“Scott what?”
“Geoghagen.” She spelled it. “I’d better just get used to it, its going to be my name. Naomi Geoghagen. Four months ago that was a name I never even heard. I was going out with an altogether different guy when I met him. Stuart Claymore. He has got a new Plymouth, now that I quit going out with him. Come on up and I’ll show you my stuff.”
We went up the stairs, past her father’s door.
“How is he?”
“Who, him? There’s so many holes in his head the birds are laying their eggs in it.”
Her mother appeared at the top of the back stairs and accompanied us into Naomi’s room.
“We decided we’d just have a quiet wedding,” she said. “What is a great big wedding anyway? Its just for the show.”
“You have to be my bridesmaid,” said Naomi. “After all you are my oldest friend.”
“When is it going to be?”
“A week from this coming Saturday,” her mother said. “We’re going to have it in the garden under a trellis if the weather holds out. We’re getting a loan of the United Church chairs and the W.A. is going to cater, not that we’ll need much. You’ll have to get a dress, dear. Naomi’s is powder blue. Show her your dress, Naomi. Coral colour would be a nice choice for you.”
Naomi showed me her dress and her going-away outfit and her underwear and her bridal nightgown. She cheered up some, doing this. Then she opened her hope chest and another chest and several drawers and took boxes out of the closet and showed me all those things she had acquired for furnishing and maintaining a home. I was thinking unhappily that being the bridesmaid I would have to give a shower for her, and decorate a chair with streamers of pink crepe paper and cut the crusts off sandwiches and make radish roses and carrot curls. She had bought plain pillowcases and embroidered every one of them, with garlands of flowers and baskets of fruit and little poke-bonnetted girls with watering-cans. “Bella Phippen will be giving you a pincushion,” I said, with a feeling of sadness, for our old days in the Library after school.
Naomi was pleased at the idea. “I hope its green or yellow or orange, because those are the colours I’m using for my decorating scheme.” She showed me doilies she had crocheted in those colours. Some she had stiffened with a solution of sugar and water, so they would stand up around the edges, like baskets.
Her mother had gone downstairs. Naomi folded everything and closed the drawers and boxes and said to me, “Well, what have you heard about me?”
“What?”
“I know. There are a lot of people in this town have got damn big mouths.”
She sat down heavily on her bed, her bum making a big hollow. I remembered that mattress, how when I stayed all night we would always roll into the middle and wake up kicking and butting each other.
“I’m pregnant you know. Don’t look at me with that stupid look. Everybody does it. Its just everybody isn’t unlucky enough to get pregnant. Everybody
does
it. Its getting to be just like saying hello.” With her feet on the floor she lay back on the bed, put her hands behind her head and squinted at the light. “That lamp is full of bugs.”
“I know. I’ve done it too,” I said.
She sat up. “
You
have? Who with?
Jerry Storey
. He wouldn’t know how. Garnet?”
“Yes.”
She flopped back. “Well, how did you like it?” She sounded suspicious.
“Fine.”
“It gets better as it goes along. The first time it hurt me so bad.
That wasn’t Scott, either. He had a thing on, you know.
Hurt!
We should have had some Vaseline. Where are you going to get Vaseline, out in the bush in the middle of the night? Where did it happen to you the first time?”
I told her about the peonies, the blood on the ground, the cat killing a bird. We lay on our stomachs across the bed and told everything, scandalous details. I even told Naomi, all this time later, about Mr. Chamberlain, and how that was the first one I had ever seen, and what he did with it. I was rewarded with her pounding the bed with her fist, laughing and saying, “Jesus, I never yet saw anybody do that!” After some time, though, she grew gloomy again, and raised herself on the bed to look down at her stomach.
“You’re lucky yet. You better start using something. You better be careful. Nothing is sure, anyway. Those rotten old safes split sometimes. When I first knew I was pregnant I took quinine. I took slippery elm and damn laxative and jujubes and I sat in a mustard bath till I thought I was going to turn into a hot dog. Nothing works.”
“Didn’t you ask your mother?”
