Evie, the Baby and the Wife

by Phyllis Rudin

  Evie and her brother had reason to be on their best behaviour. This visit was the tradeoff that allowed them to snub the family for the rest of the year with relative impunity and they were determined to be agreeable, for all that their cheek muscles cried out for mercy. The siblings had even shown up early, in time for all the pre-game shlock they despised, to score a few suck-up points with their mother who was a red carpet aficionado.

  Apparently Evie’s snacks passed muster. They had now found their way into one of the serving bowls that Marilyn was shuttling up and down the stairs. She shouted out to her husband over the railing, “Jake. Go ahead. Don’t wait for me. Serve them martinis. Kids, look what your dad learned how to do.” Josh and Evie were taken by surprise. Outside a celebratory shnepsl now and again at a bris or a wedding, their parents didn’t know from social drinking. Normally the only liquids on tap at home were Diet Coke or Ginger Ale, but Marilyn had recently won a stylish martini set as a door prize and was determined to do it justice. Jake agitated the new cocktail shaker like he’d taken a cue from the Maytag churning away in the adjoining laundry room, throwing his whole body into it. “Just like James Bond,” he said. “In honour of the night.” Josh begged off in consideration of the drive home and Evie followed his lead, but their mother and father imbibed happily, slugging back the kids’ portions so that nothing would go to waste. In the no-no hierarchy of the Troy household, going-to-waste nearly topped the charts, bested only and forever by nutmeats.

  “So, Evie, what’s new and exciting by you?” her father asked. “Life treating you right?”

  Since this was a night that called for generosity of spirit, Evie tossed a couple of loonies into the pushke her father held out to her. It was a non-movie offering that she thought would grab her parents, a vaguely personal disclosure that would leave them feeling like she’d indulged them with an intimate glimpse into her private life but would deflect any further questions; a terminal tidbit as she viewed it.

  “Guess who it turns out lives in my building?” She left a theatrical pause that no one present felt moved to fill. “Jean-Gabriel Médéry no less.”

  “Whoa, he’s pretty major,” said Josh.

  “Isn’t he the shmuck who wrote that play about his wife, a real tell-all?” said Marilyn. “I remember it. A sort of Québécois Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Didn’t we go see it at the Centaur, Jake?”

  “He ravaged the poor kid in it all right,” said Evie’s dad, shaking his head.

  Evie hadn’t realized until now that the epithet shmuck was screwed onto her neighbour’s backside like a vanity plate. First Audrée and then her mother; what was it about that particular noun that resonated with women of a certain age when the subject of Jean-Gabriel Médéry hit the fan? Maybe it was because they’d mastered algebra back in an era when the study of math was a more serious business than in today’s lackadaisical classrooms. They had both been drilled that in order to balance an equation that had Jean-Gabriel’s name on one side of the equal sign, only that single honorific could stand on the other. Though this was a night for blind obedience, a night where she had willed herself to choke back every retort, Evie bit.

  “For your information, he happens to be great. I had him over for dinner even. Everybody who was there loved him, a real raconteur.”

  “So he’s still alive,” Josh marvelled. Evie’s brother was a big fan of the party game Is He Canadian or Is He Dead? Here was a factoid he could stash away for future use.

  “Apparently, if he ate at my table. And he happened to be a perfect gentleman I might add.”

  “Well, why not? At his age,” said Marilyn. “He must have been effectively neutered by all the crap he picked up off the ten thousand women he slept with on the side. Why that girl put up with him for as long as she did I’ll never understand. She probably had nowhere else to go. Back in his prime, I bet you anything, he was festering with STDs.”

  “Mum, please.”

  “What? I’m not inventing his reputation. Everybody knew. I’m surprised he still has a tooth in his head.”

  “You’re wrong about him, Mum. It was all malicious gossip, tabloid stuff.”

