Lady Oracle (18 page)

I found a secondhand portable Olivetti and bought it, using my limited vocabulary and finger signals. I came out of the store weighed down by the typewriter but nevertheless feeling light as a dancer, anonymous and unwatched in the procession of sidewalk people I would never have to know.

Then suddenly I remembered Arthur. He’d been there with me, we’d been on this very same street together, I could feel him still beside me, real as touch. We’d been holding hands. We’d stopped to consult our map, right here in front of this store, it even smelled the same. Had it happened or was I making it up? Had we really walked through the maze of Roman streets together, did we meander in a rented Fiat, did we drive along the Appian Way with its tombs and rumored ghosts, did we descend into the Catacombs, stuffed with the dried shells of Christians, were we guided by a short Bulgarian
priest, did we rise again after thirty minutes? Did we go round and round the Colosseum, unable to find the right exit while thunderous trucks swayed past on either side, loaded with metal and cement, pillars, lions for the games, loot, slaves? My feet hurt a lot but I’d been happy. Arthur had been with me, he wasn’t with me now, we had been walking along a street like this one and then the future swept over us and we were separated. He was in the distance now, across the ocean, on a beach, the wind ruffling his hair, I could hardly see his features. He was moving at an ever-increasing speed away from me, into the land of the dead, the dead past, irretrievable.

I
first met Arthur in Hyde Park. It was an accident: I collided with him between an anti-vivisectionist speaker and a man who was predicting the end of the world. I was living with a Polish Count in London at the time, and I still wasn’t sure how I’d gotten into it.

When I’d walked out my mother’s front door two years earlier, closing it gently behind me so as not to wake her up, I had no such plans. In fact I had no plans at all. I had a suitcase in one hand and my purse in the other. The suitcase contained the few clothes that would still fit me, skirts with belts that could he pulled in, blouses that could be gathered and tucked; I’d had to discard a whole wardrobe over the year I’d been deflating. It was the end of June, almost my nineteenth birthday. I’d written the grade thirteen examinations and I knew I’d failed at least four papers, but the results wouldn’t be available till August. In any case I didn’t care.

Aunt Lou’s fox was in my suitcase, and in my purse I had her birth certificate and the picture of us at the National Exhibition. I had about thirty dollars, seventeen of my own and thirteen from the petty cash box my mother kept in the kitchen; I would repay it later.
I could not yet collect Aunt Lou’s legacy as I was still overweight, but I had money in the bank from my various jobs and I could get some out in the morning.

I took a bus downtown, where I checked into the Royal York Hotel. This made me nervous: I’d never stayed in a hotel before in my life. I used Aunt Lou’s name, as I didn’t want my mother to trace me. That was stupid, she would have recognized Aunt Lou’s name at once, but I didn’t think of that. Instead I was prepared to be challenged by the desk clerk for being underage, and I would then have been able to whip out Aunt Lou’s birth certificate and demonstrate that I was forty-nine.

But all he said was, “Anyone with you?”

“No,” I said. He looked over my shoulder and around the gilded lobby to make sure I was telling the truth. It didn’t strike me at the time that he might have suspected I was a prostitute. I attributed my success not to the fact that the lobby was empty, but to the white gloves I’d worn as a symbol of adulthood and social status. “A lady never goes out of the house without putting on her gloves,” said my mother. Aunt Lou lost gloves continually.

(Perhaps it was to the Royal York Hotel, that bogus fairyland of nineteenth-century delights, red carpeting and chandeliers, moldings and cornices, floor-to-ceiling mirrors and worn plush sofas and brass-trimmed elevators, that the first stirrings of my creative impulse could be traced. To me, such a building seemed designed for quite other beings than the stodgy businessmen and their indistinct wives who were actually to be found there. It demanded ball gowns and decorum and fans, dresses with off-the-shoulder necklines, like those on the Laura Secord chocolate boxes, Summer Selection, crinolines and dapper gentlemen. I was upset when they remodeled it.)

