Not Exactly As Planned

by Linda Rosenbaum

  So I stayed put in Detroit. Gone were plans, thoughts and dreams for my future. Also gone was any semblance of my confident, adventurous way of being in the world. Interest in any political cause vanished, too. It was me I had to take care of now.

  I stayed with my parents in the apartment they moved into after three home robberies sent them fleeing to the suburbs. My childhood bedroom was only a memory. This new, gated complex in suburbia felt foreign and cold, but it was now the only home I had.

  I took refuge in a spare bedroom, watching TV and reading old copies of my mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal and Woman’s Day stored in an old nightstand. My parents were smart enough to keep away from me. They still had no idea of the trauma I had just been through, and chalked up my moodiness to post-graduation confusion. I joined them now and again for meals at the kitchen table when the familiar smells of my mother’s chicken soup, chopped liver or brisket permeated the hazy miasma I was orbiting in.

  I spent little time that summer talking about what had happened. My friends Barbara and Sybil and my sister Barbara knew, but I seldom spoke about the rape to them. They were patiently waiting for me to unload. It never happened. For the first time in my life, something felt beyond words. I was shell-shocked. What was there to say?

  I tried to avoid thinking about it, let alone talking about it. It wasn’t easy. It was the first thing that entered my consciousness every morning, ducking mercilessly in and out until I lay down on the pillow at night. It didn’t only appear in the form of words or even images. I had a visceral reaction, as if the psychic aftermath of my terror had seeped into my gut and was metastasizing throughout my body until it colonized every cell and pore.

  I spoke to my roommate Rosie several times during the summer, but neither of us could find much to say. Each of us was full-up with our own pain. We couldn’t take on each other’s. We just wanted assurance the other was doing fine. It never came.

  “I’m still upset it was stolen,” Rosie said during our initial call, referring to the first serious camera I ever owned, stolen in Washington. My Ricoh 35mm SLR. In it was a fully exposed roll of film shot the weekend before, documenting a happy, carefree Linda and Rosie visiting Coney Island, the last remaining evidence of girls who no longer existed.

  I also spoke to Jeffrey periodically, still in Washington, but neither of us knew what to say. We both needed a script, mine telling me how to get someone to think I was listening even when I wasn’t because the screams inside my head were driving everything else away.

  I was sad we had not made it through to this period, yet realistic enough to know any relationship with a man, particularly physical, would be more burden than comfort.

  After a couple of months at my parents’ apartment, I began to feel a shift.

  I phoned my sister. “I feel ready to move on, but I might be blocking stuff I should be dealing with.” She made an appointment for me with a well-known psychiatrist. I answered questions he hurled at me, more voyeuristic than therapeutic. I wasn’t strong enough not to. After twenty minutes he took his glasses off, leaned forward in his chair and pronounced with great certainty, “You’re fine. The experience wasn’t that significant. You’re handling it well. Congratulations.”

  Idiot.

  At the end of the summer, I received a call from my friend Barbara. Barbara had been living in Toronto since she graduated from Michigan State. She loved Toronto and was making a life there.

  “I’ve been waiting until you were ready before I asked,” she said. “Why don’t you come up for a while and check it out here?” She was working on our friend Sybil to do the same.

  I liked the idea of the three of us being together again. And no small thing, anti-war Americans like me had a warm spot in our hearts for a Canada that had opened its doors to our draft dodgers and military deserters. I could make a loud statement of thanks with my feet.

  I called Sybil.

  “Let’s do it,” she said.

  Days later, in early September of 1970, I announced to my incredulous family that we were moving to Toronto. My dad offered his station wagon to haul our stuff, mostly tie-dyed T-shirts, jeans, work shirts, Indian skirts and Moroccan bead jewelry; my Motown collection; cherished books by James Baldwin, Les Fleurs du Mal by Baudelaire and Thoreau’s Walden. I bought myself a brand new Pentax 35mm SLR camera.

