Dropped Threads 2: More of What We Aren't Told

by Carol Shields

  Those thawing bedsheets could also be used as a scrim, illuminated by a flashlight while a sister frightened herself and us with a story of haunting spirits. That one, the storyteller, was scrawny and blond, with warts on the knuckles of a hand. She had already distinguished herself with a summer of hanging upside down from the limbs of a tree beyond our bedroom window, her gobs of spittle—aimed at passersby—spotting the sidewalk below. Then once again, she achieved notoriety by entering and winning a poetry contest. With this sudden vault in status she vacated the sniper’s nest and graciously agreed to assist her classmates master the complexities of rhymed verse.

  The warts on the poet’s knuckles were made more apparent by the way she attempted to conceal them, hand tucked into her armpit as she climbed the stairs to the stage of the school auditorium to accept her prize. The twin with the pageboy had dressed the poet’s hair for the occasion, a style that resembled an octopus lying on top of her head, each of its arms fastened down with a rhinestone-bedecked bobby pin. The prize she accepted was a voucher for five dollars worth of dry cleaning and publication of her winning poem in the school newsletter. Her prize was our prize, too, our prestigious moment, until days later, when a classmate suggested that she might have read my sister’s winning poem elsewhere. When questioned, she retreated from her certainty, but by then our poet had been labelled a plagiarist, and the damage had been done.

  We fed on one another’s indignation, pumped ourselves into a rage that sent us off on a self-righteous march to take revenge. The wounded poet returned to her perch in the tree, while the twins and I lay in wait for her accuser. When she appeared, we descended on her with mud patties, splattering her crisp white blouse. The crime of slander justified the revenge: the soiled blouse, lawn ornaments going missing during the night, a shrub dug up and replanted in a neighbouring yard. When challenged, the Bartlettes had a kind of solidarity that brings an understanding of how wars might begin.

  But there were, of course, finer moments when that esprit de corps came into play: in times of illness, when a sibling was struggling at school, when a pre-schooler needed coaching to get a head start, our assistance was carried out with a Samaritan fervour as intense and self-righteous as the desire for revenge.

  All too soon, I discovered that my wide-eyed pondering over the nature of our family was shared by others in the town. The minute details of our household and living arrangements were a source of curiosity that, unfortunately, was less than benign. Where did we bathe, wash and brush our teeth? How in heaven’s name did our poor mother manage to clothe all of us on my father’s income? Mention would be made of a family of two or three children in such a way as to imply that this was a status to be desired, an achievement. And then one day, in my presence, as though I were invisible, I overheard a woman suggest that the reason for our large numbers was that my parents lacked self-control. I began to doubt that we were special and to wonder if we were, in some way, deficient.

  The hearth keeper was the first to leave home, and within months I heard her on a live radio broadcast of a Search for Talent concert singing “O Danny Boy” in a quavering sweet voice that took my breath away. Then the gadabout brother was gone too, and I was all the poorer for the absence of his laconic wit—and the two bits he’d pay me for shining his shoes before a night out on the town. The eldest brother remained. He’d wait for night, when the house was still, before spreading his textbooks across the dining room table, studying on into the early morning hours. I’d come home, my body shaking with cold and the excitement of a basketball game well played, and find him there. After we had talked and he had given me something good to think about, I sat at the table across from him, going through his medical dictionary and copying the meanings of a list of words he needed to memorize before the night was done. When he acquired his university degree and a president’s medal, he too was gone.

  Another sister left soon afterwards, as a married woman, and by that time I had given up scrutinizing my siblings and had abandoned the attempt to write about a family. Instead, like many in their teens, I became enamoured of a more fascinating topic—the topic of me.

  For a time I imagined becoming a missionary or transforming into “the big-eyed girl” with a ponytail whom the Big Bopper sang about with such sexual zest. Gradually I discovered a profound need for quiet and solitude, which was a surprise to me—and for others who perhaps assumed that a person who grew up in a large family would naturally be gregarious and extroverted, a player of team sports and at home in a crowd. The need to be alone took me far out into the countryside, on walks to neighbouring towns and villages and alongside the Red River, whose yellow current hinted at mystery, at a bygone era, at the people whose birchbark canoes had once plied its surface. One of those walks took me away from home for half a year, and when I was seventeen, another took me away for good.

  One by one the Bartlettes left home, and the absence of our body heat and voices made the rooms in the house shrink. The bedroom where my sisters and I had shared the choreography of our nocturnal movements became half its size. Sometimes, when we returned home, we crept up the stairs to look at the room in disbelief and wonder, feeling that we were interlopers and had never slept in the sagging bed and given each other our childhood diseases, shared the afflictions of bed wetting, teeth grinding and growing pains. Likely we had shared an aching need for privacy and quiet, too, even though an expressed desire for privacy had seemed an affront, a lock on a diary a challenge.