Once the bellhop was finally gone – he hung around for a long time turning the lights on and off and opening and closing the
Venetian blinds until I remembered what I’d read about tipping – I opened all the bureau drawers. I longed to write an elegant note on the aristocratic stationery, but there was no one at all I could write to. I took a bath, using up all the monogrammed towels. I washed my hair and rolled it up in a set of plastic-mesh-covered rollers. All the time I was fat I’d worn my hair cropped short, which emphasized the roundness of my face. My mother kept making proposals for improvement; she’d wanted me to wear a pageboy, then a poodle cut, but I’d rejected everything. Now, however, I’d been growing my hair for a year and it was shoulder-length, dark red and straight. I didn’t wear it loose but kept it back with a bobby pin behind each ear. When my hair was neatly rolled, I stood in front of the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door and examined myself, much as a real estate agent might examine a swamp, with an eye to future development. I was still overweight and I was still baggy. There were stretch marks on my thighs, and my face was that of a thirty-five-year-old housewife with four kids and a wandering husband: I looked worn down. But I had green eyes and small white teeth, and luckily I didn’t have pimples. I had only eighteen pounds to go.

In the morning I bought a paper and went through the want ads, looking for a room. I found one on Isabella Street, called up the landlady and represented myself over the phone as a twenty-five-year-old office girl, non-drinking and non-smoking. I pinned my hair back, put on my white gloves and went off to inspect it. I gave my name as Miss L. Delacourt, and I used this name also when I opened a new bank account later in the day. I withdrew all my money from my other account and closed it; I didn’t want my mother tracking me down. This was the formal beginning of my second self. I was amazed at how easily everyone believed me, but then, why should they suspect?

That afternoon I went to the hospital to see my father. I’d never been inside it before, so I had no idea how to find him. I asked
receptionists and they asked each other until they discovered he was in an operating room. They wanted me to make an appointment or stay in the reception area – I hadn’t told them I was his daughter – and I said I would. But I’d heard the floor number, and when none of them was watching I got up quietly and went to the elevator.

I stood outside the door, waiting, and finally he came out. I’d never seen him dressed in his official uniform: he had a white cap on and a gown, and a mask over the lower half of his face, which he was in the act of pulling down. He looked much more impressive than he ever had at home, he looked like someone with power. He was talking with two other doctors. I had to call out to him before he noticed me.

“Your mother’s been worried sick,” he said without annoyance.

“She’s been worried sick all my life,” I said. “I just wanted to tell. you that I’m all right. I’m not coming back, I have a room and enough money.”

He stared down at me with an expression I could not place then because I’d rarely had it directed my way. It was admiration, and perhaps even envy: I had done what he couldn’t bring himself to do, I had run away. “Are you sure you’re all right?” he said. When I nodded, he said, “I don’t suppose I could persuade you to go around and see her?”

“She tried to kill me,” I said. “Did she tell you that?” I was exaggerating, as the knife hadn’t gone in very far, but I wanted to impress on him the fact that it wasn’t my fault. “She stuck a knife in my arm.” I rolled up my sleeve to show him the scratch.

“She shouldn’t have done that,” he said, as if she’d made a left-hand turn where a right was required. “I’m sure she didn’t mean to.”

I agreed to keep in touch with him – I kept this promise, more or less – but I refused to have anything more to do with my mother. He understood my position. He said it in those words exactly, like a man who has spent a lot of time understanding people’s positions.
I’ve remembered that phrase, and it occurred to me a long time afterwards that no one ever understood his position; not me, not my mother or Aunt Lou, not anyone. I don’t think it was because he didn’t have one. His position was the position of a man who has killed people and brought them back to life, though not the same ones, and these mysteries are hard to communicate. Other than that, his position was that of a man who wears maroon leather slippers and fiddles with house plants on weekends, and for this reason is thought of as an inconsequential fool by his wife. He was a man in a cage, like most men; but what made him different was his dabbling in lives and deaths.

For the next couple of months I lived in my Isabella Street room, for which I paid fourteen dollars a week. That included a change of sheets and towels and a hot plate, on which I boiled cups of tea and prepared low-calorie snacks. The house itself was a red-brick Victorian one – they’ve torn it down since and built a highrise – with dark, creaky wooden-floored hallways, a staircase which has been useful to me on several occasions (“She glided up the staircase, one hand on the banister …”), and a smell of furniture polish. Undercutting the furniture polish was another smell, probably vomit. Both the house and the neighborhood had gone downhill; but the landlady was a Scot and severe, so whatever vomiting went on was done behind closed doors.

