by Sally Clark
ISBN 9781897151419 | 5.5" x 8.5" | TPB with French Flaps | $21
Categories:Fiction - Literary
Purchase:Local Bookstores | amazon.ca | chapters.indigo.ca
Waiting for the Revolution (Preview)
GIRL’S OWN ANNUAL
1974
At that time, there was much talk of the Revolution amongst Jay’s peers. The Revolution would arrive and you were either a part of it and would be embraced or you were not part of it and would be gunned down. Jay had a morbid fear that the Call to Revolution would occur when she was having dinner with her godfather in one of the expensive steakhouses that he frequented. One minute the waiter would be gaily tossing the Caesar salad; the next minute they would all be lined up against the wall for execution. Jay would try and explain that her godfather had taken her to this restaurant, but that would imply that he should be lined up and shot first and that wasn’t altogether fair — though he was a capitalist. He drove a big huge car that he referred to as his “bucket of bolts.” He said “positive” and “negative” instead of “yes” and “no.” He said “zero seven hundred hours” instead of “seven o’clock.” He lived in a penthouse apartment and made investments. He was very happy to be a capitalist. Jay was not. She was a Revolutionary-in-Training. She wondered if the handsome young man with the cold eyes and the machine gun would realize that she was on his side. She thought not. Revolutions seemed to bring out the worst in people.
Jay had an unrequited passion for Nicholas Woodbridge that was festering quite nicely until Nicholas became a Revolutionary. He had been a shy, diffident young man, brilliant and prone to bouts of melancholy. Jay tried to manipulate Nicholas into becoming her boyfriend, but he never obliged. They remained, elusively, friends.
When Nicholas moved to Toronto to attend university, Jay followed him. She convinced herself that it was a pleasant coincidence that the university he chose was ideally suited to her needs as well. Victoria was a cultural backwater. Jay needed to go to Toronto where the real artists lived. Jay actually believed that the real artists lived in New York.
Nicholas left a few weeks before Jay. He had not arranged to keep in touch — an unpleasant fact Jay might have taken to heart, but instead ignored. Jay was convinced that being away from the comforts of home would invoke a need for human company in Nicholas. He would finally be primed for love and she, Jay, would be nicely in his line of vision.
When Jay first arrived on campus, she searched for Nicholas, but didn’t see any sign of him. Having travelled across Canada to be near her object of desire and finding herself within one hundred yards of it, Jay was suddenly stricken by a shy pride that prevented her from pursuing Nicholas any further. She became absorbed in her life in the student residency, her classes, the ebb and flow of new people, and a month or so later, it was Nicholas who discovered Jay.
In that short time, Nicholas had undergone a complete metamorphosis. He had become a Revolutionary. The passion that Jay felt should have been hers by right, Nicholas now funnelled into an unholy devotion for a Cuban revolutionary named Che Guevara. Nicholas dressed in military fatigue wear, sported a black beret and grew a beard and moustache, presumably to look like his hero, but succeeding only in looking more like Fidel Castro than Che.
Nicholas frequently began sentences with the phrase, “When the Revolution comes....” Jay’s biggest frustration was that she was never given a clear answer on what the Revolution was. It was vaguely tied in with Movements. Movements were different from Revolutions in that a movement was heading towards Revolution but was not as drastic as a Revolution, though the net result could be far worse.
Jay found it all quite confusing because she thought the Revolution had come. In Russia. In 1917. And what a mistake that was. Nicholas disagreed — it wasn’t a mistake. He told Jay that her history professor was a pawn of the Establishment and that the history books were lies written by power mongers.
“But what about Stalin’s purges? That’s history,” Jay protested.
“An exaggerated version of history.”
“He killed people who disagreed with him. I don’t think you can make up things like that.”
“Sure you can. Print it up in textbooks. Make children read them as part of their school curriculum and it becomes fact. Where do you think you got your knowledge of Stalin?”
“So you think Stalin was good?!”
“Good, bad, it’s so definitive. I don’t think he was as bad as the West makes him out to be. Anyway, it’s not like that in Russia now.”
“How do you know? The people who’ve defected didn’t seem to like it.”
“Bunch of sissy-assed athletes and ballerinas. They’re always going to complain. Anyway, the Revolution wasn’t supposed to happen in Russia. Wrong environment. It’s supposed to happen in a highly evolved capitalistic society. The real Revolution still has to happen. Here!” Nicholas’s eyes gleamed with a supple ardour.
Jay sighed, then registered what he said. “Here?! In Canada?!”
“Or the States.”
“Definitely not here.”
“Why not?”
“Nothing happens in Canada.”
“Lots of things happen here. We just don’t hear about them. It’s all capitalist propaganda. A massive brainwashing campaign to turn everyone into mindless consumers. Like the nuclear family!”
