The Eliot Girls (15 page)

As Ms. McAllister opened the door, Audrey saw Kelly Stiles, a grade twelve who had reputedly once been paid a hundred dollars by a
UCC
boy for a blow job, waiting her turn, looking pre-emptively chastised. Ms. McAllister gripped Audrey's upper arm firmly with her bony hand and said,
“Per studia mens nova.”

Out of the burnished library light of the office, Audrey shrank in the exposure of the wide corridor. Head down, she hurried to her classroom. All she wanted was to get out of the building. She felt watched, overheard. There seemed no privacy to her failure. Surely everyone knew. A stronger person, she thought, would have been motivated, determined to prove herself, but all she felt was a sinking inside. She wanted to cry, not so much in embarrassment as in regret. If only she had refused to take that last entrance test. If only she had summoned all her strength, corralled every rebellious impulse she had never acted on, for just one moment, a millisecond, really, to say no. How could she have neglected to foresee this mess? In a haze of humiliation, she made straight for her desk and began throwing binders and pencils into her bag.

She became aware of the sound of quiet music only after it stopped. Looking up, she saw Seeta lounging in a window seat, strumming her guitar.

“Hey,” Seeta said, jumping down. “Just practising a new tune for tomorrow.”

Audrey returned a thin smile.

Seeta set her guitar down and let out a sigh heavy with the troubles of the world. “So, I'm glad you're here, actually. I've been wanting to talk to you.”

The first thought that entered Audrey's mind was that Seeta was going to make a direct plea for friendship. Maybe invite her to her house. Audrey was stricken with panic at the prospect of this confrontation. She could bear going on as they were, but the thought of formalizing their association, intensifying it, making a public declaration of sorts, was unthinkable.

“This is difficult,” Seeta said, sighing again. “Look, yesterday, we had that math test. I think you know where I'm going with this. I thought of telling Mr. Marostica, but that didn't seem like the honourable thing to do if we could sort it out ourselves.”

Audrey looked at her in confusion.

“Are you going to pretend you don't know what I'm saying?” Seeta asked.

The hesitance in Seeta's face was retreating and in its place grew something harder and more formed. Audrey searched her mind for a clue. “There's no pretending. I have no idea what you're talking about,” she said.

“The math test,” Seeta said emphatically.

“The math test?”

“You cheated. You were looking at my paper. I saw you. If you're going to deny it, I might as well just tell Mr. Marostica.”

Audrey was astounded. She and Seeta sat in the front row, right under Mr. Marostica's nose, and even if it had occurred to her to cheat, she would never have dared.

“I didn't cheat,” Audrey said. “I didn't look at your test.”

“I saw you.”

“Don't flatter yourself.”

“I see your marks when you get tests back,” Seeta said. “I know you need help. I saw your report card, no matter how you tried to hide it.”

“My report card is none of your business!” Audrey exclaimed.

“It is if you're cheating off me.”

Audrey turned her back and Seeta came around so that they were again standing face to face. “I have rights here!” Seeta said. “My work is private, and just because I got stuck sitting next to someone who can't calculate the value of
x
doesn't mean I should pay—”

“Just fuck off, would you?” Audrey burst out.

Seeta blinked at Audrey as though she had never before heard the word
fuck
. She looked almost dizzy with shock, her eyes wandering, her face washed of all expression. For a second, she teetered on the spot, then lurched forward, grabbed her guitar, and fled from the room. Audrey sat at her desk and pressed her forehead with the heels of her hands. Now Seeta would tell on her. Swearing was an infraction that incurred demerits, but given her academic performance, the punishment might be worse. Detention? Such a penalty seemed so crude. Did detention even exist at Eliot?

She sat in worried silence for some minutes, half-expecting a teacher to thunder through the door any second. Finally, she gathered her things and made her exit into the early evening.

This was how so many days ended now, in an orchid dusk whose descent she had scarcely noticed. The streetlights had come on in the quiet avenue beyond the tall Eliot gate, and it was there that she wanted to be, on the roads that streamed in every direction away from here. For the first time in her remembered life, she longed to be on the other side of the enclave. But it was the ultimate escape she desired, not just a departure, but a purging: her mind capsized, emptied of all its knowledge of the place. She couldn't leave, though, not now. It was too late.

