ROBERTA REES
I
That she reached menopause, my mother. That she reached menstruation.
That she survived, gave birth to four children she raised with ferocious big-hearted love.
Oxygen tubes up her nose in her little subsidized apartment where she cooks for anyone who looks hungry, tells bullies to fuck off, hangs a sign on her door, “Evie’s Massage Parlour, Take Your Clothes Off Before You Enter.”
II
Menopause began one-ovaried, surgically induced when she was thirty-seven. In the mountain village where we lived, broody mountains all around, the grey-gouged face of Turtle Mountain rising above town at the west end of Main Street, its ninety million tons of fractured limestone rubbling the valley of coal mining towns necklaced along the river.
Bellevue. The funny looks when we told people where we lived. An intense place, our Bellevue, forty years ago when my mother was thirty-seven — big thighed, bulgy muscled from pitching softball, hitting homeruns out of ballparks, running twelve machines at a cable winding factory up the valley — stopped on her way uptown to get our mail and run errands at the Seniors’ Centre where they called her “Legs.”
Stopped in the -30°F breath-snapping, constant wind, braced herself against the wall of a plumbing shop, a wave of heat igniting her, drenching her in dizzy sweat. “What the hell, what the goddamned hell.”
“Menopause,” the post-mistress told her as my mother whipped off her coat and scarf, a sensation of drowning, heart pounding, gasping for air.
“You’re less of a woman now, no wonder your husband left you,” another woman said when my father, my mother’s shy handsome lover since their teens — two homeless youths longing for love and security — at thirty-five ran away from our home with a singer from his band, and they sang their way through the U.S. while my mother ran her twelve machines at the cable plant.
When she was working the night shift she hemorrhaged, blood poured through her clothes onto the cement floor between her machines, washed across the concrete and a man at the next bank of machines ran for towels, said he felt like he was going to pass out.
III
“Don’t feel sorry for me,” she says, flipping the tangled cord that tethers her to the oxygen machine constantly humming in the entrance to her apartment. “This is my life. It isn’t who I am. I’ve had a good life.”
I nod, take off my shirt, my bra, so she can massage my shoulders and back, the way she did when I was the baby she birthed at seventeen, the way she has my whole life. Look up at the photos of grandkids on her green walls, photos of her in Australia when she was fifty-five and taking what she called her “happy shot” to stop the spontaneous human combustion that would boil up, drench her with sweat and foul temper.
“I can’t take hormones,” I say, sweat beading my back under her skinny fingers, my heart starting that erratic thump-thump-thumping that quakes the bones, “migraines, risk of stroke.”
“I worry about your migraines,” she says, “your Auntie Mert died at fifty-one after a three-day migraine.”
Wheeze enters her boned-down chest, the heavy wet cough coming up, slumping her forward, unable to breathe in or out, drowning in thick phlegm and so I sit silent, “Don’t hover when I get like that,” while she heaves and rocks and coughs and pants.
I focus on the photos of her on her fridge:
Robust and smiling, sometime in her forties, receiving first prize in a horseshoe pitching tournament.
In her ball uniform, head cocked, cocky grin, squinting into the sun, her face middle age proud.
Also at middle age in her blue flowered pie dress, the hundreds of pies she baked to sell at markets, entered into pie baking contests at summer fairs. Baked, packed, carried hundreds of pies.
On a painting ladder, that meditative gaze when she got up in the middle of the night, took her tools to whatever home or business or construction site she was contracting to, spent nights and days getting the job right and loving the dance of challenge and skill, providing for herself after my father — who came home from his singing spree months after he left, unable to forgive himself — died at fifty, and my mother did forgive, loved and nursed him for two agonizing years. Construction chemicals poisoning her unprotected lungs.
On a horse in Australia where she got a job guiding tourists on horseback through the rainforest, her back straight, easy and alert on her horse, a feather in the band of her Akubra hat pulled low over her brow.
A photo of her we had enlarged for her seventy-fifth birthday — fifteen, athletic arms, legs, gabardine cowboy pants, cowboy hat, laughing in the sun.
And finally the phlegm spews from her body into a Kleenex and she sits back, eyes watering, sucks in. “It’s bullshit to let anyone make you think you become invisible or stupid just because you don’t have periods or much pubic hair,” and we start to laugh, laugh until we cry and she starts choking again at the joke between us — the time she asked me to get slimmer “piss pads” for her because the sticky strip on the wide ones got caught in her hair.
“How did it get all the way up to your head,” I’d asked on the phone, and the next day she greeted me at her apartment door with a bladder-leak pad twisted into a bow over her ear.
“I have my burning paid for,” she says when she catches her breath.
“We’re born to die,” she pats my shoulder, “the moment we’re born we’re going to die. It’s what we do in between that matters.”
IV
The sheer guts it takes for her to walk the length of the apartment hall, oxygen tank over her shoulder, leg muscles atrophied, shape of her bones, her knees, through her pants. Shoulders hitched, curve of ribs, sheer effort of breathing.
