Liberty Street (17 page)

“I'm not talking about me,” Frances says. “But a lawyer, say. Some hypothetical woman lawyer.”

The way the word “lawyer” creates hope in her mother's eye.

Frances's father says, “She's got you there, Mother. No woman lawyer could cook like you do. I'd bet the farm on that.”

“Oh, how would you know?” Alice snaps. “And she
could
be a lawyer, if she set her mind to it. I have dreams for you, Frances. You're not going to end up married to a few half sections of bush and cow shit if I can help it.”

Even Alice looks shocked by what she's said.

“I hope that's not yourself you're talking about there,” Basie says.

“And what if it is?”

Silence.

“She's got you there, Dad,” says Frances, attempting levity.

Neither one of her parents laughs.

“Well, stop worrying,” Frances finally says to her mother. “I have no interest in signing on as some man's domestic help.” She points her fork at the macaroni-and-cheese casserole and says, “If I did, he would be disappointed.”

Still no laughs.

The evening passes with nothing further said about Frances's future. Before they all go to bed, her mother says, as though apologizing, “You have to admit, Basie, farming is nothing but work.”

Not long after, her mother's obsession with grandiose career choices goes into overdrive. She reminds Frances that Esme Sullivan left money for tuition, so that should not be a concern; she can afford to be picky. Frances is lucky, she says—not everyone has that kind of freedom to choose. The career suggestions come up at the supper table, in the car on the way to town, in front of the television.

“Women make good doctors. Dr. Frances Moon. I can see it on an office door. Give me one good reason why not.”

“I'll give you one,” Frances says. “I don't want to be a doctor. Is that good enough?”

Her mother had just learned about library science, having seen a program on the National Library of Canada. “What about that?” she asks. “You like books.”

“Seriously, you want me to pay a bunch of money to learn the Dewey decimal system?”

Biology, then. What about biology?

“You mean a lab tech?”

“Lab tech? You need to be more ambitious than that,
Frances. You want to be
head
of the lab, not just a technician.”

“All right. Here's ambition for you. I'm going to beauty school, and I'm going to be a hairdresser to the stars. Figure out how to make that happen, and I'll do it.”

That look again.

Frances begins walking around the house with her transistor radio in her hand, even when her mother's talking. (The song about knowing the way to San Jose . . . Where is San Jose, anyway?)

“It's not just me, Frances,” her mother says. “Your father wants you to get a good education too.”

“He doesn't care,” Frances says. “He'd be just as happy if I married a farmer and started having babies, one after the other.”

Worse than horrified.

“That, Frances, would be a terrible mistake. I couldn't bear it.”

Frances feels bad, but not bad enough. She finds herself telling her mother there's a rumour at school that Myrna Samples is pregnant and the father is Buddy Hynde, a boy from St. Agnes, and everyone is saying they might get married.

“But Myrna is in your class, isn't she? She's only fifteen.”

“Sixteen,” Frances corrects. “She's turned sixteen.”

Her mother's face turns pale, as though she's just learned that someone died.

That night, Frances lies in bed in the dark and tries to picture herself in Myrna Samples's life, her future, Buddy and babies. Then she tries, just for the heck of it, to picture herself in the life her mother wants for her—university, an
apartment in some city—but all she can see is herself in the back seat of a car with a map in her hand.

The next morning Frances wakes up cranky—the crankiest she's ever been—and it gets worse as she rummages for clothes and gets herself dressed for school. She doesn't want to go, but there's a test they've been told not to miss. She looks at herself in the bathroom mirror and
despises
what she sees. She doesn't know what she wants, maybe to go back to bed and stay there for the rest of her life. When just she and her mother are left at the breakfast table, she says, “You're the one who wanted to make something of yourself. Why don't you go to university? Become whatever it is you always wanted to be. I'll stay here and look after Dad, and we'll be fine without you.”

Slap. A hand comes across the table so fast she hardly sees it.