“What about it?” asked Jay, fearing she would get a lengthy reply, yet wanting to know his views on the subject. Jay still entertained the hope that Nicholas would fall in love with her and the two of them would get married.
“This bullshit about a man and a woman needing their own separate little house away from other people. People never lived like that before.”
“They didn’t?!”
“No — they lived communally.”
“Like in hippie communes?” Nicholas had somehow made the jump from no sex to communal sex. Monogamous sex, i.e., romantic love, had been sadly bypassed.
“Well, not entirely. It wasn’t uncommon, say in England in the nineteenth century, to live with your grandmother, aunts, great aunts, uncles. Many people sharing one home. Much better for a person psychologically.”
“Why?”
“Well, say your parents are assholes ...”
Are your parents assholes? Jay desperately wanted to ask. Nicholas didn’t talk about his home life.
“Then you’re stuck with them. You’ve got to spend the next twenty years in one house with these morons. They control your life. Or maybe they’re okay — maybe you’re the asshole; then, they’re stuck with you. Whereas in an extended family, if your parents are driving you crazy, you can go talk to your uncle or your aunt. You have options.”
“I guess that depends on how you feel about your aunt,” Jay said.
“No point going into specifics.”
“But what if your aunt or uncle is a horrible person and you’re stuck with them?”
“You would accept the situation. The way kids accept their parents.”
“But most kids I know hate their parents.”
“Look, the point is, as a society, we once lived communally. The capitalist regime is dividing us up into smaller units so we’ll buy more. They don’t care about the nuclear family. They’d be quite happy if the couple split up and everyone lived on their own because then we’d all have to buy more stuff. Look at apartment buildings — all those people living in their little boxes, all needing their living room couch, their tv, their bedroom set. You break down the social structure so people can’t rely on each other anymore. People will forget how to co-operate. The social mechanisms will no longer be in place. Take our generation. The baby boomers. Well, we are one huge target for these mindfuckers ...”
Somehow, salty language was a necessary part of a revolutionary’s vocabulary. Before Nicholas underwent his metamorphosis, he was very polite and soft-spoken. When Nicholas went off on one of his tirades, Jay was not even certain that he was aware of who he was talking to. He spoke to her as though she were some young, ignorant neophyte. Their conversations followed the form of a Socratic dialogue, with Jay doing Plato’s lines: “Yes, Socrates. That’s very true, Socrates. What do you think, Socrates?”
“... We’re all encouraged to be independent. That’s part of the plot. ’Cause if we all co-operated together, we could defeat the military- industrial complex. But we won’t. We’ll all grab what we can. And when we’re old, we’ll be up shit creek, ’cause there won’t be any system in place to look after us. We’ll have to buy our way out of our problems. And if you don’t have money, honey, you’re sunk. ’Cause that’s what capitalism is all about: money.”
Jay always felt very guilty when revolutionaries talked about the evils of money. She came from a wealthy family. She liked to think of herself as upper middle class but she knew that, compared to a poor person, she was rich. Nicholas’s parents were also rich, but Nicholas was able to throw off the shackles of his moneyed past with more conviction.
Jay didn’t join Nicholas’s cell because it seemed patently obvious to her that she couldn’t be a revolutionary. She wore the wrong clothes. All the revolutionary women wore either blue jeans or baggy, dirty-green military fatigue gear. Jay didn’t look good in jeans, which seemed to be designed for women with big waists. The ideal figure at that time was a big waist, narrow hips and large, but not drooping, breasts. Height was another beauty asset. Jay was short. She had small breasts that appeared even smaller in the imperative tight T-shirt. Her narrow waist made her hips seem larger, giving her an old-fashioned hour-glass figure, except the hours on top were smaller than the hours below.
Seeing female revolutionaries with their long, lanky bodies, clad in jeans and tight-fitting tops, Jay felt a pang of envy. Didn’t they feel silly, all of them dressed alike? Apparently not. The women all wore heavy boots. The men wore sneakers. Jay supposed that the differing footwear was somehow related to their social duties. The women were expected to stay and man the camp, have babies — basically, do things that required heavy, pragmatic shoes — whereas the men were free to ramble, roam, run as fast as the wind would carry them.
Jay wished she could throw herself into the revolutionary game: be Natural, not bathe for weeks at a time, wear her hair in long dirty strands, parted in the middle, plastered on either side of her face. Jay knew what she had to do to fit in, but it was as though she had a little old woman in her brain, saying “You’re not going to be this age forever. This is the only time in your life that you’ll be attractive. Make the most of it. Wear pretty clothes while you can.” Jay always had this sense of her body as some foreign article that was on loan to her so she mustn’t mess it up because, sooner or later, the original owner was going to want it back.
Nicholas sighed with satisfaction, as he always did after a long rant. He smiled at Jay. Nicholas’s smile was a shaft of light after a thunderstorm: brilliant, warm and full of promise. “Guess you’ll be heading back to Victoria when the term’s out.”
