Lives of Girls and Women (17 page)

He was sitting on the bedroom floor fooling with some jacks. He was not crying. I had vague hopes that he might be persuaded to make trouble, not because I thought it would do any good, but because I felt the occasion demanded it.

“If you prayed for Major not to get shot would he not get shot?” said Owen in a demanding voice.

The thought of praying had never crossed my mind.

“You prayed you wouldn’t have to thread the sewing machine any more and you didn’t.”

I saw with dismay the unavoidable collision coming, of religion and life.

He got up and stood in front of me and said tensely, “
Pray
. How do you do it? Start now!”

“You can’t pray,” I said, “about a thing like that.”

“Why not?”

Why not? Because, I could have said to him, we do not pray for things to happen or not happen, but for the strength and grace to bear what does. A fine way out, that smells abominably of defeat. But I did not think of it. I simply thought, and knew, that praying was not going to stop my father going out and getting in the car and driving out the Flats Road and getting his gun and calling, “Major! Here, Major—” Praying would not alter that.

God
would not alter it. If God was on the side of goodness and mercy and compassion, then why had he made these things so difficult to get at? Never mind saying,
so they will be worth the trouble;
never mind all that. Praying for an act of execution not to take place was useless simply because God was not interested in such objections; they were not His.

Could there be God not contained in the churches’ net at all, not made manageable by any spells and crosses, God real, and really in the world, and alien and unacceptable as death? Could there be God amazing, indifferent, beyond faith?

“How do you do it?” said Owen stubbornly. “Do you have to get down on your knees?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

But he had already knelt down, and clenched his hands at his sides. Then not bowing his head he screwed up his face with strong effort.

“Get up, Owen!” I said roughly. “It’s not going to do any good. It won’t work, it doesn’t work, Owen get up, be a good boy, darling.”

He swiped at me with his clenched fists, not taking time out to open his eyes. With the making of his prayer his face went through several desperate, private grimaces, each of which seemed to me a reproach and an exposure, hard to look at as skinned flesh. Seeing somebody have faith, close up, is no easier than seeing somebody chop a finger off.

Do missionaries ever have these times, of astonishment and shame?

Changes and Ceremonies

Boys’ hate was dangerous, it was keen and bright, a miraculous birthright, like Arthur’s sword snatched out of the stone, in the Grade Seven Reader. Girls’ hate, in comparison, seemed muddled and tearful, sourly defensive. Boys would bear down on you on their bicycles and cleave the air where you had been, magnificently, with no remorse, as if they wished there were knives on the wheels. And they would say anything.

They would say softly, “Hello hooers.”

They would say, “Hey where’s your fuckhole?” in tones of cheerful disgust.

The things they said stripped away freedom to be what you wanted, reduced you to what it was they saw, and that, plainly, was enough to make them gag. My friend Naomi and I told each other, “Don’t let on you heard,” since we were too proud to cross streets to avoid them. Sometimes we would yell back, “Go and wash out your mouth in the cow trough, clean water’s too good for you!”

After school Naomi and I did not want to go home. We looked at advertisements for the movie that was showing at the Lyceum Theatre and the brides in the Photographer’s window and then we went to the Library, which was a room in the Town Hall. On the windows on one side of the main door of the Town Hall were letters that read LAD ES REST RO M. On the other side they read PUBL C RE DING ROOM. The missing letters were never replaced. Everybody had learned to read the words without them.

There was a rope beside the door; it hung down from the bell under the cupola and the browned sign beside it said: PENALTY FOR IMPROPER USE $100. Farmers’ wives sat in the windows of the Ladies Rest Room, in their kerchiefs and galoshes, waiting for their husbands to come and get them. There was seldom anybody in the Library except the Librarian, Bella Phippen, deaf as a stone and lame in one leg from polio. The Council let her be Librarian because she could never have managed a proper job. She stayed most of the time in a sort of nest she had made behind the desk, with cushions, afghans, biscuit tins, a hot plate, a teapot, tangles of pretty ribbon. Her hobby was making pincushions. They were all the same: a kewpie doll on top dressed in this ribbon, which made a hoop skirt over the actual pincushion. She gave one to every girl who got married in Jubilee.

