Lives of Girls and Women (29 page)

“It makes me laugh the way people think they can ask a few questions and get to understand something, without knowing any of the groundwork.”

“Laugh then,” I said sourly. “I hope you enjoy yourself.”

But my mother had taken a liking to him, and from then on lay in wait for him, to know his opinions about laboratory-created life, or machines taking over man. I could understand how her hectic flow of questions baffled and depressed him. Wasn't this how I had felt when he himself grabbed
Look Homeward Angel
off the top of my pile of books—I was taking it back to the Library—and opened it and read in flat-voiced puzzlement,
“A stone, a leaf, a door—O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost—”
I snatched it back from him, as if it was in danger. “Well what does that
mean
?” he said reasonably. “To me it just sounds stupid. Explain it to me. I'm willing to listen.”

“He is extremely shy,” my mother said. “He is a brilliant boy but he must learn to put himself across better.”

It was easier having supper at his place. His mother was the widow of a teacher. He was her only child. She worked as the high school secretary, so I knew her already. They lived in half of a double house out on the Diagonal Road. The dishtowels were folded and ironed like the finest linen handkerchiefs and kept in a lemon-scented drawer. For dessert we had molded Jello pudding in three colours, rather like a mosque, full of canned fruit. After supper Jerry went into the front room to work on the weekly chess problem he received through the mail (an example of what I mean about his pure, impres-sive
conforming to type) and shut the glass doors so our talking would not distract him. I dried the dishes. Jerry's mother talked to me about his IQ. She spoke as if it were some rare object—an archaeo-logical find, maybe, something immensely valuable and rather scary, which she kept wrapped up in a drawer.

“You have a very nice IQ yourself,” she said reassuringly (all records were open to her, in fact were kept by her, at the school) “but you know Jerry's IQ puts him in the top
quarter
of the top 1 per cent of the population. Isn't it amazing to think of that? And here I am his mother, what a responsibility!”

I agreed it was.

“He will be years and years at University. He will have to get his Ph.D. Then they even go on after that, post doctoral, I don't
know
what all. Years.”

I thought by her sober tone she was going to go on to talk about the expense.

“So you mustn't get into trouble, you know,” she said matter-of-factly. “Jerry couldn't get married. I wouldn't allow it. I have seen these cases of young men forced to sacrifice their lives because some girl has got pregnant and I don't think its right. You and I have both seen it, you know the ones I mean, in the school. Shotgun weddings. That's the style in Jubilee. I don't agree with it. I never did. I don't agree that it's the boy's responsibility and he should have to sacrifice his career. Do you?”

“No.”

“I didn't think you would. You are too intelligent. Do you have a diaphragm?” She said that like a flash.

“No,” I said numbly.

“Well why don't you get one? I know the way it is with you young girls nowadays. Virginity is all a thing of the past. So be it. I don't say I approve or disapprove but you can't turn back the clock, can you? Your mother, she should have taken you in and got you fitted. That's what I would do, if I had a daughter.”

She was much shorter than I was, a plump but smart little woman, hair fluffy yellow, tulip colour, grey roots showing. She always had earrings and brooches and necklaces in bright, matching, plastic
colours. She smoked, and allowed Jerry to smoke in the house; in fact they were always squabbling in a comradely, husband-and-wifely way about whose cigarettes were whose. I had been prepared to find her very modern in her ideas, not as modern as my mother intellectually—who was?—but a great deal more modern about ordinary things. But I had not been prepared for this. I looked down at her grey roots as she said that about my mother taking me to get me fitted for a diaphragm and I thought of my mother, who would publicly campaign for birth control but would never even think she needed to talk to me, so firmly was she convinced that sex was something no woman—no
intelligent
woman—would ever submit to unless she had to. I really liked that better. It seemed more fitting, in a mother, than Jerry's mother's preposterous acceptance, indecent practicality. I thought it quite offensive for a mother to mention intimacies a girl might be having with her own son. The thought of intimacies with Jerry Storey was offensive in itself. Which did not mean that they did not, occasionally, take place.

Why offensive? It was a strange thing. Heavyheartedness prevailed, as soon as we left off talking. Our hands lay moistly together, each one of us wondering, no doubt, how long in decent courtesy they must remain. Our bodies fell against each other not unwillingly but joylessly, like sacks of wet sand. Our mouths opened into each other, as we had read and heard they might, but stayed cold, our tongues rough, mere lumps of unlucky flesh. Whenever Jerry turned his attention on me—this special sort of attention—I grew irritable and did not know why. But I was, after all, morosely submissive. Each of us was the only avenue to discovery that the other had found.