Jay had told Nicholas several times what her plans were but he never remembered. “No. I’m staying here for the summer. I’m going to art school.”
“Oh, right. Art school. You know, I never think of you as an artist.”
“You don’t?”
“No. You’re, ah, too ....” Nicholas lingered to find the word. Jay was about to suggest intelligent.
“Tidy.”
“Tidy?!”
“Yes. I always think of artists as crazy and messy. Well, you know — inspired.”
“And I don’t strike you as inspired?”
“Um, I guess you’re looking for a place to stay,” said Nicholas, quickly changing the subject. “There might still be a room at Mamma Sunshine’s. I’ll ask for you.”
Jay did not want to live in Mamma Sunshine’s house. Mamma Sunshine was a large, belligerent woman in charge of a commune in the student annex. Most of these homes had a big fat woman running things. Hippie communes favoured matriarchal rule.
Nicholas was always urging Jay to move into a commune, though never the ones where he was staying. Jay had once feigned interest which, unfortunately, led straight to an interview with Mamma Sunshine.
To Jay’s surprise, Mamma Sunshine’s commune was very clean and well-organized. Jay was reconsidering her views on communes when Mamma Sunshine informed Jay that Saturday would be her day. Jay thought that sounded rather nice till she discovered it meant that she was responsible for cooking all the meals every Saturday. She tried to politely extricate herself from the interview but Mamma Sunshine insisted that she stay for lunch and “get a feel for the place.”
Lunch was a revolting affair: vile-tasting, hard, black and orange lumps imbedded in a sandy, grey bean mash — looking and tasting like cigarettes in an ashtray. Jay pretended to eat the mash by shifting it from side to side on her plate.
A thin, scrawny man, accompanied by a young girl, scurried past the dining room in a futile attempt to escape upstairs, unnoticed. Mamma Sunshine stopped him cold.
“You’re late!” she barked.
“Sorry, Sunny, but I, ah, had to —”
“If you’re not coming for lunch, I need to know.”
“Yeah, well, things came up.” He looked nervously at the girl.
“Will you be home for dinner?”
“Ah.” Whatever romance that had been blossoming between the couple rapidly wilted under Mamma Sunshine’s intrusive glare. “Is she staying for dinner?” asked Mamma Sunshine, driving the point home.
“Um ...”
If the food wasn’t bad enough, that little interchange put Jay completely off. Living with her own mother in Victoria would be a piece of cake compared to the surrogate scrutiny of Mamma Sunshine. Jay wondered how Nicholas, who claimed to be such a free spirit, could tolerate such conditions.
“Thanks anyway, Nicholas, but I think I’ve found a place.”
“Not the student residence!”
“No, it’s full. Somewhere else.”
“A rooming house?” Nicholas asked excitedly.
Jay was ashamed to tell Nicholas that she was thinking of renting a room in a sorority house.
At that time, sororities were extremely unfashionable. Smart young women of the time did not want to ally themselves with a fascist, cliquish, retrograde organization such as a sorority house. Sorority houses were considered sexist as well, because they only housed women. Unisex was the catchword of the times. What sort of woman would not relish sharing her morning ablutions with a lot of strange men in a unisex toilet? The “new” woman embraced this liberated vision, shedding those antiquated notions of separate sex, separate species. Men and women were the same. They should dress the same. They should be the same. As a true test of mettle, many women learned how to pee standing up.
Jay’s aunt had been a member of the Kappa Alpha Theta (kat) sorority. She insisted that Jay apply for a room there. Jay paid a grudging visit to the house. It was fitting that the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority was in a beautiful old Victorian house; built to last, despite the ravages of modern thought. Like attracts like. Girls who weren’t sure about the merits of joining a sorority fell in love with the house. It had a serene, gentle energy. Jay fell under its spell.
The sorority sister who showed Jay the room seemed very nice, not at all ‘snobby,’ as the current wisdom would dictate. The room was lovely: pretty and spacious. A green Tiffany lamp hung from the ceiling; the room bathed in a soothing verdant glow. Jay put down a small deposit to hold the room while she made up her mind. Nicholas hated sorority girls, with a blind passion that only a revolutionary can possess. For some arcane reason, he dismissed them as “bourgeois pigs.” Nicholas never elaborated and Jay didn’t dare ask. She felt that, in his regard, she was perilously close to becoming a bourgeois pig herself.
If Jay were a true student of the Revolution, she would have lived in a rooming house run by drug addicts and thieves. That would have been the honourable choice. Jay could entertain the idea but it was the small day-to-day realities that defeated her. Given the choice between sharing a bathroom with a heroin addict or a sorority sister, Jay preferred the security of middle-class women. She knew what to expect.
“Yes. A rooming house,” said Jay. “What have you got against the student residence? I lived there all year and you never said anything against it.”