Once I asked her where to find something and she crawled around the desk and limped heavily along the shelves and came back with a book. She handed it to me, saying in the loud lonely voice of the deaf, “There is a lovely book.”

It was
The Winning of Barbara Worth
.

The Library was full of books like that. They were old, dull blue and green and brown books with slightly softened, slightly loosened, covers. They would often have a frontispiece showing a pale water-coloured lady in some sort of Gainsborough costume, and underneath some such words as these:

Lady Dorothy sought seclusion in the rose garden, the better to ponder the import of this mysterious communication. (p. 112)

Jeffrey Farnol. Marie Corelli.
The Prince of the House of David
. Lovely, wistful, shabby old friends. I had read them, didn’t read them any more. Other books I knew so well by their spines, knew the curve of every letter in their titles, but had never touched them, never pulled them out.
Forty Years a Country Preacher. The Queen’s Own in Peace and War
. They were like people you saw on the street day after day year after year, but never knew more than their faces; this could happen even in Jubilee.

I was happy in the Library. Walls of printed pages, evidence of so many created worlds—this was a comfort to me. It was the opposite with Naomi; so many books weighed on her, making her feel oppressed and suspicious. She used to read—girls’ mystery books— but had outgrown the habit. This was the normal thing in Jubilee; reading books was something like chewing gum, a habit to be abandoned when the seriousness and satisfactions of adult life took over. It persisted mostly in unmarried ladies, would have been shameful in a man.

So to keep Naomi quiet, while I looked at books, I would find her something to read that she would never have believed could be in a book at all. She sat on the little stepladder Bella Phippen never used and I brought her the fat green
Kristin Lavransdatter
. I found the place where Kristin has her first baby, hour after hour, page after page, blood and agony, squatting on the straw. I felt a slight sadness, handing this over. I was always betraying someone or somebody; it seemed the only way to get along. This book was not a curiosity to me. No; when I had wanted to live in the eleventh century, even to have a baby in the straw, like Kristin—provided I lived of course— and particularly to have a lover like Erlund, just such a flawed and dark and lonely horseback rider.

After Naomi had read it she came to find me and ask, “Did she have to get married?”

“Yes.”

“I thought so. Because if a girl has to get married, she either dies having it, or she nearly dies, or else there is something the matter with it. Either a harelip or clubfoot or it isn’t right in the head. My mother has seen it.”

I didn’t argue, though I didn’t believe it, either. Naomi’s mother was a practical nurse. On her authority—or what Naomi claimed was her authority—I had heard that babies born with cauls will turn out to be criminals, that men had copulated with sheep and produced little shrivelled woolly creatures with human faces and sheep’s tails, which died and were preserved in bottles somewhere, and that crazy women had injured themselves in obscene ways with coathangers. I believed or did not believe these things according to the buoyancy or fearfulness of the mood I was in. I did not like Naomi’s mother; she had a brassy hectoring voice and pale protruding eyes—like Naomi’s—and she had asked me whether my periods had started yet. But anybody who will go into birth and death, who will undertake to see and deal with whatever is there—a hemorrhage, the meaty after-birth, awful dissolution—anybody who does that will have to be listened to, no matter what news they bring.

“Is there a part in the book where they do it?”

Anxious to justify literature in Naomi’s eyes—like a minister trying hard to show how religion can be practical, and fun—I hunted around and found the part where Kristin and Erlund took shelter in the barn. But it did not satisfy her.

“Is that supposed to be telling that they do it?”

I pointed out Kristin’s thought.
Was this ill thing the thing that was
sung of in all the songs?

It was getting dark when we came out and farmers’ sleighs were heading out of town. Naomi and I caught a ride on one going out Victoria Street. The farmer was wrapped up in a muffler and a great fur cap. He looked like a helmeted Norseman. He turned and swore at us to get off, but we hung on, bloated with cheerful defiance like criminals born with cauls; we hung on with the rim of the sleigh cutting into our stomachs and our feet spraying snow, until we reached the corner of Mason Street, and there we flung off into a snowbank. When we collected our books and got our breath back we shouted at each other.

“Get off you bugger!”

“Get off you bugger!”

We both hoped and feared that somebody would hear our language in the street.

