Poles Apart (6 page)

I made my escape after getting Dad set up in front of his
TV
while he rhythmically squeezed the two little black rubber balls in his left hand. His Ford Focus was still sitting in the parking lot, so I drove it back to my apartment.

Over the next week, I spent my mornings hunting down reasonably priced furniture, buying some kitchen and bathroom stuff, and arranging for cable
TV
and high-speed Internet in the apartment. I spent my afternoons walking and talking with Dad, while he ogled every woman, whether patient, doctor, or staff, who came within his field of view. He also exchanged a few epithets with Chevrolet each time he passed him. Each afternoon, the older woman from our first encounter, who still looked
familiar somehow, was on a different park bench, always writing. For three days in a row, she would position herself on the next bench from where she’d perched the day before. I might be wrong, but it was as if she was giving Dad a new target each day, making him walk another fifty feet if he wanted to chat with her. He always made it, though their exchanges were always brief. They never even introduced themselves. They’d just leap into their acerbic jousting. I could only take about a minute of this before I became so mortified that I’d drag Dad back to his feet and make good our escape. She just kept smiling through it all. Dad thought she was playing hard to get, while I thought he was playing hard to like.

Finally, the furniture was delivered, including a bed, basic dresser, a kitchen table and four chairs, a cheap couch and easy chair, and a bland, wheat-coloured area rug for the living room. I picked up a flat-screen
TV
for an amazing price at a local big box store and set it up myself. Things were shaping up. Just before lunch on about day seven, I arrived at the apartment with the two boxes of books I’d just picked up at the FedEx depot. It certainly wasn’t my entire book collection, but I needed at least some of my favourites to make me feel like this was my home, if only for a while. That’s what books do for me. I sat on the floor in front of the built-in shelves and started unloading. There were biographies, lots of novels – mainly Canadian – some history, and memoirs. There weren’t nearly enough books to fill the shelves, but plenty to make the place look welcoming
and a little lived-in. That’s what books do for apartments.

I was unloading the memoirs from the second box when it happened. I don’t know why it had taken me so long to realize it. Even with the passing of so many years, it should have dawned on me long before now. I held the book in my hand and looked at the face staring back at me. I could scarcely believe it, but it was true. I was sure of it. Shocked and excited, I headed for the door, the book in my hand.

It was just after lunch when I arrived.

“Why, young Everett, always great to see your smiling face,” Yolanda said as I came through the doors. “That’s every day this week. Can’t get enough of us, huh?”

“Love it here,” I said as I hustled by the nurses’ station. “Just love it.”

“I’ll talk to the pharmacist to see if I can get you something for that,” she replied, shaking her head.

Dad was in his room watching
TV
.

“Hi, Dad,” I said as I passed right by his open door without slowing down. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

I just caught a glimpse of his perplexed look.

I nodded a greeting to Chevrolet as I passed his sentry post just beyond the doors to the walking paths. He grunted something, but I was moving too fast to notice what he’d said.

I found her on a bench at the far end of the Yellow path. She looked up from her writing when I stopped right in front her. She smiled.

“You’re Beverley Tanner” was all I could muster.

“Nice to see you again, young man. But you have me at a disadvantage, sir,” she replied.

The sun was behind me so she squinted a bit as she looked up.

“Sorry, I’m Everett Kane, son of the lewd and lascivious Billy Kane, your occasional bench mate.”

“Everett. A lovely and sadly neglected name. Nice to meet you.”

She held out her hand and we shook.

“Now, how did you come to discover that I’m Beverley Tanner? No one has recognized me for years.”

“I’m a fan” was all I said as I handed her the book I’d been holding behind my back.

“My, my, I haven’t seen one of these for a good dozen years. Wherever did you get it?”

“I bought it at a used bookstore about eighteen years ago when I was in university,” I started. “And I loved it. It had a big impact on me at a time when I was trying to sort some things out.”

“I’m honoured and, well, surprised. I don’t think that book was read by many sporting your anatomy.”

The book she now held in her hands was her own memoir,
The Funny One
, with the edifying subtitle
Reflections of a Feminist with a Sense of Humour
.

