Lives of Girls and Women (24 page)

In the third bundle were typewritten verses. Some had titles. “Home-made Lemon Squeeze.” “The Lament of the Truck-Driver’s Wife.”

Husband, dear husband, what am I to do? I’m wanting some hard satisfaction from you. You’re never at home or you’re never awake. (A big cock in my pussy is all it would take!)

I was surprised that any adult would know, or still remember, these words. The greedy progression of verses, the short chunky words set in shameless type, fired up lust at a great rate, like squirts of kerosene on bonfires. But they were repetitive, elaborate; after a while the mechanical effort needed to contrive them began to be felt, and made them heavy going; they grew bewilderingly dull. But the words themselves still gave off flashes of power, particularly
fuck,
which I had never been able to really look at, on fences or sidewalks. I had never been able to contemplate before its thrust of brutality, hypnotic swagger.

I said no to Mr. Chamberlain, when he asked me if I had got my homework done. He did not touch me all evening. But when I came out of school on Monday, he was there.

“Girl friend still sick? That’s too bad. Nice though. Isn’t it nice?” “What?”

“Birds are nice. Trees are nice. Nice you can come for a drive with me, do my little investigations for me.” He said this in an infantile voice. Evil would never be grand, with him. His voice suggested that it would be possible to do anything, anything at all, and pass it off as a joke, a joke on all the solemn and guilty, all the moral and emotional, people in the world, the people who “took themselves seriously.” That was what he could not stand in people. His little smile was repulsive; self-satisfaction stretched over quite an abyss of irresponsibility, or worse. This did not give me second thoughts about going with him, and doing whatever it was he had in mind to do. His moral character was of no importance to me there; perhaps it was even necessary that it should be black.

Excitement owing something to Fern’s dirty verses had got the upper hand of me, entirely.

“Did you get a good look?” he said in a normal voice.

“Yes.”

“Didn’t find a thing? Did you look in all her drawers? I mean her
dresser
drawers. Hatboxes, suitcases? Went through her closet?”

“I looked and looked everywhere,” I said demurely.

“She must have got rid of them.”

“I guess she isn’t sentimental.”

“Sennamenal? I don’t know what dose big words mean, little dirl.” We were driving out of town. We drove south on the No. 4

Highway and turned down the first sideroad. “Beautiful morning,” said Mr. Chamberlain. “Pardon me—beautiful afterno-on, beautiful day.” I looked out the window; the countryside I knew was altered by his presence, his voice, overpowering foreknowledge of the errand we were going on together. For a year or two I had been looking at trees, fields, landscape with a secret, strong exaltation. In some moods, some days, I could feel for a clump of grass, a rail fence, a stone-pile, such pure unbounded emotion as I used to hope for, and have inklings of, in connection with God. I could not do it when I was with anybody, of course, and now with Mr. Chamberlain I saw that the whole of nature became debased, maddeningly erotic. It was just now the richest, greenest time of year; ditches sprouted coarse daisies, toadflax, buttercups, hollows were full of nameless faintly golden bushes and the gleam of high creeks. I saw all this as a vast arrangement of hiding places, ploughed fields beyond rearing up like shameless mattresses. Little paths, opening in the bushes, crushed places in the grass, where no doubt a cow had lain, seemed to me specifically, urgently inviting as certain words or pressures.

“Hope we don’t meet your Mama, driving along here.”

I did not think it possible. My mother inhabited a different layer of reality from the one I had got into now.

Mr. Chamberlain drove off the road, following a track that ended soon, in a field half gone to brush. The stopping of the car, cessation of that warm flow of sound and motion in which I had been suspended, jarred me a little. Events were becoming real.

“Let’s take a little walk down to the creek.”

He got out on his side, I got out on mine. I followed him, down a slope between some hawthorn trees, in bloom, yeasty-smelling. This was a travelled route, with cigarette packages, a beer bottle, a Chiclet box lying on the grass. Little trees, bushes closed around us.

“Why don’t we call a halt here?” said Mr. Chamberlain in a practical way. “It gets soggy down by the water.”

