Thirteen Crucifixions 28

                                                                   1984

            Carol had never punched a man before in her life.  Nor had she ever shed blood.  She had always disapproved strongly of violence.  Gandhi and Martin Luther King were her mentors.  But this was the first time that she had ever been groped, if Randall had indeed groped her.  It was, perhaps, an accident?  He had been gesticulating quite wildly, perhaps he had not intended to brush his hand on her like that. But he smiled when he did it.  The hand of Richard alone which now rested in the crotch of a mahogany tree had ever touched Carol there.  Her mother had lost her left breast to cancer.  Perhaps Carol had not meant to hit Randall like that.  An overreaction.  Without thinking, she watched as her hand, a partly clenched fist, struck him in the face.  Should she have refused him, ten years ago, when he tried to seduce her?  Her mind still wasn’t made up.  The cookies were nice.  Chocolate chip.  Store-bought, but two were enough.  It was really the milk she craved.  Perhaps this was a breast thing?  Her breast?  Her mother’s, the one she’d lost?

            She suspected that Glen might be queer.  And he and Randall seemed to really like each other.  Randall a closet case?  A lot of men are, she thought.  Even Richard, who, in some of his letters admitted to having an amorous interest in a young male prostitute whom he had met in Victoria.  After that, Carol could no longer focus on his letters.  She was homophobic?  Not that she meant to be.  She was still afraid of hell-fire, so effective had been her father’s indoctrination.

            She sat now on a bed in Margery’s room.  Good, kind Margery.  Good, kind Dwight, for asking her to spend the night with them; for not wanting Carol to be alone, not in the state she was in.  She had just tried unsuccessfully to sleep.  Not that she really needed to.  She had just been adopted.  Carol was the honorary third.  She didn’t know what to assume about them.  They were some sort of couple?  Such enormously kind people.  This is what Carol was needing?  New friends?  Near her age.  People she could just be with, no pressure to compare and approve of respective ideologies.  Apolitical friendship?  If there could be such a thing.  She had become so used to alienating people, frightening them away with her formidable intellect, her eloquence, her matchless integrity.  Carol, with her electric blue glare, could stare down any politician or corporate baron—she had slain her share.  But to have friends?  Well, there were Stan and Suzanne—why didn’t she think of them as her friends?  That, if they no longer lived in the same house then there would be no occasion for their seeing each other?  The house alone held them together?  But how could Carol tell?  She treated them like her inferiors.  Not just that Suzanne had become Stan’s ticket to freedom from her, when Carol herself had become thus liberated into her only true romance, ever, with Richard, whose head now was rolling, detached from his body, like a blue eyed soccer ball across the mountains of Nicaragua.  They weren’t friends, they were lovers.  And he was twelve years older.  She had at times hoped feebly that Stan or Suzanne would show some spark of intellect, some interest in the world that lay outside of their small and petty little lives.  She had never known anyone so shallow as those two.  Nor had Carol ever experienced, till now from Margery and Dwight, such an outpouring of disinterested love as from Stan and Suzanne.  She loved them.  Carol had never admitted this before.  She loved her ex-husband, with whom she had never consummated the marriage, and Carol also loved his young little common-law wife, as though they were her own brother and sister.  She was embarrassed by them?  Such ingratitude!  Margery and Dwight could never stand in, or replace Stan and Suzanne. But Carol could already feel her heart enlarging, her personal frontier expanding to accept and include two more, and with Glen, another.  And Randall?  She didn’t want to think about Randall.

            She put down the book—Winnie the Pooh, courtesy of Dwight, who insisted that nothing went better with chocolate chip cookies and milk.  To Carol’s surprise she was enjoying this, this being at thirty-one the child she had always been forbidden to be.  Her father would never have permitted her to read A. A. Milne, nor even Beatrix Potter, and certainly not that paedophile Lewis Carroll!  Writings of the Devil! He had declared them, permitting Carol and her latently gay brother only the pleasures of certain Bible stories.  At eighteen she finally broke free, moving to Victoria, ostensibly where she would be studying nursing.  Carol, instead, enrolled in the religious studies program in one of the colleges.  Irrationally, she began to fear eternal damnation, so she switched to English literature. She lived with a Catholic roommate, a dark-haired girl named Marnie, with who she stayed for three years until Randall, Marnie’s boyfriend at the time, tried to coax Carol into bed with him.

