Lives of Girls and Women (20 page)

The dancers were dressed in bright cotton skirts, red, yellow, green, blue, and white embroidered drawstring blouses. Alma had loosened the drawstring of her blouse to show the impudent beginnings of her bust. Even that, Miss Farris just smiled at, and floated by. Anything that wanted to, it seemed, might happen now.

Near the beginning of the dance my headdress, a tall medieval cone of cardboard wrapped in yellow net, with a bit of limp veil, began to slide slightly, disastrously to the side of my head. I had to tilt my head as if I had a wry neck, and go all through the dance like that, teeth clenched, glassily smiling.

After “God Save the King,” after the last curtain, we ran up the street to the photographer’s, all in our costumes still, without coats, to have our pictures taken. We were all crushed together, waiting, among the sepia waterfalls and Italian gardens of his discarded backdrops. Dale McLaughlin found a chair, the kind in which fathers of families used to sit for their pictures, wife and children clustered round them. He sat down, and Alma Cody sat boldly on his knee. She flopped against his neck.

“I’m so weak. I’m a wreck. Did you know I took four aspirins?”

I was standing in front of them. “Sit down, sit down,” said Dale jovially, and pulled me down on top of Alma, who screamed. He opened his long legs and dumped both of us on the floor. Everybody was laughing. My hat and veil had fallen right off, and Dale picked it up and set it on my head backwards so the veil fell over my face.

“You look gorgeous like that. Can’t see a thing.”

I tried to dust it off and get it on the right way. Frank Wales appeared suddenly between the curtains, after having his picture taken, alone, in his lordly, beggarly costume.

“Dancers! Next!” called the photographer’s wife, angrily, sticking her head through the curtains. I was the last to go in, because I was still trying to get my headdress on properly. “Look in my glasses,” Dale said, so I did, though it was distracting seeing his lonely, crossed eye behind my reflection. He was making leering faces.

“You ought to walk her home,” he said to Frank Wales.

Frank Wales said, “Who?”

“Her,” said Dale, nodding at me. My head bobbed in his glasses. “Don’t you know her? She sits in front of you.”

I was afraid it would turn out to be a joke. I felt sweat start out of my armpits, always the first sign of fear of humiliation. My face swam in Dale’s foolish eyes. It was too much, too dangerous, to be flung like this into the very text of my dream.

However Frank Wales said consideringly, and as gallantly as anybody could, “I would too. If she didn’t live such a long ways out.”

He was thinking of when I lived out on the Flats Road, and was famous in the class for my long walk to school. Didn’t he know I lived in town now? No time to tell him; no way, either, and there was still the smallest risk, that I would never take, of having him laugh at me, his quiet, reflectively snorting laugh, and say he was only kidding.

“All dancers!”
cried the photographer’s wife, and I turned blindly and followed her through the curtains. My disappointment was after a moment drowned in gratitude. The words he had said kept repeating themselves in my mind, as if they were words of praise and pardon, the intonation so mild, matter-of-fact, acknowledging and lovely. A feeling of rare peacefulness like that of my daydream settled on me during the picture-taking and carried me back through the cold to the Council Chambers and stayed with me while we changed, even with Naomi saying, “Everybody was killing themselves laughing, the way you held your head when you were dancing. You looked like a puppet with its neck broken. You couldn’t help it, though.” She was in a bad, and worsening, mood. She whispered in my ear, “You know all that stuff I told you about Dale McLaughlin? That was all a lie. That was all an act I put on to get your secrets out of you, ha ha.”

Miss Farris was automatically picking up and folding costumes. She had cornstarch spilled down the front of her cerise-pink dress, and her chest actually looked concave, as if something had collapsed inside it. She hardly bothered to notice us, except to say, “Leave the rosettes off your shoes, girls, leave those too. Everything will have its use another day.”

I walked around to the front of the hall and there was my mother waiting with Fern Dogherty, and my brother Owen in his flag drill outfit (the younger grades had got to do inconsequential things, like flag drill, rhythm band numbers, before the curtain went up on the operetta), poking his flag, which he had been allowed to keep, into a snowdrift.