Here in the half-shade above the creek I was cold, and so violently anxious to know what would be done to me that all the heat and dancing itch between my legs had gone dead, numb as if a piece of ice had been laid to it. Mr. Chamberlain opened his jacket and loosened his belt, then unzipped himself. He reached in to part some inner curtains, and “Boo!” he said.

Not at all like marble David’s, it was sticking straight out in front of him, which I knew from my reading was what they did. It had a sort of head on it, like a mushroom, and its colour was reddish purple. It looked blunt and stupid, compared, say, to fingers and toes with their intelligent expressiveness, or even to an elbow or a knee. It did not seem frightening to me, though I thought this might have been what Mr. Chamberlain intended, standing there with his tightly watching look, his hands holding his pants apart to display it. Raw and blunt, ugly coloured as a wound, it looked to me vulnerable, playful and naive, like some strong snouted animal whose grotesque simple looks are some sort of guarantee of good will. (The opposite of what beauty usually is.) It did not bring back any of my excitement, though. It did not seem to have anything to do with me.

Still watching me, and smiling, Mr. Chamberlain placed his hand around this thing and began to pump up and down, not too hard, in a controlled efficient rhythm. His face softened; his eyes, still fixed on me, grew glassy. Gradually, almost experimentally he increased the speed of his hand; the rhythm became less smooth. He crouched over, his smile opened out and drew the lips back from his teeth and his eyes rolled slightly upward. His breathing became loud and shaky, now he worked furiously with his hand, moaned, almost doubled over in spasmodic agony. The face he thrust out at me, from his crouch, was blind and wobbling like a mask on a stick, and those sounds coming out of his mouth, involuntary, last-ditch human noises, were at the same time theatrical, unlikely. In fact the whole performance, surrounded by calm flowering branches, seemed imposed, fantastically and predictably exaggerated, like an Indian dance. I had read about the body being in extremities of pleasure, possessed, but these expressions did not seem equal to the terrible, benighted effort, deliberate frenzy, of what was going on here. If he did not soon get to where he wanted to be, I thought he would die. But then he let out a new kind of moan, the most desperate and the loudest yet; it quavered as if somebody was hitting him on the voice box. This died, miraculously, into a peaceful grateful whimper, as stuff shot out of him, the real whitish stuff, the seed, and caught the hem of my skirt. He straightened up, shaky, out of breath, and tucked himself quickly back inside his trousers. He got out a handkerchief and wiped first his hands then my skirt.

“Lucky for you? Eh?” He laughed at me, though he still had not altogether got his breath back.

After such a convulsion, such a revelation, how could a man just put his handkerchief in his pocket, check his fly, and start walking back—still somewhat flushed and bloodshot—the way we had come?

The only thing he said was in the car, when he sat for a moment composing himself before he turned the key.

“Quite a sight, eh?” was what he said.

The landscape was post-coital, distant and meaningless. Mr. Chamberlain may have felt some gloom too, or apprehension, for he made me get down on the floor of the car as we reentered town, and then he drove around and let me out in a lonely place, where the road dipped down near the CNR station. He felt enough like himself, however, to tap me in the crotch with his fist, as if testing a coconut for soundness.

That was a valedictory appearance for Mr. Chamberlain, as I ought to have guessed it might be. I came home at noon to find Fern sitting at the dining room table, which was set for dinner, listening to my mother calling from the kitchen over the noise of the potato masher.

“Doesn’t matter what anybody says. You weren’t married. You weren’t engaged. It’s nobody’s business. Your life is your own.”

“Want to see my little love letter?” said Fern, and fluttered it under my nose.

Dear Fern, Owing to circumstances beyond my control, I am taking off this evening in my trusty Pontiac and heading for points west. There is a lot of the world I haven’t seen yet and no sense getting fenced in. I may send you a postcard from California or Alaska, who knows? Be a good girl as you always were and keep licking those stamps and steaming open the mail, you may find a hundred-dollar-bill yet. When Mama dies I will probably come home, but not for long. Cheers, Art.

The same hand that had written:
Del is a bad girl
.

“Tampering with the mails is a Federal offense,” said my mother, coming in. “I don’t think that is very witty, what he says.”

She distributed canned carrots, mashed potatoes, meat loaf. No matter what the season, we ate a heavy meal in the middle of the day.

