Lives of Girls and Women (32 page)

“Shut them chickens up in the back! Get me some lettuce and green onions and radishes out of the garden! Lila! Phyllis! Quit that jumping up and down! Can't you think of anything better to do? Boyd, get out of that truck! Get him out of that truck! He put it in
gear the other day and it rolled across the yard and missed this verandah by inches.”

She took a package of tobacco and some cigarette papers out of her apron pockets.

“I'm not a Baptist lady, I enjoy a cigarette now and then. Are you a Baptist?”

“No. I go with Garnet.”

“Garnet got going to it after his trouble—you know about

Garnet's trouble?”

“Yes.”

“Well he got into it after his trouble and I never said it's not a good thing for him, but has some strict ideas. We all used to be—we
are
— United, but it's quite a distance to drive and I'm at work sometimes, Sunday's not any different day in a hospital.” She told me she worked in the Porterfield Hospital, as a nurses aide. “Me and Garnet, we mainstay the family,” she said. “Farms like this is no place to make a living.” She told me about accidents, a poisoned child who had been brought into the hospital recently turned as black as shoe polish, a man with a crushed hand, a boy who got a fishhook in his eye. She told me about an arm that was hanging from the elbow by a strip of skin. Garnet had disappeared. In the corner of the verandah sat a man in overalls, vast and yellow as a Buddha, but with no such peaceful expression. He kept raising his eyebrows and showing his teeth in an immediately fading grin. At first I thought this was a sardonic commentary on the stories about the hospital; later I realized it was a facial tic.

The girls had stopped jumping on the bedsprings and come to hang around their mother, supplying her with details she might miss. The boys fell into a fight in the yard, rolling over and over on the hard dirt, savage, silent, their bare backs as brown and smooth as bark is, on the inside. “I'll go and get a kettle of boiling water!” the mother warned. “I'll scald the hide off you!” One of the girls said, “Would she like to see the creek?”

She
meant me. They took me down to the creek, a trickle of brown water among the flat white stones. They showed me where it came to in the spring. One year it had flooded the house. They took me to the
haymow to look at a family of kittens, orange and black, that did not have their eyes open yet. They took me through the empty stable and showed me how the barn was propped up with makeshift beams and poles. “If we ever get a big windstorm this barn is going to fall down.”

They skipped through the stable making up a song:
This old barn is falling down, falling down
—

They showed me through the house. The rooms were large, high-ceilinged, sparsely and strangely furnished. There was a brass bed in what seemed to be the living room, and piles of clothes and quits in the corners, on the floor, as if the family had just moved in. Many windows were uncurtained. Sunlight came into the high rooms through the barely moving trees, so the walls were covered with leafy floating shadows. They showed me the marks the flood water had left on the walls, and some pictures from magazines they had cut out and tacked up. These were of movie stars, and ladies in lovely ethereal dresses advertising sanitary napkins.

In the kitchen the mother was washing vegetables “How'd you like to live here, eh? It looks pretty plain to anybody from town, but we always get enough to eat. The air's lovely, in summer anyway, lovely and cool down by the creek. Cool in the summer, protected in the winter. Its the best situated house I know of.”

All the linoleum was black and bumpy, just islands of the old pattern left, under the table, by the windows where it didn't get so much wear. I smelled that grey smell of stewing chicken.

Garnet opened the screen door, stood dark against the glare of the back yard. He had a pair of work pants on, no shirt.

“I've got something to show you.”

We went out on the back porch, his sisters too, and he made me look up. Carved on the underside of one of the roof-beams of the porch was a list of girls' names, each one with an X after it. “Garnet's girl friends!” one of the sisters cried, and they giggled rapturously, but Garnet read out in a serious voice,

“Doris McIver! Her father owned a sawmill, up past Blue River. Still does. If I had've married her, I would've been rich!”

“If that's any way to get rich!” said his mother, who had followed as far as the screen door.

“Eulie Fatherstone. She was a Roman Catholic, worked in the coffee shop of the Brunswick Hotel.”

“Married her you would have been poor,” said his mother significantly. “You know what the Pope tells them to do!”

