“Jake, admit it, we never really recovered from the Floyd and Hampstead disaster,” I said. “It changed us.”
“I love you. We can fix it. I know we can,” he said. “I was going to ask you to marry me on Valentine’s Day.”
My hand froze over the mug of carnations. Isn’t that what I’ve always wanted? “Don’t say that. It’s not fair. It’s just proof to me of how far apart we were. I wanted to break up and you wanted to get married. Why did you come here tonight?” I asked.
“I had to see you.”
“You mean you had to show me. You wanted me to see your smashed face.”
“Maybe.”
“You should go. I need to be alone. I need to sleep.”
“Any chance of a kiss goodnight?” He leaned toward me, lips puckered on his raw, pulpy face.
“So gross,” I said, laughing and averting my face. I couldn’t help it.
“I am not an animal,” he said. I put my hand squarely on his chest. He leaned into me and I tenderly kissed his hot cheek.
I couldn’t know in that moment that this would be the first in a decade-long series of mismatched attempts at getting back together, where one of us would want to try again but we never found ourselves in sync long enough to make it happen.
39
GRADUATION
I passed all my exams. Macroeconomics was my lowest grade: 51 percent. Professor’s fudge. Thank you, Dr. Binhammer. I felt like an academic idiot. I had three Ds: Macroeconomics, business finance, public finance. I had technically fulfilled the requirements of the four pillars — academics, military leadership, bilingualism, and fitness — necessary to graduate as a cadet from the Royal Military College of Canada, Class of 1984, but I took no pride in it. I had disappointed myself.
A four-year posting to CFB Kingston had come through. I would simply move up the hill on the other side of Fort Henry, live in the officers’ quarters, and start working in base supply as a second lieutenant supply officer.
All four women from the Frigate had gone the distance, and we would graduate together. Of the thirty-two women who had started, only twenty-one remained, but this was statistically a much higher success rate than that of our male classmates. In total, our class had started with over five hundred recruits in CMR, Royal Roads, and RMC. Only 229 from that group, including the women, had finished.
Sunday, May 13, 1984. The Toronto Star did a cover story on our graduation. Three stories were highlighted on the full-colour headline banner, with photographs, on the front page: one on Lady Diana, “Diana of a Thousand Days Is a Changed Woman”; one on Robert Redford, “A Rare Interview with Robert Redford”; and one on me, “Meet the First Woman Grad of Royal Military College.”
During various interviews with the press that week, I didn’t say a bad word about the college, and neither did any of the other women cadets. The press clippings had never been honest. We didn’t tell anyone the truth. Maybe we couldn’t even look at it for ourselves. My boldest comment was in an article published by the Ottawa Citizen on May 14, when I commented on missing my chance to train to be a pilot: “I still hope someday I’ll be able to. I know I’m capable. I don’t think it’s fair.” It would be another year until the final decision was made to open the pilot classification to women. In the end, my life would go in another direction and I would never apply for pilot. The administration spoke highly of the success of the integration, and we all agreed wholeheartedly that the male cadets had been gracious and supportive, that we had all done it together.
Just before graduation weekend, an envelope came in the mail. I didn’t recognize the scrawling handwriting or the Ottawa return address, and I opened it with curiosity. I pulled out a folded newspaper article, three pages from the Ottawa Citizen. It was the recent interview with Meg and me, including photos. There was a handwritten message in the corner of the margin on the front page, next to a photo of me shining my boots in my room: “Congratulations, I’m proud of you. Bob Bennett.”
I was delighted that the “top curmudgeon against women at RMC” from my mess dinner evening in Ottawa had taken the time to cut out the article and send me a supportive note.
Convocation took place on a Friday afternoon, May 18, 1984. My parents had arrived with my sister, Ellen, and my middle brother, Peter. Except for Dad’s visit during first year for the father-son mess dinner, none of my family had set foot on the college grounds.
