Your Daughters (1)

David always answers the door, just as he’s always the first to grab for the telephone when it rings. He enjoys those little breaks in his daily routine. He stands at the door, widely grinning, nods amiably at the inevitable spiel and when they run down like an overplayed record, extends the money. We only donate to medical research and from March into June there’s a steady stream of canvassers soliciting for Salvation Army, heart fund, cancer, diabetes, muscular dystrophy, you name it. David, in his way, is helping the unfortunates of our society - or so he often solemnly declares.

I was glad to have him take over my role of reluctant lady bountiful because I dread those calls. At first they used to ask to see “the lady of the house” but I told him to say “my mother’s no lady - tell ME” and he says this obligingly, eagerly, and although many are likely taken aback, at the very least bemused, they’re polite and carefully explain what they’re campaigning for. Ironic really, to be met at the door by one whom society pities as yet another type of ‘unfortunate’.

Fortunately, David doesn’t know that - yet. He feels he is taking his place as a responsible member of this community. I don’t like to conform myself, but David, like his father, is very socially conservative.

Which makes for some very interesting conversations around the dinner table where many of our discussions take place. So the boys are exposed to opposite sides of any social or political conflict, as it were. And though we’re spirited in defending our views, we don’t try to foist them on each other, or on the boys. Although just recently, from sheer exasperation, Cliff said “Donna, you’re beginning to sound like your brother, a raving lunatic?, when I ventured a certain opinion critical of a recent government initiative.

“Anarchist”, I repeated firmly. I like the ring of the word. I’m no Red Emma, just a hausfrau who dislikes most of the obligations society burdens us with for the sake of propriety - observation of ritualistic ‘norms’. I have no intention of inciting my boys to riot, yet would like to teach them that there is nothing wrong with civil disobedience under certain circumstances. Nothing wrong with questioning the questionable. Alas, they don’t understand, perhaps don’t choose to - they’re too young, and the only disobedience incurred here is in relation to my homely little dictums like “take out the trash”, “cut the grass”, “wash the windows”, and zoom! Everyone disappears when minutes before no amount of gentle persuasion could entice them out of the house to enjoy the benefits of fresh air, sunshine, exercise and all that other good stuff mothers are supposed to be concerned about. Pity David isn’t as quick as Robbie and Denis, as he gets left holding the bag - rather the trash, the lawnmower, the Windex.

But on that particular occasion, the boys sat there bug-eyed until Robbie said “Gee mom, anarchists are dangerous loonies, they get zapped, like Sacco and Venzetti”. I swung on him in astonishment. “How’d you ever hear about them?” I asked, never having heard him offer anything outside sports-related trivia before. “social history”, he mumbled, stabbing his meat and proceeding to cut it so vigorously the rest of us had to stabilize the table until Cliff hissed at him.

“Well, not all anarchists are violent, there’s something called passive resistance” I told him, them, defensively. “And the educational system is so backward they don’t teach you THAT. They’re probably still teaching about how savage the natives of Canada were - subhuman inhabitants of a land that belonged by right of destiny to whites who herded the savages onto undesirable land, paid them a joking pittance to stay there, diseased them with apathy and alcohol and now point at the meagre, sorry remnants and say ‘Ha! We told you so!”

“Now just a minute …” Cliff began, but I don’t like to be interrupted.

“AND THEY DO THE SAME WITH THE REST OF US TOO, only we’re too stupid to notice”, I overrode his objection and he settled back, knowing from long experience who useless it is to try to interrupt me. “ … all of us unsuspecting fools are herded onto urban reservations to become fodder for commerce”. I glared at him. “We’re subservient to the whims of a handful of political egotists stifling individuality and initiative with an insidious long-term program of depersonalization. We all conform to the consumer norm, cheer the banners of national pride and boost the gross national product - and the national product is GROSS!”

Why bother. Not only are they unconvinced, but puzzled as well. Granted, I tend to get carried away, my voice rises, my face gets red; the boys sit there careful not to say anything that will set me off again. Cliff, on the other hand, is always calm, considers his words carefully, is sparing of them and of everyone’s ears.

Robbie giggled nervously. Cliff regarded me with that concerned look a parent often bestows on a naughty child.

David though, David was loyal, undemanding, ready to appreciate. He regarded me with admiration. He knew he could never get HIS tongue around such a mouthful and he repeated lovingly, “Mom’s an aynarkist”.