A few girls milled around on the front steps, waiting for late rides, but no one noticed her. No one said goodbye. Down the long driveway she started, under the spartan coverage of the winter-ready trees. She walked quickly, paying little attention to the dirty black
SUV
pulling up alongside her. On its passenger side door, someone had traced “
XOXO
” in the thick dust, and when it screeched to a stop, the rear window opened. Low hoots and soprano shrieks of male and female laughter flooded the air like a gale of smoke. Audrey looked up to find Arabella sitting in the back, packed in tightly with five other people.

“Yo, yo!” called out a Crescent boy in a mocking tone.

Whitney was sitting on a boy's lap, nuzzling his neck, at the far end of the back seat.

“The walk of shame?” Arabella said with an imperious lack of sympathy.

“I guess,” Audrey replied.

“Larissa's probably up there smoking a cigarette as we speak.”

Audrey forced a little laugh. For a second, she wondered if they were going to offer her a ride, but then the driver revved the engine, and Arabella let her hand flop out of the window in a throwaway wave. “Well, ta-ta!” she cried. The window rose, and she became again an unidentifiable silhouette behind the tinted glass. A spurt of exhaust clouded the air, and the
SUV
was off, speeding towards the front gate and screeching out onto the road, leaving too much silence in its wake.

 

 

Cha
p
ter
Ni
ne

RUTH OFTEN HAD FLASHES
where she felt that she had been transported to an alternate reality. She would tune out for no more than seconds, and when she returned to herself, everything looked just a little different, in no way clear enough to articulate. She might be sitting at a red light, the stream of pedestrians drawing her into a meaningless daze, a welcome moment of emptiness, and when her senses reawakened, there was a film between her and the world. It was as though she had been hit by a temporary, mild myopia. The trees and the sky seemed to have withdrawn slightly, and all the objects in her vision were vaguely hazy. Her sense of unreality was so strong that she would wonder if something terrible had happened, if she had been catapulted out of the known world and was suspended in some liminal psychic space, that maybe she was not sitting, as it seemed, at the red light, watching all the pedestrians walk past, that in fact she had ploughed straight through them all and simply didn't know it yet, that she was caught in a chasm between before and after and it would take some time for her mind to catch up to what her body already knew. She'd had such flashes often when Audrey was a baby. She would be walking down the stairs, baby in her arms, and her sleeve would catch the top of the banister, or she would lose her footing and almost trip, and when she reached the bottom of the stairs, she would wonder if she really had fallen, if now in reality she was screaming over the broken body of her baby while her mind remained in the protective realm of what was supposed to be.

So did she feel as she walked into George Eliot the morning after Henry came to her in the staff room. Nothing looked quite as she remembered it, and nothing looked altered. She could see the school from the road, through the newly leafless trees. In every definable way Eliot looked as it always had, but the clear day allowed the sun to fall unobstructed across the buildings in such a way that she felt alert to them for the first time in years. There was an unworldly precision to the buildings' outlines that gave her the sense of a sophisticated film set, as though she were looking at mere façades that would topple in a strong wind.

All day she had seemed to be on the verge of seeing him. She looked for his little Saab in the parking lot when she arrived and didn't see it, but minutes after she settled in her classroom, she heard his voice in the hallway. On Wednesday mornings, Junior and Senior school assemblies were separate, and when her class was filing into the gym, she saw the back of his head as he ushered the grade elevens out the side door to the chapel. She was irritated that each time they nearly collided, it was she who had heard him, she who had seen him, while to him she remained unobserved.

The night of the kiss she had not slept. She had lain in bed on her back, eyes closed. She was not exactly replaying the kiss, for she could not have replayed the scene even with great effort—she was living, still, too much inside it to confer on it such objective study. It reverberated inside her with its obscure sensory power, and she relived it as miniature explosions in her consciousness. Now and then, a punctuating snore from Richard startled her out of her reverie, but when all was quiet again, she resettled in the absorbing private regions of her mind.

In the pale grey clarity of the morning, however, she found that she was no longer able to summon the sensations of Henry Winter's insistent lips, his long fingers on her skin, the aftertaste of apple in his mouth. The more she thought about the kiss, the more she was taken away from a conviction in its reality—the less plausibly it seemed to be anything but a construct of her hyperactively wishful mind. It could not have been Henry Winter—Henry Winter, who had coolly informed Larissa McAllister in front of a staff room full of teachers that he preferred not to overuse the word
brilliant
when she had just applied it to an award-winning grade twelve English essay—it could not have been that man who embraced her with such crushing warmth. His advance on her conflicted with every impression she'd ever had of him. The change was incomprehensible and destabilizing.

