Liberty Street (26 page)

Frances promises, yes, before school starts again in the fall. She worries she's once again being reckless, the old Frances, committing a major taboo by sleeping and living with a boy, but she gets over it because there's no stigma attached to cohabitation within the student community. Male and female students are living together in houses and apartments all over the city, as well as in housing co-ops and communes, with incense burners and candles on every surface and music blaring from open windows. No one looks twice when Frances and Rudy come and go together, and shop for groceries, and
mingle their laundry in a single washing machine at the coin launderette. For the first time in her life, she feels as though she's doing what everyone else is.

But she can't tell her parents.

She tries to explain herself to Rudy one night when they're playing a game called five that they've made out of chart paper and pennies, half of which have white nail polish on one side. Rudy taught her this game. It's as easy as checkers.

She says, “My parents are old-fashioned. I'm here for an education, not to find a man or have a good time.”

Rudy says he can't even begin to explain to Frances all the things that would be wrong with what he's doing in his parents' eyes.

“I'm not a Christian,” she says, moving a white penny into line with three others.

“But you're not Muslim,” Rudy says. His father might not care, because his own religious practice has lapsed, and he'd had, at least for a short time, a non-Muslim girlfriend in London, but Rudy absolutely couldn't tell his mother about Frances. She's devout, and believes all North American girls are vain, and has warned him to keep up his prayers and protect his modesty, to save himself for God and a good Muslim girl. He's told his mother that he belongs to the Muslim Students' Association on campus, and that he keeps up his prayer ritual.

“So in other words, you lie,” Frances says.

Rudy shrugs, and then places a penny and wins the game.

Frances likes the fact that they are each other's secret.

T
HREE MORNINGS IN
a row, she throws up. She thinks she has
the flu. Then she starts to feel sick all the time. Could she be pregnant? How could she be when she's on the pill? It's true that she'd forgotten to fill her prescription a month ago, but she hadn't missed that many days and she read in a pamphlet from the pharmacist that there's still some protection if you miss. She finds the pamphlet and reads it again, and there's a list of pregnancy symptoms. She has them all.

She tries to keep it from Rudy, hoping she will lose the baby.

She phones home to say she's not coming as planned between the summer and fall semesters; there's a music festival she wants to attend, folk music. Her mother pleads—“We haven't seen you since you left”—and Frances gambles and suggests they come to the city and see her, knowing that it's harvest and not a time when farmers are able to take a holiday.

“Maybe we can come for Thanksgiving,” her mother says. “Find someone to do the milking. I suppose we could stay in a hotel.”

Yes, Frances says, they could. There's one not far away.

Rudy's father asks him if he wants to come to New England for a few days before the fall semester starts, and when Rudy says he doesn't think so, he should really study, his father says he's going to fly to London, then, for ten days.

“He sounded relieved,” Rudy tells Frances, “that he could go to London without me.”

In September, just as classes begin again, there's a heat wave and their apartment is unbearably hot. Frances feels sick every day because of the pregnancy and spends most of the time lying on the bed. She misses the first week of school, and hopes every day that she'll wake up not pregnant
anymore. In spite of the heat, she takes steaming baths that turn her skin red because she'd heard somewhere that might cause a miscarriage, but the baths just make her feel sicker. She knows she has to tell Rudy what's going on, but she can't find the words. There's a narrow section of rooftop right under the window overlooking the street, and Frances takes to climbing out to sit on the asphalt shingles once the sun has moved around behind the house and the roof is in shade. There's a houseful of what she thinks must be art students across the street. They come and go from the house like ants, carrying cardboard portfolios, rolls of paper, cans of paint. They wear plaid shirts and overalls with paint splashed on them. In the evenings, they dress like gypsies. She begins using the art students as her excuse for sitting on the roof.

Rudy thinks she's acting strangely and he keeps sticking his head out the window and asking her what she's doing, why she's missing school, why she's so interested in the hippies across the street. When she throws up all over the shingles one day, she has to tell him about the baby. He hands her a plastic pail filled with water through the open window, and she splashes the water around on the roof to clean it up. He says, his head out the window, that he doesn't care what his family thinks, he will do the right thing. He will marry her.

Marry.
Frances well knows that she is not in a position to marry anyone. She throws the last of the water on the shingles and watches it run down the slope of the roof and into the rusty eavestrough. A girl with long straight hair and wide-legged jeans walks by on the sidewalk below and Frances thinks how lucky the girl is not to be pregnant. She can't stop herself—it must be the hormones—and she starts to cry because once again she's found herself where she
doesn't want to be, about to make a mess of her life, and she has no one to blame but herself. The old Frances has sabotaged the new one.

When she's done crying, she hands the empty ice cream pail to Rudy and climbs in the window and tells him she doesn't want to get married. Marriage, she says, is an institution they don't have to believe in. Rudy looks concerned. He asks her if she's not worried that her reputation will be ruined.

Her reputation? It's the seventies, she says, women's lib and all that. She tells him he's not westernized enough if he's still worried about her reputation. She tells him to get used to her independent spirit.

“I'm a feminist,” she says. A word she's never before applied to herself.

Rudy seems to be thinking that over.

F
OR HER NINETEENTH
birthday, she gets a card and a new sweater in the mail from her parents. Rudy buys her a flower, a rose, which they put in a glass spaghetti sauce jar on the table. She also gets her summer session marks and they're surprisingly good, better than she'd expected. Rudy's marks come in the mail as well and they are not good: two failing grades. But he has managed to pass his mathematics class, thanks to Frances's tutoring. Rudy gets called to the dean's office for a review of his foreign student status, and he's given one more semester to improve his grade point average or he will have to sit out for a year, which also means that he will have to leave the country.