After our degrees were awarded, the celebrations started in earnest. That evening, the sunset ceremony showcased cadet life: Old Eighteen drill team performance, unarmed combat team demonstrations, gymnastics, Highland band and dancers, and various skits roasting staff and professors. At sunset, a bagpiper sounded taps and the college flag was lowered on my military college career. A passing of the colours took place from the fourth-year cadets to the third-year cadets.
My family was seated together in two rows on the red bleachers, Ellen, Peter, and I directly behind our parents. My mother shifted angrily in her seat, complaining about her neighbours. “If he wasn’t so tall and her hair wasn’t so big, I might be able to see the whole show at once,” she grumbled loudly toward the couple in front of her.
Dad patted her knee, but she continued to squirm. Near the end of taps, Ellen leaned forward to gently ask Mom to be quieter. “It’s almost over, Mom. Just a few more minutes.”
This was met with a middle-finger knuckle in her eye. Ellen gasped and clasped her hand to her face. I leaned in and asked if she was okay. She nodded and motioned for me to quit making a scene, but she continued to hold her eye. The moment the show was over and people stood to disband, Ellen calmly declared, “I need to go to emergency. I think my contact lens is lodged behind my eyeball.”
“Are you sure it didn’t just pop out?” asked my mother, half-heartedly looking around the benches at my sister’s feet.
“I’ll take you,” I said. I drove my sister’s rental car straight to the Kingston General Hospital Emergency Department to have the lens dislodged and then delivered her safely back to her hotel for the night.
Tensions were still high between my mother and Ellen and me the next morning. After the graduation parade, we were loitering in the hallway outside my room, alongside a gathering of classmates and their families doing the same. There was a general atmosphere of celebration, and in the midst of it my mother and my sister started arguing about the previous night.
“I never touched you,” declared my mother.
“You poked me in the eye! I had to go to the hospital,” Ellen said.
“What a load of nonsense. I never touched you!”
“Please, just be quiet,” I said, my face flushed with embarrassment.
Dad scowled worriedly and looked frightened.
My mother shouted, “Don’t you dare speak to me that way. You think you’re something special, you and all your friends here. You’re just a bunch of pompous asses.”
I flinched. The crowd around us hushed, a few people staring.
In a flash, Ellen grabbed Mother’s arm, dragged her into my room, and closed the door. The crowd became more animated than ever and drifted away from our area. Soon we were nearly alone in the hall.
My mother let out a blood-curdling cry for help. “Gordie! Gordie! Help me! Help me! She’s trying to kill me.”
I heard the muffled expletives of my sister telling her to calm down. I wanted to die. My father stood transfixed with a frozen look on his face.
I stared at him. “Will you do nothing?”
“Why do you girls always have to go out of your way to upset her?” he muttered and stared at the ground.
The next thing that happened was only what could have been predicted to happen.
Nothing.
We pretended nothing had happened and tried to salvage what was left. Just like always. Ellen and my mother emerged from my room and we went out for lunch. That evening, my mother dressed in a teal ball gown and wore a mink stole to my graduation ball.
“Auntie
Greta lent it to me.” My mother beamed.
“You look lovely, Mom.”
We danced until dawn, and then we made our way to the parade square and posed for the Class of 1984 graduation sunrise photo.
I didn’t go back to bed that day. I was too excited to sleep. A large room with a loft bedroom was waiting for me in CFB Kingston’s officers’ quarters, where the next chapter of my life would begin. From my bed, I would look through the two-storey picture windows onto a sloping lawn that led down to the edge of the St. Lawrence River and the Thousand Islands. I had four years of lost sleep to make up.
My RMC clearing-out routine was completed in time to meet my family, who showed up to help me move out of the Frigate. Everyone chipped in. The cars filled quickly. At one point, I saw Mom pick up the vase of dried pink carnations from Jake amongst a few unwrapped delicate items on my desk. I had to resist grabbing them out of her hands to keep them safe.