  We came home on holidays wearing our new identities with a self-conscious stiffness and thinly veiled belligerence that dared a person to question our acquired tastes in fashion, philosophies, religious belief or the apparent lack of one. As the years passed, our mother’s dining room proved to be too small for our growing numbers, and banquet tables were set end to end in the basement. Near to thirty, and then forty, adults gathered around the table for meals, while small children ransacked the rooms above and our mother scurried up and down the stairs. With our leavetaking, our father’s pocketbook had grown fatter, and our mother’s memory improved. She had purchased a diary and recorded the names and birthdates of all her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and they could expect to receive a birthday card on the appropriate day.

  Remember when? Do you remember the time? The storytelling began around the dining room table, but the teller was not allowed to finish because of the number of people interrupting to object, clarify, to change the sequence of events and outcome of the tale, each one intent on his or her own point of view.

  By then, I had begun to tell my own stories in earnest, to snatch an hour here and there, writing in a room I shared with the piano, ironing board, sewing machine and television. I would enter it and discover my son’s jeans draped over the typewriter in need of a patch, his lovely note signed with hugs and kisses. A daughter’s half-finished essay scrolled into the machine. I once found a message—“Dear Mom, people are more important than words. Right?” My youngest child had drawn little squares beneath her note and typed the words, YES, NO, beneath them. “Please check one box only,” she instructed, a wily girl, no doubt anticipating my struggle with the question.

  I never could sit down to write with a sick child in the house or without the beds made, meals planned and the place cleaner than it needed to be. And never without a sense of guilt similar to the one I used to experience while perched on the edge of the bed, when all around me my siblings and parents performed the tasks that were necessary to keep a large family going. The experience of living in a large family has caused me to guard jealously what time I claim as my own, but writing will always feel like a surreptitious act, a covert activity that must be carried on while rightly tending to the more important acts of caring for others.

  The Coat I

  Left Behind

  Maude Barlow

  As a Western feminist, I have had to temper my political perspective many times while on international travels. There was my first visit to a Mexican maquil
adora free trade zone in Tijuana, where I had to keep my counsel over the cartoon drawings on the factory walls that communicated, in no uncertain terms, that any female worker who got pregnant would be fired. These workers were not even questioning this edict; their struggles were for basic wages and to be able to use the toilet more than once a day.

  Then there was the trip to Cochabamba, Bolivia, to show solidarity with the people’s uprising against a private water company that had doubled the price of water. High on a dusty slum overlooking the city, I participated in a celebration as the first piped water cascaded out of a tap and held my tongue as the men of the community officiated, gave speeches and generally took charge, while the women, who had always been responsible for fetching the family water, often for miles, stood mutely in the background.

  Recently, I stood in quiet anger at a press conference in Tokyo, Japan, where thirty or so journalists—all men—quizzed me in their press club, papered in oversize Marilyn Monroe posters and soft-porn cartoon fantasies. When I gently asked the young women, who had organized the briefing, if they were offended by the heavy male atmosphere of Japanese journalism, they became defensive, and I quickly dropped the subject.

  But the exchange that challenged me more than any other to walk non-judgmentally and with complete support in another woman’s shoes was my January 1991 trip to Iraq on the eve of the Gulf War. This international women’s solidarity peace mission was organized by Margarita Papandreou, the American ex-wife of the former prime minister of Greece, Andreas Papandreou. Margarita had long wanted to bring together a group of women from North America, the (then) Soviet Union and the Middle East to oppose the growing conflict; but only when war seemed imminent did the Iraqi government suddenly allow our mission into the country.

  Our hosts were members of the General Federation of Iraqi Women, a government-sanctioned organization that supported, at least in all ways public, the regime of Saddam Hussein. Now, I went to Iraq with no illusions about this man and his methods of keeping order in his country. Saddam took power of the Ba’ath Party by selecting, at the leadership meeting, his rival’s key supporters, who were then taken outside and shot. His terrified rival only saved his own life by joining the firing squad. Saddam raised the orphaned children of the men he had killed to become his personal bodyguards and to do his violent bidding, from torture to murder. He had two of his own sons-in-law murdered, despite promising them amnesty if they returned to Iraq after fleeing the country with his terrified daughters.

  Yet the members of the General Federation of Iraqi Women, like virtually every single person I met in Iraq, spoke with adoration, even reverence, of their president and would blanch if we criticized him. There were huge posters of Saddam all over their offices—as there are in every home, office and shop in the country—and the women of the federation particularly loved to tell us about how close he was to his wife, when, in fact, he was openly living with another woman. When I asked one federation member about the terrible news photographs we in the West had all seen of dead Kurdish children killed by Iraqi bombs, she turned deathly pale and declared that the photos were all fake.

  The federation assigned me a “minder,” something all foreign visitors to Iraq must have. My minder was a sweet young woman named Mina, whom of course I called “Mina my Minder” to the other women of our delegation. I was basically a prisoner while there, unable to travel anywhere without Mina or the president’s bodyguard who had been assigned to drive me to my daily meetings from the Al Rashid Hotel in downtown Baghdad, where I was staying. Mina would be waiting for me every morning at the elevator and would wave good-night to me each evening as the elevator doors closed. One day, Flora, the Russian delegate, and I tried to saunter on our own out the front door of the hotel. We were immediately surrounded by Iraqi bodyguards and firmly escorted back into the foyer, where Mina and Flora’s minder were wringing their hands in distress.

