Ernie played out as Dagwood, Blondie’s husband, a subservient, henpecked weakling.
Once again, poor old Ernie.
All men, according to the housewife followers of Blondie, were Dagwoods: mid-day couch sleepers, sneaky avoiders of chores, destroyers of housework, and foulers of clean sinks and towels. They left grimy fingerprints everywhere, slopped mud onto shining kitchen floors, and snored and farted with abandon.
No wonder women had to be like Blondie. They were forced to it. Forced to use “every trick in the book” to keep their husbands in line. Blondie used rolling pins and frying pans to keep Dagwood in line. The Amazon Housewives used sharp tongues, guilt, sarcasm, and withheld sex. Only a woman’s steady vigilance kept a man civilized. Otherwise the man she had married would gain the upper hand and she’d wake up to find she’d married a slob.
This was the Gospel According to Elsie and the Amazon Housewives
Whew!
I never wrote that essay for Miss Hewitt. I wasn’t up to it. I couldn’t reconcile the man-hating meanness of the Amazons with my own dimly realized yearnings for love and romance. And where was tenderness? And the rumoured gallantry of men? Where was their care and kindness, qualities I had often seen in Ernie, and in my father, Billy? So instead, I handed in a dry little book report: “The Amazons were an ancient tribe …”
• • •
Now and then Elsie and I would watch a late-night movie together. A musical, or a romantic comedy. She would be on one side of the den, in Ernie’s recliner (he’d have gone to bed), and I’d be on the couch wrapped in a blanket. The Fred and Ginger movies. And Mrs. Miniver, How Green Was My Valley. We smiled at the spunky portrayals of women with spirit who stood up to a man, who were independent and cutely petulant. No man could ever “get to first base” with them, not until they were “churched,” as Elsie called it. Enchanted, we watched the men in these movies. They were so remote from us, so clean and handsome in their tuxedos. They could dance and sing and had “hearts of gold” and went gallantly about the intricate business of winning a woman’s heart. Entire films were given over to the tug and pull, the sexless sophistication that was the fantasy of romantic comedy. There was not a man in our known world who could reach the elevated level of Cary Grant or Fred Astaire, though in my heart—and I believe in Elsie’s, too—we knew we were equal to them, knew we could turn into Ginger Rogers at the drop of a top hat.
Elsie never had much to say about these movies, other than to sigh, “Too bad life’s not like that!”
Once, during a musical, Ernie shuffled out in his flannel pyjamas; the fringe around his bald head was ruffled like Einstein’s. He told us to turn down the TV. All that tap-dancing was giving him a headache.
Watching him return to their bedroom, Elsie snorted. “There goes the man of my dreams.”
Poor old Ernie, I thought, feeling hopeless for him yet again. There seemed no escape from the Amazon Housewives. He’d lost the Battle of the Sexes.
I wished Ernie could be on a TV show where he’d be given his most-wished-for things. Like Queen for a Day, the show for hard-up women. Ernie could be King for a Day. He’d turn into Cary Grant, be tall and handsome, have thick black hair. He’d be given a year’s supply of chocolate bars. A new truck. He’d drive off in the new truck, with a new wife, a dish he’d call “baby”….
• • •
If “The Gospel According to Elsie” didn’t stick with me, and I went searching for other bowls of soup, it was because of Ernie.
Dear Raphael Max Winters, a.k.a. my son,
You know that woman who likes to drive through Forest Hill with the sunroof open to titillate the teetotallers and tipplers with the sounds of Joe Strummer? You think she’s pretty cool, don’t you. Well, she wasn’t always. In fact, that woman was beaten up by a horrific pipsqueak half her size in grade four while the rest of her classmates laughed. In fact, she was taunted from her first day of school until she ran screaming to New York when she was eighteen. Yes, I can see by the way you are tossing your macaroni that you feel my pain, you feel the injustice. Why was she so maligned? Well … because your mama was different. She couldn’t cut it. She was a misfit.