Curiosity could carry things quite a long way. One evening in the winter, in his mother's front room—she was out attending a meeting of the Eastern Star—Jerry asked me to take off all my clothes.

“Why do you want me to?”

“Wouldn't it be educational? I have never seen a real live naked woman.”

The idea was not without appeal. The words “naked woman” were secretly pleasing to me, making me feel opulent, a dispenser of treasure. Also, I thought my body handsomer than my face, and
handsomer naked than clothed; I had often wished to show it off to somebody. And I had a hope—or, more accurately, I was curious about a possibility—that at some further stage in our intimacy my feelings for Jerry would change, I would be able to welcome him. Didn't I know all about desire? I was in the old, trite, married sort of situation, trying to direct its dumb torments towards the available body.

I wouldn't do it in the front room. After some arguing and delaying he said we could go upstairs, to his room. Mounting the stairs I did feel a pricking of eagerness, as if we were seven or eight years old, and going somewhere to pull down our pants. While pulling down the blind in his room Jerry knocked the lamp off the table, and I almost turned around, then, and went back downstairs. Nothing sets things back like a stroke of awkwardness, at a time like this, unless you happen to be in love. However, I decided to remain good-humoured. I helped him pick up the lamp and set the shade on it properly and did not even resent his turning it on once to see if it was damaged. Then turning my back I pulled off everything I had on—he did not help or touch me, and I was glad—and lay down on the bed.

I felt absurd and dazzling.

He stood by the bed looking down at me, making faint comical faces of astonishment. Did he feel my body as inappropriate, as unrealizable, as I did his? Did he want to turn me into some comfortable girl with lust uncomplicated by self-consciousness, a girl without sharp answers, or a large vocabulary, or any interest in the idea of order in the universe, ready to cuddle him down? We both giggled. He put a finger against one of my nipples as if he was testing a thorn.

Sometimes we talked a dialect based roughly on the comic strip
Pogo
.

“Yo' is shore a handsome figger of a woman.”

“Has I got all the appurtances on in the right places does yo' think?”

“Ah jes' has to git out my lil ole manual an' check up on that.” “Yo' don' min' this lil ole third breast Ah hopes?”

“Ain't all the ladies got them lil ole third breasts? Ah has led a rather sheltered life.”

“Boy, Yo' sho' has—”

“Shh—”

We heard his mother's voice outside, saying goodnight to somebody who had driven her home. The car door closed. Either the Eastern Star meeting was over earlier than usual, or we had spent more time than we had thought arguing, before we came upstairs.

Jerry pulled me off the bed and out of the room while I was still trying to grab my clothes. “Closet,” I hissed at him. “I can hide— closet—get
dressed!
”

“Shut up,” he begged me, whispering too, furious and almost tearful. “Shut up, shut
up
.” His face was white; he was shaky but strong, for Jerry Storey. I was struggling and pulling back, protesting, still trying to convince him that I had to get my clothes, and he was pulling me forward, getting me down the back stairs. He opened the cellar door just as his mother opened the front door—I heard her cheerful cry, “Nobody ho-ome?”—and pushed me inside and bolted the door.

I was all by myself on the back cellar stairs, locked in, naked.

He switched the light on, to give me my bearings, then quickly switched it off again. That did no good. It made the cellar blacker than before. I sat down cautiously on the step, feeling cold splintery wood on my bare buttocks, and tried to think of any possible way I could get myself out of here. Once I got used to the dark perhaps I could find the cellar windows and try to force one of them open, but what good was that going to do me, when I was naked? Maybe I could find some old ragged curtain or piece of shelf-oilcloth to wrap myself up in, but how could I ever get into my own house in that? How could I get across Jubilee, right across the main street, at not much more than ten o'clock at night?

It was possible Jerry would come and let me out, when his mother was asleep. When he did, if he did, I would kill him.

I heard them talking in the front room, then in the kitchen. Jerry and his mother. “Wants to get her beauty sleep?” I heard his mother say, then laugh—unkindly I thought. He called his mother by her first name, which was Greta. How affected, how
unhealthy
I thought that was. I heard pots and cups clattering. Evening cup of cocoa, toasted raisin buns. While I was locked up cold and bare in that hole of a
cellar. Jerry and his IQ. His intellect and his imbecility. If his mother was so modern and knew about none of us girls being virgins nowadays why did I have to be shoved in here? I did hate them. I thought of banging on the door. That was what he deserved. Tell his mother I wanted a shotgun wedding.

