Lives of Girls and Women (29 page)

Curiosity could carry things quite a long way. One evening in the winter, in his mother’s front room—she was out attending a meeting of the Eastern Star—Jerry asked me to take off all my clothes.

“Why do you want me to?”

“Wouldn’t it be educational? I have never seen a real live naked woman.”

The idea was not without appeal. The words “naked woman” were secretly pleasing to me, making me feel opulent, a dispenser of treasure. Also, I thought my body handsomer than my face, and handsomer naked than clothed; I had often wished to show it off to somebody. And I had a hope—or, more accurately, I was curious about a possibility—that at some further stage in our intimacy my feelings for Jerry would change, I would be able to welcome him. Didn’t I know all about desire? I was in the old, trite, married sort of situation, trying to direct its dumb torments towards the available body.

I wouldn’t do it in the front room. After some arguing and delaying he said we could go upstairs, to his room. Mounting the stairs I did feel a pricking of eagerness, as if we were seven or eight years old, and going somewhere to pull down our pants. While pulling down the blind in his room Jerry knocked the lamp off the table, and I almost turned around, then, and went back downstairs. Nothing sets things back like a stroke of awkwardness, at a time like this, unless you happen to be in love. However, I decided to remain good-humoured. I helped him pick up the lamp and set the shade on it properly and did not even resent his turning it on once to see if it was damaged. Then turning my back I pulled off everything I had on—he did not help or touch me, and I was glad—and lay down on the bed.

I felt absurd and dazzling.

He stood by the bed looking down at me, making faint comical faces of astonishment. Did he feel my body as inappropriate, as unrealizable, as I did his? Did he want to turn me into some comfortable girl with lust uncomplicated by self-consciousness, a girl without sharp answers, or a large vocabulary, or any interest in the idea of order in the universe, ready to cuddle him down? We both giggled. He put a finger against one of my nipples as if he was testing a thorn.

Sometimes we talked a dialect based roughly on the comic strip
Pogo
.

“Yo’ is shore a handsome figger of a woman.”

“Has I got all the appurtances on in the right places does yo’ think?”

“Ah jes’ has to git out my lil ole manual an’ check up on that.” “Yo’ don’ min’ this lil ole third breast Ah hopes?”

“Ain’t all the ladies got them lil ole third breasts? Ah has led a rather sheltered life.”

“Boy, Yo’ sho’ has—”

“Shh—”

We heard his mother’s voice outside, saying goodnight to somebody who had driven her home. The car door closed. Either the Eastern Star meeting was over earlier than usual, or we had spent more time than we had thought arguing, before we came upstairs.

Jerry pulled me off the bed and out of the room while I was still trying to grab my clothes. “Closet,” I hissed at him. “I can hide— closet—get
dressed!
”

“Shut up,” he begged me, whispering too, furious and almost tearful. “Shut up, shut
up
.” His face was white; he was shaky but strong, for Jerry Storey. I was struggling and pulling back, protesting, still trying to convince him that I had to get my clothes, and he was pulling me forward, getting me down the back stairs. He opened the cellar door just as his mother opened the front door—I heard her cheerful cry, “Nobody ho-ome?”—and pushed me inside and bolted the door.

I was all by myself on the back cellar stairs, locked in, naked.

He switched the light on, to give me my bearings, then quickly switched it off again. That did no good. It made the cellar blacker than before. I sat down cautiously on the step, feeling cold splintery wood on my bare buttocks, and tried to think of any possible way I could get myself out of here. Once I got used to the dark perhaps I could find the cellar windows and try to force one of them open, but what good was that going to do me, when I was naked? Maybe I could find some old ragged curtain or piece of shelf-oilcloth to wrap myself up in, but how could I ever get into my own house in that? How could I get across Jubilee, right across the main street, at not much more than ten o’clock at night?

It was possible Jerry would come and let me out, when his mother was asleep. When he did, if he did, I would kill him.

I heard them talking in the front room, then in the kitchen. Jerry and his mother. “Wants to get her beauty sleep?” I heard his mother say, then laugh—unkindly I thought. He called his mother by her first name, which was Greta. How affected, how
unhealthy
I thought that was. I heard pots and cups clattering. Evening cup of cocoa, toasted raisin buns. While I was locked up cold and bare in that hole of a cellar. Jerry and his IQ. His intellect and his imbecility. If his mother was so modern and knew about none of us girls being virgins nowadays why did I have to be shoved in here? I did hate them. I thought of banging on the door. That was what he deserved. Tell his mother I wanted a shotgun wedding.