“It’s so bourgeois. I was waiting for you to outgrow it.”
“Pardon?”
“That puerile stage. Being with a bunch of pampered children. My God, you didn’t even go co-ed. You stayed on the girls’ floor. Too uptight to face a guy in the morning.”
A deep blush rose up from Jay’s neck and emblazoned her cheeks.
A smug, knowing smile crept across Nicholas’s face. “You’re still a virgin, aren’t you?”
So far Jay had managed to ignore the sexual aspect of the Revolution. When she first arrived at the university, a grubby individual thrust two cumbersome, newsprinted booklets at her: one on birth control and another on venereal disease. Jay saw that the booklets were full of information that might be useful to her at some later date, but she didn’t want to carry them around in full view from class to class. Unfortunately, they were an awkward size, large and floppy. They didn’t roll easily and they didn’t fold, either. They perched in Jay’s clear vinyl book bag for all the world to see. Jay pushed the booklets between two binders and worried about their visibility all day.
When she got home, she leafed through them. Both showed pictures of happy, hairy people making love. The women in these pamphlets did not shave their leg or underarm hair. The men had long hair and scruffy beards. These couples looked just like Nicholas’s friends. The pamphlet-makers made it appear as though every person between the ages of sixteen and twenty-six was a hippie. There were no pictures of clean-cut, well-groomed young men or women. Presumably, these people did not exist or if they did, were certainly not having sex. Sex was the domain of the hippies or the “love generation.” All of the people portrayed had beatific smiles that contrasted oddly with the accompanying paragraphs on genital herpes and venereal warts.
Venereal disease was now an outmoded annoyance. A foulsmelling pus issuing from one’s loins no longer ruined one’s life. A person simply took the appropriate antibiotic and the offending discharge disappeared. Jay found the pamphlets repulsive, yet compelling. Sex was a lot of work: so much research and equipment involved in its practice; so many precautions needed to avoid venereal disease and pregnancy. (These two being equal in the minds of the pamphlet-makers.)
The birth control pill was blazing new trails in sexual relations. By mimicking pregnancy, the Pill fooled a woman’s body into thinking it was pregnant, thus preventing conception. Constant headaches, nausea, a possible stroke, the abrupt appearance of hair on the upper lip were minor inconveniences to the huge advantage of being sexually available at all times. Feminist literature of the time lauded the Pill for liberating women from their biological imperative. Women were no longer doomed to suffer the ignominy of an unwanted pregnancy. Tragedy, ruin and retribution were alien concepts to Jay’s generation. And why should they feel any other way? It was a brave, new world and they were its eager pioneers. Many of the girls in Jay’s dormitory were on the Pill. They liked it because it made their breasts bigger. There was still a social stigma attached to being sexually promiscuous. Very few girls would admit that they were on the Pill so they could have unlimited sexual intercourse. The Pill’s safest and greatest endorsement for young womankind was that it regulated their periods. One was on the Pill for health reasons.
Jay felt she must have been a throwback to some other century because she worried about things. She instinctively knew that there was a price to be paid. If something came too easily, well then, there was a hitch, a hidden flaw that would bring the flimsily constructed edifice tumbling down. Jay called it common sense, but “common” implied that this was a view shared by others, and Jay felt quite alone in her beliefs.
She could see why the Pill was so popular. It was easy; take a pill every day and that was that. The problem for Jay was that you had to take the Pill every day, regardless of whether you were going to have sex. Jay hated waste. She felt she should get her money’s worth. None of the dorm girls who were on the Pill seemed to be having sex. They spent more time arguing with their boyfriends than making love. Granted, Jay didn’t know the girls in her dormitory well and they might have been weird and cranky before but it seemed someone was always on some crying jag or other. The dorm was a wailing wall of weeping women. Weeping for what? Jay could never get a coherent word out of them. They were restless, plumped up with estrogen; big mamma bears lumbering around the halls, alert to nurture offspring that weren’t going to be born.
“You should have sex.” Nicholas eyed Jay thoughtfully.
Jay sighed. So, this was how it was to be with Nicholas. Years of patient expectation and finally, the big declaration: You should have sex. Scientific, analytic, wholesome, as though sex were good for you. Like eating bean sprouts. Not very appealing, but maybe that was how shy boys hid their real feelings: offer to render a biological service rather than declare themselves. “Okay, Nicholas, you’re on! Let’s have sex,” Jay replied in a vain attempt to be nonchalant.
“Oh, well, I didn’t mean me.”
“What?!”
“I suppose I should have sex with you because after all, it doesn’t mean anything. Sex is simply a means of communicating. It’s like a body shorthand.”
“Huh?”
“But I think sex only works if you’re attracted to the other person. I could try it with you, but I just don’t think it would work.”
“Forget it.”
“I’ve offended you.”
