I look at you, You always wear pants, and you always wear the same pants. I am filled with admiration and an almost atavistic—look it up—sadness, and say nothing.

But last week your father said to me, “If you are going to write about the beauty tips your mother never passed on to you, why don’t you pass them on to our daughter?” And this seemed like a revolutionary idea, because, although I’ve been thinking about beauty for fifty years, it never occurred to me that I had anything to pass on. How wrong I was.

Beauty Tip #10: Check out Audrey Hepburn in pants.

Conjuring Up
                              a New Life

Carole Sabiston

My arms, thrust into our old costume trunk, are searching for something when my fingers slide into ripples of liquid silk. I pull out the mysterious thing. A white rabbit-fur coat! The height of fashion—Mary Quant, Carnaby Street, 1968, wide horizontal bands of fur and leather, a royal purple satin lining—so glamorous, I believed then. Memories flow back. Some thirty-four years ago, this coat enticed me to run away from my life.

That year, 1968, I was twenty-nine, with thirty looming uncomfortably on the horizon.
Don’t trust anyone over thirty
was the mantra of the pop culture. I was divorced—rarer then—with a four-year-old son. My life seemed caught in a hypocritical net of dated correctness. Daily life was full with teaching high school art and raising my son, but I met few new people, was occasionally trapped in platonic relationships and travelled nowhere. Self-pity was my easy street. What social life I had was narrow. Woman friends would say “come for tea” and then describe the “married couples only” dinner parties they gave or attended. Their husbands or other men discreetly—and sometimes not so—offered their helpful services.

My parents, immigrant butchers, always concerned with keeping one’s place in society, pressured me, an only child, subtly but relentlessly, to be respectable and get settled, which in their minds meant to marry again, quit my job and give up all this art stuff that occupied my non-teaching time. The man I would marry was not a priority; the convention of marriage was.

On the other hand, many aspects of my life were working well. My students were lively and stimulating. My own art-making—painting, collage and textile assemblage—happily consumed me. And, of course, my main focus was my son, Andrew, sunny, engaging and full of four-year-old enthusiasm.

The Feminine Mystique
by Betty Friedan and later
The Female Eunuch
by Germaine Greer confirmed my gut feeling that modern women, particularly working women, were far from being on an equal platform with the other half of humanity. Businessmen, for instance, could write off expenses for entertaining and travel, while working mothers, at far lower salaries, were paying hefty fees for daycare with no tax relief at all. Aside from the usual female jobs of nurse, secretary, teacher or telephone operator, no one ever suggested there were more creative possibilities. But as feminist awareness gained momentum, for the first time in my life I actively began dreaming about a wider, more independent and challenging existence. Before I could evolve, though, a moment of insanity was necessary.

It was late December. Joy! I had been invited to a real adult New Year’s Eve party—a progressive dinner party—formal and swishy, tuxedos and long gowns. My life was about to brighten up.

About thirty of us were to “progress” from one house to another all across the city. The first stop was for martinis and canapés, the second for turtle soup and Caesar salad—a cutting-edge menu at that time; the third, for duck à l’orange and wild rice; the fourth, for pears flambé with Cointreau. Finally, on to the last house to jive, boogie and twist under psychedelic strobe lights till dawn.

A city bus was hired for the evening travels, freeing all from driving—oh clever planning. But wait, there would be much putting-on and taking-off of coats all evening long. Wearing my utilitarian everyday khaki raincoat hardly seemed appropriate over the delicate amethyst brocade gown I had just sewn from a Vogue Couturier pattern—cloth label included. The full ensemble must be perfect. Already in place were the dress, shoes, purse and big gypsy earrings—but no coat!

Ah, the sales had just started—quick, hunt for a coat. There it was at Gibson’s Ladies Wear on a clearance rack for only $99. Blowing my budget by 200 percent, I bagged the white rabbit-fur coat. For days the bounty hung on the outside of the closet door where I could admire and stroke it, burying my face into its sweet, sensuous fur, anticipating the good time to come. And indeed it did. The party, merry and amusing, was a great success, and because of a rare Victoria snowfall, the last eve of 1968 became a fantasy night. Trudging through deep, silent snow between houses, I became Dr. Zhivago’s Lara.

January 1, 1969. As the late morning sun poked around the blinds in my bedroom, my eyes homed in on a great white mass—the fur coat—puffed up on its hanger, glowing from its previous night of glory. A new year, but something felt wrong—a letdown, a promise unfulfilled, an emptiness. What was there to celebrate?

All that day, pacing in our apartment, I found a question taking shape. What was I
not doing
with my life? What
could
I do? That damn rabbit-fur coat was the catalyst, of course. It seemed to mock me. To squander precious dollars on a stylish garment destined to spend most of its life in a dark closet was pathetic. Then a moment of clarity—an epiphany!
I
needed to change my life’s direction. Time to take charge.

Yes, the coat had provided the answer—take a leave of absence from teaching, travel to a faraway land, live frugally, perhaps primitively, and escape all convention. As I had an invitation to hold a solo exhibition of my textile wall hangings in Toronto the following year, this could be the solution to finding maximum preparation time.

