The Eliot Girls (26 page)

Minutes later, the noise of laughter in the hall, retreating, brought her back to herself. She rose to follow the sound, not wanting to confront it so much as confirm. Her black ballet flats allowed her to travel light-footed, undetected. She had grown used to carrying herself secretively anyway, slipping here and there on the periphery. The voices drew her to them, like a pinprick of light in the pitch black. She edged forward until she was just close enough to make out the words.

“Didn't you think Julie Michaels looked like a total whore? Actually, she's too fat to look like a whore. Before you got here, she leeched on to me. Literally following me everywhere, smelling like her house.”

“I hear she gives good head,” came a male voice.

“Ugh. Thank you. I'm literally going to have nightmares with that image in my head.”

“Hey, man, fat, thin, a mouth is a mouth.”

“Is a mouth is a mouth.”

“I'm so going to get one of those hats,” said a voice Audrey knew all too well.

“Well, I'm a gentleman. I'd be more than happy to help you out.”

“Never going to happen, sweetheart. Grade elevens only.”

“Um, ladies. What are we talking about here?” asked a different male voice.

“It's this thing the grade elevens are doing. A contest, sort of.”

“
SBGG
. I'll leave the rest to your imagination.”

The voices stopped, as if their owners heard the breath of the intruder, and Audrey hurried off in the opposite direction. She had a dim idea of what they were discussing. Over the past couple of weeks, more and more grade elevens had been wearing red baseball caps with “George Eliot” on the front and “
SBGG
” on the back. It was against the rules to wear hats during the school day, but on the buses after school, the grade elevens formed a distinctive pack. Although Audrey had grown accustomed to the perpetual anxiety that she was missing out on a joke, that feeling opened out into a sweeping loneliness now that she had a better idea, at least broadly, of the act to which
SBGG
alluded. It wasn't simply that she hadn't conceived of participating in such activities; it hadn't even occurred to her that others were. She tried to see herself in that pose—kneeling as if in prayer?—but all she could conjure was a room so dark that even her mind's eye couldn't penetrate.

She was in front of the double library doors when she heard a rustling in the side hall, followed by migrating laughter, shushed into a furtive babble. Not desiring a collision with Arabella, she darted into the concealment of the library and strayed into the tall stacks. The darkness here was almost complete. She sank to the floor and breathed deeply, consoled by the mildewed smell of the towering books. The hands of her watch glowed, but she looked away, unwilling to acknowledge the decree of time, its reminder of what awaited below.

How unlikely it was, she thought, that it should be in the library that she felt most at home while at Eliot. The volumes enclosed her, watchful and beneficent. In spite of her academic struggles, she felt connected to the books; they seemed to represent a superior world to which she should aspire. Lining the rows at eye level were aging Penguin paperbacks, their spines worn and peeling. As her eyes adjusted, she squinted at the titles and author names, barely able to make out the words. McEwan. Morrison. Munro. The final book in the row was
Who Do You Think You Are?
She pulled it out and tried to make out the cover image. A tanned girl sat in the grass, her arms and legs bare, knees to her chest, lank, straw-coloured hair falling around her shoulders. The pages let out the warm, musty smell of a book long loved; the words were an inky blur. Audrey felt she had to have it.

Voices surfaced in the stillness. Different voices. So remote did the rest of the Eliot world seem that Audrey wondered whether the murmurs were a figment of her imagination. But there was anger in them—low and restrained, but intelligible nonetheless. She crept to the end of the row and peered out into the open space. There she saw, in a basin of opal moonlight, what she first thought must be a ghost. The figure was pale, clad in white that gleamed in contrast to the pewter shadows, expressing some kind of lament, twisting slightly in an aspect of explanation or pleading. It was a second before Audrey made out a second body; the voice came first, divulging its owner's identity.

“And that,” it said, “is a fantastically inappropriate T-shirt.”

The first figure turned into profile, the face still hidden by a veil of dark hair, but the voice, when it came, sent Audrey stumbling back into the coverage of the bookshelf.

“Jesus, Henry! Why are you being so hard?”

The exchange that followed was muffled. Then: “I had no choice. As if I wanted to be there.”

A mirthless laugh was released.

