Notes from an Exhibition (22 page)

He guessed she was a little younger than him, though having that North American knack for self-preservation, she could have passed for late-fifties. Yet to have been at school with Rachel, she must have been in her mid-sixties. Her hair must once have been blonde and now was dyed but she had allowed enough silver through for her hair to match her finely lined skin. She was dressed with quiet elegance and was laughing in the picture because a large dog – a Newfoundland? – had jumped up to greet her. She appeared to be standing in the doorway of some kind of furniture shop.

She was also, without question, Rachel’s sister.

‘PS’, she had added under the picture. ‘Her name was Joanie, back then. Joanie Ransome.’

For as long as Winnie Ransome could remember, she had dreamed of an extra sibling. Brother or sister, either would have done. She simply needed one to spread the pressure a little and mop up some of the attention. With just her and her older sister, Joanie, the situation was intolerable. Among friends, groups of four were held to be good, unlike groups of three, because they could split into pairs. But four in a family meant your parents had only the two of you to weigh in the scales of justice so invariably one would always be down when the other was up.

Joanie came first. She was almost exactly a year older and was so tough and strong-natured she’d probably have withstood being an only child. But as soon as Winnie arrived and there was a point of comparison, their parents decided that Winnie was the good one, the little angel,
no trouble at all and Joanie was the miniature hellcat, the hothead, the problem child. It was almost as though Mom needed this one of each thing to make her life complete. Like having a nest of tables. And if you took a girl and told people, in her hearing, that she was good, that was who she felt she had to be. Always. Or perhaps Winnie’s problem was that she was a born conformist? Maybe if she’d found the courage to break the mould earlier on she wouldn’t have felt so constrained now that she was within a year of leaving school and finding the avenues open to her so few.

Joanie was dark and bony – skinny Mom called it – and striking despite her big nose. Her eyes were green, true green not just pond-coloured, and she was quick-witted and funny, though their mother called it sharp. Winnie, by contrast, took after their mother and was a Dutch blonde, curvy and blue-eyed and invariably standing two steps behind and staring at her feet while Joanie shot her mouth off. Winnie was undeniably pretty, china doll pretty, with a little tiptilted nose and tiny hands and tidy little ears and a neat, if rather too rosebuddy mouth.

But it was a prettiness that seemed to require inactivity. As a little girl, much admired by relatives, her reward was to be buttoned into dresses she must not tear or get dirty, so she had to sit still indoors while Joanie ran wild climbing trees with boys. Now she was a teenager she had more say in what she wore and since Dad had been promoted and they had moved to the new house in Etobicoke she actually had a clothing allowance. Boys had taken to calling her a doll, which was a compliment but again seemed to require a kind of waxen passivity.

Joanie was talented and clever. She scored well in class, when she could be bothered, and maddened the Havergal staff by her habit of answering back questions in a way that made the whole class laugh and the teacher feel stupid. She loved Katharine Hepburn and sat through
The
Philadelphia Story
over and over until she could imitate her funny accent and angular way of talking and drove their mother crazy pretending that was now the only way she could talk. And Joanie was an artist. She had been winning art prizes and illustrating the school magazine since she was fourteen or so and it didn’t matter if she was so rude and wild that no boy would marry her because she had a future. Admittedly Mom thought being an artist was an unladylike ambition and there was an ongoing battle because Joanie wanted to go to Ontario College of Art and draw people with no clothes on whereas Mom wanted her to be a commercial artist, and get a job painting glamorous gowns and pots of makeup for one of the better magazines or working for an advertising agency, like Lauren Bacall in
Written on the Wind
, only not so vampy.

Winnie, by contrast, had no talents beyond gymnastics, which had got her into the cheerleading squad but would never prove a ticket to the wider world. If she could be any film star it would have been someone sweeter than Katharine Hepburn; she favoured the ones that sang without showing too much body – Kathryn Grayson or Debbie Reynolds. She had a sweet, true singing voice in church but was too terrified of singing solo ever to do anything with it. She was invariably placed in the lower third of her class and would be lucky if she even made
it to secretarial school. (She had glanced at a shorthand manual and thought it looked impossibly strange and difficult.) She had recently decided that her only realistic option was marriage and motherhood.