Frances is so shocked that she just sits at the table and stares at her mother, whose face is such a mix of rage and hurt, gaskets and tear ducts about to burst like dams, that Frances has to acknowledge she went too far. Her mother has never raised a hand to her before—no one has—and Frances can't cry foul or act indignant because she knows she deserved the slap. What is the matter with her?

They are both saved when Frances's dad comes through the door smelling like the barn, and because of his failing eyesight, he can't see the looks on both their faces, although he catches the tension in the silence and knows something is going on, and he says, “Well, what hornet's nest have I walked into here?”

Frances's mother manages to say, “Frances and I were talking about her future.”

Basie says, “Oh, I see.
That
hornet's nest.”

Frances fights back tears, hating both her mother and herself because they are becoming more and more alike.

A
T SCHOOL
,
ALL
eyes and ears are on Myrna Samples. When she misses two days in a row, the know-it-all gossip girls begin to whisper things like, “I wonder if it's
premature labour.
” As if they know anything, Frances thinks. Then it begins to circulate that Myrna Samples isn't actually home sick but has taken off with Buddy Hynde to get married, and then stupid Daphne Rose reports that she has first-hand knowledge—has it right from Myrna—that Myrna's mother is trying to force her to give the baby up for adoption and forget about Buddy, and the two of them must have decided not to let Myrna's mother ruin their lives.

Daphne says, “I wonder where they are right now. It's so romantic. And Buddy Hynde, only the cutest boy between here and Yellowhead. Myrna is so lucky.”

Frances wants to throw up at the melodrama, even though she can't stop herself from listening. There's a song she likes, about a couple moving from town to town, following a dream that never pans out, and she imagines Myrna and Buddy Hynde on the road to some unknown place, perhaps Nashville, where she'd once imagined her mother on a stage belting out country songs.

After lunch that day the principal comes into Frances's homeroom class and asks if anyone knows where Myrna has gone, because it is very serious to run away, and if anyone knows, he says, they should speak to him privately in his office. If they know anything at all, he says, they should come forward, because Myrna's parents are very worried about her.
Frances wonders why he doesn't mention Buddy, and whether Daphne will say anything, since she claims to have spoken with Myrna.

When Frances gets home from school, her mother says she learned at the post office that Buddy Hynde abducted Myrna from her house, took her from the breakfast table right in front of her mother. And apparently he'd said he had a knife. Myrna had tried to make him leave, but he wouldn't. Then, as he was dragging her from the kitchen, she'd grabbed her mother's arm and pulled her housecoat right off. And Buddy had pushed Myrna into his car and they'd driven away, and Myrna's mother is now, obviously, just beside herself.

“Do you know anything about this?” Frances's mother asks her. “The kids must have been talking about it at school.”

“The principal came to our class,” Frances says. “But he didn't tell that part of the story. He just said Myrna was gone and her parents were worried. Someone said she and Buddy ran off together.”

“Well, they certainly didn't just run off,” Alice says. “That Hynde boy took her.”

The story is on the provincial news. Two minors from north of Yellowhead are missing, the radio says, the girl taken against her will and presumed to be in danger. Descriptions of Myrna, Buddy, and the car follow, along with the supposed direction they are travelling. No names are given.

“Look at that,” says Alice. “We're in the news again. What must people think of us?” Frances knows she's referring to Silas Chance all those years ago, his death a mystery that has never been solved.

A couple of hours later the phone rings and it's someone Alice knows in town saying that the two have been found.
Buddy's father discovered them at his hunting cabin, the woman says. They were trying to keep warm with only a wood stove. They all went to the RCMP detachment, and now Buddy is under arrest and Myrna is home with her parents. Alice shakes her head, as though it's all too sordid and ignorant, the result of pants-chasing and not enough attention paid to the future.

