The Eliot Girls (29 page)

Like Audrey, Ruth watched the couple, dreaming of escape. The woman's hopefulness was riveting, the aura of freedom around her. Ruth felt almost distraught with envy.

She had known a family meal was a terrible idea. But how to get around it on Richard's birthday? She hadn't been sure she could eat a thing. Fish had seemed the most innocuous thing to order, but when the Lake Huron yellow perch arrived, and was sitting before her in its watery juices, she had struggled to push away all thoughts of the texture of fish, the smell by the fish counter in Loblaws.

She had tried to go along with the conversation, but she worried that she hadn't played her part well enough. She had been jumpy, testy: it simply wasn't in her to cast a benevolent maternal ray over the proceedings. Was Audrey driving at something? Or did knowledge of her own sin cause her to interpret every statement as innuendo?

Yes, she and Henry had met briefly in the library on the night of the dance, for no more than ten minutes. What were the chances that her daughter had happened into the room during that narrow period? Her early abdication of guilt had begotten a belief in her immunity. Naturally, she had understood that she and Henry could get caught; that was the inebriating truth, the undercurrent of every encounter. But as with all givens, it had remained an abstraction.

Occasionally, she had wondered what would happen if Audrey did find out. It wasn't impossible. Most of Henry's and her encounters had been inside Eliot's walls. Flashes of running smack into Audrey had come to her while they hunted for secluded spots. The idea had been weirdly exhilarating. Would Audrey lie for her? Even abet future meetings by providing alibis? Might her loyalty to her mother transcend the dull haze of morality? Or would such discovery be the thing to catapult Ruth out of her life? The thought of leaving Richard, of exploding their marriage, had only ever been fanciful, an illogical midnight reverie, floating free of any context of divorce proceedings, custody arrangements, house selling. She simply saw herself in a darkened kitchen somewhere, her head against Henry's lank chest. She had gone no further. Part of the affair's pleasure had been its eternal present. Yet something would happen, inevitably. There was only so long that such a tremulous balance could be held.

Having scraped all the sauce off her chicken and eaten perhaps two bites, Audrey was now regarding Ruth's hands again. Ruth glanced down at her scarlet nails and blushed. She had painted them in a flight of fancy she had quickly regretted. This overreaching—grasping for an image ill-suited to her—was a failure that exposed her worst self. She removed her hands to her lap and smiled uncomfortably.

Audrey stood.

“Where are you going?” asked Ruth tensely.

“Um, to the bathroom?” Audrey replied.

When she was out of sight, Richard put his hand on Ruth's arm.

“I really am sorry I never read that book,” he said.

“It's nothing.”

“It mattered to you.”

Ruth waved her hand. “I got it wrong. It happens.”

She glanced at the neighbouring table, where the drunken couple was conversing in forceful low voices. The woman's tongue stud flashed as she licked her lips.

“Do you think I'm boring?” Ruth said.

“Hardly.”

“I've been with you for so long, I think I've lost the knack of being interesting.” She turned away, half-disgusted with him, either for failing to recognize how boring she was, or for making her so in the first place. “It's too late for me.”

“Life doesn't give us many chances to go diving naked into lakes. That doesn't mean you're boring.”

Ruth laughed in spite of herself. Their first trip away together had been to Richard's family cottage, a rustic cabin on an island with only two other properties, at the end of miles of dirt road and a short boat ride. Though it was early June, the temperature evoked autumn, and they had spent the week wrapped in sweaters and blankets, reading in the red Adirondack chairs on the screened-in porch, trying to stretch their provisions so they wouldn't have to make the inconvenient trek to the grocery store. They tried to take hikes but were swarmed by deer flies. On the final morning, Ruth ripped off her clothes, ran down the steep stone path to the water's edge, and threw herself off the dock headfirst before Richard had even removed his shoes. She was treading water thirty strokes from shore as he cannonballed into the lake, yowling as he surfaced. She swam in to give him a quick kiss, her lips already turning an opalescent purple, then flipped on her back and glided over the rippling water away from him again.

