Lives of Girls and Women (27 page)

We walked out the highway on a Friday night, in our flowered, full-skirted dresses. I had done my best; I had washed, shaved, deodorized, done up my hair. I wore a crinoline, harsh and scratchy on the thighs, and a long-line brassiere that was supposed to compress my
waist but which actually pinched my midriff and left a little bulge beneath that I had to tighten my plastic belt over. I had the belt pulled in to twenty-five inches, and was sweating underneath it. I had slapped beige makeup like paint over my throat and face; my mouth was a red, and nearly as thickly painted, as an icing-flower on a cake. I wore sandals, which collected the gravel of the roadside. Naomi was in high heels. It was June by this time, the air warm, soft, whining and trembling with bugs, the sky like a peach skin behind the black pines, the world rewarding enough, if only it had not been necessary to go to dances.

Naomi went ahead of me across the unpaved haphazard parking lot, up the steps lit by a single yellow bulb. If she was afraid, like me, she did not show it. I kept my eyes on her disdainful high heels, her biscuit-pale, muscular, purposeful bare legs. Men and boys hung around the steps. I could not see their faces, and did not look. I just saw their cigarettes or belt buckles or bottles glinting in the dark. To get past the soft and easy, surely contemptuous, strangely dreaded things they were saying I tried to stop my hearing, the way you can hold your breath. What had happened to my old confidence—false confidence of the early days of buffoonery and superiority? It was every bit gone; I would think with nostalgia and disbelief of how bold I had been, for instance with Mr. Chamberlain.

A fat old woman stamped our hands with purple ink.

Naomi found her way at once to Bert Matthews who was standing near the dancing platform. “Well I never expected to see you here,” she said. “Did your Momma let you out?”

Bert Matthews took her up to dance. The dancing went on on a wooden platform about two feet high, the railing strung with coloured lights, which also climbed the four posts at the corners and hung on two crossing diagonal strings above the dancers, making the platform something like a lighted ship floating above the earth and sawdust floor. Except for these lights and the light from a window open on a sort of kitchen, from which they sold hot dogs, hamburgers, soft drinks and coffee, the place was dark. People stood around in dim huddles, the sawdust underfoot was wet and smelly with spilled drinks. A man stood in front of me, holding out a paper cup. I thought he had mistaken me for somebody else, and shook my head. Then I wished I had taken it. He might have stayed beside me and asked me to dance.

After two dances Naomi came back, bringing with her Bert Matthews and another man, thin, foxy, red faced and red haired. He stood with his head thrust forward, his long body curved like a comma. This man did not ask me to dance but took my hand when the music started and pulled me on to the platform. To my alarm he turned out to be a fancy, inventive dancer, continually throwing me away from him and snatching me back, flipping himself around, snapping his fingers, doing all this without a smile, indeed with a dead-serious, hostile expression. As well as trying to follow his dancing I had to try somehow to follow his conversation, for he talked too, during those brief unpredictable parts of the dance when we were close enough to each other. He was talking with a Dutch accent, which was not real. At this time Dutch immigrants had taken up a few farms around Jubilee, and their accent, its warm and innocent sound, was to be heard in certain local jokes and catch-phrases. “Dance me loose,” he said, using one of these phrases, and rolling his eyes at me imploringly. I did not know what he meant; surely I was dancing him, or he was dancing himself, as loose as anybody could do? Everything he said was like this; I heard the words but could not figure out the meaning; he might have been joking, but his face remained so steadily unsmiling. But he rolled his eyes, this grotesque way, and called me “baby” in a cold languishing voice, as if I were somebody altogether different from myself; all I could think of to do was get some idea of this person he thought he was dancing with and pretend to be her—somebody small, snappy, bright, flirtatious. But everything I did, every movement and expression with which I tried to meet him, seemed to be too late; he would have gone on to something else.

We danced until the band took a break. I was glad it was over and glad he had stayed with me; I had been afraid he might recognize how inadequate I was and just whirl on to somebody else. He pulled me off the platform and over to the kitchen window where we were pushed about in the crowd until he could buy two paper cups of ginger ale.

