I left home as an almost-eighteen year old, young, naive, and just a bit terrified.
Somehow — I will say miraculously — older women would come as friends into my life, to provide guidance and mentorship, to sustain me. Their mentorship was both intentional and otherwise.
I look back and am not certain what role I played in their lives. A re-connecting with the younger self? Reminder of nascent fire, albeit unfocused? An opportunity to grow patience and tongue-holding? Oh, I’ll bet there were so many words they could have said, and had to restrain themselves.
But I never had that feeling from even one of them. They understood the proportion of one mouth and two ears, and I loved them for it. Even if I could not articulate it at the time; surely acceptance is the biggest gift someone, anyone, can give you, from mentor to friend to lover. They gave me many gifts, in many forms.
The first of these women was Francesca
She was my night-school writing teacher. I’d wanted to “be a writer” since grade two, since I could read. But those precious Monday nights in Vancouver’s West End Community Center became the highest point of my week, the $33 fee stretched from my hairdressing apprentice’s paycheck.
She lived in the simplest one-room apartment, her bed a narrow mattress the width of a yoga mat and not much thicker. There was such self-denial in that bed, such angry independence; even I could see it. But I could also see hope and dignity, and commitment to the self, to hold on.
She spoke of Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing, and Virginia Woolf as if they were old friends. She smoked more than I did. One writing class evening, she commented “cliche!” on the subject matter of my poem. I was the youngest in the room by at least a dozen years. I was under-educated but learning all the time. Her words cut me and made me determined to read more. It took effort to return to the class the following week, but I did, head up, and kept writing.
After a couple years of working with her, listening to her expound on how selling one’s writing was prostitution of the soul, and how she was a “cultural missionary” to Canada (ouch), I realized that if I was going to grow in my own direction, I needed to move on. Yet, it was my time with her that had caused this very growth in me — the capacity to recognize this — and I was grateful to her for that. Even as I moved on.
Next was Kay
Miss Kay was a ballet teacher in the old way of a dance instructor. I did not spend long enough working with her. The building she taught within was sold and brought her long career to an abrupt end before I’d had the gift of even a year with her.
I’d long wanted to study dance, and I took advantage of the funds saved when I decided to quit smoking; it made sense to spend the same money on dance, on something that would remind me why I made the decision.
We lined up at the barre, and she taught us as if we were children, tucking in errant body parts, reminding us — over and over. This was no aerobics class. She taught us as if, at some future point, we might in fact be dancers. She spoke to us as dancers; it was the only language she knew, I suspected. But that must have been a decision she’d made at some point. One of us even advanced to toe shoes. What a gift — to be taken seriously. I absorbed the lesson.
When I work with writers, I assume they want to write.
Then there was Helen
Helen was the aging dress-maker who worked across the hall from my two-chair hair salon. Her life was about her work, and she could create anything with fabric, with skills from another time. She had a small and loyal number of clients, and from across the hall, my work-partner and I could hear her speaking of politics, and admonishing her clients to cease looking as if a rat had combed their hair, and to lose some weight. There was an art to how she got away with this, and they would return for more punishment and fabulous clothing, evening gowns, wedding dresses, perfectly-fitted women’s suits with hand-covered buttons.
“My colleagues are jealous of me,” I remember one woman’s voice floating across the hallway, with its self-satisfied tone. No wonder Helen would take them down a bit, even as she built them up. My own work-mate and I would exchange looks, and have a giggle.
Helen matched Archie Bunker for word mishaps, and the biggest giggle we shared was when she raved into our salon one day as we were drinking our coffee, smoking our cigarettes (remember those days?), and she began to rant about “women’s monthly administration” problems. I don’t believe I ever purchased another box of tampons without hearing her voice and those words.
In her 20s, she’d been “jilted” — not a word we hear anymore. She’d had a large circle of mixed friends, and her fiance had decided one of them appealed to him, and had eloped the night before the day that was supposed to be their wedding.
She would tell my work-mate and me about how that event and sorrow had made her decide never to love again. And she never did. She would inform any hapless date that while she loved to dance, she was not girlfriend material. She had many who tried (we’d seen the photographs — the war era “dinner dance photos” — and she was stunning) but her answer was always no.
By the time we knew her, she had a regimented life: spaghetti on Mondays, work late Thursday, grocery shop for the week Friday, allow herself to wear trousers on Saturday, when she might garden. She entered her workspace door at 8:30 a.m. and left at 5:00 — except for Thursday. 9:00 p.m. Sharp. Clockwork. Listened to political talk-shows on the radio. She could not eat store-bought food — everything was from scratch. She had canned cranberry sauce, once, for Thanksgiving, and was ill for days.
I asked her if I might join her on Thursday nights to work with her and learn more about sewing. She welcomed the company, and we sewed together and talked. She taught me how to change up patterns, and create a perfect bound buttonhole. She gave me an old dress-form I still have.
She was a lesson in trying to wrest control of one’s life. She was not unhappy. But I watched, I took note. I decided that pain would not shape who I am.
And Helen Two
Helen Two was a client. In many ways, the antithesis of Helen One.
She was of the roller-set and comb-out era, and every Saturday morning began with Helen Two, and her time under the dryer, book in hand. Always a book in hand. The best books.
I invited her to see A Midsummer’s Night Dream with me once, on a whim. She was the person in my life at the time who I thought would most appreciate it. It was the 80s, and Puck was on a skateboard, the stage a thrilling reverse half-pipe rising in the back of the set, illuminated with colored lights. Titania was queen in leather. Characters sported haircuts with shaved sides, lines to scalp, brilliant colors.
“It’s so different from my childhood,” Helen said in her softened Scottish accent, “with flowers and pastels.” She laughed. “I quite enjoyed that,” she added as we walked out.
She gave me her books as she finished reading them. There was no mistaking her voice when she said, as she handed them to me, “I will not be reading them again.” Life is too short to read the same again. Life is just short.
Every Saturday, I ignored the smell of alcohol. I did not know how to ask. What to ask. How would she know I cared? She’d lost her only son to a drunk driver on his grad night; it all made terrible sense.
So I never said anything. We just talked about books and life and the weather. And maybe that a blow-dryer and curling iron might cut it at some point. She did try that finally. And then I missed seeing her under the dryer, book in hand, cigarette smoke curling into the air.
Sometimes, in spite of our best efforts, pain still shapes us. Sometimes it is enough just to be. Accepting, humbled.
Now
I am back in Vancouver’s West End, once again, decades later. I suspect I am at an age when, in some eyes, I might be “old.” I’m not at all certain if I’m on the outside edge or the inside edge of middle-age.
I wonder if there is an opening for one creative writing night-school instructor at the Community Center. I will not tell a young writer that her ideas are cliche (though I might say that of her words).
I have made choices, from which others might glean and grow. Mistakes, too. All my own. And I have been given such gifts.
I loved meeting these women. Thank you Alison. You are and will be one of those women other women turn to 💞
There are such women in our little chapel sometimes I leave them a single rose 🌹and a note of gratitude in their pew. Yes I know where to find them.