Other people lived in the house but I seldom saw them, partly because I was out a lot. I trotted briskly down the steps every morning as if I had a job, but actually I was starving myself so I would be able to collect Aunt Lou’s money. In the evenings I would return to my room and boil up a package of peas or some corned beef on the single hot plate. While I ate I mourned Aunt Lou. Now that she was dead I had no one to talk to; I’d get out her fox fur, which smelled of mothballs, and stare at it, hoping it would miraculously open its mouth and speak, in the voice of Aunt Lou, as it had during my
childhood. I tried going to the movies, by myself, but it only depressed me more, and with Aunt Lou absent I had to deal with the attentions of strange men, which interrupted the films. In August I went to the Canadian National Exhibition, a melancholy pilgrimage. I hadn’t been there with Aunt Lou for three years – she must’ve felt I was getting too old for it – and it seemed different, shoddier somehow, the gaiety forced and raucous.

I went to the museum a lot, and the art gallery, places where I could walk around and look as if I was doing something, places where I would not be tempted by food. I took bus trips: to St. Catharines, to London, Ontario, to Windsor, and to Buffalo and Syracuse and Albany. I was searching for a city I could move to, where I would be free not to be myself. I didn’t want anything too different or startling, I just wanted to fit in without being known.

It was on these bus trips that I first discovered there was something missing in me. This lack came from having been fat; it was like being without a sense of pain, and pain and fear are protective, up to a point. I’d never developed the usual female fears: fear of intruders, fear of the dark, fear of gasping noises over the phone, fear of bus stops and slowing cars, fear of anyone or anything outside whatever magic circle defines safety. I wasn’t whistled at or pinched on elevators, I was never followed down lonely streets. I didn’t experience men as aggressive lechers but as bashful, elusive creatures who could think of nothing to say to me and who faded away at my approach. Although my mother had warned me about bad men in the ravine, by the time I reached puberty her warnings rung hollow. She clearly didn’t believe I would ever be molested, and neither did I. It would have been like molesting a giant basketball, and secretly, though I treasured images of myself exuding melting femininity and soft surrender, I knew I would be able to squash any potential molester against a wall merely by breathing out. So when I shrank to normal size I had none of these fears, and I had to develop them artificially.
I had to keep reminding myself: Don’t go there alone. Don’t go out at night. Eyes front. Don’t look, even if it interests you. Don’t stop. Don’t get out of the car. Keep going.

I would be sitting near the center of the bus. Behind me would be a man smoking a cigar, beside me a stranger. Every couple of hours we would stop at a roadside restaurant where I would make sleepwalking trips to the Ladies’, which smelled always of disinfectant and liquid soap. There I would wipe from my face with dampened paper towels the bus fumes, oily and brownish; and later, when the side of my head was bumping against the cold metal of the window frame and my body itched with the desire to sleep, a hand would appear on my thigh, stealthy, not moving, an exploratory hand, tense with the knowledge of its solitary mission.

When the hands appeared I couldn’t cope with them. They took me by surprise. Men didn’t make passes at fat girls, so I had no experience, and I was acutely uncomfortable. The hands didn’t frighten or arouse me, they simply made me aware that I didn’t know what to do. So I would pretend I didn’t notice the hand; I would gaze out the window at the pitch-black landscape, while deft fingers crept up my thigh. At the next stop I would excuse myself politely and stumble off the bus, without much idea of what to do next.

Sometimes I would look for a motel; more often, though, I’d head for the bus-station restaurant and eat all the dry doughnuts and pieces of fish-glue pie I could afford. At these times I felt very lonely; I also longed to be fat again. It would be an insulation, a cocoon. Also it would be a disguise. I could be merely an onlooker again, with nothing too much expected of me. Without my magic cloak of blubber and invisibility I felt naked, pruned, as though some essential covering was missing.