One of the nephews said, “Do the blessing, Uncle Isaac.” At this point, he leaned over the table, took a piece of matzo and ran his fingers over the top of its rough edges, pretending to read Braille. Then he asked, “Why is this night different from all other nights?” He smiled as though he were still reading the matzo with his finger. “Tonight is different because your Aunt Clara is going to let us watch the Stanley Cup playoffs.” All the nephews laughed wholeheartedly at what was obviously the annual blind Passover joke.
After a long Passover tale with the little kids acting out all ten plagues, an overwhelming mountain of food was passed around and Alina leaned over and provided some advice that I have used for forty years. “Hints on Jewish dining. Rule number one: always say you’re not hungry and only want one kreplach in your soup. If you ask for two, you get four. Rule number two: go heavy on the appetizers and desserts. The main course is seven meats cooked at 500 degrees for eight hours — skip it.”
When it was time to eat, Uncle Jack gave a toast to “next year in Jerusalem” and Michael’s mother stood up and said, “What’s wrong with this year? Let’s hope Uncle Max can find some nice man for my daughter.” As her husband glared at her, she said, “What, what? Max doesn’t drive rich people around all day? He can’t find one for my Alina?”
CHAPTER 25
coming ashore
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes
— Dylan Thomas, “Fern Hill”
After four years of living with Michael, I was getting furtive inklings that it was time to get married. I had always remembered with trepidation what my friend Sara had said about courtship: it is the brief time when the man pleases you, and then marriage is the rest of your life when you please him. I figured five years was long enough to figure out if a person was the real deal or a snake charmer.
However, what eventually forced my hand in the nuptial department had nothing to do with feelings, but ambition. My professor said that I should really be in graduate school at Columbia University in New York City since there was a large history-of-science department and some world-class Freud historians as well as Darwinians. He knew people there and offered to write a referral letter for me to a few of his colleagues. I’d learned with my Oxford letter that when a heavy-hitting professor goes to bat for you, it pretty well means you’re a shoo-in. What could be better than being in New York in your twenties doing a Ph.D.? I remembered with awe the colossal New York Public Library I’d gone to with Laurie so many years previous. My mother would be thrilled for me, as she had loved New York as a young woman.
I had one problem — Michael. He was in medical school in Toronto and could not transfer to another country for licensing and financial reasons. I had to make some decisions. I was willing to stay in Toronto for him because, although New York loomed large, I was at a stage when I knew that loving and being loved was more important than all other accomplishments. I just had to make sure Michael was on the same page.
I told him I was willing to stay in Toronto, and give up a great opportunity to work with a famous psychologist, but I wanted to know that I had placed my eggs in the right basket. If he didn’t want to marry after five years of living together, it was time for me to move on. Lots of women give up all kinds of career options for love, but I wasn’t the type to do it with no tangible assurances. Love is one thing, the real world another.
Michael gave all the reasons men give for not marrying: “What’s the point?” “Aren’t we happy now?” “Why do we need society’s approval?” I wasn’t buying it. I told him to let me know in a week or I’d apply to Columbia. It was a big deal to apply to an American university. The application itself cost more than one month of my living expenses. Many American grad schools wanted you to write essays about your life experiences and take all kinds of costly achievement tests. The whole application was as much work as at least one course. Plus, my professor had to write to his colleague. You can ask for that kind of favour from a professor only once. After all it was work for him as well as me. I had to proceed with caution. I told Michael to think carefully, as it was a big decision.
>> <<
The Day of Judgment was upon us. It was a Sunday evening and we were eating aloo gobi at the Rajput Restaurant. I can still smell the curry in the air and see the scene as though I had a camera in my frontal lobe. I was sitting in a booth opposite Michael and wearing a black turtleneck, jeans and Clarks Wallabees. Michael had not said a word about my proposal or even acted as though he’d been preoccupied with any decision-making during the week. I’d hoped he would bring it up at some point. This whole “engagement” was not turning out to be the stuff dreams are made of. I was not expecting roses and a man on his knees begging, but I had not expected to be on my knees either.
Finally while sipping my chai, I said, “Well, the week is up and I guess you have thought of the” — I held up my fingers to make a quotation signs — “‘marriage question.’”
His face clouded. He exhaled loudly and looked pained. He was never unkind or said mean things in a fit of temper. Even with his mother, he tried his hardest not to blow up, and believe me, Job could not have passed that test. I had seen him angry about twice and then he just rationally expressed his position. He hated hurting people’s feelings. I could tell by his face that this wasn’t going well. Finally, he swallowed, his Adam’s apple climbing his neck, and said, “The only way we can work this through is by being painfully honest, no matter how brutal.” Whenever anyone prefaces a statement with having to tell the unvarnished truth, you know that the guillotine is about to shear off your head and it isn’t going to be a clean cut. Finally, the blunt blade fell with him saying, “Honestly, I feel railroaded.”
