Thursday, January 28, 2010

Escape



We were such a care-less generation, those of us who spent our adolescence in the fifties. However did we grow up to be people who cared about the world? Pat, Claire and I all became women who stood up. Perhaps now we don’t stand quite as tall as we once did, but we all still care. We marched as long as we could, and we continue to care even though we do so from home now.

In the mid-fifties I was never inside their heads, despite the fact that we talked all the time, but my memory seems to tell me that Pat at least did some thinking. Claire remembers thinking, if not in 1955, at least in 1958.

What I remember about my own thinking is not very flattering. My head was filled with cotton candy, sickly sweet thoughts utterly empty of substance. I cared about clothes and boys and sex. I wanted to make as much money as possible so that I could buy more clothes, attract more boys, have more sex. I didn’t care a whit about school in 1955. I was sure that I knew enough to do what I really wanted to do, have babies.

And my life was just as empty as my head.

They went on to university. I descended into a world of diapers. Their minds expanded. My bubble filled up with trite dullness. My only contact with adults was occasionally with parents of babies and toddlers, women who, like me had traded lives for mothering ... not in any conscious intelligent way, but simply because that was what we did. And even that contact disappeared when we moved east of the city.

The paucity of intelligent thought was matched by our physical poverty. We lived in rent to income housing on the outskirts of  Pointe-aux-Trembles in a concrete, faceless collection of anonymous three storey buildings. In some ways they make me think of a refugee camp I saw in Jordan, but worse. In Jordan the refugees had a sense of community. The poor anglos living in the Point-aux-Trembles ghetto led atomized, separate lives.

My husband was a man who spent hours commuting on a series of buses. When he got home he collapsed on the couch in front of the television set as soon as he had eaten supper, a meal that was as dull and flat as the rest of our lives. My grocery budget was $15 a week so we made do with wieners and hamburger. A wiser older woman, a better cook, could have done something interesting with so little, but I was still a teenager.

We never talked. We shared a bed and a dinner table, nothing else. We didn’t even share an interest in the children. They were my children, his burden to support. They were simply the bars of the trap we shared.

He escaped to play softball and to go out drinking with the boys. Even his job was an escape for him.

Until the couple moved in next door, there was no escape for me. They were both nurses who had training if not education. On the nights my husband was out I would slip over to their apartment leaving our two front doors open so that I could hear the children.

And we would have spelling bees. I find it hard to imagine a life so devoid of colour that a spelling bee could be vitally important, my only escape. Then one day even that escape route was cut off.

My husband came home drunk one night and we went to bed almost immediately. We slept in a single bed with a bookcase headboard, the same bed I had slept in since I was eleven. Normally we adjusted our bodies quite easily to the cramped space we shared, but this night he became angry instead of simply rolling over to accommodate my movements.

His elbow crashed into my eye with such force that I was knocked onto the floor. All I remember now is how fast my eye swelled up. I could barely cup my open palm around the lump. When I got to the bathroom, it was already beginning to discolour, and the eyelid was split open.

As soon as he saw me, he was immediately sober and contrite. He was not a brutal man. He was a boy ... a trapped child, just like me.

The next day I spent as much time as possible lying down, getting up only to change diapers and feed the babies.

About 10 a.m. there was a knock on the door. It was my friend from next door. He was off duty till the afternoon. He took one look at me and told me my eye needed attention. He bathed it and then went in to the hospital to get some advice and whatever he needed to treat it.

When he came back he sat down on the edge of the couch and looked after me ... and then his hand strayed to my breast. That was the end of my friendship with the couple next door. I was afraid to be alone with him. I didn’t tell his wife. I just distanced myself from them. The spelling bees ended.

The next time I escaped was when Pat came back into my life. She was living with Tom. Peter was their friend. They talked about things that young university students talk about, at least all the things that young university students who imagine themselves to be budding intellectuals and bohemians discuss. I was enthralled. I saw them seldom; I lived in Pointe aux Trembles after all, but those brief glimpses of life outside the ghetto walls were like oxygen to a starved brain.

One day I packed up my babies, climbed into Peter’s old Plymouth and fled my barren existence.

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