by Rebellious Daughters- True stories from Australia's finest female writers (retail) (epub)
Mimi was a puzzle to me. She wanted to be liked in the same way I did, but she didn’t actively seek anyone’s approval, not even that of our parents. As the cliché goes, she forged her own path. Not with the careful deliberation that I employed, but in a tumbling whirlwind of whacky, rule-breaking behaviour. At school, instead of striving to be part of the popular crowd, Mimi willingly adopted the company of nerds and weirdos. She stood up to school bullies, often putting her own reputation at risk to defend others and displeasing teachers with her preferred methods of dispute resolution (which were way less peaceful than they would have liked). She certainly wasn’t a Good Girl. And yet people seemed to like her anyway. I was completely confused.
It took Mimi’s Christmas play for me to finally understand that playing by the rules wasn’t always the preferable path to social success and the praise of adults. She’d landed the plum role of Mary, which – despite being a rather critical character in the whole birth-of-Jesus scenario – didn’t involve much actual acting. Mimi was mostly required to stand still, looking demure and clasping her hands together in prayer.
On the night of the play, our family claimed the best seats in the house, front row and centre. We were primed and ready to watch our little Mimi (she was aged four then), play history’s ultimate Good Girl. All had gone smoothly in the build-up to her big scene, which was the tiresome journey to Bethlehem with Joseph, riding on a donkey. A brooding, quiet boy called Valentino played the role of Joseph. There was a slight hurdle though. Valentino didn’t speak very good English, so wasn’t entirely clear about his on-stage responsibilities.
In that scene, Valentino’s job was to carry the toy donkey which Mimi would walk beside, pretending she was sitting on it as they followed the star around the stage. The star was a gold cardboard cut-out, held aloft by a fishing rod. But Joseph’s language barrier meant the poor donkey got left in the wings and Mary was stuck on stage, devoid of transportation. My sister had no choice but to take matters into her own hands. She ran back to collect the donkey, stuffing it under one arm and dragging Valentino along with the other. This was no easy task as she was also grappling with a cumbersome headscarf and a cushion shoved up the front of her dress.
The sight of pregnant Mary hauling arse and that laggard Joseph to Bethlehem was too much for the audience. Everyone erupted into fits of laughter, which only spurred Mimi on. When Baby Jesus arrived, there was no way she was going to give up her newfound limelight. As three bearded children presented Jesus with shoeboxes covered in glitter glue, Mimi, who thought this part of the play was particularly boring and had decided to liven it up a bit, looked at the crowd deadpan and went cross-eyed. They lapped it up. The teachers declared her an acting genius and my parents laughingly accepted the compliments of their contemporaries in the audience. Their youngest daughter was a star.
During the drive home, I began to process the events of the evening. Mimi didn’t behave the way adults expected her to, but instead of getting in trouble she was praised for her creativity. She didn’t follow the rules and it made people laugh. It was actually her not-trying to be good that somehow worked for her.
I looked at my little sister, asleep in her booster seat next to me, completely buggered from her night of acting glory. I leaned over and pinched her hard on the arm. She woke up with a squeal.
‘Jamila, don’t pinch your sister!’ exclaimed Mum angrily.
Mimi smirked in triumph.
ME, MY MOTHER AND SEX PO
LEE KOFMAN
During one of my mother’s recent visits to Australia to see me, I suggested we go to the Sexpo exhibition. She agreed, although without knowing exactly what she was agreeing to. You see, my mother lives in Crown Heights, a Hassidic neighborhood in Brooklyn. Along with my father and brothers, she moved there from Israel 15 years ago. In Crown Heights, where the air ripples with klezmer music deep into the night and the residents believe their dead leader Rabbi Lubavitch will eventually make his comeback as the Messiah, exhibitions featuring nipple clamps aren’t exactly a prominent feature.
I don’t think my mother even realized that Sexpo had anything to do with sex. All she probably heard was this was an invitation to spend time with her daughter at some mysterious exhibition, and she loves art. So in my eagerness to shock my mother, to show her how different my life was now from the one she had hoped I would lead, I stooped so low as to capitalise on her naiveté.