“You’re so goddamned self-involved and rude! Rude! That’s what you are! Rude!” Jay stormed out and that was the end of the Revolution for her — for a while, anyway.
GIRL’S OWN ANNUAL
1974
At that time, there was much talk of the Revolution amongst Jay’s peers. The Revolution would arrive and you were either a part of it and would be embraced or you were not part of it and would be gunned down. Jay had a morbid fear that the Call to Revolution would occur when she was having dinner with her godfather in one of the expensive steakhouses that he frequented. One minute the waiter would be gaily tossing the Caesar salad; the next minute they would all be lined up against the wall for execution. Jay would try and explain that her godfather had taken her to this restaurant, but that would imply that he should be lined up and shot first and that wasn’t altogether fair — though he was a capitalist. He drove a big huge car that he referred to as his “bucket of bolts.” He said “positive” and “negative” instead of “yes” and “no.” He said “zero seven hundred hours” instead of “seven o’clock.” He lived in a penthouse apartment and made investments. He was very happy to be a capitalist. Jay was not. She was a Revolutionary-in-Training. She wondered if the handsome young man with the cold eyes and the machine gun would realize that she was on his side. She thought not. Revolutions seemed to bring out the worst in people.
Jay had an unrequited passion for Nicholas Woodbridge that was festering quite nicely until Nicholas became a Revolutionary. He had been a shy, diffident young man, brilliant and prone to bouts of melancholy. Jay tried to manipulate Nicholas into becoming her boyfriend, but he never obliged. They remained, elusively, friends.
When Nicholas moved to Toronto to attend university, Jay followed him. She convinced herself that it was a pleasant coincidence that the university he chose was ideally suited to her needs as well. Victoria was a cultural backwater. Jay needed to go to Toronto where the real artists lived. Jay actually believed that the real artists lived in New York.
Nicholas left a few weeks before Jay. He had not arranged to keep in touch — an unpleasant fact Jay might have taken to heart, but instead ignored. Jay was convinced that being away from the comforts of home would invoke a need for human company in Nicholas. He would finally be primed for love and she, Jay, would be nicely in his line of vision.
When Jay first arrived on campus, she searched for Nicholas, but didn’t see any sign of him. Having travelled across Canada to be near her object of desire and finding herself within one hundred yards of it, Jay was suddenly stricken by a shy pride that prevented her from pursuing Nicholas any further. She became absorbed in her life in the student residency, her classes, the ebb and flow of new people, and a month or so later, it was Nicholas who discovered Jay.
In that short time, Nicholas had undergone a complete metamorphosis. He had become a Revolutionary. The passion that Jay felt should have been hers by right, Nicholas now funnelled into an unholy devotion for a Cuban revolutionary named Che Guevara. Nicholas dressed in military fatigue wear, sported a black beret and grew a beard and moustache, presumably to look like his hero, but succeeding only in looking more like Fidel Castro than Che.
Nicholas frequently began sentences with the phrase, “When the Revolution comes....” Jay’s biggest frustration was that she was never given a clear answer on what the Revolution was. It was vaguely tied in with Movements. Movements were different from Revolutions in that a movement was heading towards Revolution but was not as drastic as a Revolution, though the net result could be far worse.
Jay found it all quite confusing because she thought the Revolution had come. In Russia. In 1917. And what a mistake that was. Nicholas disagreed — it wasn’t a mistake. He told Jay that her history professor was a pawn of the Establishment and that the history books were lies written by power mongers.
“But what about Stalin’s purges? That’s history,” Jay protested.
“An exaggerated version of history.”
“He killed people who disagreed with him. I don’t think you can make up things like that.”
“Sure you can. Print it up in textbooks. Make children read them as part of their school curriculum and it becomes fact. Where do you think you got your knowledge of Stalin?”
“So you think Stalin was good?!”
“Good, bad, it’s so definitive. I don’t think he was as bad as the West makes him out to be. Anyway, it’s not like that in Russia now.”
“How do you know? The people who’ve defected didn’t seem to like it.”
“Bunch of sissy-assed athletes and ballerinas. They’re always going to complain. Anyway, the Revolution wasn’t supposed to happen in Russia. Wrong environment. It’s supposed to happen in a highly evolved capitalistic society. The real Revolution still has to happen. Here!” Nicholas’s eyes gleamed with a supple ardour.
Jay sighed, then registered what he said. “Here?! In Canada?!”
“Or the States.”
“Definitely not here.”
“Why not?”
“Nothing happens in Canada.”
“Lots of things happen here. We just don’t hear about them. It’s all capitalist propaganda. A massive brainwashing campaign to turn everyone into mindless consumers. Like the nuclear family!”
“What about it?” asked Jay, fearing she would get a lengthy reply, yet wanting to know his views on the subject. Jay still entertained the hope that Nicholas would fall in love with her and the two of them would get married.