“Looks like it hasn’t put me off my food, anyway,” said Fern, sighing. She poured ketchup. “I could have had him. Long ago, if I’d wanted. He even wrote me letters mentioning marriage. I should have kept them, I could have breach-of-promised him.”

“A good thing you didn’t,” said my mother spiritedly, “or where would you be today?”

“Didn’t what? Breached-of-promised him or married him?” “Married him. Breach-of-promise is a degradation to women.” “Oh, I wasn’t in danger of marriage.”

“You had your singing. You had your interest in life.”

“I was just usually having too good a time. I knew enough about marriage to know that’s when your good times stop.”

When Fern talked about having a good time she meant going to dances at the Lakeshore Pavilion, going to the Regency Hotel in Tupperton for drinks and dinner, being driven from one roadhouse to another on Saturday night. My mother did try to understand such pleasures, but she could not, any more than she could understand why people go on rides at a fair, and will get off and throw up, then go on rides again.

Fern was not one to grieve, in spite of her acquaintance with opera. Her expressed feeling was that men always went, and better they did before you got sick of them. But she grew very talkative; she was never silent.

“As bad as Art was,” she said to Owen, eating supper. “He wouldn’t touch any yellow vegetable. His mother should have taken the paddle to him when he was little. That’s what I used to tell him.”

“You’re built the opposite from Art,” she told my father. “The trouble with getting his suits fitted was he was so long in the body, short in the leg. Ransom’s in Tupperton was the only place that could fit him.”

“Only one time I saw him lose his temper. At the Pavilion when we went to a dance there, and a fellow asked me to dance, and I got up with him because what can you do, and he put his face down, right away down on my neck. Guzzling me up like I was chocolate icing! Art said to him, if you have to slobber don’t do it on my girl friend, I might want her myself! And he yanked him off. He did so!”

I would come into a room where she was talking to my mother and there would be an unnatural, waiting silence. My mother would be listening with a trapped, determinedly compassionate, miserable face. What could she do? Fern was her good, perhaps her only, friend.

But there were things she never thought she would have to hear. She may have missed Mr. Chamberlain.

“He treated you shabbily,” she said to Fern, against Fern’s shrugs and ambiguous laugh. “He did. He did. My estimation of a person has never gone down so fast. But nevertheless I miss him when I hear them trying to read the radio news.”

For the Jubilee station had not found anybody else who could read the news the way it was now, full of Russian names, without panicking, and they had let somebody call Bach
Batch
on “In Memoriam,” when they played “Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring.” It made my mother wild.

I had meant to tell Naomi all about Mr. Chamberlain, now it was over. But Naomi came out of her illness fifteen pounds lighter, with a whole new outlook on life. Her forthrightness was gone with her chunky figure. Her language was purified. Her daring had collapsed. She had a new delicate regard for herself. She sat under a tree with her skirt spread around her, watching the rest of us play volleyball, and kept feeling her forehead to see if she was feverish. She was not even interested in the fact that Mr. Chamberlain had gone, so preoccupied was she with herself and her illness. Her temperature had risen to over a hundred and five degrees. All the grosser aspects of sex had disappeared from her conversation and apparently from her mind although she talked a good deal about Dr. Wallis, and how he had sponged her legs himself, and she had been quite helplessly exposed to him, when she was sick.

So I had not the relief of making what Mr. Chamberlain had done into a funny, though horrifying, story. I did not know what to do with it. I could not get him back to his old role, I could not make him play the single-minded, simple-minded, vigorous, obliging lecher of my daydreams. My faith in simple depravity had weakened. Perhaps nowhere but in daydreams did the trapdoor open so sweetly and easily, plunging bodies altogether free of thought, free of personality, into self-indulgence, mad bad licence. Instead of that, Mr. Chamberlain had shown me, people take along a good deal—flesh that is not overcome but has to be thumped into ecstasy, all the stubborn puzzle and dark turns of themselves.

In June there was the annual strawberry supper on the lawns behind the United Church. Fern went down to sing at it, wearing the flowered chiffon dress my mother had helped her make. It was now very tight at the waist. Since Mr. Chamberlain had gone Fern had put on weight, so that she was not now soft and bulgy but really fat, swollen up like a boiled pudding, her splotched skin not shady any more but stretched and shiny.