  Sybil and I hit the road. We planned to get landed at the border. Being landed meant the Canadian government would grant us official status as permanent residents. It would allow us to live and work in Canada indefinitely. Most hopeful immigrants did not try to get landed at the border. It was seldom successful. The usually long-drawn-out bureaucratic procedure took months, even years to complete. It was best undertaken at home through the mail.

  We drove my dad’s car through the tunnel underneath the Detroit River to the border checkpoint in Windsor, Ontario. Nervous, and unsure, Sybil walked up to the immigration officers behind the desk, “We’d like to get landed, please.”

  “Just like that, eh?” one of the officers asked. The others looked on, smirking. The men sat us down, and pulled out forms. We had to answer a series of questions, including work prospects, whether we spoke French, where we would live in Toronto, and how much money we were bringing in. Depending on our responses, the officer would assign a certain number of points. At the end of the interview if we had enough points, we were in. Landed. If not, homeward bound. They never asked for any proof or documentation, not that we had any. They put their papers down, and one of the officers looked at us.

  “You hit the jackpot,” he said. We were landed.

  We had no real, useful job skills, little money and no evidence of future employment to prove we wouldn’t be a financial burden to our new country. What did we have going then? We were young, white, smart, cheerful females. What harm could we possibly do?

  I pulled my dad’s car onto the MacDonald-Cartier Highway 401, the long, flat stretch of road that would take us to Toronto in four hours. While I drove, Sybil reeled off the names of places we were passing with British-sounding names.

  “Chatham,” she first said, then “Ingersoll, Woodstock, London and Stratford.” We even passed the river Thames outside of London.

  It made me hopeful. Maybe this new country would be far enough and foreign enough for me to leave my recent past behind.

  Or so I had hoped.

  Toronto was a peaceful, welcoming city. It gave me exactly what I needed, a feeling of safety. I was still a city girl, and no major city in the United States at that time came close to fitting the bill.

  Sybil and I moved into a downtown neighbourhood near Kensington Market on a street lined with narrow, single-family Victorian row houses. Our house was one of the many communes in the burgeoning American ex-pat ghetto developing smack in the middle of a Chinese neighbourhood.

  Toronto wasn’t exciting like Washington, but I was no longer looking for exciting. I was looking for a safe haven.

  Many of the estimated 50,000 young Americans who came to Canada during the Vietnam-war era lived in communes near me around Beverley and Baldwin Streets. We created a tight, counterculture community packed with draft dodgers, deserters, students and other wayward souls who weren’t quite ready to get on with the practical matters of their lives.

  At night, Sybil and I would often go for dinner at Grossman’s Tavern, the slightly down-on-its heels union-style beer hall and restaurant on the corner of Spadina Avenue and Cecil Street. We always found a little bit of home there. The elderly Jewish Mrs. Grossman gave many of us what was missing from our lives at the time — the feeling that someone cared. She’d load up our dinner plates with greasy potato knishes and cabbage rolls mit extra dollops of sour cream, always followed by kind words and a big smile.

  Later in the night, with the dishes cleared away, we’d line our arborite tables with sudsy-looking pitchers of draft beer and listen to The Downchild Blues Band or David Clayton-Thomas. We’d loudly debate American foreign policy and
inadvertently pick up bits and pieces of the Canadian culture we had come to embrace.

  Despite all the wonders I was discovering, Toronto still didn’t feel like home, whatever I needed home to be. I had no past, no history or cultural references to the city or country. I was uprooted and disconnected. I was lonely, afraid of the night, unsure of what I was doing, what work I should look for, who I wanted to be with and who I wanted to be.

  Within a month of my arrival, I had landed a sales job at Britnell’s, a bookstore where Barbara was working. I was hired to help out until Christmas, but it was a miracle I managed to keep the job considering my performance within a month after starting.

