LIKE EVERYONE ELSE, I ignored Emily Rubenfeld. Maybe I always found her fascinating and just called the feeling pity, I don’t know, but it was easy enough to mind my own business and just lump her in with the other social outcasts. Until Grade 11 history, when I became obsessed with her. The entire hour she never took a note or opened her History of Canada. She sat there serving the coldest contempt, but a different take on the dish I had often been fed. Going beyond the curled lip and contorted forehead that signalled social dominance, Emily’s disgust was angrier, more generalized, perhaps included herself. I couldn’t stop looking at her.
One day, the bell rang but Emily didn’t get up – she just sat there looking more enraged than usual. I hung around futzing with my binders and pencils as the classroom emptied, trying to muscle the flailing animal of my desires into a sack I could call compassion.
I walked towards her desk and asked if she was okay.
She was quiet long enough that I thought about slinking out of the room. But then she pushed herself up, dropped her books into a black army satchel, said, “Yeah. This class just fucking pisses me off.”
Outside, she lit a cigarette and started walking. I took in her chipped black nail polish, her pale neck beneath roughly cut hair, painfully aware of my pressed Benetton jeans, my shiny ponytail wafting Mom’s stinky Alberto shampoo.
We reached the main road and headed west. Emily glanced at me, pointed to my street, said, “You live down there, right?”
I couldn’t tell if the question really held a note of accusation, or if that was just how she talked, but I was sorry to have to say yes. “My dad grew up downtown, above his family’s fabric shop,” I blurted, lunging for distance from the neighbourhood. This felt imperative, though I had no idea what suddenly seemed so embarrassing about my family or how we lived. But all I wanted in life was for Emily to teach me.
THAT AUTUMN AND EARLY WINTER we walked all over the city, almost always winding our way down to Queen Street, where groups of kids sat on the pavement with boom boxes and ratty blankets and big dogs. They were terrifying, not because of the menace they projected with every spike and pin but because they seemed to be in contact with life in a way I was not – shrapnel embedded into the skin of existence by the force of their rage and rebellion. I envied their comradeship and hard faces and was ashamed of the pity I felt at the sight of them, the clucking sorrow that kids not much older than me should be living so raw and comfortless. I wanted to be them, but I also wanted to ask if they had somewhere warm to sleep.
Emily and I never went to each other’s homes – the thought of her seeing the five-bedroom English Tudor where I lived was intolerable, and I assumed she just didn’t like me enough to bring me to hers – until one especially dismal day over winter break. We began our walk, the wet cold slapping our faces, cars throwing slush at our feet, until suddenly Emily halted. I figured she was going to say we should just forget it. I watched the car exhaust haunting the asphalt and tried not to look as miserable as I felt, formulating the nonchalant goodbye. Then, Emily looked back at her building and asked if I wanted to go in.
We opened the pale pink door to Emily’s father sitting at the kitchen table reading a newspaper and smoking. The first thing he said was, “Four more nuns were killed in El Salvador.”
Emily drew a cigarette out of her father’s pack, lit it, and inhaled, looking impassively at the headline. “No one gives a shit about El Salvador, Pa. The government will kill whoever it wants.”
I followed her dark form and glowing cigarette into the dark hallway. I had only ever been in the bedrooms of people I had known since childhood, and was queasy with uncertainty about what would happen next. About what I wanted to happen. I remember expecting her room to be like her clothes, dark and a little tattered. Instead, she opened the door to a made bed, a desk with a neat pile of books. She strode past it to the dresser, took a record from a small stack. “Joy Division,” she said, lifting the needle. She sat down on the wooden chair, rested an elbow on the desk. It seemed to me she could sit there, without changing position, forever, and that my own muscles were dangling from tangled wires. I didn’t know where to sit. Perching on the edge of the bed felt stiff and nervous, but what else could I do, lay on it? That felt presumptuous, and exposed, and anyway the bed looked so clean I couldn’t sully it with my salt-encrusted cuffs. Emily was telling me about the band’s name, and the crack of drums was ricocheting around the room, filling the air like a sheet of ice breaking on a lake, echoing and opening into a dark tide of melody that pulled me down to the bare floor, where I crossed my legs and listened at Emily’s feet.
