Dressing Up for the Carnival (23 page)

Her own clothing, needless to say, comprised layers of underclothes, foundation garments, garters and stockings, brassieres, camisoles, slips, blouses, cardigans, lined skirts, aprons, and even good aprons worn over the everyday aprons. Her mind drifted toward texture, fabric, protection, and warmth, as though she could never burrow deeply enough into the folds of herself.

Which was why she had so much difficulty taking part in the annual July rites at Lake Simcoe. Naturism was not her nature. Nudity was the cross she bore.

 

 

At first she tried to make bargains with her husband. “I’ll go,” she told him, “but don’t expect me to go around with
my
clothes off.”

He reasoned with her gently, reminding her that nudity was an activity that, once established, did not allow abstentions. Nudity implied community. The effort to throw off cultural ignorance was so difficult, he explained, that reinforcement was ever needed. A single clothed person creates a rebuke to the unclothed. One person walking across the Club Soleil lawn in a summer dress and sandals and underpants is enough to unsettle others in the matter of the choice they had taken.

But going without clothes was unhygienic, she argued.

No, he said, not at all. (He had read his material from the International Naturism Institute closely.) Woven cloth harbors mites, molds, dust, germs. Whereas nothing is easier to keep clean than human skin, which is, in fact, self-cleaning.

Infection, my grandmother pointed out. From others.

Not a chance, he argued. Not when every camper is issued a clean towel at the beginning of the day, and this towel is used on the various benches and hammocks at Club Soleil, and even carried into the dining hall and spread on the chair before the diner sits down.

“It’s different for women,” she protested, gesturing awkwardly, miserably. “Women have special problems.”

My grandfather explained that when women campers were “having their time,” they had only to wear a short pleated skirt, rather like a tennis skirt. No one thought a thing of it, six days, seven days, nature’s timetable. There was, of course, no reason to cover the breasts or shoulders.

“I can’t imagine Mrs. Archie Hammond going around naked, not with her sags and bags.” My grandmother said this with uncharacteristic bitterness.

“Kate and Archie have both signed up.”

“Naked? Those two?”

“Of course, naked. Though naked, my love, is not really a word that naturists use.”

“Yes, you’ve told me. A hundred times. But naked is naked.”

“Semantics.” (My grandfather, it must be remembered, lived in the day when to snort out the word
semantics
was enough to win any quarrel.)

“You do know what people will say, don’t you?”

“Of course I know. They’ll say that visitors to Camp Soleil are licentious. That we are seekers of sexual pleasure, and that the removal of the artificial barrier of clothing will only inflame our lust. But these people will be wrong.”

“I’m not so sure of that,” she said. “I know Archie Hammond. I’ve seen how he looks at women, even with their clothes on.”

“Our bodies are God’s gifts. There are those who believe that our bodies are holy temples.”

“Then why,” she asked cannily, “don’t you ever see pictures of Jesus without
his
clothes on? He’s always got that big brown robe wrapped around him. Even on the cross he had a little piece of cloth—”

“This discussion is going nowhere.”

Indeed this discussion would have gone nowhere. It would have vanished into historical silence, except that my grandfather confided its essence to his adult son—my own father—years later, where it was received, as such parental offerings are, with huge embarrassment and rejection. How could such a private argument have taken place between one’s own mother and father? Why this mention of the unmentionables between them, infidelities, monthlies—was it really necessary?

“Don’t you see,” my grandmother, not yet thirty years old, said to her husband, “how humiliating this is for me? A grown-up woman. Playing Adam and Eve at the beach.”

He was touched by the Adam and Eve reference. It brought a smile to his lips, threw him off course. This was not what she intended.

“Do it for me,” he pleaded. He had a slow, rich, persuasive way of speaking. “Please just try it for me.”

“Would you love me less if I refused?”

“No,” he replied. But he had let slip a small pause before he spoke, and this was registered on my grandmother’s consciousness.

“It’s wrong, you know it’s wrong. It fans those instincts of ours that belong to, well . . .”

“To what? Say it.”

“To barnyard animals.”

“Ah!”

“I can’t help it. That’s what I think.”

“We are animals, my precious love.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Why don’t we make a bargain, then?”

She was suspicious of bargains. She came from a wealthy Ontario family (cheese, walnuts, whiskey) where bad bargains had been made between brother and sister, father and son. “What kind of bargain?” she asked.

“You’re crying.”

“I have to know. I need to know.”

“I propose that during the month of July we abstain.”

“Abstain?”

“From sexual intercourse.”

“But”—she must have paused at this point, hating this term
sexual intercourse,
and yet shocked that her husband would relinquish so easily their greatest personal pleasure—“why?”

“To prove to you, conclusively, that going unclothed among those we trust has nothing to do with the desires of the flesh.”

“I see.”

My grandmother was a passionate woman, but probably shy about the verbal expression of passion—and not sure how to show her shocked disappointment in the proposed accommodation. “I don’t know what to think,” she said, tears lining her lashes, knowing she had somehow been trapped in her own objections.

And so she was now faced with a dilemma. Her husband had countered each of her arguments about Club Soleil, and had even offered the ultimate sacrifice, an abstention from intimate relations during the unclothed month of July. She was cornered. She must respond, somehow, and of course she was at an age when people believe they will become more and not less than they are.

“All right,” she said to the proposed bargain. “All right.”

Did she say it crossly or tenderly? With a sense of defeat or victory? The particular tone of the story has not come down to me.