“Drink some,” he ordered, abandoning his Dutch accent and sounding tired and practical. I drank some of mine. “Of both,” he told me. “I never drink ginger ale.” We were moving across the floor. I could make out faces now and I saw people I knew and smiled at them, tentatively proud of being here, proud that a man had me in tow. We reached Bert and Naomi and Bert took out a flask of whisky and said, “Well, corporal, what can I do for you?” He poured some into both cups. Naomi smiled at me glassily like a swimmer just come out of the water. I was warm and thirsty. I drank down my rye and ginger ale in three or four large gulps.

“Good Christ,” said Bert Matthews.

“She drinks like a fish,” said Naomi, pleased with me.

“Then she don't need the ginger ale,” said Bert, and poured rye into my cup. I drank it down, wanting to increase my new prestige, and not actually minding the taste so much. Bert began to complain that he didn't want to dance any more. He said he had a lame back. The man I was with—whose name, then or later, I learned to be Clive—let out a startling, rattling, machine-gun laugh and feinted with his fist at Bert's belt buckle.

“Howdja get a lame back, eh, howdja get a lame back?”

“Well I was just layin' there, officer,” said Bert in a high whiney voice, “and she come up and sat down on me, what could I do about that?”

“Don't be filthy,” said Naomi happily.

“What's filthy? What did I say? You want to rub my back, honey?

N'omi, rub my back?”

“I don't care about your stupid back, go out and buy some liniment.” “Will you rub it on me, h'm—” sniffing in Naomi's hair—“rub it on me good?”

The coloured lights had gone blurry, they were moving up and down like stretched elastic bands. People's faces had undergone a slight, obscene enlargement across the cheeks; it was as if I was looking at faces reflected on a curved polished surface. Also the heads seemed large, out of proportion to the bodies; I imagined them— though I did not really see them—detached from bodies, floating smoothly on invisible trays. This was the height of my drunkenness,
as far as alteration of perceptions went. While I was experiencing it Clive went to buy hot dogs, wrapped in paper napkins, and a case of ginger ale, and we all left the dance hall and I got into the back seat of a car with Clive. He put his arm around me and rather roughly tickled my armoured midriff. We drove along the highway at what seemed to be great speed, Bert and Clive singing, with falsetto harmonies, “I don't care if the sun don' shine, I git my lovin' in the evenin' ti-ime.” The windows were all down, the wind and stars rushed by. I felt happy. I was no longer responsible for anything.
I am drunk,
I thought. We entered Jubilee; I saw the buildings along the main street and it seemed they had a message for me, something concerning the temporary, and playful, and joyously improbable nature of the world. I had forgotten about Clive. He bent over and pressed his face against mine and stuffed his tongue, which seemed enormous, wet, cold, crumpled, like a dishrag, into my mouth.

We had stopped behind the Brunswick Hotel.

“This is where I live,” said Bert. “This is my happy home.”

“We can't get in,” said Naomi. “They won't let you take girls in your room.”

“Wait and see.”

We went in a back door, up some stairs, down a corridor at the end of which shone a bubble-shaped container of red liquid, utterly beautiful to me in my present state. We entered a bedroom and sat down, in sudden hot light, apart from each other. Bert sat, and later lay, on the bed. Naomi sat on the chair and I on a ripped hassock, our skirts properly spread. Clive sat on the cold radiator but got up at once to fit a screen in the window, then pour us all more whisky, mixing it with the ginger ale he had bought. We ate the hot dogs. I knew it had been a mistake stopping the car, coming inside. My happiness was leaking away and, though I drank more and hoped it would come back, I only felt bloated, thick in the body, particularly in the fingers and toes.

Clive said to me sharply, “You believe in equal rights for women?” “Yes.” I tried to get my wits together, encouraged, and feeling some sense of obligation, at the prospect of a discussion.

“You believe in capital punishment for women, too?”

“I don't believe in capital punishment at all. But if you are going to have it—yes, for women.”

Quick as a bullet Clive said, “You believe women should be hung like men?”

I laughed hard, unhappily. Responsibility was coming back.