Where is it written that the ability to recite the Maple Leafs lineup at the age of eight relegates you to the Land of the Losers, or that the entry into the in crowd (and all their birthday parties) is barred to you? Who decides that you are the untouchable who has to sit alone at lunch, that you don’t fit in, that you are different? Is it self-selection or are you selected? Who knows? Do I look like the Philosopher Queen with my hair coated with your raspberry Yoplait? OK, OK, stop flinging your arrowroots, here’s the story.
I’ll admit, I was a weird kid. Once when I was seven my father gave me money to buy a book of fairy tales, and instead I bought Gerald Green’s Holocaust and read it all night in my walk-in closet. Other kids in my ‘hood bought Owl magazine; I had a subscription to Pro Wrestling Illustrated. The girls had long beautiful brown hair and were cute and petite. I had short curly red hair and was all legs. “Please God,” I’d pray at night, “please let me be like THEM.” But, my son, God didn’t listen.
Your now so-hip-it-hurts mommy used to be a serious dork—a geek of the highest order. Rejected by the in crowd (or any crowd, now that I think about it), I buried myself in my books. From grade nine to grade twelve, I never saw a mark lower than A. My teachers loved me because I was smart; my classmates loathed me for the same reason. What’s this? You want to give me a hug? Such a good son you are. But wait, I have to tell you something else first. When I used to cry on the toilet in my mother’s (your baba’s) bathroom before school she would say, “Fuck ’em. Get good marks then get outta town.” Your baba also didn’t fit in. At twenty-one, she ran screaming from the shtetl of Winnipeg to the Promised Land of Toronto and there she met my father, your zaida.
Charming and totally bonkers, your zaida would put on his fur coat, red Chuck Taylors and a black Russian fur hat, and drive Shabbat morning carpool to Holy Blossom Temple in a green army jeep. After he dropped the other kids off at religious school, explaining to them that he and I had “important business” to attend to, we would go watch the fights at Maple Leaf Gardens. When I should have been practising my aleph bet, I would spend glorious hours screaming at the Wildman from Syria while he broke his opponents in two. My beloved father, as you might have guessed, also didn’t fit in.
Tragically, his time in my life was short. His sudden death when I was twelve really did me in. In a minute, my childhood and its innocence were over. The ground beneath my feet was gone. The taunting bestowed upon me by my classmates was replaced for a time by an embarrassed silence, and my different-ness magnified.
Sounds brutal, doesn’t it? It was. But you see, my son, I learned very early in my life what hell looked like. Knowing that, I became a lot stronger than the other kids, and I used that strength as a shield. Their continued rejection of me bounced off. What did their childishness mean to me? I, who had seen my father smash his head on a rock and float lifelessly down the Don River—the consequences of a canoe trip gone terribly wrong—became tougher, harder. I stopped caring about being an outcast. Hell, I stopped caring about most things.
I stepped away from my past. I threw out all my shirts with the alligators on the left breast and purchased a used trench coat at Kensington Market. Not content with little diamond studs, I pierced my ears eight times and put safety pins through them. I found new friends who took the subway to have lunch at the Hare Krishna Temple cafeteria or to eat scrambled eggs at the Mars on College St., rather than drive their fathers’ spare BMWs to the local mall. We threw pillows at boom boxes playing the Top 40 and refused to go to big-name concerts like the Boss or Madonna. Instead, we would put on our gloves with the fingers cut out, paint our faces white, our lips red and enter the late great Concert Hall to hear Echo and the Bunnymen, snatching a few tokes off the older punk rockers. We refused to do the Toronto two-step: the pathetic excuse for da
ncing common in the suburbs. Instead we would slink around the hall and, in moments of sheer ecstasy, lie down on the cigarette-covered floor—an indication that we had shut the world out and had become one with the music. My new friends had introduced me to a cooler world and I loved it.
Instead of my classmates rejecting me, I started rejecting them and their stunted upper-middle-class values. The more I rejected them, the happier I became and the more I embraced my new, trench-coat-wearing, purple-haired self. I had found new meaning and new places to go. And once I had a taste of that more accepting outside world, I just kept running toward it.
Wow … I sound like one of those women who run with the wolves … I sound like someone who watches too much Oprah. Oy and vey … we had better continue this monologue while we watch the Leafs game. I need some testosterone.
