Shrewed by Elizabeth Renzetti

Author:Elizabeth Renzetti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc
Published: 2018-02-20T19:18:38+00:00

THE STORY OF MY MOTHER

“AND THEN,” my mother says, holding up one red-­lacquered nail, “you had to hold your finger in the dial and wait until precisely 9 a.m. to dial the last number.” She is remembering one of her main duties as a nurse in a major Toronto teaching hospital in the 1970s: making golf appointments for one of the surgeons in her department.

“He’d be very upset if you didn’t get exactly the tee time he wanted,” she says. “So you had to be quick on the trigger.” She is eighty-five years old, her face turned to the sun, and she is cradling her favourite drink, Pinot Grigio-and-whatever-juice-was-in-the-jug. I’ve heard this story a hundred times, and it still makes my blood boil. My mother shrugs. Golf-dialling was among the lesser humiliations she and her fellow nurses suffered. They were groped, and underpaid, and made to stand when the doctors came to the nurses’ station. They were required, periodically, to shave the chief surgeon’s back.

My mother is made of stories, like Scheherazade, like Borges’s library. She is made of stories the way a margarita is made of tequila. She is made of stories that are part 1950s horror comic book, part Black Narcissus, and part Carry On Nurse. Her best stories have a mad, surreal quality — the product of working in a deeply Catholic hospital run by nuns at a time when the world was twirling in its disco shoes and snorting poppers outside.

When I was a child she would come home and present these stories over dinner. One female patient had inserted a lemon in a particularly private place, and the exhausted resident who was confronted with the task of extraction said: “If I’d known there was going to be a party, I would have brought the gin.” There was the man who complained of pain in his abdomen until a blue crayon was extracted from his bladder. There was an overly amorous pet monkey attached by his jaws to a woman’s bottom.

In those years, there were no public places to celebrate sexual fetishes, which were still labelled deviancy. If things went wrong with your particular jam, you went to emergency and relied on the kind doctors and nurses to sort it out for you. And if the doctors and nurses went home and chuckled about it to their families, perhaps it was a small price to pay.

Years later I would come to understand this humiliation in a particularly acute way. It’s probably better to just say it quickly and get it out there: When I was in my twenties, I accidentally swallowed my friend’s engagement ring and ended up in the emergency room where my mother had worked. The very same hospital! You could hear God laughing even with the doors closed. Many years later I heard that my X-ray was still posted in the doctors’ lounge, the emerald ring clearly visible on its journey toward my sphincter, and freedom.

My mother’s stories drew a picture of a world that was dark and strange and thrillingly absurd.

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