Liberty Street (12 page)

Frances and her parents are invited to the small wedding in Tobias's house. One of the first things Frances wants to know when they arrive is whether Dooley is there. No, Esme says (she's Esme now, rather than Mrs. Bigalow, having insisted so many times that Alice gave up), and she shakes her head as though Dooley is a subject not spoken about in this house.

The living room is decorated with bunches of pink and white tissue flowers, and the guests sit in a semicircle of chairs for the ceremony. Besides the Moons, there are a few
neighbours, one other retired teacher from the school, and the two remaining members of Tobias's gourmet cooking club, which used to be a
going concern
in Elliot, they say, but now most of the members have passed on. After Esme becomes Mrs. Sullivan, she whispers to Frances, “Remember what I told you about men preferring girls like me for their cooking? Well, look what I found: a man who can cook better than I can!”

Frances is the only child at the wedding, although she'll be eleven her next birthday, so she's not really a child. Still, Tobias Sullivan keeps looking at her as though he expects her to do something wrong. When she goes down the hall to find the bathroom, she decides she
will
do something wrong if that's what he expects, and she snoops around for signs of Dooley. Next to the bathroom there's a small bedroom that she guesses must have been his, but when she looks inside there's nothing there but a bed, a dresser, and a picture of a sunset on the wall. She looks in the dresser drawers, but they're completely empty. No clothes, no photographs, no toys a boy might have played with in his room. It's as though Tobias has erased Dooley from his life. She goes to the kitchen for a drink of water and once again sees the pots and pans hanging from the ceiling and decides the house must have mice. The orange cat could have caught them if he hadn't been moved to the Moons' farm because Tobias is allergic. Now he's learning to be a barn cat, whether he likes it or not.

After everyone has coffee and wedding cake, the guests leave so the bride and groom can rest up for their honeymoon bus trip to the Black Hills. The retired teacher who was at the wedding is still young enough to drive, and the next
morning he takes them to Yellowhead to meet their tour bus. When they return ten days later, Esme invites the Moons for supper to thank them for their part in her relocation to Elliot and subsequent reunion with Tobias. Tobias makes the meal of roast pork with herbs. Although he insists he's in charge of the kitchen, Esme has to climb on a stool whenever he needs a pot or a utensil from the rack on the ceiling (which doesn't seem like a good idea for an old lady who broke her hip, Frances's mother whispers to Basie). After supper, Tobias sets up a screen and projector, and they all look at slides of Deadwood and the faces of American presidents carved into a mountain. They can hear Tobias wheezing over the whir of the slide projector, even though there is no longer a cat in the house.

On the way home, Frances's mother says, “I don't know what she was thinking. Well, she made her bed, didn't she?” Then she asks, “Why are those pots hanging from the ceiling anyway?”

“Mice,” Frances says.

Uncle Vince's house goes up for rent again, but there are no takers.

J
UNE
. T
HE END
of grade five and the last week of school. There's not much work, just a lot of outdoor activity. They pick teams and play softball, and Frances gets hit in the head by a fly ball because she doesn't see it coming right for her. Still, her head stops the ball and a boy picks it up and throws it to second and the batter is out, so it's not as big a humiliation as it could have been. She feels kind of dizzy for a while after being hit in the head, but she doesn't tell anyone.

On the last day—the day the report cards get handed
out—Myrna Samples shows up wearing a bra. Daphne Rose, who now sits across from Frances, pokes her and asks if she's noticed. Frances thinks Daphne must be wrong, but when she looks she can see Myrna's new pointy breasts under her sweater. Myrna's bra makes Frances feel more sick than getting hit in the head with a softball.
It's grade five. Grade eight girls wear bras, not grade fives.
When Myrna gets up and waltzes to the front of the room to sharpen her pencil (
who needs to sharpen a pencil on the last day of school
?), the girls all stare and the boys whisper and make jokes until the teacher tells them to be quiet. Frances
never
wants to wear a bra (brassieres, her mother calls them). She is suddenly terrified that her breasts will begin to grow, and what will she do then?