“This bullshit about a man and a woman needing their own separate little house away from other people. People never lived like that before.”
“They didn’t?!”
“No — they lived communally.”
“Like in hippie communes?” Nicholas had somehow made the jump from no sex to communal sex. Monogamous sex, i.e., romantic love, had been sadly bypassed.
“Well, not entirely. It wasn’t uncommon, say in England in the nineteenth century, to live with your grandmother, aunts, great aunts, uncles. Many people sharing one home. Much better for a person psychologically.”
“Why?”
“Well, say your parents are assholes ...”
Are your parents assholes? Jay desperately wanted to ask. Nicholas didn’t talk about his home life.
“Then you’re stuck with them. You’ve got to spend the next twenty years in one house with these morons. They control your life. Or maybe they’re okay — maybe you’re the asshole; then, they’re stuck with you. Whereas in an extended family, if your parents are driving you crazy, you can go talk to your uncle or your aunt. You have options.”
“I guess that depends on how you feel about your aunt,” Jay said.
“No point going into specifics.”
“But what if your aunt or uncle is a horrible person and you’re stuck with them?”
“You would accept the situation. The way kids accept their parents.”
“But most kids I know hate their parents.”
“Look, the point is, as a society, we once lived communally. The capitalist regime is dividing us up into smaller units so we’ll buy more. They don’t care about the nuclear family. They’d be quite happy if the couple split up and everyone lived on their own because then we’d all have to buy more stuff. Look at apartment buildings — all those people living in their little boxes, all needing their living room couch, their tv, their bedroom set. You break down the social structure so people can’t rely on each other anymore. People will forget how to co-operate. The social mechanisms will no longer be in place. Take our generation. The baby boomers. Well, we are one huge target for these mindfuckers ...”
Somehow, salty language was a necessary part of a revolutionary’s vocabulary. Before Nicholas underwent his metamorphosis, he was very polite and soft-spoken. When Nicholas went off on one of his tirades, Jay was not even certain that he was aware of who he was talking to. He spoke to her as though she were some young, ignorant neophyte. Their conversations followed the form of a Socratic dialogue, with Jay doing Plato’s lines: “Yes, Socrates. That’s very true, Socrates. What do you think, Socrates?”
“... We’re all encouraged to be independent. That’s part of the plot. ’Cause if we all co-operated together, we could defeat the military- industrial complex. But we won’t. We’ll all grab what we can. And when we’re old, we’ll be up shit creek, ’cause there won’t be any system in place to look after us. We’ll have to buy our way out of our problems. And if you don’t have money, honey, you’re sunk. ’Cause that’s what capitalism is all about: money.”
Jay always felt very guilty when revolutionaries talked about the evils of money. She came from a wealthy family. She liked to think of herself as upper middle class but she knew that, compared to a poor person, she was rich. Nicholas’s parents were also rich, but Nicholas was able to throw off the shackles of his moneyed past with more conviction.
Jay didn’t join Nicholas’s cell because it seemed patently obvious to her that she couldn’t be a revolutionary. She wore the wrong clothes. All the revolutionary women wore either blue jeans or baggy, dirty-green military fatigue gear. Jay didn’t look good in jeans, which seemed to be designed for women with big waists. The ideal figure at that time was a big waist, narrow hips and large, but not drooping, breasts. Height was another beauty asset. Jay was short. She had small breasts that appeared even smaller in the imperative tight T-shirt. Her narrow waist made her hips seem larger, giving her an old-fashioned hour-glass figure, except the hours on top were smaller than the hours below.
Seeing female revolutionaries with their long, lanky bodies, clad in jeans and tight-fitting tops, Jay felt a pang of envy. Didn’t they feel silly, all of them dressed alike? Apparently not. The women all wore heavy boots. The men wore sneakers. Jay supposed that the differing footwear was somehow related to their social duties. The women were expected to stay and man the camp, have babies — basically, do things that required heavy, pragmatic shoes — whereas the men were free to ramble, roam, run as fast as the wind would carry them.
Jay wished she could throw herself into the revolutionary game: be Natural, not bathe for weeks at a time, wear her hair in long dirty strands, parted in the middle, plastered on either side of her face. Jay knew what she had to do to fit in, but it was as though she had a little old woman in her brain, saying “You’re not going to be this age forever. This is the only time in your life that you’ll be attractive. Make the most of it. Wear pretty clothes while you can.” Jay always had this sense of her body as some foreign article that was on loan to her so she mustn’t mess it up because, sooner or later, the original owner was going to want it back.
Nicholas sighed with satisfaction, as he always did after a long rant. He smiled at Jay. Nicholas’s smile was a shaft of light after a thunderstorm: brilliant, warm and full of promise. “Guess you’ll be heading back to Victoria when the term’s out.”
Jay had told Nicholas several times what her plans were but he never remembered. “No. I’m staying here for the summer. I’m going to art school.”
