Lives of Girls and Women (33 page)

We never spoke a word, to each other, about any of this.

This was the first summer my mother and I had stayed in Jubilee, instead of going out on the Flats Road. My mother said she was not equal to it and anyway they were happy as they were, my father and Owen and Uncle Benny. Sometimes I walked out to see them. They drank beer at the kitchen table and cleaned eggs with steel wool. The fox farming business was finished, because the price of pelts had fallen so low after the war. The foxes were gone, the pens were pulled down, my father was switching over to poultry. I sat and tried to clean eggs too. Owen had half a bottle of beer. When I asked for some my father said, “No, your mother wouldn't like it.” Uncle Benny said, “No good ever come of any girl that drunk beer.”

That was what I had heard Garnet say, the same words.

I would scrub the floor and clean the windows and throw out mouldy food and line the cupboards with fresh paper, working with an aggrieved and driven air. Owen grunted at me, to show he was a man, and stretched out his feet in a lordly way and moved them fractionally when I said, “Move! I want to scrub here.
Move
.” Sometimes I would kick him or he would trip me and we would fall into kicking, pounding fights. Uncle Benny would laugh at us, his old gulping, shamefaced way, but my father would make Owen stop fighting a girl, make him go outside. My father treated me politely, he praised my housecleaning, but he never joked with me as he would with girls who lived on the Flats Road, with the Potter girl, for instance, who had quit school at the end of Grade Eight and gone to work in the glove factory in Porterfield. He approved of me and he was in some way offended by me. Did he think my ambitiousness showed a want of pride?

My father slept on the kitchen couch, not upstairs where he used to sleep. On the shelf above it, by the radio and the ink bottle were three books—H. G. Wells's
Outline of History, Robinson Crusoe,
and a collection of pieces by James Thurber. He read the same books over and over again, putting himself to sleep. He never talked about what he read.

I walked back to town in the early evening, when the sun, though still an hour or more away from setting, would throw a long shadow out on the gravel road in front of me. I watched this strange elon-gated figure with the faraway, small round head (one afternoon, with nothing to do, I had cut off my hair) and it seemed to me the shadow of a stately, unfamiliar African girl. I never looked at the Flats Road houses, I never looked at the cars that met me, raising dust, I saw nothing but my own shadow floating over the gravel.

I came in late at night sore in unexpected places—I always had an ache across the top of my chest, and in my shoulders—and damp and frightened of my own smell, and there would be my mother sitting up in bed, the light shining right through her hair to her tender scalp, her cup of tea gone cold on the table beside the bed, along with the other cups of tea abandoned earlier in the day or the day before—
sometimes they sat there till the milk in them soured—and she would read to me out of the University catalogues which she had sent away for.

“Tell you what
I
would take—” She was not afraid of Garnet any more, he was fading in the clear light of my future. “I would take Astronomy, and Greek. Greek, I have always had a secret desire to learn Greek.” Astronomy, Greek, Slavonic languages, Philosophy of the Enlightenment—she bounced them at me as I stood in the doorway. Such words would not stay in my head. I had to think, instead, of the dark not very heavy hairs on Garnet's forearms, lying so sleekly parallel that it looked to me as if they had been combed, the knobs of his narrow wrists the calm frown with which he drove the truck, a particular expression, combining urgency and practicality, with which he led me into the bush or along the riverbank, looking for a place to lie down. Sometimes we would not even wait until it was really dark. I did not fear discovery, as I did not fear pregnancy. Everything we did seemed to take place out of range of other people, or ordinary consequences.

I talked to myself about myself, saying
she. She is in love. She has just come in from being with her lover. She has given herself to her lover. Seed runs down her legs
. I often felt in the middle of the day as if I would have to close my eyes and drop where I was and go to sleep.

As soon as the examinations were over Jerry Storey and his mother had left on a car trip through the United States. Irregularly throughout the summer I would get a postcard with a view of Washington, D.C., Richmond, Virginia, the Mississippi River, Yellowstone Park, with a brief message written on the back in cheerful block letters.

PROGRESSING ACROSS LAND OF THE FREE BEING GYPPED BY MOTEL OWNERS, GARAGES, ETC. LIVING ON HAMBURGERS AND ROTTEN U.S. BEER, ALWAYS READ DAS KAPITAL IN RESTAURANTS TO ASTONISH NATIVES. NATIVES DON'T RESPOND.

Naomi was going to get married. She phoned me up and told me, and asked me to come over to her house. Mason Street was just the same, except that Miss Farris's house was occupied by a newly-wed couple who had painted it robin's egg blue.

“Hello, stranger,” said Naomi accusingly, as if the break in our friendship had been all my idea. “You're going out with Garnet French, aren't you?”

“How did you know?”

“You think you were keeping it secret? Are you a Baptist yet? He's an improvement on Jerry Storey anyway.”

“Who are you getting married to?”

“You wouldn't know him,” said Naomi dejectedly. “He's from

Tupperton. Well, no, he's from Barrie originally but now he works out of Tupperton.”

“What does he do?” I asked, just meaning to be polite, and show an interest, but Naomi scowled.

“Well he's not a great genius or anything. He didn't go to
University
. He works for the Bell Telephone. He's a lineman. His name is Scott Geoghagen.”

“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.”