I grew up with parents whose relationship to the body – even before we get to sex – was ambivalent at the best of times. My father always struggled with the idea of having a body at all, trying to ignore this inconvenient fact. He kept his showers to a minimum and remembered to put his underwear in the washing machine only when it acquired a yellowish-brownish shade. He forwent regular dental check-ups until his teeth rotted, spoiling his otherwise handsome face.
My mother’s relationship to the flesh was a different kind. For her, bodily functions – particularly those performed by her children – had always held deep fascination and were the subject of continuous preoccupation and enquiry. During our childhoods and even our adolescence, our shit, snot and dandruff were thoroughly examined, commented upon and dealt with without preliminary consultations with the owners. Our ears and noses were poked, for cleaning purposes. Our farts and burps were allowed, even encouraged, as signs of productivity and health, as were those of my parents, who also – for similar reasons – frequently consumed raw garlic and onions without bothering to brush their teeth afterwards.
My parents’ manners revolted me. I wanted to redesign my father, and more so my mother, with whom I had more to do, into something more refined and aesthetically pleasing. I wanted my mother to keep her bad breath and her hands to herself. I wished for some cultivated distance between us, something bordering on propriety. To no avail.
The sexual body was even more problematic in our family. My father, true to his ways, ignored its existence, at least as far as I could tell (although he did manage to manufacture four children). My mother, a Russian-born professional translator of English with a rich vocabulary in at least three languages, avoided using any words that even remotely related to sexual organs or activities. When I was a child too young to feel shame about my genitals, if my mother sometimes caught me exploring my vagina, she would say, ‘Lubochka, don’t touch there. It’s gadost, filth.’
Even the word ‘menstruation’ embarrassed my mother. If she absolutely had to, she would refer to it as eto delo – that business. This attitude was in line with my parents’ religious beliefs. In Judaism, menstrual blood is the chief manifestation of human uncleanliness, sinister enough to threaten the relationship between God and people. The Book of Leviticus warns that a menstruating woman is so impure that she contaminates whatever she touches, be it bread, the TV remote control or her husband. To protect my father from such degradation, he and my mother – like most religious Jewish couples – avoided touching each other and slept in separate beds for the week of menstruation, and the following one too.
No wonder I grew up thinking everything related to my vagina was filth. Getting my first period felt like a fall from grace. This happened when I was 12, during our last summer in Russia, shortly before we emigrated to Israel. The dacha we stayed in during those holidays was a sultry entity: blossoming, singing, buzzing, overflowing with ripe bees, yellow cherries and warm sunflowers. And even though I lay still in my bedroom with its rotting wooden walls, my body felt like an echo of the outside – buzzing, overripe, overflowing. I thought I was losing control over it, and generally over my life, as I felt myself being carried away by the painful river that streamed from between my tightly squeezed legs.
My mother came in, towering above me to inspect the sheets. To my dismay, she wore a smile, even though I was cowering, weakening, leaking – becoming this meek, filthy creature called a ‘woman’.
‘Congratulations, dochenka, you’re a big girl now! Finally, you got… eto delo…’ my mother said, trying to sound
cheerful. That business! No, it was a curse I had been struck with, this red river that would soon flush me out of my childhood.
In years to come, I didn’t monitor the timing of my periods, trying, in my father’s way, to ignore the fact that I even had them.
Pregnancy had been a frequent event in our home since I was eight years old, when my mother went on producing my brothers in rapid succession – all three within five years. Still, in keeping with the mystery surrounding sex in our family, I didn’t have a clue about how babies entered their mother’s belly. On the other hand, I did accumulate enough information about the way they exited to even further put me off the business of having a vagina.
