Shrewed

by Elizabeth Renzetti

At dinner, I showed my hand to my family. “Can any of you read what this says?”

  “Wow,” said my husband. “If only you had a magical electronic device that could record these things for you.”

  “Does it say ‘hi-bye’?” my son asked.

  “Why would I write ‘hi-bye’ on my hand?” I said, perhaps a bit too shrilly.

  My daughter grabbed my hand, pondered it for a minute. “I think it says ‘worry.’”

  I snatched my hand back and stared at it. Maybe I’d become the kind of madwoman who writes “worry” on her hand, just in case she forgets, for five minutes, to worry. Then the absurdity of the situation hit me, and I burst out laughing.

  “You know what I’m going to do?” I said. “I’m going to cut off my hand. Then I won’t have to think about it anymore.”

  “I have a knife,” my daughter said.

  The next day, with the ink still mockingly black on my hand, I realized that the scrawled message was actually the set of initials of someone I’d forgotten to email. One more plate hit the floor, but it didn’t matter. I’d become used to walking around ankle-deep in crockery. We all had. If I may paraphrase T. E. Lawrence, or at least Peter O’Toole playing T. E. Lawrence: Certainly, it’s a mess. The trick is not minding that it’s a mess.

  One morning I find an old journal. I was always terrible at keeping journals. I felt the same way about them as I did love affairs and cigarettes: I was only ever interested in the first, freshest stretch. This one documents a desert between its green suede covers. In early 2000 I had left Toronto with my husband to live in Los Angeles, where he had a job and I did not. I knew no one, though the geography of the city was intimately printed on my brain; I’d been crazy about old movies since I was a child, an obsessive in black and white.

  The street on which we settled, in a decrepit building mockingly named the Saint-Tropez, was a bridge across time. Vinyl-clad sex workers, unfailingly cheery, anchored one end; at the other sat the yellow stucco bungalows of Charlie Chaplin’s old studio. The city was full of everything, and my life was empty. I had no work visa, and so no work. I dreamed about having a baby and waited, month after month, for it to happen.

  Lassitude is a prophecy that fulfills itself. The less I worked, the less I wanted to work. A trip to the drug store could take a whole day: the planning, the preparation, the actual excursion, the recovery. The frenetic movement of my life in Toronto — I’d been the executive editor of a women’s magazine — had slowed to a standstill, like a rocking horse come to rest. The air quivered with my self-pity.

  On the day of my thirty-fourth birthday, I taped into my journal a poem I’d been carrying around between the pages of a book. It was called “Table,” by Turkish poet Edip Cansever, and I would read it in the morning, when the day stretched unfilled ahead, and at night, with the desert behind. It suggested a future in which I wasn’t alone in an apartment building populated largely by porn stars and valets waiting for their hip-hop careers to begin. I longed for the day when I wasn’t unburdened but, like the table, sagged with abundance:

  Table

  A man filled with the gladness of living

  Put his keys on the table

  Put flowers in a copper bowl there.

  He put his eggs and milk on the table.

  He put there the light that came in through the window.

  Sound of a bicycle, sound of a spinning wheel.

  The softness of bread and weather he put there.

  On the table the man put

  Things that happened in his mind.

  What he wanted to do in life.

  He put that there.

  Those he loved, those he didn’t love.

  The man put them on the table too.

  Three times three make nine:

  The man put nine on the table.

  He was next to the window next to the sky;

  He reached out and placed on the table endlessness;

  So many days he’d wanted to drink a beer!

  He put on the table the pouring of that beer.

  He placed there his sleep and his wakefulness;

  His hunger and his fullness he placed there.

  Now that’s what I call a table!

  It didn’t complain at all about the load.

  It wobbled once or twice, then stood firm.

  The man kept piling things on.