There was no time for Audrey to consider what she had witnessed. She knew only that she had to escape without detection, and as quickly as she could manage it. She stole back to the exit and, cringing at the noise, pushed open the creaky door and hurried back to her locker. Only once there did she realize that she had forgotten the book, out of sequence on the edge of the Ws. She sat in front of her locker and rested her head on her arms. Tears of disappointment welled up in her eyes. It was just a library book, she told herself, read by many Eliot girls before her. She could get it on Monday. But the sense of a botched destiny left her nauseated, breathless, so certain she had been that it contained a message just for her. An answer to a question she couldn't even formulate. All through the weekend to come, her mind returned to it again and again, there in the library, bearing the invisible imprint of her hand.

 

ON SATURDAY MORNING, WHILE
Ruth was out grocery shopping and Richard was at the clinic, Audrey went into their bedroom and sat down in the middle of the unmade bed. She stared for a time at the horse picture, listening to the quiet house. The smell of Ruth's rosewater cream wafted out from the bathroom, the oddly old-fashioned smell of it recalling Ruth's mother before her. When Audrey was quite young, and her parents had left her with a babysitter for the evening, she had liked to fall asleep in their bed, listening to the raccoons tangle in the pear tree outside. The mattress, long since replaced with a superior model, had sagged in the middle, and she had burrowed in there, hoping they would forget to return her to her own bed. Now she spent very little time in their room. It made her uneasy to think of the private life they carried on away from her. People didn't realize that being an only child wasn't just about lacking a sibling with whom to experience childhood. The biggest problem of a small family was that none of its parts existed independently. There was such exposure, and within that exposure such a resonant loneliness.

She could almost see her reaction to what she'd witnessed in the library—like an object masked by a heavy fog—but she couldn't quite grasp it, bring it close to her and make out its shape. People often said of deceptions that they had known all along. But over the preceding months, she had sensed nothing. Whatever had happened—was happening—had gotten past her.

She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror above the dresser. She looked like one of those deranged children from the movies, scowling, her bob flipped outwards, a bobby pin securing her hair off her face. A spinning, anaesthetized sensation washed over her. More than anything—more than the treachery against her father, more even than the prospect of her family's dissolution—she was appalled by her own maddening innocence. That stubborn, useless part of her. How could she have failed to sense the change in the air of her house? A titanic untruth had been unfolding right under her nose: Ruth was carrying on a hidden life. All the moments of their shared world, down to each boring word uttered over dinner, had been part of a hollow display, an enactment of something that did not exist.

At home after the dance, she had lain in bed, searching for another interpretation of what she had seen. But then she recalled Henry eavesdropping on her phone conversation at Arabella's house. Very quickly, her disbelief had collapsed catastrophically into belief. And what was she to do with belief? Where did such knowledge leave her? Her family?

Her mother, she'd always thought, was the person she knew best. There was scarcely a memory in Audrey's head that didn't involve her at least peripherally. When she was a little girl, her mother had been everything to her. More than that: she had felt her very self to be embedded within Ruth. A future existed, she knew, in which she would live independently, be married, have her own children, but this outcome hovered as abstractly, as insignificantly, as the stars in the city's night sky. She and her mother had argued sometimes, of course, but even then Audrey had felt only that she was tugging at Ruth's sleeve; no real separation had been possible.

Since she started at Eliot, Audrey's every thought of Ruth had coursed longing and comfort and hatred and alienation, all together. Every good feeling about her mother awakened its opposite. Audrey felt herself straining away, but as poorly as she ran from danger in nightmares, with wobbly legs, tripping over her own feet. Daily, she despised her mother, but still she couldn't help wanting to retreat into what had once been.

On the nightstand rested an old framed photograph of Ruth reading to Audrey in her canopied girlhood bed. There was a time when they had ended every day that way. Sometimes the dogs had joined them, piling onto the bed. Sometimes Richard sat on the floor. It was as though every being in the house had been drawn to that epicentre, pulled in by the sound of Ruth's voice. A perfectly ordinary voice it was, but Audrey had never wanted her to set the book down and leave. The transience of the reading was part of the pleasure—knowing that soon she would have no choice but to be shut alone in the darkness of her room. The future was always intruding, making each moment a glorified version of itself.

To the side of the photograph lay a paperback, face down. Audrey picked it up.
The Rainbow.
She opened the front cover and found Henry Winter's name scribbled inside.

She was still sitting in the bedroom when Ruth returned from the grocery store some time later, but she made no move to leave. From the kitchen came the noise of groceries being put away; minutes later, footsteps on the stairs.

Ruth appeared in the doorway. “Oh, what are you doing in here?” she asked pleasantly.

“Just sitting.”

