Girl Unwrapped (33 page)

“It’s late. Where were you, for God’s sake? Couldn’t you have phoned? I was asleep, of course I was, but a mother sleeps with one eye open. You stink of smoke. And what is that? Perfume? Feh! A vile one. Like that stuff they burn in churches. Why didn’t you ask for my nice cologne?”

Before Toni can reply, Lisa continues: “But really, where were you? You can tell your old mother. I’m happy you’re going out more, meeting people finally. It’s good one of us finds a little joy. For me it will be when I dance at your wedding. Who were you with? Someone special? Don’t give me that look. A mother knows. You were in a club of some kind. You think I never did such things when I was young? I tangoed the night away at Café Max in Prague, a downstairs bar with a live jazz band. I broke a few hearts … so long ago. But tell me, do you have to wear such mannish clothes?”

She reaches out to grasp the collar of Toni’s pinstriped shirt. The blazer, tie, and cap came off in the car and are hidden in Toni’s rolled-up winter jacket. Nevertheless, her mother looks Toni up and down and for a moment anxiety clouds her eyes, a terrible doubt seems to break in, then is pushed away again.

“I know, everything’s topsy-turvy now. Boys have long hair, girls wear overalls, young people on the street look like they’re going to a masquerade ball. Never mind. Come have a cup of tea with your old mother. And then you must sleep.”

Lisa puts the kettle on and continues to babble, filling up the silence while Toni suppresses yawns. Bone tired, she wants to fall into bed, but she can see her mother is like a wound-up top, desperate for contact. And despite her weariness, Toni relishes the comfort of tea in the kitchen, her chattering mother in her housecoat across the table. A dignified grief is etched on her mother’s face, an Old World beauty filled with grand tragedy and resolve.

When at last Toni stumbles to her feet, her mother reaches up to hold her face between her hands.

“Sleep well,
Bubbele
.”

Her mother can have no inkling about Loulou’s. It’s beyond her horizons. But had things gone further with Marie, would Lisa not have sensed something?
A mother can tell.
Toni cringes at the thought. Her body aches with thwarted desires. She doesn’t know how she’ll face the gang at Loulou’s next week after tonight’s humiliating performance. She tosses on the searing embers of anxieties before tumbling at last into merciful sleep.

Part V

The Ghetto and Beyond

chapter 26

A poster on a bulletin board stops Toni in her tracks, arresting her brisk journey across the university campus. Normally, she doesn’t bother with the announcements that compete for student attention like waving hands. There is always so much going on: hootenannies, protest marches, poetry readings, football games, frat parties, film nights, talks on everything from Mao to meditation. When do these people have time to study?

During orientation week the entire freshman class assembled in the gymnasium for a pep talk by the rector. He stood at a podium, a remote stick figure in a grey suit, but with a voice that boomed over the sound system.

“Look to your left, look to your right,” the voice thundered. “Imagine those people gone. Only a third of you will graduate. The rest will fall by the wayside.”

Skeptical titters ran through the crowd, but Toni believed him. The rector’s gloomy warning confirmed what she already knew, how much easier it was to go under than to stay afloat. She’d missed a year, was no longer in the groove of disciplined study. Only iron will could save her. She bought thick notebooks for each of her courses: Introduction to Biology, Bio Lab, Organic Chemistry, Plant Morphology, Psych 101. Inside the front covers she stapled schedules and campus maps and reading lists. She shunned the carnival-like distractions.

This day in mid-October, she’s in a rush to get to Psych 101, a popular course held in an auditorium that fills up quickly. If she’s late, she’ll have to stand in the lobby and watch the professor on closed-circuit TV. Yet something about the poster has caught her eye.

“Sisters Unite!” shout the big red letters. “Rise up against patriarchy! A talk by Marsha Dvorak from the Women’s Liberation Collective of Columbia University. Basement of the Unicentre. Thursday, Oct. 19, noon. THIS IS A WOMEN-ONLY EVENT”

The poster includes a black-and-white photo of the speaker defaced with a moustache, a forked beard, horns, cartoon boobs. After “Sisters Unite,” some wag has penned “and get up-tight.” Other graffiti include: “cunts
über alles
,” “butch bitches,” “cocks unite to cure feminine frustration movement!” and most ominously, “We’re coming to get you!” In a different tone, someone has neatly printed a question beside the “women only” restriction: “Isn’t this discrimination too?”