To the car, into our favourite lunch place — a fish restaurant. Wind stealing what breath she has.
Seated by the time I park the car, joking with the waitress. “One of the best jobs I ever had,” she says of her years of waiting tables, short order cooking, when she was a fifteen-year-old living on her own and the handsome jockey from the thoroughbred track came into the Stampede Grill. When she was seventeen and pregnant with me, but didn’t know why she kept throwing up.
And through those eighteen years of hot sweats and happy shots — when my father was on strike at the strip mine where he worked and my mother took a job at a ski hill cooking thousands of hamburgers, cabbage rolls, eggs, and bacon. And during the time my father was a runaway and she left the cable plant, the job she took waiting tables and cooking in one of the other towns in the valley where everyone knew her husband had run away, and she laughed and joked, delivered food to tables, told a man making a sexist comment to fuck off, got fired and rehired in five minutes.
“But didn’t you feel invisible or that you had a lack of power with menopause,” I ask her.
“I wouldn’t let anyone make me feel invisible,” she says, flipping her oxygen cord, “You don’t survive what I survived and let anyone make you think you’re invisible just because you have your uterus removed or your hormones change.”
V
The kinds of invisibility that offer refuge.
The kinds that can kill us.
The summer my sister turned eleven and her breasts grew larger than mine and our mother’s, and kept growing.
The shape girls and women were told we should want. Large breasts. Slim hips and legs.
“Slut,” the boys on Main hissed when my sister had to pass them on her way to the bus stop.
“Slut,” in the hallways at school, and no one stopped them.
Adult men leered at her. In the arena, in the café, on the streets of our village.
The layers of clothing she started wearing.
The boy who cornered her in the dark, shoved her to the ground, clamped a hand over her mouth and nose, jammed his forearm into her windpipe, “You want this as much as I do, cunt, tell and I’ll kill you.”
“Slut,” the boys hissed in all the hallways and streets, “Cunt, two-bit whore. Jump her, fuck her.”
The man at a party in the city she escaped to, his hand reaching for her breast, “Are they real?” His offence when she walked away, “I was giving you a compliment, bitch.”
The physician in the long hospital corridor where she had to pass him every day on her way to work, his eyes locked on her breasts.
“Teach your breasts ventriloquism,” I suggested, “Have them say ‘get your fucking eyes off me,’ or stare at his crotch the whole length of the hallway.”
The way he squirmed, turned and faced the wall, scrabbled past.
The prying hands, words, leering eyes of so many men.
Her first mammary reduction at nineteen. “Smaller,” she told the surgeon after he presented the size he envisioned for her, explained the risks and the procedure — anaesthetic, slice of knife, removal of nipples, removal of tissue, reattachment of her nipples, possibility of lost sensation.
“Smaller,” she said.
The look in her eyes when the nurse removed the bloodied bandages and she looked down at her wounded breasts. “He didn’t listen to me.”
VI
“Exposed,” she said years later, “violated” about the decades of men’s eyes and hands and words, and the boy who raped her got married, had kids, walks around our village, the same village my sister gets nauseated driving into.
“Who’s going to believe me,” she says after her second reduction, her surgical menopause at forty-one, “I thought it was my fault, that somehow I deserved it.”
Layers of clothing, body fat.
“If I tell now, who gets hurt — his wife and kids.”
VII
“Menopause,” her doctor says when my sister goes to see her about the drenching night sweats, pounding heart that makes her bed shake, dizziness that makes her afraid to walk, extreme fatigue.
“But I’ve been through that, after the hysterectomy. This is different.”
“Anxiety,” the doctor says, writes a prescription for anti-depressants, group therapy.
And my sister keeps going back. “I can’t sleep my heart is pounding so hard, I’m drowning in sweat. I feel like I’m going to have a heart attack.”
Prescription for an additional anti-depressant.
“My heart is pounding out of my chest, I’ve been fainting.”
“You didn’t really faint. You just thought you did.”
“There’s a guy with anger issues in group therapy,” she tells me on the phone, “He loses it — shouts, gets physically aggressive.”
“I can’t be in that group,” she tells the psychologist, her doctor, “I was raped at fifteen.”
“You have to work through it so you’re not so easily triggered.”
“I’m not the one who needs to work through his anger.”
“You have to self-advocate to get better.”
“I can’t be in there with him.”
“Non-compliant,” the psychologist says, and the doctor writes on my sister’s chart.
My sister who did hundreds of hours of sweat equity labour on her Habitat for Humanity house, aced physiology and kinesiology classes, hiked in the mountains with our family, moved a ton of sod in one day, is raising two amazing daughters as a single parent.
“What about these bruises,” she asks her doctor and starts to raise her shirt to show her doctor the massive bruise covering half her torso. “What about this rash on my stomach?”