My eyes got used to the dark, a bit, and when I heard a whooshing sound, a lid closing upstairs, I looked in the right direction and saw a tin thing sticking out of the cellar ceiling. A clothes chute, and something light-coloured flying out of it and landing with a muffled heavy sound on the cement floor. I crept down the stairs and across the cold cement praying that this was my clothes, and not just a bundle of dirty things Jerry’s mother had thrown down for the wash.

It was my blouse, sweater, skirt, pants, brassiere and stockings, and even my jacket which had been hanging in the downstairs closet, all wrapped around my shoes to make that quiet thud. Everything except my garter belt had made the trip. Without it I couldn’t put my stockings on, so I rolled them up and stuffed them in my brassiere. By this time I could see fairly well and I saw the washtubs and a window above them. It was hooked at the bottom. I climbed up on the washtub and unhooked it and crawled out, through the snow. The radio had been turned on in the kitchen, perhaps to cover my noise, perhaps only to get the ten o’clock news.

I ran home barelegged through the cold streets. I was furious now, to think of myself naked on that bed. Nobody to look at me but Jerry, giggling and scared and talking dialect. That was who I had to take my offerings. I would never get a real lover.

The next day at school Jerry came up to me carrying a brown paper bag.

“I beg yo’ pardon, lady,” he said softly in his Pogodialect, “I think I got one of yo’ personal-type possessions.”

It was my garter belt, of course. I stopped hating him. Walking down John Street hill after school we transformed the night before into a Great Comic Scene, something jerky and insane from a silent movie.

“I was yanking you down the stairs and you were yanking just as hard the other way—”

“I didn’t know what you were going to do with me. I thought you were going to throw me out on the street like the woman taken in adultery—”

“You should have seen the look on your face when I pushed you down in the cellar.”

“You should have seen yours when you heard your mother’s voice.” “Most inopportune, Mamma,” said Jerry, trying out an English accent which we also used sometimes, “but it just so happens that I have a young female person here unclothed on my bed. I was about to perform an exploratory—”

“You were about to perform nothing.”

“Well.”

So we left it, and oddly enough got on after this fiasco much better than before. We treated each other’s bodies now with a mixture of wariness and familiarity, and no longer made demands. No more long hopeless embraces, no more tongues in the mouth. And we had other things to think about; we got the forms to fill out for scholarship exams, we got the calendars from several universities, we began looking forward to June, when we would write the examinations, with pleasure and dread. Nothing we had come up against in our lives equalled in importance those examinations, sent from the Department of Education, sealed; the Principal of the High School would break the seal in front of our eyes. To say we studied does not half describe the training we put ourselves into; we submitted ourselves like athletes. It was not just high marks we wanted, not just to win the scholarships and get into university; it was the highest possible marks: glory, glory, the top of the pinnacled A’s, security at last.

I would shut myself up in the front room, after supper. Spring was coming, the evenings were getting longer; I turned the lights on later. But I noticed nothing, only noticed, without being aware of it, the things in that room, which was my cell or chapel. The faded pattern of the rug, straw-coloured at the seams, the old unworkable radio, big as a tombstone, with dials promising Rome and Amsterdam and Mexico City, the mossy ferned chesterfield and the two pictures—one of the Castle of Chillon, dark out of the pearly lake, and the other of a little girl lying on two unmatched chairs, in a rosy light, parents weeping in the shadows behind and a doctor beside her looking tranquil, but not optimistic. All this which I stared at so often, fixing verbs, dates, wars, phyla, in my mind, took on a significance, an admonitory power, as if all these ordinary shapes and patterns of things were in fact the outward form of the facts and relationships which I had mastered, and which, once I had mastered them, came to seem lovely, chaste, and obedient. From this room I would go out pale, exhausted, incapable of thought as a nun after hours of prayer or a lover, maybe, after punishing devotions, and I would wander down to the main street, to Haines’s Restaurant, where Jerry and I would have agreed to meet at ten o’clock. Under the fanlights of amber glass we would drink coffee and smoke, talk a little, surfacing slowly, able to understand and approve each other’s haggard, hardened looks.

My need for love had gone underground, like a canny toothache.