Boys of my age in our neighbourhood in Odessa did occasionally talk about how a man would ‘stick’ his ‘capsicum’, as it was called in Russian slang, into a woman’s piska (a literal translation of this also slang word is ‘pissing device’) to produce a baby. The aggression of this tale seemed to me utterly improbable. I disputed the boys’ story by quoting from a Soviet book I had discovered at home on so-called ‘family health’. According to how I interpreted my chaste, quite abstractly written source, to make babies a man and a woman would embrace tightly (I wasn’t clear on whether they needed to take off their clothes). Then the man’s sperm (I knew it was liquid but had no idea from which body part it came) would fertilise an equally mysterious egg inside the woman’s belly, and the latter would grow into a baby.
Having come from the most literate family on our street and now demonstrating familiarity with such terms as ‘sperm’ and ‘egg’, my version of events was accepted as superior, at least by other girls. The boys were put to shame and I felt a solid sense of achievement.
It was not until we moved to Israel, shortly after I began menstruating, that I realised who had been the better informed. Soon after our arrival we visited my parents’ secular friends. While the adults were talking in the kitchen, as Russians do, I went through our hosts’ library and found an expensive-looking hardcover book exotically titled the Kama Sutra. I loved Indian mythology, particularly the story of Siddhartha. Eager for a new narrative, I opened the book. To my delight, it was lush with illustrations of peacocks, marigolds and golden palaces. Then came the shock. Amongst all that beauty, I clearly saw how men and women really connected with each other in order, I still naively assumed, to make a baby. No wonder my mother called this stuff filth. What kind of a God would plan such atrocities? Obviously, I would never want any capsicum to go anywhere near my poor piska. I told my parents I felt nauseous, which was true, and they rushed me home.
At the age of 14, I was already weary enough of God, and not just on account of sex, to give my parents an ultimatum. Either they enrol me in a secular school or I would forget about school completely. They knew I meant business. For Russian-Jewish parents, education of their children is more important than even God, so eventually my mother gave in. But not before requesting that I sign a contract stating that I would still keep to the Sabbath and eat kosher. I signed, never intending to follow the contract through.
Now that I could smell some freedom, I wanted my body out of my mother’s and God’s clutches, to shape it and put into action according to my wishes. I discarded my modest clothes – long skirts and tops with high necklines and substantial sleeves. I had more spirit than taste though, and would apply excessive quantities of phosphorescent-purplish lipsticks and hideous green eye-shadow to my face. I wore tiny miniskirts and the shortest possible midriff tops still fashionable during the late eighties when I was coming of age. But while I often looked like a Lolita, I didn’t behave like one. I was painfully shy, particularly around boys, and was still frightened and revolted by the so-called facts of life.
Nevertheless, by now my initial nausea at the idea of sex was mingled with curiosity. I educated myself by reading the few ‘naughty’ novels I managed to find in the local library which, in the provincial town of Ashdod where we moneyless migrants ended up, had an uninspiring book collection dominated by Jackie Collins.
My chief textbook was an obscene and chauvinistic, yet titillating novel by Russia’s bad boy, Eduard Limonov. Really a straightforward account of Limonov’s experiences, the novel was unsurprisingly titled It’s me, Eddie. Its main theme was Eddie’s rage, mingled with sexual longing, at his treacherous and (of course) beautiful wife who had deserted him after they had emigrated to America. In Eddie’s erotic world, the tantalising was usually mixed with the revolting, like the time he kept his wife’s bloody tampon to relish during her absence. My mother appeared to be right. Sex was bound up with filth.
I didn’t score my first kiss until I was 16. Unfortunately, my first boyfriend was a recent arrival from Russia and, as such, prone to spoiling his handsomeness with bad haircuts and trousers that reached almost to his nipples. Worse still, his kisses were sloppy, enormously lipped. I felt swallowed, rather than kissed. Just as with all my sexual discoveries to that point, he, too, verged on the grotesque, the revolting. Shortly after our big wet moment, I left him.
The more I was becoming entangled with boys, the more the question of sex confused me. The popular movies of my adolescence – Cocktail, Wild Orchid, Lambada – oozed with sex, showing it as smooth pleasure steeped in poetic longing, seductive lighting, sleek music and the harmonious movements of flawless bodies. Those films and the music I was listening to – Led Zeppelin, The Doors, even Bananarama – made me horny, made me burn. In reality, however, everything was far more compromised. Soon enough, some of my Russian boyfriend’s successors showed me that kissing could be a more exciting endeavour. Still, even when I experienced pleasure, it was always mixed with some degree of repulsion – about the smell, or posture, or anything else belonging to the boyfriend in question. Sometimes, indeed, I wasn’t attracted to these boys. More often, my revolt had to do with my sense that what we were doing together was gadost.