Beneath this poster on the bulletin board, scotch-taped to the wall and lacking the administration’s stamp of approval, hangs a densely typed mimeographed sheet proclaiming a manifesto by S.L.A.P. (Sisters Linked Against Patriarchy).

“Man, the oppressor, is responsible for war, violence, domination, capitalism, conformity, privilege, supremacist ideology. Womyn, the nurturer and original force of civilization, has been raped, abused, exploited, silenced, imprisoned in suburbia and the family. We are non-hierarchical, non-exploitive, anti-bourgeois, anti-doctrinaire, freedom-loving, joy-affirming.”

At the end of the thirteen-point manifesto comes an invitation to another event: “Hex-in against the Annual Engineering Students’ Miss Sensation contest. Disrupt this pageant of degradation. All wimmin welcome.”

Surprisingly, this manifesto has not been defaced, perhaps because all those words leave little room in the margins for commentary and because the mimeographed sheet is hard to read. One has to stand close, bend down, pore over the blurry blue lines. A strange fascination roots Toni to the spot. She’s heard mutterings about Miss Sensation in campus corridors and even at Loulou’s, which she still frequents—her one indulgence—on Saturday nights. The manifesto’s call to arms and the nasty comments on the Marsha Dvorak poster set off a storm in Toni’s head. She imagines brandishing a baseball bat at thick-necked engineering types who threaten the women’s lib meeting. The fantasy gathers force and she quivers with righteous anger. Then checks her watch. Damn! Better hurry.

As she cuts across campus, feet swishing through crisp autumn leaves, she notices a cluster of women by a fountain. She recognizes the impassioned, gesticulating figure of Francine, ringleader of the radical feminists at McGill, and a regular at Loulou’s. Before she can swing away, they notice her too. Francine stops in mid-sentence to call out her name. Reluctantly, Toni approaches.

“You’re coming to our protest action, right?”

More than Francine’s words, it’s the tone that rankles. The smug assumption, the veiled threat. The radicals claim Toni as their own because they’ve seen her at Loulou’s. Supposedly, she has no choice but to fall into line.

“I have a lecture,” Toni says, balling her fists in her jacket pockets.

“The action is on a Friday night,” Francine says reasonably.

“I’ll be preparing for my lab.”

“A lab is more important than women’s liberation?”

Francine’s eyebrows arch upward above her granny glasses.

“I didn’t come to college to fool around. I came for an education. Anyway, I’m not a witch.”

Francine ignores this last comment. “Our event is very educational,” she says. “Whereas what you get in the lecture halls is a bourgeois, conformist message to uphold the patriarchy.” The other women nod. Francine’s bright, intelligent eyes fire out challenges. “Don’t tell me you get the respect you deserve as one of the few women among all those male chauvinists in the science faculty.”

Toni sees herself in the lecture hall with the rows of conservatively dressed, studious young men who generally ignore her because she’s neither one of the guys nor dating material. Which is just fine, thank you. She doesn’t want their attention.

“I’m not oppressed. If I do my work, I’m treated as an equal.”

“But you’re so hooked into the system, you don’t see what it does to you.”

Francine’s tone drips with pity now. She bares her teeth in an ingratiating smile while scanning Toni’s attire, taking obvious note of each concession made to traditional femininity: a purse, a bead choker, a satin blouse whose shiny cuffs peek out of the sleeves of Toni’s wool pea jacket. The outfit is designed to conform to campus trends and contrasts markedly with the clothes Toni wears to Loulou’s. A “gotcha” look gleams in Francine’s eyes.

Toni glares back. “Can’t chitchat any longer. I’m in a hurry.”

“Maybe you’re afraid to be seen with us? Afraid of what the straights might think?”

“You’re right. I don’t want to be seen with a bunch of commies.”

Toni stalks off. There’s a lot more she could add. For example, that she’s heard the same rant against bourgeois education from one of the biggest male chauvinists in the hemisphere, a guy called David Konig, who uses hippie rhetoric to manipulate people, women especially, into abandoning their wills. And what’s so bad about getting a degree, having a profession, instead of ending up a lowly paid stenographer in an office or a freeloading drop-out? She fumes to herself throughout the psych lecture while she leans against a wall in the lobby and frantically, awkwardly, scribbles notes about Pavlov’s dog.