            During this time, she never visited her parents, preferring instead to communicate by post with scant and only the most essential information.  She already knew that her father didn’t want to see Carol until she’d repented of her deception and apostasy.  Occasionally her mother came to visit her in Victoria.  Though disappointed, she seemed to accept her daughter’s reluctance to attend church.  Carol had simply immersed herself into every good thing that her father had denied her.  Except sex. She was “saving” herself for marriage.  She still dressed modestly, in unfashionable knee length skirts and sensible shoes.  She couldn’t bring herself to wear jeans, nor any kind of trouser. The truth was for Carol that this solo venture out into the godless world was so terrifying that she had to cling savagely to the tenets of her upbringing.  Which for her meant dressing as unattractively as possible and refusing to let a man anywhere near her.  Her personal discovery of coffee became for Carol her real rebellious sinful indulgence.  Alcohol was still out of the question, and drugs?  Even with half the campus smoking pot in every corner and corridor Carol did not seem to know that it even existed.  She studied.  She read.  She worked part time as a waitress.  She avoided men, and all occasions towards sin.  She was usually exhausted by day’s end.

            Reading literary classics and listening to Marnie’s records were Carol’s real pleasures.  She eschewed TV, finding the programming moronic.  She had never watched any before, given that her father had forbidden it as a tool of the devil.  Marnie was her only friend.  She didn’t want anyone else in her life. Marnie was going to major in social work.  Then Randall began to appear.  Frequently.  He dropped in often, when just Carol was home, becoming Carol’s second friend.  They both became Carol’s windows onto the life that her father and upbringing had denied her.  She never took to Marnie’s habit of wearing make-up and cologne.  But watching her, chatting with her roommate while she made herself pretty for her boyfriend, or talking about this singer, or that band, or discussing the themes that she descried in Dickens, Thackeray, and Virginia Woolf, nourished and vitalized Carol in a way that she’d never realized possible.  In their last year together, Marnie began giving Carol some of her dresses.  She still couldn’t convince her to wear pants.  Marnie had particularly beautiful clothes, and Carol was soon resplendent in linens, cottons and silks, solidly hued in copper, emerald and cobalt blue.  Carol accepted the risque hemlines, delighting in the discovery that she had lovely legs, that she wore nice clothes very well.  That she was really a very attractive young woman.  Her hair remained fashionably long, but she even then always wore it up in its unfashionable schoolmarm bun.  She still wouldn’t wear make-up.

            They began to invite her out with them.  Usually Carol declined, but sometimes she went with them. She discovered that she enjoyed movies. But not concerts, and certainly not bars.  She never lost the basics of her religious upbringing.  Carol steadfastly believed in God, in Jesus, and in the teachings of the Bible.  She avoided church.  Growing up with a fundamentalist preacher for a father had thoroughly soured it for her.  She enjoyed sleeping late on Sundays, and eating brunch with Marnie and Randall, who never spent the night since it was a tiny one bedroom that the women were sharing.  Liking Randall, she couldn’t say that she more than liked him.  Nor did she think of him as handsome.  She found him nice, kind.  Very pleasant.  A bit self-absorbed, perhaps.  Until he began to visit Carol alone, then he would open up, telling her about his childhood—isolated like Carol’s, in a rural community, and also a domineering tyrant for a father.  He insisted that he could talk more easily with Carol than with Marnie, his own girlfriend. One afternoon, while they drank tea at the kitchen table, Randall got up and kissed Carol in a way she didn’t like.  Right on the mouth, and more than just on the mouth.  She didn’t respond, but sat there, dull and perplexed.  She had never been kissed that way before, nor could she tell if she liked it or not.  Randall wanted to stay longer.  Marnie was away for the weekend at her parents.  Carol didn’t think it was a good idea.  When Randall tried to stroke her back, Carol flinched, then told him to please leave.
            Complete innocent that she was, Carol felt terribly confused.  She wasn’t aware that she had responded, if only mildly, to Randall’s sexual advance.  That she even found it rather enjoyable.  But terribly, terribly confusing, for neither was she aware that she had just been violated, that he was exploiting her vulnerability.  When he left she lay on her bed and cried.  She told Marnie nothing about Randall upon her return, but soon was finding that she was busy whenever they invited her anywhere.  The situation soon resolved itself when Marnie moved to Calgary, and Carol suddenly was not able to meet the full rent of the apartment.  Randall was no longer around, and Carol answered an ad in a local grocery store in James Bay and moved into a house she would be sharing with four political activists.  She also changed jobs, working now as a cashier in the same grocery store.