  Britnell’s was a quiet, library-like, traditional English-style bookstore on busy Yonge Street, with floor-to-ceiling oak bookshelves and sliding ladders to retrieve books from upper shelves. It was known for its quiet, genteel ambiance, which one day I managed to seriously betray. Screaming “Oh, my god,” I frantically ran through the store, back to front, having just spotted a handsome, slightly dishevelled Jeffrey walking through Britnell’s front door, with guitar case in hand and grinning from ear to ear. He had arrived unannounced and unexpectedly from Washington to be with me. I was shocked, flattered and ready to give the relationship one more try.

  The mostly elderly saleswomen at Britnell’s thought our dramatic, happy front-door reunion was charming, romantic and straight out of a Harlequin romance novel. The senior Mr. Albert Britnell, the store’s owner, who came to work each morning in spats and a pin-striped suit, didn’t share the saleswomen’s sentiments about my embrace with Jeffrey. He didn’t fire me, but I was “reassigned” unceremoniously one day shortly after Jeffrey’s arrival. I was released from covering the store’s Fiction section and banished to the Siberian hinterland of Nature and Cookbooks.

  Jeffrey and I lived together for over a year, for the most part happily. A musician and serious opera buff, Jeffrey eventually found work in the classical music department at Sam the Record Man at Yonge and Dundas Streets. It kept him happy for a while.

  In time, though, we knew things weren’t going to work. He had fast-tracked his master’s degree in history at George Washington and longed to teach in his field. He didn’t have the right papers to “officially” work in Toronto and wasn’t sure Toronto was where he should be, anyway. Like other people I knew from the West Coast, Jeffrey was terribly homesick. These were parts of his life he understandably couldn’t give up for the uncertainty of what Toronto and I could give him.

  He moved back to his hometown, Seattle. I didn’t go with him. My life was still sketchy, undefined and too fragile to pack up and start over again. I was beginning to feel I belonged in Canada, not in the States. Maybe if I believed Jeffrey was the one, I would have gone. And maybe if I were the one for Jeffrey, he might have stayed. But timing was everything. Our ability to commit to one another, or in my case, to anyone at all was still way off. Washington, DC, still held a tight-fisted grip on me.

  After Jeffrey left Toronto, I flitted from one guy to the next.

  “You’re making up for lost time,” my mother said. “You didn’t have a real boyfriend until you went to college.”

  “Maybe that’s it, then,” I responded. But I was lying. My mother didn’t know what happened to me in Washington, so was missing an important piece in the Linda puzzle. It was becoming more and more clear to me that what happened in Washington continued to affect my relationships with men, and that included Jeffrey. Though my desire to be married and have children began bubbling up again in my early twenties, it was only in the abstract. The reality seemed further away than ever.

  Four years later, in 1974, I met a man named Alexander Ross who would put in motion the chain of events that dramatically changed my life. I was twenty-six when I met Sandy, a charmingly boyish, brilliant, mildly eccentric journalist of legendary short attention span.

  Sandy was thirteen years older than me and at a significantly different stage in his life, particularly regarding work. Since my degree in French literature wasn’t getting me anywhere in the job market, I had gone back to school the year before Sandy and I met and earned a Diploma in Public Health from the University of Toronto. But even with my new specialization, I was still floundering about what to do with my life. Sandy, on the other hand, already had a successful career behind him. He had recently become editor of the trendy city magazine Toronto Life after years as a columnist for the Financial Post and Toronto Star. Before that, he was London correspondent for United Press International (UPI), and managing editor of Maclean’s.

  To my horror as well as that of my friends, Sandy, for all his ostensible charm, intelligence, wit and good looks, was a political small c-conservative.

  Sandy, known to be extremely generous with young talent, encouraged me to write. He assigned me my first commissioned magazine piece, an article for Canadian Business. Edited by his then managing editor Margaret Wente, it won a National Magazine Award. On the strength of the article, I was hired to work on a public affairs talk show at CITY-TV. It proved to be a major stepping-stone in my work life.

