by Rebellious Daughters- True stories from Australia's finest female writers (retail) (epub)
Not long before the scheduled interview, Ron took me to his Tel Aviv, which was the city of other semiemployed musicians performing in semi-attended bars for semi-attentive audiences. We listened to his friends jamming in a wood-laden pub on King George Street. Absorbed in the music, we missed the last bus to Ashdod.
I knew my mother’s wrath, if I stayed out all night with Ron, would be mighty. This was something I was strictly forbidden from doing with any boyfriend, let alone an older and disreputable one like Ron. But we couldn’t afford a taxi and so crashed the night on the couch of Ron’s drummer friend.
If I had held onto my virginity in the privacy of Ron’s mother’s basement, there was little chance I would lose it now, in this crowded shared apartment. But for my mother, that night I didn’t come home stood for a mythical straw that broke the poor camel’s back. Besides, she – who thought my writerly aspirations an annoyance, an interference with school, a misstep on my way to some solid career in social work or perhaps education – finally had a way to exact revenge on her rebellious daughter. There would be no interview, no matter how much I pleaded.
As a disappointment to our editor, I was now sunk back into anonymity in the office, with no prospect of ascending the magazine’s ladder. This devastated me. Already deeply insecure around my sophisticated peers from Tel Aviv, I felt I had sabotaged my entire literary future. This sense of failure lingered in me for a long, long time, even after I later had books published. And at that time, my bitterness seeped into my feelings towards Ron too, accelerating my decision to break up with him.
I never let my mother know, refusing her the satisfaction, but I actually lost my virginity only at the age of 20, at the end of my army service, when I had already been living away from my parents for a year. I did this with yet another boyfriend whom I didn’t particularly love, but this time his body – swarthy, lean, smooth – truly appealed to me. With him, and at that age, the idea of penetration no longer repelled me, not in theory nor in practice when the practice finally began.
I was glad I waited to have sex only when I was truly ready and didn’t succumb to my boyfriends’ pressures nor blindly followed the zeitgeist of my generation that postulated that adolescent virginity wasn’t cool. In this way, I launched into my sex life with a healthy sense of self-respect, and perhaps, I concede, some of my persistence in waiting for the right time was inspired by my strict upbringing. Still, it took me at least six years and quite a few lovers for the feeling of revulsion to slink away completely from between my sheets. Even to this day some shreds of shame remain. Sometimes, when I make love, I still find it difficult to let go. I still won’t go to a chemist to buy any sex-related paraphernalia. But these internal battles are no longer epic. Sex lost its filthy edge and has become what it should be: mostly pleasure, sometimes a chore, and on some occasions – a reason to live.
So you would think that by the time both Sexpo and my mother arrived in Melbourne – with the life I created here, in my own image, where I was a writer and a happy wife to a spunky husband, and fancied myself as sexually liberated (or rather, rehabilitated) enough to invite the world into my bedroom through my memoir about non-monogamy – I would be able to put the past behind. But no. My mother was here and I was ready for my revenge. ‘Lubochka, what lovely-looking torches!’ My mother, excitable by nature, exclaimed as we entered Sexpo, its stalls and performance stages sprawling across the gigantic Melbourne Exhibition Centre. At once we were faced with Sexpo’s buzz, both metaphorical and literal, for the ‘torches’ were exuding loud electric sounds.
‘Those are vibrators, Mama.’
‘Ah...’ My mother stopped still.
I looked at her with apprehension. In her sensible shoes, a fluffy wig, opaque stockings and a long-sleeved dress that barely contained her rolls of flesh, my mother fitted into this crowd of bearded hipsters with jeans beginning around their pubic bones and anorexic women in little frocks no better than I once had into our building in Ashdod. The difference was, I had chosen to stand out back then while she followed me here blissfully ignorant, like those poor children did when they trailed the pied piper to their doom.
