F(OUR) FOR ALL.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” says Jon, who has dropped by, supposedly to pick me up, really to see. He is suspicious of my doings with women, although he will not demean himself by saying so. He does however refer to them as “the girls.”
“It’s a pun on free for all” I tell him, although I know he knows this. “Plus it encapsulates the word our.” Encapsulate is also one of Jody’s words.
He does not comment.
It’s the banner that attracts the newspapers: this kind of thing is new, it’s an event, and it promises disruption. One newspaper sends a photographer, in advance, who says, jokingly, “Come on, girls, burn a few bras for me,” while he’s taking our pictures.
“Pig,” says Carolyn in a low voice.
“Cool it,” says Jody. “They love it when you freak.”
Before the opening, I come to the gallery early. I pace around the show, up and down the former aisles, around the checkout counters where Jody’s sculptures pose like models on a runway, past the wall where Carolyn’s quilts yell defiance. This is strong work, I think. Stronger than mine. Even Zillah’s gauzy constructions appear to me to have a confidence and subtlety, an assurance, that my own paintings lack: in this context my pictures are too highly finished, too decorative, too merely pretty. I have strayed off course, I have failed to make a statement. I am peripheral. I drink some of the awful wine and then some more, and feel better; although I know that later I will feel worse. The stuff tastes like something you’d use to tenderize pot roast. I stand against the wall, beside the door, hanging onto my Styrofoam cup. I’m standing here because it’s the exit. Also the entrance: people arrive, and then more people.
Many, most of these people are women. There are all kinds of them. They have long hair, long skirts, jeans and overalls, earrings, caps like construction workers‘, lavender shawls. Some of them are other painters, some just look like it. Carolyn and Jody and Zillah are here by now, and there are greetings called, squeezes of the arm, kisses on cheeks, shrieks of delight. They all seem to have more friends than I do, more close women friends. I’ve never really considered it before, this absence; I’ve assumed that other women were like me. They were, once. And now they are not.
There is Cordelia, of course. But I haven’t seen her for years.
Jon is not here yet, although he said he would come. We even got a baby-sitter so he could. I think maybe I will flirt with someone, someone inappropriate, just to see what could happen; but there aren’t many possibilities, because there aren’t many men. I make my way through the crowd with another Styrofoam cup of the dreadful red marinade, trying not to feel left out. Right behind me a woman’s voice says, “Well, they certainly are different. ” It’s the quintessential Toronto middle-class-matron put-down, the ultimate disapproval. It’s what they say about slums. It would not look good over the sofa, is what she means. I turn and look at her: a well-cut silver-gray suit, pearls, a suave scarf, expensive suede shoes. She’s convinced of her own legitimacy, her right to pronounce: I and my kind are here on sufferance.
“Elaine, I’d like you to meet my mother,” says Jody. The idea of this woman being Jody’s mother is breathtaking. “Mum, Elaine did the flower painting. The one you like?”
She means Deadly Nightshade. “Oh yes,” says Jody’s mother, smiling warmly. “You girls are all so gifted. I did like that one, the colors are lovely. But what are all those eyes doing in it?”
This is so much what my own mother would say that I am swept with longing. I want my mother to be here. She would dislike most of this, the cut-up mannequins especially; she wouldn’t understand it at all. But she would smile, and dredge up something nice to say. Very recently I would have derided such talents. Now I have need of them.
I get myself another cup of wine and a Ritz cracker with some cheese on it, and peer through the crowd for Jon, for anyone. What I see, over the heads, is Mrs. Smeath.
Mrs. Smeath is watching me. She lies on the sofa with her turbanlike Sunday hat on, the afghan wrapped around her. I have named this one Torontodalisque: Homage to Ingres, because of the pose, and the rubber plant like a fan behind her. She sits in front of a mirror with half of her face peeling off, like the villain in a horror comic I once read; this one is called Leprosy. She stands in front of her sink, her wicked paring knife in one hand, a half-peeled potato in the other. This one is called AN•EYE•FOR•AN•EYE.
Next to this is White Gift, which is in four panels. In the first one, Mrs. Smeath is wrapped up in white tissue paper like a can of Spam or a mummy, with just her head sticking out, her face wearing its closed half-smile. In the next three she’s progressively unwrapped: in her print dress and bib apron, in her back-of-the-catalogue Eaton’s flesh-colored foundation garment—although I don’t expect she possessed one—and finally in her saggy-legged cotton underpants, her one large breast sectioned to show her heart. Her heart is the heart of a dying turtle: reptilian, dark-red, diseased. Across the bottom of this panel is stenciled: THE•KINGDOM•OF•GOD•IS•WITHIN•YOU.
It’s still a mystery to me, why I hate her so much.
I look away from Mrs. Smeath, and there is another Mrs. Smeath, only this one is moving. She’s just inside the door and heading toward me. She’s the same age as she was. It’s as if she’s stepped down off the wall, the walls: the same round raw potato face, the hulky big-boned frame, the glittering spectacles and hairpin crown. My gut clenches in fear; then there’s that rancid hate, flashing up in an instant. But of course this can’t be Mrs. Smeath, who must be much older by now. And it isn’t. The hairpin crown was an optical illusion: it’s just hair, graying and cropped short. It’s Grace Smeath, charmless and righteous, in shapeless, ageless clothing, dun in color; she is ringless and without ornament. By the way she stalks, rigid and quivering, lips pinched, the freckles standing out on her root-white skin like bug bites, I can see that this will not be transformed into a light social occasion by any weak-chinned smiling of mine.
I try anyway. “Is it Grace?” I say. Several nearby people have stopped in mid-word. This is not the sort of woman who usually frequents gallery openings, of any kind.
Grace clumps relentlessly forward. Her face is fatter than it used to be. I think of orthopedic shoes, lisle stockings, underwear laundered thin and gray, coal cellars. I am afraid of her. Not of anything she could do to me, but of her judgment. And here it comes.
“You are disgusting,” she says. “You are taking the Lord’s name in vain. Why do you want to hurt people?”
What is there to be said? I could claim that Mrs. Smeath is not Grace’s mother but a composition. I could mention the formal values, the careful use of color. But White Gift is not a composition, it’s pictures of Mrs. Smeath, and indecent pictures at that. It’s washroom graffiti raised to a higher order. Grace is staring past me at the walclass="underline" there are not just one or two foul pictures to be appalled by, there are many. Mrs. Smeath in metamorphosis, from frame to frame, naked, exposed and desecrated, along with the maroon velvet chesterfield, the sacred rubber plant, the angels of God. I have gone way too far. Grace’s hands are fists, her fatted chin is trembling, her eyes are pink and watery, like a laboratory rabbit’s. Is that a tear? I am aghast, and deeply satisfied. She is making a spectacle of herself, at last, and I am in control.