  When we left Los Angeles and moved back to Toronto, my table groaned. My baby son I put there, and my father who was so difficult, and the house with the cracked walls. My ambition. The job that put me in charge of nearly thirty people, and woke me at 4 a.m. every morning to a dull hum of dread, I put those on the table. I climbed on the table to make sure everything was safe, and though it felt like the whole thing was going to collapse, it wobbled, then stood firm.

  What if balance is overrated? The British philosopher and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips makes an elegant case in his essay “On Balance”: “Faced with the stresses and strains of everyday life it is easy now for people to feel that they are failing; and what they are failing at, one way or another, is managing the ordinary excesses that we are all bested by: too much frustration, too much bad feeling, too little love, too little success, and so on.”

  But what if we accepted a simple proposition? That we are, as Phillips says, “too much for ourselves.” We are overstuffed with longing and frustration and ambivalence, but these are home-base emotions, and we should not flee from them. It’s in the chaos that we find ourselves.

  In fact, we are most alive when we are off-balance: We speak of being “swept off our feet” by love or “bowled over with happiness” when a child graduates. We lose balance when we’re captivated by a person, or a thought, or the sight of something beautiful or disturbing. We are over the moon, and has there ever been a less stable place? But that is where we find the greatest joy, with the ground rushing up to meet us, falling or flying, or both at the same time.

  THE STORY OF MY MOTHER

  “AND THEN,” my mother says, holding up one red-­lacquered nail, “you had to hold your finger in the dial and wait until precisely 9 a.m. to dial the last number.” She is remembering one of her main duties as a nurse in a major Toronto teaching hospital in the 1970s: making golf appointments for one of the surgeons in her department.

  “He’d be very upset if you didn’t get exactly the tee time he wanted,” she says. “So you had to be quick on the trigger.” She is eighty-five years old, her face turned to the sun, and she is cradling her favourite drink, Pinot Grigio-and-whatever-juice-was-in-the-jug. I’ve heard this story a hundred times, and it still makes my blood boil. My mother shrugs. Golf-dialling was among the lesser humiliations she and her fellow nurses suffered. They were groped, and underpaid, and made to stand when the doctors came to the nurses’ station. They were required, periodically, to shave the chief surgeon’s back.

  My mother is made of stories, like Scheherazade, like Borges’s library. She is made of stories the way a margarita is made of tequila. She is made of stories that are part 1950s horror comic book, part Black Narcissus, and part Carry On Nurse. Her best stories have a mad, surreal quality — the product of working in a deeply Catholic hospital run by nuns at a time when the world was twirling in its disco shoes and snorting poppers outside.

  When I was a child she would come home and present these stories over dinner. One female patient had inserted a lemon in a particularly private place, and the exhausted resident who was confronted with the task of extraction said: “If I’d known there was going to be a party, I would have brought the gin.” There was the man who complained of pain in his abdomen until a blue crayon was extracted from his bladder. There was an overly amorous pet monkey attached by his jaws to a woman’s bottom.

  In those years, there were no public places to celebrate sexual fetishes, which were still labelled deviancy.
If things went wrong with your particular jam, you went to emergency and relied on the kind doctors and nurses to sort it out for you. And if the doctors and nurses went home and chuckled about it to their families, perhaps it was a small price to pay.

  Years later I would come to understand this humiliation in a particularly acute way. It’s probably better to just say it quickly and get it out there: When I was in my twenties, I accidentally swallowed my friend’s engagement ring and ended up in the emergency room where my mother had worked. The very same hospital! You could hear God laughing even with the doors closed. Many years later I heard that my X-ray was still posted in the doctors’ lounge, the emerald ring clearly visible on its journey toward my sphincter, and freedom.

  My mother’s stories drew a picture of a world that was dark and strange and thrillingly absurd. She was the kind of nurse patients loved and remembered, and sent notes to after they’d left hospital. “That poor man,” she’d say, as she launched into a story about a patient who’d had the wrong eye operated on, “such a terrible thing.” Her compassion refilled itself day after day, and it was tempered with a streak of pragmatism. If she noticed someone was a smoker, she’d lock the door to the room, crack the window, and they’d light up together, leaning on the sill and puffing up to the sky.

