Warnings: Trigger warning for abuse, internalised misogyny and internalised homophobia. Please let me know if I should add any more.
Notes: One of the things I love most about this show is how it represents female sexuality. What follows is my attempt to try and do that justice by exploring how Kate might conceive of her sexuality, before and after her kiss with Betty.
Disclaimer: All characters and environments belong to Michael Maclennan and Adrienne Mitchell/Shaw Media.
Marion's eyes always face forward, staring without seeing. She prays that God will make her blind, so that she can prove to Him that she has no need for earthly things any more. Her hands stay demurely clasped, never out of view, ready to pray at a moment's notice.
When she was in Toronto, she got up to unspeakable things, trying to ensnare innocent and not-so-innocent people alike with her beauty. Marion knew she was doing wrong, but she carried on anyway. Her family would have wept for shame, if they had seen her then.
Nobody needs to worry about Marion now. Marion doesn't even know what lust is. She's pure, the way women are meant to be.
One bright spring morning, Kate's father takes her mother to see a doctor. He seems to crackle with purpose, as though taking Mother to a doctor was something that hadn't occurred to anyone before now. Walter and Richard are sent out to run errands. Kate is left home with a list of chores to accomplish. She puts her hand to the window pane as she watches Father supporting Mother down the street. It takes them an eternity to round the corner.
The breakfast dishes are done, the beds are made. Kate takes a seat at their folding table. She figures she can take a break before she starts on the mending and ironing. This is the first time Kate's been left alone since Toronto. She must be doing well, if Father trusts her not to bolt the minute he's gone.
It should cheer her more than it does, but now that she's by herself, she has a weary, restless feeling. This is not a good sign, considering what she used to do when she was restless and alone. The bad thing she used to do is what led to her having to run away from home in the first place.
It started when Kate was quite young, about fourteen or fifteen. Late at night, in her bed, Kate would think about men and women together. She would give her players names: Joshua for a man, and Grace, Linda, Janet or Anita for the woman. She would tell herself stories about how Joshua met and courted these various women. Usually, she'd be so tired by the time she got to the wedding night that she wouldn't have the energy to imagine anything more intimate than a tight embrace. She would lie in bed, squeezing her thighs together rhythmically, until she was too sleepy to continue the story. Kate never quite knew why she did it, only that it felt nice and it made her a little less sad.
Kate knew it was wrong, though. Somehow, she knew. She would only do it when she was so tired that she couldn't stop herself. Kate would always promise God that she would hold off for a few weeks. She wasn't aware just how wrong it was until a little over a year ago.
It was so very cold, that night when she got caught. Everyone else seemed to drop off to sleep immediately, but Kate couldn't get warm in her cot, no matter how tightly she curled into a ball. She started it up, rubbing her thighs together to keep warm, to help herself relax. Her hands went up to her chest. She truly meant to just wrap her arms around herself, to try and keep her body warmth close, but somehow that turned into touching her breasts. It felt good but guilty, especially afterwards, when she couldn't stop shaking.
She remembers how quiet the trailer was – too quiet, in retrospect. She should have realised something was wrong.
Kate let a sigh escape her as she finished. She was warm at last, and her stiff back muscles had relaxed as though she were lying on a feather bed instead of a lumpy cot. The next thing she knew, her father was hauling her out of bed by the arm. He punched her in the stomach. He had never punched her before. It was always shoving and slapping, crushing her hand or her shoulder, hitting her with his belt. Punching her with a fist, or striking her in the face, those were the things he'd held off on for twenty-three years. It was his unspoken promise, as a father, that he would never do those things. He's done them both since, lots of times.
She can't blame him, though. Kate was the one who went beyond the beyonds. He had no choice but to follow, to keep her safe.
Father had never been so angry with her in all her life. He didn't even turn on the light, he just hit her over and over, shouting about how there were virgins in deed and virgins in intent. She didn't want to understand what he was talking about. She didn't want to take any of it in. Sometimes she's been lucky enough to drift up to the ceiling and watch herself being beaten with a curious detachment. That time, God didn't see fit to grant her that small mercy. She remembers every word Father said, remembers her brothers cowering in their bunks, remembers her mother crying.
Her father made her get down on her knees and pray for forgiveness, interjecting with insults whenever she faltered. When he outright called her a whore, Kate blurted, "But I've never even kissed a man!" That was a bad idea. It didn't do her any favours, implying that she sometimes thought about kissing.
"Don't tell me you learned to pollute yourself alone?" her father asked incredulously. Kate's always been quick to catch on to the implications behind her father's words. It's the only way she was able to make it to twenty-three without him punching her. She worked out, then, that doing this thing alone was worse than being with a man. It meant that she had so much sin inside that she had managed to corrupt herself.
The next day, she had expected Father to resume punishing her, but he left the trailer early and stayed out late. Kate dared to hope that Father was keeping his distance in order to calm down, but when he came back, he wouldn't speak to her. For days, Father wouldn't look at her. If Kate asked him a question, Father ignored her until Richard or Walter repeated it, and then directed his answer to the boys. When Father began talking to her again, it was as though she were a visitor, staying with the family. He didn't ask about her prayers any more. It was like he assumed she didn't pray any more – or that if she did, God wouldn't listen.