“Oh, right. Art school. You know, I never think of you as an artist.”
“You don’t?”
“No. You’re, ah, too ....” Nicholas lingered to find the word. Jay was about to suggest intelligent.
“Tidy.”
“Tidy?!”
“Yes. I always think of artists as crazy and messy. Well, you know — inspired.”
“And I don’t strike you as inspired?”
“Um, I guess you’re looking for a place to stay,” said Nicholas, quickly changing the subject. “There might still be a room at Mamma Sunshine’s. I’ll ask for you.”
Jay did not want to live in Mamma Sunshine’s house. Mamma Sunshine was a large, belligerent woman in charge of a commune in the student annex. Most of these homes had a big fat woman running things. Hippie communes favoured matriarchal rule.
Nicholas was always urging Jay to move into a commune, though never the ones where he was staying. Jay had once feigned interest which, unfortunately, led straight to an interview with Mamma Sunshine.
To Jay’s surprise, Mamma Sunshine’s commune was very clean and well-organized. Jay was reconsidering her views on communes when Mamma Sunshine informed Jay that Saturday would be her day. Jay thought that sounded rather nice till she discovered it meant that she was responsible for cooking all the meals every Saturday. She tried to politely extricate herself from the interview but Mamma Sunshine insisted that she stay for lunch and “get a feel for the place.”
Lunch was a revolting affair: vile-tasting, hard, black and orange lumps imbedded in a sandy, grey bean mash — looking and tasting like cigarettes in an ashtray. Jay pretended to eat the mash by shifting it from side to side on her plate.
A thin, scrawny man, accompanied by a young girl, scurried past the dining room in a futile attempt to escape upstairs, unnoticed. Mamma Sunshine stopped him cold.
“You’re late!” she barked.
“Sorry, Sunny, but I, ah, had to —”
“If you’re not coming for lunch, I need to know.”
“Yeah, well, things came up.” He looked nervously at the girl.
“Will you be home for dinner?”
“Ah.” Whatever romance that had been blossoming between the couple rapidly wilted under Mamma Sunshine’s intrusive glare. “Is she staying for dinner?” asked Mamma Sunshine, driving the point home.
“Um ...”
If the food wasn’t bad enough, that little interchange put Jay completely off. Living with her own mother in Victoria would be a piece of cake compared to the surrogate scrutiny of Mamma Sunshine. Jay wondered how Nicholas, who claimed to be such a free spirit, could tolerate such conditions.
“Thanks anyway, Nicholas, but I think I’ve found a place.”
“Not the student residence!”
“No, it’s full. Somewhere else.”
“A rooming house?” Nicholas asked excitedly.
Jay was ashamed to tell Nicholas that she was thinking of renting a room in a sorority house.
At that time, sororities were extremely unfashionable. Smart young women of the time did not want to ally themselves with a fascist, cliquish, retrograde organization such as a sorority house. Sorority houses were considered sexist as well, because they only housed women. Unisex was the catchword of the times. What sort of woman would not relish sharing her morning ablutions with a lot of strange men in a unisex toilet? The “new” woman embraced this liberated vision, shedding those antiquated notions of separate sex, separate species. Men and women were the same. They should dress the same. They should be the same. As a true test of mettle, many women learned how to pee standing up.
Jay’s aunt had been a member of the Kappa Alpha Theta (kat) sorority. She insisted that Jay apply for a room there. Jay paid a grudging visit to the house. It was fitting that the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority was in a beautiful old Victorian house; built to last, despite the ravages of modern thought. Like attracts like. Girls who weren’t sure about the merits of joining a sorority fell in love with the house. It had a serene, gentle energy. Jay fell under its spell.
The sorority sister who showed Jay the room seemed very nice, not at all ‘snobby,’ as the current wisdom would dictate. The room was lovely: pretty and spacious. A green Tiffany lamp hung from the ceiling; the room bathed in a soothing verdant glow. Jay put down a small deposit to hold the room while she made up her mind. Nicholas hated sorority girls, with a blind passion that only a revolutionary can possess. For some arcane reason, he dismissed them as “bourgeois pigs.” Nicholas never elaborated and Jay didn’t dare ask. She felt that, in his regard, she was perilously close to becoming a bourgeois pig herself.
If Jay were a true student of the Revolution, she would have lived in a rooming house run by drug addicts and thieves. That would have been the honourable choice. Jay could entertain the idea but it was the small day-to-day realities that defeated her. Given the choice between sharing a bathroom with a heroin addict or a sorority sister, Jay preferred the security of middle-class women. She knew what to expect.
“Yes. A rooming house,” said Jay. “What have you got against the student residence? I lived there all year and you never said anything against it.”
“It’s so bourgeois. I was waiting for you to outgrow it.”
“Pardon?”