That spring there was to be a Revival Meeting in the Town Hall. Mr. Buchanan our history teacher stood at the top of the stairs, at school, handing out buttons which said,
Come to Jesus
. He was an elder of the Presbyterian Church, not the Baptist, which was in the forefront of all the arrangements for the Revival; but all the churches in town, with the exception of the Catholic and possibly the Anglican—so small it couldn’t matter—were giving their support. All over the country revivals were becoming respectable again.

“You wouldn’t care for one of these, Del,” said Mr. Buchanan, not interrogatively, in his flat mournful voice. Tall, dry, and skinny, hair parted in the middle in the style of a turn of-the-century cyclist— which he was old enough to have been—half his stomach cut away for ulcers, he smiled at me with that faint twitching irony he usually kept for some historical personage (Parnell would be a good example) who cut a fine figure for a while but did overreach himself, in the end. So I felt obliged, out of contrariness, to say, “Yes. I’d like one, thank you very much.”

“Are you going to that?” Jerry said. “Sure.”

“What for?”

“Scientific curiosity.”

“There are things there is no point in being curious about.”

The revival was held upstairs in the Town Hall, where we used to do the school operettas. This was the first week in May; the weather had suddenly turned warm. It would do this, right after the annual flood. Before eight o’clock the hall was already crowded. It was the same sort of crowd you would see at the Twelfth of July parade, or the Kinsmen’s Fair—a good number of town people, but many more from the country. Mud-splashed cars were parked all along the main street and up the side streets. Some men wore hot black suits, some women wore hats. There were other men in clean overalls and women in loose print dresses, running shoes on their feet, arms bare, big and rosy as hams, holding quilt-wrapped babies. Old men and women, who had to be supported and guided into chairs. Unearthed from country kitchens, they wore clothes that seemed to have grown mould. I wondered if you could tell by looking at them what part of the country they came from. Jerry and I, watching from the Science Room windows the loading of the three school buses—gaudy old rickety buses that looked as if they should be rocking over some mountain road in South America, live chickens flapping out the windows—used to play this game, talking like sociologists, in elegant prudish tones.

“From Blue River they are well-dressed and quite respectable looking. Lots of industrious Dutch out there. They have been to the dentist.”

“Almost on an urban level.”

“From St. Augustine they are run-of-the-mill. Farm Folk. They have big yellow teeth. They look as if they eat a lot of oatmeal porridge.”

“From Jericho Valley they are moronic and potentially criminal. Their IQ never breaks a hundred. They have cross-eyes, clubfeet—”

“Cleft palates—”

“Hump shoulders—”

“It’s the inbreeding that does it. Fathers sleep with daughters.

Grandfathers sleep with granddaughters. Brothers sleep with sisters. Mothers sleep with fathers—”
“Mothers sleep with fathers?”

“Oh, its downright terrible what they get up to out there.”

The seats were all filled. I stood at the back, behind the last row of chairs. People were still coming in, crowding down the sides of the hall, filling up the space behind me. Boys sat up on the windowsills. The windows were up as high as they would go and still it was very hot. The low sun was shining on the old cracked and stained, plastered and wainscoted walls. I had never known it was so shabby, that hall.

Mr. McLaughlin from the United Church did the opening prayer. His son Dale had run away from home, long ago. Where was he now? Cutting grass on a golf course, the last anybody heard. I felt as if I had lived a lifetime in Jubilee, people going away and coming back, marrying, starting their lives, while I kept on going to school. There was Naomi with the girls from the Creamery. They had all done their hair the same way, tied in two little bunches behind the ears, and they wore bows.

Four Negroes, two men and two women, walked on to the stage, and their was a craning of necks, a hush of appreciation. Many people in the hall, including me, had never seen a Negro before, any more than we had seen a giraffe or a skyscraper or an ocean liner. One man was thin and prune-black, dried up, with a powerful, frightening voice; he was the bass. The tenor was fat and yellow-skinned, smiling, munificent. Both women were plump and well-girdled, coffee-coloured, splendidly dressed in emerald green, electric blue. Sweat oiled their necks and faces when they sang. During their song the revival preacher, recognizable by his face which had been plastered on telephone poles and stuck in store windows for weeks—but smaller, tireder, greyer than that picture would suggest—came modestly on stage and stood behind the reading stand, turning toward the singers with an expression of tender enjoyment, lifting his face, in fact, as if their singing fell on it like rain.