• • •
Where was I? Oh yes … so, being different sucked rocks the size of Stonehenge at first, but then it provided your mother with the courage to go exploring and to apply to university at a left-wing loony bin in Bronxville, N.Y., which her teachers and classmates had never heard of. “Sara Lee,” they would say. “Isn’t that a type of frozen dessert?” “No, it’s Sarah Lawrence … you know…. that hotbed of radical feminism, an institution where women are encouraged to think beyond marrying the boy next door and settling in Thornhill.”
Being on the outs with the in crowd also gave your mother the freedom to question the Establishment and its confining elitism. Let me give you an example. As a visiting student at Oxford, your mother learned that among the learned, there was a subculture of single mothers who could afford to pay babysitters only in hashish. And she knew this because she was free to question privileged worlds, to see that what lies below the surface is often more real than what lies above. And freedom, my boy, also means never getting bored. If you take anything from this maternal treatise, let it be this: boredom = death.
Now, sweetness, I want you to understand that when your brain refuses to think à la mainstream, you will be able to straddle many kinds of worlds. But you should also know that you probably won’t fit into any of them. You’ll go to business meetings and want to throw fastballs at the CEO for rejecting any idea that might be, God forbid, creative, or for dismissing a solution that came from someone without an MBA. You’ll go to poetry readings and roll your eyes at the poets who just seconds before going to the microphone had ended their sentences with the oh-so-comfortably-Canuck eh and then read their poems in affected, attitude-filled voices as though they had just graduated from Eton.
You will feel equally out of place at the fanciest restaurant or the dingiest bar. In your many moments of frustration, just remember this: being different is a real pain in the ass, but ultimately you’ll have better stories to tell at cocktail parties.
Seeing things differently allowed your mother to start a PhD in genocide studies, but it also gave her the instinct to know when to walk away from it. So after meeting the love of her life—also known as your father—she tossed her notes on the Khmer Rouge into the garbage and followed him to Winnipeg, where she worked as a receptionist—all in the pursuit of love and a regular sex life.
But be forewarned, my son: different-thinking people often don’t have a straight career path like those with LLBs, PhDs or degrees in accounting. This can be a good thing since you won’t get stuck teaching Genocide 101 at the University of Yahoopitzville to a bunch of bored students who have better things to do. Nor will you have to have professional hair. However, should you choose a winding career path and quit high-income jobs to find your calling, make sure that your partner is both gainfully employed and highly sympathetic. Because you are going to spend many angst-ridden moments on your marital bed fretting to your spouse about what you are going to do when you grow up.
And speaking of that marital bed … being different has its advantages. When you accept that you stick out (sometime after puberty), you lose your self-consciousness. You become a little freer with yourself and with others. Now let me give you a piece of non-motherly advice: we chicks who lost our inhibitions because we had no one to impress, we are great in bed. Those chickies with the long nails, high-maintenance hair and wacky weight obsessions … bad lays. Every single manicured one of them. I know that you’re still young and sex is not on your eighteen-month-old radar screen, but trust me, it will be. And when it shows up, remember what I have said. Still, I have a few years to distract you with other topics, so let’s talk love for a second.
When you allow yourself to be different from others, you love differently and I would argue, more successfully. You and your partner (is that politically correct enough for you?) don’t have to spend your precious time together keeping up with the Ginsburgs because, hey, they’ve already rejected you. Instead, you can love each other completely and gratefully because you can distinguish between the baubles of love and the love itself. That’s a bit heavy-duty for a toddler … let me explain. I remember sitting in shul one Yom Kippur and watching the couple in front of me. She with her multi-string pearl necklace and large ruby ring displayed for all to see. Her husband, a “big-time Bay Street lawyer,” beside her. “He’s been sleeping with his junior—a blonde shiksa with big tits,” my father whispered to my mother. I knew then that I didn’t want to end up like the ruby-ringed woman or the blonde shiksa with big tits. And I know now that I wouldn’t want you to end up like the “big-time lawyer” either.
