by Karen Smythe
I half lived, hidden in a black cavern with slippery sides and an aperture so narrow it curtailed my breath. I carried a large container emptied of Cover Girl loose face powder and filled with a bottle of extra-strength Aspirin. The pills were insurance, assurance that I’d be ready for the moment to come — and I was certain it would come — when the emptiness swelled and eclipsed the slim possibility that I could emerge and be a whole person again.
Getting out of those depths was like an exercise in climbing for novices. Learning to find a foothold, uncertain that the rock-face would hold me as I moved up, ledge by ledge, was far harder to do during the week at school than achieving high grades had ever been. In time, the core of shame turned grey, like a shadow, light enough to provide a porthole glimpse of the air that awaited, and I kept going. I don’t know why, but I did. I pulled myself up as if I were harnessed to a future, successful me. Once I surfaced that summer, I knew that, come September, I couldn’t go to the high school in our neighbourhood, because my despair, the extent of which was known by friends and classmates who were headed there, would have — through them — followed me.
As I recovered that summer, I imagined a loosely woven fabric with prickly filaments, like burlap, growing across the opening in the burrow I’d inhabited. It would remain a friable cover, I was sure, because once aware that you have that particular strength — the ability to choose nonlife, not being — then falling back in one day, any day, becomes a permanent possibility.
***
I used to listen to an “oldies” radio station that took me back to my youth. My parents played a lot of Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, Johnnie Ray, Nat King Cole — I grew up on their flat-note melodies and lyrics. I’d come to see that all songs were love songs: no one seemed to write any other kind, no matter what the generation. James liked jazz with no vocals, upbeat tunes that lifted him, made him want to move, and I liked those too — Charlie Parker, Dave Brubeck, Thelonious Monk, Artie Shaw. He kept a stash of his favourites in my apartment.
One night, when James was over at my place and I had the radio on, we heard Nat singing “A Blossom Fell.” I smiled slightly but must have looked forlorn, because James asked why I liked to listen to music that made me feel sad. “Well… it gives me pleasure, too,” I tried to explain, but when I saw the puzzled look on James’s face, I couldn’t find the right words. “My taste is not all doom and gloom,” I reminded him. I pulled a few records from my collection. “Look: Led Zeppelin, Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush — okay, she’s introspective, forget her. But here’s Boz Scaggs, the Police, Springsteen, of course…and here’s Roxy Music.” We spent the evening playing one song from each album and then made love to Time Out.
I thought about James’s question a lot after that, and I played the radio less and less often. He was right, many of songs on that station were about lovers who had gone away. When Ted twisted and torqued my heart, I came to know the music viscerally; it was both torture and company of sorts, the kind you reach for when you’re sure the damage is irreparable. The despair of others can feel like commiseration, at times like that. Listening to those songs then made me feel vaguely human again.
I first heard those tunes as a child, when they made sad promises that I didn’t understand. Then I met Josh, my fierce, first love, and the lyrics befriended me, threaded their way into my being. I began to understand that sadness and love were a natural pair. I thought of my friendship with Josh as a piece of jewellery made from a precious metal. I kept it close, and I polished it, and I wore it like a medal.
The first winter after Josh left Toronto for Europe to model for Versace, Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” became my favourite. When I found the record in my parents’ collection of LPs, I made a tape for my Walkman so I could listen to it alone, luxuriating in my longing for that boy.
I kept Patsy a secret. In the neighbourhood where I grew up, country music, even if Willie Nelson did write it, wasn’t so much uncool as unheard of. We lived in Denlow Estates, a Jewish subdivision uptown, north of Forest Hill, but we weren’t Jewish. We didn’t go to church, either; Gina and I had to beg our father to put up outside lights at Christmas; even then, all he’d do was replace the clear floodlights that normally shone on the house with blue or green bulbs. I didn’t know what “Protestant” and “Catholic” meant until my friends asked me what kind of Christian I was, and my mother had to explain the various factions to me. So yes, we were different; but our neighbours and friends went to synagogue only on high holidays, so it wasn’t religion that separated my family from theirs.