  “Who told you it wasn’t so? The man himself?” Evie’s mother had a good nose. “I thought you’re supposed to be a journalist? Don’t you do your research? It looks more like you go right to the source and ask him to tell you the truth, and then you fall for it like a ton of bricks. A reporter she thinks she is.”

  “I do trust him,” Evie said, straining to keep a lid on, “just like I would any friend of mine. I take him at his word.”

  “Evie, it’s guys like him who couldn’t keep it in their pants who forced me to shlep across the country in the back of a pick-up truck.”

  Uh-oh, here it comes, thought Evie. She glanced over to Josh for some brotherly support in what was about to go down but his eyes were shooting death rays at his sister.

  The overdose of martinis had Marilyn sufficiently lubed that she would have required only the slightest tap to set her careering down the slope of her favourite subject, and here Evie’d gone and whacked her one on the back. They were in for it now.

  “I was barely twenty when we started off from Vancouver. Still wet behind the ears. Three thousand miles we covered. And three thousand miles meant something back then when the roads stank. Across snow-capped mountains, under the stars.”

  Oy. She was waxing poetic. They were in for the uncut version.

  “More than two weeks it took us. And it’s not like we were travelling in comfort. We didn’t have an RV with its own jacuzzi and kitchen like they do today. Oh no! We made our pit stops at gas stations and if there wasn’t one handy when we had to go we just squatted behind the nearest bush. Some mornings, for special, we wrapped our sandwiches in foil and stuck them on top of the engine to melt the cheese while we drove.

  “Cooking, we called that. I was the youngest and since I didn’t have a driver’s license I wound up bouncing around on the truck bed most of the way like a bale of hay. Talk about black and blue. The others, they split themselves up between the cab of the truck, Arlene’s convertible, a beauty it was, lemon yellow, and the Volkswagen bus, one of those hippie jobs.

  “We were just a few at the beginning, only seventeen of us, but by the time we reached Ottawa for the protest there were more than a thousand women on Parliament Hill. You couldn’t see the grass when you looked down we were packed so tight.”

  Marilyn’s Abortion Caravan days were the highlight of her life, a blip in the otherwise invariable yenta stations of the cross. Her involvement in the cause didn’t arise from any personal imperative as was so often the case; it’s not like her vents had ever needed to be professionally vacuumed. A freak encounter with a true believer transformed Marilyn, in the space of just a few hours, into a hardcore member of the movement. She talked the talk and she walked the walk. No man was ever going to dictate to her what she could or couldn’t do with her own uterus.

  Evie and Josh were a straight-laced pair of kids. They found their mother’s activist past embarrassing. What children want to hear a parent rant about placentas and fetuses in mixed company? It used to be that when Marilyn started to rev up, they tried their best to distract her. Evie and her brother would drop to their hands and knees, one behind the other, in their juvenile rendition of a caravan; more of a wagon train, really. Their references were strictly North American. They clip-clopped across the living room like a pair of pack donkeys out on the trail following Dusty and Lefty to the next watering hole. But they were too old for that now. Nor could they count on their father to cut Marilyn off. It was his habit to let his wife unreel.

  Tonight, though, God was in his heaven. The red carpet chose that moment to wash across the screen in a vast scarlet hemorrhage, distracting their mother from her organ recital. Josh and Evie took great pains to participate animatedly in the Oscar proceedings hoping their stream
of jabber would keep her safely off track, and in this they succeeded until they said their goodbyes. Marilyn understood that she was being handled but she played along. The same martinis that had initially loosened her tongue ended up diluting her scrappiness so she shelved her abortion monologue to placate the kinder. The topic never failed to bring out hives in her hypersensitive offspring. But later that night while she was drifting off to sleep, she treated herself to remembering how it all began. It must have been some lingering effect of the Oscars that had the Marilyn Henkin Troy story unroll behind her closed eyelids as if it were in Cinemascope.