So what does all this ranting mean for you? Wait, let me wipe your nose. Here’s the deal—parents who are different are able to resist much of how parents are supposed to be. You look confused. OK. You know that awful smell that arose from our kitchen stove when you were about six months old? That was the aroma of my frying the baby development books. The ones that said you were supposed to do something at some specific time. Do you recall that wacko lady who made you bang on a drum to “Mary Had a Little Lamb”? That experience was called a “program.” A program is something that parents insist that their children do “to socialize them,” a.k.a. make sure that they fit in. Because, after all, our kids must fit in, they must get it. No square pegs allowed. Kids, in case you haven’t figured it out, are the unsuspecting beneficiaries of their parents’ insecurities. And you know who the worst offenders are? The square pegs who still try to pound themselves into round holes! If they can’t fit in, then their kids damn well better. The more these parents fall outside the in-circle, the more they push their kids toward it: shop at the most expensive stores, enroll at the best schools, play with the kid whose parent is a big macher in the entertainment world. I could go on and on … By the way, in case you are wondering why we haven’t been to that music class for a while, I thought it would be more fun to crank up a little Bob Marley and teach you the lyrics from Songs of Freedom.
Do you mind if I preach a little bit? I think I’ve been pretty restrained so far. Here goes: if squirts like you can both accept the differences that lie within you and respect the differences among you; if you can open up your ears to voices that sound different from your own, that come from places you have not yet seen, then you will learn that tolerance is more than just a word on a spelling test. Once you learn tolerance, you will understand empathy. And if you and all your little boy buds and gal pals become more tolerant and more empathetic, there might just be a hope in hell for a little peace in our tired world.
Hey … why are you looking at me like that? Are you nodding your head in agreement? I’m not surprised. After all—you are my son.
Love you,
Mom
When I was eleven or twelve, I began to spend my Saturday afternoons in my mother’s kitchen, taking instructions on pounding meat, whipping cream and grinding graham crackers into crumbs. Where’s the chef’s helper? my mother would call up the stairs until I dragged myself into the kitchen. It’s good for you to learn these things, she would tell me. And then, most often, she’d say, Now put on your apron, put your hair up and get started. You’re going to make T
iny Tomatoes.
Tiny Tomatoes was a time-consuming, messy recipe and a favourite on my mother’s menus. Now, no arguments—you know everyone always enjoys these. Get the boxes out of the fridge—the cherry tomatoes. There’s a few dozen in there. Set aside the ones that are too big or too small and make sure they’re all decent. Remember that you have to wash them really well. Really, really well. Take your time.
Weekdays our routine was much like other families’ in suburban North Toronto: in the morning I would get a quick glimpse of my father as he gulped down his coffee, grabbed his briefcase and fled out the door to catch the subway downtown. My mother rushed us through breakfast, thrust lunches into our school bags, and banged the dishes into the dishwasher before she put on her nursing uniform and drove to her job at a local day clinic. Many women who managed this life—a full-time job and a family—would have welcomed a rest at the end of a week, but not her. Though we were not wealthy, my mother liked to have dinner parties, almost every weekend. I’m going to need your help today, she would say most Saturday mornings, and after the house was cleaned from corner to corner she would call me into the kitchen and announce who was coming to dinner. Then we would start to cook.
My sister Julie was older by eighteen months, and it was long understood that she would not be in the kitchen. In her bedroom, with its walls covered in pictures of Cat Stevens and long strands of wooden beads draped over the mirrors, Julie and her friends spent Saturdays listening to music behind a closed door. She doesn’t have your interest, my mother would say, with pursed lips. I wondered when it was exactly that I had expressed my interest.
Are you ready to slice the tomatoes? Make sure you don’t take too much off the top; otherwise it’s a waste. Get a sharper knife than that one. Hull them out, completely, all the tomato meat, the seeds and the juice. Lay them out upside down on paper towels, so that they dry perfectly. No, absolutely dry. If they’re not dry inside then use the paper towel to dry each of them. I know—but they have to be dry. If you don’t do it right, the filling won’t stick and you’ll still be at it when the guests arrive.
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