When I went to my friends’ houses after school, the atmosphere was relaxed and casual; we watched TV in the family room, where there were newspapers spread out on an L-shaped sofa, and heavy art books on ottomans or large coffee tables. The clutter, like the furniture, was comfortable. (At our house, my mother had begun to cover surfaces with dried flowers and covered dishes and Royal Doulton figurines.) We could help ourselves to snacks in the kitchen — apples and pears or oranges in a bowl on the counter, plain yogurt with toasted granola kept in glass jars on a shelf, matzo or bagels with cream cheese, slices of challah with jam. I’d often not want dinner —roast beef or brown-sugared broiled pork chops with boiled frozen vegetables was typical fare — when I got home.
I loved those houses, and I loved being with my friends and their families. I wanted parents like Shelley’s parents, who would take me to Mel Brooks movies and to the Pickle Barrel for dinner. I wanted to go to shul on Saturdays so I could complain about it with everyone else. And when I was older, I wanted to be part of a community that stood together because they had to, had always had to; where everyone knew everyone else’s family and valued each other because of who they were, and because they were here. Because they were here: they were alive and loved and that was what mattered most.
***
My sister, Gina, is four years older than me and began dating when she was in grade nine. She had a crush on a popular boy named Michael, and she bragged to me that they’d gone to “third base” in his car one night. Our mother overheard us and she gave my sister a talking-to, not because Gina had gone too far but because Michael was Jewish. “There’s no point,” she said, “because you’ll never be accepted into a family like his anyway. You aren’t one of the chosen people.” I didn’t understand what she meant by that. I was about eleven, and I didn’t know anything about anti-Semitism or the diasporas or the Holocaust, or how Israel came to be, or why; but what my mother said, in that tone, sounded wrong to me.
Once Gina met Ben, whose family background was Welsh, that was that: her future had been decided at sixteen. When I was sixteen, I was attending an alternative high school where students learned independently, with few rules and lots of flexibility. We called our teachers by their first names. We smoked in class — and classes were small, with five or ten kids at most, held just once or twice a week in each subject. The school attracted kids with serious outside interests that consumed great chunks of their time, like playing sports on provincial or national teams, studying piano at the Conservatory, training in ballet, publishing poetry, or acting in commercials; but it also drew studious types who wanted to work through the high-school curriculum quickly and get to university ahead of schedule. I finished high school a year early.
Students could enrol from all over the city, but most had transferred from York Mills or Forest Hill Collegiate, so my new friends, too, were Jewish. Jennifer was a competitive figure skater; Rob, my first boyfriend, was ambitious and aiming for Western’s business program; others were guitar players, writers, comedians. We hung out in the Common Room, a large open space with scratched-up hardwood floors; second-hand, stained, saggy sofas and chairs; and lots of ashtrays.
The majority of boys were older than me, and some were Gina’s former classmates, including Michael. Grade ten that year was a small cohort, and Jennifer and I quickly bonded. We became known as the “hot” girls to the group of guys we considered the coolest; they paid us innoc
ent attention, for the most part, as if Jennifer and I were mascots or pets or younger sisters. We smoked up with Michael, in the back of his tiny Honda Civic, at a drive-in showing E.T.; we bummed cigarettes from Joe, Rob, and Daniel, who drove us whenever we asked to Baskin-Robbins up on Sheppard Ave. for milkshakes (or, on fewer occasions, to the public library on Yonge). We learned how to flirt and toy and tease those eighteen-year-olds, who called us jailbait until we weren’t.
Michael asked me to go out to dinner with him. Gina wouldn’t believe me when I told her; I said no, anyway, because I couldn’t get the image of Michael’s fingers inside my sister’s panties out of my head. His buddy Rob intrigued me, though; he reminded me of Al Pacino, and the depth I suspected he hid beneath his soft-voiced, monosyllabic conversation attracted me more than his looks. I was startled when I was walking to the subway one afternoon and he stopped his dad’s car — an Audi, I think — to ask if he could drive me home.
In the spring there were sightings of Rob’s car in our driveway, which went on for some weeks and well into the summer. Josh started to park his Datsun in front of the house that fall, after Rob left for university. Gina’s friends wondered at first if she was seeing Rob and then Josh without telling them. Gina told me that I’d gained a reputation at York Mills, that people were calling me the shiksa sister.
