Shape shifter

My mother enrolled me in after school ballet class not because she wanted me to become a ballerina but so I would develop grace and poise while improving my posture since being tall for my age I had a tendency to slump. She thought ballet would cure me of slouching and make me less shy. And possibly the psychiatrists recommended it.

Because she had paid for my lessons, my mother believed I was taking ballet after school once a week. 

I went to the first classes and learned the basics: first position, second position, arabesque, plier etc

To be honest I don't think I attended more than two or three classes. 

I was supposed to have skipped Grade Two altogether which would have meant going straight into Grade Three from Grade One. But at the same time my parents had enrolled me in a classified program downtown.

 It was those McGill psychiatrists who had paid my parents $3000 two years earlier for my participation in their experiment. They owned the rights to my life but my parents had the final say. So they compromised. I would skip only half the year. 

I would travel between my elementary school and the university. It was like paying off a debt.

Effectively the doctors had split me into two little girls, one of whom was still in Second Grade while the other wandered  the halls of a mental hospital talking to poets and occasionally visiting the homes of important Montreal families who were part of the Cult.

One of whom took ballet and practiced arabesques, the while the other rode around in a black limousine belonging to the same psychiatrist who had evaluated Rudolph Hess for the Nuremberg Trials.

Nineteen fifty-nine was the year the MKULTRA program began moving out of McGill and over to York University in Toronto-- because Dr Cameron feared the French were out to get him in Montreal and he needed more space for his secret experiments on children and adults patients.

So soon we would travel to Toronto to continue in the program and I would acquire a lifelong aversion to that city and its tawdry secrets.

But for now we lived in a quiet Montreal suburb tucked behind riverside monasteries and other monuments to Catholicism, in our modest bungalow with a view of Mount Royal in the distance.

During days when I stayed home I would read myself fairy tales and children's classics.

Waking up in my bed some afternoons I would hear my mother in the living room watching I Love Lucy or daytime soap opera like Love of Life.

Sometimes I would sit in front of the TV with her and laugh myself silly at Lucy's antics. Or puzzle over Love of Life since the characters seemed so hateful.

School seemed far away and I missed too much of it to make any friends. My friends were the doctors and mental patients of the Allan Memorial. The experts in neurology who knew the secrets of the brain. One was a renowned child psychiatrist from New York.

As I taught myself to read thanks to a generous supply of children's classics on my beside table, I never wondered where these books came from but likely my small children's library had been gifted to me by the eminent doctors. I read them one by one. Black Beauty. Little Women. Tom Sawyer. Huckleberry Finn. Alice in Wonderland.

My frequent absences from school would be blamed on a string of childhood illnesses.  Measles mumps chickenpox German measles... I ran the gamut. 

At home they had moved me into my brother's room which was next to the front door. The motive for this was mysterious but I think it made for easier exits and reentries since I was spending a lot of time in downtown mansions.

The mansion at 33 Rosemount was built at the turn of the century by a well known Montreal architect who designed villas and row houses for the Westmount elite.

The architects made use of a series of elements, including turrets, chimneys and balconies, to enliven the somewhat sombre appearance of the red brick building.

 It had two entrances, one from the front, and one via a garage at the rear which opened onto the next street over which was Mount Pleasant Avenue.

You could enter via the front door if you were a guest. Of if you were a child you could be  transported in the trunk of a car and carried in through the garage. Without being seen by the neighbors or even by the residents of 33 Rosemount.

Once inside, you joined the festivities with masked and costumed guests who had been drinking since they arrived.

Anything might happen and many things did happen in that house over the next 50 years some of which had long running and deep-rooted impact on Canadian society and politics. Between 1958 and 1961, the associate minister of national defence lived at that house and had an affair with an East German spy. 

The ensuing scandal nearly brought down a government and the minister's career was forever ruined by even darker accusations. And blackmail.

The discredited Minister eventually sold the house to a couple connected to McGill and the CIA, who began hosting a weekly Salon on the premises. The Wednesday Night club was notorious for its after hours all night parties, which brought together influential people from government, business and journalism for the next thirty years.

Those all-night chats were punctuated by strobe lights, a sound and multi-media wall, a trapeze swing and water playground in the basement… that some remembered witnessing and playing with in the after hours.

If you were a child you might not remember how you got there or how you left - if you made it home.

My progress in ballet had stalled since I missed most of my after school lessons which happened to fall on Wednesdays.

When spring came, and the recital loomed, I attended a single class and was given a little costume and tutu to wear for the performance.

I tried my best. It must have been excruciating for my mother seeing her child on stage, so clueless and clumsy. When we ballerinas filed out on stage all dolled up as "little French pastries" I glimpsed her in the audience. It was a mistake to be out there performing without having learned the routine. When the other little ballerinas went right, I went left. And vice versa and so on. And when it was over they let me keep my costume and my mother took me home.

For some reason it hadn't worked out and neither of us understood why.

It never occurred to me to defend myself and say I had missed all the classes, because I knew I was invisible.

On the last day of school my report card showed straight E's for Excellent in every subject despite my 100 days' absence clearly marked. My teacher introduced me to the class explaining I'd missed half the year but still finished first! 

I was indeed a very special girl.

Through my hair I glimpsed the blurred faces of my schoolmates. I'd started that year with very short hair believing on the first day that I was a boy - but my crewcut had grown out and now covered my ears and I was a girl and all was well.

Hear no evil see no evil speak no evil.

I was a shape shifter and didn't know it.