“You did okay without the Pope yourself, Momma—Margaret Fraleigh. Red hair.”

“You can't trust their kind of a temper.”

“She didn't have no more of a temper than a baby chick. Thora

Willoughby. Sold the tickets at the Lyceum Theatre. She's in Brantford now.”

“What is the X for, son? That when you stopped going out with them?”

“No, ma'am it's not.”

“Well what is it
for
?”

“Military secret!” Garnet jumped up on the porch railing—his mother warning, “That'll never take your weight!”—and began carving something at the bottom of this list. It was my name. When he finished the name he did a border of stars around it and drew a line underneath. “I think I've come to the end,” he said.

He snapped his knife shut, jumped down. “Kiss her!” the sisters said, giggling wildly, and he put his arms around me. “He's kissing her on the mouth, look at Garnet, kissing her on the mouth!” They crowded up close and Garnet batted them away with one hand, still kissing. Then he began tickling me, and we had a tremendous tickling fight in which the sisters took my side, and we tried to pin Garnet down on the porch floor, but he got away, finally, and raced towards the barn. I went inside and proudly asked his mother what I could do to help get supper. “You'll spoil your dress,” she said, but gave in and let me slice radishes.

For supper we had stewed chicken, not too tough, and good gravy to soften it, light dumplings, potatoes (“too bad it's not time for the new!”), flat, round, floury biscuits, home-canned beans and tomatoes, several kinds of pickles, and bowls of green onions and radishes and leaf lettuce, in vinegar, a heavy molasses-flavoured cake, blackberry preserves. There were twelve people around the table; Phyllis counted. Along one side everybody sat on planks laid over two
sawhorses, to make a bench. I sat on a varnished chair brought from the front room. The big yellow man was brought from the verandah and sat at the head of the table; he was the father. From the barn, with Garnet, came an older but sprier man who talked about how he hadn't slept all the previous night, with toothache. “You better not try any chicken,” Garnet told him, mock solicitously, “we better just give you some warmed-up milk and roll you off to bed!” The old man ate heartily, describing how he had tried warm oil of cloves. “And something stronger than that, I'll bet you my wedding ring!” Garnet's mother said. I sat between Lila and Phyllis, who were working up a play-fight, refusing to pass each other things, hiding the butter under a saucer. Garnet and the old man told a story about a Dutch farmer on the next concession who had shot a raccoon, believing it to be a dangerous forest animal. We drank tea. Phyllis quietly took the top off the saltcellar and poured salt into the sugar bowl and passed it to the old man. Her mother grabbed it just in time. “I'll skin you alive someday!” she promised.

There is no denying I was happy in that house.

I thought of saying to Garnet, on the way home, “I like your family,” but I realized how strange it would sound to him, because he had never thought of my not liking them, becoming part of them. To pass judgements of this sort would seem self-conscious, pretentious, with him.

The truck broke down just after we turned off the main street, in Jubilee. Garnet got out and looked under the hood and said he thought so, it was the transmission. I said he could sleep in our front room, but I could tell he did not want to, because of my mother; he said he would go and stay with a friend of his who worked at the lumber yard.

Since our arrival at my house had not been signalled by the noise of the truck we were able to go around to the side and crush up against the wall, kissing and loving. I had always thought that our eventual union would have some sort of special pause before it, a ceremonial beginning, like a curtain going up on the last act of a play. But there was nothing of the kind. By the time I realized he was really going ahead with it I wanted to suggest all sorts of improvements;

I wanted to lie down on the ground, I wanted to get rid of my panties which were wound around my feet, I wanted to take off the belt of my dress because he was pressing the buckle painfully into my stomach. However there was no time. I pushed my legs as far apart as I could with those pants tangling my feet and heaved myself up against the house wall trying to keep my balance. Unlike our previous intimacies, this required effort and attention. It also hurt me, though his fingers had stretched me before this time. With everything else, I had to hold his pants up, afraid that the white gleam of his buttocks might give us away, to anybody passing on the street. I developed an unbearable pain in the arches of my feet, Just when I thought I would have to ask him to stop, wait, at least till I put my heels to the ground for a second, he groaned and pushed violently and collapsed against me, his heart pounding. I was not balanced to receive his weight and we both crashed down, coming unstuck somehow, into the peony-border. I put my hand to my wet leg and it came away dark. Blood. When I saw the blood the glory of the whole episode became clear to me.