Richard hated swimming in frigid temperatures, and he climbed back up onto the dock and ran to the cottage to get towels and a camera. By the time he returned, she was a white flare in the middle of the dark lake, an uncertain reflection, disappearing and appearing amidst the insignificant waves. On the car ride home, wearing Richard's cable-knit fisherman's sweater, she had drunk coffee until her stomach burned. They had pulled off the highway and lain in the back seat together. He rubbed her arms vigorously as if to get the blood back into them. He told her that she was a madwoman. He said that she was the love of his life, that there could be no other, and she knew that this was a noble overstatement, a romantic boast, but she burrowed her face in his warm neck and let him believe it.

The difficulty she kept coming up against now was something more confusing than the betrayal of the marriage: Richard was her oldest friend. She had never kept any of her girlfriends. Her mother was gone. Who else had known her for nearly twenty years, through the discrete portions of her life—from her directionless twenties to the approach of middle age, through the wrangling of that capricious girl into a wife and mother—and not just in her lowest moments but in the most banal, the most trifling, in the inconsequential minutes where the heart of their life lay? To whom else could she have said, in the dismal early days of parenthood, that she had to put down their screaming daughter and walk away or risk harming her gravely?

Sometimes Ruth wondered if that was exactly the problem, if she and Richard were burdened by excessive intimacy. Maybe she knew him too well, or simply thought she knew him too well. Was she blind to his possibilities, his capacity to change, to be things she didn't predict? And had being with him for such a long time made her equally fixed, frozen in his image of her, incapable of adaptation, of challenging her notions of what she could be, of what they could be? Often, when she came across him on the street, in the millisecond that he was just a man in the distance, she saw him with a stranger's clemency and found herself admiring his handsomeness, his elegant height and sure gait. He looked like a man from another time. In these moments, she wanted to run to him.

She knew how lucky she was to have Richard. She did. But gratitude was like her youth: it seemed always to be slipping away from her.

“How much longer do we have to stay?” Audrey was back, standing over them, a hand on the back of her chair.

“Give in, kid,” Richard reached out and grabbed her playfully. “Let's go wild and get something sweet.”

Ruth and Audrey looked at each other. They both wanted to leave, but it was Richard's birthday. The least they could do was say yes to dessert.

 

LATE THAT NIGHT, LONG
after Richard had gone to sleep, Ruth put the house to bed. She let the dogs out and stood at the back window looking out at the wintry yard, the startlingly lucid green of the pine tree in moonlight. When she went to turn out the lamp by the family room couch, she noticed a hardcover, missing its book jacket, on the coffee table.
The Lives of Girls and Women.
Opening the book to glance at the first sentence, she discovered an inscription on the title page.

 

To Richard, on your birthday, February 1988

In memory of all childhoods,

some forgotten (but to be found one day)

and some deeply remembered.

Ruth

 

She had no memory of having written the words, but beyond this minor failure of memory was something more disorienting: she could not remember ever having been a woman who would have written something so lovely. She knew the writing to be hers, but it was like looking at the dedication of a dead person, elusive yet enduring, hauntingly bridging the distance between the present and a time scarcely remembered.

A shuffling sound behind her brought her back to herself. Audrey was standing at the threshold of the room in her pyjamas. The only lit lamp now was the small one by the back window, and Ruth was grateful for the diminished light. She and Audrey had become to each other little more than a presence, the known figure of an intimate, seen from the distance only in outline. For a second, she felt as though she had a grip on an important thought, but then it dissolved, leaving her head as dim as the room around her.

“Your thing broke,” Audrey said. She held up Ruth's antique compote, its scalloped bowl broken at the joining place.

“You broke my compote?” Ruth was incredulous, angry.

“No,
I
didn't break it. I guess the dogs bumped the table.”

Ruth's voice dropped. “Is there something you want to say to me, Audrey?”

Audrey looked down at her feet, which she was rubbing together in her thick wool socks. “No.”

Ruth reached for the compote, and Audrey handed over the broken pieces. Even at close range, Audrey's face was provokingly unreadable. “What a shame,” Ruth said.

“You never really liked it anyway.”

“That's not true!”

“Then I guess you changed your mind.” Audrey turned away. “I'm going to bed.”

