Cat's eye (43 page)

But I am on shaky ground, in this testifying against men, because I live with one. Women like me, with a husband, a child, have been referred to with some scorn as
nukes,
for
nuclear family. Pronatalist
is suddenly a bad word. There are some other nukes in this group, but they are not in the majority and say nothing in their own defence. It seems to be worthier to be a woman with a child but no man. That way you’ve paid your dues. If you stay with the man, whatever problems you are having are your own fault. None of this is actually said.

These meetings are supposed to make me feel more powerful, and in some ways they do. Rage can move mountains. In addition, they amaze me: it’s shocking, and exciting, to hear such things emerging from the mouths of women. I begin to think that women I have thought were stupid, or wimps, may simply have been hiding things, as I was.

But these meetings also make me nervous, and I don’t understand why. I don’t say much, I am awkward and uncertain, because whatever I do say might be the wrong thing. I have not suffered enough, I haven’t paid my dues, I have no right to speak. I feel as if I’m standing outside a closed door while decisions are being made, disapproving judgments are being pronounced, inside, about me. At the same time I want to please.

Sisterhood is a difficult concept for me, I tell myself, because I never had a sister. Brotherhood is not. I work at night, when Sarah is asleep, or in the early morning. Right now I am painting the Virgin Mary. I paint her in blue, with the usual white veil, but with the head of a lioness. Christ lies in her lap in the form of a cub. If Christ is a lion, as he is in traditional iconography, why wouldn’t the Virgin Mary be a lioness? Anyway it seems to me more accurate about motherhood than the old bloodless milk-and-water Virgins of art history. My Virgin Mary is fierce, alert to danger, wild. She stares levely out at the viewer with her yellow lion’s eyes. A gnawed bone lies at her feet.

I paint the Virgin Mary descending to the earth, which is covered with snow and slush. She is wearing a winter coat over her blue robe, and has a purse slung over her shoulder. She’s carrying two brown paper bags full of groceries. Several things have fallen from the bags: an egg, an onion, an apple. She looks tired.

Our Lady of Perpetual Help
, I call her.

Jon does not like me painting at night. “When else can I do it?” I say. “You tell me.” There is only one answer, one that would not involve the loss of his own time:
Don’t do it at all.
But he doesn’t say this. He doesn’t say what he thinks of my paintings, but I know anyway. He thinks they are irrelevant. In his mind, what I paint is lumped in with the women who paint flowers.
Lumped
is the word. The present tense is moving forward, discarding concept after concept, and I am off to the side somewhere, fiddling with egg tempera and flat surfaces, as if the twentieth century has never happened. There is freedom in this: because it doesn’t matter what I do, I can do what I like. We have begun to slam doors, and to throw things. I throw my purse, an ashtray, a package of chocolate chips, which breaks on impact. We are picking up chocolate chips for days. Jon throws a glass of milk, the milk, not the glass: he knows his own strength, as I do not. He throws a box of Cheerios, unopened. The things I throw miss, although they are worse things. The things he throws hit, but are harmless. I begin to see how the line is crossed, between histrionics and murder. Jon smashes things, and glues the shards into place in the pattern of breakage. I can see the appeal. Jon sits in the living room, having a beer with one of the painters. I am in the kitchen, slamming around the pots.

“What’s with her?” says the painter.

“She’s mad because she’s a woman,” Jon says. This is something I haven’t heard for years, not since high school. Once it was a shaming thing to say, and crushing to have it said about you, by a man. It implied oddness, deformity, sexual malfunction.

I go to the living room doorway. “I’m not mad because I’m a woman,” I say. “I’m mad because you’re an asshole.”

S
ome of us from the meetings are having a group show, of women only. This is risky business, and we know it. Jody says we could get trashed, by the male art establishment. Their line these days is that great art transcends gender. Jody’s line is that art so far has been mostly men admiring one another. A woman artist can get admired by them only as a sideline, a sort of freaky exception. “Titless wonders,” says Jody.

We could get trashed by women as well, for singling ourselves out, putting ourselves forward. We could be called elitist. There are many pitfalls.

There are four of us in on the show. Carolyn, who has an angelic moon face framed in a Dutch cut with dark bangs, calls herself a fabric artist. Some of her pieces are patchwork quilts, in inventive designs. One has condoms stuffed with tampons (unused), glued onto it in the shapes of letters, spelling out WHAT IS LUV? Another is done in florals, with an appliquéd message:

MAN

IFESTO!