“That puerile stage. Being with a bunch of pampered children. My God, you didn’t even go co-ed. You stayed on the girls’ floor. Too uptight to face a guy in the morning.”
A deep blush rose up from Jay’s neck and emblazoned her cheeks.
A smug, knowing smile crept across Nicholas’s face. “You’re still a virgin, aren’t you?”
So far Jay had managed to ignore the sexual aspect of the Revolution. When she first arrived at the university, a grubby individual thrust two cumbersome, newsprinted booklets at her: one on birth control and another on venereal disease. Jay saw that the booklets were full of information that might be useful to her at some later date, but she didn’t want to carry them around in full view from class to class. Unfortunately, they were an awkward size, large and floppy. They didn’t roll easily and they didn’t fold, either. They perched in Jay’s clear vinyl book bag for all the world to see. Jay pushed the booklets between two binders and worried about their visibility all day.
When she got home, she leafed through them. Both showed pictures of happy, hairy people making love. The women in these pamphlets did not shave their leg or underarm hair. The men had long hair and scruffy beards. These couples looked just like Nicholas’s friends. The pamphlet-makers made it appear as though every person between the ages of sixteen and twenty-six was a hippie. There were no pictures of clean-cut, well-groomed young men or women. Presumably, these people did not exist or if they did, were certainly not having sex. Sex was the domain of the hippies or the “love generation.” All of the people portrayed had beatific smiles that contrasted oddly with the accompanying paragraphs on genital herpes and venereal warts.
Venereal disease was now an outmoded annoyance. A foulsmelling pus issuing from one’s loins no longer ruined one’s life. A person simply took the appropriate antibiotic and the offending discharge disappeared. Jay found the pamphlets repulsive, yet compelling. Sex was a lot of work: so much research and equipment involved in its practice; so many precautions needed to avoid venereal disease and pregnancy. (These two being equal in the minds of the pamphlet-makers.)
The birth control pill was blazing new trails in sexual relations. By mimicking pregnancy, the Pill fooled a woman’s body into thinking it was pregnant, thus preventing conception. Constant headaches, nausea, a possible stroke, the abrupt appearance of hair on the upper lip were minor inconveniences to the huge advantage of being sexually available at all times. Feminist literature of the time lauded the Pill for liberating women from their biological imperative. Women were no longer doomed to suffer the ignominy of an unwanted pregnancy. Tragedy, ruin and retribution were alien concepts to Jay’s generation. And why should they feel any other way? It was a brave, new world and they were its eager pioneers. Many of the girls in Jay’s dormitory were on the Pill. They liked it because it made their breasts bigger. There was still a social stigma attached to being sexually promiscuous. Very few girls would admit that they were on the Pill so they could have unlimited sexual intercourse. The Pill’s safest and greatest endorsement for young womankind was that it regulated their periods. One was on the Pill for health reasons.
Jay felt she must have been a throwback to some other century because she worried about things. She instinctively knew that there was a price to be paid. If something came too easily, well then, there was a hitch, a hidden flaw that would bring the flimsily constructed edifice tumbling down. Jay called it common sense, but “common” implied that this was a view shared by others, and Jay felt quite alone in her beliefs.
She could see why the Pill was so popular. It was easy; take a pill every day and that was that. The problem for Jay was that you had to take the Pill every day, regardless of whether you were going to have sex. Jay hated waste. She felt she should get her money’s worth. None of the dorm girls who were on the Pill seemed to be having sex. They spent more time arguing with their boyfriends than making love. Granted, Jay didn’t know the girls in her dormitory well and they might have been weird and cranky before but it seemed someone was always on some crying jag or other. The dorm was a wailing wall of weeping women. Weeping for what? Jay could never get a coherent word out of them. They were restless, plumped up with estrogen; big mamma bears lumbering around the halls, alert to nurture offspring that weren’t going to be born.
“You should have sex.” Nicholas eyed Jay thoughtfully.
Jay sighed. So, this was how it was to be with Nicholas. Years of patient expectation and finally, the big declaration: You should have sex. Scientific, analytic, wholesome, as though sex were good for you. Like eating bean sprouts. Not very appealing, but maybe that was how shy boys hid their real feelings: offer to render a biological service rather than declare themselves. “Okay, Nicholas, you’re on! Let’s have sex,” Jay replied in a vain attempt to be nonchalant.
“Oh, well, I didn’t mean me.”
“What?!”
“I suppose I should have sex with you because after all, it doesn’t mean anything. Sex is simply a means of communicating. It’s like a body shorthand.”
“Huh?”
“But I think sex only works if you’re attracted to the other person. I could try it with you, but I just don’t think it would work.”
“Forget it.”
“I’ve offended you.”
“You’re so goddamned self-involved and rude! Rude! That’s what you are! Rude!” Jay stormed out and that was the end of the Revolution for her — for a while, anyway.