“You said it!” Denis whooped, splattering mashed potato around the table.

“You’ve learned a new word, but let’s keep it in the family”, Cliff advised, laughing. But he meant it. I’ll tell you how conservative he is, he’s a chartered accountant and you can’t get any more strictured than that, can you? But I shouldn’t knock it, that’s how we get our bread, as Robbie would say.

Disagreements are surface though, in our family. When it comes to the things that matter to us, we’re all agreed, relaxed and reasonably content. We like each other’s company, get along fine. Learning to live with what life throws at you helps - or does that work in reverse?

I was, I am, a nurse, though I haven’t worked for a while, and one learns to be practical. Sometimes, just to ease the tension, I flaunt some little idiosyncrasy. Cliff is very understanding.

Most people seem to think that nurses should know better, that, like doctors, they have all the answers, about health and sickness, that kind of thing. And it extends to other areas as well. Well, tain’t necessarily so. Starting a family late in life, the risks are greater. My mother once ventured the opinion that the wrong genetic material came from Cliff’s side, but I put a damper on that.

The last several years the younger boys have spent their summers at my family’s place in the Annapolis Valley. No use sending David. My mother wrote the neighbours wouldn’t take kindly to him, you know how things are. No, I don’t, I wrote back. How are they? But she didn’t reply to that and I don’t really care. We’d rather him him with us anyway. Summers are easier with the other two away and only David with us here.

Cliff and I decided it would be a good idea to get David accustomed to an outdoor experience early, so he’s become a competent hiker, climber, canoeist - in the winter, snowshoer. We go climbing in the Gatineaus throughout the spring and the fall; hike through the woods and canoe on the lakes in the summer.

We try to keep him busy, give him learning opportunities, interest him in solitary-type activities, especially now that he’s getting older. Fifteen last month.

“It’s hard on him”, Cliff said. “I mean, I explained as much as I could and he says he understands but he doesn’t even have the normal outlet of a boy his age, mingling with girls, talking with them under normally developing circumstances.”

I won’t tell him, I decide, that some woman up the street, newly moved ink knocked at the door a few weeks ago, asked me to keep ‘that boy’ at home, ‘please’. I felt my face tighten, but smiled, asked why.

“He keeps calling”, she said, obviously embarrassed.

“Oh?”
“At my house”, she explained. Asking for my daughter.”

“Does he know her?”

“He walked into our backyard one evening, just walked in, introduced himself. Said he hoped we’d like living here. It was very NICE of him and we didn’t know how to discourage him. I mean, what could we say? Go away? He made himself comfortable on one of our chairs and chatted with us, me and my husband. Our daughter was playing with the cat and this boy, oh, I am sorry - your son said he wanted to take her out.”

“Oh, did he?” Little beggar, he didn’t mention anything to us, about asking girls out. Getting brave!

“Yes. Well, of course we said she’s too young. She’s only thirteen, not that that makes any difference. Then he picked up a magazine I had been reading on interior decorating, leafed through it - I mean, he SEEMED up until then like a reasonable boy, even if … that is to say, we were surprised, he stabbed the magazine at a certain page, said “know what it says here?” And we said “No”. And he replied, “it says here she’s going to kiss me, probably marry me, too.”

“Oh dear!” I had to repress an impulse to laugh. Nervous tension. I was not amused.

“Exactly!” she said indignantly, forgetting perhaps, that I was the mother of ‘that boy’. “since then he’s been coming around pestering her to go for walks with him. Look, I realize he’s uh, special, and we’d like to be understanding, but what guarantee have we … Look, I’m sorry, we just don’t want him around. My daughter is almost hysterical with same.”

“Well, we can’t have your daughter hysterical.” I shouldn’t have said that. I know I shouldn’t have, and our parting was somewhat less than amicable although I did say I would look after things.

And the confused look on his face when I confronted him. Oh, not a confrontation, that’s not right, just a quiet conversation. He had a right to be confused after all. Hadn’t he just done what any other young boy might do, having conceived an interest in a particular girl? Seems he’d selected the girl, noticed her around the street, thought she’d be the right one for him. He explained. He doesn’t like the girls, the few girls who attend special education classes with him. They have, he says, “funny faces - fat, Mom”. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Hugged him instead. My funny, fat-faced boy.

But he has to learn there are certain things people don’t, or won’t understand. And trying to explain this to him was almost like a re-play of a problem we had when he was much younger.