At Loulou’s, she’s become a lone wolf. Though she still clinks bottles with Juanita occasionally, Toni’s not with that gang anymore. She got bored with the repetitive conversation, the hollow jokes, and they with her lengthening silences. Now she keeps her own company, nursing an air of mystery, her nose in a beer, one of a row of quiet, steady drinkers at the bar. She’s got no time for entanglements anyway. She escapes to the club just to refresh and recommit herself to her serious long-term affair with her texts. Juanita comes by sometimes for a chat. She and Toni have maintained cordial relations, bound by some instinctive code of honour. The loyalty persists, though Toni’s a college girl and could be viewed as one of “them,” the new guard crowding out the old-timers. Loulou’s has been changing, and fast. Every Saturday brings a fresh wave of kids from the suburbs and campuses. They are cute, though stridently unisex or studiously weird, and Rick has relaxed her standards to accommodate the new crowd. Anything goes—jeans, overalls, plaid shirts, beads and hippie tresses, Mao jackets, Che Guevara berets, army surplus togs. Rick shrugs as if to say, “
Ben
. What can you do?” She’s got too much business sense to resist a rising tide.

The Saturday night after the Marsha Dvorak talk and the Miss Sensation pageant, Francine and her pals breeze in, lively and energized by the week’s events. (A photo of them chanting, fists raised, upstaging the beauty queens at the pageant made the front page of the
McGill
Daily.
) They wear austere outfits in keeping with their revolutionary zeal and butch haircuts, but woe to anyone who calls them butch. The buttons on their berets say, “Stop sleeping with the enemy” and “Sappho was a right-on woman.” These gals buy drinks, though. They make Rick’s cash register sing as they chatter and laugh and have a grand old time with their revolution. A couple of the militants begin distributing a flyer; it’s the S.L.A.P. manifesto. Toni pushes it away.

“No thanks.”

She sees Rick accept the flyer with a good-natured smile.

“
Ouai
. Don’t need to tell me men are pigs. That’s why I make this bar for girls only. What’s that? Girls are women? Got it,
ma petite
.
Exactement!
”

Toni watches Rick slip the manifesto behind the counter—straight into the garbage no doubt—and smiles to herself while chugging back her beer. She’s in that nice, numb state of inebriation when everything strikes her as delightfully absurd. Raised voices nearby wake her from her daze. An argument has broken out at a table by the back. Toni stands up to look over the heads of gathering spectators.

“Those shoes aren’t made for walking, sister. High heels are a trap of the patriarchy. Liberate yourself.”

Francine is haranguing Renée.

“Show some respect for the lady,” Rhonda bellows. She’s risen from her seat, drawn herself up to her full height—which doesn’t amount to much—and jabs her finger upward into Francine’s face. Renée has remained seated, her mouth turned down in an expression of disdain while her fingers pluck at Rhonda’s sleeve as if to say: “It’s not worth the trouble.”

“Lady!”

Francine shakes her head and sighs as one would with a child painfully unaware of its foolishness.

“That’s right, she’s a lady. Better watch your tongue,” Toni growls, pushing her way through the circle. Numbness has given way to righteous anger. Francine turns to face her.

“You think that’s a term of respect?
Ladies
are patronized.
Ladies
are put on pedestals and turned into objects. And to think women are doing that to their sisters. It’s pathetic. These women here have been brainwashed by double oppression, sexism and classism. But you! You should know better.”

“I do. I know disrespect when I see it. I know commie talk when I hear it. If you were a real butch, I’d belt you.”

A mighty wind fills Toni’s chest. The joy of the fighting cock.

“Trouble with you is you’re male-identified,” Francine says with quiet scorn. “A repressed, fucked-up, bourgeois, imitation man who feels threatened by the revolution because it’ll strip you of your privileges.”

“See this?” Toni yells, raising her fist. “This ain’t no imitation.”

A hush falls over the group, a look of thrilled expectation illuminates the faces, even those of Francine’s friends. The promise of drama grips them all.

But then a powerful force grabs Toni from behind, pinioning her arms, practically lifting her off the floor, and, in front of the startled onlookers, she’s frog-marched to the rear door. A firm, adroitly planted foot on her backside thrusts her over the stoop and into a cluster of aluminum trash cans below. Lids scatter and clatter. The heavy door slams. She finds herself on the ground, holding her gravel-grazed hands to her chest, blinking her beer-dazed eyes in the dark. Flung like a rat into the alley. She immediately starts to shiver. The air is damp, unusually cold, with a whiff of approaching snow, and she’s in her shirtsleeves.