From the time I’d hit puberty my mother would say, “I don’t care who the father is, I just want you to make me a grandmother.”
I’d barely turned seventeen when a friend I used to hang out with at a coffee house in Montreal said, “You’ve got to meet this cute boy from Brooklyn.” Murray was also seventeen and already living on his own in a room his parents had rented so he could go to university while they moved back to the States. That impressed me. Everyone else, including me, was still living with their parents and itching to get away from them.
Murray turned me on to marijuana and Marxism, and after he began serenading me with his blues harp under my bedroom window I couldn’t resist him. We rented a wonderful apartment, for sixty-five dollars a month, on Prince Arthur near McGill University. It was in a small, old, brick building taken care of by someone we referred to as “Dribble Puss.” We covered a sofa in black-and-white vinyl cowhide, painted our wooden furniture black and made curtains out of baby blue burlap.
Had I known then that my parents had lived together in the 1930s before they were married, I wouldn’t have pretended Murray lived upstairs with a guy from the Eastern Townships who taught me to make hamburgers. Confident I could cook anything, I invited my parents for dinner and baked veal scallopini for the first (and last) time. When I took it out of the oven, the tomato sauce had completely dried up so just prior to serving, I threw water on it to moisten it. The hot Pyrex dish instantly cracked into several pieces, but my mother inspected the food and said it was fine, so we ate it anyway.
We questioned authority and, in those days, partied hard. This was in spite of or maybe because of the carnage in Vietnam, a constant backdrop to our lives. When Murray received a deferment from the draft because he’d been born with a minor foot deformity that prevented him from being able to march well, we danced with relief.
After we both graduated from Sir George Williams with BAs, I worked with emotionally disturbed kids who lived in an old mansion that had been converted into a treatment centre. There were at least three staff people per child and the kids actually improved under our care. It was a job I liked so much I was surprised I got paid for it.
Murray landed a government job in Albany, the state capital of New York, about a four-hour drive from Montreal. On Labour Day weekend I donned my Jackie Kennedy look-alike coat (she was the reigning fashionista back then) and took the bus to visit him. The next day we joined Murray’s parents in Brooklyn to go to his cousin’s wedding in Paterson, New Jersey, which really excited me because it was Allen Ginsberg’s home town. Even though I was sure he didn’t know the couple, I still harboured the fantasy he might show up at their wedding.
At the reception the men were dressed in dark tuxes, the women in pastel gowns. I wore what I considered to be my finest garment, a wine-coloured silk sari trimmed in gold leaf. If there were any raised eyebrows about my appearance, I was as blissfully unaware of them as I was of the concept of cultural appropriation. I felt graceful and elegant.
I’d recently stopped taking the birth control pill, which had so blasted me with hormones I’d been depressed and bloated for the entire previous year. But every month since, if my period was even a day late, I’d cry about it to my friend, Trudy, because I was terrified I might be pregnant. Murray however used to blithely assure his mother that we’d get married as soon as I was.
On that Labour Day weekend in Albany I got pregnant. It had been exactly for the same reason people plan pregnancies that we hadn’t wanted to—it was too momentous a decision. We preferred to play reverse Russian roulette. We were twenty-one and we were in heaven.
Each of us held on to our job because we intended to go in a few months to England where Murray was to attend film school in London and I was to give birth. All I remember about Expo ’67 was standing in line for Laterna Magika at the Czech Pavilion. That’s where I blurted out to my sister that I was going to have a baby. She was floored.
We were right on the cusp of the great social changes of that decade, but still, in those days, if you got pregnant you got married. In Quebec, then, you couldn’t have a civil ceremony, so one bright mid-October afternoon, Murray and I went looking for a Greek Orthodox priest because I liked the dramatic way they looked with their long beards and long dark cassocks. Only later did I realize how much they resembled Chassidic rabbis around whom I always felt irrationally guilty and scared.
After two Greek priests brushed us off, thinking we were just pulling their legs, on our usual route home we passed St. James United Church, the landmark built in 1898, on Ste. Catherine Street. For the first time, we stopped in. The minister was puzzled about why two Jewish people would come to him, but he also seemed flattered by our request—or else simply concerned we’d continue to live in sin if he didn’t marry us. He bore a strong resemblance to Billy Graham whose picture sat prominently on his desk—they both had the same bushy eyebrows and good-natured Nordic looks.
He offered to use his office, but we insisted that we be married in the main part of the church, with its 2,000-person seating capacity, and hurriedly got hold of two friends, Alden and David, to be our witnesses-cum-bridesmaids. Sunlight streamed through the stained glass windows on that breezy fall day as the five of us stood at the front. The only other person there was the caretaker at the entrance to the church, far behind us, sweeping up the fallen leaves. Just as the minister was about to begin, Murray instructed him: “Don’t mention Jesus.”
He was taken aback for a second, but then graciously asked, “Is God okay?” and chuckled when we gave him the go-ahead.
The ceremony took about three minutes after which we walked over to David’s place on de Boullion (or was it St. Cuthbert?) where we partied and everyone but me dropped acid. A couple of days later we went to my parents’ house to begin to tell our families the news. We anticipated Murray’s parents would be thrilled since they’d been bugging us to tie the knot, but when we phoned they were horrified we’d eloped and had done it in a church yet!
We thought my mother, who rarely expressed surprise because that would have meant someone had caught her off-guard, would be ecstatic since she was finally going to be a grandmother. Instead, in a complete deadpan, all she said was, “Well I knew you two weren’t just playing Monopoly,” a favourite game of ours when we were stoned.
My family wasn’t the slightest bit religious but the day after we’d broken our news, my mother called to say she’d found a rabbi in the Yellow Pages who told her our baby would still be a mumzer (bastard) if we didn’t get married in a Jewish ceremony.
A month later, on Remembrance Day, Murray’s and my immediate family assembled in the rabbi’s study to get married again. I wore a cream-coloured dress and a veil, made for me by my friend Rhonda’s sister, whose shade of pink matched the sash around my waist and the spots of blood that had begun to appear on my underwear.
Worried that I was on the verge of a miscarriage, my mother said to the rabbi, “Make it snappy, I don’t want her on her feet too long.” He sped through the service, interrupting himself only to yell at those of our relatives who kept hopping on his upholstered armchairs to get better vantages from which to take their photographs.
Then everyone, except for the rabbi, went to a French-Canadian restaurant, chosen by my mother, in Old Montreal. The main attraction at Au Lutin qui Bouffe was a piglet that got wheeled around in a cage for patrons to feed with a baby bottle. Jews are strictly forbidden to eat pork. Unlike in India, where Hindus can’t eat beef but treat cows with respect and festoon them with garlands, Jews and pigs have never quite hit it off. That evening though, everyone seemed to enjoy the diversion.