“Whatever kept you so long?” my mother said. “It was lovely, did you have a crick in your neck? That Wales boy was the only one on the entire stage who forgot to take his cap off for “God Save the King.” My mother had these various odd little pockets of conventionality.

What happened, after the operetta? In one week it had sunk from sight. Seeing some part of a costume, meant to be returned, hanging in the cloakroom was like seeing the Christmas tree, leaning against the back porch in January, browning, bits of tinsel stuck to it, reminder of a time whose hectic expectations, and effort, seem now to have been somewhat misplaced. Mr. McKenna’s solid ground was reassuring under our feet. Every day we did eighteen arithmetic problems, to catch up, and listened securely to such statements as, “And now because of the time we have lost we are all going to have to put our noses to the grindstone.”
Noses to the grindstone, shoulders to the wheel, feet on the pedals
—all these favourite expressions of Mr. McKenna’s, their triteness and predictability, seemed now oddly satisfying. We carried home large piles of books, and spent our time drawing maps of Ontario and the Great Lakes—the hardest map in the world to draw—and learning “The Vision of Sir Launfall.”

Everybody’s seat was moved; the housecleaning of desks and change of neighbours turned out to be stimulating. Frank Wales now sat across the room. And one day the janitor came with his long ladder and removed an object which had been visible in one of the hanging lights since Hallowe’en. We had all believed this to be a French safe, and Dale McLaughlin’s name had been connected with it; less scandalously, though just as mysteriously, it was discovered to be an old sock. It seemed to be a time for dispelling illusions.
Getting down to brass tacks,
Mr. McKenna would have said.

My love did not of course melt away altogether as the season changed. My daydreams continued, but were derived from the past. They had nothing new to feed on. And the change of season did make a difference. It seemed to me that winter was the time for love, not spring. In winter the habitable world was so much contracted; out of that little shut-in space we lived in, fantastic hopes might bloom. But spring revealed the ordinary geography of the place; the long brown roads, the old cracked sidewalks underfoot, all the tree branches broken off in winter storms, that had to be cleared out of the yards. Spring revealed distances, exactly as they were.

Frank Wales did not go on to high school as most of the others in the class did, but got a job working for Jubilee Dry Cleaners. At this time the dry cleaners did not have a truck. Most people picked up their clothes but a few things were delivered. It was Frank Wales’s job to carry them through town, and we would meet him sometimes doing this when we were coming from school. He would say hello in the quick, serious, courteous way of a business man or working man speaking to those who have not yet entered the responsible world. He always held the clothes shoulder-high, with a dutifully crooked elbow; when he started working he had not yet reached his full height.

For a while—about six months, I think—I would go into Jubilee Dry Cleaners with a vestigial flutter of excitement, a hope of seeing him, but he was never in the front shop; it was always the man who owned the place, or his wife—both small, exhausted, bluish-looking people, who looked as if dry-cleaning fluids had stained them, or got into their blood.

Miss Farris was drowned in the Wawanash River. This happened when I was in high school, so it was only three or four years since
The Pied Piper,
yet when I heard the news I felt as if Miss Farris existed away back in time, and on a level of the most naive and primitive feelings, and mistaken perceptions. I thought her imprisoned in that time, and was amazed that she had broken out to commit this act. If it was an act.

It was possible, though not at all likely, that Miss Farris would have gone walking along the river bank north of town, near the cement bridge, and that she might have slipped and fallen into the water and not been able to save herself. Neither was it impossible, the Jubilee
Herald-Advance
pointed out, that she had been taken from her house by person or persons unknown, and forced into the river. She had left her house in the evening, without locking the door, and all the lights were on. Some people who were excited by the thought of marvellous silent crimes happening in the night always believed it was murder. Others out of kindness or fearfulness held it to be an accident. These were the two possibilities that were argued and discussed. Those who believed that it was suicide, and most people, finally, did, were not so anxious to talk about it, and why should they be? Because there was nothing to say. It was a mystery presented without explanation and without hope of explanation, in all insolence, like a clear blue sky. No revelation here.

Miss Farris in her velvet skating costume, her jaunty fur hat bobbing among the skaters, always marking her out, Miss Farris
con brio,
Miss Farris painting faces in the Council Chambers, Miss Farris floating face down, unprotesting, in the Wawanash river, six days before she was found. Though there is no plausible way of hanging those pictures together—if the last one is true then must it not alter the others?—they are going to have to stay together now.