“I can’t believe you’re here. I can’t believe it’s you. The odds of meeting you like this are, um, microscopic,” I said.

“Yes, they’re almost as low as meeting a youngish man who owns, and seems even to have read, my book, let alone liked it.”

“Correction, loved it.”

She tucked her note pad and pen into her small canvas bag and patted the bench beside her.

“Everett Kane, sit down and tell me your strange story. This, I have got to hear.”

I sat down. She held the book on her lap. Suddenly, the world shrank, and I was unaware of anything else going on around us. “Hmmm, how long do you have?” I asked.

“Well, I’m recovering from my fourth stroke in five years, so I could check out for keeps, any time now.”

“No, no, no! That’s not what I was asking,” I stammered. “I just meant it’s nearly four o’clock. When is dinner?”

“Have you had the food here? Trust me, I don’t mind missing dinner. And neither will anyone else who’s eaten the slop they serve in this place.”

I was nervous. I was sitting with a hero of mine. Admittedly, she was not a conventional role model for someone like me. But there you go. I gathered my thoughts for a moment, trying to figure out how to tell her what she’d aptly described as my “strange story.”

“Hellooo. This going to take long?” she gibed. “I don’t mind missing dinner, but I intend to sleep tonight.”

“Sorry, just trying to decide how to start.”

“How about you start, say, at the beginning.”

“Okay, okay. From the top, then,” I began. “I’ve always thought of it as an awakening – my awakening. It happened while at
school. When I started there nearly twenty years ago, Ryerson University was a hotbed of political activism. I suspect it still is. Most universities were. Central America, racism, the Middle East, funding to universities, terrorism, human rights, equality, you name it, the student movement was engaged in it. The Ryerson Student Union, always leaning a little, or sometimes a lot, to the left, played a leadership role in the national student movement. I was doing my degree in journalism. I had a strong interest in politics and got involved after successfully navigating my first year of university.

“When I made it into second year with reasonable marks, I decided I could begin to dabble outside of the classroom. In the fall of my second year, a vacancy on the Student Representative Council opened up when one of the journalism reps transferred to another school. I ran in the by-election against one other student. I printed up brochures and a few posters and asked my professors if I could talk to the class before they started their lectures. They usually agreed. My opponent was far less serious about it all than I. He stopped just short of promising beer in the drinking fountains. Thankfully, my fellow students were a discerning lot, and I won. That was how it all started.

“I spent the next three years immersed in student politics and the national student movement. My outrage at injustice of all kinds grabbed me by the throat and just wouldn’t let go. One day I’d be marching for better working conditions for foreign workers. The next, I’d be writing a column in the student newspaper
about the lack of diversity on Canadian corporate boards. The day after that I’d join a sit-in protesting the university’s investment in companies that despoiled the environment. I was all over the activist’s map. And I really felt like I was doing something. In hindsight, I might have been ‘doing something,’ but I don’t think I was accomplishing anything. My colleagues and I were spreading ourselves very thin. Yet I’d never felt more fulfilled and energized in my life. I completely understand the powerful hold social movements can exert over their converts. It was almost like an addiction.”

She nodded and smiled.

“Anyway, in my final year, I was burning out, but I didn’t want to stop. I realized I needed to change something. I needed to focus in one area and put an end to my scattershot approach to activism. I thought I could contribute more and achieve more if I concentrated on one injustice, rather than all of them.”

“A wise call. And I gather you chose gender equality as your personal mission,” she said. I nodded. “Why?”

“I attended a powerful presentation about women in advertising given by a woman named Jean Kilbourne.”

“Killing Us Softly,”
she said, nodding. “She’s still a good friend.”

“Right! That was it. She was incredible. It was a revelation,” I explained. “Right after that, I started to see gender discrimination, injustice, inequality everywhere I looked. Not to get too melodramatic about it all, but it was as if the scales suddenly fell from my eyes, and I could see. And I saw it everywhere. Everywhere!”

Beverley just nodded and smiled again.