  One late summer night, fairly soon into our relationship, Sandy said he wanted to take me someplace special, a place he was surprised I hadn’t already visited since I had come to Toronto. We drove down to a dreary, relatively undeveloped industrial area along the city’s waterfront on Queen’s Quay, parked the car, and walked to the dour cement-grey ferry docks run by the city government. We bought round-trip tickets for two dollars and boarded a large two-storey black and white ferry. At the toot of a horn, the dockmen lifted the gangplank and the ferry drifted slowly into the shimmering waters of Lake Ontario.

  Just over ten minutes later, the captain pulled into the docks at Wards Island, one of fifteen little islands that comprise an archipelago called Toronto Island. It didn’t take me long to realize I had landed in another world.

  Coming off the boat, we walked towards the nearby clubhouse, passing through the perfume of linden trees planted along the path. At the side of the blue-painted clubhouse, adults were lawn bowling while barefoot children and untethered dogs ran playfully around the village green. To my left, I could see a large cluster of cottage-like houses nestled cheek to jowl in rows separated by sidewalks. Drifting around us were the sounds of people talking, dogs barking and the slight hum of the city.

  “Considering all these sounds,” I said to Sandy, “there’s a remarkable quiet here.”

  “Look around,” Sandy said. “Do you notice anything missing?”

  “No streets, no traffic … no cars.” For a girl from Motor City, this was astounding.

  “Wards Island,” Sandy said. “One of the few carless communities left in the world.”

  Sandy and I walked into the area where the houses stood, past freshly washed laundry hung out to dry on lines tied from tree to tree across tiny yards. People were walking up and down the streets, interrupting their chats to smile and say hello to us. A pod of children’s tricycles sat parked in the middle of a sidewalk while excited owners exalted in the black and yellow garter snake soaking up warmth on the sun-drenched pavement.

  “Wanna see a live snake?” they asked as we passed.

  “Sure do.”

  The word charming didn’t begin to describe what I saw. Of course I had heard about the Island and this community, but I had been so entrenched in my narrow little corner of Toronto’s landscape that I hadn’t branched out much. I now thought it unfathomable that I hadn’t come to the Island before this. I was in love with the place.

  “Let’s find a place to rent,” I said.

  As luck would have it, Sandy’s managing editor at Toronto Life lived full-time on the Island. She and her boyfriend were soon leaving for a holiday.

  For the month of August, Sandy and I lived in a two-bedroom cottage facing an inland lagoon. Month’s end came too quickly. We wanted to live on the Island full-time. Sandy was outgrowing Rosedale, his upscale downtown neighbourhood, and ready for this new adven
ture. As for me, the time had come to leave the security of my ghetto behind.

  In 1974, competition for houses to buy or rent on the Island was stiff, surprising since the local government was making serious noise about demolishing the Island community to make way for development. But Sandy and I had a better chance than most people to find a place. Islanders had a warm spot for Sandy because of his Toronto Star columns railing against the government’s planned demolition. So when an elderly Island couple decided to retire to the country, they telephoned Sandy and offered us first shot to rent their tired-looking Insulbrick bungalow of no apparent charm. We grabbed it.

  The fit was good for me on the Island. I could start building a new life for myself. I thanked my lucky stars that not only did this anachronistically charming village exist, but also that I was led to it. It was a long way from Detroit, even further from Washington, and had all the makings of home.

  We moved into a community of roughly 650 people at last count, though no one knew for sure when the last count was or if anyone was actually counting. Islanders inhabited 250 small, wood-frame, cottage-like homes nestled on a twenty-seven-acre sandbar, roughly one and a half miles long and a ten-minute ferry ride across the bay from downtown Toronto.

  We had meadows, a beach, two community clubhouses, a café, a canoe club and enough community meetings fuelled by fire and brimstone to rival electoral debates in a New Hampshire Town Hall.

  The community sat on two islands, Wards and Algonquin, at the eastern end of a collection of seventeen small islands covering 591 acres called Toronto Island Park. Close to a million people visited the park every year, mainly in summer and mainly to the two other major islands in the system — Centre Island and Hanlan’s Point.