My eyes got used to the dark, a bit, and when I heard a whooshing sound, a lid closing upstairs, I looked in the right direction and saw a tin thing sticking out of the cellar ceiling. A clothes chute, and something light-coloured flying out of it and landing with a muffled heavy sound on the cement floor. I crept down the stairs and across the cold cement praying that this was my clothes, and not just a bundle of dirty things Jerry's mother had thrown down for the wash.

It was my blouse, sweater, skirt, pants, brassiere and stockings, and even my jacket which had been hanging in the downstairs closet, all wrapped around my shoes to make that quiet thud. Everything except my garter belt had made the trip. Without it I couldn't put my stockings on, so I rolled them up and stuffed them in my brassiere. By this time I could see fairly well and I saw the washtubs and a window above them. It was hooked at the bottom. I climbed up on the washtub and unhooked it and crawled out, through the snow. The radio had been turned on in the kitchen, perhaps to cover my noise, perhaps only to get the ten o'clock news.

I ran home barelegged through the cold streets. I was furious now, to think of myself naked on that bed. Nobody to look at me but Jerry, giggling and scared and talking dialect. That was who I had to take my offerings. I would never get a real lover.

The next day at school Jerry came up to me carrying a brown paper bag.

“I beg yo' pardon, lady,” he said softly in his Pogodialect, “I think I got one of yo' personal-type possessions.”

It was my garter belt, of course. I stopped hating him. Walking down John Street hill after school we transformed the night before into a Great Comic Scene, something jerky and insane from a silent movie.

“I was yanking you down the stairs and you were yanking just as hard the other way—”

“I didn't know what you were going to do with me. I thought you were going to throw me out on the street like the woman taken in adultery—”

“You should have seen the look on your face when I pushed you down in the cellar.”

“You should have seen yours when you heard your mother's voice.” “Most inopportune, Mamma,” said Jerry, trying out an English accent which we also used sometimes, “but it just so happens that I have a young female person here unclothed on my bed. I was about to perform an exploratory—”

“You were about to perform nothing.”

“Well.”

So we left it, and oddly enough got on after this fiasco much better than before. We treated each other's bodies now with a mixture of wariness and familiarity, and no longer made demands. No more long hopeless embraces, no more tongues in the mouth. And we had other things to think about; we got the forms to fill out for scholarship exams, we got the calendars from several universities, we began looking forward to June, when we would write the examinations, with pleasure and dread. Nothing we had come up against in our lives equalled in importance those examinations, sent from the Department of Education, sealed; the Principal of the High School would break the seal in front of our eyes. To say we studied does not half describe the training we put ourselves into; we submitted ourselves like athletes. It was not just high marks we wanted, not just to win the scholarships and get into university; it was the highest possible marks: glory, glory, the top of the pinnacled A's, security at last.

I would shut myself up in the front room, after supper. Spring was coming, the evenings were getting longer; I turned the lights on later. But I noticed nothing, only noticed, without being aware of it, the things in that room, which was my cell or chapel. The faded pattern of the rug, straw-coloured at the seams, the old unworkable radio, big as a tombstone, with dials promising Rome and Amsterdam and Mexico City, the mossy ferned chesterfield and the two pictures—one of the Castle of Chillon, dark out of the pearly lake, and the other of a little girl lying on two unmatched chairs, in
a rosy light, parents weeping in the shadows behind and a doctor beside her looking tranquil, but not optimistic. All this which I stared at so often, fixing verbs, dates, wars, phyla, in my mind, took on a significance, an admonitory power, as if all these ordinary shapes and patterns of things were in fact the outward form of the facts and relationships which I had mastered, and which, once I had mastered them, came to seem lovely, chaste, and obedient. From this room I would go out pale, exhausted, incapable of thought as a nun after hours of prayer or a lover, maybe, after punishing devotions, and I would wander down to the main street, to Haines's Restaurant, where Jerry and I would have agreed to meet at ten o'clock. Under the fanlights of amber glass we would drink coffee and smoke, talk a little, surfacing slowly, able to understand and approve each other's haggard, hardened looks.