Ruth turned out the last lamp but stayed in the family room after Audrey left. She felt paralyzed, like a child afraid of the midnight change in a landscape made so benign by daylight. She still held the compote in her hand, and it was several minutes before she was pulled back to herself by the sensation of a hand on her back. She braced herself, calmly certain that she was about to see the ghost of her mother, but when she turned around, there was only the empty darkness.

 

 

Cha
p
ter
Fi
ft
een

THE WEATHER WAS UNSEASONABLY
warm for February, and the cluster of boys who awaited the Eliot girls after school stood around in the circular driveway with their coats open, their ties loose around their necks. Audrey, pausing by the landing window, watched the rapturous reunions. Kate Gibson's boyfriend stood in the centre of the group, wearing only his school blazer to keep him warm. Instead of talking to the boys around him, he stared at the ground, a posture that gave the impression not of brooding, as he may have intended, but of a thin neck that couldn't support the weight of his disproportionately large head, his mop of thick, wavy hair. When Kate spotted him, she rushed over and embraced him, her melodramatic enthusiasm unabated by the daily predictability of his presence—it was the custom of the most sought-after girls to pretend to be surprised every time they discovered their congregated admirers—and as they walked away, he clasped her hand in both of his, walked a bit in front of her, smiling backwards, as if leading her to a mystery location.

Audrey circulated the school at an amble until the crowds dispersed. The afternoon was quiet, with no scheduled sports practices, no choir rehearsal. For two days, the note Arabella had given her in the locker room had been buried in her math binder, and she wanted to get the mission done with, the note out of her bag, out of her mind.

She was making her way, head down, through a first floor corridor when she heard the sound of guitar music drifting out of the third grade room. Inside, Seeta and Ms. Massie-Turnbull sat on desktops facing each other, tuning their guitars. Ms. Massie-Turnbull, sensing someone's presence, looked up, smiling when she saw Audrey in the doorway.

“Hey, kiddo,” she said. “Come on in and give us an audience. I'm trying to convince Seeta to have a run at this with me in chapel tomorrow.”

Unable to come up with a reason to escape, Audrey went in and took a seat near the door. Ms. Massie-Turnbull locked eyes with Seeta, who then glanced uncomfortably at Audrey before looking determinedly down at her guitar. As in assembly that morning, Audrey knew the song right away—more Neil Young, this time “Long May You Run.” Audrey was amazed by the power of Seeta's thin fingers as she started to strum. They looked so fragile, yet they glided through the chords with utter assurance. Audrey remembered herself, back in the days when she had played the piano, always stumbling and cursing, her fingers too little practised ever to make their way effortlessly. In the classroom, away from the acoustics of the chapel and the disapproval of the audience, the singing was even more affecting. Seeta lost herself completely, as though she were not quite singing but allowing herself to be a conduit. The warm, confidential sound of it overpowered Audrey, engulfed her in its sonic shelter, and for a moment she forgot herself in a way she never had inside Eliot's walls.

It wasn't just that she no longer hated Seeta's playing; she no longer wanted to hate it.

When they finished, it took a second for her to return to herself. Then she stood to leave. “That was really nice. Thank you.”

Ms. Massie-Turnbull pointed to Seeta. “It's all her. This is one talented kid.”

Seeta smiled at Ms. Massie-Turnbull but kept her gaze studiously averted from Audrey. For the first time, Audrey wondered if Seeta suspected Audrey's part in the notes. She had always assumed that the widespread understanding held that such an enterprise could only have been spearheaded by Arabella. But Seeta's steely disregard seemed to stem from something that went deeper than their petty friction. In it was a stoicism and loathing, a maturity, that made Audrey's stomach somersault.

“Yes, she is talented,” Audrey said. “I wish I were that talented.”

On her way up to the second floor, she had to sit on the stairs. There was no reason to call off the plan, she thought, no barrier compelling enough to make her oppose Arabella. You couldn't change a place like Eliot. There was no point in trying.

Upstairs, the hallway was empty, and Audrey knew she could be done with the whole mess, perhaps permanently, in seconds. On the outside of her locker, Seeta had placed a single sticker, a musical note. The sight of it made Audrey unspeakably sad. How innocent it seemed, this emblem of Seeta's passion, marking her small territory at school.