Ruth peeled off her old wool sweater and threw it to the floor, then stepped out of her jeans. One of the curtains was drawn so that light came through only half the window, casting her left side in a pale light. She studied herself in the mirror, one hand on her hip, her feet shoulder width apart, her hips squared forward rather than softly angled, less a model's pose than a critical study.

“Why are you getting changed?” Audrey asked.

“I have to run a few more errands.”

“Does that answer my question?”

“That sweater's too itchy.” Ruth frowned at her reflection. “The mirror in your room is better. This one makes me want to kill myself.” She swung around to face Audrey. “Tell me the truth. How bad is this jiggle?” She slapped her lower stomach and looked down in revulsion.

“What jiggle?”

She rotated towards the mirror again, taking a step back. “Oh, God. I can barely…Ugh.” Ruth rotated away from the mirror again and looked over her shoulder at the back of herself. It could have been a child's dance, pirouetting towards the mirror, then away, towards and away. “I wish I didn't have my period. I'm so sick of it. No. I take that back. God, menopause will be awful.”

As Ruth adjusted her bra, Audrey closed her eyes, but distorted images of Henry Winter and her mother burst garishly onto her mental screen.

Audrey fixed her eyes on Ruth's reflection in the mirror. “You never told me,” she said. “What did you think of Arabella's mother?”

“Clayton?” Ruth wrinkled her nose. “Her skin is so sun-damaged.”

 

 

Cha
p
ter
Th
i
rteen

ON MONDAY MORNING, RUTH
sat outside Larissa McAllister's office, inspecting the loose papers in her briefcase in order to avoid assuming the posture—sitting straight up, staring ahead—of the errant student summoned to face the authority. It was not yet eight o'clock, and the school was disarmingly quiet. No movement was audible behind Larissa's closed door, and Ruth worried that she might have gotten the meeting time wrong, a slip that wouldn't have been surprising given her fractured frame of mind.

A splash of early morning light threw a golden glaze across the deep scratches in the hardwood at the base of the door frame. She thought of her first day at Eliot many years before, that moment of stepping into her pristine classroom, the unused chairs propped upside down on the glossy desktops, the vacuumed floors, the spotless blackboard, the long sticks of chalk in a line along its tray. Flushed from her walk, contentedly aware of her own glow, she had breathed in the air that seemed never to have been breathed by anyone but her. She had thrown open the windows and looked out at the blanket of undisturbed green stretching to the houses beyond. She could not believe that Eliot had not always been there. Its presence seemed almost organic, a necessary feature of the landscape.

Out of sight a groundskeeper had been humming, and the purity of his tenor, its artless flight through the air, had seemed a perfect expression of her own emotional state. The moment demanded nothing of her but that she allow it, that she suspend herself in its nothingness, that she not think ahead to the day's schedules and tasks, to her first meeting with her students, to the grocery shopping that awaited after work, to the pizza she would make as a dinner treat, or to the vaster responsibility of being not just at a personal beginning but the school's beginning, the first official day of an institution that would, over time, affect the lives of thousands of girls. The weeks leading up to this day had been some of the busiest of her life, filled with formal two-hour meetings that lingered over information she estimated could have been delivered concisely in ten minutes, as well as nightly, long-windedly therapeutic telephone conversations with Larissa about the quality and accuracy of the media attention on Eliot, the barrage of inquiries she was fielding from parents, the appallingly countless lists of all the things that had yet to be accomplished in order for school to start smoothly. All this activity had drained out of her as she listened to the groundskeeper's tune. Fancifully, she had thought that his disembodied song might not, after all, be an expression of her joy but an answer to it, an element of the intuited connection between them, two people sharing, separately, the same sliver of morning.

Ruth was still recalling that long-ago hum when it was overlaid by another melody, a strident, discordant rendering of “And Did Those Feet in Ancient Times.” Jolted back into the present, her heart sank.

“Ruth!
Quelle surprise!
” bellowed Michael at a volume better suited to a later hour.

“Good morning, Michael.”

“Awaiting your demerits?” Michael chuckled as she skipped around Ruth's briefcase to the photocopier next to the secretary's desk. She set down a canary yellow folder and began what looked alarmingly like a marathon copying session. “Staff room copier is on the fritz again. I think Larissa is going to have to bite the bullet and get a replacement.” She sighed contentedly as the copier spat out her handouts. She picked up a worksheet on Virginia Woolf's “Shakespeare's Sister” and held it to the light, gazing at it with beatific satisfaction. Then she turned to Ruth and cocked her head. “So, how's Ruth?”

