Lives of Girls and Women (32 page)

For supper we had stewed chicken, not too tough, and good gravy to soften it, light dumplings, potatoes (“too bad it’s not time for the new!”), flat, round, floury biscuits, home-canned beans and tomatoes, several kinds of pickles, and bowls of green onions and radishes and leaf lettuce, in vinegar, a heavy molasses-flavoured cake, blackberry preserves. There were twelve people around the table; Phyllis counted. Along one side everybody sat on planks laid over two sawhorses, to make a bench. I sat on a varnished chair brought from the front room. The big yellow man was brought from the verandah and sat at the head of the table; he was the father. From the barn, with Garnet, came an older but sprier man who talked about how he hadn’t slept all the previous night, with toothache. “You better not try any chicken,” Garnet told him, mock solicitously, “we better just give you some warmed-up milk and roll you off to bed!” The old man ate heartily, describing how he had tried warm oil of cloves. “And something stronger than that, I’ll bet you my wedding ring!” Garnet’s mother said. I sat between Lila and Phyllis, who were working up a play-fight, refusing to pass each other things, hiding the butter under a saucer. Garnet and the old man told a story about a Dutch farmer on the next concession who had shot a raccoon, believing it to be a dangerous forest animal. We drank tea. Phyllis quietly took the top off the saltcellar and poured salt into the sugar bowl and passed it to the old man. Her mother grabbed it just in time. “I’ll skin you alive someday!” she promised.

There is no denying I was happy in that house.

I thought of saying to Garnet, on the way home, “I like your family,” but I realized how strange it would sound to him, because he had never thought of my not liking them, becoming part of them. To pass judgements of this sort would seem self-conscious, pretentious, with him.

The truck broke down just after we turned off the main street, in Jubilee. Garnet got out and looked under the hood and said he thought so, it was the transmission. I said he could sleep in our front room, but I could tell he did not want to, because of my mother; he said he would go and stay with a friend of his who worked at the lumber yard.

Since our arrival at my house had not been signalled by the noise of the truck we were able to go around to the side and crush up against the wall, kissing and loving. I had always thought that our eventual union would have some sort of special pause before it, a ceremonial beginning, like a curtain going up on the last act of a play. But there was nothing of the kind. By the time I realized he was really going ahead with it I wanted to suggest all sorts of improvements;

I wanted to lie down on the ground, I wanted to get rid of my panties which were wound around my feet, I wanted to take off the belt of my dress because he was pressing the buckle painfully into my stomach. However there was no time. I pushed my legs as far apart as I could with those pants tangling my feet and heaved myself up against the house wall trying to keep my balance. Unlike our previous intimacies, this required effort and attention. It also hurt me, though his fingers had stretched me before this time. With everything else, I had to hold his pants up, afraid that the white gleam of his buttocks might give us away, to anybody passing on the street. I developed an unbearable pain in the arches of my feet, Just when I thought I would have to ask him to stop, wait, at least till I put my heels to the ground for a second, he groaned and pushed violently and collapsed against me, his heart pounding. I was not balanced to receive his weight and we both crashed down, coming unstuck somehow, into the peony-border. I put my hand to my wet leg and it came away dark. Blood. When I saw the blood the glory of the whole episode became clear to me.

In the morning I went around to look at the broken peonies, and a little patch of blood, yes, dried blood on the ground. I had to mention it to somebody. I said to my mother, “There’s blood on the ground at the side of the house.”

“Blood?”

“I saw a cat there yesterday tearing a bird apart. It was a big striped

Tom, I don’t know where it came from.” “Vicious beasts.”

“You should come and look at it.” “What? I’ve got better things to do.”

That day we began to write the examinations. Jerry and I were writing and Murray Heal and George Klein, who were going to be a dentist and an engineer, respectively, and June Gannett whose father was making her get her Senior Matric before he would let her marry a hollow-chested, dissipated-looking boy who worked in the Bank of Commerce. There were also two girls from the country, Beatrice and Marie, who planned to go to Normal School.