Maybe it was the music, or maybe it was just this—her own fatigue, the dissipation of the intoxicating panic of the early days—more than anything resembling guilt, that made her pause by Seeta's locker. Maybe it was this total physical quiet—her hands weren't shaking and her heart wasn't racing—that made her pay attention to what she was doing in a way she never quite had before. The act had acquired a kind of banality: there was no rebellion here. She had never been more obedient. It was not her own audaciousness she was discovering, but Arabella's master plan, her inscrutable rules. And for what? The pleasure one took in Arabella bore no relation to actual pleasure. Audrey couldn't have explained, even to herself, the compulsion involved. Was this what all her anticipation had come down to? Was this the riotous display of freedom? Her reason for coming to Eliot?

She leaned exhaustedly on the locker next to Seeta's, the note dangling in her hand. She didn't know what she would say to Arabella, and for the moment, she didn't care. She crouched down and pulled a pad of pink Post-it notes from inside her knapsack. “I can't do it,” she wrote, then pressed the note onto the words Arabella had written and, before letting a second thought undermine her decision, slid the construction paper into Arabella's locker. All at once she became aware of a sound moving towards her, a shuffling step, feet dragging a bit on the carpet in late day fatigue. She turned her back to the lockers just as Henry Winter rounded the corner. He smiled faintly, without warmth, and glanced down at her knapsack, which was gaping open.

“Hi there, sir,” she said.

He nodded. “Audrey.”

Since she had found out about Henry, English class had presented her with a conflict unlike the one she'd expected. She could make no connection between the Henry known to Ruth and the Henry who stood before her as English teacher, jadedly lecturing about F. Scott Fitzgerald. She studied him for signs, half-expecting him to grant her some special attention that would constitute a loving, coded message to her mother. But she detected nothing. His attitude towards her was as indecipherable as ever.

She reached down and casually zipped up her knapsack.

“Friday afternoon and still here,” Henry said.

“Lots of homework. Just packing everything in.”

If anything, he seemed more restless than usual, his hands thrust into his pockets, looking not at Audrey but at the locker next to her head. She pictured him on an incomparably verdant expanse of lawn, mindlessly remarking on the monotony of the ocean, martini in hand.

“
Gatsby
quiz tomorrow,” he said. “You'll want to make sure you're prepared.”

“It's a hard one?”

He smiled thinly. “Well, it's best always to be prepared, isn't it? This is your education, after all.”

She returned an uneasy smile as he continued on his way, at a frustrating amble, glancing back once to give her a final nod.

 

RUTH STOOD IN THE
doorway, waiting to speak. She had been waiting all day. Her class had been gone for an hour, and each moment that passed had confirmed her condition: he was not coming. So, beating back her pride, she had gone to him.

The classroom was lit, but at first there appeared to be no one inside. The smell was stale, of a place long since vacated: no lingering breath of humanity. She cursed Sheila for delaying her downstairs with an explanation of the importance of nut-, gluten-, and dairy-free treats for an upcoming bake sale. Then came the sound of a heavy book falling in the corner. Henry rose, holding an encyclopedia.

“What's up? You working?” she said. Her words aimed for breeziness, but a tight perkiness of tone betrayed her. “An encyclopedia? Aren't you supposed to know everything already?” She laughed.

“I thought I saw a mouse.”

“Christ!” she exclaimed, looking around her feet before she could stop herself. “And you plan to kill it with the encyclopedia?”

He shrugged. “Killing a mouse with a book may be ultimately less painful than dealing with a horde of screaming girls on Monday. But now I'm not certain I saw anything at all.”

He had gotten a haircut. For all the time Ruth spent summoning him in her mind, she found it difficult to look straight at him, to note the minutiae of his appearance, to absorb what he actually looked like, there in that moment. The freshly cut tips of hair glinted even more brightly with silver. At the back of his neck, in the centre of his hairline, was a little point, like an arrow. She had always wondered why barbers did that, and she didn't want to notice it on Henry. There was a vulnerability she associated with it, and as embarrassed and unwanted as she felt, she didn't care for the defencelessness of his naked expanse of shaven neck, the prissiness of that tiny V.

