Bilingual Being (16 page)

As she grew, my mother went indoors more often to learn baking, set the table, or starch the linens: to learn her gendered trade, become a homemaker-in-training, and be a girl with a predictable future. For his part, Claude took his youthful self into the meat shop that adjoined the boarding house, walls supporting one another: to acquire his gendered trade, become a butcher's apprentice, and be a boy with a promising future. But somewhere between all that familiarity, the girl-and-boy-next-door phenomenon, they lost interest in one another. After domestic arts college, my mother headed off to university to be further educated – in health and nutrition, of course. Perhaps it was seen as a clue to sure trouble at his end, a sign of the times, an omen of the changing cultural script my grandparents were editing slightly, here and there, as they went along. Claude stayed firmly put.

And that's how my mother ended up marrying a man who would, instead, start a television business in the very house she'd grown up in, on the inside edges of that adjoining wall – a man, my father, for whom she'd «faire les comptes» [do the accounts]. As for Claude, he accepted the challenge of continuity, took over the meat business, and married a local girl who would «faire les comptes» for him. Similar endings? Not at all. Difference lies in the possibility for change. And my mother, at least, embraced it for a while, in a way. Did her best.

On the other side of the arrangement, my father's family was mute. A son assumed for two years to have been on his deathbed, completely uneducated, had somehow found an attractive wife with proper domestic training and a friendly personality. It was more than anyone had ever expected of someone who wasn't supposed to live past thirty, according to expert opinions in that hospital room back in the late 1940s. (He lived past sixty, in fact, putting two packs of cigarettes a day through the remaining lung and working sixteen to eighteen hours a
day.) There was little to lose, in other words, in agreeing to this bilingual, bicultural marriage.

Exploring my father's sociolinguistic universe for a minute, I reflect in turn on his only other marriage prospect, as my mother once explained it: the daughter of an esteemed family friend. I have a photograph of my granny's in my possession dated “Spring 1922, Washington,
DC
.” Granny annotates it with the names of the five people standing on a
CN
platform, waiting for the train, on what was clearly a meaningful day and trip. The group includes herself and her husband (my grandfather), another couple, and the father of a girl whom I shall call Claire here.

Claire's family was close to my father's for so many reasons. Her extended family had been the first to befriend my granny in English when she first arrived in Canada. Her father was a colleague of my grandfather's at work, a man of Irish extraction. And her mother was a French-Canadian girl who'd been raised in Hadlow, which was then considered to be an English community on the “south shore” of Quebec and what is currently a cove within the larger region of Lévis. Claire's grandmother and my father's grandmother, both French Canadians themselves, had been best friends all their lives. And even as my grandparents moved to the suburbs, so did this family, relocating only three streets away.

It seems clear in retrospect that Claire was deeply in love with my father, though, as my mother tells it, he wasn't as keen on her. Claire was the only person who visited him in the hospital when he suffered for so many months with tuberculosis and was deemed terminally ill. She was unafraid of the curse of the age, or else bravely willing to take the risk each and every day, coming despite her own family's strict prohibition against it, for safety's sake. Meanwhile, their mothers surely plotted to set them up with one another if he ever recovered – assumed, even, that thoroughly bilingual Paul and Claire, respectably culturally English despite the French-Canadian threads that ran through their respective genetic fabrics, would eventually marry.

So what happened? Why didn't my father run into Claire's arms when he was finally well enough? She'd certainly hoped he would. That remained abundantly clear even in the decades that followed, so that I noticed it as a child myself when her family and ours, going on the
fourth generation between the clans now, continued to intertwine. Who knows? Maybe it was hard for him to feel a romantic commitment with a woman who'd seen him through countless days of bedpans and fears. Maybe, like me, he was hoping for a relationship that wasn't a constant reminder of his trauma. Or maybe, like my mother – whom he understandably would have found dazzlingly refreshing – he wanted to explore the fresh terrain of possibility. Wanted to dare to hope for something different from the future than what the past so confidently offered.