  But of course, over the days that followed, we started to see the incredibly brave women inside the armour. They had fought quietly, and at great risk to themselves, to be able to dress in styles of their choosing, and they had the same rights as men in the Iraqi Constitution—more than can be said of the rights of women in Kuwait, which is the U.S. and Canada’s “ally.” They had just come through the brutal nine-year war with Iran and had all lost sons, husbands and brothers to this dreadful conflagration. They were absolutely terrified about the looming war with George Bush and knew more than anyone in the world what it was going to mean for their lives.

  Slowly, we started to bond, particularly when we sat through long meetings with senior government and military leaders who would insist on doing most, if not all, of the talking and who had the exact litany of complaints about the “Great Satan.” On more than one occasion, my eye would meet those of Manal, or Azza, and a hint of a conspiratorial smile would dance at the corners of our mouths.

  We sat together with a group of international activists at a “peace camp” on the outskirts of the city and recorded their stories on tape recorders. Together on that soft evening, we heard tales of courage and commitment from women as young as fifteen and as old as eighty-five who had come from Australia, France and Florida, among other places, to do what they could to stop the impending war. In the evenings, we would sit in the Al Rashid dining room, which looked like a scene out of Casablanca, with its stately old furniture and exotic guests from all over the world, and share personal stories over rapidly dwindling dinner rations. One night, Margarita and I bought everyone a beer (very expensive), and we giggled like a group of schoolgirls staying out after curfew at summer camp. Even sweet Mina took a drink.

  One day, they let us visit the fabled monument to the dead of the Iran-Iraq war, which was then off limits to foreigners and local citizens alike. Two giant bronze statues the size of office towers stand on either end of a long tree-lined boulevard. Each is an enormous sculpture of Saddam’s arms and hands from the elbows up, holding crossed scimitars against the sky. At the base of each are huge cornucopias, filled to overflowing with the bloodied helmets of thousands of dead Iranians. We stood under Saddam’s Swords—Canadians, Americans, Europeans, Russians, Jordanians and Iraqis—and joined our women’s hands together in mute tribute to the mothers and wives of the dead Iranians whose blood we could still smell in the air.

  We held a press conference, Iraqi women, Western women and Soviet women together, which was amazingly well attended by journalists from all over the world. After all, we were the only Westerners left in Iraq, except for the last embassy people and a few journalists. We said that we thought there were still causes worth living for and called on all sides to stand down. “In the name of justice and for the sake of humanity, we ask you to reject the rivers of blood that will flow in the Gulf region and find a political solution,” we begged as one voice. Our message was carried in newspapers all over the Middle East, and I was quoted in the government-controlled Iraqi papers as urging on the war against the “American running-dog imperialists”—hardly a part of my everyday vocabulary.

  And then it was all over. On Wednesday, January 9, the Canadian ambassador called me to say that the Canadians were all leaving across country that very day and that he could not vouch for my safety if I did not join them. But I was determined to take my scheduled flight home on January 11 and thanked him for his concern. Except for a few journalists, I would be the last Canadian to leave Iraq before the war.

  Friday morning was beautiful, warm and sunny after a week of rain. My Iraqi friends brought their daughters to see us off at the airport. I had lost my coat, a pretty pale grey spring coat with a pastel-coloured scarf, probably left in one of our meetings the day before. I didn’t say a word, of course, as it was so unimportant in light of the situation. Sharp-eyed Flora made note of the absence of my coat at the airport, and Azza, one of the women I felt closest to, got all bothered about it. “We’ll find it and send it by mail, or I’ll have your embassy send it to you.” We looked at each other. I couldn�
��t tell her that our embassy was gone. It didn’t matter. She knew. We also both knew that there would be no mail in or out of Iraq for a long, long time. “Find the coat, Azza, and keep it as a gift.”

  We hugged and wept and said goodbye. I knew I could get on a plane and leave this terrible place. These women and their beautiful daughters—who reminded me of my nieces—could not. During the war, when I would see the relentless bombing of Baghdad on television every night, I would have a recurring dream that my coat was keeping some little girl warm in one of those bomb shelters, and the pain would ease a little.

  A decade later, I still remember these exceptional women of the federation with great tenderness. And the questions about the meaning of their lives keep coming back. Iraqi women have none of the conventional freedoms Western feminists consider fundamental to a full, self-directed life. Their family customs restrict personal and sexual choices that we now take for granted. Iraqi women have no freedom of speech, freedom of assembly or political choice. They cannot leave the country unless accompanied by a husband or father who is a senior official in the regime. And, of course, they have endured horrible deprivation under the U.S. embargo that has killed so many children and crippled the economy of their country.