“It’s okay, I don’t need to see.” More drugs, more discussion of mood, therapy.
“Could this be lymphoma,” my sister asks, “I’m forty-eight, our father died of lymphoma at fifty; he had night sweats and fainting.”
“Anxiety. Depression,” the doctor writes in my sister’s chart. And never runs a blood test.
“Anxiety attack,” the paramedic says when he comes to her friend’s house where her friend is holding my sister on the bed.
“Heart attack,” they say in the back of the speeding ambulance where they test for troponin in her blood.
“I’m not recovering, I’m trembling, fainting,” she tells the head of cardio rehab when she’s out of hospital.
And he sends her to a psychiatrist. “Your symptoms aren’t depression,” the psychiatrist says after several sessions and blood tests, “there’s something physically wrong. You need to go back to your doctor.”
“How did this happen,” she says after the diagnosis — Stage IV Lymphoma — “Why wasn’t I heard?”
VIII
“Why am I still not being heard,” she asks after the car accident halfway through chemo, caused by the other driver, that totals her car, slams her into the steering wheel, damages her shoulder, her chest, knees, jaw.
The doctor she sees who puts up his hand for three years when she keeps coming back to ask for an investigation into her continued pain, keeps asking her about her mood.
The locum who asks, “If I could wave a magic wand, what one issue would you choose?”
IX
“Rape culture,” I say to a friend, “We’re finally talking about it, we’re finally being heard.”
“You’re more hopeful than I am,” she says.
“Maybe,” I say.
X
All the girls and women who never make it to menopause.
“He looks like the man who raped me,” my mother says when she sees the photo in the book about Russell Williams, the leader of an air force base who tortured and murdered two vibrant young women, one a flight attendant on “his” base.
“I’ve been having flashbacks,” she says when she hears the news of the six-year-old girl raped and beaten beyond recognition, the fifteen-year-old First Nations girl raped and beaten, dumped into the Assiniboine River. “I want to go hold them, tell them it wasn’t their fault.”
XI
What the elderly woman in 1948 said to the little girl on her doorstep — half naked, battered and bitten, bleeding, trembling.
Wrapped her in a quilt, held her, “You did nothing wrong, you did not deserve this.” Rocked her, called the police, “Send the woman officer.”
The woman officer who held the girl in the police car, “You did nothing wrong,” miles through the city to the little girl’s clapboard house in the inner-city warehouse district, the house the girl had left hours earlier to go fetch her father from the bar, her mother too sick with lung disease to get up, the other seven kids somewhere else.
Was passing Lowney’s warehouse two doors down when a man stepped out of the shadows, “Hey, little girl, anyone ever tell you that you look like Shirley Temple,” locked her in a choke-hold before she could answer, clamped his other hand over her mouth and nose, dragged her miles through town, kicking and trying to breathe, not one person she knew in their warehouse district out on the street.
“My daughter,” he told strangers they passed, “I’m taking her home,” his hand cutting off her breath.
“Famous,” he said when he pulled her into the bushes beside the river miles from home, “I’ll make you famous.”
“Famous as Shirley Temple,” and he got off her to find a rock and the girl heard her mother call her name, staggered half-conscious to her feet, into the river, swam even though she couldn’t swim, the man somewhere behind her, frantic up the far riverbank, across the road, banging on doors until the elderly woman opened her door.
“You did nothing wrong,” her mother said, black circles around her eyes from not being able to breathe, “that man is evil,” held her daughter crazed with fear and hurt while the doctors examined her and the girl heard them say, “She’s so damaged inside, she’ll never be able to have kids.” Took her trembling daughter into bed with her because the girl couldn’t be around any male, not even her brothers.
Died three weeks later — violent eruption of her aorta and the little girl thought she’d killed her mother.
Wanted to die, sat catatonic on the street outside the funeral home, in the court where she had to testify against the man who aimed his finger at her like a gun, “When I’m out in five, kid, I’ll hunt you down, I’ll find you, I’ll make you famous.”
XII
“I worry about you writing about stuff like this,” a woman says to me after a book-club discussion of my last book, “There’s so much dark stuff, I worry about your mental health.”
She is a stranger to me; her eyes are kind.
“Your mother shouldn’t talk about stuff like that,” someone said to me when I was in high school, “What happened to her as a kid, your dad running away, hot flashes — people don’t want to hear stuff like that.”
XIII
“Don’t say I died,” my mother says, boned down scrawny. “Because I didn’t. Not yet.”
“Do you think you spoke up more during or after menopause,” I ask her and my sister when I show them what I’ve written.
My mother rolls her gaunt shoulders, cocks her head, “I always spoke up for myself. If that didn’t work, I used my fists.”
The three of us bust out laughing.
“What about you,” I ask my sister.
“A little bit,” she says, “Not during, but after.”
“Do you have anything else you’d want to say about menopause?”
“Yup — my hat goes off to women.”