Rebellious Daughters (9 page)

Out of all my adolescent rebellions, when it came to boys, Ron was the most flamboyant. He was 34, a gifted
yet penniless musician. Following a recent divorce, he had returned to Ashdod after years in Tel Aviv to live in his mother's basement. We met when I was 17 and working as a young reporter for a popular national youth magazine. I interviewed him about his music, he interviewed me for the role of his girlfriend. That article was never published, but we became an item.

I loved the outrage of us getting together. I loved the subtle scent of marijuana that clung to Ron's clothes, the way he let his curls grow long, his golden pirate-like earring, his taste for arty movies. He drove an ancient, ostentatiously purple, roofless Volvo prone to breakdowns. Sometimes when Ron came to pick me up from my apartment block populated with pious Georgian Jews, his friend Dudu, once a sailor and now a smalltime crook, would sit in the back of Volvo with his bare feet up, sporting a badly cut mullet and crooked teeth. They would play Pink Floyd really loud. My neighbours would stare at me and my entourage with wonder, as if we had just landed from Mars in our incompetent purple spaceship. Knowing my mother was also watching us from the window, I would bend over to give Ron a throat-deep kiss before getting into the car. It didn't take long until the local boys began spreading rumours about my supposed sexual sophistication.

The irony was that neither the boys nor my mother were right. Despite my Lolita outfits, the considerable
number of boyfriends I collected along the filthy path of my adolescence, and now Ron, whom I flaunted as boldly as I did my bare abdomen, I was embarrassingly chaste – at least by the standards of my friends, many of whom had begun having sex way before I scored my first kiss. I held onto my virginity with the force of a Rottweiler's bite, refusing to let the ultimate filth enter my life (metaphorically and physically), even when my flesh scorched with desire.

In Ron's case, though, I didn't find it that hard to resist sex (and for his part, being a romantic, he didn't pressure me much, assuming we had before us an unlimited future together). I didn't like the thinness of him, the somewhat feminine handsomeness of his melancholy face, his penchant for oversized buttoned shirts. Our heavy petting left me feeling queasy. But he was the perfect antidote to my life at home. The version of Ron I loved was the one I saw on stage when he performed with his band. And he carried the aura of someone who had really lived in Tel Aviv, the cultural Mecca of our country, at the time when I was making my first, tentative advances towards that city (my magazine's offices were based there). Ironically, it was Ron's Tel Aviv-ness that eventually led to my – and then our – demise.

A budding writer, I took my work as a reporter superseriously (at the expense of attending school). My output was high and my name became familiar to the
magazine's readers. But what I was really yearning for was intellectual respect for my provincially based, migrant, insecure self from our chief editor, a well-known young adult fiction author and the only ‘famous writer' I knew in person. He never invited me in for conversations in his office or sent me on special assignments like he did with his favourites. The only time I was summoned to the coveted office was when this editor proposed interviewing my family. He wanted to write an article about our past as dissidents in the Soviet Union. I was overwhelmed by his sudden interest, which I saw as my only opportunity to win his more sustained attention and, by extension, to make my claim in the circle of real writers. I begged my timid parents to say ‘yes'.

Not long before the scheduled interview, Ron took me to his Tel Aviv, which was the city of other semiemployed musicians performing in semi-attended bars for semi-attentive audiences. We listened to his friends jamming in a wood-laden pub on King George Street. Absorbed in the music, we missed the last bus to Ashdod.

I knew my mother's wrath, if I stayed out all night with Ron, would be mighty. This was something I was strictly forbidden from doing with any boyfriend, let alone an older and disreputable one like Ron. But we couldn't afford a taxi and so crashed the night on the couch of Ron's drummer friend.

If I had held onto my virginity in the privacy of Ron's mother's basement, there was little chance I would lose it now, in this crowded shared apartment. But for my mother, that night I didn't come home stood for a mythical straw that broke the poor camel's back. Besides, she – who thought my writerly aspirations an annoyance, an interference with school, a misstep on my way to some solid career in social work or perhaps education – finally had a way to exact revenge on her rebellious daughter. There would be no interview, no matter how much I pleaded.