The first thing I felt was fear, then profound disappointment. Since those two emotions were too unbearable, I let anger swirl into my brain like dry ice, and it forced the other feelings out of my mind. I sat there for a full minute with my heart racing. I got hot and my neck began to itch under my turtleneck. I wrapped both of my hands around my warm teacup so they wouldn’t shake. Eventually I said, “Let me get this straight. After five years of living together, you feel railroaded?” I thought a note of clarification was in order.
“I am just trying to express how I feel. I am not guaranteeing it will be rational. One should marry when one wants to.”
“Let’s cut to the chase and minimize the psychobabble,” I replied. “Most men don’t want to marry. They do it because they have to for sex or pressure from the little wife to be. Sexual liberation did away with the first, and we are left with the latter,” I used the most business-like tone a spurned lover could manage.
With a set jaw, he looked right into my eyes and said, “Okay, then the answer is no.”
I was shaken. Involuntary voices entered my brain. The first was Michael’s cousin’s vile wife who’d come from Israel the previous year and told me in her thick Israeli accent that no one in Michael’s family in Europe or in North America had ever married a shiksa and no one ever would. Her summary was “No Jewish girl would ever live with him without being married, so he is living with you and when it is time to marry you’ll be,” and then she motioned to the alley off the kitchen, “tossed in that alley with the other curvehs.” I responded by throwing her suitcase off the balcony into the lane and told her if she wanted it she’d have to scrounge for it with the other alley cats.
A cacophony of derision thundered through my brain — all the warnings those women of my mother’s generation had given me. Aunt Clara’s voice led the brigade with “So you are living with Mike in the same house? What? You think men buy the eggs when they can get the hen for free?”
Wow, had I screwed up yet again? Why is it that people who fantasize that they are in the avant-garde are really the last to know what every schmo on the street knows? I was rocked and held on to the table for dear life.
I figured that it was best to simply smile and move on. I am the queen of bravado so I simply broke into an off-key rendition of “New York, New York.”
>> <<
I had no time to mourn my thwarted proposal. I worked feverishly on the Columbia application since I only had one week to send it in, plus the application was expensive and I didn’t want to blow it. I had to get all kinds of legal documents, transcripts and certified cheques plus write an “intellectual autobiography from 500 to 700 words.” I also had to write in what ways I was unique — that part was a breeze.
I couldn’t move out that night or anything that satisfyingly dramatic. Melodrama like that is only for the rich. We shared the cheap rent and I couldn’t afford to live alone. I would have to wait until I got in Columbia and then move to New York with whatever money they gave me. We solved the problem by not mentioning it again. We were both too busy with labs, work and studying to sit around crying in our soup. Fortunately civilization offered superficial politeness to hide a broken heart.
My application was due on April 1, so three hours before the deadline, I had to ride my bike at breakneck speed to the one all-night post office in order to get a March 31 postmark. I made it with ten minutes to spare. I got back on my bike and leisurely rode home. I remember thinking on that cold night that the die had been cast and a new chapter of my life was about to begin. I tried to ignore the tears that were falling down my cheeks, chaffing my skin and running into my wool jacket collar.
As I climbed up the apartment stairs at about one in the morning, Michael was sitting at the kitchen table, studying Gray’s Anatomy. He had his cadaver skull out of his carrying case. He often brought home a skull or some human bone in a square wooden box in order to study it. The skull was shellacked and smelled like a gravedigger had just unearthed it. It had a round trap door on the cranium with rusted latches so you could flip it open and see its brainless interior. He was looking inside the skull and feeling for certain bumps. Never one to lose graciously, I said, “Well, Hamlet, enjoy your skull, because that’s all you’ll have come September 1.”
“You mailed it?” He looked simultaneously surprised and disgusted, as though someone had just hit him in the face with a rotting fish from Lake Ontario. I found his response perplexing. What did he think I had been frantically doing over the last week? He’d even helped with the autobiography. “I can’t believe this,” he said. He honestly did look pale and taken aback. He knew if I mailed it I was serious and the money was gone.
There was no point in saying any more. It’s bad enough we had to have the aloo gobi showdown. I was going to New York. He had his chance and he’d declined. By this point in our relationship, I’d come to realize he was from a family that chronically complained but never did anything to alter their lives. Perhaps he’d had no idea that I was not bluffing or just whining. Did he think I was going to perpetually moan and act wounded but stay by his side on his terms? That would be the definition of neurotic dependence.
He closed the lid of his skull and gently placed it back in its wooden box. He flopped back into the kitchen chair and stuck out his long legs, flung his palms in the air and said, “All right already, so when are we getting married?”
By this time I was sick of the whole thing. Who wants to marry someone when they feel backed into a corner? I thought about it for about thirty seconds.
“This week.”
“Tell me we are not having some kind of a formal wedding?” he said.
“No. Your mother doesn’t even like me. She will sit shiva and my mother is not the type to get into wedding planning; besides she is dying of leukemia. Let’s just go to city hall and call it a wrap.”
“Will you regret not having a wedding do?” he asked.
“No. Will you?”
“God no,” he said. “Are you ever even once going to say that if it weren’t for me, you could have gone to Columbia and lived in New York?”