And then there were her lies to Richard. As soon as she got home, before he could notice its absence on his own, she told him that her wedding ring had rolled down a sewer. She described, without suspiciously excessive detail, how she had placed the ring on the hood of her car while she applied hand cream, then accidentally knocked it off when she reached for it, how it had rolled neatly, as if along a track, and then through the grate before she knew what was happening. The story made very little sense, but Richard wasn't prone to doubt and analysis. The earrings and the necklace he would never even notice.

The reason she had lied to him about the mugging was not particularly clear to her. It had something to do with the attention he would heap on her if she told him the truth. She didn't want the plans and solutions and rehashing, the concerned awe, the husbandly indignation and the overprotection that might follow, the whispery comfort he would offer in bed. She just wanted to be left alone with her thoughts of Henry. Richard had given her a short lecture about carelessness, while she sat at the table with her head bowed, not listening to a word, and then he left her alone because he was irritated. He thought she was quiet because she felt guilty about losing the ring.

But she felt guilty about nothing.

She was as aware of guilt as she might be of any obligation that was a drag. The unwashed dishes piled in the kitchen sink when all she wanted was to sit down with a book. The plate of broccoli, the snow needing to be shovelled, the yard full of dog shit. Her compassion for Richard and her marriage was crowded out by her desire to see Henry again. Guilt was nothing more than a principle, honourable and valid in the abstract but sterile and useless in application to her specific needs.

On the day of Henry's and her shared break, she nearly avoided going to the staff room because she didn't want to appear to be seeking him out. The prospect that he would apologize terrified her. If he showed remorse, if he were cautious with her, she didn't think she could bear it.

He entered while she was preparing a cup of coffee, and when she heard him laugh at a remark made by Michael Curtis, she became so agitated that she upset her mug on Lorna's loaf of gluten-free bread. Muttering to no particular audience that she'd forgotten something in her classroom, she mopped up her mess and made a bashful exit.

Several minutes later came a knock on her classroom door.

“Are you always so clumsy?” he said.

He came inside and closed the door, and at his touch, she went floppy and yielding, as though someone had removed all her joints. He pushed her into the corner behind the door and pressed himself against her, so that anyone looking for her would have opened the door right into them. He held his mouth near hers for a moment, then kissed her with reserve, as though his lips were determined to be more polite than his urgent body, its persuasive weight pinning her to the wall.

At first, she was aware only of his lips and his hands, but then she heard a knocking, distantly, at the margins of her consciousness. For a moment, the sound seemed to be coming from inside her until she realized that it was footsteps in the hall. She jerked in shock, and they came apart.

Trembling—whether with fear or reverberating desire she was not sure—she went back to her desk and sat down, a red pen and an open folder of papers before her. Henry opened the door and leaned against the frame, slightly out of breath. They watched each other in silence until the footsteps receded.

“Were you all right getting home on your own last night?” he asked in a low voice.

“Yes. Uneventful.”

“I was concerned about the after-effects of an event like that.”

She dismissed the comment with a wave of her hand.

“Is there any chance of your belongings being recovered?”

“I wouldn't think so,” she answered. “I never called the police.”

When Henry left, Ruth got up and went to the bathroom. A dying fluorescent bulb over the cubicles hissed and flickered for several minutes before it went out. Facing her reflection in the cold grey light, she started to giggle. Laughter was burbling up, from a place deep in her gut, a place that was raw like the skin under a fingernail. She put her hand over her mouth instinctively, like a child trying to contain laughter in church, but it was beyond her. She took several deep breaths, calmed herself, then regressed, and finally managed to gain control.

She studied her face. She wouldn't have said that she looked exactly good that day—she had rejected the self-abasement implicit in prettying herself, and she was wary of any actions Henry might interpret as special effort for him—but she was comforted by what she saw. Of course she was aging, but she could still look at herself and see the teenager she had been. One day, she knew that she would look in the mirror and find an unrecognizable old woman. But for now she still looked like the girl who had not yet conceived of a husband or a child, the girl who smiled sweetly in old pictures of high school dances, who was only just beginning to intuit the exhilarating scope of her own power.