‘And where’s the shame in that, I’d like to know?’ Mom asked.

And there lay the problem. Havergal was a good school. For girls it was probably the best and they were very lucky to be sent there. Through its prestige, through the friends with brothers, through sports events and carefully policed interschool dances, she was meeting the pick of the local boys, boys with old money behind them and futures all mapped out. And her family were going to let her down. Her father was only middle management in a pharmaceuticals firm. The boys she was meeting had fathers who were on company boards or they were surgeons or judges or, at the very least, political. Dad worked every hour God gave then came home and simply wanted to eat with his family and watch TV. He didn’t belong to any clubs because he didn’t see the point. He didn’t even play golf. Secretly she loved him for all this, for his lack of push, but right now it was not what she needed. Her mother was no better, since her ambitions were too naked and her clothes and background, Winnie was coming to realize, were all wrong. The only thing she did right was attend the right church, i.e. not the Catholic one. And it was through church, not Havergal contacts, that Winnie had met the boy she thought she stood some chance of marrying. Josh MacArthur was handsome, but not too clever. He was assistant captain of his school hockey team and, unless he was offered a
sports scholarship to a college in the States, likely to skip university to go into sales for the MacArthur family business, which was hotels.

He always talked to her after church, even walking her home or to their car if the weather was bad. If he saw her on the street or in a store, he came right over to talk. He liked her, she could tell he did. He paid her compliments. She even had it from one of her friends via her friend’s brother, who played on the same team, that Josh thought she was a doll. But he had never asked her on a date. The nearest she had come was when she was out with a group of girlfriends and they had met him in a group of boys. But that didn’t count as, being a good girl, she didn’t have the sort of friends who paired off under such circumstances and necked in the backs of cars. He was currently available, having been dropped for the team captain by Diana Holberton a whole year ago. Her friends said he was dumb but she didn’t care. He was polite. He was a gentleman. He would never make her feel stupid or pious. He was perfect.

The problem, she decided, was Joanie. Since graduating from Havergal, Joanie had been running wild. She had started drinking and smoking. She had crashed her car – amazingly not hurting anyone. She had stopped coming to church. Worst of all, she had a reputation as a tramp. Joanie had never dated anyone, or not for long enough for it to be serious. She tended to treat dates as a handy means of getting out of the house and into a party, where she could then lose the date in question and have fun. Behaviour like this threatened other girls and,
Winnie was certain, was where the bad reputation had arisen, not from anything more sinister.

But this summer things had escalated. There was a huge fight with their parents one night because she was offered a place at art school but Mom was disgusted when she found this was on the basis of a portfolio containing detailed drawings of naked women in ‘graphic’ poses. (Winnie wasn’t allowed to see the originals but Dad, who had been drinking a bit, said, ‘Let’s just say their legs weren’t crossed,’ at which Mom hit the roof.) Mom had then worked on Dad and forced him to agree that Joanie could only accept the offer if she agreed to attend secretarial school for a year first, at which Joanie had called her a
fucking self-righteous bitch
and stormed out, stealing Mom’s car and worried everyone sick by not coming back until lunchtime the next day. Then she cut her dresses and her hair short, both badly. And then she stole money from Dad’s wallet before, the last straw, she was brought home by a policeman. He had ‘found’ her at some party where people had been arrested for smoking marijuana. Luckily he didn’t go to their church.

Joanie swore up and down she hadn’t smoked it herself but Winnie discovered this was a lie because all the time Joanie was grounded she kept seeing her, bold as brass, leaning out of her open window so as to smoke reefers without the smell giving her away. She burned filthy incense all the time, too, which could only have come from Chinatown and which even Winnie knew was a sign.