LA MAUDITE RELIGION PROTESTANTE

That belief explains much about why my mother was so delighted when the three anglo women who married into the clan of five bilingual anglophone brothers (my father and his siblings) – as per my Granny's expectations – all ended up acting «un peu folle» [slightly crazy] around religion, in her opinion. Meanwhile the two francophone women who married into the clan (of which my mother considered herself the better catch – read: sexier – of the pair) were apparently «simplement des bonnes femmes d'famille» [simply good homemakers]. Or so the story went.

As a case in point, one of the English aunts was offered up as evidence. She was American and «tellement gentille» [really so nice], especially because she made some effort to conduct small talk in her broken French. But what could you do with a woman who was «complètement tombée dans' religion» [completely fallen into religion]? There were magnets and stickers all over the refrigerator saying “Jesus loves you,” and she did «les comptes» [the accounts] for «son Église» [her church], some sort of Anglican or United congregation – we weren't sure which one. Besides, they were, according to the theory, «la mème maudite chose» [the same damned thing].

This business of the fridge magnets actually became woven into the folklore of “us” and “them” – my child's ethnographic portrait of Self versus Other – added to the list of defining attributes of kinds among humankind. French Canadians didn't decorate refrigerators. English Canadians put everything there: baby pictures, children's drawings, reminders to go the doctor, grocery lists, favourite greeting cards, and on
and on. In our home, the refrigerator was an appliance of modernity – even more, the valued repository of the most necessary tools of that critically vital trade: cooking. But in my beloved auntie's home, the refrigerator was a narrative all to itself, a wonder to read.

Funny thing, too, the pattern seemed to hold in every home I visited, as refrigerator decorations became the telltale sign of the mother's tongue. Even now my mother isn't entirely comfortable in her postmodern, post-homemaker days. She's conceded to buying two quite expensive fridge magnets, jewelled bees. One sits there with nothing to do all day; the other, on a rare occasion, holds a reminder about critical errands, no more than two or three, in a manicured hand on adorable notepaper. Cultural and temporal scripts borrowed, appropriated slowly, resisted mostly.

Going to church every day when it was empty to hold communion with God under the watchful eye of the Virgin Mary was deemed «complètement normal.» But working for the church, so that the wives of religious men became your friends and you went to their homes and cottages, well, that was beyond understanding. And what was the confirmation of that madness? A woman who'd seek a divorce just because a man drank – «Y a des pires choses dans 'vie, t'sais!» [There are worse things in life, you know!] And, in the ultimate rejection of normalcy, she refused to drink herself – «Ah bin, j'ai mon voyage!» [That's just the most ridiculous thing ever!]

Final support for French holding religion within reason and the English being unable to do so was another English aunt. A British nurse with impeccable diction and a relatively meagre command of French, she came to Quebec via New Brunswick as a war bride after World War II and raised her daughters as three proper ladies, the cousins ahead of me at the Catholic school we attended, in whose footsteps I tried to follow. They were the brightest, most gorgeous girls there, and although I rarely saw them – high school students on this side of the building with lighter tartan, and elementary students on the other side with darker tartan – their presence in the building and my aunt's commanding agency in the school community gave me imaginary psychological leverage. I belonged, I believed. On occasion, when girls across the ages intersected in tidy lines on the way to the chapel and back, I
felt them signalling about me proudly to their friends, with a smile and a quick nod. Well, as much signalling as girls can do in an atmosphere where skirt lengths are measured each day and a whisper leads to hundreds of lines of punishment – a place of complete predictability that I loved with all my heart.

Yet all of this wasn't sufficient, in my mother's eyes, to salvage the image of a woman who was far too stern. The proof? High-cut shirts, almost no drinking, and her husband calling her “dear” all the time – or “battle-axe” under his too-loud breath, after a few drinks at our house had worked their predictable magic. Did we need any other proof of their stilted English marriage than this? Had we ever seen them kiss in public, or even touch each other? If anyone needed more evidence, here was the ultimate sign that the English language itself wasn't the real problem at all, but «la maudite religion protestante» [the damned Protestant religion] surely was.