The Principal broke the seal before our eyes, and we signed an oath that it had never been broken before. We were alone in the High School, all the lower grades dismissed for the summer. Our voices, our footsteps sounded huge in the halls. The building was hot, and smelled of paint. The janitors had taken all the desks out of one classroom and stacked them in the corridor; they were varnishing the floor.

I felt far away from all this. The first examination was on English literature. I began to write about “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso.” I could understand perfectly well what the question meant, and yet somehow I could not credit that it really meant that, it seemed nonsensical, oblique, baleful as some sentence is a dream. I wrote slowly. Every once in a while I would stop, screw up my forehead, flex my fingers, trying to get a sense of urgency, but it was no use, I could not go any faster. I did get to the end, but I had no time, or energy, or even desire, to check my paper over. I suspected that I had left out part of one question; I deliberately did not look at the question-paper to see if that was true.

I had a radiant sense of importance, physical grandeur. I moved languidly, exaggerating a slight discomfort. I remembered now, over and over again, Garnet’s face, both in extreme effort and in the instant of triumph before we crashed. That I could be the occasion to anyone of such pain and release made me marvel at myself.

Beatrice, one of the girls from the country, had brought her family’s car, because the school buses were no longer running She asked me to have a coke with her at the drive-in that had been opened—in a refitted, repainted blacksmith shop—at the south end of town. She asked me because she wanted to find out what my answers had been. She was a big hard-working girl who wore broadcloth dresses buttoned down the front. Naomi and I used to giggle at her because she came to school in winter with white horse-hairs on her coat.

“What did you do for this?” she said, and read out slowly:
Englishmen in the eighteenth century valued formal elegance and social stability. Discuss, with reference to one eighteenth century poem
.

I was thinking that if I got out of the car and walked to the back of the gravelled lot where we were parked, I would be on the street that ran up behind the lumber yard. The men who worked in the lumber yard parked their cars on this street. If I walked over there and stood in the middle of the street I would be able to see the back fence, the entrance, the roof of the long open shed and the top of some piles of lumber. In the town were certain marked, glowing places—the lumber yard, the Baptist Church, the service station where Garnet bought gas, the barber shop where he got his hair cut, the houses of his friends—and strung between these places, the streets where he habitually drove appeared in my mind like bright wires.

Now was the end of all our early sweet gropings, rainy games in the truck. From now on we made love in earnest. We made love on the truck seat with the door open, and under bushes, and in the night grass. Much was changed. At first I was numb, overwhelmed by the importance, the name and thought of what we were doing. Then I had an orgasm. I knew that was what it was called, from Naomi’s mother’s book, and I knew what it was like, having discovered such seizures by myself, some time ago, with many impatient, indeed ravenous, imaginary lovers. But I was amazed to undergo it in company, so to speak; it did seem almost too private, even lonely a thing, to find at the heart of love. So quickly it came to be what had to be achieved—I could not imagine how we had once stopped short. We had come out on another level—more solid, less miraculous, where cause and effect must be acknowledged, and love begins to flow in a deliberate pattern.

We never spoke a word, to each other, about any of this.

This was the first summer my mother and I had stayed in Jubilee, instead of going out on the Flats Road. My mother said she was not equal to it and anyway they were happy as they were, my father and Owen and Uncle Benny. Sometimes I walked out to see them. They drank beer at the kitchen table and cleaned eggs with steel wool. The fox farming business was finished, because the price of pelts had fallen so low after the war. The foxes were gone, the pens were pulled down, my father was switching over to poultry. I sat and tried to clean eggs too. Owen had half a bottle of beer. When I asked for some my father said, “No, your mother wouldn’t like it.” Uncle Benny said, “No good ever come of any girl that drunk beer.”

That was what I had heard Garnet say, the same words.

I would scrub the floor and clean the windows and throw out mouldy food and line the cupboards with fresh paper, working with an aggrieved and driven air. Owen grunted at me, to show he was a man, and stretched out his feet in a lordly way and moved them fractionally when I said, “Move! I want to scrub here.
Move
.” Sometimes I would kick him or he would trip me and we would fall into kicking, pounding fights. Uncle Benny would laugh at us, his old gulping, shamefaced way, but my father would make Owen stop fighting a girl, make him go outside. My father treated me politely, he praised my housecleaning, but he never joked with me as he would with girls who lived on the Flats Road, with the Potter girl, for instance, who had quit school at the end of Grade Eight and gone to work in the glove factory in Porterfield. He approved of me and he was in some way offended by me. Did he think my ambitiousness showed a want of pride?