I expected my mother to get angry at me for bringing her into this merry gadost, to tell me, as she used to when I really got onto her nerves, that I was selfish, that I did everything to spite her. But she just kept standing there with her plump arms hanging by her sides, inert. It was so strange seeing her like that, for my mother was a woman always on the move, busy with her children, prayers, teaching jobs, domestic preparations for the countless Jewish holidays. Rather than enjoying the success of my plan, I felt like crying.
‘So… What would you like us to do now, Lubochka?’ My mother looked at me uncharacteristically uncertain. At the sound of her Russian, a few of the hipsters glanced in our direction, incredulous.
What would you like us to do…? To be honest, I’d have liked us to go home. By now I was already fully regretting my juvenile attempt at revenge. Too late perhaps, I realised this bacchanalia I had brought my poor mother into might make her feel inadequate. In recent years, before my thirst for revenge had overpowered me, I had reconsidered my mother’s sexual attitudes in the light of her upbringing. She, who up until her early thirties had lived a secular life, nevertheless had spent her youth in a puritanical atmosphere. In the Soviet Union, even more so than in Judaism (which at least postulates that it is a husband’s duty to pleasure his wife in bed), sex was taboo. The erotic drive was chaotic, unpredictable and powerful, and therefore – from the government’s point of view – had no place in Soviet society. The authorities worried sex would interfere with the main function of the citizens: to serve the state.
If anyone did speak about sex in the Soviet Union, the language was either clinical or particularly degrading in its obscenity (the latter might explain my mother’s rejection of any sexual vocabulary). Ignorance ruled and, for women, following your desire often meant unwanted pregnancies. Then there was the problem of space. Most apartments in major Soviet cities were partitioned in a frugal, rather cruel, manner, allocating one room per family often composed of three generations. Sexologists who studied the Soviet Union consider this lack of privacy, which meant sex was often tied up with embarrassment and (internalised) fear of interruption, as one of the major sources of the sexual neuroses so common in that country. When we lived there, my family was lucky to have a small apartment to ourselves. Still, my parents, along with my little brothers, slept in one room which also served as our living room, and shared a door with my grandmother’s adjacent room. They were only in their thirties then, supposedly in the prime of their sexuality, and this bedroom arrangement must have been tough on them.
I was now feeling increasingly sorry for my mother and, by extension, for that entire generation of women who had come of age with no privacy and in ignorance, in a culture where men often stunk of alcohol and had poor personal hygiene. Of course my mother would associate sex with filth. I wanted to rescue her here, at Sexpo. I patted her shoulder, reassuring her we didn’t have to stay, we could leave straight away.
‘Leave?’ my mother asked, puzzled. ‘But there’s still so much to see, dochenka, my little daughter.’
At that, she regained her usual speed. Despite my mother’s weight and her bad leg, which she broke years ago while climbing Golan Mountains in Israel, she could move well. Now, before I even had a chance to respond, my mother was already several stalls away from me, buried deep in other types of mountains – stacks of penis rings and whips.
‘Try this, Lubochka!’ she yelled from a distance, holding something garishly pink and quivering obscenely against her palm. I nervously looked around to see if anyone I knew was there...
We kept walking through stalls offering what appeared to me identical merchandise, just under different brand names. Yet my mother seemed to be spotting the differences, and was navigating her way around the dildos with an ardour she usually reserved for exploring nature and biblical tracts.
It was I who was feeling disgruntled here.
In my vengeful mood, I had forgotten how unappealing I found the adult industry. Sexpo was just another example of the damage our consumerist culture has inflicted upon erotica, which is more likely to thrive on mystery and a certain darkness than on blatant marketing and kitsch. Here, under the brutal electric lights conducive to exhibiting the goods, bunny-shaped clitoral stimulators glittered cheerfully, strippers in pink G-strings flaunted friendly attendant smiles and stall displays crumbled under the masses of Madonna-style conical bras. Joseph Brodsky, my favorite Russian poet, famously warned against such ubiquity in his essay, Less than One. He wrote that ever since he had grown up amidst the overwhelming amount of Soviet propaganda, exemplified in the excess of images of communist leaders in public spaces, any large quantities of the same thing appeared to him to be in bad taste.