Three weeks, almost to the hour, after Kate's sin was revealed to her entire family, Father tried to drown her in a bathtub, in a boarding house in Spruce Grove. It was the worst night of her life. Kate won't let herself think about it during the daytime, but that doesn't matter. She knows she'll still be having bad dreams about it when she's ninety.
Betty is the only person Kate ever told about that night. It was before the kiss, obviously, back when Kate thought she could trust her. Betty knows all Kate's darkest secrets, everything except what it was that Kate did to make her father feel like there was no hope for her any more.
When she told Betty, Kate said flat out that she didn't want to talk about what it was that made her father so angry with her. Betty told her that she didn't deserve to be hurt, that there was nothing wrong with her, that nobody could ask for a better daughter. But even after the way Betty betrayed her, even with Betty being … being the way that she is, Kate knows there's no way she would have been so understanding. It is bad enough when a woman is coerced into filth by someone else. Kate did it alone, so she has no-one to blame but herself. She'll never tell anyone else about that night in Spruce Grove.
For the entire year up to her leaving her family, Kate didn't do it again. She wishes she could say that was because she found the strength inside herself to give it up. Truth is, she did try it again, when she was feeling so low that praying or singing couldn't lift her spirits. Kate tried, and nothing happened. It was like she was dead from the waist down.
Wicked as it was, coming to Toronto was like being born again. For the first time, she was surrounded by people who had no reason to believe she was anything other than a good, hardworking Christian woman. People liked her, and it made Kate like herself a little more each day.
Living at the rooming house, showering and changing with the other Blue Shift workers – it was almost frightening how normal everybody thought she was. Like she had a perfect right to prance around half-dressed, just like anyone else, because they were all girls together, after all. Nobody recoiled at the mere notion of Kate's body, nobody barked at her to cover herself. She showered quicker than anyone and kept her back against her locker when she changed clothes, but that was because she wanted to, not because they thought she should.
Kate had privacy, for the first time in her life, when she changed in her own bedroom or bathed in the rooming house. It made her realise just how little she had seen of her own body. She's never liked it much. It's not just the scars. Kate stayed as straight up and down as an ironing board until she was sixteen. As soon as she started to think wistfully that it might be nice to have a little bit of a figure, she gained breasts and hips seemingly overnight. They made her so self-conscious that she was twenty-one before she could stand without her arms folded tightly across her front. She felt awkward enough fully clothed, but being naked, even to bathe, made her hideously uncomfortable.
As the weeks wore on, and she made friends, and got the hang of working the floor, and discovered the delights of drinking and dancing and cards and the blues, Kate started to take longer and longer in the bath. She made an uneasy peace with her body. It wasn't such a bad body, just unruly sometimes. Just wilful. It didn't mean her any harm. If her body didn't bother her, she wouldn't bother it.
Her bruises faded, and her cracked rib mended, and her back healed enough for her to lie comfortably against the enamel of the bath without chafing any of her wounds. Kate started to find things to appreciate about her body. Namely, the way it could feel when she was alone, with a locked door between herself and the world.
At the rooming house, provided she bathed late enough at night that there wasn't a line of women waiting, Kate could lie in the water and daydream. She would sing her latest Billie song under her breath, think about her day at work, about something funny Betty had said at lunch. She would get happy and relaxed, and her hand would steal between her legs. She hasn't got much idea what, if anything, women have down there, but even rubbing and stroking clumsily tended to produce a nice feeling.
It was easy, then. Easier than it had ever been before. She wasn't Marion Rowley any more, she was Kate Andrews. She didn't have to be furtive about it, didn't have to make furious pacts with God in her head. Kate could deny it to herself when she was alone with her body and her thoughts, when her family wasn't sleeping a few feet away.
For the first time in her life, Kate started to look forward to bathing. She told herself that maybe it was a necessary evil, evoking this feeling inside herself. She could hardly go without washing. After that terrible night in Spruce Grove, with her father and the bathtub, the only way she could go anywhere near a bath was by making it as different to that night as possible. Lights on, instead of pitch darkness. Completely naked, instead of in her nightgown. Rubbing between her thighs, instead of being shoved under the water by her neck. It was just so that she could relax and take a bath, like every single other woman in the rooming house. It didn't have to be dirty. She always felt so clean and new, getting out of a late night bath.
That night before Pearl Harbor, almost the entire rooming house went out dancing or to the movies. Kate took advantage of this to stay in the bath for more than an hour. She felt more than she ever had before. It still wasn't quite enough, somehow. She knew now that it was building towards something, something she was finding increasingly difficult to put out of her head when she was outside the bathroom. That elusive something was the reason she couldn't stop, had never been able to really stop, no matter how many times she promised God it would be the last time.
At that moment, it dawned on Kate how silent the rooming house was, without anyone else in it. She was all alone.
