Subject to Change

By Renee Rodin

Composed of stories that sketch the resonant heights and depths of an auto- biography, Subject to Change is a series of portraits along the road of a life well lived. Each story is an articulate, intelligent, passionate record of how an encounter with a significant “other,” be it a parent, a lover, a neighbour, a child, a grandchild, a politician or a friend, has changed and shaped the humanity, character and community—the “subject”—of the writer.

These are masterfully crafted stories: attentive to detail; conscious of the fact that our eccentricities often mask precisely what is authentic in our lives; and aware that a finely honed empathy is as likely to cause exhilaration as to cause pain. It is precisely this uncompromising empathy of Rodin’s voice that lends a sense of profound drama to the lives of the “ordinary characters” she reveals in these stories—a voice that knows how to take a measure of those characters on their own terms, to let them speak for themselves and to report on what both shakes us to the core and transports us to a place where we seem larger than ourselves.

Renee Rodin has said that: “Throughout my life I’ve had the privilege of peace and have never seen, unless in the media, the ravages of war, what people have had to live with, or die because of.” Subject to Change reminds us that the most vital moments of recognition in our lives come from those with whom we share our hopes and dreams.

It is Rodin’s masterful ability to show the reader that things we usually think of as too ordinary to talk about or too extraordinary to be able to communicate to others are often the most formative elements of our social lives that make this book such a great read.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Talonbooks
• Release date: Mar 12, 2015
• ISBN: 9780889229662

Renee Rodin

Writer, visual artist, and cultural worker Renee Rodin was born and raised in Montreal. Spending a year in London, England, after graduating from Sir George Williams University, she returned to Vancouver, Canada, in the 1960s. In the 1980s she founded the bookstore R2B2 and ran its regular readings series for eight years. She was literary co-ordinator of the Western Front from 1992-1993. Her writing has appeared in numerous periodicals, and her visual work, generally photographic, has been displayed widely. Her piece in the exhibition Fear of Others—Art Against Racism toured North America in 1990. Rodin is the author of a book of prose poems Bread and Salt (Talonbooks), Subject to Change (Talonbooks), and a chapbook Ready for Freddy (Nomados).

Book preview

Once I Got Married Twice

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.

Stretch Marks

In the spring of 1979, my father left my housebound mother in Montreal and came to Vancouver to join my sister and me on a holiday. My mother had planned this trip for us, probably feeling guilty and thinking that my father had become weary of looking after her.

I was tired too. My marriage to a filmmaker had ended years earlier. We’d been together since we were teenagers and had three kids in three and a half years, each one very much wanted by both of us. But we were just kids ourselves.

Though Murray took the children when he could, which meant mainly on the weekends, I was ready for a longer break. Neither my sister nor I was especially close to Abe, but saying no would have caused a big commotion in the family. Sandy was also due for time off from her job, and since our parents were treating us, we decided to go for it.

Joey was now eleven years old, Noah nine, Daniel almost eight, and it was a perfect time to be away because they were so focused on my daughter’s cat, Bushka, who’d just had her first litter, all female. Joey named them Pierre, Elliott and Trudeau.

Fortunately, Sandy’s partner offered to stay with the kids, otherwise it would have been impossible. Finding a reliable babysitter, even for an evening, was difficult and expensive. I didn’t want to impose on my childless friends nor on those who had only one child. It didn’t seem right for them to take three of mine, and I didn’t want to take their one child three times in order to make it even. I was determined that the few things I could control would be fair. My kids were very good at keeping me on my toes in that area.

We chose San Francisco because our father, a Montreal taxi driver and tourist guide, had heard the only other place in North America that came even close to Montreal’s beauty was San Francisco and he was curious to compare. Another plus was that city was just a three-hour flight from Vancouver, but American and therefore foreign.

Downtown, where our cheap hotel was located, the streets were filled with amputees in wheelchairs or on crutches. Most were disaffected. These vets were the embodiment of war, their young lives had barely begun before they had been so brutally disrupted. Vietnam had never seemed so real to me.

Long before we’d left Vancouver, Sandy and I had made our own plans. Minutes after we dropped our bags I muttered to Abe, We’re going to an art show. You won’t be interested in it. We’ll meet you later for supper. We couldn’t wait to see The Dinner Party at the Museum of Modern Art, an exhibition causing a sensation. As it turned out this would be the only time, for decades, that it would be shown in its entirety.

Headed by Judy Chicago, the collective project took four years and four hundred volunteers to complete. At its centre was a series of thirty-nine ceramic plates using floral imagery to depict female genitalia. Each setting was dedicated to a guest of honour who had contributed significantly to Western civilization. The work was highly controversial; some thought Chicago was ridiculous to reduce the representation of a woman to a body part, others that she was heroic.

Eager as we were to leave, it didn’t occur to us to ask Abe what he’d be doing while we were away. But as we were racing off he told us anyhow. With a sheepish look he said, "Well, while you’re doing that, I’ll be going to my first porn movie. I’m going to see Deep Throat."

The Dinner Party was good and gutsy, though my expectations had been unreasonably high because of the hype. And I was distracted. The room was jammed with onlookers and as we inched alongside the long tables to peer at the plates and read the information on each woman, my mind kept returning to my father, wondering what he was seeing.

Later Sandy and I talked far less about the show than we did about Abe. Because he was a