Three days after that, Myrna is back in school telling everyone that Buddy Hynde is a loser and she hopes they lock him up forever. When Myrna and Frances end up in the washroom together, just the two of them, Myrna speaks to her as though they're friends (
what?
). She gets her lipstick out of her purse and holds it up for Frances to see. “Daredevil Pink,” she says. “It's new. I love it. Give me your wrist and we'll see if it suits you.”

Frances doesn't give Myrna her wrist. “I don't look good in pink,” she says.

For some misguided reason, Frances takes this exchange as an indication that she is in Myrna's confidence, and she thinks she has to say something sympathetic, so as Myrna purses her lips and applies Daredevil Pink, Frances says, “I guess it will be hard to give up the baby.” She's looking sideways at Myrna to see if she is
showing
yet, and Myrna sees this and turns and looks at Frances as though she is the most pathetic person on the face of the earth. Then she looks away without another word, drops her lipstick in her purse, and leaves the washroom as though Frances isn't even there.

Frances wants to shout after her,
Stupid bitch for getting yourself knocked up in the first place
, but she's embarrassed, and anyway Myrna is gone now and she's in the bathroom alone. She shuts herself in a cubicle and skips the next class.
She stands on the toilet seat so no one can see her legs, but no other girls come in, and when she hears the bell she goes to her next class, social studies, and no one seems to have noticed that she's been missing. As the teacher drones on about how the Second World War started—something about the invasion of Poland and not the bombing of England—Frances thinks about Myrna and Buddy driving down the highway, and she wishes that they'd had a car accident and that Myrna had been killed, or better yet, permanently disfigured.

A week later the story of Myrna and Buddy is old news and no one seems to know for sure whether Myrna was abducted or went willingly. The RCMP let Buddy out of jail, and before you know it Myrna is
Buddy this
and
Buddy that
in the halls at school as though the whole thing never happened and she isn't pregnant and is an ordinary teenager with a boyfriend in the next town—only before long you can see that she is definitely pregnant, and Daphne begins spreading the rumour that Buddy Hynde isn't the father. There's even a fight on the sidewalk in front of the school, and Myrna grabs Daphne by the hair and bites her on the cheek before a teacher breaks it up. They're both suspended for a day, and when she comes back Daphne has a Band-Aid on her cheek and tells everyone she'd had to get a rabies shot.

When Frances's mother says to her one evening, “I hope this business with Myrna has taught you a lesson or two,” Frances says back, “Like what? That Myrna deserves her reputation as a one-size-fits-all boot?”

Her mother says, “Well, that wasn't very nice, was it?” but she looks pleased with Frances's response.

Later that summer, Alice comes home and says that Myrna had the baby and gave it up for adoption.

“That's very sad,” she says to Frances, “but for the best. I hope the rest of you girls will take a lesson from that.”

Frances just shakes her head. The idea that “don't be like Myrna” is something she needs to be told.

I
N SPITE OF
the constant reminders of the pitfalls of not taking school seriously, Frances finds high school easier than elementary school. She makes her mind up to aim for mediocrity, and she's able to hide in the shadows of the students who capture the teachers' attention for one reason or another, good or bad. Her lack of interest in sports or dances or other extracurricular activities goes unnoticed. Because she does well enough on her exams—somewhere between Bs and Cs—no teacher has expectations one way or the other, and she finds herself in a comfortable place in the middle. School becomes something she neither likes nor hates. One teacher suggests that she join the camera club, but when Frances politely declines, he doesn't seem to care. Her mother keeps her eye on her grades because, she says, “Someone in this house has to mind that you have good enough marks to get into university.” Frances neither agrees nor argues. She can stay in the middle just by showing up, so that's what she does. She avoids thinking about graduation, still almost two years away. Something will present itself. She knows jobs for girls are few and far between in Elliot, and those that do exist get snapped up by town girls, but she has a fallback plan—that is, to stay home and be her father's eyes whenever he needs her. When she turns sixteen and gets her driver's licence, she becomes his chauffeur, driving him to town and back. She often goes in with him when
he has business at the bank or the lumberyard or the parts dealership. She reads for him and tells him where to sign.