“That was her idea, the mustard bath. She doesn’t know as much as she lets on.”
“You don’t have to get married. You could go to Toronto—” “Sure, stick me in a Salvation Army home. Praise Jesus!” she quavered, and added somewhat inconsistently in view of the mustard and quinine, “Anyway I wouldn’t think it was right to give my baby up to strangers.”
“All right, but if you don’t want to get married—”
“Oh, who says I don’t want to? I’ve collected all this stuff, I might as well get married. You always get depressed when you’re first pregnant, its hormones. I’ve got the most god-awful constipation as well.”
She walked me out to the sidewalk. She stood there looking up and down the street, hands on her hips, stomach pushing out her old plaid skirt. I could see her married, a bossy, harassed, satisfied young mother out looking for her children, to call them in to bed or braid their hair or otherwise interfere with them. “Good-bye nonvirgin,” she said affectionately.
When I was halfway up the block, under the street light, she yelled, “Hey Dell” and came running clumsily after me, panting and laughing, and when she got close she put her hands up on either side of her mouth and said in a shouting whisper, “Don’t trust withdrawal either!”
“I won’t!”
“The bastards never get it out in time!”
Then we each walked in our own directions, turning around and waving two or three times, with mocking exaggeration, as we used to.
Garnet and i went to Third Bridge to swim, after supper. We made love first, in the long grass, after scouting around for a while to find a place free of thistles, then walked awkwardly holding on to each other down a path meant for one person, stopping and kissing along the way. The quality of kisses changed a good deal, from before to after; at least Garnet’s did, going from passionate to consolatory, pleading to indulgent. How quickly he came back, after crying out the way he did, and turning his eyes up and throbbing all over and sinking into me like a shot gull! Sometimes when he had barely got his breath back I would ask him what he was thinking and he would say, “I was just figuring out how I could fix that muffler—” But this time he said, “About when would we get married.”
Naomi was married now, living in Tupperton. We were past the peak of summer. Mountain ash berries were out. The river had gone down, after weeks with little rain, revealing lush peninsulas of water-weeds that looked as if they would be solid enough to walk on.
We walked into the water, sinking in mud until we reached the pebbly, sandy bottom. The results of the examinations had become known that week. I had passed. I had not won my scholarship. I had not received a single first-class mark.
“Would you like to have a baby?”
“Yes,” I said. The water which was almost as warm as the air touched my sore prickled buttocks. I was weak from making love, I felt myself warm and lazy, like a big cabbage spreading, as my back my arms my chest went down into the water, like big cabbage leaves loosening and spreading on the ground.
Where would such a lie come from? It was not a lie.
“You have to join the church first,” he said shyly. “You have to get baptized.”
I fell on the water, arms spread. Bluebottles made their quivering, directly horizontal flights on a level with my eyes.
“You know how they do it in our church? Baptizing?”
“How?”
“Dunk you right under the water. They got a tank behind the pulpit, covered up. That’s where they do it. But its better to do it in a river, several at one time.”
He threw himself into the water and swam after me, trying to catch hold of one foot.
“When are you going to get it done? Could be this month.”
I turned on my back and floated, kicking water in his face.
“You have to get saved sometime.”
The river was still as a pond; you couldn’t tell to look at it which way the current was going. It held the reflection of the opposite banks, Fairmile Township, dark with pine and spruce and cedar bush.
“Why do I have to?”
“You know why.”
“Why?”
He caught up to me and grabbed me by the shoulders, pushed me gently up and down in the water. “I ought to baptize you now and get the job over with. I ought to baptize you now.”
I laughed.
“I don’t want to be baptized. Its no good if I don’t want to be baptized.” Though it would have been so easy, just a joke, to give in, I was not able to do it. He kept saying, “Baptize you!” and bobbing me up and down, with less and less gentleness, and I kept refusing, laughing, shaking my head at him. Gradually, with the struggle, laughing stopped, and the wide, determined, painful grins on our faces hardened.
“You think you’re too good for it,” he said softly.