“I can help you,” Frances says. “We'll just have to work harder.” But Rudy doesn't seem to be taking the warning seriously. She worries that he will lose his student status.

Lie after lie to her parents. She convinces her mother not to come for Thanksgiving.

The baby is due in April, and as Christmas approaches and Frances begins to show, she wonders in earnest what she should do. She doesn't want the baby. She doesn't say so to Rudy, but she seriously considers giving the baby up for adoption. Another poster she's seen on the walls at school: “Need Birth Control? Pregnant? Come for Counselling.” The poster gives the location of the women's centre and Frances takes note. If she can find a way to keep from seeing her parents until after the baby is born, she can give it up and they will never know. To cover Christmas, she invents another lie—that she's met a girl from Montreal and they've become close friends and she's been invited to Montreal to spend the holidays with the girl's family, who don't speak English. A once-in-lifetime invitation, a cultural experience, being in a French city. Her mother will appreciate that. Once she's had the baby, she will take the bus home for a quick visit, a weekend. Maybe the time will be right to tell them about Rudy—not everything, but that she's met a boy her own age. They will like the possibility of normal.

She doesn't get a chance to visit the women's centre, or to give the baby up without her parents finding out. A few days after Frances tells her carefully worded Christmas lie, there's a knock on the door. When she opens it, still in her housecoat, there is her mother, her white overnight case in her hand. Frances instinctively draws her housecoat further around herself, hoping her rounded belly won't give her away. They both stare, one as shocked as the other, until Frances says, “You'd better come in before you die in all those clothes.”

After Alice is seated at the small kitchen table, her winter
coat on a hook by the door, she says that she'd known something was wrong because of Frances's refusal to come home, all those crazy letters about hippies and oppression and God knows what else. In spite of the icy roads, she'd driven to the city by herself and found the Greek family's house again, and they'd told her Frances was no longer living there. They'd given her Rudy's address, which Frances had left so they could forward any mail that came for her. “We think she might have a boyfriend,” the landlord had said. “We think she might have moved to his apartment.”

“I was mortified,” says Alice, almost in tears. “Imagine my not knowing where my own daughter lives. How could you, Frances? How could you? And who is this boyfriend? Surely you're not living here with a boy.”

She looks around then. Rudy's running shoes by the door. Jeans across the foot of the bed, not Frances's. An open gym bag with a soccer ball in it. A boy's sweatshirt draped over the back of an armchair in the corner.

Frances comes clean. She says, “Mother, I am living here with a boy named Rudy. And brace yourself, I'm expecting a baby. It was an accident, obviously, but I'm doing well at school and there are services here that will help me with the adoption, because I've decided I'm not keeping it. You don't have to worry or do anything. I have it figured out. No one at home needs to know—the neighbours, I mean.” She thinks she is being so mature. It's not the best situation, but it's not as bad as the one they've already been through, the mistake that was Joe Fletcher. She's relieved that she can stop trying to think up new lies. The envelope with her summer marks is in a bowl on the table, and she picks it up and holds it out to her mother and says, “Have a look. My grades are really
good. I even got a call from the biology department asking me to change my major. I think I should start applying for scholarships.”

Alice won't look at the envelope. Frances isn't even sure her mother is breathing.

“Say something, Mother,” she says, although she's now worried about what might come out of her mother's mouth once she does decide to speak.

Rudy comes home just then. She hears him coming up the stairs two at a time, as usual, and then the door opens and he stops dead when he sees Frances's mother.

“This is my mother,” Frances says. “She knows. I told her.”

Rudy closes the door and takes off his coat, and then Frances introduces him to her mother as Rudy, originally from Egypt, later London, his father a professor in New England (thinking this will impress her mother), Rudy himself with a high school education from London (“They call it A levels there, but you likely know that”) and now here on a student visa. Rudy holds out his hand for Alice to shake and says, formally, in his slightly accented English, “I'm very pleased to meet you, Mrs. Moon. I understand that you too lived in London, during the war. It must have been a difficult time.”

Frances's mother looks from Rudy to Frances and finally says, “So this is what ‘doing me proud' means. First a man twice your age, and now a foreigner.”

Frances can't believe what her mother has said. She's embarrassed with Rudy standing right there, his hand still out. Racism? The student union holds anti-racism rallies on campus. Is that what this is? It had never occurred to her that her mother might react this way. She hasn't said a single word about the baby, or Frances's plans.

“Mother,” she says, not knowing what to do, sounding desperate, “Rudy is really nice. You'll like him.”

Alice gets up from the table and grabs her coat and boots and walks out of the apartment. Just walks out without another word, forgetting her overnight case on the floor, thumping down the staircase in her stockinged feet. Frances is confused—what should she do?—then furious that she's been so humiliated in front of Rudy. She runs out the door after her mother, follows her down the stairs, shouting things without thinking, things she doesn't even mean. “You don't like the colour of Rudy's skin? Is that it? I've just decided; I'm keeping this baby. Did you hear that? I'm keeping this foreigner's baby.”

Alice stops in the foyer at the bottom of the stairs and shoves her arms into her coat sleeves and struggles to get her boots back on. “Don't go twisting my words,” she says. “I'm disgusted because you, Frances, are the most selfish and irresponsible child ever to be raised in a good home. Can you think of any other ways to put me into an early grave?” She leaves the house, and Frances lets her go.

Later that evening, after Frances is sure her mother isn't going to return for her overnight case, she places it in the closet. She supposes her mother's toothbrush is inside, her nightgown, a pair of shoes—things she'll wish she hadn't left behind—but that was her own fault, the way she'd stormed out.

Rudy's been mostly quiet since her mother left, but now he says he's sorry.

“For what?” Frances says. “You didn't do anything wrong. We made a mistake. We're not living in the Dark Ages anymore. She's the one who should apologize.” Not really believing what she says.