She worries all summer, even though there's no sign of breasts sprouting on her chest. Her parents decide she's spending too much time moping, and she needs to do something useful, such as help with the chores. She hates slopping around in her rubber boots, pushing scoops of stinking muck into a channel in the barn floor and then out the door for her father to haul away with the tractor. She complains constantly about the smell, and she's so slow that her parents give up and send her back to the house.

“You'll never make a farmer's wife,” her father says.

Her mother tells her she'd better start planning a future that doesn't require manual labour, since she seems to be allergic to work as well as to milk.

“I wasn't meant to clean up cow manure,” Frances says, sulking.

“Then start thinking about what you
were
meant for,” her mother says.

Frances goes back to worrying about the gross unfairness
of girls having to grow breasts. Myrna and her bra ruin a perfectly good summer.

Just before school starts again, Alice finds a renter for the Liberty Street house. A new United Church minister moves to town, a thirtyish single man with a Beatles haircut. Even though Alice is not a churchgoer herself, and she doesn't think much of his hair, she hopes she can't go wrong with a United Church minister. He gives her six months of post-dated rent cheques and says he doesn't mind the sound of trains passing; in fact, he likes it. He also likes Bob Dylan. Do they know Bob Dylan? He sings a few lines of “The Times They Are a-Changin'.”

“Isn't he the one who has that song on the radio about drugs?” Alice asks.

“I'm pretty sure the lyrics were misinterpreted,” the minister says.

He turns out to be a good tenant. He pays his rent on time, and he even knows how to fix things like dripping taps. He tells Frances that in a few years' time, she can join the teen club he'll be starting at the church. Teenagers need clubs and sports, he says, to keep them on the right track. When Esme's orange cat disappears, they find out that he's made his way back to town and moved in with the minister. They let him stay there, since both the cat and the tenant seem happy with the arrangement.

Frances manages to get through most of the next year, grade six, before her chest does betray her and she starts to grow breasts. It feels like the end of the world. Her mother says, “Oh, for heaven's sake, it happens to all girls.”

Which is true. By the end of grade seven, half of the girls in her class are wearing bras, including her. Frances's
new constant worry is that a boy will grab her bra at the back and snap it.
What is wrong with them
? And the girls are just as bad, the way they put up with the boys snapping their bra straps and making crude gestures, and even seem to like it. She can't understand at all how everything has changed, turning the classroom into some kind of zoo. She tells her mother what's going on and Alice says it sounds as though the girls in her class are all turning boy crazy.

“You, Frances,” she says, “are going to get the hell out of here, the same way I did, only you'll actually land some place other than a cow farm because you'll have a good education.”

What? Get out of Elliot
?

Where would she go? The unknown destination is as remote to Frances as outer space, even though she's not meant for cow farming. She imagines herself drifting toward the moon without any kind of spacesuit or breathing tubes.

That summer, a man really does walk on the moon.

They watch on TV.

T
HE WEEK BEFORE
school starts again—grade eight, the last year before high school—Frances's mother runs into Esme in the drugstore in town and learns that she and Tobias are about to leave on another bus trip, this time through Europe. They're to catch a Greyhound to the city and then fly to Toronto, where they'll meet up with their tour at the airport.

“The stupidest thing I've ever heard of,” Alice tells Frances and Basie. “You should have seen the batch of medications she was picking up for Tobias. He's no more able to make a trip to Europe than he's able to climb Mount Everest.” Alice
shakes her head and says thank goodness Esme Bigalow—or Sullivan, rather—is no longer their business.

Only that turns out to be not quite true. A week later, Frances and her parents are watching TV when the phone rings. It's Esme, calling from a payphone in Toronto. Tobias has picked up a cold and the tour company won't let him continue on to Europe. They're going to spend the night in a hotel before they fly west again, and Esme wonders if Alice would mind driving to the city the next day, a Saturday, to pick them up when they land at the airport. It's a big request, she knows, from someone who isn't even family, but she can't think of anyone else to call. Tobias's friends are either unavailable or too old to drive to the city, and Tobias is not able to make the trip home by bus.