Absent-mindedly, either when he was contented or agitated about something, he’d simultaneously suck his thumb and grasp himself, begin fondling his crotch. It took a long time to break him of that. And that was the first time we’d ever got really angry with Robbie and Denis; when we discovered that they were imitating him, ridiculing him, encouraging him … faster, faster.

“How will we make him understand?” Cliff asked me. In a panic not to do the wrong thing, which was to make David feel guilty.

“We’ll just have to tell him it will upset people, if they see him doing it”, I told him, oh so wearily Because it seemed to me I had tried everything else, and that was the last resort, telling hi that he’d be upsetting other people. Me, the non-conformist. But it meant a lot to him, pleasing people. He is always so anxious to please.

“The nicest feeling things are private, David, remember that”, I heard Cliff tell him cautiously. “People get funny about nice things, they get jealous, they want to share, and that’s only for yourself. So if you want to keep it for yourself, you have to keep it private.”

Since he felt very protective toward his diddle, very possessive about the ‘nice’ feeling, he finally learned, and if, sometimes, during the learning process, we’d see him get that dreamy expression on his face, his hand gently begin probing his pants, one of us would urge “David!” He’d smile slyly, snatch his hand away, slap it with the other, and say “no diddling, Da-vid!”

************************************************************************

On our right lives Mrs. Wright, who is convinced she is. Soon after we moved to this house she approached me as the self-appointed ‘representative of neighbourhood concern’.

“She’s worried about us, Cliff, feels we should take steps to ‘protect’ ourselves from ‘a troubling future’”, I told him, afterward. “Said we should give serious thought to institutionalizing him. In her words: “best for him, for you, for the rest of us”. I told her to get the hell out.”

He seemed pained, listening to me. And I didn’t know what hurt him more; the thought of David institutionalized or my uncivil behaviour. Mean and little of me. I knew he didn’t give a damn about her, he just likes to observe civil propriety, wished I would maintain a polite distance.

David knew the woman didn’t like him, so he stayed away from her property. When Cliff told him never to trespass, even accidentally cutting across lawns, not even to smile - for David has a smile even for her - David understood.

She doesn’t see him as a human being. To her, he’s sub-human. “He leers”, she’d said, and calmly at first, I’d corrected her: “he smiles”. Useless, there was no point. She sees them all as the stigmata of sin. We must be dreadful people for God to have punished us with this living blemish. As some people see blacks or Orientals as depersonalized ‘looking all the same’ so does she see our David as a leering moonface, better locked away in shame and fear.

When he was ten, we got him - oh really all three boys, it was for all of them - a dog, a boxer. A first they all played with the dog. It was only a puppy. But then it became a chore to look after and Denis and Robbie had so many other things to do, friends to play with. And since David had no other friends, Sami became his pet, his friend.

We left the pup’s ears unclipped, just docked the tail, and the ears hung loose and floppy, the dog’s round, pushed-back snout clown like, funny, and in its clumsily affectionate nature it almost resembled David. When it romped with him, its hind end would wag ponderously from side to side, altogether hilarious. As it grew older and bigger it, like David, didn’t recognize its own strength and was capable of affectionately bowling over an unsuspecting object of its attentions.

They would wrestle on the grass, the two of them, and the dog slept in David’s bedroom, on its back, legs crooked into the air, and when the dog dreamed at night, it often yelped little messages, kicked its legs about. Like David, who had always been a restless sleeper.

We had a little trouble the first several months, for the dog would invariably head for the lawn of the neighbour on our right, to evacuate or otherwise relieve itself. She complained vociferously to David, told him to shovel up the mess. He’s very obliging; the first time he shovelled the dog’s ordure, he piled several days’ worth in a neat little pile on her front porch and she, unsuspecting, slid into the morass on hurriedly exiting her house one morning. You cannot imagine the embarrassment, the apologies, the “it won’t happen again” promises.

Unrepentant joy lurked behind the remorse in his eyes when we told him (Cliff told him, I secretly applauded him) his action was irresponsible, not cute, and had Mrs. Wright fallen she might have hurt herself. As it was, only her sense of dignity had been impaired but she railed at David more cautiously, convinced perhaps that ‘that boy’ might be capable of ANYTHING.
Time passed, the puppy became a mature dog and learned to control the venue of its evacuations. Time passes and with David, one problem gives way to another. He is now as he always was, as a younger child, eager to please, to introduce himself to ‘new’ neighbours in the hope that he may find some friend, someone who won’t be ‘nice’, but still want to spend time with him. And he tries to be helpful, offers to rake lawns, take pets for walks. But his presence annoys people and they turn down his offers. No matter, I always find things to do around here, to keep him busy.