Naomi lived on Mason Street, I lived on River Street; that was the basis for our friendship. When I first moved to town Naomi would wait for me in the mornings, in front of her house, which was on my way. “Why do you walk like that?” she would say, and I would say, “Like what?” She would walk along in a strange weaving way, oblivious, chin in her collar. Offended, I laughed. But her criticisms were proprietary; I was alarmed and elated to discover that she considered we were friends. I had not had a friend before. It interfered with freedom and made me deceitful in some ways, but it also extended and gave resonance to life. This shrieking and swearing and flinging into snowbanks was not something you could do alone.

And we knew too much about each other to ever stop being friends, now.

Naomi and I put our names down together to be board monitors, which meant we stayed after school and cleaned the blackboards, and took the red white and blue brushes outside and banged them against the brick wall of the school, making fan-patterns of chalk. Coming in, we heard unfamiliar music coming from the Teachers’ Room, Miss Farris singing, and we remembered. The operetta. That would be it.

Every year, in March, the school put on an operetta, which brought different forces into play, and changed everything, for a while. In charge of the operetta were Miss Farris, who during the rest of the year did nothing special, only taught Grade Three, and played “The Turkish March” on the piano every morning, to march us to our classrooms, and Mr. Boyce, who was the United Church organist, and came to the school two days a week to teach music.

Mr. Boyce attracted attention and disrespect because of the ways in which he was unlike an ordinary teacher. He was short, with a soft moustache, eyes round and wet-looking, like sucked caramels. Also he was English, he had come over at the beginning of the war, surviving the sinking of the
Athenia
. Imagine Mr. Boyce in a lifeboat, in the North Atlantic! Even the run from his car to the school, in the Jubilee winter, left him gasping and outraged. He would bring a record player into the classroom and play something like the 1812 Overture, and ask us what the music made us think of, how it made us feel. Used only to factual, proper questions, we looked at the floorboards and giggled and quivered faintly, as at an indecency. He looked at us with dislike and said, “I suppose it doesn’t make you think of anything, but that you’d rather not listen to it,” and shrugged his shoulders in a gesture too delicate, too— personal, for a teacher.

Miss Farris was a native of Jubilee. She had gone to this school, she had marched up these longs stairs hollowed out in two places by the daily procession of feet, while somebody else played “The Turkish March” (because that must have been played since the beginning of time). Her first name was well known, it was Elinor. She lived in her own little house close up to the sidewalk on Mason Street, near where Naomi lived, and she went to the United Church. She also went skating, once a week, in the evening, throughout the winter, and she wore a dark blue velvet costume she had made herself, for she could never have bought it. It was trimmed with white fur, and she had a matching white fur hat and muff. The skirt was short and full, lined with pale blue taffeta, and she wore white dancer’s tights. Such a costume gives a good deal away, and in more ways than one.

Miss Farris was not young, either. She hennaed her hair, which was bobbed in the style of the nineteen twenties; she always put on two spots of rouge and a rash, smiling line of lipstick. She skated in circles, letting her sky-lined skirt fly out. Nevertheless she seemed dry and wooden and innocent, her skating, after all, more of a school-teacherish display of skill, than of herself.

She made all her own clothes. She wore high necks and long chaste sleeves, or peasant drawstrings and rickrack, or a foam of white lacy frills under the chin and at the wrists, or bold bright buttons set with little mirrors. People did laugh at her, though not so much as if she had not been born in Jubilee. Fern Dogherty, my mother’s boarder, said, “Poor thing, she’s only trying to catch a man. Everybody’s got a right to do it their own way, I say.”

If that was her way, it did not work. Every year there was a hypothetical romance, or scandal, built up between her and Mr. Boyce. This was while the preparations for the operetta were going on. People would report that they had been seen squeezing up together on the piano bench, his foot had nudged hers on the pedal, he had been heard to call her Elinor. But all baroque concoctions of rumour crumbled, when you looked into her face, her little sharp-boned face, self-consciously rouged and animated, with flickering commas at the corners of her mouth, bright startled eyes. Whatever she was after, it could not be Mr. Boyce. Fern Dogherty notwithstanding, it could hardly even be men.