A few days later we were smoking a little pot in the cemetery near her house, because that was what I did after school now. We were reading the gravestones, all the familiar Jewish names. I asked Emily whether she thought things could get better. She didn’t answer, just went rambling off among the graves as though I should find my answer there. When she came back, I said, “I think kindness matters. I think being good to people matters. I know that probably sounds like bullshit to you, but maybe the little things people do can add up to a better world.” I was sixteen and stoned, and the sun was setting in the snowy graveyard. I offered her this belief, this sudden radiant sense of human interconnection, like an ember in my cupped hands.
“That does sound like bullshit,” she said.
IN FEBRUARY, police raided the bathhouses on and near Richmond Street. It was “Operation Soap,” a name that struck me even then as both comical and chilling. Emily and I had walked that neighbourhood many times, heading south from Queen to the run-down streets towards the bottom of the city, wondering at the Victorian houses with their unassuming signs. The Toronto Star enlightened Emily and I, sort of, about the nature of those houses, in an article about the protest that happened the night after the raids. I remember her calling me, which she almost never did, telling me to look at the paper right away. On the front page was a headline screaming about a homosexual “rampage”: cars had been smashed, fires set, people had fought with police and besieged a police station. I was gobsmacked by the crush of people in the photograph – more than I’d ever seen on a street in this city, other than maybe at the Santa Claus Parade – and by the word “homosexual” in print, in a newspaper. I sat at the kitchen table staring at it.
Emily wanted to go down to where it had happened, so I left my family puttering in the warm house and went to trawl Yonge and Wellesley for evidence of what a place felt like after a riot, or a protest, or whatever it had been. The bars, cheap takeaway restaurants, and clothing stores didn’t reveal much – a typical sleepy Hogtown Sunday. The streets were maybe covered in a bit more litter than usual. Disappointed, we headed south, past the arcades and Sam the Record Man; here and there a piece of fabric stuck out from a sludge heap or wisped down the street; we saw puddles of broken glass, and I noticed a lone boot in a doorway. I tried to imagine throwing something at a policeman.
We walked east to Church Street, to what we had just learned was becoming Toronto’s “gay village.” Despite the cold, people stood clustered on the narrow sidewalks, shrouded in breath and smoke. I remember one man crying, many more people yelling and cursing, and Emily next to me, seeming charged with a greater purpose than in even her most aggrieved rants. She strode forward, head swiveling on her delicate neck, until she came to a halt by a telephone pole, took out her notebook and copied the information on a hand-drawn poster. It gave the date for a meeting to talk about the raids and how to respond.
And so, a couple of days after our walk down Church, I went to my first political event. It was in the auditorium of a downtown high school, a building which seemed like a Gothic castle compared to the smooth modern buildings of our Collegiate. My first impression was that everyone in that room loved one another. I know that sounds dumb, but it was wonderful to me at the time. I don’t remember much of what was said, only the feeling that something urgent and good was underway. It was a force as innate as the heat in my arm – inches from Emily’s – and my agonizing hope that she would draw closer, rest there, which of course she did not.
The next Sunday, my mother and I were putting out the brunch spread when CBC Radio introduced a report on the meeting. I had begun changing my parents’ classical station to the news, and they indulged me without comment. I had not told them about attending the meeting, mostly because I thought they might question my sexuality, and the idea of their concerned conversation in their elegant grey bedroom depressed me.
Mom and I were beside each other when the voice of one of the speakers entered the kitchen. He began his story humorously, recounting that he had been naked and pursued by big, burly men. Then he turned serious: police were smashing and shouting; he was naked before raw power. His parents were Holocaust survivors, he said, and never before that night had he known how they felt.
“That is appalling,” Mom said. “To compare being caught in a bathhouse with his parents fleeing the Nazis!”