Alice agrees, no questions asked, which is a bit of a surprise to Basie because she's never driven any farther than Yellowhead, and she's certainly never driven in the city.

“Frances can come along to help navigate,” she says. “We can get a city map at a gas station.” Then she says, as though this thought had been lodged in her head for some time, “I'd like to drive by the university, see what it looks like. It's a good school, so I hear, and less expensive than some of those bigger universities. Maybe we could arrange a tour. Well, I suppose not, on a weekend.”

Frances has no interest in the university—good or cheap or otherwise—but she'd like to see what the city looks like, a bigger city than Yellowhead. She imagines pizza parlours, hippies, the Mod Squad.

They leave early and find their way from one highway to the next, west, south, and then west again, arriving at the city limits four hours later, without incident. The land is flat and
the buildings of downtown rise above the industrial outskirts in which they find themselves. “It should be straightforward,” Alice tells Frances, who has the newly acquired city map open on her lap. “We just keep going west and watch for the airport signs.” Frances examines the map and reports that the street they're on leads almost to the airport; there's just one turn after they get through downtown.

“Downtown?” Alice says. “You mean we have to drive through downtown? That can't be right.” At the first break in the traffic, she pulls into a strip mall so she can look at the map herself.

“You used to live in London,” Frances says. “There must be lots of traffic there.”

“No one I knew in London owned a car,” Alice says, trying to find where she is on the map. “There was no petrol then. Gas, I mean.”

It's warm and they both roll down their windows to catch a breeze. Frances sees a convenience store in the mall and asks if she can get them each a cold drink, and her mother says yes, go, and gives her some change from her purse. Frances returns with two bottles of Mountain Dew, opens the passenger door, and is about to slide in when she is approached by a blonde woman in white cowboy boots. At the same time, she sees a tall man with jet-black hair approach her mother's side of the car, open the door, and ask her to step out.

“Would you mind getting into the back seat?” the blonde woman says to Frances. “Please.”

Frances feels her heart begin to beat a little faster and she looks to her mother to see what she should do, but her mother is getting into the back seat on the driver's side while the man holds the seatback against the steering wheel for
her. Frances doesn't know what to do other than get in, trying not to spill the two open bottles of soda. For a moment, she wonders if the man and woman are undercover police officers in need of a car, like on television, but she soon realizes that that isn't the case.

Once the couple are in the front seat and the doors are closed, the woman asks Frances's mother, “Do you mind if I have a look in your purse?” but doesn't wait for an answer before she starts rifling though it.

Frances waits. Waits for her mother to speak up, to give the pair a piece of her mind, to turn into the ferocious mother who once strangled a rooster and tell these tossers to get out of her car right this minute and hand her purse back.

It doesn't happen.

“Don't hurt us,” Alice says, her terrified voice sounding unfamiliar to Frances. “Please don't hurt us.”

Then she goes silent and sits, frozen, staring at the back of the seat in front of her while the man plays with the radio dial and the woman empties her purse.

“No fags,” the woman says to the man. “I guess she doesn't smoke.”

The man puts the car in gear and drives them first to a gas station to buy cigarettes, and next to a grocery store. While the man stays in the car with the captives, smoking, the woman goes inside with Alice's wallet and returns with several bags of groceries and a box of diapers. Then they leave the parking lot, obviously on their way to someplace else.

Frances is so completely puzzled by her mother's submissive behaviour that it becomes more frightening than the couple in the front seat, who are acting as though this is a day like any other. The woman talks to herself in such an
ordinary way—“You know, I think I might have left a stove burner on. No, I remember now, I turned it off, I'm pretty sure”—while the man guides them through traffic as though he's out for a routine day of running errands.
Hey
, Frances wants to say,
we're back here, in case you haven't noticed
, but she's not quite brave enough, or sure enough that the two are simply stealing their money. She keeps sneaking glances at her mother, who appears to be almost catatonic, to have gone somewhere else.