I dropped the final armload of clothes into the back seat of my graduation present to myself, a brand-new silver two-door Subaru coupe, and turned to my dad. “Just give me a few moments to say goodbye?”
“For sure, take your time,” Dad said, squeezing my shoulder.
I made my way up the fire escape stairs, entered my newly emptied room, closed the door, and sat on the bare mattress. The room was stark — there was nothing left of me there. I looked out at the familiar view of Navy Bay and said a mental goodbye to the harbour. I’d done it. It seemed like a small thing and such a tremendous thing all at once. I felt like I should cry, though I didn’t.
In the corner behind my door, I noticed my spider basher. I had kept it with me since recruit term and had killed countless squadron mascots with it. I laughed, grabbed it, and went downstairs to the recruit flight hallway. I stood in front of the headless woman and gave her a silent nod of goodbye. She had helped me make it. I made it. I shuddered and pushed through the door to leave my basher stick in the shower room.
On the way out, a streak of pink from the open garbage can caught my eye. I stood and stared into the bin in disbelief. A bouquet of dried pink carnations was haphazardly strewn amongst the paper towels, stalks snapped in half and heads mangled.
I felt such a blast of hatred for my mother that it scared me.
I went directly to my old room and sat on the bed to catch my breath and calm myself. For the first time in my life, I felt that nobody had any right to expect anything of me. I didn’t have anything left to prove to anyone. I didn’t have to rush anywhere to please anyone, especially not her.
The door eased opened and my mother entered. I said nothing as she sat down beside me. I didn’t look at her; I didn’t want her there.
“So, you’re sad to be graduating from camp?” she asked.
“Yes, I suppose I am,” I said tersely.
“That’s the first time you haven’t corrected me when I called it camp.”
“That’s because my graduation gift to myself is to stop fighting you.” I looked over at her pursed lips and narrowed eyes. The whole of our history was written in her pinched face.
“I never should have let you come here. It’s ruined you,” she said.
“How can you even say that? I’m not ruined. Don’t ever say that to me again.” I moved to get up and she grabbed at my arm, but I eluded her grasp. “You didn’t let me come here. I made the decision, and I was the one who stuck with it.”
“Well, you’ve definitely changed,” she said bitterly.
“Yes, I suppose I have after all.” My mother didn’t know me. I couldn’t make her see me if she didn’t see me by now. She didn’t want to know me. I didn’t want to let her know me.
“Let’s go,” I said, stepping quickly out the door and leaving my mother behind. She could take her own time coming down the stairs, but I was ahead of her now and I wasn’t looking back.
EPILOGUE
Nelson, BC
April 2018
It’s late afternoon on a Sunday. Snow is melting off the roof of the woodshed and off the lawn, and last year’s green grass is emerging from the edge of the snowdrift under my office window.
I’ve been enjoying flipping through photo albums and RMC yearbooks. My laughter shocks and delights me — I’m finally on the other side of a journey that started many years ago and felt like a long, cold winter that threatened to never end.
I have been with my husband, Rick, for five years, and am finally in the right relationship. I’ve married a good man, a bright and kind and supportive partner. I’m watching him hang birdhouses in the trees along the edge of the creek. He built them during the winter months in his workshop using discarded antique doorknobs as perches and reclaimed barnboards for the frames. Despite being in the midst of his own project, he accepts, with his usual generosity of spirit — showing interest and laughing along — my frequent disruptions when I go outside and ask him to listen to this story or look at that photo.
And it hits me. I realize I’ve been telling myself a lie. It’s not true that I wasn’t a good cadet and didn’t belong at RMC. I was actually well suited to military college life: the antics, the camaraderie, and the skylarks. Under different circumstances, I would have done well academically and even athletically. My future life was a testament to this, scoring grades in the nineties during a three-year program to become a registered professional counsellor while continuing to work full-time at my corporate job, pushing my limits as a whitewater kayaker on the rivers of the Pacific Northwest, skiing off-piste bowls at Whistler, and offshore sailing to the South Pacific during a thirteen-month sabbatical from work. I lean back in my chair and watch Rick on his ladder in the woods. A warm wind blows through my memories and I am not sure if I have ever been so happy. We had a lot of fun at RMC. I can say that now and really feel it. RMC did give me a fabulous start in life and set me up for interesting careers, but I have never been able to reconcile the good with the ugly.