I tapped my busy mother on her back: ‘Remember what Brodsky said? A few trees are beautiful, but a forest is banal. Have you had enough?’
‘Yes, of course, Lubochka,’ my mother mumbled in that benign agreeableness she exhibited whenever she wasn’t actually listening to me, then returned to examining a rack of DVDs with titles such as Anal Delight and Who is Afraid of Dick’s Cock? Still, despite her absorption, she was quick to catch an announcement over the loud speakers that the penis puppetry show was about to begin. The enormous screen projected a close up of the puppeteer’s freckled hands twisting his fleshy, reddish cock into the shape of a turtle.
‘Tfu!’ spat my mother. ‘What a shameful activity. Do you think we can get closer to the stage?’
Should I have really been that surprised that my pious mother could sometimes be more frivolous than I was? I, who had studied her closely for years, both for the sake of my writing and for my sanity, should have acknowledged that my mother accommodates more paradoxes than most, possibly because of the many metamorphoses she has undergone in her life. Before she fell in love with God, my mother enjoyed waving red flags and dancing the night away. Afterwards she began a career battling the KGB for the right to practise her religion. The state retaliated and she lost her job as a translator, working instead as a street cleaner. In Israel my mother reinvented herself as a teacher of Hebrew, only to later move to New York where she now gave classes on the bible – in Russian. Having lived through all those reincarnations, she hadn’t discarded her previous selves, as converts of any persuasion often do. Instead, to paraphrase Whitman, she had retained a capacity to contain multitudes, as contrary to each other as they could be.
And yet I had chosen to forget that my mother, while disapproving of my midriff tops, had actually bought me some revealing dresses to live vicariously through me. Or that night back in my teenage years, when I came home late to find her alone in the darkened living room watching a semi-porn German TV channel. And there was my visit to New York some years before our Sexpo excursion, when I had bought the memoir The Sexual Life of Catherine M, which recounted the author’s adventurous sexual history, including her willing participation in gangbangs. I had conveniently supressed the memory of my mother snatching that book from me and finishing it in one day. Then she had gone back to her staple reading – The Book of Psalms (interestingly, allegedly authored by King David, one of the most oversexed of all biblical characters).
Perhaps, like me, my mother had always struggled against her upbringing, trying to understand what she wanted and whether she was missing out on anything. Yet, instead of considering her humanity, her internal battles, like a proper writer and daughter would, I had often tried to reconcile the different women residing within her, merging them into a coherent, one-dimen-sional character. Such a version of my mother, after all, made her an easier target for my rebellion.
But if my mother wasn’t the ultimate prude, then, if I am really honest, I wasn’t the ultimate, unabashed rebel I fancied myself as. Not dissimilarly to my mother, I have often been baffled by some aspects of current sexual mores: that Dolly magazine can advise girls on how to perform fellatio while wearing braces, the increasing popularity of labiaplasty, the widespread practice of ‘hooking up’. I am way too romantic for all that. For me, courtship that delays sex has often felt the most erotic. Gradual seduction a la Dangerous Liaisons is more my thing. Which is not to say I have always connected sex with love. But I have always wanted even my brief affairs to be imbued with infatuation, roses, champagne, poetry – any romance really. My erotic desires and Sexpo were hardly compatible. So what had I been thinking when I had decided to bring my mother here, as if this was my life?
Half an hour or so later, when the penis puppeteer had extricated his poor member from yet another complicated knot yet again, I suggested again, this time rather meekly, that we go home.
‘But, Lubochka,’ said my mother, ‘the program says they have some new show on every hour.’
For the next few hours my mother closely monitored the performance schedule. We watched pretty girls twist their bodies – not dissimilarly to the penis puppeteer – around poles, Chippendales flex their muscles, porn stars discuss their artistic visions. ‘What gadost, filth,’ my mother would occasionally remember to say. However, this word which had so darkly dominated my youth, now acquired a ring of sheer exhilaration in her mouth. In fact, the day turned out to be one of those very few times when I saw my mother let go of her daily worries and enjoy herself with gusto.