  My friends love her for her stories. I’m fairly certain they only tolerate me as a conduit to Mildred. Gay men love her, but so do children and the mentally troubled. She adores parties, and when I invite her to one, I will often find her at centre of a rapt huddle, the odd word or phrase drifting out: rupture, lawsuit, and then I saw a little curl of smoke above his testicle and I knew something was wrong.

  As I grew older, I realized that what had seemed hilarious was in fact horrifying, and the stories she told had at their roots a diminution of her professional worth. As a student nurse, she had to kneel if the hospital’s priest walked by carrying the sacraments of Holy Communion; one afternoon he walked past and my mother obediently dropped while her fellow student, carrying two full bedpans, struggled to her knees.

  The nurses across Ontario formed a union, finally, to ask for what should have been given to them long before. They went on strike for better pay, and my siblings and I stayed up late painting slogans on cardboard. The next day she and her colleagues picketed the hospital, and a man driving by rolled down his window to bellow, “Florence Nightingale would turn in her grave to see you!”

  She has long since retired. “Ah, well,” she says, as we sit in the sun on my porch. “It’s easier for you girls these days.” Like a cat, she loves a patch of sun. There is no bitterness in her words: I think she is truly happy that things are easier for me. I look over at her, the blonde hair she will never surrender and the vibrant red lips she applies many times each day, and I marvel once again at her strength. She has overcome things I can’t imagine: a gothically horrible marriage to my father, separation from him and the drug addiction that followed; depression, poverty, illness, and the death of my brother.

  All of her stories begin this way: Have I ever told you. Often, she has already told me. On a surprising number of occasions, she has not. I have known her for five decades, and she still surprises me. As we sit on the porch, she throws me a curveball. “Have I ever told you about the time I was supposed to go to Tasmania?”

  I turn to look at her. I’m usually starting to drowse when I hear Have I told you, but this is new.

  “No, you haven’t.”

  “It was after I graduated. My friend Ruth and I were going to go to Tasmania. She had family there.”

  “Tasmania — are you serious? Did you have jobs lined up?”

  My mother shakes her head. “It just seemed like a great adventure.”

  Now I’m sitting up on the porch sofa. She has all my attention. “But you didn’t go. Why not?”

  She turns to look at me, and I’m pretty sure I already know the answer. “Because I met your father.”

  WHEN I MOVED with my family to London in 2004, Mildred pretty much moved with us. That is, she visited for three months at a time, twice a year. It was an adventure for her, and she is a sponge for adventure. I got free child care, companionship, and an in-house storyteller who was equal parts Monty Python and H. P. Lovecraft.

  “Have I ever told you,” I heard her say, as I descended the stairs one morning, “what human brains look like?” She was sitting at the breakfast table with my six-year-old son, who was enthralled. “Most people think they’re pink. But really they’re grey. They look like a bag of grey sausages.”

  We were alone a lot, the two of us, in the company of two young children and the crates of wine that came to the door every week. My husband was on the road, reporting from whatever country was on fire: Iran, Libya, Greece. My Daddy never takes me to Poland! our son shrieked one morning, and it was hard to argue with that.

  “Did I tell you,” my mother said over the evening meal, “that we almost didn’t have butter for dinner tonight?” I was half-ignoring her, as I often did, as all adult children do with their parents. One day my children will ignore me.

  “The only reason we have butter,” she continued, “is because the Holy Spirit reminded me.”

  That got my attention. I am an atheist — the rotten apple fell far from the tree — but a story about the Holy Spirit at the grocery store will get me every time.

  “Yes,” my mother said, happy now that I was listening. “I had just left Waitrose, and I was just passing the pub, when I heard a voice in my ear say, ‘Mildred, did you remember to get butter?’ And you know, I hadn’t.” I did not ask her how she knew it was the Holy Spirit — perhaps there was a password. Later, when I repeated the story to my husband, he said it was the only good argument he’d ever heard for organized religion.