“But Mom,” I said, “listen to what he’s saying. He’s not comparing. He’s saying that he understands now how frightening it is to be at someone’s mercy.”
“Yes, sweetheart, but here’s the difference: he has a choice about his actions. Jews had no choice. This man – so what, he can’t have public houses in which to have sex? I don’t see how oppressive that is. You think these men were treated unfairly?”
“Yes,” I said. “And I think if you knew their stories you would, too.”
“And you know their stories?”
“I was at this meeting.”
She looked at the radio like it was a person who could give her some answers. A reporter was relaying details of the damage caused by the raids. We listened to her well-tempered voice, my mother’s hand paused on a serving fork in its velvet-lined tray.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I thought you might worry. But it was just a bunch of people in a school.”
Mom looked at me, head tilted, clear-eyed and full of love. Her love, that warmth – I thought they must exist only because she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, see how much I’d changed, how little I deserved them.
“Don’t go looking for fights,” she told me. “There will be plenty to worry about, there’s no rush.” Then she touched my cheek, gently, turned her pat into a mischievous pinch, said, “My good punim. My shaina meidel. You’ll be okay.”
She was right, I am okay. But neither of us could have known what fights were coming for me.
I DIDN’T TELL MY PARENTS I was going to the protest; it was on a Friday, and I was skipping school. It felt unbelievably renegade, getting on the bus south and bouncing down the leafy street, past my elementary school and the cluster of shops known as the Little Village. Some of those shop owners had known me my whole life. I tried not to think about my younger self buying candy, buying bagels with my parents, playing in the park, as I sat across from Emily, who was perched on the edge of her seat holding a sign with a swastika and the date of the bathhouse raids. The symbol was painful to look at, those four reaching arms in thick black paint; I worried it would upset somebody. I wanted her to explain the purpose of using it, but all the ride long failed to form a question.
At Queen’s Park, Emily strode into the heart of the crowd and I followed. Words came through a bullhorn and people began to move – some aggressively jubilant, others stern and tense, all of us packed tight in the wide street, breathing the fog of each others’ breaths. Chants rose up, died out, began again. On the sidelines of the procession people stood on the pavement screaming insults; some ran alongside us, their bodies disappearing and emerging at the edge of the crowd. Sometimes an object arched toward us and in the crowd, arms raised to fend it off. Police stood by doing nothing. I saw one officer lift his baton, step towards the marchers, his buddies laughing as the threatened bodies swerved – then a man broke from the crowd, yelling at the cops, who brought their batons down on him and on those who came to pull him away.
I couldn’t believe this was my city, that such violent hatred was here. Sure, I’d heard about my dad’s cousins’ valour in the great Christie Pits riot – one had helped tear down the swastika flag – but that was ancient history, a different era. Heart beating hard, unafraid as only a teenager can be, understanding defiance as love and pledging myself to that force, I looked, with gratitude and wonder, at Emily. Her round cheeks were rosy, but her chapped lips clenched white, jaw muscle jumping. I dropped my gaze to her combat boots, heavy and hard at the ends of her spindly legs, pulling her forward with insistent rhythm.
She was scared all the time, I saw then, not just sad and angry about the world but truly petrified by it. The swastika on her sign was a drawing she had done, as unconscious as a kid, of the brutality she
saw everywhere.
I wondered whether, if I was someone else, I would put my arm around her. We could walk that way, together in the crowd. I would tell her, “But also, there’s this.”
Samantha Annie Bernstein is the author of Kitchen Island Poems (Gap Riot Press, 2021), Spit on the Devil (Mansfield Press, 2017) and Here We Are Among the Living (Tightrope Books, 2012), which was nominated for a B.C. National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction. Her creative work has appeared in journals including The Fiddlehead and Freefall; her scholarship on class, aesthetics, and social justice was most recently published in English Studies and is forthcoming in Canadian Theatre Review. She lives in Tkaronto/Toronto with her spouse, children, three cats and an anxious mutt, and teaches Creative Writing at York University. Instagram: @sammyanniebobbie