Or else she makes wall hangings out of toilet paper twisted like rope, braided and woven with reels of outdated girlie movies, the kind that used to be called “art films.” “Used porn,” she says cheerfully. “Why not recycle it, eh?”

Jody does store mannequins, sawn apart, the pieces glued back together in disturbing poses. She, fixes them up with paint and collage and steel wool stuck on at appropriate places. One hangs from a meat hook, stuck through the solar plexus, another has trees and flowers painted all over her face like fine tattooing, with a delicacy I wouldn’t have suspected from Jody. Another has the heads of six or seven old dolls attached to her stomach. I recognize some of them: Sparkle Plenty, Betsy Wetsy, Barbara Ann Scott.

Zillah is blond and skimpy, like the frail flower girls of a few years back. She calls her pieces
Lintscapes.
They are made from the wads of feltlike fuzz that accumulate on drier filters and can be peeled off in sheets. I have admired these myself as I stuffed them into the wastebasket: their texture, their soft colors. Zillah has bought a number of towels in different shades and run them repeatedly through the dryer, to get shades of pink, of gray-green, of off-white, as well as the standard underneath-the-bed gray. These she has cut and shaped and glued carefully to a backing, to form multilayered compositions that resemble cloudscapes. I am entranced by them, and wish I had thought of this first. “It’s like making a soufflé,”

Zillah says. “One breath of cold air and you’re dead in the water.”

Jody, who is more in charge than anyone, has gone through my paintings and chosen the ones for the show. She’s taken some of the still lifes,
Wringer, Toaster, Deadly Nightshade,
and
Three Witches.
Three Witches
is the one of the three different sofas.

Apart from the still lifes, what I’m showing is mostly figurative, although there are a couple of constructions made from drinking straws and uncooked macaroni, and one called
Silver Paper.
I didn’t want to include these, but Jody liked them. “Domestic materials,” she said. The Virgin Mary pieces are in the show, and all of the Mrs. Smeaths. I thought there were too many of her, but Jody wanted them. “It’s woman as anticheesecake,” she said. “Why should it always be young, beautiful women? It’s good to see the aging female body treated with compassion, for a change.” This, only in more high-flown language, is what she’s written in the catalogue. The show is held in a small defunct supermarket, west on Bloor Street. It is to be converted to a hamburger heaven, shortly; but meanwhile it’s empty, and one of the women who knows a cousin of the wife of the developer who owns it has managed to persuade him to let us use it for two weeks. She told him that in the Renaissance the most famous dukes were known for their aesthetic taste and patronage of the arts, and this idea appealed to him. He doesn’t know it’s an all-woman show; just some artists, is what she told him. He says it’s okay with him as long as we don’t get the place dirty.

“What’s to get dirty?” says Carolyn, as we look around. She’s right, it’s dirty enough already. The produce counters and shelves have been torn up, there are patches ripped off the erstwhile linoleum tile flooring where the wide bare boards show through, lights dangle in wire cages; only some of them work. The checkout counters are still in place, though, and there are a few tattered signs drooping on the walls: SPECIAL 3/95¢. FRESH FROM CALIFORNIA. MEAT LIKE YOU LIKE IT.

“We can make this space work for us,” says Jody, striding around with her hands in her coverall pockets.

“How?” says Zillah.

“I didn’t take judo for nothing,” says Jody. “Let the momentum of the enemy carry him off balance.”

In practice this means that she appropriates the MEAT LIKE YOU LIKE IT sign and incorporates it into one of her constructions, an especially violent dismemberment in which the mannequin, dressed only in ropes and leather straps, has ended up with her head tucked upside-down under her arm.

“If you were a man you’d get stomped for that,” Carolyn tells her.

Jody smiles sweetly. “But I’m not one.”