That started Bert and Clive telling jokes. Every joke would start off seriously, and would continue so for quite a time, like a reflective or instructive anecdote, so that you had to be always on guard, not to be left stupidly gaping when the time came to laugh. I was afraid that if I did not laugh at once I would give the impression of being too naive to understand the joke, or of being offended by it. In many of these jokes as in the first one it was necessary for Naomi or me to supply the straight lines, and the way to do this, so as not to feel foolish as I had that time was to answer in a reluctant, exasperated, but still faintly tolerant way, to follow the joke with narrowed eyes and a slight smile as if you knew what was coming. Between jokes Bert said to Naomi, “Come on the bed with me.”

“No thanks. I'm happy where I am.” She refused to have any more to drink, and flicked cigarette ashes in the hotel glass.

“What have you got against beds? That's where you get more bounce to the ounce.”

“Go ahead and bounce, then.”

Clive was never still. He had to jump around the room, shadow-boxing, illustrating his jokes, lunging at Bert on the bed, until finally Bert jumped up too and they pretended to be fighting, taking little close-in punches at each other, bouncing up from their knees, laughing. Naomi and I had to pull our feet back.

“Pair of morons,” Naomi said.

Bert and Clive finished up by putting their arms around each other's shoulders and facing us formally, as from a stage.

“I can see by your outfit you must be a cowboy—” Bert said, and Clive sang back, “I can see by your outfit that you're a cowboy too—”

“You can see by our outfits that we are both cowboys—” “Hey Rastus,” said Bert spookily.

“Yas?”

“Is yo' fo' years old or is yo' five?”

“Ah don' know. Ah don' know if Ah is fo' years old or five.”

“Hey Rastus? Yo' know ‘bout women?”

“No-o.”

“Yo' is
fo
'.”

We laughed but Naomi said, “That was in the Kinsmen's Minstrel

Show at Tupperton, I heard that before.”

“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said, and got up. I must have been still drunk, after all. Ordinarily I would never have said that in front of men.

“You have my permission,” said Bert magnanimously. “You go right ahead. You have my permission to leave the room. Go right down the hall and go in the door where it says—” He peered at me closely and then stuck his face almost into my chest—“ah, I can see
now—Ladies
.”

I found the bathroom and used it without closing the door, later remembering. On my way back to the room I saw the bubble of red liquid, and a light beyond it, at the end of the corridor. I walked towards it past the door of Bert's room. Past the light there was a door, open because of the warm night, on to the fire escape. We were on the third, or top, floor of the hotel. I stepped outside, tripped and nearly fell over the railing, then recovered, bent down and with great difficulty removed my sandals, which I blamed for making me trip. I walked down the steps, all the way. There was a drop of about six feet at the bottom. I threw my shoes down first, feeling clever to have thought of that, then sat on the bottom step, let myself down as far as I could and jumped, landing on hard dirt, in the alley between the hotel and the radio station. Putting my shoes on, I was bewildered; I had really meant to go back to the room. I could not think where to go now. I had forgotten all about our house on River Street and thought we were living out on the Flats Road. At last I remembered Naomi's house; with careful planning I thought I could get to it.

I walked along the wall of the Brunswick Hotel bumping up against the brick, came out at the back of it and walked along the Diagonal Road—first starting in the wrong direction, and having to turn around—and crossed the main street not looking either
way, but it was late, there were no cars anywhere. I could not see the time on the blurry moon of the Post Office clock. Once off the main street I decided to walk on the grass, on people's front yards, because the sidewalk was hard. I took off my shoes again. I thought I must tell everybody about this discovery, that the sidewalk hurt and the grass was soft. Why had nobody ever thought of this before? I came to Naomi's house on Mason Street, and forgetting that we had left the back door unlocked went up the front steps, tried to open the front door, failed, and knocked, politely at first then harder and louder. I thought Naomi must be inside, and would hear me and come to let me in.

No lights went on, but the door did open. Naomi's father in a night-shirt, with his bare legs and white hair, glowed in the dark of the hall like a risen corpse. I said, “Naomi—” and then I remembered. I turned and stumbled down the steps and headed towards River Street, which I had also remembered at the same time. There I was more prudent. I lay down in the verandah swing and fell asleep, in deep engulfing swirls of light and darkness, helplessness, belched smell of hot dogs.