As a disappointment to our editor, I was now sunk back into anonymity in the office, with no prospect of ascending the magazine's ladder. This devastated me. Already deeply insecure around my sophisticated peers from Tel Aviv, I felt I had sabotaged my entire literary future. This sense of failure lingered in me for a long, long time, even after I later had books published. And at that time, my bitterness seeped into my feelings towards Ron too, accelerating my decision to break up with him.

I never let my mother know, refusing her the satisfaction, but I actually lost my virginity only at the age of 20, at the end of my army service, when I had already been living away from my parents for a year. I did this with yet another boyfriend whom I didn't particularly love,
but this time his body – swarthy, lean, smooth – truly appealed to me. With him, and at that age, the idea of penetration no longer repelled me, not in theory nor in practice when the practice finally began.

I was glad I waited to have sex only when I was truly ready and didn't succumb to my boyfriends' pressures nor blindly followed the zeitgeist of my generation that postulated that adolescent virginity wasn't cool. In this way, I launched into my sex life with a healthy sense of self-respect, and perhaps, I concede, some of my persistence in waiting for the right time was inspired by my strict upbringing. Still, it took me at least six years and quite a few lovers for the feeling of revulsion to slink away completely from between my sheets. Even to this day some shreds of shame remain. Sometimes, when I make love, I still find it difficult to let go. I still won't go to a chemist to buy any sex-related paraphernalia. But these internal battles are no longer epic. Sex lost its filthy edge and has become what it should be: mostly pleasure, sometimes a chore, and on some occasions – a reason to live.

So you would think that by the time both Sexpo and my mother arrived in Melbourne – with the life I created here, in my own image, where I was a writer and a happy wife to a spunky husband, and fancied myself as sexually liberated (or rather, rehabilitated) enough to invite the world into my bedroom through my memoir about non-monogamy – I would be able to put the past behind. But
no. My mother was here and I was ready for my revenge. ‘Lubochka, what lovely-looking torches!' My mother, excitable by nature, exclaimed as we entered Sexpo, its stalls and performance stages sprawling across the gigantic Melbourne Exhibition Centre. At once we were faced with Sexpo's buzz, both metaphorical and literal, for the ‘torches' were exuding loud electric sounds.

‘Those are vibrators, Mama.'

‘Ah...' My mother stopped still.

I looked at her with apprehension. In her sensible shoes, a fluffy wig, opaque stockings and a long-sleeved dress that barely contained her rolls of flesh, my mother fitted into this crowd of bearded hipsters with jeans beginning around their pubic bones and anorexic women in little frocks no better than I once had into our building in Ashdod. The difference was, I had chosen to stand out back then while she followed me here blissfully ignorant, like those poor children did when they trailed the pied piper to their doom.

I expected my mother to get angry at me for bringing her into this merry
gadost
, to tell me, as she used to when I really got onto her nerves, that I was selfish, that I did everything to spite her. But she just kept standing there with her plump arms hanging by her sides, inert. It was so strange seeing her like that, for my mother was a woman always on the move, busy with her children, prayers, teaching jobs, domestic preparations for the
countless Jewish holidays. Rather than enjoying the success of my plan, I felt like crying.

‘So… What would you like us to do now, Lubochka?' My mother looked at me uncharacteristically uncertain. At the sound of her Russian, a few of the hipsters glanced in our direction, incredulous.

What would you like us to do
…? To be honest, I'd have liked us to go home. By now I was already fully regretting my juvenile attempt at revenge. Too late perhaps, I realised this bacchanalia I had brought my poor mother into might make her feel inadequate. In recent years, before my thirst for revenge had overpowered me, I had reconsidered my mother's sexual attitudes in the light of her upbringing. She, who up until her early thirties had lived a secular life, nevertheless had spent her youth in a puritanical atmosphere. In the Soviet Union, even more so than in Judaism (which at least postulates that it is a husband's duty to pleasure his wife in bed), sex was taboo. The erotic drive was chaotic, unpredictable and powerful, and therefore – from the government's point of view – had no place in Soviet society. The authorities worried sex would interfere with the main function of the citizens: to serve the state.