The healing journey started in earnest during the fall of 2014. Unexpectedly, as part of the Class of 1984’s thirtieth-reunion weekend, the first thirty-two women had been invited back to participate in the unveiling of a commemorative plaque to acknowledge the historic moment of our entry into RMC, a moment that had lasted four long, difficult years for me and, I’m guessing, for the other twenty women who had graduated alongside me.
The college had changed. The Frigate had been renovated, and my recruit room no longer existed. I had shed the old self of my college days, and the Frigate had done the same. The dining hall had changed, too. The walls on one side were blown out and an entire wing had been added to accommodate the expanded cadet population. The college now boasted twelve squadrons instead of eight, though I took little interest in the new squadron names or their dorms. The present RMC cadets had fobs for entering buildings, and there were electronic monitors for announcements in the dining hall. Cadets wore a mishmash of unrecognizable uniforms, mostly bagged-out looking combats, and they even carried knapsacks. They emailed. Texted. Tweeted.
But one thing seemed to have remained constant. On Friday afternoon I followed the Frigate recruits from the Class of 2018 as they ran the obstacle course. A fourth-year female cadet from my old squadron stood by my side as we cheered the recruits scaling a twenty-foot-high military cargo net.
I asked her, “How are the guys with you?”
“Okay. I’m one of the guys,” she said confidently.
“Yeah. I thought I was one of the guys, too.”
She turned and faced me. “But weren’t you?”
“Not really. I wanted to be. I tried hard. But they never really let me. Not completely. Not in real life after RMC either,” I admitted.
“Real life. That’s funny.”
I tried another tack at my question. “Have you ever had any trouble with the guys?”
“What kind of trouble?” she asked.
“I’ve been reading in the media about the military rape culture. I’ve heard quite a few of the cases were reported by female
RMC cadets.”
“I’ve never been raped.”
“I wasn’t either. I know of one person from my time at the college who was raped, but she only told me about it years later.”
“I know a few. It’s the friends you have to watch out for,” she said. Our eyes met.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s the friends who rape. You’d think it would be the mean ones or the women haters. They might, too, but the friends are the ones that can destroy a person,” she said. My face must have registered my shock. “Yeah. It’s not a very nice story. But I’ve already said too much. I really should keep up.”
I watched her run away and thought about regrets: saying too much, not saying anything, the secrets of RMC, the secrets of my family. My mother had died seven years earlier, failing to ever get what she wanted from life, what she thought she needed from me or felt was her due. I’d stood over her deathbed sobbing with regret. We had never figured it out, never connected in a healthy way. My dad died three years after her.
We’re taught to expect unconditional love from our parents, but I had always felt like that was what was demanded of me. I felt like I had to earn my place, earn my right to be in the family; I felt like I was being watched and judged and graded. Even after I exposed the reality of my childhood experience to my entire family, I was expected to pretend that what had happened with Robert and my mother hadn’t been damaging — that my abuse hadn’t scarred me in ways that I am still trying to unravel and heal — and that I was the one with a problem. The shame of what had happened was thrust upon me, like I was causing trouble by asking them to look where they refused to go.
Eventually, I had to concede that my family would never see the situation my way. And I discovered that I couldn’t play along in my old role as the scapegoat. I wouldn’t do that to myself any longer. I finally walked away, not knowing how to live without family. In time, I’ve learned to stand not knowing. To thrive in it even. This seemed impossible to imagine in the early painful days, but my sadness and grief didn’t kill me, and a new paradigm for family — made of chosen, loyal friends and a loving husband — filled the empty space left within me.
The Stone Frigate Page 23