Ruth forced a smile. “Pretty well. You know, busy, of course. But well.”

“Busy, busy, busy…aren't we all? I'm just amazed by how quickly the year is flying by. Before we know it, March break will be here! I'm counting down the days already.”

“Big plans?”

Michael bit her bottom lip, smiling flirtatiously through the contortion of her mouth. “You're going to hate me!” she sang out.

Ruth looked at her in bewilderment.

“My girlfriends and I are taking off on a cruise in the Caribbean. No hubbies! No kids! Just us gals and a tray full o' margaritas!” She jiggled her head in delight.

“Oh, that sounds fun,” Ruth replied doubtfully.

“Did someone say Caribbean cruise?” called out Sheila accusingly from the hallway. She popped her head into the office and thrust out her bottom lip. “No fair!”

Michael threw her head back in a noiseless laugh. “It's my first time away from the kids for more than a weekend. They're devastated. But they'll have a grand time with their dad. Of course, Graham is already puttering around the house trying to keep track of where everything goes. He actually asked for a refresher on how to work the washing machine! Poor bloke! He's going to be lost.”

“Well, if I know you, you'll leave them well provided for,” returned Sheila.

Michael nodded a demure concession. “I've been cooking like a madwoman for a fortnight.”

“Make sure you take along as much sunscreen as you can pack into your suitcase,” advised Sheila. “I just finished reading this gut-wrenching article about this beautiful young woman, just the world at her feet, who died of melanoma. And you, with that beautiful porcelain skin of yours…”

“I have bottles of
SPF
60 lined up in my lavatory. I was telling our lad Henri L'Hiver that I can't comprehend how these people come back from vacations so burned to a crisp that you can barely recognize them. Don't they think of their skin, not to mention their health?” She smiled broadly and gestured towards her lack of crow's feet. “Never you worry, Sheila, I shun the sun.”

“I hope you protect your skin, Ruth,” said Sheila.

“Of course. I have better things to do than lie out.”

“It's not just sunbathing, though. It's everyday things like just being outside. This poor, beautiful girl had never had a sunburn a day in her life…”

Ruth rummaged around in her briefcase in an effort to look busy. She was desperate, now, for them to leave. Although she was doing her best to look casually distracted, she was fuming. Who did Michael think she was? She was insufferable, positively repellent in her presumption. Henri L'Hiver? Of course, what else should she have expected of a woman who, in announcing her third pregnancy, circulated her ultrasound picture with the caption, “Oops, we did it again!”?

Michael and Sheila chatted on amiably about the pros and cons of cruises and resort vacations, showing no inclination to take their conversation elsewhere. Ruth considered telling them she had work to do in advance of her meeting but knew that would only invite prying questions.

“Ruth,” said Sheila, spinning around, “is it true that at the dance a
UCC
prefect asked for your hand?”

Ruth waved her hand. “Not seriously.”

“I'm not surprised,” said Michael, her smile weakening. “I could barely tell you apart from the students. You always look so youthful, Ruth.”

Ruth was saved, then, by Kate Gibson poking her head into the office. “Hey, ladies!” she said sunnily. “Ms. Curtis, would you be willing to come watch our sketch for this morning's assembly? We're, like, kind of locked in this disagreement. We need another opinion.”

“My pleasure!” Michael crowed.

“Oh, and I guess my opinion isn't worth two cents,” said Sheila, mock-petulantly.

Kate's face fell.

“I'm just giving you a hard time!” Sheila laughed, shooing them away. “I've got a million things to do. And I like to be surprised by the skits you kids come up with. They're so creative!”

When they were all gone, Ruth exhaled deeply. Her hands were trembling slightly with leftover fury. But just as she closed her eyes to compose herself, Larissa's door opened and a throat clear projected its familiar censure into her ear. “Come in and take a seat.”

With arthritic ceremony, Larissa strode to the other side of the desk and sat in her wingback chair. This chair, Larissa's first purchase for her office, was a regal, deep crimson leather, bordered with polished brass nailheads, and seemed itself to preside, to demand, to disapprove, to exemplify the spirit of Larissa's pedagogical goals, her philosophy, her aspirations. Her hands locked in a tense prayer pose in front of her, Larissa studied the surface of her desk. Prominent veins crossed her thin, spotted hands. Ruth had never seen Larissa's desk so messy, strewn with piles of papers and open textbooks jammed with Kleenex bookmarks. The phone peeked out from under a brown folder. One closed book sat by Larissa's elbow: the Bible.