  She was, like most Catholics, death-enthralled, the essential blitheness of her character tinted with a touch of the macabre. I inherited this trait from her. Cemeteries bound us. We both loved walking in them, reading the stories told by the tombstones. London is rich in gravesites: We visited Karl Marx and George Eliot in Highgate, Samuel Johnson and Charles Dickens in Westminster Abbey.

  In St. Pancras churchyard, we found the marker where Mary Wollstonecraft once lay (the great feminist philosopher’s grandson moved her remains to Bournemouth decades after her death). Wollstonecraft died of childbed fever, and her absence left a hole in her daughter Mary’s heart that was never entirely filled. Her words would give Mary purpose, though: As a child, she was taught to read from the letters on her mother’s headstone. Later, sixteen-year-old Mary would lie on her mother’s grave with her lover Percy Shelley, and they would read Wollstonecraft’s works of radical philosophy to each other.

  I became slightly fixated on the story of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, two women who refused to be bound by convention, who used their stories to transcend their unhappy lives, whose histories are linked for all time thanks to the writing they left behind — particularly Shelley’s novel Frankenstein and Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women. They were separated in life but their words spoke to each other, stories of pain and loss that echoed across centuries. Mary Shelley was obsessed with the mother she lost, and would read and reread Wollstonecraft’s seminal works; her mother’s voice bled, across the years, into her own.

  They were both abandoned by their fathers: Wollstonecraft by her alcoholic and profligate father Edward, and Shelley by hers, the political philosopher William Godwin, who preached radicalism but was horrified when it appeared in his own house. After Mary ran away with Percy Shelley and bore his child out of wedlock, her father refused to have anything to do with her.

  Mother and daughter suffered the social ostracism of a society that thought women’s highest perch could only be obtained through lawful matrimony. Wollstonecraft also bore an illegitimate child, her first daughter, Fanny. They both poured the pain of exile and abandonment into their w
riting. The men they loved, fathers and husbands, disappointed them without cease. They would live, instead, in art.

  This was nearly impossible for women at the time. Little changed in the period between Wollstonecraft’s intellectual peak in the late eighteenth century and her daughter’s a few decades later: “In the early nineteenth century, women artists were by definition monstrous,” writes Charlotte Gordon in her magnificent biography of the mother and daughter, Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft & Mary Shelley. Horace Walpole called Wollstonecraft “a hyena in petticoats.”

  Wollstonecraft published much of her early work anonymously, as her daughter did, twenty years later, with Frankenstein. When Shelley was revealed as the novel’s author, Gordon writes, “The knowledge that a woman had written Frankenstein was so shocking in many circles that it hurt the book’s sales.” Frankenstein is often seen as Shelley’s psychological payment to her mother, the creature destroying its creator. In all ways, her mother gave her the stories that defined her life.

  My mother came with us to Rome over Christmas one year. We spent a day wandering in the Cimitero Acattolico, the Protestant cemetery where Percy Shelley’s ashes were buried after he drowned in 1822 (in perhaps the most famous recorded case of white man’s overconfidence, Shelley was an avid sailor who never learned to swim). We wandered among the tombstones in the late afternoon sun as the graveyard’s resident cats slunk in and out of the shadows. We found Shelley’s grave, with its famous epitaph taken from The Tempest:

  Nothing of him that doth fade

  But doth suffer a sea-change

  Into something rich and strange

  My mother took my daughter by the hand, and they tried to coax the cats from their hiding places. I wandered by myself through the tombstones and the angels and urns. Most of the graves held people lost to history. I looked for women’s lives. Each grave held a thousand untold stories, the heart of someone’s family. Each terse epitaph was compressed with meaning, like the tiny medieval prayer boxes that contain an entire biblical scene carved within: “Her loss was as that of the key-stone of an arch,” I read on one gravestone. And another: “She saw. She knew. She created beauty.”