Her housemates, two of whom were American draft-resisters, were all working against the nuclear arms race.  Carol began to read about King and Gandhi.  She was soon participating in workshops and demonstrations.  She began to wear blue jeans and long peasant dresses.  Instead of losing her religion, peace activism simply re-enforced for Carol what she’d always deeply believed, that the God she loved was a God of Justice, Peace and Love.  But she was soon finding herself isolated. They said that it was because of where she worked.  This store was part of an American chain which, naturally, put profits over people.  Carol herself had found this out when she was on several occasions threatened with dismissal for offering free groceries to beggars.  But she didn’t feel that she could leave her job.  She had been brought up to be responsible, and responsible she would remain.  One day, Amanda, one of her housemates, took Carol aside in order to explain to her some facts of life.  Amanda was a lesbian, which didn’t much matter to Carol, since her brother Thomas had already been exiled from the family for being homosexual.  “There is something that you’re not understanding, Carol”, she said very kindly over a cup of coffee.  “Almost all the men here are in love with you. And their girlfriends don’t like it.”  Carol played dumb.  “It’s never occurred to you that you are a beautiful young woman, as well as highly intelligent, and extremely moral.   You don’t realize what a threat this makes you.”

            Carol, again disillusioned, promptly gave her notice and moved to a housekeeping room near Beacon Hill Park.  Uncompromising by nature she severed her connections with everyone apart from Amanda, who alone had had the courage to tell Carol the truth.  She continued to work at the grocery store.  She read a lot, met weekly with Amanda, now her only friend, over coffee.  Much to Carol’s relief she was not Amanda’s “type”, who anyway was already involved in a committed relationship with a woman.  She was ten years older than Carol who accepted her role as her mentor.  She wasn’t exactly depressed, but deeply puzzled about where she was going, and what her next move should be.  A year later, Carol moved to Vancouver, where she spent six months on the sofa of a friend of Amanda’s before she met Stan.

According to Doris Goldberg, “Peace-making” had become for Carol her new religion, though her core Christian beliefs remained staunch and unaltered.  Then Richard began to remind her that in reality Carol was worshiping at the altar of Martin Luther King inside the temple of Mahatma Gandhi.  Richard, whose fine body was now scattered across the mountains of Nicaragua.  She, and Doris Goldberg, had each delivered two of the most memorable speeches ever heard in the history of Vancouver’s peace movement.  And then Carol bloodied the nose of Randall.  She lacked Satyagraha—soul-force.  She seldom prayed, never holding sufficiently still to meditate properly.  Carol was too busy to sit still?  Too busy doing, too busy—too busy what?  How could she heal this wound that bled forever?  Wounded.  Carol Harley-Atkinson, a wounded woman, being stalked by a handsome, weasely and amoral journalist who had yet to write concerning her one single true or accurate word.  At this most ordinary of moments, she was making, thanks to Margery’s candid self-disclosure, a critical decision.  Carol had not been living true.  She had been basing her life on a lie?  There was nothing untrue about peace and justice.  Carol herself was the lie?  What could she say?  What could she say—that Richard was now dead and that she, or part of herself had perished with him?  What she wouldn’t do right now, just now, once more to feel anywhere upon her body the touch of Richard’s hand.