Ruth was rigid in the wooden ladderback chair, a seat that had no comfortable nook, that seemed designed, in fact, to prohibit relaxation, to force the sitter to perch, unwillingly erect, awaiting condemnation. How Larissa expressed so much with such economy of movement and expression was a matter of continual amazement to Ruth, who perceived something hazier than simple exasperation emanating from her clasped hands, her rigid mouth. In her physical reserve, Ruth saw the control, the inscrutable complexity, of a leaping mind. She breathed loudly—only there, in her slow inhalations and quicker exhalations, betraying the strain of trying to be patient, imposing yet benevolent, with a tiresome underling. A car horn sounded abruptly outside, followed by nothing.

“So, bring me up to date,” Larissa said at last, wearily, as though the literary journal were a pet project of Ruth's to which she had graciously agreed.

“Well,” says Ruth, pulling out her folders and holding them awkwardly, unsure of where to set them on the cluttered desk. “I've been having a lot of fun reading these submissions! You were right on the money giving me this project. So much great work here. The real challenge will be whittling it down to the very best and figuring out the right format for showcasing it. You know how it goes, I'm mulling over an assortment of different ideas and I haven't yet made up my mind. There are so many possibilities and I know what a responsibility I have to these girls and their work. They deserve…” She noticed that Larissa was looking away, towards her bookcases. She had thought she was rather convincingly enthusiastic.

As Larissa stood and passed behind her, Ruth caught a whiff of lilac perfume, a scent that made her unaccountably sad, reminding her that Larissa was not as young and vigorous as she strove to appear. She was standing by the rows of books, some literature, some pedagogical theory, in a pocket of shadow outside the sphere of strong yellow cast by a pot light, and the half light exposed the fatigue on her face, the bags she had attempted to cover with the wrong shade of concealer, the rouge in the fine lines of her sagging cheeks.

A virgin, she claimed. It was a source of pride, an educative tool. She never lectured about the immorality of sex before marriage, but simply offered this personal information to her religion classes, letting her choices serve as inspiration. Surely this choice, though, was about more than morality, more than her Christianity, which struck Ruth more as a token, a nod to tradition, than true religiosity. Ruth had always assumed that Larissa wanted nothing from the world of men. Still, she used perfume. Was her virginity a necessity reframed as a choice? Did she ever wonder where her life had gone, as she sprayed her collarbone after dressing?

Restlessly, Larissa crossed back to her desk, and the burgeoning sunlight through the window behind her shone through her thin hair, teased slightly upwards to give the appearance of fullness, creating the effect, almost, of a halo. She clasped her hands again, then reached down to the bottom drawer of her desk, withdrew a piece of orange construction paper, and set it on the desk in front of her. Ruth could not see past the disorder to make out what it was. At first she thought it was a special submission, something that had tickled and impressed Larissa so much that she wanted to present it to Ruth personally, not only to ensure that Ruth afforded it the proper respect, to shepherd Ruth through her own response to it, but also to seize a rare moment of connection, to bond with Ruth over their appreciation of a gifted student's creativity. Then she noticed that Larissa's gaze upon the paper was far from pleased, and far from proud.

“I don't know what to do,” Larissa said, handing the paper across the desk to Ruth.

A full thirty seconds passed before Ruth understood that they were no longer talking about the journal, or Ruth's responsibilities to the school, that the paper was not a submission that exposed the flimsy charade of her coloured folders, not a dazzling piece of student work to be lauded and displayed, and not—the possibility had hit her at the last second—an incriminating piece of evidence linking her to Henry Winter. It was a note to Seeta Prasad. She knew that the notes had not ended—Lorna Massie-Turnbull had reported the news to several teachers, including Sheila, in a hush—but because there had been no official staff meeting to discuss the situation, she had assumed that the harassment of Seeta had evolved into nothing more than an occasional nuisance, half-hearted pestering, the obligatory, lacklustre mocking of the class loser. Instantly, she saw how wrong she was and why Larissa was working so hard to keep the situation quiet. She needed to make no effort, as she had thought she would have, to muster the expected indignation, for she was genuinely shocked and, indeed, repelled at the sight of the note. No words taunted the victim, only an image. On the construction paper was glued a cut-out from a magazine, a still shot from the movie
Carrie
, the moment just before Sissy Spacek is doused in pig's blood.

Ruth shook her head. “I had no idea things were so bad.”

“I cannot understand,” Larissa said, “the pathology of the brain that seeks to make itself heard with this kind of abuse.”