The atmosphere at home was terrible. Joanie was either seething in her room playing loud music or storming off slamming doors. (Grounding her had proved hard to
enforce.) Mom was either haranguing her through her closed bedroom door or weeping hysterically or getting sozzled on Old Fashioneds she clumsily disguised by mixing them in coffee mugs, although they gave her breath like a flamethrower.

Dad began to work late and Winnie would happily have learnt shorthand if it had meant she could join him at the office.

The sad thing in all this was that she never stopped loving Joanie. But her admiration for her died, her envious admiration, and Joanie sniffed this out and began to hate her for it. She had always pretended to hate her, calling her Little Miss Perfect or God’s Dolly but this had been only to get at Mom, because she would come into her room later on and be friendly and sweet and talk about them being united in adversity. But now if she saw Winnie she just sneered or looked right through her or barged her out of the way. Winnie had come to stand for everything she hated, which was so unfair. She couldn’t help being conformist; she did it because everything else scared her so. And she couldn’t help the way she looked. The smooth, blonde perfection that still smiled blandly back at her from the bathroom mirror was no effortless blessing but took work to achieve and tension to maintain. It took so much tension that the effort to pull herself together in the morning and get herself to Havergal for classes began to give her sick headaches and sometimes she had to excuse herself from class and lock herself in a washroom cubicle and just sit there breathing deeply.

Her friends began to fall quiet when she rejoined them. She saw the MacArthurs, as a family, cross a street to
avoid her. Word was getting around. Ronnie Fleming, the friend’s brother who had agreed to be her date for the Prom, began to look hunted and then suddenly wasn’t taking her after all because he was taking Dede MacLean and blushingly let on that his arrangement with Winnie had never actually been agreed, had it, and he had a prior promise to Dede. Like hell he did.

Jesus was no help, although Winnie didn’t give up on him. On the contrary, she began to demand more of him and started taking herself off to weekday Communion services and even Bible Study. It was on the way home from Bible Study that she saw Joanie in another boy’s car with a whole gang of them, all boys except her, driving into the Flemings’ place.

The Flemings lived in one of the older houses, on the edge of Etobicoke really; a place whose original land must have been carved up when the area was developed. They had money. They had a cleaning lady, twice a week, and a kind of rec room for the
young people
built on the side of their garage in what had once been some kind of servants’ quarters or stable block. They were just the sort of people Joanie despised, especially in her new, ultra-rebellious persona. So it was incongruous to glimpse her in their midst, all in black, with her insane Beatnik haircut and trampy lipstick while they were all dressed like only slightly updated versions of their fathers and might have been on their way to a country club dance. One of the boys, one Winnie didn’t recognize, had been swigging from a Jack Daniel’s bottle and it was perhaps this inconsistency and the crazy speed of the car that made her pause halfway to her parents’ house and turn back, Bible in hand.

Night was falling and it was easy enough to slip into the Flemings’ drive unobserved. It wasn’t like her to be so bold and brave but they had been studying the story of Deborah and she saw how a sense of righteousness could be like a flaming torch or a sharpened steel.

There were lights on in the main house, not many, and she saw Louisa Fleming carrying a casserole out from the kitchen. There were lights on in the rec room too, but not so brightly, and there was music. The car she had seen was parked there, not over by the main house. She heard boys whooping. It was some kind of party.

Curious, she drew closer, sliding between the car and the hedge. The curtains were drawn but there was a gap. She peered in.

The scene was so confusing, so unlike anything she had seen before, that it took her a second or two to make sense of it. The boys were standing, huddled together, drinking and passing a reefer between them, vaguely watching something on the television. Joanie was on a sort of day bed a few yards away. Winnie only spotted her because the light from the television was flickering across her bare legs. There was a boy on top of her. When he climbed off her, she saw Joanie’s breasts were bare and glimpsed her face. It looked blurred because her lipstick and mascara were all smeared but she seemed to be laughing. Then a second boy, unmistakably Ronnie Fleming, came over, unzipping himself as though he were about to use the bathroom. He dropped his pants and, fumbling with his underwear, took the other boy’s place and started pumping.