The Pied Piper; The Gypsy Princess; The Stolen Crown; The Arabian Knight; The Kerry Dancers; The Woodcutter’s Daughter.

She sent those operettas up like bubbles, shaped with quivering, exhausting effort, then almost casually set free, to fade and fade but hold trapped forever our transformed childish selves, her undefeated, unrequited love.

As for Mr. Boyce, he had already left Jubilee, where as people said he never did seem to feel at home, and got a job playing a church organ and teaching music in London—which is not the real London, I feel obliged to explain, but a medium-sized city in western Ontario. Word filtered back that he managed to get along quite well there, where there were some people like himself.

Lives of Girls and Women

The snowbanks along the main street got to be so high that an archway was cut in one of them, between the street and the sidewalk, in front of the Post Office. A picture was taken of this and published in the Jubilee
Herald-Advance,
so that people could cut it out and send it to relatives and acquaintances living in less heroic climates, in England or Australia or Toronto. The redbrick Clocktower of the Post office was sticking up above the snow and two women were standing in the archway, to show it was no trick. Both these women worked in the Post Office, had put their coats on without buttoning them. One was Fern Dogherty, my mother’s boarder.

My mother cut this picture out, because it had Fern in it, and because she said I should keep it, to show to my children.

“They will never see a thing like that,” she said. “By then the snow will all be collected in machines and—dissipated. Or people will be living under transparent domes, with a controlled temperature. There will be no such thing as seasons anymore.”

How did she collect all her unsettling information about the future? She looked forward to a time when towns like Jubilee would be replaced by domes and mushrooms of concrete, with moving skyways to carry you from one to the other, when the countryside would be bound and tamed forever under broad sweeping ribbons of pavement. Nothing would be the same as we knew it today, no frying pans or bobby pins or printed pages or fountain pens would remain. My mother would not miss a thing.

Her speaking of my children amazed me too, for I never meant to have any. It was glory I was after, walking the streets of Jubilee like an exile or a spy, not sure from which direction fame would strike, or when, only convinced from my bones out that it had to. In this conviction my mother had shared, she had been my ally, but now I would no longer discuss it with her; she was indiscreet, and her expectations took too blatant a form.

Fern Dogherty. There she was in the paper, both hands coquettishly holding up the full collar of her good winter coat, which through pure luck she had worn to work that day. “I look the size of a watermelon,” she said. “In that coat.”

Mr. Chamberlain, looking with her, pinched her arm above the bracelet-wrinkle of the wrist.

“Tough rind, tough old watermelon.”

“Don’t get vicious,” said Fern. “I mean it.” Her voice was small for such a big woman, plaintive, putupon, but in the end good-humoured, yielding. All those qualities my mother had developed for her assault on life—sharpness, smartness, determination, selectiveness—seemed to have their opposites in Fern, with her diffuse complaints, lazy movements, indifferent agreeableness. She had a dark skin, not olive but dusty-looking, dim, with brown-pigmented spots as large as coins; it was like the dappled ground under a tree on a sunny day. Her teeth were square, white, slightly protruding, with little spaces between them. These two characteristics, neither of which sounds particularly attractive in itself, did give her a roguish, sensual look.

She had a ruby-coloured satin dressing gown, a gorgeous garment, fruitily moulding, when she sat down, the bulges of her stomach and thighs. She wore it Sunday mornings, when she sat in our dining room smoking, drinking tea, until it was time to get ready for church. It parted at the knees to show some pale clinging rayon—a nightgown. Nightgowns were garments I could not bear, because of the way they twisted around and worked up on you while you slept and also because they left you uncovered between the legs. Naomi and I when we were younger used to draw pictures of men and women with startling gross genitals, the women’s fat, bristling with needley hair, like a porcupine’s back. Wearing a nightgown one could not help being aware of this vile bundle, which pajamas could decently shroud and contain. My mother at the same Sunday breakfast table wore large striped pajamas, a faded rust-coloured kimona with a tasselled tie, the sort of slippers that are woolly socks, with a sole sewn in.