  Marilyn, April 1970

  The camera panned across the frontage of Abie’s Knitterie. At Abie’s, like all the shops on the Main, the concept of window-dressing was at a primitive stage in its development as an art form. Essentially it amounted to cramming the window with as much stock as humanly possible. Needles, crochet hooks, skeins of wool, pattern books, ball winders, stitch holders, gauges; all were jumbled together, pressing against the glass, blocking the sun. The gentleman store owners treated their window displays like they did their marriages, as life-long arrangements. Oh, they fussed over them a bit at the beginning, adjusting this, prodding that, but then they just left them be, allowing a stratum of dust to settle on the entire business. This was the way of things on St. Lawrence Boulevard. Abie’s neighbour Saul, who owned a kitchen goods emporium, was a fellow graduate of the pile high and deep school, as was Julie Levine of the eponymous Levine’s Custom Table Pads. Down at Schwartz’s, bloody smoked briskets were mounded for sidewalk viewing in a knacker’s cart arrangement. Quantity and entropy were the guiding decorative principles up and down Montreal’s premier shopping artery.

  Inside the dim shop, Marilyn was sitting behind the cash, her nose buried in a textbook, allowing her father to sneak off for the quickie snoozola he fancied before supper. Abie had no compunctions about leaving Marilyn in complete charge of the Knitterie once her afternoon classes at McGill were over. It was the quietest time of day. His establishment, frequented almost exclusively by housewives, tended to be at its busiest earlier, while the children were locked up in school. Besides, his little Marilyn had grown up in the business. She knew the stock backwards and forwards, and her needlework was flawless. Marilyn’s bubbe had observed the infant’s agile fingers in the cradle and took it upon herself to tutor her in the woollen arts. Abie was duly proud of his daughter’s talents in the knitting department. That girl could cast off like Ahab. He’d set her to work in the store back when she still needed to stand on the Yellow Pages to see over the counter, and she’d put in a few hours each week ever since to earn herself some pocket money.

  The chime on the door jingled and a tall form filled the door. The woman who came in wasn’t one of her father’s regulars, most of whom she could i.d. by now. This customer strode purposefully up to Marilyn without even bothering to burrow in the twenty-percent-off bins. “Hello,” she said. “I wonder if you could give me a little advice.”

  “No problem, I’m sure we can help you out.” Marilyn adopted the royal we at work. To her ears it made her sound more sophisticated.

  “I have a pattern here, and I’m new to knitting.” The clerk plastered her face with her I’m-so-interested mask, but realistically, just how much enthusiasm could she summon up for what was sure to be the zillionth ho-hum beginner’s scarf she’d end up having to nurse along since her father had drafted her into his service.

  “And what are we planning on making?”

  “A uterus.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Marilyn figured she’d misheard.

  “A uterus, you know,” and she pointed at the sales clerk’s nether parts. She passed a pattern across the counter for Marilyn to examine. It was a carbon copy, not the usual half-page torn out of a Chatelaine magazine. The sketch that accompanied the typed instructions on a separate sheet was hand drawn, but accomplished, and struck Marilyn as anatomically correct based on her hazy recollections of grade seven phys. ed. where they’d covered the reproductive systems of both sexes at warp speed. The pattern’s illustration even included the ovaries as a pair of perky pompoms stitched onto the uterine extremities, like the dangle balls on a court jester’s hat.

  “If you don’t mind my asking, why would you need to knit such a thing?” Marilyn had trouble pronouncing so very personal a word aloud. “How exactly would you, you know, wear it?”

  “It’s not meant to be worn. It’s a symbol in the struggle for women’s rights.”

  Marilyn’s eyes widened. It was clear to the customer that this guileless girl was missing the drift, and she took it upon herself to educate the innocence out of her. A bit of tough love never hurt.

  “Don’t you know what’s going on in the world? Don’t you ever read the papers?”

  Of course Marilyn knew that newspapers existed and foggily intuited their purpose. Her mother lined the Pesach cupboards with them, and spread them out to protect the kitchen linoleum when she scrubbed out the oven with Easy-Off, but it had never actually occurred to Marilyn to read one.