We work for three days, arranging and rearranging. After we have the stuff in place, there are the rented trestle tables to be assembled for the bar, the hooch and eats to be bought.
Hooch
and
eats
are Jody’s words. We get Canadian wine in gallon jugs, Styrofoam cups to serve it in, pretzels and potato chips, hunks of cheddar cheese wrapped in plastic film, Ritz crackers. This is what we can afford; but also there’s an unspoken rule that the food has to be unwaveringly plebeian. Our catalogue is a couple of mimeographed sheets stapled together at the top corner. This catalogue is supposed to be a collective effort, but in fact Jody has written most of it, because she has the knack. Carolyn makes a banner, out of bedsheets dyed to look as if someone’s bled on them, to hang above the outside door:

F(OUR) FOR ALL.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” says Jon, who has dropped by, supposedly to pick me up, really to see. He is suspicious of my doings with women, although he will not demean himself by saying so. He does however refer to them as “the girls.”

“It’s a pun on
free for all
” I tell him, although I know he knows this. “Plus it encapsulates the word
our.” Encapsulate
is also one of Jody’s words.

He does not comment.

It’s the banner that attracts the newspapers: this kind of thing is new, it’s an event, and it promises disruption. One newspaper sends a photographer, in advance, who says, jokingly, “Come on, girls, burn a few bras for me,” while he’s taking our pictures.

“Pig,” says Carolyn in a low voice.

“Cool it,” says Jody. “They love it when you freak.”

Before the opening, I come to the gallery early. I pace around the show, up and down the former aisles, around the checkout counters where Jody’s sculptures pose like models on a runway, past the wall where Carolyn’s quilts yell defiance. This is strong work, I think. Stronger than mine. Even Zillah’s gauzy constructions appear to me to have a confidence and subtlety, an assurance, that my own paintings lack: in this context my pictures are too highly finished, too decorative, too merely pretty. I have strayed off course, I have failed to make a statement. I am peripheral. I drink some of the awful wine and then some more, and feel better; although I know that later I will feel worse. The stuff tastes like something you’d use to tenderize pot roast. I stand against the wall, beside the door, hanging onto my Styrofoam cup. I’m standing here because it’s the exit. Also the entrance: people arrive, and then more people.

Many, most of these people are women. There are all kinds of them. They have long hair, long skirts, jeans and overalls, earrings, caps like construction workers‘, lavender shawls. Some of them are other painters, some just look like it. Carolyn and Jody and Zillah are here by now, and there are greetings called, squeezes of the arm, kisses on cheeks, shrieks of delight. They all seem to have more friends than I do, more close women friends. I’ve never really considered it before, this absence; I’ve assumed that other women were like me. They were, once. And now they are not.

There is Cordelia, of course. But I haven’t seen her for years.

Jon is not here yet, although he said he would come. We even got a baby-sitter so he could. I think maybe I will flirt with someone, someone inappropriate, just to see what could happen; but there aren’t many possibilities, because there aren’t many men. I make my way through the crowd with another Styrofoam cup of the dreadful red marinade, trying not to feel left out. Right behind me a woman’s voice says, “Well, they certainly are
different.
” It’s the quintessential Toronto middle-class-matron put-down, the ultimate disapproval. It’s what they say about slums. It would not look good over the sofa, is what she means. I turn and look at her: a well-cut silver-gray suit, pearls, a suave scarf, expensive suede shoes. She’s convinced of her own legitimacy, her right to pronounce: I and my kind are here on sufferance.

“Elaine, I’d like you to meet my mother,” says Jody. The idea of this woman being Jody’s mother is breathtaking. “Mum, Elaine did the flower painting. The one you like?”

She means
Deadly Nightshade.
“Oh yes,” says Jody’s mother, smiling warmly. “You girls are all so gifted. I did like that one, the colors are lovely. But what are all those eyes doing in it?”

This is so much what my own mother would say that I am swept with longing. I want my mother to be here. She would dislike most of this, the cut-up mannequins especially; she wouldn’t understand it at all. But she would smile, and dredge up something nice to say. Very recently I would have derided such talents. Now I have need of them.

I get myself another cup of wine and a Ritz cracker with some cheese on it, and peer through the crowd for Jon, for anyone. What I see, over the heads, is Mrs. Smeath.

Mrs. Smeath is watching me. She lies on the sofa with her turbanlike Sunday hat on, the afghan wrapped around her. I have named this one
Torontodalisque: Homage to Ingres,
because of the pose, and the rubber plant like a fan behind her. She sits in front of a mirror with half of her face peeling off, like the villain in a horror comic I once read; this one is called
Leprosy.
She stands in front of her sink, her wicked paring knife in one hand, a half-peeled potato in the other. This one is called AN•EYE•FOR•AN•EYE.