A lifetime ago, before they ever left Vancouver, the girls had shot out telegrams to the Prime Minister, to his Minister of Justice, and to his Minister of Health and Welfare, setting up the meeting. A sympathetic MP booked the girls the Railway Committee Room for the parley, right up on the Hill, a serious venue for a serious discussion. Saturday, May 9th, 1:00 p.m. At long last it was about to happen. This is why they’d barrelled across the country listening to the voices of Canada’s women all along the way. For this encounter. They would all sit down and thrash out an abortion program that made sense if it took until doomsday.
Chapter 18
MARILYN, MAY 1970
The bastards stood them up. Turns out they were previously committed. Right hand left hand. Oops.
The girls regrouped back at the church. Marilyn was devastated, but the others fed on the repudiation like manna. Arlene was pumped, her face aglow with righteous indignation. “Let none of those scumbag politicos ever claim that they weren’t given fair warning. We offered them the chance to thrash things out all civilized over one of their mahogany conference tables, but they stiffed us. So the gloves are coming off. Come Monday we’re going to do things our way. They won’t know what hit ’em.”
None of them had the proper clothes for their plan B. It fell to the local Ottawa organizers to come to their vestimentary rescue. The Ontario girls would gladly have donated their own clothing to make up for the deficiency, but their counterculture closets yielded only denim, denim, and more denim, not at all what was required for a day of radical chic. So they pillaged their mothers’ wardrobes and fanned out to hit the thrift stores. They negotiated the racks strategically, spurning the more recent styles in favour of outfits from the early sixties and even back to the fifties, retro garb that would drape the advance group in an extra layer of protective prim.
The Caravan girls were a disciplined bunch. On Monday morning they prepared themselves from the ground up, shaving feminist gams that had never before made nice with a razor. Marilyn gauged all the hair in the sink with a professional eye, and there was plenty. If she were to gather it all up into a ball she’d have enough to crochet up maybe a dozen commemorative yarmulkes. But no time today. She was busy dolling herself up with the others. Marilyn was humbled that she, the most junior of the group, was being trusted with such a weighty assignment, included as a member of the special ops branch for the afternoon’s offensive.
As the only ex-princess among them, Marilyn was undaunted by the dressing-up process, though she tried not to flaunt her expertise in front of the others who were having their issues. For the first time in donkey’s years her Birkenstock sidekicks, who normally hung freestyle, were obliged to harness themselves into bras so they would point in the proper womanly direction. The girls all managed it, albeit not without grumbling. Why was it that men were allowed to dangle? Arlene put a lid on their bellyaching with a look. That gravitational discussion would have to keep for another day. They couldn’t afford to get sidetracked.
Next up, panty hose. In their clumsy fingers, garnished with serrated nails since they bit them off for expediency, the mesh sprang runs before the girls had even yanked their stockings up as far as their knees. At the rate they were goring them, they’d soon have no hose left. The clock was ticking. Marilyn had no choice but to out herself. She moved in and instructed the others in the proper unrolling-from-the-toe technique. And with that small gesture Marilyn assumed control over the girls’ toilette. She rescued her covey of amateurs as they fumbled to straitjacket their wild and woolly 1960s locks into Grace Kelly upsweeps and guided them in making pert bows of their lips while not colouring outside the lines.
What constituted beauty, Marilyn was moved to ponder as she shuttled from one girl to the next wielding a mascara wand in one hand and a spray can of Aqua Net in the other. Here she was philosophizing. Was there no end to her transformation on the road?
From the beginning she admired her companions their naturalness. Their hair was unperoxided, their faces unpowdered, their nails unpolished, just as God made them. This was not the standard of female beauty Marilyn had been suckled on. The women in her family were adherents of the brassy school. Back home her father used to look out the kitchen window mornings and expound on the wonders of the natural world. “Look kids,” he’d say when he spotted a scarlet cardinal flitting from fence to fence in the yard. “See how the male of the species is the more brightly coloured to attract the female?” Marilyn’s mother Bryna listened to nature boy’s lectures, her glossed lips set in a moue of disapproval. The animal world had it ass-backwards in her estimation. Of the evolutionary model that positioned the male as the glamour puss while the female sat on the nest in a faded red shmatte, Bryna was a flat-out denier. Women weren’t meant to be the shlumps. When Marilyn’s mum went out there was no missing her. Her gold hoop earrings were big enough for Shamu to leap through and as for makeup, Bryna slathered it on like cream cheese on a deli bagel. And that was just for everyday. When she dressed up for a night-time do, she looked like she’d been plugged in. Natural was not part of her vocabulary.
Marilyn reeled her errant thoughts back in from her family in suburban Montreal and its be-sequinned matriarch. Enough with the daydreaming. She had to stay focused. The girls were on to the final touches and they needed her to cover their backs for every errant zipper, snap, or hook-and-eye. As wardrobe mistress it was Marilyn alone who had sign-off privileges. Only once the girls twirled round in front of her and received her blessing were they permitted to don their white gloves and head out to meet their fates.
