A Favourite Classic
Grade four. I am about to finish Charles Dickens' Great Expectations for the first time, and I ask my Mom what I should read next. She gives me Wuthering Heights.
A Saturday night in my midteens. My sister has over a bunch of friends, and I am in love with one of them — Heather (a beautiful, purple flower found in the moors) — and she knows it. She comes out of our bathroom as I am passing in the hall. She stares me down with a smile, halting my progress. She raises her fingers and sweeps them across my upper lip while I stand stunned by her eyes and freckles and glowing white teeth and frantically curly hair. It is the first time a woman has deliberately offered me the scent of her cunt. She says nothing. She disappears into my sister's room. She is Catherine Earnshaw incarnate.
Grad school. I am teaching my first Novel & Short Story course, and the first book I put on my syllabus is Wuthering Heights.
College. I am taking a course in Romantic Literature with Dr. Jane Drover (my secret Professor crush for years and years), and the work I choose to present in the first half of the year is Wuthering Heights.
A summer in my late teens. The Plaza Theatre in Calgary, Alberta is owned and operated by Fleming Nielson, and he's showing classics and cult movies, so I drag my Mom to a Sunday matinee, and we geek out to Merle Oberon's Catherine and Laurence Olivier's Heathcliff.
Sunset on our honeymoon. Erika (a beautiful, purple flower found in the moors) tells me that the stick she peed on is showing a +. She's pregnant. I say it's twins (it was) and name one of them — on the spot — Brontë Woolf (after Emily, of course, and Virginia). Brontë prefers Të these days, but she loves that she's Emily's namesake.
Last year. A bunch of my favourite students are coming back to my class for Prose Fiction, so I decide to share some of my favourites with them. A Clockwork Orange. To Have and Have Not. The City and The City. They are all on the list. But we start with Wuthering Heights.
Charlotte and Anne. Who are they? To this day the only Brontës I know are Emily and my daughter, and I will probably keep it that way. I'll just keep building on the memories Emily's already given me.