He walked briskly to the desk and set the encyclopedia down with a resolute thud. Ruth reached behind her and closed the door, then stepped forward, grabbed his hand, and pulled him towards her. With her strained execution, the move was not so much lightheartedly seductive as petulant and demanding, and his body was far less compliant, less flexible, than she anticipated. He stumbled a little, his body tautly resisting the momentum she was trying to create, but she ignored this and grabbed the lapels of his blazer, looking up into his face.

“It's been too long,” she said, pulling his face into alignment with hers. When he didn't respond by kissing her, she kissed him hard, her annoyance masked as passion.

He pulled back decisively. “Christ, Ruth,” he said, his eyes shooting towards the door.

“You said you liked spontaneity.”

“Spontaneity, not stupidity.”

“Forgive me,” she replied. “I didn't realize we'd never behaved stupidly before.”

“Clayton is picking me up today at 4:15. My train leaves at six.”

Ruth looked back at the clock and saw that it was not yet four. “There's still time,” she said.

He reached out and ruffled the back of her hair, smiling absently with a big brother tameness she was terrified to interpret as pity. He turned back to his desk, where he transferred several folders from the desk to his briefcase.

The previous day, at the end of lunch, there had been a staff room meeting about improper use of staff computers. (Larissa had been appalled to boot up a computer one morning when her office computer was down, only to discover that the most recently browsed website was not the
New York Times,
or the
Globe and Mail
—she could even have abided the
Toronto Star
—but
People
magazine. A further search revealed that celebrity pictures, entitled “Star Tracks,” had been perused.) Henry had been sitting directly across from Ruth at the long table, leaning back in his chair with his arms crossed mid-chest. Before her was a mug of tea that she was clutching so hard she felt everyone must notice the telling whiteness of her knuckles. (Did she not want him to detect her tension and feel moved to reassure her with a foot nudge, a hand on her knee?) But he seemed entirely at ease—his posture relaxed, his eyes twinkling in amusement. Was that a message he was scribbling to Michael Curtis on the notepad in front of him? A subversively cavalier comment that made her throw back her head and elbow his arm? Even if the note's content were inconsequential, the revelation was rude: he could enjoy himself in the company of others, with her in plain sight; he could forget her for the world outside them, the mindless pageantry of daily life. Was it so easy to get bored of her? If Ruth had been inclined to think moralistically, she would have theorized that this was the requisite flip side of an affair's early rewards, that the narcotic excitement, the blissful resurrection of self, were merely a bluff, concealing the awaiting punishment: your metamorphosis into this contemptible thing, this grasping, loathsome creature.

Ruth had left the meeting as soon as Larissa stopped talking, and she had deliberately gone all the way around the table so that she could pass behind him on her way out. She looked for a change in posture, a deep intake of breath, even a forced attitude of relaxation, anything that would indicate that he felt her presence at his back, that his apparent indifference was only typically male compartmentalization, or better yet, a chivalrous, loving shield designed to protect them both from the ravenous scrutiny of their colleagues. She noticed that the collar of his blue shirt was up at the back, and she had to resist the urge to reach out and turn it down, not just because they were in public, but because she knew that he would disapprove, even if they were alone, that he would consider the gesture a misguided assertion of ownership: unsettlingly proprietary, repellently sentimental.

When she was at the door, she glanced back as Larissa was barking out a final reminder about the United Way fundraiser, and Henry's eyes met hers; he looked immediately away. That was all she had needed, as satisfying, in its way, as the opposite would have been. How perversely grateful she had been, as she entered the fresh air of the hallway, for this sign that he was troubled by her, that she was not, after all, like everyone else.

On the desk beside his briefcase now lay a dog-eared copy of the Coles Notes for
The Great Gatsby.
He wedged it inside, next to a folder bursting with essays.

“Looking for teaching tips?” Ruth laughed, a breaking into the liquor cabinet kind of cackle. How she hated everything she said.

“Weeding out plagiarism. I had to give them quite a lecture today about what constituted plagiarism. Most seemed to be under the impression that if the ideas came from Coles Notes, they were doing nothing wrong. They seemed genuinely shocked that borrowing from that tripe was dishonest, and not a little unintelligent.”