***
Josh said that at our school, everyone other than us seemed like a “Charlie in the Box” — a line he took from the Christmas cartoon about Rudolph, who went to the Island of Misfit Toys. Josh’s impression of Charlie’s strained, sad prepubescent voice was hilarious. I was fast-tracking my studies to get into the medical-school stream early — that was what I told Josh when he asked why I didn’t go to York Mills; that was where his girlfriend, who lived near my neighbourhood, went. I didn’t ask Josh why he transferred from Forest Hill in the first place, though. I knew he’d been on a Junior A hockey team when he was younger, but he only played for fun now, so that didn’t seem to explain the switch in schools. And he didn’t become a model until his second year of grade thirteen, after he won a contest that awarded prizes to the best-looking male and female photographed by the newspaper that year.
Josh’s attendance was sporadic, and when he did pull into the parking lot in his Datsun 240z, the girls who knew him from Forest Hill rushed out to greet him. Before I knew Josh, I’d roll my eyes along with Jennifer whenever we saw this happen. Jennifer thought he must be completely conceited, having all of those Jewish-American Princesses after him (it was okay for her to call those girls JAPs, Jennifer said, because she was Jewish herself). Those in the clique wore designer jeans, Ralph Lauren button-down blouses, and diamond earrings; they carried the latest Roots bags and styled their hair Farrah Fawcett style, flipped and highlighted. Josh’s girlfriend, Gina said, was the most popular girl at York Mills. “What can he see in her?” I wondered, when Jennifer and I talked about it. “She’s so superficial.” “They’re all spoiled brats,” Jennifer said, “but she is the queen of the JAPs. She is the “Princess of all Princesses.” I thought Josh and his girlfriend were like characters in a fairy tale, so the nickname that Jennifer came up with for her — the Princess — took on that connotation for me, and stuck.
***
Jennifer spent hours at her skating club, training with her coach. (“She’s world-famous,” Jennifer told me, “but if anyone here knew she’s Jewish, they’d probably drop her.”) After she finished her lesson, we’d order lunch and charge it to her account. Sometimes Jennifer would order french fries, which were taboo while she was in training, but she’d pay cash so her mother wouldn’t find out. We sat at our own table, apart from the other skaters. “They’re so prissy,” Jennifer said. “Their mothers look at me, like, ‘How did she get in here?’ It’s okay for their daughters to be around gay skaters, but Jewish ones? That’s another story.”
***
When we sat at the breakfast table after I slept over at Jennifer’s house, her mother nagged her for putting too much sour cream on her latkes or not enough sliced melon on her plate. “Ma, enough already!” Jennifer would say, and we’d all laugh. This was a new concept for me, relaxing with your family as if you were friends. In our house, the basic rule for communication was, “If you can’t say anything nice, say nothing at all.” My favourite was the “no singing at the table” rule. It was one of my father’s; he had a few. He’d leave notes around the house with orders, too. He taped one to the handle of the door to the rec room: “Turn the lights OFF when you come back upstairs! — The Management.”
Jennifer began skipping some of her skating-practice sessions since she and I’d become friends; she had also fallen behind in her course work. Her father blamed me — her first goyim friend — for the changes in his daughter’s behaviour. He rarely addressed me, except indirectly through Jennifer: “So sweetheart, tell me what you two are going to do with your day?” Jennifer played it perfectly: “Believe me, dad,” she’d say, “you don’t want to know!” She’d kiss him on his cheek as we left the table.
On Sunday afternoons, we usually went to one of our favourite bakeries or cafés for brownies or carrot cake. We’d drink cups and cups of coffee and smoke half a package of Belmont Milds each, using vintage cigarette holders that Jennifer stole from an aunt in Florida. We’d go home in the evening shaking from caffeine and nicotine and sugar, wound up about what we might say to Josh if we saw him at school the next day.
***
Josh and I got to know each other before I finished grade ten. By this time, he’d started to arrive later in the day, when Jennifer was gone for skating practice and the older girls were at home watching soaps like General Hospital and The Young and the Restless. I usually stayed in the quiet, emptied study room to work through trigonometry and calculus problems. Josh sometimes visited his favourite teacher, Abe; through the wall I’d hear them talking, the low rumble of Josh’s voice mesmerizing me. Then I’d hear Abe’s door close, and I’d see Josh in the doorway, peripherally, but I wouldn’t look up until he’d walk into the room and sit down across from me. “Are you saving this seat?” he asked, because Rob, who was not a friend of his, often sat there. Then Josh would open his textbook and start doodling on a notepad, humming, until I raised my eyes to him and smiled.