  “Are you aware, missy, that in this day and age women in Canada do not have free and open access to abortions?”

  Marilyn, of course, was unaware. Abortion was another of those prickly words that was never spoken in her circle. It had those wash-your-mouth-out-with-soap vibrations. She shook her head in the negative.

  “Do you have any idea of the number of hoops that women in this country have to jump through in order to get a safe hospital abortion?” Marilyn’s blank face revealed her quasi-total hoop ignorance. Her customer bowled on.

  “These women are already in a bad way, right? Here they are pregnant, desperate, and on top of that they have to grovel in front of hospital abortion committees made up mostly of men, natch. And I’m talking about the ones who even get that far. What about all those mixed-up kids who don’t know the system even exists? Some system. The process is so public. It’s so degrading, so long and drawn out, that thousands of them still end up in back alleys or try to do it themselves.”

  Marilyn was vaguely cognizant of that other furtive purpose of the knitting needle and felt a brief cramp of guilt, though she had never, to her knowledge, sold an implement to be used to such ends, but then how could she be sure? Had she ever been indirectly complicit in the criminal application of a knitting needle? Had an object that left her hands at Abie’s eventually led to the mutilation or even death of some poor woman? Suddenly she felt like Mme. Defarge.

  “Those TACs aren’t worth shit.” Marilyn’s customer was wound up now.

  “TACs?” Marilyn ventured to ask, her first peep since the conversation swerved away from her comfort zone of the garter stitch.

  “Therapeutic Abortion Committees. TACs. Like I was just telling you about.” For Marilyn’s benefit she backed up a bit. “According to the Criminal Code, section 2-5-1 to be exact, women can have an abortion in hospital if their life or their health is in danger.”

  “And that’s not good?” Marilyn was emboldened enough to question. This section 251 thing sounded positive from where she stood.

  “Aha, the catch is that women have to appear before a committee to judge if they are entitled to the procedure or not.”

  “The TAC.”

  “You got it. The whole TAC system is rotten on so many levels, I don’t even know where to start. First, you have to find yourself a doctor willing to take your case up with the committee. Never an easy business. Then, assuming you do find one, in lots of hospitals the committees are stacked with members from the anti-side so it’s all a dead end anyway. You’re just spinning your wheels. And of course not all hospitals even have the committees. What’s a woman supposed to do who lives in PEI where the closest accredited hospital might as well be on Mars? And could the committees move any slooow-er? These so-called experts, they’re even dim on the biology. They deliberate as if gestation took fift
een months. By the time they get around to rendering a decision the poor woman’s on to number two.

  “You like stats? Try these out for size. You know how many women we figure die each year in Canada from hack abortions?” Marilyn didn’t volunteer a number. The question had a rhetorical ring to it. “Two thousand women. Two thou-sand. And you know how many women in BC who applied to the committee succeeded in getting their abortions approved? One stinkin’ solitary percent. And those women were all middle class, married. Classic. And listen to this if you can stomach it. There are estimates out there that every year 100,000 women go through an under-the-table abortion, and out of them 20,000 land in a hospital bed anyway with complications. Permanent ones some of them. Horrible. Raging infections. Infertility. Didn’t they suffer enough already?

  “The government and their damn TACs. Who the hell are the guys on those committees to decide anyway? What gives those obstructionists with penises the right to determine which women should be allowed to have an abortion and which shouldn’t. And let’s be honest. They’re the ones who knocked them up in the first place. It’s not like we’re talking about virgin births here. Pack of hypocrites.

  “I belong to a group,” she said, “that believes women should have complete say, complete control over their own bodies.”

  This simple statement struck a chord with Marilyn. No one had the right to forbid her from doing something to her own body if she so desired. She remembered with rancour how her father had refused permission for her to pierce her ears when she was younger. It wasn’t just a case of tight-assed parenting as she had thought at the time. She now saw it for what it was, a human rights violation.