My father slept on the kitchen couch, not upstairs where he used to sleep. On the shelf above it, by the radio and the ink bottle were three books—H. G. Wells’s
Outline of History, Robinson Crusoe,
and a collection of pieces by James Thurber. He read the same books over and over again, putting himself to sleep. He never talked about what he read.

I walked back to town in the early evening, when the sun, though still an hour or more away from setting, would throw a long shadow out on the gravel road in front of me. I watched this strange elon-gated figure with the faraway, small round head (one afternoon, with nothing to do, I had cut off my hair) and it seemed to me the shadow of a stately, unfamiliar African girl. I never looked at the Flats Road houses, I never looked at the cars that met me, raising dust, I saw nothing but my own shadow floating over the gravel.

I came in late at night sore in unexpected places—I always had an ache across the top of my chest, and in my shoulders—and damp and frightened of my own smell, and there would be my mother sitting up in bed, the light shining right through her hair to her tender scalp, her cup of tea gone cold on the table beside the bed, along with the other cups of tea abandoned earlier in the day or the day before— sometimes they sat there till the milk in them soured—and she would read to me out of the University catalogues which she had sent away for.

“Tell you what
I
would take—” She was not afraid of Garnet any more, he was fading in the clear light of my future. “I would take Astronomy, and Greek. Greek, I have always had a secret desire to learn Greek.” Astronomy, Greek, Slavonic languages, Philosophy of the Enlightenment—she bounced them at me as I stood in the doorway. Such words would not stay in my head. I had to think, instead, of the dark not very heavy hairs on Garnet’s forearms, lying so sleekly parallel that it looked to me as if they had been combed, the knobs of his narrow wrists the calm frown with which he drove the truck, a particular expression, combining urgency and practicality, with which he led me into the bush or along the riverbank, looking for a place to lie down. Sometimes we would not even wait until it was really dark. I did not fear discovery, as I did not fear pregnancy. Everything we did seemed to take place out of range of other people, or ordinary consequences.

I talked to myself about myself, saying
she. She is in love. She has just come in from being with her lover. She has given herself to her lover. Seed runs down her legs
. I often felt in the middle of the day as if I would have to close my eyes and drop where I was and go to sleep.

As soon as the examinations were over Jerry Storey and his mother had left on a car trip through the United States. Irregularly throughout the summer I would get a postcard with a view of Washington, D.C., Richmond, Virginia, the Mississippi River, Yellowstone Park, with a brief message written on the back in cheerful block letters.

PROGRESSING ACROSS LAND OF THE FREE BEING GYPPED BY MOTEL OWNERS, GARAGES, ETC. LIVING ON HAMBURGERS AND ROTTEN U.S. BEER, ALWAYS READ DAS KAPITAL IN RESTAURANTS TO ASTONISH NATIVES. NATIVES DON’T RESPOND.

Naomi was going to get married. She phoned me up and told me, and asked me to come over to her house. Mason Street was just the same, except that Miss Farris’s house was occupied by a newly-wed couple who had painted it robin’s egg blue.

“Hello, stranger,” said Naomi accusingly, as if the break in our friendship had been all my idea. “You’re going out with Garnet French, aren’t you?”

“How did you know?”

“You think you were keeping it secret? Are you a Baptist yet? He’s an improvement on Jerry Storey anyway.”

“Who are you getting married to?”

“You wouldn’t know him,” said Naomi dejectedly. “He’s from

Tupperton. Well, no, he’s from Barrie originally but now he works out of Tupperton.”

“What does he do?” I asked, just meaning to be polite, and show an interest, but Naomi scowled.

“Well he’s not a great genius or anything. He didn’t go to
University
. He works for the Bell Telephone. He’s a lineman. His name is Scott Geoghagen.”