A beautiful war bride married a hopeful bilingual Canadian. But as years went by, «toute la famille est anglaise» [the whole family is English], the husband and children speaking only English. Next thing you know, there's a husband «qui perd son français» [who loses/is losing his French]. And even though these girls were in a Catholic convent day school, they attended United Church services on the weekend – «Imagine-toi donc?» [Can you imagine?] It was nearly treasonous. It was all right
not
to go to Catholic church – that was a choice. But to go to a Protestant church instead? That was quite another matter.

To top it all off, they had dinner parties without even one bottle of wine, as if that were even possible, let alone humane. Of course, it was unenjoyable. In such marriages, the argument went, the woman takes control of the man; public fondling ceases; Protestant pastors become personal friends who lead a typical family life, whose children visit the congregation's children, and other strange things of that nature. Such events were so unlike that around «el bon frère» [the good brother] or «el bon père» [the good father] – aka the average priest – whose visits to a French Catholic home were layered dramaturgy involving absolutely no interaction with family, but only pomp and circumstance implicating a solitary adult in perceived need of moral uplifting, and some mute female serving tea and «des p'tits biscuits» [cookies].

STRANGE ALLIANCES

And so it was that my parents came to form a partnership, a francophone and bilingual anglophone alliance, a merging of self-appropriating Catholicism-of-convenience with Protestantism-disguised-asconverted-Catholicism. They formed a union on a micro scale of the two major social and political agencies in Quebec in the second half of the twentieth century. Marriage as an alliance: there was nothing much new about that in the annals of human history.

I did seek more than a few times to give the idea of an alliance my own particular twist, though. Tried my best, anyhow. Went looking for what lay on the other side of the fence, as they say, and how I could work with it – or it with me. My pattern of relationships as alliances was founded on an adherence to a straightforward, practical schedule: every couple of years, sometime between September and November, I'd rotate lovers with the goal of sampling other ways of
being
. I started in 1976, the first year I left home.

Subject number one was Aboriginal. It wasn't a serious relationship, more a hanging out together in groups, but it left us as friends and was a good start for my explorations. In 1978, I fell in love with an American Jew studying at university in Montreal. It was an intense romance full of promise that was sadly broken by an overdose of passion and immaturity. In 1980, I moved in with my Protestant boyfriend. But from being great study-buddies at university, we eventually dissolved into fighting. Maybe that's why I went back to Catholicism in 1981, and my beloved photographer, the chance I blew that forever became the path not taken. In 1984, I had a brief stint, fun despite its constricting gender roles, in Orthodox Christianity. This was replaced in 1985 by a Scientologist whose curious intellectual game I thoroughly enjoyed for a time, and who is the biological father of my three children. In 1993, I was infatuated with a Buddhist who, perhaps predictably, wouldn't commit. In 1994, I partnered with a neo-Pagan, an albeit supportive union that seemed to turn in circles. Then, in 1999, I became interested in a loose practitioner of Confucianism, a kind heart under a harsh exterior, though distances took their toll. And in 2000, I fell deeply in love inside moderate Islam with a diligent and brilliant soul much my junior – a man who spoke a language I didn't understand and who
came from a country I'd never visited (and still haven't) – and I finally felt something for the first time ever with a man: safe.

I'll end the record there. It surely makes the point. Of course, there was the odd one-night stand or two-week summer fling thrown in between one or the other, completely unconnected to the schema. But all the most significant men in my romantic life can be accounted for by it. And while my plan wasn't explicitly formulated, it was absolutely impossible for me to deny the force of its implicit imperative.

Most women my age chose their partners by face, race, cash, promises, things like that. But every two to five autumns – my breeding cycle? – I chose by faith first. I let men hold me just so I could get close enough to hold their values, live by their beliefs, install their paradigms, acts by their rules, reinvent myself. Of course, I was condemned by my family as changeable, too easily influenced. No one, including me, noticed that I was stuck in endless mimicry of patterns bred in the bone. A child seduced by pedophiles whose identities issue from their theology becomes an adult convinced that sex and religion are inseparable.