LITMIR.BIZ

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years was read. I read books and I discovered that there were places in the world other than Ottawa and people in the world other than my sister and I couldn’t wait to see them. I knew one day I would get out, but in the meantime I read and finished high school early. My mother told me I couldn’t just hang around the house every day. So for the first year after high school I went to the library every day and read. Which suited me fine because I couldn’t stand my sister and I wanted to get out anyway.

      “And then, when I was seventeen I went to a party at the National Film Board and met a man who took me up in a back elevator to drink liquor. And it changed my life. I will never forget it. I smelled the silver nitrate on the film stock and I was intoxicated. I could think of nothing else. I knew I wanted to make films.

      “So I went back the next day. ‘Can I help you?’ a woman behind a desk asked me. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’d like a job.’ ‘What can you do? Are you a writer?’ she said. ‘Are you a director? An editor?’ she asked. ‘No,’ I said. ‘What can you do?’ she asked. ‘Nothing. But I can learn,’ I said. ‘No,’ she said, ‘that’s not how it works.’ ‘Well this is where I want to work,’ I told her. ‘That may be true,’ she said to me, ‘but unless you know how to do something we can’t hire you.’ ‘Oh,’ I said and I went and sat down in the waiting room.

      “‘Excuse me? What are you doing?’ she asked me. ‘Well I’m just going to sit here until something opens up,’ I said. ‘You can sit there as long as you want, but even if something opens up we’re not hiring you until you know how to do something.’ ‘Well I think I’ll just sit here. This is where I want to work.’

      “So I sat in the waiting room at the National Film Board of Canada every day for two weeks until they gave me a job. And I followed a man down a long hallway to a door with a sign on it that said NFBC DISTRIBUTION. Now, I had no idea what distribution meant but I went back to the woman at the front and I said, ‘Excuse me this isn’t what I had in mind.’ ‘I beg your pardon?’ She looked like she was going to kill me. ‘Well there’s just a lot of desks and filing cabinets in there,’ I said. ‘It’s not very interesting. I want to learn how to make films. That’s what I came here for. I don’t think I’ll learn that in there.’”

      And thus began my mother’s illustrious career at the National Film Board of Canada, where she escaped her family, made documentaries, met two men with whom she had four children and each of whom left her a widow. The end.

      Dinner is served.

      

      I meet a woman named Rita Marie Ross. She is Italian. She has inkblack hair in the style of Louise Brooks and a signature that strongly resembles the logo for Saks Fifth Avenue. Her skin is the color of vanilla ice cream and her lipstick is the color of the inside of a pomegranate. She is the most well-read, educated person I have ever met. She is appalled that I do not have a skin-care line. When I invite her for dinner she sends flowers and a thank-you note. She instructs me on the importance of good manners. She takes me to get a manicure every week right around the corner from where I grew up on Park Avenue. She makes me get a Saks card and commit to a moisturizing program. She teaches me that there is no shame in being a waitress. She says everyone in the world has a job to perform and there is honor and satisfaction in a job well done. She worked at a newspaper. She taught English to Raymond Carver. She published two books. She had a baby when she was nineteen and gave it up for adoption. She has lived more than anyone I know except my own mother. She smokes Camel straights, and when she laughs it rocks the room. She owns art. She is forty-five. I am twenty-five. She is my hero. When I meet my husband, who I don’t know is going to be my husband, she smiles at me and says in her low smoker’s drawl, “Oh, Catherine, you are having a life-changing experience.” She is a waitress where I work. My mother doesn’t like her at all.

      “Sterling Jackson made my knees into jelly,” my mother says walking out the double door of her office building. It is a story I have loved hearing ever since I started dating. “I was absolutely helpless. He treated me rotten and I would say, ‘I’m not gonna see him anymore,’ and the weekend would come and he would call and I would send the kids to my mother’s so I could be alone with him. Half the time he’d cancel and I would curse him and swear not to see him anymore and the next weekend would come and he would call and I would drop everything. Finally, thank God, he stopped calling me. Years later I was having a business lunch at the Dorset and someone said, ‘Isn’t that Sterling Jackson?’ And I hadn’t thought about Sterling Jackson for years. He hadn’t entered my mind. And there I was at lunch and I heard his name and my knees turned to jelly and I thought I was going to fall right under the table. ‘Whatever happened to Sterling Jackson?’ I managed to ask. ‘He just got married,’ someone said. ‘Again,’ someone else said and the rest of lunch was a blur. He made me crazy.”

      “And then you ran into him again eventually. Right?” I say, knowing the ending.

      “That’s right. Years later I went back to Toronto for a conference and he was there. I’d heard he’d had some trouble and he looked old. He came up to me and, I’ll never forget it, he said in the same voice, ‘God I’ve missed you. Let’s get together. Where you staying?’ And I said, ‘The Sutton Place. Room 217.’ But I was staying at the Park Plaza. And the next morning he found me and he was furious and he said, ‘Where were you last night?’ and I said, ‘I must have forgotten,’ and I walked away. And that is the last time I saw Sterling Jackson.”

      

      My new boyfriend, who Rita smiled so wisely about, is older than me and makes dinner reservations. He wears real shoes. I have never gone out with anyone who didn’t wear Converse All Stars or combat boots. He has a car. He has a gold American Express card. He takes me in like a stray. I decide to break up with him because I am bored. But before I do, he appears carrying a breakfast tray covered in red roses. I watch him bring it to me in my bed and have the strangest sensation. I feel feverish and my stomach hurts. And then I realize: I am safe. He makes me feel safe. I borrow money from a family friend to buy him a gold watch for Christmas. I get it engraved “Boy oh Boy.” He gives me a gold watch on a chain engraved with my initials. It is very “Gift of the Magi.” When he tells me he loves me, I wish he hadn’t. It is too soon and I have nowhere else to go. He owns a store across the street from the bar I work in and he watches me every day from his window. He proposes on our one-year anniversary. I call my mother from a phone booth in upstate New York, ashamed. My giant engagement ring doesn’t suit me. I feel like I am wearing a big SOLD sign. “I’m getting married,” I say. I want to hear her say, “Don’t worry.”

      “Well good luck,” she says. And hangs up.

      

      I get a job at Barneys. I can sneak out and run a half a block down Seventeenth Street to the theater I work at for fittings. I can go to rehearsals on my lunch break and my husband can’t see me through the window anymore. The dressing room at the theater company is just one room with a curtain hanging down the middle. My husband says this is wrong. He thinks all we do at the theater is undress in front of each other. He says he will start undressing at his store. I tell him it’s not really the same thing. “Why?” he says. “If there’s nothing wrong with it at the theater then there shouldn’t be anything wrong with it where I work. Barneys,” he continues, “has separate locker rooms. Why? Maybe because it is not normal to undress in front of people that you work with!” He is really bugging me. I get a part in the Issues Project. This year’s “issue” is censorship.

      “Oh great,” my husband says. “Censorship. So what, there’ll be like what? A bunch of naked people on stage?”

      “Gross,” I say. “What is wrong with you? Only someone as narrowminded as you would think of such a dumb expression of censorship. There are a lot more interesting and imaginative, less literal, classier ways of expressing censorship than taking your clothes off. And believe me, they will think of them, even if you can’t.”

      I storm out. The night of dress rehearsal I watch all the plays for the first time. The lights dim for the first set change and four people silently appear on stage to move the furniture. And what do you know?

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