As the evening was drawing close, my mother at last consented to leave. On our way out, she suddenly stopped.
‘Wait, Lubochka. I want to buy a souvenir for your father.’ At that she purchased a pair of handcuffs decorated with leopard-fur. Now, she said, she was finished.
JUST BE KIND
ELIZA - JANE HENRY - JONES
Grandmothers
I shared a bed with my mother until I was 13 years old. I had my own room, but I refused to sleep there. I was scared of my grandpa’s ghost; he’d died in my bedroom, collapsing where my bed now was. Scared, also, of the ghosts of other family members who’d died or had overnight vigils in the house, their coffins in the middle of our small, still rooms. I was scared of the dark and the house creaking, of people breaking in through the large windows near my bedroom door. I slept with a knife slipped under the mattress.
Mostly, though, I was scared of my grandmother. She had Alzheimer’s and we lived with her, my mother and I. And the Alzheimer’s had taken her, piece by piece, until most of the time we were living with a person who could only be described as insane. Gone was the woman who wore silk blouses and finely cut pants and walked my scooter up to the primary school each day so that I could ride it home. Gone was the woman who laughed so hard at my jokes that her eyes crinkled shut, walked everywhere at high speed and cooked chicken soup so perfectly I still dream about it when I am sick.
Alzheimer’s had turned my grandmother into someone who would urinate on the bedroom floor in the middle of the night. Someone who would pull her blouse on over her pyjamas and pace the house, murmuring and huffing to herself. More than once, I woke up to her standing beside my mother’s bed, staring at me. Sometimes, half asleep, I mistook her footsteps for a ghost or a thief and my fingers fumbled for the handle of my knife.
She would often cry. She would cry because her feet were too big. Cry because she missed her mother. She forgot how to use the toilet and would leave poo tucked into teapots and in the kitchen sink. She would forget where the front door was and smash the windows. Trying so hard to get back inside.
Forget is a strange word. You can forget your keys. Forget to feed the dog. But you can also forget your family. You can forget who you love. Where you are. Where you’ve been. Even who you are.
We cannot shape our sense of who we are without remembering.
We forget. The word scattered so thinly across so many different meanings. My grandmother was imprisoned inside a forgetful mind. My mother and I now knew my grandmother more than she knew herself.
Living with people who forget, you carry their stor
ies as well as your own. Do you tell your grandmother that the mother she’s calling out for has been dead for 40 years? Do you tell her that the pile of papers she’s just thrown out, thinking she was tidying up, was actually your homework? Living in the face of such fierce forgetting is unsettling. It dislodges you. As a teenager, I developed social anxiety. I missed out on great swathes of school. I had panic attacks. I became obsessed with germs. With cleanliness. My grandmother vomited in strange places and never washed her hands and I imagined germs closing in on all of us until we suffocated. I would stand outside the bathroom door and yell in at my grandmother – insisting she wipe, insisting she wash her hands. With soap. Hot water. No, wash them again. I would spray every surface with Glen 20. I tried to convince my mother to get a second washing machine just for my clothes. I rewashed dishes and refused to sit on the couch.
So, I sprayed until I felt lightheaded, until even the street outside reeked of Glen 20. I sprayed and I wiped until my arm hurt. Doorknobs and the kitchen bench. The sink and the coffee table and the soaked fabric arms of the couch.
It’s not the loss of memory that strikes hardest in the experience of Alzheimer’s. For my mother and I, it was the erratic moods that were the most painful. How my grandmother, who we loved, who loved us, would call us awful names, haunting names, would spew vitriol so sharp that we physically hurt. Sometimes she literally did throw things at us or hit us in the face.
And then she’d forget.
‘Oh, what’s wrong darling?’ my grandmother would ask me, two minutes after calling me a bitch and slapping me across the face because I locked the front door to stop her wandering off. She often got lost. She would go out with her handbag stuffed with tissues and not much else. Sometimes it would be to find my mother. Or her mother. To find her brothers, who, too, had died many years before. She would strike out the front door, purposeful, and be found hours later curled up and teary. Once we found her near the beach, five kilometres away.