For all that they were devoted to the cause, the prissy little gloves were almost more than the girls could stomach. Even the netted hats that they plopped like maraschino cherries onto their heads were somehow less repellent than the gloves. In an uncharacteristic show of sass, they hustled her to let them go without. Would it really make any difference? But their soft secretarial pool hands had morphed over the course of a journey that saw them digging cars out of ditches and pitching tents in the Manitoba mud. Didn’t these gals ever look down? Didn’t they see that their transfigured mitts belonged in overalls at the Esso service bay doing oil changes and rotating tires? Field Marshal Marilyn issued an ultimatum. Cover them up or ship out. They covered them up.
At last the troops were dressed. But before they could set off on their mission they required one crucial accessory to complete their ensembles. In a corner of the church basement, a folding table was covered with handbags set out in size-wise rows like fruitcakes-in-waiting for the parish bake sale. An Ottawa volunteer handed over to each girl the purse assigned to her with an air of solemnity that bespoke cached cyanide capsules. Once all of them were kitted out with their carry-on, they opened up their handbags and checked the gear within as assiduously as paratroopers. It was crunch time.
The demonstration on Parliament Hill was going full tilt when they arrived. The TV cameras were rolling and the press corps was out in force. The girls guesstimated the crowd as they pulled up; there must have been a thousand women, maybe even two, spread out across the lawns chanting, singing, and waving their placards. It was a wild, circus atmosphere. The turnout was better than the Caravanners could ever have hoped for, thanks yet again to their Ottawa hosts who grabbed whatever assignment was thrown their way and ran with it.
After Saturday’s meeting with the Trudeau troika went phfft, the local girls took to the telephones and as directed mobilized women’s groups in Toronto, Montreal, Hamilton, London; any city within shooting distance of the capital. Their message was to the point; charter every bus that isn’t nailed down and hightail it for Ottawa to come to the aid of your sisters. But they decided not to stop there; these chicks didn’t need to be spoon fed. They prepped their knuckles with a few limbering-up cracks and kept right on dialing; they dialed with call-centre doggedness, they dialed until their fingers bled, targeting towns further and further out across the country until t
hey had girls hitching down from Moosonee, hopping the train over from Quebec City, and flying in standby from as far away as St. John’s and Banff. They hoped the Vancouver group had a war chest deep enough to foot the phone bill. It was going to be a whopper.
One alcove of calm, just to the rear of the Centennial Flame, set itself apart from the hue and cry. At that spot, in a simple dawn ceremony, the Caravanners had laid to rest the black slat coffin that accompanied them on their journey out from the Pacific. It was their Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Like many of the women who filed by later in the day to pay their respects, Marilyn attached a specific name to its symbolic remains. To her the coffin was Jesse’s, and she recited a silent kaddish before she disappeared to honour her shadow sister’s memory with action.
In all the brouhaha, no one paid much attention to the shirt-waisted women who sniffed at all the unseemly rowdiness as they forged their way through the rabble to the entrance of the House of Commons. The Parliamentary commissionaires barely glanced down at the faux entry passes the girls tendered in their impeccably gloved fingers. So far so good. For this linchpin step the Caravanners dug their feminine wiles out of cold storage. Most of them weren’t even aware they had any to draw on, but Marilyn, their secret weapon, their link with the unliberated, brought them up to speed. As she had advised them to do, they smiled their widest at the doddery guards hoping to distract them from their forged documentation. The best they could come up with, most of them, was a rictus, inexperienced as they were at even elemental coquettishness. Eyelash fluttering they managed better. A scent of baby powder wafted from the group, wrapping them in a protectionist cloud of innocence. It was working.
One by one security passed them through the checkpoint that led upstairs to the Parliamentary visitors’ galleries. Until it was Marilyn’s turn. Inexplicably, as she paused before him, one of the guards popped out of his trance and remembered what it was he was paid to do. He requested, with all due courtesy, that Marilyn open her purse for a spot check. It couldn’t all come crashing down on their heads now, could it? On her watch? Her failure to deliver would be more than she could bear. Marilyn had no choice but to unlatch her bag for inspection. The guard peered in at the contents. Instead of the neatly pressed hankie he was expecting, his eyes landed on a bottle of bleach. Luckily, the skull and crossbones on the label, coached with all the girls earlier in the day, knew enough to smile sweetly up at him. The commissionaire didn’t say boo. It struck him as entirely plausible that über-housewives like the ones now filing before him might naturally be taken by a sudden urge to sanitize the Parliamentary toilets and he waved Marilyn and the rest of the group through with a ladies-right-this-way sweep of the hand. They were in.