I try not to think too much about how he often walks down to the municipal swimming pool and stands there, watching the other kids having a great time. I came across him there once, just passing by, and saw him leaning on the wire fence surrounding the pool, his face immersed in his old dreamy look, but his hands firmly locked above his head, on the wire.

He’s got Sami. The two of them start every morning with a little exercise. Before the school bus arrives to pick him up, he gets out his bicycle, puts Sami’s leash on and they pedal and run for several miles. If I have some letters to mail from the day before, he’s pleased to have that to do, on his way.

But he gets restless. Sometimes when you think problems have been solved, they haven’t been, not at all. They’re just submerged and they’ll re-surface, sooner or late. We were just kidding ourselves thinking his sexuality could be kept on a back burner. If it’s not natural for any other boy, why should it be for him? He’s taken to cutting the sleeves off tee shirts, like some of the other boys around, to show off the muscles in his shoulders. He’s a well developed boy; stocky, musclebound. Let me tell you, he’s so healthy that he’s never had to have anything done to his teeth, not even a filling. The dentist says it’s unheard-of. Funny, he survived a precarious babyhood, several heart operations, continuous susceptibility to attacks of pneumonia, and now he’s a lovely physical specimen.

It didn’t work though. All that show of muscle and not one nibble from any girl. Naturally. I’ve tried to imagine just what might be going through his head. It’s not possible, of course, even Cliff can’t guess. Correct that; we can surmise and it doesn’t make us anything but uneasy. We catch him now, observing his reflection in the mirrors around the hosue whenever he passes one, pushing out his chest, fisting his hands to make his biceps bulge.

“You’re stuck on yourself!” Denis giggles and ducks to avoid David’s good-natured slap.

“Honey, this can’t be ignored”, Cliff tells me.

“right, so what do we do? Talk to him again? You want to talk to him again?”

“Yes, that too. But it’s not enough. He just nods his head, says “Sure Dad, I know”. But does he? What DOES he know?”

We pit it off. We were waiting for some opportunity. Oh, not that, trying to figure out just what to say, to do. At one point we decided we were being unnecessarily alarmist. He was going through a phase of pre-adulthood, like any other boy.

Then one day Robbie and Denis spoke to us, said we had to do something about Davd. “Jeez, we’re the laughing stock of the neighbourhood. Everyone’s having a grerat laugh on us. He’s going around telling all the girls he’s going to marry them They scream and run away and he goes on to the next one. What’s he expect? That some girl’s gonna want to go out with him? ‘s he have to act like a freak as well as look like one?

They were as stunned afterward as we were. Our children, his own brothers. They said they were sorry, even cried. It was pressure. Peer pressure; wanting to be accepted does that to people. That’s why I’d rather not present as an accredited member of society. But I haven’t been able to imbue the boys with that distance; they want acceptance.

Later, Cliff proposed what he said was a solution.

“Why, WHY do we have t go those lengths?”

“I’ve spoken to Dr. Clinton about it, he suggested it as a solution. They’re doing that now. Vasectomies for boys, sterilization for girls.” It wasn’t easy for him.

“It’s immoral, do they even ask the kids? Do they explain? Can they make them understand? It smacks of Nazi purification of the race!”

“Don’t be unreasonable, Donna, please. Let’s not have a lesson in sociology or politics this time. This is a problem we have to deall with on a personal level, without rhetoric or histrionics.”

“Cliff, what about the fact that these kids have low sperm counts - it’s true, I should know.”

“Yes, Dr. Clinton told me. I think I knew anyway. Nature’s way of inhibiting reproduction of an inferior product”, he said bitterly.

“There’s NOTHING inferior about David!”

He looked at me, a glum expression on his face. I felt badly for him. For me. Most of all for David. And what good would it do, the sterilization?

“Cliff, what’s the point? A vasectomy will do nothing to diminish his sex drive.”

“Yes”, he acknowledged. “That’s perfectly true.” And we looked at each other. God help us.

I’d always half-seriously considered David my innocent metaphor, my response to a society hung up on facile social convention, everyone marching to join the social mess. Docile clones. Now it appears that the fuse of my metaphor is burning a short wick.