 

THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, HENRY
approached her in the hallway at the beginning of the lunch hour.

“Shall we take lunch outside?” he asked.

She stared at him, clutching a brown paper bag containing leftover pasta and an apple. They were standing in the crowded hallway, people swirling around them. The possibility of conversing openly had never occurred to her.

“When I was walking the other day, I noticed a little park not far away,” he said. “I could use some air. You?”

Ruth glanced towards the staff room. She was just as glad to avoid it. Lately, it had been a social minefield. Since the argument about Seeta, she had found even the most minor communications excruciating. Every time she stepped into the room, someone was at her, wanting to share a word of support or concern about Audrey's adjustment. It seemed that everyone considered Audrey perilously shy. Ruth despised being constantly confronted by this new view of her daughter—for her part, she couldn't tell whether Audrey cared too much about being liked or too little, whether she suffered from intensity or apathy—and she couldn't help being annoyed at Audrey for putting her, however unwittingly, in such an uncomfortable position.

Ruth looked around nervously. “Okay,” she replied. She didn't know whether to be reassured or disappointed by the lack of flirtatious subterfuge in his voice.

She followed him out and around the corner in silence, uneasily affecting the cavalier attitude he seemed interested in establishing.

“I can't believe we made it out without anyone seeing us!” she said once they were out of sight of the school. She wanted to grab his hand and bask together in the delightfully subversive purpose of this trek. Henry, however, didn't seem interested in viewing their exit as an escape, or this excursion as a rebellious romantic stroll. His sense of justification ought to have been encouraging—they were consenting adults, colleagues, walking in broad daylight on a public sidewalk—but it was more than a little dispiriting. Her heart had pounded as they descended the side stairwell of Eliot. She had felt young and insane. But now there seemed no need for her enlivening adrenaline. Again, she feared that he might be leading her to a private place so that he could apologize for the liberties he had taken with her and put a civil end to the madness.

His strides were long and purposeful, as though he were trying to get them somewhere on time, and she found herself scurrying in a rather undignified way to keep pace. They talked idly about the unseasonably cold November weather, and Ruth made some mindless remarks about colleagues already planning their Christmas shopping. Then a silence fell upon them.

They continued for several blocks. What was his point in bringing her out? If he had no desire to connect, why not let her stay inside? He had chased her, she reminded herself. It was not her job to make a case for the survival of his attraction. They passed a noisy construction site and had to walk onto the dusty road to get around a backhoe. From a distance came the shouting commands of the workers, though little was visible beyond the temporary plywood fence, covered in images of the sophisticated urban life on offer to buyers of the condos being erected. In black and white, smiling men and women gathered with wine glasses on balconies. Lovers embraced. Across a male model's chin was scrawled, in black marker, “My nose looks like a dick.”

“Really?” Ruth barked awkwardly. “That nose doesn't look like any dick I've ever seen.”

She looked to Henry, laughing gruffly. He returned a mild smile.

Silence fell upon them again, and Ruth contemplated what an idiot she was.

When at last they came to the park, she was ready to return to the school. Already exhausted by her nerves, her ungloved fingers red with cold, she flopped down onto a park bench and sat on her hands. She really would not talk first now, no matter how much quiet he made her endure. She had always despised people who controlled others with silence. He sat next to her, pulled an unappetizing, slightly squished cheese sandwich out of his pocket, and began to eat. She fished out her apple and regarded its many bruises with distaste.

The park was bordered with neat lines of fledgling trees, and as the wind gusted up, quite suddenly, from the west, they arched in the wind. A golden retriever chased a tennis ball while its owner, a white-haired man in a McCarthy Tétrault baseball cap, talked furiously into his cellphone. A young mother had spread a picnic on a patchwork quilt, her stroller parked lopsidedly beside it on the uneven ground. Her newly walking son, undeterred by frequent falls, toddled along with poorly controlled speed, as if his motion were propelled by gravity. From an enormous canvas bag she unloaded Tupperware containers full of small cubes of cheese and banana, a bag of Goldfish crackers, a bottle of water, and a pile of children's books. The baby staggered over to the books, sat heavily in a kind of free fall, and immediately started tearing pages out of one.