“I don’t!”
“You think you’re too good for anything. Any of us.”
“I don’t!”
“Well get baptized then!” He pushed me right under the water, taking me by surprise. I came up spluttering and blowing my nose.
“Next time you won’t get out so easy! I’m going to keep you down till you say you’ll do it! Say you’ll get baptized or I’ll baptize you anyway—”
He pushed me down again but this time I was expecting it. I held my breath and fought him. I fought strongly and naturally, as anybody does, held down in the water, and without thinking much about who was holding me. But when he let me come up just long enough to hear him say, “Now say you’ll do it,” I saw his face streaming with water I had splashed over him and I felt amazement, not that I was fighting with Garnet but that anybody could have made such a mistake, to think he had real power over me. I was too amazed to be angry, I forgot to be frightened, it seemed to me impossible that he should not understand that all the powers I granted him were in play, that he himself was—in play, that I meant to keep him sewed up in his golden lover’s skin forever, even if five minutes before I had talked about marrying him. This was clear as day to me, and I opened my mouth to say whatever would make it clear to him, and I saw that he knew it all already; this was what he knew, that I had somehow met his good offerings with my deceitful offerings, whether I knew it or not, matched my complexity and play-acting to his true intent.
You think you’re too good for it.
“Say you’ll do it then!” His dark, amiable but secretive face broken by rage, a helpless sense of insult. I was ashamed of this insult but had to cling to it, because it was only my differences, my reservations, my life. I thought of him kicking and kicking that man in front of the Porterfield beer parlour. I had thought I wanted to know about him but I hadn’t really, I had never really wanted his secrets or his violence or himself taken out of the context of that peculiar and magical and, it seemed now, possibly fatal game.
Suppose in a dream you jumped willingly into a hole and laughed while people threw soft tickling grass on you, then understood when your mouth and eyes were covered up that it was no game at all, or if it was, it was a game that required you to be buried alive. I fought underwater exactly as you would fight in such a dream, with a feeling of desperation that was not quite immediate, that had to work upward through layers of incredulity. Yet I thought that he might drown me. I really thought that. I thought that I was fighting for my life.
When he let me come up again he tried the conventional baptizing position, bending me backwards from the waist, and this was a mistake. I was able to kick him low in the belly—not in the genitals though I would not have cared, I did not know or care where I kicked—and these kicks were strong enough to make him lose his hold and stagger a bit and I got away. As soon as there was a yard of water between us the absurdity and horror of our fight became plain and it could not be resumed. He did not come towards me. I walked slowly safely out of the water which at this time of year was not much more than armpit-deep, anywhere. I was shaking, gasping, drinking air.
I dressed at once in the shelter of the truck, with difficulty making my legs go through the legs of my shorts, trying to hold my breath to steady myself, so I could do up the buttons of my blouse.
Garnet called me.
“I’ll give you a ride home.”
“I want to walk.”
“I’ll come and pick you up Monday night.”
I didn’t answer. I guessed this was said for courtesy. He would not come. If we had been older we would certainly have hung on, haggled over the price of reconciliation, explained and justified and perhaps forgiven, and carried this into the future with us, but as it was we were close enough to childhood to believe in the absolute seriousness and finality of some fights, unforgivability of some blows. We had seen in each other what we could not bear, and we had no idea that people do see that, and go on, and hate and fight and try to kill each other, various ways, then love some more.
I started walking along the track that led to the road and after a while walking calmed me down and strengthened me; my legs were not so terribly weak. I walked down the Third Concession, which came out at the Cemetery Road. I had about three and a half miles to walk altogether.
I cut through the Cemetery. It was getting dark. August was as far away from midsummer as April, a fact always hard to remember. I saw a boy and girl—I could not make out who they were—lying on the clipped grass over by the Mundy mausoleum, on whose dark cement walls Naomi and I had once written an epitaph that we had made up, and thought wicked and hilarious, and that I could no longer fully remember.
Here lies the bodies of lots of Mundys
Who died from peeing in their soup on Sundays—