“Plus, I realized that I’d seen the whole gender-role streaming thing play out in my own family, I guess the same way it does in millions of other families. But it was more pronounced in mine – remind me to tell you about my mother some time – so it struck close to home.”

I paused in thought for a moment. Beverley let the silence hang, allowing me to hold the floor.

“But there was something else. I think it was partly a numbers game, for me. I decided if I was going to limit myself to one injustice, I wanted it to be ‘the big one.’ I figured that systemic gender discrimination prevails in every country and every society. So to put it crudely, I considered it more widespread than discrimination based on race, religion, sexual orientation, economic status, disabilities, and everything else. It won on the numbers. I think of it as the world’s most pervasive injustice. For me, equality of opportunity for women became the holy grail of social causes even though I was born into the ranks of those largely responsible for the inequity in the first place. Strange, I know, but not without logic.”

“Seems like a sound analysis to me, even for a man,” she said. “But quite rare among men. Some might call it downright weird. Not I, but some.”

“Yeah, well, plenty do think it’s weird, including my own mother, and many of the women I’ve dated in the last decade or so.”

“I’m sorry. I can see how that could pose a problem in affairs of the heart.”

“But it bugs me that everyone thinks it’s so odd that I should be a committed feminist. No one thought it was weird when so many white students worked on black voter registration drives in the south. Isn’t this the same thing?”

“In principle, yes, but in practice, perhaps not,” she replied. “Based on your father’s daily performances, he clearly has some Neanderthal tendencies. How does he feel about his hardcore feminist son?”

“Well, my dad is a lifelong Republican and spent his entire career, nearly forty years, on the line at Ford, surrounded mainly by like-minded men – not exactly a crucible of progressive social thought.”

“Ah, I see. So while you were focused on gender equality, he was focused on fender quality,” she quipped.

“Very nice,” I said.

“Thank you.”

“Anyway, for quite a while, I think my dad thought I was gay, or a communist, or perhaps a gay communist. I don’t quite fathom the logic in that. But my father has never been known for his logic.”

“What did you do after you decided on your cause?”

“I borrowed and bought books and started reading up on the history of sexism and the women’s movement. I knew that not being a woman left me unable to truly experience the injustice
I was fighting, so I tried to compensate by reading everything I could get my hands on. I read Wollstonecraft, de Beauvoir, Friedan, Millet, Dworkin, Jong, Brownmiller, MacKinnon, Steinem, you. I read
you
. I read them all, including the emerging Canadian feminist writers. In fact,
Women and Children First
by Michele Landsberg was as influential as almost anything else I read, back then.”

“My goodness, aren’t we earnest. I’m impressed. And you actually read their books? I mean, really read them?”

“Of course! Cover to cover. Most of them were great. The good ones made the issues so simple and straightforward. I remember thinking that if every man on earth could read one or two of those books, we might make significant progress in a very short time,” I said. “Anyway, in the longer term, my goal was to graduate and begin a career as a crusading freelance journalist, exposing injustice, righting wrongs, of course with a focus on women’s issues. Yeah, right. That worked out well.”

“Let me guess,” she said. “The world was not ready for a young man with the feminist bit between his teeth who wanted to write about women’s equality. You were an anomaly, an aberration, a freak.”

“Well, let’s go with anomaly, shall we?”

“Certainly,” she agreed. “So, however committed and informed you were, no one would hire you or assign you stories on the women’s beat because it just wasn’t credible. Some news outlets were skeptical. Some feminist editors might even have thought
of you as fifth columnist, an undercover agent from the male species, bent on keeping women in their place.”

“Wow, you are good,” I said. “It’s like you were there with me.”

“I know that world. It was my world, a long time ago.”

“Anyway, I ended up taking any writing gigs I could get, just to put food on the table and pay the rent. I’ve written very compelling newsletter stories for the Artificial Joint Manufacturers Association – think orthopedic, not narcotic – the Septic Tank Cleaners Association, the Canadian Society of Spiritualists, and the North American Broomball Federation. Surely you’ve read some of my work. I get all the big stories.”