She's never really been frightened of the dark, but silence scares her to death. Silence always used to precede the worst fights between her parents, the worst beatings from her father. It's why Kate would always sing when she was working in the store room, or walking down wintry streets at night. Whenever it gets too quiet, Kate always feels like something horrible is about to happen.
Her instincts, dulled somewhat by months of living as Kate Andrews, turned out to be absolutely correct. She towelled herself off, tiptoed down the shadowy hallway to her bedroom, and found Father waiting for her, Bible in hand. It was almost as if she had conjured him up by doing that awful thing in the bath, by making these discoveries about her body. If Kate were smarter, she would know not to do it any more, that it brings nothing but trouble. If Kate were stronger, she wouldn't want to. She wouldn't want anything at all.
Her whole family knows about what Betty did. Father insisted on telling them everything Kate got up to during her months in Toronto. He said that the only way Kate – Marion – could truly repent her sins is if she was totally honest about them with the people who love her. It's clear that it has changed her brothers' opinion of her, perhaps irrevocably. Though Mother was told everything, same as the boys, she gives no indication that she knows about her daughter singing in seedy nightclubs or smoking cigarettes, let alone being kissed by another woman. Kate isn't sure whether this means Mother doesn't mind, or that she minds all too much.
It feels like they're watching her, all the time. Kate watches herself too. She knows she's not (can't be) like Betty, but the knowledge that women can think about other women that way has put Kate on her guard. It's made her look at those stories she used to tell herself in bed at night with new, critical eyes.
It doesn't mean anything, that her fantasies feature a rotating cast of women and only one man. In the few romantic movies she's seen, the camera always concentrates on the woman's reaction to being kissed. It's so the men in the audience can imagine themselves with the woman, and the women can picture themselves up on the screen. Kate's fantasies work the same way. She doesn't think about breathy little sighs, soft hands and red lipstick because she's a deviant. It's because – well, Kate would like to wear red lipstick and have well-kept hands, and she'd like someone to make her sigh. Someday. After she's married.
If she spent a long time constructing each of the women, well, it was only because there is so much more to the way women look. There's hairstyles to pick out, and patterns for dresses, and nail polish and perfume. She would only spend a moment fleshing out Joshua, but that was because he was her special, private dream man. When someone is your ideal, you don't have to spend ten minutes at a stretch picturing them. They just pop into your head unbidden. Kate's not a total innocent. She knows enough about attraction to know that it's not supposed to be an effort, fancying someone. It's supposed to come naturally.
Only now it turns out that thinking about men and women together is a dangerous slippery slope to thinking about just women. The only woman who ought to be featuring in her fantasies is herself. It is a terrifying and intimidating prospect. Kate's never been able to picture anyone saying nice things to her, let alone declaring their undying love. She decides to try anyway. She hopes God will understand. This is an emergency. She has to prove to herself that she's normal.
When she tries thinking about what she wants, how she would want someone to romance her, to make love to her … it all gets so muddled, inside her head. She thinks about Leon, his powerful shoulders, his dashing smile and his strong, gentle hands dancing over piano keys. She starts to feel warm and wanting inside, which is encouraging, so she lets herself keep going.
The phantom lips crushing against hers are smaller than Leon's, sweeter somehow, and she gives a jolt when she realises she's started thinking about Betty. As much as she tries to keep thinking about Leon, Marco or even, God forgive her, Gladys' fiancé James, whenever Kate starts to ache and throb between her legs, her mind wanders back to Betty.
The little calluses on Betty's fingertips, her curvy waist, the mole on her neck, the way she rounds her lips when she exhales smoke. Kate committed it all to memory, during those months that they were together. She thought she noticed so much because she was envious of Betty's looks. She figured anyone would be. She assumed everyone else must feel the same way that she did, when they looked at Betty.
But if that's true, then why did she never feel pinched and mean when she was noticing, the way she usually does when she's jealous? And why – oh, God – why did all her pretend women, Grace and Anita and the rest, slowly become blondes? Kate's always thought blonde hair particularly enviable, but her pretend women used to all have different hair colours, before. Before Betty.
She knew, is the worst part. Kate was perfectly well aware that all her pretend women were starting to look like Betty, but somehow it didn't click for her that that was completely inappropriate. She thought it was a compliment showing her high regard for her best friend, that her fantasy women started to take on little aspects of the way Betty looked at work, in her dancing frock, in a jacket and trousers, in Russell Joseph's newsreel. Somehow, Kate had known this was the sort of compliment that ought to stay a deathly secret, but she hadn't let herself think why … until now.
It's so confronting that Kate ends up sobbing without tears, from fear and confusion and frustration. She can't catch her breath. Her vision clouds. It feels like she's dying, drowning in white. Can you die from a heart attack when you're not yet twenty-five? She slumps forward and her head connects with the tabletop with a bang that shocks her back into herself.
She rises from the table and blunders to the door. Fresh air, Kate thinks numbly. Everything will be all right if only I can breathe some fresh air. When she discovers that her father has locked her inside the trailer, it's all she can do to keep her heart beating, to try and keep the white at bay.