 

 

And so the long succession of summers began, the humiliation of July first when my grandmother’s favorite flowered dresses came off, her girdle, her hose, her underpants. There is a certain sharp irony to be felt when cast in a role one can’t quite occupy, and for my grandmother a jolt of anger must surely have accompanied her acquiescence, the beginning of a longer anger. She found a way to walk on the beach with reasonable dignity, but never with ease, and she learned to stand nodding and chatting with Kate Hammond and the other women, blocking out the sight of their bared, softening flesh, discussing the weather, the children, the latest movies and books. She never, apparently, became accustomed to her exposed body with its pale protrusions, its slopes and meadows and damp cavities. Her fair face lightly perspired in the fresh breeze. Always she carried herself with an air of doleful-ness, her eyes wary, her hands crossed stiffly over the region of her pubis. Stiff with love and suffering and absence.

This went on for years. My grandparents and the other original members grew older. Some of them retired and moved to Florida, but a new and younger set of naturists joined the ranks. Archie Hammond died of a heart attack, though Kate Hammond remained a loyal summer camper, moving from a tent into one of the newer cabins. The tennis courts were upgraded. A vegetarian chef was brought from Banff.

Then, suddenly one summer, my grandmother refused to take part. The cause of her refusal was me, her ten-year-old grandson, who was to be taken to Club Soleil for the first time. It was one thing, she felt, to take off her clothes in front of her husband and friends; she had hardened herself to the shame of it. But she would not become a naked grandmother, she would not allow herself to surrender to this ultimate indignity. This was asking too much.

She remained in Toronto that summer, and the rupture between herself and my grandfather was never completely mended.

It might be wondered why I was not introduced to Club Soleil until I was ten years old. I loved my grandparents, and had often wondered where they disappeared to each summer. I sensed some reticence, distaste even, on my father’s part when it came to discussing the matter.
Soleil
was a French word, he explained carefully, meaning sunshine. Our own vacations—my mother, father, and I, their only child—were taken at Muskoka Lodge, where the wearing of clothes was unquestioned, and indeed may have been part of the reason for going there. It was a fashionable place in those days, and a full wardrobe of “resort apparel” was de rigueur. I remember that my mother possessed a pale peach dress with a little “bolero” that floated behind her as she stood leaning on the porch rail during the evening cocktail hour. My father, of course, ended each day by exchanging his golf clothes for a white dinner jacket.

Then one year they decided to go to Europe instead, and someone suggested that I should stay behind and join my grandparents at Club Soleil. The idea of perpetual
soleil
was appealing, especially since our own Muskoka Lodge summers were often cloudy or rain-soaked.

At this point the real nature of the enterprise was explained to me, and I remember my father’s words as he struggled to fill me in. “It is a place,” he said, “where people go about in their birthday suits.”

I knew what birthday suits meant. It was one of the jokes of the schoolyard. Birthday suits meant buck-naked, stark-naked. Starkers.

“You mean with nothing on?” I was deeply shocked, though I later wondered if part of my shock was rehearsed and just slightly augmented for effect.

My father coughed slightly. “It’s believed, you see, to be good for the health. Vitamin D, the sunshine vitamin.”

“Not even their swimming suits?” This came out in a theatrical squeal. It seemed important to reach a full understanding at once, to get it over with.

“I know it’s difficult to imagine.” He patted me on the shoulder then, a rare gesture from a man who lacked any real sense of physical warmth.

Oddly, the thought of my grandmother’s naked body lay well within my powers of imagination. I had inspected the plump nylon-encased feet and legs of my mother, so rosy, sleek, and un-scented, and I’d also seen the statues in the park and at the art gallery, the smooth marble parts of women, unblemished and still and lacking human orifices. What shocked me far more was thinking of my unclothed grandfather, a man who had always seemed to me
more
clothed than other men. His dark business suits were thicker of fabric and more closely woven. And there were his tight collars, black hose, serious oxfords, and the silk scarf he tucked in the neck of his woolen overcoat so that not an inch of flesh, except for his hands and face, was available for scrutiny. But this was my winter grandfather, the only one I had ever seen. Could he possibly have, tucked between his trousered legs, what my father had, what I had?

Yes, it turned out that he did, but instead of hiding these parts behind a bath towel as I was taught to do at home, he strolled the grounds of Club Soleil, an elegant man at home in his own aging, pickled-in-brine skin, a revered ascetic and—it was clear—lord of his own domain, majestic in his entitlement, patting the heads of children and stopping to chat with Kate Hammond at the edge of the archery range. “You must not be afraid,” he said to me kindly on the day of my arrival, “to follow the rituals we observe in our summer community.”

To be encouraged in such sanctified naughtiness was beyond any dream a ten-year-old boy might have. I learned. I learned fast, but at the same time I understood that the world was subtly spoiled. People with their limbs and creases and folds were more alike than I thought. Skin tones, hairy patches—that was all they had. Take off your clothes and you were left with your dull suit of invisibility.

What I witnessed led me into a distress I couldn’t account for or explain, but which involved a feverish disowning of my own naked body and a frantic plummeting into willed blindness. I was launched into the long business of shame, accumulating the mingled secrets of disgust and longing, that eventually formed a kind of rattling carapace that restricted natural movement and ease.

“I’m only sorry,” my grandfather said often that summer, “that your grandmother is not here to see how brown and strong you’ve grown.”

 

 

When my grandfather died he was buried in a plain pine coffin, just as the instructions in his will outlined.