My mother followed my growing succession of boyfriends with anxiety and distaste. ‘Don’t let them spoil you,’ she would say, as if I was milk and not to be left out of the fridge. Often, while I was awkwardly making out with my boyfriends, mostly focused on removing their hands from inside my panties rather than enjoying their touch, the image of my mother’s face came to me with her pale, narrow lips pressed together in disgust: ‘Don’t let them spoil you…’ My face would grow sweaty and hot, not from pleasure but shame. Still, I was determined to walk onwards along my dirt road, even just to spite my mother. Even just so as not to be her.
Out of all my adolescent rebellions, when it came to boys, Ron was the most flamboyant. He was 34, a gifted yet penniless musician. Following a recent divorce, he had returned to Ashdod after years in Tel Aviv to live in his mother’s basement. We met when I was 17 and working as a young reporter for a popular national youth magazine. I interviewed him about his music, he interviewed me for the role of his girlfriend. That article was never published, but we became an item.
I loved the outrage of us getting together. I loved the subtle scent of marijuana that clung to Ron’s clothes, the way he let his curls grow long, his golden pirate-like earring, his taste for arty movies. He drove an ancient, ostentatiously purple, roofless Volvo prone to breakdowns. Sometimes when Ron came to pick me up from my apartment block populated with pious Georgian Jews, his friend Dudu, once a sailor and now a smalltime crook, would sit in the back of Volvo with his bare feet up, sporting a badly cut mullet and crooked teeth. They would play Pink Floyd really loud. My neighbours would stare at me and my entourage with wonder, as if we had just landed from Mars in our incompetent purple spaceship. Knowing my mother was also watching us from the window, I would bend over to give Ron a throat-deep kiss before getting into the car. It didn’t take long until the local boys began spreading rumours about my supposed sexual sophistication.
The irony was that neither the boys nor my mother were right. Despite my Lolita outfits, the considerable number of boyfriends I collected along the filthy path of my adolescence, and now Ron, wh
om I flaunted as boldly as I did my bare abdomen, I was embarrassingly chaste – at least by the standards of my friends, many of whom had begun having sex way before I scored my first kiss. I held onto my virginity with the force of a Rottweiler’s bite, refusing to let the ultimate filth enter my life (metaphorically and physically), even when my flesh scorched with desire.
In Ron’s case, though, I didn’t find it that hard to resist sex (and for his part, being a romantic, he didn’t pressure me much, assuming we had before us an unlimited future together). I didn’t like the thinness of him, the somewhat feminine handsomeness of his melancholy face, his penchant for oversized buttoned shirts. Our heavy petting left me feeling queasy. But he was the perfect antidote to my life at home. The version of Ron I loved was the one I saw on stage when he performed with his band. And he carried the aura of someone who had really lived in Tel Aviv, the cultural Mecca of our country, at the time when I was making my first, tentative advances towards that city (my magazine’s offices were based there). Ironically, it was Ron’s Tel Aviv-ness that eventually led to my – and then our – demise.
A budding writer, I took my work as a reporter superseriously (at the expense of attending school). My output was high and my name became familiar to the magazine’s readers. But what I was really yearning for was intellectual respect for my provincially based, migrant, insecure self from our chief editor, a well-known young adult fiction author and the only ‘famous writer’ I knew in person. He never invited me in for conversations in his office or sent me on special assignments like he did with his favourites. The only time I was summoned to the coveted office was when this editor proposed interviewing my family. He wanted to write an article about our past as dissidents in the Soviet Union. I was overwhelmed by his sudden interest, which I saw as my only opportunity to win his more sustained attention and, by extension, to make my claim in the circle of real writers. I begged my timid parents to say ‘yes’.