“Nope. Never.” The real reason I never mentioned it again was not emotional restraint, but because I wasn’t accepted. Several weeks after our marriage, I received the rejection letter saying the professor was on sabbatical and I should reapply in a year. When I read it aloud to Michael, he hit himself in the head and wailed, “I can’t believe I married you for nothing!”
>> <<
Our parents had more in common than I thought. When I told my mother I was getting married, she said, “Oh how nice — to whom?” Michael’s parents said the same thing. Did they think we were living together, but hiding our true loved ones in the basement? Since neither of them seemed to care in the least, I was freed up to plan whatever I wanted — which wasn’t much.
Michael was in his internship year and had to be in the hospital all day, so I had to get things organized for the wedding. I had the blood test at city hall and then crossed the street to Eaton’s department store to get the rings. I bought both of them and then the sales lady said they are always engraved with a statement. When I asked what kind of statement, she said one of “enduring love.” I had Michael paged at the hospital. He said he was in the middle of a procedure and I could inscribe whatever I wanted, and then he had to hang up. I chose love, forever, Michael for mine, and soon after we got married at a crowded city hall. We had no money for a honeymoon and no time off so we went back to school the next day.
>> <<
A week after we were married, there was a long weekend so we tacked on a day or two and went to Ithaca to visit Michael’s friends at Cornell. They lived in a huge old American colonial clapboard home, near the top of a steep hill. The house was like the white colonial I’d grown up in. Ithaca resembled my hometown of Lewiston, a small sleepy New York town in the snowbelt. We arrived late and in a snowstorm — the windshield wipers actually got stuck in the wet snow on the centre of the windshield. The snowflakes were so enormous I swear I saw Queen Anne’s lace in their structure as they fell.
Since everyone was asleep when we arrived, we made ourselves hot chocolate, which was all we could find. Smelling my cup of cocoa made me feel like I did as a kid when the hot drink warmed me up after playing in the snow. I remembered those early mornings at the drugstore when my hands were so frozen from selling newspapers at dawn that I could hardly grip the cup of hot chocolate with mini marshmallows that Roy would always have picked up for me on his way into work. The storm had added five hours to an already long trip, so we flopped into bed.
We had both loved The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show when we were younger and we often quoted gags from it. Our relationship somewhat resembled George and Gracie’s: Michael played George, the put-upon male, while I was the outrageous and often silly Gracie. When we crawled into bed that night, Michael mimicked George Burns, shaking the ashes off his pretend cigar and saying, “Say goodnight, Mrs. Gildiner.”
In Gracie’s ditzy voice I responded, “Goodnight, Mrs. Gildiner.” It was at that moment that I realized that I really was married. I actually heard my new name for the first time. I was no longer Cathy McClure. I was starting a life with no tracks, no paths, nothing to tell me what to do. That didn’t worry me. I was always good at blazing a new trail. Besides security was mostly a myth. My future didn’t feel empty or frightening; it felt pristine, like skiing on new powder.
That night I had a dream that was basically a rehash of a memory from 1960. I was twelve years old and standing right against the fence of the Horseshoe Falls. It was hot and the mist was cooling my face as I sucked on an orange Popsicle. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a young boy go over the Falls. We spectators on shore all watched helplessly as his orange lifejacket bobbed in the whirlpool at the bottom. The Maid of the Mist tourist boat sped over to him and threw him a life preserver. Several times he missed it as the current spun him away. Finally, just as he was going under, he reached out as far as could and grabbed the ring and was hauled in. We all watched with relief as the blue-eyed blond
seven-year-old came ashore bruised, but alive.
Everything until this point had been true to life, but in the dream, Roy, who in reality had departed years earlier, stood next to me at the fence, just inches from the Falls. He put his arm around me and leaned down and said to me over the roar of the Falls, “That youngster musta knowed he was too close to the Falls and jumped ship just in time. He beat the odds in comin’ ashore alive and in one piece.”
>> <<
The next morning when we woke up it was freezing, since our second-floor guest room was in reality an uninsulated glassed-in sun porch. From our bed, we could see out the window, and we looked down the hill to a town blanketed by well over two feet of sparkling snow. The snow buried all landmarks like streets, signs and sidewalks; even the telephone line sagged under the weight of several feet of snow. There were no car tracks. Not even pedestrians had wandered out. The blue sky blazed in the pure sunshine, and it was so quiet that, as Roy used to say, “you could hear a mouse piss on cotton.”
The moment was right out of my childhood. I loved the days when the world stopped for heavy snowfalls and here I was back in New York State in another immobilizing snowstorm — the kind that knocked you out of your regular life and closed the schools. The combination of the perfect childhood memory and the perfect adult moment next to the man I loved gave me the first instant in my life that I was sure I would always remember.
That day I did something I had never done before: I lived in the moment. I savoured Michael’s long arms around me, the warmth of his body next to mine as we both looked at a red cardinal on a snow-covered fence. I didn’t speak, but I knew that it was the most cherished moment of my life — and it has remained so.
Coming Ashore Page 32