In the morning I went around to look at the broken peonies, and a little patch of blood, yes, dried blood on the ground. I had to mention it to somebody. I said to my mother, “There's blood on the ground at the side of the house.”

“Blood?”

“I saw a cat there yesterday tearing a bird apart. It was a big striped

Tom, I don't know where it came from.” “Vicious beasts.”

“You should come and look at it.” “What? I've got better things to do.”

That day we began to write the examinations. Jerry and I were writing and Murray Heal and George Klein, who were going to be a dentist and an engineer, respectively, and June Gannett whose father was making her get her Senior Matric before he would let her marry a hollow-chested, dissipated-looking boy who worked in the Bank of Commerce. There were also two girls from the country, Beatrice and Marie, who planned to go to Normal School.

The Principal broke the seal before our eyes, and we signed an oath that it had never been broken before. We were alone in the High School, all the lower grades dismissed for the summer. Our voices, our footsteps sounded huge in the halls. The building was hot, and smelled of paint. The janitors had taken all the desks out of one classroom and stacked them in the corridor; they were varnishing the floor.

I felt far away from all this. The first examination was on English literature. I began to write about “L'Allegro” and “Il Penseroso.” I could understand perfectly well what the question meant, and yet somehow I could not credit that it really meant that, it seemed nonsensical, oblique, baleful as some sentence is a dream. I wrote slowly. Every once in a while I would stop, screw up my forehead, flex my fingers, trying to get a sense of urgency, but it was no use, I could not go any faster. I did get to the end, but I had no time, or energy, or even desire, to check my paper over. I suspected that I had left out part of one question; I deliberately did not look at the question-paper to see if that was true.

I had a radiant sense of importance, physical grandeur. I moved languidly, exaggerating a slight discomfort. I remembered now, over and over again, Garnet's face, both in extreme effort and in the instant of triumph before we crashed. That I could be the occasion to anyone of such pain and release made me marvel at myself.

Beatrice, one of the girls from the country, had brought her family's car, because the school buses were no longer running She asked me to have a coke with her at the drive-in that had been opened—in a refitted, repainted blacksmith shop—at the south end of town. She asked me because she wanted to find out what my answers had been. She was a big hard-working girl who wore broadcloth dresses buttoned down the front. Naomi and I used to giggle at her because she came to school in winter with white horse-hairs on her coat.

“What did you do for this?” she said, and read out slowly:
Englishmen in the eighteenth century valued formal elegance and social stability. Discuss, with reference to one eighteenth century poem
.

I was thinking that if I got out of the car and walked to the back of the gravelled lot where we were parked, I would be on the street
that ran up behind the lumber yard. The men who worked in the lumber yard parked their cars on this street. If I walked over there and stood in the middle of the street I would be able to see the back fence, the entrance, the roof of the long open shed and the top of some piles of lumber. In the town were certain marked, glowing places—the lumber yard, the Baptist Church, the service station where Garnet bought gas, the barber shop where he got his hair cut, the houses of his friends—and strung between these places, the streets where he habitually drove appeared in my mind like bright wires.

Now was the end of all our early sweet gropings, rainy games in the truck. From now on we made love in earnest. We made love on the truck seat with the door open, and under bushes, and in the night grass. Much was changed. At first I was numb, overwhelmed by the importance, the name and thought of what we were doing. Then I had an orgasm. I knew that was what it was called, from Naomi's mother's book, and I knew what it was like, having discovered such seizures by myself, some time ago, with many impatient, indeed ravenous, imaginary lovers. But I was amazed to undergo it in company, so to speak; it did seem almost too private, even lonely a thing, to find at the heart of love. So quickly it came to be what had to be achieved—I could not imagine how we had once stopped short. We had come out on another level—more solid, less miraculous, where cause and effect must be acknowledged, and love begins to flow in a deliberate pattern.