I phoned my friend Betty and announced my decision, assigning her the watchdog role of preventing any attempted retraction.

“Where will you go? To Provence?” she suggests, having just returned from there.

But I knew my inadequate French would paralyze me. “Maybe a Spanish-speaking country—Mexico or Spain,” I imagine spontaneously.

“Then have you seen the latest
Maclean’s
?
”

“Not yet.”

“Well, whip out and get it—I’ll say no more,” she concludes, leaving me in suspense.

The article with intriguing colour photographs radiated from the pages:
Ibiza
—a small island in the Mediterranean, off the Spanish coast—
Islas Balearos
. Our destination—Andrew’s and mine—was decided at that moment.

With a purpose and new direction I found it was easy to sell, scrimp and save from that January to June, amassing a small fortune of $1,500—enough for the coming year. Spanish lessons at night school began to give me a taste for the flamboyance of
olé
.

Late on a September evening, we arrived at Ibiza’s then primitive, open airport. Everyone, except Andrew and me, was whisked away by family or friends. Suddenly, the two of us were alone in the dark oleander-scented air. As his little hand slowly began to squeeze tighter in mine, panic, then remorse, gripped me. I must be completely irresponsible to embark on this selfish adventure. The lone remaining taxi driver took us to his cousin’s
pension
in Santa Eulalia del Río. (I fancied that village for its pretty name.) Two weeks later, a small tiled flat in Es Caná, high on a cliff overlooking an inviting white sand beach, became our home.

It wasn’t long before I stopped winding my clock and lived by the Mediterranean sun’s predictability. Every day became an adventure—playing on the beaches, exploring the ancient countryside, indulging in aromatic markets, making art all day or socializing with new friends at the outdoor cafés. Often there would be four or five languages spoken at one table—a European cross-section. My limitations were frustrating. Not so for Andrew. He quickly found little friends speaking Ibithenco, Spanish, French, German or English, who all blended their words together, creating a new, efficient play-world language.

Perhaps some might question my taking a small child on this unknown year. At first I did, too, until I saw him flourishing. His name became Andres,
el rubio
(the blond one). Hands ruffled his white locks. Families appeared and included us in their everyday Ibithenco lives. He absorbed the new experiences with wide-eyed exuberance—seeming to understand that the world is a thrilling and diversified place. I learned much through my child’s eyes.

New senses awakened. My practical schoolmarm clothes were shed for leather, lace, beads, tie-dyes and shawls—it was flower-child time, after all. A nearby gypsy camp filled the night air with poignant flamenco rhythms. A neighbouring farmhouse, clearly seen from our third floor, had its annual hog slaughter, attended by a lively extended family who had jointly fed the beast all year. The squealing, celebrating and sausage-making carried on for days.

My taste buds continuously met new flavours and textures. Fresh-caught octopus, squid and finger-size turquoise and orange fish that sizzled in local olive oil; brilliant saffron yellow paella; huge country lemons and oranges, then green and black figs—yes, pluck them off any tree, any time; the ubiquitous potato frittatas; the local olives and almonds; and the all-pervasive scent of wild rosemary.

But it was the colour, the stunning colour, that shifted my visual perceptions from familiar muted Pacific Coast hues—slate blues, grey-greens, grey-browns in soft light—to the explosion of glowing vibrancy that made my eyes dance: cobalt skies, copper red soil, turquoise seas, valleys of shimmering pink-white almond blossoms and always the singing vermilion of wild geranium bushes against the blinding white farmhouses. I would never be afraid of red again.

After living by my wits for a year, I knew I could choose a freer life for the future. Living on that small island—with only a short trip back to Toronto for a successful art exhibition—and some weeks travelling with a Eurail Pass left me with a lifelong taste for exploring the world. But more important, I also recognized the need to reconnect with the Canadian me. Time to go home.

Three years later, I had finally left teaching to work full-time in a downtown studio loft, taking on progressively larger architectural commissions for textile wall hangings, occasionally employing up to six assistants at a time. My own exhibition work has travelled internationally, with titles like
Sailing, Flying
and
Parachuting
—all directly connected with the concept of travel and metaphorical escape.

Like others who choose a life in art, I have the privileges of no boss, no set hours and freedom to express myself, constantly pursuing the quest to solve the next self-imposed problem, both visual and financial. Conversely, there is no dental plan, no pension, no day of retirement for most of us in the arts.

As well, women artists of my generation, and before, if married and with children, invariably put domestic chores ahead of the “stolen” time to create, whereas our male colleagues usually have wives or partners to run the household. I have always admired Emily Carr’s resolve to remain a “spinster.” Her genius might never have been revealed had she accepted a standard domestic life. Bravely she chose singular, personal hardship and, likely, profound loneliness in order for her artist soul to soar.

Eventually I did marry again, understanding what choice means. With my husband’s youngest daughter and my son, we became an instant blended family. They and their friends quickly commandeered the white-rabbit fur coat for dressing up. Now, still in the costume trunk, it sleeps, between generations, awaiting discovery by our grandchildren.