They scattered themselves throughout the two observer galleries that faced each other choir loft style above the floor of the Commons. The girls shrugged their shoulders apologetically at the engaged citizens who were already seated as they bumped past their knees to assume their own places and listen to Question Period. Marilyn didn’t find the debate quite so flat this time as during her previous student visit to the chamber. Probably because she couldn’t catch any of the words being spoken over the roaring in her ears. Was she really the only one to hear it? Surely her neighbours on either side could make out her blood crashing against her skull like the Fundy tides, but they appeared oblivious to the din, completely homed in on the discussion down below. Their focus on the House floor served Marilyn well. It meant that they wouldn’t see her shaking. She was suffering from delicate, ladylike tremolos to be sure, not landed trout fliperoos. No one would be tempted to stuff a towel in her mouth, but they were the shakes nonetheless. And to top it all off, she thought she might throw up. At least that symptom of her nerves run amok was indiscernible to the gallery. For now anyway. She had to pull herself together. She peeped discreetly at her fellow travellers. All the other girls had assumed an easy, attentive posture, heads tipped forward, legs crossed demurely at the ankles, purses on their laps, as if they were Mrs. Leave it to Beaver at the PTA. Marilyn took their cue and was able to reconnect with her inner chutzpah that had briefly decamped for a joyride around Ottawa.
At the two o’clock bongs from the Peace Tower carillon Arlene rose from her seat directly behind the carved wooden balustrade and made a megaphone of her hands. “Why should women be punished just because you can’t control your honourable members?” The voices on the House floor cut out and all eyes turned in her direction. Before the MPs had a chance to assay the rogue loon in their balcony Marilyn leapt up on the opposite side of the hall. She used her Bat Mitzvah voice, trained to carry all the way back to the women’s section. “My uterus is not government property.” Sarah, back over on Arlene’s side, launched herself from her seat with such vigour you could almost hear the sproing. “Abortion is our right.” The parliamentary heads pivoted back and forth as if they were at Wimbledon.
“Women are dying.”
“The operating room, not the back room.”
“Babies deserve to be wanted.”
“Free abortions on demand.”
Sloganizing women were popping up like rabbits. The seats of their wooden chairs, bereft of their anchoring cheeks, snapped up with a bang, adding to the racket.
“Order, order in the House.” The Honourable Speaker Geoffrey Boisclair shouted into the fray, but it had all the effect of a substitute teacher trying to rein in a kindergarten classroom riding a sugar high.
With the head of every MP fixed on the galleries, the girls reached into their purses and pulled out the heavy machinery; bleach bottles, untwisted coat hangers, cans of drain cleaner, vacuum cleaner hoses, knitting needles, letter openers, turpentine. They held their products high like TV pitchmen with their vegematics. Martha had wanted to throw their props over the railings to crash on the floor of the House at the end for effect.
“Think of the drama,” she’d said when they were strategizing after the Trudeau snub.
“Think of the lawsuits. What if we conk someone on the head and knock them unconscious, or kill them even? These aren’t water balloons, you know.”
“It would be poetic justice.”
The rest of the girls nixed her knucklehead suggestion. There was a place in every activist group for a hothead, but the House of Commons wasn’t it.
The Speaker scrambled to reassert his authority, but he’d left his Bourinot’s back in the bookcase at the office. He mentally thumbed through the chapters to see where this type of situation would fall. Unparliamentary language? No, that only applied to the Members themselves. He racked his brain to remember if there was an entry in the index under visitors comma unruly. Probably not, seeing as how it was a Canadian book.
He’d have to wing it. “Silence in the balconies. Silence aux balcons.” But the broads wouldn’t shut their yaps. This was no surprise. He was used to being ignored. MPs talked over his head all the time like he was the pickle in the middle. He was convinced that they disrespected him because of that damned speech impediment that robbed him of the necessary gwavitas. He tried another tack. “Empty the balconies.” He wanted done with these blots on the face of womanhood who were ruining what should have been a placid afternoon umping a who-cares debate over radio station licenses.
The Commissionaires were enjoying the commotion like they would a catfight in a bar, but now they were being pushed to take some kind of action. The Speaker was waving them upwards. These guys didn’t move fast. Their main responsibility, propping up the House doorframes, had flattened their feet and stiffened their joints over the years. They were rooted into the parquet like maple trees. Never had they been called on to eject a soul, least of all a woman. They followed the front porches of their bellies up the steps, straining to remember the security training they’d undergone back in the days when they still had hair.
Aloft, the Caravanners burrowed into their purses yet again as if the Speaker’s do-something hand signals we
re intended for them. Out came the chains. These were no-nonsense chains, heavy grade, the kind used to restrain junkyard dobermans, none of those wimpy chains that lift up the flapper when you flush. I-mean-business chains. The girls wrapped them around their ankles in multiple figure eights and then padlocked themselves to their seats. They were quick about it. They’d rehearsed their Houdini knots all Sunday night.
The Speaker heard the clanking. He recognized the sound. Under other circumstances women in chains would perk up his day immoderately, but today he wasn’t in the mood. The Commissionaires were stumped. Nobody had ever issued them chain cutters. They were equipped for their job like Mr. Jingeling, the security elf at Santa’s workshop. All they carried were keys. They shuffled about in the balconies examining their navels. Arlene gave the signal and the girls commenced to chant. “Legalize all abortion now. Legalize all abortion now. Legalize all abortion now.”
Evie, the Baby and the Wife Page 19