If anyone did speak about sex in the Soviet Union, the language was either clinical or particularly degrading in its obscenity (the latter might explain my mother's rejection of any sexual vocabulary). Ignorance ruled and, for
women, following your desire often meant unwanted pregnancies. Then there was the problem of space. Most apartments in major Soviet cities were partitioned in a frugal, rather cruel, manner, allocating one room per family often composed of three generations. Sexologists who studied the Soviet Union consider this lack of privacy, which meant sex was often tied up with embarrassment and (internalised) fear of interruption, as one of the major sources of the sexual neuroses so common in that country. When we lived there, my family was lucky to have a small apartment to ourselves. Still, my parents, along with my little brothers, slept in one room which also served as our living room, and shared a door with my grandmother's adjacent room. They were only in their thirties then, supposedly in the prime of their sexuality, and this bedroom arrangement must have been tough on them.

I was now feeling increasingly sorry for my mother and, by extension, for that entire generation of women who had come of age with no privacy and in ignorance, in a culture where men often stunk of alcohol and had poor personal hygiene. Of course my mother would associate sex with filth. I wanted to rescue her here, at Sexpo. I patted her shoulder, reassuring her we didn't have to stay, we could leave straight away.

‘Leave?' my mother asked, puzzled. ‘But there's still so much to see,
dochenka
, my little daughter.'

At that, she regained her usual speed. Despite my
mother's weight and her bad leg, which she broke years ago while climbing Golan Mountains in Israel, she could move well. Now, before I even had a chance to respond, my mother was already several stalls away from me, buried deep in other types of mountains – stacks of penis rings and whips.

‘Try this, Lubochka!' she yelled from a distance, holding something garishly pink and quivering obscenely against her palm. I nervously looked around to see if anyone I knew was there...

We kept walking through stalls offering what appeared to me identical merchandise, just under different brand names. Yet my mother seemed to be spotting the differences, and was navigating her way around the dildos with an ardour she usually reserved for exploring nature and biblical tracts. It was I who was feeling disgruntled here.

In my vengeful mood, I had forgotten how unappealing I found the adult industry. Sexpo was just another example of the damage our consumerist culture has inflicted upon erotica, which is more likely to thrive on mystery and a certain darkness than on blatant marketing and kitsch. Here, under the brutal electric lights conducive to exhibiting the goods, bunny-shaped clitoral stimulators glittered cheerfully, strippers in pink G-strings flaunted friendly attendant smiles and stall displays crumbled under the masses of Madonna-style conical bras. Joseph Brodsky, my favorite Russian poet, famously warned
against such ubiquity in his essay,
Less than One
. He wrote that ever since he had grown up amidst the overwhelming amount of Soviet propaganda, exemplified in the excess of images of communist leaders in public spaces, any large quantities of the same thing appeared to him to be in bad taste.

I tapped my busy mother on her back: ‘Remember what Brodsky said? A few trees are beautiful, but a forest is banal. Have you had enough?'

‘Yes, of course, Lubochka,' my mother mumbled in that benign agreeableness she exhibited whenever she wasn't actually listening to me, then returned to examining a rack of DVDs with titles such as
Anal Delight
and
Who is Afraid of Dick's Cock?
Still, despite her absorption, she was quick to catch an announcement over the loud speakers that the penis puppetry show was about to begin. The enormous screen projected a close up of the puppeteer's freckled hands twisting his fleshy, reddish cock into the shape of a turtle.

‘
Tfu
!' spat my mother. ‘What a shameful activity. Do you think we can get closer to the stage?'

Should I have really been that surprised that my pious mother could sometimes be more frivolous than I was? I, who had studied her closely for years, both for the sake of my writing and for my sanity, should have acknowledged that my mother accommodates more paradoxes
than most, possibly because of the many metamorphoses she has undergone in her life. Before she fell in love with God, my mother enjoyed waving red flags and dancing the night away. Afterwards she began a career battling the KGB for the right to practise her religion. The state retaliated and she lost her job as a translator, working instead as a street cleaner. In Israel my mother reinvented herself as a teacher of Hebrew, only to later move to New York where she now gave classes on the bible – in Russian. Having lived through all those reincarnations, she hadn't discarded her previous selves, as converts of any persuasion often do. Instead, to paraphrase Whitman, she had retained a capacity to contain multitudes, as contrary to each other as they could be.