Did I look interesting to Josh then, the way I looked to James when he saw me that night at the pottery studio? I wonder. I’d not thought of that before, of how I came across to Josh before he knew me. I’ve forgotten so much about Josh, and that surprises me. When I think of him now — I am letting myself, I am forcing myself to think of Josh, now — I am aware that what I let surface when I knew him, even to myself, was but a titch of what I felt. For a long time. A long time ago.
Josh called me his “goy toy” or his “gentile gal,” which sounded as wimpy to me as “WASP” sounded sour. “I may be a gentile,” I said to him on the phone the first time he called me, “but I wouldn’t be gentle. In case you were wondering.” He was probably smiling when he said, “I don’t doubt it, Mazz, ‘You Sexy Thing,” a song we both liked. “I bet you go down on a dime, too.” I didn’t know what that meant. I displayed a consistent lack of need and a fake confidence with Josh, and it was working.
I called Jennifer right away, after Josh and I spoke on the phone that night. She’d wanted to hear about my exchanges with him at school on days she spent at the rink, and I thought she’d want to hear about the phone call, too. But Jennifer was neither pleased nor pleasant. She said if Josh was being crude when he spoke to me (“going down on a dime,” she said, meant you were a slut), then he didn’t see me as having any real potential, partner-wise, and that — since he was always polite and respectful to her — his choice between us was becoming clear. In the beginning, I’d not expected Josh to take either one of us seriously; yet it seemed that we’d become competitors, Jennifer and I.
My friendship with Jennifer ended in flames in November of the next school year, when she switched back to Forest Hill Col
legiate. In December she called to tell me that, according to her brother Barry, Rob was dating the Princess. We both knew that Josh had broken up with her the summer before she left for Western, and I was happy if she’d moved on; I hadn’t loved Rob anyway. When I said, “So what?” Jennifer added this: “Rob is telling everyone Josh is gay, and that’s the real reason he broke up with the Princess. So you didn’t really win anything after all, Maslen. That’s what.”
Soon Josh would tell me this: “I like you a lot more now, Mazz, without Jennifer being around all the time. You’re more grown-up than she is.” He told me about the time Jennifer and her brother had gone to one of his hockey games the year before. I knew about it, because Jennifer had told me Barry had tickets, and I remembered what she said to me on the phone after the game that night: “Mazz, he is so sexy in his gear, with his hair all sweaty. I thought I’d die — Josh, the best-looking guy in Toronto, skating right in front of me. I swear he was looking at me!” I’d fretted about that, at the time, but Josh told me Jennifer had looked like a little kid at a parade.
***
When Josh was five, his father and mother divorced and his dad got full custody; Josh hardly saw his mom after that, and his grandmother moved in to help raise him. This was all Josh said, the first time he joined us for Sunday dinner, when my mother asked questions about his family. I frowned at her, to dissuade her from pressing him further, because Josh had only recently told me about his mom’s hospital stays and psychiatric problems. “Interview’s over, Mom,” I said. Josh smiled and my father smiled, too, when I said that.
“I like your dad,” Josh told me after that meal. “He’s a cool guy.” I didn’t think of my father as cool, not in the way Josh meant.
Josh kept a photo of his father on the table next to his bed. I knew his dad had died when Josh was fifteen, but I didn’t know how or when, so when I saw the photo the first time, I asked Josh what happened. “Heart attack. He was on the tennis court. It was instant. There wasn’t anything anyone could do.” When I said I was sorry, Josh turned away. It wasn’t like him to stop talking, to withdraw, and I sensed that he didn’t want to, really; that talking about his dad was hard, but important to him. So, very quietly, I said, “You don’t look like your dad, Josh.” In the picture, his dad appeared to be blond, on the short side, and stern. “I know,” Josh said, turning back to face me. “I take after my mother. Good looking, great smile — but crazy.” He was smiling, and I laughed as if that was the crazy part — as if Josh, with those legions of leggy beauties lusting for him, would ever be on the fringe, unhinged, alone.