***

Mike was a catch. Although he did like to do his hair like Eddie Cochrane and Bo Diddley, Mike wasn't in a band in 1959, or even thinking of going into music. 

 He was already appearing on TV in England - a rising star of rock-climbing. 

Soon he would form a band with his pals called Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys.

Their first recorded track was "Go On To School" a Jimmy Reed cover about a little schoolgirl. 

Like my brother and me, he was part of the. secret program involving drugs and hypnosis.

They flew Mike to Canada from England, while my parents drove to Toronto in my dad's Ford Zephyr. We arrived the day before my aunt, uncle and 10 year old cousin flew to London for a month's vacation.

I remember arriving at their home where we were to spend the month of July. My cousin had a treehouse that we played in, and then we walked to the neighborhood swimming pool and swam in the turquoise water til dinnertime. And the next day she and her parents took off in a plane across the Atlantic. A few days later a postcard arrived showing her feeding the pigeons out of her hand at Trafalgar Square. She wore a little hat and coat and her hair was perfectly in place as if she were on her way to meet the Queen.

I remember nothing of the month long "summer school" my twin and I attended. Not a single thing. It was built up as a big event, but later we never talked about it, never reminisced, never even asked each other what we did there. The entire school experience has always been blank, suggesting it was part of the MKULTRA mind control program.

I believe it was.

What I do remember is waking up one morning in the basement room where I slept on a cot, and finding blood in my panties. I recall awkwardly telling my mother who took me to the doctor, and having my first pelvic exam, being asked if I was ever constipated, and then listening to the verdict: early menstruation. "Eight is young, but it can happen." 

My mother pretended to believe him and to be on the safe side she took me to the drug store and bought supplies: a little white belt and box of Kotex napkins. Then she gave me instructions, explaining that for the rest of my reproductive life I would be bleeding like this every month.  I'd never heard of this before but it sounded awful and no wonder they'd never told me.

Before leaving Toronto we saw Sleeping Beauty in a downtown theatre. Beauty pricks her finger on a spindle and it bleeds and she falls asleep for a hundred years but it ends in a happy marriage to the prince so there was nothing to fear.

I was still waiting for my next menstrual period when my grandmother died...

Same week as Maurice Duplessis...

Same.week I entered Grade 3

It was understood that I missed a lot of school which contributed to the notion that I was of frail health ...

And a terrible ballerina

Meanwhile over back in England Mike had started brylcreaming his hair into a pompadour and bragging to his buddies that he knew all about girls and sex. They formed a band and recorded their first tape in a friend's basement. Mike was the singer.

He sang:

I met a little girl, was on her way to school

I met a little girl, she ain't nobody's fool

Well go on baby, don't be nobody's fool

They got ya readin' an' writin', workin' 'rithmetic

I know those teacher's 'bout ta, make ya sick

But go on baby, don't be nobody's fool

I'll see ya in the mornin' on your way to school

Well you know they got ya standin' at the, head of your class

And the kids don't like it, tryin'-a make ya feel bad

Go on baby, don't be nobody's fool

I'll see ya in the mornin', on your ways to school

My mother was no fool either, however. My failure to menstruate on cue removed all doubt. Someone had raped her daughter in Toronto and there was a suspect. 

The question was, how would he atone for what he'd done to the daughter of the family that had sponsored him over in Canada?

Our mothers agreed: he'd have to marry me. Off in the future of course.

Meanwhile no one bothered to inform me I'd been raped in Toronto. I was back in elementary school missing classes and reading myself fairy tales in bed. 

Until I read Andersen's The Little Mermaid, I laboured under the delusion that all children's stories have happy endings. That too was a lie.

My view of life darkened when the Little Mermaid I so identified with did not reunite with her handsome prince. Instead he married a princess, with manners and money.  The mermaid got her tongue cut out and then she died and turned to foam. 

All this came as a shock to me. 

Closing the book, I cried my eyes out, which alarmed my mother.

"She shouldn't be reading Grimm fairy tales at her age - she's not ready for these terrible endings."

But my childhood had ended. I was a young woman now. The lesson I learned that day was threefold:

‌Not every young girl gets to marry her handsome prince. Some end up with a frog. Some get Nothing at all.

‌There are many frogs in the pond of life so if a girl ends up with nothing it's probably her personal choice. She likely has a Joan of Arc complex.

‌The Little Mermaid was that type of girl. She was born in the sea, to which she must one day return to die as do all mermaids. Human life was just a detour for her.

Furthermore:

‌Even though her mission to find the Prince on his island is doomed from the start, the little mermaid forges ahead. Not only is this brave of her but otherwise there would not be a story.

‌When the witch sells her the bitter potion that makes her unable to get around on land without feeling she is walking on sharp swords, we see where this is headed and yet  she must keep going if she desires a human life. 

‌She knows only misery on land and having seen the true nature of her prince and what goes on under the sun, she wants no part of the human world. In the end, the fairies help her to become a creature of the Air. She hangs around and helps humans in and out of trouble for the next 300 years. Not long at all in Mermaid Time.

‌

So in a way it's a happy ending. She grows wiser and accumulates virtue. Better luck next time. Part of me still believed some day my prince would come and I would live happily ever after and bear children.

It would be several more years before blood appeared in my panties again. By then I would be 15, the age when mermaids leave their deep sea abode and swim to the surface for a glimpse of an alternate reality.

Mermaids are quintessential shape shifters. In Greek they're known as Gorgons. They lure sailors to their death. That's right there in the fairy tale, at the beginning, if you know how to read.

As for the prince, he could just keep on singing since the reckoning, if it ever came, was years off in the future.